News

CONTEXT MIAMI 2014

Posted on by Mike

 

CONTEXT Booth E31
2901 NE 1st Avenue  |  Miami, FL 33137

December 3 – 7, 2014  |  11am – 8pm, daily
VIP/Press Preview: December 2, 2014  |  5:30pm – 10pm

Jonathan LeVine Gallery is pleased to announce its programming for CONTEXT in booth E31 featuring works by Brett Amory.

Amory’s paintings portray abstracted studies of urban life through fragmented cityscapes and anonymous, isolated figures. Based on photographs he has taken of ordinary city architecture, as well as people who he sees on a daily basis but never speaks to, the exhibited works are part of the ongoing series entitled Waiting. In conjunction with paintings from the Waiting series, Amory will create site-specific installations around two of the works and present a sampling of portraits from his Anonymous series.

As the title suggests, the Waiting series is about how we rarely experience living in the now, always awaiting what will come next. In our age of distraction, being in the present is difficult to achieve, it requires heightened cognitive awareness and clear mental space, often prevented by constant internal dialogue, preoccupation with memories of the past and/or concern for the future. Amory’s work attempts to visually represent this concept of disconnection and anticipation, conveying the idea of transient temporality that exists in most moments of our daily lives.

For Context, the exhibited works from Amory’s Waiting series will depict several locations in Miami. Jumbo’s, a 24-hour diner located in Miami’s Liberty City neighborhood was the first Caucasian-owned restaurant to employ and serve African Americans. Operated by the Flam family since 1955, the artist was able document the establishment’s final night before permanently closing its doors on July 23, 2014. In Waiting #212, a brightly colored sign reading, “Jumbo’s”, reigns above the pitch-black night sky as a solitary, African American man enters the fluorescent lit diner. Additional locations include: Café Versailles, Club Deuce, La Sandwicherie, Overtown and Tobacco Road. 

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Brett Amory was born in 1975 in Chesapeake, Virginia and is currently based in Oakland, California. In 2005, Amory received a BFA from Academy of Arts University in San Francisco. Amory’s work has been exhibited in galleries in Los Angeles, San Francisco, London and New York. In 2012, The San Francisco Bay Guardian named him artist of the year with a cover story. He has also been featured in publications such as The Huffington Post and New American Paintings. Amory’s forthcoming monograph will be released in the spring of 2015.

 

Recap Greetings From NYC

Posted on by Mike

Last month Jonathan Levine Gallery presented Greetings From New York City, in association with Urban Nation Berlin. The project included a group exhibition featuring works by 12 artists and a large scale public mural by DALeast.

Images courtesy of the artist and Henrik Haven.

 

In addition to the mural, 5 artists in the exhibition also created new works on 10×10 foot panels, which were placed in windows on the ground floor of Urban Nation. These pieces are visible to the general public and will become part of the future museum’s permanent collection after the exhibition closes. The artists included Dan Witz, Jeff Soto, Olek, Saner and Nychos.

 Photos be Henrik Haven

 

Fabio D’Aroma featured on Hi-Fructose

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Fabio D’Aroma’s “West of Ovest” at Jonathan LeVine Gallery

by Nastia Voynovskaya
October 31, 2014
 
Painter Fabio D’Aroma’s characters perpetually march westward, though it’s unclear to what end. His nude men and women with protruding bellies and knobby limbs appear to be part of an endless procession. D’Aroma adorns them with anachronistic accouterments such as 19th-century bayonets, animal pelts and punk rock mohawks, making it impossible to determine the continuity between the various works in the series. His highly stylized paintings are currently on view at New York’s Jonathan LeVine Gallery through November 8 for his solo show, “West of Ovest.” The artist says that our culture’s crippling obsession with social media — and the resulting social awkwardness — was the inspiration behind his ungainly figures.
 

 

http://hifructose.com/2014/10/31/on-view-fabio-daromas-west-of-ovest-at-jonathan-levine-gallery/

 

Greetings from New York City

Posted on by Mike

Greetings from New York City:
Jonathan LeVine Gallery Visits Berlin

Group exhibition at Urban Nation
Bülowstrasse 97, 10783 Berlin, Schoneberg, Germany

October 25—November 28, 2014
Opening Reception: Saturday, October 25, 8pm—Midnight
Gallery Hours: Monday—Friday, 10am—6pm

Jonathan LeVine Gallery is pleased to present Greetings from New York City: Jonathan LeVine Gallery Visits Berlin, a group exhibition presented in association with Urban Nation as part of their ongoing series, Project M.

