Devin Borden Gallery presents Table Top a selection of intimately scaled sculpture by Sharon Engelstein, Nicholas Kersulis, Darryl Lauster, Matt Messinger and Kaneem Smtih.
Opening reception April 13 (Friday) from 6 to 8 pm
Through May 31st.
Sharon Engelstien at Devin Borden Gallery
Nicholas Kersulis at Devin Borden Gallery
Christopher French Between Heaven and Home
Through May 8, 2012
Christopher French is based on Long Island, New York and is known for geometric abstractions utilizing a variety of systems to generate images from the simple geometry of the circle. In French’s earlier works, the patterns evolved in strict grids. His current body of work examines more free-form shapes including the relationships between plants in the garden, individual flowers petals or the rambling forms of ground cover and ivy. Delicate veils of acrylic in overlapping colors are set against hard-edged circles which use oil combined with different media, including marble dust, to create different textures and reflective qualities.
Christopher French "Swarm" at Devin Borden Gallery
Christopher French makes paintings that are abstractions in the fullest sense. He records and distills the brilliant palette of nature and makes it intelligible without dampening its inherent mystery. These new works are based on the landscape in and around Water Mill, New York, where French moved three years ago….With these paintings French underscores his commitment to the careful notation of nature’s infinite variety.
-Rex Weil
Artnews June 2011 from a review of French’s recent exhibition at Marsha Mateyka Gallery, Washington, D.C.
Christopher French "Touchy-Feely" at Devin Borden Gallery, oil and acrylic on linen 2011
Laura Lark The Liveable Forest
on view through April 3
Laura Lark at Devin Borden Gallery
Much of Laura Lark’s work is devoted to exploring the way that popular culture, media, and public opinion colonize our sense of ourselves and provide us with the only vocabulary we seem to have for making ourselves understood. These explorations are governed, formally and materially, by paradox: motifs are drawn from familiar, even shopworn, sources but become a highly personal vocabulary; a kind of feminist vision is carried through by means of recovering a cult of beauty rejected by feminism; a certain monumentality is sometimes sought with materials – tyvek, nail polish remover, faux leaf, paint markers, sharpie – that are anything but resounding, intimidating, historical.
Though there is a certain kinship that draws Lark close to Pop and more recent movements that explore the tension between personal vocabulary and banal “original,” she thinks of her work as differing from some of these others since the aim in exalting this detritus from the culture industry lies in uncovering a certain psychological and emotional dimension – in herself and in the viewer – that is otherwise hard to articulate or identify.
Laura Lark at Devin Borden Gallery
One way she does this is to operate by selecting visual images in series. Some of the work has consisted in “replicating” a series of magazine pages; some have involved painting successive “stills” captured from the video screen; and many have drawn from the sort of list of instructions that all women (and more and more men these days) are familiar with: recipes, sewing patterns, how-to guides to better dress, hair, cosmetics.
The Liveable Forest employs many of these techniques and themes, but there are also some new ones. For instance, Lark has begun thinking about the formal and material paradoxes that exist in trying to see ourselves both as natural creatures and as social ones. This is especially evident in the installation elements of the show: the stuff that represents nature here – “leaves,” “hills,” “snow” – makes it clear that this is nature as experienced by someone who really doesn’t want to go outside.
Douglas Britt on Geoff Hippenstiel at ART LTD.
Rachel Hooper on Geoff Hippenstiel at Fluent Collaborative …might be good
Robert Boyd on Geoff Hippenstiel at The Great God Pan is Dead
Devin Borden Gallery will open the 2012 season with its first solo exhibition of large-scale works by Houston painter Geoff Hippenstiel. Hippenstiel pushes abstraction in a manner that reinvigorates the materiality of painting, and this showing will provide a unique opportunity for this artist to display works as grand in scope as they are expressively executed. January 14 through March 13
Geoff Hippenstiel at Devin Borden Gallery through March 13, 2012
Geoff Hippenstiel cultivates the ambiguities of abstract representation with his most recent large, lushly painted canvases. Each is a presence to be reckoned with, a thing vibrant and almost alive in its physicality. Hippenstiel is drawn to that thingly quality of a painting’s being, its sheer existence, and a powerful and dynamic application of oil and impasto give his works an urgent sense of materiality. But from all that musculature something like a recognizable world tantalizes (and sometimes disturbs) the viewer.
