calendario eventi  :: 

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10/1/2003

2 exhibitions

Elizabeth Dee Gallery, New York

KEVIN LANDERS
MAIN GALLERY
CARL OSTENDARP
GALLERY 2

Elizabeth Dee is pleased to announce exhibitions by Kevin Landers and Carl Ostendarp in the gallery at 545 West 20th Street. Kevin Landers presents new photographs and sculptures in the main gallery. In gallery 2, fifteen gouaches on paper represent the last fifteen years of Carl Ostendarp's work. There will be an opening reception for both artists on Saturday, January 11, from 6 to 8 pm.

In his sixth solo exhibition in New York, Kevin Landers pictures the urban vernacular with a unique and uncanny sensibility. His photographic work seeks out the spontaneous banality of the street and its ephemera, chiefly around his home in New York's East Village. Landers's documentation of everyday objects furthers the tradition of street photography while lending it a wry poetry and edgy humor. A metal grate clogged with cigarette butts, candy wrappers, and other, less identifiable detritus contrasts the chaos of trash with the failed order of the grid that frames it. Other photographs highlight the displaced object; an open guitar case, empty save for a few coins and a lone cigarette, becomes a visual metaphor with the artist's customary economy and grace.

Landers's three sculptural works complete the installation in the main gallery and portray the same types of mass-produced, prosaic objects that appear in his photographs. Crafted by hand by the artist, they emphasize those objects' improvisational character, and their poignant physical and psychological presence. A stack of black metal and red vinyl chairs look as through they belong in a Chinatown restaurant, but are facsimiles; handmade of similar materials they project a subtle awkwardness. A fragile handcart made of wire holds replicas of three-dollar umbrellas in a variety of patterns. The largest work covers the gallery's back wall with sixty Plexiglas shelves holding Landers's sculptural version of Niketown. Each sneaker is made from various felts and plastics, plasticine, tubing, and lacing; displaying the funny obviousness of its making.

Concurrent with the exhibition Carl Ostendarp: 189 Drawings at the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in Ridgefield, Connecticut (January 19ÃMarch 23, 2003), the gallery will exhibit fifteen drawings in gallery 2 representing the development of Carl Ostendarp's imagery over the last fifteen years. This will be the first time works from the different periods of the artist's career will be shown together. From the late 1980s and early Ã90s works that play unabashedly with the inherent abstraction of paint, through the development of biomorphic imagery as universal biography, this collection of drawings shows the range of the artist's styles and concerns.

Image: Kevin Landers, Unititled (Grate, New York) 2002, C-print, 30 x 40 inches (detail).

Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 11AM to 6PM and by appointment.

Elizabeth Dee Gallery
545 W 20th Street
New York City 10011
T 212 9247545

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