Tomasz Kowalski Carlier Gebauer Berlin

Joep van Liefland : DEADLAND

Lehmann Berlin

Armen Eloyan, Timothy Taylor Gallery, London

Reviewed by Charles Darwent


As self-portraits go, Armen Eloyan's Untitled (Painter) is a bit of an oddity, surpassed in the weirdness stakes only by Untitled (Painter II).

In the first, the 40-something Armenian depicts himself as a log, sporting natty red shoes and propped up against a wall fast asleep, palette and brushes on the floor beside him. In the second, the alter-log is at work on a canvas, but looks surprised to find that a wedge has been hacked from the back of his head. If Armen is trying to tell us something about life as an artist, his take on the subject does not seem entirely upbeat.

Cartoons have a venerable history in contemporary art – think Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons – but Armen's cast of characters feels different from these. Lichtenstein and the rest were playing high-art-low-art games with their "whams!" and their Mickey Mice. Armen, by contrast, is inventing rather than appropriating, and although his biggest influence is clearly Philip Guston, his logs and potatoes and tomatoes and books smack oddly of Chagall: bit-players from a Mitteleuropa folklore, down-market versions of wolves and pigs and little girls in red capes.

If Armen's characters have one thing in common, it is their air of jaunty cruelty. His Untitled (Potato) wears the stock cartoon-zany expression of crossed eyes and lolling tongue, but has hacked off one of his Mr Potato Head arms with a carving knife and taken a slice, à la Van Gogh, out of his own tuberous bonce. The titular hero of Untitled (Tomato as a Cook) is as cheerily self-destructive as he sounds. Self-abuse of one kind or another is a recurrent theme in Armen's painted fairy tales. Several characters appear to be masturbating, most insistently the case of the log in Untitled (Pink Pinocchio) who is touching a strategically placed twig in what can only be described as an inappropriate manner. Another log, in watercolour this time, has a stick up what would, in other circumstances, be his arse.

And what is this all about? Well, black humour isn't the only thing that Armen's pictures share. The other is the quality of their painting. The palette and brushes in Untitled (Painter) are in deep impasto, standing proud of the canvas so as to be both representations of themselves and demonstrations of what they can do. Like Armen's self-cooking tomatoes and self-slicing potatoes, they elide cause and effect, the maker and the made. In their throwaway way, they are deeply clever and accomplished and they want you to know it. To put it another way, Armen's pictures are Absurd with a capital "A", squandering their talents on what looks like childish nonsense but slyly underlining those talents in the process.

In this, the new work has the feel of a manifesto. His last show here, just over a year ago, was both more painterly and less so. Then, his cartoons felt like German New Painting, expressionistic, harder to read. Now, the potatoes and tomatoes are both simpler and more virtuosic, exasperated but in a good way. What artist hasn't occasionally felt that he was killing himself with work to no end?

At times like this, you go back to the beginning, which is what I'd guess Armen is doing. Personally, I'm intrigued to see where he goes next.

Luc Tuymans @ Wexner Center for the Arts

Luc Tuymans is the most challenging painter in recent history. A retrospective of the fifty-one-year-old Belgian artist at the Wexner Center for the Arts, in Columbus, Ohio, invites a verdict. Mine is a thumbs-up. Tuymans’s thinly brushed, drab-looking (but sneakily lovely) canvases, usually based on banal photographs with wispy political associations, dramatize the fallen state of painting since the nineteen-sixties. Tuymans also discovers in the very humiliation of the medium a surprising vitality. He does so with audacity, in terms of subject matter. He works in thematic series, whose topics have included the Holocaust, disease, Flemish nationalism, Belgian colonialism, post-9/11 America, and the mystique of Walt Disney. One of Tuymans’s first definitive works is a 1986 painting of the gas chamber at Dachau. The first-person touch of his brush is the work’s sole, and frail, emotional anchor. Tuymans is Flemish, a native and lifelong resident of Antwerp. He quit painting in the early nineteen-eighties to pursue filmmaking, resuming in 1985. Tuymans’s works would rather whisper than shout, though always in a vicinity of raw nerves. He has recently painted both a series touching on Belgian politics and a suite responding to America in the era of George W. Bush. His 2005 painting of Condoleezza Rice both demands and rejects answers. Tuymans articulates a modern tradition that gives equal weight to the dazed German Romanticism of Friedrich and the wide-awake Parisian modernity of Manet. He has compared his method to the self-developing of Polaroids, saying of his process, “It’s like I don’t know what I’m doing but I know how to do it, and it’s very strange.” Tuymans is influential among younger painters, but he is not apt to become popular.

