MSA-X 2019 coverage of Fredric Snitzer-Gallery, Miami
Moon people, Alexander Kroll, FREDRIC SNITZER GALLERY,2019
Moon people, Alexander Kroll
Moon people are the others. The awkward. The stumbling. The unknowing. The uncertain. The beautiful.
These paintings cast the viewer as a figure in the landscape.
Cities made ...of skin or bodies made of leaves.
Space that is both meaty and graphic; illusionistic without illusion.
They have the most history.
They are neither-nor and both-and.
We are the performers!
I want to roll around, luxuriant in velvet, my stomach pressed against a black mattress and my ass in the air.
___
Alexander Kroll received his BA from Yale University followed by MFA from Otis College of Art and Design in 2008. He currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California. His work has been exhibited at Johannes Vogt (New York, NY), Praz-Delavallade (Los Angeles, CA), Fredric Snitzer Gallery (Miami, FL), James Harris Gallery (Seattle, WA), CB1 Gallery (Los Angeles, CA), 68 Projects (Berlin, DE), 1969 (New York, NY), Torrance Art Museum, (Torrance, CA), The UCLA New Wight Gallery (Los Angeles, CA), The Ben Maltz Gallery at Otis College of Art and Design (Los Angeles, CA), The Armory Center for the Arts (Pasadena, CA) and many others. He has taught at a variety of institutions including Art Center College of Design, California College of the Arts, and the UCLA School of Art and Architecture.
MSA-X wants to thank Frederic Sinitzer, gallery
and the gallery staff for there kind help, and to all the artist for
without them there would not be an exhibition .
Moon people, Alexander Kroll, FREDRIC SNITZER GALLERY,2019
Moon people, Alexander Kroll Moon people are the others. The awkward. [...]
Moon people, Alexander Kroll
Moon people are the others. The awkward. The stumbling. The unknowing. The uncertain. The beautiful.
These paintings cast the viewer as a figure in the landscape.
Cities made ...of skin or bodies made of leaves.
Space that is both meaty and graphic; illusionistic without illusion.
They have the most history.
They are neither-nor and both-and.
We are the performers!
I want to roll around, luxuriant in velvet, my stomach pressed against a black mattress and my ass in the air.
___
Alexander Kroll received his BA from Yale University followed by MFA from Otis College of Art and Design in 2008. He currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California. His work has been exhibited at Johannes Vogt (New York, NY), Praz-Delavallade (Los Angeles, CA), Fredric Snitzer Gallery (Miami, FL), James Harris Gallery (Seattle, WA), CB1 Gallery (Los Angeles, CA), 68 Projects (Berlin, DE), 1969 (New York, NY), Torrance Art Museum, (Torrance, CA), The UCLA New Wight Gallery (Los Angeles, CA), The Ben Maltz Gallery at Otis College of Art and Design (Los Angeles, CA), The Armory Center for the Arts (Pasadena, CA) and many others. He has taught at a variety of institutions including Art Center College of Design, California College of the Arts, and the UCLA School of Art and Architecture.
MSA-X wants to thank Frederic Sinitzer, gallery
and the gallery staff for there kind help, and to all the artist for
without them there would not be an exhibition .
Rafael Domenech Paradoxically Tied: A Landscape of Permissions, 2019
I started early to formulate personal theories about the temporality [...]
I started early to formulate personal theories about the temporality of a work of art, and to generate thoughts on how a piece accepts and acknowledges surroundings rather than refusing ...them. The concept of time became not only the subject matter of the work, but also an idea about how the work can continuously be transformed, based on context.
My own historical interpretation of a painting, photograph, or drawing has always been of an image that is looked at more than once and does not change form; we receive and reflect information based on personal circumstance. In this case, I was exploring the idea of a work that starts with the act of discovery and continues transforming the perceptional experience.
Battleship Potemkin Curated by Rafael Domenech, Fredric Snitzer Gallery, 2019
Battleship Potemkin Curated by Rafael Domenech, Fredric Snitzer [...]
Battleship Potemkin Curated by Rafael Domenech, Fredric Snitzer Gallery, 2019
“Battleship Potemkin” takes its title from the 1925 black and white, silent film by Sergei Eisenstein that remarkably served as an ...inspiration to many of Francis Bacon's convulsive portraits. Consequently, it is the purpose of this exhibition to create a forum that explores disjunction, time, space and cinema as concepts for art-making.
