Luhring Augustine is pleased to announce a group exhibition featuring new and recent work by artists ektor garcía, Kaveri Raina, Rebecca Shore, and Clarissa Tossin. On view in Chelsea from June 28 through August 16, the exhibition presents garcía and Tossin’s sculptures in dialogue with Raina and Shore’s paintings. Through formal and material interventions, these artists draw on their diverse histories to explore connections across culture and time.
ektor garcía’s (b. 1985) hand-worked sculptures transform materials through connection. Employing fasteners, loops, and knots, garcía references rural handcraft and gendered traditions from his family history in Tabasco in Zacatecas, Mexico and adds sources found through his global travels. The exhibition presents garcía’s recent work, including sculptures made of glazed ceramic, porcelain, steel, crocheted cotton, and copper wire that are simultaneously delicate and powerful.
Raised in Brasilia, Brazil, a city designed as a modernist utopia by architect Oscar Niemeyer and urban planner Lucio Costa, Clarissa Tossin (b. 1973) focuses on the failures of modernity and globalism in her work, and combines sculpture, performance, video, and photography to examine the impact of cultural and economic exchange. Her recent work previews a dystopic future shaped by the impact of globalism on the natural landscape, such as Amazonis Planitia #1, a multimedia work that includes a suspended, rotating "planet" woven from strips of Amazon.com delivery boxes and a satellite image of Mars, along with two glossy NASA satellite photos depicting a smooth plain on Mars named for the rainforest. All that You Touch, You Change, and The Only Lasting Truth is Change are spherical sculptures that resemble melting, molting globes, and Future Fossil Study is a sculpture of manmade non-biodegradable materials and recycled plastics from the artist’s own waste forming the strata of a future geologic sedimentation.
In Kaveri Raina’s (b. 1990) vibrant paintings, anxious, yet familiar shapes teeter across the surface, amorphous but present. Her forms hover in space and collapse any distinctions between figure and ground, landscape and portrait, and abstraction and representation. Using permeable materials like woven burlap and canvas, Raina paints on both sides of the surface, playing with saturation and texture, molding color like clay. Drawing on the colors from the past, specifically familiar to her childhood in New Delhi, India, she uses a jewel-like palette to create vivid combinations and patterns.
Rebecca Shore (b. 1956) has long explored pattern, ornamentation, trompe l’oeil, and shallow space, first in her quilts, and later in her meticulous paintings. In these recent works, dating from 2017-18, she draws on a vocabulary of ribbons, draped fabric, chains, and hoops, which are defined in part by their physical characteristics: floating, looping and twisting ribbons, taut and weighted chains, pleated, translucent fabric, and stiff hoops. These elements activate the backgrounds of her paintings, which feature bands of color and interlocking shapes derived from medieval manuscripts and architecture. Often alluding to the human body or face, they are at once serious and playful.
About the Artists
ektor garcía lives and works in Mexico and New York. He received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2014 and an MFA from Columbia University in 2016. The artist’s first solo presentation in New York, ektor garcía: cadena perpetua, is on view at SculptureCenter, New York, NY through July 29, 2019. Additional recent solo exhibitions include Cooper Cole, Toronto, Canada; Mary Mary, Glasgow, Ireland; Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany; Visitor Welcome Center, Los Angeles, CA; and kurimanzutto, Mexico City, Mexico. Group exhibitions include LAXART, Los Angeles, CA; New Museum, New York, NY; Chicken Coop Contemporary, Portland, OR; Museo de Arte de Zapopan, Guadalajara, Mexico; and ACCA, Melbourne, Australia.
Kaveri Raina lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She was born and raised in New Delhi, India and moved to the United States at the age of eleven. She received her BFA from Maryland Institute College of Art in 2011, her MFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2016, and studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2017. Raina has received various awards and fellowships including the James Nelson Raymond fellowship, Fred and Joanna Lazarus Scholarship, and was recently nominated for the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors grant. Raina’s work has been exhibited in the US, India, and Germany. She had her first international solo exhibition in March 2019 at Annarumma Gallery, Naples, Italy, and had a solo show at Assembly Room, New York, NY this past spring.
Rebecca Shore lives and works in Chicago, IL. She was raised in Vermont and has lived in Mexico, Tonga, Raiatea, and Italy, drawing inspiration from a rich variety of intellectual and aesthetic sources. Shore attended Smith College from 1974-76 and then studied with the Imagists at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she earned her BFA in 1981; Shore also taught at SAIC from 1991-2017. She has presented solo exhibitions at venues including Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago, IL; Eight Modern, Santa Fe, NM; Elmhurst Art Museum, Elmhurst, IL; Klein Art Works, Chicago, IL; and The Chicago Cultural Center, IL.
Clarissa Tossin lives and works in Los Angeles, CA, and holds an MFA from the California Institute of Arts. From 2017- 2018, she was a Radcliffe Institute Fellow at Harvard University. Tossin had a solo exhibition at the Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, TX in 2018; the same year her work was included in Pacha, Llaqta, Wasichay: Indigenous Space, Modern Architecture, New Art at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY and the 12th Gwangju Biennale in Gwangju, South Korea. Tossin's work has been exhibited widely, including at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, CA (as part of 2017’s Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA); the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco, CA; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, MI; SITE Santa Fe, NM; and Queens Museum, New York, NY. Tossin is the recipient of a Foundation for Contemporary Art Artist Grant (2019); a Fellows of Contemporary Art Fellowship (2019); and an Artadia Los Angeles Award (2018); among others.
