Bjarne Melgaard
Allen Jones Remakes (Suite of Three Figures)
2013
In his installations Bjarne Melgaard combines painting, film, animation, photography, fashion and other objects that demonstrate his ability to create expressive, highly sensual spaces. His art deals with the dark side of humanity and provides an insight into parallel worlds that exists alongside the world of normality. Artist points to problem areas that have been marginalized by society and which we perhaps prefer not to be confronted with.

Artist’s most famous work are appropriations of a similar Allen Jones series from 1969. The pop art sculptures Jones made in the late 60s, which use women — literally — as furniture, reflect the attitudes of its time and now is represented as a part of Tate collection. Questioning the power of representation, Melgaard investigates the psychological attitude of society to the problems of sexism, racism and the use of the female image in the mass media and pop culture.

Fiberglass resin, human hair, leather, sheep skin,
steel (base), acrylic paint, enamel paint, glass, lucite
hat stand: 132 x 38,1 x 154,9 cm

Exhibitions
Naturally Naked. Gary Tatintsian Gallery, Moscow. Aug–Dec 2019
New York, Leila Heller Gallery, 'Pop Sculpture / Pop Culture,"
Sep 18–Nov 15, 2014
Paris, Galerie Thaddeus Ropac, "Empire State" curated by Alex Gartenfeld
and Sir Norman Rosenthal, Nov 16, 2013–Feb 15, 2014
Rome, Palazzo delle Esposizioni, "Empire State" curated by Alex Gartenfeld
and Sir Norman Rosenthal, Apr 23–Jul 21, 2013
New York, Venus Over Manhattan, "Gang Bust: William N. Coply and BFBC, Inc.," Apr 11–Jun 22, 2013

Bjarne Melgaard
Allen Jones Remakes (Suite of Three Figures)
2013
In his installations Bjarne Melgaard combines painting, film, animation, photography, fashion and other objects that demonstrate his ability to create expressive, highly sensual spaces. His art deals with the dark side of humanity and provides an insight into parallel worlds that exists alongside the world of normality. Artist points to problem areas that have been marginalized by society and which we perhaps prefer not to be confronted with.

Artist’s most famous work is his fiberglass sculpture Chair (2013), an appropriation of a similar Allen Jones piece from 1969, which depicts a black woman on her back while a white woman sits on the cushion of her thighs. The pop art sculptures Jones made in the late 60s, which use women — literally — as furniture, reflect the attitudes of its time and now is represented as a part of Tate collection. Questioning the power of representation, Melgaard investigates the psychological attitude of society to the problems of sexism, racism and the use of the female image in the mass media and pop culture.

Fiberglass resin, human hair, leather, sheep skin,
steel (base), acrylic paint, enamel paint, glass, lucite
chair: 68,6 x 101,6 x 83,8 cm

Exhibitions
Naturally Naked. Gary Tatintsian Gallery, Moscow. Aug-Dec 2019
New York, Leila Heller Gallery, 'Pop Sculpture / Pop Culture,"
September 18 - November 15, 2014
Paris, Galerie Thaddeus Ropac, "Empire State" curated by Alex Gartenfeld
and Sir Norman Rosenthal, November 16, 2013 - February 15, 2014
Rome, Palazzo delle Esposizioni, "Empire State" curated by Alex Gartenfeld
and Sir Norman Rosenthal, April 23 - July 21, 2013
New York, Venus Over Manhattan, "Gang Bust: William N. Coply and BFBC, Inc.," April 11 - June 22, 2013

Bjarne Melgaard
Allen Jones Remakes (Suite of Three Figures)
2013
Fiberglass resin, human hair, leather, sheep skin, steel (base), acrylic paint, enamel paint, glass, lucite
Table: 147 x 76 x 66 cm

In his installations Bjarne Melgaard combines painting, film, animation, photography, fashion and other objects that demonstrate his ability to create expressive, highly sensual spaces. His art deals with the dark side of humanity and provides an insight into parallel worlds that exists alongside the world of normality. Artist points to problem areas that have been marginalized by society and which we perhaps prefer not to be confronted with.

Artist’s most famous work are appropriations of a similar Allen Jones series from 1969. The pop art sculptures Jones made in the late 60s, which use women — literally — as furniture, reflect the attitudes of its time and now is represented as a part of Tate collection. Questioning the power of representation, Melgaard investigates the psychological attitude of society to the problems of sexism, racism and the use of the female image in the mass media and pop culture.