Using the technique of montage or superposition as his curatorial strategy, curator Rafael Domenech assembles a wide range of artists and mediums. Like the film, the exhibition does not tell a story. It meticulously divides its visual syntax into segments. In response to the gallery’s architectural layout, it is installed in three different stages. This curatorial gesture transforms the building into a metaphor for the film. Each work becomes a spurt of energy that captures the eye. They are photograms, frame cuts within a movie projecting artists together that may never have shared the same space before as a way to create new narratives.
The artists involved are Matthew Barney, Vivian Chiu, Justin Cloud, Alejandro Contreras, Dana Degiulio, Jose Iraola, Michael Joo, Jon Kessler, Jonas Mekas, Ernesto Oroza, Bat-Ami Rivlin, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Tomas Vu, Fischli and Weiss, Ayoung Yu.[+] Show More
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Fredric Snitzer-Gallery, Hiejin Yoo and Erika Malzoni 2019
Fredric Snitzer-Gallery, "Hiejin Yoo "The Recovery of Openness, [...]
Fredric Snitzer-Gallery, "Hiejin Yoo "The Recovery of Openness, Intimacy and Trust, and Erika Malzoni "Infected", 2019"
Hiejin Yoo
The Recovery of Openness, Intimacy, and Trust
Fredric Snitzer Gallery is pleased to present, The ...Recovery of Openness, Intimacy, and Trust, Hiejin Yoo’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. Included in this exhibition is a selection of paintings chronicling Hiejin’s experiences, focusing on the day-to-day in contemporary life.
Erika Malzoni
Infected
Fredric Snitzer Gallery is pleased to present Infected, Erika Malzoni’s first solo exhibition at the gallery. Included in this exhibition is a large sculptural installation alongside a series of ceramics chronicling a recent 40 day period the artist spent in Miami. Erika Malzoni’s multidisciplinary approach to her artistic practice often results in object based works that include ready-made assemblages, sculptures, and installations. Her works stem from an interest in giving prominence to ordinary, discarded materials, questioning how an object acquires its value, conventions, and transience. With an attentive and generous gaze, Malzoni collects and resignifies these leftovers of daily life transpiring something of little worth into aesthetic value.
Jon Pylypchuk "i love you like a milkshake" Fredric Snitzer Gallery. 2019, MIami
Jon Pylypchuk "i love you like a milkshake" Fredric Snitzer Gallery. [...]
Jon Pylypchuk "i love you like a milkshake" Fredric Snitzer Gallery. 2019, MIami
Jon PylypchukBorn in 1972, Winnipeg, CanadaLives and works in Los AngelesJon Pylypchuk’swork evolves from the realm of the ...pathetic. His drawings and sculptures bring to life a make-believe world populated by abused cuddly creatures, where emotional frailty and menace are worn on every shirt sleeve and pet tag. Mirroring the naked state of the human condition, Pylpchuk’s tragic-comic figures are both loveable and loathsome, recreating instances of pitiful irony that ring all too true.
Also, On view in the project room:
Rafael Domench + Ernesto Orozo
La mata (the perennial sprout)
Alexandre Arrechea "Uninhabited Order" Following a fascination with [...]
Alexandre Arrechea "Uninhabited Order"
Following a fascination with the performative nature of historical narratives, Cuban-born artist Alexandre Arrechea brings new work under the banner Uninhabited Order to Fredric Snitzer Gallery. ...Mixing multi-media installations, sculptural pieces, and wall length watercolors, Arrechea assembled structures that are both devoid of physical presence and inhabited in a new way. These individual pieces form a relational nexus, setting off an active dialogue between them and bringing forth a new order in the process. The show not only marks the artist’s first use of bronze in a large-scale piece, but also serves as a new model of art production within his highly varied oeuvre.
Uninhabited Order is also Arrechea’s first attempt at collaboration with figures outside the art world. This new multidisciplinary approach allows for a richer dialectic, not just among the pieces in the show, but internal to each work as well. In Materfall from Agora series, he approached longtime friend, musician Pavel Urquiza, who shot a music video of an escalator framed to look like a waterfall. Displayed on a flat-paneled screen, the video is the centerpiece of a 9’ x 5’ x 3’ stadium-like structure Arrechea renders in a vibrant yellow hue.
In dancer, the artist lays bare one of the show’s central themes: historical narrative as performance. This bronze piece is at once an art-historical reference to the iconic Edgar Degas sculpture La Petite Danseuse de Quatorze Ans (1880) and something new altogether. Instead of Degas’ frilly tutus, Arrechea’s dancer is caught in a tutu turned stadium. A commentary on the duality of performance, the artist’s dancer seemingly wants to inhabit the stage and escape it at the same time.
