BE THEREWinter Kunstkammer Part IIPresented by Walter Randel Gallery February 10, 2010- March 27, 2010Arlan Huang, Bruna Stude, Charles Birnbaum, Ernest Kafka, Josef Levi, Mark Sengbusch, Ted Kurahara, with Works of Art from Antiquity through Today
The seven contemporary artists in the exhibition are as diverse as the works of art from the past with which they exhibit their oeuvres— along side works of art spanning a timeline of four millennia and from all over the world: art from European, Asian, African, Oceanic, and New World cultures are represented. Variety and choices for the collector abound. We hope that this exhibition can demonstrate that examining sculpture, painting, ceramics and decorative arts from the history of art along with art made by living artist can make looking and collecting contemporary art a wonderful, exciting process and inform the viewer's opinions and tastes with an immediacy that is not usually available in institutional settings. Arlan Huang, painter and glass artist, was born in Bangor, Maine, in 1948 and grew up in San Francisco’s Chinatown. He graduated from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. The paintings he presents in this show are his latest works dating from 2009. His awards include a grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and recognition from the Department of Cultural Affairs of New York City. Huang’s current project is an ambitious commission at the Laguna Honda Hospital, in California, where thirty blown glass rondels laminated on ten frosted mirror glass panels with four large windows with blown glass forms inside glass blocks will be installed in early March. Ernest Kafka, a New York photographer, is an enthusiastic collector of art from ancient and medieval times to the present. His photographs of a recent voyage to Jordan and Egypt appropriately record how modern-day people live today surrounded by vestiges of the past among the ruins of some of the oldest cradles of civilization. The images both record the flow of time and put the viewer in the places and epochs in history when some of the works in the exhibition were created or derived their inspiration. Bruna Stude is a photographer who first studied law in Split, Croatia. After years of working as a journalist and radio reporter, she left Croatia in 1987 to pursue a life as a crewmember at sea, where she became a photographer of the ocean and its forms; she has circumnavigated the globe several times. Since 2002, she has made her home on the island of Kauai, recording the sea’s changes and the things that live in it. Stude’s work was recently included in two museum collections at which she exhibited: "20 Going On 21: Honoring the Past, Celebrating the Present, Looking to the Future" at The Contemporary Museum Honolulu and "Artists of Hawaii 2009" at The Honolulu Academy of Arts juried by Laura Hoptman, the Kraus Family Senior Curator of the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, NY. Charles Birnbaum, an artist for over 25 years, studied clay sculpture at the Kansas City Art Institute with Ken Ferguson, the noted teacher of ceramics. He then did his graduate work at the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia. His hand-sculpted porcelain art is subtle and precise, conflating intricate organic imagery. He received a prestigous Honorable Mention in the 2008 International Ceramics Festival in Mino, Japan. Josef Levi, who currently lives and works in Italy, studied at the University of Connecticut and Columbia University. In 1965 he had his first show in New York City. His work can be found in the Museum of Modern Art, the Albright Knox Gallery, the Aldrich Museum, and the Corcoran Gallery. Corporate collectors of his art include the Bank of New York and Exxon. Originally a painter, Levi has since 2002 been altering his “still lives” of known faces from paintings of women by old and modern masters as well as commissioned portraits on the computer, so that there is a greater bias toward abstraction. Mark Sengbusch was born in Ravenna, Ohio, in 1979. He received his MFA from the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan. He currently lives and works in Brooklyn. The imagery in his paintings, influenced by Sengbusch’s experiences with a loom and computer games, can be described as “future artifacts”—compositions in which a rich tapestry of weaving and functional computer data are merged. Ted Kurahara was born in Seattle, Washington, and moved to New York after graduate work done in Peoria, Illinois. An abstract painter of unusual subtlety, Kurahara has worked for many years in downtown New York. He has received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts; and has exhibited worldwide, in France, Italy, Sweden, and Switzerland. His Fall 2009 solo exhibition met with great critical acclaim and a review of the show by Jonathan Goodman is available on-line on artcritical.com For more information contact: Yoo-Jong Kim or Walter Randel
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