LESLIE SHOWS

Posted on 2012-04-30

Shows initiated this body of work while in residence at the Bemis Center in the summer of 2011. Beginning with digitally scanned images of pyrite, Shows constructs and collages large-scale paintings on aluminum panels, with materials including ink, acrylic paint, Mylar, Plexiglas, metal filings, sand, crushed glass, and canvas. The works are spectral, reflective, and aim to accurately depict their object source, yet engage the alchemical mythology of the material. A second body of work includes a series of cast sulfur objects. Shows’ casts of everyday forms—remotes, telephones, toys—conjoin cast-away objects with an element that is used heavily in industrial processes.

Shows has built deep resonance between the two series and a video work, The Cares of a Family Man(2012). The iron pyrite landscape works are illusory, artificial representations of fool’s gold, an economically useless yet psychologically and historically charged sulfide mineral. In contrast the sulfur sculptures are chalky, a waxy opaque yellow copy of senseless objects. The Cares of a Family Man utilizes Kafka’s story about an object named Odradek to illustrate the disorienting dimensions and unstable perceptive qualities shared by all her works.

Opposite – Face A, 2011

Exhibition runs through to July 28th, 2012

The Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts
724 south 12th street
Omaha
NE
68102
Nebraska

www.bemiscenter.org

  

MARIUS BERCEA – CONCRETE GARDENS

Posted on 2012-04-30

Bercea belongs to the generation of Romanians who grew up under Ceausescu’s regime, and saw their country’s rapid transformation after the dissolution of the Communist Bloc. In some of his earlier paintings, the artist tackled real and imagined childhood recollections: the formulaic school photographs, games, and picnics of faceless kids, wrapped in the yellowish, noxious air that hung over Eastern Europe after Chernobyl’s nuclear disaster.With this new series, described by the artist as a “collective urban portrait,” Bercea deals with what happened immediately after 1989, with the arrival of Western capitalism; neon slowly taking over the cityscape, its fluorescent hues slapped on the decaying concrete, the shifting sense of what is normal, what should be aspired to, and how it could, or should, be obtained. Although it eschews direct narratives, Imperfect Pearls Shimmer at Dusk evinces a sense of being in flux. Advertising blurs progressively emerge from the brushstrokes’ rich interlays; Romania’s transition is happening on the canvas under our eyes.

Opposite – Imperfect Pearls Shimmer at Dusk, 2012

Exhibition runs through to May 26th, 2012

François Ghebaly Gallery
2600 La Cienega Blvd
Los Angeles
CA 90034

ghebaly.com

  

ADRIAN NAVARRO – REFLECTIONS

Posted on 2012-04-30

These large scale paintings, part of the two series Rings and Loops, are reflections in its two meanings, i.e., mental and optic or physical. Adrian Navarro puts in front of us a clear equivocation of figure and ground. The classic geometries of ring and helix are carved as reliefs with precise ambivalence -sometimes the circular holes are opaque, sometimes transparent, revealing their painted matter. These volumes are intermittently altering their own figure-ground revealing technique: they are themselves defined against a veiled ground of formless paint; the ring is self-contained, whereas the loop is an open-ended figure cropped by the frame of the canvas; both contain figures within them, and are the ground to their own figures as well.

What Navarro is presenting here is the Battle of the Paintings that has been taking place at his studio for the last half decade, three centuries after The Battle of the Books at the King’s Library – both in London. What Jonathan Swift satirized in 1704, was the quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns. The beehive and the spiderweb were the metaphors of that day. Today, the battle is that between: abstraction and figuration, craft and design, the eye and the hand, movement and confinement, and ultimately between totality and infinity. The work of Emmanuel Levinas of 1969 (Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority) finds in these series and in the gallery as battleground – its best pictorial equivalent.

Opposite – Loop 02, 2012

Exhibition runs through to June 15th, 2012

Maerz Contemporary
Weimarer Str. 16
D – 10625
Berlin
Germany

www.maerzcontemporary.com

  

AIRWALK – THE ONE

Posted on 2012-04-30

Airwalk have relaunched its all time top-selling sneaker, The One. First dropped in 1993 this iconic shoe is reissued in a blue color way that was originally a Japan exclusive. Composed of a rich all-suede upper stacked over a fully molded rubber cupsole, The One is recognized around the world as one of the first skate-inspired lifestyle kicks.

www.airwalk.com

  

UNDERCOVER X DISNEY UNIQLO UT T-SHIRT COLLECTION

Posted on 2012-04-30

Uniqlo continues its collaboration with Undercover under the UU label and this time also involves Disney. Remixed Disney graphics, produced bu Jun Takahashi’s brand Undercover, are featured on the t-shirts. The line includes mens, women’s and children’s t-shirts.

www.uniqlo.com

  

RAF SIMONS X FRED PERRY SPRING/SUMMER 2013

Posted on 2012-04-30

Raf Simons x Fred Perry Collaboration will return for Spring/Summer 2013. The collection first launched in Autumn/Winter 2008 and ran until last summer, sitting out the last two seasons. A 28 piece clothing line by Fred Perry, designed by Raf Simons, will return next summer. The collection will be officially presented during Paris Fashion Week this coming summer.

www.rafsimons.com
www.fredperry.com