The Whirlwind Opening Reception of Van Arno’s “Upright” & Molly Gruninger “Luminescent”

The opening of Van Arno’s “Upright” and Molly Gruninger’s “Luminescent” was a whirlwind night filled with laughter, art legends, costumes, animal friends, and of course great art. At the door stood a friend of Arno’s dressed as a butler showing off the exclusive wooden box set of prints, and throughout the evening the models in Arno’s work dressed in black and adorned with a white rose enjoyed the showing with the packed house of art enthusiasts. The Godfather of the Low Brow movement, Robert Williams, came to show his support for Van Arno along with fellow movement veteran Anthony Ausgang.

In the project room, Molly Gruninger’s “Luminescent” illuminated her understanding and manipulation of light in her flawless oil painting works. The pieces look digitally rendered, but the only digital element in her pieces are the references she uses to then put paint on canvas.

Both exhibitions are on view now through February 24th.

Click here to view available pieces by Van Arno: Upright

Click here to view available pieces by Molly Gruninger: Luminescent

Interview with Molly Gruninger for “Luminescent”

Thinkspace Projects is pleased to present Molly Gruninger first solo exhibition in the Thinkspace project room,  Luminescent.  The exhibition features new pieces of her hyper-realistic oil paintings, a commentary on the way we adorn ourselves to express our identity. In anticipation of the exhibition opening, Saturday, February 3rd, our interview with Molly Gruninger introduces us to this new artists and provides insight into her creative process and evolution.

Opening reception, Saturday, February 3rd  from 6 pm to 9 pm. 

SH: Can you tell us a little about your background? Where are you from? Studied art? Favorite food?
MG: I’m originally from Indiana where I studied art at Ball State University. I initially wanted to be an art teacher, but after realizing I have no patience for kids, went into graphic design. However, painting has always been my true love.

SH: What inspired this latest body of work?
MG: I’d say this series plays a bit more on the past, present and future of adornment.

SH: How did you come to develop this hyper-metallic futuristic style? What is your creative process?
MG: Once I began studying design and learning about the marketing world, I became much more aware of the effect that visual advertising and the media has on our perceptions of beauty and identity. Themes relating to self and social image are now inspired by all walks of life, but that was where the idea stemmed.

SH: What is your favorite and least favorite part of the creative process? How long does it take to complete a piece?
MG: I take reference photos to use in the painting process, which is first staged using mannequins. I do some concept sketches and then construct my decorations, while keeping my composition in mind. Ideas come to me at random times, so I usually keep a list for anytime something pops in my head.

SH: What does a day in the studio look like? How do you structure your days?
MG: The beginning stage when I’m coming up with concepts and the project is still fresh and exciting is my favorite part. The worst part is the end when you’re trying to work through a lack of sleep when pressed for time.

Pieces usually take anywhere from 60-80 hrs.

A typical day varies, but I usually have to eat breakfast and wake up for about an hour before I can focus in, but once I get going, I’ll work for 10 hrs straight with the exception of little breaks here and there to step back and reassess my progress.

SH: We use our outer appearance as a form of expression, so how have you used makeup style, hair, clothing as a way to express yourself or shape a moment?
MG: My style pretty much says I’m lazy about style haha. For the most part, I strive for comfortable and casual. Even if I dress up, comfort is number one. I just use all my pent up style expression at Halloween, when I can become a peacock.

SH: If your artwork inspired a cocktail? What would be the name and recipe?
MG: Shiny Surprise: various liquor obscured by a cup wrapped in ribbons that you must drink through a straw. You don’t know what you’re gonna get!

SH: What were you listening to while developing this body of work? Does your background noise influence the mood of the pieces?
MG: I tend to listen to movies or podcasts. Sometimes high energy music like Daft Punk or Kraftwork, but I’m usually paying half attention to the things going on around me when I’m working. It might affect my mood slightly, but not so much the pieces.

SH: Which piece in this show was most challenging and why?
MG: Probably the one titled “Armored Guard”, where I used my fiancé as a model. Though he did great, people tend to be slightly more temperamental about the process than a mannequin.

SH: If you were to have a dinner party, which 5 people would you invite (dead or alive)? What would be on the menu? And what is the one question you’d ask from everyone?
MG: Jim Henson, Cloris Leachman, Alex Jordan (House On The Rock), Charles Darwin, Obama. I would ask everyone to give a detailed description of their most embarrassing moment.

