Westside, Los Angeles
Group Exhibition
Notions Of Architecture
Patrick PainterBas Jan Ader Valie Export Rodney Graham Won Ju Lim Meyer Vaisman Patrick Painter Inc. is pleased to present, Notions of Architecture. The exhibition will showcase each of the five artists’ unique visions of architecture as an agent of self-discovery philosophical inquiry. Dutch born and California-based artist Bas Jan Ader (1942-1975), mysteriously vanished in 1975 when he set sail on what was to be the smallest sailboat ever to journey across the Atlantic. His disappearance happened while he was working on the third part of In Search of the Miraculous. In this project, BJA uses his body as both the object and subject of his photography series. He performs emotive actions to capture elements of both anticipation and resolution. Born in 1960, Venezuelan-born Jewish artist Meyer Vaisman has been largely absent from the art world for the past ten years. Back in the 1980s, Vaisman was regarded as one of the most promising protagonists of the New York art scene. He was named a member of the quartet the “Fantastic Four” along with Jeff Koons, Peter Halley, and Ashley Bickerton. Vaisman is also a founding member of the East Village Gallery International with Monument. Canadian born artist Rodney Graham explores a wide variety of mediums since the 1970s, experimenting with diverse media such as film, video art, painting, drawing, photography, sculpture, and installation art. His works incorporate complex narratives and draw upon literary, philosophic, and Biblical references, as seen in Ezek. 40-42. This biblical verse from the Old Testament scriptures is a vision of a glorious temple described in detail with specific measurements that were quite different from typical temple complexes of the time. Graham depicts this verse with a minimalistic approach, designing a coded address in a clean, white font, emphasizing the architectural qualities of the excerpt. Viennese artist Valie Export has been challenging gender stereotypes and societal constructs in her work since the 1960s. Export’s work stood at the forefront of the European feminist art inspired by arthouse cinema and auteurism. She confronts the viewer with conflicting messages, and turns traditional art historical images of objectified women on its head. EXPORT creates a sense of tension that has come to define feminist art with lasting impact. Won Ju Lim is an artist from Gwangju, South Korea. She now lives and works in Los Angeles after earning an MFA from the Art Center College of Design. Lim’s work comments on space, time and memory using her body to explore the architecture, sculpture and atmosphere around her. Her Hawaiian landscape sculptures of rich green hilltops are set in orange plexy-glass and reveal its substructure oozing with orange and white glue. Her dynamic 3D landscapes appear to melt from within, and the disjunction between reality and hyper-reality comments on the fragmentation of memory and time in relation to landscape and architecture. Bas Jan Ader's works are shown all around the world, his most recent exhibition being at the Simon Lee Gallery in London, UK and Metro Pictures in NYC, 2016. Meyer Vaisman has released new works through Portikus in 2015, and has recently shown at Kabe Contemporary in Miami in 2016. Rodney Graham received the Audain Prize for Lifetime Achievement in Visual Arts in Canada, and has solo exhibitions in France, the UK, Canada, Italy, and Turkey in 2016. Valie Export’s work has been shown at solo exhibitions in Vienna, Austria at the Jewish Museum, in 2017. Roy Arden’s works are part of many important collections, including the LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art), Los Angeles, and MOMA (Museum of Modern Art), New York. In 2016 his works were exhibited at the Monte Clark Gallery. Won Ju Lim’s works are part of public collections at various foundations such as the UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, and her recent exhibitions have been at the Haines Gallery, San Francisco, and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, USA.