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

SICK!

April 8- May 31st

Misc.

Ion Birch, Steve Budington, Steven Charles, Steve DiBenedetto, Dawn Frasch, Aaron Johnson, Eddie Martinez, Tom Sanford, Peter Saul, Michelle Segre, Joceyln Shiipley, Kelli Williams, Jeremy Willis

Misc. is pleased to announce the opening of a new group exhibition, Sick!. This selection of works by 13 artists examines how artists give particular shape to abject feelings and fantasies. Surrealism, and later, nineteen-seventies postmodernism encouraged an active engagement between art practice and the unstable. The works in Sick! continue this dialogue by exteriorizing psychological tension as a crucial component in each artwork.

The exhibition aligns a fluid iconography, but it is the abject, or the sick, as cultural criticism, thoughtful structure and subtext that relates the work to each other.  Through a variety of methods, Sick! artists articulate personal interpretations about anxiety, clutter, suffocation, and other unpleasant feelings that suggest a fractured, but whole experience. Steadfast repudiation of the decorative and/or decorum ranges from malevolent to punch-drunk to pathos. This sensibility serves as a control-factor in a showcase of work that does not behave.

The artists are as at ease in blending categories of art history as they are with handling their visionary trajectories. In keeping with an overwhelming suspicion that human beings are as much propelled toward primordial, amorphous states as they are of achieving Organizational Man, these works have mastered their conditions by surrendering to that ancient urge rather than trying to escape it.

-Elizabeth Sapperstein

For my part, Morten will show my newest painting, “Sexy Monument (after Guston)”. It is my updated, and super sexy version of the great Philip Guston painting, “Monument”(1976), that hangs at the Tate.

If you happen to be in Copenhagen this December, please go check out the show.

“The Poulsen X-Mas Show 2010″

OPENING Thursday December 2nd, Reception 5-8PM @ GALLERY POULSEN

Flæsketorvet 24, Kødbyen
1711 Copenhagen V

Featuring:

Tom Sanford (US) Aaron Johnson (US) Smike Käszner, Peter Ravn, Olafur Eliasson, Kristleifur Björnsson (IS)
Liv Carlé Mortensen, Debra Hampton (US) Vuk Vidor (F) Jeanne Susplugas (F) Lars Grenaae, William Anastasi (US)
Dove Bradshaw (US) Jeppe Hein, Javier Aguilera (ES) Christian Finne, Mihael Milunovic (SRB) og Artstamp.dk

The traditional Christmas exhibition at Gallery Poulsen has in other words a lot of fine art for its guests and offer a chance to purchase an exclusive Christmas gift to you or your dearest. The art that is shown is all selling at a modest sum.
We are shooting in “The Poulsen X-Max show 2010” Thursday, December 2nd at 5 pm. All of the Gallery´s permanent artists is presented and shows their new and interesting work. It is names that have performed well in 2010 and whom are expected to do even better in 2011. As an extra spice, we will surprise with other artists; The exhibition includes work that is done by World Stars, Olafur Eliasson, Jeppe Hein, Dove Bradshaw and William Anastasi. All four are represented at world greatest museums and are among today’s acclaimed and popular artists.
2010 has been wonderful and an eventful year for Gallery Poulsen. New location, new daring exhibitions and new artists. With the Christmas exhibition we review the past year and look forward to 2011, which will be an even greater year!

Welcome

I am in a show upstate at the SUArt Galleries of Syracuse University. Eric Gleason is going to drive a party bus up from NYC for the opening, so I will be there for the opening. I understand that I will be staying at Gleason’s old frat house. I will do my best to recreate Old School, playing Frank the Tank and get some eats at the original Dinosaur BBQ location while I am at it:

RUN AND TELL THAT: New Work form New York

curated by Eric Gleason and David Prince.

