MONICA ESPINEL

Creon, New York
November 3 – December 4, 2010

“Nothing tells memories from ordinary moments. Only afterwards do they claim remembrance on account of their scars.” Chris Marker, La Jetée

Memory Leaks is a personally charged show of works that were tattooed in my brain, a subjective momentary ordering of memory, time and meaning. It is about making intangible memories palpable again; about images that ooze into my consciousness without me calling them and how time rolls back precipitated by them, making other memories leak. The show features drawing, photography, sculpture, video and performance, by Angela Freiberger, Auguste Garufi, Robin Graubard, Geneviève Maquinay, Lui Shtini, Julie Tolentino, Carlo Zanni and Krzysztof Zarebski.

I have always been intrigued by the way some images or a body of work by a given artist affects me. I seek to understand why these works linger in my mind amidst the swarm of images that I have experienced, why they keep coming back and how my remembrance of them has mutated with time. In the process of retrieving, finding and reintroducing myself to the work or the artists for the first time, it has been revealing to see the threads amongst them; how my recollections are often linked to the feelings or memories triggered, thus providing vital clues to what has marked me in time and highlighting the importance of emotion in the fixation and recalling of memories.

Several artists perceive the body as a locus of art-making. Angela Freiberger’s Strong Body is a celebratory video peopled with multiple self-portraits about her resilience as a sculptor and performance artist, with sardonic notes on the complexities of religion and nationality. Julie Tolentino will present a performance and sculpture entitled LEAD:Led, a trace of a private performance that touches on notions of loss and transition, evoking a presence through absence in the residual traces of the live action. Krzysztof Zarebski’s Message 1 is built of readymade materials like snips of magnetic tape and a telephone handset, which pertain to the sense of hearing but have long since lost their original appearance and utility, yet preserve memories of their origins, potentially encapsulating some music, sounds, words.

Other works touch on illness such as Carlo Zanni’s The Possible Ties Between Illness and Success, an unsettling short fiction film that uses data flux from the Internet to generate its visuals, is inspired by John Haskell’s American Purgatorio and the work of psychiatrist Kay Redfield Jamison who explored the relationship between manic-depression and success at large. A black and white portrait by Robin Graubard, The Doll Hospital, is a gripping, intense image that portrays with absolute intimacy and empathy the vulnerability of a girl waiting for surgery on a hospital bed in Sarajevo.

Yet others reflect on process, materials and juxtapositions. A sculpture installation by Auguste Garufi is composed of Japanese paper and resin vessels with slight chromatic fluctuations. Together they elucidate the translucency and weight of paper, and reflect on his process of making work that builds on itself, that is exposed to the elements, like our own lives. Geneviève Maquinay’s sculptures are an archeology of objects arrested in their process of aging and oblivion that touch and balance each other, taking on a new beauty and harmony, which transmits her admirable sensitivity to commonplace wonders. Lui Shtini’s uncanny drawings in a hyperrealistic style challenge our perception of known objects by creating images with bizarre twists that awaken the language of the unconscious.

Memory Leaks is organized at CREON by guest curator Monica Espinel, an independent curator and critic.

60 Wall Gallery, Deutsche Bank
May 24 – September 3, 2010

In the post-World War II era, artists in Latin America broke away from the creation of national artistic styles and socially concerned figurative art and began developing abstract languages that reflected a broader international context. “Then & Now” explores the various modes of abstraction that arose in Latin America, ranging from geometric to gestural, kinetic, neo-concrete art and more. The exhibition features works by thirty artists including drawings, prints, paintings, video, photography and sculpture. It unites pioneers of Latin American modernism with contemporary artists and offers a rare opportunity to view these cross generational works together.

Beginning in the 50s geometric abstraction boomed throughout the region and many artists pioneered innovations, such as shaped canvases and viewer participation. During this period abstraction was strongly linked to a Utopian modernist view and artists focused on formal investigations and concerns for expression, truth in representation, illusions of space, and the materiality of a painting’s support. Works by María Freire and Antonio Llorens feature dynamically asymmetrical compositions in vibrant colors, while Raul Lozza and Marcelo Bonevardi play with structure, wedding painting and sculpture.

