ART15 LONDON MAY cynthia-reeves.com

Transcription

1 ART15 LONDON MAY cynthia-reeves.com

2 Art15, London s newest and freshest art fair, draws galleries from Asia and Europe as well as a small number of select galleries from the US. For this year s exhibition, Cynthia-Reeves will be featuring a large-scale, suspended stone installation by Korean sculptor JaeHyo Lee, as a contribution to the public art exposition at the fair. The curated works at the stand continue the dialog established in the elegant work of Mr. Lee, emphasizing innovative use of materials, a sense of line and a strong philosophical thesis. Lee is a master at taking the mundane and turning it into something unexpectedly triumphant: here, the material of choice is stones, which, envisioned in a new way become an explosive motif with tremendous energy and power. Rather than dismantling each sculptural component and creating a hybrid aesthetic, JaeHyo Lee s works emphasize his materials essential nature. Often minimalistic, Lee s typically monumental work centers around circular motifs. Of the artist s work, art critic Jonathan Goodman wrote in Sculpture Magazine: Allowing the materials to speak to him, [Lee] builds self-contained worlds that mysteriously communicate with their outer surroundings...texture is deeply important to Lee, who emphasizes the façade of the wood, crosscut and planed to reveal the character of the grain. The surface thus reveals the character of its making, becoming indicative of the creative process and holding interest by itself. (Sculpture Magazine, The Possibilities of Nature, May, 2009). Lee graduated from Hong-Ik University in 1992, and is the prize winner of the Hankook Ilbo Young Artists Award in 1997; the Osaka Triennial Award in 1998; the Kim Sae-Jung Award in 2000; the Sculpture in Woodland Award in 2002; and the Japan Hyogo International Competition Award in His work is included in the permanent collections of the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea; Hyogo Prefecture Museum of Art Japan; Metropolitan Art Museum, South Korea; Busan and the Osaka Contemporary Art Center, Japan. Most recently, his work was included in the Museum of Art and Design s inauguration exhibition, Second Lives, and was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Montgomery Museum of Fine Art, Montgomery, AL. In 2013, the artist debuted his first public art installation in New York City, Lotus, a 20-foot wood tower installed in Union Square a collaborative exhibition by CYNTHIA-REEVES Projects and the New York City Parks Department.

3 Anita Glesta s video project, WATERSHED, will be on view as a public art project in London as part of the Totally Thames River Festival in September. The project is concerned with climate change and its impact on our oceans and riverways. The video content juxtaposes imagery of jewel-toned fish with educational content on how water levels are impacting ecosystems at all levels: human and marine. The project we have selected to feature at the fair is SPIN, a tri-screen installation with imagery of revolving doors as a metaphor for ceaseless, and often random, movement in the urban landscape. Glesta s work has been installed in public spaces as well as galleries, museums, and nonprofit spaces in New York and internationally. Solo Exhibitions have included White Columns Gallery, White Box, Black and White Gallery, Sculpture Center, the Queens Museum, and other galleries and museums. A highly recognized artist in the public realm, Glesta has worked on several large-scale international projects. In 2010 the General Services Administration Art and Architecture program commissioned a permanent outdoor integrated landscape sculpture for the Federal Census Bureau Building in Washington, DC. The multi-media project, Guernika, was shown at the Sackler Museum in Beijing in 2013, having traveled from the Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCAK) in Krakow, Poland in Eric Slayton is the master of minimal in sculptural forms. His functional art hews to a more Japanese aesthetic, so finely crafted and pared down are the forms. The proportions, however, are where he expresses his decidedly new approach to function, as witnessed in the recent series of powerful, low-slung benches - one of which will be shown at the Longhouse in Southampton, NY, this coming season. Here at the fair, the gallery has chosen his vertical concrete sculptures understated in form, celebrating the material to its fullest advantage, allowing the concrete to provide the color, the texture, the visual interest. The rusted steel footings suggest earth, and all at once the concrete is a material with great warmth and depth. (paragraph on background for Slayton)

