STUDIO-ONLINE

Franz West
The Ego and the Id

The Ego and the Id is internationally acclaimed artist Franz West’s newest and largest aluminum sculpture to date. Soaring 20 feet high, the piece consists of two similar but distinct, brightly colored, looping abstract forms, one bubble gum pink and the other alternating blocks of blue, green, orange, and yellow. Each of the forms curve up at the bottom creating stools that invite passersby to stop, take a seat, and directly engage with the artwork. The sculpture is only truly complete once the viewer interacts with the work. The Ego and the Id is consistent with the artist’s overarching desire to produce sociable environments for viewing art using his signature combination of whimsy and monumentality.

Created specifically for West’s first comprehensive American retrospective this past fall at the Baltimore Museum of Art, The Ego and the Id borrows its name from one of Sigmund Freud’s best known texts, in which he explores the ego’s battle with three forces: the id, the super-ego, and the outside world. Removing the gallery walls heightens the connection between West’s work and Freud’s work, allowing these forces to intermingle with the streets of New York City as a backdrop.

Franz West began his career in mid-1960s Vienna during the height of a local movement called Actionism. His earliest sculptures, performances, and collages were a reaction to this movement, in which artists engaged in displays of radical public behavior intended to shake up art-world passivity. In the early 1970s, West began making a series of small, portable sculptures called “Adaptives” (”Paßstücke”). The Ego and the Id is in many ways an oversized version of an “Adaptive.” The sculpture also directly relates to the artist’s furniture installations, which transform galleries, museums, and public spaces into lounge-like environments. West has described the correlation between his plaster objects and furniture installations as a way to put dreams on earth; “The Adaptives would be the dream and the chairs and tables would be the Earth.”

About Franz West

Franz West lives and works in Vienna, where he was born in 1947. He has exhibited internationally for more than three decades in galleries and museums, and at major festivals including Documenta IX (1992) and Documenta X (1997), Kassel, Germany; Sculpture Projects in Münster (1997); and the Venice Biennale (1988, 1993, 1997, 2003, 2007). His first major American retrospective, Franz West, To Build a House You Start with the Roof: Work, 1972-2008, debuted at the Baltimore Museum of Art (2008), and then traveled to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2009). His work has been exhibited at Gagosian Gallery, New York (2008); Gagosian Gallery, London (2006); Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (2003); Whitechapel Gallery, London (2003); and Museo Nacional de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (2001). He had a solo exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1997.

Doris C. Freedman Plaza in Central Park
East 60th Street & 5th Ave.
New York, NY
Web: www.publicartfund.org

Liu Kuo-sung (b. 1932)
Sun/Moon Symmetry, 2008
Ink and colour on paper
62 x 29 1/2 inches (158 x 75 cm)

‘Beyond China’ is an ambitious exhibition of ten contemporary artists from Taiwan, all of whom represent the best of the New Ink Painting—the contemporary expression of the classical brush and ink style developed over the centuries. This exhibition highlights some of the most significant work being done by the most distinguished practitioners of the New Ink Painting beyond the Chinese mainland.

The works of these artists range from the neo-classical to the avant-garde and from those who have long been internationally established (Liu Kuo-sung, Tong Yangtze, Yuan Jai, Lo Ch’ing, Yu Peng, and Ho Huai-shuo) to the emerging younger generation of brilliant exponants (Fay Ku, Pan Hsin-hua, Yao Jui-Chung, and Chun-yi Lee). Each with their own distinct style, these artists represent different trends in the development of contemporary Chinese ink painting.

Ink painting, as expressed in calligraphy and monumental landscape painting, is the foundation stone of Chinese culture. While this tradition was interrupted in Mainland China because of the Cultural Revolution, Taiwan has benefited from an unbroken link with China’s cultural past.

