Hole Foods

Three-Month Pop Up Restaurant

May 5th – August 5th, 2012
Opening with a private dinner on May 5th
231 2nd Avenue @ 14th Street, NYC
212 260 8015

The Hole is pleased to announce Hole Foods, an artist designed restaurant pop up for three
months this summer on 14th Street and 2nd Avenue. Joe Grillo of the collective Dearraindrop
has transformed the restaurant into a vibrant den of artworks, with a neon drip mural across
the ceiling, walls and floor, customized tables and tablecloths, painted furniture, video works,
black light bathrooms, a ceiling installation, and interactive sound sculptures. He even made a
customized chef suit and hat for the executive chef, Robert Rubba.

Instead of the traditional handful of paintings hung on a dingy wall of a coffee shop, The Hole
wanted to create a real artist café that featured the complete vision of an artist customizing all
the components of the restaurant to make a unique dining experience. Grillo (b. 1980 Virginia
Beach) has exhibited internationally with recent solo shows at Galleri Loyal in Sweden, GAD in
Norway, and has his first big New York City solo show with the Hole this coming October.

The Hole will be opening the restaurant with a private dinner Saturday May 5th with top artists,
curators and collectors featuring video by artist Matthew Stone who will also DJ the event. We
will be activating the restaurant this summer with special projects and performances, including
a Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black night with hostesses and servers in head to toe Karen
Black make up.

Holton Rower
Pour Paintings

April 28 – May 26th, 2012
Opening April 28th 7-9pm

The Hole is pleased to announce the first New York solo exhibition of pour paintings by Holton Rower. Filling all galleries at the Hole with nineteen enormous pours, Rower will present the variations in technique that produce wildly different effects. From the entrance to the gallery featuring small pours with “hats”, as the artist calls them (wood protrusions on which the paint is poured and flows down); to the medium-sized works with hats, some of which flow onto the floor; to the rear gallery where large works both with and without hats feature “exclusions” (where the artist placed obstacles that the paint was forced to flow around then removed); to Gallery Three where he shows five tectonic pours: the variety and intensity of the exhibition is assured.

Rower makes these paintings by pouring fantastic quantities of doctored paint onto plywood: however, the simplicity of this description belies the shocking and unexpected results. The paint flows slowly and determinedly over the surfaces he creates, timed to dry and spread at just the right rate, in color combinations both highly premeditated and fancifully spontaneous. The sloes of paint often fracture, vacillate, clump up, and extrude. Fissures and zigzags abound, as do waterfalls, U-turns, and smears, but always the flow triumphs.
The textures of paint, mixed on occasion with reflective elements, opalescent admixtures, and spicy sparkling polishes, vary widely and behave differently. Paint here is truly on parade.

The works have a relationship to color field painting and other formal explorations of abstract and minimal legacies—the most superficial relationship perhaps to Morris Louis’ “Pour Paintings”—but instead of seeking the autonomy of color, these works are physical, aggressive, literal and muscular. They, of course, are process-driven as the paint is given free reign to be itself, and like the heroic works of the last century do pursue the sublime; but there is nonetheless something else happening here. Rower deals not just with gravity but gravitas.

Rower’s pours come closer to the abstracting nature photos of Edward Weston than to the works of Pollock or de Kooning, painters who, even when most abstract, always left behind traces of the actions of their hands. Meanwhile, the breadth of suggestibility Rower’s pieces spans such a huge range: from the geode-type pieces to the brain scannish works, from spaceships to vertebrae to Northern Lights, lace antimacassars, ghoulish masks, surfaces of distant planets, adipose tissue, underwater mollusks, dendrites, coral, sexual bodies, Christian relics, mitochondria and Golgi complexes: it’s hard for the poetic mind not to run amok.

Rower was born in the psychedelic 60s and grew up working in his father’s construction business, where he learned about heft and weight and managing teams of people to do massive undertakings. The grandson of Alexander Calder, Rower was surrounded by a culture of art making and the influence of amazing cultural figures. He has been developing and perfecting these pours in seclusion over the past five years. Recent shows at Pace last summer, John McWhinnie in New York and forthcoming projects at Shirazu in London are just the beginning of sharing these important works with a broader audience. A catalogue will accompany this exhibition.

