Anat Ebgi is pleased to announce Quiet Time, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Canadian artist Corri-Lynn Tetz. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. An opening reception will take place at 2660 S La Cienega Blvd, Saturday October 14 from 5 – 7pm.

With titles such as Ecstasy is Necessary, Soft Fascination, and Bleeding Heart, Corri-Lynn Tetz’s paintings draw out connections between the romantic tradition of depicting the female nude and notions of feminist self-determination. Her approach is equal parts humorous and absurd, while conveying a grace and vulnerability from her subjects. Working with the solitary figure, Quiet Time addresses ideas of being on our own, having moments of pleasure or introspection; what is captured on the canvases are in a sense spiritual and sensual crossover events.

Although Tetz uses found images from vintage men’s magazines as the basis for her paintings, she often places her subjects in new environments. Working intuitively with color, she embellishes these settings and poses drawing from her own imagination. For example in Hidden Source, the figure appears surrounded by a mountain of pillows as if reclining in a landscape; a large butterfly disrupts the pictorial space grounding the composition into a dialogue with surrealism, evoking dream logic. Other works seem to laugh along with the absurd fantasies acted out in these taboo periodicals such as Horse Girl; one wonders ‘where are her pants?’ Painterly brush strokes, playful focus, and curious luminosity tease out the humanity of these women and situate them in a psychological arena.

Tetz pushes the boundaries of romanticism to the point of near excess. Through an over-the-top almost saccharine embrace of glamor, beauty, and everything ‘feminine’—lace, makeup, and high heels—the works in Quiet Time go beyond the mere superficial and emerge transformed through poetic fantasy. Together they operate as a commentary on complexities of taste, class, shame, and idolatry within the realm of female sexuality and the politics that shape it.

Corri-Lynn Tetz (b. 1977, Calgary, Alberta) studied at Red Deer College, Red Deer, Alberta; received a BFA from Emily Carr University of Art + Design, Vancouver, British Columbia; and received her MFA from Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec. Recent solo exhibitions include Heaven goes on forever and ever and ever… Arsenal Contemporary, New York, NY; Art Lover, Contemporary Calgary, Calgary, Alberta; and Soft Touch, Dianna Witte Gallery, Toronto, Ontario. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Gallery 12.26, Dallas, TX; Kasmin Gallery, New York, NY; Bradley Ertaskiran, Montreal, Quebec; and Big Pictures, Los Angeles, CA among others. Tetz has received project support from the Conseil des Art et des Lettres du Quebec, The Canada Council for the Arts, the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation, and in 2016 was awarded the Brucebo Residency Fellowship. Tetz lives and works in Montreal.

Anat Ebgi is pleased to announce Means of Opposites, a solo exhibition by British artist Nigel Howlett on view at 2660 S La Cienega Blvd, August 26 – October 7, 2023. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery and in the U.S. An opening reception will take place Saturday, August 26 from 2 – 5pm.

Nigel Howlett is a London-based artist whose monochromatic drawings and paintings focus on anonymous, futuristic characters. His minimal and recognizable style draws on elements of the surreal and uncanny to explore complexities and nuances of human experience. Fear, love, violence; we witness Howlett’s ensemble in the midst of high drama expressed through emotional and referential poses, yet much is left to ponder as we examine these faceless figures.

In our era of avatars, facial recognition software, and artificial intelligence, Howlett’s figures suggest a post-human or cyborgian future. Devoid of discreet identity markers, his figures move through a sleek, seemingly frictionless world. It’s not difficult to imagine this place: soft evening light, pools of silver water and canals glittering from horizon to horizon. The tantalizing mystery—how did they arrive here? Was there an earlier planet which became inhospitable, air too thin, nations too violent? Perhaps advancements in technology birthed this world. Either way, as the works in the exhibition reveal, patterns continue, conflicts (internal and external) unfold in forms symbolic and pictoral.

Ever in conversation with the past, Howlett revisits art historical and classical references. Neither revealed nor hidden, the largest work in the exhibition, receives its title from 12th century Persian poem The Conference of the Birds, an allegorical and mystical poem describing the arduous journey and search for truth. Narratively, this work borrows from Picasso’s 1939 Cat catching a bird, a painting directed toward tumult and horrors of war which continues to resonate. His drawing The Hunt hearkens to Titian’s Venus and Adonis, where goddess Venus is seen trying to restrain her lover Adonis from going off to the hunt. Venus fears (correctly) that Adonis would be killed. The work echoes Howlett’s tension of moods: at once sensual and romantic, it is a love story colored by tragedy.

Howlett’s process is slow and patient. He works with extreme parameters for color and tactility of the surfaces. Reducing, condensing, leaving only what is absolutely necessary, silent figures emerge solid and monolithic like polished stone. Weathered marble, pearl, or chrome, Howlett’s scenes of futuristic androgynes offer space to reflect on something greater than ourselves.

Nigel Howlett (b. 1979, England) received his BA in Fine Art from the University of East London, (UEL, London, UK). In 2021 he exhibited his work in a solo exhibition at Ojiri gallery in London, UK. Selected group exhibitions include Ramp Gallery, London, UK; WOAW Gallery, Hong Kong; and Studio 1.1, London, UK. Anat Ebgi’s presentation of his work at the Felix Art Fair earlier this year, marked the artist’s debut in the United States. Howlett lives and works in London, UK.

Anat Ebgi is pleased to announce a group exhibition Variations on a Theme, featuring works by Gloria Klein, Jesse Krimes, Suchitra Mattai, Theo Mercier, linn meyers, Jordan Nassar, Meeson Jessica Pae, and Mia Weiner. The exhibition will be on view from June 24 through August 5 at 2660 S La Cienega Blvd. An opening reception will take place at 2660 S La Cienega Blvd, Saturday June 24 from 3 – 6pm.

Looking at an intergenerational selection of artists, Variations on a Theme examines artistic practices which utilize structures and systems as their primary approach to art making. Self-created, complicated, and varied parameters encourage results beyond imagination—invoking improvisation, entropy, and spontaneity. These processes often challenge conceptual notions of meaning and representation, relinquish authorial control, and allow artworks to emerge organically as consequences of sets of rules.

Variation, modulation, deviation—breaking from a pattern can reinforce the steadiness of rhythms and the rigidity of structures. As such, the turns, breaks, and slippages in the exhibition expose inherent limitations of visual language and highlight subjectivity of interpretations. Creators of their own universes, working in a system allows artists to take the unassertive and ordinary, such as a colored stripe, a round stone, or a google image search and transform it into something full of energy and surprise.

The work of Gloria Klein (1936 – 2021) uses self-developed systems and processes to experiment with palettes and compositions that result in intricate patterns ranging from the highly structured to the completely chaotic and every variation in between. The interplay of order and disruption plays a vital role in Klein’s practice, who came of age in 1970s New York. Her slender hard-edged hatch marks of varying lengths were core to her paintings and drawings. Like a single sewing stitch only makes one mark, collectively hundreds and thousands of them create intricate patterns and complex compositions.

Relinquishing control to Google image search algorithms, Jesse Krimes’ (b. 1982, Lancaster, PA) sculptures expose hidden systems and networks. Krimes begins with the search terms, ‘beauty’ and ‘decay’ printing the results exactly as they appear, onto transparent trays, each one a digital archeological site, a toxic soil sample of contemporary society. His work investigates the circulation of these images through news and popular media that produce and reinforce stereotypes and beauty standards not reflected in the real world we live in. Krimes uses participatory art practices that traverse prison bars and the urban and rural divide. Alongside his art practice, he is the co-founder of Right of Return USA, the first national fellowship dedicated to supporting formerly incarcerated artists.

The creation of Suchitra Mattai’s (b. 1973 Guyana) kaleidoscopic sari tapestries involves traditional domestic labor techniques such as weaving and embroidery. As crafts these techniques are guided by foundational structures of logic, order, and repetition. Through manipulation of the elemental stitch one can find room for expression and individuality. Expressive of her identity as an Indo-Caribbean artist, they are made from a mixture of everyday found materials such as feather boas, fabric, beads, and rope, and legacy materials such as ghungroo bells, prayer Dupattas, and her mother’s vintage saris, which embed cultural and familial meanings. Though fundamentally abstract, Mattai weaves these materials into mass produced gridded net structures, mobilizing her forms to address topics such as the legacy of colonialism, immigration, labor, borders, and political narratives around caste systems and social classes.

As a true autodidact, Théo Mercier (b. 1984, Paris) has claimed great formal freedom since the beginnings of his art practice. The sculptures in this exhibition comprise large stones resting on stacks of eggs nested in protective cardboard crates. These found precarious structures allude to an avowal and disavowal of protective systems: the hard but fragile shell of the egg, the soft but ultimately secure egg cartons. Mercier’s works impose paradox, strangeness and humor as visual points of view, resulting in a sprawling practice including sculpture, performance, plays, film, and installations. Drawing his raw materials “from the world,” that is from ordinary life, his works lead to reflections located at the crossroads of anthropology, geopolitics, and tourism. Mercier is a collector and creator; oscillating between authenticity and choreography, he explores themes of cultural obsolescence, artifice, and mechanisms of history.

linn meyers (b. 1968, Washington D.C.) makes meticulous drawings that hinge on the unique and imperfect quality of the hand-drawn line. Her works are manifestations of human movement through repetitive sequences of dots and lines. meyers welcomes the slippages that occur with the slightest involuntary movements of her body and the delicate patterns that emerge over time. Her practice explores ideas of impermanence, as many of her labor-intensive wall drawings are ultimately painted over, leaving only the documentation or memories of the work. In this way, the artist’s works on paper become even more central to her practice, emphasizing their presence and objecthood.

Exploring heritage and homeland through various mediums, Palestinian-American artist Jordan Nassar (b. 1985, New York, NY) has rooted his artistic practice in traditional levantine craft forms. He adapts Palestinian tatreez embroidery (a patterned geometric cross-stitch) to reflect his hybrid upbringing and collaborates with craftswomen in the West Bank to create contemporary works. A self-taught artist, Nassar’s embroideries juxtapose regional motifs with imagined landscapes in a way that breaks with and expands upon the thousands of years old tradition. His practice is rooted in a linguistic and geopolitical field of play characterized both by conflict and unspoken harmony. Although Nassar continues to work within the inherent gridded structure of his embroidery cloth, the pieces for Variations disrupt structure by expanding the landscapes and symbolic patterns across multiple panels.

Drawn to the visceral, Meeson Jessica Pae (b. Indianapolis, IN) explores interiors of the body as sensual architecture and machine, where fleshy soft bits and bodily fluids undulate and transform into otherness. The machine/body distinction is complicated further through her process. With the assistance of computer generated systems, Pae renders her compositions in three dimensions before painting them on canvas.  Her imagery oscillates between representation and abstraction, micro and macro, biological and mechanical. Pae’s fluid gestures and undulating forms are used to create entangled, mysterious, asymmetric compositions where fleshy folds, dripping refractions of bodily fluids, and mechanical machine components create relationships and function symbiotically.

Mia Weiner (b. 1991, Chicago, IL) weaves monochromatic tapestries based on her own photographs. Her imagery begins by considering slight physical sensations such as the feeling of a knee crossed over a leg, a deep breath, or what it feels like to float in water. Pictorially, Weiner’s work disrupts stable network relationships such as plant systems (stems/leaves), muscle relationships (head/neck), or elementals (land/sea/air). Although she works with a digitally assisted jacquard loom, guided by intuition, Weiner retains her ability to make adjustments to color or yarn, manipulate tension, or insert odd materials into the weavings resulting in a collaboration between human and computer.

Anat Ebgi is pleased to announce Falling Together, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Molly Lowe. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. An opening reception will take place at 2660 S La Cienega Blvd, Saturday February 25 from 3 – 5pm.

At once abstract and figurative, the paintings in Falling Together channel a way of observation that seeks balance within states of limbo, straddling reality and imagination. Lowe begins from assorted everyday images, combining anonymous online imagery and personal photos, she slices, dices, mixes, and mutates these sources until she arrives at scenes that expose the awkwardness of life in a human body—physically and emotionally.

Unconventional assemblages of color, these oil on linen compositions emerge from a palette that skips, jumps, and flicks you on the nose. In moments she leaves behind clues to specific scenes or possible narratives, yet the overall effect of the work requires viewers to relax their gaze, untether expectations and let the pictures untangle themselves through the flow of her expressive improvisational gestures.

In addition to painting, Lowe frequently works in performance and sculpture, as such, her paintings are events in their own right. Agile, emanating a sense of action, they record mental and physical movement of the artist’s own body; as they evolve, they take on a life of their own. Enigmatic and voyeuristic, the compositions strike at ordinary life and personal “events”—having sex, stretching, smoking a cigarette—Lowe articulates the contours of human experience, stringing up something recognizable while simultaneously slipping from our grasp.

Molly Lowe (b. 1983, Palo Alto, CA) received her MFA from Columbia University and her BFA from Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). She has had solo exhibitions and performances at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Lilith Performance Studio, Malmo, Sweden; Pioneer Works, Brooklyn, NY; Suzanne Geiss Company, New York, NY; SculptureCenter, Long Island City, New York; and Performa 13, New York, NY. Her films have screened at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY and JOAN, Los Angeles, CA. Lowe has participated in residencies at the Shandaken Project, Storm King Art Center, New Windsor, NY; Pioneer Works, Brooklyn, NY; Recess Art, New York, NY; and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Skowhegan, ME. In 2015, she received the New York Foundation for the Arts interdisciplinary artist fellowship award, and she was recently nominated for a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation award. Lowe lives and works in New York.

Anat Ebgi is pleased to announce Samantha, a solo exhibition by Roby Dwi Antono on view at 2660 S La Cienega Blvd, October 29 – December 10, 2022. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. An opening reception will take place Saturday, October 29 from 5 – 7pm.

Samantha consists of ten new paintings shown alongside a selection of works on paper. Returning to a state of childlike honesty and spontaneity are both core thematics of the works in Samantha. The title of the exhibition is taken from Spike Jonze’s science fiction romantic drama HER (2013). In this film, the sensitive protagonist Theodore falls in love with his charming, artificially intelligent virtual assistant “Samantha,” who reveals that she gave herself the name because she simply liked “the sound of it.” Antono’s way of working is similarly immediate, painting directly on the unprimed surfaces—his works are like cave paintings, simple expressions of desire as incantation. The repeated glyph-like subjects raise questions about heroism, pop culture, and nostalgia.

