Meulensteen

NOAH DAVIS, LU XINJIAN, OLIVER MICHAELS, MONIQUE PRIETO

DAVID SHRIGLEY, TUN WIN AUNG and WAH NU

RE-ANIMATORS

April 26 – June 2, 2012

Opening reception: Thursday, April 26, 6 – 8 PM

Meulensteen is pleased to announce the opening of RE-ANIMATORS, a group exhibition featuring seven artists who appropriate iconography from a diverse group of sources and transmutate their subjects through a series of equally varied processes.   The exhibition will open with a reception for the artists on Thursday, April 26^th from 6 - 8pm, and will be on view through Saturday, June 2nd.

 Lu Xinjian’s monumental painting CITY DNA: New York, 2012, a twenty-six foot long acrylic on canvas work that spans the west wall of the main gallery, is a reconstitution of the island of Manhattan composed of the artist's characteristic form of visual coding.  In the video animation Lion, 2010 from the series Museum Postcards, Oliver Michaels animates the mouth of a marble lion pictured on a postcard from The Metropolitan Museum of Art and overlays a string of irreverent existential questions.  Similarly irreverent are the works on paper and video projection by David Shrigley, whose distinct visual vocabulary is derived from ancient land art, indie rock, comics and the work of Ivor Cutler, Gilbert & George, and Raymond Pettibon. 

Monique Prieto paints short phrases from Samuel Pepys’ 17^th century journal into a series of saturated abstractions, imparting a contemporized, lively aesthetic onto the centuries-old text.  In Isis: Feminine Creation Principle, 2012, Noah Davis continues his series of multi-layered allegorical narratives based on the story of Osiris, while using collaged imagery culled from an array of magazines and texts as a compositional study for the painting.  Tun Win Aung and Wah Nu, an artist couple from Myanmar, paint over comic book pages in a reductive manner, placing emphasis on images representative of their childhood memory.