/ Gallery One

Sleep

Ed Ruscha
Rosemarie Trockel
Robert Gober
Jorge Macchi
Paul Thek
Felix Gonzalez-Torres
Jānis Avotiņš

curated by Paolo Colombo
September 25 – December 17, 2016

/ Gallery Two

David Adamo
Untitled (Music for Strings)
September 25 – December 17, 2016

/ Gallery Three

Devin Farrand
Heft
September 25 – November 5, 2016

LOS ANGELES­ — September 8, 2016 ­— Ibid Gallery (London & Los Angeles) will open a new gallery in Downtown Los Angeles on September 25,2016 at 670 S Anderson Street. Designed by wHY, the 13,000 square feet (1,200 sq. m.) of connected warehouses will be inaugurated with three exhibitions; Ibid Gallery will present two solo presentations from Devin Farrand and David Adamo, in addition to a group exhibition in the main space.

The largest exhibition space, Gallery One, will be inaugurated with a group show, Sleep, curated by Paolo Colombo. The title of this show touches on a mood, rather than on an abstract concept of sleep: the presentation includes a number of works that illustrate the dimension of dreaming, of surrender, and of submission to states of trance and slumber. A rare group of modern and contemporary artists will be exhibited together to include key works by Ed Ruscha, Rosemarie Trockel, Robert Gober, Jorge Macchi, Paul Thek, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, and Jānis Avotiņš. Sleep is the first of a series of exhibitions hosted by guest curators that Ibid Gallery will present in its space.

Gallery Two, dedicated to works of significant provenance, will feature a re-staging of David Adamo’s installation Untitled (Music for Strings), 2010, exhibited for the first time since its debut at the 2010 Whitney Biennial. Part of an untitled ongoing series, this installation is comprised of conventionally masculine tools and utilitarian implements. An ax, arrow, knife, and a pair of scissors—lodged into the wall as if forcibly thrown in an act of violence—loom amongst canes hacked and whittled into fragile, useless spindles. Such emasculated objects are paired with a deconstructed violin case and reconfigured wire hangers to create a spare, repetitive arrangement that speaks to both the aggression and simplicity of the objects. To offset the repetition, Adamo carefully adds pools of wood shavings around the objects as a nod to his aesthetic process.

Gallery Three focuses on emerging artists either based in Los Angeles or showing for the first time in the city. Here, the Los Angeles-based artist Devin Farrand will present a new body of work for Heft, his first Los Angeles solo show. Farrand’s sculptures are drawn from his cross-generational family tradition of building small airplanes, boats, cars and furniture. Using his connection to labor, industrial materials, and manufacturing processes, Farrand abstracts and transforms shop equipment into streamlined minimal objects.

Printed Matter, Inc. presents
THE NY ART BOOK FAIR
September 20-22, 2013
Preview: Thursday, September 19, 6-9pm
MoMA PS1

Printed Matter presents the eighth annual NY Art Book Fair, from September 20 to 22, at MoMA PS1, Long Island City, Queens. 

Join us for our opening night preview featuring a live set from MASKS on the steps of MoMA PS1. Comprised of New York City-based duo Alexis Georgopoulos and Max Ravitz, the group incorporates elements of underground dance music through analog synthesizers and drum machines. Supporting MASKS, one of the most enigmatic artists on the L.I.E.S. roster, Terekke (aka Matt Gardner) makes subliminal, dub�influenced, tape hiss�fueled basement house.

Free and open to the public, the NY Art Book Fair is the world's premier event for artists' books, catalogs, monographs, periodicals, and zines. Last year, the fair featured 283 booksellers, antiquarians, artists, and independent publishers from twenty-six countries, and was attended by more than 25,000 people.

Hours and Location
Friday, September 20, 12�7 pm
Saturday, September 21, 11 am�9 pm
Sunday, September 22, 11 am�7 pm

MoMA PS1
22-25 Jackson Avenue at 46th Avenue
Long Island City, NY (map)

SADE LA is proud to present ‘Absinthe’, a solo exhibition from Chris Lux (San Francisco, b1980), with an opening reception on Sunday, September 18.

Chris Lux’s ‘Absinthe’ will be on view at SADE until October 23.
Gallery hours are Tues–Sat from 1–6pm, and by appointment.

