We are pleased to announce American artist Joshua Nathanson's first European solo exhibition. Froth, the title of the show, references Henri Bergson's essay Laughter, in which the acrid foam of an ocean wave is used as a metaphor to describe the fundamental quality of humor. In this body of work Nathanson revisits the theme of seaside recreation on the California coast but within a new framework – here we witness the fever dream of one of his characters as he lies on the beach in the hot shade. Nocturnal absurdity eclipses diurnal banality and a surrealist fantasy ensues. Using a high-keyed color palette Nathanson reimagines the painterly strategies of artists such as James Ensor and Philip Guston through a common cast of allegorical players: the clown, the frog, the city, the ocean and the dark plume of pollution. Together these paintings function as a disjointed comic strip where narratives ebb and flow across the landscape like scenes from a Beckett novel. An intense melancholy drives the prevailing narrative as a disheartened man attempts to return to a state of naive joy and youth.

Joshua Nathanson was born in 1976 in Washington, DC and lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.
Nathanson had a solo exhibition at Various Small Fires, Los Angeles, CA in 2015.
Selected group shows: ARNDT, Singapore, Four81, New York, 356 S. Mission, Los Angeles, Pepin Moore, Los Angles, CA, "Takashi Murakami’s Superflat Collection - From Shohaku and Rosanjin to Anselm Kiefer" at the Yokohama Art Museum, Yokohama.
Upcoming exhibition: solo show at Kaikai Kiki Gallery, Tokyo.

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The Swedish artist Peter Mohall, in his first italian solo exhibition, presents a series of new paintings alongside sculptures in the gallery's space.The central body of work includes two series of paintings with a mutual focus on the brushstroke, although with significant different approaches. In the Brushstrokes painting series, sculpting techniques is appropriated and transferred into painting. Thick brushstrokes are casted, copied and multiplied, resulting in a painting of a plurality of identical strokes. In a new technique Mohall retraces the expressionist and post-expressionist theories on the brush gesture, conceiving a formal minimalism. Although his work is the result of his Scandinavian culture that is visible in the work, in an examination of the aesthetic consequences of repetition, where the mechanical is set against the painterly authenticity. The repetition becomes a tool in painting, which continues in the installation where paintings are grouped by color and compositions. Both series have an element of painterly "impossibilities". In the Brushstrokes series this impossibility is the identical brushstrokes, in the Flat Gradient Brushstrokes series, it is the soft gradation within the brushstroke itself, where the artist works with a particular technique with multiple layers of paint and melted wax. Here everything that appears is overlapped on the contrary. And if at first glance they seems simply brushstrokes signs made on a simple white base, in real it's the white itself that is ultimately applied on the brushstrokes. The show also includes sculptures made of abdominal training devices that are merged and assembled incorrectly. The artist finds interest in the change of context and the altering of communication of an object through abstraction, where the object moves on the boarder of being recognizable more or less as a sculpture in relationship to be seen as the initial product in itself.

Peter Mohall was born in Loddekopinge, Sweden. He lives and works in Oslo, Norway. The exhibition is Mohall's first in Italy. Recent solo exhibitions includes "Brushwork" at Galleri Jacob Bjørn, Aarhus, Denmark and "Out of the blue, into the hue" at Galleri Mors Mössa, Gothenburg Sweden. Mohall is a 2015 grant recipient of the Ellen Trotzig foundation from Malmö Art Museum.

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Luce Gallery is pleased to announce Robert Davis’s second solo exhibition at the gallery. Including paintings, bronze panels, and sculpture, the artist’s newest body of work, “Anything to Feel Weightless Again,” expresses a shared longing for embodied experience. The work and the title play with the possibility of encountering an oceanic dissolving of the self rather than the uncertain and alienated reality of daily life. In the most immersive component of the exhibition, Davis uses a RYB palette for a series of large paintings that consume the viewer in fields of primary colors. Uses an original technique to find perfect shades immerses in an horizontal position canvases in water, adding dye color and finding the right balance. Significantly, RYB is a historical model that predates scientific color theory and the dominance of RGB and CMYK in contemporary screen and printing technologies. The paintings’ hypnotic colors create a mesmerizing scene of collective attachment, of absorbing and enchanted relationships to objects in an increasingly pixelated world of grids and binary code. Davis’s installation visualizes a sustaining fantasy of fulfillment and continuity. (In other words, love.) Invoking this fantasy, Davis points at our relentless struggle to manage the disappointment, violence and unintelligibility that often characterize our desire for belonging and intimacy. Davis makes knowing gestures toward color theory, modernist geometries and designed objects, but his use of base bodily materials (urine on bronze panels, for example) emphasizes the inevitable material flaws in these historical styles. Like a child’s imperfect memory of awe, Davis’s work in “Anything to Feel” suggests that modernist resolutions are temporary, precarious, and incomplete. The installation’s central sculpture is a melancholic figure, a representation of the coexisting optimism and failure that animate these attempts for a shared social experience. Yet Davis’ work does not shy away from the pleasure to be had in these provisional solutions: he proposes a romantic oscillation between success and failure, function and dysfunction, as a kind of solution itself.

