SanArt

Joshua Liner Gallery
548 West 28th Street, 3rd Floor, 212-244-7415

Chelsea

March 18 – April 17, 2010
Opening: Thursday, March 18, 6 – 9 PM
Web Site

Joshua Liner Gallery is very pleased to present the New York/Tokyo-based collective the Barnstormers in their first group exhibition at the gallery. With thirty-five artists featured, this is the largest exhibition to date at Joshua Liner, which will double its gallery space temporarily to accommodate the special event. Expanding to host the collective’s full spectrum of art practices, the gallery will show individual works in painting, printmaking, photography, video, installation, and other mediums by the following Barnstormer artists:

Alex Lebedev, Alice Mazorra, Bluster One, Che Jen, Chris Mendoza, Chuck Webster, Cycle, Daikon, David Ellis, Dennis McNett, Doze Green, Ge-ology, Gion, Guillermo Carrion, Joey Garfield, JPL (UFO), Kami, Kenji Hirata, Kiku Yamaguchi, KR , Madsaki, Manny Pangilinan (Wello), Marlene Marino, Martin Mazorra, Maya Hayuk, Mikal Hameed, Mike Houston, Mike Ming, Miyuki (Pai) Hirai, Naomi Kazama, Pablo Power, Paul Coors, Pema Rinzin, Rostarr, Ryan McGinness, Sasu, Shie Moreno, Swoon, West One, Yuri Shibuya, and Yuri Shimojo.

Over the past decade, the Barnstormers have created large-scale collaborative paintings, films, and performances. The group formed in 1999 after a pilgrimage of twenty-five artists to the rural town of Cameron, North Carolina, where they painted barns, tractor-trailers, shacks, and farm equipment, and continue to return to paint new murals. The Barnstormers’ “motion paintings” best demonstrate the range and flexibility of their collaboration: each timelapse video depicts a mural in the making as members dart about, adding and effacing marks, evolving the image with each passing second. A 2005 project included the disassembly/relocation/reassembly of a barn captured on video in a time-lapse flurry of activity. Improvisation, in spirit and practice, is the Barnstormer ethos.

In this exhibition, the Barnstormers will present works by the group’s individual artists, all of whom have drawn acclaim in their own right and individual careers. As the unofficial founder of the Barnstormers (which rejects any form of organizational hierarchy), North Carolina native David Ellis is nonetheless the driving force who first drew this intrepid band of artists South. In his own practice, Ellis has received acclaim for freestylin’ installations inspired by popular music and DJ-ing, specifically the ways that image, sound, materials, and technology interconnect in
contemporary culture. His installations have been featured at the Huntington Museum of Art, WV; Rice University Gallery, Houston, TX; Tidal, Osaka, Japan; Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh, PA; and Deitch Projects, New York. Other Southeasterners in the collective include Virginian Dennis McNett, West Virginian Martin Mazorra, and North Carolinian Mike Houston, all master printers (in a cracked, R.Crumb vein) working with Cannonball Press.

Swoon is a Brooklyn-based street artist who gained immediate international attention in the mid-’00s for her woodcut-print-on-paper portraits—lovely, intricate, and life-size, these casual views of neighborhood denizens were wheatpasted by the artist on walls and other surfaces of the urban environment in close proximity to the lives depicted. More recently, Swoon has led teams of artists in the construction of “Swimming Cities,” handmade rafts of art navigated to various ports of call on the Mississippi River, Hudson River, and Adriatic Sea where the group has
performed songs and skits for local audiences.

Among the Barnstormers’ Eastern cohort are Hitotzuki, the collaborative duo of Kami and Sasu. The husband and wife team are Tokyo-based muralists who work in a distinctive style of wavy lines and geometric patterns. Born in Osaka, the artist Madsaki spent 25 years in the United States, three as a bicycle messenger in New York—now based in Tokyo, his art incorporates painting, contemporary graphic design, masks, heraldry insignia, and tag-style text, among other sources and media. Also originally from Tokyo, Yuri Shimojo brings a very different contribution
to the collective: supremely delicate works in watercolor on paper. Blending imagery from nature and eastern mythology, her practice also includes journaling, dance, and the traditional arts of the Samurai from whom she is descended.