For inquiries about available works, please contact Kathy@theholenyc.com

Nick Mead: Paintings

April 14-21, 2012

Opening Saturday, April 14, 6-9PM

The Hole is pleased to announce a solo show of paintings by Nick Mead. In this group of new works, Mead explores a technique that blends abstraction and thickly impastoed moments of semi-figuration: his stark, tangled paintings of controlled scrawl ball up in some of the intersections and bespeckle the negative spaces in masses of paint that are then given “eyes”.  The large canvasses are rawly taupe and in the seepages of the oil into the fabric–compounded by the directionality of the black and the mountainous surfaces of the eyes–create a strange topography. Are they a schematic of a storm system, a landscape of thatch and hay; a core sample showing layers of shale, slate and hidden igneous deposits? Compounded with the art-historical evocations: the playfulness of a Klee or Miró is crossed with something uniquely digital feeling: something very contemporary about them that suggests sound frequencies, sub-atomic diagrams, thickets of vectors and confused conduits. Are they Jazz, perhaps, or Deep House? As with many works that seem both inter-cellular and inter-stellar, they seem to address the way humans make sense of the non-delineated continuity of the natural world around us.

The manner of application supports the visual effect of controlled chaos as these paintings appear expressionistic but are not solely intuitive, hasty, or written and re-written.  For something so lyrical, these paintings are clearly premeditated and “just-so”. The eye wants to remain playful in the flows of abstraction but it can’t help but encounter at some point the innumerable “eyes” looking back at it. Like an Argus exploded through its infinite potentiality of being, these paintings stare back at us and self-consciously catch us looking.

This is a special one-week show in Gallery Three, not to be missed. Nick Mead is from Somerset, UK and lives in Connecticut.

For information on available works, please email kathy@theholenyc.com

GIVERNY
By E.V. Day and Kembra Pfahler

March 30^th – April 24^th, 2012

OPENING Friday, March 30th, 7-9PM

The Hole is proud to announce the exhibition “Giverny,” a collaboration between E.V. Day and Kembra Pfahler opening March 30th. The artists created photographic works in the famous French gardens built and immortalized in paint by Claude Monet, and will be exhibiting them for the first time here on the Bowery.

Playboy.com has generously funded this massive exhibition, for the duration of which the Hole will be transformed into a living, breathing garden—with a lily-padded pond traversed by Monet’s signature green Japanese arched bridge, and scattered with the indigenous plants he is famous for painting. The walls of the exhibition will be printed with the almost claustrophobically green willow trees that surround this historic French site, and your first step into the gallery will be onto grass.

In 2010, E.V. Day was awarded the Munn Artists Residency by the Versailles Foundation, to live on Monet’s famous estate in Giverny, and to be inspired by the gardens. She invited artist Kembra Pfahler to come to Giverny in August—the most fecund, riotous month—to achieve a collaborative project that blends Kembra’s signature performance attire with the lush verdure of the natural setting and E.V.’s signature refracted photography.

Kembra’s attire, or rather the body-painted and bewigged look that is more sculpture than costuming, presents an interesting alien injection into the almost Disneyland-esque, iconic landscape of Giverny. Her anti-naturalist image is in many ways at odds with the natural growths and overflows. But oddly, as we see in their artworks, this is not so aberrant as one might think: the gardens themselves are in many ways a controlled and sculpted landscape, an illusion of chaos, as Monet coordinated the colors of the plants, and had the gardeners clean soot from passing trains off the lily pads every day. The gardens are a national treasure, a historic landmark frozen in time since Monet lived in a small cottage there and meticulously created a huge, living still life to paint from. Paradoxically, every splash of shrubbery is “just so”, each tulip in place, and it is not too far fetched to imagine a gardener spotting a bug cross the path and putting the bug back into its proper place.

