Filed under: Art World, Boston | Tags: Andy Warhol, Boston, Richard Pryor, samsøn, Todd Pavlisko
Installation view, Todd Pavlisko: All of Nothing, Samsøn, Boston
Todd Pavlisko gets by with a little help from his friends. We swung by Samsøn while the New York-based artist and his crew were installing (and creating) the work that makes up his first solo show in Boston, All of Nothing, including a 10-foot tall portrait of Richard Pryor made up entirely of carefully placed, differently colored plastic retail price tag fasteners. Scattered among the paintings and drawings in the show are a few sculptural installations, including a colorful nest of tall, melted bongs (excuse me, water pipes) and two works made from workout benches originally belonging to Andy Warhol.
We caught a few shots of Todd & company while they were attaching thousands of individual price tag fasteners, one by one, with price tag guns (effectively giving Pryor an especially textural afro). More pipes, and pics, after the jump!
Filed under: Art Fairs, Art World, Boston, New York, On the Road | Tags: Armory Arts Week, Camilo Alvarez, samsøn, Summer Wheat, VOLTA NY
We last featured Summer Wheat in our list of 11 To Watch In 2011: Editor’s Picks, featuring our picks for the emerging artists to keep an eye on this year, and her booth for samsøn, Boston, at VOLTA NY doesn’t disappoint one bit. Her acrylic and oil portraits are downright haunting, and the pair of three-dimensional painted objects exhibited here reveal deep, romantic sculptural qualities in her paintings. Not to be missed if you make it to VOLTA NY this weekend.
Don’t miss samsøn (and our interview with owner/director Camilo Alvarez) in our recent video with Future Shipwreck at Art Los Angeles Contemporary. More Summer Wheat pics after the jump!
Filed under: Art Fairs, Art World, Los Angeles, On the Road, Video | Tags: Aaron Spangler, Angles Gallery, Camilo Alvarez, Charest-Weinberg Gallery, Country Club, Eric Charest-Weinberg, Iva Gueorguieva, Jessica Silverman, John Knuth, Katharine Mulherin, Lucky Dragons, Luke Butler, Luke Fishbeck, Matt Distel, Mike Bayne, Nicole Cherubini, Ooga Booga, Ryan McGinness, samsøn, Shannon Finley, Silverman Gallery, Wendy Yao
March Madness is here, and that can only mean one thing: art fairs. (And college basketball, I suppose.) As we at New American Paintings excitedly head to New York for The Armory Show, VOLTA, Pulse and the fairs this week, we’re reminded of how much fun we had at Art Los Angeles Contemporary recently. We teamed up with the talented Graham Kolbeins of Future Shipwreck—who last filmed Iva Gueorguieva in her studio—to interview dealers at Art LA and bounce from booth to shining booth. The result is a candid crop of gallerists revealing details about the work they’re exhibiting, and never-ending throngs of art-hungry visitors.
Dealers and featured artists include:
David Kordansky Gallery (LA): Richard Jackson
Camilo Alvarez (samsøn, Boston): Nicole Cherubini
Jessica Silverman (Silverman Gallery, SF): Luke Butler, Shannon Finley
Matt Distel & John Knuth (Country Club, LA): Ryan McGinness
Wendy Yao (Ooga Booga, LA): Luke Fishbeck (Lucky Dragons)
Angles Gallery (LA): Iva Gueorguieva
Eric Charest-Weinberg (Charest-Weinberg Gallery, Miami): Aaron Spangler
Katharine Mulherin (Katharine Mulherin Contemporary Art Projects, Toronto): Mike Bayne
Susanne Vielmetter (LA): Olga Koumoundouros, Andrea Bowers
Allegra LaViola Gallery (New York): Jennifer Catron & Paul Outlaw
If you happen to be scouting out work at the New York fairs this weekend, don’t forget our Armory Arts Week Twitter Contest where you can win a free year’s subscription to New American Paintings just by tweeting about NAP artists while you’re out and about.
