September 15 - October 27, 2018

“Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.” – Lao Tzu

Christopher Grimes Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new works by Sharon Ellis, her ninth with the gallery since 1993. In her latest body of work, Ellis explores the patterns and rhythms of nature as metaphors for endings, loss and ultimate renewal. Blue Hour, the title of both the exhibition as well as a work in the show, refers to the time of day when the sun has disappeared from the sky, yet light still remains. These words acknowledge the sadness of the loss of the day, while taking refuge in the hope that lives on in the emerging stars.

Continuing her recent trajectory of creating smaller, more intimate works on paper, Ellis’s paintings embody the solace that can be found in nature and the reminder that new life continually replaces that which has passed on. In several works, trees with bare branches are paired with new growth and a gentle wind that sweeps through the landscapes, hinting at the possibility of change, renewal and of life waiting to emerge.

Working in multiple layers of transparent glazes, Ellis’s paintings are the result of a meticulous and time-consuming process. Much like nature itself, Ellis’s practice is unhurried and conscientious, resulting in paintings that hum with the vibrant spirit of the natural world.

Sharon Ellis lives and works in Yucca Valley, CA. She was recently included in the group exhibitions Explode Every Day: An Inquiry into the Phenomena of Wonder at MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA (2016); Experience 19: Touch at the El Segundo Museum of Art, El Segundo, CA (2015), and her work was also featured in Eden’s Edge: Art in L.A. at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA (2007) and POPulence (2005), curated by David Pagel, which traveled throughout the United States. The Long Beach Museum of Art organized a ten-year survey of Ellis’ work in 2002 entitled Evocations, which traveled to the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, OH and San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, CA. Ellis was also included in Flower Power at Palais des Beaux-Arts in Lille, France.

June 23 - August 31, 2018

Selected Affinities features works by Allan Sekula, Miles Coolidge, Connie Samaras, Katie Shapiro and Billy Woodberry. From the desert to the docks, farmland to the sea, this exhibition brings together four artists, who, along with Sekula, use photography or video not only as a tool for documentation but also as part of a discourse rooted in social relations.

On view for the first time at the gallery will be Sekula’s Message in a Bottle (from Fish Story Chapter 5) (first version). One of his best-known bodies of work, Fish Story is a sequential piece composed of over one hundred pictures in nine chapters documenting maritime spaces and the effects of globalization. Message in a Bottle specifically addresses the decline of the fishing economy in the small Spanish town of Vigo. Sekula has exhibited extensively both internationally and locally, with solo exhibitions most recently at Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna, Austria; NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore; and Johan Jacobs Museum, Zurich, Switzerland. His work is in the collections of the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; Museum of Modern Art New York, NY; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Museu de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain; and Tate, London, UK, among several others.

Coolidge will exhibit a selection of pictures from his Mattawa series, fourteen photographs of converted cargo containers used to transport refrigerated goods, modified into a migrant housing project on farmlands in central Washington State. The impartial pictures are devoid of figures, yet traces of their presence can be seen in abandoned benches and pathways. Without being overtly political, the work depicts the cyclical nature of capitalism and the laborers who are inherent to the system. Coolidge studied under Bernd Becher at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and has recently been the subject of solo exhibitions at Peter Blum Gallery, NY and ACME. Los Angeles, CA. His work is in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; Whitney Museum, New York, NY; and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA, among others.

After the American Century is a series of photographs Samaras captured in the United Arab Emirates starting in 2008 at the beginning of the global economic recession. The pictures document the ongoing construction of Dubai, a symbol of uber-capitalistic expansion of incredible scale and massive wealth. The Burj Khalifa looms in the background of one photograph, while other pictures depict the industrious laborers that make this unimaginable world possible. Samaras has exhibited widely for more than three decades, and her work was recently included in Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon at the New Museum, NY. Most recently she has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena, CA (2013) and the California Museum of Photography, Riverside, CA (2011).

In Malibu Sandbags, Shapiro turns her attention to Broad Beach, an exclusive stretch of oceanfront in Malibu that has been historically contested ground between public access and private property. Over the course of two years Shapiro documented the erosion of the beach and homeowners’ attempts to protect their property from the rising seas. Here the sandbags serve not only as a barrier against nature but also the public, simultaneously highlighting and masking social divisions. Shapiro has recently exhibited at Kopeikin Gallery, Los Angeles; Joan Los Angeles; and 356 Mission Road, Los Angeles. She was recipient of the Banff Centre Artist in Residence, and her work is in the collection of the Huntington Library, San Marino, CA.

Woodberry presents his film, Marseille Après La Guerre, a portrait of dockworkers in Marseille after the Second World War. Woodberry discovered a collection of photographs of the Marseille docks made by union photographers, many portraying workers of African descent. The images reminded him of the great Senegalese film director Ousmane Sembène, who in 1947, worked on the docks of Marseille and became active in the French trade union movement. Told through a series of still black and white images and set to music by Moussu T e lei Jouvents, Woodberry’s choice of framing and editing creates a moving visual narrative of the workers. Woodberry is a key figure in the L.A. Rebellion film movement. His film Bless Their Little Hearts (1984) was honored with a jury award at the Berlin International Film Festival and was selected for preservation by the National Film Registry.

May 5 - June 16, 2018

In classical science, aether was thought to be the fifth element, filling the region of the universe above the terrestrial sphere, connecting and permeating all things and acting as a medium for the propagation of light. Though these theories were eventually disproved by modern science, the word ethereal still invokes a sense of otherworldliness, fragility and spirituality. This exhibition brings together gallery artists from different backgrounds whose work engages with the immaterial, through forms such as light, color, vapor and air. Included in the exhibition are works by Olivier Mosset, Gianfranco Foschino, Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, Dane Mitchell and João Louro.

Dane Mitchell’s (New Zealand) practice is concerned with manifesting the physical properties of the incorporeal. In Ethereal, Mitchell will present a series of hollow, amorphous glass objects, which act as repositories for incantations. Each sculpture was molded by the artist’s voice as he relayed spells prepared by a practitioner of the dark arts into the molten glass. The resulting forms bulge and undulate with the invisible forces they contain. Mitchell’s work was recently on view in a solo exhibition at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, Japan, and he will represent New Zealand in the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019.

Gianfranco Foschino (Chile) sets up a fixed camera and films the subtle movements that occur in front of the lens. Using this technique and applying no editing, he relies on intangible elements such as wind, light, fog and time to create the drama in the scenes he captures. Foschino recently held solo exhibitions at Museo de Artes Visuales (MAVI), Santiago, Chile and Stadtgalerie, Saarbrücken, Germany, and recently participated in the International Creator Residency Program at Tokyo Arts and Space.

Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle’s (Spain/USA) works are engaged in an investigation of how certain extraordinary forces and systems perpetually reshape our world. Through his sculptures of clouds and hurricanes, Manglano-Ovalle gives form to objects that defy boundaries and dimensionality, representing the physical manifestations of unseen meteorological phenomena. His work is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; Museo de Arte Contemporaneo, Bilbao; and Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, among others.

Olivier Mosset (Switzerland/USA) has been associated with a multitude of art historical movements throughout his career. Through his exploration of pure color fields, he has remained committed to questioning painting as a historical object by, paradoxically, continuing to paint, turning to monochrome works on canvas and walls, which create open-ended experiences of scale and color vibration for the viewer. Mosset’s work is in the collections of Museum of Modern Art, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris; National Gallery of Canada, Ontario; and Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne, Switzerland, among others.

João Louro’s (Portugal) body of work encompasses painting, sculpture, photography and video, with a referential lexical universe comprising minimalism, conceptualism, pop culture, structuralism and post-structuralism. In Big Bang #3, we are reminded that all physical bodies, even the earth itself, were once void of form and that everything came from and will return to the ether. Louro represented Portugal at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015, and he has held recent solo exhibitions at Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Elvas, Portugal; Travessa da Ermida, Lisbon, Portugal; and Museo d’Art Contemporanea, Rome, Italy.

March 17 - April 28, 2018

While divergent in materiality, Kellndorfer and Ballester Moreno share a sensibility in their approach to the subject of Modernism as a theme in their work. Kellndorfer’s practice is centered on photographing some of the most recognized and renowned Modernist architectural spaces around the world, while Ballester Moreno’s paintings embody the Modernist emphasis on line, form, symbolism, color and process, bringing to mind early champions of the avant-garde such as Paul Klee, Joan Miró and Josef Albers.

For this exhibition, Kellndorfer presents photographs of Modernist structures by Albert Frey and Oscar Niemeyer printed on highly reflective glass panels. She primarily focuses her lens on the transparent façades of the structures, allowing the difference between the interior and exterior to play out on the surface of the glass. As a result of this process, the viewer and their surroundings are conflated on the surfaces of the works, resulting in the superimposition of image space and real space, the man-made and the natural.

With attention to texture and figuration, Ballester Moreno applies up to thirty layers of thinned acrylic paint to raw, unprimed jute, essentially dyeing the surface of the canvas. Using this process he applies elements of a simplified, geometric visual language that cohesively represent nature. Through symbolic depictions of the sun, moon, water, mountains and light, Ballester Moreno’s paintings portray a natural world that is interdependent, integral and cyclical.

Veronika Kellndorfer lives and works in Berlin, Germany. She has held solo exhibitions in museums and institutions around the world, including the National Museum, Oslo, Norway (2017); Casa de Vidro, Instituto Lina Bo Bardi, São Paulo, Brazil (2015); Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, Germany (2012 and 2014); Aedes Land, Berlin, Germany (2010); Berlinische Galerie, Berlin, Germany (2005); Il parco, Villa Massimo, Rome, Italy (2005). Her work is included in the permanent collections of the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; Pilara Foundation, Pier 24 Photography, San Francisco, CA; National Gallery, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; and Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, San Diego, CA, among others. 

Antonio Ballester Moreno lives and works in Madrid, Spain and is considered one of the key figures in the young Spanish art scene. In 2017, he was the subject of a major solo exhibition at La Casa Encendida in Madrid, Spain. His work is included in the monograph Vitamin P2 published by Phaidon (2012) and is in the collections of Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo (CA2M), Móstoles, Spain; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León (MUSAC), León, Spain; the Olbricht Collection, Berlin, Germany; and Collection Reydan Weiss, Essen, Germany. Ballester Moreno has exhibited internationally at Museo de Arte de Zapopan, Guadalajara, Mexico; La Casa Encendida, Madrid, Spain; Peres Projects, Berlin, Germany; and Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo (CA2M), Móstoles, Spain and is a recipient of the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León’s (MUSAC) Artistic Creation Grant.

January 6 - March 10, 2018

The Crime of Art (Hollywood Edition) is Kota Ezawa’s third solo exhibition with the gallery. At the heart of the exhibition will be the new multi-channel animated film, The Crime of Art, in which Ezawa re-creates – in his distinctive flattened, distilled style – scenes from Hollywood art heist films, among them The Thomas Crown Affair (1999), How to Steal a Million, Topkapi, and Entrapment. The 3-screen installation functions like a cinematic “exquisite corpse” in which one screen continues the narrative thread where the previous screen leaves off. In contrast to a Hollywood film, this animation has no beginning and no end.

Ezawa notes: “I like to think of crime in this work not as a mystery that needs to be resolved but as a snake that bites its own tail.”

Ezawa will also present a selection of light boxes that further his investigations into stolen works of art, including to-scale recreations of Edvard Munch’s The Scream, versions of which were stolen in 1994 and 2004, and Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, which was appropriated by the Nazi regime in 1938 and was famously repatriated to the Bloch-Bauer family in 2006.

Kota Ezawa (b. 1969, Cologne, Germany) lives and works in San Francisco, California. His work is currently on view in a solo exhibition at SITE Santa Fe, NM and in the group exhibition Art Lessons at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid. Additionally, he has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Mead Art Museum, Amherst, MA (2017); Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA (2015); Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY (2013); Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA (2013); Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH (2009); Hayward Gallery Project Space, London, England (2007); and Artpace, San Antonio, TX (2006). Ezawa’s work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Art Institute of Chicago, IL; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, CA; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Pier 24 Photography, San Francisco, CA; and Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA; among others.

November 4 – December 29, 2017

Christopher Grimes Gallery is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of photographs by Miguel Rio Branco in conjunction with Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA’s participating gallery program, in which the artist will present a selection of works from the Out of Nowhere series. Rio Branco is renowned for his dramatic use of color and the intimacy and complexity of his subject matter: direct, often brutal photographs of marginalized communities in Brazil. His photo-essay, Out of Nowhere, delves inside the Santa Rosa Boxing Academy in Rio de Janeiro, where former prostitutes, street youths, and people of all backgrounds would flock to train. The photographs, which were originally captured in the early 1990s and were first exhibited under the title Out of Nowhere at the 1994 Havana Bienal, depict the boxers at the academy while focusing on the pervading transcendental atmosphere of the space rather than the individual subjects.

Miguel Rio Branco lives and works in Petrópolis, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. His work cuts across the worlds of cinema, photography, photojournalism, and social and political criticism. His photographs and films are included in such esteemed collections as the Centre Georges Pompidou, SFMOMA, the Walker Art Center and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. He has had numerous solo and group shows internationally, including Miguel Rio Branco: When I die I will take nothing, Museu de Arte de São Paulo, Brazil (2017), Miguel Rio Branco: Gritos Surdos, Casa França-Brasil, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (2015), the 34th Panorama of Brazilian Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, São Paulo, Brazil (2015); Made in Brazil, Casa Daros, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (2015); and Out of Nowhere, a retrospective survey with nine installations, Groninger Museum, Groninger, Netherlands (2006). Rio Branco has been a correspondent for Magnum since 1980 and his work has been published in magazines such as Aperture, National Geographic, and Photo Magazine.

Christopher Grimes Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle in conjunction with the Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA participating gallery program, in which he will present a selection of works from the The Garden of Delights series. The Garden of Delights is an early body of work made from the DNA samples of forty-eight participants – sixteen chosen by the artist, each of whom invited two additional participants with whom they would comprise a triptych. Manglano-Ovalle collaborated with a team of laboratory technicians to create the DNA portraits, which were produced as digital prints. While the series visually alludes to abstraction, it conceptually engages with 18th century casta paintings – paintings commissioned by Spanish officials in Spain’s American colonies, which depicted the different racial mixtures that derived from the unions between the three major races, Africans, Spaniards and indigenous peoples. In contrast to the familial subject matter of casta paintings, however, Manglano-Ovalle creates communities of chosen relationships, redefining the idea of family, and effectively challenging the idea of identity both aesthetically and socially.

Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle lives and works in Chicago. He will participate in the forthcoming Chicago Architecture Biennial, was the 2012 winner of a USA Fellow Award, the winner of the 2001 MacArthur Fellowship and has been honored with numerous solo exhibitions including The Black Forest, Museo Universidad de Navarra, Pamplona, Spain (2015); Seven Thousand Cords, Chicago Architecture Biennial, Farnsworth House, Plano, IL (2015); Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle: Bird in Space at Mach 10, Ernst Schering Foundation, Berlin, Germany (2013); Always After (The Glass House), The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL (2011); and Gravity is a force to be reckoned with, Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams, MA (2009). Manglano-Ovalle’s work is in the collections of the Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (SMAK), Gent, Belgium; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; Museo de Arte Contemporaneo, Bilbao, Spain; and Museo Nacional Centro de arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain, among others. 

September 9 – October 28, 2017

Christopher Grimes Gallery is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of new works by Lucia Koch, in conjunction with Pacific Standard Time LA/LA. In No more things. Koch will present a continuation of her Fundos series: photographs of the interiors of empty boxes, bags, and packages, manipulated to house and reflect light and mimic architectural scales. Koch began photographing for the Fundos series in 2001 while reading Paul Auster’s dystopian novel, In the Country of Last Things, which tells the story of a collapsed society with no economy or industry, in which the population must resort to selling scavenged, nearly forgotten objects to survive. In this collection of new photographs, Koch explores the feeling of vacuity when objects become obsolete and only their negative space is left behind. The result is a series of disorienting portals that hint at the inevitable downfall of a materialistic society.

Lucia Koch lives and works in São Paulo, Brazil. In September 2017 she will be included in the PST: LA/LA exhibition, Condemned to be Modern, curated by Clara Kim, Curator at the Tate Modern, at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery at Barnsdall Art Park. Recent exhibitions include Transparência e Reflexo, Museu Brasileiro da Escultura, São Paulo, Brazil (2016); Jameel Prize 4, Pera Museum, Instanbul, Turkey (2016); the solo exhibition, La temperatura del aire, at el Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Caja de Burgos (CAB), Burgos, Spain (2015); and Cruzamentos: Contemporary Art in Brazil, Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH (2014); among others. 

September 9 - October 28, 2017

Christopher Grimes Gallery is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of video works by Gianfranco Foschino in conjunction with Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA. Using a fixed camera and time as his primary media, Foschino captures the subtle variances of the landscape, bringing attention to the effects of light in altering the drama of the natural scene. From peaceful, sun-drenched blue skies, to brooding storm clouds and the uneasy in-between, Foschino brings focused awareness to the celestial changes that are occurring around us at every present moment.

Gianfranco Foschino is a key figure in a new generation of artists from Chile. Recent solo exhibitions include LOCUS, Museo de Artes Visuales (MAVI), Santiago, Chile (2016) and Hidden Stories, Stadtgalerie in Saarbrücken, Germany (2015). He has participated in a number of group exhibitions, including: We Were Here: Absence of the Figure, Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA (2016); Unsettled Landscapes, SITE Santa Fe, New Mexico (2014); and Monolith Controversies, 14th International Architecture Exhibition, Venice Biennale (2014); among others.

June 24 - September 1, 2017

Christopher Grimes Gallery is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of paintings by Glen Rubsamen. This will be Rubsamen’s first exhibition with the gallery and his first solo show in a West Coast gallery. In The Disguise Was Almost Perfect he will present a collection of paintings that engage with the influence of technology on the cityscape. The process behind Rubsamen’s paintings is peripatetic in nature, it migrates and wanders. Using Google Street View, Rubsamen creates an itinerary around Los Angeles, placing markers in the satellite map and allowing Google to find the shortest path around them without using freeways. In Street View, he scrupulously follows this itinerary looking for anomalies in the landscape, beautiful combinations of buildings, outdoor advertising and vegetation.  He then visits each of the sites in person, photographing his chosen landscapes from the same perspective as they are depicted by Google. These photographs serve as the raw materials for the paintings.

The paintings represent a complex mixture of chance elements in the landscape: fan palms, yuccas, eucalyptus trees, billboards, roadside attractions (such as Mark Di Suvero’s Declaration on Venice Beach), cell phone towers, lamp posts and the anonymous architecture of the city sprawl. The result is a sort of “accidental ensemble” depicting new culture/nature symbiosis in the cityscape. Rubsamen’s paintings are influenced by a complex set of circumstances: the direction of the sun, property rights, the flow of traffic, the arbitrary decision-making of corporate capitalism, the fertility of the soil, the social class of the neighborhood, energy and lethargy, to name a few. Somewhere in this hyper-complexity, Rubsamen finds the opportunity to create images with great authenticity, thoughtfully integrating the overlooked, quotidian elements of the Los Angeles cityscape into his paintings, while representing a tangible and inevitable shift towards a creative process that incorporates the vast and ever-expanding virtual world.

Glen Rubsamen was born and raised in Los Angeles, CA. After nearly three decades living in New York and abroad, he returned to his hometown in 2013. He now divides his time between Los Angeles and Dusseldorf, Germany. He has exhibited at venues including the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, Germany; Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain, Strasbourg, France; Witte de With, Rotterdam, Netherlands; Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), Los Angeles, CA; The Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco, CA; Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), London, UK; Kunstverein Munich, Germany; Newport Harbor Art Museum, Newport Beach, CA; and extensively in international galleries. 

May 6 - June 17, 2017

Christopher Grimes Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of photographs by Ulrich Wüst. This will be Wüst’s first exhibition in a U.S. gallery. Trained as an urban planner, Wüst came to photography in the 1970s as a rhetorical tool for studying the development of cities. This work quickly developed into a critique of the East German approach to city building and led ultimately to a conceptual approach to portraiture of the Socialist state. In the Stadtbilder series, Wüst photographed East German cities that were slow to recover from wartime destruction, bringing emphasis to the massive, soulless housing structures that emerged in the rise of the Socialist regime and that failed to address the rehabilitation of the cities’ historic city centers.  As Wüst recalls: “I wanted to create a landscape of the soul, drawing attention to what we had done to ourselves with our city planning.” Concurrent with the exhibition, the Stadtbilder series will be featured in documenta 14 in Kassel.

Wüst remained in East Berlin after the fall of the Berlin Wall, where he began photographing left behind objects from the homes of those who abruptly fled the city. In these photographs from the Nachlass series Wüst captured the intimate architecture of everyday life, creating the objects’ historical portraits, and ultimately a portrait of their former owner, before they were disposed of and forgotten.

