Susanne Kühn at the Lippische Kunstverein

Susanne Kühn
Solo Exhibition
Kunstverein Lippe
Opening: 04/11/10

Presenting a new selection of paintings, Susanne Kuehn will have a solo exhibition at Kunstverein Lippe in Detmold, Germany opening on April 11, 2010.

Scott Hunt in The Morning News

Scott Hunt was recently interviewed by The Morning News, for the full interview click here.

Scott Hunt News

Scott Hunt has been busy recently with a group show with Joe Biel and Cornelia Renz, Exquisite Corpse, which is currently on view at Cream Contemporary in Berlin. The show features the above image "An Homage to Hugh Steers", an artist whose work has influenced Hunt and who is the subject of an online exhibition which Hunt curated for Visual AIDS gallery.
Furthermore, his work was recently featured in a group exhibition at Wartburg College's Waldemar A. Schmidt Art Gallery:

Ahmed Alsoudani reviewed in Art in America

Ahmed Alsoudani's exhibition at Voss Strasse 33, in Berlin, has just been reviewed on Art in America's website.

CLICK HERE for more details

Type A in Art in America

This month's Art in America includes a long feature on Type A.

Oliver Pietsch at the The Flat

The Inner Space
The Flat - Massimo Carasi, Milan
01/12/2009 - 02/13/2010

Oliver Pietsch's film "The Shape of Things" will be on view at The Flat in Milan until mid February.

CLICK HERE for more details

Simon English - Galerie Volker Diehl

SIMON ENGLISH: English Painting 2009-2010 (Below the Belt)
Galerie Volker Diehl, Berlin
11/21/2009 - 01/15/2010

Simon English's new paintings will also be on show at Galerie Volker Diehl until mid January.

CLICK HERE for more details.

Simon English at the Essl Museum of Contemporary Art

ASPECTS OF COLLECTING
ARKEN IHC LOUISIANA MART MdM
MOT MS MSU STÄDEL TATE
20/11/09 – 28/02/10
Opening: 19 Nov 2009, 7.30 p.m.


On the occasion of its 10th anniversary in 2009, the Essl Museum has invited ten international museums to take part in the exhibition project >ASPECTS OF COLLECTING<. All participating institutions and museums received a certain budget and were asked to acquire works of art they considered interesting and significant. The selection was made by the respective museum directors or curators. There were no conditions imposed, there was only the recommendation to focus on contemporary art. The Essl Museum will also contribute its own acquisition scheme. The selected sets of works will be presented in an exhibition at the Essl Museum and will then be made available to the individual museums as permanent loans.

The project partners were primarily selected on the basis of personal contacts established by the art collector Karlheinz Essl, who considered it important to invite not only institutions in Western Europe, but wanted to involve renowned museums with very different cultural and socio-political backgrounds. The wish to enhance future networking and co-operation and foster intercultural exchanges is one of the main driving forces of the project.

CLICK HERE for more information.

iona rozeal brown at the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland

iona rozeal brown
On view January 29th, 2010 through May 16th, 2010

ON VIEW in the William D. Ginn Gallery and Dr. Gerald and Phyllis Seltzer Rotunda Gallery

Organized by MOCA Cleveland

Curated by Megan Lykins Reich, Director of Education and Associate Curator

Recipient of the 2009 Joyce Award, this exhibition features recent and newly commissioned work by Washington D.C.-based artist, iona rozeal brown, who examines the globalization and appropriation of hip-hop culture in vibrant large-scale acrylic paintings. Sparked by her interest in ganguro, a trend in the late 1990's among Japanese teenagers (mostly girls) who were infatuated with looking like African-American hip-hop stars, brown integrates hip-hop's stylistic motifs into the compositional framework of Japan's most illustrious modern artistic tradition: ukiyo-e printmaking. Connecting hip-hop's material culture to the opulent ukiyo-e world of geishas, samurais, and Kabuki actors, brown reveals the malleable, polymorphic nature of history, culture, and identity.

