Cristin Tierney Gallery is pleased to participate in ZONA MACO. Visit us in booth D109 to see works by Claudia Bitrán, François Bucher, Alois Kronschlaeger, and Francisco Ugarte. The fair opens with a preview on February 7th and continues through February 11th.
Color and form, positive and negative space, light and shadow. These are the tools used by Claudia Bitrán, François Bucher, Alois Kronschlaeger, and Francisco Ugarte to reassess art history's modernist legacies. Strikingly different in methods and interests, each artist employs these basic elements to create two and three-dimensional artworks that explore movement--either by inviting viewers to circle around the work, or simply portraying subjects in motion.
Sculptures by Kronschlaeger and Ugarte add a phenomenological twist to the booth. Kronschlaeger's wall-sculpture reveals a shifting array of colors and produces a moiré pattern that can create a push-pull effect when viewed. Similarly, Ugarte's sculptures flash hints of color that invite the viewer to move around and see the work from different angles. These sculptures are painted only on the bricks' interior hollow cores, inverting the usual relationship between positive and negative space. Like Kronschlaeger's cube, they have a profound impact on the audience's spatial awareness and perception through the senses.
The theoretical aspects of space are explored in François Bucher's abstract metal sculptures called Tesseracts. Although they are undeniably three-dimensional, their shadows reveal new shapes that represent each form's fourth invisible dimension. These works are a continuation of the artist's interest in multidimensional reality, or the theory that there are multiple parallel timelines unfolding in alternate universes. Bucher's work seeks to give expression to these invisible spaces, underscoring the artist's belief that inter-dimensional consciousness is the only path forward for humanity.
This presentation-with an obvious heavy emphasis on space and geometric abstraction-also allows for counterpoints and other voices, like Claudia Bitrán's drawings depicting young, contemporary dancers in moments of deep emotion. Bitrán uses charcoal and pastels to depict these choreographic movements and the heightened moments of tension, release, and expression that accompany them. Her series is largely inspired by Degas's depictions of dancers, while her goal "is to present candid, vulnerable, and spectacular points of inflection that these young bodies perform."
Claudia Bitrán (b. 1986, Boston, MA) works primarily in painting and video, frequently using DIY aesthetics to represent the hyperbolic worlds of social media and pop culture. The artist employs a wide range of painting strategies to metamorphosize her source material, resulting in dense and thick surfaces that transform the content of the artist's videos. The artist holds an MFA in Painting from Rhode Island School of Design (2013), a BFA from the Universidad Catolica de Chile (2009) and was recently an artist-in-residence at Pioneer Works, New York. She lives and works in Brooklyn. Bitrán has has solo shows at Walter Storms Galerie in Munich, Spring Break Art Show in NY, Muhlenberg College Gallery and Practice Gallery in PA, the Brooklyn Bridge Park in NY, Roswell Museum and Art Center in New Mexico, and at Museo de Artes Visuales in Santiago Chile. She has held residencies at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Roswell Artist-in-Residence Program, Smack Mellon Studio Program, Outpost Projects, and Pioneer Works.
François Bucher (b. 1972, Cali, Colombia) is an artist and writer. His research spans a wide range of interests, focusing--as of late--on multi-dimensional fields and on other tropes from shamanism and science fiction, such as time "travel." He contends that trauma acts as a portal through time, both at a collective and an individual level. Bucher's work has been exhibited worldwide, including at the Venice Biennale, Lyon Biennial, Marrakech Biennale, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Museo de Arte de Zapopan, Bienal de Cartagena, Bienal de Cuenca, Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporaneo, Station Museum of Contemporary Art, Centre d'Art Contemporain Geneve, Berlin Documentary Film Forum, Jeu de Paume, Prague Biennial, Tate Britain, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. His writing has been published in the Journal of Visual Culture, documenta Magazine, e-flux journal, and Valdez. He holds a master's degree in film from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The Catastrophe of the Present, a book on his work from 1999 to 2016 written by Claudia Salamanca, was published in 2016. His studio is in Mexico.
Alois Kronschlaeger's (b. 1966, Grieskirchen, Austria) work exists at the intersection of art, architecture, and design. The artist is best known for his site-specific installations and sculptures, which demonstrate a preoccupation with environment and light, as well as an interest in exploring time and space via geometry. He has exhibited at such international institutions and festivals as The Figge Art Museum, The Bruce Museum of Arts and Sciences, Yuan Art Museum, MAC Lima, Islamic Arts Festival, and MOCA Tucson, where he constructed a 10,000 square foot installation of a "mountain range" inside the museum's Great Hall. Over the past decade he has produced five site-specific public installations with the art space SiTE:LAB, including Spire, which stretched over three stories tall, and Hybrid Structures, a series of ramps that connected various abandoned buildings on a deconsecrated Catholic church campus in Grand Rapids. Kronschlaeger works in Brooklyn, NY and Mexico City.
Francisco Ugarte (b. 1973, Guadalajara, Mexico) is an architect and artist. His multidisciplinary, abstract and minimalist work can be understood as a series of material and architectural explorations at the intersection of experience and perception. Using different media such as site-specific interventions, sculpture, drawing, painting, video, and installation, his subtle gestures invite a deep attention to the environment and highlight the materiality of the elements he uses. Presence, perception, action, intuition, light, time, change, place, the material and the universal are recurring themes in his work. Ugarte has had solo exhibitions at Museo Cabañas, Galería Curro, Post Box Gallery, the Clemente Orozco Museum, and the Experimental Museum El Eco. Select group exhibitions include the Raúl Anguiano Museum of Art, Museo Jumex, Salón ACME, and Museo Nacional de Arte, Mexico City. His work is held in the Charpenel Collection, Jorge M. Perez Art Collection, and Colección Jumex. Ugarte's studio is in Guadalajara.
Founded in 2010, Cristin Tierney Gallery is a contemporary art gallery located on The Bowery with a deep commitment to the presentation, development and support of a roster of both established and emerging artists. Its program emphasizes artists engaged with critical theory and art history, with an emphasis on conceptual, video, and performance art. Education and audience engagement is central to our mission. Cristin Tierney Gallery is a member of the ADAA (Art Dealers Association of America).