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Fazal Sheikh photographs displaced people in Africa, South Asia, and the Americas. In books and installations, he combines photographs with the personal testimony of his subjects, producing sustained portraits of communities that address their beliefs and traditions, as well as their political and economic problems. The current exhibition includes work from his latest series—Moksha (Heaven) and Ladli (Beloved Daughters)—which reflect on the position of women in rural India. The exhibition is presented in conjunction with Brown University’s Year of India.

Sheikh spends long periods with the people he photographs. As he explains, “It is one thing to photograph a group of people and another to try to understand them. For that you need time, and patience, and an innate respect for difference. . . . At a time when traditional photographic coverage is often limited to a brief stopover and a search for sensational images, the need to take time and represent and understand the people whose lives and values are very different from our own is greater than ever.”

Moksha portrays the northern Indian holy city of Vrindavan, where dispossessed widows go to devote themselves to Krishna and seek moksha, or final release from the cycle of death and rebirth. The exhibition weaves cityscapes, interiors, street views, and portraits into a complex, cinematic vision.

Ladli examines the lives of girls and young women who, despite progressive laws, are routinely denied their human, civil, and economic rights in an India that remains tradition bound despite recent rapid economic growth.

Sheikh worked with a variety of non-governmental organizations in Delhi, Ahmedabad, and the Pubjab to meet girls and young women who helped him understand the social practices that continue to imperil and limit the prospects of girls and women.

David Winton Bell Gallery
List Art Center
Brown University
64 College Street
Providence, RI 02912

Herbert Krenchel (Danish, b1922), an engineer by profession, designed the classic Krenit bowls.  The first of these coloured enamel bowls were designed in 1953 and eight different sizes, in eight standard colours, were developed over the next two years.  This best-selling range of bowls were continuously in production until 1965.  In 2006 Rocket presented the first comprehensive exhibition of Krenchel’s pioneering work.

Hans J Wegner (1914-2007) was the most activce furniture designer in Denmark during the latter half of the twentieth-century and his work is internationally renowned.  We first showed some of his furniture at Rocket in the group show ‘Danish Design’ in 2006.  In this current exhibition we feature some of his refreshingly minimal and utilitarian pieces from the late 1950s and 1960s.  We focus on the three versions of the Getama daybed and on his Andreas Tuck coffee tables.

Ib Geertsen (1919-2009) became the father figure of Danish geometrical abstraction.  From 1943 onwards his paintings and sculptures were exhibited in every major museum in Denmark and in 2003 he had a retrospective at the Kunsthallen Nicolaj, Copenhagen which led to renewed critical attentiion.  In 2008 his work was included in the group show ‘Danish Konkrete’ at Rocket and in 2009 we presented his first London solo show.  he died in June 2009 and the Guardian published a full-page obituary.

Rocket Gallery
Tea Building
56 Shoreditch High St.
London E1 6JJ
Phone: +44 20 7729 7594
Web: www.rocketgallery.com

Richard Avedon
Nastassja Kinski and the Serpent
Gelatin silver print  32 x 49″

Great Photographs of the 20th Century: Staged and Startled. The gallery will be exhibiting a selection of rare and sought after photographs lent from numerous private collections representing some of the most important photographers of the last 100 years.

The title Staged and Startled refers to the various processes artists use in achieving their final images including lighting, setting, equipment and planning, or conversely, deliberate eschewal of preparation. The opportunity to compare these works side by side reveals the individuality of the century’s most iconic photographers. The exhibition spans from the premeditated studio portraits of artists such as Richard Avedon and Irving Penn to the spontaneous street photographs of such masters as Robert Frank and Lee Friedlander.

Whether a photographer has staged or startled his or her subject also leads to an important consideration of the relationship of the photograph to truth and reality. Along these lines, Steven Klein’s photograph of actors Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, in which multiple layers of acting and playing are realized, Case Study #13 (2005) and Irving Penn’s posed model in an exotic scene, Woman in Moroccan Palace (1951), present an interesting contrast to Harry Callahan’s more sincere but no less nuanced photograph of his wife and child, Eleanor and Barbara, Chicago (1953) and Joel Sternfeld’s photograph of a planned fire department exercise that he encountered unexpectedly, Mclean, Virginia (1978).

