This handmade book is available in the Anteism Shop

Matthew Stone – Optimism as Cultural Rebellion – Exhibition tour from Matthew Stone on Vimeo.

The Hole is pleased to announce the first comprehensive gallery exhibition in the United States by British artist Matthew Stone.

The exhibition will focus on the intersections between the ideas, photography and sculptures that define Matthew’s work. Alongside his sculptural installations of photography, he will also be presenting a performance at the gallery titled “Anatomy of Immaterial Worlds” (November 3rd at 9pm) as part of the visual art performance biennial PERFORMA 11.

Two large wooden planes bisect the gallery walls and provide a rhythm for the navigation of the space. Photographic nudes printed directly onto birch panels are cut, hinged and folded along the walls and across the floor, in what uber-curator Hans-Ulrich Obrist has described as “a-perspective constellations”. In one work titled “Forever Rules” a large photographic nude is cut into hundreds of squares and attached to fabric that passes through an oak dodecahedron and cube, draping down onto the floor. Whilst Plato’s divine geometry is honored in part, it is simultaneously corrupted by the poetic complexity and beauty of the human body in action, flowing through and against the rigid logic of its geometric counterparts.

The title of the exhibition “Optimism as Cultural Rebellion” should be considered a one-line manifesto, perhaps a “mini-festo”. Since 2004 Matthew has developed a personal philosophy of Optimism, defining it as “the vital force that entangles itself with and then shapes the future.” This timely position permeates all of his activities. Matthew Stone operates as an artist in a total sense: his very being, his community, his lifestyle and its expression dictate the creation of his interconnected works. As well as creating photography and sculpture he works in multiple worlds as curator, philosopher, performer, musician, facilitator and cultural provocateur.

Matthew was born in 1982 and graduated from Camberwell College of Arts, University of the Arts London with honors in painting. After leaving college he masterminded the art-collective-cum-scene !WOWOW! in squatted South-London buildings. Their group shows and parties in empty buildings attracted audiences of over 1500 people and a performance event at the Tate saw a record 4000 people in attendance. Recent solo exhibitions have been presented at V1 Gallery, Denmark; Galerie Paul Freches, Paris; Boyschool, London; Gea Politi, Milan, and Union Gallery, London. I first came across Matthew’s work when Terence Koh presented Tianhuang Dadi at Asia Song Society on Canal Street in 2007.

Recent photographic projects include a collaboration with Givenchy’s Ricardo Tisci for the cover of the 20th anniversary issue of Dazed & Confused magazine and a fold-out sculptural cover for the current Flaunt Magazine. He composes original music for close friend and collaborator, fashion designer Gareth Pugh’s shows and has directed music videos for acclaimed British bands These New Puritans, S.C.U.M and for New York lo-fi band No Bra.

More about Matthew Stone:

Matthew Stone is an artist and shaman. These two interconnected roles are defined by his activities as photographer, sculptor, performance artist, curator, writer, Optimist and cultural provocateur. Stone’s work and thinking goes far beyond the remit of his art, and his power of existence is recreating the role of the artist in the 21^st century. Recognising this, The Sunday Times recently placed him at number one in the arts section of their “Power players under 30” list.

After Graduating from Camberwell Art School in 2004, with a first-class degree in Painting, Stone spearheaded South London’s !WOWOW! art collective, organizing guerrilla art exhibitions and throwing London’s most notorious and decadent squat parties. Dazed and Confused magazine featured the collective, claiming the children of !WOWOW! “would live on in legend for years to come.” and i-D Magazine described Matthew, saying “He gave birth to a happening, and all of a sudden, in his wake, London was exciting again.”  In 2008 — !WOWOW! took over Tate Britain — attracting a record 4,000 people, who came to witness one of his performances.

