Mike Lash and Leonardo Nierman Exhibition
Lyons Wier Gallery
This event has ended.
Mike Lash's new work is a marked departure from his well-known figurative work. While he maintains his wry sense of humor without losing the base banality he has become known for, Lash's new work is less focused on image and concentrates on ideas or "stuff".
Whilst his works still may have renderings of things one may recognize, Lash moves towards a more abstract, if not conceptual, picture plane. Many of the pieces are in fact simply text-based works.
The artist pushes the viewer to expect the unexpected, taking the viewer between the boundaries of hard science and the inner angst of the individual. His paintings maintain a ready-made feel as well as the immediate gesture of his rendering style.
Lash flatly proposes in his artist statement: "I make stuff, mostly paintings and drawings. The stuff I make kind of documents things I'm personally interested in and think about. Sometimes people like them. I hope you like them."
In this newest body of work, Nierman hearkens back to his Mexican predecessors, as well as to the modern lessons of cubism and abstraction, combining Western artistic revolutions. His hyper-real paintings of crumbled paper employ many old tropes yet read surprising fresh as the mind wanders from the sheer technical deftness of hand to the conceptual recognition of subliminal images or words, real or imagined, within these densely rendered compositions.
Nierman's flame sculptures echo the elements of infinity, straight and curved lines, and reflected light that rise toward the sky. "A candle is constantly creating sculptures," says Nierman. "The form of the flame is always perfect, [it] represents hope, light out of darkness, a form of happiness". His sculptures combine the forces of nature and intellect, referencing contrasting aspects of the physical world released as turbulent energy and then frozen into intricate structures whose forms are a visible expression of physicality.
Media
Schedule
from January 08, 2010 to February 05, 2010
Opening Reception on 2010-01-08 from 18:00 to 20:00