Thursday, December 19, 2013

Robert Kushner Exhibition Opening January 10 at Carl Solway Gallery


Robert Kushner, Peony Damask, 2011
Oil, acrylic and gold leaf on canvas
45 x 60 inches

ROBERT KUSHNER: Paintings 2010-2013 & The Four Seasons, Commissioned in 1990 for Tower Place Cincinnati

January 10 – April 12, 2014
Opening Reception: Friday, January 10, 5-8:30 pm
The artist will be present.


Robert Kushner’s exhibition at Carl Solway Gallery includes paintings from 2010 to the present, a small selection of prints and The Four Seasons, four large-scale paintings recently removed from Cincinnati’s Tower Place.  The works feature his signature botanical subjects, often set against backgrounds of richly textured geometric patterns.  An early participant in the Pattern and Decoration Movement in the 1970s, Kushner continues to draw upon a wide range of influences including the decorative arts of Asian and Islamic cultures; such recognized Western artists as Henri Matisse, Georgia O’Keeffe and Pierre Bonnard; and Asian artists such as the 18th century Japanese painter, Jakuchu Ito, and Chinese painters, Wu Changshi  (1844-1927) and Qi Baishi (1836-1957).

To quote the artist, “I never get tired of pursuing new ideas in the realm of ornamentation.  Decoration, an abjectly pejorative dismissal for many, is a very big, somewhat defiant declaration for me…The eye can wander, the mind think unencumbered through visual realms that are expansively and emotionally rich.  Decoration has always had its own agenda, the sincere and unabashed offering of pleasure and solace.”

In 1990, Robert Kushner was commissioned to create paintings for the atrium of Tower Place, the shopping mall adjacent to the Carew Tower.  Completed in 1930, the Carew Tower is one of Cincinnati’s finest buildings from the Art Deco era.  The mall was a busy center of downtown activity until many of the stores moved to the suburbs.  The Tower Place building was recently sold and Carl Solway Gallery was able to rescue the four paintings, 9 feet by 27 feet each.

Best known as a painter, Robert Kushner’s prolific artistic output encompasses large-scale murals for public and private spaces, installations, performances and costume designs for dance companies.  In 2004, he installed two monumental mosaic murals titled Four Seasons Seasoned at the 77th Street and Lexington Avenue subway station in Manhattan.  He recently completed an 80-foot long marble mosaic, Welcome, for the Raleigh Durham International Airport in North Carolina.  Kushner’s most recent installation, Scriptorium, comprised of over 1000 drawings of flowers and plants on book pages dating from 1500 to 1920, has been exhibited internationally.

Kushner’s work is included in many major public collections such as The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Whitney Museum of Art, New York; The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; The Philadelphia Museum of Art; J. Paul Getty Trust, Los Angeles; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Tate Gallery, London; Museum Ludwig, St. Petersburg, Russia and the Galleria degli Ufizzi, Florence, Italy.  His work has been extensively exhibited since 1973 in the United States, Europe and Japan and was included in the Whitney Biennial three times (1975, 1981 and 1985) and the Venice Biennale twice.  He was the subject of solo exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia.

Born in Pasadena, California in 1949, Robert Kushner attended the University of California, San Diego.  He was first active in the arts community of southern California and moved to New York City in the 1970s where, as a young artist, he supported himself as a restorer and collector of Oriental carpets.  In addition to his artwork, Kushner has written many articles for art publications and, in 2006, edited Amy Goldin: Art in a Hairshirt, a collection of her writings.  The late critic was an important professor and mentor to the artist.










Friday, December 13, 2013

INK Miami Art Fair

Carl Solway Gallery participated in the INK Miami Art Fair at the Suites of Dorchester from December 4-8, 2013.

Monday, November 18, 2013

2014 Whitney Biennial

Carl Solway Gallery is pleased to announce the inclusion of Stephen Berens, Channa Horwitz and Joel Otterson in the 2014 Whitney Biennial.


Installation view of Thinking of Pinturicchio (While Looking Out Sol LeWitt's Windows), an exhibition by Stephen Berens on view at Carl Solway Gallery during the fall of 2012.

Ann Hamilton Lectures at DAAP, University of Cincinnati on November 20, 2013

Ann Hamilton lectures, Wednesday, November 20, 2013, 5 pm, at the University of Cincinnati DAAP Room 4400, free and open to the public. 
http://bit.ly/1bYEWPn 

In conjunction with the lecture, a selection of Ann's work, including her most recent edition, near-away is currently on display at Carl Solway Gallery.



