Durham Press @ INK Miami

We’re on our way to INK Miami next week, the show runs from December 2nd though the 6th.

INK Miami is located at 1850 Collins Avenue in Miami Beach, only a couple of blocks from Miami Basel, and admission is free- so we look forward to seeing you there!

It’s a great little fair that is dedicated only to prints. This year the participants are going to make an effort to bring some printmaking materials to give visitors a little insight into how prints are made. We are going to bring one of the jigs and all the woodblocks from one of our new Apfelbaums, as well as a great little slideshow of behind the scene at Durham Press!

We will be exhibiting a selection of our lastest prints including Hurvin Anderson, Polly Apfelbaum, Beatriz Milhazes, James Nares, Allison Elizabeth Taylor, and Ray Charles White.

And, as always, we will have monoprints and editions of many more artists to browse through. For more information on our artists, see our website.

Hurvin Anderson, New @ Durham Press

Peter’s Sitters 2 & Welcome Series: Fan Drawing, two of Hurvin Anderson’s paintings

Durham Press recently began working with painter Hurvin Anderson. Hurvin has been working on several prints, using both silkscreen and woodcut processes, and we were pleased to launch the first of these beautiful new works at the IFPDA Print Fair in New York City. The print is yet untitled, it is a woodblock and woodcut of amazing complexity and measures 33” x 26” and will be made in an edition of approximately 40. Thomas Dane will be exhibiting the new print at MiamiBasel and we will have it on display at INK Miami also. The edition is still in production, but is available now for pre-publication sales.

Unititled 2009

In addition to working at Durham Press, 2009 has seen Hurvin exhibiting work in several important venues both in the United States and internationally. In January, he had his second solo show at Thomas Dane, his gallery in London, followed soon after by an exhibition of his paintings at the Tate Britain. Through October 25th, a body of work titled the Peter’s Series can be seen at the Studio Museum in Harlem. This is his first solo museum exhibition in the United States and has garnered a great deal of attention, including a review in the New York times written by Roberta Smith (which can be read here). All in all, it has been a very busy, exciting year for Hurvin and we are happy to have him out working at Durham Press in the midst of all of it. Enjoy some photographs of Hurvin working out at Durham Press (and a sneak peek of one of his new editions).

James Nares back @ Durham Press

James Nares, long-time Durham Press friend and collaborator , returned to the studio recently to complete work on his new screenprint, THUMP. This new edition is the 13th print James has created at Durham Press, and he and JP (the master printer here) continue to push the dynamic dimensionality of his painted brushstrokes into amazing, rich, vibrant screenprinted editions. When asked recently about his experience of working at Durham Press and with JP on this process, James said:

Working at Durham Press is really a pleasure. JP’s knowledge of, and experience with the silkscreening process is second to none, and working with him is a collaboration, as with another artist. He has come up with an ingenious method to create screen prints of my brush strokes which have all the body and tones of an actual, painted brush stroke, but without the use of half-tone…

For those maybe unfamiliar with the screenprinting process, creating a halftone is the process of turning all the tone in an image into various sized and spaced dots in order to create the tonal variation. This allows all of the tone to be printed at once and is what you are looking at when you see a black and white photo printed in the newspaper, for example. What gives James’ prints the fluidity, the subtle shift in tone and the overall richness of color is that is is not printed as a halftone, but is rather broken down into 10-15 layers of varied tone and color and then rebuilt, through printing each layer one on top of the other. It is a complicated process, but creates a seamlessness in the color and tonal shifts that would not be possible otherwise.

To see THUMP as well as some of the other work James has produced with Durham Press, please visit our booth at the IFPDA Print Fair in New York City. The fair is held at the Park Avenue Armory and runs from November 5th – November 8th, 2009.

Also, James film Rome in ‘78 is currently being shown at MOMA as part of the film exhibition, Looking at Music: Side 2. The next screening will be on Saturday, November 28th at 7:30 p.m. The film, according to the MOMA website, is “a narrative about the Roman emperor Caligula set in a shabby Manhattan apartment, proposes an analogy between ancient Rome and modern America as cultural empires. The image below is a still from the film.