Exhibitions
Naturally Naked. Gary Tatintsian Gallery, Moscow. Aug–Dec 2019
New York, Leila Heller Gallery, 'Pop Sculpture / Pop Culture," Sep 18–Nov 15, 2014
Paris, Galerie Thaddeus Ropac, "Empire State" curated by Alex Gartenfeld and Sir Norman Rosenthal, Nov 16, 2013–Feb 15, 2014
Rome, Palazzo delle Esposizioni, "Empire State" curated by Alex Gartenfeld and Sir Norman Rosenthal, Apr 23–Jul 21, 2013
New York, Venus Over Manhattan, "Gang Bust: William N. Coply and BFBC, Inc.," Apr 11–Jun 22, 2013

George Condo
Orgy Composition
2008
Oil on canvas
190,5 x 215,9 cm

In a career spanning more than three decades, Condo’s highly original and distinctive body of work has consistently drawn upon art historical traditions and genres, in order to hold a mirror up to contemporary social norms and reflect American culture of his time.

His work daringly fused the sensibilities of European Old Master painting blending their imagery and techniques with aesthetics that echo “Avignonin naiset” by Pablo Picasso, “Studies from human body” by Francis Bacon and “Woman” figures by Willem de Kooning with references to popular American culture, including Playboy magazine, comics and cartoons. Condo is widely recognized as the ‘missing link’ that connects the figurative tradition begun by Old Masters to his contemporaries, John Currin, Glenn Brown, Dana Schutz and others.

“I describe what I do as psychological Cubism,” — Condo’s art can be viewed as a multilayered experience that brings the viewer in touch with a psychological exploration of human nature. Through the process of transformation involving art historical language and an actualization of philosophical content, Condo’s paintings create a visible window into the world we live in.

Exhibitions
Naturally Naked. Gary Tatintsian Gallery, Moscow. Aug-Dec 2019
George Condo.
The Lost Civilization, Musee Maillol, Paris. Apr - Aug 2009
George Condo. Artificial Realism. Gary Tatintsian Gallery, Moscow.
May - Aug 2008

Publications
Catalogue 'George Condo. The Lost civilization', Fondation Dina Vierny - Musee Maillol, pa. 126.
Catalogue 'George Condo: Artificial Realism', Gary Tatintsian Gallery, 2008, pp. 59-61

Tony Matelli
Female Sleepwalker
2008
Epoxy, hair, color, steel, underwear
160 x 75 x 55 cm

Matelli’s famous work ‘‘Sleepwalker’’ was first publicly installed outside Wellesley College, hosting a concurrent exhibition of his work at Wellesley’s Davis Museum. Public reaction to sculpture was similar to that of some people’s to Anthony Gormley’s figure placed near a ledge on the Empire State Building being called in to emergency services as a jumper. The college students claimed that the sculpture produced apprehension, fear, and triggering thoughts about sexual assault on the all-women’s campus. In 2016, New York’s High Line hosted Sleepwalker’s next major public debut.

This time, the context was strikingly different: There was a celebration about the piece being up there. Sleepwalker was surrounded by tourists taking pictures with the sculpture. Turning into a hit on social media, in two years, Sleepwalker had transitioned from an alleged menace to a selfie prop.

‘What they see in the sculpture is not in the sculpture...’
In a female version of Sleepwalker (2009) the emotions
to the statue are being pushed aside in favor of having a discussion about art, a question that Matelli called ‘issues of modesty and Victorian ideas people have about the human body’. Why did the nude male Sleepwalker create such angst, whereas nude female version has presumably not? This reaction can also indicate a larger problem: Why a half-nude man sculpture inspires such fear when the woman in her most natural appearance causes the sense of insecurity and defenselessness. What is most threatening about Sleepwalker is its reminder of how vulnerable and exposed we often are when we lose the illusion control of what is happening around us.

Exhibitions
Naturally Naked. Gary Tatintsian Gallery, Moscow. Aug-Dec 2019
People, Jeffrey Deitch Projects, 2019, Los Angeles, CA
People, Jeffrey Deitch Projects, 2018, New York, NY
Female Sleepwalker AP (2018)
Tony Matelli - A Human Echo, Kunstmuseene Bergen, Norway 2013
CCA Andratx, Majorca Spain
Tony Matelli - A Human Echo, ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum in 2012
Uppsala Art Museum 2009

John Currin
Christiana
2007
Oil on linen
40,6 x 50,8 cm

With his mastery of graphic and painterly techniques, combined with a predilection for the extreme, the humorous, and the ribald, Currin's subjects challenge social and sexual taboos while subverting the historical linearity of artistic genres. His presentations are intended as satirical references to society’s ever-present barrage of the elusive «ideal» fed to us through art history, media, advertising, and the glossy pages of magazines.

