past
November 26, 2011- Jan 22 2012
Opening Reception Date: Saturday November 26, 2011 4pm – 8pm
As the Golden State is a buzz with Pacific Standard Time, a Getty initiative that is bringing international attention to Southern California art from1945-1980, Royale Projects will turn a spotlight onto the seminal works of Kenneth Capps, an artist who came to notice in the1970s.
Originally inspired in the late 1960s by the expressionistic works of David Smith, the minimalist intent of Donald Judd, and the embracing of industrial materials by his peers, Mark Di Suvero and Richard Serra. Kenneth Capps created objects that use friction and gravity to support his weighty, sculptural elements. These astutely composed works, with reductive sensibilities, excite the viewer with feelings of danger and tension.
In 1973, as a result of these early works, Capps was invited to exhibit at Storm King Art Center in upstate New York, the largest and most prestigious outdoor sculpture garden in the Nation. He then opened his first solo exhibition in New York City at the O.K. Harris Gallery. Within the decade Kenneth Capps had become recognized as an important California sculptor and was exhibited in major institutions alongside Donald Judd, Mark Di Suvero, Richard Serra, Sol LeWitt, Carl Andre, Frank Stella and his West Coast compatriots John McCracken, Robert Therrien, Chris Burden, DeWain Valentine and Bruce Nauman,
Kenneth Capps is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; the Oakland Museum, Storm King Art Center; the Alfred Schmela Sculpture Park in Dusseldorf, Germany; the Eli Broad Foundation in Los Angeles CA and Museum of Modern Art in New York City. This is Kenneth Capps’ first solo exhibition at Royale Projects in Indian Wells, a gallery renowned for its insight into the history of West Coast abstraction and its forward thinking vision of contemporary art.
November 26, 2011- Jan 22 2012
Opening Reception Date: Saturday November 26, 2011 4pm – 8pm
Young Artist David Allan Peters Lays it on Thick at Royale Projects
On Saturday November 26th Royale Projects will open the first solo exhibition by artist David Allan Peters at the gallery in Indian Wells. Peters crafts painstaking creations that, though definitively paintings, have as much in common with sculpture as they do with his chosen medium.
“My paintings are a collection of time captured in each layer” explains Peters of his works. Formed exclusively with acrylic paint, David Allan Peters applies countless sheathes of solid color which he then carves, chops, and assembles in ways that are unique to the time honored history of painting.
Replacing the brushstrokes, drips, stains, and splatters of conventional painterly marks, Peters consciously accentuates the physical attributes of the medium by employing excessive layers, severs, and scrapes as gestures.
In some cases deceptively minimal works are carefully excavated to expose implosions of color. Other pieces contain a baroque-like energy of hundreds or even thousands of tiny cuts that, at first, give the impression of a frenetic, expressionistic process but, upon deeper consideration, a rigorous practice in precision and perfection is revealed.
As Peters forms his works, the boundary between sculpture and painting is examined and dissolved as he recognizes potential in the by-products of each successive step. Discarded paint is then incorporated back into the pieces or amassed into nebulous three-dimensional objects that imply crystal- like compositions, once again alluding to the passage of time.
Peters received his MFA from Claremont Graduate University. He worked as a studio assistant to the revered abstract painter Karl Benjamin where he learned a way of perceiving color and a method of artistic approach that profoundly affected his practice. David Allan Peters has exhibited in New York, Texas, Georgia, California and Italy attracting the attention of collectors and curators Nation wide.
Royale Projects is a contemporary art gallery, located in the City of Indian Wells, that is renowned for its insight into the history of West Coast abstraction and its forward thinking vision of art today.
Elizabeth Orleans
Summer Project 2011
Royale Projects of Indian Wells presents the third annual summer project featuring work by
Los Angeles based artist Elizabeth Orleans.
Elizabeth Orleans has created a series of ambitious installation works that include hundreds, possibly thousands, of elements that collaborate with the indoor environment. These architectural interventions penetrate boundaries and explore movement, change, and the infinite possibility of time.