Ulrich Wüst has lived and worked in Berlin since 1972, where he continues to photograph the evolution of German cities and their historic memory. Wüst’s first solo exhibition in the U.S., Public and Private: East Germany in Photographs by Ulrich Wüst, debuted at the MIT Museum in Cambridge, MA in 2015 and travelled to the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, VA in 2016. Wüst’s work has been collected by the Berlinische Galerie, the Deutsche Genossenschaftsbank, the Art Collection of the German Bundestag, the Berlin State Museums, and the Museum of Prints and Drawings Berlin, and has been featured in solo exhibitions throughout Europe.

March 18 - April 29, 2017

Christopher Grimes Gallery is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of new works by Kevin Appel. Appel’s new series of paintings begin as primary arrangements: cut-out paper forms referencing the portholes of Jean Prouvé’s Maison Tropicale are combined with Appel’s own photographs of fragments of his previous works, landscapes, and images of Paolo Soleri’s Arcosanti. These forms are constructed into soft, sculptural collages on the studio wall that are photographed at close range and then printed onto canvas. Multiple layers of geometric and gestural marks are silkscreened and hand painted over these flattened images creating a rhythm within the painting while obfuscating the original subject matter. Appel’s paintings are prismatic collages, an investigation of new and old imagery engaged in a recursive conversation where images and forms are pulled from one canvas and used in another, their intersection hinting at a controlled collapse of utopian ideals.

Appel (Los Angeles, CA, 1967) lives and works in Los Angeles. He received his BFA from Parsons School of Design in New York and his MFA from University of California, Los Angeles. He is a professor of art and Department Chair of Art in painting and graduate studies at the Claire Trevor School of the Arts at University of California, Irvine. Appel’s work was recently on view in Endless House: Intersections of Art and Architecture, Museum of Modern Art, NY (2016); and his work has been included in the exhibitions Painting in Place, Los Angeles Nomadic Division, CA (2013); California Modern, Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA (2005); Trespassing: Houses x Artists, MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles, CA (2003); Drawing Now, Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY (2002); and Painting at the Edge of the World, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN (2001). Appel has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Museo Rufino Tamayo, Mexico City, Mexico (2003) and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1999). His work is in the permanent collections of such institutions as the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN, among others.

Christopher Grimes Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of early works by Allan Sekula. The exhibition will open on January 14 at 6 pm with a panel discussion between Jill Dawsey, Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Philipp Kaiser, independent curator, and Glenn Phillips, Curator and Head of Modern & Contemporary Collections at the Getty Research Institute. In addition to the panel discussion we will launch the second edition of Photography Against the Grain: Essays and Photoworks 1973-1983, a seminal collection of early essays and photographs by Sekula that has been out of print for nearly three decades.

Sekula’s exhibition will include unique, preliminary versions of his established works such as This Ain’t China (unique maquette), (1974), comprised of almost 90 contact sheet prints depicting the class struggle of kitchen workers (including the artist himself), and School is a Factory, consisting of selected prints that have never been exhibited. Also on view will be Meditations on a Triptych, as well as Long Beach Notes and the single-channel video Reagan Tape, among other works.

Allan Sekula’s (1951-2013) recent solo exhibitions include, Fish Story, to be continued at the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore, Gillman Barracks, Singapore (2015); Dockers' Museum, Johan Jacobs Museum, Zürich, Switzerland (2014); Meditations on a Tritpych, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands (2013); and Ship of Fools, Ludwig Museum, Budapest, Hungary (2010). Select group exhibitions include those held at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, CA (2016); Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY (2015); Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY (2015); Leal Rios Foundation, Lisbon, Portugal (2015); Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY (2014); Victoria & Albert Museum, London, England (2014); MAXXI National Museum of XXI Century Arts, Rome, Italy (2014); 55th Venice Biennale, Catalan pavilion (2013); 29th Bienal de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil (2010); and Documenta XII and XI, Kassel, Germany (2007 and 2002). His work is in the collections of the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Museo de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Tate, London, UK; Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna, Austria; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, San Diego, CA; and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN, among others.

November 12, 2016 – January 7, 2017

Christopher Grimes is pleased to present a solo exhibition of paintings and works on paper by Pia Fries. The artist will present a series of unique paintings of seascapes, also on paper. In this body of work, roiling seas and capsizing ships taken from the engravings of renowned Italian artist of the Baroque period, Stefano della Bella, act as the ground over which Fries applies bristling, vibrant color. The gestures of della Bella’s engravings are echoed in Fries’ energetic application of paint while the white, negative spaces proffer respite from the storm.

Pia Fries lives and works in Dusseldorf and Berlin, Germany. She is an MA student of Gerhard Richter, having attended his painting classes at the Kunstakademie Dusserldorf from 1980 to 1986. Fries has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Kunstplattform AKKU, Emmenbrücke, Lucerne, Switzerland (2015), Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe, Germany (2011); and Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Winterthur, Switzerland (2007), among others. Her work has been included in the group exhibitions, Ortswechsel: Works from the Kunstmuseum Bonn, Schauwerk Sindelfingen, Sindelfingen, Germany (2016); Drama Queens Die inszenierte Sammlung, Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen, Germany (2016); freshly painted, Brother Klaus Museum, Sachseln (2014); Yes, No, Maybe, Artists Working at Crown Point Press, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (2013); The Doubled Image, Kunstmuseum Solothurn, Switzerland (2013); Landscape Confection, Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH (2005); Beau Monde, SITE Santa Fe Biennial curated by Dave Hickey (2001); and Venice Biennale (1999). Fries’ work is in the collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, CA; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, NY; Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany; and Kunsthaus Zurich, Switzerland, among others.

November 12, 2016 – January 7, 2017

“[Ellis’ paintings] give everything and ask nothing. Their scale betrays no demand for an august setting, no aspiration to public oratory or civic circumstance, no interference of the artist’s heroic persona, or any urgent necessity to persuade.”

- Dave Hickey

Christopher Grimes Gallery is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of new paintings by Sharon Ellis, representing her first ever show of works on paper. Ellis continues to mine the trajectory of Symbolism with its imaginary dream worlds, however now she has turned her attention toward making more intimate works on paper. Using light as the primary medium, Ellis juxtaposes light and dark values, creating seemingly sculptural forms and deep spaces. Her subjects are rendered with multiple layers of transparent glazes, resulting in surfaces that are spacious and immaterial. While it typically takes one year to make a work on canvas, this change in material and scale allows Ellis to work more spontaneously and offers her the opportunity to explore her ideas with greater fluidity.

Ellis is featured in the new book by Dave Hickey, Twenty-Five Women: Essays on Their Art, 2016.

Sharon Ellis lives and works in Yucca Valley, CA. Her work is currently on view in the exhibition Explode Every Day: An Inquiry into the Phenomena of Wonder, MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA. Previous exhibitions include Experience 19: Touch, El Segundo Museum of Art, El Segundo, CA (2015); Eden’s Edge: Art in L.A., Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA (2007); and POPulence (2005), curated by David Pagel, which traveled throughout the United States. In 2002 the Long Beach Museum of Art organized a ten-year survey of Ellis’ work entitled Evocations, which traveled to the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, OH and the San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, CA. Ellis was also included in Flower Power at Palais des Beaux-Arts in Lille, France (2004).

September 9 – November 5, 2016

Christopher Grimes Gallery is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of works by Antonio Ballester Moreno. This will be his first solo exhibition with the gallery and will feature a series of new paintings and paper collages. Ballester Moreno is guided by instinct and uses the raw material of jute and acrylic paint within a palette of primary colors and foundational geometric shapes. The paintings refer to patterns and colors found in nature: yellow for light; blue to water; and the mixing of the two creates green, the color of vegetation; circles are cycles of the moon and sun; triangles are trees and mountains. All of these shapes are created through careful hand-eye coordination, resulting in subtle variances and a spontaneous quality of line. The title of the exhibition is reinforced through the repetition inherent in the making of each painting, which can be comprised of up to thirty layers of paint.   

Through his application of simplistic and determined shapes and colors, Ballester Moreno has developed a personal vocabulary upon which he builds a world of subtle variances and symbolic compositions. And while ultimately rooted in abstraction, his work evokes the history of pattern and decoration, craft, tapestry design, and African, Islamic and Ottoman influences.  

Ballester Moreno lives and works in Madrid, Spain and is considered one of the key figures in the young Spanish art scene. His work is included in the monograph Vitamin P2 published by Phaidon (2012) and is in the collections of Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo (CA2M), Móstoles, Spain; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León (MUSAC), León, Spain; the Olbricht Collection, Berlin, Germany; and Collection Reydan Weiss, Essen, Germany. Ballester Moreno has exhibited internationally at La Casa Encendida, Madrid, Spain; Peres Projects, Berlin, Germany; and Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo (CA2M), Móstoles, Spain and is a recipient of the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León’s (MUSAC) Artistic Creation Grant. 

July 8 - September 2, 2016

Architecture is “an adventure in which people are called to intimately participate as actors.” - Lina Bo Bardi (1914–1992)

Christopher Grimes Gallery is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of new works by Veronika Kellndorfer. This body of work stems from her 2015 solo exhibition at the Casa de Vidro in São Paulo, home of celebrated Italian-born Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi. During this time Kellndorfer also engaged with the architecture of Oscar Niemeyer and gardens of Roberto Burle Marx, finding their approach to Brazilian Modernism nascent to a new scope of reference.

For Tropical Modernism: Lina Bo Bardi, Kellndorfer continues working in the process she developed in the early 1990s of silk-screening photographic images to highly reflective glass panels, fusing image to form. In the main gallery, Kellndorfer will show works pairing details of Bo Bardi’s iconic SESC Pompéia in São Paulo with an individual plant species found in the Royal Botanic Garden in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Like Bo Bardi, whose architecture explored reciprocity between the human and the built, Kellndorfer examines the dialog between the playfully Brutalist and culturally dynamic SESC Pompéia and the global selection of various plant species flourishing in Brazil. The South gallery will feature works referencing Bo Bardi’s architectural treasure: Tree House (Casa de Vidro) as well as two sculptures Casa de Vidro, Quadrado and Casa de Vidro, Triângulo.

Kellndorfer has had exhibitions in museums and institutions around the world, including the Casa de Vidro, Instituto Lina Bo Bardi, São Paulo, Brazil (2015); Architekturmuseum of the Museum Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, Germany (2014); Pier 24 Photography, San Francisco, CA (2013), Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA (2012); and she completed a residency at Villa Aurora, Pacific Palisades, CA (2003). Kellndorfer's work is included in the permanent collections of the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Pier 24 Photography, San Francisco, CA; National Gallery, Berlin; and Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, CA, among others.

May 7 – July 1, 2016

“A canvas is never empty.” -Robert Rauschenberg

Christopher Grimes Gallery is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of new works by Henry Codax. This will be the artist’s first exhibition with the gallery. The monochrome paintings of Henry Codax consider the exploration of color isolated to the purest form of abstraction. Without references or painterly gestures signifying authorship, this new body of work questions our contemporary focus on the personality behind the art object giving the viewer the opportunity to become immersed in self-reflection.

May 7 - July 1, 2016

The South Gallery will feature new paintings by Los Angeles-based artist Salomón Huerta. For this exhibition, Huerta presents a new series of portraits depicting celebrated boxers such as Mohammed Ali, Leon Spinks and Manny Pacquiao. Huerta’s portraits continue his examination of assumed social identity, this time by contrasting these powerful figures that have become intrinsically linked with violence to the medium of watercolor, historically aligned with the pastoral tranquility of landscape.

Huerta (Tijuana, Mexico, 1965) lives and works in Los Angeles. His work has been included in the Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, NY, and exhibitions at Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; National Portrait Gallery at the Smithsonian Institute, Washington, D.C.; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, CA; Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, NC, and a solo exhibition of his paintings at Austin Museum of Art, Austin, TX. Huerta's paintings are in the collections of Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA and Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, CA, among others.

March 19 – April 30, 2016

“The word is a fine skin that has lost its contents.” - João Louro  

Christopher Grimes Gallery is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of works by João Louro. A key artist in Portugal, Louro’s work descends from the conceptual framework of post-minimalism. His appropriation of literature, film and popular culture explores and codifies visual language binding artistic reference into a unified meaning. For this exhibition, his third with the gallery, Louro will present works from three of his ongoing series. In his famous Blind Image series, Louro uses a blank plexiglass surface to reflect the viewer’s gaze, accompanied by a line taken from classic books or film as a caption, inviting the viewer to create his or her own images to go along with the textual narrative.

Louro will also exhibit new works from his Clockwise from Above and Left to Right series where he composes an arrangement of monochromatic painted plexiglass panels provoking a dialog between the image devoid of content and the viewer’s engagement in completing his or her own version of events suggested by the accompanying didactics. In the South Gallery, Louro will present 5 Minutes after Violent Death, where he has taken images from iconic films such as The Misfits and North by Northwest and stamped the title line on top of each image to evoke a shared memory by use of well known cultural points of reference.

João Louro (b. 1963) lives and works in Lisbon, Portugal.  Upcoming exhibitions include a solo exhibition at the Museu de Arte de Rio (MAR), Rip de Janiero, Brazil and a group show at the Cité de la Musique – Philharmonie de Paris, curated by Christian Fevret and Carole Mirabello in 2016. Louro represented Portugal at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015 and other recent solo exhibitions include Smuggling, Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Elvas, Elvas, Portugal (2015); My Dark Places, Museo d’Art Contemporanea, Rome, Italy (2010); and The Great Houdini, Centro de Arte Contemporânea Graça Morais, Bragança, Portugal (2010).

His work is included in the collections of Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon, Portugal; Coleção BES, Lisbon, Portugal; Coleção António Cachola, Elvas, Portugal; Fundación ARCO, Madrid, Spain; Coleccion Helga de Alvear, Cáceres, Spain; Coleccion Purificacion Garcia, Madrid, Spain; Margulies Collection at the Warehouse, Miami, FL; Jumex Foundation, México City, México; Fundação de Serralves, Porto, Portugal; Museu do Caramulo, Caramulo, Portugal; and Coleção EDP, Lisbon, Portugal.

January 9 – March 12, 2016

Christopher Grimes Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by Kota Ezawa, featuring an animated film and light boxes of the thirteen stolen works of art from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Ezawa’s six-minute animation recreates the March 1990 surveillance videotape recorded at the museum the night before the thieves, dressed as Boston Police, stole $500 million worth of art. In August 2015 the FBI released the video recording in hopes that the public would help identify an unknown man. Apart from the potential crime evidence captured on tape, the hand-drawn animation looks at the material nature of the video, which, over the course of 25 years, has naturally degraded and accumulated a host of video artifacts that attest to the age of the recording. 

The light boxes are reconstructed in the original size of the thirteen stolen works, and include paintings and sketches by Rembrandt, Vermeer, Manet and Degas. In addition, a light box depicting the now empty museum wall represents the quiet absence of these works. While Ezawa’s prior drawings relied exclusively on photographs as source material, this series draws upon painting, with the understanding that painters like Vermeer and Rembrandt were essentially the photographers of their time. Ezawa continues to distill these iconic images to their most essential form, and by doing so his work communicates the symbolic power these images have on the collective psyche and underscores a keen understanding of how images shape our experience and memory of events.

Kota Ezawa (b. Cologne, Germany, 1969) lives and works in Oakland, CA. Ezawa has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA (2015); Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY (2013); Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA (2013); Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH (2009); Hayward Gallery Project Space, London, England (2007); and Artpace, San Antonio, TX (2006). He has participated in group exhibitions such as Screen Play: Life in an Animated World, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY (2015); Out of the Ordinary, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC (2013); After Photoshop, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY (2013); and HERE., Pilara Foundation, Pier 24 Photography, San Francisco, CA (2011). Ezawa’s work is in the collections of such institutions as Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Art Institute of Chicago, IL; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, CA; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Pier 24 Photography, San Francisco, CA; and Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA, among others.

October 31, 2015 – January 2, 2016

Christopher Grimes Gallery is pleased announce an exhibition of new work by Gianfranco Foschino. This will be his first solo exhibition in the United States and his first with the gallery. Foschino’s videos confront our perceived distinctions between multiple genres including photography, painting and video. For this exhibition he will present a series of landscapes captured from Easter Island and locations in Southern Chile. The South Gallery will feature surveillance footage recorded in São Paulo. While the content and implications of these two bodies of works is widely different, the technique is the same: in all cases, Foschino sets up a fixed camera and captures the subtle movement that occurs in front of the lens. There is no editing, no interference on his part. Filmed from a distance, the scene increases in intensity as the minutes pass by with no sign of the narrative, which has become increasingly prevalent in video. Referring to historical precedents of early video art where the emphasis was on documentary and time, Foschino’s works engender us to pause and be present, to unplug and reconnect with our senses.

Gianfranco Foschino (b. 1983 in Santiago, Chile) lives and works in Santiago.He has recently held institutional solo exhibitions at the Stadtgalerie in Saarbrücken, Germany (2015) and MAVI: Museo de Artes Visuales in Santiago, Chile (2016). Foschino will be included in the forthcoming Cuenca Biennial XIII in Cuenca, Ecuador and has participated in a number of group exhibitions, including: We Were Here: Absence of the Figure, Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA (2016); Unsettled Landscapes, SITE Santa Fe, New Mexico (2014); Monolith Controversies,14th International Architecture Exhibition, Venice Biennale (2014); Videosphere: A New Generation at Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY (2011); 54th Venice Biennale (2011); Antologia Visual de Jovenes Fotografos Chile 2010-2011, Contemporary Art Museum, Santiago, Chile (2011); and Less Time Than Space, Museo de Arte Raúl Anguiano, Guadalajara, Mexico (2011), among others. His work is in the collections of the Albright Knox Art Gallery, New York; Borusan Contemporary, Istanbul, Turkey; Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach; and National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.

September 12 - October 24, 2015

Christopher Grimes Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new works by Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle. As part of the Site Santa Fe’s 2014 Biennial, Manglano-Ovalle installed a permanent work of land art in the community of the Santa Clara Pueblo, New Mexico. This vertical sculpture penetrated the ground to reach the aquifer below on top of which was installed a hand pump to manually extract water for public consumption. For this forthcoming exhibition, 500 gallons of water from this well will be transported to Santa Monica where visitors can access this resource and gift of P’oe courtesy of Santa Clara Pueblo. Of this project, Manglano-Ovalle states:

“Well is on the one hand a simple and reductive gesture of drilling down to tap what’s beneath us, on the other hand it’s simply a utilitarian means of accessing a basic necessity. As an artwork it reconsiders Robert Barry’s Inert Gas Series and Walter de Maria’s Vertical Kilometer, and it could remain as such contentedly. Except that once the aquifer is tapped the work is no longer inert, and its verticality is contested by demands for horizontal distribution. Landscape turns into land, and water into commodity, calling into question De Maria’s metrics of vastness and Barry’s indefinite expansion of elements, as well as the colonial underpinnings of this earlier work. Put to use Well politicizes concepts of site and landscape and problematizes the very substance of the work – water."

Throughout his career, Manglano-Ovalle has addressed urgent issues relevant to our time. Couched in a formal language of art historical references, topics such as migration and climate change have been explored through metaphors of clouds and icebergs, and water itself. Well in particular calls into question the environmental impact of resource extraction, the carbon footprint of the artists and the political, legal and cultural complexities of water rights and shared consumption.

Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle (b. 1961 in Madrid, Spain) lives and works in Chicago, IL. He was the 2012 winner of a USA Fellow Award and winner of the 2001 MacArthur Fellowship. Manglano-Ovalle has been honored with numerous solo exhibitions including The Black Forest, the inaugural exhibition at Museo Universidad de Navarra, Pamplona, Spain (2015); Always After (The Glass House), The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL (2011); and Gravity is a force to be reckoned with, Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams, MA (2009). He has presented major projects at Documenta XII, Kassel, Germany (2007) and the Barcelona Pavilion, Mies van der Rohe Foundation, Barcelona, Spain (2002). Manglano-Ovalle’s work is in the collections of such institutions as Broad Art Museum, East Lansing, MI; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, CA; Museo de Arte Contemporaneo, Bilbao, Spain; and Museo Nacional Centro de arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain, among others.

July 10 - September 4, 2015

Christopher Grimes Gallery is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of new works by Lucia Koch. Throughout her career Lucia Koch has become known for her interventions within existing architecture, either through her use of sculpture, photography, video or colored filters. In this, her second exhibition with the gallery, she will intersect the entire space with a gradient printed on fabric — something that moves in space but is constant, subtle, transformative and never repeating. In addition, ordinary windows will be replaced with colored panels disrupting one’s expectation, and images of small, empty containers enlarged to architectural scale disassociate the photographs from their references and challenge how we relate to space. Through all of these strategies, Koch elevates basic elements of architecture to effect change in one’s immediate atmosphere and physical surroundings.

