NEW YORK
ALL FIGURED OUT: The Presence of the Figure
November 12, 2020 - January 24, 2021

Matt Bollinger
Marc Desgrandchamps
Lois Dodd
Charles Garabedian
Kyle Staver

On November 17, Christie’s Education hosted a Zoom webinar conversation about figurative painting with Matt Bollinger, Kyle Staver, Marc Desgrandchamps, and David Humphrey, moderated by Veronique Chagnon-Burke, Director of Christie’s Education. Click here to watch the entire conversation.

Click here to download Press Release.

What I find in nature is infinitely more exciting than anything I could invent. Therefore I go to nature.
Lois Dodd, 1973

One may extrapolate and declare that Matt Bollinger, Marc Desgrandchamps, Lois Dodd, Charles Garabedian and Kyle Staver exhibited in ALL FIGURED OUT go to the figure, because what they find in figures is infinitely more exciting than anything they could invent. Our current reality of involuntary isolation compelled Zürcher Gallery to talk about the presence of the human figure and conceive ALL FIGURED OUT as an exhibition theme out of necessity.

When asked about the absence of figures in her scenes, Lois Dodd replied : "Certainly the buildings involve people… the laundry involves people… You would not see any of that without people. It’s not like it’s a truly unhumanized nature." Seated Nude and Clothesline, 2000 (oil on wood panel) combines the figure with an image of laundry on clothesline, an ongoing theme from 1977. The rather bizarre scene of a seated nude figure lifting her legs on a blue plastic seat shows how Dodd is more concerned with structure, shape and pattern than flesh– the block-y body contrasts with the dynamic movement of the laundry drying in the wind and the overall effect of sheer translucency in the yellow landscape. Such an efficiency appears in what Dodd calls herself her Flashings, which are step flashings used to waterproof roofs that Dodd purchases in a hardware store, sands, cleans them with alcohol, leaves them bare to get a silvery quality. The series of 6 oils on aluminum Flashings, 5x7 in, executed in 2018 depict nude figures striking various poses in outdoor settings. Nude on Grass with Top Hat, Reclining Nude on Grass, Legs over Head, Seated Nude + Tree Trunks, Two Hands + One Foot, Seated Nude, Head back Gazing at Sky are based on studies executed in a life drawing group that met for years in Maine near her home during the summers in the late 90’s , a modus operandi she was already using in the 50’s before painting outdoors in the mid-60’s. A confident rendering of light and shadow blocks out musculature and and shows the trajectory of a pose. The body appears monumental within the tiny confines of the aluminum plate.

Charles Garabedian is the only painter from the West Coast in this exhibit. His practice may range from an almost naive approach to a monumental figurative arrangement. The Eunuch (2003-2004) shown in ALL FIGURED OUT is a remarkable example. Charles Garabedian paints a neo-byzantine often symbolic decoupage of forms which seem quite real and at the same time inherited from his middle-Eastern collective subconscious. What matters to him is the intensity of the struggle, the sincerity of the subject and his willingness to make the subject vital. "I make art to find out who I am- and so far I’ve been disappointed in what I’ve discovered. I’d hoped to find Giotto or Omar Khayyam in there somewhere. I can key it to three words. I want my work to be primal, archetypal and monumental. Those qualities are at odds with my nature, which is lighthearted, yet you can’t help pinning for things."

Marc Desgrandchamps, the leading figure painter of his generation in France, plays with the notions of opacity, transparency and superimposition. He paints in degrees of dilution. If his painting is figurative, indeed we recognize bodies and landscapes, the perspective is often twisted, space is indefinite, and suddenly anomalies arise: bodies and objects are fragmented. His works' references comes from many universes (art history, photography, cinema, literature and music), it raises the question of the medium’s specificities and experiences the limits of figuration. He paints, according to his own words, "a painting of doubt, doubt of the figure, doubt of presence, doubt even of painting". A recurrent motif in his artistic practice, the feminine figure occupies a central place as shown in the recent dyptich exhibited. Presence and absence enter into resonance in his work with his "fleeting figures". He leaves open the possibility of their playing a role in other fictions. "My work is not narrative, although I would not say that the concept is entirely absent. It’s like when you are watching someone strolling down a city street or a car whizzing by- nothing is happening, and yet it’s the beginning of a possible story."