In the past three decades, Taiwan has experienced enormous technological and economic development, which has in turn prompted its artists to search for ways to convert their culture’s traditional aesthetic into work that is relevant to the contemporary world. While all of these artists have benefited from a rigorous foundation in the brush and ink tradition, they have evolved in different adventurous ways to express the reality of modern Asia with a new pictorial language.

Opening Reception Friday, 30 October 2009, 6 – 8 PM

Michael Goedhuis, London
16 Bloomfield Terrace
London SW1W 8PG
Phone: +44 (0) 20 7823 1395
Web: www.michaelgoedhuis.com

A House in Corfu: A Family’s Sojourn in Greece by Emma Tennant (Henry Holt, 2002)

Reviewed by Cindi Di Marzo

Now considered among the most select spots for luxury retreats and vacations, the Greek island of Corfu offers blissful views of jewel-toned seas, mountains carrying the weight of history on their ancient backs, and a vibrant terrain that can seem at once purely Greek, Italian and even Provençal. The island’s northern coast lies just off Sarandë, Albania, while the southern aspect looks toward the heel of Italy; this proximity and long periods of Venetian and French rule in Corfu explain Venetian and French influences in the architecture, landscape, food, language and attitudes found on this island paradise. And since the British succeeded the French, there are many Victorian touches that, oddly, do not seem out of place. Similarly, echoes of the gods resound continually as one travels through Corfu, enabling those familiar with Greek mythology and, particularly, Homer’s Odyssey, to reflect on the legends that might have been enacted on the very ground on which they stand. Over thousands of years, Corfu’s cultural and artistic melange has blended to a rich patina.

Long before modern hotels with reliable water supplies and electricity appeared in Corfu, in the mid 1960s novelist Emma Tennant’s parents sold their farmhouse in southern France and built Rovinia House near the village of Liapades on the southern coast of the island. Tennant’s father, Christopher Grey Tennant, 2nd Baron Glenconner, belongs to a long line of Scottish royalty. Born in London, she spent much of her early years at the family’s mansion in Peeblesshire, Scotland. Before turning novelist, she was a travel writer for Queen magazine and editor for British Vogue. Her novels (Sylvia and Ted, Strangers: A Family Romance, etc.) have earned Tennant a reputation for compelling modernist fiction. A House in Corfu reveals her considerable talents as novelist and travel writer as she charts her parents’ transformation from foreigners learning to navigate through Corfu’s tricky terrain and even trickier social conventions to accepted landowners whose friendships with those in and around Liapades exemplify the term “good neighbor.” Eventually, the Tennants are invited to all important passages that mark time in this most timeless of places: births and christenings, engagements and weddings, holy feast days and disasters (mainly due to volatile weather that is part and parcel of Corfiot life)–but not funerals. These the islanders ignore as scrupulously as their ill-tended graveyards. Of course, each days’ activities are watched over by the island’s protector, St. Spiridon.

At first concerned that her parents have not bargained for the problems they will certainly meet, quickly Tennant is lured into the adventure, bringing her son and, later, her infant daughter to Rovinia at every opportunity. Soon even the seemingly fruitless struggle to dig a well yielding something other than salt water joins hopes for other modern conveniences in the background, while the land, food and people come to the fore. (But readers will cheer along with Tennant when a retired British military officer with a gift for divining strikes fresh water.) The family’s days are spent discovering Corfu from coast to coast, walking or sailing in her father’s Falainas (two caiques, one big, one small), and learning the history of their village and the humorous and frequently tragic stories of its inhabitants. Gladly, readers will come along for the ride, their emotions rising with dangerous winds, plummeting with economic recession in the 1970s, and sadly shaking their heads when a hotel opens across the bay, blaring disco music into the early morning hours. In a postscript, Tennant brings her saga to spring 2001 when she returns with her partner, now husband, Tim Owens. Having died in 1983, Tennant’s father is no longer there to provide his pragmatic insights and singular sense of humor. It is a few years before her mother sells Rovinia House and moves to a smaller house nearby.

