Galerie Praz-Delavallade
28, rue Louise Weiss
10 rue du Chefdelaville
75013 Paris
France
+33 145862000

 

Galerie Praz-Delavallade 

 

Read On... Galerie Praz-Delavallade 

 

 

January 14th - March 13th, 2010

 

Marcel Dzama (1974, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada) presents his second solo exhibition in Spain, and first in Galería Helga de Alvear. His drawings, endowed with a unique and personal imagery, have become extremely popular in the past few years..

 

Marcel Dzama's world is rooted in the history of traditional illustration, with visual references which refer us to the classics from the decades of the 20's and 30's of the last century. Nevertheless, it is as if the artist were presenting us with a perverse version of these. He has created a personal, perfectly identifiable iconography, with recurring characters who perform rather difficult to discern actions, creating an atmosphere, an aura, full of humour, irony, anxiety and absurdity.

 

These are hybrid characters, personified animals, animate objects. Their actions are sustained on the limits of narrative, prompting the spectator to find a meaning, a linearity, which doesn't lead anywhere but which keeps the spectator guessing. It is as if we had access to a unique, not decisive moment, not knowing what happened before or what comes after.

 

The works are realised in pencil, ink and watercolours with a restricted palette: there is a dominance of red, brown, green, khaki, grey and black. The paper background is always left white, emphasising that reference to traditional illustration and, occasionally, the artist adds a text, either a line as a title or filling up the whole page.

 

He has produced a project specifically for this exhibition, in which he has given vent to Spanish motives. Almost as in a circus parade in which we see Don Quixote, bulls and bullfighters, flamenco dancers and a new character in his world; perverse, dressed in polka dots, and sexually ambiguous, these figures along with details borrowed from Goya's drawings and quotes from Federico García Lorca and from the Aragonese painter himself.

 

Regarding The Dance of Delilah, the artist says: "I had recently embarked on the task of collecting the images piled up around me, and Delilah wasn't something I was expecting to do. It emerged from the concern with the meaning of existence, and, above all, the death of the anonymous masses. Thus, Delilah dances with uncertainty and plays with language, as if she really cared about one language or another. Beyond that, the rules are random, and nothing is familiar or usual, although they do join the rhyme and richness of the harmonies and the suggestions of the imagery. So, please, enjoy the dance."

 

Along with the series of drawings, the artist also presents the video "The Infidels", in which two armies, a male and a female one, face each other in a battlefield, mixing choreography and details of great violence.

 

 

Galería Helga de Alvear
Doctor Fourquet, 12
28012 Madrid
+34 91 468 05 06

 

Read On... Galería Helga de Alvear 

 

Domo Baal is delighted to welcome Lara Viana to the gallery programme with her first solo show.

 

" ... When taking in these works one can't help but think about how the photographic object has been previously handled in paint, by the likes of Gerhard Richter or Luc Tuymans. They radiate a peculiar energy that sits somewhere between the fuzzy warmth of recollection and the alchemical mystery of the re-dimensionalised subject. Viana appears at home within the representational hall of mirrors that connects the world of painting with that of imaging, drawing one's attention to the innate human desire to render things realistically and the ways that new technologies fracture our understanding of reality. Where Richter's and Tuymans' blurry re-contextualisation of familiar and mass-media imagery are associated with particular political themes, Viana hovers between the time-based evidence of an unspecified event and its fictional (mis)reading as if stage-managing fragments of a baroque drama. Her paintings may be more about the workings of the mind than the media machine but, like her predecessors, she appears alive to the difficulties of extrapolating one from the other.

 

It is no surprise, then, that Viana cites Velazquez as an influence, particularly when it comes to her chromatically complex interiors out of which social situations, or the aftermath of them, seem to have grown like soft-tissue attachments. So, too, her reductive approach to technique - Viana applies, moves and erases oily umbers, ochres and blues around and from the ground as if hesitant to pin the image down. Ever since her Royal College days, Viana has been making works in which the potential elements of a story appear to emerge, low-relief, from matter. The lurid gaseous compositional quality of her earlier paintings has given way to a more sophisticated set of mid-tonal propositions, the slippery smears of organic hues reminiscent at points of bodily fluids on glass - biopsy slide evidence of the painter's uncanny ability to describe space and the passage of time.