Surrounding these pieces is a series of four large-scale watercolors that elaborate on main visual motifs. The first two works to create a nearly imperceptible text, a new language of the artist’s own making. The shapes, lines and blocks Arrechea constructs attempt to say more than the abstract composition before the viewer.
The third watercolor expands on the stadium metaphor, depicting a large hand populated by stadiums that weave throughout its surface like a tangled web of fingerprints. Entitled History Matters, the final watercolor renders two bowl-like stadiums with a green liquid poured out of one and into the other. It’s a visual allegory that attempts to deconstruct the process of historical assemblage, where one event leads to another, and meaning is constantly created, destroyed, and recreated.
Alexandre Arrechea (Born in Trinidad, Cuba) graduated from the Instituto Superior de Arte (ISA) in Havana in 1994 and was a founding member of the collective Los Carpinteros (1994-2003). The interdisciplinary quality of Arrechea’s work reveals a profound interest in the exploration of both public and domestic spaces. Most recently this quest has led him to produce several monumental projects like NOLIMITS (2013) encompassing ten monumental sculptures installed along the Park Avenue Malls. Among his solo shows are Twisted Horizon at Magnan Metz Gallery, New York (2012), Espacio Derrotado at Casado-SantaPau Gallery, Madrid (2011), Black Sun, which was on the NASDAQ Billboard in New York (2010), The Rules of Play, Savannah College of Art and Design, Georgia (2010), and Orange Tree at the Bronx Museum, New York (2011). The artist’s work can be found in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum in New York, CAB Burgos, Spain, Museum of Latin American Art, California, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, Daros Collection, Switzerland and the Museo Centro de Arte Contemporáneo Reina Sofia in Madrid.[+] Show More
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FREDRIC SNITZER GALLERY, Tomas Esson "Miami Flow II" 2019-20
Tomas Esson is transported into an altered state of consciousness when [...]
Tomas Esson is transported into an altered state of consciousness when he paints. His new series “Miami Flow” features highly labored abstract paintings produced in a flurry of focused exertion. ...Toiling away in his Miami studio, Esson finds solace in the mental state he is transported as he flicks, swipes, and drizzles paint onto canvass. This state of flow is recognized in the psychological literature for its "fully immersive feeling of energized focus,” colloquially known as, "being in the zone."
The current exhibition follows up 2017’s “Miami Flow” by adding more paintings to the series and developing ideas espoused in the original. Yet, one gets a sense of refinement, both thematically and technically, in this new body of work. Esson has forgone his once suggestive and erotic figuration for a totally abstract universe. There’s also the question of scale; these new pieces are massive compared to his previous canvases—meant to envelop the viewer in a vertiginous cloud of colors.
“I feel like my work now is completely abstract,” Esson explains. “It’s a total revelation. I feel free of structure and my whole attitude towards my work has changed.”
While in many ways a departure from his previous paintings, the new series still features hallmarks of his oeuvre. A new painterly gestural process masks the same erotic elements he is known for. These new canvasses are brimming with so much energy they seem practically electric. Swatches of color swirl, layered atop of each other, for what becomes a dizzying field of the artist's own making.
“This series comes from a whole other point of view,” he brims. “I feel more like a painter now than ever before.”
—
Esson was born in Havana, Cuba, in 1963. After graduating from the Instituto Superior de Arte in Havana in 1987, his work was showcased in a number of controversial exhibitions and he became a central figure in the decade’s renaissance in Cuban art. In 1990, he left Cuba and has lived in Miami and New York City, where his work continues to earn international acclaim. His paintings are in the collections of the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Havana; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst, Aachen, Germany; and Museo de Arte Contemporaneo, Monterrey, Mexico[+] Show More
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Kelley Johnson, and Rafael Rodriguez @ Fredric Snitzer Gallery, Miami
Kelley Johnson Windows, Planes, Screens, and Veils Kelley Johnson's [...]
Kelley Johnson
Windows, Planes, Screens, and Veils
Kelley Johnson's work is process driven, built upon gradually by repeating lines and geometric shapes. This repetition gives way to a structural language, which ...then allows room for intuitive, meditative painting. Using the grid as an underlying structural guide, Kelley works to build layers of space held together by armatures, functioning like planes which interact with one another. Windows, planes, screens and veils all act as framing devices in a system of spatial observation. True to the core purpose of a grid – to separate fluid space into individual units, while also maintaining an operational whole – the framing devices in these paintings obstruct one from viewing a single plane in its entirety, while also functioning as the uniting element visually, physically, and conceptually.
