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The New Contemporary Art Magazine
While women artists have been involved in making art throughout history, their work has been dismissed or not as often acknowledged in comparison to men. Today, women do have important roles in society as writers, painters, sculptors, dancers, business leaders, among others, but they are still statistically under-represented by art institutions. "Trifecta", which opens this Friday at Jonathan Levine Gallery, will shed a light on three prominent women in Contemporary art - Handiedan, Mimi Scholz, and Sandra Chevrier. Curator Yasha Young shares, “This exhibition addresses the fact that art created by women has been historically dismissed as craft as opposed to fine art, affecting the development of women in art throughout history. I would like to open doors for women artists and encourage them to step out and up."
Nature and the creatures that inhabit its delicate world have always been a fascinating subject for Scott Musgrove (previously covered in HF Vol. 2, 8, 24 and online). With a big solo exhibition coming up at Jonathan LeVine Gallery in New York on May 16, we discovered that he has been quite busy, and not only with producing paintings and sculptures. He also recently became a father. As he put the finishing touches on his new work, Musgrove took a few moments to share his thoughts on parenthood, competitive bike racing, and, of course, the balancing act of family and making art. Read the exclusive interview below.
Often using himself as a subject, Madrid-based painter Eloy Morales paints large-scale, expressive portraits that hone in on the uniqueness of the human face. Morales often depicts his subjects covered in paint and other props as a way to add interesting textures as well as emotional content. The artist has a solo show coming up this week at Jonathan LeVine Gallery in New York titled "About Head." Opening May 16, the exhibition will present new, mural-scale portraits that put the human head front-and-center, inviting the viewers to get lost in Morales' meticulously-painted details.
Continuing their 10 year anniversary celebration, "Oh, the Places We've Been" is a group exhibit showcasing the core artists that have helped shape New York's Jonathan LeVine Gallery into what it is today. Street art pioneers like Blek Le Rat and Dan Witz will have their work hanging beside that of artists with a more illustrative style, such as Tara McPherson, Gary Taxali, and Gary Baseman. More expressionistic painters will be featured, as well: Brett Amory, Natalia Fabia, and Esao Andrews all have work in the show also. Check out our preview below before "Oh, the Places We've Been" opens on April 2.
Now a well-established Manhattan gallerist, Jonathan LeVine continues to nod to his roots in the 1980s New York punk scene with his curatorial choices. Over the past 10 years, Jonathan LeVine Gallery has become a premier destination for high-caliber art with a countercultural aesthetic and the gallery (which is down divided into two locations) will celebrate a decade in business with "The Color and the Fury: 10 Years of Jonathan LeVine Gallery."
Currently on view at Jonathan LeVine Gallery in New York, "The Lost Mitten Society" is a salon-style group show filled with work from emerging and well-known artists working across various disciplines. The exhibition opened on January 10 and includes a diverse sampling of work from artists we have featured in print over the years as well as ones we recently introduced on our blog.
Known for his design-oriented paintings of voluptuous bird women, Amsterdam-based artist Parra will present a new series of work for his January 8 solo show at Jonathan LeVine Gallery in New York, "Yer So Bad." Named after a Tom Petty song about a femme fatale who can't seem to settle down, the exhibition features new Pop Art-inspired paintings filled with sex and intrigue. We first featured Parra in Hi-Fructose Vol. 25. Check out a preview of "Yer So Bad" below to see what he has been up to.
On November 22nd, London artists Kai and Sunny celebrated the opening of "Lots of Bits of Star" at Jonathan Levine Gallery (previewed here). A simple theme ornately executed, their exhibition takes an up close and personal look at the dramatic life stars. As if looking through the lens of a super-telescope, the duo have created inspired images that take the shape of familiar motifs; wild, flowering petals, a flock of birds, to surreal geometric patterns.
Tomorrow, California based graffiti artist Doze Green will celebrate his fifth solo at Jonathan LeVine Gallery, "Out of Knowhere". On the show's concept, Green shares, "This is my interpretation of the soul’s journey. Leaving behind illusion, ego and material to connect with the self and converge with the source of life.” A recent video takes viewers behind the scenes, where pieces from Green's rural life are mirrored in his paintings. Among his inspirations are the seasons, reincarnation and the natural cycles of human, plant and animal life.
Kai & Sunny are a London based creative duo that are especially attentive to detail. Together, they create intricate, nature inspired screen prints on a variety of media. The images below show their scrupulous process- taking us behind the scenes of their hand drawn sketches to the final, hand pulled screen prints. For their upcoming show at Jonathan Levine gallery, "Lots of Bits of Star", Kai & Sunny will debut new prints with unreal geometrical patterns exposing our misconceptions of the world around us.
Jonathan LeVine Gallery recently brought Olek, DalEast, Dan Witz, Saner, Nychos and Jeff Soto to Berlin for their takeover of Project M, Urban Nation's ever-evolving outdoor art gallery. In addition to murals and public installations by the above-mentioned artists, LeVine curated a pop-up exhibition titled "Greetings from New York City" with works by Kevin Cyr, Tara McPherson, Gary Baseman, Faile and Evol as well as studio works from the artists who did the street art portion of the show. Photographer Henrik Haven captured the artists in action as they left their mark on Berlin's cityscape.