November 9, 2010- January 9, 2011

Public Reception: Thursday, November 11, 5-7 pm

Moderated Panel Discussion with artists in the exhibition:
Thursday, November 11, 3-5 pm, Shemin Auditorium, Shaffer Art Building

Run and Tell That! New Work from New York presents, for the first time in Syracuse, recent and new work by twenty-one young New York City artists.  Included in the exhibition’s wide array of media are several installation pieces created specifically for the SUArt Galleries.  Co-curated by SU alumnus Eric Gleason ‘05, Sales Director at Marlborough Chelsea, and David Prince, Associate Director at the SUArt Galleries, the show illustrates conceptual and aesthetic trends in contemporary art.

Synonymous with “spread the word,” Run and Tell That! is a phrase attributed to Antoine Dodson of Huntsville, AL, whose flamboyant July 28, 2010 television interview following the attempted sexual assault on his sister, quickly became an internet sensation.  The phrase has since been integrated into contemporary vernacular; a phenomenon that could only happen now, in a time when information is digested and distributed constantly via the World Wide Web.  The artists in Run and Tell That! take advantage of this wide spectrum of media to develop a conceptual focus that characterizes this younger generation.

Painters Kamrooz Aram, Steven Charles, Inka Essenhigh, Aaron Johnson, Liz Markus, Tom Sanford, Ryan Schneider and Aya Uekawa use personal experience, art history, abstraction, and social commentary to keep the medium fresh and relevant.  Sculpture becomes a widely encompassing term as pieces by Robert Lazzarini, Diana Al-Hadid, Will Ryman and Ethan Greenbaum broaden the definition.  In the series of thirteen prints entitled Ars Magica, William Powhida continues his astute satirization of the art world by likening its practices to sorcery.  Turkish photographer Pinar Yolacan, in her Mother Goddess series, examines deity figures from pre-neolithic periods which were the archetype of beauty in her geographic region thousands of years ago; while Rashaad Newsome’s contemporary coats of arms elevate hip-hop culture to high culture by replacing traditional shields, wreaths and charges with Lamborghini’s, Rolexes and iced-out medallions.

Site-specific installations include a first-time collaboration between Ethan Greenbaum and Adam Krueger; a dynamic wall-length installation in which a tree violently emerges from a Hudson River School painting by Valerie Hegarty; Virginia Overton’s minimal trompe l’oeil construction using only an eight-foot 2 x 4 and two sheets of mirrored Plexiglas; Vlatka Horvat’s repurposed ceiling fan and aluminum ladder; and individual projects by Wade Kavanaugh and Stephen B. Nguyen whose monumental collaborative installation White Stag, 2010 is currently on view at Mass MoCA.

Please join us for a free, moderated panel discussion with several of the artists on Thursday, November 11 from 3-5 pm in Shemin Auditorium in the Shaffer Art Building.  Following the presentation there will be a catered opening reception next door in the SUArt Galleries, also free and open to the public.

Visitor information
Gallery hours for Run and Tell That! are Tuesdays–Sundays from 11 a.m.–4:30 p.m. and Thursdays from 11 a.m.–8 p.m. The gallery is closed on Mondays. The SUArt Galleries is accessible to persons with disabilities.

Paid parking is available for weekday visitors in any SU pay lot. Free parking for weekend and evening visitors is available in the Q4 lot, located on College Place. Patrons should notify the attendant that they are visiting the SUArt Galleries. Evening and weekend parking is on a space-available basis and may be restricted during events held at the Carrier Dome.

Patrons attending Run and Tell That! are encouraged to ride Centro’s Connective Corridor Shuttle Bus (Centro Route # 543) to visit the SUArt Galleries. The shuttle stops at all marked Centro bus stops along the Connective Corridor and is free. For more information and to view the shuttle schedule, visit http://connectivecorridor.syr.edu/corridor-shuttle-bus.

The SUArt Galleries strives to provide the best possible environment for art appreciation and scholarly development. No photography will be allowed in exhibition spaces. For approved, press-ready images, visit the exhibition website.

The SUArt Galleries, accessible through the Shaffer Art Building on the SU campus, enhances the cultural environment of SU and the Syracuse area through meaningful educational experiences and encounters with the University’s permanent collection and traveling exhibitions. It is the main campus venue for the visual arts and home of the University’s extensive permanent collection. The facility hosts a variety of temporary and permanent exhibitions throughout the year. The SUArt Galleries and the Palitz Gallery are members of SU’s Coalition of Museum and Art Centers (CMAC).

