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27/3/2015

Two Exhibitions

Galeria Leme, Sao Paulo

Eugenio Espinoza

Since the late 1960s, Eugenio Espinoza has perpetually challenged, explored and embraced art historical conventions in his prodigious output of installations, photography, paintings, drawings and sculptures. His practice evidences a profound and rigorous conceptual exploration of modernist traditions (Minimalism, Arte Povera, Geometric Abstraction) and an equally persistent and powerful conceptual and physical reworking of his own oeuvre.

Espinoza is best known for his monochromatic, minimalistic and nonfigurative manipulations of grid forms. Producing works as a reaction to the dominant tendencies of geometric abstraction and Kinetic art in Venezuela.

His series of Impenetrables are considered Espinoza’s most relevant pieces and one of the few breakthrough works of the international avant-garde in the last 35 years. A true creative synthesis that reformulates Gego’s structuralist geometry, Soto’s and Oiticica’s Penetrables, and Walter de Maria’s Earth Room, into Espinoza’s own and memorable contribution to the history of painting.

The first Impenetrable, made in 1972, was a painting of a black grid on raw canvas. The painting was the same size as the room. It was exhibited horizontally, at knee-level, preventing viewers from entering the space. While inviting consideration of its immediate context of presentation, the Impenetrable, if read metaphorically, also tackled the politics of a continent where ideas of equitable distribution of wealth or of social justice certainly found their paths blocked. As critics immediately recognized, the piece channeled the most progressive tenets of Latin American geometric abstraction.

For his first solo exhibition at Galeria Leme, the artist presents two distinct bodies of never before seen works. One of them connected to the investigations after his first Impenetrable, and the other, related to the testing and development of his creative process.

After his initial Impenetrable, Espinoza grew bolder and started experimenting with his painting beyond conventional display methods and outside exhibition spaces, formulating an institutional critique based on the viewer’s spatial experience.

The first body of works exhibited at Galeria Leme, is composed by a group of photos, taken by Espinoza himself, during his show at Conkright Gallery in 1973. On the exhibition, rolls of fabric with a black grid printed on them (with the same dimensions as the one used on the Impenetrables) was accessible to the public who was invited to cut pieces from it and use them as they wanted. The audience used both the interior of the gallery as well as the street outside as stages for their own “performances”, while the artist photographed them.

A selection of these photos was shown for the first time in Miami in 2006 at CIFO and another small selection of these same photos was shown at INOVA, Milwaukee 2007. Some of these photos are being showcased at the Perez Art Museum, Miami, USA, part of the exhibition Eugenio Espinoza: Unruly Supports (1970 – 1980).

The second body of work is composed of a group of collages from 2003.

By using simple means the artist constructs a system based on possibilities in order to test and carry on his work, while avoiding getting trapped in preconceived ideas and safe paths.

In some of these collages, Eugenio uses photocopies of images taken from the catalog of his first show at the Museo de Bellas Artes in Caracas in 1972. Using the images of the paintings, with their geometric shapes, as a background in which he intervenes upon, introducing new planes of almost organic forms.

The artist does not shy away from mixing medias in order to expand the field of possible results. In some cases gluing canvas with white plaster and blending it with the white photocopy paper. In others, using raw canvas just like the ones in 1972. In two of these works he appropriates the image of Reina Maria Lionza, the great goddess of the popular religion of Venezuela, photocopying a postcard and then painting a black grid on top of the religious figure.

For this solo show Eugenio presents two crucial moments of his artistic research. This small excerpt of his extensive work is not only an important insight into the creative process of one of the most significant Latin-American artists, but maybe it can also be understood as a hint of what else might be coming from his still poignant artistic production.

About the artist:

Eugenio Espinoza was born in 1950 in San Juan de los Morros, Venezuela. Lives and works in Archer, FL, USA.

He has exhibited in the United States and internationally in museums and gal¬leries. His work is in the permanent collections of the Tate Modern, London, U.K.; the Fine Arts Museum of Houston, USA; Perez Art Museum Miami, Miami, USA; Museum of Latin American Art, Long Beach, USA; Museo de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, Brazil; Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Museo de Bellas Artes, Caracas, Venezuela; Galeria de Arte Nacional, Caracas, Venezuela; Museo de Arte Contemporaneo, Caracas, Venezuela; Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Bogota, Colombia; The Cisneros Collection, New York, USA and the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation, Miami, USA, among others.

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Jessica Mein: Tramas



Tramas is Jessica Mein’s second solo show at Galeria Leme. The artist presents wall-based works and spatial structures. With this new body of work, Mein deepens her research on the physicality and spatiality of images and further subverts the boundaries and hierarchies between image and the support that sustains it, surface and structure.

Mein’s work focuses on the increasingly obsolete visual materials from Dubai and São Paulo, which are being substituted by high-tech alternatives. Her fascination with the nearly extinct billboard structures and papers in São Paulo, as well as the hand printed hemp bags found in dry-goods markets around Dubai, is rooted in an investigation of the systems of production and dissemination of images throughout the urban space, and our consequent mental and physical relation to these processes and products.

As a contrast to the overwhelming ease and speed images are produced and circulated nowadays, Mein’s physical interventions are highly laborious, slow and complex.

Mein combines billboard fragments, originally discarded due to printing errors, with the manual imprints from the hemp bags that are generally used to transport rice. The artist uses the hemp as a source of imagery, surface and support for her works. A new image is then superimposed to the one that previously existed on the hemp bag. She also scans sections of hemp bags and transfers them as images onto blank hemp. She then unthreads, rips and cuts the material, in a manual process that is inevitably doomed to errors and imperfections. By doing this, the artist simultaneously reveals the constitution of the fabric, decomposing it to its threads and fibers, and also exposes the structure sustaining the work, showing the wooden frames behind the hemp.

This inversion between structural backstage and image is taken further with a group of freestanding wooden installations that are spread around the exhibition space physically confronting the viewer with their size and scale. The formal qualities of these quasi-architectural constructions simultaneously echo the works on the walls, as well as the precarious urban structures that hold up large images. Here, the support elements become as important as the de-constructed images.

In a constant oscillation between construction and the subsequent sabotage of her own works, Jessica Mein’s exploration ranges from the micro-scale of the hemp’s fibers to the macro scale of the spatial structures reminiscent of the billboards placards. By altering and experimenting with her works to their most basic architectures, the artist questions the authority of the image as the all-encompassing contemporary commodity.

About the artist:

Born in São Paulo, Brazil, 1975. Lives and works in Dubai, where she is currently a resident artist in the A.i.R. program run by Art Dubai, Delfina Foundation, Dubai Culture and Arts Authority and Tashkeel.

Among her solo exhibitions are: Obras, Simon Preston, New York; The Pavilion Downtown, Dubai.
As well as the group shows: The Street Files Biennial, Museo del Barrio, New York; The Julia Stoschek Foundation, Dusseldorf; Wellin Museum, Hamilton College, New York; Museo Tamayo de Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico; Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde, Dubai; Drawing Center, New York; New York University, Abu Dhabi; Harvard University, Cambridge, USA.

Her work is included in collections at The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Julia Stoschek Foundation, Dusseldorf; and Museu de Arte Contemporânea, São Paulo.

Image: Eugenio Espinoza Participaciones, 1973

Opening: March 28th, 12pm

Galeria Leme
Av. Valdemar Ferreira, 130
Sao Paulo
Mon - Fri 10am to 7pm, Sat 10am to 5pm

stampa

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