303 Gallery

On the occasion of the inaugural Frieze Viewing Room, 303 Gallery is proud to share a selection of works from our roster of artists. We are also pleased to present selected works by Sue Williams, within the Chicago Tribute sector. Coming to prominence in the early 1980s, Sue Williams has become one of the most influential painters of her generation. In her most recent canvases, she synthesizes modes of painting from her past into gushing explosions of color, line, bits of text and cartoon flourishes.

Drawing correspondences between romantic tradition and contemporary culture, Karen Kilimnik's works realize a quest for a fairytale sublime. The diverse realms of history, architecture, art, fashion, film and television, music and ballet, animals and landscape, science and literature create an imagery that has been selected from stories both historic and fictional, bringing these observations into the present. In a world where the forces of nature have taken awesome hold, Kilimnik's work brings a haunting and contrary sense of beauty to contemporary art.

Working symbiotically with nature and the elements, Sam Falls' artworks are ingrained with a sense of place specific to their creation while also conveying a universal mortality. At the core of his practice, Falls engages the essential elements of photography –namely time, representation, and exposure – to create works that dissolve the divide between the artist, object, and audience. With a reverence toward art history, Falls empathetically blurs the lines between artistic modalities, from modern dance and minimalist painting to conceptual photography and land art, boiling it down to the fundamentals of nature and the transience of life that art best addresses. Sublimating the natural world in works that both defy and embrace the basic functions of art, Falls' works record specific moments in time as well as the infinite human impulse to commune with nature. Falls brings large sheets of canvas into the deepest corners of America's national parks, covering them with dry pigments and arranging bracken and found flora to create intricate patterns. These arrangements are then left exposed to the elements, where dewdrops, mist, rain, sun and atmosphere activate the pigments. This process, similar to a photogram, records not only the formal qualities of the plant life, but also a semblance of the psychological and climatic substrata that constitute a tenuous definition of 'place.' These works point to the inescapable omnipresence of the natural world in our lives outside society - the circadian rhythms and innate formal reflexes that determine what might be interpreted as beautiful, optimistic, pleasing, virtuous, ominous, or frightening. That nature itself has been perhaps the most pervasive concern of art since the beginning of mark-making should be no surprise.

"We are living in a new era, one of complete connectivity, where screen space has become seemingly equal to the physical landscape. This surreal shift in evolution brings us into uncharted waters, a new frontier, one for which we are not fully prepared. My artworks question how we navigate a world of increasing speed and transition, the direction of where we can go and how we can confront the future." – Doug Aitken

Finding inspiration in the constant regeneration of perception, Jeppe Hein's work asks the viewer to become aware of the elemental processes that form sensory reality. Born from ideas in Eastern philosophy and sculpture's potential for profound spatial recombination, the works offer a world of experiential simultaneity.

303 Gallery is pleased to present Stephen Shore: Instagram, a selection of works originating from the artist’s personal social media feed. Presented as unique, dye sublimation prints on aluminum, the artworks preserve the square format and spontaneity of their digital source, while establishing themselves beyond the online platform as physical objects and individual moments to consider. From the very outset of his practice, Shore has continually challenged the traditional conventions of the photographic medium, pursuing instead pictures that convey the physical act of seeing. A pioneer of color photography and an originator of the snapshot aesthetic, Shore has consistently experimented with various means of popular photography, using Mick-a-Matic, Polaroids, 35mm point-and-shoot cameras, and now his iPhone, in tandem with large-format cameras throughout his career. Shore’s Instagram feed harkens back to his early 1970s series, “American Surfaces” in which he sought to create a visual record of each day’s mundane experiences. Posting daily since joining the platform in 2014, Shore always adheres to Instagram’s default square format, and engages enthusiastically with the community through comments. His subjects fall under categories common to many users: pets, landscapes, and objects seen on the ground; yet his singular approach to visual thinking is ever present. Recontextualized as individual, physical prints isolated from the surrounds of a feed, the most ordinary scenes reveal their structural underpinnings. Defined by a formal rigor and harmony of light, color and form, the works convey Shore’s enduring motivation: the exploration of new possibilities within the photographic image.

