NYC Art Shows- Thomas Scheibitz at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Installation Art, Mixed Media, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Sculptors / Sculpture
Apr 172025
 

Currently on view at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery is the Thomas Scheibitz exhibition Argos Eyes. The show includes paintings, sculptures, and in the upstairs gallery, a table of tools and objects related to the work.

From the press release-

Internationally renowned for his mastery of painting, Scheibitz subverts traditional notions of the medium with radical juxtapositions of color and a unique formal language that lands ambiguously between abstraction and representation. Drawing from classical painting and architecture, the contemporary urban landscape, and popular culture, Scheibitz deconstructs and recombines signs, images, shapes, and architectural fragments in ways that challenge expected contexts and interpretations.

Scheibitz’s practice has been at the center of contemporary artmaking since the late 1990s with early solo exhibitions at the ICA London, the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, and the Berkeley Art Museum, University of California, Berkeley, as well as breakthrough presentations at the German pavilion of the 51st Venice Biennial, MUDAM Luxembourg, Centre d’Art Contemporain Geneva, Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin, and more recent major shows at Kunstmuseum Bonn, MMK Frankfurt, and Pablo Picasso x Thomas Scheibitz at the Museum Berggruen, Berlin.

In an age of infinite images and visual information, Argos, the multi-eyed, all-seeing guardian giant of Greek mythology, serves as a kind of avatar for Scheibitz. Like the panopticon-esque figure, the artist’s painting and sculpture absorb and dissolve visual material, encoding and decoding, mapping, measuring, penetrating and exploring a pictorial inventory. For Scheibitz, Argos Eyes are the observers of events and circumstances; that which we see directly, or indirectly via our ubiquitous technological devices, lenses, and screens. For the artist, a picture has always been a summary of different sources of observations and experiences which remain in the mind’s eye like “double exposures”. The eye, or by proxy the lens, is the entrance to the conscious or unconscious processing of what we see or do not see. A fundamental question for the artist remains the philosophical question: do we only see what we already know?

In the main ground floor gallery, Scheibitz presents a dynamic range of painterly compositions and a sculpture. Bringing together selections from his vast lexicon of images, Scheibitz builds up these compositions meticulously yet intuitively, using maquettes, drawings, collage, photography, and sketches. Recognizable forms such as eyes, cubes, droplets, and pyramids are translated into multilayered and complex pictorial structures that urge the viewer to consider multiple perspectives.

In the upstairs galleries, more intimately scaled paintings encircle the room, in addition to an Atlas-like master table filled with models, stencils, and other tools representative of the repeated motifs found in the artist’s studio. This conceptual landscape illustrates the core nature of the work, offering interrelated exercises in form, color, and material.

This exhibition closes 4/18/25.

Los Angeles Art- Olafur Eliasson at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, California Art Shows, Conceptual Art, Installation Art, Los Angeles Art Shows, New York Art Shows, Sculptors / Sculpture
Dec 122024
 

The above work is Olafur Eliasson’s Edgy but perfect kinship sphere, 2020, spotted at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery’s Los Angeles location.

Eliasson is showing work in a solo exhibition at the gallery’s New York location that includes two new light installations, one of which includes sound, a series of recent watercolors, and two new sculptures. That exhibition will be on view until 12/19/24.

In Los Angeles he has a solo exhibition at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, on view until July 2025. This show is part of the PST ART: Art and Science Collide programming taking place throughout Southern California.

Los Angeles Art Shows- Lisa Williamson at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, California Art Shows, Los Angeles Art Shows, Mixed Media, Sculptors / Sculpture
Nov 142024
 

“OoOoOo”, 2024, Water-based paint, glass particles, maple, aluminum, and lacquer

“New Wave”, 2024, Water-based paint, glass particles, basswood, aluminum, and lacquer

“Ray”, 2024, Water-based paint, glass particles, basswood (left) and “Wavy Earth”, 2024, Water-based paint, glass particles, maple, aluminum, and lacquer

“Chimera”, 2024, Water-based paint, glass particles, basswood, aluminum, and lacquer (left) and “Fields”, 2024, Water-based paint, glass particles, maple, aluminum, and lacquer (right)

“A Bird and a Bud”, 2024, Water-based paint, glass particles, basswood

“Trace”, 2024, Water-based paint, glass particles, maple, aluminum, and lacquer

“Pool”, 2024, Water-based paint, glass particles, basswood, aluminum and lacquer

Shapes create a visual language in Lisa Williamson’s exhibition Hover Land Lover at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in Los Angeles. The hand painted colors accent forms that feel both familiar and strange at once.