"Diktatur" Ronald de Bloeme @ Hamish Morrison Berlin

With an army of billboard-sized works of equal dimensions (220 x 350 cm) de Bloeme questions media strategies and the content of the information found in contemporary visual sign systems, as used in advertising and the packaging industry, reflecting on the absolutism of today`s communication processes.

In an era in which imagery is increasingly superseding language, de Bloeme analyses the origin of signals and the components of their persuasiveness. How do producers of visual language manage to manipulate neutral form and colour in a way that they induce a subconscious process of identification for the largest possible number of individuals of a specifically defined target group? To what extent does red next to white evoke a flag or the packaging of a chocolate bar?

Through appropriation, deconstruction and manipulation using a computer Ronald de Bloeme transforms image templates of our consumer society. He censors existing text and eliminates any figurative references, creating a pure geometric language, which he again combines and distorts into arresting compositions. These are then transferred to canvas with competing colourful layers of high-gloss and matt enamel paint. The resultant expansive surfaces capture our attention through the combination of colour and use of various techniques, with a suggestive impact analogous to the original advertising medium's intention.

„The viewer often doesn´t know what is more enjoyable - the mastery with which the artist gives a new unity to a whole range of elements, or the remaining fine imperfections that are a sign of the handiwork."(1)


Through the collaging of everyday consumer goods that we are constantly exposed to, de Bloeme´s body of work creates a heterogeneous field of forces, of tensions and contradictions, certainties and uncertainties. The original context is not maintained as such, rather the work recalls memories of perception or of consensus of knowledge; the information, retained only as codes, has an effect on us but we cannot explain why. Are we not merely carriers of internalised decoding systems, controlled by the ever-extending propagandistic sign-systems of the dictatorship of consumerism?
Whilst de Bloeme´s colour combinations can be identified as codes, at the same time samples of other contextual systems of signs unfold. In doing so the artist brings the relativity of information into an innovative game. In his painting Ironie he mixes a military code system with the aesthetics of a paper napkin; in Extract he replaces in a more radical manner all relevant core information with constantly oxidizing gold pigments.
With his contra-manipulation de Bloeme asks us to determine how complex the structures behind communications strategies for consumer goods really are and how much impact they have on our subconscious and to what extent they control our everyday life.

see also interview: http://whitehotmagazine.com/articles/interview-with-ronald-de-bloeme/1951

Mark Bradford & Kara Walker @ Sikkema Jenkins

Sikkema Jenkins now hosts an exhibition with not one, but two MacArthur Genius grantees. Announced this morning, Los Angeles based artist Mark Bradford now joins the ranks of his show colleague Kara Walker as a grantee. Bradford uses found paper from billboards, posters, and magazines that he finds on the streets to create painterly collages.

530 West 22nd Street
New York, NY 10011

TJEBBE BEEKMAN Galerie Diana Stigter

About Alienation
by Andrea Alessi

TJEBBE BEEKMAN
Galerie Diana Stigter
Elandsstraat 90, NL 1016 SH Amsterdam, Netherlands
05 September 2009 - 10 October 2009







Tjebbe Beekman’s large, tactile paintings, currently showing at Galerie Diana Stigter, exhibit an ambivalent passion for their medium. Shiny, thickly layered paint is contaminated with sand, pieces of yarn, and nails. It is one of the most striking features of his work. In a series of smaller, snapshot sized pieces, acrylic and resin is applied so thickly that it has warped the paper underneath, leaving rectangles resembling melting polaroids or glass. Like most conceptual painters, Beekman makes paintings that are (at least in part) about painting.

Thankfully, there is more to them than that. The paintings depict complex, yet ultimately false architectural environments created initially as digital composites. There is a giant theatre, a television studio, and multiple museum interiors. Whereas Beekman’s earlier paintings can be characterized by their middle-distance vantage points and empty spaces, the foregrounds of these new interiors are inhabited by non-human objects like TV cameras and skeletons in display cases.