This exhibition will feature a commission of new paintings referencing prints from the collection of the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College. In addition, rozeal brown will be working with select area high school students* in January 2010 to design and paint wooden Japanese screens that will be exhibited in our Rotunda gallery.

CLICK HERE for more information.

Melanie Manchot at Whitechapel

13 January - 14 March 2010
Outset Project Gallery (Gallery 5)
& 176 / Zabludowicz Collection Project Gallery (Gallery 6)


Drawing on traditions of group portraiture at public street parties, Melanie Manchot’s new work explores individual and collective identity through photography and film.

For this commission, Manchot has worked with residents of Cyprus Street, east London, to hold a street party and make a new film. She documents this event with a single tracking shot, capturing residents as they gather in front of the camera. The film bridges still and moving image, to look at the process of forming and dissolving a group portrait. It asks questions about what it means to form a community: both through the collaboration between residents and artist for the party, and in the relationships captured on film among the participants.

The film is shown alongside a new series of photographs made with the residents and a display of archive footage of street parties, such as peace parties in 1919 and 1945. Celebration (Cyprus Street) is part of the Gallery’s Education Programme, which commissions artists and explores the relationships between the Gallery, public spaces and community.

Melanie Manchot is a London-based artist working with photography, film and video.

CLICK HERE for more information

Ahmed Alsoudani Vossstrasse Exhibition

Sadly, Ahmed Alsoudani's exhibition in Berlin had to close early. Thanks to everyone who was able to make it to Vossstrasse, it was a fantastic opening and exhibition. If you were unable to see it in person here are a few photos to enjoy!

Type A at the Tang

Type A "Barrier" is on view at The Tang Teaching Museum, Skidmore College, through January, 2nd.

Ain Cocke -- 21C Museum, Louisville, Kentucky

Ain Cocke is featured in the current show at the 21C Museum Hotel in Louisville, KY. The show, entitled Creating Identity: Portraits Today, includes Ain's painting Das Geheimnis des Garten. The group show also features art by Kenhinde Wiley, Chuck Close, Yinka Shonibare, Vik Munix, and Catherine Opie, among others. The exhibition will be open until April 2010.

Titus Kaphar at Roberts & Tilton

tryharder blog has posted images of Titus Kaphar's current show at Roberts & Tilton in L.A. Click here for more details.

Mont Blanc Prize awarded to Chiharu Shiota

The Montblanc brand is historically and naturally bound to artistic creation, to the art of writing, of expressing thoughts and staging them. This intellectual dimension of the brand is part of its genes and did not stop developing through its products but also through its communication in its widest meaning. It opened itself at multiple artistic forms as classical music, opera, contemporary painting, and more recently cinema and photography.

Montblanc supports numerous projects in those different domains. Particularly through its Cultural Foundation which rewards every year, since 1992, illustrious Arts sponsors in 11 different countries, of which France of course.

It was thus natural to sponsor the Mont Blanc Docks Art fair prize which distinguishes the best of contemporary artistic creation in such eclectic domains.

Chiharu Shiota, the winner of this year's award, will have an exhibition in October in the new shop of the brand, Place Vendôme, in Paris.

The committee, specially joined together for this occasion, is:

Paul Ardenne, art critic and French curator - Paris

Marc Blondeau, modern and contemporary art expert - Geneva

Olivier Houg, Olivier Houg Galerie director, Docks Art fair art director - Lyon

Hélène Kelmachter, cultural attaché of the French embassy in Japan - Tokyo

Ingrid Roosen, worldwide director of the cultural affairs at Mont Blanc - Germany

Kevin Francis Gray in Quebec

(click image to view larger)

Type A Opening at G+R

Fall opening season is beginning in Chelsea. G+R will open with a new installation by the artist duo Type A on September 10th. They've been hard at work for the past month installing a complex maze of hanging plumb bobs in the front gallery space. The final result looks fantastic -- stop by next Thursday evening to see the work and chat with Adam and Andrew.