Urban Nation will be the first museum worldwide to exclusively collect and exhibit contemporary graffiti and street art. In anticipation of the museum opening, the organization has invited internationally acclaimed artists and curators to be a part of Project M, an ongoing art initiative with the goal of promoting community and creative exchange. The three aspects of Project M include a group exhibition, a mural and ten paintings placed in the window panels of the institution.

Greetings from New York City, curated by Jonathan LeVine, will be the sixth installment of Project M and includes work by twelve artists: AJ Fosik, DALeast, Dan Witz, EVOL, Faile, Gary Baseman, Jeff Soto, Kevin Cyr, Nychos, Olek, Saner and Tara McPherson.

Six of the artists exhibiting in Greetings from New York City will also have the opportunity to travel to Berlin. DALeast will paint a large-scale mural on the façade of Urban Nation. Dan Witz, Jeff Soto, Nychos, Olek and Saner will create new works on 10×10 foot panels, which will then be placed in windows on the ground floor of Urban Nation. These pieces will be visible to the general public and become part of the future museum’s permanent collection after the exhibition closes.

ABOUT URBAN NATION
Urban Nation is based in Berlin and unites creative voices from cities worldwide in support of urban art. The groundbreaking institution will open as an official museum during summer 2015 with the goal to support renowned and up-and-coming contemporary artists, as well as cities and their inhabitants. By hosting workshops, events and exhibitions in a non-profit public space, Urban Nation is a creative platform for artists to create without political, social, financial or commercial pressure. For further information, please visit: www.urban-nation.net.

DALeast mural in Poland

Posted on by Mike

DALeast recently painted a mural in Lodz, Poland for the Urban Form Project. 

In the artist’s words: "The deer represents the figure of the motherland. Birds are roosting and taking off above her while her body separates them from a thunderstorm underneath. She is an individual being and the source of all emotions, a play is being performed by her perceptions, thoughts and actions."

* Photos by Marek Szymanski

Marc Giai-Miniet on Yatzer

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Marc Giai-Miniet’s Nightmarish ‘Theatre of Memory’ on Show in New York

By Rooksana Hossenally
October 7, 2014


With his eerie twists on children’s dolls houses, French artist Marc Giai-Miniet’s dioramas, or miniature 3D theatres or boxes, are disturbing metaphors for the human condition that succeed in rattling our curiosity wide-awake. Containing the aftermath from scenes of unknown experiments, interrogations and slaughters, the works form an exploration of the physicality of memory that will be shown this month at the Jonathan LeVine Gallery in New York, as part of a solo show entitled ‘Théâtre de la Mémoire’ (Theatre of Memory).

When Giai-Miniet first created his boxes in the early 90s, he included cardboard characters in this ”ironic existential ballet”. But over time, the figures were no longer and the boxes went on to increase in size to feature scenes comprising never-ending libraries, abandoned laboratories used to conduct unidentifiable experiments, stock rooms in a state of disarray, desolate waiting rooms, interrogation rooms, prison cells, stairs, ovens, sewers, drains all became his focus. In short, the artist creates the idea of people, of a human presence, in each scene without using figures.


The boxes are barren of people and contain or depict scenes that although they are difficult to decipher, are nevertheless heavily marked by human presence. These mini theatres often feature chaotic libraries, where the books are stacked precariously on shelves that threaten to collapse and that darken into a burnt mess as they descend into a basement built into the bottom of the box. In fact, books are a primary and recurrent symbol for the wide-ranging record of human memory and thought, many of which have proved to be fundamental or have been merely been used to control society by tyrants or establishments, for instance. The books, white at first, are pulled into darkness as the libraries descend into the sewers, or the underbelly of memory, as their contents are sullied and tarnished.

Other boxes contain bundles of rusting unidentifiable machinery and scientific apparatus, for example, there’s a scene crowned with a life-size skinned chicken’s corpse stretched out over two floors. Filthy and worn, the objects and spaces depicted in each box are a reference to the recording of memory, be it in books, suitcases, bulging parcels, or bloody organs.