The Nagasaki-born Kenji Hirata is inspired by billboards, Southeast Asian signage, and the pop-cultural legacies of Futurism and Superflat. His unique approach to hard-edged abstraction celebrates the dynamic interplay of color and form. The photographic arts are represented by the Okayama-born Gion, who has often served as documentary photographer for the Barnstormers’ international projects. Additionally, several of the collective’s artists hail from South Korea. The Seoul-born Che Jen works in sumi ink and acrylic on vellum and paper, building up gorgeous
abstractions from ornate filigree and calligraphy-style marks (she has also collaborated with Madsaki on installation works). And from Daegu, the artist known as Rostarr is the South Korean “Frank Stella,” creating dynamic abstract paintings and murals of banded colors, wavy lines, and camouflage-like patterns in acrylic and aerosol.

The Queens, NY-born graffiti writer KR became so successful that he now markets his own specially designed line of paint and markers called Krink—he built his fine art reputation in the active street/gallery crossover scene of San Francisco before coming back to New York. Doze Green, another New York-born graffiti artist in the collective, pioneered the use of ongoing-characters in street work, as well as participated in the burgeoning breakdancing and B-Boying dance styles with the Rock Steady Crew.

Maya Hayuk, who also got her footing in San Francisco, is now based in Brooklyn. She draws pure pleasure (or “bliss,” as several titles suggest) from the interplay of Day-Glo color and pure geometric forms, creating wall works of prismatic facets, spectral rays, and explosive starbursts. Similarly abstract and colorful but incorporating more organic, even vaguely representational forms, the New York-born Chuck Webster works both large and small in oil on panel. Rounding out the New York-based Barnstormers cohort is the Nicaraguan-born, Bronx-raised Chris Mendoza. His fantastical ink-on-paper drawings display a love of architectural draftsmanship and call to mind the abstract works of Miro, Kandinsky, and the Chilean modernist Matta.

To highlight the Barnstormers’ no-holds-barred sense of improvisation and internationalism, the exhibition will include Confessional Booth, a live, transatlantic project by Greater New York alum Ryan McGinness. While currently in Madrid executing his solo show Studio Franchise at La Casa Encendida, McGinness will host one-to-one conversations via Skype videoconferencing throughout the run of the Barnstormers show. Open to all visitors, the “confessionals” will be conducted during set hours from inside a draped cubicle, complementing the artist’s collaborative studio-cum-showroom project occurring simultaneously in the Spanish exhibition.

In their myriad combinations and collaborations, the Barnstormers have conducted public art projects and participated in exhibitions at venues worldwide, including Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, OH; Museo del Arte de Puerto Rico, San Juan; The Contemporary Museum, Honolulu, HI; Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, Winston-Salem, NC; Society for Arts and Technology, Montreal, Canada; Smack Mellon, Brooklyn, NY; and CWC Gallery, Tokyo, Japan.

Visual Arts Gallery
601 West 26 Street, 15th floor, 212.592.2145

Chelsea

March 19 – April 3, 2010
Opening: Tuesday, March 23, 6 – 8 PM
Web Site

School of Visual Arts (SVA) presents “Mentors,” an exhibition of works by over 80 BFA Photography Department students inspired by their mentorships with key figures in the arts community. Drawn from the ranks of New York City’s best-known photographers, curators, art directors, publishers, art dealers, critics and writers, SVA’s mentors are paired with students based upon their field of expertise and the student’s area of concentration. The 2009-2010 program mentors include picture editor Philip Gefter, critic Vince Aletti and photographers Tina Barney, Ryan McGinley, Platon and Taryn Simon, among others.