Jeremy Earhart Collaborates with Designer Tracy Feith

Jeremy has been working with Tracy Feith on a few different exciting projects:

Jeremy's artwork can be seen in the window of Tracy Feith's Williamsburg shop, located at 64 Grand Street. More details to follow, but the artist has produced a line of apparel (t-shirts, sweatshirts, shorts, etc.) featuring his signature graphics that is for sale at Feith's Williamsburg and The Surf Lodge (Montauk, NY) retail locations.


Next up: TEEPEES. The artist recently look a trip out to Montauk, NY with Tracy Feith to participate in the designer's project for the Surf Lodge Teepee Collaborative. Each teepee will be auctioned off, with the proceeds going to support Montauk Skate Park. The teepees will be up until mid-summer, so take a look on your next weekend trip out to the Hamptons.

Check out the construction process (Jeremy can be spotted a few times throughout the video):

London Times Reviews Hayward Gallery Show

Walking in My Mind at the Hayward Gallery, London SE1
Joanna Pitman

The final room in the Hayward’s summer show, Walking in My Mind, contains an installation by a young Japanese artist, Chiharu Shiota. She is one of ten international artists invited to construct installations depicting the contents of their minds, and Shiota’s visualisation of her mental landscape is troubling.

She has filled a large room with a tangled web of black woollen threads, woven around a central group of five white dresses. The threads are densely spun, knotted in and out of one another in a spreading tangle, sticking arbitrarily to the floor and ceiling and quivering like the work of a giant malevolent spider. A narrow tunnel is left unfilled, allowing the visitor to creep around and view her thought processes, her networks of neurons and synapses from the inside.

Shiota has been creating these black webs since 1994 to exorcise her fears. She tells me that she grapples daily with powerful fears of the dark and of death, with childhood fears and anxieties about her identity and her future, and finally, with worries about losing her insecurities, which are what fire her artistic imagination. It is shocking being confronted with such tangible terror.

The curators Mami Kataoka and Stephanie Rosenthal’s concept for this exhibition came from their visualisation of the gallery as a giant head that invites visitors to wander around in the recesses of its mind. Their chosen artists — Yayoi Kusama, Charles Avery, Thomas Hirschhorn, Bo Christian Larsson, Mark Manders, Yoshitomo Nara, Jason Rhoades, Pipilotti Rist, Keith Tyson and Shiota — have constructed some intimately revealing works that allow us the privilege of creeping around inside the privacy of these creative heads.

Hirschhorn has built a giant fantasy brain, Cavemanman, out of curving tunnels and a series of chambers lined with adhesive tape in which you can explore, while physically and mentally losing your way. Inside, there is a wealth of data from Hirschhorn’s mind, philosophical books, girly pin-ups, clocks, piles of detritus in overflowing bins; and throughout there are groups of mannequins wrapped in silver foil, their brains connected with foil arteries.

Kusama, a leading figure in Japanese postwar avant-garde art, has made an installation of mirrors and balloons decorated with red and white polka dots. In this strange, hallucinatory chamber, the visitor quickly loses orientation and perhaps experiences some of the dizzying qualities of Kusama’s singular life.

This show is fascinating and illuminating, and as you emerge, you cannot help wondering how your own mind might be visualised in 3-D.

Hayward Gallery (southbankcentre.co.uk/walking), from today to Sept 6

Isca Greenfield-Sanders in Marie Claire Italy

Goff + Rosenthal Summer Exhibition

featuring works on paper by

Ain Cocke | Simon English | Scott Hunt | Isca Greenfield-Sanders | Faris McReynolds

June 17 - July 24, 2009
Opening Reception
June 17, 5-7 pm

Please note new summer hours:
Monday - Friday, 11am - 6pm

Isca Greenfield-Sanders, A Walk With Daddy, 2008

Direct to plate photogravure and aquatint, 23.5 x 22 inches, 59.7 x 55.9 cms, Edition of 50, $ 1500.00.

