Every work in Hoeber’s 2011 series Execution Changes is titled in alphanumeric code. The geometric pattern that composes each acrylic-on-panel painting is determined by a preordained ratio of 2 to 3. But even though a formulaic system determines the image’s structure, its surface is full of painterly effects. While the minimalist appearance of these works references similarly striped paintings by Frank Stella, Hoeber does not emphasize the painting’s underlying structure but instead tugs it apart and obscures it. Layers of paint betray the image not as surface-and-support, but as presence with depth.
Using a variety of media, the Los Angeles–based artist Julian Hoeber produces fastidiously ordered compositions. His paintings, constructions, and installations emphasize concept and materiality even-handedly, resulting in works evocative of both intangible theory and concrete spatial relationships. His immersive environment Demon Hill (2010-2011) used gravity as its primary tool, while undermining everything certain about it; inside the space, the most predictable force on Earth operated at an unexpected and deeply disorienting angle. Uncommon sensation is a thread that runs through much of Hoeber’s work. The otherworldly springs from the readily available, unusually arranged. His paintings are situated somewhere between Modernism’s emphasis on the physical reality of the painting, Postmodernism’s fraying of that reality, and Op art’s insistence on playing perceptual tricks.
Shot in the streets of Tokyo, Collapse , is a meditation on the passing of time and on the complicated way in which we are smashed between the past and the future...
MUM , the acronym used to title a series of Rogan’s small interventions on found magazines, stands for “Magic Unity Might,” the name of a vintage trade magic publication...
Oliver Laric’s video Versions is part of an ongoing body of work that has continued to evolve and mutate over time...
Physical and mental exploration have been founding elements in Joachim Koester’s research for several years...
Shot in the streets of Tokyo, Collapse , is a meditation on the passing of time and on the complicated way in which we are smashed between the past and the future...
MUM , the acronym used to title a series of Rogan’s small interventions on found magazines, stands for “Magic Unity Might,” the name of a vintage trade magic publication...
This particular drawing, like many of Grotjahn’s works, presents a decentered single-point perspective...
All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace takes its title from a 1967 poem by American writer Richard Brautigan, which describes a utopian future where computers are in harmony with and protective of mankind and nature, performing all the necessary work while we retreat back towards nature...
In Fordlândia Fieldwork (2012), Tossin documents the remains of Henry Ford’s rubber enterprise Fordlândia, built in 1928 in the Brazilian Amazon to export cultivated rubber for the booming automobile industry...
This untitled work from 2012 is a print originally made as part of the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art’s artist limited edition series...
Her 2016 video installation quotes the sitcom-as-form and also draws from a 1907 comedic short, Laughing Gas...
Reborn, 2010 is a three-channel video by Desiree Holman that questions ideas of motherhood and the maternal instinct...
Ambiguous Gestures takes as its point of origin a film Gmelin discovered in his father’s archive...
A subject’s back stands before a landscape of mountains, arid and majestic, Der Wanderer 3 revisits the theme of man versus nature dear to Romantic painting and the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich in particular...
Got Your Back by Gisela McDaniel depicts two women of color from different ethnic backgrounds who share similar violent experiences...