上海James Cohan画廊将于2009年9月展出《美国青年：Trenton Doyle Hancock、 Erick Swenson、Alison Elizabeth Taylor》。本次展览汇集了三位近期在美国、欧洲广受好评的年轻艺术家。他们作品的叙事效果新颖、独树一帜。而此次展览亦是其作品首次在中国亮相。
出生于得克萨斯的Trenton Doyle Hancock在作品里揉杂了多种媒材，从绘画、拼贴、雕塑、版画到表演艺术；而艺术家本人却将绘画视作其创作核心。Hancock以作品绵延芜杂得名。故事铺陈为他的绘画系列设定了特殊的语境，其故事充盈着天马行空的角色，譬如，骨瘦如柴、夜间出没的素食者（他们同树林中的土墩展开了一场大战），又如帮手鱼雷少年、圣赛松、彩色宝宝，以及敌人邪恶的贝托等。交叠的符号与图像喻体为作品编织出了丰富的层次，造就了艺术家所述的"另类世界"。Hancock称："就像我们身处的物质世界，我所画的是由一系列系统内的系统构建而成的世界。这些系统微观地向内延伸又宏观地朝外延展。这是一个不断自我诘问的宇宙，它又为了应答这些问题而扩张。"
Hancock现在生活工作于休斯顿。 2007年Hancock获得了纽约工作室博物馆（Studio Museum）的伟恩大奖（Joyce Alexander Wein award）。他参加过许多大型展览，诸如，当代犹太人美术馆（旧金山）的《起源——艺术家答创世纪》、美国民间艺术馆（纽约）《德尔格主义——当代艺术家和亨利•德尔格》、《前景1：新奥尔良双年展》。2008年4月，Hancock与编舞家Stephen Mills、作曲家Graham Reynolds合作，为奥斯汀芭蕾舞团（得克萨斯）的《色彩狂热——召唤颜色》创作了对白、服装、布景。前一年，爱丁堡的画廊"水果市场（Fruitmarket Gallery）"推出了Hancock重要的欧洲个展《恣意的思想家》，该展览后又巡回至荷兰鹿特丹的Boijmans Van Beuningen博物馆。Hancock连续两度入选惠特妮双年展（2000、2002年），是最年轻的参展者之一。他的不少作品已被世界重要的美术馆收藏，如，布鲁克林博物馆（纽约）、达拉斯美术馆（得克萨斯）、Boijmans Van Beuningen博物馆（鹿特丹）、现代美术馆MoMA（纽约）、大都会博物馆（纽约）、惠特妮美国艺术馆（纽约）、哈莱姆工作室博物馆（纽约）、旧金山现代美术馆（加州）、当代艺术馆（特伦蒂诺）等。
另一位艺术家Erick Swenson以其娴熟的技艺创作了一批涉及纷繁情感世界的雕塑作品。这些雕塑中神秘生物缘起于他儿时对自然历史博物馆中立体动物模型的热忱。
在他2008年的作品《无题》里面，一只无辜的鹿形生物，裹着黑的斗篷，被风刮起，卷入空中——全然了一场鲜活却浸淫着脆弱、孤独、疏离的戏剧。Swenson的动物们常出现在无邪的一刻，又犹如面对惨剧。作者用它们讲述了生命脆弱的一面。而观者则亲历了一个无言、凝固的瞬间。这些场景里鲜有艺术家留下的线索，观众因此需揣测这神秘的一刻将会把眼前的生灵引向命运何处。策展人Lynn Herbert曾说："Swenson把故事交付给我们……我们通过许多童话寓言里动物的眼睛观察、理解到人的周遭。"
Erick Swenson于1999年毕业于北得克萨斯大学视觉艺术学院。他的作品参加过多个美术馆展览，包括加州大学翰墨美术馆（洛杉矶）、Villa Stuck（慕尼黑）等，并被达拉斯美术馆、富特沃士现代美术馆（得克萨斯）、萨奇（伦敦）、洛杉矶现代美术馆等机构/个人永久收藏。
女艺术家Alison Elizabeth Taylor由于运用镶嵌艺术（木质内嵌工艺）创作具象作品而广为人知。她的作品考量了日常生活里隐藏的故事，由此为这门传统工艺注入了新的活力。以木片和肌理作为媒质，Taylor颠覆了这类材料惯常的装饰性用途（如制作象征荣华富贵的装饰品），而用其刻画失落、失意的人们。这些巧妙且工艺精湛的作品遂打破了工艺品与艺术品间的壁垒。
Taylor有着批判的视野，她的作品以社会边缘人作为主题，如本次展览的点睛之笔《文身师》中所展示的。这件作品里我们目睹了文身师在饭桌边就着一盘生的鸡肉练习文身。这件作品参照了某些经典主题，如艺术家在工作室中的肖像，但艺术家的叙述又隐射了美国主流文化的软肋以及对大车、枪械、性的迷恋。仅以天然木材为媒质，Taylor的革新之处在于以木料的颗粒、色调互为搭配，探索了空间、表面、线条、色彩、形式等手法上的诸多问题。
Alison Elizabeth Taylor毕业于哥伦比亚大学的艺术学院，先已于James Cohan纽约画廊完成了两次个展。与本次《美国青年》同期她还将在伍斯特大学美术馆（俄亥俄州）举行一个个展。迄今为止，Taylor被邀请参加了多个展览，如96 Gillespie的《脏鸽子》（伦敦）、艺术出口空间的《另一个美国》（纽约）、新图像画廊的《其实她谁也不是》（洛杉矶）以及"16条"空间的《化妆间》（洛杉矶）等。
开幕酒会：2009年9月11日，周五，晚6-8点。
更多信息，请联系 许宇 lxu@jamescohan.com 或 +86 21 5466 0825。
James Cohan Gallery is pleased to present its fall exhibition
Young Americans: Trenton Doyle Hancock, Erick Swenson, and Alison Elizabeth Taylor. The exhibition features the work of three prominent gallery artists whose works are becoming highly regarded in the United States and Europe. All three of these young artist use narrative in their works, each one to a unique and stunning effect. This exhibition marks their Chinese debut.
