Lara Schnitger

Anton Kern Gallery, 532 West 20th Street

September 8 - October 8, 2005

Lara Schnitger is showing large-scale sculptures at Anton Kern Gallery that expand her exploration of the boundaries between craft and high art.

Station Independent Projects Presents Dark Nature: Part 1 featuring work that focuses on the mysterious and ominous side of the natural environment. Nature is often seen as being pure and frequently has been idealized throughout art history. The work in Dark Nature: Part 1 shows nature in all of its wildness, vast and strange and unknowable.

After the theme of the 2003 Beijing Biennale, "Originality: Contemporaneity and Locality," one would imagine that the organizers of the 2005 iteration, coming in September, would have trouble coming up with a more nebulous title.

Confronted with Rubens' The Life of Marie de Medici in the Louvre, an epic sequence full of pale, voluptuous and muscular bodies engaged in mythological dramas, a young man sits on a bench and contemplates for a while.

Although gestural abstraction continues to be earmarked as one of the few taboo modes of expression in the contemporary art scene–barring a few exceptions, such as Cecily Brown–the work of Xavier Busquets triumphantly repudiates the ascendant dogma.

Gardens have always held a deep significance for Laurie Blum, as they had for the great Persian mystics whose poetic visions are memorialized in her paintings.

Stephen Hall has been an artist all his life. During those forty-odd years he has moonlighted as an illustrator, a designer, and a cartoonist. But although he has found ample success in each of these fields, it is his painting that he has returned to time again to ground him in his artistic practices. And rightfully so.

Delicate thin black whisps curl around yellow and white rectangles, orange and brown spheres?dreamy, organic forms?connecting the disparate elements of the canvas.

At first glance, the red craggy landscapes of Lisa Mordhorst's "In Between" series–pushing from above, pushing from below–resemble abstractions of Mars as relayed by the Hubble telescope. The processes by which Mordhorst and the telescope create their images are remarkably similar.

Born and raised in the Tuscan countryside, Serena Ras now resides in New York City. I caught up with Ras after she had returned from stints in Italy and Amsterdam, and just before she left for Brazil. Trying to contact Serena is like trying to swat a fly with a bobby pin.

Why are so many artists sticking their heads in things at the moment? There is something intrinsically, humanly funny about it. But it?s also an image of disaffection, solitude, ignorance, and even perversion.

On July 2nd, more than one million fans jammed into ten venues across four continents for Live 8. The music marathon–aimed at pressuring world leaders into eradicating African poverty–included free concerts held in London, Paris, Berlin, Moscow, Rome, Philadelphia, Tokyo, Johannesburg and Toronto.

Norma Drimmer?s photographs experiment formally with ideas of doubling, tripling, symmetry, and repetition. The series "Relationships of Beauty" features black and white, mystical landscapes with a snarling creature lording it at the top?all perfectly split down the middle and mirrored for abstraction, making them look subtly like Rorschach tests.

For the past two years, Jason Bryant has been exploring the complex link between painting and film through large-scale, cropped portraits?almost photo-realistic ones?of celebrity faces and film stills.

Curated by Amy Hauft, "Relativity" features the works of four Virginia Commonwealth University’s artist/teachers paired with the works from VCU’s collection that inspired them.