SCOPE Basel, Switzerland: Mindy Solomon Gallery Euro Style

The Mindy Solomon Gallery will make its second visit to SCOPE Basel in Basel, Switzerland, from June 12 –June 17. SCOPE, the world’s leading contemporary art show, proudly returns to Basel for the sixth year. Renowned for curating cutting-edge contemporary art from around the world, SCOPE will return to its high-profile venue in historic Kaserne, running concurrently with Art Basel, and just blocks away.

SCOPE Basel’s 5,000 m2 pavilion in the heart of Basel will provide an extraordinary opportunity for visitors to experience a view of the contemporary art market available nowhere else. Attendees to SCOPE Basel are a serious and dedicated group of collectors, press, museum professionals, and art enthusiasts whose impact on the cultural landscape is of inestimable importance.

Mindy Solomon is curating a program for the fair that references a sense of old European two-dimensional masterworks, as well as dynamic three-dimensional objects. Mindy Solomon Gallery artists Generic Art Solutions, Marc Burckhardt, Georgine Ingold, and Carrie Ann Baade will be featured; works by guest artists Elke Sada and Karin Karinson Nilsson will also be on view.

Generic Art Solutions will feature photographs referencing historic and religious subject matter with their unique humorous style.  Their interpretation of ‘The Raft of the Medusa’ by Théodore Géricault, ‘Liberty Leading the People’ by Eugene Delacroix, and ‘The Death of Marat’ by Jacques-Louis David promise to enliven and inspire collectors.

Generic Art Solutions, The Raft, 2010, 30 x 40 inches, archival digital print on photographic paper

Also highlighting historical reference in her work is German artist Elke Sada. Regarding her new collection ‘Hallstattpieces,’ Sada states: “In 2010, the sight of an ancient copper vessel in the Cultural Heritage Museum of Hallstatt, Austria, generated this new group of work I call the ‘Hallstattpieces.’ The ancient vessel and its riveted material connections inspired me to create these contemporary sculptural forms: Our home is storage for our memories. Our belongings are our keepsakes. Our minds have their own ways. When we touch, hear, smell, taste, and see objects, our senses instantaneously catapult toward our past or into a foreign place. My work is stimulated by this endlessly recurring experience. Because surface design and colorful paintings have always played a crucial role in my work, I naturally pick up my china brushes when I have finished a new form—a volume now, a body. Focused and exuberant, I apply colored slips and transparent glazes like paint.”

Elke Sada, Phyrulla, 43 cm, red grogged earthenware, engobes glaze

Painter Marc Burckhardt is trained in old master techniques to achieve texture and luminosity; he “comes from a storytelling as well as figurative tradition steeped in the visual language of Western art’s historical symbolism.” Providing contemporary insights and commentary, Burckhardt’s work references “possession-oriented” genres including portraiture and sporting painting, European masterworks, and American primitivism. A sense of familiarity inhabits his paintings—yet the viewer is struck by the psychological disconnect between real and imagined.

Marc Burckhardt, Sepulchre, 2012, 7.5 x 7.5 inches, acrylic and oil on wood panel

Also a scholar of old master technique, painter Carrie Ann Baade revitalizes the traditions of both oil painting and egg tempera. With subjects adopted from religion and mythology, her images mirror personal experience through allegory and narrative. Baade’s use of hundreds of separate clippings to form a new whole provides the viewer with an arresting array of pictorial references—parables combining fragments of the Renaissance and Baroque, surreal landscapes inhabited by exotic flora, fauna, and figures.

Carrie Ann Baade, The Butterfly Lovers, 2012, 18 x 24 inches, oil on panel

Basel-based artist Georgine Ingold’s rich oil paintings evoke the mystery and headiness of human emotion. Inspired by television and film, Ingold borrows psychologically compelling visual narratives and executes them in rich jewel tones. Her ‘self portraits’ explore the loneliness one can feel even when another person is in the same room. Psychological isolation, physical intimacy, and unfamiliar locations are subjects from which Ingold does not shy. Her brush work is exceptionally tactile in orientation, resplendent of the artist’s years working with her hands in ceramic material.

Georgine Ingold, Self Portrait, 2009, 69 x 40 cm, oil on cotton

Swedish sculptural artist Karin Karinson Nilsson works in found objects and fabricated items that she finds primarily in flea markets. She reinterprets these materials by joining them with clay, glazes, and glass. The newly created artwork becomes a narrative of reinvention and curiosity.  Karinson Nilsson states:  “My interest lies within mass-produced and highly consumed items, where the aesthetic expression is often perceived tasteless and the material value is low. Mass-produced objects raise strong feelings of recognition, bringing with them associations, narratives, and notions of time and existence.   We live off of and through material things, and even in our thoughts we refer to the use of things in a concrete, symbolic, or metaphorical way. My sculptures embody the symbolic, aesthetic, and cultural values that the objects in themselves posses, but by transferring these objects to alternative contexts I create contradictions and challenge the normative view. I want to raise questions that revolve around tradition. What happens when you move away from these traditions? And, what happens in the encounter between spectator and object when the object no longer looks as expected?

