Friday Dec. 4: Open Studio at MAD with Jil Weinstock

Rubber. Its uncanny approximation of flesh, its factory aesthetic, its art historical precedents have all made rubber an irresistible medium for Jil Weinstock. She use its ambivalent appeal to beguile the viewer with questions about identity, beauty, memory and artifact. First using it as nature entraps a fly in amber for the suspension of household objects in a celebration/critique of domesticity. Then for making vintage dresses float Ophelia-like in compositions revealing their seams, linings and zippers. And then for its ability to mold the shape of a shirt so convincingly it looks ready to wear except for its waxy sheen.

These textile sculptures hang on the wall much like vanity mirrors or portraits or groups of cast-rubber forms that have a familial relationship. The fabrics become sheer and sensuously folded when suspended in the rubber. The material's fleshy surface acknowledges the body while the strict geometric shape of the pieces shows her continuing exploration of formal and photographic composition. Confined by these formal shapes, the garments have fallen into folds that enhance the intimate impression of being worn, evoking the very skin that wrinkled them. The delicate and fragile garments are placed and arranged; carefully tucked , pinched and folded. In looking at these artifacts, the viewer feels like a nostalgic voyeur.

The amber color of the rubber is similar to that of sepia-toned photographs – precious mementos of lives no longer with us. This idea has become the departure point for Jil Weinstock's next body of work.

Represented by: Charles Cowles, New York; Walter Maciel Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

Education: BFA, University of California Berkeley; MFA, University of California at Berkeley

Selected One-person exhibitions in order of most recent first: Walter Maciel Gallery, LA, CA, Byron Cohen, Kansas City, MI; The University of Alabama Sarah Moody Gallery of Art, Tuscaloosa, Alabama; Charles Cowles Gallery, New York, NY; Catherine Clark Gallery, San Francisco, CA; Davidson Contemporaries, Seattle, WA; Avram Gallery, Southampton College, Long Island Univ., Southampton, NY; Caren Golden Fine Art, NYC; Orari Galleria, Milan, Italy; Perimeter Editions, London, England; Frumkin/Duval Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; The Cultural Arts Center, Vienna, Austria; Novy Horizon Galerie, Prague, CzechoslovakiaSelected awards, honors and publications in order of the most recent first: McGrath Grant, ³Bottle: Contemporary Art and Vernacular Tradition", Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, (catalog production); ³Rubber! Fun, Fashion, Fetish², book by Janet Bloor, published by Thames & Hudson, work reproduced; Women¹s Visual Studies League Grant (catalog production); Whitney Museum of American Art, Youth Insights Pilot Program; SECA Arts nomination, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Polaroid Corporation Artist-In-Residence, Oakland Museum, Oakland, CA; Artist-In-Residence, Richmond Art Center, Richmond, CA

Selected Group Exhibitions in order of the most recent first: "Seams", Noyes Museum of Art, Oceanville, NJ,"Things Remain", Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY, "Pattern redefined", Walter Maciel Gallery, Los Angeles, CA,"Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things: 3-logy Triennial 2008, Price Tower Arts Center, Bartlesville, OK,"Reminiscence", Grounds for Sculpture, Trenton,"Undercover", The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, CT; "A Changing Fabric", Salina Art Center, Salina, Kansas; Hildur Bjarnadóttir, Nick Cave, Jessica Rankin, Jil Weinstock; "Sights", Arco Madrid, Spain; "Beyond Plastics", LIMN Gallery, San Francisco, CA; "A Summer Group", Charles Cowles, New York, NY; "Surfaced", Byron Cohen Gallery, Kansas City, MI; "Bottle: Contemporary Art and Vernacular Tradition", The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT; "Crits' Pix", Black & White Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; "Strata", Davidson Galleries, Seattle, WA; "Window Project" New Langton Arts, San Francisco, CA; "Art and Auction", San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, San Jose, CA; "Post-Systemic," Hunterdon Museum of Art, Clinton, NJ; "Picture Prone," Avram Gallery, Southampton College, Long Island Univ., Southampton

Selected Publications include: Art in America, ARTNews, Art Scene, Artweek, Fiberarts Magazine, Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Weekly, Metropolitan Home, The New Yorker, The New York Times, New York Magazine, San Francisco Bay Guardian, San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco Examiner, San Francisco Examiner - Magazine, SF Gate, San Francisco Tribune, San Francisco Weekly, Sculpture Magazine, The Seattle Times, Seattle Weekly, Southampton Press, Surface Magazine, Time Out, New York, World, Sculpture News.