4 American sculptor Jonathan Prince has evolved an expansive conversation on contemporary sculpture, beginning with his successful Torn Steel series. The new Liquid State sculptures continue to test the physical boundaries of rigidity and fluidity of stainless steel, forming the material into wave-like undulations through extensive handwork and expert welding techniques. An array of patterned light and shadow is the unexpected gift of this highly reflective sculptural form. The artist has maintained his passion for sculpture throughout his distinguished and diverse professional career in the arts and sciences. Prince completed a doctorate at Columbia University and post-doctoral studies at the University of Southern California. Recent exhibitions include an installation of monumental steel works at the Sculpture Garden at 590 Madison Avenue, New York in 2011; permanent installation of his iconic work, LightBox, as part of the Julie and Edward J. Minskoff collection in New York City; the acquisition of Vestigial Block by the new Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum in Michigan; an exhibition of Torn Steel works at Christie s Sculpture Garden at 535 Madison Avenue, New York in 2012; an installation at Dag Hammarskjold Plaza in New York City in ; and, LIGHT/ DARK, an installation of black Cambrian granite sculpture at Hudson River Park, New York City in Dawn Black recently opened a show of new work at the gallery s venue on the campus of MassMoCA. Incitements of Folly is an exhibition of socially poignant paintings that takes a candid look at the personifications of folly within the broader context of Black s primary themes: dynamics and imbalances of power; the constructs of identity and self awareness; and, depictions of the socially absurd. Dawn Black s award winning thesis, Conceal Project, is the work featured for Art15. A montage of intimate, expository portraits, this is an ongoing inquiry that has been on view at The Columbus Museum in Georgia, (2012), followed by subsequent traveling exhibitions with the Museum of Paper and Watermark in Fabriano, Italy (2013); Fundacion Pedro Cano,Blanca, Spain (2012); Weatherspoon Museum, Greenboro, North Carolina (2013); and the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans, LA (2013). Black received an MFA in Painting and Sculpture in 2001 from the University of Iowa, and has been awarded several prestigious residencies around the country; Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, McColl Center for the Arts, Lawndale Arts Center, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her work has been profiled in Art Papers, Art in America, New American Paintings, The Washington, and The Advocate.

5 Lianghong Feng lives and works in Beijing, pursuing the language of abstract expressionism through the lens of a colorist. His saturated palette, enriched by the complex layering and dripping of paint, gives a distinctive edge to his canvases. Trained in the both China and the United States, his work incorporates the thesis of abstraction combined with the sensibility and discipline of calligraphy. During the ten years he lived in New York City in the 1990s, Feng began distorting the shapes of the urbanscape, in direct reaction to the prevalent graffiti he saw in Brooklyn. This inspired a non-cultural and irrational form of painting. While Feng often allows his work on a painting to develop organically and intuitively, he is constantly looking for the images, or what he terms the different visual elements of his work, and to elaborate relationships among them. This is part of his process of finding the painting s artistic perspective, harmony. Lianghong Feng was recently the subject of a major mid-career retrospective at Beijing s Inside Out Museum (2011) and the White Box Museum of Art (2013), where his paintings filled three floors of exhibition space. Considered one of China s leading contemporary voices in Abstract Expressionism, he is a frequent exhibitor at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (Shanghai). Feng s international and museum exhibitions include: Brot Hulger Kunstalle (Vienna), Beijing World Art Museum (Beijing), Today Art Museum (Beijing), Yonghe Art Museum (Beijing), Perdue University (Indiana), Yuan Art Museum (Beijing), among others. His works are in the permanent collections of the Dana Farber Institute (Boston), Duke Energy Collection (Charlotte), White Box Museum of Art (Beijing), among others. An explosion of color and object is the point of Thomas Jackson s photography, but his work shows toward a marvelous humor, as the viewer is met with an unexpected and improbable tableau. He uses nature as his backdrop, against which he fabricates his whimsical and confounding compositions. While the artist relies on digital photography to realize his creative vision, he continually tries to find that balance between organically allowing images to cohere, and retouching or editing his images to achieve the composition he is after. Thomas Jackson earned a B.A. in History from the College of Wooster and has spent much of his career in New York as an editor and book reviewer for several magazines. His attraction to photography books led him to experiment with a camera, initially shooting Gary Winnograndinspired street scenes, then landscapes, and finally the installation work he does today. Jackson was named one of the Critical Mass Top 50 in 2012, and won the installation/stilllife category of PDN s The Curator award in 2013.

