Zachary Buchner, Untitled (JYS 08), 2012. Plaster, acrylic, and tempera on canvas. Courtesy of Andrew Rafacz

Looking at Zachary Buchner’s one-man show of mixed media plaster paintings at Andrew Rafacz Gallery entitled, Just Say Yes, I couldn’t help but think of Julian Schnabel’s sculptural plate paintings from the 80’s. In both cases, the dense treatment of the surface straddles the line between sculpture and image while exploring painting as an idiomatic language. Unlike Schnabel, Buchner doesn’t go in for representation or introduce any narrative or iconographic elements that would distract from the purity of this investigation. He’s not building a surface over which to paint a picture. The way Buchner layers paint and plaster creates an integrated whole that preserves the basic characteristics of each. The materials are always distinguishable from one another. They exist in the same plane – over lapping, covering – though there is never a breach of material autonomy.

Buchner’s work is very much in the tradition of painting about painting. That’s not meant to be a de facto criticism, but it does suggest a strategy for approaching the work that requires a certain openness on the part of the audience.

Buchner’s investigation is distilled to a few key concepts; specifically, the boundaries of integration through material engagement, surface density, the interplay between “neutral” material colors like the white of the plaster or beige of raw canvas with the vivacity of saturated hues – all within the confines of a specific rectangular format. The mark making is generally restrained and absent of much expressiveness or lyricism, and shapes curb toward organic round-ish blobs. Color becomes a real source of energy within the work. In Untitled (JYS 08) (all works are from 2012) a splotchy layer of white plaster rests over tones of warm green, bright yellow, and silver. Shards of blue painted plaster imbedded in and framed by the white pops out in front of the acidic background like icy ruptures.

Fire has always mesmerized me; as a child, I was frequently chastised for playing with matches and open flames. Until last winter, when I came upon a burning apartment building, my experience was limited to these tame interactions. Within moments, the flames engulfed the structure, sending giant plumes of orange and yellow and black smoke into the night sky. The scene led me to pause with a combination of horror and awe.

Over the past two years Lee Yujin has produced sumptuous drawings that examine the tension between the beauty and violence of smoke. In Cloud Series – the first body of work to investigate this subject matter – she isolates found images of bombs and explosions, divorcing these potent indicators of turmoil and violence from their original contexts. While these works in pencil present smoke as a static phenomenon, the dynamism of Lee’s meticulous mark-making breathes energy into these forms.

Lee Yujin. “Volcano Eruption 2." Pencil on Paper. 110 x 218 cm. 2010. Courtesy of the Artist.

Lee Yujin. Detail from “Volcano Eruption 2." Pencil on Paper. 110 x 218 cm. 2010. Courtesy of the Artist.

When viewed from the perspective of form and shape, these drawings reveal themselves as arresting abstractions. I was immediately reminded of Alfred Stieglitz’s Equivalents, a series of small-scale, black and white photographs of cloud-filled skies. Stieglitz viewed these photographs as “vision[s] of life,” a visual “equivalent” for human experience. Lee views smoke in much the same way. She explains, “there is something beautiful about smoke because it is something we cannot take control over. It is intangible and ephemeral. Its shape is unexpected and transformable. In this sense, ‘smoke clouds’ can be an allegory for life…”

Lee Yujin. "I am a Telescopic Viewer, You are a Telescopic Viewer, We are Telescopic Viewers (Telescope Series)." A series of 100 drawings; each drawing with frame 43 x 43 cm. Charcoal and conte on paper. 2011. Courtesy of the Artist.

While these pencil drawings are particularly notable for their incredible precision, her most recent series, I am a Telescopic Viewer, You are a Telescopic Viewer, We are Telescopic Viewers, approaches the subject with a more fluid gesture, using charcoal and conte to produce drawings that introduce color. The quietude of her earlier drawings is in stark contrast to these new works which, when exhibited en masse, allude far more evidently to the violence underlying these images.

Lee was included in several solo and group exhibitions in Berlin in 2011, including “One Night Stand” at Kims Bar, “Benumbed” at Takt Kunstprojektraum, and “We Can Start a Process” at Kreuzberg Pavilion. You can stay apprised of her upcoming projects through her website.

