February 21 - April 30, 2009

"In my view, it's always important to consider matters from the vantage point of a bit of time and distance. Consequently, I tend to view life from the sidelines, deliberately maintaining some distance from the mainstream, seemingly "drifting away" from the main currents of every day life. "Drifting away" for me, usually means questioning my surroundings and the status quo. You could say I've developed an attitude towards life that I adhere to, where I intentionally keep some distance from the mainstream and from what might be considered central to others.

For most, contemporary art is widely accepted as integral to every day life. However, this does not mean that trends in contemporary art can solve all of life's problems nor become part of the mainstream. Most so-called "Contemporary Art" is no more than a by-product or phenomenon needed to meet the demands of the marketplace and our endless appetite for the latest consumer products and spectacle. Today, much of "Contemporary Art" never goes beyond creating faint shadows of societal reality, images so far removed from reality that they often appear fake and vulgar. Unlike "Modern Art" of the past, which sought to depict the heavy weight of reality and flesh-and-blood activities, today's "Contemporary Art" often lacks meaning and substance, typically conforming to what is popular -and superficial - in every day life. So in my view, it is time to find a more appropriate term for what passes these days as "Contemporary Art".

Admittedly, I am also engaged in "Contemporary Art" production. In the past I thought I was an art creator, but now I regard myself as an art producer. To my surprise, I feel happier with the title of "Art Producer" rather than "Art Creator", and I am more determined than ever in realizing my art works. This shift in my attitude and self-consciousness arose following my change in my living environment. The past two years living in Beijing have made me accustomed to my current status as a person on the periphery looking at life's events from the sidelines. Thanks to my marginal status, I now enjoy more freedom and less anxiety. I can observe all the hustle and bustle and turmoil around the centre of activity, as an outsider, and occasionally butt in if I wish. But for most of the time, I stay away from this phenomenon of so-called "Contemporary Art" related activities. Having said all of this, one may rightfully ask whether I am more than a little ambivalent toward the art world of today.

In Peripheral Vision I attempt to present the main focus of my most recently completed Art Work; Art Works that came out of my status living on the periphery with an attitude of ambivalence. Maintaining this marginal status reinforces my feelings of ambivalence toward many of life's realities. And the Art Work that is born of this tension between a life on the periphery and the inevitable attitude of ambivalence resulting there from, has inspired the title of this exhibition. In Chinese, the term is literally translated as "Always on the Periphery".

Huang Zhiyang
September 30, 2008
Beijing

 

No. 241 Cao Chang Di Village
Cui Ge Zhuang, Chao Yang District
Beijing
+86 10 5127 3220

 

 

 

 

 

 

February 21 - March 28, 2009   

Mark Moore Gallery is pleased to announce the inaugural exhibition of work by Nobuhito Nishigawara. In an era of globalization, as cultural identities and the boundaries between them become less rigid, Nishigawara's ceramic sculptures embody these cultural intersections. Born in Nagoya, Japan but having lived across the States, from Missouri to California, Nishigawara takes this global phenomenon and transforms it into a personal investigation of the inner-self. His repeated use of a stylized donkey figure is reminiscent of the industrialized kawaii aesthetic that prevails in Japanese culture, yet his use of ceramic renders it a sophisticated contemporary talisman. When paired with Nishigawara's other characters, that reference everything from ancient warriors to Renaissance dress to Disney cartoons, the donkey figure speaks of attempted relationships, of cultural confusion and dislocation. Nishigawara's sculptures seem to belong to every time and no time, to every place and no place. Rather than presenting concrete observations, they propose open-ended questions, their very uncertainty both liberating and disconcerting, their aesthetic belonging to us all and to no one in particular.

My inspiration comes from the culture I live in. Living in a melting pot of imported cultures and stimulants, my perception of aesthetic and self has become uncertain.
Nobuhito Nishigawara

Nobuhito Nishigawara received his BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute (Kansas City, MO) and his MFA from Arizona State University (Phoenix, AZ). He has exhibited his work widely throughout the United States in both group and solo exhibitions. Identities will be his first exhibition at the Mark Moore Gallery. Nishigawara lives and works in Santa Ana, CA.       

 

 

 

Bergamot Station A1
2525 Michigan Avenue
Santa Monica, CA 90404
Los Angeles
+1 310 453 3031

 

 

 

 

 

 

February 26 - April 11, 2009

 

Daneyal Mahmood Gallery is very pleased to present Oil Evolution by Andrei Molodkin - commemorating the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth. While Molodkin's work is known for questioning the role of oil in Western democracies; and exploring the troubling intersection between art and money - Oil Evolution uses oil as a liquid record of the earth's fossil history to reconstruct the descent of man.

Charles Darwin's model of evolution comes together in a three-part installation featuring Primate, Australopithecine and Homo sapien skulls negatively cast in acrylic and joined by a series of interconnected tubes circulating crude oil. Here it is not DNA that is the great signifier, that which transmits the virtues of one generation to the next, but oil - the new symbol of a universalized identity.