In the Studio with Titus Kaphar

Photo Credit: Elizabeth Weinberg

"In the Studio with Titus Kaphar"
Steven Psyllos
GIANT magazine
April 17, 2009

For the past year, 32-year-old artist Titus Kaphar has been prepping for “History in the Making,” his solo exhibit at the Seattle Art Museum, which opened April 3rd. The painter recently purchased a house in Connecticut, where he earned his M.F.A from Yale, and renovated his garage into a studio space. He and his wife also just welcomed their second son into the world. These days, keeping work close to home is a priority because Kaphar is a family man on a tight schedule.

The Setup
“This is my first solo show of this size. A year ago, they flew me out to see the space and we talked about the setup. Then I figured out what works best: Just make the work and stop thinking.”

Letting Go
Kaphar relied heavily on curator Sandra Jackson-Dumont. “You have to work with someone you trust. You have to have a good idea of their vision because then you can let them do that.”

Negotiation
“Four months ago, Sandra came to narrow down what would be included.” Some selections were obvious, while others were not. “There’s a nice piece that I had to pull out. I have conversations with it, like, ‘You figure out what you want yet?’ and it’s not saying. So I’m waiting. [I also ended up] including things I never intended on showing.”

Methodology
Kaphar’s work is more than painted canvases—he shreds them, crumples them into balls and stitches them together. “If I’m feeling hyped, then it’s time to deconstruct or do a drawing. If I’ve got that focused energy, then it’s time to paint.”

Time Management
With a small family and a budding career, Kaphar doesn’t play. “I get up at 5:30 A.M—my newborn doesn’t sleep—then I get my two-year-old up at 7:00 A.M., make breakfast. At 9: 30 A.M., I come into the studio and my here until 7:00 P.M. All that romantic ‘Ah, I gotta wait to be inspired’ kind of thing is gone.”

Flavorpill visits G+R

Thanks to Noémie Bonnet of Flavorpill for this review:

Iraqi-born American painter Ahmed Alsoudani builds tumultuous compositions about violence, war, and human suffering, juxtaposing human and bestial figures whose violent disembodiment seems to unfold right on the canvas. Within these surreal landscapes, art-historical references abound, including allusions to Picasso's Guernica, Bacon's overhead lights, and Bosch's Fall of the Rebel Angels. Painterly elements in disconcertingly vivid colors are placed alongside sections of charcoal drawings on un-primed canvas, letting the mood sway unsteadily somewhere between beautiful and haunting.

Event page on Flavorpill.com

History in the Making: Titus Kaphar Cuts up to Rebuild

Michelle Carlson
Art in America
May 20, 2009

History has a certain way of being selfish-the past is often understood through its inequities and linear narratives, static lines marching forward that are capped by dates, deaths, and wars -- by way of the winners and occasionally, the losers. Personal and collective trauma can be difficult, if not impossible to articulate, as many are left out (sometimes, on purpose). When those who have lived through history are gone and the voices of their retelling have long faded past fables and cautionary tales, how will those lessons be recounted? Will they fall into the vast fissures of histories lost? In "History in the Making," on view at the Seattle Art Museum, artist Titus Kaphar's sculptural paintings challenge canonical representations of history and memory by collapsing past into present.

Article continues...

Kevin Francis Gray in Venice

Kevin Francis Gray opens show in Venice

Kevin Francis Gray has been working on a new piece, entitled "Black Metal Martyr," that will be included in his upcoming show presented by Changing Role Move Over Gallery of Napoli and Rome. The show will take place in Venice's Palazzo San Pasquale Campo di San Francesco della Vigna, which Kevin thinks is a perfect venue for his work with its references to classical sculpture.

Ahmed Alsoudani in Artnet

Advance write up on show opening tonight by Charlie Finch:

What kind of art would you make if you were always on the run? If you lived in fear of arrest and were always moving across borders from one strange place to another? And how would your art practice change if you suddenly landed in the lap of luxury?