Color Field Note Portfolio

A snapshot of Polly Apfelbaum’s Color Field Notes on the wall at Durham Press.

Polly Apfelbaum launches new monprints at this year’s New York Print Fair

Durham Press will launch several new Polly Apfelbaum monoprints at this year’s fall fairs. New work will include smaller  sized “Love” woodblocks (the flowers),  as well as some remarkable new “ZigZag” prints in a grand scale.

Priced at an affordable entry point, there will be new “Love” monoprints in sizes ranging from 12″x 12 to 20 x 20″. The prints were originally made as part of Polly’s conceptualization for a new edition, but they were so successful as unique prints, and fitting for our changed economy that we made a group of them in different sizes for this year’s fair.

WAVE PARK – five new 79 x 79″ monoprints have just been completed Wave Park 3 will be exhibited at the fair.

 

Beatriz Milhazes events this Fall

Fall 2008 is shaping up to be a busy one for Durham Press friend and artist, Beatriz Milhazes, as she has several noteworthy events taking place in both the United States and abroad in the upcoming months. On September 6th, her retrospective exhibition at the Pinacoteca do Estado in Sao Paulo, Brazil opens. The show will feature work spanning Beatriz’s career including a number of prints she has made in collaboration with Durham Press.

On October 10th, her third solo exhibition at James Cohan Gallery opens. The show runs from October 10th, 2008 to November 15th, 2008 and will feature a selection of her new paintings and collages. The James Cohan website provides the following press release for the exhibition:

James Cohan Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new works by artist Beatriz Milhazes, opening October 10th and running through November 15th 2008. As one of the most celebrated Brazilian artists working today, Milhazes’ exuberantly colored, rhythmically constructed abstract paintings, collages, prints and architectural installations are well-known worldwide. Milhazes merges all of the formal concerns inherent in abstract painting with a dizzying hybrid of influences that bounce off of each other to produce works in which, as the artist describes, “culture eats culture.” In her attempt to make the viewer’s eye “spin around,” Milhazes deftly uses images as a distribution system for color.

In this third solo gallery exhibition, Milhazes will present a selection of collages and paintings. In the past, the paintings have been the inspiration for the artist’s other endeavors, such as her collages made from chocolate candy wrappers, shopping bags and colored paper and her installations on building façades. In this latest body of work however, the reverse is true; the paintings, whose surfaces are built up from an elaborate process of transferring motifs painted on plastic sheet, are increasingly influenced by the immediacy of working with small bits of paper and the bold strokes of large-scale architecture. This shift, as well as a deepening involvement in nature — the artist’s Rio de Janeiro studio borders her beloved Botanic Gardens — has influenced Milhazes’ new work, making it even more rigorously structured with broader fields of color and new elements derived from abstractions of natural and architectural forms.

Not afraid to gather inspiration from sources such as Brazilian folk arts and decoration, Milhazes embraces these “low” art influences and balances them with the high-minded modernism that was brought to Latin America by an earlier generation of artists such Helio Oticica and Tarsila do Amaral. Mix in the rhythms and grooves of Tropicalismo, the spectacle of color that is Carnival and the over-the-top ornamentation of the Colonial Baroque and the paintings exemplify “anything goes”—an apt phrase coined by the Neo-Concrete artist Waldemar Coreiro in the 1960’s. As Paolo Herkenhoff explains in his catalogue essay for Milhazes’ exhibition Mares do Sul, rather than trying to create a destabilizing effect, “Milhazes aspires to encountering harmony in the absurd, her painting not being the collapse of order but that moment that follows vertigo.”

