David Kordansky Gallery is pleased to present Saturn Comes Again, an exhibition of new paintings and a new video by Los Angeles-based artist William E. Jones. The exhibition runs from July 3 through August 24, 2024. The exhibition’s opening day is Tuesday, July 2 from 10 AM to 4 PM. Over the course of 40 years, Jones has established himself as a unique figure in the worlds of contemporary art, experimental film, and literature. He approaches his work in each of these fields as a researcher, immersing himself in official and unofficial archives. Some of these are archives he assembles by amassing digital and analog materials, and some he creates himself, producing his own images and narratives based on experiences in the past and present. The products of these activities have included photographs, videos, films, collages, appropriations, novels, biographies, and essays. In Saturn Comes Again, however, Jones has made what is perhaps the most dramatic and paradoxically surprising shift of his career. The exhibition features 14 of the paintings he has been producing over the last two years, signaling not only his commitment to new areas of research and a new medium, but a comprehensive reconsideration of his role as an artist and his points of intersection with his audiences. In keeping with his interest in texts as records of—and engines for—sociopolitical analysis and sexual desire, Jones was inspired to begin painting by the example of a character in his novel I Should Have Known Better. The paintings therefore become living elements in multiple narratives, including the narratives of his own trajectory through the worlds of contemporary art, the Los Angeles art world, and the broader worlds of culture undergoing constant change at the hands of economic and political forces. At the same time, the paintings reflect Jones’s ongoing commitment to research. They depict a range of subjects, some well-known—actress Joan Crawford, writer Georges Perec, musician Lou Reed, artist Gerhard Richter—and some notable only for their anonymity. What unites is them, in addition to their visual interest, is the provocation they display in both subtle and not-so-subtle forms. Some paintings, for instance, are based on images in gay pornographic magazines from the 1970s, while others make use of images borrowed from popular culture or the annals of art history. Works from one category might resemble works from the other, serving as a reminder that the official record often contains details its authors prefer to hide. Taken together, they constitute an intuitively constructed archive of passions and personalities, as well as a multi-faceted study of the many uses to which the human body can be put. However, the content of the paintings only tells part of the story. Their formal properties are the result of material experimentation and nuanced thinking about the development of the medium throughout its long history. Characterized by a blurring technique that establishes links with effects in photography and video while accentuating the viscosity and luminosity of oil-based pigments, the paintings are, like many of Jones’s videos, sites where representation is made more complex—and paradoxically more tangible—through the use of abstract optical effects. When distinctions between color and shape or between drawing and painterly gesture begin to fall away, the images hover like holographs in a foreground that appears to extend in front of the surface of the canvas support. This allows the paintings to key associations to the past, present, and future and to synthesize close-up emotional resonance with a critical awareness—and biting humor—that time them into the larger fabric of Jones’s project. Connections between emotion, observation, and analysis play a prominent role in Stimulus (2024), the new video included in the exhibition, which features images of a series of photographs published by pioneering French neurologist Guillaume Duchenne de Boulogne in 1862. The photographs documented a study called The Mechanism of Human Facial Expression in which de Boulogne used electrical probes to generate involuntary facial expressions in psychiatric patients. An important influence on figures like Charles Darwin and Sigmund Freud whose ideas would go on to shape the intellectual trajectory of the twentieth century, du Boulogne sought to bring scientific rigor to the classification of what has often been considered an entirely subjective facet of human experience. Jones brings an analogous sense of order to an archive of images that is alternately grotesque, moving, and puzzling. Stimulus is the latest of his works—others include Killed and Model Workers—to create narrative motion by positioning still images in a sequence that helps reveal their distinct non-objective qualities. Here, for instance, an uncanny choreography of symmetry and asymmetry is on display out as one image gives way to the next. Because de Boulogne sometimes used black forms to obscure half of his subjects’ faces, Jones’s sequencing establishes a staccato, pulsating rhythm whose intense opticality temporarily obscures the medical context in which the images exist. As in the paintings, what emerges instead is the disconcerting power of focused, interpersonal emotional connection infused with encompassing historical perspective. The exhibition’s title, which refers to