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Currently on view In Chicago is Amy Mayfield's installation Doog Vs. Live at threewalls. Mayfield's exhibition marks the beginning of threewalls SOLO program for 2008/09, running until November 15th, 2008.

Known for her paintings that depict ecstatic landscapes located between terrifying and medicated, fear and joy, greed and grandeur, Amy Mayfield's paintings employ personal-world symbolism to inform fantastic landscapes. Here for threewalls, Mayfield has moved off the substrate, turning the gallery into a funhouse that embodies the feminine, ornate and chaotic worlds that she cultivates in her paintings. Employing patchwork colors, decorative black patterning, photo collage, pins, house plants, a stacked wall of books, and sculptural blobs of poured paint, Mayfield manifests here an environment for the audience to enter and occupy. Mayfield will be giving an artist talk at threewalls October 30th at 6pm.

Amy Mayfield has exhibited her paintings throughout Chicago at Gahlberg Gallery, The Hyde Park Art Center, Bucket Rider and Zolla Lieberman Gallery as well as Franklin Parrasch in New York. In 2007 she exhibited in the MCA 12x12 series. Mayfield received her MFA from the The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2006 where she was a recipient of several grants and scholarships.

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In the decade since her breakout success in 1996, Liza Lou has won a $500,000 genius grant from the MacArthur Foundation, kept a studio in Durban, South Africa, and continuously mesmerized the world's critics and collectors. She works with millions of tiny glass beads, taking the traditionally craft-oriented medium and elevating it to astonishing artistic heights.

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Happy Lion Gallery in Los Angeles recently opened Marina Kappos' POLITICUS, an exhibition of new paintings inspired by the forthcoming Presidential Election. The artist's style recalls that of Greek vase painters, her crisp imagery referencing politics, war, and the economic crisis. Her overlapping compositions provide layers of meaning, depicting both cultural history and daily life.

Kappos received her BFA from California Institute of the Arts in L.A. and her MFA from Yale University. She has previously exhibited at Haunch of Venison in London, I-20 and P.S.1 in New York, and Galleria Marabini in Bologna. Her current exhibition at Happy Lion will run until November 29, 2008.

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Currently exhibiting at la BANK in Paris is a solo exhibition, entitled NO CASH/CASH, featuring two series of work by Juliana Beasley. Beasley, a former assistant of Annie Leibovitz, has become a notable photographer in her own right. The two series being shown at la BANK, Rockaway Park and Lapdancer, are seemingly polarities in terms of subject matter, but both cut to the heartbeat of what it is to be human and struggle, regardless of how that struggle manifests itself.

In Rockaway Park, the Jersey City photographer documents the faces of that fringe of the Queens population in a Leibovitz-esque style of portraiture, although capturing far less glamorous faces than those of the Hollywood stars shot by Leibovitz. These faces are not those gracing the covers of US Weekly, but those marginalized by a class seen above their own in both economic stature as well as broader social terms--predominantly found on the other end of the A train. One striking image, Last Stop Diner, seems to be made up of one part joy to two parts sorrow. The ubiquitous site of that scarf-covered white hair and red lipstick, maybe a little on the teeth, lives in the subconscious of others in the neighborhood, or in the bittersweet nostalgia of those who have since left the various Rockaway Parks of the world.

Lapdancer is taken from the 2003 book of the eponymous name. The series graphically captures the seediness of an establishment that lives within a time capsule of the late night hours, no matter how light it is outside. It documents the experience of the dancers and the anxious clientele in the coarsest and most honest of terms, omitting most traces of pleasure and leaving one grimacing at the sight of these scenes. NO CASH/CASH is on display until November 8th.

Juliana Beasley lives and works in Jersey City. A 1990 graduate of New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, her work is represented by Contact Press Images. Beasley is the recipient of numerous industry nominations and awards.

