1: Can you tell me about your background?
Grew up in New Jersey, And sincerely feel my experience as a child being driven around in a car through Jersey’s sprawling landscapes inspired me. Both my parents went to Pratt, My dad for Architecture, and my mom for printmaking. My sister is a performance/ musician/ comedian/videographer.

2: How did you decide to use Bee Bee Guns ?
I use Bee Bees, because I love them as pure non-descript little orbs, like atoms, molecules or just simple building blocks as if they are the egg or seed of somethings origin.

3: What is the Idea / concept behind your art?
Something about design and how that rules our bodily experience. Finding viscerality in our relationship with technology and ultimately social relations with one another.

4: What is the Worst/Best thing about being an artist?
Life, work, and art are pretty much the same thing, which usually is great, but also is distracting.

5: Collectors – Gallerist – ”art investors” – Good, bad or ………?
I believe art brings the future closer. And whatever route is available for art to find eyeballs to view it, fund it, and advertise then the more avenues the better.

6: What would you ask an artist in a Q&A and Who ?
I kind of just wonder if any artist genuinely believes that their intentions actually match their audiences reading of it, and then I would challenge if it matters. No artist in particular.

Jesse Greenberg at Gallery Loyal >>>

Artist Page: >>>

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Different Types of paintings : lidocaine, Re-stretching, Cast Paintings, Clean Paintings, Sterilized Dirt, Sand.

Post from 2013 >>> Click Here

lidocaine – A lidocaine base and black pigment trace the stretcher bars of the canvas.  While wet the work is un-stretched and re-stretched, each break in the line causes a hint and cascading effect of the numbing agent.

Clean Paintings – These paintings are made by laying a pattern onto canvas, and tossing a handful of dirt onto the face while wet.  A sponge is taken and when all the dirt is cleaned, the work is finished. 

STERILIZED DIRT – Dirt is taken, mixed with an organic disinfectant and heated to 600 degrees.  This sterile material is then silkscreened onto canvas and re-stretched while wet.

Sand – These works are the collected loss of sanding the charcoal drywall mixture.  The silica sand is sifted from the drywall charcoal powder and applied using the same technique.

Link to Artist Page >>

Gallerist Page >>>>

The post Ryan Estep / Updated Post – 2014 appeared first on Copenhagen Contemporary.

ARTIST PROFILE 

Graham Collins (b. 1980, Washington, USA), received his BFA from The Corcoran School of Art and an MFA from Bard College. Collins’ artwork routinely incorporates a wide range of disciplines, including painting, sculpture, ceramics, woodworking, and architectural intervention. Collins currently lives and works in Brooklyn, USA.

The tinted monochromes combine the artist’s appreciation of normative craft forms, specifically woodworking and DIY window tinting, with the canon of abstraction. Collins forces a harmony from the disparate cultural and aesthetic values associated with these different entities. Taking a cue from Frank Stella’s dictum that “what you see is what you see”, the works function at first glance as minimalist forms, yet hold a bevy of specific information right on the surface. The weather-stained wood, the torn window tinting, the color, the shape of the stretcher, the heavy, sharp glass, a section of wall–all serve as a collection of marks that signify different histories. While pocked and torn in places, these planes still shimmer and act as a kind of mirror reflecting their surrounding environment. On closer inspection the viewer’s eyes focus back and forth on the surfaces of the glass, the canvas, the tinting – revealing what we ourselves look like when viewing an artwork. 

More Information: http://artdaily.com/news/63461/Sam-Moyer–Mika-Tajima-and-Graham-Collins-at-Halsey-McKay-Gallery#.Um63qpEg_ns[/url]
Copyright © artdaily.org

Link to Interview with Graham Collins

“32-year-old Brooklyn-based sculptor Graham Collins offered an unexpectedly alluring yet amusing view of the contemporary art object as both concept and decoration in his exhibition “Civic” at The Journal Gallery, which closed last weekend. Consisting of six reductive paintings (which are more objects than paintings) and two sculptures (which consist primarily of said paintings), the show nevertheless appertained to Sol Lewitt and Damien Hirst as readily as Crate & Barrel and AutoZone.Whitewall caught up with Graham to speak with him about his work.

Link to artis page at coopercolegallery – and at:  halseymckay

Show at The Journal – Graham Collins

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At Metro Pictures, Chelsea – New York, NY, USA , October 12, 2013

“The new N Bilder paintings by André Butzer are chromatic horizontal and vertical variations of one another, with nuances subtly differentiated by obfuscated color gradations. Each painting is an ornamental matrix, a materialized picture screen with apertures. They further his investigation of pure color and light begun in the N-Bild series of the past few years. “N” is Butzer lexicon; “N” is binary, a non-denominational marker signifying a phenomenological presence. “N” is a Zen koan both empty and active at the same time. “N” is a pietà, the vertical bar upholds the weight of the horizontal one as a body. “N” is an elusive state of being, a contrariness whereby the maximum amount of expansive space is conveyed with the least amount of visual information. Embedded within these planar forms are the intense color spectrums found in the bustling color palette of his previous output. On the surface, the mercurial egg tempera pigment has been worked up into a highly refined emulsion. The paintings tonality offer a calm antidote to the cliché’s of expressionist angst and are free of representational limitations. All of the well-known cartoonish Butzer signifiers are now dissolved, yielding into a zone of stability and a state of grace.”

