E6 Gallery / Robert Berman Gallery Presents
“Behold the cartoons in Go Fish: there is no more savage yet brilliant wit than that possessed by Mr. Fish, who will never compromise on his deep artistic insight or the outrageous honesty of his social commentary. In a sellout culture he is that rare witness for unfettered truth.” - Robert Scheer, Editor in Chief, truthdig and author of The Great American Stickup.
ROBERT BERMAN GALLERY is pleased to present the original drawings and unique multiples of Dwayne Booth aka Mr. Fish - political cartoonist and author of GO FISH (how to win contempt and influence people.)
In the appendix of his book, Mr. Fish dissects the journalistic responsibility he faces as a cartoonist to make it make sense. It being his raw emotional output in response to a given stimuli (government, society, et al) manifesting itself via pen on paper without regard to the cleverly pointed punchline that will accompany and ultimately define it. In his inaugural gallery show, he eschews that responsibility; the political cartoons hanging vulnerably on the walls in their original illustrated state, stripped of any captioning and absolute clarity. If the objective of a political cartoonist is to speak clearly than the goal of this exhibition is to express freely. The drawings are a celebration of the technical mastery and unbridled emotional truth of Dwayne Booth – the Clark Kent to Superman’s Mr. Fish.
Mr. Fish has been a freelance writer and cartoonist for eighteen years, publishing under both his real name (Dwayne Booth) and the penname of Mr. Fish with many of the nation’s most reputable and prestigious magazines, journals, and newspapers. In addition to his weekly cartoon for Harper’s and daily contributions to Truthdig, he has also contributed to the Los Angeles Times, the Village Voice, the LA Weekly, the Atlantic, the Huffington Post, The Nation, Vanity Fair, Mother Jones, the Advocate, Z Magazine, the Utne Reader, Slate.com, MSNBC.com, and others. He has also worked for National Public Radio. In May 2008 he was presented with a first place award by the Los Angeles Press Club for editorial cartooning. In May 2010 he was awarded the prestigious Sigma Delta Chi Award for Editorial Cartooning from the Society of Professional Journalists and most recently won the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) Award in May of 2011. He lives in Philadelphia with his wife and twin daughters.
Recent Press:
Interview with Mr. Fish on TruthDig.com
LA WEEKLY: Events
ARTWEEK.LA: Go Fish, Mr. Fish
HUFFINGTON POST: Finding Common Ground Through Art
NEW YORK JOURNAL OF BOOKS
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E6 Gallery / Robert Berman Gallery Presents
Rob Setrakian
ELEVEN
November 11th - December 31st, 2011
Opening Reception: 11/11/11 from 6-9pm
With Special Musical Performance by Sofi Rox from 7-9pm
OCTOBER 2011, SAN FRANCISCO, CA. — The temporal has an illusive, magical quality in art, relating to everything from the amount of time it takes to make a particular work to the sense of time that work creates in a viewer. Pure gestures born of the relationship between painter and materials, Rob Setrakian’s paintings possess timeless characteristics, yet he’s often invoked the momentary in the titles of his solo exhibitions, such as Chronologies, Current Destinations and last year’s show at Robert Berman/E6 Gallery, Present Tense.
In ELEVEN. Setrakian’s art reaches a new intensity and specificity in terms of time. “Sometimes as you walk down the path you look straight ahead and take in the moment and the future,” he says. “Then you look back and take in the moment and the past, on all levels. That is how it has felt in the studio this last go-round.” Through three collections of eleven (eleven oils on paper, eleven oils on canvas, and eleven monotypes) Setrakian brings his formidable skills as a painter to bear upon darkness and illumination, vitality and mortality. The result adds to a still-relevant tradition of Californian abstract expressionist painting while relating visually to the revived presence of poetry, particularly lyrical poetry, within the Bay Area.
While ELEVEN. marks a day when the calendar lines up a series of numerical ones — signaling beginnings — the show also collects paintings created by Setrakian since the death of significant loved ones, including his mentor Nathan Oliveira, who had a “profound” impact on his development from the point that they first worked together in Italy in 1986. Fittingly, ELEVEN. arrives in the immediate wake of an acclaimed exhibition of Oliveira’s last canvases (at John Berggruen Gallery), demonstrating that his spirit and influence remains alive. In life and on canvas, his fellow painter Setrakian passes through fatal scenes to develop character and a vivid sense of past, present, and future experience.