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On October 8th, LACMA opened Contemporary Projects 11: Hard Targets--Sports and Masculinity, a survey exploring the intersection of masculinity and sports in contemporary culture and artistic practices.

Curated by Christopher Bedford (himself a player of rugby and American football), the show poses athleticism not in diametric opposition to artistic expression, but rather as a kind of male-dominated theatrical spectacle of gender performance. In Bedford's accompanying exhibition article, he noted, "This new interest among practicing artists in the imagery of and materials associated with men's sports can be traced to the increasingly polymorphous depictions of star athletes in the media. More and more often, popular magazines such as Sports Illustrated and ESPN the Magazine publish portraits that lavish as much attention on the bodies and apparel of male athletes as has traditionally been accorded female models and celebrities endorsing cosmetics, clothing, and perfumes."

This hypersexualization, or offering up of the male body and identity for consumer culture, is on the one hand liberating, yet also a cause for concern. While women have long been objectified as a means to fuel commercial desire, now it appears men are subjected to the same unflinching, and unattainable vision. Yet the implications of imposing such unattainable ideals upon masculinity are apparently a new subject for consideration, the implications of which still as of yet unknown.

Continue reading "Hard Targets: Masculinity and Sports @ LACMA" »

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Currently on view at Black & White Gallery in Chelsea, NYC is a new series of constructed photographs titled Shanghai At Last, by the artist Isidro Blasco. The exhibition is conceptually built around the physical space and architecture of Shanghai and and is presented in impressive sculpture / relief-like constructions where the collaged photographs sit directly on top of a wood armature. About the exhibition, the artist has stated, "Every city has a different impact on my work. I try to respond to the way the city is affecting me through the way I respond to the space that I inhabit. By doing so, I connect my experience as an outsider who walks the streets and interacts with the city with my more intimate feelings about closed and private spaces".

Isidro Blasco was born in 1962 and currently lives and works in New York City. The artist recently exhibited The Truth at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, in Sheboygan, WI, La Construccion del Paisaje Contemporaneo at the Centro de Arte y Naturaleza in Huesca, Spain, and Substance and Light: Ten Sculptors Use Cameras at the Museum of Art, Munson-Williams Proctor Arts Institute, Utica, NY.

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I don't usually get hung up on press releases, but there's one phrase from the release for Daniel DeSure's current exhibition that I can't forget: "things we use to soften the blow." DeSure's work is described as an understated, non-reactionary response to the fact that blows are a given. Things inevitably go wrong; technologies malfunction, people disagree, cars crash, natural disasters strike. But what if we stop worrying about the inevitable blows, asks DeSure? What if we accept malfunction and disaster and focus on living instead of preventing? He's not the first to ask questions like these, but there's something surprisingly relevant about the way in which he asks.

Continue reading "Softening the Blow: Daniel DeSure" »

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The all new Cerasoli:LeBasse Gallery in Culver City, California is celebrating the newly formed partnership with their first gallery opening together, Blender, new works from Vincent Hui, Melissa Haslam, Ryuichi Ogino, Deth P Sun, and Mari Inukai in Gallery 1 and Jennifer Davis and Suzanne Sattler in Gallery 2.

The selection of emerging international artists coming from Japan, China and Australia are all influenced by the various cultures of Asia and reflect that influence in their paintings and drawings. While these artists demonstrate a vast approach to their craft, certain aesthetic continuities begin to emerge when viewed as a group. Each artist has a slight touch of illustrative qualities inherent in their work, and each subtly attempts to bridge the cultural divide between the East and the West.

Suzanne Sattler, whose work is pictured above, is a graduate of Hartford Art School, and has worked as a professional printmaker with several famous artists such as Andrea Zittel and Louise Bourgeois. She has recently left the print world to pursue her own artistic career. Sattler lives and works in New York City.

