At six o’clock on Saturday evening in SoHo, Kathy Grayson and Meghan Coleman made public their intent to fill the hole that Jeffrey Deitch‘s trans-continental career move created in the world of New York art, which is no small undertaking. The two former directors of Deitch Projects opened a much anticipated new space at 104 Greene Street, aptly titled The Hole. The inaugural exhibition, Not Quite Open for Business, was directed by Taylor McKimens and showcases unfinished works by over twenty artists, including Nate Lowman and Rosson Crow.

When their originally planned exhibition fell through mere weeks before the scheduled opening, Grayson and Coleman decided to make the best of what others might deem an impossible situation. They solicited their artists to “Give us an incomplete piece…Give us a drawing that you just cant bring yourself to finish from your flat files. Put half your makeup on and give us most of a performance!” In a press release littered with intentional “typoos,” Grayson and Coleman clarify that this is not about the process of the artist, or the deliberate incompletion of work, but about “being caught with your pants down and your lipstick smudged and your armpits sweaty because you didn’t have time to take a shower before YOUR FIRST GALLERY SHOW.” A personal and self-deprecating tone replaced the more traditional formality of this document. The opening was a straightforward and unpretentious debut for Grayson and Coleman, making up in energy what it lacked in polish.

The unfinished theme pervades, and the space resembles a construction site overtaken by creatives. Painted scrap lumber, an industrial ladder, bare studs and unfinished sheetrock share the space with art. Works on paper are mounted with thumbtacks. A half painted logo contributes to the the display’s impromptu, work-in-progress quality, disarming the viewer and generating unlimited interest in future progress.

Not Quite Open for Business will remain on view until August 14th. As mentioned in a Wall Street Journal article written by Erica Orden, upcoming exhibitions include a solo show by Mat Brinkman and an installation by Kenny Scharf and the collective Dearraindrop. Other projects in the plans for The Hole include a book store in the back room of the gallery, Holey Books, and a dating service for artists, purportedly titled Hole Lotta Love. We’ll keep you posted.

While it may seem that every press release these days somehow equates the art on view with the Obama era, things really are better now that big dummy Bush is out of office and you can feel it in Jules de Balincourt’s current show, Premonitions, at Deitch Projects.  I’m not saying this show screams, “Yes, We Can,” but with the oppressive anxiety of the Bush era gone, de Balincourt seems to be turning inward, and with some impressive results.

His work has always been catchy, but the best paintings in Premonitions contain a sense of complexity and mystery that exceeds previous efforts. Floating Through It, Enlightened Burn Out Tree, and A Few Good Men, each reference rites of passage, a communion with nature, and the intangible things one learns through traveling.  Whereas earlier paintings relied on eye-catching but flat-footed elements like laser beams zipping through the composition or text that spelled out activist slogans such as “Think globally, act locally,” these paintings refreshingly allow the viewer to pursue their own way through the work.

More painterly than Inka Essenhigh, yet not nearly as gloppy as Hernan Bas, de Balincourt strikes a balance between unfussy and thorough. Up close, we get just the amount of information we need to believe in the image.  Although some of the folk/naïve sensibility that made his earlier work almost cloyingly accessible is still present in these paintings, it is not so much as to distract from the message. In other words, substance finally trumps style in de Balincourt’s newest works.

But before I go overboard praising this show, the truth is that it’s pretty uneven. Power Flower, given prominence on the main wall of the gallery, is a real clunker. The debt to Chris Johanson weighs heavily here; use of converging lines to symbolize the infinite is better left to Mark Grotjhan, not to mention Jay Defeo. Hawkes and Doves, with its swishy mysticism, looks like it could be a sign for those depressing 24-hour psychics that no one goes to. Dismounted pictures two Native Americans sitting beside a pathetically rendered patchwork horse. If one of them were crying the famed single tear from the 70s ad campaign, the painting’s schlocky, moralizing narrative would be complete.  That said, the gains made here by de Balincourt override any missteps, and there are plenty of winning moments on view.

A “closeout sale”-style hanging has become the norm at Deitch Projects now that the gallery is in fact closing in June. Call me a classicist, but I think de Balincourt’s work would have benefited from a pared down installation. I’d also like to see the artist find a dealer that affords him continued growth now that the art market has leveled and the political situation has calmed a bit. And one last thing: it would be great if Deitch’s next and final show, May Day by Shepard Fairey, contained nothing more than a forty-foot version of one of the artist’s signature Andre the Giant images. But I’m not holding my breath.