Art fairs are synonymous with crowded, cavernous booths, prepackaged artwork, and most of all: money. But, this new art fair in Los Angeles does what very few art fairs have managed in the past; PULSE has combined a strong, experimental group of galleries and project spaces with actual money making. Combining gallery booths with project spaces for non-profit institutions and artists, PULSE delivers sculpture, installation, photography, and painting from some of the world’s most interesting contemporary artists. Having a strong presence in New York and Miami, PULSE opened its doors in Los Angeles to an all new crowd on Friday September 30th, and will continue through 5pm this evening. DailyServing sent three writers to  PULSE LA to bring you the most interesting and noteworthy projects.

Allyson Strafella, Von Lintel Gallery, Booth B-9

Allyson Strafella, “Crenelation,” 2006. Typed dashes on green transfer paper. 6” by 10”.

By its very nature, an art fair overstimulates.  This might be the reason my eye landed on Allyson Strafella’s work, a series of simple and colorful geometric forms, à la Ellsworth Kelly:  two deep red rectangles, one black, and one more I can’t quite recall—possibly something voluptuous and green floating in a field of white.  They looked out of place, overly simple and stubbornly modern.  Yet…they wobble.  They even seem a little furry.  Strafella works on a customized typewriter, with a special set of keys and a much wider bed than what any of the secretaries on Mad Men would use.  She chooses flimsy papers, including colored carbon papers, which she then inserts into her machine and completely distresses through repeated mechanical contact. In some places that Strafella hits over and over with the typewriter keys, the paper becomes lace-like, or begins to fall apart.  The results hover between sculpture and drawing, bringing new texture to an old form.

Allyson Strafella is represented by New York’s Von Lintel Gallery and can be seen for one more day in booth B-9.

Written by Danielle Sommer.

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Kenji Sugiyama, Standing Pine Gallery, Booth I-7

Image Caption: L: Kenji Sugiyama, detail from Institute of Intimate Museums: Mazes, 1998, mixed media installation; Right: Kenji Sugiyama, installation view of Institute of Intimate Museums, 2000, mixed media installation. Courtesy Standing Pine - cube.

Japanese gallery Standing Pine’s whole booth is devoted to obsessively detailed miniature “museums” by artist Kenji Sugiyama. They’re small cardboard boxes or round viewfinders the size wiffle balls that you can look through to see a whole exhibition installed to scale. At Pulse, a long line of flimsy pasta boxes sit on a white shelf, and when you crouch to look through one end, you’ll see a corridor assembled in a pristine, calculated manner, with faux wooden floors, framed images lining the walls, and benches spaced along the center. Sugiyama calls this series of work, which he began making in 1999, Institute of Intimate Museums and each museum exhibits tiny installations of his own work. This makes the project slightly solipsistic, but teeny-tiny solipsism, it turns out, can be delightfully idiosyncratic.

Written by Catherine Wagley.

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Hong Seon Jang, David B. Smith Gallery, Booth A-7

Hong Seon Jang, Green Forest, Tape on chalkboard, 24 x 36 in., 2011 (Detail)

I always love to see what galleries have tucked away in their closets at art fairs – interesting work is often times hidden behind closed doors, drawn curtains or around a corner. I was pleased to peak down the closet hallway of Booth A-7, Denver’s David B. Smith Gallery, where a small work by New York based artist Hong Seon Jang is hung. By meticulously applying layers of tape on a chalkboard, the artist creates an idyllic scene of a deer in a forest, capturing the subtlety of shading, pattern and depth using only this simple material. His use of tape – a material employed for its temporary nature – adds a sense of physical vulnerability to the work, challenging what may initially be seen as simply a beautiful image.

Written by Allie Haeusslein.

