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February 2, 2007- March 3, 2007
Reception: February 2, 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Marc Handelman
Sikkema, Jenkins & Co
530 W 22nd St Marc Handelman Trusted, Independent, Powerful (2006) |  Marc Handelman Monument in Eighty-eight Searchlights (2006) |
Sikkema Jenkins & Co. will present "Empire of the Eye," an exhibition of new paintings by Marc Handelman, February 2 – March 3, 2007.
Marc Handelman’s previous exhibitions have examined the visual and rhetorical legacy of mid-19th century American Landscape painting, and how operative features such as the organization and conquest of space, the seduction of and identification with power, and the various naturalizations of ideology are marshaled and manifested in contemporary pathologies. Traditional painting methods are used to locate image production back into objects that lay bare their construction and the subjective field of their origin. Drawing also from fascist aesthetics, kitsch, advertising, and modernist painting, Handelman's work explores how power is sublimated or obfuscated in the consumption and making of images.
Handelman's paintings explore a critical re-deployment of structures of power registering a psychological space alternately seductive, discomforting, pleasurable and repellent. The often highly charged subjects are themselves already subsumed within aestheticizing processes that beautify, dramatize and mask to redeploy their functioning machinations. W.T.J. Mitchell refers to a similar function in landscape as the "dreamwork" of imperialism and ideology.1 In this way, Handelman’s paintings seek not to reify but to externalize and re-animate the fetishizations of power and possibly "the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, [and] to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us."2
In "Empire of the Eye,"3 a new series of paintings continues to examine similar questions of power and representation, and to explore the agency of pictures and their viewers. Formal, optical, and psychological correlations refract between these paintings, contaminating different subjects, and re-contextualizing them to reflect potentially latent content. This body of work frames a particular and historical American pictorial fascination with intimations, voids, presences, concealments, masks, and the momentarily visible. Monumental and telescoping scale, abstraction, ephemeral visions, light, and an array of destabilizing optical phenomena address such subjects as an imaginary Fox News billboard, meteorological displays, Albert Speer’s "Lichtdom" (or "Cathedral of Light") from the Nuremberg party rallies, "The Tribute in Light" from Ground Zero, and a "staged" landscape photograph by Leni Riefenstahl.
Handelman has had previous solo exhibitions in New York and Los Angeles. His work has also been included in numerous group exhibitions, most recently in USA Today at the Royal Academy, London. This will be the first solo-exhibition of Marc Handelman at Sikkema-Jenkins & Co.
Art Reviews of Empire of the Eye
| New York Times February 23, 2007 | Roberta Smith | "In his second gallery show in New York, Marc Handelman seems bent on reviving a genre that never existed but is rear-guard anyway: abstract history painting. But his immense, swaggering, high-gloss canvases exemplify what might be called the Big Empty. A fellow traveler is Barnaby Furnas and his big red sea paintings. These works are essentially academic pastiches of known motifs executed with unimaginative diligence...." |
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