Hippenstiel identifies with and draws inspiration from artists as diverse as Robert Ryman and Cecily Brown, whose individual explorations concerning surface and tactility are akin to his own. However, he is perhaps more intent than these precursors on delving into assumptions about what constitutes a conventional painting, exploring variations in the nature of the paint itself. The artist’s use of spray enamel, metallic, and fluorescent paints alongside traditional oils is exceptional: a canvas dense with earthy greens or pale yellows is electrified with a single swipe of neon pink; in another, metallic gold or silver plays against thickly applied, buttery, and colorful elements, yielding a highly original eye popping effect.
Geoff Hippenstiel at Devin Borden Gallery
As an abstractionist, though, Geoff Hippenstiel’s focus is also always on the question of how image is present in non-representational works of art. Much depends on how the viewer engages and identifies with the painting, and the artist brings this awareness of process into the works themselves. If an absolute abstraction is impossible, Hippenstiel actively embraces the challenge of creating a visual experience of something that is at once somehow familiar yet unrecognizable. Each painting thus represents a pact between artist and viewer in which intellectual deliberation, athletic gesture, and uncommon – even uncanny — combinations of texture and color deliver a whole that far outstrips the sum of its (carefully meditated) parts.
Ted Kincaid Every Doubt That Holds You Here
Ted Kincaid’s images are beautiful, dreamy, ethereal. It’s not necessary to know anything about the work to be transported by them. Some have a hazy, Romantic quality, others a crystalline clarity, still others feel antique; all of them insinuate familiarity. Even if we can’t identify the exact location for each scene, we feel that we’ve seen it somewhere–perhaps in mid-century nature photography or in an old movie. We recognize these places; of this we can be sure. Continue reading
Splits
December 3, 2011 through February 7, 2012
Jillian Conrad ARTFORUM March 2012
Jillian Conrad at Devin Borden Gallery
foldedSpace through January 10, 2012
The work of Charles Wiese is characterized by a search for structure in chaos and is constantly advancing the notion of simplicity from complexity.
Artists first engaged computers in the production of work in the 1960s. Analog, non-digital machines and output devices, most designed for a single task of scientific or military value, produced results that at best reflected nascent Op Art or Minimalism. Truly programmable computers had been invented but were in limited use because of enormous cost and size.
As circuitry evolved and was miniaturized, computers became smaller, more powerful and more affordable. It is of course now impossible to imagine any human endeavor that is not touched by the tool of computing technology. Storing and manipulating images has become so commonplace that the computing power used by an artist who does not consider herself to make computer art probably surpasses that used by NASA to put a man on the moon. This use of the tool is for the most part superficial. Among those artists attempting to realize its true potential is Charles Wiese
Timelines
October 1 through November 29, 2011
Darry Lauster "Jacktars" 2010
Timelines, Darryl Lauster’s newest exhibition, is a discrete investigation of American history, reflecting on aspects of our nation’s identity and on the various sensibilities that go into our feeling of “American-ness”. Lauster employs a multi-layered process that involves appropriating and transforming various historical icons, folklore, and popularly accepted narratives and institutions.
The artist’s use of collaged text, images and handwriting has a critical edge, since these fragments are frequently appropriated out of context and made to mirror the rhetoric we are familiar with from current political discourse. In this way they criticize a paradoxical nostalgia for times and events that were themselves corrupt but at present are accepted without critical thought.
September 10 through September 27, 2011
The simple notion of paper is a malleable term in contemporary art. In many cases, The word connotes a flexible support, and the artists in Works on Paper, a group exhibition at Devin Borden Gallery, have tailored these supports to their personal projects with engaging results. The physical surface of paper itself challenges traditional ideas of what a drawing should be or is used to suit the work thematically.
Hilary Wilder "Liquor Cabinets for a New World"
Melissa Thorne
Hilary Wilder’s use of acrylic paint on photo paper for her Liquor Cabinets for a New World series (2011) produces a faux bois effect with a glassy sheen. The properties of the acrylic, fighting adherence to the slick surface, produces, an effect that mimics the highly polished sectioned wooden cabinets that the artist became so intrigued with in her travels.
Ben L. Culwell: Mid-Century Drawings
September 10 through November 1, 2011
Ben L. Culwell (1918-1992) was born in San Antonio, Texas. In New York during the late-1930s he came into contact with the American Abstract Artists Group before joining the U.S. Navy prior to the outbreak of war in the Pacific.
Culwell’s development from an artist working in a regional style typical to America in the late-1930s to an Abstract Expressionist by 1950, was highlighted by a series of critical exposures in Texas and New York. The personal and artistic influence of Jerry Bywaters and Everett Spruce fostered an interest in print making and experimental technique while Culwell was still a teenager. They also made possible access to a trove of German Expressionist works moved to Dallas for safekeeping following the rise of Nazi power in Germany.
Ben L. Culwell "Untitled (Face of a Woman)," 1937