In Memory of Karl Junker who died 100 years ago today

Zdenek Kosek at Palais de Tokyo in Paris

ZdenekKosek’s works will be shown at the inaugural exhibition of the new Palais de Tokyo in April 2012.

As part of its collaboration with guest curators, Palais de Tokyo has invited Bruno Decharme, abcd founder, and Barbara Safarova, its president, to present an exhibition of Zdenek Kosek, a Czech artist with whom abcd has collaborated closely from 2003, thus contributing to the recognition of this exceptional oeuvre.

CHRIS HIPKISS AND ROBYN O'NEIL Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan (WI) January 22–April 29

Robyn O’Neil (CA) creates sweeping narrative drawings in graphite on a large scale—some as large as five feet tall by fourteen feet wide. For eight years, O'Neil developed a narrative series of drawings depicting an epic drama of weather, wildlife, and the human race.

Each installment follows an environment in flux, navigated by tribes of men in sweat suits and white tennis shoes struggling to survive against dominant natural forces. Meant to represent the everyman, these figures appear woefully out of place in their overwhelming and raw environment. Throughout the series, O’Neil suggests that their survival is questionable. Over the course of this entire account, her drawing techniques stretch and weave in response to the changing moods in each scene, from the high-contrast, hard-lined snowscapes of the earlier works to the smudgy overcast skies and murky seas in later works.

Chris Hipkiss, a British artist living in France, also works in graphite and makes large-scale, incredibly intricate images of a barely recognizable future world. For several decades, Hipkiss has been developing an epic tale in which mutated humans negotiate a threatening and unruly—and equally mutated—landscape. In contrast to O’Neil’s remote and barren corners of the planet, Hipkiss focuses on cultivated gardens and cityscapes that appear to grow out of control in spite of their seemingly rigid structures. While O'Neil’s protagonists are track-suited men, Hipkiss's scenes are dominated by androgynes attempting to control, survive, and sometimes merge with their surroundings.

Both artists’ work—the tri-paneled scenes by O’Neil and the vast scrolls by Hipkiss that stretch up to 35 feet—recall the layered narratives and complex landscapes of Northern Renaissance painters Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Brueghel the Elder. Similarly depicting roiling events of biblical proportions, Hipkiss and O’Neil allude to contemporary feelings of alienation and unease over a rapidly changing and increasingly volatile environment through the perilous scenarios they illustrate.

J.B. Murray: Writing in an Unknown Tongue: Reading Through the Water

John Bunion (J. B.) Murray (1908-1988) was a farmer who lived in rural Glascock County, Georgia, near the community of Mitchel. When he was approximately seventy years of age, believing he had experienced a vision from God, he began writing a non discursive script on adding machine tape, wall board, and stationery. He described it as "the language of the Holy Spirit, direct from God" and interpreted it using a bottle of water as a focusing device. In the last ten years of his life he made over a thousand paintings, introducing the script into fields of color and adding figures that represent "the evil people; the ones that are dry tongued, the one's that don't know God". Murray's works are exhibited throughout the world and he is represented in collections in Japan, Switzerland, France, and the United States.
See the filmmaker Judith McWillie's site on at http://art.uga.edu/lessonsandchants/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjJGl1MGoMs&mid=56

New Book about August Walla by Johann Feilacher Weltallende

Weltallende:

das Monumentalwerk zu Leben und Schaffen eines Künstlers. August Walla ist einer der weltweit bekanntesten Künstler der Art Brut. Sein ganzes Leben war ein langer Prozess des Schaffens. Das künstlerische Werk, das dabei weitgehend unabhängig entstanden ist, ist völlig eigenständig und zugleich unglaublich vielgestaltig. Die groß angelegte Monographie, die hier nun in vier Bänden vorliegt, trägt dieser Vielseitigkeit Rechnung. Sie beinhaltet Reproduktionen seiner Werke, Texte und Dokumente zu seinem Leben, zu Wallas Aktionismus, seiner Fotografie und Environmental Art, Faksimiles seiner Briefe, seiner Schriften und Zeichenblöcke. Texte von Peter Weiermair, Gerhard Roth, Nina Katschnig, Margit Zuckriegl, Silvia Aigner und Helmut Zambo ergänzen das monumentale Werk.
Über den Autor
August Alois Walla, 1936 geboren, wurde von seiner Mutter als Mädchen erzogen, damit ihm der Kriegseinsatz erspart bleibe. In der Rückschau auf seine Kindheit erklärte er, von den Besatzern zu einem russischen Knaben umoperiert worden zu sein. Walla begann schon in seiner Jugend künstlerisch zu arbeiten. Er zeichnete, malte, fotografierte, war Kalligraph und Lettrist und gestaltete seine Umgebung, indem er Häuser, Straßen und Bäume beschriftete. Ab 1983 lebte und arbeitete Walla im Haus der Künstler in Gugging. Er starb dort am 7. Juli 2001.

LAFFOLEY is critic's pick in the December-issue of ARTFORUM

Paul Laffoley, The Orgone Motor, 1981, oil, acrylic, vinyl lettering on canvas,

Paul Laffoley
"secret universe"
HAMBURGER BAHNHOF

September 4, 2011–March 4, 2012

The term post-critical has been thrown around in recent years to describe the ideals of hybridity and inclusivity governing much contemporary art. In this context, the exclusive category of “outsider artist” appears antiquated and counterproductive. Reflecting on this contemporary scenario, curators Udo Kittelmann and Claudia Dichter initiated a project space in Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof dedicated to artists who have been largely excluded from the mainstream art world. In the second exhibition in their program, titled “Secret Universe II,” the forty-year career of the Boston-based artist and architect Paul Laffoley is granted reassessment. Featuring over thirty paintings and prints comprising dense interplays between philosophical texts, mystical diagrams, and historical references, Laffoley’s superb draftsmanship frames his paranoid and hyperactive assessments of how history interacts with and constructs the future.

Combining a Conceptualist sensibility with New Age illustration techniques, Laffoley’s works reveal his engrossment in the alternative realities and lifestyles synonymous with the counterculture of the 1960s. His paintings evoke a Philip K. Dick–esque world where history, psychosis, and science fiction come together in ways that are simultaneously thought-provoking, entertaining, and, frankly, weird. Aligning his artistic practice with historical figures from R. Buckminster Fuller to Heraclitus, Laffoley gives an architectural schema to speculative notions and mysterious historical forms, tackling subjects as diverse as kabbalah, the shroud of Turin, quantum theory, cosmogenesis, the work of Wilhelm Reich, and the philosophy of Lucretius. His unconventional theories are delicately spelled out with adhesive lettering on the surfaces of his paintings, conveying his esoteric beliefs and giving the exhibition its legibly driven character. Yet the innovative pictorial arrangements of works such as The Orgone Motor, 1981, and The Eloptic Nohmagraphon, 1989, are often more captivating than the theories themselves. The exhibition provides an engaging introduction to Laffoley’s fascinating career, and exemplifies the move in contemporary art to abolish “outsider” status.

Wes Hill, ARTFORUM, 12/2012

Michael Patterson-Carver at NADA Art Fair

Michael Patterson-Carver

December 1–4, 2011

Solo presentation in collaboration with Sorry We're Closed (Brussels) and Laurel Gitlen (New York)

Deauville Beach Resort
6701 Collins Ave
Miami Beach, FL

www.newartdealers.org