Glenn Ligon 「Glenn Ligon」
Rat Hole Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition of New York-based artist Glenn Ligon on view from March 29 until June 30, 2013. The exhibition will present a suite of new paintings, neon sculptures, and drawings, and marks the first time for Ligon’s work to be shown in Japan.

Glenn Ligon
Double America (2012)
neon and paint
91.4 x 304.8 cm (36 x 120 in.)
© Glenn Ligon Courtesy of the artist
Born in 1960 in the Bronx, New York, Glenn Ligon has an artistic practice that encompasses painting, neon, printmaking, photography, installation, and video. Reflecting social and personal histories, Ligon’s work often addresses issues of race, sexuality, and identity, while building critically on the legacies of modern painting and conceptual art. Engaging in an acute investigation of American history and culture, Ligon uses text, language, and imagery from a wide range of sources, from the literary works of writers such as James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, and Gertrude Stein, to stand-up comedy routines, children’s coloring books, and slave narratives.
While Ligon works across a wide range of mediums, he is best known for his landmark series of text-based paintings made since the late 1980s. These abstract works are painted with repeated stencils in black oil stick, with each overlapping layer causing the letters on the canvas to rise and thicken with excess paint, becoming increasingly smudged and illegible. The large-scale text paintings in the exhibition are from Ligon’s Stranger series, which draws on excerpts from James Baldwin’s 1953 essay “Stranger in the Village” about the author’s experience as an African-American visiting a small village in Switzerland. These paintings are flocked with layers of coal dust, which add texture and glitter to the canvas, as well an element of contrast and contradiction between the beauty of coal dust as a black shiny material in relation to it being a waste product leftover from coal processing.
The exhibition will also feature several small-scale drawings produced with oil stick and coal dust, which repeat the phrase “negro sunshine,” a fragment of text from Gertude Stein’s 1909 novel “Three Lives.” In both Ligon’s paintings and works on paper, the appropriated text is transformed into abstract compositions, creating a dialogue between visibility and erasure and between the artist’s use of formal elements (such as the monochrome palette, stencil lettering, and repetition of text) and the emotional narrative. In addition, they exemplify Ligon’s interest in the force of language, the multiplicities of meanings across generations, and shifting notions of identity and the self in relation to culture and history.
Since 2005, Ligon has produced neon works that also employ quotes from historical writings or isolate a single word or phrase. These neon reliefs are painted with black on the front of the letters so that the light of the neon appears against the wall, creating a luminous haze of light behind the black letters that face the viewer. Presented in the exhibition will be two neon works: Double America (2012), which continues a series of works using the word “America” and Untitled (Orpheus and Eurydice) (2013), shown for the first time. Ligon’s neon sculptures present racial, social, and political complexities by embodying a metaphor between black and white, while at the same time play with the opposing notions of light and shadow, vision and non-seeing, and life and death.
Ligon’s work has been included in the 1991 and 1993 Whitney Biennial, Venice Biennale in 1997, and Document XI in 2002. He has also been the subject of several solo museum exhibitions including a major mid-career retrospective in 2011 entitled Glenn Ligon: America, which opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art and traveled to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. His work is included in Obama’s choice of artworks currently on loan to the White House, making him the youngest artist ever to receive this honor.

Glenn Ligon
Study for Negro Sunshine #52 (2010)
oilstick, coal dust, and gesso on paper
30.5 x 22.9 cm (12 x 9 in.)
© Glenn Ligon Courtesy of the artist
Glenn Ligon
Double America (2012)
neon and paint
91.4 x 304.8 cm (36 x 120 in.)
© Glenn Ligon Courtesy of the artist
Born in 1960 in the Bronx, New York, Glenn Ligon has an artistic practice that encompasses painting, neon, printmaking, photography, installation, and video. Reflecting social and personal histories, Ligon’s work often addresses issues of race, sexuality, and identity, while building critically on the legacies of modern painting and conceptual art. Engaging in an acute investigation of American history and culture, Ligon uses text, language, and imagery from a wide range of sources, from the literary works of writers such as James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, and Gertrude Stein, to stand-up comedy routines, children’s coloring books, and slave narratives.
While Ligon works across a wide range of mediums, he is best known for his landmark series of text-based paintings made since the late 1980s. These abstract works are painted with repeated stencils in black oil stick, with each overlapping layer causing the letters on the canvas to rise and thicken with excess paint, becoming increasingly smudged and illegible. The large-scale text paintings in the exhibition are from Ligon’s Stranger series, which draws on excerpts from James Baldwin’s 1953 essay “Stranger in the Village” about the author’s experience as an African-American visiting a small village in Switzerland. These paintings are flocked with layers of coal dust, which add texture and glitter to the canvas, as well an element of contrast and contradiction between the beauty of coal dust as a black shiny material in relation to it being a waste product leftover from coal processing.
The exhibition will also feature several small-scale drawings produced with oil stick and coal dust, which repeat the phrase “negro sunshine,” a fragment of text from Gertude Stein’s 1909 novel “Three Lives.” In both Ligon’s paintings and works on paper, the appropriated text is transformed into abstract compositions, creating a dialogue between visibility and erasure and between the artist’s use of formal elements (such as the monochrome palette, stencil lettering, and repetition of text) and the emotional narrative. In addition, they exemplify Ligon’s interest in the force of language, the multiplicities of meanings across generations, and shifting notions of identity and the self in relation to culture and history.
Since 2005, Ligon has produced neon works that also employ quotes from historical writings or isolate a single word or phrase. These neon reliefs are painted with black on the front of the letters so that the light of the neon appears against the wall, creating a luminous haze of light behind the black letters that face the viewer. Presented in the exhibition will be two neon works: Double America (2012), which continues a series of works using the word “America” and Untitled (Orpheus and Eurydice) (2013), shown for the first time. Ligon’s neon sculptures present racial, social, and political complexities by embodying a metaphor between black and white, while at the same time play with the opposing notions of light and shadow, vision and non-seeing, and life and death.
