GAVLAK

Through her latest series, Deborah Brown delves into the inquiry of familiar scenes of bustling sidewalk markets in New York City. Within her fleeting snapshots we witness the illicit practice of selling the knockoff luxury designer bags and storefronts teeming with exotic fish, fruits, and medicinal herbs. Much like the early 20th century German expressionists, Brown amplifies the chromatic range of her work, fills her canvases with vivid unnatural light and uses exaggerated, distorted angles to underscore the pulsating energy of the city streets. It is this energy that guides us through our own aesthetic response to her large-scale works and allows us to experience the beauty of the scenes beyond the obvious litter and urban chaos.

GAVLAK Palm Beach is excited to announce the group exhibition, Tupelo Honey, curated by Eloise Janssen and Bethani Wells. The exhibition explores southern summer as it ebbs and flows from day to night. The front gallery explores the dreamy feeling of summer days, while the back gallery space is a rumination on dark coastal nights. The exhibition presents works by artists Lindsay Adams, Jose Alvarez (D.O.P.A.), Andrew Brischler, Deborah Brown, Taina Cruz, Marc Dennis, Judith Eisler, Braxton Garneau, Manuela Gonzalez, Taha Heydari, Nir Hod, Nancy Lorenz, Maynard Monrow, Anthony Sonnenberg, Awilda Sterling, Alexis Teplin, Betty Tompkins, T.J. Wilcox, and Rob Wynne. Tupelo Honey will be on view from June 16 - October 5, 2023. The opening reception will occur on Friday, June 16, from 5 – 7 pm.

GAVLAK Los Angeles is pleased to announce Braxton Garneau’s solo exhibition with the gallery, Procession. Garneau’s work is based in collecting and researching materials, culture and history. Focusing on harvested and hand-processed materials, he explores the sociocultural history of his Caribbean heritage. In Procession, Garneau will present a new series of works focused on ritual and costuming through the complex history of Canboulay, and character development of present-day Carnival.

GAVLAK Los Angeles is thrilled to present Cannons Buried in Flowers, a solo exhibition of sculptural works by Anthony Sonnenberg. When folks individually and collectively defy the limiting sex and gender roles prescribed by prejudicial societies to enact authentic self-expression, their queerness is resistant and performative. But can objects be queer? The answer—a resounding yes—can be found in Anthony Sonnenberg’s solo exhibition Cannons Buried in Flowers at GAVLAK Los Angeles, on view from May 20 - July 1, 2023. When folks individually and collectively defy the limiting sex and gender roles prescribed by prejudicial societies to enact authentic self-expression, their queerness is resistant and performative. But can objects be queer? The answer—a resounding yes—can be found in Anthony Sonnenberg’s solo exhibition Cannons Buried in Flowers at GAVLAK Los Angeles, on view from May 20 - July 1, 2023. Anthony Sonnenberg’s newest body of sculptures follows the development of unique processes, passions, and investigations undertaken over the past decade. Sonnenberg builds clay structures that he covers with silk flowers, porcelain tchotchkes, and yards of textile trimmings. Spraying on layers of liquid ceramic slip, he obscures finer details of the objects, and consolidates his sculptures structurally and formally. Through glazing and subsequent re-firings, Sonnenberg offers a variety of matte, glassy, and lustrous finishes and range from mauve and chartreuse to frosty blue and rusty pink. Sonnenberg’s sculptures are filled with texture and event.

GAVLAK Palm Beach is proud to announce the solo exhibition for Puerto Rican artist Awilda Sterling, Unbound Rhythms.Sterling is an acclaimed painter, performance artist, and dancer who explores themes of identity, gender, diaspora, language, and migration, challenging conventional notions of culture, national, and gendered boundaries.

GAVLAK Los Angeles is pleased to announce Luke O'Halloran's premier solo exhibition with the gallery, Going, going, gone. O'Halloran is known for his oil paintings that suspend a moment in time: playing cards midair, slot machines spinning endlessly, a house of cards teetering on completion or collapse, and magic tricks. Within these still frames exists the drama and anticipation we find in games and life. O’Halloran will be presenting eight new paintings and one sculptural element for this exhibition. Going, going, gone. will be on view at GAVLAK Los Angeles from April 8th through May 13th, 2023.

