Klaus Wanker
September 1 – September 29, 2007
Opening Reception:
Saturday September 8th, from 5-7pm
Mark Moore Gallery
2525 Michigan Avenue, A1
Santa Monica, CA 90404
Phone: 310.453.3031
Fax: 310.453.3831
Hours: Tuesday – Friday 10 – 5 pm,
Saturday 11 – 5pm
http://www.markmooregallery.com
Mark Moore Gallery is pleased to introduce new works by Austrian artist, Klaus Wanker. Wanker’s realist portraits pose and explore questions relating to youth culture, identity, mass media and the glut of images and celebrities that inundate contemporary society. He captures his young subjects intertwined with pop culture, presenting them as fantasies of themselves: cool, emotionless, beautiful and perfectly posed. His works present individuals that, ironically, find personal identity and location in mass media and advertising. The subject is reduced to an ideal paradigm of youth and beauty.
Wanker’s work is ultimately a series of paradoxes and complexities; his subjects demand to be looked at and yet their faces betray nothing. He simultaneously critiques and mimics advertising; his works resemble advertisements formally yet they have none of the opulence. Although he seems to suggest there is a certain soulless-ness to his subjects, he is also apparently buying into the culture, replicating t-shirt slogans to transform his paintings into adverts themselves. He even seamlessly inscribes the title of the piece across the canvas, labeling the painting as an advertisement for itself, subtly branding it a commodity and ushering in a whole host of new complexities regarding the contemporary art market.
Born in Austria, Wanker studied at both the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and at the Kunstakademie in Dusseldorf, Germany. His work has been exhibited extensively across Europe and in the last year has been included in exhibitions on both the East and West Coast. This show will be his first solo exhibition in the United States. Klaus Wanker lives and works in Vienna, Austria.
Project Room
Jennifer Nehrbass
September 1 – September 29, 2007
Opening Reception: Saturday September 8th, from 5-7pm
Mark Moore Gallery is pleased to present new paintings by Jennifer Nehrbass in the Project Room. Nehrbass’s opulent yet unsettling realist portraits of women are a complex presentation of voyeurism, beauty, femininity, sexuality and independence. Although obviously influenced by glossy, stylized fashion photography, her paintings seem to document a performance, rather than a pose; she catches her subjects in action, presenting then as more than simply inactive props for their own beauty. Thus Nehrbass both supports and subverts traditional notions of the gaze and the female portrait, echoing the complexities and contradictions of being a woman in contemporary society. She explores notions of formulated female identity, and the resulting difficulty of a sense of self, free from media influence and preconceived ideals. Her work reflects a desire to disarm and subvert accepted ideals of beauty by presenting the unexpected and often confusing, even distasteful. By seeing these elements of beauty in settings we do not understand or expect, we are forced to reconsider and hopefully to question why our expectations are so limited, so ingrained that we cannot find beauty in the other.
[Nehrbass] turns the pose of the helpless female inside out. Her figures exude a private sexuality that is neither passive nor aggressive […] With a self confidence detached from manly desires, Nehrbass’ women are independent characters in their own right.
Juxatpoz Magazine, June 2006
Jennifer Nehrbass received her MA from New York University, NY and her MFA from the University of New Mexico, NM. She has exhibited widely across the United States, most prominently in New Mexico and New York; her work has also been exhibited in Europe. She lives and works in Albuquerque, NM.
For more information on either artist or the opening event, please contact the gallery at 310.453.3031, info@markmooregallery, or http://www.markmooregallery.com
