Gabriele Beveridge

Work from By mistake or design

“Gabriele Beveridge (b.1985) is a London-based artist who creates two-dimensional and three-dimensional collages and installations using sun-faded images and a variety of natural and man-made objects. Through framing, balancing and propping, these disparate elements are brought into precisely constructed but open-ended dialogues. Materials such as sand, copper and marble rub up against the seductive sheen of cosmetics, suggesting poetic associations, psychological states, and a heightened awareness of the surfaces that surround us.” – Zabludowicz Collection

Johan Rosenmunthe

Work from Enlargements.

“Johan Rosenmunthe’s installation utilizes an image taken from the Empire State Building down on the roofs of Manhattan and shows printed crops and zooms into that single image. Part of the exhibited images are posters pasted directly to the wall, others are ‘framed installations’ of images. The master image is present but monitored by the Nexus CCTV 4-camera surveillance system along with other parts of the installation. The audience will partake in the surveillance of each other during the show. 64 Hammershøj building bricks placed directly on the preserved floor functions as support for a few frames. A laser level constantly confirms the position of bricks, posters and a single frame. The laser line is extended by a line of chalk. All materials at the show is for sale. ” – Johan Rosenmunthe

Émile Claus

Work from his oeuvre.

“At the time of his debut, Emile Claus enjoyed fame chiefly as a portrait painter. The Antwerp and Brussels bourgeoisie almost immediately recognised in him the hand of a master, able to capture reality in charming, romantic-realistic showpieces, genre scenes and official portraits. He mastered the landscape well only during a journey to North Africa and Spain in 1879-1880. Suddenly convention disappeared from his work. His outlook became unrestrained, his touch powerful and his application of paint, thick. Romantic-realism would never again return in his bravado pieces.

He would gradually direct his antennae outside Antwerp and Belgium, and became acquainted with naturalism. The naturalists preferred depicting everyday life in the city and especially in the countryside. In essence, it was a sequel to realism, albeit with the sharp, social-critical edges smoothed. The monumental landscape paintings that Claus sent to the exhibitions in 1880s were all naturalistic in nature, while he gradually showed himself to be sensitive to French impressionism. Despite the great success he enjoyed with his naturalistic exhibition pieces at the major exhibitions in Brussels and Paris, he was looking for a different way. The sharp, photographic realism and the picturesque anecdotal character so characteristic for the period around 1886-1887, were gone two years later. Claus was more than forty years old when he was confronted with the most important revolution in his career. He withdrew from the official circuit from which he obtained much support, and for three winters long lived in an atelier in Paris. He gradually came under the spell of the French impressionists, and back at the home front, he incorporated their technique into his own work. However, his paintings were never really French. Even the light had a more northern tint than that of his French predecessors. This shimmering light received form via a nervous touch capable of bringing about a magnificent harmony via a wide range of short and long strokes. However spontaneous his paintings may appear, they were always the fruit of a thoroughgoing study. They are all the result of passionate study. This manner of working persisted for almost fifteen years, until the beginning of the war.” – Oscar Devos

Michael Krebber

Work from his oeuvre.

“‘Real art has the capacity to make us nervous’, writes Susan Sontag in her essay ‘Against Interpretation’ (1966), and this is exactly what one can expect when encountering Michael Krebber’s work. In his exhibition ‘London Condom’ at Maureen Paley 21 canvases of equal size depict extracts from Krebber’s recent lecture ‘Puberty in Painting’. The series was realized by a professional signwriter on top of black and white screen prints based on French Western comics. There are energetic cowboys, romantic embraces and a thoughtful-looking, lonesome hero whose image and speech-bubble thoughts are covered by random excerpts from the lecture. These include lines such as ‘painting is such a wonderful little subject, such an exciting subject’ and ‘the wonderful photos in the Feldmann exhibition’.

‘London Condom’ is the final instalment of three shows featuring this new series of works by the artist, recently shown at Daniel Buchholz, Cologne, under the title ‘Respekt Frischlinge’ (Respect Fledglings) and at Chantal Crousel, Paris, as ‘Je suis la chaise’ (I Am the Chair). Each of the exhibitions included a different selection from the 90 canvases that comprise the series. By using different titles in the countries’ native languages for each show, Krebber imposed a certain autonomy on each of the exhibitions, as well as creating a superficial local connection. However, rather than taking up the subject of the works, the titles added to the exhibitions’ complexity and reflected Krebber’s idiosyncratic humour.

