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

Sometimes life throws you a fantastic Twist, and by life I mean Dave Schubert.  If you’re into a certain style of San Fran Graffiti from the 90’s (with a NY shot added), lucky you.

Tonight.

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

Alex Lukas opens a show of new work, The Eventuality of Daybreak, at Glowlab tonight.  Above is just a hint of what you can expect to see.

Glowlab is pleased to present The Eventuality of Daybreak, a solo exhibition by Alex Lukas featuring a new series of post-apocalyptic urban landscapes that blur the visual boundaries of fiction and reality. Glowlab will host a reception for the artist on Thursday, November 12, 2009, from 7 to 9 pm.

Lukas’ work explores the existence of disaster, be it realized or fictitious, in contemporary society. Hyper-realistic motion pictures and unforgiving news footage depict seemingly identical – and equally riveting – facades of tragedy. The artist recognizes that relentless visual bombardment has resulted in society’s desensitization to the aesthetics of destruction.

For The Eventuality of Daybreak, Lukas has selected photographic spreads of well-known metropolises from vintage publications and uses them dually as canvas and unlikely subject. Through a deft handling of paint and carefully placed screenprinted passages, the artist pushes these aging illustrations in futuristic contexts. Submerging these cities conceptually and physically, Lukas inundates images of American cities with layers of media representing cataclysmic floods and crippling overgrowth.

Also included in the exhibition are works on paper depicting near-future scenes of devastated landscapes – crumbling infrastructure, overturned trucks and telling signs of human despair. As a counterpoint to the underwater cities, these darkly atmospheric and barren vistas signal devastation through an unsettling sense of absence.

Lukas’ intentional use of dated imagery presented in tandem with contemporary situations forces the viewer to reconcile two differing ideologies of urban space. The artist’s work calls into question society’s collective acceptance of the urban environment as an arena of destruction, once thought unthinkable and now seemingly inevitable.

The Eventuality of Daybreak is Lukas’ first solo exhibition with Glowlab. Lukas’ work has also been exhibited in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, San Francisco, London, Stockholm and Copenhagen as well as in the pages of Swindle Quarterly, Proximity Magazine, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Village Voice, The Drama and The New York Times Book Review. Lukas is a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design and currently lives and works in Philadelphia, where he is a member of the artist collective Space 1026.

New York’s got a new visitor, The Decapitator.

Country Pan Fried Chicken?  Yum.  Alan Richman visits for GQ.com

Charle’s Country Pan Fried Chicken
2841 Frederick Douglass Boulevard (near 151st Street), New York, NY; 212-281-1800

NY Mag investigates.  (That’s Dirty Projectors above)

TERENCE KOH, SAAQIOU
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 7th at 9:30pm
BROOKLYN MUSEUM, 200 EASTERN PARKWAY, BROOKLYN, NY

Terence Koh, whose work is featured in the Brooklyn Museum’s collection, presents a special performance that blends vocals, rock and synthesized music, mixed with a light and media installation.
Curated by Sarah Giovanniello, Traslin Ong, and Eugenie Tsai.
Presented as Part of Target First Saturdays at the Brooklyn Museum.
FREE

via, supremebeing

Julia Chesky crept out into the night with us and documented the scene at Kim Cogan’s, Kristin Baker’s, and Paul McCarthy’s openings, plus a party at OAK.

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.”

Anthony Pappalardo in Circle Board in New York City.

Film by: William Strobeck