SIN TITULO: 

CLIFF HENGST & SCOTT HEWICKER

April 25 - May 27, 2012

In Sin Titulo, San Francisco artists Scott Hewicker and Clifford Hengst explore the nether worlds between sublime mystery and lurid banality. In drawing, painting, videos and performance, both artists mine sparsely populated interiors and haunted objects that reflect on the anticipatory charge of discreet physical contact through experience, memory, and fantasy.

Hengst's watercolor and ink paintings on paper are based on dim light and shadows, and places people hide themselves both physically and emotionally. He investigates the darkness and mundane allure of anonymous settings and the strange and silent waiting game of boredom and promise.

Hewicker's acrylic on canvas paintings take on a wide breadth of subject and styles from muted objects and abstracted figurations, to blurry landscapes and soft focus interiors. His new paintings concentrate on the empty low-resolution environments of bedrooms, bathrooms and various public and outdoor spaces emphasizing a compulsive ambiguity between public and private.

Cliff Hengst has shown at Gallery 16, SF; Mariella Arts, Milan; Test-Site, Austin,  TX; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, SF; Second Floor Projects, SF, and LACE, LA.
Scott Hewicker has shown at Jack Hanley Gallery, SF; Galleri Christina Wilson, Copenhagen; Deitch Projects NY, University Art Museum, Berkeley, CA; New Image Arts, LA and Second Floor Projects, SF. He co-curated the exhibition, Hauntology at the Berkeley Art Museum with Lawrence Rinder in 2010.
Hengst and Hewicker will collaborate on a performance piece during the opening. They have previously collaborated together for the book, Good Times, Bad Trips published by Gallery 16 Editions in 2007.

Asea, Aloof

MATTHEW FISHER

April 25 - May 27, 2012

Mulherin + Pollard is pleased to present "Asea, Aloof," an exhibition of recent paintings and drawings by Matthew Fisher. Fisher is a Brooklyn, NY-based artist who makes stylized paintings that utilize symbolic placement, pattern, line, and a sense of the lasting touch of man on landscapes that reference universal timing, placement, and a frozen sense of now.

Fisher's latest works depict the sea as a contemplative space detached from human presence and often from any sense of land itself as well. Here, narrative is replaced by a concern with the quieter drama of the sea itself-the motion of its ripples, the fleeting nature of its form and appearance, and its interactions and relationship with light, space, the drifting clouds, and the passing of time.

Fisher was educated at the Columbus College of Art and Design and received his MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2000. He has had numerous solo exhibitions including at Heskin Contemporary, New York (2010); RARE Gallery, New York (2009); ADA Gallery, Richmond, VA (2009 and 2006); and the University of the Arts, Philadelphia, PA (2006); and has shown extensively in group exhibitions in the United States and abroad. He was awarded a Fellowship in Painting from the New York Foundation for the Arts in 2010.

Earthly Delights

March 28 - April 21, 2012

Earthly Delights is an exploration into the seductive nature of the apocalypse. Based loosely on Bosch's "The Garden of Earthly Delights", the works of Oscar de Las Flores, Kim Keever and Christy Langer are integrated in this exhibition to explore human, animal, and landscape in a fantastical, prophetic and tangible take on the world we live in.

Both menacing and enchanting, the works in this exhibition comment on our complexities negotiating our relationships within in an increasingly unnatural and complex world, pointing to past and current transgressions.

Kim Keever's large-scale photographs are created by meticulously constructing miniature topographies in a 200-gallon tank, which is then filled with water. These dioramas of fictitious environments are brought to life with colored lights and the dispersal of pigment, producing ephemeral atmospheres that he must quickly capture with his large-format camera.

Keever's painterly panoramas represent a continuation of the landscape tradition, as well as an evolution of the genre. Referencing a broad history of landscape painting, especially that of Romanticism, the Hudson River School and Luminism, they are imbued with a sense of the sublime. However, they also show a subversive side that deliberately acknowledges their contemporary contrivance and conceptual artifice. Keever's staged scenery is characterized by a psychology of timelessness. A combination of the real and the imaginary, they document places that somehow we know, but never were. The symbolic qualities he achieves result from his understanding of the dynamics of landscape, including the manipulation of its effects and the limits of spectacle based on our assumptions of what landscape means to us. Rather than presenting a factual reality, Keever fabricates an illusion to conjure the realms of our imagination.



