STUDIO-ONLINE

Tim Prentice
SMALL MIRROR CURTAIN IN FRAME, 2009
Polished aluminum and stainless steel
28 x 22 x 10 inches
71 x 56 x 25.4 cm

Trained as an architect, Prentice turned to full-time sculpture making over thirty years ago. His architectural background has enabled him to design sculptures with a sensitivity to their surroundings, whether they be for large public installations or more intimate private collections. In this exhibition, the artist further investigates the shape, form, and flow of wind currents in order to make air virtually visible. Constructed on “systems” of identically bent wire, the intricate structures and reflective metals he uses allow the sculptures to soar or undulate in response to their environment, creating delightful patterned movements for the eye. As one of the foremost kinetic sculptors working today, Prentice has executed literally hundreds of his whimsical and complex pieces for galleries, universities, museums, hospitals, airports, corporate offices, civic centers, and private collections around the world. A portion of the works in this exhibition were recently exhibited at the Mattatuck Art Museum in Waterbury, CT.

Maxwell Davidson Gallery
724 Fifth Avenue 4th Floor
New York, NY 10019
Phone: 212.759.7555
Web: www.davidsongallery.com

C-47 Alberta, 2009
Digital c-print facemounted to plexi
90 x 72 inches

After fifty summers, the wrecked aircraft’s ultra-modern form becomes a part of the primeval landscape. Its shattered carapace lies scorched by the sun and scoured by extreme winters. Redolent of science fiction, these Futurist antiques have been partially cannibalized, their unwanted buckled shell listing in the mountain gales. American and Japanese automobiles lie scattered in the dangerous wastes of central Iraq. Ephemeral relics, shot to a skein of rusting metal, tremble delicately in the abrasive dust storm. Like Saddam Hussein’s shattered hilltop palace, these are the follies of globalized forgetting.

Around the time that Thoreau pegged the idea of wilderness as a cultural construct, the new technology of photography was gaining weight as a tool of Empire. This was the era of the photographic survey. Teams embarked with view cameras and mobile darkrooms to chart and document remote territories. Seemingly neutral in intent, the photographic survey was anything but. Surveyors often worked as part of a military unit, such as the British team who took part in the Abyssinian Campaign of 1867-68. This was in fact a rescue mission, but the corps of Royal Engineers produced 1,500 landscape photographs during the expedition. This was a valuable document of Abyssinia at that time, as well as being an apparatus of colonization and propaganda.

The Fall is a photographic survey of our historic unconscious. Mosse travelled to intensely remote locations, from the Patagonian Andes to the Yukon Territories, and worked as an embed with the US military to produce work for this exhibition. The Fall is a rescue mission to try to locate our blasted sense of landscape and archeology, and reclaim the primeval waste for our imagination. Produced to an epic scale, each of the photographs in The Fall is a history painting for our times.

The Fall is comprised of work from Mosse’s first year of working with the two-year Leonore Annenberg Fellowship in the Performing and Visual Arts.

Born in Ireland, Richard Mosse earned his Postgraduate Diploma in Fine Art from Goldsmiths, University of London in 2005 and his MFA in Photography from Yale School of Art in 2008. His work has been exhibited at Tate Modern, The Barbican Centre and Art Chicago. His work has been featured on the front cover of Source, an established British photography magazine, as well as in Art Review, C International Photo Magazine and Lapiz. Mosse has been interviewed on National Public Radio and London’s Resonance FM. His work will be included in the upcoming Fotofest 2010 Biennial of Contemporary U.S. Photography, March 12 – April 25, 2010, Houston, TX.

Opening reception: Thursday, November 19, 6-8 pm

Jack Shainman Gallery
513 West 20th Street
New York, NY 10011
Phone: 212 645 1701
Web: http://www.jackshainman.com/home.html

Max Wigram Gallery presents new works by Mustafa Hulusi.

On the first floor, the exhibition features The Worshippers, a video by Mustafa Hulusi and Mark Titchner. The work, originally designed as a moving billboard to be encountered in a public space, is screened on a structure of scaffolding poles. This display highlights the work’s reference to the visual language of advertising, a recurring theme in both Hulusi and Tichner’s practices. In the work, images of Ayatollah Khomeini, leader of the 1979 Iranian revolution, are merged with hypnotic geometric patterns and Titchner’s signature truisms in a style reminiscent of 60′s psychedelia and 80′s rave culture. By recalling these recent countercultural movements the video subverts it’s own aesthetic; it denounces aspects of Western capitalism and consumerism and proposes we look elsewhere for spiritual fulfilment.

