UNTITLED, ART is an international, curated art fair founded in 2012 that focuses on curatorial balance and integrity across all disciplines of contemporary art. UNTITLED, ART innovates the standard fair model by selecting a curatorial team to identify and curate a selection of galleries, artist-run exhibition spaces, and non-profit institutions and organizations, in dialogue with an architecturally designed venue. The next edition of UNTITLED, ART San Francisco will take place January 17 – 19, 2020 at Pier 35, 1454 The Embarcadero.

Jeffrey Lawson is the Founder and owner of Art Fairs Unlimited, LLC, UNTITLED, ART and ELEMENTS Global Trade Show, LLC. Lawson has produced and consulted on large-scale trade shows globally for the past 12 years. In 2010, Lawson founded Elements Showcase. In 2012, he established UNTITLED, ART which launched in December 2012 on the sands of Miami Beach at Ocean Drive and 12th Street, and debuted on the West Coast in San Francisco in January 2017.

In July 2017 UNTITLED, ART appointed Manuela Mozo as Director to lead the international development of UNTITLED, ART and oversee the curatorial and strategic vision of the fairs in Miami and San Francisco. Manuela Mozo was a partner at Simon Lee Gallery from 2013, where she established the gallery’s office in New York. Prior to this, Manuela was a Director at Metro Pictures and Skarstedt Gallery, both in New York. Manuela holds a Masters in Contemporary Art Theory and Cultural Studies from New York University and currently sits on the advisory board of RxArt.

– for more information on additional images from this event please contact EMS at emsartscene@gmail.com or Instagram at @ericminhswenson

Celebrating today’s most significant creatives and leading contributors to the worlds of design and visual arts, the fair assembles 48 leading international galleries; prominent 20th-century and contemporary design dealers; a weekend of exciting programs; and 21POP, a special installation created by Stanlee Gatti.

FOG has become a focal point for the design and arts communities on the West Coast and further afield. The fair is synonymous with a uniquely pioneering spirit due to its bold hybrid approach and intimate presentation of art and design, dynamic programming on-site and its community-led mission to champion art and design in its historic Fort Mason setting. Building on FOG’s longstanding commitment to cultural institutions, the fair’s Preview Gala is honored to continue its crucial support of SFMOMA’s exhibitions and education programs. FOG represents a key moment in which the local and global community congregate to engage in critical dialogue, artistic exchanges, and a shared passion for creative pursuits.

– for more information on additional images from this event please contact EMS at emsartscene@gmail.com or Instagram at @ericminhswenson

Parrasch Heijnen is pleased to present Peter Alexander, a correlative selection of the artist’s recent sculpture and wall relief work in conversation with his sea and landscape paintings dating from 1990 – 2019. Alexander’s attention to the energies and forces of light and color discerned through observations of atmosphere and water are defining concentrations of this artist’s six-decade practice.

The core of Alexander’s work has consistently remained focused upon a devoted engagement with light in structural space, evoking the emotive sublime in an opulent exploration of color. Whether looking through paint or resin, depth emerges from thin layers and suspended pigments. The artist’s textural play loosely defines focus and horizon lines, often confusing the viewer’s physical orientation. This brilliance permeates through the work’s precise turns bending light by way of tinted gradations. Alexander’s forms transmit luminous energy in relation to their adjacent negative space, with illusionistic light bursting forth from beneath.

Informed by his architectural background (the artist began his career working as an illustrator for architect Richard Neutra), Alexander perceives the atmosphere around him as an all-encompassing entity. Encouraging his paint in swift motions to naturally settle, he mirrors the unpredictability of celestial phenomena and seduces the viewer into a hypersensitive state inciting a spectrum of emotive visual perceptions. The artist’s translucent urethane objects envelop the viewer in secluded interiors, consciously engaging with surroundings through various monochromatic hues, echoing a sense of cosmic awareness. Both mediums inform the other, quietly interacting with the senses and capturing the passage of time.

Peter Alexander (b.1939, Los Angeles, CA) has been widely exhibited in galleries and museums worldwide since the mid-1960s. Alexander is the recipient of multiple honors and awards including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1980 and the California Art Award in 2014. In 1999, the Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA mounted a retrospective exhibition In this Light inclusive of painting and sculpture. His work resides in the permanent collections of numerous institutions including: the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA; and The Getty Museum, Malibu, CA.

Peter Alexander will be on view at Parrasch Heijnen Gallery, 1326 S. Boyle Avenue, Los Angeles, from January 7 – February 1, 2020, with an opening reception taking place on Sunday January 5, from 1-3 pm. For more information, please contact the gallery at +1 (323) 943-9373 or info@parraschheijnen.com

– for more information on additional images from this event please contact EMS at emsartscene@gmail.com or Instagram at @ericminhswenson

Legends of Speed is the first major exhibition of racing cars presented at Phoenix Art Museum. Open now through March 15, the landmark exhibition features more than 20 legendary cars by Maserati, Mercedes, Alfa Romeo, Ford, and more, an unprecedented collection of cars driven by some of the greatest drivers in the history of racing, including A.J. Foyt, Dan Gurney, and Stirling Moss.

