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Rokeby, London

Graham Hudson

Perhaps hard to pin down, Hudson’s practice is full of curious juxtapositions and breaks in style. His references are wide ranging, from religion to contemporary advertising, whilst his concerns range from both the moral and ethical to aesthetic and the mundane.

Graham Hudson makes work for a world overloaded with information; he is concerned with our relationship to this world of excess and how we order and understand it. More often than not, Hudson will source his materials from the streets around him, building constructions from discarded furniture and pound store plastics. These items can then be veneered or treated to seductive lighting, the artist investing in them in a manner inconsistent with their previous throw away status.

Je ne regrette rien (or we'll meet agian, don't know where, dont know when), Graham Hudson, 2005

Installation view at Team gallery - fragments for studying what's leftover, Ross Knight 2005 

Team Gallery, New York

Ross Knight : fragments for studying what's leftover.

Ross Knight's contradictory sculptures seem to have been frozen at precisely the moment when their component parts first came together or, conversely, in the instant before they completely fall apart. They hold together just barely, but in a form that also appears to be inevitable. Not only are Knight's materials always in tenuous balance, but their meaning is composed of diametrically opposed impulses and values that court destabilization - they are both epic and diminutive; sprawling and weightless; elegant and sloppy; poetic and insulting; brilliant and idiotic; considered and thrown away.

Akin to three - dimensional drawings in space, Knight's sculptures wrestle with notions of authenticity, ephemerality and severity. Without taking themselves too seriously, Knight's rigorous and carefully cobbled together constructions reference a battery of practices. How do three - dimensional objects always invoke the functional and in what way does Knight parody these implications? What exactly is a primary structure; what is secondary?

Contemporary Fine Arts Berlin

CHRIS OFILI : THE BLUE RIDER

After his spectacular appearance in the British Pavilion at the Vienna Biennale in 2003 as well as the recently opened installation acquired by the Tate Modern, The Upper Room, we are very pleased to announce our second exhibition of works by the British artist Chris Ofili.

Chris Ofili makes his debut as a sculptor. A couple, whose portrayal is reminiscent of the Catalonian tradition of caganer, takes on the leading role. Its patina (the lady is silver, the gentleman is blue) provides the chromatic design for the entire exhibition. Chris Ofili restricts himself to the colours blue and silver in all the works presented.

As already suggested by the title, the exhibition is also a homage to the artists' movement, The Blue Rider, whose internationality, non-conformity and liberalism can serve as a model also for today's generation of artists.

Chris Ofili : The Blue Rider at Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin, 2005

Patricia Piccinini, CYCLEPUP, 2005. Fiberglass, automotive paint, leather & stainless steel

Robert Miller Gallery, New York

Patricia Piccinini: Nature's Little

With her series Nature's Little Helpers Piccinini has created her own ecosystem, populated by creatures that sit somewhere in between the real world and a world that we can only imagine. They are uncanny, impossible, almost mythological, and yet somehow familiar. Among them is the 'Surrogate', a placid gnomish figure whose back is covered in bulging pouches containing wriggling animals in various states of growth. Nearby sit a group of 'Cyclepups', custom-painted, embryonic motorcycles that blur the boundaries between the animal and the mechanical.

The works revolve around the idea of our changing relationship with the natural world, particularly our increasingly significant interventions. Playing with the idea of doing the wrong thing for all of the right reasons, Piccinini presents us with a series of 'solutions' for a number of environmental problems. However her interest is not so much in 'environmental correctness', as in the stories that emerge when new beings are added to - and begin to interact with - the world. Her assumption is that while we might have the ability to create new forms, we will never have the power to contain them. Piccinini revels in the probability that her creations will get loose and begin to create their own worlds, beyond our control and expectations.

PaceWildenstein - 545 West 22nd St, New York

John Chamberlain : Recent Sculpture

PaceWildenstein presents John Chamberlain: from October 21 through December 3, 2005 at the gallery’s newest space in Chelsea, Street. Featuring sculptures made in 2004 and 2005 in Chamberlain’s Shelter Island, New York studio, the centerpiece of this exhibition is Neptune's Cap, an 8' x 6' x 4' steel sculpture. The work was originally conceived two decades ago for artist Donald Judd's pool in Marfa, Texas, but never realized. Chamberlain recently returned to the idea and finished the piece this summer. A full color catalogue with an essay by art historian Irving Sandler accompanies the exhibition.

