On view through April 5, 2009 at the Chicago Cultural Center is House of the Rising Sun, an installation of paintings by the collaborative duo of Robert Davis and Michael Langlois.

Though their output primarily consists of paintings, the pair also collaborates to create sculpture and large-scale installations with a conceptual bent. Their scrupulously crafted, whimsical and stinging paintings explore the lowbrow with a fastidious fixation on the human figure as it undergoes psychological or physical stress. Their work is replete with historical and pop culture characters, loving family portraits, controversial icons, and hard core sensibilities.

For this exhibition, a small number of related paintings are presented in a similar but new configuration from their 2008 exhibition at Steve Turner Contemporary in Los Angeles, under the same title. Among the works on view is Babylon, a large canvas depicting among other things female nudes, airliners, oil derricks, and a pig fucking a goose, all rendered in shades of blue. While this painting is displayed centrally in the gallery space, it is flanked on either side by two smaller paintings to round out the installation: Face of God, and Dads.

Robert Davis and Michael Langlois have been collaborating as artists since they met at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1997, and divide their time between Chicago and Brooklyn.

Swedish painter, Sigrid Sandstrom, exhibits twelve of her newest abstract paintings at The Company in downtown Los Angeles from March 14th through April 18th. Sandstrom’s strength is revealing the paradoxical in both painting and nature. Even the artist’s preferred technique is an oxymoron–the transparent layering of opaque whites. Decision making, editing, working, and reworking are crucial elements of Sandstrom’s finished work. She purposefully leaves behind squeegee smears, paint drips, and brush marks that not only reference her process, but also signifies her work. Milky acrylic washes, often of snowcapped mountains and angular glaciers, sit underneath layers of planar geometric shapes. The polygonal shapes contrast in a variety of ways: irregular vs. regular, convex vs. concave, and rough/torn edges vs. hard/masked edges. Though the shapes are painted, they are made to look as though they are torn paper collage, textured pieces of wood, or see-through strips of masking tape. The shapes’ faux edges are yet another reference to painterly fabrication and thus, process. In her artist statement, Sandstrom mentions ” the cumulative activity of adding layer-upon-layer is the evidential aftermath of mental engagement which, in turn, insinuates and provokes the next painterly response.” By constantly juggling interactive variables, the artist explores the self-reflexive nature of decision-making and the creative process.

In 1997, Sandstrom received her B.F.A. from Academie Minerva in The Netherlands, and in 2001, an M.F.A. in painting and printmaking from Yale University. She is the 2008 recipient of The Joan Mitchell Foundation: Painters and Sculptors Grant as well as the 2008 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. Sandstrom’s paintings are in permanent collections at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita KS; and Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT. Currently, she lives and works in Stockholm.

Jonathan Owen’s current solo exhibition at the Doggerfisher Gallery features new works by the artist. Throughout the show, Owen alters everyday images through acute attention to detail. Owen’s largest piece, Untitled, was painstakingly constructed by Owen of foam board, wood, and paint. Its pattern, inspired by the chip found on European credit cards, epitomizes the artist’s preoccupation with motif pulled from everyday existence. This work as well as the Untitiled lamp reference the mass-production of image and the theme of money defines their appearance.

Owen alters the ubiquitous, utilitarian wine rack and coat stand through meticulous addition and deconstruction. He has placed hand-carved wooden chain links within the wine rack to render it useless. The carefully overturned coat stand hooks are completely removed from their suppor–connected only through a wooden chain.

The exhibition also includes removed book pages that are partially erased by Owen using a blade and a piece of rubber. All of these pages once held an image of a civic monument. Some monuments are erased completely, while a ghost-like outline remains upon other pages. Through the deductive act of erasure Owen forces the viewer to question collective memory.

In 2000, Jonathan Owen graduated from the Edinburgh College of Art with an MFA and received the John Watson Prize from the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. The artist currently lives and works in Edinburgh. Look for Owen’s work at the Talbot Rice Gallery’s Round Room in 2010.

Travelers, 2008, oil on linen, 77 x 62 x 1 1/4 inches

David Zwirner in Chelsea is currently presenting several recent large scale oil paintings by contemporary American figurative painter Lisa Yuskavage in her second solo show at the gallery. Since receiving her M.F.A. at Yale in 1986, Yuskavage has shown her work across the world and is included in several major museum collections. Works included in this gallery exhibition are PieFace (2008), Travellers (2008), Figure in Interior (2008), Snowman (2008), Reclining Nude (2009), The Smoker (2008), Pond (2007), among others, in addition to small oil paintings, including Figure in Landscape (2008) and Chrissy (2009).

Yuskavage began her career as a key part of a new figuration movement taking place in the 1990s (the “Bad Painting” movement), which occurred when the glitz of the previous decade faded and painting became more personal and traditional. Other artists grouped in this movement include John Currin, Elizabeth Peyton, and Luc Tuymans. Yuskavage’s now iconic sexualized young females are painted in a refined style that recalls the technique and skill of the great masters. These female characters are given anatomical irregularities, such as bloated bellies and exaggerated breasts, but sustain some mesmerizing sexual appeal. They are placed into erotically charged settings and positions, forcing the viewer into a sometimes uncomfortable voyeuristic situation. Yuskavage’s suggestive subject matter and her employment of a kitschy soft core aesthetic highlight the artist’s impeccable technical ability.