Featured cars have won many of the world’s most iconic races, including Le Mans, the Indianapolis 500, and the Italian Grand Prix, and were loaned to the Museum by internationally recognized collectors from Arizona and across the United States. Legends of Speed offers an unparalleled opportunity for Museum guests to experience and learn about some of the most successful and famous racecars of all time.

– for more information on additional images from this event please contact EMS at emsartscene@gmail.com or Instagram at @ericminhswenson

A film by Eric Minh Swenson. (Film number one-thousand two-hundred and thirty in the series.) Tendrils, the Solo Exhibition at Riverside Art Museum by Michael Skura represents his newest work in 2019. The installation includes over 1,000 pieces of hand blown glass, over 20 video projectors, metal casting, cast glass, neon plasma, sound, and interactive projection mapping technologies. Skura’s newest exhibit explores materials and technologies with minds of their own and celebrates conventional defects as opportunities for the expression of the essence of the materials. Working primarily with blown glass and video projection, Skura is most interested in “coaching” glass to assert itself through distortions, bubbles, debris, stress marks, and chemical reactions. Lighting phenomena and interactive technology are integral to Skura’s work. In many cases, the light itself becomes the central artwork in its own right. His installations combine moments of “simple magic,” such as headlights reflecting off bent chrome car bumpers, with more sophisticated effects generated using motion sensors, 3D video mapping, and directionally reflective surfaces. Filling more than 2,000 square feet at the Riverside Art Museum in Riverside, California with original work, Skura has partnered with Epson®, Lumo Play and RabCup Corp to create a unique and other worldly experience.

“The Fahey/Klein Gallery is proud to present Volume 3, a solo exhibition of works by renowned photographer Frank Ockenfels. This exhibition is a celebration of Frank Ockenfels 3’s long career and an analysis into his personal collaged journals, featured in his first publication Frank Ockenfels 3, Volume 3.

The works of Frank Ockenfels 3, on view in this exhibition, provide a window into his visual thinking. Subjected to ink, collage, or paint, the images are no longer just photographs of an individual, but become a more personal statement of who the artist is, of his psyche, and as such, creative artistry in its purest form. The erotic, the sublime, and the violent collages are blended with portraiture that seamlessly complement each other. The photographic creations become tactile, bringing another dimension of sensory experience. His photographs are a “re-presentation” of what he saw through the lens.

Frank Ockenfels 3 is propelled by a drive and curiosity to discover an image that is not yet known. Simultaneously, he creates a visual language that speaks from the most primal and dark corners of his mind. He produces waking dreams, images that represent the darkest, least-illuminated aspects of his unconscious – projected on the individual he has photographed. He has the courage to go way beyond the expected and the obvious; breaking the boundaries of traditional photography.

Frank Ockenfels 3 does not play it safe, and as a result, he is very effective at evoking from the viewer aspects of their own psyche of which they may or may not be aware. One cannot help but feel a resonance with the chaotic vibrancy of his creativity. He leaves the imprint of his unconscious on the photographic image.

Frank Ockenfels 3 is an American photographer, artist, and director. He is renowned for his portraiture and incorporating non-photographic elements in his work. Ockenfels applies techniques like collage, painting, and drawing to his photographs. His career began working for magazines such as Rolling Stone, Spin, Vanity Fair, New York Magazine, and Vogue. He photographed over 200 album covers for various musicians.” – per website

– for more information on additional images from this event please contact EMS at emsartscene@gmail.com or Instagram at @ericminhswenson

“Until the Meiji Restoration in 1868, the Japanese language did not have a word for fine art. The word bijutsu was constructed, combining Chinese characters bi, for beauty, and jutsu, for craft. This hybrid term reveals the unique trajectory of Japanese contemporary art, different from the foundations of contemporary art in the West.

Tokyo Pop Underground, curated by Tokyo gallerist Shinji Nanzuka, explores the complex history of Japanese contemporary art from the 1960s to the present through the works of seventeen artists who emerged from pop and underground culture.

Shinji Nanzuka explains that “originally in Japan, most of what is referred to as art are practical items, developed together and in integration with popular culture.” He cites examples from calligraphy to folding screens, paintings on sliding paper doors, lacquerware, netsuke, and the Ukiyo-e prints that served as posters and commercial portraits. He also mentions art historian Naoyuki Kinoshita’s study of intricately realistic handicrafts such as iki-ningyou, life-like dolls that were made for exhibitory performances. Nanzuka’s mission in this exhibition is to present contemporary artistic commentaries on this Japanese artistic heritage.” – per website

– for more information on additional images from this event please contact EMS at emsartscene@gmail.com or Instagram at @ericminhswenson

“Founded in 1931, the Nevada Museum of Art (the Museum) is the only art museum in Nevada accredited by the American Alliance of Museums (AAM).

Co-founded in 1931 by Dr. James Church, an early climate scientist, humanist, and lover of art, the Museum in its early days was run by a small group of outdoor landscape painters. As a result, the Museum has long understood the importance of examining how humans interact with their natural, built, and virtual surroundings. Designed by internationally renowned architect Will Bruder, the present Museum facility opened in 2003 at the heart of Reno’s downtown Liberty district. The four-level, 70,000-square-foot building is inspired by geological formations in northern Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, and serves as a visual metaphor for the institution’s scholarly focus on art and environment.