Rafael Rodriguez
Prototype No. 1: The possible and the actual
Motion introduces into being a scission through which being is separated from its own being. What is finds itself separated from what it is, since what it is may or may not occur to it without it necessarily not being anymore. […] Why is being what it is and what it is not at one and the same time?
Prototype No.1: the possible and the actual considers the modal distinction between the possible and the actual that underlays our idea of motion and change. It offers an experience of the scission or division that separates an object from itself while it is in motion. The featured sculptures touch upon this scission through language of prototyping, its material constitution and visual devices.[+] Show More
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Raul Cordero "The ABC of it" Fredric Snitzer Gallery, 2021
Raul Cordero "The ABC of it" Fredric Snitzer Gallery, 2021 Fredric [...]
Raul Cordero "The ABC of it" Fredric Snitzer Gallery, 2021
Fredric Snitzer Gallery is pleased to announce, The ABC of it, Raúl Cordero’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. Cordero’s exhibition presents ...an ongoing investigation into his conceptual approach to painting – a combination of blurred images reduced from their initial information with layered texts that are rendered from typography the artist has designed out of fragmented dots not easily read upon first glance.
Cordero’s paintings, the mismatch between texts and images, resembles the constant state of distraction we live in: we look at something while thinking of something else at the same time. The main intention of this text, given its visual fragmentation, is to slow down the process of looking, disrupting the initial reading of the picture plane between layers of text and image.
When broken down by images, Cordero shows us what he calls “the three ranges”: one, is a wide-open space (landscapes or general scenery); the second, gather things and people we are surrounded by (objects light, shadows, portraits, interiors) and the third, is a metaphorized representation of the quantum reality (energy particles, vibration); that is, what we can’t see but only feel, what we and everything else is made of.
These two elements, imagery, and text are two language systems invented by human civilization in order to record and spread information throughout history. These visual and textual languages have no translation or compatibility between them, both are used as a complement to another to serve humanity to create truths, inform, educate, or indoctrinate, among other functions. Cordero uses visual and verbal in a paradoxical way to displace their intended function as communication.
Raúl Cordero, born in Havana, Cuba, in 1971, studied art in his native city at both the Academia San Alejandro and the Instituto Superior de Diseño, and in the Netherlands at the Graphic Media Development Centre, The Hague, and the Rijksakademie Van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam. Cordero’s works have recently been shown at Mai 36 Galerie in Zürich, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Havana, and El Espacio 23 in Miami. His work can be seen in public collections around the world, including the Musée National D’Art Moderne Centre Pompidou in Paris, France; Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles (MOCA), The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, The Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) and the Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale, in the United States of America; El Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, in Cuba; The Stedelijk Museum Voor Actuele Kunst (SMAK) in Gent, Belgium; El Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno (CAAM) and Museo Extremeño e Iberoamericano de Arte Contemporáneo (MEIAC) in Spain; among many others.[+] Show More
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Ajarb Bernard Ategwa Sweet Flowers of Douala, 2021
Ajarb Bernard Ategwa was born in 1988 in Kumba, Cameroon. His recent [...]
Ajarb Bernard Ategwa was born in 1988 in Kumba, Cameroon. His recent series of portrait-based works construct an image of Cameroon and of Cameroonian people. Ategwa lives and works in ...Douala, Cameroon’s largest city, which has had many foreign influences in the past and more recently an influx of migrants from within the country and neighboring regions. This has shaped Douala into a vibrant and colorful metropolis that is the source of Ategwa’s art. Ategwa’s painting style is based on complex line drawings on canvas, which are executed free-hand. They imply a movement and momentum reflective of his rapidly transforming city. Previous exhibitions include Peres Projects, Berlin; Espace Doual’art, Douala; the Cameroon National Museum, curated by Simon Njami; and Jack Bell Gallery, London.
Fredric Snitzer Gallery is pleased to present Sweet Flowers of Douala, Ajarb Bernard Ategwa’s first solo exhibition in a US gallery. The exhibition consists of a new series of portrait-based paintings celebrating the women of Cameroon. This celebratory energy is evident not only in the individuality of each presented subject but in the use of brightly, fluorescent hues of the paintings and patterned motifs they are wearing.
