Mireille Mosler, Ltd. is pleased to announce the first New York gallery exhibition of Marcel van Eeden. Is Grunewald still modern? features an installation of new drawings and wall painting.

Born in 1965 in the Netherlands, Marcel van Eeden, explores the world before his own existence by creating predominately black and white drawings after images from magazines and newspapers that predate his birth. Many drawings are also accompanied by texts, which are more or less separate from the images but inform them nevertheless. Van Eeden, as a conceptual draughtsman, often works in large series in which he follows his protagonists, such as K.M. Wiegand, Celia Coplestone and Matheus Boryna. Art itself is often the subject of the drawings.

For Is Grunewald still modern? Van Eeden turns to Modernism, since New York played such an important role in this movement in the 1950s. Fascinated by the seriousness with which terms as 'free expression' used to describe Abstract Expressionism at the time, Van Eeden conjures his own pairings. The title of the exhibition comes from a German article, "Ist Grünewald noch modern?" by Adolf Behne, first published in 1930 in Berlin. In this polemic, Behne criticizes the lack of any painting by the fifteenth century painter Matthias Grünewald in Berlin's public collections and points out why this old master still matters. Van Eeden shows details of what are possibly Grünewald reproductions, combined with texts that are seemingly unrelated as well as simple titles like Modernism and Meaning in Modern Art. Other drawings depict funny illustrations from the 1950s, while maintaining similar subtitles.

Marcel van Eeden has shown extensively in Europe and is represented by Galerie Zink in Germany. Van Eeden currently has a solo show at the Kunsthalle in Hamburg and his drawings are included in Compass in Hand, the drawing show at MoMA and Towing the Line, Drawing Space: 40 Contemporary Dutch Artists Defining the Moment in Holland at White Box. The exhibition coincides with the publication of Marcel van Eeden. Wird die moderne Kunst 'gemanagt"? Zeichnungen und Malerei 1992-2009, a publication with 500 drawings, articles and an interview by Arnon Grunberg published by Dumont.

 

Mireille Mosler, Ltd.
35 East 67th Street
New York, NY 10065
+1 212.249.4195

 

 

 

 

 

September 10 - October 10, 2009
Opening reception: Thursday, September 10, 6 - 8pm

 

Betty Cuningham Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by Greg Drasler, on view from September 10 through October 10, 2009. It will be the artist's second exhibition at the gallery, located at 541 W. 25th Street, between 10th and 11th Avenues. The artist will be present for an opening reception on September 10th, from 6 - 8 PM.

Included in the exhibition will be approximately ten large canvases, including three interiors and seven hat paintings. Developing out of previous work in this series, the hat paintings present an overview of a group of hatted men crowded onto the canvas creating a tightly knit composition. Although representational, the hats are the notes which unite the canvas into a subtly composed symphony. Drasler continues to develop the hats as a theme because each time he paints an object, "the act of painting repacks these things with new meanings". The bowler, fedora, newsboy, and boater hats represented in these paintings are reminiscent of the thirties and forties, a period that has always held the artist's fascination.

Like the hat paintings there too is nostalgia for a time gone by in Drasler's interiors. Although the room interiors do not feature human figures, these dreamlike paintings are not devoid of a human presence, and eerily include objects appearing to have only recently been deserted such as a small toy car at the foot of the chair in Mixed Marriage. This emptiness creates a longing to enter the artist's dream world, a surrealist nostalgia for these times and places. In Country Place and its upside-down opposite Without Paddle, Drasler lets us enter his Japanese beach house in the first canvas and then flips the painting, removes the floor and we enter his boat house.

A native of Waukegan, IL, Greg Drasler received his BFA and MFA from the University of Illinois at Champaign/Urbana. He began exhibiting upon moving to New York in the mid-1980s. Drasler's work can be seen in the collections of Dow Jones, Inc.; Krannert Art Museum, Champaign, IL; University of Illinois, Champaign/Urbana, IL; New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, NY: and Thurston Twigg-Smith, Honolulu, HI.

