BJÖRN MEYER-EBRECHT
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The Politics of Architecture, 2017
Vintage cloth book cover, colored pencil, graphite, mounted on archival museum board
19 x 21.25 in. (48.5 x 54 cm)
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The Way Life Was, 2017
Vintage cloth book cover, colored pencil, graphite, mounted on archival museum board
18.25 x 19 in. (46.5 x 48.5 cm)
BJöRN MEYER-EBRECHT
Lives and works in New York
ARTIST BIO
Björn Meyer-Ebrecht (b. 1974) is a multi-disciplinary artist whose practice extends from sculpture and installation to large-scale drawing. From these different vantage points, he examines the meaning of physical space in art and architecture- historically and in the present– and its relationship to communal interaction. Born in Hamburg, Germany, the artist has been based in New York City since 2000. After graduating from the University for the Arts in Berlin in 1999, he received his MFA from Hunter College in New York in 2002. He has had solo or two-person shows, including Galerie Susanne, Neuerburg Hennef Germany, Matjö, Cologne Germany, Matteawan Gallery, Storefront TenEyck, and Owen James Gallery in New York.
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Categories: artists
Tags: Björn Meyer-Ebrecht
PICASSO, WELCOME TO AMERICA
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Madison Ave New York
Picasso, Welcome to America
June 15 – September 27, 2023
R.C. Baker
Brandon Ballengée
Romare Bearden
Deborah Buck
Shijia Chen
Billy Copley
Eileen Foti
Björn Meyer-Ebrecht
Jaye Moon
Pablo Picasso
André Raffray
Janet Taylor Pickett
Zhang Hongtu
Every artist since the early 20th century has been influenced by Pablo Picasso. The protean painter/ sculptor/ printmaker/ ceramicist helped define what “modern” art once was – and is still becoming. In 1939, MoMA’s staff was gathering 300 works by the world’s “most famous living artist” (according to the museum’s press release) for Picasso: Forty Years of His Art. A centerpiece of the exhibit was Guernica, his grisaille mural decrying the destruction of the small Basque town by Nazi bombers, in 1937.
Along with Michelangelo and Rembrandt, the name Picasso (1881-1973) has become a synonym – a cliché, even – for “artist.” But none of the artists in Picasso, Welcome to America see the Spanish-born titan as an old hat. Instead, these ten Americans find in the European trailblazer constant inspiration and ongoing challenge. Zhang Hongtu imagines Chairman Mao exposed by glaring illumination similar to the all-seeing lantern in Guernica. Jaye Moon also reimagines Picasso’s anti-war masterpiece, in When Bob Dylan Meets Picasso, Guernica – using Lego bricks in Braille rather than paint.
The bodies and masks in another Picasso touchstone, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), come under scrutiny from Eileen Foti and André Raffray through substitution and homage. Billy Copley finds masks in unlikely surroundings, while Janet Taylor Pickett moves effigies aside to place her powerful female figure at center stage. Deborah Buck turns Picasso’s infamously harsh male gaze around, painting surreal figures that might be asking, “Who’s crying now?” In Weary of Treading the Earth, from 1945, Romare Bearden, working in watercolor and ink rather than his later signature collage, energizes cubist space with a circus-like palette. R.C. Baker riffs beyond Picasso’s Blue and Rose periods through primary-colored aluminum printing plates. Björn Meyer-Ebrecht’s dynamic wood and enamel sculpture strips the figure to cubist angles and voids, while Brandon Ballengée searches for animals that, like Picasso’s minotaurs, are no longer with us. Original works by Pablo Picasso will also be on view, commemorating the 50th anniversary of his death.
All of the artists in this exhibition have been influenced by Picasso’s experiments with form and perspective – his breaking of traditional and academic rules. Some of the work here also comments on his darker side, while other pieces engage with the social and political aspects of Picasso’s art. Ultimately, these ten contemporary artists in Picasso, Welcome to America appreciate the formal and aesthetic complexity of a constant innovator. This great artist was effectively barred from ever visiting the United States because he was a member of the French Communist Party. But the joke was on the Feds – Picasso has been in America all along.