Ligon’s work has been included in the 1991 and 1993 Whitney Biennial, Venice Biennale in 1997, and Document XI in 2002. He has also been the subject of several solo museum exhibitions including a major mid-career retrospective in 2011 entitled Glenn Ligon: America, which opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art and traveled to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. His work is included in Obama’s choice of artworks currently on loan to the White House, making him the youngest artist ever to receive this honor.
Glenn Ligon
Study for Negro Sunshine #52 (2010)
oilstick, coal dust, and gesso on paper
30.5 x 22.9 cm (12 x 9 in.)
© Glenn Ligon Courtesy of the artist
Monica Bonvicini 「Off the Grid」
Rat Hole Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of sculptural works and drawings by Berlin-based, Italian artist Monica Bonvicini on view from November 2, 2012 until
January 20, 2013.

Monica Bonvicini
Straps and Mirror, 2010
Installation view: Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin, Monica Bonvicini Bet Your Sweet Life, 2010
Courtesy of the artist © Monica Bonvicini, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
Born in Venice in 1965, Monica Bonvicini explores specific conventions and social connotations, investigating the relationship between space, power, and gender. Her artistic practice varies across sculpture, installation, photography and video to works on paper. Working with traditionally “masculine” industrial materials that reference modernist architecture, such as metal and glass, and often combining them in unexpected contexts with allusions to sexual fetishism- leather, chains, and rubber- Bonvicini confronts the structures of power and seduction in architecture that surrounds us, while at the same time revealing connections between the world of labor, sexuality, politics, and social representation.
For this exhibition at Rat Hole Gallery, a large-scale and site-specific sculptural installation work, Straps and Mirror, will be shown in the main gallery space. Created of large, mirrored glass panels affixed to non-functional metal scaffolds with hanging leather straps and harnesses suggestive of S/M subculture, this work not only engages in a critique of the male-dominated history of architecture, but also investigates the interrelationship between physical and social space and deconstructs the connection between function and aesthetics in modernist architecture. The artist’s use of industrial materials and the work’s aggressive presence in the space by way of the reflective mirrors present a formal commentary on minimalist sculpture, as well as portray that, according to Bonvicini, architectural structures and spaces are by no means neutral, but on the contrary ideologically and sexually charged.
The exhibition also includes a large-scale black-and-white drawing in tempera from the artist’s Off the Grid series, which features words such as RUN and RAGE, and patterns drawn that resemble the strings and steel chains often seen in her sculptures and installations. For Bonvicini, drawings are a way of engaging directly and personally with a subject, demonstrating the notion of the artist’s process.
Also on view will be smaller works, including Leather Tools, sculptures of tools tightly wrapped in black leather, presented on pedestals and covered with glass, and NeedleKnows, works on paper of red-thread embroideries of needle-nose pliers which reference Freudian symbolism and the needle as a phallic object- a symbol used in much of Bonvicini’s work.
Monica Bonvicini’s work has been widely exhibited in solo and group exhibitions around the world. She is a recipient of the Golden Lion of the Venice Biennial (1999) and the Preis der Nationalgalerie für Junge Kunst, Berlin (2005). Earlier this year, RUN, a large-scale outdoor sculpture commissioned for the 2012 Olympic Games was permanently installed in the Olympic Park, London. The exhibition at Rat Hole Gallery marks the first time for the artist’s work to be shown in Japan.

Monica Bonvicini
NeedleKnows, 2012
Embroideries on paper
21.7 x 28 cm (23 x 29.7 cm framed)
Courtesy of the artist © Monica Bonvicini, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

Monica Bonvicini
Leather Tool (’point end’ hammer), 2009
hammer covered in black leather, black leather string
2 x 27.5 x 12 cm + pedestal
Courtesy of the artist © Monica Bonvicini, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

Monica Bonvicini
Off the Grid (Untitled), 2012
black tempera on paper,
271 x 380 cm
Courtesy of the artist © Monica Bonvicini, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
January 20, 2013.
Monica Bonvicini
Straps and Mirror, 2010
Installation view: Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin, Monica Bonvicini Bet Your Sweet Life, 2010
Courtesy of the artist © Monica Bonvicini, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
Born in Venice in 1965, Monica Bonvicini explores specific conventions and social connotations, investigating the relationship between space, power, and gender. Her artistic practice varies across sculpture, installation, photography and video to works on paper. Working with traditionally “masculine” industrial materials that reference modernist architecture, such as metal and glass, and often combining them in unexpected contexts with allusions to sexual fetishism- leather, chains, and rubber- Bonvicini confronts the structures of power and seduction in architecture that surrounds us, while at the same time revealing connections between the world of labor, sexuality, politics, and social representation.
For this exhibition at Rat Hole Gallery, a large-scale and site-specific sculptural installation work, Straps and Mirror, will be shown in the main gallery space. Created of large, mirrored glass panels affixed to non-functional metal scaffolds with hanging leather straps and harnesses suggestive of S/M subculture, this work not only engages in a critique of the male-dominated history of architecture, but also investigates the interrelationship between physical and social space and deconstructs the connection between function and aesthetics in modernist architecture. The artist’s use of industrial materials and the work’s aggressive presence in the space by way of the reflective mirrors present a formal commentary on minimalist sculpture, as well as portray that, according to Bonvicini, architectural structures and spaces are by no means neutral, but on the contrary ideologically and sexually charged.
The exhibition also includes a large-scale black-and-white drawing in tempera from the artist’s Off the Grid series, which features words such as RUN and RAGE, and patterns drawn that resemble the strings and steel chains often seen in her sculptures and installations. For Bonvicini, drawings are a way of engaging directly and personally with a subject, demonstrating the notion of the artist’s process.
Also on view will be smaller works, including Leather Tools, sculptures of tools tightly wrapped in black leather, presented on pedestals and covered with glass, and NeedleKnows, works on paper of red-thread embroideries of needle-nose pliers which reference Freudian symbolism and the needle as a phallic object- a symbol used in much of Bonvicini’s work.