Vivid experiences are guaranteed at ELEVEN..’s opening reception, a momentous family affair where the unveiling of Setrakian’s art will be matched with an album-release performance by his daughter, the ukulele-based folk and pop singer-songwriter Sofi Rox. Many of the themes present in Setrakian’s paintings take melodic form in Sofi Rox’s music, which harkens back to Woody Guthrie while incorporating the sort of soulful, expressive vocalization normally found in torch songs. ELEVEN. doesn’t avoid what Setrakian calls the “death scenes” of painting, nor those of daily life. But it passes through them to discover opportunity and scenes of energetic activity. Join the artist and his daughter at a dynamic opening event on Friday, November 11th, or meditate upon his command of matter and light during the quieter weeks that follow.
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E6 Gallery / Robert Berman Gallery Presents
Lauren Marsolier and Marc Fishou
Exhibiting Hyper-Real and Hybrid Realities
September 24 – November 5, 2011
San Francisco, September 7, 2011 – On Saturday, September 24, 2011, E6 Gallery will celebrate the opening of Recent Works by Lauren Marsolier & Marc Fichou. In their first San Francisco exhibit, French artists Lauren Marsolier and Marc Fichou individually address what they describe as “the viewer’s relationship to viewing images.”
Responding to our present day simulated environments and realities, Marsolier creates photographic images that are intentionally suspect, capturing, as she states, “a place that does not exist, a place without a history.”
Unlike traditional photography, which seizes an instant of reality or a moment in time, Marsolier’s images are shot in different places and times over the course of several months, then layered and blended until the real and fabricated become a singularly unique image. The resulting hyper-real photographs feel like viewing a place we know, but can’t quite identify.
It is this sense of disorientation in Marsolier’s work that deliberately inclines the viewer to contemplate the images as one would a painting, while curiously suspecting their fabricated nature. By contrast, Fichou’s featured body of work compels viewers to re-establish their relationship to subject and medium.
Attempting to reunite matter and its image, Fichou creates works containing their own memory, a record or recording of the past, blended with their material surface. His meticulous attention to the alchemy of that which is and that which was, is as Fichou notes, “a means to explore the conflict between escaping the real through the image and anchoring oneself to the real through matter.”
In Fichou’s recent works, instead of providing a window to an elsewhere as images commonly do, Fichou creates his images as a way to bring viewer’s attentions back to the materiality of the present, to the here and now. Inextricably interweaving matter and its image by embedding photographs and videos within the very materials used to construct the imagery they depict, Fichou integrates a form of simultaneity into his artwork where images instead of detaching themselves from matter, reflect themselves upon it.
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E6 Gallery / Robert Berman Gallery Presents
Jeff Charbonneau and Eliza French
Circumspect
July 30 – September 14, 2011
“Charbonneau and French’s work adds to the neo-dandy trajectory explored by such flamboyant self-documenting pairs as Pierre et Gilles, McDermott & McGough, and Gilbert and George. Now, however, dandyism has been given a noir edge.” -Peter Frank, On View
JUNE 2011, SAN FRANCISCO, CA. – Los Angeles based collaborating photographers Jeff Charbonneau and Eliza French’s summer exhibition, Circumspect, at Robert Berman/E6 Gallery is a vigilant display of pure photography that invokes narratives reminiscent of Saki and Roald Dahl stories, or as previously described in Photograph magazine “Fellini’s take on Lewis Carroll.”
Circumspect, the duos’ first San Francisco exhibit, features 20 large-scale photographs from both Charbonneau and French’s Massillon series and their current Playground series.Utilizing traditional darkroom techniques (read: without Photoshop), and shooting with medium and large format film, Charbonneau and French’s photographs are rendered via meticulously executed installation staging and equally detail oriented post-production work.
Charbonneau explains, “Our images are essentially performance/installation stills, as we are very interested in capturing a real moment in time and adhering to the sentiments of traditional film based photography. As such, we prefer manipulating our images in a wet darkroom environment, rather than in the digital domain. In our Massillon series, where clouds are upside-down, or superimposed over a figure, the manipulations were done strictly in the darkroom using multiple negatives. In Playground we only retouched minor areas where the large orbs were tethered to the ground with small weights.” Charbonneau and French do, however, rely on digital technologies for the enlargement and printing process of their images. In the interest of maintaining consistency throughout their editions, large-scale exhibition prints are created using digital c-print technology based on their original silver gelatin masters.
