THE ART COLLECTION

Favorite Artists

Martin Mull, Steve's friend and a favorite artist

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The Toronto Star

3 Mar 2001

Daphne Gordon

 Marcel Dzama's quirky drawings are scooped up as quickly as he can produce them

   It's not often a gallery show sells out before it's even mounted on the wall.

 But it really shouldn't be much of a surprise when it comes to works by Marcel Dzama, the 26-year-old art star from Winnipeg.

 His freaky little drawings have been shown in such major art cities as New York, Los Angeles, Berlin and Stockholm and been bought up by the likes of Jim Carrey, Drew Carrey, Nicolas Cage, Steve Martin and Dave Eggers.

 And now, Canadians John Oravec and Roy Bernardi can add themselves to the celebrity-studded list of collectors.

 The pair, business partners from Sarnia who describe themselves as obsessive collectors of Canadian contemporary art, bought up every single piece in a show of 100 ink-on-paper drawings that's set to launch at the Olga Korper gallery today.

 And they did it before the drawings were even unpacked from the shipping crates.

 "We came in last week to see Olga about something else, on other business,'' says Oravec. ``We'd seen the work before and had talked about a big Dzama (purchase) . . . We loved it, so we bought it.''

 It's an urge that's not uncommon when people see Dzama's work, says Korper, who first spotted his drawings in Los Angeles three years ago and was struck with their humour and pathos.

 "He appeals to all kinds of people,'' she says. ``Museums collect him, corporations, individuals from all walks of life and socioeconomic groups. That's really unusual. So his popularity is built in.''

 And it's not unusual for collectors to buy several of his pieces, she explains, because they're small and priced accessibly at $400 (U.S) apiece.

 Each page-sized drawing hints at the peculiar and marvellous world inside Dzama's head. It's populated by a cast of anthropomorphic bats, kitty cats, robots and trees, as well as humans, some of whom wear costumes of strange varieties, including superheros, cowboys, bears and bunnies.

 Dzama captures these characters at moments of puzzling drama: A woman dressed in a Captain America-esque costume has sex with a laughing lion. A man gently kisses a naked woman emerging from a television. A tree in a tux puffs on an elegant cigarette holder. A bunny snickers while a young woman reveals her breasts.

 One can only imagine how these bizarre beings ended up in such outlandish situations, which is part of their appeal.

 But while the content is a whimsical flirtation with low-brow pop culture, Dzama's drawing technique is sophisticated and refined, with a sureness of hand that Korper describes as ``spectacularly good'' in some pieces.

 "Drawing is not unlike handwriting - it's very personal. And when you look at two or three of his drawings, you can't mistake that they're Dzamas. There's an odd magic to his work.''

 The pieces are interesting as individual works, but even more fascinating when displayed in a group, where the entire Dzama-esque cast of characters comes alive. They recur in different settings, apparently roaming around his little world, bumping into each other, interacting, then moving on to the next scene.

 Oravec and Bernardi, who have been collecting together since they became business partners in the '90s, plan to do something very unconventional with their Dzamas. They'll divide them, then display them at their respective homes just as they were when they bought them - in crates.

 The pair hopes to negotiate with the Plug In gallery in Winnipeg to purchase the large orange crates in which the drawings were shipped to Toronto.

 The rest will be stored unframed in drawers, says Bernardi, explaining that he's running out of wall space in the home he designed for his family in Sarnia.

 He and Oravec share a similar taste and, in their spare time, travel the world seeking out art. They collect mainly contemporary Canadians such as Joanne Tod and Paterson Ewen.

 Bernardi explains in simple terms why he likes Dzama: "It's fun.''

 Oravec agrees that the appeal is simple, describing the work as "fresh and new.''

 The international art world seems to agree.

 Dzama's show last year in New York sold out, and critics have gone googly-eyed, gushing about him in such publications as the New York Times and Art In America.

 "We like supporting Canadians, and he's making it internationally, so he's the best of both worlds,'' says Oravec.

 Dzama, who is scheduled to drop into the gallery today, was surprised when he heard his show sold out before it was even mounted.

 "I've sold out before, but never before a show opens. It's kind of crazy,'' said the artist in a phone interview just after he returned to Winnipeg from Stockholm, where a show of 120 of his drawings just opened.

 Since he began drawing these small works about four years ago, the University of Manitoba graduate has done about 5,000 pieces.

 As demand for his work gains momentum, Korper is glad he's prolific. She was able to procure about 50 more drawings, in addition to the ones in the show, to satisfy other buyers interested in Dzama's work.

 Some of the additional drawings were done very recently, Korper noted, guessing that Dzama's trip to Stockholm inspired a piece that includes a bit of Swedish writing.