In his first solo exhibition in an Italian gallery, Davide Balliano presents a series of new paintings on wood and ceramic sculptures.With several solo exhibitions in New York, Berlin, Paris and recently London, Balliano seems to consolidate its organic style approaching a new formal maturity.If previously the relationship with history, the ambivalent transparency of the glass, and the bare architectural references constituted the main body of his work, today we can see a further consolidation in the research of the artist which, started from photography, formed itself through painterly intervention on book pages, performances and installations.A research based on the use of different media aimed to achieve a minimal and organic composition, veined by transcendental suggestions and by the dialogue with a void that takes the form of intuited metaphysical subject.The almost poetic relationship with architecture, which in ruins finds a new monumental identity free from the original function, the use of geometry as a tool for translation, and the Romanic references, give to Balliano’s painting an almost sculptural scent.Plaster, gesso and lacquer builds the work as if it had been placed on a wall, and the surface of the paintings, profoundly flat, seems to rise from it only by the wooden support that distinguishes their elegant structure. Through a stratified coverage of geometric shapes, often born from the decomposition of archetypal forms as the circle and arc, Balliano’s searches for the perfect balance between absence and presence, between empty and full invisibly, and in this way he changes the gallery space transforming the floor in white as a sign of absence or nothing that gives a sense of floating to the objects in the exhibition.In the same way the ceramic sculptures feed from the tension of the encounter between the illusory solidity of the shape with the fragility of the material. Contrast that comes back in the dialogue with the physicality of objects, which seem to be containers of an emptiness, shelters for a silent presence, the cornerstones of an architecture questioningly votive.An icon that seeks identity in the dialogue between man and the universe around him.

Luce Gallery is proud to present the first exhibition in Italy, and in the gallery, by Leif Ritchey.The solo exhibition will contain a series of new paintings, mostly done on  large scale. With their abstract structure, Leif Ritchey’s paintings convey a lack of linearity in his language, meaning that we often come across representations that actually contain clear references to figuration. Through appropriation of a range of techniques and the use of unconventional materials, the artist inserts elements of texture and material thickness that make the paintings dense of details that can be perceived only by approaching the work, in an ongoing process of deduction and discovery of the structure of the painting itself. The interaction between the ephemeral and the material seems to be the framework on which all the artist’s work rests. Its play reveals the stroke of the drawing or watercolor in painting that is fluid but dense in subtle colors that never terminate their presence clearly, but mingle in continuous shadings.Leif Ritchey seems to begin his paintings almost aimlessly. He gives them titles only after ending the works, sets no barriers for himself, and often making his work in a natural way, without boundaries, paced and accompanied by music or simply by the rhythm of life in a continuous voyage towards its destiny: “Life happens around you and I think you miss it by trying to overpower it and make to many decisions. Sometimes is good just to let it happen. A little give and a little take, that sort of balance. For me, this staff we call art is what always gives me the balance. The ability to enjoy it”.

Luce Gallery is proud to present the first italian solo exhibition by Matt Mignanelli.
Grattan Street, the title of the show, is the location in Brooklyn where the artist' studio is based. A place that influnced the artist perception on the city landscape and architectural view where he lives and works.
Calm is the impression that the artist has had about the Ellsworth Kelly paintings who's work he was longely been inspired by, calm and silence is probably the immediate reaction that a monochromatic Matt Mignanelli work gives to the viewer. Combination of the space mixing architectural design mode and elegance are curated by light and energy.
In his series of monochromatic works Mignanelli reexamines the evolving interactions amongst light and surface throught the use of reflective gloss and absorbing matte in the continue research of purity and simplicity.
The elegance and minimalism of the works create a constant challenge with the surface texture that plays between bidimensional and thredimensial forms.
The exhibition will display a series of new monochromatic white and black paintings.