The second floor presents new sculptures and paintings by Hulusi. The three statues at the centre of the room are modern black marble replicas of statues from the Roman ruins of Salamis on the eastern coast of Cyprus. On the one hand, the three disfigured female figures refer to the artist’s personal history and his childhood memories of seeing the original ruins on a family outing to the archaeological site. On the other hand, the work takes on a deeper metaphor for the politics of colonization and the survival of a culture despite various dominations. The paintings, from the Orange (Cyprus 08) series, reiterate the artist’s Cypriot roots as well as pertaining to the hyperrealism of advertising and the representation of an unattainable beauty.

Hulusi (b. 1971, London, UK) is a Turkish Cypriot born and educated in the UK. Projects for 2009 include a solo show at Patrick Painter (Los Angeles) and a group show at the Saatchi Gallery (London). Last year, Hulusi had solo exhibitions with Galerist, Istanbul, Turkey and Max Wigram Gallery. In 2007 Hulusi represented the Republic of Cyprus at the 52nd International Exhibition of Contemporary Art of La Biennale di Venezia and had solo exhibitions at A-Foundation, Liverpool, and Max Wigram Gallery. Since 2002 he has taken part in group exhibitions in the UK and internationally including When We Build, Let Us Think That We Build Forever, BALTIC, Gateshead, UK; Into Me Out of Me at P.S.1/MOMA (NY) and Kunst-Werke (Berlin); Abstraction – Extracting from Reality, Millennium Galleries (Sheffield); East International 05, Norwich Art Gallery (Norwich); This is England, Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art (Sunderland).

Max Wigram Gallery
99 New Bond Street
W1S 1SW
Phone: +44 (0)20 74954960
Web: www.maxwigram.com

An Inspired Exhibition for Modern and Contemporary Latin American Art

Sixty galleries from Latin America, the United States and Europe will take part in this Art Fair

Works by the following artist will be exhibited: Víctor Grippo | Django Hernández |Doris Salcedo | Luis Camnitzer |Regina Silveira | Nicola Costantino | Roberto Jacoby |Henrique Oliveira | Pablo Vargas Lugo | Arthur Lescher | Eduardo Costa | León Ferrari | César Paternosto | Elías Crespín | Marta Chilindrón | Darío Escobar | Sandra Bermúdez | Graciela Sacco | Pepe López | Valeska Soares | María Fernanda Cardozo | José Gabriel Fernández | Magdalena Fernández | Luis Lizardo | Luis Roldán | Alessandro Balteo Yazbeck | Mauro Giacone | Ernesto Pujol | Alexandre Arrechea | Cao Guimarães | Luiz Hermano | Antonio Manuel | Sebastião Salgado | Alejandro Almanza Pereda | Juan Irribaren | Liliana Porter | Teresa Margolles | Leandro Katz | David Lamelas | Lygia Pape | Lygia Clark | Sergio Camargo | Carmelo Arden Quin | Joaquín Torres García | Augusto Torres | Caetano de Almeida | Gego | Mira Schendel | Carmen Herrera | Hélio Oiticica | Vik Muniz | Manuel Alvarez Braco | Jesús Soto | Julio Le Parc | José Da Costa | María Freire.

On November 18th, 2009, the launch event for PINTA Modern and Contemporary Latin American Art Fair 2009 will feature Darío Escobar, a visual artist born and based in Guatemala City. Escobar will discuss his work and recent projects with Sara Reisman (Director, Percent for Art New York City Department of Cultural Affairs) at Americas Society. The artistʼs most recent group shows include: “Artiglierie dellʼArsenale” (representing Guatemala) at the 53rd Venice Biennial (2009); “The Hours: Visual Arts of Contemporary Latin America”, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia (2007); and “Poetics of the Handmade”, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2007).

