Press Release
2525 Michigan Ave B-5A
Santa Monica, CA 90404
May 1 - May 29, 2010
Opening reception: Saturday, May 1st, 5 - 7pm
Richard Heller Gallery is pleased to present Thin Skinned, Andrew Sendor’s first exhibition with the gallery, and his solo debut on the west coast of the United States. For the past six years, Sendor has been deeply involved with a painting practice that investigates both the potential and the limitations of representational painting. While Sendor’s paintings have evolved both materially and conceptually, the motivation behind the work has always been characterized by a profound fascination in how ideas and images are mediated through the language of painting.
This recent body of work, which Sendor created in Madrid, Spain, where he currently lives, is a progression of uncanny hypothetical situations presented in the form of intimately sized, highly skilled oil paintings. Sendor intelligently navigates his way through a web of delicate topics, such as the tenuous boundaries between the sacred and the profane, between religious faith and philosophical inquiry, all within a pictorial space that is clearly his own.
Thin Skinned features paintings that portray videos, photographs, paintings, sculptures, and, absurdly, human-beings-as-art within the walls of museum and gallery spaces. This unexpected contextualization of the figure, mysteriously frozen in a taxidermy form on pedestals, at once adopts a monumental status and undermines accepted notions about what Art is, or what Art can be. While the depicted characters are ostensibly functioning as the subjects, it is the setting in which they are found, in and amongst appropriated artworks, that generates the questions embedded in Sendor’s ambitious painting project.
Exploring the role of the painter becomes a multifaceted endeavor for Sendor as he straddles the vernaculars of historical genres and contemporaneous methodologies in painting, from nineteenth-century portraiture to photorealism. As Jasper Sharp eloquently states, “Sendor does not set out with the express intent to revise painting. Rather, with an educated consciousness of the work of his predecessors and the debates that have swirled around contemporary art in recent years, he formulates his own visual language and with it a distinctly personal sensibility.”
Andrew Sendor was born in New York and currently lives and works in Madrid, Spain. He has studied at Pratt Institute, NY, as well as in Australia. Recent exhibitions include: “Inflection,” HVCCA, NY (2010); “Wishing You Love and Happiness and Curiosity Forever,” V1 Gallery, Copenhagen (2010); “Mad Love,” Arken Museum, Copenhagen (2007); and “Phantasmania,” Kemper Museum, Kansas City (2007). Sendor’s work is included in several public collections including; The Cartin Collection, USA, The HVCCA, NY; CB Collection, Japan; Progressive Art Collection, Ohio; Rubell Family Collection, Miami, Florida, 21C Museum Hotel, KY; as well as many prominent private collections throughout North America and Europe.
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The Armory Show
Recent paintings on view with Richard Heller Gallery
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Caren Golden Fine Art
539 W 23rd Street, NYC 10011
April 9th - May 16th, 2009.
opening reception: Saturday, April 11, 2009, 6-8pm.
Caren Golden Fine Art is pleased to present "Based on a True Story," Andrew Sendor's third solo exhibition with the gallery. Through a series of uncanny hypothetical scenarios Sendor embarks on a self-referential investigation of the recent history of art. Each canvas features an interior exhibition space where videos, paintings, photographs and, absurdly, human-beings-as-art, reside. "Based on A True Story" speculates why, when no medium or subject is too outrageous, the site of a museum remains sacred. What would happen if taxidermied humans were put on display as art? Would this represent a vanguard act of appropriation, or an unspeakable taboo? And if it is indeed one of the last in art, then what does a painted representation of the taboo convey?
Sendor considers the historical function of the act of painting as a mimetic device, a means of expression, and an agent of desire. While his recent work is born of difficult questions and complex ideas, Sendor's provocative imagery evokes a more visceral reaction from the viewer. Exquisitely rendered and improbably seductive, these disquieting compositions thrive on the same attraction-versus-repulsion dynamic that activated the work of such painters as Goya, Courbet and Bacon. Sendor extends these socio-psychological dialogues and continues to test the experiential limits of representational painting.
Supplementing the paintings, and adding to the philosophical discussion, Sendor introduces a new series of drawings. Executed on antique paper with such visible signs of age as oxidation, water stains and in some instances mildew, the ambiguities presented in these works disrupt any clear determination of authorship, authenticity or chronology. Thus, the ontological discussion comes full circle back to the paintings, as Sendor's voice alternates between describing a fictional or a contingent scenario and the impartial documenting of an actual event.
Andrew Sendor lives and works in NYC. His work has been featured in museum exhibitions including "Phantasmania" at the Kemper Museum of Art in Kansas City, MO, "MAD LOVE" at the Arken Museum of Modern Art in Copenhagen, Denmark, and "XS-Size Matters" at the Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art, which traveled to the Knoxville Museum of Art in Knoxville, TN. In addition to having a solo show in 2007 in Denmark at Mogadishni Gallery, his work has been presented in "Salon Nouveau" curated by Jasper Sharp at the Engholm Engelhorn Galerie in Vienna, Austria. Sendor's work has been featured in numerous publications including Art in America, New American Painters, Art Premium and M Magazine. His third solo show "Based on a True Story" with Caren Golden Fine Art will be on view from April 9 through May 16.
