Monthly Archives: April 2017

Mark Moore Fine Art is pleased to announce the release of a new major sculpture work by gallery artist YORAM WOLBERGER. The artist has just released a new edition of his trademark oversized fiberglass sculptures. Much like the (now sold-out) “Cowboy and Indian” series and the “Trophy” series of sculpture works, Wolberger’s new “Toy Soldiers” strike a chord for nostalgic Americana and pop culture.

YORAM WOLBERGER
Toy Soldier #4, (Offhand Position), 2016
3D digital scanning, CNC digital sculpting, Reinforced Fiberglass Composite, Urethane
Approximate dimensions: 72 x 60 x 24 inches
Edition: 3 + 2 A/Ps

PRICE UPON REQUEST

Please note that Edition 1/3 and 2/3 have already been sold. The artist still has one example that remains available in the edition of three, as does one Artist Proof.

Yoram Wolberger uses childhood toys and everyday domestic items to create his large scale sculptures, foregrounding the latent symbolism and cultural paradigms of these objects that so subtly inform Western culture. By enlarging this ephemera to life size, Wolberger emphasizes the distortions of their original manufacture disallowing any real illusion and conceptually forcing the viewer to reconsider their meanings. When enlarged beyond any possibility of dismissal, we see that toy soldiers create lines between Us and Them, plastic cowboys and Indians marginalize and stereotype the Other, even wedding cake bride and groom figurines dictate our expected gender roles.

As the HUFFINGTON POST put it: “Wolberger’s Cowboys & Indians is based on the widely familiar toy figurines with which Wolberger played during his youth, and invites viewers to consider the manufacturing of common cultural stereotypes. Faithfully reproducing the seemingly innocent figurines at life size proportions with all their original design “flaws” intact, the artist compels us to reexamine the cultural attitudes implied by such distorted portrayals.”

For additional information on all available works currently available by YORAM WOLBERGER please reference his artist page on our ARTSY website for you to view there by clicking on this link.

Please note that shipping, crating, and taxes for in-state sales will be additional, and all editioned pieces are available subject to prior sale.

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ON VIEW NOW: The Mark Moore Fine Art is proud to present an Exclusive Online ARTSY Exhibition, Julie Oppermann: Waking Lines – currently on view through May 15th. Check it out now at the following link:

https://www.artsy.net/show/mark-moore-fine-art-julie-oppermann-waking-lines

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Check out this article on the painting of  Julie Oppermann published this by the UNLV NEWS CENTER week at the following link titled “Neuroscience, Art Come Together in Barrick Museum Exhibit“:

https://www.unlv.edu/news/article/neuroscience-art-come-together-barrick-museum-exhibit

Reminder: The Mark Moore Fine Art is proud to present an Exclusive Online ARTSY Exhibition, Julie Oppermann: Waking Lines – currently on view through May 15th. Check it out now at the following link:

https://www.artsy.net/show/mark-moore-fine-art-julie-oppermann-waking-lines

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#julieoppermann

Christopher Russell is among the ten MMFA artists will be featured in the exhibition titled PROCESS curated by Matthew Gardocki at the Barrick Museum at the University of Nevada Las Vegas which closes on Saturday, May 13, 2017.

This exhibition will also include works by: Julie Oppermann; Christopher Duncan; John Bauer; Kara Joslyn; Kim Rugg; Ryan Wallace; Heidi Schwegler; Meghan Smythe; Christopher Russell, along with Lester Monzon.

This show is currently featured on ARTSY at the following link:

https://www.artsy.net/show/mark-moore-fine-art-process-at-the-unlv-marjorie-barrick-museum-las-vegas

You can also download Christopher Russell free online STATEMENTS Catalog published by Mark Moore Fine Art featuring full color images of recent artworks, bio information, and a Q&A with the artist at the following link HERE.

For more information on this work please contact: mark@markmooregallery.com

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Please note that our current Julie Oppermann: Waking Lines show is currently being featured on the Los Angeles galleries page of ARTSY.