The Metropolitan Pavilion
125 West 18th Street ,
Between 6th and 7th Ave.
New York City, NY 10011

The Altman Building
135 West 18th Street
New York City, NY 10011

Jean Tinguely
CH (Pierre Joseph Proudhon), 1986
Iron, wood, grapevine, electric motor
78 X 31 1/2 X 27 1/2 inches
(198 X 80 X 70 cm)

The Irreverent Object, a group exhibition of European sculpture from the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. The exhibition includes work by Arman, Joseph Beuys, Louise Bourgeois, Marcel Broodthaers, Lucio Fontana, Georg Herold, Martin Kippenberger, Jannis Kounellis, Piero Manzoni, Mario Merz, Reinhard Mucha, Giulio Paolini, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Gerhard Richter, Dieter Roth, Jean Tinguely, Rosemarie Trockel and Franz West.

The Irreverent Object examines the subversive nature of sculptural practice employed by European artists from the 1960s through the 1980s. These artists expanded the historically limited definition of the sculptural object through an elevation of non-traditional media and a rebellion against the accepted canon. Unorthodox construction, diverse pairings and alternative materials blurred the conventional distinction between aesthetic and utilitarian forms, opening the floodgates for limitless appropriation and giving rise to a dynamic new formal vocabulary.

Referencing Marcel Duchamp’s infamous ready-mades, artists such as Marcel Broodthaers, Giulio Paolini, Jean Tinguely and Joseph Beuys bucked tradition through the re-contextualization and display of recognizable objects. Broodthaers’ wall piece, Moule, presents a dense group of empty mussel shells affixed to board, and Paolini’s Intervallo (Torsi) divides the classical plaster cast of a figure which emerges from opposing walls. Disparate mechanical parts appear functional in Tinguely’s ultimately impractical floor and wall sculptures, and Joseph Beuys’ Fluxusobjekt is a grouping of intentionally arbitrary elements such as a cardboard box, fat, oil, a rubber ring, and a child’s toy. By removing ordinary items from their familiar context, these artists often use humorous presentation and language to highlight the artistic potential that lies within the objects around us.

Other artists employed everyday items to address existential notions of mortality. Dieter Roth’s Motorcycle Driver’s Misfortune reflects this somber perspective through the implied demise of the titular character and the decaying composition of the organic materials that make up the work itself. Similarly, Martin Kippenberger’s Baby Püppi uses dark humor to address issues of mortality and artistic legacy. The absurd juxtaposition of a baby stroller and a bronze cast of a pig leg in place of a child elevates the sculpture to an object of high art and, in a literal replacement of progeny, suggests that his artwork is his lasting contribution to humanity.

Luhring Augustine
531 West 24th Street
New York, NY 10011
Phone: 1-212-206-9100
Web: www.luhringaugustine.com

© 2009 Stephen Flavin/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; courtesy of David Zwirner, New York.

From 1963, when he conceived the diagonal of May 25, 1963 (to Constantin Brancusi), a single gold, fluorescent lamp that hangs on a diagonal on the wall—a work which marks the artist’s first use of fluorescent light alone, until his death in 1996, Flavin produced a singularly consistent and prodigious body of work that utilized commercially-available fluorescent lamps to create installations of light and color.

Curated by Tiffany Bell, this exhibition will examine Flavin’s use of progressions and serial structures, ideas that were central to the artist’s practice throughout his career. Flavin has been credited with being “one of the first artists to make use of a basically progressional procedure,” and the systematic arrangement of color and light fixtures was an aspect of his work that not only led to it being characterized as Minimal art but which moreover influenced Conceptual artistic practices.

On view will be the nominal three (to William of Ockham), 1963, an installation that was of seminal importance to the artist’s body of work, in that it was the first work by Flavin to explore a systematic procedure. Here, Flavin has extended the primary unit of fluorescent light into a serial, additive system that consists of six fluorescent lamps (in three vertical sets, grouped as one, two, and three lamps). As Michael Govan explains, the nominal three “is at the crux of Flavin’s emerging practice. The vertically-oriented single fixture in white, known as one [according to a drawing by the artist], must have been considered a reduction to the simplest of formulations. Yet Flavin’s final resolution involved three sets of lights, a series rather than a consolidated whole, which realized the possibilities implicit in the first diagonal—that it could be extended endlessly…the nominal three was not a fixed composition, but rather a concept—whose premise had enormous implications for a form of art that could be drawn out from an idea.” The work is dedicated to the Medieval English theologian and philosopher known for expounding the methodological principle (ìOckham’s Razorî) of forming a hypothesis based on the most concise means possible.