MOLLY GRUNINGER – LUMINESCENT – Opening February 3rd, 2018

MOLLY GRUNINGER
LUMINESCENT
February 3, 2018 – February 24, 2018

Concurrently on view in the Thinkspace project room is Luminescent, featuring new works by Molly Gruninger. Fascinated by the ways in which we adorn ourselves physically to convey identity or meaning, Gruninger creates hyper-realistically rendered oil paintings that play with the extremes of artificiality and posturing. Taking the cultural importance we place on appearances, and the reductive demands of this implicit idealization as a starting point for this series, Gruninger captures the extremes of superficiality in a series of hyperbolically stylized, humanoid effigies.

The artists’ rendering of her ambiguously human figures feels digital and ominously futuristic. Like gilded automatons or mannequins, they seem to suggest the disconcerting extremes of objectification. These uncanny ‘portraits’ of metallic and reflective icons confound the viewer’s expectations, forcing us to question the artifice and the rigidity of the subjects, not to mention seeking evidence of their abjured humanity. Much in the same way that we are expected to ascribe value or worth to a person through a perfunctory physical impression, Gruninger’s cold, beautiful, silvery shells resonate with uncomfortable, if not dangerous, indifference.

Opening Reception of SWANK at Thinkspace Gallery

The opening reception of Swank on September 2nd debuted nine artists from the gallery’s roster, whose work and recognition are on the rise. Each brings their own unique stylistic and technical approach to their practice, and though they share loose affinities, the grouping demonstrates the diversity and latitude of the New Contemporary Movement. Michael Reeder, David Rice, Tran Nguyen, Wiley Wallace, Molly Gruninger, Alex Garant, Sean Norvet, Christopher Konecki, and Lauren Brevner were curated by the gallery for this exhibition as promising new voices to watch on their ascent.

 Please visit the Thinkspace Gallery website to view available work from SWANK,

Next Up at Thinkspace Gallery – “Swank” September 2 – 23, 2017

SWANK
GROUP SHOW
September 2 – September 23, 2017

Thinkspace is pleased to present Swank, a group show dedicated to showcasing nine artists from the gallery’s roster, whose work and recognition are on the rise. Each brings their own unique stylistic and technical approach to their practice, and though they share loose affinities, the grouping demonstrates the diversity and latitude of the New Contemporary Movement. Michael Reeder, David Rice, Tran Nguyen, Wiley Wallace, Molly Gruninger, Alex Garant, Sean Norvet, Christopher Konecki, and Lauren Brevner were curated by the gallery for this exhibition as promising new voices to watch on their ascent. Michael Reeder

Michael Reeder
Dallas-based painter Michael Reeder graduated with a BFA in painting from the School of Visual Arts in New York and works as both a fine artist and freelance graphic artist. Reeder combines figurative references with abstract motifs, graphic patterns, negative space, and an illustrative style to create concise and impactful compositions. Exploring the shifting of identities and the instability of the self as central themes, Reeder uses the portraiture element in his work as an armature around which visual signifiers are hung. The paintings begin with the same reference image of a stranger, rather than a particular individual, to emphasize the general universality of the themes, and to stress the alterable and transfiguring aspects of the human in flux. Reeder taps into a feeling of dislocation and absence as a trope for the volatility of the individual caught in the incoherence and discontinuity of the modern day. Psychologically provocative, Reeder’s paintings are thoughtful deconstructions of the fragmented self.

David Rice
David Rice is a Portland-based artist, illustrator, and designer. Having grown up in rural Colorado, Rice is deeply inspired by nature and its wildlife. The natural world figures prominently as a recurring theme in his detailed works, as he combines the human with the animal in playful and unexpected encounters. By individuating his animals as personified subjects rather than undifferentiated specimens, they take on new symbolic and narrative value as extended metaphors. Geometric patterns and graphic motifs are drawn from textiles and other decorative elements to tie his compositions together. These elements punctuate his works with moments of abstraction while also referencing contained, domestic human spaces in stark contrast to the limitlessness of the wild.

Tran Nguyen
Born in Vietnam, Tran Nguyen emigrated to the US with her family at the age of three. She completed a BFA at the Savannah College of Art and Design in Georgia. Interested in exploring the psychologically evocative potential of the surreal, she channels visual dreamscapes as a therapeutic means of investigating the mind’s potential to heal through imagery. Her practice is drawing-based with graphite and pencil figuring prominently in her works on panel as well as on paper. Delicate and softly diffused, highly detailed figurative elements in the works are set against expanses of vaguely defined space. Playing with shifts in scale and context, Nguyen allows her powers of free association to shape and turn her shadowy worlds.

