Sponder Gallery

Exhibitor's Artists:

• Ellen Carey
  Detailed Description : Ellen Carey is a pioneer in the camera-less, installation and lens-based contemporary art field. Carey creates images, often site-specific monumental installations, that are uniquely abstract/minimal and simultaneously photographic. Her breakthrough large-scale Polaroid artworks termed Pulls (1996 – 2011) highlight an investigation into making images with little or “zero” exposure. The concepts and images begin with light, often incorporating experiments in process to produce challenging and innovative artworks. Ellen Carey (b.1952 USA) is a nationally and internationally recognized lens-based artist and photographer whose work has been the subject of forty-six one-person exhibitions and several hundred-group exhibitions. Her work is in the permanent collections of museums such as The Whitney Musuem of American Art, Metropolitan Musuem, Musuem at The Chicago Art Institute, Los Angeles County, Fogg Art Musuem, Albright-Knox Art Gallery (AKAG), Wadsworth Atheneum, Yale University Art Gallery, George Eastman House as well as many corporate collections.
• Lynn Chadwick
  Detailed Description : Lynn Chadwick was born in 1914 in London. One of the leading sculptors in Britain, Lynn Chadwick’s abstract and figurative work has brought him international renown. The angular contours and diamond shaped heads are entirely characteristic of his oeuvre. His figures with their softened geometric forms and rigid, stilted postures became a major theme of his work throughout the 1980’s. His talent for infusing cubic figures with anthropomorphic allusions remains one of his highest artistic accomplishments. Chadwick's work is in the collections of many major museums throughout the world.
  Also exhibited by: Contessa Gallery, Abby M. Taylor Fine Art LLC,
• Dan Christensen
  Biography : Dan Christensen was born in Cozad, Nebraska in 1942. He received his BFA in 1964 from the Kansas City Art Institute and currently resides in New York City. His early work was of a minimalist geometric style which he later abandoned due to its constrictiveness. He now works as an romantic minimalist, using spray guns and squeegees to create luminous canvases with abstract patterns floating on In 1967 Dan began using spray guns to draw colorful stacks, loops and lines on his paintings, that were among the most original abstract paintings of the decade. Having a unique mastery of the language of abstract painting color, line, surface, and a confident and gifted touch Christensen has used his ability to produce a varied and high quality body of work. By 1968, Christensen made a group of paintings that were colored rectangles and bars floating in a sprayed atmosphere of lyrical, multi-colored space. That year he also began his important series of loop spray paintings. Resembling colored pencil or ball point pen doodles on a note pad, made on a giant scale by a giant hand, these paintings are astonishingly primal and liberating. Painted mostly in thin sweeping lines of sprayed primary color on neutral canvas-colored grounds, these paintings are a remarkable achievement. He followed those paintings with another series of sprayed line paintings that were thick, thin, twisting, serpentine lines and arcs painted on richly colored fields. Christensen's lucid and articulate ability to paint has led his fertile imagination into several radically different series. He has a willingness to change and grow and he has often altered his painting methods and his style. In the early seventies he made paintings with squeegees that were solid blocks of perpendicular color of different surfaces. Dan Christensen began exhibiting his paintings in New York City in 1966. He has had more than 60 solo exhibitions and his work has appeared in important group shows all over the world. His paintin

  

