The Hole NYC

Theo A. Rosenblum & Chelsea Seltzer “Two Heads are Better than One”

TheHole — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 16:13:10 +0000

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

Lola Montes Schnabel, Love Before Intimacy

TheHole — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 21:35:38 +0000

Lola Montes Schnabel

Love Before Intimacy

December 16th, 2011 – February 4th, 2012
OPENING December 16th, 6-9PM

The Hole is proud to present a new group of paintings by Lola Montes Schnabel. These five works, created over the period of the last year, comprise a suite of allegorically suggestive figurative paintings that use a shared five-color palette to great effect.

Each painting depicts an episode in a narrative of androgenous youth encountering each other on a remote Greek island. They depict a time of love before sexuality, with the nude youths, occasionally shrouded in sheepskins, romping playfully about the teal and tan landscape. In one work, a youth drags a dead albatross across an expanse, in another, the last in the series, the two figures come together in ecstasy, forever changing their innocent, idyllic world.

The works each begin with bleached linen and rabbit glue. Lola then engaged the surface with a five color palette reminiscent of the restrictive color schemes of the Spanish Romantics or the lucky five-color Ko-Kutani school of Japanese ceramics. Not just paint but asphalt, plaster weld, and copper plating solution are part of her toolbox, making the painting not just an assorment of emmoliated pigments, but the site of a rich alchemical reaction as the plasterweld slowly dries clear and the copper plating oxidizes and chrystallizes.

Magic, luck and intuition fill these large, confident, and very feminine tableaux. Lola graduated from Cooper Union in 2008 and has been in numerous group shows since, with both her paintings, her iodine works on paper, photographs and video work. This is her first solo painting exhibition in the United States.

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

“…”

TheHole — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 19:43:43 +0000

“…”

Kadar Brock

Matt Jones

Sam Moyer

Scott Reeder

December 16th, 2011 – February 4th, 2012

Opening Friday, December 16th, 6-9PM

“…” is a group exhibition exploring new tendencies in abstraction. The artists featured all explore a material-driven or process-based approach to abstract painting—beautifully brushless—with a strong dose of humour or the absurd. There are also lots of dots. Hey: it’s an abstract painting show!

Scott Reeder makes visually scintillating spray paintings on canvas using the shadows left behind from spaghetti, lentils, and other foodstuffs. These products are often Italian—the nationality of the Arte Povera movement he is reprising. Pasta, Italy, capito? If the Arte Povera movement challenged established art conventions through its use of found or “low” materials, and if abstract expressionism was in many ways a tradition of American hegemony during the Cold War and the ultimate in “high art seriousness” as practitioners confronted the sublime and the subconscious in their energetic output, Scott’s paintings are a strange hybrid of both. Reeder calls himself an “agnostic” when it comes to painting and these works exhibit a profound ambivalence, with nonetheless a visual seductiveness that aims to engage.

Sam Moyer makes tonal paintings with bleach and dye, treating the canvas as just another swath of cloth, but also turning the canvas into an illusion of fabric with her weaving, patterned strokes and her illusionistic implications of a fluffy duvet cover all puckered and folded. Unlike Morris Louis or the other poured and stained Color Field painters, Sam makes her viewers unable to consider the work as a window into something or a transportation to another place by insisting on the visual reality that they are staring at a piece of cloth mounted onto some wood. The attention to line and tone evoke the considerations one might encounter pondering an Agnes Martin, while her process insists upon the domesticity or even craftiness of her work.

Kadar Brock took the neon paintings from his “failed” series of canvasses from 2005-2008 and in a seeming fit of despair, covered them with various whites, blues and greyed-out paints negating his former exuberance. Folded and pulled, they are then subjected to more angsty torture of sanding, shredding with a razor, more paint and more sanding until Kadar ends up with a result that is a smooth as a baby’s butt; an evocative, ethereal surface. The patterns are dictated largely by a series of 12-sided die rolls and an arbitrary compositional formula attached to the die. How could so much despair and futility, not to mention arbitrariness turn into something so sublime? That is our puzzle.

Matt Jones was once told that he needed to hone and focus his use of space. Grumpily he threw white paint onto wet black paint and painted outer space. Whether his peers accepted this as a concerted exploration of space in a painting is unknown; but what he ended up with, perhaps accidentally, is a richly textured, beautifully depth-filled galactic series of abstract paintings. Hiding reds, purples, greens and blues in the rich black, Matt throws white paint onto the surface pulling colors out of the deep void to create small halos of color around each droplet. In case you did not realize that Matt is an abstract artist exploring space, he has hung a planetarium painting above our heads for good measure. While the space paintings are paintings of “everything that exists simultaneously”, his internal energy paintings on the adjacent wall are paintings of the intangibility of experience. They are “the you that you can’t see.”

