Originally published on: March 31, 2008

Wangechi Mutu will never experience the heated backlash that Kara Walker experienced. No one will call Mutu the “patsy of the white art establishment,” accuse her of selling fellow black artists down the river, or launch a letter-writing campaign to keep her artwork from being shown. There are good reasons for this: unlike Walker, the Kenyan-born Mutu does not share the slavery lineage of African-American artists and she does not make work with a lucid historical context. Yet Mutu’s work is often as disturbing as Walker’s, reconfiguring sexualized representations of women and creating visceral collages that appear more pornographic than critical. Continue reading for the complete DailyServing article by Catherine Wagley.

"Eat Drink Swan Man", 2008 Watercolor and collage on paper Overall dimensions 43" x 63" (nine parts) Courtesy of Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects.

Mutu and Walker both probe the ways in which women’s bodies have been caricatured and both use craft-inspired materials to create compositionally seductive images. Both also provoke the same question: is this work compelling because of what it says or because of the way it speaks?

Mutu received her BFA from Cooper Union and her MFA in Sculpture from Yale. Since leaving Yale, Mutu has participated in celebrated group shows internationally and her inclusion in Saatchi Gallery’s USA Today made her, at least fleetingly, an art world sensation. The critical discussion surrounding her work often hovers around terms like mutilation, fashion and empowerment, emphasizing the contrast between representations of gender in Africa and the West. But there’s something missing from the discussion of Mutu’s art. The compulsive, sentimental, and seductive quality of her imagery overwhelms any social criticism that she might be articulating.

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Kirsten Hassenfeld’s ambitious paper sculptures far exceed what most would imagine could be created with the material at hand. A legion of delicate intricacies store like gems in the chest of treasure that is each piece she produces. The results of presumably painstaking hours spent folding, snipping, coiling and chaining, Hassenfeld’s sculptures are as elaborate as they are elegant. Recently, two of her bodies of work–Blueware and Dans la Lune–were on view at Brown University’s David Winton Bell Gallery. The new series, Blueware, focuses on embodiments of nature, and both the Eastern and Western traditions of decorative arts. Meanwhile, Dans la Lune, which was a highly celebrated installation first exhibited at the Rice Art Gallery in Houston, Texas in 2007, thrills the senses with its ornate ceiling hung sculptures. The work glows with light from within and bathes in its own projection of baroque shadows.

Kirsten Hassenfeld lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She received her MFA from the University of Arizona, Tuscon and her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence. Her work has been exhibited extensively, including at: Bellwether, New York, NY; The Hudson River Museum, Yonkers, NY; Massachusetts College of Art, Boston, MA; P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, NY; Phillips de Pury, New York, NY; The Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, NY and White Columns, New York, NY. She is a 2006 recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant.

Currently exhibiting at the N2 Gallery in Barcelona, Spain are the works of Spanish artist Aurelia Munoz. The works on display are delicate, yet formidable, sculptures made of materials ranging from handmade paper to textile fibers. The piece Entre Social, 1976, is a large-scale macrame sculpture that serves as testimony to Munoz’s ability to beautifully marry geometry and abstraction with natural textiles, creating an entirely new three-dimensional artistic vocabulary. Mandala con flores, 1988, gives new meaning to the term “work on paper”. Made from tiny pieces of handmade paper, suspended on tiny strips of flax linen, Munoz successfully straddles the two and three-dimensional planes, capturing the ever-elusive medium of shadow. This exhibition, which will be on view through November, marks the first gallery exhibition for the 83 year-old in nearly thirty years, as her work primarily is shown in museums.

Aurelia Munoz was born in 1926 in Barcelona, Spain. Her works are included in many museum collections worldwide such as the Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, Japan; The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL; Stedelijk van Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands; Royal Scottish Museum, Edinburgh, Scotland; Museum of Contemporary Art Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain and theMuseum of Contemporary Art, Barcelona, Spain just to name a few.

Karl Haendel

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.

“Secrets and Cymbals, Smoke and Scissors (My Friend Dash’s Wall in the Future)” is work by conceptual artist Dan Colen that is a life-size recreation of the interior wall of a friend. In Colen’s version, each element attached to the wall — every sticker, newspaper, photo and hand-written note — has been illusionistically painted by the artist. Colen extends this process of painting into other works that equally underscore value in the mundane and familiar through his painstakingly realist application. Colen is a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design (2001). Recently, the artist exhibited “No Me” with the Peres Projects in Berlin and the work above with the Deitch Projects in New York. Notable group exhibitions include “Fantastic Politics” at the National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design in Oslo, Norway, and USA Today at the Royal Academy of Arts in London.

The characters found in artist John Casey’s drawings are often deformed and humorously dark. Each piece is created with dense line work and minimal color on a white ground and is said to reference a different psychological state experienced by the artist. While these “psychological” self portraits have an apparent dark side, they also embody a sense of fragility and vulnerability. This seems to be a consistent characteristic of the artist’s work. Casey is a graduate of Massachusetts College of Art (1988). This year, the artist will be exhibiting “Metamorphorsis Chamber” with FPAC Gallery in Boston, Mass., and “New Works” with TAG Art Gallery in Nashville, Tenn. Last year, the artist exhibited with Boontling Gallery and 33 Grand, both in Oakland, California Next month, Casey will be featured in a group exhibition that highlights drawing at OKOK Gallery in Seattle.