Richard Avedon’s Nastassja Kinski and the serpent, Los Angeles, California, 1981 was a major turning point for the artist. Shot for Vogue magazine, this photograph received immediate critical acclaim and widespread publicity making both Avedon and Kinski household names. Although Avedon was well regarded in the fashion and photographic communities prior, the celebrity of this image outgrew these spheres. Its presentation here alongside the earlier photograph of a model by Irving Penn and the later photograph by Steven Klein of the early 21st century super celebrities Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt provides an interesting genealogy of American culture as well as photographic history.

This exhibition also includes works by Tina Barney, Lisette Model and Garry Winogrand. Imagery ranges from celebrity to unknown subjects who happened to be at the right place at the right time to an artist’s friends or family. Many of the photographs possess levels at which they are the staged, controlled presentations of the subject or photographer, and other levels at which they are startled, unplanned and even unintentional.

Hasted Hunt Kraeutler
537 West 24th Street
New York, NY 10011
Phone: 212 627 0006
Web: www.hastedhunt.com

Princess Y
2008
Painted hydrocal
45″ x 25 1/2″ x 13 1/4″

On exhibit are a group of life-size figures, the largest Bruce Gagnier has made to date, and selected mid-size sculptures, small heads and mounted cruciform figures. The ten human-scale works, ranging from five to six feet in height and made of cast hydrocal plaster, represent a marked departure from Gagnier’s last body of work. Whereas the Otom/Otoma series (2001-06), stressed formal coherence over individual psychology, the figures of Incarnate are more so their own persons than ever, a fact emphasized by each piece’s given title: Emma, Louis and Mrs. Petit, to name a few.

Accompanying the increase in scale of these “people” is a greater physiognomical variegation and specificity. Gagnier has stated, too, that he has worked more from outside himself than ever before, a letting go which has contributed to the creation of beings which are more real, and less distant to their maker and the viewer. The spirit of his process is surprisingly like that of an Abstract Expressionist: he works unconsciously, starting with his materials rather than a fixed idea and allowing specific psychic states to emerge from his creations.

Over the course of his career, the subject of Gagnier’s work has eluded the categorizations of “ugly” or “pretty.” Nor has the artist sought to represent any number of recognizable, universal sensations which have lent themselves readily to figurative sculptural tradition: the heroic, the tragic, the sublime, the pathetic. In this recent body of work, such ideals are not merely muted, but rendered irrelevant. They are realizations of particular individuals, recordings of particular flesh. They have as their criteria to fit poetically together and to be internally complete, relying on contemporary specificity rather than historical standard.

Bruce Gagnier (born 1941, Williamstown, MA) studied art history at Williams College (1959-63) and went on to attend the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (1963) and Columbia University (1963-67), where he studied with Nicholas Carone, Peter Agostini and John Heliker. In 2004 he was elected Academician by the National Academy, and is the recipient of the Ingram Merril Award (1993) and the New Jersey State Council Award (1985). Gagnier’s teaching career includes positions at Yale University, Sarah Lawrence, Parsons, Haverford College and the International Schoold of Art in Umbria, Italy. Since 1979, he has been teaching drawing and sculpture at the New York Studio School. Gagnier lives and works in Brooklyn.

Lori Bookstein Fine Art
138 Tenth Avenue
New York, NY 10011
Between 18th and 19th Streets
Phone:  212.750.0949
Web:  www.loribooksteinfineart.com

Thukral and Tagra
I like my man covered II
acrylic on canvas
2007
72 x 72 in

India has rapidly emerged in the forefront of the international art scene, as young artists are showcasing their work around the world at art fairs and galleries.

As India itself has been changing, her younger artists are also expressing themselves in many different ways that reflect the rapidly evolving political, social and cultural scene throughout the country.

The artists in ‘Singularities’ are some of the most exciting talents currently working and exhibiting. Interestingly, their work is figurative, which is a tradition that has been in existence for many centuries in Indian art, abstraction having been practised by few artists in the modern tradition.

Within this area of figuration, though, all these artist have quite different approaches.  Thukral and Tagra broach edgy subject matter and idea with the gloss of graphic design and media styling. Surendran Nair wittily creates a fantasy world to comment on society.  Gurusiddappa G.E, also has a fantastical vision that seems to leap from our subconscious.  G.R.Iranna examines the existential fate of man, alone in the world, the city.  Jagannath Panda strikingly contrasts the encroachment of the industrial new with the deterioration of the old, and ironically, the rotting of the ‘new’. Rekha Rodwittya works a consciously feminist approach to painting, presenting her female figures as powerful and independant of the male gaze. Sachin Karne, alternating between figurative and abstract works, examines powerful forces that govern our world, and uses symbols as icons that reflect the artist’s curiousity about how certain images are fetishized while others are ignored.