Os Gemeos, which translates to “the twins” in Portuguese, are identical twin brothers from Sao Paulo, Brazil, who began break dancing at an early age and later moved on to the visual arts. Otavio and Gustavo Pandolfo transformed Brazilian street art and have since exhibited at museums all over the world including their first solo exhibition at The Luggage Store in San Francisco in 2003. Their influences include hip hop culture, American street movies, and Sao Paulo protest art. Their subject matter ranges from family portraits to commentary on Sao Paulo’s political and social affairs as well as Brazilian folklore.

On June 28th, the brothers opened Too Far Too Close at Deitch Projects in New York. For the exhibition, they will be transforming the gallery space into a fantastical cityscape, complete with passages, houses, and doors. Their signature imagery includes characters, background, and letters, and can range from graffiti tags to complicated murals. This exhibition will include new paintings, sculpture and installations that build upon a group of work created for the Museum Het Domein in the Netherlands. Os Gemeos have been reviewed by the New York Times in 2006 which referred to their style as “sort of Dr. Seuss on acid.” Their work has an appealing and universal quality that has drawn the attention of fans including cult figure Barry McGee and Nike C.E.O. Mark Parker.

Too Far Too Close will remain at Deitch Projects until August 9, 2008.

L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast
A weekly column by Catherine Wagley

Jeffrey Deitch was officially named MOCA’s director early on Monday; by the afternoon of the same day, the web homes of leading papers, art mags, and blogs were Deitch-driven blurs of cultural commentary. MOCA held a press conference  on Tuesday (I was there, along with a painfully small handful of others), at which  philanthropist Eli Broad, who bailed MOCA out of destitution last year, gave a speech unnervingly similar to the one he gave at the opening of LACMA’s Broad Contemporary two years ago. He again celebrated L.A. as the emerging art capitol of the world, only this time, MOCA, not LACMA, helmed L.A.’s rise.

Deitch spoke last, with a voice that wavered slightly and eyes that almost looked watery. He said he “was happy to lead” and not, as video artist Diana Thater duly pointed out, “happy to join” MOCA, its curators and its artists. He corroborated Broad, saying he would “continue to build MOCA so that, over the next decade, it is indisputably the leading contemporary art museum in the world”— it’s the sort of  thinly veiled domination rhetoric that seems more unsettling coming from art executives than from world leaders.

Keith Haring, "The Ten Commandments," Deitch Projects, 2008

Bravado aside, the list of what Deitch, who’s championed many of the same artists DailyServing has featured over the years, could bring to MOCA probably outstrips his conflicts of interest: business savvy, fundraising experience, a staggering reserve of energy, contacts galore, a likable persona, familiarity with a wide range of cultural outlets (he interviewed actress Chloe Sevigny for Paper Magazine the same year he entered the Smithsonian’s Oral History Archive). Still, it’s hard to say how venture will play out in reality.

Roaming around before Tuesday’s press conference, I ran into an old timer from L.A.’s Arts District, a man who’d arrived on the scene long before MOCA opened its doors in 1979. Downtown has changed, he said. It’s been evacuated in favor of the city’s Westside, but there are young people, young partiers, who are setting up camp down here, and they’re the crowd Deitch could reach. Then, almost with the same breath he’d used to tell me of the young downtowners, the man switched gears, talking about attending Pharmaka’s exhibition of Warhol prints last year, and seeing all the young “Snoop Doggs” at the opening. After seeing these kids, and hearing the owner of the prints carelessly discuss their value, he was, of course, unsurprised when the high-priced prints went missing a few months later.

I felt I’d been handed the perfect argument for why Deitch matters—Deitch may be flashy and financially vested in a few too many ways, but he certainly knows how to disrupt stereotypes about visual culture (this is the man who championed surf/hip-hop/punk energy of the 90s, and made minimal distinction between imagery from People Magazine and actual artwork in the catalogue for his Posthuman exhibition). I don’t see him blindly equating young people who [purportedly] listen to Snoop Dogg and look at Warhols with theft.

“Los Angeles has a remarkable, young audience who responds to art in a fresh way and wants to get involved,” Deitch said on Tuesday. “Young audience” doesn’t mean the 20-somethings graduating from BFA and MFA programs in SoCal (that demographic will attend MOCA with or without Deitch); it means a graffiti-savvy demographic with street cred.  If he can make that audience MOCA’s audience, he’ll have accomplished something memorable.

The artist received her BFA from Rhode Island School of Art and Design in 1997 and was recently featured in Mail Order Monsters, a traveling exhibition that appeared at Deitch Projects in the summer of 2009.