A self-taught painter, Antono’s works for this exhibition are rendered with loose, expressive linework, primarily in oil pastel, pigment sticks, and pencil. Antono depicts wide-eyed children and dinosaur-like animals with a scrawled and cartoonish freedom. He captures a flatness and naiveté associated with children’s drawing and his subjects echo raw or primal emotional states such as joy, rage, and sadness. The artist thoughtfully contends with ideas of representation in these works as many of the compositions seem to dissolve into pure line and color—painterly gestures of innocence and playfulness.

His boldly colored characters, outlined and embellished with premixed reds, greens, and blues push to the foreground of the picture plane. These latest works in Samantha make use of blank, raw canvas and the silent world of these characters continues, in pauses and margins. These breaks shape the field—emphasizing rhythm, space, and the delicate cadence of the artist’s hand, highlighting sensual, spontaneous, and emotional manifestations of our humanity. Out of the linear flow of time and logical thinking, Antono’s characters occupy places of humor and harmony, drawing out each other’s light.

Roby Dwi Antono (b. 1990 Semarang, Indonesia) has been featured both in Indonesia and internationally in numerous solo and group exhibitions including presenting work at the 2017 Yogyakarta Biennale; Nanzuka Underground, Tokyo, Japan; and Gallery Droste, Paris, France. Antono lives and works in Yogyakarta, Indonesia.

Impact: LA for Choice 2022
W.R.R.A.P.: Benefit Auction on Artsy

Impact: LA for Choice 2022 is a contemporary art auction benefiting W.R.R.A.P. (Women’s Reproductive Rights Assistance Project) and CLRJ (California Latinas for Reproductive Justice). Co-hosted by Anat Ebgi Gallery and Artsy, 100% of proceeds from this initiative will be donated to these organizations as a visual protest by over 40 LA artists in solidarity with reproductive rights.

Opening reception: Saturday, July 16, 2 – 5pm
On view in person: July 20 – 22, 10am – 5pm
Online auction closes Friday, July 29

 

>>>  BID NOW  <<<

 

For more information on Impact: LA for Choice 2022, visit anatebgi.com or contact Alex Rojas at alex@anatebgi.com.

Participating Artists

Alli Conrad
Anna Membrino
Avery Wheless
Becky Kolsrud
Brea Weinreb
Caris Reid
Carrie Cook
Claire Collette
Daieny Chin
Elana Bowsher
Ellen Jong
Ellen Khansefid
Emma Webster
Erin Calla Watson
Gwen Hollingsworth
Gwen O’Neil
Hopie Stockman
Isabel Yellin
Jen Hitchings
Jess Valice
Jessica Taylor Bellamy
Kat Olschbaur
Kate Pincus-Whitney
Katja Ferin
Laura Watters
Laurie Nye
Liz Markus
Meegan Barnes
Megan Reed
Michelle Blade
Miranda Byk
Nevine Mahmoud
Nicolette Mishkan
Nihura Montiel
Ruby Neri
Samantha Thomas
Sarah Ann Weber
Sophie Wahlquist
Tallulah Hood
Tidawhitney Lek
TK Kuk
Trulee Hall
Veronica Fernandez
Virginia Broersma
Wendy Park

For his third solo exhibition at Anat Ebgi, Neil Raitt has created eight new paintings and a suite of watercolors for an exhibition titled Between a Rock and a Setting Sun. On view at 2660 S La Cienega Blvd, opening Saturday, November 13, 2021.

Neil Raitt’s surreal landscapes test the limits of reality and artificiality. His paintings depict impossible places and forego the idea of an original relationship to a real or even specific place. Terrains, climates, disparate geographies are all mixed together becoming a portal to an emotional or psychological space. Their impossibleness acts almost as a parody or critique of traditional sea and landscapes and argues for the possibility of fresh perspectives. Free from nostalgia and lamentation of fading natural beauty, Raitt’s landscapes have an almost mythological, dream-like quality conveyed both through the saturated intensity of his color and the strangeness of the wolf silhouettes repeated through several works.

The title of the exhibition Between a Rock and a Setting Sun nods to Raitt’s shift away from infinite interlocking landscapes with the introduction of suns, moons, and distinct horizons to his work for the first time. Still, he continues to subvert and displace traditional illusions of space. Viewers have a sense of being in two places at once as cave-like forests open out to distant seashores. Meadows and glades are dotted with desert flora and bathed in the tropical light of setting suns, one gets the sense that these scenes are lit from within.

Over time Raitt’s process has evolved to become more intuitive, resulting in paintings that emerge slowly through delicate brushy layers. Working the compositions out first in watercolor produces a fluidity and looseness that distinguishes the pieces from previous bodies of work. Due to the repeating nature of his earlier paintings, Raitt could start at the top of a canvas and work his way down in a near-mechanical fashion resulting in abstract and maze-like pictures. Together the works in this exhibition embrace the romantic and expressive possibilities of painting, uncovering a world that is open and mysterious, wild and irregular.

Neil Raitt (b. 1986) received his MA from the Royal College of Art, London in 2013. Over the past ten years he has been included in solo and group exhibitions at Nicelle Beauchene, New York, NY; The Cabin, Los Angeles, CA; Chez Valentin, Paris; Choi & Lager, Cologne; The Hole, New York, NY; Lin & Lin Gallery, Taipei, Taiwan; and Rental Gallery, East Hampton, NY. His work has been exhibited at institutions including the Centre d’art contemporain La Halle des bouchers, Vienne; Villa Du Parc centre d’art contemporain, Annemasse; the DePaul University Art Museum, Chicago; and the Goss-Michael Foundation, Dallas. He was the recipient of the Northern Trust Acquisition Prize, 2016 and the Catlin Art Prize, 2014. His work is in the permanent collections of Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Los Angeles, CA; DePaul Art Museum, Chicago; Saatchi Collection, London; and Frank-Suss Collection, London. Raitt lives and works in London.

Leather-clad cruisers, charismatic glamazons, and ecstatic pleasure-seekers of all proclivities find themselves writhing on the dance floor in It’s Much Louder Than Before. This group exhibition features new work by 19 artists and is on view at 2660 S La Cienega Blvd from August 14 – September 18. An opening reception will be held on Saturday, August 14, 2021, 6-8pm. The exhibition is organized by James Bartolacci and Stefano di Paola.

It’s Much Louder Than Before explores various communities and aesthetics of queer nightlife. From libertine sex parties to the glitz of discos to the queer nightclub as a historic space for organizing and political activity, the importance of these parties and locales in creating connection has been amplified by their absence in the pandemic.

Beginning with the physical space as a locus, the exhibition also explores amorphous and ever-changing sites of sonic experimentation and self-expression, as well as the radiating experiences of melting eroticism, underground decadence, and the pagan religiosity of worshiping flesh. Composed of endless variations of status, identity, and homespun fashions, dark and pounding dance floors is the ritual site that brings them together.

A percentage of the sales from this exhibition will be donated to REACH LA, a youth-driven organization serving LGBTQ+ people of color and their communities to encourage creative expression, provide supportive safe spaces, and promote health and wellness since 1992.

After four months of being closed, Anat Ebgi is thrilled to announce the reopening of the gallery and AE2 to the public with a two-person exhibition, featuring Alejandro Cardenas and An Te Liu. This exhibition will take place at AE2 2680 S La Cienega Blvd from July 11 through September 5, 2020.

An Te Liu, a Toronto-based sculptor, will present a curated grouping of new sculptures alongside a suite of recent paintings by Los Angeles-based painter Alejandro Cardenas. These artists are linked through their search of form through the shared interrogation of design and architecture. In their respective practices, each borrows, transforms, and recontextualizes the built and designed world with a sense of humor and playfulness that translates into something simultaneously familiar and mythological.

In Cardenas’s newest “Field House” series, melancholic figures populate a modernist glass country house. One has the sense these figures are trapped inside, gazing longingly at blue skies, only to be enjoyed from a distance. In two works Clear Skies at the Field House 1 and 2, sublimating humanoids repose on Mies Van der Rohe chairs, as uncontested monuments to calm and effortless elegance at the time they were designed and now cult objects for connoisseurs. Cardenas’s work juxtaposes the iconic with the abstract and ineffable.

Liu’s work is frequently contextualized in terms of his borrowing forms from consumer objects and packing materials. However, he takes these sources beyond their utilitarian origins to a precarious unknown, imbuing them with a new lyrical narrative. In the case of Talismaic 2000, Liu cast the reflective interior casing of a headlight from his defunct 2000 Honda Civic. Then taking inspiration from Brancusi’s The Newborn—a sleek bronze ovoid—Liu modeled the backside of this piece after an egg. With Aspira, Liu dissected a handheld dustbuster, stretching and twisting it open, and finishing it with copper leafing. Though the vacuum retained its distinct snout, suspended from the ceiling it is graceful and bird-like, the final form resembling an ancient fossil.

Alejandro Cardenas (b. 1977, Santiago, Chile) completed his BFA at the Cooper Union School of Art in 2000. Cardenas has exhibited his work in solo and group exhibitions including at the Hammer Museum (2003), Anat Ebgi (2019), Harper’s Books (2019), and James Fuentes (2008 and 2010). Before becoming a full-time studio painter, Cardenas had a successful career as a multimedia artist, working in illustration, graphic design, and videography. For over a decade, he served as the lead textile designer and art director for the influential fashion label Proenza Schouler. He was also a founding member of Lansing-Dreiden, a New York-based transdisciplinary art collective that produced musical albums, a literary journal, and artworks. Reviews of his art and design projects have appeared in the New York Times, Vogue, and Another Magazine. Cardenas currently lives and works in Los Angeles.

An Te Liu (b. 1967, Tainan, Taiwan) received his Masters in Architecture from Southern California Institute of Architecture in Los Angeles and his BA in Art History University of Toronto. Working predominantly within sculpture and installation, Liu’s work has been exhibited in venues including the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Ursula Blickle Stiftung, the EVA International Biennial of Ireland, the Venice Biennale of Architecture, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. His works are included in the permanent collections of The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery of Canada and The Art Gallery of Ontario. Liu lives and works in Toronto, Canada.

After four months of being closed, Anat Ebgi is thrilled to announce the reopening of the gallery to the public.

On July 11th, the gallery will open August, a solo exhibition by Los Angeles artist Alec Egan. This exhibition, Egan’s second with the gallery, will be on view at 2660 S La Cienega Blvd.

August consists of a suite of 14 paintings made by Egan during the first half of this year. The exhibition title alludes not only to the hottest apex of the year when everything is at its most combustible, the “dog-days” month that ends summer, but to a proposed conclusion before the start of something new.

Since 2017, Egan’s practice has focused on creating oil paintings of the interior of a singular imagined house. Typically, Egan’s exhibitions are constituted around one “key” painting—often of dominant scale—that depicts one room, such as a bathroom, living room, or bedroom, full of domestic details, which then become the conceptual fodder for the remaining works in the show. Although this project has been ongoing, the recent quarantine at home has cast a new light on Egan’s meditations on the domestic.

The key painting in August is Changing Room where, using an ad nauseum approach, Egan layers a cacophony of sentimental patterns, the effect is simultaneously grounding and disorienting. References abound from the personal to Victorian wallpapers to vintage Laura Ashley upholsteries, as well as boldly-colored travel posters that are reminiscent of the sixties. The room has an air of mystery and concealment. Curtains hang heavily from their rods in a strange wild garden, perfumed by dewy roses. What is happening in the stillness of this house? Who or what is hidden behind the privacy screen?

Drawing upon his imagination and memory (rather than life or photographs), Egan’s interiors purposefully avoid connection to a specific place or time.The paintings also more broadly suggest the aesthetics of particular 20th-century masters, ranging from Édouard Vuillard to David Hockney to Wayne Thiebaud. At the same time, Egan’s paintings include symbolic objects. Bag of Fruit on Ottoman includes an overflowing grocery bag, a 21st century cornucopia—which can correspond to a womb, to fertility, or abundance. A pair of red-laced work boots—suggesting Vincent van Gogh still lifes—evokes exploration, endurance, and life’s many journeys. Blooming bouquets and flower stems connote new life, love, and fragility. Egan’s lush paintings are as much nostalgic snap shots of collective memory as they are explorations of materiality, reality, and imagination, expanding the tradition of abstraction and still life painting.

Alec Egan (b. 1984, Los Angeles, CA) completed his MFA at Otis College of Art and Design in 2013, and received a BFA in creative writing and poetry from Kenyon College. Recent solo exhibitions include Pets at Charles Moffett Gallery, New York (2019); Alec Egan: The Living Room at Dubuque Museum of Art, Iowa (2019); and Viewing Room at Anat Ebgi Gallery in Los Angeles (2018). His work has also been exhibited at the California Heritage Museum (2017) and the Torrance Art Museum (2015), among others. Egan lives and works in Venice, CA.

 

As a spring breeze rolls through our windows, we find ourselves in a state of limbo and shock. This time of year signals an awakening, flowers bloom, the weather warms, and life continues. In this great tangible shuffle, we reassess the essential and turn inward, finding inspiration in what we know, connecting with family and loved ones, seeking solace in personal truths we can wrangle and wrap around our fingers.

Anat Ebgi is pleased to announce Staycation, an exhibition of works intended to be shared with you in the physical realm, carefully packed, flown, and installed across the country, instead they will be viewed in a virtual one. Planned out for a year, the selection of works by ten artists were meant to be seen in the various spring fairs and exhibitions. They were labored over in studios across the country and are now shared with you digitally, while we shelter-in-place.

Staycation can also be viewed on our website as well as our Instagram page. We will program IG live visits with the artists in their studios as well as stories that peek into their process. A very cool feature you will find on the PDF is a camera icon, click to get a peek into the artists’ studios.

To view the Staycation PDF, click here.

** While plans are in constant flux, we are excited about the new dates and welcome the new attitude of non-attachment with positivity. We appreciate the flexibility, support, and creativity of all the artists, gallery staff, and community!

Anat Ebgi is pleased to announce A Place That Has No Name: Early Works, Tina Girouard’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles. The exhibition will run from February 22 – March 28. An opening reception will take place Saturday, February 22 from 5 – 7pm.

Giouard’s participation in, and influence on, the SoHo art scene of the 1970s, with its growing cultural significance represents an elusive social energy of the period—marked by the spirit of collaboration, do-it-yourself methods, and a willingness and commitment to dispense with limitations: aesthetic, conceptual, and political. She countered the austere minimalist art being made at the time with exuberant color, eclectic compositions, and unorthodox materials. Eschewing any kind of media specificity in her performances, videos, paintings, and installation pieces, Girouard works with anything from silk fabrics, tapestries, wallpapers, to rolls of linoleum and tin tiles. Her work is as varied as her imagination, and the materials and ideas she uses are charming and accessible, ordinary and profound, revealing the genius and magic of her mind.