From the press release-

With an interest in forming a language through concise material abstraction, Lisa Williamson creates works that are visually precise, physically resonant, and often attune to the spaces in which they are exhibited. For Hover Land Lover, the artist presents a series of painted wall reliefs and sculptures that convey language as a series of formal compressions — of landscape, of architecture, and of figuration. At once systematic and intuitive, Williamson tunes and calibrates material space, in that of her individual works and in their relationship to one another within the gallery.

Central to the exhibition is a series of machine-carved basswood relief sculptures that are mounted to aluminum and painted by hand in layers of semi-transparent shimmering metallics, contrasted by surfaces of densely saturated color. Shifting in scale from vast horizontal expanses to modest head or page size abstractions, each work punctuates space and impresses an energetic chromatic charge. Wrapping around the galleries, the artist relates the installation of these works to the structure of a sentence or to that of an imagined morse code. Installed with “room to breathe”, Williamson carefully considers the sculptures’ relationship to the walls and connection to the surrounding architecture, rhythmically creating a conversation between each form and the space they occupy.

In the metallic silver-blue relief, New Wave, the sculpture echoes a long and narrow wave, a line drawing, a curtain, or a vibration. In juxtaposition is the compact relief, Fields, a concentrated bolt of color in which three horizontal bars of vivid green float before a gold infused bronze-metallic ground. Inventing subtle color associations and complex painted surfaces through her incorporation of glass and metallic particles, Williamson’s sculptures catch light and perceptually shift as one moves around each work. Groover is a direct nod to this act of tuning as a pattern of black dials reminiscent of stereo knobs protrude from a glimmering cream block. Hovering in the galleries, Williamson’s reliefs each convey a particular optical frequency — autonomous forms that hold space — at once expressive in their physicality while also maintaining a certain level of interiority, opacity, or resistance.

In a series of vertical sculptures, the artist draws from leveling or navigational tools such as plumb bobs, fishing bobbers, and pins. Human in scale, each upright form personifies balance and the demarcation of space. Situated in conversation with Williamson’s reliefs, these works disrupt the horizontality of the exhibition and instead “drop in”. Ray is a tall and tapered pin that is bifurcated by warm and cool tones, with alternating sections of opacity and luminosity. Drawing from a ray or beam of light, this work exemplifies the active nature of Williamson’s painted forms as glass particles reveal a non-static and light-responsive surface. In the diptych, A Bird and a Bud, Williamson inverts two identical forms and reorients her approach to color within each. Standing together, these animated sculptures conflate nature and figure, as an after-image of color casts against the wall to activate the surrounding space. Regarding precision as an expressive gesture and calibration as a mode of production, Williamson imbues her forms with character and locates a distinct formal resonance, softening the line between painting and sculpture, language and object.

This exhibition closes 11/16/24.

Flashback- Los Angeles Art Shows- Haim Steinbach at Tanya Bonakdar

 Architecture, Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, California Art Shows, Conceptual Art, Los Angeles Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Quotes, Sculptors / Sculpture, Writers
Aug 162024
 

What does a wall of color make you feel? Does that change if it exists in a gallery? What about the specific color? And if you add text?

These are some of the questions that arise when viewing Haim Steinbach’s mypoemisfinishedandIhaven’tmentionedorangeyet, 2019. The work was part of his 2019 exhibition Appear to Use at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in Los Angeles.

From the press release-

Holding a wall of the back gallery is an expansive wall painting consisting of the color orange along with the line—mypoemisfinishedandIhaven’tmentionedorangeyet—from the poem “Why I Am Not a Painter” by Frank O’Hara. Here, Steinbach challenges our perception of architecture in the relationship between language, color and cultural structures, encompassing the core themes of the exhibition.

Here is the Frank O’Hara poem being referenced-

I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,

for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
“Sit down and have a drink” he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. “You have SARDINES in it.”
“Yes, it needed something there.”
“Oh.” I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. “Where’s SARDINES?”
All that’s left is just
letters, “It was too much,” Mike says.

But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven’t mentioned
orange yet. It’s twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike’s painting, called SARDINES.

And below is Michael Goldberg’s Sardines.

Michael Goldberg, “Sardines”, 1955, oil and adhesive tape on canvas, image via Smithsonian American Art Museum

NYC Art Shows- Uta Barth at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Conceptual Art, Digital Art, Installation Art, New York Art Shows, Photographers / Photography
Apr 192023
 

“…from dawn to dusk, (January)”, 2022

“…from dawn to dusk, (May)”, 2022

“…from dawn to dusk, (December)”, 2022

“white blind (bright red) (02.13)”, 2002

“white blind/bright red (02.6)”, 2002

“Untitled (98.5)”, 1998

From “nowhere near” Untitled (NW 18), 1999

“… and to draw a bright white line with light (Untitled 11.10)”, 2011

Uta Barth’s two part exhibition at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery is a fascinating look at the artist’s work.  It includes the New York debut of her most recent piece, …from dawn to dusk, a nearly 360-degree installation of images commissioned by the J. Paul Getty Trust.