For further information, please contact gallery@s-a-d-e.la

Sharón Zoldan and Brittany Mojo are collaborating on a Ceramics Pop Up on the afternoon of the 18th.  Come eat, hang and touch things you're not supposed to.  Previews available upon request. 

836 Traction Avenue 90031, Downtown Arts District

Hauser & Wirth New York presents ‘In the Wake’, its first exhibition with New York based Zoe Leonard. The artist’s distinctive merging of photography, sculpture, and installation will unfold over three floors of the gallery’s townhouse, debuting three new bodies of work that balance the rigorous conceptualism and personal vision for which she has achieved critical recognition. On view through 22 October, the photographs and sculptures in the exhibition probe the generational impact of displacement and what Leonard has described as 'statelessness as both an individual experience and a shared social condition.'

With the work on view at Hauser & Wirth, Leonard draws a connection between the social upheaval of the postwar years and the rise of photography as a popular medium. The family snapshot can be understood as a form of self representation and a mode of describing and sharing lived experience, an alternative to official representations of history. Leonard photographs these snapshots not only as images, but as objects – paper curled, surfaces shiny, and edges scalloped, cracked, or cut – in a way that pushes imagery to the edge of legibility and calls into question the idea of faithful reproduction or representation.

Before Midnight

Milton Avery
Forrest Bess
Victor Brauner
Mathew Cerletty
Ann Craven
Henri Rousseau
Rudolf Stingel

August 13–August 29, 2016
In the Louvre there is a work by a primitive painter, known or unknown I cannot say, but whose name will never be representative of an important period in the history of art. This painter is Lucas van den Leyden and in my opinion he makes the four or five centuries of painting that come after him inane and useless. The canvas I speak of is entitled "The Daughters of Lot," a biblical subject in the style of the period. Of course the Bible in the Middle Ages was not understood in the same way we understand it today, and this canvas is a curious example of the mystic deductions that can be derived from it. Its emotion, in any case, is visible even from a distance; it affects the mind with an almost thunderous visual harmony, intensely active throughout the painting, yet to be gathered from a single glance. Even before you can discern what is going on, you sense something tremendous happening in the painting, and the ear, one would say, is as moved by it as the eye. A drama of high intellectual importance seems massed there like a sudden gathering of clouds which the wind or some much more direct fatality has impelled together to measure their thunderbolts.

The sky of the picture, in fact, is black and swollen; but even before we can tell that the drama was born in the sky, was happening in the sky, the peculiar lighting of the canvas, the jumble of shapes, the impression the whole gives at a distance – everything betokens a kind of drama of nature for which I defy any painter of the Great Periods to give us an equivalent.

A tent is pitched at the sea's edge, in front of which Lot is sitting, wearing full armor and a handsome red beard, watching his daughters parade up and down as if he were a guest at a prostitutes' banquet.

And in fact they are strutting about, some as mothers of families, others as amazons, combing their hair and fencing, as if they had never had any other purpose than to charm their father, to be his plaything or his instrument. We are thus presented with the profoundly incestuous character of the old theme which the painter develops here in passionate images. Its profound sexuality is proof that the painter has understood his subject absolutely as a modern man, that is, as we ourselves would understand it: proof that its character of profound but poetic sexuality has escaped him no more than it has eluded us.

On the left of the picture, and a little to the rear, a black tower rises to prodigious heights, supported at its base by a whole system of rocks, plants, zigzagging roads marked with milestones and dotted here and there with houses. And by a happy effect of perspective, one of these roads at a certain point disengages itself from the maze through which it has been creeping, crosses a bridge, and at last receives a ray of that stormy light which brims over between the clouds and showers the region irregularly.

The sea in the background of the canvas is extremely high, at the same time extremely calm considering the fiery skein that is boiling up in one corner of the sky.

It happens that when we are watching fireworks, the crackling nocturnal bombardment of shooting stars, sky rockets, and Roman candles may reveal to our eyes in its hallucinatory light certain details of landscape, wrought in relief against the night: trees, towers, mountains, houses, whose lighting and sudden apparition will always remain definitely linked in our minds with the idea of this noisy rending of the darkness. There is no better way of expressing this submission of the different elements of landscape to the fire revealed in the sky of this painting than by saying that even though they possess their own light, they remain in spite of everything related to this sudden fire as dim echoes, living points of reference born from it and placed where they are to permit it to exercise its full destructive force.

