Daniel Johnston "Hi, How Are You?" @ MAMA Gallery In Los Angeles
photographs by Sara Clarken and Oliver Maxwell Kupper
On view in New York are McGinleyβs groundbreaking Winter photographs, which portray his nude figures in frozen landscapes. There is virtually no photographic or cinematic precedent for these works: to capture naked bodies in such extreme conditions took profound measures of precaution, audacity and sacrifice on the part of all involved. The artist and his team invented and improvised manifold contrivances, employing the likes of ice-fishing tents, propane tanks and rock-climbing gear, in order to enable the production of these images. These pictures, unlike the Fall photos, feature hyper-limited palettes of whites, greens, blues and greys, finding intrigue and variance instead in the texture and organic architecture of ice formations. Impossibly, the unclothed bodies appear native to their wintry settings. Ryan McGinley "Winter" will be on view until December 20th, 2015 at Team Gallery, 83 Grand Street, New York. Julianna Vezzetti
Blum & Poe presents The Avant-Garde Wonβt Give Up: Cobra and Its Legacy, the second installment of a two-part exhibition which began in New York and now opens in Los Angeles, offering a broad and critical reassessment of Cobraβan essential postwar European movement named for the home cities Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam. The exhibition follows the solo exhibition of Karel Appel, one of the movementβs key protagonists, presented at Blum & Poe, New York in September 2014. Named after a seminal work by Cobra founder Asger Jorn, The Avant-Garde Wonβt Give Up pays tribute to Jornβs catalyzing role and to the movementβs enduring aesthetic and conceptual influence on artists working today. Works by artists Enrico Baj, Joe Bradley, Bjarne Melgaard, Richard Prince, Julian Schnabel and many more are included in this exhibition. The Avant-Garde Wonβt Give Up: Cobra and Its Legacy Group Show officially starts today and will be on view until December 23, at Blum & Poe gallery in Los Angeles.
MAMA gallery presents "Hi, How Are You?," an immersive exhibition exploring the art, music and mind of prolific cult singer-songwriter-artist, Daniel Johnston. The November 7, 2015 opening reception will feature the world premiere of the short film, Hi, How Are You Daniel Johnston, directed by Gabriel Sunday and starring Daniel Johnston. Hi, How Are You is an exhibition about Danielβs past and present. "Through creative visions of madness and hope, we witness an aging musician coming to terms with the dreams of yesteryear." This unique exhibition of Daniel Johnston works explores his past and present art, exposing his heartrending tales of unrequited love, cosmic mishaps, and existential torment. Daniel Johnson: Hi, How Are You? will be on view from November 7 to November 11, 2015 at MAMA Gallery, In Los Angeles
Viewing Room: Richard Kern features photos from Kern's extensive archive, curated by Leo Fitzpatrick. Viewing Room will be on view until December 23, 2015 at Marlborough Gallery, 545 West 25th Street, New York. photograph by Adam Lehrer
My American Dream is a large installation and body of work by artist Keith Mayerson created over the last decade. Various incarnations of this project, or βchaptersβ, first appeared in exhibitions in New York, Cleveland, Los Angeles, Houston, and Brussels, most recently culminating in his 42-painting installation, curated by Stuart Comer into the 2014 Whitney Biennial. My American Dream is a meta-narrative, consisting of more recent personal images from photographsβof his husband and himself, his family, and worldβand also from a long career of painting from appropriated imagery and abstraction. This particular body of work began in 2005, building on the hope that one day the cosmology would be exhibited in a site-specific composition. Marlborough Chelsea presents the large cosmology of the work (accompanied by a fully illustrated catalog) to inspire and promote a progressive, positive view of Americaβs past in the hope to help make a better future. My American Dream will be on view until December 23, 2015 at Marlborough Chelsea, 545 West 25th Street, New York. photographs by Adam Lehrer
Itβs been a long strange trip for Fitzpatrick since he was discovered skateboarding in Washington Square Park at age 14 by Larry Clark to star in the directorβs seminal β90s troublemaker film Kids. Though he has remained involved in acting on and off ever since (heβs most likely appeared in at least one of your favorite shows: The Wire, Carnivale, Banshee, and a hilarious turn in this past season of Broad City as a misdemeanor prone trust fund man child), art has more or less been his primary passion since he bought his first Chris Johanson piece at age 17. He gained some notoriety for his austere and slightly brutal painting style as well as for his documented friendships with some of the early β00sβ most famous wild child artists like the aforementioned Snow and Colen, Nate Lowman, and Ryan McGinley. Click here to read our intimate convo with Adam Lehrer.
