calendario eventi  :: 

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6/8/2008

Group show

Kamal Mansion, Mumbai

Thomas Erben Gallery is excited to announce a group show of gallery artists held at Chatterjee & Lal, Mumbai. This exhibition establishes many firsts; not only is this the first presence, albeit temporarily, of a foreign gallery in India but, for the first time, diasporic artists such as Chitra Ganesh and Yamini Nayar are seen in Mumbai. Also on view are works by American compatriots Dona Nelson and Krishna Reddy, Korean painter Haeri Yoo, German film artist Matthias Mueller, Lahore based Mahbub Shah, the rarely exhibited Indian artist Kiran Subbaiah and, in his local gallery debut, Ashok Sukumaran.

From its very inauguration in 1996, Thomas Erben Gallery's program has been multidisciplinary and internationally oriented, showcasing emerging as well as established artists. Conceptually minded, the gallery strives to either expose or rediscover work that contributes to contemporary discourse and extends the possibilities of artistic media. Contemporary Art From India, a 2004 group show which included work by Anita Dube, Bharti Kher, Sheela Gowda, Jitish Kallat, Reena Saini Kallat, Gautam Bhatia and Sonia Khurana - publicly marked the gallery's strong involvement with South Asian art and its diaspora within an international gallery context. It was a natural decision to now physically place this extended programming within the context of one of its strong sources of enrichment.

Chitra Ganesh Digital collages. L: Twisted, 2001. 30 x 20.5 in.; R: Sugar and Milk, 2008. 25.5 x 41.5 in. (b. 1977. BA in Art-Semiotics and Comparative Literature, Brown University, magna cum laude, 1996. MFA Columbia University, 2002.) Over the course of her career, Chitra Ganesh's digital collages and works in other media, enriched by an exuberant camp-ness and brimming with queer desire while simultaneously uprooting social expectations and female gender roles, have gained international recognition. Selected exhibitions: Fatal Love, Queens Museum of Art. 2005; Sub-Contingent, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, Italy, 2006; One Way or Another, Asia Society, New York, 2006 (traveling); ZKM Thermocline of Art - New Asian Waves, Karlsruhe, Germany, 2007; Forthcoming: Of this Tale, I cannot guarantee a single word, Royal College of Art, London, 2008; Pandora's Box, Dunlop Art Gallery, Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada, 2008. D.E.N. Gallery, Culver City, CA, 2008. 7 Beauties, Contrasts Gallery, Shanghai - Beijing, 2008. The Empire Strikes Back, Saatchi Museum, London, 2009.

Matthias Müller Still from Promises, 2003. DVD loop, color, silent, 8 mins. (b. 1961. Studied Arts and German Literature at Bielefeld University. Studied Arts at HBK Braunschweig. Master's degree. Guest Professor at Johann Wolfgang Goethe University, Frankfurt/Main. Guest Professor at Dortmund Fachhochschule. Since 2003, Professor in Experimental Film at Academy of Media Arts, KHM, Cologne) For years now, Matthias Müller has been counted among the premier German experimental filmmakers. Using film as a means of expression, Müller's condensed montages lend each frame an added, denser complexity. In Promises, Müller's re-appropriated a group of found wedding portraits from the 1950's, focusing the viewer upon the brides' red rose bouquets. Each still starts to pulsate and digitally bleeds over, morphing into the next, systematically identical, if defunct, totem of love and fidelity. Selected Exhibitions: Album, Stellan Holm Gallery, New York, 2005; As If My Bones Had Turned To Water - Sleepy Haven, Thomas Erben Gallery, New York, 2005; Fair Use: Appropriation in Recent Film and Video, Armand Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, 2005; Le Mouvement des Images - Art, Cinema, Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2006; We Love Cinema, Bard College - Center for Curatorial Studies and Art in Contemporary Culture, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, 2007; Phoenix Tapes (with Christoph Girardet), Sigmund-Freud-Museum, Vienna, 2007; Collateral 2 - When Art Looks At Cinema, SESC Paulista, São Paulo, 2008; The Morning After. Videoarbeiten der Sammlung Goetz, Weserburg - Museum für moderne Kunst, Bremen, 2008.

