Arslan Sükan

Work from INtheVISIBLE at Galerist.

“Through a process of eradications and slight additions, Arslan Sukan assembles photographs based on the formulaic codes that dominate the installation views of white-cube gallery spaces. His digital images document international venues, many of them familiar and some even identifiable, prompting seasoned art viewers to engage in a memory game of sorts. Each photograph seems to depict a blank space—a pristine gallery emptied of art. A bit like the way Robert Rauschenberg took a Willem de Kooning drawing for the sole purpose of obliterating it, Sukan appropriates installation views from the Internet, erases all traces of visible art, and digitally transforms each interior into a cool white expanse (even removing the architectural corners of rooms)—like a Minimalist vandal effacing conventional images.

Sukan defines his own spaces via a hybrid of appropriation and elimination. In some instances, the shine of the floor reflects what hung on the walls before his interventions. He empties the rooms to emphasize the sites of exhibitions, but in doing so he disrupts the space of display, making the invisible visible—a duality emphasized by the title of the show, “INtheVISIBLE.” The emptiness that pervades the sites creates an uncanny, alien sensibility and highlights the three essential shots—medium, wide, and detail—that make up the classic installation view, interrogating the art-historical record and its standardized documentation practices. Sukan’s photographs are in turn installed to highlight Galerist’s architectural space: One is placed near a doorframe at shin height. By pointing to some of the more quotidian visual experiences offered by the art world, Sukan infiltrates their meaning, even if he ironically reinforces the codes of the white cube and the installation view through his challenge.” – Kathleen Madden

Mitsuko Miwa

Works from Rendition at Longhouse Projects.

“Rendition focuses on multiplicity within the medium of painting. In one body of work, Miwa offers seemingly typical “abstract paintings”—bands of color that are derived from stacks of nameless books, providing a pictorial dilemma, in which the viewer is asked to read but cannot. In another body of work, she produces partially abstracted images, repetitive depictions of several forms of a still-life in flux—a molded piece of clay, which slowly proves to be a boisterous revamping of rendering, revealing slight and shifting discoveries in every new composition. In a third body of work, she accumulates quick strokes of Prussian Blue oil paint to make pared down, monochromatic, illustrative pictures of wine glasses—banal portraits of a simple vessel for the most cheerful or somber of times, a symbolic duality gleaned from an unexpected icon.

Dualities are integral to the overarching scope of Miwa’s practice. She is both faithful to and skeptical of the medium of painting, yet her paintings evidence her giving in to the medium time and time again. Despite her initial plans for each body of work, she allows the paintings to speak for themselves, claiming to refute a specific “style,” much in the tradition of Kippenberger, Polke, Richter, etc. Similar to her refusal of any sort of subscription to style, she also refuses to be didactic; instead, she uses the diversity of depictions and endless referents to humbly hand her paintings over to the viewer to piece together.” – Longhouse Prohjects

  
Rob Pruitt

Work from “The Suicide Paintings” at Massimo De Carlo

“Massimo De Carlo gallery in London inaugurates its new season with The Suicide Paintings by American artist Rob Pruitt. Pruitt in his third show at Massimo De Carlo presents new paintings that explore infinite space and blankness, purity and pollution, and optimism and desperation. The work in the show represents a culmination of previous bodies of work, from his fountains to face paintings. While so much of Pruitt’s previous work has dealt with cultural subject matter, in this new body of work, content has been drained, leaving only a psychological and emotional residue.

In the new paintings, two gradient fields of colour are juxtaposed, creating a picture within a frame. The images suggest both heavenly and hellish vistas, evoking everything from the clouds in a Botticelli painting to the screensaver on an iPad. While the gradient fields suggest depictions of space and the changing times of day, they are also a visual metaphor for transitioning psychological states.

Composing a full room installation, a number of chromed TV Sets: having become useless as means of information and entertainment, replaced by flat screen TVs, these objects from the 80s and the 90s survive through their shape, reconstructed with a glamorous and glittery patina. Even this body of works refers to the classics: these TV sets deliver a strong sense of nostalgia.

