Matt Connors, Bernard Piffaretti, and Michael Rey

8 November 2014 - 3 January 2015

(Cherry and Martin archive - Cherry and Martin is now Philip Martin Gallery.)

 

Cherry and Martin is pleased to announce an exhibition of selected works by Matt Connors, Bernard Piffaretti and Michael Rey.

 

For more than 30 years, Bernard Piffaretti has expressed the virtues and contradictions of painting, pairing codes of modern abstraction with a strict conceptual methodology. By vertically dividing the canvas into two equal halves creating the one side as the original and the other side its copy, Piffaretti has shaped his oeuvre into a multi-perplexing paradox that runs the gamut of painting’s canon while forming the quintessential Duchampian question to the audience.

 

Bernard Piffaretti has been the subject of solo museum exhibitions at the Musée d’ Art Moderne (2009, Saint-Etienne, France); Mamco (2007, Geneva, Switzerland); Beaumont Public Gallery (2006, Luxembourg, Germany); Sara Hilden Art Museum (2001, Tampere, Switzerland); Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art (2000, Paris, France); and Villa Arson (1991, Nice, France). Piffaretti has been featured in museum group exhibitions at the Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris, France); Hong Kong Museum; CAPC Museum of Contemporary Art (Bordeaux, France); Joan Miro Foundation (Barcelona, Spain); National Gallery of the Grand Palais (Paris, France); and Switzerland Museum of Fine Arts (Bern, Switzerland). Piffaretti was born in 1955 in Saint-Etienne, France; he currently lives and works in Paris, France.

 

Matt Connors’ open-ended approach to art-making embraces movement, change and meaning. Many of Connors’ works invoke physical methods like dripping, rubbing and staining. Describing the paintings in “Impressionism,” Connors’ 2012 solo exhibition at MoMA PS1, Museum of Modern Art curator Peter Eleey writes that Connors’ paintings are remarkable: “paint ends up in them, rather than on them."

 

Connors’ work was the subject of “Impressionism,” a solo exhibition at MOMA PS1 in October 2012. Recent solo and two- person museum exhibitions include “Gas... Telephone... One Hundred Thousand Rubles,” Kunsthalle Düsseldorf (Düsseldorf, Germany), and “Concentrations 54: Matt Connors and Fergus Feehily,” Dallas Museum of Art (Dallas, TX). In 2013, Connors was also included in “Outside the Lines: Painting: A Love Story,” Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (Houston, TX) and the international survey, “Painter, Painter,” Walker Art Center (Minneapolis, MN). In 2012, the artist received the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship Grant and the Belgacom Art Prize. Born in 1973, he received his BFA in 1995 from Bennington College (Bennington, VT) and his MFA in 2006 from Yale University School of Art (New Haven, CT). Connors grew up in San Diego; he lives and works in New York.

 

Michael Rey's works provide for us a fascinating paradox. Their forms, shapes and colors are straightforward and immediately comprehensible. Yet somehow upon looking at them, we experience an immediate, entirely unresolvable mystery that grows the longer we look at them. These seemingly simple forms, shapes and colors avoid categorization, and in doing so, provoke us to talk about greater issues. We talk about the language of painting; the language of sculpture; our sense of our own bodies -- identifying Rey's subtly textural surfaces as 'skins' is a common response; and, above all, we attempt to determine what exactly his work 'represents.'

 

Michael Rey was born in 1979 in Sarasota, Florida. Rey received his BFA from the Ringling School of Art and Design (2002) and his MFA from Art Center (2008). Recent and upcoming solo and group exhibitions include Lisson Gallery (London); Ratio Three (San Francisco); Room East (New York); and Swiss Institute Contemporary Art (New York). Michael Rey is represented by Cherry and Martin and Office Baroque (Brussels). He lives and works in Los Angeles.

 

Philip Martin Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday from 10am-6pm and by appointment. For further information and images please contact the gallery at +310-559-0100 or info@philipmartingallery.com.

 

Philip Martin Gallery
2712 S. La Cienega Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90034
+310-559-0100
info@philipmartingallery.com

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