So much in their little paradise on Corfu has changed , Tennant remarks, but not the elements that first drew her parents to the island. For instance, a mountain they call the Monkey’s Head, “for it is round and brown and intelligent-looking”; old olives trees “flanking houses that are like the houses in faded frescos, of stone that is the palest of washed reds, a blue that looks as if the colour has been sucked out of it into the sky, a yellow like melons when you cut them open and all the white pips spill out”; and the sea. Tennant marvels that so much in Corfu is eternal: “The absolute purity of the sea was, and remains, a miracle,” amidst the new airport, tavernas and hotels that are boosting the economy.

Like predecessors poet/illustrator Edward Lear (1812-1888) and writers Lawrence (1912-1990) and Gerald Durrell (1925-1995), the Tennant family’s romance with Corfu has endured.* Their life there, and Tennant’s gorgeous descriptions, make for an idyllic reading experience.

* Lear’s time in Corfu is the subject of a three-part television documentary, Exiles in Paradise, directed by Derek Smith and presented by Robert Horne for Lear Productions, and a 1988 book edited by Philip Sherrard and published by Denise Harvey, Edward Lear: The Corfu Years; Gerald Durrell’s Corfu Trilogy consists of three books set on the island during the 1930s; and Lawrence Durrell referenced his views of Greece in many of his novels.

The Golem
with a live score by Brian LeBarton

REDCAT | the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater
631 W Second Street, Los Angeles, CA 90012
Fri Oct 30 - Sat Oct 31 | 8:30pm
Tickets: $20 [Students $16]
213-237-2800 or www.redcat.org

REDCAT (the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater) celebrates Halloween with a theatrical screening of The Golem, one of the earliest and surely creepiest horror films in cinema history, accompanied by live music from tricked-out ghouls under the direction of Brian LeBarton, best known as Beck’s prodigious music director. The Golem with a live score by Brian LeBarton takes place on Friday, October 30, 2009 and Saturday, October 31, 2009 at 8:30pm.

The 1920 touchstone of Expressionism tells the Eastern European Jewish legend of the Golem–an oversize clay statue brought to life by a Prague rabbi to do muscle work and help protect the city’s Jews. It doesn’t take long, though, before the plan goes horribly wrong… With director Paul Wegener as the Golem, cinematography by Karl Freund (Metropolis) and amazing sets by architect Hans Poelzig. LeBarton’s costumed band, meanwhile, features analog keyboards, electronic treatments, cello, and special guest Carla Azar on drums and percussion.

The Golem with a live score by Brian LeBarton is funded in part with generous support from Wendy Keys and Donald Pels.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

An excerpt from The Golem:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VBm4P9GIJk&feature=related

Brian LeBarton’s website:
www.brianlebarton.com

GENERAL INFORMATION

REDCAT (the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater) opened by CalArts in 2003, introduces diverse audiences, students and artists to the most influential developments in the arts from around the world, and gives artists in this region the creative support they need to achieve national and international stature.

Opening Reception: Thursday, October 29, 5-8pm

UCLA New Wight Gallery
1100 Broad Art Center
Los Angeles, CA 90095

Katie Aliprando
Derek Curry
Abbey Dubin
Jennifer Gradecki
Jane Jin Kaisen
Nanette La Salle
Anton Charles Lieberman
YoonKyung Lim
Caitlin Lonegan
Peter Lynde
Matthias Merkel-Hess
Ian Pines
Job Piston
Chadwick Rantanen
David Snyder
Greta Svalberg
Jacob Tillman
Wu Ingrid Tsang
Katrina Umber
J.R. Valenzuela

Gallery Hours:
Monday-Friday, 9:00am-4:30pm
(Closed Nov 11, Veterans Day)
 
Admission is free

Daily parking in Lot 3: $10
Short term parking (payable at pay stations)
in Lot 3 North: $3/hour
Directions to Broad Art Center

Ashley Hagen. Blaze, 2009
Mixed Media on Canvas
70″ x 40″

Within each of Hagen’s deliberate and romantic meditations linger the
traces of a lustrous, dark enigma – an atmospheric effect
concurrently brooding and joyous in its intensity.