These questions arise from the life and work of Iraqi artist Ahmed Alsoudani, a man who defaced a poster of Saddam Hussein on a whim when he was a teenager and now, at 33, finds himself opening a solo show of new paintings at Chelsea's Goff + Rosenthal Gallery this weekend. After the minute Ahmed defaced Saddam, he was a marked man, who fled to Syria, living four dicey years there as a kind of non-person.

article continues...

Ahmed Alsoudani Opening at G+R

Pietsch Week

live Twitter feed from last night's event
www.twitter.com/goff_rosenthal

PIETSCH WEEK at G+R

Facebook event page

Update on Jeremy Earhart

Goff + Rosenthal artist Jeremy Earhart will be helping out friends FreeTime, the Brooklyn-based band, prepare for their upcoming show at MonkeyTown in Williamsburg. The show promises to be a great event; the band played at Goff + Rosenthal for the closing event of Jeremy's show The Thin Ice of Modern Life in February. For more info on the event, here's the page on MonkeyTown's site: FreeTime at MonkeyTown -- Saturday 4/18/09 @ 10:30 pm.

Scott Hunt in NY Arts Magazine

Scott Hunt discusses how he uses found photography as a part of his creative process in the current Spring 2009 issue of NY Arts Magazine. The full article is on the magazine's website: DRAWING, Lost and Found: Scott Hunt.

Seattle Times reviews Titus Kaphar's show at SAM

Photo Credit: Jim Bates, The Seattle Times
Article by Jerry Lange, Seattle Times Staff Columnist

PAINTER CHALLENGES HISTORY WITH SEATTLE ART MUSEUM EXHIBIT
Titus Kaphar gives history a chance to live in the present.

Titus Kaphar gives history a chance to live in the present.

He's a young painter who had turned his passion for history into a body of work that asks contemporary questions of historically significant paintings, mostly from the 18th and 19th centuries.

The question he asked George Washington drew me to a showing of Kaphar's work, which opened at the Seattle Art Museum Friday and runs through Sept. 6.

Kaspar copied part of that famous painting of George Washington crossing the Delaware, just showing Washington and two dark hands on an oar. He made it big, then he cut Washington out and turned him upside down, making the painting look like a giant playing card.

Washington gambled with the lives of an entire people by not trying to end slavery.

He called the painting "George, George, George." Kaphar told me it's meant to be said in exasperation. He knows the complex situation Washington faced and the turmoil that shows up in Washington's diaries, but still.

Kaspar said Washington's writings show he "clearly understood that this is a sin, that it is unjust, that it is evil," but he did nothing about it.

Those two black hands on the oars start to look like fists.

For the full article, please visit the website of the Seattle Times.

Ahmed Alsoudani in DER SPIEGEL and Titus Kaphar at SAM

Ahmed Alsoudani is the subject of a recent article in the German publication DER SPIEGEL entitled "Star of the Hour." To read the full article in German or the translated version in English, please navigate to the press section of Ahmed's artist page on the G+R website: http://www.goffandrosenthal.com/alsoudani_press/

Additionally, congratulations to Titus Kaphar for opening his solo show at the Seattle Art Museum today. The exhibit kicked off last evening with an opening reception. For more info on his show and to watch a video of the artist speaking about his work, please view the website of the Seattle Art Museum: http://www.seattleartmuseum.org/exhibit/exhibitDetail.asp?eventID=15647

Upcoming Museum Shows

G+R artists are several opening museum shows in the following weeks, so here's a summary of what's going on:

-- Titus Kaphar at the Seattle Art Museum, April 3–September 6, 2009 (more information here)

-- Susanne Kühn at Forum Kunst Rottweil in Rottweil, Germany, March 29-May 10, 2009
Opening Reception with the artist, March 28, 2009 at 7.00 pm (with introduction to the exhibit by Robert Goff)

--Chihara Shiota is participating in a group show that opens at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, in Kanazawa, Japan on April 18, 2009 and will remain up until August 30, 2009.