Flavin would continue to explore themes of seriality in a number of key works, including his
barriers,î which literally extend the notion of potentially endless repeatability into the exhibition space. The exhibition will include untitled (to Helga and Carlo, with respect and affection), 1974, a work configured in a modular sequence of square units that dramatically bathes the surrounding space in blue light. Here, the artist has constructed a fence-like structure of fluorescent lamps that cuts across the length of a room and disrupts the surrounding architecture. Part of a series of four related “barriers” (created in blue, pink, yellow, and green), this work has not been exhibited since it was first on view in 1975 in a solo presentation of Flavin’s work at the Kunsthalle Basel (fünf Installationen in fluoreszierendem Licht von Dan Flavin); the dedication is to Carlo Huber, who was the director of the Kunsthalle Basel, and his wife Helga.

David Zwirner
525 West 19th Street
New York, NY 10011
Phone: 212 517 8677
Web: www.davidzwirner.com

ROROGER BALLEN
Boarding House, 2008
Silver gelatin print
31 1/2 x 31 1/2 inches (80 x 80 cm)
Ed. of 10

It is difficult to explain this place except that I think it exists in some way or another in most people’s mind.

–Roger Ballen

Ballen applies principles of sculpture, drawing, and painting to the psychologically evocative environments depicted in his theatrical photographs. Working exclusively in black and white, he examines the core sensations of the human psyche, based as much in fact as in fiction. Both a continuation and advancement of themes in his earlier series Outland (2001) and Shadow Chamber (2005), Boarding House emphasizes the absence of human presence and features obscured bodies, animals and hand-drawn faces whose minimal identifying characteristics initiate an immediate, visceral response. The Boarding House is a three-story warehouse hidden among the gold mines of Johannesburg and inhabited by disenfranchised, impoverished families, fugitives and witch doctors. Lacking walls, many rooms are separated only by rugs, blankets, and metal sheets. In his visually complex tableaux, Ballen forgoes a strictly documentary approach and casts further doubt on their veracity, intervening to alter each room, and collaborating directly with the subject to create the sculptures and drawings that appear in the photographs .

Ballen’s unique artistic vocabulary, which he composes using a square format, creates visual ambiguities as universal metaphors of the human condition. A fixed truth in the Boarding House exists only within the viewer’s psyche, as if the mind is playing tricks. In Pathos (2005), there is an apparent lack of human intervention, yet haunting evidence of remains ‘left behind’ where a ragged clothed monkey is placed against a threadbare rug. In Mimicry (2006), a child’s naïve drawing traces the subject’s arms. Paradoxical relationships wind through the series and culminate in Fragments (2005), where a plate of apples inscribed with a hand-drawn face sits below a pair of hovering feet, suggesting either a macabre end or a miraculous ascension.

Roger Ballen was born in New York in 1950 and lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa. His work is represented in museum collections including the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, Centre Pompidou, Paris, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. His work has been the subject of exhibitions at international institutions including the State Museum of Russia, St. Petersburg, 2004; Bibliotheque National, Paris, 2006; Deichtorhallen, Hamburg, 2007 and La Triennale di Milano, 2009.

Gagosian Gallery
980 Madison Avenue
New York, NY 10075
Phone:  212.744.2313
Web:  www.gagosian.com

967 Fuentes de Luz Tapadas – Ernesto Ballesteros
2005/2009
Permanent black marker on photography
100 x 149,81 cm
Cod:19621

When fixed by the gaze, the light sources basically inflame. When that happens, it is hard to see what surrounds them.* I started by covering the stars in photographs, to distinguish the intricate and delicate nebulae, galaxies or star dust.

Later I concluded the same loneliness caused by a nocturnal sky without stars occurred with the nocturnal landscape of a city with its light sources covered.

Like in the astrophotographies, covering the sources of light turn the reflected light of the cities more visible, the textures of the surfaces, shades and the diversity of colors almost imperceptible in their delicate reflex.

The simple question of how many light sources there are in each photography led me to count them with covering them.

Ernesto Ballesteros

A strong believer in the work of each and every one of her artists, gallery owner and director Zoe Randall admits that not every painting, photograph, sculpture or unique work on paper in the gallery strikes a cord within her as deep as another does. Yet, she is always reticent to point out her favorites. “Although the gallery is very much about my personal aesthetic, I don’t love every piece in which I do find merit. Relevance may not be subjective, but taste is,” says Randall. “It’s my job to present the finest works I can, but never to intrude upon one’s personal taste,” she says.

