For Gallery Platform LA, Anat Ebgi is pleased to present a snapshot of our gallery program for 2020. From historical work by Tina Girouard to large scale anthropomorphic drawings by Cosmo Whyte, this curated selection looks back a recent shows and offers a glimpse into the future ones featuring Jibade-Khalil Huffman, An Te Liu, Robert Russell, Sigrid Sandström, and Sarah Ann Weber.

Olga Balema constructs objects and installations from the found, the readymade, and the fabricated, moving fluently through various genres and stylistic points with a material intelligence that encompasses references to art history, cinema, literature, and personal narratives. While Balema is often described as a sculptor, her work in fact undoes many of the medium’s most traditional traits. Frequently situated low to the ground and integrated into their architectural surroundings, her objects frustrate expectations of sculptural monumentality. Composed from heterogeneous materials—ranging from electronics and plastics in day-glo hues to soft cloth and latex—they instead evoke instability, growth, and discomfort. While Balema eschews straightforward figuration, a sense of embodied experience nonetheless enlivens her work.

Olga Balema (b. 1984, Ukraine) is an artist living and working in New York. She received her MFA in New Genres from UCLA and subsequently attended the Rijksakademie as a resident, as well as Skowhegan. Balema is the 2017 recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant. She has participated in national and international group exhibitions in venues including Haus der Kunst, Munich (2018); Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, Sankt Gallen (2018); High Art, Paris (2017); Croy Nielsen, Vienna (2017); Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2016); and in exhibitions including The Baltic Triennial 13, Vilnius (2018); 2015 Surround Sound Triennial, New Museum, New York (2015); and the 2019 Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Balema has held solo exhibitions at venues including Bridget Donahue, New York (2019); Swiss Institute, New York (2016); and Kunstverein Nürnberg, Nürnberg (2015).

A lifelong resident of California, LA-based artist Richard Jackson has played a key role in the art scene since he moved to the city in the late 1960s. Influenced by both Abstract Expressionism and action painting, Jackson has spent the last five decades exploring a performative painting process which seeks to extend the medium’s potential by upending its technical possibilities.

These seven works employ a mix of materials including neon, a Volkswagen car, fiberglass, oil paint, and steel in an array of expressive installations. The works showcase Jackson’s pursuit of ‘painting as performance; painting as experience’ and exemplify his high level of craftsmanship and engineering. For Jackson, paint is not a tool used to create a representational image, but a ubiquitous liquid to be spurted, splattered and sprayed over the surface of his installations.

Born in Sacramento, California in 1939, Jackson first came to international attention with a major presentation of his installation works at the Menil Collection, Houston, in 1988, followed by the 1992 exhibition, ‘Helter Skelter,’ at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. In 2019, Jackson presented a solo exhibition at the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento. Since the beginning of 2020, he has opened a solo exhibition at the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt and published a new monograph with Hauser & Wirth Publishers that investigates the myriad facets of his practice.

In Cantonese, jook-sing is a pejorative term for persons of Chinese descent who live overseas and identify more strongly with western culture. The term itself evolved poetically from the word for “bamboo pole.” Bamboo rods are hollow and compartmentalized, so if one is to pour water in one end, it is trapped, unable to flow through to the other side. 
 
Dominique Fung was born and raised in Ottawa, Canada, to first-generation parents from Shanghai and Hong Kong. At home, she spoke Cantonese, at school English. Her early artistic passions were informed by Vermeer, Manet, Rembrandt, and Goya, but her sense of Chinese heritage was largely informed by vessels and objects she saw at home and on display in the Asian art section during visits to the Met in New York.

The relics in the museum, Fung thought, were jook-sing like her: anonymously Asian in appearance, separated and oftentimes stolen from their original contexts by oceans, hemispheres, and centuries, imbued with identity by masters long since deceased. She imagined what the objects’ lives were like when they were born, what they held within their bodies, who touched and used them, how they felt about it. She began to think of them as concubines, with personalities, secrets, and stories to share. She wondered what they’d look like with hair. She realized her relationship to her own Cantonese identity was shaded by a sort of 19th century Orientalism.
 
In her 2018 essay “Ornamentalism: A Feminist Theory for the Yellow Woman,” Anne Anlin Cheng defines 19th century Orientalism as such: “that opulence and sensuality are the signature components of Asiatic character; that Asia is always ancient, excessive, feminine, available, and decadent; that material consumption promises cultural possession; that there is no room ... for national, ethnic, or historical specificities.” The Asian art section at the Met is Orientalist, thought Fung. In a way, so was she.

Relics and Remains, Fung’s first solo exhibition with Nicodim, is the result of the subsequent years of research into her motherland’s cultural history, casting the objects in the Met she once fetishized as an entry point. These paintings are the artist’s dark and playful exploration of her own jook-sing-ness; they navigate and reclaim the water of her identity suspended within bamboo.

Dominique Fung (b. 1987, Ottawa, Canada) lives and works in New York. She received her BAA from Sheridan College Institute of Technology in Toronto in 2009. Recent exhibitions include Animal Kingdom, Alexander Berggruen, New York (2020); Hollywood Babylon: A Re-Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, Nicodim, Jeffrey Deitch, and AUTRE Magazine, Los Angeles, USA (2020); If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller, MAMOTH, London, UK (2020); Skin Stealers, Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles (2020); Trans World, Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles, USA; Galeria Nicodim, Bucharest, Romania (2019); Wash Your Corners, Ross + Kramer, New York, USA (2019, solo); Dominique Fung, Taymour Grahne, London, United Kingdom (2019, solo); Barmecide Feast, The 14th Factory, Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, Washington DC, USA (2018).

