Échafaudage | Group show
Échafaudage | Group exhibition
Artists: Charlie Barthelet, Ricky Bearghost, Erik Foss, Danny Gretscher, Adam Handler, John Maull, Karri Paul
Dates: June 11 to July 11, 2020
Beginning June 11, 2020, Galerie C.O.A will partner with seven different artists, three of whom have intellectual disabilities, to honour art at its best.
This exhibition offers a three-dimensional vision of playful and colourful art. Whether they are self-taught artists or contemporary plastic artists, all seven come together around a common aesthetic “genre.” Accumulations of found objects, combination of materials, successions of traces or layers, there emerges a real emotional density that nevertheless retains a certain purity. C.O.A invites you to savour the authenticity of these twenty-two stratified works, much less simple than they tend to be perceived.
Charlie Barthelet
Charlie Barthelet (b. 1985, France) creates large sculptural objects by wrapping shapes in layers of yarn and fabric, linking them together to make organic, lyrical pieces. He is a quiet and hard-working presence at Creativity Explored, deriving pleasure from the artistic process and the tactile qualities of his materials.
Charlie joined Creativity Explored as a studio artist in 2009 after graduating from Mission High School. He is an international traveler who spends many summers in the country of his descent.
Ricky Bearghost
Ricky (Richard) Bearghost was born on March 6, 1964 in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. He learned how to weave as a member of Project Grow and is an active visual artist at Portland Art & Learning Studios. His early weavings were markedly traditional and usually small, created using a lap loom and colorful yarn. He finished his weaving by painting the back side of the textile, a signature effect that is still incorporated in his works today.
Bearghost’s interest in neighborhood cleanup intersected his artistic process in the fall and winter of 2015. In a moment of serendipity, he had exhausted his yarn supply and turned to the bucket of collected debris that contained bailing twine, corn husks and leaves. Gradually he added to his work electric colored plastic pony beads, which are woven alongside found buttons, soda tabs, and reclaimed pieces of jewelry. His work often reflects the seasonal flora at the time of creation and Bearghost’s penchant to harvest and preserve the natural beauty surrounding him in the Pacific Northwest.
Erik Foss
Erik Foss mines pop culture to create his layered works. His paintings and collages incorporate images that spur the viewer’s nostalgia or their melancholia, but in ways that contort the memories they evoke and thus the reception of his works: in one beloved Bugs Bunny takes a tab of acid, in another photographs of Albert Einstein and the Obamas are layered into a chaotic collage along side images of women’s bodies and dripping paint reminiscent of graffiti. Erik’s works ask us to examine the uncomfortable underbelly of popular culture and consumerism.
Danny Gretscher
Born in 1977 in Jena (East Germany), Danny Gretscher then moved to Stuttgart where he began doing graffiti at the age of 16. He studied graphic design, but quickly focused on painting. In 2004 he decided to settle his first studio in Berlin without putting his street art apart.
To his passion for painting he added his desire to travel. Australia held an important place as he spent many months there between 2016 and 2017, juggling between a show at 19 Karen (Gold Coast Art Gallery), a residency in Sydney, or even transforming urban spaces like the mural he created for the collective project Elysium in Byron Bay.
Adam Handler
Adam Handler was born in Queens, NY. He studied Life Drawing in Italy and graduated from Purchase College with a major in Art History. Handler has mounted numerous solo and group exhibitions worldwide, including New York, Europe, Africa, and Seoul, South Korea. His work has been shown extensively at major art fairs including Art New York, Art Market Hamptons, Art Context Miami, and the Armory Print Fair.
John Maull
Born in Los Angeles, California, John Maull has worked as a studio artist at the progressive art studios of Tierra del Sol since 2005. Maull’s work explores motifs which seem iconic on their surface but are based on idiosyncratic personal histories and experiences. His drawings include layers of floral patterns which border on abstraction through their repetition but also have references to Maull’s childhood home embedded in their imagery. In ceramics, he forms dogs and automobiles based on autobiographical references with colorful dripping and swirling glazes.
Maull has collaborated with internationally renowned artists such as Charles Long and Karen Kimmel and has exhibited his work across the United States.
Karri Paul
Karri Paul is an artist and writer living in Los Angeles. Born in Wisconsin and raised in Tennessee, Karri Paul earned an MFA at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, a Graduate Certificate from the UI Center for the Book, and an MFA in Studio Art at the University of Texas at Austin. For sixteen years, she taught art, writing, book arts, visual culture, and cross-disciplinary courses at various institutions including MICA, Johns Hopkins, and most recently, Otis College of Art and Design.
