Oli Epp Interview in Juxtapoz Magazine
Dec 6, 2021

The Getting Bigger Everyday Game: A Conversation with Oli Epp

It always seems like Oli Epp is playing a big game. The Lonodn artist's spirit is generous, and it's palpable even across the ocean. As a residency host and fine artist, his work is about a rare sense of sexiness in an otherwise near-digital aesthetic, a warmth in what could be perceived as a modern chill. His newest body of oil and acrylic works are on display at Richard Heller Gallery, where BigGame comprises of 6 paintings that speak to the bold and broad universe that is Los Angeles. 

Evan Pricco: You have always been sort of this great energy in the London art world, and I loved how you hosted a residency and felt like you were observing the art world around you in a very comuunial way just as you were emerging into the scene yourself. When the world slowed down a bit, what was it that you were noticing then? And now that it is opening, what do you see now amongst your friends and peers?

Oli Epp: That's kind of you to say that. Lockdown was really dispiriting for a lot of people. It made me question what it means to be an artist during a time when art couldn't really be seen. 

I have a handful of friends in first and second year of art school and it was clear that it was a very difficult time for them. Imagine how hard it must have been to develop a studio practice in your bedroom. I really wanted to get PLOP Residency up and running again this year, in collaboration with Cob Gallery, so that there would be more opportunities for creative dialogue in London. I wanted to bring back the energy to the Big Smoke. 

Now that the world has reopened, I have noticed a real thirst amongst artists to just reengage with art in the physical world again, as much as possible. We all want to go to as many shows and openings as we can, get in each others studios and see what we have all been working on these last eighteen months. 

Click here to read the whole interview: https://www.juxtapoz.com/news/painting/the-getting-bigger-everyday-game-a-conversation-with-oli-epp/

Kajahl Interview in Juxtapoz Magazine
Oct 26, 2021

Tabula Rasa: A Conversation with Kajahl

That Kajahl was looking at a painting from 1573 as we conducted this interview says a lot about his process and the history is looking into. He speaks of the art canon, the A-sides of art history as you will, but he is digging deep into the B-sides, the forgotten parts of the canon that are just as illustrious as the paintings we see in books throughout the centuries. On the occassion of his solo show, Tabula Rasa, on view now at Richard Heller Gallery, we spoke the Santa Cruz artist about time, artifacts and assemblages. 

Evan Pricco: I want to talk about the pieces that you collect that go along with yourpaintings. The sculptures and objects. Where do you find those? Are they reference pieces from museums that you go to?
Kajahl: I've been fortunate in my ability to travel. Of course, artists have done this for centuries,learning and discovering, informing their interests. A formative experience for me was spending several days at the Warburg Institute in London, poring through their massive photography archives. The Museo de Antropología de Xalapa, in Mexico, is where I encountered Olmec culture, dating back 3,000 years. At last year's Making Marvels show at the Met, it was terrific to see the posh objects European royalty collected. 

Click here to read the whole conversation: https://www.juxtapoz.com/news/painting/tabula-rasa-a-conversation-with-kajahl/

Cindy Bernhard in Hypebeast
Sept 9, 2021

Cindy Bernhard's "Smoke and Prayers" Is on View at Richard Heller Gallery

by Shawn Ghassemitari

Cindy Berhard is a Chicago-based artist with a spooky aesthetic. Working across mediums, such as air-brushed veneers, oils and pastels, she creates superflat dreamscapes that invite us to slow down and take in the peculiarities of daily life. 

Bernhard has just unveiled a new solo exhibition entitled, "Smoke and Prayers" at Richard Heller Gallery in Santa Monica. Quickly one can detect the artist's penchant for humor and irony through symbolic juxtapositions, such as those used in her painting, Joints and Jesus. "This structure allows me to access viewers through empathy and humor," said Bernhard in a past statement. However, the artist does not use humor simply as comedy relief, but rather as a "political response and act of resistance to pop culture's demanding aesthetics," she added.

Click here to read the whole article: https://hypebeast.com/2021/9/cindy-bernhard-smoke-and-prayers-richard-heller-gallery

My Sweet Doppelgänger in Juxtapoz.
Aug 4, 2021

My Sweet Doppelgänger: Richard Heller Gallery Examines the Shadow Self in New Group Show

As we always expect an artist to be looking out, beyond the studio, and interpret and examine the world and figures that surround us, it's always an interesting idea for the artist to look at themselves. Lucian Freud literally comes to mind, and even the likes of Tracey Emin or Chuck Closer also have made career's of looking back into the self with their work. 

Richard Heller Gallery is about to open My Sweet Doppelgänger, a new group show that "gathers a diverse, international mix of twenty-four artists who each bring their own unique take, in various mediums, as to what the concept of "Doppelgänger" (whether "sweet" or otherwise) inspired in them for this exhibition." And Heller has made an interesting prompt: For the upcoming exhibition, My Sweet Doppelgänger, we offer a kind of reversal of what 'Doppelgänger' means, introducing a 'body double' for each artist, with a more benevolent and often friendlier face. In a loose adaptation of Jungian terms, this could be seen as an embrace of the shadow-self."

Click here to see the rest of the article and images from the show: https://www.juxtapoz.com/news/installation/my-sweet-doppelgaenger-richard-heller-gallery-examines-the-shadow-self-in-new-group-show/

Brandon Lipchik Review in Artillery Magazine.
Jul 6, 2021

Brandon Lipchik - Richard Heller Gallery

by Shana Nys Dambrot

A new suite of swimming-pool themed paintings by Brandon Lipchik look like everything but what they are. Their physical surface textures are varied from shape to shape, and even more so the range of techniques employed in each image. Their reductive geometrical and planar elements of nature, architecture and anatomy nestle like intersecting passages of stylized abstraction. Their bold graphic quality, foreshortening and forced perspectives suggest a hyper-flat picture plane when in fact each scene inhabits complex depths of pictorial space. While optically informed by the digital condition, and at moments outright presenting as photo-collage, the works are painstakingly hand-built with layers, expert taping and multiple visual languages. Once the puzzle of how he constructs his images is solved, the content which has presented as quirky, jaunty armatures for flourishes of style reveals nuanced, pensive and even melancholic emotional states.

Click here to read the whole review: https://artillerymag.com/brandon-lipchik/

Laure Mary-Couégnias Interview in Juxtapoz.
Jun 29, 2021

Escape Lane: A Conversation with Laure Mary-Couégnias

How do we daydream an escape plan? I think every single person reading this went through the subconscious thoughts of what it was to feel static and need to move over the last year, and the way Paris-based painter Laure Mary-Couégmnias has worked with dreams and surrealism, a classic throwback with contemporary nuance, she has begun a new conversation about space and the places we inhabit. On the occasion of her solo show, Escape Lane, on view now at Richard Heller Gallery in Los Angeles, we spoke to her about rooms, dinners and Paris. 

Evan Pricco: I have a funny one; what is your favorite room you have ever been in? Could be from your childhood or just a room in a museum… 

Maybe my bedroom when I was a child. It has undergone many changes since then, so it exists only in my memories. A bedroom is a space in which the boundaries are uncertain. I remember creating countless surreal theatrical scenes in that room, with invented friends who made me feel less lonely, worthless objects that I arranged on shelves as if they were priceless treasures, whole boxes of things whose meaning escapes me, but each of which symbolised a moment I didn't want to leave behind. I loved this room, it was carefree and made things more beautiful, easier, timeless. Every day it was different, every day I rediscovered it. My childhood room was the life that builds duration.

Click here to read the whole conversation: https://www.juxtapoz.com/news/painting/escape-lane-a-conversation-with-laure-mary-couegnias/

John Greenwood in Juxtapoz.
Jun 24, 2021

I've got a massive subconcious: John Greenwood @ Richard Heller Gallery

You know those macro to micro shots that go from the vastness of the universe and end up on a nucleus of a cell, or something like that?! That, with the addition of the elusive time element, is what John Greenwood's paintings are meant to represent. Once we were given this key during the recent virtual studio visit with the artist, these convoluted displays of otherworldly but certainly organic forms earned a whole new meaning.

There are countless benefits of getting an art education and being taught how to paint, use tools, and look at your own and others' work, but one should never forget the impact that teachers and mentors can have. After recently talking with Greenwood ahead of his big US debut with Richard Heller gallery which opens on June 26th, we've learned that he is an example of what happens when one tries to mould another person and its creativity. It was many years ago that one of Greenwood's teachers made a negative remark about his use of color which completely locked the young artist's ability and confidence to work with bright, vivid hues he was feeling affinity towards. This resulted in years of working with subdued tones instead of colors, in an effort to fit in a box that was allegedly existing for him. Luckily, during those years and decades of working "under restrictions" he kept exploring the aspects of paintings he was drawn towards, polishing his technique along the way to supreme extent. And it wasn't until only a few years ago that the artist dared to reach for those shiny, light-infused colors and quite quickly had a big break, with international exhibitions lining up one after the other.

Click here to read the whole article and see images from the show: https://www.juxtapoz.com/news/painting/i-ve-got-a-massive-subconcious-john-greenwood-richard-heller-gallery/

Brandon Lipchik Interview in Juxtapoz Magazine
May 19, 2021 - May 19, 2001

What We Talk About When We Talk About Swimming: A Conversation with Brandon Lipchik

Swimming pools are an interesting subject to paint. They are both a personal and almost secretive place of discovery, and often they can be a place of community and fun. Brandon Lipchik has captured the essence of swimming in a way that is both unique and spiritual. For his new solo show at Richard Heller Gallery, Inground, Lipchik has taken the pool as a place of personal revelation, those moments of desire that are so engrained in the mind that the openess of water seeps into your psyche. 

Evan Pricco: How have you been? I figured I should just start with asking you how the last year has been, how productive you found yourself. 
Brandon Lipchik: Thanks for asking! My year has actually been super productive regardless of COVID. My practice as a painter is pretty isolated anyway so it just gave me an excuse to continue to be productive in quarantine. I am sort of quarantined pandemic or not.

Click here to read the rest of the interview: https://www.juxtapoz.com/news/painting/what-we-talk-about-when-we-talk-about-swimming-a-conversation-with-brandon-lipchik/

Orkideh Torabi Review in New City Art
May 17, 2021

Poking Fun at the Patriarchy: A Review of Orkideh Torabi at the MCA

The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago continues its Atrium Project series with work by the Iranian-born, Chicago-based artist Orkideh Torabi, entitled "Peach House's 5 Bucks Morning Special." It uses dye on cotton fabric, which is then transferred to vinyl. The piece depicts a men-only public bathhouse, a representation of male characters in a traditional cultural context at several times larger than life-size.

Torabi has for many years created unique artworks inspired by the traditional elements and scene-setting concepts of Persian miniature. She uses techniques of Persian miniature that enable her to show both the interior and exterior spaces simultaneously. This allows her to become a set of eyes positioned outside, as if on a rooftop, directing their gaze inside, into the bathhouse. The exterior backgrounds feature clouds, skies and mountains similar to Persian miniature, while the interior space is filled with a range of blue hues and shapes inspired by mosaics and geometrical forms of Persian architecture and painting. The larger frame is divided into several smaller two-dimensional rectangles encompassing the figures.

Click here to read the full review: https://art.newcity.com/2021/05/17/poking-fun-at-the-patriarchy-a-review-of-orkideh-torabi-at-the-mca/

Paco Pomet in Juxtapoz Magazine
Apr 7, 2021

Paco Pomet's Elegant and Surreal "Beginnings" @ Richard Heller Gallery, Los Angeles

A fresh, or at least another start, a new page.replace("?", "%3F")+".html", a chance to try new things, or familiar ones but armed with experience, the beginnings are usually seen as an opportunity and therefore a positive predicament. Yet, the cold truth is that they are merely a logical follow-up of endings, a term with downright opposite connotations. And this interconnectivity of the beginning being a consequence of an ending, is what prompted Paco Pomet to choose such a momentous title for his 5th solo show with Richard Heller Gallery. Seduced by the idea of approaching this body of work with a vision of commencement instead of closing one, Beginnings is the artist's response to the profound awareness of finitude, limitation, uncertainty, and precariousness in times of the global pandemic.

Click here to read the full review: https://www.juxtapoz.com/news/painting/paco-pomet-s-elegant-and-surreal-beginnings-richard-heller-gallery-los-angeles/

Hunter Potter Interview in Juxtapoz Magazine.
Mar 9, 2021

I'll Wake Up Older: A Conversation with Hunter Potter

by Evan Pricco

There is a sense we had a lost year in 2020, and yet here we are in 2021, on the precipice of life returning, perhaps a light at the end of the tunnel. In 20 years time, we might have a better sense of what the pause looked like in terms of our collective psyche. Hunter Potter is talking about it now, but also a deeper conversation about personal life with his new body of work, I'll Wake Up Older, now on view at Richard Heller Gallery in Los Angeles. Looking at youth, small town America, the perception of peaking in high school and being heartbroken when looking at the past. That it reflects perhaps our COVID life seems apt. I spoke with the Brooklyn-based painter recently to talk about what the intricacies of his work were speaking to, how the happy accident of connecting with COIVD came to fruition, growing up in small town America and the idea of You Can't Win. 

Click here to read the full interview: https://www.juxtapoz.com/news/painting/i-ll-wake-up-older-a-conversation-with-hunter-potter/

Justin Liam O'Brien Interview in Elephant Magazine
Dec 17, 2020

Justin Liam O'Brien Paints Loneliness as a "Pathological Condition"

by Emily Steer

Loneliness is never far from Justin Liam O'Brien's paintings. In Bread on a Seder Plate, a new work which is currently showing at Richard Heller Gallery in Los Angeles, five lively figures are crowded around a brightly lit table, apparently deep in dinner party conversation, while two more sleep on the sofa behind them. But it is the eighth figure who really catches the viewer's attention. Standing alone, he looks off canvas and appears to blend with his surroundings, his clothes and even his skin are tinged with the soft blue grey of the wall behind him. He is a figure that many people will relate to; most have felt this sense of sinking loneliness at some social event or other, hoping that the room might just swallow them up.

Click here to read the full interview: https://elephant.art/justin-liam-obrien-painting-loneliness-interview-17122020/

Justin Liam O'Brien Interview in Juxtapoz Magazine
Oct 31, 2020

Justin Liam O'Brien A Freed Style 

by Evan Pricco

Through the chaos and divide that America has gone through in 2020, from the minor ups and tragic and enduring lows, moments of clarity emerge. For painter Justin Liam O'Brien, 2020 is a bit of breakthrough through a break-up: leaving his day job behind in 3D modeling to focus solely on his craft in his studio, resulting in a stunning new direction with his show this summer, Dammed By the Rainbow, at GNYP Gallery in Berlin, and his upcoming fall exhibition with Richard Heller Gallery in Los Angeles. The intimacy in these works, speaking on topics such as Queer identity, isolation, sadness and humor, have begun to evolve as O'Brien becomes more seasoned in his practice. From his early aspirations in video game design, to finding inspiration in the career of David Wojnarowicz, with the world in flux, O'Brien is finding meaning in this new chapter in American painting. 

Click here to read the full interview: https://www.juxtapoz.com/news/magazine/features/justin-liam-o-brien-a-freed-style/

Joakim Ojanen in Artillery
Oct 7, 2020

2 Ceramics Shows: Joakim Ojanen & Max Maslansky

by Jody Zellen

Stockholm-based artist Joakim Ojanen's delightful exhibition of paintings, drawings, and ceramics at Richard Heller Gallery is aptly titled: "A Show for the Lonely Distant Baby Souls." According to the artist, it is "a celebration of the human being." He goes on to say, "Let the stupid feelings take over. Get mad, get angry, get drunk, get happy, get sad! Find a friend, give them your heart, smoke a cigarette, look up in the blue sky, suck a flower, enjoy the day but also cry. Please don't forget to cry. There's many of us, we can make miracles together, beautiful things! But most of the time it's hard to understand each other, that's OK but just please be nice."

Click here to read the full article: https://www.artillerymag.com/2-ceramics-shows-joakim-ojanen-max-maslansky/

Jackson Casady in Art Now LA
Jul 27, 2020

Jackson Casady: 'Peccadillo Soup'

by Jody Zellen

Jackson Casady is a young Los Angeles artist (just 24 years old) whose surreal and satirical paintings cull their subject matter from the entertainment industry, popular culture and the manicured landscape of Los Angeles. His figurative canvases and works on paper have a dream-like quality— as if what is depicted is at once possible and impossible. 

Click here to read the full article: https://artnowla.com/2020/07/26/jackson-casady-peccadillo-soup/

Eric Croes in Architectural Digest
May 19, 2020

What 11 Artists Have Created During Quarantine 

by Gay Gassman

Belgian artist Eric Croes has been quietly working away in his studio in Brussels, a five-minute walk from his house. He has taken advantage of the short commute to bring his dog, Mammouth, a little dachshund, to and fro. Croes has been one to watch these past few years, building up an artistic practice of fanciful and colorful ceramic totems and sculptures, all highly personal. He once told AD that these works were ways for him to tell personal stories without bothering anyone. As for the past few weeks on lockdown, the artist says, "God never closes a door without leaving a window open." Croes was meant to have a solo show mid-March at Sorry We're Closed, his Brussels gallery, but he says, "Instead of drowning in melancholy, I took advantage of the time to throw myself into my work: I started working on a commission for the city of Nantes and it took an unexpected turn during this strange period. During the modeling process, it became something like an ex-voto covered with good luck charms. I wanted it to be like a good genie protecting the passersby. It's also brought me good luck in the studio during this time." instagram.com/eric.croes

Click here to read the full article: https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/artists-work-in-quarantine

Joakim Ojanen in HYPEBEAST
Apr 21, 2020

Joakim Ojanen Welcomes You to His Fever Dream

Joakim Ojanen's work is a feverish childhood dream immortalized in oil paintings, charcoal drawings, ceramic sculptures, and installations. Over the years, the Swedish artist has played maker to a cast of humanoid creatures and their wacko companions.

Click here to read the full article: https://hypebeast.com/2020/4/joakim-ojanen-interview-new-work

Baldur Helgason in Hypebeast
Apr 6, 2020

Baldur Helgason Creates "Spiritual Paintings for Emotional People" as part of a new virtual presentation with Richard Heller Gallery

by Keith Estiler

This past weekend, Balder Helgason virtually presented a new body of work as part of an exhibition titled "Spiritual Paintings for Emotional People" at Richard Heller Gallery. The works on show feature the Chicago-based artist's stripe-shirted cartoon character in varying, vivid scenes of the everyday mundane. 

Click here to read the full article: https://hypebeast.com/2020/4/baldur-helgason-creates-spiritual-paintings-for-emotional-people

David Jien in the New York Times
Apr 1, 2020

David Jien in the New York Times

Illustration for a piece written by Sophie Dahl. 

Click here to see the illustration: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/01/magazine/letter-of-recommendation-mudlarking.html

A Conversation with Sara Birns in Juxtapoz
Mar 31, 2020

Art In Uncertain Times: A Conversation with Sara Birns As She Celebrates Her First Solo Show in a Crisis

in Studio Time

"I has the privilege of introducing Sara Birns to oil paint just over a year ago," Juxtapoz alum Christian Rex van Minnen enthused about his protege, Santa Cruz, California-based painter Sara Birns. "To be this young with this kind of talent is insane. I can't wait to see where she goes, and I feel extremely fortunate to get to play a small role in her journey... Sara is a natural, a phenom."

Click here to read the full conversation: https://www.juxtapoz.com/news/studio-time/art-in-uncertain-times-a-conversation-with-sara-birns-as-she-celebrates-her-first-solo-show-in-a-crisis/

Ana Benaroya Interview in Juxtapoz
Mar 5, 2020

Ana Benaroya: Poetic Justice

by Kristin Farr

The great and powerful OZ was revered and feared, but secretly, a humble and quiet creator, empowering an alter-ego to express his emerald-hued, fiery feelings. Ana Benaroya's fervent paintings are akin to the Wizard's approach, but they speak for her rage as a female, which, considering global cultures and the perpetration of varying levels of violence, remains a second-c;ass gender or worse. 

Click here to read the full interview: https://www.juxtapoz.com/news/magazine/features/ana-benaroya-poetic-justice/

David Jien in Hi-Fructose Magazine
Sept 11, 2019

David Jien Returns with 'All Is Not Lost'

by Andy Smith

Rendered in colored pencil and graphite, the new works of David Jien expand his wild worlds in a show at Richard Heller Gallery. "All Is Not Lost," running though Nov. 2 at the Santa Monica space, moves between his strange scenes and shelves of curiosities. 

Click here to read the full article: https://hifructose.com/2019/09/11/david-jien-returns-with-all-is-not-lost/

Orkideh Torabi Review in the LA Times
Jul 29, 2019

In her paintings, the glorious awkwardness of men failing to have fun

by David Pagel

The men in Orkideh Torabi's pictures at Richard Heller Gallery don't really know what they're doing.

That's not unusual: Some men have gotten so used to pretending to be experts, they've also gotten used to thinking they're more capable and intelligent than those around them, including women and children. What’s striking about the Chicago-based female artist’s cartoon dudes is that they’re just trying to have a good time — and failing, miserably.

Click here to read the full review: https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2019-07-29/orkideh-torabi-richard-heller-gallery

Orkideh Torabi Review in Artillery
Jul 24, 2019

Orkideh Torabi Review

by Annabel Osberg

Orkideh Torabi's painted burlesques of men offer sardonic commentary on patriarchal oppression of women in Iran and beyond. The Tehran-born, Chicago-based artist's 2017 LA show featured mostly frontal portraits of caricatural men whose stark, formal poses against Persian patterns heightened their appearances of self-satisfied foolishness. Her new paintings build on the previous with added humor and intricacy, depicting full-length male figures in pairs or groups engaging in activities from which women are excluded. 

Click here to read the full review: https://artillerymag.com/orkideh-torabi-2/

Orkideh Torabi Review in ArtNowLA
Jul 14, 2019

Orkideh Torabi: 'Give them all they want'
Exploring Issues of Patriarchy

by Jody Zellen

Give them all they want refers to men: the subject and objects of Orkideh Torabi's gaze. Her colorful paintings, created by screening fabric dye onto cotton, explore issues of patriarchy, infusing this loaded topic with a wry sense of humor. Torabi is now Chicago-based, but was born in Iran during the revolution (1979). Her paintings depict Iranian men in domestic and nature settings where their portrayals are surprisingly intimate and vulnerable.

To read the full review click here: https://artnowla.com/2019/07/14/orkideh-torabi-give-them-all-they-want-2/

Sean Norvet in Juxtapoz Magazine
May 6, 2019

In Conversation with Sean Norvet: From "High On Stress" to "Revenge of the Steersman"

by Sasha Bogojev

It's been 2 years since Sean Norvet had his last solo show in Tokyo, and after seeing his smaller works in group shows in the meantime, we were eager to see a full-on elaborate solo exhibition by the LA-based painter. And lucky for us, on May 11th, Richard Heller Gallery will be presenting Arrangements, Norvet's long-awaited solo debut with the gallery.

As fans of his work and the ways he is deconstructing and disrupting his subjects while collaging a wide range of familiar, everyday visuals, we were curious to see what he worked on for this showcase. His concept of patching up characters and surrounding scenes from goods they consume is an original take on the classic figurative painting that results in psychedelic and humorous visuals. After seeing some teasers on his Instagram, we've decided to get in touch with Norvet, have a peek inside of his studio and chat about the new body of work.