-- More information to follow about Pietsch Week, a weeklong screening of Oliver Pietsch's films in mid-April at our NY gallery.

iona rozeal brown at the MAM

From the Milwaukee Art Museum:

Listen to iona rozeal brown as she talks about her painting sacrifice, on view in the Museum's New Acquisitions and Rotations Gallery, and her artistic influences. Her painted subjects come from the idea of the Ganguro, which literally means "black face," and fashion-conscious Japanese teenagers. She combines this imagery with 17th- and 18th-century Japanese woodblock prints of geishas, bathhouse girls, samurai, and Kabuki theater actors. The results are extreme hybrids, the combination of traditional Japanese imagery with an overtly hip-hop stylization.

Simon English and Susanne Kühn News

Simon English is included in the show, "New Acquisitions: 2007-2008," at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark. The Museum has recently acquired one of Simon's works from the fall show at Goff+Rosenthal. The show will run from March 5 - September 20, 2009.

Additionally, Susanne Kühn will be opening her a solo show at the Forum Kunst Rottweil in Germany on March 29th, which will feature new paintings by the German artist. If you happen to be in Rottweil, the opening reception is on March 28th at 7:00 pm. The show will remain up until May 10th.

artnet.de coverage of Art Dubai

Goff+Rosenthal was featured in an article that appeared on artnet.de. For the full article (in German): please click here.

English translation of section discussing G+R:
In general, expectations were lowered as a precaution. Nevertheless, individual gallery owners have reported good sales on Tuesday, including Michael Schultz from Berlin and Goff+Rosenthal, who due to lacking inflow, recently closed its Berlin branch, but continues its presence in New York. In Dubai, Goff+Rosenthal has presented the large oil paintings of Ahmed Alsoudani, which behind the seemingly decorative surface reveal a violently charged atmosphere a la Francis Bacon. The Iraqi born Alsoudani lives in Berlin and was given a lot of space recently in the exhibition "Unveiled - Art from the Middle East" at the Saatchi Gallery in London. "That has certainly helped," says Robert Goff unreservedly. Because in these tense times a small miracle has occurred: even before the opening all the images were reserved (55,000 - 65,000 USD / ca. 42,000 - 50,000 EUR). Goff held back a single piece: "So we still have something to sell".

Interview with Ahmed Alsoudani in Art Dubai Journal

http://www.artdubai.ae/journal/2009/march/Ahmed_Alsoudani.html

Ain Cocke in VMAN

Nicholas Weist interviewed Ain in the latest issue of VMAN magazine. Full text available here: http://www.vman.com/blog/soldiers-in-arms/#more-591

iona dj's after party at Collette Blanchard Gallery

iona rozeal brown dj'd late into the night on March 7th at Collette Blanchard Gallery bringing Armory weekend festivities to a close

Chiharu Shiota in Summer Show at Hayward

G+R artist Chiharu Shiota will participate in a group show at the Hayward Gallery in London this summer!

Art Dubai

G+R has been busy this week getting ready for Art Dubai. If you're in the Middle East, check out our booth with a solo show of five of Ahmed Alsoudani's new works! TimeOut Dubai has posted a great article with an overview of the fair that highlights must-see participating galleries and artists from each continent.

iona rozeal brown speaks at MAM

If you happen to be in Milwaukee today, head to the Milwaukee Art Museum to hear G+R artist iona Rozeal Brown talk about her latest work:

Artist Lecture: a3(afro-asiatic allegory) with iona rozeal brown

THURSDAY, MARCH 5, 6:15 PM

Come listen to iona rozeal brown as she talks about her painting sacrifice, on view in the Museum's New Acquisitions and Rotations Gallery, and her artistic influences. Her painted subjects come from the idea of the Ganguro, which literally means "black face," and fashion-conscious Japanese teenagers. She combines this imagery with 17th- and 18th-century Japanese woodblock prints of geishas, bathhouse girls, samurai, and Kabuki theater actors. The results are extreme hybrids, the combination of traditional Japanese imagery with an overtly hip-hop stylization.