Stone’s whole being is geared toward a life lived as art. His personalised definition of Optimism as a method for avant-garde thought and art practice, inverts the nihilistic cultural dialogues of the late twentieth century to create a necessary space for vibrant new ways of being. Saatchi Online said that Stone’s work “definitely points to the art of tomorrow, I think, an immaterial quality equal parts idealist belief and cynicism, working as an alternative, very palpable reality running along the rest of society.” Esteemed curator and ex-head of the Royal Academy; Norman Rosenthal said simply “he has invented a new ‘ism’—Optimism.”

Stone has provided the soundtrack to each of close friend, designer Gareth Pugh’s fashion shows and films, and was a resident DJ at London’s legendary nightclub Boombox.

Though perhaps most known for his painfully beautiful photographic nudes, most exciting is Stone’s recent move into video. He has begun to direct his own video-based artworks as well as a rapturous, celebrated and daring directorial debut in the form of a music video for cult heroes These New Puritans. Following the video’s release, NME instantly placed Matthew at number 14 in their list of the “50 Most Fearless People In Music”.

Churning bodies dissect rhythmic windows that open onto varied states of concentrated being. A collage of  limbs and interconnected consciousness, involving and depicting transcendental states, meditations and ecstatic dance, spin into contemporary motion. The body is shown and used to free the viewer from their own. Stone’s work revolves specifically around creative interactions and community, based on the idea that individual autonomy can be successfully combined with the power of collectivity.

Recent exhibitions and performances have taken place at the Baltic, the Royal Academy, the ICA and Tate Britain. - Biography written by Karley Sciortino.

A Day in the Life: Matthew Stone by KARLEYSLUTEVER

We are please to announce the release of a new artist book produced for Javier Perés’ show “One of Ours” at Grimmuseum in Berlin.

This colour catalog showcases the artwork in the exhibition and is hand bound with a screenprinted jacket.

PURCHASE
• Edition of 100
• 3 panel fold out serigraph cover (Exterior metallic silver / Interior Blue), deckled edge, archival printmaking paper.
• 20 Colour pp. on white and metallic stock.
• 28 x 23 cm
• Published 2012

A RIVER RUNS THROUGH JAVIER PERES

By ANA FINEL HONIGMAN

As a gallerist in Berlin and Los Angeles, Javier Perés assembled and nurtured a roster of hard-partying art stars. He has offered a perfect platform for seminal work by Terence Koh, Joe Bradley, Dan Colen, Dash Snow, Agathe Snow, Kirstine Roepstorff, among others. And all along, the Havana-born former entertainment lawyer’s own creativity was unmistakably the gallery’s guiding spirit—his vision quite possibly defines the early 2000′s art world. Continue reading at Interview Magazine

Check out Javier Perés’ fist solo show at the Grimmuseum in Berlin

by Jamie Martinez

It’s about time we get to see Javier Perés’ own art! Everyone in the art world is talking about it! The Grimmuseum, Berlin, presents “One of ours”, the first solo exhibition of the Berlin/Los Angles based, Cuban born artist, gallerist and writer, Javier Perés.  If anyone knows contemporary art it’s Perés, a man already highly respected in the industry for his ability to make superstars of the artists he chooses to represent. His artist roster includes or has included among others, assume vivid astro focus, Terence Koh, Kirstine Roepstorff, Dan Colen, Joe Bradley, Mark Titchner, Agathe Snow, Mark Flood and the late Dash Snow. Continue reading at ARTEFUSE

Javier Peres to Show at Grimmuseum

by PADDY JOHNSON

Famed art dealer Javier Peres – of Peres Projects – will cast his net a little wider in 2012, now venturing into the world of exhibiting art makers. Slated to open January 12th at Grimmuseum in Berlin, Peres’s work focus on the theme of collective and personal memory; in this case, realist paintings of River Phoenix. The 23-year-old Hollywood heartthrob died of a drug overdose in 1993. Continue reading at Art Fag City.