I feel an attraction to ready-mades, for how they portray scenes from life far removed from my own: a romantic view, in which symbolic values and aesthetics are alluring. Ready-mades’ sense of humor and anonymity make it possible for me to fill them with new purposes of my choosing.  I am fond of the idea that objects are mass-produced so that I can fill them with personal meaning—dreams, longing, desire, lust, and wishes.”

Karin Karinson Nilsson, Brick A Brack Said The Lamb To The Boy, 2011, 10 x 15 in, readymades, brick, glaze, clay, glass

Each of the artists presented at the fair bring a new and inventive perspective to mythology, history, and object. Mindy Solomon Gallery is proud to bring this exhibition program to the global art community during SCOPE Basel 2012.

William Pachner: Renowned Artist Joins Mindy Solomon Gallery

William Pachner, Falling Landscape, 1965, 41 in w x 41 in h, oil on canvas

Woodstock, New York, based artist William Pachner has recently become a member of the Mindy Solomon Gallery program. Pachner has had an extensive and prolific career spanning from the 1940s to the early 1990s. Born in Czechoslovakia, William Pachner studied in Vienna before coming to the United States in 1939 on the eve of World War II. During the war, his anti-fascist illustrations appeared in the foremost national magazines.

When he learned in 1945 that all members of his family had been exterminated by the Germans, he quit his commercial career. At that moment, he resolved never again to do a commercial job, but to paint what he felt. He has had numerous solo exhibitions in New York City and Florida, and was the recipient of several awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts, two Ford Foundation grants, and a National Institute of Arts and Letters Award for painting. His work is represented in many museums and private collections, including: the Whitney Museum, The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, The Butler Institute of American Art, The Florida Holocaust Museum, the Tampa Museum of Art, the St Petersburg Museum of Fine Arts, Polk Museum of Art inLakeland, Florida, and the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art.

William Pachner, #4330 78 WP51, 1965, 70.5 in h x 71 in w, oil on canvas

The Pachner Estate has offered the Gallery a very significant body of abstract expressionist works from the late 1950s through mid 1970s. Most of these paintings were recently on solo exhibition at the Tampa Museum of Art, Tampa, Florida.

Pachner’s abstract expressionist works are a visual feast—embodying swirling colors and texture; his deeply layered surfaces speak to a much deeper world concern. Pachner states: “I want, in each work, the world —like my countryman Mahler, the whole pie, not just one triangular wedge of it, but all of it in all of its contradictions, paradoxes, ironies, unbearable sorrows, indescribable joys, tragic comedy, farce, pathos, and drama, both authentic and fraudulent.

The world, I say to myself, on which all this takes place simultaneously—the world so incomprehensible, so dear, so much in need of our care, of our embrace.”

David Hicks Acquired by ASU Art Museum Ceramic Collection

The Arizona State University Art Museum is celebrating their Ceramics Research Center’s 10th anniversary in its current facility. The ASU Art Museum Ceramic Collection has been a leader in collecting contemporary ceramics for over half a century. To honor this event, the Museum acquired several masterworks to add to their permanent collection of over 4,000 objects. Mindy Solomon Gallery artist David Hicks‘ glazed ceramic Flora was one amongst those to be included.

Flora (yellow melt), 2012
Glazed Ceramic, 25 x 15 x 14 in

Hicks also recently received a major commission for the Celebrity Cruise Line (below).

Flora Group, 2012
Glazed Ceramic, dimensions variable

Hicks’ organic shapes call to mind agricultural and allegorical references.

“Agriculture speaks to me about my own human experience. In the agricultural world there are cycles that that feel like allegorical references to a human struggle, a struggle that starts with fertilization, moves through growth and finally ends in decay.”

Read more about his work at the Mindy Solomon Gallery website.

Muir Vidler Featured in Curiosity

Contemporary photographer, Muir Vidler is featured with nine internationally-acclaimed artists in a MASS MoCA sponsored exhibition entitled, Curiosity. The art work presented in Curiosity represents a wide range of creative materials used to explore themes that many children might be curious about, such as dinosaurs, superheroes, ninjas, cowboys, monsters and dream inspired fantasy.

Muir Vidler, Adrian Delgoffe, Photograph

Muir Vidler travels to far away places in the hopes of uncovering the unconventional that exists below the norms of acceptable societal existence. Thought provoking, playful and stylized, Vidler’s photographs present a passport that apprehends the senses.

