January 30: Ernst Caramelle

What is reality, how credible is the visible, and what are the conditions of art - these are recurring questions in Ernst Caramelle's work since he first began exhibiting in the mid-seventies. In his conceptually based œuvre spanning many different media - from drawing, painting, photography,video, and mural art to virtually ephemeral works of sunlight on paper - he weighs the status of the original and fake, production and reproduction, the perception of art, and the context of art reception.

Born in Tyrol, Austria in 1952, Caramelle studied at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna from 1970 to 1976 , 1974/75 he moved to Cambridge as a Research Fellow at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT where he realized one of his first video works (video-ping-pong). He has been teaching at the Städelschule in Frankfurt and the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. Since 1994 he teaches at the Academy of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe. Ernst Caramelle lives and works in Frankfurt, Karlsruhe and New York.

Exhibitions (selection): 2012 Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus OH; 2011 Galerie Nächst St.Stephan,Vienna; 2010 Bloomberg Space, London; 2009 Lawrence Markey, San Antonio TX; 2008 Galerie im Taxispalais, Innsbruck; Tracy Williams Ltd., New York, 2005 Museu Serralves, Porto; 2001 BAWAG Foundation, Vienna; 1998 Städtische Galerie, Nordhorn; 1993 Wiener Secession, Vienna; Portikus, Frankfurt; 1992 documenta IX, Kassel; 1990 Museum Haus Lange, Krefeld; Nationalgalerie Berlin; Musée d'Art Moderne, Paris; 1989 Musée départemental de Rochechouart; 1986 Kunsthalle Bern; 1982 Kunsthalle Basel.

 

February 6: Enoc Perez

Born in San Juan in 1967, Enoc Perez first took painting lessons at the age of eight. As the son of an art critic, he spent family vacations traveling to museums in different countries and learning about the history of art. In 1986, Perez moved to New York to study painting at the Pratt Institute before earning his master's degree at Hunter College. Embracing art's potential for pleasure and beauty, Perez paints sensuous nudes, still lifes, tropical resorts, and modern architectural icons in a sleek aesthetic with dazzling, vibrant colors. 

Perez is best known for his paintings of modernist buildings that nostalgically capture the utopian ambitions and optimism that inspired their construction.

"In a way, these architects really believed in the idea of utopia. There's a true sense of believing in these buildings, and if you look at contemporary architecture, that's not as much the case. Living in midtown Manhattan since 1997, Perez has been surrounded by the great skyscrapers and architecture of New York. Among other buildings, he has made series of the Seagram building, the Eero Saarinen TWA terminal, the United Nations building, and the Lever House. In 2007, he exhibited a series of Lever House paintings in the lobby of that very building. He is attracted not only to the optimism that went into constructing these skyscrapers but also to their now-lost sense of power and permanence, which has been compromised by the tragedies of 9/11 and the destruction of the World Trade Center.

 

February 20: Kim Dorland

Kim Dorland was born in 1974, in Wainwright, Alberta Canada. He received his MFA in 2003 from York University, Toronto and his BFA in 1998 from the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design, Vancouver, BC.

Kim Dorland's paintings depict the real space of his hometown suburbia; free of romantic delusions, but perfectly accepting of quiet, unexpected beauty. His refusal to remain faithful to one medium or approach plays into the symbiotic nature of his work, the deadness of acrylic, the sheen of spray paint, the density of oil paint all convene to engage the viewer. The loose yet identifiable scenes are interjected with areas of heavy abstract impasto, adding to the raw, fleeting quality of his canvases. Dorland is by no means trying to entice his audience with a nostalgic vision of utopia, but rather he cultivates reflection, upon a quiet moment, a party ended, the fleeting beauty within the often ugly and mundane.

With five solo exhibitions in 2009 alone, Dorland has exhibited globally - including shows in Milan, Montreal, New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. Dorland is featured in The Sander Collection (Berlin), Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art (KS), Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (Montreal), Blanton Museum of Art (TX), The Glenbow Museum.