Beatriz Milhazes is participating in several important exhibitions and events in the upcoming year. Milhazes is the subject of a major survey exhibition at the Pincoteca do Estado in São Paolo, Brazil opening on September 6th 2008. Another solo exhibition is planned at the Fondation Cartier in Paris opening March 2009. Both of these solo exhibitions will include site-specific installations on the windows of the museums. Milhazes will be participating in a number of group exhibitions this fall including When Lives Become Form at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, curated by Yuko Hasegawa, opening October 21st; the Prospect 1 New Orleans, the largest biennial of international art to be organized in the US, opening October 31st for which she has been commissioned to make a chandelier-like room installation. Concurrent with the Frieze Art Fair in October 2008 will be the launch of Milhazes’ new artist book published by Ridinghouse, London, UK. In addition, The Rug Company, London UK will be launching a new limited edition artist tapestry project in October 2008 for which Milhazes has created a work and New York fabric manufacturer, Maharam is producing a line of artist’s fabrics that will include a design by Milhazes also to come out this fall.

Milhazes has exhibited widely in museums around the world and has represented her country at the 50th Venice Biennale, 2003. She has participated in many international biennial exhibitions including; Shanghai Biennale, 2006; XXVI Bienal de São Paolo, 2006 and 1998; the 11th Biennale of Sydney, 1998 and the Carnegie International, 1995. Milhazes was born in 1960 in Rio de Janiero, Brazil where lives and works today.

For further information, please contact Jane Cohan in New York at jane@jamescohan.com or telephone 212-714-9500.

As mentioned in the press release, Beatriz will also be participating in Prospect 1. New Orleans, the largest biennial of international contemporary art ever organized in the United States. Prospect 1 was curated by Dan Cameron and runs from November 1st, 2008 through January 18, 2009.

This Fall will also see the release of Beatriz’s new artist’s book published by Ridinghouse, London, UK, as well as a new limited edition artist tapestry produced by The Rug Company, London UK and a line of artists’ fabrics produced by Maharam that includes one of Beatriz’s designs. For more information about any of these projects, please visit the embedded links.

Polly Apfelbaum at Locks Gallery

Polly Apfelbaum’s exhibition, Monochromes 2003-2007, opens at Locks Gallery in Philadelphia on September 5th, 2008. The show runs from September 2nd through September 30th and will feature a number of Polly’s “fallen painting” installations. The Locks Gallery website provides the following press release:

Locks Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of fabric installations by Polly Apfelbaum, on view September 2-30, 2008. There will be a reception for the artist on Friday, September 5, 5:30-7:30 pm.

Polly Apfelbaum’s highly intricate fabric installations – works she describes as “fallen paintings”, range from mandalic sunbursts to riotous spills and Pop-inspired gardens. Comprised of hundreds of individual dyed fabric pieces, Apfelbaum’s installations reference modern art history – the 1950s poured works of Morris Louis and Helen Frankenthaler, and Lynda Benglis’s latex floor pieces. With their vibrant, saturated colors, Apfelbaum’s works explore the nature of craft, Pop design aesthetic, and sewn, hand-crafted applications.

The Locks Gallery exhibit will bring together 4 large-scale floor works from 2003–07 that have not been previously exhibited together. Each of the four works presents a variation on flower imagery. Limited to a single color with the flowers outlined in black, these flower power works line the gallery wall’s perimeter and envelope the viewer like a cartoon garden brought to life.

A series of the artist’s 20 x 24 inch Polaroid images of her flowers will also be shown in the Locks installation.

New York-based Apfelbaum has had one-person museum exhibitions throughout the US and Europe. Her recent solo exhibitions were held at the Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis and the Paine Gallery, Massachusetts College of Art, Boston. The ICA Philadelphia organized a 2003 retrospective that traveled to the Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati and the Kemper Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO. The artist’s work is in numerous museum collections including MoMA, the Whitney Museum of Art, L.A. County Museum of Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Dallas Museum of Art and Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.

Locks Gallery is located at 600 Washington Square South in Philadelphia, PA. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 10am to 6pm. For additional information, please contact Locks Gallery at 215.629.1000 voice, 215.629.3868 fax, or info@locksgallery.com.

For more information, please visit the Locks Gallery website here.

