Bambou Gili: Goodbye Earl | Libby Rosen: Rib Erosion
2276 East 16th Street, Los Angeles, CA 90021
Saturday, March 25 at 5:00 PM 8:00 PM
Ends Apr 29, 2023
Night Gallery is pleased to present Goodbye Earl, an exhibition of new paintings by Bambou Gili. This is the artist’s first solo show with the gallery, following her inclusion in the gallery’s 2022 group presentation Shrubs. Gili is known for her surreal, figurative oil paintings, which reference art historical compositions and employ atmospheric, often nocturnal color palettes. Her new work builds on this style while responding to pressing contemporary concerns: following the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade and a spate of assaults against Asian American women, the artist offers a fantastical narrative about female friendship, vengeance, and revolution. The show takes loose inspiration from The Chicks’ 1999 song “Goodbye Earl,” a wry, upbeat murder ballad that tells the story of two high school friends—Wanda and Mary Anne—who kill Wanda’s abusive husband. Gili abstracts this tale in her cinematic canvases, walking viewers through the song painting by painting. She refers to her process of finding art historical compositions to work from as “location scouting.” Her figures and settings change dramatically throughout the exhibition, giving the series a sense of universality. The show begins with Mary Anne and Wanda were the best of friends (2022), which depicts the titular friends standing in prom dresses, clutching each other’s arms. Gili replicates the type of image the press often publishes about missing women, highlighting their innocence to gain public sympathy. Gili subverts this trope in subsequent canvases, turning would-be victims into powerful, righteous perpetrators. In Goodfellas (2022), Mary Anne and Wanda have embraced their violent, more masculine instincts. Gili bathes her figures in an angry red glow, clothing them in mobster suits and giving one a sharp sword. Nature itself becomes witness and accomplice to the murder. Full Moon (2022), Goya’s Ghost (2023), and In the Reeds (2022) all feature the lake where Wanda and Mary Anne deposit Earl’s dead body. These paintings take inspiration, respectively, from the compositions of Alfred Väinö Blomstedt, Francisco Goya, and a 12th century illustration of Saint Quentin, the patron saint of prisoners. Gili’s haunting, epically scaled canvas Earl’s Descent (2022) employs over a dozen shades of blue and careful studies of light to capture Earl sinking to his final resting place. The viewer looks up through the water, towards the body and the women’s boat above. Gili modeled the painting off medieval illustrations of an angel falling from heaven to Hell. Here she trades a fiery underworld for a sublime, aquatic landscape. In the final canvas Jam Stand (2023), Wanda and Mary Anne appear together, and happy, at their new joint venture: a jam stand (the bucolic setting reflects the view outside Gili’s new studio in New Mexico). The pair never wanted to kill Earl—they did what they needed in order to be free. Gili’s canvases convey tenderness, grace, and hope for anyone who might be in such a predicament. Bambou Gili (b. 1996, New York, NY) presented her debut solo exhibition at Arsenal Contemporary, New York in 2021. Her work has been featured in group shows at Night Gallery, Los Angeles; Jeffrey Deitch, New York; Lyles & King, New York; Galerie Perrotin, New York; WAOW Gallery, Hong Kong; and Asia Art Center, Taipei, among others. She has appeared in publications including Elephant, Artnet News, and Artsy. Gili lives and works in New Mexico. _____ Night Gallery is pleased to present Rib Erosion, an exhibition of textiles by Libby Rosen—a collaborative project between artists Anne Libby and Anna Rosen. This is Libby Rosen’s first joint solo show with the gallery, following Libby’s 2021 exhibition See Me So and Rosen’s 2020-1 exhibition Egg and Dart. Anne Libby and Anna Rosen come together under the moniker Libby Rosen, a collaboration that integrates the hypnotic marbling techniques of Rosen's works on paper with the eye-catching quilting for which Libby is known. This synthesis yields unexpected results as the preconceived representations of urban structures in Libby's work become distorted through the psychedelic lens of Rosen's marbling, which relies on chance. As the show’s cheeky, assonant title suggests, the works throughout Rib Erosion—its title a loose reordering of the letters in the artists’ names—delight in permutation and rhyme. In these process-based textiles, Anna Rosen’s jewel-toned, marbled silks rattle against and seep into the comparatively muted, earthy palettes of Anne Libby’s quilted satins, slyly disrupting their gridded frames. The creep of pigmentation is visible in Shower Scene (2022), in which giddy, oil-slicked iridescence gradually overtakes angular, gridded blue and black waves. The resulting compositions appear on the verge of both cohesion and fissure. Libby Rosen draws on the artists’ shared interest in traditional craft techniques. Rosen’s marbled textiles use a process derived from Turkish Ebru painting, in which pools of acrylics are suspended on the surface of a water bath and coaxed with an awl into striated bands; a sheet of silk is then carefully overlaid on the bed to transfer its swirling eddies of pigment. The resulting compositions and patterns appear as devil-may-care psychedelic and as transient as a liquid light show projection, although they are actually the result of deft manipulations that ensure the strands never synthesize into a homogenous mud. These swatches snap periodically into the winking coherence of faces, flowers, a moon, and other imagery. Libby strategically incorporates swatches of Rosen’s fabrics into her quilted, patchworked grids, part of the sculptor’s ongoing series that captures the disorienting urban visual experience of encountering kaleidoscopic refractions of light on the glassine windows of skyscrapers. In lieu of a conceptual conceit, Libby Rosen adopts a playful collaborative logic that follows the cadence of theme and variation. Rosen’s textiles, appearing like the bacterial growths of a petri dish, contribute a micro response to Libby’s macro compositions. The resulting works, taken from the patterns that cover the surface of our world, point to the generative possibilities for exchange. Anne Libby (b. 1987, Los Angeles, California) has had recent solo exhibitions at Night Gallery, Los Angeles; Ribordy Thetaz, Geneva; Magenta Plains, New York, NY; The Downer, Berlin; Zak's Project Space, New York; Violet's Cafe, Brooklyn; and Metropolitan Structures, Baltimore. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Soft Opening, London; Josh Lilley Gallery, London; Nina Johnson Gallery, Miami; and the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, among others. She has been featured in Artforum, Artsy, Mousse Magazine, and Emulsion Magazine, among others. She lives and works in Los Angeles. Anna Rosen (b. 1984, Arlington, Virginia) received her M.F.A. in 2010 from Columbia University. In addition to Night Gallery, Rosen has had solo exhibitions at Kerry Schuss, New York. Her work has been included in recent exhibitions at Page (NYC), Lyles & King, Murray Guy, Cleopatra’s, American Medium, Malraux's Place, and Derek Eller Gallery in New York; The Gallery @ Michael's, Los Angeles; and at Silberkuppe, Berlin. She lives and works in Los Angeles. Image: "Early Moon," 2022
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