Charbonneau’s twenty-year background in photography and in the motion picture and television industry, coupled with French’s background in screenwriting from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and Art History degree from UCLA, has created a partnership that consistently produces works that transport viewers to fanciful lands of visually interpreted imaginations, dreams, myths and memories. Ultimately, to discover oneself caught in the storybook narratives that unfold in the Massillon series or to experience Charbonneau and French’s Playground series, which will make you think differently about the alignment of the stars as you look into the night sky, brings to mind the fact that some pictures are worth a thousand words, or in the case of Charbonneau and French’s work, a thousand stories.
Massillon
Included in Circumspect are select works from Massillon, Charbonneau and French’s premiere body of work, which takes its name from the Ohio town where French’s great grandmother Zeta Eliza Woolley lived at the turn of the 20th century.
Creating images with Victorian-era aesthetics and a 19th century craftsmanship, combined with traditional black and white darkroom techniques and contemporary photographic processes, Massillon, for Charbonneau and French, “is a meditation on memory, and how it functions through the two of us, and between us.” Part of an unraveling narrative inspired by the life of French’s ancestor, Massillon reads as an archive of the artist’s memories, old family folklore, dreams and childhood reminiscence, transformed into works that have been described as “stills, it would seem, [from] an Edgar Allan Poe film adaptation by Ingmar Bergman.”
Playground
Playground, Charbonneau and French’s most current body of work, focuses on the study of primary shapes, in particular the sphere, and its literal and symbolic relationship to human subjects and the natural world. Notes French, “In these highly designed pictures we have strayed away from the emotionally driven narrative that characterized our previous series, Massillon, to create visual poetry through experiments with proportion, distance, and repetition in space.”
With the Playground series, Charbonneau and French have ventured into such realms of influence as classic mythology, Buckminster Fuller’s utopian communities, mid twentieth-century architectural sketches, Dava Sobel’s book, Planets, and their own childhood experiences with weather balloons. Set upon sweeping and stark landscapes, as if in a play-space one might comfortably reach into and rearrange on a whim, each photograph in Playground begins with the artists sculptural intervention into a found landscape or surface through the decisive placement of people and objects, such as large monochromatic spheres and diminutive and fanciful female figures, and concludes with performances, postures and arrangements captured on film that are often infused with elements of classical mythology and subtle references to the universe as created and manipulated by gods and goddesses of polytheistic times.
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E6 Gallery/Robert Berman Gallery Presents
River of Time
Select works by Josh Graham
June 2nd - 25th
Robert Berman / E6 Gallery is pleased to present “River of Time” an exhibition of new works by Brooklyn based artist Josh Graham.
Grahams digital assemblages ebb and flow on the fault line between fiction and reality. The nature of time is explored and documented in complex landscapes of urban blight and detrition. The images are so seamless and sublime that they take on a somewhat organic reflection of the tireless composition. Artifacts of war and industry lay weathered amongst bourgeoning flora and fauna; stripped bare of any meaning or function to pure form and color. Juxtapositions suggest beyond the pale renditions of natural history dioramas where time is suspended at the brink of epoch. The mies en scene of found images resonate though a silent orchestration of light and shadow. Void of any passage, these frozen constructions allow the viewer to formulate narrative based on their own personal relationships to the objects and space contained. “River of Time” focuses on the artist’s recent works in a range of visual output including digital collage, video installation and photo. These three forms of media make up the integral framework within the artists practice. The interrelationship between the mediums is evident throughout the work, as is the result of their convergence on the artist’s method. In the exhibition Graham’s milieux of fragmented realities are explored through a series of corresponding works from the various mediums.