Check out this exclusive online exhibition at:

https://www.artsy.net/mark-moore-gallery

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Zemer Peled’s work in the Winston Wächter Fine Art exhibition Form Over Function has been featured in a Seattle Times article as a “not-to-miss” ceramics exhibition. Here is a short excerpt from the article:

Image: Zemer Peled, Black Dreams #3, 2016 / Porcelain / 10 1/2 × 10 1/2 × 5 ins

“Peled’s meticulous pieces never had a function to begin with. ‘Untitled 1’ and ‘Untitled 5’ are symmetrical abstractions of flower forms, built from hundreds of thin painted prongs of clay. Their colors change depending on your vantage point. ‘Black Dreams #3’ is still more complex: an asymmetrical organism of dark ceramic tendrils that undulate as if swaying to an underwater current.” -Michael Upchurch

DETAIL Image: Zemer Peled, Black Dreams #3, 2016 / Porcelain / 10 1/2 × 10 1/2 × 5 ins

For more information on this and other artists we have work with please go to our website: www.markmoorefineart.com

You can find additional available works by this artist and prices on our ARTSY website: www.artsy.net/mark-moore-gallery

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Mark Moore Fine Art proudly presents “Waking Lines” – an exclusive online exhibition on ARTSY by painter Julie Oppermann. Predominantly intrigued by the idea of sensory interference, Oppermann creates meticulously painted patterns that reference cognitive perception through synthetic experience. As if capturing warped television signals or pixilated computer screens, Oppermann’s work evokes conceptual associations derived from intricate moiré patterns, thus revealing profound observations about our intellectual acuity.

View this show now at the following ARTSY Link.

Julie Oppermann, B1214, 2012 / Acrylic on wood panel / 83 × 75 ins

Oppermann’s compositions are achieved through equal parts rule and spontaneity. Painting layers upon layers of nearly identical lines and waves, Oppermann crafts hallucinatory abstractions that flicker, expand, contract, and undulate based on the unique vantage point of an individual viewer. Her attuned use of hue, space, and contrast induce a kind of visual interference that embodies her concerns about the way information is disseminated – oftentimes generating strains between regions of glitches and consistency to illustrate the inherent flaws between transmission and perception. Oppermann’s divergent studies in Neuroscience and Color Theory, coupled with her interest in comprehension and cognition yield these unsettling terrains – distorted topographies that achieve the familiar tension felt between physical and digital interface. While at times, Oppermann’s hand appears extraordinarily controlled and calculated, her paintings simultaneously broadcast a competing technique born of impulsiveness and imperfection. Like the visceral reactions derived from manufactured imagery and information, Oppermann’s paintings elicit an instinctive sense of attraction and curiosity.

Julie Oppermann, TH1224, 2012 / Acrylic on canvas / 72 × 60 ins

“I would say that when you look at my paintings you see yourself seeing. They are sometimes a little challenging to look at, After-images and simultaneous contrast create sensations of movement, flashes and flickers of light, illusions of depth and space, uncomfortable tensions. If you look at them for a while they literally start moving, and you end up blinking and wondering what is going on – you are watching your visual system bug out. It is a little over- whelmed by the information coming in, and is having trouble figuring out how to process it. That’s pretty cool to recognize, because most of the time we don’t give this any thought, we just assume that what we are seeing is true.”  – Julie Oppermann

Julie Oppermann’s work pushes the limits of visual perception, making paintings that are physically difficult to perceive. The scintillating effects arising through the calculated layering and juxtaposition of contrasting colors through repetitive line patterns elicit shuttering afterimages, optical flicker, and disorienting sensations of movement. The paintings, on one hand, reference the digital, looking as if they might be computer-generated, vector-based interference patterns; up close, however, they reveal a gestural, intuitive approach. Glitches, bleeds and mis-registrations rupture the illusory field of the moiré, creating visual noise and also highlight the basic tools at work: taped-off line patterns and paint on canvas. Where others approach ideas such as rasterization, pixelation, image compression, data loss and corruption primarily through the more obvious channel of digital media, Oppermann succeeds, instead, by effecting these phenomena directly through the medium of perception itself. The glitch, so to speak, occurs in the viewing of the work, by distorting the viewer’s field of vision, and interfering with their ability to “see” and look at the painting.

Julie Oppermann, m1203, 2012 / Acrylic on canvas / 72 × 96 ins

Concurrently, Oppermann is also featured in another exhibition titled “Process” at the Barrick Museum at the University of Nevada Las Vegas through May 13, 2017.

