heather

a visual meditation on meloncholy

Howard495 is pleased to present “heather”, a group exhibition featuring work by Daniele Buetti, Robert Longo, Lisa Yuskavage, Banksy, Tim Gardner, Richard Prince, Willy Ronis, Luce Meunier, Miwa Ogasawara, Yousuf Karsh, Jonas Wood, Rene Groebli, George Tice and Caj Bremer.

Marked by an historical moment in time and a collective feeling of melancholy, “heather” provides a framework with which to explore melancholia as an aesthetic emotion. Though the works exhibited display an orchestra of form, concept and media, there is a sublime underpinning of meditative contemplation running throughout the work. This subliminal expression – not of thought but of pure emotion – is an unheralded gift. A reminder of the potential art has to invite its viewers to bear witness to their own feelings and to explore the raw edges of their conscience self. Melancholy, nuanced with sadness, suffuses the exhibition yet somehow does not elicit sadness; rather, through the work it carries us inward to a place of stillness and introspection. Attending to and contemplating what we are feeling, is where the beauty lays.

June
I am that which is idle on a summer day.
I am the mouth that does not move.
I am the dish that parts the beef like a sea.
I am the wind’s last legs at dusk.
I am six feet short of the moon,
Watching you as you sleep, and you,
Who came to my breath, perhaps expecting me
To turn up around the corner in the rain,
Like a memory of Paris, so I close my eyes
And kiss you as if I was there.
Matthew Wong

Daniele Buetti
Kate Moss (Looking for Love series)
Altered Photo on Aluminium
40.5 x 29.5 in
Edition of 3
Signed on Recto
1997
$12,000 CAD

Daniele Buetti is a contemporary Swiss artist with a multi-media practice focused on exposing the fragility of popular culture and the excesses of today’s consumer driven society. Interested in exposing and analyzing the gap between appearance and reality, Buetti attempts to reveal what lies beneath the glossy surface of the beauty, sports and fashion worlds. In Looking for Love, a series from the late 1990’s, Buetti draws brand names, logos, and scribbles onto the backs of reproduced images taken from fashion magazines.

The closing years of the twentieth century are a period in which the body is of a central importance. Exalted exorbitant prestige, beauty and sports are cultivated with almost religious devotion. Metaphors of the body are taking over our vocabulary. […] These skin drawings throw an everyday relationship into sharp relief: products, and the brand emblems get under our skin and make themselves at home in our subconscious, into which they are insinuated by the suggestive technique of advertising.

Daniele Buetti

Robert Longo
Study for “Wedge” from the Essentials Series
Charcoal and Ink on Vellum
Private Collection

Study for Wedge comes from the Monsters series of charcoal drawings that depict things at the moment of their fulfillment. The waves are presented at the top of their crests, suspended in time, displaying their unstoppable power, and imminent denouement.

Metro Picture Gallery has said about them: “Devoid of people, location and color, the looming crests of exploding power are notably singular portraits of emotional and physical forces. The near abstraction of the waves is strikingly dissimilar to the more familiar representations of the sea as poetic and romantic, or in terms of man against nature.”

…things that were existing at the moment of their being: a bomb is supposed to explode, a rose … to bloom and a wave … to crash. They are at the moment of their fulfillment.

Robert Longo

Rene Groebli
Eye of Love #510, 1953
Selenium-toned gelatin silver print
12 x 16 in
Edition 6/7
Signed, numbered in pencil
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Rene Groebli
Eye of Love #510, 1953
Selenium-toned gelatin silver print
12 x 16 in
Edition 6/7
Signed, numbered in pencil
Inquire for Pricing

Rene Groebli
Eye of Love #510, 1953
Selenium-toned gelatin silver print
12 x 16 in
Edition 6/7
Signed, numbered in pencil
Inquire for Pricing

BANSKY
Nola (Grey)
Screenprint in colours
29 3/4 x 21 3/4 in
2008
Signed in pencil and numbered on wove paper
Accompanied by a COA
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Nola, part of a 14 piece series, was first seen in 2008 in the Marigny neighbourhood in New Orleans; three years after the tragic events of Hurricane Katrina. The series references the disaster that befell the city affectionately known as ‘Nola’. The work depicts a young girl failing to find the shelter she seeks, from that which is promised to provide it to her. Banksy, assumedly, is suggesting that what we often believe is there to help us, will in reality cause us harm.

