Primary is proud to present the third iteration of OMGWTF, a group exhibition featuring Alic Brock, Dustin Emory, Neil Gall, Hell Gette, Ellon Gibbs, Typoe Gran, Piero Penizzotto, Cameron Platter, Hunter Potter, Jeffrey Sincich, Bradley Sizemore, Francisco Tavoni, & Wade Tullier.
In one form or another, this exhibition is hell-driven, sprinting down the asphalt under a new moon, accelerating just before daybreak, hinting at rhythms and war drums, folklore, or nothing more. It is a search for salvation, living through strange times, not judging things out of their control, declaring a mood of disillusion, and watching the decaying city with a cool detachment.
It could be more for the sake of more, a maximalist playground, a 42-gallon contractor bag filled with mini chocolate bars fashioned into a polka-dotted bindlestiff, a desire to be overwhelmed.
It's how you felt when borrowing your older sister's size five fuck me pumps, recognizing you wear a size six, and struggling through them two nights in a row, blisters and all, because you know you're a stunna, and that's all that truly matters in this world on fire.
It is an opportunity to watch two underdressed friends celebrate the eats they bought and brought to the gala; they seem like kind guys, a couple of odd fellows who would share a bite if asked appropriately.
Personally, it became an exercise in breathing, a stranger handing us a memory, an obstacle, a temptation in league with the devil; real recognizing real, vulnerability for all makes and models, a park that goes on forever, a third eye, and five grams of psychedelics taking you far beyond the littlest death.
The exhibition title, OMGWTF, is a contemporary cultural acronym commonly associated with a wide range of passionate responses. It is being utilized here as a compass. It serves as a reminder that instinct and intuition, as opposed to academia, are unrivaled gifts to be built upon in the execution of creativity.
Ultimately, this presentation is the cultivation of unpredictability and the result of a dedicated search for honest works.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - >
Opens
Monday, December 4, 2023
4 - 8 PM
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - >
Alic Brock (b. 1992, Dayton, Ohio) Brock’s practice is an irreverent but loving interrogation of painting as it stands at the crossroads of technological innovation. Through his medium-to-large scale, photorealist paintings, the Atlanta-based artist transmutes the sensibilities of today’s digital life—it’s over-stimulation, its obsession with celebrity—while underscoring its inherent superficiality and strangeness. “Your brain does interesting things when it’s confronted by something that might appear to be about new technologies but has the physicality of something that has been around for a long time,” says Brock of his paintings. “And I’m really interested in how those two things can live side-by-side, a digital image and a painting.”
Neil Gall (b. 1967, Aberdeen, Scotland) Currently lives and works in London, received his BA in Painting at Gray’s School of Art and then attended Slade School of Art in London in 1991. His art has garnered him numerous awards in Great Britain, and his work is featured in prominent international collections including, David Roberts Arts Foundation, London, UK, Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO, Hiscox Collection, London, UK, Insinger de Beaufort, Amsterdam, the Netherlands, The Lodeveans Collections, London, UK, The Morgan Library & Museum, New York, NY, Simmons & Simmons, London, UK, Unilever, Rotterdam, the Netherlands and the Zabludowicz Collection, London.
Hell Gette (b. 1986, Karabulak, Kazakhstan) Currently based in Germany, studied painting, sculpture and graphics and graduated with honors in 2018 from the Academy of Fine Arts Munich under Prof. Oehlen and received the “Debutants Prize” by the Ministry of Culture of Bavaria.
A selection of solo exhibitions would be at Hubert Burda Media (2019), Art Talk with Prof. Dr. Thomas Girst, head of culture BMW group, Nagel Draxler Gallery Berlin (2020), Nagel Draxler Gallery Cologne (2021). Hell Gette is currently preparing her solo exhibitions at Kebbel-Villa Museum (2023), Each Modern Gallery, Taipei Taiwan (2023) and Nagel Draxler Berlin (2023). Gette ́s work has been included in international art fairs such as Art Basel, Basel, Art Basel Miami, Armory Show New York City, Art Cologne and Art Singapore. Her works can be found in the permanent collections of Hubert Burda, Valeria Napoleone, Craig Robins / DACRA, and the Xiao Museum. Furthermore she has received the Paperpositions Award in 2019, the US Grant by the DAAD (Germany Academic Exchange Service) for a six months stay in New York City in 2022 and an invitation from the art-in-public-space program by the City of Munich in 2023.
