This is very exciting. OK, it’s been out for two weeks already, but it’s still very exciting. We got our first review in Art in America, a national art magazine! And, it’s CB1 Gallery artist Mira Schor’s second review in the magazine.
The abandonment of explicit imagery or words and a reliance on the expressiveness of the paint itself to communicate leave us searching for clues, meditating on the paintings’ secrets. It appears as if Schor is finally, truly, “painting paint.”
–Constance Mallinson, Art in America
Also, Larry Mantello got a review in ArtScene’s April Continuing and Recommended list. It looked the show from a different angle.
His deliberately over-saturated boldness finally comes across as an attempt to exorcise the demons of pop-cultural overstimulation for our collective well-being.
–MS, ArtScene
“…the schematic, profile style also harkens back to the hieroglyphic figures of ancient Egypt, who speak a mysterious language that continues to fascinate. A better analogy than that for the place of painting in today’s hyper-digital universe is difficult to imagine.”
–Christopher Knight
The complete review can be found in LA Times’ Culture Monster section.
I also want to share one of my favorite paintings recently brought in by Lisa Adams. To me it has Zen-like quality, and yet upon a closer look you find a practical joke about to be played out. Beautifully painted and quirky!
Lisa Adams – Seconds To Go, 2010
Oh, here’s the video interview!
Fine Artist Lisa Adams shares insight about her career and what exactly makes her Pretty Rough and Tough.
Tomorrow will be the first day and the opening reception for our next exhibition, Mira Schor: Paintings From The Nineties To Now. Mira is a New York artist and author, and this show will be the first major survey of Mira’s work to be shown in Los Angeles. Here are some details about Mira and the exhibition:
November 20 – January 9, 2011
Opening Reception: Sat., November 20, 5 – 8 p.m. CB1 Gallery, Downtown Los Angeles
Mira Schor’s paintings exist on the razor’s edge between visual and verbal language, between formalism and politics. A conceptual artist who is a painter’s painter, a feminist who is an odd inheritor of the approaches to painting of the New York School, Schor’s primary subject is the co-existence of embodiment and thought within the material and pictorial surface of painting. Using the materiality and meaning of these two sets of languages, Schor references femininity and intellectualism, the body in wartime, the politicization of the personal, the self-portrait of thought. Mira Schor: Paintings From The Nineties To Now is the first major survey of Schor’s work to be shown in Los Angeles.
“I chose handwriting as image when I had arrived at the portal of that end zone of painting, monochromatic abstraction. I no longer wanted to represent, in the sense of picturing the body, except through the bodily qualities of oil paint itself. In a sense, I was searching for the equivalent for me of Cézanne’s apples, something simple that would allow me to paint paint.”
–Mira Schor, “Poetry Plastique,” 2001
More details can be found on our exhibition page. We also published an essay Mira Schor: Making Thought Material, Painting (the Act of) Painting, by Amelia Jones. You can read a PDF version, or come by the gallery and pick one up!
Yes, time for a new show, For Your Pleasure. Opening reception is this Sunday, 4 – 6 p.m. But, it’s already installed and ready for viewing starting today! Here’s some copy from the newsletter that we sent out:
CB1 Gallery proudly presents the work of ten gallery artists, all of whom will be showing in solo exhibitions at the gallery over the next two years, in a group exhibition entitled, For Your Pleasure. These ten artists work in media ranging from paintings and drawings to photography, from sculpture to installation. The exhibition opens on August 6, 2010 and closes on September 4, 2010. A reception for the artists will be held at the gallery on Sunday, August 8, 2010, 4 – 6 p.m.
The artists in For Your Pleasure include Los Angeles based artists Martin Durazo, Chris Oatey, HK Zamani and Tameka Norris, recently transplanted from LA to New Haven, CT. The gallery is also pleased to present work by several New York artists whose work has not been seen in LA galleries in recent years–Chuck Agro, Larry Mantello, Mira Schor, Susan Silas and Amy Yoes. Plus, Belgian painter Hilde Overbergh will be showing new paintings following her successful participation in “The Story of O” at Otis College of Art and Design this past spring.
