Thursday, September 25, 2014
Carl and Michael Solway Featured in the ADAA Website's Gallery Chat
The website for the Art Dealer's Association of America features a gallery chat with Carl and Michael Solway. See the link below.
http://the-adaa.tumblr.com/post/97817328866/gallery-chat-carl-michael-solway-cincinnati-avant-garde
Carl Solway Gallery Participates in the 30th Fine Print Fair in Cleveland
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Monday, September 15, 2014
Fall Exhibitions at Carl Solway Gallery Opening Friday, September 19.
MARCUS RATLIFF: Collages
MARCUS RATLIFF: The Art World: Forty Years
of Graphic Design
JODY ZELLEN: Time Jitters (FotoFocus
Biennial)
TOM WESSELMANN: Steel Drawings & Prints
MARK COHEN: Grim Street (FotoFocus Biennial)
an outdoor installation presented
in the Carl Solway Gallery parking area by Iris BookCafe and Gallery
September 19 – December 20, 2014
Opening Reception: September 19, 5-8:00 pm
Gallery Hours: Monday – Friday 9am-5pm; Saturday
noon-5pm
Free admission
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Regional Student Show (FotoFocus Biennial)
Findlay Street Project Space
Across the Lobby from Carl Solway Gallery
October 8 – October 29, 2014
Gallery Hours to be announced
Opening Reception: Saturday, October 11, 11am – 2 pm
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MARCUS RATLIFF
Carl Solway
Gallery showcases recent collages and selections from the graphic design
archive of Marcus Ratliff. His intimate,
small-scale collages incorporate paper imagery collected from countless sources
over many years. His cut and pasted
fragments take narrative form, often incorporating literary or mythological
references. Ratliff’s collages mark his
return to personal artwork after an extremely successful, forty-plus-year
career as a graphic designer. In his
words, “It would have been strange for me to begin to paint on large canvases
and return to the abstract expressionist paintings that I was doing in art
school. So I worked with paper,
scissors, knives and glue, just like I did as a designer.”
Trained as
a painter in the 1950s, Ratliff designed books, catalogues, posters, advertisements
and announcements for the most significant galleries and museums in New York
City. The Art World will feature an extensive selection from his graphic
design archive. Several galleries have shown his collages in recent years, but
the exhibition at Carl Solway Gallery is the first to juxtapose them
side-by-side with his graphic design work.
A native of
Cincinnati and graduate of Walnut Hills High School, Ratliff moved to New York
City in 1956 to attend Cooper Union. He
befriended the pop artists Jim Dine, Claes Oldenburg, Tom Wesselmann and Red
Grooms. Dine and Wesselmann also moved to New York from Cincinnati. In 1959, during his third year of studies,
while living at the Judson Student House off Washington Square, he started the
Judson Gallery where he organized some of the first exhibitions for artists like
Oldenburg and Wesselmann who would become lifelong friends. After graduate studies in painting at Yale,
Ratliff returned to New York where he apprenticed in letterpress printing with
a former professor at Cooper Union. The typesetting
and printing skills he acquired led to his career in graphic design. He briefly worked for Time-Life books and
Fortune magazine, but he soon gained so much freelance work that he opened his
own design studio. Leo Castelli provided
Ratliff with many early gallery contacts.
His design practice thrived through the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and on into
the millennium.
As the
world of graphic design became more and more digitized, and galleries focused
less and less on fine printed materials, his business gradually began to
wane. About eight years ago, he closed
his office. He now lives in Norwich, Vermont,
where he makes collages, an art form he initially explored in the 1960s.
JODY ZELLEN
Time
Jitters
In conjunction with the FotoFocus Biennial, Carl
Solway Gallery presents Time Jitters,
an exhibition of artworks by Jody Zellen including digital photographs,
paintings, animations and iPad apps that take their point of departure from
news photographs culled from daily newspapers.
Zellen
calls attention to image overload in contemporary society by creating her own
over-saturated world. She begins with images culled from both digital and print
media sources and alters them a variety of ways. In a series of photographic
works, she reduces the web images to their essential pixels, distilling the
photograph into a grid of colors. Line drawings made by tracing the printed
newspaper images are overlaid on these grids of color, creating a push/pull
between the abstracted grids of color and the contents of the source: politics,
war, natural and man made disasters. While the original image is diffused, it
never really disappears.
The
various components in Zellen’s work serve as building blocks that are
reconfigured in different mediums. A line drawing of a newspaper image is
scanned and then used in a digital collage, which can become a template for a
painting, a page in an artist’s book, an image in an iPad app as well as an
animation in which the drawing process is made visible.
In
the exhibition Zellen presents a grid of gouache on paper paintings. While the
specific events may not be discernible, these 22 x 30 inch works collectively
become a representation of the passage of time. The translucent colors of the
paintings contrast with the harsher opaque tones in the digital photographs,
which are in fact, their referent.