Although the works in this series are reminiscent of John Baldessari’s text paintings from the 1960s, as well as of Pop art’s appropriations of comic strips, Krebber is explicitly interested neither in the ironic self-referentiality of text as image nor in the mechanical reproduction of popular culture’s flat imagery. The similarities exist only on a formal level. This kind of referencing has always played a significant role in Krebber’s artistic practice – in the past he has turned Georg Baselitz-esque paintings on their head or used, like Sigmar Polke, kitsch fabrics as canvases.

The starting-point for Krebber’s series was his lecture on painting, However, once the words reach the canvas, their meaning changes. A shift from content to form takes place, and the text begins to function as a ready-made. Graphically strong, it merges uncomfortably with the seemingly random selection of repetitive comic-strip imagery. Grainy, dark and partially cut off at the edges, the screen prints are reminiscent of cheap photocopies and render the text fragments almost illegible in places. In their state of painterly vagueness, the works echo the lecture, in which he stated that painting is something ‘which is just undefined and wholly contradictory in itself’.

The press release, which discusses the Hollywood Western Red River (1948), was written by fellow artist John Kelsey. The text takes up the Western theme of the exhibition, but rather than relating explicitly to the images on display, Kelsey’s writing provides another layer of meaning. Red River’s Howard Hawks and John Wayne are described as bossy and macho pals, while Montgomery Clift, whose image is shown on the invitation card for ‘London Condom’, comes across as an outsider and a greenhorn in the film industry. This Hollywood scenario leads back to Krebber, who takes on the role of ‘the lonesome cowboy’ amid the ‘stampede’ that is the art market. ‘Like painting, cattle must be driven to the market,’ Kelsey writes. However, Krebber is anything but new to the art world, and Kelsey’s text makes it clear that Krebber is very much aware of his market clout.

With his deliberate avoidance of a signature style, Krebber is not an artist who is eager to please. In the past he has exhibited a Laurel and Hardy postcard, canvases made from cheetah-patterned fabric and paintings that were partially covered by exhibition posters. Unlike the current series, some of the artist’s previous works have shown traces of his physical involvement. In his exhibition at the Secession, Vienna, in 2005 the impressively sized main space was left almost empty, displaying only a small number of works; earlier exhibitions showed barely anything at all. The context of the gallery space, in particular the formal relationship between the work and its immediate surroundings, is crucial to Krebber’s artistic practice. In ‘London Condom’ he grouped the canvases into clusters of three, four or six, enclosing one of the corners of the gallery wall. In a show at Greene Naftali, New York, in 2003 his paintings were leaning against the wall, while at the Secession the works were framed and hung, conventionally, at eye-level. Krebber shows that the wall is the logical extension of the painting’s surface and that painting is therefore intrinsically linked with exploring its own environment.

The ‘London Condom’ works are characterized by a visual indecisiveness, However, with its system of loose connections as well as what Kelsey called Krebber’s ‘empty appropriations’ of recent art history, this exhibition was a clear reflection of the artist’s understanding of painting.” – Bettina Brunner

Laturbo Avedon

Work from Sunset at Mt. Gox

“Laturbo Avedon is an artist, but not a real person. On Avedon’s Facebook, Twitter, SoundCloud and Tumblr pages, pieces of an identity can be gleaned of an ostensibly female character: Selfies of a glamorous blonde taken in different virtual environments; pitch-shifted remixes of pop songs by Kylie Minogue and Justin Timberlake; a first Tweet asking “A/S/L?” Laturbo Avedon is an artist-avatar without a real world referent, a digital manifestation of a person that does not and has never existed outside of a computer.

For her first exhibition at webspace.gallery, Avedon has erected an equally virtual monument to Mt. Gox: The Tokyo-based Bitcoin exchange that disappeared in February this year along with nearly half a billion U.S. dollars worth of bitcoins. For the duration of the exhibition, visitors to webspace.gallery are encouraged to anonymously submit images and 3D objects to be left at the monument on their behalf. Every second day, new renders of the monument will be uploaded, showing the various acts of vigil, or vandalism requested by visitors. A video of the monument will be uploaded on April 14 to document the end-result of this month-long process.”-webspace.gallery

Lorne Blythe

Work from his oeuvre

“Lorne Blythe uses the still life to investigate how photography has historically shaped and manipulated the way we see the world, and to transform simple structures into forms loaded with mental or metaphysical qualities. In his photographs of tooth brushes, white sugar cubes and pink Gillette razors piled before pastel studio backdrops, Blythe removes these industrial devices from their accepted context, transforming them into miniature sculptures.”

via Culturehall

Scott Reeder

Work from 365 Mission

“On view through March 16 at 356 South Mission Road, Scott Reeder has created something akin to the abandoned set of a film in process, which it may in fact be. According to IMDB, Reeder is in post-production on a film called Moon Dust starring some one named Tyrone Love. This show is comprised of clunky constructions of brightly colored space ship interiors that remind me of Flash Gordon and even its goofy porn film spoof, Flesh Gordon.