Sponsored by the Contemporary Art Society and African American Art Alliance
Lubar Auditorium
Free with Museum admission

AIN COCKE - opening on Friday, March 6

Goff + Rosenthal is proud to present Ain Cocke’s first solo exhibition in New York.

Ain Cocke’s lurid and flamboyantly “traditional” portraits of male World Wars I and II era soldiers recall Rococo artists such as Boucher and Fragonard as well as the Neue Sachlikeit painter Christian Schad. These two historical points of reference—pre-Revolution France and 1920s Weimar Germany—give context to Cocke’s painfully pretty pictures. “These periods of history and art history interest me,” says Cocke. “They were strange times for painting and life. A new time is coming and painting is transforming again as we get closer to the event.” With intimations of radical change, Cocke addresses the current cognoscenti’s suspicion of painting by pushing hard on the very buttons that irk it the most: the decorative, the figurative and a seemingly kitsch nostalgia. He creates a kind of Neue Rococo style for a world about to fall apart, again.

A central undercurrent running through this body of work is a personal meditation on male intimacy and its peculiar shifting definitions and its problems. Says Cocke: “The difficulties of male intimacy have always intrigued me. Since I was young, I have had difficulty understanding the now apparent, invented narrative of masculinity. For me, the act of making these works is an actual intimate moment between myself and the phantasms of the masculine iconic.” These iconic “phantasms”—World War-era soldiers—relate to the theory that a shift occurred in the nature of masculinity around this time. Gender theorists and historians have posited that the first half of the 20th century was the end of a period where male intimacy was allowed without the burden of specific identities like “homosexual,” which imposed restrictions on behavior between men as much as clarified and codified it.
Georges Bataille wrote that “an aura of death is what denotes passion,” connecting the intimacy of lovers with its opposite: violence and the fear of departure. The subjects of Cocke’s work, soldiers and men of war, are both archetypal in terms of their maleness and representative of the brutality, or the tyranny of love—“Violence is an expression of love,” says the artist. These portraits are intimately close, yet historically displaced and out of reach. Cocke has taken an already idealized image—the original photograph of a subject, now transformed beyond recognition by age or death—and added exponentially to the intensity the subject’s idealization through his depiction in paint.

Ain Cocke (rhymes with “smoke”) is a native of California and currently resides in China. He has shown his work in group exhibitions at Deitch Projects, Marc Selwyn Fine Art and Goff + Rosenthal Berlin, among others. He received his MFA from Yale in 2004.

New Susanne Kühn catalogue available

Susanne has sent us the link to a new catalogue of her work which has just been published by Forum Kunst Rottweil. The catalogue, priced at 18 euros, will be available through the publisher's website.

[translated version of text on publisher's page]
“Beauty is something that is sought after,” says Susanne Kühn in a studio visit with Elke Buhr. And the pictures and drawings by the 1969 Leipzig-born artist operate in spaces that are as truly artificial as they are aesthetic. Susanne Kühn cites both the Renaissance painting and its gorgeous interiors, fabrics and furnishings, as well as the Japanese woodcut. A dynamic is created through the juxtaposition of different pictorial systems and the area of the space.

When Susanne Kühn speaks of her painting, she likes using terms like "painting control panel" and "research lab". For someone who studied at the School of Visual Arts, Leipzig, she has mastered the technique and is able to concentrate on the essence of painting: exploring the possibilities of the image. Hence Kühn’s paintings and drawings possess an equally aesthetic and intellectual game. So far, Susanne Kühn has primarily been received in the context of the Leipzig school and an expanded concept of realism and as well as a new romanticism. In the new works from 2007-2009, it might also become apparent that this artist living in Freiburg is undertaking a renewal of the still life and portrait painting. These new works will be shown for the first time at Kunstforum Rottweil.