Muir Vidler, Isobel Varley, Photograph

Kidspace is a collaborative project of The Clark, WCMA, and MASS MoCA—three museums with outstanding exhibitions, public programs, and deep commitments to the community. Kidspace is integral to all three organizations’ educational programming and access strategy, helping to build bridges between the local community and professional artists and their artwork. Now on exhibition. Read more: Hyperallergic.com review and Mindy Solomon Gallery ‘Candor and Provocation.’

Muir Vidler, Danny Lynch, Photograph

ART MRKT San Francisco = Asian Inspired Art

The Mindy Solomon Gallery is proud to return to ART MRKT San Francisco for its second year. Returning artist, Sungyee Kim, delivers paintings that might be described as deeply spiritual, a theme that unifies a cohesive collection of Meditative Works that embody a combination of traditional and contemporary themes.

In addition to a select grouping of two-dimensional works we will be presenting a collection of pop-inspired Chinese sculptures. San Francisco based artist, Wanxin Zhang, will feature a dynamic union shared between expressive figural work and historic narrative.

Mindy Solomon Gallery powerhouse painter James Kennedy will debut a new body of sophisticated hard edge geometric abstractions. Kennedy is a master of tonal painting that is reminiscent of mid-century modern design and architecture, which also elicits an Asian aesthetic.

Korean artist Lee Kang Hyo’s lovely jar forms, recently on display at the prestigious Asian Art Museum in San Francisco will be available for serious collectors of beautifully rendered puncheong onggi ceramics, as well as the newly inspired first time buyer. Erin Parish, newly added to the gallery roster, will be displaying a series of non-objective paintings that showcase her fervent commitment to Buddhist practices. Sylvia Hommert’s layered holographic paintings evoke Mandala like imagery, rounding out this magnetic group of talented artists.

ART MRKT San Francisco takes place May 17—20. If you are traveling to San Francisco, or reside in the area, feel free to contact us for fair passes and on site consultation. We look forward to seeing you soon.

“Candor and Provocation: Photography at the Mindy Solomon Gallery”

by Julie Chae

Many commercial gallery owners shy away from presenting ‘controversial’ art, especially those located outside of New York and LA. In St. Petersburg, Florida, Owner/Director Mindy Solomon of the Mindy Solomon Gallery regularly organizes exhibitions that challenge cultural norms and institutions, often with candor and humor. Such exhibitions as “Undressing the Feminine” (July 3 – August 14, 2010), “Hero Worship” (August 6 – September 17, 2011) and “Contradictions” (September 24 – November 5, 2011) questioned social definitions of femininity and masculinity, and treated topics like sex, politics and race with irreverence and irony. And recently on April 14, 2012, Solomon opened “Explicit Content” (on view until May 19, 2012), an exhibition that challenges the notions of what is permissible behavior related to sexuality.

Most of the gallery’s photography artists exhibited work in at least one of these ‘controversial’ exhibitions. These artists—Muir Vidler, Generic Art Solutions, Becky Flanders, Aiden Simon, Sean Fader, Jeremy Chandler, David Hilliard, Barbara DeGenevieve and Scot Sothern—question societal values through their art and show us how we can explore or define our own identities.

Muir Vidler’s body of work involves capturing the spirit of individuals who refuse to be confined by social expectations. While traveling to different countries throughout the world—often on assignment for clients like The New York Times, Vanity Fair, Time and Sunday Times Magazine, London-based Vidler finds time to seek out vibrant lives with character for his personal work. Vidler’s images inspire me to ask questions such as:

• Who says you can’t wear pristine white and flip off a guy with a camera?

Muir Vidler, Qatar, 2006, C-Print, edition of 6, 20”x30”

• Must someone who feels like a woman be a man? What does being a prostitute mean in a country with strict codes of sexual and gender behavior?

Muir Vidler, Tarlabaşi Prostitute, 2008, C-Print, edition of 6, 20”x30”

• How do we define beauty?

Muir Vidler, Kelly Knox, 2009, C-Print, edition of 6, 20”x24”

• Who decided tattooing “Bacardi” across your lower back is a bad idea? Who cares?!

Muir Vidler, Bacardi, 2007, C-print, edition of 6, 20”x24”

Generic Art Solutions (“G.A.S.”), a team of the multimedia artists Matt Vis and Tony Campbell, create sculpture, video, photography and performance art pieces using visual vocabulary from advertising, marketing and art history. G.A.S. reinterprets some of the well-known masterpieces of Western art history with present-day scenarios, questioning the cultural values represented in canonized works of art. For instance, the Church with its wealthy and powerful past has supported art throughout history that glorified God. In works by G.A.S., biblical characters praised for unwavering religious faith appear as if they could be those “crazy” folks from reality TV shows, settling family disputes with whatever happens to be within reaching distance, or buddies on a hunting trip gone bad due to a little too much alcohol.