Artist Bio /
Josh Graham is a visual artist and composer based out of Brooklyn. He is highly regarded as one of the early pioneers in today’s abrasive music community, being recognized widely for his involvement in the New York doom outfit, A Storm of Light, and his visual contributions to the seminal post metal band, Neurosis. Graham’s desire to coalesce music and visuals into a cohesive experience has spawned countless monumental records and performances over the last decade. Grahams vast discography has long been imbued with an equally rich visual aesthetic, thus creating a uniquely recognizable catalogue of work. Graham began exhibiting his work in 2007, and has shown extensively throughout the united states, in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Recent shows include “Catalyst” at 5024SF (2008),“Voices in the Bardo” at Shadow Space Gallery (Philadelphia) 2010, and Scion’s “Installation 6” a traveling video exhibition in Los Angeles/ Austin/ Minneapolis/ Brooklyn/ Wichita 2010.Graham’s work — up to and including musical set pieces with any number of his earth moving bands, from a past with Red Sparowes to a present with A Storm of Light — addresses with no uncertain focus the inescapable slide of time in passages significant and singular where the fleeting nature of the illusion of permanence and its ruin are nothing if not inevitable. In print/altered photographic mnemonics, visual installation, and sculpture, Graham pursues an obsession with light, dark, shadow space and natural forms.
Large formats [6 feet plus] on aluminum dominate [with wolf sculptures redolent of his ground-breaking work with musical confrontationalists Neurosis abounding], and round out an expansive body of work that is, in micro and macro, about nothing if not the emphasis on form, structure, discipline and their eventual loss. Using found objects, digital manipulations and video/audio installations, Graham’s work presages a near eschatological understanding of life cycle and being.
- Eugene Robinson
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For Immediate Release:
ROBERT BERMAN / E6 Gallery
The Beat Goes On:
Select works by Ben Talbert and John Altoon
Beyond Erotic Art from the 60s
Opening Reception Wednesday, April 13, 2011; 6-9pm
7pm Walk-through with Hal Glicksman
8pm Performance by Norton Wisdom and Mercury Falls
Robert Berman / E6 Gallery is pleased to present a selection of erotic paintings, drawings and assemblages by Ben Talbert alongside the evocative works of John Altoon. Painter and sculptor, Ben Talbert and Ferus Gallery artist, John Altoon were part of the Semina Group: an original circle of beat and alternative Venice, CA artists from the 1960s centered around Wallace Berman. Talbert worked closely with many key art world players, namely close friend and former roommate Hal Glicksman. Glicksman, a well-known curator, began his career working under Walter Hopps, the director of the Pasadena Museum of Art (now the Norton Simon Museum) in the 1960s. Hopps exhibited Talbert in a major show at the museum.
In the late 1960s, Talbert painted large Pop paintings of pin-up, pornographic playing cards using the American Flag as the background. This work was shown in a group exhibition in 1972 at the David Stuart Gallery in Los Angeles only to be closed down by police categorizing the imagery as obscene. Soon after, his friends, lead by Wallace Berman, successfully organized a secret two-day exhibition: Luck and Love - at the Mermaid Tavern in Topanga, California. Afterwards, most of the works were stored and disseminated to friends, including Glicksman, who held onto the pieces after Talbert’s death in 1974.
“Talbert’s career, from his abstract expressionist origins to his untimely death, actually parallels that of John Altoon. Like Altoon’s, Talbert’s late-‘50s oils are big, tumultuous, and often clearly orgiastic. Like Altoon, not to mention Berman, Kienholz et al., Talbert was a social rebel and he was making a statement.” - Peter Frank, Art Ltd. Magazine
Talbert died long before he gained proper recognition but his assemblages are still well known, attributed in part to recent exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Santa Monica Museum of Art.
Altoon and Talbert were both leaders of beat culture, the “lost generation” and pushed the boundaries of humor in eroticism. Though Altoon rose to considerably loftier heights - his work resides in the permanent collections of LACMA, MOMA, MOCA and the Whitney, amongst others - both artists thrived on counter-culture expression bordering on “anti-art” on the fringes of the Pop and Fluxus movements.
Please join us for the Opening Reception, April 13, 2011 from 6-9pm with special musical performance with Norton Wisdom and Mercury Falls and a walk-through with curator Hal Glicksman. Contact Ashley for images or more information E6Gallery@anet.net
THE BEAT GOES ON
Please refer to Robert Berman’s article in Huffington Post:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-berman/ben-talbert-emluck-and-lo_b_471908.html
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Announcing: Robert Berman / E6 Gallery @ ArtPad SF, May 19 – 22, 2011
For Immediate Release:
March 01, 2011 (San Francisco) – ArtPadSF, a provocative 21st century hotel based art fair, focusing on emerging contemporary galleries and artists from the Bay Area and beyond, will debut May 19-22, 2011 at San Francisco’s legendary Phoenix Hotel.
