Kris Kuksi
Beast Anthology
November 21–December 19, 2009
Opening reception, Gallery I: Saturday, November 21, 6–9 PM
Joshua Liner Gallery

Barry McGee & Phil Frost
mindthegap
Curated by PM Tenore
November 20th 7 – 10pm
PRISM
8746 W. Sunset Blvd
West Hollywood, CA 90069

PANKABESTIA: PUNK BEASTS OF THE SWIMMING CITIES OF SERENISSIMA
OPENING RECEPTION NOVEMBER 20 6-9PM
Anonymous Gallery @ Collective Hardware – 169 Bowery New York, NY 10002

Tonight.

Opening this weekend in Oakland at Johansson Projects, Earth Engines features the staged photographs of Barry Underwood(above) and Oliver Dicicco’s sound sculptures(after the jump).  The video of Oliver’s sculpture is pretty amazing, make sure to check it out after the jump.
Showing November 21st 2009 – January 9th 2010
Opening Reception: Saturday, November 21st 5-8pm
2300 Telegraph Ave. Oakland, CA

Opening in like 30 minutes is Slater Bradley’s 6th solo exhibition at Team Gallery, if we were immortal.

Team is pleased to present a show of new work by Slater Bradley. Entitled if we were immortal, the exhibition will run from the 12th of November through the 19th of December 2009. The gallery is located at 83 Grand Street, cross streets Wooster and Greene, on the ground floor.

Slater Bradley’s latest exhibition finds the artist, primarily known for his videos, moving into painting. Although Bradley has never stuck strictly to videomaking — he has curated exhibitions, shown sculptures, mounted performances, taken photographs, and made tender drawings — these paintings, whose exhibition here marks the culmination of a two-year long process, will clearly surprise anyone who has followed the work since his debut at Team ten years ago.

Although this show marks a radical shift, the continuity of the paintings with his past work is also quite strong. As is usually the case, Bradley is concerned with the melancholic, bordering on a fecund morbidity, with death taking center stage. There are never any absolutes when talking about Bradley’s practice, but most of the work in this exhibition came out of his interest in the vast array of sentimental ephemera produced by, and around, the band Joy Division.

Among the paintings shown are a series of foot square portraits of some of the best-known Joy Division bootlegs, along with a few that Bradley himself invented. Images from rare promotional fliers, LP inserts, video recordings, and cassette-only releases have been re-cropped, re-sized, and re-combined. After being painstakingly rendered, usually on grounds of palladium leaf, they have been brushed over with numerous washes, making the paintings appear oddly timeless. The preservation of life — the mummy complex — has always been Bradley’s concern. The fact is that either as a documentarian or as a fantasist, Bradley’s work has always stemmed from his desire to preserve, or otherwise re-animate, a cultural artifact.

As is typical for a Bradley exhibition, however, there are works which will destabilize a closed reading — mysterious elements, unplaceable. Included, for example, is a single four-channel video of sea foam formed by gently lapping waves. There are also a few photographs of models that are meant to represent emotional states, such as loneliness and longing. These pieces move the show away from a Joy Division centered nostalgia and towards a more open tale of remorse.

Opening Saturday night in San Francisco is a show that we will miss but, you should not.  Steve ‘Espo’ Powers at White Walls.  Boom.

MBA: Most Blogged About

More info on the fun at White Walls

And while you’re at it, have a look at this old interview from Megawords with Steve Powers and Ari Forman

White Walls Gallery
835 Larkin Street, San Francisco, CA 94109

A bunch of shows opening up this weekend, we decided to consolidate it all to one easy-to-manage post.  That’s Jeremy Fish above who opens a show at Laguna Art Museum on Saturday.

Tomoo Gokita – Heaven

November 07, 2009 — December 19, 2009

Opening Reception
November 07, 2009
6:00 — 8:00 PM

2622 S. LA CIENEGA BLVD.
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90034

T: 310.837.0191

Opening Saturday, Nov. 7th, 7pm to 10pm
Exhibition runs through Dec. 20th, 2009
rsvp to: MichaelKevinGeoff@hvw8.com

HVW8 Art + Design Gallery
661 N. Spaulding Ave. L.A. Ca 90036
Hours: Tues to Sun, 1 – 6pm
www.hvw8.com
323 788 4898

HOW TO BLOW YOURSELF UP
By WK

Opening Reception: Saturday, November 7th / 8-11PM FREE
November 7th – December 5th

Subliminal Projects
1331 W Sunset Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90026

Sat, Nov. 7th 7-10PM
New Image Art Gallery
7908 Santa Monica Blvd. in West Hollywood / 323.654.2192
“14 Artists” featuring the works of Dennis McNett, Paul Wackers, Erik Foss, Richard Colman, Eddie Ruscha, Lori D., Kellesimone Waits, Jordin Isip, Cleon Peterson, The Date Farmers, Judith Supine, My Mo and Skullphone