This exhibition will also include works by: Julie Oppermann; Christopher Duncan; John Bauer; Lester Monzon; Kim Rugg; Kara Joslyn; Heidi Schwegler; Meghan Smythe; Christopher Russell, along with Ryan Wallace. Each of the artist’s process of creation is brought to the forefront in the exhibition. While some of the work seems very immediate visually the artists process is actually quite extensive in getting to the final image. Highlighted are the artist’s use of materials including the sun and time to create abstractions while others use computers and man made materials.

Rooted in Dada and performance theater, Process Art is a conceptual framework that allows the intangible act of creation to be made perceptible in the finished artwork. It played a key role in the careers of pioneering twentieth-century art world figures such as Joseph Beuys, Eva Hesse, Bruce Nauman, and Richard Serra. Following in their footsteps, the artists of “Process” have forged eloquent visual languages around the environmental effects of the sun, the retrieval of debris from a studio floor, and the intricate movements that a hand undergoes as it cuts and reassembles postage stamps. Visitors can expect to encounter a fresh and perhaps unfamiliar field of art-making in which energy is celebrated and the finished object is not always the principle focus.

Julie Oppermann, ypf07, 2014 / Acrylic on yupo paper / 26 × 20 ins

Julie Oppermann is an artist from New York who lives and works in Berlin. She received her BFA from The Cooper Union, and a Master’s in Neuroscience from the University of California, Berkeley. In 2012 she completed a residency at FAAP in São Paulo, an academic exchange with Professor Robert Lucander at the Berlin University of the Arts, and completed her M.F.A. at Hunter College. In 2013 she had solo exhibitions at Mark Moore Gallery in Los Angeles, and Galeria Árnes y Roepke in Madrid. Her work is included in numerous public and private collections, including the Museum of Fine Arts Houston (TX), and the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (CA).

For more information, please contact: mark@markmooregallery.com

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As one of the most noted figures of Japan’s ubiquitous manga and anime culture of the so called “Cool Japan”, Kenichi Yokono has been making his unique brand of art using traditional woodblock cutting techniques to question in his very own, eccentric manner the way of life of Japanese suburbia for the last twenty years.

Mark Moore Fine Art now focuses on this highly-acclaimed talent with an Exclusive ARTSY on-line exhibition. This exhibition closes April 17th.

Image: Kenichi Yokono, The Scene, 2009 / Carved wood and enamel / 71 3/5 × 108 ins (181.9 × 274.3 cm) 

“Yokono’s dazzling work merges the playful and the dire, the upbeat graphic punch of cartoons with dark Expressionist urgency. Yokono carves woodblocks as if for printing, painting the raised surfaces cherry red and the rest a crisp white. Raw, vibrant and irreverent, the works have one foot in the pop-dominated present and the other in the tradition-bound past.”

“Several of the sculptural paintings are in the shape of skateboards, and the spectacular centerpiece of the show, “Fling Mac,” takes the form of a folded screen. The trademark golden arches blast upward within this four-panel landscape, a radioactive wonderland of ebullience and postapocalyptic toxicity.”

– Art Critic Leah Ollman, Los Angeles Times

John Bauer and Mehgan Smythe (shown below) are among the ten MMFA artists will be featured in the exhibition titled PROCESS curated by Matthew Gardocki at the Barrick Museum at the University of Nevada Las Vegas which is open now and continues for two more weeks through May 13, 2017.

This exhibition will also include works by: Julie Oppermann; Christopher Duncan; John Bauer; Kara Joslyn; Kim Rugg; Ryan Wallace; Heidi Schwegler; Meghan Smythe; Christopher Russell, along with Lester Monzon.

You can download a complete PDF list of available works in PROCESS at UNLV by clicking here.

For more information on this work please contact: mark@markmooregallery.com

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I wanted to share this recent interview with painter and MMFA artist JULIE HEFFERNAN that was recently published by the McDowell Fellows online magazine “Between Two Pines“. 

Julie Heffernan is a painter whose imaginative landscapes, which she has referred to as self-portraits, evoke Baroque sensibilities and depict alternative habitats and calamitous events related to climate change. Born in Peoria, IL, she received her BFA in Painting and Printmaking from UC Santa Cruz and her MFA in Painting from Yale. She has shown in numerous galleries in New York and around the country and is the recipient of many grants and Fellowships including an NEA grant, a NYFA grant, and a Fulbright-Hayes grant to West Berlin. She was at the McDowell Fellows Colony in 2012 and is a member of the committee planning our upcoming May 1, 2017 National Benefit in NYC in which her work will be featured.  Visit her website here.