In his essay, Mr. Sandler notes, “The synthesis of painting and sculpture is central to Chamberlain's work. His early metal constructions were influenced by David Smith’s works, but around the late 1950s, they increasingly alluded to de Kooning's Gesture or Action Painting. As Chamberlain remarked, it was the tendency with which he felt ‘intuitively in tune.’ He was taken with the roughness, muscularity, and energy of de Kooning's painting and the ambiguity of its shifting and interpenetrating open planes. These gave Chamberlain permission to use smashed car parts that seemed to be in constant motion. But he was not satisfied with Gesture Painting's two-dimensions, and he translated its flat forms into bulky and swelling volumes, both in reliefs and in-the-round sculptures. In the process, Chamberlain transformed Gesture Painting and achieved an original style.”

John Chamberlain, Neptune's Cap, 2005, painted and chromed steel, 95" x 72" x 53" (241.3 cm x 182.9 cm x 134.6 cm) © Copyright 2005 - Pace Wildenstein.

Rachelle Rojany, “Chicken”, 2005, Glass lens with the artist's prescription ground into it, 2 x 2.5 x .05 inches, Edition of 3

Happy Lion, Los Angeles

Rachelle Rojany: First Solo

The Happy Lion is pleased to present the first solo exhibition by Los Angeles-based artist Rachelle Rojany. Using a wide range of materials such as wood, mirror, glass and feathers, Rojany presents seven meticulously constructed sculptures that are visually striking and rich with metaphor. The individual works have their own formal language yet join together in a conversation about perception, mortality and infinite possibility.

The work evokes elements of contradiction and the unexpected. For example, a six foot pair of fiberglass and mirror wings is ominous yet hopeful, suggestive of flight yet suspended mid air. A tall male figure made of wood with diamond eyes and out-stretched arms expresses human yearning but is at the same time ghostlike. Displayed on a velvet pillow, a gold ring — a traditional romantic emblem of unity is redesigned into a figure eight, also the sign for infinity. This transformation of the object suggests both the hopeful and constrictive implications of forever. On a whole the sculptures emphasize the pervasive nature of subjectivity — the dissonance between the world as it exists and how it could be.

the apartment, Athens

Jonathan Callan : New Work

the apartment is pleased to announce an exhibition of new sculpture, drawing and photographic works by British artist Jonathan Callan. All works have been made especially for his Athens show and include a number of his trademark book sculptures – exploded into thousands of pieces or laid out twisted or manipulated and stripped of any meaning. Commenting on these works, Callan has claimed that ‘it’s almost as if I am interested in doing something to the book as an object to emphasize the fact that language is incapable of dealing with certain aspects of life.’ It would thus make sense to claim that part of Callan’s practice questions our notion of meaning, as it has been informed by Western thought and culture – a culture unashamedly literary.

Central to the exhibition is a major new sculpture made of hundreds of books and titled ‘Another So Far’ (2005), a monumental extension of earlier book pieces. An abstract mass of books but also a perplexing exercise in beauty and chance, this piece fills one of the galleries, occupying a space between the sculptural and the pictorial.

Jonathan Callan, Masterpieces, 2005. Paper 66 x 48 x 11 cm

Matt Franks, Totem scull, 2005, strofoam, plastazote, aluminium, epoxy resin, nylon flock, height 1.40 m

vamiali's, Athens

Matt Franks : 'I am alive and you are dead'

Matt Franks presents a new series of sculptures and drawings. Franks place himself in the field of traditional curved sculpture. His work made mainly from styrofoam and epoxy resin is drawn from comics and cartoons imagery. In this new entity he will present three new sculptures titled “Zombie Reanimator”, “NecroBaroque” and “Twin Voodoo Death Skull” using as a point of reference many sources, such as deconstructionism science fiction and inspired by the work of writer Philip K Dick (Blade Runner etc.).

Franks’ sculptures are three dimensional volumetric forms of two dimensional graphic renderings. He gives form to a bomb explosion, a swirl, a scull with bright neo-glo or very dark colours. His works relates to altered states of the mind and imagination, blurring of realities and uncertainties while on the other hand he uses humour as a tool of deployment. Franks combines a mixture of gothic and baroque elements to produce complicated and darkly humorous hybrids with a mysterious but comical existence.

Franks finds modernism and postmodernism labels patronising and didactic, implies with his work the importance of fun and adventure where at the same time he is extremely generous with his viewers, almost exuberant.

Praz-Delavallade, Paris

VEDOVAMAZZEI

The name Vedovamazzei brings together the Italian artists Stella Scala and Simeone Crispino. Under this pseudonym which they randomly chose on a tomb stone and which means “widowed Mazzei”. They summarize at the same time the female and male part of the couple while preserving a kind of anonymity. But the ambiguity of their name also introduces their choice where reality plays with the fiction and where objectivity is always mixed up.