Among a wave of artists, including Cecily Brown, Jenny Saville and John Sonsini, John Currin renewed an interest in portraiture, searching for the point at which the beautiful and the ugly are held in perfect balance. His work, which mingles an early training in classical painting with a decidedly American palate for the absurdity found in kitsch, presents figurative portraits, often nude, that reflect the perversity within our culture’s obsession with beauty and perfection. Upon first glance, Currin’s paintings may seem like realistic figurative portrayals of the beautiful, yet upon closer inspection something goes awry. A body part emerges larger than its otherwise symmetrical parts, the neck on a graceful vixen might stretch inordinately long, or the female nude central to our observation turns out to be too old and too far from the Old masters ideals — these slight distortions tip the painting toward the grotesque. The pleasure of voyeurism turns into discomfort and we are asked to reflect upon the original motivations within our glance. This exploration into vanity continues to inform his work today.

Exhibitions
Naturally Naked. Gary Tatintsian gallery, Moscow. Aug-Dec 2019
'Insight?', Gagosian Gallery, Prime Concept and Alfa Bank, Moscow, October, 18-28 2007

Publications
Cat. 'Insight?', published by Gagosian Gallery, Prime Concept and Alfa Bank, 2007. Illustrated in cat. p. 16-17
Cat. 'John Currin' published by Gagosian and distributed by Rizzoli International, 2011, on occasion of the exhibition John Currin. Nov, 4 - Dec, 23 2010. Illustrated in cat. p. 67

Peter Saul
Return to the Alamo
2017
Acrylic / canvas
198 X 305 cm

Merging ideas central to Surrealism and Pop Art, Saul’s works are at once authoritative and powerful, though they often employ an attenuated caricature of mundane objects.

If we think about behavior as the way in which natural phenomenon function and how humans act in response to situations or stimuli, then human nature in Saul’s works takes the form of satire, irony, and bad taste seen through acrid color and gesture.

His use of childlike marks and clashing colors are meant to both disturb and engage the viewer. And yet, despite the display of pictorial irreverence, the paintings are grounded in working knowledge of art history, laying the foundation for sophisticated and powerful dialogues between stylistic formal considerations, political ideas, and autobiographical detail.

Saul continues to shock viewer with his complex compositions, grotesque imagery, and controversial takes on subjects ranging from Donald Duck to O. J. Simpson. His manipulation of forms is both fluid and sculptural: a wildly imaginative synthesis of Salvador Dali’s melting and rubbery forms and Willem de Kooning’s savagely comic, figural distortions.

Exhibitions
Naturally Naked. Gary Tatintsian Gallery, Moscow. Aug-Dec 2019
Peter Saul. Fake News. Mary Boone Gallery, NY. 9 Sept - 4 Nov 2017

Carroll Dunham
Any Day
2017
Urethane, acrylic, pencil on linen
198,1 x 254 cm

Dunham’s art seems to have absorbed the Art Brut physicality of Jean Dubuffet and fused it with an erotic vernacular akin to illustration or cartoons. He creates forceful scenes in which human figures violently face off against the world in ways that seem both in charge and out of control. Tuberous body parts and primal shapes emerge from sharp blocks of color with a rude sexuality, comic aggression and insistent physical presence.

Alike George Condo at the beginning of his career, Dunham started what he now calls the Bathers, being drawn to late 19th-century and early 20th-century French paintings. Drawing, the foundation of his art practice, led him intuitively toward what he calls “naked human woman in a natural setting.”

In the late ’70s, Dunham began creating what he calls his “primitive” visual language. This formal vocabulary originally manifested as quasi-psychedelic biomorphic abstractions and has since evolved to include concrete figures — women, men, suns — that are as clearly defined as those in a coloring book. He’s slowly built a graphic world of “nameable things” — tree, flower, house, gun — in a purposeful evasion of subtlety, an attempt to purge a subject of its nuance and reduce it to an essential visual archetype.

