Marc LeBlanc presents Patrick Alt, Edward Clive, Ryan Fenchel, Alexis Knowlton, Eric Legris, and Justin Swinburne
The Forgotten Bar Project (Galerie Im Regierungsviertel) - 10967 Berlin-Kreuzberg, DE
February 09 – February 10, 2010
Patrick Alt's I Open Up The Gallery
Kavi Gupta Gallery - Kluckstrasse 31 - 10785 Berlin-Schöneberg
February 07 – February 07, 2010
Kavi Gupta Gallery Berlin is proud to present the debut solo exhibition of painter Patrick Alt. Although the gallery's inaugural exhibition was last September, Alt's daft exhibition title - "I Open Up The Gallery" - relates to a figurative suggestion rather than the exhibition's actual vernissage; Alt's exhibition is one to naively rediscover the space anew, in the same sense that Alt approaches his work as a painter. Included in the exhibition are a suite of the artist's abstract and bold oil canvasses as well as few painted bought objects installed throughout the gallery. Shot from the hip, Alt perpetually creates works that balance between the artist's reasoned and developed conceptual disciplines and one's will to make a new, heartfelt, and expressive work of art. The works' self-criticality arises from Alt's radical sense of trepidation, one that questions how an artist is able to break stride with their past and begin again.
Patrick Alt (b. 1976 in Frankfurt am Main) is currently completing his Meister Schule at Frankfurt's Städel Schule under Prof. Michael Krebber. Most recently Alt's work has been included in a group exhibition (Adrian Buschmann, Henning Straßburger, and Alt) at Galerie Fiebach & Minninger in Köln. Alt has also spent the past year making shows across continental Europe with the artist group Vandel (Philipp Schwalb, Henning Straßburger, Christian Rothmaler, Jannis Marwitz, and Alt). The group has made a series of exhibitions under their collective title, most recently at the AtelierFrankfurt in Frankfurt am Main and at Marks Blond Project in Bern, Switzerland. Alt lives in Frankfurt am Main; he maintains a studio there and in Berlin.
For more information and/or images, please contact the gallery at info@kavigupta.com or +49.162.800.7609/1.312.432.0708.
Carola Ernst's GATL, ROTT & VERTIGO
Kavi Gupta Gallery - Kluckstrasse 31 - 10785 Berlin-Schöneberg
November 13 – January 23, 2010
Kavi Gupta Gallery Berlin is proud to announce a new solo exhibition by German artist Carola Ernst. Working from a litany of potent literal and abstract images, Ernst's works draw a correlation between different turning-points, specifically the events when revolution hardens to become its own enemy or when hegemony dissolves to become all that it once sought to displace, and those same moments in aesthetics, when the order of composition is on the brink of yielding to chaos. Form and content taken together, Ernst's works are the embodiment of how the constitution of anything new always arrives with the knowledge that it too will grow to govern.
Included in the exhibition are the above pictured Challenger (2009) and two other graphite, ink, and watercolor on paper works. These works are accompanied by two sculptures made from found wood and miscellaneous antique parts, a graphite on paper drawing, and a single oil on canvas painting. In addition, Ernst has made especially for the exhibition a signed hand-made catalog in an edition of 100 entitled Das Panoptische Reich.
Carola Ernst (b. 1981 in Stuttgart) lives and works in Berlin. Ernst completed Meister Schule at the Universität der Künste in Berlin in 2009, where she worked under professors Valérie Favre and Thomas Zipp. She has recently exhibited her work at Galerie Barbara Thumm in Berlin, Galerie Andreas Höhne in München, and powergallery in Hamburg.
For further information and/or images, please contact the gallery at info@kavigupta.com or +1.312.432.0708/+49.162.800.7609.
James Krone and Jason Loebs
Kavi Gupta Gallery - Kluckstrasse 31 - 10785 Berlin-Schöneberg
September 25 – November 07, 2009
Kavi Gupta is proud to announce the opening of his new gallery in Berlin featuring a two person exhibition of new works from gallery artist Jason Loebs and Berlin-based painter James Krone.
