FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

Inaugural Exhibition

STAPLED TO THE SOUL: May 19 – June 19, 2004

Jerry Jofen – Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt

PAVEL ZOUBOK GALLERY is pleased to announce the opening of our new street-level space in Chelsea and the exhibition STAPLED TO THE SOUL: Jerry Jofen & Thomas Lanigan- Schmidt. Please join us for the opening reception on Wednesday, May 19 from 6-8pm, or during the run of the exhibition, which continues through June 19. The gallery is located at:

533 West 23rd Street (between 10th & 11th Avenues)

Gallery Hours: Tuesday – Saturday, 10am - 6pm

STAPLED TO THE SOUL brings together the work of two artists whose distinctive aesthetics emerged during the 1960s and established new directions in the field of mixed media collage and assemblage. Both Jerry Jofen (1925-1993) and Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt were raised in religious immigrant communities whose theological underpinnings infused their art with a sense of spiritual longing and a reverence for the transformative power of art. Using the most humble of materials, both artists eschewed the use of conventional adhesives such as glue or paste, in favor of ordinary household and industrial staples. The results were dramatically different, with Jofen taking the path of abstraction and Lanigan-Schmidt referencing images and objects from Catholicism and mass culture. A central figure in the careers of both Jofen and Lanigan-Schmidt was artist and filmmaker Jack Smith, whose avant-garde aesthetics embodied the liberation politics of the 1960s and 1970s. Although each had important personal and creative ties to Smith, their paths never crossed. STAPLED TO THE SOUL includes works from the past four decades, establishing a critical dialogue between these two ground-breaking artists.

JERRY JOFEN (1925-1993)

An elusive presence in the New York art world of the late 1950s through 1970s, painter, collagist and filmmaker Jerry Jofen created intimate abstractions from discarded scraps of found paper and staples. Although Jofen was known among the denizens of the art world, his work was rarely shown, except for a single exhibition at Allan Stone Gallery during the 1960s, and a 1997 exhibition at the Court House Gallery organized by writer and curator Klaus Kertess . Jofen's collage-like films have been screened at The Museum of Modern Art, the Jewish Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and most recently at Anthology Film Archives. In 1975 Jofen became ill, suffered paralysis and severe disability until his death in 1993. Klaus Kertess writes, “Jerry Jofen was a migrant in search of light. Collage formed his art and his life. Makeshift procedures and the dispersal of the found and discarded in restless search for coherence, so often endemic to collage, parallel the make-do strategies, vagaries and serendipity of immigrant life. Born into a scholarly rabbinical family in Bialystok Poland , Jofen and his parents fled across the Soviet Union in 1941 and arrived in the United States on the last refugee-filled ship from Japan . Eventually moving from San Francisco , he settled in New York , wandering the streets, attending cafes and all night movie houses, and reading poetry influenced by Mallarm é and Rimbaud. Not until 1959 did Jofen become serious about art, first painting, then turning to collages configured from fragments of the street detritus he scrupulously gathered during his constant wanderings in Manhattan . Ephemeral, manic, lyrical and intimate, Jofen's collages are literal and figurative diaries of his displacement and quest.”… “Jerry Jofen secured the ad hoc structuring of his collages with staples. These at once reveal the layered process of their making and add to it a veil of syncopated light. The glistening staples are physical embodiments of light – a light that “should shine adazzle, touching lightly the dreamer in his somnambulistic trapeze.”*

*from an interview with Jofen by Jud Yalkut in Film Culture (c. 1967)

THOMAS LANIGAN-SCHMIDT

Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt's glittering mixed media collages and sculptures draw upon theological texts and the history of religious ornament to explore the conflicted relationship between religious devotion and sexual freedom. A pioneer in the use reflective materials, Lanigan-Schmidt has influenced subsequent generations of artists who have engaged a “glitter” aesthetic, exploring themes of material opulence, Baroque excess, cultural status, glamour, sexual transgression, camp and kitsch. Critic Robert C. Morgan writes, “Glittering sequins, polychrome plastic, magic marker ink, disco tape and tinsel sparkle throughout the sanctuary of his [Lanigan-Schmidt's] crowded studio reliquary. His magical constructions illuminate dreams of darkness as if to dispel harrowing memories from his youthful past. Born of German-Irish parents, Lanigan-Schmidt was raised in a working-class family as a devout Roman Catholic. Much of his adolescent youth was spent on the streets of New York , between Port Authority bus terminal and the Lower East Side .

Over the years, Mister T – as he once called himself – evolved toward art where his subject matter became the tacky brilliance found in old dime stores -- trinkets, party favors, sparklers, rhinestones and other delicate ephemera. His formative influences were largely theatrical, artists like Jack Smith and Charles Ludlam. Campy as his work may appear, Lanigan-Schmidt's intimate, though excessive aesthetic has always been fundamentally spiritual, an authentic search for light as he builds erotically-charged collages and phantasmagoric assemblages. Light pervades every nook and cranny in these iconic forms – each one alluding to a temporal selfhood, seeking transcendence.”

For information and images please contact Pavel Zoubok at (212) 675 7490 or [email protected]