UNIX Gallery Presents New Works as Part of Art Miami New York This Weekend
NEW YORK - UNIX Gallery is excited to announce its participation in Art Miami New York 2015, held at Pier 94 this weekend, May 14 - 17, 2015. The gallery is presenting a carefully curated show featuring new paintings, sculptures and mixed-media works by Engels, KwangHo Shin, Justin Bower, Eugenio Merino, Desire Obtain Cherish, Machiko Edmondson, and Marcello Lo Giudice. Other artists exhibiting with UNIX Gallery at Art Miami New York include Agostino Bonalumi, Ellen de Meijer, Pino Manos, Alfredo Scaroina, and John Messinger.
For Haitian-born abstract artist Engels, painterly elements are just as much an aesthetic choice as a vehicle for the creative process. He builds with wood, paper, and layers of paint, questioning the elemental notions of what is painting. "Stretchers lay bare. Canvas is crumpled, torn, or shredded. Staples can be more than simple fasteners and can function as paint," he explains. Engels has the uncanny ability to create pieces as if from nothing, always listening to his senses. In addition to being featured in many influential private collections, Engels has been featured in the Florence Biennale in 2011. In 2014 Engels was the subject of award winning painter, Patrick Graham's BP Portrait submission. Graham's portrait of Engels was exhibited in the British National Portrait Gallery and became the face of the 2014 campaign with posters and advertisements of the portrait throughout the city and the London Underground. Engels will be returning to London with UNIX Gallery for Art15 at the end of May.
Justin Bower's striking and complex portraits speak to the destabilizing effect technology has on the individual and how it has infected the daily lives of contemporary man. The artist places these post-human faces in a nexus of interlocking spatial systems and augments specific features - such as three eyes, spliced noses, melting mouths - to optically play with notions of stasis, and conceptually destabilize the subject. Born in San Francisco and currently living in Los Angeles, Bower's post-human subjects separate human from non-human, interior from exteriority and self from binaries. He addresses an invasive trauma that is encountered daily and how we might interact with it symbolically.
In his paintings, KwangHo Shin attempts to capture the complexity of human emotion and the experience of the mind, as we perceive it visually. Evoking themes of Abstract Expressionism, Shin employs intense and vibrant colors in order to depict individualistic expression of emotion and a sense of self. He applies charcoal and oils in thick brushstrokes to distort and exaggerate the subject's facial features. His technique confronts the viewer with the resulting emotional impact these painterly effects have on our understanding of the subject. Shin's portraits are able to document the psychological changes and clashes that arise in the self.
Agostino Bonalumi (1935-2013) studied technical and mechanical drawing, but abandoned these formal structures, teaching himself how to paint at an early age. By age 21 he had his first solo exhibition in Milan. Around this time, Bonalumi started visiting the studio of Lucio Fontana, where he explored elements of spatial planes and produce the first of his estroflessioni works: specially made stretcher bars with dynamic shapes that created reliefs. This gave his paintings movement and mystery beneath their colored surfaces.
Los Angeles-based artist Desire Obtain Cherish creates controversial works by twisting appropriation of art, luxury brands, material culture, sex, drugs, pop icons, and questioning the very system that holds it all in such high esteem. Through cutting-edge material - UV cast resin and other amalgamations - and exquisite craftsmanship, he creates immaculately produced sculpture and mixed media works that confront the viewer with a mirror of the commodification of society. Desire Obtain Cherish's sardonic, vibrant pieces expose society's voracity and limitations, and questions commercial promises of fulfillment and happiness that end in dependency.
Spanish-born Eugenio Merino is known for his controversial photorealistic sculptures - including dictators, artists, dealers, and other institutionalized figureheads - tackling themes of politics, religion, and socioeconomic standards with the aim of questioning these systemic, supposed truths. Merino uses irony, metaphor, and satire to make his art a space for the exchange of dialogue, free thought, and finding beauty in the germination of ideas and human agency.
John Messinger combines elements of photography and tapestry to create large-scale, 3-dimensional mixed media artworks. His body of work consists of thousands of individual 3.25 x 4.25" instant photographs assembled together to create photographic tapestries that examine the proliferation and ubiquity of the photograph in the digital age. Inspired by the notions of singularity and time, Messinger combines hundreds of varying images and transforms them into a single experience. His work fuses indexical and abstract imagery to question the notion of photography, photographer, and subject.
Pino Manos was born in Sassari, Italy, moving to Milan in 1951, where he attended the Academy of Fine Arts "Cimabue" with Enrico Castellani and Vincenzo Agnetti, and befriended other Spatialism artists including Lucio Fontana. He began creating multidimensional works taking the movement of his canvases, opening them to communicate new expressions of figuration with shade and movement. Manos' works are in numerous private and public collections in Italy and abroad, three of which are in the collection of Nelson Rockefeller in New York, NY.
Dutch artist Ellen de Meijer's distorted, grey-faced subjects bridge classical figurative portraiture and surrealist motifs. Disproportionately small bodies on large heads, eyes swollen with fear, rejection, and insecurity, de Meijer's figures connect to modern trappings - iPhones, Bluetooths, Google Glass - that serve to alienate more than link. Ellen de Meijer regards her 'ceremony portraits' as the derailed and dysmorphic human qualities that characterize modern mankind.
British artist Machiko Edmondson refers to her practice as a representation of painting rather than as being representational. Despite the overt use of faces as her image source, she regards her work as neither figurative paintings nor as portraits of people. Employing the momentary seduction of fashion photography to lure the viewer into the world of idealized beauty, her paintings mimic the styles and codes of the desire industry to question the value and obsessions of aspirational perfection.
Dominican-born Alfredo Scaroina fabricates expressive, abstract experimental works that unveil a universal understanding into the subconscious. Scaroina's use of signs, symbols, and psychologically aesthetic dialogues invites the viewer to explore his personal experiences focusing on aspects of urbanism and unequivocal modernism. The materials used become suitable remedies to the unique approach of finding natural and synthetic truth. A language is formed that transcends physical and cultural borders.
Concurrently, an exhibition of work by Marcello Lo Giudice is on view at UNIX Gallery from May 12 - June 20. Lo Giudice combines his knowledge of the Earth's metamorphoses with a profound affection for organic, geological substances to create a variety of meticulously crafted paintings and sculptures. He composes vibrant and energetic paintings by spreading and layering colorful pigments thickly on the canvas, thus creating a coarse, haptic surface. Internationally renowned art critic and Yves Klein historian, Pierre Restany, defined Lo Giudice as an exceptional "telluric" painter. Lo Giudice has been exhibited at the main pavilion of the Venice Biennale in 2009 and 2011 and has a significant European and American collector base.
For more information or inquires please contact UNIX Gallery at info@unixgallery.comor by phone at 212-209-1572.