Man may be excused for feeling some pride at having risen, though not through his own exertions, to the very summit of the organic scale; and the fact of his having thus risen, instead of having been aboriginally placed there, may give him hope for a still higher destiny in the distant future...We must, however, acknowledge, as it seems to me, that man with all his noble qualities, with sympathy which feels for the most debased, with benevolence which extends not only to other men but to the humblest living creature, with his god-like intellect which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar system - with all these exalted powers - Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.
(Charles Darwin)

Daneyal Mahmood Gallery
511 West 25th Street 3rd Floor
New York, NY 10001
+1 212 675 2966

 

 

 

 

 

 

Adam Gillam, Sara MacKillop

21 February - 29 March 2009

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

February 28 - April 11, 2009

 

Loock Galerie is pleased to present new works by Takehito Koganezawa at Halle am Wasser. On February 13, the exhibition 'Polyrhythm' opened at BDI Kunstfenster, Breite Strasse 29, Berlin, and will be on view until December 2009.

Koganezawa works with video, drawing, installation, and performance, treating each as an equal means of expression. All his works share a poetic approach to everyday occurrences and observation, an engagement with the issues of time and the void as well as an underlying musicality.

In his drawings, Takehito Koganezawa creates relationships between objects from his everyday world of experience and abstract or fictive ones. While they show in part familiar content, they seem to emerge in the realm of a dream world due to their positioning, and are gathered in work groups like 'forgetting WORDS', 'forgetting SELF', or 'Superficial Blackhole'. Despite the usually obvious concretion of the visual subject, this verbal refusal of classification or theme is intentional in Koganezawa's work. "I would really like to see nothingness," he said in an interview with Hans-Ulrich Obrist. "So I am trying to generate meaning from an object."

Last year, Takehito Koganezawa held a fellowship at Villa Aurora in Los Angeles. His works have been presented at Christopher Grimes Gallery, Santa Monica, Otis' Ben Matz Gallery, Los Angeles, and at the exhibition Out of the Ordinary: New Video Art from Japan at MOCA Los Angeles, and at Museu de Art Moderna in Sao Paulo. After a fellowship at the Artist Residence Program of Kea Island, Greece, his installation could be seen in Qbox, Athens. He also showed an extensive video exhibition 'Between This and That' in November 2008 at Kanagawa Prefectural Gallery, Japan, and a catalog was published to accompany this exhibition.

On January 18, 2009, a solo exhibition of his work opened at Japan's MIMOCA, the catalog will be available in March 2009. Haus Konstruktiv in Zurich will show a further exhibition of his work in September 2009.

 

Loock Galerie
Halle am Wasser
Invalidenstraße 50/51
10557 Berlin
+49 30 2462 7690

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

27 February - 28 March, 2009

We have pleasure in presenting new works by the German artist Jürgen Drescher (born 1955 in Karlsruhe, lives and works in Berlin) in our next exhibition.

His work has been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including at venues in the USA, Italy and Germany, and recently at the Shanghai Biennale. The Buchhandlung Walther König publishers published the monograph entitled "Jürgen Drescher - Arbeiten bis heute" in 2007.

Jürgen Drescher's artistic work is characterised by a concern with everyday objects, which he transfers either directly - in the sense of "objects trouvé" that are already transferred by the artist's gesture into "ready-made" objets d'art -, or, as was the case here, through the recent indexal reproduction method of the "casting process" in the gallery. His videos are similarly produced in that he puts existing film material into new contexts and gives it a new interpretation. For some years now, Jürgen Drescher has been combining this practice with an approach characterised by scepticism and mistrust of social regulations and commercially orientated agreements.

In this, his second solo exhibition in Mai 36 Galerie, Jürgen Drescher presents an installative setting of individual objects from various work complexes that may be interpreted in a contextual connection. Aluminium casts - a bench, a window cross, a safe door and discarded clothing - are interspersed by facial impressions, drawings of roll down gates and videos of wheels, rolled-out marquises and empty projection screens placed pointing towards the ceiling

With the aim of creating formal and semantic connections between the exhibits, Jürgen Drescher uses concepts such as the German word "Fund" in the sense of its literal translation "find", as well as in its original English meaning "fund" = capital. Jürgen Drescher regards his finds, his focal material, as capital because they represent - via a kind of "ethnographic" examination - self-experience in the facets of the inventory of the exhibition. This also applies to the facial impressions, which were acquired from the inhabitants of a Pacific island on a South Sea expedition in 1880. The artist and the viewer find themselves in an experimental order that contains material for private mythologies or critical examination.

[Text: Barbara Buchmaier, Berlin]

 

Mai 36 Galerie
Rämistrasse 37
CH-8001 Zurich
+41 44 261 68 80

 

 

 

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