Sean Kelly debuts two new exhibitions – Photographic Memory, Jose Dávila, as well as VERDES, Ana González. An opening art party was held on January 20, 2024. The exhibitions run through March 9, 2024.
Sean Kelly Jose Dávila
Photographic Memory is Jose Dávila’s first exhibition at the Los Angeles gallery. The exhibition is comprised of a series of Dávila’s signature cut-out works. These works reference Richard Prince’s solo exhibition at LACMA in 2018. The exhibition features large-scale photographic works in which Dávila has removed the main figure of Prince’s influential Untitled (cowboy) series. Challenging conventional connotations and limitations of photography in today’s image driven society, Dávila’s cut-outs interrogate originality, appropriation, and the truth behind an image.
Dávila began making cut-outs in 2008, an ongoing series in which he simultaneously pays homage to and critiques icons of 20th century art and architecture through acts of excision, physically removing the central subject from photographic reproductions of original works of art. With these works, Dávila investigates whether an artwork can be produced through a reductive rather than additive process. This technique is inspired by the Mexican folk-art tradition of papel picado or Cut-Paper, which Dávila applies to contemporary art to explore the importance of negative space.
Artwork by Jose Dávila; courtesy of the gallery
In Photographic Memory, Jose Dávila explores the boundaries of artistic influence, skillfully intertwining homage and critique. He simultaneously challenges authorship through the alteration of iconic images to create new artworks and a distinctive oeuvre all his own.
Ana González
VERDES is Ana González’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles. Through her artistic practice González captures the duality of the natural world – its fragile state due to humanity’s extraction of natural resources and the political and spiritual power inherent to it. Drawing upon the landscapes of her native Colombia, and her collaborations with the indigenous communities that protect them, González’s work serves as both a warning of the gradual disappearance of a vital, historic ecosystem and a celebration of its sensual power. Occupying Sean Kelly, Los Angeles’ third-floor space, the exhibition features paintings, textiles, works on paper, and sculptures.
Also on view are González’s sculptural works, including a series depicting the Cattleya, an orchid native to South America. Executed in Limoges porcelain, a technique González’s learned while studying in Paris, the Cattleya sculptures and related works render, in vivid detail, the soft and sensual surfaces of the plants. As with the Devastations textiles, the fragility of the porcelain underscores the precarious nature of the environment they represent. Some of the flowers are enclosed in bell jars, as though they are preserved specimens of a lost environment. Other sculptures depict detailed renderings of birds, which reappear in the artists’ Sacred Bird drawings. To the artist, birds serve as doors to the spiritual world. In VERDES, their presence invites the viewer to access the transcendent qualities of the earthly scenes on view.
On view: January 20, 2024 – March 9, 2024
What: New Exhibitions
Where: Sean Kelly, Los Angeles 1357 N Highland Ave Los Angeles, CA 90028
When: Running through March 9, 2024
Website: https://www.skny.com
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