Diane Rosenstein Gallery is pleased to announce The Creator Has A Master Plan — a thematic installation inspired by Pharaoh Sanders’ epic spiritual jazz recording from his album “Karma” recorded in 1969. Our group exhibition includes sixteen artists who engage the mystical energy and power of the natural and often supernatural world.
Artists included are: Charles Fine, Daniel Gibson, Birdie Hall, David Hicks, Farrah Karapetian, Jay Kvapil, Sean McGaughey, Sarah Mikenis, Vanessa Prager, Joe Ray, Roland Reiss, Liza Ryan, Gail Stoicheff, Matthew Sweesy, Ilona Szwarc and Brian Wills.
The gallery is open by appointment only.
Tuesday – Saturday, 10:00 am – 6:00 pm
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Sean McGaughey (USA, b. 1974)
The phrase — “The Creator Has A Master Plan” — is drawn along the bottom edge of Sean McGaughey’s vibrant painting Pharoah Sanders: Karma (2020) which greets visitors as they enter the gallery. McGaughey’s portrait presents the jazz saxophonist in full motion, with bird feathers embedded into the fluorescent palette. McGaughey also shows his portrait of Sun Ra, and his Healing Plants, a series of works on paper.
McGaughey's canvases build from a repetition of lines and forms pushing, pulling and confronting each other, while his sense of color works to subvert the action. A narrative built up from the action of lines and forms begins to dissolve, opening up a subconscious space for the viewer to insert themselves. Sean P McGaughey is a graduate of Art Center College of Design in Pasadena and he has been in shows throughout California.
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Ilona SzwarcShe was neither in the state of innocence nor a state of grace, 2018Ilona Szwarc (Poland, b. 1984)
Ilona Szwarc uses photography to play with the surfaces we construct to produce and affirm our identity. By taking apart the language of identification, she gives birth to hybrid identities and turns to fantasy to understand what it takes to shape a self. Her large photograph She was neither in a state of innocence nor in a state of grace (2018) is a portrait of a model whose face is covered in flower petals; but whose appearance is dually transformed as if feathered.
Ilona Szwarc received an MFA in Photography from Yale University and a BFA from the School of Visual Arts. Szwarc’s recent solo exhibitions include Make Room (2019), AALA Gallery, Los Angeles (2018); Instytut Fotografii Fort (2017) and Leica Gallery, Warsaw (2016); Amerikahaus, Munich (2015); Foley Gallery, New York (2013); and Galerie Claude Samuel, Paris (2012). She has participated in group exhibitions at the Benaki Museum, Athens, Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb; Fotografiska Museum, Stockholm; Shulamit Nazarian Gallery and Regen Projects, Los Angeles; Danziger Gallery and International Center for Photography, New York; among others. Among her awards and grants she has received the Richard Benson Prize for Excellence in Photography (2015), the Arnold Newman Prize for New Directions in Photographic Portraiture (2014), and the World Press Photo (2013). Her photographs have been featured in numerous publications worldwide.
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Installation Views
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Vanessa PragerMy Horse, 2020
Vanessa Prager (USA, b. 1984)
Vanessa Prager makes paintings that nearly obscure her subject from view under a "furry" impasto style. In Wishful Thinking (2020), a woman's face emerges from the spikey and textured surface, as if conjured from distant memory. Her intimate paintings in this show include a floral still life - Red Vase (2020) - whose elements emerge then recede from view, as if beckoning us to sense rather than see what is hidden in the work itself.
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Farrah Karapetian (USA, b. 1978)
Farrah Karapetian will show unique chromogenic photograms of musical instruments from her Stagecraft series (2014-15). Having recognized that her process consistently dealt with performativity (but always in the dark), Karapetian began to observe the trappings of actual stagecraft. Using multiple light sources, she created images of musical instruments: a saxophone - You Don't Know (Shortly) (2014) - and a cubist-inspired double image of an electric guitar in red and blue, Soundscape 36 (2015).