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On exhibition until November at San Francisco's Mission District-based gallery, Triple Base, are Jay Nelson's latest works. Titled Temporary Autonomous Zone, Nelson captures his journey for "self" through an array of paintings, drawings, and sculptural devices. Working mostly with landscapes, Nelson's body of work is comprised of gauche, watercolor, graphite, and oil on paper or canvas. In addition to his delicate two-dimensional practices, Nelson has applied his creative energies into ambitious and conceptually driven sculptural models. In Temporary Autonomous Zone, the gallery space functions as a nest for his dichotomous endeavors. Displayed is Nelson's deluxe-edition motor scooter, fully equipped for a solitary coastal tour. Skillfully fashioned wooden editions (roofs, drawers, and encasings) are added to the scooter and additionally, to a Honda hatchback car--which one can find in the Mission neighborhood streets surrounding the gallery-- thus transforming these everyday transportation modes into energy-efficient and fully autonomous vehicles. The sculptural structures placed alongside Nelson's soft, ambiguous paintings and drawings at Triple Base successfully articulates his search for an independent self.

Born in Los Angeles, Nelson currently lives and works in San Francisco- a notable detail since his work conveys a notion of the American West and the investigation of oneself. He graduated in 2008 with an MFA from Bard College and holds a BFA from California College of the Arts in Oakland, CA.

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As one of the most monumental presidential elections approaches, artist Nikki McClure takes action. Vote for Survival, a series of politically minded and motivated screen prints and signs, is on display at Needles and Pens in San Francisco. McClure, who is known for her elegantly detailed paper cut-outs, has taken a new approach in reaction to the present day political changes. Vote for Survival is a traveling exhibition which will tour the west-coast towns of Los Angeles, San Francisco and McClure's hometown of Olympia, Washington. In addition to silk-screen prints, Vote for Survival includes numerous original paper cuts. These works, generated from a single piece of paper, are delicate in both technique and subject matter. Drawing influence from life's austerities, McClure's tactile approach in demonstrating birds, weeds, children, berries and boats is inherently an homage to beauty and simplicity.

In addition to paper cuts, McClure produces an annual calendar, numerous book covers, posters, album covers, cards and t-shirts. Vote for Survival is simultaneously exhibiting at GR2 Giant Robot in Los Angeles until November.

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Currently on view at Loyal Gallery in Stockholm, Sweden is a new group of water color paintings on birch panel by New York based artist Suzannah Sinclair. The exhibition, titled Eyes For No One, largely consists of portraits of young woman bearing confrontational gazes, though not always back at the viewer. The women convey a multitude of emotions ranging from the vulnerable to the proud all the while in a seductive manor that calls into question both sex and sentiment. Sinclair completed two exhibitions earlier this year with Voges + Partner Galerie in Frankfurt and with Samson Projects in VOLTA NY.

Sinclair first exhibited with LOYAL in the Spring of 2007 in the group exhibition I've Been Setting Fires All Day. LOYAL was founded by Kristian Bengtsson, Amy Giunta and Martin Lilja in 2005, and was born from Loyal Magazine.

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Blair Thurman's first solo exhibition opened last week at Galerie Frank Elbaz on rue St.-Claude in Paris's Marais neighborhood. The show, entitled Krumms Along the Mohawk is named after an ice-cream flavor at Thurman's local gas station in New York. The exhibition is in concept a mini-survey of Thurman's work over the past decade and a half - although most of the pieces are new, completed in 2008.

Press releases can be daunting and artist statements can often be even more conceptual than artist's work. However, Thurman's statement in the press release trumps any words that could be said by the gallery about the show, and worth noting, simply asserts that, "It's been said of some of my favorite painters that they are always repeating the same painting. Sam Grosse told me painters always do the same show throughout their career - which I took as a compliment. Maybe it is something about painting. The point of Krumms Along the Mohawk is to show the trail of my work has changed and hasn't changed over 15 years." The works exhibited, acrylic paintings on unconventionally shaped canvases, often in three-dimensional form, are more architecturally aesthetic than what we tend to expect of paintings. Bringing neon sculptures into the mix continues the sense of dimension and tangibility not often seen in a show of predominantly paintings.

