New York City. April 26, 2013

UPCOMING EXHIBITIONS
Nadja Frank  Rock Shop
In the Project Gallery: David X. Levine and Ross Simonini  Eat and Die
May 18 - June 16, 2013  Opening Reception: Sunday, May 19, 6 to 8 pm

Denny Gallery is pleased to announce the first solo exhibition in the United States of Nadja Frank, titled Rock Shop and running from May 18 to June 16, 2013.

Nadja Frank works in the space between painting, sculpture and the architectural environment. The work in her new exhibition, Rock Shop, originated during the artist’s travels across the United States, and focuses on unpopulated areas of the High Desert. Traveling is an important part of her process, as her works maintain a dialogue with the outside world. The relationship between indoor and outdoor, free and enclosed, natural and studio space, is central to Frank’s practice. This produces a tension in the works between their natural and imaginative features, requiring viewers to ask a question about their true source. Her work explores how we experience landscape: visually by moving in time and space, in our interior imaginations, and through ubiquitous images.

Rock Shop displays a series of new paintings alongside of a large-scale sculptural intervention in the gallery space. Each painting is made of a specific sample of earth, found and collected by the artist during her recent travels. By making paintings, the artist is revisiting her earlier practice, paralleling the space’s regression to nature as it is subsumed by prehistoric materials and forms. The second part of the exhibition is a large scale installation, the Rock. Although the sculpture reaches toward a single peak, it is divided into four parts. The viewer is encouraged to walk into the interior world of the Rock and to experience the many images it presents. Set on casters, the pieces of the Rock move, encouraging a spirit of playfulness while engendering a sense of the shifts in geological time.

Nadja Frank was born in 1980 in Lohr am Main, Germany, and lives in New York City.  Frank received her Diploma in Fine Arts with Honors from Hochschule fur bildende Künste in Hamburg, Germany in 2008, and her M.F.A. from Columbia University. She has exhibited internationally in solo exhibitions at 401contemporary Berlin/London (Berlin), Margini Arte Contemporanea (Massa, Italy), Galerie Conradi (Hamburg), and in group exhibitions at Kunst und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Bonn), Kunstverein Hamburg, Kolbe Museum (Berlin), Chelsea Art Museum (New York), and Socrates Sculpture Park (New York).

IN THE PROJECT GALLERY:

David X. Levine and Ross Simonini: Eat and Die
Curated by Molly Rand

By Ross Simonini

After Molly asked me to show some drawings in a two-person show with David, I took a trip over to his studio. He works in a clean, compact, windowless box of a room in TriBeCa, where he’s been for a little over a decade, and his artwork is, in some ways, a reflection of this environment. It’s tight, economical, without clutter, and it’s created mostly with a single medium: colored pencil, which he applies for up to ten hours a day, until he’s built up a vibrating texture of color. David showed me hundreds of drawings at his studio and the work is all like this -  bold, and fastidious with a singularity of vision.

I’ve always dreamt of having this kind of monastic, consistent focus, but I am, it looks like, a different kind of artist. I work across mediums and tend to find inspiration in distraction, which might be a signifier of my younger, internet-sodden generation. (David and I are about 20 years apart in age.) I’ll spend my day sliding between writing, painting, drawing, and making music, and I like it when the artwork looks like the product of this kind of activity, like it’s an object that comes out of a multifarious life. This is part of the reason why I end up using food in my work, because it’s a pigment I already have around and inside of me 

All of these interests are, in some abstracted way, in the process of my drawings, but David arranges his cultural addiction on the surface of his work. He’ll use iconic images of Amy Winehouse and Brian Wilson in  a collage, maybe as a sort of dedication, it’s not clear. This show includes a work with an obituary of the rock writer, Paul Williams, and David mixes it among clippings of Artforum and the New York Times, which he’s made unrecognizable by his careful selection of solid-color chunks. For him, all of these elements are connected, and the act of choosing them, and placing them, is a path toward transforming them into precious, radiant objects.

Choice is something I’m usually trying to avoid. I don’t particularly enjoy decision-making, so I find any kind of stimulus around me to make the decisions for me. Because of this, the drawings end up as documentations of searching, failing, accidents. I also try to draw non-visual, physical feelings, such as a nagging pain in my knee or the naturally erratic movements of a bus ride, or proprioception, which is the sensation of what it feels like to be inside your own body  - a tricky kind of perception I learned about through Alexander Technique. Rather than try to ignore or overcome or work through these feelings I try to point the art right at the sensations and squeeze them for images. 

It’s not always easy to find images, and as an artist, it’s important to meet other artists and look at your own work through their eyes. It lets that image-making part of your mind forget all its nervous habits. I experienced that with David, when I went to his studio and forgot about my own work for a second when I saw, in his drawings, a single, almost imperceptible imperfection, the way one of his lines appeared initially straight, but was revealed, over a nice long look, to have the wavering, breathing quality of being cut by hand.
- Ross Simonini

David X. Levine was born in 1962 in Boston, MA, and lives in New York City. Levine is a self-taught artist. He has had ten solos exhibitions in the past ten years all over the U.S., from NYC to Las Vegas. He is currently preparing for a retrospective show at Boston University in 2014.

Ross Simonini was born in 1981 and is an artist, writer, and musician living in Brooklyn. He is a founder of the music and art project, NewVillager, and has shown his work and performed at Jack Hanley Gallery, Fredericks & Freiser, Human Resources Los Angeles and New York, Brooklyn Museum, Andy Warhol museum and elsewhere.  He is the interviews editor of The Believer magazine, the executive producer of KCRW’s The Organist, and the creator of Blood Pillow, an audio project at Clocktower Gallery. He regularly contributes to the New York Times, Frieze, Interview, Art in America, and a book of his interviews with artists will be released by Picturebox books in 2014.