Kim Keever lives in New York City and has exhibited extensively in museums and galleries throughout the United States and abroad. His work is currently on exhibit at the Hunterdon Art Museum in Clinton, New Jersey in the exhibition Deconstructing Nature and was most recently featured in Otherworldly at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York. Public collections include the Metropolitan Museum, New York, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York, Chrysler Museum, Norfolk, Virginia, the Nassau County Museum of Fine Art, Roslyn, New York, the Hirschhorn Museum in Washington D.C. and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond.

Working mainly with traditional pen and ink on paper, Oscar de Las Flores generates masterful figurative works, elaborately layered, that incorporate grotesque imagery with the beauty of sinuous lines. His drawings depict figures, both real and imagined, that tell the story of an unending battle between society's powerless and powerful. With a dark sense of humor that is Flores' own, his work also shows the influence of generations of artists, integrating the grace and detail of early masters with the imagination of the Surrealists.

Oscar de las Flores is a Canadian artist born in El Salvador during Central America's most unstable political period. Its portentous history of the continent transpired and permeated his work since its beginnings: The occult pleas of the downtrodden, the forgotten migrants ever more invisible, the dramatic developments that corruption carries along. Canada, with its multifaceted and expanding universal cultural hybridization also contributed to the development of his visual vocabulary, its hues and histories of diversity and hope.

As a child De las Flores had the opportunity of living a pivotal part of his childhood in Mexico, as a war refugee, it was here that he had the possibility of absorbing the spellbinding and hypnotic flux of this ancient, complex and often paradoxical culture. Mexico's culture essence as well as its pictorial legacy, greatly contributed to his development as an artist, so did classical literature, popular history, and art history, with a predilection for the baroque and expressionism. Oscar has searched through those identities to define a vision that is sensible to occult fragile existences, violent and dangerous realities, absurd social practices etc. with a care to detail. Oscar has traveled extensively to discern these actualities; his work has also been exhibited widely, primarily in print and drawing biennales and exhibitions.

Christy Langer's sculptural work is inspired by her interest in the embellishment that can occur during the marriage of gradual ingestion and manipulation of reference. Each work, although deviated, are reconstructions of previously existing models; the artist utilizes these animal forms to illustrate the disparity between reality and remembered experience. As the works evolve into an aesthetic state closer to realism while simultaneously referential origins based in truth degenerate, the boundaries between reality and falsity become blurred and permeable.

Raised in Dryden Ontario, Christy Langer moved to Toronto in 1999 to study at the Ontario College of Art & Design. She earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree in 2004. She has since worked in Toronto as a prop fabricator, sculptor, art director, and production designer parallel to the development of her fine arts practice.

Balint Zsako in Downtown Express

Appetite reviewed in Downtown Express.

Balint Zsako, Appetite

March 28 - April 21, 2012

Balint Zsako's work filters the disparate elements of contemporary art through the language of figurative painting. Its like performance art recorded using Indian miniatures, land art described by medieval illumination, conceptual art acted out by the figures on a Greek vase or installation art transcribed into Egyptian hieroglyphs.

The starting point for these paintings is the pose of a figure copied from a photograph or an old master painting. The next step is working out what direction the narrative is going to take. How will adding a minimalist construction of microphones and lightbulbs, a flock of birds or a vascular system that turns into the roots of a flowering plant contribute to the plot? Most of the stories center around themes of bodily functions, human interactions, sex and death but are held tightly in place by strict considerations of geometric balance and color relationships.

*Presented in collaboration with The Proposition (NYC) where the "Appetite" continues from April 14 to May 27.