Richard Prince
Together
Off-set lithography, hand-cutting,
painting and assemblage
19 x 24 inches
Edition of 26 lettered A through Z. - Edition H
2008/2011
$5500

Richard Prince’s Together series is a process of interaction with his idol Willem de Kooning. The idea for these works came to Prince while he was reading a catalogue of de Kooning’s Women series. He began to sketch over the images in the book, drawing with graphite and oil crayon, adding outlines, collaging and taping silhouettes and textures to the original figures.

Tim Gardner
Night Ferry
Watercolour on paper
10 x 14.125 in
Private Collection

Willy Ronis
Lorraine
Silver Gelatin print
16 x 12 in
3,500 EUR

Willy Ronis was a central figure in the humanist photography movement with his French colleagues, Robert Doisneau, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Brassai. He captured the Parisian streets in full play and celebrated the poetry of everyday.

I have never sought out the extraordinary or the scoop. The beauty of the ordinary was always the source of my greatest emotions.

Willy Ronis

In his boldly colored, graphic works—including paintings, drawings, and prints—Jonas Wood combines art historical references with images of the objects, interiors, and people that comprise the fabric of his life. Translating the three-dimensional world around him into flat color and line, he confounds expectations of scale and vantage point.

You could call [my work] a visual diary or even a personal history. I’m not going to paint something that doesn’t have anything to do with me. Of all of the possible things I could paint, the thing that interests me is something that I can get close enough to in order to paint it honestly.

Jonas Wood

Jonas Wood
Untitled Pot
Woodblock and lithography on paper
40 x 28.5 in
2009
$19,000.00 USD

Luce Meunier
Flot 6
Acrylic on cotton and linen canvas
36 x 24 in
$4,500 CAD

Luce Meunier
Flot 9
Acrylic on cotton and linen canvas
36 x 24 in
$4,500 CAD

Luce Meunier
Flot 5
Acrylic on cotton and linen canvas
36 x 24 in
$4,500 CAD

Luce Meunier pursues abstract fields that ethereally hover at the juncture of control and unpredictability. Implementing a programmatic methodology, gesture is largely accorded to the medium itself as waterborne pigments are repeatedly introduced to suffuse surfaces in duration, creating layers of palpably organic forms accumulating in a formal geometry. With the series, Eaux de surface, Meunier triggers successive layers of pigment moving inward from the periphery to coax fugitive gestures made by time and gravity as paint encounters the canvas surface. In the most recent work of the series, Eaux de surface #9, Meunier includes the centre of the canvas as a point of trajectory, resulting in forms suggestive of a Rorschach-like doubling, but achieved through aleatory approximation. In Eaux de surface, areas of the unprimed canvas remain bare, registering the tactility of the woven fabric to underscore the reductive formula of paint, canvas, absorption. Meunier’s determinations around the pictorial are almost entirely located within an antecedent conceptualization, predictive of a given medium’s response to a set of conditions — effectively, mapping chance — and activated by time. There is a prevailing imperative to geometry across each series, through mechanisms of the grid, the act of doubling, or repeated forms, and Meunier demonstrates its elastic legibility, with her various processes consistently privileging chance over precision.

Miwa Ogasawara
Wange
Oil on Canvas
12 x 12 in
2008
$4,800 CAD

Lisa Yuskavage
Bonfire
Intaglio print with chine cole
15 x 12 in
Edition 5/14
$2,500 USD

Lisa Yuskavage’s simultaneously bold, eccentric, exhibitionist, and introspective characters assume dual roles of subject and object, complicating the position of viewership. At times playful and harmonious, and at other times rueful and conflicted, these characters are cast within fantastical compositions in which realistic and abstract elements coexist.

Yousuf Karsh
Georgia O’Keeffe
Gelatin silver print
20 x 16 in
1956

George Tice
Petit’s Mobil, Cherry Hill, New Jersey
Selenium-toned gelatin silver print
16 x 20 in
Signed in pencil on recto, titled & dated in pencil on verso
1974/Printed March 20, 2004
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