Paul Kasmin Gallery

David LaChapelle
American Jesus


July 13 - September 18, 2010


American Jesus, David LaChapelle's solo exhibition at Paul Kasmin Gallery, and his most recent solo show in New York since 2008, will be on view from July 13 through September 18, 2010.

LaChapelle draws on an immense lexicon of art historical references, current events, and popular culture, to make visually compelling images each unique in their narrative and evocative content.

Shown for the first time in New York is part of a series which began over a decade ago including three large-scale photographs depicting Michael Jackson as a modern day martyr. Of all of the subjects LaChapelle has portrayed, Jackson unquestionably lived one of the most epic and dramatic lives of our time. Such sentiment is shown with biblical connotations and is hauntingly represented in these images.

In addition, LaChapelle presents Thy Kingdom Come, a look at the results of greed and corruption amongst religious establishment. 

Also making its New York debut is The Rape Of Africa, a monumental artwork inspired by Sandro Botticelli's Venus & Mars of 1484. The well-known allegorical work depicts the poised and beautiful Venus, goddess of love, having tamed and diffused Mars, the vengeful god of war, who soundly sleeps, while small cherub figures play with Mars' instruments of warfare. Here LaChapelle subverts the meaning of the original work by proposing a black Venus, striking in her beauty, yet completely powerless to both her treatment as property, and to the destruction of her land through mining and war depicted in the background. The Mars in this image is not sleeping as much as satiated by his own victories, sitting on top of his plunder gained by conquests. LaChapelle's contemporary allegory is densely layered with poignant and symbolic imagery, as seen in the jarring combination of young children with deadly weapons, or the gilded human bone resting under the finger of Mars. Alongside the photograph will be studies for the work, illuminating LaChapelle's studies in the traditional medium of drawing and watercolor. 

LaChapelle's photographs typically begin with a series of compositional graphite drawings, collages, watercolors, and mixed media sketches—a little known facet of his artistic process. This exhibition will allow viewers the opportunity to examine LaChapelle's artistic process, from conception to the completed works. 

David LaChapelle's work has been exhibited internationally at museums and institutions including the Museo de las Artes, Guadalajara; the Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso, Mexico City; his first show in Asia at the MOCA, Taipei; the Tel Aviv Museum of Art; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA); The National Portrait Gallery, London; The Helmut Newton Foundation, Berlin; The Brandhorst Museum, Munich; and the Kunsthaus Wien, Vienna. His artwork is included in multiple international private and public collections.

Mitchell-Innes & Nash

ITEM

Group exhibition
Showing June 30 - August 13th, 2010

Mitchell-Innes & Nash announces a group exhibition entitled "ITEM," on view in the Chelsea gallery from June 30 to August 13, 2010. The exhibition focuses on lists, arrangements, collections, and patterns. 

ITEM is an object, an instance, a word on a list, a thing depicted, or the artwork itself. ITEM connotes the mechanical and commercial, but also the particular and individual. It implies both singularity and aggregation. The artists in ITEM work in different media, with different approaches to artmaking, with images, objects, and text. Taken together, however, the works in the exhibition call to mind behavioral and decorative patterns, and collections of words and things: an interest in describing the world in its itemized peculiarity. In these works, repetition serves not merely to emphasize, but to describe more fully.

In ITEM there is an atmosphere of sneaky fun, and rigorous practices are inflected by human idiosyncrasies or allowed mistakes.

Mitchell-Innes & Nash is located at 534 West 26th Street. 

Tel: 212 744 7400  web: www.miandn.com  

Summer hours: Monday – Friday, 10 am – 6 pm

Nicole Klagsbrun

Shape Language

Group exhibition organized by Natalie Campbell
Showing June 22 - August 13th, 2010

Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery presents Shape Language, a group exhibition organized by Natalie Campbell.The works on view rethink the basics of color and form while treading the line between what is inside and outside a formal vocabulary. The starting point for the exhibition is Blinky Palermo’s Graue Scheibe from 1970, in which form attains a precarious autonomy: an irregular lozenge of shaped noncolor, floating (almost) freely on the gallery wall.

Shape making is an incessant, purposeful activity; it allows forms to speak and generate their own next iteration or question, as is apparent in Amy Sillman’s humanized, electric canvas and Imi Knoebel’s Messerschnitte collage series. A sense of experimentation carries through the silhouettes and shadows in Amy Granat’s photographs of destroyed, manipulated film. Jason Tomme’s hybrid of painting and monotype uses spray paint and a pressed sheet of paper to make process, physicality, and serendipity visible, while the marks in Zak Prekop’s delicate painting emerge from a process both immediate and contemplative. A hulking, monolithic sculpture by Esther Kläs creates an almost human personality out of surface and volume. Everyday materials generate their own unique idioms: in Patrick Brennan’s paintings, the matter-of-fact layering of paint, popsicle sticks, silk, and other craft media embeds daily life within an anxious yet confident visual field.

The curves and planes of Keiko Narahashi’s half-formed clay pots create surprising, unstable relationships that shift fluidly between two and three dimensions. A similar optical play emerges between the rigid lines and the traces of spray paint in Ned Vena’s painting. Simultaneously physical and disembodied, the shaped and stacked canvases of Joe Bradley and Wendy White make use of the tension between surface and edge, fullness and emptiness. Adam McEwen defamiliarizes shape and opens it to new meanings, appropriating and altering a form from Ellsworth Kelly’s Curve series with representations of banal text messages. Playing off of the contrasts and harmonies among these works, the exhibition coheres around the near-freedom of a visual language grounded in the physical world.

Camel Arts Space

Chris Burnside, Tania Cross, Nathan Gelgud, Sam Martineau, Ben Needham, Alisa Ochoa, Adam Taye, James Woodward

Lonely Fire

Metro Pictures

Andre Butzer

Nicht Furchten! Don't be scared!

André Butzer's second New York show at Metro Pictures "Nicht fürchten! Don´t be scared!" features a group of new, closely related works that focus on the "formal event" of painting. By emphasizing shapes and fields of color, these works possess a less linear take on the usual motifs in his work—colorful hybrids of abstraction and cartoon figuration featuring a family of characters inspired by art history, comics, politics and animation. Both sinister and amusing, these elegant compositions balance large, vaguely recognizable biomorphic forms within chaotic, multicolored backgrounds or heavily textured monochromatic fields.

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Galerie Lelong

Ursula Von Ryding
Erratus










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Paul Kasmin -Simon Hantai

Simon Hantai
March 19-April 24, 2010







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