Matt Mignanelli was born in 1983 in Providence, RI; lives and works New York. Selected solo shows: Marianne Friis Gallery, Copenhagen, Denmark, Stories Unfold, Richard Heller Gallery, Los Angeles, CA, Nonstop, Dubner Moderne, Lausanne, Switzerland. Selected solo show: Linear Abstraction, Scad Museum of Art, Savannah, GA, Art Heming, Marianne Friis Gallery, Copenhagen, Denmark, Re Define 2012, Goss-Michael Foundation, Dallas.

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They were six. we were only two.

I immediately knew we were going to loose this fight. But we were already on them.

A mess of breath, blood and sand. my heart – a beat on the temples.

Flicker. Timeless. Unthinking. Seconds of eternity.

The endless end and yet my jacked must be lying around somewhere.

Born in the former GDR, Einhorn is strongly influenced by the socio-political upheavals of the 90s. He played in punk bands from the mid-nineties onwards, eventually finding his way into visual arts via photography and music.

Having studied photography in Leipzig and also sculpture and newmedia with Astrid Klein, he enrolled in a master class with TalR at Düsseldorf Academy in order to concentrate more on painting.

The structured system of tiny picture elements lends them the air of digital-seeming, abstract painting. There is a special quality within the works reminding on urban graffiti fragments, large scaled advertisement prints and painterly gestures only using mesh, glue and raw pigments on canvas.

Music was to play an important role as an early means of expression. Electronic Music is totes related to his artworks. Like musicalbeats, the images’ pixel-like fragments are working their way through a delicate haze permeated by coloured light. Youth Culture and present an important backdrop for his pictures, like fleeting audiovisual impressions. It has been a sociocritical means of expression, processing dystopian visions of the future tapping into new technology.

I dig the way his mash-up method, making use of fabric, pigment, glue and colour, lends a rather object-like quality to his pictures, accounting for their striking presence within the space.

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The exhibition is about the suggestion of a song by Pete Yorn: Just Another. Music is often intertwined with other artistic disciplines, in a reciprocal exchange between images and sound waves. When we see a film accompanied by a special soundtrack our perception of time is multiplied through images and music: the hearing and sight are connected and the feeling is strengthened. The paintings on display seem to contain that sound that recalls our easier moments but also more intimate ones in which space and time seem to stop. Certain situations have a particular atmosphere and relate in a natural way with music. Similarly Just Another, the soundtrack of this exhibition, Is inspired by the passing of life, but can also refers to the turn of a page or simply moving on to another show. Pete Yorn reminds us that every moment can be special, in any place, he said “it is the ordinary becoming extraordinary” as in the alchemy of the exhibiting artists. "Silence in my opinion is a place where sound can start" says JPW3; in the silence of the gallery paintings allow us to attune with the song of Pete Yorn, which leads us to infinity, the great landscapes, the sea, the desert. As well as the works on display that suggest the idea of sound and thought in motion. Each of the five artists in the show has his musicality that unites him with the intimist spirit of Just Another. If you try to "listen" to paintings you'll see they possess a certain rythm  that can be a syncopated cadence as well as a gentle movement. It could be a road leading nowhere or the journey of a lifetime as in Ethan Greenbaum or David Balliano, or the deserts of Dustin Pevey with their flavor of aridity that opens up to infinity. Letting themselves go with the soundtrack, visitors can be part of the artists' journey. Everyone walking on his own road that doesn't need to be a long one since what matters is not the destination but the journey.Davide Balliano was born in 1983 in Turin, lives and works in Brooklyn. Selected exhibitions are: Room East, New York, Rolando Anselmi, Berlino, MoMA PS 1, Brooklyn, Michle Rein Gallery, Parigi, Tate Modern, Londra, Plymouth Art Center.Ethan Greenbaum was born in Tom's River, New Jersey, lives and works Brooklyn. Selected exhibitions are: Kansas Gallery, New York, Thierry Goldberg, New York, The Suburban, Chicago, Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York, Halsey Mackay, East Hampton.JPW3 lives and works in Los Angeles. Selected exhibitions are: Night Gallery, Los Angeles, Michael Jon Gallery, Miami, Samuel Friedman Gallery (con Sayre Gomez), Los Angeles, Robert Blumenthal, New York, Kavi Gupta, Chicago, The Suzanne Geiss Company, New York.Dustin Pevey was born in 1980 inTexas, vive e lavora a Brooklyn. Selected exhibitions are: Bill Brady, Miami, Retrospective Gallery, Hudson, Marfa Book Company, Marfa Texas, Galleria Massimo Audiello, Mexico City.Leif Ritchey was born in 1975 in Ann Arbour (MI) where lives and works. Selected exhibitions are: The Journal Gallery, Brooklyn, Ltd Galery, Los Angeles, Martos Gallery, New York, ATM Gallery, New York, Canada Gallery, New York, Zach Feuer Gallery, New York.

