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The city square is deserted. There’s no one strolling past the columns of the former municipal building, no one on the bandstand. The heat that pulsates on the canvas is keeping everybody at home in this languid summer evening. The modernist pyramid, vaguely redolent of Le Corbusier and Oscar Niemeyer, is a monumental relic of the failed utopias of the 20^th century. Imperfect Pearls Shimmer at Dusk (2011) could be in any nondescript ex-USSR city. Although Marius Bercea does not specify the location, the artist is clearly picturing a place lived in, used by its invisible inhabitants to the point of exhaustion. The three diving statues invite the eye to the vast sand expanse, absurdly tropical with its exotic flowers and white promotional umbrellas. There’s a distinct yearning for escape from this place saturated with memories — fed 24/7 by the lurid billboards gleaming on the horizon.

Bercea belongs to the generation of Romanians who grew up under Ceausescu’s regime, and saw their country’s rapid transformation after the dissolution of the Communist Bloc. In some of his earlier paintings, the artist tackled real and imagined childhood recollections: the formulaic school photographs, games, and picnics of faceless kids, wrapped in the yellowish, noxious air that hung over Eastern Europe after Chernobyl’s nuclear disaster. With this new series, described by the artist as a “collective urban portrait,” Bercea deals with what happened immediately after 1989, with the arrival of Western capitalism; neon slowly taking over the cityscape, its fluorescent hues slapped on the decaying concrete, the shifting sense of what is normal, what should be aspired to, and how it could, or should, be obtained. Although it eschews direct narratives, Imperfect Pearls Shimmer at Dusk evinces a sense of being in flux. Advertising blurs progressively emerge from the brushstrokes’ rich interlays; Romania’s transition is happening on the canvas under our eyes.

Bercea bathes his built-up environments in the suspended atmosphere of twilight: dawn of an era, dusk of another. He uses these warm, vaguely threatening skies for a forensic study of light and its effects, walking in the footsteps of the great landscape painters J. M. W. Turner and Claude Monet. The heavy purple offsets the street light boxes’ electric glow and the lush emerald leaves quivering in the breeze; it enlivens the dusty grays of the buildings, temporarily smoothing their fast-coming obsolescence. Most of the edifices presented in this series exist somewhere in the real world, at least in part. Bercea has collected different bits of buildings, combined and reconfigured them to create this recent-past dystopia, a condensed version of all his sources. With its top lost in the heavens, the pyramid in Imperfect Pearls has something of a Tower of Babel — an overbearing icon of men’s folly, past and to come.

Critic and curator Jane Neal describes Bercea’s painting as a kind of archaeology, a process of navigating layers of time, space, colors, and semantics encrusted on the canvas. While the conceptual background of each piece in this new series is too pregnant to ignore, it’s also a ploy for the artist to stretch further his ongoing exploration of the medium, his tireless testing of Albertian perspective, and experiments with the dilatation and refraction of light on the picture plane. Bercea’s practice is decidedly figurative, and yet it also freely taps into a gestural tradition more readily associated with abstraction. Dotted throughout the images — indeed making the images — countless impetuous impastos stand as so many pieces of bravura, only fully appreciable up close. These idiosyncratic touches reinforce the sense of the artist’s presence; his personal experience is rendered palpable through the materiality of the paint. But Bercea always aims beyond intricacies of the specific. In these canvases, he recounts the history of a part of the world as it struggle to find its place in a new geo-political landscape.

For further information, please contact the gallery at info@ghebaly.com

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Concrete Gardens

14 April – 26 May

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Francois Ghebaly Gallery is delighted to present Body of Evidence.  The exhibition presents work by four women artists: Ellen Altfest, Marlene Dumas, Nicole Eisenman and Caroline Walker. Each features the body as a key part of her artistic practice, whether it be the main subject carefully scrutinised; a means to critiquing contemporary notions of identity; a focus through which to explore basic human desires and intentions (often disguised by social mores); or the projection of the artist’s concerns with the performative aspects of ‘being’ a woman in a given space. The show considers how all four artists thus create a body of evidence for the viewer to peruse and assess.

The decision by the curator, Jane Neal, to bring together these four diverse painters was made in recognition of the changing attitudes and relationships between women’s art and the body. Once used as a focus for the expression of so-called biological feminist ideas by women artists via performance, this modus operandi was rendered unfashionable in the 1980s by the apparently subsequent wave of interest in so-called theoretical feminist expression through language, the distancing process of signification, photography and the adoption of psychoanalytical texts. However the linear reading of women’s art as ‘evolving’ from biological ‘goddess’ or ‘mother earth’ inspired motifs to a more coolly conceptual approach, has now been called into question. There is considerable evidence to suggest biological and theoretical approaches to the examination of the body in women’s art practice not only co-existed from the 1970s onwards, but in fact corporeality has gained precedence in art from the mid 1990s to the present day, through becoming a centre of focus in women’s painting.

