Group Show 2016

January 25, 2016 - February 19, 2016

 

Yoshii Gallery is proud to present a group show with Lucas Arruda, Bianca Sforni, Sally Mann and Tom Friedman. The works of these exceptional artists, shown together, embody the playful relationship of the real and the illusory, creating a delightfully surreal atmosphere.

Lucas Arruda was born in São Paulo, Brazil in 1980. He creates eerie, imagined and impressionistic subtle depictions of flat land, water and expansive, glowing skies landscapes which are minimally interrupted by low rocks and forested islands. Many pictures suggest beaches at low tide on foggy mornings, or twilight that seem to follow the styles of Whistler, Casper David Friedrich and Edward Hopper. He is genuinely interested in the use and evocative possibilities of mere colored paint smeared on fabric to explore and create illusions. His works strike a pleasing yet existential nerve that has a universal quality that needs to be felt, not just understood, which is an essential component of art. He says “Painting for me is like having a candle in the dark that allows you to see only what is close to you.” Arruda has participated in numerous international exhibitions including III Mostra de Programa de Exposiçoes 2014, Centro Cultural São Paulo, Brazil, La Bienal 2013: Here is Where We Jump, Museo del Bario, New York, USA, and is in permanent collections of the J. Paul Getty Collection, Los Angeles, USA and Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, Brazil. Lucas Arruda currently lives and works in São Paulo, Brazil.

 

Bianca Sforni  was born in Milan, Italy in 1963. Her works proclaim a return to the primary ideas of modernism and the historical tradition process of photography called Ataraxia, while rejecting the contemporary photography technique of commercial and time efficient productions. The overall process created through her painstaking technique calls to mind exceptional stability for fading and maintaining its original state – wherein four pigmented layers of yellow, magenta, cyan and black become the components in an effortless composition. Left in an unprocessed condition – their physical presence emphasized by their smooth texture and natural color – her works subliminally seduces, creating in the viewer a desire to touch. Her works, when viewed at various angles, obdurately deny a singular comprehension, allowing instead a variety of interpretations ranging from subtle meditative mood to liveliness and sexuality. They unfold slowly, demanding patience from their viewers but rewarding them with lavish outpouring of painterly allusion and sensual pleasure. Sforni’s previous museum exhibitions include a group show at Museum of European Photography in Paris and Museum of Contemporary Art in Rome. She currently lives and works in New York.

 

Sally Mann was born in Lexington, Virginia in 1951. She has photographed the American South since the 1970s, focusing on portraiture, architecture, landscape and still life. She is best known for her intimate portraits of her family, her young children and her husband, and for her evocative and resonant landscape work in the American South that are simultaneously painterly and photographic. Her photographs are made from wet-plate collodion negatives, produced by coating a sheet of glass with ether-based collodian and submerging it in silver nitrate. The resulting light sensitive plate, loaded into a plate holder and attached to the camera, must be explosed while still wet for a period of approximately 6 minutes. Sally Mann embraces these peculiar flares, stains and dust trails that are unique to the collodion process. She states “Our history of defeat and loss set us apart from other Americans and because of it, we embrace the Proustian concept that the only true paradise is a lost paradise. But we know that love emerges from this loss, becomes memory and that memory becomes art.” Sally Mann has won numerous awards, including three National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and a Guggenheim fellowship. Her works are in permanent museum collections including Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, New York, and The Whitney Museum of American Art.

 

Tom Friedman  was born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1965. He invents his own visual language through his almost obsessive attentiveness to detail, striking ability to transform the familiar into the unexpected, and how the work is executed so flawlessly. Utilizing banal common household items such as toilet paper, aluminium foil, spaghetti, fishing line, hair, Styrofoam and Play-doh to create complex forms and works that rearrange the viewer’s perception of the everyday environment, he creates a whimsical heterogenous body of work. Friedman’s works raise questions about how we make and see art. He has had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, St. Louis Art Museum, Museum of Contemporary in Chicago as well as major group exhibitions like São Paulo Bienal 1996, and Guggenheim Museum in New York. His achievements are widely recognized with numerous awards including an Academy Award in Art from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1993), and a grant from the Joan Mitchell Foundation (2001). Friedman currently lives and works in Leverett, Massachusetts.