OPENING SATURDAY - SIMON BIRCH - Ignite 14: Recent Works & LAWRENCE GIPE - Recent Pictures

August 6 - September 17, 2022
Opening Reception: Saturday, August 6, 5-8PM

Russian Drone Painting No.3 (Damascus, 2015), 2019-2022, oil on canvas, 72” x 96”

Two of the works are culled from the Russian Drone Paintings. This is Gipe’s latest series which employs the visual style of “Manifest Destiny” canvasses of the 19th Century, in a reference to the Industrial Revolution - the historical origin of all our ecological peril. The image sources are contemporary, based on screenshots of drone footage posted on the now-censored RT news service run by the Russian government. The Russian Drone Paintings engage issues like surveillance, climate change, and the Anthropocene, seen through the lens of our global “adversary,” in images of cities abandoned to radioactivity, bombardments, and other traumatic evidence of humanity’s relentless intervention into Nature.

Russian Drone Painting No.1 (Mir Diamond Mine, Siberia)” , 2018-2022, oil on canvas, 72” x 96”

In another recent series, The Great Fog and Other London Pictures, Gipe uses photos and stills from period newsreels to create a series on the subject of London’s toxic “Pea-Soupers” during the intense rebuilding after World War II. Gipe is interested in the role painting has had (and will continue to have) in the representation of climate change vis-à-vis Romantic tropes, engaging in a conversation about the rapidly transforming notion of the Capitalist Sublime.

ABOUT LAWRENCE GIPE:

Born in Baltimore in 1962, Gipe has had 70 solo exhibitions in galleries and museums in New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, Munich, Berlin, Düsseldorf (Kunstverein Düsseldorf.) Currently, he splits his time between his studio in Los Angeles, CA, and Tucson, AZ, where he is an Associate Professor of Studio Art at the University of Arizona. Gipe has received two NEA Individual Fellowship Grants (Painting, 1989 and Works on Paper, 1996.) A mid-career survey, 3 Five-Year Plans: Lawrence Gipe, 1990-2005, was organized in 2006 by Marilyn Zeitlin at the University Art Museum, Tempe, Arizona.   

Articles and reviews about his work have appeared in Vanity Fair, Harper’s Magazine, The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, Art and Antiques, L.A. Weekly, The Washington Post Magazine, Juxtapoz, Architectural Digest, Elle, The Los Angeles Times, Huffington Post, The Miami Herald, The Boston Globe, ArtForum, ArtNews, Artscene LA, San Francisco Chronicle, SFAQ, Fabrik LA, Art in America, Flash Art, Village Voice,Time Out New York; Kunstforum (Germany); BijutsuTecho (Japan) and many others.

August 6 - September 17, 2022
Opening Reception: Saturday, August 6, 5-8PM

Shutdown Danger Pink, 2019, oil on canvas, 78.7” x 78.7”

William Turner Gallery in collaboration with GuY Hector (The Art House Global), is pleased to present an inaugural exhibit of paintings by British-born, Hong Kong-based artist Simon Birch. A reception will be held at the gallery on August 6th, 2022 from 6 to 8 PM, the exhibition will remain on view through September, 17th 2022.

In this series of portraits, Birch materializes enigmatic, ectoplasmic figures in his psychologically charged canvases linking sympathies between external forces and interior emotion. These large-scale renderings of figures in motion - are torn between attraction and repulsion as they twist and tumble through space. Birch delves into allegorical states of the human condition through his painterly poetics of cleaved color blocks disrupted with loose, painterly, gestural strokes. Intent on the inward, only vestiges of the external linger with allusions to what Hamlet described as, “the heartache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.”  

Building upon and scraping away layers of paint he fragments into Cubist planes, the pluralistic impulses of creation and destruction conflate to generate what art critic Clive Bell theorized as “significant form,” provoking aesthetic emotion. Investigating line, shape, and color, his canvases oscillate between figuration and abstraction, dissolving features into the dematerialized ether. Mutable flesh becomes a terrain of primordial corporeality. Employing the Futurist’s “lines of force,” and the “fourth dimension” to express a veiled space, he illustrates a reality perhaps more honest than that of visual perception.

Basing his paintings on photographs he shoots, Birch then labors with study upon study of countless preparatory drawings, which he then resolves through the act of painting, translating them onto canvas. Drawing upon a vast repertoire of painterly techniques such as scraping, troweling, scumbling, and brushing, the dynamic figures emerge in rigorous investigations of materiality in the plastic medium. His idiosyncratic palette is often punctuated with pulsating complementary reds and greens. The raw, unprimed canvases frame his shattered compositions of isolated figures within voids of negative space. 

The Marvel, oil on canvas, 84”x84”

In 2017, Birch created the socially engaged,  experiential art installation The 14th Factory which opened in Los Angeles. Spanning a cross-section of his multivalent oeuvre, it encompassed sculpture, painting, photography, performance, video, and installations, leading one through a narrative sequence of a hero’s journey inspired by mythologist Joseph Campbell. Due to its popularity - the show was visited by over 100,000 people lured by word of mouth and the power of Instagram - further iterations of this ambitious and groundbreaking new format for art are planned to take place in major international cities and will be announced soon. 

