ART LOS ANGELES CONTEMPORARY

13 – 16 FEBRUARY 2020

| PETER BLAKE GALLERY | LAGUNA BEACH CA | [email protected] | (949) 584-1224 | LITA ALBUQUERQUE “Light carries information” – Lita Albuquerque Since the early 1970s, Lita Albuquerque (b. 1946, Santa Monica, CA) has created an expansive body of work, ranging from sculpture, poetry, painting and multi-media performance to ambitious site- specific ephemeral projects in remote locations around the globe. Often associated with the Light and Space and Land Art movements, Albuquerque has developed a unique visual and conceptual vocabulary using the earth, color, the body, motion and time to illuminate identity as part of the universal.

She represented the United States at the Sixth International Cairo Biennale, where she was awarded the Biennale’s top prize. Albuquerque has also been the recipient of the National Science Foundation Artist Grant Program for the artwork, Stellar Axis: Antarctica, which culminated in the first and largest ephemeral artwork created on that continent, three NEA Art in Public Places awards, an NEA Individual Fellowship grant, a fellowship from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation and MOCA’s Distinguished Women in the Arts award.

Her work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Getty Trust, the Whitney Museum of American Art, LACMA and MOCA, among others. She is on the core faculty of the Fine Art Graduate Program at Art Center College of Design and currently lives and works in Santa Monica, California.

LITA ALBUQUERQUE UNTITLED 2019 24K Gold Leaf on Resin, Pigment on Panel 60 x 60 x 4 inches

PETER BLAKE GALLERY “Stephanie belongs to a younger generation of STEPHANIE BACHIERO artists who, looking back at the 1960s and ’70s, are inspired by minimalism and the Finish Fetish movement. She chose a hard-to-control medium that reflects the challenges she has had to face in her life, but she also brings intellectuality, a sense of playfulness and sensuality into her work.” — Grace Kook-Anderson, Curator of Contemporary Art, Laguna Art Museum 2011 Stephanie Bachiero (b. 1982) manipulates porcelain clay to form elegant, seemingly undulating, minimalist sculptures. Twisting and turning, her graceful abstractions have the deceptive appearance of weightlessness, grounding themselves through components of negative space and solid architectural structure. Many of her works appear to defy gravity from every angle; her forms push and pull, expand and contract, creating a tension that represents the tension present in the conscious mind and in the human body. In the lyrical forms of Bachiero’s work, it is impossible to separate out the artist’s personal narrative from the formal concerns of a contemporary sculptor. Bachiero views her sculptures as a way of thinking and communicating what she often cannot speak, since she suffered a severe head trauma in 2003 that impaired her cognitive and speech function. “Through sculpture I can restructure the life I lost intellectually,” she says. “I still have this isolation in my mind, but I can have conversations with the porcelain as it moves.” Bachiero’s sleek bronze and porcelain sculptures balance strength and fragility. Their refined, flowing forms mask the complexity of their creation, which requires fastidious attention to the material’s temperamental qualities. The process to discover these forms, and the various series and media which they have existed in, is part of an ongoing dialogue with form, logic, and limitation. Bachiero received her BA in Fine Art Studio STEPHANIE BACHIERO from Boston College in 2007 and has exhibited EVENNESS throughout the United States. Her work has been 2019 juried into the New York Armory Show and exhibited Bronze at the Laguna Art Museum and the Smithsonian Edition 2/8 Institution in Washington, D.C. 9.5 x 9.5 x 6 inches

PETER BLAKE GALLERY STEPHANIE BACHIERO HELIX 2020 Engineered Aerospace Composite 24 x 22 x 22 inches

PETER BLAKE GALLERY Judy Chicago (b. 1939, Chicago) is an artist, author, JUDY CHICAGO feminist, and educator whose career spans over five decades. Since 1996, she has lived in Belen, New Mexico, where her nonprofit arts organization, Through The Flower, is headquartered and where an art space and resource center is being established.

Synonymous with early feminist art, Judy Chicago has been challenging the male-dominated art world since the 1970s. Her characteristically colorful body of work includes paintings, tapestries, sculpture, and mixed-media installations celebrating women’s achievements. Chicago legally assumed the name of her hometown after becoming a widow at the age of 23, symbolizing her lifelong struggle with identity, which she chronicles in Through the Flower: My Struggle as a Woman Artist (1975). In homage to 1,038 women central to the history of Western civilization, Chicago’s most celebrated work, The Dinner Party (1974-79), exemplifies her ongoing endeavor as an artist, educator, and author to elevate women from the margins of society and history. The work—on permanent display at The Brooklyn Museum—features 39 place settings meant to represent famous women from history, from Joan of Arc to Emily Dickinson, with a further 999 names inscribed on the floor.

The Schlesinger Library, Penn State, and National Museum of Women in the Arts recently collaborated to launch the Judy Chicago Visual Archive at the Schlesinger Library at Harvard.

