Art Uncovered : Die Like You Really Mean It This week on Art Uncovered, artists Paul Brainard and Frank Webster talk about the show they've curated at Allegra LaViola Gallery: Die Like You Really Mean It. The show is on view through December 3rd, 2011.
Prague Post Review Review of "living dead" show at Dvorak Sec Contemporary.
Live TV interview on Czech Television for "living dead" Live interview at Dvorak Sec Contemporary for the opening of "Living Dead" on September 2nd 2010 in Prague Czech Republic.
Dvorak Sec Contemporary Paul Brainard "Living Dead"
September 2 – November 26, 2010
Dvorak Sec Contemporary is pleased to announce of exhibition of works by New York-based artist Paul Brainard; the debut solo exhibition of the artist in Europe.
September 2 – November 26, 2010
Dvorak Sec Contemporary is pleased to announce of exhibition of works by New York-based artist Paul Brainard; the debut solo exhibition of the artist in Europe.
Priska Juschka Fine Art PRISKA C. JUSCHKA FINE ART
P R E S E N T S
BIG PICTURE
Priska C. Juschka Fine Art is pleased to announce BIG PICTURE, a group exhibition curated by Tom Sanford and Ryan Schneider, literally comprised of predominately large-scale paintings by a generation of New York based artists, who have emerged over the past decade. The title, while referring to subject matter and visual capacity, also articulates clearly the artists’ own personal ambitions and intentions.
The curators, Sanford and Schneider, define the exhibition as a collective survey of nineteen representational painters, working in the New York City area and linked by their own virtuous handling of their medium while taking advantage of the vastness of their surroundings and the open-endedness of a repertoire of cultural references. By finding inspiration in universal themes such as love, sex and death as well as in the reality of their personal experience, their work demonstrates the eclectic style of a generation versatile in blending categories such as academic painting and pop culture with juxtaposing techniques such as classic paint application and mixed media collage.
At first sight, the works ostensibly differ in aesthetic and visual tonality, evoking a dissonant ambience, expressive in color and expansive with gesture, simultaneously seductive and destructive — they linger in the viewer’s consciousness long after the first impression.
While reflecting a contrasting artistic vocabulary, the individual paintings interact conceptually, insisting in commonality and commanding a shared synergy reminiscent of the Gestalt theory — whereby the entire show pronounces a bigger picture and perspective, rising above the summary of its parts.
The gallery will be hosting a panel discussion with Kamrooz Aram, Lisa Sanditz, Tom Sanford and Ryan Schneider, moderated by art critic and writer, David Coggins, on Monday, July 12, from 6:30 to 8:00 PM.
P R E S E N T S
BIG PICTURE
Priska C. Juschka Fine Art is pleased to announce BIG PICTURE, a group exhibition curated by Tom Sanford and Ryan Schneider, literally comprised of predominately large-scale paintings by a generation of New York based artists, who have emerged over the past decade. The title, while referring to subject matter and visual capacity, also articulates clearly the artists’ own personal ambitions and intentions.
The curators, Sanford and Schneider, define the exhibition as a collective survey of nineteen representational painters, working in the New York City area and linked by their own virtuous handling of their medium while taking advantage of the vastness of their surroundings and the open-endedness of a repertoire of cultural references. By finding inspiration in universal themes such as love, sex and death as well as in the reality of their personal experience, their work demonstrates the eclectic style of a generation versatile in blending categories such as academic painting and pop culture with juxtaposing techniques such as classic paint application and mixed media collage.
At first sight, the works ostensibly differ in aesthetic and visual tonality, evoking a dissonant ambience, expressive in color and expansive with gesture, simultaneously seductive and destructive — they linger in the viewer’s consciousness long after the first impression.
While reflecting a contrasting artistic vocabulary, the individual paintings interact conceptually, insisting in commonality and commanding a shared synergy reminiscent of the Gestalt theory — whereby the entire show pronounces a bigger picture and perspective, rising above the summary of its parts.
The gallery will be hosting a panel discussion with Kamrooz Aram, Lisa Sanditz, Tom Sanford and Ryan Schneider, moderated by art critic and writer, David Coggins, on Monday, July 12, from 6:30 to 8:00 PM.
The Big Picture Panel Discussion BIG PICTURE - PANEL DISCUSSION
Join us for a panel discussion with artists from BIG PICTURE including Kamrooz Aram, Lisa Sanditz, Tom Sanford and Ryan Schneider, moderated by art critic and writer, David Coggins, on Monday, July 12, from 6:30 to 8:00 PM.