Jason Loebs' works are studies in historiography and the shape of time. Drawing from images throughout art history as well as the artist's own developed formal processes, the work describes how the present is comprised of a fragmented and reconfigured past to show how the artist wavers between being the determined object of history and the autonomous agent capable of constituting the new. Five of Loebs' grey and cracked "Untitled" paintings will be on view.
James Krone's paintings are geometric abstractions built through an impressive palette of violet, crimson and black washes. Casual about their rigor they demonstrate the grand effect of making little effort. For an artist whose other bodies of work include collages of himself and Jim Morrison and ashtrays made from long birch branches, it is a painting practice that speaks of a hollow world and solipsistic living.
Jason Loebs (b. 1981 in Hillside, New Jersey) lives and works in New York City. His work has previously been exhibited at Loop Raum für Aktueller Kunst in Berlin, Voxpopuli in Philadelphia, and Harris Lieberman Gallery in New York City. Loebs received his MFA from The School of The Art Institute of Chicago in 2007.
James Krone (b. 1975 in Chicago) lives and works in Berlin. His work has previously been exhibited at venues in Europe and America including Circus Gallery in Los Angeles, Gallery Gerersdorfer in Vienna, and Schalter in Berlin. He received his BFA from the The School of The Art Institute of Chicago in 1998.
For further information and/or images, please contact the gallery at info@kavigupta.com or +1.312.432.0708/+49.162.800.7609.
A Wreath Of Poppies
Co-Lab, Copenhagen
May 22 – June 20, 2009
Co-Lab is proud to present A Wreath Of Poppies, a group exhibition. Consisting of nine works by five artists, A Wreath of Poppies is a sparse and solemn exhibition - an aesthetic tone poem. With abstract works, haunting video, emotive painting, and images of psychic desperation and transcendence, the exhibition's aesthetic sensibility is what its title infers – introspective as well as elegiac. Taking its name from poetry that employs the poppy as a symbol of eternal sleep, the exhibition strings together practices that dwell on human defeat, death, and the unknowable.
Michele Abeles (b. 1980, lives and works in New York City) makes photographs that are laden with tension and unease. Using subtle nuance, subjects like sheer precipices, dead dogs, and snowy forests show how easily the ubiquitous becomes uncanny or preternatural.
Craig Doty's (b. 1981, lives and works in Chicago) recent series of photographs takes young women as a subject. Elegantly composed with simple, but compelling sets, the women are physically exhausted as well as ethically or morally debased. In the exhibited work, a wet and shivering young woman looks out and beyond the viewer, leaving one without any clarification as to the cause of her condition.
Dana Degiulio's (b. 1980, lives and works in Chicago)abstract paintings are as strict formally as they are expressive. Executed with precision, they are deliberately bare and honest, while still heralding the value of abstraction in painting discourse today.
Henning Straßburger (b. 1983, lives and works in Berlin) works predominantly in painting, collage, and drawing. His works often satirize expressionism by amalgamating historical artistic styles and drawing from various cultural phenomenom from Emo culture to traditional German Schlager ballads.
Justin Swinburne's (b. 1985, lives and works in Los Angeles) video Santa Ana (2009) shows a man standing in a isolated enclave of tall shrubs. The trees shudder violently in the wind, the man stares back onto the viewer, alone and unrecognizable.
Co-Lab invites you to a private view of this exhibition on the 22nd May 2009, 5-8PM. Opening Hours: Fri – Sat 1-4PM
Amplifying The Twilight
Ampersand International, San Francisco
March 06 – April 18, 2009
Amplifying the Twilight investigates the gray area between the rationality of hard science and the speculative intuition of culture. Works by Shashana Chittle, David Coyle, Ryan Fenchel, Sayre Gomez, and Alison Ruttan bridge the horizons between the futurism of technology and exploratory alchemical practices. Responding to Arthur C. Clarke's maxim that "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" - the works examine the role of science in human life, inquiring how science shapes our understanding of the world, from metaphysics and spirituality to politics and ethics.
The drawing practice of Shashana Chittle methodically archives her experience awakening each morning, capturing her fleeting visual perceptions. David Coyle's video triptych reinterprets the speculations of science fiction as a form of personal horror. The intuition-driven collages of Ryan Fenchel draw from the subjects of freemasonry, Egyptology, and other esoteric studies. Sayre Gomez records how the alchemical transformation of energy has become a pedestrian, invisible part of our visual lives. The photographic clusters of Alison Ruttan parallel the behavior of primates and humans in humorous and embarrassing dialogs.
