VRR

Sylvia Sleigh | No5A | April 2013

katherineastew — Thu, 16 May 2013 18:08:14 +0000

“I wanted to give my perspective, portraying both sexes with dignity and humanism. It was very necessary to do this because women had often been painted as objects of desire in humiliating poses. I don’t mind the ‘desire’ part, it’s the ‘object’ that’s not very nice.” – Sylvia Sleigh

No5A is proud to present the first exhibition of paintings by Sylvia Sleigh in New York since her passing in 2010. Known for her detailed portraits that capture individuals and epochs, Sleigh was one of the most important realist painters working in the post-war era and a key figure in the geographic and ideological downtown scene. Both a Bohemian and a proper lady, Sleigh always managed contradictory aspects well – conservative in her dress, radical in her lifestyle; the wife of a powerful art-world figure and also a deeply ambitious artist in her own life. It is in a way only now in retrospect that we can envision just how groundbreaking and deeply important her work was.

It is fitting that this first posthumous exhibition is taking place in an Upper East Side townhouse dating from 1910 as Sleigh was a steadfastly New York artist despite her roots in Llandudno on the coast of Wales. Sleigh studied at the Brighton School of Art in Sussex before moving to London where she met her second husband Lawrence Alloway, the curator and art critic. In 1961 Sleigh and Alloway emigrated from the United Kingdom to the United States and both became New Yorkers. It is here, in this city of creating and remaking and reimaging that Sleigh settled into a Chelsea townhouse where she lived and painted until her death at the age of 94.

While her husband Alloway is remembered as a highly intelligent champion of Minimal and Abstract art who curated shows at the nearby Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum — Sleigh remained a determined realist painter. Not on-trend, Sleigh was committed to rendering the human form and the personalities of those forms as expressed in their physical self. Her sitters, the models of these sometimes lush narrative paintings, were most often friends from the art world or their family members. In this way her documents are renderings of what the real-life practitioners of Abstraction and their loved ones actually looked like – with and without their clothes.

Sleigh’s paintings span decades of the New York art world, creating physical evidence of those that passed through it in the 1950s and 1960s as well as the 70s, the 80s, and the 90s and on through her final works in 2006. Sleigh would often return multiple times to her favorite muses and vivid outdoor garden scenes finding new details and idiosyncrasies in her subjects through the changing times. Sleigh painted the surface of her subjects’ skin sometimes a dozen times to achieve its quality and texture. When painting her subjects with their clothes on she has left behind some highly significant and historical group portraits. For instance, there stands a work of Lawrence Alloway and art dealer Betty Parsons on the beach. There are also some large group portraits of women artists in New York: “SoHo 20” (1974) ; as well as the members of the women-led A.I.R. gallery (1978). Feminist artist Nancy Spero appears in the latter tableau. But Sleigh’s portraits need not be of recognizable figures in order to be

extraordinary time capsules. Thanks to her obsession with details, we may never forget the “relaxed” hairdos and clothing in the 1970s, or those “clever” patterned bathing suits that American women chose for the beach in the 1950s and 60s. (Also please see the collected stories of John Cheever.) And, thanks to Sleigh, we may never forget the Jacobsen chair. But beyond this surface whereupon details are almost a fetish – her passion or compassion for her sitters runs somewhat deeper. To view her portraits today is to perceive her subjects as she saw their inner quality expressed on the outside and as she fully believed them to be. Quirks and clothing styles notwithstanding – her personal breakthroughs in painting are intense.

Sleigh has been widely credited today as a feminist artist. She was certainly among the first to paint the male nude figure as male painters had long painted female figures, creating the concept in art of “the male gaze.” If Sleigh created or strengthened an alternative concept of “the female gaze,” it was not, however, to co-opt an exploitative point of view where nudity was concerned.

Sleigh’s personal vision as a painter was paramount and she was an equal opportunity painter who saw the beauty in women and men both, and in their surroundings. Some of the more intimate paintings are seen here in their true surroundings: the city of New York.

