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15/7/2010

Jorge Pardo / Nancy Rubins

Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills

Nancy Rubins
Works for New Space, Stainless Steel, Aluminum, Monochrome I & II

"We all have some history with boats, whether our grandparents came over that way or whether we used them as kids. The canoe, for example, is such a simple form, an ancient form. And it's 100 percent figurative, designed around the human figure."
Nancy Rubins

Gagosian Gallery is pleased to announce "Works for New Space, Stainless Steel, Aluminum, Monochrome I & II," Nancy Rubins' first exhibition in Los Angeles since 2001. The exhibition features two new sculptures, which were assembled on site at the gallery.

A pre-eminent American sculptor, Rubins takes used or discarded industrial materials and objects and transforms them into monumental sculptures whose scale and forceful presence have an overwhelming physical impact. Rubins acts as an intermediary between the past and future states of her chosen materials, crafting them into sculptures while maintaining the discrete identities of their constituents. Her work incorporates objects of consumer culture that sometimes retain visible identifying logos, however she is most interested in their formal qualities and spatial potential than their brand. Her arrangements evoke a precarious equilibrium of objects in space, citing both the traditions of modernist American monumental sculpture as well as bricolage, which emphasize the aesthetic possibilities of quotidian objects. Using these diverse precedents as her foundations, she produces sculptures that brim with the entropic energies and forces of nature.

Boats entered Rubins' sculptural vocabulary in 2000, which she chose for their lightness, mobility, and dynamic structure, as well as their iconographical import. Two massive sculptures, Work for New Space, Stainless Steel, Aluminum, Monochrome I & II, are made up of a variety of used aluminum boats including canoes, insta-boats, jon boats, and rowboats. In both, wire cable connects the boats to each other and to the steel armature, forming a weblike structure of compression and tension that recalls Buckminster Fuller's notion of "tensegrity," where the whole is stronger than the parts. The seemingly monochromatic metal sculptures reveal a subtle yet rich patination on closer examination, from the dents and scrapes of incidental damage to stenciled serial numbers. In a nod to Brancusi that conflates Bird in Space with Endless Column, they rise away from the floor, cantilevering toward each other in mid-flight.

Nancy Rubins was born in Naples, Texas, raised in Tullahoma, Tennessee, and studied at the Maryland Institute, College of Art, Baltimore (BFA, 1974) and the University of California, Davis (MFA, 1976). Her work is included in public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; and FRAC Bourgogne, Dijon, France. Major exhibitions include "Airplane Parts and Building, A Large Growth for San Diego," Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (1994); ARTPACE, San Antonio (1997); The Museum of Modern Art, New York (1995); Miami Art Museum (1999); Fonds regional d'art contemporain de Bourgogne, France (2005); "MoMA and Airplane Parts," SculptureCenter, Long Island City, New York (2006); and "Big Pleasure Point," Lincoln Center, New York (2006).

Nancy Rubins lives and works in Topanga Canyon, California.

For further inquiries please contact Domenica Stagno at domenica@gagosian.com or at 310.271.9400.

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Jorge Pardo
Bulgogi

"That former notion of inside and outside is completely reformulating itself. It happens in a very blunt way - you go to a gallery and then you go outside and realize that the garbage you are looking at on the ground is more interesting, or the car you're getting into. One of the reasons I became interested in the functional was precisely because of that problematic."
Jorge Pardo

Gagosian Gallery is pleased to present "Bulgogi," a new mixed media installation by Jorge Pardo.

Pardo merges art, design, and architecture, drawing on the historical intersections of these disciplines from the Bauhaus to Robert Smithson while interrogating the conventional uses of public and private space. His diverse production range from hand-crafted furniture evoking Modernist designers such as Alvar Aalto and Charles Eames to large-scale, site-specific projects such as the house he designed in 1998 for an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and subsequently moved into. In his designs for both the Mountain Bar in Los Angeles and the lobby and bookshop of the former Dia Foundation for the Arts in New York, Pardo re-imagined public spaces as vivid aesthetic environments. Although his works are not easily categorized, he considers himself to be a sculptor, transforming traditional gallery spaces into installations that often combine his own designs for rugs, lamps, and furniture with paintings to prompt a reevaluation of their respective functions and significance and thus further dissolve the boundaries between art and life.

Bulgogi is the name given to a traditional Korean dish of marinated, barbequed beef, which Pardo uses here as a metaphor for Korean immigration and cultural assimilation in Los Angeles. Transforming the gallery into a domestic environment, Pardo creates a "drawing room" using a kaleidoscopic patterned rug of his own design and wallpaper based on a photo-collage of local Korean-Americans. The wallpaper includes scrapbook images framed by graphic flower cutouts, an evolution of a previous wallpaper installation that mapped the social history of Los Angeles. A series of vibrantly colored "fan paintings" on canvas, based on computer-generated abstractions evokes the push-pull dynamic of modernist abstraction, while a newly designed jewelry cabinet filled with idiosyncratic bracelets, rings and necklaces made of plastic, wood, gold, pearls and diamonds is an adaptation of Pardo's own earlier designs in the new context of the unifying cabinet display and gallery space. This gesture is intended to parallel the assimilation and adaptation of the immigrant population over time.

Jorge Pardo was born in Havana, Cuba in 1963 and studied at the University of Illinois, Chicago and received his BFA from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions including "4166 Sea View Lane," Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1998); Fundació "la Caixa," Barcelona (2004); "House," Miami MoCA North (2007), traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland (2008); K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen (2009); and the Irish Museum of Modern Art (2010). Architectural projects and non-art specific spaces have included creating a café for the Leipzig Messe in Germany, a restaurant for the K21 Museum, and the re-design of the installation for the pre-Columbian collection at LACMA. His work is part of numerous public collections, including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Modern Art, New York and Tate Modern, London.

Jorge Pardo lives and works in Los Angeles.

For further inquiries please contact Sarah Womble at swomble@gagosian.com or at 310.271.9400.

Opening reception for the artist: Friday, July 16th, from 6 to 8 pm

Image: Work for New Space, Stainless Steel, Aluminum, Monochrome I, 2010
Stainless steel, stainless steel wire, aluminum 23'4" x 37' x 43'. Photo by Erich Koyama

Gagosian Gallery
456 North Camden Drive Beverly Hills, CA 90210
Summer Hours: Mon-Fri 10-5:30
Admission free

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