Presented by the Paul Robeson Galleries

In conjunction with the exhibition,

“The Wicked Twins: Fame & Notoriety”

Tom Sanford, Custom Mao Zedong (Lucha Libre), 2011, oil on canvas, 36”x24”, courtesy of the artist

Wednesday, April 18, 1030am-1130am

Main Gallery, Robeson Campus Center, First Floor

350 Martin Luther King Blvd, Newark, NJ 07102

FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

The United States has been described as having a fame hungry culture, which has been fuelled in recent years by the plethora of communication devices, social networking sites which facilitate the dispersal of information in real time, and a slew of reality programming on both television and the internet.  This exhibition focuses on the work of artists who address ideas about fame and infamy, celebrity culture, current idols, imitation of celebrities, and attempts to secure at least 15 minutes in the spotlight.

New York artist Tom Sanford’s work features irreverent/reverent takes on almost everything, from Tupac to Jesus to Sanford himself.  He has done solo exhibitions  in New York at Leo Koenig Inc as well as galleries in Copenhagen, Beijing, and Brussels, Sanford exhibits internationally and has been reviewed in publications such as artnet, Artinfo, The New York Times, The Barcelona Guide, Japan Times, The Los Angeles Times, and Whitehot Magazine.  Sanford received his BA from Columbia University and his MFA from Hunter College, CUNY.

a group show organized by Tom Sanford and Ryan Schneider and featuring…

Nina Chanel Abney, Justin Craun, Rene Holm, Tom Sanford, Gretchen Scherer, Ryan Schneider

LaMontagne Gallery, 555 E. 2nd Street / South Boston, Ma 02127

On view: April 14th – May 19th, 2012
Opening Reception: Saturday, April 14th, 6 – 8pm

“I go to parties sometimes until four,
It’s hard to leave when you can’t find the door”

The lyric congers up a familiar scenario. Well, familiar to us at least. Long nights, numb on intoxicants, loitering near the beer stocked refrigerator at a house party, the beer stocked garbage can at an art opening, or in the darkest corner of a beer soaked bar. Talking about painting in a way that others argue about sports. Gossiping about other artists, luxuriating in the folly of the late hour, delaying the inevitable cold realization that if you want to get to the studio at a decent time tomorrow, you should be making your exit soon. But for some reason, the door cannot be found, anywhere. Well, fuck it. You sit back down with your friends, order another pitcher, make one more veiled trip to the bathroom, add one more comment to the now indecipherable discussion. Hey, the studio will be a little rough tomorrow, but you will be there. You’ll be there because, what else are you going to do? Where else would you actually go? There is always so much to get done, no matter how tragic you feel.

We asked a group of painters whose work we respect and admire to join us for this exhibition. These are artists with whom we have spent or would like to spend a long night. We told the artists the title of the show, and asked them to paint us a picture or two. This is the result. Painting as disjointed and harmonious as a sunrise ride home in a blurred taxi. Late nights, becoming mornings, becoming another day, becoming another night, becoming fodder for another painting. Then we hang them on a wall, and that’s that.

I mean, if you do actually find the door, you never know what you’re going to miss, so why even look?
Cheers,

Ryan and Tom, April 2012

521 West 21st Street, Ground Floor
New York, NY 10011

Nina Chanel Abney, Michael Bevilacqua, Iona Rozeal Brown, Benjamin Edwards, Asad Faulwell, Wendell Gladstone, JP Munro, Justin Samson, Tom Sanford and Christian Schumann

February 23 – March 24, 2012
Opening Reception: Thursday, February 23, 6 – 8 pm

For Immediate Release

The Kravets/Wehby Gallery is pleased to announce the group exhibition Disorder, including new work by Nina Chanel Abney, Michael Bevilacqua, Iona Brown, Benjamin Edwards, Asad Faulwell, Wendell Gladstone, JP Munro, Justin Samson, Tom Sanford and Christian Schumann, opening on Thursday, February 23 and running through March 24, 2012.

Surrounded by an excess of visual stimulation it often becomes difficult to focus. When faced with such an abundance of spectacular color and energy, one can do nothing more then succumb to the sensory overload. Finding ourselves in the presence of an abundance of exciting things, we could not help ourselves and slowly the collection of visible disorder emerged. Nina Chanel Abney’s mix of portraiture and narrative painting deals with controversial issues by inserting characters based on real people into imaginative worlds. Luminous silver works, painted with metallic lacquer byMichael Bevilacqua are musically influenced and adorned with lyrical text. The geisha subject matter in the work of Iona Rozeal Brown also touches on global influence of African American culture, illustrated by bold shape and imagery. The fractured landscapes created by Benjamin Edwards are visionary. Frenzied clusters of color shift into a woman’s face emerging from a dense cityscape. The seductive quality is mirrored in the work of Asad Faulwell, whose historically based portraits are saturated with bold color and mesmerizing detail. Wendell Gladstone’s quiet portrait weaves together the elements of the piece in a beautiful and focused way while the epic battle in a painting by JP Munro embodies opulence and elegant ritual. Justin Samson continues his exploration with fake fur, vibrant color and universal communication, blurring the lines between time and space. Tom Sanfordacknowledges a passing in time with a serene homage to Steve Jobs, speaking on his ambivalence about American culture. The dense visual flow in the work of Christian Schumann merges organic elements with technological forms. With no restraint from the artists, the calculated chaos is guaranteed to send the mind spinning with creative stimulation.

For further information please call the gallery at (212) 352-2238 or emailinfo@kravetswehbygallery.com.
www.kravetswehbygallery.com

HENDERSHOT GALLERY

195 Chrystie Street
New York, NY 10002

Alben, Daniel Arango, Ghost of a Dream, Ted Noten, Rachel Bee Porter, Tom Sanford, Shelter Serra and Marie Vic

Featuring a pop-up shop exhibition by photographer Jesper Haynes

February 10 – March 16, 2012

Opening Reception February 10, 6 – 8 pm

Come and Get It! encompasses our inherent fascination with consumer goods. While the artist’s reference to popular culture is certainly not a new endeavor, the boundary between art and commerce has become increasingly faint. Come and Get It! exhibits the work of eight contemporary artists, each of whom explores the intersection between popular culture, consumerism and art. Inspired by bold and overt advertisements scattered throughout Manhattan, the title of this show further exaggerates on the sales tactics used to seduce us into making an impulsive purchase. For the duration of this five-week exhibition, Hendershot Gallery will redesign its gallery space – creating an ironic juxtaposition between the contemporary art world and the retail experience.

Highlighting this reciprocal dialogue between art and commerce, Hendershot Gallery has partnered up with local businesses, artists, and designers to contribute their products for this exhibition. Books, t-shirts and photographs will be available in Jesper Haynes’ pop-up gallery shop, revealing twenty years of iconic New York City memories captured from 1986 to 2006. Parked outside Hendershot Gallery during the opening reception, ICU’s mobile art truck invites visitors to climb aboard and take pictures. Initially appearing only as a pitch-black void, designs materialize within the vehicle through the use of flash photography.

The opening reception for Come and Get It! will be sponsored by our friends at BOMB Beer Company and The Little Cupcake Bakeshop.

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