Each of these singular artists have unique, energetic visions that capture the singularity of modern life.

RL Fine Arts
39 West 19 Street Suite 612 (between 5 and 6 avenues)
New York NY 10011
Phone:  212 645 6402
Web:  www.rlfinearts.com

Wall Flowers Installation - View 1
Photo @ 2010 Francis Dzikowski

Wall Flowers, new works in sculpture and drawing by Norman Mooney.  The exhibition will feature brand new wall and floor sculptures by Mooney and will be on show at the gallery’s new location in Williamsburg, Brooklyn  at 92 Wythe Avenue.

Wall Flowers marks Norman Mooney’s first adventures in color sculpture having previously worked only in grays, blacks and whites.   Wallflower no. 1 measuring six feet in diameter is an explosion of pollen yellows.  The piece consists of over 500 aluminum castings all projecting outward four feet off the wall.    Another larger wall flower in crimson resin  having a diameter of 6-7 feet will also be a part of the exhibition.

In addition to the wall flowers,  Mooney’s exhibition will include the three final windseeds from a group of six he has executed.  The first three such sculptures are in the permanent collection of Richard and Helen DeVos in Michigan, founders of Amway International.  While like the wall flowers executed in cast aluminum, these white eight foot diameter sculptures seem light enough to move in a breeze and have been liked to  dandelion seeds among other natural objects.

In both styles of sculpture, Mooney is inspired by his larger experience of the natural world and his attempt to understand the joy, wonder and beauty one experiences when feeling the first rays of the sun on your face in the morning, the explosion of color bursting from a flower or the etherealness of seeds floating on the wind.  Formally, Mooney hopes to challenge the viewer to evaluate their place in the natural world and to engage them in a larger intuited reality.

Norman Mooney was born in Dublin, Ireland in 1971. He studied at Crawford College of Art and Design in Cork and completed his BFA at the National College of Art and Design in Dublin in 1992. He then had the distinguished honor of participating in the Third Degree Program at the Irish Museum of Modern Art from 1992 to 1993. In 1994 he relocated to New York City and has been exhibiting locally and internationally for more than 15 years. Recently his work has conjured the image of the actual and representational star shape, which conceptually deals with perceptions of contraction and expansion, the end of what previously was and the birth of something new, transformation on a global scale, and an origin of connectedness. Recent exhibitions include “Absence and Presence” at Causey Contemporary Gallery in New York, “Falling Short of Knowing” show at Milk Gallery in New York, and a sculpture exhibit at Collector’s Contemporary in Singapore. He also founded a successful design, engineering and fabrication firm dealing inarchitectural metals. He continues to reside in Brooklyn with his wife and three children.

Causey Contemporary
92 Wythe Avenue
Brooklyn, NY 11211
Phone:  718 218 8939
Web:  www.causeycontemporary.com

Female artistic expression in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries followed prescribed time-honored conventions. Most of the graceful works presented in this exhibition, all of which are in the museum’s collection, were created within the strictures of postrevolutionary Republican Motherhood and the Cult of Domesticity. The majority were made during years spent in the cultivation of skills that prepared a young woman to shoulder the many roles required of her in adulthood as a wife and a mother. Others demonstrate that women continued to nourish their creative selves by plying those skills throughout their lives. Yet these paintings, drawings, samplers, quilts, rugs, and other works were artful from conception to execution, were displayed in parlors and best rooms, and conferred status and taste upon both heads of household: male and female.

Stacy C. Hollander, senior curator

American Folk Art Museum
45 West 53rd Street
New York, NY 10019
Phone: (212) 265-1040
Web: www.folkartmuseum.org

Nina Yuen (b. 1981, Hawaii) approaches video as a tactile medium. Her seductively honest and visually striking narratives weave elements of her personal relationships with found stories and appropriated personae.

For this show, the main gallery space will become a cinema showcasing a selection of Yuen’s recent videos in sequence. The artist states, “My work as a filmmaker engages with the production of false personal memories and with stirring disagreements about the past in the accounts of my family and friends. I regard myself primarily as a passive artist; my work is created at the intersection of a recorded document and a lifestyle that I adopt. For the taping of each film, I live for at least a week in a constructed environment, with its own conventions governing ceremony, behavior, and dress. My work and living in my studio demand that there be no distinction between my personal and artistic development; I view my life as more than a subject.”

