The Close of Day, Chase Hall’s first solo museum exhibition, opens at SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah, Georgia, on February 28 and will be on view through August 21, 2023. The exhibition brings together new paintings and a dynamic installation featuring a century-old, self-playing Wurlitzer organ ensconced in a brick room, evoking the museum’s historic structure—and the breath and memory of those who created it. The works address a range of issues, from the complexities of race and labor to the weighty histories of coffee, cotton, and other commodities, as well as personal meditations on the artist’s own place in society and history.
The Close of Day is organized by SCAD Museum of Art Chief Curator Daniel S. Palmer, and presented as part of SCAD deFINE ART 2023.
NEW YORK
JASON FOX
Old Wrld
March 10 – April 22, 2023
Opening Reception: Thursday, March 9 | 6 – 8 PM
Since his paintings first appeared in New York galleries in the 1990s, Jason Fox has consistently worked against the grain of prevailing stylistic modes and aesthetic pieties. The resulting works are not contrarian for the sake of being so but avail themselves of disparate painterly strategies to constellate pictures of life’s inside-out, ever-surprising tendency to conflate the personal with the collective and the transcendent with the mundane. In a group of recent paintings on view in Old Wrld that exemplify his range, humor, and invigorating openness, Fox develops new motifs and revisits themes and characters in new, intensive ways.
Fox’s recent "list" paintings, for example, find him incorporating informal text, doodle-like images, and improvisatory brushwork to create complex, intercut visual layers. Each inch of these large works is filled with unexpected turns and a richness of detail that unifies the varied nature of their content. Born equally from the artist’s everyday life and his deep engagement with conundrums set out by modernist painters as disparate as Agnes Martin and Edvard Munch, the paintings ultimately tell broader stories about a world stuck perennially in transition—one in which old forms of knowledge crumble, yet new ones can never emerge.
LOS ANGELES
WILL BOONE
Hell is Wet
March 18 – April 22, 2023
Opening Reception: Saturday, March 18 | 6 – 8 PM
Generating content from an unlikely array of sources, Will Boone makes works with graphic power matched by their palpable physicality. His technical processes are informed by vernacular languages of numerous American subcultures, from the DIY ethos of punk to the precision of industrial manufacturing, typically reflective of the area in which the artist lives.
In Hell is Wet, Boone makes visible the localized nuances associated with the American South and Southwest and showcases his recent experimentations on canvas with enamel, bar top resin, and auto body paint—known as "candy paint" in Houston. The paintings in this exhibition incorporate found relics that chart Boone’s physical and experiential trajectory. A lucky rabbit's foot, a black Stetson hat, and a splayed Santa Claus suit appear embedded and crystalized in vibrant red and yellow canvases, forming a visual biography of the artist’s interactions, travel, and residences over the past five years.
HILARY PECIS
Paths Crossed
March 18 – April 22, 2023
Opening Reception: Saturday, March 18 | 6 – 8 PM
Hilary Pecis creates drawings and paintings inspired by the interior, exterior, and inter-spaces that surround her daily life. In Paths Crossed, her first exhibition with the gallery, the artist presents a selection of lush, saturated landscapes reflecting the mountainous, desert, and urban landscapes commonly associated with Southern California.
Many of the paintings on view begin as source images taken on Pecis’s phone on her daily runs throughout Los Angeles’s streetscapes or through the various trails she frequents in the surrounding mountains and forests. The photos are then referenced and sometimes even printed out and re-imbued with dynamic and vibrant color, becoming preparatory sketches for future paintings. This process allows Pecis to distill whatever memory she has of a space while traveling through it, as the initial phone image often loses the clarity and vibrancy cast by the Southern California sunshine and mutes the otherwise bright hues that distinguish the region. By exploring a car-reliant city on foot, Pecis further attunes herself not only to the visual elements present—streets, mountains, storefronts, plants—but also to other non-visible elements: smells, sounds, textures, and the overwhelming energies and tensions that exist in a physical space.
MAI-THU PERRET
Mother Sky
March 18 – April 22, 2023
Opening Reception: Saturday, March 18 | 6 – 8 PM
Over the course of two decades, Mai-Thu Perret has consistently approached her subjects with a revisionist feminist gaze, illuminating hidden histories and alternate readings of canonical ideas and figures, and generating new ways of seeing in which distinctions between self and other, or between the human, plant, and animal worlds, are reimagined as areas of transition rather than marked separations.