Deitch Projects in New York City is currently showing Tauba Auerbach‘s Here and Now/And Nowhere, an exhibition which explores the collision of two conflicting states. The title (purposely composed as an anagram) reflects the artist’s fascination with the origins of language, both verbal language and the symbols used in written language. The multimedia show includes paintings, photographic works, sculpture, and a musical instrument, all investigating the space between order and randomness.

The exhibition showcases five bodies of work: Crumple Paintings, Static Photographs, Fold Paintings, a sculpture that is situated half inside and half outside of the gallery, and the central work of the show, the Auerglass. The Crumple Paintings require the viewer to stand far away from the work to perceive the illusion of crumples, created by large Ben Day dots. The Fold Paintings, painted on raw canvas with an industrial paint sprayer, are a series of incrementally sized fold paintings, which represent the conversion of a previous three-dimensional state to two-dimensionality.

The Auerglass, designed by the artist and her friend Cameron Mesirow of the band Glasser, is a two-person wooden pump organ. The instrument requires two people to play, as one must pump in order for the other to play and vice versa. The Auerglass was played at the opening on September 3rd, and will be played as a prelude to a Glasser performance at 8pm on September 11th. During the exhibition, it will be played daily at 5pm from Tuesday through Saturday.

Auerbach was born in San Francisco and received her B.A. in Visual Arts from Stanford University in 2003. She has had solo exhibitions at the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts and Jack Hanley Gallery in San Francisco, and was included in the New Museum‘s Younger than Jesus this year in New York. She published Tauba Auerbach-How to Spell the Alphabet with Deitch Projects in 2006.

Here and Now/And Nowhere will remain at Deitch Projects at 18 Wooster Street until October 17th.

At the site of the infamous 1982 Keith Haring mural located at the corner of Houston Street and Bowery, is the second installment of an ongoing mural program organized by Deitch Projects and Goldman Properties. On view from this July through March 31, 2010, is a large mural by Brazilian-born identical twin brothers Gustavo and Otavio Pandolfo, otherwise known as Os Gemeos. The massive wall painting contains many of the characters popularized by the artists’ work. Common everyday scenes from the artists’ lives are mixes with explosive abstract patterns and vivid psychedelic colors. About the work, the artists’ have stated “we only report scenes from a magic, love and real place that live inside us, a real dream, the scene of our own universe.”

Os Gemeos have been featured in countless publications, and have been including in a wide range of international solo and group exhibitions. They are represented by Deitch Projects in NYC and Galeria Fortes Vilaca in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

Courtesy of Roberts & Tilton, Culver City, CA

With The World Stage, Wiley moves away from using models sourced from the streets of Brooklyn and Los Angeles to pose for his majestic paintings, which emulate the portraiture of Western European noblemen and kings. Instead, he has embarked on a select world tour in this body of work, wherein he chooses models native to the country that he is working in, expanding his ideas beyond the basis of traditional European portraiture to create a more global dialog. He now refers to the artistic and historical traditions specific to those cultures which continue to be marginalized or ignored by the art world. Bringing these developing countries into the forefront of the discussion, Wiley begins a dialog about identity and power that isn’t dominated for once by the ideas of the West.

Courtesy of Roberts & Tilton, Culver City, CA

The previous installments of the World Stage were China and Africa, Lagos-Dakar. For the Brazil series, Wiley continued his pattern of working in which he sought out a very specific type of model to be photographed. He was very clear that he was looking for young men from their teens to early thirties, who come from poor neighborhoods and who carry certain physical traits similar to the art works he is attempting to emulate. Wiley even mentioned in his lecture at the Getty that when word began to leak about what type of models he was looking for on the streets of Rio, hoards of young men showed up doing their best impressions of what they heard he was interested in.

Courtesy of Roberts & Tilton, Culver City, CA

The larger than life canvases in ornate wooden frames on display at Roberts & Tilton introduce confident, yet accessible young men posed amidst fluorescent backdrops of explosive pattern. The young men from the “favelas” of the so-called Marvelous City, in their contemporary Brazilian style, appear at once completely unrelated to their staged circumstances — the old-world postures, the props that they hold, and the floral backdrops that intertwine with their bodies — and at the same time seem to embrace the roles that their director has asked them to undertake.