Brooklyn-based artist and curator Eddie Martinez brings eight of his figurative but highly abstracted works to Berlin. As a self-confessed “garbage disposal”, he takes influence from everything from graffiti to his mood. Through Dec 17 at Peres Projects

Seeker available in the Anteism Book Shop

Seeker is a body of work which consists of nine paintings. The paintings display Martinezʼs recognizable combination of virtuoso brushwork, which sings like his drawings, alongside heavily worked passages of dense color.

Itʼs easy to imagine Martinez standing with his nose nearly pressed into the wet canvas, craning his tall frame in order to examine an area where thick paint curls like breaking surf. We can imagine him deciding to act, and dragging a thick wet brush into more fresh paint with a decisive gesture. In that way his paintings evoke the memory of a host of heroic painters, and like those heroic modernists associated with the early to mid-twentieth century, Martinez uses his canvases to make paintings which flirt with abstraction, but keep one foot planted in the referential.

Martinezʼs work is both less serious and more serious than his forebears. The less seriousness mirrors the central turn in philosophy and art over the past sixty years, which has been the cementing of the unconscious into every facet of human activity. The paintings are more serious in the sense that, once the subject is decentered, the topic shifts from the individual towards relationships and communication. Youʼll notice that the figures in Martinezʼs paintings arenʼt isolated. They are either in relationship to one another, or looking pointedly out at you, or in the case of Sun Setter, deliberately looking away.

In a world that loves to talk about the death of painting, Martinez offers optimism to lovers of painting. Martinezʼs paintings have their own internal logic, and the startling clarity of his vision creates a testimony regarding the way he sees the world. In the same way that the works of Van Gogh or de Kooning evoke worlds and change the way we see, by meeting our world and leaving a trace left behind, Martinez also discloses a world. His work holds the potential for historical continuity with earlier traditions, while breaking from their fallacies and charting new territory.

A Extremely Limited ( Edition of 8 ) Artist Book Documenting Kembra Pfhaler’s Notorious Performance “The Vagina Wall” photographed by Bruce la bruce with critical text by Michael Vannoy Adams.

“I first saw the pancake stack up of girls in a cheezey magazine I bought at 7/11, while on tour across the U.S. with my band “The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black”. It was a picture that I always remembered. I duplicated it live at the Disinformation Conference in New York in 2002. Samoa filmed us that night with his new camera. He was excited about this new performance too. We were in our traditional band outfits… I gave Alice a turkey baster filled with plain yogurt that she ‘splooged’ onto me as I was on the top.

A couple of years later, at a show in Los Angeles that was organized by Ron Athey and Vaginal Creme Davis… I did the W.O.V. live again and we decided to do a photo shoot in the garden of the hotel we were staying at. The Highland Gardens. These are the photos by Bruce La Bruce, Legendary filmaker….

Bruce La Bruce’s direction was perfect. He made us feel beautiful and important. It was a little precarious because we just sort of free~balled the situation and pretended like everything was normal when we were shooting. He motivated us to focus on our intentions. Bruce is a very important ‘pre~code’ filmaker. Because of him… punk rock boys everywhere blossomed into glamourous porn stars and artists.” – Kembra Pfhaler – NYC, 2009

“Kembra Pfahler (Born August 4, 1961) is an American performance artist, rock musician and actress. As a performance artist she has been recognized on every “Top 10 List” published during the past quarter century. Her graphic depictions of the horror, repetition, degradation, and sheer misery of the human condition have been recognized as insightfully accurate in art curricula globally. Her humanistically centered positions on Feminism and  Post Beat Ban The Bomb Politics has moved a generation.” – Wikipedia

“LaBruce was born Bryan Bruce in Tiverton, Ontario, and wrote for Cineaction magazine, curated by Robin Wood, his teacher. He first gained public attention with the publication of the queer punk zine J.D.s, which he co-edited with G.B. Jones. He currently writes and photographs for a variety of publications including Vice, Nerve.com and BlackBook magazine, and has made a number of films which merged the artistic techniques of independent film with gay pornography.”

