Hill's "Curls, Kinks, and Waves" sets a stage of fragmented landscapes, wavy horizons and sensual feminine silhouettes. Mark Hagen's first Paris solo exhibition of new paintings and sculptures is entitled "TBA de Nouveau".
Patrick Hill
Curls, Kinks, and Waves
Curls, Kinks and Waves sets a stage — an abstract scene of fragmented landscapes, wavy horizons, and sensual feminine silhouettes. Precisely engineered, the sculptures are constructed from overlapping panes of glass and pieces of marble that are fixed to a wooden base with brass pins. The flatness of these materials exaggerate the sculptures’ facade-like quality while recalling the graphic shapes and imagery of 1980’s design.
The marble is stained with a palate similar to artist David Hockney’s pool paintings. Bright blues splash the wavy edges of marble sheets decorated with neon yellow squiggles, sperm, jelly beans — a pattern repeating throughout the show. The works evoke So Cal beaches, pools, O.P., Esprit and all the surface that came with 1980’s opulence.
Hill’s new work moves away from the blacked-out gravitas seen in his 2008 solo exhibition with David Kordansky Gallery in Los Angeles, attending to issues of market, wealth and regionalism through the whimsical and subtly erotic lines and curves of his beachy tombstones. The unreal (or extra-real?) colors buoy these heavy, sinking grave sites letting the sculptures float throughout the gallery space:
“I like the idea of a floating space, the idea that these sculptures are almost in a state of free fall, that they are in a state of weightlessness”
Patrick Hill
The sculptures, levitating at the command of the artist, are bound and forced to submit again to gravity and time through a subtle fastening system inspired by the clasp on Cartier’s LOVE bracelet.
Born in 1972 in Royal Oak, Michigan, Patrick Hill lives and works in Los Angeles, California
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Mark Hagen
TBA de Nouveau
Almine Rech Gallery presents Mark Hagen’s first Paris solo exhibition of new paintings and sculptures. Mark Hagen was born in 1972 in Black Swamp, Virginia. He lives and works in Los Angeles, California. In TBA de nouveau subtle temporal disorientations are framed and contingencies foregrounded as physical entanglements mirror visual ones. For this show Hagen manipulates the materials of burlap, acrylic house paint, cement, and obsidian through numerous controlled and surrendered processes and serialization to explore categorical slippages of value, history, and vision.
Image: Mark Hagen, Work in Progress, 2011
Opening January 12 2012
Galerie Almine Rech
127, rue du Chevaleret - Paris
Tuesday – Saturday, 11 AM – 7 PM