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In Gallery 1
Doran
Malner
Winckelmann
Show dates: November 21 to December 20, 2008
Opening reception: Friday, November 21, 5 to 8pmMore images here
Western Exhibitions opens the third show in its new location in Chicago’s West Loop Gallery district with a three person painting show, featuring the work of Paul Doran from Dublin, Ireland, Dale Malner from Madison, Wisconsin and Mette Winckelmann from Copenhagen, Denmark. Please join us for the public reception on Friday, November 21, from 5 to 8pm.
PAUL DORAN’S small, gritty paintings remind one of Arthur Dove upon first view. Small and seemingly clumsy, like Dove’s early forays into abstraction, Doran seems to be channeling early modernism. However, Doran’s palette (greys, blacks, subtle stabs of pink, yellow or brown) and his strange forms feel contemporary, like a rougher, faded version of a Monique Prieto painting or some of the more abstract work of Luc Tuymans. Doran takes as his subject the process of painting, stating “For me, practical and conceptual concerns are inseparable. We live in a world that is more easily defined by technology, but I am interested in ideas about the handmade, how human existence can be communicated through the handmade in a more meaningful way. There is a real difference between process paintings and paintings that emphasise the presence of the human hand. For me, the latter is a more conceptual approach. I think that ideas about the handmade have an important role to play in a contemporary context”.
METTE WINCKELMANN evokes the paintings of Sonia Delaunay. Winckelmann updates Delaunay’s patchworked, geometric abstraction by juxtaposing “masculine” and “feminine” approaches to modernist painting and decoration, attempting to “liberate painting from the rigid concepts of gender that seem to continually influence our approach to painting” (1). Her new paintings take the geo-morphic grid of her earlier works (and of Delaunay) and offsets the hard-edges with brushy coloration within the grid’s cells, as if coloring in an Excel Spreadsheet. The complex compositions and her juxtapositions of hard edges and fuzzy swaths of paint conjure associations between Cubism and early Ellsworth Kelly paintings or an impromptu Op Art.
DALE MALNER is the wild card in this show in several senses: he doesn’t look back to early modernism; his work is much more emotionally charged; and in this show, his work will be much bigger than Doran and Winckelmann’s intimate canvases. He does, however, look back, in this case, to late Guston and to Martin Kippenberger. Malner’s paintings develop from his drawings, born of imagination, executed primarily in small drawing books, often during travel.
He scans and then manipulates these drawings in Photoshop, ultimately transferring the images via a digital projector to the canvas, where he then lets his improvisational, expressionist impulse take over. Style and subject sources are both historically specific and idiosyncratically based. Common narrative themes range from vulnerability, frustration, resignation, violence, and grief, to desire, enthusiasm, innocence, resignation, awe, or surprise. Malner states “I try for mix of tragedy and comedy”.
PAUL DORAN is represented by Green on Red Gallery in Dublin. He will have a solo show with SUNDAY L.E.S. in New York City in 2009. His international shows are numerous, including solo exhibitions at Green on Red, Galerie Katharina Krohn in Basel, Finesilver in San Antonio and group shows at the Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art, the Irish Museum of Art, and in galleries in The Netherlands, Stuttgart, Cologne Belfast, and across Europe.
DALE MALNER is a founding member of the collective FIELDWORK and is president of Art Industry in Madison, Wisconsin. His numerous exhibitions and projects have appeared at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Western Exhibitions, the Hermetic Gallery in Milwaukee, the Wisconsin Academy of Arts and Sciences in Madison and Project 1981 in Queens. Malner lives and works in Madison, Wisconsin.
METTE WINCKELMANN has shown extensively in Denmark, where she is represented by Galleri Christina Wilson in Copenhagen. Internationally her work has been exhibited in Luxembourg, France, New York City, Seoul, The Netherlands, Toronto and Barcelona. Her work is in the collections of The Royal Museum of Fine Art, Copenhagen, Denmark and Herning Kunstmuseum, Herning, Denmark. Winckelmann lives and works in Copenhagen.
(1). From the essay “A Room of One's Own – identity and possibilities in abstract painting” By Sara Hatla Krogsgaard
Also on view, in the gallery office: New artist books
“A Comparative Analysis of Sex Scenes from Mainstream Movies (And How to Make Them Better)”
by Deb Sokolow
The new Philip von Zweck artist compilation
“Sewing Book (Rome)”
by Miller & Shellabarger
“Hair Drawings”
by Dutes Miller
Signature and Walking Books
By Stan Shellabarger
In Gallery 2, Dead Center / Marginal Notes: Lockett & Hermetic, curated by John Neff. This is the final show in this series. More here.
ALL IMAGES © WESTERN EXHIBITIONS & EACH INDIVIDUAL ARTIST