GROUP SHOW AT NICOLE KLAGSBRUN

Opening Reception: Friday, February 25, 6-8 PM Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery is pleased to present works by Robert Barry, Peer Bode, Nikolas Gambaroff, Raymond Hains and Ryan Sullivan, from February 25 – April 9, 2011. An opening reception will be held on Friday, February 25th, 6-8pm. Working in distinct idioms, the artists in the exhibition explore the dynamic potential of what Jan Verwoert has termed the "conceptual gesture." Reflective of and reacting to their spatial and historical context, each work reverberates differently with the next. Seminal early works by Robert Barry directly address the relationship between being and place. Delimiting only the corners of pictorial space, hung centrally on an empty wall, Barry's paintings describe their own physical and perceivable boundaries, while drawings reveal the malleability of privileged terms for measurement. Rendering permanent the ephemeral and performative, Raymond Hains' photographies hypnagogiques are drawn with refracted, diffused and shattered light. A key figure of Nouveau Réalisme best known for his torn posters and assemblage, Hains' interest in the playful fracture and dissolution of information permeates the work, manifested later in the artist's use of his voice and the internet. In a contemporary vein, Nikolas Gambaroff considers an artwork's historical, architectural and economic support structures, and the hierarchies implied within. In repeating the gesture of a signature or abstracted script across multiple canvases, incorporating newspapers and found objects, the artist's mark is demystified and rendered as a meaningless action and hollow sign. Ryan Sullivan uses observed and absorbed visual phenomena to negotiate the inherent action and chemistry of painterly materials. Uninterested in depiction or orchestrated abstraction, these assimilated influences run parallel to the work, carried as the "resonance of the world." Producing much of his video work at the Experimental Television Center in Owego, NY, Peer Bode re-engineers familiar technologies to similarly investigate and collapse his medium. Manipulating sound and image to reveal the dependence of sonic and visual information on moving parts, these elements are often interlaced and overlapped to obliterate one's primacy over the other. Taken as a whole, the works in this exhibition do not translate but operate in dialogue with their world, exploring media through legitimacy. The self-reflexive cycle of the artists' relationship to medium and oeuvre folds past into present, accumulation and perception into material, atmosphere into form. Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery 526 W. 26th Street, No. 213 New York, NY 10001 gallery@nicoleklagsbrun.com P. 212.243.3335 F. 212.243.1059 nicoleklagsbrun.com