#pocket utopia

[eucanthos]

Antoine Masson (1636–1700)

“Portrait of the Guillaume de Brisacier” (1664)

Pocket Utopia’s 2012 debut exhibition in its new location (Lower East Side) is arguably strange, because the art in it is so radically recontextualized.

Engraving is a fiendishly difficult art to master (unlike etching).

17th and 18th-century prints, portraits of artists - members of the French Academy created by master engravers.

Bounded by their social and artistic status, these engravers bored so thoroughly into their technique that, to our eye, they seem to emerge on the other side as virtual abstractionists. Just look at the insane tangle of hair in the “Portrait of the Guillaume de Brisacier”...

The title of the show is “Artists and Other Frenchmen: portrait prints from Nanteuil to Villon (all members of the French Academy). An official aesthetic body anathema to our contemporary conceptions of art — yet their range of expression is surprisingly natural and unstuffy — far more real and affecting than the official portraits of kings and courtiers lining the wall opposite them.

hyperallergic

[nycartscene]

opens Tonight, Mar 16, 6-8p: “Everything Under the Sun: Moon and Stars”  Summer Wheat   Pocket Utopia, 191 Henry St., NYC In collaboration with Hansel and Gretel Picture Garden

[nycartscene]

opens tonight, Jan 5, 6-8p: “Knock Knock : new work”  Jane Kent   Pocket Utopia, 191 Henry St., NYC (bt Clinton & Jefferson) At the center point of the exhibition at Pocket Utopia are two new silkscreen prints, one titled Pink Eye and the other Blue Nose. Kent uses unfolded cardboard boxes as templates for silkscreen construction. Unabashedly colorful, with layered assemblies of rectangles and punctuated by flat, carefully errant marks and brushstrokes, Kent’s prints and drawings unfold in a precise dialogue of silhouettes and juxtaposed shapes. Stretching and elongating forms often within a strict frame, whether painted, printed or both, Kent torques pictorial space. Not unlike the print work of Donald Judd, Kent demonstrates her interest in straight lines. Kent’s concerns are inner volumes and like Donald Judd’s printed series, Kent ends up elaborating on ideas such as defining the space of a sheet of paper, shifting shapes and cantilevering forms. Though being primarily a printmaker, Kent engages in the relationship between printmaking as a set of historical techniques, materials and processes—and in the influence the mechanics of this discipline exerts on the nature and character of the artist’s images. Produced to be given away during this exhibition, Jane Kent has self published an offset print in an edition of 1000. This untitled, folded image was printed commercially using standard business paper and technique. It is a ‘take away’— a part of the show, along the lines of a memento, souvenir or free sample. - thru Feb 16

[debra-ramsay]

Yellow Trail gets focus

A heartfelt thank you to Sharon Butler at Two Coats of Paint for  featuring my painting Yellow Trail Spring with Gray on her blog:

  http://www.twocoatsofpaint.com/2013/09/back-to-school-at-pocket-u-niverse-ity.html

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[hyperallergic]

Intimate Distances: Kris Graves’ Cold Comfort

Kris Graves, “Hverarönd #3, Iceland” (2013), archival pigment print, 20 x 30 in (all images via kri…

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[nycartscene]

Opens Tonight, Mar 3, 6-8p: “Twilit Ensembles”   Paul D'Agostino Pocket Utopia, 191 Henry St., NYC a solo exhibition of new paintings, drawings, sculptures and collages. Creating sets within series, stories across drawings, sculptures out of characters, and settings from paintings, the poet and artist Paul D'Agostino employs narrative relationships within and throughout his works that are sometimes in opposition to each other, sometimes complementary. - thru Apr 21

[nycartscene]

Opens Jan 6, 6-8p: “Precisionist Casual”  Sharon Butler Pocket Utopia, 191 Henry St., NYC (bt Clinton and Jefferson, F to East B'Way) solo exhibition of new paintings. Butler finds herself pulled between the worldly confines of the Precisionists of the early twentieth century and the fey liberation of today’s Casualist abstraction. Like the Precisionists, Butler is drawn to urban settings, structures, and HVAC architecture – all in evidence from the windows of her Bushwick studio. Yet, like the Casualists, she seeks a mode of presentation that evokes more than the triumphs and laments of industrialization that earlier artists have already plumbed so well, embracing those inconsistent realities and searching for new ones. - thru Feb 17

[nycartscene]

Opens Tonight, June 9, 6-8p: "Photo Still"  Ellen Letcher

Pocket Utopia, 191 Henry St., NYC (bt Clinton & Jefferson St) F train to East Broadway Wresting images from glossy magazines and pasting them down with paint, Letcher creates a highly idiosyncratic collection of pictorial data. She replays this device of painting and pasting, maintaining a graphic energy while carefully editing, and anything might and does happen along the way. - July 15