Nicole Eisenman at Leo Koenig

Nicole Eisenman moves deftly in and out of genres, sifting through both history and contemporary philosophical concerns with a poignant and searing personal lens. In this series of paintings, Eisenman’s wit, facility and sheer visual eloquence are exemplified. Co-mingled tropes suggest the conflict of the thinking contemporary artist struggling with both the ordinary and the immense issues of the day.

When recently interviewed about her new series of works, Eisenman said this:

"There’s a whole genre of paintings, particularly French ones, of people eating and drinking, and the beer garden seems to be the equivalent, for certain residents of twenty-first-century Brooklyn, of the grand public promenades and social spaces of the nineteenth century. It’s where we go to socialize, to commiserate about how the world is a fucked-up place and about our culture’s obsession with happiness."

Communication, or perhaps the futility of it, seems to be a lingering premise in these visually hypnotic and psychologically fraught paintings. The large and medium scaled works depict group scenes at beer gardens, conversations between various night creatures at a dinner table, and a couple langorously reclining. Color and pattern play a pivotal role in the accessibility of these works. Fascinated by shifting ways of seeing, Eisenman acknowledges pattern recognition as an integral aspect of visual communication as well as a tool to vary perception.

Though coupled or grouped together, Eisenman’s canvases are populated with characters that seem adrift in their own thoughts. The scenes are suspended in that comforting “golden moment” at night before things go one way or another. The artist’s proclivity for painting each character differently heightens the sense of “being alone in a crowd.” Throughout, Eisenman offers an insight into the isolation experienced in the pursuit of artistic creation and the very human need to seek diversion from that same pursuit.

Nicole Eisenman currently has a solo exhibition at the Tang Museum, Skidmore College, NY. She has also had solo shows at the Kunsthalle, Zurich, Switzerland, Barbara Weiss Gallery, Berlin, Germany, and Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, in Mexico City, The Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, The Centraal Museum Utrecht, Holland and the San Francisco Art Institute.

Olaf Breuning: Small Brain Big Stomach at Metro Pictures

The wall drawings and wood sculptures that make up the core of Olaf Breuning's exhibition are based on the content and imagery of his small, childlike pencil drawings that "speak about the simple questions one could have about life." These drawings are typically produced in concentrated episodes of self-imposed isolation; prior to this exhibition Breuning spent five days alone drawing in his room aboard the Queen Mary II. In their translation to a larger scale, Breuning's humorous and earnest philosophical aphorisms are presented with a directness that is poignantly faithful to their source drawings. The wall drawings use broad black lines painted directly on the white walls. Their sculptural counterparts are essentially three-dimensional drawings made of wooden blocks painted black such as "Me, Me, Me, You and Me," which depicts a human head in profile with each egocentric thought illustrated inside: a dozen "me's" and a single "you." In "Yesnoyesno," the viewer is literally confronted with a wall of indecision.

In contrast to the existential, stark, black and white works, the third gallery is devoted to "color studies," a series of works based on paint and primary colors. Breuning's play with dripping, splattering and spraying paint is documented in these sculptures and photographs. Experiments that began as diversions in the studio evolved into Breuning's active engagement with painting and abstract art—issues he never before considered.

Olaf Breuning was born in Switzerland and lives and works in New York City. www.olafbreuning.com

Tim Eitel: Invisible Forces at Pace Wildenstein

This series of new oil on canvas paintings by Tim Eitel is his second solo exhibition at Pace Wildenstin. A catalogue with an essay by Joachim Pissarro, Bershad Professor of Art History and director of the Hunter College Art Galleries, will accompany the exhibition. Tim Eitel: Invisible Forces will be on view from November 6 through December 5, 2009 at 545 West 22nd Street, New York City.

In Tim Eitel’s emotionally complex and stirring paintings, the artist conflates fragments of images and memories of everyday life with print and film media, as well as the history of art. Using formal, realist painting techniques, Eitel creates disconnected worlds extracted from time. The artist isolates his anonymous subjects from their contexts, profoundly elevating the significance of every gesture and nuance. Past and present, memories, feelings, and associations converge, evoking ambiguous narratives which force viewers to reexamine their own perceptions of society and to see that which they often allow to become invisible.