New Image Art
7908 Santa Monica Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90046
(323) 654-2192

C215 & Logan Hicks

Parallel Universe

opening reception this Friday November 6th between 7 – 11pm and the show will be running until December 4th

Show & Tell Gallery
1161 Dundas St. West
Toronto, ON
M6J 1X3
Canada

LeBasse Projects presents:

ʻGo Eastʼ – A three-day group exhibition in New York
LeBasse Projects NY
42 Rivington St.
New York, NY 10002

November 5th – 7th, 2009
Opening reception: Saturday, November 7th, 7-11pm

KAWS, TARGET GAMES, 2009, Acrylic on canvas, 96 x 72 inches, Image courtesy of Gering & López Gallery, New York, NY.

A new, must see show opening tonight at Gering & Lopez featuring KAWS, Keith Haring, Erik Parker, Frank Stella, George Condo, Michael Bevilacqua, Steve DiBenedetto, Steven Parrino, Lisa Ruyter, David Salle, Michael Scott, and John Tremblay.

ERIK PARKER, Guru, 2008-09, Acrylic on canvas, 99 x 90 x 3 inches, Unique, Image courtesy of Gering & López Gallery, New York, NY.

GERING & LóPEZ GALLERY is pleased to present Just what is it that makes today’s painting so different, so appealing?, a group painting exhibition.

The landscape of American painting has changed radically over the past several decades. Although many leading figures working in the medium have divergent styles, there are visible commonalities latent within much of the genre. Just what is it that makes today’s painting so different, so appealing? seeks to create a dialogue between the works of several artists shaping the terrain of contemporary American painting, exploring the interplay of overlapping themes that appear across the works. Using Frank Stella’s Odelsk III (Polish Village #11) as the historical referent, this exhibition traces the motifs of the minimalist line and shape; vibrant use of color and material; and Pop culture imagery throughout the paintings on display.

Opening tonight, her work is so fresh.

November 05, 2009 — December 19, 2009
18 Wooster Street, New York

Splitting Twilight, an exhibition of new paintings by Kristin Baker, opens at Deitch Projects on November 5, 2009. Baker continues to push the contradictions inherent in the genre of painting while simultaneously celebrating its history. The new body of work playfully remixes the legacy of landscape painting within a modernist structure.
Kristin Baker is bending painting’s seeming limitations. By emphasizing the materiality of paint through her built up layers of troweled acrylic, Baker’s paintings approach other two-dimensional practices such as printmaking, photography and paper assemblage. While upholding the power and dynamism of painting, Baker seeks to create a third dimension in between many genres and hindered by none. Her compositions combine illusionistic and pictorial space as well as blatantly artificial forms and surfaces. Each mark and shape is created not by a brush but by an outline of torn tape. The final silhouette is filled in with paint, and when the tape is ripped away, a free-floating “gesture” or “mark” is added to the piece. These shapes are layered together to make forms and landscapes or scraped away to reveal the colors underneath. Layers of these joints create tufts, grooves and corrugated surfaces that approximate collage or even the planar aggregation of 3D digital imaging techniques. Using scraping tools Baker rubs, abrades and smoothes until the surface is like an x-ray of the past.

Kristin Baker graduated from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and received a M.F.A. from Yale in 2002. This is her third solo exhibition at Deitch Projects. She has been commissioned by the Denver Art Museum to create an artwork responding to the Daniel Libskind architecture. It will be featured in the exhibition Embrace! opening November 14th.

Opening tonight.

Beginning November 5, 2009, Hauser & Wirth New York will present WHITE SNOW, a group of never before seen pieces from a new body of work by Paul McCarthy, drawing upon the famous 19th century German folk tale ‘Snow White’ (‘Schneewittchen’) and commenting upon the modern interpretation of the story in Disney’s beloved 1937 animated classic Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

WHITE SNOW at Hauser & Wirth New York will be comprised of two sets of drawings made by the artist since late 2008. The first is a selection of diminutive black and white pencil works as detailed, atmospheric and unapologetically lovely as Old Master drawings. Here, McCarthy develops his characters – the young Snow White masturbating in a solitary romantic reverie, various phallic-nosed dwarfs in a dither at the arrival of the beautiful stranger in their midst – as players in a sly yet poignant coming-of-age narrative packing a metaphorical wallop. The images touch upon myriad dark associations invited by the Snow White tale while simultaneously suggesting a love story with profound personal resonance for the artist.