Karapetian works with camera-less photography in a sculptural and increasingly relational field. Her methods incorporate sculptural and performative means of achieving imagery that refigures the medium of photography around bodily experience. She has had multiple solo exhibitions and is represented by Danziger Gallery (New York, NY). Recent exhibitions include The Fabric of Felicity (Garage Museum of Contemporary Art) (2018); Synthesize, MOCA Jacksonville (2017); Light Play: Experiments in Photography, 1970 to the Present, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2017); A Matter of Memory, George Eastman Museum, Rochester, NY (2016); The Surface of Things, Houston Center for Photography (2016); and About Time: Photography in a Moment of Change, SFMOMA, San Francisco, CA (2016). She curated Unsparing Quality (2014) at Diane Rosenstein Gallery. Her work is in the collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, and the Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH. She was in residence Spring/Summer 2018 in St. Petersburg, Russia, as a Fulbright U.S. Scholar and received a grant from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation for 2017. Ms. Karapetian received her BA from Yale University (2000) and her MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles (2008). She lives and works in Los Angeles.
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Installation Views
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Jay Kvapil (USA, b. 1951)
California artist Jay Kvapil is a potter who explores the tension between the abject and the beautiful and balances minimal forms with spectacular glazes that melt, fuse, bubble, crawl, and drip in the heat of the kiln. Kvapil’s abstract glazes allude to the landscape -- he grew up in Arizona, a land of vast desert landscapes, but rich in intimate pictorial spaces found in small rocks and stones. Many pieces depict the subtle space through which we travel – whether literally or in our minds --without a specific reference. From his studio at California State University Long Beach (CSULB), he creates his custom glazes through hundreds of tests, and the final pieces often the results of a dozen separate firings. He describes himself as more of a cook than a chemist, adding a pinch here and a pinch there.
The artist writes, "In the end, what I make is pottery just pottery. I’m not interested in calling it ceramic art or sculptural ceramics. It’s pottery, plain and simple, because that is the language that it speaks and the history from which it comes, and to whom it speaks. If my work is successful, I like to think that it is kind of conversation with potters that came before me, and the ones who will come after. "
Kvapil's pottery has been shown in notable exhbitions including American Porcelain, New Dimensions in Ancient Art, The Renwick Gallery at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC (1980); On and Off the Wall: Shaped and Colored, Oakland Museum of California (OMCA),CA (1985); International Ceramic Invitational, Taipei Fine Arts Museum (TFAM), Taiwan (1985); The Scripps College Invitational; and Pacific Currents: Ceramics ’82, San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, CA (1982).
Jay KvapilBowl #1432, 2019 -
Roland Reiss (USA, b. 1929)
Roland Reiss will show Universal Language (1967) and Mirage (1968) — two important early resin paintings. As new materials became available to artists in the early 60s, Reiss began work with acrylics and plastics (notably Plexiglas), foams, and resin and created the breakthrough paintings exhibited here. These pivotal works are among the first sculptural resin paintings: produced in Boulder, Colorado, in synchronicity with both the Light and Space and Finish Fetish movements in Southern California.
Roland Reiss is widely recognized for his Miniatures, but he is first and foremost a painter. In the 1960s, Roland Reiss was included in exhibitions at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and the San Francisco Museum of Art (SFMOMA); the 1975 Whitney Biennial and dOCUMENTA 7 (1982). LACMA included Reiss in Avant Garde in the '80s (1987). He has received survey exhibitions from the Begovich Gallery at Cal State Fullerton (2014), Pasadena Museum of Contemporary Art (2011-2012) and the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery (1991). Reiss has continuously received solo and group exhibitions throughout his career, at institutions including the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), the Neuberger Museum of Art at SUNY (Purchase, NY), Orange County Museum of Art (Newport Beach, CA), Armory Center for the Arts (Pasadena, CA), San Diego Museum of Art, San Diego, CA), The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (Washington, D.C.), and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art (Kansas City, MO). He was recently included in Collecting on the Edge: Part II at the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art at Utah State University, Logan, UT (2019). His paintings and sculpture are included in the permanent collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles, CA; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), the Orange County Museum of Art (OCMA), and the University of California Irvine Institute and Museum for California Art, Irvine, CA, among others. Roland Reiss was the Chairman of the Art Department at Claremont Graduate University from 1971- 2000; he has also received four National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artist Fellowships for both painting and sculpture. Roland Reiss lives and works in Los Angeles.