Girouard rose to prominence among a group of artists who arrived on the downtown scene around the same time including Lynda Benglis, Gordon Matta-Clark, Deborah Hay, Mary Heilman, Richard ‘Dickie’ Landry, Mabou Mines, Richard Serra, and Keith Sonnier. During the late 60s the Chinatown loft she shared with Dickie Landry and the Philip Glass Ensemble quickly became a symbolic home for a growing community of young artists that had also migrated to NYC. As an important member of this core group of artists that established the SoHo art scene, Girouard was a founding participant of 112 Greene Street Gallery, The Anarchitecture Group, Clocktower Gallery, FOOD restaurant, PS1, Holly Solomon Gallery, Creative Time, and The Fabric Workshop.

Girouard grew up on a rice farm in Louisiana “between De Quincy and Lake Charles, in the country, a place that has no name.” Girouard’s work finds itself in a similarly unique non place, permeating several movements. Her works are connected to the post-minimalists, but also deeply associated with the Pattern and Decoration movement in New York. Her work is strongly intertwined with feminist art history, with her consideration of domestic space and the “women’s work” that has become indicative of her practice. Rethinking and reworking art into something increasingly unpredictable and uncategorizable, ever close to life itself, Girouard exploits the porousness of these classifications, occupying and dissolving between several different modes.

Tina Girouard (b. 1946, DeQuincy, LA) has an exhibition history that includes a 1983 mid-career retrospective mounted at the Rufino Tamayo Museum in Mexico City, and international events such as the 1980 Venice Biennale, the 1977 Paris Biennale, 1977 Documenta VI and 1972 Documenta V, Kassel. Girouard’s work has been exhibited widely at galleries and museums including: Leo Castelli Gallery, The Kitchen, Walker Art Center, New Orleans Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Palais des Beaux-Arts Brussels, Holly Solomon Gallery, David Zwirner, the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, and the New Museum. Girouard currently has works on view at MOCA Los Angeles for the exhibition With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art 1972 – 1985 curated by Anna Katz and the Ludwig Museum Budapest for the exhibition Pattern and Decoration. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Hessel Museum of Art, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY; Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA; Ludwig Forum fur International Kunst Aachen, DE; Rufino Tamayo Museum, Mexico City, Mexico; and Stedelijk Museum Actuele Kunst, Gent, Belgium. Girouard lives and works in Cecilia, LA.

“Some images ask to be folded or covered, others suggest a line. They have their language. And I try to understand how they speak to me.” – Amie Dicke.

Anat Ebgi is pleased to announce ONE-LINER, the gallery’s third solo exhibition by the Dutch artist Amie Dicke. The exhibition will run from January 11 through February 16 at AE2 Gallery located at 2680 S La Cienega Blvd, Los Angeles. An opening reception will take place Saturday January 11 from 6-8 pm.

The exhibition’s title refers to a striking new technique whereby Dicke uses a continuous, meandering incision to slice into aluminum plates bearing composed fashion portraiture. As she follows her line around the immaculate bodies in works such as ONE-LINER III (Holding the Rodeo Image) and ONE-LINER IV (Listen), the artist maps the touch of her hand and eye around the images, then bends new shapes into the metal. “Nothing is really removed, nothing is lost, just opened,” she notes. By adding space where there was none, and creating work that elides the conventions of two- and three-dimensional forms, Dicke continuously distorts and realigns the possibilities of our visual experience. “They are almost a movie in one still,” she says of these intriguing assemblages.

Many of the works on show in this exhibition feature the edges of a book or page in some way, so context and framing are highly visible throughout. In her HANDLE series, which includes the work HANDLE HER (Between Sheets and Covers) seen above, the artist’s hand is literally in the frame, holding an image or partially obscuring it. “To touch is an act of curiosity,” says Dicke.

Elsewhere, a triptych of ostensibly disparate yet subtly interrelated images from Dicke’s studio archive forms a horizontal assemblage in SMILE/LEAN IN/ELBOW whereas, for works such as WITH CLOSED KNEES AND ELBOWS, Dicke’s intricate abrasions of the printed aluminum plate reveal the very metal which is the carrier of the image. Despite her mastery of inventive techniques and myriad sources, Dicke says that over and over she’s pleasantly perplexed to spot the resonances that recur in her oeuvre. “Often I think I have a new way of working, but after looking longer at it I see familiar topics, shapes and lines coming through. It’s like an autograph.” 

The discriminating gaze of Amie Dicke (b. 1978, Rotterdam) reveals associations and resonances that might otherwise go undetected. Whether she’s cutting and altering fashion magazines, blowing up obscure portions from forgotten studio portraits or painstakingly covering books with layers of powdered make-up, Dicke’s practice is characterized by judicious selection and removal.

Dicke rose to prominence in the early 2000s after a period of living and working in New York City that saw her literally de-facing the advertising imagery of Madison Avenue, obscuring the features of famous models and driving nails through glossy publications – some of which subsequently commissioned Dicke to contribute to their pages.

Amie Dicke lives and works in Amsterdam. Her work has appeared in institutions including Tate Modern in London, Project Space 176 in London and Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt.

Image: Amie Dicke HANDLE HER (Between Sheets and Covers), 2019
Digital print on archival paper, mounted on aluminium, framed 13.5 x 10.25 inches / 34.3 x 26 cm

Anat Ebgi is pleased to announce You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me, the gallery’s second exhibition of Jibade-Khalil Huffman. The exhibition will run from January 11 through February 16. An opening reception will take place Saturday, January 11 from 6-8pm. 

You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me is comprised of two new video works, a series of related photographs and abstract photo collages printed on transparency and paper. A series of vinyl wall text pieces surround and explode out of the video and wall works, acting as another type of poem and play with ideas about information and authority in didactic wall texts.

Huffman’s work builds on a foundation rooted in poetry, synthesizing traditional and contemporary linguistic forms into a practice that employs multimedia platforms including, videos, photographs, performances, and text-based works. He often utilizes found, archival material, and contemporary ephemera to address slippage in memory and language, particular to race and visibility. The idea of erasure (of certain voices, people, and ideas that run counter to various status quos) as subject matter and as technique is central in this practice, in building up and removing the many layers of material in both the video and photo based collages. 

Zero, the near feature-length video in the exhibition (runtime 72 minutes), like much of Huffman’s video work, fits within a tradition of collage and appropriation in American avant-garde film. The piece features an elaborately edited montage of car accidents, collisions, shattering windows, fights, protests, 3D renderings, and explosions, all stand ins for the trauma described in the titles and subtitles that translate these instances of violence and describe the artist’s own experiences with depression. Huffman’s choice to slow down and reverse the sampled clips calls to mind Bruce Connor’s short film, Crossroads, (1976), which features extreme slow-motion replays of the July 25, 1946 underwater nuclear test at Bikini Atoll in the Pacific, while also speaking to our own daily overload of information, and how, we are in particular, desensitized to this. It is about feeling bad about complaining, about the anxiety surrounding speaking to your own turmoil when things could always be worse. Similarly, Huffman’s piece mines a visual archive of destruction, demolition, and violence, exploring both their mesmerizing and terrifying qualities. For the soundtrack, Huffman has constructed another layer of collage from songs and music samples along with found dialogue, creating a disarming layer of contrasting texture and mood counter to the relentless montage unfolding visually. 

Entirely his own, Huffman’s meticulously dense editing weaves an abstraction from both fact and fiction. His layered transparencies, like his films, draw from a long list of sources and symbols: tv guides, abstracted maps, classic television stills, icons of technology, charts, diagrams, staircases, tunnels, markers, indices, arrows, annotations, advertisements, and more. Across his work, Huffman’s attention to the poetic language and semiotics addresses how we make and shape meaning.

The final week of Huffman’s exhibition will coincide with Frieze LA weekend which runs from February 13-16. Huffman will present a restaging of “May Day,” a bill-board sized transparency based around Grace Jones’ character from the James Bond movie, A View To A Kill.  This sculpture was originally commissioned by Ballroom Marfa as part of Huffman’s 2018 solo exhibition. Frieze Projects 2020 will be staged at the Paramount backlot and is curated by Rita Gonzalez (Curator, Los Angeles County Museum of Art) and Pilar Tompkins Rivas (Director, Vincent Price Art Museum).

Jibade-Khalil Huffman’s (b. 1981) exhibitions includes the Hammer Museum’s “Made in L.A.” (2014); MOCA Los Angeles (2017); Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (2015); The Jewish Museum, New York (2016); LAX ART (2016), The Studio Museum in Harlem (2016); Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (2016); Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (2017); Swiss Institute (2017); KMAC Museum, Louisville (2018); Ballroom Marfa (2018) The Kitchen, NYC (2018) and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland (2019). His past performances include P.S.1/MoMA (2010), Southern Exposure (2011), MOCA Los Angeles (2014), ICA, Philadelphia (2017), Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland (2019) and Frieze Projects (2019). From 2015-2016, he was Artist in Residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem. Huffman received an MFA in Literary Arts from Brown University, an MFA in Studio Art from USC, and a BFA from Bard College. Huffman is also the author of three books of poems: Sleeper Hold (Fence, 2015), James Brown is Dead (Future Plan and Program, 2011), and 19 Names For Our Band (Fence, 2008). In fall 2020 he will present a new body of work along with a selection of recent projects at Tufts University Art Galleries. 

Image: Jibade-Khalil Huffman Figure, 2019
Inkjet print, 40.5 x 31 inches / 102.9 x 78.8 cm

Anat Ebgi is proud to announce A Divine Dance, a solo exhibition by Srijon Chowdhury. The exhibition will be on view from November 2 through December 14, 2019. An opening reception will take place at 2660 S La Cienega Blvd on Saturday, November 2^nd from 5-7pm.

A Divine Image
By William Blake (1789)

Cruelty has a Human Heart
And Jealousy a Human Face
Terror the Human Form Divine
And Secrecy, the Human Dress

The Human Dress, is forged Iron
The Human Form, a fiery Forge.
The Human Face, a Furnace seal’d
The Human Heart, its hungry Gorge.

Srijon Chowdhury’s paintings are characterized by moody symbolist compositions of richly colored floral and domestic settings. He conjures poetic and allegorical narratives through the use of myth, memory, and repetition.

The works in A Divine Dance are charged with the emotions of new fatherhood, anxiety of looming apocalypse, and a romantic appreciation for life. Inspiration is drawn from a variety of sources such as daydreams, personal photos, sketches, and art history. The titular painting depicts a woman in a crimson robe holding a young child in one arm, while her other arm cradles her pregnant belly. They are engulfed in flames, encircled by fiery dancing figures, and framed by two hands forming an arch, a recurring device Chowdhury uses.

Pale Rider, the largest painting in the exhibition, depicts an angelic woman with flowing hair riding horseback; its monumental scale envelopes viewers in a mystical narrative. The rider appears translucent and wields a scythe as she moves across a meadow of blooming flowers—an allusion to death and birth. In the foreground, there is a fence composed from a poem by William Blake titled “A Divine Image” that Chowdhury has turned into a sigil—an ancient practice of transforming pictorial text into a symbol that is considered to have magical powers. The poem speaks about destructive abstracts of human nature: cruelty, jealousy, terror, and secrecy.

Chowdhury’s work confronts universal physical and emotional themes. Soft aura of moonlight, glow of flowers, and dancing flames invite quiet contemplation. He sensitively vacillates between despair and hopelessness at the human condition, while brightening at joy, beauty, and hope that like flowers, life will go on.

Srijon Chowdhury (b. 1987, Dhaka, Bangladesh) completed his MFA at Otis College of Art and Design and his BFA from the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. He has exhibited his work widely in solo exhibitions and group exhibitions most recently at Foxy Production, New York, NY (2019); Antoine Levi, Paris (2018); Et Al, San Francisco, CA (2018); Upfor, Portland, OR (2018); Klowden Mann, Los Angeles (2016); and the Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, CA (2015). Chowdhury currently lives and works in Los Angeles, CA and Portland, OR.

Anat Ebgi is pleased to announce Tempest, a solo exhibition of painting, sculpture, and video by Los Angeles based artist Michael John Kelly. The exhibition will be on view from July 20th through August 24th. An opening reception will take place at 2660 S La Cienega Blvd on Saturday, July 20th from 5-7pm.

Across media, Kelly’s work strikes at the fourth dimension, exploring emotional, instinctual, and capricious realities. With this new body of work, the artist seeks to reveal theoretical, spiritual, and conceptual planes. His wild sense of color and gesture defies demands of concrete ideas and compositional logic, freeing viewers to experience a renewed sense of the world.

Kelly’s initial gesture—broad and brushy washes of underpainting—determines the foundational mood and personality for his paintings. Next he photographs these preliminary gestures and imports the photos to his iPad, where the paintings undergo layers of digital transformation, modulating color palettes, stretching forms, obliterating the original underpainting into something completely new. Returning to the analog, he prints the reworked paintings onto large sheets of paper. Tearing the sheets into smaller pieces, Kelly collages them onto the painting.

In a final act that is equal parts degradation and conjuration, Kelly attacks the collaged-painting with oil stick and paint. Smoldering, splitting, contorting each composition, the results are stunning achievements full of action and emotion. Kelly cites Kandinsky and Malevich as significant influences on his conceptual thinking; both artists explained that their work contained responses to spirituality, invisible feelings, and the unknown.

Kelly pushes viewers to consider what might lay beyond a representational register. Through a complex and free-flowing process, spanning the digital and analog, he excavates his pictures from within. As abstractions, each work is an exploration of painting as a conduit (though imperfect) of feeling. He parts the veil of reality to expose a world of blazing color and vibrating forces.

Michael John Kelly (b. 1975, Provo, Utah) received his MFA from the University of California Los Angeles in 2014. He also received a BFA in painting and drawing from Brigham Young University in 2004. Kelly has exhibited his work in group and solo exhibitions across the United States at Gavlak (Los Angeles, CA), Pacific Design Center (Los Angeles, CA), Torrance Art Museum (Torrance, CA), Fredric Snitzer Gallery (Miami, FL) and 68 Projects (Berlin, Germany). He currently has work on view at 68 Projects where he completed an artist residency in the spring of 2019. Kelly lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.

 

Video walkthrough with augmented reality, here.

Anat Ebgi is proud to announce Boring Art, the first Los Angeles solo exhibition for Canadian artist Tammi Campbell. The exhibition will be on view from September 7th through October 26th. An opening reception will take place at 2660 S La Cienega Blvd on Saturday, September 7th from 5-7pm.

