calendario eventi  :: 

X

23/1/2009

Two solo shows

Kim Light/ LightBox, Los Angeles

Kim Light/LightBox is pleased to present DREAM-US-09, the first American solo exhibition by Swiss artist Marianne Mueller. Her distinctive style of photographic image making embraces a wide range of subjects--from ephemeral chronicles of her own body and habitation; languid, erotic shots of intertwined nudes; to the banal beauty of peripheral details in the outside world. In DREAM-US-09, her photographic prints are hung in purposefully composed groups, encouraging multivalent connections among works-- relationships that are alternately formal, symbolic, and whose sequence ultimately accumulates its own form of reasoning. Whether the subject of the camera's lens is rumpled bed sheets or an ordinary truck tire; a shadowy thigh or an excavated gravestone; Mueller's approach is distinct.

Repeated throughout her images, there is a characteristic treatment of light and a strategic organization of masses; a perplexing framing and cropping of her subjects to heighten activity in the viewers eye and mind. To that end, black-and-white is typically favored over color and limbs play a larger role than faces in Mueller's regard for the human figure; which is inspected piece by piece, angle by angle. Though Mueller's reservoir of images includes the most interior and intimate passages, the camera's eye treats them with no more or less fascination than the most everyday features of a cityscape. This marriage of intimacy and studied detachment gives a crystalline clarity to the artist's examination of the figure: drawing visceral, fleeting characters formed outside the boundaries of any traditional narrative. Her nudes, in their stark reality, offer not a voyeuristic experience of lives lived; but an event of the camera whose interests and sequences remain mysterious, ornamental, and subject to reversal and reconstitution.

Born in Zurich, Marianne Mueller lives and works in London and teaches at Zurich University of the Arts, Department of Art & Media. Her work has been exhibited internationally in solo shows with: Galerie Susanna Kulli, Zürich; Arndt & Partner, Berlin; Attitudes, Geneva; Center for Visual Art (CAV), Coimbra; Mario Sequeira Gallery, Braga; and in group shows at: Museum of Contemporary Art, Santiago; Neuchâtel Center for Art, Neuchâtel; Winterthur Fotomuseum, Winterthur; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and the Migros Museum for Contemporary Art, Zurich. Public collections include: Kunsthaus Zürich; UBS Art collection; Center for Visual Art (CAV), Coimbra; Fotomuseum Winterthur; and Foundation for Art Today, Kunstmuseum Bern.

..............................

Kim Light/LightBox is pleased to present NO $ DOWN, an exhibition of drawings on paper by Penelope Gottlieb. For nearly a decade, Gottlieb has been producing a series of works addressing the archetypal American dream of home ownership, examining the roles of houses as status symbols, markers of class identity, and focal points of desire. In NO $ DOWN, her colored-pencil drawings catalogue frontal views of Southern California's domestic architecture. The storybook house, the track home, the bungalow, and numerous other familiar faces are indexed in Gottlieb's artistic response to the complex and evolving narrative of real estate in America

To create these encoded and layered variations on the real estate marketing theme, Gottlieb scours newspaper ads in the Los Angeles Times, seizing on the minute photographs of houses published there, with their uniform camera angles and hyperbolic advertising phrases (“Exceptional Feng Shui!,” “Shangri- La Personified!”). In these advertisements, Gottlieb sees a variation of forms on the same meaning, revealing a system of relationships; a syntax. Selecting houses from these advertisements as sources images, the artist creates finely detailed monochromatic drawings, with an atmospheric, dream-like density. These drawings are then matched with vintage frames Gottlieb considers “fixer-uppers,” which she then elaborately “refurbishes” and paints to match the correlating drawing. Intensified by larger transformations in the contemporary perception of home ownership, NO $ DOWN reflects on a subject at once firmly planted in our collective unconscious, and yet proven more fragile now than we ever imagined.

Penelope Gottlieb was born in Los Angeles and grew up next to the infamous housing development, Mt. Olympus. She received her BFA from Art Center College of Design and her MFA from UC Santa Barbara. Her work has been exhibited in numerous venues including the Krannert Art Museum, Otis Ben Maltz Gallery, Michael Kohn Gallery, Contemporary Arts Forum Santa Barbara and the Nathan Larramendy Gallery. Public collections include the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 21c Museum, the Drawing Center New York, the Chicago Art Institute and numerous corporate collections including the Fannie Mae Corporation.

Reception, Saturday, January 24, 6 – 8 pm

Kim Light/ LightBox
2656 S. La Cienega blvd - Los Angeles
Free admission

stampa

permanent link