“It doesn’t really make sense — but why not?” said Adam Lindemann when asked why his Upper East Side gallery, Venus Over Manhattan, is hosting “LIFE,” a celebratory exhibition to mark the 10-year history of the Journal Gallery, a decidedly Brooklyn-based art institution. “The Journal Gallery has great energy; summer shows can be dull; this was a way to bring fresh, new work to the stodgy U.E.S.; and younger people are interested in seeing new names and new work.”
The Journal Gallery kicked things off in 2004 with a group show titled “How Soon Is Now?,” including Tim Barber, Dan McCarthy, Deanna Templeton, and others. The original location was a venue at 619 E. 6th Street in the East Village. It was intended as an extension of the Journal, a magazine that Michael Nevin and Julia Dippelhofer had launched years before. “We wanted to present artists and projects featured within the publication’s pages, and to create a physical space open for conversations,” explained Nevin and Dippelhofer via email. “As the gallery, now in its third location, developed over the years, we were conscious of having fun, and keeping the original approach intact: that the art comes first.”
Following their gut instincts has paid off, both in terms of critical reception and, incidentally, the market. As the work spotlighted in “LIFE” demonstrates, the Journal Gallery has long been in tune with the new wave of abstraction, showing people who have since exploded onto the art world’s radar: Michael Williams (who shows with both CANADA and Michael Werner Gallery); Dan Rees (whose work is coveted enough to earn him the questionable distinction of “flippers’ favorite” in a recent New York Times piece on the rabid contemporary auction scene); and Joe Bradley (who currently has an enormous painting hanging in the ground-floor lobby of the Museum of Modern Art). Other artists represented in “LIFE” — from Eddie Martinez to Rita Ackermann, Sam Moyer, and Graham Collins— certainly aren’t suffering from a lack of plaudits, or sales. In retrospect, it’s almost uncanny how solid the Journal Gallery’s eye has been, and how quickly the market followed suit. Perhaps that further explains this exhibition’s siting in a neighborhood far from the gallery’s inception: While much of the art may have been made in Williamsburg, or Bushwick, or more remote parts of Brooklyn, it now comes with a decidedly Upper East Side price tag.
As Nevin and Dippelhofer explained, the gallery has ongoing relationships with its artists that have developed over its decade of operation. We asked the duo to share some specific recollections, and they described meeting Jeff Zilm (now one of four officially represented artists), who will show at the Journal Gallery in September: “His studio was inside a maze of an old autobody shop in Dallas, with florescent lighting, and music by D Edwards playing in the background. The paintings we saw that day were from his series made from black-and-white films like ‘Nosferatu’ and the W.C. Fields comedy ‘The Bank Dick.’ He had stripped the emulsion in a chemical bath, creating ‘pigment,’ and applied it onto the canvas through a compressor. Each film is destroyed and preserved at the same time, compressed into a single abstract picture.”
Regarding their 2012 Jeff Elrod exhibition “Echo Paintings,” Dippelhofer and Nevin called it “one of those moments where everything clicked, and we knew that there was something special. He’d been making these paintings for years — works that express a human-made/machine-made duality, which were in a sense ahead of their time.” (Elrod has most recently exhibited in a buzzy solo at Luhring Augustine in Chelsea, earlier this year.)
Sarah Braman shows with both CANADA and Mitchell-Innes & Nash and will have a work in this fall’s “Broadway Morey Boogie,” a series of public works on the Broadway Mall organized by Marlborough Chelsea. She’s one of two sculptors represented in “LIFE.” Her work “incorporates a sensibility for light, space and color in such a way that the found materials used in her sculptural works take on new meanings,” Nevin and Dippelhoffer said, citing Braman’s piece in the Venus Over Manhattan show, titled “In My Mind I’m Gone,” which sandwiches a lowly filing cabinet between two empty vitrines of colored Plexiglas.
Graham Collins (represented by the Journal Gallery), makes minimalist pieces of wood, glass, and other materials that waver between painting and sculpture. He showed with the Journal Gallery for the first time in September 2013. “Graham and his work have become so much a part of our lives that it’s hard to believe that we met him only one year ago. In some ways taking cues from Arte Povera and Semina, Graham’s work functions very much within a distinct space holding other artists of the generation, like Sam Moyer and Dan Rees,” Nevin and Dippelhofer said. “Good company.”
“LIFE” is on view at Venus Over Manhattan through July 26. A solo exhibition by Daniel Hesidence is at the Journal Gallery in Williamsburg through June 27.
