Condo New York 2018

Exhibition dates: 29 June – 27 July 2018
Summer hours: Tuesday – Friday, 11-6PM.

**Christian Andersen, Copenhagen:

Tom Humphreys
Sven Loven**

Tom Humphreys’ recent figurative sculptures combine emotive postures with colored surfaces. Some works are constructed in a fine steel mesh, deliberately left in what appears to be an armature stage or are bubble-like, suggesting transparency. Often with visible scale shifts and distortion, these sculptures connect to the room in various ways without supports: leaning, reclining, or sealed within glass vitrines. Lightweight building materials, including mesh and aluminum foil, are employed to give a surface to which artist’s color is applied.

Sven Loven’s painting A Trip to Mars depicts a metaphoric journey to another world. Advertisements preaching disjointedly banal platitudes bombard the travelers on their exit from Earth. In this piece, Loven is interested in the theme of exit and flight. Inspired by a copy of a lost Bosch painting depicting a concert taking place in an egg, he sees the musicians as a raucous crowd solipsistically involved with their own quandaries. He pictures these figures in a futuristic setting: the egg starts to resemble a spaceship. Just as Bosch can be viewed with a camp sensibility, Loven’s scene brings to mind the ‘70s sci-fi Logan’s Run, a movie about fleeing a deadly form of enforced escapism. The flight the travelers take is not just literal, but also one from issues they seek to avoid; exit is emphasized as the last hope for those unable to vanquish their foes.

Tom Humphreys (b. 1972 in Essex, UK, lives and works in London and Essex) studied at Chelsea College of Art and Winchester School of Art. Recent solo exhibitions include High Art, Paris, 2018; Rob Tufnell, Cologne, 2017; Forde, Geneva, 2017; Christian Andersen, Copenhagen, 2016; What Pipeline, Detroit, 2015; Pro Choice, Vienna, 2011; Portikus, Frankfurt am Main, 2011. Recent group exhibitions include Kunstmuseum Luzern, 2016; Carl Louie, Ontario, 2016; The 31st Biennial of Graphic Arts, Ljubljana, 2015; Carlos/Ishikawa, London, 2014. Upcoming group exhibitions include Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem. Upcoming solo exhibitions include North Dumpling, New York; and Schiefe Zähne, Berlin.

Sven Loven (b. 1979 in Stockholm, lives and works in New York) studied at The Cooper Union. Recent solo exhibitions include Jan Kaps, Cologne, 2017; Magenta Plains, New York, 2017; Christian Andersen, Copenhagen, 2017; Jeffrey Stark, New York, 2015. Recent group exhibitions include Aguirree, Mexico City, 2018; Christian Andersen, Copenhagen, 2018; Carl Kostyál, Stockholm, 2017; BB5000 Studio, Milan, 2016; and Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin, 2015.

**Edouard Malingue Gallery, Hong Kong & Shanghai:

Jeremy Everett
Zheng Zhou**

Edouard Malingue Gallery is thrilled to present two artists, Jeremy Everett (b. 1979, USA) and Zheng Zhou (b. 1969, China), who reflect the gallery’s dedication to initiating a pluralistic dialogue between East and West, across multiple mediums.

Jeremy Everett creates works that exist as the fragment of a sentence – a lyrical exposé, released into the world with precise abandon. With an initial degree in Landscape Architecture, Everett traversed into the making of art by subsequently completing an MFA at the University of Toronto. A Colorado native, Everett was exposed in the formative parts of his early years to raw space. With inspirations such as Land Art masters Robert Smithson and Michael Heizer, Everett’s work stems from a center of intuition and subtly develops beyond process and creation; neither never fully created nor complete, its significance is in its evolving state.

Whether standing before “Padded painting” (2018) and its textured dégradé of blue paint, or “Light box exposure/rose’” (2018) and its oscillatory fuchsia to violet luminescence, the viewer shifts between fields of sight, surfaces at once reflecting, luring, and questioning one’s perception. Channeling a state of motion, “In situ #8” (2013) presents the photograph of a person in shuffle, its presentation playing a role by being pinched loosely onto a larger simple wooden frame. Further evoking a state of precariousness, “Kenny Paradise” `(2017) is an installation featuring a potted palm wedged between a titled foldable stool and a wall. Ultimately, Everett’s practice is about exploring mediums and reflecting fine balances that demand your unresisted vulnerability.

In contrast, Zheng Zhou is a painter of instinct, conveying onto canvas observations from the world, as ad hoc as they may be. His strokes, furtive yet decisive, depict an urgency – to grasp, to depict, to capture that mesmeric multitude of the cosmos, the ‘phenomena’ we, or more precisely he, is a witness to. Referencing “I Ching” (“The Book of Changes”), Zheng channels the astronomical: the myriad of components that make up our universe.