Recognizing the need for a local independent fair to further engage and cultivate new audiences for Bay Area arts, Chip Conley, Founder and Chief Creative Officer of Joie De Vivre Hotels and regular keynote speaker for the Wallace Foundation, along with ArtPad Director, Maria Jenson, have set out to create an art fair that accentuates the emerging disciplines and independent elements active in the contemporary art world and prominent in the Bay Area arts community. Notes Conley, “Whether it’s going to Open Studios around the Bay Area or experiencing Art Basel in Miami Beach, I’ve enjoyed the various venues where art is shared and appreciated. And I’m proud that ArtPadSF will give us the opportunity to create a ‘crossroads for the creative’ right in our own backyard.”
Featuring approximately 30 select galleries from across the nation, including White Walls Gallery and Ever Gold Gallery (San Francisco), Ampersand International Arts (San Francisco/Paris), Robert Berman Gallery and LA Launch (Los Angeles), and Art Modern Gallery (Miami), ArtPadSF will offer art enthusiasts and seasoned collectors alike the opportunity to discover new trends and artistic practices in a cool mid-century hotel setting. Notes Jenson, “San Francisco, with its vibrant and visionary arts community and increasing international art market prominence, combined with the Phoenix Hotel’s iconic reputation and style, provides the perfect place to debut the first annual ArtPadSF.”
ArtPadSF’s opening preview event on May 19, 2011 from 7pm until midnight will benefit Black Rock Arts Foundation (BRAF). BRAF works with communities in the Bay Area and around the world to collaboratively produce innovative, relevant and pioneering works of public art that build community. To date, BRAF has supported over 20 projects in the Bay Area and over 60 projects worldwide, including the recent installation of The Raygun Gothic Rocketship, a large-scale sculpture by artists Sean Orlando, Nathaniel Taylor, David Shulman, and their FiveTonCrane crew, on view until September 2011 at Pier 14 on San Francisco’s waterfront.
Further invigorating ArtPadSF’s inaugural year will be a series of speakers panels, coordinated by ArtPadSF’s Associate Producer William Moreno, featuring participating museum and art world professionals including Lawrence Rinder, Berkeley Art Museum and Peter Selz, Professor Emeritus of Art History at UC Berkeley, as well as an outdoor video theatre curated by Bay Area artist and author Dorka Keehn, temporary installations by Black Rock Arts Foundation, performance art, the unveiling of Eddie Colla’s new public mural commissioned for ArtPadSF, and the Phoenix Hotel’s open heated pool for more unusual artistic deal making transactions.
The Details…
WHAT: ArtPadSF
WHEN: May 19 – 22, 2011
WHERE: The Phoenix Hotel, 601 Eddy Street (at Larkin Street) San Francisco, CA 94109
TICKETS: $10 – General Admission
HOURS: Thursday: 7PM–12AM – VIP Preview& BRAF Benefit
Fri. 12PM–9PM / Sat. 12PM–9PM Sun. 11AM–6PM
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Beyond Daylight- A solo art exhibition by DAVID TRULLI
Date: February 23 through April 8, 2011
Closing Reception, In Conjunction with SFADA First Thursdays: Thursday, April 7, 5:30-7:30pm
Where: E6 GALLERY
1632 Market Street Suite B
San Francisco, California 94102
Please go to http://e6gallery.com/davidtrulli for more information
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ROBERT BERMAN / E6 Gallery
Presents:
Present Tense
New Works by Rob Setrakian
October 20th – November 20th, 2010
Opening Reception:
Wednesday, October 20th from 6 - 9pm
ROBERT BERMAN / E6 Gallery is pleased to present Present Tense,
New Works by Rob Setrakian. This exhibition will feature nearly forty paintings in a variety of forms ranging from a large-scale 96 x 120” oil on canvas, to more intimate works.