 

The most recent series of table paintings, still lifes of table tops literally writhing with dinner party detritus and rudely cropped like outtakes from a film reprographic project, push the subject/context dissolution further still. Despite the chaotic melding of objects and interiors, one is never allowed to get lost in each frame on account of areas of sharp linearity - the crisp edging of laundered linen and the encroaching presence of brushstroke walls - but directed as if to experience the shift that occurs as the familiar yields something unexpected. As with other of Viana's series, one is left to situate oneself between the layers of the representational onion, the metaphorical distance from the table. As a group, they make visible the subjective discrepancies between different human accounts on a single event, the treacle slide of time between one perfunctory moment and one of significance.

 

Viana's delectable, yet disquieting studies for a mental picnic open up many byways between personal and public territories: the influence of cultural production on the content and stylistics of memory, at every level. But back in the studio, and drawn into a Viana Rorschach-image conundrum, one remembers that these works are as much about the nature of living as the removed technical recording of it. Her curious handling of the half-remembered comes as a result of serious real-time observation, an acute sensitivity to the manner in which light alters objects and situations. And as one watches an eggy ovaloid visage melt into a mirror holding a secret interior, it's hard to care about the chicken. ... "

- Rebecca Geldard, an extract from her essay for Lara Viana's exhibition at Phoenix Arts, Exeter, in June 2009.

 

Lara Viana was born in Salvador, Brazil, where she spent her childhood. She graduated from the Painting Department at the Royal College of Art in 2007, was selected for New Contemporaries in 2008 and the Whitechapel Gallery's East End Academy 2009 - The Painting Edition as well as a solo show at Phoenix Arts, Exeter. Lara Viana is also currently exhibiting in a group show at Workplace Gallery, Gateshead. Rebecca Geldard's essay will be published with images as a pocket-book by domobaal editions, and will be available from the gallery.

 

 

17 January - 7 March 2010

 

VILMA GOLD is pleased to announce an exhibition of new works by Nicholas Byrne.

 

'Drawing on copper, linen and paper, Nicholas Byrne's recent paintings disperse emergent figures amongst a restless ground. Made on a scale relating directly to the body, these works are reminiscent of an era in British painting in which the figure is brutalised. Byrne�s paintings butt up clean, bright planes of colour against aged surfaces holding torn and delineated incarnations. The paintings hinge upon offering up a series of tensions, or flirtations perhaps;- the pure and the profane, lucidity and doubt, confession and secrecy, innocence and experience. Picked up, discarded and remembered elsewhere as the paintings take shape, Byrne's fidelity to these vibrations opens the possibility of entering into an ornate visual play with the works.'

 

Arriving from within a particular history of taste, Byrne sources and mills a cast of characters -imagery associated with having 'exotic' or 'liberal' tastes - to cast them in a febrile drama: A fragment of Chinoiserie for example, comes to resemble the Commedia dell'Art's famous Pierrot, elsewhere an ornamental dial kicks out like a leg. The notion arises that Byrne is foregrounding emergent sensibilities- the tasteful, the exotic, the catholic, or the figure as free as the bricoleur- and in doing so laying out his group of works to become a chorus making an ode. Here 'A Catholic Episode' could suggest the thrill of being 'over-come' by a sudden collapse in disposition, or point to the migrating elements- potentials and places perhaps- that form sensibility as a whole.

 

Embodied in the loops and coils of his painted winding forms, Byrne's mining of Modernity's underbelly, - its excesses, overflows and contradictions, has functioned to open a sinuous developmental tract in his work. In this regard his index of graphic motifs play a secondary role, forming a potent locus directing the event of growth and erasure by which each painting evolves. A black husk of a doll on a blue pastel ground for example, provides a charge for the movement of quick, scouring marks- it seems to function as a factory; a guttural tract almost- consuming, digesting and re-distributing shape and colour throughout the body of the painting. As form bubbles out and quickly dissolves again it becomes apparent that the figure/ground opposition works here as a permeable skin. Byrne's enigmatic paintings mark the gap between saying and not saying, between the want to confess all and something more private. They act as configurations tracking the forms that somehow survive, that just slip out, episodically- to quote Jasper Johns,

 

 

Born in Oldham, Nicholas Byrne lives and works in London. He studied at the Royal College of Art and has exhibited at Tate St Ives (2009), David Zwirner, New York (2009), Studio Voltaire (2008) and Marc Foxx, Los Angeles (2007).