Monica Bonvicini’s work has been widely exhibited in solo and group exhibitions around the world. She is a recipient of the Golden Lion of the Venice Biennial (1999) and the Preis der Nationalgalerie für Junge Kunst, Berlin (2005). Earlier this year, RUN, a large-scale outdoor sculpture commissioned for the 2012 Olympic Games was permanently installed in the Olympic Park, London. The exhibition at Rat Hole Gallery marks the first time for the artist’s work to be shown in Japan.
Monica Bonvicini
NeedleKnows, 2012
Embroideries on paper
21.7 x 28 cm (23 x 29.7 cm framed)
Courtesy of the artist © Monica Bonvicini, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
Monica Bonvicini
Leather Tool (’point end’ hammer), 2009
hammer covered in black leather, black leather string
2 x 27.5 x 12 cm + pedestal
Courtesy of the artist © Monica Bonvicini, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
Monica Bonvicini
Off the Grid (Untitled), 2012
black tempera on paper,
271 x 380 cm
Courtesy of the artist © Monica Bonvicini, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
Nobuyoshi Araki "Sentimental Sky"
Rat Hole Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by Nobuyoshi Araki entitled Sentimental Sky (Japanese title: Senchimentaru na Sora) on view from August 24 until October 7. The exhibition will feature a video installation “Sanzenkū (Three Thousand Skies)” composed of 3000 of Araki’s images of the sky, as well as photographs from his series “Ai no Balcony (Balcony of Love)” which depicts scenes from Araki’s balcony across a span of 30 years.

After the loss of his wife Yoko in 1990, taking photographs of the sky became a habitual practice for Araki. To the artist, the sky is a mirror reflecting his emotional state, and the ever-changing faces of the sky are a metaphor for the simple passing of the days- a similitude of life itself. Araki often refers to his photographs as being like an I-novel. Similarly, these photographs of the sky are personal, what Araki calls “shikū (I-sky),” capturing a sky that belongs to no one else other than Araki.
For his video installation “Sanzenkū (Three Thousand Skies),” a 4-hour long montage of 3000 photographs of the sky will be projected on a large screen in the main gallery. From images of clear blue skies to floating clouds and bold sunset colors, Araki’s photographs depict an endless array of expressions of the sky. In addition, the telephone wires, rooftops, and trees in the foreground that are signature to “Araki’s sky,” serve as a vital presence, and the feeling of nostalgia evoked by the images remind us of the painful loss of Yoko and Araki’s beloved cat Chiro.
The exhibition will also feature a display of over 40 photographs from Araki’s “Ai no Balcony (Balcony of Love)” series taken from 1983 until 2011, along with 3 new silkscreen works of a drawing of Yoko.
Due to a move at the end of last year, Araki bid farewell to his house and balcony, a special place that has appeared as the setting of many of his works. Following “Sentimental Journey, Winter Journey,” a photo book of the time Araki spent with Yoko up until her death, and “Sentimental Journey, Spring Journey” which documents Chiro’s final days, “Sentimental Sky” is symbolic of yet another closing chapter to a love story in Araki’s life.

Rat Hole Gallery will also release a publication by Nobuyoshi Araki in parallel with the exhibition.
Nobuyoshi Araki Senchimentaru na Sora (Sentimental Sky)
Book release date: August 24, 2012
170 pages, price 4,725yen(tax included)
Published by: RAT HOLE GALLERY
After the loss of his wife Yoko in 1990, taking photographs of the sky became a habitual practice for Araki. To the artist, the sky is a mirror reflecting his emotional state, and the ever-changing faces of the sky are a metaphor for the simple passing of the days- a similitude of life itself. Araki often refers to his photographs as being like an I-novel. Similarly, these photographs of the sky are personal, what Araki calls “shikū (I-sky),” capturing a sky that belongs to no one else other than Araki.
For his video installation “Sanzenkū (Three Thousand Skies),” a 4-hour long montage of 3000 photographs of the sky will be projected on a large screen in the main gallery. From images of clear blue skies to floating clouds and bold sunset colors, Araki’s photographs depict an endless array of expressions of the sky. In addition, the telephone wires, rooftops, and trees in the foreground that are signature to “Araki’s sky,” serve as a vital presence, and the feeling of nostalgia evoked by the images remind us of the painful loss of Yoko and Araki’s beloved cat Chiro.
The exhibition will also feature a display of over 40 photographs from Araki’s “Ai no Balcony (Balcony of Love)” series taken from 1983 until 2011, along with 3 new silkscreen works of a drawing of Yoko.
Due to a move at the end of last year, Araki bid farewell to his house and balcony, a special place that has appeared as the setting of many of his works. Following “Sentimental Journey, Winter Journey,” a photo book of the time Araki spent with Yoko up until her death, and “Sentimental Journey, Spring Journey” which documents Chiro’s final days, “Sentimental Sky” is symbolic of yet another closing chapter to a love story in Araki’s life.
Rat Hole Gallery will also release a publication by Nobuyoshi Araki in parallel with the exhibition.
Nobuyoshi Araki Senchimentaru na Sora (Sentimental Sky)
Book release date: August 24, 2012
170 pages, price 4,725yen(tax included)
Published by: RAT HOLE GALLERY
Elad Lassry 「Elad Lassry」
Elad Lassry, who was born in 1977 in Tel Aviv and currently lives and works in Los Angeles, is known for his visually seductive yet detached, complex photographs and films that investigate the use of images in our visual culture, along with their inherent layers of histories and formalisms. By creating compositions and images that are simultaneously familiar and alien, both ever present and elusive, Lassry’s work explores current possibilities for the engagement with pictures and challenges the viewer with physical and perceptual paradoxes.