Already recognized as a talented artist she has been honored with exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Santa Rosa, CA and at the Museum of Craft & Folk Art in San Francisco. She was also recently selected to complete an installation at the internationally reputed collector, Susan Hancock’s Los Angeles art space Royal/T.
Elizabeth Orleans furthers the usage of her chosen medium, with her innovative installation works that are conceptually routed and skillfully executed. She chooses to work with ceramic art but is not confined by the history and tradition of the ancient craft. Her work at times can be seen as aggressive, imposing, and grotesque while simultaneously soft, beautiful, and sensuous, offering a dreamlike experience to the viewer.
This installation opens July 2nd and will continue to “grow” as the artist adds to and changes the works through out the summer. In the fall the public will be invited back to view the final works of art.
FIRED! contemporary perspectives on ceramics
April 2011
Clay is a medium almost as old as dirt itself. California has a rich history of innovators in ceramic art such as; Peter Voulkos, Robert Arneson, Viola Frey, and Kenneth Price. “FIRED! contemporary perspectives on ceramics”, opening at Royale Projects in Indian Wells this Friday April 15, explores the medium through the work of California–based contemporary artists; Elizabeth Orleans, Maberry & Walker, and Stephanie Bachiero. The exhibition observes the way these artists create within this time honored tradition and continue to push the boundaries.
Elizabeth Orleans collaborates with indoor environments to create architectural interventions. Though abstract, her works are often referential to organic forms and the human body. Recognized as a skilled craftsperson with exhibitions at Museum of Craft & Folk Art in San Francisco and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Santa Rosa, CA, she furthers the usage of the medium with installation works that are conceptually routed in the exploration of relationships, growth, and vitality.
Phillip Maberry & Scott Walker are known for their eccentric, intensely colorful style associated with the ‘Pattern and Decoration" movement of the late 70s and early 80s. Maberry and Walker continue a 25 year investigation of constructed figurative forms, with a playful & contemporary approach. Honored as participants of the 1983 Whitney Biennial, Their work is included in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, St. Louis Museum of Art, the Newark Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
The pure, minimalist forms of Stephanie Bachiero create a sensual push/pull tension representative of the enduring challenges of the human mind and body. With less than four years of exhibition history behind her, she has already been exhibited at Laguna Art Museum in California, The Smithsonian International Gallery in Washington D.C., and recently was shown at the Armory Show in New York.
Alejandro Diaz: The Townhouse
March 2011
In 2003, Diaz earned an international reputation with an ongoing performance piece called Breakfast Tacos at Tiffany’s, in which the artist made and sold cardboard signs to passers-by in front of Tiffany & Co. in New York. He later created a series of text-based works in neon that similarly explore themes of class and culture.
The works in this exhibition include a return to painting, sculpture, and collage. Like his politically charged and wryly humorous signs, these new works are emblematic of his ongoing involvement with art as a form of entertainment, as artworld critique, and as social intervention.
Alejandro Diaz has exhibited at the Jersey City Museum, NJ; The Brooklyn Museum of Art, NY; The Los Angeles County Museum, CA; Museo Rufino Tamayo, Mexico City; Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, AZ; and the Aldridge Contemporary Art Museum, CT. Diaz has had public installations in New York, NY and San Antonio, TX. His work is included in the permanent collections of the Fundacion Jumex, El Museo del Barrio and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. This is Alejandro Diaz’ first solo exhibition at Royale Projects.
March 4th 2011, Royale Projects will dedicate the gallery to artist David Buckingham.
Artist talk and reception Saturday March 5 at 4pm
“In good California-assemblage, Buckingham renders his panels from found and welded metal, incorporating the rusty tints and textures and the oddly sweet colors of mid-century tin cans and car parts into everything from minimalist abstractions to evocations of folk quilts to wise-ass signage…Buckingham’s formula is as flatfooted as they come, and that only enhances the bad-boy charm of the resulting hyper-plaques,” – Peter Frank in LA Weekly.