These new sculptures are standing on hundreds and hundreds of black and white cubes. Part sculptures themselves, and part plinths for the other works in the show, these cubes are configuring a new modular system of exhibiting Rob Pruitt’s sculptures through a new radical, pixelated signature pedestal. These cubes can even take the form of a new floor for one of the rooms in the basement of the gallery, as if Carl Andre had suddenly turned digital.” – Massimo De Carlo

via Contemporary Art Daily

Larry Bell

Work from his oeuvre.

“Larry Bell’s art addresses the relationship between the art object and its environment through the sculptural and reflective properties of his work. Bell is often associated with Light and Space, a group of mostly West Coast artists whose work is primarily concerned with perceptual experience stemming from the viewer’s interaction with their work. This group also includes, among others, artists James Turrell, John McCracken, Peter Alexander, Robert Irwin and Craig Kauffman On the occasion of the Tate Gallery’s exhibit Three Artists from Los Angeles: Larry Bell, Robert Irwin, Doug Wheeler, Michael Compton wrote the following to describe the effect of Bell’s artwork:

At various times and particularly in the 1960s some artists have worked near what could be called the upper limits of perceptions, that is, where the eye is on the point of being overwhelmed by a superabundance of stimulation and is in danger of losing its power to control it… These artists sometimes produce the effect that the threat to our power to resolve what is seen heightens our awareness of the process of seeing…However, the three artists in this show… operate in various ways near the lowest thresholds of visual discrimination. The effect of this is again to cause one to make a considerable effort to discern and so to become conscious of the process of seeing.[2]” – Wikipedia / Michael Compton

Martin Kippenberger

Work from his oeuvre.

“”Everything in moderation,” counseled Aristotle. Martin Kippenberger never got this message, as a good friend pointed out after the artist’s death at age forty-four in 1997. Kippenberger’s artistic career—based in his native Germany but encompassing such far-flung locations as Florence, Madrid, Vienna, New York, Los Angeles, Rio de Janeiro, Syros, and the Yukon—was a twenty-year commitment to unrestrained excess. It began in the late 1970s, at a moment when the greatness of modern art seemed suddenly distant—a century-long celebration whose door was now closed to newcomers. Kippenberger’s response was to create his own party and cast himself as an artist-jester whose antics both disguised and permitted a piercing analysis of contemporary art and society. The scores of posters he designed for his exhibitions begin to suggest the creative energy channeled into his thousands of works, including paintings, sculptures, installations, drawings, prints, multiples, books, and recordings. Embracing the full range of his output and yet by no means comprehensive, this exhibition contributes to the ongoing process of absorbing one of the most inventive and influential bodies of artwork of the late twentieth century.” – MoMA, New York

Ebbe Stub Wittrup

Work from Overgarden.

“The question of what is real has been debated throughout the entire history of humanity: Is it what our senses tell us, or is there a world beyond what we can immediately perceive? In this philosophical field, Ebbe Stub Wittrup explores life’s enigmatic layers by highlighting phenomena and material drawn from the periphery of culture. His work emphasizes the ’otherness’ of reality which, as the art historian Rune Gade has put it, runs like an esoteric undercurrent beneath the realistic subject matter. Since the late 1990s, Stub Wittrup has been extending his photographic prac- tice, in a movement from a neo- realistic snapshot aesthetics to a more conceptual sensibility with historical and literary dimensions. In the solo exhibition The Voice of Things, this movement finds expres- sion in a cross-media field in which fiction, mythology and theosophy are interwoven with optical and co- lour-psychological phenomena….” – Anna Holm

Suga Kishio

Work from his oeuvre.

“The term Mono-ha, which translates roughly as “school of things,” refers to a group of artists working in Japan in the late 1960s and early 1970s who developed a radically elemental language, combining natural and industrial materials in a manner that echoed aspects of Western Minimalism and Arte Povera while developing material poetics quite its own.

Suga’s works tend to revolve around provisional interactions between a few common objects — “situations,” created by the artist, that serve to emphasize the nature of the existence of each object, however illogical their association.

In one of the most beautiful works, a site-specific installation called “Tabunritsu (Law of Multitude)” from 1975 (like many of the older works, it has been re-created by the artist for the current show), a large plastic sheet suspended horizontally at knee level between the four walls of a room is scattered with football-size stones, each supported from beneath by a short concrete column.

In another, “Shachi Jokyo (Left-Behind Situation)” from 1972, a similar horizontal plane is created by the wall-to-wall crisscrossing of a single length of thick wire, at every intersection of which the artist has balanced a stray scrap of wood.