 "Wherever he goes and whatever he experiences becomes his source material. His everyday life feeds the content.''

 Dzama, who has also done illustrations for Saturday Night magazine and will design an upcoming cover for the offbeat American literary quarterley McSweeney's, says comic book artist Jack Kirby has had a big impact on him. He has also looked to the simplicity of Inuit art for inspiration.

 But he can't really say where the absurd images come from.

 I usually don't like my explanations of my own work. I like to listen to other peoples','' he says. ``They usually have some weird twist on it that I find interesting.''

 CAPTIONS:

RENE JOHNSTON/TORONTO STAR OBSESSIVE COLLECTORS: Sarnia businessmen John Oravec, left, and Roy Bernardi reflect on the drawings they bought before Marcel Dzama's show even opened at the Olga Korper gallery. ABSURD OUTLOOK: Winnipeg artist Marcel Dzama is not sure where his freaky outlook comes from, but is interested in others' interpretations of his work.

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Friday, April 3, 1998

Leah Garchik's Personals

Leah Garchik

Martin Mull would wince at a news release about his new show of dreamlike figurative paintings at the Rena Bransten Gallery in San Francisco that says he's ``best known as an actor.'' Mull, who lives in Los Angeles, has bachelor's and master's degrees in fine arts and has taught painting on the college level. ``Of all the things I could see myself doing,'' he said this week, ``painting is the only thing that is a lifetime commitment.''

Most painters are forced to support themselves with other jobs, ``teaching, cab driving, frying shrimp at HoJo's,'' says Mull. ``As long as I have to do that, too, I couldn't ask for a better job than playing in show business two or three times a week. It's the best cab-driving job that I can think of.''

Although he's proud that his New York dealer signed him on without knowing anything of his show business career, Mull admits there are advantages to Hollywood connections. ``My compatriots are some of the few people I know who are depression-proof. They can buy art and tend to do so.'' Well-known art collector Steve Martin, for example, owns 31 Mull paintings. ``He's my own private Lorenzo Medici.''

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June 21, 2001 Thursday, Home edition

Features; Pg. 6D

Catherine Fox

When Tierney Gearon's photography exhibition opened Wednesday at the blue-chip Gagosian Gallery in New York, it was the latest milestone in a sometimes nightmarish fairy-tale career.

 In the past year and a half, the one-time model and fashion photographer has sold her pictures to actor Steve Martin out of the trunk of her car in the Caribbean island St. Bart, had her first exhibition at the prestigious Saatchi Collection in London and seen her nude photos of children Emilee and Michael in the tabloids as alleged child pornography.

 In a conversation from New York, where she was preparing for her show, Gearon seemed slightly dazed by it all.

 "It's quite shocking," said the 37-year-old Atlanta native, who has lived in London for a decade. "I never went to art school. I never thought any of this would happen to me. Basically I was just documenting a project on my family."

 Always a creative spirit, Gearon "fell into photography taking Polaroids of friends," said her father, retired real estate developer Mike Gearon. From there she became a fashion photographer. A few years ago, she made the unusual move of using members of her extended family, who had gathered at Sea Island, as models for an Italian Vogue spread.

 Gearon met influential collector Charles Saatchi through a friendship with his wife, Kay, and he saw and fell in love with Gearon's work. (He owns the works in the controversial "Sensation" exhibition that inflamed New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in 1999.) Saatchi bought 19 pieces and featured her in a group show, "I Am a Camera," in February along with such notables as Nan Goldin and Hiroshi Sugimoto. Some of the photos depicted her children, now 6 and 8, romping naked.

 The tabloids had a field day spreading reproductions of her photos across their pages. Gearon was afraid she might go to jail. She got famous instead.

 Interest piqued by the commotion, Gagosian representatives went to see the Saatchi show.

 "We were immediately excited about it," said Courtney Plummer, Gagosian's exhibition coordinator. "We thought it was an opportunity to work with someone fresh and new. We thought the work was important and intriguing enough to warrant a show at our New York gallery."

 Unschooled in the art world, Gearon said she's gotten advice from Atlanta dealer Jane Jackson.

 "I would love to show her work," Jackson said. "I think she's pulling on a lot of different people, but it's very fresh. It's very different from Sally Mann (who also photographs her children) --- less formal and also a lot freer. It has a loose documentary feel to it. It has a weird edge to it."

 "My photographs are about the moment, not the person," Gearon said. "I don't crop. I don't pose. I wait for something to happen."