This exhibition was curated with Brian Andrews.
Constellation
Kavi Gupta Gallery, Chicago
September 05 – October 11, 2008
Kavi Gupta Gallery is proud to present Constellation, a group exhibition of painting, drawing, video, collage, and sculpture featuring Los Angeles artists Sayre Gomez, Mark Hagen, Julian Hoeber, Brett Lund, and Landon Wiggs. Constellation is an exhibition that addresses notions of time, process, and human agency. Elementary in nature, Constellation places emphasis on formlessness, physical affect, and expression to look at the metaphysical purpose of art making. The exhibition draws a common thread through multiple movements as it references Romanticism, Minimalism, and Surrealism and ventures to relate cosmological movement and natural phenomenon to themes of idealism, fate, and free will.
Through the ominous gaze of a surveillance camera, Landon Wiggs's video Trans Live shows different views of the steel skeleton of the new Broad Contemporary Art Museum. Words slowly form out of the building's structure, eventually succeeding into a rapid constantly morphing series of anagrams. Wiggs's clever and textual play starts with what the suburban megalopolis in background affirms, specifically, that "everything happens".
Another work, Mark Hagen's painting titled Pride, features a peculiar graph drawn by the inspirational executive coach Keith "Vanguard" Raniere, leader of the cultish NXIVM Executive Success Programs. The graph details Raniere’s unconventional perspective on the connection between an individual's pride (the "pride barrier") and their drive to live "ethically" and achieve their "ultimate dreams". Hagen's painting appears as an oversized version of the diagram; the text and graph are superimposed over the geometric topography of the paper suggesting the struggle and disconnect between one's ideas and actions.
Brett Lund's Black Orpheus is a striking, albeit crude-looking herm. Similar to a figurative bust, but without the solidity of any specific identity, the sculpture is an abstract embodiment of otherness. Referencing Marcel Camus' 1959 postcolonial film of the same name, Lund's sculpture alludes to Brazilian modernism, classical mythology, and the processes that form historical narratives.
Part of his new series that will debut this September at Blum & Poe in Los Angeles, Julian Hoeber's polished aluminum bust continues the artist's ongoing representations of death. Cast in aluminum from a wax bust that was repeatedly shot with a handgun, the work is visceral and uncommonly eerie in how it relates figurative art history to human annihilation and oblivion.
Sayre Gomez's recent collages entitled Formal Exercises combine craft paper, masking tape, airbrush, and a seemingly disparate set of images to create extraordinary formal compositions. Recurring images of child play, handicrafts, and ancient artifacts, the collages look at the connection between an individual's aim to create meaning and the subsequent formation of art history at large.
The Beginning Of The End Of The Beginning
Bucket Rider Gallery (Andrew Rafacz Gallery), Chicago
July 21 – August 26, 2006
Featuring work by Steve Canaday, Jeff Williams, Shashi Chittle, Jon Parot, Nathan Mabry, and John Knuth.
Soft Radical
CompactSpace Gallery, Los Angeles
November 05 – November 27, 2005
Featuring work by Amir Fallah, Sarah Anne Johnson, Christy Karacas, Sam Lopes, Jennifer Porter, and Erika Somogyi.
This exhibition was curated with Katie Herzog.
Exhibitions at 1R Gallery
1R Gallery - 119 N. Peoria Street, Chicago
2001 – 2004
1R Gallery was a space for young art in Chicago. The gallery opened in November of 2001 and closed at the end of 2004; I directed the space during this time. The gallery presented some 40 solo and group exhibitions with its program predominantly focusing on the work of Chicago artists. The gallery was a member of the New Art Dealers Alliance, and participated in NADA Art Fair in Miami, as well as Art Chicago 2004 and Portland's Affair at The Jupiter Hotel.
Selected solo exhibitions include:
Sterling Ruby
Matthew Weddington
Kirsten Stoltmann
Aaron Curry
Jose Lerma
Primitivo Suarez
Sam Salisbury
Carol Jackson
Scott Roberts