Available through Anteism Book Shop

We’re pleased to be launching a new artist book for Evan Gruzis at his upcoming exhibition at the Hole. The book “Existential Crisis” will juxtapoz Evan’s childhood drawings with his contemporary paintings.

The book will be available later this month through the Hole & Anteism Shop.

The Hole is pleased to announce Exotic Beta, the second New York City solo exhibition by Evan Gruzis. The exhibition features ink paintings, sculpture, video and installation, including a collaborative installation with renowned designer Rafael de Cardenas. Exotic Beta is presented in collaboration with True Religion Jeans.

Exotic Beta fuses a sense of the exotic with the language of market research to explore the way meaning is made and the relativity of “taste”: Exotic like a tattoo of a Japanese character the bearer of which doesn’t know the meaning, Beta like a corporation’s second re-launching of a product after market research and focus groups have masticated all the language to the point of flavorlessness. Exotic Beta also refers to an alternative form of asset class in investment markets—like an art collector who starts buying baseball cards—adding extra relevance to the title.

Evan’s main goal is creating the potential for meaning amidst the post-apocalyptic landscape of empty signs. By using imagery that was once evocative and now is just a husk of a cultural signifier, Evan can foreground his real interest, which is the simple act of looking. His technique certainly suggests this as well. With methodical and painstaking execution, Gruzis uses a magician’s bag of tricks to keep the ink and paper looking like anything but; the gestalt is a now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t pictoral modification meant to present the images both as authentic representations of the object and as hand-painted images that float between photography, airbrush and digital technology.

The centerpiece of this exhibition is the large triptych in the back of the main gallery, titled Stratatos. Featuring the silhouetted form of a skull, a Fender Stratocaster guitar and a metronome, this contemporary Vanitas presents our forever-teenaged culture’s “rebelliousness” in contemplation of it’s own ticking clock.

The “castle gallery” features light-up works and video: Dancing into Forever is the central video work projected on the back wall of the gallery. A droning un-programmed digital clock flashes 88:88 and other messages while a silhouetted figure slowly gyrates in front of a water-drenched plane. This next-generation video work uses generative software to randomize intersecting clips of video so it is an ever-changing intersection of visual information, never presenting the exact same image twice, like a live video mix. A trio of other luminescent pieces, including the light-box work Connoisseurship, which juxtaposes the stereophile and the armchair pharmacologist, round out the dark side of the exhibition.

Back in the main gallery, Self-portrait as Self-portrait’s explosion of paint drips, balloons, cocktail paraphernalia, confetti and plastic fruit are arranged into an image of the artist. The result is a drawing-photo-painting hybrid, a mise en abyme that references Gruzis’s own body of work and creates a territory for image and object to meet. In Geishas of Key West, 2009, a folding fan, ribbons, flowers and an illustration from Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions float atop an illusionistic ink painting of tile to form a concept of beauty straight out of a 1980s hair salon. Aesthetically these canvases call into question issues of taste and process and are absurd pseudo-paintings attempting to divorce the image from a single medium.

Another featured installation in Exotic Beta offers Evan’s “acid sketches”; painstaking recreations of hastily scribbled sketches made during a psychedelic experience. They relate in concept and palette to the work High Design, which frames splatter as the opposite of controlled designed form: acid wash, acid sketch, acid trip.

The selection of paintings continues with 16:9, featuring cinematic display proportions and purposeless graphic design that would be obscured in a 4:3 format “to fit your TV”. Harakolada evokes the pineapple as the international symbol of hospitality and nods to Margaritaville with its pat tropical fantasy, while the tanto blade stabbed through it introduces lethality, beauty and craftsmanship; here is an inappropriate re-appropriation of samurai culture via violence and Zen. As Laurie Anderson asked: que es mas macho? Pineapple o knife?

Many works in this show feature superimposed text, both in painting and sculpture: the chromed, autobodied ANX, the pieces Green and Indigo are everything that color isn’t: text, black and white. Angst? XANax? Zen? The sculpture, ZEN? (Helvetica, IKB), painted in International Klein Blue, is a distilled koan of challenging legibility, through which we can contemplate the void, the emptiness of “no selection”.