Mindy Shapero is best-known for her sculptures and works on paper that employ a vivid color-palette and myriad use of often humble materials. Through a mixture of surrealism and kitsch, Shapero playfully manipulates her media in a process of accretion and repetition, resulting in objects that dare to contradict their reasons for being. Though Shapero traces visual histories of materials being put to use, her relationship to the material world is not defined by sheer pragmatism. Rather, she perceives how tangible things are capable of transporting us beyond ordinary experience, so that the intangible is just within reach.

Midnight Portal Scars, Shapero's first exhibition with the gallery, features new works on paper that recombines materials and techniques seen in her sculptures. Thus, these works on paper act as markers of process. Through layers of paint, spray paint and subsequent leafing, Shapero treats “viewing” or “looking” as a continuous state of transformation - “a state of mind that allows interiority and exteriority to mix and become a single metaphysical continuum.”

The works on paper, much like her sculpture, are a reflection of material and process. Stencil-like remnants of cut paper used to make sculptures are laid down as templates, thus the negative created by the stencil becomes the positive in the drawing. After spray paint and leafing are applied, the negative spaces left in their wake demarcate a dense layer of grids. Through these layers of grids, the ghostly shadows of everyday objects, such as buttons and jewelry, can be found. It is Shapero’s deliberate maneuvering of materials, forms and levels of transparency that pushes the resultant work to the edge of otherworldly, almost psychedelic, while maintaining hints of the natural world.

Mindy Shapero (b. 1974 in Louisville, KY) earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, MD (1997) and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA (2003). Shapero’s work has been shown extensively in institutions across the country in exhibitions such as, Highlights from the Collection, Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA (2017); NO MAN’S LAND: Women Artists from the Rubell Family Collection, Miami, FL (2015); Storytelling as Craft, Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft, Louisville, KY (2013); New Art for a New Century: Recent Acquisitions 2000-2009, Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA, (2010); Like color in pictures, Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, CO (2007); The Uncertainty of Objects and Ideas, Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C. (2006); Thing: New Sculpture From LA, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA (2005), and a two-person exhibition with Jockum Nordström at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH (2006), among others.

Lilian Martinez’ work blends representation and iconographies of past with present and imagined future, combining classical architectural elements with contemporary pop cultural references to create the settings for her portraits, landscapes, and still lifes. Her flat, bold style recalls iconic predecessors like Matisse, while her impetus to center brown bodies that have historically been essentialized, if not omitted altogether, from these sorts of historical artworks recontextualizes the roles of the artist and subject at once.

Martinez’ newest body of work is both more commanding in scale, as well as increasingly focused on the figures she portrays. The figures are usually engaged in everyday leisure activities, and Martinez’ work indulges color and mood, all while maintaining a charming nonchalance. Even in the works bold simplicity, a matrix of historical and cultural signifiers exposes a boundlessness, both in connection through nostalgic specificity and limitlessness in the lack thereof. Towering above the line of sight, Lilian Martinez’ women portrayed welcome the viewer with open arms into a dreamscape of her making.

Lilian Martinez (b. 1986, Chicago, IL) lives and works between Yucca Valley and Los Angeles, CA. She earned a BFA in Photography from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is the founder of BFGF, an art brand working with digitally printed and woven versions of her artwork. She has exhibited her work nationally and internationally.

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Residency Art Gallery proudly presents a selection of new offerings from texas isaiah, Devon Tsuno, Alanna Fields and Alfonso Gonzalez Jr. for Gallery Platform LA. Thank you for your consideration.

Just getting through the day, another like the ones before. Not only is space constricted as we stay home with so many public places still off limits or tainted with risk, hoping to weather another wave safely (or is this still the first?), but time gets recalibrated and folded in on itself into an incessant loop. Longer term planning gets shelved, succumbing to the abiding uncertainty and unplanability of the year, so that the short, immediate term of day-by-day takes over. Always a key feature of the everyday, repetition looms larger than ever. With schools closed and work for many still on hold, the days of the week blur and fade. It is an entropic and timeless kind of time, destructured into a mostly stale equilibrium of suspension, delay, postponement, and waiting—waiting to enter a new phase, waiting for the zoo or school or museum to reopen, waiting for positivity rates to fall, waiting for test results, waiting for the incubation period to pass, waiting for some good news, waiting for some accurate and actionable information, waiting for a breakthrough, waiting to be able to reschedule, waiting to plan, waiting for a delivery, waiting for the election. Quarantine time can feel, alternately, frantic and uneventful—full of silent static. Days float by adrift, unmoored, undefined or defined routinely by meals and sleep; or they harden into a frozen block, paused, and stuck in a holding pattern. We look forward, we think ahead to when this is over.

—Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer

Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer is an art writer, curator, and educator in Los Angeles. She is the author of Lee Lozano: Dropout Piece (Afterall Books, One Work Series, 2014) and Can’t Reach Me There (Midway Contemporary Art, 2016). She is the editor of Pep Talk publications, begun 2009, and runs the non-commercial Finley Gallery, begun 2011.