SO MUCH DEPENDS: guest curator Charlotte Eyerman
January 2011
curator talk: Sat Feb 19 2011 1pm
An exhibition built around artists who use text to create new realities. Inspired by the first line of a strikingly visual poem by William Carlos Williams, known as “The Red Wheelbarrow”, SO MUCH DEPENDS observes how artists can construct a vivid world using very few words. Charlotte Eyerman is a curator and art historian based in Los Angeles (former director of Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills / former Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, Saint Louis Art Museum) brings the exhibition to Royale Projects as the first guest curator to work with the gallery.
Exhibiting Artist
Tom Friedman
Tom Friedman’s witty conceptualism registers in this show in this new installation of 20 drawings. “Untitled (Critique)” 2010) channels disbelieving viewers using aphorisms drawn from the vernacular—and our current day culture wars: “This is garbage.” “This is why I hate art.” “I could do this.” Friedman has said, with his characteristic philosophical wryness that he makes art to “slow down the process of looking” in our information-saturated world. This work, like Friedman’s art in general invites the viewer to pose serious questions and to laugh at the world while doing so.
Sarah Frost
Sarah Frost was born in Detroit and grew up in Rochester, NY. She received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting from Washington University in St. Louis and a Master of Fine Arts degree in sculpture from Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville. Frost’s work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions regionally, and she has her first show in New York in 2010. She has also received numerous awards and grants, including the inaugural Riverfront Times’ Visual Arts Mastermind award in 2008 and grants from Arts in Transit and the Missouri Arts Council. Most recently she won the Great Rivers Biennial 2010, a grant funded by the Gateway Foundation and solo exhibition at Contemporary Art Museum Saint Louis. She currently lives and works in St. Louis.
Rob Reynolds
Rob Reynolds lives and works in Los Angeles and has exhibited work at The Wexner Center; The Katonah Museum; Gagosian Gallery, Los Angeles; Khastoo Gallery, Los Angeles; Happy Lion, Los Angeles; ROVE New York/London; The Basel Art Fair; Threadwaxing Space; Printed Matter at DIA; The Whitney Museum ISP; Bell Gallery, Brown University, and elsewhere. His photographic work has been published in Blind Spot, Spin and George magazines. Rob was art editor of FEED Magazine and taught literature and documentary studies at Harvard University. Previously, he played in the noise band Dung Beetle. Rob graduated from Brown University, (BA Art and Semiotics 90’), and completed the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program (92’), previously studying at The Boston Museum School, and The School of Art Architecture and Planning, Cornell University. Rob was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1968.
David Buckingham
David Buckingham roams the windblown alleys, abandoned factories, gritty industrial areas, dodgy neighborhoods, and low deserts of Southern California in search of the cast away, the discarded, the forgotten: old 55-gallon barrels, wheelbarrows, tool boxes, road signs, tractor parts, car doors, gas cans, etc. These battered relics are carted to a dusty studio in downtown Los Angeles where they are muscled into works of art with a bewildering array of power tools and sheer force of will. All colors are original as found; David Buckingham is no painter.
Ian Weaver
Ian Weaver’s work, which engages ideas of lost personal and community history, examines notions of alterity, power, and culture with the use of constructed history. It is informed by ethnography, anthropology, African-American and European history, and museology. The concept of a non-linear history, of a fractured narrative, is an important aspect of the work – it points to the fragmentation and death of existing information. Ian Weaver has approached this re-imaging of history as a process of visual layering; these disparate objects, artifacts, documents, and ephemera gain their power within the context of the larger project. They tell a story that occupies a certain time period, but travels backward and forward into and out of our time.
JonMarc Edwards
JonMarc Edwards’ latest body of work can best be described as “Deep Pop.” Utilizing images, attitudes and strategies of well-founded popular culture and myths, JonMarc goes deeper into the underlying impulses and desires that drive our common pleasures. Jonmarc says of his new work, “As we become more alike, we struggle to be more diverse, articulate, acute.” JonMarc Edwards has exhibited at Carl Berg Galley, Newspace Los Angeles, Deborah Colton Gallery, Houston, Westwood Gallery, New York, Apex Art, New York, Art Affairs Gallerie, Amsterdam, NDL.
