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Hernan Bas Sandroni Rey is pleased to present Ask the Sky, an exhibition of new paintings by Hernan Bas. This will be Bas’ fourth solo exhibition at Sandroni Rey. Driven by an interest in literature and a passion for historical painting, Bas infuses his compositions with nihilist romanticism. As he has recently moved away from more figure-dominated work, the paintings in “Ask the Sky” relish in the landscape—forests and jungles that are rich with rushing waters, birds in flight, the gravity of wet paint, and become at once a dream and a nightmare. As he reflects on this body of work, Bas comments that “Ask the Sky is harping back to the grand feeling of being really puny in the scheme of it all… taking little leaps of faith that while they might be imaginary are incredibly important right now.” Bas’ rich palette flames with dreamy brushstrokes, and his forms swell and recede with controlled eroticism. This exhibition is comprised of large-scale paintings including one diptych and a grouping of graphite drawings—many of which are studies for completed and upcoming works where Bas focuses in on characters from larger works, and a more formal line that informs his looser brushwork. Bas currently lives and works in Miami, FL. He is a graduate of the New World School of Arts, Miami. His work was included in the 2004 Whitney Biennial, and he recently closed his first retrospective at the Rubell Family Collection in Miami, FL. |
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Anthony Goicolea Sandroni Rey is pleased to present an exhibition of new works by Anthony Goicolea. "Related" is the latest in an ongoing series in which Goicolea uses drawing, photography, sculpture and installation to explore his family history and identity as well as larger themes of ritual, assimilation and alienation. Like many first generation immigrants, Goicolea experiences a sense of cultural dislocation. Customs and family tradition keep immigrants linked to a mythical homeland while the tendency to assimilate into their surroundings isolates and estranges them from their origins and creates a sense of alienation. Tackling these issues, Goicolea has executed a series of portraits based on old photographs of family members, known and unknown, while they were still living in Cuba. By drawing and painting these portraits, Goicolea creates a reinterpreted, second-generation reproduction of their likenesses. In a large cinematic drawing/photo diptych, Goicolea assembles generations from both sides of his family around a long dining room table. Each member is drawn in an idealized state from when they were living in Cuba such that his great grand mother is the same age as his aunt. Goicolea confesses to feeling "a strange sense of nostalgia for something I have never been a part of or experienced directly." In May of 2008 he made his first pilgrimage to Cuba. He visited the homes, schools and churches of his parents and grandparents. The resulting photographs are devoid of people and color. Digitally cobbled together from locations through out Havana, Goicolea uses the architecture as a means to excavate his family's past. He further manipulates these images by painting over small voids of space or drawing on top of the doctored images, thus re-imagining and re-imaging the remains from another time. In the center of the gallery lies a sculptural installation in the form of a two and a half meter long, low-lying wall made from enamel and concrete in the shape of cement masonry blocks. Referencing the sea wall, which runs the length of the Havana harbour, the shallow wall bisects a black outlined architectural plan of the house Goicolea's parents left behind in Havana shortly after the revolution. On top of the wall, drawn family portraits on Mylar, executed in negative, are obscured and sealed inside a collection of twelve hand-blown glass bottles. While the exhibition continues to explore the artist's own unique identity and background, the new body of work is marked with a poignant search for connections and roots to the past, reflected in the importance and symbolic use of Cuban and historic family imagery |
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Sandroni Rey/Ten Year Anniversary Exhibition Founded in October 1998, the gallery originally opened as a project space in Venice, CA where Sandroni and Rey worked with local emerging artists before developing a more formal program. As they began to exhibit national and international artists on a larger scale, Sandroni.Rey moved to a new space in Culver City designed by Dia:Beacon architects Allen Koch and Linda Taalman in 2004. Since that time, Culver City has emerged as one of the primary art destinations in Los Angeles. Sandroni.Rey has developed a full program of artists from the United States and Europe, including Hernan Bas, iona rozeal brown, John Espinosa, Sue de Beer, Anthony Goicolea, Soo Jin Kim, Yanai Toister, Jorg Lozek, David Schnell, and Chloe Piene. Recent additions to the roster