Zachary Leener and Anne Neukamp Exhibition
Lisa Cooley Fine Art
This event has ended.
Lisa Cooley presents a two-person exhibition of new work by Zachary Leener and Anne Neukamp.
Zachary Leener’s latest sculptural works mark a point of departure for the artist. Dressed in a prurient midnight-blue glaze, they eschew the marbled pastel veneer that once overlaid his bawdy clay forms and introduce a darker and more dominant appeal. The former chalky coating lent a jocular sense to the artist’s anthropomorphic forms, while also disabling any tension radiating from the sculptures’ swollen and merged phalluses, garishly knobby growths, and concise yet insufficient castrations. With these new iterations, however, Leener calls a spade a spade, and fortunately not at the expense of any latent ribald humor.
Not only has Leener excised the pastels, he has increased the scale of the works and further amplified their psychological power by adding electrical elements, which appear here as paltry neon appendages. Diminutive 4-watt night-lights translate to bright pink nipples, while lurid yellow electrical cords spill from the rear like disemboweled intestines. Abundant cording and multiple sockets only bolster allusions to the mechanized body, and to electricity as life force.
These new sculptures fully embrace corporeality and its quietus aspects without constraint. Their vernacular dysmorphic physicality addresses the new horizons for humans, and human bodies, in the 21st century. Furthermore, the surreal and character-driven narrative exhibited in his etchings reveals a world populated by disaffected humanoids rendered either pathetically swollen or reduced, prostrating or inane. These drawings provide a perfect context for his sculptural forms to exist in, and this is made subtly clearer in the rounded edges of the frames, which intimate their aberrant three-dimensional foils.
Anne Neukamp’s paintings, peculiar in their familiarity, distort and undermine our preconceptions of a painter’s formal vocabulary. Much like Leener’s work, there is a layered psychological resonance that emerges unconsciously as we attempt to process and locate motifs and elements drawn from the desires of everyday life: décor, consumer imagery, and cartoon characters all pull us nearer in comprehension, though these aspects are often obscured beyond recognition, challenging our predetermined set of expectations.
The backgrounds of the paintings consist of matte, washed-out silver and neutral tones, as if one is staring at the surface of a sheet of industrial metal. On top of these backgrounds are images, drained of most color, painted in two distinct styles. One is a flat, screen-print-esque style in black and gray. The other is a kind of “digital realism,” reminiscent of logos and virtual images, rendered with a gleaming, animation-like sensitivity to light and reflection or, contrastingly, a pixelated, digital blockiness.
The flat, monochromatic images of phones, rope, blades, and/or metal shapes carry smudges and smears, as though they were industrial graphics banged-up in transport. In pristine clear space, the more digital-seeming images float in, around, and under the black-and-gray graphic objects, their fuzzy, low resolution captured as if from a screen. The paintings collapse multiple senses of space into one visual surface. The compression suggests a flow of images, logos and icons in transit, unfixed and variable in our comprehension, and the result is a cheeky one. These works assert themselves in our consciousness, but their messages are interrupted, slippery and idiosyncratic, defiant in acquiescing to the presumptions often ascribed to paintings.
Zachary Leener was born in 1981 in Los Angeles, California, where he currently lives and works. He holds an MFA from the University of California, Riverside, and a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art. He had a solo exhibition at Tif Sigfrids in Los Angeles in 2014. He has been included in group exhibitions at Rachel Uffner Gallery, New York (2015); Wallspace, New York (2015); the Berkeley Art Museum and Public Film Archive, Berkeley, California (2014); Young Art, Los Angeles (2012); Klaus von Nichtssagend, New York (2012); and Salon 94, New York (2012).
Anne Neukamp was born in 1976 in Düsseldorf, Germany, and currently lives and works in Berlin. She holds an MFA and BFA from the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts, Dresden, Germany. Recent solo exhibitions include Faux Amis, Galerija Gregor Podnar, Berlin (2015); Galerie Greta Meert, Brussels, Belgium (2014); tl;dr, Valentin, Paris, France (2014); and Circuit, Kunstverein Oldenburg, Germany (2013). She has participated in select group exhibitions at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York (2014); the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2013 and 2011); and the Kunstverein Heidelberg, Germany (2011).
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Schedule
from September 12, 2015 to October 18, 2015
Closing Reception on 2015-10-18 from 18:00 to 20:00