Monthly Archives: September 2015

Opening on September 11, from 5-8pm, Vernon Fisher‘s newest solo exhibition will take place at Zolla/Lieberman Gallery (Chicago, IL) through October 24, 2015. Says the gallery:

Zolla/Lieberman Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of Vernon Fisher: Lifting Weights in Space. For more than 40 years, Fisher has used photo-realism, cartoons, text, pop icons, maps and grids to create interdisciplinary post-modern narratives.  He blurs the lines of the emotional and the scientific, often insisting the viewer consider perspective.  Fisher’s illustrated stream of conscience include bits of digital noise and washed abstractions appearing at random that invite speculation and challenge the conventions of contemporary composition.  

Vernon Fisher (b. 1943, Texas) has been included in two Whitney Biennials (most recently in 2000). Museum installations include the Museum of Modern Art, NY; the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C.; and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Major public collections include: Albright-Knox Museum, Buffalo, (NY), Art Institute of Chicago (IL), Baltimore Museum of Art (MD), Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Dallas Museum of Art (TX), Denver Art Museum (CO), Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis (MN), High Museum of Art, Atlanta (GA), Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C., Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, IL, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (CA), Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (TX), Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (IL), Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (TX), Museum of Modern Art (NY), Orange County Museum of Art (CA), Phoenix Art Museum (AZ), San Antonio Museum of Art (TX), Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (CA), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (CA), Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (NY), Tucson Museum of Art, (AZ), Whitney Museum of American Art, and The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (MN). The artist lives and works in Fort Worth, TX.

For more information about the artist or available works in Los Angeles, please email info@markmooregallery.com.

The gallery is pleased to announce that a major work, “Lake Project 15” (2002), by Mark Moore Gallery artist David Maisel, has been acquired by Denver Art Museum.

The Denver Art Museum is an educational, nonprofit resource that sparks creative thinking and expression through transformative experiences with art. Its holdings reflect the city and region—and provide invaluable ways for the community to learn about cultures from around the world. Its mission is to enrich the lives of present and future generations through the acquisition, presentation, and preservation of works of art, supported by exemplary scholarship and public programs related to both its permanent collections and to temporary exhibitions presented by the museum.

David Maisel is a visual artist based in San Francisco, CA. His large-scaled, surreal photographs chronicle the complex relationships between natural systems and human culture. His research-based practice has been the subject of five monographs, including “The Lake Project” (Nazraeli Press, 2004), “Oblivion” (Nazraeli Press, 2006), “Library of Dust” (Chronicle Books, 2008), “History’s Shadow” (Nazraeli Press, 2011), and “Black Maps: American Landscape and the Apocalyptic Sublime” (Steidl, 2013). Maisel’s images of radically altered terrain have transformed the practice of contemporary landscape photography. His hallucinatory worldview encompasses both stark documentary and tragic metaphor, and explores the relationship between nature and humanity today. Maisel’s images of environmentally impacted sites consider the aesthetics and politics of open pit mines, clear-cut forests, rampant urbanization and sprawl, and zones of water reclamation. These surreal and disquieting images take us towards the margins of the unknown, and as the Los Angeles Times has stated, “argue for an expanded definition of beauty, one that bypasses glamour to encompass the damaged, the transmuted, the decomposed.” Maisel also explores similar ideas of perception through alternative techniques in other bodies of work, such as “History’s Shadow” (completed during the artist’s residency at the Getty Research Institute) and “Library of Dust,” which The New York Times has called “a fevered meditation on memory, loss, and the uncanny monuments we sometimes recover about what has gone before.”

Maisel is the recipient of a 2011 grant from the Center for Cultural Innovation, a 2008 Artist Residency from the Headlands Center for the Arts, and a 2007 Scholar/Artist Residency from the Getty Research Institute. Maisel has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Opsis Foundation. He was appointed a Trustee of the Headlands Center for the Arts in 2011. His work has been shown globally, including in such prestigious institutions as the California Museum of Photography (CA), Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art (AZ), Portland Art Museum (OR), Fotografie Forum International (Frankfurt), American Academy (Rome), Musee des Beaux Artes (Bordeaux), and Seoul Arts Center (Seoul) among many other venues. Maisel’s works are in major public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art (NY), the Getty Museum (CA), the National Gallery of Art (D.C.), the Victoria and Albert Museum (London), and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (CA), among many other institutions. He received his BA from Princeton University, studied at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, and received his MFA from California College of the Arts. The artist lives and works in Sausalito (CA).

For more information about the artist or available work, please email info@markmooregallery.com.

The gallery is thrilled to announce the recent acquisition by Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) of Penelope Umbrico‘s large work, “Suns from Sunset from Flickr,” (2015) for its permanent collection.

Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) is a modern and contemporary art museum dedicated to collecting and exhibiting international art of the 20th and 21st centuries. PAMM serves one of the most diverse populations in one of the fastest growing regions in the country, where a unique confluence of Caribbean, North and South American cultures adds vibrancy and texture to the civic landscape. The city’s thriving community of artists, designers and collectors and its avid and growing art-engaged public are driving Miami’s demand for a world-class museum and dynamic center of visual arts education. PAMM transformed Museum Park into a central destination on Miami’s cultural map, promotes progressive arts education, builds community cohesiveness and contributes substantially to downtown revitalization.

