Robert Berman Gallery

FUTURE

Opening Reception:

Thursday, October 8, 2015, 6-8pm

ROBERT BERMAN / E6 GALLERY

1632 Market Street, San Francisco, CA 94102

Featuring Wine from:

ROBERT BERMAN / E6 GALLERY is pleased to present Paper Cuts, a group show featuring Bay Area artists Winston Smith, John Held, Jr., and David Jones, and Hope Kroll from Central California. Reminiscent of Matisse’s Cut-Out series, Paper Cuts shows how paper can take on a strength and beauty in it’s abstract and narrative forms. In this exhibition, we observe how such a simple medium can be transformed into diverse ranges of forms. Considering paper’s history as one of the oldest formats for documentation and avenues for expressing ideas, the exhibition continues to foster the growth of this utilitarian medium and explores how it can adapt with the times. Paper Cuts features four artists who all express their unique take on the same material.

Winston Smith’s work, in their traditional collage format, express a social-cultural phenomenon. They deal with America and the world’s issues and tragedies, using icons, humor and aesthetic juxtaposition. Hope Kroll, like Smith yet different in approach and subject, intensifies her collage with three-dimensional exploration of contemporary ideas using vintage books. David Jones, with his malicious precision in recycling vintage puzzles, causes us to reach for a separate reality within the child’s familiar game. John Held, Jr., whose many years of being active in the fluxes generated world of mail art, has reinvented himself using the cut out perforations from his arcane yet extremely beautiful perforation machine. Each of these gems glisten and glow when adhered to canvas to create formal and enticing works of conceptual contemporary art. These four artists, shown together in Paper Cuts, create strong bodies of work individually that also ignite an interesting conversation while sharing the walls of ROBERT BERMAN / E6 GALLERY.

Winston Smith, Separation of Church and State (The Trojan Horse), 2001

WINSTON SMITH
Punk Art Surrealist Winston Smith, a master of “hand-carved” collage, has been crafting his thought-provoking art since the 1970’s. After being abroad for six years, Winston returned to America and was astonished by the complacency the American public exhibited towards the corporate domination in their society. Winston began taking “safe” images from magazines and combining them to create politically charged works of art that challenge the viewer to confront incongruities and political paradoxes of modern society.

Smith first became known and beloved for his collaborations with punk legends Dead Kennedys and his numerous album covers, inserts and flyers for the band in their formative years. His technique of cutting out by hand and gluing each individual element has inspired a generation of artists.

Though Smith primarily uses the medium of collage, he is classically trained in Renaissance art, having left the U.S. in 1969 to study at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence, where he lived for several years before moving to Rome.

Over the last 35 years, Winston has had numerous one-man shows in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York City, London, Berlin, Antwerp, Rome and Tokyo, as well as group shows throughout the United States and Europe.

Winston’s transition from underground rebel to nationally recognized illustrator was chronicled with the release of his debut volume of collected works Act Like Nothing’s Wrong (Last Gasp, 1994). Since then, he’s had two more volumes, Artcrime (Last Gasp, 1999), and All Riot on the Western Front (Last Gasp, 2001). Winston works on custom commissions and special projects from his North Beach Studio.

David Jones, Turnabout: Mid-Scape Survey, 2013, 28 x 28 7/8

DAVID JONES
Artist Statement

I assemble actual vintage jigsaw puzzles straight out of the box.

Next, I examine completed puzzles as to their mutual fit and imagery.

Corresponding puzzles are then placed side by side. By shifting pieces from one to another new images are born with the goal of creating two completely new images.

Resolving each image demands change and rearrangement of individual pieces and surrounding pieces. No pieces are altered to fit, and the fit influences imagery. Through this process unanticipated and unpredicted results occur.

The journey of transforming the puzzles is curiously like the process of painting with the pieces akin to individual strokes: a process of marking, removing, and resolving an image.

Hope Kroll, Men of Industry, 2015, 28” x 30”

HOPE KROLL
As an avid bibliophile, Hope has largely used as her source material second-hand hardcover books ranging mostly from the early 1900’s through the 1950’s. What she looks for in these books are both the blank pages, which are often used as her canvases as well as the images contained therein. The subjects and themes of these images vary widely from antiquated scientific instruments and obsolete machinery to physical deformities and outdated medical and surgical procedures.

Entomological and botanical imagery also plays an important role, as do birds, which as a re-occurring theme in her work, play the part of spiritual messengers. These found images are then dissected from the pages with an almost surgical precision using cuticle scissors and X-acto knives. This early stage of her work is simply devoted to gleaning images from books, cutting them out and organizing them for later retrieval. These images then become the lexicon from which she begins to create her collages.

Because the three-dimensional quality of this work can easily be overlooked when viewing her work face-on, many of these images also include additional angled shots. These works are all quite small and intimate, rarely measuring larger than 8” x 10”. As there are often numerous minute details hidden within these pieces, many of the additional views also offer extreme close up shots. Occasionally, some small amount of drawing or lettering may also be included as well as the occasional book cover and even old photographs.

John Held, Jr., Perforation Series, 2015

JOHN HELD, JR.
John Held, Jr. is a San Francisco based visual artist and writer, who has had over thirty solo exhibitions in twelve countries (Moscow 2003, Paris 2005, South Korea 2006, Japan 2015). He is the author of Mail Art: An Annotated Bibliography (Scarecrow Press, 1991), Rubber Stamp Art (AAA Edizione, 1999), Where the Secret is Hidden, Parts 1&2 (TAM Publications, 2011) and Small Scale Subversion: Mail Art and Artistamps (TAM Publications, 2015). He has contributed essays to the Dictionary of Art (Grove, 2000), Conversing with Cage (Routledge, 2003) and At a Distance: Precursors to Art and Activism on the Internet (MIT, 2005). He has lectured widely including the V&A Museum (London, 1991) and the Museum of Communications (Berlin, 2004). Held has organized exhibitions at the National Palace of Fine Arts (Havana, 1995) the Mayakovsky State Museum (Moscow, 2003) and the San Francisco Art Institute (2013). His works are in the Getty Research Institute (Los Angeles) and the Museum of Modern Art (New York City). His personal Papers are in the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution (Washington, D. C).