In his third solo exhibition at Luce Gallery, Curtis Mann continues his exploration of the physical image.  For this exhibition, Mann uses images made of the gallery space and items or people that exist in the space, prints them, turns them over and then cuts various sized openings in the back of the photographic prints.  The slits are then folded out revealing the imagery through distorted windows, which creates a soft, unclear and sometimes confused version of the original image.  The work relies on its own physicality and the viewer’s angle of view to give a new and slightly altered reading and presence.  The final works offer a physical and sculptural entry to the photographic space and hope to elicit conversations of image, object and the complexities of visual experience. The vision of these successive layers of reality, one above the other, depends solely on the observer, on the point of view that he chooses; thus opening the work to multiple interpretations and giving us the complexity of the viewing experience. The visitor is surrounded by pictures of the space in which he is located, but the images are modified so as to produce a particular effect of estrangement. The gallery becomes a shared space, a place where the works stimulate reflection and vision, but also an area where everyone can be mirrored and, once the confusion disappears, one can find themselves. Curtis Mann uses mainly an approach that is located somewhare between photography and sculpture. In his early works he intervened on images that he found on the web, using photoshop or mechanical work. Today the artist makes another step forward taking the pictures himself, making them the raw material on which he afterwards intervenes with cuts and ripples; thus opening a window - or more than one – on the reality portrayed and on its transformation depending on the point of view of the observer. With Verso Curtis Mann builds up a game of boxes and variations on the subject of the space that sourronds him, a visual and sensory experience.

Luce Gallery is pleased to present artist Graham Collins's italian first solo show.In the exhibition the terms clean room and clean room design become metaphors for the gallery space and the production of artwork.  A series of paintings are installed throughout the gallery. Appearing to cast reflections of the art and architecture in the room, these works are in fact matte, inkjet on canvas paintings.  The apparent reflections are of an altogether different space; we see a mirror image of the art and architecture of the exhibition Clean Room, installed at Soloway Gallery, Brooklyn and running concurrently with this show.  The paintings are hung to precisely project the mirrored ghost of the Soloway installation onto the Luce Gallery space.  Dead spots in the Soloway reflection result in dead flat monochrome canvases.Two large, claro walnut slabs occupy the floor of the gallery space. Cut sequentially from the tree trunk, they have nearly identical shapes and a similar grain pattern. The slabs have been treated with a combination of traditional woodworking and DIY auto body techniques.The exhibition appears as an experimentation about the time, in the attempt to relive what meanwhile is happening on the other part of the ocean with feint reflection in a sort of a poetic recall.Graham Collins was born in 1980 in Washington, DC.Selected solo show are Concert in Central Park, Jonathan Viner, Londra, Soloway, New York, Civic, The Journal Gallery, New York, V8, Halsey McKay Gallery, East Hampton, NY.

In conjunction with Wes Noble, Amir Nikravan will present a group of his Parallax Paintings. This new series of work exploits the inherent possibility of replication that has emerged throught the process in which his works are made; a complex set of procedures that successively remove the physical object while preserving its traces as an image. Aiming to evince the gaps between image and experience, Nikravan's works present the viewer with objects that enact a frustrating disconnect between sight and touch, absence and presence, desire and possession. His Parallax Paintings, which explore the condition in which a seeming or apparent displacement on an object occurs throught a shift in point of view, further expand the artist's interest in imbiguing his works with perceptual, physical and psycological tension. Wes Noble is a collective artist. Making large minimal canvases, often depicting small signs, the attention is drawn to the meaning of symbols that focus the viewer to the details and the elegance of the representation. An ermetical approach is given to the free interpretation of the work, while the content of the canvas, somewhere between abstraction and figuration, let the whiteness of the background to a sort of infinity of the forms drawn like floating in the air.

Amir Nikravan lives and works in Los Angeles. A forthcoming solo exhibitioon at Various Small Fires, Los Angeles, will take place in September 2014. Past gallery exhibition include Greene Exhibitions, Pepin Moore and Rosamund Felsen Gallery.

Wes Noble lives and works in New York. Recent group shows include "Showtime" at Johannes Vogt, New York, "Doesn't even matter", V1 Gallery, Copenhgen, "Sad Plinth", Chelsea Mini Storage, New York, "Ce qui arretait, Ces dames", Galerie Jeanroch, Paris.

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