Each Sunday we reach deep into the DailyServing Archives to unearth an old feature that we think needs to see the light of day. This week we found a review of Lisa Yuskavage’s 2009 exhibition with David Zwiner. If you have a favorite feature that you think should be published again, simply email us at info@dailyserving.com and include DS Archive in the subject line.

Originally Published: March 16, 2009

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.

Each Sunday we reach deep into the DailyServing Archives to unearth an old feature that we think needs to see the light of day again. This week we found a feature with the artist Rosemarie Fiore. If you have a favorite feature that you think should be published again, simply email us at info@dailyserving.com and include DS Archive in the subject line.

Originally Published: June 10th 2009

Image courtesy of the artist and Priska C. Juschka Fine Art, NY

Rosemarie Fiore is drawing with fireworks, low explosive pyrotechnic devices such as color smoke bombs, jumping jacks, monster balls, and ground blooms, to name a few. The artist recently exhibited several of these large scale works on paper in a solo show at Priska C. Juschka Fine Art in New York. The artist’s incendiary process of exploding and containing live fireworks over paper reveals her remarkable aesthetic control over the combustible material. Photographs of this process recall Hans Namuth’s photographs of Jackson Pollock slinging industrial paint onto canvas and the indelible images of Richard Serra hurling molten lead against the walls of his studio.

Image courtesy of the artist and Priska C. Juschka Fine Art, NY

Fiore ignites her chosen explosive inside a bucket or other container, which is inverted on the paper. The explosions create strokes and sunbursts of vibrant pigments, including magenta, ochre, rust, and copper, all varying in saturation and intensity. Gunpowder marks and sooty burnt surfaces provide visible traces of the detonation. Fiore overlaps and collages the best effects on large sheets of the same paper, repeating these actions a number of times. The final works are heavy and contain multiple layers of collaged explosions, resulting in abstract compositions and fields of color described by Robert Schuster of the Village Voice as “op art visions of the cosmos.”

Fiore has often worked out of action, considering each process a performance and documenting it by video and photograph. She has used repurposed machines and has previously painted and drawn with a modified floor polisher, a windshield wiper, and a Scrambler (the multi-armed amusement park ride). She received her B.A. from the University of Virginia in 1994 and her M.F.A. from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1999 and has also shown at the Gallery Bar and the Winkleman Gallery in New York.

Each Sunday we reach deep into the DailyServing Archives to unearth an old feature that we think needs to see the light of day again. This week we found a video presentation by artist Josiah McElheny discussing the role of models as both sculpture and as direct tools of information sharing. If you have a favorite feature that you think should be published again, simply email us at info@dailyserving.com and include DS Archive in the subject line.

Originally Published on July 31, 2007

On March 22, artist Josiah McElheny presented a lecture at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City called “Artists and Models” to discuss his investigation of models and how they operate in relation to sculptural thought rather than direct function or information. McElheny is interested in the idea of a model as an “aesthetical utopia that could never be built.” In a 1929 conversation between sculptor Isamu Noguchi and architect Buckminster Fuller, the idea of an experimental environment containing no shadows was determined feasible if a totally reflective form was constructed in a completely reflective space. While never completely realized by Fuller or Noguchi, McElheny, who is known for working with glass, used this reflective principle to create a series of sculptural models, both large and small, called “Extended Landscape Model for Total Reflective Abstraction,” which contained a mirrored glass table with hand-blown mirrored glass objects placed directly onto the table. These works were eventually, over a period of about four years, extended into other works that illustrated the same principle through other environments and models. Many of these examples can be viewed currently at the Donald Young Gallery in Chicago in “Josiah McElheny: Cosmology, Design, and Landscape Part Two,” while other projects and ideas are discussed in season three of the ART:21 series.

Originally published on: November 18, 2008

The new James Cohan Gallery in Shanghai is currently exhibiting work by Dutch sculptor Folkert de Jong. The artist’s large scale narrative installations often reference themes of war, big business, and global greed, as well as the history of art. This particular body of work takes Darwin’s “survival of the fittest” theory and applies it to competition between the nations.