ANN HAMILTON
near-away, 2013
Slices of paperback books, cheese cloth, string,
bookbinders glue, newsprint, methyl cellulose, steel wire
#6 from a series of 26 unique pairings
19.5 x 23 x 3.25 inches


near-away pairs artifacts from two previous installations: the husk of a hand shaped by paper from stylus, a 2010 project at The Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, and the sliced book fragments re-bound as counterweights in the 2009 project human carriage, “The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia: 1860-1989” at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

The placement of the “hand” adjacent to the “book weight” expresses what changes us the most: the “hand” through the physical change of being  “touched” and the “book weight” through the mental change brought on through reading. 

Monday, November 11, 2013

Ann Hamilton at Elizabeth Leach Gallery

The Ann Hamilton exhibition a reading: video installation, works on paper and sculptural objects is on view at Elizabeth Leach Gallery in Portland, Oregon from November 2, 2013 - January 11, 2014.

www.elizabethleach.com/Exhibit


Ann Hamilton, book weight tt (human carriage), 2009/2010, archival inkjet print, 44 x 34 inches, edition of 10 + 2 APs.

Friday, November 8, 2013

Peter Halley at the IFPDA Print Fair




Peter Halley visits the Carl Solway Gallery booth at the 2013 IFPDA Print Fair.  Four new Halley pieces, published by Carl Solway Gallery, are on view behind the artist.

Albert Paley at the IFPDA Print Fair


Albert Paley visits Carl Solway at the Carl Solway Gallery booth at the 2013 IFPDA Print Fair.  Four of Paley's monoprints, shown in the background, are on view in the booth.

Diane Landry Exhibition Featured in the Cincinnati Enquirer

Diane Landry's exhibition at the Contemporary Arts Center was featured in an article in the Cincinnati Enquirer by Julie Engebrecht.

Diane Landry Exhibition at the Contemporary Arts Center

Diane Landry: by every wind that blows
November 9, 2013 – March 2, 2014
Curated by Raphaela Platow & Steven Matijcio
Celebrated Canadian artist Diane Landry translates everyday items and mechanical systems into mystical meditations on life, death and our relationship with technology. Turning the mundane into the wondrous, everything from water bottles and laundry hampers to bed frames and plastic cutlery are imbued with unexpected life. Like a scrapyard version of Disney’s Fantasia, Landry’s automated actors expand the basic functions of her respective materials – allowing their shadows to dance hypnotically across gallery walls. Whether these works speak to the sins of disposable culture or the untapped promise of the everyday, her mechanized entities inspire a magical re-evaluation of the material world.
Landry’s CAC exhibition will feature the U.S. debut of her newest installation Exhaustion: a chandelier-like form (made of plastic forks & knives) that floats up and down like a colossal jellyfish. The show also highlights some of her most notable works from the past decade, including swelling mandalas made from plastic water bottles and laundry hampers, as well as chiming bedframes and videos that measure time through the lens of the artist. As a special feature, Landry will perform one of these works during the November 9th opening – paddling a suspended canoe through plastic sheet waves high above the CAC lobby.



Linda Schwartz from Carl Solway Gallery and Diane Landry discuss work in progress at the Contemporary Arts Center.

Thursday, November 7, 2013

Diane Landry Opening Celebration and Performance at Contemporary Arts Center

The Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati hosts the exhibition Diane Landry: by every wind that blows with an opening reception Saturday, November 9th from 6-9pm.  As a special feature, Landry will perform Icebreaker during the opening.  The pieces involves paddling a suspended canoe through plastic sheet waves in the CAC lobby.  The exhibition is on view through March 2, 2014.,

Monday, November 4, 2013

Carl Solway Gallery Participates in the IFPDA Print Fair 2013

Carl Solway Gallery participates in the 2013 IFPDA Print Fair, November 7-10, with an opening reception on Wednesday, November 6.  The booth will feature work by Lynda Benglis, Harry Bertoia, Peter Halley, Ann Hamilton, Roy Lichtenstein, Albert Paley, Peter Saul, Pat Steir and Andy Warhol, among others.www.ifpda.org

Tuesday, October 22, 2013

ISC Awards Lifetime Achievement Awards to Judy Pfaff and Ursula von Rydingsvard


The International Sculpture Center (ISC) has announced that the 2014 Lifetime Achievement Award will be presented to world-renowned sculptors Judy Pfaff and Ursula von Rydingsvard at the 23rd Annual Lifetime Achievement Award Gala. Ms. Pfaff and Ms. von Rydingsvard are expected to attend this event, where arts patrons and professionals will come together in celebration of their remarkable careers. This exciting event will occur in the Spring of 2014 in New York City.

