VON LINTEL GALLERY

Showing posts with label CONTEMPORARY DRAWING. Show all posts

Thursday, January 30, 2014

CANAN TOLON: Sidesteps | Parasol Unit — Installation shots

Friday, January 17, 2014

CANAN TOLON | Interview @ Blouin ArtInfo

Vertigo, Balance and Belonging: An Interview with Canan Tolon

By Ashitha Nagesh

Canan Tolon was born in Istanbul and spent her childhood in France. She spent her formative years between the ages of 1 and 11 in hospital being treated for Polio. Tolon later studied in Scotland, Germany, England and the US, worked in architectural practices for ten years, and now lives and works as an artist in Emeryville, California. However, Tolon disavows readings of her own biography in her body of work - instead, her pieces are made with the intention of allowing the viewer to see themselves within the abstractions. Her work has made use of organic materials, including grass that was grown on canvas and died during the course of the exhibition, rust, and coffee. A series of ink drawings on mylar plastic called Futur Imparfait, completed between 1986 and 1999, have recently been acquired by the British Museum. She spoke to Ashitha Nagesh on the occasion of her first UK solo show, “Sidesteps” at Parasol Unit in London.

I’m interested in your architectural background, because it translates quite strongly into a lot of your work and there’s an exploration of space in a lot of the pieces. Could you tell me a bit more about this?

You know, I think I studied architecture because I was interested in space, rather than the other way around. I worked for ten years in architectural offices, and I realised that although I didn’t have my own office or anything I had a strong idea of space – space and distance have always been very important to me. When I walk I of course take longer than other people, and sometimes I have to work on the floor; so I see a different perspective to others. Of course, architecture really helps as an education in so many ways, for example with scale and draughtsmanship, but I’m really beginning to see that it’s not the architecture that influenced the work – I studied architecture because I wanted to structure my concept of what space was. Even when I made figurative works, space was very much a part of it.

With those figurative works depicting people within the boxes, there’s the idea of inhabiting a space. This might seem like a strange connection to make, but in one of your later monumental works also it looks as though you’ve used pre-natal sonograms?

Yes, I didn’t use sonograms but I used a squeegee and I twisted it to get that same sweeping effect, and the mylar [plastic] gives it that x-ray quality – and the inside of our bodies are spaces also. I was thinking about how we can grow in spaces, in rooms rather than wombs – but the interesting thing is that if you are a woman you might think it’s a pregnancy or similar inhabited space. I like the idea of people reading my works in different ways, especially when doctors look at them and they think it’s about looking under the skin. This is a space that we don’t really know, but we just are. It’s another form of architecture really.

The womb is the first space we inhabit…

Yes! Exactly. It wasn’t intentionally from a womb image, though, it was totally accidental. I never want to use borrowed images; I create my own images, but I want them to look like they’ve been borrowed.

That reminds me of what you were saying earlier in the gallery about wanting to “trick the viewer.”

It’s like a guessing game – and I’m glad that you’re guessing in the game. I basically want people to see something different each time they look at the pieces. I’d be very happy if people were not able to describe my work.

I’m also drawn to your use of grass and other natural materials that decay, marking the passing of time through the course of the exhibition.

In this work [Under Pressure, 1994, in the exhibition catalogue] you can see that there is a repetition. It’s a Cartesian mapping – but when the different elements of the sculpture were placed next to each other, they looked like stretchers carrying bodies. At the same time, they had a beautiful California landscape look, because the California landscape is pretty bold. But because of the rhythm they were also like hospital beds, with bodies lying down to recover.

The idea of the body seems to pervade all of your work.

Yes, exactly.

Read full interview @ Blouin ArtInfo

Thursday, December 19, 2013

Canan Tolon: Sidesteps15 January - 16 March 2014 | Parasol Unit Foundation for Contemporary Art

Canan Tolon, ‘Glitch II’, 2007.
Oil on canvas, 140 x 180 cm.
Tim and Nancy Howes, private collection.
Photo: Eli Ridgway.

