Beatriz Milhazes at the Cartier Foundation

JP flew for a quick visit to Paris last month to join Beatriz Milhazes at the opening of her exhibition at the Cartier Foundation and by all accounts the exhibition is breathtaking. If you find yourself in Paris before June 21st, make sure to see the show!

“For the exhibition at the Fondation Cartier, Milhazes presents a focused selection of large format acrylic paintings, chosen from her work of the past decade, as well as a monumental collage created especially for the show. She has also realized a monumental commission for the building’s glass facades. Her striking installations play with natural light to create a powerful visual dialogue with the architecture of Jean Nouvel and the surrounding garden.”

Here is a link to the Cartier Foundation’s website and here are a few snapshots of the installation. There are incredible videos of the collage being installed.

http://fondation.cartier.com

Also on exhibit last month was “Gamboa, 2008″, a stunning sculptural installation in iron and mixed media. 27.6 in tall x 45.7 in diameter. The piece which was originally made for Prospect.1 New Orleans Biennial and was on display at James Cohan Gallery last month. “Gamboa (2008) is chandelier-like mobile with suspended glittering ornaments. Recurring motifs from Milhazes’s well-known paintings populate the sculpture, reflecting the artist’s desire to celebrate the shared cultural traditions of Rio de Janeiro and New Orleans. As she explained in The New York Times, “New Orleans was always about the vitality, the dancing and the music. So I link it — the carnival in New Orleans with the Carnival in Rio. It will make this kind of dialogue between two cities”

Beatriz is expected back in Durham this September to begin work on some new prints. Please be sure to check in if you are interested in receiveing infomation closer to their release.

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” mono-prints 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 The prints were originally made as part of Polly’s conceptualization for a new edition, but they were so successful as unique prints, and fitting for our changed economy that we made a group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.

New York Print Fair 2008 – Basic Details

Durham Press will be exhibiting at the New York Print Fair this week. I hope you will join us. The annual IFPDA Print Fair is unique among the world’s major art fairs for its focus on fine prints from all periods. All dealers exhibiting at the Fair are members of the International Fine Print Dealers Association (IFPDA).

We are in booth A30, near the Cafe.

We will have new work by
Polly Apfelbaum
Emil Lukas
James Nares
Ray Charles White

And recent prints by

Beatriz Milhazes

Alison Elizabeth Taylor

John Giorno

Tom Slaughter

As well as work from…
Joe Amrhein, Lydia Dona, Roland Fischer, Michael Heizer,
Stephen Hendee, Scott Kilgour, Jenifer Kobylarz, Antonio Murado,
Lisa Stefanelli, David Urban, Leslie Wayne and Stephen Westfall.

Fair Dates And Viewing Hours:
10/30/08 12:00pm – 7:00pm
10/31/08 12:00pm – 7:00pm
11/01/08 12:00pm – 7:00pm
11/02/08 12:00pm – 6:00pm

Location:
The Park Avenue Armory
643 Park Avenue at 67th Street
New York, NY 10065

Durham Press at Art Toronto 2008

David Urban - Like Seeing Fallen Brightly Away - Three Etchings

 

On October 2nd, Durham Press will be returning to the Toronto International Art Fair after missing a year in 2007. We are looking forward to seeing the many new friends and clients we have made in Canada over the years. We have a strong connection to Canada since I grew up in downtown Toronto (I’m Ann Marshall – co-owner and director of Durham Press) and several of our artists are from Canada, most notably Ray Charles White who has been with us since the start. (and up there for the fair) Other Canadians with whom we have published work include David Urban, Gina Rorai, Daniel Villeneuve and Claude Tousignant. Tom Slaughter also spent most of his summers in Stratford, Ontario since he was a young man and was married to celebrated Canadian author, Marthe Jocelyn. Her books are wonderful! Here’s her website: www.marthejocelyn.com

This year’s show will include many new works from 2007 and 2008, as well as some of our favorites from the past twenty years, as a way of celebrating our upcoming 20th year anniversary! 

The Toronto International Art Fair will be held at held at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre at 255 Front Street West from October 2nd, 2008 through October 6th, 2008. For more information on the fair, including hours and exhibitors, please visit www.tiafair.com.

Below is a small sample of the works you will see up there, but we should have something from all of our artists on hand. To see a complete list of our inventory please visit our website. www.durhampress.com

I hope to see you there!!

