For over 25 years, Huma Bhabha (b. 1962, Karachi, Pakistan) has been making objects, drawings, and other works that depict the strangeness and vulnerability of the contemporary figure. Her hybridized forms, which borrow from ancient and modern cultural sources alike, exude pathos and humor, going straight to the heart of the most pressing issues of our time. Posing questions about the alien qualities of unfamiliar beings, and the criteria by which lifeforms are considered monsters, Bhabha locates the point where science fiction, horror, modernist form, and archaic expression intersect. The timelessness of her objects is enhanced by her technical mastery and her creative approach to her materials, by which she draws attention to the similarities and differences between natural and manmade substances. In monumental outdoor projects for public spaces, meanwhile, she uses bronze to stage large-scale mediations on nature, war, and civilization’s ancient past and distant future.

Huma Bhabha (b. 1962, Karachi, Pakistan) has been the subject of solo exhibitions at institutions that include the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2019); The Contemporary Austin, Texas (2018); the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, where We Come In Peace, an installation of large-scale sculptures, was a Roof Garden Commission (2018); David Roberts Art Foundation (2017); MoMA PS1, Long Island City, New York (2012); Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia, Italy (2012); and Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, Colorado (2011). Among the many group exhibitions in which she has participated are the Yorkshire Sculpture International (2019); Carnegie International, 57th Edition, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh (2018); and All the World’s Futures, 56th Venice Biennale (2015). Bhabha’s work is in the permanent collections of the Centre George Pompidou, Paris; Hammer Museum Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among other institutions. She lives and works in Poughkeepsie, New York.

– for more information on additional images from this event please contact EMS at [email protected] or Instagram at @ericminhswenson

“David Kordansky Gallery is pleased to announce GO HANG A SALAMI IM A LASAGNA HOG, an exhibition of new work by Calvin Marcus. The exhibition will be on view November 1, 2019 through January 11, 2020. An opening reception will be held on Friday, November 1 from 6:00 pm until 8:00 pm. 

GO HANG A SALAMI IM A LASAGNA HOG is Marcus’s second exhibition at the gallery and his most extensive and immersive in any venue to date. The gallery has become a “rabbit hole”: four bodies of work—including paintings, sculpture, and photography—unfold across its three exhibition spaces, with only one way in and one way out.

Unexpected shifts in scale, and the uncanniness these shifts engender, are a feature throughout Marcus’s practice and a pronounced theme for the show. This idea is initially raised in the first gallery, where a group of new paintings evoke watercolor pictures at a heroic scale. Whether a filmic depiction of a greyhound chasing a rabbit or a cartoonish rendering of a mortal forearm contorting to shake hands with the divine, these objects balance, with heady precariousness, the washy immediacy and insouciance of a hobbyist’s sketches with the incisive line, poised composition, and physical and psychological gravity of serious painting.

The series, which debuted at the 2019 Whitney Biennial, marks an important development from Marcus’s prior serial production. Each painting attempts to achieve complete autonomy within its edges and is a vignetted universe unto itself. Capturing dream-like visions and snapshots of the absurdity of contemporary life, the paintings depict diverse subjects: animals, humanoid figures, and interior and landscape-like spaces. These singular representations share a sensibility, at once idiosyncratic and disarming, that immediately draws the viewer into the mysteries of the quotidian world. While the pictures retain an inherent openness and recognizability and can often be described succinctly in a few phrases, the paintings belie a prickly, even anxious subjectivity, denying the simple readings they seem to proffer. They also refuse to settle into any one genre, typology, or even medium; amongst one another, the works’ painterliness is a function of formal qualities shared with drawing, sculpture, and installation-based practices. Each, therefore, poses—with Marcus’s humorous brand of surrealism—as many questions as answers.

A second gallery funnels inquiry into two objects, a sculpture lit from within and a color photograph, the only elements in an otherwise darkened space. Each inverts the expectations of the prior room, recalibrating perception again. The sculpture is a small-scale replica of the exterior of an East Los Angeles storefront. Existing somewhere between a memorial and a facsimile, the object expresses a remarkable degree of fidelity, maintaining a working ventilation fan and lights, and retaining a sense of life on its own. The photograph seemingly portrays similarly mundane stuff: a meal of asparagus on a plate. This image, reminiscent of Surrealist photography, flips conventions of representation as it deceives the viewer using only analog means.