Study for Spiral Block #2, 2010 Acrylic 5.75 x 6 x 6 inches Photo: Richard Nicol

There is a well-worn narrative of twentieth century painting that goes like this: From Cezanne to Picasso to Pollock, the illusionistic space of painting flattened more and more until the picture plane and the surface created by the paint itself became the primary subject matter, eliminating images altogether in favor of abstraction. While this teleology has some merit, the purity of the story is incomplete. When Linda Benglis began pouring polyurethane on her studio floor, creating a sculptural object, paint itself began to function as a readymade. Linda Besemer then recognized abstraction as a metaphor, working with it in terms of its figure/ground relationships. The figure of paint, once removed from the ground of the canvas used the world – including the architecture and institution of the museum as well as the social relations of its public –as its ground.

Study for Waferboard, trimmed, 2010 Acrylic 8 x 8 x 0.75 inches Photo: Richard Nicol

Margie Livingston’s work participates directly in this narrative, creating hybrid objects that shift back and forth between sculpture and painting as well as abstraction and representation. After making paintings on canvas for many years, Livingston began pouring paint, layering it, then cutting it and breaking it apart in order to construct objects that are images of their own making. But while these works are abstract, they begin to resemble other objects like wooden blocks, stone, or waferboard. In this sense she breaks two cardinal rules of modernist painting by making works that are images of other things while at the same time telling a story. But the images depict raw materials that have the potential for making other artworks and the story that she tells is modern art history itself. So these works become objects that at once enact pious devotion and heretical rebellion – rooted in both process and conceptual reference.

Study for 2x4, 2010, Acrylic 1 1/8 x 2.75 x 24.75 inches Photo: Richard Nicol

Her logs of paint begin with about a dozen sheets, each one made with two gallons of paint. They are laminated together then milled and cut into 2 x 4 pieces of lumber, much in the same way that wooden beams are made.  This gesture marks an apparent turn away from a sublime notion of nature, replacing it with artifice. By making a plank of wood out of plastic paint, Livingston also points to the role of mechanized production in the timber industry. In this sense, she participates in a contemporary sublime of plastic beauty, leaving behind the Romantic attachment to nature’s mythic truths. Our conception of the natural and a truth of origin is just as much of a cultural construction as a milled log made of plastic paint. Maybe these faux natural objects remind us of the environmental threats of our time. But that does not preclude them from being objects of wonder and beauty.

Waferboard, 2010, Acrylic 30 x 22 inches Photo: Richard Nicol

Seattle-based artist Margie Livingston is represented by Greg Kucera Gallery. She has exhibited her work at Luis De Jesus Gallery in Los Angeles, Richard Levy Gallery in Santa Fe and will be included in an upcoming exhibition at LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions).

Dean Smith, Thought Form #11 (2005), image courtesy of the Berkeley Museum of Art

I’ve been watching the conversation surrounding abstraction here in San Francisco out of the corner of my eye for a while now.  In particular, over the last year I’ve seen three great shows that have challenged my understanding of what abstraction can achieve when you insist that it turn against itself and become a full-body experience: Alexander Cheves’s paintings and sculptures of floating geometric house forms at Rowan Morrison, Josh Podoll’s odd (and awe-ing) transcendental, painted meditations between the extremely close and extremely far at Romer Young, and (the icing on the cake) Chris Duncan’s mind-bending Eye Against I at Baer Ridgway.  This is what I wanted out of the Berkeley Art Museum’s bookended pair of shows, Abstract Then and Abstract Now.

Robert Irwin, Untitled (1969), image courtesy of San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Instead, I got breadth, which I feel silly complaining about, but I’ll get to that in a second.  Despite its claim of featuring work from 1940 – 1985, Abstract Then sneakily kicks off with the Futurists:  the first work in the gallery space is one of Duchamp’s Boites (Series F) (1966), which contains – amongst other things – a small replica of Nude Descending a Staircase (1912).  Jean Tinguely’s disturbingly sexual Black Knight (1964) is worth interacting with; push a button and the mechanized sculpture kicks into gear, pushing and pulling a rod through an eyelet for as long as you feel comfortable allowing it.  Abstract Then is loosely grouped; progenitors of abstract expressionism like Jackson Pollock share one wall, while post-painterly descendants like Helen Frankenthaler occupy another.  Eva Hesse’s series of heavy, flesh-like rectangles, Aught (1968), separates these groups from minimalists and post-minimalists like Dennis Oppenheim and Robert Irwin, whose untitled disk-cum-orb is one of the most outstanding pieces in the show.  Not only does it play with your perceptions, but there’s a strong complement with Chris Duncan’s Untitled (The Painting) (2010), a 7.5’ x 14’ series of painted and collaged concentric ellipses.