By turns heartbreaking and wickedly witty, these intimate works provide the foil for a second set of images – more than a dozen massive drawings, ranging in height from 7 to 10 feet and incorporating pages torn from auction catalogues, illustrated books, tabloids and pornographic magazines. McCarthy created these enormous, fiercely gestural and unstintingly funny drawings through a performative process – walking around and into his picture plane, coming from different directions toward paper stretched out on specially constructed tables while intermittently speaking aloud “in a sort of trance”, in a recorded monologue of words and sounds.

One of the few exhibitions ever to focus exclusively upon Paul McCarthy’s drawings, WHITE SNOW provides rare access to the initial stages of exploration that fuel the work of one of America’s most challenging and influential artists. McCarthy’s early investigations into his characters always occur through repeated and even compulsive sketching, a process that reveals layers of connections – in this case, connections between Snow White and icons of femininity as diverse as Venus, the Mona Lisa, the classical high art nude and an array of expertly packaged celebrities who populate our movies and tabloids, as well as people from the artist’s own life and private fantasies – and will ultimately give rise to sculptures, installations, a film and other works over time.

With their antecedents in his now famous 1992 Heidi collaboration with the artist Mike Kelley, the new WHITE SNOW drawings shift the Heidi narrative back to the New World where McCarthy has been inspired by impressions of the deep forests and magical clearings on his own property above the Mojave Desert and books about Disney’s version of Snow White given to him by friends. Weaving his ideas about these and other influences together, he has embarked upon an investigation of the culture that generates and embraces mass-produced images – and of artmaking itself. “It’s more about making than telling,” McCarthy has said. “Drawing is a form of analysis. I’m not controlling it, just allowing it to unfold. It’s not about clarity, it’s about each piece suggesting the next one in a continuum.”

The WHITE SNOW exhibition simultaneously introduces McCarthy’s ambitious long-term plans for his theme and vividly reveals the deep complexities of his varied agenda. The drawings on view at Hauser & Wirth New York extend his hallmark critique of our most stubbornly held and hypocritical societal norms. But while McCarthy continues here to polish his funhouse mirror onto the contradictions of Hollywood-generated fantasies and cherished American notions of purity and decency, he also opens – perhaps more widely than ever before – a window onto the deeper regions of his artistic discipline and his psyche. The large WHITE SNOW drawings, with their bold, sweeping lines and structural rigor, are simultaneous celebrations and critiques of monumental painting and its aggressively male heroes; he duels overtly with such titans of Modernism as de Kooning, Rauschenberg and Twombly, appropriating their visual language while subverting it. At the same time, McCarthy’s drawings contain worlds of self-reflection, with memory as the artist’s constant co-author.

“WHITE SNOW is a history, and some of that history is a self-portrait,” he has said. “The longer you live in the world the more you transpose present and past. At times, the past becomes the window you travel through, the window between the present and past, and things become more layered. You aren’t in the past but you are thinking about it. This [work] is not just about the story of Snow White, it’s a story about a lot of things. It’s about art, it’s a love story. I don’t have a concrete answer about what it is and I’m not looking for one. I don’t look for art to provide answers. I do something and it takes me to the next thing and the next after that.”

Friday saw the private opening of STAGES NYC in Soho.  Our friend Jeff from The Art Collectors had a camera on-hand and put together a great set of pics summarizing the night.  We couldn’t resist this photo of Lance Armstrong taking a shot of tequila with Tom Sachs.  A couple more images are after the jump, and a full set of pics are here

Rosson Crow

JR, Geoff McFetridge

Richard Prince

This is one of those epic shows that you’ll feel stupid for missing.  Opening Halloween night.

ROBERT WILLIAMS
Conceptual Realism
IN THE SERVICE OF THE HYPOTHETICAL
October 31, 2009 – January 23, 2010

Tony Shafrazi Gallery is pleased to announce the upcoming exhibition
ROBERT WILLIAMS
Conceptual Realism, In the Service of the Hypothetical
Featuring new paintings, drawings, and for the first time, sculptures.
Opening Saturday, October 31, 2009, on view through January 23, 2010.
Fully illustated book to coincide with the exhibition by FANTAGRAPHICS

On view until Valentine’s Day 2010. No Strollers.

“For his first large-scale solo presentation in an American museum, Urs Fischer has taken over all three of the New Museum’s gallery floors to create a series of immersive installations and hallucinatory environments.

The exhibition “Urs Fischer: Marguerite de Ponty” is the culmination of four years of work. Neither a traditional survey nor a retrospective, the exhibition features new productions and iconic works combined to compose a series of gigantic still lifes and walk-in tableaux. Choreographed entirely by the artist, the exhibition is a descent into Fischer’s universe, revealing the world of an artist who has emerged as one of the most exceptional talents working today.

