Shinpei Kusanagi is a Japanese painter working in Tokyo. Utilizing a technique reminiscent of traditional Japanese nijimi, Kusanagi stains untreated canvas with layers of translucent color. Incorporating improvisational brushstrokes in vivid hues, the compositions hover on the surface and then recede into deep space. Kusanagi’s uninhibited use of color offers oscillating contrast and harmony, resulting in abstracted landscapes that appear simultaneously dynamic and serene.

Kusanagi’s landscapes evoke familiar urban and natural scenes, such as sidewalks, windows, trees, foliage, and flowers, clouds and the sea. Yet, they simultaneously make viewers imagine an unknown “elsewhere” that expands outside our world. His atmospheric washes of color leave the paintings devoid of specific detail, conjuring memories of time and place rather than a precise representation.

Shinpei Kusanagi (b.1973) lives and works in Tokyo, Japan. Solo exhibitions include: Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo; Altman Siegel, San Francisco; Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery; Gallery Sora, Tokyo; Bankart Studio, Tokyo and Makii Masaru Fine Arts, Tokyo. Group exhibitions include: Carnegie Art Museum, Oxnard; Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago; XYZ collective, Tokyo; The Ueno Royal Museum,Tokyo; Gallery Space Prism, Tokyo and Creation Gallery G8, Tokyo.

Anthony Meier Fine Arts is pleased to present a selection of works on paper by Joseph Havel for the June 2021 edition of 8-bridges. Havel employs light and dark in his abstract drawings. Known primarily for his bronze sculptures of boxes, spheres and draped textiles, Havel has transposed his sculptural gestures onto paper using graphite and oil pigment. The artist lives and works in San Francisco and Houston, and currently serves as the Director of the Glassell School of Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

“My previous project, Bright Black World, published in 2018, explored my feelings of a darker world that I saw us slipping into. To my great dismay, I see no reprieve or respite, And honestly, could anyone have imagined what was coming? Yet I continue to fight tooth & nail.

The first sentence of the essay written by Alexander Nemerov for Bright Black World is, “The end sends advance warning.” He could’ve stopped right there because those five words have infected me and my vision in the best way. I find that as a visual artist it often only takes a few good words to clarify and motivate one to create. Much of my new work is made with that phrase echoing in my subconscious as I look at the spaces I move through.”

— Todd Hido

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”  – Joan Didion

At the intersection of Rebekah Goldstein, James Perkins and Amy Nathan’s works is a desire to share stories about change. Each artist utilizes formal investigations as a way to share a narrative endowed from personal experience with a focus on transformation. Goldstein alludes to movements, memories and changes that took place in her body during pregnancy through the contours of her canvas, which escape the rectangular. While her paintings still retain a certain flatness, the unconventional shapes relate to the metaphorical journey of human-life, which is far from uniform. 

Perspective and composition guide the narrative in Amy Nathan’s artworks, which reinterpret historical documents of ancient Greek and Roman mythologies to re-examine mythology from a feminist perspective. In these three drawings of photographs of ancient sculptures, Nathan considers how we acquire knowledge—the many filters, perspectives, and informed guesses that are part of any object’s narrative arc through time. By cropping source images to focus on certain details of warriors and goddesses, Nathan highlights the delicate moments, and the tools women use (literally and metaphorically) to hold themselves together. In the drawing, Athena wears Medusa, the goddess is portrayed wearing on her armor a brooch of Medusa. Medusa—whose head was used as a weapon in her own mythology— becomes a mediating talisman itself, an interface of public and private.

James Perkins creates paintings through performative installations that employ the elements and forces of nature to mark time on stretched silks and linens. Made on the beach in Fire Island, New York, Perkins’ work explores the beauty and experience of weathering the vicissitudes of life. The “post-totem structures” start outdoors in the language of sculpture and culminate as “nonsite” wall reliefs with marks made in collaboration with nature. He believes that we all navigate totems and their historical and contemporary values to paint an identity either closer to or further away from his idea of a neutral existence.  

For more information contact the gallery at info@cultexhibitions.com .

For June on 8-bridges, Friends Indeed Gallery presents new work by Livien Yin.