Lehmann Maupin Gallery | Ashley Bickerton & Nicolas Pol | March 2013

katherineastew — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 14:16:26 +0000

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Ashley Bickerton & Nicolas Pol

21 March – 20 April 2013

201 Chrystie Street, New York

Public Reception: Friday, 22 March 2013, 6-8 PM

New York, TK March 2013 – Lehmann Maupin is pleased to collaborate with Vladimir Restoin Roitfeld on a two-person exhibition pairing long time gallery artist Ashley Bickerton and Nicolas Pol together for the first time. The exhibition presents a dialogue between two distinctive and wildly imaginative artists, born of different generations, who draw upon a similar reactive nature to construct vibrant, fantastical, and often times, otherworldly images of apocalyptic proportion.

Ashley Bickerton’s work from the late 80s and early 90s was fueled by a critical assessment of America’s obsession with consumerism and corporate branding; created in reaction to the sleek packaging, trendy logos, and growing reliance on technology that dominated the cultural landscape at the time. His object-based sculptures, or “Culture-scapes,” from this period were defiant constructions covered in corporate branding and seemingly built to withstand apocalyptic devastation. Bickerton’s move to Bali in 1997 paralleled a dramatic visual shift to figurative painting and sculpture. As an expat, he found the “idyllic” paradise to be “riddled with corruption, greed, snarling Third-World traffic and a booming 21^st century economy.” Scenes of modern-day hedonism, carried out by fictional characters of a surreal and hallucinatory nature, portray a world lacking in morality, one that has moved beyond redemption. Five works by Bickerton, spanning a twenty-year period, will be included in the exhibition, including four paintings and an early sculpture from 1992 entitled Seascape: Floating Costume to Drift for Eternity III (Elvis Suit).

A similar sense of absurdity and dark humor plays into Nicolas Pol’s paintings of obscure visions where sin and forbidden fantasies run wild. Six new canvases reveal a vast array of historical references, ranging from medieval times to modern scientific advancements; and artistic styles, dating from the Renaissance to present day. Like Bickerton, Pol constructs allegorical fictions rife with sexual innuendo, disillusionment and malevolence. His central characters are often skeletal depictions of the fallen man struggling for salvation. In Grey Martus, a group of overly stimulated island inhabitants attempt to exorcize themselves from surrounding evil. Pol also returns to his fictional world Neverlodge, half brothel, half adult amusement park, in the painting Fat Man and Little Boy on NL Map, where scenes from a nuclear disaster are juxtaposed against a map of this artist’s sinister play land.

Ashley Bickerton (b. 1959, Barbados, West Indies) graduated from the California Institute of the Arts in 1982 and continued his education in the Independent Studies Program at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Over the last twenty-five years, Bickerton’s work has been exhibited extensively in nearly every major museum around the world. Recent exhibitions include The Living Years: Art after 1989, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2012); This Will Have Been: Art, Love & Politics in the 1980s, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2012); and Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970-1990, Victoria and Albert Museum, London (2011), among others. Bickerton’s work was featured in the 9^th Biennale of Sydney, Australia (1992) and the 1989 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Bickerton’s work is part of numerous public collections worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Japan; and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, among others. He will be the subject of his fourth solo exhibition at Lehmann Maupin in September. Bickerton lives and works in Bali, Indonesia.

Nicolas Pol (b. 1977, Paris, France) spent much of his childhood in Africa before relocating to France, where he earned a degree at the prestigious École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts at La Sorbonne. Following two successful solo shows at Alsopp Contemporary in London, Vladimir Restoin Roitfeld presented Pol’s work in three large-scale international exhibitions – The Martus Maw, New York (2009); The Mother of Pouacrus, London in (2010); and Sick Atavus of the New Blood, New York (2011). Pol has participated in numerous group exhibitions organized by prestigious institutions such as J-en Rêve, Fondation Cartier, Paris; Plus Que Vrai, École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris; Salle des Quais, Paris; and the Loic le Gaillard, London. Pol lives and works in Paris, France.

For further information, please visit www.lehmannmaupin.com. For gallery news and exclusive updates become a Facebook Fan of Lehmann Maupin.

The New York Times

katherineastew — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 21:58:46 +0000

ART IN REVIEW

Lucy Dodd: ‘The Studio Before 54’

Lucy Dodd and David Lewis Gallery, New York

“And the cracks spoke of the ‘waters of chaos,’” a work from 2012 that measures 12 feet by 12 feet, by Lucy Dodd.

