Acclaimed and often contested artist Eric Fischl is currently exhibiting a new series of eight large paintings titled Corrida in Ronda, featuring images of bullfighters engaging in the Corrida Goyesca. Held in the Andalusian town of Ronda, the fighters dress in eighteenth century attire that falls in the era of the classic Spanish painter Francisco Goya. Goya actually designed the distinctive costumes, which are still worn by the fighters today in this special event.

Like previous bodies of work, Fischl focuses on the particular customs of a community and builds a psychology within the paintings through formal considerations of light source, color palette, and viewpoint.  Corrida in Ronda has been exhibited this year at Jablonka Galerie in Berlin and will travel in 2010 to the Centro De Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga in Málaga, Spain.

The exhibition will be on view at Mary Boone Gallery at 541 West 24th St. until the 19th of December.

Play With Your Own Marbles is the title of a new exhibition currently on view at San Francisco’s NOMA Gallery. The exhibition, which is curated by Betty Nguyen, Creative Director of First Person Magazine, brings together three Los Angeles-based artists in an examination of artistic process and its relation to utility, both in object and image. The exhibition highlights the objects and cyanotypes of Walead Beshty, the meticulously rendered photorealist drawings of Karl Haendel, and the formal concrete “paintings” of Patrick Hill.

Play With Your Own Marbles is not only linked through the evident formal and aesthetic concerns of each artist, as the show is remarkably connected through its homogenized temperament, graphically monochromatic palette, and overall deconstructionist sensibility, but each artist also plays with a strong sense of irony through material, form and method of display.

Patrick Hill

Patrick Hill has applied thick bands of concrete, absorbed and stained into a black velvety surface revealing small crevices of color, opening a dialogue between a strictly modernist approach to painting and the everyday utilitarian material of concrete.

Walead Beshty’s FedEx Kraft Box………… sculpture, which contains custom shatter proof glass cubes placed inside standard Fed-ex boxes, displays the evidence of wear as an object travels from one location to another. These ready made materials are further “improved” by the imposing alteration of travel. In addition to the sculpture, Beshty also presents several photographic images of isolated objects produced by placing the otherwise utilitarian forms on photosensitive paper, rendering them useless of their original function. Images of crumpled paper and eyedroppers begin to resemble abstracted paintings, drawings and monoprints further removing the viewer from the object’s original state and placing it more in the realm of the artifact.

Karl Haendel’s photorealist graphite drawings subvert functional objects by manipulating scale, content and source imagery. Haendel’s imagery and method of presentation is generous in it ability to be easily recognized though careful rendering and specific depiction of everyday materials such as paper, razor blades, nails and paper clips. However, the work subtly unfolds and challenges the viewer through its coded symbols and methods of display. Haendel presents a delicately drawn image of ripped paper on a plywood platform supported by stacks of art magazines, which plays with the viewer’s physical perspective to drawing and the repetition of material (paper) through multiple forms. This work is presented along side images of blades mounted to wood gently resting against a wall and large scrolls of paper containing references of would be titles for the exhibition, all of which playfully discuss the relationship between concept and material.

The collections of work in Play With Your Own Marbles are subtly seductive, engaging the viewer first through a whisper and later through a tug of the ear. Each work takes the utilitarian object and subverts it to reveal new potentials that have the ability to exist on a sliding scale of completion, remaining in a state of flux both formally and conceptually.

Play With Your Own Marbles will be on view in San Francisco through October 3rd.

English painter Richard Patterson takes miniature toys and covers them with voluminous paint, photographs the object and then recreates it in oil on canvas. The artist largely focuses on formal issues in his work literally reducing representation and figuration by covering the figurines in globs of visceral paint. Patterson also draws a connection to art history by referencing color field painters of the modernist period. Richard Patterson is a graduate of Goldsmiths College (1986), and recently exhibited with Timothy Taylor Gallery, London. The artist has also exhibited with the Dallas Museum of Art (2000) and with the James Cohan Gallery, NYC (1999). In 2007 Patterson will have three paintings exhibited in the Rowan Collection at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, and will be the first artist commissioned by Wallpaper* Magazine to collaborate on a feature and have work on the cover (March 2007).