Category Archives: Events

Magnetic North At Ratio 3

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Ratio 3 in San Francisco recently opened a group show entitled Magnetic North featuring the work of Birgir Andrésson, Buck Ellison, Sigurdur Gudmundsson, Roni Horn, Ryan McGinley, Takeshi Murata, Geof Oppenheimer, Mitzi Pederson, and Christopher Williams. Through photography and sculpture each artist grapples with themes involving the natural world and the effects mankind has on planet earth. Multiple approaches are taken. Mitzi Pederson’s concrete and glitter fragment sculptures glisten as they speak of a broken environment while Sigurdur Gudmundsson’s Project for the Wind remains playful. The show is on view through May 11, 2013.

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Made With Color Presents: The Grotesque Paintings Of Christian Rex van Minnen

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CHRISTIAN REX VAN MINNENCHRISTIAN REX VAN MINNEN

Beautiful/Decay has partnered with premiere website building platform Made With Color  to bring you some of the most exciting contemporary artists working today. Made With Color allows you to create a website that is professional and easy to use with just a few clicks and no coding. This week we bring you the beautifully grotesque paintings of Christian Rex van Minnen whose clean and sleek website was built using the Madewithcolor.com platform. See Minnen’s  solo show entitled “Welsh Rats” at Robischon Gallery in Denver Colorado running through May 4th 2013.

“Welsh Rats” is a complexly layered presentation of new and recent paintings by emerging, New York-based artist Christian Rex van Minnen. Extolling his lavishly ornamented personal vocabulary of subtle and outrageous grotesqueries, van Minnen’s unsettling and disfigured, yet comical portraits hang alongside still life paintings of twisted tulips and hyper-real glistening entrails. Equally tangential, the exhibition title of “Welsh Rats,” is the Anglicization of the German word ‘Weltschmerz’ a reference by John Steinbeck in “East of Eden” meaning “world pain.” This sincere yet somewhat naive American (mis)interpretation of weighty European concepts of the past, reflects the confusion of language and history which is crucial to van Minnen’s artistic stance. This extends not just to the artist’s perception of European culture and painting but, also to how Native American and other ancient histories are also assimilated through art. Likened to a modern Archimboldo, van Minnen states, “I find myself either suppressing or indulging of my own desire to associate personal narrative to the raw visual information inherent in the material and process. Construction, destruction and reconstruction are symbiotic elements in the creative process allowing the image to fluctuate between abstraction and representation, truth and illusion, personal and archetypal.”

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Evan Nesbit At Ever Gold

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Evan Nesbit lives and works in Nevada City, CA. He has just opened his first solo exhibition with Ever Gold San Francisco entitled Light Farming / Heavy Gardening. From the press release: “A recent graduate of the Yale MFA program, Nesbit’s recent body of work includes mixed media paintings, perceptual objects, sculpture and interactive “space blankets”. Through exploration of painterly materials, visual process and participation from the public, this new body of work will explore the imbrication of patterns and experience that structures ones vision, suspended in doubt, sometimes cured in paint. Through the use of constructed “space blankets”, Nesbit challenges the viewer to interact with this exploration by taking refuge beneath their comfort, only to be immersed in the stereoscopic images produced by pin hole camera effects.” The exhibition is on view through April 26th.

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Ben Barretto at The Popular Workshop

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San Francisco Gallery The Popular Workshop recently opened a solo exhibition by Australian artist Ben Barretto entitled Self Help. From the press release: “Self Help continues Barretto’s ongoing exploration into recursion; with each of the series of works he presents ‘making’ themselves to some extent. That is, the chosen material and its inherent properties inform the process and drive the work into a constant loop of feedback.
Self Help presents iterations of this process over 3 different mediums, including hand woven tapestries made from used climbing rope, reconfigured nylon training pants and a set of oil paintings. Within each of these series, Barretto creates a system through which the material qualities of each medium are unbound and rebound into a continuous ongoing cycle, a cycle which sits in collaboration with the expressive additions of Barretto’s own hand, having these works sit somewhere between assemblage and action painting.” The show is on view through April 12, 2013.