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Brian Wills (USA, b. 1970)
Brian Wills’ art adopts a meticulous approach that is illustrated by the painted and varnished wooden panels that are crisscrossed by spoke-like motifs of colorful threads. The colors are gradually revealed as the viewer moves around the work, creating an interplay between the subtle forces of perception and dance of color and form. His triptych Untitled (Spectrum) (2019), optically vibrates, defying space and fixed color.
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Installation Views
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Charles Fine (USA, b. 1951)
Charles Fine is a painter and sculptor who has created a visual language to express a collective psychological state regarding humankind’s interaction with (and imprint on) nature. Inspired by Constantinos Doxiadis’ theories of Ekestics, Fine studied illustrations of population settlements and their spatial impact on the landscape. His new painting, Centripetal Forces (2020), derives from his sense memory of studying these illustrations encountered decades earlier. His presentation in our exhibition includes colorful works on paper from his Inflatables series (2019), and a totemic bronze — Parallel History I (2014) — that depicts the circular rhythms of the cycle of life.
Charles Fine has exhibited widely, including SFMOMA, The Armory Center for The Arts, Pasadena, CA and the Frederick Weisman Museum of Art, Malibu, CA. His paintings and sculpture are in the permanent collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), The Anderson Collection, Santa Barbara Museum of Art (SBMA), the Orange County Museum of Art (OCMA), and the Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art at Pepperdine University. Most recent exhibitions include Wouldn’t it be nice if we could dream together? at Diane Rosenstein Gallery, Los Angeles (2017) and Made in California: Selections from the Frederick R. Weisman Foundation (Curated by Billie Milan Weisman) at Mana Contemporary, Jersey City, NJ (2015). In 2012, Fine received a Thirty Year Survey of Drawings, Paintings, Sculptures, Photographs, and Video at Ace Gallery, Beverly Hills, CA.
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Joe Ray (USA, b. 1944)
Joe Ray explains that he is "into outer space and inner space. I want the inner space of a human individual and the largeness of the cosmos." His Nebula series of intergalactic landscape paintings began in the late 1970s. Using acrylics and aerosol paint, these abstract skyscapes continue his exploration of outer fields of vision with an affinity for early 20th Century Impressionism. Ray is showing two Nebula Paintings (from 1993) as well as a new work created for this show. Red Yellow Black White and Burnt Sienna (2020) is a blue skyscape with five vinyl discs painted in the titular colors, each a metaphor for the global spectrum of racial identity.
Ray was born in Alexandria, Louisiana, and arrived in Los Angeles in 1963. After he returned from Vietnam, he settled in Leimert Park; and began making resin-based sculpture. He first showed his artwork in the 1969 4th Annual Watts Summer Festival Art Exhibition; received the 1970 Young Talent Award from LACMA; then in 1973 received his BA from Cal Arts where he was mentored by John Baldessari and Nam June Paik. Joe Ray was one of 15 members of the original MOCA Artists Advisory Council from 1978-1980. His work has never been confined to a specific medium or style and has shifted between representation and abstraction, sculpture, painting, and photographs. His work is in the permanent collection of LACMA, where he was included in Made In California: Art, Image and Identity (1900–2000); and was notably included in L.A. Object & David Hammons Body Prints (2007) at Tilton Gallery (NY) and Roberts & Tilton (LA). Joe Ray received a 50-year survey, Complexion Constellation, at Diane Rosenstein Gallery in 2017. He lives and works in Los Angeles.
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David Hicks (USA, b. 1977)
David Hicks is an artist based in Visalia, in the Central San Joaquin Valley of California. His ceramics draw inspiration from nature and local agrarian life, and he examines organic forms common to the American landscape. Hicks is showing sculptures, including Poly Panel (2020), a large wall work of his glazed Terracotta objects flowering from a steel fence.
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Installation Views
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Liza Ryan (USA, b. 1965)
Liza Ryan’s painted photographs of icebergs from her Real, Unreal series were created in Antarctica, where she was inspired by the otherworldly environs to create Blue/Black (2015), Glass (2017), and Light Ice (2016), the photo-based works on view here. Through a process of drawing on these prints and following parts of the land’s contours with charcoal ink and graphite, her work became a collaboration with the real, unreal place. Ryan emphasizes the symbiotic relationship between the human and natural worlds. She recently began interacting with octopuses for a new body of work, and we are happy to debut Darwin Waiting (2020).