By ROBERTA SMITH Published: February 28, 2013

No5A

5A East 78th Street, Manhattan

Through March 9

The solo debut of Lucy Dodd, a recent graduate of Bard College, features three enormous paintings as wry as they are beautiful and spatially startling. Leaning against the walls of a demure Upper East Side parlor, the show — organized by the fledging (and as yet spaceless) David Lewis Gallery — inaugurates No5A, the new project space of the dealer Vladimir Restoin Roitfeld and the collector and adviser Eleanor Cayre. The paintings seem to have heaved up from a horizontal position, partly because the surfaces of two of them bear the impressions of an old, wide-plank wood floor, creating a sense of flatness and order strikingly at odds with random marks — stains, footprints, delicate splatters — and the more infinite space they create. Made largely by rubbing dry materials on canvas, they are 12 feet square, and as much drawings as paintings.

The most actively worked — rubbed with rust and black — is “And the cracks spoke of the ‘waters of chaos,’ ” whose materials include graphite, hematite, iron glimmer and the urine of a dog named Bub. Relatively minimal is “the humble deep extreme,” which relies more completely on the wood imprint, except for a galaxy of small black dots, carefully painted rather than splattered. The materials listed on the checklist are more process-oriented and poetic than informative, and also distinctly female. A partial list: “the souls of the shoes of Nanette Lepore, Margiela, Clergerie, a half calf cowboy boot, a no name mule, a foot with foss mud.”

The third work, “Après la Rainbow Bain” (10 feet square) was made on another surface (possibly concrete) and lacks the built-in horizontal banding provided by the wood flooring. It is freer, if not a little too scanty, and its various smudges and smears conjure clouds, a tossing sea and even a bit of rain, consistent with the weather-related title. The paintings are physically eccentric and intimate domesticity: the stretcher bars are covered with canvas, but the edges of the paintings themselves are exposed; they evoke textiles, especially quilts and rugs.

Male artists don’t own the XL artwork format, but they make a majority of the large-scale efforts. So it is inspiring to see a woman handle the format so successfully. The outsize paintings of Julian Schnabel, Anselm Kiefer and Rudolf Stingel are invoked here, which may be Ms. Dodd’s intention. Against theirs, her efforts abjure traditional bravura and hold their own.

Click here for link to original article.

Spring 2013

katherineastew — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 21:12:00 +0000

- March 7-10

Nicolas Pol

The Armory Show, Piers 92 & 94

- March 21-April 20

Ashley Bickerton and Nicolas Pol

at Lehmann Maupin Gallery, 201 Chrystie Street

Check back for more information coming soon.… More

BLOOMBERG

katherineastew — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 21:38:57 +0000

Faded Hotels, Swizzle Sticks, Gilbert & George: Hot Art

In Enoc Perez’s large-scale paintings, images of grand hotels seem to disintegrate amid accumulating paint.

In “The Good Days,” his second solo show at Acquavella Galleries, the New York-based artist revisits modern architecture of his native San Juan, Puerto Rico.

Perez is known for giving landmark buildings the iconic treatment Andy Warhol reserved for celebrities. He started about a decade ago, with buildings whose history and names — Normandie, El Miramar, La Concha — alluded to his country’s colonial past.

Back then, seductively textured images were crisp and easily identifiable. The new paintings are a lot more abstract. Densely layered oil paint obliterates the buildings’ solid structure, leaving behind only ghostly silhouettes. Perez’s former tropical palette has given way to pastels.

The show also introduces Perez’s first sculptures, inspired by his collection of swizzle sticks, many from the hotels he paints. The tiny trivia are cast on a much larger scale — one piece is more than 6 feet tall.

The lanky, knobby formations — some bronze, others plaster — also look abstract and figurative at once, alluding to

V MAGAZINE

katherineastew — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 14:44:02 +0000

SUBTEXT ART: MERCI MERCY

TEXT NATASHA STAGG

Text Art, the movement, feels very much behind us, and yet, it can’t possibly be. Text in art is as widespread as ever, and text-focused art more so than when it was at its popularity-peak. The “new aesthetic,” “internet art,” or whatever the kids are calling it these days relies on text as much as it relies on code, and it focuses on communication—on a call and response, or on a shout into a void.