Born in Trappes, southwest of Versailles in France, the 68-year-old painter comments on his website that these boxes appeared much later in his career ”…like a natural and necessary continuation, and have become an inseparable element, my painting’s accessible double.”

These nightmarish variations on a puppet theatre may be a reflection of the artist’s repressed desire for taking up drama as a teenager, he says, or are perhaps a symbol of games he would play as a child. Nevertheless, these boxes go further than simply recalling the artist’s childhood memories. They retrace Marc Giai-Miniet’s macabre paintings; paintings that depict brains being removed from skulls for instance.

His distinctive worn, dismal aesthetic can be traced to his exposure to images of the Holocaust at a young age, specifically the manner in which the Nazis seized concentration camp victims’ belongings and recorded their identities. In fact, many parallels can be drawn on the subject and the aesthetic with the work of Christian Boltanski, a highly acclaimed French artist of the same generation.

One thing is for sure: the shudder some spaces where unknown events have taken place, jolt our imagination awake and perhaps even nudge our memory of something that’s been left buried deep below the surface…

Théâtre de la Mémoire – Marc Giai-Miniet’s solo exhibition opens on October 11th and will run until November 8th, 2014 at Jonathan LeVine Gallery, 529 West 20th Street, New York.

http://yatzer.com/marc-giai-miniet-dioramas

 

 

Mémoires Vives—Trailer

Posted on by Mike

This is a trailer for Mémoires Vives, an award-winning short film portraying a dead man’s journey into the afterlife. The film was created in 2012 by Fabrice Mathieu and Philippe Giai-Miniet, inspired by (and featuring images of) the work of Marc Giai-Miniet. Many of the sculptures featured in the film are part of Théâtre de la Mémoire, the artist’s debut solo exhibition in the United States. To watch the entire film, please click HERE.

Esao Andrews interview on HF

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HiFructose.com Interview: Esao Andrews Discusses New Work for Epilogues at Jonathan LeVine Gallery

by Nathan Spoor
October 2, 2014

Ever the astute aesthete, Esao Andrews brings a renewed sense of clarity and purpose to his latest body of work. His new paintings will be featured at NYC’s Jonathan LeVine Gallery from October 11 through November 8 for Andrews’ upcoming solo show, Epilogues. For this series, the artist embraced some of his signature motifs, bringing them back into the studio and furthering their growth. The ongoing narrative in his work, as Andrews tells us, needed a conclusion, a way to say farewell and move forward with his pursuits. This exhibition of painting provides him with just that: closure. In Epilogues, we are treated to a visual feast of some of Andrews’ most well-known images as they would appear as aged, matured and weathered in his trademark tonality, creating transcendent moments of haunted familiarity.
 

Thanks for taking time out of your schedule to talk to us, Esao. Let’s get right to the good stuff, your show is called Epilogues. That sounds like a statement of some finality. What is the concept for this new body of work?

For the most part of my career, I’ve compartmentalized my output. Even though my work is all pretty moody and surreal, I like to bounce around with my subject matter and style — both to keep myself and my audience excited. Because of this, any group of work I’ve come up with tends to be a bunch of stand-alone pieces and not really a cohesive body. Epilogues is an attempt to bridge that diversity in imagery with a narrowed theme. That being: journeys coming to an end and homecomings.

Is this new work based on a decision to put a series of popular works to bed, to walk away and consider this a final moment?

The paintings titled The Thinker, On Letting Go and Monsoon are some of my best known pieces. The last two have had a life of their own being album art for Circa Survive, circulating the internet and as tattoos. All these years I was afraid of returning to and embracing them because I felt they weren’t really my paintings. So this is not necessarily a finale for them, but a reason to be okay with bringing them full circle.

I suppose this leads to a fairly obvious question but let’s go with this – do you begin your works with the thought that there is a narrative or timeline going on in the world of the paintings?

Yes, I definitely do and I like the idea of that world aging.

When we spoke earlier you mentioned that these works were a way to have some closure with certain popular works mentioned above. How did it feel to have this realization that you needed to show the final chapter of these ideas or characters? Did you feel relieved or was there any anxiety?

I feel relief. The idea of taking a look at older paintings and continuing the narrative is a new way of creating ideas for me. This whole time I’ve been relying on the viewer to come up with the story of what’s happening based on just a single scene. Now that I feel like I have a big enough world laid-out, I can start connecting dots and actually writing complete stories. There’s anxiety to that side of it (nervous laughter).