Lassry’s photographs reference a diversity of genres such as still life compositions, photocollages, studio portraits of friends and celebrities, and involve a broad range of image-making processes. The subjects in his works, which also canvas a wide range of everyday objects, people, animals, and landscapes, are placed within saturated fields of color and removed from their original context and history. Drawing on source material such as advertising, vintage picture magazines, illustrated books, and film archives, the resulting photographs are collages of pre-existing images or newly staged studio photographs in which the artist plays with the relationship between analog and digital methods of producing images. Lassry creates what he describes as a “nervous picture”- one that, according to the artist, “makes your faculties fail, when your comfort about having visual information or knowing the world is somehow shaken.” Further complicated by Lassry’s use of layered exposures, blurs, and harsh colors, the images slide between stillness and movement, and the viewer’s eye is never fixed. Lassry’s photographic works are made so that their dimensions never exceed the size of a magazine page, and the frames, which are painted with richly saturated colors that derive from the dominant hues in the photographs, also play a fundamental role. By allowing the viewer to consider the photographs as physical objects, Lassry raises the issue of whether the work’s existence is image-based or object-based, or whether it can be both, and opens up broader conceptual questions about the interaction between the tangible and cognitive experiences of a picture.
The relationship between image and object and the exploration of issues concerning the circulation and history of images within a set of cultural references extends into Lassry’s film and sculpture as well. His film Untitled (Passacaglia), which will be shown with a 16mm projector in the exhibition, is based on inspiration from a 1966 documentary made for public television centered on the 1938 choreography Passacaglia by revolutionary modern dance choreographer Doris Humphrey, and features penetrating images of New York City Ballet dancers against a set displaying a well-known painting by Robert Delaunay Tall Portuguese Women (1916). No attempt is made to provide insight into dance choreography, a painting, a stage set or a story. Rather, Lassry’s use of the camera’s position and movements which draw upon the legacy of Structuralist film, the indistinct space between abstraction and figuration, and the combination of flatness and depth, all serve to examine the process of seeing and the relationship between the seeing subject and the seen object.
For one of the sculptures that will be presented in the exhibition, Lassry has constructed a work resembling a small bed made from wood suggestive of the frame that often characterizes the artist’s photographs. Adorned with four crosses, the work simultaneously temps and denies a host of symbolic and functional interpretations, once again incorporating perceptual paradoxes that are seen in his photography and film work. Constantly shifting between original and found material, Lassry fosters a dialogue across photography, film, and sculpture, creating tension between an image and its physicality in space.
Lassry’s work was featured in ILLUMInations, the International Pavillion at the 54th Venice Biennale last year and he was also recently nominated for the prestigious Deutsche Börse Photography Prize. Lassry has also exhibited extensively in major international institutions including solo exhibitions at Kunsthalle Zurich, Switzerland; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis; and Tramway, Glascow.







Lassry’s photographs reference a diversity of genres such as still life compositions, photocollages, studio portraits of friends and celebrities, and involve a broad range of image-making processes. The subjects in his works, which also canvas a wide range of everyday objects, people, animals, and landscapes, are placed within saturated fields of color and removed from their original context and history. Drawing on source material such as advertising, vintage picture magazines, illustrated books, and film archives, the resulting photographs are collages of pre-existing images or newly staged studio photographs in which the artist plays with the relationship between analog and digital methods of producing images. Lassry creates what he describes as a “nervous picture”- one that, according to the artist, “makes your faculties fail, when your comfort about having visual information or knowing the world is somehow shaken.” Further complicated by Lassry’s use of layered exposures, blurs, and harsh colors, the images slide between stillness and movement, and the viewer’s eye is never fixed. Lassry’s photographic works are made so that their dimensions never exceed the size of a magazine page, and the frames, which are painted with richly saturated colors that derive from the dominant hues in the photographs, also play a fundamental role. By allowing the viewer to consider the photographs as physical objects, Lassry raises the issue of whether the work’s existence is image-based or object-based, or whether it can be both, and opens up broader conceptual questions about the interaction between the tangible and cognitive experiences of a picture.
The relationship between image and object and the exploration of issues concerning the circulation and history of images within a set of cultural references extends into Lassry’s film and sculpture as well. His film Untitled (Passacaglia), which will be shown with a 16mm projector in the exhibition, is based on inspiration from a 1966 documentary made for public television centered on the 1938 choreography Passacaglia by revolutionary modern dance choreographer Doris Humphrey, and features penetrating images of New York City Ballet dancers against a set displaying a well-known painting by Robert Delaunay Tall Portuguese Women (1916). No attempt is made to provide insight into dance choreography, a painting, a stage set or a story. Rather, Lassry’s use of the camera’s position and movements which draw upon the legacy of Structuralist film, the indistinct space between abstraction and figuration, and the combination of flatness and depth, all serve to examine the process of seeing and the relationship between the seeing subject and the seen object.
For one of the sculptures that will be presented in the exhibition, Lassry has constructed a work resembling a small bed made from wood suggestive of the frame that often characterizes the artist’s photographs. Adorned with four crosses, the work simultaneously temps and denies a host of symbolic and functional interpretations, once again incorporating perceptual paradoxes that are seen in his photography and film work. Constantly shifting between original and found material, Lassry fosters a dialogue across photography, film, and sculpture, creating tension between an image and its physicality in space.
Lassry’s work was featured in ILLUMInations, the International Pavillion at the 54th Venice Biennale last year and he was also recently nominated for the prestigious Deutsche Börse Photography Prize. Lassry has also exhibited extensively in major international institutions including solo exhibitions at Kunsthalle Zurich, Switzerland; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis; and Tramway, Glascow.
JACK GOLDSTEIN "Jack Goldstein"
Rat Hole Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of the late artist Jack Goldstein (1945-2003).
Jack Goldstein’s performances, films, paintings, and sound works of the late 1970’s and early 80’s helped define the early stages of post-modernist art. A leading member of the Pictures Generation in New York that initiated a paradigm shift in art focusing on the critical examination of images, he has served as a major influence on many artists who came after him and has been called one of the most important artist’s artists in the last 30 years. On view from January 25 until March 25, this exhibition marks the first time for Jack Goldstein’s work to be shown in Japan.
