Contemporary Art from the Collection

June 30, 2010–September 12, 2011

MoMA

The works selected for this installation highlight the debates around economics, politics, gender, and ethnicity that have permeated artistic practices since the late 1960s. Including approximately 130 works drawn from all of the Museum’s curatorial departments, the installation features a variety of approaches to art-making and follows a chronological path. The exhibition begins with works such as a haunting “body print” by David Hammons (1969), which depicts the artist in an act of prayer, and Pino Pascali’s Machine Gun (1966), a sculpture he made out of parts from a Fiat 500 during a period of intense social unrest in Italy. Concluding the show are two projects that explore larger themes of humanity and loss through current events: Huma Bhabha’s expansive print series Reconstructions (2007), in which the artist memorializes lost civilizations in her native Pakistan, and Paul Chan’s Waiting for Godot (2007), a project based on the artist’s restaging of Samuel Beckett’s play in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

also…new publications, go get ‘em

Hannah Wilke @ Neuberger Museum of Art (August 30, 2010)

Hannah Wilke / Prestel / Nancy Princenthal

Fallen Lander, 2010

Klutch Stanaway: Altaira opens Saturday, July 3rd, with a reception for the artist from 6 – 9 pm.  The exhibition continues through August 8, 2010.

NASA explorations, ‘50s science fiction films, and household electronics are springboards for Altaira. The sculptures resemble lunar probes, modernist sculptures, and Exquisite Corpses with faux marble bodies on spindly legs. These forms stem from a landing pod that safely transported the Mars Exploration Rovers to the Martian surface.  Altaira refers to a character in the 1956 film Forbidden Planet, who grew up surrounded by astounding futuristic appliances and her wild animal friends. The references in Forbidden Planet are multi-faceted, captivating, and yet ridiculous.  Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Freud, Greek mythology, popular science, the American military, and an amazing electronic score all blur to create a fascinating slippage of time.  Like the science fiction films of the ‘50s, the sculptures are layered with faux surface treatments, futuristic efficiency, and simulation.  Klutch Stanaway’s Altaira celebrates the objects we use to explore.

In the artist’s own words, “ I’ve made a fake boulder and some freestanding structures to transform the floor of the gallery into an unknown landscape. Wall units with colored lights transform the walls of the gallery into an interior of an unknown vessel. The boulder can roll through the space via remote control, flipping the notion of which objects are static and which objects are dynamic.  I’ve tried to embody a slight sense of anachronism in the space, and I used 1950s science fiction films as a model.”

To get a preview…follow this link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hyca45lLx7I


Los Angeles based artist Klutch Stanaway received his M.F.A in Sculpture from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2004, and is currently a sculpture professor at Fullerton College.  Stanaway has had recent solo exhibitions at Haus Gallery in Pasadena and Spacecraft Gallery in San Diego, and in the group exhibition Sound & Motion in 2007 at SolwayJones.

For more information, please contact:

Michael Solway or Angela Jones

solwayjones@sbcglobal.net

http://www.solwayjonesgallery.com/

By Christopher Knight

link to Los Angeles Times

In 1962, Andy Warhol used a stamp technique to reproduce 210 bottles of Coca-Cola on canvas as they might appear in a big supermarket cooler, 30 bottles across and seven rows high. Some were pictured full, others empty and still others only partially filled.

In “Naked Coke,” sculptor Koh Byoung Ok ups the numerical ante while adding a considerable degree of mystery. Eleven rows high, his aluminum shelves feature 264 unprinted, silver cans, polished to a high reflection, in regimented rows of 24. Their tops have not been popped. Whether the mute, light-reflective array of stripped commercial goods is full or empty is a question inducing an unexpected state of meditative stillness and tranquility.

Nearby in his show of eight sculptures at SolwayJones (his first with the gallery), an illuminated light bulb suspended from a cord dangles into water that puddles in the seat of a modern, mass-produced plastic chair. Potentially shocking, in a literal sense, the work twists Warhol’s 1960s silkscreen paintings of electric chairs into conceptual and perceptual knots.