Works from the 60s, 70s and 80s by a later generation of artists whose involvement with abstraction was informed by developments in pop, conceptual, minimalism and performance art, reveal how the possibilities of meaning attached to abstraction were expanded during these decades. Influenced by social change and the burning political issues of the day, artists such as Ana Maria Maiolino, Leon Ferrari and Claudio Perna, challenged conventional concepts associated with abstraction. They explored radical new directions incorporating a diversity of disciplines and mediums including ink, clay, film and performance. Hoping to reproduce those moments of discovery in the viewer, this exhibition presents works like Alejandro Otero’s Hoy en TV (1965), which daringly combines formalism and content demonstrating that political and critical content can be conveyed through formally reduced, nonobjective art forms.

The exhibition’s contemporary artists simultaneously celebrate and question the legacy of their predecessors. Juan Iribarren’s paintings of luminous traces, are a meditation on light and color that hints at the symbolic remains of modernity. Luis Fernando Roldán and Arturo Herrera carefully construct their abstractions through the fragmentation and combination of elements, resulting in complex spatial relationships that are formally rigorous, yet feel very casual.

“Then & Now” encompasses a period of great transformation and embodies the spirit of freedom and possibility that abstraction has generated from the start, highlighting the vitality of its force as an authentic expression of every artist’s individuality. Emerging from the posture of presenting an installation generated by the works themselves without following a chronological or geographical order, the exhibition embraces each individual’s aesthetic through aggregation and visual analogies. This allows for juxtapositions that reveal the innovation and originality achieved by the artist, enabling viewers to witness the transculturalism and international cross-fertilization that has contributed to Latin American abstraction. In doing so, the exhibition permits challenging the perception of Latin American art as a single phenomenon, by revealing important differences and tensions emanating from the various artistic proposals articulated around abstraction from 1950 through today.

Featuring: Waldo Díaz-Balart, Alessandro Balteo Yazbeck, Tony Bechara, Marcelo Bonevardi, Waltercio Caldas, William Cordova, Alejandro Corujeira, Antonio Dias, Iran do Espírito Santo, Eugenio Espinoza, León Ferrari, María Freire, Manuel Hernandez, Carmen Herrera, Arturo Herrera, Ana Mercedes Hoyos, Juan Iribarren, Guillermo Kuitca, Judith Lauand, Julio Le Parc, Gerd Leufert, Antonio Llorens, Raul Lozza, Ana Maria Maiolino, Alejandro Otero, Claudio Perna, Alejandro Puente, Luis Fernando Roldán, Fanny Sanín and Mira Schendel.

“Then & Now: Abstraction in Latin American Art from 1950 to Present” is organized by Monica Espinel, a New York based independent curator.

Catalog:
[gview file=”http://34.74.233.136/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/Then-and-Now-Catalogue-low-res.pdf”]

Henrique Faria, New York
October 16 – November 24, 2009

Geometric Abstract Works: The Latin American vision from the 1950s, 60s and 70s offers a rare opportunity to view seminal works by Latin American artists whose exposure in the United States has been limited. This is the first in a series of historically rooted exhibitions on Latin American art by Henrique Faria Fine Art. The show presents over thirty works from an array of movements associated with Constructivist trends in Latin America with a focus on three seminal decades. Artists included are: José Pedro Costigliolo, María Freire, Antonio Llorens and Raúl Pavlotzky from Uruguay; Julián Althabe, Martín Blaszko, Raúl Lozza and Gregorio Vardanega from Argentina; Sérgio Camargo, Willys de Castro and Judith Lauand from Brazil; Omar Carreño, Gego, Gerd Leufert, Alejandro Otero, Rafael Pérez, Carlos Cruz-Díez and Víctor Valera from Venezuela; Fanny Sanín from Colombia and Carmen Herrera from Cuba.