To view the full conversation please click here: https://www.juxtapoz.com/news/painting/sean-norvet-from-high-on-stress-to-revenge-of-the-stressman/

Oli Epp Review in the L.A. Times
Apr 15, 2019

Painter-on-the-verge Oli Epp's U.S. solo debut has human folly in full technicolor

by David Pagel

Oli Epp, born 1994, may be today's Roy Lichtenstein. Or tomorrow's Ed Ruscha. Or the next day's Philip Guston. Or all of the above. Or maybe none.
At Richard Heller Gallery, the London-based painter's U.S. solo debut, "Contactless," raises big questions about art, life and technology - and then ducks and runs.

If you look at art because you want to find out what other people think, you probably will be frustrated by Epp's crisply delineated pictures of humanoids do: behave like people while getting us to see the folly of our behavior.

Click here to view the full review: https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-et-cm-oli-epp-review-20190415-story.html

Amy Bennett: Nuclear Family - Brattleboro Museum
March 9, 2019 - Jun 16, 2019

Amy Bennett: Nuclear Family

The Brattleboro Museum and Art Center, Vermont

Working with common themes such as time, isolation, and transition, Amy Bennett is interested in the fragility of relationships and people's awkwardness in trying to coexist and relate to one another. To that end she creates miniature 3D models to serve as evolving still lifes from which she paints detailed narrative paintings. Using cardboard, foam, wood, paint, glue, and model railroad miniatures, Bennett constructs various fictional, scale models. Recent models have included a town, neighborhood, lake, theater, doctor's office, church, and numerous domestic interiors. The models become a stage on which she develops narratives. They offer her complete control over lighting, composition, and vantage point to achieve a certain dramatic effect.

For more information: http://www.brattleboromuseum.org/2018/08/09/amy-bennett-nuclear-family/

Farshad Farzankia in T The New York Times Magazine
Oct 24, 2018

The Artist Who Is Selling Out Shows Just Two Years After He Started Painting

Farshad Farzankia left his day job in 2016. Now, he's putting the finishing touches on his first major U.S. solo show, which will open later this month.

By Natalia Rachlin

At just past 10 on a late summer morning, the artist Farshad Farzankia is sitting at a desk in his sun-seeped studio on the outskirts of Copenhagen, wearing paint-splattered Vans and old track pants, like a '90s skater kid now fully grown. Nursing a can of Coke and occasionally puffing on a hand-rolled cigarette, he doodles on a sheet of printer paper. Stacked against the walls are the large hypersaturated canvases that consume his days (and often nights, hence the early soda fix).

Farzankia's paintings are instantly appealing: Simple, figurative compositions of androgynous bodies, birds, plant life and obscure symbols, rendered in bright pop palettes, they are well suited to the age of Instagram. Less apparent is that he's only been making this work for two years. In 2016, Farzankia, now 38, quit his day job as an art director at an advertising agency in order to turn his attention to painting, a hobby he had picked up some six months earlier, after years of idly drawing and sketching in his spare time. Since then, he has become one of Scandinavia's most buzzed-about emerging artists. When, last December, the Los Angeles-based gallerist Richard Heller presented a selection of Farzankia's work at Art Basel Miami's Untitled fair, it sold out instantly. Now, he is preparing for his first major U.S. solo show,at Heller's galleryin Santa Monica, opening on Oct. 27.

Click here to read the entire profile: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/24/t-magazine/farshad-farzankia-art.html?action=click&contentCollection=t-magazine&region=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=sectionfront

Vanessa Prager featured in It's Nice That.
Oct 1, 2018

Vanessa Prager on embracing the chaos of life in her work, and collaborating with her sister, Alex Prager

by Billie Muraben

Vanessa Prager's paintings depict the female form in various degrees of abstraction. Her busy, tactile, portraits blend form and landscape in a sort-of kaleidoscope of colour and expressive mark-making; showing "the complexity of character, and the years of experience, good or bad, in each portrait", she says. "When I started working with paint, I wanted everything to be great and something akin to perfect, but perfect is an impossible standard and quite unattainable. Somewhere along the way, when life got more wild and messy, so did my painting, and I just kind of embraced it" Vanessa explains. "The layers, imperfections, the smooth glossy parts next to the pokey peaks and the bubbled extra bits, the excessive amount of paint and colours, it all just kind of made sense to me."

Click here to read the whole article: https://www.itsnicethat.com/articles/vanessa-prager-soft-serve-maya-rudolph-alex-prager-painting-011018

Vanessa Prager - The New York Times Magazine
Sept 14, 2018

Vanessa Prager and Alex Prager collaborate on the New York Times Magazine cover portrait of Maya Rudolph.

Jake Silverstein, editor in chief:

"Maya Rudolph is such a game subject that we wanted to try something a little weird and collaborative. The photographer Alex Prager's sister, Vanessa, a painter, created a portrait of Rudolph that is inspired by a work by the 20th-century American portraitist Alice Neel. It was then cut to allow Rudolph's real face and hand to come through, creating a surreal image that blends fact and fiction, much the way she does as an actress."

Click here to watch a video on how the cover was made: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/14/magazine/behind-the-cover-maya-rudolph.html

JUXTAPOZ - A Conversation with Paco Pomet
Sept 13, 2018

An Ailment You Enjoy: A Conversation with Paco Pomet

The Portuguese writer Manuel de Melo described Suadade as "a pleasure you suffer, an ailment you enjoy", though it's considered a word or feeling that is untranslatable. Paco Pomet is a painter, and I think he paints poetry. Resonate is too mild a word to describe the drama and color contained in each canvas, as it reels you in. There is no glancing at a Paco Pomet canvas. I spoke to the artist by email about his show, Melancholia, at Richard Heller's Santa Monica gallery, which runs through October 20, 2018.

Read the conversation here: https://www.juxtapoz.com/news/painting/an-ailment-you-enjoy-a-conversation-with-paco-pomet/

Eric Croes in Architectural Digest
Sept 1, 2018

Fantastic Beasts

To create his latest array of ceramic treasures, Belgian artist Eric Croes let his imagination run wild.

It's been a slow and steadypath for Belgian artist Eric Croes, who retired his paintbrush five years ago after painting for a decade. "I was fed up and wasn't finding my voice, so I stopped for two years and took up night classes to study ceramics ,'' he explains during a recent visit to his Brussels studio. "I became passionate about the material."

Following his highly successful show at Paris's VNH Gallery this past spring, it's clear he has now found his way creatively. At first glance, his ceramic works are fanciful and fun-full of bold hues and imaginary creatures that he has fashioned into totems, birdhouses, and table lamps. However, he explains, they are also highly intimate statements, "a way to speak about very personal things without bothering anyone." Taking inspiration from his own memories and surroundings, Croes builds up his sculptures like collage, piecing together images and forms.

At times he'll riff on games like exquisite corpse, wherein multiple players draw different parts of a figure. In other cases, he'll impose his own rules. For his upcoming solo exhibition, opening January 2019 at Santa Monica 's Richard Heller Gallery, Croes gave his family members disposable cameras to take pictures of their daily lives. (No Photoshop allowed, hence the old-school devices.) He has since developed their images - en larbring them, cutting out figures, mixing everything up. "The idea is to make a family portrait," Croes explains. "This will be a way for me to have them with me on my first trip to America. I don't even have a passport yet! I'm excited. I just want people to see my work." Gay Gassmann

Corey Arnold featured in National Geographic
Jul 30, 2018

How Explorers Sleep in Extreme Spots

by Alejandra Burunda

National Geographic photographer and active fisherman Corey Arnold knows the curse of the busy mind all too well. During the height of the commercial fishing season, sleep gets sidelined: When the choice is to sleep or to make thousands of dollars, he chooses to stay awake and work. And even when he carves out an hour or two for a nap, his brain is racing too fast to relax.

“After all the adrenaline of a long day, a big stormy day, your brain is vibrating,” he says. If he can get to sleep, his dreams are filled with waves crashing over boats. Sometimes, sleep just replays a dream-state reel of his waking experiences. When he fished for crabs, he spent the day counting each crab he pulled out of the pots and thre down into the hold.

Click below to read the entire article: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2018/07/extreme-sleep-photos-wild-places-explorers/

Los Angeles Times: Joakim Ojanen Review
Jul 25, 2018

Review: With 'Year of the Dog,' artist Joakim Ojanen crafts imaginary creatures full of real drama.

by David Pagel

The characters in "Year of the Dog," Joakim Ojanen's second solo show in the United States, are more diverse than those that appeared in the Swedish Artists' solo debut two years ago, also at Richard Heller Gallery in Santa Monica.
Made of clay, bronze, paint and charcoal, Ojanen's menagerie of sentient critters is also more fantastic: Less realistic and more cartoon, they suggest humans are most humane when we're in touch with our animal selves.

To read the entire review, click here: http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-et-cm-joakim-ojanen-review-20180725-story.html

DOT Magazine: David Jien - Epic Drawings
Jul 25, 2018

DAVID JIEN: EPIC DRAWINGS

by Solvej Shou

"I'm inspired the most by nature: its textures, colors, the sun, sky, animals, trees," says fine artist David Jien (BFA 09). "My work is based on my own narratives, and also influenced by folklore, Greek mythology and the bible."

On a bright afternoon, Jien sits in his garage work studio, decorated with vintage monster, manga and robot figures. His stained glass sculptures—one looks like a psychedelic Humpty Dumpty—and his intricate graphite and colored pencil drawings of reptile-like beings line the room, along with a gigantic acrylic painting. Steps from his house in Baldwin Park, 30 miles east of ArtCenter, the garage is his creative inner sanctum.

To read the rest of the interview, please click below. http://www.artcenter.edu/connect/dot-magazine/articles/illustrate-this.html

Art Now LA - Joakim Ojanen Review
Jul 6, 2018

Joakim Ojanen: Year of the Dog - High Art That Makes You Smile

by Jody Zellen

Joakim Ojanen is a Swedish artist based in Stockholm. He spent the last few months working in the ceramic studio at Long Beach City College to create many of the pieces in his current exhibition,Year of the Dog. Ojanen has filled the gallery with these ceramic sculptures, as well as drawings, paintings and bronze casts— all of which depict quirky, cartoon-like, part-human/part animal figures. These works have an immediate appeal. They are simultaneously seductive, melancholic, comic and tragic.

This ambitious installation includes a freize of charcoal drawings, a suite of paintings, two bronzes and more than 33 ceramic sculptures that range in size from just a few inches to over 50 inches high. Upon entering the gallery, it is hard not to first gravitate toward a rectangular group of tables where sculptures including Octopus Ballin' On Home Stone with Little Guest (all works 2018) are situated. Octopus Ballin' features an octopus perched on a tall, dome shaped grayish stone. Its long tentacles dangle and one of them holds an orange basketball. The frowning octopus sports a hat and has long white tears streaming from finger-like eyes that extend from the creature's face.

Read complete review and see additional images here: http://artnowla.com/2018/07/06/joakim-ojanen-year-of-the-dog/

Juxtapoz Magazine
Jun 25, 2018

Joakim Ojanen: Year of the Dog

Through a series of paintings, drawings and perhaps his strongest series of ceramic works to date, Joakim Ojanen just opened his most recent solo exhibit, Year of the Dog, at Richard Heller Gallery in Santa Monica, CA. Ojanen spent the last few months in a studio provided by Long Beach City College, giving the Swedish-born artist a Southern California base to realize this new body of work, which is on view through July 28, 2018.

https://www.juxtapoz.com/news/installation/year-of-the-dog-joakim-ojanen-explores-the-child-in-all-of-us-in-new-show-richard-heller-gallery/

Andrew Chuani Ho Interview in Elephant
May 5, 2018 - June 9, 2018

Andrew Chuani Ho on Animals and the Art of Sport

"The characters in my drawings are surrogates that I live through vicariously." Andrew Chuani Ho's colourful, intricate drawings depict a world full of bright-eyed animals wearing sports jerseys and lounging in richly-patterned interiors.

Words by Rosalind Duguid

Your show The Other Side has just opened at Richard Heller Gallery in Los Angeles. What can we expect from it?

I have made a new body of drawings that depict the story of a mythology that I'm creating. At this point in the story the characters are stuck in a sort of limbo. All my characters in this show are lost in a unique labour that they must overcome.

Continue Reading here

LA TIMES REVIEW: Christian Rex van Minnen
Nov 25, 2017

REVIEW: Christian Rex van Minnen's modern tales of male domination, painted like an old master

By: David Pagel

Christian Rex van Minnen makes icons for an age whose virtues have curdled. The scariest part of his gut-punch paintings, watercolors and monotypes at Richard Heller Gallery in Santa Monica is that that age is ours.

Read complete review and see additional images here: http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-et-cm-christian-rex-van-minnen-20171125-htmlstory.html

CHRISTIAN REX VAN MINNEN | JUXTAPOZ
November 1, 2017 - November 30, 2017

"IN MOURNING AND REBIRTH"

Interview with Christian Rex van Minnen, by Evan Pricco, in Juxtapoz:

There are artists working today whose technical skills rival the museum stalwarts of 400 years ago, and there are those who combine humor, satire and the fantastical, along with the likes of Tim Burton and David Lynch. For years, Christian Rex van Minnen has balanced the incredible intuition of a fine painter with an almost cinematic approach to character creation. But, as this conversation will reveal, these are surface-level observations. The NYC-based painter works in a larger scope, one that examines not only his own personal identity, but some of the ugly truths and struggles for meaning that, perhaps, most American men have yet to understand in themselves. In a mood of self reflection, Christian and I dove into a wide-ranging talk about his recent stay in Colorado, Twin Peaks, UFC, male identity destabilization and the beauty that will emerge after this period of fear in America.

To read more go to: https://www.juxtapoz.com/news/magazine/features/christian-rex-van-minnen-in-mourning-and-rebirth/

CHRISTIAN REX VAN MINNEN | ELEPHANT
Oct 31, 2017

”Christian Rex van Minnen on Horror, Humour and Light"

Words by Rosalind Duguid

"There's this strange feeling of life being layered; there's a private life where I have a deeper sense of meaning, a spiritual practice, and then this constant, addictive, dopamine drip of social media layered on top." Christian Rex van Minnen's paintings are at once nightmarish and hilarious—grotesque fleshy creatures that look as though they've crawled from the darkest corner of the internet.

To read the interview please go to: https://elephant.art/christian-rex-van-minnen-horror-humour-and-light/

ARTIST TALK: KAJAHL
Oct 21, 2017

KAJAHL

Richard Heller Gallery will be hosting an artist talk with KAJAHL on Saturday, October 21, at 4:00 p.m. Come meet KAJAHL and hear him talk about his exhibition, Unearthed Entities, currently on view at the gallery.

Jazz/Not-Jazz selections before and after the talk, between 3:00 to 5:00 p.m., provided by The Nonsemble.

KAJAHL | ArtilleryMag.com
September 9, 2017 - October 28, 2017

RICHARD HELLER GALLERY: KAJAHL

by Annabel Osberg ·

October 11, 2017

Kajahl's paintings vivify ancient statues, presenting them as dignified, mysterious multicultural personae. Embodying Western clichés from bygone eras, the characters in his current show titled "Unearthed Entities" include alchemists, explorers and conquerors. While these subjects assume old-fashioned European styles of posed oil portraiture, their carved facial features appear mostly African or Middle Eastern.

Kajahl's personified artifacts appear to be embracing European style in the same way that artists such as Picasso have appropriated African artifacts and styles. His portraits thus function as reclamations of Afro-Asiatic identity within Western tradition.

They could also be interpreted as self-portraits of an artist making sense of his own mixed lineage. In his artist statement, Kajahl notes the ambiguous space he transits between his parents' histories, never fully identifying with either, "as the son of a nomadic Italian-American mother and Belizean Rastafarian father." Aligning with his depicted personages' enigmatic presences, titles like Void Space (2014) and Ethereal (2014) bespeak mystical equivocality.

Kajahl's homogenized subjects evoke the fragmented experience of diaspora haunted by plurality of heritage. They suggest identities clouded by the passage of time and stereotypical pigeonholing. Africa is a huge landmass encompassing diverse cultures and peoples; but owing to migration, colonization and Western ideals, it is often agglomerated into a single unit tinged with mythical "Dark Continent" inscrutability. (An ideal example of this phenomenon within the art world is Robert Storr's controversial African Pavilion at the 2006 Venice Biennale.)

While the majority of "Unearthed Entities" depict hybridized individuals, a series of studies most effectively presents a disjunctive sense of identity. Each of these portrays a different Egyptian, Mesoamerican, Middle Eastern, or European artifact fragment. Arranged salon-style, together they reveal the mystical indefiniteness that often results from removal of context.

Despite surfeits of historic and genealogical postulations, the pedigree of any living person is similar to that of an artifact. Kajahl's imaginative composite portraits speak to the fact that once ancestral connections are severed and experiences forgotten, vague origin myths take on lives of their own.

Kajahl, "Unearthed Entities," September 9 – October 28, 2017 at Richard Heller Gallery, 2525 Michigan Ave. #B-5A, Santa Monica, CA 90404.

To view images accompanying this review please go to: http://artillerymag.com/richard-heller-gallery-kajahl/

KAJAHL | HIFRUCTOSE.COM
September 9, 2017 - October 28, 2017

Kajahl's Portraits Combine Cultures, Histories

by Andy SmithPosted on October 11, 2017

The new oil paintings of New York-based artist KAJAHL explore "the history and taxonomy of portraiture." The paintings take notes from differing cultures through time for hybrid reflections on the history of human creativity. The artist's current show at Richard Heller Gallery, titled "Unearthed Entities," presents a new collection of these works.

"KAJAHL's process entails sifting through history, both amassing and archiving imagery ranging from ancient art, vintage ethnography, historical portraiture and landscape, to strange alternative histories, pseudoscience, and the absurd. In Unearthed Entities, KAJAHL depicts a range of figures such as an alchemist, astronomer, cryptid-like amphibian, high-ranking dignitaries, and a navigational explorer. In this sense, a playful dissonance is achieved in what we would normally presume to be a tradition that depicts heroic leaders from a bygone era."

To view images in this article please go to: http://hifructose.com/2017/10/11/kajahls-portraits-combine-cultures-histories/

Elephant, Expo Chicago: Gender, RYAN SCHNEIDER
September 14, 2017

Ryan Schneider, Richard Heller Gallery, Los Angeles

Ryan Schneider's works also explore the ecstatic, depicting the male and female forms in a manner that is undeniably sexual, yet not to the point of perversity. His male and female subjects get the same treatment, often with arched backs, receiving the welcome glow of sun or moonlight in a hyper-lush natural setting. Two works at Expo Chicago (Infinite Man andInfinite Woman) sit above one another, showing a man and woman reclining in shallow water under a full moon that hangs in a deep green sky. The water ripples away from them and the hills behind them are soaked in a bright pinky red. They appear to be returned to their natural form, away from our cultural ideals of man and woman.

'EXPO Chicago' runs from 13-17 September at the Navy Pier, Chicago. expochicago.com

To read full article please see: https://elephant.art/expo-chicago-gender/

Amy Bennett at Oakland University Art Gallery
September 9, 2017 - Nov 19, 2017

Ethics of Depiction: Still life, Landscape, Human curated by Dick Goody

This exhibition is about the way objects, landscapes, and people can be rendered unambiguously and ethically (as opposed to metaphorically or abstrusely). Most of the images in the exhibition act as metonyms and so are not to be interpreted because they speak precisely and specifically for what they are. Featuring: Matthew Albanses, Greta Alfaro Yanguas, David Allee, Jasper de Beijer, Amy Bennett, Julie Blackmon, Sharon Core, Roe Ethridge, Richard Finkelstein, April Gornik, David Hilliard, Alex Kanevesky, Patrick Lee, Richard Mosse, Michael Najjar, Toyin Ojih Odutola, Richard Renaldi, Becky Suss, Jörn Vanhöfen and Guido van der Werve

Oakland University Art Gallery
209 Wilson Hall
371 Wilson Boulevard
Oakland University
Rochester, MI 48309-4401 

For more information please go to: http://www.ouartgallery.org/exhibitions/

BLOUIN Modern Painters
July 31, 2017 - Jul 31, 2018

BLOUIN Modern Painters 2017-2018

500 Best Galleries Worldwide
United States / Los Angeles:
Richard Heller Gallery

Devin Troy Strother in Unobstructed Views
Jul 27, 2017

Devin Troy Strother in Unobstructed Views

Library Street Collective and the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD) are pleased to announceUNOBSTRUCTED VIEWS - a group exhibition at the historic W. Hawkins Ferry house. A modernist gem, the house was restored in 2015 with the owner's original intention in mind—to showcase a vast art collection and views of Lake St. Clair. Unobstructed Views will showcase a curated collection of over 30 groundbreaking contemporary artists, with each available for purchase on Paddle8. The home setting will also offer the opportunity for conversation about the original Hawkins Ferry House art collection, currently located in museums throughout the country.

Artist list includes: Nina Chanel Abney, Derrick Adams, Brian Bellot, Trudy Benson Katherine Bernhardt, Sanford Biggers, Greg Bogin, Kendell Carter, Jack Craig, Greg Fadell, Beverly Fishman, James Benjamin Franklin, Sayre Gomez, Tyree Guyton, KAWS, Mike Kelley, Paul Kremer, Andrew Kuo, Sadie Laska, Austin Lee, Tony Matelli, Charles McGee, Josh Reames, Scott Reeder, Jason Revok, Carlos Rolon, Holton Rower, Adrianne Rubenstein, Chris Schanck, Willie Wayne Smith, Agathe Snow, Sheida Soleimani, Devin Troy Strother and Spencer Sweeney.

Unobstructed Views will also serve as the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit's fourth annual Interchange Art + Dinner Series summer fundraiser. Detroit's most avid art collectors and supporters open their homes and spaces for a range of exclusive evenings combining food, drink, and art to create truly unique experiences. This array of unique and diverse events will unite like-minded members of the community to benefit MOCAD and the ever-thriving creativity in the city of Detroit.

To purchase tickets and for more information please go to: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/2017-interchange-hawkins-ferry-house-unobstructed-views-tickets-33316272869?aff=ehomecard

American Genre curated by Michelle Grabner
July 20, 2017 - Sept 15, 2017

Institute of Contemporary Art - Maine College of Art 

STILL LIFE

Gina Beavers, Wendy Edwards, Dana DeGiulio, Francesca Fuchs, Hope Gangloff, Evan Gruzis, Angelina Gualdoni, Magalie Guerin, Jessica Halonen, Jonn Herschend, Tucker Nichols, Aliza Nisenbaum, Roger White, Griff Williams, Kelly Williams, Emi Winter, Mathew Zefeldt

PORTRAITURE

Herman Aguirre, Lucas Ajemian, Deborah Brown, Kristin Calabrese, Brian Calvin, Susanna Coffey, Angela Defrense, Andreas Fischer, Howard Fonda, Richard Hull, Jose Lerma, Keith Mayerson, Frank Stockton, Henry Taylor, Storm Tharp

LANDSCAPE


Dan Attoe, Peter Barrickman, Amy Bennett, Michael Berryhill, Patrick Chamberlain, Ann Craven, Cindy Daignault, Rackstraw Downs, Mari Eastman, Shara Hughes, Brad Killam, Eva Lundsager, Tyson Reeder, John Riepenhoff, Claire Sherman, Gail Spaien, Spencer Sweeney and Emily Sundblad 

Catalog available.