Liza Ryan has been included in museum exhibitions at The Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, Netherlands; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and Miami Art Museum. She was commissioned to make a site-specific piece for the 2006 Biennale of Sydney. Ryan has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Reed College’s Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery (cat.); The Herter Gallery at the University of Massachusetts and the Eleanor D. Wilson Museum at Hollins University. Her work is held in the permanent collections of the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and the Maison Européen de la Photographie, Paris, among others. A survey of her work was published by Steidl in 2018.
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Daniel Gibson (USA, b 1977)
Daniel Gibson grew up in El Centro, California and other surrounding towns that border Mexicali. He was inspired as a young artist while growing up next to a sheet rock factory in Plaster City, CA where his father worked. The vast desert horizon and emptiness lent its path to imagination and wander. Gibson's practice is bred by his indispensable draw towards creation, something he views as a therapeutic and expressive flow of visions and beliefs. His painting, July 10, 2020, Man walks into desert (2020), is a blue, black, and yellow figurative portrait of a migrant sprawled under the desert sun, one hand thrust against a seemingly closed door, the other pressed against the dry, unwelcoming earth. His face is twisted in agony and the composition recalls José Clemente Orozco’s 1939 mural, Man of Fire. “Art is Knowledge at the service of emotion,” wrote Orozco, and Daniel Gibson’s expressive paintings in this exhibition connect man to his emotional and spiritual environment.
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Installation Views
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Gail Stoicheff (USA, b. 1976)
Gail Stoicheff is a painter whose work always begins with a character from Hellenic mythology, usually female. The paintings on view are rooted in mythological figures: Asterion (the Minotaur), the goddess Athena, and Pasithea, one of the three graces, who is the personification of hallucination and altered states. Stoicheff explores the mysterious, psychological, and symbolic presentations of myth; those that celebrates the Dionysian qualities, typically mistrusted and maligned, ascribed to women throughout history and that still permeate current ideology.
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Birdie Hall (USA, b. 1994)
Birdie Hall is an artist based in Montana and New York. She is finishing her MFA in printmaking at NYU, and her paintings, etchings, drawings, and soft sculpture reimagine familiar archetypes and landscapes with a sly sense of humor, while touching on themes of spirituality, psychedelics, nature, visionary poetry, modernist literature, epistemology of science, theories of the New Age, ethnobotany, reproductive history, and the afterlife. We are pleased to debut Birdie Hall’s recent gouaches, Nightlife in Pompeii (2020) and Kundalini Contradiction Cowgirls – I Kill and I Make Alive, I Wound and I Heal! (2020) in this exhibition (which is her first major group show.) Hall’s work, which often combines visual and textual elements, is born of an interest in a return to bodily experience (with “that dark involvement with blood and birth and death” to quote Joan Didion) amid the alienation of modernity and technology.
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Matthew Sweesy (USA, b. 1974)
Matthew Sweesy is a Los Angeles-based painter who is influenced by literature such as Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the Romantic poets and Fernando Pessoa’s inventive maze of heteronyms. His drawings and paintings battle for new perspectives and sensory experiences which take place along boundaries of nature and ideas of self. The stories of transformation in these works, especially when a character’s consciousness is transferred to that of a tree, a bird, a cloud or other animal, serve as a starting place for the artist to find new spaces of thought away from habitual notions of identity. His Supper Time (2020) and A Near Afternoon Assemblage (2020) are two recent works on paper that balance the bold color of oil pastels with dream-state sensibilities.
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Sarah MikenisDream On, 2019
Sarah Mikenis (USA, b. 1986)
Sarah Mikenis makes sculptural paintings, manipulating canvas to suggest an interaction between body and textile. Her work brings a Baroque sensibility to geometric abstraction, a balance between the surface and the subliminal. The soft billowing pink Dream On (2019) considers the conflict between the surface of a composition and its form and challenges the relationship between the physical and the optical. Dream On is seemingly draped and gathered over a skeleton of stretcher bars, as if the painting itself is a loose garment in zero gravity.
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The Creator Has A Master Plan will be on view from October 30 – December 26, 2020.
The gallery is open by appointment only from Tuesday – Saturday, 10am – 6pm.