Emerging from the posture of presenting an argument generated by the works themselves, Geometric Abstract Works embraces each individual’s aesthetic through aggregation and visual analogies. Blaszko’s Pintura Madi (1947), is a wonderful example of this movement’s desire to celebrate asymmetry, use vibrant colors and employ irregularly shaped canvases; while Vardanega’s Sagitario-Ecuacion (1958) creates the illusion of levitation through a dance of tiny triangles sprinkled on a cerulean background. Camargo’s Untitled (c. 1973) is a marble sculpture which plays with equilibrium by balancing one column off-kilter above another. Lauand’s Untitled (1960) depicts blocks of muted color in a spare composition that swaddles geometric abstraction in minimalism. Meaningful connections can also be made between the incorporation of everyday life materials in works such as Gego’s Drawing without Paper (1978) made of wire and thread, and Otero’s Hoy en TV (1965) made from discarded newspapers.

Henrique Faria Fine Art specializes in modern and contemporary Latin American art, with a focus on geometric abstraction and conceptualism. Over the past decade Faria has operated privately in New York and in 2007 he opened Faria+Fábregas Galería in Caracas, Venezuela. The gallery aims to support the legacy of historic figures and the practice of established and emerging artists. Currently, works by Luis Roldán (Colombia), Ramsés Larzábal (Cuba) and Magdalena Fernández (Venezuela) are exhibited in the 53rd Venice Biennale. The gallery will exhibit at Pinta New York, Art Basel Miami and The Armory Show.

Geometric Abstract Works: The Latin American vision from the 1950s, 60s and 70s is organized at Henrique Faria Fine Art by guest curator Monica Espinel, an independent curator and critic.

Catalog:
[gview file=”http://34.74.233.136/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/Geometric-Abstract-Works-sm.pdf”]

Glyndor Gallery at Wave Hill, New York
August 1 – November 29, 2009

Laura Anderson Barbata, Mary Anne Barkhouse, Lorenzo Clayton, Peter Edlund, Nicholas Galanin, Edgar Heap of Birds, Melanie Printup-Hope, Maria Hupfield, G. Peter Jemison, Jason Lujan, Alan Michelson, Anna Tsouhlarakis, William R. Wilson

Muhheakantuck, a Lenape word meaning “the river that flows both ways,” was the original name for the estuary now named for Henry Hudson. It provided both a connective route for the indigenous people and a conduit for launching European trade and expansion beyond the region, ultimately impacting the entire continent. The Muhheakantuck in Focus replicates this initial concept of exchange, bringing together artists from Mexico, the United States and Canada, drawing on different generations and perspectives to explore the significance of the waterway to indigenous peoples before and after Hudson’s arrival.

Exhibiting artists treat a historically sensitive subject, one that includes the displacement of numerous communities from the shores of the Muhheakantuck, in a manner that expresses acceptance, diversity and beauty. The works in Glyndor Gallery and on the grounds span a range of media, including video, painting, sculpture, drawing and site-specific installation. Although diverse in nature, they reveal several common threads, exploring language, history and trade and, in a recurring motif, the merging of indigenous and European art practices and experience, a process that continues today.

The Muhheakantuck in Focus is an integral part of a series of dynamic programs at Wave Hill, organized to celebrate the Hudson River Quadricentennial this summer and autumn. Art, music, walks, family and school programs, readings and discussion groups prompt a fresh view of the river. As a public garden and cultural center with incomparable views of the Hudson River and the Palisades, Wave Hill is uniquely positioned to explore the many facets of this important waterway.

Frederico Sève Gallery / Latincollector, New York
July 17 – September 13, 2008

Frederico Seve/Latincollector Gallery is pleased to announce Ceremonies of Summer, a multimedia exhibition curated by Mónica Espinel. The exhibition is an homage to Marta Traba, critic, author, curator and historian, and was inspired by her first novel “Las ceremonias del verano” published in 1966. The show includes an eclectic group of artists whose work explores the polarities between transience and being present and the ephemerality of experience and its residues.