E.V.’s vision of Giverny sees through the bamboo and willow tendrils to the spectacle behind this art historical monument.  She followed the gardeners during their daily duties, which included containing any plants that had begun to outstrip their proper place, replacing the exact species and location of the 100,000+ annuals that die yearly, and beheading flowers. In her career she has explored many themes related to female sexuality and female pleasure, and the poignant metaphor of the pruned and propped-up Mother Nature with the sexual yet terrible figure of Kembra naked is a rich juxtaposition that does not resolve into any fixed viewpoint.

Science and sex are present in this exhibition, as E.V. digitally fictionalizes and manipulates her space. Mimicking the inverted world of the pond’s surface reflections, she bifurcates, splays and refracts her images. Shooting in both the Clos Normand and the Japanese water garden, these artworks complexify the position of objectifier and objectified and explore voyeurism and power. In the same way that Kembra mixes sex and power, beauty and horror, the works hint at the possibility of a bizarre and titillating new sexuality. Perhaps like a water lily itself: solitary, bisexual and radial.

Kembra’s look was originally inspired by Playboy’s Femlin, the sexy sketched figure created by LeRoy Neiman that wears thigh-high black boots, black gloves, and nothing else.  Kembra recently collaborated with Playboy during Art Basel Miami Beach at Dream South Beach to present “Femlins”, a one-night exhibition and performance where she recreated the playful scale shifts of the Femlin drawings in real life.

Kembra Pfahler is an artist and rock musician, best known as the painted lead singer of The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black, a theatrical death rock band she co-founded in 1990. The band uses music, drawings and films to spread a vision of radical feminism in a beautiful, anti- natural, fearless and happy way to dispel the antiquated notion that there is a hierarchy of artistic mediums. In her art and music, Pfahler follows the philosophy of “availabism”— making the best use of what’s available. This is apparent in the low-tech props and homemade costumes the Girls of Karen Black don on stage and which fill Pfahler’s exhibition installations. Kembra has been featured in the 2008 Whitney Biennial; The Palais Des Beaux Arts, Brussels; the MACRO Museum in Rome; and the Garage Center for Contemporary Art in Moscow. She has presented solo shows at Contemporary Fine Arts and Deitch Projects, and has appeared in numerous publications from Rolling Stone to the New Yorker.

E. V. Day (born 1967, New York) is a New York-based installation artist and sculptor. Day’s work explores themes of feminism and sexuality, while employing various suspension techniques reflecting upon popular culture. Day received her MFA in Sculpture from Yale University in 1995, and began her “Exploding Couture” series in 1999, the first installment of which, “Bombshell,” was included in the 2000 Whitney Biennial and is now in the museum’s permanent collection. For “G-Force,” her 2001 solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum at Altria, Day suspended hundreds of resin-coated pairs of thongs from the ceiling in fighter-jet formations. In 2004, the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University mounted a ten-year survey of her work. More recently, Day exhibited “Bride Fight”, a site-specific installation of two bridal gowns in mid-explosion, in the lobby of The Lever House on Park Avenue in New York City. She also exhibited a solo show of her work with the flowers of Giverny with Carolina Nitsch last January entitled “Seducers”.

For information on available works please email kathy@theholenyc.com

Theo A. Rosenblum and Chelsea Seltzer
Two Heads are Better than One
February 14th – March 17th, 2012
OPENING: February 14th, 6-9PM

The Hole is proud to announce the collaborative exhibition “Two Heads are Better than One” by Theo A. Rosenblum and Chelsea Seltzer opening this February 14th. This exhibition will feature sculpture, painting and drawing by these two artists, who, working in tandem over the past year, have created a significant assortment of deeply unsettling, playfully odd, and unavoidably memorable works.

From what the artists call “a vending machine of myth, magic and mystery” comes our exhibition, ranging from the intricately finished large sculptures back to the irreverent sketches where their ideas are born. The exhibition features all manner of hybrids, puns and below-the-belt punches: large sculptures like “Sandwitch” may have started out as a collaborative doodle on a homophone, but realized in sculpture they reveal many strange nuances and details the original concept or sketch lacked. “Snow Manimal” may have come about just from the oddly relatable spheres of upper horse and lower snowman, but fit together physically so well that the visual and conceptual rupture created is all the more stark.