Lucia Koch (b. 1966, Porto Alegre, Brazil) lives and works in São Paulo, Brazil. She has recently participated in Prospect 3, New Orleans, LA (2015), curated by Franklin Sirmans; Cruzamentos: Contemporary Art in Brazil, Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH (2014); A Sense of Place, Pier 24 Photography, San Francisco, CA (2014); and Re-emerge: Towards a New Cultural Cartography, 11th Sharjah Biennial, United Arab Emirates (2013). She has been included in the 11th Biennale de Lyon, France (2011); 27th Bienal de São Paulo, Brazil (2006); 2nd, 5th and 8th editions of the Mercosul Biennial in Porto Alegre, Brazil (1999, 2005 and 2011); and the 8th Istanbul Biennial, Istanbul, Turkey (2003). Her work has been included in such exhibitions as, Another Place, Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo, Brazil (2011); and When Lives Become Form, Yerba Buena Center for Arts, San Francisco, CA (2009) and Contemporary Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan (2008). Koch’s work is in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, Brazil and Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, Brazil, among others. In 2016 she will be the subject of a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

May 23 - July 3, 2015

Christopher Grimes Gallery is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of new works by Julião Sarmento. Throughout his career Julião Sarmento has developed a multi-media visual language incorporating cultural narratives from literature, philosophy, architecture, music and cinema. For this, his third exhibition with the gallery, Sarmento first pays tribute to the city of Los Angeles by titling the exhibition after the inaugural show at Ferus Gallery. His long-standing engagement with LA, and by extension the city’s own stars – be they artists, actors, architects or luminous points in the night sky - is represented in a series of new paintings consisting of elegant lines based on fractal geometry and colors that reference the constellations. The sparseness of the work echoes a recurring formal quality found in his paintings, and the fragmentation of the images and their subsequent combinations formed on the canvases – one of which includes a rendering, in the nude, of Degas’ Little Dancer – disarms the viewer’s expectations.

Julião Sarmento (b. 1948 Lisbon, Portugal) lives and works in Estoril, Portugal. He has exhibited extensively since his first show in 1969. In 2012 he was the subject of a major retrospective, Julião Sarmento: White Nights, at Museu Serralves, Porto, Portugal. He has been included in numerous group shows around the world including Documenta VII (1982) and VIII (1987); he represented Portugal at the Venice Biennale in 1997 and was also included in the Venice Biennales of 1980 and 2001. His work is included in public collections worldwide, including Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Musée National d’Art Moderne Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France; Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, Netherlands; and the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, Japan.

Christopher Grimes Gallery is pleased announce its forthcoming exhibition Kaleidoscope: abstraction in architecture. This exhibition brings together artists from different backgrounds that engage with the languages of abstraction and architecture through multiple media to achieve distinctly varied results. Included in the exhibition are works by Kevin Appel, Carlos Bunga, Gianfranco Foschino, Veronika Kellndorfer and Lucia Koch.

From its beginnings in the early 20th century the legacy of abstraction is rooted in social and political utopias. Today, abstraction as an artistic strategy has reinvented itself for the 21st century, and the fragmentation of form is a common denominator within the majority of the works featured in this exhibition. Kevin Appel’s (United States) paintings explore the relationship between physical space, architecture and the painted image. Using photographs as a ground on which to build his painting, he applies layers of paint that act as screens, compressing the perceived space between the built environment and nature. The act of looking through one element to another, or the blocking of one impenetrable layer by another and mediating our perception of nature and our encounter with the exterior world has become a signature of his painting. Appel’s work is in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, among others.

While Appel’s approach to abstraction is to collide several planes of visual information, Veronika Kellndorfer (Germany) reveals the subjectivity of space and the ephemeral nature of seeing. Her photographs of the glass facades of modernist architectural landmarks are silkscreened onto large glass panels. The works conflate internal and external environments and invite the viewer to uniquely experience their own surroundings. Kellndorfer has recently completed a site-specific commission for the Architekturmuseum, Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich, where she is presenting large-scale works for the Lina Bo Bardi 100 survey show open through February 22nd. Her work is included in the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, CA, Hammer Museum Los Angeles, CA, and Pier 24 in San Francisco, CA, in addition to several European institutions.

Lucia Koch (Brazil) challenges the viewer's perception and experience of space using diverse tactics within architectural settings. In addition to a video and one of her large-scale photographs of the interior of a small coffee bag, Koch will present a wall structure made of aluminum and colored acrylic panels that filter natural light. Through planar interventions, the wall connects different spaces and environments. In 2016 Koch will be the subject of a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Carlos Bunga (Portugal) creates process-oriented works that refer to and intervene in their architectural surroundings. While using ordinary, unassuming materials such as cardboard and tape, the resulting finished works involve an extreme degree of aesthetic care and delicacy. For this exhibition he will preset a singular object that functions at the intersection of painting and architecture. Bunga was shortlisted for the Artes Mundi 6 Prize (January), where he produced a major work for the exhibition of the participants at the Wales's National Museum of Art in Cardiff and in November he will be the subject of a solo exhibition at MACBA, Barcelona. 

Gianfranco Foschino’s (Chile) videos confront one's perceived distinctions between multiple genres including photography, painting and video. He sets up a fixed camera and captures the subtle movement that occurs in front of the lens. Filmed from a distance, the scene increases in intensity as the minutes pass by with no sign of the narrative one has come to expect from video. Foschino’s work was included in SITE Santa Fe's Biennial, Unsettled Landscapes, and he was commissioned to create a new work for the Chilean Pavilion in the 14th International Architecture Exhibition at the Venice Biennale.

January 17 – March 14, 2015

Christopher Grimes Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition with new works by Carlos Bunga and Olivier Mosset. This exhibition highlights the juxtaposition of two divergent artistic approaches to painting and challenges the viewer to examine their understanding of the medium: from Mosset’s two-dimensional wall murals to Bunga’s three-dimensional cardboard constructions; from Mosset’s seeming self-sufficiency and “authorlessness” to Bunga’s tactile originality and authenticity; to the monumentality of Mosset’s installation and the intimacy of Bunga’s paintings.
 
Olivier Mosset emerged in the 1960s and has since been associated with a multitude of art historical movements, involving himself in both the European and American artistic and critical contexts. In anticipation of many artists, who in the 1980s would use appropriation to critique Modernist authority, Mosset called into question the painter’s gesture and signature by sharing styles and dissolving authorship to reach a “degree zero” of painting. This line of questioning continues in this exhibition where he will present a wall painting composed of four yellow and blue triangles in the form of a motif found from a mural discovered in Cuernavaca in Mexico. In addition, a horizontal grey and white wall painting will extend the length of the nearly 45-foot wall spanning the Main and South galleries. Mosset’s paintings possess a strong materialist sense that recalls Malevich, Reinhardt or Stella while simultaneously maintaining a subtle relationship to the readymade and appropriation.
 
Carlos Bunga’s work can be described as painting that exists at the intersection of architecture and sculpture. Bunga is well known for his large-scale installations made of common, unassuming materials. These installations call to mind Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau project for their built quality and the creation of architecture in already existing spaces. Like Schwitters, Bugna’s installations respond to existing architecture, yet Bunga’s installations are painted in monochromatic planes of color and are built with the intention of ultimately being destroyed. In the South gallery, Bunga will present one such intervention in cardboard, tape, and paint in response to the architecture of the space. In the main gallery, he will show a series of new “construction” paintings that are much more intimate in nature, made from the same materials used for his installations. Although smaller in scale, they nonetheless stem from his interest in the process of painting and spatial issues as well as the presence of the body.
 
Carlos Bunga (b. 1976 in Porto, Portugal) lives and works in Barcelona. Bunga first attracted international attention with his work at Manifesta 5 in San Sebastian, Spain (2004). Since then, he has been shortlisted for the Artes Mundi 6 prize (2014), and he was awarded both the ArtPrize 2013 Grand Rapids, MI and a visual arts grant by the Fundación Marcelino Botín, Spain (2006). He has had solo exhibitions at Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC), Mexico City, Mexico (2013); Museu Serralves, Porto, Portugal (2012); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA (2011); Miami Art Museum, Miami, FL (2009); and Museo de Arte Contemporanéa de Vigo, Spain (2009). Group exhibitions include Artes Mundi 6, Cardiff, UK (2014); Ruins in Contemporary Art, University Art Museum, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA (2012); Museu d’Arte Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA), Barcelona, Spain (2009); Unmonumental, New Museum, New York, NY (2007); and inSite_05, San Diego Museum of Art, San Diego, CA (2005). His work is in the collections of such institutions as Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Serralves Foundation, Porto, Portugal; and Museo d'art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA), Barcelona, Spain.
 
Olivier Mosset (b. 1944 in Bern, Switzerland) lives and works in Tucson, AZ. Mosset first became known in France for having been part of the famous BMPT group alongside Daniel Buren, Niele Toroni and Michel Parmentier. Since then he has exhibited extensively in galleries and museums worldwide. In 2012 he was the subject of a solo exhibition at Kunsthalle Zurich, and a retrospective of his work, Olivier Mosset: Travaux/Works 1966-2003, was presented at Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne, Switzerland and Kunstverein St. Gallen Kunstmuseum, Switzerland (2003). His work has been included in several group exhibitions including Manifesta 10, Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia (2014); Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, NY (2008); and he represented Switzerland in the 44th Venice Biennale (1990). His work is in the collections of such institutions as Museum of Modern Art, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; National Gallery of Canada, Ontario; and Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne, Switzerland among others. 

November 11, 2014 - January 10, 2015

“Even when you are merely copying, something new is added, whether you like it or not.” — Gerhard Richter

Christopher Grimes Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new paintings by Scott Short. There is an elegance to Short’s unorthodox approach to abstraction, and in this exhibition, viewers will see an evolution in his imagery. Works such as Untitled (red) underscore his process of meticulously painting by hand the abstracted markings made by machine and further his examination of the relationship between the original and the copy, the mechanical and hand-made, abstraction and representation.

The South Gallery will spotlight a series of 48 portraits, Thank you, Adam West, For Helping Make Me The Man I Am Today. In the early 1990s, Short experimented with the persistent copying and reworking of works by Gerhard Richter, including his 48 Portraits. Returning to this as a point of departure, Short’s use of Richter’s standardized format, the seeming uniformity of the portraits, and his choice of cultural icons rendered as Batman belies the underlying absurdism of his own crisis of faith in painting and the heroic and functions as a reminder of its manifestation as banal.

Scott Short (b. 1964 Marion, OH) lives and works in Vallauris, France. In 2007, a solo exhibition entitled Scott Short was held at The Renaissance Society, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL (catalog). Additional exhibitions include A Study in Midwestern Appropriation, The Hyde Park Center, Chicago, IL, curated by Michelle Grabner; Decade: Contemporary Collection 2002-2012, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; 2010, Whitney Biennial, curated by Francesco Bonami and Gary Carrion-Murayari, Whitney Museum of American Art, NY (2010); Gerhard Richter and the Disappearance of the Image in Contemporary Art, Centro di Cultura Contemporanea Strozzina, Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, Italy (2010); and No Information Available, curated by Francesco Bonami, (inaugural exhibition), Gladstone Gallery, Brussels (2008), among others.Permanent collections include the Leal Rios Foundation, Lisbon; Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; and the Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH. 

September 13 - November 1, 2014

Christopher Grimes Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new paintings by Pia Fries. In this new body of work Fries incorporates isolated fragments of historical etchings by Stefano della Bella (1610-1664), renowned Italian engraver of the Baroque period. Concentrated fragments of della Bella’s stirring etchings of tumultuous seas and skies and capsizing ships serve as the ground upon which Fries applies paint as a viscous mass: firm and fluid, heavy and light. Fries works within the tension of optical vs. physical weight through the interplay of texture, her energetic application of paint and expressive use of color. She integrates the printed and painted parts of the surface while continuing her interest in movement, transitory states and metamorphosis through traces of the hand, the action, and the tools used to facilitate mark making.

Pia Fries lives and works in Dusseldorf and Berlin, Germany. She is an MA student of Gerhard Richter, having attended his painting classes at the Kunstakademie Dusserldorf from 1980 to 1986. Fries has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Kunstplattform AKKU, Emmenbrücke, Lucerne, Switzerland (2015), Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe, Germany (2011); and Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Winterthur, Switzerland (2007), among others. Her work has been included in the group exhibitions, Ortswechsel: Works from the Kunstmuseum Bonn, Schauwerk Sindelfingen, Sindelfingen, Germany (2016); Drama Queens Die inszenierte Sammlung, Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen, Germany (2016); freshly painted, Brother Klaus Museum, Sachseln (2014); Yes, No, Maybe, Artists Working at Crown Point Press, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (2013); The Doubled Image, Kunstmuseum Solothurn, Switzerland (2013); Landscape Confection, Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH (2005); Beau Monde, SITE Santa Fe Biennial curated by Dave Hickey (2001); and Venice Biennale (1999). Fries’ work is in the collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, CA; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, NY; Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany; and Kunsthaus Zurich, Switzerland, among others.

July 3 – September 6, 2014

Christopher Grimes Gallery is pleased to present the late Allan Sekula’s, Ship of Fools. This series was first shown at the São Paulo Biennial and represents Sekula’s last major body of work. Throughout his career, he repeatedly returned to the theme of maritime space through a number of interrelated books, films, and exhibitions including Fish Story, TITANIC’s wake and Lottery of the Sea. Ship of Fools examines the adaptation of a cargo vessel in 1998 to host a mobile multi-media exhibition in its hold. The exhibition, sponsored by the International Transport Workers Federation, formed part of an 18-month campaign around the world against a system of shipping under flags of convenience that shield substandard vessels and exploitative labor conditions. Sekula’s participation in various stages of the journey on the Global Mariner resulted in this series of photographs on display.

Allan Sekula (1951-2013), photographer, theorist, historian and writer lived and worked in Los Angeles. Sekula’s work was recently included in the Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, NY (2014), and will appear this summer in SITElines, Santa Fe, NM (2014). Recent exhibitions include Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY (2013); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2013); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2011); and Ludwig Museum of Contemporary Art, Budapest, Hungary (2011). Sekula has participated in the 29th Biennial de São Paulo (2010), documenta 11 and 12 (2002, 2007), and he was the subject of a major retrospective, Performance Under Working Conditions, for the Generali Foundation in Vienna, Austria (2003). Recent museum acquisitions of his work include J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Ludwig Museum, Cologne, Germany; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, CA; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Stedlijk Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands; Tate, London, UK; and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN, among others.

May 10 - June 28, 2014

Christopher Grimes Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new paintings by Los Angeles-based artist Salomón Huerta. Perhaps best known for his series of paintings depicting anonymous subjects who sit or stand with their backs to the viewers, this body of work signals a new direction for the painter. Rather than working serially on a single subject, Huerta takes cues from his environment and relationships as points of departure. He continues to work in representational painting – primarily portraiture – distilling elements of classicism with a modern social and cultural scrutiny. While his distinct bodies of work can be linked through their shared investigations and considerations of identity, his work remains engaged in a delicate balance between rich color and strong brushwork and an unassuming intimacy that provokes self-reflexivity in its viewers.

Salomón Huerta (Tijuana, Mexico, 1965) lives and works in Los Angeles. His work has been included in the Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, NY, and exhibitions at Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; National Portrait Gallery at the Smithsonian Institute, Washington, D.C.; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, CA; Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, NC, and a solo exhibition of his paintings at Austin Museum of Art, Austin, TX. Huerta's paintings are in the collections of Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA and Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, CA, among others. 

March 15 - May 3, 2014

Christopher Grimes Gallery is pleased announce an exhibition of paintings by Sharon Ellis. Eight years have passed since Ellis’ last exhibition in Los Angeles. In this long-anticipated show, Ellis applies her singular vision to the representation of timeless landscapes. Working within the tradition of Romanticism and with a tangential relationship to such early modernists as Agnes Pelton and Charles Burchfield, Ellis’ paintings highlight the interplay between a visible world and an equally present, invisible one.

Ellis lives and works in Yucca Valley, CA. She was recently included in the group exhibitions Explode Every Day: An Inquiry into the Phenomena of Wonder, MASS MoCA, North Adams (2016), Experience 19: Touch, El Segundo Museum of Art, El Segundo (2015), Eden’s Edge: Art in L.A., Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2007); and POPulence (2005), curated by David Pagel, which traveled throughout the United States. The Long Beach Museum of Art organized a ten-year survey of Ellis’ work in 2002 entitled Evocations, which traveled to the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati and San Jose Museum of Art. Ellis was also included in Flower Power at Palais des Beaux-Arts in Lille, France (2004).

March 15 - May 3, 2014

Christopher Grimes Gallery is pleased to announce an installation of sculpture and photographs by Dane Mitchell. Mitchell’s practice is concerned with manifesting the physical properties of the incorporeal. Through the use of scent, spells and shamans, his work channels invisible forces into concrete forms, coupling spiritual tendencies with minimalism and conceptualism. In this exhibition Mitchell presents a highly-polished three-dimensional Venn diagram: one ring is engraved “dusk,” the other “dawn.” The intersection represents an unknowable space between these two states. On the floor, four polished brass corners demarcate the space of a trapezoid. This “empty” space, intimated by the corners, becomes activated by “Sleep Architecture Scatter Piece” – the scattering of a sleeping aid within the interior space of the floor sculpture. On the walls Mitchell presents a series of six photographic prints. Taken on a microscopic camera, each contains a single piece of rheum or “sleep,” the unconscious material produced by the body that gathers in the corner of the eye during sleep.
 
Mitchell (Auckland, New Zealand, 1976) lives and works in Auckland. He has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Auckland Art Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand (2012) and Govett Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, New Zealand (2011). His work has been included in exhibitions worldwide such as the Liverpool Biennial, Liverpool, UK (2012); Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju, South Korea (2012); and Busan Biennale, Busan, South Korea (2010).  

Christopher Grimes Gallery is pleased announce an exhibition of new work by Kota Ezawa. This will be Ezawa’s first exhibition with the gallery and his first gallery solo show in Los Angeles. Ezawa’s work references images in popular culture, cinema, television and art history. Through such media as digital animation, slide projections, paper cut-outs, watercolor, light boxes, and collage, he recontextualizes and distills these iconic images to their most essential forms, communicating the symbolic power they have on the collective psyche. For this exhibition Ezawa will present a series of paintings and silver gelatin prints derived from historical photographs and paintings that underscores a keen understanding of how images shape our experience and memory of events.
 
Ezawa (Cologne, Germany, 1969) lives and works in San Francisco. He received his BFA from San Francisco Art Institute and his MFA from Stanford University. Ezawa’s work has been shown in solo projects and exhibitions at Vancouver Art Gallery Offsite, Vancouver, Canada (2012); The Box, Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH (2009); Hayward Gallery Project Space, London, England (2007); Artpace, San Antonio, TX (2006); and Matrix 154, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT (2005). He has participated in group exhibitions such as After Photoshop, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY (2013); HERE., Pilara Foundation, Pier 24 Photography, San Francisco, CA (2011); The More Things Change, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA (2011); and The Moving Image: Scan to Screen, Pixel to Projection, Orange County Museum of Art (2009). Ezawa’s work is in the collections of such institutions as Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, CA; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA; and Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA, among others.

November 9, 2013 - January 4, 2014

Christopher Grimes Gallery is pleased present an exhibition of new sculpture and drawings by Waltercio Caldas. Widely considered by critics, curators and writers to be one of the most important artists emerging from Brazil in the years following the Neo-Concrete movement of the early 1960s, Caldas is known for his rigorous formal concerns which arrive from investigations into human perception. 

For this exhibition, Caldas will present a series of new sculptures that address space in it self. Frequently using forms that defy one’s sense of volume and depth perception, viewers are often surprised by his objects which reference architectural and perspectival space that is not wholly present. His materials – often stainless steel, thread, granite, ice or cloth – become part of the experience created or intimated. These materials suggest an ephemerality, further confirming Caldas’ desire to let the viewer’s experience cultivate meaning in the work.

This exhibition is concurrent with the first comprehensive career survey of Caldas’ work from the1960s through the present, The Nearest Air: A Survey of Works by Waltercio Caldas, at the Blanton Museum in Austin, TX.

Caldas (Rio de Janeiro, 1946) lives and works in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Most recently Caldas has been the subject of a touring retrospective that opened at Fundação Ibere Camargo, Brazil (2012) then traveled to Pinacoteca São Paulo, Brazil (2013), and will make its final stop at Blanton Museum in Austin, TX (October 2013). He has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Casa França-Brasil, Rio de Janeiro (2012); Daros Latinamerica, Zurich, Switzerland (2010) and Museu de Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (2010). Caldas’ work is in the collections of such institutions as Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Museu de Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; and Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, Brazil, among others.

September 13 – November 2, 2013

Christopher Grimes Gallery is pleased announce an exhibition of new work by Kevin Appel. This will be Appel’s first exhibition with the gallery. Kevin Appel’s paintings explore the relationship between architecture and the painted image. Using photographs as a ground on which to build his painting, he applies layers of paint that act as screens, compressing the perceived space. The act of looking through one element to another, or the blocking of one impenetrable layer by another has become a hallmark of his paintings. 
 
In this new body of work Appel furthers his consideration of the compromised landscape through photographs he captured in the California desert. In the new paintings, several planes of visual information collide: the abstract application of paint on the surface and a photographic representation of another place and time masked in the background, each layer obliterating the last. 
 
