The Kopeikin Gallery 2766 La Cienega Blvd CA. 90034 Los Angeles, CA California North America T: +1 310-385-5894 F: +1 310 385-7964 M: W: www.kopeikingallery.com
June 2 - July 7, 2012 reception and booksigning Friday, June 1st 6:00 - 8:00
Kopeikin Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition with UK born and New York based artist Phillip Toledano, whose portrait series "A New Kind of Beauty" may be the most memorable exhibition you'll see this year. These images, which many consider disturbing, are of people who've made choices that while creating an abnormal appearance exude a captivating bodily presence. The exhibition opens on Friday, June 1st with a reception and booksigning for the artist from 6:00 - 8:00 and continues through July 7th.
"... looking at these images, we have to question how our aesthetic judgments are compromised by our guardedness or discomfort with these seeming distortions, these new proportions. This is different and unfamiliar territory, and that makes us resistant or, after a couple of deep breaths, tentative. That is what art does sometimes. it is insistent, and it makes us react. It pushes, and we push back." - Bill Hunt writing about Phillip Toledano's "A New Kind of Beauty"
Toledano's staid approach focuses on the physicality of his sitters and doesn't sensationalized them. Placing them in classical poses and chiaroscuro style, they are shown nude or partially clothed, draped in cloth with simple hairstyles and unornamented. The Images alternately resemble the compositions of classical painting and sculpture. Magnificently lit and printed, the large images reveal the impressive detail capture by the photographer. Pores, veins and fine lines all become visible, and the varied texture of the skin becomes a complex element of some of these images. To me, these are the most beautiful. In people who have strayed so far from their natural human forms, it is here that I find the tenderest human element. Like Tolledano's portrait of Allanah, the woman who inspired the project. Her face is striking, strangely distorted and mask-like, a series of beautiful features that in combination seem unsettlingly off. She is a vision of surgical enhancement. Her expressionless face seems oddly inert, yet her eyes draw you in.
"I believe we are at the vanguard of a period of human-induced evolution. A turning point in history where we are beginning to define not only our own concept of beauty, but of physicality itself." - Phillip Toledano
Phillip Toledano was born in London to a French Moroccan mother, and an American father. He believes that photographs should be like unfinished sentences. There should always be space for questions. Phillip's work is socio-political, and varies in medium, from photography, to installation. His work has been exhibited through the Western world and has appeared in Vanity Fair, The New York Times magazine, The New Yorker, Esquire, GQ, Wallpaper, The London Times, The Independent Magazine, Le Monde, and Interview magazine, amongst others.
Find his CV at: http://www.mrtoledano.com/extra/information/cv
Amy Park "California Experimental Architecture"
June 2 - July 7, 2012 opening reception Friday, June 1st 6:00 - 8:00
Kopeikin Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition with New York based artist Amy Park, whose watercolors push the medium beyond it's usual constraints with large scale, hard-edged, geometric compositions. Her new series, titled "California Experimental Architecture," is inspired by the immense collection of photographs Julius Shulman took of the modernist architecture movement that developed in California during the mid 1900s. Park's work is another take on the architecture as well as Shulman's photographs of that architecture. The exhibition opens with a reception with the artist on Friday, June 1st and continues through July 7th. It is free and open to the public.
Park's love of experimental architecture developed from spending years in a cabin that her father designed and built himself. Today, she and her family spend much of their time in a solar and wind powered studio in upstate New York designed and built by her partner, artist Paul Villinski. Park's interest in California architecture began when she was a student learning about Richard Neutra's Kaufmann House in Palm Springs. Shulman was the photographer of the first images she saw, and they were seared into her memory.
Researching architecture in California, Park realized she couldn't photograph the buildings herself so she quickly decided to use Shulman's photographs, now housed at the Getty Research Center. Shulman had enormous talent and the skill and equipment necessary to make these building come alive in his photographs. In many cases he was the first to photograph these important structures.. His photographs were used to sell the experimental buildings and houses to individual people and the public. And his iconic pictures are still telling the story of a complicated and idyllic time culturally and politically today.
Amy Park received her B.F.A. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1999 and her M.F.A. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2003. Amy also studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Ox-Bow Summer Art School. She was a recipient of a Marie Walsh Sharpe Space Program Award in 2007-2008.
