Gestalten Space

The pre-opening on Thursday, April 28th, 18:00-21:00

I Check You

April 21 – May 22, 2011

New works by Rauha Mäkilä and Geraldine Visco

BASK

April 23rd, 2011

323 East, Royal Oak, MI

About the Event

International Artist BASK to Exhibition New Art at 323East
Special Edition Screen Print Release on 4/18 & Live Mural Painting 4/19 – 4/22
Bask, the Czech-born agent provacateur of countless “thoughtcrimes”, will headline a new exhibition Saturday Night Special at 323East Gallery on Saturday, April 23 at 6 p.m. Art fiends, free thinkers, urban-culture aficionados and scenesters alike are invited to mingle, have a drink and enjoy the painter’s latest works.

There will be a special overture to the festivities starting April 19. That day BASK will commence a mural on the Royal Oak gallery’s outside wall – an ambitious work he’ll continue to labor on until the exhibit’s official unveiling on the 23rd.

Continuing with the week long festivities BASK is releasing his second art print on 323East’s sister site 1xRUN. The featured image from Saturday Night Special will be recreated in a multi-color silkscreen print. This limited edition, signed and numbered print will be available for 1 week starting at Noon EST on April 18th – April at http://1xRUN.com. In this image the woman is casually framed by ghostlike mechanical engines and an ambiguous ocean of objects swirls beneath her eyes – the latter element resembling the schema of a computer’s mainframe as delineated by things suspiciously similar to spermatazoa. Is the mask meant to conceal identity or does it hide the marks of some past crime?

Bask is that rarity in the contemporary art world – a serious commentator on social issues and problems who draws upon personal experiences and insights rather than theory. Equally inspired by graffiti, the punk scene’s D.I.Y. use-what-ya-got ethos, and the parallels he sees between the stark propaganda of his Eastern European childhood and contemporary American pop culture with all its overt manipulations, his works are gritty and thematically rich. Encompassed in the original slogan that first caught the imagination of critics and public – “Bask in your thought crime” – his philosophy is one of freedom and individuality, rather than the exacerbation of blind nihilism. He sees myriad possibilities in a discarded piece of wood, in a whitewashed brick wall, or in the emotions that arise when familiar shadows loom behind bright, shining lies.

His eyes are open -as is his mind. His art encourages us to embrace the same practices.

Bask’s imagery has been shown in New York, London, San Francisco, Miami, and Detroit, and is a part of the Jacksonville Museum of Contemporary Art’s permanent collection. His work has also been published in countless publications including books like, Graffiti World, New Amarican Paintings, BLK/MRKT ONE, and the upcoming 3D Art Book. For more information on BASK, go to KnownAsBask.com

323 East is a collection of creative energy materialized in a mashup of art, culture, lifestyle and creativity. Located 20 minutes north of Detroit in Royal Oak, MI; 323East is home to over 100 artists with rotating works in a variety of mediums.

WHAT: Saturday Night Special, Art by Ales BASK Hostomsky, Saturday, April 23rd 2011 6pm-11pm
Live Mural Painting: April 19 – 22 @ 323East
Limited edition print release: April 18th on 1xRUN.com

WHERE: 323 East Gallery, 323 E. Fourth St. Royal Oak MI

Thursday, March 17, don’t miss the most exciting night of the SGC Conference! That’s right, the DPA is has graciously been given the keys to Evil Prints, Tom Huck’s Evil Lair!

This exhibition and collaborative performance will feature several booths from the DPA and Bastards of Printmaking. Participate in carnival attractions and side shows, and you can win prints and prizes!

Booths include:
…
Ryan O’Malley and Gamblin Ink present: Gamblin Ink ring toss. Play and win the best ink in the biz!

John Hancock and Emily Arthur Douglas and the Wheel of Misfortune. Spin the wheel and win a Tom Huck print… or, drink from the bottle marked heartache… get spanked… or perform a feat to win your DPA or BOP print prize!

Katy Seals and The Printmaking Panty Parade! Pop a panty-printed balloon and win a special prize!

Matt Rebholz presents: bobbing for Ink/PBR! Grab a can and high-five the man! Matt may even be persuaded to kick up a few of his amazing works for the winners!