Wiley Wallace
Wiley Wallace completed a BFA in intermedia arts at Arizona State University and an MFA from University of California, Santa Barbara. A painter with a metaphysical interest in surreal worlds and pseudo-science fiction themes, Wallace often depicts his own children as protagonists on the edge of unknown universes. At times eerie and even grotesque and others understated and subtle, his works combine a dizzying array of visual devices to denote suspension, transition, or immersion in alternate realities. At times realistic depictions deliquesce into abstract blurs of bright colors, while at others subtle apparitions make their way into otherwise unassuming everyday scenes. His ambiguous depictions feel like personal meditations on mortality, the existence, and dissolution of boundaries, and the presence, whether literal or philosophical, of worlds beyond.

Molly Gruninger
A graduate of Ball State University, Los Angeles-based Molly Gruninger is interested in exploring themes like camouflage, the contemporary role of technology in our society, identity, and the shifting nature of perception. At first glance, excessively smooth and dimensionally ambiguous, her figurative works appear to be digitally generated. Upon closer inspection, however, they are in fact highly detailed oil paintings on canvas. Exploring the idea of self-ornamentation, and by proxy the excessive nature of materialism and consumption in contemporary society, Gruninger pushes the artificiality of self-adornment to a literal point of complete synthetic conversion. In a compelling inversion of process, Gruninger creates photorealistic depictions of a seemingly digitally generated form, creating a subject that exists in some strange hyper-real limbo.

Alex Garant
Toronto-based artist Alex Garant creates portrait paintings with a combination of hyper-realistic painting techniques and a graphic aesthetic. Garant intends to overwhelm and saturate the viewer’s senses with an optical distortion, creating subjects that seem captured through multiple exposures. Using an alla prima technique in which layers of wet oil paint are applied over top wet under layers and executed in a single sitting, Garant creates hauntingly beautiful figures that seem to actually reverberate with frenetic energy and life, somehow caught off register between temporal dimensions or physical layers of reality.

Sean Norvet
Los Angeles-based artist Sean Norvet attended Pasadena’s Art Center College of Design, graduating with a BFA in 2013. His unique take on portraiture relays a chaotic and satirical mash-up of cultural references. Distorting the human anatomy of his subjects to the point of total obliteration, his portraits become grotesque, clever and playful amalgams of skin, random objects, food, detritus, type, and cartoons, all parodying the more abhorrent and absurd aspects of American life. Norvet’s subjects become literal and observational reflections of their context and periphery. It’s as though the person’s face, identity, and corporeality are engulfed and consumed by the culture in which they’re immersed. Combining a photo-realistic painting technique with an excessively cartoonish and hyperbolic artificiality, Norvet seizes the viewer in a hallucinogenic distortion of portraiture.

Christopher Konecki
Sand Diego-based Christopher Konecki is a self-taught painter, muralist, sculptor, and installation artist. Drawing inspiration from his surrounding environment and an experimental penchant for the creation of new forms, Konecki creates works that harness a feeling of stylistic chaos and strategic balance. Interested in the reuse of found materials, he revitalizes public spaces and castaway objects to elevate them aesthetically and change the perception of their value. Natural imagery figures prominently in Konecki’s work as he explores the intersection of urban manmade spaces and architectures and the ubiquitous prevalence of technology alongside disproportionately scaled wildlife elements. This juxtaposition of worlds highlights their conflicted coexistence in the modern city and the absurdity of their tangential relationships. His palettes are often cool and subdued, an understated stylistic choice that refocuses attention on the dynamic interaction of the compositions’ disparate facets, and synergy of its parts.

Lauren Brevner
Vancouver-based artist Lauren Brevner explores the feminine in her mixed media portraiture. Using oil, acrylic, and resin, she incorporates Japanese chiyogami, yuzen, and washi papers through collage as well as gold and silver leafing, both traditional Japanese techniques, as an homage to her roots. In 2009, she moved to Osaka, Japan, to reconnect with her cultural heritage and ancestry, and this immersion has had a significant impact on her artwork. Inspired by 19th-century Japanese art, as well as Western European Art Nouveau and Symbolist painting of the same period, and modern abstraction of the early 20th century, Brevner’s work feels both contemporary and historically referential. Her use of flattened graphic space is offset by the detail of her delicately rendered portraits. Striving to re-appropriate the vantage point of the “gaze,” her work seeks to counter the objectification of the feminine, empowering her subjects as sensual and self-possessed entities.