Rachel Uffner Gallery is delighted to be presenting a two-artist booth with Leonhard Hurzlmeier and Pam Lins at Frieze New York from May 4 – May 8, 2016.
Leonhard Hurzlmeier is a Munich-based artist. For Frieze New York Hurzlmeier will be presenting a suite of six new paintings titled “The Blue Suite.” Hurzlmeier’s practice slows down the process of looking. Building on the history of portraiture, Hurzlmeier plays with our perceived notions of what it is to look at a portrait (á la cubism). The discomfort created by Hurzlmeier’s voyeurism of real-life women is balanced by his use of art historical methodology, abstraction, and humor. “The Blue Suite” is comprised of paintings humorously titled Shy Blonde (Blue Suite, Royal Blue), Black Beach Beauty (Blue Suite, Cobalt), Doctor's Diary (Blue Suite, Indigo), Pasta Pause (Blue Suite, Turquoise), Sailor's Wife (Blue Suite, Cyan), Smokey Mouse (Blue Suite, Prussian Blue).
Pam Lins is a New York-based artist. For Frieze New York, Lins will be presenting a project conceived of during David and Roberta Logie Fellowship at Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University from 2013-14. Enzo Mari tables from his open-source manual Autoprogettazione 1974 are combined with ceramic sculptures Lins recreated from photographs of a classroom at VKhUTEMAS, the school of art, architecture, and design founded in Moscow in 1920. Opening three years after the October Revolution, the school was known for its radical pedagogical approach and Constructivist connections. Student models from the “Space” course, taught by the architect Nikolai Ladovskii, investigated formal and spatial relationships, but far from being useful designs to be built later, elsewhere, at a larger scale, they invoked works by Kasimir Malevich, Alexander Rodchenko, and Vladimir Tatlin—all of whom taught at VKhUTEMAS. Aiming to replace outmoded bourgeois art forms, avant-garde Soviets turned to models: objects defying classification that promised a utopian dissolution of the categories of artistic production.*
Lins’ conceptual practice is manifested in the laborious recreation of objects seen only in photographs. Both the meaning of the objects as well as the formal elements are blurred when revealed only in a photograph – the recreation of these objects encourages us to re-examine our perception. The viewer must walk around the sculptures to see the color that Lins has just added to one side – the side hidden in a black and white photograph.
*Excerpted text by Juliet Koss titled “It’s For You,” on the occasion of “model model model” by Pam Lins, April 19 – May 31, 2015, Rachel Uffner Gallery, NY
Leonhard Hurzlmeier has had solo exhibitions at Galerie Jo Van De Loo, Hubert Burda Media, Galerie Andreas Grimm, all Munich, GE. Hurzlmeier has also recently shown in Other Better Things curated by Adrian Rosenfeld, Annual Exhibitions, Los Angeles, CA, Proper Nouns curated by Wyatt Kahn, Rachel Uffner Gallery, New York, NY, at Autocenter, Berlin, GE, Museum für Konkrete Kunst, Inglostadt, GE, Artist League, Kiev, UK, and Gallery of Art Academy of Budapest, Budapest, HU. Hurzlmeier has been the recipient of the following rewards and grants, Kulturpreis Bayern of the EOn Bayern AG and the Jubiläums-Stipendien-Stiftung for the Akademie der Bildenden Künste. Hurzlmeier is included in the books The HU, 2014, Reflectionfactory, 2011 and others. Hurzlmeier will have is first solo exhibition in the United States at Rachel Uffner Gallery this Fall.
In 2015 Pam Lins received the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award and the Anonymous Was a Woman Award. Lins received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2008 and the Howard Foundation Fellowship from Brown University in 2007. Lins was a participant in the 2014 Whitney Biennial and has recently shown in exhibitions at CCS Bard Galleries, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY, and a solo exhibition at the The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, Saratoga Springs, NY. Lins has been a long-time teacher at The Cooper Union School of Art, Princeton University, and Bard College.