The artist’s previous paintings described a prophylactic existence - the “capsulization” of contemporary society and the experience of isolation within the spaces of modernity. Beekman’s latest environments are sites of presentation and mediation. Theses are the places where our society and our world, past and present, are re-presented back at us. Yet this is not intimate person-to-person communication, and the works still convey a sense of separation and emptiness. Indeed, we watch TV alone at home; we sit in a crowded theatre and do not interact with our neighbors; geography, time, and a physical pane of glass separate us from objects in museums. The architectural convolution and painterly distortion of Beekman’s spaces suggest that maybe what they present to us is not as clear as it might seem.

These new investigations are not so much a deviation from Beekman’s previous body of work, as they are a conceptual evolution and refinement of ideas. If The Image of a Capsular Society explored the symptoms of societal segregation and control, perhaps Beekman’s new paintings have begun to question the cause.

--Andrea Alessi

(Image: Tjebbe Beekman, Tv Studio, 2009, Acrylic , enamel and sand on pael, 200x300 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Diana Stigter, Amsterdam)

james kalm visits closed up gallery´s in NY

Michael Raedecker-Gem Museum The Hague

Michael Raedecker – one of the most successful artists of his generation – presents a broad overview of his latest work at the GEM this summer. His complex, multi-layered paintings, which daringly combine the “high-status” medium of paint with the homelier medium of embroidery, are based on traditional genres like the still life and flower painting. Raedecker has shot to fame since 1999, winning international prizes and seeing his work included in renowned collections like Saatchi and Tate Modern.

Michael Raedecker began his artistic training by studying fashion at the Rietveld Academy. He then attended the Rijksacademie and received his MFA from the prestigious Goldsmith’s College in London. He gradually developed a highly distinctive style, raising eyebrows by his unusual combination of paint and thread. His disturbing pictures are characterised by the complete absence of any human presence and are inspired by the “good life” depicted in the American TV shows of his childhood. They are usually based on a photographic image, which Raedecker reduces to its essence. As he works on it, he reduces the lines and gradually leaves more and more to the viewer’s imagination.

For Raedecker, there is nothing self-evident about working in paint. Time and again he asks himself how, as an artist today, he can add anything to the history of painting or of art in general. His relationship with the contemporary world is also a major issue; how does he relate to society and what rationale is there being an artist in today’s world? The latter question became particularly pressing after 11 September 2001, when he was overwhelmed by a feeling of powerlessness. He felt out of place and decadent in the safety of his studio.

His pictures have gradually become more restrained and his palette subtler. therapy (2005), a still life showing the remains of a breakfast on a table, is typical of a phase in which Raedecker has gone in search of the essence of painting. Like his seventeenth-century predecessors, his aim is to impress the viewer with his virtuosity. In his latest work, his paintings are increasingly transparent, making the creative process still more immediately apparent.

Raedecker regards his flower paintings as the height of decadence. Like the still lifes of the Golden Age, they remind the viewer of beauty and transience, of seduction and death. However, the prissiness of flower arrangements and bits of embroidery is offset by confrontational, suggestive titles like pornography (2005) and penetration (2005), which give the paintings an entirely different frame of reference. The ambiguity applies to the handling of the paint as well as the content of the pictures; from a distance, the representation of flowers is clearly visible but closer up it disintegrates into abstract components exhibiting subtle differences of colour and texture.

HURVIN ANDERSON: PETER’S SERIES 2007–2009

The Studio Museum in Harlem is proud to present the first solo U.S. museum exhibition of the work of London-based artist Hurvin Anderson. Born in 1965 in Birmingham, United Kingdom to parents of Jamaican descent, Anderson engages the formal traditions of landscape painting and abstraction. Through his paintings, he explores his own relationship to the Caribbean through depictions of complex, personal spaces and memory.