Blair Thurman lives and works in New York. She received her MFA at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. She has exhibited at Triple V in Dijon, France, Hard Hat in Geneva, Switzerland and Galerie Hubert Bachler in Zurich, Switzerland, among others.

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Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr, both artists and former research fellows at the Tissue Engineering and Organ Fabrication Laboratory at Harvard Medical School, are integral participants in SymbioticA, an art and science collaborative research laboratory at the University of Western Australia. They founded the Tissue Culture and Art Project in 1996 and have exhibited numerous projects that create opportunities for public reflection on concepts brought to light by interaction with tissue culture.

Their projects have included Victimless Leather, where a cultured living tissue layer was grown on a biodegradable polymer scaffolding in the shape of a tiny seamless coat, Disembodied Cuisine, where tissue taken from a living frog was grown into a steak-like creature and consumed during their exhibition at L'art Biotech in Nantes, France, and DIY De-victimizer Kit Mark One, which gave the layperson the tools to experiment with the culturing of dead animals for the relief of their own guilt brought about by killing.

Continue reading "Oron Catts & Ionat Zurr: Victimless Utopia" »

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In an exhibition titled Objects of Wonder, the Columbus Museum of Art has teamed up with Ohio State University to present an assortment of unusual cultural artifacts from the University's archives. Viewing objects from the collections of a university that opened its doors in 1870s may sound mundane, but the curiosities that Ohio State has acquired and horded for over a century are surprisingly dynamic and mind-bending. In the above video, archivist Tamar Chute shows off a 1980s egg catapult that was used to demonstrate the importance of seat belts. The exhibition also includes a pump organ that was taken aboard the Nautilus submarine's 1931 Arctic Expedition, the fossil collection of amateur paleontologist Robert Guenther, unpublished photographs of Marilyn Monroe reading, and a taxidermied Ivory-Billed Woodpecker. And this is just a glimpse of the exhibition's span.

All together, the objects give a nuanced portrait of cultural niches and under-explored moments in history. Displayed in the context of an art museum, these objects act as sculptural commentaries, fragmented yet expansive portrait of the way people live and the ideas or phenomenons that fascinate them.

In an effort to expand the scope of the exhibition, the museum is soliciting participation from anyone who has a noteworthy collection of their own strange objects. Images can be sent to education@cmaohio.org. Objects of Wonder opened September 29th and will continue through January 11th.

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Kruisdijk and Kuilboer are two artists from the Netherlands who began their artistic collaboration in 2007. In their independent practices, Kruisdijk works with systems of visual language and Kuilboer's interest lies in concepts on the perception of time. Kuilboer often uses images and objects from her childhood and redefines their meaning, such as the blanket, which holds contradictory connotations of oppression and comfort. Together, they try to investigate what it means to be an artist today, which often includes traveling with a lot of stuff to exhibit. Seen above is a life-size donkey named Atlas who carries their books, work, and materials needed for that particular exhibition. Other previous work includes Graduation from the Blackhole, the artists' "graduation" from their post art academy depression, commenting on the artistic isolation felt when one is not living in a large metropolis.

Kruisdijk and Kuilboer have an upcoming exhibition at De Creatieve Fabriek in Hengelo, Netherlands opening on October 17th and they are currently represented by Actionfields Temporary Art Gallery in Belgium.

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Tim Roda's exhibition, Family Album, opened on October 2nd, 2008 at the fresh San Francisco gallery, Bear Ridgway Exhibitions. Roda and his family could be called a collaborative, since the creative process involves the whole family's participation. Roda creates intricate sets (often on-the-spot) including--just to name a few--found objects, costumes and carpentry materials. Roda then invites his family into his newly fashioned space where the scenes are created--which he documents closely with a 35mm camera. Roda captures out of the ordinary moments that draw influence from his past family life. His photo development process is also unique in that he pays little attention to the exacting tasks of typical photo development--he burns, dodges, and cuts down at his own accord evoking a blurry, pixilated, and "unfinished" feel to his photographs.

