Installation view
January 19 – March 31, 2013
Some Walls is pleased to present David Rhodes: “Nocturnes,” paintings on linen and paper by the British-born, Berlin-based artist from January 19 – March 31, 2013. This is a unique opportunity to see Rhodes’s work in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Widely exhibited, Rhodes is also a prolific writer about art, most recently for Artforum, The Brooklyn Rail, and Art Critical. Recent catalog texts include writing about: Ernst Wilhelm Nay for Michael Werner Gallery/Mary Boone Gallery; Nathan Peter for PSM Galerie, Berlin; Henri Matisse for Museum Ludwig, Cologne; and Mary Heilmann for Museum Ludwig, Cologne.
Rhodes’s work at Some Walls, all untitled, is part of the body of mostly black, white, and sometimes gray with occasional color, chevron-like paintings that have occupied him for the past few years. Variously thin, taped, near-verticals, under which paint bleeds, make soft-edged lines that zip and zag, running up and down, not quite matching or aligning.
In Rhodes’s images there are hints of signage, design, planning, mapping, traffic, interchanges, grains, wedging, each which their own conditions of place and space, layers or flatness: compact, energetic, open and closed, pressed and stacked, fitted and busting out, the world seeping in, the world beyond the painting, all struggling at the edges of the the conventional, containing rectangle. And there is a sense of playfulness and virtue found in no hesitation, repetition, following process, acceptance of decoration, and the value of work for work’s sake.
Responding to this sense of play, here is a game: which Beatles’ song sounds most like how Rhodes’s paintings look? There are no rules, you just have to feel it, and it works like this: Strawberry Fields Forever sounds like a 1960’s de Kooning clam digger. Pollock’s Blue Poles looks like how Birthday sounds. Glass Onion sounds like a vitrine by Paul Thek. A late Joan Mitchell looks like Tomorrow Never Knows. Barnett Newman’s Stations of the Cross is the sound of Taxman (“…if my work were properly understood, it would be the end of state capitalism and totalitarianism”). And as for Rhodes… see images, an essay, and biography.
Recent selected group exhibitions: On Tour at Kunsthaus, Tosterglope, DE; X6 at galerie oqbo, Berlin DE; Futureshock 12 at Galerie Dr Julius, Berlin, DE; Crossing Abstraction II at Galerie-Kunsthaus and Forum Konkrete Kunst, Erfurt, DE; Twin, Twin at Pierogi, New York, USA; Paper Works and Rhyme Not Reason at Janet Kurnatowsky Gallery, New York, USA; Concrete Things at Forgotten Bar Projekt, Berlin, DE; Ramp at Parkhaus, Berlin, DE; Maximal Pleasure at Souterrain, Berlin, DE; and Offon at Galerie Hafenrand, Hamburg, DE.
Some Walls is a curatorial and writing art project founded in 2009 in a private home in Oakland, California. Some Walls is open by appointment only. View the exhibition online at somewalls.com. To schedule a visit, or for more information, please contact Chris Ashley at info@somewalls.com.