Drasler has been the recipient of numerous awards and grants, including a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in 1991 and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1993. Currently he is an Assistant Professor at Pratt Institute and has also taught at Princeton University.

 

Betty Cuningham Gallery
541 West 25th street
New York, NY 10001
+1 212 242 2772

 

PV: Thursday 17 September 2009, 6-9 pm
18 September 2009- 16 January 2010

 

Invited by the Hammerson's Emerging Artist Initiatitive, artist Adrian Navarro presents his second solo show in London, "Implosion", a series of works combining painting and screen-printing on canvas, the outcome of a process which also involves installation, photography and the digital post-production of images.

Navarro's work configures a visual exploration of space through rhythm, movement and energy fields. His creative processes seek to expand the vocabulary of the visual arts, investigating new mechanisms of intervention in the pictorial medium, which include tools borrowed from architecture. The process in "Implosion" is based on a spatial investigation whose first step is the creation of a real physical model of human scale, composed of a series of three-dimensional webs whereby cloths of multiple colours and patterns intersect in space. Adrian Navarro's eye travels across the installation following its movements which he will later deconstruct into series of photographic stills. By manipulating and shifting these images on the canvas, an implosive structure is created.

This new series of works describe spaces inhabited by emerging figures trapped in virtual webs from which they can only be set free through the eye of the observer. Adrian Navarro pursues a personal investigation into the perception of space that is constructed through superimposed layers in constant transformation, developing depth in the painting by means of a projected perspective. In the paintings at "Implosion", this space has just collapsed inwards provoking multi-directional deformations due to the internal tension between the elements. Works such as "Interzone" (2009) or "Mercury" (2009) generate a dynamic perspective whereby the spectator's visual field is drawn in by the depth of the painting and a subjective landscape is reconstructed in the observer's innermost eye.

In the series "Spheres", the skin which encapsulates these implosions becomes visible, like a surface containing organic forms which float in weightlessness. The circular experience of the gaze is frozen and, from an insurmountable distance, the spectator observes the figures trapped within. In "Sphere 01", Adrian Navarro's obsession in capturing light converts it into a fully tangible and physical element which at the same time emerges and is absorbed by the gravity at the centre of the sphere, attracting all that surrounds it. Once the critical state of the implosion has been overcome, nothing escapes this silent collapse.

Adrián Navarro (Boston, 1973) is a visual artist currently living and working in London. In 2001, Adrian began his art practice in New York after graduating from the Polytechnic University of Madrid, School of Architecture. Since 2006, he has established himself in London where he completed his art studies at Central Saint Martin's College of Art & Design (2007-2008). He has participated in a number of solo and group exhibitions in both cities. His work can be found in collections such as that of the UBS Bank and the Caja Madrid.

 

 

Image:
Adrian Navarro
SPHERE 01, 2009
Oil, acrylic and digital printing on canvas
2,00x2,00 m
Courtesy of the artist
 

HAMMERSON ART SPACE
60 Threadneedle Street
London EC2R 8HP

 

 

 

 

 

 

September 10 - October 17, 2009

 

For his forth one-person show at Anton Kern Gallery, Italian artist Alessandro Pessoli has put together a body of work, seamlessly moving between drawing, painting, collage, and sculpture, that places man at its center. With his fragility and his uncertainties, the human being is presented in a fragmentary way, with many parts left undefined while others are closely examined.

Expressively painted, fluid and immediate, often using a raw, loosely sketched, mark-making technique, or stencils and spraypaint, comprising erasures and overlays, the artist draws inspiration from classical themes of Christian iconography. Pessoli transforms the two gallery rooms into metaphorical spaces. The main area is dominated by the richly painted, large static figure of a crucifixion (Gesù che brucia tra i limoni) in intense lemon-lysergic coloration, that is surrounded - in an act of destabilizing the conventions of traditional altar painting - by bands of small-scale narrative scenes (Red People Gold Sky). These images depict a heterogeneous humanity populated by restless characters, masked, unconscious and unaware like sleepwalkers, punctuated by fields of pure golden light. Doubts are articulated, common beliefs and values are questioned. Pessoli embarks on a research journey that is above all emotional, his figures express sentimental tension, always looking for emotional movement.