SUMMER HOURS: Monday - Friday, 11 AM - 6 PM, or by appointment (effective July 1 - August 6, 2010)
Join us for a panel discussion with artists from BIG PICTURE including Kamrooz Aram, Lisa Sanditz, Tom Sanford and Ryan Schneider, moderated by art critic and writer, David Coggins, on Monday, July 12, from 6:30 to 8:00 PM.
SUMMER HOURS: Monday - Friday, 11 AM - 6 PM, or by appointment (effective July 1 - August 6, 2010)
American Garbage Hosted by the House of CHocLet & Billyburgwick.org:
Before there was recycling there was American Garbage=the art of all that is thrown away. (Examining America’s sordid relationship with refuse.)
Come out for the Whale made of Garbage, Sculpture, Drawings, Paintings, Works on Video & Collection of Essays by the artists. Evidently there is much to be said about garbage…
Everything has lead up to this point! EVEN the garbage looks like ART. We are in a critical mass in the culture of waste. What’s with all the garbage? Where does it all go? American garbage is the best in the whole world; I think in NYC you can live off of it.
We have reached a critical mass in the culture of waste. What’s with all the garbage? Where does it all go? One could say that a culture is as good as its garbage. American garbage is the best in the world, and it looks like art.
Show runs until November 19th
For further information:
Justin Stone-DIAZ: 646-427-6827
Before there was recycling there was American Garbage=the art of all that is thrown away. (Examining America’s sordid relationship with refuse.)
Come out for the Whale made of Garbage, Sculpture, Drawings, Paintings, Works on Video & Collection of Essays by the artists. Evidently there is much to be said about garbage…
Everything has lead up to this point! EVEN the garbage looks like ART. We are in a critical mass in the culture of waste. What’s with all the garbage? Where does it all go? American garbage is the best in the whole world; I think in NYC you can live off of it.
We have reached a critical mass in the culture of waste. What’s with all the garbage? Where does it all go? One could say that a culture is as good as its garbage. American garbage is the best in the world, and it looks like art.
Show runs until November 19th
For further information:
Justin Stone-DIAZ: 646-427-6827
The Brooklyn Rail review I’m With Nature
by John Hawke
Ryan Steadman
Paul Brainard
Brooklyn Front
DUMBO
Brooklyn Front presents an alluring array of paintings by Paul Brainard and Ryan Steadman, ranging from the uncanny to the goofy to the aggressively blank.
The paintings of Brainard and Steadman are opposite in their temperature and direction. Wheras Steadman’s work is cool and circular, Brainard’s work may be characterized as an ongoing inward excavation of the damp recesses of the mind. He paints easel-sized “portraits” with a satisfying jumped-up oiliness. The integrity of his portrait heads are constantly being underminded, however, by the blob-like interpenetration of bring ground colors. The effect is something like the push and pull tension of Thomas Nozkowski struggling with “the Thing” from the Fantastic Four. Brainard is afflicted with the condition of what may be termed “paint joy,” which is good to see.
In certain works, such as Sparks, Brainard’s concatenation of kitsch and the cosmic vibrates in a truly unsettling way. Knowing eyes stare out at you through safety glasses, while brightly colored camouflage patterns swirl in and over the background, head and nose. The painting becomes a mask for the painted. The black night sky background, which in other paintings functions more as a “far out” decorative swatch, here charges the painting, establishing an ambiguous cosmic stake for the weird confrontation with the staring eyes. These are paintings which establish limits, show you their terms, and direct you inward – into the surface, into the forms, into the mind.
Leave it Long in Back recalls the half length morality tales of Baroque painting, with a mullet-wearing Brainard in the middle, and at his right a Carnival masked father figure in the midst of frightening hilarity. There is an unnerving dynamic between an elbowing pop culture reference and the possible flash of psychic revelation. Brainard’s work appears to be in a fecund state of evolution; it will be interesting to see how he organizes his array of painterly ideas in the future.
In the foyer hangs a medium-size horizontal painting by Ryan Steadman of a suburban Sisyphus pushing a lawnmower up an inclined plane. The painting’s scale is cinematic, but the reduction retards viewing in depth. Instead, Steadman has flattened the Sisyphus myth into a duochromed color field with the rectangle bisected diagonally. It appears that this is Steadman’s mission: to create finely calibrated paintings that balance pictorial rigor with pop dumbness, blank seriousness with goofy humor. The painter John Wesley attempts something similar, but whereas Wesley embraces the mediation of pop, Steadman limits himself to an ambivalent handshake.