Many of the themes of this exhibition are activated in the collaborative installation with Rafael de Cardenas. This sculpture, inspired by a sequence in the movie Flashdance called “Imagination” (after the Laura Branigan song it features), encapsulates a strange and uniquely 1980s Orientalism. The film’s dancer devolves from post-apocalyptic geisha to businesswoman to writhing freak-out by strobe, and Gruzis and De Cardenas have grown this moment into a massive frieze consisting of their own custom kimono, presented on a multi-tiered stage that has the presence of a futuristic art deco monument.

Concurrently with this exhibition, Evan will present a simultaneous solo show of new works at Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery in Chelsea. Entitled Shadow Work, this exhibition features multiple desaturated works on paper, a marble mannequin sculpture entitled Monument to Fashion, and focuses on semi-autobiographical works. Like the Jungian phrase for dealing with the dark parts of your psyche that you don’t even know exist, Shadow Work, circulates images from Evan’s shadow of repressed iconography. ‘Lude Wig for example is a splattered, spectral portrait of the composer Beethoven materializing in front of a palm tree in some sort of tropical astral plane or an afterlife vacation. Bouquet Shift No. 2 re-imagines a Dutch still-life that looks sliced through the middle, bisected and offset by the slash of a sword. In one of Gruzis’ hallmark still-lifes, Placement de Produit features an unmistakeable Coca-cola bottle with pieces of tape covering the label, referencing a resistance to uncontrollable brand recognition.

Gruzis will also be releasing a new limited-edition book, Existential Crisis, published by Anteism, as well as a limited edition C-print and a silver gelatin print (both derived from the triptych Stratatos), produced by Signed And Numbered, a company specializing in artist-edition collaborations.

Evan Gruzis is a young artist from Milwaukee, WI who has exhibited around the world since graduating from Hunter College in 2008. He has had solo exhibitions at Deitch Projects (2008), DUVE Berlin (2008, 2010), Andreas Melas Presents in Athens (2010) and SAKS Gallery, Geneva (2011). He has been in group shows at The Swiss Institute, NYC; Max Wigram, London; The Deste Foundation, Athens; The Garage Center for Contemporary Art, Moscow; MACRO Museum, Rome; and many other notable institutions. His work is in the collection of Dakis Joannou, the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Hort Family Collection, Artist Pension Trust, David Zwirner collection, and many other notable private collections.

Evan Gruzis – Exotic Beta

September 10th – October 22nd

Opening Saturday, September 10th

7pm-10pm

The Hole, NY

Years worth of Tim Barnard’s black and white drawings have been compiled in a new book simply titled “Drawings“. The 96 page book dives deep into the claustrophobic, jam packed drawings of Barnard. These large drawings are featured as a whole on the page along with cropped detailed shots.

An introduction by Rupert Bottenberg gives insight into Barnard’s methodology and discusses the characters of the massive crowd-scapes.

A limited edition of the book is available for a short period of time before the launch of the standard edition.The limited edition (100 copies) has a dust jacket screenprinted on a luscious black printmaking paper.  Purchase a copy of the book.

Anteism releases free book for Free Comic Book Day

In a last minute effort to support the International Free Comic Book Day Anteism has rallied a handful of artists to put together an art zine.

Seven artists have submitted comic related/inspired artwork for this booklet. The book is available to download as a PDF & Epub and physical copies will be available through the online Anteism book shop.Copies are wet off the press, photos to come. Order your copy today.

Download the Web PDF Here

Have a flip through the web version.

River Kuo is a multidisciplinary artist based in Taipei, Taiwan. His drawings and paintings are prominent in the fashion industry of Taiwan – as well as his shop window installations. A self pro-claimed “pop artist and designer”, Kuo provides a hint at his illustrative styling which links to the fashion industry and artists like Andy Warhol. These early links are severed once a large body of work is witnessed in his new book.

