calendario eventi  :: 

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19/11/2009

Two exhibitions

Pierogi 2000, New York

John Stoney
For your love

Pierogi is pleased to present an exhibition of recent video, sculpture, and drawing by John Stoney. Much of Stoney's work takes the form of a landscape. Through changes in perspective or focus the meaning of the original subject shifts, layering and sometimes obscuring the collective understanding of, in most cases, a place. Working with the history and visual language of the 19th century romantic tradition of landscape painting, Stoney's art re-examines historical and contemporary approaches to the question of whether meaning is inherent in nature or imposed by the viewer.

The video and the show are both titled For your love. The vantage point of the video—looking north along the Hudson River from the battery at West Point—is positioned exactly where a 19th century painter would have stood and shows the familiar view of many well known landscape paintings, with the exception of the middle ground where a kettle of vultures circle. This landscape was carved out of the Hudson highlands by the retreating Laurentide ice sheet about 12,000 years ago. It looks now just as it did then, 12,000 years before the military academy and its attendant philosophies existed, and it will be recognizable as the same landscape 12,000 years after the academy has gone. "The video, as with all the work in the show, conflates romantic love and longing with Freud's Todestrieb or death drive, and the 19th century romantic notions of the sublime and catastrophism with modern scientific understanding of geology and deep time." (Stoney)

Corner Piece (after Caspar David Friedrich’s ‘Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer’), is a sculptural reproduction of the figure in Friedrich’s painting (Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog) and here conflates the point of view of the wanderer and the artist. The figure is taken out of the context of the landscape and his gaze appears isolated as the key component. Friedrich maintained that "The artist should paint not only what he sees before him, but also what he sees within him." Here Stoney traces the connection between the German romantic landscape tradition (in particular, Friedrich’s contribution to it) to the American Hudson River School painters, but he simultaneously removes the figure from the romantic setting thus placing the work within a conceptual framework.

"Often Stoney’s sculptures contain juxtapositions that foreground the relationship between ancient natural phenomena and the modern world, on which mankind has stamped out its place. The Sword and the Stone is a rather playful visualization of this idea. A cast of a petrified log and some surrounding rocks and dirt provides the setting for a tiny cocktail sword, suggesting at once the antiquity of fossils and the ephemerality of contemporary structures of power." (Chelsea Weathers)

The three landscape drawings are colored pencil enlargements of small, 1.5 x 2.5 inch landscape snapshots from the early to middle 20th century that Stoney has collected for their enigmatic beauty; "a beauty which I attempt to understand by applying to landscape photography John Ruskin's belief that drawing from life is the only way to have a true understanding of nature."
The threads connecting all of these works are Stoney’s long-standing love of nature, the beauty of landscape, and his interest in the grand scale of deep geological time and space and our insignificance within it; the insignificance that this artist feels equally in the face of an awe-inducing landscape and a great work of art, and the longing and desire that each produce.

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Johan Nobell
Bugs and Ceramics

Pierogi is pleased to present an exhibition of recent paintings by Swedish artist Johan Nobell. In these new paintings, Nobell continues to develop his unique take on landscape and man’s relation to it, and on the struggle between abstraction and figuration. In these paintings—which at first glance read as landscapes—abstraction does battle with figuration in riotous mash-ups where forms are built up from fragments of this and that, where detritus swirls into the seemingly familiar shapes of horizons, mountains, canyons, seas and, recently, even human forms. Here nature strikes back against its own poisoning and struggles to survive by returning man’s interventions and debris to natural forms. But the poisoning reveals itself and revels in noxious colors and cartoon-esque gestures. Each painting depicts a self-contained world while resisting easy interpretation. In paintings like Desperate Trails, Last Stand, and Hobo Mountain, Nobell suggests evocative and unbelievable narratives, potential scenarios that could be taking shape.

"Nobell’s paintings aren’t really landscapes in any realistic sense of the word. But they do inhabit or haunt a space that is vestigially connected to the high falutin’ language of the romantic sublime, the panoramic vistas of Cole or the luminist landscapes of Martin Joseph Heade. As a phylum of the American landscape sensibility, Nobell’s canvasses owe something to Jim Shaw’s thrift store politics, H.C. Westermann’s take on America… and the ‘impure’ political painting that Philip Guston undertook after turning his back on abstraction…. Like work by these artists, Nobell’s landscapes are born of the jerry-built enclosure, the closed-ground atomic test sites of the 50’s, the amateur politics of the thrift store, the do-it-yourself acid trip, the kitsch counter and the emblem / scrap book." (Tan Lin)

Nobell graduated from Valand University of Art (Gothenburg, Sweden). He was an artist-in-residence at New York’s International Studio and Curatorial Program and has recently exhibited his work in Sweden, Denmark, and elsewhere. He currently lives and works in Stockholm.


Image: John Stoney, The Sword and the Stone, 2007 18 x 42 x 42 inches, polymerized gypsum. A 15.5 Ma petrified Gingko from Utah on a rocky berm. Details

Opening Friday, 20 November (7-9pm)

Pierogi 2000
177 north 9th street Brooklyn, NY 11211
noon to 6p friday through monday and by appointment

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