Thursday, June 30, 2016

Retrieval of the Beautiful at The Painting Center


Deanna Lee




The Retrieval of the Beautiful

A group exhibition on view through July 16th.

The Painting Center
New York, NY

Friday, June 10, 2016

Final Show: An Occasional Dream at Life on Mars



Farrell Brickhouse



It's bittersweet to be included in Life on Mars' final exhibition.
Looking forward to a blow out of an opening with friends and peers that I respect and that have done so much to promote the medium we love in the neighborhood we love!


From the Press Release:

Life on Mars Gallery is pleased to present An Occasional Dream, our final exhibition celebrating our creative community.

This show will feature Life on Mars artists: Todd Bienvenu, Farrell Brickhouse, Mandy Lyn Ford, Brenda Goodman, Arnold Mesches, Fran O'Neill and Karen Schwartz. We have also invited regulars from our artistic community, including Len Bellinger, Paul Behnke, Paul D’Agostino, Daniel John Gadd, Catherine Haggerty, Elisa Jensen, Zachary Keeting, Thomas Micchelli and Dave Pollack. I will also be showing one of my pieces to raise a painterly toast to all that we have accomplished within the Bushwick community and at the gallery.



Fran O'Neill



Opening: Friday June 24, 6 - 9 pm


Life on Mars
Brooklyn, NY

Friday, June 3, 2016

Jonathan Cowan and Rachael Gorchov at Simuvac Projects


Rachael Gorchov (left) and Jonathan Cowan



From the Press Release:

“The arithmetical world is there for me only when and so long as I occupy the arithmetical standpoint. But the natural world, the world in the ordinary sense of the word, is constantly there for me, so long as I live naturally and look in its direction.” [1]

Simuvac Projects is proud to present the two-person exhibition "Nonspecific Places" featuring the works of Jonathan Cowan and Rachael Gorchov. Their work, exhibited together for the first time, allows viewers to inhabit a removed reality in which the natural world is at the forefront, although often placed at arms length. While Cowan and Gorchov begin with specific places, Cowan painting from photographs of visited locales, and Gorchov working from her sketches of the lawns, ponds, and plant life of the suburban landscape, ultimately they each remove any specificity through their respective multilayered processes.

Cowan’s surfaces straddle the calm and the cautionary, the familiar and the unfamiliar. While he traditionally begins his landscapes as paintings on paper, which he then photocopies and transfers to his surface, he has, for the works included in "Nonspecific Places", painted directly onto his surface. After completing a painting, Cowan embroiders multicolored forms that hover over the landscape and both suggest and deny the presence of the spiritual. The embroidered abstract shape at the center of "Form in the Sky" (2016), from which thin lines of various colors emerge and cut across the ominous cloud that dominates the picture plane, recalls both a Christ figure with open arms and Maleveich’s Suprematist forms, which replace traditional icons with the non-representational.

Gorchov’s painted three-dimensional pieces allow viewers to simulate the actions of exploration that are slowly diminishing along with the natural landscape. For her recent works Gorchov has introduced the use of a Claude Glass, an 18th-century observation device through which she views the suburban landscape, sketches it on site and then returns to her studio where she “builds a highly subjective experience that highlights what is hidden in plain view”. "3:00" (2016) takes the shape of an inverted Claude Glass and requires the viewer to peer around the curled edges to see its backside, a soft-yellow. covered with multicolored strokes and patches. Continuing to the front, one finds an abstracted landscape, comprised of a deep blue background over which Gorchov has painted bright green flora; when viewed closely it surrounds the viewer, “creating a forced perspective and panoramic experience.”

Jonathan Cowan was born in 1982 in Temple, Texas. He attended The University of Texas at San Antonio in August of 2003 where he received his Bachelor of Fine Arts in drawing in 2006. He currently lives and works in New York City.

