Noriko Ambe, Dario Escobar, Maximo Gonzalez, Peter Halley, Thomas Hirschhorn, Marco Maggi, Manfred Peckl, Stefan Saffer, Mathias Schmied, Ken Solomon, Yuken Teruya, The Three, Rachel Urkowitz

The gallery is pleased to present Newpapers an exhibition of works on and of paper by thirteen international artists including: Noriko Ambe, Dario Escobar, Maximo Gonzalez, Peter Halley, Thomas Hirschhorn, Marco Maggi, Manfred Peckl, Ken Solomon, Stefan Saffer, Mathias Schmied, Yuken Teruya, The Three, and Rachel Urkowitz.

The artists in Newpapers build images and objects by cutting & pasting, slicing & folding, shredding & recycling, using paper as their main material. The imminent replacement of paper by more efficient and environment-friendly supports was announced in the early Nineties. Today, the ever-increasing consumption of paper coexists with millions of screens, hard-drives and memory sticks. Recording and printing are our favorite activities and paper is reborn from its ashes.

The works in Newpapers express the short distance between nostalgia and humor, between archeology and science fiction as in Maximo Gonzalez’ sculpture, a double filtered cigarette sticking out of the wall. The Three is a team of young women in constant travel who work simultaneously as conceptual artists and fashion models. They appeared last year at Deitch Projects in New York and in numerous international publications. For Newpapers, their first appearance in a group show, they select a recent press clipping.

Marco Maggi presents a new series of cuts on paper titled DDD on tradition. The work introduces color for the first time, in homeopathic doses. Inaugurating a technique , he orchestrates a betrayal of art history with an Xacto knife on paper back.

Mathias Schmied manipulates comic strips and magazine images. In his Venetian Blinds, he transfers images from pornographic magazines into pristine sheets of blank paper by cutting straight lines with a sharp blade. His strips from comics are webs made of the emptied–out contend of Spider-Man comic strips.

Peter Halley’s recent paintings on paper, diagrammatic structures of rectangular cell units and linear conduits in day-glow and acrylic paint depict a social landscape of isolation and connectivity. Dario Escobar presents a critical interpretation of Guatemalan’s religious heritage and active legacy of war by mixing visual kitsch referents from the repertoires of clerical, military and commercial propaganda.

Ken Solomon’s meticulous drawings of Love and Flag stamps on envelopes posted from various locations in New York City document the extinction of “snail mail” with affectionate compassion. Yuken Teruya also chooses the simplest materials, objects and symbols—a take-out bag, a dollar bill, a kimono from his native Okinawa, to subvert their meaning through gestures of intimate scale.

Rachel Urkowitz’s collages are inspired by the visual languages of landscape painting, animation and gardening. She cuts and assembles brightly colored papers to build explosive wall environments. Stefan Saffer's delicate paper cutouts are made of what is not there: a drawing, reduced to a skeleton becomes a sculpture that casts moving shadows onto the wall.

Thomas Hirschhorn’s “Qu’est-ce que la Philosophie” is a larger than life cardboard surrogate of Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari’s seminal book published by Les Editions de Minuit. The cover an exact color Xerox replica of the original is the only accessible element of information.

Noriko Ambe draws by cutting hundreds of sheets of Yupo, a plastic based paper from Japan, with an Xacto knife, carving complex streams of swirls and ripples into the multi layered stacks. German artist Manfred Peckl also builds mutilayered abstract landscapes by shredding geographic maps.