include Los Angeles-based photographer and sculptor Farrah Karapetian and Los Angeles based painter Matty Byloos. Diversely talented and working at varying stages in their careers, these artists have shown their work throughout the world and are part of collections at institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The 10 year anniversary exhibition will include new work from all current gallery artists. Additional upcoming exhibitions for the 2008-2009 season include Anthony Goicolea, Hernan Bas, Jorg Lozek, Chloe Piene and Farrah Karapetian. In an effort to recapture and harness some of its original exploratory spirit and energy, Sandroni Rey has re-opened its shipping container as a secondary exhibition space, Sandroni.Rey/Container, that is meant to provide a relaxed platform for artists to present and audiences to view more experimental artworks. While video works have traditionally been shown within this project space, other unique projects have been shown in the past year such as Farrah Karapetian’s “Shipping Container” and most recently Drew Dominick’s “Snake Box with Video.” Beginning this fall season, the container will be curated on a regular basis in coordination with the main gallery program. Upcoming projects include exhibitions with John Espinosa, Lisa Tchakmakian, Sarah Vanderlip, Jim Skuldt, Mim Goodman and Kendell Carter. |
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Sayre Gomez & Ruby Sky Stiler Questions of authenticity and the value of originality in artwork run through both Sayre Gomez and Ruby Sky Stiler’s work. Approaching collage and sculpture respectively from a similar focus on materials, both artists enlist the process of art making itself in order to create meaning. Contextual references to a wide variety of art historical themes run through each artists’ work but irreverent play and juxtaposition lightens the mood and allows the focus to remain grounded in the fundamental pleasure of invention. Ruby Sky Stiler carefully constructs and styles sculptures that evoke physical human attributes and subvert the historical concern with authenticity. For this exhibition she has made two large-scale sculptures out of painted foam core that resemble ancient vases found at Pompeii. In the work Lets Get Comfortable, Stiler's addition of a simulated, over-ripe pear recalls traditional still-life iconography, as well as a visual pun, which refers to the voluptuous shape of a female figure. The artist pinpoints a peculiar, human instinct to domesticate or assimilate natural settings: an arbitrary chip out of a boulder at just such a height reads as an instinctual location to set, store, or tuck something away. Using the ancient vase as a definitive reference to ancient art, and authoritative history, these added elements reframe the original object and question the value of authenticity. Sayre Gomez makes installations, drawings and collages that address art making from the most basic creative instincts. For this exhibition he has made a series of collages using images from a variety of books that illustrate artistic projects for children as well as for the amateur or hobbyist. Using these images as his primary source material, Gomez incorporates them into compositions that include basic symbols of art making such as, line and color, or the gestural brush stroke to reference aspects of the history of art and to suggest that the simple act of placing things into a different context can be a useful and rewarding exercise for artists and viewers alike. Sayre Gomez graduated with an MFA from CalArts in 2008 and currently lives and works in Los Angeles. He will show work in an upcoming group exhibition with Kavi Gupta Gallery in Chicago, IL in September, 2008. Ruby Sky Stiler graduated with an MFA from Yale University in 2006 and currently lives and works in New York. Her work has been exhibited internationally, recently including group shows at Annarumma 404 Gallery in Naples, Italy and Sunday Gallery in New York City. She will also have her first solo show with Nicelle Beauchene Gallery in New York in the spring of 2009. |
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Matty Byloos Byloos’ latest series, New Paintings, is inspired by the homes that were removed during the Los Angeles International Airport expansion that occurred during the mid-1970s. Byloos focuses on architecture; specifically of his native southern California and using a variety of source materials his paintings aim to capture the homes in a transitional moment. Boarded up, vacant and completely drained of functionality, these homes allow Byloos to investigate ideas of photography’s ability to reconstruct memory and how painting might be a more appropriate vehicle for representing the mercurial qualities of distant experience. Like a recycled vellum manuscript, Byloos’ paintings embody the idea of a palimpsest. The homes no longer occupy any tangible architectural space, rather they exist as portraits of houses already lost to the past and have already been “scraped clean” for new use. Obscured by shadows and built up through suggestive layers, the paintings convey a ghostly and mysterious air: seen but nonetheless intangible. Furthermore, Byloos’ paintings push this metaphor of architectural palimpsest into a more general sense of understanding the complex writing of Los Angeles’ own architectural history and its constant revision rivaled against its own historical context. Byloos currently lives and works in Los Angeles. He received his MFA from ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, CA. |