Rachael Gorchov received her BFA from Tyler School of Art, Temple University and her MFA from Hunter College, City University of New York. She has participated in exhibitions at The English Folk Dance and Song Society in London, Galeria Arsenał in Białystok, Poland and in New York, recently at Driscoll Babcock Galleries, Owen James Gallery and the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM). She is a member of Tiger Strikes Asteroid, an artist-run gallery in Brooklyn and is Full Time Faculty at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh. Originally from Philadelphia, she lives and works in New York City.

[1]Edmund Husserl, "Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology", in Literary Theory: An Anthology, edited by Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan, (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 139.



Nonspecific Places: Jonathan Cowan and Rachael Gorchov

 Opening tonight: 6-9 pm

Simuvac Projects
Brooklyn, NY



Wednesday, June 1, 2016

David Rhodes @ Hionas Gallery


Untitled 10.4.16, 2016, acrylic on canvas, 118 x 78 in.



From the Press Release:

Hionas Gallery is pleased to announce the forthcoming solo exhibition from David Rhodes, entitled Between the Days, comprising three new large-scale abstract paintings, including one diptych, composed of fractured forms cast in interlocking angles that evoke distinctive yet ambiguous qualities. 

The show will run from June 2 - 25, 2016. 

Rhodes’ approach to painting is as much constructive as spontaneous, wherein moments of both precision and improvisation may occur. With this latest body of work, the contrast between painted space and lines of exposed canvas is lessoned, yielding a gestalt of rhythms and unified forms that seem to instantaneously accumulate throughout the painting. And while those familiar with Rhodes’ work will recognize a continuity in the resulting compositions, applying lines over and within an illusionistic pictorial space, for these newest paintings the artist has stopped most lines short of coinciding directly with one another. This allows a greater measure of spatial depth to take hold. Exposed canvas lines tend toward relationships that no longer define a form, but rather exist independently. 

The deft balance of line, plane, volume and space, while exacting to an astounding degree, is countered by elements of the artist’s touch, which reveal themselves in unexpected, arrhythmic variations. The geometry at hand acknowledges a sense of temporality, in both a consistent and contradictory way, approximating the complexities of time as experienced from day to day.

Rhodes’ title for the exhibition is a reference to process, both in life and in painting. Each vertical shift that deviates from a line’s trajectory, each abrupt stop, jagged edge or soft exit that a form takes bears its own trace or mark over time. Rhodes has introduced a diptych, the two parts of the painting separated by a vertical space, extending the single painting contemplation of time and its inconsistencies. “Between the Days” points to both the ruptures and redux of memory, with its expansive rhythms and unanticipated flux. 

The opening reception for Between the Days will take place on Thursday, June 2, at 6:00 PM. The artist will be present. For more information visit www.hionasgallery.com. 



David Rhodes (b.1955) is originally from Manchester, UK. He has exhibited extensively throughout Europe and the U.S., with solo exhibitions at Some Walls, Oakland, CA; Galerie Katharina Krohn, Basel; Centrum Berlin, Berlin; Palacete dos Viscondes de Balsemão, Oporto, Portugal; and Habitat, Kings Road, London, as well as dozens of group exhibitions worldwide, most notably with Lion and Lamb, London; JiM Contemporani, Barcelona; Kunsthaus, Tosterglope, Germany; ParisCONCRET, Paris; Mass MOCA, North Adams, MA; Janet Kurnatowski Gallery, New York; and Pierogi, Brooklyn, among others. Rhodes is also a prolific writer, publishing reviews for Artforum, The Brooklyn Rail, and Artcritical, as well catalog texts about the work of Ernst Wilhelm Nay for Michael Werner Gallery and Mary Boone Gallery, New York; Nathan Peter for PSM Galerie, Berlin; Henri Matisse for Museum Ludwig, Cologne; and Mary Heilmann for Museum Ludwig. Previous shows with Hionas Gallery include the solo exhibition Schwarzwälde (2013); the group exhibitions Drifter (curator) (2013), Almost Delancey (2014), and #TBT (2015). 


David Rhodes: Between the Days

Hionas Gallery
LES
New York, NY

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