Preview: 14 January 2014, 6.30 – 9 p.m.

Parasol unit foundation for contemporary art is delighted to present a solo exhibition of works by Turkish-born artist Canan Tolon. This, her first major exhibition in a London institution, provides in-depth insight into her works from 1986 to the present day. It includes Futur imparfait, 1986–1999, a series of 33 ink-wash and crayon figurative drawings that were recently acquired by the British Museum. At Parasol unit they will be on show all together for the first time in the UK.

Canan Tolon was born in Istanbul and grew up in various European countries. After earning her baccalauréat from the École Française d’Istanbul in Turkey, in 1975, she studied design in Edinburgh and London. In 1980, she received a BA from Middlesex Polytechnic / Architectural Association, London, and that same year moved to the Bay Area of San Francisco to study for a Masters in Architecture at the University of California at Berkeley. After graduating in 1983 she worked for about ten years in several architecture offices while continuing her work in the visual arts. Her paintings and installations have been exhibited internationally. She has works in a number of major public collections, including the British Museum, London; Istanbul Modern; IKSV (Istanbul Foundation for Culture and the Arts); the Nesrin Esirtgen Collection, Istanbul, Turkey; and the di Rosa Collection, Napa, USA.

Canan Tolon lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area, California, and in Istanbul, Turkey.
This exhibition is curated by Ziba Ardalan, Founder/Director of Parasol unit.

Canan Tolon: Sidesteps is accompanied by a comprehensive book, including an artist interview by Ziba Ardalan and essays by Bill Berkson and John Yau, published by Parasol unit foundation for contemporary art. A related programme of educational events at the gallery will include lectures, poetry readings, animation and storytelling workshops.

Read the full press release.

Parasol unit is grateful for the generous support of Berna and Tolga Tuglular, Mehves-Dalinc Ariburnu, Isik Kececi Asur, Mine - H.Cem Bahadir, Aylin Benardete Sarihan, Şeli Elvaşvili, Nesrin Esirtgen, Öner Kocabeyoglu, Caroline Landin, Derin Mermerci, Ebru Ozdemir, Aysegul - Ömer Özyürek, Yosun Reza, Edwina Sponza, Billur-Atilla Tacir, the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism and those who wish to remain anonymous.

Read more @ Parasol unit foundation for contemporary art

Thursday, December 5, 2013

Epic: Joseph Stashkevetch Drawings @ Denver Art Museum

Joseph Stashkevetch, *Ask the Dust* (detail), 2011
Conte crayon on watercolor paper
Courtesy the artist and Baldwin Gallery, Aspen, CO
Photo courtesy Christopher Burke

Epic: Joseph Stashkevetch
Drawings November 17, 2013 – July 13, 2014

Installation photos by Jeff Wells

Friday, October 4, 2013

ROSEMARIE FIORE | Firework Drawings at SCAD-Atlanta — Burnaway Review

Rosemarie Fiore, Firework Drawing #20, 2009. Lit firework residue on paper.

By Andrew Alexande

There’s an intriguing radioactive instability of incompatible elements in any action painting. There’s the stillness and permanence of the created object, but then there’s also the implied volatility, noise, and irretrievability of the activity itself, still semi-present in its lasting traces, but ultimately insurmountably past. When the action is literally explosive, that juxtaposition becomes even more manifest.

New York-based artist Rosemarie Fiore’s Firework Drawings, at SCAD-Atlanta’s Gallery 1600 through December 6, is a selection of large works on paper created through the use of live fireworks and colored smoke bombs. Fiore refers to the pieces as drawings: Most are titled Firework Drawing and then numbered in a series. But the activity that created them, particularly the application of color in the form of smoke, and the resulting work seem closer kin to painting—perhaps even suggesting a playful literalization of the famous Renaissance mode of painting, sfumato (smoked), the use of smokelike borderless gradations between darkness and light to give a sense of the depth of solid forms (Fiore has worked as an art restorer in Europe and has pointed to Renaissance masters as a source of inspiration). The artist deploys a variety of colored smoke bombs, jumping jacks, monster balls, and rings of fire to create her work, using coffee cans, buckets, and other containers to transfer the pigment-rich smoke onto paper.