Polly Apfelbaum is back making new woodblock monoprints. I will be taking some new small sized works with me including flowers, stripes, zigzags and ribbons. I will also take one of the last of her edition Lover’s Leap 13 (47″ x 47″). This small edition was a huge success and sold out before it was even finished. I have reserved one to sell at the fair in Canada.

Below is stunning new piece we made early this year with Ray Charles White Parallax - 67″ × 67″. I will have this hanging and other new works to show.

Emil Lukas will be back at Durham Press this week making more monoprints. I hope to have several of the new pieces with me. They are really remarkable works from an incredible artist. There is a earlier post showing how they were made (October 29, 2007) and here is a link to his site. www.emillukas.com

Finally, I am planning to bring a hard to find work by Brazilian Painter, Beatirz MIlhazes, called O Espehlo (The Mirror). JP just got back from Brazil where Beatriz opened a huge survey show at the Pinacoteca in Sao Paolo that included her prints from Durham Press. A book will be launched soon that will include a chapter written by Faye Hirsch on Beatriz’s printmaking at Durham Press. Post on this coming soon too!

Beatriz Milhazes O Espehlo

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.

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)

Polly Apfelbaum Production in the Studio

For the last couple of weeks, the studio crew has been working hard to finish production on the last of our new editions–Polly Apfelbaum’s Wood Street and Lover’s Leap 13. Both editions required a bit of innovation and a constructed jig in order to print the perfect edition, and it has been an interesting process to see these prints being produced. Below are a handful of images taken while the studio crew has been been working on these two unique new editions.

Jason, Kyle and Jeremy inking blocks prior to placing them in the jig seen in the foreground

Jason making notes on the ink colors while Kyle and Jeremy place inked blocks into the jig

Jeremy and Kyle placing inked blocks into the jig

Inked blocks in the jig

Once the jig is filled with the appropriate blocks, the entire set up is placed into the hydraulic press, and all of the blocks are pressed into handmade sheets of Japanese paper. The end result is a finished Lover’s Leap 13 print, as seen below.

Colors rolled out for Polly Apfelbaum’s Wood Street (Gray)

Chris placing the inked blocks into the custom-made jig

Chris locking the jig up preparing it to be printed

Reveal of one of the Wood Street (Gray) prints

The finished Wood Street portfolio

Revision, Reiteration, Recombination installation images

Curator Leslie Wayne chatting in front of Lydia Dona’s Portraits & Speed…

We recently received installation images from the exhibition Revision, Reiteration, Recombination: Process and the Contemporary Print curated by Leslie Wayne. The show featured Durham Press prints by Polly Apfelbaum, Lydia Dona and Leslie Wayne among others and traveled to two separate venues. The included images were taken from the installation at the College of Visual Arts in Minneapolis where JP joined Leslie and another invited guest in a roundtable discussion. By all accounts, the exhibition was a success and may travel to other venues later next year.

Polly Apfelbaum’s Baby Love 84 (left) among other works in the exhibition

Image of the installation including works by Leslie Wayne (center right) and Lydia Dona (right)

New Durham Press prints @ Marty Walker Gallery

Tonight marks the opening of Recent Prints by Polly Apfelbaum, Roland Fischer, Beatriz Milhazes, James Nares and Alison Elizabeth Taylor at Marty Walker Gallery in Dallas, Texas. All of the prints in the show are recent projects completed at Durham Press, and for Roland Fischer’s Facades on Paper III, James Nares’ GO and Alison Elizabeth Taylor’s Idylls, this is the first time they will have ever been exhibited outside of the print fairs. The show runs from March 29th to May 3rd, 2008 with an opening reception tonight, March 29th, from 5-8 pm. For more information, please visit www.martywalkergallery.com and click on “Current Exhibition.”

The Marty Walker Gallery website features the following press release for the show:

Marty Walker Gallery presents recent prints from Durham Press. Celebrating its 20th anniversary, Durham Press has earned a reputation for impeccable quality among artists, dealers and curators worldwide. A fine art print publisher based in a turn-of-the century schoolhouse in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, the Press has published and produced over one hundred limited edition contemporary prints with influential artists from around the world. Its projects have been placed with major museums and contemporary art collections, including the Museum of Modern Art and Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Press is a member of the IFPDA. This exhibition features extraordinary new prints by Polly Apfelbaum, Roland Fischer, Beatriz Milhazes, James Nares, and Alison Elizabeth Taylor.