Sensual Chinese men and androgynous figures take center stage in Livien Yin’s painting series, Paper Suns. The fictionalized portraits are inspired by the largely hidden experiences of Chinese-born “paper sons and daughters” who became American citizens by obtaining forged documents that stated they were children of Chinese Americans. In Paper Suns’ vignettes of leisure, Yin expands on her historical research to imagine what “paper” identities could have looked like in spite of the pervasive limitations experienced by many during the Chinese Exclusion era (1882-1943). Through repurposing imagery from Exclusion era photographs and American Realist paintings, Yin visualizes scenes of Chinese immigrants where desire, pleasure and new camaraderies set the tone.

Livien Yin received her BA from Reed College in 2012 and MFA from Stanford University in 2019. Her upcoming first solo show opens July 2021 at The New Gallery in Calgary, Alberta. She has been awarded a 2019-2020 Graduate Fellowship at Headlands Center for the Arts, the 2019 American Austrian Foundation Seebacher Prize for Fine Arts, and the 2019 Anita Squires Fowler Memorial Award in Photography. Yin lives and works in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Jessica Silverman is pleased to announce a curated selection from our inaugural exhibition at 621 Grant Avenue in San Francisco’s Chinatown. Titled “We Are Here,” the group show features paintings, sculptures and photographs.

Wishful Thinking, Damian Loeb’s debut presentation with Pace, is an off-world homage to the history of allegorical painting and comprises eight new paintings created in 2020 and 2021. Celebrating the relevance of representational work in a conceptual world, Loeb extends the genre of landscape painting to encompass new realms, translating the 19th century Romantic ideals of the sublime into contemporary images of the universe. He manipulates scale and composition to capture the spiritual awe of extra-terrestrial scenes, using classical art tropes to convey the escapist beauty in these strangely familiar expanses. Alluding to the Pygmalion myth, the show’s title refers to the desire of a certain reality rather than what exists. These works present distant landscapes as welcoming and a possible future home, yet simultaneously highlight the failure of verisimilitude—the fact that they will forever remain an “ideal”.

Following the tradition of early Baroque painters, these transcendent paintings seek to offer a spiritual salve for modern times and reference classical myths to examine themes such as martyrdom, faith, and sacrifice in their contemplation on the human condition. In Danae and the Shower of Gold (after Rubens) (2020), viewers see the gaseous folds of Jupiter mirror the modesty of fabric and plentiful flesh presented in Rubens’ painting of the same name.

Moving toward a new level of abstraction, the artist invites viewers to contemplate questions about an individual’s place in the infinite through this new body of work. Loeb’s paintings are “wishful thinking”: a meditation on fate as it manifests itself in beauty, and a false resolution—offered by myth—to find lost hope by anthropomorphizing the vast and mysterious images of other worlds, seemingly closer and better than the present one.

In our ongoing focus on artists working on the cusp of material culture, PATRICIA SWEETOW GALLERY is pleased to present Chicago artist Jacqueline Surdell in her first one-person exhibition, “I started from a place of embracing that which I cannot control”. This amazing young artist employs complex knotting, weaving, cutting and tying, upending a story of American idealism. The tapestries in the exhibition emerged since the lockdown of 2020, they reflect the angst of the times, triple knotted into complex terrains, a true gift of transference!!

The physical demands of Jacqueline Surdell’s process are extreme, with an oversized constructed loom and no mechanical assist for the weft. Jacqueline becomes her own shuttle, carrying pounds of rope and sundry materials, her force providing necessary tensile strength. The finished works are suspended by wood or steel rods, weighing an average of 150 lbs.

The works on view begin with a shower curtain, whose imagery depicts a single painting from the Hudson River School of Art in the 19^th century.  Those heroic paintings offer a burgeoning national and spiritual American Ideal, an accordant utopia. In metaphoric disassociation with those artists, Surdell delivers a blow, as she shreds the curtains, disrupting their harmony. She employs historical knotting techniques from Korea, Japan, and First Nations, as well as maritime, architecture and fashion to surround and contravene the cultural homogeneity of the Hudson School with exquisite unmannered, reckless expanses. That one could imagine a redrawn historical map of articulated marred and damaged vistas in cascading geologic relief, whether planned or intuitively pursued, earmarks Surdell’s art.

Jacqueline Surdell, b.1993, received her MFA in Fiber and Material Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2017. Exhibitions include New Orleans, Chicago, San Francisco and elsewhere, with her first international exhibition at Kunsthal KAdE, The Netherlands, “This Is America | Art USA Today”, curated by Robbert Roos.  Jacqueline Surdell’s tapestry along with Jeffrey Gibson’s boxing bag was featured in a review of the exhibition written by Janneke Wesseling, published in the daily newspaper NRC Handelsblad.