6 Shen Chen, a Chinese artist whose meditative works draw from his discipline in ink brush drawings, works nonetheless in bold color, laying in tonal studies side by side for an ombre effect in his paintings. Shen has been exhibiting his minimalist works in museums and galleries in Asia, Europe and the United States to great acclaim. Of this latest work -- and Chen s studio practice in general -- art critic Robert Morgan, who has studied Chen s work for a decade, writes in the artist s catalogue: In contrast to other important Chinese artists living or who have lived in New York, Chen functions solely as a painter. He is very clear about his position. He is committed to painting as a form that gives him the space and time to do what he wants and to express what he needs..he is a painter, specifically an abstract painter, intent on working with the surface, using acrylic paint the way he was trained to use ink. Robert Morgan, Paintings in Memory of Time and Infinity, Shen Chen is a Chinese painter who now lives full time in New York. He earned his BFA from the Shanghai Academy of Theater in 1982, and an MFA at Boston University in Since the 1980s, Chen was among China s burgeoning pioneers of abstract painting and experimental ink painting. His career spans several international museum exhibitions including: Shanghai Art Museum, Ningbo Museum of Art National Art Museum of China (NAMOC), Roma Academy of Fine Arts, Rome, Italy; Today Art Museum, Beijing, China; Nantong Museum of Art, Nantong, China; San Shang Museum of Contemporary Art, Shanghai, China; Shanghai University Museum, Shanghai, China; Queens Museum of Art, Queens, NY; Zhendai Museum of Modern Art, Shanghai, China; Hexiangning Museum of Contemporary Art, Shenzhen, China; Xi Hu Art Museum, Hangzhou, China; Doulun Museum of Modern Art, Shanghai, China; Museum of Chinese in America, New York, NY; Singer Museum of Art, Singer Laren, Netherlands; Kuntsmuseum Bochum, Bochum, Germany; and Kunsthalle Recklinghausen, Rechlinghausen, Germany.

7 SHEN CHEN Repeating the same techniques or same methods within an image is central to my concept of the making of paintings. The process of making a painting is as important as a completed painting itself. Simplifying my images, which often appear as strokes or lines, and purifying colors into mostly black and white are part of an artistic ideology that reflects my personal philosophical beliefs and my Chinese culture background. My recent paintings, acrylic on canvas, indicate the development of my changing style. I use self-made wide brushes and work on canvases that lie on the floor. I paint images that often show overlapping brushstrokes repeating themselves vertically; the image consists of a field of mystical lines and patterns in gray with foggy tones. A range of textures seems to float to the surface of the canvas, with marks that look more like rubbings, drawn lines, or woodblock prints, than brushstrokes. The lines or patterns are distant to each other in the depth beyond the flat surface, and are dissolved downward or upward into a transparent space that energizes the view. Many of the compositions resemble traditional Chinese ink painting: the use of black ( yong mo ) as a primary color and the use of emptiness ( liu bai ) as inner space are central to my esthetic. I try to recreate the beauty and the mysterious power of Chinese ink paintings even though I work with Western materials and formats. Inevitably, my personal experiences, consisting of a physical, emotional, and spiritual journey traveling between the East and the West, have been incorporated into a more poetic and abstract style. I sometimes think that my work aspires to involve an abstract style with a philosophical notion of contradictions, known in statements such as less is more, full is empty this is my way of making art. -Shen Chen

8 Shen Chen, , 2013, acrylic on canvas, 64 x 48

9 Shen Chen, , 2013, acrylic on canvas, 64 x 46

10 SOO SUNNY PARK Soo Sunny Park s work combines an ongoing investigation into natural sciences with experimentation in large-scale sculpture and installation. Her work often responds to specific sites and plays with scale to foster viewer interaction. Through the elements selected for her projects, she addresses questions of structure, rhythm and pattern, and geometries, creating a liminal, interstitial space. The re-purposed materials, such as string, plastic cups and chain link fence, create an unexpected - and unexpectedly beautiful - environment. The experience of the intended space totally upends the viewer s assumptions about day-to-day materials, and about artificial environments. ective, time, and presence. The artist has opened exhibitions of large scale installations, Vapor Slide, at the Cranbrook Art Museum; Capturing Resonance was installed at the Rice University Museum in Houston, Texas in April Park is a tenured professor of Studio Art at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire.

11 Soo Sunny Park, Apperception (#2 on the wall), 2015, wood, plastic, aluminum, pollish, paint, 31 x 31 x 4

12 Soo Sunny Park, Apperception (#2 on the wall), 2015, wood, plastic, aluminum, pollish, paint, 31 x 31 x 4 (detail)

13 JONATHAN PRINCE Prince writes: Steel is... an additive process; segments can be attached to the core material. As such - I am very excited by the notion that one can penetrate space by the additive process of steel fabrication in ways that could never be done in stone carving, where the sculpture s entire mass must be present in the initial stone block. This is actually the reason I was initially interested in exploring steel as a medium. A point of interest in my work is the idea that even though the steel work was created in an additive fashion, the sculpture has often been reduced from the complete form or geometry. This contradiction in apparent form and process is shown to great example in one of Prince s signature works, Vestigial Block, which is now on permanent view at the new Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University. His recent works, done entirely in stainless steel, play the polished surface of unblemished stainless against the intended rupture of manipulated steel to excellent effect. Prince recently exhibited Torn Steel, a series of three of his monumental works, at the Sculpture Garden at 590 Madison Avenue in New York in Additionally, Prince s newest work, G2V, was on view at Dag Hammarskjold Plaza outside of the United Nations through April A mini-retrospective of the artists s black granite sculptures and functional art is on view at ABC stone in Brooklyn, NY. The artist lives and works in western Massachusetts.

