What's New at Zane Bennett Contemporary Art Gallery, Santa Fe, NM

WHAT'S NEW

Jean Arnold Mixed Media
Dunham Aurelius Sculpture
Stephen Buxton Mixed Media
Susan Davidoff Mixed Media
Karina Hean Mixed Media
Henry Jackson Mixed Media
Kellogg Johnson Sculpture
Matthew Troy Mullins Watercolors
Soledad Salamé Multimedia Prints
Denise Yaghmourian Mixed Media
Rachel Stevens Sculpture
Bruce Dorfman Mixed Media
James Havard Oils
Mary Shaffer Sculpture
Pierre Soulages Prints

UPCOMING EVENTS & OPENINGS

Who: West Coast Artists
What: Prints, Sculpture
When: Friday, January 27, 2012 until Friday, February 17, 2012;

In conjunction with Pacific Standard Time, an initiative of the Getty Museum, Zane Bennett Contemporary Art is pleased to present an exhibition celebrating the significance of the LA art scene from post-World War II years through the 60s and 70s. Artists included are John Baldessari, Judy Chicago, Richard Diebenkorn, Guy Dill, Sam Francis and Ed Ruscha. The show opens Friday, January 27, 2012 and continues through February 17. The opening reception will be held on Friday, January 27 at the gallery, 435 South Guadalupe Street, from 5:00-7:00 pm to coincide with the Railyard Arts District Last Friday Art Walk.

ARTIST BIOGRAPHIES

Richard Diebenkorn (1922-1993) Diebenkorn’s early work is associated with abstract expressionism and the Bay Area Figurative Movement of the 1950’s and 1960’s. His later work, best known as the Ocean Park paintings, brought him worldwide acclaim. Influenced by Clyfford Still, Arshile Gorky and Willem de Kooning, he became the leading abstract expressionist painter on the west coast. In 1950 Diebenkorn enrolled under the G.I. Bill in the University of New Mexico graduate fine-arts department where he created a distinct version of abstract expressionism. The “Ocean Park” series, begun in 1976 and continued for more than twenty five years, becoming his most famous work and resulting in more than 140 paintings. These are large-scale abstract compositions based on aerial landscapes and the view from his studio in Santa Monica, California. He was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 1991.

Guy Dill is an acknowledged contemporary master of large-scale, abstract sculptural work. His bronzes, while not figurative, often suggest the lines, curves, and lithe swoop of bodies and of movement itself. Dill’s work is collected and exhibited around the world, with works in the collections of the Smithsonian Museum (D.C.), the Guggenheim Museum (NYC), MoCA (LA), and Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam). Dill has had over fifty one-man exhibitions, in cities including: Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, London and Brussels. He was born in 1946 and received his education at Chouinard Institute of Art, Los Angeles, California (BFA-Honors) in 1970. Guy Dill presently works in Venice, California, and Brussels, Belgium.

Sam Francis (1923-1994) One of 20th century’s leading abstract expressionists had a long and prolific career creating thousands of paintings as well as works on paper, prints, and monotypes. His work references Color Field painting, Japanese art, French impressionism and his own Bay Area roots. Francis's work has been included in numerous museum exhibitions, including a solo exhibition at the Pasadena Art Museum, California, a Retrospective at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY, and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California, and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

Edward Ruscha (b. 1937) is recognized for paintings incorporating words and phrases and for photographic books, influenced by the Pop art movement and the beat generation. The vernacular of Los Angeles and southern California landscapes have contributed to the themes and styles central to much of Ruscha’s paintings, drawings, and books. Museums that have acquired large collections are the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Whitney Museum and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. Currently on exhibit at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles is Ed Ruscha: On the Road, which brings together two great visionaries of art and language – Ed Ruscha & Jack Kerouac. The exhibition will travel to Haus der Kunst, Munich and the Moderna Museet in Stockholm.

Who: Under Thirty-Five Group Show
What: Variety of media including glass, prints, paintings, sculpture
When: Friday, February 24 – Saturday, March 23, 2012
Opening Reception: Friday, February 24, 5:00-7:00pm

Zane Bennett Contemporary Art invites young art enthusiasts to engage with art. Fostering the next generation of collectors is the focus of this exhibition. Under Thirty-Five features works by artists whose styles, techniques, and concepts are constantly being invented, recycled, updated and discarded. Featured artists working in a variety of media include Dunham Aurelius, Tamara Zibners, Matthew Szosz, Michael Petry, Holly Roberts, Karina Hean, and Heidi Pollard. The show opens Friday, February 24, 2012 and continues through Saturday, March 23, 2012. The opening reception is Friday, February 24th at the gallery, 435 South Guadalupe Street, from 5:00-7:00pm in conjunction with the Railyard Arts District Walk.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Dunham Aurelius' work focuses on the human condition influenced by his observations of war, suffering, oppression and poverty. He also identifies with, and pursues an aesthetic connection to the aspects of primitive tribal arts and indigenous cultures. His sculptures are composed of a variety of materials inclusive of clays, waxes, wood, steel, bone, and found objects, using the lost wax casting method for transforming his art into bronze.

Heidi Pollard's works are a study in aesthetic paradox. Her heroes are the hard-edge painters of the 1960's, yet her art glows with a new formalist warmth. These works are layered yet flat, simultaneously textured and spare. They explore the color, geometry, and motion of painters that came before, but with originality, subtlety, and affection. These paintings are not "about" something else; they are a unique voice transmitted through paint. Clear aesthetic purpose and visual rhythm echo across Pollard's surfaces; her bright colors and bold strokes enliven the corridors of the mind, where thought and visions mingle. -Amy Rahn

Matthew Szosz's glass work is created by employing ready-made material, most often common window glass, as a tool for the investigation of material behavior. It is heated to a point of flexibility, subjected to acute force, and quickly solidified. The resulting forms are created partly by manipulation, and partly by the physical response of the glass to stresses placed on it. In this way, the works are partnerships between the glass and artist - a carefully planned and assembled experiment is prepared, and then submitted to physics for sudden, violent, often unpredicted results.

Tamara Zibners series, How Bad Can it Get is of real and imagined scenes that use photographs as underpinnings to a drawn and colored surface. Cultural color associations and the formalisms of cartooning are invoked to read a situation that is instantly recognizable. Magenta conjures up the cries of riot girl music. Taupe rubs viscerally like a tasteful middle class carpet.