While the sculptures maintain the snickering subterfuge of a doodle, starting with one funny thing and evolving in all directions and sometimes back upon itself, the tiny sketches hung in the rear of the gallery are where we can watch the ideas start agglutinating.  These sketches find one level more of elaboration in the poster works, oil on found images (stock posters printed on unstretched canvas) where the artists can go back and forth adding weird tidbits until the upset is complete (like a mountain erupting with cheese, a huge hat on a tree, a goat straddling its own poo pile). Here the collaborative nature of their working is most apparent and where the work feels funnest, in-between their one-upmanship of back-and-forth bizarreness.

The next level of complexity is the assisted framed pieces, where a sculpted and painted frame intersects with the odd painted intervention in the found canvas itself. A bevy of knives (kitchen and cutlass) adorn a large found painting of a penumbral tropical getaway, “Blue Hawaii”, suggesting the potential assault from both pirates and chefs, perhaps. An inexplicable assortment of fast food surrounds the romantic painting of wild horses charging across a rainbowed field titled “A Horse is a Horse”, drawing a visual line between junk art and junk food, (eye candy?) or maybe just revealing the craving for something more to “chew on” in the boilerplate painting.

In all the various types of work exhibited, the often comforting and mundane familiarity of the found objects is perverted by the input of Rosenblum and Seltzer’s handcrafted interventions, resulting in an unsettling world somewhere between laughter and horror. The parts are familiar but the forms they take are strange and new with a logic all their own: the mythical meets the merry, the religious meets the natural and supernatural; the delicious meets the deformed. Like gum stuck to your shoe, these works stick in your head (whether you want them there or not) and some details may haunt your quiet moments for a long time to come: the power cord coming out of the articulated, puckered butthole of “Snow Manimal” perhaps?

Curatorially, I see these works as “good bad”: so wrong they’re right. Their vibe is similar in concept to Heta-Uma (literally “Bad-Good”), a movement Japanese punk artist King Terry articulated. Something “technically” bad that challenges the notion of “bad” by being sensually and conceptually amazing: a wonky line often describes a face much more evocatively than a perfectly rendered photo-realist drawing, for example. In Rosenblum and Seltzer’s world, these hand-sculptured and not-quite-right forms—and even the “handmade” and wonky ideas that form them—are much more exciting than a fabricated (or logical) version would be.

Besides each piece creating a rupture in the viewer’s sensibilities, in a larger sense the work stands out also from what is trending in galleries, from what their contemporaries are making, from what people expect them to make. The work shows them pursuing their own interests without the pressures of situating themselves within a particular discourse, without the pressure even of making work “about something”.  As Dan Colen wrote in his catalogue essay for Theo’s first solo exhibition, the work is “honest, brave and generous… human and accessible.”

Now that we mention it, the assisted found paintings have a relationship to Dan Colen’s adjusted thrift store paintings in this kind of “dark Disney” world they both hang out in. Rosenblum and Seltzer’s piece with skeleton hands holding up an old bouquet is right out of Disneyland’s “Haunted Mansion” ride, literalizing the idea of an Old Master painting coveted by a long-dead collector and the idea of amemento mori as a genre of painting in a kind of humorous tangle. Or “The Enchanted Picnic”, the classical painting of a nymph or dryad with an irreverently added bucket of fried chicken and some pink panties louchely twirling on her toe is wryly humorous, but combined with the detail of the painting seemingly bursting into flames, like the offensiveness of the graffitied classical painting caused it to hellishly combust, I mean it’s just, de trop.

And while the overall mood of the show involves the humor of being de trop, these artists always manage to rein in the insanity and conceptually push things just far enough, or rather perfectly too much. There are no extraneous elements in the works, everything is as it should be, the Frankensteined parts all link up perfectly and the monster springs to life!

For information on available works please email kathy@theholenyc.com