Educated in ceramics, Roda earned his MFA from the University of Washington and his BFA from Pennsylvania State University. Roda has exhibited widely throughout the United States, Canada and Europe. He and his family are currently living and working in Italy on a Fulbright scholarship. DailyServing's Arden Sherman, had a chance to speak with him about his current exhibition, his working process, and what's next to come.

Continue reading "Tim Roda" »

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Opening this Friday, October 17th, at Thierry Goldberg Projects on Rivington St., on the lower east side of New York, is the first solo exhibition of paintings by Logan Grider. The exhibition will include Grider's latest work - paintings depicting colorful blocks and abstract shapes of the bold-colored and moody-shadowed variety. Grider's oeuvre conjures up Cubist kings like Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, within a history-obsessed and history-rejecting, postmodern era. In Grider's pieces, everyday objects in abstract form sit stacked atop one another in front of vague, textured backdrops.

Grider was mentioned along with Rosson Crow and Dash Snow in an article by Kelly Crow of the Wall Street Journal in 2006, about the rise of young artists to galleries and collections of notoriety. He has exhibited in group shows at Yvon Lambert Gallery in New York, Jack Tilton Gallery in New York, Baumgartner Gallery in New York and Allston Skirt Gallery in Boston.

Logan Grider was born in Salem, Oregon and currently lives and works in Connecticut. He holds an MFA from Yale University and a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, having completed programs at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and The International School of Art, Italy.

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Among the works featured in the exhibition are Noelle Mason's window installation of Mag-lites spelling the word SILENCE in Braille, and an illuminated stained glass that projects a surveillance image of 9/11/2001 hijackers passing through security at the Portland airport. Another work by Mason consists of 10 stitcheries that depict x-rays and infrared images of undocumented immigrants crossing the US/Mexico border illegally. Mason collected the images from the US Border Patrol and Minutemen websites, and then sent the images to Brazil where they we embroidered by Bilu Alcantara in exchange for the amount it would cost her to illegally immigrate to the United States. John Delk contributes a candy-coated American flag, and a drain installed in the gallery floor spewing George Bush's past five State of the Union speeches, which he has edited to consist solely of fear-inducing buzzwords and phrases. For his part, Conor McGrady offers up four new vignettes that are de-contextualized portraits depicting roles played by those at various levels within the political power machine.

John Delk is a Brooklyn-based artist whose work has been exhibited nationally in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and Washington. He received an MFA in 2001 from the School of the Art Institute.

Noelle Mason graduated the School of the Art Institute's MFA program in 2005. Her work has been exhibited internationally and she is a member of the faculty in the University of Houston's sculpture department.

Conor McGrady has recently exhibited his work in the one-person exhibitions, New Arcadia at M.Y. Art Prospects, New York and Green and Pleasant Land, Saltworks Gallery, Atlanta. In 2002 he was selected to participate in the Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

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Mekanism Skateboard Company recently partnered with German artist Dirk Skreber to custom paint a new series of skateboard decks. Skreber explores imagery related to natural and man made disasters. In this project,
he renders the pieces of a vehicle in the process of being blown up, which is further echoed in the fragmented grid of skateboard decks. In total Skeber completed fifty skateboard decks in over four paintings.

The artist, who was born in 1961, currently lives and works in New York City and Dusseldorf, Germany. His rencent exhibition Blutgeschwindigkeit (Blood Speed) is currently on view at the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, Germany and will travel to the Museum Franz Gertsch, Burgdorf, Switzerland. The artist is currently represented by Blum and Poe in Los Angeles and Friedrich Petzel Gallery in NYC.