Matt Bollinger is a story-teller painter also working in animation. Matt Bollinger’s animation Apartment 6F takes inspiration from the artist’s own life and his interest in 70s horror films like Rosemary’s Baby. Painting interiors based on his own apartment, Matt uses hand-painted stop motion animation to tell his story. Matt Bollinger explains “I wanted to combine the mundane everyday with something heightened that seemed to burst through from the character’s imagination”. In the animation, a freelance web designer in New York is invited to a housewarming by a neighbour, after his wife goes on a trip. Matt adds: “After drinking too much, social anxiety and possibly unnatural occult influences cause him to spiral into dark visions, which are suspended only when his wife returns.” The project took three months for Matt to complete, and his process was long and detailed, which started with making 54 small paintings on canvas – 11 of them are exhibited in ALL FIGURED OUT. “Each of these was the opening frame of a shot in the video. Then, with the painting on a copy stand, I modified each one a small amount and took a photograph,” says Matt. “I would repeat this process sometimes hundreds of times per canvas.”“I made my earlier animations using relatively dry drawing materials (ball point pen, felt-tipped marker, and correction fluid). This new process allowed me to animate the liquid qualities of the paint in ways that took on a personified dimension,” he explains. Matt has also created the score, which plays alongside the hypnotic visuals and it took him several weeks to record the sounds and make the final mix. “As things move around in my videos, they leave trails and obscure imagery that was there previously. In a way, movement is traumatic to the image. A figure is made and unmade many times per second. Each painting contains its history tattooed across the picture plane.”

Kyle Staver deals with mythology and allegories and imbues the ostensible stories with the drama of their own making. The current political situation in the US inspired her recent painting S.O.S. (Save our Ship) where the naked feminine figure, wearing a blue starry ribbon, appears as dominating and enticing - even if she needs to save the vessel and the mass of sailors. Samson is the theme of the other group of works ( painting, relief and watercolor) exhibited in ALL FIGURED OUT. According to the story in the Old Testament of the Bible, Samson had tremendous physical strength and led the Israelites against the Philistines. He was to be raised devoted to God, and required to refuse all strong drink and never cut his hair. Delilah was a woman, probably a Philistine who, after seducing Samson to win his confidence, got him to reveal what made him strong—his long, thick hair. Delilah then lured him to sleep and had his hair cut. As a result, Samson became weak, and the Philistines were able to seize him. Marc Desgrandchamps says "Kyle Staver’s art is one-of-a-kind, made of universal subjects that she interprets in her own way. It is a world of 'paradise lost', overwhelmed by today’s fears, but fears held at bay by a staging that provokes joy rather than fear, a joy also caused by an attention to form that does not reduce his painting to a simple narrative. On the contrary, a real visual jubilation emerges from these reds, blues and yellows that animate the canvas like powerful light signals. This joy also comes from the humor that runs through these representations. Kyle Staver’s paintings and sculptures are the product of a very serious art that does not take itself seriously. Serious, in the formal qualities that structure each work by giving it the evidence of a painting, and not serious, in the lightness that subverts these scenes of judgement of martyrdom by bringing them to an irresistible burlesque condition".

Gwenolee Zürcher
New York, November 2020

Matt Bollinger (b. 1980, Kansas City, MO) is an artist living in Ithaca, NY who works across painting, animation, sculpture and music. Bollinger earned his BFA at the Kansas City Art Institute in 2003 and his MFA at the Rhode Island School of Design in 2007. He has had 6 solo exhibitions at Zürcher Gallery, New York and 3 solo exhibitions at Galerie Zürcher, Paris. His animations have been included in numerous film festivals and screenings in the US and Europe. His work is in the collections of the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art (Kansas City, MO), Museum of Fine Arts (Dole, France), and the Bowdoin College Museum of Art (Brunswick, ME) Recent solo exhibitions include Extended Present, at the South Bend Museum of Art (South Bend, IN) and Labor Day at M+B (Los Angeles, LA). In 2020, Zürcher Gallery participated in the Armory Show for the first time with a duo-presentation of Staver and Matt Bollinger in the Focus Section, curated by Jamillah James.