Kuo’s style and mood are dramatic, from cutesy, colourful naive line drawings to dark portraits reminiscent of possessed children in asian horror films. His lines are minimal yet retain emotion and energy.

The publication itself is a work of art, with an unheard number of printing techniques, paper stocks, inserts and binding. The book contains fine art water colour papers, thin coloured bond papers, thick cardstocks, newsprint, vellum and even clear acetate inserts. These inserts have River’s patterned floral motifs which can be removed and overlayed ontop other pages as an interactive feature.

The spine of the book has a beautiful textured glued finish. The finishing technique looks similar to a hardcover book which had the cover ripped off.

Braile, embossing, gold leaf and sewn in fabric are other interesting details that will be found when exploring the book.

The back of the book has information printed on to fabric tags which are sewn into the back cover, like the tag on a t-shirt.

I can’t recommend this book enough to fans of River Kuo’s art and to people who love to hold an original unique artbook in their hands.

Unfortunately the book may be hard to get a hold of as it is currently only for sale through a shop in Taiwan. There is some info below. You can also checkout the River Kuo Artist Zine / Book

*River Kuo Zine Available

書名 РRIVER KUO
發行人 Р趙慶論
發行 РJJ40嵥傑國際有限公司
ISBN – 978-957-41-7141-5
ÂÆöÂÉπ – $1500ÂÖÉ
語言 Р中/英/日
販售 Р誠品書店

‰ΩúËÄÖ – RIVER KUO
製作統籌/裝楨設計 Р林小乙
文編 Р林佳賢 . 黃顗穎
文案 Р林佳賢
行銷企劃 Р黃顗穎
JJ40/02-2627-7758

Book title – RIVER KUO
Publisher – JOHNNY JAN
Publish – JJ40 International corp.
ISBN – 978-957-41-7141-5
Language – Chinese / English / Japanese
Where to buy – Eslite bookstore (TAIWAN)
Pricing – $1500.-(NT)

Author – RIVER KUO
Producer/designer – Xiao-yi Lin
Editor – AD Lin / Christine Huang
Copywriter – AD Lin
Marketing – Christine Huang
Contact – JJ40 International corp.
Tel / 886-2-2627-7758

20100924 Taipei Taiwan

PRISM index #2 features 60 artists in film, writing, poetry, music, art, and comics. The compilation includes an 88 page book printed offset, a 95 minute DVD of award-winning short films, an 80 minute CD of unreleased and rare music, and a mini-comic, all in a handmade, silkscreened cover.

PRISM index is a limited edition, handmade, silkscreened, mixed-media book that compiles the work of a wide spectrum of artists into one place. The name serves as an acronym for print, images, sounds, and movies.

THIS IS THE SECOND ISSUE OF PRISM INDEX. 60 BRAND NEW CONTRIBUTORS!

The goal of this publication is to create a collage of current art/culture scenes from throughout the US and the world. As a network for artists, this project seeks to establish a platform for multi-media sharing through the tactile, aural, and visual experience of print, images, sounds (CD), and movies (DVD) and to extend and elaborate those expressions through its online presence. PRISM index intended to create something that could not be thrown away, skimmed through, replicated, or forgotten.

Limited to 500 hand-numbered copies. Packaged in archival sleeves.

Luke Ramsey discusses the concepts and process of his commercial illustrations and personal art at the Pictoplasma Festival in Berlin.

Luke Ramsey is an illustrator and fine artist from Canada. He is founding member of Islands Fold, an artist residency located on Pender Island off Vancouver. His work is distinct through a continuous flow of pen on paper, which he digitally colours to strong tableaux. Human characters are set in landscapes and natural settings, mountains stare motionless and simple shapes build up to intricate agglomerations. Luke has collaborated with over 80 different artists to date and has exhibited widely in North America and Europe.

Here’s a 10 minute edit of Luke’s presentation at the Pictoplasma Berlin Festival, 2010.