Since first exhibiting his work in the early 1980’s, Bay area native Rob Setrakian has developed a liberating and intuitive painting style that is abstract, primal and unencumbered by reliance on figurative limitations. To look at his painted surfaces is to witness a conversation between the artist and the world around him and more definitively, between the painter and his medium. Setrakian’s method begins with one fearless gesture onto a surface and evolves with each stroke into meditations on texture and color, energy and light, continuity and fissure. His finished paintings are imbued with a suggestive sense of motion and energy that border on the performative and seem to preserve the artist’s actions in a language of their own. While vestiges of figures, objects and landscapes begin to emerge from the compositions, they consistently give way to more primary but subtle themes and universal relationships that occur in the natural world. The interplay between hot and cold, bright and dark, dry and damp, interior and exterior will ultimately preside where more concrete and reductive forms simply melt away.
“I think of my work as a forward moving spiral or auger that cannot be put in reverse. My current work explores the ‘fissures’ that go into space—how that tactile emergence can be taken to the next level.” – Rob Setrakian
Biography
Rob Setrakian has exhibited work since the early 80s locally, nationally, and internationally including the Bolinas Museum, Fresno Art Museum, Charles Cowles Annex Gallery in New York, the Kimball Art Center in Park City, Utah and Galleria Teorema in Florence, Italy. He is pleased to be exhibiting with Robert Berman E6 Gallery years after his Los Angeles show with the gallery in the late 90s. He received his BA from Stanford University in 1979 and was strongly influenced by his mentor Nathan Oliveira, as well as artists Frank Lobdell and Keith Boyle. Setrakian’s work is represented in many public collections including the De Young Museum, Portland Art Museum, and Stanford University Hospital.
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Deep Dimension
A Retrospective of Select Works by Winston Smith
September - October 16th, 2010
Robert Berman / E6 gallery is pleased to exhibit a select retrospective of works by montage artist Winston Smith, creator of some of Punk Rock’s most lasting and iconic symbols. This is Smith’s first major exhibition in San Francisco since the turn of the century. Included in this exhibition are works from his career spanning over 30 years from Punk Rock to Armageddon.
Smith has created more than 50 album covers, including Greenday’s “Insomniac,” multiple Dead Kennedys records, George Carlin’s last comedy album and an elaborate 4-panel insert for Ben Harper’s “Both Sides of the Gun.” His collage art has been featured in scores of magazines, including Playboy and Spin, as well as on the covers of The New Yorker, The Progressive, Adbusters, Utne Reader, and Maximum Rock & Roll. San Francisco publisher Last Gasp has published three volumes of his montage art.
Biography
Smith came of age in the McCarthy era in Oklahoma. He escaped to Florence, Italy as a teenager, where he finished high school, studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence, traveled the country as a roadie, and lived in Rome to pursue his art and work in films.
He landed in San Francisco in 1976, where his prankster nature, love of music and graphic arts brought him to the attention of local Punk venues and musicians who were staking a claim in the Bay Area. Smith began to collaborate with bands and artists, eventually working with Jello Biafra to create some of his most infamous images, the Dead Kennedys logo and the culture-shock LP cover for “In God We Trust, Inc.”
Smith spent much of the ‘80s & ‘90s on his remote Northern California ranch where so many of his collage originals were created by the light of kerosene lamps and the glow of an old cast-iron stove. His works are mini worlds of impossible dimensionality created by layer upon layer of images that he hand-slices from unique paper elements. The resulting montages are visually arresting creative condemnations of the modern world, seamlessly carved from the pages of everyday ephemera of a bygone era.
Over the years Smith has had multiple solo exhibitions in the US, the UK, and throughout Europe. His work is particularly beloved in Florence, Milan, and Rome where he’s been a frequent guest of anarchist groups and art galleries featuring underground and punk art.
When he isn’t on his remote Northern California ranch, Smith continues his subversion in San Francisco, where he lives with his wife, Chick Fontaine, and his kitties, Eloi and 1288.
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Misspelled
An alphabet by Victor Reyes
July 7th - August, 2010
Robert Berman / E6 Gallery is pleased to present MISSPELLED, an alphabet by Victor Reyes, handmade in California. The ambitious public art installation turned gallery exhibition explores the artistsʼ unique approach to graffiti, by dissecting individual letters and exploring the anatomy and architecture found in the symbols we use to communicate. Inspired by San Franciscoʼs streets, surfaces, and overall visual vibrancy, Reyes reinterprets the letters and presents them to us in a brilliant array of color and movement. These alphabets, recontextualized on various abandoned surfaces around the city, are not intended to provide answers, but to raise questions about how we interpret public spaces and the content assumed within.