For this exhibition, Campbell reproduced iconic works by Ellsworth Kelly, Frank Stella, Josef Albers, John Baldessari, and Ed Ruscha. Her selection reflects the creation of a personal index, rather than a cohesive art historical narrative. Ranging from hard-edge abstraction to Los Angeles conceptualism to shaped canvases and color studies, the works are unified through similarities in technical production, ubiquity in private and museum collections, and formal serialization within each artist’s practice.

Campbell’s method for penetrating the male-dominated canon hinges on an enormous amount of research that allows her to technically and truthfully replicate each work. The results of which are perfect stand-ins for their respective originals. Her visible additives, whether bubble wrap, tape, or leaving some element undone, tends to generate both “a-ha” excitement and confusion. A closer look at the paintings shows that the protective bubble wrap and tape are in fact an illusion—trompe l’oeil painting taken to its hyperrealistic extreme—the materials are cast completely from acrylic paint medium. Campbell’s intervention suspends viewers in a perpetual state of anticipation and prevents us from entering a true work of art.

The gesture of covering these works emphasizes the preciousness of the goods they contain, while simultaneously highlighting the frequently invisible network of art world laborers, art handlers, shippers, registrars, studio assistants, etc. who support and care for them as they circulate. The coverings also obscure the originals and draw our attention to their fixed state of transition. 

The exhibition title is a tongue-in-cheek reference to the John Baldessari piece I Will Not Make Boring Art (1971) commissioned by the Novia Scotia College of Art & Design in Halifax, Canada. Unable to fund his own trip to Canada for the exhibition, Baldessari proposed a pedagogical “punishment piece” that student-volunteers would enact in his place by repeatedly writing the phrase “I will not make boring art” on the walls of the gallery throughout the duration of the show.

The late 60s and early 70s marked an important shift in Baldessari’s art making. In 1970, he cremated his entire body of early work, all abstract paintings, and deposited the ashes in an urn. This act demonstrated his commitment to new forms of art making and resulted in his foray into text and language based paintings. Similarly, Campbell is concerned with memorializing art history, while also making a break from it. Her work literally envelopes, secures, and mummifies historical paintings; it asks viewers to ponder what is valued and allows us to imagine making room for something new. Full of contradictions, Campbell’s work pays homage to the past, while simultaneously taking it hostage.

Tammi Campbell (b. 1974) holds a BFA from the University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon. Over the past ten years, Campbell has shown in solo and group exhibitions across Canada and the U.S. including at Arsenal, New York (2019); the Mendel Art Gallery, Saskatoon (2015); the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, Toronto (2014); the Dunlop Art Gallery, Regina (2013); Mercer Union, Toronto (2013); and the Galerie de l’UQAM, Montréal (2013). She has also participated in the Canadian Biennale 2014 at the National Gallery of Canada, in Ottawa, as well as the 30th International Symposium of Contemporary Art of Baie-St-Paul. Campbell lives and works in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.

Anat Ebgi is pleased to announce a group exhibition featuring works by Jordan Nassar, Faith Ringgold, Salman Toor, and Cosmo Whyte. The exhibition will be on view from June 8th through July 13th. Opening reception will take place at 2660 S La Cienega Blvd on Saturday June 8th from 5-7pm.

The exhibition takes its name from James Baldwin’s 1953 novel Giovanni’s Room, the story of a young man’s placelessness as a queer American abroad. The protagonist’s conflicted sense of self and identity becomes his only source of connection to the feeling of home. He explains, “home is not a place, it is an irrevocable condition.”

Despite the inexplicable and elusive nature of one’s sense of placelessness, it is a heavy bindle slung over one’s shoulder as one presses forward. Within this context of cultural estrangement and hybridity, communities have been built. Thus the exhibition looks not to the difficulties faced by outsiders making home in America, rather these artists explore the joy and power found within the spaces that they have created.

“Go back to where you started, or as far back as you can, examine all of it, travel your road again and tell the truth about it. Sing or shout or testify or keep it to yourself: but know whence you came.” (1)

As if through a kaleidoscope, the artists work reveal the endless colors and shades of emotions within this country’s conflicted society and history. With Faith Ringgold’s series, Coming to Jones Road, the artist follows a 200 year narrative of a group of slaves headed north which ends in her modern day home on Jones Road in Englewood, New Jersey. With this series she “tried to couple the beauty of this place with the harsh realities of its racist history to create a freedom series that turns all of the ugliness of spirit, past and present into something livable.”

Salman Toor’s explorations of figuration as a young queer of Pakistani origin living in America depict his ambiguous subjects to be reveling in the presentation of their found community. The imagined scenarios and characters parade their bodies, unashamed, donning feather boas and rivers of tears. The intimacy of these moments belies the staged narratives and envelope the boys in celebration of their most private experiences. Cosmo Whyte, whose large scale drawings pose the celebratory body of Jamaican and diasporic communities, shares the desire to present jubilation. His figures, adorned with gold leaf and black glitter, defy their colonial past, tearing it from their bodies through unbridled dance.

The soft and contemplative works of Jordan Nassar look back to the landscape of his family’s homeland. Using the traditional Palestinian craft of embroidery, he portrays the idealized and fictionalized space that has come to represent home in the minds of the diaspora—one that doesn’t and never did exist. The same celestial bodies in Nassar’s skies hang heavy in Ringgold’s. We moved along as if in one body hardly knowing where we was goin, our way lit only by a chalk-white moon in a blood red sky. (2)

Each of these artists disrobe America of its myths—and unveil the complicated and tedious nature of being an American. The works included in the exhibition celebrate the dissonance of loving the home they’ve found while championing, as Baldwin notes, “…the right to criticize her perpetually.” (3) For each moment of peaceful stillness, there is the arduous fight. Living well, building and supporting a community, and sharing one’s story are all forms of protest. To exist as an other in this country is the most meaningful and profound act of resistance.

---

1 Baldwin, James. (1953). Go Tell It on the Mountain.
2 Ringgold, Faith. (1999). Coming to Jones Road Part I.
3 Baldwin, James. (1955). Notes of a Native Son.

 

Home is Not a Place PDF

Anat Ebgi is pleased to present Book Paintings, a series of new oil paintings by Los Angeles- based artist Robert Russell. The exhibition will be on view at the gallery through June 1st, with an opening reception on April 27th, 5-7pm.

Robert Russell’s new body of work depicts imagined artist-monographs laying supine on a neutral background. With this exhibition, he continues explorations of authority and iconography. On the covers, he reproduces both a famous work of art by Twombly, Guston, Currin, etc. as well as the artist’s signature. Russell’s works weave together various lineages of art history and challenge ideas of authenticity.

The artist uses the artist monograph to poke at the romance of canonical legends lining the bibliotheca, or amassing atop coffee tables. Each still life entertains its general function, wherein studied subjects are faithfully reproduced. But pupil attempts to conquer master–or possess entirely–by paintstroke or hemlock, kiss or worse.

Russell embraces artifice and prioritizes the superficial, negating true fidelity. Through irreverent mimesis, the canon is adjusted—an “original” experience—including both iconic artist and Russell himself. Representational painting is a sort of fakery, but these aren’t observational paintings. Despite their persuasive spines, the books themselves don’t actually exist. Acting as a conduit, the artist, within his painterly articulation, takes certain liberties which heighten the artifice of each tome. Like a mask, the reproduction is the slick illusory surface, an inherent masquerade. Homage is parody. Parody is homage. The aura of the artist, or The Portrait of Robert Russell, is bound in a book. And then sealed up in a painting.

Robert Russell lives and works in Los Angeles, California. He completed his MFA at The California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) in 2006. Recent solo exhibitions include The Cabin LA, Burrard Arts Foundation (Vancouver, BC Canada), LA><ART (Los Angeles), François Ghebaly Gallery (LA), Big Pond Artworks (Munich, Germany) and Osmos (New York, NY). He has also been included in numerous group shows in Los Angeles including Roberts and Tilton Gallery, Material Press MOCA LA and M+B Gallery.

Anat Ebgi is pleased to present Three Holes in a Parachute, featuring new sculptures and paintings by Jason Bailer Losh, his second show with the gallery. The exhibition will be on view at the gallery through April 20th, with an opening reception on March 16th, 6-8pm.

Directly informed by his paternal lineage of craft, Losh’s assemblages and sculptures often incorporate seemingly everyday materials – wood, foam, plaster – carved and reoriented to create unique experiences. A skillset passed down by Losh’s carpenter father, this exchange continues with his father-in-law who regularly mails Losh objects of his own design, which in turn become incorporated into, or inherited by, finished works. Through one set of hands, many more make, imbuing each sculpture with an emotional quality just beneath the resin finish.

Chairs stand in, or sit in, as the case may be, for the pedestal. A row of chairs could refer to church pews or a stadium, but a loose circle implies a gathering, equi-sided as with the King Arthur’s court or perhaps, the convergence of kin. The balance of family life and studio practice can prove tricky. In Three Holes in a Parachute, Losh refers to extended family raising concerns about one interfering with the other. This story, among others, is not under the rug swept, but part of the furniture, an invisible feature which informs the work’s process and existence, as with an unfurled chain of DNA within an organism. Losh forgoes the functionality of his objects, upended, askew, referent but not replica. Carrying the rough, handwritten marginalia and measurements of their construction, each form rises from the partially excavated styrofoam. Similar to Michelangelo’s Bound Atlas, these sculptures deliberately claim the appearance of non-finito or in-progress, both material and memory frozen in conflict within their own origins. A domestic still life, overturned.

An essay by Amanprit Sandhu accompanies the exhibition.

Jason Bailer Losh (b. 1977, Denison, Iowa) currently lives and works in Los Angeles. He received his MFA in 2007 from the School of Visual Arts, New York. Solo exhibitions include those held at venues such as Zieher Smith & Horton, New York; Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles; Control Room, Los Angeles and City Ice Arts, Awareness, Kansas City, MO. Group exhibitions include Minnesota Street Projects, Ochi Gallery, Ketchum, Idaho; FLAG Art Foundation, New York;  Venus Over LA; The Pit, Glendale, CA; M&B Gallery, Los Angeles; Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Los Angeles and Finesilver Gallery, San Antonio, TX.

Anat Ebgi is pleased to announce Scriptorium Revisited, the first solo exhibition of artist and activist Faith Wilding with the gallery. The exhibition will be on view January 26th, through March 9th, 2019. An opening reception will take place Saturday February 9th, 6-8pm. A book signing and discussion with the artist will precede the opening at 4pm.

Scriptorium Revisited focuses on the development of Wilding’s rich and multi-faceted practice during the 1980s, alongside lush, recent watercolors. Perhaps best known for her involvement in the early 1970s Feminist Art Movement in Los Angeles, and the activities of the Women’s Building, Scriptorium Revisited re-orients the social aspect of Wilding’s prolific career within the context of her private studio environment, which fuels the artist’s commitment to collective political action.

Inspired by the 12th century German abbess Hildegard von Bingen, who greatly contributed to the fields of music, medicine, biology and the visual arts, Wilding’s Hildegard series portrays biological life cycles using botanical imagery, realized in an array of mediums including gold-leaf, stenciling, ornate patterning and cut-outs. Wilding first encountered Hildegard’s writings in Paraguay, where she grew up. Years later, Wilding made a pilgrimage to Eibingen Abbey on the Rhine, to see Hildegard’s illuminated manuscripts firsthand. The Hildegard series extends the mystic’s work into an “eco-feminist mythology,” informed by contemporary biopolitics, offering a feminist counterpoint to Western and male-dominated narratives.

Revitalizing the forms of medieval bestiaries and herbals, which originally sought to provide a moralized history of organic life, Wilding’s Scriptorium pages depict human forms with animal features and skins. These scroll-like drawings embody Wilding’s concept of “becoming,” a spirited, perpetual rebirth allowing for multiple transformations, and life-forms. The large drawings are pages in-laid throughout with intricate, gestural moments of human activity: joy, suffering, communing, that correlate to the body of the viewer.

A co-initiator of the Feminist Art Programs at Fresno State and California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), Wilding’s practice is informed by a steadfast resistance to gendered roles and ideas. Her fiber pieces of the 70s, and her continued use of handwriting, watercolor, and ink, combined with other natural materials, all quietly refer to the decorative handwork typically ascribed to women artists. Wilding reclaims these forms, as well as her deep research into medieval manuscript illumination, typified by her use of gold-leaf, no longer as only adornment, but as an elevation of the feminine. In a suite of new watercolors, Wilding continues to explore this visionary iconology of the energy and force of growth.

Venus is in retrograde, in Lucifer, the morning star. The Moon connects with the Sun at 9:23 PM, the votive’s out. The Russians hacked my account, so while my data’s getting exorcised I head to the sperm bank for a little relaxation. The real opioid crisis is happening behind the church, it’s a vibrating little talisman promising me everything I want. ACCEPT. SUBMIT. The shrine razed, the stars aligned; the altar begat the pedestal, the exclusive kunsthaus now the temple of yore.

This autumn, Anat Ebgi presents Worshipping Sticks and Stones, a group exhibition featuring works by Angela Dufresne, Pierre Knop, Frederik Næblerød, Penny Slinger, and Jay Stuckey. The exhibition opens November 3 and runs through December 8 at Anat Ebgi, 2660 S La Cienega Blvd.  

Working across a range of media, these five artists summon existential desires in the contemporary void, focusing on collective memory alongside social and historical myths. Fashioned in the likeness of his oft-comical paintings, Jay Stuckey’s plush dolls come to life, slyly residing somewhere between confession and depraved spoof. Phases of color suggest unease in Angela Dufresne’s paintings, her oil canvases ripple with certain deviance, suggesting a Pre-Raphaelite, cinematic reverie of details and motion. No one form has a definite identity, Dufresne’s subjects are as loose and fluid as her painterly hand. This thread continues in Pierre Knop’s crayon, graphite and oil paint tableaus depicting figurative scenes of historical satire, made fantastical through earthy, exaggerated ironies. Based on archival images and public ceremonies, Knop’s converts political chaos into humorous anachronism. Frederik Næblerød offers grotesque commentary through raw, gestural paintings alongside a stoneware piece entitled, Four Seasons, each side a monstrous visage cast in 14 karat gold. Over a four decade career, Penny Slinger has established herself as a surrealist sorceress, sifting through the subconscious to create highly erotic and mystical experiences. Slinger’s sculptures, writing, and collage work celebrates the feminine, beckoning a pre-modern idolatry through ritualized incantations of the cosmos.

Please join us in this sacrifice.