An engineer of imaginary worlds, in the past Fischer has created sculptures in a rich variety of materials including unstable substances such as melting wax and rotting vegetables. In a continuous search for new plastic solutions, Fischer has built houses out of bread and given life to animated puppets; he has dissected objects or blown them out of proportion in order to reinvent our relationship to them. In 2007, in a now-legendary exhibition, he excavated the floor of his New York gallery, digging a crater within the exhibition space. Throughout his work, with ambitious gestures and irreverent panache, Fischer explores the secret mechanisms of perception, combining a Pop immediacy with a neo-Baroque taste for the absurd.

Please note that for the duration of the exhibition “Urs Fischer: Marguerite de Ponty” strollers will not be allowed in the galleries. Please check them at coat check.”

This Saturday in Los Angeles.  see pics of the install here

Two great shows under one roof Saturday night.

Jonathan Levine Gallery

529 West 20th Street, 9th Floor, New York, NY 10011

Jonathan LeVine Gallery is pleased to present Make Room For The Emptiness, a solo exhibition of new original works by Jim Houser. Returning for what will be his third solo show at the gallery, Houser has created a new series of paintings and sculptures which will be incorporated into a site-specific installation. Additionally, the artist has composed a new score of original instrumental music to be played in the space throughout the exhibition, enhancing the experience on an audio-sensory level by complementing the tone, rhythm and repetition of the work.

Houser’s paintings are visual poems by which he communicates his innermost thoughts and feelings; words are involved at times, but not in the traditional sense. By cataloging his experiences through a unique pictoral language, the artist has created his own iconography. As a result, the collective imagery acts as a cognitive presentation of highly interpretive ideas. Houser’s signature aesthetic contains elements of stylized figures and hand-drawn typography along with patterned line work—all rendered with clean precision using a gradient of tints and shades within his minimal palette of harmonious flat colors. When his sculptural pieces—which include hand-made guitars and flowerpots—are combined with his paintings, it becomes clear that all of the works are associative and directly related. This deceptively dimensional quality is further highlighted when the pieces are assembled into one of Houser’s elaborate installations, adding to the complexity of each individual piece by emphasizing a greater cohesive inter-connectivity to the body of work, as a whole.

Make Room For The Emptiness marks a subtle departure in style and sophistication for Houser, resulting in a cleaner, simpler, more mature approach to his installation. For the past several years, his work has been heavily influenced by intense physical and emotional pain due to a congenital health problem and grief suffered from personal tragedy. Honoring the memory of his late wife, while also suffering from health issues, Houser’s work has often been a practice in cathartic meditation, driven by memory and mourning. This year however, the artist has celebrated the affirmation of a new love and has also received medical treatment for his previous health condition. Through experiencing these feelings of profound change and healing in both heart and body—as the show title suggests—Houser is consciously choosing to make some room for fresh, new beginnings by creating a blank slate upon which he can begin to write this new chapter in his life.

Jonathan LeVine Gallery is pleased to announce True Self, a group exhibition of new works by over 40 artists, brought together by represented artist and special guest curator Gary Baseman. The theme has been left open to encourage individual interpretation and there are no size or medium restrictions, so that each participating artist has complete creative freedom on the subject at hand.

In the curator’s words:
“In this exhibition, I have invited a group of painters, photographers, and sculptors, to look deep inside themselves and create an image that they feel represents their own passion or obsession. They might imagine themselves as anyone or anything—a wolf, a cupcake, a mermaid, even a skyscraper. I am requesting each artist to create an artwork that represents his or her true self. I am not asking for (nor do I want) a self-portrait. Rather, I’m requesting that the participating artists pick an icon, metaphor, or symbol that they feel represents their true essence. The desired result is a breaking of boundaries to allow a space and time where we can discover, accept, and love our true selves, feeling nirvana and heaven on earth.”

Participating artists include: Adam Wallacavage, Alex Prager, Amor Muñoz, Boris Hoppek, Christian Clayton, Cleon Peterson, Dalek, Dave Cooper, David Sandlin, Deedee Cheriel, Eric White, Esther Pearl Watson, Fons Schiedon, Frieda Gossett, Friends With You, Gary Taxali, Gary Baseman, Gerard Dubois, Gretchen Ryan, James Jean, Jennifer Poon, Jonathon Rosen, Korin Faught, Lauren Bergman, Leah Hayes, Lola, Luke Chueh, Marion Peck, Mark Ryden, Mark Todd, Martha Rich, Mike Shinoda, Miso, Natalia Fabia, Orly Cogan, Ray Caesar, Rob Clayton, Robin VanValkenburgh, Ron English, Ryan Heshka, Ryan Jacob Smith, Shag, Shannon Freshwater, The London Police, Tim Biskup, Travis Lampe, and more to come!