NY Arts Mag Interviews Ain Cocke

Ain Cocke recently spoke with Colter Jackson of NY Arts Magazine to talk about his work, his fascination with visual memory, and way in which memory changes. INTERVIEW HERE

Save the date - Ain's solo show will be opening at G+R on March 6th! More details to follow.

NY Press coverage of studio visit

NY Press was in attendance at Jeremy's studio visit last weekend in Brooklyn. Justin Richards posted an article detailing the night, from guests' varying interpretations of Jeremy's Rorschach-like imagery to the difficulty of fully understanding an artist's inspirations when viewing a gallery show. CHECK IT OUT HERE

Susanne Kühn at Forum Kunst Rottweil

A solo exhibition of Susanne Kühn's work will be on show at the Forum Kunst in Rottweil from March 29th until May 10th. For more information please see the Forum Kunst website.

Slideshow from Saturday night

Click images to link to our Flickr slideshow:
All images by Tod Seelie.

www.flickr.com

Also, check out art blogger Olympia Lambert's post after her night at Jeremy's studio.

Closing Party, Titus speaks at the SAM

Thanks to everyone that came out for our closing party in celebration of Jeremy Earhart's The Thin Ice of Modern Life last Saturday evening. FREE TIME was the perfect accompaniment to Jeremy's work in the black light ambience!

There was a very cool little article on MetroMix about the night with a slideshow of pictures. If you weren't at Jeremy's studio in Brooklyn beforehand, be sure to look for the plexiglas factory in his basement.

On another note: Video coverage of Titus Kaphar, recent winner of the Gwendolyn Knight and Jacob Lawrence Fellowship at the Seattle Art Museum, speaking about his plans for his upcoming solo exhibit this fall at the SAM.

Works by Simon English's from his solo show at G+R this November have found new homes -- Jemima Puddleduck (along with a few others) will go to the Essl Museum in Vienna, and Mobile or Gob-stopper will be at the Lousiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark.

Check out the website of the Lousiana (they just opened the first ever major Max Ernst show to hit Denmark!): http://www.louisiana.dk

Titus Kaphar wins Fellowship at Seattle Art Museum

Titus Kaphar has been named the winner of the inaugural Gwendolyn Knight and Jacob Lawrence Fellowship at the Seattle Art Museum. The $10,000 award and a solo exhibit at the Museum will be given out biannually to a young black artist who is in their early career. 

Titus's show will run from April 3 - September 6, with more information to follow as the date gets closer. 

Full article on ARTINFO

Join us for our first "Artist Tailored Event" with Jeremy Earhart

ARTnews review of Isca Greenfield-Sanders at G+R

If you missed out on seeing Isca's solo show at the gallery in September, here's your chance to read about it! ARTnews published a review of the show in the January 2009 issue.

Sasha Lee with Jeremy Earhart: Beautiful/Decay

Sasha Lee of Beautiful/Decay Magazine spoke with Jeremy in an interview published on B/D site. Jeremy opens up on the Plexiglas factory in his Brooklyn studio, his childhood fascination with Lite Brites, and the symbols of a universal Americana that inform his work.

Read the entire interview: Jeremy Earhart by Sasha Lee.

iona rozeal brown wins Joyce Award

iona Rozeal Brown has been named an 2009 Joyce Foundation Award winner. The Joyce Foundation, based in Chicago and serving the cities of Chicago, Cleveland, and Detroit, supports the artistic endeavors of artists of color. Brown (in collaboration with the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland) will receive a $50,000 grant to create a new series of work commissioned by the MOCA and to participate in an on-site artist residency program working with advanced high school arts students from the Cleveland area. The students will work alongside the artist to develop a series of painted wooden screens, while other students film a documentary of Brown to be shown during her 2010 exhibition at the MOCA along with all of her work from the new series.

Check out the slideshow of pictures from the awards ceremony in Chicago (G+R Associate Director Jessica Sain was there!) and short video of iona herself on the Joyce Foundation site.