For more information please go to: https://www.meca.edu/event/american-genre-contemporary-painting-exhibition/

Art and Cake - Vanessa Prager: Ultraviolet
Jun 15, 2017

Vanessa Prager: Ultraviolet

By Amy Kaeser

Vanessa Prager's third solo show at Richard Heller Gallery is a series of impasto-abstracted self-portraits. The work in Ultraviolet delves deeper into the artist's psyche detailing the interrelationship between the art object and the unconscious drive of the artist. Whether Prager had a psychoanalytic theory in mind when creating this body of work is unknown, but the link between the heavily abstracted self-portraits and the unconscious mind of the artist seem to bear fruit. Prager operates in both small and large-scale for this show as well as the addition of untraditional materials in the use of neon lighting as a framing device on several panels.

At close examination, the individual pieces work on an intimate level; the thick paint captures the gesture of the brush Prager employees–swift, short strokes build up pigment as features of a face peering out from the canvases. The most compelling pieces in the show are those that obscure and only suggest feature of the face or body thus leaving the viewer to wonder if a portrait exists at all; Salt of the Earth (2017), an oil on panel with neon frame is a tightly focused image of what could be considered facial features. The eyes stare out as dark pools cast against a thick application of grey-green skin. The features neither confirms nor denies as belonging to the artist, the androgyny of the sitter in each work only adds to the abstract nature of Prager's series. Utilizing the artificial neon light as a frame, Prager emphasizes the built-up paint as deep valleys in shadow and the raised ridges in highlight. The dualities of light and dark work to further abstract to almost grotesque levels these self-portraits.

To read the complete article and see images, please go to: https://artandcakela.com/2017/06/15/vanessa-prager-ultraviolet-at-richard-heller-gallery/

Ryan Schneider: Museum Exhibition 6/13-9/9
June 13, 2017 - September 9, 2017

Ashland Daily Tidings

By: Vickie Aldous

ASHLAND — The Schneider Museum of Art is transformed into four separate galleries with art ranging from minimalist to lush for exhibits that will continue through Sept. 9.

An opening reception for the exhibits and artists will be held from 5 to 7 p.m. Tuesday, June 13, at the museum, near the corner of Indiana Street and Siskiyou Boulevard on the Southern Oregon University campus in Ashland.

The exhibit, part of the museum's celebration of its 30th anniversary, features the work of Liz Shepherd of Ashland, Tofer Chin and Amir H. Fallah of Los Angeles, and Ryan Schneider, who relocated from New York City to Joshua Tree, Calif.

"We turned our sights south and once again into our backyard for selecting the four artists for our four solo exhibitions this summer," says Scott Malbaurn, director of Schneider Museum. "Two are quickly emerging artists from Los Angeles and one from the desert of California adjacent to Joshua Tree National Park. The fourth artist lives and works in Ashland. Each artist works predominantly two-dimensionally with an emphasis on drawing and painting and each have their own distinct style."

To read the complete article, with images, please go to: http://www.dailytidings.com/entertainment/20170608/schneider-museum-host-to-four-new-exhibits

Juxtapoz: Interview with Paco Pomet
June 1, 2017 - Jun 30, 2018

PACO POMET: THE SURREALIST ADVENTURER

INTERVIEW BY GWYNNED VITELLO

Viewing the Twilight Zone in black and white, as it was filmed, evokes simultaneous feelings of connection and distance, but you don't just watch. The scenes linger and loop around with a searing shot, just like the paintings of Paco Pomet, who injects a jarring jolt of surprise or color into each seemingly serene image. Neither snack food nor stylized confection, this works like a time-released truth serum. A gash of crimson severs a glorious glacier. A poison pen suffuses a mountain lake. Somber faces engage (or are engaged) in incongruity. Something's been happening, and things just aren't what they appear to be. Educated at the University of Granada with further studies at New York's School of Visual Art, Pomet combines the austere color and time elements of the Spanish cubists and the ironic dreaminess of the Andalusian surrealists. A conversation with the thoughtful artist reveals that, indeed, "You are about to enter another dimension."

To read the complete interview and see images please go to: https://www.juxtapoz.com/news/magazine/features/paco-pomet-the-surrealist-adventurer/

Berlin Art Link: Vanessa Prager
May 18, 2017

Exhibition // 'Ultraviolet' at Richard Heller Gallery: An Interview with Vanessa Prager

Article by Liam Casey in Los Angeles // Thursday, May 18, 2017

Last Thursday, installation was in full swing at Richard Heller Gallery for Vanessa Prager's solo exhibition, 'Ultraviolet'. Prager has made a name for herself as a painter with her portraits that more often resemble colorful and rich topographies of paint, blurring the borders between portraiture and sculpture. In the gallery, works were placed meticulously on the ground, awaiting mounting, as installers etched measurements on the newly constructed dry walls. Beeping sounds, originating from the platform lift, permeated the gallery space, located in Bergamot Station. On one of the pieces, a gently glowing tube of neon circumscribed the canvas, something Prager was experimenting with; "It became interesting to me to just put it on like an outfit, 'here's how I am today, here's how I am in this situation'". Although the atmosphere in the gallery was industrious, Vanessa Prager took the time to speak with us about her work and the upcoming show.

To read the full interview, please go to: http://www.berlinartlink.com/2017/05/18/exhibition-ultraviolet-at-richard-heller-gallery-an-interview-with-vanessa-prager/

Elephant Magazine-5 Questions with Vanessa Prager
May 15, 2017

5 Questions with Vanessa Prager

Text by Emily Steer

"They have neutral expressions on their face while all this seemingly wild and messy and chaotic activity is happening, and that is very real to me." American artist Vanessa Prager discusses her new series of self-portraits, which are currently showing at Richard Heller Gallery in Los Angeles. 

Can you tell me a bit about Ultraviolet, your new show at Richard Heller Gallery?

Ultraviolet is a series self-portraits. Not literal versions of me but characters, personae, and aspects of my personality represented. I have spent the last two years making multiple series of portraits based on others, that I had actually known or had made up, and finally just felt like there were pieces of me I wanted to get out. There are often times I've said or done things that I can't even believe, phrases I have repeated in my head over and over, certain scenes repeat themselves. Some things just get stuck in my head on loop. There is a kind of shame or embarrassment that goes with all of these events—and an obsession—and I just wanted to air them out, get the pressure off and admit, yeah, I've done these things or desired this quality or wanted to be this part of this person. And really this is my way of being a million versions of me.

These are much more figurative than your previous works but the faces are still abstracted in many ways. How did you come to this balance?

I wanted to bring it back in and share things about myself that scare me but in the most beautiful way possible. Sometimes I'm uncomfortable, and sometimes that leads to weird solutions. I still feel like hiding a lot of the time, I still don't want to go out and be social, I still feel like crawling out of my skin when I get rejected. These portraits are my way of hiding parts of myself and showing all the things I pile on and cover up with, intentionally or unintentionally: jokes, makeup, outfits, vocal quirks. I can't always be open and outright about how I actually am and feel, I have to hide it, jumble it, obfuscate it.

You have also increased the size of the works, and it's been mentioned that they have become more "experiential". Has this changed your own relationship with the pieces as you are working, and do you feel you surrender some control the larger they get?

Yes, I surrender some control. That is true with all of the works really just in working with oil paint, but especially on these larger ones. I don't have the ability to simultaneously see the full painting and work on it, so there is always that element of working on two images at once, the micro and the macro. And they are two entirely different worlds that ultimately combine to make one. That fits well with how I feel too, trying to have an individual personality while being part of a group and all of the awkwardness, mistakes and clumsiness that goes along with that.

Your pieces are incredibly hands-on. What is your process when making a painting? Do you have quite structured plans for composition or do you work instinctively?

I don't start with super detailed plans, mainly because I've found I'll throw them out along the way. Often though I will have a colour concept or general compositional forms in the shape of masses. I lay out a bunch of paint initially, slather it on and make a mess and then I go about bringing order to it, forming the figure and shaping it together, then destroying parts of it again by adding more to it and so on. It's a back and forth. I work on it and walk backwards to see it, it's sort of a dance really. It's very instinctive. I get in a zone where time passes at a weird rate, it seems like hours and then it's only minutes and then it seems like minutes and it's been hours. I fall into another dimension.

Your works have been described as "tortured souls", and they are incredibly complex and energetic. Would you describe them as emotional and if so, do they reflect your own emotions?

They are definitely emotional to me. It's funny because often they have neutral expressions on their face while all this seemingly wild and messy and chaotic activity is happening, and that is very real to me. I often have this feeling of standing back and just observing it all. This world is so crazy I often have felt I'm not part of it or I don't belong here really and there is this distance from huge chunks of it, that is self imposed. It is a way of protecting myself. If I'm not in it fully I can't be hurt by it. But unfortunately it doesn't work like that. I try to work out all of these things in the paintings and go through all of the things I think and feel and put them into the paint more than the actual expression of the figure. And then there's the overuse of paint itself. So if they seem tortured I think that is part of the human experience. There's always this element of trying to fit into a world where they don't actually belong.

'Ultraviolet' shows until 17 June at Richard Heller Gallery, Los Angeles. richardhellergallery.com

To see images accompanying this interview, please go to: https://elephantmag.com/5-questions-vanessa-prager/

CREATORS | VICE.com - Interview w/Vanessa Prager
May 12, 2017

CITY OF THE SEEKERS

Self-Taught Painter Sculpts Monumental Portraits With Oil Paint

TANJA M. LADEN

Vanessa Prager learned about art online—and turned it into a dynamic art practice.

Unless it's made to be seen online, art rendered in just about any medium needs to be appreciated in real life. Reading about an artist and viewing high-resolution images can be helpful, but let's be honest: most works are made to be engaged with physically, in order to truly be experienced. Take Vanessa Prager's dense, gravity-defying abstract paintings, for example. Throughout history, artists have aimed to infuse 2D images with dimensionality, but only since the 18th century has impasto, the technique of heavily applying paint so it extends from the canvas, become widely practiced. Prager's richly textured works on canvas are a rare contemporary example of this technique, and in her new solo show, Ultraviolet, she delivers paintings that are not only heavily-layered but are also self-portraits.

Up close and in person, Prager's works appear non-figurative, but step a few feet away, and a face materializes—Prager's own. It's a powerful departure for a woman used to working on a smaller scale and representing the world around her, rather than herself. It's also telling, given that her sister Alex Prager has achieved a measure of success as a photographer, challenging Prager to make a name for herself, too.

A native Angeleno, Prager works from a studio based in Boyle Heights, on the outskirts of Downtown LA. But the nature of her own arts education differs from that of many of her contemporaries. Rather than attend a prestigious arts college, she opted to learn about art online—an interesting choice, given that her work is so palpable.

"I consider my style maximalism," she tells Creators. "I work with large volumes of oil paint that I mostly get from a small manufacturer. Pints, quarts, and gallons—I work directly out of the containers using highly saturated colors, and any color-mixing is done directly on the canvas. The canvas is my palette. I try never to take materials away and only add to the whole, as I feel everything has a use, and if I can find what it is in the work, then I have done my job well."

Prager says her art stems from a need to "capture the feelings that life brings and study what it means to exist today."Likewise, she finds inspiration from such disparate sources as degraded VHS tapes, neon signage, melting ice cream, piles of trash, icing, bouquets, and wide open spaces. "I want the work to embody the franticness, the composure, the hysteria, and the resultant blanketing of it all," she says. "Opposing emotions can exist at the same time, and often do. There are often many things running through my head at any one moment, and I try to show all of that."

Beneath all her layers of paint, the artist has the simple goal to "make it all work," and though she's tried to do so elsewhere, it's only been in her hometown of LA where she's been able to truly develop a specific, unique style. "The characters that people put on—on and off screen—have impacted me a lot,"she explains. "Just the idea of not really knowing who you are yourself, and yet putting on personalities as you would put on an outfit. [...] I became fascinated with that, and it has very much affected my art in general, and specifically this series. I see this in myself, and so in creating this new series of self-portraits, I was able to explore just how far-reaching this is. I can 'be' anybody, and it's actually quite liberating, and helps build empathy as well."

In the end, Prager's philosophy is simple, even though it sounds complicated. "The disgust, the excess, the stuff, the beauty, the ugliness—it all comes our way, and it's important to move forward despite everything. Even better to use it all to help you move forward," she says. "I think it can be really hard to make something, to start something, and to keep it going. But if all the worst parts of you are actually reasons to help you move forward, and each new thing you discover is another brick in the path, then it's welcomed instead of resisted. Try to flow with it instead of using it as a reason not to."

To see all images accompanying this article please go to: https://creators.vice.com/en_us/article/self-taught-painter-sculpts-monumental-portraits-with-oil-paint

Ultraviolet is on view May 13—June 17, 2017 at Richard Heller Gallery. Follow the artist on Twitter and Instagram

Ryan Schneider: Hall Art Foundation, Reading, VT
May 6, 2017 - Nov 26, 2017

Ryan Schneider: Hall Art Foundation

The Hall Art Foundation is pleased to announce a group exhibition curated by American artist Eric Fischl to be held in its galleries in Reading, Vermont from 6 May – 26 November 2017. Approximately sixty-five artists are represented in Hope and Hazard: A Comedy of Eros, which includes over eighty paintings, photographs, works on paper and sculptures selected by Fischl from the Hall and Hall Art Foundation collections. In this fresh and provocative show, Fischl illustrates the absurd extremes associated with romantic and sexual love. Desire, passion, vulnerability, disappointment, pleasure and torment are expressed as a Greek or Shakespearian comedy – epic and tragic, hopeful and hazardous. 

Hope and Hazard: A Comedy of Eros includes works by Siegfried Anzinger, Alexander Archipenko, Robert Arneson, Dan Attoe, Georg Baselitz, Lillian Bassman, Ellen Berkenblit, Katherine Bernhardt, Norbert Bisky, Josef Breitenbach, André Butzer, William Copley, John De Andrea, Carroll Dunham, Marcel Dzama, Peter Eide, Nicole Eisenman, Judith Eisler, Tracey Emin, Lee Friedlander, Dan Gluibizzi, Bendix Harms, Georg Herold, Jocelyn Hobbie, Thomas Houseago, Ridley Howard, Chantal Joffe, John Kacere, Craig Kauffman, Yves Klein, Jeff Koons, David Levinthal, Judith Linhares, Tala Madani, Robert Mapplethorpe, Tony Matelli, Jonathan Meese, Bjarne Melgaard, Gladys Nilsson, Jim Nutt, Julian Opie, C.O. Paeffgen, A.R. Penck, Enoc Perez, Alessandro Pessoli, Erwin Pfrang, Francis Picabia, Nathaniel Mary Quinn, Mel Ramos, Man Ray, Bettina Rheims, Jason Rhoades, Walter Robinson, Aura Rosenberg, David Salle, Peter Saul, Ryan Schneider, Lara Schnitger, Pieter Schoolwerth, Joan Semmel, David Smith, Luc Tuymans, Tom Wesselmann, Hannah Wilke, Erwin Wurm and Lisa Yuskavage.

For more details please go to: http://www.hallartfoundation.org/about/mission

The Cantor Arts Center introduces: Hope Gangloff
May 24, 2017 - May 26, 2017

The Cantor Arts Center introduces Artist at Work 2017: Hope Gangloff as part of the Diekman Contemporary Commissions Program, a recurring opportunity for artists to create new work

Hope Gangloff, the first visiting artist in the program, transforms the museum's historic Atrium into an active artist's studio this May

Stanford, California — The Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University is pleased to announce that Hope Gangloff has been chosen as the first Diekman Contemporary Commissions Program artist. For the inaugural presentation of the program—Artist at Work 2017: Hope Gangloff—she will paint several large-scale, site-responsive portraits to hang along the light-filled Atrium Balcony. She will create additional works on site in the museum's grand 1894 Atrium, painting for three days May 24–26, and display those works on handmade easels.

"This project allows contemporary artists to use the Cantor Arts Center as a laboratory of sorts as they respond to the architectural space and create new and unexpected works," said Alison Gass, Associate Director for Collections, Exhibitions and Curatorial Affairs. "This is a rare and exciting opportunity for the museum, since this type of boundary-pushing project can activate the experience of the visitor by altering otherwise familiar museum spaces and conceptually trigger a new engagement with the artistic ideas of our world. We are thrilled Hope Gangloff accepted our invitation to transform our Atrium into a space for contemporary creation and dialogue, and delighted that the public will be able to witness the artist's process."

As an extension of the contemporary commissioning program, Gangloff will mine the museum's permanent collection and select key historical works to hang alongside her own contemporary paintings in the exhibition Hope Gangloff Curates Portraiture. Using the format of artist as curator, this exhibition will contextualize contemporary art within the language of art history and investigate the traditional genre of portraiture. It will also invite viewers to experience the Cantor's rich historical collection through the eyes of a celebrated artist working today. The exhibition will be on view April 5–September 24, 2017.

Joakim Ojanen: Interview in Juxtapoz
Apr 28, 2017

MERRY MELANCHOLY

INTERVIEW BY SASHA BOGOJEV

Swedish artist Joakim Ojanen has created an entire universe packed with a diverse army of endearingly gloomy characters. His own Les Misérables, if you will. Over the past couple of years, these oddballs and their pet companions, sculpted in ceramic and painted in oils, quietly enjoy a pensive sadness while keeping their native cool. The life of these mavericks isn't an exciting one, but they are content—they hang out alone or in squads, occasionally read a book, draw, play, or have a cheeky beer or cigarette. So mundane, yet so lovable, they are cheery monuments to melancholy and its quirky beauty.

To read the interview, and see images, please go to: https://www.juxtapoz.com/news/magazine/features/joakim-ojanen-merry-melancholy/

Corey Arnold, Zafiri - Endurance and Outdoors
Apr 17, 2017

Nature Overuns in Corey Arnold's "Aleutian Dreams" Los Angeles Show

Will Ross

Currently on show at Los Angeles' Richard Heller Gallery at Bergamot Station, "Aleutian Dreams" gathers a series of burly sea-faring images from National Geographic photographer Corey Arnold. Photographs capture the hardy lifestyles of fishermen and everyday residents in Alaska's Aleutian Islands.

To read the complete article go to: http://www.zafiri.com/corey-arnold-aleutian-dreams-los-angeles-show/

Hyperallergic: Dallas Art Fair Review
April 7, 2017 - April 9, 2017

At the 2017 Dallas Art Fair, Big Ambitions and the Big Mo

Mayor Mike Rawlings recently announced that the city's annual Dallas Arts Week would become Dallas Arts Month, starting on April 1. Its centerpiece, the Dallas Art Fair, now in its ninth edition, has become a symbol of the local arts scene's impressive growth and increasing momentum.

Edward M. Gómez

… From Los Angeles, Richard Heller Gallery is showing some of the humblest but most memorable selections of the whole fair — the Swedish artist Joakim Ojanen's cast-bronze sculptures of cute-quirky animals; human heads with long, ribbon-like ears; and little heads with caps or top hats. With their subversive charm, free of self-conscious irony, this is the kind of art a tired ironist-entertainer like Jeff Koons could not even imagine creating. That's because, for all its offbeat aura, Ojanen's work is filled with soul.

To read the complete article, with images, please go here: https://hyperallergic.com/371039/at-the-2017-dallas-art-fair-big-ambitions-and-the-big-mo/

Corey Arnold, Westside Today - TV
Apr 4, 2017

Aleutian Dreams | Richard Heller Gallery

By: Michael Ray Category: Westside TV

Photographer Corey Arnold presents his new photo exhibit Aleutian Dreams at the Richard Heller Gallery. The exhibition consists of photos from Alaska's Aleutian Islands, some of the photos are part of his larger series titled "Fish-Work." While the photos themselves are related to fishing, Corey was brought aboard the fishing vessels not as a fisherman but as a photographer. The Richard Heller Gallery is located at unit B-5A at the Bergamont Station in Santa Monica.

To watch the video, with images from Corey's exhibition, go to: http://westsidetoday.com/2017/04/04/aleutian-dreams-richard-heller-gallery/

Corey Arnold, National Geographic
Apr 2, 2017

THE BERING SEA, WHERE HUMANS AND NATURE COLLIDE

BY DANIEL STONE

Fishers and crabbers in such a harsh environment occasionally create opportunities for beauty.
The Bering sea, near the chain of the Aleutian Islands, is one of the most intense patches of ocean on Earth. Strong winds, freezing temperatures, and icy water are normal conditions. The combination makes for some of the most ferocious waves on the planet, where the water can rise and fall 30 feet on a normal day.
What drives a person there? The bounty of the waters. The region is one of the most productive fisheries in the world for salmon, char, and crab.
Corey Arnold is a salmon fisherman during the June to July summer season. But during the punishing winter, he's also a photographer, the rare expert who turns his camera on an industry he knows well.

To read the complete article, with images, go here: http://www.nationalgeographic.com.au/nature/the-bering-sea-where-humans-and-nature-collide.aspx

Corey Arnold - Los Angeles Magazine
Mar 30, 2017

Photo Exhibit in Santa Monica Offers a Chilling Look at Life in Alaska

And spoiler alert: the pictures are stunning

Maddie Crichton Art

This Saturday, April 1, the Richard Heller Gallery in Santa Monica will open a new photography exhibit by Corey Arnold, a Portland-based photographer. The exhibit, called "Aleutian Dreams" will showcase photos from Arnold's time in the Aleutian Islands in Alaska. The Los Angeles magazine contributor's work explores the human relationship with nature, animals, and the environment. You can check out the collection until May 6.

To see more images include in this article go to: http://www.lamag.com/culturefiles/photography-exhibit-alaska-corey-arnold/

The California Sunday Magazine - Corey Arnold
Mar 30, 2017

Dirty Birds

What it's like to live with a national symbol

By Laurel Braitman

Dutch Harbor is a small town on a small island far out in Alaska's Aleutian chain, nearly 1,200 miles from Anchorage at the edge of the Bering Sea. It's the most productive fishing port in the United States. Every winter the tiny population swells with thousands of people who come to work in the fish processing plants, on the crab boats, or out on the big cod and pollack trawlers. But they're not the only ones trying their fortunes in town or out on the boats.

People in town call them Dutch Harbor pigeons. The rest of us call them bald eagles. In a community of just over 4,700 permanent residents, there live an estimated 500 to 800 eagles. They stare judgily down from light posts, peer intently into people's windows, eat foxes and seagulls while perched in the trees next to the high school, and sit on rooflines like living weather vanes. Down at the docks, they swarm every boat that comes into port like some sort of Hitchcockian nightmare, fighting for scraps of bait, elbowing one another for prime positions, crowding together on top of crab pots, and squawk-cheeping their opinions.

To continue reading, go to: https://story.californiasunday.com/dirty-birds

Corey Arnold, Wall Street International
Mar 22, 2017
Wall Street International

ART

1 Apr — 6 May 2017 at the Richard Heller Gallery in Santa Monica, United States

Fifteen years ago, I wrote a job-wanted sign and hung it outside of a bathroom near Seattle's Fisherman's Terminal. It read: "Experienced deckhand looking for work on a commercial crab or halibut fishing boat in Alaska - hard worker - does not get seasick." I was 24-years old, energetic and ambitious, with a few years of salmon fishing experience (but naive to the world of high seas fish-work). After a few shifty respondents, I was hired by a seasoned Norwegian fisherman and flew on a small prop plane, past the icy volcanoes and windswept passes of Alaska's Aleutian Islands, eventually slamming down onto the short runway in Dutch Harbor. The experience would forever change the direction of my life and shape my identity as both a fisherman and photographer.

Isolated from the mainland by some of the world's roughest waters, Dutch Harbor is a thriving, working-class commercial fishing port surrounded by steep mountains and lonely windswept valleys. It's a place where industry and nature collide in strange and beautiful ways, a place where people harvest seafood on a massive scale, and share their meals and their refuse with local wildlife --- from rapacious bald eagles to curious foxes.

