GAVLAK

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. A symposium will take place on November 12, 2022 and Valeria Tizol Vivas will perform her durational piece Mejunje: la encendida. 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. Though this pressure to produce and/ or represent on behalf of a larger cultural identity is not isolated to artists of the Latin American diaspora, Terms of Belonging proposes a framework for Latin American art that does not hinge on nationality or ethnicity. Like the contentious term “Latinx,” the exhibition signals the need to expand beyond antiquated categories of belonging while acknowledging the ways in which these new and supposedly more inclusive terms are themselves rooted in specific and localized definitions of Latin American experience. Like the broader conceptual and minimalist traditions to which they belong, the works in the exhibition do not comprise a rejection of figuration, or identitarian concerns entirely. Instead the inclusion or allusion to real bodies constitutes an acknowledgment of the reductive nature of individual and collective identity, and a desire to speak beyond the constraints of the self. In publicly subjecting his own body to a period of chemically induced insentience, Carlos Martiel demonstrates the fundamental impossibility of communicating the depth of interior states via external systems. Joiri Minaya in her Container series depicts tableaux of women outfitted in floral bodysuits which paradoxically camouflage them amongst staged “natural” environments, registering the contemporary effects of primitivizing narratives that conflate Black and Latina women with nature. Jose Alvarez (D.O.P.A). capitalizes on the ubiquity of mass media in everyday life, tapping into and satirizing the craving for meaning that has historically spurred colonizing cultures to fabricate (and impersonate) “native” spiritual guides. In a striking video composition that features no human subjects at all, Allora & Calzadilla produce a vision of Puerto Rico defined by structuring absences: the Taíno people who have become the subjects of the island’s pre-contact origin myths following their eradication through colonialism, and the ruins of the agricultural and petrochemical industries that abandoned the island after extracting its resources. Through charred compositions of burned and cut paper that grimly approximate the carbon traces left by dead vegetation, Teresita Fernández likewise traces the lingering effects of cut-and-run colonialism, on Puerto Rico’s compromised ecosystems. Similarly, the bright, kaleidoscopic panes of Candida Alvarez’s acrylic abstraction evoke the fragility of man made structures in the face of ever-intensifying natural disasters due to climate change. The forms which emerge from her canvas directly reference rejas, the decorative iron grilles that are placed over home windows throughout Latin America. In Puerto Rico, where Alvarez was born, these grilles protect against tropical storms; here, however, they appear in fractured, sunken relief, ominously signaling vulnerability instead of fortification. A new work by Gabriela Salazar recapitulates a day-long participatory art experience staged for the Climate Museum in Washington Square Park, New York, in which Gabriela Salazar compelled the public to consider their potential as agents of climate justice by offering a surrogate of her own home to be dismantled. Over the course of one rainy day, passersby were invited to take a piece of a delicate structure created from paper casts of the windows of Salazar’s apartment, propped into place with sandbags obviously incapable of preventing the sculpture’s dissolution. Here she presents a re-fabricated element of that original installation that functions as a desire for preservation in the face of climate-catastrophe. In an installation combining the sterility of minimalist readymades with the preciousness of hand-crafted facsimiles, Débora Delmar examines the exalted place to which the avocado has ascended in global food systems and the impact the increased demand has had on its primary importer, the state of Michoacán, Mexico. In a series inspired equally by Donald Judd’s minimalist “stacks” and the food cultures of corner bodegas endangered by gentrification, Lucia Hierro produces reverse readymades by creating meticulous replicas of glossy, mass-produced packages of salty snacks. In luminous monoliths that are at once atavistic and imposing, Gisela Colón resists dominant interpretations which posit minimalist sculpture as austere and impersonal. Layers of sediment harvested from formative sites in the artist’s life support a glittering pinnacle, becoming stacked totemic structures forged in a crucible of pulverized bullets and cosmic dust. American minimalist sculptors in the 1970s often chose to present and preserve ordinary industrial materials in a pristine state; comparatively, Yoab Vera’s modular abstractions in scumbled oils and concrete approximate the living quality that these substances take on as they decay. Similarly, charcoal is the product of human intervention in a process of controlled entropy, Ricardo Brey’s mixed media assemblages stage baroque encounters between manmade flotsam and organic jetsam; delicate chains adorn a deep blue pedestal for a slender, bleached white bird skull that achieves its status as an objet d’art only through the animal’s demise. As a genre uniquely concerned with thwarting death by visually securing the subject’s immortality, memorial sculpture often resorts to calcified neoclassical formulas designed to project power even from beyond the grave. Anuar Maauad works with the literal refuse of this industry, appropriating the plaster molds of cast bronze sculptures rejected by their commissioners for their failure to produce a desired immortalizing effect. These molds, presented themselves as sculptural works by Maauad, appear as monstrous, faceless golems embodying the horrors that the heroic idealism of memorial sculpture is meant to conceal. In the work of Iván Argote, the Romantic notion of the ruin as a site where hubristic culture is reabsorbed into nature is updated for the ongoing project of postcolonialism. By seizing on a worldwide tide of resistance resulting in the removal and destruction of monuments to slavers and colonizers, Argote, in a recent body of work, proposes that these toppled sculptures be repurposed as planters for local flora. He not only presents these proposals as artworks but has been actively engaging in an outreach campaign with the goal of manipulating news outlets into believing these acts of iconoclasm have already taken place, baiting contemporary political regimes into revealing their own investments in these monuments to inequity. The dangerous challenge of marking and confronting a violent political regime is assumed by two artists in the exhibition whose respective careers bookend the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in Chile. Inspired by Irish republicans’ use of trash can lids as noise-making tools of resistance, Alfredo Jaar in 1981 studded the streets of Santiago with them in an act of defiance that he could claim as a simple aesthetic exercise. By exhibiting documentation of the work alongside newspaper clippings chronicling the actions in Belfast, Jaar established the significance of this gesture only after he had completed it. Ignacio Gatica demonstrates the enduring significance of Jaar’s hijacking of the strategies of mass media propaganda for the next generation of Chilean artists by engaging participants with an interactive circular LED display that monitors the stock price of major corporations in real time. By swiping specially programmed cards through a digital reader, visitors trigger the interjection of street poetry into this capitalist recitation, asserting the potentiality of protest in both physical and virtual realms. Through their work, these artists transcend the negative formations produced by an identification forged in shared traumatic experience and affirm the artist’s power to create radical forms and action in response to an oppressive market which seeks to fix, delimit, and categorize artistic output based on identatrian social constructions. Terms of Belonging is organized by Efrain Lopez.

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. The anonymity that enables the flâneur to see without being seen manifests in Brown’s work in the long shadows that spill over the manicured lawns and sprawling driveways of stately Pasadena mansions. In each of the canvases and works on paper that comprise the exhibition, the silhouettes of a person—the artist herself—and a leashed dog cast a sense of alienation and menace over these ostentatious properties and their meticulously curated sensuality. Enticed by the artist’s lush palette and fluid brushwork but instinctively repelled by a host of visual and architectural cues designed to keep them at a distance, the viewer apprehends the subtle means by which the experience of even something as ineffable as beauty is determined by matters of class and access.