Eric Fuertes and his amazing new press! Come see what’s next for Printmaking’s most creative press sculptor!

Drive By Press celebrates FIVE Years of Spreading the Ink, visiting over 200 Universities and 200,00 miles! They’ll be selling em’ and slinshoting some freebies too!

AAAAAAAND…. The infamous Bob Reuter’s Black Diamond and Nasty Cat Bath will be performing live and in person at 9pm!!!!!!!!!!!

…and much much more!!!!

The event will also include exhibitions from Sleeper Cell, Fred StoneHouse, Jack Damer, Satans Camaro and more… as well as Represent, a DPA portfolio of the hottest prints from students across the country!

And just like every year, the DPA will be challenging the Bastards of Printmaking in a grudge match! This time it involves a baby pool, ink, green jello and Aaron Lovell as our referee!!

Want to arrive in evil style? LOOK OUT for the cardinal red EVIL PARTY BUS, with on-board dj. The bus will shuttle conference participants from the Chase Park Plaza to the Evil Prints Studio, every 20 minutes starting at 9pm on the 17th!

Sponsored by PBR and the Riverfont Times!!
www.pabst.com
www.riverfronttimes.com

Learn more at:
www.dirtyprintmakers.com
www.evilprints.com

SXSW Special Events

Umshini Wam

Director: Harmony Korine

Big dreams, big blunts, big rims, and big guns.  its time to get gangsta gangsta.   Ninja and Yo Landi are wheelchair-bound lovers and real gangstas.  They live in the outskirts of civilization, they shoot guns for fun, smoke massive joints, and sleep in the woods. They don’t have any bling to show for their gangsta cred, but the world deserves to know who they are.  They’re tramps, and their wheels are starting to fall off.
Ninja become despondent over their vagabond existence, but Yo Landi won’t let him give up.  what ensues is straight up gangsta mayhem, the realist of the real, true gangsta shit.

For more information visit:

And if you’re asking yourself “Who is Die Antwoord?” then you need to watch this:

John Stezaker

January 7 – February 12, 2011

Friedrich Petzel, New York

About the Event

Friedrich Petzel Gallery is pleased to announce the second solo exhibition of work by the London-based artist John Stezaker.

John Stezaker has been highly influential in the key artistic developments of the last three decades from Conceptual art and Appropriation to the re-emergence of collage. For his second solo show in New York, Stezaker will be showing a selection of silkscreens that were made between 1979 and 1992 and a selection of collages from his ‘Dark Star’ series from 1979 to 1983.

Both the silkscreens and the ‘Dark Star’ collages come from a period of time in which Stezaker was a frequent visitor to New York, and both bodies of work bear the imprint of the city. Stezaker’s encounter with New York and its culture in the late 70’s and early 80’s proved to be momentous and inspiring. It not only represented his first comprehensive encounter with American Modernism (especially Warhol and Newman) but was also his first encounter with his American counterparts in Appropriation (Goldstein, Prince, Longo, Kruger, and Levine).

In 1979 Stezaker described New York as ‘a city of voyeurs’ and his ‘Dark Star’ works are testimony to his observation. The absented (cut-out) figures of the ‘Dark Stars’ convert the object of spectacle – the star – into a voyeuristic shadow figure. The remaining photographic aura or spotlight, separated from its figure, cuts the image off from its function in portraiture to become an object of independent, autonomous fascination: they echo what Stezaker has described as ‘the dark aura of fascination.’ It was Stezaker’s contact with New York during this period that confirmed his desire to follow the image: to put aside conceptual ideas about the image, to yield to its pure fascination and to work within the horizons of the found image. Color appeared in his work for the first time, both in the small-scale collages and in the silkscreens, and in both, it was the color of the city at night – of neon and technicolor.

The silkscreens are the only period in his career in which he has worked primarily on a large scale and in color. By 1983-4, the disembodied heads of cinematic voyeurs and kissing couples were replaced by the

multiple headless torsos on silkscreen prints, using images from nudist magazines and soft-porn ‘art studies.’ Following these, it was the baby heads and then the abstract spheres that went on to punctuate his multiple image silkscreens. But whatever the image that dominates each development of the silkscreens, there is a continual return to a dialogue with modernist painting and geometric abstraction, culminating in the final shaped monochrome canvases, shown here for the first time.

