Erika Vogt

Work from her oeuvre.

“Vogt arranges groups of sculptures throughout the space, reiterating the vocabulary present in the videos and drawings. These sculptures invite tactile engagement, and derive their form both from found objects as well as invented ones. There are, for example, knobs, a jig, a window sash, wood scraps, a guide, and some musical instruments. The gestures implied by the handling of these objects—the turning of the knobs, the measuring with the jig—become important component of the works. TheGuide, for instance, a roughly 100 inches by 1 inch structure with handles on each end, is meant to be handled by two people.  One person “leads” the other, as they carve a line through The Engraved Plane.  Viewers are allowed to handle the sculptures when looking at the show.

Vogt conceived the works in The Engraved Plane in close relation to the groupingGrounds and Airs that will be featured in the first Los Angeles biennial, Made in LA, at the Hammer Museum from June 2, 2012 – September 2, 2012.”- Simone Subal Gallery

Gabriel Kuri

Work from “punto y línea en el altiplano“.

“Galleria Franco Noero announce the opening of its new exhibition space in Turin, with “punto y línea en el altiplano,” an exhibition of new works by Gabriel Kuri. This is the third solo show of the Mexican artist for the gallery.

Shown in the former factory building converted to a design by Flavio Albanese, the series of works illustrates the ongoing development of Kuri’s most characteristic themes: an analysis of the nature of sculpture and of its potential in terms of form, together with the possibilities opened up by combining different elements, whether found or made, in a way that augments their intrinsic material and tactile qualities.

Beneath the large skylight in the central space of the Gallery, the notions of monumentalism, balance, weight and gravity are simultaneously expressed in a sculpture consisting of elements that interact with each other as mirror images: a skip for rubble is surprisingly tipped up at 45°, counteracting a thick sheet of steel gently curved into an L-shape and painted in a neutral colour. As the result of an industrial process, the metal contrasts withnature, in the form of two large stones thatanchor them to the ground,establishing a balance of composition and tension between horizontal and vertical.

The twists and turns of a segmented line of solid colour nearby wind through space, unfurling a continuous series of painted metal tubes joined together by curved linkages. In these “broken lines”, as Kuri calls them, the smooth, coaxing quality of the curves contrasts with the sharp, pointed starkness of the anti-pigeon spikes that cover them like a thorny mantle. Like drops of rain or an imaginary celestial constellation, copper-coloured coins are scattered on the floor beneath them.

Opposite the large strip windows on Via Mottalciata, a long unbroken wall defines a space that reveals other characteristic aspects of Kuri’s work. These are the parallels between the abstraction of economic systems and abstraction in art, the link between the immanence of everyday life and the horizon formed by universality, to the habits of social life and to human presence, and the desire for the work of art to come alive through them.

The entire wall is covered with hand-drawn coordinates from a calculation book, a system that is interrupted by two quarry-rough stones that mysteriously appear to lose their weight – a double phrasing like notes on a musical score. On one of the stones a sweater that seems abandoned quotes the physical presence through the absence in the form of the discarded clothing.

Further on a progression of metal trestles painted grey, designed by Kuri, become the sloping horizon on which a soft, undulating “tongue” of linoleum unfolds: blown-up microchips emerge on the surface, where natural stones are also resting. The irregularly wavy shapes of the linoleum recall a section of a landscape, the crest of a downward slope, but our attention is also shifted to the deviation in size of the microchips, which are at variance with what they are, thus becoming a succinct graphic sign.

Perpendicular to this is what Kuri calls an “alignment”. This is a neatly arranged series of different objects that are placed in an empathetic relationship, as though run through by a flow of energy and ideas. This plays on the concept of line, of breakage and juxtaposition, of heights, planes and volumes, making every object capable of presenting all its characteristics individually but also within a global “system”, endowing each one with the same level of aesthetic dignity.” - Galleria Franco Noero, Turin

Sam Falls, Federico Maddalozzo, Julia Rommel

Work from “Good Luck & Safe Journey” at T293, Naples.

