William Turner speaks with Curtis Ripley in his Mar Vista studio
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AllTogetherNow - A Video Message from William Turner
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William Turner Speaks with William S. Burroughs for Venice Magazine 1993
As part of our programming for AllTogetherNow we invite you to view this short video message from William Turner. Through the course of AllTogetherNow we will be inviting our viewers and clients to take a more in depth look at some of the talented image makers we have had the honor to work with over the years.
We would like to kick off this ambitious initiative by first taking a look at our own history. This year the gallery proudly celebrates it's 29th anniversary. Though we had planned aspects of this celebration for next year, the current situation we all face has made this an ideal opportunity for self-reflection. With this in mind we welcome you to become more personally acqainted with the gallery, our artists, and the art of our time.
TRIBUTE TO ED MOSES
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On January 17, 2018 our friend, colleague and force of nature, Ed Moses passed away. His contributions to the art world have only begun to be fully understood, but for those of us that had the honor of working with him in the twilight of his career his memory lives in our thoughts daily. Ed did things his own way, in "a relentless pursuit" until his last breath. He serves as an inspiration for those that knew him, and many that did not. Visually a master, an outspoken and thoughtful critic, and a passionate arbiter of the arts, you are remembered Ed Moses.
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/In celebrating Bergamot Station’s 25-Year Anniversary, we are excited to present the work of Greg Miller and Nick Hunt, two California artists whose work embodies boldly personal journeys. They also represent a bookend celebration of “firsts” for the gallery. Greg Miller was the first artist to exhibit when we opened William Turner Gallery in Venice in 1991 and Nick Hunt is the latest, showing here for the first time with this debut exhibition.
While both artists diverge stylistically, their work draws upon similar romantic elements of their western roots.
Greg Miller grew up in 50’s -60’s Sacramento, inspired by the rush of billboards, posters, ads and text that shaped the flat delta landscapes and pulp fiction images of his youth. Layer upon layer of images, one billboard or poster slapped over the next, formed a sort cultural geology, where the passage of time might jumble, conceal and reveal an archeology of images, their stories hidden & hinted at in the remaining fragments.
Labeled a “neo-pop” and “post-pop” artist by such critics as Donald Kuspit and Peter Frank, Miller does indeed draw from pop-cultural imagery that saturated American consciousness during the 1950’s and 1960’s. It was a time when advertising and text became indelibly encrypted into our experience of everyday life. Life as “advertised” and life as “lived” became insuperably intertwined on the pages of “LIFE” and “LOOK” magazines, on television shows, commercials, billboards, hotel signs, romance novels and even matchbook covers as never before. Miller’s paintings excavate this imagery and often appear as unreconstructed fragments of these signs, drips, patterns and phrases.
Miller’s work is featured in numerous museum and private collections, including those of the Frederick R. Weisman Foundation, and Charles Saatchi Foundation.
Greg Miller, DREAM, Acrylic, Collage Paper, Resin on panel, 48"x48"
Nick Hunt, grew up in in Newport Beach in the 80’s and early 90’s. As Hunt states, “It was an unknown area to a lot of the world. Development was in progress, but at that point in time it was still mostly open land, populated with surfers and desert-beach dreamers. My work is inspired by this desert-ocean dangerous allure.”
Hunt’s work, while abstract, conjures a sense of history - both in their Light and Space influences and in the the rough beauty of the objects themselves. The scumbled, dented, sometimes bullet riddled surfaces reveal layers of color, painted on metal, and hint at a romantic complexity beneath the glossy enameled surfaces.
Hunt spent a lot of time in Mexico as a boy, where he got to know Billy Al Bengston, Peter Alexander, Chuck Arnoldi, and Laddie John Dill, who would come down to visit his father’s house on the Sea of Cortez. “I think our unspoken love for this place was what originally bonded us. The open spaces, the danger, the adventure, the feelings of being lost while finding yourself and being perfectly at ease with the nothingness that surrounds you. The undeniable beauty in a place with such minimal resources was captivating.”
That same feeling of exploration and adventure is what drew Hunt to California Art at a very early age. “The at times dangerous exploration of materials and search for the unknown possibilities of beauty - like Chuck with the chainsaw, Billy with his Dentos, Peter with resin and Laddie with sand and light.”
“Since I was a kid, the idea of being an artist, because of the artists I knew and admired, was not always the most glamorous. You made art because it was all you wanted and could do. So being an artist in California came with a sense of prideful hopelessness. It’s obviously changed now, but that sense of undeniable purpose in an area that seemed lost to the rest of the world inspired me as something wonderful, meaningful, and for me.”
Nick Hunt, Is this not a target? (White on Gold) 2018, Oil based acrylic on anodized aluminum in painted artist frame, 50 x 50 inches
Javier Peláez: Broken Tree review by David S. Rubin
/Continuing through September 7, 2019
Motivated in part by the death of his father, new paintings by Mexico City-based Javier Peláez are potent reminders that there is some truth to the ideas that every cloud has its silver lining and that happiness follows despair. Entitled “Broken Tree,” the exhibition is comprised of expertly crafted abstract and semi-abstract oil paintings on canvas, paper and metal which are dominated by ultraluminous pastel colors that, in spite of the work’s sober subject matter, convey an overall tone of hope and optimism.
Peláez’s formal vocabulary is often linked to vaporwave aesthetics, a sensibility that emerged in the late 20th century and is characterized by abstract fields of psychedelic colors common to consumer and internet media. In most of the new paintings, Peláez’s images appear superimposed over or immersed within amorphous fields of fluorescent sherbet-like color clusters akin to what is ubiquitously found on a computer screen. Another feature of vaporwave aesthetics, which is particularly popular in Japanese anime and advertising, is the use of stick-like calligraphy. Peláez’s connection to this format is most evident in his “Split Triptych,” a left-to-right tripartite work on paper where a vertical white line floating in open colored space moves panel to panel from being upright to broken to being separated into two units.
In the “Broken Tree” series, splintered and bent tree limbs symbolizing the demise of the artist’s father cohabit with transparent intersecting geometric planes that allude to his father’s profession as an architect and Peláez’s own background as an architecture student. In the more maximal works, a multitude of intersecting triangles immersed in fields of brightly colored light yields an ebullient prismatic effect. One of the most striking examples is the relatively minimal “Broken Tree #6,” where the composition is reduced to a foreground, middle ground and background. A splintered tree trunk depicts every detail with a careful meticulousness that conveys the artist’s reverence for the beauty and fragility of all living things. Behind it is a simply defined architectural space. In the background are the distant, colorful metaphysical spaces that we presumably encounter when the soul leaves the body. Using a contemporary visual language, Peláez effectively resurrects ideas espoused in the historically celebrated paintings of the German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich, whose works were representational but similarly symbolized life’s journey with stoic acceptance of its inevitable cycles.
Javier Peláez, Broken Tree #3, #6, & 5, 2019 oil on linen 62.9” x 47.5” x 1.37”
JAVIER PELÁEZ: BROKEN TREE
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Esteemed critic and curator Erik Castillo discusses the work of young Mexican artist Javier Peláez.
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