Sam Jinks, Woman and Child, 2010. Silicon, Silk, Human hair, 57 x 15.7 x 15.7 in. Courtesy of the artist.

Featuring: Jeffrey Gibson, Jong Oh, Charles Hinman, Paul Pretzer, Sam Jinks, Ulf Puder, Chris Jones, Antonio Santin, Marin Majic, Florian Schmidt, John Newsom, and Entang Wiharso.

Xigue-Xigue
July 2-August 22, 2014
Marc Straus Gallery
299 Grand St.
New York City
marcstraus.com

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Huma Bhabha, Installation View. Courtesy of VeneKlasen/Werner, Berlin

Huma Bhabha
May 2-July 26, 2014
VeneKlasen/Werner
Rudi-Dutschke-Str. 26
Berlin
vwberlin.com

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Nandita Raman, Rock on Grid, 2012. Archival inkjet print mounted behind plexi mirror, edition of 3 plus 1 AP, 25 x 20 in. Courtesy Thomas Erben Gallery.

Featuring: Barry Gerson, Duy Hoang, Nandita Raman, and Giovanna Sarti.

On Permanence and Change
July 1 – July 25, 2014
Thomas Erben Gallery
526 West 26 St.
New York City
thomaserben.com

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As he investigates the primitive aspect of our nature, the sculptor arrives at the pristine aspect of an animal, which is its sacred manifestation. This “sacredness” of an animal, usually worshiped and glorified from the dawn of mankind, is brought to the forefront again here. The sculptor builds his own private temple for the animals, the way monkey temples were built in India, or jaguar sanctuaries were created in Mexico.

The big animals retain their most static, archaic dimension. Beasts such as elephants, hippopotami, or gorillas are sacred “prophets” in the sculptor’s personal symbolic language. He gives a perpetual moving energy to their mass as exemplified in the voluminous sculptures of the beasts David chooses to create. The sculptor freezes the beasts in an instant in which the animal’s energy manifests itself. As the result, the sculpture’s power is embodied in that reduced and minimized momentum. The sculptor formally divides his work into three categories of sacred priests, warriors, and terrestrial beings.

However, his bronzes, taking forms such as Darwin or a Zoroastrian prophet, deny all the categories: ontologically they nourish the idea of the embryo and its metamorphosis. The sculpture tells us the story about our birth and development on earth where the fallen Adams and Eves give in to earthly pleasures.

The series of “Prophets” includes mythical beings—an orangutan who is a Pharaoh, an Asian elephant who is mightier than Ganesh, an African marabou invoking prophecies, a study of a hand escaped from Michelangelo’s studio, and a fortune-telling mouse. Even the prince of darkness Satan himself appears in a sculpture entitled Batman, and again in Dark Prince, which is a graceful bronze of a scorpion. However, all of these “ animals,” being already pure in their essence, do not evoke the Aristotelian notion of catharsis.

The binding element in all of them is humor, which ranges from Daumier’s grotesque, with the Pharaoh, to the Surrealist joke, as exemplified in the insects and smaller animals in Hadrien’s theater of “earthly delights.”

Many of these sculptures openly originate from images drawn from Biblical tales. The animals are really princely creatures for him, thus the story of the Dark Prince or the story of a fallen angel who dabbles with religions and terrorist actions, and who is our “next-door neighbor” out there to kill or undermine our desires.

In contrast to these concrete figures from the animal and the animated world, there stands a long 2.4 meter totem made in mortar, which serves as an abstract “animus” for the sculptor, representing his interior as a process of constant transformation. During the years of the demanding work with bronze as material, Hadrien David has acquired and developed his own themes—from Michelangelo he takes a muscular precision mixed with a lyrical beauty, which is the manner in which he works on his torsos. Gericault had inspired his approach to horses, and Degas’ dancers and choreography informed his approach to smaller animals.

A cinema-inspired approach is also very characteristic of the sculptor’s work. The group of “Warriors” consists of powerful animals; white leopards, bulls, running horses, jaguars, and apes. Here, the warrior’s stance is manifested in an upward movement through the air. These beasts are never quite static as they embody the essence of the movement itself. This exceptional quality in David’s work makes a clear distinction between his sculptures from a great number of artists who have worked within the same genre.