The effects of exaggeration reach a crescendo in the final room, a terminus where four monumental paintings encircle the viewer. Each titled Stretch Sturgeon, the four pictures follow the same format: a five-by-twenty-two-foot canvas has been painted in watercolor washes of yellow and green to depict an impossibly extended fish. Recalling both naturalists’ field guide illustrations and the folk-art tradition of fishermen recording their haul, each painting also functions as surrogate human portraiture, as a trophy representing the angler who made this proverbial catch of a lifetime. Anomalous if not absurd, Marcus’s sturgeon stretch belief; indeed, they suggest tall tales by literal elongation. The length of each painting matches that of a novelty stretch limousine, and they follow a similar creation logic. The front and back (or head and tail) of a car bookend multiple middles of the same model, all welded together with custom touches to confirm seamless continuity. The resulting form is still at human scale, but beyond reason. Repeated four times, this expansion inches toward abstraction and the sublime.

As in much of his production, in GO HANG A SALAMI IM A LASAGNA HOG Marcus translates the vagaries of an interior, personal world into images and objects notable for their clarity and directness. By amplifying the peculiarities of his own vision and processes, he channels the contradictions of contemporary life. Through this, Marcus demonstrates how familiar and unfamiliar, large and small, and heroic and ordinary are no longer oppositional categories, but unified experiences in the collective awareness.

Calvin Marcus (b. 1988, San Francisco; lives and works in Los Angeles) has been the subject of solo exhibitions at The Power Station, Dallas (2017); Peep-Hole, Milan (2015); and Public Fiction, Los Angeles (2014). Recent group exhibitions include Whitney Biennial 2019, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Trick Brain, Aïshti Foundation, Beirut, Lebanon (2017); Inaugural exhibition, Syz Collection, Banque Syz, Geneva (2017); and High Anxiety: New Acquisitions, Rubell Family Collection, Miami (2016). His work is in the permanent collections of the Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo; Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.” – per website

– for more information on additional images from this event please contact EMS at [email protected] or Instagram at @ericminhswenson

“In recent years Ruby Neri has become increasingly recognized for her ceramic sculptures featuring figurative female forms. Almost always based on the centralizing idea of the vessel, these works are notable for the physicality of their construction and the intensity of their glazes, which are often applied using an airbrush. This exhibition will feature a group of some of the largest and most complex objects of this kind that Neri has made to date. 

Neri arrived at what has become a signature typology by synthesizing an idiosyncratic group of influences, including the Bay Area Figurative Movement, street art, ancient fertility figures, and more recent currents in ceramic-based contemporary art. The work is defined by its psychologically and sexually charged content and its bawdy feminism, with women engaged in what appear to be ritualistic power dynamics. Several of the new sculptures are composed of numerous figures that differ greatly in size. Smaller women are held, supported by, and wrapped around bigger ones, suggesting relationships in which one dominates the others. The ambiguity and playfulness of these tableaux add a layer of narrative richness to the works, especially because they are highly three-dimensional objects in which visual and sculptural information flows across every surface, front and back, under and over, inside and out.

This narrative quality draws attention to the qualities of the figures themselves, which all share certain basic characteristics. Blonde, with dramatically full lips, voluptuous bodies, and revealed genitalia, they can also be considered variations on a single character whose most prominent feature might in fact be her disarmingly frank facial expression. Enraptured, knowing, bemused, the gaze she returns to the viewer suggests that the complexity of her relationships–with her own interiority, the other versions of herself that surround her, the viewer, the materials from which she has been crafted, and the artist who made her–comes as no surprise.”

– for more information on additional images from this event please contact EMS at [email protected] or Instagram at @ericminhswenson

David Kordansky Gallery is pleased to announce The Eighties, an exhibition of work from the 1980s by Chris Martin. Featuring both paintings and works on paper, and including many works that have never before been exhibited, the show provides a window into a seminal period in the Brooklyn-based artist’s 40-year career. It opens on March 16 and will remain on view through April 27, 2019. An opening reception will be held on Saturday, March 16 from 6:00pm until 8:00pm.

The Eighties charts Chris Martin’s transformation from a painter of slow, heavily worked canvases into a radical figure willing to invite the widest possible range of materials and experiences into the studio. If he entered this period as a strictly abstract painter, he emerged as one who employed abstraction as methodology rather than an end result, and who became increasingly interested in infusing his work with archetypal symbols, found materials, and other vivid remnants of lived experience. Some works are truly composite objects: large-scale paintings constructed from multiple canvases, with their geometric formalism slipping into recognizable imagery.