Texas-born,
Trenton Doyle Hancock's work encompasses a wide variety of media from painting, collage, sculpture, printmaking, to the performing arts; however, primarily, Hancock identifies painting as being central to his practice. Well-known for sprawling works, Hancock uses storytelling as a way of creating context for his paintings albeit an absurdist one populated by imaginary characters like the bony, nocturnal Vegans who are engaged in an epic battle with the gentle forest dwelling Mounds, and others like helpers Torpedo Boy, St. Sesom, and the Color Babies and enemies like the evil Betto. The artist's densely layered works are composed with a collision of symbols and visual tropes that create what he refers to as an "alternate universe." Hancock says, "Like our own corporeal universe, my painted universe is comprised of a series of systems within systems that extend inward microcosmically and outward macrocosmically. It is a universe that constantly questions itself and expands in order to accommodate answers to those questions".
Trenton Doyle Hancock is the 2007 Joyce Alexander Wein award winner from The Studio Museum, NY. His work has been included in numerous exhibitions, including
In the Beginning: Artists Respond to Genesis, at the Contemporary Jewish Art Museum, San Francisco, CA, and was recently part of the
Dargerism: Contemporary Artists and Henry Darger at the American Folk Art Museum, New York. He is included in Prospect 1 New Orleans Biennial, (2008/9). In April 2008, Hancock provided the narrative, costumes and set design for
Cult of Color: Call to Color, a collaboration with choreographer Stephen Mills and composer Graham Reynolds for the Austin Ballet, TX. In 2007, the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh, hosted Hancock's major European solo show,
The Wayward Thinker, which traveled to the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, Holland. Hancock was one of the youngest artists ever to be included in the Whitney Biennial, in both 2000 and 2002. Born in Paris, Texas, Hancock exhibitionsly lives and works in Houston, Texas. His works are included in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, NY; The Dallas Museum of Art, TX; Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam; The Netherlands; The Museum of Modern Art, NY; Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; The Studio Museum of Harlem, NY; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; and Museum di arte moderna e contemporanea, Trento, Italy.
With skillful object-making,
Erick Swenson creates sculptures that embody a complex emotional terrain. Inspiration for the mythical creatures that populate Swenson's sculptures springs from the artist's childhood passion for the taxidermied animals in the dioramas at the natural history museum.
Swenson creates his own brand of drama rife with vulnerability, loneliness and isolation, as exemplified in the work
Untitled, 2008, where an innocent deer-like creature, swathed in a black cape, is being swept up into the air and carried off by the wind. Depicted at innocent moments, but in what often appear to be the face of tragic circumstances, Swenson's animals are a comment on the fragility of life. The viewer bears witness to an unexplained scene frozen in time. By giving few clues, Swenson sets the scene for the viewer to ponder the mysterious events leading up the creature's fate. As curator Lynn Herbert has written, "Swenson leaves the story in our hands… and we come to see and understand the human condition, as in many a child's fable, through the eyes of the animal."
Erick Swenson graduated from the School of Visual Arts, University of North Texas, in 1999. His work has received solo exhibitions at ULCA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; and at the Villa Stuck, Munich; and is the permanent collectors of The Dallas Museum of Art, The Modern Art Museum of Ft. Worth, Texas; as well as the Saatchi Collection, London, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Alison Elizabeth Taylor is well-known for re-invigorating the ancient craft of marquetry, or wood in-lay as a means for creating figurative works that explore the hidden stories of everyday lives. By using wood veneer as her medium, Taylor subverts the material's customary use as a decorative element in objects created to display wealth and power and instead uses it to depict people who are down and out on their luck. Thus, her intricate and masterful works uniquely transgress the traditional distinction between craft and high art.
With her critic's eye, Taylor's works take on as subject society's outcasts, people who live on the fringe, as the characters portrayed in
The Tattooist, the centerpiece of this exhibition. Here, we are witness to the tattoo artist at his kitchen table, practicing his meticulous craft on the skin of a raw chicken. With its subtle reference to classical subject matter—the portrait of an artist working in his studio, Taylor's oblique narrative also hints at the underbelly of mainstream American culture and its fascination with large vehicles, guns and sex. Limited to a palette of natural woods, Taylor innovates by using the grain and tone of the veneer to explore formal issues of space, surface, line, color and form.
Alison Elizabeth Taylor is a graduate of Columbia University, School of the Arts and has had two solo exhibitions at the James Cohan Gallery in New York. Conexhibitions to this exhibition, Taylor has a solo show at the College of Wooster Art Museum, Ohio. Her work has been featured in numerous group exhibitions such as 96 Gillespie's
Dirty Pigeons, London;
Other America at Exit Art, New York;
Truly She is None Other at New Image Gallery, Los Angeles; and
The Powder Room at Track 16 in 2007, in Los Angeles.
Opening Reception: September 11, 2009, Friday, 6-8 pm.
For further information, please contact Leo Xu at
lxu@jamescohan.com or +86 21 5466 0825.
