ASPEN ART MUSEUM
MAGAZINE
50
Meet the Artists
“Painting with the voids of canvas is an attempt to understand cotton as a conceptual white paint. Cotton acts as light, it acts as emptiness, and it acts as a conceptual play on how this mate- rial is showing its weighted history.” The use of cotton and coffee, and their complex histories and connec- tions to slavery, trade and exploitation, brings an added dimension to Hall’s paintings of figures at work and leisure. Starting from the personal, he looks to the past and the present to examine issues of race now and through history. Hall lives and works in New York. His works are held in prominent collec- tions around the world, including Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Hall will exhibit at the Aspen Art Museum this summer as part of “A Lover’s Discourse.”
numerous prominent museum collec- tions including, the Museum of Modern Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Left Peter Halley. Courtesy: the artist; photograph: Roxanne Lowit
Alex Israel Work kindly donated by the artist and Gagosian
Born and raised in Los Angeles, Alex Israel’s work is all about his hometown. Honing in on the city’s celebrity culture, he shot to fame with two series of inter- views, “As It Lays” (2011–12/2018–19), in which he asked questions of famous local figures. The self-portrait silhou- ette, which was the logo for the series, developed into a body of paintings. Fascinated by the city’s sun-soaked pop culture, he has since taken its iconic visual imagery and made it his own. “Lens” is a series of large-scale sunglass lenses, made in bright shiny plastic, that lean against the wall, while in 2017, Israel tapped into West Coast beach culture with SPF-18 , a feature-length teen surf drama which was screened on Netflix. This subject matter was then further explored in his aluminum-cast sculptures “Self-Portrait (Wetsuits)”, and his painted reliefs, “Waves”. Next up, “Fins”—a series of giant, immacu- late plastic surfboard fins. Israel has collaborated extensively and diversely: he has created bags for the French fashion house, Louis Vuitton, and more recently the packag- ing for their perfume, City of Stars, as well as working with the high-end luggage company, Rimowa. In 2016 and 2017 he joined forces with acclaimed novelist Bret Easton Ellis on a series of paintings for two exhibitions: inspired by LA, Ellis contributed texts to overlay on Israel’s chosen stock backdrops. The artist also has his own line of sunglasses, Freeway, and clothing, Infrathin, a range of unisex vegan athleisurewear. Speaking about his eyewear in Interview magazine in 2010, when it was first launched, Israel said: “I see sunglasses as the symbol of Southern California: they’re objects
Peter Halley Work kindly donated by the artist and KARMA
Profoundly inspired by growing up in New York, Peter Halley is fascinated by the organization of social space, the communication networks that govern it, and the evolution these technolo- gies have undergone during his career. Since the 1980s, when Halley and his fellow neo-conceptualists came on the scene, he has exhibited extensively around the world, producing a remarka- bly consistent body of work. Describing his paintings as “diagrammatic” rather than abstract, the tessellating, interconnected squares, rectangles and lines, are his “cells”, “prisons” and “conduits.” As a student Halley read Josef Albers’s Interaction of Color (1971)—a text which would influence him throughout his career—while later on he became interested in the writings of the French post-structuralists. In a conversation with Tom McGlynn for the Brooklyn Rail in 2018, he re- marks: “From Foucault, I gained the insight that any attempt to borrow from a culture outside one’s own is impossible. Your interpretation will always be filtered through your own cultural lens.” In the same conversation, he describes walking and cycling the streets of New York as a child, experi- encing the scale of the buildings, the noise and the crowds as a “futuristic nightmare”, and even now he describes being in Midtown Manhattan as like being “in a tropical storm”. In footage on his website from 1994, Halley describes his workplace as “more like an operating room than an artist’s studio”. Painted with extreme precision, the large-scale canvases present hard-edged geometric forms in bright and fluorescent colors, offset by black. The surfaces have a rough texture thanks to the application of Roll-A-Tex—every DIY enthusiast’s quick path to nubbly walls. Speaking with McGlynn, Halley remarks, “I think, at heart, my work has a parodic element. Using Roll-A-Tex, for example, was a parody of painterly texture, and the prison had a parodic relationship to the modernist square.” Based in New York, in addition to his visual practice, Halley teaches, writes and was the cofounder of Index magazine. His work is included in
Below Alex Israel. Courtesy: the artist; photograph: Jack Pierson
Online auction closes Saturday, August 5th, 12pm MT at sothebys. com/aspenartmuseum Live auction takes place Friday, August 4th at 8pm MT, at the ArtCrush Gala Phone and absentee bids accepted. For all enquiries, email bid@ aspenartmuseum.org No buyer’s premium! View and bid on works at sothebys.com/ aspenartmuseum
Visit the museum and view the ArtCrush Auction Exhibition July 26—August 3, 2023.
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