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Indepth Arts News:
"New Work : New York"
2009-11-07 until 2009-11-28
Fortune Cookie Project
, ,
SG Singapore
Fortune Cookie Projects is pleased to present New Work: New York, an exhibition of works by six of the most exciting and dynamic artists working in New York-- Lucky DeBellevue, Ben Degen, Jacob Feige, Keltie Ferris, John Finneran, and Sam Gordon. Each artist displays a unique and highly personal approach to grappling with the legacy of art in the 21st Century and rigorously explores the possibilities for pushing the medium forward. Well known, exhibited, and collected in the west, Fortune Cookie Projects will introduce these artists and their work to Asia.
Lucky DeBellevue has developed a unique transformation of a quotidian material, having adopted the chenille stem as a basic unit for creating soft, brightly colored, sculptures and as a tool for stamping and applying paint to canvas. The quirky, web-like sculptures activate the architecture of the gallery space, resembling organic, cellular structures anchored in the corners of the room, while sculptural attachments on his paintings appear to grow out of the surface of the canvas. DeBellevue engages sculpture and painting in a generative process of creation, using humble materials to develop a sophisticated practice and body of work.
Lucky DeBellevue has exhibited extensively throughout the US and Europe and was the subject of a solo exhibition at The Whitney Museum of American Art, in New York. He was the recipient of the prestigious Rome Prize at the American Academy in Rome, Italy, and recently completed a residency in Giverny, France.
Ben Degen's tightly rendered compositions are a dense and highly organized world of bodies, objects, text, and marks competing to occupy the compressed pictorial space of the canvas. One has the sense that even the air within the painted space exists as paint, and everything sharing that space is held in tension by a meticulous formal configuration of shapes and patterns. Degen clearly reveres and understands the wide range of historical precedents for his work, including Cubism, Folk Art, and artists like Picasso and Balthus. He builds on these traditions with a persistent vision that is compelling and unique.
Ben Degen has exhibited throughout the US and Europe. His work gained widespread attention during its inclusion in PS1/ MoMA's Greater New York Exhibition in 2005. His work is in numerous private and public collections including The Museum of Modern Art in New York, NY.
Jacob Feige's oil paintings present pastoral natural landscapes littered with references to counter-culture traditions. The sky and horizon appear to explode with psychedelic and hallucinatory patterns of geometric shapes, bursts of color, glossy glazes, and drips of paint that suggest a ruptured, shifting landscape in a state of transition between abstraction and representation. He synthesizes many sources including 19th Century American landscape painting, psychedelic light shows and record album covers, and the utopian architectonic geometry of Buckminster Fuller, fusing nature and culture into a kaleidoscopic vision that transforms a traditional medium and a conventional genre into a sublime space.
Jacob Feige has exhibited his work throughout the US and Europe. His work was recently exhibited at the Orlando Museum of Art, Orlando, Florida and at the Daimler Chrysler Emerging Artist Award Exhibition in Berlin, Germany.
Keltie Ferris approaches painting as a raw, physical process-- brushing, spraying, scraping, cutting, and peeling away paint. The seemingly casual and crude nature of the marks and technique are held in tension against dazzling color combinations and complex compositions. Using metallic silver and bright, almost fluorescent colors, the artist invites free associations with the era of glam, drag, decadence, Andy Warhol's Factory, Old Hollywood, "space age" science fiction, and blatant artificiality as well as evoking a wide range of artists including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jean Dubuffet, Hans Hoffman, and Joan Mitchell. Ferris' fusion of techniques and processes reveal her rigorous dedication to the continued possibilities of abstraction.
Keltie Ferris has exhibited her work throughout the US, and has a forthcoming solo exhibition at the Kemper Museum, Kansas City, Missouri.
John Finneran has developed a poetic, humorous, and enigmatic visual mythology that is both highly personal and ubiquitous. Repeated images of lips, hands, feet, noses, and eyes appear to emerge out of a hazy abyss of brushy, abstract shapes. The works call to mind artists like Philip Guston and Jasper Johns, who also explore the body and its relationship to abstraction. Using reflective aluminum grounds and a limited color palette that consists primarily of black, grey, and white punctuated with red, green, and pink, the paintings offer the viewer a contemplative dream-like space.
John Finneran's work has been included in numerous exhibitions in the US and will be included in a forthcoming exhibition of works from the Saatchi Collection in London, England.
Sam Gordon's series of abstract paintings are layered with optical patterns, grids, and interlocking positive and negative shapes that frame perceptual experience as a system of visual codes. Each work reminds the viewer that he or she is looking at a painting with its own internal formal logic. Often, the paintings display traces of the process of their creation, and in some cases the ground is a mirror that reflects the act of looking back onto the viewer. Gordon achieves a wide variety of marks and surfaces with surprising economy, using spray paint, ballpoint pen, enamel, and sweepings (bits of detritus and scraps swept from his studio floor and glued to the surface of the panting). The paintings are a reflexive space, where the artist's act of creation and the viewer's act of looking hold equal weight in determining the work.
Sam Gordon has exhibited throughout the US and Europe. His work is in numerous private and public collections including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, NY.
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