When I first heard about Vladimir Restoin-Roitfeld’s “Merci Mercy” (showing on the third floor of 980 Madison in New York), I imagined a retrospective. Tracey Emin, Jack Pierson, Ed Ruscha, Jenny Holzer and other heavy hitters of the Text Art movement were listed, alongside artists not so known for their textual orientations: Louise Bourgeois, Nan Goldin, Sophie Calle, Tom Sachs, and Pier Paolo Calzolari, to name a few. But younger artists appeared on the list, too: Rashid Johnson, Peter Davies, Dash Snow, and Aaron Young. What could they all possibly have in common? A great deal, actually.

What’s surprising about the exhibition is its cohesion. In the entrance a quote is ironed onto a wall, falsely credited to Walter Benjamin—a piece by Scott King. A bright Mel Bochner hangs on a far wall, a crowded Peter Davies to my left, and an equally crowded Tom Sachs diptych to my right. One of Christopher Knowles’s type-written pictograms is hung near a Nikolas Gambaroff pop art collage, and Jack Pierson’s Abstract sits in the middle of the room. Walking through feels like reading a very clever comic strip. Vladimir Restoin-Roitfeld is amused, too. Each piece has a great story: the piece by autistic Knowles is his mind’s version of an image, which must be represented in neat rows of symbols; the Michael Krebber, a large white painting divided into three “pages” is a replicated blog entry; the Ben Schumacher, located at floor level, is a 3-D print of a Japanese restaurant lunch. “This room is very much about repetition,” says Restoin-Roitfeld, which is clear by the way each piece feels circular in its content. Peter Davies recorded phrases he found from the media used to describe those up-and-coming artists we’ve forgotten about in Whatever Happened To. The Sachs describes a day in the life, sparing no small detail. These works are casually loaded, like the endless chats we experience daily online. Like looping emails, the content is always flowing, but getting to the meat may take some focus.

This is why the show is “not a retrospective at all,” says Restoin-Roitfeld, close friend to V and co-curator with Christine Messineo. It is about text being used in the world today, not the Text Art movement, which is intentionally represented as a sort of blank spot in the collection. “I wanted artists known for their text art to show art with not so much text, and artists not known for using text in their art to show some that included text.” The Lucien Smith, for example, in the adjoining room, may be the only one of its kind, made up of whitewashed newspapers in a rare form of literary representation. The Goldin displays text in that it is a photograph of a gravestone; the Sophie Calle, which “may be the most text-oriented of them all,” is made up of several tarot-readers’ offerings after Calle’s ex-boyfriend’s breakup letter was handed over. Two of Jenny Holzer’s three contributions, “probably the strongest pieces in the collection,” are as serene as most of her work is hyper. Two U.S. Government documents, mostly blacked out due to their top-secret information, have been blown up and painted white. An Aaron Young piece is covered in graffiti; Rashid Johnson’s is spray-painted with the word, “Run;” one of Dash Snow’s is a ransom note-like collage, the other a letter. One of Ed Ruscha’s trademark text pieces is found here in 2010’sCollision Frame Repair, juxtaposed beside a 2003 painting of a blank-paged book, open over the words “DAMN MAD.”

That’s the other surprising part of this collection: most of the works are fairly new. Even Tracey Emin’s tried-and-true neon text, which spells out “And I Said I Love You!” is from 2011, and a similar piece by Dominique-Gonzalez-Foerster, which spells out “Exotourisme,” was made only last year. It seems Text Art is alive and well, only it isn’t called that anymore. Text is so much more a fabric of our being than ever, it is simply a given that all artists would eventually incorporate it, or reject it, which means the rejecting of text in art is now a necessary action. The exhibition’s titular piece, Merci Mercy, by Louise Bourgeois, feels stark near all of the work that precedes it in the space. Although Bourgeois was not known for her text, she was inarguably a communicator, and the simple message here is at once warmly anticipated, and, near a similarly blunt Holzer (a white footstool that reads “The Future is Stupid”), cold. Words, used sparingly, can make as morbid a statement as an elegy, when cushioned with the everyday runoff we’re now so accustomed to: The show, although lighthearted for the most part—having fun with words—is as much about absence as it is about text’s presence. The collection can be viewed online here, and will be on view in New York until Febrary 17th.