John Stezaker has had numerous solo exhibitions, most recently at The Approach, London; Galerie Gisela Capitain, Köln; and Capitain Petzel, Berlin. An overview of his work will be presented at the Whitchapel Gallery, London, in 2011, and will travel to Musée d’Art Moderne- Grand Duc Jean (Mudam), Luxembourg, and the Kemper Museum, Washington University St. Louis, St. Louis. His works are included in the public collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Tate Collection, London, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Ellipse Foundation, Cacais, and the Rubell Family Collection, Miami. He lives and works in London.

Friedrich Petzel Gallery is located at 537 West 22nd Street (between 10th and 11th Avenues) New York, NY 10011. The gallery is open to the public from Tuesday through Saturday, 10:00 AM – 6:00 PM. For further information, please call (212) 680 – 9467 or email info@petzel.com.

Yes Biological

Erwin Wurm

January 11 – February 12, 2011

Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris

About the Event

Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac is pleased to present, for the first time in Paris, a comprehensive solo exhibition of new sculptures by the Austrian artist Erwin Wurm.

During the 1990s, Erwin Wurm attracted much attention with his One-Minute Sculptures. Following the artist’s instructions, visitors to the exhibition could themselves briefly become sculptures, by taking up often absurd poses frequently involving everyday objects.

Wurm has always concentrated on extending the traditional concept of sculpture, starting from the classic pre-modern premise that sculpture is concerned with the alteration of mass and volume. He takes this premise literally, and applies it to everyday reality: “To change mass and volume is a sculptural act. To gain or lose weight is also a sculptural act.” Thus people can themselves become sculptures.

In the early 1990s, Wurm made a video entitled 59 Positions, now in the collections of the Museum Ludwig, Cologne, and the Centre Pompidou, Paris. It shows people taking up specific and unusual positions using a pullover, according to his instructions, then freezing as One-Minute Sculptures. Here the performative is combined with the sculptural. In the present exhibition, the works thus created are represented as monumental sculptures or as groups of sculptures on a greatly reduced scale.

The small sculptures seem to huddle together, to twist themselves round to face outwards. The large sculptures, because of their monumentality, are more static, but they, too, seem to be in a state of dissolution. Here Wurm takes the performative element of the One-Minute Sculptures to a new level of monumentality, nevertheless retaining their processual aspect. The definition of inside and outside is blurred in these works; they can be seen as both inward- and outward-facing. They look compact and self-contained; we can put ourselves in their place, but we cannot empathise with them.

Erwin Wurm’s sculptures are often defined by their shell, the outline that circumscribes their volume. This may be a suit, or a pullover. Originally, the artist used to pull garments over simple wooden plinths, thus converting them into sculptures. In his latest works, the box shape of the plinth is sometimes still visible. What in the One-Minute Sculptures was a person, later became a plinth, and is now a hybrid form.

The oversized police cap in the exhibition becomes a complete sculpture only when a viewer stands underneath it; the head disappears, so that the cap seems to sit directly on the torso, rendering the person anonymous. This is reminiscent of a child trying on its parents’ clothes to assume an adult role, which it cannot fulfil.

Erwin Wurm will install an enormous “knitted wall”, which reintroduces a previous work on a smaller scale, titled, like the exhibition, Yes Biological (43 x 85 cm), which also deals with the expanded concepts of sculpture and painting. The exhibition area becomes the canvas, a mural (in the literal sense) is created, and we are uncertain as to whether it should be called a picture or a sculpture.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/13/world/asia/13china.html

A new site worth checking out has just hit the web.  Artist Justin Gorman of PAPERMAKESTACK is at it again with A Variety of Fine.

According to Justin, the site is “An ever-changing grid of curated images and original photo based content from Heather Lin and myself. “

This site is sure to be another high caliber endeavor, and we at Beefmaster are looking forward to the future of Fine!