 This is Gearon's moment. Clearly something quite amazing has happened to her. ON THE WEB: More on Tierney Gearon: www.gagosian.com "Untitled, 2000" by Tierney Gearon

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http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nyt/20010624/en/the_restless_american_on_ed_ruscha_s_road_1.html

Sunday June 24 08:31 AM EDT

Amei Wallach, The New York Times

For more than four decades, the artist Ed Ruscha has been taking the pulse of the America that lives at the outskirts of cities and at the edges of the American dream.

MIAMI -- IT'S an odd thing about Ed Ruscha. His cowboy charisma has done as much to muddy his artistic contribution as the fact of the place in which he has chosen to make it, Los Angeles. If you were going to cast an L.A. artist in a movie, you'd cast Ed Ruscha, even before you'd cast his old pal Dennis Hopper. Then you might look at the work.

If you were interested enough, you'd have traveled around the country for the last year investigating its intricate facets, and you'd have junked the simplistic L.A. modifier, along with a lot of the others that irritate Mr. Ruscha, like Pop, Western, Conceptual, hip. For more than four decades, he has been taking the pulse of the America that lives at the outskirts of cities and at the edges of the American dream.

The road runs through all his work, muse and metaphor for the all-American restlessness that makes Mr. Ruscha, now 63, one of a handful of triple-threat artists as fluent in printmaking and photography as painting.

He virtually invented the artist's book in its cheap, mass-produced American form (as opposed to the luxury livres d'artistes of Matisse and Picasso). It was 1962. He was spending a lot of time driving back and forth on the old Route 66, between Oklahoma City, where he grew up, and Los Angeles, where he'd moved in 1956 and begun attending the Chouinard Art Institute (now Cal Arts) about the time Jack Kerouac published "On the Road."

"Today the route is more supersonic, it's such a giant shopping experience, but then it was much more primitive, you could drive for miles and miles and not have to see anything," Mr. Ruscha told me when I caught up with him at the Miami Art Museum, the most recent stop for his traveling retrospective of paintings and artist's books.

He doesn't like the sound of his own voice, "too Okie," he says, but it's part of the package, which is laconic. You can see why with his down-home charm he'd be good at opening-night dinners. He met Magritte and Duchamp, knows Steve Martin, and his name has been linked with starlets and models. You think he's attentive, but it's an evasion tactic: he's really off somewhere else inside his head. He shows up "with my lunch pail," as he calls his painting regime, then acts surprised by all the attention.

Lately there has been a lot of it. A painting retrospective opens next Sunday at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, through Sept. 30, when it moves to Oxford, England (it was jointly organized by the Smithsonian Institution's Hirshhorn Museum and the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford).

Through Oct. 7, at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, a selection of Mr. Ruscha's prints celebrates the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco's acquisition of the entire archive of Mr. Ruscha's 325 prints and 800 working proofs. The museum bought the archive and negotiated for impressions of future prints with a $10 million gift from the Phyllis Wattis Purchase Fund. Just disbanded is an exhibition celebrating the catalogue raisonné of Mr. Ruscha's books and prints, organized by the Walker Art Center, which has been on the road since 1999.

At art school Mr. Ruscha studied commercial design and typography. In the middle of the night during one of his endless Oklahoma commutes, he decided he'd make a book called "Twentysix Gas Stations," and so, he says, "I started photographing gas stations."

"Twentysix Gasoline Stations" was printed in 1963, the first of his dumb, deadpan photographic essays that debunked hierarchies and have been so influential in Europe and America. "I consider my books to be one of my most important statements, and a rather deep statement," Mr. Ruscha says.

His books went on to catalog "Every Building on the Sunset Strip," "Thirtyfour Parking Lots," motel swimming pools, the banality, glamour and Edward Hopper bleakness of the everyday landscape, as encountered from a car. From beginning to end, Mr. Ruscha has been an artist of the American landscape, with the bravura of the Hudson River painters, although his take comes out of layout, design and signs seen passing obliquely at 60 m.p.h.

His America has buried its heart in the unlovely strips that were swallowing flat land and farms in the post-dust-bowl, postwar boom town of Oklahoma City. Billboards and suburbs sprouted overnight, hazing the big, flat sky with neon, and there were only the movies, hillbilly music and jazz to tell stories about what things meant or how they felt. "There was an emphasis on money- making futures and not enough on poetry or inner thinking," Mr. Ruscha recalls. For him, the promise of California was "a vibrant music scene, art scene, theater scene, the movie business, architecture."

The summer before he printed his first book, he made a painting of the 20th Century Fox sign, klieg lights behind it, in hard-sell graphic diagonals. "I liked the exaggerated cartoon perspective," he says, standing in front of the painting in Miami. "It seemed to have some kind of, maybe, goofiness to it, or simplicity, that I wanted." The next summer he painted "Standard Station, Amarillo, Texas" in the same huge, diagonal format; at roughly 5 feet by 10 feet it has the proportions of a Cinema- Scope movie screen or a 19th-century panorama.