Alison Elizabeth Taylor Installation Photographs

We recently received several installation photographs of Alison Elizabeth Taylor’s incredible exhibition at James Cohan Gallery. The show received positive reviews from a number of publications, including Artforum, The New York Times, and Modern Painters, all of which can be seen and read here. The images below are of several of Alison’s smaller works in the front gallery at James Cohan and then two shots of her Room installation that occupied the back. For more information, please visit the James Cohan website, and to see the new portfolio of screenprints Alison made in collaboration with Durham Press, please visit her section on our website here.

View of Alison Elizabeth Taylor’s Room as you enter the space

View of Room looking out of the space

Several of Alison’s smaller wood-veneer pieces in the front space at James Cohan Gallery

Alison Elizabeth Taylor @ James Cohan Gallery

This Thursday, May 22nd, Alison Elizabeth Taylor’s exhibition, New Works, will also open at James Cohan Gallery in New York City. The show runs from May 22 – June 21, 2008 and will include Alison’s recent collaboration with Durham Press, Idylls, alongside her stunning wood veneer inlay pieces (see image below). The James Cohan website features the following press release for the exhibition:

James Cohan Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new works by Alison Elizabeth Taylor, whose marquetry, or wood-inlay, figurative works reveal the hidden histories of everyday lives. In her use of wood veneer, Taylor subverts the material’s customary use as a decorative element used to convey a sense of wealth, power, and elite social status. Taylor’s oblique narratives refer to mainstream American culture and interests— large vehicles, sex, guns, video games, religion, hunting and the military—that seem to predominate. Limited to a palette of natural woods, she innovates by using the grain and tone of the veneer to explore issues of space, surface, line, color, and form. Her paintings uniquely transgress the traditional distinction between craft and high art.

The centerpiece of Taylor’s exhibition is a free-standing architectural installation in Gallery Three entitled Room. Like the trompe l’oeil masterpiece known as the Duke of Urbino’s Studiolo from the Ducal Palace in Gubbio (1479-1482), now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the contents but not the occupant of Room are depicted in detailed wooden marquetry panels. During the Italian Renaissance, patrons commissioned large intarsia projects, like the Gubbio Studiolo, as expressions of their wealth and power to confirm their positions in society by illustrating their educated tastes—the images amounting to an idealized autobiography. In contrast, Taylor’s Room does not exalt her subject. In this architectural portrait, Taylor examines the habitat and possessions of its resident, who reveals himself to be a character living on the edge of society.

The Room is a trove of objects fascinating and mundane: a US Army helmet from Vietnam rests in a display case with a handgun; a deer hoof is mounted on a horseshoe; a lamp has been fashioned of a hollowed-out grenade; the room is inhabited by animals taxidermied or carved. Many of the objects have price tags attached, indicating the multiple uses of the space: a store, a workshop, and a habitation. An open window hints that the occupant may have escaped. The east-facing window looks out onto a stretch of land decimated by the incursion of tract-homes which threaten to crowd Room out of existence. Through the opposite window is rocky, virgin desert. There, beauty and entropy entwine, contrasting with the ordered monotony of development. As the rural desert concedes to suburban planning, it becomes what the subject was trying to escape: over-crowded, over-priced and stifling. The old bargain he struck with the desert—freedom for isolation —has been reneged.

Single-panel works installed in the front galleries further chronicle those who are driven by their desire to escape society and who ultimately realize the impossibility of finding respite. In Hank (2007), a shabbily dressed man peddles a bicycle up a mountain incline, and his worried glance over his shoulder suggests that he is fleeing some danger. Slab City (2007) pictures another kind of trouble —two characters, one entirely nude, the other dishevelled, ignore what looks to be a person submerged and drowning in an adjacent pond. Taylor’s subjects are society’s dropouts whose surroundings—a geodesic dome or a VW bus—suggest that they fled to the West in search of the refuge of an alternative lifestyle. Despite their utopian dreams, her characters find themselves in predicaments that are far from enlightened. At least, this is what we imagine; Taylor masterfully piques viewers’ interest while leaving many questions unanswered.

