Other Better Things

Amy Brener Conor Fields Eric Huebsch Leonhard Hurzlmeier Adrian Rosenfeld is pleased to announce Other Better Things, the second in an LA-based series called Annual Exhibitions. Featuring the work of four young artists in a temporary exhibition space located high above downtown Los Angeles, "Other Better Things" is organized loosely around themes of collective restlessness, isolation, and the body. The title of the show is borrowed from Lord Byron’s pronouncement that “the visitor will be convinced there are other and better things even in this life,” and was discovered on a plaque at the former leper colony at San Lazzaro island in Venice. Amy Brener works with everyday materials and objects to transform them through embedding and encrusting processes. The colorful resin sculptures on view hold an inconceivable number of objects or cast impressions of objects: keyboard keys, beads, tiles, dried flora, and so on. Through these nearly archeological crystallizations, Brener provides a material time-stamp caught in between technological obsolescence and future historical discovery. Four monumental sculptures by Brener were on view at MoMA PS1 earlier this year in their Greater New York show. She earned her MFA in Sculpture from Hunter College and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Conor Fields’ sculptures often stem from imagined environments where the lines between the natural and synthetic are blurred, and his alter ego figure could be described as an end-times art survivor or the last artist on Earth. In “Other Better Things,” a beach ball emerges through a fissured square of sidewalk concrete, hand-excavated by the artist. Nearby, an old fire escape ladder emerging from a bed of sand and tar holds up two orphaned rubber boots. Fields received his graduate degree at Cal Arts and also studied art at the storied Tyler School of Art at Temple University in Pennsylvania. Eric Huebsch mines the wormholes of human sexuality and identity through a surrealist instinct and conceives of his sculptures as embodied incarnations of sexual desire and corporeal presence. His work hovers over a valley of the formless and the formidable, where giant wads of chewed up gum occupy a corner of the space like those collecting under countless restaurant tables, and an eerie, larger than life hand-carved wooden figure with sculpted “googly eyes” sits resting on the floor, after what appears to be an unfortunate incident with a steam roller. Huebsch earned his MFA in Sculpture at the University of Illinois. Leonhard Hurzlmeier’s paintings precariously balance between abstraction and figuration, manipulating the body through endless geometric operations. The subject of his work vacillates wildly between objects of desire, contempt, mythology and biblical legend, many of which take on anecdotal and humorous undertones. The works here present different “types”: the student, the bather, and the nurse. Although they initially appear as what New York Magazine describes as “somewhere between Fernand Léger’s personalized Cubism and your emoji keyboard,” on closer inspection, they reveal an expert brushwork and old-fashioned mastery of paint. Hurzlmeier studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, Germany, where he currently lives and works. Annual Exhibitions is a collaboration between Geoff Anenberg and Adrian Rosenfeld. Anenberg is a Partner at Creative Space, an integrated real estate company that has been instrumental in bringing creative businesses like Maccarone, Hauser Wirth and Schimmel, and Mia Lehrer Architects to the Arts District in Los Angeles. Rosenfeld is a private art dealer and owner of Rosenfeld Co., a Los Angeles-based art consultancy.

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