Still, Randall finds that her customers, more often than not, want to know which pieces she prefers over others—which pieces she would chose for her own home. Curator’s Choice is the opportunity to find out.

Participating artists are Mark Beard, Mariella Bisson, Rimer Cardillo, Keith Cardwell, Grant Collier, Michael Fauerbach, Judith Lamb, Inverna Lockpez, Patrick McCay, E. Ira McCrudden, Jenny Nelson, Lisa Pressman, Alberto Rey, Christine Rodin, Meredith Rosier, Christie Scheele, Sharon Wandel and Marie Vickerilla.

Granted, many of Zoe Randall’s “favorites” have slipped away over the years, sold to a good home or placed in institutional collections. These “favorites” are part of Chace-Randall’s current inventory. And there will be no “red-dotting” in this exhibition. Works will be wrapped from the wall, another piece replacing it. “I want people to have the opportunity to buy art for their holiday pleasure, whether a gift for themselves or another,” says Randall.

No sneak previews, as it cannot be determined what will sell when. The only assurance is a fine exhibition of the finest artists showing in the Western Catskills. There will be new large format photographs by Christine Rodin on display, as well as works by the gallery’s newest artist, Lisa Pressman. The exhibition, however rotating, will remain for viewing pleasure all winter.

A surprise: a new photographer, just for winter, lovely work. Come see the work of Lisa Candela, a California, Mexico, and New York City artist, just moved to Andes.

Reception of the Artists: Saturday, Nov 14, 5 – 7 pm

Chace-Randall Gallery
49 Main Street
Andes, NY
Phone: 845.676.4901
Web: www.chacerandallgallery.com

Paulo Bruscky
Ensaios 2008
6 tubos de ensaio (vidro e borracha) e jornal
17,5 x 11,3 x 6,4 cm

“Art has ceased to be a conclusion; on the contrary, it is a presumption.”
Toni Negri

Take I
Every multi-form and plural work by Paulo Bruscky, as well as promoting a written record composed of its own signs, which are registered neither by Mass Custom nor by cultural objectification, represents one of the greatest expansions of extended writing in Brazilian and international art. This is partly due to the artist’s condition as a poietes – an original picture-maker – and partly due to his continuous contact with textual elements (which may be letters, words or sentences, achieving an iconic result), but above all it is due to his demonstrating that the poetic function of this corpus is to intermediate currents which are external to textuality: the creation of aesthetic lines of escape that fail to eliminate ethical realities to come, critical formulations that are able to articulate the principle of reality and its playful, game-like manipulation.

Constantly in evidence in his work is the opening up of argumental and representational limits, in which the registrations/supports/means are the fields that give rise to a posture (a poetic) that denounces this primigenial filiation with the transversal concept of poiesis – of language creation, of a cosmovision of the world, always within the bounds of “sharing of the sensitive” that art constitutes, reconfiguring even as an – experimental – political position before the world. We are, therefore, talking of a contaminated poetry that does not conceal the root of its contents or intentions, that transpires a bond with the various instances of life, without wanting to be tied to them or to expound sociology; being a “different sensorium to that of domination” (as Jacques Rancière says), with forms/actions that question reality. This whole symbolic perspective of his work dynamizes – and aerates – the visual forms/objects/proposals that, as if avoiding the dangers of merely denoting information and messages, are presented within the strict characteristics or physical properties of the objects of art placed in circulation; not before long perfecting something to keep freedom in activity: “The art of my time. I’m in a hurry.” (E-mail art).

Indeed, similar to other important Brazilian artists, Bruscky also follows the precept of quantity as food and vital élan (which Villa-Lobos advocated so strongly), and which explains that his large idea bank diaries are still nurseries of works yet to be done, projects that await possible moments of execution (even if the artist himself makes it clear that “I only believe in reincarnation because I have too many ideas for a short life.”)

Rio de Janeiro, October 2009
Adolfo Montejo Navas

Galeria Nara Roesler
Avenida Europa 655
São Paulo SP Brasil
01449-001
Phone: 55(11)3063 2344
Web: www.nararoesler.com.br