Rosemarie Fiore creating a firework drawing, 2009. Courtesy of the artist.

In the past she has likewise taken up a wide variety of unusual objects as part of her practice: waffle irons, lawn mowers, pinball machines, and floor polishers. It’s mark-making as collaboration, often with objects designed for other uses—indeed, seemingly resistant to their use as a brush or tool in an aesthetic process, but often surprisingly pliant, their resistance to control part of their enhancive effect. One might be tempted to identify her purely as a conceptual artist, but the aesthetic rigor of the work itself often stands powerfully independent of any conceptual underpinnings

“I’ve chosen to collaborate with machines,” the artist has said. “I use machines as mark-making tools. For me, paint just isn’t enough.” Actually, she seems fine with the paint; it’s the brush—its illusion of precision, its predictability, its obeisance, its specific design for its purpose—and perhaps the supposed authority of the painter’s hand holding it, that she has rejected.

Rosemarie Fiore, Firework Drawing #13, 2009. Lit firework residue on paper

Fiore’s work is charged with energy and a strange, almost perspectival depth, a richly suggestive and active field, or set of fields. Although most of the firework pieces have dark backgrounds—Fiore places cut paper, often in layered circles on surfaces, all stained in powdery daubs and streaks by smoke—the most successful works are the ones whose backgrounds are left more intriguingly bare, the traces of smoke less deeply saturated but their subtle, gemlike gradations more evident. Here the circles of paper seemingly float above the surface, their active interplay of depth more apparent against the white background, as in Firework Drawing #13. The work here seems to engage with cosmic themes of void and chaos, planetary and molecular motion.

The drawings suggest the famous 1960s fire paintings of Yves Klein, though I think Klein’s work radiates a sense of existential terror, heat, sex, violence, and destruction, a post-apocalyptic non-landscape, and these issues don’t seem as germane to Fiore in her colorful, almost celebratory, pieces. Contemporary Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang similarly works with gunpowder, the material itself indicative of war and destruction, the resulting beautifully bleak work often suggestive of their aftermath. In all of these artists’ work, there is, of course, a moment of violent “destruction” channeled as creation, leaving behind an object of mysterious beauty. It’s violence and chaos, if not controlled, then at least directed by the artist’s will. The work argues for the aesthetic of the release of authorial control. Perhaps it might be even taken as a working definition of the artistic process in general: the conscious manipulation—but never quite conquered—movement of the chaotic and ultimately uncontrollable forces of matter.

Read original review @ Burnaway

Wednesday, April 17, 2013

CANAN TOLON | Somewhere Now — April 18 - May 25, 2013

Canan Tolon Untitled 4.3, 2013
oil on canvas
24 x 24 inches

Von Lintel Gallery is pleased to announce our first solo exhibition of paintings by Canan Tolon.

Canan Tolon's paintings at first appear as purely abstract, but with time the eye discovers familiar urban landscapes in the rhythmic painted streaks. She explores the visualization of space by creating an illusion of depth and engages the viewer in the game of seeking recognizable imagery and inventing a visual narrative. The black and white pieces in particular allude to the documentary quality of photography, suggesting reality where there is only imagination. Like a distant mirage, the viewer is drawn into the work, wanting to explore the multiple layers of information. With even closer inspection, the elusive vistas dissolve back into abstract patterns revealing the painting's deception. This duality makes the imagery unstable, flickering between truth and illusion to create an ever-interesting visual feast.

Born in Istanbul, Tolon trained as an architect and holds a Masters from the University of California at Berkeley. In addition to her paintings, she is also well known for her large-scale installation work. She has exhibited internationally since 1984, including shows at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Rotterdam's Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, the Istanbul Modern Museum, and London's Saachi Gallery. In 2012, she was named one of Art+Auction's 50 Next Most Collectible Artists. Tolon lives and works in the California Bay Area

The exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue.