Drawn to You
‘Works on Paper from New York’

Michael Anderson Michael Bevilacqua Daniel Davidson Aaron Johnson Mi Ju Erik Parker William Powhida Tom Sanford Alfred Steiner Jade Townsend Eric White

Vernissage Friday January 13th, 2012 from 5 – 8 pm
The exhibition runs until February 18, 2012

Gallery Poulsen Contemporary Fine Arts
Flæsketorvet 24, Den hvide Kødby
1711 København V.
Tlf. +45 4015 5588 // +45 3333 9396

GOOD INTENTIONS

december 29th, 2011 – february 4th, 2012

Aaron Johnson, Assi Meshullam, Lisa Sanditz, Ryan Schneider, Shay Kun, Tai Shani, Tom Sanford.

As in a fantasy or dream, the gallery space contains the past, present and future commingling in a superfluity of familiar images, images drawn from the collective subconscious, the two-dimensional and three-dimensional compounded within sound and silence

The exhibition “Good Intentions” deals both with topics familiar to the updated viewer, as well as the critique of them. In their works the painters try to point to social-economic-political developments in Western culture. For example, the works of Lisa Sanditz, Tom Sanford and Shay Kun can be seen as dealing with the complexity of the relationship between the U.S. and China. Sanford takes the images of Mao and responds, turning Mao into a zombie, a popular culture icon or a man dressed in S&M attire. In her previous works, Sanditz dealt with the topographical changes in the landscapes of China and the U.S. as a result of the mass production of consumer products, thus raising the question of dependency between the two superpowers’ economies. One of her paintings in this exhibition shows SpongeBob SquarePants, the hero of a children’s animated television series identified with American culture though its brand-name merchandise is actually manufactured in China. SpongeBob is depicted wearing a Santa Claus hat, his body lying in a children’s pool in an American town abandoned after the last economic crisis. This sad end transports SpongeBob, like a yellow Ophelia, to the heights of Shakespearian tragedy.

Kun depicts ancient caves in strong pop colors inside these caves hot water balloons are forever trapped. The caves are a popular touristic hotspot for the American tourist crowd in China. Inside stalactite caves Kun creates a contrast that foreshadows a bad omen.

The work of Aaron Johnson reflects the deterioration of American culture. Johnson turns Jesus into an object that looks like half a turkey served for dinner on Thanksgiving Eve. The holiday rewrites American history, denying the murder of the indigenous inhabitants and creating the myth of an emergence of a pioneer and pluralist nation.

The works of Tai Shani and Ryan Schneider betray the contemporary generation of artists’ attitude vis-à-vis the feelings of alienation and loss of identity in their era. Shani tells the story of an actress who loses her identity, turning into an empty incubus of the character she plays. Schneider depicts modern man being swallowed by American consumer culture and banal male chauvinism.

Likewise, formalistic issues are addressed by the paintings in the exhibition, e.g., the return to a Pop-Trash style of painting and garish coloration are grasped as an attempt to endlessly recreate a moment that has passed, a moment that contains within it a glorification of consumer culture’s beauty and colorfulness with all of its tempting, addictive advertisements and billboards, and of its emptiness as well.

The themes emerging from these works represent an attempt by the artists to expose, dig up, point out and intelligently observe the contemporary state of culture. Opposite them, like onlookers, stand the statues by Assi Meshullam; like worldly-wise creatures, like ghosts of the past come to mend the ills of the future. They are equipped with litters and bandages, but it is unclear whether in order to heal or in order to kill. As such who have already experienced the fall of mighty empires, they are present at the exhibition and, looking back, can truly attest: “The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.”

“So where do girls who don’t dream go to when they are asleep? She asked.” And I’m asking: what happens when reason sleeps? Thus are monsters born. As in a nightmare, among the exhibitions works crop up grotesque hybrids, partly recognizable and partly invented (half-Mao, half-Jesus, half-SpongeBob, half-woman, half-zombie), that bear witness to the disruption of the ideologies that began with such good intentions.

Ofra Harnam

Erna Hecey is pleased to announce New-York based American artist Tom Sanford’s exhibition CLASH at Galerie Nordine Zidoun in Luxembourg. While Tom Sanford’s work has been frequently presented in the USA and in Europe since the early 2000’s it is his first exhibition in Luxembourg.

Among the most mischievous of image makers working today, Tom Sanford wields the visual acuity of pictorial veracity to cut through mediated distance, laying bare ugly truths with satiric incision that lets us laugh just enough to disguise the more visceral flinch in our gut reaction. His terms of exaggeration, whereby caricature is a nearly sincere form of flattery, are emotional and epistemological- not so much an abnegation of truth as an investigation into what any truth might actually mean. That he does so in a common language and through events, figures and signs we all readily recognize, dispels the clutter of commentary so that clarity itself may guide us ever more deeply into the utter confusion by which we experience the hyper reality of events and existence itself. Rare in the art world today, his art actually makes sense, but it is that very rationality that gives room for the inane absurdity of his subjects to manifest their own irrationality.

