Robert Graham: Early Work
Dara Friedman: PLAY
Through March 8, 2014
Kayne Griffin Corcoran
1201 South La Brea Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90019
Kayne Griffin Corcoran is pleased to present two solo exhibitions: early sculptures and works on paper by Robert Graham and PLAY a film by Dara Friedman.
Robert Graham: Early Work
Presented in the main gallery is work by sculptor Robert Graham (1938-2008). This exhibition will consist of the artist’s early figurative sculpture in wax and bronze, as well as a selection of graphite and pastel drawings.
Robert Graham’s career-length meditation upon the human form is represented here with a series of wax figures arranged in various tableaux and encased in Plexiglas boxes. Working from photographs of live models Graham produced meticulously detailed replicas of his human subjects. Frozen as they may be, Graham’s figures—replete with perfectly formed fingers, nostrils and genitalia—evoke the tension of a body in motion; they sprawl supine across the floor, arch and twist at the torso, and slump over in a standing position. These wax forms inhabit a stage that is, for the most part, stripped bare of props. Instead, the transparent box itself serves as a pointed framing device. In peering through panes of glass to the disarmingly life-like nudes below, the viewer finds himself engaged in a disconcertingly voyeuristic act.
Despite the inherent sensuality of his subjects, Graham’s interest lay in portraiture rather than erotic reflection. Like Muybridge before him, the artist sought to capture the full effects of human motion, tracing a model’s gesture through a series of movements, presented side-by-side within a single box. In the 1970s, he removed the enclosures and began to cast his figures in bronze. This material transition allowed
Graham to mount his precise and detailed studies on a larger scale, beginning with columns and studies of female heads.
Robert Graham’s work can be found in numerous permanent collections including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. His works have been exhibited widely including solo exhibitions at Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Walker Art Center, Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City. His public commissions include monuments for the Franklin D. Roosevelt Memorial in Washington D.C., the Olympic Gateway in Los Angeles, and the Great Bronze Doors of the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in Los Angeles among others as well as many public installations nationally. Robert Graham was born in Mexico City in 1938. He attended San Jose State University and San Francisco Art Institute, and lived and in London during the mid-’60s, prior to settling in Los Angeles.
Dara Friedman: PLAY
PLAY, a new work by Dara Friedman will be presented in the South Gallery. The two-part film, completed as part of the artist’s 2012 residency at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, where it was recently screened, will also be exhibited at Gavin Brown’s enterprise in New York.
In PLAY, Friedman engaged seventeen couples—some real-life partners, others perfect strangers–to reflect upon and explore notions of intimacy through a series of interviews and improvisational theatre games. From this raw material, Friedman crafted a series of short, self-contained scenes, which she then staged on the streets of Los Angeles, at The Billy Wilder Theater, and in a shack in the hills of Topanga Canyon. The film is marked by the development of seemingly disparate narratives that extend, at times, beyond the screen. This concern with conceptual layering is evident in the film’s title. PLAY simultaneously alludes to the performative nature of romance, addresses the structure of this scene-based narrative performed by actors on a stage, and references the video equipment that serves as our official conduit to the film.
Part 1 and 2, filmed in Super 8mm and HD video and 46 minutes in length, will be shown on a double-sided screen. This screen requires the viewer make a deliberate investment in the work through the selection of a vantage point. Even as fresh expressions of intimacy—poetic, familiar, often deeply moving—flicker and subside, questions linger. Friedman’s concern with PLAY’s physical framework, characteristic of her installations, provokes a curiosity as central to the work’s theme as is the film itself.
Dara Friedman’s work can be found in the permanent collections of such institutions as the Museum of Modern Art in New York. She has exhibited at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington D.C. the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. Born in Bad Kreuznach, Germany in 1968, Friedman now lives and works in Miami.
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*Image: Top: Robert Graham in 1967. Photograph. © Jerry McMillan. Courtesy of Craig Krull Gallery, Santa Monica, California. Bottom: Dara Friedman, PLAY (Fernando & Nana), Super 8mm film and high definition video, color and black & white, sound, running time: 46 minutes. Courtesy of the artist, Gavin Brown’s enterprise, and Hammer Museum’s Residency Program, Los Angeles.
