FOG Design+Art 2022: Tauba Auerbach, Liam Everett, Koak, Shinpei Kusanagi, Trevor Paglen, Kikuo Saito, Sara VanDerBeek

Jan 19 - 23, 2022
    • Koak My Ouroboros, 2021 Acrylic, oil, and graphite on linen 15 x 12 in 38.1 x 30.5 cm
      Koak
      My Ouroboros, 2021
      Acrylic, oil, and graphite on linen
      15 x 12 in
      38.1 x 30.5 cm
  • Drawing on the visual vocabulary of comics, Koak imbues her figures with a sense of agency and inner life to...
    Koak, My Ouroboros, 2021

    Drawing on the visual vocabulary of comics, Koak imbues her figures with a sense of agency and inner life to challenge patriarchal views of the feminine. Rendered in a variety of materials including oils, pastels and graphite, the artist’s subjects engage in an array of everyday activities. However, her compositions lend even the most mundane tasks or psychologically charged scenes a sense of pure self-possession. 

     

    In her looping, thickly lined portraits, Koak examines the joyous, performative, and vulnerable sides of femininity. The artist utilizes a variety of materials, including acrylic, ink, chalk, graphite, and oil, to render her figures spare, bright, and wide-eyed.

    • Koak Strange Loop, 2021 Bronze 64 x 50 x 74 in 162.6 x 127 x 188 cm Edition of 6 plus 2 artist's proofs
      Koak
      Strange Loop, 2021
      Bronze
      64 x 50 x 74 in
      162.6 x 127 x 188 cm
      Edition of 6 plus 2 artist's proofs
  • “I’ve always been interested in using very different mediums… For sculpture, it feels like drawing. You’re still creating lines and... “I’ve always been interested in using very different mediums… For sculpture, it feels like drawing. You’re still creating lines and... “I’ve always been interested in using very different mediums… For sculpture, it feels like drawing. You’re still creating lines and... “I’ve always been interested in using very different mediums… For sculpture, it feels like drawing. You’re still creating lines and...

    “I’ve always been interested in using very different mediums… For sculpture, it feels like drawing. You’re still creating lines and you’re still making a shape that leads the eye different places. The only difference is that you have to make sure you’re looking at it at every angle.” 

     

     Koak in conversation with Summer Bowie, “Koak: Physiological Impetus and the Sameness of Visual Language,” Autre, 2018

    • Koak Bench, 2020 Cast bronze and walnut 86 x 34 1/2 x 31 in 218.4 x 87.6 x 78.7 cm Edition of 3
      Koak
      Bench, 2020
      Cast bronze and walnut
      86 x 34 1/2 x 31 in
      218.4 x 87.6 x 78.7 cm
      Edition of 3
    • Koak Careful, 2021 Flashe and graphite on linen mounted to panel 10 x 8 in 25.4 x 20.3 cm
      Koak
      Careful, 2021
      Flashe and graphite on linen mounted to panel
      10 x 8 in
      25.4 x 20.3 cm
    • Koak Blue Night, 2021 Acrylic, Flashe, liquid charcoal, and graphite on linen mounted to panel 8 x 10 in 20.3 x 25.4 cm
      Koak
      Blue Night, 2021
      Acrylic, Flashe, liquid charcoal, and graphite on linen mounted to panel
      8 x 10 in
      20.3 x 25.4 cm
  • Kikuo Saito entered New York’s Color Field and Abstract Expressionist circles after relocating from Tokyo in 1966. Serving as studio...
    Kikuo Saito, Ginger Night, 1980

    Kikuo Saito entered New York’s Color Field and Abstract Expressionist circles after relocating from Tokyo in 1966. Serving as studio assistant for painters Helen Frankenthaler and Kenneth Noland, he was deeply invested in the relationship between theater and painting. From the movement of paint across his canvases to the interplay between surface and background, Saito explored the ways painting, like theater, can distill gesture and sensation.

     

    Ginger Night is situated well within Saito’s experimentation with Color Field painting, for its broad applications of color are opened up to reveal intimate, gestural mark-making. Here Saito considered the potential of acrylic painting and theatre, constructing a portal in which paint dashes lyrically atop the canvas.

    • Liam Everett Untitled (the photograph), 2021 Ink, oil, salt and graphite 70 x 67 in 177.8 x 170.2 cm
      Liam Everett
      Untitled (the photograph), 2021
      Ink, oil, salt and graphite
      70 x 67 in
      177.8 x 170.2 cm
  • Liam Everett commences each painting on heavy bound unstretched linen and builds large-scale, chromatic compositions by utilizing additive and subtractive...
    Liam Everett, Untitled (the photograph), 2021

    Liam Everett commences each painting on heavy bound unstretched linen and builds large-scale, chromatic compositions by utilizing additive and subtractive processes. Everett considers the process of erasure as a viable and generative approach involving the continual re-adjustment of orientation and time. Magnificent in their ability to envelope both viewers and their surroundings, his paintings are elaborate endeavors, offering increasing detail the longer the viewer spends with the work.

     

    “The question for me is, how can this contact between me and the painting be developed and continue to occur in order to expose the nature of practice within the studio?” 