Penelope Umbrico offers a radical reinterpretation of everyday consumer and vernacular images. Umbrico works “within the virtual world of consumer marketing and social media, traveling through the relentless flow of seductive images, objects, and information that surrounds us, searching for decisive moments—but in these worlds, decisive moments are cultural absurdities.”
She finds these moments in the pages of consumer product mail-order catalogs, travel and leisure brochures; and websites like Craigslist, EBay, and Flickr. Identifying image typologies—candy-colored horizons and sunsets, books used as props—brings the farcical, surreal nature of consumerism to new light.

Penelope Umbrico (born in Philadelphia, 1957) graduated from the Ontario College of Art and Design in Toronto, and received her MFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York. She has participated extensively in solo and group exhibitions, including at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and PS1 Contemporary Art Center, New York. Umbrico is core faculty in the School of Visual Arts MFA Photography, Video, and Related Media Program. Selected public collections include the Guggenheim Museum (NY), International Center of Photography (NY), McNay Museum of Art (TX), Metropolitan Museum of Art (NY), Museum of Contemporary Photography (IL), Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (CA), Museum of Modern Art (NY), and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (CA), Los Angeles County Museum of Art (CA), among others. She lives in New York City.

Sydney Contemporary, Australasia’s International Art Fair, returns in 2015 from September 10-13 (Opening Night on September 10th) with over 70 leading galleries from around the Pacific Rim and beyond. For the first time, the gallery will participate in a video-focused section of the fair with available works by Josh Azzarella and Allison Schulnik.

Housed once again in Carriageworks, Sydney’s striking contemporary arts precinct, the Fair has an expanded footprint with seven exhibition spaces offering visitors access to cutting-edge art from some of the world’s most respected established artists as well as the opportunity to discover new emerging artists. Azzarella and Schulnik will be showcased in the video section of the fair, and were also the only two video artists from America to be featured in the 62nd Sydney Film Festival. Artists from around the globe had their works displayed in the free-access Festival Hub, giving guests a close look at many different perspectives from artists at the forefront of their field.

Josh Azzarella (b. 1978, Ohio) creates videos and photographs that explore the power of context in the authorship of memory, oftentimes utilizing seminal moments in pop culture and news media to create accessible confrontations with historiography. By illuminating the individual encounter with communal experiences, Azzarella evaluates the perception of realness – which can ultimately be rooted in both the fantastic as much as the pragmatic.

Azzarella was the recipient of the 2006 Emerging Artist Award and related solo exhibition from The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum (CT). He has previously shown at the California Museum of Photography (CA), University Art Museum, Long Beach (CA), Vancouver Art Gallery (Canada), Kavi Gupta Gallery (IL), Academie der Kunste (Berlin), Sean Kelly Gallery (NY), Catharine Clark Gallery (CA), Mississippi State University (MS), the Santa Barbara Museum of Art (CA) and DCKT Gallery (NY). His work is included in the permanent collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (CA), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (CA), the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PA), the Museum of Fine Arts Houston (TX), the San Diego Museum of Modern Art (CA), the Margulies Collection (FL), Western Bridge (WA) and JP Morgan Chase (NY). He lives and works in Easton, PA.

Allison Schulnik choreographs her subjects in compositions that embody a spirit of the macabre, a Shakespearian comedy/tragedy of love, death and farce. The subjects often stare back at the audience and study them as they are in turn studied, aware of their ancestors from the Grand Theme works of the past, the genre paintings that inform them. Although a haunting sense of foreboding, discomfort and unease is palpable, a sense of understanding, compassion and hopefulness for her cast of characters is still evident in the heavy impasto paintings. Her sculptural use of oil paint references her clay-animation background, as a motion-like sensibility affords her paintings unparalleled depth and energy.

Born in 1978 (San Diego, CA), Schulnik earned her BFA in Experimental Animation from the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia (CA). She has had solo exhibitions at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art (OK), Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art (KS), Rokeby Gallery (London), Unosunove Arte Contemporanea (Rome), Division Gallery (Montreal), and ZieherSmith Gallery (NY), in addition to her inclusion in film festivals around the world. Her work has also been shown at the Garage Center for Contemporary Culture (Moscow), Hammer Museum (CA), Los Angeles County Museum of Art (CA), Santa Barbara Museum of Art (CA), Contemporary Arts Museum (LA), and Hangar-7 (Salzburg), among many others. Allison Schulnik’s work is in the public collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (CA), Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art (KS), Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (CA), Santa Barbara Art Museum (CA), Museé de Beaux Arts (Montreal), Farnsworth Art Museum (ME), Laguna Art Museum (CA), Montreal Contemporary Art Museum (Canada), Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art (CT), and Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (Canada). The artist lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.

Fair previews will be available after September 1st, by request. For additional information about special events, fair access, day passes, and featured artists, please email info@markmooregallery.com.