The institution’s identity continues to be shaped by the geographic location and environment. The Museum’s proximity to the San Francisco Bay Area, the Sierra Nevada, Lake Tahoe, and the surrounding Great Basin desert region places it at the nexus of both awe-inspiring scenery and a rapidly changing landscape. It is an ideal place for dynamic conversations about the ways that humans creatively interact with environments. This idea is reflected in the Museum’s permanent collection, which is divided into four thematic focus areas: the Robert S. and Dorothy J. Keyser Art of the Greater West Collection, the Carol Franc Buck Altered Landscape Photography Collection, the Contemporary Art Collection, and the E. L. Wiegand Work Ethic in American Art Collection.” – per website

– for more information on additional images from this event please contact EMS at emsartscene@gmail.com or Instagram at @ericminhswenson

“Tanya Bonakdar Gallery is pleased to announce its first solo exhibition with multidisciplinary artist Jónsi, on view at the gallery’s Los Angeles space from November 16, 2019 through January 9, 2020.

What is the shape of sound? What does it feel like? Can we smell it? How does it move through your body and what kind of sensations does it trigger? These are the questions that are posed by Jónsi in his first exhibition at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in Los Angeles. Best known for producing distinctive musical sounds ranging from hypnotic ambient incantations to driving sonic waves as a member of the band Sigur Rós, Jónsi has expanded his artistic practice over the past few years in a series of collaborations with visual artists such as Doug Aitken, Olafur Eliasson, Merce Cunningham and most recently the artist and composer Carl Michael von Hausswolf with whom he formed the musical duo Dark Morph. In the wake of these collaborations, Jónsi’s most recent solo aesthetic explorations have resulted in a series of immersive installations that sculpt with sound as they ask us to meditate on the liminal threshold between our bodies and the world around us.

In a series of three new gallery-based works, Jónsi riffs on the invocation of sensory inversion in Goethe’s fifth Roman Elegy in which the Romantic poet makes a connection between the experience of a lover’s body and a classical marble sculpture with the phrase, “see with a feeling eye, feel with a seeing hand.” In Jónsi’s remix, Goethe’s advice to experience the world in a different way is given a sonic update that might read as follows: “hear with a feeling ear, feel with a hearing hand.” Seeing, hearing, feeling – each of these senses collapse upon one another in Jónsi’s work as sound takes a concrete form and the tactile and the auditory merge into a surprising synesthesia. While one might read these works within the lineage of bombastic noise experiments harkening back to those of the Italian Futurists who championed the revolutionary aspects of noise in opposition to formal music, Jónsi’s approach is far more interested in exploring the phenomenological complication and extension of the senses as an antidote to a world in which we are constantly confronted by the agitated white noise of contemporary civilization. In his work there is an overarching attempt to assert the primacy of the auditory, the tactile, and the visual in helping the human organism navigate its way through this unmoored and volatile world.” – per website

– for more information on additional images from this event please contact EMS at emsartscene@gmail.com or Instagram at @ericminhswenson

“Regen Projects is pleased to announce its first solo exhibition by Los Angeles-based artist Alex Hubbard. On view will be a selection of new works comprising multimedia paintings and two handmade projectors streaming animated videos. Hubbard has often experimented with various media to extend the prescribed characteristics of both painting and video.

The moving image has always been an integral thematic of Hubbard’s practice. His early video works often render a series of alternating acts of construction and deconstruction across a flattened plane while proposing a visual allegiance to painting. With these new works comes a series of questions concerning the position of video in a post-YouTube era. The two projectors display referential animations – recycling elements of Hubbard’s past videos while alluding to the history of structuralist films. Each projector’s animations – one a surrealist landscape, the other a hand-drawn layered composition – feature colorful kinetic forms that play out on the gallery walls.

Hubbard’s paintings combine the language of abstraction with nontraditional, industrial materials like resin, fiberglass, pigmented urethane, and auto-body paint. In this series of paintings Hubbard has employed a new UV printing technology. Each composition is achieved through a multi-layered process of paint pours and printing. While still employing abstract compositions, traces of the figurative are present through cut-out prints of machinery and quotidian objects.

Alex Hubbard (b. 1975 Toledo, OR) received a BFA from Pacific Northwest College of Art. In 2003 he attended the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. He lives and works in Los Angeles. 

He has been the subject of recent solo exhibitions including Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham (2014); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2012); The Kitchen, New York (2010); and Midway Contemporary Art, Minneapolis (2009). Hubbard’s works have also been featured in group exhibitions at Weatherspoon Art Museum, University of North Carolina at Greensboro (2016); Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach (2016); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2015); Museo Experimental del Eco, Mexico City (2014); Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson (2012); Le Consortium, Dijon (2014); and the 2010 Whitney Biennial; among others.” – per website

– for more information on additional images from this event please contact EMS at emsartscene@gmail.com or Instagram at @ericminhswenson