Sculptural koans, where intuition transcends logic, Koh’s work draws its forms from Pop, Minimalism and Conceptual art, especially the work of Warhol, Donald Judd and Felix Gonzalez-Torres (perhaps significantly, all now deceased). Two of the most compelling works stop time — again literally, simply by affixing thread and yarn to the second-hand of battery-powered clock mechanisms affixed to the wall.

The tension and weight of the slender material is enough to cause the second-hand to jerk and quiver, rendered unable to move forward through the curve of space. The most compelling works in the show, Koh’s simple clocks warp expectation

Photo: Naked Coke, 2010

Copyright © 2010 Tribune Company

Koh Byoung Ok: G Sculpture Show

To be exhibited at SolwayJones, Los Angeles

May 22 – June 26, 2010

Naked Coke III, 2010,  polished coke cans, dimensions variable

Koh Byoung Ok: G Sculpture Show opens Saturday May 22nd, with a reception for the artist from 6 – 9 pm.  The exhibition continues through June 26, 2010.

Continuing the artist’s use of musical scales for exhibition titles and as his archive of past solo shows since 2001, Koh Byoung Ok: G Sculpture Show brings together a group of new and recent sculptures by this Korean born Los Angeles based artist.  G Sculpture Show, his first solo presentation with SolwayJones, will include several works that explore issues of duration, gravity, balance, and volume.  Koh’s ephemeral sculptures float and dance back in forth somewhere between performance, conceptual and minimal art humorously bridging with twists of absurdity and disbelief.

In the artist’s own words, “I approach art as the articulation and encounter of the unexpected, the mundane, and the temporal.  I contemplate the processes and objects of daily life that surround us and define our lives, but that often are seen as small and insignificant due to their commonplace—a snail inching its way along the ground, a person drinking water, a clock ticking, the wrinkles on your fingers after a bath, strands of hair lifted by a breeze.  I isolate these actions and objects, strip them down to their inner energy, put into conversation seemingly unrelated forces, and leave them for viewers to do as they will.  I see my practice as a type of performance art that captures a moment in an encounter, one that I transform and that takes on other articulations in my absence.  I am interested in the meaningless.“

Koh Byoung Ok works were included in the group exhibition Instruments at SolwayJones in 2009.

Recent exhibitions include Near West, Makii Masaru Fine Art, Tokyo, 2008, Humor Us, Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, Los Angeles, 2008, E Sculpture Show, The Substation, Singapore 2007, Exquisite Crisis And Encounters, Asian/Pacific/American Institute of New York University, New York, 2006, 2002 Gwangju Biennial, Korea.

Jet Set Saturdays: Channa Horwitz at SolwayJones and kunsthalle LA

By Anne Martens

If Channa Horwitz wasn’t female and 78 years old, she’d perhaps—and deservedly—be as well known as her male, L.A. artist contemporaries Robert Irwin and James Turrell. At the time of Ferus Gallery’s emergence, she lived in Tarzana—then as Channa Davis—raising three children, where she created remarkable works of art. One wonders, had she hung around La Cienega Boulevard often enough, would the boys have let her in the clubhouse? This Jet Setter doubts it.

In 2005 and 2007, SolwayJones Gallery exhibited Horwitz’s contemporary work. The gallery’s current two-part exhibition, one at its main space on Hill Street; the other at kunsthalle LA on Chung King Road, showcases the artist’s seminal work of the 60s, 70s and 80s, as well as a piece from 2000 and one from this year. Upon a recent visit to both gallery spaces, Michael Solway pointed out a 1971 LACMA exhibition catalog in a vitrine — tangible evidence of the type of historical exclusionism female artists face. On the cover, about a dozen artist-faces, all male, stared back. Nearby hangs Davis’ 1968 notated sketch for a sculpture, Suspension of Vertical Beams Moving in Space. The sculpture would have included eight moving parts and eight light beams, suggesting the complexity and ambition that any “Light and Space” project would have entailed. The artist had submitted the drawing as part of a proposal for an installation she planned to execute if accepted into the prestigious “Experiments in Art and Technology” program—in which artists were paired with scientists and engineers to explore perceptual phenomena—that culminated in the LACMA show. Although she was admitted into the exhibition, the more significant installation proposal got rejected.

continue reading

Channa Horwitz at SolwayJones and kunsthalle L.A

“Sequences & Systems,” a terrific two-part show (split between SolwayJones and kunsthalle L.A.), skims across 40 years of visual investigation by the L.A. artist Channa Horwitz. By the time Horwitz earned her B.F.A. from CalArts in 1972, she had already submitted a proposal (included in this show) to the landmark “Art & Technology” exhibition at LACMA and was well on her way to developing methods of articulating space, typically in ink on paper, using the orderly rigor of predetermined systems.