Timothy Ernst
Finding beauty in the banality of every day urban existence, Timothy Ernst explores the sensational and attractive reflections of facile city life. Ernst’s multiple medium practice draws its influence equally from the “anti-art” artists born the decade previous to him, such as Jack Pierson, Tim Noble and Sue Webster, and from the early pioneers of West Coast Minimalism such as James Turrell, Robert Irwin and Craig Kauffman. In his paintings, Timothy Ernst prefers to create the illusion of light instead of light illusions. He embraces the “low brow” tools and street ideology of punk rock, graffiti art, and of Southern California’s Kustom Car Culture and utilizes, reduction, subtle humor, the decorative, and the artificial to accomplish a new visual language. The signage sculptures are an extension of his discovery into contemporary human experience. Reconfiguring letters taken from found signs, Ernst creates simple words, giving intimate meaning to the commercial text. His work mines our chaotic and unnatural world addressing the obvious and creating meditative moments out of the space in between.
download Exhibition Overview
KARL BENJAMIN: under the influence
November 2010
In·flu·ence -the capacity or power of persons or things to be a compelling force on or produce effects on the actions, behavior, opinions, etc., of others.
As New York action painting — the Abstract Expressionism of Jackson Pollock, Willem DeKooning, Franz Kline, and Robert Motherwell — began to fall out of vogue toward the end of the 1950s, a group of West Coast painters offered a bracingly cool new style. Soon, California artist, Karl Benjamin (b. 1925), emerged as one of the most consistent and influential painters, working in Hard Edge Abstraction, also known as Abstract Classicism.
His fresh ideas, new techniques, and dynamic color relationships captured the spirit of his day, as well as the imagination of so many artists in the decades that followed. Indeed, the influence of Karl Benjamin surfaces in the work of many of today’s most progressive painters.
Tim Bavington (b. 1966) — whose work is in numerous important collections, from the Museum of Modern Art in New York to the Palm Springs Art Museum in California— refines and reworks the aesthetics of Benjamin’s stripe paintings, drawing a deeper, conceptual meaning. Utilizing current technologies and referencing popular culture, Bavington re-contextualizes the work in present time.
Benjamin taught Alex Couwenberg (b. 1967) at Claremont Graduate School, opening him to the idea that one mark dictates the next and one color calls to the artist as he adds the previous color. Couwenberg, honored in 2007 with the prestigious Joan Mitchell Foundation Award, creates meticulously crafted works that follow this intuitive painting style.
David Allan Peters (b. 1969) was a studio assistant to Benjamin. In that time, the young artist learned a way of perceiving color that profoundly affected his practice. He carves away his pristine white, glossy black, and reflective silver surfaces to reveal dozens and dozens of thin, vibrant, colorful layers of paint below the surface.
The exhibition KARL BENJAMIN: under the influence, which opens November 27 at Royale Projects in Indian Wells, explores the work and the significance of the pioneering abstract painter. Viewing his paintings in context with three artists of today’s generation demonstrates Benjamin’s enduring impact on contemporary art.
Opening simultaneously
(Rick Royale and Phillip K Smith lll)
PHILLIP K SMITH III
November 2010
“Beauty is not a thing-“the beautiful” is a thing” – David Hickey (art critic/writer)
It is easy to be impressed by the work of Phillip K Smith III. In his Aperture installation at the Palm Springs Art Museum (on view until December 19th. 2010) you can imagine the days spent sprawled over a computer designing the object. You can envision the intricacy and technology involved in perfectly cutting 700 pieces of acrylic to fit together like a complex, three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle, or the sequencing and programming of a series of over a thousand tiny Light Emitting Diodes. You can visualize the countless hours it takes the artist and his assistants to complete the 7 foot tall, 24 foot long piece of art. But, when you are face to face with Aperture the only thing you see is “the beautiful”.
