Large Drawings, see exhibition at link below http://www.davidnolangallery.com/exhibitions/

George Grosz 
The Way of All Flesh

 Large Drawings


Carroll Dunham, Mel Kendrick, Barry Le Va, Alice Maher, Andrei Roiter, Kiki Smith, and Al Taylor

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David Nolan Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of two exhibitions: George Grosz, The Way of All Flesh, which includes seven works on paper, and a group exhibition entitled Large Drawings, featuring seven works by contemporary artists. 

George Grosz, one of Germany’s most celebrated artists of the early 20th Century, produced a body of work centered on the theme of butcheries during his final years in Berlin, prior to his departure for the United States where he would make his home for 25 years.  

For Grosz and other artists like Otto Dix, the butchery became a metaphor for a brutalized society; instead of providing nourishment, the butcher is portrayed as a harbinger of death. In 1931, Grosz created a series of drawings entitled “Pig Slaughter in the Countryside” that was illustrated in Frankfurter Illustrierte magazine. For those who were able to see these illustrations, the scenes of pig must have been a fever dream. On view will be works from this series as well as others. A catalog published by Galerie Nolan Judin, Berlin, accompanies the exhibition. 

Large Drawings will feature artists who work in other media, like painting, sculpture, and photography, but for whom the act of drawing itself still remains an important part of the creative process.

     Irish artist Alice Mahe{, who's long been pulling it all together {myth. magic, folklore, memoi4 in video, music. drawing, sculpture, and more), turned this unlikely venue into a small theater with viewers sandwiched between screens that tantalized and confounded with a kind of primitive animation. Little in this fascinating show of video works, sculpture, and prints was exactly what it seemed. There were the videos with soundtracks by British composer Trevor Knight, drawings and prints in the back gallery and mock-classical sculptures of a boy and a girl-the kind you might find on Victorian mantelpieces orin cemeteries. The videos initially suggest a narrative with mythological ceatures and lots of metamorphosing. There's a centaurlike fellow, a Rapunzel figure, and mounds of what might be gold. But it soon becomes ciear that what we are viewing is really a series of erased drawings, one atop the other, assembled in the manner of animation but leading nowhere in particular. In a still from her video Godchildren of Enantios (2010), a woman sits sidesaddle (sans saddle) on a bull. Wearing knee-high stockings, big underpants. and a necklace, she is draped with flowing, unstoppable{ooking hair, which also covers the bull's eyes. effectively blinding him to her charms. Here, rather than being cumulative and in a linear progression, the drawings appear as a palimpsest, continually reminding the viewer that the past is always a presence. Maher's work is much about hair, head, and body; anditk about sex* men's decapitated heads sucking at a sphinx*postured woman's breasts,/teats - and a lot aboutart as the process of produclion. Through the erased pentimenti. we can gauge the evolution of the work and the story/noastory. The music is ambiguousiv allusive and elusive. producing disconnected enticing sounds
that keep us spellbound all the while. The quickly sketched and erased drawings suggest dreams almost recollected and not nearly understood. showing that resolution is not what art and dreams are really about. 
-Barbara A. MacAdam