Ategwa offers a local perspective on modes of self-representation in Cameroon today, portraying the strength and individuality of each subject in his paintings. The use of portraiture is reminiscent of black and white studio portraiture popular across countries in post-independence Africa, as well as a contemporary selfie culture. The use of this “lens” marks ascendance, status, and abundance.
Within this new series, there is also an apparent contrast between traditional and contemporary iconography. Each subject is dressed in either traditional garments or references more contemporary reinterpretations of African wax fabrics. Clothing holds importance within African society and the artist’s use of African wax fabrics within this new body of work showcases the impact and power these materials have. African wax fabrics are known for their ability to tell stories unapologetically through the use of bold designs, creative patterns, and bright colors. Often used as a type of non-verbal communication amongst its wearers, these textiles conveying certain messages or represent a specific culture connecting people to politics, religion, culture, and traditions.
What is also visually evident is the painting's overall graphic quality. The artist’s use of bold lines to block out flat shapes and color to draw the viewer directly into the subject is an attribute to the artist’s background in billboard painting. In stark contrast to the artist's hardline execution, he introduces a new painterly watercolor element that holds back the portrait's full disclosure.
Sweet Flowers of Douala expresses the energy of the West-Cameroonian artist and his surroundings by capturing the wealth and vitality of the people with whom the artist is surrounded.[+] Show More
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THE NEW AGE OF BRONZE, FREDRIC SNITZER GALLERY
THE NEW AGE OF BRONZE José Bedia, Tomás Esson, Yusimy Lara, [...]
THE NEW AGE OF BRONZE José Bedia, Tomás Esson, Yusimy Lara, Jon Pylypchuk, and Alan Sonfist
Fredric Snitzer Gallery is pleased to present, The New Age of Bronze, a group ...exhibition of sculpture by six artists’ exploring contemporary interpretations of the traditional technique and material, bronze. The title references the great civilizations of The Bronze Age which marked the time humans first began working with metals, a period that brought about other technological advances such as the first writing systems and the invention of the wheel.
The New Age of Bronze focuses on contemporary approaches and surveys various methodologies and perspectives specific to each of the featured artists: José Bedia, Tomás Esson, Yusimy Lara, Jon Pylypchuk, and Alan Sonfist.[+] Show More
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Hernan Bas "Nightlite", and Tomás Esson "S.O.S. CUBA"
Fredric Snitzer Gallery is pleased to announce Nightlite, a solo [...]
Fredric Snitzer Gallery is pleased to announce Nightlite, a solo exhibition by Hernan Bas commemorating the 20th anniversary of representation by the gallery. This exhibition, Bas’s ninth with the gallery, ...features a small selection of large-scale paintings depicting scarcely illuminated scenarios unfolding under the cover of night.
Natural and artificial sources of light cast shadows in moody compositions within these works and invite the viewer to points both familiar and obscure. Famed Paris locations such as the Pont des Arts bridge and the tomb of Oscar Wilde at the Père Lachaise Cemetery have been paired with unspecified mysterious destinations. One such anonymous setting is seen in Torch Fishing for Flounder, which finds a pair of young men in a canoe doing just that. Torch fishing is a centuries-old method for spearing prey at night, and It is an image the artist has described as “so hopelessly (Southern) gothic in its romance; the reeds, the flames, the stillness of dark streams... I couldn't help but attempt to emulate the unlikely drama of dudes fishing at night.”[+] Show More
Founded in 1977, the Fredric Snitzer Gallery is located in Miami’s Wynwood Art District. For over thirty years, Fredric Snitzer has played a leading role in boosting emerging Miami artists into international recognition. Gallery artists have exhibited their work at institutions such as the Whitney Biennial, Palais de Tokyo, Kunsthaus Baselland, Serpentine Gallery, The Whitney Museum of American Art, and The Museum of Modern Art, New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles, among others. In addition to the gallery’s membership in the prestigious Art Dealers Association of America, Fredric Snitzer himself has been serving on the selection committee board of the Art Basel Miami Beach since the fairs inception over 10 years ago.
Artists represented:
ALICE AYCOCK
HERNAN BAS
JOSE BEDIA
ENRIQUE MARTINEZ CELAYA
ZHIVAGO DUNCAN
NAOMI FISHER
MAURICIO GONZALEZ
RIDLEY HOWARD
ALEXANDER KNOLL
MARIA MARTINEZ-CANAS
GAVIN PERRY
JON PYLYPCHUK
DIEGO SINGH
