Celeste Rapone: Future Amateur | Lenz Geerk: Mixed Blessings
442 South La Brea Avenue Los Angeles, California 90036
Saturday, September 14 at 6:00 PM 8:00 PM
Ends Oct 12, 2019
Roberts Projects is pleased to present Future Amateur, a new show by Chicago-based artist Celeste Rapone. Through her paintings, Rapone invokes the willing suspension of disbelief and the engagement of suspicion aligned along particular interests or ideas communicated to us by the characters she portrays. Initially conceived as coping mechanisms for a future as a failed painter, Rapone's portraits now tap into consequences of exposure: humiliation, vulnerability, self-doubt and self-deprivation. Her autobiographical characters - most often women - are proxies to her discomfort felt at new ideas and approaches, the doubt in her own representation and object-making, her inability to mediate attention once exposed to it, and the abstract possibilities opened up and emphasized by these failures. The women twist and turn in the picture plane, unapologetically voluminous and on display. They have presence. They take up space. Fully exposed, this display is at times uncomfortable. The rare male figure is more accessory than protagonist. -------------- Robert Projects is pleased to announce an exhibition of recent paintings by German artist Lenz Geerk. Geerk is a figurative painter whose subjects of portraits, landscapes and still-lifes are portrayed in exceptional intensity and luminosity. He manipulates traditional techniques to bring distinct render to every figure through soft acrylic color. The nearly monochromatic palettes, only occasionally warmed by other colors, add an aura of heightened emotional tension. Lenz Geerk's new series is an insightful examination into the undercurrent of the threat, uncertainty, and fear of the current day. Unlike The Table Portraits, Geerk's first solo show with the gallery, there is no formal link between the individual works of this show. What ultimately connects the works on view is an underlying feeling of domestic suspense, fueled by an unsettling lack of faith.
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