Each artist in Body of Evidence could be described as working with ‘the body politic’ – though in very distinct and different ways – yet each is also deeply concerned with the nature of the medium they work in: the plastic possibilities of paint, the challenges, and the timeless nature of a medium that is arguably the most readily expressive and adaptable. Body of Evidence aims to draw the viewer into an enthralling encounter with flesh, desire and the boundaries of public and private space.

Ellen Altfest’s subjects of choice are the male body and still life. Unlike many artists working today who favour the help of modern technology, Altfest prefers to work from life. It is this intense scrutiny that enables her to make paintings that are extremely focused to the point of obsessive, but also neither ugly nor beautiful. The style is not too far away from Freud’s early work and his observations of his first wife, Kitty’s green dressing down, each towelling loop delicately picked out and the short bristly hair of their dog meticulously described. In Altfest’s case though, the viewer might find the coarse curly hair on a man’s back and a few open pores, or the wrinkly sac of his testicles as his leg bends to provide the viewer with a close up view. In another work the viewer might find that the man is obscured by a macro close up painting of a cactus or gourd, a large stone or a piece of wood. This feels deliberate rather than accidental, as if the artist is communicating what she finds fascinating is in fact a section of object, or part of a man, not what it symbolises. Everything is broken down, turned over and minutely recorded with the dedication and precision of a research scientist.

Marlene Dumas uses the traditional subjects of Western painting such as the classically inspired nude or the funeral portrait to tackle some of the most pressing concerns of our age: the questions surrounding identity and the impact of racial, sexual and social stereotyping. Drawing from found imagery derived from photography (most notably polaroids), newspapers and magazines, Dumas translates the subjects of these sources into paint in a most remarkable way. She allows the nature of her material to infuse atmosphere and create narrative: inky splotches variously suggest decay, heightening passions, or tensions and embarrassment. Dumas specialises in intimacy, drawing in the viewer to an up close and personal view of her chosen subject; but while the viewer become an active, even avid participant in her game, the resulting experience can be awkwardly uncomfortable, even shocking.

Nicole Eisenman presents a heady, rich ensemble of situations most usually derived from her own experiences. Often comic in tone and diary-like, Eisenman’s choice of colour and style reveals her fascination with both French and German expressionism. Of late her carefully planned group scenes have given way to an increased focus on heads or deconstructed bodies that tend towards the abstract, yet still there is the sense of an artist closely observing and commenting on her peers and society; paring down further and further until desire and explicit intentions are laid bare and no longer hidden by social mores.

In Caroline Walker’s intimate paintings we witness women engaged in domestic activities that seem incongruous considering the starkly modernist houses we find them in. Often the women are dressed up in bizarre clothing, or performing tasks that appear more ritualistic than naturally expressive. They never meet our gaze and in Walker’s hands, each woman is clearly a subject to be looked at, anonymous and vulnerable. She represents a ‘private’ face of woman that is in opposition to the air-brushed images of her found in magazines and mass media.

Intriguingly, although the women appear to have ‘a room of their own’ (as outlined by Virginia Woolf in 1929) that they are at liberty to do what they want in, this is itself a fiction spun by Walker. The artist makes it clear that what is apparently a sign of liberation can paradoxically become a prison; the women are at various times trapped, isolated, bored and frustrated. It is Walker, not the subject, who is free. The artist is at liberty to work as she wishes and to create and inhabit a ‘virtual’ world – but at the expense of the ‘imprisoned’ women. The dilemma could not be more clearly articulated: as the creator and director, Walker is the one with all the choices in this domestic scenario, while the model, still occupying her traditional role, remains subject to Walker’s whim.

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Curated by Jane Neal

Ellen Altfest,  Marlene Dumas, Nicole Eisenman and Caroline Walker

March 24 – April 10th

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new sculptures by Patrick Jackson

The Armory Show in collaboration with Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery
Pier 94 – Booth 534
Twelth Avenue at 55th St.
New York City

March 8 – 11 2012

Night Gallery and François Ghebaly invites you to take a ride on the street of Los Angeles with Davide Balula behind the wheel. Following the wandering minds of our driver, horns creates an imaginary landscape through long overlaying sounds; guitars, respond to the rhythm of the mechanics of the engine, and its shifting gear; poetry brings forward the mindset of our driver.