Polly Apfelbaum’s new multicolor wood-block prints recall the artist’s marker on silk-rayon velvet wall pieces, part Josef Albers, part Gene Davis, with the same pop sensibility that informed her flower series. The woodblock monoprint in the exhibit consists of a composition of stripes featuring a spectrum of up to eighty colors. Apfelbaum’s ubiquitous stripes simultaneously address color theory, fashion, pop culture, and rhythm, revealing themselves as both cliché yet iconic. Apfelbaum’s work is included in numerous museum collections, including the Armand Hammer Museum of Art, Dallas Museum of Art, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, and Magasin 3 Stockholm, Sweden.

Brazilian artist Beatriz Milhazes embraces motifs that might become kitschy in less skilled hands. Heavily influenced by both the botanical gardens outside her studio and her sister’s dance company, the flirtatious colors and festive patterns are steeped in carnivalesque rhythms and landscape of her native Brazil. Milhazes has exhibited extensively, showing at the 2006 Shanghai Biennial and the 2004 Venice Biennale. Milhazes has work included in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Guggenheim, 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanzawa, Japan, and Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sophia Madrid, Spain.

For James Nares, painting is a sort of ritual process. A finished work, comprised of a single “perfect” brushstroke, in some ways relates to Asian calligraphy. However, unlike working with ink on paper, open to the caprices of chance, Nares reworks canvases over and over until a precise gesture appears capturing the perfect brush stroke. Born in England, Nares has worked and lived in New York since 1974. Nares work is included in many collections, including Albright Knox Museum, Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

German photographer Roland Fischer photographs sections of buildings’ façades in such a way as to flatten their geometry and create two-dimensional abstract compositions that are simple and starkly beautiful. Closely cropped buildings allude to both abstract painting and portraiture, purposefully concealing the context and size of large buildings in order emphasize their unique decorative and geometric patterns. Work by Fischer is included in collections, such as the Margulies Family Collection, Merrill Lynch London, Microsoft, and Museo Municipal de Arte Contemporáneo de Madrid, among others.

And in the OTHER GALLERY, recent Columbia graduate, Alison Elizabeth Taylor masterfully works ambiguous scenes of small-town adolescent angst in a suite of screenprints published by Durham Press making their exhibition debut at Marty Walker Gallery. In this suite, Taylor continues to portray suburban small-town scenes of mischief, boredom, and awkwardness, among barren landscapes and tacky interiors. Taylor’s narratives are sharp social critiques displaying the banal and the abject in her dystopic vision of modern life. Taylor’s mundane landscapes are executed in the antiquated medium of marquetry (wood veneer inlay), for a solo exhibit at James Cohan Gallery, May 22 -June 21st, 2008.

Polly Apfelbaum @ Center for Contemporary Arts, Santa Fe

Next month, Polly Apfelbaum is going to be part of a group exhibition at the Center for Contemporary Arts Santa Fe in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The exhibition, titled Hair of the Dog, features Polly’s work alongside that of AES+F, Ann Gaziano, Rebecca Holland, Jason Manly, Philip Sanderson and Brandon Soder. The exhibition runs from April 5th through May 25th, 2008, with an opening reception on April 5th from 5 to 7 pm. For more information, please visit the Center for Contemporary Arts Santa Fe website here.

According to the Center for Contemporary Arts website:

The exhibition Hair of the Dog investigates the vocabulary, limitations, and mythology of the medium of painting through modern art history and into the 21st century. The artists and their works do not lend themselves to conclusions; rather, the aim is to provoke critical considerations of how painting functions as art in our culture. None of the artists in the exhibition will apply pigment to canvas in the traditional manner; some will not use paint at all. Portraiture, landscape, and narrative are some of the structures within the language of painting to be engaged. Featuring the work of AES+F, Polly Apfelbaum, Ann Gaziano, Rebecca Holland, Jason Manly, Philip Sanderson, & Brandon Soder; mediums include needlepoint, video, installation, photography, and cast sugar.

Tom Slaughter’s Obama 2008 Posters

Durham Press artist and friend Tom Slaughter recently completed a series of posters in support of the Barack Obama 2008 Presidential Campaign. The posters, printed at Durham Press, come in both a reddish-orange and a blue and feature Tom’s signature papercut-style graphic elements. For more information, please visit Tom’s website at www.tomslaughter.com and click under “Obama Prints.”

The Obama 2008 posters in production at Durham Press

Jason holding one of Tom Slaughter’s untrimmed Obama 2008 posters