There is moreover something frighteningly energetic and troubling in the way the painter depicts this fire, like an element still active and in motion, yet with an immobilized expression. It matters little how this effect is obtained, it is real; it is enough to see the canvas to be convinced of it.

In any case, this fire, which no one will deny produces an impression of intelligence and malice, serves, by its very violence, as a counterbalance in the mind to the heavy material stability of the rest of the painting.

Between the sea and the sky, but towards the right, and on the same level in perspective as the Black Tower, projects a thin spit of land crowned by a monastery in ruins.

This spit of land, so close that it is visible from the shore where Lot's tent stands, reveals behind it an immense gulf in which an unprecedented naval disaster seems to have occurred. Vessels cut in two and not yet sunk lean upon the sea as upon crutches, strewing everywhere their uprooted masts and spars.

It would be difficult to say why the impression of disaster, which is created by the sight of only one or two ships in pieces, is so complete.

It seems as if the painter possessed certain secrets of linear harmony, certain means of making that harmony affect the brain directly, like a physical agent. In any case this impression of intelligence prevailing in external nature and especially in the manner of its representation is apparent in several other details of the canvas, witness for example the bridge as high as an eight-story house standing out against the sea, across which people are filing, one after another, like Ideas in Plato's cave.

It would be untrue to claim that the ideas which emerge from this picture are clear. They are however of a grandeur that painting which is merely painting, i.e., all painting for several centuries, has completely abandoned: we are not accustomed to it.

— excerpt from Antonin Artaud, "Metaphysics and the Mise en Scène"
in The Theater and Its Double, 1938

The three exhibitions Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, and Before Midnight explore our continually transforming relationship to landscape. The works range from precisely-rendered picturesque scenes, to distorted surreal realms with far-out arrangements, to reductive abstract representations of nature.

RSVP ONLY // Reception 5-8pm

If you're out there, you know how to find me.

JOHN BALDESSARI + ED RUSCHA // MIXOGRAFIA PRINTS

Sharón Zoldan presents several suites of masterful three-dimensional prints that utilize a relief technique (embossing and debossin) to create incredibly dynamic pieces.  Baldessari’s Crowds with Shape of Reason Missing (2012), with its cinematic stills and silly white blobs, Ruscha’s Rusty Signs (2014) appearing rusted and weathered by time, and his Petro Plots (2009) in a nod to the LA landscape are all made entirely from a single sheet of handmade paper.
Private Reception from 7-9 pm

It's the Jo Cool Viewing Party.  The party starts at 8 though the screening starts right at 9.

Or go tonight for Ben Lee's birthday spanks and span the distance.  

IN LA WE PLAY ALL DAY.

The birthday beatings continue at Tenants of the Trees tonight in LA along with Amy Pham, Ana Calderon, Marc Baker, Brian Vidal and his majesty, Ben Lee Ritchie Handler.

DM for guestlist.

Artwork: Nancy Grossman: No Name, 1968

Straight from Bucharest to your backyard.

DM for more information.

Ren Hang
What We Do Is Secret

Closing Night 

“The Keeper” is an exhibition dedicated to the act of preserving objects, artworks, and images, and to the passions that inspire this undertaking.
 

TUESDAY JULY 19, 2016
8–10 PM   Opening Reception

On view July 20–September 25, 2016

View the newest collaborative collection between Wrapped LA and Taiping Carpets.  The collaboration will be launched at BD West at the LA Convention Center.  Enjoy the preview among friends with cocktails and hors d'oeurves.  Invitation only and RSVP is required for entry.

Live Analog Techno DJ Set + Ramen 

Pixelife (Throne of Blood) has enough knobs and buttons to make a music nerd squeal but his demeanor is anything but over-excited.  His laid-back style comes out through his music and he doesn't seem to break a sweat bringing beats to life.    

The space is an old loading dock in a Brooklyn factory that was converted into a gallery a few years ago.  We're bringing in floor to ceiling 360 projections, good food and lots of chairs.  

Your $30 ticket buys you a live performance, sit down Ramen dinner and drinks.