Exhibitions
Naturally Naked. Gary Tatintsian Gallery, Moscow. Aug-Dec 2019
Carroll Dunham solo show at Gladstone Gallery, New York. April 20-June 22, 2018

Carroll Dunham
The Golden Age (8)
2016
Pencil on gessoed linen
66,4 x 84,6 x 2,2 cm

Dunham’s art seems to have absorbed the Art Brut physicality of Jean Dubuffet and fused it with an erotic vernacular akin to illustration or cartoons. He creates forceful scenes in which human figures violently face off against the world in ways that seem both in charge and out of control. Tuberous body parts and primal shapes emerge from sharp blocks of color with a rude sexuality, comic aggression and insistent physical presence.

Alike George Condo at the beginning of his career, Dunham started what he now calls the Bathers, being drawn to late 19th-century and early 20th-century French paintings. Drawing, the foundation of his art practice, led him intuitively toward what he calls “naked human woman in a natural setting.”

In the late ’70s, Dunham began creating what he calls his “primitive” visual language. This formal vocabulary originally manifested as quasi-psychedelic biomorphic abstractions and has since evolved to include concrete figures — women, men, suns — that are as clearly defined as those in a coloring book. He’s slowly built a graphic world of “nameable things” — tree, flower, house, gun — in a purposeful evasion of subtlety, an attempt to purge a subject of its nuance and reduce it to an essential visual archetype.

Exhibitions
Naturally Naked. Gary Tatintsian Gallery, Moscow. Aug-Dec 2019
Blum and Poe, Los Angeles, Carroll Dunham, April 28 - June 17, 2017

Carroll Dunham
The Golden Age (10)
2016
Pencil on gessoed linen
56,7 x 73,8 x 2,4 cm

Dunham’s art seems to have absorbed the Art Brut physicality of Jean Dubuffet and fused it with an erotic vernacular akin to illustration or cartoons. He creates forceful scenes in which human figures violently face off against the world in ways that seem both in charge and out of control. Tuberous body parts and primal shapes emerge from sharp blocks of color with a rude sexuality, comic aggression and insistent physical presence.

Alike George Condo at the beginning of his career, Dunham started what he now calls the Bathers, being drawn to late 19th-century and early 20th-century French paintings. Drawing, the foundation of his art practice, led him intuitively toward what he calls “naked human woman in a natural setting.”

In the late ’70s, Dunham began creating what he calls his “primitive” visual language. This formal vocabulary originally manifested as quasi-psychedelic biomorphic abstractions and has since evolved to include concrete figures — women, men, suns — that are as clearly defined as those in a coloring book. He’s slowly built a graphic world of “nameable things” — tree, flower, house, gun — in a purposeful evasion of subtlety, an attempt to purge a subject of its nuance and reduce it to an essential visual archetype.

Exhibitions
Naturally Naked. Gary Tatintsian Gallery, Moscow. Aug-Dec 2019
Blum and Poe, Los Angeles, Carroll Dunham, April 28-June 17, 2017

Yasumasa Morimura
An Inner Dialogue with Frida Kahlo (Dialogue With Myself 2)
2001
Color photograph
162 x 194 cm

In Morimura’s “Inner Dialogue With Frida Kahlo” he casts himself as the world famous Mexican artist known for her lush, surreal self-portraits:

“As I am being inspired by you, Doña Frida, I drink in what I like to think of as your essence so as to create a Frida of my own, in my own mind’s eye... In that fantastic sphere, the various elements of Doña Frida and myself mix into a muddle, a chemical reaction occurs, creating this imaginary Frida of mine. I wanted to give form to what Doña Frida is to me. Via self-portraiture, that is.”

“A Few Small Nips” features a woman being literally “murdered by life,” as Frida herself felt, murdered both physically by her chronic pain and suffering and emotionally by an affair of Diego Rivera with her sister Cristina. The painting’s theme is based on a newspaper account of a real murder: a man who murdered his girlfriend by stabing her again and again. On the court the murderer claimed: “But I only gave her a few small nips.”

Exhibitions
Naturally Naked. Gary Tatintsian Gallery, Moscow. Aug - Dec 2019
Yasumasa Morimura. One artist's theatre. Gary Tatintsian Gallery, Moscow. Oct 2006 - Jan 2007

Publications
Yasumasa Morimura. One artist's theatre. Gary Tatintsian Gallery, Moscow, 2006. page 25