 

 

VILMA GOLD
6 Minerva Street
London E2 9EH
+44 (0) 20 7729 9888

 

 

VILMA GOLD 

 

Read On... VILMA GOLD, London 

 

 

November 21, 2009 - February 27, 2010

 

GALERIE VOLKER DIEHL is pleased to present English Painting 2009-2010 (below the belt). This will be the second solo exhibition at the gallery of the London based artist Simon English and will consist entirely of new works on canvas.

 

Simon English emerged onto the London Art scene in 1994 with his first ever solo show Young British Art 3 at the Saatchi Gallery. In more recent years, he has become known for his large and small-scale works on paper which have been described as painted drawings and fit somewhere between the two.

 

Lyrics and literature loom large in the work. Extracts from Jonathan Coe, John Betjeman, Annie Lennox and Barry McSweeney to name a few, combined with his story and history, twist and turn through the painted score. Seemingly random texts hijack the Image Bank and sets forth an emotional discourse to sad and comic effect. In Art in America, January 2007, Ana Finel Honigman states that "English resurrects lost images, connects loose references and makes beauty from pictorial chaos".

 

English Painting 2009 - 2010 goes a little below the belt.

 

This is no survey show or genre that Simon would necessarily identify with. The paintings quite often break the rules from top to bottom. Indeed the work takes a swipe when you least expect it and when looking at the Painting referencing Barry McSweeney's "The Book of Demons" you are left positively bruised and riddled with crabs. In the gate crashed Wedding of Laura Wingfield, the established use of oil on paper makes way for paper on oil. Each work has it's own internal logic in which supposedly "high" and "low" become flattened onto one scene. It is hard to know at times, whether you are awake or dreaming, or if fantasy has superseded reality.

 

Simon's large loft Studio Space is situated above his flat. In the painting Upstairs Downstairs it is difficult to know whether you are in his painting space or the bedroom below, in a 1970's Victorian Soap Drama, decoding a map of desire or addressing his proverbial "upstairs, downstairs", above and below the belt.

 

In Paul McCarthys 1974 "Penis dip painting", associations of Renoir and the patriarchal tradition of painting come straight to mind. English describes returning to canvas as "feeling a bit like going back to an all male boarding school." In the painting Lady Digby (The Rotters Club) (referring to Digby House, Sherborne School, Dorset ) English returns to puberty/ painting and describes growing breasts with the same bewilderment as when Mervin Peake's Mr Pye grew wings. The exquisite corps of Lady Digby fights to find an ungainly balance between her male and female persona. This two-spirited hermaphrodite tries to reach reconciliation with her body and find a poetic alignment between drawing and painting. Her protrusive semi covered form is ludicrously serenaded by a prayer for swimming trunks (taken from a section in Jonathan Coe's novel, "The Rotters Club", set in a 1970's school) from Benjamin, who not only finds a pair of swimming trunks in the locker room but God at the same time.

 

English Painting 2009 - 2010 is the start of a new love affair.

 

In Song for Painting, Galloway, where tableaux and still-life prop each other helplessly up, we are now led to believe that for Simon, Painting is "my first, my last, my everything".

 

In 2005, English's work was included in the Contemporary Erotic Drawing Show at the Aldrich Museum in Connecticut and his monograph, "Simon English and the Army Pink Snowman" (Blackdog publishing) was released, with extensive essays by Bill Arning and Stella Santacatterina.

 

Simon English has had solo exhibitions in London, Berlin, Zurich, Norway, Paris and most recently in New York. His work is in the collections of Agnes b, Paris, Sammlung Falckenberg, Hamburg, The Louisiana Museum, Copenhagen, The Essl Collection, Vienna, The Museum of Israel, The Burger collection, The Furstorffer collection, The Arts Council Collection of Great Britain, The British Museum, London, The Paisley Museum, Scotland, The Saatchi Collection, The Schacter Collection and The U.K Government Art Collection amongst many other important collections.

 

 

 

Galerie Volker Diehl
Lindenstrasse 35
D - 10969 Berlin
+49 30-22 48 79 22

 

 

Galerie Volker Diehl 

 

Read On... Galerie Volker Diehl