• Brandon Anschultz
    Blue Camo (Reverse), 2010
    Oil on raw canvas
    42 x 52 inches

Brandon Anschultz & Nicole Mauser

July 16—August 14, 2010


Carrie Secrist Gallery is pleased to announce two upcoming exhibitions featuring the work of Brandon Anschultz and Nicole Mauser. These will be the first solo exhibitions in Chicago for both artists.

Brandon Anschultz’s work exists at an intersection between painting and sculpture. While the work is founded in the tenets of painting, it invariably moves into the language of sculpture to find resolution, achieving a satisfactory form only when the result seems adequately in-between and outside of each tradition. For this exhibition, Anschultz employs three primary processes. The first starts with simply applying his selected palette of paints to a canvas, after which another canvas is placed directly on this painted surface. Eventually the two are pulled apart and a decision is made whether to allow one or the other to remain as paintings or be re-stretched over armatures to create sculpture. The final set of works start with the backs of stretched, raw canvases. Paint is added to the backs, solvents are added to the fronts, and pressure is applied so that the materials show through both sides of the painting. Once this process is complete, Anschultz then decides whether the front or back will essentially become the face of each painting. Achieved as much through deconstructing as constructing, these artworks act as conduits of ambiguity, transmitting the work’s confusion to the viewer.

Nicole Mauser’s approach to abstraction stems from an aim to create tension between the materiality of the painted surface and the constructed image it contains. As she builds paintings through the addition and subtraction of marks, Mauser is careful to allow the process of it’s making to remain. While constructing these surface images she maintains an awareness of each painting’s objectness, leading to a sense of being able to physically navigate the layers of the finished picture plane. By combining this use of abstraction with an interest in narrative, Mauser seeks to break down distinctions between the organic and synthetic, system and intuition, space and light, abjection and desire. Trespassing through these fields, the painting process becomes a search for form and meaning, both for the artist as its maker and for the viewer.

Brandon Anschultz was born in Judsonia, Arkansas and currently lives and works in St. Louis, Missouri. He received his BFA from Louisiana Tech University and his MFA from Washington University in St. Louis. Stick Around for Joy, a solo exhibition at Laumeier Sculpture Park in St. Louis is currently on view. Anschultz has had recent solo exhibitions at the Center of Creative Arts, White Flag Projects, and Philip Slein Gallery in St. Louis; @Space Contemporary in Santa Ana, California; and Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, New York. Recent group exhibitions include Front Desk Apparatus in New York; Monte Vista Projects in Los Angeles; the Brooks Museum of Art, Memphis; the Daum Museum of Contemporary Art, Sedalia, Missouri; The Dolphin Gallery and Urban Culture Project’s La Esquina, in Kansas City and Sun Yat Sen Memorial Hall, Taipei, Taiwan.

Nicole Mauser is a recent graduate of the MFA program at the University of Chicago and has a BFA from the Ringling School of Art in Design, Sarasota, Florida. Mauser has had recent exhibitions at DOVA Temporary, Chicago, IL and at the Arts Incubator of Kansas City. Mauser is the recipient of the Student Fine Art Fund University of Chicago, Grant for Berlin painting research, has studied at Centre pour l’Arte et la Culture, IAU Aix-en-Provence France and was included in the New American Paintings, issue #76, Midwest Region Competition, Curated by Raphaela Platow. Mauser has participated in the Urban Culture Project Residency in KCMO and was recently chosen as a Post-MFA Teaching Fellow at The University of Chicago, which begins in 2011.

Images

  • Brandon Anschultz
    Installation view, Carrie Secrist Gallery, Chicago
    July 16 – August 14, 2010

  • Brandon Anschultz
    Numbers 1 & 4 (Green), 2010
    Oil and acrylic on canvas and wood
    24 h. x 19 x 24 inches

  • Brandon Anschultz
    Numbers 3, 5 & 7 (Tan), 2010
    Oil and acrylic on canvas
    54 x 44 inches

  • Brandon Anschultz
    Reverse (BGYR), 2010
    Oil on raw canvas
    20 x 18 inches

  • Nicole Mauser
    Descent, 2010
    Oil on canvas
    20 x 24 x 1.5 inches

  • Nicole Mauser
    Descent, 2010
    Detail
    Oil on canvas
    20 x 24 x 1.5 inches

  • Nicole Mauser
    Sleaze, 2010
    Acrylic and oil on canvas
    16 x 20 x 1 inches

  • Nicole Mauser
    Re-Entry, 2010
    Acrylic and oil on canvas
    20 x 24 x 1 inches

  • Nicole Mauser
    Herringbone Homunculus, 2010
    Oil on canvas
    16 x 20 x 1 inches