The book is a highly introspective chronicle about time, heightened awareness and self-discovery, told through an almost maniacal depiction of the colors, sounds and smells of different cities in summertime and through the character’s restless search for a place to call home. In a pseudo-autobiographical manner, Traba recorded her encounters with people and the feelings aroused during her travels in an array of reminisced and imagined cities including Buenos Aires, Paris, New York and Bogotá. Traba explores the ways in which we mediate and construct our environment and establishes a tenuous balance between the here and now, including the physicality and transience of our surroundings.  Her writing serves as a kind of wandering and addresses the fascinating question of emigration and self-definition, creating a space where imaginary flight, the past, personal narrative and critique all intersect in a kaleidoscopic flow of places and emotions.

“Las ceremonias del verano” created an ideal departure point to bring together artists whose work is self-reflexive and exudes similar sensibilities.  Angela Freiberger’s Mood Swings, a marble sculpture and video, explores the palpability of a trace and the malleability of place and time; the black & white photographs of André Cypriano and Miguel Rio Branco depict contemplation beatified by solitude; Lina Gonzalez’s sculpture Migrar presents a double edged chronicle of departure; Luis Cantillo’s animation 21 Sundays depicts the soporific state of an individual’s ruminations in the desert; Lishan Chang’s large-scale collages depict the unrelenting disfiguration of traveled landscapes; Soledad Arias’ you are here flickers incandescent palpitations, subtle reminders that the present is both a moment of stasis and suspension.

Love like With And Low, like I dug, an installation by Sebastián Patané Masuelli is about a woman whose heightened susceptibility to stimuli threatens her everyday with an inability to deal with fragmentary and unresolved experience. Similarly, Santiago Picatoste’s hyperbolized paintings of flowers are pictorial elaborations of the derangement of the senses and are juxtaposed to drawings by Jorge Julián Aristizábal like Hairy Ladder, which reinvent and challenge our perception of known objects evoking latent meanings.

Frederico Sève Gallery / Latincollector, New York
May 1 – June 14, 2008

Frederico Seve/Latincollector Gallery is pleased to announce a retrospective exhibition of paintings by Fanny Sanín. A Chromatic Journey, 1966 – 2006 presents Sanín’s exploration undertaken with color as the thread that links the various phases of her work. This small survey enables viewers to embark on a visual voyage through forty years of creation that generate an interesting discussion of the painter’s artistic development.

Sanín’s trajectory can be seen, in a way, as the history of her personal treatment of color. Speaking of her works Edward Sullivan wrote, “in Sanín’s work the most unexpected colors coexist in a state of harmony that would be unimaginable in the art of a more conventional personality.” Oil No. 8, 1966, a masterpiece of painterly abstraction already anticipates Sanín’s penchant for color that was to become her trademark. The work’s conglomeration of fluid forms in hundreds of hues ranging from a core of soft blue aiming for proximity to a brilliant red, displays a freedom that by 1968 was to undergo a transformation when she took a step toward hard edge works. By the mid seventies the dominance of order and Sanín’s perfectionist tendency toward beauty becomes apparent in works like Acrylic No. 4, 1977, Acrylic No. 3, 1993 and Acrylic No. 1, 1994. Sanín’s dexterity and keen intuition for chromatic combinations demonstrates an unparalleled continuity that never repeats itself and remains as affecting as it was in the early stages of her career. However, in the last decade she has with increased momentum begun making works that are bursting with a new force. Intensely vivid canvases such Acrylic No. 2, 2005 display an increased exuberance and have become more daring in their juxtapositions.

Sanín’s Chromatic Journey has been a celebration of color, whose ecstatic cadences are illustrative of the Utopian spirit embedded in her work. Having worked outside of any group affiliation and eloping the sixties wave of figuration, Sanín has remained faithful to the principles of formalist abstraction yet her work eludes any strict categorization. Her oeuvre is the result of a personal questioning that negotiates between the legacy of Matisse’s and Kandinsky’s preoccupation with color, Mondrian’s neoplasticism and Russian Constructivism; it relates to modes of minimalism, color field and hard edge painting. However, Sanín’s explorations have taken their lessons and discovered a way to temper the severity of geometry with intuitive chromatic adjustments.