Balint Zsako was born in Budapest, Hungary in 1979 and immigrated to Canada with his family in 1988. Since graduating with a B.A in Fine Arts from Ryerson University in Toronto, he has exhibited his photographs, collages, sculptures, paintings and drawings internationally.The New Yorker Magazine, Harper's Magazine, The Walrus Magazine, Poetry Magazine and the New York Times Magazine have all featured his works. A travelling exhibition of his drawings was organized by the MoCCA in Toronto and is accompanied by the artist's first monograph.

Balint Zsako lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Press for Mike Bayne at The Armory Show

Mike Bayne is included in "The Best of the Armory Show" on The Daily Beast.

Bill Clarke runs down the New York fairs in Canadian Art.

Ken Johnson mentions Mike Bayne's work in his review of The Armory Show in The New York Times.

Mike Bayne Solo Presentation at The Armory Show

Katharine Mulherin Contemporary Art Projects will be participating in the Armory Show in New York City with a Solo Project featuring Mike Bayne.

Mike Bayne's exquisitely rendered paintings capture North American scenes that are familiar and iconic. At first glance, they are often mistaken for small photographs; yet, they somehow capture a reality that photographs are unable to. There is an aura of the unbelievable in Bayne's deliberately banal subjects, a determined skill that precisely captures every nuance of the scene — the isolation, the stillness, the quality of light, the richness of colour, the extreme attention to detail in every reflection, every surface, every blade of grass. While Bayne's work commonly depicts human absence and isolation, the viewer often gets a sense of "being there," the result of such an accurate depiction.

Mike Bayne attended Queen's University and received a BAH and BFA in 2001. In 2004, he received an MFA from Concordia University. He has had several solo exhibitions with Katharine Mulherin Contemporary Art Projects in Toronto and has participated in a number of group exhibitions in Chicago, New York, Vancouver, and Toronto. He was featured in the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art's group exhibition Magenta Publishing Carte Blanche, in 2008, and was featured in a 2009 issue of Border Crossings magazine. He is the winner of the 2011 Kingston Prize for Portraiture.

The Armory Show, a leading international contemporary and modern art fair and one of the most important annual art events in New York, takes place every March on Piers 92 & 94 in Manhattan. Now celebrating its fourteenth year, the Armory Show is re-establishing itself as the most adventurous and dynamic contemporary art fair in New York City. The 2012 edition will feature an international roster of exciting, leading galleries, the acclaimed Armory Show VIP program, a lively opening night party at MoMA, the eclectic and engaging Open Forum program with major art- world figures, Armory Film, a series featuring an international selection of leading contemporary video and experimental films curated by Moving Image, and Armory Arts Week in partnership with New York's top cultural institutions.

George Kuchar in the Whitney Biennial

George Kuchar is included in the 2012 Whitney Biennial.

Bill Burns in the Huffington Post

Interview and slideshow of A Brownnoser's Story in The Huffington Post.

Bill Burns: A Brownnoser's Story

March 1 - 25, 2012

Katharine Mulherin is pleased to present A Brownnoser's Story, an exhibition of works by Canadian artist Bill Burns at Mulherin + Pollard, NYC.

"A Brownnoser's Story is the story of my relations with art critics, editors, dealers, museum directors and curators. The story is told in carved logs, photographs, words and watercolours. Many of the events that I describe take place while on hike, at log cabins, on northern lakeshores and in boreal forests.

The show consists of about 100 carved logs, some log carrying cases, a machine that tests artworld celebrity gloves, a photo and a set of watercolours. The logs are carved with the names of the top 100 people in the art world from Art Review. The photo is remade after a film still from "Thee Film" circa 1957 by Brion Gysin, Ian Sommerville and William Burroughs. The people in the picture are discussing the previously mentioned carved logs. The machine that tests art world celebrity gloves is a simple robot. The gloves are embroidered with the names of people who have either helped me, wronged me or who I still hope will help me. The watercolours tell of singularly important episodes in my life as an artist.