Zellen
illustrates the process of creation via her animated works. Time Jitters
is a nineteen minute, two channel video projection. In the work, a grid of twenty-five animations looping at different
rates becomes a media wall -- a cacophony of pulsing color and flickering imagery.
This frenetic display is seen in contrast to a large-scale projection weaving
together a narrative from the various fragments. Seen together these works
become a meditation on remediation, using the media presentation of world
events as its point of departure.
Jody
Zellen is a Los Angeles-based artist who works in many media
simultaneously to make interactive installations, mobile apps, net art,
animations, drawings, paintings, photographs, public art, and artists’ books. Her recent installations include "Time
Jitters," Grand Central Arts Center, Santa Ana, CA, 2014; "Above the
Fold," The Halsey Institute at the College of Charleston, SC, 2014,
"The Unemployed," Disseny Hub Museum, Barcelona, 2011. Zellen was a 2012 recipient of a California
Community Foundation Mid Career Fellowship and in 2011 she received a Center
for Cultural Innovation Artistic Innovation Grant and a Fellowship from the
City of Santa Monica to develop an artwork for mobile devices. Her six apps "Urban
Rhythms," "Spine Sonnet," "Art Swipe," "4
Square," "Episodic" and "Time Jitters" are available
for free in the iTunes app store. For more information, visit her website
www.jodyzellen.com
TOM WESSELMANN
Tom
Wesselmann (1931–2004) is recognized as a leading figure in the Pop Art
movement that came to prominence in the 1960s.
Throughout his long career, he infused the classical subjects of the
figure, the still life and the landscape with his own graphic line quality and vibrant
sense of color.
Carl Solway
Gallery will feature an intimate exhibition of laser-cut steel drawings of the
nude figure and a small selection of figurative and still life prints. The steel drawings represent one of
Wesselmann’s best-known technical innovations.
In 1983, Wesselmann sought a way to draw in steel. He envisioned the illusion of lifting the
lines from his drawings and placing them directly on the wall. Once installed,
the pieces appear to be drawn on the wall. His idea preceded the available
technology for mechanically laser-cutting metal with the accuracy Wesselmann
needed. He invested more than a year in
the development of a system that could accomplish this. Wesselmann created a
number of steel drawings in the 1980s and 1990s. Laser-cut paper and metal are
materials now utilized by countless artists.
The
graphic qualities of printmaking also appealed to Wesselmann and he created,
etchings, lithographs and screenprints.
In addition to paper, he printed on other materials including plastics.
The
exhibition at Carl Solway Gallery is concurrent with Beyond Pop Art: A Tom Wesselmann Retrospective on view at the
Cincinnati Art Museum from October 31, 2014–January 18, 2015. Tom Wesselmann attended the Art Academy of
Cincinnati before moving to New York City to study at Cooper Union.
MARK COHEN
Mark
Cohen was born in 1943 in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, where he remained for the
next 60 years, until relocating to Philadelphia in 2013. He has received
international recognition for his radical street photographs, made in his hometown
in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, collectively published in 2004 as Grim Street. His
work was first exhibited by Nathan Lyons in the group exhibition Vision and
Expression at the George Eastman House in 1969, then by John Szarkowski as
a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1973. Cohen was only the third
photographer to be given solo exhibition by the legendary Leo Castelli, first
at Castelli Graphics in 1977 then at Castelli Gallery in 1979. In 1980 his work
also was included in the Museum of Modern Art exhibition Mirrors and
Windows: American Photography Since 1960. Cohen’s photographs are held in
the collections of more than 30 museums and he has received two prestigious
Guggenheim Fellowships. This Iris exhibition in the Carl Solway Gallery parking
area is organized by Iris’ curator William Messer; the twelve black and white
prints on vinyl coated canvas were originally created for staging on a cyclone
fence at SteelStacks in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania in 2012 for the InVision Photo
Festival, at which Messer encountered Cohen and invited him to exhibit in
Cincinnati.
REGIONAL STUDENT SHOW
In
conjunction with the FotoFocus Biennial, Findlay Street Project Space presents
a juried exhibition of lens-based imagery.
Entry to this show was open to college
and university students living within a 200-mile radius of Cincinnati. Findlay Street Project Space is located at
424 Findlay Street, across the lobby from Carl Solway Gallery.
Wednesday, September 10, 2014
The Return of Nam June Paik's Metrobot
Metrobot, a sculpture by Nam June Paik, returned to public view today It was unveiled and dedicated in front of the Contemporary Arts Center, 44 East Sixth Street, in downtown Cincinnnati as part of the CAC's 75th Anniversary celebration. The sculpture was originally sited in front of the CAC's former home on Fifth Street in 1988. The CAC moved to its new home in 2003 and Metrobot has been in storage since 2009. The sculpture is now refurbished and technologically updated.
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