MIKE NUDELMAN – SEEING THINGS

Posted on 2012-11-19

Nudelman’s meticulous ballpoint pen drawings take Earth and outer space landscapes as a starting point, filtering sources through various historical ways of viewing: painting, stereoscopy, telescopic photography, and screen-based media found on the Internet. Each work is built up with thin layers of diagonally drawn iridescent marks. The artist’s hand scans the surface of the paper from the lower left corner to the top right leaving thousands of marks the size of small hairs, gradually building an image.

Among Nudelman’s sources for the images in this exhibition are reproductions of pictures by Hudson River School painters Frederick Edwin Church and Albert Bierstadt, former-astronauts-turned-artists Alan Bean and Alexei Leonov, and NASA photographers using the Hubble Space Telescope. Some images are cobbled together using a combination of these sources depicting seemingly unbelievable, serendipitous phenomena. The images often appear closer to movie stills, simulations, or dreamscapes, than anything naturally occurring. These supernatural images exist primarily on the virtual plane where time and space are malleable constructs and the sublime is more a feat of engineering than happenstance.

Opposite – This One’s a Fake #1, 2010

Exhibition runs through to December 22nd, 2012

Thomas Robertello Gallery
939 W Randolph
Chicago
IL
60607

thomasrobertello.com

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PETER BLAKE – ROCK, PAPER, SCISSORS

Posted on 2012-11-19

The show features almost 50 new and previously unseen works from the past six decades. The exhibition title takes the idea from the children’s game, and provides a framework for the sections sculpture, works on paper and collage.

In his sculpture, Blake continues to assemble found objects, with surreal scenes and narratives. ‘A Parade for Saul Steinberg’, started in 2007, resembles a New York street parade, where famous cartoon characters and other fantasy figures march in recognition of the cartoonist Steinberg; one of Blake’s artistic heroes. Popular characters from Blake’s earlier works reappear; Snow White is seen showing-off her garden of underwater debris to René Magritte, whilst elsewhere 30 of her dwarf companions lead an invasion of a bagpiper’s Swiss chalet.

In addition to using plastic, readymade characters, Blake constructs figures from natural materials including a miniature army made from bowling balls and stained wood, adorned with medals and badges to represent military achievements. Another sculpture built from wooden objects is a life-size family group posing beneath a driftwood tree, and this two-metre-high sculpture will dominate one of the galleries. As a departure from his constructions of found objects, in a new group of works Blake presents six found objects as works of art in their own right, reminding him as they do of sculptures by Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth and other twentieth-century masters.

Opposite – The Performance Artist (from Incidents from a Sculpture Park), 1983

Exhibition runs through to December 15th, 2012

Waddington Custot Galleries
11 Cork Street
London
W1S 3LT

www.waddingtoncustot.com

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