(from website) David Kordansky Gallery is pleased to announce Chromospheres, its first exhibition by Fred Eversley. The show of new sculptures will open on January 12 and remain on view through March 2, 2019. An opening reception will take place on Saturday, January 12 from 6:00pm until 8:00pm.

Based in Venice Beach for five decades, Fred Eversley is a key figure in the development of contemporary art from Los Angeles during the postwar period. His work is the product of a pioneering vision attuned to enduring principles of energy, motion, space, gravity, time, light, and color, and synthesizes elements from several 20th-century art historical lineages with roots in Southern California–most notably the Light and Space movement, with which he has long been associated. Chromospheres will feature the latest examples of Eversley’s iconic Parabolic Lens sculptures, an ongoing typology that is the result of continuous experimentation over the course of five decades. Made using clear resin and commercial dyes, these objects generate complex and highly luminous optical events for their viewers, encapsulating the mechanics of sight and the action of physical and metaphysical energies.

After formative experiences as an aerospace engineer, Eversley began in the late 1960s to produce multicolor, multilayer cast polyester sculptures informed by his knowledge of technology, scientific principles, the properties of various materials and his ability to develop his own specialized tools to manipulate them. Spinning liquid resin and dyes in molds affixed to turntables fashioned from lathes, potter’s wheels, and repurposed industrial machinery, he produced sculptures that in turn initiated a focused yet open-ended body of work that continues to the present day.

By adjusting the saturation of his dyes or pigments, the thickness of each layer of poured resin, the amount of catalyst responsible for eventually hardening it, and the speed at which he spins the mold, Eversley creates the Parabolic Lenses, disc-like objects that contain a wide variety of chromatic effects and varying degrees of transparency. These features only fully emerge after each sculpture undergoes a long polishing process whose technical and physical demands far exceed those of the casting itself.

All works of this type are defined by the parabolic curvature, on one side, of a concave surface, which reflects the spaces in which they are installed and creates ever-changing spatial illusions. (Eversley has often remarked that the parabola is the only shape that focuses all forms of energy toward a single point.) As light interacts with the sculpture, the sharp surface edge refracts it like a prism, each of the curved layers of color comes into focus, and viewers are given a new, constantly shifting experience of discovery that depends on their angle of approach. The world around them is transformed within: flipped upside down, its proportions distorted, and suffused with rich color.

Eversley has described his Parabolic Lenses as kinetic sculptures, though the motion to which he refers is the movement of viewers’ bodies and the corresponding variations in their perceptions of light and reflection. The intentionality of composition that makes such movement possible and invites natural, often instant, engagement by the observer, distinguishes his work from many of the West Coast minimalists who have been his peers and neighbors over the last five decades. Though he has produced large-scale works for a variety of contexts, Eversley does not privilege monumentality or imposing forms. Rather, he calls attention to universal forces responsible for moving and arranging light and matter, ephemeral atmospheric effects (including the sun’s interactions with sky and sea), and the formal poetry created when ineffable workings of the eye and mind are given formal expression.

Eversley’s singularity of purpose nonetheless results in sculptures that demonstrate a wide range of compositional variation. This can perhaps be observed most readily in his use of color. The earliest Parabolic Lenses all contained the same order and combination of blue, amber, and violet; he achieved a range of effects by varying only the speed at which he spun his molds, as well as the proportions of resin and dye concentrations. While some of the works on view in Chromospheres shift the old color combination into new orders, others are radiant two- and three-color lenses that make use of the entire color spectrum. Also on view are monochromatic lenses so saturated or dark that they appear to be completely opaque mirrors. In its own way, each of these works demonstrates how Eversley reveals fundamental properties of energy by harnessing time, gravity and centrifugal force to create parabolic forms and distribute color and matter within them. As the artist points out, “The genesis of energy is central to the mystery of our existence as animate beings in an inanimate universe. The original and ultimate source of all energy on earth is the sun. My early sculptures were directly influenced by the solar energy source; my new works take this theme deeper and beyond to the colors of the stars, which we can not see, but only imagine.”

– for more information on additional images from this event please contact EMS at [email protected] or Instagram at @ericminhswenson