GAVLAK is proud to announce Nancy Lorenz's solo exhibition, Gilded Matter. Lorenz’s work is characterized by her innovative use of materials and techniques. In Gilded Matter, she experiments with gold leaf, silver leaf, cardboard, burlap, and jute.

GAVLAK Los Angeles is thrilled to announce the group exhibition, Think Pinker, curated by Beth Rudin DeWoody. The show opens on February 11 and will continue through March 25, 2023. ⁠ Think Pinker is a revisitation of the exhibition and collaboration between Beth Rudin DeWoody and Sarah Gavlak, Think Pink, which took place in 2010. Thirteen years later, we will highlight the color in another immersive installation, this time in Los Angeles. ⁠

GAVLAK Palm Beach is pleased to announce Loom, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Taha Heydari. Loom represents the culmination of Heydari’s engagement with Persian rugs as a paradoxical embodiment of transcendental authority and quotidian materiality. Displaced from their conventional settings, Heydari’s ornately painted rugs appear suspended in a dystopian twilight in which they unravel, revealing narratives which had been lost between the fibers. Loom will be on view from February 9 – March 5, 2023 at GAVLAK’s Palm Beach location.

GAVLAK Palm Beach is pleased to announce a two-person exhibition with Jake Clark and Konstantin Kakanias. The exhibition showcases the vibrant and whimsical works of both artists, highlighting their distinct styles and perspectives. Each artist draws inspiration from the world around them and uses their work to capture the current moment through reinterpretations of signs, product branding, and logos. Their pieces are accessible and immediately recognizable offering a unique perspective on contemporary culture and icons. The exhibition will be on view from December 17, 2022, to January 7, 2023, and the opening reception will be on Saturday, December 17 from 5-7 pm.

Once Upon A Time, is a solo exhibition with ten new paintings by New York-based artist Marc Dennis. The exhibition marks the artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery and his first in Los Angeles.

GAVLAK is pleased to present Jose Alvarez (D.O.P.A.): Elegy for the Venezuelan Exile. This show marks the artist’s eighth solo exhibition with the gallery and will feature 13 new works made in 2022 employing his well-known materials of mica, quills, feathers, and acrylic paint to create an elegy for the Venezuelan crisis. An elegy is a lyric poem composed “to praise and express sorrow for someone who is dead”1; a way to aesthetically represent loss and to share it with others going through the same experience.