Her work falls somewhere between game and exercise, mathematics and music. Its key ingredients are rhythm, pattern and repetition, its precursors the minimal, serial art of the ’60s. The entrancing “Composition #8 Augmented Variation #2 reads like an elegant score, following the momentum of a single thick ink line that rises, falls, breaks into separate staccato beats then resumes its sustained visual hum. Some of Horwitz’s works over the years have been performed live, using dancers, synthesizers and projected imagery. Even when not actualized physically, her notations are dynamic and usually involve a sense of progression, so that time and process are actively engaged.

In the Canon series of 1982, for instance, Horwitz draws a simple geometric pattern on separate sheets of graph paper, then draws images that represent the sum of the individual parts. “Eight Layers From the Canon Series, Exposed” presents a grid of 64 such basic components, and the lacy tapestries of line that result when the patterns of each row or column are combined. The austerity of the system gives way to sensual ebullience, and the images, however prescribed, feel immediate and fresh.

– Leah Ollman

Copyright 2010 Los Angeles Times

Channa Horwitz: Sequences and Systems to be exhibited at SolwayJones and kunsthalle L.A., Chinatown March 13 – April 25, 2010


64 Variations on the Canon Series, 1982

Channa Horwitz: Sequences and Systems will be presented in two exhibitions in both the SolwayJones gallery space located at 990 North Hill Street, #180, and in the kunsthalle L.A. exhibition space located at 932 Chung King Road in Chinatown.  Channa Horwitz: Sequences and Systems will include new works and selected early works from the 1960s to 1980s.  Both exhibitions open Saturday March 13th, with a reception for the artist from 6 – 9 pm. The exhibitions continue through April 25, 2010.  The gallery hours are Wednesday – Saturday 11 – 6 pm, Sundays Noon – 5 pm.

more info…

Heian Shrine Stroll Garden/Azure Vista, 1999, Cut photo mural with mobile, Panel 76 x 48 inches, Mobile dimension varies

White Flag Projects

Newtonland: Orbits, Ellipses and other Planes of Activity

With artwork by Greg Bogin, Elizabeth Bryant, Anne Eastman, Ib Geertsen, Grabner/Killam, Jean Painleve, Jan Van Der Ploeg and Jonas Wood.

Curated by Michelle Grabner

February 22-April 3, 2010

more info…

Sam Gilliam and Hadley Holliday

Hadley Holliday and Sam Gilliam

Sam Gilliam and Hadley Holliday

Matt Mullican: Works from the 1980s and 90s to be exhibited at kunsthalle L.A.

932 Chung King Road, Chinatown

January 23 – February 27, 2010

Opening reception Saturday, January 23, 6-9 pm

SolwayJones and François Ghebaly / Chung King Project are collaborating on a solo exhibition of painting, sculpture, and prints from the 1980s and 1990s by Matt Mullican. Matt Mullican: Works from the 1980s and 90s will be presented at the Chinatown exhibition space, kunsthalle L.A. located at 932 Chung King Road, Los Angeles. The opening reception will be held on Saturday, January 23, 6-9 pm.

Matt Mullican: Works from the 1980s and 90s will include painting, etched granite sculptures and etchings and screen prints from two portfolio sets published in 1988, and 1993.  The exhibition will include Untitled, 1993, a portfolio of ten silkscreen prints and 64 etchings based on twenty years of Matt Mullican’s notebooks.

For more information, please contact:

Michael Solway or Angela Jones

SolwayJones
990 North Hill Street, #180
Los Angeles, Ca 90012
323.223.0224
solwayjones@sbcglobal.net

————————————–

François Ghebaly

510 Bernard Street
Los Angeles Ca 90012
323 221 2300
info@chungkingproject.com