Judy Pfaff weaves landscapes, architecture, and color to create tense, elaborate sculptures and installations that speak to order and disorder simultaneously. A pioneer of site-specific installation art in the 1970s, Pfaff combines painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, and architecture to create works that are equally dependent on intense planning and improvisation. Space seems to expand and collapse in these installations, fluctuating from two to three dimensions with a wide range of materials. She is the recipient of many fellowships and grants, including the prestigious “genious” grant of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts grants in 1979 and 1986






Ursula von Rydingsvard, River Bowl, 2001. Cedar 174 x 120 x 120 in. courtesy: Galerie Lelong




Ursula von Rydingsvard is best known for creating large-scale, monumental sculpture from cedar beams, which she painstakingly cuts, assembles, and laminates, finally rubbing powdered graphite into the work’s faceted surfaces. Von Rydingsvard’s sculptures are in numerous permanent collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art. Her current projects include outdoor sculptures for Princeton University and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.. Von Rydingsvard’s first permanent outdoor sculpture in Brooklyn- her workplace of 35 years -was recently installed at the Barclays Center.

Thursday, October 17, 2013

Steven Rosen's City Beat article about the Peter Halley exhibition at Carl Solway Gallery






 
Click to Print

The Explosive Art of Peter Halley

BY STEVEN ROSEN · OCTOBER 9TH, 2013 · THE BIG PICTURE
"Smoking Cell XVIII" by Peter Halley - Courtesy Solway Gallery
Artists have long had an interest in serial imagery — repeatedly painting or making prints of such objects as haystacks (Monet), numerals (Jasper Johns) or flowers (Warhol). For the artist, it isn’t a rote, repetitious action — seeing how color, light or perspective changes the way you see an object makes one artwork as different from another as, well, night and day. 
Appreciating that demands something special of the viewer. You can’t just adopt a “seen one, seen them all” attitude; you have to look hard and think about what the object means to the artist — and to you. It’s a way to slow down the art-viewing experience and make it matter more.
I had a rewarding time doing that at Peter Halley’s Print & Editions: 25 Years show at the Carl Solway Gallery, helped immensely by his presence opening night to share his insights. This fine, intriguing and thought-provoking show is up through Dec. 21 — try to see it.
Halley, 60, is a New York-born artist and former director of graduate studies in painting and printmaking at Yale University School of Art. His work at Solway — paintings and prints, primarily, with several three-dimensional pieces — can be taken as abstracts and/or geometric painting. In some cases, they have a Pop-influenced cartoon quality.
They at first look like exercises in art-making without a lot of consideration of the symbolic or social meaning of what is being depicted. After all, the object most often shown is a “cell” — really an undefined solid-color rectangle, sometimes with a “smokestack” sticking up from the top. 
But not so fast.
Those cells are often in the process of exploding. In the show’s signature work, a set of nine silkscreen-on-paper prints from 1994 called “Exploding Cell,” Halley takes us through the whole process of how matter becomes nothingness. He lays it out in the panels like a wordless graphic novel. The cell slowly becomes fire-engine-red hot and then blows up, expanding outward in a huge burst before collapsing into thick clouds, a dust pile and, finally, just short black, horizontal lines across a gray background. Dead air. 
Whatever exactly is occurring in this piece is being repeated in his other work. In the show’s largest “Explosion,” a 2008 wall installation of 21 digital prints on canvas, Halley captures that explosion’s kablooey power again and again in different colors. It’s remarkably vibrant in a fun way, like a Lichtenstein painting with a big “POW!” on it. But if you think about what it really depicts, you can almost feel the ground shake from its destructive power. 
On opening night, Halley explained his preoccupation. “The explosion is an important icon for the 20th-21st century,” he said. “You have the atomic explosion, Sept. 11. It lives on in our consciousness all the time. This either has a connotation of a bomb, or sometimes something a little more positive.” (We’ll get to that “something a little more positive” in a bit.)
Understandably, one can see what the attraction of the explosion is for Halley. There’s enough power — literally — in an explosion to repeat its depiction over and over.
But what is the cell? Is it a conceptual energy cell, something chemical in the atmosphere just waiting to ignite? If so, it looks like a Monopoly board house. In a book about Halley, he is quoted as saying in 1982 that the cell is a “reminder of the apartment house, the hospital bed, the school desk — isolated end points of industrial structure.”
So is this cell, then, meant as a political statement — we live in cells of our own making? Several of Halley’s other pieces in the show actually have “prison” in their name.
It’s not easy to figure out, and maybe there is no single answer. But it’s definitely worth spending time on it. Overall, the rigorous attention Halley pays to the consistency of his themes and images makes his work all the more worth contemplating.
About that “something more positive” statement Halley made on opening night. He explained that it’s not a given that all will respond to the explosions rendered in his work as a bad thing. At New York University, where he is working on a mural, students have said they interpret that image as a good thing — a way to make visual, and thus concrete, the abstract notion that an explosion of knowledge comes with a college education. 
If only that was the way the whole world thought of explosions. 
For more information, visit solwaygallery.com.