Allison Schulnik / Hobo Clown / 2008 / video still (detail)

The gallery is pleased to announce that The Tang Museum at Skidmore College has acquired “Shell #5” (2012), by Allison Schulnik for its permanent collection.

The Tang Collection of over 7,000 objects represents a wide variety of materials, subject matter, and time periods. From Pre-Columbian pots to works made by current contemporary artists, our collection offers an unlimited variety of opportunities for study, inspiration, and discussion for the Skidmore community and beyond. The collection is used in imaginative ways and varying contexts through classes, exhibitions, and research.

Allison Schulnik choreographs her subjects in compositions that embody a spirit of the macabre, a Shakespearian comedy/tragedy of love, death and farce. The subjects often stare back at the audience and study them as they are in turn studied, aware of their ancestors from the Grand Theme works of the past, the genre paintings that inform them. Although a haunting sense of foreboding, discomfort and unease is palpable, a sense of understanding, compassion and hopefulness for her cast of characters is still evident in the heavy impasto paintings. Her sculptural use of oil paint references her clay-animation background, as a motion-like sensibility affords her paintings unparalleled depth and energy.

Born in 1978 (San Diego, CA), Schulnik earned her BFA in Experimental Animation from the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia (CA). She has had solo exhibitions at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art (OK), Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art (KS), Rokeby Gallery (London), Unosunove Arte Contemporanea (Rome), Division Gallery (Montreal), and ZieherSmith Gallery (NY), in addition to her inclusion in film festivals around the world. Her work has also been shown at the Garage Center for Contemporary Culture (Moscow), Hammer Museum (CA), Los Angeles County Museum of Art (CA), Santa Barbara Museum of Art (CA), Contemporary Arts Museum (LA), and Hangar-7 (Salzburg), among many others. Allison Schulnik’s work is in the public collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (CA), Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art (KS), Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (CA), Santa Barbara Art Museum (CA), Museé de Beaux Arts (Montreal), Farnsworth Art Museum (ME), Laguna Art Museum (CA), Montreal Contemporary Art Museum (Canada), Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art (CT), and Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (Canada). The artist lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.

For more information about the artist or available work, please email info@markmooregallery.com.

Gallery artist Vernon Fisher is part of the exhibition “Contemporary Masters: Works on Paper, from the Collection of the Art Museum of South Texas.”

Exclusively from the AMST Vault, this exhibition of 60 works on paper includes three new works to the Museum’s collection and 22 that have not been previously exhibited at AMST. Artists include Milton Avery, Luis Jimenez, Judy Chicago, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, Ed Ruscha and Andy Warhol.

Click here to read an in-depth article about the show, highlighting Fisher’s work, in Caller Times.

For more information about the artist or available works, please email info@markmooregallery.com.

The gallery is proud to announce Ali Smith‘s upcoming solo exhibition at Mindy Solomon Gallery, “Fever Pitch.” This show opens Saturday, September 12th 6-9pm, and remains on view through October 16, 2015.

Says Mindy Solomon:

Ali Smith’s paintings in ‘Fever Pitch’ mark a departure from her previous work. Experimenting with larger, more gestural swaths of color and scale shifts, the compositions explore a new openness in which forms are less constrained and paint is applied in raw, lush marks. Pushing the intuitive line against more carefully edited forms and developed shapes, Smith utilizes color as a potent form of communication. Ranging in size from ambitious to intimate, ‘Fever Pitch’ spotlights Smith’s range and desire to give the viewer a complex, multi-layered perceptual experience.

Drawing on the history of abstraction while often breaking down or remixing, Smith toys with elements from art history as seen through her eyes: “My new series of paintings combines intuitive drawing with more slowly drawn-out imagery, which collides to create complex, almost map-like surfaces. With this latest work, there are a variety of surfaces—sculptural, flat, atmospheric, gestural application against intricate marks—that create a visual flip-flop or contradiction, a constant theme in my work.”

Ali Smith (b. 1976) lives and works in Long Beach, CA. She earned a BS in Studio Art at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, NY, studying in Paris for her junior year, and went on to complete an MFA in Drawing and Painting at California State University, Long Beach. Her work has been featured in solo showings across the US, including Los Angeles, New York City, Boston, and Houston. Recent group shows include “Defining Abstraction” at the Ringling College of Art, Sarasota, FL; “Here Now,” Wilding Cran Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; “Neo-Chroma: Large-scale non-objective painting,” Bentley Gallery, Scottsdale, AZ; “The OsCene,” Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach, CA; “Art for Art’s Sake: Selections from the Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation,” Marjorie Museum, UNLV (traveling); “Millennial Abstraction,” Marin Community Foundation, Novato, CA; and “Chasm of the Supernova,” Center for the Arts Eagle Rock, Los Angeles, CA. Her work is in held in public and private collections including the Weisman Foundation, the Laguna Art Museum, the Progressive Collection, and the private collection of Richard Prince. Smith is a recipient of the Hoff Award and the City of Long Beach professional artist grant.

For more information about the artist or available works, please email info@markmooregallery.com.