 

Anat Ebgi is pleased to announce The Splits, the first major solo exhibition of Canadian painter Janet Werner in the United States. The exhibition will span the main gallery and our AE2 space. 

Developed over a practice spanning thirty years, Werner’s figures revel in multiple, fragile personalities culled from fashion magazines, children’s toys and art history. Despite their representational qualities, each subject remains an ambiguous distortion of references, devoid of one, singular identity. Trading in the traditional “likeness” of naturalist portraiture, Werner focuses on gestural tension and the deceit of traditional beauty.

Flattened against tenebrous, watery voids or indeterminate architecture, women stare blankly into space, inviting one to look beyond the predicament of each character, mirroring the viewer herself. Empathy amongst emptiness, the work may appear abstract at close glance, yet taken as a whole, the figures become exquisite corpses self-referential in scale, violently rendered in pointed paint strokes suggestive of crisis.

This new body of work further reorients the intention behind the gaze, as Werner shifts from paragon to process directly. Now in situ, they peer out amongst the tape, folded and crumpled photographs and cut-outs which inform their creation in the artist’s studio. Rather than relying on the tropes of the feminine or portraiture at large, Werner subverts the figure further — it becomes arresting and abject, aware of its construction. The ingénue reclaims her body, as in the case of the fragmented, many-armed Spider, who rebukes the legend of the Black Widow temptress. In Table with Picasso, one model slyly peeks out from below Werner’s effortless rendering of a Picasso, challenging the latter artist’s insipid quip, “All women are machines for suffering.”  Werner exposes the mechanisms of this misogyny, manipulating the act of spectatorship and myth of production. If there is suffering, trauma is situated in Werner’s formal consideration of the consumable waif. The smudged furrows, tears and creases anatomize the internal, asserting a worth to pain beyond the performance of gender or glamour.

 

Janet Werner (b. 1959, Winnipeg, Manitoba) lives and works in Montreal, Quebec. She received her MFA from Yale University in 1987. Solo exhibitions include Parisian Laundry (Montreal), Galerie Julia Garnatz (Cologne), Saidye Bronfman Centre for the Arts (Montreal), Whatiftheworld Gallery (Cape Town) and Plug Institute of Contemporary Art (Winnipeg). Group exhibitions include AXENEO7 (Gatineau), MASS MoCA (North Adams), Musée d’art contemporain (Montreal), Kenderdine Art Gallery (Saskatoon). A solo survey exhibition entitled “Another Perfect Day” organized by the Kenderdine Art Gallery, University of Saskatchewan, toured to five locations in Canada from 2013-2015, including the Esker Foundation (Calgary) ; the McIntosh Gallery, (Ontario); Galerie de l’UQAM (Montreal); and the Doris McCarthy Gallery (Toronto). Werner’s work is in the collections of the Musée du Québec, Musée d’art contemporain (Montreal), The Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO), Toronto, Owens Art Gallery (Sackville), the Canadian Embassy in Berlin, University of Lethbridge (Alberta), Winnipeg Art Gallery, the Mendel Art Gallery and numerous private and corporate collections.

 

The world divides into facts.

The picture is a model of reality.

The picture is a fact.

Thus the picture is linked with reality.

 

Anat Ebgi is pleased to announce Propositions, the second solo exhibition of New York-based artist Ethan Cook with the gallery. The exhibition will be on view from June 30 until August 11th. An opening reception will be held at 2660 S La Cienega Blvd on Saturday, June 30th from 6-8pm.

Working with a four-harness floor loom, Cook creates woven compositions of cotton squares and rectangles. These colorfields of varying hues follow the reasoning behind propositional logic, conditional reasoning which interprets the combination or alteration of one statement, in order to further understand their innate connections to construct more complex relationships.

The simplest statements are understood as the given, “known” parts. Similarly, Cook approaches the essential atomic elements of painting – canvas, frame, color and texture – as the individual properties of the equation. The resulting compositions become the proof, each canvas sequently growing outward, following its own inherent analytical structure, yet still heavily indexed by the artist’s hand.

Each cross of cotton is understood as a deictic fact. In conversation with the mimetic qualities of appropriation, Cook imparts deliberate, subtle gestures in what otherwise appears as an aesthetic and emotional sublimation of form. Regarding the loom as analogous to the canvas printer, the work is dictated as much by the parameters of the apparatus, as calculated against its limitations. The composition of each piece is arranged according to the remaining or leftover canvas from the previous work, which in turn determines the stretchers. Each canvas drifts into the next, an exercise of restraint akin to mathematical painting. In this way, Cook’s paintings develop organically, producing entirely affected landscapes, realized cumulatively through the whole, complete installation.

The exhibition is accompanied by a monograph survey of Cook’s works from 2012-2018 with an essay by Alex Bacon.

 

Ethan Cook (b. 1983) lives and works in New York, NY. His work has shown extensively in the United States and beyond, including institutions such as the Fondazione 107, Turin, National Museum of Capodimonte, Naples and the Chelsea Art Museum, New York. Recent and upcoming solo exhibitions include Patrick De Brock Gallery (Belgium), Gana Art (Seoul) and Bill Brady (Miami).

“And his passions were like an advertisement for the shop: you might have thought that he was embracing the whole of the fair sex in a single caress, the better to bewitch them and keep them at his mercy.”

– Emile Zola, The Ladies Paradise, 1883

Anat Ebgi is pleased to announce Strawberry Coconut Cream Pie, the second gallery exhibition with New York-based artist Martin Basher.

There’s flash in the salesroom – but if diamonds are a girl’s best friend, what of the department store’s glass coffin in which they are displayed? What of the shelf, the plinth, the rack? Where is the Emergency Exit? Continuing Basher’s long-standing inquiry into the many sublimated desires at play in consumer display, Strawberry Coconut Cream Pie probes emotion through surface.

Anchored by a suite of seven paintings on canvas, burlap and cardboard, Basher’s installation employs the seductive logic and narrativity of commercial presentation with a dash of ad-man’s elan. The hierarchies of value extend to painting’s erotic potential; meticulously labored by hand, these serial, fetishistic arrangements of artwork and consumer goods recall mass production and replicability.

Basher’s signature, seamless oil-paint fades range from chromic silver to black, or white to nuclear pink. Each alternating striation is pierced by its middle ground, evocative of light pouring through slatted, plastic blinds; the vertical, abstract gradations purposely disrupting any sense of horizon line. Strawberry Coconut Cream Pie also features black and white photorealistic renderings of tropical beaches punctured by the same hard-edged stripes, flipped sideways, on shelves or leaning against other painted surfaces. These darkly generic tropical locales accent the lusty commercialism which defines the exhibition, the sparkle of both alluring exotica and gyres of pulverized, ocean-borne plastic. Basher entertains the aspirational and the edenic, relishing in the emptiness of the sourced stock-image library which make those dreams so palpable to begin with.

You too, could have all of this.

Martin Basher (b. 1979 in Wellington, New Zealand) lives and works in New York. He will receive a Doctorate in Fine Arts through Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland in 2018 and he earned his MFA at Columbia University in 2008. He has shown widely internationally, and has exhibited at public institutions including the University of Connecticut, Art In General, Auckland Art Gallery, and The Public Art Fund. Recent solo exhibitions include Starkwhite, Auckland, Saatchi & Saatchi, New York and Brand New Gallery. Basher has been included in group shows at 179 Canal, New York, Tracy Williams, New York and Art in General, New York.

Anat Ebgi is pleased to announce Viewing Room, the first solo show of Los Angeles-based painter Alec Egan with the gallery. Featuring a series of new paintings, Egan’s figurative still-lifes swallow the viewer into vivid, kitsch scenes wherein a melancholic nostalgia grows unbridled.

Fragmented and yet fully whole, Egan tackles the psychology of the domestic interior through a maze of lushly wallpapered rooms. Tulips, a window, a rug, a painting-within-the-painting; these are the clues presented in Egan’s blueprint-key, allowing the viewer to map this imaginary home. The indulgent use of oil paint create textures imbued with a cognitive power, the flatness of the patterns complemented by raised brushstrokes seemingly pushing and pulling one’s gaze. Thick impasto accentuate the dapples found in the floorboards or drywall of this home, the overwhelming quality of Egan’s playful patterns bordering on abstraction through Rococo-esque embellishment.

A pair of socks, boots, glasses; these discarded items wait to be used again, frozen against the wild landscape of the wallpaper, or the duvet-cover, a literal flowerbed. A camouflaging ensues – an upholstered chair all but disappears into the adjacent wall. For all the objects, the absence of the figure is palpable, yet each still-life insists on a haunting human presence and the viewer as witness. There is a sense of escapism throughout, books are featured prominently, and the air is rife with the nostalgia of adolescence and Americana. Swatches on swatches, Egan’s canvases produce an infinite number of windows, chambers and corridors, blending the internal with the external, relishing in their own lurid pattern-making and the comfort of déjà vu.

Alec Egan (b. 1984) lives and works in Los Angeles, California. He completed his MFA at Otis College of Art and Design in 2013, and a BFA in creative writing and poetry from Kenyon College. Solo exhibitions include the California Heritage Museum in Santa Monica and an upcoming show at Dubuque Museum of Art in Dubuque, Iowa. His work is in several private and public collections including the Saunders Collection, (Berlin, Germany) and Key Brand Entertainment (London, England).

Anat Ebgi is pleased to announce Sunset, the first solo exhibition of Caroline Walker in Los Angeles. Featuring new large scale paintings and intimate works on paper, Walker’s exhibition focuses on the figure of a woman within the psychological spaces of a modernist Hollywood Hills home. The exhibition opens Saturday, Jan 13 and is on view until March 10.

As a cohesive body of work, Walker’s paintings hint at a larger narrative that is never fully revealed to the viewer. The central character in Sunset is an aging beauty queen accompanied by her two small dogs, a pool boy, and a makeup artist. The viewer is given glimpses into the feigned private life as the woman moves about her day engaged in leisurely activities. Despite her attendants, the woman appears strikingly isolated within her environments— floating in the pool, brunching at the Beverly Hills Hotel, dwarfed by the towering greenery in the pastel light of dusk.

Walker’s paintings build upon the cinematic language of Los Angeles life. The icons and emblematic locations of the city are pulled throughout the constructed scenes. The main figure, a former Miss Colorado, becomes an actress in Walker’s paintings, playing into the fantasy and cinematic trope of the LA woman with the enviable life of ease and affluence. Using a hired model in a rented home in the hills, Caroline’s work becomes an appropriation of the process of movie making. Her paintings are captured moments of a carefully composed set, yet distanced from their photographic origins through painterly gestures that abstract the body and exaggerate the psychological space they inhabit.

Caroline Walker (b. 1982, Scotland) currently lives and works in London. She completed her MA at the Royal College of Art, London in 2009. Recent solo exhibitions include GRIMM Gallery, Amsterdam; ProjectB, Milan; Space K, Gwacheon; and Marlborough Fine Art, London. She has been included in numerous group shows including Whitechapel Gallery, London; Milan Triennale, Milan; Fine Arts Society, London; Lin & Lin Gallery, Taipei; and the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. Her work is included in many international collections including the Saatchi Collection, London; The Franks-Suss Collection, London; Shetland Islands Council; and the Woong Yeul Lee Collection, Korea.

Anat Ebgi is pleased to announce Not Right Now, the gallery’s fourth exhibition of American artist Elias Hansen. The exhibition will run from November 4th through December 16th. The gallery is located at 2660 S La Cienega Blvd, Los Angeles. Concurrently, a sister-show of Hansen’s work will run at Team (bungalow), located at 306 Windward Avenue in Venice, CA, from October 29 – December 17th.

Not Right Now is an ambitious installation consisting of two major sculptures. The exhibition’s centerpiece is a 400lb spidery chandelier from which hangs mismatched assortment of beakers and bulbs, some of which emit colorful light. Several smaller works consist of pairs of elegant blown glass objects, set into roughhewn wooden fixtures. With this show, Hansen exhibits a fascination with modes of display and the marriage of disparate materials: the delicate pipettes, flasks and beakers and their rugged driftwood armatures are given equal visual priority.

The other major sculpture is one of Hansen’s so-called “fountains” – elaborately jerry-rigged contraptions featuring buckets, hoses and light fixtures, which pour and recycle supplies of water. The simultaneous appearances of functionality and futility represent a central theme in Hansens’ oeuvre; the artist seeks to confound our dichotomous conceptions of decorative and utilitarian objects. The sculpture becomes a site of erasure, removing the lines of necessity and luxury, amateur and professional creativity.

The show at Team (bungalow) is comprised of a chandelier and fountain as well. However rather than displaying the pieces in an austere gallery space, the works will be installed overwhelming the domestic setting of the bungalow, offering the viewer a radically altered perspective from which to engage the sculptures.

Elias Hansen (b. 1979) lives and works in Washington State. Hansen graduated from New Orleans School of Glass and Print in 2001. Hansens’ work has been exhibited at public and private institutions including the Palais De Tokyo, Paris; American Academy in Rome, Rome; Albert Baronian, Brussels; Pomona College Museum of Art, Pomona; and Art Basel Hong Kong. His recent solo exhibitions have been held at Maccarone, NYC; Take Ninagawa, Tokyo; Cooper Cole, Toronto; Jonathan Viner, London; and Halsey McKay, New York.

Room 191. Follow a winding stone path to the entrance of this cozy room. Inspired by Mother Nature…the serene misty rock walls, rich earth-tone accents and the soothing effects of a waterfall create the perfect atmosphere to relax. King bed with rock waterfall shower.

Greeted by a delicate soundscape, listening to the fountain is a great way to wash your daily worries away: close your eyes or lie down, and let the unnatural sounds permeate your mind. Make your way to the Magic Tree portal and become a participant within the environment— a passageway into the paintings and the space they’ve absorbed. It is a definite destination for those who love a little fantasy in life. A little bit tawdry, a whole lot of fun.

Named for a room in at the Madonna Inn in San Luis Obispo, Neil Raitt’s second exhibition with the gallery transforms the space into a resplendent tableau. In Raitt’s newest compositions, his works have begun to dissolve away the edges, undermining senses of border and framing devices. Raitt’s circuitous compositions have eschewed their places on the canvas— expanding across the walls and onto the set like pieces dotting the environment.

In refining the language and expanding the vernacular of his craft, Raitt’s paintings-cum-installation proposes a new Romanticism. The sublime grows palpable yet skewed with its thrift store slatted walls and natural features embracing their artifice. The human-sized manifestation of his painted pines, mountains, and serene waterfalls lush with silk foliage merge the world of the canvases with the world they inhabit.