There is an erotic force in his forms, as their muscular mass takes over the space they inhabit. On view here is a certain Husserlian notion of epoche, a sort of suspending of the “natural attitude” toward the object that we experience. In order to get us into this state of suspension that we have in relation to an animal, the sculptor does an in-depth “dissection” of the model. This approach was observed by the old masters, but it has all but completely disappeared over time. He is influenced by the Classical Greek art and their approach to sculpture. The frog is, perhaps for him, the animal that expresses the plasticity of the body most dynamically.

Hadrien David’s harmonic vision is at its best in his “terrestrial” group, obeying the perpetual rites of fecundity including gorillas (Adam’s Temptation), dancing frogs (The Egyptian), and kangaroos (The Athlete). As all these animals belong to the same earthly parade, the sculptor places them in an unusual setting within his work The Doors of Paradise. It is here that his work resembles more the work of a theater director who places the scenes into a certain sculptural setting. Here he approaches both the Surrealist cinema of Jan Svankmajer or Antonin Artaud’s theater of cruelty.

Hadrien’s sculptures, thus, are both real and surreal. Their reality comes from the feeling that sculpture is the stomach of our history, and as the history of sculpture is his life-story, it is also the story of his multilayered presentation of the past combined with the present.

By Nina Zivancevic

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Something I’ve been reminiscing about with some old friends was how we noticed, in retrospect, an implied expectation in school of having to digest and metabolize the entire arc of 20th century painting in four years of study. Students rise and die with Modernism in the classroom. They start you off with the observational stuff, and then you move on to maybe some expressionistic-but-still-representative things, and eventually you make it to abstraction, which then gets discarded in favor of conceptualism and the immaterial art object. I’m exaggerating, of course, and not everyone did that! But it was a common narrative, and funny to watch people sneer at whatever previous method they’d been using once they had “evolved” to the next step.

All this to say is I’ve run the gamut. I took a stab at everything when I was starting out. As a young painter I’d sometimes try and figure out how to make the paintings of an artist I was obsessed with—it was like a fever, and the cure was understanding something about their process. Once I vaguely succeeded I’d lose interest, and be able to move on with my life. I’ve made knock-off Alan Shields, Alex Katzes, Manets! I’m not making the “kind” of work I thought I would be making at all. You metabolize your influences, and climb out of the maze.

MH: Your mark-making has a decidedly casual feel to it, but many of your compositions end up being quite complex. I see a number of art historical connections that could be made, but who are some of you favorite sources of inspiration?
TB: Composition is one of those things that I can’t rely on myself to reliably produce. I need some source material, food, or otherwise I’ll fall into the same three tricks over and over. Certainly other paintings are great sources. I lived in Paris during high school, so I spent a lot of time on the weekends at the big museums. The Raft of the Medusa is an old favorite. I try and visit that thing every time I go home. Caravaggios, too. Those have some crazy compositional gestures.

I certainly owe some debt to the Supports/Surfaces artists, as well as 60-70s painterly painters that were collected in Katy Siegel’s excellent 2007 show, High Times Hard Times. I’m also consistently obsessed with Milton Avery, as everyone should be.

MH: What other sources of inspiration do you find in the world around you?
TB: I derive a lot of inspiration from pop culture and humor especially. I watch a lot of stand-up and also improv, which I particularly adore. So much of humor is derived from cadence and timing, just like paintings. There’s rehearsal, where you accumulate muscle memory, and then the act of painting is really rhythmic where you’re continuously responding in real time to external and internal stimuli. Knowing when to stop, knowing when to land the punchline, that’s all very tricky.

I finally broke down and took an improv class at the UCB theater this summer. I was terrified—I am absolutely not a performer and don’t enjoy being onstage. But in the end, it was unreservedly the most fun I’ve had in ages. I hadn’t been around adults who were so unselfconsciously playful and collaborative. It made me realize how infrequently we actually play games in regular life, and it was just unbelievably helpful for painting. I learnt so much, and I’m still unpacking that experience.

