Cogan, Uribe and Hoshine

Two artist that I've blogged about before, and among my favorites, are Kim Cogan based out of San Francisco and Nicolás Uribe from Bogota, Colombia.  To my surprise I just discovered that they are showing work together this month at Maxwell Alexander Gallery in L.A. along with another talented artist, new to me, Kenichi Hoshine. The show is called "Abstracted Realities". Here's a few pieces by each with very brief comments.

Kenichi Hoshine was born in Tokyo in 1977 but earned his BFA at the School of Visual Arts in New York, NY.  Although there's limited imagery of his work online it's clear from what is there that he delights in the push and pull between realism and abstraction. He frequently combines the two in ways that suggests the haunting and surreal quality of dreams without ever seeming remotely like a surrealist. It reminds me a little of the way Gerhard Richter moves back and forth between representation and abstraction, but somehow got stuck doing both at once. One might think Gerhard Richter could pull it off. But it doesn't matter because Kenichi Hoshine clearly can.

"Study of J"  oil on wood  18" x 18"

"Untitled 54"  16" x 16"

"Untitled"  Charcoal, Acrylic and wax on Wood  20" x 20"

Kim Cogan is quite versatile, from occasional figures, to skulls, waves and wharfs, but especially the urban landscape. He's a technically deft magician with paint. His images that haunt me the most are the lonely scenes of an San Francisco at night. I posted his work back in April 2013. Here's 2 of his pieces that will be in the show:

"Open Late"  12" x 12"

"Sunset"  60" x 40"

And here's 2 by Nicolas Uribe. He focuses on the figure, especially personal portraits of friends and family, but the personal becomes universal, his models mere studies for observing the human animal in all it's intimate idiosyncratic honesty. You can see one of my earlier reviews from July 2010.
Here's 2 of his that will be in the show:

"Wife (Breakfast)"

"Father (After Lunch)"

The opening is this Saturday so if you happen to be in LA may I suggest that this is not just something to do but a chance to see three artists who are doing some amazing work and helping to define why painting continues to be a powerful and significant medium of personal and artistic expression.

Katie Metz

"Grounded Stories 22"  acrylic on canvas  48" x 34"

"Grounded Stories 28"  acrylic on canvas  33" x 24"

"Grounded Stories 38"  acrylic on canvas  24" x 33"

"Grounded Stories 39"  acrylic on canvas  28" x 27"

"Grounded Stories 40"  acrylic on canvas  43" x 21"

Katie Metz is a Seattle based artist who captures the look and feel of her home city with a style and technique that is both ordered and chaotic, like the city itself. The gray and rain are here too, and the glimmering reflection of headlights on damp pavement. But it's that knack for combining hard rigid lines and a grid-like structure with loose expressionistic brushwork and frenetic scratching hatch marks that really suffuses the work with an urban feel. I posted some work by her once before back in July of 2011. Since then her work has become less abstract, more firmly rooted in the specific and the observable but the vibrant energy that made that earlier work successful still remains.
These new pieces will be included in a show that opens February 3rd at Abmeyer + Wood Fine Art in Seattle. You can seem more of her work online at katiemetzstudio.com

Hubert Blanz

Geospaces - M 1:115000 C-Print, matt foil on aluminum  180x180cm  2002

Geospaces - detail

Roadshow no. 1  C-print, Diasec on aluminum  80x120cm  2007

"X-Plantation 11"  C-Print  Diasec on Dibond  100x150cm  2008

"Fifth Face no. 1"  C-print, diasec on dibond  117x135cm  2010

I had a hard time picking out just a few images to represent Hubert Blanz's work. And in addition to the photographic work there's film, installations and sculpture. But my favorites are these collages of freeways and airports and cities, and his satellite-like views of landscapes composed entirely of microchips, motherboards and other computer circuitry. One just sort of gets this work viscerally and immediately. It doesn't require much in the way of analysis. The environments most of us live in are so far removed from the natural world that these images trigger a instantaneous spark of recognition. The artificial pushes aside the natural sometimes so completely, whether in the real life of our actual cities or in the second life of online digital environments, that scale begins to seem meaningless, and what's real vs. unreal is called into question. Each of these images is from a series with many more examples to look through on his website: www.blanz.net

Damon Kowarsky

"Istanbul I"  etching and aquatint from 6 copper plates  22.5 x 47cm

"Blackbird" with Kyoko Imazu etching & aquatint from 2 copper plates  32x21cm

"Night March"  with Kyoko Imazu  etching & aquatint from 2 copper plates  32x21cm