Painter Fabio D'Aroma's characters perpetually march westward, though it's unclear to what end. His nude men and women with protruding bellies and knobby limbs appear to be part of an endless procession. D'Aroma adorns them with anachronistic accouterments such as 19th-century bayonets, animal pelts and punk rock mohawks, making it impossible to determine the continuity between the various works in the series. His highly stylized paintings are currently on view at New York's Jonathan LeVine Gallery through November 8 for his solo show, "West of Ovest." The artist says that our culture's crippling obsession with social media — and the resulting social awkwardness — was the inspiration behind his ungainly figures.
Thursday night's opening of Alex Gross's "Future Tense" at Jonathan LeVine Gallery in New York's Chelsea district greeted viewers with a heavy dose of consumer culture. The exhibition initially comes off as accessible and playfully reflective of modern addictions, yet the works as a group are rather grim and much harder to swallow than their glossy, candy-colored exteriors would suggest.
Los Angeles-based artist Alex Gross (featured in HF Vol. 21) recently completed a series of oil paintings and mixed-media works for his upcoming show, "Future Tense," opening October 9 at NYC's Jonathan LeVine Gallery. His bright new works utilize realist techniques with such perfectionism that his characters more closely resemble Photoshopped models in magazines than anyone we'd encounter in real life. This glossy look adds to the impact of Gross's underlying cultural critique. Always plugged in and connected, his characters seem far from engaged in the present moment. While they pacify themselves with smartphones and junk food, their gazes look vacant and their happiness, fleeting.
Like tiny movie sets that recall the color-coded cinematography of Wes Anderson, Marc Giai-Miniet's sculptural dioramas reinterpret real-life, utilitarian settings. The artist (who we introduced on the blog recently) builds doll house-like architecture that evokes factories and workshops, turning these industrial spaces into whimsical settings filled with strange objects that seem precariously organized. Each room is stuffed to its brim, and it takes time for the eye to traverse the different compartments of each piece. While Giai-Miniet is a recognized artist in his native France with a long career behind him, he will debut his first US solo show at NYC's Jonathan LeVine Gallery on October 11, "Théâtre de la Mémoire." Take a look at some of his new works for the exhibition below.
Ever the astute aesthete, Esao Andrews (previously covered in HF Vol. 8 and online) brings a renewed sense of clarity and purpose to his latest body of work. His new paintings will be featured at NYC's Jonathan LeVine Gallery from October 11 through November 8 for Andrews's upcoming solo show, "Epilogues." For this series, the artist embraced some of his signature motifs, bringing them back into the studio and furthering their growth. The ongoing narrative in his work, as Andrews tells us, needed a conclusion, a way to say farewell and move forward with his pursuits. This exhibition of painting provides him with just that: closure. In "Epilogues," we are treated to a visual feast of some of Andrews’s most well-known images as they would appear as aged, matured and weathered in his trademark tonality, creating transcendent moments of haunted familiarity.
While most people's experiences with animals involve encountering the domesticated or captive sort, DALeast depicts an animal world far from the civilized, cute and cuddly version we humans like to imagine in his current solo show, "The Laten Photon," at New York City's Jonathan LeVine Gallery. With his abstracted, high-contrast paintings, the Chinese-born, South African-based artist presents a high-intensity drama of predators and prey. Known for his monochromatic street art, in which gleaming, ribbon-like black lines coalesce into expressionistic animal silhouettes, DAL departed from his typical color palette and worked with rich hues of eggplant, indigo and burgundy in addition to his signature tea-stained linen. The title of the exhibition comes from quantum physics, where the photon is defined as a particle that creates light and makes matter visible to the human eye. The title speaks to DAL's continual interest in transformation and evolution.
Italian artist Alessandro Gallo (featured in HF Vol. 24) presents a disorienting series of sculptures for his upcoming solo show at Jonathan LeVine Gallery, "Strani Incontri." The show's title translates to "strange encounters," which is an apt summary of the experience of coming upon one of Gallo's large-scale clay figures. Expertly reproducing human and animal anatomy, Gallo blends the two to create convincing hybrids of man and beast. The works produce an almost eerie sense of unheimliche, as Freud put it: when the familiar becomes uncomfortably strange.
Currently on view at Jonathan LeVine Gallery in New York City is "Cruel Summer," an extensive showcase of artists with ties to the international graffiti and street art scenes. The show is curated by Roger Gastman, a graffiti writer turned filmmaker and author whose extensive credits include consulting producer of Banksy's Exit Through the Giftshop and co-curator of the major street art exhibition "Art in the Streets" at LA's MoCA. With humorous, playful works by Dabs Myla, Finok and HuskMitNavn, neon dreamscapes by Maya Hayuk and POSE and black-and-white flash tattoo drawings by Mike Giant, the exhibition demonstrates the broad scope of artists making their marks on the streets of cities across the world.
In the way a funhouse mirror warps the mundane into the absurd, Brazilian artist Rafael Silveira combines innocuous imagery with the vaguely grotesque to provide a disorienting sensory experience not unlike that of a carnival, where the cheery morphs in and out of the eerie until they are no longer distinguishable.