CONTACT STEVEN ROSENsrosen@citybeat.com
 
 
 
 

www.citybeat.com/cincinnati/article-28774-the_explosive_art_of_peter_halley

Friday, September 27, 2013

Texas Contemporary Art Fair

Carl Solway Gallery will participate in the Texas Contemporary Art Fair in Houston from October 10-13.
www.txcontemporary.com

Thursday, September 26, 2013

Expo Chicago 2013

From September 19-22, Carl Solway Gallery presented a booth at Expo Chicago 2013 featuring sculpture by Judy Pfaff.  Two large pieces date from the 1980s and another six were created in the last two years.



Peter Halley Opening Reception

Peter Halley attended the opening reception on September 6th for his exhibition Peter Halley: Prints & Editions, 25 Years.

Monday, August 26, 2013

Peter Halley Exhibition at Carl Solway Gallery opens September 6th.


PETER HALLEY
Prints & Editions: 25 Years

Opening reception: Friday, September 6, 5:00 – 8:30pm
The artist will be present.

Exhibition continues through December 21, 2013
Gallery Hours: Monday – Friday 9:00-5:00; Saturday noon-5:00pm
No admission

Opening on September 6, 2013, Carl Solway Gallery will present a 25-year survey of the prints and editions of New York artist Peter Halley. The exhibition will feature 33 editioned works, including silkscreen, letterpress, and digital prints, editioned wall installations, and low-relief sculptural editions.  

The works on view provide an overview of Halley’s wide-ranging experimentation in both traditional and digital printmaking techniques since the 1980s.

Beginning with his early vacuum-formed relief “Prison,” produced in 1987, and concluding with his most recent low-relief edition, “Explosion," produced digitally with a CNC router by Carl Solway Gallery in 2013, this show presents the first retrospective of Halley’s prints and wall installations since his 1997 solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Halley’s prints can be seen as a counterpoint to his paintings, which are based on a hermetic, restricted visual vocabulary.  In contrast, his printmaking practice has provided him with the opportunity to incorporate elements from the outside world including imagery from cartoons and found graphics such as flow charts. As opposed to the rational, rectilinear geometry of his paintings, Halley's printmaking has long focused on the image of the explosion, beginning with 1993 silkscreen print “Exploding Cell.” Halley is also a recognized innovator in the use of digital prints to produce mural-sized works.

Peter Halley has executed permanent digitally-printed mural installations for the Biblioteca Publica Jose Hierro in Usera, Spain, in 2002, and at the Gallatin School for Individualized Study at New York University in 2008.  

PETER HALLEY

Since the mid 1980s, Peter Halley has been recognized for his geometric paintings that reinterpret abstract art through the diagramming of contemporary social space.

Halley came to prominence through his early exhibitions at International with Monument in New York’s East Village in 1985 and 1986. Halley has had one-person museum exhibitions at the Musée d'Art Contemporain, Bordeaux (1991), the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid (1992), the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (1992), the Des Moines Art Center (1992), the Dallas Museum of Art (1995), the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1997), the Kitakyushu Municipal Museum of Art (1998), the Museum Folkwang, Essen (1998), and the Butler Institute of American Art (1999).

Since the mid-1990s, Halley has produced site-specific installations for exhibitions and as permanent public works. These projects have been realized at the State University of New York, Buffalo (1998), the city library in Usera, Spain (2002), the Banco Suisso d’Italia Art Collection, Turin (2003), and the Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport in Texas (2005). In 2008, he completed a large permanent installation for the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University.

Peter Halley is also a well respected teacher, publisher, and writer.  From 2002-2011, he was Director of Graduate Studies in Painting and Printmaking at the Yale School of Art. From 1996 to 2005 he published index magazine, featuring in-depth interviews with creative people from all fields. His writings, addressing post-structuralism, post-modernism and the digital revolution of the 1980s have been anthologized in Selected Essays: 1981-2001, published in 2013 by Edgewise Press.  In 2001, Halley received the Frank Jewett Mather Award for excellence in art criticism from the College Art Association.

Born in New York City in 1953, Halley received his B.A. from Yale University in 1975 and his M.F.A. from the University of New Orleans in 1978.  He lived in New Orleans in the latter half of the 1970s and has lived and worked in New York City since 1980.