FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

Geoffrey Hendricks                               January 5 – February 4, 2006

Continuing Sky Dialogues

BERTY SKUBER

Labels

PAVEL ZOUBOK GALLERY is pleased to announce the opening of two solo exhibitions by GEOFFREY HENDRICKS and BERTY SKUBER. Please join us for the opening reception on Thursday, January 5, from 6-8pm, or during the run of the exhibition, which continues through February 4. The gallery is located at: 533 West 23rd Street (between 10th & 11th Avenues) Gallery Hours: Tuesday – Saturday, 10am-6pm

Geoffrey Hendricks lives and works in New York and Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia.  For the exhibition Continuing Sky Dialogs, Hendricks will install a wall of watercolors of sky painted at his farm in Nova Scotia, Canada, together with old roof slates taken from his early 19th century townhouse in New York. The juxtaposition of sky watercolors and slates on a wall have previously been created in Cologne, Germany (1999): Genoa, Italy (2000); and Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island (2003), each used slates from that region. Sky Ladder (2005), Birdcage with Pulley (2005), boxes containing an assemblage of objects with sky watercolors titled Sky/Skull (2004) and Bill's “Blue” Suitcase (2005), in addition to an earlier work Two Balls for Ray (Johnson) (1999) each speak to a different history. An assortment of weathered objects combined with sky watercolors and two Sky Bundles (2005) will also be shown for the first time.

Hendricks, often referred to as “Cloudsmith", has been active with Fluxus since the mid-sixties.  Book works and publishing have consistently interfaced with his work in painting, installation, and performance. Sky imagery is used to describe changes, shifts and the passage of time, a form of reflection, a vocabulary he builds and attaches to objects.

Berty Skuber, a longtime friend of Fluxus, lives and works in Fie, north of Bolzano, Italy.  For the exhibition Labels, Skuber will be showing fourteen patch-works (created from clothing labels) accompanied by matching drawings that review and reconsider their themes and images. In addition, five large collages on paper that integrate reflections on the theme of labels, are more representative of the usual concerns of Skuber's work: a kind of phantasmagoria of drawn and painted imagery, both representative and abstract, photography and writing, both real and simulated.

These last works can be seen as more complex treatments of the same concerns to be found in the small collages that accompany the special edition of the catalog Under Penalty of Law (2002) shown with Emily Harvey  in the fall of 2002, and then later, in 2003,  Clasing & Etage, Münster; Museion, Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Bolzano; Archivio Emily Harvey, Venezia; Museo di Villa Croce, Genova and  also included in the exhibition Threadbare: Subversive Aesthetics, SAC Gallery at New York State University, Stony Brook, New York.

Hendricks and Skuber have collaborated on four boxed books (1990-92) that compose 4" square watercolors of skies and labyrinths, skies and gardens, skies and rooms, that were created together at various times, in Fié, Italy and Roskilde, Denmark.

For additional information and images please contact Julie Brunner Cross at (212) 675 7490 or [email protected]