Courtesy of Roberts & Tilton, Culver City, CA

In Rio de Janeiro, Wiley’s inspirations did not rest in old master paintings hanging on the walls of powerful institutions, but allowed the work to be impacted by the iconic nationalistic sculptures found around the city, which he might argue are the cultural equivalent to the David or Velasquez paintings referenced in his earlier work. The earnest looks in the painted mens’ eyes seem to be pleading with us to accept them and the orchestrated scenes into which they are set. The sheer size of the paintings and the nearly unmatched skill in rendering human elements, down to the soft skin and muscular arms, command the viewer to linger in front of the colossal works much longer than the pieces might merit if executed in a smaller scale. The backgrounds, which are inspired by ethnic tapestries discovered by the artist, hypnotize the viewer as their eyes attempt to make sense of it all.

Courtesy of Roberts & Tilton, Culver City, CA

In discussing his oeuvre, Wiley admits to having a great affection for, interest in, and knowledge of the scope of Western painting from which he draws inspiration for his modern day recreations. So it has become clear to the viewer over the past few years that his attitude isn’t necessarily one of criticism of these works which have undoubtedly dominated the canon of art history for centuries. Rather, by bringing the element of the young, modern black man into the picture, he is creating a conversation about power, which is much more interesting and effective than satire in this dialog. However, since his completion of the MFA at Yale and his residency at the Studio Museum Harlem more than half a decade ago, Wiley has been, essentially, exhibiting the same work — albeit cleverly and progressively investigating the broader themes of art history, power, war or the fallen with each new series. While most of his audience remains basically enraptured by the work — because of its size, because of its photo realist qualities, because of its social implications, because of the way it relates to modernity overtly or through undertones, or because of its bright colors and patterns — one wonders if it is still challenging us in the way it had when the first series was shown.

Courtesy of Roberts & Tilton, Culver City, CA

The World Stage is moving beyond the comfort zone of the Western context of power, and into a world still largely unexplored by American artists, and through this, Wiley has added another dimension to the discourse. The conversation now reaches beyond the obvious juxtapositions of social prestige and into ideas about the American fetishization of the exotic and especially the less-than, as he discussed at his lecture at the Getty. It’s one thing to paint images of “the other”, and it’s another to paint scenes that refer to art history, but when the two are combined, the viewer is forced to contemplate each piece on several levels. It begins to be more difficult to deduce from each painting the same one-liner about contemporary culture versus historical ideals of power and pomp. Introducing the Brazilian men and the many contexts from which they come, into the pieces, American viewers now find ourselves in the uncomfortable position of being faced with something we may not fully understand, and that means the work is asking us to spend more time with it, thinking, talking, and even struggling with our own preconceived notions.

Courtesy of Roberts & Tilton, Culver City, CA

The World Stage: Brazil is on view at Roberts & Tilton through May 30, 2009 and is accompanied by a 64-page hardcover book of the exhibition.

Kehinde Wiley is based in Brooklyn, New York. He received his MFA from the Yale University School of Art and his BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. His work is in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, The Columbus Museum of Art, The Denver Art Museum, The UCLA Hammer Museum and The Studio Museum in Harlem, among others. He has shown in solo exhibitions internationally, including at sorrywereclosed, Brussels, Belgium; John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Milwaukee; Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago and Roberts & Tilton, Los Angeles. His work has been discussed in Art in America, Newsweek, Artforum, ARTslant, The New Yorker, Art Papers, on NPR and many others.

Courtesy of Roberts & Tilton, Culver City, CA

On view at the Deitch Projects Wooster Street Gallery is The History of the Heart in Three Rainbows, a new series of large-scale watercolor paintings by Francesco Clemente . For this series, Clemente has literally wrapped the gallery with his new water colors, creating an immersive environment for contemplation. The artist has also continues his use of capturing spiritual experiences through art. As the title suggests, the rainbows are a metaphor for a bridge, connecting the body to more religious or spiritual ideas.

The Italian born artist’s work has been the subject of numerous exhibitions and retrospectives. The artist has completed major exhibitions at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Royal Academy of the Arts and the Pompidou among many others.

Opening tonight at Deitch Projects‘ 76 Grand Street, New York City space is Pictures of Women, new works by Matt Greene. In his second solo exhibition with the gallery, Greene will present, as the title suggests, representational images of women. The large scale works blend formal concerns such as surface, color and abstracted space, with what the press release states as, “…investigations into the connections between sexual fetish of the female figure, and forms of nature.”

Physically, the works begin as paper collage. The artist then builds the surface through paint and subsequent layers of collage, which are peeled back to reveal earlier incarnations of the work.

