ROY COLMER

Posted on 2018-01-08

Influenced by the likes of Arshile Gorky, Bruce Nauman, Nam June Paik and Jackson Pollock, with a career spanning five decades, Colmer’s work holds an important place in the narrative of contemporary art. The presentation at Lisson Gallery highlights Colmer’s unique visual language by bringing together eight paintings from the early 1970s, reflecting the artist’s intellectual engagement with the contemporary changes of science and technology of that time, along with a film and documentation of his work in this medium.
London-born artist Roy Colmer (1935–2014) was a painter, photographer, graphic designer and film artist. Through the use of painting, film, photography and collage, inspired by the introduction of new, electronic media that dominated the artistic landscape of the 1970s, Colmer challenged the disciplinary boundaries in which he worked. His incorporation of time-based technologies with paint and canvas – which other artists at the time found too conventional – mark Colmer as a true innovator in his field.

Exhibition runs through to January 13th, 2018

Lisson Gallery
67 Lisson Street
NW1 5DA
London

www.lissongallery.com

  

HYUN-SOOK SONG – 7 BRUSHSTROKES

Posted on 2018-01-01

Hyun-Sook Song was born in 1952 and grew up in a mountain village in Korea. In 1972 she travelled to West Germany and soon after that she began to draw and to paint. In doing so she often gave voice to her nostalgic memories of her beloved motherland. Over several decades she created paintings with only a handful of motifs or themes: clay pots, silk ribbons draped around posts, or woven textiles hung on a thread.

Song developed both a very distinctive style and a technique that blends elements from the West and the East. She chose to use tempera, a type of paint made by mixing pigments with egg yolk. This technique was widely used in Western painting in the Middle Ages, notably because of the paint’s opaque character. Song, by contrast, uses tempera in a way that is almost transparent: the brushstrokes are economical but accurate. Each brushstroke represents a single movement and there is no room for doubt. Her artistic outlook has been heavily influenced by Eastern philosophy and calligraphy but also by her love of nature, the body and her materials. She sees painting as a performative happening. She places the stretched canvas on the floor of her studio and balances above the painting on a simple wooden plank that is placed above it. In doing so she is in a state of utter concentration and meditation. The intensity of the painting enables her to work for only a few hours per day. This does not prevent her from going to the studio every day to maintain her dexterity.

Opposite – 12 Brushstrokes #I, 2013

Exhibition runs through to February 24th, 2018

Zeno X Gallery
Godtsstraat 15
2140 Antwerp
Belgium

www.zeno-x.com

  

KATHLEEN WHITE – A YEAR OF FIRSTS

Posted on 2018-01-01

These intimate narratives take the form of drawing, painting, sculpture, and performance. Never simply an outside observer, White used her love for others as well as her own reality—happiness, grief, love, sadness—to expose other people to something beautiful. Tragedy and loss became ever-present in White’s life. The title work of this exhibition, A Year of Firsts, 2001, is an installation of 40 works on paper that circles the entire gallery. It can be read like a book, or more accurately a diary and unique system of language, as it takes you through White’s year after; year after her father’s death, her brother’s death, her sister’s death, and the many friends that were lost to AIDS. Anchoring the gallery entrance are two small cars made of Sculptamold and oil paint. White made hundreds of these cars, in different sizes and colors. They were, for White, vessels for fantasy, adventures, good and bad fortune. The final component is a performance The Spark Between L And D, 1988, which plays on four screens in the middle of the gallery. Wearing a nurse’s uniform covered with flags from around the world, White first beats herself up then licks the blood off of her fingers before bandaging herself up, almost mummy-like, the whole time singing “On Broadway” until she is so bound, she can no longer make a sound.

Opposite – A Year of Firsts, 2001

Exhibition runs through to January 27th, 2018

Martos Gallery
41 Elizabeth St
NY 10013
New York

www.martosgallery.com

  

SAM MCKINNISS – DAISY CHAIN

Posted on 2018-01-01

McKinniss has made a grouping of nine new paintings to be exhibited together under the title “Daisy Chain”. The city of Los Angeles inspired the choice of subjects, although a narrative of innocence and its destruction is the real thread here. The paintings, all intimately scaled, depict movie stars, pop singers, animals, book illustrations, landscapes. These images stitch themselves together, revealing a national obsession with creating, then desecrating, icons of purity. Behind these beatific paintings – a fantasia of greeting card images – lurk cults, suicide, murder and drug addiction.

In selecting the images that make up this exhibition, McKinniss has touched upon popular and mass culture, middle and high-brow. In the degree to which a visitor recognizes one or more of these subjects, a shortcut is forged between the painter and his audience, a shortcut that bypasses irony, erases distance and eases the triggering of emotional effects.

Opposite – Beck, 2017

Exhibition runs from January 7th – February 25th, 2018

team (gallery, inc.)
306 Windward Avenue
Venice CA 90291
Los Angeles

teamgal.com

  

BILL LYNCH – DRAWINGS & PAINTINGS

Posted on 2017-12-25

Painting onto pieces of salvaged scrap wood (sometimes on both sides), Lynch depicted birds, animals, blossoming branches, waterfalls, Chinese vases, statuettes and landscapes. The artist’s loaded, seemingly spontaneous brushstrokes betray his investment in Chinese and Japanese painting but also evoke his American roots. His gestures combine a dry lambent brush and thick pasty paint, which confidently flows as Lynch is evidently caught up in the passion of depicting his visions. The moiré woodgrain on the rough boards are often absorbed into his compositions, becoming a still body of water or suggesting a moving sky. Knots and grain in the wood seem to inspire the superimposition of moons, mushrooms, flowers or vessels.

Lynch excelled not only at painting, but also in drawings that will be presented alongside each other in this exhibition at The Approach. Small studies in Conté pencil on paper of nesting and flying birds, a pair of hands at a piano, trees and wildflowers emphasise the great tenderness and sensitivity with which Lynch treated his beloved subject matter.

Opposite – No title, n.d.

Exhibition runs from January 7th – February 25th, 2018

The Approach
1st Floor, 47 Approach Road
Bethnal Green
E2 9LY London

theapproach.co.uk

  

JULIA WACHTEL – DISPLACEMENT

Posted on 2017-12-25

Displacement introduces ten epic paintings that address the implication of urgent, radical viewpoints from digital and print sources that reflect the nation’s current political and larger global psyche. Opening precisely one year after the election of Donald Trump, this is the first complete body of work by the artist to address the significant shifts of our time.

This fully conceived monographic exhibition takes a sweeping, wide angle view of the post-truth, zero sum ideology so profoundly impacting our society. The “post-truth” American landscape can be applied to all of the ten works in the exhibition and continues as a central theme for the artist. A spectrum of topics as diverse as: the marketability of “fake news” by the alt-right, the question of the citizen in relation to the dispossessed, tech’s monopoly in global business and social media, financial hacking, political interference, the Republican conservative agenda, the Second Amendment, global warming, entertainment and television, racism and the sexist backlash are all topics or related departure points presented in these paintings. In confronting this, the paintings in this exhibition meditate on the collective trauma in many forms, and engage in a call to action.

Opposite – Picnic, 2017

Exhibition runs through to January 20th, 2018

Elizabeth Dee
2033/2037 Fifth Avenue
NY 10035
New York

www.elizabethdee.com