Cirrus Gallery & Cirrus Editions, Ltd.

Cirrus is pleased to announce the exhibit of John Baldessari’s Hegel’s Cellar, a 1986, portfolio of 10 etchings, acquaints, photogravures, spit bites, soft ground etchings, and dry points.

Hegel lectured on Aesthetics, the topic of the realm of the beautiful, more precisely, their province as art, or rather fine art. It appears Hegel places fine art between pure thought and what is merely external, sensuous, and the transient between nature and finite reality, and the infinite freedom of conceptual thinking.

John Baldessari has been called a conceptual artist and a founding member of that 70’s movement, although he has also said that he finds the term “a little boring” maybe a bit limiting. His practice includes paintings, prints, performance, video, artists books, film, installations, and photomontages created with a pastiche of found images.

Cirrus Gallery & Cirrus Editions, Ltd. is pleased to announce Self-Portraits. Self-Portraits is a continuation in our study of Figuration, featuring works by Japanese artists Kyoko Asano and Marc Katano. The exhibition is presented in an effort to extend conversations brought up by Asian Heritage month. Asano and Katano are essential contributors to Cirrus’s history in Los Angeles, with exhibitions and prints released in the 1980s and 1990s.

At first glance, the works of Asano and Katano fall into oppositional genres; Asano illustrates landscapes while Katano traces the movement of the human body through abstract forms. Yet, the works of both artists embody similar articulations of time. Asano’s fantastical depictions of oceans and beaches are indicative of movement. She captures the sensation of liquidity as a wave circles from ocean through rock, or the levity of a bird suspended mid-flight. These depictions of an imagined natural world are accompanied by traces of human activity. Footprints and debris litter the landscape, forming an additional layer of temporality that is both disruptive and symphonic to the landscape they inhabit.

This form of temporal suspension is similarly articulated through the abstract compositions of Katano. Katano describes that, while the works may feel “organic,” they are not meant to emulate “nature”. Katano’s monoprints act as a form of archival, memorializing his own physicality as he paints. The works articulate a sense of movement and ephemerality that also manage to encapsulate time.