That first year I worked jigging for Codfish in the Bering Sea and continued to return for work as a crabber for the next seven seasons. What lured me back, though, wasn't only the money but the curious and often masochistic realization of the American dream happening in the Aleutian Islands. Those who come here often possess a desire to escape the safety of home to work in an environment filled with risk and visual grandeur that is far from ordinary. In recent trips, I joined fisherman at sea aboard crabbers and trawlers, and on land, documenting the surreal landscape of fishing culture that once captured my imagination as a young greenhorn. Aleutian Dreams is a collection of images from my journey through this wild and unforgiving frontier of Western Alaska.

To see more images from this article go to: http://wsimag.com/art/24437-corey-arnold

Announcement
Jan 29, 2017

Richard Heller Gallery
is pleased to announce the representation of
Christian Rex van Minnen

Interview with Joakim Ojanen in The Hundreds
Jan 8, 2017

The Secret Life of Joakim Ojanen's Art

Like most artists, Stockholm-based painter and ceramicist Joakim Ojanen aims to make work that is timeless. But Joakim's approach to timelessness is unconventional: His woozy characters are intended to be both 8 and 30 years old at the same time. "I'm fascinated about the fact that we are aging and all the time changing a little bit," Joakim explains. "And all the time we still have the memories and experiences from all our previous years. I try to use that in my work."

What results are oil paintings and stoneware sculptures that appear both childlike and innocent, mature and melancholy. For example, at a recent exhibition at Richard Heller Gallery in Los Angeles—the artist's first solo show in the United States—a downcast duckbilled character strummed a guitar, and a boy with an aquamarine Pinocchio nose fiddled with a soccer ball. The figures were a combination of both playfulness and profundity. "I definitely think they look the way they do because of my illustration background," Joakim explains in the following interview with The Hundreds. "The expression of the characters is really important to me—that's how you make them feel alive."

To read the complete interview please go to: https://thehundreds.com/blog/joakim-ojanen-interview/

Amy Bennett: “Small Changes Every Day"
Nov 10, 2016

Molly Enholm: Amy Bennett: “Small Changes Every Day”

The Romantic landscape is a subject that has sparked the imagination for generations, from John Constable’s nostalgic visions to Turner’s overwhelming sublime to Church’s luscious portraits of the divine wilderness. Through these images of nature, the artists also evoked issues of identity, nationalism and a nascent 19th-century environmentalism. At first glance, New York-based Amy Bennett follows in the Arcadian tradition with her neat rows of suburban homes nestled into lush green hills and valleys. But don’t get too comfortable; it only takes a moment to realize all is not what it seems. The homes and shops, a little too perfect, exude a sort of Stepfordian cubic dystopia. And there’s another glitch, the paintings are not based on life but on the artist’s own handmade fiction. For this series, nearly four years in the making, Bennett created her own miniature landscape, using an 8-by-8-foot Styrofoam base and hand-carving the meandering hills, carefully planting the wire and foam trees, playing the role of city planner guided by Google earth, old city maps, and her own experiences of Upstate New York and the Hudson Valley. As she continued to work, making “small changes every day,” the fictional rural farming community grew into a fictional small town-each of these buildings also handcrafted by the artist. These paintings document this evolution. Throughout, Bennett’s hand remains evident through her deft brushwork, reminding the viewer of the painterly interpretation of the original mediation. A far cry from Cole, Church and the gang, the American wilderness has been tamed into a beautified Monopoly board.

As impressive as Bennett’s methodology is, what remains most captivating about these works is the subtle negation of utopia they present. The main gallery is filled with paintings that seem innocent enough, but there is something disturbing about the perfect grid-like streets coupled with charming cul-de-sacs crowded with buildings and cars but void of human forms. Also missing are the familiar elements of identity: the streets and stores bear no name; homes have no address; and churches have no denomination. In the second gallery, the playful deceit continues. From a similar aerial point-of-view the vista extends across a bucolic rural setting complete with lazy afternoon shadows-another “natural” element controlled by the artist-but similarly lacking any precise clue of locale or chronology. Without such designations, the nostalgic illusion is complete, and these quixotically wrought narratives remain suspended in time and the imagination.

Andrew Chuani Ho Review in Hi-Fructose
Nov 5, 2016

Andrew Chuani Ho's Absorbing Colored Pencil Drawings

by Andy SmithPosted on November 5, 2016

Andrew Chuani Ho, a Los Angeles native, creates vibrant scenes with colored pencil on paper, with works that are both surreal and autobiographical. In his first solo show at Richard Heller Gallery, titled Days and Days, the artist brings his trademark insanity and blending components in a new set of works. The artist cites influences like Matisse, Marquez, and even Henry Darger. From the gallery: "Having a deeply spiritual upbringing, Ho's work exhibits the use of patterns, colors and symbols to reinterpret myths and fables of yore into meditatively drawn colored pencil drawings."

http://hifructose.com/2016/11/05/andrew-chuani-hos-absorbing-colored-pencil-drawings/

Andrew Chuani Ho in Juxtapoz
Nov 4, 2016

ANDREW CHUANI HO @ RICHARD HELLER GALLERY

Andrew Chuani Ho just opened his first solo show at Richard Heller Gallery and from the looks of these images, it certainly won't be his last. From the gallery: "In his inaugural solo show, Days and Days, Ho stages the inception of his narrative with a set of drawings that draw from a diverse range of influences, including the likes of Henry Darger, Henri Matisse and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Having a deeply spiritual upbringing, Ho's work exhibits the use of patterns, colors and symbols to reinterpret myths and fables of yore into meditatively drawn colored pencil drawings."

http://www.juxtapoz.com/news/painting/andrew-chuani-ho-richard-heller-gallery/

Review: Amy Bennett - Art and Cake
Oct 14, 2016

Amy Bennett: Small Changes Every Day

by Shana Nys Dambrot

Amy Bennett channels Thomas Cole and other Hudson River School painters in her latest exhibition, a series of oil paintings on canvas depicting the gradual transformation of pristine New England-style wilderness into farmland and townships — changes she herself inflicted over a four-year period on the 8-foot square 3D miniature model she built in her studio. Out of handmade mountains, verdant forests and sparkling rivers, she cleared crops, roads, and pastures. Over the years, she eventually fabricated and arranged over 450 wooden buildings in 1/500 scale — barns, churches, houses, industrial buildings, storefronts, silos, and schools. Her daily pausing to document the progress of this analog game of The Sims comes to resemble a kind of time-lapse of this self-generating fantasy as it was unfolding.

Read the whole review here: https://artandcakela.com/2016/10/14/amy-bennett-small-changes-every-day-at-richard-heller/

LA Times Review: Amy Bennett
Sept 27, 2016

"Are those model buildings or a painting? For artist Amy Bennett, the answer is both." 

by Leah Ollman

Amy Bennett makes paintings that call little attention to the elaborate process of their creation, but what may seem like conventional landscapes come with a back story that gives us far more to absorb and ponder than what's visible on the wall.

For "Small Changes Every Day," her recent series at Richard Heller Gallery in Santa Monica, Bennett started with an 8-by-8-foot hunk of plastic foam and built a model of an undisturbed patch of verdant terrain. She painted a portrait of the land as seen from above, a handsome Eden dotted with ponds and etched with streams.

To read the complete review, please go to: http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-et-cm-amy-bennett-artist-20160921-snap-htmlstory.html

Modern Painters: Feature on Amy Bennett
Sept 5, 2016

Amy Bennett Builds a Miniature World

BY JULIET HELMKE, MODERN PAINTERS

If not for the rapidly rising Brooklyn rents, Amy Bennett's last series of paintings might never have come to fruition. "Space- and money-wise, my husband and I felt pushed out," the artist, who earned her MFA at the New York Academy of Art in 2002, explains. Hunting for a new place to call home, the painter found herself spending hours "just image- searching specific towns and looking down at them in Google maps." By the time the couple and their young son decided on Cold Springs, in Upstate New York, she "had the impulse to build my own town." But for Bennett, that meant doing so at 1:500 scale, or what she calls "Monopoly size."

To read the entire feature, please go to: http://www.blouinartinfo.com/news/story/1508649/amy-bennett-builds-a-miniature-world

Modern Painters
Aug 23, 2016

500 Best Galleries Worldwide

From Dallas to Dubai, Sydney to Shanghai, the global art market continues to swell its ranks. It can be a Sisyphean chore to keep track of this international scene — which is why Modern Painters has done some of the legwork for you, charting the most exciting and noteworthy galleries around the world. In its August issue, the magazine created a helpful guide that presents a snapshot of the ever-growing, globalized hunger for art. The issue also includes in-depth conversations with a dozen dealers, who talk about their passions, early days, and future ambitions. In the upcoming days, ARTINFO will publish Modern Painters' guide to the 500 Best Galleries Worldwide. Here, we present the magazine's selection of the top galleries in the Americas.

Richard Heller Gallery
Santa Monica
Leadership:
Richard Heller
Artists:
Amy Bennett, Michelle Grabner, Sasha Pierce, Devin Troy Strother, Dustin Yellin
Established:
1997
Contact:
richardhellergallery.com
art@richardhellergallery.com
+1 310 453 9191

http://www.blouinartinfo.com/news/story/1496484/top-galleries-of-2016-the-americas

REVIEW: ARTILLERY MAGAZINE
June 26, 2016 - July 30, 2016

RICHARD HELLER GALLERY : JOAKIM OJANEN

by Jody Zellen

Swedish artist Joakim Ojanen creates paintings and ceramic sculptures that are quirky and compassionate. His part-human / part-animal creatures have distinct personalities and are full of feeling and emotion. Though the overall sentiment is a kind of melancholy, Ojanen's exhibition is remarkably refreshing and uplifting. The figures' frowns elicit smiles from the viewer.

Ojanen's ten paintings are strategically placed on the gallery walls, complementing the sculptures. Each is a 3/4 portrait of a doll-like figure against a light monochrome background. One, Untitled Portrait 07 (2015), appears to be an altered version of a figure in Picnic (2016) as both wear a baseball cap with the number 85.

The larger ceramics—both busts and full figures—sit in solitude on pedestals whereas many of the smaller works are presented in clusters. Ojanen also presents two tableaux with numerous ceramic items. Picnic and Friends from the Past (2016) are quasi-narratives where Ojanen's cartoony figures are seen together but not interacting, isolated from each other— reading a comic, holding a ball or staring longingly out into space.

Viewing the exhibition is akin to stepping into a world dominated by children, specifically boys in short-pants smoking, reading, drawing or playing. Many of the heads have long noses and floppy ears that often function like arms holding pieces of fruit atop their heads or wiping away tears. Amidst these sad boys are a few happy dogs. That the animals are the only creatures to smile says a lot about Ojanen's world view, or at least speaks to the difficulties of growing up. This is reinforced through Ojanen's titles. Indecisive (2016) is a double nosed, three eyed and three legged ceramic boy. The painting I Hate Mondays (2016) features a slumped-over baseball capped figure who refuses to move.

Ojanen's painted and ceramic figures are minimal and not rendered in exacting detail. Their large eyes, long noses, shorts, striped or logoed t-shirts and drooping cigarettes delineate an attitude of insecurity and defiance, yet rather than elicit stoicism they are empathetic, yearning and delightfully whimsical.

Joakim Ojanen, "What a Time to be Alive :(", June 25 – July 30 at Richard Heller Gallery, 2525 Michigan Avenue, #B-5A, Santa Monica, CA, www.richardhellergallery.com

To see images referenced in this article please go to: http://artillerymag.com/richard-heller-gallery-joakim-ojanen/

Artillery Magazine "Pick of the Week"
Jul 7, 2016

JOAKIM OJANEN

Richard Heller Galleryby Eve Wood

Joakim Ojanen's playfully enigmatic ceramic sculptures are strangely endearing. Throughout the exhibition, the artist has set up a series of intimate vignettes using small-scale ceramic figures of people with bald heads and duckbill faces engaged in the various and often mundane activities of living. More importantly though, Ojanen's figures appear alienated and lovelorn, part of a larger community, yet unable to fit in completely. This theme is certainly pertinent given all the tragedy that is happening in the world today. One wonders if these forlorn and confused little sculptures might know more about us than they let on.

Richard Heller Gallery2525 Michigan Ave. #B-5ASanta Monica, CA 90404Show runs thru July 30, 2016

LA Times Review: Joakim Ojanen
June 25, 2016 - July 30, 2016

Review Joakim Ojanen: Innocence and melancholy, sculpted into old souls and teary dogs

By David C. Pagel

The figures in Joakim Ojanen's "What a Time to Be Alive :(" look like they might be the same guy: a sensitive soul who has suffered plenty of indignities growing up in a cruel world yet still brings an open heart toevery experience that comes his way.
Innocence and persistence come together in the Swedish artist's U.S. solo debut. By turns comic and tragic, his exhibition at Richard Heller Gallery in Santa Monica features 31 standalone sculptures, 10 oils on canvas and a pair of tableaux, each of which includes boys wise beyond their years and soccer balls, soda cans, beer bottlesand cigarettes.

The pitfalls and benefits of vulnerability are Ojanen's great subject. It takes shape in all his works, which suggest that the capacity for forgiveness is the source of real strength. Toughness, on the contrary, comes across as dimwitted insensitivity. In the eyes of the 31-year-old, the cost of growing up is too high a price to pay for what ittakes away from us.

Ojanen's paintings are whimsical. The seven largest are portraits of creatures that seem to have been modeled on dolls made from scraps of fabric by an eccentric aunt. Their creamy pastels and obsessive-compulsive paint handling give them terrific tactility.

But Ojanen's ceramic sculptures steal the show. Their expressions are far more complex — more wounded, befuddled, earnest, excited and surprised. Also more melancholic, mischievous, levelheaded and wise. All seem to be old souls trapped inside kids.

Many are simply heads that rest on tabletops. The smallest are no bigger than saltand- pepper shakers. Packing loaded emotions into a few cubic inches, they show Ojanen at his best.

Others, about the size of a child's head, similarly surprise in their capacity to elicit empathy. It's hard to tell if some of Ojanen's heads are human or canine. His dogs often use their long floppy ears to wipe away tears, to tug at their lowers lips (as if deep in thought) and to cover their eyes (as if they've seen enough). Four freestanding mutts are among the happiest — and most well adjusted — of Ojanen's creatures.

His full-body figures stand about 2ó feet tall. They have the presence of ventriloquist dummies that have run away and are now on their own. Most know they are in over their heads. But the responsibilities of adulthood have not extinguished their passion or joy. They make room for those moments when innocence and wisdom commingle.
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Richard Heller Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica.Through July 30. Closed Sundays and Mondays. (310) 453-9191, www.richardhellergallery.com

Follow The Times arts team @culturemonster

Interview: Devin Troy Strother - Elephant Magazine
Jun 1, 2016

Interview with Devin Troy Strother in Issue 27 of Elephant, The Art Culture Magazine (Summer 2016).

To purchase a copy of the magazine, please go to: https://elephantmag.com/product/elephant-27/

Fisk Frisk Magazine
May 12, 2016

Matt Mignanelli / Brian Rochefort / Russell Tyler – Richard Heller Gallery – Santa Monica CA

Matt Mignanelli

Born in 1983 in Providence, Rhode Island. Mignanelli lives and works in New York City and is a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design.

In his works, Mignanelli's approach to painting has evolved from subtle monochromes to a stark black / white, deep blue / white, and deep blue / black palette. While continuing to explore relationships between structure and nature, which are relayed through the use of harsh light and shadow against architectural elements, Mignanelli has been reexamining the evolving interactions amongst light and surface in these works.

The hard edge is applied over gestural strokes and drips of the background. Mignanelli allows for the hand to come through again on his surface through the use of hand­painted shapes and the imperfections the human hand creates amongst them. Chance enters into these paintings through the mode of execution; the works are all painted flat on a table. As Mignanelli moves around the work, painting in sections, the viscous enamel splashes and drips into the negative spaces. This spontaneity that emerges makes the paintings feel alive, and have allowed the works to become much more about painting itself.

The subtle variation of shapes in each painting creates areas of "disruption" within these environments. The visual breaks within the repetition of shape create a movement that forces the eye to dance.

The return to color in Mignanelli's works has been marked by another significant change in his life, the birth of his daughter last summer. The many sleepless nights that followed changed his work. The midnight blues of the night sky, and the early morning light inspired the deep blue palette for these new works. There is a certain serenity in the palette, representing those peaceful moments when the world is still asleep.

Mignanelli's paintings have been exhibited extensively throughout the United States and internationally with solo exhibitions at Richard Heller Gallery, Los Angeles, LUCE Gallery, Torino, and Dubner Moderne, Lausanne. He recently had a two­person exhibition at Anonymous Gallery, Mexico City (2015). His works will be included in Face to Face: Selections from the Ernesto Esposito Collection at Palazzo Fruscione, Salerno (forthcoming), and have been exhibited in Linear Abstraction at the SCAD Museum of Art, Savanna (2015), Ameringer, McEnery, and Yohe (2015), Dickinson Roundell (2015), Contemporary Istanbul (2015), EXPO Chicago with Richard Heller Gallery (2015), Regina

Rex (2014), Bleeker Street Arts Club (2013), GRAHAM (2013), Guerrero Gallery (2013), Art Copenhagen with Marianne Friis Gallery (2012), Goss­Michael Foundation (2012), and Quint Contemporary (2012).

***
Brian Rochefort

Born and raised in Rhode Island. Lives and works in Los Angeles, California. Rochefort received his BFA in Ceramics at the Rhode Island School of Design in 2007. He was awarded the Lillian Fellowship from the Archie Bray Foundation for the Ceramic Arts in Helena, Montana 2007/­2009.

Rochefort is a mixed media sculptor working in ceramics, glaze (on vessels) and automotive paint (on sculpture).

Rochefort's vessels, ceramic "paintings" and sculptures flaunt the anxious and risky mindset of disorder and chaos in the face of the viewer, reminding us that the Horror Vacui exists. His works are homages to both AbEx and contemporary painting, he builds layers slowly and uses multiple firings in his quest for texture.

The seductive messes and goo that spread out in our lives, regardless of our attempts to contain them, are the insistent presence at the forefront of the work. Freezing untidy, mucky moments, the works scream at us to pay attention to their nauseous ornament, throwing up our most base fun­house selves, celebrating the pleasure, beauty and horror of the entirety of what is worldly and human.

Rochefort has had recent exhibitions at Sorry We're Closed, Brussels, Retrospective Gallery, Hudson, New York, and Vault Exhibition, American Museum of Ceramic Art, AMOCA, Pomona, California.

***
Russell Tyler

Born 1981 in Summertown, Tennessee. Lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Tyler received his MFA from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and BFA from Concordia University in Montreal.

Tyler's practice consists of two complementary qualities: the gestural and the hard edge, or geometric.

The geometric paintings are redolent of both the history of abstract painting as well as the contemporary image space of the computer screen. While sensuous and tactile, with expressively applied oil paint and rich impasto, the work is also highly structured and unfolds with deliberate shifts in color schemes and forms. The work invites a playful dialogue with several dueling movements from the history of abstraction, including Minimalism, Concrete Art, and Expressionism. While Tyler's work shows the strong influence of artists from these movements such as Josef Albers, the work is also distinctly of its time, related to digital technologies both outmoded and new. The unfolding blocks of color refer to the computer's organization of virtual dimensional space on a flat surface.

The gestural paintings push the boundaries of confined space by allowing a certain cosmic wildness in which colors collide. Clearly influenced by Philip Guston and Cy Twombly, the work allows for drips, splotches, and textures which are meaningfully applied or randomly allowed to come through on the surface.

Tyler has had solo exhibitions at Denny Gallery in New York, B15 Gallery in Copenhagen and EbersMoore Gallery in Chicago.

To see all images included in this article please go to: https://fiskfrisk.com/2016/05/13/matt-mignanelli-brian-rochefort-russell-tyler-heller-gallery-santa-monica-ca

Hope Gangloff - Gallery Gurls
Apr 25, 2016

Hope Gangloff: A Mixture of Familiarity, Warmth, and Exuberance at her Los Angeles Exhibit

by Jasmin Hernandez

Familiarity, warmth, and exuberance take center stage in Hope Gangloff's latest exhibit, a series of acrylic-based portraits currently on view at the LA-based Richard Heller gallery. The figurative works stem from tender encounters with close individuals, mostly friends from Gangloff's inner circle, who are presented in a succession of engaging and intimate moments. Gangloff continues in depicting creative life in Brooklyn through vivid, expressive, and highly textured canvases bursting with fluorescent waves. Artist peers such as Yuri Masnyj (former classmate from Cooper Union) and Benjamin Degen (Gangloff's husband), as well as rising actor Christopher Abbott (of 'Girls' fame) have all served as characters in her work, beautifully captured in a variety of vulnerable, pensive, and introspective states. Executing her paintings in a large-scale format coupled with a striking color palette, mundane aspects of everyday life - laying in bed, playing chess, waiting at the airport, getting dressed - become sublime and compelling scenes. In these casual snapshots, as seen through the artist's bright and vibrant lens, Gangloff presents contemporary American urban life and challenges us to cherish the ordinary in our daily lives. 

Hope Gangloff was born in Amityville, Long Island and is a graduate of Cooper Union. Gangloff is represented by Susan Inglett in New York and by Art Dept for her illustration work. The artist lives and works in upstate New York. Hope Gangloff: New Paintings will be on view through April 30 at Richard Heller in Santa Monica, CA.

To see all images included in this review please go to: http://gallerygurls.net

Cover + Interview: SFAQ - Devin Troy Strother
Mar 27, 2016

AQ 4INTERVIEWSNYAQ 3SFAQ

DEVIN TROY STROTHER: IN CONVERSATION WITH LINDSAY PRESTON ZAPPAS

Devin Troy Strother knows how his work can be perceived and he's not afraid to talk about it. I joined Strother in his LA studio, where we discussed the unique references in his work, and how he situates himself within the art world, the art market, and the black community. 

Devin Troy Strother: Both of my parents worked all day so I was basically raised by television. They would just leave me at home with the television on so I watched a shit ton of TV and a lot of movies all the time.

Lindsay Preston Zappas: That's kind of a suburban condition, right, to be a latchkey kid? Do you watch TV a lot in the studio?

No, at home after I leave the studio. I have this publishing company called Coloured Publishing that my girlfriend Yuri and I started and work on at home. Basically, I watch TV whenever I'm at home, working on a book. I'm kind of hard of hearing so I play shit really loud, which my girlfriend hates. I used to go to a lot of shows when I was younger so I fucked up my ears. I listen to music really loud in the car. I play everything really loud. We started living together and it's usually just me drawing until 4 in the morning, blaring the TV (usually comedy specials) or podcasts hosted by comedians like Marc Maron, Joe Rogan, and Doug Benson, to name a few. I think a lot of my work comes out of that. A lot of the titles have an aspect of me trying to be a comedic storyteller—almost like the title is a one-two punch line to the visual element. The piece is the set up and the title is the punch line.

To read the whole interview, please go to: http://sfaq.us/2016/03/devin-troy-strother-in-conversation-with-lindsay-preston-zappas/

LA Times Datebook
Mar 25, 2016

ENTERTAINMENT / ARTS & CULTURE / CAROLINA A. MIRANDA

Datebook: Abandoned buildings, new paintings and a show that tackles race and violence

By Carolina A. Miranda

A trio of painters. Photography that records ruin in intelligent ways. And abstracted bits of landscape rendered as mosaic. Plus, the Underground Museum unveils a timely new exhibition.