Yuen’s films are unabashedly romantic and quietly profound assemblages of performance, spoken monologue, soundtrack and montage, which create a flux of vivid imagery and feeling. In Alison, the loose narrative is inspired by a story of the artist’s childhood friend who wandered off one winter without a coat and was found dead months later. The piece incorporates the artist’s voice-over of an excerpt from the missing persons report filed by his mother (Alison), a snippet of Virginia Woolf’s suicide note, and a poem by Raymond Carver. As in many of Yuen’s films, a dream-like quality pervades the fragmented stories and richly textured visual elements.

Don takes as its subject the breakup of the artist’s mother with her ex-husband. Yuen recorded her mother speaking about various relationships and memories throughout her life, which the artist then transcribed and taped to the ceiling of her studio as cue cards. Yuen narrates the piece by lip-synching her mother’s words. The artist plays multiple characters in the video, creating a temporal disjunction between the stories as recalled by her mother and Yuen’s acting out their retelling.

White Blindness, a condition that causes one to see nothing but a white glare, is a film for which Yuen transformed her studio/living space into a completely white space as a way to experience the phenomenon. Blurring the line between her work and her life, for one year, anything she bought she spray-painted white. Preoccupied with naming and ordering, Yuen’s voice-over includes a history of the term “post-traumatic stress disorder”, instructions for an Islamic bathing ritual and an essay by Joan Acocella. As a lyrical gesture, Yuen invents props to carry out her idiosyncratic versions of everyday routines. InClean, she proposes alternatives to conventions of daily hygiene. The idiom “instead of” becomes the operative element in this work, emphasizing the deliberate transgression of accepted social behavior by creating one’s own set of rules to follow.

Nina Yuen completed her BA at Harvard University and a residency at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. Recent exhibitions include, An Imaginary Relationship with Ourselves, Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, Oregon; Performance, Manifestacao Internacional, Belo Horizonte, Brazil; De-narrations, PanAmerican Art Projects, Miami, Florida; The Sky Within My House, Contemporary Art Patios, Cordoba, Spain.

Lombard-Freid Projects
531 West 26th Street
New York NY 10001
Phone: (212) 967-8040
Web: www.lombard-freid.com

Nathan Sawaya has taken a childhood fascination with a ubiquitous building block and transformed it into a captivating artistic medium. Sawaya constructs large-scale sculptures with LEGO(R) bricks, utilizing their multifarious shapes and brilliant colors to create a wide range of subjects including desserts, planets, pop culture icons, and even a life-sized self-portrait. Sawaya, though working with a decidedly unyielding medium, is able to create expressionist images that affect lithe curves and forms. Within his oeuvre, one is struck by the endless possibilities of this medium; it is as limitless as his fertile imagination.

Moreover, Sawaya’s work is a testament to the bricks as a means for creating fine art, something that has great power, as is indicated by viewer’s reactions. “I am seeing children and families who have never stepped into an art gallery in their lives being drawn in because of my work.” His upcoming premier marks the first occasion of a solo exhibition comprised entirely of LEGO bricks in New York. Sawaya lives and works in Manhattan.

Agora Gallery
530 West 25th Street
New York, NY 10001
Phone: (212) 226-4151
Web:  www.Agora-Gallery.com

A Brief History of America and Its Peoples offers the viewer a rare opportunity to see highlights of John Kirchner’s artwork created over the past thirty years. Kirchner continues to question himself, our times and living in America. Through minimalism and subsumed form, he persists on deconstructing culture to create a unique vision of our lifetime.

Over the years, Kirchner has explored what he likes to refer to as “inert” materials such as Styrofoam and balsa wood that have almost an anti-matter aspect intrinsic to them. Playing with our sense of what we know and what we’re actually perceiving, Kirchner wavers between the transparent and the inaccessible, asking more questions than providing answers.

Kirchner states, “I don’t want the viewer to fall back on what they already know, I want to divert the imagination and our comprehension of formal aesthetics and craftsmanship by using fragile, expendable and immediate materials that challenge our perception of weight and permanence. To very carefully and exactly craft something that is non-utilitarian and to animate the inchoate, that is what I‘m really after.”

Kim Foster Gallery
529 West 20th Street
New York, NY 10011
Phone: (212) 229-0044
Web: www.kimfostergallery.com