Robert Goodman @ Seraphin Gallery

Robert Goodman
"Pulse"
March 7 - April 20, 2013
Opening reception: Friday, March 7, 6 - 8 PM

Fleisher Ollman

Eugene Von Bruenchenhein Time Produced Non Better October 10 - December 7, 2013 Reception: Thursday, October 10, 6-8pm Fleisher/Ollman This exhibition will provide a sampling of the breadth of work made by Eugene Von Bruenchenhein (1910-83), the Milwaukee-based, self-taught artist, active from the early 1940s through the early 1980s. Living in a modest house, which served as both a studio and exhibition space, with his wife and muse, Marie, he created a world of highly original beauty steeped in an idiosyncratic synthesis of non-Western art and architecture, girly magazine archetypes, theories of cosmic genesis, and current events like the Cold War fear of nuclear annihilation. Time Produced Non Better showcases Von Bruenchenhein's signature ceramics; a selection of paintings of imaginary architecture and fantastical botanical imagery; pinup-inspired black and white photographs of his wife; and rarely seen 35mm color slides of Marie and arrangements of completed art works photographed in the artist's backyard, presented in a slideshow format. Concurrent with the exhibition at Fleisher/Ollman, Adams and Ollman, Portland, OR presents a three person exhibition with Eugene Von Bruenchenhein, Felipe Jesus Consalvos and Paul Lee on view from October 4 - November 9, 2013.  A 1947 hand-colored photographic self-portrait by Von Bruenchenhein is inscribed by the artist's hand with the following: "Edward the first king of lesser lands/Time cannot touch/He moved ten centuries/A fortress of good/Time Produced non [sic] better." While we can surmise that this statement is an homage to his father, Edward, the text's superimposition on Von Bruenchenhein's own image suggests his belief in his own greatness, a kind of icon of self-proclaimed genius. One might be struck by the artist's self-confidence--after all, he was a man of lesser means, a baker who lived frugally (he began the profession in 1944, shortly after marrying Marie, and retired in 1959 due to health reasons). His steadfast ego belied the fact that he remained unrecognized as an artist outside of his family and close friends, rarely exhibiting his work during his lifetime, though his practice spanned more than four decades. In order to make his art, however unacknowledged that pursuit was, he inhabited two different worlds--one workaday and the other a realm of artistic fantasy. The latter was made real through a tireless nocturnal work ethic, in which he sometimes collaborated with his wife Marie. Von Bruenchenhein, along with several other self-taught artists, is featured in the 2013 Venice Biennale, The Encyclopedic Palace, June 1-November 24, and was recently included in The Alternative Guide to the Universe, Hayward Gallery, London, Summer 2013, and Great and Mighty Things: Outsider Art From the Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Collection, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, Spring 2013. Fleisher/Ollman has exhibited Von Bruenchenhein's work since the mid 1990s.

ROB SWAINSTON @ MARGINAL UTILITY

ROB SWAINSTON: WOODCUT MAP OF UTOPIA FROM THE SEPTEMBER 2013 EDITION

6 September – 20 October 2013

Opening reception Friday, 6 September 2013, from 6 – 11 pm

Artist reception Friday, 4 October 2013, from 6-11 pm

Marginal Utility is proud to present WOODCUT MAP OF UTOPIA FROM THE SEPTEMBER 2013 EDITION, a solo exhibition by the New York based artist Rob Swainston.

The show explores the interface between political and institutional structures, historical memory and print technology by exposing the “unstable image” in moments of visual interference—moiré, bitmap, collage, and line.

The exhibition draws its title from an illustration heading in a mass-market edition of Renaissance humanist Thomas More’s Utopia, picked up for free at New Harmony Vegetarian in Philly’s Chinatown, several years ago.

The illustration, Woodcut Map of Utopia From the March 1518 edition, is now out-of-copyright and displayed in cheap reproduction on self-destructing paper. This mass-market paperback is a shadow of a reminder that once people could write a book describing an idealized society via a fictionalized conversation between two people that did actually exist.

While print technologies were once cutting-edge methods of disseminating representations (maps, fine art reproductions), or political machination (treatises, manifestos, proclamations, or representations of historical events), we now have the fragmented and democratized pixel.

Swainston’s Woodcut Map addresses the dismantling of the printed image. The theme is explored in multiple forms in which different print media masquerade as each other; the line between print, video and painting is blurred; cast iron poses as wood; and a deconstruction of Léon Frédéric’s Four Seasons is translated as an inscrutable color explosion, matching our current state of “global weirding,” to Frédéric’s 1894 Academic idealism.

Swainston’s recent work employs print-based installation, video, and works on paper to explore print technology, the meaning of the image and ultimately the fragmentation and disappearance of the image.

Mario Ybarra @ Fabric Workshop

Mario Ybarra, Jr.: Books Of Drawings, Beyond Our Dreams, Blame Our Dads, Brains On Drugs, Better Off Dead

August 30, 2013–Fall 2013

Opening Reception:

Friday, October 4th, 6:00–8:00 pm
Press & Members Preview: Artist talk by Mario Ybarra, Jr. at 5:30 pm

The Fabric Workshop and Museum (FWM) presents an exhibition of new work by artist-in-residence Mario Ybarra, Jr. whose work involves examining hidden histories of U.S. street culture through large-scale, mixed media installations. Ybarra, Jr.’s collaboration with FWM serves as a vehicle for telling a creative, visual narrative of his former street crew B.O.D., established in 1990.

Bio
Born 1972, Wilmington, California. Lives and works in Wilmington.

Mario Ybarra, Jr. received an MFA from the University of California, Irvine (2001) and a BFA from Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles (1999). Recent solo exhibitions include Double Feature at Honor Fraser Gallery, Los Angeles (2013); Mario Ybarra Jr.: The Tio Collection at the Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum (2012); Wilmington Good at the Cardi Black Box, Milan, Italy (2011); Silver and Blacks at Michael Janssen Gallery, Berlin, Germany (2010); Take Me Out…No Man Is An Island at the Art Institute of Chicago (2008); and Black Squirrel Society at Lehmann Maupin Gallery, New York (2008). Ybarra, Jr. has been included in such group exhibitions as Made in L.A., the Los Angeles Biennial organized by the Hammer Museum in collaboration with LAXART (2012); Invisible Cities at the Instituto Cervantes, Madrid, Spain (2010); the Whitney Biennial, New York (2008); Phantom Sightings: Art After the Chicano Movement at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Los Angeles (2008); Prague Biennale 3 in Prague, Czech Republic (2007); The World as a Stage at the Tate Modern, London, UK, as well as the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2007); the California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach (2006); and Alien Nation at the Institute of Contemporary Art, London, UK (2006).