“I won’t tell you between what ocean and mountain I’m driving, or what car, some ways in the distance, decided to break the state’s  unspoken rule by adhering to the posted speed limit. It’s the difference of not moving in that seventy-five mile per hour sweet spot where my soul really touches something like automotive grace.“- Tyler Coburn

A car ride in the streets of Los Angeles serves as a timeline and structure for a musical score in two acts.

Act 1 represents the trajectory of a car and its mechanics. The score (written in collaboration with Jesse Peterson) takes the form of a slide show of textual instructions. Screens are shared by both the audience and the performers while 4 bass players interpret the text in real time, following each change and pause of the score.

Act 2 represents the wandering mind of a driver. A poem composed while driving (written and performed by artist Tyler Coburn) is read out-loud while 4 bass horns improvise an imaginary landscape through long, overlapping layers of sound.

(Order of the acts subject to change).

Davide Balula is an artist living and working in Paris. A Car Ride is a Musical Score is part of an ongoing series of textual improvised music performances. Previous related work includes A 1000 Feet, based on a walk in New York City and Niagara Falls and Cranberry Leaves, based on the digestion of a diuretic cocktail.  http://www.twitter.com/davidebalula. http://davide.balula.free.fr

For further information, please contact the galleries at nightgalleryla@gmail.com or info@ghebaly.com.

Nate Lowman, 2011

Taken together, the Renaissance frescoes at the Met, the May ’68 graffiti slogans, and Warhol’s Cow Wallpaper were clues to an alternative direction away from the self-contained object. This is not to suggest that these three events alone constituted the sole impetus for the turn to the wall. But they began to suggest a new site, a new scale, a new sense of time – in short, the possibility of a new kind of experience. Wall-works bypass double support.

-Mel Bochner, “Why Would Anyone Want to Draw on the Wall?”, October, Fall, 2009

Triple A is a two-year public art project initiated by François Ghebaly, Emma Gray, and the Mandrake Bar. Eight internationally recognized artists will be asked to create a single color image to be painted at large scale on the exterior wall of a former muffler shop that sits at the corner of Venice Boulevard and La Cienega Boulevard, just south of the 10 Freeway in Los Angeles California. The wall, situated in the Culver City gallery district, home to many of Los Angeles’s most important art galleries, also sits at one of the most heavily trafficked intersections in Los Angeles. This location offers high visibility to both arts professionals and the larger general public.

The eight images painted on the wall over the course of the project will also be used to create a suite of eight individual silkscreen prints in an edition of ten. The inaugural project, a wall painting by New York based artist Nate Lowman, will open in fall 2011.

The mural is located at 2600 South La Cienega Blvd. The silkscreen prints will be available at the reception to celebrate the completion of the first wall painting at Mandrake Bar, October 1, 2011 from 4 to 6 pm.

LA Weekly: Art to See

François Ghebaly presents Material Underground, a group exhibition with works by Mike Kuchar, Andra Ursuta, Patrick Jackson and Anna Betbeze.

Working since the early 1960’s, Mike Kuchar has created prolific bodies of work in both drawing and film/video. When speaking of his two practices Kuchar has described them as “a projection of visions in your mind that you either put on paper or you try to achieve that effect when you’re behind the camera.” This show will include several of Mike’s original drawings for publications such as Meatmen, Gay Heart Throbs and Manscape. The video Statue in the Park (1996) will also be screened, which tells the story of two strippers who venture into the park to see a statue that “will make you kind of horny.”

Both sculptures by Andra Ursuta have a relation to the body, food and violence. Speed Bag of Bread is both a punching bag and a bread bag, while Untitled is a scythe made from bicycle parts.

Dirt Pile on Table (marble), part of a new series by Patrick Jackson, resulted from craigslist searches for coffee tables of varying genres. The tables are then piled with hand squeezed portions of mud, which are dried, soaked with epoxy, and result in a hardened dirt shell that looks like excrement.

Anna Betbeze will contribute Noir, a wool carpet that’s been painted, sculpted and otherwise attacked. The result of this material transgression is red over black, or perhaps, considering the piece’s title, a black widow.


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MATERIAL UNDERGROUND

Anna Betbeze, Patrick Jackson, Mike Kuchar,  Andra Ursuta


Opening Reception
January 21, 2012
6PM – 9PM

January 21 – March 9 2012

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- Booth 807

Thursday, Dec 1; 2pm to 8pm
Friday, Dec 2; 11am to 8pm
Saturday, Dec 3; 11am to 8pm
Sunday, Dec 4; 11am to 5pm

François Ghebaly Gallery is pleased to present work by Neil Beloufa, Joel Kyack and Oscar Murillo at NADA Art Fair, Miami Beach.

Also showing work by Marius Bercea, Gina Osterloh and Robert Russell.