Yamini Nayar C-prints left to right: Unfamiliar Territory, 2005-6; I Wish, Thank You, 2005-6, both 20 x 24 in.; Underfoot and Overhead, 2008. 30 x 40 in.; Solid, 2005-6. 20 x 24 in. (b. 1975. BFA Rhode Island School of Design, 1999; MFA School of Visual Arts, 2005.) Yamini Nayar's photographs of hand-made, entirely constructed miniature sets of private interiors show a sly neglect for perspective and proportion while highlighting the personal nature of everyday ephemera through a hyphenated narrative. Devoid of figures, our reading of these objects is intensified, as is the tension between Nayar's unstable unification between sculpture and photography. Selected Exhibitions: First Left, Second Right, Thomas Erben Gallery, 2008; ExitArt, New York, 2007; BosePacia Modern, New York, 2006; Fatal Love, Queens Museum of Art, New York, 2005. Forthcoming: Exploding the Lotus, Art and Culture Center of Hollywood, FL, 2008. The Empire Strikes Back, Saatchi Museum, London, 2009.

Dona Nelson Dona Nelson. Untitled, 2003. Acrylic and cheesecloth on canvas, 11 x 14 in. (b.1946. BFA, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, 1968; Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, New York City, 1968.) Dona Nelson is widely regarded as one of the most vital, intellectually considered, aggressively tactile and physically inventive American painters of her generation. Throughout her practice, Nelson has explored the classical distinction between mind and body while maintaining her insistence upon the primacy of her chosen medium. Brief History: Over the years, Nelson's work has received extensive critical support including numerous reviews in the New York Times, Art in America, The New Yorker, The Village Voice, and Artforum. Her work has been favored and discussed by many notable curators and historians such as Lucy Lippard, Klaus Kertess, Lisa Liebman, and Sanford Schwartz. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Weatherspoon Art Museum, the Guggenheim Museum and other important institutions as well as private collections have included Nelson's work in their holdings.

Krishna Reddy The Great Clown, 1975-1982. Simultaneous color intaglio print , 39.5 x 29 in. (plate). (b. 1925. Kala Bhavan, Santiniketan, 1946; Slade School of Fine Arts, London, 1951-53) Celebrated printmaker, innovator and experimenter, Krishna Reddy is a pivotal figure in India's artistic path through Modernism. A student in Santiniketan in the early 1940s, with the European Modernists in London and Paris in the 1950s, and finally moving to the United States in the 1970s, Reddy maintained a singular perspective while experiencing directly many of the 20th century's most influential developments. Renowned for his self-developed 'simultaneous color intaglio prints', Reddy's work fuses a hyper-reductive figuration, with a transcendental understanding of an artist's ability, or rather inability, to master the objects he depicts. Brief History: Krishna Reddy has presented more than 200 solo exhibition of his work throughout the world. His works is in more than 250 international museum and major private collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the British Museum, London; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the National Gallery and Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; the Albertina Museum, Vienna; and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Mahbub Shah Circular Ruins I & II, 2008. Collage on Paper, each 48 x 48 in. (b. 1978. BFA National College of Arts, Lahore, 2001) Mahbub Shah's work references the Pakistani classical miniaturist appreciation of geometric unity and composition by reinventing this detail-oriented genre through his meticulously deconstructionist processes. Through his formal arrangements, Shah's nuanced collage works convert found media materials, i.e. paper discs cut from magazines, into conceptual tools thus establishing a palpable relationship between geometry and aesthetics. Selected exhibitions: Face of the Artist: Self Portraits of our times, Rohtas 2 Gallery, Lahore, 2005; Out of the Box, Zahoor-ul-Akhlaq Gallery, National College of Arts, Lahore, 2005; Beyond Borders, National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai, India, 2005; Punctured and Unravelled, Green Cardamom, London, 2007; Contemporary Art from Pakistan, Thomas Erben Gallery, New York, 2007.