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Dead Zone At Nudashank

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Baltimore Gallery Nudashank has just wrapped a new exhibition entitled Dead Zone. The exhibition was presented as a “new film” about the future by Alex Da Corte. The materials used in the various installations are so vital to the exploration of the show that they are listed in the press release as characters in the “film” (along with additional artists): “Starring (in order of appearance) Paint roller extension pole, package of dish sponges, enamel paint, gold chain, Coca-Cola can, electrical tape, pink giraffe patterned dust broom,clamp, wire, John Roebas‘ AMONG THE MAXIMS,vertical blinds, Alex Perweiler‘s Chameleon (Juicy Fruit), miniature hand chair, Thigh Masters, metal gridwalls, display brackets, Janet Jackson’s The Velvet Rope cds, Kyle Thurman‘s Untitled (501 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014), John Roebas’ UNTITLED (THE ONLY ONE I CAN’T), IKEA frames, digitally printed hamburger ottoman cover, Borna Sammak‘s Borna Print Burton Jacket, gold foil, carpet, mattress foam, cheese head, shampoo, mirror, Jamie Felton‘s Fog II,ratchet straps, Christmas ball, Andrew Gbur‘s Untitled, Sean Fitzgerald‘s 16 Colors, fringe, leggings, foam, rubber glove, cardboard tube, metal stand, zip tie.”

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Mel Davis’ Begin Here

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Berkeley based artist Mel Davis has just opened her latest exhibition at Eleanor Harwood Gallery entitled Begin Here. From the press release: “With these new paintings, Mel Davis explores the polarities between the natural and the allegorical, the decorative and the expressive, the representational and the gestural. She is engaged in a conversation that exists between these states, measuring the gaps between thought and language, trying to expand on her diverse visual vocabulary. Integral in Davis’s new paintings is the notion of foliage as a connecting thread, both pictorial and metaphorical, describing a taut emotional and private landscape that illustrates the potency of variation. The works are engaged in a simple pared down composition but push an expansive, dramatic and romantic use of language. Always with the goal of achieving visual pleasure, the paintings are calculations of light shifts, the space that trees occupy, the reverie that happens when looking out a window, reminding us of our fragile coexistence with the natural world and its everlasting powers.” The show is on view through April 27th, 2013.

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Ryan Travis Christian’s Well, Here We Aren’t Again

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Chicago based Ryan Travis Christian has just opened his first Museum Exhibition at CAM Raleigh entitled Well, Here We Aren’t Again. Ryan spent three weeks on site creating a large-scale wall drawing, sculptures and floor installation specifically for CAM Raleigh’s Independent Weekly Gallery. This new body of work continues his hazy vision of dank landscapes ripe with powerful patterns, cartoon personalities, and awkward situations expertly rendered with graphite and ink.

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Made With Color Presents: Wendell Gladstone’s Fabricated Myths

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Wendell Gladstone

Wendell Gladstone

Wendell Gladstone

Beautiful/Decay has partnered with website building platform Made With Color to present the works of some of the most exciting contemporary artists around. Made With Color is committed to providing a service to the creative community that allows them to easily  create a website that is professional and accessible. Visit them and start building your new website today!

We’ve been long time fans of Wendell Gladstone’s work since we first featured him in Beautiful/Decay Magazine Issue: T. Last week Wendell opened “Cave to the Grave”, a solo exhibition of new paintings at Kravets/Wehby Gallery in NYC.

In Cave to the Grave, Wendell Gladstone debuts a new series of paintings that depict the life of a man from his youth through his death. Referencing the allegory of Plato’s cave, the story begins with a boy immersed in darkness and continues to trace the boys’ life after he emerges from behind the curtain. Gladstone uses a collage sensibility by mining ideas and images to create his own fabricated myths. His paint handling is also diverse, a wide range of techniques are employed from very thick geometric hard edge areas, to subtle mists of airbrush, to organic veils of transparent stained color.

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