Recent museum exhibitions include The End: A Meditation on Death and Extinction, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington D.C. (2019–2020); Judy Chicago: A Reckoning, ICA Miami, Miami, FL (2018–2019); Roots of The Dinner Party: History in the Making, Brooklyn Museum, JUDY CHICAGO Brooklyn, NY (2018); and Inside the Dinner Party IRIDESCENT DOMES #2 Studio, National Museum of Women in the Arts, 1968 Washington, D.C. (2017–2018). Sprayed acrylic inside successive formed clear acrylic domes 2 x 5 inches each

PETER BLAKE GALLERY Gisela Colon (American, b. 1966 Vancouver, GISELA COLON Canada, raised 1967 San Juan, Puerto Rico) is a contemporary artist who has developed a practice of Organic Minimalism, an idiosyncratic sculptural language imbuing life-like qualities into reductive forms. Oscillating between masculine and feminine, primitive and futuristic, liquid and solid, fecund and phallic, inert and biological, Colon’s objects possess a confluence of polarities that take the minimal object to a new frontier, a new world where the man-made becomes alive in a post-human ontological reality.

Colon approaches her sculptural practice from the expansive perspective of phenomenological concerns, addressing physical laws of the universe such as gravity, time, movement, energy and transformation. Colon’s vocabulary of organic forms and humanized geometries, embody a feeling of energy, movement and growth, that stems in a broader sense from the artist’s connection to the Earth, the vital energy that pervades all living organisms, and the extensive, infinite forces that rule the cosmological realm.

Colon’s oeuvre is the result of a synthesis of pointed historical reflection and pure visceral raw energy. Colon’s practice of Organic Minimalism simultaneously expands and challenges the legacies of Light and Space, Minimalism and Latin American Op and Kinetic Art, merging industrial inertness with transformative biological mutability. Her sensual, gender-ambiguous sculptural forms further connect her practice to a history of female artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Yayoi Kusama, Linda Benglis and Judy Chicago. By channeling Bourgeois’ notions of sexualized energies and Chicago’s nascent feminist atmospheric works, Colon similarly posits her sculptures as vehicles for conversion of classic masculine forms into feminized power.

Colon’s merger of scientifically advanced technologies and materials with naturally-occurring GISELA COLON in vita properties places her squarely in the current SUPER ELLIPSOID (PALLADIUM) international discourse of contemporary sculpture. 2019 Contemporaries such as Olafur Eliasson, Alicja Blow-Molded Acrylic Kwade, Jose Davila, and other practitioners, 23 x 58 x 12 inches alongside Colon, integrate the use of ubiquitous industrial materials of the Anthropocene era with the palpable tension of the laws of physics that pervade the invisible world around us.

PETER BLAKE GALLERY Best known for her exploration of radiant and MARY CORSE interactive surfaces and her innovative technique of painting, Mary Corse first gained recognition for her involvement in the Light and Space movement in 1960s Southern California, along with James Turrell, Robert Irwin, and Douglas Wheeler. Like many of these artists, Corse rejected Abstract Expressionist practices of using accident and relinquishing intention in the application of pigment, favoring instead the controlled formal geometry of Minimalism. As the viewer moves or surrounding light conditions alter, Corse’s works seem to shift subtly, creating a complex spatial and temporal dynamic. As the artist herself eloquently said, “Where there is space, there is time.”

MARY CORSE UNTITLED 1999 Glass Microspheres in Acrylic on Canvas 36 x 96 inches

PETER BLAKE GALLERY Since the 1970s, Marcia Hafif (1929–2018) has MARCIA HAFIF been committed to process-oriented monochrome painting, working in a range of hues on serialized colored canvases that continue the medium- specific advances made by such forebears as Robert Rauschenberg, Alexander Rodchenko, and Robert Ryman. Based in Southern California, Hafif seeks to highlight the essential qualities of both paint and color, favoring an approach that is more exploratory and deconstructive than reductionist. Hafif contends that she is not breeding sameness but similarity, as she attempts to answer questions through repetition. The artist mixes her own oil paints, which are less consistent than commercial versions and enable her to create subtle gradients and tensions among hues. Although she is best known for her monochromes, a steady observational style also permeates her photographs, videos, and text-based work.

MARCIA HAFIF ALIZARIN CRIMSON, FEBRUARY 14 2000 Oil on Canvas 16 x 16 inches

PETER BLAKE GALLERY MARCIA HAFIF CAPUT MORTUUM LIGHT, AUGUST 19 2000 Oil on Canvas 30 x 26 inches

PETER BLAKE GALLERY Helen Pashgian (b. 1934) is a pioneer and pre- HELEN PASHGIAN eminent member of the Light and Space movement. Her signature forms include columns, discs and spheres in delicate and rich coloration, often with an isolate element appearing suspended, embedded or encased within. Developed through innovative applications of industrial epoxies, plastics and resins, Pashgian’s semi-translucent surfaces seem to filter and contain illumination. Activated by light, these sculptures resonate in form and spatiality both inner and outer.

Helen Pashgian was an artist in residence at the California Institute of Technology from 1970–71. She received a National Endowment of the Arts Individual Artist Grant in 1986. In 2013, she was a recipient of the MOCA’s Award to Distinguished Women in the Arts.

She was included in Pacific Standard Time: Cross Currents in L.A. Painting and Sculpture, 1950-1970 at The Getty Center, the related Pacific Standard Time exhibition Phenomenal: California Light, Space, Surface at The Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, and was the subject of a major solo exhibition, Helen Pashgian: Light Invisible, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art during the spring of 2014.

HELEN PASHGIAN UNTITLED (ELLIPTICAL SPHEROID) 1969 Cast Polyester Resin and Acrylic 3.75 x 7 inches

PETER BLAKE GALLERY