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The leading work in the show is a slick, black fiberglass figure, standing over two meters in height in a stoic and monumental form. The work furthers the artist's interest in appropriating loaded cultural imagery and altering the often iconic forms to reveal new and challenging views that push against traditional values and cultural norms.

Abbas currently lives and works in Islamabad and Boston and works as an Associate Professor at the National College of Arts in Rawalpindi. She has received degrees from Universitat der Kunste, Berlin and National College of Arts, Lahore. Recent exhibitions include New Works at Gallery NCA and a self-titled exhibition at Gallerie Dorothia Konwiarz, Berlin.

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This exhibition marks Woodruff's seventh solo exhibition with P.P.O.W. The artist has exhibited internationally with recent shows including the major traveling project FREAK PARADE which is presently held at the Herron Gallery in Indianapolis, IN.

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MADE UP was curated collaboratively by a team drawn from partner galleries and the Biennial under the artistic directorship of Lewis Biggs. The exhibition takes place across thirteen locations around the city of Liverpool, including The Bluecoat, Tate Liverpool, Open Eye Gallery and FACT (Foundation for Art & Creative Technology).

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Australian artist Greer Honeywill's sculptural work investigates humanity, domesticity, and the changing nature of the home. Her materials range from kitchen graters, skewers, and mop twine to timber framings and personal ephemera. The artist forces the viewer to re-evaluate these objects and investigate the political and social issues and hierarchies which unfold in every home.

Honeywill grew up in suburban Adelaide in the 1950s and her work references this personal past, with allusions to her mother who faced domestic challenges, such as an alcoholic husband. The role of the household woman and the setting of the kitchen are frequently given attention and analysis in Honeywill's work. Embroidered House, seen above, was inspired by the walk of the ghost crab, an animal scientists refer to as "nature's housewives." By drilling thousands of tiny holes in the walls and roof of the house, Honeywill pays tribute to the small tasks that become daily rituals. Their illumination creates a poetic pattern both on the structure and the surrounding walls.

The artist recently showed work at Craft Victoria in Melourne and received her PhD in Fine Art from Monash University in 2003. The artist is currently represented by Flinders Lane Gallery in Melbourne, Australia.

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Opening this weekend at Sprovieri Progetti in London will be Drive thru #1, new work by Brazilian artist Matheus Rocha Pitta. The exhibition, which is the artist's first UK show, will feature sculpture, video and photographs that investigate the concept of the word 'apprehend' as it relates to the Brazilian police. Often, the term apprehend is used to describe seized goods (mostly drugs). Once these items are confiscated, the police will create a display of the goods and call the press to have the items photographed and circulated through the media, boasting the crack-down. Pitta is interested in the meaning of this term and how it relates to global issues of possession, displacement and territory.

The exhibition was recently awarded the first Illy Sustainart and ARCO prize in Spain. Matheus Rocha Pitta was born in Minas Gerais, Brazil in 1980, and studied history at the Universidade Federal Fluminense and philosophy at the Universidade Estadual of
Rio do Janeiro.

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In A Pure Land is the title of a new exhibition on view through the 8th of November at Isis Gallery in London. The exhibition which features new sculptures by artists Nayland Blake, Martin Griffiths and Alyson Shotz, whose work is pictured above, attempts to reinsert purity and deliver viewers from the "communal unease, bad news, moral panic and government-induced fear" that is often characteristic of our time. The results are clean and sleek creations that emphasize a purity of form and material. The works are minimal in structure and contemplative by nature.

The group of artists includes Nayland Blake, who has exhibited works at the Tate, the Whitney Museum and the Contemporary Art Museum, Houston. Martin Griffiths, who is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Wales and the Cass Sculpture Foundation in England, and Alyson Shotz who has exhibited with Guggenheim, New York and the Hirshorn, Washington D.C.