Born in Brighton, England in 1974, Birch has lived and worked in Hong Kong for over twenty years. He has had solo exhibitions in Beijing, Miami, and Singapore and has participated in group shows at the Hong Kong Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo. Birch has been awarded the prestigious Louis Vuitton Asian Art Prize and the Sovereign Asian Art Prize. Birch has organized many large-scale multimedia installation projects in Hong Kong, most notably HOPE & GLORY: A Conceptual Circus (2010), Daydreaming With… The Hong Kong Edition (2012), and The 14th Factory (2017). He has been included in the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art’s (LACMA) permanent collection.

HALO Exhibition Catalog Now Available

MARK STEVEN GREENFIELD
HALO

April 30 - July 9, 2022

Mark Steven Greenfield: “I am reimagining what a saint is.”

- Mark Steven Greenfield speaking about the legendary, mythic, and often little known, black figures featured in HALO, on view now through July 9, 2022 at William Turner Gallery, in Santa Monica,CA. 
This online exhibition catalog for HALO, and forthcoming printed first edition, features the artist’s lustrous paintings and the illuminating background stories  which accompany each portrait.

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To order an advance copy of the print edition of HALO contact the gallery at 310-453-0909 or info@williamturnergallery.com

MARK STEVEN GREENFIELD 

Mark Steven Greenfield is a native Angelino, and son of a Tuskegee Airman, which led to spending the first part of his life abroad, living on military bases from Taiwan to Germany, until returning to LA at the age of ten. In high school Greenfield studied with revered Los Angeles artist, John T Riddle. Riddle quickly noted Greenfield’s talent, but saw that he was vulnerable to the influences and dangers confronting black youth at the time.  Riddle remarked, "You could be a pretty good artist....if you live that long.” This got Greenfield’s attention and set him on the path that would define the course of his life. 

Greenfield went on to study with Charles White, at Otis Art Institute, and received his Bachelor’s degree in Art Education in 1973 from California State University, Long Beach and a Masters of Fine Arts degree in painting and drawing from California State University Los Angeles in 1987. 

This year, Greenfield’s work was the subject of a 20-Year retrospective at the Museum of Art & History in Lancaster, CA, from which the The Crocker Museum of art acquired a piece for their permanent collection. 

Greenfield’s work has been exhibited extensively throughout the United States most notably with a comprehensive survey exhibition at the California African American Museum in Los Angeles in 2014, and in 2002 at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia. Internationally, he has exhibited at the Chiang Mai Art Museum in Thailand; at Art 1307 in Naples, Italy; the Blue Roof Museum in Chengdu, China; 1333 Arts, Tokyo, Japan; and the Gang Dong Art Center in Seoul, South Korea. 

Greenfield is a recipient of the L.A. Artcore Crystal Award (2006) Los Angeles Artist Laboratory Fellowship Grant (2011), the City of Los Angeles Individual Artist Fellowship (COLA 2012), The California Community Foundation Artist Fellowship (2012), the Instituto Sacatar Artist Residency Fellowship in Salvador, Brazil (2013) , the McColl Center for Art + Innovation Residency in Charlotte, North Carolina (2016) and Loghaven artist residency in Knoxville, Tennessee in 2021. He was a visiting professor at the California Institute of the Arts in 2013 and California State University Los Angeles in 2016. 

From 1993-2011, Greenfield worked for the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs as director of the Watts Towers Arts Center, and later as director of the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, Barnsdall Park. He has served on the boards of the Downtown Artists Development Association, the Armory Center for the Arts, the Black Creative Professionals Association, the Watts Village Theatre Company and was past president of the Los Angeles Art Association/Gallery 825. He currently teaches drawing and design at Los Angeles City College, and serves on the board of Side Street Projects, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibition (LACE) and the Harpo Foundation. 

ANDY MOSES, Reflecting The Dawn - Currently on View at the Laguna Art Museum

Andy Moses, Reflecting the Dawn, Acrylic on Canvas over concave wood panel, 40x96 inches

Sky Space Time Change is an exhibition that examines artworks by more than 40 California artists that look up, look out and look across the Southern California skies in contemplation of the interconnections between physical, environmental and cultural systems. The exhibition takes viewers through the colorful landscapes of Conrad Buff, Fernand Lungren, and Anna Althea Hills, to the muted visions of Roger Kuntz and Florence Arnold, and into the ethereal realm of Andy Moses, DeWain Valentine, Craig Kauffman and Larry Bell. The exhibition of paintings, prints, sculpture, and photography from Laguna Art Museum’s permanent collection has been assembled by Laguna Art Museum’s 2024 Getty Pacific Standard Time guest curators Sharrissa Iqbal and Michael Duncan.