Here are four shows to see this week:

Hope Gangloff, Benjamin Degen and Yuri Masnyj at Richard Heller Gallery. Heller's gallery is featuring a series of solo exhibitions by a trio of New York-based painters. These include Gangloff's moody portraits, Degen's glitteringly surreal landscapes and the diagrammatic paintings by Masnyj, which function as strange inventories of objects and things. Opens Saturday at 5 p.m. and runs through April 30.

Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Ste. B5, Santa Monica, richardhellergallery.com.

Read more at: http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/miranda/la-et-cam-datebook-john-divola-hope-gangloff-show-about-race-and-violence-20160325-column.html

Arte Fuse Interview: Matt Mignanelli
Mar 11, 2016

ARTE FUSE

Interview with Artist Matt Mignanelli

By Laura Mylott Manning

Recently, I saw your work in an exhibition at The Hole and was intrigued to learn more. You've stated previously 'A lot of my works are based on industrial facades and architectural elements.' How does working from your studio in Bushwick, Brooklyn influence your art? 

The entire city has been a source of great inspiration, but the industrial landscape that Bushwick is comprised of has critically influenced the works as they have developed over the years. The roll down gates, corrugated metal walls, sidewalk hatches, diamond plate steel, surfaces in the subway that have been repainted hundreds of times all fascinate me. These industrial surfaces and the utilitarian applications of paint feel so pure to me, and something I strive to bring into my own works.

I am immediately drawn to the meditative quality of your paintings. Please discuss your process and the importance of repetition.

When analyzing the construction of surface, repetition is at the core of all we construct. It readily appears in the natural world; such as blades of grass that repeat to create a lawn, and has been copied by man to create surface as well, such as in the bricks we build structures with or the brush stoke that endlessly repeats to coat a wall. Repetition presents itself again in the form of time, and our daily routines.

Within this line of thinking, repetition feels so natural to me. Within my works, the choice to focus on repetition creates immersive environments.

The works are begun with gestural brush strokes using large house painting brushes to lay down a base coat. The painting is measured out with a pencil and ruler, and then painted entirely free-hand in enamel. The work is painted flat on a table. As I move quickly through the shapes, the viscous enamel splashes onto the surface.

Currently you have an exhibition at the Richard Heller Gallery; can you talk about the work you have included? 

The new works being exhibited at Richard Heller mark the first exhibition where I have departed from the subtle black on black and white on white works, and returned to color after more than 4 years, moving into bolder black/white, blue/white, and blue/black works.

I have been thinking about these new works as "Disruptions," as the different shapes disrupt these repetitious fields and create a sense of movement within the picture.

Many of your works explore harsh light and structure. Would you ever consider an artist residency in the desert?

The desert does interest me quite a bit, the desert light enhances such a unique landscape. I would certainly consider working there, I have a couple of friends who have recently decamped to Joshua Tree and absolutely love it. I have been inspired by the structure and light in Mexico. The painted stucco in the harsh sun creates such beautiful shadows.

I can't wait to see more of your paintings! What's next?

I'm going to continue to explore the works focusing on disruption, and the reintroduction of limited color.

To see all images included in this article please go to: http://artefuse.com/2016/03/11/interview-with-artist-matt-mignanelli-124436/

Hope Gangloff - Modern Painters, March 2016
Mar 1, 2016

PAINTING FROM LIFE A social network, on canvas

"THERE IS A KIND of mania that I court when working," says Hope Gangloff. "I'll work on way too many pieces, ruining most and finding clarity in others. Decisions get made fast. I like when the brush is falling through space as fast as gravity." Gangloffs paintings-many hyper-contemporary, moody portraits of her friends, set against vibrant patterned interior&­ are imbued with this sense of motion.
As of press time, the artist wasn't certain which pieces would be among the new paintings on view in her upcoming show at Richard Heller Gallery in Los Angeles, opening March 26. (The artist also shows with Susan Inglett Gallery in New York.) But a likely candidate is Study for Wigmore, in which the lighting sculptor John Wigmore reclines on his side on a picnic blanket, button-down rumpled and Corona in hand. His form is accented by decorative patterns: crosshatch grass, blankets in checkered red and wavy blue-details typical of the artist's intimate canvases. Gangloff pulls in such textural elements from, she says, "the things that I surround myself with. I hold on to old sun catchers and books and ladders from my youth; I make quilts, sew dresses in particular patterns, make decorations, and buy plants, just so I can paint them." -THEA BALLARD

Interview with Ryan Schneider
Feb 16, 2016

Curate Joshua Tree

Emily Silver

Right off of Old Woman Springs Rd. in Flamingo Heights, perched on top of a hill over looking this incredible landscape sits Ryan Schneider's cabin and painting studio.It's a gorgeous day, and exceptionally windy on this hill, we caught Ryan for a studio visit and interview as he is just about to ship off all this work for an upcoming show in March at Gerhard Hofland Gallery in Amsterdam (GerhardHofland.com)

Before we met, I sent a few questions to Ryan, below is what he had to say to those. Listen to podcast to hear the entire studio visit, Ryan talks about his shift from NYC to the Mojave, his spiritual act of painting and his new found patience in his work.

Tell us about where you are from and how you ended up here in Flamingo Heights area?

I grew up outside of Indianapolis, Indiana. Sort of a rural/suburban area but mostly rural where my family and I were. Just acres of woods, a creek, and up the road is just an endless sea of corn fields. I went to school at the Maryland Institute College of Art, so I lived in Baltimore for 4 years- those years are a little fuzzy. Then in 2002 I moved to New York, and never imagined I would live any where else because I loved it so much. Last year my wife Dana and I came out to Joshua Tree for what was supposed to be just a three-month retreat in the desert. We rented a house a few miles down a dirt road, near the back entrance of the park. I was painting outside, she was working and we were just enjoying the silence and nothingness of the desert, hiking, breathing, and sort of recovering from 13 years of intense living in the city. I think it was in March that we started to realize we weren't going back to New York. It was a shocking but titillating idea, and we didn't really tell anyone about it, until our friends offered us the house they were about to move out of in Flamingo Heights. We came to look at the place and as soon as I saw the green studio on the property, I knew we were not going back to New York. We were just seduced by the strangeness and openness out here, and ready for a radical change in our lives. I still love New York and consider it home as well. But now I can love it from a distance and get to work out here with my wife and two orange cats wandering around.

To read the complete interview please go to: http://www.curatejoshuatree.com/#!Ryan-Schneider/cd23/56c351810cf2100f64748a13

To listen to the podcast that accompanies this interview please go to: http://www.curatejoshuatree.com/#!podcast/n6v

ARTE FUSE Interview With: Sasha Pierce
Feb 14, 2016

ARTE FUSE Interview With: Sasha Pierce

Laura Mylott Manning

LM: Recently, I had the pleasure of viewing your paintings at the Richard Heller Gallery booth during the Untitled Miami Art Fair. I am very impressed by the meticulous detail of your work. Can you talk about your process and how you arrived at it? 

SP: Thank you. During my Master of Fine Arts degree at the University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, I wanted to create a terry cloth texture on a section of a canvas. I wasn't satisfied with a painted illusionistic texture and so I carefully extruded thin thread-like lines of oil paint out of a little plastic bag to re-create the three-dimensional terry cloth texture that I desired.

I have continued to experiment with this technique, which has evolved to the work that you saw at Untitled Miami Art Fair. My current work has a multi-colored woven-like surface, and as I lay each thin line of it down it goes from a thicker to a thinner stream of paint and ultimately to a vanishing point. In my paintings you'll find a paradox of space between the textured surface and the illusionistic space created by a vanishing point.

LM: In a review of your paintings, it's been written that 'A connecting thread between the artworks of Sasha Pierce is literally thread… (and) reference textiles, even though they are not textiles in themselves.' In which ways has fiber arts influenced your work?

SP: Surprisingly it is not fiber arts but textile itself, which inspires my paintings and silkscreen collages. When I was a young child I remember sitting on the floor and enjoying the sensation of drawing temporary lines and patterns in the carpet. I was seduced by the soft, malleable and tactile qualities of the carpet. Now, as an artist, I am interested in visually representing the sensations of textile with oil painting and collage.

There is also a historical thread that connects me to my ancestors. My great grandmothers were quilters and knitters, and my maternal grandfather's occupation was fixing and selling sewing machines. For my ancestors working with textiles was not considered an art but a part of daily life.

That being said, just last week I had the opportunity to tour the textile storage facility at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM), Toronto. I had no idea that looking at historical textiles and fiber arts from around the world would make me so happy. I am drawn to earthy hand-dyed colors and I enjoy the meticulous yet imperfect labor found in hand-woven textiles. This visit to the ROM was deeply inspiring and I look forward to continuing my research into historical textiles and allowing them to influence my work.

LM: Your compositions are very dynamic. What sparked your interest in using geometrical forms as a starting off point? 

SP: I have an interest in math and I am fascinated by the possibility of representing 3D space on a 2D surface. The simpler shapes in my previous paintings have become more complex over time and my compositions have become more dynamic with the use of tessellations and vanishing points. A few years ago I came upon an amazing mathematical website called Tilings Encyclopedia which was created with support by the University of Bielefeld, Germany. This encyclopedia includes examples of substitution tilings, which are listed in lexicographical order. I love the colors of the diagrams and the names given to the each tiling. Currently I am using a substitution tessellation called Birds and Bees, which will be the name of the painting when it is complete. I often use tessellations as a starting point and then I sort of camouflage the geometry with my own processes.

LM: Ancient geometric art comes to mind because of your use of labor and patterns. Are there any specific time periods that you look to for inspiration? 

There is no one specific time period influencing my work at the moment, however with the historical research that I'm doing now, that could change with my next paintings.

If, however, I were to pick a time period that I am generally interested in I would have to say the 9th century Islamic Golden Age of mathematics. I love the complexity of Islamic geometric patterns and Muqarnas, which is a form of architectural ornamented vaulting.

LM: I'm looking forward to seeing your paintings again. Any upcoming exhibitions? 

SP: Yes, I am very happy to be working closely with Richard Heller Gallery – with the amazing Richard Heller as well as his awesome team: Associate Director Barry Belkin and Registrar Kaye Heller. Richard Heller Gallery is located in the Bergamot Station in Santa Monica and the gallery represents a talented group of artists. I am currently creating new work for a European art fair in June, and I am working toward a solo exhibition at Richard Heller Gallery early 2017.

In addition, I was just awarded an Ontario Arts Council Chalmers Research Fellowship to research the art practices and writings of Anni and Josef Albers. In order to conduct this research I will be travelling to Milan, Italy; Dusseldorf and Bottrop, Germany; Bethany, Connecticut, US; and New York, New York, US. I will also be participating in an upcoming 2016 residency at the Digital Painting Atelier at OCAD University in Toronto. I am excited to see what impact these experiences will have on my work.

To see the images included with this interview please go to the following link: http://artefuse.com/2016/02/14/interview-with-sasha-pierce-124397/

Charlie Roberts | Souland Collaboration
Feb 12, 2016

FashionBeans.com
Men's Fashion News
Soulland Delivers Wearable Art For Its New Collection

Fashion and art collide for a one-of-a-kind collab between Soulland and artist Charlie Roberts

BY ILANA GREENBERG 

After Fashion Week, it's easy to feel that fashion has become depressingly monolithic. Dark and muted colourways in styles that look like you're prepping for the dawn of Ragnarok have been everywhere recently.

Thankfully, a few brands are infusing joy back into their collections, none more so than Soulland. For SS16, the brand has teamed up with Norwegian-based, American artist Charlie Roberts to create a unique and colourful collection that blurs the line between fashion and art.

Soulland and Charlie Roberts' partnership follows a successful collab during Soulland's LCM 2015 presentation in July. For this show, Roberts created a enormous spray paint piece, working as a complementary background for the models stood in front of it.

For the Soulland SS16 collection 'Iron Wheel Club', Roberts created unique, wearable art pieces. Different elements from his original artwork are embedded in the clothes, from jacquard woven patterns to cordelia embroidery and needle punch.

Roberts is known for his use of a wide range of materials, abstract patterns and flowing colours, in pieces that are often inspired by pop culture and hip-hop. It's no wonder then that Soulland felt such a kinship towards him, considering its focus on Scandinavian craftsmanship, mixing classic and simple designs with playful contemporary elements influenced by urban subcultures and skateboarding. We're calling it a masterpiece.

The Soulland x Charlie Roberts collection is available now in store at goodhoodstore.com.

For fashion images included in this article please go to: http://www.fashionbeans.com/2016/soulland-charlie-roberts/ 

Video Interview: Vanessa Prager
Feb 11, 2016

Wall to Wall | Vanessa Prager

from Dailymotion
MSN.com

2/11/2016

Vanessa Prager is a Los Angeles based painter who uses an excess of paint on the canvas, creating portraits that are both textured and abstract.

To watch the video of Vanessa Prager talking about her practice please go to: http://www.msn.com/en-ae/health/video/wall-to-wall-vanessa-prager/vi-BBpphf8?refvid=BBp4f3A

REVIEW: Ryan Foster - Art Scene, February 2016
January 9, 2016 - February 13, 2016

Art Scene, Vol. 35, No. 5, February, 2016
Continuing and Recommended

REVIEW: Ryan Foster - Art Scene

By: Jody Zellen

There is something disconcerting about Ryan Foster's paintings. Upon careful viewing, what is seen in the foreground of one painting appears in the mid-ground of the next - a bit out of focus and in the background of the next even further distorted. Foster is a skilled representational painter. What makes the images compelling is his ability to paint in myriad styles in a single painting. The Alabama based artist has perfected the illusion of painting one work that folds into another over and over again. The works allude to the passage of time as well as the dissolution of the object. Foster's subjects are surreal landscapes filled with homeless and disabled characters who pay no attention to that which unfolds around them. In these works the harder one looks, the more one sees. Also on view are small scale intimate gouaches by Oslo based artist Charlie Roberts.

CHARLIE ROBERTS | BEAUTIFUL SAVAGE REVIEW
January 9, 2016 - February 13, 2016

"HALCYON DAZE" BY CHARLIE ROBERTS AT RICHARD HELLER GALLERY

by Chad Saville / January 10, 2016

"Charlie Roberts opened a solo show in Los Angeles this past Friday. And it's gorgeous."

Charlie Roberts' lives and works somewhere in the forests outside of Oslo, Norway and made a name for himself a few years back by creating mesmerizing, sexually charged and sometimes violent images featuring hundreds of tiny characters and severed heads arranged together in something akin to Byzantine complexity. In 2012, Vice writer Milene Larsson said Roberts' work "looks like the mindstream of a comics-obsessed tween with a Ritalin prescription."

Roberts' latest series Halcyon Daze, which opened last Friday at Richard Heller Gallery in Los Angeles, the artist's Fifth solo show, is a strong departure from his past work. The images are astonishing, peaceful even. I'm particularly drawn to the image "Wet Lite," a figurative work featuring two characters lounging in a bathroom and framed by hypnotic black and white tile. I'm not one for artspeak, but the image is rad.

Born in 1984 in Hutchinson, Kansas, Roberts attended the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in Canada, and has exhibited internationally at Galerie Magnus Karlsson in Stockholm, David Risley Gallery in Copenhagen, and Vous Etes Ici in Amsterdam.

"Charlie Roberts' work takes us into the mind-stream of a manic, obsessive and eclectic collector of contemporary pop culture and art history," according to Richard Heller Gallery. "Everything is sampled and laid out without hierarchical order and judgements. Roberts uses a wide range of materials and masters a furious force as well as a sensitive subtleness. Abstract patterns, flowing colors and a primitive brutality alongside tender lines, seductive realism and psychedelic poetry."

Richard Heller Gallery opened Halcyon Daze, a series of gouache on paper works by Charlie Roberts on January 9. It will be on view through February 13 at their Santa Monica location.

To see all the images included with this review please go to: http://beautifulsavage.com/design/halcyon-daze-by-charlie-roberts-at-richard-heller-gallery/

PROFILE: DEVIN TROY STROTHER
Dec 16, 2015

THE FINE PRINT MAGAZINE

PROFILE: DEVIN TROY STROTHER

MUHAN ZHANG

Los Angeles-based artist Devin Troy Strother wields humor with an acerbity not often seen in the prestigious exhibition spaces his work frequent. 

With titles like "Gurrrl I'm just talking about that composition", "Gurrrrl what'chu know about that post modernism", Strother grounds his references and his art in the language and drollery of the ghetto. He refers to these titles as "the punchlines of the paintings". 

As for the paintings themselves, Strother's style is characterized by the collaging and painting over of paper cutouts. The figurines of his paintings, which he fondly refer to as "little black people," are rearranged in various fictive narratives or abstract spaces, oftentimes in blatant, even satirical reference to the works of other artists. His 2012 painting, "A Black Marina Abramovic in "I'm gonna fuckin' shoot you with this arrow" ", for instance, references the 1980 performance piece, "Rest Energy", by artists Marina Abramovic and Ulay. 

Strother's sculptures are magnified and monumentalized versions of his painted figurines, featuring his characteristic long-winded and humorous titles, such as "Look at my guuurl Shariece over there getting her shie on". 

Strother has frequently expressed his ambivalence towards the framing of his art as black art and of himself as a black artist. The majority of his work indubitably feature themes of black identity; however, the double standard stands that a white artist painting white subjects would not receive such scrutiny about racial identity. In a cultural context where white identity remains the default, Strother's works are a poignant and accessible antithesis to intersectional elitism in the art world and society at large.

To see all images included with this profile please go to the following link: http://thefineprintmagazine.com/profile-devin-stroy-strother/

Russell Tyler - Artspace
Dec 4, 2015

Picks

Susan and Michael Hort's Picks From Miami Art Week 2015

By Artspace Editors

The dynamic collecting and philanthropic duo that is Susan and Michael Hort is back with more picks, from Miami's annual Art Week. These paintings, many of them by younger artists, are must-sees at Art Basel  Miami Beach, NADA Miami, and Untitled. Enjoy!

UNTITLED ART FAIR

RUSSELL TYLER

We loved how his minimalist paintings worked with his abstract paintings.

The one on the left looks like things flying through the air.

To read the complete list of the Hort's picks please go to: http://www.artspace.com/magazine/contributors/picks/hort-picks-miami-2015-53338

Profile: Matt Mignanelli
Dec 1, 2015

Aujourd'hui

INSIDE STUDIO - MATT MIGNANELLI

Matt Mignanelli, born in Rhode Island in 1983, lives and works in New York City and is a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design. His paintings have been widely exhibited throughout the United States and internationally with exhibitions at Richard Heller Gallery, Los Angeles, LUCE Gallery, Torino, SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, Goss-Michael Foundation, Dallas, Quint Contemporary, San Diego, among others. His works will also be included in Face to Face: Selections from the Ernesto Esposito Collection at Palazzo Fruscione, Salerno.

His studio is located in Bushwick, a really industrial section of Brooklyn. This landscape consists of cinder block, diamond plate steel, roll down gates and corrugated metal buildings painted in basic colors: black, white, chrome, brick red and grey. There is vibrancy and work ethic in the neighborhood. Since architecture and environment play such a huge role in informing his work, Matt loves the utilitarian nature of it all. New York is a constant source of inspiration and there is the right energy around his studio for him to feed off. Check the pictures below and how they capture such a unique space.

To see all images in this article please go to: http://www.aujourdhui.pt/exclusives/inside-studio-matt-mignanelli

LOS ANGELES TIMES | DEVIN TROY STROTHER
Nov 22, 2015

DEVIN TROY STROTHER

Critics' Choices

Devin Troy Strother To an oeuvre that includes paintings, sculptures and collages, Strother adds custom-made carpeting, custom wallpaper, neon signs and three new bodies of work. The double-barreled extravaganza is a throbbing, rollicking party that, like all great art, you have to experience for yourself (D.P.). Richard Heller Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica. Tue.-Sat. 11 a.m.-5 p.m.; ends Dec. 19.

To read the complete Sunday "Guide" please go to: http://eedition2.latimes.com/Olive/ODE/LATimes2/

PROFILE: CHARLIE ROBERTS
Exhibition "Halcyon Daze" begins January 9, 2016 - February 13, 2016

PROFILE: CHARLIE ROBERTS

The Fine Print Magazine

PATRICK LABA

Find a physical comfort. Look at your fingers, your toes. Count them; order them in any kind of obscure way possible. Now, sprawl out on a mattress; loosen your limbs. Try; if possible, to feel your extremities stretch and curl around you like the smoke of a cigarette. Perhaps most people associate such body-bending images with the effects psychoactive drugs can produce, but artist Charlie Roberts offers a similar visual world through the pieces he dreamily creates. Originally from the United States, Charlie Roberts studied in Canada and currently resides in Norway, and has been unleashing his unique blend of pop-culture, day-in-the-live-of-an-angsty-adolescent work to the world of art and social media (you can follow him on Instagram at @colonelcatfish) throughout the years surrounding his relocations. Roberts' earlier work presents meticulous rows of animals, human heads, tombstones, sneakers, needles and everything in between. These early paintings present a dizzying attention to an obscure detail that Roberts seems to have perfected. Following this artistic phase, Charlie Roberts began to create scenes of contorted bodies, lying loosely and oftentimes intertwined with one another. These pieces explore themes such as lazily smoking joints, drinking beers, the absent-mindedness that accompanies our technological age and the seemingly elastic sensation of love when you're young, high and care free. Venturing through Charlie Roberts' repertoire is quite a jarring experience, but one that is remarkably exhilarating in the duality of his work. More recently, Roberts has expanded his talents to the art of creating sculptures. His work can be viewed at various exhibits, including the Kravets Wehby Gallery in New York, the Richard Heller Gallery in California and the David Risley Gallery in Denmark. A collaboration with Danish menswear brand Soulland is also due to be released in Spring of 2016. Although his work presents a comforting looseness, one can expect nothing short of total artistic tightness to come from Charlie Roberts in the future.

To see all the images included with the profile please go to the following link: http://thefineprintmagazine.com/profile-charlie-roberts/

REVIEW: DEVIN TROY STROTHER | LA CANVAS
Nov 13, 2015

Mo' Money, Mo' Art: The Psychedelic Mind Trip of Devin Troy Strother

By Jose Picon

Ever wonder what the inside of an artist's mind looks like? Devin Troy Strother isn't afraid to show us his.

Based in LA, Strother studied at the Art Center College of Design, and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Skowhegan, Maine. Strother's works are in permanent collections at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, and the Studio Museum in Harlem. He has also been featured in solo exhibitions at the Richard Heller Gallery in Santa Monica, the Marlborough Chelsea in New York, and the Bendixen Contemporary Art in Copenhagen.

In his new show at the Richard Heller Gallery, Strother explores the paradigm of an African American who pursues "the stereotypical route of becoming a rapper, an athlete, or some type of entertainer" and becoming successful; subsequently, making a lot of money and not knowing "how to spend their money wisely or invest it properly." It's unapologetically named "They Should've Never Given You N*ggas Money," after a Dave Chappelle comedy sketch about Rick James (you know, that "f*ck your couch, n*gga" sketch).

Strother focuses on furthering the conversation, adding a touch of humor as he does with all his work, with aluminum sculptures painted with acrylic, exploring with neon, wallpaper, and carpet. He masterfully transports his audience into another world as the visual aesthetics of his show are wonderfully correlated to the trope he attempts to bring to light.

Welcome to the Next Dimension: A Tour Through Strother's "They Should've Never Given You N*ggas Money"

After taking the first couple steps into the gallery, your mind goes into a psychedelic mind trip by everything that's going on. Think listening to Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon" while being stoned out of your mind.

