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.