Figures, crowds, animals, objects – the quotidian are the protagonists of Zheng’s vision, except none are depicted quite as is. In “Victor” (2014) a group grasps, with arms raised, at the torso of an upheld man, the effusiveness and excitement of the people emphasized by contouring and looping limbs. Conveying Zheng’s interest in the cosmos, “Pointing to the Moon” (2014) presents a character, leaning back, his body resting on a bed of green flames akin to a burning star in an anthropomorphic constellation. “The Monkey King” (2014) captures a recurring animal motif, a giant primate hovering over a humanoid figure, backed by silhouetted troops, whilst “The Secrets of Communication” (2018) is a collage of imagery and figures, a composition of varying painterly techniques, protagonists and depths, offering various hints of figurative and abstract voyeurism.

Jeremy Everett is a highly celebrated emerging artist who has held solo exhibitions in Los Angeles, New York, Paris and Hong Kong, amongst other locations. Everett recently held a residency at Hooper Projects in Los Angeles and has been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Everett’s practice has been extensively featured in publications and critical reviews including Phaidon, l’Officiel de l’Art, Muse Magazine,The New York Times, The Smithsonian Magazine, Flash Art, Modern Painters, and ArtReview, amongst others.

Zheng Zhou (Zhejiang Province, China, 1969) lives and works in Beijing, China. He studied at the China Academy of Art, Hangzhou, and at the China Academy of Art, Hangzhou.

**Foxy Production, New York:

Gina Beavers
Rafal Bujnowski**

For Condo New York 2018, Foxy Production presents paintings by Gina Beavers and Rafal Bujnowski that take the artist’s palette as their starting point. The artists reflect upon contemporary image-making by embracing the palette and its long history of literal and figurative usage.

Gina Beavers’ paintings are both images of artist’s palettes and, to an extent, reconstructions of them. Based on photographs of palettes posted to plein-air painting groups online, Beavers’ works have impasto surfaces that recreate the daubs of paint on the original palettes. The artist builds tension between the simulated and the real, blurring distinctions between the thing and what Kant called “the thing-in-itself.” In an anxious landscape of images exchanged across social media with vertiginous speed, she re-purposes the painter’s conventional role as the producer of pictures.

Gina Beavers makes paintings and installations that transform the digital world into a painterly, sculptural one. Using photographs culled from the Internet and social media that she renders in relief using layers of acrylic paint, her subject is the ways the creative urge transforms into images, whether they be in the form of body painting, “food porn,“ make-up tutorials, or body-builder selfies.

Rafal Bujnowski presents a series of monochrome oil paintings of the moon in different phases that reuses the artist’s old, dried-up paint palettes as their surface. Both the moon and the darkness around it share the same impasto texture, as if the moon were at the center of a cosmic storm or the hidden forces at work in our solar system are revealed. With the palette so long associated with artists and as old a subject for art that the moon is, they are both rich with possible interpretations—from the elemental to the romantic—that that the artist leaves well and truly open.

Rafal Bujnowski takes a conceptual approach to paintings, videos, objects, and actions to explore the social functions of the artist and the artwork. His work reveals tensions between the process of artistic production and the artwork’s consumption.

Gina Beavers (1974, Athens, Greece) lives and works in New York City. She holds a BA in Studio Art and Anthropology from the University of Virginia, Charlottesville (1996); an MFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL (2000); and an MS in Education from Brooklyn College, NY (2005).

Selected exhibitions include Michael Benevento, Los Angeles, CA (solo) (2018); “American Genre: Contemporary Painting,” The ICA at Maine College of Art, Portland, ME; Carl Kostyal, London, UK (solo), GNYP Gallery, Berlin, Germany (solo); “Drawing Island,” The Journal Gallery, Brooklyn, NY (all 2017); “Summer School,” Flag Art Foundation, New York, NY,; “The Female Gaze Part II: Women Look at Men,” Cheim and Read, New York, NY (both 2016); “Greater New York,” MoMA PS1, Long Island City, NY (2015); Retrospective, Hudson, NY (solo) (2014); Fourteen30 Contemporary, Portland, OR (solo) (2013); Clifton Benevento, New York, NY (solo); and “Bad Girls of 2012,” Interstate Projects, Brooklyn, NY (both 2012).

Rafal Bujnowski (1974, Wadowice, Poland) lives and works in Kraków. He studied Architecture at the Kraków University of Technology (1993-1995) and Graphic Arts of the Academy of Fine Art, Kraków (1995-2000).

Selected exhibitions include “What is Abstraction?,” Foundation Stefana Gierowskiego, Warsaw, Poland (2017); “L’arte differente: MOCAK al MAXXI, MAXXI,” National Museum of XXI Century Arts, Rome, Italy; Raster, Warsaw, Poland (solo); National Gallery of Art, Warsaw, Poland (solo)(all 2016); Neuer Kunstverein Wien Vienna, Austria, with Michał Budny (2011); “Painting: Process and Expansion. From the 1950s till Now,” MUMOK, Vienna, Austria (2010); Kunstverein Duesseldorf, Germany (solo)(2005); and Art in General, New York City, US (2004).

CREDITS
Installation photography: Charles Benton.

• Noor, Tausif. “Critic's Guide: The Best of the Gallery-Share Shows On Now in New York.” Frieze. 13 July 2018. Web.
• Kissick, Dean. “THE DOWNWARD SPIRAL: CONDO NEW YORK.” SPIKE. 11 July. 2018. Web.