re.riddle is excited to announce the gallery's participation in UNTITLED, SF Art Fair 2018 at The Palace of Fine Arts, from January 12-14, 2018.
Located near the main entrance of the art fair, re.riddle will present Summer Lee's Pieta, an installation for UNTITLED's prestigious Monuments program which curates large-scale, site-specific works by leading international artists.
Come visit us at Booth C21, where select works by artists Patricia Reinhart (Paris, Vienna) and Hongtao Zhou (Shanghai) will be exhibited.
Included are a few highlights of the show. Please feel free to contact us if you have questions or would like more information about a specific work.
Fabric, wood and projections.
Summer Lee conceptualized Pieta for UNTITLED, Monuments program which curates large-scale, site-specific works by leading international artists. The main feature of the work entails two opposing video projections, one in the form of Mary and the other Jesus. Lee invited an artist in Italy to submit the image of Mary, thus bringing the distant geographic and emotional realities into the nearness of a repetitive forming and dissolution of the tableau vivant. The two opposing projections pass through each other and cast singular images on opposite walls. However, the two projections meet in the middle of the installation space on moving diaphanous fabric panels where a pieta-like image is formed. Lee's work focuses on the themes of absence/presence, light/dark and the notion of "into the nearness of distance".
Multimedia 3D print.
By conflating text (2D) and object (3D) in his Textscapes, Hongtao Zhou simultaneously recalls the history of printmaking as a medium primarily associated with text together with the contemporary innovations in 3D printing with the construction of a sculptural object. The notion of materiality is emphasized through the various protruding heights and shapes of the text, which form the cityscapes of dense urban cities such as Shanghai, New York, Hong Kong, London, etc. The text functions as legible maps, both visually representing the skyline as well as describing the city's demographics.
Chromogenic print taken from various Photomatons around Paris, 2013-2017.
Reinhart’s self-portrait series entitled THE SELF PORTRAITS / PORTRAITS TO QUESTIONS OF FEMININITY employed the Photomaton booth in the Parisian subway stations as a platform to perform different identities as a woman. This series begun 2001, when Reinhart first moved to Paris and it is an ongoing project.
The photographic double portraits reflect an intimate sensibility and implicit symbolism and function as indexes of the artist’s emancipatory gesture performed in these Photomaton booths. The various gestures and poses portrayed in the self-portraits explore female identity, confronting and critiquing the insidious and naturalized ideologies about women, and experiences women go through subconsciously to comply with the stereotypes that are dictated and perpetuated by the society.
Adapted for UNTITLED, San Francisco, six of Patricia Reinhart's self portraits are displayed, and arranged within a collage with text from Honoré de Balzac's novel "A Woman of Thirty", which emphasizes the female perspective in contemplative gestures.
Watercolor, marker and linen, 2016.
Reinhart approaches her painting through the notion of an active moment. There is an immediate need to paint directly with color and brush without pre-sketching on the white canvas. The active moment of “doing” underscores this body of work, which constructs a guiding principle and structure to her practice. Reinhart refuses to retract a single brushstroke or mark, and as such if an idea fails, the image is destroyed; a false line ruins the entire composition. Thus, the color compositions and lines are and may be as they are, which produces a dynamic coalescence of tones and shades without a deliberate color order. In the painting series Patience begun in 2015, Reinhart paints exclusively with watercolor on linen, a technique which requires a very special approach. The artist works in several phases, every gesture is meticulous and repetitive, almost hypnotic, until the moment Reinhart knows she has to stop.
Throughout the painting process, Reinhart will rotate the linen canvas and paint. This practice creates various layers of depth and compositions, and more importantly, perspective and the picture plane become multiplied. Moreover, the act of rotating the canvas prevents the color from accidentally dripping into another color line and is consciously controlled by creating a moment of a clash or a non-clash. The collision of the colors is never hidden, the evidence of the encounter of colors is always visible. Areas are never painted over, thus the possibility that one color does not harmonize with the other color represents the risk the painter embraces and explores in the process.
Watercolor, marker and linen, 2017.
In the recent series The Cut-Outs, Reinhart is even taking a bigger risk by cutting directly into painted fields of a composition. The Cut-Outs present erratic, seemingly uncontrollable compositions of polychromatic lines together with deliberate, precise cut-out and detached areas of the composition. Reinhart perceives the cutting and painting as parallels, inevitability enhancing the painting into a sculptural object.