Ryan Schneider and I are traveling to Copenhagen for a show that Ryan organized and we are both showing new paintings in at Gallery Poulsen:

The Irascible Assholes – New Paintings from New York

Vernissage and opening party friday June 18 from 5 to 10 pm

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

The Irascible Assholes are: Ryan Schneider, Tom Sanford,  Aaron Johnson, Daniel Heidkamp, Van Hanos, William Powhida, Jamison Brosseau

There is a press release for the show, but a brief summery of the conceit of the show might be: The Irascible Assholes: A bunch of new paintings by some dudes from NYC who make bad ass paintings.

Ryan and I will be in Copenhagen for about a week leading up to the June 18th opening and are hoping that Morten Poulsen will allow us to make a few collaborative paintings in the space, we will probably also spend a good amount of time at the world’s coolest dock bar, Halvandet with our pal Jens-Peter Brask.

I am in a group show of several generations of contemporary painters:

The Antidote
Claire Oliver Fine Art
513 West 26th Street, NYC 10001
January 28th – March 6th, 2010
Opening: Thursday January 28th, 6-8PM

The photos shows the three small paintings that I will be exhibiting in the Antidote: Susan Boyle (2010) , The Salahis (2010) & Tiger Woods (2009).

Artists: William T. Wiley, Herb Jackson, Ulf Puder, Rina Banerjee,
Jessee McCloskey, Aaron Johnson, and Tom Sanford

In the 160 years since French painter Paul Delaroche
proclaimed “from today painting is dead”, many scholars
and critics of art have echoed his sentiments. As each new
concept or movement in the visual arts comes to the fore,
judgment is passed on all that came before it. In
Delaroche’ time, the advent of photography changed the
usefulness of painting as documentation, in the 20th
century, modernist painting transitioned paint from a
representational two dimensional medium to art grounded
in codes rather than images. In our contemporary culture
of instant access and short attention spans, painting has
once again reinvented itself.

By examining the validity and variety of painting in the post-modern era, The Antidote shines light on paint’s continued potential for innovation and influence. Uninhibited by traditionally expected technique, these artists have developed their own processes in order to best execute their
contemporary concepts in this historically rich medium. The Antidote features new works painted for
this exhibition by three generations of artists embracing paint as their medium of expression: William T.
Wiley, Herb Jackson, Rina Banerjee, Ulf Puder, Tom Sanford, Aaron Johnson and Jesse McCloskey.

Joann Moser, Senior Curator of the Smithsonian American Art Museum says of William T. Wiley’s work: He has created a distinctive body of work that addresses critical issues of our time. Art, politics, war, global warming, foolishness, ambition, hypocrisy, and irony are summoned by Wiley’s fertile imagination and recorded in the personal vocabulary of symbols, puns and images that fill his objects. His wit and sense of the absurd make his art accessible to all with multiple layers of meaning revealed through careful examination. Wiley’s works employ a playful treatment of language and image, producing a nonlinear mix of words, gestures, and figures to convey his concepts.

William T. Wiley is in the permanent collection of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, The Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C. and many other important museums and institutions. Wiley was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship Award in 2004.

Herb Jackson’s paintings are built up in many layers which are scraped off as they are being applied. Shapes and marks come and go as the painting develops to a hundred or more layers. There is an unmistakable dissonance between the luminous, often pearlescent colors and the raw sense of corrosion and violent gesture which Jackson’s compositions and surfaces combine to convey. The final outcome is the result of a process of discovery Jackson says is similar to the life experience itself. Herb Jackson has had over 150 one-person exhibitions and his paintings are in the permanent collection of over 100 Museums including The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York and The Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C. Jackson’s work was included in the first exhibition of contemporary American art, curated by Donald Kuspit and presented in the former USSR in 1989.