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Click here to read a recent article on Whitewall Magazine:
http://www.whitewallmag.com/2009/04/16/andrew-sendor-based-on-a-true-story/
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Group Exhibition:
ALL TOO HUMAN: YOUNG AMERICAN PAINTERS
January 31 - March 13, 2009
Justin Allen, Michael Houk, Josh Peters, Andrew Sendor
SCHUEBBE PROJECTS
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Interview for "All Too Human"
Schuebbe Projects
Andrew Sendor
January 18, 2009
1. What influences and inspires your work?
As an artist, I find myself in a similar position of vulnerability to that of the surfer. Without a wave, a surfer is merely a beach bum. With the presence of a wave, the surfer now has an objective. The waves come and go, requiring astute attention to their activity to be able to understand the nature of the wave and ride it. I cannot create a wave; however, I can find one. If ever I try to create a wave, my failure will always be noticeable.
2. What painters do you admire and why?
There are many painters that I have studied over the years, from Piero della Francesca to Michael Raedecker. Rene Magritte, a painter whom I regard as one of the most important of the twentieth century, is significant to me for the doors that he left wide open in reference to reevaluating representational painting and interrogating the ways in which we go about interpreting images. Magritte's artistic output was fueled by serious inquiry into the fundamentals of human perception that ultimately led to a dramatic revamping of typical preconceived notions surrounding the appearance of everyday objects and clichés.
Here are a couple of Magritte's ideas on interpreting paintings:
"To equate my painting with symbolism, conscious or unconscious, is to ignore its true nature … People are quite willing to use objects without looking for any symbolic intention in them, but when they look at paintings, they can't find any use for them. So they hunt around for a meaning to get themselves out of the quandary, and because they don't understand what they are supposed to think when they confront the painting. . . . They want something to lean on, so they can be comfortable. They want something secure to hang on to, so they can save themselves from the void. People who look for symbolic meanings fail to grasp the inherent poetry and mystery of the image. No doubt they sense this mystery, but they wish to get rid of it. They are afraid. By asking 'what does this mean?' they express a wish that everything be understandable. But if one does not reject the mystery, one has quite a different response. One asks other things."
- Gablik, Suzi, Magritte, Thames & Hudson, May 1985
3. How important is America for your work?
Living and creating work in New York City-- a city that is ripe with paradox and extremes-- is certainly dramatic, eliciting emotions and states of being including, but not limited to, agony, misery, poverty, ingenuity, progression, beauty, elation, and bloom. While I was born and raised in America, I have spent time living and working in other countries such as Australia and Denmark, and the influence of the place in which I am working is sometimes more profound than that of others. Of course, the people that populate the place in which you are creating, their ideas and responses to the work, can be significant influences, too.
4. What interests you about humans/humanity in particular?
A goat emphatically told a snake that his conception of God is deeper and more valid than the snake's conception of God. The goat's ideas do not interest me. Everything else about humans/humanity I find to be endlessly fascinating.
5. What do you think about the following sentence: "The human being is inherently evil, as it is subordinated to an alien order", Nietzsche
A Book for Free Spirits accompanies the title of Nietzsche's collection of aphorisms titled, "Human, All Too Human," and perhaps it is a free spirit, and only a free spirit, who has the facility and inclination to extricate themselves from the baggage in which they are brought into this world. Philosophically speaking, the rhetoric of moral judgment can in fact prove to be stifling. Practically speaking, and in relation to the naturalistic and scientific legacy of C. Darwin, there are certain judgments that must occur, namely the more instinctually driven ones that are intrinsically linked to human survival. I appreciate Nietzsche's provocative approach in this particular aphorism, which is at once criticizing the weak and sheep-like behavior of society at large and simultaneously presenting the daunting challenge to rearrange and entirely deconstruct all that we have inherited. Alternatively, an acceptance of this "alien order" would be the ultimate demise of any potential towards progress.
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Click here to read a recent interview in the Danish on-line art Magazine Kopenhagen.dk.
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PRESS RELEASE
Andrew Sendor
Is There More to Life Than Bread, Blood and Bicycles?
February 21-March 31, 2007
Reception: Saturday, February 24, 6-9 PM
Caren Golden Fine Art is pleased to present the exhibition Is There More to Life Than Bread, Blood, and Bicycles?, featuring new paintings by Andrew Sendor. For his second solo exhibition at the gallery, Sendor has transformed the traditional white cube into a dimly lit, contemplative space, creating an almost sacred atmosphere that metaphorically weds the mysterious narratives within his paintings. Enveloped in this unworldly aura, his paintings exist not as independent, decontextualized objects, but more as sequential acts in a Romantic play or unfolding chapters in a Victorian novel, exploring the spiritual, the mystical, and the unknowable nature of the afterlife.