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iona rozeal brown ...of heroines, demons and those on the fence-myth beginnings Solo Exhibition at VOLTA4, June 2 - June 7, 2008 Basel, Switzerland |
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Soo Kim Kim’s portraits freeze moments of a subjects’ continuous movement as she traces imagined images onto a glass table with her fingertips. Each unique photograph is differentiated by cuts-outs made by Kim that relate to the posture of the woman in each piece and range from representational images of the natural world to more graphic depictions that suggest movement in time and space. Each photograph in the series is linked to the figure’s movement as it comes alive in a type of dance that flows through the photographs. In this way, each photograph is reminiscent of the next. In the same way that a dancer’s steps are linked together to become fluid choreography, each step in the Superheavies series is experienced within the context of the series as a whole. Placed between the portraits are shots of Wayfarers Chapel in Palos Verdes, CA, a glass church designed by Lloyd Wright as a “tree chapel” that considers the trees as a frame for the architecture, and the space created therein as sacred. These uncut photographs work in tandem with the photographs of the young woman to consider a type of liminal space present in both architecture and photography. Soo Kim received her MFA from the California Institute of the Arts and now lives and works in Los Angeles. She teaches at the Otis College of Art and Design. Her work has been exhibited at the North Carolina Museum of Art and the Orange County Museum of Art’s 2004 California Biennial. She has also shown at the Pasadena Museum of California Art and the Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College. |
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Andy Warhol Portraits on Paper March 20, 2008 - April 19, 2008 |
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Farrah Karapetian While the structure of the piece itself is restrained; bound literally to the shape and scale of the container it inhabits, the method behind it is tri-fold: sculptural, photographic and performative. Entering the container the viewer is surrounded by photograms made by Karapetian in collaboration with graffiti artists Jaber and Failure, who tagged the photo paper with light, invoking the history of graffiti art and linking the repurposed container to its alternate circumstance. “Shipping Container” is an echo chamber. Karapetian aspires to communicate the various encounters involved in the act of representation and to challenge the conventional orientations of the photographic print. Perhaps like all photographs, the meaning of “Shipping Container” is defined in its surface and in the environment shaped and enacted by that surface. Karapetian graduated with a BA from Yale University in 2000 and will graduate with an MFA from the University of California - Los Angeles this Spring. Her thesis show will be in April, 2008 and her work will be included in the upcoming exhibition “Something About Rooms and Walls” curated by Mitch Mcewen at Superfront in Brooklyn, NY. Karapetian lives and works in Los Angeles. |
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Johan Nobell In this new body of work Nobell continues to explore landscapes through intricate narratives conjured from both imagined and real events. He juxtaposes vibrant color and cartoon-like imagery with apocalyptic themes to create paintings that are ominous yet amusing as machines and natural elements merge and take on lives of their own. Nobell creates organized chaos in a degenerated paradise where he plays out the life cycles of political struggle, violence, hunger, sexuality and death. While his work does not necessarily fit within traditional landscape genres, Nobell borrows from a wide variety of art historical references in order to evoke intense emotion and conflict through anthropomorphic beings—acknowledging and interpreting human relations to nature in a contemporary society where natural and man-made worlds collide. Nobell graduated from Valand University of Art (Gothenburg, Sweden). He was an artist-in-residence at New York’s International Studio and Curatorial Program and has exhibited his work at Andrehn Shiptjenko Gallery in Sweden and Pierogi Gallery in Brooklyn. He currently lives and works in Stockholm. |
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Sandroni Rey Group Show |