Among Sanford’s favorite tropes by which he consistently frames the contemporary to a wider skeptical scrutiny is the academic genre of History Painting. Hierarchically considered above all other genres as the aesthetic epitome of fine art since its inception in the Italian Renaissance and until Modernism rendered such terms obsolete four centuries later, History Painting is the ideal medium for Tom Sanford’s uncanny confluence of signification and meaninglessness. Trivia, be it sports statistics, public opinion polls or nasty gossip, is only important in so far as we obsess over it, and fascinated as many of are by these things, Sanford takes this mass mania into the realm of personal fetish and public spectacle. By historicizing current affairs and giving the historical patina of grand import to contemporary figures- in this show the savaging of artist Shepard Fairey by leftist squatters in Copenhagen, a fatal stampede of sale hungry shoppers at a discount store amidst the economic crash of America, and the rise of the angry white voter in an early Tea Party rally, but in the past he’s given similar treatment to the killing of metal star Dimebag Darrell, a brawl at a music awards ceremony and populated his paintings with personages like Kate Moss, L’il Kim, 50 Cent and Tupac Shakur- Tom Sanford manifests the myopia by which we focus on the incidental while ignoring the larger issues and underlying forces that direct these events, as well as our delirious dedication to them.

Working inversely but to very much the same effect as his latest body of work included here, cheaply commissioned paintings of Mao from China the artist reworks to generic impersonations of identity, Sanford’s historical paintings invest petty behavior with heroic import and transform the quotidian into epic allegory. History Painting, from the Latin historia, or literally ‘story-painting,’ offers Tom Sanford the ultimate vehicle for getting across the imperatives of narrative by which the stories he tells dissimilate the modified and manipulative hybridity of news in the age of infotainment. His re-creation of events belong to the hyperbole of docudrama reenactments yet are rendered with an attention to detail and visual verisimilitude that could well place them in the journalistic documentary tradition of witness photography. Like Mao, the iconographic is both absolute and infinitely malleable, a truth posited in the telling and given certainty only as it is agreed upon.

At once prurient and voyeuristic, the pathos and absurdity by which this artist delineates the mutant persona of fame and notoriety in our society brings to mind the hysteria by which urban myth and conspiracy theory constitute a new kind of alternative reality today. As such they hearken back to the mythological and religious subject matter that was the original province of historical paintings, but it is not even the subject that matters so much here. Declamatory and authoritative, these are not just incidental paintings; they are History Paintings, a ‘you are there’ fabrication where actuality is made epic and grandly monumental in style and scale. We like it all larger than life, these paintings remind us, precisely because as such they are not life. And it is hard to think of an artist working today who paints fiction’s great impersonation with the deftness of our consensual deception than Tom Sanford.

Carlo McCormick,
NYC October 2011

Tom Sanford born in 1975 in Bronxville, NY  studied at   Columbia University, NYC
and Hunter College City University New-York. Tom Sanford lives and works in New York.
His work has been exhibited  since the early 2000’s at   Leo Koenig Inc., New York,  (2006 and 2008)
at Erna Hecey Project space in Brussels, as well as at ArtBrussels and Fiac 2009, at  gallery  Faurchou (2005/2009) and gallery Poulsen (2011) in  Copenhagen,  Wetern Projects, Los Angeles (2004) and   at Tomoyo Saito Gallery, Tokyo (2003)  Sanford ‘s work was included in Big Picture, Priska C. Juschka Fine Art, New York, NY.  (2010) Leisure Suite (curated by Martin Basher), Neiman Center Columbia University, New York, (2008)  No New Tale To Tell….,31 GRAND, Brooklyn, NY (2007) The Incomplete (curated by Hubert Neumann), Chelsea Art Museum, New York, NY (2007) Heroes…Like us?, Palazzo delle Arti, Napoli, Italy (2007) Dangerous Beauty, Chelsea Art Museum, New York, NY (2007) Leaving Cockaigne, Leo Koenig Inc., NYC (2006)

For further information please contacte Anne Solene Groppe t. + 352 26 29    anne.galeriezidoun@gmail.com or visit
www.galeriezidoune.com and  www.ernahecey.com

Galerie Nordine Zidoun
101 rue Adolphe Fischer
L-1250 Luxembourg
t. +352 26 29 64 49
f. +352 27 48 94 49

From Where You Just Arrived | paintings from New York & Los Angeles

organized by Ryan Schneider & Jonas Wood

Pepin Moore | 933 Chung King Road |Los Angeles California 90012 | +1 213 626 0501