A native of Las Vegas, Alison Elizabeth Taylor is concerned with the changing desert and environmental sustainability. This is Taylor’s second exhibition at James Cohan Gallery. Taylor graduated with an MFA from Columbia University, New York, in 2005. She has been featured in group exhibitions such as 96 Gillespie’s Dirty Pigeons (2005, London); Other America at Exit Art (2005, New York); Truly She is None Other at New Image Art Gallery (2006, Los Angeles); and The Powder Room at Track 16 Gallery (2007, Los Angeles).

For more information, please visit www.jamescohan.com

Hank by Alison Elizabeth Taylor (image courtesy of James Cohan Gallery)

Roland Fischer @ Von Lintel Gallery

This Thursday, May 22nd, marks the opening of Roland Fischer’s exhibition at Von Lintel Gallery. The show will feature photographs from a number of Roland’s series, including Facades and Chinese Pool Portraits. The exhibition runs from May 22 through June 28, 2008.

The Von Lintel Gallery sent out the following press release for the exhibition:

Von Lintel Galley is pleased to present an exhibition of new photographs by German photographer Roland Fischer.

Including outstanding new additions to his Facades series and striking Chinese Pool Portraits, an offshoot of his well-received Los Angeles Portraits series, the works in this show exemplify the
new territory Fischer continues to explore in his unflagging examination of the formal aspects of photography.

Whether photographing buildings for his Facades, or people for his Pool Portraits, Fischer focuses
our attention directly on a specific entity. In the case of the buildings, Fischer fills the frame of his viewfinder with their facades, stripping them of the distracting visual cacophony that normally
surrounds them. Isolated so, their vivid colors and dramatic geometries demonstrate a striking formalism and visual punch that call to mind a photographic version of modernist abstract painting. Fischer’s human subjects are also visually isolated, with only their heads and shoulders visible above the un-modulated blue of a still, indoor pool. De-contextualizing them this way, and portraying them with crystalline clarity, Fischer pointedly concentrates the viewer’s awareness of the individuality of the building or person. Each picture is imbued with the feeling that it holds captive the spirit of its subject, and thus, his photographs transcend mere documentation and border on the sublime.

Born in 1958, Munich based photographer Roland Fischer is a key figure in contemporary German
photography. Photo Technik International named him one of Germany’s top ten photographers alongside Demand, Gursky, Ruff, and Struth. His work has been the subject of many national and international exhibitions and is included in numerous public collections, such as at the Musée d’art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Munich; Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain, Strasbourg; Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst, Antwerp; Saarland Museum, Saarbrücken and the Grand Rapids Art Museum, Grand Rapids.

For more information, please visit www.vonlintel.com.

James Nares – Motion Pictures film screening

This weekend James Nares will be screening a number of his films at the Anthology Film Archives in New York City (32 Second Avenue between 1st and 2nd Streets). The Anthology Film Archives provides the following press release for the program:

James Nares is known primarily as a painter. His reputation in film rests mainly with ROME ‘78, NO JAPS AT MY FUNERAL and WAITING FOR THE WIND, three rarely-screened movies he made between 1978 and 1982, when he was associated with what came to be known as the No Wave movement in New York. However, he was making films before that period, and has continued to make them ever since. Presented here is a selection of 34 films (many in brand-new prints) made from 1975 to 2007, only seven of which have ever been screened. All the movies from 1975 and 1976 were missing and presumed lost until a number of them were discovered in deep storage in 2007. Nares has spent the past year revisiting and restoring all this work, and in the case of one, THE LIGHTHOUSE, finishing a movie which had been lying in rough-edit form for 17 years. Program 7, on Thursday, May 22, will be followed by a conversation between Nares and writer Luc Sante (LOW LIFE)!

Each night a different selection of films will be screened, and the full schedule can be seen here. For more information, please visit www.anthologyfilmarchives.org.