Hagen’s paintings offer a captivating, resplendent mirage in which
dense abstraction of shape and texture seem to distill themselves
over time, inexorably coalescing into tangible, half-glimpsed form –
rabbits, spaceships, hopscotch charts.

Her romantic, lustrous colors of chartreuse, charcoal, lavender and
cherry evoke the mysterious delights of an Edwardian children’s candy
counter as well as the phosphorescent bottles of Belle Epoque
aperitif liqueurs.

Born in Iowa, Ashley Hagen currently lives and works in Los Angeles,
CA. Hagen received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of
Chicago. She has studied in Florence, Italy, and Vienna, Austria. Her
work has exhibited in galleries in Iowa, Chicago, Vienna, and
throughout Southern California.

Howard Seth Miller, Baseball, Schoolyard, Long Island 1982-2008
Archival Ink Jet Print
22″ x 15″

Howard Seth Miller gazes at youth through the milky cataract of age
and cultivation, creating opalescent images of childhood. Light
reveals often disturbing ambiguities of character, as shadow conceals
an impending loss of naiveté. Baseball cards and blackboards and
chain link schoolyards provide a charmingly stilted cinematic
backdrop for Miller’s haunted iconography of childhood.

Miller was born in New York City, 1954. He received his BS from
Empire State College (SUNY) and his MFA from the School of the Art
Institute of Chicago. Howard’s work has been exhibited in museums
and galleries throughout NY, Chicago, Arizona and the University Art
Museum at UC Berkeley.

Artist Reception: Saturday, November 14th 6-10pm

Deborah Martin Gallery
209 W. 5th St.
Los Angeles, CA 90013
Gallery Hours: Thursday- Saturday 1-6pm and by appointment.
310 428-6464
www.deborahmartingallery.com

Melanie Van Latum’s portraits pop with a hardboiled baroque, neo-noir coterie of haunting, flamboyant heroines. Handsome, sinister, and supremely confident women stare from the canvas with an imperiously mysterious gaze, clearly indicating that no cloister, boudoir, suburb or nursery could ever contain the canny power of their bodies and minds. Van Latum’s cleverly balanced compositions and high-tension-line lighting conjure a triumphant, intelligent feminine charisma – a mise-en-scene flushed with dizzyingly endless décolletage and the intricate obsessions of coiffure. In playfully provoking erotic traditions, these post-traditionalist paintings resuscitate the vapid, gaping pin-up model to her proper stance as empress, saint, and icon.

Melanie earned her BFA in illustration from Art Center College of Design and her MA in Drawing & Painting from Cal State Fullerton. A Signature Member of the Pastel Society of America, Melanie is the only female street painter to win the title of Maestro and several gold medals in both Italy and Germany. Co-Founder of two prominent organizations in the chalk painting world, Street Painting Society and the Street Painting Academy, Melanie has consulted, painted, and held painting workshops for clients in Turkey, Holland, France, Canada and throughout the U.S. Melanie’s fine art work has been exhibited in galleries throughout Southern California.

Opening Reception: Saturday, December 12, 6-10pm

Deborah Martin Gallery
209 W. 5th St.
Los Angeles, CA 90013
Gallery Hours: Thursday- Saturday 1-6pm and by appointment.
310 428-6464
www.deborahmartingallery.com

R. Nelson Parrish. # 27 Untitled, 2009
13″ x 13″ x 3.5″
Acrylic, Wood, Fiberglass and Resin

Opening Reception: Saturday, October 17th, 2009, 6-9pm.

R. Nelson Parrish’s work concealed under layers of resin, unfinished wood plank, clear straight lines, elaborate processes of coating and building up, take months of layering, while adding contradiction to the seeming simplicity of the surface design.