Click here for link to original article.

Lucy Dodd | “The Studio Before 54″ | January 2013

katherineastew — Mon, 04 Feb 2013 20:55:17 +0000

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Lucy Dodd

“The Studio Before 54”

1•27•13

Under these conditions, it is surely useful to try to define how animate or inanimate nature can give the impression of escaping its own norms, and even of mocking them outright. Rarity and strangeness here play a crucial role. For example, simply considering the world of vertebrates, alongside the animals that are the stuﬀ of legend (sphinxes, chimeras, centaurs, mermaids, griﬀons, etc), there exist animals, such as the unicorn, that natural science catalogued and described for a long time. Conversely, certain animals catalogued only quite recently actually do exist. Their morphology is so bizarre that an observer would readily judge them more thoroughly unreal and inadmissible than the legendary hybrids. Of course, to name them “fantastic” is a misuse of language, but a significant one. In any event, being subject myself – perhaps unwittingly – to the diffuse pressure exerted by language, I was induced to launch the idea ) surprising, to say the least, especially to me) of the natural fantastic. I first used the term in connection with an insect from northeast Brasil, the lantern fly, and a North American mammal, the star- nosed mole or Condylura. These two animals’ appearances made me resort to a category whose specious nature I could easily perceive. Quite obviously, these creatures were not fantastic because they were a part of nature. Just as obviously, they seemed fantastic, and even gave quite an exceptional sense of the fantastic: the tree-dwelling homopteron, on account of its frontal protuberance, which is almost as big as its body and deceptively suggests a crocodile’s muzzle; and the subterranean vertebrate, on account of its snout, which sports a crown of twenty-two short tentacles of live pink flesh, all mobile, sensitive, and retractable, flaccid or tensed at will, and very vaguely like an intricate starfish or some horrible corolla. – Roger Caillois Au coeur de fantastique (1965)

980 Madison | Merci Mercy | January 2013

katherineastew — Mon, 04 Feb 2013 19:29:08 +0000

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

VLADIMIR RESTOIN ROITFELD PRESENTS

MERCI MERCY

JANUARY 24 – FEBRUARY 17, 2013

Curated by Vladimir Restoin Roitfeld & Christine Messineo

NEW YORK CITY – Vladimir Restoin Roitfeld presents Merci Mercy, opening January 24, 2013 at 980 Madison Avenue in New York City. Curated by Vladimir Restoin Roitfeld and Christine Messineo, the group exhibition examines the many ways that language and text imbue narrative and meaning in contemporary art. A central focus of the exhibition, Louise Bourgeouis’ eponymous wall panel Merci Mercy is a plain and simple plaque inscribed with the title. It encourages viewers to examine the varied and evocative meanings that the two words convey.

The act of manipulation is an undercurrent that is consistent throughout the exhibition. Jack Pierson’s sculpture, Abstract 10, repurposes rusted fragments of advertising signs to utilize words in a different way. He removes the intended meanings from the fragments and uses their new cursive collisions to demand a new reading. Paintings by Jenny Holzer reprint text from released and redacted government documents relating to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Holzer culled simple, yet highly charged words from the painted, smeared, off-whites of erasure. The emptied page conveys both anger and mourning.

The kinetic nature of written language permeates the exhibition. TheEnd, by Dirk Bell, is decipherable yet jumbled, seemingly cinematic in its misleading order, while Aaron Young’s sculpture conveys its virility and power not with words, but with the style of the writing. His police barricades are spray-painted with graffiti tags and pushed askew, evoking a sinister narrative.

The mechanization of writing to manifest images is another reoccurring theme. Christopher Knowles’ tool is the typewriter but constrained and often limited to the C key. Sheets of paper are pushed through the machine and his unique mathematical language. Knowles develops a way of communicating that extends beyond text to create geometric and pictorial meaning. Through a methodology dictated by the artist, Philippe Parreno derives drawings from fragments of Marilyn Monroe’s journal. The artist imposes an algorithm in place of his hand and uses a robot to reproduce an iteration of the text multiple times. Within this serial repetition, a ghostly trace of the original remains that reflects on loss and the original.

While each of the artists included in Merci Mercy uses different approaches, their universal medium of text reveals the strength and vitality of language.