Anat Ebgi is pleased to announce Neil Raitt’s exhibition Misty Rock. The exhibition opens Saturday September 9, 6-8pm and is on view until October 21.

Neil Raitt (b. 1986, Leicester, UK) lives and works in Los Angeles and London. Raitt received his MA from the Royal College of Art, London in 2013. Raitt’s work has been exhibited at public and private institutions including the Centre d’art contemporain La Halle des bouchers, Vienne;  Villa Du Parc centre d’art contemporain, Annemasse; the DePaul University Art Museum, Chicago; and the Goss-Michael Foundation, Dallas. He was the is the recipient of the Northern Trust Acquisition Prize, 2016 and the Catlin Art Prize, 2014. Recent exhibitions include solo exhibitions with Nicelle Beauchene, NY and Mon Cheri, Brussels. Raitt will have an upcoming solo with Galerie Chez Valentin, Paris.

Anat Ebgi is pleased to announce Transmission, the gallery’s first exhibition with Toronto based artist An Te Liu. Transmission opens Friday June 9 from 6-8 pm, and will be on view until July 15.

For the exhibition, the artist will present ceramic and bronze sculptures carved and cast from styrofoam and domestic artifacts. Liu’s sculptures are coy compositions that appear strikingly familiar yet distant. Their seemingly unplaceable quality originates from their humble origins as packaging and found objects. The forms are carvings, mutations, and amalgamations of the protective layers that surround consumer goods. On a platform running the length of the gallery, the bronzes are raised from the physical space of the viewer. The platform is at once playing upon the tropes of museological installation practices and creating a theatrical space for the works.

Liu’s works occupy a conceptual space between definitions. Their chimeric quality allows them to be atemporal and coquettish— waltzing between opposing reads. A Pulcinella of sculpture, the works proffer multitudes of identities willfully embodying a paradox. Upon the stage-like platform, cast elements of chairs evolve and contort into animalistic trophies while packaging is cracked into the remains of historic ruins. The exhibition becomes a theater where the sculptures play ancient and futuristic roles, “primitive” and canonical; stoic modernism with a tongue planted firmly in its cheek.

An Te Liu (b. 1967, Tainan, Taiwan) lives and works in Toronto, Canada. His work has been exhibited in venues including the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Ursula Blickle Stiftung, the EVA International Biennial of Ireland, the Venice Biennale of Architecture, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Liu’s works are included in the permanent collections of The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery of Canada and The Art Gallery of Ontario.  In 2015, Black Dog Publishing released a monograph of his work with texts by Kitty Scott, Andrew Berardini, Pablo Larios, and Ken Lum. He is represented by Division Gallery in Montreal and Toronto, Canada.

Anat Ebgi is pleased to present Brass Tacks on view at the gallery from July 22nd through August 19th.

Organized by Ryan Wallace, Brass Tacks brings together artists who glean highly specific material spoils from the outside world to fuel and map their work environments. Drawing from piles of photograms, stacks of paper, shards of Perspex, spools of Targhee fibers, documentation of light reflections, measurements of body mass, and hoards of wooden furniture, all manner of actions are employed in forging the works in the show. Brass Tacks considers how from the mise-en-scène of the studio, subtractive selection is as informative as the additive actions that result in visible, finished, artworks. These eleven artists employ sculpture, ceramics, photography, collage, knitting, painting and glass blowing to address a variety of concerns while a spirit of place, accumulation, and editing pervades all.

Anat Ebgi is pleased to announce our first exhibition with Montreal born, Chicago based artist Magalie Guérin, No Body Knows. Comprised of intimately scaled paintings, the show continues Guérin’s exploration of defined shapes. An opening reception will be held Saturday April 22, from 6-8 pm and the exhibition will be on view until May 27.

Guérin’s compositions start with a ground of built up gesso that amounts to a surface with sinuous hard edges. The texture creates a topographic map where deep valleys and pleats contour and inform the bodily shapes arranged on the pictorial plane. Each of Guérin’s forms are without a referent but rather suggest something vaguely recognizable. The diversity of Guérin’s paint handling complicates the reading of figure/ground relationship within the works. The layering of shapes contributes to the paintings’ visual depth, often shifting their place while cementing their gravity and weight.

For the last few years, Guérin’s paintings have undergone formal and rigorous restrictions. Namely, the artist has only worked in small scale and with the repetition of a few shapes. By creating these rigid guidelines for the practice, the paintings are allowed to develop as variations on a theme. Despite their similar formal beginnings, each painting forms its own individuality through the process of paint application and editing. By working to build surface as well as reveal the layers underneath, the paintings consider both the image and the intimate experience of the studio. The sensual shapes of her canvases are traces of Guérin’s time, labor, and personal connection to the objects.

Magalie Guérin (b. 1973, Montreal) lives and works in Chicago. She has had recent solo exhibitions with Corbett vs. Dempsey, Lyles & King, and soon.tw. She has participated in several group exhibitions, most notably at Elmhurst College and College of DuPage. Her work has also been featured in Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago, Nicelle Beauchene, New York, and Julius Caesar, Chicago among others. In 2016, she released her first book Notes On, a compilation of studio writings, with The Green Lantern Press. Guérin is represented by Corbett vs. Dempsey.

 

 

 

1

All men who repeat a line from Shakespeare are William Shakespeare.

2

It seems like a simple case of real versus copy, a mimesis with two terms. Rather they renounce direct imitation by using colors that are clearly artificial and fantastic: greens, reds and blue. As much as they imitate canvas they dramatise their status as independent form. Which is to say that three degrees or levels of representation are in play, not just two: the surface of the actual canvas, made of cotton and bought at the store; the hand woven canvas, whose simulation is both approached and renounced; and the painting itself, the lines and color patches that have their own autonomy, in a median space between the poles of original and copy. When a representation is placed alongside or against the original, representation is raised to a higher power: it becomes ‘simulation’. After all, that something can be accurately represented need have no bearing on the status of the original: representation does not necessarily produce of itself the idea of competition between the original and copy, or of the copy’s independent power. But when the copy stands adjacent to or in the place where one would expect the real thing, something more is involved; the original loses its autonomy, it becomes the first in a series that also includes fictions.

3

white=red=black=blue=yellow=green=violet

4

If anything, this work begins as an attempt to make something, if not nothing.

5

One may say that this painting no longer has any plastic character, but that it is indicative or critical; among other things, indicative/critical of it’s own process. This zero/neutral degree of form is “binding” in the sense that the total absence of conflict eliminates all concealment (all mythification or secrecy) and consequently brings silence. One should not take neutral painting for uncommitted painting.

6

It is a complete thing. Anyone can see it and everyone is certain that it is a complete thing, and some are certain it is a complete thing and some are feeling it as being existing, a complete thing, and certainly it is a complete thing, and certainly then it is in a way a gentle thing, that is to say a gently complete thing, that is to say a thing that is a complete thing and some are certain of this thing.

7

I don’t become important, things just pass through me. I’m an appropriator.

Ethan Cook (b. 1983 in Texas) lives and works in New York, NY. Cook has exhibited at institutions including the Fondazione 107, Turin; National Museum of Capodimonte, Naples and the Chelsea Art Museum, New York. The artist has shown internationally at galleries including T293, Milan; Sadie Coles, London; American Contemporary and Bodega, New York. His work and practice has been covered by the New York Times, Interview Magazine and W Magazine. This is the artist’s first solo show with the gallery.

Anat Ebgi is pleased to present Other Places, the gallery’s second solo show by the Swedish painter Sigrid Sandström, opening July 30 and on view until August 27.

Sandström’s practice actively interrogates the methods by which viewing initiates and elicits thought and cognition. Her newest body of work consists of a series of portrait-sized paintings hung at equal distance throughout the gallery. As a gestural template, each painting comprises an assortment of brushstrokes impastoed onto intimately-scaled panels colored vividly with swatches of magenta, industrial yellow and concrete grey. With wide gestures applied alongside delicately-painted trompe l’oeil motifs, Sandström situates the dialectic of her practice relationally to the perspective of the viewer.

Sandström’s work engages in the ontology of painting and viewing; how relatively few elements of pigment, stretcher bars and Masonite panels convey complex relationships and sensations far beyond their immediate sensorial qualities. Her idiomatic use of paint explores relationships of experience and materiality, as when a stripe of paint has the likeness of an index card or a strip of tape stuck to the panel’s surface. These motifs both encode and reveal the phenomenological space within her painting where presence and perception supercede material reality. It is in this space that the viewer is connected with their self-awareness as a perceptual agent. They are caught between the awareness of themselves and the transcendent experience of the external object.

Sigrid Sandström (b. 1970) is a painter and Professor of Fine Art at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm, Sweden. She lives and works in Stockholm. Her work has been shown in numerous international institutions including Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, Borås Konstmuseum, Borås, the Contemporary Art Museum, Houston, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and the Dallas Center for Contemporary Art. Her work is part of public and private collections including the Borås Konstmuseum, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita and the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven. In addition to her work as a painter, she has edited and published several scholarly books and anthologies on painting including Sigrid Sandström: The Site of Painting (Art & Theory: 2016), Studio Talks: Thinking through Painting (Arvinius+Orfeus: 2015) and Grey Hope: The Persistence of Melancholy (Antopia: 2013). Copies of her most recent publication, The Site of Painting, will be available in conjunction with her show at the gallery.

Knut Ivar Aaser
Ethan Cook
Mika Horibuchi
Erica Mahinay

Curated by Miranda

If you pull back the curtain, you’ll find some scene — scattered fruits, glasses, a deck of cards, some animal tearing into the skin of a rotten fig. Each object is carefully placed, backed by a burgeoning ballet of dizzy flies and dusty butterflies. This dinner theater is about a passage; the mundane miracles of growth and rot. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity but it’s about a transition, not some memento mori. I arranged it for you, but it seems you let the candle burn out.

I can’t think of a better place for the smoke and mirrors, seated precariously next to someone’s peach. You can’t help but want the flesh when things look better than they taste. A spiraling curl of a citrus peel is sensuous, but it’s bitter to the tip of the tongue. Fruit is a fickle friend. Bitter. Then sweet. Then putrid. Either way it ends up on someone’s plate, yours or theirs.

Carrion, musk and sickly sweets are to be savored. An herbaceous preparation, a perfume of putrescense hangs heavy like a dead swan. There’s still some graceful gesture in a long neck, she nods to dinner and winks to the wheel. Fortune favors none save some and I’m certain our friends have all found theirs.

But if it’s about the extravagance, opulence is a virtue. I say go and gild the lily. Abundance is a luxury and with all the world’s possessions, there are plentitudes to procure. It isn’t excess if it’s just enough.

In order to read what has never been written, look deeply onto a blank wall, an obscured face or a glimpse of human form. Every perception is fertile with meaning–even a perceived absence provokes a search for a hidden piece or illusory presence. Images of two hands, hung closely apart, will guide the eyes towards the unseen arms of the body that binds them together. While a keyboard spacebar inputs distances between characters, this spacing also unifies words in the structure of a sentence. Legibility is found in the perception of what is real, what is present and what is possible.

Anat Ebgi is pleased to present Quote Unquote, Amie Dicke’s second solo show at the gallery, composed of photographic prints, mixed media assemblages and raw color ink plates. In this new series of work, Dicke interrogates the language of visual culture through breaks, spaces and intervals of absence. Each item used by the artist is a quotation of an existing structure, an artifact of a previous visual or material identity culled from print media, archived photography or found studio materials. Dicke’s work interrogates these existing visual mediums through sandpaper abrasions, selective framing, cropping and other deviations

Expanding on her “corrected artwork” series, Dicke’s new body of work introduces pairings between similar formal elements taken from varying sources and materials. A pair of crossed women’s legs and a boy’s folded arms echo one another in two photographs, yet are differentiated by each figure’s skin tone and background color—black and white become inverted notions. Another pairing shows two sets of hands gesturing at a quotation mark, but are subtracted from the male figure lurking invisibly between the frames. Dicke’s Split Self is composed of two images that remove the center of a female face, yet, through this removal, open up her identity to an infinite number of possibilities. A further elaboration of the unwritten is explored in two mosaics of meticulously arranged crayons. 

In rooting her work between the threshold of presence and possibility, Amie Dicke actively engages in the sequences and contingencies that structure visual language and human perception.

Amie Dicke (b. 1978) lives and works in Amsterdam, Netherlands. She received her masters at the Willem de Kooning Academy of Fine Arts in Rotterdam. Dicke has shown internationally at galleries and institutions including the Gemeente Museum, The Hague, Stigter van Doesburg and Castrum Peregrini, Amsterdam, Peres Projects, Berlin and Hiromi Yoshii Gallery, Tokyo. Her work is included in collections including Gemeentemuseum The Hague, Collection Rob Defares, Direct Art Collection, the Zabludowicz Collection, Collection Rik Reinking, Takashi Murakami and the City Collection of Rotterdam through the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen. Upcoming exhibitions include her solo show at Looiersgracht 60, Amsterdam.

Anat Ebgi is pleased to present Double Blind, the gallery’s second solo exhibition with Margo Wolowiec, on view January 30 through March 12, 2016. Wolowiec’s newest series of work expands upon her distinct woven practice with three new freestanding sculptures grounded by a large double-paneled wall work.

In this body of work, Wolowiec continues her examination of digitally sourced images while presenting the viewer with a conflicted field of doubles. An automated algorithm triggered by various ‘trending’ hashtags yield colorful, suggestive imagery. The images are abstracted through the artist’s process of dye sublimation transfer onto polymer threads and weaving them together on a handloom. Like a double blind procedure in which neither the subjects nor those administering the experiment know what is at stake, Wolowiec’s practice mixes chance and intention. The exhibition’s title also references the way visual stimuli are translated into meaningful information, distorted, or forgotten. The proliferation of images and visual trends in social media and net culture serve as a point of contestation for Wolowiec, who sees social media platforms as conflicted systems that entangle the personal and private with the corporate. Wolowiec manipulates the sourced representations of femininity culled from individual profiles as well as from advertisements and magazines, creating a strained duality between the two.

Wolowiec’s gridded compositions make use of the internet’s predominantly rectangular image format as well as weaving’s inherent checkered logic. The role of the artist’s hand in abstracting this grid, while borrowing techniques from painting and photography, represents a challenge to both. In both her wall works and her freestanding woven pieces, distinct lines are blurred and images misaligned. Woven fabric can be viewed from the front and the back, while transparency in the weave allows both sides to merge into a whole. Images repeat from one work to the next in varying degrees of legibility, akin to repetitive advertisements that have been absorbed into the subconscious realm. Subtle, surprise elements woven into the fabric further contribute to the sculptural dimension of the freestanding works.