Ulf Puder belongs to the first tier of famous graduates of the Leipzig’s Academy of Visual Arts. Along with his peer, Neo Rauch, Puder has created a new vocabulary that combines the neo-realism prevalent in the former Eastern Germany with a surrealistic bent. The artist skillfully balances comfort and ruin as well as reality and abstraction. His assemblage of squares, symmetrical triangles and rectangles each add a different texture to a controlled sense of imminent disaster. By locating his scenes on smooth, sandy plains or glassy lakes and recording them in soft grays and purples Puder’s orderly chaotic world is both two and three dimensional, constructed and deconstructed, present and imagined.

Tom Sanford says of his work that he “hopes the subject becomes dated even before (He) finishes the painting”. Using painting, a “slow food” visual medium, the artist creates advertisement like posters of the latest tabloid gossip. By juxtaposing tradition and our throw-away contemporary society, Sanford has created his own Modern-day history paintings.

Rina Banerjee is an Indian born New York based artist whose work explores the aesthetics of exotic beauty, physical illusion and ornamental object. Her imagery stems from her dual cultural history of both eastern and western art. Banerjee seeks to transform everyday objects (and their cultural identity), recreating their identity as a thing of beauty cultural gap. Says the artist of her work: The global place is a garden made out of travel – both real and imagined – and is my illusionary world. Banerjee has exhibited her works in the Greater New York Show, PS1 MOMA, and at the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY.

Jesse McCloskey’s work is certainly representational, yet he considers himself and abstract artist. He begins each work by making several large colorful abstract paintings which he then cuts into hundreds of exacting abstract shapes. These small pieces of painted paper are then painstakingly applied to a stretched canvas, layer by layer, building up dimension, color, impact and design. Influenced by a childhood full of gothic New England legends, the final work is representational, haunting and mysterious and can be twenty to thirty layers thick.

Aaron Johnson’s frenetic patterning, drips, psychedelic swirls and iridescent globs collage to create a singular apocalyptic universe of grotesque figures and carefully controlled painterly excess. Johnson creates a strikingly effective fusion of paint, process, and image that oozes evil. In his latest series of works, the artist takes on the old masters, reinventing an established vocabulary of imagery while creating a dichotomy of old/new, east/west, painting/design. New York Times art critic Roberta Smith says of the work: if you look carefully it is all there in works that are visceral, beautiful and flamboyantly timely, which is saying a lot.

Aaron Johnson’s work has been exhibited at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, Boulder, CO, Art House Texas, Austin, TX and the Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art, Peekskill, NY.

For more information:
www.ClaireOliver.com
Tel:212.929.5949

Ridykeulouse Hits Bottom opens tonight at Leo Koenig Projekte and includes this drawing by Aaron Johnson. I checked out the show yesterday while the Ridykeulouse ladies were installing. It is a really wonderfully vulgar show, and one would expect nothing less – lots of exceptional work, including Aaron’s gruesome drawing. The show includes work by the following artists:

A.K. Burns, Aaron Johnson, Anna Sew Hoy, Celeste Dupuy-Spencer, Cody Critcheloe/ssion, Cyrus Saint Amand Poliakoff*, Dana Schutz, Dawn Frasch, Dawn Kasper, Dawn Mellor, Dean Daderko as Referee, Eve Fowler & Math Bass, Explosion Robinson, Fastwurms, Leidy Churchman, Two Serious Ladies, Ulrike Muller, Zackary Drucker + A.L. Steiner

I wanted to post Aaron’s drawing, not only because I love it, but also because it is of my wife Alex and I. When Alex and I got married back in 2007 Aaron gave us a lovely drawing of Alex and I, or at least monstrously ghoulish versions of us. In our drawing I am putting a ring on Alex’s finger in honor of our nuptials. We love the drawing and currently have it in our kitchen. At the time he told me that this was not the original wedding gift drawing, but the first one was not appropriate for the occasion and so he had made a second drawing which he presented to us.

I had forgotten about this, until Aaron told me that Nicole Eisenmann had asked him to participate in the Ridykeulouse show and had selected the original wedding drawing for the show – needless to say I was eager to see the first drawing. It is great as well. I guess I do understand why he thought better than to give us a picture of Alex decapitating me on our wedding day,  as perhaps it is not the most conventional marriage portrait – but brilliant none the less. Bravo Mr. Johnson, you are the master of monsters!