What is immediately striking in the work of Vedovamazzei is its incredible polymorphism, feeling free to use every medium: from painting to video, from cartoon to performance, from sculpture to architecture.
They gave life to an innovative and provocative work, often tinted with irony and often interpreted as a comment of contradictions and neuroses of the contemporary life style.

“Isn’ t it romantic?”: ( Pictured ) a Thonet chair whose reversed back gives to this banal object the tragic beauty of a human being, too weak to live anymore and which rests folded up on itself under a glass box. The structure confirms the interest of Vedovamazzei for contradiction: contradiction, in this case, between the anecdotic contents and the execution of an almost neo-classic elegance.

Rebecca Warren, Dancer 1, 2005. Reinforced Clay with Plinth, 49 1/2 x 24 x 24 in; 126 x 61 x 61 cm.

Matthew Marks Gallery 523 W 24 ST, New York

Rebecca Warren: Pas de Deux

Rebecca Warren makes figurative sculptures in unfired clay. These sculptures are expressionistic and often overtly sexual. In the present work, Warren takes as inspiration the art historically-loaded figure of Degas’s sculpture of the little dancer. Exploring the duality between the prostitute and the ballerina, Warren interrogates the way that canonical sculpture has been read and reread over time. The artist’s work has been called feminist, but Warren tends to disagree: “I want them to look like they'd been made by a sort of pervy, middle-aged provincial art teacher who’d taken me over.”

The artist will be exhibiting over a dozen new sculptures, including nine figures, loosely termed “dancers.” The [I]pas de deux[/I] referenced in the title is the dynamic, fluctuating relationship between art history’s most persistent binaries: male/female, high/low, old/new, Dionysus/Apollo, classic/grotesque. This exhibition scrutinizes these traditional sets of opposing forces and explores the way in which they interact and gain meaning from each other.

SHOSHANA WAYNE GALLERY, Los Angeles

Kathy Butterly

In her new sculptural pieces called “body language,” Butterly continues her pursuits in clay, calling on her interest of the vessel and how it evokes aspects of the body. In addition, she will also include a series of drawings that relate to her ceramic work.

Words that are often used to describe Butterly’s work have included: oddities, perverse hybrids, beautiful, intense, complex, vividly colored, humorously grotesque, erotic and freakish. She considers all her work to be a type of self-portrait, both in the idea of the vessel as metaphor for body, but also commenting on how her body becomes a receptacle of the world around her. She states: “I find great pleasure and comfort in things that are not perfect or things that are so close to perfect....... and then there is a flaw. I find that I am most interested in things that have contradictions within them. An example of an image from the real world which I may find interesting would be finding a fine Chinese Ming vase and turning it over to find that a kid stuck a piece of chewed gum underneath it. It's funny, beautiful, gross and real.”

Kathy Butterly, Why Not Knot, 2005, Porceline, earthenware, glaze, 4 1/2 height with 4 1/2 in diameter

Jeroen Jacobs, Untitled, 2005. Concrete, 15x15x15cm

magnus müller, Berlin

Jeroen Jacobs

Jacobs tests the possibilities of the sculptural process by casting concrete onto an inclined plane. Intention and chance develop a fascinating interaction, which in turn creates surprising and even historically recognisable forms. The sculptures seem to consist of several layered objects and some of the surface structures carry a resemblance to well known forms. But their glossy surface tapers into the massive, unshaped base, which brings one back to the production process and the original essence of the material. Abstract forms are developed into complex casts from everyday objects and the spaces between them. Some motifs reappear in many sculptures, but are always recombined in different ways so that the resultant sculpture is a completely new piece of art. The precise analyses of space and material, of matter and vacuity - classical questions of sculpture - play a role as important as the process of casting based on the coincidence.

Lisa Boyle Gallery, Chicago

The Hundred-Headed Ass : Brian Getnick

In his first solo exhibition with Lisa Boyle Gallery, Brian Getnick presents both two and three dimensional works that put form to rich fantasy and invented myths and narratives. In "The Hundred Headed Ass", Getnick presents elegant works on black and white paper along with complex sculptures made from cardboard and other disposable materials. In this new work Getnick continues to explore the reserves of his dreams and imagination. He projects into both the past and future to arrive at a synthesis of scientific data (real or imagined), mythology (mostly self-crafted) , ancient and modern interpretations of the afterlife, and human and animal coexistance.. In the central work of the show,( pictured ) an untitled sculpture of a lifesize boar's head, the viewer turns into a duplicate audience to an imaginary performance, literally. While circumventing the sculpture, which stands on supports that hoist it to face height, the viewer slowly comes to realize (from the physical act of turning around to the back, interior side of the head) that it contains a miniature, and incredibly detailed performance stage, complete with tiny glowing stage nestled far down into the mouth of the boar.

Brian Getnick, Untitled, 2005