Sendor's disquieting paintings portray demure, anonymous characters juxtaposed against vivid backdrops ranging from timeless and majestic landscapes to ethereal spectrums of transcendent light. Often quoted from antique cartes-de-visite and cabinet cards, Sendor's figures are immaculately rendered in sharp, nearly photographic detail and deployed upon an even more pristine support of Plexiglas. Large sections of the highly polished surfaces are frequently left unpainted, allowing the reflective areas to function like secret portals that mirror and incorporate the viewer's presence. At the same time, these windows encourage a contemplation of the history of technological advancement, from the mythology surrounding photographic "truth" and the camera's ability to capture the soul, to the innumerable and mind-bending uses of manufactured plastics. Sendor expresses an ethnographic curiosity in the visual taxonomies of various people, places, and periods, combining and collapsing them to create otherworldly realms that bridge the spiritual and the material.
Sendor has literally turned a corner in his practice of painting, when looking at the piece entitled, I use the term, Struggle for Eternal Existence, in a large and metaphorical sense, including dependence of one being on another, and including (which is more important) not only the life of the individual, but success in leaving progeny, working with two planes of highly reflective black Plexiglas joined together at a right angle. As the Plexiglas reflects the imagery from one perpendicular plane to the other, the viewer gets caught in a physically interactive dialogue, transcending that of the typical viewing experience with a two dimensional object. An androgynous baby is sitting within an indeterminate abstract space, while a venerable couple clad in all black hovers in a clearly defined picture plane, describing some of the formal concerns that are primary to this current series of paintings. The relationship between the baby and the couple, in a certain way represents the sum of the meaning that is transpiring between the paintings in the exhibition the cyclical nature of existence and the regeneration of all life, functioning both as the central metaphor as well as an umbrella of meaning.
In the painting entitled, The Complex Relations of All Animals and Plants to Each Other in the Struggle for Euphoric Existence, a family plucked directly from early twentieth-century Europe is positioned amongst a rocky ground at the base of an erupting volcano. The painting's title suggests the writings of Charles Darwin and speaks of the epic struggle between humans and nature, while the eye-less chickens ambling at the sitters' feet perhaps symbolize how humans are so often blind to nature's mystique and power until sideswiped by its devastating effects. Gazing intently out of the picture plane, the well-mannered family attempts to make eye contact with the viewer as if seeking some type of consolation and acknowledgement of the fear and uncertainty inherent within the experience of living in such close proximity to death.
In The Great Tree of Life, a unique synthesis of symbolic portraiture and non-referential abstraction add up to a conglomerate of pictorial languages, as they traverse throughout history, seamlessly blended into one hybridized image. Rather than merely glorifying the essence of a specific person, Sendor has created a portrait of humanity, at once calling attention to our biological makeup and the psychological roller coaster characteristic of the much explored topic of the human condition - the positive and negative aspects of existence as a human being, especially the inevitable events such as birth, childhood, adolescence, love, sex, reproduction, aging and death.
Andrew Sendor was the subject of a ten page article, (with cover illustration), in the May/June, 2006 issue of Art Premium magazine. His work is currently on view in the Salon Nouveau exhibition at the Engholm Engelhorn Galerie in Vienna, Austria and will be featured in the Phantasmania exhibition at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City this summer. In the Fall of 2007 Sendor's work will be presented in a solo exhibition at Mogadishni Gallery in Copenhagen, Denmark.
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Click here to view a recent article in Art Premium Magazine.
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Press Release from the Exhibition at Caren Golden Fine Art
"Supernatural"
February 25 - April 2, 2005
Reception: Friday, 25 February, 6-8 PM
Caren Golden Fine Art is pleased to announce Andrew Sendor's Supernatural. Glossy and pristine, Sendor's oil paintings on Plexiglas are uncanny scenes which question man's superiority over beast in a bizarre juxtaposition of civilization and chaos. Sendor exposes the tensions between the material world and the spiritual world, employing historical imagery to reveal what lies behind our horological illusion of progress- the shadows, the dark; the unseen forces at work within our fragile notions of civilization.
The ghostly countenances of children dressed in Victorian finery stare out from wilderness scenes, comfortably at home beside wild animals, challenging our notions of animal instinct versus cultivated behavior. Could it be that inside us, lying in wait behind our flimsy conformity to an all-pervading materialism, is the uncanny and elusive "other" - that beautiful animal that holds sway over our unconscious? Sendor's other-worldly characters expose the shortcomings of civilization and the alarming plasticity of tradition.
Both in his subject matter and use of materials, Andrew Sendor confronts both philosophic and painterly traditions, subtly deconstructing the idea of ritualization, rebuilding it with a fresh and intriguing vocabulary. Elements of the foreground and background of Sendor's paintings are exposed Plexiglas, contrasting with the elaborate painted surfaces. The artificiality of the Plexi only serves to reinforce the strange connections the artist has drawn between the real and unreal. This unique process casts an eerie shadow over Sendor's already complex dialectic between materialism and naturalism.
Supernatural is Sendor's first solo exhibition with Caren Golden Fine Art.
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