Working with concepts of nature, science, philosophy and perception, Alicja Kwade has become renowned for her ability to succinctly question and sublimate natural phenomena, challenging our most basic logical assumptions. Her work uses nature as a tool to investigate senses and awareness, opening fissures in which we may rethink the world around us as well as our place in it. Often using the language of minimalism, Kwade's work transcends formal concerns and begins to dissolve an object's materiality, relying on an experiential modus operandi that is both disorienting and startlingly alluring.

303 Gallery is pleased to announce our reopening and a new thematic group exhibition, entitled Alien Landscape. The exhibition will be on view in the gallery’s physical space and simultaneously presented as an online Viewing Room, with an extended selection of works. Alien Landscape brings together a variety of contemporary approaches to depicting the natural world and beyond. The artists in this exhibition confront the vastness of their subject matter by directing our attention toward a particular vista, phenomenon, plant or creature to be considered anew. Conspicuously absent are people themselves, though traces of human intervention and technology appear. Rendering terrain both observed and invented, these works reframe our perspective, while in turn cultivating a heightened awareness of ourselves as just a small part of a big planet— one that requires our attention and care. Visits to the gallery require an advance appointment, available in 30-minute time slots for up to 2 people at a time. We ask all visitors to wear a mask and adhere to social distancing requirements. To make an appointment, use See Saw Map app or visit https://tinyurl.com/303-gallery

For his fourth solo exhibition at 303 Gallery, Nick Mauss has brought together works from the past several years that have never been exhibited, underscoring the primacy of drawing and its temporalities within the continuum of his work in other dimensions and mediums. Mauss also reimagines the threshold to the exhibition itself as an image plane on the scale of the body, inserting a set of painted doors that dramatize the viewer’s passage through the space, even implicating the viewer among the shifting frames, recurring figures, and points of contact set off in Mauss’ work. As art historian Gloria Sutton has written, Mauss’ work is “not simply about the movement of bodies but, rather, movement itself as a historiographic condition—a set of narrative frameworks used to interpret both proximity and distance and the transitions that occur in between. The ways bodies come together (as multitudes, constellations), as objects (collections), as fields of knowledge (disciplines), and commensurately, the ways bodies move apart, separate, retreat, and withdraw via diverse pressures (including acts of erasure and disavowal) within the current moment and throughout history remain of equal and pressing import.” Mauss’ exhibition Bizarre Silks, Private Imaginings and Narrative Facts, etc. will be on view from February 7th, 2020 at Kunsthalle Basel, Basel, Switzerland, and his 2018 work “Images in Mind” is installed at the Whitney Museum as part of The Whitney’s Collection: Selections from 1900-1965, and will be on view until 2021. His multi-part ceramic murals “Dispersed Events” were recently permanently installed in the I.M. Pei-designed Building 66 at M.I.T. Mauss’ book “Transmissions”, which expands on his 2018 exhibition at the Whitney, is forthcoming from Dancing Foxes Press and Yale University Press. Nick Mauss (German/American, born 1980, New York, NY) is known for an expanded use of drawing that traces unexpected arcs into a multidisciplinary practice. Working in multiple mediums and scales — including reverse-painted mirrored glass, paper, ceramic, fabric, performance, and writing — Mauss practices a form of drawing that simultaneously folds together and expands the intimate space of the page with its spatial and performative implications. His work points to connections and ruptures between contemporary artistic practice and other forms and genealogies — in the performing arts as well as the decorative arts — which he often critically confronts with museum collections or archives in the form of experimental exhibitions that activate counter-histories in which both artist and viewer are re-positioned.