Appel (Los Angeles, CA, 1967) lives and works in Los Angeles. He received his BFA from Parsons School of Design in New York and his MFA from University of California, Los Angeles. He is a professor of studio art at the Claire Trevor School of the Arts at University of California, Irvine. Appel’s work has been included in solo exhibitions at Museo Rufino Tamayo, Mexico City, Mexico (2003) and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1999). He has participated in group shows such as California Modern, Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA (2005); Tresspassing: Houses x Artists, MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles, CA (2003); Drawing Now, Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY (2002); and Painting at the Edge of the World, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN (2001). Appel’s work is in the collections of such institutions as Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN, among others.

July 5 - September 7, 2013

Christopher Grimes Gallery is very pleased to present an exhibition of new abstract paintings by Joshua Podoll. In his previous body of work Podoll introduced gestural brushstrokes that expressed honesty through imperfection. With these new paintings Podoll places greater emphasis on drawing - marks are built up layer upon layer form a white ground: blurry airbrush lines, transparent washy brushstrokes and heavy impasto piles all interweave to create a tapestry of mark-making. Within this densely layers space Podoll paints austere floating objects that act as portals and serve to create tension between themselves and the layers of market. The paintings become energized through the bravado and angularity of brushwork and intensity of color and contrast.

Podoll (Seattle, WA, 1972) lives and works in San Francisco. His work has been included in exhibitions at Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, CA (2010); You Can Heal Your Life!, curated by Emma Gray at Circus Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2010), Without Sun, curated by Carole Ann Klonarides at Christopher Grimes Gallery (2007); Headlands Center for the Arts, Fort Barry, CA (2003) and University of Iowa Museum of Art, Iowa City, IA (2002).

The  South  Gallery  will  feature  new  paintings  by Carlos  Bunga,  made  as  a  part  of  a  dialogue  with  his recent site-specific installation at the gallery. Photographs of this work, Future Anterior, were printed and used as a foundation on which to make the paintings. The paintings act as a more permanent reference to the  structure  which  was  by  nature  ephemeral.  The  manner  in  which  paint  was  applied  to  the  exterior  of the original installation is maintained in these works, providing continuity and shared formal sensibility.

Bunga  (Porto,  Portugal,  1976)  lives  and  works  in  Barcelona.  After  studying  Fine  Arts  at  the  Escola Superior  de  Arte  e  Design  in  Caldas  da  Rainha  in  Portugal, Bunga  first  attracted  international  attention with  his  work  at  the  contemporary  art  biennial  Manifesta  5  in  San  Sebastian,  Spain  (2004).  Since  then, he has  had  solo  shows  of  his  work  at  Museu  Serralves,  Porto,  Portugal  (2012);  Hammer  Museum,  Los Angeles, CA (2011); Miami Art Museum, Miami, FL (2009); and Museo de Arte Contemporanéa de Vigo, Spain  (2009).  His  work  is  in  the  collections  of  such  institutions  as  Museum  of  Modern  Art,  New  York, NY;  Hammer  Museum,  Los  Angeles,  CA;  Serralves  Foundation,  Porto,  Portugal;  and  Museo  d'art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA), Barcelona, Spain

May 11 - June 29, 2013

Christopher Grimes Gallery is very pleased announce an exhibition of new work by Lucia Koch. This will be Koch’s first solo exhibition in the United States and her first with the gallery. Koch uses interventions, installations, videos and photographs to explore the means for effecting change in one’s experience of the environment. She often covers the façades, skylights and windows with translucent materials, filters, or laser-cut panels of patterned wood or metal, creating new layers between inside and outside. Her interest lies in generating altered states of place, where invisibility and interruption short circuit perception.

In imagining the opportunities architecture presents for art, Koch will build a site-specific installation, transforming the anatomy of the main gallery. Here, “architecture” is less the construction of an object than a strategy for occupying space. Also on view will be large-scale photographs of the interior of cardboard boxes, installed as virtual extensions of the environment. This series represents Koch’s ongoing engagement with understanding how a space is converted into place.

Koch (Porto Alegre, Brazil, 1966) lives and works in São Paulo. She has participated in the 11th Biennale de Lyon, France (2011), the 27th Bienal de São Paulo, Brazil (2006), the 2nd, 5th and 8th editions of the Mercosul Biennial in Porto Alegre, Brazil (1999, 2005 and 2011), and the 8th Istanbul Biennial, Istanbul, Turkey (2003). Her work has been included in such exhibitions as, Another Place, Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo, Brazil (2011), and When Lives Become Form, Yerba Buena Center for Arts, San Francisco, CA (2009) which was also on view at Contemporary Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan (2008). Her work is in the collections of such institutions as Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, Brazil and Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, Brazil, among others.

March 16 - May 4, 2013

Christopher Grimes Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of work by Reynold Reynolds. Working primarily with 16mm film and often employing stop motion or time-lapse photography, Reynolds has developed a distinct filmic language, creating contrived worlds full of powerful pictorial symbols. 

In the south gallery Reynolds will present a series of recent video works, where impossibilities are made possible through his signature aesthetic - a lens that can fill one with reverence for the mundane. In order to better understand the nature of time and one's relationship to it, Reynolds subtly alters the regular conditions of life and watches their effect. His depiction of people often makes us aware of the small frames we use to understand reality.

In the main gallery Reynolds will move components of his studio into the space where he will film parts of his current enterprise, The Lost, in front of a live audience.

Reynolds (Fairbanks, Alaska, 1966) lives and works in Los Angeles and Berlin. He received a BA in Physics from the University of Colorado at Boulder (1991), and remained in Boulder, studying under experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage. He completed his MFA at the School of Visual Arts in New York (1995). In 2003 Reynolds was awarded the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, and in 2004 was invited to The American Academy in Berlin with a studio at Kunstlerhaus Bethanien. Reynolds has received numerous awards for his films and his work has been included in solo and group exhibitions at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, Germany; Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany; and Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY. His work is in the collections of such institutions as Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Lyon Museum of Contemporary Art, Lyon, France; and Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin, Germany.

January 19 - March 9, 2013

Christopher Grimes Gallery is very pleased announce Future Anterior, an exhibition of new work by Carlos Bunga. This will be Bunga’s first exhibition with the gallery. Future Anterior will feature two distinct works. In the main gallery, Bunga will create a site-specific installation based on the idea of memory, the present and the future using the ordinary, unassuming materials he has become known for: cardboard and adhesive tape. The process-oriented nature inherent in this work forms a fusion between the gallery’s existing space and the abstract space that he creates, resulting in a finished installation involving an extreme degree of precision coupled with aesthetic care and delicacy.

In addition to his architectural structures, Bunga also works in drawing, photography, painting and sculpture. In the south gallery, he will debut a slide projection piece titled Skin. In this work, the projected images of the surfaces of his paintings touch upon both the plastic and organic components of his practice.

Bunga lives and works in Barcelona. After studying Fine Arts at the Escola Superior de Arte e Design in Caldas da Rainha in Portugal, Bunga first attracted international attention with his work at the contemporary art biennial Manifesta 5 in San Sebastian, Spain (2004). Since then, he has been awarded a visual arts grant by the Fundación Marcelino Botín, Spain (2006) and has had solo shows of his work at Museu Serralves, Porto, Portugal (2012); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA (2011); Miami Art Museum, Miami, FL (2009); and Museo de Arte Contemporanéa de Vigo, Spain (2009). Group exhibitions include University Art Museum, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA (2012); Warsaw Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw, Poland (2009); Museu d’Arte Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA), Barcelona, Spain (2009); Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno (IVAM), Valencia, Spain (2008); New Museum, New York, NY (2007); Justus Lipsius Building, Brussels, Belgium (2007); Artists Space, New York, NY (2005); and as part of inSite_05 at San Diego Museum of Art, San Diego, CA (2005). His work is in the collections of such institutions as Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Serralves Foundation, Porto, Portugal; and Museo d'art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA), Barcelona, Spain.

November 3 - December 22, 2012

Christopher Grimes Gallery is pleased to present the world premiere of Creation (Megaplex) by Marco Brambilla, the completion of a trilogy of 3D video collages that began with Civilization (Megaplex) (2008) and Evolution (Megaplex) (2010). Creation (Megaplex) presents a spectacle of hundreds of clips from a vast archive of iconic Hollywood and international films. Set within the form of a giant DNA double-helix, Brambilla takes the viewer on a spiraling trajectory that begins with a big bang and continues through embryonic inception, idyllic Eden-like bliss and decadence, and culminates in annihilation—only to then interminably re-invent itself. Brambilla creates a hyper-realistic landscape of clouds, meadows and burning cityscapes against which this cycle of human endeavor unfolds. 

Using ground-breaking 3D technology, Creation (Megaplex) is the most technologically complex work in the triptych. According to Christopher Eamon, “Brambilla’s working method is unique. Not content to merely montage clips together one after the other as in the now-familiar ‘collage film’ genre where appropriated films are sequenced to create something new, Brambilla’s approach crops and isolates figures and bits of action…collaging them together across space—as in a painting—as well as in time, as the piece unfolds temporally.”

Brambilla lives and works in New York and has received awards from the Tiffany Comfort Foundation and the Colbert Foundation for his work in film and video. Brambilla has been honored with solo exhibitions including a 10-year survey, The Dark Lining, at Santa Monica Museum of Art, Santa Monica, CA (2011); Contemporary Arts Forum, Santa Barbara, CA (2004); and New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (2003). His works have been screened at the Venice Biennale (2011) and the Sundance Film Festival, Park City, UT (2012 and 2006). Brambilla’s work is in the collections of such institutions as Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; and Corcoran Museum, Washington DC, among others.

September 7 - October 27, 2012

Christopher Grimes Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle. Formally seductive, technologically sophisticated and conceptually rigorous, Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle’s works make the intangible tangible and challenge our notions of the political and the cultural. In his forthcoming exhibition at Christopher Grimes Gallery, Manglano-Ovalle will premiere four distinct new bodies of work that explore the permeability and sustainability of the atmosphere from multiple perspectives.

In the main gallery Manglano-Ovalle will present an installation of standardized Langstroth beehives. A simultaneous nod to the principle aesthetics of Minimalism and the Duchampian ready-made, the pristine white serial structures double as fully functional beehives when taken outside the gallery context. Coinciding with the beehives will be a bat house, made in anodized aluminum and hung high on the gallery wall. Manglano-Ovalle will also display a mass of anodized aluminum representing a physical rendering made from scientific data collected on the asteroid Apophis. Originally predicted to collide with Earth in 2029, the flight of the now-listed Near Earth Object, Apophis, reflects a tenuous existence comprised of possibilities and probabilities. 

The 1926-1928 legal contestation over the categorization of Constantin Brancusi’s Bird in Space as a manufactured metal object and not a work of art delayed the object’s entry into the country for exhibition. In the south gallery, Manglano- Ovalle’s own investigation of modernism’s re-entry into modernity manifests itself though his presentation of a full-scale reproduction – in aluminum and steel – of Brancusi’s Bird in Space. Working in collaboration with engineers from the US Air Force Hypervelocity Testing facilities, Manlano-Ovalle subjected his sculpture to a Mach-3 wind tunnel and captured the dynamics of high-speed flight through specialized photographic technique, focused Schlieren. 

Manglano-Ovalle lives and works in Chicago and was the 2012 winner of a USA Fellow Award and winner of the 2001 MacArthur Fellowship. Manglano-Ovalle has been honored with numerous solo exhibitions including Always After (The Glass House), The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL (2011) and Gravity is a force to be reckoned with, Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams, MA (2009). He has presented major projects at Documenta XII, Kassel, Germany (2007) and the Barcelona Pavilion, Mies van der Rohe Foundation, Barcelona, Spain (2002). His work is currently on view in More Real? Art in the Age of Truthiness at SITE, Santa Fe, NM. Manglano-Ovalle’s work is in the collections of such institutions as Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, CA; Museo de Arte Contemporaneo, Bilbao, Spain; and Museo Nacional Centro de arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain, among others.

June 23 - September 1, 2012

Christopher Grimes Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition and a live performance by Takehito Koganezawa. The exhibition will run from June 23 – September 1, 2012. The Performance and Opening Reception will be held Saturday, June 23 from 6:00 – 8:00 p.m.

Berlin-based artist Takehito Koganezawa will present an exhibition of two recent video works and a live performance that coincides with a recent survey of his work “Luftlinien” (Lines in the Air) at the Haus am Waldsee in Berlin.

For the opening reception, Koganezawa will perform a live video projection piece. With a camera positioned directly over his work surface, Koganezawa will “spin” his drawings – much like a disc jockey to vinyl – to project overlaying image streams on the gallery wall.

Koganezawa's ongoing phenomenological approach to video is inherent in the dialog between the two new video works. The main space of the gallery will be devoted to a projected work titled Paint it Black, and Erase, which draws on obvious references to Hans Namuth's well-known film of Jackson Pollock working over a sheet of glass while filmed from the underside. The continuous “action” of the application of paint in Koganezawa’s work is perpetuated by the movement of the pigment over the glass surface simultaneous to the erasure of the preceding gestures with every stroke.

The 10-channel contemplative work CANBEREAD will be installed in the more intimate South Gallery on a series of small monitors surrounding the viewer. A detailed view of a finger constantly circling the rim of a half-filled wine glass sets up a concatenation of harmonics within the room. The suspension and emphasis of time in this work are accentuated by the repetitive movement of the image and the fluctuation of the pitch. As Los Angeles Times art critic Christopher Knight has stated “...absent any linear narratives, time and space collapse.”

Koganezawa was born in Tokyo in 1974 where he graduated from Musahino Art University. He has been living in Berlin since 1999 and has exhibited internationally at various institutions including Langen Foundation, Germany; Museu de Arte Moderna São Paulo, Brazil; Aichi Triennale, Japan; Haunch of Venison, London; Hamburger Kunsthalle, Germany; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; and Institute for Contemporary Art, London. He has held residencies in Villa Aurora in Los Angeles; Kea Island in Greece; India and São Paulo. In 2009 he was given a solo exhibition at MIMOCA in Marugame Japan, that featured all aspects of his practice including drawing, sculpture, video and installation. 

May 5 - June 16, 2012

Christopher Grimes Gallery is pleased to present Abstract Neighbors, an exhibition of new works by Veronika Kellndorfer, whose distinct technique of binding silk-screened photographic images onto large glass panels, bridges the gap between photography, architecture, painting and installation. 

 
Originally through painting and then through photography, Kellndorfer has been concerned with the physical and social construction of space in her body of work. The images in this exhibition represent classic modernist architectural landmarks in Los Angeles, yet rather than capturing the iconic wide-angle views famously photographed by Julius Shulman, Kellndorfer focuses on the intimate details of windows and reflections and how they reveal the ephemeral nature of seeing, as well as the subjectivity of space. 
 
Modernist architects have long been enamored with glass and its ambiguous qualities—solid yet invisible, present yet transparent. Kellndorfer’s interest in the ambiguity of space within homes designed by Oscar Niemeyer and Rudolf Schindler, for example, is evident in her studies of architectural elements such as glass windows, blinds and screens, whether man-made or shelters of bamboo, that provide privacy yet filter natural light to create a kind of enigmatic environment. This ambiguity of space is heightened by Kellndorfer’s use of highly reflective glass panels that are often life-sized, and when displayed in a gallery or museum, invites the viewer to experience his or her own subjective surroundings.
 
“Kellndorfer photographs emphasize the values of the International Style—simplicity, economy, order—but complicate them with layers of local vision, both hers and ours. The results are haunting elegiac images that pay tribute to the ideals of high modernism, yet also cast them adrift in the shifting context of the here and now.” (Sharon Mizota, ArtForum)
 
Kellndorfer has exhibited in museums and institutions in Russia, the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States, including the AedesLand, Berlinische Galerie, Hamburger Bahnhof and Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin; the School of Visual Arts Leipzig, Leipzig; Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh; Contemporary Art Center, Moscow; and the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. Upcoming projects include a major commission for the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich and “polychromie architecturale," a large-scale public installation in Berlin. Her work is included in the permanent collections of the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, and the Hamburger Bahnholf, Berlin, among others. Kellndorfer’s second monogram, titled Veronika Kellndorfer: Case Studies, Layers of Light and Reflection, will be published this year by Hatje Cantz Verlag. 
 
We would like to give special acknowledgment to Johnston Marklee, Los Angeles, and Dörr Ludolf Wimmer, Berlin, for their assistance with the installation design.

March 10 - April 28, 2012

Visionary Landscape II is the second exhibition organized by Christopher Grimes Gallery that explores contemporary interpretations of the traditional motif ot the landscape within art history. Featuring new works by an international group of artists—Marco Brambilla, Sharon Ellis, Takehito Koganezawa, Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, and Richard T. Walker—this exhibition is not so much about the visual representation of the landscape as subject matter, as it is about investigating the concept of landscape environments through individual perceptions.

From the early Renaissance, when the landscape was utilized as a backdrop for religious scenes and portraits, to its exalted place in prose and paintings by the Romantics in the mid 18th-century, the landscape continues to be a subject artists turn to when contemplating the ways we relate to the places where we live and the impact we as humans have on the land. Simon Schama in his book, Landscape and Memory, argues that the veneration of nature is “one of our most powerful yearnings: the craving to find nature a consolation for our mortality.” In the context that our culture is formed from our experience and memory of our natural world, the artists in this exhibition approach the study of the landscape through various cultural prisms, whether historical, environmental, spiritual, or with regards to questions of personal identity.

The works in Visionary Landscape II range from the subtle to the fantastic, all expressing the idea that the landscape does not have to be about any specific physical location. Marco Brambilla’s intricate video collage, Evolution (Megaplex), for instance, depicts the apocalyptic landscape of human conflict through the lens of cinema; Untitled (The Weather Project), Takehito Koganezawa’s quartet of drawings depicting various meteorological patterns, combines both poetic abstraction and representation; and using aerial shots of Antarctic icebergs taken by NASA, Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle’s glicee prints are strikingly beautiful and mysterious, yet they also raise metaphysical questions about the future of such diminishing ecosystems.

Two artists in the exhibit are steeped in the Romantics’ deep veneration towards the natural environment. Sharon Ellis affirms her connection to the spiritual and sensual aspects of nature through detailed renderings of sylvan motifs. In contrast, Richard T. Walker’s photography and video works confront the complex relationship between people and the natural landscape through language, music and performance. 

January 14 - March 3, 2012

Christopher Grimes Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings by Scott Short.  Expanding upon a precise and highly laborious art making technique, Short’s new works continue to investigate the dialectics of representation and the relationship between the mechanical and hand-made.

The genesis of these elaborately rendered paintings begins as simple colored construction paper that the artist copies on a black-and-white photocopying machine. He then takes that first copy and repeats the copying process, perhaps a dozen times, or as many as several hundred times, until the layering of copy over copy creates an image that Scott finds appealing - in effect these images emerge from the “flaws” that are inherent to this process. The final chosen image is then photographed and projected onto a large primed canvas, where Short begins a meticulous rendering of the original using black oil paint.  

Despite the technical restraints and precise fidelity to the original, Short has stated that the painting process is subordinate to the effects of the copy. Randomness and acts-of-faith play a part in Short’s adherence to the copy machine’s unpredictable translations of patterns and abstract marks. By way of both process and concept, “Short”, writes Leah Ollman in the Los Angeles Times: 

“…joins a cadre of thinkers, makers and re-makers (from Walter Benjamin on up through Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince and beyond) who muse on the meaning of authorship and originality, the simultaneity of abstraction and representation, the assignation of value, the porous boundary separating objectivity from subjectivity.”

Currently based in Vallauris, France, Scott Short received his MFA and BFA from Ohio State University. His work has been included in the 2010 Whitney Biennial and in group exhibitions entitled “Gerhard Richter and the Disappearance of the Image in Contemporary Art” at the Centro di Cultura Contemporanea Strozzina, Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, Italy and at the Gladstone Gallery, Brussels, Belgium. He also had a solo exhibition at The Rennaissance Society at The University of Chicago for which a catalog has recently been produced.

November 5, 2011 - January 7, 2012

The Christopher Grimes Gallery is pleased to present Allan Sekula’s Untitled Slide Sequence. This series of photographic prints, adapted from the original slides produced in 1972, is in direct dialogue with the Getty Research Institute’s Pacific Standard Time initiative (October 2011 – April 2012). 
 
The works of Allan Sekula - photographer, theorist, historian, and writer - are concerned with the consequences of economic changes arising from globalization. His work questions the function of documentary photography in the media, art, and society. 
 
Sekula’s early work dealt with social issues stemming from the Vietnam War and, more specifically, workers within the workplace. Such critical and conceptual approaches to photography helped to solidify Sekula’s stature within the Southern California arts community.
 
Photographed in rapid succession, Untitled Slide Sequence (1972) depicts workers as they depart from the General Dynamics Conair Division Aerospace Factory in San Diego. This work documents the aerospace industry and its socioeconomic implications in the Southern California landscape. Originally exhibited as a projection, the gallery will exhibit Untitled Slide Sequence as a series of photographs taken from the original slides. The South Gallery features California Stories 1973-1977, a never before seen series of photographs.
 
The work of Allan Sekula will be included in two exhibitions in conjunction with Pacific Standard Time: Under the Big Black Sun: California Art 1974-1981 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and State of Mind: New California Art Circa 1970 at the Orange County Museum of Art. He will also be included in the exhibition, Light Years: Conceptual Art and the Photograph,1964-1977, at the Art Institute of Chicago, opening December 13, 2011. 
 
Allan Sekula’s work has recently been included in the following exhibitions: The Workers, MASS MoCA, North Adams, Massachusetts; Ship of Fools, 29th Biennial de São Paolo, Brazil and the Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium; and Polonia and Other Fables, Ludwig Museum, Budapest, Hungary. His work is included in the collections of the Thyssen-Bornesmisza Art Contemporary in Vienna; the Whitney Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art; Centre Pompidou, Paris; MACBA, Barcelona; National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens, Greece; and the ARCO foundation, Madrid, Spain, among others. 
 
His film, The Forgotten Space, co-directed with Nöel Burch, won the Special Orizzonti Jury Prize at the 2010 Venice Film Festival. The Forgotten Space recently screened at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid. Upcoming screenings include The New School in New York City and Scotland’s Centre for Photography, where a retrospective of Sekula’s 

September 9 - October 29, 2011

Christopher Grimes Gallery is pleased to announce a solo exhibition featuring new work by Anton Henning. This will mark Henning’s fourth exhibition with the gallery.

Anton Henning’s work is informed by an encyclopedic knowledge of art historical styles and realized through myriad media. Often combining traditional art genres (landscape, nude, portrait and still life), Henning appropriates stylistic motifs of modernist masters and reconstitutes them into his own signature style. The harmonization of these artistic tropes can at times seem absurdist or contradictory in nature, but are in fact methodical attempts to defy categorization. 

Henning not only transgresses the traditions of high art through his paintings, but also extends this practice to the dramatic presentation of his work. Though Henning has widely exhibited his collages, drawings, and videos, these works always relate to his paintings. In the artist’s words “I’d be ashamed to describe myself as anything other than a painter.”

Anton Henning lives and works in Berlin, Germany. He has exhibited extensively throughout Europe. He has had major solo exhibitions at the Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, Germany; Kunstmuseum of Art Luzern, Lucerne, Switzerland; the De Pont Foundation, Tilburg, Holland; Haus am Waldsee, Berlin, Germany; and the Stedelijik Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Ghent, Belgium.

July 8, 2011 - September 3, 2011

Christopher Grimes Gallery is pleased to present Super 8, an ambitious video exhibition featuring the works of forty international contemporary artists. With the roots of video art intertwined with that of cinema, Super 8 derives its title from the mid-century motion picture film format of the same name.

For this exhibition, the gallery has invited eight artists to curate a week’s worth of programming with fellow artists from their respective cities. Each week of Super 8 will focus on a different city. Within that week, a day will be dedicated to the work of one artist. Below is a listing of the featured cities and curating artists:

Lisbon: Julião Sarmento

San Francisco: Richard T. Walker

Tokyo: Takehito Koganezawa

Rio de Janeiro: Tunga

London: Wood & Harrison

Los Angeles: Marco Brambilla

Berlin: Reynold Reynolds

Dublin: Walker & Walker

Super 8 highlights key video artists from their respective cities, in addition to contextualizing their work within a global community of artists working in the same media. Through various approaches, from a variety of generations, Super 8 will present a cross section of this often misunderstood and underestimated form of art.

Super 8 will travel to venues throughout South America and Europe in the months following its premiere at the gallery. It will also act as a catalyst for symposia in each represented city with artists, curators and historians of video art.

May 7 - July 2, 2011

Christopher Grimes Gallery is pleased to present a group exhibition featuring Ginny Bishton, Ingrid Calame, and Scott Short. Through meticulous labor, each artist has developed a systematic, transformative approach to abstraction that is distinctive and uniquely identifiable.

Ginny Bishton’s collages, constructed from photographs of minute instances in her daily routine, are cut into numerous colorful circles and organized to create abstract patterns. Often using specific locations as a departure point, Ingrid Calame focuses her attention on the detritus and markings left on surfaces over time. Calame traces these markings and often combines them with other drawings to create layered compositions rooted in representation yet not easily identifiable. In the case of Scott Short, colored construction paper is repeatedly run through a copy machine, sometimes several hundred times or more, until a composition of distortions begins to emerge. From this point, Short painstakingly reproduces the composition in black oil paint on white primer. Though disparate in subject matter, each artist’s technique transforms the minute into the momentous.

March 12 - April 30, 2011

The Christopher Grimes Gallery is pleased to present the speed and eagerness of meaning, an exhibition of new works by San Francisco based artist Richard T. Walker. This exhibition will include a 3 screen video installation in the main gallery space with related photo-based works in the south gallery that form a continuation of his ongoing investigation into the interweaving relationships between nature, culture and perception.

the speed and eagerness of meaning plays with notions of spatial transition, highlighting the particularities of perception and the fragility of our linear-based understanding of reality. The tension between the undeniable reality of the beauty and awe-inspired in such landscapes and our internal inability to translate such experience into a genuinely comparable response form the basis for the underpinnings of this work.

Such temporal shifts are reconciled through the pace and stability of a story-type narration that will be accompanied by music written and recorded by the artist. Multiple instruments played by the protagonist in the landscapes will congregate together to form a fluid, multilayered musical response to a situation whereby a fantastical understanding of reality contends with a fantastical understanding of space.

Richard T. Walker received his MFA from Goldsmith College in 2005. He has exhibited at institutions such as the Tempo rare Kunsthalle, Berlin; La Galerie Contemporary Art Centre, Noisy-le-Sec, Paris; De Appel, Amsterdam; and the Kunsthalle Luzern, Switzerland and LAXART, Los Angeles. Currently, his work is included in the group exhibition Embodying at the Atlanta Contemporary Arts Center. Walker will also be included in the forthcoming exhibition, Big Picture, at K21 in Dusseldorf.

January 15 - March 5, 2011

Christopher Grimes Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of paintings by Olivier Mosset, featuring motorcycles painted and customized by Vincent Szarek and Jeffrey Schad.

For more than 40 years, Mosset has challenged the historical notion of painting as an art object. Beginning with his involvement in B.M.P.T. (a Paris-based group of painters active during the mid-1960s consisting of Daniel Buren, Mosset, Michel Parmentier, and Niele Toroni), Mosset sought to question authorship and democratize art through “radical procedures of deskilling”. As each artist became identified with a specific composition, the members of the group would then sign each other’s work thus calling into question the originality of the painting.

Following his affiliation with B.M.P.T., Mosset has become a pivotal figure in artistic practices spanning monochrome, abstract and ‘Neo-Geo’ painting.  By employing variations on color, size, paint application, format and the stretch of the canvas, Mosset has continued questioning the preconceived notions of what constitutes a painting.  Collaboration remains an integral aspect to his practice. For this exhibition Mosset will collaborate with Vincent Szarek and Jeffrey Schad by exhibiting their custom motorcycles.

Olivier Mosset was born in Bern, Switzerland and currently lives and works in Tucson.  Mosset has exhibited extensively in galleries and museums worldwide, including a two part retrospective, Olivier Mosset: Travaux 1966-2003 at the Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts Lausanne and the Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, Switzerland. Mosset represented Switzerland in the 44th Venice Biennale, in addition to being featured in the 2008 Whitney Biennial.  His personal collection of artwork is featured in the exhibition, The Artist as Collector: Olivier Mosset at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tucson, on view through February 15, 2011.

November 6, 2010 - January 8, 2011

The Christopher Grimes Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings by celebrated German artist Katharina Grosse. Grosse’s exhibition at the gallery will precede her first major US solo exhibition at MASS MoCA, which opens December 22, 2010.

Employing an audacious palette and an unconventional painting style, Grosse is perhaps best known for her site-specific works that organically expand over architectural spaces and enable her to create larger than life  paintings. In this process, she explores the concept of transformation and the experience of memory. With each color indicating a multitude of layers, Grosse “emphasizes color over brush-work, (and) movement over stasis…”

In these new paintings, Grosse explores not only the positive or painterly surface, but the negative or blank spaces that may lie between the layers of paint. By dichotomizing forms, Grosse departs from the confines of the picture plane and explores the schisms that lay between. Through this fluidity of form, Grosse articulates the movement of time and space.

Katharina Grosse was born in Freiburg, Germany. She currently lives and works in Berlin. She has exhibited at institutions worldwide including: the Arken Museum for Moderne Kunst, Copenhagen; Neues Museum Nurnberg, Berlin; Temporare Kunsthalle, Berlin; De Appel Centre for Contemporary Art, Amsterdam; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Magasin 3, Stockholm; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki; the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo. Her work was included in the Bienal de São Paulo, and Prospect 1, New Orleans. Grosse was recently included in If not in this period of time – Contemporary German Painting at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo, Brazil.

September 11 – October 30, 2010

Christopher Grimes Gallery is pleased to present Less World, a solo exhibition of new work by Ester Partegás. With the transformation of the gallery space to reflect that of the urban landscape, Ester Partegàs investigates the bombardment of imagery and the excess and waste in consumer society. Utilizing torn magazine advertisements, Partegàs’ large-scale photographic collages entitled “Less World” extricate the product in question to create polychromatic images devoid of their usual messages by superimposing layers of media paper. Partegàs offers us only the remains as an absence, which becomes more expressive and empowering than its over-abundant counterpart. In a similar fashion, her works on paper styled after packaged food, “Studies on Mysticism”, become lush vibrant abstractions calling attention to the seductive and transcendental promise of commodified culture. Partegàs’ sculptures “Overcast” and “Nothing”, explore themes of isolation, alienation, and emptiness. 
 
The “Less World” series will also appear in a weekly newspaper published by Latitudes in collaboration with Ester Partegàs at the New Museum, New York, from October 6, 2010 to January 9, 2011.
 
Hong-Kong based fashion design team Ffixxed collaborated with Ester Partegàs on their Spring-Summer 2011 collection called “surviving sustainability:______” which features imagery from the “Less World” series.
 
Ester Partegàs was born in La Garriga, Spain. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Partegàs has exhibited her work at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut; the Denison Museum, Granville, OH; and Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, among others.

June 26 - September 4, 2010

Make It New is a group exhibition featuring international artists such as Juliao Sarmento, John Baldessari, Lawrence Weiner, Allan Sekula, David Ireland, and Olivier Mosset. The exhibition's title is derived from a series of essays by Ezra Pound published in 1934, in which Pound states, "The artist is always the beginning ... Any work of art which is not a beginning, an invention, a discovery is of little worth." With this in mind, Make It New demonstrated that what was considered avant-garde in literature of the time was actually archaic. The same way Pound drew attention to the redundancy of literary works amongst his contemporaries, this exhibition seeks to bring together artists who, during their inception, attempted to distance themselves from what they considered archaic in the art world to create an avant-garde.

The artists included in this exhibition pioneered the avant-garde in their respective country, railing against what was considered popular in the 1970s, when this work was created. At the time of their creation, these works were provocative in their character and seen as a shift from the existing concerns of the day. From a contemporary point of view, these works are now regarded as "academic" or "vintage", as the marginal has become the mainstream; one avant-garde movement begets another.

The aim of this exhibition is to reanimate these works within the context of one another and to rethink the work's impact implicit at the moment of their creation. Without knowing it, the artists in this exhibition fulfilled Ezra Pounds premise of making it new. 

April 30 - June 19, 2010

Christopher Grimes Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings by Scott Short. Adhering to a highly detailed and laborious process, Short’s work explores the dialectics of representation - the original and the semblance, the infinite and the temporal, and, above all, the relationship between the machine and the man-made.

Short begins his painting process with a piece of colored construction paper. Using an analog copy machine, he makes a black and white photocopy and continues this process, several hundred times until he finds an image that appeals to him aesthetically from the distortions and the fortuitous failures of reproduction. From this point, Short makes a slide of the image and projects it onto canvas and painstakingly reproduces it, in black oil paint on white primer, until the copies become an original in their own right. What seems simple at first thought, is actually assiduous in practice. The only reference to the original sheet of construction paper is found in the title of the painting. In the words of one scholar: 

“Short’s paintings are a wealth of visual effect in which value, arrived at through the textural interplay of black and white, becomes as rich and complex a phenomenon as color itself…(his) manual labor, by following precisely in the footsteps of the machine, allows the copy to become the original, and the abstract to lay claim to being strictly representational.” - Hamza Walker, Education Director, The Renaissance Society
 
Scott Short lives and works in Vallauris, France. He received his MFA and BFA from Ohio State University. His work will be included in the 2010 Whitney Biennial curated by Francesco Bonami and  Gary Carrion-Murayari. Recently, his work was included in the group exhibition Gerhard Richter and the Disappearance of the Image in Contemporary Art, Centro di Cultura Contemporanea Strozzina, Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, Italy. He has also exhibited at The Renaissance Society at The University of Chicago and the Gladstone Gallery, Brussels, Belgium. This is Scott Short’s third exhibition with the gallery.

March 6 - April 24, 2010

Christopher Grimes Gallery is pleased to exhibit new work by Brazilian artist, Waltercio Caldas, from March 6th until April 24th, 2010. Since his last solo exhibition at the Christopher Grimes Gallery in 2005, Caldas has had solo exhibitions at premier international institutions, including the Centro Galego de Arte Contemporanea, Spain, and the Fundacao Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon, Portugal. In 2007, he was included in Robert Storr's exhibition, Think with the Senses- Feel with the Mind. Art in the Present Tense during the 52nd Venice Biennale.

Caldas is widely considered to be one of the most important Brazilian artists working today. Inspired by geometric abstraction and working in a diverse array of materials - each situation determining the media - Caldas' work articulates the tenuous relationship between the architectural space and those who occupy it. From a distance, one sees an abstract pattern of lines intersecting areas of color. However, upon closer inspection, one discovers that the lines are not as rigid as they first appeared - swaying slightly with the air current in the room. These materials allow him to sculpt the surrounding negative space. In the words of one critic: "The work insists persistently upon being a border. It further insists upon reducing the border it is. It wants to erase its outlines, its very constitution."

In a similar fashion, the artists' drawings and stainless steel wall constructions explore ideas of experience and perception within a formal dialogue by using thread to lead the eye from one point to another. They allude to perspective space that is not wholly present creating, what Caldas says is "a maximum presence from the least amount of material."

Waltercio Caldas lives and works in Rio de Janeiro and has shown extensively internationally since the 1960's. He has had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, Rio de Janeiro; Museum of Art, Sao Paulo; and Centre D'Art Contemporain, Geneva, among many others, and also represented Brazil in the 47th Venice Biennale and Documenta IX. Forthcoming solo exhibitions include the Blanton Art Museum, Texas and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia. His work is included in numerous permanent collections; some of which include the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Staaliche Museen, Kassel, the Chase Manhattan Collection and the Museum of Modern Art, Sao Paulo.

January 16 - February 27, 2010

Christopher Grimes Gallery is pleased to present inbetween, an exhibition of new work by Joshua Podoll. In his previous exhibition, Podoll incorporated the use of hard, delineated, and often, fetishized edges with synthetic forms. With his new body of work, Podoll introduces new phrases into his lexicon of painting. One such element is the gestural brushstroke a la abstract expressionism. With this, Podoll believes the mark reflects what it is to be alive by adding a sense of honesty through imperfection. Podoll considers his work to be a formal study in painting, and seeks to weave together a cohesive oeuvre with elements from his previous works in hopes of creating a dialogue within his paintings. This is Joshua Podoll's second solo exhibition with the gallery.

Joshua Podoll was born in Seattle in 1972. He has exhibited at the University of lowa Museum of Art, Iowa City, IA (2002); Retreat, Peres Projects, Los Angeles (2003); as well as Without Sun, Christopher Grimes Gallery, Santa Monica, curated by Carole Ann Klondarides. His work will also be featured in two forthcoming exhibitions: Populate This Form, Feature Inc., New York and You Can Heal Your Life!, Circus Gallery, Los Angeles, curated by Emma Gray. Podoll currently lives and works in San Francisco.

January 16 - February 27, 2010

For his inaugural exhibition at Christopher Grimes Gallery, British born, San Francisco-based artist, Richard T. Walker will present a video work in the South Gallery entitled successive inconceivable events. Walker's work explores the complex relationships between people and the natural environment through language, music and text. By incorporating a contemporary meditation on the ideal of the Romantic individual within the Romantic landscape asking contemplative questions, Walker highlights the inconsistencies within the current human condition and the environment in which we inhabit.

Richard T. Walker received his MFA from Goldsmiths College in 2005. He has exhibited at Iceberger Gallery, San Francisco; i'll be lost when I find you, Galeria Del Angels, Barcelona, Spain; All Man Made, the Temporare Kunsthalle, Berlin, Germany; A corps & a texts, La Galerie Contemporary Art Centre, Noisy-le-Sec, Paris, France; Romantic Damage, De Appel, Amsterdam, Holland; and Focus the star please!, the Kunsthalle Luzern, Switzerland.

November 20, 2009 - January 9, 2010

Christopher Grimes Gallery is pleased to present, Elemental Frequency, video works by Takehito Koganezawa. We will feature three if Koganezawa’s seminal silent works, Birds, Neon, and Water. Time, a central theme in his work, is exemplified through these three pieces.

"[Koganezawa] processes time through various media and forms, whereby it is the status of the respective medium that defines the way in which time is treated and vice versa… This transcription is fascinating, because Koganezawa seems to have found a means of complementing the ways in which "visual modernism“ has been interpreted until now. While the theory of modern painting perceived the movement of the image area to be a monochrome surface that explicitly excludes the moment of time, Koganezawa’s work point us to this theoretical blind spot of despatialisation. The loss of depth, the flattening of a picture is always a temporal event as well, a process, which Koganezawa exposes by choosing video as his medium to depict it. His work deals with the genesis of diachronistic pictures that are synchronized via time."- Knut Ebeling, in Continental Shift, Ludwigforum Aachen, 2000

We will also present Catcher a site-specific installation in the South Gallery. In the projection, Koganezawa is catching and dropping on the floor unidentifiable creatures flying towards him. Despite the usually obvious concretion of the visual subject, this verbal refusal of classification or theme is intentional in Koganezawa’s work. “I would really like to see nothingness,” he said in an interview with Hans-Ulrich Obrist. “So I am trying to generate meaning from an object.”

Koganezawa was born in Tokyo in 1974 where he graduated from Musashino Art University.  He has been living in Berlin since 1999 and has exhibited internationally at various institutions such as Berlinische Galerie, Berlin; Wohnmaschine, Berlin; Haunch of Venison, London; Institute of Visual Art, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee; Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, Germany; Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery; Institute for Contemporary Art, London; Internationales Filmfest, Rotterdam, The Netherlands; La Biennale de Montreal, Canada; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; Queens Museum, New York and Project Rooms, ARCO, Madrid, Otis’ Ben Maltz Gallery, Los Angeles, as well as artists residencies at the Villa Aurora in Los Angeles and the Kea Island, in Greece. In January 2009 a solo exhibition of his work opened the Marugame Genichiro-Inokuma Museum of Contemporary Art (MIMOCA), in Marugame, Japan, which featured video, drawings, sculpture, and installations.

September 9 - November 7, 2009

Christopher Grimes is pleased to present Private Utopias, an exhibition of new works by Veronika Kellndorfer. 

First through painting and then through photography, Kellndorfer has introduced a body of work whose focuses on the ephemeral nature of architecture and space. Her new body of work, featured in the main gallery space, focuses on Californian modern architectural landmarks of Frank Lloyd Wright, John Lautner, Pierre Koenig, and Rudolf Schindler. Her work re-examines the physical and social construction of space through her distinct technique of silk-screening photographic images onto large glass panels.

“Veronika Kellndorfer’s photographs of classic modernist houses are mediations on place, the passage of time, and the act of seeing…Reflection seem to place the viewer within the images, some of which are nearly life-size. At the same time, glare and the spatial ambiguity crated by cast shadows-the largest pieces are propped against the wall-prevent a clear view.”-Sharon Mizote, ArtForum

In the South Gallery Kellndofer will revisit her past with an exhibition of her paintings from the 1990’s. Formally trained as a painter, Kellndorfer’s works on canvas also investigate architectural elements, which give the viewer a basis of where her current work originated.

Veronika Kellndorfer has exhibited in museums and institutions throughout Europe the United Kingdom, Russia and the United States. She has had solo shows at the Berlinische Galerie in Berlin and at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.  She also exhibited at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles and at the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart, Musee d’Art Moderne, St. Etienne, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh and Contemporary Art Center, Moscow. She has held residencies at Villa Massimo in Rome and Villa Aurora in Los Angeles. Kellndorfer has participated in large-scale public commissions all over Germany such as SCHOCKEN for the Akademie Schloss Solitude und Hegelmuseum, Stuttgart and just completed a public commission for The Family Ministry in Berlin, Germany this past month.

July 18 - September 5, 2009

Christopher Grimes Gallery is celebrating it’s 30th Anniversary with a Works on Paper exhibition commemorating/paying homage to the past, present and future of the gallery.

Opening its doors in 1979, Christopher Grimes Gallery has presented a diverse yet rigorous program of contemporary art, working with national and international artists alike. This pioneering spirit has allowed the gallery to serve as the starting point for the careers of numerous artists and its motivated the promotion of many artists who have moved on to exhibit at major museums and art venues worldwide.

The exhibition includes recent works on paper that pay tribute the gallery’s incredible history. With works by artists from the gallery's past, such as Lisa Yuskavage and the recently passed David Ireland, the gallery looks back to the many artists whose careers it has helped to launch. Including works by artists such as Anton Henning, Katharina Grosse and Waltercio Caldas acknowledges artists who have been with the gallery for many years and whose careers continue to be impacted by the gallery’s efforts. We also are looking towards new goals for the future by incorporating new additions to the gallery’s roster of artists such as Scott Short and Alessandro Balteo Yazbeck.

Artists in the exhibition include Waltercio Caldas, Katharina Grosse, Anton Henning, David Ireland, Max Jansons, Takehito Koganezawa, Joao Louro, Ester Partegas, Juliao Sarmento, Scott Short, Alessandro Balteo Yazbeck and Lisa Yuskavage.

May 23 - July 3, 2009

Christopher Grimes Gallery is pleased to present Cultural Diplomacy: An Art We Neglect an exhibition of new work by Alessandro Balteo Yazbeck. Much of the artist's work recycles the material remains of modernist art to present analyses of current political and economic issues.

In this new body of work, Balteo Yazbeck entangles art history with the global politics of oil and war. Cultural Diplomacy: An Art We Neglect offers the viewer a narrative of unexpected connections that borders on absurdity. This series is the result of a yearlong collaboration with art historian Media Farzin, which began as a conversation about the cultural symmetry between their respective countries, Venezuela and Iran, and led them to investigating the buried origins of the Cold War. Their narrative sketches out the intersection of foreign policy and corporate interest that has controlled the distribution of global power since World War II. The strategies of modernist art are employed and distorted to reveal a delicate Cold War balance of oil and bombs.

Balteo Yazbeck’s work is informed by historic conceptual art. He invades what is traditionally understood to be the domain of the curator, using exhibition design as a medium to create an aura of curatorial authority for his work. His approach undermines the notion of authorship through the explicitly quoting, appropriating or collaboratively incorporating the work of other artists, curators, and historians.

Alessandro Balteo Yazbeck (Caracas, 1972) was born in Venezuela to Italian and Lebanese parents. While in Caracas, he studied design and fine arts, and graduated with an emphasis on sculpture. Since the mid-nineties, he has shown extensively in Latin American institutions such as the Galeria de Arte Nacional, Caracas, Venezuela; Museu de Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Museo de Arte de Lima, Peru; and Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Santiago, Chile and also participated in the VII Bienal de la Habana, Cuba. In 2008, Balteo Yazbeck had his first US major solo exhibition at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University. This year he was invited by Adriano Pedrosa, Julieta Gonzalez and Jens Hoffmann to participate in the second Trienal Poli/Gráfica de San Juan. This is Balteo Yazbeck’s first solo exhibition at the gallery and on the West Coast. 

April 11 - May 16, 2009

Christopher Grimes Gallery is please to present works by Olivier Mosset.  Olivier Mosset is one of the most influential artists working today. Mosset is firmly committed to blank abstraction, in which empty canvases become fields of limitless reflection.  His work presents the viewer with “nothing to look at and therefore everything to consider." In his most recent works, Mosset expresses the collapse of painting as a meaning-making gesture. Critic Jean Baudrillard states, “ridiculing all the heavy armature of language and communication.”

Olivier Mosset was born in Bern, Switzerland and lives and works in Tucson, Arizona. He first gained prominence in Paris the mid 1960’s as a member of BMPT (Buren, Mosset, Parmentier and Toroni), an influential group of radical painters. Since then, Mosset has exhibited extensively in galleries and museums worldwide, including a two part retrospective, Olivier Mosset: Travaux 1966-2003 at the Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts Lausanne and the Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, Switzerland, as well as the being featured at the 44th Venice Biennale and the 2008 Whitney Biennial.

The South Gallery will feature new sculptures by Thom Merrick. Since his first New York exhibition in 1987, the summation of an exhibition could be said to be "against method" encompassing drawing, installation, painting and sculpture. "Concurrent hypotheses" riddle the last twenty odd years of his output. The current works began as oil paintings, but were found to be unsatisfactory until the scrapped off oil painting was deposited on the figurines. The faulted combinations oddly mimic the shape of the stone hills around his studio in the Mojave Desert.  

Thom Merrick received his BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. He lives and works in New York and the California Mojave Desert. Since the late 1980s he has had numerous exhibitions in galleries and museums throughout the United States and in Europe. His works have been exhibited at prestigious institutions such as PS 1, New York, the Museum for Modern Art, Frankfurt, and Documenta IX, Kassel as well as participating in Without Sun, in 2007, curated by Carole Ann Klonarides at the Christopher Grimes Gallery, Santa Monica and HDTS and 2008 California Biennial, curated by Lauri Firstenberg, at the Orange County Museum of Art.

February 28 - April 4, 2009

Christopher Grimes Gallery is pleased to present, Works on paper: Women, and Houses, and Plants… an exhibition of new drawings by Julião Sarmento. Sarmento has exhibited extensively since his first show in 1969 and is known as one of Portugal’s most important artists.  Throughout his career, Sarmento’s work has revealed his pre-occupation with desire, psychological interactions, sensuality, and voyeurism. His work implements a symbolic representation of his own unconscious. Sarmento’s new body of work investigates latent memory related to desire and experience based within the confines of an architectural premise. As stated by Chrissie Iles, in Louise Neri’s book Julião Sarmento, “Sarmento undermines the objective analytical study that the early photographic works suggest with his blatantly subjective erotic content, just as nineteenth-century taxonomic studies of the hysterical, criminal and insane body by scientists and photographers from Muybridge to Dalton and Charcot belied a prurient interest in the suppressed drives implied by their subject matter.”

Julião Sarmento lives and works in Estoril, Portugal. He studied painting and architecture at the Lisbon School of Fine Arts. He has shown in numerous group shows around the world including Documenta VII (1982) and VIII (1987), the Venice Biennales of 1980 and 2001, and in 1997, he represented Portugal at the Venice Biennale. His work is included in public collections worldwide, including The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C., the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Guggenheim Museum, New York; MoMA, New York; the Musée National d’Art Moderne Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; and the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo.

In 2009, Julião Sarmento will have a solo exhibition at The Estação Pinacoteca in São Paolo, Brazil, curated by Ivo Mesquita and Delfim Sardo. In 2010, He will have a solo exhibition at The Parish Museum, in the Hamptons in New York, curated by Terrie Sultan, which will travel to the Blaffer Gallery at The Art Museum of the University of Houston. 

January 10 - February 21, 2009

To begin the thirtieth year anniversary of the Christopher Grimes Gallery, we will be presenting, Excerpts from the Capital Project, 1988-2008: The Bleach Paintings and Perfume Site Photos, vintage painting and photographs by Peter Hopkins.

The Bleach Paintings were first exhibited in New York at Colin DeLand’s groundbreaking gallery, American Fine Arts, in 1988. Using only bleach as a substitute for paint the artist produced a simple and powerful body of work that at once scrubbed clean the space of painting from the textual overload of that time, but acted also as a kind of x-ray of what a painting could be.

Long thought lost in a near catastrophic gallery flood the paintings resurfaced in 2003 upon the passing of Mr. DeLand, and the closing of the gallery. Newly cleaned and restored, the work is an important body of work that clearly marks the beginning of the artist’s twenty-year investigation of the intersection between the conceptual and the social. The exhibition is both an examination of that work and a means to refer to Hopkins’ newer works based on earlier methods.

Accompanying the Bleach Paintings is another body of work from this same period: the Perfume Site photographs. The exhibition was originally mounted in 1991 at Galerie Marc Jancou in Zurich. The artist documented the introduction of perfume into rooms of a villa once lived in by Carl Jung during a crucial phase of his battle with Freud over the nature of the subconscious. The resulting works are de-constructed as a virtual crime scene. The viewer is left to re-connect the parts back into an artificial whole. Perfume acts here, polemically as an opposite to bleach, as a reminder of this other social dimension of art. Hopkins states that often what is most important about an artwork is not what it tries to show, but rather what it wants to hide.

Bleach and perfume, the cleaning of a space, and the resulting odor are the basis of this historical exhibition. From Airchitecture: Guarded Breaths and the [cough] Art of Ventilation, the Canadian art critic and writer Jim Drobnick states, “…to surprise and awaken individuals to an aromatic experientiality that can reconfigure habitual relationships between body, self, city, and society…the surreptitious scents engage on an almost subliminal level, catching passersby while in states of vulnerable distraction.”

Peter Hopkins received his BA from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and his MFA from the University of Wisconsin, in 1982. Since the mid 1980s he has had numerous solo and group exhibitions in galleries and museums throughout the United States and western Europe including France, Germany and Switzerland. His works have been exhibited in prestigious venues such as The New Museum in New York, Thread Waxing Space, the Folkwang Museum in Essen, the Musee d’Art Contemporain in Geneva, the Corcoran Biennial, the Neue Galerie in Graz and the Whitney Museum of American Art, as well as Documenta IX.

November 29, 2008 - January 3, 2009

Christopher Grimes Gallery is pleased to present new paintings by Scott Short. Using a specific palette and process, Short explores the relationship between the machine and the man-made, the original and the copy, abstraction and representation, the infinite and the temporal. Short begins each painting with a piece of colored construction paper. Using an analog copy machine, he makes a black and white photocopy of the construction paper. He then makes a photocopy of that photocopy, continuing this process several hundred times. An image ultimately evolves through the degradation of this reproductive process, at which point Short begins the transference of this image to canvas. He makes a slide of the late generation copy, projects it onto canvas, and painstakingly reproduces the image in black oil paint on white primmer. The only reference to the color of the original construction paper remains in the title.

James Yood from Art Forum states: "...the artist's determined resurrection of every infinitesimal squiggle and fleck, and his attentiveness to a kind of visual poetics embedded within the mundane and overlooked makes these images surprisingly evocative. That a photocopy is not a draining of meaning, that it doesn't actually reduce the aura or substance of an original but rather creates a new original every time it scans its predecessor, makes something of nothing, or at least of very little." 

Scott Short lives and works in Chicago. He received his MFA and BFA from Ohio State University. He will be participating in No Information Available, the inaugural exhibition of the Gladstone Gallery in Brussels, curated by Francesco Bonami in October 2008. He had his first museum show at The Renaissance Society at The University of Chicago curated by Hamza Walker in 2007. 

October 18 - November 28, 2008

Christopher Grimes Gallery is pleased to present, Living the Dream, a solo exhibition of new video works by Marco Brambilla. Brambilla's new work Civilization (Megaplex), illustrates a contemporary and often satirical take on the concepts of Heaven and Hell. Cathedral, in the South Gallery, investigates the spectacle of contemporary consumerism. 

Civilization (Megaplex), a metaphysical journey from Hell to Heaven, is portrayed by computer altered found footage. The journey begins under Kurosawa's "Dreams" volcano, then rises through a purgatory populated by images of suburbia, demolition derbies and shopping malls, finally soaring towards a paradise of beauty contestants, cherubs, bodybuilders, then past the peaks of Mount Olympus to a cosmic portal inspired by Gustav Dore's paintings, as reinterpreted in the movie, "The Fountain". Civilization (Megaplex) is an epic video mural containing over 300 individual channels of looped video into a multi-layered seamless tableau of interconnecting images.

Frances Richard from Art Forum states:

"Marco Brambilla has parallel careers as a video installation artist and a commercial film director, and his videos benefit from a savvy, self-assured camera style and sense of timing that likely derive from his industry work. Nevertheless, their giddy, elliptical studies of speed, stasis, and masculinity seem to glory in the small scale auteur's freedom to be non-narrative and idiosyncratic."

Cathedral, in the South Gallery was filmed in The Eaton Center shopping mall in Toronto, Canada at the height of consumerism: Christmas. Christmas shoppers are shown during "rush hour." The constant flux of shoppers, weaving their way through the veins of the mall, shuttled from one location to the next through arteries of escalators and elevators, carried from one purchase opportunity to the next. The work is inspired by the time study work, during the American industrial revolution, of Frederick Winslow Taylor and the motion study work of Frank and Lillian Gilbreth. The movements of the hustling people have been slowed down and the time frame shifted, emphasizing the mindless actions of consumers. The images in Cathedral are superimposed and multilayered, creating a kaleidoscope view and disorienting landscape of the epic space.

Born in Milan, Italy, Brambilla now lives and works in Los Angeles, California. His career spans from fine arts, film and commercials. He has had solo shows at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, in 2003, and the Contemporary Arts Forum, Santa Barbara, in 2004, as well as the Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, in 2004. His work belongs to the permanent collections of the Guggenheim Museum, San Francisco Museum of Art, and the ARCO foundation in Madrid. He has been awarded both the Tiffany Comfort Foundation and Colbert foundation awards for his video installations.

September 5 - October 11, 2008

Christopher Grimes Gallery is pleased to present Pleasures, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Max Jansons. "In an age filled with a constant flow of images and media, a painting's ability to create a slow and intimate experience is one of its greatest assets," is how Jansons describes his paintings' aptitude for intimacy, which relates to the smaller scale of his new body of work. Jansons' use of nature and antiquated objects as subjects are intuitively reinforced by his employment of vintage techniques: linen primed in lead, paint ground in aged oil, and pigments whose sources are extinct. He has aligned himself with historical American painters such as Marsden Hartley and Arthur Dove by creating work inspired by daily life. Jansons elaborates further on the his relationship to painting and the subjects he chooses to paint:

"I blur the distinction between the abstract and the material world. I consider myself a painter of things and I paint to experience the pleasure of seeing and the pleasure of painting these things ... The exchange that exists within the work between the old and the new, history and the present, acts a metaphor for the project and the process of painting."

A New York native, Jansons currently lives and works in Santa Monica, California. He received his MFA from Columbia University and his BFA from UCLA. He participated in two solo exhibitions in 2004 and 2005 at Wooster Arts Space in New York. His work was included in the group shows Far Out at View Room Exhibitions in New York, curated by Joseph Roeder, and Some Dumb Fun, curated by David Pagel for the University of Nevada in Las Vegas.

July 11 - August 30, 2008

Christopher Grimes Gallery is pleased to present No Room, a group exhibition curated by architects Sharon Johnston and Mark Lee, employing a selection of artwork from artists Katharina Grosse, James Welling, Anton Henning, Kevin Appel, Veronika Kellndorfer, João Louro, Allan Sekula and Hiroshi Sugimoto.

Architecture, both vernacular and iconic appears as a consistent subject, source matter and reference for the artists collected in No Room. Johnston and Lee will turn the gallery space into an interactive environment, juxtaposing artwork with furniture, such as Veronika Kellndorfer’s “Barcelona Pavilion” and Mies van der Rohe’s “Barcelona Chair.” This interface creates a scene of perpetual oscillation between the transactions of the postmodern critique and the nearly insatiable contemporary desire for the holistic image. As stated by the curators, “beyond the brick and mortar, modern architecture in contemporary art is an oft used shorthand for the social movements of its time: the original out of which the architecture evolved, the failure of that optimism, the domination and veneer that post-modernism associated with it, and most recently its renovation into lifestyle fodder.” At once, the gallery holds the transactions of the architecture, the imprint and translation of the artist and the gallery space as a constructed interior.

Sharon Johnston and Mark Lee founded the award-winning architectural practice of Johnston Marklee & Associates with a distinctly critical and inventive approach towards all projects. Featured extensively in national and international media, the repertoire of Johnston Marklee include the exhibition designs of nano at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Kaikai Kiki Merchandise Room of ©Murakami at the Museum of Contemporary Art; the structurally innovative Hill House in Pacific Palisades, CA; the color-specific Sale House in Venice, CA; the conjoined boutiques of Mameg and Maison Martin Margiela in Beverly Hills, CA; and the Writers-in-Residence Studies for the Lannan Foundation in Marfa, TX. Current projects include the Grand Traiano Art Complex in Grottaferrata, Italy for the D.E.P.ART Foundation; the View House in Rosario, Argentina, the Verdant Hills Hotel Villas in Jixian, China; and the Energy Store in Los Angeles, CA.

May 24 - July 5, 2008

Christopher Grimes Gallery will feature new sculptural, video and paper works done by Takehito Koganezawa, during his residency at the Villa Aurora. This prestigious residency is awarded to German based artists in a variety of disciplines. Known for his performances turned into multimedia installations, his neon works and silent videos inspired by an oriental approach to the moving image, Koganezawa's drawings and collages find their roots in surrealism's automatic writing as well as in the 1980s new figuration in painting. They are characterized by an unconventional use of space, coupling representational elements (human figures, animals) with abstract motifs and shapes, and playing with discrepancies in scale and geometries.

Koganezawa was born in Tokyo in 197 4 and has lived in Berlin since 1998. He has shown his work internationally at institutions such as the Berlinische Galerie, Berlin; Institute of Visual Art, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee; Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, Germany; Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery; Institute for Contemporary Art, London; Internationales Filmfest, Rotterdam, The Netherlands; La Biennale de Montreal, Canada; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Queens Museum, New York; the Mori Art Center, Tokyo; and the Neue National Galerie in Berlin.

May 24 - July 5, 2008

Christopher Grimes Gallery is pleased to present its first solo exhibition of new abstract paintings by Joshua Podoll. Meditation plays an important role in the making of his work and becomes evident in the way he plays with perspective and space.  The experience of meditating and the act of painting become indistinguishable to Podoll and he encourages the viewer to engage the work in this contemplative fashion. He also strives to slow down the way the painting is absorbed by rupturing the various spatial planes within the composition. 

Joshua Podoll was born in Seattle in 1972. He currently lives and works in San Francisco. He has exhibited at the University of Iowa Museum of Art, Iowa City, IA (2002); Close Calls, Headlands Center For The Arts, Fort Barry, CA, curated by Linda Samuels (2003); Retreat, Peres Projects, Los Angeles (2003); Abstractions, Spencertown Academy Arts Center, Spencertown, NY, curated by Linda Horn and Nancy Van Deren (2006); Feature Gallery, New York, NY (2003, 2006) as well as Without Sun, Christopher Grimes Gallery, Santa Monica, curated by Carole Ann Klondarides (2007).

April 12 - May 17, 2008

Christopher Grimes Gallery is pleased to present the second US exhibition of João Louro, one of Portugal's most important contemporary artists, as he explores the relationship between image and text, through looking at architecture and film.

For his upcoming show at Christopher Grimes Gallery, Louro will present new work utilizing architectural drawings of the sites where movies were filmed, which are presented in connection to the dialogue spoken in that location.  One large-scale piece, with several panels (76” x 76” each) will represent LAX International Airport where James Bond arrives during the end of the movie “Diamonds Are Forever.” Other locations and movies Louro explores include:  The Elrod House, Palm Springs, in “Diamonds are Forever;” Richard Neutra’s Lovell House, Los Angeles, in “LA Confidential;” the Libera and Malaparte House, Capri in “Le Mépris;” and John Lautner’s, Malin House, Los Angeles in “Body Double.” In many ways, Louro is casting the spectators, by presenting them with dialogue and the conceptual space to perform.

Louro studied architecture at the University of Lisbon and then, painting at the Arco School of Visual Art.  He came into prominence in the Portuguese and international art scene in the 1990’s both through solo and collaborative endeavors, following the conceptual and minimalist practices of the 1970’s.  Yet he defines himself in opposition to them.  The result is a relationship to the finished object that goes beyond art historical references and uses language and image as his tools. He does not confine himself to a single medium; taking ideas as a starting point, he uses painting, sculpture, photography, drawing as well as film, selecting media as an architect selects the team that constructs his vision. Text also plays an integral role in his work, mainly for its ability to conjure up images in the mind of the viewer. 

João Louro’s work has been the subject of solo shows at important institutions such as the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto, (2000), and the Centro Cultural de Belem, Lisbon (2004). He has participated in numerous group shows in Portugal, France, Holland, Italy, Spain, Ireland, Brazil and the US.  His work was also included in Insite 05, San Diego-Tijuana (2005), and The Experience of Art in the Italian Pavilion curated by Maria de Corral for the 51st Venice Biennial (2005).  Currently, he is in the group exhibition, In the Beginning at the University Art Gallery, University of California, San Diego, California (2008.)

February 29 - April 5, 2008

Christopher Grimes Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new sculpture by Chuck Moffit inspired by desert landscapes, the ceramicist John Mason, Southern California design of the 1950s - 70s and, most importantly, by the various materials that he works with (clay, steel, and branches) and the methods they require. Moffit is interested in the ideas of transformation and chance in the process of casting metals and the resulting “inclusions,” casting flaws evident by the presence of a particle distinct from the substance it is imbedded in.

Chuck Moffit lives and works in Southern California. He exhibited in the Hammer Museum’s group exhibition Thing: New Sculpture from Los Angeles (2005) curated by Christopher Miles, James Elaine and Aimee Change. He also was invited to participate in high desert test sites 4, 5 and 6 (2005, 2006, 2007) organized by Andrea Zittel in Joshua Tree, CA.  He received an Arts/Industry residency at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, Wisconsin.

December 1, 2007 - January 12, 2008

Christopher Grimes Gallery is pleased to present what you are, the world is, a solo exhibition of new work by Ester Partegás that furthers her exploration into the social, emotional and physical relationship of the spectator to those objects that have become part of the urban landscape. This exhibition will coincide with a solo show at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain opening on December 18, 2007.

Partegás introduces large unique digital archival pigment prints depicting close-ups of the slick surfaces of black garbage bags. The black garbage bag continues to function for her as a signifier for what “remains from our quest of wanting,” – in other words - “what we refuse.”  Her characteristic play with the size of everyday objects in her work is evident here as the images are enlarged to human size and exhibited 3 inches off the floor.  Partegás also, “...want(s) to emphasize the similarity of these photos to sadomasochist uniforms, a relation of love and desire, also of violence and rejection. This work echoes the current general behavior of a constant state of wanting and un-satisfaction.”

The South Gallery will present a new work, INVADERS, in conjunction with the work that will be shown at the Reina Sofia. Based on drawings, this work is rendered in enamel on plexiglas and reveals an abstracted and variegated image of trash bins in their urban landscape. Propped against the wall, the work presents the viewer with the most banal features of urban experience, the detritus found on the streets. Partegás wants the viewer’s attention to focus on what is taken for granted, even deliberately ignored by a contemporary society where over-consumption and over-production is the norm.

Ester Partegás was born in La Garriga, Spain. She studied in Berlin and Barcelona and she lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Partegás has exhibited her work at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Rice University Art Gallery, Houston, Texas, PS 1 Contemporary Art Center, New York, and Centre d’Art, Santa Monica, Barcelona.  She participated in the 2nd Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art (2007) as well as the Busan Bienniale in Korea (2006).   

Christopher Grimes Gallery is pleased to announce the third solo exhibition of new work by Anton Henning. The artist will present a dramatically lit installation of paintings and sculpture in contrast to his previous exhibitions. This approach is an extension of a theme that was developed for an important solo show at S.M.A.K. - Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, in Ghent, Belgium earlier this year.

Henning places portraiture, still life and landscape in dialogue with abstraction, and painting in dialogue with sculpture. A three-dimensional work appears to be an abstract painting that has morphed into a stand-alone sculpture. Henning’s creative strategies extend to the dramatic presentation of his work. He not only transgresses the traditions of high art but also high art exhibition and creates a dimly lit seductive “lounge” like installation. He has designed “Light Frames” to accompany all his paintings that are practical but exist as sculptural elements of his paintings.  He even chooses the color of the dark walls of the exhibition. His display strategies demonstrate his unusual critical wit and are a nod to his predecessors.

Anton Henning lives and works in Berlin. He has exhibited extensively internationally. He will open two solo museum shows at the Gemeente Museum, Den Haag, Netherlands and at ARP Museum in Germany in the Fall.  He has had major solo exhibition in the following museums and institutions; 31 Apotheotische Antiphrasen für Haus Esters, Museum Haus Esters, Krefeld, Germany; Oktogon für Herford, MARTa Herford, Herford, Germany; Frankfurter Salon, Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, Germany; Ziemlich schöne Malereien, Kunstmuseum of Art Luzern, Lucerne, Switzerland; and Surpassing Surplus, De Pont Foundation, Tilburg, Netherlands. 

September 7 - October 13, 2007

Christopher Grimes Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by Veronika Kellndorfer representing the modern architectural landmarks of Charles and Ray Eames, Frank Lloyd Wright, Richard Lind, and Rudolf Schindler.  This exhibition is a result of a residency by Kellndorfer at Villa Aurora in Los Angeles in 2003.  Her work re-examines the physical and social construction of space through her distinct technique of binding silk-screened photographic images onto large glass panels at 1472 degrees farenheit. 
 
Kellndorfer began her studies in Vienna and continued them at the Hochschule de Kunste in Berlin from 1984 to 1990.  Originally through painting and then through photography, she has been concerned with the ephemeral nature of architecture and space. With her new work, the viewer becomes acutely aware of the solidity of the ink’s imprint as the glass panels’ reflective nature invites the viewer and its surroundings to enter into the work and “see” these architectural sites differently. As Helga Lutz, an art historian from Berlin writes,
 
“The confusion that arises from the glass panels – their uncertain condition between image and non-image, the ambivalence of permeability and impermeability that undermines, mirrors and makes uncertain the act of seeing – is in striking contrast to the highly sober character of their physical material. What the photographic material shows is well known, indeed famous. Here are the icons of modern architecture in Los Angeles...Yet they are photographed in a decidedly unspectacular way, which both avoids defamiliarization and declines to emphasize particular individual styles. These photographs have the clearly recognizable aim of precisely rendering the functional clarity of the architecture.” 
 
Kellndorfer lives and works in Berlin. She has exhibited throughout Russia, the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States. She had a solo show at the Berlinische Galerie in Berlin and has exhibited at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles and at the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh and Contemporary Art Center, Moscow.  She has participated in large-scale public commissions all over Germany. She has held residencies at Villa Massimo in Rome and Villa Aurora in Los Angeles. She will be participating in a group show in 2008 at the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg in Wolfsburg, Germany.   

Christopher Grimes Gallery and Chung King Project are pleased to present Without Sun, a group exhibition organized by independent curator Carole Ann Klonarides, which includes artists Dan Bayles, Case Calkins, Euan Macdonald, Thom Merrick, Joshua Podoll, Anna Sew Hoy and Elizabeth Tremante, with works selectively shown in both galleries.

The concept of the exhibition began as rumination on the Chris Marker film Sans Soleil (Sunless, 1982), a fictional documentary that questions our ideas of appearance, time, memory, and history. In the film, Marker uses the conceit of documentary form and a diarist narrative between a globe traveling filmmaker and a woman who could be a lover or colleague, but who serves as a "vessel of another consciousness." Marker is interested in the banality of everyday life and its disruption – in particular, the impermanence of things and the subsequent need to resource and recycle (represented as a matter of survival in Africa), and to find everything a place (in Japan, where digital technology was conceived, there is a mourning for all that is lost with a spiritual quest for its return).  This meditation on representation and recollection recognizes that images are inauthentic representations of a lost past, but can also provide a key to transforming the present and the future.

Sans Soleil is itself an artifact from an already receding past, but like the film, the group exhibition Without Sun reflects on the notion of impermanence and the artist’s utopian need to alter this reality. Dan Bayles’ paintings are of re-imagined sites, which simulate technological interventions in what appears to be architectural or militaristic mappings; Case Calkins sculptural painted totems are receivers for transported psychic messages; multi-media artist Thom Merrick paints and sculpts aberrations within the desert landscape where he lives and works; Josh Podoll’s abstract paintings serve as portals to another dimension; Anna Sew Hoy sculptures are accumulations of the once functional and then discarded, that now invite reinvention; Euan Macdonald, conceptual media works depict the banality of everyday life, and the paintings of Elizabeth Tremante depict the terrifying beauty of ecological transformations.

The artists each combine a variety of materials and methods within their individual works that when seen together, reflect the landscape as a vector of very separate and detached subjectivities.

March 17 - April 14, 2007

Christopher Grimes Gallery will be presenting an exhibition of new work by German artist, Herbert Hamak. Hamak both maintains and revitalizes the tradition of painting with this new body of work. The paintings to be included in this exhibition extend the picture plane beyond the canvas support structure. The works are thus illuminated in reverse by light reflecting off the walls behind them, creating a new approach for investigating color within the genre of traditional monochromatic painting.

“His works impress because they are strongly structured, rigorous, transparent, and ambiguous entities. The transparency is such as to capture and retain light. The ambiguity lies in the vitreous consistency of the material, a midway point between solid, liquid and airy … It is not very important whether the work is on canvas and projects from the wall or if it builds up from a base on the floor: neither the one nor the other decides if a work is a painting or a sculpture. The decisive question is that matter reveals itself through its growth in volume.”

- Bertoni, Mario. “The Quintessence of Formed Form,” Herbert Hamak (catalogue), 2001

Herbert Hamak has exhibited in numerous museums and galleries throughout Europe, the United States and Japan. He is currently exhibiting a 5-meter column in the Main Garden at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, Italy, as well as working on a large-scale project at Castel Vecchio in Verona, Italy, which is due for completion in March of 2007.

March 17 - April 17, 2007

Christopher Grimes Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition by Max Jansons entitled, Field Notes. Jansons, in his second show with the gallery, focuses on a new body of work which ventures beyond organic forms to an observational study of the natural world. Jansons' work is specific in its content while still abstract in its execution.

A New York native, Jansons currently lives and works in Santa Monica, California. Jansons received his MFA from Columbia University and his BFA from UCLA. He participated in two solo exhibitions in 2004 and 2005 at Wooster Arts Space in New York. His work was included in the group shows Far Out at View Room Exhibitions in New York, curated by Joseph Roeder, and Some Dumb Fun, curated by David Pagel for the University of Nevada at Las Vegas.

I WON'T TAKE ANYTHING WITH ME WHEN I DIE, THOSE WHO OWE ME SOMETHING WILL PAY ME IN HELL.

January 13 - March 10, 2007

Christopher Grimes Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of video and photography by internationally acclaimed artist Miguel Rio Branco. Works presented will include images from his prostitutes series of 1979 in the main space as well as a 20-minute video, whose title holds the same name as the exhibition, in the south gallery.
 
“Meat, flesh, saliva, sweat, and blood pour and ooze, have been spilled on the floor, ceiling, walls, lenses, eyes. It’s all deeply and painfully intense, enigmatic, rich, raw, dark, luscious, primal, primitive. Boxers, capoeristas, prostitutes, Native Brazilian Indians, poor kids and older men from the streets, horses, fishes, sharks, snakes, dogs, coconuts, fires, knives and blades, scars and tattoos, dead men, dead roses. It’s all profoundly black, blue, maroon, orange, yellow, but above all red. Red is all over the place, in the images, the subjects, the objects, the settings, the backgrounds and foregrounds, the filters, and lenses, the shadows and lights. The play with light is elaborate and dramatic, so difficult to pin down, to uncover, to unveil. It’s all about life, death, survival, sex, violence, politics, pleasure.” It is with these words that Adriano Pedrosa introduces his “Real Poetry” essay on Miguel Rio Branco’s work, published in Entre los ojos by the Caixa Foundation in 1999. These words hold true for his current exhibition.
 
Miguel Rio Branco’s work cuts across the worlds of cinema, photography, photojournalism, and social and political criticism. Rio Branco’s photographs and films are included in such esteemed collections as the Centre Georges Pompidou, the SFMoMA, the Walker Art Center and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. His photography has been awarded the 1980 Great Prize of the First Triennale of Photography of the Museu de Arte Moderna, São Paulo, Brazil, and the 1982 Kodak de la Critique Photographique Award, Paris. He has had numerous one-person and group shows internationally, including his most recent exhibitions, Out of Nowhere, a retrospective survey with nine installations at the Groninger Museum in the Netherlands, and Dislecsia at the Noorderlicht Photogallery also in Groninger. Miguel Rio Branco has been a correspondent for Magnum since 1980 and his work has been published in magazines such as Aperture, National Geographic and Photo Magazine. Recently, Rio Branco has helped to illustrate, along with Mary Ellen Mark, Patrick Bard and Graciela Iturbide, the book Babel: A Film by Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, which companions the release of the major motion picture.

December 2, 2006 - January 6, 2007

Christopher Grimes Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of selected drawings by Takehito Koganezawa in the south gallery in conjunction with the presentation of A Hole in my Head, a book dedicated to his drawings.

Koganezawa has become known for his performances turned into multimedia installations, his neon works, his silent videos inspired by an oriental approach to the moving image as well as his drawings. His work with drawing seems to find its roots in surrealism’s automatic writing as well as in the 1980s new figuration in painting. Koganezawa’s drawings are characterized by an unconventional use of space as well as placement of the subject on the frame defined by the paper. More often than not he couples representational elements, such as renderings and sketches of human figures or the animal and vegetable kingdoms, with a variety of abstract motifs and shapes, making a wide use of discrepancies in scale and geometries. Koganezawa is also very much at ease with collage and the creation of peculiar compositions through the combination of unrelated images.

I see the huge empty hole at the edge of life.

It is dark, deep and quiet.

One day I threw something into the hole,

and it slightly gleamed.

It was my first work which was led by curiosity

All of my work might be thrown into the hole

and light it up for a moment.

I fear to fall, but I have to get closer

to the edge to see inside.

It is with these words that Koganezawa introduces his new book entitled A Hole in my Head reproducing part of his extraordinary drawing output from 1997 to 2006. With 140 pages and full color illustrations for 132 drawings this publication provides a new opportunity for an overview of Koganezawa’s focus on that specific medium, following the 2002 Drawings publication.

Koganezawa was born in Tokyo in 1974 where he graduated from Musashino Art University. He has been living in Berlin since 1998 and has exhibited internationally at various institutions such as Berlinische Galerie, Berlin; Institute of Visual Art, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee; Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, Germany; Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery; Institute for Contemporary Art, London; Internationales Filmfest, Rotterdam, The Netherlands; La Biennale de Montreal, Canada; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; Queens Museum, New York; Project Rooms, ARCO, Madrid, the Mori Art Center, Tokyo and the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin.

October 19 - November 18, 2006

Christopher Grimes Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new paintings and drawings by Julião Sarmento, perhaps Portugal's most acclaimed contemporary artist, entitled Film Noir.

In the main space he will present nine medium and large size paintings that draw their subject matter from 1940s and 1950s Hollywood leading ladies such as Lauren Bacall, Ava Gardner, Rita Hayworth, Kim Novak. In the south gallery, Sarmento will present nine drawings using the same subject matter as the paintings. Following a technique of the “white paintings”, that has become one of his familiar styles in the 1990s, Sarmento is combining photographs, drawings, and collage on the surface of a prepared canvas. In these he has silk-screened the opening sentences the stars have uttered in classics of the film noir genre. He leaves a good part of the space empty so as to allow the spectator to fill the gaps and imagine the connections that exist between the text, the image, the drawings and whatever else might come to populate the image. With this exhibition, Sarmento maintains his characteristically sparse compositions and explores even further the concepts of desire and voyeurism, amongst the many themes that have informed his work since the 1970s. Only this time the show is approached as a commentary on the way Hollywood films inflate the desirability of women. As he stated in an interview with Louise Neri in discussing his work, he is interested in “seduction, or the possibility of maintaining desire.”

Julião Sarmento lives and works in Estoril, Portugal.  Born in 1948, he has exhibited extensively since his first show in 1969. Defying categorization he has used film, painting, sculpture, drawing and installations as tools for the investigation of the subjects that intrigue him.

Sarmento’s work has been shown in numerous group shows around the world including the 7th and 8th Documenta in 1982 and 1987, the 1980 and 2001 Venice Biennial, and represented Portugal in Venice in 1997.  His work is included in public and private collections worldwide, including The Hirshorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C., the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Guggenheim Museum, New York; MoMA, New York; the Musée National d’Art Moderne Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; and the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo.

Recent major exhibitions have included: Drift, A Project by John Baldessari, Julião Sarmento and Lawrence Weiner, Centro Cultural de Belém, Lisbon, Portugal, and the Miami Design District, Miami Beach, Florida; Ghosts, CAV – Centro de Artes Visuais, Coimbra, Portugal; Echo, the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands; Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Deurle, Belgium and MEIAC Museo Extremeño e Iberoamericano de Arte Contemporáneo, Badajoz, Spain; Sarmento’s forthcoming solo exhibitions include the Museu Serralves, Porto, Portugal and the Fundacion Marcelino Botin at Santander, Spain.

September 8 - October 14, 2006

Christopher Grimes Gallery is pleased to announce the first US exhibition of João Louro, one of Portugal's most important contemporary artists.
 
João Louro came into prominence in the Portuguese and international art scene in the 1990’s both through his solo work as well as through a series of collaborative endeavors. Louro has been experimenting first and foremost with ideas that relate to his two primary subjects: language and images. Louro's work can be loosely defined as following on the heels of 1970’s conceptual art endeavors or minimalist practices in the theatrical sense. However, he defines himself in opposition to them and his relationship to the finished object is one that goes beyond art historical references. He refuses to be confined to a single medium; taking ideas as a starting point, he is at home using painting, sculpture, photography, drawing as well as film, selecting media as a director selects the musicians for his orchestra.
 
For his upcoming show at Christopher Grimes Gallery, Louro will present a number of new works from several of his ongoing series. A new large-scale piece, based on The History of Crime series, consists in 24 elements that create a unique work measuring 90 x 164 inches. There will be three new paintings from his famous Blind Image series in which he uses captions to describe an obliterated, or missing, image hiding behind layers of black or colored paint. Louro will also present a number of the smaller Phantomgraph works, unique silk-screened images on canvas. In these the artist plays with the spectator’s capacity to reconstruct the image based on the text. Last but not least, he will present for the first time a new series of works consisting of low relief words installed directly on the wall. Given the location of the gallery, Louro decided that all of the works presented will have a direct relationship to the film industry.

João Louro’s work has been the subject of solo shows at important institutions such as the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art (MACS), Oporto, (2000), and Centro Cultural de Belem, (CCB) Lisbon (2004). He participated in numerous group shows in Portugal, France, Holland, Italy, Spain, Ireland, Brazil and the US. Among his most important recent participations are Insite 05, San Diego-Tijuana (2005), and The Experience of Art curated by Maria de Corral for the 51st Venice Biennial (2005). 

July 8 - September 2, 2006

Ester Partegàs, in her first West Coast solo exhibition, will create a room-sized installation in the South Gallery. Partegàs will showcase four critically minded photographic compositions, expressing overarching concern for commercialization, consumerism and the growing culture of wastefulness pours into her artwork with heated flair and disturbing allure.

Ester Partegàs was born in La Garriga, Spain. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Partegàs has exhibited her work in several group and solo shows such as Outer City, Inner Space at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Samesation at Rice University Art Gallery, Houston, Texas and Fixed and Hazardous Objects at Virginia Commonwealth University in Virginia.

Christopher Grimes Gallery is pleased to exhibit the seductive new work by Marco Brambilla, titled Sync, from January 14 – February 26, 2006. Brambilla, whose background is in the film industry, samples mainstream imagery from both action films as well as the increasingly pervasive realm of adult film to create an experience that is both immersive and overwhelming. Through the use of rapid editing, the three channel video commandeers the space, creating both shocking subliminal impressions on the viewer with its information overload. Simultaneously, through deconstructing the often formulaic style of these genres, new life is breathed into each frame’s content, sending playful messages between the opposing screens. In the south gallery, a separate, single-channel video work titled Sea of Tranquility is featured.

Brambilla is an Italian filmmaker and artist who now lives in Los Angeles. His work is currently on view at the 2006 Sundance Festival as part a group of short films entitled Destricted organized by Matthew Barney. He has had solo shows at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York and the Contemporary Arts Forum, Santa Barbara as well as the Nevada Museum of Art, Reno. His work is included in the collections of the Guggenheim Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Arco Foundation, Madrid. Brambilla is currently exhibiting at SFMOMA as part of The Art of Design: Selections from the SFMOMA Collection. His work was included in the group show, Vanishing Point, at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio. He has also shown at the Kunsthalle in Bern, Switzerland, and at the Seoul Biennial. 

September 9 - October 15, 2005

Christopher Grimes Gallery will present the first U.S. solo show of work by Takehito Koganezawa. Dancing in Your Head, a three-channel video installation, will be shown in the Main Gallery and recent drawings in the South Gallery. Koganezawa's notion of space and time is oriented toward the various rhythms, movements, and currents of people and their ordinary actions. These elements are superimposed upon one another creating a unified, harmonious synchronization between image and soundtrack – irregular in meter with a changing tempo.

Dancing in Your Head is based on 297 short videos and audio tracks of sounds produced by everyday objects such as the snapping of a pair of scissors, the pouring of wine in a glass, and the piercing of an orange with a knife. The tracks are assembled on 3 DVDs, each composed of 99 tracks. They play simultaneously on 3 separate channels on random shuffle generating various combinations of actions and sounds. The base, rhythm and melodies that are generated and unpredictably sequenced refer to experimental music and leave an impression of a home-made laboratory in which, through compulsive time repetition of absurd experiments, formulas for new possibilities are generated. To quote the artist:

"Berlin, Tokyo, New York … they all have a very different relationship between time and city.  So I find that time is not very stable. It floats. Perhaps my main theme is no longer grasping time, but is more like catching a stream…or waves."

Koganezawa was born in Tokyo in 1974 where he graduated from Musashino Art University.  He has been living in Berlin since 1998 and has exhibited internationally at various institutions such as Berlinische Galerie, Berlin; Wohnmaschine, Berlin; Haunch of Venison, London; Institute of Visual Art, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee; Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, Germany; Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery; Institute for Contemporary Art, London; Internationales Filmfest, Rotterdam, The Netherlands; La Biennale de Montreal, Canada; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; Queens Museum, New York and Project Rooms, ARCO, Madrid, among others.

July 13 - September 3, 2005

Waltercio Caldas is widely considered to be one of the most important Brazilian artists working today and was recently named one of the most underrated artists of 2005 by Art News and Olga Viso, Director, Hirshhorn Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. Inspired by geometric abstraction that was popular in the 1940s and 50s in South America, he had his first major museum exhibition in 1975 at the Museu de Arte, São Paulo. In this show he will expand upon a body of work that was first previewed at the gallery in 2001 and, again, in 2003. 

Caldas prefers to work with diverse types of materials – each situation determining the media.  He may use color affixed directly to the wall, metal or common yarn. These materials allow him to sculpt the surrounding negative space, at times letting the elements, such as a breeze, change its form organically. It is said that he creates a maximum presence from the least amount of material.

In 2004 Caldas received the, City of Light Award, the highest honor at the Gwangju Biennial in South Korea curated by a prestigious panel including Russell Ferguson of the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and Kerry Brougher of the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C. His current projects include an outdoor, public commission to be included in this year’s Mercosur Biennial (Brazil) and designing the sets for Rio de Janeiro’s Theatro Municipal’s production of Verklarte Nacht and Erwartun, a ballet and opera respectively, both by Shoenberg. Recently, the artist participated in Beyond Geometry at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and MoMA at El Museo - Latin American and Caribbean Art from the Collection of the Museum of Modern Art both in 2004.  He has had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, Rio de Janeiro; Museum of Art, São Paulo; and Centre D’Art Contemporain, Geneva, among many others.  He represented Brazil in the 47th Venice Biennale and Documenta IX.

Christopher Grimes Gallery is pleased to present Allan Sekula’s Aerospace Folktales May 28 – July 9. A historical work that was first exhibited at the University of California at San Diego in 1973, Aerospace Folktales is made up of photographic prints, a soundtrack consisting of recorded conversations and a written commentary among large potted plants that are dispersed throughout the gallery.

Aerospace Folktales is an autobiographical piece told in a third person narrative that investigates the artist’s own class situation and familial circumstance in order to clarify his own political views.  The work contains two focal interviews.  One with the engineer, his father who was laid off from the aircraft manufacturer, Lockheed, and the other with his mother, the engineer’s wife.  Their words reflect the frustrations that come with finding employment at middle age, the stigma society attaches to being without it, and the couple’s pontifications on technology and the future of the country in the midst of the Vietnam War.

Through a series of images Sekula documents the couple and the life of their family in a working class neighborhood in San Pedro, CA.  He uses the strategy of the disassembled movie by combining voice, images and text that have been carefully edited and sequenced in order to link the…micro-sociological observations that are cast up for the camera or tape recorder…to a broader context and pattern of meaning. Sekula further states in the same interview with Benjamin Buchloh: This ‘disassembled movie’ would…function as a extended portrait, not of an autonomous individual, but of family members in relation to one another and to the structuring of the familial institution through ideology and socialization.

Sekula has recently exhibited at Vienna’s Generali Foundation which organized a comprehensive retrospective in 2003; The National Museum, Zadar, Croatia and the Harn Museum at the University of Florida, Gainsville.  TENT Center for Visual Arts in Rotterdam, will be opening Black tide/Marea negra, the artist’s previous body of work, in May. Fish Story, his extended photographic project produced between 1987-1995, was on view in its entirety at Documenta 11 in Kassel, Germany, 2002.  Additionally, he has shown at the Whitney Biennial (1993); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C.; Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam, Barbican Centre, London; Henry Art Gallery, Seattle; and the Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels.

Sekula's work is included in the collections of the Whitney Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art; Museum Boymans van Beuningen, Rotterdam; Centre Pompidou, Paris; MACBA, Barcelona; Vancouver Art Gallery; Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany; the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens, Greece and the Thyssen-Bornesmisza Art Contemporary in Vienna, among others.

March 5 - April 9, 2005

Christopher Grimes Gallery will present new works on canvas and an installation by Katharina Grosse from March 5 to April 9, 2005. A reception will be held for the artist on Saturday, March 5 from 6 to 8 PM. The gallery is located at 916 Colorado Avenue in Santa Monica.

Katharina Grosse’s radical approach to painting is in a constant state of evolution. Departing from her earlier work, the site-specific paintings tend to transform everything in their path which might include articles of fabric, books, eggs, completely furnished domestic settings, and large canvases propped against walls. The function of these objects become neutralized as the painting moves rhythmically from room to room, organically expanding to conceal doors, ceilings, and win­dows.

Evoking the spontaneity of common street graffiti with the sensibility of the modern colorist, Grosse’s application is assertive and her palette bold. She explores consistency, transparency, and contrast of color while experimenting with technique and painting gestures in both her site-specific works and her independent works on canvas.

Born in Freiburg/Breisgau, Germany in 1961, Grosse lives and works in Berlin and is currently on residency in New Zealand. She has been commissioned by institutions throughout the world including the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Magasin 3, Stockholm; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki; the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, Waltham, MA; and the Artsonje Museum Kyongju, Korea. Her work was included in the 2002 Bienal de São Paulo and the 11th Biennial of Sydney in 1998. This will be her second solo exhibition at the gallery.

May 22 - July 2, 2004

Christopher Grimes Gallery is pleased to present a new body of work entitled Elective Affinities by Tunga from May 22 – July 3. There will be an opening reception and performance by the artist Saturday, May 22 from 6 – 8 pm. This will be his first performance in Los Angeles since 1999 and will include actors and a musician in the context of a major new sculptural work. A new film by Tunga will be screened that will show simultaneously at the Cannes Film Festival. The gallery is located at 916 Colorado Avenue in Santa Monica.

Elective Affinities is a considerable shift from his 2001 exhibit, La Belle et la bête, building upon the intricate glossary of forms historically used to define his work. Tunga now puts forth the human tooth as the most noticeable addition to his work. Its presence supports an allegorical dialog and manipulates the volatile space between seduction and danger – inherent polar opposites. More directly, the teeth could reference the act of cannibalism, an activity through which the consumption of another empowers the individual and, therefore, results in an elevated plane of awareness and spirituality.

Tunga produces performance-based artwork in all media that investigates the subtle transaction among issues such as ritual, alchemy, sexuality, science and mythology. His frequent materials of choice – iron, magnets, fabric, copper and gel, hark to the open-ended experimentation informed by the Arte Povera movement.  However, his performances and many of the objects he produces reference shamanic ritual and a possible relationship to the work of early conceptualists like Joseph Beuys. While the performative manifests it self in the objects he creates they are allowed to stand independent of their historical foundations.

Tunga is the youngest of a group of Brazilian conceptual artists that emerged in the 70’s following the pioneering efforts of Neo-Concrete sculptor and performance artist Hélio Oiticica. Originally trained as an architect, Tunga left the field of architecture to pursue the visual arts in 1974. The artist is regarded as one of the most important contemporary Brazilian artists working today. He has exhibited at the Guggenheim Museum, Venice, Italy and New York; Istanbul Biennal, Istanbul, Turkey; Gwangju Biennal, Gwangju, Korea; Documenta X, Kassel, Germany; Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume, Paris; Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL and the Reina Sophia, Madrid, Spain.  He is the recipient of numerous awards and was nominated for the Hugo Boss Prize by the Guggenheim Museum in 2000. This will be Tunga's third solo show at Christopher Grimes Gallery.

June 6 - July 12, 2003

Christopher Grimes Gallery is pleased to present a new body of work by Allan Sekula entitled Black Tide/Marea negra. In December 2002, at the invitation of the Barcelona newspaper, La Vanguardia, Sekula traveled to Galicia in northwest Spain where, in November, a crippled tanker carrying more than 20 million gallons of oil had split in half, creating one of the worst environmental disasters in history. Sekula produced a sequence of documentary photographs, which are less conventionally dramatic and more meditative than typical photojournalism.  His pictures focus on the beleaguered coastal topography, the physical properties of the invading oil, and the Sisyphean labors of the volunteers who battle the black tide.

The work that resulted is subtitled Fragments for an Opera.  The artist’s accompanying text sketches out an imaginary "operatic" restaging of the event 30 years in the future.  With this allegorical strategy, the work takes on a pressing political theme: the profound gaps between political elites -- in this case the right-wing Spanish ruling party -- and the chorus of volunteers and "people of the sea," who actually confronted the disaster.

This May, Vienna’s Generali Foundation will open a comprehensive retrospective of work by Sekula that will also include the artist's early performance-based pieces, dating back to 1970.  Fish Story, his extended photographic project produced between 1987-1995, was most recently on view in its entirety at Documenta 11 in Kassel, Germany, 2002. Additionally, Sekula has exhibited in the Whitney Biennial (1993), Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C.; Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam, The Netherlands; Barbican Centre, London; Henry Art Gallery, Seattle; and the Palais des Beaux Arts, Brussels.

Sekula's work is included in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art; Museum Boymans van Beuningen, Rotterdam; Centre Pompidou, Paris; MACBA, Barcelona; Vancouver Art Gallery; Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany; and the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens, Greece.

April 12 - May 31, 2003

Christopher Grimes Gallery will present new works on canvas and an installation by Katharina Grosse from April 12 to May 31, 2003.  A reception will be held for the artist on Saturday, April 12 from 6 to 8 PM.  The gallery is located at 916 Colorado Avenue in Santa Monica.

Grosse is perhaps best known for her site-specific wall paintings that organically expand, covering doors, ceilings, win­dows and even moving from room to room. Each Grosse mural is unique, responding to the particular environmental, architectural and social circumstance. Her most recent installation was included in a group show curated by James Rondeau of the Art Institute of Chicago.  It was completed outside the Bass Museum in Miami in conjunction with Art Basel Miami Beach. The piece will remain indefinitely but has, by nature, a temporary existence.

The artist explores consistency, transparency, and contrast of paint and color while experimenting with technique and painting gestures in both her site specific works and her works on canvas.  In some of her paintings she employs a broad brush stroke to make visible the physical effort and temporal activity of her practice.  She may also use spray guns, evoking the spontaneity of common street graffiti with the precision of modern colorists.

Grosse is an artist with a significant international reputation. Born in Freiburg/Breisgau, Germany in 1961, she lives and works in Düsseldorf and currently has a traveling exhibit throughout Europe.  Her installations have been commissioned by institutions throughout the world including the UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, and the Artsonje Museum Kyongju, Korea.  Her work was also included in the 2002 Bienal de São Paulo and the 11th Biennial of Sydney in 1998.  This will be her first significant solo exhibition of work in the United States.

March 1 - April 5, 2003

Waltercio Caldas to exhibit new work at Christopher Grimes Gallery from March 1st to April 5th, 2003.  A reception will be held for the artist on Saturday, March 1st from 6 to 8 PM.  The gallery is located at 916 Colorado Avenue in Santa Monica. Caldas is widely considered to be one of the most important Brazilian artists working today. In the main gallery he will expand upon a body of installation work that was first previewed at the gallery in January, 2001. In the south gallery will be a selection of new wall and pedestal sculptures in stainless steel and thread.

He will create an experiential installation of works by juxtaposing sectors of pure color affixed to the wall - in vinyl or paint - against yarn suspended from the ceiling.  Caldas further articulates the tenuous relationship between the architectural space and those who occupy it.  From a distance, one sees an abstract pattern of lines intersecting areas of color.  However, upon closer inspection, one discovers that the lines are not as rigid as they first appeared-swaying slightly with the air currents in the room.  In the words of one critic: “The work insists persistently upon being a border.  It further insists upon reducing the border it is.  It wants to erase its outlines, its very constitution.In a similar fashion, the artists’ stainless steel wall and pedestal constructions explore ideas of experience and perception within a formal dialogue by using thread to lead the eye from one point to another.  They allude to perspectival space that is not wholly present creating, what Caldas says is “a maximum presence from the least amount of material.”

He lives and works in Rio de Janeiro and has shown extensively in Brazil and internationally since the 1960’s. He has had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, Rio de Janeiro, Museum of Art, São Paulo, and Centre D’Art Contemporain, Geneva, among many others, and also represented Brazil in the 47th Venice Biennale and Documenta IX.  Most recently he was included in Tempo, the inaugural exhibit of the Museum of Modern Art’s, Queen’s branch. His work is included in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Staaliche Museen, Kassel and the Museum of Modern Art, São Paulo.  

September 5 - October 12, 2002

Christopher Grimes Gallery presents a group show of works by Daniela Brahm, Anton Henning, Achim Kobe and Erik Schmidt from September 5th to October 12th.

The exhibition Bilder aus Berlin, curated by Ken Freed, brings together four Berlin painters that have taken an active part in the recent discussion of painterly practice in the context of art, design, architecture and urban landscape. The show aims to give not only a profile of the current painting practice in Berlin but also offers a perspective of Germany's aesthetic development and its impact on cultural production. 

In the Main Gallery, we will present recent works by Daniela Brahm and Achim Kobe. Bearing strong resemblance to design sketches, Brahm's works on paper cross the traditional borders of painting and architecture. Suggesting a sense of locality her painterly visions of urban spaces, however, remain two-dimensional. Kobe's wallpaper works step out of the canvas into the space intervening in the gallery architecture. Directly applied on the walls the wallpaper gives the space a sculptural quality, defined by forms and colors. 

In the South Gallery an installation of numerous works by Anton Henning will be on view. Making work in a variety of media, this artist will present recent paintings that are engaged in a complex dialogue amongst themselves. Perhaps a motif in one painting shows up in another image on the opposite gallery wall or a pattern is repeated in two different works—the interaction between the "intérieurs", still lifes, landscapes and pin-ups is multifaceted. 

May 26 - June 30, 2001

Christopher Grimes Gallery will present Roxy Paine in his first solo show on the West coast.

Roberta Smith says in the New York Times that Paine "might best be described as a brainiac with great technique and a prevailing love of moving parts."  He has arrived onto the international contemporary art landscape with an assortment of conceptually robust ideas.  Smith adds: " 'in progress' is a permanent state"  for this artist's work.

Among projects of the last few years, Paine has made machines to fabricate paintings, drawings, and sculptures automatically; he has recreated poppy fields as real-looking plots of land and has installed replicas of wild mushroom fields in the Terra Museum in Chicago and the Musée d'Art Américain in Giverny, France.  Paine was included in The Visionary Landscape exhibit at Christopher Grimes Gallery in Jan. 2000, and the 2000 Lyon Biennial in France and All-Terrain: Contemporary Visionary Landscape at Contemporary Art Center of Virginia in March 2001. His work is currently in 010101: Art in Technological Times at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art until July 2001.

Roxy Paine will exhibit a new body of work based on wild mushroom fields.  His painstaking recreations of fungi move beyond trompe l'oeil visual artistry by insinuating processes of decay and proliferation within the gallery. "Where there are mushrooms, there is death, whether it is dead wood or grass. . .," says Paine.  "Thus the field implies the decay of the gallery floor and the architecture surrounding it."  They also imply "regeneration because mushrooms are the first step in the breaking down of organic compounds, ultimately nourishing new life," he says.

A dichotomy between organic and technical processes invigorates much of Paine's work.  In numerous projects, the artist says he is "taking that romantic idea of [artistic] expression and forcing it into this context of mass production which it resists." By automating the fabrication of artwork and by reproducing natural growth, Paine extends his rational functioning to an absurd degree.  

Roxy Paine lives and works in New York, where he was born in 1966 and where he completed his graduate studies at Pratt Institute. 

September 8 - October 13, 2001

Christopher Grimes Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition by David Ireland.  In the main gallery, he will present a selection of sculptures created over the past 10 years and in the south gallery, he will present recent works on paper. This will be his first solo show in Los Angeles since 1992. Ireland, in his use of mundane objects 
such as wash basins, cabinets, doors and sinks, reveals that art can reside in any thing. As Ireland has said about his work: "So much of what I do is living my life and art simply occurs in the process."

July 1 - September 12, 1998

Am.ne.sia 1: loss of memory due usu. to brain injury, shock, fatigue, repression, or illness 2: a gap in one's memory 3: the selective overlooking or ignoring of those events or acts that are not favorable or useful to one's purpose or position

Amnesia is an exhibition of contemporary art from South America curated by Christopher Grimes, to be presented jointly at the Christopher Grimes Gallery and Track 16 Gallery from July 1st through September 12th, 1998. There will be an opening reception on July 1st at both galleries. This exhibition will present artists from Venezuela, Colombia, Argentina, and Brazil and will explore current artistic, political and cultural discourses taking place in South America. The curatorial thesis is not limited to a specific theme, nor to geography, but rather to the curator's recent travels and investigations of contemporary artists in South America. Amnesia will focus on artists working in South America, but will also include those whose origins are based in South America but are producing work in other parts of the world. The resulting exhibition will be influenced by the culture and the history of the continent, and the viewer will be called upon to draw his or her own conclusions regarding the links or cultural bridges between the diverse countries represented.

As the title suggests, Amnesia will explore the idea of South America as a forgotten continent within the context of a Western art world, and how issues are still formed, shaped and processed through a colonial history. The exhibition will also take on the idea of the human condition through artworks that serve to evoke memory and the complexities of the psyche, as well as issues of life, death, and the temporal nature of our anatomy. Amnesia will be framed within a formal, socio-political, post-modern ideal. 

All of the art that will be exhibited in Amnesia will be current work, and the sixteen artists represented will compromise a cross-section of younger, less-recognized artists and more established, well-known artists. The selection was subjective and based on the personal experiences of the curator and conversations he had with various South American curators, critics, writers, and artists. Amnesia will play an important role as the first major introduction of many of these artists to an international audience. A fully illustrated catalog will be published by Smart Art Press which will document the exhibition, in addition to informing the reader about contemporary art issues in South America. Some of the foremost scholars and critics writing about art in South America will be contributing essays to the bilingual catalog.

Artists: Waltercio Caldas, Emesto Neto, Miguel Rio Branco, Valeska Soares, Tunga, Jose Gabriel Fernandez, Jose Antonio Hernandez-Diez, Alfredo Ramirez, Roberto Obregon, Miguel Angel Rios, Monica Giron, Marcelo Pombo, Pablo Siquier, Sergio Vega, Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, Oscar Muñoz.

Writers: Monica Amor, Curator/Writer and Editorial Advisor for the U.S. for Art Nexus; Dan Cameron, Senior Curator for The New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York; Charles Merewether, Curator of The Getty Research Institute for Art History and Humanities; Adriano Pedrosa, Adjunct Curator, XXIV Bienal de Sao Paulo. 

April 18 - May 16, 1998

The El Niño Effect is a two-room installation consisting of a main room with sensory deprivation tanks, video and sound components and a second room consisting of a shower/changing area for two participants with direct access to main room. 

The use of the artwork for actual sensory deprivation requires only that a pair of individuals engage it simultaneously. There shall be no determination as to the relationship of the pair to each other, they may be intimate friends or partners, or they maybe complete strangers who choose to undergo a session of simultaneous sensory deprivation. Isolated in the tank with no external sounds or sensations, the participants undergo a mutual experience, albeit individually distinct from their partner, and separate from any viewing public. While there may be maximum time set for a session, 90 minutes is recommended, there should be no imposition of a minimum time. Any one individual may exit before the session is over while their partner may choose to remain. The pair is only asked that they enter the tanks at the same time. 

The two-channel video, Wind Shear, depicts looping time-lapsed footage of clouds traveling north and south above the U.S./Mexico border. The cloud movements are the result of wind-shear, climatic conditions often prelude to calamitous meteorological activity. The video is displayed on two small monitors or LCD displays above eyelevel centered in the room. 

The sound component, Sonambulo,is what at first appears to be a recording of a summer rain-storm that arrives suddenly and lasts about eleven minutes before it retreats into the distance. It mimics an ambient recording of nature strictly for the purpose of contemplation and relaxation.The only apparent deviation being that it starts abruptly with a gunshot. In reality this first explosive burst is the only real recorded sound and serves as the only source for all the subsequent auditory units that camouflage themselves as natural elements. The gunshot is replicated through a series of fractal equations to become the 385,000 bullets that make up the sound of thunder-claps and lightning, raindrops and even chirping crickets. Organized enough to feign the familiar narrative of a summer rain shower, and randomized enough to prevent the artifice from attaining structure or rhythm.