A Brownnoser's Story tells how I got into the art world and how I manage my life in it. It's a catalogue of misadventure, failure, and success. One increment tells of how I nursed a visiting Taiwanese curator whose testicles had swollen, now to the size of navel oranges, now to the size of grapefruits, now to the size of melons. Since we were deep in the woods I jerry-rigged a sling for him from my own tee shirt and some birch saplings and I applied a poultice that I concocted from reindeer moss, pine needles and way-bread to sooth the pain and extract the contents of the grub coloured pustules that had erupted all over the afflicted area. Another increment tells of how, sometime after my first exhibition of Safety Gear for Small Animals in New York, television's Homer Simpson became a conceptual artist and began making safety gear for animals. Neither of these events proved to be particularly bankable. I was not, as I had hoped, invited to the Biennale in Taipei and the Simpsons episode has yet to have any tangible effect on my career." -Bill Burns, February, 2012

Bill Burns' work about animals and civil society has been shown and published widely including solo projects at the Fondacion Cristina Enea, San Sebastian, Spain (2010); Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, England (2008); and the  KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin, Germany (2007) and group shows at the Kunsthallen Nikolaj in Copenhagen, Denmark (2009); Museum of Contemporary Art and Design in Lausanne, Switzerland (2006); Museum of Modern Art in New York (2005-06); the Seoul Museum of Art in Korea (2002); and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (1995).

He has published more than ten books including Dogs and Boats and Airplanes told in the form of Ivan the Terrible, (Space Poetry, Copenhagen, 2011); Bird Radio, (Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther Koenig and KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Cologne and Berlin, 2007) and The Guide to the Flora and Fauna Information Station: 0.800.0FAUNA0FLORA, (Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, England, 2008). His writing and artist’s projects have been published in Publicsfear, Art Monthly, Re/Search, and Semiotext(e).

George Kuchar: Snapshots & Twisted Tales

March 1 - 25, 2012

John Pollard is pleased to present Snapshots & Twisted Tales, an exhibition of works by the late filmmaker at Mulherin + Pollard, NYC

In the 1970s, Kuchar actively returned to his childhood interests in comics, and the current exhibition Snapshots & Twisted Tales will focus on the graphic work that he produced during this period and published in Arcade: The Comics Revue, a magazine begun with the noted underground artists Art Spiegelman and Bill Griffith, neighbors of Kuchar’s in San Francisco. Arcade included work by a variety of other artists, including George's twin brother Mike, as well as R. Crumb. The show will also feature a few of George's childhood drawings, early cartoons made in the mid 1950s when he was a student studying commercial art at the School of Industrial Art (later the Manhattan School of Art and Design). These drawings prefigure some of his signature future themes and preoccupations centering on food, heartthrobs, and the struggles and mortifications of everyday living. The exhibition will also include a selection of his photographs—portraits and personal snapshots of friends and various locales encountered on his many travels.

He has recently garnered new attention and recognition in the contemporary film and art worlds marked by his retrospective exhibition at MoMA PS1, “George Kuchar: Pagan Rhapsodies,” as the subject of a recent article in the February Artforum, and his inclusion in the forthcoming 2012 Whitney Biennial (at the Whitney Museum of American Art, March 1–May 27, 2012), which will be showing a selection of his Weather Diaries, a series of video works produced between 1986 and 2011.

Kuchar produced many paintings, works on paper, comics, and photographs during his lifetime, some of which were featured in the recent show at PS1. His works are represented by the ADA Gallery of Richmond, Virginia, whose director and owner, John Pollard, is also co-owner of Mulherin & Pollard, ADA’s sister gallery.

With a catalog that includes over 200 films and videos, George Kuchar's artwork has been recognized through countless awards and grants, including The National Endowment for the Arts, The Eureka Fellowship Program, and a Ford Foundation Fellowship from United States Artists. He is the recipient of the prestigious Maya Deren Award for Independent Film and Video Artists from the American Film Institute, and the Los Angeles Film Critics Award for Independent/Experimental Film and Video. Kuchar's work has screened around the globe in cinemas, festivals, and major museums, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Pompidou Center in Paris.

