What You're Told
16 January - 27 February, 2010
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NEW YORK – Jen Bekman Gallery is pleased to present What You're Told, six paintings on canvas and eleven works on paper by Clare Grill. What You're Told is Grill's New York City solo debut.
An opening reception will be held on Friday, January 15th, 2010 from 6:00 to 8:00 p.m. What You're Told will be on view Saturday, January 16th through Saturday, February 27th, at Jen Bekman Gallery, located at 6 Spring Street, New York, New York.
The works created for What You're Told encompass Grill's participation in the Bronx Museum's prestigious Artist in the Marketplace (AIM) program. Of her work, Bronx Museum of the Arts curator Micaela Giovannotti wrote:
Clare Grill's paintings dig up references from familiar histories, anecdotal imagery and make-believe. They are equally invested in exploring the formal tenets of painting and reinterpreting Grill's childhood memories. Translucent layers of paint evoke the shabby surfaces of indoor furniture and the covers of antique books as much as they evoke the disconsolate tales of a wandering minstrel.
Grill has chosen young students, still-lifes, campfires, televisions and nuns as her subjects. In the seventeen works on view, she deftly combines abstractions and gestural moments to construct loose narratives of rights of passage, both secular and sacred. As her color palette wavers between washed-out and burnt-in, stories form and fall apart. In The Overachievers, girls with braids and buns hunch diligently over unseen tasks, their thoughts shimmering halos above their heads. In Fast Forward Through The Love Scenes, a TV screen reveals fleshy tones and blurs actual figures. Part tricks of memory and part magical acts, people and things appear and disappear. It quickly becomes known that all that can be recreated from fading memories are ghostly abstractions of the past.
Clare Grill was born in Chicago and now lives and works in Queens. She studied in St. Paul, MN and received her MFA from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY. She has exhibited in numerous group shows throughout the US, at venues including The Bronx Museum and Islip Art Museum. She has participated in the Drawing Center's Viewing Program, Aljira's Emerge program and Vermont Studio Center's residency program. Her work was featured on the back cover of New American Paintings Vol. 68, and has been reviewed in The New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle and New Jersey's Star&ndashLedger. Grill has limited-edition prints available on 20x200.
Hey Hot Shot! 2009 Second Edition
6 March - 20 March, 2010
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Visual Aides
27 March - 8 May, 2010
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Marill finds inspiration in salvaged "visual aides," originally used in classrooms of the 1950s, which she reproduced and repurposed with gouache and modern influence.
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...Practice...
15 May - 27 June, 2010
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NEW YORK – Jen Bekman Gallery is pleased to present ...Practice..., thirty-seven photographs by Gregory Krum.
...Practice... is Krum’s first solo exhibition in New York. An opening reception will be held on Friday, May 14th, 2010, from 6:00 to 8:00 p.m. ...Practice... will be on view Saturday, May 15th, through Sunday, June 27th, at Jen Bekman Gallery, located at 6 Spring Street, New York, New York.
Titled after Gerhard Richter’s book The Daily Practice of Painting, ...Practice... embraces Richter’s convictions about art and art making. In a series of carefully grouped photographs, Krum explores the ways in which truth is derived simply by virtue of belief.
Photographs of tombstones, images of dust and sand, and a pair of enigmatic photos of flowers taken with the artist’s Blackberry hang alongside one another. Together they depict the ruminations of investigations, both elemental and expansive, and the search for the tangible entities that define the beliefs through which we find meaning in life and art.
Five still-lifes, evocative of Dutch interiors, illustrate more literally how objects often become vessels of life’s meaning. Finally, twenty-four small photographs - pinned in a grid to the wall by the artist - depict devotional offerings in varying states of decay. The repetition of these sculptural objects mimics the daily rituals that become symbols of belief. The artist\'s daily compulsion to create is rooted in the same faith that inspires the spiritual to practice these rituals.
Of Krum’s work, gallery founder Jen Bekman notes:
I cannot articulate what makes Greg's work so magical for me. That formal qualities and deep intellect inform his practice doesn't justify the way that it seems perfectly acceptable for me to allow his truths to serve as impostors for my own memories. But does that matter, really? Is memory about experience and belief, or an emotion?
Gregory Krum was born and raised in Portland, Oregon. He studied biology, sculpture and design at Portland State University and received an MA in studio art from New York University and the International Center for Photography. His work has appeared in Purple Magazine and has been exhibited at the Armory Show and Spencer Brownstone Gallery in New York and Soren Christiansen Gallery in New Orleans. He lives and works in Brooklyn and Hong Kong.
