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NOW ON VIEW! Michelle Grabner: Get Better Mrs. Michelle!, MINUS SPACE project space, Brooklyn, NY, March 27 – May 1, 2010 Michelle Grabner, Untitled, 2010 March 27 – May 1, 2010 MINUS SPACE project space MINUS SPACE is delighted to announce a new exhibition of drawings by Chicago-based artist Michelle Grabner. Grabner works primarily in painting, drawing, and printmaking, and her practice is commonly organized around straightforward mathematical systems. For her exhibition, Grabner will present a new series of drawings made from black gesso and silverpoint on heavyweight paper. In contrast to her other work, Grabner thinks of her drawing practice as “purely playing — it’s curiosity.” She continues saying, “The drawing just has to be executed, I have to play through it. I’m working on a lot of silverpoints right now; they’re not painting, but in their presence, I see them as an extension of painting.” Michelle Grabner has exhibited her work extensively, including in North America, Europe, and Australia. Her work has been presented at museums, such as the Milwaukee Art Museum (WI), Kunsthalle (Bern, Switzerland), Musee d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean (Luxembourg), Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago, IL), Smart Museum (Chicago, IL), Mary and Leigh Block Museum (Evanston, IL), Naples Museum of Art (Naples, FL), Ulrich Museum (Wichita, KS), and Tweed Museum of Art (Duluth, MN). Her work has been reviewed widely and is included in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago, IL), Musée d’Art Moderne (Luxembourg), Milwaukee Art Museum (WI), Daimler Art Collection (Berlin, Germany), and Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington, DC). Michelle Grabner is also a professor and chairperson of the Department of Painting and Drawing at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She holds an MFA in Art Theory and Practice from Northwestern University in Chicago, and an MA in Art History and BFA in Painting and Drawing from the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee. In addition to her artistic work, Grabner and her husband, artist Brad Killam, founded and direct The Suburban, a very well regarded, experimental exhibition space in Oak Park, Illinois. Grabner has also written extensively for publications, such as ArtForum, Modern Painters, Frieze, and X-tra. In collaboration with MINUS SPACE, Grabner recently organized the online VIEWLIST project There are many things in the air and all of them are for free, published in May 2009. Her work was also included in the group exhibition Open House for Butterflies at MINUS SPACE in August 2009. A comprehensive interview with Michelle Grabner by Saul Ostrow appears in the March 2010 issue of Art in America magazine. |
Sunday, March 28, 2010
Michelle Grabner
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
Momenta Benefit
Aron Namenwirth "peace pipe" pin oak, 3.5x.5x.5 2008-1010 (click on image to enlarge)
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 | save the date Annual Benefit may 26 discount tickets until april 30 | |||
| Brain Coral. 2010, benefit multiple by Katy Schimert. | ||||
| Order your tickets now for momenta art's annual benefit raffle and auction. All tickets purchased before april 30 will receive a $50 discount.
 Momenta Art presents its fifteenth annual benefit to support its ongoing mission to exhibit the work of emerging and underrepresented artists. A ticket guarantees you a work of art and entrance for two to the silent auction and raffle drawing held at White Columns Gallery on May 26. Tickets are limited to the number of artworks included. Tickets purchased after April 30 will cost $225. | ||||
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Friday, March 19, 2010
KWAWRK
KWAWRK
Charles Lahti
Steven Salzman
Boris Torres
March 19 - April 11, 2010
Gallery hours: Thursday - Sunday 1-6pm
or by appointment
Bowman / Bloom Gallery
95 East 7th Street, NYC
basement (between 1st Avenue & Avenue A)
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
Jim Torok
JIM TOROK
Portraits and Clowns
Jim Torok is known for both his photo realistic, miniature portraits and his narrative storyboard, cartoon-like paintings, both based on acute observation. His portraits are generally of ordinary people he knows—artists, friends, neighbors—and depict the everyday rather than celebrity status. They are small studies of fact and plainness. His cartoon works are simultaneously hilarious and sobering, innocently optimistic and cynical, because they state so plainly what is known but most often left unsaid.
In this exhibition Torok will focus on the portrait, both realistic and cartoon-like abstractions. In Gallery 1 will be a group of Torok's miniature portraits-each no larger than 5 x 4 inches-primarily of his upstate New York neighbors. Gallery 2 will be filled with a new series of cartoon-like clown portraits and text paintings. As clowns often are, these are both comic and sinister. One text painting reads “Life Is OK, Except for the Clowns.” Another reads, “You Are A Vibrant Human Being.” Stylistically, the two groups of paintings could not be more different. The miniature portraits are carefully painted in oil with great detail using extra-fine brushes, whereas the clown portraits are larger and loosely painted in acrylic with brushy strokes of color on panel. The abstraction and loose rendering of the clown paintings links Torok's portrait work with his storyboard panel paintings.
Regarding Torok's portraits, the curators of “Portraiture Now: Communities” write—
For Torok, the discoveries made through the process of creating a likeness are part of portraiture's appeal. By painting twenty-three members of a single family, he created a record of three generations; in doing so, he also confronted the larger issue of family resemblance. What are the traits that unite a family and other group relationships? This question is central to the idea of communities. (Fortune, Goodyear, Goodyear II, 2009)
Torok's portraits are compelling studies that range from objective, life-like representations of real people, to entirely subjective, spontaneous abstractions. The work in this exhibition demonstrates a dexterity that few besides Torok can accomplish so seamlessly. In a sense he is painting independently with his left and right brain, each with complete control. At first glance these two bodies of work appear completely unrelated but they do have a real and fortunate co-existence. These are paintings that interpret the human condition and Torok makes no judgment about the distance between them, as he views the world through a wide lens.
This will be Jim Torok's third one-person exhibition at Pierogi. Torok's work is currently on view in “Portraiture Now: Communities,” a three-person exhibition at The National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC and was recently included in “The Lens and the Mirror: Self-Portraits from the Collection, 1957-2007” (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC), “Attention to Detail,” (The FLAG Art Foundation, NYC, Curated by Chuck Close), among others. He received a MFA from Brooklyn College and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