+ featuring work by +

Jennifer Guidi, Raffi Kalenderian, Joshua Nathanson, Ruby Neri, Laura Owens, Devin Troy Strother, Henry Taylor, Rob Thom, Jonas Wood, Benjamin Degen, Van Hanos, Valerie Hegarty, Ezra Johnson, Eddie Martinez, Jeanette Mundt, Tom Sanford, Ryan Schneider, and Ken Tisa

Allegra LaViola Gallery

179 East Broadway
New York, NY 10002
T: 917 463 3901

Featuring the work of:
Erik Benson, Paul Brainard, Pia Dehne, Hiroyuki Hamada, Elizabeth Huey, Erika Keck, Emily Noelle Lambert, Frank Lentini, Eddie Martinez, Brian Montouri, Bryan Osburn, Kanishka Raja, Erika Ranee, Tom Sanford, Christopher Saunders, Kristen Schiele, Ryan Schneider, Oliver Warden, Frank Webster, Eric White and Doug Young

Allegra La Viola Gallery is pleased to present Die Like You Really Mean It, a group exhibition on view from October 26 – December 7. The exhibition is curated by artists Paul Brainard and Frank Webster and features new paintings and sculpture by over twenty artists living in the New York metro area.

The curators have assembled an energetic and dynamic show, where each work registers as a highly charged expression of the individual artist. Brainard and Webster have maintained a special interest in choosing works that register not as intentionally ironic but rather as sincerely and at times viscerally rendered. This exhibition celebrates painting as a healthy, living, and variegated mode of art making in New York.

The works included in this exhibition are often resistant to purely formalist and conceptual concerns, engaging themes that extend beyond the material media of painting. Figurative and scenic elements may invite narrative readings while color is used forcefully, liberally, or selectively. The expressive qualities of color among the works range widely from Oliver Warden’s transformative explosions of color, to Hiroyuki Hamada’s restrained, bi-chromatic capsule-like wall reliefs. Also of concern among the works is the relationship between the human being and its environment, exemplified by Erik Benson and Kristen Schiele’s depictions of inhabited indoor and outdoor settings, Pia Dehne’s complex compositions in which figure and ground are enmeshed through lyrical patterns of line and geometry, and Kanishka Raja’s use of pattern to unite various specific locations depicted in the same visual space.

Atypically, this show exalts in its contrasts. The works of Chris Saunders and Brian Montouri could best sum this up. Saunder’s paintings are slick and calm on the surface but belie an unsettling and subversive content, while Montouri’s vision is a veritable disgorgement of expressionist storm and bluster. Each artist pushes the medium with equal passion, but in radically different directions, with starkly different results. This passion however is one thing all of the artists in Die Like You Really Mean It share in common.

—Paul Brainard, Kristen Lorello and Frank Webster

Gallery Poulsen

Flæsketorvet 24, Kødbyen
1711 Copenhagen V

Vernissage September 2nd from 5 – 8 pm
The show runs until October 1st, 2011

“2011 is fast, painting is slow. I am interested in history, but I work
in a post-historical period. I make paintings about the time I live
in. By the time I finish the paintings, their subjects are history. I
am an American, living at the end of the American Century. Things are
happening all the time. I learn about these things on the radio, on
television, on the internet, on Twitter. The media is my muse, I paint
by the light of my computer. I make paintings about the things that
interest me. I wish I had time to paint more things, but art is slow
and the world is fast.” – Tom Sanford

For his first solo exhibition at Gallery Poulsen, Tom Sanford’s work
continues to reflect the artist’s ambivalent fascination with a
culture that is driven by the 24-hour news cycle, hungry for scandal
and obsessed with celebrity. Sanford’s paintings use a variety of
genres to present the villains and victims, the tragedies and triumphs
of the moment. The story of the hijacked Mersk Alabama and the rescue
of Captain Richard Phillips by the USS Bainbridge is presented as a
history painting akin to Géricault’s “Raft of the Medusa”. The recently
deceased British rock bad girl, Amy Winehouse, is painted as an icon
to be venerated by her fans. The seamy exploits of anti-heros Charlie
Sheen and Silvio Berlusconi are painted in a garish, yet beautiful
tableaux; these paintings are part renaissance painting, part low brow
political cartoon. Sanford’s work is hybridized and bastardized like
the culture it emerges from.

In the four Custom Mao paintings, Sanford shifts genres to the
conceptual. Sanford takes advantage of globalization in his production
by outsourcing a large part of the labor to China, and then adding the
intellectual property himself in America. The artist has commissioned
Chinese painters to paint copies of the famous state portrait of Mao
Zedong, on which Warhol based his 1973 silk screen paintings of Mao.
The paintings are then shipped to Sanford’s New York studio, where he
“customizes” them by altering the paintings to become cultural
archetypes from his western cultural milieu. Through this conceptually
driven means of art production, as well as the juxtaposition of
eastern and western cultural iconography, the artist comments on the
shifting dynamics of global cultural and economic power at the end of
the American century.