Chris Duncan, Untitled (The Painting) (2010), installation view courtesy of Baer Ridgway

And herein lies the beginning of my complaint:  why not Abstract In Perpetuity, instead of Abstract Now and Abstract Then?  There are so many connections to be drawn between works, to keep them separate feels like dismemberment.  Most of the works in Abstract Now – which appears to be the weaker sibling – could have been complicated by juxtaposing them with the works of their predecessors.  Ron Nagle’s beautiful ceramic structures, though much smaller, display an attention to material topography and color that would be interesting paired against Jay DeFeo, or even Ad Reinhardt, while Jim Drain’s anthropomorphic fabric sculpture, Scribble (2007), would make an fun asterisk against Duchamp.  Not only that, but works that fail to hold up in such a setting could have been eliminated.

Jay DeFeo, Origin (1956), image courtesy of the Berkeley Art Museum

I’m left thinking of Yves Klein (who was not represented).  In its own unique and counter-intuitive way, Yves Klein’s Le saut dans le vide (1960) might be one of the most abstract works of the 20th-century, providing a powerful visual for the relationship between inescapable materiality and transcendental hope.  In Le saut, Klein captured his attempt to separate himself from the earth (and gravity); his body has just begun its leap, his eyes face upwards.  Klein realized that the body itself was an untapped medium for experiencing the opposing tendencies of abstraction — the transcendent and the material — and I see abstract artists like Cheves, Podoll, and Duncan playing in this tradition.  By allowing its works to co-mingle, instead of keeping them at arm’s length from each other, Abstract Now/Then might have been able to achieve what I think is a truly “now” experience of abstraction, one that insists on full-body immersion.

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.

Albert Oehlen
Originally Published on December 24, 2007

Albert Oehlen, a German artist who currently lives and works in Bizkaia, Spain has been on the international radar for decades as a provocative painter. The artist studied with Sigmar Polke in the mid-seventies at Hochschule fur Bildende Kunst, Hamburg and emerged in the 1980′s along side artist Martin Kippenberger. Oehlen challenges painting today by rigorously investigating and referencing historical painting from many periods, simultaneously. The scope of his painting references allows the artist to point out some of art’s failures, something that Oehlen is very interested in revealing. The artist recently exhibited “Spiegelbilder” with Max Hetzler in Berlin, and “The Good Life” at the Nolan / Eckman Gallery in New York. Oehlen has appeared in countless publications, and in April of 2003 Artforum conducted an interview between Oehlen and Eric Banks.

Closing this week is a new exhibition of 40 watercolors and collages on paper by painter Tomory Dodge at CRG Gallery in New York. While the artist’s large and dynamic paintings have become very well known, it is much more rare to find an exhibition of his watercolors and collages. Many of the same themes run through these new works as are found in the artists larger paintings, such as the catastrophic and uncanny in relation to the landscape. Chaotic storms spread fragments of paper wildly across the pictorial space in Lost in the Woods, large strips of color fall from the an abstracted sky in Tweedle Dum, and in garbage floats placidly on top of a large body of water in Sea of Objects.  Each piece is carefully balanced between formal abstraction and representation, a signature element of the artist’s other work. The immediacy of these works on paper offers the viewer a welcome break from the more calculated larger paintings found the in artist’s oeuvres. These new collages and watercolors embody a more playful and carefree mode of creation, allowing for a less self conscious product to form.

Dodge’s Works on Paper were exhibited at ACME in Los Angeles from October 17 – November 14, 2009 and will be on view at CRG Gallery in New York through December 19th, 2009. The artist lives and works in Los Angeles, California.