Screenshot from SteveTurnerContemporary.com
The small group exhibition L’idée Fixe opened recently at Steve Turner Contemporary in Los Angeles, featuring a single work by artists and CalArts alumni Sayre Gomez (Art MFA 08) and Joe Goode (Chouinard 61) along with former CalArts School of Art faculty member John Divola.
The title, which translates as “fixed idea” or “obsession,” refers to the 1928 René Magritte painting of the same name, in which the artist used the same window to present four separate vignettes. Each of the three works in L’idée Fixe use the window as a frame, a boundary between the external and internal and representation and abstraction.
From the gallery:
- John Divola presents a photograph from his Zuma Beach series in which the artist spray-painted the interior of an abandoned beachfront property, which became the foreground for capturing a series of spectacular sunsets. The color gradients of the sky meld beautifully with the dilapidated interior, thereby conflating notions of the beautiful and the abject.
- Sayre Gomez presents an architectural intervention, which consists of a window installed directly into the gallery wall. In so doing, the work exposes a second window that was covered by the initial build-out of the gallery. The piece allows natural light to filter into the room, light that is partially obscured by a tinted film that the artist distressed and applied to the inside of the installed window. In this work Gomez refers to both the history of abstraction and the legacy of the readymade.
- Joe Goode presents a painting from his Vandalism series in which the surface of a painted blue sky is torn and scored to expose its underlying substrate. In this series, Goode continues to explore vandalized planes through painterly means. The tears within the painting cause a rupture in the vibrant field of blue, revealing the materiality of an otherwise perfect image. By intention, the piece is framed under glass so one may see one’s own reflection within the painting, an experience resembling that of looking through a window.
The exhibition is currently on view at Steve Turner Conteporary with the show Fragmental, by Mexico City artist Pablo Rasgado. Both are on view through Aug. 4.
L’idée Fixe
Steve Turner Contemporary
6026 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles (across from BCAM at LACMA)
Gallery hours: Tuesday-Saturday, 11 am-6 pm