Pitchfork   The Dissolve   Festivals: Chicago | Paris
:

One of the many benefits of being Richard Prince is that art book stores are willing to host your garage sales. Earlier in the summer, the Long Island branch of the Karma bookstore held a one-day sale of erotic books, prints, and paintings, and an ironing board Prince was willing to part with. While the yard sale was light on Prince's own work, it offered one more chance to grab a few cans of Richard Prince's Lemon Fizz, his soda collaboration with the Arizona Iced Tea company. If you missed out on the last few cans, apparently, Arizona still has a few T-shirts for sale.

See more photos from Kava Gorna at Nowness.






The uncanny aesthetic of Alex Roulette's paintings is likely caused by his source material: extensive photographs and found images of an area filtered through distorted and subjective memory. His oil paintings have subtle fantasy elements that could just as easily go unexplained (see the blue smoke cloud), while his choices in posture and perspective feel photorealistic.

Alex Roulette lives and works in New York City.


Photo by: Brandon Bird | "Prelude to the Magic Hour"

Brandon Bird, the artist who painted the modern day classics "No One Wants to Play Sega with Harrison Ford" and "Lazy Sunday Afternoon," the latter depicting Christopher Walken spending a leisurely day building robots in his garage, has just launched a Kickstarter campaign to paint "the greatest Sears stores in the country." He's seeking funding for a 30-day road trip starting from his home base in Los Angeles sometime in the fall in order to produce a total of ten new Sears paintings. Rewards include prints of various sizes, the original oil paintings, and at the very top level, a custom painting of a backer in front of their hometown Sears.

The funding period runs until the end of August, with possible reach goals including a gallery show, and a trip to a Sears outside of the lower 48. 





Photo by: Jake Longstreth

All images courtesy of the artist and Monya Rowe Gallery, New York

For his latest series of paintings Jake Longstreth replaced the saturated colors and sharp lines of his earlier architecture-centered work, with softer tones, gradients, and more visible marks. The subjects are different this time, too. Instead of suburban landscapes, his imagery is closer to the photo he shot for the cover of the collaborative Dirty Projectors and Bjork album, Mount Wittenberg Orca.

Selections from "Particulate Matter" are being show as part of the group show Being Paul Schrader at the Monya Rowe Gallery in New York until July 26. 










Images courtesy Suzanne Tarasieve Paris

Swiss artist Pierre Schwerzmann creates bold canvases that seem to contain a kinetic energy. Blocks of color sit next to black and white spaces that appear to throb and move. Some even seem set to hypnotize us—but the experience is too heady to label a trompe l'oeil.

In recent years, it has been possible to see the data-driven work of Andrew Kuo in art galleries as well as the pages of the New York Times. His meticulously illustrated charts vary in purpose: some recounting the events of his day, while others dissect new music from Vampire Weekend and Odd Future. His neon-colored, overstated geometric patterns often represent linear time, telling stories in a compacted and distorted timeline. His annotations tie emotions, statistics, and opinions to the images, making sense of rigid patterns and intersecting lines.

Andrew Kuo's solo show You Say Tomato was held at New York's Marlborough Chelsea Gallery last month. Follow Andrew Kuo on Tumblr and Instagram. Or search his NY Times charticles online.






[images via New York Times]

Photo by: Jonas Wood | BBall Studio, 2012

The clutter of objects and mismatched fabrics in Jonas Wood's paintings give his work an overwhelming sense of reality. Which makes sense, because for his domestic scenes Wood didn't look much further than the apartments and studios he inhabits every day. The details that show up in his work, like the printing of a baseball card company name on a cardboard box, give his images a kind of humorous awareness and subtlety. 

Jonas Wood has a self-titled show running until May 12 at the David Kordansky Gallery in Los Angeles. 





The bears, deer, and other creatures in Deedee Cheriel's paintings aren't chosen lightly. Her work is concerned with the interaction of the natural world and human emotion, and by painting animals she hopes to show emotions like fear and happiness taking non-human form. Although she now lives and works in urban Los Angeles, she cites childhood camping trips with her mom in a Volkswagen bus as the beginning of her fascination with the natural world. Cheriel's earliest experience as a working artist actually came a few years after those camping trips when she painted album covers and T-shirts for her teenage band and record label.

Her new show "Little Spirit and The Infinite Longing" opens April 19 and will run through May 13 at the Pure Evil Gallery in London.






Photo by: Gert & Uwe Tobias | Untitled (GUT/2055) 2012

One look at the artwork of Romanian-born twin brothers Gert and Uwe Tobias and we sense that they communicate via a secret code that no one else understands. And that’s what makes their huge paintings, woodcut prints, and drawings so captivating—a lush-colored folklore freak show of sharp, often symmetrical, graphics that meld the duo’s Transylvanian roots with deranged pop culture and sharp Constructivism.

Creepy ghouls with melting faces, jagged flowers, a color-blocked bed with a serrated saw wheel above—the works are slightly horrific, and yet utterly majestic. You can see all of these pieces and more at NYC’s Team Gallery where the Tobias’ exhibition, "Untitled ’13", runs through this Saturday, March 30 in both of Team’s gallery spaces.

Team Gallery: 83 Grand Street & 47 Wooster Street, New York, NY; Tue–Sat 10am–6pm

 

Photo by: Alex Steckly

Portland-based Alex Steckly is relentlessly creative. Upon walking into his studio loft you cross a threshold into his whole world, a wide and bright working space with a couple simple corners carved out for living, into what looks and feels like the surprisingly cozy diary of his brain spilled out onto the walls in various stages of completion.

 

His process starts with a loose wash in oil, keeping canvases visceral, allowing the colors to be almost aggressively bright, building organic layers and letting gravity pull the pigments around whichever way it wants. From there he begins a long meditative process of weaving a mask of tape into precise shapes and patterns in a process he describes as nearing sculptural, allowing him to work and approach the painting in a physical manner. Opaque layers of tone on tone automotive enamels in alternating finishes are then spayed on, as the masks are stripped away to form patterns. Working strictly in daylight, his timeframe for each day’s studio time is limited, and his process can sometimes take months as he lives amongst his works and allows their growth to come at a natural pace.

Steckly’s paintings are deceptive; standing five feet back from one it’s tempting to see the canvas as a silky smooth surface with barely undulating colors and textures. But with closer inspection you start to become aware of the almost overwhelmingly elaborate surface, the sharp lines fade with a soft feel that carries a reminder of a grainy film stock or an image shown just slightly out of focus. Steckly’s obsession with light and texture reveals itself slowly, the complexities unfurling the longer you allow yourself to stand and be drawn in to the abstract images, discovering tiny variations amongst the strict order in the geometric shapes. Rich velvety textures zap the light and look dead flat while the luminous sheen of the enamel lines strike hard and vibrate lying next to them. Steckly’s voice is heard loudly and clearly through his work, through the repetition, exploration, and controlled, but obvious, joy in the colors and patterns he weaves into his paintings.

See more of his work at alexsteckly.com