Jack Goldstein was born in 1945 in Montreal, Canada and moved with his family to Los Angeles when he was a teenager. Goldstein received his initial training at the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles and then went on to earn a master’s degree as a member of the inaugural class at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) in 1972. During his time at CalArts, he was a student of and teaching assistant to John Baldessari, where the primary focus of Baldessari’s famous “post-studio-art” class was the analytical investigation of imagery produced by the mass media.
Goldstein created a number of minimalist sculptures early on in his career, but soon turned to performance and film. During the 1970s, Goldstein divided his time between Los Angeles and New York, and from 1973 he began to produce a group of color films using professional technicians and special effects from the film and entertainment industry. With flashes of color and spectacularization undermining the iconic architecture of the image and the “place” of the viewer, these films were interrogations of media, technology, and spectacle, showing the artist’s fascination with appropriated Pop culture and Hollywood imagery. One of the most famous of these color films is The Jump (1978), a twenty-six second loop film projected onto a red painted wall, which will be shown in the exhibition at Rat Hole Gallery and was also screened at last year’s Venice Biennale. In The Jump, made using altered footage taken from Leni Riefenstahl's documentary of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, Olympia, the image of a somersaulting high board diver is rotoscoped, tinted gold, scattered with stars, and placed against a void-like black background, out of which the figure repeatedly dives. Goldstein’s use of the rotoscoping technique strips the image of all identifying references, and the element of spectacle overpowers physical matter. Along with other members of the Pictures Generation, which takes its name from the landmark 1977 “Pictures” exhibition at the Artist’s Space in New York City and also included artists Robert Longo, Sherrie Levine, Troy Brauntuch, Goldstein’s examination of the image was based on an attitude of conceptual distance, in reaction to the extreme dominance of technology and media in post-war American society.
In 1976, Goldstein commenced with a new body of work, the records. These were colored vinyl records of sound recordings sourced from commercial archives that conjured intense visuals with titles such as “Burning Forest” or “Wrestling Cats.” These audio works served as a further abstraction to his films and were also designed as “images” to be installed on a wall without the possibility to play them. Goldstein conceived his records as both sound carriers and visual objects, saying “the records, they’re sounds as image, so I saw them as pictures.” Altogether, Goldstein produced eight record works, each of which differed with regard to design, size, and playing time. Out of the eight works, three consist of a series and one of these series, A Suite of Nine 7-Inch Records, will be on view in this exhibition.
Jack Goldstein’s oeuvre spans sculpture, performance, film, sound, photography, and painting. Central in his work however are primarily the 16mm films and records made in the 1970s, which can be considered among the finest examples of post-conceptual work from this time period. This exhibition will provide a unique and rare opportunity to view among Jack Goldstein’s most famous film works- a selection of ten short 16mm films from the period 1974-1978 including The Jump, MGM, Shane, and Butterflies- as well as a display of his record series.
Jack Goldstein’s performances, films, paintings, and sound works of the late 1970’s and early 80’s helped define the early stages of post-modernist art. A leading member of the Pictures Generation in New York that initiated a paradigm shift in art focusing on the critical examination of images, he has served as a major influence on many artists who came after him and has been called one of the most important artist’s artists in the last 30 years. On view from January 25 until March 25, this exhibition marks the first time for Jack Goldstein’s work to be shown in Japan.
Jack Goldstein was born in 1945 in Montreal, Canada and moved with his family to Los Angeles when he was a teenager. Goldstein received his initial training at the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles and then went on to earn a master’s degree as a member of the inaugural class at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) in 1972. During his time at CalArts, he was a student of and teaching assistant to John Baldessari, where the primary focus of Baldessari’s famous “post-studio-art” class was the analytical investigation of imagery produced by the mass media.
Goldstein created a number of minimalist sculptures early on in his career, but soon turned to performance and film. During the 1970s, Goldstein divided his time between Los Angeles and New York, and from 1973 he began to produce a group of color films using professional technicians and special effects from the film and entertainment industry. With flashes of color and spectacularization undermining the iconic architecture of the image and the “place” of the viewer, these films were interrogations of media, technology, and spectacle, showing the artist’s fascination with appropriated Pop culture and Hollywood imagery. One of the most famous of these color films is The Jump (1978), a twenty-six second loop film projected onto a red painted wall, which will be shown in the exhibition at Rat Hole Gallery and was also screened at last year’s Venice Biennale. In The Jump, made using altered footage taken from Leni Riefenstahl's documentary of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, Olympia, the image of a somersaulting high board diver is rotoscoped, tinted gold, scattered with stars, and placed against a void-like black background, out of which the figure repeatedly dives. Goldstein’s use of the rotoscoping technique strips the image of all identifying references, and the element of spectacle overpowers physical matter. Along with other members of the Pictures Generation, which takes its name from the landmark 1977 “Pictures” exhibition at the Artist’s Space in New York City and also included artists Robert Longo, Sherrie Levine, Troy Brauntuch, Goldstein’s examination of the image was based on an attitude of conceptual distance, in reaction to the extreme dominance of technology and media in post-war American society.
In 1976, Goldstein commenced with a new body of work, the records. These were colored vinyl records of sound recordings sourced from commercial archives that conjured intense visuals with titles such as “Burning Forest” or “Wrestling Cats.” These audio works served as a further abstraction to his films and were also designed as “images” to be installed on a wall without the possibility to play them. Goldstein conceived his records as both sound carriers and visual objects, saying “the records, they’re sounds as image, so I saw them as pictures.” Altogether, Goldstein produced eight record works, each of which differed with regard to design, size, and playing time. Out of the eight works, three consist of a series and one of these series, A Suite of Nine 7-Inch Records, will be on view in this exhibition.
Jack Goldstein’s oeuvre spans sculpture, performance, film, sound, photography, and painting. Central in his work however are primarily the 16mm films and records made in the 1970s, which can be considered among the finest examples of post-conceptual work from this time period. This exhibition will provide a unique and rare opportunity to view among Jack Goldstein’s most famous film works- a selection of ten short 16mm films from the period 1974-1978 including The Jump, MGM, Shane, and Butterflies- as well as a display of his record series.
Thea Djordjadze "Thea Djordjadze"
Rat Hole Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new works produced on-site in Tokyo by Berlin-based, Georgian artist Thea Djordjadze. On view from October 28, 2011 until January 22, 2012, the exhibition marks the first time for Djordadze's works to be shown in Japan.
Born in Tbilisi in 1971, Djordjadze is best known for making sculptural installations that develop from an intuitive process of playing with objects and forms in space. She works with materials ranging from plaster and cardboard to glass, wood, metal, concrete, linoleum and foam to create amorphous constructions that hover between functionality, decoration and abstraction. At times these constructions resemble fragmented pieces of furniture - chairs, tables, beds, shelving - and they are often accentuated by their pairing with found objects such as carpets, photos or lamps. Presented together in site-specific installations, these works conjure uncanny, dispersed domestic spaces where the expected relations between body and habitus no longer cohere, triggering awareness and reflection in viewers of how things make us behave, and how we behave around things.
Trained as a painter, Djordjadze says that she approaches her installations as compositions of form, texture, depth and color. While neither explicitly about anything, nor intended as a particular commentary on historical archetypes of art and design, Djordadze's works also develop from her deep interest in cinema, literature and architecture, beginning with her youthful attraction to the 1920s- and '30s-era Constructivist buildings in her native Tbilisi. Occasionally surfacing in her works, such references provide only a momentary sense of orientation before quickly shifting beyond the comfort of customary knowledge or symbolism. In this way the works evoke the dynamic tensions between memory and forgetting that constantly occur in the generative process of the material world, and in the creative process of artistic experimentation.
Djordjadze also makes drawings, paintings and small sculptures, which are often incorporated in her installations. From 1999 to 2003, she was part of the Düsseldorf-based interdisciplinary collaborative group hobbypopMUSEUM. She has had solo exhibitions at international venues including the Common Guild, Glasgow; Contemporary Art Museum, St Louis; Kunsthalle Basel; and Kunstverein Nürnberg; and has participated in international exhibitions including "The New Décor" at Hayward Gallery, London; the 5th Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art; 9th Biennale de Lyon; and 50th Venice Biennale.
October 28, 2011 – January 22, 2012 12:00-20:00
Gallery closed: Mondays and December 26 – January 5





Photos: ©Thea Djordjadze, APG-JAA
Courtesy of Sprüth Magers Berlin London/Rat Hole Gallery
Born in Tbilisi in 1971, Djordjadze is best known for making sculptural installations that develop from an intuitive process of playing with objects and forms in space. She works with materials ranging from plaster and cardboard to glass, wood, metal, concrete, linoleum and foam to create amorphous constructions that hover between functionality, decoration and abstraction. At times these constructions resemble fragmented pieces of furniture - chairs, tables, beds, shelving - and they are often accentuated by their pairing with found objects such as carpets, photos or lamps. Presented together in site-specific installations, these works conjure uncanny, dispersed domestic spaces where the expected relations between body and habitus no longer cohere, triggering awareness and reflection in viewers of how things make us behave, and how we behave around things.
Trained as a painter, Djordjadze says that she approaches her installations as compositions of form, texture, depth and color. While neither explicitly about anything, nor intended as a particular commentary on historical archetypes of art and design, Djordadze's works also develop from her deep interest in cinema, literature and architecture, beginning with her youthful attraction to the 1920s- and '30s-era Constructivist buildings in her native Tbilisi. Occasionally surfacing in her works, such references provide only a momentary sense of orientation before quickly shifting beyond the comfort of customary knowledge or symbolism. In this way the works evoke the dynamic tensions between memory and forgetting that constantly occur in the generative process of the material world, and in the creative process of artistic experimentation.
Djordjadze also makes drawings, paintings and small sculptures, which are often incorporated in her installations. From 1999 to 2003, she was part of the Düsseldorf-based interdisciplinary collaborative group hobbypopMUSEUM. She has had solo exhibitions at international venues including the Common Guild, Glasgow; Contemporary Art Museum, St Louis; Kunsthalle Basel; and Kunstverein Nürnberg; and has participated in international exhibitions including "The New Décor" at Hayward Gallery, London; the 5th Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art; 9th Biennale de Lyon; and 50th Venice Biennale.
October 28, 2011 – January 22, 2012 12:00-20:00
Gallery closed: Mondays and December 26 – January 5
Photos: ©Thea Djordjadze, APG-JAA
Courtesy of Sprüth Magers Berlin London/Rat Hole Gallery
Nobuyoshi Araki exhibition "equinoctial week" from Frida...
The rat hall gallery start the Nobuyoshi Araki exhibition "equinoctial week" on Friday, July 22, 2011 until Sunday, September 25. I display approximately 450 points of most new works including the work "paradise" which photographed a color work, a flower photographed just after the monochrome work which photographed a town of Tokyo over the window of the taxi by the book exhibition becoming the sixth private exhibition in our gallery, Tohoku district Pacific offing earthquake with the figure skating of the monster.
While Araki was treated for the prostate cancer, approximately 400 points of cabinet photographs developed in the shape of a grid in a wall surface photographed Tokyo in the summer of 2010 when it was record intense heat over the window of the taxi. Araki continued similar photography as the "クルマド" series for many years, but Araki can turn to the lens in the figure form of various people until now as if I stare at the equinoctial week in spite of being a stack or as if the photograph of the book exhibition is photographed by a 200mm telephoto lens and stares at "the lostness" for the daily scene of the town from the equinoctial week.
Ten points of large-scale prints of the approximately 40 points of works which have begun to be photographed after an earthquake disaster and "paradise" series are displayed. "This world itself is the equinoctial week". In other words it is when all of the photograph is the equinoctial week that both works show the way of own photograph after the major earthquake for Araki to eat frequently since March 11. I am colorful, and the work which figure skating and the doll of a monster living in a passionate flower and the home balcony appear may grasp an outcome of the outlook on life and death only in Araki telling, "there is paradise before the equinoctial week".
All the photographs of the book exhibition are photographed the last spring when love cat チロ married for many years reached death later, and various thought of Araki for (time) sinks into each photograph at the time when I lost it. It may be always said that it is the world on "the equinoctial week" when it is sentimental that Nobuyoshi Araki who is going to find true joy and nostalgia to a photograph is going to show by a book exhibition while taking in "death in the life" sensitively.
I match it with an exhibition and publish the collection of photographs "equinoctial week" from a rat hall gallery.
The collection of Nobuyoshi Araki photographs "equinoctial week"
Friday, July 22, 2011 release 200 pages of 5,250 yen (tax-included) plans
Publication: RAT HOLE GALLERY
RAT HOLE GALLERY
107-0062 5-5-3, Minamiaoyama, Minato-ku, Tokyo B1
TEL: 03-6419-3581 FAX: 03-6419-3583
www.ratholegallery.com
While Araki was treated for the prostate cancer, approximately 400 points of cabinet photographs developed in the shape of a grid in a wall surface photographed Tokyo in the summer of 2010 when it was record intense heat over the window of the taxi. Araki continued similar photography as the "クルマド" series for many years, but Araki can turn to the lens in the figure form of various people until now as if I stare at the equinoctial week in spite of being a stack or as if the photograph of the book exhibition is photographed by a 200mm telephoto lens and stares at "the lostness" for the daily scene of the town from the equinoctial week.
Ten points of large-scale prints of the approximately 40 points of works which have begun to be photographed after an earthquake disaster and "paradise" series are displayed. "This world itself is the equinoctial week". In other words it is when all of the photograph is the equinoctial week that both works show the way of own photograph after the major earthquake for Araki to eat frequently since March 11. I am colorful, and the work which figure skating and the doll of a monster living in a passionate flower and the home balcony appear may grasp an outcome of the outlook on life and death only in Araki telling, "there is paradise before the equinoctial week".
All the photographs of the book exhibition are photographed the last spring when love cat チロ married for many years reached death later, and various thought of Araki for (time) sinks into each photograph at the time when I lost it. It may be always said that it is the world on "the equinoctial week" when it is sentimental that Nobuyoshi Araki who is going to find true joy and nostalgia to a photograph is going to show by a book exhibition while taking in "death in the life" sensitively.
I match it with an exhibition and publish the collection of photographs "equinoctial week" from a rat hall gallery.
The collection of Nobuyoshi Araki photographs "equinoctial week"
Friday, July 22, 2011 release 200 pages of 5,250 yen (tax-included) plans
Publication: RAT HOLE GALLERY
RAT HOLE GALLERY
107-0062 5-5-3, Minamiaoyama, Minato-ku, Tokyo B1
TEL: 03-6419-3581 FAX: 03-6419-3583
www.ratholegallery.com
Installation views: Cheyney Thompson Chronochromes "Data...
current exhibition






Cheyney Thompson "Chronochromes, Data, Motifs"
11 MAR 2011 – 12 JUNE 2011
Gallery hours: Tuesday – Sunday 12:00 - 20:00
RAT HOLE GALLERY
http://www.ratholegallery.com/
Cheyney Thompson "Chronochromes, Data, Motifs"
11 MAR 2011 – 12 JUNE 2011
Gallery hours: Tuesday – Sunday 12:00 - 20:00
RAT HOLE GALLERY
http://www.ratholegallery.com/
News of the extension of the session
Cheney Thompson exhibition "Chronochromes, Data, Motifs" held,
It was a plan until May 15 at first, but you want to see it towards most more and did it in a thing extending a session until June 12. Look by all means at this opportunity.
Cheney Thompson exhibition "Chronochromes, Data, Motifs" from March 11, 2011 to June 12
From 12:00 to 20:00 (moon holiday)
RAT HOLE GALLERY
It was a plan until May 15 at first, but you want to see it towards most more and did it in a thing extending a session until June 12. Look by all means at this opportunity.
Cheney Thompson exhibition "Chronochromes, Data, Motifs" from March 11, 2011 to June 12
From 12:00 to 20:00 (moon holiday)
RAT HOLE GALLERY
Current: Cheyney Thompson Chronochromes "Data, Motifs"
Current Exhibition
Cheyney Thompson Chronochromes "Data, Motifs"
11 MAR 2011 – 15 MAY 2011
Gallery hours: Tuesday – Sunday 12:00 - 20:00
RAT HOLE GALLERY

Rat Hole Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings and sculptures by Cheyney Thompson entitled Chronochromes, Data, Motifs. The exhibition, on view from March 11 until May 15, 2011, is Thompson's first solo exhibition in Japan.
Cheyney Thompson was born in 1975 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana and currently lives and works in New York City. Exploring the history, practice, and circulation of painting as his subject, Thompson often systematically deconstructs how a work is created, unpacking it into its colors, its establishment of perspective, its subject matter, and its post-studio life within a socio-economic context. For this exhibition, Thompson will present an exhibition comprised of four components: Paintings, Pedestals, Laser-cut Gouaches, and Drawings.
Thompson’s abstract oil paintings on canvas are made in such a way that they track their own time of production using the Munsell color model. In Munsell’s system, color is named according to three descriptive categories (hue, saturation, and value), which result in a complete, and asymmetrical color space. In these paintings, the color system is grafted onto a calendar. The month, hour, and day of the time of production are indicated by colors on the painting. Each day has a complementary hue pair, each hour changes the colors’ value, and each month the saturation changes. Noon is absolute white and midnight is absolute black. This motifs of the paintings are derived from an enlarged digital scan of the linen canvas texture on which they were painted, and the complementary color pairs which make up the resulting delicate, grain-like pattern are executed by hand using minutely-controlled brushstrokes.This creates a very repetitive process, which produces subtle variations in the appearance of the works. Also, it provides a system of producing paintings which, in theory has the potential to produce a smooth gradient that represents a continuous flow in time, and also registers the artist’s fatigue, distractions, interruptions, and the inability to work at all times. Thompson states, “Painting is here equated with a kind of wage labor, where time itself, the time of life, has become a discrete set of countable units and plotted within the support-- painting. But of course pictures always say more than they intend, so that even if the paintings are the result of a highly instrumentalized reasoning, they seem to picture a kind of desire which is rooted in the laboring body.”Each of the five paintings in the exhibition, which the artist refers to as chronochromes, shares the same height, with every width numerically unique.