  Ibid

  
  Also exhibited by: Berry Campbell,
• Michael Halsband
  Biography : Born and raised in New York City, Michael Halsband started photography as a hobby at age ten. At school, almost by chance, he was shown how to make a print from start to finish. Amazed by this process, he ran home and announced to his parents "I'm into photography". They said, "If you're into photography in a year, we will buy you a camera". For a year, Halsband happily printed old family snapshots in the darkroom and understood that true creation takes place there. For him, every step in photography serves getting into the darkroom. As a teen, Halsband attempted to gain admission to The School of Visual Arts with his drawings & paintings. The head of admissions was not impressed with Halsband's work and asked if he had anything else to show. The next day, Halsband came back with his photography and was immediately accepted into the school. While attending SVA in 1978, Halsband began professionally photographing portraits for magazine stories and covers. By his third year at SVA, he made enough money to buy his own studio. Some of the people he photographed at that time were: Andy Warhol, Bernice Abbott, David Byrne, Walter Stedding, Glenn Branca, Alan Vega, Bob Guccione, Klaus Nomi and Lydia Lunch and Eight Eyed Spy. Klaus Nomi's portrait was made in February of 1980, and was part of Halsband's senior thesis. Klaus showed up with the space-like outfit that had just been made by a costume designer. Nomi wanted Halsband to be the first to photograph him in that outfit because he loved Halsband's relentless attention to detail. After graduating from SVA in the spring of 1980, he and continued to work for magazines like Interview, Avenue and Rolling Stone, making portraits including Jim Carroll and Peter Tosh. In summer of 1981, after several weeks on the road photographing James Brown, Halsband got an assignment to photograph Keith Richards for the cover of Rolling Stone Magazine and consequently was asked by Mick Jagger to be The Rolling Stones tour photograph
• Patrick Hughes
  
  Also exhibited by: Elizabeth Clement Fine Art,
• Jun Kaneko
  Biography : Jun Kaneko was born in 1942 in Nagoya, Japan and came to the United States in the 1960’s. Particularly drawn to sculptural ceramics, Kaneko studied at the Chouinard Institute of Art during a pivotal time when ceramics as functional craft was expanding to embrace the highest levels of contemporary artistic expression. After studying with Peter Voulkos, Paul Soldner, and Ken Price in California, Kaneko emerged during the time now identified as the “America Clay Revolution.” Jun Kaneko’s work is defined by its overwhelming scale and exquisite form, implying a spatial relationship between the object and viewer. Evidence of Kaneko’s early years as a painter exists in the richly glazed surfaces and rhythmic pulse of his marks and patterns. Their sheer size combined with the artists hunger to push the physical limitations of his material, generate an undeniable presence.
• Jeff Koons
  Biography : Born in York, Pennsylvania, Jeff Koons became one of the better-known contemporary artists in New York, focusing on pop-art relative to the consumer culture. He transforms items of mass market appeal, especially kitsch, into high art. He studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Maryland Institute College of Art and in 1977 arrived in New York from where he became an art world celebrity. His studio has been an immense SoHo loft on the corner of Houston and Broadway in New York, and his work expresses his fascination with commercial packaging and children's toys. Running his studio like a corporation, he has 35 full-time assistants, each assigned to a different aspect of his output--sculpture and small and large-scale paintings.

  

  Split Rocker

  
  Also exhibited by: ADLER & Co.,
• Alexander Liberman
  Detailed Description : Alexander Liberman was born in 1912 in Kiev, Ukraine and was a magazine editor, publisher, painter, photographer, and sculptor. After emigrating to New York in 1941, he began working for Condé Nast Publications, rising to the position of editorial director, which he held from 1962-1994. Only in the 1950s did Liberman take up painting and, later, metal sculpture. Prominent examples of his work are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Storm King Art Center, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Pyramid Hill Sculpture Park, Tate Gallery, and the Guggenheim Museum.
• Jane Manus
  Biography : Jane Manus has been continuously developing her oeuvre of forceful geometric sculptures since the 1970s, when as a young, female artist at the Art Institute of Boston she learned to weld metal into sculpture, an experience Manus describes as a breakthrough in her artistic career. Manus’ work has indeed evolved, and today she works exclusively in aluminum. Her vibrant sculptures seamlessly integrate disparate elements of geometry, thereby truly transforming the spaces that they inhabit. Dynamic shapes and massive forms penetrate the viewer’s space, and seem to move and change in appearance due to their extreme three- dimensionality. Abstract though they are, Manus’ sculptures also retain an unyielding expressive character that gives each work a life and spirit of its own. Jane Manus was born in New York in 1951, and is now based in West Palm Beach, Florida. Her work has been exhibited worldwide, and is included in many prestigious collections, including those of the Cricket Taplin Collection, Miami, FL; Harn Museum of Art, Gainesville, FL; The Lincoln Center/List Collection, New York; the Georgia Museum of Art, Atlanta; and Syracuse University. Also represented by: C. Grimaldis Gallery,
• Jedd Novatt
  Biography : “Out of chaos comes order. Jedd Novatt’s impressive body of work explores the structural tensions specific to sculpture — the forces that bring equilibrium or disequilibrium to three-dimensional form. Notwithstanding the disorder implied by their titles, the finished objects are elegant and visually thrilling.”“Novatt’s works carry a freight of implied danger that seems to intensify with the increase in scale. His large-scale outdoor works are also impressive feats of engineering, yet happily they are feats that remain subtly subordinated to the aesthetic power of the work. [...]The death of Spanish artist Eduardo Chillida (1924-2002) left a gaping hole on the horizon of ‘proper’ sculpture — sculpture that is concerned with those eternally important matters such as scale, volume, structure, balance, the dialectics of internal and external energy, and so on. [...] Novatt may be the rightful heir to Chillida’s crown.”Tom Flynn, London-based art historian