Kathryn Markel Fine Arts
529 West 20th Street, 212-366-5368

Chelsea

March 18 – April 17, 2010
Opening: Thursday, March 18, 6 – 8 PM
Web Site

Kathryn Markel Fine Arts is pleased to announce New Paintings, the third solo exhibition of paintings by Alex Couwenberg. Couwenberg draws from the aesthetics of his California experience (hotrods, surf and skate culture, and arcade games) to layer forms into a contemporary conversation with mid-century modernism.

Influenced by his relationship with mentor, Karl Benjamin, Alex Couwenberg builds a stratum of shapes and textures to converse with and reminisce on the not too distant past. The layers in his work reflect this relationship with history, “I wanted to find a middle ground between expressionism and hard-edge abstraction. I was really into laying down grounds of paint, leaving the hard raw edges but exposing the underpainting, revealing the history of the painting.” If the familiar muscular dynamism of Couwenberg’s earlier work appears tamed, today’s work is less removed and more intimate like a story that is more character based than event based, a kind of contemplative soliloquy. With increased painterly complexity, the work is honed and intimate. Loosening the austerity of the hard edge, the striations and loose outlines add risk to the execution and, with more at stake, the work is quiet and heartfelt; think Miles Davis’ move from Bebop. As Couwenberg’s work is still very masculine, this show represents a quiet side.

Born and raised in Southern California, Alex Couwenberg received his BFA from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA and his MFA from Claremont Graduate School in Claremont, CA. He exhibits regularly throughout California, Idaho, Georgia and New York. Couwenberg’s work is in a number of public, corporate and private collections, including the Crocker Art Museum and the Long Beach Museum of Art. Alex Couwenberg currently lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.

Hauser & Wirth
32 East 69th Street, 212-794-4970

Upper East Side

March 16 – April 24, 2010
Opening: Tuesday, March 16, 6 – 8 PM
Web Site

In 1969, one year before her death at the age of 34, German-born American artist Eva Hesse wrote of her desire “to get to non-art, non-connotive, non-anthropomorphic, non-geometric, non-nothing; everything…It’s not the new, it is what is yet not known, thought, seen, touched; but really what is not and that is.” In her effort to make works that could transcend literal associations, Hesse cultivated mistakes and surprise, precariousness and enigma. The objects she produced, at once humble and enormously charismatic, came to play a central role in the transformation of contemporary art practice.

Hauser & Wirth New York is presenting exhibition of such objects: Eva Hesse brings together fourteen works, many never before shown publicly in the United States, that previously have been considered improvisational ‘test pieces’ or prototypes for larger sculptures. Of these, eleven are delicate papier caché forms – wisps of assembled paper, tape, cheesecloth and adhesive made between 1966 and 1969 – that are neither round nor rectangular, but indeterminate. Intimate manifestations of the artist’s thought process, they evoke the bodily, suggesting fragments of skull, sheaths of timeworn parchment, tablets awaiting manuscript, curving shadows, the lens of an eyeball. These objects evade easy definition: They have been seen variously as experiments, little pieces, molds, tests for larger works, or finished works in their own right. In her recent research on Hesse’s work, prominent British art historian Briony Fer has renamed these objects collectively as ‘studioworks,’ proposing that their precarious nature places them at the very heart of Hesse’s influential practice and raises important questions about traditional notions of what constitutes sculpture.

Eva Hesse will present its contents upon a plinth that loosely alludes to how these works may have been encountered in Hesse’s studio, temporarily arranged in groups on the artist’s work table, always subject to change. The objects in this exhibition will be included in the museum survey ‘Eva Hesse: Studioworks’ at Fundació Antoni Tapies in Barcelona (May 14 – August 1, 2010), the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto (September 10, 2010 – January 2, 2011), and the Berkeley Art Museum in California (January 26 – April 24, 2011).