The new work, entitled Thousand Years Business as Usual, includes three sculptural tableaux composed of industrial Styrofoam and Polyurethane insulation foam. The main installation, Early Years, consists of 7 anthropomorphized monkeys arranged in a loose circle, alluding to Matisse’s The Dance of 1901. They are precariously positioned atop oil barrels, with one foot suspended in the air. Covered with a sloppy application of black pigment, these simian characters appear to be plucked from a horror movie. This circular format not only quotes a Modern master, but also references the cycle of life and evolutionary (and artistic) progression. In addition to their role in evolutionary theory, monkeys are also the most versatile sign in the Chinese zodiac. In Business As Usual-The Tower, 3 monkeys are stacked one on top of the other on an oil barrel, miming the cautionary statement “See no evil, hear no evil, say no evil.”

De Jong’s choice of materials holds symbolic significance, for the insulation itself is a petroleum product. Styrofoam has no sculptural precedent and was originally used by Americans in World War II to create blue lift rafts that were barely visible on the water. After the war, Styrofoam was absorbed into our daily lives after several companies developed the “Styrofoam Plan” in the 50s, an effort to replace other materials. War leads to innovation and progress and slowly this technology is incorporated into mass culture. While both Styrofoam and Polyurethane are mixed with the same chemical components, Styrofoam has a rigid closed cell structure, while the Polyurethane foam allows the artist to develop more organic forms due to its fluidity.

Folkert de Jong studied at the Academy of Visual Arts and the Rijksacademy for Visual Arts, both in Amsterdam, where the artist currently lives and works. He has had several solo shows, one at James Cohan in New York in 2007 as well as Peres Projects in Berlin. de Jong won the Prix de Rome in 2003 for sculpture and has been influenced by artists such as George Grosz and Otto Dix.

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.

Originally published on: August 7, 2008

The artists in Environments are living in the here and now, responding to Global Warming, going green, and pollution with down-to-earth sincerity. Curated by Al Nodal, currently president of the Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Commissions, the exhibition emphasizes the role artists play as citizens and is part of the 18th Street Art Center’s Future of Nations Series.

Environments is ultimately about engagement: How can citizens actively and effectively engage environmental problems? The artists involved represent a confluence of international, socially active aesthetes. The multi-disciplinary team Los Animistas, 18th Street’s current artists-in-residence, explore the cultural relationship between humans and nature; Ala Plastica is an Argentina based organization that collaborates with scientists and environmentalists; Lauren Bon is best know for her Not a Cornfield project, in which she turned inner city brownfield into a fertile community cornfield; Natalie Jeremijenko runs a research lab out the art department at UC San Diego, studying landfills, pollutants and other environmentally pertinent phenomena. Each artist or collective in Environments is taking a different, aware approach to citizenship and the exhibition as a whole is a hopeful glimpse into what might happen if the boundaries between art and life continue to break down.

Originally published on: July 2, 2008

Os Gemeos, which translates to “the twins” in Portuguese, are identical twin brothers from Sao Paulo, Brazil, who began break dancing at an early age and later moved on to the visual arts. Otavio and Gustavo Pandolfo transformed Brazilian street art and have since exhibited at museums all over the world including their first solo exhibition at The Luggage Store in San Francisco in 2003. Their influences include hip hop culture, American street movies, and Sao Paulo protest art. Their subject matter ranges from family portraits to commentary on Sao Paulo’s political and social affairs as well as Brazilian folklore.

On June 28th, the brothers opened Too Far Too Close at Deitch Projects in New York. For the exhibition, they will be transforming the gallery space into a fantastical cityscape, complete with passages, houses, and doors. Their signature imagery includes characters, background, and letters, and can range from graffiti tags to complicated murals. This exhibition will include new paintings, sculpture and installations that build upon a group of work created for the Museum Het Domein in the Netherlands. Os Gemeos have been reviewed by the New York Times in 2006 which referred to their style as “sort of Dr. Seuss on acid.” Their work has an appealing and universal quality that has drawn the attention of fans including cult figure Barry McGee and Nike C.E.O. Mark Parker.

Too Far Too Close will remain at Deitch Projects until August 9, 2008.