Jonathan Callan Jacob El Hanani Marco Maggi Jonathan Rider Ignacio Uriarte

March 7- April 13, 2013
Opening reception: Thursday March 7, from 6-8pm

 

The gallery is pleased to present Drawing up!, an exhibition featuring new works by Jonathan Callan, Jacob El Hanani, Marco Maggi, Jonathan Rider, and Ignacio Uriarte. Drawing is working in the corridors that separate ideas from one another, a space prior and posterior to certainty. The five artists in Drawing Up! have a particular interest in classifying sediments. Isolating element after element allows them to discover totalities of smaller scales and intensities. Every dot, cell, brick is at the same time an elementary particle and a matter onto which they can focus undivided attention. Drawing could be seen as the opposite of not understanding in general, as it permits not understanding in particular, not understanding the letter, the syllable, the word. Not understanding specifically requires a very rigorous training.

Jonathan Callan builds images by minutely altering and removing data; appropriating photographs from books and scratches their surface leaving only one or two elements. Born in Manchester, England in 1961, Jonathan Callan lives and works in London. Recent exhibitions include: Speaking Volumes, Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, WI (2010); I Can’t Tell You Why, Grusenmeyer Art Gallery, Deurle, Belgium (2009); Uncoordinated: Mapping Cartography in Contemporary Art, Contemporary Arts Center Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH, (2008); Overcraft, Haifa Museum of Art, Israel (2007).

Informed by the tradition of Jewish micrography, Jacob El Hanani uses hebrew letters as building blocks inside wavering nets of cross lines, whose curvature gives the drawings the feeling of a digitally rendered relief map or google earth search. Born in Casablanca, Morocco in 1947, Jacob el Hanani lives and works in New York. His work has been exhibited extensively since 1975. Selected exhibitions include: Drawn to Detail, DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, Lincoln, MA (2008); Transforming Chronologies: An Atlas of Drawings, Part Two, Museum of Modern Art, New York (2006); Moment by Moment: Meditations of the Hand, North Dakota Museum of Art, Grand Forks, ND (2006); The Broida Collection, The National Gallery, Washington, D.C. (2006).

Through the endless proliferation of various components, Marco Maggi’s pencil drawings on clayboard panels accumulate signals and vibrations impossible to detect without an extraordinary level of attention. Born in Uruguay in 1957, Marco Maggi lives and works in New York and Montevideo.  His work has been exhibited extensively since 1998, throughout the United States, Europe, and Latin America in galleries, museums, biennials and is included in the most prestigious collections. In December he received the Premio Figari (Career Award) followed by a solo exhibition at Museo Figari, Uruguay (January, 2013). Recent exhibitions include: MOCA's Permanent Collection: A Selection of Recent Acquisitions, Museum Of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA (February 10-March 11, 2013); Lentissimo, The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY (2012); Desinformacion Funcional, Instituto Ohtake, San Paolo, Brazil (2012); No Idea, The Museum of Latin American Art, Long Beach, CA (2012).

With obsessive attentiveness to detail, Jonathan Rider’s objects and floor installations subvert the conventions of monumental practice and articulate architectures of minuscule circles of paper, metal or plastic. Born in 1983 in Easton, PA, he graduated from the School of Visual Arts MFA program in 2011 and was the recipient of the Paula Rhodes Memorial Award. He lives in New York.

Ignacio Uriarte uses the office and its travails as a total medium. His work intersects the behaviors, textures, rhythms and languages of business administration with the strategies and tactics of conceptual art, minimalism, Op and performance art. Born in 1972 in Krefeld, Germany, he lives and works in Berlin. His first solo museum exhibition in North America is on view at The Drawing Center in New York through March 13. Binaries, the artist’s largest museum survey to date, opens March 1st, at The Utah Museum of Contemporary Art in Salt Lake City. Recent solo exhibitions include: Centre d’Art la Panera, Lleida, Spain (2012); Sala Rekalde, Bilbao, Spain (2011); Casa del Lago, Mexico City, Mexico (2011); Kunstverein Arnsberg, Germany (2010); Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León, Spain (2008).