MH: I’d maybe describe you as an abstractionist for the most part, but a good deal of your work also flirts with representation. It’s clear no one has to feel pressure to land on one side or another these days, but it makes me curious whether or not the more sparse abstract works you create come from somewhere in the “real/lived” world somewhere.
TB: Everything has a referent. Just as all representation is abstraction, all abstraction gets filtered through a mind that, through force of habit, reads language and representation into everything. It’s not just that you can’t have one without the other; they’re simultaneous.

MH: Much of your work deals with an economy of expression when it comes to your handling of the paint. How do you know when to stop working on any given piece?
TB: That’s the big hat trick, ultimately. I don’t know a single painter that doesn’t continue to struggle with that one. I mess this one up a lot on either end, by under-working or over-working. It feels like sexual edging: you have to stop yourself right at the cliff edge without going over. I have this feeling that the very best painting, regardless of speed, stops just short of being “done.” Where you’re able to imagine what could happen next. In that way it acts as an irritant and makes you complicit in its life.

Of course this method runs the high risk of being undercooked and unsatisfying mush. That’s what makes it fun, and hard—when you succeed it’s transportative and experiential like nothing else.

MH: In your Tent works, the structures you paint on are built in the round as multi-sided stretcher volumes draped in canvas and painted. I love this work. I had seen images, but first saw one in person at the show About Space at the ArtBridge Drawing Room. I like your decision to put them on casters, giving them an implied movement and transportability. Can you tell me a bit about how this side of your work came about?
TB: When I was younger I think I felt typically torn between what I assumed were different postures, the abstract and the depictive. I’d think of some paintings as “concave” and “convex”—the concave being of the illusionistic variety, and the convex as the assertive “objecthood” objects. But what I came to understood is that in my work these two modes actually operate in the same way, at the same time.

I strongly anthropomorphize my work. This is something we all do, involuntarily. To ignore that is to ignore a facet of human perception. Just as every concave painting is three-dimensional object in space, every convex one leads a double life as a legible, depictive symbol. It was my feeling that while the recent history of painting has roundly addressed this first principle, we have not yet had so much work addressing the second.

Everything is a body. Everything is a cartoon. Everything has a dick, etc.

Those are some of the things the tents are trying to address. They sprung out of a curiosity I had, wondering what a painting would look like broken up, exposed, and hanging out in our human space, while occupying a human amount of space. I’m untrained in any form of sculpture, so I’m amused in the way that they’re the product of an unskilled person working their way backwards, problem solving with the only skills available to them—in my case, painting skills, like stretcher building.

I love the tents a lot, at this point they’re a familiar, friendly shape to me. They’re more mobile and assertive than even I as a person get to be, and they are wonderful vehicles for ideas.

Tatiana Berg, Joanna Tent, 2013. Acrylic on canvas, wood, casters. 60 x 38 x38 in. Image courtesy of Hansel and Gretel Picture Garden.

MH: Is the fact that they are on wheels a playful invitation to the viewer, enticing them to walk around the work? Can I get your permission to push the next one I see around the gallery and really ruffle some feathers?
TB: One of my favorite things is the way the tents suggest a possible function, while having none. They definitely feel like potential furniture, or containers for something, or possibly a very specific and weird tool.

With the tents it seems like they want us to touch and move them and play with them. They’re saboteurs. They seem friendly but are deliverers of sneaky ideas, I hope.

I’d love for people to be able to touch them all day long but it’s sadly impractical because some people aren’t so respectful! One of the funniest things I ever saw was someone using a smaller one as a little drink coaster at an opening. Just set your cup of wine down, and wheel it around with you while you circulate.

MH: In a time where other art exploration is always seeming to invite viewer participation, this decision seems to be pointing an accusatory finger at the art world’s long standing position of frowning on the viewer’s ability to touch a painting.
TB: I think about usefulness, and touch, a lot. I wonder what the use of a painting is. Ostensibly, once it’s “done” a painting just sits quietly on a wall, looked at but never touched. Maybe its greatest moment of “use” is the painter using it and touching it for their personal expressive purpose, and then that’s it. A painting is a one-use thing that’s almost discarded when it leaves the studio—which is a melodramatic idea I love.

You know what else I just love? Mary Heilmann’s chairs. It’s such a goofy thing, to like sit on a “painting” while looking at paintings. I like work that does stuff that. It’s irreverent in a way that seems dumb but is actually aggressively smart.