Over the past 2 years, Reyes has been diligently painting freestanding alphabets within San Francisco on the many vacant surfaces that resulted from the financial crash in 2008. What started as an initial impulse to push color and movement in a city with a long history of outdoor murals and graffiti has morphed into an attempt to inspire personal and public change in reaction to the economic downturn of recent years.
The individual letters painted in multitude have become an indiscernible narrative written in spray paint and acrylic house paints. These letters adorn trucks, fences, walls and rooftops throughout San Francisco. Alphabets have been strung together and carved out of forgotten spaces, exceeding his original intentions, multiplying in numbers.
Reyesʼ restlessness in California over the last two years is portrayed in the landscapes and figures formed out of these letters. Often using the juxtaposition of vibrant colors and dirt, his unique hand-painted characters are meant to exist on their own, an unconventional quality rarely seen with most street writing. Their message is scattered and fleeting, open to interpretation; The letters are ephemeral, constantly weathering, fading over time, and are often facing neighborhood intervention. The placement of letters on the sides of panel trucks that disappear at the change of a stoplight exemplifies the alphabetʼs physical mobility, in most cases leaving us with only a photograph as proof of their existence. Since the projectʼs inception in 2008, Reyes has executed over forty site-specific murals around the city, as well as created countless studies and mixed media works for the exhibition.
In addition to the street installation and gallery exhibition MISSPELLED will also take on the form of a 104 page book documenting the story of these alphabets and how they came to be. It will include photographs, studies and reproductions of the murals and works featured in the exhibition. The release of the book will coincide with the opening of the exhibition, and will be available throughout the show.
Reyes has been painting since the early 90s, and has shown extensively around the world, in Bosnia, Germany, Switzerland, Taipei, Japan, and Miami. Recent shows include blue.print.for.space/Primary Flight at Miami Art Basel 2009, Public Provocations at Carhartt Projects in Germany, Will Rise at Robert Berman Gallery (Los Angeles) in 2008, and Letters First, a traveling show in Japan/Korea/Barcelona 2006-2008. Reyes is inspired by his peers, including a community of new California artistʼs “The Seventh Letter” who have had integral role in the development and motivation for this body of work.
“The photos and illustrations capture a time in my life when I was able to make this work for a city I love and labor in.” — Victor Reyes, July 2010
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Cameron Gray
It’s all Downhill from Here
March 20, 2010- June 2010
Robert Berman / E6 Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Los Angeles artist Cameron Gray. Respected art critic Peter Frank declares, “Cameron Gray has become a master of a kind of collage whose formal roots are in century-old trick technology but whose spiritual sources are in surrealism and pop art.” Like Photomosaics, Gray’s paintings exist on two visual levels. Each painting is made up of a large number of smaller paintings on 3” x 4” wood tiles. Visually, things are not what they seem. As you look closer the larger image breaks down to reveal the smaller paintings that transform a simple portrait into numerous separate cells, which have their unique properties that differ from one another. For instance, The Pornification of Everything, is a portrait of Mona Lisa made from 900 paintings of hardcore pornography and Can’t See the Forest is an 8’ x 15’ painting of a forest made from 2,200 paintings depicting traffic, factories, urbanity and violence.
Behind Gray’s art is his work with digital, network manufacturing. His work begins as digital studies, which are divided into hundreds of small pieces and then outsourced, to be painted, by other artists, colleagues and Facebook friends. By breaking the painting down into a grid of pixels and outsourcing the work, Gray builds a virtual factory by way of the Internet. The smaller images used are thematic and play a vital role in the depiction of the larger image. This modern approach is used to create what appears to be a traditional oil painting.
Frank expresses, “If there is a political or even social message in this, it is the viewer’s, not the artist’s. Then again, the artist is asking the viewer to zoom in and zoom out in order to “read” pictures in, and out of, other pictures. The multi-leveling of perception in this case is itself a statement about – or, perhaps, demonstration of – how we perceive the world. That is, we understand contemporary life and its newly digitized landscape as a sum of pixels that comprise some sort of whole – albeit a whole that is itself unstable and threatens to fall apart into its components every time we walk outside, talk with one another, or even boot up and log on. As such, Cameron Gray’s assemblages are the faces of our present reality. They are not the faces we see in the mirror, but the faces we see on one another – and on our many screens. They are animations made from many, many stills.” Or as Gray puts it, “At times the act of viewing itself becomes very physical or like a strange dance. The viewer must walk forward, then backward or lean in very close to see the work. I want the viewing experience to be visual, physical and conceptual all at once.”
