Marie Jager
The Big Nowhere
May 1 – June 19, 2010
Opening reception:
Saturday, May 1, 2010 5-9 PM
Kunsthalle LA
932 Chung King Road
Los Angeles, CA 90012
Francois Ghebaly is pleased to present the first solo exhibition of works by Marie Jager. The exhibition includes paintings, prints and works on paper.
In her “Pollution Paintings”, Marie Jager makes visible the invisible combustion and sediment that defines the city’s landscape while reflecting the artist’s restless view of the city where she lives. Playing off L.A.’s varied reputation for car culture, inevitable sunshine, and smog-induced sunsets, Jager placed canvases at various sites around the city—her garden, near the beach, on a rooftop in an industrial neighborhood—and retrieved them as readymade landscape paintings. The delicate abstractions that result invert the en plein air of one of painting’s longstanding conventional modes as Los Angeles’ traces of pollution are captured and re-framed as landscape paintings. In contrast to these durational portraits of the urban environment, the instant of ignition that defines everyday life in Los Angeles—turning over the engine in your car—is captured repeatedly in Jager’s Starter paintings where the burnt oil discharged when the motor engages makes an instant oil-on-canvas landscape of the city’s mobility and automobile reliant citizenry.
In her Sun Map and Rain Map series, Jager has exposed blueprints of Los Angeles’s aerial pictures to the elements (sunshine and rain) that have altered them. While the Sun Map results in hallows of light entering the picture, the Rain Map turns the aerial view of the city into a giant watercolor. The title of the exhibition is taken from the James Ellroy’s novel, but refers mostly to the endless urban landscape that defines the California Metropolis. Each aerial view depicts a precise area of the city but is also nearly impossible to locate.
Marie Jager was born in Copenhagen, Denmark in 1975. She lives and works in Los Angeles where she received her MFA from the University of Southern California in 2004. Her work has been presented in such venues as Sculpture Center, Artists Space (NY), China Art Objects, the MAK Center (LA), Mercer Union (Toronto), Croy Nielsen (Berlin), Jeffrey Charles Gallery (London) and the Henry Art Gallery (Seattle). She was included in the 2006 California Biennial and her work has been written about in Flash Art and Artforum. Jager’s work is in several private collections in Europe and the US.
The exhibition is open Wednesday to Sunday, 12pm to 6pm. For further information, please contact the gallery at (323) 221.2300 or info [at] ghebaly.com.
Image above:
Marie Jager
Starter, (detail), 2008
© the artist
Courtesy Francois Ghebaly