Tom Sanford works in New York City and has exhibited all over the
world, including solo exhibitions at Leo Koenig, Inc. in New York and
Galleri Faurschou in Copenhagen. His work has been exhibited at the
Cincinnati Center for Contemporary Art, the Chelsea Museum in New York
City and the Palazzo delle Arti in Naples, Italy. He is currently
preparing for an exhibition in November at Gallery Zidoun in
Luxembourg.

About three weeks ago I received a late night phone call from Powhida. Some of you may know Powhida as the quasi-fictional alter-ego of William Powhida, I know Powhida as what replaces William after about 3 hours at Iona, the bar across the street from his Williamsburg studio.

Powhida didn’t seem to be where I normally find him, at Iona, but instead somewhere in the Hamptons. Actually he didn’t seem to be quite sure where he was. He had been on some collectors boat for “a very tedious party”. In an effort to spice up the evening, he had drunk this, snorted that, puked on this Dutchess, spat in the face of that media mogul. It was hard to get the details straight, as Powhida was, as nautical types might say, “three sheets to the wind”.

But Powhida didn’t call to name drop and try to make me jealous of his glamorously debauched evening, which is normally why he would call. He called to cash in a favor that he claimed I owed him. It seemed the Powhida had scheduled an exhibition at Marlborough gallery’s Chelsea space that was to open on the 27th of the month. He told me that he would be able to attend the opening, but there was “no fucking way he was going to spend a minute in his un-air conditioned studio in fucking hot-ass-Brooklyn July”, and besides he had altogether too many pressing social engagements between Venice and the Hamptons for this to be possible. I was able to understand only a portion of Powhida’s drunken ranting but it seemed he had yet to make any actual art work for the show. All he really needed was a painting of him, as that he explained, was all that anyone was interested in buying these days. Besides he figured I probably didn’t have too much going on (I have two solo shows in the fall of 2011), and this  would likely be the biggest opportunity I could expect to get anytime in the near future.

I told him to fuck himself and hung up and went back to bed.

The next day I received a series of calls from the suits at Marlborough who confirmed this problem, and offer to make this “worth my while”, and I really needed to start immediately. Later that day a canvas arrived in a truck, and 3 weeks later, here we are. I have the dubious honor of being Powhida’s ghost painter, having produced at least a portion of the work for his solo show that opens July 27th at Marlborough Chelsea, I really have no idea what he’ll use my painting for, in truth I shudder to think. This is not something I am altogether proud of, but I thought It best to get in front of this one and set the record straight…

Below is the press release

The directors of Marlborough Chelsea are pleased to announce POWHIDA, a site-specific project by the eponymous artist, will open Wednesday, July 27th, with a reception from 6-8pm. The exhibition will be on view through August 12th at 545 West 25th Street. Utilizing the entire ground floor gallery, POWHIDA is the artist’s most ambitious installation to date.

In keeping with his oeuvre, Powhida has taken his relationship with the art world as the very subject of the exhibition, employing numerous historical departure points and creating a vast conceptual spectrum reflected in the diversity of the artist’s approaches to making art.

The artist states: “The gallery is a world unto itself, a social space with a highly codified set of relationships having the formal beauty of a ballet.  I will transform it, literally, choreographing each movement, each gesture with every interaction. No two viewers will have a similar experience in the gallery if I can help it.  They may never see an art gallery the same way again.”

POWHIDA is generously supported by Flavorpill, The Mondrian Soho and Pernod-Absinthe.  Please see our website for more details and download the full press release.

For press inquiries, please contact Eric Gleason at egleason@marlboroughgallery.com.
Copyright © 2011 Marlborough Chelsea, All rights reserved.
545 West 25th Street, New York, 10001

My Custom Zombie Mao Zedong decks are now available at i-20. The show MAKE SKATEBOARDS opened yesterday and there was an incredible turnout in un-imaginable heat. The show looks great and all of the skateboards, editions as well as unique decks are really amazing.

If you dig my deck and want one, i-20 gallery selling the first 25 for the low low price of $95. I understand that after the first 25 the price will raise. i am not sure of the size of the edition but the people at the gallery would know. I know they sold a bunch at the opening, but they might still have a couple cheap ones before they go up in price.

to get one either visit the gallery or email jonathan at lavoie@i-20.com

Below is Alfred Steiner’s copy of the deck. It is good to see that my man put the appropriate red wheels on for the father of Red China!