While she has availed herself of a wide range of mediums, including sculpture, painting, drawing, site-specific installation, performance, and text, Perret’s use of ceramics has served as a clearinghouse for sculptural experimentation in which a wide range of techniques and approaches to color and texture have resulted in objects of many kinds. In Mother Sky, Perret presents a wall-mounted ceramic work, among her largest and most ambitious to date; a figurative ceramic sculpture based on a digital scan of an ancient sculpture of the goddess Minerva; and smaller ceramic works dedicated to animal and other forms. By way of juxtaposition, the show also features a neon work in which Perret engages with the legacy of multidisciplinary Swiss artist Sophie Taeuber-Arp (1889–1943).
David Kordansky Gallery is pleased to announce our representation of Mario Ayala. View a new work by Ayala in our Art Basel Miami Beach presentation at Booth F19 from November 29 – December 3. The artist's first solo exhibition with the gallery will be presented in Los Angeles in 2023.
Ayala reimagines a contemporary landscape where identity, observation, and the presence of material fact play equal roles. In his paintings, Ayala brings together figures and forms drawn from every corner of his experience living on the West Coast. Ayala's work lends interest in traditions and techniques with strong visual ties to California, such as muralism, tattooing, and industrial techniques used in automobile painting and commercial signage. Ayala's influences also extend into postwar art historical movements such as the Cool School of Los Angeles and Bay Area Funk art. Ayala's highly personal, often surreal, tableaux are vivid representations of the way in which images course through the world, carrying with them fragments of the past, present, and a future still in formation. His creations live as collectively inspired documents that reflect issues, energies, and aesthetics alive in Mexican American, Latin, and Brown communities throughout the region. Ayala's sculptures, site-specific works, and collaborations embody his capacity to envision the local and the global as interwoven phenomena. Like his paintings, they locate surprising—and even unsettling—moments of cohesion in a world defined by multiplicity and rapid, ever-changing flux.
Mario Ayala has been the subject of solo and two-person exhibitions at Jeffrey Deitch, New York (2022) and Ever Gold [Projects], San Francisco (2021). Recent group exhibitions include Hot Concrete: LA to HK, K11 Musea, Hong Kong (2022); Shattered Glass, Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles (2021); and Made in L.A. 2020: a version, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2020). His work is in the permanent collections of institutions including the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles and the Aïshti Foundation, Beirut. Ayala lives and works in Los Angeles.
David Kordansky Gallery is pleased to announce our representation of Jenna Gribbon. The artist's first solo exhibition with the gallery will be presented in Los Angeles in 2024. Read more about the artist in ARTnews.
Gribbon’s oil paintings constitute an important new entry in the long lineage of figurative art, extending its narrative possibilities to explore the act of looking. Her vivid portraits, frequently nudes or partial nudes, depict those closest to her, and sometimes the artist herself, in candid poses, during uncanny moments. Replete with saturated colors—and spotlit in awkward, uncomfortable, or humorous positions—the protagonists are often seen looking directly at the artist, blurring the line between observer and the observed. By including her own image in her paintings, whether it’s her legs brushed up against her partner’s or her dramatic shadow lurking in the foreground, Gribbon becomes both actor and director in an unfolding storyline that is equal parts comedic, tender, fantastical, and dark. She uses scale to decipher between true-to-life and constructed scenes. In her larger paintings, Gribbon employs strategically placed props––mirrors, blindfolds, clamp lights, colored gels, green screens––to explore different types of mediation that affect image consumption and investigate the power dynamics between subject, artist, and viewer. Her recent work most prominently features her partner, Mackenzie Scott, whose recurrence both personalizes and simultaneously establishes her as a kind of avatar; shifting the focus of the painting away from the figure and toward the way the figure is framed. Gribbon’s paintings often begin as a photo taken on her phone, forging a fluid relationship between photography and painting, the real and the surreal, and between the ephemerality of phone photography and the enduring quality of oil paint. By painting otherwise fleeting scenes, the artist adds texture, depth, and a sense of permanency to these temporal images, highlighting themes of pleasure, joy, and expanding the lexicon of queer iconography.
Jenna Gribbon (b. 1978, Knoxville, Tennessee) is currently the subject of a solo exhibition on view through February 19, 2023, at Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia, Italy. Recent group exhibitions include Living Histories: Queer Views and Old Masters, The Frick Collection, New York (2022); and I will wear you in my heart of heart, FLAG Art Foundation, New York (2021); and Paint, also known as Blood: Women, Affect and Desire in Contemporary Painting, Warsaw Museum of Modern Art, Poland (2019). Her work is in the permanent collections of institutions including the Kunstmuseum The Hague, the Netherlands; Brant Foundation, New York; Dallas Museum of Art; Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art, Las Vegas, Nevada; New Orleans Museum of Art, Louisiana; Kurpfälzisches Museum, Heidelberg, Germany; Rubell Museum, Miami; and FLAG Art Foundation, New York. Gribbon lives and works in New York.
In collaboration with David Kordansky Gallery, Gribbon will continue to be represented by MASSIMODECARLO and LGDR.