Monday, April 22, 2013

Thanks For Attending An Awful Rainbow

Photo by Robin Stout


Thanks to everyone who came out last Thursday and helped me celebrate the opening of my show, An Awful Rainbow @ Kathryn Markel Fine Arts.
Below are a few photos of the installation.  The show is up through May 18th.
Also thanks to Kathy, Alex and Debra @ KMFA  for all their work in making the show possible.




There is a full color catalog accompanying the exhibition with an essay by James Panero.







Tuesday, April 16, 2013

Paul Behnke @ Kathryn Markel Fine Arts


Please join me for the opening of my one person show, An Awful Rainbow, at Kathryn Markel Fine Arts.

A full color catalog is available with an essay by James Panero. Read the essay here.


Paul Behnke: An Awful Rainbow
Opening: Thursday, April 18, 6-8PM.
April 18 - May 18, 2013
Kathryn Markel Fine Arts
529 W 20th Street
New York, NY 10011

Thursday, April 11, 2013

In Process: Gabriel Phipps

Gabriel Phipps is painter based in Brooklyn, NY.
Here he presents two recent works and let's us in on their progression and his decision making process.
Recently Phipps curated and participated in Simultaneity (up thru May 19) at the Sherman Gallery at BU College of Fine Arts. Phipps is represented in New York by Howard Scott Gallery .


Gabriel Phipps in his studio, Brooklyn, NY 2013


The First painting presented here is:

Fault Line IIdiptych, 2011, oil on canvas, 24 x 40 in. 

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Fault Line IIdiptych, 2011, oil on canvas, 24 x 40 in. 


Artist Statement:

A great teacher of mine once said paint can be anything, a sentiment I very much agree with. I might add that paint can be everything - at once.

Through the use of basic geometric shapes – squares, rectangles and trapezoids – I make paintings that simultaneously reference a number of visual notions and phenomena. Architectural forms derive from rectangularly shaped painting media and are a response to the urban landscape in which I live. Color combinations reference the elements - water, earth, sky, and fire - while also referring to digital light, the vibrant blue of a computer desktop, and childhood memories of Boston’s brick cobbled streets and buildings. Figurative content speaks to the experience of confronting somebody within the confines of a rectangle, be it a doorway or a mirror. Pressurized junctions of form, and subsequent deformations of shape, are a nod to aerial photography and environmental forces acting on one another.

Laden with contradictory source material, the geometric units that reverberate throughout the work are at once flat and volumetric, solid and ephemeral, synthetic and organic, static and kinetic, fictitious and real; they are structures seen from above and from the ground; they are free-standing and verge on collapse; they speak of pink flesh, metal shards and glowing television screens; they are somebody who is nobody, someplace that is no place.

The duality of the paintings, their refusal to fit into a single reading, their very instability makes them more than the sum of their parts – it gives them vitality and a spark of life.


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On the painting process:

My painting process combines critical thinking and intuition. I have no single method of making a painting. There are times when I find an image purely through the act of painting. There are also times when I make preparatory sketches as a way of beginning a painting. Once the painting process begins, I usually amend any initial plans I may have crafted. Some paintings come easily - in a matter of a day - while others take months or years to complete. Those that are made over a protracted period often get sanded or scraped down and are subsequently repainted. Photography and computer imaging often play a roll in my process - I'll photograph a painting and repaint it using both Adobe Photoshop and actual paint on hard copies of the photograph; those sketches - both the computer generated and the hand crafted ones - become blueprints for re-working a painting. However, those blueprints are merely jumping-off points - once I start painting, anything can happen within my chosen parameters. 

Intuition plays its biggest role when I respond to the material qualities of paint media. Nearly ten years ago I began my checkerboard paintings. In a moment of frustration I blackened a series of failed paintings, using the largest paint applicator I could find - an eight inch rectangular scraper. As I did, something shifted; I felt a sense of lightness and euphoria. The very act of obliterating began bearing fruit; marks produced by the scraper gave way to images resembling walls, each mark suggesting a stone or brick. As I made these paintings my sensitivity to application and touch expanded; scrapers and trowels became instruments to describe mass and form, while brushes became increasingly useful to describe atmosphere and air. What I was painting didn’t only look like its’ referent – it felt like it as well. Without intending to, I’d begun a new train of expressive thought. 

- Gabriel Phipps


The second painting presented by Phipps is:

Nursemaid’s Elbow, 2010, oil on canvas, 39 x 24 in.


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Nursemaid’s Elbow, 2010, oil on canvas, 39 x 24 in.