—Evan J. Garza, Editor-at-large
Filed under: Q&A | Tags: 74, Evan J. Garza, nudes, Playboy, samsøn, Suzannah Sinclair
Installation view, Susannah Sinclair: Tomorrow is Here, samsøn, Boston
Suzannah Sinclair probably has more copies of Playboy than your dad. (And there’s a pretty good chance she’s putting them to better use.) Featured in edition #74 of New American Paintings, Sinclair has a thing for vintage nudes, and her ability to render them so subtly is matched only by her insistence on throwing the viewer into the interiors she reproduces. Her recent exhibitions have included objects from the spaces she paints, a practice she began with a solo show in Sweden and one that seeks to place the viewer within a furnished environment not unlike that of her subjects. I caught up this week with the Brooklyn-based artist to talk nudie magazines. —Evan J. Garza
EJG: Do you work from photographs? It seems as if many of these girls might be from decades ago. There’s a vintage quality to them. How do you procure your images and how do you work with them?
Yes I do, I paint from old men’s magazines from the ’60s and ’70s, mostly American but I am always on the lookout when I travel and have some great ones from Sweden. I’ve lost count of how many I have. A while a go my friend was cleaning out the house she grew up in and, between her father and her older brothers, there were a lot of Playboys. She gave them to me and it just kept going from there. During that era the bodies were real, pre airbrushing. I love the furniture and the textiles and even the print process that gives the photos an otherworldly saturation and hue.
Still Crazy, 2009 | Watercolor and pencil on birch panel, 16 x 22 inches. Courtesy samsøn, Boston.
Filed under: In the Studio | Tags: Anoka Faruqee, Evan J. Garza, George Condo, homoeroticism, queer, samsøn, Steve Locke
Featured in edition #86 of New American Paintings, Steve Locke makes work that is colorful, complex, and unapologetically human. Concerned with figuration and perceptions of the male figure, Locke’s paintings evoke richness in all its forms. I sat down last week with the Boston-based artist in his Hyde Park studio, where he lives and works, to discuss his paintings, his mother, and ideas of queerness. Above his door, a brightly-colored neon by the artist fluctuated between the phrases, “GOD IS LOVE” and “you little faggot.” —Evan J. Garza
EJG: Before we left for coffee, we were talking about those pieces (pointing to the wall) that feature a pattern of faces and those wonderful gradients of color, and you mentioned your mother.
My mother died of lung cancer in 2004 and I was back and forth between here, in Massachusetts, and Michigan, flying back and forth to take care of her. I’m a very anal retentive person and I schedule time to be in my studio, and I was so upset and so overwrought about it that I didn’t know what to do [while] in the studio, so I just tried to paint my mother’s profile from memory. And there’s tons of work in that series because I would just come into the studio and mix this color, gradient by gradient, just trying to ease the transition. I don’t normally talk about this work, it’s been hard to show, it’s been hard—all that sort of stuff—but I like you.
(Laughing.)
No, really! …It’s funny because I don’t—like I said, you’re the first person I’ve ever really spoken to, outside of my close friends, about what that work is about, but as I get older, and the event of my mother’s passing gets further and further into the distance, I feel like I have a different relationship to that work now. The hard part about it is I keep trying to change the content of that work to make it speak to people in different ways. I think that a lot of people misunderstand paintings. And that’s fine—sometimes that misunderstanding can be really interesting. With that work in particular, it’s always been so close, I didn’t want people to misunderstand it. I’ve always been very, sort of, protective of it.
EJG: And it must also be difficult because it is so conceptually different from the rest of the work that you make.
Very much so. I’ve always let people have their own experience with their eyes. I know that the modern moment is over where an object can talk about everything all at once. I think sometimes text is helpful. But with these paintings, for me to talk about where they came from would diminish their visual power, and they would start to become this sad thing, and instead I wanted them to be these sort of evanescent moments. And since then I’ve seen Anoka Faruqee, and her work is so brilliant, but working with the same idea with gradiation and stuff like that—her work leaning more towards abstraction and mine staying with a figurative basis because I think it’s the only thing I know how to paint. It doesn’t occur to me to paint anything else.