If Pee Wee Herman ever devised a space ship to transport him to the outer limits, it might look like this installation. Tangerine snack bar, lemony console, ultraviolet lounge with views of a galaxy far, far away. One wall is covered in large panels painted in atmospheric colors with a roller while other vibrant paintings offer hand drawn lists of names and ideas, many of them quite funny. “Lazy vs. Ugly” as a potential exhibition title? The sets have already been the background for Reeder and his brother Tyson Reeder’s performances but they activate the imagination even without the participation of the artist.”

text via Art Talk on KCRW

Sylvan Lionni

Work from his oevure.

“One particularly interesting aspect of Sylvan Lionni’s art is that he makes seemingly impersonal items feel personal. His is not the art of the hand-rendered, yet his sensibility is very much in evidence in his choice of materials, scale, craftsmanship, color, and probably minute details that are not even obvious to me. The choice of subject matter is extremely important – important precisely because it involves selections that might generally be considered unimportant, objects from daily life that could so easily be overlooked. The energy in the work emanates from the lavishing of crafted attention on such quotidian wallflowers.

The work also expresses a sharp awareness of the history of art. A sense of play is evident as things are presented to us in a traditional gallery or museum context. The objects seem to beg the question, “How do we compare to traditional paintings?”
I get such pleasure just saying what the subject matter of some of the works are: pieces of paper, rulers, and dust.

–B. Wurtz, February 2014

Sylvan Lionni’s practice continues to find resource in the notion of social geometry; the means by which we order our daily lives in response to the spatial and structural relationships that passively inform our thoughts, movements, and impulses. Fascinated by the overlooked details embedded in the American mundane, his work aims to qualify material, aesthetic, and conceptual properties within our revolving banality.

Lionni will present two new bodies of work. In a series of dust paintings, the artist has created a generative brand of trompe l’oeil that addresses the surface of a painting itself. Lionni starts with a dusty, industrial aluminum panel, photographs it, primes and prepares the ground, and then screen prints the image of dust onto the aluminum – a recursive gesture that points to the material bedrock of origin. In a series of ruler paintings, Lionni has meticulously recreated groups of framing squares by cutting, painting, and screen-printing steel in a process akin to industrial manufacturing. The artist takes the ruler as symbol and tool of both designer and engineer and transforms it into utilitarian artifice. The resulting paintings refer to the history of geometric abstraction and examine the porous boundary between image and object.” – text via Kansas Gallery

Aaron Garber-Maikovska

Work from “Being One and Then Sum“.

““Chopin’s small forms (nocturne, impromptu, waltz, mazurka, scherzo, ballade, prelude) are rooms, single-occupancy, open to hauntings.
Chopin assists my quest to imagine a vocation of pleasure, and to find value in the tiny, the out-of-date, and the wrong.”
– Wayne Kostenbaum: Hotel Theory, Brooklyn, 2007

“Words bounce. Words, if you let them, will do what they want to do and what they have to do.”
– Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red, New York, 2013

Think of a colour. It could be any colour (I am thinking about breakfast and hence thinking of the yellow of egg yolk, but that is insignificant; you’re free to choose something else). Think of just the colour itself: its hue, its vibrancy and its depth. Then think of a line that makes enough curves to give this an appearance of a face. Then think of another line that is trying to cross and cancel that out. Then think of a third line that is annoyingly close to being a letter without being one. Then think of all of these things at the same time.