The new works are based on pictorial elements isolated from photographs that Eitel takes on city streets as part of an ongoing investigation of the world surrounding him. Eitel uses ambiguous settings and distills out all reference to motion or change, allowing the works to become a lens into the viewer’s own contextual references and associations. “There is a saying that we only see what we know, and sociologically, this notion might explain why it is so easy to ignore the homeless, the cardboard boxes, and the pigeons, that are all over the streets,” Eitel explains; “If you don’t ‘know’ these things, they become invisible. But in front of a painting, you bring so many things you know already—your expectations, taste, opinions—that you can’t help but look at the subject with other eyes. A painting is much like an invitation to go and see things differently.”

Some of Eitel’s most recent works have become markedly more abstract, accompanying his growing interest in formal composition, like paintings in which figures disappear altogether: a pile of cloth strewn across the floor, a cot with rumpled sheets, paper towels and bags on the sidewalk. Looking to Piet Mondrian, Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko, Eitel’s abstraction is closely tied to spirituality and philosophy and how these messages can be expressed through art. Formal structure and meaning work in tandem in his canvases, such as Crows, 2009, (85-1/8" x 70-1/8"), where the bleak, grey backdrop serves as a formal device and simultaneously emphasizes a sense of despair.

Tim Eitel was born in 1971 in the southern German city of Leonberg, near Stuttgart. He graduated with a degree in painting from the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst in Leipzig in 2001. Eitel first gained recognition as a co-founder of the collective art gallery, Liga, in Berlin. He joined PaceWildenstein in 2006 and his first solo-exhibition at the gallery, Center of Gravity, was mounted the same year.

Eitel has participated in more than fifty exhibitions worldwide since 2000. In 2008, Martin Hellmold, Director of the Kunsthalle Tübingen, Germany, organized and curated Tim Eitel: Die Bewohner, a traveling exhibition which debuted at the museum and had subsequent installations at the Kunsthallen Brandts, Denmark and Kunsthalle zu Kiel, Germany. Other significant solo exhibitions include Currents 96: Tim Eitelat the Saint Louis Art Museum, Missouri (2005-6); Tim Eitel: Terrain, a traveling exhibition organized by the Museum zu Allerheiligen/Kunstverein Schaffhausen (2004-5); and Tim Eitel at Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin (2002).

Eitel’s work has also been included in a traveling exhibition organized by Mass MocA (2004-2008) and in group shows at the Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (2008-9); MART Museo di arte moderna e contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, Italy (2008); Cleveland Museum of Art (2005); Rubell Family Collection, Miami (2004-8); Museum der Bildenden Künste, Leipzig (2003); and Frankfurter Kunstverein (2003).

Eitel has received a number of prestigious scholarships and awards throughout his career, including the Marion Ermer-Preis (2003) and the Landesgraduiertenstipendium, Saxonia, Germany (2002). He was granted an artist’s residency in the International studio programme at Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin in 2002. His work is part of numerous museum collections and important private collections worldwide, such as the Museum Frieder Burda, Baden-Baden, Germany; Ovitz Family Collection, Los Angeles; Sammlung Essl—Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Austria, and the Rubell Family Collection, Miami.

The artist lives and works in New York City.

Matthew Ritchie: Line Shot at Andrea Rosen

Since Matthew Ritchie exhibited The Universal Adversary at Andrea Rosen Gallery in 2006, his process of synthesizing and expressing complex systems and cosmologies to create new forms and explore new myths has increasingly expanded across disciplines and into collaborative projects with physicists, composers, writers, actors, architects and engineers, aimed at developing a group of visual and performance environments that can
theoretically sustain not one, but every possible representation of the universe.

Simultaneously, Ritchie has been creating a uniquely dynamic digital world built from his drawings, which allows him to film inside this world using a vast bank of images and narratives to inform increasingly sophisticated videos which can then be deployed into these collaborations. One such example is ‘Hypermusic’, a collaboration with physicist Lisa Randall and composer Hector Parra at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, which makes his complex work more relevant and legible to multiple, broader communities and builds a potential description of the idea of creativity itself.

The exhibition is being held in conjunction with The Long Count, part of the Next Wave Festival at Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York, October 28, 30, and 31, 2009: a one hour work based on intertwined American creation myths, written and directed by Matthew Ritchie with music by Aaron & Bryce Dessner and featuring Matt Berniger, Kim & Kelley Deal and Shara Worden.

Various works will be exhibited in the gallery, including a series of large paintings that use gorgeous abstract iconography to describe the pure space of creation, Line Shot, a one hour animated feature film, with music and spoken text, Haruspex, a series of drawings made in collaboration with authors and The Dawn Line, a modular structure that is part of The Morning Line: a vast architectural, film and musical collaboration created with architects Aranda\Lasch and Arup AGU with commissioned music by Bryce Dessner & Evan Ziporyn, Lee Ranaldo, Thom Willems, Jon 'Jonsi' Birgisson and others, which will be traveling the world in 2009.