Lest we find this press release too self-consciously “clever”, let me reaffirm that all these artists are crucially interested in being a part of the traditions of abstract painting, while turning the perhaps misapplied seriousness of its legacy on its head. They all seek a way of making a sincere and poignant abstract expression of feelings and ideas, but use various methods of distancing themselves from the myth of the lone artist pushing paint around with their heroic brush; in fact none of these artists use a brush per se.

To be a young artist who engages with the daunting abyss of the abstract tradition, these artists critique and burlesque the enormity of the philosophical trajectories of abstraction, while not quite wanting to let them die. The humor is there to humanize abstraction and to acknowledge the widely perceived futility of it, while the artists themselves do not see abstract approaches as futile. Perhaps the more apt quote (elided of course) would be from Herman Hesse “It is an … idea that the more pointedly and logically we formulate a thesis, the more irresistibly it cries out for its antithesis.”

To see available works please contact kathy@theholenyc.com

Kembra Pfahler Presents “Femlins” with PLAYBOY

TheHole — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 00:32:08 +0000

The Hole debuted “Femlin” a series of photos by Kembra Pfahler & Andrew Strasser featuring the girls of Karen Black with PLAYBOY in Miami during Art Basel:

Event Photos by Bijoux Altamirano the PLAYBOY party with Kembra Pfahler and the girls of Karen Black

Matthew Stone, Outdoor Sculpture

TheHole — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 05:51:49 +0000

Matthew Stone

Outdoor Sculpture Installation, Poolside at the Mondrian

November 30 – December 5th, 2011

The Hole is pleased to announce a special outdoor sculpture installation by British artist Matthew Stone.

The exhibition will focus on the intersections between the ideas, photography and sculptures that define Matthew’s work. Four large photographic sculptures will be installed in the pool area that incorporate tangles of figures printed on wood and arranged into polygonal volumes.

Matthew was born in 1982 and graduated from Camberwell College of Arts, University of the Arts London with honors in painting. After leaving college he masterminded the art-collective-cum-scene !WOWOW! in squatted South-London buildings. Their group shows and parties in empty buildings attracted audiences of over 1500 people and a performance event at the Tate saw a record 4000 people in attendance. Recent solo exhibitions have been presented at V1 Gallery, Denmark; Galerie Paul Freches, Paris; Boyschool, London; Gea Politi, Milan, and Union Gallery, London. His first comprehensive exhibition in America is on view at The Hole, 312 Bowery, from November 1^st – December 10^th.

Recent photographic projects include a collaboration with Givenchy’s Ricardo Tisci for the cover of the 20th anniversary issue of Dazed & Confused magazine and a fold-out sculptural cover for the current Flaunt Magazine. He composes original music for close friend and collaborator, fashion designer Gareth Pugh’s shows and has directed music videos for acclaimed British bands These New Puritans, S.C.U.M and for New York lo-fi band No Bra.

The Hole & Delano present SALEM

TheHole — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 05:45:20 +0000

Salem

Special Live Performance at Delano

November 30^th, 2011

Doors at 10pm, Performance at 11pm, 1685 Collins Avenue, Miami Beach

The Hole and Delano are pleased to announce a special live performance by acclaimed art crossover band Salem to celebrate this year’s Art Basel Miami.

Salem are three young musicians from Chicago and Michigan who have been making art and music together since 2004. The band is celebrated as having invented a new kind of music, a genre that some call “witch house” or “drag”, that is essentially a new incarnation of hip-hop.

Heather Marlatt, John Holland and Jack Donoghue comprise the band, and their three personalities find auditory expression in the music: John’s languor, Heather’s innocence and intensity, Jack’s sloppy fearlessness. They are digitally savvy internetted youth using the available tools to take music into their own hands to creating the kind of music they want to hear. It just might be the future!

Salem has been featured recently in Purple Magazine, Rolling Stone, Interview, T Magazine, GQ, V magazine and i-D magazine. Their debut album was released in 2010 titled King Night and their most recent release is an EP called I’m Still in the Night.

The performance was designed by Thunder Horse Video. NYC- based artists Thunder Horse Video have collaborated with Salem internationally – producing a surreal swatch of fog, light, and effects. They will be presenting a stage designed specifically for the pool of the Delano.