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On view now at Giant Robot's GR2 gallery in Los Angeles is the exhibition Under Fluorescent Light, featuring new works by artist Masakatsu Sashie. The artist, who is from Kanazawa, Japan creates intricate paintings of hovering orbs, which contain details of his youth, densely packed in an auto-biographical manner. The work references, video games, fast food signs and vending machines, among other highly recognizable imagery.

The artist is currently a professor of art at Kanazawa College of Art, the same school from which the artist graduated. Sashie began his carreer as an artist by exhibiting in Takashi Murakami's GEISAI exhibitions in Japan. Under Fluorescent Light, will be the artist's first solo exhibition in the United States. The work will be on view at GR2 until October 15th.

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The Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Newcastle presents Yoshitomo Nara and graf's A to Z Project. Nara, who was born in Hirosaki, Japan in 1959 and presently lives and works in Tokyo, is mostly known for his deceptive, innocent and childlike images. Since 2003 he has teamed up with graf, the Japanese creative design team, to work on the A to Z project, building small 'huts', as they call them, to fit within gallery and museum spaces in Japan and abroad.

Nara and graf are interested in exploring the relationship between the lived in space and the individual. They recreate work spaces and the objects that may inspire and help their creative sensitivity. This installation includes three houses, with ramps connecting two of them, one with a dog house. Nara's paintings are strategically distributed within the spaces with a few billboards outside the houses. The third house, Castle of Baltic, was inspired by the Newcastle area and was created specifically for the Baltic exhibition. These small villages are built with recycled materials. In one of the rooms from the Big Seagull House, he has recreated his studio with a half finished painting, beer cans, the Baltic CD playlist he listened to during his time there with the CD playing in the background, among other paintings, furniture, garbage, etc.

In addition there is special surprise! You are lead by a ramp to a separate room. You imagine this will be another little house but instead you are confronted by the huge sculpture, Puff Marshie, one of Nara's characters, who represents an innocence but it is also intimidating because of its size.

It is a place to explore, where you continuously find something new. The experience of stepping into this sort of naughty children's village allows for a privileged and secret glimpse into a world that adults have forgotten, but at the same time makes it a wonderland for all, including children. The exhibition is running until the 26 October 2008.

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Dennis Oppeheim, known for his experimentation in land art and body art, is now exhibiting new work at Ace Gallery in Los Angeles. Cactus Grove features colorful, exuberant, architectural sculptures of cacti - a lighthearted but characteristic venture for an artist who has spent the last forty years adventurously challenging the way people interact with space and nature. Oppenheim has used a span of materials, including fiber glass, side walk grating, galvanized steel, doors and windows, to evoke these organic cactus forms, engaging a conversation between architecture and natural bodies.

Oppenheim, who has lived and worked in New York since the 1960s, studied art at California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland and Stanford University. At the 2007 Vancouver Sculpture Biennale, he was recognized for his life's work in sculpture, photography and performance. Recently, Oppenheim was commissioned to display public sculptures during the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Two of his works, Engagement and Raining Halos, appeared during the games, one in Hong Kong, the other in Beijing. Oppenheim's exhibition at Ace Gallery continues through December 2008.

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Exhibiting at Rena Bransten Gallery in San Francisco is German photographer, Matthias Hoch. Using architecture as his focus, Hoch creates a blurred division between the natural and the man-made. His large-scale, vibrantly colored photographs reveal contemporary city elements and cutting-edge architectural structures. Through learned manipulation, Hoch has created an organic atmosphere among these structures. The artist's choice in photographing public space questions the architectural notion of public arena - what are city planners, architects and urban designers creating for contemporary outdoor spaces?

Hoch has exhibited widely throughout Europe. He currently lives and works in Leipzig, Germany. Born in post war Germany, Hoch has been invited to show in the upcoming traveling exhibition, Art of Two Germanys/Cold War Cultures, which commences at Los Angeles' Broad Contemporary Art Museum and will continue to tour throughout Germany in 2009.

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