In New York in the 1960s, Hesse was among a group of artists, including Robert Morris, Bruce Nauman, Richard Serra and Robert Smithson, who engaged materials that were originally soft and flexible: aluminum, latex rubber, plastic, lead, polythene, copper, felt, chicken-wire, dirt, sawdust, paper pulp and glue. Often unstable, these elements yielded works forever alive in their relativity and mutability. Hesse was aware she produced objects that were ephemeral, but this problem was of less concern to her than the desire to exploit materials with a temporal dimension. Much of the tumescent, life-affirming power of Hesse’s art derives from this confident embrace of moment. As she stated in an interview with Cindy Nemser in 1970, “Life doesn’t last; art doesn’t last.”

Maccarone
630 Greenwich Street, 212-431-4977

Greenwich Village

March 12 – April 24, 2010
Opening: Friday, March 12, 6 – 8 PM
Web Site

Maccarone
630 Greenwich Street, 212-431-4977

Greenwich Village

March 12 – April 24, 2010
Opening: Friday, March 12, 6 – 8 PM
Web Site

The Guild Art Gallery
45 West 21st Street, #39, second floor, 212-229-2110

Chelsea

March 11 – April 13, 2010
Opening: Thursday, March 11, 6:30 – 8:30 PM
Web Site

The Guild Art Gallery is pleased to present, Domus Vulgus, the New York debut show of Contemporary India artist Apnavi Thacker. Born in Bombay, India and brought up in Geneva, Switzerland, Apnavi Thacker grew up benefiting from two very different cultures. Her experiences in both cities have had a major impact on her work. Apnavi is a self-taught artist, although she gained valuable knowledge and experience during her two years of training under the guidance of Bose Krishnamachari. Her work addresses such issues as the possible link between a woman and her self-confidence and level of comfort with her sexuality, and the impact of urban development on the environment.

Her work retains a focus on street art, common in most cities around the world although it remains non-existent in Bombay. Apnavi has exhibited in Bombay in both solo and group shows. This includes the Mumbai Festival in 2005, for which she was commissioned to do a single piece inspired by her thoughts on the city of Bombay, and the Kala Ghoda festival in 2006 for which she created an installation consisting of urinals. The works represent a continuation of themes based on urban development.

For DOMUS VULGUS, Thacker will literally recreate a shack, similar to the ones seen in slum dwellings of the city of Mumbai, India, as well as paintings. Being a street artist Thacker has developed a keen eye for urban environments and in particular what society would term as urban decay – meaning the vast slum areas that are now synonymous with urban construction and the landscape of Mumbai. Her initial practice as an artist in Switzerland exposed her to street art and graffiti something that is virtually non-existent in India. Thackers work therefore amalgamates the visual aesthetic of street art from one culture and the literal visual and functional aspects of street culture in another, to conjure up strongly individualistic, socio-political statements.

About her work, Thacker says:

Through my work I want to be able to provide an insight on the dichotomy of these two lifestyles and thereby the blatant socio-economic barrier that divides them. An underlying theme which is equally important is the use of space by the two disparate segments of society… My canvas works are often dark but they’re not negative. They are reflections of my thought process and the struggle within me to adapt to the great dichotomy which is Bombay.

The Guild Art Gallery
45 West 21st Street, #39, second floor, 212-229-2110

Chelsea

March 11 – April 13, 2010
Opening: Thursday, March 11, 6:30 – 8:30 PM
Web Site

The Guild Art Gallery is pleased to present, Domus Vulgus, the New York debut show of Contemporary India artist Apnavi Thacker. Born in Bombay, India and brought up in Geneva, Switzerland, Apnavi Thacker grew up benefiting from two very different cultures. Her experiences in both cities have had a major impact on her work. Apnavi is a self-taught artist, although she gained valuable knowledge and experience during her two years of training under the guidance of Bose Krishnamachari. Her work addresses such issues as the possible link between a woman and her self-confidence and level of comfort with her sexuality, and the impact of urban development on the environment.