“The exhibition examines the procedures and repeated gestures used to structure works in a certain way and open them up to random luck and chance, be it natural or employed. In their final forms, the works by Sam Falls, Federico Maddalozzo and Julia Rommel present a record of the processes while outlining new directions in pictorial and sculptural abstraction. Control and supervision have to surrender to or only attempt to remedy the action of time, chance and nature, which will always be unpredictable and ungovernable.

In much of his work, Sam Falls investigates the capacity for representation involved in the processes of deterioration, such as the long-term effects of sunlight, rain and time on materials like paper, steel and cloth. Throughout the past few years he has been creating sculptures, paintings and photographs whose interest comes from the work’s potential in both its unfinished and finished state.

Julia Rommel will present a series of new paintings that provide evidence of the processes through which they pass. Surfaces coated with thick textured and multi-layers of paint on linen show signs of being cut, unstretched and restretched more than once. The resulting monochromes are indeed deeply intimate and emotional.

In ‘Refreshing chromophobia’, Federico Maddalozzo goes through an inverse process by which he reproduces urban structures – such as casings of windows and doors – and the action of clearing them from spray paint. The structures become fetishist objects that absorb and reflect the process showing the remains of colors and their visual impact.” - T293

Esther Kläs

Work from her oeuvre.

“Despite the idea of stillness often associated with sculpture, Kläs’ works contain the energy of movement while integrating joint body parts in monolithic structures counterbalanced and held up by frames and ephemeral supports. In “All In”, 2011 a varied and multiform set of figures dialogue together in the main space, as in a family picture of humankind, keeping a precarious and yet controlled equilibrium. Through the cast, the artist is able to frieze a movement at the highest point of tension and the sculptures keep echoing that vibrating instant, like adjectives with a spirit.

The direct impact and physicality of the sculptures challenge the viewer to read through the forms, discerning the movements and searching deeper in an effort to elaborate a reference.” – Peter Blum

Jonathan Binet, Walker Evans, Aaron Garber-Maikovska, Guyton/Walker, Alex Hubbard, Ann Cathrin November Høibo, Adriana Lara, Klara Liden, Anders Nordby, Sigmar Polke, Chadwick Rantanen, Nick Relph, Hannah Ryggen, Torbjørn Rødland, Oscar Tuazon, Franz West

Work from Standard Escape Routes

“Consequential damage (Law)

(a) Damage so remote as not to be actionable
(b) Damage which although remote is actionable.
(c) Actionable damage, but not following as an immediate result of an act.

Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, 1913

The exhibition will be inaugurating the gallery´s new exhibition space in Waldemar Thranes gate 86 B, which will be running parallel to a solo exhibition by Michaela Meise in the adjacent, current exhibition space of Waldemar Thranes gate 86 C. The preview will also see the launch of the publication Hegdehaugsveien 3, documenting the exhibitions that took place in the gallery´s initial exhibition space during the years 2005-2012 and including texts by Matias Faldbakken, Eivind Furnesvik and Knut Knutsen.” – Standard (Oslo)

Magali Reus

Work from her oeuvre.

“Through the way the works are presented, by the appropriation of objects, and thanks to the use of colour, two identifiable thematic series thus gradually come to the fore: on the one hand, sporting imagery, with training sessions and gym equipment (rings, wall-bars and wallbrackets, and various training mats), and, on the other, the signs of mass exoticism. Thus described, it becomes increasingly obvious that she is proposing something akin to an abstract version of the visual leisure world, mainly sport and tourism, along with the many di!erent ways they are depicted by the media. So Magali Reus’s work does not seem to have the autonomy which it at first appears to lay claim to.

Heteronomy—being subject to something else—defines many abstract, conceptual and minimal works produced since the 1960s. So it is in relation to something external that certain abstract paintings may nowadays be described as realist.¹ These “found abstractions”² are to be found all around us, in reality; they have invaded everyday life. Minimalism, similarly, which, at the outset, saw itself stripped of all symbolic and structurally autonomous content, has become gradually loaded with many di!erent meanings. In particular, it started making reference to luxury furniture, and the graphic quality of the brands and logos of the large corporations of the 1960s.” - Jill Gasparina

Lucas Blalock

Work from his oeuvre.

