Westside, Los Angeles
Group Exhibition
Altered States
Patrick PainterJustin Bower Valie Export Mike Kelley Martin Kippenberger Rinus Van de Velde Patrick Painter, Inc. is pleased to present, Altered States. The exhibition will showcase each of the five artists’ unique vision of an altered reality. This is Justin Bower’s first exhibition with Patrick Painter, Inc. In Palindromic DNA I and Palindromic DNA II, Bower presents us with deconstructed, somewhat hallucinatory images of pseudo-human faces. Bower’s interest lies in the rapid digitization of humanity, and its affect on society at large. Humans function in a world of ubiquitous technological advances, and what Bower calls “control society.” Coupled with repeated Op Art patterns, Bower’s paintings show the destabilization of the figure through the doubling of features - multiple eyes, spliced noses, melting mouths, and expressionist brushwork. Viennese artist VALIE EXPORT has been challenging gender stereotypes and societal constructs in her work since the 1960s. Arguably EXPORT’s most iconic work, Action Pants: Genital Panic (1969/2001), stood at the forefront of the European feminist art movement. Inspired by arthouse cinema and auteurism, the image is a photographic documentation of a performance EXPORT did at an experimental theater. EXPORT confronts the viewer with conflicting messages, and turns the traditional art historical image of woman as object on its head. Iconic Los Angeles artist Mike Kelley left behind an enormous body of work that included an array of photographic pieces. From 2001, Black Out (Detroit River) 1-8 consists of eight panels, each showing a different section of the Detroit River. Large portions of each panel are blacked out (due to a camera malfunction), offering only glimpses of what was intended to be a panoramic view. Here Kelley critiqued “pop” psychology theories such as repressed memory syndrome, and draws a parallel between these obscured portions and the lapses caused by repressed memories. Inspired by a kind of contemporary fiction, Rinus Van de Velde’s large, highly rendered charcoal on canvas pieces focus on central characters within a more complex narrative. Here Van de Velde focuses on a fictionalized alter-ego, and his search for a young writer who has gone missing. The drawing and descriptive titles present the artist’s fruitless attempt to locate his friend, and his isolation as he draws out the contradictory traces left behind by his disappearance. Van de Velde’s work melds art historical precedent and a reinterpretation of the drawing medium. Justin Bower has recently exhibited at UNIX Gallery in New York, and Ace Gallery in Los Angeles. VALIE EXPORT’s work is currently on exhibit at Tanja Grunert Gallery, New York, and the Hamburger Kunsthalle in Hamburg, Germany. Mike Kelley’s work was recently featured in a multi-museum traveling retrospective, and at Skarstedt Gallery in New York. Martin Kippenberger’s work was recently exhibited at Galerie Gisela Capitan, Cologne, and Skarstedt Gallery in New York. Rinus Van de Velde has exhibited at major international museums including the Stedelijk in Amsterdam, and has a forthcoming exhibition at S.M.A.K., Ghent.