Iiu Susiraja isn’t simply challenging the modus operandi of how we understand and perceive beauty. The photographer, born near Turku, Finland, is a private performance artist, a secret exhibitionist using her body as a versatile dress form to experiment with everyday props, like ladles, vases, plungers and other flotsam of the mundane. In one image, Susiraja lays in bed with a whole raw chicken resting on a silver platter, creating a sort of quotidian surreality. Ghebaly Gallery presented the artist’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles, which included her strange autoerotic still lifes and video work. The following interview was published in our Fall Winter 2018 issue, featuring a selection of the artist’s diffident self-portraits. Read more
Bernhard Buhmann's 'My Automatic Me' @ Nino Mier Gallery In Los Angeles
Informed by a background in sociology, Vienna-based painter Bernhard Buhmann’s hard-edged, abstracted works speak to larger issues concerning the figure in a modern-day environment and therefore, humanity, as it engages with a society that is technologically advancing at an accelerated rate. The exhibition title, My Automatic Me, suggests themes which belong to today’s world of cyborgian post-humanism, digital avatars, virtual reality and artificial intelligence but with a sense of friendliness that is either uncanny or intimate - or both. As the world advances, forcing our animal behaviors to evolve towards Buhmann’s Automatic Me, the artist examines what it means to be human in this newfangled, spectacular landscape.
Buhmann’s whole body of work eventually fits together to form an integrated aesthetic matrix, capturing performative remnants of a sociological body, the crux of human condition disguised as a computer game, even attempts to calculate consciousness – each work a colorful, geometric portrait of our quickly evolving selves. My Automatic Me is on view through November 17 @ Nino Mier Gallery Two, 7313 Santa Monica Blvd., Los Angeles. photographs by Summer Bowie
Madeleine Pfull's Inaugural Solo Exhibition @ Nino Mier Gallery In Los Angeles
Australian artist Madeleine Pfull’s inaugural exhibition at Nino Mier Gallery illustrates a stylized narrative of a complex suburban universe inspired by her youth. Littered with images and subjects that are familial, humorous and peculiar, the paintings center around the lives of these richly imagined characters. The subjects she paints exude a specific type, mostly middle-class women, likely from the 1980s. Her women wear big-box store clothing, live in homely domestic interiors, but with an earnestness and sense of pride that makes them all more intellectually interesting. Pfull explains that ‘they appear as the quotidian details of middle-class suburbs. They can appear fed up or bored but it is more of a sense of importance and stoicism.
The subjects could be one of many mothers, aunts and neighbors, with their familiar awkward sweaters, botched perms, floral aprons and old-fashioned curtains. Most of the works grow richly from these known phenotypes, and the artist enjoys when the viewer enhances the character’s narrative by implying extended storylines. Pfull explains further that her work articulates her fascination with taste and expressing one’s social status and personal pride through material things. For the women she portrays, she asserts that the ones who try the hardest to appear superior are the ones most uncomfortable with their lack of taste. This duality to their identity, of inferiority and superiority, is exaggerated through the medium of painting, where, like the current embracing of retro culture and fashion, time adds prestige to kitsch. Madeleine Pfull’s eponymous solo exhibition is on view through November 17th at Nino Mier Gallery 7313 Santa Monica Blvd. photographs by Summer Bowie
Celeste Dupuy-Spencer 'The Chiefest Of Ten Thousand' @ Nino Mier Gallery In Los Angeles
Over the course of her career Celeste Dupuy-Spencer has set out to create paintings interrogating the American experience, a subject that she began to believe could not be addressed without attending to the question of religion. The resulting body of work gathered for her exhibition The Chiefest of Ten Thousand offers a depiction of our moment through a series of portraits, religious scenes, and landscapes. Taken together these works present a view that is conflicted, terror-filled, absurd, and marked by a powerful tenderness. This show exposes dark palimpsests of our culture as well as warmth, pleasure, and humor.
This body of work is a record of the deeply felt task of trying to be, and be good, in the contradictions of this moment. The polyvocality the artist brings to each painting, through their images and gestures, make them purposefully hard to grasp, refusing to cohere even as they have a razor sharp affective import. They picture a self that cannot be reconciled as a manifestation of a society that refuses reconciliation. Dupuy-Spencer suggests that there are real and profound ways to save ourselves—finding grace in the mire is an unending and complicated process, but love and community might be an ongoing redemption. The Chiefest of Ten Thousand is on view through November 3 @ Nino Mier Gallery 7313 Santa Monica Blvd, Los Angeles. text by Diana Nawi, photographs by Summer Bowie
Jansson Stegner Paintings @ Nino Mier Gallery in Los Angeles
Nino Mier Gallery is currently presenting Jansson Stegner's first solo exhibition in Los Angeles. This new series of oil paintings that ascribe male and female figures with exaggeratedly rendered physiques explores the inversion of gender roles within myriad aspects of authority, dominance, submission and beauty. Jansson Stegner Paintings will on view until March 3 at Nino Mier Gallery 7313 Santa Monica Blvd Los Angeles, CA 90046. photographs by Summer Bowie
Opening Of "Present Conditional" Group Show @ Mier Gallery in Los Angeles
Mier Gallery presents Present Conditional, the first group exhibition of the gallery. With eight major contemporary female painting positions, Present Conditional will form a powerful, heterogeneous and intergenerational exhibition as a visual and contextual snap-shot. Artists included: Rita Ackermann, Amy Bessone, Ida Ekblad, Sophie von Hellermann, Joyce Pensato, Jana Schröder, Odessa Straub, Anke Weyer. Present Conditional will be on view until November 27, 2015 at Mier Gallery, 1107 Greenacre Ave West Hollywood, CA