Her work retains a focus on street art, common in most cities around the world although it remains non-existent in Bombay. Apnavi has exhibited in Bombay in both solo and group shows. This includes the Mumbai Festival in 2005, for which she was commissioned to do a single piece inspired by her thoughts on the city of Bombay, and the Kala Ghoda festival in 2006 for which she created an installation consisting of urinals. The works represent a continuation of themes based on urban development.

For DOMUS VULGUS, Thacker will literally recreate a shack, similar to the ones seen in slum dwellings of the city of Mumbai, India, as well as paintings. Being a street artist Thacker has developed a keen eye for urban environments and in particular what society would term as urban decay – meaning the vast slum areas that are now synonymous with urban construction and the landscape of Mumbai. Her initial practice as an artist in Switzerland exposed her to street art and graffiti something that is virtually non-existent in India. Thackers work therefore amalgamates the visual aesthetic of street art from one culture and the literal visual and functional aspects of street culture in another, to conjure up strongly individualistic, socio-political statements.

About her work, Thacker says:

Through my work I want to be able to provide an insight on the dichotomy of these two lifestyles and thereby the blatant socio-economic barrier that divides them. An underlying theme which is equally important is the use of space by the two disparate segments of society… My canvas works are often dark but they’re not negative. They are reflections of my thought process and the struggle within me to adapt to the great dichotomy which is Bombay.

BronxArtSpace
305 East 140 Street

Bronx

April 3 – April 24, 2010
Opening: Saturday, April 3, 7 – 11 PM
Web Site

CONVERSIONs | one-night stands month-long mini festival in April 2010 showcasing emerging and established artists at BronxArtSpace in the Mott Haven section of the South Bronx. Since 2004, each CONVERSIONs presents a unique curatorial theme; CONVERSIONs | one-night stands focuses on the ephemeral nature that contemporary art is seen and experienced in the South Bronx. Under this larger theme, each evening throughout the month will present works that speaks of impermanence, displaced gratification, and the nature of immediacy.

FESTIVAL SCHEDULE

Saturday, April 3rd, 2010 – 7pm – I’m Caught Up… kick off reception, visual art exhibition and performance event.

Wednesday, April 7th, 2010 – 5pm – First Wednesdays Performance by Charles Beronio.

Saturday, April 10th, 2010 – 7pm – Synthetic Zero Presents… Film & Video works, projects, and experimental visual media.

Saturday, April 17th ,2010 – 7pm – Give Me the Night… Featuring 4 unique works of performance.

Saturday, April 24th, 2010 – 7pm – F*ck Your Art Fair! Let’s Party! Conceptual music performances and closing reception.

BronxArtSpace
305 East 140 Street

Bronx

April 3 – April 24, 2010
Opening: Saturday, April 3, 7 – 11 PM
Web Site

CONVERSIONs | one-night stands month-long mini festival in April 2010 showcasing emerging and established artists at BronxArtSpace in the Mott Haven section of the South Bronx. Since 2004, each CONVERSIONs presents a unique curatorial theme; CONVERSIONs | one-night stands focuses on the ephemeral nature that contemporary art is seen and experienced in the South Bronx. Under this larger theme, each evening throughout the month will present works that speaks of impermanence, displaced gratification, and the nature of immediacy.

FESTIVAL SCHEDULE

Saturday, April 3rd, 2010 – 7pm – I’m Caught Up… kick off reception, visual art exhibition and performance event.

Wednesday, April 7th, 2010 – 5pm – First Wednesdays Performance by Charles Beronio.

Saturday, April 10th, 2010 – 7pm – Synthetic Zero Presents… Film & Video works, projects, and experimental visual media.

Saturday, April 17th ,2010 – 7pm – Give Me the Night… Featuring 4 unique works of performance.

Saturday, April 24th, 2010 – 7pm – F*ck Your Art Fair! Let’s Party! Conceptual music performances and closing reception.