NADA NEW YORK 2023: BLACK FLAG

Featuring Alejandro García Contreras, Christine Rebhuhn, and Aris Azarmsa

May 18th - May 21st 2023

Swivel Gallery is pleased to offer a three-person presentation for this year's NADA New York,  featuring paintings by Aris Azarmsa, ceramics by Alejandro Garcia Contreras, and sculptural assemblies by Christine Rebhuhn. The work of these artists converge in a feisty echo of punk sentiment and create an unexpected harmony within their dissonant structures. By staking a claim on the modern “outside” in their idiosyncratic processes, they vocalize a refusal to surrender to mainstream conformity. 

Azarmsa presents his biggest works to date, “Taxi Of Oz” and “Eyes Wide Shut”, each which capture their eponymous films by rendering their every frame in obsessive smears of oil paint. The onslaught of images lift the gritty aesthetics from the films of 1980s New York, likewise delivering their fast-paced, electrifying motions. With logical registers of time and sequence melting in dark dissolution, the impressionistic overwhelm of the whole captures mass media consumption–with its violence, vapidity, and drama–from a remote, nearly abstract perspective. Contreras similarly condenses chaos into form with a set of three ceramic pieces, each which evoke intimate dimensions of hell, purgatory, and paradise with effusive ornament. We observe the maximalist worlds held by these vessels and frames as extremely passionate webs of experience within difficult but necessary phases of life. Syncing with the cacophony are Christine Rebhuhn’s perplexing sculptures, which reimagine spare objects–bicycle handlebars, a taxidermy canary–in off-kilter dichotomies and poetic misalignments. Within these compositions lies a stoic desperation, or perhaps a playful gesture towards the coldness of the world. 

The booth brings together an emerging trio of artists whose work takes inventive turns to evade the edicts of the establishment. Despite their bombastic clashing and sounds of protest, the three artists hold space in a unified way, playing off one another’s surfaces with both cruelty and mercy. They at once unsettle us and comfort us; they tap into collective memory and present skewed versions of our psyches in tatters, stains, slashes, and smears. In reviving this quintessential punk ethos across a variety of media, they tell us what it means to straddle the refined and the undone, and furthermore, how to accomplish aesthetic unity by subverting the rules of commercial success. 

ALEJANDRO GARCÍA CONTRERAS 

Alejandro García Contreras  (b. 1982, Tapachula Chiapas, MX) characterizes his creative work by experimentation and dialogue between different materials and technical resources, making his work a mix between various media such as painting, sculpture, photography, video and graphics. The themes of his work are linked to his personality, and through his artistic projects, he explores topics and themes inspired by contemporary popular culture, Mexican folklore, myth, occultism and religion.

He holds a bachelor's degree in Visual Arts from the National Institute of Fine Arts (Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes) in Mexico City, Mexico. His work was the winning acquisition of the 2006 Artfest WTC, and he is a two-time recipient of the FONCA / Young Creators Scholarship. Contreras has held solo exhibitions at Proyecto NASAL, Gamma Galleria, and will be included in forthcoming exhibitions at David Castillo, Albertz Benda as well as Swivel Gallery in New York City.

ARIS AZARMSA

Aris Azarmsa (b. 1997, Palo Alto, California) is a Persian-American painter currently based in New York. He graduated with a BFA from Pratt Institute in 2019. Azarmsa’s use of color leaves one feeling displaced into a realm of chaotic yet tedious meditation in layering, navigating around space and path in the composition: the push and pull of the dimensional boundaries break into and open up his works. Azarmsa was featured in a group exhibition at New Release Gallery in 2021, and presented his first sold out solo exhibition at Swivel Gallery in February 2022. He was included in the inaugural group show The Cowboys Made Me Cry at Swivel Saugerties, as well as the Upstate gallery’s current show, In The Bleak Midwinter. Azarmsa’s work lives in numerous collections and the artist is set for donation to a prestigious museum in 2023.

CHRISTINE REBHUHN

Christine Rebhuhn (b. 1989 in Mount Vernon, Iowa) is a Queens based sculptor. She received an MFA in ceramics from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2015. She has had solo exhibitions at Thierry Goldberg Gallery in New York, NY, NARS Foundation in Brooklyn, NY, Soo Visual Arts Center in Minneapolis, and at Makeshift in Kalamazoo, MI. Her work has been included in group shows at Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Brooklyn, NY, the Boiler in Brooklyn, NY and at Stove Works in Chattanooga, TN; she also exhibited at the 2015 Gyeonggi International Ceramics Biennale in Incheon, Korea. She has been an artist-in-residence at the Vermont Studio Center (VT), Elsewhere (NC), NARS Foundation (NY), and Makeshift (MI). Her work was published in ArtMaze Magazine, Maake Magazine, and Artspace Magazine.