MH: Your marks seem so brusk and intuitive, made quite quickly—yet a lot of the structures you paint on in the Tent work seem like they took some time to build. Is there some amount of planning that goes in to how each tent piece will eventually look? Or once you have the surface ready do you just bang them out?
TB: Two modes of thinking are necessary, in life and in painting: there’s the fast and performative, and the slow and designed. Oscillating between the two is healthy and I like that the tents embody both. They’re difficult and time-consuming to build, and then I don’t treat their surfaces differently than my “flat” works; I bring my best self to the party, respond to what’s in front of me, and let ‘em rip.

I read this book over the summer, Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow, which is like a treatise on the psychology and latest neuroscience of human behavior. I think it did a great job addressing these two modes of thinking; how our brains have two broad ways of working and what activities are best suited for them. I suspect I design in slow mode, and then paint in the fast mode—similar to athleticism and what we often call “intuition.” It’s an interesting read and seemed to confirm a lot of my suspicions and half-baked theories of how my own brain operates while I’m working.

MH: I see a lot of your new work on assorted social media. (Yes I stalk you.) Do you tend to burn through materials? Did this factor into your recent move to works on paper? Or had you been working this way all along?
TB: I burn through materials like a nymphomaniac on death’s row. Not really; but I do alternate through fallow periods of contemplation and relative laziness, to bursts of manic output. I have what I consider a high failure rate (for a painter, anyway). I live for high-risk painting—anything else bores me—and if going to fail, I want to really go down in flames.

Anyway to answer your question, yes, I have sort of always worked this way, and finding the right kind of paper has been a godsend. It allowed me to really pick a speed that’s almost impossible to maintain with other media. Canvas and stretchers are just inherently costly, so I had to find other ways to allow failure; some of my earlier abstractions have many, many failed paintings hidden beneath the final product.

MH: Each of the paper works seem to be painted on two pieces of paper placed together to make a single composition—is this move a practical way to work larger, or does it intentionally reference the painting tradition of the dyptich?
TB: The move was definitely started by a practical need to work larger, at first, but it has become a deliberate part of the content now. It’s a push/pull, gap-thing that doesn’t operate in the same way when it’s a single sheet. It also has that effect, you know, when you cut up a giant pizza into little squares, you end up eating more? It’s like that.

MH: Please clue us in on some new exhibitions or exciting projects to look forward to in 2014.
TB: For the time being I’m looking forward to exhibiting my thesis work at the end of my Columbia MFA, but beyond that I don’t yet know of anything for certain!

The post Everything Has a Dick: The Work of Tatiana Berg appeared first on NY Arts Magazine.

Zhang Dali, Square-Sketch No. 4, 2014.
Acrylic on canvas, 39 3/8 x 31 1/2 in. Courtesy of the artist.

Zhang Dali: Square
June 21-25, 2014
Klein Sun Gallery
525 West 22nd St.
New York City
kleinsungallery.com

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Tom Friedman, Toxic Green Luscious Green (Detail), 2014. Paint and Styrofoam, 60 x 96 x 5 1/2 in.

Tom Friedman: Paint and Styrofoam
May 22 – Aug 8, 2014
Luhring Augustine Bushwick
25 Knickerbocker Ave
Brooklyn
luhringaugustine.com

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VOLTA10
June 16–21, 2014
Viaduktstrasse 10
Basel
Switzerland
voltashow.com

Guest of Honor Preview
Monday, June 16, 10 am – 12 pm
VIP / Press Preview
Monday, June 16, 12 – 2 pm
Public Vernissage:
Monday, June 16, 2 – 8 pm
Public Hours:
Tuesday, June 17 – Saturday, June 21, 12 – 8 pm

See more at: gallerylog.com

The post Volta10: Patrick Jacobs appeared first on NY Arts Magazine.

Karin Kneffel, Untitled, 2014. Oil on canvas, 70.8 x 106.3 in. Photo Credit: VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

Rüdiger Schöttle Gallery at Art Basel 2014
June 19 – 22, 2014
Art Basel
Messeplatz 10, 4055 Basel
Switzerland
artbasel.com

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