Continuing Anderson’s fascination with and exploration of places imbued with social history, meaning and memory, Hurvin Anderson: Peter’s Series 2007-2009 presents seven paintings and nine works on paper. These works re-imagine spaces created by Caribbean immigrants during the 1950s and 1960s. At that time, barbershops and other places for personal services often were opened in people’s homes and functioned as sites for both social gatherings and economic enterprise. These shop owners and their customers were among a significant wave of immigrants to the United Kingdom from the Caribbean Commonwealth countries after World War II. The barbershop was not only a place to get a haircut, but also a social space in which to meet and talk with one’s friends and neighbors.
For Anderson, the barbershop functions as a personal space loaded with imagery, and also houses intertwined political, economic and social histories. “Peter’s Series” takes as its subject one of the last-known of these spaces—a small attic that was converted into a barbershop where the artist’s father went for haircuts. Finding the space both complex and ambiguous, Anderson explored the technical exercise of recreating it many times. At first intrigued by the physical features of the attic, Anderson focused on the architecture of the room in early paintings, providing multiple perspectives of the space, like a series of portraits. Working from photographs, memory and imagination, Anderson painted and repainted the space, and even repainted a painting of it, continually reducing the interior architecture to its basic colors and simple geometric forms. In later paintings, he centralizes an anonymous figure in the barber’s chair, further negotiating between functional space and shared experience, while also providing a voyeuristic glimpse of a private moment.

Anderson studied at the Wimbledon College of Art and the Royal College of Art in the United Kingdom. His first solo gallery show was in 2003 and in 2006 he was the artist in residence at Dulwich Picture Gallery in London. Earlier this year, Anderson had his first solo museum show at the Tate Britain.

Dash Snow, East Village Artistic Rebel, Dies at 27

By ROBERTA SMITH
Published: July 15, 2009

Dash Snow, who rebelled against his privileged and art-loving family to become a promising young New York artist in his own right, died Monday night at a hotel in the East Village. He was 27 and lived in Manhattan.

His death, at Lafayette House, on East Fourth Street, was confirmed by his grandmother, the art collector and philanthropist Christophe de Menil. The cause was a drug overdose, she said.

Mr. Snow was known to be a heroin addict, but Ms. de Menil said he had been in rehab in March and had been off drugs until very recently.

Mr. Snow was a rebel as young as 13, when his parents — Taya Thurman, a daughter of Ms. de Menil’s, and Christopher Snow, a musician — sent him to a reformatory-like school in Georgia. He stayed there two years. After his release, he returned to New York and began living on his own. With no more than a ninth-grade education, he was largely self taught. His art would eventually include photography, drawing, collage, installation, zines, film and video. But he began, in his teens, as a graffiti artist known by the tag “Sace.”

Handsome, heavily tattooed, with waist-length blond hair and a full beard, he soon became something of a downtown legend. He began taking Polaroids of the sex- and drug-fueled young bohemian circles in which he moved, recording his life and times in a style similar to that of his close friend Ryan McGinley and older artists like Nan Goldin and Larry Clark. Several of these images were included in the 2006 Whitney Biennial.

Mr. Snow had his first solo show in 2005, at Rivington Arms, a gallery on the Lower East Side. (His work is now represented by Peres Projects of Los Angeles and Berlin.) By then, Mr. Snow had become close with a group of artists that included Nate Lowman, Adam McEwen and Dan Colen, all of whom were experimenting with appropriation, or found-image, art in various mediums.

He began using newspapers in different ways, drawing in colored pencil, for example, on historic images, like a photograph of the shooting of President John F. Kennedy. He made large collages out of headlines and strange, delicate, sexually suggestive ones that evoked the medium’s Dada origins. He had also started making short Super 8 films and converting them to video.

Sexuality, violence and life’s fragility were frequent themes in Mr. Snow’s work, but there was also an air of exuberant misbehavior. A 2007 article in New York magazine, “Warhol’s Children,” highlighted Mr. Snow’s art, antics and underground stature, bringing his notoriety to a wider audience. It mentioned that he and his friends liked to turn hotel rooms into “hamster nests” by littering them with torn-up telephone books.

That summer, Mr. Snow and Mr. Colen went public with this practice. In their installation “Nest,” they filled Deitch Projects, a SoHo gallery, with several feet of shredded phonebooks and invited visitors to hang out, party and add graffiti to the walls. Many cooperated.

Mr. Snow was born in Manhattan in 1981 to a family whose cultural contributions included the Menil Collection in Houston and the Dia Center for the Arts in Manhattan and Beacon, N.Y. When he was 18, he married Agathe Aparru, now the artist Agathe Snow. The marriage ended in divorce.

In addition to his grandmother and his parents, Mr. Snow is survived by a grandfather, Robert Thurman; his sister, Caroline Snow; his brother, Maxwell Snow; his companion, Jade Berreau, and their daughter, Secret, all of Manhattan.

