good news.

July 28 - August 29, 2016

Ricardo Alcaide
Abdulaziz Ashour
Ernesto Caivano
Darío Escobar
Fernanda Fragateiro
Simryn Gill
Anne Lindberg
Yuri Masnyj
Julianne Swartz
Yuken Teruya
Rirkrit Tiravanija & Tomas Vu
Adam Winner

July 28 - August 29, 2016
Opening reception: Thursday July 28, 6pm to 8pm
Summer hours: Monday to Friday 10am - 6pm

Josée Bienvenu is pleased to present good news., an exhibition of international artists working on and off paper to deconstruct and reconfigure information. With the daily deluge of bad news at our fingertips, we become disoriented in our distanced yet simultaneously intimate sense of connectedness to the world.

Based in Sao Paulo, Ricardo Alcaide interested in the social aspects of architecture and design. His interest in geometric abstraction, modernist constructions, and dynamics in urban centers allow him to juxtapose the poetic and the political. In his Intrusion series, Alcaide hinders the pictorial and symbolic reality of luxurious spaces by introducing a foreign element to pages of design magazines.

Based in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, Abdulaziz Ashour presents international newspapers that have been altered by communication officials, as well as new sanded collages made during his recent residency at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation in Connecticut. Ashour’s gestures add another layer of obscurity, questioning the power of the image as a means to convey underlying ideology.

Argentine American artist Ernesto Caivano lives and works in New York. He presents a panoramic work and abstract drawings that form part of a post-anthropocentric narrative titled After the Woods. Caivano's intricate drawings take their cues from cosmology, mythology, philosophy, romantic poetry, science fiction, Japanese printmaking and fractal geometry.

Darío Escobar lives and works in Guatemala City. He presents a new series of graphite and cinnabar clay compositions. His work is characterized by the revitalization of materials charged with historical and symbolic meaning, reexamining Western art history and aesthetics from a Guatemalan perspective.

Fernanda Fragateiro lives and works in Lisbon, Portugal. Her works are characterized by a keen interest in re-thinking and probing modernist practices. Fragateiro frequently employs the method of repurposing already-existing and symbolically layered material, such as second-hand books and magazines, in order to fashion complex yet delicate work that is criss-crossed by an intricate web of inner references to art theory and architectural history.

Singaporean-born artist Simryn Gill was educated in India and the UK, and now lives and works in Sydney and Malaysia. Included in this exhibition are the studies of her Let Go, Let's Go series of collage drawings on paper, presented at the Australian Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013. Several of her works involve erasing or excising the printed word in a microcosmic struggle with authority as embodied by canonical texts.

Anne Lindberg’s works tap a non-verbal physiological landscape of body and space, provoking emotional, visceral and perceptual responses. She works with an expanded definition of drawing languages that reside between abstraction and metaphor. Her graphite drawings are optical, sensual and metaphysically charged.

Ukrainian American artist Yuri Masnyj lives and works in New York. Masnyj's drawings focus on the aesthetic of historical avant-garde, in particularly Russian Constructivism, combining elements inspired by graphic design, architecture, and the art-historical past. Commenting on the ways that the avant-garde has filtered into the mainstream, tempering its utopian spirit, Masnyj's work alludes to the institutionalization and domestication of these once-radical forms.

Born in Phoenix, Julianne Swartz lives and works in upstate New York. Her sculpture Stability Study (bowl), explores negative space and the interface between outside and inside. Her work encourages a quizzical reconsideration of our relationship to our body and our surroundings, a metaphoric investigation of the limitations, fragility and endurance of the body, and the weight of human relationships.

Born in Okinawa, Japan, Yuken Teruya lives and works in New York. Teruya manipulates everyday objects, transforming their meanings to reflect on contemporary society and culture, creating micro universes that pertain to broader concerns. Teruya’s Minding My Own Business series features old New York Times newspapers that have been meticulously sliced open to sprout delicate plant life, adding a nuanced narrative to dismal front page news that seldom gives attention to ecological matters.

Rirkrit Tiravanija and Thomas Vu collaborate on a series titled Green Go Home, it is part myth, part misunderstanding and part imagination. Tiravanija extends from the notion of relational aesthetics, and Vu's work plays with the roles of man and machine and the waning boundary between the two.

Adam Winner is an American artist based in Brooklyn. Made with dense layers of oil on paper, Winner’s sculptural paintings expose their own accidents and mistakes, laying bare the edges and seams. Exploring imperfect gestures and the manifestation of internal conflict, his drawings are imbued with a sense of self-doubt, yet with confident control over the materials.

I am pleased announce that my work (including the above sculpture called "sleep" and 4 drawings from the insomnia series) will be included in Sleepless Nights at Galerie Hubert Winter in Vienna, Austria. Curated by Abigail Solomon-Godeau, this exhibition is part of a city wide project called The Century of the Bed from Curated By_Vienna.

Here is an excerpt from Beatriz Columna's essay The Century of the Bed:

The Century of the Bed
by Beatriz Colomina

In what is probably now a conservative estimate, The Wall Street Journal reported in 2012 that 80% of young New York City professionals work regularly from bed. Millions of dispersed beds are taking over from concentrated office buildings. The boudoir is defeating the tower. Networked electronic technologies have removed any limit to what can be done in bed. It is not just that the bed/office has been made possible by new media. Rather new media is designed to extend a 100-year-old dream of domestic connectivity to millions of people. The city has moved into the bed.

How did we get here?

Industrialization brought with it the 8 hour shift and the radical separation between home and office/ factory, rest and work, night and day. Post-industrialization collapses work back into the home and takes it further into the bedroom and into the bed itself. Fantasmagoria is no longer lining the room in wallpaper, fabric, images, and objects. It is now in the electronic devices. The whole universe is concentrated on a small screen with the bed floating in an infinite sea of information. To lie down is not to rest but to move. The bed is now a site of action.

Between the bed inserted in the office and the office inserted in the bed a whole new horizontal architecture has taken over. It is magnified by the “flat” networks of social media that have themselves been fully integrated into the professional, business and industrial environment in a collapse of traditional distinctions between private and public, work and play, rest and action.

What is the architecture of this new space and time? What is the nature of this new interior in which we have decided collectively to check ourselves in? What is the architecture of this prison in which night and day, work and play are no longer differentiated and we are permanently under surveillance, even as we sleep in the control booth?*

The exhibitions within the framework of curated by_vienna: The Century of the Bed address these questions and raise new ones. The individual projects offer insight into the diverse artistic investigations with this topic, but also into different kinds of curatorial practices.

*Read the unabridged version of Beatriz Colomina’s essay in the publication, which will be published on the occasion of the opening of curated by_vienna: The Century of the Bed and contains contributions of all participating curators and galleries.