“Aperture is about beauty” Phillip K Smith III states, “It is about the sublime visual experience that causes pleasure.” Like standing at the edge of the Grand Canyon or looking at the subtle movement of the clouds, Smith III seeks to find that instant that unites the design, labor, and engineering of an object or space into a single, unique, moment of awe, making all of what was invested into the creation of the work disappear.
In the artist’s third solo exhibition at Royale Projects, opening November 27th 2010, he draws inspiration from the colors and growth patterns of native flora and fauna. He finds equal motivation in the distillation of form, shape, and experience created by artists such as modernist, Constantin Brancusi, minimalist, Sol LeWitt, and the California Light and Space artist, James Turrell. Phillip K Smith III presents a series of works associated to the study of his Aperture installation. These works further delve into the artist’s aspiration to merge the precision and purity of geometry with the immeasurable organic qualities of the hand and nature.
OUTSIDE THE LINES: drawing in contemporary art
October 2010
Drawings render inspiration into the visible. They are are the basis of visual thinking. Drawings can be blueprints or designs for larger objects. They can be the seed of an idea that, through deeper exploration, will grow into something completely different. Some drawings are both a beginning and an end unto themselves.
OUTSIDE THE LINES is the first exhibition of Royale Projects’ 2010-2011 season. It explores the drawing in contemporary art and exposes the artist’s broad definition of the word. OUTSIDE THE LINES features work by Kenneth Capps, John Clement, Tony DeLap, Alejandro Diaz, Dennis Koch, Sol LeWitt, Dennis Oppenheim, David Allan Peters, Kenneth Price, and Debra Scacco.
Jane Callister : Tastes like Pink…Smells like Burning
Summer Project 2010
Jane Callister has been included in numerous museum exhibitions from the Albright Knox to the Laguna Art Museum. She was invited to participate in the “Prague Biennial”, at Veletrzni Palace Museum of Contemporary Artand the “California Biennial,” at the Orange County Museum of Art. She is featured in the “Vitamin P – new perspectives in painting”, a global survey of contemporary painters, and is recognized as one of the top California artists along side Ed Ruscha, Paul McCarthy, and Raymond Pettibone in the book “LA Artland: Contemporary Art From Los Angeles”.
Best known as a painter, In her current installation at Royale Projects, Jane Callister digs deeper into the psychological terrain of her own abstraction. Shetransforms one of her 2 dimensional works into an environment full of representational objects such as a whirlwind of scribbles emanating from a giant, velvet, black eyeliner pencil and satin covered soft-sculpture rocks.
“Tastes Like Pink… Smells Like Burning” references synesthesia, a neurological phenomenon whereby it’s sufferers see sounds and taste colors. Callister’s multifaceted installation alerts us to the fragility of the mind’s ability to accurately translate sensory experiences into a coherent inhabitable terrain. It also suggests that the extreme colors and dreamlike landscapes, which she has become known for, are emotionally charged rather than merely a psychedelic aesthetic brought with her from her time in the neon infused desert of Las Vegas where she studied with famed professor, curator, and writer David Hickey.
Helen Pashgian
April 2010
Helen Pashgian ’56 is a Pioneer Light and Space artist, a member of the small group of Southern California artists who coalesced in the 1960s around the use of industrial materials, which offered unique optical and color possibilities. Technically innovative, Pashgian continues her rigorous exploration of the spatial qualities of color in light. The early resin work of 1968 and 1969 introduced Pashgian as a sculptor of light and one of the L.A. Light and Space artist. Artists such as Peter Alexander, Larry Bell, Robert Irwin, Craig Kauffman, James Turrell, DeWain Valentine, Doug Wheeler, and Helen Pashgian shared an interest in new materials, new industrial processes, and new modes of hypersensitive seeing. In the 1960’s this segment of the Southern California art scene was first dubbed the L..A. Glass and Plastic School, and then the Light and Space Movement. Individually they explored the perceptual effects of light in space, testing the limits of luminosity and the possibilities of immateriality with industrial materials such as cast acrylic, resin and glass.