Exhibited Artists

Darren Almond, Dirk Bell, Mark Bradford, Mel Bochner, Louise Bourgeois, Sophie Calle, Pier Paolo Calzolari, Peter Davies, Sam Durant, Tracey Emin, Nikolas Gambaroff, Gilbert & George, Robert Gober, Nan Goldin, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Jenny Holzer, Rashid Johnson, Scott King, Christopher Knowles, Michael Krebber, Sean Landers, Jason Loebs, Charles Mayton, Harland Miller, Philippe Parreno, Jack Pierson, Ry Rocklen, Ed Ruscha, Tom Sachs, Ben Schumacher, Gary Simmons, Lucien Smith, Dash Snow, Kon Trubkovich and Aaron Young

About Vladimir Restin Roitfeld

Vladimir Restoin Roitfeld has collaborated with emerging and established artists to produce exhibitions, providing them with an artistically significant and commercially viable platform to promote their artwork in venues around the world. Since 2008, Roitfeld has worked with a diverse array of artists including Ouattara Wats, Nicolas Pol, Richard Hambleton. In 2011, he curated Hue & Cry at Sotheby’s S2 Gallery.

About Christine Messineo

Christine Messineo is the Director of Bortolami Gallery in New York and organizes exhibitions and projects internationally. She is a regular contributor to Dossier Magazine and is on the Executive Committee of the Whitney Museum of American Art and serves on the committees of multiple other cultural institutions and arts related nonprofits.

Media Inquires:

Adam Abdalla, Nadine Johnson & Associates

adam@nadinejohnson.com | (212) 228-5555

GARAGE MAGAZINE

katherineastew — Fri, 01 Feb 2013 18:06:11 +0000

MERCI MERCY

At the reception for Vladimir Restoin Roitfeld’s Merci Mercy, held on a cloud of champagne at 980 Madison Ave., an Italian financier offered to buy me any work I wanted. I didn’t answer. I asked which he’d choose. Was the Wall Streeter being ironic when he chose Mel Bochner’s bright, tautological ode to foreclosure?

One can hope. Optimism was certainly in the air Thursday evening in Adam Lindemann’s art-is-business temple. Co-curated with Christine Messineo, the text-based, text-themed exhibit drew the usual collecting suspects. Roitfeld has claimed strong sales in shows, and with the names he pulls—Ed Ruscha, Nan Goldin and Tom Sachs, to name a few—it’s easy to see why.

That’s not to say the show is crassly commercial. For every Bochner, there are quiet and intimate portraits like Sophie Calle’s contribution from Take Care of Yourself or conceptual quandaries like Seaweed Salad (lobster place) by Ben Schumacher. As such, this very post-Saussurian curatorial platform highlights the diversity and malleability of text in art.

“I wanted it to be unexpected,” the 28-year old Parisian told me the next day, sitting cross-legged on the gallery floor. “There are a lot of text artists that I like and we all know but that are not in this show- like Lawrence Weiner and Barbara Kruger. I wanted to co-curate the show with Christine and so I brought the concept to her. Agreeing it was broad, I said let’s write down 25 artists who use text and who we liked, and not one overlapped. We realized we didn’t need to have necessarily text-artists.”

The result is a tribute to Saussure’s signs and signifiers, or rather text and meaning.

Collages by Dash Snow, which provide a (literal) fluid extension into the abject, are shown alongside Aaron Young’s ready-made aided sculpture, which conveys a different sort of virility and power. Noticeably, many well-known word enthusiasts, like John Baldessari and Glenn Ligon, were absent. Instead Vladimir and Christine selected artists who use text, but are not necessarily text-based artists. Follow? As Vladimir explained, text was an ideal foundation for the show in that it allowed him to work with a range of artists.

The titans dressing the pristine, and recently finished-walls are largely both critic and investor-approved, but Vladimir often includes the new guard among the ranks of the old. The show thereby becomes a survey of both medium and money. He emphasized, “I have no rules. I do not want to be working with only established artists. I think you need awareness and that awareness can only be seen if you are bringing something new to the table, it’s not about the money but doing something that has a stronger intellectual process.”

That the show straddles the meaningful and monetary is testament to rising dealer and curator Vladimir Restoin Roitfeld’s foothold in the contemporary art landscape.

