NEW YORK
David Lefebvre / Project Room: Colt Hausman
May 19 - June 20, 2010

DAVID LEFEBVRE

This is the first New York exhibition by David Lefebvre, a “low def” painter. [1]. The subjects are random (a nightclub, a hunting scene, a supermodel, a prefabricated building, a snow man with kitten, a portrait of a Volkswagen Beetle) and their sources unexceptional (photos cut out of magazines or taken with mobile phones, videos from YouTube, MMS messages). Insignificant in themselves, the pictorial treatment of these images as “paintings” nonetheless modifies their status, although as “works of art” they do not claim to show anything that might justify them as such. Quite the contrary – to the extent that they seem close to banality, the first thing that is visible is an “raw effect”. Lefebvre paints fast, he accepts the fact that paint runs, and he leaves parts of his canvases intact. He does not seek to “do it right”, even if it would be tempting to use a sophisticated technique - because his subjects do not deserve such sublimation. Lefebvre’s “low definition” painting, whose spontaneity is nonetheless free of naivety, manifests a sincerity that is touching. It appears as “the result of an ambiguous taste for things, and as blogs on MySpace, resulting from a simple appetite for gesture.” [2]

 Bernard Zurcher

[1] Stéphane Sauzedde, Peinture “Basse Def”, David Lefebvre catalogue, Ecole Supérieure d’Art, Grenoble, 2007

[2] ditto

Born in 1980. Lives in Grenoble (France)
Ecole Superieure d’art de Grenoble

Solo Shows
2009
Galerie Zürcher, Paris

2008
Galerie Zürcher, Paris

2007
Fake, Galerie Long yi ge, Beijing

Border line, espace Vallès, Grenoble

Basse Def, Oui, Grenoble

Group Shows

2010
Tout, Centre d’art Oui, Grenoble

2009
Oh quel beau déni que le débit de l’eau, Abbaye Saint André - Centre d’art contemporain, Meymac


2007
Pilot: 3, Cloister of SS. Cosma e Damiano, Venice

COLT HAUSMAN

Zurcher Studio is pleased to present an installation of Colt Hausman’s prints in our Project Room.
The installation of the prints has taken its cues from the printmaking process. The walls have been painted with gradients of color, and the hanging of the prints on the wall mask out areas of the colorfield. The viewer is faced with what reads like a cryptic language---perhaps a heiroglyphics of the digital age, or a colorful contemporary code. Upon closer inspection the prints are in fact multiples of the everyday, in which an outline of a butterfly becomes an atom in a repeating grid. As a BFA student at the Rhode Island School of Design, Hausman found himself in Providence, one of America’s leading suppliers of brass and costume jewelry. Using sheaths of brass earring templates, Hausman creates his prints, allowing individual earrings to fall out naturally throughout the process. The negative space caused by this loss creates the illusion of a coded pattern, vibrantly shaded and enigmatic. Combining the old artform of printing with industrial and commercial materials, Hausman enhances the juxtaposition between the two. While the earring templates are mass-produced, his prints are manually crafted, and while the works themselves can portray an abstract, digital aesthetic, they are built upon fine figurative detail. - Nicole O’Rourke

Born 1983, Prague,CZ - Lives and works in New York
2005 BFA Rhode Island School of Design, Providence RI

Solo Show

2007
“Prints & Drawings”, Bobo’s on 9th, Philadelphia, PA

Group Shows

2009
“Room Tones”, Convent of Saint Cecilia, Brooklyn, NY
“Relics From [the] Other Realms”, Barat Foundation, Newark, NJ 2008 “BOBO’s on 27th”, Foxy Productions, New York, NY

2007
“One Wall”, Copy Gallery, Philadelphia, PA

2006
“Reality and Alteration”, Brenda Taylor Gallery, New York, NY