His films include Hold Me While I’m Naked (1966), selected by the Village Voice as no. 52 on its list of the 100 Best Films of the 20th Century; Eclipse Of the Sun Virgin (1967); and I, An Actress (1977), selected by the Library of Congress this past year for inclusion to the National Film Registry. His video works include Weather Diaries (1986–2011), and Secrets of the Shadow World (1989–99)

Shannon Wright: Mechanical Reproduction

February 3 - 26, 2012


California artist Shannon Wright’s installation Mechanical Reproduction parodies the industrial-age compulsion to create means for mass-producing everyday comforts for the modern home. An oversized rubber stamp is utilized to produce patterned wallpaper whose whimsically overlapping impressions and uneven stamping display more a sense of human indecision rather than any kind of machinelike precision. For Wright, the piece is a kind of “misguided labor-saving device” that may indeed offer more complications than easy solutions to the problem of mechanical reproduction.

Jared Clark, Bild

February 3 - 26, 2012


Jared Clark’s double-sided composition Bild poses as a painting from its frontal view (visible in the gallery’s window display) but reveals on its reverse a maelstrom of found objects ranging from wood, brick, and styrofoam to kitchen sponges and other household items. As in much of his other work, Jared references a Greenbergian flatness—“the privileged plane of painting”—on one hand, which he then subverts with the work’s playfully chaotic three-dimensional sculptural underbelly.

Bruce Wilhelm, Feelings For Dead Tree Thinklings

February 3 - 26, 2012

Bill Burns ( New York)   Alika Cooper   Carl D'Alvia   Michael Harrington   Kris Knight   Christy Langer ( New York )   Annie MacDonell   Rob MacInnis   Goody-B Wiseman

Makin' It Natural

January 6 - Jan 28, 2012

In conjunction with Robert Hengeveld's installation, Katharine Mulherin curates Makin' It Natural in our Freeman gallery, with works by nine artists from Toronto, Los Angeles, New York, Ottawa, and Maine, all of whom present a version of "natural" in their practice, whether embracing or questioning the notion of the term itself or our complicated struggle with it. Our relationship to animals, landscape, our inner animal and our own corporeal existence are examined in this exhibition of sculpture, textile work, painting, photography and printmaking. Annie Dunning, Mount Waddington/Drumheller

Robert Hengeveld: ersatz

Robert Hengeveld

ersatz

January 6 - Jan 28, 2012

Robert Hengeveld's new installation project, ersatz, consists of a collection of materials used to create an expansive composition comprised of synthetic rocks and trees, a series of orchestrated cuckoo birds, a clothes iron, fog juice, glass beads, cardboard, packing tape, lumber, hacked wildlife decoys, and many other materials – some created with the intent of mimicry, while others awkwardly beginning to take on marginal references to the 'natural' landscape given their associated company. The installation is animated through the periodic inflating and deflating of an inflatable deer. A makeshift smoke machine creates a subtle mist at the base of the beaded waterfall. Cuckoo birds periodically pop in and out of holes which pepper the fabricated cliff façade. All this is overseen by a chrome coyote perched high above, looking over the entire installation – part romanticized emblem of nature, part dollar-store trophy. A small bunny tucked in behind some boxes quivers intermittently. The work explores our capacity to suspend disbelief and our ability to meld our perceptions in order to fit within a predetermined notion of what it is we are seeing. We can choose to engage a mock rock as a rock or a plastic Christmas tree as a pine or spruce, despite our underlying awareness to the contrary.  The at times conflicting collection of these manufactured elements do not set out to pass judgment – synthetic good, synthetic bad – rather their collective association questions and examines our relationship to the increasingly manufactured environments around us, and our interest in mimicking all things natural – to the extent of embossing wood grain in plastic lumber. The amplification and manipulation of the artificial within this peculiar installation sets a platform in which our existing relationship to the synthetic can be explored; its fiction shedding light on the reality (or recreated reality) of the world we live in.

STO and Brian Novatny in The New York Times

My STO Called Life and Picture Fishing reviewed in the New York Times

So sorry for not posting for so long!