GAVLAK is proud to announce Pompeii Gray, the gallery’s first solo presentation of the work of Los Angeles-based artist Iva Gueorguieva. The exhibition showcases three sculptures alongside seven new, ambitiously scaled works in acrylic and collage that mark Gueorguieva’s return to the stretched canvas after a three-year immersion in the making of unstretched and at times double-sided tapestry paintings. The genesis of the Pompeii Gray works was her sudden decision to paint over a massive, colorful abstract painting from 2017 with white gesso and washes of gray. Gueorguieva’s new paintings are works in low relief: layers of muslin, gauze, and pigment combine to blur the difference between the raw edges of strips of fabric and the illusionism of a painted line. Variegated layers of gray form a miasmatic haze that hangs over strata of bright colors and agitated lines that churn beneath the surface to reveal flashes of figures, human and animal. Like the bodies uncovered in the centuries-long process of excavating Pompeii from its blanket of volcanic ash, Gueorguieva’s compositions invite speculation about the relationships of the creatures embedded in the dense layers to one another. Though originally compelled to strip her work from the stretchers, Gueorguieva’s act of generative destruction ultimately inspired her to reconceptualize the canvas as a site of possibility and discovery, like the framed sieve of an archaeologist sifting through the layers of history. Pompeii Gray opens October 26 and will be on view through November 20, 2022 at GAVLAK Palm Beach. To behold And She Cried for the Weekend (2021) is to experience the pleasure of uncovering fragments—buoyant breasts, splayed limbs, and rangy digits—that appear to combine in a scene of conjugal bliss. This sensation is quickly eclipsed by the unsettling possibility that the human figures rendered in anxious, wiry line as a writhing, undifferentiated mass are engaged in violent rather than orgiastic activity. Fingers that initially seemed arched in erotic tension over the belly of a lover now appear to be clawing through layers of gray and bruise-purple viscera. A Slow Congress Under Heavy Gauze (2021) similarly binds the carnal with the moribund; pink and blue aurorae shimmer beneath a shroud of gray to highlight a couple locked in eager congress. Yet the ashen palette and the gauzy texture produced by layers of muslin swaddling the surface of the work mummify this scene of passion and render our curious prying perverse. Wrapped in Animals and Fears (2021) corrupts even the sweet contentment of relaxing with an animal companion, as the stiff figure of a hollow-eyed hooved creature splays in a suffocating posture over where the neck of a vaguely human figure ought to be. The exhibition also features three sculptures from Gueorguieva’s “Talisman Debris” series, which informed her initial impulses to abandon the constraints of canvas stretchers, as well as the omnivorous approach to different media manifest in her latest work. Gueorguieva salvaged hunks of concrete and twists of rebar from a Tampa demolition site and from these humble fragments fashioned compositions that exude a surprising, buoyant liveliness. Vanished Animal 3 (2015) lofts bright tatters of intaglio prints on fabric on a twisted steel scaffold, balanced precariously on a concrete island in a manner suggestive of migration and ruination. Inspired by her own family’s immigration histories, in this series Gueorguieva alludes to the natural and manmade disasters that prompt us to leave life as we knew it behind. In considering the human and animal subjects of Pompeii fated to share their last breaths and long afterlives together amongst the ruins, Gueorguieva envisages the interpersonal exchanges we perform in the thick of unfathomable disaster. The tender gestures of people frozen at the moments of their demise take on a particular sharpness in the contemporary context of a global plague that compels individuals to sacrifice physical closeness as an act of collective care. The companions who cling together within these compositions are at least not alone, and the beauty of their bonds is undiminished even in their wretchedness. Iva Gueorguieva (b. 1974, Bulgaria) lives and works in Los Angeles. Her work is part of the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego. Her recent solo exhibitions include presentations for UTA Artist Space, Los Angeles (2021; 2020); Frederic Snitzer Gallery, Miami (2018; 2016) and Miles McEnery Gallery, New York (2016; 2015; 2014). Her work featured prominently in recent group exhibitions including L.A. Louver, Venice, California (2022; 2018); David Lewis Gallery (2020); and Sophia Contemporary, London (2018; 2017).

GAVLAK is proud to present Terms of Belonging, an intergenerational exhibition of Latin American artists featuring Allora & Calzadilla, Candida Alvarez, Jose Alvarez/D.O.P.A., Iván Argote, Ricardo Brey, Gisela Colón, Débora Delmar, Teresita Fernández, Ignacio Gatica, Lucia Hierro, Alfredo Jaar, Anuar Maauad, Carlos Martiel, Joiri Minaya, Gabriela Salazar, Yoab Vera, and Valeria Tizol Vivas. The exhibition opens on October 22 and will continue through December 10, 2022. The word “belonging” conveys an effortless kinship: a natural affinity between like and like. The imposition of the word “terms,” however, shatters this ideal and serves to remind that communities are also forged through selective exclusions. By focusing solely on conceptual practices in the work of Latin American artists, Terms of Belonging asks what it means for an artist to refuse the call for “positive” representation on behalf of a marginalized community through established artistic conventions and forms.

GAVLAK is proud to announce Deborah Brown: Flâneuse, the gallery’s second solo presentation of the work of the Brooklyn-based painter Deborah Brown. In new works (all 2022), Brown assumes the role of the flâneuse, the feminine counterpart to the 19th century archetype of the flâneur, a sophisticated and urbane subject whose powers of observation flow from his simultaneous immersion in and detachment from the living organism of the city.