"Spring Street"  etching & aquatint from 2 copper plates  32x34cm

"Shalami Bazaar"  charcoal on paper  109x240cm

I posted Damon Kowarsky's work way back in June 2009. He's kept busy since then. His career has taken him all over the planet. He studied in Scotland and Australia and taught art in Pakistan. He worked on an archaeological dig in Egypt, and has executed work based on travels in Japan, Korea and the United States. At the center of all his work is the city, sometimes modern, but more often the ancient cities he's visited in his travels, ancient cities that stand as living links to the archaeological artefacts he has occasionally illustrated for scientific publication. He has a knack for expressing architecture not as the perfect straight lined preplanned illusion of blueprints and conceptual renderings, but as the organic evolving things they actually are. Sometimes the city is portrayed for it's own sake, for the love of it's rooftops and windows and labyrinthine complexities. But in much of his work he invites figures, both human and animal to enter the urban realm in scenarios ranging from the ordinary to the dreamlike and surreal.
You can see more at hs website: www.damon.tk

And if you happen to be in Melbourne anytime in the next couple of weeks he currently has new work showing in Armadale at Gallery 1156.

Amy Casey

"High-rise," acrylic on panel, 48" x 36"

"Inner City," acrylic on panel, 30" x  30"

 "Lean To," acrylic on panel, 16" x 16"

 "Megalopolis," acrylic on panel, 36" x 60"

"Distant Lands," 2 color etching on paper, 8 ¼" x 10" (signed and numbered edition of 30)

It is rare for me to be able to see artwork that I post here in person. Which is unfortunate. It is often impossible to assess artwork online. Such was the case with Amy Casey's work which I first posted in July of 2009. As much as I enjoyed the imagery it was simply impossible to appreciate the delicate detail in her originals which I saw recently at Zg Gallery in Chicago. The work is still up for a while if you happen to be in the area. Amy's work has been exploring the complex web of the urban environment for quite some time. In her earliest pieces buildings still rested upon terra firma though often via rickety stilts. The stilts grew, swayed, tottered and finally collapsed leaving her buildings to fend for themselves in a white void. Now the buildings must rest upon other buildings (like the mythical turtles that were once thought to hold up the earth one imagines it's nothing but buildings all the way down) or they are bound together by wires, bridges, and brick walls. Trees, grass and rivers no longer exist upon native soil for all of that has vanished. The urban architecture itself provides the only haven for small green places. These are meditations on how cities exist, how they grow and evolve, becoming a life unto themselves until the landscape upon which they once stood is impossible to detect. It is beautiful, humorous, poignant work.
You can look through her work at the galleryy link above or at her website amycaseypainting.com

Tom Parish

"Osteria"  66" x 72"

"La Porta Verso La Luce"  60"x72"  2009

"Wait Here"  66" x 78"  2007

"Doppo Mezzanotte"  68" x 72"  2006

"Notta Serena"  66" x 72"  2009

I've never been to Venice. Until now.
Tom Parish was born in Minnesota with an English name from French and Finnish parents but his heart belongs to Venice, Italy. He's been painting scenes from his beloved city for a decade. He's captured the place in many moods from bright sunlit days to cool quiet nights. He seems to look especially for those hidden corners that all cities possess, those small places where one can imagine that the crowds simply cease to exist. There is a kind of emotional magic in those urban spaces where one can feel alone with the massive built environment that surrounds you. How much more powerful that feeling must be in a place as old and surreal as Venice. But his paintings include moments with people as well. Again they're quiet moments, not trying to depict the hectic pulse at the heart of any city but the simple moments of individuals in their daily routines. Looking through these paintings is likely to make you put Venice on the top of your list of places you must someday see.

To see more online you can check out the gallery through the link above or look through the artist's website: tomparish.net

Trevor Young

"Claim Etiquette"  50" x 50"  oil on canvas  2012

"Blue Brand"  42" x 42"  oil on canvas  2012

"Civilian Departure"  42" x 42"  oil on canvas  2013

"Three Squares"  48" x 48"  oil on canvas  2013

"Man in Box"  42" x 42"  oil on canvas  2011

Trevor Young's paintings combine minimalism and realism in perfect combination to capture the peculiar loneliness that haunts America's constructed landscapes. This atmosphere or spirit of loneliness is especially strong at airports. Traveling by car, bus or train, it is possible to open a window and breathe the air rushing by, which somehow turns the act of transportation into adventure. Airplanes and Airports are containers in which everything is in a state of suspended unreality, disconnected from the larger world. And yet, there is still something latent within them that holds a promise... for they also are the means of the most significant physical translocation available to us. They represent not only the very limits of impersonal tedium but also the promise of unlimited exploration. This kind of dichotomy is present in much of our contemporary built environments. The artist seems to love the cold impersonal structures of modernity in a way that is not remotely ironic, but rather it's opposite. There is wonder here. It seems to me as if the artist somehow possesses that spirit of loneliness, as if he becomes it, personifies it, and coolly observes with seeming detachment, and yet captures with aching nostalgia, places that most of us never look at twice or even notice at all as we bustle through or past them.
You can see more at his website, www.trevoryoung.net
or the websites of his galleries, J. Cacciola Gallery in NY, and David Klein Gallery near Detroit.

