Tag Archives: Roxy Paine

Roxy Paine’s Farewell Transmission at Paul Kasmin Gallery

Meeting
Meeting, 2016, Scale Diorama By Roxy Paine (All Photos By Gail)

Paul Kasmin Gallery is currently hosting Farewell Transmission, a two-venue exhibition of recent sculpture by Roxy Paine, for the artist’s first major New York solo exhibition in three years and the first of his sculpture with Paul Kasmin.

Over the past 25 years, Paine’s sculptures ruminate upon the clash of the human and the natural worlds, and the warring of chaos and control that result from humanity’s attempts to manage the process.  Farewell Transmission presents two distinct series, Dioramas and Dendroids; each express the artist’s anxieties about the human impact on our habitat and the mechanized tools that seek to impose order and control, often to disordered and unpredictable ends.

In his Dioramas, Paine adopts and adapts a format familiar within the natural history museum, but instead of employing human artifice to represent the natural world, Paine’s Dioramas use organic materials to represent quotidian environments where the fundamental states of the Homo Sapien can be observed. Rooted in the Greek language, diorama translates to “through that which is seen.” Paine’s Dioramas are a device through which one can examine our own habitat, culture and society.  Seemingly innocuous at first, each Diorama presents a room devoid of actual figures, yet charged with their psychological dilemmas.

Meeting Detail

Meeting (2016) is the artist’s most intimate in scale from the series, and implies through attentive details such as a ring of non-descript office chairs, the community space that hosts one of the variety twelve-step substance abuse programs.

Meeting Coffee

Experiment
Experiment, Installation View

Experiment (2015) the only diorama of an actual historical event, though one for which we have no photographs, depicts the setting of a 1950s-70s CIA surveillance program examining the effects of LSD.

Experiment Detail

Looking at this hallucinatory experience through another surveilling environment heightens the paranoid feelings of control, manipulation and misguided forensic observation. Personal associations and past encounters with these familiar spaces inevitably creep into the imagined scenes of the Diorama, collapsing the distance between the viewer and that which is on view.

Experiment Detail

Desolation Row

In Desolation Row (2017) a remarkable new work, Paine synthesizes the tree silhouettes of the Dendroids, the simulation of the Dioramas and the expansiveness of his earlier Fields series to replicate nature in solitude and at its most poignant moment.

Desolation Row

Returning to the motif of the tree, Paine presents them in Desolation Row as charred, barren, and destroyed. Positioned across a 13-ft table, Desolation Row is an unflinching portrayal of the infinite cycle of control and chaos reaching its devastating yet paradoxical conclusion where Paine leaves the question of renewal to be resolved.

Dendroids Installation View

Fusing organic forms, such as trees, flowers, and fungi with man-made structures and materials among which include stainless steel, epoxy, and polymer, Paine invents, distorts, surprises and confounds our perception of the natural and inorganic and the real and artificial.

Dendroids

The new Dendroids, Paine’s first iteration in over 5 years of his iconic stainless steel sculptures, further expand upon this multifaceted, yet imperfect, transformation of the industrial into the natural, with even more daring grafting, beguiling engineering, and wild experimentation.

Organ Tree

In the new works, tree trunks, branches and roots intertwine with lungs and hearts, or with electricity poles and debris and detritus.

Utility Pole Treet

Ground Fault (2016) poetically melds a tree’s roots and trunk with two transformers that are used to circulate electromagnetic energy.  Paine’s Dendroids continue to reveal the intrinsic affinities and twisted connectivity of a tree’s form with other plant, human and man-made systems.

Dendrils Triptych

Roxy Paine: Farewell Transmission, will be on Exhibit Through July 1st, 2011 at Paul Kasmin Gallery’s Locations at293 and 297 Tenth Avenue, at 27th Street, in the Chelsea Gallery District.

Roxy Paine Signage

Dendrils

 

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Bloodflames Revisited at Paul Kasmin Gallery

Roxy Paine Incident/Resurrection, 2013
Roxy Paine, Incident/Resurrection, 2013 (This Image Courtesy Paul Kasmin Gallery. All Other Photos By Gail)

Paul Kasmin Gallery, in collaboration with Rail Curatorial Projects, is currently hosting the exhibit Bloodflames Revisited, curated by Phong Bui. For this exhibit, in which bright red is a predominant thematic color, a red wooden catwalk has been constructed inside the gallery for visitors to walk on, and the floor has been covered with straw. Very interesting!

Red Catwalk and Straw

Bloodflames Revisited includes works by Worley Gig favorites like Lynda Benglis, Will Ryman, Roxy Paine and Cindy Sherman plus John Bock, Lee Bul, Cameron Gainer, Candida Höfer, Bill Jensen, Michael Joo, Deborah Kass, Alex Katz, Benjamin Keating, Glenn Ligon, Chris Martin, Daniel Joseph Martinez, Donald Moffett, G.T. Pellizzi, Joanna Pousette-Dart, Dorothea Rockburne, Do Ho Suh, Superflex, Tunga, Not Vital and Joe Zucker.

“We were all interested in building a field of vision in which the relationship between the works of art and the spectators is intergrated with greater amplification,” explains Bui.

Will Ryman Rose
Rose I By Will Ryman

In this exhibit, Bui and the participant artists pay homage to the seminal March 1947 Bloodflames exhibition at Hugo Gallery, which Alexander Iolas directed before opening his eponymous gallery. Organized by Nicolas Calas and designed by Frederick Kiesler, Bloodflames presented works by Arshile Gorky, Matta, Isamu Noguchi and Jean-Claude Reynal among others.

Kiesler’s design called for an unconventional exhibition construction, wherein artworks were projected and tilted at various angles from the gallery walls, to allow uncommon perspectives of view. His bold architectural interventions dissolved the barrier between viewer and artwork. By recontextualizing this groundbreaking exhibition, Bloodflames Revisited evokes the inventive spirit and unified spatial experience of the original exhibition.

Redemption of the Flesh
Daniel Joseph Martinez, Redemption of the Flesh: It’s just a little headache, it’s just a little bruise; The politics of the future as urgent as the blue sky, 2008 (Computer-controlled animatronic cloned sculptural installation, fiber-glass and animal hair over aluminum, and synthetic “blood”).

The imposing Daniel Joseph Martinez piece above takes over the entire rear wall of the front gallery. I am sure it looks quite different at this juncture than it does in this pic from the opening reception.

Here are few of our favorite pieces from the show.

Michael Joo, Intuited Composition, 2008
Michael Joo, Intuited Composition

Specimen Series: Stove
Do-Ho Suh, Specimen Series: Stove

Alice Cooper

Look, it’s Alice Cooper!

IMG_2442

Bloodflames Revisted will be on Exhibit Through August 15th, 2014 at at Paul Kasmin Gallery, Located at 293 Tenth Avenue at 27th Street in the Chelsea Gallery District.

Bloodflames Exhibit Signage

Must See Art: Roxy Paine Maelstrom Sculpture on the Roof of The Met

Gail Roxy Paine Sculture
Photo By Geoffrey Dicker

Geoffrey took this fun picture of me standing inside of the Maelstrom sculpture by artist Roxy Paine, which currently installed on the roof of the Met. As you can see, yesterday was a beautiful day in the city.