The freestanding pieces in this exhibition mark a continued foray into the territory of sculpture, pairing architectural steel with woven panels. Referencing the dimensions of a doorframe, these new works signify transition and multiple dualities—in/out, seen/unseen—indicating an exploration of the threshold as a space for transformation.

Margo Wolowiec (b.1985) received a BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA from California College of the Arts, San Francisco. Her work has been exhibited internationally in galleries and institutions including Lisa Cooley, New York, Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco, Laura Bartlett Gallery, London, and the Di Rosa Foundation, Napa, CA, among others. Her work is in the collections of the Kadist Art Foundation, San Francisco, CA, and the Detroit Center for Photography, Frame/s, Digital Gallery of Lens Based Media. She has lectured at Maryland Institute College of the Arts, Baltimore, and San Francisco State University, San Francisco. Wolowiec lives and works in New York.

Anat Ebgi Gallery is pleased to present If She Hollers, a solo show of new video, photography and installation works by Jen DeNike.

Mining Hollywood filmic archetypes and the cult of masculinity, Jen DeNike presents a series of three vignettes that challenge static notions of gender, race and sexuality. Taking the exhibition name from Chester Himes’ 1945 novel If He Hollers, Let Him Go, DeNike traces the motivations of Himes’ protagonist who fails to find a more tolerant and accepting society in the Californian idyll. DeNike expands on this sense of lost paradise in her new body of work, with characters confronting the limits of gendered roles and struggling to transform themselves in settings laden with thematic significance.

Navigated through her distinct cinematic gesture, DeNike’s character motifs allude to fixed notions of gender-racial narratives: the spectacle of male physical power, the ambiguity of gender and the thresholds of self-transformation. The unfolding narratives occur within the coordinates of a boxing ring shot in black-and-white, a pimped out garage turned reality TV catwalk and poolside vistas; settings of physical altercation, warrantless interloping and musing self-expression. Yet while DeNike’s settings are extracted from familiar cultural references, her characters are shown in forms of confrontation against the backdrop, seeking to transform themselves outside their immediate physical presence.

The show’s three protagonists “The Boxer”, “The Cat” and “The Pimp” interweave elements adapted from references ranging from Joe Lewis to Alice in Wonderland and RuPaul’s Drag Race. While these references merge elements of race, gender and mass media, DeNike seeks to question these images and the inherent complexities of their portrayal. In “The Boxer”, the camera’s fixation on his sinewy, exhausted physique exposes the fantasy of an invincible masculinity through the body undergoing transition from the combat of the boxing ring to the idleness of a resting pose. While the boxer functions as a spectacle of masculine power, “The Pimp” displays the performative nature of gender expression as he takes on the role of the drag queen Jori <3. Her self-transformation becomes expressed through ever-greater displays of her own whimsy until she defiles her den by spray painting it with black hearts. This act of self-effacement acknowledges that she may only become herself once she seeks to transcend beyond her projected reality of moving images. This tension between the projected self and the other is further explored in “The Cat”, as it follows an ambiguous character dressed as the Cheshire Cat meandering through nine backyard pools in Los Angeles, eventually confronting his doppelgänger. The “Cat”, both as actor and performer, is a poolside symbol of ceaseless deviation, a foil of both leisure and desire in a Los Angeles of vacillating aspiration increasingly untethered from reality.

Caught within the double-bind of situational context and dissonance, DeNike’s protagonists depict subjects in transition, set adrift in the psychogeography of Hollywood projection. Only with the embrace of the mysterious logic of the transition can the figures become themselves, transcending beyond merely moving images.

Jen DeNike lives and works in Los Angeles and New York. She received her MFA at Bard College and also completed a Master Class with Stephen Shore. Her work has been exhibited internationally in galleries and institutions including MOMA, Eastman House,  54th Venice Biennale, Garage Projects Moscow, Palais de Tokoyo, MOMA PS1, KW Berlin, Faena Art Center in Buenos Aires, Julia Stoschek Collection, Kunstlerhaus Stuttgart,  Zendai Museum of Modern Art, Shanghai, Cobra, Netherlands, MOCA Toronto, MACRO ROMA, Madre Museum, Palace for the Arts, Naples, Tensta Konsthall in Sweden, Site Gallery in England, Hessel Museum of Art and the Long Beach University Gallery. Commissioned projects and performances have included Creative Time, LAND Los Angeles Nomadic Division, Miami Art Basel Art Public, Grey Area, Performa Biennial, Chris Bicalho Collection performance sponsored by Brazilian Vogue & Christies for the Sao Paulo Biennial and PopRally MOMA. Her work is in the permanent collection of Julia Stoschek Collection, Il Giardino dei Lauri Collection and The Museum of Modern Art.

We got in touch when he sent me a friend request. He looked interesting, somewhat basic, but had agreeable features; a masculine, angular face with contours where it mattered.

He messaged me, “hey girl what’s up?”, and I responded, “not much, listening to music.” We went from there and discussed mundane subjects, surfing, juice bars and a nostalgia for ‘90s alternative. The conversations went on and off for a few days until he gave me his number.

What began as a text interchange of emojis, memes and pets soon became a sordid feed of selfies and nudes with the accompanying detail shots. Though the angles of his body were always twisted, even obscured, it still hinted at a genuine attractiveness.

A few weeks passed and we decided to meet up. I planned a vacation in Arizona close to an area with brilliant rock formations and craggy, sedimentary valleys. I still didn’t know his true name, but that didn’t matter, and neither did the fact that he didn’t have a working credit card. I booked the trip, and the airfare. ‘He’d pay me back,’ I thought.

I drove out to the hotel early, expecting to see him upon arrival. Hours passed, then the evening went by. I checked my messages, no response, and then looked online.

Anat Ebgi is pleased to announce Hungarian artist Gergö Szinyova’s first solo show of work in Los Angeles, opening August 1 until August 22, 2015.

Based in Budapest, Hungary, Szinyova’s paintings are composed of a distinct process of layer making that structures and defines each surface. Successive layers of acrylic paint are applied with airbrush, squeegee and palette knife, then let to dry in order to form a chronology of mark-making and blunt gesture that unfolds across each canvas. Earlier brushstrokes become concealed, while others remain obscured behind the filter of further layers. Szinyova’s elaboration of surface is not narrative, but rather refers to the process by which each mark is revealed and dissolves back into the composition of the medium.

For this series of work, the industrial hues of grey, ochre, violet and spearmint reflect on the imagery that influences Szinyova’s painting, gathered from browsing the internet for photographs of modernist environments. The artist translates the experience of browsing, and the urban human environment, as an abstracted memory of kinetic gestures and hidden content.

Gergö Szinyova (b. 1986) lives and works in Budapest, Hungary and studied at the Hungarian University of Fine Art. Recent exhibitions include a solo presentation at LISTE and group shows at the Trafó House and with Flash Art Hungary in Budapest. Upcoming shows include a group show at ICA-D, Budapest.

For more information, please contact Stefano di Paola: stefano@anatebgi.com or call (310) 838- 2770. Please note that gallery hours in August will be Wednesday – Saturday, 12pm-5pm, or by appointment.

Keep track of this jumble, it’s important to know how it all works out. Rich people look like candy, but their facials aren’t cheap. Today’s headache predicates another night of heavy drinking. Tylenol® should help with that.

A trip to the mall is a trip to the liquor store; a throwaway experience. Marbled interiors and glossy surfaces are the best places to find silk socks or finely aged whiskey. It’s the finest on display until it’s usurped in the fall; hangovers always remain in season.

Confidence is a convertible sprayed by a sprinkler with red lipstick smeared on the rich leather seats. Ruined bed sheets and carpet stains only add to this unfolding Jack Pollock of salty virility. White always can use a good dose of pigment, anyway, and the credit card will always cover the mess.

Between the Ativan in the medicine cabinet and the oxfords in the closet, an unfolding narrative emerges. A triumph of disposable income is hanging on the living room wall. Those rich, deep hues are a damn good thing to look at while getting in her pants.

There is no need to explain when the television is on and Marcello has the whip, Asa nisi masa. It’s classic, all in black and white with a touch of grey. Before you: voyages between meeting rooms, cocktail lounges and blackout moments between two legs.

It’s the best a man can get.

Anat Ebgi is pleased to present A Guide to Benefits, the first Los Angeles solo show of New York-based artist Martin Basher. Expanding upon the lineage of display-based artistic practices, Basher’s work taps consumer psychology, sublimated desire and masculine gaze. The title of the exhibition refers to credit card protections, customer loyalty programs and the masochistic intimacy of encounters between associates, clients, friends and partners.

For his solo exhibition, Basher will present a series of paintings and collages featuring his signature motif of flawless oil-painted gradated stripes, along with a site specific sculpture made from plexiglass, aluminum, chrome and everyday consumer goods. Marking a new development in the work, A Guide to Benefits brings photo-real renderings of legs and liquor glasses into the paintings and collages, making an explicit link between the paintings and the retail forms that constitute his sculpture. The objects and images resonate with the emotional undercurrents of consumerism. The consumer’s appetite is insatiable; customer loyalty is only as good as its dopamine kick. In this context, Basher’s work wryly locates the sublime on the shop floor and gallery wall in equal measure.

Martin Basher was born in 1979 in Wellington, New Zealand and lives and works in New York. The artist received his MFA at Columbia University. He has shown internationally at public institutions including University of Connecticut, Art In General, Auckland Art Gallery, and The Public Art Fund. Recent solo exhibitions include Starkwhite, Auckland and Saatchi & Saatchi, New York. Basher has been included in group shows at 179 Canal, Tracy Williams, New York and Brand New Gallery, Milan. Basher has an upcoming solo exhibition this fall with Brand New Gallery, Milan.

The painter observes the landscape, takes a palette knife and graces the canvas. It creates a geometric smudge of paint. Two more palette knife strokes and a mountain begins to form. It looks coarse, but with a background brush and some applied magic white, the slopes begin to distinguish themselves covered in heavy snowfall. Another mountain begins to form, just to the top right, and then another on the bottom left. The bottom of each mountain denotes a new mountain, just as each peak dissolves into a new one. One mountain, ten mountains, a canvas of mountains.

Whether you’re climbing mountains or relaxing in your estate housing, your Kappa tracksuit is affixed with the logo of two figures sitting back-to-back. Kappa’s range of football jerseys display the wearer’s affinity for clubs like West Ham, Tottenham and Leicester City. The sleeves carry the Kappa logo repeated down the sides of the tracksuits. Two figures on top, twenty down the sleeve, a line of figures down the leg. You never forget the hook ups, breakups and fuck ups you’ve experienced while wearing your Kappa tracksuit.

“I hope you are plagued with dissatisfaction your entire life,” said Bob Ross. Because that’s what makes you want to paint another forest, a hundred forests, a whole career of forests—the Sundaypainter understands the rigors of landscape painting as a leisurely pursuit. The pigments may be oil or watercolor, and are applied in gestures that create an illusion of depth, perspective and reflect the unfolding delicacy of natural light. Every landscape is different with varied nuances, yet the process remains similar. In one painting, Alizarin Crimson, Indian Yellow and Sap Green are brought onto the palette board and mixed together to create a mountain cabin within a placid, densely forested valley.

Each painting ceaselessly samples these idyllic images on repeat. One loop, ten loops, a whole tape of mixed signals. The languages are chopped and screwed, each ripple giving way to the next in an arc of color. Tie-dyed in the age of photoshopped flawlessness. The sojourn continues from each point in continued cyclical motion. The tape player’s heads are worn, the sound crackles with fuzz and it skips from overuse. The song has changed, but it is still the same rhythm.

Well, the little clock on the wall says we’re just about out of time. Happy painting and God bless.

Neil Raitt (b. 1986) recently graduated from the Royal College of Art. Raitt’s work has been exhibited at public and private institutions including the Goss-Michael Foundation, Dallas and is the recipient of the Catlin Art Prize 2014. Recent exhibitions include group shows at Untitled NYC and Choi and Lager, Cologne. Upcoming exhibitions include group shows at The Hole and Super Dakota. He lives and works in London.

Upon the pedestals rest pot metal, a croquet ball, a bowl, copper tubing, a gourd and some shrink-wrap. The wall works are made of Ultracal and ringed with rubber hose, a jump rope and plastic. The pedestals are built of pine, birch, maple; some finished with altered wallpaper patterns, shellac and acrylic paint.

“Jason, you might consider combining the sections of the thin floor lamps to make one of two endless columns.”

The objects upon each pedestal are found in thrift and second-hand stores. The motley collection is bought by the artist’s father-in-law and boxed and sent to Losh. He uses these items and constructs them into particular compositions, sequences and arrangements.

“You should consider that sculpture is elusive. It presents too many faces at once.”

The surface of each component is carved with a distinct history. Cracks, dents and paint abrasions that have accrued over decades distinguish their weathered surfaces. The wall sculptures are laced with ropes and etched with lines that record the artist’s hand.

“Consider that presentness is grace.”

The pedestals are either laid bare or laid with William Morris wallpaper patterns. They are essential objects that contain the elegant, gestural movement of each piece through consummating their raw presence.

“Jason, simplicity is complexity resolved.”

Jason Bailer Losh’s works are composed of everyday materials repurposed into wholly new objects. They feel visible and familiar, yet relate outside of their tactility and functionality. Through the artist’s hand, common, commercial and domestic objects are exposed of their sculptural, formal and physical dimensions.

“Well, good for plow Louise.”

Anat Ebgi is pleased to announce Plow Louise, the gallery’s first solo exhibition with Los Angeles based sculptor Jason Bailer Losh. The exhibition opens February 27th and is on view until April 4th. An opening reception will be held Friday, February 27th from 7-9PM.

Jason Bailer Losh (b. 1977, Iowa) received his MFA from School of Visual Arts, New York. Losh’s work has been recently exhibited at several public and private institutions including The Museum of Love and Devotion, at Fairview Museum of Art and History in Fairview, Utah; the Gala at Greystone for LAXART, Los Angeles; and Rockaway!, an exhibition organized by Klaus Biesenbach at PS1/Rockaway Surf Club, NY. Losh has also participated in Soft Target, a group exhibition curated by Phil Chang and Matthew Porter at M+B Gallery, Los Angeles; and Building Materials, a group show curated by Lucas Blalock at Control Room, Los Angeles; and a group exhibition at CANADA, NY. He lives and works in Los Angeles.