From the press release-

Barth’s expansive 2022 series … from dawn to dusk focuses on the intersection of Southern California light with the architecture of the Getty Center. It traces the changing light at one location of the Richard Meier built campus, for the period of one year. The location was photographed every five minutes, from dawn to dusk, on two days each month, for the entirety of the year. Made with a GigaPan, over 64,000 images were captured and a Timelapse video sequence now shows the progression of this movement of light. As the view repeats from panel to panel, there are subtle changes in light as well as more dramatic blurring and color shifts, which invoke inverted optical afterimages and other visual phenomena that occur when staring at a fixed point for a prolonged period of time. Presented as twelve consecutive single views, the video is embedded among the still images of the installation, and it comes as a surprise to discover what one first assumes to be a still photograph to actually be the moving summation of the show.

In the upstairs galleries, Elizabeth Smith’s selection of work reveals the foundations of the artist’s renowned and influential practice, as well as the trajectory that led to the explorations found in …from dawn to dusk. Elizabeth Smith shared her thoughts on Barth’s practice as she approached this exhibition:

It’s been almost thirty years since I worked with Uta Barth to present her first solo museum show at MOCA in 1995. In relation to her newest project, the gallery’s invitation to select some key examples from both her early series and subsequent ones has offered a welcome opportunity to reengage with and consider the full trajectory of her work. From her earliest to her most recent photographs, Barth’s practice has centered on a nuanced investigation of visual experience, free from narrative. Light, color, the passage of time, and the shifting nature of the process of vision through bodily experience are the ongoing subjects of her resonant images, probed in various ways over decades.

Throughout her career, Uta Barth has made visual perception the subject of her work. Regarded for her “empty” images that reference painterly abstraction, the artist carefully renders blurred backgrounds, cropped frames and the natural qualities of light to capture incidental and fleeting moments, those which exist almost exclusively within our periphery. With a deliberate disregard for both the conventional photographic subject and the point-and-shoot role of the camera, Barth’s work delicately deconstructs conventions of visual representation by calling our attention to the limits of the human eye.

As Leah Ollman writes in her recent Los Angeles Times profile of the artist,

From her earliest years as an artist, Barth’s attention has been drawn to the eye’s behavior: what attracts it, what makes it stay, what causes it to double back, what generates after-images and optical fatigue. Learning to photograph was, for her, a way of learning to see.

This exhibition closes 4/22/23.

 

Ernesto Neto at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery Los Angeles

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Conceptual Art, Los Angeles Art Shows, Mixed Media, Sculptors / Sculpture
Nov 012019
 

Closing 11/2 at Tanya Bonakdar’s Los Angeles location is Ernesto Neto’s interactive exhibition Children of the Earth.

From the press release-

In Children of the Earth, Neto creates an alluring environment of color, materials, fragrances and sound, transforming the gallery into a living organism, where visitors are encouraged to wander, touch, feel, interact and connect.

Upon entering the gallery, a curtain in green and brown patterns invites the viewer to walk through a tunnel-like path which leads to the main gallery space. Entitled Children of the Earth, a large-scale installation of crochet, spices and leaves hangs from the ceiling to the floor. The large biomorphic shape—hand knitted in vibrant colors of yellows, greens, purples and reds—is flanged by drop-shaped crochet vines that serve as counterbalance and establish the delicate equilibrium of the piece. Here, references to nature interconnect with formal questions of tension, gravity and weight. On the floor, tracing the outline of the structure above, a soft surface of handmade textile is installed. Ceramic vases sprout from the ground, representing the diversity of peoples inhabiting the planet, and that ultimately, we are all the children of the earth. Musical instruments, spices, and crystals comprise an integral part of this malleable, highly tactile sculpture, which engages the five senses, and invites viewers to connect with one another in new and meaningful ways. In expanding the boundaries of physical space and calling for a new type of interaction, Neto creates an experience that is physical, sensorial, intellectual and social all at once.

Surrounding the piece, as another layer of skin, hand-sewn fabric hangs. The organic pattern and color pallet further recall the natural world, as they invoke the forest, wood grain, or the circulatory system of a plant. The path the visitor follows throughout the space, and from within the piece—like an organic line in nature—is analogues to Neto’s conception of life where there is “no separation between humans and nature, nor between art making and art experience”, highlighting that in the exhibition, as in life, everything is connected.

