| Ian Ingram:Divining and Kukuli Velarde:PatrimonioMarch 4, 2010- April 17, 2010Reception: March 4, 5:30 pm - 8:00 pm
Ian Ingram: Divining
"We know that life delivers constant changes both welcome and unwelcome; gray days of melancholy, moments of shining sunlit ecstasy, wrenching psychological storms from loss and tragedy. This is everyman’s lot. To watch it play out over many years on the topography of one face remains a revealing journey." –
Garth Clark, art critic, writer, art dealer
Barry Friedman Ltd. is pleased to present the New York debut of contemporary artist Ian Ingram featuring his newest body of self-portraits. Ingram has spent the past 2 ½ years working on this highly anticipated series of large-scale drawings. The exhibition, Divining, will be accompanied by a full-color catalogue with a feature essay by Garth Clark, published by Barry Friedman Ltd.
Ian Ingram’s work is often about moments of transition, points in life when change occurs. His self-portraits are autobiographical reflections of meaningful events, such as his wedding, or the birth of his child. Ingram describes these emotional moments as “times when a decision or an action changes your entire worldview. The image is of leaving one world and pushing through to another.” His hyper-realistic and intensely emotional self-portraits arrest the viewer with a direct gaze that at times seems almost uncomfortably intimate. Art critic Kristin Barendsen states, “Viewing these intense self-portraits isn’t like looking at another person-its like being another person looking in the mirror, searching for meaning inside your own brilliant eyes.” Drawings are often considered the most direct connection between an artist and his ideas, and Ingram’s self-portraits are no exception. Beyond serving as a vehicle to relay his feelings to the outside world, Ingram’s drawings become unflinching windows into his subconscious, and serve as a tool for his own self-reflection and rumination.
Ian Ingram’s tightly rendered canvases are realistic yet dreamlike, and demonstrate a range of techniques. From dramatic contrasts of light, dark, and line, to organic methods of cross contours, grids, and blending, each method plays a role in building the subtleties, nuances, and porous surfaces of the human face. Working with a base of charcoal, pastel, ink, and watercolor, Ingram also incorporates more unconventional materials, such as beads, beeswax, metallic thread, silver leaf, string, and even butterfly wings. The embrace of these organic patterns and mediums has become a critical component to Ingram’s creative process and has increased the aesthetic complexity of his finished works.
Garth Clark explains, “Take each drawing, remove everything extraneous and focus on the face unadorned. Do this again and again and it becomes clear…what makes [Ingram] so unique in an otherwise crowded genre. He is a mapmaker of his face with a particular specialization, topography. Topography is the precise recording of rising and falling contours that illustrate the three-dimensional matrix of a particular region or landmass. And this is what Ingram does to his face. [Ingram has taken] a handsome face and converted it into startlingly rugged terrain; huge pores, a hillock of a nose, stubble that looks like steel cable, and fissured lips that could pass for an arroyo.”
Ingram’s work is included in numerous private collections, as well as the permanent collection of the De Young Museum in San Francisco, CA, and the Arnot Art Museum, Elmira, NY. Ingram was born in 1974 in Atlanta, Georgia. He is a graduate of the University of Georgia, and currently lives and works in Austin, Texas.
For visuals or more information, please contact Osvaldo Da Silva or Karen Gilbert at 212-239-8600.
Kukuli Velarde: Patrimonio
Barry Friedman Ltd. is pleased to present contemporary Peruvian artist Kukuli Velarde in her first solo show since joining the gallery. Recently awarded the prestigious USA Knight Fellowship by the Knight Foundation and the United States Artists organization, Velarde will exhibit an installation of ceramic sculptures from her Plunder Me Baby series, figurative paintings on aluminum from her Cadavers series, and a video/drawing performance, Apple of his Eye, that will take place during the first two weeks of the exhibition.
Inspired by pre-Columbian terracotta figures, Velarde's Plunder Me Baby sculptures reveal folk tradition, evoke histories of ornament and craft, and disrupt normal aesthetic hierarchies. Removed from their natural environment and installed as if in an anthropological museum, these figurative characters appear as though awakened for the first time. Each figure exhibits strong reactions to their new surroundings including fear, disdain, and aggressive anger. With pejorative slurs as titles, such as Chola Puteadora, Grabby!! Needs to Be Put in Her Place, or Méndiga Perra Autoctona, Bites. Will Not Trust. Likes Tough Love, Velarde imbues these “plundered” artifacts with references to the struggles of indigenous populations as a result of European colonization. Velarde re-casts these appropriated figures as self-portraits as a means of defiantly reclaiming their ownership while giving them new meaning and context.
Velarde’s Cadavers paintings examine popular culture from the context of a Latin American origin. Taking images from colonial Peruvian painting and contemporary culture, she infuses them with references to gender roles, flaunted sexuality, religious and political colonization, and Latin America’s expectations of women in society. Often based on self-portraiture as well, the results are intimate and personal. Velarde takes clear cues from art history and the influences of the renowned Cusquenian Baroque School. Parallels can also be drawn to the aesthetics of such culturally aware painters as Diego Velázquez and Frida Khalo. By alluding to indigenous myths through mass media, popular art, and modern religious references, she notes the many guises and archetypes that humans must endure in modern society.
Apple of his Eye, the third component of Velarde’s exhibition, is comprised of both a video and a performance piece. The video, depicting her late father speaking about his hopes and dreams for his daughter, examines the strong paternal relationship that led Velarde to become an artist. In the performance piece, Velarde will draw directly onto a gallery wall daily for two weeks, summoning the 3-year old doodler who first caught her father’s eye. She states, “overt communication makes us vulnerable yet it may strengthen interaction and deepen bonds. I do not mind becoming ‘vulnerable’ if in the process common grounds are established and a relationship is created with the viewer.” At the close of the exhibition, the drawings on the wall will be painted over and, as Velarde describes it, “returned to memory.”
In a 2008 review for Art in America, Senior Editor Janet Koplos describes Kukuli Velarde's work as "wickedly funny" scoring "feminist and cross-cultural points." She concludes," This work should have been in one of the feminist shows. Velarde is a marvel!"
Kukuli Velarde’s work is included in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Racine Art Museum, Wisconsin, and the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, WI. She has received numerous awards, including a PEW Fellowship for the Visual Arts, Evelyn Shapiro Foundation Fellowship, Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant and Sculpture Award, Bronx Council of the Arts Fellowship, and recognition for Freedom of Expression by The Andy Warhol Foundation, The Rockefeller Foundation, and The Merce Cunningham Foundation.
Kukuli Velarde was born in Cusco, Peru in 1962. She has a Bachelors of Fine Arts from Hunter College and currently lives and works in Philadelphia, PA.
For visuals or more information, please contact Osvaldo Da Silva or Karen Gilbert at 212-239-8600.
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