Thompson’s pedestals are related to the paintings in sharing a systematic approach and the artist's fascination with different forms of display. All of the five pedestals in the exhibition are unique forms but have the same surface area. The material on display covers an increasingly wide area of research that is related to what Thompson sees as a central concern of his work- the relation of measurement to the body, or number and effect, or the problem of quantity and quality. Objects on display include artifacts, academic texts, press material, facsimile books, and collections of data, amongst other things that lie behind Thompson’s motifs in his works. “These pedestals are presenting information which as information can only have a tertiary relationship to the presentation of painting. But with the pedestals, the information can find its own mode of address by being bound to the singular instance of that which presents (the non-repeating formal iteration of the pedestals).”
The laser-cut works and drawings are also derived from motifs that emerge from Thompson's research and data collection. An aspect of the research that is reducible to a graphic sign or logo is what generates the laser-cut paintings, which are gouache and watercolor works on paper intricately mounted on laser-cut aluminum. To date, Thompson has created works from the following motifs: Robert Macaire, the letter R, the letter M, a fan blade, a image of ritual genital mutilation (sub-incision), a grid, an ink splotch, a lamp, the Munsell color solid, and a flower drawn by Pierre Bezier. The ink drawings in the exhibition are from a collection of the artist’s attempts to learn a calligraphy style popular in France in the 19th century.
Together, these four components attempt to articulate the internal “information” that lies in his paintings with external “influences” that characterize the paintings’ references and histories of circulation and display, subtly provoking viewers with the question of “What belongs to the category of painting?”
RAT HOLE GALLERY
5-5-3-B1 Minami Aoyama Minato-ku, Tokyo, 107-0062
TEL: 03-6419-3581 FAX: 03-6419-3583
www.ratholegallery.com
Cheyney Thompson Chronochromes "Data, Motifs"
11 MAR 2011 – 15 MAY 2011
Gallery hours: Tuesday – Sunday 12:00 - 20:00
RAT HOLE GALLERY
Rat Hole Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings and sculptures by Cheyney Thompson entitled Chronochromes, Data, Motifs. The exhibition, on view from March 11 until May 15, 2011, is Thompson's first solo exhibition in Japan.
Cheyney Thompson was born in 1975 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana and currently lives and works in New York City. Exploring the history, practice, and circulation of painting as his subject, Thompson often systematically deconstructs how a work is created, unpacking it into its colors, its establishment of perspective, its subject matter, and its post-studio life within a socio-economic context. For this exhibition, Thompson will present an exhibition comprised of four components: Paintings, Pedestals, Laser-cut Gouaches, and Drawings.
Thompson’s abstract oil paintings on canvas are made in such a way that they track their own time of production using the Munsell color model. In Munsell’s system, color is named according to three descriptive categories (hue, saturation, and value), which result in a complete, and asymmetrical color space. In these paintings, the color system is grafted onto a calendar. The month, hour, and day of the time of production are indicated by colors on the painting. Each day has a complementary hue pair, each hour changes the colors’ value, and each month the saturation changes. Noon is absolute white and midnight is absolute black. This motifs of the paintings are derived from an enlarged digital scan of the linen canvas texture on which they were painted, and the complementary color pairs which make up the resulting delicate, grain-like pattern are executed by hand using minutely-controlled brushstrokes.This creates a very repetitive process, which produces subtle variations in the appearance of the works. Also, it provides a system of producing paintings which, in theory has the potential to produce a smooth gradient that represents a continuous flow in time, and also registers the artist’s fatigue, distractions, interruptions, and the inability to work at all times. Thompson states, “Painting is here equated with a kind of wage labor, where time itself, the time of life, has become a discrete set of countable units and plotted within the support-- painting. But of course pictures always say more than they intend, so that even if the paintings are the result of a highly instrumentalized reasoning, they seem to picture a kind of desire which is rooted in the laboring body.”Each of the five paintings in the exhibition, which the artist refers to as chronochromes, shares the same height, with every width numerically unique.
Thompson’s pedestals are related to the paintings in sharing a systematic approach and the artist's fascination with different forms of display. All of the five pedestals in the exhibition are unique forms but have the same surface area. The material on display covers an increasingly wide area of research that is related to what Thompson sees as a central concern of his work- the relation of measurement to the body, or number and effect, or the problem of quantity and quality. Objects on display include artifacts, academic texts, press material, facsimile books, and collections of data, amongst other things that lie behind Thompson’s motifs in his works. “These pedestals are presenting information which as information can only have a tertiary relationship to the presentation of painting. But with the pedestals, the information can find its own mode of address by being bound to the singular instance of that which presents (the non-repeating formal iteration of the pedestals).”
The laser-cut works and drawings are also derived from motifs that emerge from Thompson's research and data collection. An aspect of the research that is reducible to a graphic sign or logo is what generates the laser-cut paintings, which are gouache and watercolor works on paper intricately mounted on laser-cut aluminum. To date, Thompson has created works from the following motifs: Robert Macaire, the letter R, the letter M, a fan blade, a image of ritual genital mutilation (sub-incision), a grid, an ink splotch, a lamp, the Munsell color solid, and a flower drawn by Pierre Bezier. The ink drawings in the exhibition are from a collection of the artist’s attempts to learn a calligraphy style popular in France in the 19th century.
Together, these four components attempt to articulate the internal “information” that lies in his paintings with external “influences” that characterize the paintings’ references and histories of circulation and display, subtly provoking viewers with the question of “What belongs to the category of painting?”
RAT HOLE GALLERY
5-5-3-B1 Minami Aoyama Minato-ku, Tokyo, 107-0062
TEL: 03-6419-3581 FAX: 03-6419-3583
www.ratholegallery.com
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