What is the last thing you saw/read/listened to that inspired you?

Oh what a good question! I’m listening to a Hidden Brain podcast about a guerilla gardener in South Central LA by the name of Ron Finley who realized the food choices for folks in his neighborhood were killing them as much as the shootings (Drive-ins as bad as the Drive-bys, he says), so he turned his front yard into an urban garden, and people could simply stop by and pick themselves an avocado or pomegranate anytime they wanted.  If they could they’d also bring something over to the garden to share with others.

Also just read a chilling piece in this week’s New Yorker by Jane Mayer about the moneyman behind Trump’s ascendancy – hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer – and his libertarian, climate change-denying agenda to create essentially an oligarchy in America. Chilling stuff.

What is the best free advice you ever received?

I get free advice all the time from my beloved NPR, so, from the urban guerilla Ron Finley mentioned above, it would have to be to give it away as much as possible.  In reference to the source of the derogatory term “Indian giver” –stemming from indigenous people’s potlatch ceremonies and predicated on the idea of re-gifting– giving something precious away that the receiver then offers over to someone else in turn and so on, that is the original way of paying it forward.  Keep the gift in circulation and it creates a sense of the world being a bounteous place. Be Indian givers in the true sense of the term.

What is your guilty pleasure?

Dark chocolate, of course. Beyond that I’m at a point in my life where no pleasure makes me feel guilty.  Even gossip, stemming from the word “gospel” (or “godspell”) can be an unguilty pleasure when it’s in the service of trying to figure out how the world works, via our friends and family. I know that sounds boring but really – how could real pleasure ever truly be bad??   “You do not have to be good/You do not have to crawl on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting?/You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.” -Mary Oliver

If you could live in another time and/or place, when/where would you choose and why?

I used to think Elizabethan England because of going to too many Renaissance fairs when I was a teenager, and I’m inclined to say I would like to have been a conscious being during the Civil Rights era in the South, where you could see real heroism happening on the streets.  But I realize we are in a horrible, difficult time right now, so just like those folks who were willing to put their lives on the line for equality, as true American heroes, we have to step up right now and behave like heroes too.  SO, I choose now.

MacDowell turns 110 this year – what do you think the world will be like when you turn 110?

I’m guessing Florida and other coastal areas will be all but gone, along with much of India, the Philippines, Bangladesh, China, etc. and either it’s mass chaos everywhere or the world’s people will be on their way to doing something about the climate crisis. Experts will finally be focusing their energies on coming up with ingenious strategies for energy storage, but all of us will have had to rise to the occasion because the 2+ degree experiment will have taken place and we’ll all be living with the consequences of our in/actions.  (Exxon Mobil will be gone, am I right??) Either we’ll be massively more engaged, or toast.

Question from Arturo O’Farrill: Is there a way to find hope in this terrible age of lies, greed and the worst of humanity being the dominant culture?  

I wrote this yesterday: “I’ve been reading about ‘presentism’ – the notion that what is happening now will continue to be the case; but it won’t be like this for too long and we know that.  What we’re seeing goes against everything we have built that constitutes American values, and people care about those values. Most people can see through this ridiculous person leading our country in name alone, and his cronies in Congress as well.  And if they can’t right now, they’ll figure it out later, in the same way that Germans figured out Hitler was a maniac.  We will figure it out.  No one likes to be lied to.  We are confronting particular people in the Republican party now with a different psychological inclination, one more akin to sociopathy than conservatism, and when enough people see this is a different breed of politician altogether, the kind that will bend any value to achieve their ends, they will vote them out.”

But after reading Jane Mayer’s article, I’m not so sure anymore. Mayer traces how billionaire Robert Mercer invested heavily in Breitbart News and other alt right interests essentially to reduce the US government to a “pinhead.”  He’s a big investor in Cambridge Analytica, “a firm that mines online data to reach and influence potential voters. The company has said that it uses secret psychological methods to pinpoint which messages are the most persuasive to individual online viewers.”  Egad.

What question would you like to ask the next Fellow? (Please provide your own answer, too!)

I would like someone to give me the definitive answer to how to speak to someone with confirmation bias. 

There has to be a way.  We know from many studies that facts don’t change a person’s mind, and there was also the study that told us you can change a person’s opinion by putting them in sympathetic contact with someone who personifies the qualities they disagree with, but that study turned out to be bogus.  So I would love some help with this problem.