I’m kind of embarrassed to say. I’ve never been to an opening at The Hole. I’ve been to most of the gallery shows..but never an opening. The difference? Openings usually happen after opening hours and there are drinks (in The Hole’s case..some kind of whiskey drink...very hipster).
But, what better way to kick off the new year, than seeing works by Caroline Larsen and Mathew Zefeldt at The Hole (on view from January 3rd – February 3rd, 2019).
This opening was jam-packed with your standard East Village crowd. My guess, a lot of graduated art students and city creatives by the looks of everyone’s beanies and high waisted Levy’s.
Let’s start with Caroline’s exhibition - Kaleidoscopic.
Holy cow...the level of detail and work she puts into creating these paintings.
How does she do it? - Just as I thought, with a pastry tube.
“Dispensing paint through a pastry tube with varying nibs, Larsen is able to line, layer and weave colors together, sometimes blending them within the same extrusion." - The Hole
This technique can produce a variety of effects, from 8-bitish pointillism in the weaves, to a sort of jewel-like sculptural relief in the plants, or a tessellated warping mesh grid in the lined hybrid works. - The Hole
The pieces are composed either in a wonky top-down, left-to-right layering or a block-by-block patterning that is more articulated edges and paint-by-numbers.” - The Hole
Not only must they take up tons of paint, but I also can’t imagine how long she has to wait for them to dry...let alone fix any she accidentally bumps in the process.
“The woven paintings take a horrendous amount of paint. So much paint that every ten minutes, I’m emptying out another tube! But the floral ones don’t take up that much paint in comparison.” - Painting is Dead
Caroline is a Canadian Artist - who’s had an interesting spread of education from The Pratt Institute - here in Brooklyn, To Waterloo University to New Zealand. She’s had multiple shows already at The Hole..and much more domestically and globally. She also has one of the best artist websites I’ve seen in a LONG time.
She’s represented by the following galleries:
Craig Krull Gallery, Los Angeles
General Hardware Contemporary, Toronto
Next up we have Mathew Zefeldt’s show in the back room of The Hole.
Just FYI - The Hole is often split into two shows, thanks to their conveniently large back room.
Also in typical Hole fashion...this room was converted from floor to ceiling especially for this exhibition. However, it’s rare the artist is a part of the transformation..it’s usually The Hole staff creating a complimentary atmosphere - such as a silver ‘factory inspired floor’ for Eric Yahnker’s Factory Reset show.
For this show, Mathew Zefeldt hand painted god knows how many wood panels that the hole then screwed to the floor and surrounding walls...all the way up to the ceiling (see below).
What The Hole has to say (literally the writing on the exhibition wall) about ‘Customizable Realities’
“Zefeldt creates a walk-in immersive painting installation in oil on panel. With over 2104 square feet of painting, he allows viewers to walk into a scene from the video game Grand Theft Auto.
“Repeating the screen grab across three walls and the floor, visitors are dwarfed by the houses in the hills, the palm tree-lined horizon, the wide bright streets.”
“On top of this installation eight new paintings depicting specific scenes from the game appear to focus viewer’s attention on the poetic or evocative movements the artist experiences within this virtual space.”
“The idea is to bring digital languages – or ways of seeing – onto an analogue surface through a traditional technique. Paintings usually take one to three weeks, depending on scale and detail.” - Mathew Zefeldt for Metal Magazine
Zefeldt is a California artist through and through. He was born and raised there and graduated from the University of California, Santa Cruz with his BA and the University of California, Davis with his MFA.
However, he seems to venture into the Midwest where he’s currently a professor at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities (I’m sure he misses the golden coast though).
Apparently, though Matthew share’s a love of transforming an entire space for his exhibition with The Hole and has done so before…
“I was really excited about the idea of putting large paintings in a small room. This will either make the room look smaller or the paintings look bigger. I thought painting the walls would really exaggerate this illusion, the wall would serve as an optically noisy backdrop for the paintings. The paintings’ ground would be extended onto the wall, but the pattern or palette would shift in the process.” - Mathew Zefeldt for Installation Mag
“I think that when you walk into the room there is a sense of being overwhelmed, not in a positive or a negative way, but there is a lot to look at and your eye travels everywhere. It’s like you are walking into one of these really spatially shallow paintings, but in the gallery space the experience different; it’s dimensional.” - Mathew Zefeldt for Installation Mag
He’s represented by the following galleries
Overall, we’re off to a slam-bang start. Here’s to the new year!