“Carmen Winant:
All of your pictures are shot on 4× 5 film, scanned and then post-produced in Photoshop. Why work across multiple formats?

Lucas Blalock:
Early on, it was important that the pictures had a foot in both the analogue and the digital. When I began making pictures in the late 1990s, I fell in love with the 4 × 5 camera. But analogue is not so significant to me anymore. I am more interested in the way in which it affords me moments of translation.

CW: Between analogue and digital processes?

LB: Yes, such as processing the negative through the scanner into Photoshop colour-space or removing the dust. Procedures like those, and others, become over-articulated in my process. Instead of approaching these procedural steps as expected, my action might be more evident, or less correct. As opposed to painting, which is considered to be an accumulation of a set of decisions, photography is classically thought of as a picture made by a single decision – the shutter – and that Photoshop or the darkroom is a kind of ‘post-production’. For me, the state of the photograph is much more in the physical object and I tend to think about all of these steps as stages of production.

CW: Your work is reminiscent of surfing the Internet for images for hours on end, or of being on hallucinogenic drugs. Both of those experiences are alienating in their own way: hyper-real and hyper-false. In your work they appear to co-exist.

LB: I started to think of the real and the false in this way partially through Jean-Luc Godard, which, in turn, led me to Bertolt Brecht’s ideas about theatre, and gave me a model for thinking about photography. I am interested in how I can use the technologies of picture-making, intended to be highly transparent, in opaque or interruptive ways. Offstage tools – studio, camera, Photoshop – are brought back onstage, and into the picture.” – excerpt from an interview with Carmen Winant for Frieze.

Nick van Woert

Work from his oeuvre.

“The post-apocalyptic terrain van Woert covers in “No Man’s Land” is expansive, and initially seems to lack a center. Each piece, however, addresses humans’ conflicting capacities for creation and destruction. The exhibition includes an 8-foot-tall set of silverware, with which van Woert intends visitors to “ingest” his works, alluding to the artist’s fascination with the unsustainable rate of human consumption.

Ten monochromatic paintings in earthy hues are van Woert’s nod to 19th-century landscape painting in the American West, an unexpected source of fodder for an aesthetic that’s far from romantic. “I often think of myself as a landscape painter,” van Woert says. “While growing up in places like the Yosemite Valley, I realized things have changed in our world, materially.” Van Woert examines this change, unhindered by contemporary notions of beauty. “The most challenging thing for me as an artist is to battle this conversation of what looks good and what works well,” he says. “I want to ask people to see my work as an entirely material language, rather than a visual one.” – NY Times

Lyndsy Welgos

Work from her oeuvre.

“Rawson Projects: Firstly, I think you have always attempted to address the identity of photography as an art medium in your work. In your first exhibition with Rawson Projects, while still employing photographic processes, you stripped the works of specific references to time and place. Can you describe how this new body of work continues to examine these aspects of contemporary photography?

Lyndsy Welgos: I guess it doesn’t directly address those issues from the last show, but I feel any time you have a photograph that is completely appropriated, abstract, or conflated in some way, photographic mythologies get a little mixed up. Obviously there is a kind of institutionalization of photography that is addressed in these works. Time and notions of realism are some of the biggest constraints that hold the medium to a certain institutionalized standard.

RP: What is the significance of the found images in the work? Specifically, why did you choose images from the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s online catalogue?

LW: Maybe it’s the ubiquity of these types of works that I wanted to appropriate. I don’t think these images have anything to do with art history itself. Now, they are in the context of a photograph that is its own sculptural object – one that doesn’t need to depend on a particular past for its livelihood.” – excerpt from an interview with Rawson Projects

Amy Brener

Work from her oeuvre.

“Amy Brener has developed a method of layering resin, glass and fresnel lens to create light sensitive sculptures. Her recent works resemble artifacts of an imagined future. Some surfaces suggest touch-screen platforms and energy cells. Others are left to chance: to crystallize, crack under pressure and weather with time.

She was born in Victoria, BC and now lives and works in New York City. She holds an MFA in Sculpture from Hunter College and was a participant of Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2011. Her work has been exhibited in New York, Toronto and London.” – Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts