Apple Sculpture By Claude LaLanne Photographed at Paul Kasmin Gallery By Gail in January 2019
They say that celebrity deaths come in threes. This past week we said goodbye to playwright Terrence McNally, legendary Drummer Bill Rieflin and, on a local scale, NYC Gallerist and Photographer Paul Kasmin, whose renowned Chelsea galleries have provided Worleygig.com with amazing content for more than a decade.
Continue reading RIP NYC Gallerist Paul Kasmin
All Photos By Gail
When everyone else was waiting on line to get into the Mark Ryden exhibit across the street, I was in the newest addition to the Paul Kasmin Gallery empire taking photos of Eric Parker’s latest show (and third solo-exhibition with the gallery), which had opened the previous night. Because timing is everything.
Talking Point, 2015
Talking Point, Detail (Above and Below)
Erik Parker’s Undertow is an exhibition of new paintings which represent a confluence of ideas and styles explored in previous bodies of work including the Maps, Heads, Landscapes and Hieroglyphics. Parker’s iconic, highly-saturated palette and intricate compositions are amplified by collage and airbrush techniques that create a balance of density and open space.
Taste Maker, 2015
Undertow offers insight into the evolution of Parker’s work over the last two decades. Here, the artist continues to critically chart the world’s current political, social, and economic landscapes with compositions brimming with references to media, popular culture, music, and art history. Synthesizing multiple elements from his myriad styles into new dynamic compositions, the artist works at breaking down the metanarratives of late modernist painting while simultaneously digesting the pictorial chatter of scrolling feeds of social media.
Offshore, 2015
Highlighted in the exhibition are Parker’s new shaped canvases with which he develops the narrative possibilities of form. In Offshore the support structure of the canvas takes the shape of binocular lenses, framing the action as if seen from afar.
Offshore, Detail
Disconnected, 2015
Parker’s large-scale, two-part shaped canvas titled Disconnected, features a Pyramid representing the global elite. The pyramid is physically separated from the second canvas – literally leaving the rest of the picture, or perhaps, society behind.
Front Runner, 2015
Erik Parker’s Undertow will be on Exhibit Through January 23rd, 2016 at Paul Kasmin Gallery, Located at 297 Tenth Avenue in the Chelsea Gallery. District.
New Jekyll Island Club By Erik Parker
Summer may be quickly fading away, but German-born artist Erik Parker has brilliantly immortalized the feeling of the endless summer in his new series of paintings, Bye Bye Babylon, up now at Paul Kasmin Gallery on 10th Avenue. On view in the gallery are eleven of Parker’s 2012 still-life and jungle-landscape paintings, which all incorporate vibrant, fluorescent colors and fun, almost cartoonist shapes. Some of Parker’s images reminded me of the wildly hallucinatory animation on Adult Swim’s subversive series, SuperJail. If you’ve seen that show, and see Parker’s work in this exhibit, you will know what I mean by that comparison
Colombier Beach
Updating these traditional art-historical genres through the pictorial idioms and sly humor of satirical cartoons, psychedelia and underground comic books, Parker’s paintings provide vistas into brilliantly colored worlds of semi-sentient flora and idiosyncratic geometries.
For Parker, creating the jungle paintings provides him with a way to escape into custom-made exotic locales without having to leave his Brooklyn studio.
New Bimini Trail
He draws inspiration from the imaginary landscapes of Henri Rousseau — who never left his native France, and Joseph Yoakum — who mixed his memories of his own travels into his visualizations of unknown cities and countries. In Parker’s fantastical scenes, fleshy, claw-like leaves and snaking vines part to reveal panoramas of placid rivers and distant mountains.
Detail from New Bimini Trail
Lending a sense of tongue-in-cheek surrealism to Parker’s compositions, the leaves and vines cast unrealistic shadows onto the sea and sky behind them. Following the logic of cartoons and dreams, these jungle scenes and still-life paintings feel seductive and eerie; visually sensible but also askew.
Analog Babylon
Trust me that photos cannot fully capture the intensely bright colors of these canvases. If you’re intrigued at all, do make it over to Paul Kasmin while the show is up.
Erik Parker’s Bye Bye Babylon will be on exhibit through October 13, 2012 at Paul Kasmin Gallery, Located at 293 Tenth Ave, Street Level, New York City. Gallery Hours are Tuesday – Saturday, 10:00 AM – 6:00 PM.
Babylon Chatta