Most often, you bake a cake for someone you love. You mix all the stuff together and put it in the oven and wait. Sadly, when you open the oven again and look inside, the cake doesn’t look how you feel about that person at all. It’s a disappointment. Still, you can try and fix it with icing sugar and food coloring and marzipan. You are doing the best you can. Sometimes you don’t bake for someone you love specifically but, for instance, a bake sale or a get-together. A cake can be made to impress or even intimidate your guests. The most unfortunate bakers cook in an outspoken competition like on TV. You believe the most exquisite cakes must have only been witnessed by a handful of people, because their life span is so short. (Unless you are thinking of some kind of practical German fruit loaf, which lasts for a week, but that’s not the same thing at all.) A person dedicated to their cake must build a dummy for display and conservation purposes. Another thing you remember as important is that when you serve cake, you pretend as if you don’t care what the person you love thinks of it. ABOUT VIEWING ROOM & THE ARTIST For the first in a series of concurrent exhibitions held in the gallery's Viewing Room, Swiss artist Gina Fischli presents works in sculpture and photography which explore fantasy, fakery and the allure of the consumable object. Gina Fischli (b. 1989, Zurich) studied at the Royal Academy of Art, London (2018) and the University of Fine Arts Hamburg (2015). Solo exhibitions include Interior Living, SUNDY, London (2018); Molto Suggestivo, DELF, Vienna (2017); and London Today, Forde, Geneva (2016). Group exhibitions include A house is not a home, Fri Art, Fribourg (2019); ON SITE, Swiss Institute, New York (2019); NEW RUINS, Soft Opening, London (2019); and Way Out, Jenny’s, London (2018). In 2018, she published Bad Timing (Hacienda Books, Zurich). Fischli lives and works in London.

303 Gallery is pleased to announce our second solo exhibition of new work by Kim Gordon. In a series of new works on canvas, Gordon presents a world of safety and familial intimacy surreptitiously undermined by insidious, unseen forces. Photographs of a group of revelers huddling around a beach bonfire are softened and overlaid with digital framing marks around the human figures, suggesting surveillance technology or facial recognition software. These images are emblematic of a new reality where no moment goes uncaptured, and where even the most ordinary events are packaged and sold, like an Airbnb listing promising a branded experience of intimacy. Gordon amplifies this phenomenon, referencing iconography from the world of music as it dovetails with youthful rebellion. The various crops and crosshairs allude to the logos of both Black Flag and Public Enemy, two groups emblematic of questioning authority and rising above structural oppression. Gordon's emphases seem to echo their animosity, drawing the very same lines as our tyrannical tech overlords, yet with the express purpose of reasserting control of our own dominions. Also on view will be "Los Angeles June 6, 2019," a film in which Gordon walks around Los Angeles with a guitar, utilizing handrails, plants, traffic implements, public sculpture and light poles as various accomplices in a performance that quite literally uses the city as a sounding board. Gordon assumes the role of interloper, unfazed by her happenstance audience while navigating the corporate territory of public spaces. Ironically, these scenes were surely also recorded by the various mechanisms of surveillance on the streets of LA, adding another layer of undisclosed viewership into the work's dissemination. We may know we are being watched, but it is up to us to transcend. Kim Gordon studied at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles in the late 1970s and has continued to work as an artist since. Her first solo exhibition presented under the name ‘Design Office’ took place at New York’s White Columns in 1981. Recent solo exhibitions include "She Bites Her Tender Mind," Irish Museum of Modern Art Dublin (2019); "Lo-Fi Glamour," The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh (2019); Reena Spaulings Fine Art, Los Angeles (2018); Manifesta 11, Zurich (2016); and "Noise Name Paintings And Sculptures Of Rock Bands That Are Broken Up," Deste Foundation, Athens (2015). A two-person show with Rodney Graham was presented at Dijon's L'Académie Conti in 2017. For the past thirty years Gordon has worked consistently across disciplines and across distinct cultural fields: art, design, writing, fashion (X-Girl), music (Sonic Youth, Free Kitten, Body/Head), and film/video (both as actress and director). Her first solo album "No Home Record" was released earlier this year on Matador Records.