DENNIS OPPENHEIM : splash buildings
February 2010
The name Dennis Oppenheim has become synonymous with some of the most exciting and avant-garde contemporary art movements of the last half century. Emerging as a pioneer of Earthworks in the late 1960s, he has pursued an adventurous career in body and performance art, film and video, as well as sculpture and installation. Continuing his examination of macrocosm and microcosm, Oppenheim’s most recent work focuses on the atmospheric fusion of architecture and sculpture. By creating objects that can be quickly grasped by the viewer while forcing a shift in scale, he miniaturizes the human experience, challenging a change in perception of both the object and the self.
Dennis Oppenheim’s newest series of work, Splash Buildings (2009) depict giant tear drops crashing and bursting upward into a forms that create exterior structures conceptualized and designed as buildings reaching forty stories high. The Splash Buildings were on display at the Frank Gehry designed Marta Herford Museum, in Germany last year. The work then traveled to one of the most important archeological sites of Southern Italy, Scolacium, where a collision of ancient architecture and visionary contemporary art occurred. This year three, sixty five foot tall, Splash Buildings, animated by LEDs, are being installed at the entrance way to Huston, Texas as one leaves the international airport.
Royale Projects is staging an indoor/outdoor exhibition with a series of drawings that are studies for the Splash Buildings and sculptural works that tower as high as 15 feet.
Dennis Oppenheim is in the permanent collections of over 100 major museums worldwide including the Tate Gallery in London, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, LACMA and MOCA in Los Angeles, and the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. This is the first solo exhibition of Dennis Oppenheim’s work at Royale Projects.
JOHN BALDESSARI: why borrow when you can steal
January 2010
John Baldessari became known for integrating found images and texts from the advertising and film industries into his art work, distilling the aesthetics of the Pop Art movement and concentrating the ideas. He scavenges images that nobody wants. Stills taken from movies that never made it, photographs found in dumpsters behind photo equipment stores, or pictures collected at garage sales are reduced, combined, and re-worked to reawaken the intrigue of the image. By juxtaposing seemingly unrelated images, obstructing faces or other important characteristics, often instilling subtle humor, the viewer is challenged to find meaning and context. Searching his work for significance, we instinctively create deeper connections in our minds.
John Baldessari is one of the most influential conceptual artists of his time. His art has been featured in more than 200 solo exhibitions in the U.S. and Europe and is in the permanent collections of major museums worldwide. This year he was awarded a Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Biennale. A traveling retrospective began at the Tate Modern in London, travelling to the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, over the next two years..
John Baldessari: Why Borrow When You Can Steal at Royale Projects explores the artist’s usage of the printmaking medium in his photo based works. Featuring iconic pieces from the nineteen eighties through to the current decade, you will see how Baldessari seizes preexisting images, and by altering their meaning, re-defines and gives them an entirely new identity.
ALEX COUWENBERG: waimea
November 2009
Alex Couwenberg, who was honored with the prestigious Joan Mitchell Foundation Award in 2007, continues to expand his visual lexicon in a solo exhibition of new work at Royale Projects. The Los Angeles Times recently described his paintings as “sleek, multilayered, spatially sophisticated compositions”, but these words barely scratch the meticulously finished surface.
Comparisons to the renown Abstract Classicists of the midcentury are inevitable. This is in part due to the influence of his long time mentor Karl Benjamin and in part due to his dedication to the perfection and progression of the techniques innovated by post war painters such as Karl Benjamin and Lorser Feitelson. Alex Couwenberg has as much in common, in his sensitivity to pure aesthetic, with revered contemporary California artist Chuck Arnoldi. Alex Couwenberg, like Arnoldi, boldly and deliberately crafts “beautiful” paintings and in doing so has created a visual language that is undeniably his own singular voice.