Anat Ebgi is pleased to present the first solo exhibition of New York based artist Nicholas Pilato, opening on January 10 and on view through February 21, 2015.

For his solo exhibition, Pilato debuts a series of paintings consisting of concrete and oil paint on canvas. Each work combines gritty textures and a rich color palette evoking nature and organic substances. The paintings are material compositions, disrupted through varying phases of deterioration, abrasion, and formal displacement. The canvases are scraped and broken down into abstract gestures and diffuse patterning. This excavation creates surfaces of raw texture and color, invoking aspects of sedimentation, erosion and industrial decay.

Alongside the concrete and oil paintings, Pilato introduces compositions of hand-glazed commercial tiles. Undermining the minimalist relationship to the grid, the glossy surface of the ceramic paintings are more reminiscent of Roman glass vessels which reveal their luminosity through centuries of decomposition. In a further exploration of abstraction, these sensuous surfaces contrast the pitted matte painting on canvas.

Pilato’s work blurs the distinction between material incident and artist intervention. In the vein of Pierre Bonnard’s relationships between color and memory, the lyrical abstraction refrains from any direct representation—seeking to engage the viewer’s perception through displacement and familiarity. The idiosyncrasy of the work suspends any immediate tangibility, and instead invites multiple meanings to be drawn upon the textures, color, light, and materials that are pushed together with the artist’s distinct tempo and vitality.

Nicholas Pilato (b. 1986) lives and works in New York and received his MFA from Rutgers University, New Jersey in 2013. Recent exhibitions include group shows at IDEA Miami, Annarumma Gallery, Naples, Michael Jon Gallery, Detroit and Museo Britanico Americano in Mexico City. Upcoming exhibition include a group show with Bryce Wolkowitz, New York and a solo presentation with Anat Ebgi at Miart, Milan in April.

Anat Ebgi is pleased to announce the first Los Angeles exhibition of New York based artist Luke Diiorio, opening November 1 and on view through December 20, 2014.

Luke Diiorio’s paintings are minimal compositions made of canvas and linen, methodically and repeatedly folded in a linear pattern. The folds of the works conceal much of the fabric— the physical process of folding leaves only one-third of the material visible. Through this process, Diiorio exposes the potential of repetition within material. Almost completely neutral in color, the works are either bleached white with faint blotches of pigment or left in their original raw state. The presentation of the raw material is simultaneously the structure, surface and composition of the work.

Alongside these paintings is an installation of site-specific sculptures of rough interior walls that have been sliced and collapsed upon themselves. These “folded” walls contain all the necessary materials of a functional studded drywall, but the structures cease to operate as the objects they resemble. Both the canvas and walls are dissolved of their functional flatness— they can never go back to being a flat surface for other content. Like the canvas and linen of the paintings, most of the physical material is hidden beneath the surface and becomes an assumed presence; the invisible as important as the visible.

In an attempt to eradicate all narrative content from his work, Diiorio’s folded compositions exist as an artifact of pure gesture and material. Regardless of the works’ dependence on materiality and process, the sculptural works are indebted to an unmistakable presence of the artist’s hand. Drawing from sources like Agnes Martin whose hand-drawn gridded pieces appear minimal but are deeply imbued with indexical traces, each fold differs slightly from the next. The imperfect handmade quality of the works is something intrinsic, but faint and barely perceptible. It is through tempo and repetition that the works can oscillate between opposites. By balancing the utilitarian and handcrafted; the visible and the concealed, Diiorio’s works become at once a dialectic and a tautology— each fold a meditative experience.

Luke Diiorio (b.1983) lives and works in New York and received his MA from the Royal College of Art, London in 2013. Recent exhibitions include a solo presentation at Robert Blumenthal Gallery in New York. Forthcoming exhibitions include group shows at Brand New Gallery, Milan and Kinman Gallery, London.

Anat Ebgi is pleased to announce Aftermarket Interior, Factory Paint, a solo exhibition of new works by Joe Reihsen opening September 13 and on view until October 25, 2014.

Aftermarket Interior, Factory Paint is Joe Reihsen’s third solo exhibition with Anat Ebgi, and his first show in the newly expanded gallery space. In his previous show, Clean Title, No Accidents, Reihsen focused on an intimate scale of works, akin to the size of a computer screen or sheet of paper. For this exhibition, Reihsen continues his exploration of the medium of paint, but on large-scale surfaces. Each panel deftly synthesizes three particular methods that Reihsen utilizes— the background stripes, gestural swathes of gesso emphasized with pneumatic painting devices, and the newest addition of paint “skins” applied to the top most layer of the abstraction.

The amalgamation of Reihsen’s techniques creates panels that are entrenched in the language of abstract painting, while still exerting their relationship to contemporary digital culture. Like the ubiquitous digital screen, each of Reihsen’s panels contains a profound sense of physical depth while remaining almost entirely flat. Aftermarket Interior, Factory Paint is a collection of Joe Reihsen’s most sophisticated works in which the tensions between abstraction, digital technology and industrial materials are collapsed into monumental paintings.

Joe Reihsen (b. 1979. Blaine, Minnesota) lives and works in Los Angeles. Joe received his BFA in painting and New Genres at the San Francisco Art Institute. In 2008, Joe received an MFA from the University of California, Santa Barbara where he was awarded the UC Regents Fellowship. Recent exhibitions include a solo presentation at Miart Milan. Upcoming exhibitions include a solo shows at Brand New Gallery, Milan titled Factory Paint, Aftermarket Interior, and Praz-Delavallade, Paris.

Anat Ebgi is pleased to announce I’m a long way from home and I don’t really know these roads, an exhibition of new sculpture by Elias Hansen opening Saturday January 11 and on view until February 22, 2014.

Working in Upstate New York, Hansen’s work is very much rooted in his current and past backcountry surroundings. Having lived on an isolated island in the Pacific Northwest for much of his life, he is no stranger to the wilderness. His art incorporates this while forcing its observer, often an urbanite, to ask ‘what goes on out there’?

The work comprises of hand blown glass pipettes, flasks and beakers displayed with found driftwood and arranged as rudimentary laboratories. Left dripping, bubbling or with LED lights flickering, the pieces appear to be recently abandoned; it is as if their creator has just fled the scene. Indeed, this seems like the apt conclusion to draw given their nature. With their titles reflecting possibly nefarious inspirations, we ask: are these functional? What do they distil? Their handcrafted appearance dissuades us of any scientific endeavour and lends them a mystical feel. Never certain whether we are looking at a meth lab or a witch doctors potion prep station, the juxtopositions of objects perplex the viewer.

The new work incorporates materials sourced from his geographical area, as well as historical references. This broadening of materials reflects the increasingly blurred lines in the artist’s life. He is the first to admit an uncertainty as to which of the objects in his home are art and which are his day-to-day trappings. The closeness of the artist’s life and work is something that you can sense with all of Hansen’s pieces. Each object feels manipulated and crafted so that it is hard to tell what is found and what is made. The end result is unsettling and mysterious, yet familiar. When one encounters Hansen’s installations, a feeling as if you’ve been implicated in his process, and not simply a bystander.

Originally from Indianola, Washington, Hansen currently lives and works in Upstate New York. Recent exhibitions include solo presentations at LISTE, Basel and Frieze Frame, London, with Jonathan Viner, London, UK; Maccarone, NY, Balice Hertling, Paris, and The Company, Los Angeles. Hansen’s work has exhibited in the Seattle Art Museum, WA, Howard House Contemporary Art, WA, and Parc Saint Leger, Paris (with Oscar Tuazon). Selected press includes articles in Art Review, Mousse Magazine, Art Agenda, Art Forum, Los Angeles Times, and The Stranger. He has been awarded the PONCHO Special Recognition Award from the Seattle Art Museum. This is Hansen’s fourth exhibition with the gallery.

Anat Ebgi is pleased to announce PRIMA MATERIA, an exhibition of new paintings by Jay Stuckey. The show will open Saturday September 28 and run through November 9th. The opening reception will be held on Saturday September 28 from 5-7pm. This exhibition will inaugurate the newly expanded gallery space located at 2660 S La Cienega Blvd in Culver City.

For Jay Stuckey’s second exhibition, the artist delves deeper into dreams and archetypical imagery. The paintings utilize an aoristic approach — an action without denoting whether completed, begun, or repeated — composing a perpetual grand narrative harkening back to allegorical and historical painting.

Launching from Stuckey’s previous works, the imagery in these new paintings gets pushed back, capturing the outlines and textures of faded fragments of memory, akin to the quality of dreams. They also ask more from the viewer, the images slowly boil up to the surface over a course of time, rather than immediately. Layers of oil paint, oil stick, crayon, and torn paper create a wall-like surface with scrawling figures of various sizes, veering away from the traditional pictorial plane.

By using dreams as subject matter, Stuckey consequently taps into the collective unconscious where the union of opposites manifest – male and female, love and war, darkness and light. In the large scale painting Guardians of the Secret, a smiling couple nestled inside a bus unaware, or hiding from, the dangerous and violent world outside the vehicle. These polarities are a reflection of our collective psychological condition – layered with complexities, sometimes perverted, vulnerable, and humorous.

Along with the union of opposites is a conflation of time and space. In the painting Pallas Athena II, the mythological goddess Athena shares the same canvas as a contemporary blonde female figure smoking a cigarette. As in dreams, the constructs of time and space are irrelevant, and the rules of logic are suspended.

 

PRESS

New American Paintings

Anat Ebgi is pleased to present Wassup Painters, a group show organized by Pavan Segal featuring work by Kerstin Brätsch, Paul Cowan, Cynthia Daignault, Liam Everett, Henrik Olai Kaarstein, and Molly Zuckerman-Hartung. The show will open on June 8, and will be on view until July 20. A reception will be held at the gallery on Saturday, June 8 from 6-9pm, at 2660 La Cienega Blvd in Culver City.

Wassup Painters brings together contemporary artists who approach painting through the use of nontraditional materials and innovative processes as a way of exploring new conceptual ground. Painting as a medium has a long and rich history and recent trends have focused on exploring and reinterpreting what has come before. In some contrast to this, Wassup Painters highlights artistic practices that push the possibilities of the medium into unexpected realms, blurring the boundaries between painting and other forms of object making.

The exhibition title references Larry Clark’s 2005 film Wassup Rockers, which features a group of Latino teenagers searching for identity in the racially diverse and ever changing South Central neighborhoods of Los Angeles. In the film, the teens are often mislabeled as “rockers” due to their long hair and black clothes even though they primarily self-identify as “skaters,” making them feel misunderstood in their own community. While many of the works in Wassup Painters have leanings toward painting, they could easily be perceived or labeled as other forms entirely, such as glasswork, photography, signage, deconstructed material, collage, sculpture, and fabric art. This show offers the opportunity to view works that have direct points of intersection with these forms of object making as a way of contemplating what comprises and defines painting, while asking what role context, intention, and expectation play in this process.

Kerstin Brätsch was born in Hamburg, Germany. She received Her MFA in 2007 from Columbia University. Solo exhibitions include Gavin Brown, New York and Balice Hertling, Paris. Select exhibitions include Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne (with DAS INSTITUT), Kunsthalle Zurich (with DAS INSTITUT), The 54th Venice Biennial (with DAS INSTITUT), MoMA/ PS1 (with DAS INSTITUT), Sculpture Center, New Museum, New York, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (with DAS INSTITUT). She lives and works in New York.

Paul Cowan was born in Kansas City, MI. He received His MFA in 2012 from University of Illinois at Chicago. In 2012, Cowan mounted a solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Solo exhibitions include Clifton Benevento, New York, and Shane Campbell, Chicago. Recently, his work has been included in group exhibitions at Kavi Gupta, Berlin, James Cohan Gallery, New York, and Thomas Duncan Gallery, LA. His work has been reviewed in Modern Painters, Kaleidoscope, Mousse Magazine, and Art Forum. He currently lives and works in Milwaukee.

Cynthia Daignault was born in Baltimore, Maryland. She attended Stanford University, and was a MacDowell Colony Fellow in 2010. She was invited for a solo exhibition at White Columns in 2011, which received a review in the October 2011 issue of Artforum. Solo shows include Lisa Cooley, New York and group shows at American Contemporary, New York, and Bureau, New York. Daignault is a recipient of the 2011 Rema Hort Mann Foundation Grant. She currently lives and works in New York.

Liam Everett was born in Rochester, NY. He has had solo shows at Altman Siegel, and Romer Young Gallery in San Francisco, Paul Kasmin Gallery, New York, and White Columns, New York. He has been included in group shows at 303 Gallery, New York, Canada, New York, Josh Lilley Gallery, London, and Wattis Institute, San Francisco, CA. In 2012, he received the Fellowship Award for the Artist in Residence program at Headlands Center For the Arts. He currenty lives and works in San Francisco, CA.

Henrik Olai Kaarstein was born in Oslo, Norway. He currently lives and works in Frankfurt, Germany. Solo exhibitions include T293, Rome, FIAC Paris, Holodeck, Oslo, D’Amelio Gallery, New York, and Leonhardi Kulturprojekte, Frankfurt. His work has been written about in New York times, Flash Art (Italy), and Artforum. He currently studies at Staatliche Hochschule fur Bildende Kunste Staedelschule, in Frankfurt Germany.

Molly Zuckerman-Hartung was born in Olympia, WA. In 2012, she presented her first solo museum show the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Recently, she was invited to participate in the group show, Painter Painter at the Walker Art Center. Molly is represented by Corbett vs Dempsey, Chicago. She teaches painting and drawing at the school of the art institute, and Northwestern University, and is co-founder of Julius Cesar, an artist run exhibition space in Chicago. She currently lives and works in Chicago.

Pavan Segal, M.D. is a child and adolescent psychiatrist that specializes in working with mentally ill teenagers and is a professor of clinical psychiatry based in Chicago. He has broad interests in contemporary art and is an independent curator, collector, and has collaborated with a number of artists on various projects. His interest in art focuses primarily on the role that experience, context, ideas, and personal psychology play in the production and interpretation of art. He most recently organized a group exhibition in the Summer of 2012 involving fourteen artists working across all mediums at D’Amelio Gallery, New York. This exhibition entitled, “Idea is the Object” focused on the early philosophical writings of John Locke and examined the role that experience plays in the conception of ideas and how this functions to facilitate the production of art objects and the perception of such works. This exhibition received a number of very favorable reviews including a large review in the New York Times by Roberta Smith. The next show that he is working on is entitled, “The Atlantic Effect” and will aim to compare and contrast the role and influence that regional histories play in artistic practices within the United States and Western Europe. This exhibition is slated for 2014 and will take place in Berlin.