To mark the twentieth anniversary of Gagosian Gallery Beverly Hills on North Camden Drive, founder Larry Gagosian has selected a special exhibition of works by more than thirty artists spanning three generations. Born in Los Angeles, Gagosian opened his first galleries on Almont Drive and Robertson Boulevard in the early 1980s. Chris Burden and Jean-Michel Basquiat were among the first artists to be exhibited. Drawing on the city's abundance of talented artists, Gagosian was at the forefront of developing a bicoastal model for contemporary art galleriesβthe beginning of a global expansion that now numbers fifteen galleries in three continentsβwhen he moved to New York in 1985 and opened his first gallery there, in collaboration with Leo Castelli. Los Angeles provided both artists and galleries with an ideal infrastructure for creating and exhibiting diverse bodies of artwork, sometimes on a very large scale, and in 1995 Gagosian Gallery Beverly Hills, designed by acclaimed American architect Richard Meier, opened with new sculptures by Frank Stella. The Beverly Hills 20-Year Anniversary Invitational Exhibition will be on view until December 19, at Gagosian Beverly Hills, 456 North Camden Drive Beverly Hills, CA
Artist Annina Roescheisen is making her name known in the art world. Right now, you can see her formative series What Are You Fishing For? at the Venice Biennale, in the context of the European Pavilion. Starting today, the German-born artist who received her degree in art, philosophy and folklore from the elite Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich in 2008, will see her first solo gallery show in New York. Her series What Are You Fishing For? is emblematic of her work: rife with symbolism and metaphor, and dripping, literally, in pictorial beauty. Later this month, Roescheisenβs other series, La PietΓ , which features the artist as a sort of erotic Virgin Mary, will be shown as part of a group show exploring divinity. In the following interview, Annina talks about the use of metaphor in her work, her experience getting to know New York and the meaning behind her self-designed tattoos. Click here to read the interview.
Petzel Gallery presents a solo exhibition by Berlin based artist Corinne Wasmuht. This will be her fourth solo exhibition with the gallery. One cannot address Wasmuhtβs work without considering the seemingly full palette of digital-image aesthetics in her paintings: simulations of space, distortions, and displacementsβeven right down to the effect of a backlit computer screen. Generating the ideas for her pictures in the form of digital collages and computer sketches, Wasmuhtβs initial source material derives from an array of abstracted and overlapping photographic imagery that she sources from a combination of the Internet and her own personal photographic archive. This material is then worked up into extremely complex, often very large-scale, panorama-like pictures depicting futuristic science-fictional landscapes of airport terminals, shopping centers, people in pedestrian zones, or, as Wasmuht refers to them more broadly, βstructures,β which belong to our collective, global, everyday life. Corinne Wasmuht "Alnitak" will be on view until December 19th, 2015 at Petzel Gallery, 456 W 18th Street, New York. Photographs by Adam Lehrer.
Petzel Gallery presents Traditional Contemporary, a grouping of new works by New York-based artist Adam McEwen. Comprised of large-scale drawings on paper and wall-mounted sculptures, Traditional Contemporary echoes themes previously explored by McEwen to create a disquieting opposition of the familiar momentarily made unfamiliar. Adam McEwen "Traditional Contemporary" will be on view December 19, 2015 at Petzel Gallery, 456 W 18th Street, New York. photographs by Adam Lehrer
More Worried Than a Worm in a Birdβs Nest presents the drawings of William Crawford. William Crawfordβs drawings were found in an abandoned house in Oakland, CA. Several of them were made on the backs of prison roster sheets dated 1997. Nothing is known about the artist except for his occasional and varying signature as Bill, William or WM Crawford. In graphite on paper, the drawings depict drug use and orgies often including a recurring male figure which suggests the artistβs self-portrait. Their drawings recall the comic tumescence in the work of Tom of Finland and the weightlessness of William Blake. Crawfordβs collected drawings, of which there are hundreds, appear to have comprised several narratives consisting of images in sequences of 30 or more. These sequences, presumably broken up since their original compilation, are now fragmentary. The exhibition is the first presentation of William Crawfordβs work in Los Angeles. "More Worried Than A Worm In A Bird's Nest" will be on view until December 5th, 2015 at Farago Gallery, 224, West 8th Street, Los Angeles, CA.
