Artist Joram Roukes will be exhibiting a new body of work at his Thinkspace Gallery solo exhibition ‘American Ornithology‘. Showing in the main room, a peak into his Groningen studio gives us a taste to the process and the pieces we will be seeing this weekend. Please join us at the opening reception, this Saturday, October 11 from 6 to 9 pm.
We stopped by Meggs’s Venice studio to check up on the finishing touches to his solo exhibition ‘Paving Paradise‘ at Beyond Eden opening this weekend. A multi-gallery event celebrating the New Contemporary Art Movement, Beyond Eden in it’s fifth and final edition will be at LAMAG October 3rd and 4th. Saturday’s hours for Beyond Eden will be 6pm-11pm and Sunday noon to 5pm; admission is $5 at the door.
The artwork in this show plays on the same irony and notion of tragedy. Consumerism, materialism, and over-development of the urban landscape are rapidly devastating the same natural resources and beauty we conceive as ‘Paradise’ — a utopian place where its community can live in peace, resources are sustainable, and we can equally appreciate the natural and social environment we live in.
please note there will not be an ATM at the gallery
Low Bros
Wasted Youth
June 20th – July 11th
Thinkspace (Los Angeles) – is pleased to present Wasted Youth, the first LA based solo exhibition of works by sibling artist duo Low Bros. Based in Berlin, and originally from Hamburg, the Low Bros consists of brothers Christoph and Florin Schmidt, formerly known by their aliases Qbrk and Nerd. Their murals and street art collaborations have transformed urban landscapes around the world, punctuating streets and accenting structures with a host of memorable and hyper-stylized characters. The Low Bros have developed an urban mythology with a cast of recurring characters and fictional crews, brought to life by a visual shorthand that is unmistakably their own. Drawing from 80’s and 90’s skateboard, graffiti and hip hop cultures, the brothers appropriate imagery from the graphic histories that defined their youth, and transform nostalgia into something entirely fresh and innovative.
Combining elements from the animal and human worlds, the Low Bros fuse urban references with those taken from nature. Their animal characters, ranging from tigers and cheetahs to “teen wolves”, are subcultural emblems or hyper-stylized stereotypes. As stand-ins for the human, this anthropomorphic animal world is mischievous and whimsical, while also jarring and unexpected in its juxtapositions. Graphically deconstructed and reassembled as an amalgam of strangely wonderful surreal worlds, the man-made collides with a hallucinatory animal kingdom that mimics its conventions and affects. Incorporating elements of psychedelia, West Coast skate culture, early video games and 80’s and 90’s graphic design – all brought to life with a tongue-in-cheek machismo – the Low Bros create pieces that are undeniably irreverent and playful.
The work is distinctly geometric, as though structurally composited from individual blocks or planes of color, and hovers somewhere between cubist cut-out, graffiti script and 16/32-bit atari graphics. These meticulously faceted pieces spare no attention to detail, while the intense color combinations and shading bring it all to life. The Low Bros are constantly setting up visual tensions between two-dimensional and three-dimensional optics, channeling a simultaneity of perspectives. Oscillating between flatness and dimension, some areas feel static and hard-edged while others are fluid and organic. The clever composition of these effective contrasts results in an unexpected richness of spatial depth and plasticity.
Self-taught graffiti writers, the brothers work primarily in acrylic paints and aerosols. In addition to their site-specific murals, individual panels and prints, they have also made recent forays into video and installation, bringing their motley cast of urban animals to life. The Wasted Youth exhibition will coincide with a large public project in Los Angeles, their first, and will include a large site-specific gallery mural and an installation component. Though their work is so clearly inspired by Californian youth and pop culture, the Low Bros are visiting LA for the first time on the occasion of the exhibition. An ironic nod to their mother’s admonishing cautions that graffiti was “a waste of their youth”, the Low Bros exhibition title embodies their penchant for irony, humor and, above all else, audacious play.
Yosuke Ueno – ‘Beautiful Noise’
Opening Reception with Artist: Saturday May 23, 6-9pm
May 23rd – June 13th
Thinkspace is pleased to present Beautiful Noise, the gallery’s fourth solo exhibition for Japanese artist Yosuke Ueno. A self-taught painter, Ueno has been creating fantastic worlds and characters as long as he can remember. Highly stylized and beautifully imaginative, his works are surreal and emotional; an alternate reality expressed through a quasi-mythological orbit of his own making. Like tightly knit universes unto themselves, his bizarre and wonderfully unhinged worlds feature a recurring cast of characters and repeated motifs. An intensely emotive painter who, by his own admission, allows his cathartic approach to dictate the development of his works as they’re made, Ueno’s take on pop surrealism is at times explosive and at others meditative, but is consistently seeking the reconciliation of darkness and whimsy.
Inspired by Japanese graphic cultures such as manga and anime, and drawing on the unique stylization of Japanese street fashion, Ueno’s graphic paintings are galvanized by his love of visual culture. Channeling both anger and optimism in the creation of his creatures and surreal landscapes, he seeks the transformation of the negative by invoking hope and positivity through his imagery, even when it betrays trauma and distress in equal parts. Ueno approaches painting as a communicative conduit, and as something powerfully invested with the capacity to make people feel. Because of this implicit responsibility, he has actively sought love and redemption in his imagery rather than indulging in destruction and sadness. Painting is a process of discovery for Ueno, one that he likens to scientific experimentation and unknown variables. He allows his paintings to evolve intuitively, not knowing what the end result will be.
His interest in striking a balance between light and dark imagery is immediately apparent in some of his more recent works. These manage to reconcile the suggestion of sweetness and innocence with the presence of something more sinister and foreboding. Wide-eyed, plushy, rainbow-colored characters are offset by skulls and abject anatomical references, and cotton candy landscapes are punctuated by the suggestion of something harder and menacing, or deeply melancholic. Despite a recurring invocation of love and hope that verges at times on a plea, the works clearly convey the coexistence of often irreconcilable oppositions. Ueno has spoken openly about how his work and imagery were greatly affected by the earthquake, and resulting Tsunami, that devastated Japan in 2011; an event that has left an indelible trauma on its culture. His work, following this tragedy, became less about his omission of negativity, and more about his attempt to summon love and hope in its midst.
The multiplicity of characters in Ueno’s works, and there are over a thousand, hails from the artist’s connection to Japanese Shinto; the polytheistic spiritual tradition in Japan that reveres the greatness in all small things in nature, and seeks the presence of the divine in the minute. In this belief system, there are millions of individual god figures, a veritable plethora of characters and personified energies for even the smallest of natural elements. Each individual part is as important as the whole. This spiritual pluralism is woven throughout Ueno’s work, as the artist builds complex symbolic systems, holistic worlds and recurring metaphors to reinvent a personal spiritual iconography.
Yosuke Ueno’s works, though beautiful, contemporary and graphic, are loaded with a symbolism that betrays the artist’s deeper spiritual connection to making. Giving his imagination free rein to create on impulse, Ueno builds a surreal cosmos with infinite possibilities.
