Killer Cute: In Two Parts
July 9 – August 20, 2022
Opening Reception:
Saturday July 9 (4-9pm)
Teresa Baker, Jessica Taylor Bellamy, Allan Bennetts, Guy Van Bossche, Koen van den Broek, Eunnam Hong, Sky Hopinka, Azikiwe Mohammed, Victoria Reynolds, Ivan Ríos-Fetchko, Alexander Richard Wilson, Andrew Woolbright, Michael St. John
de boer (Los Angeles) is proud to present Killer Cute: In Two Parts, the second annual summer group exhibition that presents representations of the landscape and figure in two coinciding exhibitions.
Expanding outward and drawing comparisons between land and the body, the exhibition rejects the idea that history is confined to the past. With ambiguous representations of both the landscape and the figure at the core of this exhibition, the show lends itself to zooming in and out on its subjects, leaving traces of the human presence, and towards abstraction.
The artists in this exhibition focus their attention on the production of ideas by isolating features and seeking an ever greater economy of elegance. This process changes our ideas of how we understand the media and mediums used to produce their works. And as the medium is changed, essential elements of their propositions change; sex roles reversed, significance altered, in effort to upset consequences.
Teresa Baker (b. 1985) is an enrolled member of the Three Affiliated Tribes in Western, ND. She currently lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. She has had recent solo exhibitions at de boer, Los Angeles, Interface Gallery, Oakland, and Gray Contemporary, Houston in 2018. She has exhibited widely in the San Francisco Bay area at venues such as Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, di Rosa, the Wattis Institute, Marin MoCA, Kiria Koula, Et al., and The Luggage Store Gallery. In 2016 she had her first solo museum show with the Art Museum of Southeast Texas, Beaumont, TX. She was the recipient of the 2020 Native American Fellowship for Visual Artists at the Ucross Foundation, Tournesol Award Artist in Residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts, 2013–2014, and Artist-in-Residence at The MacDowell Colony, 2015. Baker received her MFA from California College of the Arts and her BA from Fordham University.
Jessica Taylor Bellamy is a multidisciplinary artist working in painting, sculpture, and video. She was born in Whittier, CA, and received a B.A. in Political Science from USC in 2014 and an MFA from USC in 2022. Jessica’s work has been featured in exhibitions with UTA Artist Space (2020), WOAW Gallery Hong Kong and Make Room LA (2021), Superposition Gallery (2022), and upcoming in the summer of 2022, her work will be included in What a Tale Their Terror Tells at Lyles and King Gallery, New York.
Allan Bennetts’ practice takes cues from painting traditions while simultaneously engaging in concepts inspired by contemporary pursuits. His laboriously detailed oil paintings depict common and trade specific electronics with a carefulness that imbues each object with a sympathetic humanity. Bennetts graduated from Wayne State University, Detroit, MI and Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, MI. He has exhibited his work at venues such as Edward Cella Gallery, Los Angeles, CA, Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, MI, Forum Gallery, Bloomfield Hills, MI, and Miles McEnery, New York, NY. Bennetts is the recipient of 2019 Museum Purchase Award Nominee, Cranbrook Museum Of Art, Bloomfield Hills, MI, among other awards.
Guy Van Bossche (b. 1952) is a Belgian artist known for his mediation and translation of images that are often characterized by a sense of anxiety and impending doom. The artist lives and works in Antwerp, Belgium. He has had recent solo exhibitions at Tick Tack Gallery, Antwerp, Belgium; Mulier Mulier Gallery, Knokke-Zoute,Belgium; and De Garage, Mechelen, Belgium. Slag Gallery, New York; Hanappe House of Art, Athens, Greece; M HKA, Antwerp, Belgium, and Anette De Keyser, Antwerp, Belgium. Group exhibitions include de boer, Los Angeles; Urslakapel, Tongeren, Belgium; M HKA, Antwerp, Belgium; Mulier Mulier Gallery, Antwerp, Belgium; Cookie Butcher, Antwerp, Belgium; Baton Gallery, Seoul, South-Korea; Tarmac, Meerhout, Belgium; Elsene Museum, Brussels, Belgium; LLS 387, Antwerp, Belgium; and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco.
Koen van den Broek (b. 1973) is a Belgian artist known for his depictions of urban landscape. He studied at the Royal Academy of Antwerp and the Academy of Visual Arts of Breda in the late 1990s. Van den Broek lives and works in Antwerp, Belgium. Works by Koen van den Broek are featured in private and institutional collections around the world, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, the Pizzuti Collection of the Columbus Museum of Art, The Hall Art Foundation, Reading, Vermont, S.M.A.K., the Municipal Museum of Contemporary Art, Ghent, Belgium, The Stoffel Collection of The Munich Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, Museum Voorlinden, in Wassenaar, The Netherlands, The Museum of Contemporary Art (MuHKA), Antwerp, Leeum Collection, Seoul, Busan Museum of Art, Busan, South Korea and Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo. Private collections include Elton John, Jeremy Lewison, and Dean Valentine.
Eunnam Hong is a Brooklyn based artist born in Gangwon-do, South Korea. Largely inspired by film and fashion, Eunnam Hong makes delicately rendered self portrait paintings that often include multiples of the same figure within one space. Hong’s oil paintings present intimate, unnatural, and quiet settings that refer directly back to her own inner world. Working from her own photographs and obscuring her face with a blonde wig, Hong creates ambiguous main characters; A motif inspired from, and appears in, many films such as John Cassavetes, Rainer Fassbinder, and even more specifically in the character ‘Woman in Blonde Wig’, played by Brigitte Lin, in Wong Kar-wai’s Chungking Express.
Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk Nation/Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians) was born and raised in Ferndale, Washington and spent a number of years in Palm Springs and Riverside, California, Portland, Oregon, and Milwaukee, Wisconsin. His work has played at various festivals including Sundance, Toronto International Film Festival, Ann Arbor, Courtisane Festival, Punto de Vista, and the New York Film Festival. His work was a part of the 2017 Whitney Biennial, the 2018 FRONT Triennial and Prospect.5. He was a guest curator at the 2019 Whitney Biennial and participated in Cosmopolis #2 at the Centre Pompidou. He has had a solo exhibition at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, in 2020 and at LUMA Arles in Arles, France in 2022. He was awarded the Tom Berman Award for Most Promising Filmmaker at the 54th Ann Arbor Film Festival, and the New Cinema Award at the Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival. He was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University in 2018- 2019, a Sundance Art of Nonfiction Fellow for 2019, an Art Matters Fellow in 2019, a recipient of a 2020 Alpert Award for Film/Video, a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow, and was a 2021 Forge Project Fellow.
Azikiwe Mohammed is a 2005 graduate of Bard College, where he studied photography and fine arts. Mohammed received a Rauschenberg Artists Fund Grant in 2021, a Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Grant in 2016 and an Art Matters Grant in 2015. Mohammed’s solo exhibitions include the SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, GA; Transformer, Washington, DC; Yeh Art Gallery, St. John’s University, Queens, NY; Mindy Solomon Gallery, Miami, FL; Elijah Wheat Showroom, Newburgh, NY and Anna Zorina Gallery, New York, NY; as well as multiple solo offerings at SPRING/BREAK Art Show, New York. He has participated in group exhibitions at MoMA PS1, Queens, New York; Antenna Gallery, New Orleans, Louisiana; Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles, California and The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, among others. He is an alumnus of Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, New York, and Mana Contemporary in Jersey City, New Jersey. His work has been featured extensively in magazines, including VICE, I-D, Artforum, Forbes, BOMB and Hyperallergic. Mohammed lives and works in New York City.
Victoria Reynolds is a Los Angeles based artist. Reynolds uses meat as a primary decorative motif, playfully applying its visceral qualities to the surface of the painting and the surrounding frame. There is an uneasy tension between the understanding of flesh as food, and our self-identification of it; her conflation of desire, mortality, viscerality, and the survival instinct is a powerful source of aesthetic fascination.
Ivan Ríos-Fetchko is a Los Angeles based landscape painter. He received his BFA in painting from RISD and a BA in comparative literature from Brown University. Ríos-Fetchko’s paintings are often made in series with rigorous story arcs connecting each painting within the series.. Source imagery is pulled from found photography slides, many of which depict familiar known wonders and landmarks from places such as National Parks. His work is finished with heavy raw metal frames that offer a connection to the hyper American experience of landscape through vehicles and highways. Past exhibition and residency history includes Tilton Gallery, New York, NY; Spy Projects, Los Angeles, CA; and Surf Point Foundation, York, Maine.
Alexander Richard Wilson is based In Denver, Colorado. Wilson was born and raised in Saint Louis, Missouri in 1993 and educated at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2017. They have exhibited at Union Hall in Denver, Urban Mudd Gallery , Thomas Masters Gallery in Chicago, Compound Yellow Gallery in Chicago, and the Chicago Artists Coalition, Epoch Studios in Chicago, Housing Gallery in New Work and Spain, and The Armory Show in New York.
Wilson’s painting and sculpture practices reference the spaces and depths of the American landscape we occupy, and the literal relationships between figurative shapes in image and form. Referencing their history as the product of a large, African American family, and their present context as a queer black body in the American West. They work to represent the present conditions relative to climate change and cultural shift in American society with gestural clarity.
Andrew Woolbright (American, b. 1986) is an artist, curator, and critic living in Brooklyn, NY. Woolbright is an MFA graduate from the Rhode Island School of Design and is currently a resident at the Sharpe Walentas Studio Program. He has recently exhibited with The Hole, New York (2021); Galerie Valeria Cetraro, Paris (2021); Zurcher Gallery, New York (2020); and Ada Gallery, Richmond (2020); and will be exhibiting with Vacancy Gallery in Shanghai in early 2022. His work has been reviewed in Artforum, TimeOut New York, ArtViewer, Two Coats of Paint, the Boston Globe, and the Chicago Reader, and his work is currently in the collection of the RISD Museum. He is a critic and contributing writer for The Brooklyn Rail and currently teaches at The School of Visual Arts in New York.
Michael St. John has shown his work extensively over the past thirty years in museums, alternative spaces and galleries throughout the United States. He has presented solo exhibitions at de boer, Los Angeles, CA; Andrea Rosen Gallery New York, NY; team (gallery, inc.), New York, NY; Karma, New York, NY; Edward Cella, Los Angeles, CA; Ashes/Ashes, New York, NY; Pio Pico, Los Angeles; and Marvelli Gallery, New York, NY. Group exhibitions include Marlborough Contemporary, New York, NY; CCS Bard/Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY; The Rubell Family Collection/Contemporary Arts Foundation, Miami, FL; Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY; Rental Gallery, New York, NY; Greene Naftali, New York, NY; Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, NC; and Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York, NY. His work has been featured in The New York Times, Artnet, Art in America, Artnews, BOMB Magazine, W Magazine, and Cultured Magazine. St. John’s paintings are held in numerous public collections, including The Rubell Family Collection, Weatherspoon Art Museum, MIT List Visual Arts Center, The Tang Teaching Museum, and the Zabludowicz Collection.