the astrological symbolism of the Saturn cycle, offers a ribald take on this kind of connection. The well-known first Saturn return takes place when people in their late 20s, but the second one, which people undergo in the years leading up to 60, also carries with it the potential for reckonings and stormy personal rebirth. As Jones enters this new act in his career and Saturn comes again, his penchant for far-reaching aesthetic play has enabled him to engage his passions for research and formal recontextualization, and to bring new generative spark to a body of work without parallel in contemporary art. - David Kordansky Gallery is pleased to present Bruts, a group exhibition curated by artist Rashid Johnson. The exhibition’s opening day is Tuesday, July 2 from 10 AM to 4 PM, and the show will be on view through August 24, 2024. Bruts features paintings and sculptures by fifteen artists whose work comes into being through feats of physical, psychological, spiritual, and emotional strength. Many of the works on view were produced in ways that foreground the roughness of an artist’s interactions with their materials, resulting in aggressively textured surfaces and an absence of smoothness. Johnson has composed the exhibition like a poem, seeking to generate unexpected correspondences that cannot be reduced to mere visual or biographical affinity. In keeping with this ethos, the show is populated by a variety of takes on abstraction, including works that otherwise present as figurative. It also reflects Johnson’s evolving view of his own ideas and project, which have continually found him negotiating a terrain where non-objective mark making and composition overlap with lyrical approaches to representation understood in the broadest possible terms. The example of French artist Jean Dubuffet provides a centralizing force both in Johnson’s thinking and in the exhibition itself, which features a focused acrylic work by Dubuffet from 1981. Dubuffet coined the term art brut to describe practices in which artists honed and defined their own notions of what it means to be skillful. As he became interested in art that resisted or exceeded academic expectations about form, he used the aesthetic freedoms of modernism to make paintings and sculptures that were both highly personal—the artist would often root his compositions in his experiences of people in his intimate circle—and abstract enough to override viewers’ attempts to locate them in any particular subject. The other major figure whose work provides a foundational layer for the conception and realization of Bruts is the American artist Bill Traylor, who also depicted people and scenes in his immediate environment. As is immediately discernible in the seven works by Traylor on view, his incisive—and intuitive—sense of design and his felt understanding of his materials gave him the tools to transform seemingly straightforward visual elements into images with archetypal power. Their emotional impact belies the economy of means with which they were made and reveals what becomes possible when artists fully synthesize the handling of their materials and the conception of their work. In works like these, neither process nor design dominates. Rather, there is an amalgam of the two that roots the picture, however identifiable or abstract it might be, in the visceral presence of the artist’s and the viewer’s experience alike. A sculpture by Isa Genzken, for instance, incorporates a mannequin as the support for a brooding assemblage of objects—including clothing, ribbon, and a garishly painted mask—that brings together a cacophony of moods and visual provocations. The object points in any number of contextual directions, but the freedom of expression with which it has been rendered continually disrupts attempts to locate it as a response to a particular social, political, or personal condition. Throughout Bruts, representation becomes a means of support for decidedly non-representational gestures, even in the case of the paintings by Jeff Sonhouse, in which the precision of the artist’s drawing and paint application are offset by highly physical interventions like the use of wooden matches to construct his subjects’ hair. If expressivity is one of the abiding principles that unifies the works in this exhibition, another is the spirit of free and poetic juxtaposition that also defines the approach Johnson has brought to selecting them. The conversations that emerge between a work by an artist traditionally associated with art brut, like Aloïse Corbaz, a sculpture by ceramic pioneer Peter Voulkos, and a painting by abstract expressionist Herbert Gentry provide not only a series of histories and alternative histories about the evolution of Western Hemispheric art in the twentieth century, but a feeling for a prevailing spirit that presented—and presents itself—in varied works by varied artists from varied backgrounds and orientations. One result of this approach is the lessening of hierarchical thinking and looking that it engenders. Another is the sense that thinking about and looking at artworks are themselves creative propositions, and that the observations that follow from them might be the more meaningful engines for historical classification—and revisionism—than top-down decisions based on pre-established concepts, stylistic similarities, or chronological overlap. Bruts