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# are you dead, yet? – Horst Ademeit, Jason Eberspeaker, Kahlil Robert Irving, Mira Schor (Works)
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# Selected Works
## Horst Ademeit, Jason Eberspeaker, Kahlil Robert Irving, Mira Schor
are you dead, yet?
January 11 – February 17, 2018  if ($exhibition\_opening) : ?
Extended to February 17
endif; ?
## are you dead, yet? – Horst Ademeit, Jason Eberspeaker, Kahlil Robert Irving, Mira Schor Press Release
Thomas Erben Gallery is pleased to present *are you dead, yet?*, a group exhibition of artists whose work fervently apprehends the world as a domain of powerful, intransigent, often fickle forces that threaten to destabilize our collective and individual economic, environmental, political and spiritual equilibriums. Encompassing painting, sculpture and photography, *are you dead, yet?* reveals Horst Ademeit, Jason Eberspeaker, Kahlil Robert Irving and Mira Schor to be nevertheless united by a resonant approach to art, all of them stirred into action by an irrepressible awareness that life is complex and needs to be confronted. Incorporating, embracing or absorbing the realities of our fraught contemporary moment, the works by these artists reflect the urgencies of living in a fateful, precarious time.
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## Reviews
* Heike Moras, January 25, 2018 | 
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# Hard Sauce – Hanneline Røgeberg (Works)
## Hanneline Røgeberg
Hard Sauce
September 14 - November 4, 2017  if ($exhibition\_opening) : ?endif; ?
## Hard Sauce – Hanneline Røgeberg Press Release
Thomas Erben is pleased to present his first solo exhibition with Oslo-born, Brooklyn-based painter Hanneline Røgeberg. In the exhibited paintings, the artist works with traces of local, factual and personal narrative, exceeding these details in works that push against their own structural limits as records, as paintings, and as codes.
The exhibition includes a selection of earlier works that serve to highlight Røgeberg’s engagement with figuration. In Baldwin (2010), the artist paints a figure from the chest up, standing with arms behind its head. The warm tones of the subject’s flesh are scraped back and forth across the surface of the painting, with a haze of non-descriptive brushmarks pushing forward towards the upper center. Balzac VI (2008) exhibits a similar treatment, where the cropped form of a softly modeled torso is squeegeed and loosened in broad swathes. In scraping down these images, Røgeberg brings both material and felt presence to the surface, losing control and gaining intimacy in the same gesture. In Balzac V (2008), the title becomes a pun in a close-up rendering of testicles – a symbol conjured everywhere, but which cannot itself be a metaphor for anything else. The disturbed paint surface resists a distant reading of the image, making this maximally vulnerable object swing back in your face.
These formal distortions reappear in the larger work Thaw (2010). Here, thin washes and scratchy planes of gray paint establish a barren backdrop, against which a grouping of figures stands huddled. They are squeezed together, both in depiction and material, their bodies appearing as a single plume. The contour of their shape evokes the pressed and transferred masses of paint in Røgeberg’s paired works, a similarity that is striking in a painting like 24th of October to 9th of February (2014). Against a field that fades from cool gray to warm beige, a mass of flesh tones is scraped across itself, pulling the eye to the painting’s surface. Echoing the inkblots of a Rorschach test, its instability undermines a fixed reading.
In the most recent works, paired paintings depict places of decisive events that are linked by their shared histories. The two canvases may start with images of the same site in different years, or nearby views within the same time-frame, as is the case in the backgrounds of Zuccotti Park in Bigger half, flat and Bigger half, raised (both 2013). On top of one of these cityscapes, the artist has applied an additional massed form, which she then presses unto the other, transferring a hazy echo of pigment between the works and charging one with the imperative of the other. The obfuscation by these slippery forms enacts distance from the images beneath, partially concealing and filtering them into a possible new interpretation. Røgeberg pulls away from factual specificity, with the opposing images resonating with and against one another.
Throughout Røgeberg’s paintings, visual systems are treated as codes to be used and reused, manipulated, or coopted until their flaws are revealed. By addressing the trauma of history as something that is subject to alteration and concealment, these “unmade history” paintings distrust fixed meanings and highlight their potential for inversion and repetition. They embrace painting with all its inadequacy, whether material or logical, literal or formal, as a means of resisting the unconsidered reproduction of preexisting codes.
# Art Basel Miami Beach: Mike Cloud (Works)
## Mike Cloud
Art Basel Miami Beach: Mike Cloud
December 1 - 5, 2016  if ($exhibition\_opening) : ?endif; ?
## Art Basel Miami Beach: Mike Cloud Press Release
Thomas Erben Gallery is excited to announce its participation in the Positions section of **Art Basel Miami Beach** with a presentation of Brooklyn-based painter **Mike Cloud**. The booth features new painted constructions and works on paper that address painting’s entangled relationship with death, particularly with death by hanging. Cloud’s paintings are each balanced on one corner, partly suspended from the wall by a leather belt, evoking individuals who have died by hanging, whether by committing suicide, as murder staged as suicide, or by auto-erotic asphyxiation.