Bearing roots in the American West Coast trajectories of the 20th century, Nelson’s work has been compared to the works of John McCracken, yet clearly develops his own distinct formal language. Parrish’s style alludes to the interior architecture of the 1960’s and 70’s, automotive design, and to the revival of linear formality; and thus becomes more of a reflection of a young contemporary generation of artists.

The artist refers to the narrow-high standing plank shaped objects as totems, suggesting more than just the similarity of shape. The emblematic characteristic of a totem makes the signifier for a venerated other. For Parrish, the totem becomes a symbol of his appreciation of nature and his concern for human interference in its order. It is a testimony to the origin of the natural and the man-made. Through the process of transition and translation, the original purpose of the material moves and relocates in new interpretative environments; their function is re-read under new conditions and into new narratives.

Parrish lays no claim on making a socio-political statement, nor does he aim for the deconstruction of an urban myth, yet he invites the viewer to re-think the notion of the boundaries between the original source and the designed, and the processed and developed object. Thus, Parrish’s work is less of a narration of impulses, ideas and concepts; but rather a line up of questions posed.

Edward Cella Art & Architecture
6018 Wilshire Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90036
323-525-0053

Jayme Odgers. Advancing The Idea Of An Unlikely Truth, 2009.
30″ x 22”, watercolor on Arches 300lb Paper



Opening Reception: Saturday, October 17th, 6-10pm.

When Odgers paints portraits in watercolor, he strives to capture a particular moment of vulnerability that he perceives within the sitter. Odgers explains, “There is a life cycle in the work itself that roughly parallels that of the sitter. The watercolor allows me to simulate moods or even the actual flow of blood beneath the skin. The paper, in fact, acts as skin, and the result is more tattoo-like.”



Though Odgers features are rendered clearly, his subjects are placed against nondistinctive, suggestive, and timeless backgrounds. “Their faces may be expressive, but each remains on the verge of disclosure. The sitter appears to be there, as plain as day, in that particular space, but, in the guise of clerical garb (which offers a whole other set of associations) or with seemingly disinterested, paused facial expressions, they’re anywhere but here. I like to think we can sense them thinking, perhaps of us as we think about them. Therefore “self and other” disappear momentarily.” – Jayme Odgers

Born in Butte , Montana , Jayme Odgers graduated from The Art Center School in Los Angeles with a Bachelors Degree in Art with Great Distinction. In 1966, Odgers was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to study in Europe . During this time, he was honored with over 100 awards of excellence in design including Gold and Silver Medal Awards plus an international silver Typomundus Award for Excellence in typography



Odgers work has been exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum , The San Francisco Museum of Art, Arco Center for the Visual Arts, The Albright Knox Museum and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the permanent collection of the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt Museum in New York City and the White House in Washington, D.C., the Walker Art Center, including numerous books and articles. In addition he taught at The Art Center School, the Art Center College of Design, the California Institute of the Arts and Otis-Parsons in Los Angeles. Odgers has lectured extensively, most recently he toured and lectured in: Tokyo, Nagoya, and Osaka, Japan at the invitation of the Tokyo Gakuin.



His most recent public art commission has been the design of two water fountains for the plaza of the Metropolitan Water District’s headquarters in downtown Los Angeles.

Lawrence Asher Gallery
5820 Wilshire Boulevard
Los Angeles, CA 90036
323-935-9100

Robert Rauschenberg, Small Rebus, 1956, oil, graphite, paint swatches, paper, newspaper, magazine clippings, black and white photographs, U.S. map fragment, fabric, and three-cent stamps on canvas, 35×46x1 3/4 in., collection of The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, The Panza Collection, art Copyright Estate of Robert Rauschenberg/Licensed by VAGA, NY NY

Opening to the public November 15, 2009, at both of MOCA’s downtown Los Angeles locations, this remarkable presentation will be the most comprehensive long-term installation of the museum’s collection to date, showcasing key selections of more than 500 works by more than 200 artists.

Call for more information: 213-621-1745.