demonstrates how immediacy in art functions as its own kind of anti-academy, allowing individual artists and viewers to hone their responsiveness to the physical world around them. The unabashed pursuit of individual perspective that characterizes many of these works becomes a path not toward obscurantism, but toward a democratic, heterogeneous, and productively challenging space where universal connection is achieved through disagreement and dissonance as well as harmony and assent. In this respect, the exhibition’s mood is one of thorny optimism, and the propositions it makes are accordingly oriented toward spheres of life—including social and even political ones—whose intersection with the artistic domain demonstrates the central role that raw acts of creation play in all human endeavor. - David Kordansky Gallery is pleased to present INTLOMBE, a solo exhibition of new ceramic sculptures by Simphiwe Mbunyuza on view in Los Angeles from July 2 through August 24, 2024. The exhibition’s opening day is Tuesday, July 2 from 10 AM to 4 PM. Drawing from traditional ceremonies, physical typographies, and legacies of the Xhosa people from the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa, Mbunyuza creates large-scale figural sculptures and objects that document and honor the rituals and land associated with his native people. The title of the exhibition recalls an Intlombe gathering in which divine healers come together in a home for a variety of causes, from social to spiritual. These gatherings often incorporate dancing, singing, and playing drums as a way of invoking the Xhosa ancestors. As a grouping, the works on view connect the artist back to his home through the use of referential forms, color, material, and installation. Each vessel and sculpture is richly decorated with distinct textural and illustrative markings that depict regional iconography from line drawings of homes to rippled grasses as seen from an aerial perspective. The works are notable for the delineated bands of color and pattern, which Mbunyuza achieves through a combination of repetitive mark-making and the use of oxide washes to enhance the surface texture and create distinct yellows, oranges, greens, and blues. The oxide wash also mimics the appearance of imbhola which are botanically produced pigments the Xhosa women apply to their faces, further emphasizing the works’ connection to the earth. In STULO SIKA PITI (2023), whose overall tone is muted and almost mud-like, the artist introduces vivid colors through the incorporation of a series of bisected white and blue circles, arched to mimic the phases of the moon or agricultural plots as seen from above. While the overall texture appears rough to the touch, it’s punctuated by rhythmic seams with line-work so precise it can appear stitched. The artist sometimes incorporates other materials into the stonewear such as leather, metal, or wood. In instances like STULO SIKA PITI, where the foreign materials aren’t present in the end product, tools like barbed wire are pressed into the surface to create these seam-like patterns. Through these combined elements and the artist’s preference toward installing the works directly on the gallery floor, the sculptures often appear equal-parts ancient yet personal and site-specific yet otherworldly. Mbunyuza utilizes every bit of the sculptures’ surface to recreate cultural scenes, mimic landscapes, and add appendages that represent animal, human, or decorative flourishes. In particular, the artist tends toward representing the female form, through the incorporation of breast or nipple-like elements, but also by taking inspiration from tools like Imbhokodo, which is an oval-shaped rock that is used predominantly by Xhosa women to grind corn. The artist often reflects on the role women play in the village both as mothers, but also as the primary caregivers in the community, and—most importantly—as symbols of strength and power. In YEMYEM, (2023), the totemic form appears dressed in ceremonial garb. Like Mbunyuza’s other works, the vertical figure is sectioned by a series of swooped or jagged lines. When viewed from one side, the top section of the figure appears clothed with a plunging neckline. Resting just above the hips, a decorated pattern of bone-like extensions is set against a ribbon-shaped backing, taking the appearance of ceremonial dress. INGODUSO (2024), one of the largest works on view, exemplifies Mbunyuza’s continued preoccupation with clay as a material, the coiling method, and the—seemingly endless—ways in which the juxtaposition of these repeated shapes, icons, and grooved patterns can tell a story. In the same way these quadrants meet, each work itself acts as a point of connection between the artist and his ancestry. Even Mbunyuza’s use of clay as his preferred medium stems from a long history with the material. From the time he was a young boy, the artist would go to the river banks and dig up clay and shape it into chickens, cows, or other familiar forms. Although the artist works from a specific stylistic vocabulary, he continues to push the material and compositions to explore his subject matter to its fullest extent. What Mbunyuza is able to achieve with the material goes beyond pottery into other material, aesthetic, and poetic possibilities. Image: William E. Jones, Gerhard Richter Asphyxiating Himself, 2024