Dustin Emory (b. 1999, Atlanta, Georgia) is a self taught visual artist with a practice primarily consisting of painting. His work largely explores the human response to confinement through a black and white lens. He has exhibited nationally and internationally with group shows in New York and Paris, as well as recent solo exhibitions in London, Paris and Miami. His work can be found in the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA and is included in the upcoming issue (166) of New American Paintings.
Ellon Gibbs (b. 1995, Brooklyn, NY) is a self-taught painter who is based in Bushwick, Brooklyn. His work has previously shown at 57 W. 57th Arts in NYC, and NADA Miami. He was recently written about in the publication Cult Classic Mag.
In an uncertain era, Ellon Gibbs creates compelling landscapes that visualize anxieties about ecological devastation and create alternate realities that speak to the regenerative power of nature.These works build visual tableaux that pull us into portals portraying a post-apocalyptic state where dark clouds loom overhead and shadow figures ride through darkened fields filled with articulately rendered blades of glass. Such pieces speak to the perennial battle between humans and nature, and Gibbs uses his vivid imagination to conjure the sublime from the ominous.
Gibbs’ work is a meditation on the tensions between ourselves and our planet. Such portrayals transcribe some of society’s darkest fears in ways that words cannot approximate, and Gibbs’ impassioned marks transcend language to create fever dreams of infinite black space punctuated by pockets of light that speak to the embedded optimism in the artist’s work.
Typoe Gran (b. 1983, Miami) is a Miami based mixed media artist whose works range from paintings and murals to larger than life sculptural works that can be found in the public realm. His work has been exhibited at Crystal Bridges Museum, Bentonville, Arkansas, Locust Projects, Miami, FL, Public Art of UH System, Houston, TX, Artis-Naples, Naples, FL, and Faena Art Center, Buenos Aires, Argentina and can be found on the permanent collections of the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA and the Perez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), Miami, FL.
Piero Penizzotto (b. 1998, Queens, NY) is a Peruvian-American artist born and based in Queens, NY. Penizzotto’s sculptural practice is presented as an ode to the friendships and communities he is a part of growing up in New York and South Florida. He recently graduated from Hunter College with honors with a Bachelor’s in Fine Art. Previous exhibitions include White Columns, New York (2023) and Public Access Gallery, New York (2022).
Cameron Platter (b. 1978, Johannesburg) Recent exhibitions include “Imaginary Fact, Contemporary South African Art and the Archive”, 55thVenice Biennale; “Impressions from South Africa, 1965 to Now,” Museum of Modern Art, New York; “Public Intimacy. Art and Other Ordinary Acts in South Africa”, SFMOMA, San Francisco; “Rencontres Internationales,” The Centre Georges Pomidou, Paris; Le Biennale de Dakar 2010, Dakar, Senegal; “Coca- Colonization,” Marte Museum, El Salvador; and “Absent Heroes,” Iziko South African National Gallery.
Recent gallery solo shows include Blank Projects, Cape Town; Galerie Hussenot, Paris;1301PE, Los Angeles. His work is included in the permanent collection of MoMA, New York; The FRAC des Pays de la Loire, France; Zietz MOCAA Collection; The Margulies Collection; and the Iziko South African National Gallery. Press features include The Los Angeles Times, Artforum, The New York Times, NYAQ, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, Vice Magazine, and NKA Journal of Contemporary African Art. He lives and works in KwaZulu Natal, South Africa.