When Vladimir invited me to perch on the floor for our chat (the closest thing resembling a chair in this swanky cavern was a white marble, tomb-like foot stool by Jenny Holzer), he acknowledged and valued that where he came from can direct where we’re going. During an early stint in Los Angeles to study film and business, he felt a lack of creativity left him “miserable in LA.”

“I was 22 at the time and I had grown up in an environment that was very artistic, maybe more fashion-oriented than art,” he explains. “Still, very creative and naturally, I had a strong interest in art.”

Partnering with a young Italian painter in NYC, Vladimir organized his first exhibit that he since describes as a revelation. Savvily, for the following, he approached several fashion brands securing sponsorship from Louis Vuitton and Armani. After a range of international shows, he was given the opportunity to sink his teeth in Sotheby’s. And while business-as-usual is important, Vladimir is emphatic in exercising his curatorial muscles.

In asking what, and where, his next step will be, Vladimir responded: “I never want to be in the same space all the time. I thought it was fun to find something new—and maybe this is my cinema background—these exhibits are like a production, like a new film that comes out.

“My only policy is no policy.“

Merci Mercy runs until February 17^th, 2013 on the 3^rdfloor of 980 Madison Ave.

Photo credit: Thomas Mueller

Words by Danielle Forest

Click here for link to original article.

whitewall

katherineastew — Fri, 01 Feb 2013 14:56:33 +0000

Ouattara Watts’ New Paintings

Ouattara Watts is a futurist who foresaw “globalization” long before the word became trendy in pop culture. In fact, combining prophetic imagery with unusual cross-cultural symbology is necessary to Watts’ career, given his background. Born in Côte d’Ivoire, Watts moved to Paris to attend L’École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, then relocated to New York in 1989. Living in three continents and travelling across the globe, the bilingual artist continually pays homage to his Ivoirian ancestry as well as his Parisian and New Yorker influences.

From early on in his career (which spans nearly four decades), Watts has taken an interdisciplinary approach to his work, referencing many cultures, adding elements of lyrical composition (he’s a jazz enthusiast) and even topography, applying drawings and collage to canvas. Watts’ work is tricky to decipher—he pushes the boundaries, and then some. Compared to his contemporaries who often dilute everything down to décor, Watts invigorates painting with an aesthetic that’s difficult to pigeonhole. Known by many as a neo-expressionist artist in the likes of Basquiat (who he was close friends with), Watts’ large-scale canvasses seem to transcend time. He also delves into mysticism. As Ouattara explains, “My work is connected to mathematics and alchemy, not religion. I am interested in spirituality-all my work is spiritually inhabited.”

Ouattara’s latest solo show is no exception. Titled “Project Room,” his newest series is a three-piece site-specific exhibition held at The French Institute Alliance Française (FIAF). “Project Room” is, in part, a collaboration between Ouattara and FIAF’s Director of Visual Arts, Antoine Guerrero (formerly at MoMA PS1). Guerrero appointed Watts to create a series that represents the multifariousness of Francophone culture. And the subdued palette is a departure from Watts’ usual swathes of neon. Here, hints of color are delicately applied to a mainly earthy-toned backdrop. And spatial parameters were taken into consideration, drawing viewers into the gallery without overwhelming them. Watts explains, “I don’t want people to panic with three big paintings in the same small room.” Though more subtle, the symbolism and mystique remain palpable. “I want to give people the chance to interpret, but I don’t want to give them all the keys. It’s time for artists to help people think more deeply about the future.”

Ouattara Watts (b. 1957) was born in Abidjan, Ivory Coast. Watts has exhibited at MoMA PS1, the Whitney Biennale, and the New Museum in New York. He has also held solo exhibitions at various institutions and galleries including: Hess Art Collection, Paarl, South Africa; Magazzino d’arte Moderna, Rome, Italy; Galeria Leyendeker, Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Canay Island, Spain; Mike Weiss Gallery, New York, NY; The Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH; Marella Arte Contemporanea, Milan, Italy; Leo Koenig, New York, NY; Baldwin Gallery, Aspen, CO; The Kemper Museum, Kansas City, MO; Gagosian Gallery, New York, NY; and, Galerie Boulakia, Paris, France.

Click here for link to original article.