I am trying, but my concentration is poor. I am traveling. I am sitting at the desk in my hotel room. It is too small, even after I have put all of the brochures, the hotel stationery, and the various glossy cards to greet me in the drawer. I have turned off CNN. I have tidied the room. I have put the “Do Not Disturb” sign on my door knob. Yet, I am too painfully aware of this being a place of not belonging and of not working. “The nature of a hotel room, uniform, can´t be determined by its occupant”, as claimed by Wayne Kostenbaum. “The hotel room’s fixed structure enforces the inhabitant’s passivity.” Like the minibar itself it is a place of minimum needs and maximum compromises. And, to make matters even worse, I just leafed through the weekend edition of the New York Times and ended up reading an article in T Magazine about writers and the rooms where they do their work. The imperfections of this interior are even further exposed. “I spend much of my time gazing out of the window of any writing space I have inhabited”, says Joyce Carol Oates and turns away from her Macbook to face the photographer for the portrait shot. There is snow on the trees outside her window. There is a restaurant named “Big China” facing my window.

I draw the curtains and think that not only am I missing a view, but that I am also missing a view of the works that I am supposed to write about. Instead there is a framed print of a sailboat above my desk. It is in the middle of Germany. Both me and the sailboat are a tad too far from home. I imagine that a work of Aaron Garber-Maikovska would not only help me here but make good companionship in any room intended for writing – that and a view. He equally lacks the latter (his studio has skylights), but faces the opposite problem when it comes to the former: there are too many of these works keeping him company. His most recent group of paintings – executed in ink and pastel on gator boards – so easily smear with contact, and it is not possible to store them or stack them unless you frame them. Hence, they are all present, and like an audition line for a TV talent show, they wrap around one corner after the other with various degrees of hope and signs of artistic ability. With this constant confrontation of the many stages the series has moved through and assurance in the words by Bruce Nauman – that “An awareness of yourself, comes from a certain amount of activity” – Aaron Garber-Maikovska attempts to move further. Always restarting same way: upper left corner; lower left corner; switch off the GPS (read the traffic and terrain); make it back to the top of the board and its upper right corner. The ink seeping into the gator board, leaving a faint line but enough of trace evidence.

Garber-Maikovska’s movements are both utterly mechanical and unavoidably meaningful. As inane as these paintings might appear, any attempts at gestural abstraction inevitably invites an investigation of meaning and possibly also an exhaustion of such. Doubling in terms of gesture, Garber-Maikovska applies pastel on top colours of the ink in his paintings. Even in the cases where he is using the ink lines to trace his colours the consequence is a dissonant layering, a certain stumble, stutter or desynchronization. The pastel is rubbed out and another layer of ink and pastel goes on top; further adding in terms of rhythm and repetition, and once again fading in and out of sync. This switching between syncopation and in-syncopation brings to mind the modulation and movement of his performance-based video works and earlier text-based works. The former – this exhibition contains three recent videos: “Target Tree”, “Cabazon” and “Fast Red Robin” – sees the artist engaged in a semaphore of movement and a mapping out of the interior where the film is shot. The other works would have him flex, fold and force an abstraction of language. As would be the case in the work from 2009, “Always Quoting Emily Dickinson”, where the title is the very same set of words uttered over and over again. Each repetition is seeking to find its own pace and pitch while nevertheless stating the same, until the words and the viewer are equally exhausted and language turns liquid. As pointed out by curator Catherine Taft: “by riffing on the rhythms and textures of words, he is able to slacken their meanings, test their parameters and unhinge them from our more concrete systems of exchange.” Or, as stated by Jan Tumlir: “No particular urge to make effects that might otherwise predominate. No particular urge to make oneself understood or, conversely, to thwart understanding drives this work; rather, the point is to suspend any such readings on our part in favor of accessing language in a state of emergence.” Possibly taking shape of a letter, a sign, a portrait, a cartoon strip, or as calligraphy, these paintings end up resembling the form and function of the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs where a stylized picture of an object could equally represent a word, syllable, or sound. Like the minibar being both the symptom, solution and surrender, they all collapse in one. On my way out I notice that the wall across the corridor has two of the same framed sailboat prints stacked on top of each other. They are heading in different directions; even the draft of the hotel corridor got it wrong.” – STANDARD (Oslo)

Anna-Sophie Berger

Work from KE-17 JIGSAW KE-03 LARGE PINKING KE-24 SCALLOP KE-16 POSTAL

“The same images that are made into photographs are also reproduced onto silk scarfs of the exact same size. The difference between the two objects lies within their haptic reality, their ideal value in terms of fashion versus art, merchandise versus edition, handcrafted versus manufactured, static versus the mobile possibilities of site – a scarf and an image.

In marketing, colors are used as means of distinction, as well as to create an elaborate ordering of the needs of any given consumer—the possibility of choice, red over green. Hard, medium, soft, ultraflex.”