AUREL SCHMIDT AND PIERRE MOLINIER

Posted on 2014-05-05

Both Molinier’s and Schmidt’s work reflect their exquisite craftsmanship, as well as practices that are thoroughly intertwined with their own lives. Precious and personal, the work is exacting, highly detailed and teeming with overt intimacy. Decorative religious and sexual symbols abound throughout the work speaking to memory, fantasy and desire. Fascinating and repulsive, grotesque and refined, the work is meant to both entice and reveal our inner desires.

Anti-bourgeois and anti-religious, Pierre Molinier (1900-1976, Agen, France) studied as a painter, turning to fetishtic eroticism in 1950. Believing the androgynous hermaphrodite to be the ideal, balanced sex, Molinier employed his own body, along with a wide range of specially made props: prosthetic limbs, stiletto heels, elaborate godemichés (the French word for dildos), black net stockings, lingerie, masks and the occasional trusted friend in performative acts of transformation. Intended to shock, the resulting photomontages depict intimate portraits of spiritual and erotic rapture that Molinier acted out in the theater of his Bordeaux boudoir. André Breton integrated Molinier into the Surrealist group with an exhibition of his paintings in Paris in 1956. That same year, Molinier began contributing to the magazine Le surrélisme, même and started taking his erotic photographs.

Opposite – Aurel Schmidt, Untitled (Lips), 2014

Exhibition runs through to June 21st, 2014

M+B
612 North Almont Drive
Los Angeles
California
90069

www.mbart.com

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WARP & WOOF

Posted on 2014-05-05

Warp & Woof, is curated by Toby Clarke and Kathy Grayson. Taking it’s title from the weaving terms “warp” (the vertical and static component of the weave) and “woof” (the dynamic and horizontal aspect of the weave), this exhibition looks at textile-driven abstraction across continents in emerging art.

Weaving is included in the show both literally (with woven works like the above piece by Gabriel Pionkowski where each thread of the canvas is de-threaded, painted, then rewoven over a pine wood frame) and metaphorically, as “warp and woof” can be interpreted as the underlying structure of any process or system. The artists in exhibition unravel the trite cliché of the “fabric” of life by taking a temporal and indeed systemically structured approach to abstraction favoring personal history, traces, residues and chance.
Featured artists Alek O., Ayan Farah, Evan Robarts, Gabriel Pionkowski, Graham Wilson, Hank Willis Thomas, Henry Krokatsis, Johnny Abrahams, Kadar Brock, Moffat Takadiwa, Nika Neelova, Penny Lamb, Shinique Smith and Tonico Lemos Auad.

Exhibition runs through to June 20th, 2014

The Hole
312 Bowery
New York
NY
10012

slowculture.com

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BEN SANDERS – GRAVES OF CRAVING

Posted on 2014-05-05

Initially inspired by bowls of pho, these food related works chronicle Sanders’ growing interest into the processes of gastronomy and their overlapping connection to artistic production. A study into his fascination with culinary technique using the subject matter as a jumping off point for formal and material experimentation. Dried brushstrokes are peeled and collected off of glass like ingredients in a pantry then collaged onto paintings. Precisely painted gradients are layered with screen print, and air brush; even paint squeezed from piping bags normally used to frost cakes. These ultra flat surfaces contrast with areas of rich impasto where food is depicted abstractly to form loose abbreviations of the real thing. The end result: a pure exploration of form, color, and composition fused by a highly personalized contemporary approach.

Exhibition runs through to June 6th, 2014

Slow Culture
Art Gallery + Retail Project Space
5906 N. Figueroa St.
Los Angeles
CA
90042

slowculture.com

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