Fanny Sanín is one of Latin America’s most distinguished and well-respected abstract painters. Sanín studied at the University of the Andes in Colombia and pursued graduate studies at the University of Illinois and the Chelsea School of Art in London. Her work has been included in over 300 shows, and was included in the landmark exhibition Latin American Women Artists 1915-1995, which opened at the Milwaukee Art Museum and traveled throughout the United States. Most recently she had a retrospective at the Instituto Italo-Latino Americano in Rome and was awarded an Honorable Mention by the National Arts Club, New York.

Gramercy Post, New York
May 4 – June 18, 2005

In its second collaboration with emerging artists, Gramercy Post is pleased to present Crackerfarm, an artist collective comprised of photographers Mike Beyer and Lindsey Rome. Their photography is a strange brew, a kind of self-reflective ethnography that evokes Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road”. Like Sal Paradise’s strong desire to see and be on the road, Crackerfarm thirsts for this way of life. Their photographs read like a thinly fictionalized autobiography, filled with a cast made of friends, relatives and strangers encountered in their travels, at times permeated by photographs of each other.

Playing out feelings and visions, they compose very personal scenes which are left rough so that the viewers can puzzle out their own stories. Recalling the narratives constructed by Lewis Carroll or when taking on different personas Cindy Sherman’s Film Stills, their photographs have a plush, cinematographic look, often imbued with an old-fashioned beauty.

Poetic, open and raw, Crackerfarm’s timeless portraits are unflattering yet weirdly seductive. Each one is recorded with affection regardless of who the sitter is. Whether shooting a toothless bodega proprietor from the Lower East Side, rural outbackers, or bands such as “Franz Ferdinand” and “Bloc Party”, every image conveys a sense of intimacy and sincerity giving a voice to each individual.

Sexier than Chuck Close and more humanistic than Arbus, Crackerfarm’s photographs combine a stark sense of compassion with a playful earthiness that is as welcome as it is unexpected. The duo also manages to achieve an extraordinary timelessness that leads one to wonder if their black and white studies of faces were shot in 2005, 1955, or 1915. Intimate without being intrusive, candid without being undignified, Crackerfarm invest their subjects with a majestic quality that overrides the bleak context of their surroundings: crumbling walls, chipped paint, ripped wallpaper, wood-paneling. Indeed, bleakness is a powerful presence in their work, lending their photographs a touch of gothic darkness that smacks of addiction. “Sadness is a compelling storyteller,” remarks Beyer. “Our work is colored by human hardship and an appreciation for life through it all.”

Beyer and Rome met three years ago at Manhattan’s prestigious School of Visual Arts (SVA), where both were pursuing a BFA in photography, earned in 2004. Brought together by a common aesthetic and a shared experience in overcoming personal demons, the duo began collaborating on portraits not only of each other, but of dolls, mannequins, and a range of similarly humanoid inanimate objects. Encouraged by SVA alum and rock and roll photographer extraordinaire Clay Patrick McBride, Beyer and Rome began shooting portraits of anyone they could get their hands on – family members, friends, musicians, and strangers.

Gramercy Post, New York
February 16 – April 2, 2005

Gramercy Post is pleased to open its collaboration with emerging artists with an exhibition of work by Denise Schatz curated by Monica Espinel. Schatz makes collages and works on paper, using magazine cut-outs, graphite and colored pencils. She creates delicate, layered scenes where animals, molecules, body parts and plants collide and coexist, free from the viewer’s prior associations.