The new body of work in Waimea introduces large canvases covered in wide expanses of meditative, monochrome, suddenly broken by dense, chaotic layers of hard edge design. As if his work is a series of abstract semiotic studies, these intrusions of amorphic shapes, luxuriant textures, and slick pin-striping allude to deep rooted icons of West Coast culture.
This year Alex Couwenberg’s paintings have been added to the permanent collections of the Laguna Art Museum and the Claremont Museum of Art. Waimea is the first solo exhibition for Alex Couwenberg at Royale Projects.
LE PETIT OBJET
October 2009
James Dean is famously quoted as saying “there are no small parts, only small actors”, the same can be said for works of art. In a recent documentary, Herb & Dorothy, (a film by Megumi Sasaki awarded “Best of Fest” at the Palm Springs International Film Festival ) the film chronicles a couple that builds, one tiny piece at a time, what has now become one of the world’s most important collections of contemporary art. This librarian and postal worker collected with only two rules: each piece had to be affordable, and it had to be small enough to fit in their one-bedroom Manhattan apartment.
Collecting small may be one thing but what about creating small? Artists often employ scale to generate drama and impact prompting the question; can the same reaction be fashioned if the artist is bound to Herb and Dorothy’s two rules?
Le Petit Objet is the first exhibition of the 2009-2010 season at Royale Projects and will feature many of the artists that were shown last season as well as a number of new artists that will be exhibited in the upcoming months. All of the works will be affordable and no work will be larger than 2 feet square, so they can easily fit into your home, even if it is a swank little New York Apartment.
Artists:
John Baldessari, Stephanie Bachiero, Jane Callister, Kenneth Capps, John Clement, Janet Corne, Alex Couwenberg, Tony DeLap, Alejandro Diaz, Adrienne Farb, Jimi Gleason, Robert Graham, Ewerdt Hilgemann, Israel Levitan, Pierre Obando, Helen Pashgian, David Allan Peters, Ed Ruscha, Phillip K Smith III
PHILLIP K SMITH III: suites + individual prints
Phillip K Smith III is releasing a new series of works on paper. The digital prints offer a number of his sculptural forms portrayed as line art. Creating these digital prints in monochrome focuses the eye of the viewer on the study of implied movement and transformation.
Phillip K Smith III continues to disregard the perceived boundaries of architecture, art and design. He draws inspiration from architects & artists such as Louis Kahn, Le Corbusier, Isamu Noguchi and Constantin Brâncuşi. Smith III attempts to achieve geometric purity while injecting an essence of humanity and warmth in to the cool, conceptual and aesthetic constrictions of modernist design.
Phillip K Smith III, Coachella Valley native, has been commissioned to create over half a dozen public art works, from California to Kansas City, in the last 3 years and was featured in the 2008 annual review in Art in America.
Saturday Sept 26 will be an event at Royale Projects to celebrate the release of the new work as well as marking the closing of “Line to Line”. This monumental Smith III sculpture filled the entire front space of Royale Projects through the summer. The sculpture towered 10 feet above the viewer.
PHILLIP K SMITH III: line to line
Summer Project 2009
How does a line become a line? Could a 2-dimensional mark describe a transformative 3-dimensional space? Challenged to answer these questions, Phillip K Smith III has created a monumental sculpture founded in both geometric purity and abstraction, in the process, this compelling form has exposed the possibility of an infinite space.
Phillip K Smith III explores and redefines the edges and intersections of fine art, architecture and design. Drawing inspiration from the cold rigidity of the Bauhaus movement and his personal passion for mid-century architecture, Smith III continues to push the boundaries and confront these ideals, attempting to resolve the complex challenge of finding a natural state of life and spirit within these conceptual aesthetic constrictions.
Phillip K Smith III has been commissioned to create over half a dozen monumental public art works from California to Kansas City in the last 3 years from and was featured in the 2008 annual review in Art in America. He is installing a 55 foot sculpture in LaVerne California this summer and will complete a piece in front of the Oklahoma City Hall and directly adjacent to the Oklahoma City Museum of Art in the spring of 2010.