In the back gallery a hanging platform with a crochet canopy and crochet tendrils is installed. Designed for direct interaction, this is a healing bed that offers a moment of rest and respite, where people can connect to themselves, as to one another.  The tendrils function as ‘connectors’, as they amplify the pulse of life while connecting us to the environment and to our own physicality. Embracing the participant in its serenity, the healing bed investigates the meeting point of art, sensation, personal connection and the human body.

The exhibition as a whole connects mind, body and nature through a sensory experience that is unmediated. It is an invitation to connect to ourselves and to our planet at a time when connectivity is most needed. For Neto, sculpture is an extension of the body, and the body is ultimately an extension of earth.

Sarah Sze at Tanya Bonakdar NYC

 Art, Artists, Conceptual Art, Drawing, Mixed Media, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Photographers / Photography, Sculptors / Sculpture, Video and Film
Oct 182019
 

“Crescent (Timekeeper)”

“Crescent (Timekeeper)”

“Crescent (Timekeeper)” Detail

Sarah Sze’s exhibition at Tanya Bonakdar’s gallery in New York is stunning. There is so much to look at, to appreciate. There are so many pieces to all of the work, and yet it never feels overwhelming. It makes you want to keep looking.

It’s also immersive. The windows on the outside of the gallery are covered in her work, as is the staircase alcove. The video projections in the main room travel all around the room, surrounding you with visuals and sound. Upstairs the floors of the gallery have paint splattered on them, accompanying the works on the walls.

Detail of the above work

In a room on the first floor is a “studio space” where you can gain insight into Sze’s process and how she makes these elaborate works.

From the press release-

Sze’s latest body of work frays “the seam between the real and the image” (Smith). Through complex constellations of objects and a proliferation of images, Sze expands upon the never- ending stream of visual narratives that we negotiate daily, from magazines and newspapers, television and iPhones, to cyberspace and outer space. The works evoke the generative and recursive process of image-making in a world where consumption and production are more interdependent, where the beginning of one idea is the ending of another—and where sculpture gives rise to images, and images to sculpture.

In this new exhibition, Sze expands her work by embedding her nuanced sculptural language into the material surfaces of painting and into the digital realm through the interplay of cloth, ink, wood, paper, metal, paint, found objects, light, sound and structural supports—collapsing distinctions between two, three and four dimensions. This body of work fundamentally alters our sense of time, place, and memory by transforming our experiences of the physical world around us. Both objects and images, Sze says, are “ultimately reminders of our own ephemerality”.

This exhibition closes 10/19/19.

 

 

Tomás Saraceno at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery

 Art, Artists, Drawing, Los Angeles Art Shows, Los Angeles Art Shows, Sculptors / Sculpture, Video and Film
Mar 022019
 

What are the webs within our own lives? How are we connected to others? What is seen and not seen in our world? How do we function within our environment? What is created without our even noticing?

Tomás Saraceno’s current exhibition at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in Hollywood, his first ever solo exhibition in Los Angeles, explores these ideas through the intersection of science and art. In one room, balloons drag pens to create drawings from the air and movements of those who wander through. Spider webs (displayed without the spiders) play an important part in weaving together the themes of the exhibition. Made by different species of spider and dyed with carbon ink, they are in frames against the wall. Presented in another part of the gallery, in a dark room, they are spot lit creating beautiful three dimensional sculptures. In another room, in full darkness, they are lit by a slowly moving laser which highlights in red various sections of the webs as others fade away.

In the front room of the gallery is a sculpture that continues the artist’s Cloud Cities body of work (pictured below). Cloud Cities was shown on the rooftop of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2012.

 

From the press release-

… Conceived and inspired by the geometries of soap bubbles, the cluster-like artworks are composed of a number of interconnected modules, some with web-like structures set within them, which form geometric constellations inspired by the Weaire-Phelan structure. The Cloud Cities project is intimately tied to and embodied in the Aerocene Foundation, a community that proposes an epoch free from fossil fuel emissions, which challenges socio-political atmospheres by trespassing and weaving new, much needed, aerographies.

Cloud Cities are fictional urban and socioscapes in such imagined post-Anthropocenic future. These sculptural assemblages whose interplay between being tethered to the Earth whilst inviting our gaze to the sky, are devoted to reimagining life in tune and in collaboration with the atmosphere. Indeed, with 102,465 planes and about 8.3 million people traversing the atmosphere every day, swarms of particulate matter crossing borders and billions of pounds of carbon dioxide produced by fossil fuel aerial transportation, there is an entire metropolis up in the air already, coming with a huge cost and carbon print. The elemental imaginaries of Cloud Cities and Aerocene epoch call to open up the boundaries of the Earth toward a new interplanetary ecology of practice. We can reconnect with elemental sources of energy and form a new set of values that would overcome the extractive economies of the fossil fuel regime – a new stratigraphy of the future.

This exhibition closes 3/2/19.