 Forthcoming solo exhibitions include Mother's Tankstation (London, 2021) and Zürcher Gallery (New York, 2021).

Marc Desgrandchamps (born in 1960) lives and works in Lyon (France). He has benefited from several major exhibitions, especially in the Museum of Contemporary Art in Strasbourg (2004), the Museum of Contemporary Art in Lyon (2004), the Kunstmuseum in Bonn (2005), the National Museum of Modern Art - Centre Georges Pompidou (2006), as well as an important retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris (2011). In addition, his work is present in French institutional collections (FRAC Ile-de-France - Le Plateau in Paris, Musée de l'abbaye Sainte-Croix (MASC), Les Sables d'Olonne, France, Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Saint-Étienne, Regional Museum of Contemporary Art Languedoc-Roussillon in Sérignan, Museum of Contemporary Art of Lyon, Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Strasbourg), Museum Frieder Burda, Baden-Baden, and Today Art Museum, Beijing, China. Desgrandchamps recently participated in the Louis Vuitton Travel Book series, with a book of works made during his stay in Barcelona.

 Lois Dodd (American, b. 1927) studied at the Cooper Union in the late 1940s. In 1952 she was one of the five founding members of the legendary Tanager Gallery, among the first artist-run cooperative galleries in New York. Dodd is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the National Academy. In 1992 she retired from teaching at Brooklyn College. Since 1954 her work has been the subject of over fifty one-person exhibitions. In 2012, The Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art organized a retrospective of Dodd’s work which traveled to the Portland Museum of Art in Maine. In 2017 she was the subject of a monograph published by Lund Humphries with text by Faye Hirsch.  

She has forthcoming solo exhibitions at The Trenton City Museum (Trenton, NJ), Westbeth Gallery (New York, NY), Night Gallery (Los Angeles, CA), Parts and Labor (Beacon, NY), Adams and Ollman Gallery (Portland, Oregon), and Kunstmuseum The Hague (Netherlands).

Charles Garabedian (American, born Detroit, MI in 1923, died Santa Monica, CA, 2016). Charles Garabedian moved to California at age 9. After serving in the United States Air Force during World War II, Garabedian received an undergraduate degree from the University of Southern California in 1950. He began painting at age 32 and decided to return to school to receive formal painting instruction from the University of California, Los Angeles, where he earned an MA in 1961. He has shown regularly in New York and Los Angeles since the early 1970’s and is the recipient of numerous awards and grants including the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, and a prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His work can be seen in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY.  In 2011, Julie Joyce curated a comprehensive retrospective of Garabedian’s work at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art in Santa Barbara, CA.

Kyle Staver (b. 1953, Virginia, MN, lives and works in NYC) earned her BFA from Minneapolis College of Art and Design in 1976 and her MFA from Yale University in 1987. In 2015, she was awarded the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Purchase Prize. She is a member of the National Academy of Design. She has had 2 solo exhibitions at Zürcher Gallery in New York (2018 and 2020) and in 2019, had a solo exhibition at Galerie RX (Paris) curated by Gwenolee Zürcher. In 2020, Zürcher Gallery participated in the Armory Show for the first time with a duo-presentation of Staver and Matt Bollinger in the Focus Section, curated by Jamillah James. Her work is in the collections of the National Academy of Design (New York), The American Academy of Arts and Letters (New York), The National Arts Club (New York), The McEvoy Foundation (San Francisco), and Portland Community College (Portland, Oregon).

She will have her third solo exhibition with Zürcher Gallery, NY, The Four Seasons, in 2021.