“In Three” Exhibition
Callicoon Fine Art
This event has ended.
Callicoon Fine Arts presents In Three, an exhibition featuring works by Athena LaTocha, Ulrike Müller and the collaborative trio, Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh and Hesam Rahmanian.
Athena LaTocha contributes three large paintings on paper, two of which incorporate lead sculptural elements. With gestural applications of ink, LaTocha creates large dynamic surfaces that envelop the viewer. LaTocha’s works expand the landscape genre, creating fluid turbulent spaces freed from the restraints of strict genre, such as the single-point perspective that dominates landscape paintings of the 19th century. On top of coppery, sepia-toned fields, LaTocha incorporates lead sheets that she shaped by pressing them onto broken asphalt sections of road and pieces of slag left over from iron foundry operations along the Hudson River. By indexing the real, the works also capture the effect of human intervention on the landscape.
The exhibition contains seven new enamel paintings by Ulrike Müller titled Sequitur. The works build on and playfully re-articulate forms that have been present in her visual vocabulary for over ten years. The limited palette of commercially available glass frit distinguishes her open-ended yet intentional shapes on the hard, reflective surface of the enamel medium. Müller incrementally extends a recurring language of color and form, suggesting a representational logic. Figurative shapes, familiar looking silhouettes and still-lifes take their place against a central vertical line, achieving what the artist has called “a lateral movement with multiplying sets of difference.”
Rokni Haerizadeh, Ramin Haerizadeh, and Hesam Rahmanian’s video, If I Had Two Paths I Would Choose the Third transforms footage of the toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein on April 9, 2003 in Baghdad into a carnival of fantastic beasts. Each frame of the video is printed and painted over to create animation over the found footage. The images are both grotesque and comical: roses grow out of the collapsing sculpture of Hussein, statues vibrate and dance with colorful paint strokes, and crowds transform into mythical creatures. Scholar Laura Marks writes of the apex of the film: “Then most terrifyingly, a shot of the American soldiers covering the statue’s face with an American flag is mirrored, and the artists turn the negative space thus created into a gaping mouth, then a vengeful horned creature—the ancient demon awaken by this disastrous invasion.”
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Athena LaTocha (b. 1969, Anchorage, Alaska) divides her time between New York City and Peekskill, NY. LaTocha received her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a Master of Fine Arts degree from Stony Brook University, New York. In 2019, she had solo exhibitions at JDJ | The Ice house, Garrison; the Plains Art Museum, Fargo; and the MacRostie Art Center, Grand Rapids, and was the artist in residence at the Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans. Her work is currently on view at the Shirley Fiterman Art Center, New York City, through February 19, 2021 and at Smack Mellon, Brooklyn, through February 21, 2021. LaTocha is the recipient of prestigious artist grants, residencies and awards, among them the Joan Mitchell Foundation in 2019 and 2016, and Wave Hill in 2018.
Ulrike Müller (b. 1971, Austria) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She studied art at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Austria, and participated in the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program, New York. A large mural titled The Conference of Animals, is on view at The Queens Museum, New York, though early 2022. Other solo exhibitions include those at The Galleries at Moore, Moore College of Art & Design, Philadelphia (2019), Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf (2018), mumok - Museum Moderner Kunst, Stiftung Ludwig Vien, Vienna (2015), Callicoon Fine Arts, New York (2014), and the Brooklyn Museum (2012). Her work has been included in many significant group exhibitions such as The Venice Biennale (2019),The Carnegie International at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburg (2018), Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon at the New Museum, New York, and The Whitney Biennial (2017). She is the editor of Work the Room. A Handbook on Performance Strategies (OE/b_books, 2006), she organized and co-edited Herstory Inventory. 100 Feminist Drawings by 100 Artists (Dancing Foxes Press, 2014), and from 2005-2008 was a co-editor of the queer feminist art journal LTTR.
Ramin Haerizadeh (b. 1975, Tehran), Rokni Haerizadeh (b. 1978, Tehran) and Hesam Rahmanian (b. 1980, Knoxville) have lived and worked together in Dubai since 2009. The collective currently has a solo exhibition at Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt. Other recent solo exhibitions include those at the Frye Art Museum, Seattle (2019); and Officine Grandi Riparazioni (OGR), Turin (2018) and the ICA Boston (2015). They have participated in group exhibitions such as the inaugural Toronto Biennial of Art (2019); exhibitions at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark (2019); and the New Museum, New York (2019).Their works are held in the collections of The Städel Museum, Frankfurt; Le Centre National des Arts Plastiques, Paris; Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA); Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark; Frye Art Museum, Seattle; Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, among others.
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Schedule
from February 17, 2021 to March 13, 2021