To the left of the entrance is a matte, Barbie-pink wall with neon piece of a woman lounging in front the ocean and a palm tree; to the right is a multi-tasking aluminum wall highlighting mixed media pieces and wavy faces on a neon sign. All the while reflecting the full color spectrum from the neon pieces from the other wall and the lights from the roof which reminiscent of Newton's color spectrum experiment– but this time it's splattered on a wall instead of through a prism.

After orbiting through a handful of 10-foot-long sculptures of faces stacked on top of each other expressing every feeling imaginable, you find yourself gazing at the Picasso-esqe neon piece at the end of the wall.

Bright and harsh on the eyes, with salmons, whites, reds, blues, yellows all jumbled together in straight lines, squiggly lines, parallel lines, and half smiles and faces; all while being stared at an angry afro rocking dude to the top left corner.

Next to our afroman friend, you'll notice the end of the progression piece, "N*ggas on a 'nana," where several bodies are riding on bananas through rainbows and marshmallow clouds. Sitting below the progression piece: "Too many n*ggas & 'nanas to count (you count 'em up n*gga)" and "A bunch of n*ggas & 'nanas falling thru space (n*gga where's the rocket ship).

WEST GALLERY: Enter "What if Yayoi Kusama had Jungle Fever?"

Greeted by Strother's "Lazy B*tch," a blue neon piece depicting a woman positioned on her hands and knees, you'll experience a sort of head change, as if you are transitioning from our universe and into the matrix en route into the next dimension.

A blood-red wallpaper and carpet filled in with wavy faces, sausage-shaped smiles, Nike swooshes, and cartoon-esque expressional faces. Revisited by the smiley abstract sculptures, another Picasso-looking piece, and a bi-polar neon face that seems to not be able to make up its mind.

In the middle of the gallery, we are greeting once again by our sculpture friends, this time, each beaming a friendly glare, trying to express their unique personality like lonely rescue center pups showing themselves off to a potential owner.

My favorites?

"Oval shaped n*gga" expressing his curiosity for the world with with his head tilted and "single n*gga on a plate" sobbing away the crushing pain of solitude while his alter ego looks at your woman's behind with a smutty grin.

As you make your way out of the gallery, Strother reminds you of the travels ahead with his satirical piece brought back from his previous shows which says, "BABY, I HAD TO SWERVE THRU MORE F*CKING TRAFFIC YESTERDAY." Possibly a self-fulfilling prophecy, but most likely if Waze navigates you back home through the 10-FWY.

Devin Troy Strother runs through December 19th at Richard Heller Gallery
2525 Michigan Ave, B-5A
Santa Monica, 90404

To see images from the review please go to the following link: http://lacanvas.com/mo-money-mo-art-the-psychedelic-mind-trip-of-devin-troy-strother/

REVIEW: DEVIN TROY STROTHER | LOS ANGELES TIMES
Nov 3, 2015

Critic's Choice Artist Devin Troy Strother's raucous, rollicking extravaganza in Santa Monica

By David Pagel

Devin Troy Strother wowed Los Angeles five years ago with a solo debut that linked pleasure and African American imagery.

That was groundbreaking because of the no-holds-barred nuttiness with which Strother approached fun, and also because pleasure had not played a big part in the discourse that had grown up, since the early 1990s, around art made by African Americans.

In 2012, Strother's second exhibition showed him to be a formidable storyteller, a master at broaching such loaded subjects as blood, money and sex — or race, class and gender— without getting heavy-handed or glossing over the tough stuff. In 2013, he upped the scale and intensified the impact of his art, making laser-cut silhouettes that amplified the sidesplitting hijinks.

All three shows pale in comparison to "They Should've Never Given You ... Money," Strother's fourth solo show in Los Angeles and his best yet. (The title includes a variation on the N-word.) At Richard Heller Gallery, the 29-year-old artist cranks up the volume, filling two rooms with enough art for six or seven exhibitions.

To read the entire article please go to the following link: http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-et-cm-devin-troy-strother-richard-heller-gallery-20151027-story.html

INTERVIEW: Dustin Yellin in Architectural Digest
Oct 30, 2015

Architectural Digest

ART + AUCTIONS

Artist Dustin Yellin Opens His First Permanent Installation Along Sunset Boulevard

The six sculptures are valued at $1.5 million

TEXT BY NICK MAFI
PHOTOGRAPHY BY SARAH ANDERSON

Artist Dustin Yellin has been in the spotlight in the past few years—a cameo in rapper Jay-Z's 2013 video for "Picasso Baby"; being labeled the art world's It boy by Vanity Fair this past September—all the while creating works of art that sell for millions (one of his installations went for $1.7 million in a private sale in 2014). Now, the Brooklyn-based artist has left his mark on his hometown of Los Angeles.

To read the complete article and see images please go to the following link: http://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/dustin-yellin-los-angeles-psychogeographies-outdoor-art-installation-sunset-boulevard

Michelle Graber - VICE SPORTS
Oct 21, 2015

B. David Zarley

In the end, it was the laziness—not the venom—that most disappointed Michelle Grabner.

As an artist, Grabner explores the vernacular and familiar through formalism, the application of shapes and patterns as art in and of themselves. These somewhat abstracted works can then reference a multitude of themes, including repetition, domesticity, and suburbia. A professor at the highly regarded School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Grabner's work has been exhibited around the world; she was one of three curators chosen for the 2014 edition of the Whitney Biennial, among the most important contemporary art exhibitions in the country.

Her eponymous exhibition at James Cohan Gallery last fall spawned a tempest when New York Times art critic Kevin Johnson appeared to write off the show with strokes broad and base enough to hazard accusations of sexism.

To read the complete article please go to: https://sports.vice.com/en_us/article/art-by-the-balls

WALLPAPER*: Dustin Yellin
Oct 19, 2015
Wallpaper*

New world: artist Dustin Yellin unveils his first outdoor installation in LA

ART / 19 OCT 2015 / BY MICHAEL SLENSKE

Information

Photography: Sarah Lawrence

Address:

NeueHouse
6121 Sunset Boulevard
Hollywood, Los Angeles

About a year and a half ago, the Kilroy Realty Corporation approached Brooklyn-based artist Dustin Yellin about permanently installing six of his increasingly popular Psychogeographies in Columbia Square, the plaza outside the 1938 CBS Headquarters, which will re-open this month as the Los Angeles outpost of NeueHouse. Over this period, these monumental glass collage works — created by Yellin and a small army of assistants with small paint gestures and thousands of print images clipped from magazines — have anchored a TED Talk, an installation at Lincoln Center for the New York City Ballet, and a comprehensive Vanity Fair feature. This project, however, was Yellin's first al fresco installation; providing many new challenges, such as finding the right UV-protected laminated glass, stainless steel frames and concrete plinths to secure the work. He also had to consider his source of inspiration.

'It was the first movie studio and I got a bunch of historic shit from them, some I copied and some I destroyed,' says Yellin during a tour of the site, noting that Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, and Orson Welles ('cats that I dig') all worked in the building over the years. 'There's the Lone Ranger, some movie tickets,' he says, pointing to hidden micro-clippings of CBS ephemera. 'For me, these pieces are supposed to be like if you put a piece of glass on one side of your body, and another on the other side and just started cranking yourself until your skull exploded into a thousand pieces, but instead of blood and guts you'd see your memories, your experiences.'

By trapping the collective consciousness of the Hollywood landmark — or 'DNA in images', as Yellin calls it — he hopes to project the city back onto itself. 'I think when you die you realise this layer was just one existence and you'll become aware of many worlds,' says Yellin, now 40, who first got the inspiration for this mode of thinking at 18 after going through a series of Altered States-like 'consciousness experiments' (think intramuscular ketamine injections) administered by Adam Trombly, a physicist in Aspen who once worked with Buckminster Fuller and tried to launch a Tesla-like free energy initiative. 'I think a lot of my work came from those days. I was on all these drugs making art and I had no culture, and I thought if I became the most famous artist in the world I could convince the billionaires and movie stars to give money to the scientists to make free energy.'

Though he hasn't fulfilled the latter promise, he has connected the monied classes and artists with various Nobel laureates ('my brain trust') at his Pioneer Works art centre in Red Hook, Brooklyn. 'It's mixing all these weird fucking people all the time,' he says. Having completed this installation, the artist-activist hopes to do more public projects should the opportunity arise. He's also busy making new works, be it his new 'ant farm' series (made from detritus paper stuffed between glass panels with a stick) or the 32-ft landscape inspired by the epic 12-ton triptych he showed at the SCAD Museum of Art, which all began simply as a 'series of accidents'.

'With the glass I can go backwards, change my mind, add perspective, build a city, put a horse in the city, cut the city in half or add an explosion. Then I saw the Terracotta Warriors and realised I don't want to make figurative art, I want to make an army,' says Yellin, who hopes to create 120 Psychogeographies for a huge retrospective, whenever or wherever that might happen. 'I don't believe in the art world, I just believe in the world. I just make shit that I would want to live with and shit that in 500 years would be artifacts I care about because I'm obsessed with artifacts. I don't think about anything else.'

To see images included in this article please go to: http://www.wallpaper.com/art/dustin-yellin-unveils-outdoor-installation-los-angeles

Dustin Yellin / LA TIMES
Oct 14, 2015
ARTS & CULTURE Dustin Yellin adds his mark in L.A. with art that's a 'missile for social change'DEBORAH VANKIN
_________

Dustin Yellin is an artist who comes in many guises.

In Vanity Fair last month, Yellin, posing naked but for mismatched socks and eyeglasses at his Brooklyn studio, was presented as the art world's "it boy."

Other images in the media collage that is his public history: Yellin break-dancing in Jay Z's 2013 performance art video, "Picasso Baby"; the sky-high dollar amounts that his elaborate sculptures command (one installation went for $1.7 million in a private sale at Sotheby's last year); Yellin's romance with actress Michelle Williams; the time in the late '90s when he was accidentally stabbed in the leg by model-actress Bijou Phillips; and the artist's 1999 mental breakdown, which landed him in a psych ward — but not before he recorded the entire episode, ultimately turning it into a performance art video called "The Crack-Up."

To read the complete article and see more photos please go to: http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-et-cm-dustin-yellin-columbia-square-20151031-story.html

Dustin Yellin - boing boing
Sept 25, 2015

bOinG bOinG

CORY DOCTOROW / 5 PM FRI, SEP 25 2015

Dustin Yellin's stupendous, life-sized glass-pane humanoids made from NatGeo clippings

Earlier this month, I attended a two-day meeting at Pioneer Works, an art and innovation center in Red Hook, Brooklyn. The center is both physically beautiful and filled with interesting people from many disciplines doing work in open workshops. It was founded by sculptor Dustin Yellin, and the lobby has one of his remarkable, life-sized three-dimensional humaniform sculptures, composed of thousands of collaged magazine clippings pressed between many sheets of glass.

To read the complete article and see more photos please go to:http://boingboing.net/2015/09/25/dustin-yellins-stupendous-l.html

FLAVORPILL.COM INTERVIEW: Michelle Grabner
Sept 22, 2015

Michelle Grabner on Soccer Balls & Art in the American Interior

By Sehba Mohammad on September 22, 2015

Founding the Midwest's most avant garde art spaces (The Suburban and Poor Farm), co-curating last year's Whitney Biennial, enriching young minds at the Art Institute of Chicago, and a robust studio practice, couldn't save Michelle Grabner from Ken Johnson's lackadaisical New York Times review last year.

For twenty years Grabner explored dynamics of domesticity through thoughtful paper weaves, hypnotic needlepoint canvases, and ironic documentary videos, but in his critique Johnson boils her down to a "middle-class tenured professor and soccer mom."

Instead of lamenting, Grabner — with the help of object-based publication The Thing Quarterly — turned the classicist critique into a cheeky and creative rebuttal. The Grabner-designed issue is an actual soccer ball patterned with the artist's iconic gingham.

Flavorpill caught up with the artist to discuss The Thing Quarterlyissue, art in the Midwest, and of course balls. Below, our discussion via email.

What was your first reaction after reading Johnson's New York Times review? 

I was in D.C. at the time doing a visiting artist gig at American University. I remember that I could not contain outbursts of laughter as I read it to my husband over the phone. Honestly I was most disappointed in Johnson's opinion being culled from a distorted narrative of me, instead of it being based on the activity of scrutinizing and assessing the artwork in the exhibition. His review was built solely on the ironic, didactic video made by the artist David Robbins that functioned as a 'send-up' of 'identity narratives' rampant in the contemporary art world.

Why a soccer ball and not a more weave-oriented goal net or soccer gloves?

The soccer ball is much more iconic, and a more perfect geometry.

What do you plan to do with your soccer ball?

It will go on the shelf in the garage with the rest of our sports equipment.

You've used the gingham pattern for two decades. It takes various incarnations, the most recent of which is The Thing Quarterly issue. What draws you to this pattern?

Gingham is a simple weave. It is color and geometry that functions as a spectacular social cliché. Included in a forthcoming artist book published by Rocket Gallery in London are two essays by scholars Lottie Hoare and Laura Perry who examine the textile's history, first as an industrially produced material developed in the Dutch colonies of Indonesia, and today as an American brand of nostalgia.

Your work contains references to domesticity, suburbia, and boredom, which Johnson distorts in his review. How do you explore these themes in your art?

Repetition.

Your response to Johnson's article (on the surface) appears dually masculine and feminine. Is this intentional? Does the ball have feminist undertones?

The ball is a result of a fictional "identity narrative" that certainly foregrounds woman's work. But I would go further to say that the greater feminist position is based in the freedom to call out Johnson's lazy criticism with an iconic object and a sense of humor.

You're one of the pillars of the Midwestern art community. What is unique about the art scene in the area, and how is it changing?

The vertical shadows cast by cultural centers don't reach the American interior. Plus, do you know how much studio space you can get in Milwaukee for $300? The Midwest offers an abundance of space, time, and resources ideal for dedicated work. Even though, to be perfectly honest, it is often more difficult to be an artist living in the Midwest because it is up to individual artist to develop and nurture the criteria for how work succeeds. Yet there is great vision and ingenuity here that can only evolve from a perennial lack of commercial and institutional distraction.

***

Michelle Grabner's The Thing Quarterly Issue 27 is available, in an edition of 1000, for $65. Please go to: http://www.thethingquarterly.com/shop.html

To see images please go to:  http://flavorpill.com/nyc/article/art/michelle-grabner-on-soccer-balls-art-in-the-american-interior

David Jien - Artspace
Sept 19, 2015

Artist to Watch

8 Rising Stars to Watch at EXPO CHICAGO

By Andrew M. Goldstein

Sept. 19, 2015

. . . Another Art Center graduate who came to his dealer's attention through the artist grapevine is David Jien, who joined after his best friend Devin Troy Strother told Richard Heller that he was someone he needed to snap up. As a test, he brought in two of Jien's larger drawings; they sold three days later. Looking at his work, you can see why. A former graffiti artist who decided to change course after doing a little jail time for his art, Jien uses a magnifying glass and colored pencils to make incredibly intricate drawings that seem to combine comics with Persian miniatures and Medieval illuminations, and which all together build a broad master narrative about a world of creatures locked in a battle of good versus evil. (If you look closely, you might see that he occasionally works his old tag, Lyfer, into the compositions.) At the fair, Heller featured several drawings including this small rendering of the artist in his studio (priced at $4,500) that seems especially suited for hours of close looking.

All Night Wizards, 2015 / Color pencil and graphite on paper / 8.5 x 11 inches / Sold

Read the complete article here:  http://www.artspace.com/magazine/interviews_features/artist_to_watch/artists-to-watch-at-expo-chicago-2015-53122

Corey Arnold | LECTURE
Sept 10, 2015

ANNENBERG SPACE FOR PHOTOGRAPHY

COREY ARNOLD

Fish-Work
September 10, 2015

Corey Arnold works as a photographer and seasonal commercial fisherman in Alaska. Since 2002, he has been exploring and documenting the world's fisheries, an ongoing project entitled "Fish-Work." His photographs have been published in National Geographic, Harpers, Outside, The New Yorker, The New York Times LENS, Time and The Paris Review, among others. Arnold has published two books of photography, Fish-Work: The Bering Seaand Fishing with My Dad.

Corey discusses his experience working as a commercial fisherman in Alaska while simultaneously documenting his life at sea.

To watch Corey's lecture please go to: http://annenbergphotospace.org/video/corey-arnold-fish-work

David Jien | JUXTAPOZ ART & CULTURE MAGAZINE
Sept 1, 2015

DAVID JIEN: WHO RIDING WITH A LIZARD MAN

JUXTAPOZ

Somewhere in an underworld, the Who riders battle the Lizard overlords, and David Jien is the grand puppeteer pulling the strings. Articulating consciousness and ruminations through visual imagery is the foundation of his storytelling language. Asking an artist to describe their craft can be a difficult quest, as the message is rooted not in words but in their creations. Regardless, I held a dagger to David Jien's throat and made him talk, threatening him with lizard attacks and snake chokeholds. This unstoppable lizard man from another dimension just hugged and kissed the reptiles, but managed to divulge a few secrets to avoid my wrath. —Kristin Farr 

To read the interview please go to: http://www.juxtapoz.com/current/david-jien-who-riding-with-a-lizard-man

Paco Pomet at Dismaland!
August 22, 2015 - September 27, 2015

WORKS BY PACO POMET AT DISMALAND BEMUSEMENT PARKAUGUST 22nd - SEPTEMBER 27th, 2015

Richard Heller Gallery artist Paco Pomet is one of 58 artists whose works were chosen by Banksy to appear at the Dismaland Bemusement Park exhibition in the United Kingdom. See trailer here: http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/video/2015/aug/27/dismaland-watch-trailer-banksy-bemusement-park-weston-super-mare-video

According to TheGuardian.com:

"Model motorised boats crammed with migrants, paparazzi photographing a dead Cinderella, and a pocket money loans kiosk offering cash to kids at an interest rate of 5,000% – these are just some of the installations in Banksy's new art show, Dismaland bemusement park, which opens on Weston-super-Mare seafront on Thursday."

Pomet's next solo show will be at the Richard Heller Gallery in early 2016. Please contact the gallery for available works and to be put on the mailing list for next year's opening.

CHARLIE ROBERTS | IT'S NICE THAT
January 9, 2016 - February 13, 2016

IT'S NICE THAT

A dreamy love letter to young adulthood by painter Charlie Roberts

Words by Maisie Skidmore, Tuesday 28 July 2015

Artist Charlie Roberts is based in Oslo, but the energy and dynamism of his work belies the tranquility that I can't help but associate with Norway's serene landscapes. His past work dealt almost obsessively with collecting remnants of pop culture and laying them out in orderly lines to be documented, but more recently Charlie has shifted towards cool canvases depicting adolescents lazing about, smoking joints on car bonnets, wrapping their long arms around their friends and watching the world go by. It's a relaxed portrait of young adulthood – all seductive almond eyes, tangled limbs, Nike sportswear and ripped jeans, and it feels like a sweet love letter to this universal but transitory time.

To see the images accompanying this piece please go to: http://www.itsnicethat.com/articles/charlie-roberts

Devin Troy Strother Interview in Artspace
Jul 18, 2015

Artspace

INSIDER ACCESS TO THE WORLD'S BEST ART

Q&A

Devin Troy Strother on Why Michael Jordan and Gerhard Richter Belong in the Same Conversation

By Noelle Bodick
July 18, 2014

What does the song "Hey Soul Sister," Matisse, NBA players, National Geographic spreads, disco, baby daddies, and the candy piles of Felix Gonzales-Torres have in common? They are all flotsam from the cultural tides that Devin Troy Strother, a self-described product of the 1990s TV generation, nets in his intricate and often provocative collaged paintings. Into this already potent—and downright hilarious—satirical farrago, the 28‑year-old California-born and Brooklyn-based artist also adds his signature characters—impish, jet-black figures with the exaggerated facial expressions of minstrelsy.

Strother talked with Artspace about injecting humor into the buttoned-up art world, and why he thinks Michael Jordan and Gerhard Richter belong in the same conversation. 

To read the complete interview please go to:http://www.artspace.com/magazine/interviews_features/qa/qa-devin-troy-strother-52366

VIDEO: The World Through the lens of Corey Arnold
Jul 13, 2015

ALASKA DISPATCH NEWS

Tara Young

July 13, 2015

Photographer and commercial fisherman Corey Arnold has made it his life's work to document fishing culture. From his years crabbing on the Bering Sea to life at an abandoned cannery in Graveyard Point in Bristol Bay, Arnold focuses on the playful and the often surreal and extreme scenarios commercial fishermen find themselves in.

Giant waves, predatory birds, mounds of rope and bloody fish make for pictures Arnold thinks of as "curiosities." 

"You don't always know what going on, or there's something a little off, strange or something mysterious," says Arnold. "I think that's my goal when I'm taking photos... to create something that the viewer wants to know more about what's going on. The whole story's not totally there."

To watch the video please go to:  https://www.adn.com/video/video-world-through-lens-photographer-corey-arnold

Corey Arnold - Alaska Dispatch News
Jul 11, 2015
ALASKA DISPATCH NEWS
Tara YoungSuzanna Caldwell July 11, 2015_______________________________________

KVICHAK BAY -- Last summer, after all the other fishermen had gone home at the end of the Bristol Bay salmon season, Corey Arnold stuck around Graveyard Point. A photographer and commercial fisherman, Arnold described the scene at the old cannery as eerie and empty. When the people left, grizzly bears showed up, a sure sign that it was time for Arnold to leave.

To read the article and watch the video please go to: http://www.adn.com/article/20150711/summer-graveyard-point

IT'S NICE THAT: David Jien Sculptures
Jul 10, 2015

David Jien: Sculptures (detail)

Work / Art

Funny, weird head sculptures by LA artist David Jien

Published by Maisie Skidmore, Friday 10 July 2015

As an artist (in this case, David Jien) what do you do when you've created a body of work (in this case Exodus) so brilliantly executed and far flung in its mythical references and bizarre abstractions that you don't really know what to make next?

For LA-based artist David the answer lies in a series of funny sculptures, which push character design off the page and into the 3D realm. Some of them resemble mosaic eggs with faces on, sobbing angry white tears onto a downturned mouth. Others look more like a pale butternut squash might do after one too returning to its desk after many shandies of a Friday lunchtime. Beautifully crafted from ceramics and mirrored tiles, the series looks exactly like what we'd imagined David's sorcerers and dog-people might do given a life of their own outside of this fantastical drawings.

To see more images please go to: http://www.itsnicethat.com/articles/david-jien-1?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=intsocial

Artillery Magazine Pick of the Week: Joakim Ojanen
Jul 7, 2015

ARTILLERY MAGAZINE - PICK OF THE WEEK:

JOAKIM OJANENRichard Heller Galleryby Eve Wood ·July 7, 2016

Joakim Ojanen’s playfully enigmatic ceramic sculptures are strangely endearing. Throughout the exhibition, the artist has set up a series of intimate vignettes using small-scale ceramic figures of people with bald heads and duckbill faces engaged in the various and often mundane activities of living. More importantly though, Ojanen’s figures appear alienated and lovelorn, part of a larger community, yet unable to fit in completely. This theme is certainly pertinent given all the tragedy that is happening in the world today. One wonders if these forlorn and confused little sculptures might know more about us than they let on.