What was your schedule like for making these works? Did you plan this out for a while or did the ideas all kind of fall on you and demand to be painted?

The initial idea for these paintings centered on resurrecting subject matter from a few older paintings as if a lot of time passed. The word “epilogue” came to mind, then on a few sheets of paper I brain-stormed some scenes and visual puns that represent that theme.



Are you open to having any of these characters appear in other works in the future? Do you truly feel that they are over and done and that their drama is completely resolved?

Yes, I think I will bring certain ones back up in the future, or some evolved variation of them. I like to approach them as if they are in some parallel-dreamlike existence. I’m growing and evolving just as the narratives in them are. I’m not sure if there will ever be a complete ending to anything. I’m starting to look at every image as a starting point for a continued story and that image can have different possible paths.

I know you’re just on the eve of having your works finished and about to have the grand public unveiling, but have you begun to have new ideas arrive since these paintings are complete and farewells have been said?

Yes! I’m extremely excited about the new work I have planned. I got challenged to be in a show of large scale paintings for a museum show that’s coming up in October. That’s at LBMA (Long Beach Museum of Art), and it really challenged the scale of my work. Since it’s called Masterworks, I figured I needed to make something really big, to go bigger than I’d ever gone before. And that show is also about the artist looking back at the last decade of their work. So with that I got sentimental and figured that it was just time to resolve some things and get closure from some of those lingering ideas, hence Epilogues. Because of this show and the LBMA show, I look forward to working on a larger scale and planning out my narrative on a collective scale too.

http://hifructose.com/2014/10/02/exclusive-interview-esao-andrews-discusses-new-work-for-epilogues-at-jonathan-levine-gallery

GQ on Dan Witz’s PETA project

Posted on by Mike


 

Why are chicken feet appearing all over London?

By James Buxton
September 30th, 2014

Chicken feet poke out of a metal grate on the side of Smithfield market, the largest wholesale meat market in the UK and the last bastion of London’s butchers; a pig’s face stares through a window in Clerkenwell; and a flock of chickens crowd a no-entry sign on Pentonville Road: each a disturbing reminder of the way millions of animals suffer every day at the hands of the meat industry, and the work of Dan Witz, a radical artist based in New York, who has been creating provocative street art for the last four decades. 

This week I was invited to see Witz install his latest project, Empty the Cages, a guerrilla street art campaign initiated by PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) designed to draw people’s attention to the millions of animals kept in horrifying conditions around the world.

Witz says: "Like most artists, I’m interested in exploring what society hides from itself. As a human, I’m concerned with injustice. But, like most people, I feel powerless to do anything about the downward spiral our planet seems to be taking."

"As someone who operates in the public commons, with my street interventions, sometimes I get the opportunity to directly address this frustration, to provoke a dialogue about issues that matter to me." 

Witz uses extreme methods to install his illegal street art interventions. Hammer drill in hand, he drills his grates into buildings, anchoring the work to the wall by hammering nails into the bricks – in broad daylight and visible to the passing public and police. Despite that, over the course of his 36-year career, he’s never been arrested. 

At times disturbing, at times darkly comic, Witz appeals to both our sense of horror and humour. By creating trompe l’oeil in the urban environment he make us question our own reality and draws our attention to the dire plight of these animals locked in cages, raised for food. 

Witz says: "It wasn’t until the anti-whistleblower ag-gag laws began passing in the United States that my attention was drawn to America’s animal agriculture industry. Further exploration revealed unbelievable depths of abuse – perpetrated against not only farm animals, but also the environment."

He believes that our taste for cheap meat is the cause of many global problems: "It’s truly unconscionable what these corporations get away with, day in and day out with seeming impunity.  If encountering my pieces brings this topic to anyone’s attention, then art matters, because life matters and I’m satisfied."