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On Dash

On meeting Dash for the first time, you don’t get the impression that he is from our time. Dash, born in 1981, does not seem like a man of the year 2007. With his long hair, his hippie sunglasses and his clothes, his preference for the music of the late 1960s and the whole psychedelic sound, Dash seems someone who was catapulted from the 1960s into our time. And that is of course no coincidence, but rather a conscious revenge against an idiotic time. Or, to be more precise, against two idiotic decades. Dash Snow is a child of the eighties, and they were, despite all the Miami Vice like pastel craziness, at their core a dark and melancholy decade. It was the decade of Reagonomics and Thatcherism, the decade of the insane arms race, people had no social utopias anymore, but instead they were afraid: afraid of losing their work, afraid of the new Batemans who would mercilessly rationalise them away, afraid of nuclear war and forest dieback, and then, in the mid-eighties, the fear of AIDS came on top of it all. Work, love, life: everything was under existential threat. That was the time into which Dash was born; the year he turned twenty was 2001, which was the beginning of a new era of fear and hysteria – the so-called millennium years will be remembered as a decade characterised by the war against terror, fear of Islamism, and a general sense of exhaustion. In the cities, architecture summoned up the good old days; new forms hardly developed. It is clear that you ask yourself in such a time where and how to go on, what to take as your own starting point and it is not surprising – and indeed rather likable – that Dash Snow simply decided to leave his own time temporarily to delve, like an archaeologist, into the depths of the 1960s and 1920s to explore how an era works that believes in experimentation, in the future, and in itself. Dash frequently works with old, yellowed paper that he tears from old books or finds somewhere. On this paper, he glues collages of words and images – and the results look as if the beat poets had collaborated with Max Ernst. Wild physical desires encounter phrases from the press, cut-out word fragments run like worried policemen of meaning across naked bodies. Of course that’s not always original, but it is necessary. By turning himself into Kerouac and Max Ernst, by assuming their role and their aesthetics, he seeks the mechanics of an optimistic awakening, the wild, buoyant, highly energetic anarchy that characterised the eras of Ernst and Kerouac and that is so sadly missing today. Perhaps we get closest to Dash’s method by using the rich German term Verdichtung. Verdichten means on the one hand to condense, to shorten, clarify; on the other hand it means to kidnap objects from the everyday world of prose into the realm of poetry – and poetry is, according to the original Greek meaning of the word poeisis, nothing other than the ‘art of bringing forth’. What is here being brought forth and clarified in Dash’s poetical collages? Dash condenses words and images of our time, the newspaper headlines, the pictures of naked women and of the great criminals into Dadaist formulas which suddenly, almost violently, sum up all the promises and crimes of our day. The word collages are also Verdichtung: they disassemble the headlines into single components and squeeze them together into nonsense messages, – thus bringing hidden truths and desires to light. They are pictures that counter the large political ideologies, the Iraq War, the West’s promises of happiness, wealth, sex, and power, with images of an individual Gegenglueck that cannot be grasped with the images and collective promises of salvation made by politics and advertising. This counter-happiness can also be found in the finesse of the materials – when he glues a word onto a piece of wood, thus underlaying and charging themeaning of the abstract term through the direct sensuousness of the grained material. There are many melancholy gestures in Dash’s works, yellowed paper, a black-and-white aesthetic, as well as vanitas motifs, skulls, death symbols. But Dash does not surrender to this melancholy, he does not celebrate it, he counters it with emanations of a wild vibrancy and of absolute happiness in the here and now: images of kissing nudes, traces of sperm, pictures of wild excess, and this antidote is also an outcry against the time that allowed itself to be completely lulled and now lies exhausted on the ground. How could the energy and verve of Dada, surrealism, and the beat generation, how could the optimistic energy of the twenties and sixties be translated into our time? That is the question that comes to mind when encountering Dash’s work, be it his collages or the Polaroids he made of himself and his friends, an atlas of the great odyssey to adulthood. And the fact that Dash, the archaeologist of happiness and hero of the immediate moment does not always answer these questions doesn’t matter all that much. He's only 26; he still has time to find answers.

Anna T. Berger, Summer 2007

Daniel Richter- CFA Berlin "Oh La La"