PERMISSIONS
September 25 - October 18
opening reception: September 25
Permissions highlights new works by four innovative contemporary artists: Linda Besemer, Diana DeAugustine, Sherin Guirguis, and Olga Koumoundouros. These accomplished artists each have conceptually and formally contrasting practices, encompassing sculpture, painting, and photography, yielding visually distinct works. Yet these artists are united by the fact that they all claim Eva Hesse as an influence. This exhibition aims to contextualize Hesse as a canonical art historical figure whose innovative practice gave permission to generations of artists to come. Permissions intends to provide an engaging testimony to Hesse’s far-reaching influence on artists working today. Permissions is organized by Tucker Neel, an artist, writer, and curator in Los Angeles (tuckerneel.com).
This exhibition runs concurrently with Meditations: Eva Hesse, a performance written by Marcie Begleiter and directed by David Watkins. For more information on the performance an on Permissions visit http://meditationsevahesse.com/.
About the Artists:
Linda Besemer creates visually stunning works that challenge traditional assumptions about painting, primarily binary oppositions of figure/ground, paint/support, recto/verso. Referencing critical theory, feminism, objecthood, decoration and finish fetish, Besemer’s paintings question the forms and underlying signifying practices of modernism, abstraction and the two-dimensionality of the medium.
Besemer’s paintings have been featured in numerous museums, most notably: The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Corcoran Museum of Contemporary Art, The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Albright Knox Museum, the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, The South Eastern Center for Contemporary Art, SITE Sante Fe, The Bucksbaum Center for the Arts, The Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, Weatherspoon Museum of Art, The Portland Art Museum, and The Palm Beach ICA. She is also exhibiting internationally in England, Ireland, Germany, Sweden, Italy and Mexico. She is a recipient of the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant, the George and Eliza Howard Foundation Grant in Painting, and the Chuck Close Rome Prize in Painting, from the American Academy in Rome. She is represented by Angles Gallery in Santa Monica, CA.
Diana DeAugustine’s artistic practice uses tattooing as a form to create a space for discourse on the body and its use as a canvas for sociopolitical expression. Instead of tattooing traditionally with ink (pigments embedded into the skin), DeAugustine tattoos with water, resulting in an image made visible by blood that is essentially impermanent; the non-ink tattoo heals without a scar. By tattooing without ink, DeAugustine removes the permanence of the conventional tattoo, creating an ephemeral tattoo that addresses the private and the public and the process of healing to denote a passage of time. For this exhibition DeAugustine will create a new work investigating the human body’s relation to fabric design while exploring the interrelationship between fabric and tattoo design and cultural identification. DeAugustine holds an MFA from CalArts and a BA from UCSD. For more information visit http://studioephemeral.com/
Sherin Guirguis was born in Luxor, Egypt in 1974. She received her BA from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1997 and her MFA from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas in 2001. Her work references various contradictory elements, both formal and social. Having been raised in Cairo and now living in Los Angeles Guirguis’ work investigates the frictions between the contemporary and the traditional, the reductive and the ornamental. Her work engages both formal and social concerns by juxtaposing the reductive Western language of minimalist aesthetics with that of Eastern Arabic ornamentation.
Her work will be included in the upcoming 2010 California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art. She has had solo projects at LAXART, Los Angeles and Patricia Faure Gallery, Santa Monica. Selected Group exhibitions include Under The Knife, Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena, CA; Las Vegas Diaspora, curated by Dave Hickey at the Las Vegas Art Museum; Quickening, Museum of Contemporary Art, Tuscan and The Dreams Stuff is Made Of, ArtFrankfurt, Germany. She has also participated a series of public programs in conjunction with the 11th Cairo Biennale. Her work has been reviewed in the Los Angeles Times, Flash Art, Artforum, Beautiful/Decay, Artweek, among other publications. In addition to her own work, Guirguis occasionally curates exhibitions featuring emerging artists in California. She currently lives and works in Los Angeles.
Olga Koumoundouros’ provocative practice actively engages ideas of labor, class and human sustenance that shake the very core of the American Dream. The artist's dexterity and commitment to materiality is her tour de force. Working with industrial materials--plywood, corrugated fiberglass, plaster and tar, among others--Koumoundouros' sculptural objects and installations resonate with brute, elegant force, exploring the many social, economic and political ideologies that shape our relationship to both past and present.
Koumoundouros graduated from the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, and
University of Vermont, Burlington. She has presented work at Open Satellite, Bellevue,
Washington; Mullin Gallery, Occidental College, Los Angeles; Walter Phillips Gallery, The Banff Centre, Banff; Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena; Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; LAXART, Los Angeles; Glassell School of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; among others. She is the recent recipient of a
grant from The Durfee Foundation. Koumoundouros lives and works in Los Angeles.
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