     

    – Liam Everett in conversation with Hope Mohr, 2018

  • Trevor Paglen mines the history of photography, both for its physical production and its subject matter, to construct questions around...
    Trevor Paglen, Lower Yosemite Falls Deep Semantic Image Segments, 2021

    Trevor Paglen mines the history of photography, both for its physical production and its subject matter, to construct questions around seeing. Concerns around surveillance, privacy, freedom, and servitude resonate throughout his practice. Ultimately, he considers: what is the relationship between photography and power? 

     

    In this work, Paglen considers the extent to which artificial intelligence is invested in the very nature of opticality. He captures his landscape, Lower Yosemite Falls, in the historical tradition of American frontier photography – a physical journey was required to reach the site, for example. Paglen imbues this practice with questions of contemporary viewership, however, integrating an AI technique called Deep Saliency to analyze the image. In this way, the artist exposes the intertwined histories through which photography evolves and the ways emergent technologies continue to reiterate control. 

  • Working across a range of disciplines, Tauba Auerbach’s oeuvre examines the structure of geometry, gesture, logic, and communication within visual...
    Tauba Auerbach, Crease I (detail), 2009

    Working across a range of disciplines, Tauba Auerbach’s oeuvre examines the structure of geometry, gesture, logic, and communication within visual culture. The artist is driven by not only what these established disciplines are, but how they can be broken down to interrogate the limits of perception and space. 

     

    To produce the distinctive optical effect evident in Crease I, Auerbach experiments with the arrangement of the work’s dots, leaving the impression of sculptural form despite the painting's two-dimensional configuration. Through a presentation of illusional dimensionality, Auerbach embraces spatial flux, visual ambiguity, and, ultimately, instability. 
    • Shinpei Kusanagi Twin Fantasy, 2019 Acrylic on canvas 63 3/4 x 51 1/2 in 162 x 130.7 cm
      Shinpei Kusanagi
      Twin Fantasy, 2019
      Acrylic on canvas
      63 3/4 x 51 1/2 in
      162 x 130.7 cm
  • Shinpei Kusanagi stains untreated canvases with layers of translucent color then incorporates improvisational brushstrokes in vivid hues, markings that materialize...
    Shinpei Kusanagi, Twin Fantasy (detail), 2019

    Shinpei Kusanagi stains untreated canvases with layers of translucent color then incorporates improvisational brushstrokes in vivid hues, markings that materialize from rapid motions as well as pooling stillness. His atmospheric washes of color leave the paintings devoid of specific detail, conjuring expansive memories of time and place rather than precise representations. The artist once wrote on memory: “it is all fatally destined to be washed away.”

    • Shinpei Kusanagi Mirror, 2021 Acrylic on canvas 35 3/4 x 28 5/8 in 91 x 72.7 cm
      Shinpei Kusanagi
      Mirror, 2021
      Acrylic on canvas
      35 3/4 x 28 5/8 in
      91 x 72.7 cm
    • Shinpei Kusanagi Fosshil, 2021 Acrylic on canvas 17 7/8 x 15 in 45.5 x 38 cm
      Shinpei Kusanagi
      Fosshil, 2021
      Acrylic on canvas
      17 7/8 x 15 in
      45.5 x 38 cm
    • Shinpei Kusanagi Come Again, 2020 Acrylic on canvas 63 7/8 x 51 3/8 in 162.1 x 130.5 cm
      Shinpei Kusanagi
      Come Again, 2020
      Acrylic on canvas
      63 7/8 x 51 3/8 in
      162.1 x 130.5 cm
    • Shinpei Kusanagi Greek, 2021 Acrylic on canvas 23 7/8 x 19 3/4 in 60.6 x 50 cm
      Shinpei Kusanagi
      Greek, 2021
      Acrylic on canvas
      23 7/8 x 19 3/4 in
      60.6 x 50 cm
  • Sara VanDerBeek’s oeuvre addresses the nature of representation – particularly of the female form – from antiquity through to our...
    Sara VanDerBeek, Greek, National Archeological Museum Naples (detail), 2021

    Sara VanDerBeek’s oeuvre addresses the nature of representation – particularly of the female form – from antiquity through to our present moment. She ultimately asks: how do we represent and see something that is in flux? In doing so, she actively reconsiders the physical, historically grounded space of sculpture and photography, repositioning her subject matter, often women, within novel, unstable, and transformative visual fields.

     

    With this new body of work, VanDerBeek addresses complicated contemporary relationships to the body while exploring her ambivalence toward a gendered understanding of adornment and female beauty. Photographing within museums over the last decade, VanDerBeek has collected a significant archive of images. Here the artist returns to her earliest methods of image interpretation, applying hand coloration as she paints directly on the surface of her own photographs.

    • Sara VanDerBeek Tanagra, Louvre, 2021 Dye sublimation print mounted on aluminum, acrylic paint 24 x 19 in 61 x 48.3 cm
      Sara VanDerBeek
      Tanagra, Louvre, 2021
      Dye sublimation print mounted on aluminum, acrylic paint
      24 x 19 in
      61 x 48.3 cm
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