Kiran Subbaiah. L: Lazy Objects 1,2,3 & 4. R: Lazy Object No. 5, 1996. Photograph, 18.75 x 27 in. (b. 1971. BFA, Santiniketan, 1992; MFA/MS, University of Baroda, 1994; MFA Royal College of Art, London, 1999; Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam, 2002-3.) Trained as a sculptor, Kiran Subbaiah has moved away from its constraints working in a wide range of different media, from film to photography and experimental work on the internet. His work though is simultaneously unified by allegory and skepticism both of which are in turn viewed through a nonsensical Dadaist lens. His Lazy Objects 1,2,3 and 4 are finely crafted palanquins for arcane and indolent tools. And in Lazy Object # 5, a photograph, we find the artist himself posing with his sculpture "Absent Angel." The angel has returned to its wings but is napping. Selected exhibitions: Media Arts Asia Pacific Festival, Beijing, China, 2002; LA Freewaves, 9th Biennial Festival of Film, Video and New Media, Los Angeles, 2004; Subcontingent, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, 2006; Forthcoming: Singapore Biennale, 2008; Theatre of Life (Contemporary Art from India), Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, 2008.

Ashok Sukumaran Stills from Two Poles, 2007. Video, 4:45 min. loop. Edition of 3 (+ 1 AP). (b. 1974 in Sapporo, Japan. BA, School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi; MFA, UCLA). Ashok Sukumaran's innovative new-and-old-media interventions into urban infrastructure, subjectify the very public landscapes that house his technically savvy, interactive installations. Viewing the civic terrain as culture and not, as is standard, the framework for culture, Sukumaran's aesthetics of engineering traverse diverse political topics with ease through their public, private and commercial habitats while opening up the ever present and unchallenged paradigms of technology and sociability. Brief History: Over the past years, Sukumaran has produced work in a variety of contexts, including self-initiated projects in Mumbai and Bangalore, commissioned public art in the US, on the media art festival circuit, and at art-world venues including the 2006 Singapore Biennale. His work has received major honors, such as the Golden Nica at the Prix Ars Electronica, 2007, and the First Prize of the UNESCO Digital Arts Award, 2005. He had a show with the Thomas Erben Gallery in spring 2008. Forthcoming: Manifesta 7, Trentino, Italy, 2008; Dhaka Biennial, 2008; Liverpool Biennial, 2008; Indian Highway, Serpentine Gallery and Astrup Fearnley's Museum, Oslo, 2008/2009; P3, London, 2009.

Haeri Yoo L: Half Naked, 2008. Acrylic on canvas, 48 x 60 in. R: Hat blowing, 2008. Mixed media on paper, 32 x 40 in. (b. 1970. BFA, Kyeongbook National University, Korea, 1992; MFA, Pratt Institute, New York, 1997) In her abstract expressionistic cartoon paintings and works on paper, Haeri Yoo, who is known for her ability to weave disrupted narratives of feministic and culturally attuned mayhem, brings together the formal sensibility of her native Korea, psychological tension, outsider art and gestural figuration. Organic lines, pencil scrawls, brightly colored washes and bold patches of paint simplify figures and build accumulations to function around the, at times sad, at times humorous, if always unsettling space between beauty and violence. Selected exhibitions: Pia Maria Martin, Haeri Yoo, Yuh-Shioh Wong, Thomas Erben Gallery, New York, 2007. Fresh illusions, White Box gallery, New York, 2007; Twenty - Twenty, Geoffrey Young Gallery, Great Barrington, MA, 2008; Tatsuya Matsushita, Ai Shinohara, Haeri Yoo, Mehr Gallery, New York, 2008; Defining a Moment, House of Campari Art Exhibition, New York, 2008; Forthcoming: Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, MA, 2008; Forthcoming: Thomas Erben Gallery, New York, 2008.

Opening Reception: Thursday, August 7, 6 - 8:30 pm

Kamal Mansion
Arthur Bunder Road - Mumbai

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