  

  Chaos Ritmo
• Doug Ohlson
  Biography : Doug Ohlson began his education in a number of small colleges, and a three year period in the U.S. Marines before graduating from the University of Minnesota with a B.A. in fine art. That same year, Ohlson moved to New York and was fortunate to interact with artists such as Robert Motherwell, Lee Krasner, and Barnett Newman while attending Hunter College where he eventually became a full time professor. Ohlson’s formal ‘color field’ works reflect an elemental artistic vocabulary. The use of shape, scale, and line each convey a separate feeling, while simultaneously implying fundamental color theory. Much like other artists of the post war era, Ohlson’s works require an involvement by his viewers. Bold blocks of color juxtaposed with painterly strokes, and unexpected linear elements create a dialogue between the surface of his paintings and their visual depth. Apparent in each decade present in this exhibition, is a timeline of development in Ohlson’s work. The artist’s early career, dominated by boldly saturated color, progressed into translucent and opaque hues with more definite evidence of Ohlson’s hand. Most recently, the focus has turned to narrow bars of color abruptly placed throughout the canvas, as the artist says to “throw in a little wrench.” Doug Ohlson’s works have continued to appear in exhibitions organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, the National Gallery of Art, D.C., and The Whitney Museum of American Art, as well as numerous established galleries, since his initial group exhibition at the Minnesota Institute of Arts. Ohlson has also received prodigious awards including a National Endowment of the Arts Grant and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship
• Mauro Perucchetti
  Biography : The work of Italian artist, Mauro Perucchetti unites Pop aesthetics with social comment, fused together with elegance and an ironic wit. He addresses some of the most pressing and difficult issues in today’s society in a way that is subtle and accessible, without being trite, shocking or obscure. With bold, synthetic colors and pristine, shiny surfaces, Perucchetti’s “Jelly Babies” appeal to the eyes and to the sense of touch. For the artist, these little sweet rudimentary human forms symbolize the disposability that permeates all aspects of contemporary consumer society. Perucchetti uses it to mock the aspirations that this society claims it has, but which it so often cynically betrays.

  

  Jelly Baby Family
• Ernest Trova
  Biography : Ernest Trova was born in St. Louis where he lived his entire life. Inspired by the city’s massive steel industry, Trova adopted the material and used it throughout his career. The Falling Man series, begun in 1964 was to become the major theme of his work. It features an armless, androgynous human figure that recurs in his sculptures, paintings and prints. His Falling Man is not idealized; he is real, imperfect and potentially frail. "The worth of man is how he manages," says Trova, explaining that he places his hinged figures in a variety of positions to test man’s ability to adapt to his changing environment. In 1975, Trova donated 40 works to the Laumeier Sculpture Park in St. Louis. His work can also be seen at the Metropolitan Museum, the Guggenheim, MOMA, NY, LA County Museum, Tate Gallery, London and the Flint Institute, MI.
• Bernar Venet
  

  Effondrement Arcs

  
  Also exhibited by: Galerie Forsblom, Meyerovich Gallery, de Sarthe Gallery,
• James Walsh
  
  Also exhibited by: Berry Campbell,