In Mike Cloud’s paintings, store-bought stretcher bars are assembled into irregular, multi-layered structures into which the artist glues and staples canvas. By stretching the cloth into these shapes, Cloud creates a fractured surface that ruptures the conventional pictorial space. As the title of the series, *Death by Hanging* refers to individuals who have died in this manner, a motif that is reflected in the names drawn on collaged strips of paper. While the works point towards specific suicides, they also suggest that all paintings relate to death, in that paintings occupy the sacred space of the wall – a space where nothing lives. This uncanny affiliation is represented in popular culture in murder mysteries and paranormal contexts, where the eyes of a painting may be seen to move; or, in painting’s relationship with mirrors, portals to an ethereal realm that are covered after a death.
In their layers of stretchers held tense by rabbit-skin glue and stapled cloth, the sculptural works depict a range of vibrant symbols and gestures, framed by dabs of excess paint wiped from brushes onto the bars. Cloud’s works do not produce an illusory image over a concealed support, but rather present their materials as recognizable – emphasizing their trade value and the literal cost of materials. In summoning their origin rather than their potential, the paintings deny any aspiration to be priceless, instead presenting their materials as commodities. In upending these conventions, the space behind the painting is turned outwards. Rather than producing an imaginary political space, Cloud’s paintings pull away from the wall, intruding into our own space.
While Cloud employs a wide variety of mark-making and symbols, the work *S of B* is covered in repeated cube and cloud-like motifs. Painted in predominantly yellow and ochre hues, the forms are executed in a wet-on-wet technique. They cannot be singled out or counted, and are partly lost as they blend into one another. The hazy clouds appear as if concealing something – whether light, or enlightenment, or God is unclear. In another work, *F of J*, soft marks suggesting fireworks or explosions spread across the surface, each constrained within its own small panel. These isolated spaces contain their own gestures and their own shifting colors. In playing with the pigment, Cloud infuses his abstract elements with a spirited vivacity.
Included within the presentation are three smaller works on paper. In each of these collaged works, Cloud dissects a single page from a photographic monograph, one each of Mapplethorpe, Hamilton, and Kern. The depicted forms are broken apart, and the text from the pages is scrambled. In realigning the contents of each page, Cloud does not produce a new image. Rather, he breaks apart their structure, making their content legible in a new way. This understanding of collage aligns with Cloud’s analytic approach to painting that, when combined with his interest in social conditions and history, thrusts his work into the broader political sphere.
After studying at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Mike Cloud earned his MFA from **Yale University** in 2003. His work has been extensively shown, at venues such as **MoMA P.S.1**, **Marianne Boesky Gallery**, **White Columns**, **Max Protetch**, **Apexart**, and was included in *Frequency* at **The Studio Museum in Harlem** in 2006. Cloud has been reviewed in the **New York Times**, **Art in America**, **Art Review,** and was named one of **Time Out**’s *10 artists every art fan should know about*. In addition to numerous reviews, his work was part of *Painting Abstraction* by **Bob Nickas**, Phaidon Press (2009). Cloud is currently an assistant professor at Brooklyn College/CUNY in New York.
# Weather Trust / Between Stars: Offer Balancing Scenarios – Ali Van (Works)
## Ali Van
Weather Trust / Between Stars: Offer Balancing Scenarios
February 23 - March 18, 2017  if ($exhibition\_opening) : ?endif; ?
## Weather Trust / Between Stars: Offer Balancing Scenarios – Ali Van Press Release
*Out there – to harness the ephemeral we reclaim a treatise of truth for all things taut + flexible*
*wake to stand free*
*skip a beat over silver strings*
*make mobile support to center body*
*fasten limbs to coordinate active periphery*
*with persons a place and particle things*
*grammar for a tree and hair mirroring wall*
*lift to let lay, sit to breathe to look up and out for all who sway and settle above.*
Thomas Erben Gallery is pleased to present *Weather Trust / Between Stars: Offer Balancing Scenarios*, the gallery’s first solo exhibition with interdisciplinary artist Ali Van. At the center of the show is an installation in which visitors are invited to hammer a nail into the walls of the gallery, adding a star into a collaboratively built constellation. In the relational structures that Van produces – in objects and situations – she questions how the experience of artwork can reflect our shared vulnerability, and how together we can find balance with each other.
In the main project, a network of stars grows while the show continues, as more individuals add golden nails into the gallery’s architecture. People who visit the gallery are integral in producing an expansive visual constellation, a representation of the personal connections that bind the artist and the social space of the gallery. These links are inscribed upon the wall, as participants record their names with a brush made from the artist’s own hair. Visitors are invited to reach for the stars and come together to produce a collective mark: making real time between hammer and nail, space between nail coordinates, and between walls to, as the artist describes, connect discrete beings for a weathered becoming.
Installed within the space are a number of other works in which Van playfully moves in and out of uncertainty. On one scroll marked on both sides, Van writes about what it would be like to become a mother in desertion, narrating the friction between biology and will. In a suspended mobile, Van invites the audience to attach items onto its precarious levitation of light weights, addressing the desire to find ourselves in relation to one another. Through image-objects, the artist plumbs the process of vision itself, incorporating blurs and washed color that evaluate periphery, suggesting the act of seeing as an open frame for time.
The show is generated through being present together, as this relational and social process is what invokes Van’s cumulative structures. Deeply inhabiting lightness, the artist and her audience move closer and farther within to create a space infinite in motion.