The Masters of Pop Art on View at Martin Lawrence Galleries

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Martin Lawrence Galleries (MLG), the nation’s preeminent network of fine art galleries, is proud to announce an exhibition of Pop Art by the masters of Pop Art Movement, the event will begin on January 25th, 2019 with a reception at Martin Lawrence Galleries located in Costa Mesa, CA. The exhibition is a truly unique opportunity to admire and acquire breathtaking works of art by the most renowned artists of the 21st century.

MLG has curated a collection of fine art by many of the most influential artists of our time. Pop artists have celebrated ordinary objects, and people from everyday life in this way seeking to elevate popular culture to the level of fine art and this assemblage is no exception.

The exhibition will also re-introduce the works of contemporary artist’s Ben Charles Weiner and Helen Rebekah Garber. Each artist has received critical press and exhibited throughout the U.S. and abroad.

Included in the exhibition is Keith Haring's exuberant character Andy Mouse and Andy Warhol’s Mick Jagger.

Haring was one of the 20thcentury's most influential artists and social activists whose work reflected and helped define the New York City Street culture of the 1980s. Andy Mouse depicts Andy Warhol as an utterly cool, larger-than-life cartoon mouse…a fitting homage from one Pop artist to another. Haring combined two of his heroes, Andy Warhol, and Mickey Mouse, and the work is considered highly significant in Haring's oeuvre, well regarded for its bold graphics, composition, and sense of humor.

Keith Haring was born in Reading, PA and graduated from the School of Visual Arts in New York. Haring died of AIDS-related complications at the age of 31 on February 16, 1990. A memorial service was held on May 4, 1990, at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City, with over 1,000 people in attendance.

Since his death, Haring has been the subject of several international retrospectives. The work of Keith Haring can be seen today in the exhibitions and collections of major museums around the world.

‘It's like treating him [Warhol] like he was part of American culture like Mickey Mouse was. That he had become a symbol, a sign for something complete, universally understandable. He made this niche for himself in the culture. As much as Mickey Mouse had…putting him on a dollar bill was making him even more like an icon or part of the American dream.'
–Haring from Haring, Warhol, Disney

Andy Warhol's obsession with celebrity Icons takes shape once again in his infamous Mick Jagger series. Warhol’s interest in photography, collage, and drawing created a new conceptual framework associated with the appropriation of Pop Icons. The working relationship between Warhol and Mick Jagger began in 1963 and continued into maturity as both the artist and the musician were at the height of their fame in the early 1970s. The collaboration works so well because it manages to capture the essence of both parties involved. 

By the 1970s Warhol no longer relied on found imagery and had considerably expanded his range of subjects. He often took his photographs, and the ‘hand-made' look became increasingly evident by additions of collage elements using torn second graphic Color-Aid papers, which were produced in a seemingly endless array of colors.  The series of ten screenprints of Mick Jagger was characteristic of this change in style, and the artist used a selection of ten of his photographs that he had taken of Jagger.

Warhol had met Jagger in 1963 when the band the Rolling Stones were not well known in the United States. Warhol had designed the band’s provocative album cover Sticky Fingers with its focus on a man’s crotch and a zipper that opened. The album and the design proved to be a huge success and Warhol, ever keen to make money, lamented that he had not been paid enough given the millions of copies that sold. No doubt with an eye for financial success, Warhol turned to the subject of Mick Jagger, now a celebrity friend and part of the New York club scene.

Ben Charles Weiner is a New York-based contemporary artist, whose work bridges the seemingly opposite styles of hyperrealism and process-based abstraction. As a free-thinking abstract artist, Weiner always challenges himself as well as his audience to adapt to new mediums and new perspectives regarding modern consumerism. Fascinated by the substances we put into our bodies, Weiner uses art as an extension of his curiosity and judgment to challenge what we think about generic products that we see on everyday store shelves. Ben has spoken of being greatly influenced by his parents, who were both scientists and unconventional free-thinkers (hippies). Ben’s work often depicts materials used to create illusions in art and everyday life, such as oil paint on a palette, hair gel, jewels, and beeswax used in sculpture. Ben lights his work with visually hypnotic properties encapsulating the apparent desire with sheen, lively texture, vibrant color, luminosity, and transparency.  After he's satisfied with proper lighting he photographs these moments using a macro (magnifying) lens to access a practical perspective - “…a space, or landscape, but one that is of a different scale than the body, and thus physically inaccessible…” From these photos, Weiner paints beautiful large-scale compositions in oil. Playing with the ambiguity of his paintings and choosing “incongruous but evocative titles” gives him the freedom to explore the complex relationship between our imaginations and the external cues that activate them. Along with his paintings, Weiner also works with sculpture, video, crystal formations, and drawing/watercolors where he combines drugs, alcohol, and chemicals that we put into our bodies to create unique, glossy, gradient style pieces.

