calendario eventi  :: 

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14/1/2009

Two exhibitions

White Cube, London

White Cube is pleased to present Texas Crude, an exhibition of new paintings by Rosson Crow, her first with the gallery. Crow's large-scale paintings depict grand interior spaces cluttered with the residue of historical occasions.

Although the spaces depicted in Crow's work are devoid of people, there is always a hint of recent activity, as if she has painted the aftermath of a party. Crow usually begins with a reference to a specific historical event, but then allows a diverse range of allusions to enliven and complicate the work, from Baroque and Rococo interior design to cowboy culture and Las Vegas architecture. The combination of enormous scale, rich palette and exuberant application of paint pulls the viewer into a turbulent psychological space. Crow paints assuredly and expressively with broad gestures, but this improvisatory look belies the fact that she develops each work through extensive research and sketch studies, before unleashing with speed on the canvas.

The work in Texas Crude achieves a mood of time collapsing or history repeating itself. In Poverty Partye, a grand, vaulted ballroom bears witness to a scene of debauchery, the remains of a carnivorous feast strewn across a table. The residue of revelry and frenzy contrasts violently with with the room's refined formal setting, suggesting a moment of wild abandonment before the inevitable petering out of the party. The pioneering spirit of turn of the century America is referenced in works such as Wildcattin' in Paradise, which points to an era when the physical and economic landscape of Crow's home state of Texas was transformed by the discovery of oil. 'Wildcatters' were speculators who drilled in areas not previously known to yield oil, and the term originated from the clearance of wildlife in the prospective fields, including feral cats, whose pelts would then be hung from the oil derricks. The dark, earthy palette of the painting intensifies the density of the field, overpopulated as it is by steel machinery contaminating the rural idyll. New York Stock Exchange After Bond Rally features a lavishly decorated room in complete disarray after being disrupted by a rally to promote Liberty Bonds, sold in the US to support the Allied cause in the First World War. The painting's dynamic perspective and radiant patches of illumination draw the viewer deep inside the illusory space, only to be disrupted by oozing drips and splashes thrown across the surface plane. This convergence of painterly styles serves to emphasise the air of artifice. Stage sets, platforms, drapes and ornamental displays indicate a transitory use of a location, as if each painting penetrated a façade, revealing the mechanisms that lurk behind it.

Rosson Crow was born in Dallas, Texas in 1982, and lives and works in Los Angeles. She received her BFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York in 2004 and her MFA from Yale in 2006. Crow completed a residency at Cite Internationale des Arts in Paris in 2006 and has had solo exhibitions at Honor Fraser, Los Angeles; CANADA, New York, and Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris. In 2009, she will have a solo exhibition at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas.

A fully illustrated catalogue, with texts by Jonathan T D Neil and Rosson Crow, will be published to coincide with the exhibition.

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White Cube Hoxton Square is pleased to present the work of Berlin-based artist Andreas Golder in his first exhibition at the gallery. Golder's paintings and sculpture oscillate between figurative forms and broadly worked abstract passages in both naturalistic and expressive idioms.

Golder introduces a variety of pictorial styles and techniques, adds a range of cultural references, from the paintings of Hieronymous Bosch, Lovis Corinth and Philip Guston to the zombie movies of George A Romero, and allows all of these elements to collide in a single painting. Working within the 'memento mori' tradition in Western culture, the artist's dark vision confronts the transience of life and the inevitability of death through a contemporary reworking of the grotesque. In 'Zeitgeist', a skeletal figure genuflects as if at the base of the crucifixion, while the backdrop of glaring light bulbs suggests a modern-day setting. Likewise, in 'Economy', the traditional composition of the Last Supper is reworked as a monstrous feast in a setting that brings to mind a nightclub. But even in this picture the narrative element is overwhelmed by the physicality of the medium: the realistic rendering of elements of the figures - the skulls, eyeballs and tongues - is besmirched by splashes and smears of oil paint cast across the scene. Golder has described his work as occupying an 'area between the realistic and the abstract, the physical and the metaphysical; my paintings are another way of telling a story or a view of the world'. 'The Last Guest' is the first in a series of new sculptures, which Golder considers a three-dimensional rendering of the paintings' gruesome tableaux. A misshapen skeletal figure, lying in a pathetic heap on the gallery floor, looks up pleadingly as if to implore the viewer not to banish him from the scene.

Andreas Golder was born in Ekaterinburg, Russia in 1979, and lives and works in Berlin, Germany. Recent exhibitions include 'It has my name of it' (solo exhibition) at ARKEN Museum of Modern Art, Copenhagen, Denmark (2007), PAINT-O-RAMA (group show) at the Stadtgalerie Kiel, Germany (2006) and Liverpool Biennial Independents 2004.

Image: Rosson Crow

Preview Thursday 15 January 2009, 6-8pm

White Cube
48 Hoxton Square - London
White Cube is open Tuesday to Saturday, 10am to 6pm.
Free admission

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