James Buxton is the editor of Global Street Art and accompanied Dan Witz when he was installing these eerie installations for PETA. If you want to see the art for yourself have a look at this interactive map of Empty the Cages.

http://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/comment/articles/2014-09/30/dan-witz-street-art-chicken-feet-pig-heads

Alex Gross in Juxtapoz Mag

Posted on by Mike


JUXTAPOZ
October 2014 Issue

Alex Gross paints intense images of an ominous future. In fact, the future isn’t so distant, it’s here. And it isn’t full of flying cars or “robot servants bringing us drinks,” as the artist points out in this interview. I caught up with this design-minded oil painter just before the opening of his new exhibition, Future Tense, alongside the release of his new monograph of the same name. This doubly meaningful title is poignant and accurately describes our precarious surroundings for the foreseeable future. The future’s so tense, you gotta wear shades. And if you’re a figure in an Alex Gross painting, those shades are probably Gucci. —Kristin Farr

Kristin Farr: I see why you would parody luxury brands like Gucci and Fendi in some of your paintings, but I’m curious about your interest in representing more arty brands like Volcom, Obey and RVCA. 
Alex Gross: This question gets at some of the ideas I have been working with for the last few years. It is easy to parody expensive fashion brands, and I have done it in many pieces. But, when I think about it, I am actually trying to talk about the larger concept of branding in my work, not just fashion branding, or only mocking brands that I personally think are silly. The entire idea of branding is what I am addressing in my work. What, ultimately, is the difference between RVCA and Gucci? When you think about it, the only real difference is the target audience: a hip, (or wannabe hip, like myself) 20-35 year old urban skater type, versus a rich, more fashion-oriented guy or gal who may be a jetsetter, or just wants to look like one. My point is, it’s all branding, which really means it’s ultimately bullshit. I’m not a skater. I’m not even in that age demographic. But I have always liked to dress that way, and many of my friends do too. So, I like a lot of RVCA’s stuff, but it’s only because their branding has been so successful that the look of their stuff connotes all of these other things—an attitude about life, what music you like, etc. When you really are honest with yourself, a RVCA hat is just a hat, just like a Gucci purse is just a purse. So, I think it’s important, if I’m being honest as a creator, to look more deeply into what I am talking about and to not spare any particular brand just because it might seem cooler than some others. That really is the whole point—getting people to think about how branding affects their lives and their decision-making process. 

Do you ever work with a narrative, or are you more focused on composition, symbolism or other elements? 
I don’t typically start with any concept in mind, but let it emerge as the image evolves. I have many concepts that I am working with, and as time goes by, I have more and more to say in my work. The meaning of the work is extremely important to me, but how meaning begins to reveal itself in each piece tends to be a very unconscious process. I am not especially interested in narrative; it’s a more intuitive, conceptual place that I am aiming for.

* Full interview appears in the October 2014 issue of Juxtapoz Magazine

http://www.juxtapoz.com/current/in-the-magazine-alex-gross

DALeast mural in New Zealand

Posted on by Mike

DALeast recently participated in the Dunedin Mural Project in New Zealand, with a wall located on 25 Stafford Street. The subject of his mural, titled Defoliation, is the landing motion of Haast’s eagle—an extinct indigenous species from the south island of New Zealand, commonly accepted to be the Pouakai of Maori legend. The species was the largest eagle known to have existed. Its prey is suspected to have consisted of moa. This eagle’s massive size may have been an evolutionary response to the size of its prey, as both would have been much smaller when they first came to the island, and would have grown larger over time due to lack of competition. Haast’s eagle became extinct around 1400, when its major food source (the moa) were hunted to extinction by Maori, and much of its dense-forest habitat was cleared by them as well.

* Photos courtesy of the artist

 

Melissa Cooke: Huffington Post

Posted on by Mike

THE HUFFINGTON POST
10 Insanely Detailed Drawings With One Foot In Reality And The Other In Our Dreams

By Priscilla Frank
9/18/2014

Since the early days of The Huffington Post Arts & Culture page we’ve known one thing to be true: people love their hyperrealism. The demanding artistic style has tickled the eyes of many a reader with its devious ability to masquerade as a photograph despite its manmade origins. We’re well aware the genre requires time, patience and immense skill, yet we’re also mindful of the backlash against the technique — that it lacks creativity and originality.

Recently, we’ve noticed a surge of artists taking their hyperrealist talents to more surreal territories — and we couldn’t be happier. One of said artists is Melissa Cooke. The Brooklyn-based artist investigates the relationship between photography, performance and drawing in her images, conjuring visions that look even more lucid than reality itself. Cooke creates her drawing hybrids with powdered graphite, applying it with a thin brush rather than a pencil to avoid any heavy lines.

The result is absolutely mesmerizing.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/09/18/melissa-cooke_n_5761228.html