The Long Count references the cosmology of the Popol Vuh and the 1975 and 1976 World Series through twins, mirror sequences, fatal games and broken symmetries. Conceived as an endless creation, a pooled text, with characters understood as ideas in motion, The Long Count builds and dismantles a world before time. As in many of
Ritchie’s works, fragments of games and stories are used as counterpoints and motifs between the various performers and ideas which are quartered, folded and unpacked over and over again.

Chelsea Outing Saturday Nov. 14 with Artist Casey Ruble

Meet at Gagosian Gallery, 555 West 24th Street
Subway: A/C/E to 23rd St.
Scavenger hunt with artist and critic Casey Ruble.

Originally inspired by a pair of Edo-period Japanese screens depicting the Genpei Wars, Casey Ruble’s cutout battlescene paintings revolve around the desire to produce harmony within conflict. Costumed mounted warriors are set within natural elements (flowering trees, flocks of birds, wildfires) inspired by Asian landscapes. The paintings mix Western and Eastern pictorial conventions: Spatially, they are flattened in the style of traditional Japanese painting (in places descending into an almost purely abstract cacophany of shapes, patterns, and colors); simultaneously, they are punctuated by three-dimensionally rendered figures derived from the High Renaissance, Baroque, and Romantic periods. Compositionally, they are controlled in the manner of Hard-Edge Abstraction yet also narrative-driven in the tradition of Persian pictorial art. The patterning on the costumes comes from far-ranging sources including Islamic architecture, Chinese lattices, Art Nouveau designs, and 1960s op-art geometries. Disparate in geography and time as these inspirations may be, they are all about, in some sense, how we attempt to create order in the face of chaos. By cutting the paintings out, Casey deprives the figures of a cohesive, perspective-oriented space in which to exist. This reinforces the hermetic nature of the spatial/compositional system and emphasizes the visual relationships between the figures and the natural elements in which they are placed.

Abstractly depicting the moment of contact on the battlefield, the paintings in the i, ro, ha, etc. series are based on Japanese crests designs. Historically, Japanese crests were used during peaceful times as ornamentation for the costumes of courtiers and were later appropriated by warriors to identify opposing factions on the battlefield. For these paintings, I overlapped several crests, painted in the areas of overlap, and erased the remainder of the designs to produce new geometric arrangements that combine disorder and structure in much the same fashion as the figurative works do. The titles of these paintings are based on Japanese kana syllabary.

Although they are also executed in gouache, Casey calls the paintings in her third body of work drawings because they are more experimental in nature. The pieces in the drawing I section are mostly about trying to reconcile narrative and strict compositional structure. More conceptually based, the pieces in the drawing II section explore the intersections of different visual and linguistic communication systems.

Casey Ruble's Biography
Born and raised on a ranch outside Billings, Montana, Casey Ruble grew up bird hunting with her father and horseback riding with her mother, both of which subsequently influenced her work. After graduating from Smith College in 1995, Casey lived in New Orleans and Chicago and eventually settled in New York to pursue her MFA at Hunter College, where she finished her graduate degree in 2002.

Casey is represented by Foley Gallery (www.foleygallery.com) and her work has been included in group shows both here and abroad, including at Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, Parker's Box, and Black & White Gallery. Casey currently holds an artist-in-residence position at Fordham University, and has taught as an adjunct at Fordham, Yeshiva Stern, and Fairleigh Dickinson University. Casey works as a freelance writer for Art in America and has taught an art criticism course sponsored by High 5’s TRaC program. Casey have also curated and assistant-curated several exhibitions in New York.

Casey’s curatorial projects have been reviewed in publications including the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Brooklyn Rail, and Sculpture Magazine.

Friday Outing #4: Workshop with Maria Yoon at MoMA

***Meet at the Celeste Bartos Theater in the Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman Education and Research Building, 4 West 54 Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. NOTE: Do not go to the same entrance we met at last week! This is a different building!

Pizza Party and Artist Workshop with Maria Yoon
As part of an ongoing, multimedia performance taking place throughout the fifty states, Maria Yoon has “married” a cowboy in Texas, a Diana Ross impersonator in Nevada, and the Mississippi River—among many others! In this workshop, she transforms herself, with help from the audience, into a character called Maria the Korean Bride.