Saturday, April 6, 2013

Ben La Rocco @ Janet Kurnatowski Gallery

Ben La Rocco, Generating the Zodiac, 2013, oil and graphite on wood, 11x48 in.



From the Press Release:


Janet Kurnatowski is pleased to present "Fugue State", new paintings by Ben La Rocco. This will be the artist's third solo show with the gallery. Fugue State will be on view from March 22 - April 21, 2013. The gallery will be closed on Easter Sunday, March 31st. Please join the artist for an opening reception on Friday, March 22nd from 7-9pm.

La Rocco's panoramic paintings reveal the possibility of a visual space-time continuum.  These works create an experience that induces a mode of contemplation concerned with the theoretical origins of knowledge and the known universe.  La Rocco uses long, horizontal panels to knowingly negate the physical effects of gravity,  which provides  the viewer with  a free-floating and omniscient position  vis-a-vis  outer space. La Rocco's formal decisions astutely reinforce his appropriation of ancient graphic symbols.  These cosmic and astrological signifiers represent a tension between science, religion, philosophy and art; his reference to such a synthesis is an invitation if not a bridge that can be used to potentially span the illusion of time and space, in order to recall what was once known.

Ben La Rocco received his MFA from Pratt institute in 2004. He is represented by Janet Kurnatowski Gallery in New York and John Davis Gallery in Hudson. He has been a visiting professor at Rutgers in New Brunswick and at Purchase College, and has lectured and been a visiting critic at Rutgers, Montclair, Hunter, and PS1 and the National Academy Museum. He currently teaches in the fine art department of Pratt Institute. He has been the recipient of a Marie Walsh Sharpe artist residency (2005-6) and the S.J. Wallace Truman Fund Award for Painting from The National Academy of Design Museum. Most recently he received a residency at the Dam Stuhltrager Gallery, Berlin. La Rocco is a contributing writer and  is the editor at large for The Brooklyn Rail. Ben La Rocco is a painter living and working in Brooklyn. For more information or images, please contact the gallery.



Thomas Miccelli interviews Ben La Rocco for Hyperallergic here.

Ben La Rocco: Fugue State
March 22 - April 21, 2013
205 Norman Avenue
Brooklyn, NY 11222

*Image courtesy of the Janet Kurnatowski Gallery 

Friday, April 5, 2013

Philippe Richard @ THEODORE:Art

Untitled, 2011, acrylic on canvas, 19.75 x 14.25 in.


Untitled, 2010, acrylic on canvas, 13 x 10.25 in.


Untitled, 2013, acrylic on canvas, 6 x 12 in.


Untitled, 2013, acrylic on canvas, 10 x 8 in.



From the Press Release:


Theodore:Art is very pleased to present “International Incident”, an exhibition of paintings by Philippe Richard. This will be Paris-based Richard's first one-person show in the United States.

Like the artist himself, the paintings exhibited in “International Incident” combine a certain charming insouciance with contemporary intellectual concerns and historical painting traditions.

In his new work, Richard approaches the construction of his abstract structures with carefree sensitivity. His painting practice aims to present a kind of logic, with associations, analogy, obsessive investigation all manifested in the picture plane. Richard's paintings consist of networks of lines and curves, of points and ovoid shapes. These formations suggest cells dividing and multiplying in an evolving organic system, occasionally spreading or 'contaminating' all surfaces of the canvas.

Although Philippe Richard is a painter, following a European tradition of investigation into the potential of surface and color, his practice is also very close to language and poetry. Each painting is an attempt to compose a train of thought, with repetitions and exhaustion of the forms and shapes, based on rhythms and associations from a vocabulary of his own painterly syntax and grammatical structures.

Philippe Richard has exhibited widely throughout Europe. Most recently Richard had two solo exhibitions in France, “Indubitablement" at Galerie Bernard Jordan in Paris and “Comment dire” at La Maison d’Art Contemporain Chaillioux in Fresnes. In February 2013, Philippe Richard was an artist in residence at the Santa Fe Art Institute (SFAI).



Philippe Richard: International Incident
March 9 - April 21, 2013
56 Bogart Street
Brooklyn, NY 11206

*All images courtesy of the artist and THEODORE:Art



Monday, April 1, 2013

Paint: Elizabeth Sheppell & Justine Rubin @ Rialto Center For The Arts

(click images to enlarge for details)


Independents @ The Green Hill Center For NC Art




Independents:
Paintings by Brett Baker, Mark Brown, Ashlynn Browning, Philip Lopez, and Bonnie Melton
curated by Edie Carpenter

April 5 - June 2, 2013

200 N. Davie Street
Box 4
Greensboro, NC 27401