"I wanted to have some trumpets in there without hearing or seeing the trumpets," he says. "So there's some kind of glory that this may suggest and something about the notion of traveling from one place to another and seeing new things. It's a way of exploring."

MR. RUSCHA grew up Roman Catholic. "I was an altar-boy wannabe," he says, deploying the throw-away Midwestern humor with which he defuses seriousness. He's familiar with icons and he's made his share, including "Standard Station."

"I kind of spring from Catholicism. I felt like I had this perspective from the church and going to mass that was an early childhood base for a lot of my thinking," he says. "Some of my work comes out of a quasi- religious thing. I was a believer for a while and then I began to see the hypocrisy."

In his signs and scapes, the glory is reduced to its commercial value, like life growing up in Oklahoma City, where "people would turn up the air conditioners in their cars and roll the windows down."

Such excess made as little sense as the biblical exhortations trumpeted from the local pulpit Heaven, Hell, Evil all words he has used in his work. In a commission for the Miami-Dade Public Library, he decorated the rotunda with a line from "Hamlet": "Words Without Thoughts Never to Heaven Go."

There's a lapsed Catholic's moral sting there, but in his enigmatic, slippery art he plays on the senselessness. "Well, I've always felt that absurdity and paradox is really where it's at," he says. "Nonsense can end up helping you make sense of things."

Very early, words took the place of objects in his paintings: "Boss," "Spam." In 1968 he made a silk- screen print of the back of the Hollywood sign, which he could see from his studio. "I used it as a smog indicator," he says. "If I could read that sign, the weather was O.K." He placed the sign against a murky bronze sky, an apocalyptic vision of the end of the rainbow. Nine years later, he made it into a painting.

Printmaking, long a boring academic medium in mid-century America, was suddenly very much alive again by the 1960's, with the appearance of innovative print studios on the East and West Coasts. Mr. Ruscha has worked in most of them. He'd found his way out of painting the soul-baring instinctive gesture of Abstract Expressionism by "pre-planning and pre-conceiving images," as he puts it. But in printing, he doesn't always have an idea when he accepts an invitation to work with a printer. "Sometimes the result will be a surprise," he says. In 1967, he began painting words that looked as if they were made with something other than oil paint (beans for "Adios," jelly for "Jelly"). But they weren't.

Then in 1969 came a breakthrough: he made an edition of paper stained with substances that disappeared (Los Angeles tap water, acetone, engine spot remover) and those that did not (Clorox, sperm, gunpowder, beer, chocolate). He packaged "Stains" in a box lined with silk moiré and stained with his own blood. This led to the 1970 silk-screen portfolio, "News, Mews, Brews, Stews & Dues," in which raw egg, chocolate syrup, caviar and so forth were squeezed through the screen like ink.

And that in turn led to the stained paintings of the 70's like "Very Angry People" (cherry stain on moiré), "Sand in the Vaseline" (equalized egg yolk on satin) and "Various Cruelties" (blueberry extract on rayon crepe).

Mr. Ruscha began showing at the legendary Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles in 1963. He had his first New York show in 1967 and joined the Leo Castelli Gallery in 1970. Castelli paid him a stipend, only rarely able to sell anything. It wasn't until a 1986 exhibition at the Robert Miller Gallery of Mr. Ruscha's spray-gun silhouette paintings that he sold out a show. The paintings of the early 90's, with the grain of old black-and-white film stock, recast his obsession with the overlooked mediums that deliver the messages by which so many Americans live in this case the scratchy film of his childhood.

By then the art market had crashed, and with it the print market, which has never recovered. Mr. Ruscha chose that moment to open his own print studio. Hamilton Press, named after its master-printer, Ed Hamilton, makes lithographs with artists like George Condo and Raymond Pettibon.

In San Francisco for the opening of his print archive earlier last month, Mr. Ruscha made seven new etchings at Crown Point Press. They are grids of San Francisco streets overlaid on the streets of Los Angeles. L.A. grids have been the subject of recent paintings, like minimalist maps of a teeming world. In other paintings he has superimposed those street names on improbably majestic mountains, escapist transcendental fantasies for the urban overwhelmed.

These days, Mr. Ruscha regularly drives the San Bernardino Freeway from his Los Angeles studio to a desert home two hours to the east. "Ten years ago the drive had scenery," he says. "Now it's all big auto malls." He keeps a pad by his side; he jots down ideas. They become prints and paintings, bulletins from a road that's always going someplace else.

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Nicolas Granger-Taylor b. 1963

Standing Nude 1994

oil on canvas

16 X 12 inches

The Steve Martin Collection, USA