Simon Nicholas

Bankside,   Oil on Linen, 61" x 65"

Philharmonia IV,   Oil on Linen, 63" x 67"

Turbine Hall VI,  Acrylic on Linen, 79" x 55"

AMARC II,  Arylic on Linen, 34" x 62"

Crossing,   Oil on Linen, 65" x 61"

Simon Nicholas exhibits work in the same New York City Gallery as the previous artist I posted (Kim Cogan), and their work makes for an interesting contrast. While Cogan's work features the isolation that cities can often emphasize, Simon Nicholas' work focuses squarely on the central facts of city life; the crowds and the large buildings. Cogan's paintings which rarely features actual figures are clearly portraits of an individual experience of the urban environment. Nicholas' work on the other hand is swarming with figures and presents a relatively impersonal and sometimes nearly abstracted portrait of civic existence. The people become mere pattern and texture, creating a sense of movement within the formal and immobile geometrical confines of the city's buildings and streets. His interests in the regularities of  geometric forms and the chaotic textures of crowds also led the artist to become fascinated with places like AMARC (Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Center - now AMARG) near Tucson, Arizona where literally thousands of old disabled aircraft sprawl across the desert as if they dwelt in a city of their own.
The artist does not appear to have his own website but there are a few more examples of his work at
www.galleryhenoch.com

Kim Cogan

"Entrance"  42" x 32"  oil on canvas  2012

"Surf Motel"  48" x 60"  oil on canvas  2012

"Third Rail"  36" x 48"  oil on canvas   2011

"Bender"  20" x 20"  oil on canvas  2012

"Wave no. 18"  32" x 50"  oil on wood panel  2012

I've been a fan of Kim Cogan's work for a while now. His night scenes especially appeal to me. Well, all night scenes do, I suppose, but he has an unerring ability to capture the mood of the competing colors of various light sources. Anyone who has ever stood alone among the shadows at night observing the dramatic effect will feel drawn into these paintings as if they were somehow part of their own memories. But all of his work is compelling. The mix of careful realism delivered with loose expressive brushwork gives each piece an atmosphere more compelling (for me anyway) than any carefully executed hyper-realism. His series of wave paintings are from an artist who is deeply familiar with the way the ocean moves and breaks along the shore. I'm pretty sure I heard or saw somewhere that he is an avid surfer, which would certainly explain the intimacy of these pieces. Aside from the wave series, the vast majority of his work is about cities. Although he does include figures some of his paintings, they are more frequently about lonely streets devoid of people. Cities are of course are the most densely populated places on the planet. But there are always moments and small out of the way places where the crowds vanish and one is filled with a unique kind of loneliness that is not without it's own rewards. It is unique aspect of city life that Kim Cogan captures perfectly.
I encourage you to take the time looking through all of his work on his website:
www.kimcogan.com
If you happen to be in New York go see his work at Gallery Henoch,
and if you're in San Francisco head over to Hespe Gallery

Roll Hardy

"Reflections"  oil on canvas  62.5" x 70.5" 2013

"New Growth"   oil on canvas  18.5" x 24.5"   2012

"Abandoned Hydro Plant - White River Falls"  oil on canvas  66.5" x 66.5"  2013

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Roll Hardy will be showing some new work in April right here in Portland, Oregon. So for a rare treat I get to go and see some of the actual art that I post here. His paintings invariably focus on rundown industrial scenes, abandoned buildings and other little seen and less noticed sides of the urban/industrial landscape. There are plenty of artists out there documenting similar accounts of urban decay. But unlike most of them, Roll hardy seems less concerned with making direct environmental commentary or implications of society's slow collapse, than simply appreciating their visual allure. He seems to enjoy the bright hues of graffiti and the abstract expressionist quality of strewn trash. He occasionally adds brightly colored balloons or other touches of whimsy, as if to redirect our response to such scenes. In this way it is possible to re-imagine what we usually think of as eyesores, as places full of fascination. I myself have sometimes wondered if it wouldn't be rather interesting to take some debris littered derelict urban location and simply preserve it as is, with every weather beaten mattress and old tire in place, as a kind of park, allowing nature to slowly, methodically and inevitably reclaim what people once abandoned, for the enjoyment and edification of those very same people.
His show opens this Thursday (April 4) at Laura Russo Gallery.
You can see more of his work at rollhardy.com