Line to Line is an ambitions installation intended to move and inspire the viewer with it’s scale and formal beauty, marking Phillip K Smith III’s first solo exhibition at Royale Projects. Line to Line will be on view by appointment until the fall of 2009.
WEST/EAST: contemporary artists from the two coasts
April 2009
An exploration of artists of this generation actively working on the opposing edges of the Nation. Comparing and contrasting style, process, scale, medium, and concept, WEST/EAST asks the question… Does geography still play a part in determining what an artist creates today?
WEST: Jane Callister, Alex Couwenberg, Timothy Ernst, Jimi Gleason
EAST: John Clement, Alejandro Diaz, Adrienne Farb, Arthur Mednick, Pierre Obando
TONY DELAP: modern times
March 2009
Pushing the edges, often literally, of his primary disciplines, artist Tony Delap has dedicated close to half a century exploring the seam between sculpture and painting, merging the boarders of architecture, design and art, reducing to the most basic expression of form, shape, scale and color, while remaining devoted to the search for beauty in the creation of a simple object.
West Coast minimalist, Tony Delap has been an inspiration and mentor to some of California’s most revered artists. Bruce Nauman, James Turrell and John McCracken all blossomed under his tutelage. Along with artists such as Ellsworth Kelly, Tony Delap has set the path for generations of reductive artists, embracing the principles of limited color, geometry, precise craftsmanship, and intellectual rigor.
Work by Tony DeLap is included in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Tate Gallery in London, The Guggenheim Museum, The Hirshhorn Museum in Washington as well as many other prestigious institutions world wide. Along with numerous solo exhibitions, DeLap was included in several of the defining exhibitions of the mid century including; “Primary Structures” (The Jewish Museum, New York) “American Sculpture of the Sixties” (Los Angeles County Museum of Art) and “The Responsive Eye” (The Museum of Modern Art in New York)
Royale Projects is proud to present “TONY DELAP: modern times” (the title taken from a sculpture created in the mid nineteen sixties that anchors the exhibition), a brief survey of paintings, drawings, and sculptures from the sixties through the current decade that expose how Tony Delap continues to redefine “modern” by tweaking and mutating formalist ideals.
RUSCHA/WEGNER: pictures of the prosaic
January 2009
Royale Projects announces an exhibition that searches for beauty in the commonplace presenting photographs by two generations of American artists who embrace multiple mediums in their concept based work.
Born in 1937 Ed Ruscha’s work reflects the banality of life and the urban environment giving order to the barrage of images and information that confront us daily. Born 39 years after Ruscha, Peter Wegner explores similar themes, taking inventory of the unremarkable and classifying the perceptual experience, while approaching more directly the consequence of color and form.
Ruscha has been the subject of numerous museum exhibitions including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Centre Georges Pompidou, the Hirshhorn Museum, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Spain, The Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Ruscha was the United States representative at the 51st Venice Biennale in 2005.
Wegner’s work can be found in the permanent collections of the Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and The Yale University Art Gallery. In February 2008, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art unveiled a major new commission by Wegner.
OPEN: neon as a medium
December 2008
What happens when a spark of electrical current touches a rare, noble gas? Enlightenment. Since the earliest hours of contemporary art, the bravest and boldest artists have manipulated neon to express a concept. Generally used to seduce people into consuming, artists understand that neon is a medium that is in itself a statement, carrying an impact even before expressing their deeper ideas. Robert Rauschenberg, James Rosenquist, Keith Sonnier, Bruce Nauman, Tracey Emin, Zhang Dali, and many of the biggest names in art from the mid century forward have used neon to convey their message. “OPEN”, The inaugural exhibition at Royale Projects, the City of Indian Well’s first contemporary art gallery, is a survey of international artists who use neon as a medium. With works dating from the 1960s through today, this show focuses on pioneers of the medium such as Keith Sonnier, Maurizio Nannucci and Bruce Nauman as well as it looks at an adventurous new generation of artists such as Alejandro Diaz, Dan Attoe and Peter Wegner.
