Anthony Hernandez: Screened Pictures / Monique Mouton: Scene

Kayne Griffin Corcoran is pleased to present Screened Pictures, an exhibition of a new body of work by Anthony Hernandez to be shown together for the first time. This will be the first exhibition of the artist with the gallery and his first solo exhibition in his hometown of Los Angeles in over a decade.

Screened Pictures consists of portraits of Los Angeles as seen through the metal mesh of the various different bus stops throughout the city. The scenes are abstracted and offer a different perspective of the city than his earlier works—giving off a digital appearance even though they are all taken on film and have not been digitally manipulated. Screened Pictures brings forth a shift back to figures in Hernandez’s photographs as well. Different from his earlier series, his figures are now blurred through the inherent abstraction of the metal grating and his choice to focus the camera consistently on the metal mesh rather than the background. Upon closer examination of the photographs, visual cues inform the viewer as to what they could be looking at: a tent perched on the edge of a patch of grass, a lone figure walking in front of a gas station, and various different architectural details from throughout the city. All of these bring to mind certain aspects of Hernandez’s other series, yet this revisitation is from a completely different perspective. “LA is my big studio,” Hernandez has said. “One day I’m in one corner, the next in the middle…it’s like having a filter to see LA in a new way.”

Anthony Hernandez (b. 1947) lives and works in Los Angeles, CA and Idaho. He was most recently included in May You Live in Interesting Times curated by Ralph Rugoff as part of the 58th Venice Biennale and is subject to a solo-exhibition at the Nelson-Atkins Museum, Kansas City, MO. Hernandez was subject to his first career retrospective that traveled to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2016), the Milwaukee Art Museum, WI (2017), and the Fundación MAPRE in Madrid, Spain (2019). In 1998 Hernandez was awarded the Rome Prize, and in 2018 he received the Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship. His work resides in permanent collections such as the Getty Center, the Hammer Museum, LACMA, and the Museum of Contemporary Art (all Los Angeles); the Met, Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney, and the Guggenheim Museum (all New York); the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Tate Modern in London, amongst others.

In the south gallery, Kayne Griffin Corcoran is pleased to present Scene, a solo exhibition of paintings by Monique Mouton. 

This body of work is saturated in both color and composition and pushes Mouton’s interest in the marginal areas of the paintings. The artist draws attention to transitional spaces such as that between the paper and the frame by playing her irregular cuts off of the crisp structures that house them. The paintings elaborate softer signals as Mouton makes a case for gradual reception. In one painting a rainbow appears through a wash of a purple hue. Another’s subtly arced perimeter comes into clarity slowly, one edge a strip that has been sliced off then reattached. The artist’s decision-making reveals an impetus to extend the compositions beyond their formal boundaries. This intent is not a kind of metaphor (although it does pose the question: what else is worth our consideration?), it is a real discussion of the paintings themselves. How do the paintings bleed into one another? How do they share information? The architecture of the gallery space, the viewer, the frames, the weather, current events, all are contingencies on the experience of the works. One small change in variable can alter the experience, giving way to the open-endedness of seemingly fixed creations.

Monique Mouton lives and works in New York, NY. She completed her Bachelor of Fine Arts at Emily Carr Institute in Vancouver, British Columbia and her Master of Fine Arts at the Milton Avery Graduate School at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. Mouton has exhibited widely nationally and internationally with exhibitions at Bridget Donahue, New York; Natalia Hug, Cologne; Klemm’s, Berlin; Catriona Jeffries, Vancouver; Galeria Mascota, Mexico City; Fourteen30, Portland; Simon Lee, New York; Gladstone Gallery, New York; Metro Pictures, New York; Wallspace, New York; Cleopatra’s, Brooklyn; and many more.