Richard Heller Gallery2525 Michigan Ave. #B-5ASanta Monica, CA 90404Show runs thru July 30, 2016

INTERVIEW: Brendan Monroe | Long Beach Post
Jun 25, 2015

POW! WOW! Q&A SESSIONS

Brendan Monroe on Motion and Working Quickly

byASIA MORRIS

JUNE 25 2015 16:22

in ARTS & CULTURE

Photos by Asia Morris

In celebration of all things POW! WOW! Long Beach, from the outdoor muralists—who began transforming blank walls throughout the city earlier this week—to the artists currently installing their work inside the Long Beach Museum of Art's (LBMA) upcoming exhibit Vitality and Verve: Transforming the Urban Landscape, the Post reached out to several of these world-class creatives who have been working to change and inspire the landscape of Long Beach's art scene as a whole, indoors and out.

Today we feature Brendan Monroe, a Southern California-raised contemporary artist who now resides in Oakland. His work is incredibly visceral and his anonymous characters often seem to hold an introverted silence riddled with a deeper meaning the viewer must find for himself.

Monroe completed his installation at the LBMA, as of last week. Visitors can see the artist's self-described "little walk-in closet" at the museum beginning this Friday, a room of wavering lines that seem to wrap themselves around you, to make up a dreamlike, illusory enclosure surely each visitor will experience differently.

To read the interview and see more images please go to: http://lbpost.com/life/arts-culture/2000006443-brendan-monroe

REVIEW: DAVID JIEN | LOS ANGELES TIMES
Apr 19, 2015

David Pagel

Art review: David Jien serves notice with 'Exodus' at Richard Heller Gallery

Ancient mythology and contemporary gaming culture commingle in David Jien's colored pencil drawings and tabletop sculptures at Richard Heller Gallery. Titled "Exodus," like the nearly 8-foot-long drawing that took Jien two years to finish and anchors his second solo show, the two-gallery exhibition is a double-barrel blast.

It confirms that the young L.A. artist is a force to be reckoned with. It also reveals that his talents as a draftsman, which are dazzling, are the tip of the iceberg. Beneath the brilliance of Jien's virtuosity with a pencil lies a world suffused with goofy humor, head-scratching nuttiness, unexpected empathy and, strangest of all, serenity.

There's plenty to see before you get to such old-fashioned experiences, and Jien does not begrudge any pleasure any visitor may take from his impeccably rendered pictures, many of which depict action-packed dramas that put comic book movies to shame.

Most of Jien's works are not much bigger than illuminated manuscripts drawn by monks and holy men all over the globe, before the printing press was invented. Persian miniatures also come to mind.

The cast of characters that climbs mountains, vanquishes foes and embarks on Odysseus-style quests includes artists, aristocrats, backpackers, samurai, magicians, demons, robots, Humpty Dumpty-style eggheads, cobra-hooded acolytes, cat-headed pharaohs, wide-eyed innocents, gigantic mallards, reptilian monsters, hermit crabs and birds astride horses, which are fantastic renditions of the real thing.

The delicacy of Jien's lines and the elegance of his compositions make his phantasmagorical pictures seem sensible — not totally believable but certainly not freakish, exotic or out of touch with reality. The way he collages bits of holographic film and patches of glitter into his images makes them all the more magical. That's where the wisdom — and serenity — come in.

The innocence of children's book illustrations is even more boldly embraced in Jien's sculptures, each of which is about the size of a cookie jar. His 10 handcrafted icons — or supersized chess pieces — are 3-D mosaics whose DNA seems to shares strands with Hello Kitty, Pac-Man and B-movie versions of the monumental heads on Eastern Island.

The bright colors, pixel-style compositions and general silliness of Jien's sculptures do not detract from their sense of composure. In fact, their cuteness adds to the uncanny calm they exude. It's a welcome respite from the free-floating anger of adolescence, which seems to have made its way into every corner of modern life.

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Richard Heller Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 453-9191, through May 2. Closed Sundays and Mondays.www.richardhellergallery.com

David Jien - It's Nice That
Apr 8, 2015

Work / Exhibition

Superbly surreal new show from narrative wizard David Jien

Published by James Cartwright, Wednesday 08 April 2015

"The serpent no longer slumbers! He is awoken! Who shall deliver us from this affliction? Deep corruption has befallen our lands. Lo, Formosa has fallen, Shakran and his black words have immersed deep within our peoples. We have forgotten our ways and are divided, father against son, mother against daughter. The reptilian plague promises pleasure and power. We have lost many kin to its deception, they now fill the ranks of Shakran's saurian swarm. Those fortunate enough to elude the intoxicating clutch have found refuge under a different regime. Pilgrims have flocked together from all corners of the land in search of a new Formosa, Exodus dawns."

This is the preamble to David Jien's latest show, Exodus, that's currently running at Richard Heller Gallery in Santa Monica, California; the latest addition to David's ongoing mystic saga that attempts to make sense of the real world through bizarre, beautiful fantasies.

His pencil-drawn narratives are primitive in their origins, focussing on battles between good and evil, darkness and light and the fallout from an ideological war. But his protagonists are lizard-men and purple eggs, giant ducks and badgers in hats, navigating their way through an anachronistic world. Go and see them!

David Jien: Exodus runs until 2 May at Richard Heller Gallery.

To see images in this article please go to: http://www.itsnicethat.com/articles/david-jien-exodus

REVIEW: Art in America - Devin Troy Strother
Apr 3, 2015

Art in America

REVIEWS APR. 03, 2015

Devin Troy Strother

NEW YORK,

at Marlborough Chelsea

by Austin Considine

Are African-American fine artists today free from pressures to perform in specifically (but "acceptably") "black" ways, as determined by a mostly white audience? According to the critique implicit in Devin Troy Strother's impressive exhibition of new paintings and sculptures (all 2014), the answer is no. The work isn't Strother's most rigorous, but it is his boldest: "I'll give you your performance," it seems to shout, "but it won't be comfortable."

Titled "Space Jam," the exhibition partly took its name from the 1996 film starring Michael Jordan in which the basketball legend and an animated Looney Tunes cast compete to avoid enslavement by an alien race. Miniature, cartoonlike painted cutouts of Jordan appear on many of the paintings' surfaces, usually stuck to a colorful, straight-from-the-tube smear that trails him like he's a slam-dunking comet. For other paintings, Strother enlarges images of Jordan from what were probably basketball cards or fanboy posters and uses them as backgrounds for his Jordan cutouts and acrylics.

The young Los Angeles-based artist's new paintings are larger, brighter and filled with more art historical references than his previous works. I got a Joan Miro all over my brand new holograms offers Miró-like shapes atop a panel of holographic mylar, the latter a nod to the hologram basketball cards that were popular in the '90s. Devin Troy Strother x Rob Pruitt x Cory Arcangel x Walead Beshty x A Sad Face x 3 Michael Jordans is a color gradient slathered with impasto acrylic that crudely resembles eyes and a frowning mouth, bedecked with three Jordan cutouts. 

Strother's work usually deals with themes of stereotyping and cultural coding—specifically regarding the language and imagery of African-American culture. Despite the obvious affection Strother has for '90s basketball aesthetics, his critique outstrips any nostalgic underpinnings: it's no small irony that Jordan, one of the most famous men on earth, was performing for his freedom in Space Jam, and Strother's work has always underscored the art world's oppressive demand that black artists, like athletes, perform in specifically "black" ways to earn legitimacy. By co-opting such caricatures and throwing them back at his audience, Strother forces viewers to acknowledge their complicity. 

But "Space Jam" isn't just a referential conceit; it's also a description. As press material explains, the title puns on Strother's need to jam (or work quickly) to fill Marlborough Chelsea's cavernous gallery space with new work. 

Perhaps out of haste, Strother sometimes jams too many references into his work too haphazardly. Five 9-foot-tall, glossy black monoliths stood around one room whose floor was painted like a basketball court. Press material mentions that these pieces reference both basketball players and the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. They were also intended as pedestals; upon them rested cast-bronze sculptures, including several of deflated basketballs. But so many metaphors get muddled. (Do we put our heroes on pedestals, or are they the pedestals? The reference to 2001, an otherwise unrelated space movie, clouds things further.) On their own, the basketballs are perfect. How many children have had the air let out of their golden, inflated hoop dreams? 

Much of the writing about Strother's work seems fixated on his titles, which is as avoidable as it is unfortunate; such criticism easily becomes an act of merely taking inventory. (He cites Richter, but where's Tony Smith?) That's largely Strother's own fault: they're his titles, and all that name-checking, however humorous, invites that kind of lazy scrutiny. But the art objects offer plenty of rich material for deeper aesthetic and sociocultural analysis. Criticism will almost always take the easy route if you point the way.

VIDEO | Dustin Yellin at VOLTA NY 2015
Apr 3, 2015

GalleryLOG's video interview with artist Dustin Yellin.

Dustin Yellin is represented by Richard Heller Gallery (Los Angeles, booth B1) at VOLTA NY 2015.

To watch the video please go to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBDQrA-3g9Y

Dustin Yellin - The Huffington Post
Jan 23, 2015

Brooklyn-Based Artist Dustin Yellin Takes Over The New York City Ballet

The Huffington Post | By Katherine Brooks

What better way to really dig into the post-holidays spirit than a trip to the ballet? This time of year, there are less sugar plum fairies and mouse kings hanging around New York City's Lincoln Center, and more multi-dimensional human forms encapsulated in suspended animation.

To be fair, the "Psychogeographies" -- the 3,000-pound sculptures that indeed resemble human forms suspended in glass encasements -- are only on view until March 1, 2015. They are the work of Brooklyn-based artist Dustin Yellin, the founder of Red Hook's Pioneer Works, who specializes in human-size, three-dimensional collages depicting fantastical and sometimes sinister scenes. For the NYCB, he's crafted 15 of his large-scale pieces depicting figures that seem to be dancing throughout the David H. Koch Theater, confined of course by translucent material on all sides.

The sculptures are part of the NYCB's Art Series, which aims to produce annual collaborations between contemporary visual artists and the ballet. Before Yellin, street artists FAILE and JR debuted their own projects in Lincoln Center. And like years past, Yellin's residency of sorts involves three special ballet performances, which will take place on Thursday, February 12 (All Balanchine -- Serenade, Agon, and Symphony in C); Thursday, February 19 (Peter Martins' Hallelujah Junction, Christopher Wheeldon's A Place for Us, and Jerome Robbins' Interplay and Glass Pieces); and Friday, February 27 (Alexei Ratmansky's Pictures at an Exhibition, a new work by NYCB resident choreographer Justin Peck, and Christopher Wheeldon's Mercurial Manoeuvres).

Tickets for these performances are just $29, and audience members each receive a special limited-edition takeaway created by Yellin.

To see images from this exhibition please go to: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/01/23/brooklynbased-artist-dust_n_6527300.html

Video: Devin Troy Strother
Jan 21, 2015

BLOUINARTINFO

ARTICLE

VIDEO: Devin Troy Strother's Riff on "Space

Jam" at Marlborough Chelsea

BY SCOTT INDRISEK | JANUARY 21, 2015

ArtInfo's Scott Indrisek in conversation with artist, Devin Troy Strother at his show "Space Jam" at Marlborough Chelsea in New York City.

To watch the video please go to: http://www.blouinartinfo.com/news/story/1073752/video-devin-troy-strothers-riff-on-space-jam-at-marlborough

COMPLEX Interview - Devin Troy Strother
Jan 15, 2015

COMPLEX

Jumpman: Artist Devin Troy Strother Takes Off

Re-examining the legend of Michael Jordan in Strother's "Space Jam" exhibition.

___________________________________________________________________________________________________________

BY CEDAR PASORIManaging Editor at Complex Media covering art and styleJanuary 15, 2015

Devin Troy Strother laughs excitedly as he rushes over to a rolled up carpet in the middle of the prestigious Marlborough Chelsea gallery. "I've been WAITING for this!" he exclaims with a smile, ripping off the tape and rolling out a purple floor covered with stars and planets. After a quick tour, where Strother's so ecstatic that he can barely catch his breath, it's clear that he's made the gallery his universe in more ways than one. Juxtaposing outer space with his childhood hero, Michael Jordan, Devin Troy Strother has expanded his art practice by visualizing Jordan's legacy as beyond human—as a brand. Enter "Space Jam," his new exhibition.

To read the complete interview please go to: http://www.complex.com/style/2015/01/devin-troy-strother

Interview with Devin Troy Strother - VICE
Jan 12, 2015

Artist Devin Troy Strother 

Doesn't Want to Talk About

Being Black

January 12, 2015

by Zach Sokol

Artist Devin Troy Strother is on his way to becoming an art world MVP, though his own expectations are even higher: Michael Jordan status. "He's what I'm trying to reach with my work," Strother told me over a 12-pack of Miller High Life while we sat amidst pre-installed work for his new solo show, Space Jam, exhibiting at Marlborough Gallery's Chelsea location through February 14. "Jordan has surpassed identity and blackness. He's not 'the best black athlete,' he's the best athlete—this supreme entity."

While the 28-year-old Strother has achieved a level of success most artists never reach—multiple solo shows, critical acclaim, and even purchase inquiries from Kanye West—the over-the-top titles of his work and the suggestion from critics that he's in the lineage of black artists like Kara Walker often become the focal points of his creative output, and his own ideas get marginalized.

To be fair, Strother often uses black cut-outs with a minstrel-ish vibe like Walker, and past works include long, double-take-inducing names like "'My Momma's House Is So Contemporary, So Abstract That Shit Look Like a Morandi Tho,' said Keniecia to Shaniecia. 'This is my Momma's House When It Was Black.'" But he doesn't want to be known as a "black artist," and he sometimes wonders if certain buyers are swooping up his paintings just for the titles, even when they won't say their names out loud, as many of them include the word "nigga."

With his new exhibition, though, he's confronting these issues full-on by being as blatant as possible about identity issues and artistic comparisons. The floor of the gallery has been converted into a basketball court peppered with several giant, black marble monoliths. The monoliths are the most salient objects in the room, and could be viewed as black players on a court, but also black men and their changing status within the art world. Status issues also come into play with holographic canvases that resemble sought-after basketball cards and caps with iridescent stickers, as well as images of Jordan himself, trailed by streaks of color as if he's bursting through the light spectrum, or has the untouchable "on-fire" power from basketball video games like NBA Jam. As for the art-world comparisons, Space Jam includes titles like "Devin Troy Strother x Rob Pruitt x Cory Arcangel x Walead Beshty x A Sad Face x 0 Michael Jordans" (2014). The "Sad Face" may as well be a winking emoji.

Over the course of a night, Strother spoke with me about how racial identity is inherent in his work even when he doesn't want it to be, his biting (and hilarious) artwork titles, and why even KKK members love Michael Jordan.

To read the complete article please go to the following link: http://www.vice.com/read/artist-devin-troy-strother-doesnt-want-to-talk-about-being-black-111

REVIEW: DEVIN TROY STROTHER | BLOUINARTINFO
Jan 12, 2015

BLOUINARTINFO

5 Must-See Gallery Shows in New York:
Devin Troy Strother, Lucy Kim, and More

BY SCOTT INDRISEK | JANUARY 12, 2015

Devin Troy Strother at Marlborough Chelsea, through February 14 (545 West 25th Street)

At first glance, a sprawling art exhibition themed around the Michael Jordan-starring 1996 film "Space Jam" might sound like a joke, or worse. But Strother's spin on the source material is a comically charged, high-impact slam dunk (that concludes the basketball-related puns in this blurb), with canvases that willfully reference his contemporaries (Rob Pruitt, Cory Arcangel) and feature dozens of mini-Jordan figures, lovingly cut from paper, scattered across fields of color and thick gobs of paint. There are abstract works made from plastic sports-pennant flags; tall black monochromatic sculptures festooned with bronze sculptures of Styrofoam cups and deflated basketballs; and enlarged print-on-canvas images culled from Jordan collector cards. The entire back gallery's floor has been replaced with a faux b-ball court. The catch? Strother turns out to be not much of a sports fan himself, so "Space Jam" is less jock-worship than an excuse to riff on the iconography and gestural energy of the game.

To read the complete article and see images please go to: http://www.blouinartinfo.com/news/story/1072159/5-must-see-gallery-shows-in-new-york-devin-troy-strother-lucy

NYCB Art Series Presents: Dustin Yellin‬
Jan 12, 2015

Brooklyn-based artist Dustin Yellin brings a collection of his glass sculptures from the ongoing Psychogeographies series to New York City Ballet for the third presentation of Art Series, which welcomes contemporary artists to our Lincoln Center home.

To watch the video please go to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tVf2IXvsQ4

Artforum - Devin Troy Strother
January 10, 2015 - Feb 14, 2015
ARTFORUM
Devin Troy Strother
MARLBOROROUGH | CHELSEA
545 West 25th Street
January 10, 2015-February 14, 2015

Given the current acme of self-referencing Buzzfeed culture—the phrase 90s nostalgia is a nearly ubiquitous descriptor for the millennials' tics—Devin Troy Strother's new works are a timely celebration of the cannibalizing nature of this generation's zeitgeist. Here, Strother gives the 1990s Warner Bros. flick Space Jam top billing as an aesthetic jumping-off point for his lively installations, paving two of three rooms with basketball-court-inspired flooring and the third with loopy, space-themed carpet. Though three life-size cartoon-cutout Knicks introduce the show, Michael Jordan is center stage. Small cutouts of cartoon Jordan animate Strother's lush paintings, which cheekily direct visual (and titular) references to Lynda Benglis, Cory Arcangel, and Rob Pruitt, among others. Five massive, shellacked black boxes stand Stonehenge-like around a basketball court hung with marble-and-bronze baskets; individually named for iconic b-ball stars (Who's that big nigga in the room over there [TERRANCE];Who's that big nigga in the room over there [SHAQUILLE], both 2014), each structure is a McCracken-like homage to Kubrick's monolith in that other space-themed movie.

Strother's titles—a bronzed deflated basketball is called "fly like an eagle" (LeBronze), 2014; tactile paintings composed of pennants have names such as "we won nigga we won" (nigga, we never even scored), 2014—act as self-aware punch lines for each work, commenting not only on art history but basketball culture and its place in racial identity in America. With imagery that layers his stylistic and intellectual tribute to artists such as Kara Walker and Kerry James Marshall over the glossy hologram aesthetic of the NBA, Strother boldly merges the inquisitive exploration of fine art with the bright-lights appeal of popular culture, flattening a hierarchy of cultural stigma. — Anne Prentnieks

Devin Troy Strother Interview, The Huffington Post
Jan 9, 2015

'Space Jam' -- The Art Exhibition -- Is A '90s Sports Fan's Dream Come True

Note: The following interview contains explicit language that some readers might find offensive.

If you're not a big sports fan, or consider art more your speed, you've likely been in the position of having to watch a game -- be it on television or at the local high school -- without really caring which team takes home the trophy. You may have, however, become oddly fixated on the aesthetics of it all, the way the court, when seen from afar, feels like a colorful, geometric plane of slowly shifting parts. 

That's sort of what happened with artist Devin Strother. "I've been a second, third party fan of basketball for a while," he explained to The Huffington Post. "My dad and my brother were very avid fans and my best friends were really into it. I've grown up around it and had to go to people's houses and watch games. I've always watched the game from this other point of view. I wasn't really watching the game I was more watching all the things that go around basketball, more so than the game. And the courts, they're all so different, from college to high school to the pros. To me, they're like a piece in themselves."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/01/09/devin-strother_n_6439464.html

Devin Troy Strother - New York Times Magazine
Jan 8, 2015

The Artist Devin Troy Strother Turns to Michael Jordan — and Joan Miró

When the gallery Marlborough Chelsea called the Los Angeles-based artist Devin Troy Strother in September to ask whether he'd like to do a show with them this winter, he initially misunderstood the request: he thought they were asking him to have new work ready by December 2015. When he called back, he learned he had only a few months to conceive of an entire exhibition. For inspiration, he turned to the movie that was still queued up on his computer: the 1996 Michael Jordan vehicle "Space Jam." The play on words proved too good to resist. "My initial thought was the idea of 'Space Jam' — I had to fill this huge space in a short amount of time and work very quickly," Strother says.

It so happened that the movie's subject dovetailed with a longstanding artistic interest of Strother's: the role of sports culture, and particularly of the NBA, in American life. "The work is talking about identity and talking about artists' practices, but I'm facilitating all of that through basketball and the movie 'Space Jam,'" he says. The show finds Strother bridging basketball iconography — images of Jordan and others; a deflated basketball and Styrofoam stadium cups cast in bronze; reflective material Strother says is intended to evoke the holographic tags on NBA-affiliated clothing and caps — with witty twists on the signature methods of other artists. In the painting "I got a Joan Miro all over my brand new holograms," Strother applies spare, Miró-esque swoops of primary color to a holographic background. The practices of Robert Motherwell, Clyfford Still, Barnett Newman and Lydia Benglis get the same treatment; their titles nod to the preciousness with which sneakerheads treat their treasures.

http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/01/08/devin-troy-strother-space-jam/?_r=0

Devin Troy Strother - ARTNEWS
Jan 7, 2015

DEVIN TROY STROTHER WILL TRANSFORM MARLBOROUGH CHELSEA INTO A BASKETBALL COURT THIS SATURDAY

On Saturday Marlborough Chelsea will open "Space Jam," a show of new work by Devin Troy Strother that includes painting, sculpture, and a pretty ambitious basketball court installation.

"I'm not really a big basketball fan at all," Strother said over the phone. "I'm not someone who goes to Knicks games or Lakers games or anything like that. It's more about the weird aesthetics they appropriate to present graphics to you, and the way the courts look. In aerial views they look like geometric pantings."

The show's title references a few things—the 1996 Michael Jordan movie, which Strother watched recently with one of his nephews, but also to the idea of jamming together various influences (one painting's title: Devin Troy Strother x Rob Pruitt x Cory Arcangel x Walead Beshty x A Sad Face x 9 Michael Jordans). Outer space is a theme of the show, too, since a 2001: A Space Odyssey-esque monolith dominates his basketball court. (Stanley Kubrick's dimensions for the monolith, Strother noted, were 9 feet by 4 feet by 1 foot, not so far from a basketball player's.)

http://www.artnews.com/2015/01/07/devin-troy-strother-will-transform-marlborough-chelsea-into-a-basketball-court-this-saturday/

UNTITLED MIAMI 2014
Dec 3, 2014

BLOUINARTINFO

VISUAL ARTS / FAIRS / ARTICLE

Afros, Abstraction, and Photographic Experimentation at Untitled

BY SCOTT INDRISEK | DECEMBER 03, 2014

MIAMI BEACH — Untitled pitches its tent on the South Beach sand from December 3 through 7, bringing a roster of galleries that, while admittedly a bit heavy on New York representation, also includes venues from Helsinki, Mexico City, Bogota, and beyond. Despite lacking the flash and big-dollar bluster of Art Basel Miami Beach — one of Untitled's advertising partners during Tuesday morning's preview hours was Sabra hummus, which is adorable — sales seemed to be fairly brisk following the opening night vernissage on December 2. (Johannes Vogt Gallery, for instance, sold out a solo booth of playfully refined oilstick-on-satin paintings by Larissa Lockshin.)

The expanded field of photography is especially prevalent at this year's fair. That includes one of the standout booths: Kansas's solo presentation of sculptural-photographic works by Ethan Greenbaum capturing the common markings and surfaces of the urban environment. (They're direct-to-substrate prints on vacuum-formed PETG, if you want to get technical about it.) Over at the booth of Chicago's Threewalls, Windy City artist (and 2014 Whitney Biennial participant) Carol Jackson has a series of sculptures that incorporate degraded surveillance images in assemblages of paper mache and epoxy. They jut out from the wall like lumpy, bodily appendages, their surfaces ornately inscribed, using leatherworking tools, with imagery drawn from 19th-century sheet music, among other sources. Dittrich & Schlechtriem of Berlin have also brought slightly skewed photography to the fair, from Asger Carlsen's grotesque, anatomical Photoshop monstrosities to Julian Charriere's "Future Fossil Spaces," 2014, an arrangement of abstract photos whose framing and hanging is as important as its content.