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Categories: exhibitions
Tags: André Raffray Billy Copley Björn Meyer-Ebrecht Brandon Bellengee Deborah Buck Eileen Foti Janet Taylor Pickett Jaye Moon Kathy Grove Pablo Picasso RC Baker Romare Bearden Zhang Hongtu
PITCHES & SCRIPTS
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Pocket MonstersTM Strobe, 2000
Gouache on color laser copy and collage
16 3/4 x 10 7/8 in.
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Weed whacker, 2002
Inkjet on paper
11 x 9 in.
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#15 (Card Series 2), 2006
Pencil on paper
4.25 x 3 in.
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Untitled (Fountain), 2019
Ink and tape on paper
88 x 88 1/2 in.
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Dresses Akimbo (Blue Sky), 2015
Acrylic, vintage photos, inkjet print, collages on paper
8 x 7 in.
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Long Live Mao, solo, 1987
Acrylic on found Quaker Oats cereal box
9.75 x 5.25 in.
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Idiomatica, 2002
Acrylic, sewing, inkjet print, collages on paper
11 x 14 in.
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Louise Bourgeois, 2002
Acrylic, pen, pencil, inkjet print, sewing, collages on paper
11 x 17 in.
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Caffeinated, 2002
Inkjet print, sewing, collages on paper
12 x 18 in.
PITCHES & SCRIPTS
January 20 – March 11, 2023
Jennifer Baahng Gallery is pleased to present PITCHES & SCRIPTS, a group exhibition of works on paper. On view are ink and graphite drawings, collages, inkjet prints and sewed surfaces produced from the 1980’s through 2020. In pooling together six artists, the exhibition pitches a fermentation of ideas, technologies, and political stances that connote rupture and disintegration, while scripting growth, movement and new life. PITCHES & SCRIPTS runs from January 20 through March 11, 2023, with its opening reception on Friday, January 20, 6 – 8 PM.
The spectral presence of history suffuses the work of Janet Taylor Pickett and Zhang Hongtu. Blackness is a “declarative statement” for Janet Taylor Pickett (b. 1948), whose works, as ongoing visual poems, probe personal and collective memory. Dresses Akimbo, on view, elaborates upon the symbolism of that gesture: a stance of power, bewilderment, and love. A forerunner of Chinese Political Pop Art whose work engages a multilayered discourse, Zhang Hongtu (b. 1943) asserts themes of dislocation, national identity, propaganda, and politics in the Long Live Mao series, which is equal parts whimsical and profound.
Idiomerica by Sharon Butler (b. 1959) was catalyzed by the artist’s move from New York City to the suburbs. The works investigate the visual grammar of capitalist suburban Americana through video animations, text projects, digital drawings, and the resulting tendencies of reductive art. Conversely, moving from the Midwest to New York City, Jeff Gabel (b. 1968) developed Short Fiction Sketches in scribbly and smudge tone drawings. The works externalize the imagination of a solitary artist inducted into a sea of uncanny urban experiences.
The Terminal Century by R.C. Baker (b. 1960) seethes with existential angst, as painted and collaged elements tremor with disruption and discordance, while also pointing to the beauty nestled in such moments of ostensive entropy. Similarly responding to a post-War world order, Bjorn Meyer-Ebrecht (b. 1972), makes ink drawings at a monumental scale, creating a pictorial architecture in ink that displays luminous materiality. In their rich, textured surfaces, the works included push the pictorial plane from drawing into painting.
PITCHES & SCRIPTS assembles the memories of the artists at a formative historical moment, and inquires how art shapes history by responding to cultural shifts or by instigating them itself. As we are flung—‘pitched’—into the future, the exhibition looks to this collection of work for a loose, dynamic script for how to narrativize ourselves in the present. PITCHES & SCRIPTS renders a ‘soft landing’ for our launch into the new year.
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Categories: exhibitions
Tags: Björn Meyer-Ebrecht Janet Taylor Pickett Jeff Gabel RC Baker Sharon Butler Zhang Hongtu