Human Nature. Curated by Richard Heller Gallery
15/Sep/2011 - 12/Nov/2011
Corey Arnold
Jacob Magraw-Mickelson
Sumpter & Magraw-Mickelson
Brendan Monroe
Victoria Reynolds
Charlie Roberts
Devin Troy Strother
Rachell Sumpter
Coinciding with APERTURA 2011, an event organized by Madrid Galleries Association Arte Madrid to celebrate the new season beginning, Espacio Mínimo gallery opens its 2011-2012 season with a project curated by Los Angeles gallery Richard Heller Gallery. Titled Human Nature, the show groups together 8 artists’ works coming from the mentioned north American gallery –seven plus a group formed by two of the participants- in which, from different perspectives and employing a diverse range of techniques and languages, they speak about human condition.
Corey Arnold (California, USA, 1976) studied from 1996-1998 in the Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, and in 1999 obtained a BFA in Photography from the Academy of Arts of the University of San Francisco. Photographer and commercial fisherman, he gets advantage of Alaska’s fishing season and of Norwegian crab fishing ships to create his oeuvre. He has achieved important prices and his photographs have been published in the most recognized printed mediums of the world.
Jacob Magraw-Mickelson (California, USA, 1982) obtained a BFA in illustration from the Art Center College of Design of Pasadena in 2004. He creates a highly personal work where an obsessive drawing technique combines with an intense and bright colour and architectural forms. His drawings have illustrated numerous articles for The New York Times among other publications.
Rachell Sumpter & Jacob Magraw-Mickelson combine their individual work with the one that they do together. Their group work is not constrained by fixed rules. The prominence of one or the other it is marked by the work inner development in each particular case. Both artists share their life in a small island of the Puget Sound, finding inspiration in an unique natural and cultural environment.
Brendan Monroe (California, USA, 1982), lives and works in Stockholm. He is a painter and a sculptor, but he also does works of illustration. He considers himself a maker of things with the necessity to construct and produce. However, painting and sculpture are the media with which he better expresses and the ones that translate more accurately his ideas.
Victoria Reynolds (Texas, USA, 1962) lives and works in Los Angeles. His paintings of raw flesh, often set in ornate, rococo- or baroque-style frames, are unabashedly sumptuous and sensual (other media include digital imagery, drawing, sculpture, and music). Her work refers to the Venetian art of painting flesh, Dutch vanitas, kitchen and butcher stall scenes, divine sacrifice, and society’s use and sacrifice of animals.
Charlie Roberts (Kansas, USA, 1983) lives and works in Asker, Norway. Employing a figurative language with high visual impact, he depicts obsessively, like in a catalogue, a variety of human specimens. His painting is raw and exuberant, taking inspiration in different sources -internet, books and magazines, and registering the images as quick as possible.
Devin Troy Strother (California, USA, 1986), lives and works in Los Angeles. He does and aggressive work where each element used, each colour and each piece of cut out paper, helps building a very rich narrative that exceeds the panel over which they are constructed. His work is highly marked by his Afro-American condition, finding his main source of inspiration in popular culture. His narratives are built from the titles taken from songs or straight from friends and family commentaries. Suspicious from painting bidimensonality, his work is composed by layers added one after another. Multiple techniques that together create a work that strikes the spectator by their aggressive colours and content.
Rachell Sumpter (California, USA, 1972), is a west coast artist that paints tiny splendors creating isolated and communal scenes. She borrows images of religious and political tradition, specifically related to the North Pacific Ocean culture. There is celebration and lamentation in her melancholic landscapes. With an outstanding use of colour, her paintings offer a optimism that, if it wasn’t for the colours, could look like an elegy. With an iconography of fear and desire she constructs mythologies of pleasure and mystery.