The more intimate back room is given over to one sculpture and a collage painting that combine mundane materials, part simply sewn pieces of fabric, or cardboard, or a folded sheet of metal, part studio detritus such as the cloth that Pessoli used to clean his brushes with while painting Christo Giallo. The most material evidence of the artistʼs work, the "relics" of his practice so to say, takes on a dual meaning of both the concrete and the marvelous. The material and immaterial sides of Pessoliʼs work strongly resonate off each other, they are the forces that animate the entire exhibition.

A set of 30 Pessoli drawings is currently on view at the Venice Biennale as part of the Making Worlds section curated by Daniel Birnbaum. Since the artistʼs seminal New York debut at the Drawing Center in 1997, Pessoliʼs work has been shown in numerous exhibitions, including a solo presentation of painted ceramic sculptures at Chisenhale Gallery in London (2005), as well as group shows at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin, Italy (2002), the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles (2003), and the Philadelphia Museum of Art (2004). In November 2009, the exhibition Italics: Italian Art between Tradition and Revolution, 1968-2008 will open at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. The show was curated by Francesco Bonami and premiered at Palazzo Grassi in Venice in 2008

 

 

Anton Kern Gallery
532 West 20th Street
New York, NY 10011
+1 212.367.9663

 

 

 

september 23 to october 24, 2009
opening: saturday, september 19, 11am-2pm

kurimanzutto presents the first solo show by Dr. Lakra (Jerónimo López) at the gallery. This show is a wall drawing that expands throughout the 360 degrees of the space.

The visual field is saturated by innumerable stylistic references - from female African figures, Hindu deities, Japanese prints, and scientific, medical and anthropological illustrations of the nineteenth century, to 'porn' photo-novels, images in record covers, film scenes, publicity found in vintage magazines, and graffiti- mixing to conform an absolute image, where minimal landscapes camouflage behind the close-ups of exposed sexes, contorted faces, and signs of various body fluids.

This load of characters, bodies and gestures, come from such a diverse range of sources that they only share the visual avidity and the accumulative compulsion of this artist. Heterogeneity extend to the use of materials -ink, acrylic paint, pastel, and graphite pencil- with which Dr. Lakra obtains a multiplicity of drawing qualities.

Dr. Lakra merges graphic elements from the representations of the history of modern science and 'high culture', religious symbolism, and pop icons, producing a total atmosphere in which the viewer becomes embedded, and his/her sight gets fully trapped.

Dr. Lakra (Mexico City, 1972)
Among his murals excel the produced at Trienal Poli/Gráfica de San Juan (Puerto Rico, 2009) and CCA Glasgow (United Kingdom, 2007). He has presented his work individually at Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Oaxaca (Mexico, 2005). He has participated in group shows such as: Martian Museum of Terrestrial Art (Barbican Art Gallery, London, UK, 2008), Escultura Social: A New Generation of Art from Mexico City (The Alameda Nacional Center, San Antonio, US, 2008 and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, US, 2007), Goth: Reality of the Departed World (Yokohama Museum of Art, Yokohama, Japan, 2007), Wunderkammer: A Century of Curiosities (Museum of Modern Art, New York, US, 2007), Pin-Up: Contemporary Collage And Drawing (Tate Modern, London, UK, 2006), to mention a few.

His work is part of the Judith Rothschild Foundation Contemporary Drawings Collection-Museum of Modern Art, New York, L.A. MOCA, Yokohama Museum of Art, Walker Art Center and Hammer Contemporary Collection, among others.

 

In 2005 he produced the book Los Dos Amigos in collaboration with Abraham Cruzvillegas. RM and kurimanzutto have published Dr. Lakra's most recent book Health & Efficiency this year.

Image:
© Dr. Lakra
Courtesy of kurimanzutto, Mexico City

kurimanzutto
gob. rafael rebollar # 94
col. san miguel chapultepec
11850 Mexico City
5255 5286.3059

 

 

 

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