London's Ronchini Gallery has one of Untitled's most poised, cohesive presentations: a series of quasi-paintings by Rebecca Ward, many of which treat canvas like a textile meant to be plucked apart and deconstructed. Some of the delicate, tactile works are as flimsy and transparent as gauze, while others lay thick lines of paint into a bed of white wool; a minimalist wood sculpture jutting from one of the booth's walls adds a dissonant note while reflecting on the basic geometries of the paintings.

Other highlights include Denny Gallery, with crumpled graphite-on-paper and graphite-on-Mylar works by Lauren Seiden that trick the eye into thinking they might be rock or tortured metal. Chicago's Andrew Rafacz Gallery has a delightful series of bite-sized Wendy Whites — square paintings bordered with gold-mirrored MDF — paired nicely with acrylic-on-handwoven-textile works by Samantha Bittman, their lines lovably imperfect and slightly askew. East Hampton gallery Halsey McKay has texturally complex abstract paintings by Steven Cox (one of the Artists to Watch in this month's issue of Modern Painters), as well as a massive painting (made using sunlight on fabric) at the fair's entrance by Chris Duncan, which recalls both the nature-based process of Sam Falls and the self-consciously hippy-dippy tie-dye vibe of Piotr Uklanski. And Los Angeles's Richard Heller Gallery has one of Untitled's most unexpected juxtapositions: works by Michelle Grabner paired with a large sculpture of an Afro-sporting woman in a glitter-dress by Devin Troy Strother, as well as two Strother paintings featuring hundreds of tiny faces floating in space. The circular bulk of the Strotherian Afro mirrors Grabner's tondos, and both artists are playing with notions of labor and hyper-repetitive markmaking.

***

To read the complete article and see more images please go to: http://www.blouinartinfo.com/news/story/1065773/afros-abstraction-and-photographic-experimentation-at

Doug Argue in the Examiner
Nov 14, 2014

Soaring 1776 feet and 104 stories into the Manhattan sky, One World Trade Center is finally completed and ready for business. It took thirteen long years and $3.9 Billion to make it here, but the point is that it's done. With the opening of One World Trade Centerjust last week, Examiner takes a look at the art that is housed in its lobby.

The Durst Organization, the building's developer, worked with the Port Authority and Edelman Arts Gallery to find the large pieces that are now hung in the entrance and throughout the building. The result is a collection of abstract art from some of the nation's coolest contemporary artists.

The entrance features a 90-foot-long mural of splashes and whisks of color created by Brooklynite José Parlá. Parlá's creation is titled "ONE: Union of the Senses" – in interviews, he's said he hopes viewers will connect his work with life and diversity.

In the front lobby hangs two medium (by comparison)-sized works by Rome Prize Winner Doug Argue. The titles of these pieces are "Randomly Placed Exact Percentages" and "Isotropic." Each is over 13 feet long.

http://www.examiner.com/article/art-at-one-world-trade-center-fills-the-void?CID=examiner_alerts_article

Amy Bennett featured in Disturbing Innocence
October 25, 2014 - Jan 31, 2015

The FLAG Art Foundation is pleased to present Disturbing Innocence, a group exhibition curated by artist Eric Fischl, on view on FLAG's 9th floor from October 25, 2014 – January 31, 2015.

Disturbing Innocence features over 50 historical and contemporary artists whose use of dolls, toys, mannequins, robots, and other surrogates forms a deep and powerfully expressive genre. The exhibition poses profound questions surrounding social constructs of youth, beauty, transformation, violence, sexuality, gender, identity, and loneliness. Inspired by Fischl's own childhood in suburban Long Island, NY, and his early career as an artist working in New York City in the 1980's, Disturbing Innocence presents a subversive and escapist world at odds with the values and pretensions of polite society.

Firelei Báez featured in Prospect New Orleans
October 25, 2014 - Jan 25, 2015

Prospect New Orleans is an International Arts Biennial event that will take place from October 25, 2014 through January 25, 2015. "Prospect.3: Notes for Now" will present the work of more than 50 artists selected by Artistic Director Franklin Sirmans, in more than 15 locations, including museums, community centers and independent sites throughout neighborhoods across New Orleans.

http://www.prospectneworleans.org

MILWAUKEE JOURNAL SENTINEL: Michelle Grabner
Oct 20, 2014

ARTS 

E-mail | Twitter | Facebook

Mary Louise Schumacher | Art City

Michelle Grabner named one of 100 most important art-world women

Jonathan Fickies

Michelle Grabner stands for a portrait before work by Dona Nelson during the 2014 Biennial on the fourth floor of the Whitney Museum of American Art on Friday, March 7, 2014 in New York City.

By Mary Louise Schumacher of the Journal Sentinel Oct. 20, 2014

When The Atlantic ran an essay a few years ago posing the old question anew — Can women really have it all? —many in Milwaukee's art community thought immediately of Wisconsin native Michelle Grabner.

That instinct has just been confirmed in a fairly official way. Grabner was just named by Artnet to be one of the 100 most important women in the art world, along with performance art superstar Marina Abramovic and power house art dealer Barbara Gladstone.

Grabner, a Wisconsin native, is the ultimate art-world insider and outsider, too. She runs an internationally respected gallery the size of a one-car garage next to her home in Oak Park, Ill. called The Suburban, and an avant-garde art space in rural Waupaca County called The Great Poor Farm Experiment near her vacation home. She writes beautiful criticsm, has been the chair of the painting and drawing department at one of the nation's more important art schools, the Art Institute of Chicago, and this year she was one of three curators for the most important survey of contemporary art in the U.S., the Whitney Biennial. As an artist, which Grabner considers her core professional activity, she enjoyed a major career survey at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Cleveland last year and currently has an important show of new work up at the James Cohan Gallery in New York.

One of the defining characteristics of Grabner's practice is that she has created her work around the things that matter most to her — motherhood, family, friendships and time to think and read. I asked her recently how she seemed to have it all. One of her secrets, she said: Waking early. The last time I talked to Grabner, she was shopping for a home in Milwaukee, a place she considers an artistic home base. It is where she finds her tribe, people such as Nicholas Frank, David Robbins and Paul Druecke, among others.

The Artnet rundown includes many women of color and women from across the age spectrum. One telling bit: There aren't as many artists as one might hope on the list (something to parse and consider another day).

VIDEO | Dustin Yellin - TED Talk
Oct 1, 2014

TED

Dustin Yellin makes mesmerizing artwork that tells complex, myth-inspired stories. How did he develop his style? In this disarming talk, he shares the journey of an artist — starting from age 8 — and his idiosyncratic way of thinking and seeing. Follow the path that leads him up to his latest major work (or two).
Dustin YellinSculptor Acclaimed for his monumental "sculptural paintings," Dustin Yellin now nurtures voices in the art community with Pioneer Works, his mammoth Brooklyn art center.

Active Link Here:https://www.ted.com/talks/dustin_yellin_a_journey_through_the_mind_of_an_artist?language=en

Devin Troy Strother interview in Artspace
Jul 18, 2014

Devin Troy Strother talks about his aesthetic influences, how the 1990's shaped his artistic practice, and what he is working on for the future in an interview by Noelle Bodick in Artspace.

Click here for a link to the full interview. http://www.artspace.com/magazine/interviews_features/qa-devin-troy-strother

Joyride
June 25, 2014 - Aug 3, 2014

Devin Troy Strother's work featured in JOYRIDE

Marlborough Broome Street is pleased to present a special exhibition of works by an international group of artists celebrating the bicycle: a visual expression of the urban cycling movement. Joyride, has been organized by Ed Spurr and Brendt Barbur, and is presented in celebration of the 14th edition of the Bicycle Film Festival. Joyride runs from June 25 through August 3, 2014

Artists in the exhibition:

Ai Weiwei / Rita Ackermann / Tim Barber / Frank Benson / Lizzi Bougatsos / Julia Chiang / Francesco Clemente / Peter Coffin / Dan Colen / Thomas Eggerer / Urs Fischer / Leo Fitzpatrick / Rainer Ganahl / Andrew Guenther / Marc Hundley / Alex Katz / KAWS / Graham Macbeth / Ari Marcopoulos / Jonathan Monk / Jason Nocito / Laura Owens / Eli Ping / Richard Prince / Tom Sachs / Aurel Schmidt / Kiki Smith / Devin Troy Strother / Spencer Sweeney / John Tremblay / B. Wurtz

Firelei Báez
April 18, 2014 - Aug 17, 2014

A Passing Glance

Jose Garcia Miami, Review

Caribbean: Crossroads of the World, From April 18 – August 17, 2014

This is the final weekend of Caribbean: Crossroads to the World at PAMM (Perez Art Museum Miami). The exhibition showcased two centuries of rarities in a variety of mediums ranging from traditional drawing and painting to contemporary installation and digital media. The exhibition, which was curated thematically, consisted of artwork made by artists who live and work in the Caribbean and artists who found themselves influenced by the Caribbean. I have visited the exhibition a handful of times and, had it not be for all the madness that the summer brings, would have honestly seen it a couple more times before it closed. Even though the exhibition had an immense amount of work, I found myself drawn to the same artwork each time.

Can I Pass? Introducing the Paper Bag to the Fan Test for the Month of December by Firelei Báez was one of the works that I could not walk away from. The mixed-media paintings combined gouache, ink, and graphite on paper and depicted silhouettes of the artist. The 30 self-portraits illustrated the daily changes made to the artists' hair through natural elements and was set up in a calendar grid. Báez, who primarily works in painting and drawing, often brings to light issues of race and gender while also referencing traditions of the Dominican Republic. In the title of the piece Báez is referring to the fan test, which declares that if a woman's hair does not flow back "naturally" when fanned, she is considered black. Báez mentions in her statement that hair is considered to be "a natural barometer" for race. Although the silhouettes differ from portrait to portrait, the gaze remains equally intense. Báez purposefully allows the eyes to be the focal point of the work. Báez powerfully stares you down while you inquisitively stare right back.

Perez Art Museum Miami
1103 Biscayne Blvd, Miami, FL 33132.
Tuesday – Sunday: 10AM – 6PM
Thursday: 10AM – 9PM

Devin Troy Strother "Recent Shit"
April 4, 2014 - May 10, 2014

Devin Troy Strother @ Bendixen Contemporary Art, Copenhagen, DK

Recent Shit:, the title of the exhibition, reflects and comments on the variety of styles and disciplines used in naming art works. The body of work doesn’t focus on any specific trends or modes of thinking, but on the relationship between a piece and its given name.

Yuko Someya

March 15, 2014 - Mar 30, 2014

Yuko Someya's work to be included in the VOCA Show at The Ueno Royal Museum where she received the excellent work award.Link to the show: http://www.ueno-mori.org/exhibitions/main/voca/2014/artworks.shtml

Dustin Yellin
February 7, 2014 - June 8, 2014

SCAD Museum of Art

Dustin Yellin: The Triptych

"The Triptych" making its museum premiere, is Yellin's largest and most complex work, a massive 12 ton, three-paneled epic, embodying his vision of the world and consciousness. For Yellin, "the universe and the mind are shadowy places seething with dark magic, seas of boundless depth and possibility, overflowing with joy and disaster." In this composition of clippings, acrylic and glass, Yellin presents a surreal spectacle.

Devin Troy Strother Review in New York Times
Dec 5, 2013

Devin Troy Strother: ‘I Just Landed in Rome’

By Ken Johnson

Marlborough Broome Street 

In Devin Troy Strother's infectiously exuberant show are three nearly identical cartoon figures of dancing black women in glittery dresses, each cut out from an 8-foot tall, 1 ½-inch thick panel and leaning against a gallery wall. One is called "look at my guuurl! Sha'riece over there getting her shine on (with that John McCracken lean)." The other two titles have the name Sha'riece changed to Sha'niece and Sha'triece. John McCrackenrefers to the sculptor whose Minimalist planks similarly lean against gallery walls. Mr. Strother thus connects high art, kitschy cartooning and street talk.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/06/arts/design/devin-troy-strother-i-just-landed-in-rome.html?_r=0

Michelle Grabner
November 1, 2013 - Feb 16, 2014

Michelle Grabner in I Work From Home at the Museum of Contemporary Art ClevelandI Work From Home

Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland
November 1, 2013 - February 16, 2014

In Michelle Grabner's first comprehensive solo museum exhibition, her studio work will be presented as part of a varied practice that also encompasses artistic collaborations, critical writing, teaching, and curating. It will feature a range of Grabner's paintings, prints, video works, and sculptures, which investigate concepts of work, labor, and the social dynamics of domestic life.

Devin Troy Strother Review in Los Angeles Times
Oct 3, 2013
By David Pagel

October 3, 2013, 4:00 p.m.

In two solo shows over the last four years, Devin Troy Strother has shown himself to be a wickedly funny master of cut-and-paste collage as well as a sly spinner of side-splitting stories about such loaded subjects as blood, money and sex — otherwise known as race, class and gender.

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/culture/la-et-cm-art-review-devin-troy-strother-richard-heller-gallery-20131001,0,7568041.story

Charlie Roberts Review in ARTFORUM
Oct 1, 2013

Charlie Roberts

BARRY SCHWABSKY

CHARLIE ROBERTS MAY BE A NATIVE OF KANSAS WHO STUDIED IN VANCOUVER AND LIVES IN OSLO, BUT HIS WORK MAKES ME THINK MORE OF LEIPZIG THAN OF ANYWHERE ELSE. MAYBE THAT'S JUST TO SAY THAT HIS ART THRIVES NOT ON HIS HERITAGE, EDUCATION, OR CONTEXT BUT ON INHERENTLY UNPREDICTABLE FACTORS OF IMAGINATION AND ENERGY.

http://artforum.com/inprint/issue=201308&id=43159

Devin Troy Strother Interview in Bullett
Sept 6, 2013

Artist Devin Troy Strother on Race, the American Experience, and 'Goosebumps'

by Zio Baritaux

In Devin Troy Strother's paintings, delicate paper figures—often black and naked—participate in lurid activities, including wild house parties, drunken fights, and rides on the backs of leopards. The paint colors are loud, and so are the titles: "Aye Guuuurl You Know You Got a White Guuuurl on Yo Back Tho" and "Shiiiiiet, Man There's One Too Many Niggas at This Party Tho." But Strother's paintings, while certainly lavish, are also insightful narratives and interpretations of the American experience. There are subtle references to pop culture and homages to artists like Joseph Beuys and Yves Klein. "I'm trying to combine different aspects of our culture and make them work together," says Strother, who splits his time between New York and LA. The artist's third solo exhibition at Richard Heller Gallery opens on September 7, and we spoke to him about art, race, the American experience, and Gucci Mane and Goosebumps, of course.

http://bullettmedia.com/article/devin-troy-strother-on-race-the-american-experience-and-goosebumps/

Devin Troy Strother Interview, The Huffington Post
Apr 3, 2013

Editor's Note: The following interview contains explicit language that some readers might find offensive.

"Sometimes I'll have dinner with the collector and well talk about the work," Devin Troy Strother says in a phone interview with The Huffington Post. "If there is 'nigga please' or 'bitch' in the title they get a little hesitant to say the titles out loud."

Picturing the straight-laced, uppity tiers of the art crowd asking for the price on "Yassmine Guuuurl Stop Staring at Yourself All Day, You Such A Vain Bitch" is a beautiful image, but there's more to the artist than his titles.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/03/devin-troy-strother-talks-high-school-beyonce-and-the-expectations-of-making-heavy-black-art-photos-interview_n_2917392.html

Yuko Someya
March 5, 2013 - Mar 25, 2013

Yuko Someya opens at Tomio Koyama Gallery, Tokyo. The Exhibition will feature new works including two large paintings of 150 X 360 cm. and 23 works on paper.

Corey Arnold in Dark Blue:The Water as Protagonist
January 16, 2013 - May 19, 2013

Haggerty Museum of Art @ Marquette University

Dark Blue: The Water as Protagonist

January 16 - May 19, 2013

Corey Arnold's work, The North Sea is featured in Dark Blue: The Water as Protagonist.

The photographers included in the exhibition Dark Blue utilize water as an active element, making pictures that are, at their core, psychological engagements. Water is often perceived as a restorative element, an essential means to health and happiness. Yet, at the same time, it is a force formidable for its potential to threaten life.

This exhibition is comprised of works from the museum's permanent collection and select loans, and includes photographs by Kael Alford, Diane Arbus, Corey Arnold, Tina Barney, Virginia Beahan and Laura McPhee, Damion Berger, Harry Callahan, Michael Childers, Gregory Crewdson, Zoe Crosher, Joe Deal, John Divola, Doug Dubois, James Fee, Francine Fleischer, Judith Fox, Adam Fuss, LeRoy Grannis, Jill Greenberg, Tim Hetherington, Nadav Kander, Tomasz Lazar, Jocelyn Lee, Joshua Lutz, Mary Ellen Mark, Richard Misrach, Andrew Moore, Joel Meyerowitz, Asako Narahashi, Martin Parr, Irina Rozovsky, Carrie Schneider, Joel Sternfeld, Juergen Teller, Guy Tillim, Carlo Van de Roer, and Bennett Wine and Nir Nadler.

Firelei Báez
November 11, 2012 - Mar 10, 2013

Firelei Báez in Fore a group exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem

Fore presents twenty-nine emerging artists of African descent who live and work across the United States. Born between 1971 and 1987, the artists in Fore work in diverse media, often blending artistic practices in new and innovative ways. While some artists create large-scale oil paintings, others draw on top of photographs, or combine sculpture and two-dimensional work. More than half of the works in Fore have never been exhibited publicly; some are site-specific and react directly to the Harlem neighborhood and its social landscape.
http://www.studiomuseum.org/index.php?q=exhibition/fore

Thrash Lab Profile: Devin Troy Strother
Nov 1, 2012

THRASH LAB

Mixed Medium Painter: Devin Troy Strother (Profiles)
Published on Nov 1, 2012

Thrash Lab "Profiles" artist Devin Troy Strother in his Los Angeles studio. Devin reveals how he develops his paintings and what makes his style so loud and so "American."

To watch the video please go to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BF5wOmC-G1M

TIME LAPSE VIDEO: David Jien
Oct 26, 2012

Art Attack // LIES Time-lapse Art by David Jien

SoulPancake
Oct 26, 2012

‪Artist David Jien tackles the theme of "LIES" in this timelapse episode of Art Attack. This painting took 30 hours to complete! 

To watch the video please go to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Y4wf79opKo

TIME LAPSE VIDEO: Devin Troy Strother
Sept 7, 2012

Art Attack // ESCAPE Timelapse Painting by Devin Troy Strothers
SoulPancakeSept. 7, 2012

Artist Devin Troy Strothers tackles the theme of "ESCAPE" in today's Art Attack!
To watch the time lapse video please go to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJz50C37YJY

Amy Bennett @ The Metropolitan Museum of Art
February 7, 2012 - Apr 15, 2012

XS - Extra Small
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY

Installation Location: Lila Acheson Wallace Wing, North Mezzanine Gallery 

More than 50 works of art of diminutive size by 30 American and European artists working in a variety of media and techniques comprise the installation XS at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. With a title borrowed from the XS size label (for 'extra small') found in women's garments, the installation includes rarely displayed works from the Museum's collection that are usually kept in storage due to their tiny size. The installation, which challenges the adage "bigger is better," is on view in the Lila Acheson Wallace Wing through April 15, 2012. 

Featured in XS are works that span the years 1890 to 2010. While many of the artists represented usually worked in a larger format, they also created versions of their landscapes, portraits, interiors, nudes and abstractions on a significantly smaller scale. The installation opens with three miniature works in watercolor by Paul Klee (1914-1917), progressing to a river landscape by Piet Mondrian in black chalk, to Marguerite (1916), an oil on wood portrait by Henri Matisse. Additional highlights of the installation include a drawing of Man Walking(1951) by Alberto Giacometti and two portraits by Pablo Picasso—one a self-portrait entitled Yo (1900), and the other a very detailed ink and wax crayon sketch, Seated Figure (1902). The installation moves into illustrated notes, including a hand-drawn dinner invitation by David Hockney, Menu for Dinner in Honor of Henry Geldzahler (1978). The small format challenges the depth of detail an artist can achieve, a challenge met by Amy Bennett with two paintings, Diagnosis (2010) and Hypochondriac(2010). To demonstrate fully the contrast in size, a small-scale version of Mao (1973) by Andy Warhol is hung just a few steps from the artist's larger-than-life version of the same subject in the adjacent gallery. 

This installation was organized by Sabine Rewald, Jacques and Natasha Gelman Curator for Modern and Contemporary Art. 

Farber Dumontier's Constructive Abandonment review
Aug 1, 2011

National Post wowed by the absurdity of CONSTRUCTIVE ABANDONMENT

Updated August 1, 2011


Every Wednesday evening, Michael Dumontier heads over to the home of his friend Neil Farber, takes a seat at the kitchen table, and spends the night painting with his fellow artist. Canvases are traded back and forth, each adding details to the work until it is complete, a process that often requires multiple sessions. Farber estimates they've collaborated on "thousands" of paintings over the years, 61 of which are collected in a recently released survey of their recent work, Constructive Abandonment.

The work featured in the book, which is published by Drawn & Quarterly, is at once horrific and hilarious: A man dubbed the "manicorn" sits contemplating the horn growing out of his forehead; an "African Fellatiating House Frog" suckles a table leg; an alligator and monkey re-enact an episode of Dragnet; a pirate sentenced to walk the plank is reassured that "nympho mermaids" await him below the surface; a suicidal dog imagines running away from his owner and leaping off a nearby bridge; and, just when things couldn't get anymore bizarre, a sword-wielding raccoon comes to the aid of a man fighting a green dinosaur.

"The beginning of the process is very loose," Dumontier says of the pair's artistic methods. "We add things to the paintings rather indiscriminately at first. But there's a point where we have to slow down and talk. If a painting is created by combining random elements, we'll talk about how to tie those elements together. We can do this by adding more, or by writing a text that gives the image context - often both."

If you are versed in the strange aesthetic of these two Winnipeggers, the paintings found in Constructive Abandonment should come as no surprise; Dumontier and Farber are two of the founding members of the Royal Art Lodge (may it rest in peace), the legendary collective that has introduced the art world to the likes of Marcel Dzama. Although the Lodge officially dissolved in 2008, Dumontier and Farber have continued to work together - an alliance that has existed for roughly 15 years.

"It's really comfortable at this point," says Farber, on the phone from his home in Winnipeg, while Dumontier chalks up the duo's success to "a lot of hours of trial and error. We've developed a way of working together, which has little to do with the way we each work on our own. For me, it's a nice break from the time I spend working by myself in the studio."

Although their work is often visually stunning, the punchlines, for lack of a better word, frequently come from text, not images. A man with a sock puppet becomes even more tragic when you read his intentions: "He would win back the children." A shadowy figure tossing a garbage bag off a boat becomes even more sinister thanks to a caption describing the bag's contents as "decapitated head, bowling ball." The image of a wizard looking down at a giant toad gains new meaning thanks to the addition of the word "irrevocable." And the painting of a man with a frog-like creature perched on his shoulder could be the start of a short story when you learn "they arrived in Europe to find that audiences were no more receptive than the ones at home."

Dumontier agrees that the captions, which come last, have become the most important part of their work.

Ryan Schneider: Hall Art Foundation, Reading, VT
Jan 1, 1900

Ryan Schneider: Hall Art Foundation, Reading, VT
Jan 1, 1900