 

February 27: Sarah Rapson

Sarah Rapson was born in North London in 1959 and raised somewhere between Sigmund Freud and John Keats' houses. She studied at Hornsey School of Art, London, followed by L'Ecole des arts Decorarifs, Paris, and later, in 1990 the Whitney Museum Independent Studio Program. Subsequently, she spent many years living and working in a factory building in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Currently, she lives and works in a ropemaker's terraced brick cottage, in Bridport, Dorset England.

Most recently, the 'monumental' painting, 'Newhouse' made in New York in 2003, with a new work, made in England in 2011 titled, 'A Sacrifice to Apollo London 2011' was shown at the 11th Lyon Bienale.

She has shown her photographs taken in the City of London, with work made in Dorset from used construction and other materials alongside, super 8 film projections at Salon Nacional, in Cali, Columbia, 2008. The piece begun in 2007 was in homage to Robert Frank.

Other exhibitions include, 'Transcendental Materialism' at Zurcher in New York and Paris 2011. 'The Buddhist Trader' at Hive Projects, London in 2009. Her work has been included in group exhibitions "Le Tableau" curated by Joe Fyfe at Cheim & Read in New York in 2010.

 

February 28: Cora Cohen “Living Together”

"A conversation about the constantly changing nature of contemporary life and art becomes possible when a work of art is produced."

Painter and sometimes curator Cora Cohen returns to the Hoffberger School to give her view on contemporary flourishing amoung younger artists in New York. Her own work, where she has developed a strong sense of connectedness between her visual practice and a consciously lived life, is clarified in her statement.

"Painting demands a meditative calm and deliberate slowness of apprehension that runs counter to the speed and logic of contemporary electronic media. It has the capability of engaging us fully, not just our minds, but our bodies and hearts. It solicits and nourishes our psychological and spiritual well being. "Painting can change the world."

 

March 5: Ann McCoy

Ann McCoy is a New York based sculptor and painter, as well as a curator and published writer who has been involved in studies of comparative religion, Jungian psychology, 15th. century alchemy, and Native American culture for thirty years. Ann worked with C.G. Jung's main successor, Dr. C.A. Meier in Zurich for twenty-eight years, and has studied alchemy both in texts and in her dreams. She has worked on alchemical studies in the Vatican Library, and the Corsini in Rome.

Ann's work is included in the collections of many major American museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Hirschorn, the Los

Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Whitney and others. She has done large-scale projection installations at Majdanek in Poland, and also in New Delhi at KHOJ. She is the winner of a Prix de Rome, a D.A.A.D. Berliner Kunstler grant, an Award in the American Arts, a Pollack Krasner, and a Gottlieb, among others. Her work was included in the Venice Biennale ART AND ALCHEMY in 1985. For the last three years she has created fairy tales dealing with the

alchemical theme "the death of the king." Her Berlin exhibition on this theme received a full page in the Berlin Zeitung, and recently a spread in Fabrik Magazine and the Huffington Post.

 

March 26: Edgar Heap of Birds

The artworks of HOCK E AYE VI EDGAR HEAP OF BIRDS include multi-disciplinary forms of public art messages, large scale drawings, Neuf Series acrylic paintings, prints, works in glass and monumental porcelain enamel on steel outdoor sculpture.

Heap of Birds received his Master of Fine Arts from Tyler School of Art, Temple University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (1979), his Bachelor of Fine Arts from The University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas (1976) and has undertaken graduate studies at The Royal College of Art, London, England. He was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts Degree from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Boston, Massachusetts (2008).

The artist has exhibited his works at The Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, New York, The National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia, Documenta, Kassel, Germany, Orchard Gallery, Derry, Northern Ireland, University Art Museum, Berkeley, Association for Visual Arts Museum, Cape Town, South Africa, Lewallen Contemporary Art, Santa Fe, Hong Kong Art Center, China , Bandung Institute of Technology, Bandung, Indonesia and the Venice Biennale, Italy. He has served as visiting lecturer in London, England, Western Samoa, Chiang Mai and Bangkok, Thailand, Johannesburg, South Africa, Barcelona, Spain, Belfast, Northern Ireland, Norrkoping, Sweden, Hararre, Zimbabwe, Verona, Italy, Adelaide, Australia, Delhi, India and Dine College, Navajo Nation.