Ben Charles Weiner was born in Burlington, VT and graduated from Wesleyan University in Middletown, CT and completed an independent study program in muralism from the Universidad de las Americas, Mexico City, Mexico.

 

"I always wanted to be an artist, and I had this scientific/materialist prototype of doing experimentation with the aim of answering big questions. Early on I was drawn to a bunch of the '60s and 70's theorists like Clement Greenberg, Barnett Newman, Robert Smithson, and McLuhan who applied materialist concepts to art. For me, it's an ontological pursuit - access to existence beyond the anthropocentric." -Ben Weiner

                                                                                                 

Helen Rebekah Garber'spractice relies upon refraction and distillation of the various formalized aesthetic elements operating within the iconographic systems of different religious traditions and the critical assessment of abstract, symbol-based vocabularies.  By separating the imagery from its original purpose as a signifier of specific dogma, she intends to create a formal matrix of abstraction through a process of layering and negation, weaving brushstrokes in a loom-like manner – fusing the tactility of textile work with the flesh-like qualities of oil paint. 

While simultaneously mimicking the accrued sense of the sanctity of the original patterns, they are stripped from their traditional context and condensed into powerful vortexes referencing the figurative yet stripped of the mess of meat and gristle- intended to exist as vessels of synaptic energy.  The resulting works function as monolithic structures that convey the universal, while aggressively negating all ideologies.

By deconstructing these sometimes-disparate vocabularies through their base symbolic structure, repetition within seemingly disconnected communications begin to emerge and become the underlying guide architecture of the work. Garber incorporates these structural carriers of information into the greater conceptual whole. The fragmented information is reassigned new definitions and becomes the basis unto which a working language of symbols is continuously available for redefinition. 

Helen Rebekah Garber was raised in New York and works in Los Angeles, she graduated from The California Institute of the Arts in 2007 and studied painting at The New York Academy of Art and The Art Students League in New York City. Her work has been exhibited in the U.S. and Europe.

MLG’s exclusive exhibition will also include significant works from Takashi Murakami, Mark Kostabi, Brad Faine, Darren Goins, René Lalonde, Philippe Bertho, and James Rosenquistallowing viewers a unique opportunity to enjoy a visual feast like no other.

The Masters of the Pop Art Movement Exhibition and Event

Martin Lawrence Galleries

South Coast Plaza 

3333 Bear Street

Costa Mesa, CA 92626

January 25th, 2019 – 6:00PM-8:00PM

RSVP: (949) 759-0134

SOUTHCOAST@MARTINLAWRENCE.COM

WWW.MARTINLAWRENCE.COM

About Martin Lawrence Galleries

Since 1978, Martin Lawrence Galleries (MLG)-headquartered in Greenwich, Connecticut with nine gallery locations nationwide including New York, Chicago, Dallas, Las Vegas, New Orleans, San Francisco, Costa Mesa, La Jolla, Maui has been assisting and advising collectors as they consider acquiring fine art.  (MLG), has prided and defined ourselves as both publishers of fine art prints and sculpture from the most talented contemporary artists-both North American and European-and home to modern and contemporary masters like Picasso, Chagall, Warhol, Calder, Magritte, Basquiat, and Murakami. We are extremely proud to have lent and exhibited over 200 masterworks, created by more than 30 different artists, to 30+ world-class museums around the globe…including the Louvre, the Pompidou, the Metropolitan, the Whitney, the National Gallery, the Tate and the Hermitage- where we are the sole sponsor of the first ever exhibition of the work of Erté, the father of art deco and we proudly publish works by artists including Kondakova, Hallam, Bertho, Fressinier, Lalonde andDeyber. For more information visit martinlawrence.com

For further information and images contact:

Katia Graytok

kgraytok@martinlawrence.com

T. 203.989.2073