Yossi Milo Gallery is pleased to announce Four, a group exhibition featuring works by Felipe Baeza, Julia Bland, Arghavan Khosravi and Oren Pinhassi. All four artists in the show give form to personal experiences through material and color. Dusty pastels, velvety darks, and scuffed surfaces run through the works, inducing a contemplative atmosphere where subtle references to different histories and narrative can emerge. The exhibition will open on Saturday, March 16 with an artists' reception from 6:00 - 8:00 pm and will be on view through Saturday, April 27.
Felipe Baeza's (Mexican, b. 1987) paintings are an oppositional force against historical iconography. He uses his own biography and interests in migration, sexuality, and anthropology to assert an individuality outside of the strictures and disappointments of language. The results are representations of a seemingly mythic figure floating in space to more lyrical depictions of sexual contact that magnify life to heroic proportions. Baeza primarily works on paper through a process converging printmaking and collage techniques and refuses conventional strategies of portrait painting that obliquely describe subjects by use of props, possessions or space. Instead, Baeza inverts the direction, working from the inside out in highly aesthetic, detailed portraits that directly express the inner lives and frustrations of his fantastical hybrid bodies. Compelled by the force of their enigmatic characterizations, Baeza's portraits and narrative scenes are captioned by descriptive and yet poetic titles that ultimately unveil the semi-autobiographical and historical context inside which his situations between the real and imaginary are intertwined. For example, I have eyes where they can best protect me, 2019, suggests an environment within which his hybrid body lives and is persistently susceptible to hostile conditions.
Baeza received his B.F.A. from The Cooper Union in 2009 and his M.F.A. from the Yale School of Art in 2018. Baeza will be included in the forthcoming exhibition Nobody Promised You Tomorrow: Contemporary Art in the 50th Year of the Stonewall Era, Brooklyn Museum, New York, NY. Recent exhibitions include XL Catlin Art Prize, San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco, CA, travelling to Linda Warren Projects, Chicago and New York Academy of Art, New York, NY, No Longer Yours, The Mistake Room/Anonymous Gallery, Mexico City, Mexico, Tails, Next to Nothing, New York, NY, Demolition WoManhood, Skibum MacArthur, Los Angeles, CA; Reconstruir, 41 Cooper Gallery, The Cooper Union, New York, NY; New Prints 2017/Summer, selected by Katherine Bradford, International Print Center, New York, NY, and Carving Through Borders, Galería de la Raza, San Francisco, CA. He lives and works between New Haven, CT, and Brooklyn, NY.
Julia Bland's (American, b. 1986) abstract wall hangings feature archetypal and geometric forms woven into assertively symmetrical compositions. Her works begin with patterns crafted on her loom before dyed, stitched and painted fabrics, and fragments of painted canvas and linen are cut, glued, sewed, burned and tied into the works. The artist's gridded elements are patterned on mathematical formulas inspired by sacred geometry, and the notion that repetitive structures and rhythms reveal cosmic processes and the vibrations of the universe. Also building on post-minimalist investigations of materiality and context, her surfaces communicate through their physical presence as well as the history of their intersecting processes. The results of Bland's intricate handiwork and unswerving reverence towards the materials of her practice are artworks that meld painting, weaving, and netting with commanding tactile presence.
Bland earned her B.F.A. from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2008 and her M.F.A. from Yale University in 2012. She has been an artist in residence at The MacDowell Colony; The Shandaken Project; Sharpe-Walentas Space Program; Lighthouse Works, Yaddo; Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild; and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and was honored with the Milton and Sally Avery Fellowship; Carol Scholsberg Memorial Prize; Jacques and Natasha Gelman Trust Travel Fellowship; and the Florence Leif Award. The artist currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
Arghavan Khosravi's (Iranian, b. 1984) mixed media paintings interweave historical Persian motifs with 21st-century imagery borrowed from popular culture and contemporary media. Replete with surreal situations, objects and characters that demand a narrative only the viewer can provide, the paintings evoke a sense of historical and personal affairs being out of balance. State monuments, state actors, archeological relics and traditional Iranian textiles ornament and frame Khosravi's images both visually and culturally, while painted figures appear unmoored by gravity or masked by unexplained blindfolds. Featuring tromp-l'oeil female bodies that reach beyond national boundaries and traditional historical narratives, Khosravi's detailed works provide an alternative space for reflection within reality.
Khosravi earned an M.F.A. in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design, a B.F.A. in Graphic Design from Islamic Azad University of Tehran, and an M.F.A. in Illustration from University of Tehran. Her works have been exhibited in New York, Iran, and throughout the U.S., and are in the permanent collections of the Rhode Island of School of Design Museum and Newport Art Museum, both in Providence, RI, as well as many private collections. Khosravi currently lives and works in Provincetown, MA.
Oren Pinhassi's (b. 1985) art combines the logic of architecture and sculpture in his construction of fluid, eroticized installations designed to thwart one's traditional associations and encoded behaviors. Pinhassi arranges his sculptures in simulation of queer sites where the boundaries between bodies and objects is blurred and played with, setting the scene for encounters with and among each work. Everyday things such as an umbrella, a cheval mirror frame, or a bath towel are worked over in various media including plaster, burlap, sand, and Vaseline until the original object and its perceived use is masked. The synergy and static choreographed by the artist between his amorphous objects and the viewer form the basis of Pinhassi's disruptions of habit. Familiar yet strange, archaic yet contemporary, funny yet foreboding, the ultimate "site" of the artist's works lies outside fixed definition.
Pinhassi received an M.F.A. from Yale University after earning his B.F.A. at Hamidrasha School of Art, Beit Berl, Israel and is the 2011 recipient of the Shlomo Witkin Prize for Excellence in the Art Field. He recently had solo exhibitions at Edel Assanti (London, UK), Skibum MacArthur (Los Angeles, CA), Ribot Gallery (Milan, Italy) and at the Petach Tikva Museum, Israel. His work has been featured in group shows at David Zwirner (New York, NY) Galerie Eva Meyer (Paris, France), Andrew Rafacz Gallery (Chicago, IL), and Magenta Plains (New York, NY). Pinhassi was a recipient of the Shanadanken Project at Storm King Sculpture Park in 2016. Pinhassi currently lives and works in New York.
The exhibition is co-curated by Yossi Milo and Doron Langberg.