Last Thursday night, Keith Rubenstein and Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn hosted artist Lucien Smithβs "Macabre Suite," a one-night only art installation and epic party in the South Bronx to celebrate the purchase and the revitalization of the historic South Bronx Piano District by Rubensteinβs Somerset Partners. Guests included the likes of Gigi Hadid, Naomi Campbell, Adrien Brody, Baz Luhrmann, and more. There was also a strong line up of musical performances from Frankie Bones, Kool Herc, Mess Kid, Lucas Vercetti, Tigga Calore, DJ Chase B with a finale by Travis Scott. Widely considered one of the most gifted artists of his generation, Lucien Smith conceived Macabre Suite as an βart happeningβ inspired by the medieval genre danse macabre. A three-part exhibition evoking the seasonβs morbid undertones, Macabre Suite consisted of a special dance performance by Kobe Kanty borrowing from a wide range of traditional movements such as Sioux Ghost Dance and Japanese Butoh, a central sculpture which was part of Smithβs βScrap Metalβ series and a selection of oil paintings and video. photographs by Angela Pham and Matteo Prandoni/BFA.
Halloween time is like Christmas time for the Angulo family. Last week, Mukunda Angulo, one of the seven children from "The Wolfpack" β as explored in Crystal Moselle's illuminating and riveting documentary that won the U.S. Documentary Grand Jury Prize and is a must see β took Autre on a tour of his and his brothers' exhibition that ended over the weekend at Deitch Projects in New York. The exhibition showed ephemera from the brothers' homemade movies and premiered their first short film, entitled Window Feel. Polaroid photographs by Julianna Vezzetti.
Richard Prince, Mark Flood, Parker Ito, you know, the biggies β Artsy's Stas Chyzhykova has create a list of five of her favorite works from the Input/Output auction presented by Artsy and Sotheby's, that are "must haves" for collectors. Tonight is your last chance to bid on these works. Click here to see the list. All works will be on view at Fused Space in San Francisco from October 22 to October 30, 2015.
Artist Justin Adian titled his recently closed show at Skarstedt Gallery βFort Worthβ after his hometown. The show features Adianβs bold organic paintings created by stretching oil enamel-painted canvases around foam cushions then mounted on wood. Some people would argue that Adianβs work is abstract, and theyβd be right most of the time. But Adian also engages in pop culture iconography; one painting references Raymond Pettibonβs infamous Black Flag logo. Adian doesnβt so much mash-up high and low as he does reject high-low as a concept. Good art is good art. Click here to read six things we learned about Adian during his talk at Skarstedt Gallery.
"The first time I met Miami-based artist Marilyn Rondon was at this yearβs New York Art Book Fair. She was working at a booth under the tent section of the fair and itβs very hard to not be immediately drawn towards her: a fiercely petite Venezuelan woman in her mid-β20s with painfully beautiful bone structure, deep brown eyes, jet black hair, Olympian fitness level, and a vast collection of tattoos including script on her forehead and an amazing battle royale back piece done by Brad Stevens of New York Adorned. Trying to evade a pervasive sense of shyness, I briefly chatted with her while perusing through her impressive display of self-published zines and other work." Click here to read Adam Lehrer's convo with artist on the rise Marilyn Rondon.
Steven Kasher Gallery presents Thomas Roma: In the Vale of Cashmere. This exhibition of Romaβs most recent project consists of an intricate sequence of 75 black and white portraits and landscapes photographed in a secluded section of Prospect Park, a meeting place where black, Latino and other gay and bisexual men have long sought one another out to fulfill their wish for community and to satisfy sexual desire. This is Romaβs first major New York exhibition of new photographs since his acclaimed solo exhibition Come Sunday at the Museum of Modern Art in 1996. The book In the Vale of Cashmere will be published by powerHouse Books in conjunction with the exhibition. Thomas Roma: In the Vale of Cashmere will be on view starting today and running until December 19, 2015 at Steven Kasher Gallery, 515 W. 26th St., New York, NY
On October 30th Frank Stellaβs major retrospective opens at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. The survey marks the first retrospective at the new location and encompasses around 120 works from mid 1950βs to the The entire fifth floor has been taken over by Stellaβs large-scale paintings and sculptures, divided by floating walls that mark the different stages in the artistβs career. The 18,000-square-foot gallery is set up as a timeline that starts with Stellaβs iconic work Die Fahne Hoch!, from 1959, with which the artist , 23 at the time, marked his rebellion against the strict limitations of Abstract Expressionism. The retrospective impressively manages to reconstruct the different stages in Stellaβs practice, emphasizing especially lesser-known pieces made between the 1980βs and 2000βs. It is in this way that the artistβs natural progression into sculptural works unfolds for the visitor, as well as giving a clear understanding of why Stella continuous to call his work paintings. The metal structures, embedded with 3-D printed elements, tower seemingly weightless from the gallery walls and are reminiscent of canvases packed and layered with paint as in the case of βAt Sainte Luce!β. It is in these moments that Stellaβs personality and unwillingness to confirm to rigid definitions shines through. Frank Stella: A Retrospective will open tomorrow and run until February 7, 2017 at the Whitney, 99 Gansevoort Street New York, NY. photographs and text by Adriana Pauly