Hunter Potter (b. 1990, Syracuse, New York) Hunter Potter studied studio art at the University of Vermont where he graduated in 2013. He moved to New York City in 2015 and spent time sign painting, studio assisting, and art handling while finding his way to becoming a full-time artist. Now focused solely on his own practice, Potter maintains a studio in Brooklyn, New York. Hunter Potter uses a bold color palette and whimsical, geometric figures inspired by American folklore to create poppy paintings that celebrate the minutiae of daily life on a monumental scale.
Potter’s figures often feature society’s underdogs; the criminals, fighters, and runaways he associates his work with are similar to characters in novels by John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, and Larry McMurtry, whose writing influences Potter’s work. Although he continues to create more intimate work, the artist’s enthusiasm for large scale works began when he was apprenticed to paint billboards in New York. Potter was the recipient of the Roger Smith Artist Fellowship at the Vermont Studio Center in 2018 and was awarded residencies in London at the Plop Residency and The Fores Project.
Jeffrey Sincich (b. 1990, Belleair, FL) is a multidisciplinary artist based in San Francisco, CA. He graduated from the University of Florida in 2012 with a BFA in ceramics. He co-owned Variety Shop, a sign painting company in Portland, OR, from 2015-2022. Jeffrey has had solo exhibitions at Park Life Gallery in San Francisco, Nucleus Gallery in Portland, OR, and Pacifica Collectives in Tokyo, Japan. He has also exhibited in a group exhibition at Charlie James Gallery in Los Angeles.
Bradley Sizemore (b. 1984, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) attended the Edinboro University of Pennsylvania for fine arts and, following college, began tattooing extensively. After years of traveling around the United States and Europe, tattooing on the move, Sizemore settled in New York City and established his home base. At his private studio, Tear Drops, Sizemore continues to tattoo alongside a consistent pursuit of fine art painting and sculpting.
Francisco Tavoni (b. 1986, Caracas, Venezuela) uses photography as a way to collectively understand the power of affection. He addresses the ego and the generation of identity as a process that can –and furthermore should– occur within the body instead of outside of it, without the predominance of outer patterns. Tavoni sustains it’s in this realm where genuine identity is formed, in the depths of oneself, where no exterior norms apply.
Hailing from Venezuela, Tavoni has traveled earth to find authenticity in identity, moving across various different bodily shapes, regardless of gender, race or wider cultural background. Humans, he says, are subject to many outside influences that can corrupt what happens within – he then vouches for the search of meaning in separate processes from that which is socially accepted or even pushed to the forefronts of society.
In his images, veiled by delicate fabrics, human forms connect unbound by the confines of identity. With his nouveau lighting technique, light is absorbed to reveal the inner patterns of the fabric – metaphorically the apex in which human beings interact. The amber and polka-dotted setting of his images point at once to his hometown of caracas as well as to the bundjalung country in Australia where Tavoni resides since 2011. The former denotes the palette: the red, warm and fiery earth of the Avila mountain defines the city’s landscape, a natural border between the urban valley and the wild caribbean sea. The latter hints to the influence of aboriginal art techniques which traditionally use dot painting to conceal ancient sacred meaning from the colonising threat of the west. In Tavoni’s work, subtle tactile gestures coexist with movement, dance and choreography in images that lack the traditional signifiers of identity, to speak of the wider strength of embracing humanity, free from the boundaries of imposed stereotypes. Tavoni lives and works in Berlin, Germany.
Wade Tullier (b.1988, Baton Rouge, Louisiana) is a visual artist working primarily in ceramics and sculpture. His work and process are heavily influenced by storytelling and being raised within the landscape of southern Louisiana.
Tullier holds a BFA from Louisiana State University and an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art. He has exhibited nationally and internationally, with recent shows in Miami, Chicago, and Detroit. His work is included in ‘With Eyes Opened: Cranbrook Academy of Art Since 1932’ at the Cranbrook Art Museum and is included in ‘Clay Pop’ at Jeffrey Deitch New York. Cranbrook Art Museum, Detroit, MI, The Progressive Art Collection, Jorge M. Pérez Collection, John Marques Art Collection, Miami, The Bunker Art Space, Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection, West Palm Beach, FL. Tullier is represented by Primary in Miami.