Figure in Interior, 2008, oil on linen, 72 x 52 x 1 1/2 inches

In several works on display in the show, Yuskavage places her signature voluptuous beauties in mystical mountainous landscapes, sometimes accompanied by less prominent figures, as seen in Travelers, 2008. The vaporous lighting of the composition and the incomplete narrative suggested by the title trigger a slight feeling of unease, not unlike her earlier works. The artist has cleverly been able to maintain the critical balance between psychological and erotic content, but works such as Figure In Interior, 2008, call this balance into question with its salacious sensationalism.

The compositions representing interactions between two female figures are more psychologically compelling than the singular portraits, such as Teresa and Lauren, 2008, which depicts an impending encounter between two women in a warmly lit private chamber. The alluring glance of the woman looking back at us serves as both an easy entry to the rendezvous and a startling reminder of our fictional intrusion. The rousing exchange between these sapphic sirens is indicative of the artist’s continued ability to provide an undeniably stimulating experience.

Teresa and Lauren, 2008, oil on linen, 25 1/2 x 24 x 1 1/4 inches

Yuskavage was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and currently lives and works in New York where she is represented by David Zwirner. Over the past year, she has participated in group exhibitions at The FLAG Art Foundation and Thrust Projects in New York and the Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien in Vienna.

Yuskavage’s paintings will remain at David Zwirner until March 28th.

VB 64, Deitch Gallery, Long Island City, New York, 2009

Vanessa Beecroft’s newest performance, VB64, took place at Deitch Projects on March 6th, the second day of the New York Armory Show. Once again, the controversial Beecroft and the equally, though differently, controversial Kanye West joined forces (the two staged a collaborative listening event for the debut of 808s & Heartbreak, at which West’s music plays and Beecroft’s models pose). Their previous collaborations have been highlighted in a fall issue of The Fader magazine. VB64 interwove live models and gesso sculptures, an amalgam of equally passive living and lifeless forms. The white body paint on the models matched the gesso on the cast sculptures, and both animate and inanimate bodies boasted the slim, fashioned figures for which Beecroft’s performers have become notorious.

Artforum’s investigative critic Rhonda Lieberman described the event in terms that are as eerie as they are clinical. “Effectively aestheticized, abstracted by the gessolike spackle, the women were literally ornamental figures,” she writes, “their breath unobtrusive, their movements very, very slow.” West, who is producing the film of VB64, reportedly flew in from Paris just to appear at the performance, his presence further clouding Beecroft’s weird half-mainstream, half-elusive mystique. Though the performance has ended, the sculptures (including wax and gesso figures not made for the performance) will be on view at Deitch through April 12th. A video of VB64 will also be projected in the gallery space throughout the exhibition.

Julie Henson creates drawings that explore the idea of religious extremism in the United States, with a focus in the Southeast. The Charleston, South Carolina native examines historically significant religious rituals and the ways in which the modern South maintains these practices. The drawings often depict subjects united in spiritual ecstasy, while undergoing the transcendent religious acts of holding snakes, placing one’s hands in fire, speaking in tongues and the laying of hands for miraculous healing. The artist captures her subjects and suspends their emotional state by rendering them on translucent mylar, many of which are exhibited as a light-box, emitting a glowing aura. As a Southerner, the artist tracks both religious and family traditions that merge to construct a long history which is full of dark secrets and strong bonds. While the source material and research for each work is varied, every drawing is based on a first-hand experience that the artist encountered sometime in her childhood. Henson has stated that this body of work “evaluates [her] personal relationship to Southern piety and family heritage, along with the utilization of religious rituals as a tool of personal devotion and social control.”

Henson is a graduate of the School of the Arts at the College of Charleston, and is currently a member of the Studio Program at Redux Contemporary Art Center. The artist has exhibited throughout the Southeast, and her most recent solo exhibition Alone was reviewed by the Charleston City Paper. In addition, she frequently contributes to DailyServing.com as both a copy editor and writer, and has collaborated on DailyServing’s recent catalog projects, The Sun Machine is Coming Down and Broken, Beaten and Buried.

This weekend marks the relaunch of Cerasoli Gallery in Culver City, California. The gallery will simultaneously present two new solo exhibitions, featuring the work of artists David O’Brien and Tofer Chin. Both exhibitions utilize a graphically formal language of abstraction, featuring bold colors and hard-edge shapes. Explosions in a Mental Sky features the expansive paintings of Los Angeles based artist and architect David O’Brien. The artist, who is a member of Frank Gehry Architects, creates large-scale works which embody the stark mathematical rational often associated with architecture, alongside a free-flowing explosion of color and shape. The result is an impressive vibrating field that subtly shifts form, referring to multiple sources of origin.

Tofer Chin’s exhibition Double Dip promises to take the viewer on a psychedelic Op art journey into “a world of electronic psycho sexual energy.” For this new body of work, the artist is exploring the psychological and spiritual implications of LSD. The result is three large-format paintings, which make use of a spectrum rainbow as well as a play on two and three dimensional pictorial illusion. In addition to the new paintings, Chin has also produced a limited edition print titled Cause and Effect, which is printed on perforated blotter paper.

The opening for both Explosions in a Mental Sky and Double Dip will take place this Saturday, March 14th from 6-9pm. These two shows will be on view through April 15th.