Heap of Birds has taught as Visiting Professor at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, Rhode Island and Michaelis School of Art, University of Cape Town, South Africa. At the University of Oklahoma since 1988, Professor Heap of Birds teaches in Native American Studies. His seminars explore issues of the contemporary artist on local, national and international level.

He has received grants and awards from The National Endowment for the Arts, Rockefeller Foundation, Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, Lila Wallace Foundation, Bonfil Stanton Foundation, The Pew Charitable Trust and the Andy Warhol Foundation.

In June 2005, Heap of Birds completed the fifty-foot signature, outdoor sculpture titled Wheel. The circular porcelain enamel on steel work was commissioned by The Denver Art Museum and is inspired by the traditional Medicine Wheel of the Big Horn Mountains of Wyoming. Heap of Birds' art work was chosen by the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian as their entry towards the competition for the United States Pavilion at the 52nd Venice Biennale. He represented the Smithsonian with a major collateral public art project and blown glass works in Venice, June 2007 titled: "Most Serene Republics".

 

April 2: Wangechi Mutu

Wangechi Mutu is a Kenyan artist currently residing in Brooklyn, New York. Her work is commentary of a social and personal nature where the female body functions as a site of engagement and provocation. Her hybrid figures are embedded in unknown landscapes, and possess an abject allure. Reflecting her varied interests, Mutu samples come from printed image sources like medical diagrams, glossy magazines, anthropology and botany pictures, pornographic materials, traditional African arts, travel postcards, and mechanical and hunting publications. The artist's signature aesthetic combines tactile surfaces and fleshy images saturated with physical and conceptual wit, remaking the typical yet misguided narrative and placement of the contemporary African and the female that is African.

Wangechi Mutu's work is included in major collections such as the Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin, San Francisco MoMA, New York MoMA, Whitney Museum, Studio Museum in Harlem, and The Hague in The Netherlands.

 

April 9: Lisa Sanditz

Lisa Sanditz, a native of Missouri, is an American landscape painter eternally searching for ways to find the sublime in the most unexpected areas. While working in respect to the traditions of her predecessors, she has taken a new and inventive path in the realm of landscape painting. Her wildly colorful works function as stylistic and informational quilts, opening doors into strange, polluted, and mysterious impressions of collapsing space. They teeter between the seductive and the grotesque but regardless are accessible through the dynamic tension of their design. She embraces despoiled and rotten landscapes and transforms them into picturesque scenes of great beauty and power.

Lisa Sanditz is represented by CRG Gallery in New York; ACME in Los Angeles; and Galerie Rodolphe Janssen in Brussels. Sanditz earned her BFA from Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1995, and her MFA from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York, in 2001. She has taught at Bard College, the San Francisco Art Institute, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI, and Minneapolis College of Art & Design. Her website is: http://www.lisasanditz.com/landing.html

 

April 23: John Zinsser

John Zinsser was born in Manhattan, NYC, in 1961. He attended Yale University as an undergraduate, studying literature and art history. An abstract painter, he has been exhibiting in the US and Europe for 25 years. In 1987, he co-founded Journal of Contemporary Art, a magazine devoted entirely to interviews with artists and special projects. He has also written extensively for the periodicals Art in America and Flash Art. As a teacher at New School University and New York Academy of Art, Zinsser discusses contemporary art practices within their larger art historical contexts. In his own work, too, he invites a wide range of possible readings, from Freud-based psychology to popular culture sources. In March 2012, he will be showing at Kunstgaleriebonn, Germany, his 29th solo exhibition to date.

In a review titled "The Thinker" by Robin Rice of his show, "Abstract Memory" last spring at Larry Becker Contemporary Art, in Philadelphia, Rice writes: "Zinsser's commitment to lush, well-orchestrated accidents reminds us of nature. His use of engineered pigments, silvers, rust primer and alkyds keeps us in the artifice of civilization."