Generic Art Solutions, The Sacrifice of Isaac, 2008, Archival pigment print,
edition of 6, 24” x 36”

For several artists in the program like Becky Flanders, Aiden Simon and Sean Fader, debunking what people consider appropriate behavior for men and women, or even how people expect men and women to appear, is a fundamental element of their artistic inquiry. The images created by these artists challenge the ways in which society defines male and female identities.

Flanders depicts iconic women like the Virgin Mary or Marie Antoinette doing something regarded as strictly male behavior—urinating while standing up.

Becky Flanders, Marie Antoinette, 2008, Archival inkjet print, edition of 5, 50″ x 40″

Like Flanders, Aiden Simon also questions whether society should define maleness strictly by the presence of male genitalia.

Aiden Simon, Anima / Animus, 2006, Digital c-print, 15” x 12.5”

And in his “I Want To Put You On” series, Sean Fader digitally modifies his photographs of male and female friends to appear as if he is “trying on” their bodies, blurring identities and sometimes genders.

Sean Fader, I Want To Put You On, Brian, 2007, 60” x 40”

Other artists, such as Jeremy Chandler and David Hilliard, engage in more subtle questions about masculinity in current society. In a series of photographs on hunters wearing ghillie suits for camouflage in the woods or fields, Chandler examines men’s relationship with nature. And in exploring personal relationships such as his own son-father relationship, David Hilliard delves into the meanings of these male roles as they exist in our current society—as archetypes and as lived by real persons.

Jeremy Chandler, Ghillie Suit Pine Straw, 2011

David Hilliard, Rock Bottom, 2008, 3 C-prints back- and front-mounted to plexi, total 40” x 90”

Barbara DeGenevieve and Scot Sothern—whose works appear in the gallery’s current exhibition, “Explicit Content”—explore the concept of sex and sexuality when money is involved. In addition to sexual trafficking, these artists deal with the complex issues involved in how society values people, especially those who have pretty much nothing else except their bodies. DeGenevieve pays homeless men to go to a hotel room with her, clean off and pose nude for her pictures. It is amazing to me that some criticize DeGenevieve for “exploiting” the homeless, when the men in her images look more humanized and happy than any homeless person I have seen. Scot Sothern’s photographs of prostitutes in LA recall the raw and penetrating portraits of the downtown “Piers” scene in New York during the 1970s and 80s by Alvin Baltrop, and constitute the opposite of Philip-Lorca diCorcia’s theatrical, stylized images of prostitutes and strippers in LA from the 1990s.

Barbara DeGenevieve, Leon #6, From the Panhandler Project, 2006, Digital print,
24” x 28”

Scot Sothern, Missy, c. 1986-1990

The artists in Solomon’s photography program produce provocative images and challenge deeply-entrenched values with honesty and frankness. Some use humor or narrative as well. In doing so, they continue a tradition in art of artists showing us images that make us rethink our society’s values and what is possible.

Detailed Information Save the Date Saturday, May 26

The exhibition “Detailed Information” showcases a group of artists whose work is minutely crafted to exacting detail, rich with narrative content. The works in this show invite multiple viewings in order to capture important visual components that serve to decode the artist’s perspective. Implicit to this group of artist is their mastery of techniques-whether it is old master, or the application of new technologies. Each artist uses their significant knowledge to impart a comprehensive visual story.

Detailed Information opens Saturday, May 26 from 6—8PM and features: John Byrd, Kate MacDowell, Marc Burckhardt, Wookjae Maeng, Christopher Torrez and Carrie Anne Baade. Save the date and we will see you soon.

Kate MacDowell’s New Works

Kate MacDowell’s hand-built porcelain sculptures respond to environmental threats and their consequences, revealing the rifts and frictions between man and nature. Kate lives and works in Portland, Oregon, where she prolifically creates work in response to environmental threats including: air pollution, global warming, clear-cutting and the misuse of pesticides and the effects on the health of the environment. (Including all of us)!

Kate is featured in the upcoming group exhibition titled, “Detailed Information,” opening Saturday, May 26 at 6—8PM and continuing through July 7, 2012. Kate MacDowell has created a new series of works, “Stolen 1 and Stolen 2,” hand built porcelain, cone 6 glaze, measuring aproximately 7x7x12.5 inches and 11x7x9.5 inches.

You can view more of Kate MacDowell’s work here. Please contact the gallery for additional information.

John Byrd’s New Sculpture

Tampa, Florida based sculptor John Byrd recently completed a year long commission simply named, “Untitled (Bobcat).” This 16x18x13 inch hand-built porcelain piece also features a taxidermy inset, visible from behind the piece. John Byrd is also featured in our next group show, “Detailed Information,” opening on Saturday, May 26 and continuing through July 7, 2012.

You can view more of John Byrd’s extensive portfolio here, and additional gallery samples here. Please contact the gallery for additional information.