The artist has been included in countless international and museum-based exhibitions. Recently, his works were included in Mannerfantasien 2 at COMA in Berlin, Eden’s Edge at the UCLA Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, Fractured Figure at the Deste Foundation in Athens, and Dream Trauma at Kunstalle Vienna.

Vanessa Beecroft‘s newest performance, VB64, took place at Deitch Projects on March 6th, the second day of the New York Armory Show. Once again, the controversial Beecroft and the equally, though differently, controversial Kanye West joined forces (the two staged a collaborative listening event for the debut of 808s & Heartbreak, at which West’s music plays and Beecroft’s models pose). Their previous collaborations have been highlighted in a fall issue of The Fader magazine. VB64 interwove live models and gesso sculptures, an amalgam of equally passive living and lifeless forms. The white body paint on the models matched the gesso on the cast sculptures, and both animate and inanimate bodies boasted the slim, fashioned figures for which Beecroft’s performers have become notorious.

Artforum’s investigative critic Rhonda Lieberman described the event in terms that are as eerie as they are clinical. “Effectively aestheticized, abstracted by the gessolike spackle, the women were literally ornamental figures,” she writes, “their breath unobtrusive, their movements very, very slow.” West, who is producing the film of VB64, reportedly flew in from Paris just to appear at the performance, his presence further clouding Beecroft’s weird half-mainstream, half-elusive mystique. Though the performance has ended, the sculptures (including wax and gesso figures not made for the performance) will be on view at Deitch through April 12th. A video of VB64 will also be projected in the gallery space throughout the exhibition.

Currently on view at the Deitch Project’s Long Island City warehouse gallery is a massive new installation by artist Swoon. As a printmaker, sculptor and installation artist, Swoon’s exhibition Swimming Cities of Switchback Sea, features countless objects and images that reference urban decay and the darker, albeit romantic, side of city life. However, the installation is only a one part of the exhibition. Swoon, directing a crew of over seventy-five collaborators, also created seven full size boating vessels which set sail on down the Hudson River on August 15th and landed on Deitch Projects via the East River for the first time on Sunday September 7th. A crowd of hundreds welcomed the ships, and the combined crew of 40, as the band Dark, Dark, Dark played in the middle of the excited crowd.

Swoon began her artistic career as we know it today producing works on the streets of New York City. Since, the artist has exhibited internationally and collaborated with groups Glowlab, Black Label and the Barnstormers. Her work has been featured at PS1and in several exhibition with Deitch Projects.

Os Gemeos, which translates to “the twins” in Portuguese, are identical twin brothers from Sao Paulo, Brazil, who began break dancing at an early age and later moved on to the visual arts. Otavio and Gustavo Pandolfo transformed Brazilian street art and have since exhibited at museums all over the world including their first solo exhibition at The Luggage Store in San Francisco in 2003. Their influences include hip hop culture, American street movies, and Sao Paulo protest art. Their subject matter ranges from family portraits to commentary on Sao Paulo’s political and social affairs as well as Brazilian folklore.

On June 28th, the brothers opened Too Far Too Close at Deitch Projects in New York. For the exhibition, they will be transforming the gallery space into a fantastical cityscape, complete with passages, houses, and doors. Their signature imagery includes characters, background, and letters, and can range from graffiti tags to complicated murals. This exhibition will include new paintings, sculpture and installations that build upon a group of work created for the Museum Het Domein in the Netherlands. Os Gemeos have been reviewed by the New York Times in 2006 which referred to their style as “sort of Dr. Seuss on acid.” Their work has an appealing and universal quality that has drawn the attention of fans including cult figure Barry McGee and Nike C.E.O. Mark Parker.

Too Far Too Close will remain at Deitch Projects until August 9, 2008.

The artist duo “Os Gemeos” are identical twin brothers from Sao Paulo, Brazil. Os Gemeos gained international notoriety from their ambitious campaign of visual characters in the city of Sao Paulo. Some of these characters are painted six stories high or more. In 1993, while only 19 years old, Otavio and Gustavo Pandolfo (Os Gemeos) met with young American graffiti writer Barry McGee. The three artists collaborated on several projects and influenced each other immensely. Os Gemeos is now being featured in art and graffiti magazines worldwide, but the magazine 12oz Profit was the first to expose their work to the United States and abroad. In 2006, the artists exhibited “The fish that ate shooting stars” at Galeria Fortes Vilaca in Sao Paulo, Brazil. The year prior, the Os Gemeos exhibited “Cavaleriro Marginal” with the Deitch Projects in NYC and collaborated with Creative Time to present a mural on Coney Island.