Each of Ryan Steadman’s paintings contains a cartooned narrative fragment (a lawnmowing homeowner, a man leaping for an overthrown baseball, two cheerleaders battling) which resemble New Yorker marginalia drawings, and serve as painterly pretexts. In each work, the ground colors are applied in severe enamel stripes of milky uniformity, reminiscent of kids-room wallpaper, which contrasts with the globbed and pastried articulation he employs for his actors. The pictorial languages do not merge, however, resulting in an awareness of equipoised artificiality.
It appears that Steadman would rather chart the polar limits of expressivity than express himself. High ambition yields to aggressively lowered expectations. The elements of abstraction and expression are there, but the underlying faith which informs such practices has been purposefully hollowed out. The result is a kind of “skeptic painting,” which probes for the limit conditions of what can be said in painting. Steadman’s work is best when the element of humor displaces the imposed formal stasis, as in a painting which features a player in a baseball cap leaping for a hopelessly overthrown ball. Upon closer examination, one realizes from the trajectory of the ball that it is not simply overthrown, but is being launched into an earthly orbit. The absurdity and pathos of Steadman’s situations lightens an otherwise heavy atmosphere, and enables Steadman to continue painting in an age of doubt.
by John Hawke
Ryan Steadman
Paul Brainard
Brooklyn Front
DUMBO
Brooklyn Front presents an alluring array of paintings by Paul Brainard and Ryan Steadman, ranging from the uncanny to the goofy to the aggressively blank.
The paintings of Brainard and Steadman are opposite in their temperature and direction. Wheras Steadman’s work is cool and circular, Brainard’s work may be characterized as an ongoing inward excavation of the damp recesses of the mind. He paints easel-sized “portraits” with a satisfying jumped-up oiliness. The integrity of his portrait heads are constantly being underminded, however, by the blob-like interpenetration of bring ground colors. The effect is something like the push and pull tension of Thomas Nozkowski struggling with “the Thing” from the Fantastic Four. Brainard is afflicted with the condition of what may be termed “paint joy,” which is good to see.
In certain works, such as Sparks, Brainard’s concatenation of kitsch and the cosmic vibrates in a truly unsettling way. Knowing eyes stare out at you through safety glasses, while brightly colored camouflage patterns swirl in and over the background, head and nose. The painting becomes a mask for the painted. The black night sky background, which in other paintings functions more as a “far out” decorative swatch, here charges the painting, establishing an ambiguous cosmic stake for the weird confrontation with the staring eyes. These are paintings which establish limits, show you their terms, and direct you inward – into the surface, into the forms, into the mind.
Leave it Long in Back recalls the half length morality tales of Baroque painting, with a mullet-wearing Brainard in the middle, and at his right a Carnival masked father figure in the midst of frightening hilarity. There is an unnerving dynamic between an elbowing pop culture reference and the possible flash of psychic revelation. Brainard’s work appears to be in a fecund state of evolution; it will be interesting to see how he organizes his array of painterly ideas in the future.
In the foyer hangs a medium-size horizontal painting by Ryan Steadman of a suburban Sisyphus pushing a lawnmower up an inclined plane. The painting’s scale is cinematic, but the reduction retards viewing in depth. Instead, Steadman has flattened the Sisyphus myth into a duochromed color field with the rectangle bisected diagonally. It appears that this is Steadman’s mission: to create finely calibrated paintings that balance pictorial rigor with pop dumbness, blank seriousness with goofy humor. The painter John Wesley attempts something similar, but whereas Wesley embraces the mediation of pop, Steadman limits himself to an ambivalent handshake.
Each of Ryan Steadman’s paintings contains a cartooned narrative fragment (a lawnmowing homeowner, a man leaping for an overthrown baseball, two cheerleaders battling) which resemble New Yorker marginalia drawings, and serve as painterly pretexts. In each work, the ground colors are applied in severe enamel stripes of milky uniformity, reminiscent of kids-room wallpaper, which contrasts with the globbed and pastried articulation he employs for his actors. The pictorial languages do not merge, however, resulting in an awareness of equipoised artificiality.
It appears that Steadman would rather chart the polar limits of expressivity than express himself. High ambition yields to aggressively lowered expectations. The elements of abstraction and expression are there, but the underlying faith which informs such practices has been purposefully hollowed out. The result is a kind of “skeptic painting,” which probes for the limit conditions of what can be said in painting. Steadman’s work is best when the element of humor displaces the imposed formal stasis, as in a painting which features a player in a baseball cap leaping for a hopelessly overthrown ball. Upon closer examination, one realizes from the trajectory of the ball that it is not simply overthrown, but is being launched into an earthly orbit. The absurdity and pathos of Steadman’s situations lightens an otherwise heavy atmosphere, and enables Steadman to continue painting in an age of doubt.