Text from Patricia Low Gallery

Link to Artist Page

Link to more pictures of N Bilder by Andre Butzer

The post Andre Butzer – Upcoming Show in New York 2013 appeared first on Copenhagen Contemporary.

Solo Show at The Hole NYC in 2013

Link to artist page at the hole  – Kadar Brock

In what are his most well-known type of paintings—the sanded, scraped and distressed works that are often heavily perforated stretched canvasses—Brock originated his approach to breaking down and rebuilding older artworks.

Taking paintings from almost a decade ago that were bright and geometric, Brock scrapes the works down and covers them with layers upon layers of pastel pigments, then attacks the results by hand in a laborious process of both painting and scraping with a knife and sanding with a belt sander.

The former painting’s composition dictates where the razor catches and the sander obliterates, as the past is transformed into an ethereal and strongly objective work that hovers between materials and art, past and present.

Kadar Brock’s debut solo exhibition, on view at the Hole, features abstract paintings that are the result of buffing surfaces, scraping, collecting, and repurposing stray materials. They’re beautifully damaged objects, full of vibrant detail. In addition to his signature large-scale pieces—created by sanding down surfaces marked with flashe, oil, acrylic, house paint, and spray paint—this suite of new works includes ones constructed from studio leftovers and debris, arranged on canvas like so much colorful confetti.

By Scott Indrisek , September 5, 2013

“They’re pretty randomized,” Brock told me. “The material is from all the paint chips I’ve culled while deconstructing the sanded works—those gestures and brushstrokes are entirely de- and re-contexualized.” This sort of artful recycling is also apparent in a medium-sized work, equal parts sculpture and painting, entitled residuumii. “As I work on the larger pieces I collect the dust that’s sanded off of them, and then cast it into a slab of Hydrocal,” he explains.

“It’s another reconstituted painting: Same basic materials, different configuration. I like these ritual processes that turn around my relationship to mark-making—and how info is inherently, like an aura, maintained in paintings after that turnaround.” Brock’s exhibition is on view in conjunction with one by Kaspar Sonne, featuring paintings that look like they’ve been burned and dynamited off their stretcher bars. 

Does he, I wondered, feel like he’s part of some new generation of painters, pushing the medium forward by destroying it? “I see it as we’re setting up rituals and actions that make painting the result of something almost performative,” he surmises, “but not in some genius-arena-autonomous way; more in a ‘labor labor every day’ kind of way.”

Text from The Hole Solo Show in New York ! 

The second body of work exhibited here is another form of ritualistic painting, where all the scrapings of paint and the ensuing colorful chips end up. Swirled together like a tornado of shredded pigments, these paintings are dense and insistently autonomous paint, a thicket providing no point of entry. 

The final body of work exhibited here is the most obliterated, the pulverized dust from his artistic process, cast delicately into plaster and retaining the powdered and puckered surface, the final point of the destruction of painting before nothingness, the atoms of his artistic universe.

While the technique is an important part of both the appearance and concept behind his work, these pieces on their own exist in a phenomenological world of ideas and concepts divorced from process. The composition of the pieces is dictated by former gestures made with a paintbrush, and ultimately the final work maintains some of that gestural quality: however, due to the transformation of the original piece, these gestures become frozen, petrified, grown over. The works hint at the artist hand, even though the artist’s hand is here wielding a sander and razor. The hand as we see it manifest in the final result is a ritualistic, labor intensive hand, a repetitive, blistered and very dirty hand.

While expressionistic brushstrokes have always deified the romantic artistic genius in this metonymically phallocentric way, these works bury that gesture under labor and randomness, taking away that precious autonomy and also the burden of decision making. The process of making the work is also the process of deconstructing the self, and if the sublime is an idea of a lone genius confronting some consciousness-obliterating hugeness (nature, technology, etc.), then how do these paintings that cede that first-person centrism appear just so sublime?

BIO:

KADAR BROCK

b. 1980 New York, NY

Lives and works in Brooklyn, NY

EDUCATION

2002 BFA Cooper Union School of Art; New York, New York

The post Kadar Brock Artist from New York – Openings in 2013 appeared first on Copenhagen Contemporary.

Link to Halsey Mckay group show

“Sam Moyer is painting the back of sheets of glass with a special glass paint. The Canvas pieces, like those from her paintings, are placed behind this scrim of glass. That is then backed with Plexiglas for strength and an additional layer of depth.”

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Foto/ Photo: Trondheim kunstmuseum/ Anders Solberg

Lips Painted Red –

Parker Ito – New York 2013

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