14 Jonathan Prince, Basin, 2014, high chromium stainless steel, 18 x 44 x 44 CYNTHIA REEVES

15 LIANGHONG FENG Painting should be a form of expression, unrestrained, freely expressive, and releasing what the artist usually appreciates. This needs whole-hearted concentration, and capturing each unintentional effect in painting, so that the impromptu details could become the foundation and the objects of narration of painting language, and become the meditative elements after being perceived by retina, as it s consideration of another form I have to go around the inherent knowledge and concepts, and enter the unknown territory of self. This course is actual and straightforward. I have to discover and correspond to various possible doubts, and make expressions pure. Among these is not an individual s willful and arbitrary subjective wish, but the changeful and mutually penetrative cause-andeffect relationships between heart, hand and painting. Hence, I don t want to purposefully pursue a certain pattern, and would rather present each detail in painting, real, natural and meaningless, just like the inherent appearance presented by the object. - Lianghong Feng

16 Lianghong Feng, Untitled, 2014, oil on canvas, 59 x 59 CYNTHIA REEVES

17 Lianghong Feng, Untitled, 2014, oil on canvas, 59 x 59 CYNTHIA REEVES

18 THOMAS JACKSON Thomas Jackson was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and grew up in Providence, Rhode Island. After earning a B.A. in History from the College of Wooster, he spent much of his career in New York as an editor and book reviewer for magazines. It was his particular interest in photography books that led him to pick up a camera, first shooting Garry Winograndinspired street scenes, then landscapes, and finally the installation work he does today. His work has been shown at The Center for Book Arts in New York, the Governors Island Art Fair, the Gallery at Eponymy in Brooklyn and Industria Superstudios in New York. Jackson was named one of the Critical Mass Top 50 in 2012, and won the installation/still-life category of PDN s The Curator award in He lives in San Francisco.

19 Thomas Jackson, Cheese Balls, 2014, archival digital print, 30 x 38 CYNTHIA REEVES

20 Thomas Jackson, Cups no. 2, 2014, archival digital pigment print, 30 x 38 CYNTHIA REEVES

21 ERIC SLAYTON Eric pulls from his passion for nature in creating his minimalist, organic, sculptural pieces. For the past 6 years, he has been designing and fabricating out of his studio in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, using an assortment of bold reclaimed and industrial sourced materials. Each piece is truly unique by highlighting the richness of tones and textures embedded in his discerning material pallet. Slayton s creative inspirations were derived from his interest in nature that stretches back to his childhood. Growing up on Long Island s north coast, Slayton recalls being happiest when exploring the pockets of forest that stubbornly remained in his suburban surroundings. Here he could climb ancestral trees, catch sunning turtles and snakes and wonder at the untold mysteries all around. Summers were eagerly spent in the Adirondacks of upstate New York, where backpacking and canoeing in the wilds served to deepen his affection for and understanding of the natural world. His fascination and mental focus gravitated toward nature s micro details of patterns, colors, textures and shades.

22 Eric Slayton, Two Columns, 2013, concrete and steel, 77 x 9 x 7

23 DAWN BLACK Dawn Black s gouache, watercolor, and ink drawings of people pulled from the Internet and various periodicals are meditations on concealed identity. The practice of masquerade, especially its role in relation to identity is fascinating to me, she says. Of particular interest is a disguise s ability to engender the wearer powerful through clandestine anonymity and paradoxically its ability to allow the concealed to be his or her authentic self. Her Conceal Project (2008-present) is a collection of portraits of individuals wearing costumes or masks, which, Black believes, reveal the wearer s beliefs about authenticity and sincerity. These drawings constitute a bank of characters for Black, which she later integrates into the more detailed narratives of her larger satirical drawings.

24 CYNTHIA REEVES Dawn Black, Conceal Project Grid 242, 2013, watercolor and ink on paper, 7 1/2 x 5 1/2

25 Dawn Black, Conceal Project: Set 1, 2014, gouache, watercolor and ink on paper, 7 1/2 x 5 1/2

26 Dawn Black, Conceal Project: Set 2, 2014, gouache, watercolor and ink on paper, 7 1/2 x 5 1/2

27 Dawn Black, Conceal Project: Aesthetics, 2014, gouache, watercolor and ink on paper, 7 1/2 x 5 1/2

28 ART15 LONDON MAY For more information please call or CYNTHIA-REEVES.COM