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Works by Moses Nornberg
January - February, 2010
Moses Nornberg is a recent graduate from the MFA program at California College of the Arts in San Francisco and one of the 2009 ARTADIA Award winners in the Bay area.
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Julius Shulman Early Photographs from the Bay Area
Andrew George Light Leaks
Gallery and Exhibition opens Saturday, April 18, 2009
In conjunction with the Craig Krull Gallery
Robert Berman/E6 Gallery will mark its premiere exhibition in San Francisco with a 2-person show featuring photographs by legendary architectural photographer Julius Shulman and his protégé, Andrew George.
Shulman’s featured work includes 12 b&w images of architecture, design and locations mostly never before exhibited, taken in the mid-1930s during the time Shulman studied at Berkeley and resided in San Francisco. George will exhibit Light Leaks, 16 large-scale photographs that convey the simple yet profound ways light moves in quiet, interior spaces.
George, mentored during the last 25 years by Shulman, will share Berman’s gallery walls with his teacher for this historical exhibit. “With George in his late 30s and Shulman in his late 90s,” gallery owner Robert Berman comments, “the upcoming exhibit provides a unique perspective and interchange of both one of the world’s greatest architectural photographers, Julius Shulman, and his student, Andrew George. That George is a protégé of Shulman’s is immediately apparent. The photographs of each complement one another in their beauty and simplicity. Shulman’s iconic exteriors offset George’s transcendent interior moments caught in time”
Shulman’s early photographs of the Bay Area provide a historical pastiche of a place that Shulman would revisit throughout his career and a window into the development of the greatest architectural photographer of the 20th-century. Shulman, whose photographs have been featured in books by Rizzoli, Taschen, and Nazraeli Press, has said of George’s work that, “he has responded to an innate mastery of seeing, [and] thereby launched me into a sea of perception heretofore unexperienced! A unique impact for one with over six decades of photographic endeavors.”
Comprised of images taken in locations all over the world, Andrew George’s Light Leaks unveil large bursts of raw color and glowing light. The photographs capture illuminations that are both fleeting but entrancing, and each of the 4 x 3 foot prints engages viewers with a dynamic energy and an intense field of natural color.
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Performance by Raymond Pettibon
From feature on http://www.artbusiness.com/1open/011709.html
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art: Public Dialogue - Situation Room - Scott MacLeod.
Robert Berman Gallery: Pre-opening Celebration.
California is essentially unrivalled in terms of forward thinking, freedom of expression, creative license, concern for the future of the planet, and all kinds of comparably crest-of-the-wave stuff (not the least of which is surfing). That said, one curious interleague squabble I’ve always had difficulty understanding is this trumped up San Francisco/Los Angeles chasm— or Los Angeles/San Francisco chasm if you live in LA. But now in a bold and courageous move, Robert Berman of the eminently venerable Robert Berman Gallery at Bergamot Station LA (well, Santa Monica to be exact) sets geographic differences aside and dares to open a northern branch here in windswept fog-ridden wackie-jackie SF. Yes, he’s perpetrating to bridge the gap, I couldn’t be more delighted, and tonight’s intimate gathering marks that trepidatious toe-in-the-water moment.
There’s not really any art to see, oddly enough, but we do have an awesome inaugural celebration featuring some formidable LA talent including The Niche Makers, M.S. Garvey and the Hootenanny Allstars, Famous Bob Rokos, Raymond Pettibon in an uncommonly uncommon and gratifying performance, Old War Shirt, and Robert Berman himself both in spoken word and on the trumpet. (When was the last time you saw a San Francisco gallerist perform under any circumstances whatsoever? For me… never.) And this is only a sampling of what a more unified state can provide— a cultural exchange par excellence— we have so much to offer each other and so much to gain by it. Meanwhile back at the hoedown, Berman tells me the art’s definitely in the offing, but as for right here, right now, lucky guests are gifted with one of the great mementos of collaborative California artland souvenir schwagabilia ever— a Raymond Pettibon T-shirt screened by Reyes. North and South united. Yo!