It is difficult to pinpoint what makes these and many of the other works so magical, except to say that in their diligent yet oddly purposeless refinement they draw from each material some deep intrinsic resonance, as if coaxing it into being exactly what it is. Stones are heavy; plastic sheeting is thin and transparent; concrete is solid and stable. Drawn into collaboration, the three materials generate a curious harmony.

Large-scale installations from the 1970s predominate on the gallery’s ground floor, to stately, often elegant effect. In the upstairs gallery, one finds a very different scene: several dozen smaller, wall-mounted assemblages, most dating to the last 10 years.” – LA Times 

Michele Abeles

Work from English for Secretaries

“Ms. Abeles’s images are radiant, seductive and mysterious. They invite and thwart reading. She weaves images and patterns into collagelike, even quiltlike mashups that are nonlinear rebuses — rebuses speaking in tongues. They cross and recross the line between abstraction and representation, also between private and public, between the natural and the artificial, always reminding us that images deluge every aspect of life.

You can assume that everything you are looking at has a source, not only in the world but perhaps also in previous Abeles works. The mixture of Asian characters on the background of shaded pastels that recurs throughout these images appeared as fabric in the photographs in Ms. Abeles’s first show at 47 Canal, often draped over a platform on which a nude model reclined. This script motif peeks into the corner of two parts of a triptych, each dominated by the same snapshot of a cat sitting on a Persian rug in a backyard, one slightly larger than the other. The third part of the triptych is more abstract, but as you look you realize that elements from it frame the other two parts.

Here and elsewhere you’ll find motifs that seem to conjure other art, in particular the early nudes of David Salle and the brick patterns of Kelley Walker. Usually Ms. Abeles combines the pointed and obscure with enough visual pizazz to keep you interested.” – The New York Times

Luke Turner

Work from his oeuvre.

“Luke Turner (b.1982, Manchester, UK) is an artist and writer based in London. His work investigates the operations and oscillations of art, exploring notions of presence and excess within the visual realm. His practice evolved out of his work as an early net pioneer in the ’90s, when he created the influential website, thevoid. In 2011 he published aMetamodernist Manifesto, and he is currently co-editor of Notes on Metamodernism.” – Luke Turner

Blake Rayne

Work from “Folder & Application” at Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York.

“Rayne’s work deftly traverses this organizing principle with its inherent semantic play. The “application folder” is modulated and distorted throughout the exhibition in a variety of slips and puns that signal broader contexts of material production, word processing, and employment. Indeed, one imagines that the figure who circulates throughout this exhibition (perhaps named “the folder”) is an artist in the situation of either only being precariously capable of applying his or herself to the vagaries of artistic self-representation, or one who is nimbly able to dodge its mandates. Out of this ambiguity, Rayne re-programs the application of the painter’s resources – computer, canvas, paint – as they are scripted within the social domain of artistic production.

The paintings in Folder and Application oscillate between strict chromatic reduction and the decorative logic of the applied arts. In much of this work, the activities of folding, spraying and stitching that have featured as dominant components in the construction of Rayne’s work for the past several years reappear in this exhibit as codified and elastic terms. These productive procedures surface here in a strangely distanced guise; as if to offer confirmation of a subject as much enveloped in a field of painting’s historical forms as he is preoccupied with applying himself to the task of employing them for use.

Rayne engages painting’s history as a field of tensions that compose the practice of painting as cultural sign. He attempts to work through the need for historical competence in understanding the possible relevance of painting for both the painter’s level of self-consciousness and for forces of legitimation within a corporate culture of  information. This suggests that the sign “painting” is on the one hand always compensatory for other cultural interests. Nevertheless it also suggests a field of evasions and deflections, a material practice in which the artist is constantly displaced by language while being administered by institutional demands for certain types of artistic subjects: whether the latter be the hack enfant-terrible or the artist intent on legitimizing his/her endeavors with a trove of cultural reference. To some degree, Rayne attempts to organize a recognition of this dislocation by focusing on its more mundane and marginalized aspects: the laborious task of arranging one’s self-presentation for the filing of an application. Yet Rayne explodes the fixity of the terms of this arrangement in an attempt to open the possibility for examining the conditions of artistic self-enablement and perhaps, for agency. – Miguel Abreu Gallery