Schatz’s visual vocabulary opens itself up to a variety of references ranging from the prints of Albrecht Dürer and 17th Century Dutch still life, to surrealist figures such as Max Ernst. Schatz juxtaposes images that she gathers from her sketches and clippings, deftly constructing miniature incidents, explosions, and force lines that envelop her characters. Through recurring motifs of birds and hares, Schatz invents her own highly personalized language, a relaxed naturalism that seems a bit childlike at moments in its conviction that the world is an enchanted, yet dire place. In her work, Schatz deals with conflicting themes of traditional beauty and raw beauty, its energy and mutability, with a witty edge.

In “Signal if you can’t Breathe,” Schatz presents five drawings in a series naively constructed, almost imperceptible. From beginning to end, there is an assertion of gravity, which swoops the characters powerfully from one drawing to the next. Amongst these curved, organic pieces there is a manifestation of Schatz’s engagement with nature, as surfaces and textures are wonderfully rendered in legible tiny graphite marks and hints of soft pink and red that add a further level of intelligibility to the patterns of time and change.

After receiving her BFA from Hunter College, Denise Schatz is completing her MFA, also at Hunter College.

Marvelli Gallery, New York
June 30 – July 31, 2004

Marvelli Gallery is pleased to present Black Milk: Theories on Suicide, a group exhibition curated by Monica Espinel, that brings together young contemporary artists whose work touches on issues related to suicide. The multimedia exhibition will include work by Charles Cohen, Ian Cooper, Elizabeth Gray & Molly Smith, Rachel Howe, Jasmine Kastel, Molly Larkey, Rahshia Linendoll, Tim Maxwell, McCallum & Tarry, Alex McQuilkin, Adam Pendleton, Mike Quinn, Shelly Silver and Angela Strassheim.

As a heightened awareness about mental illness permeates our culture and the taboo surrounding suicide is progressively reduced, works dealing with suicide begin to appear more frequently on the art scene. Focusing on a psychological approach to the subject, the show aims to present an intimate view of this loaded issue. In the works presented there is a pervasive sense of introspection and a psychological complexity that in many cases is tangentially autobiographical.

Rachel Howe’s drawings expose the emotional and psychological tensions of adolescence by looking at the distance between experience and its representation in the media, which tends to objectify the life of teenagers. Shelly Silver presents “Suicide” a feature-length fiction of a woman’s voyages through Asia, Europe and Central America, chronicling her fiercely hopeful and desperate search for a reason to continue living. Angela Strassheim’s beautiful, hyper-realistic and disquieting group of color photographs suggests an allusive narrative that ends in suicide. Molly Larkey creates spare, yet evocative drawings by painstakingly re-creating drafts or sketches of well-known works by artists, writers, and musicians who have taken their own lives.

In “Mood Lighting for the Room Where Dad Should Kill Himself”, Mike Quinn stages an installation of a room comprised of both ready-made objects and original works, where he presents things that people do to combat and veil the pain of everyday life such as sports, drugs and religion. Adam Pendleton’s ambiguously self-empowering and poetic text pieces challenge the viewer to ultimately escape his destiny. Rahshia Linendoll’s series of photographs “Enid” creates a repetitive and overwhelming environment within each photograph, which speaks of the intimate struggle of its self-obsessed character. Ian Cooper’s sculpture of forget-me-not wreaths enclosing phone jacks connected to tangled wires that are configured into a skull, places in the foreground issues like alienation, separation and death. Jasmine Kastel’s “Nancy Jane” is a compelling and honest account of events that have tainted the artist’s view on suicide.

McCallum & Tarry present an associative visual narrative that reveals the struggle to break the cycle of reoccurring suffering and grief. Elizabeth Gray’s video “Cliffwalk” starring Molly Smith is beautiful, surreal and unnerving. Shot on a rocky beach front, the camera follows a woman’s feet in glamorous high heels as she traverses the perilous terrain. The sound of her heels against the rock and the waves crashing below create a repetitive pattern that highlights the tension and discomfort in this ambiguous moment. Charles Cohen presents “Indicators”, an uncontrollable spill of arrows pointing in every direction and functioning as metaphors for a chaotic and dysfunctional state of mind.