FRIEZE LOS ANGELES

Anat Ebgi is pleased to present a curated booth of works by Gloria Klein, Jordan Nassar, and Meeson Pae. The pairing of historically overlooked artists with artists from younger generations leads to interesting contextualization and new narratives. This presentation of Klein, Nassar, and Pae examines practices which utilize structures and systems as their primary approach to art making. Self-created, complicated, and varied parameters encourage results beyond imagination—invoking improvisation, entropy, and spontaneity. Each of the artists challenge conceptual notions of meaning and representation, relinquishing authorial control, and allow their artworks to emerge organically as consequences of sets of rules.

Gloria Klein’s (1936 – 2021) legacy of advocacy on behalf of women and lesbian artists, such as herself, has long been excluded from the art historical canon. Her systematic paintings and drawings from the 1970s are belied by their exuberant color and form. Klein developed systems and processes to experiment with palettes and compositions that result in intricate patterns ranging from the highly structured to the completely chaotic with every variation in between. The interplay of order and disruption plays a vital role in Klein’s practice, who came of age in 1970s New York. Klein’s slender hard-edged hatch marks of varying lengths were core to her expression. Like a single sewing stitch only makes one mark, collectively hundreds and thousands of them create intricate patterns and complex compositions.

Exploring heritage and homeland, Palestinian-American artist Jordan Nassar (b. 1985, New York, NY) explores landscape in a variety of forms rooted in traditional levantine crafts including woodworking, brass inlay, and hand glass bead sculptures. In many works Nassar adapts Palestinian tatreez embroidery (a patterned geometric cross-stitch) to reflect his hybrid upbringing and collaborates with craftswomen in the West Bank to create contemporary works. Nassar’s embroideries juxtapose regional motifs with imagined landscapes in a way that breaks with and expands upon the thousands of years old tradition. His practice is rooted in a linguistic and geopolitical field of play characterized both by conflict and unspoken harmony. Although Nassar continues to work within the inherent gridded structure of his embroidery cloth, the pieces for Frieze LA disrupt structure by expanding the landscapes and symbolic patterns across multiple panels.

Meeson Pae’s (b. 1979, Indianapolis, IN) multidisciplinary approach to painting and sculpture evokes the body and its relationship to technology. Drawn to the visceral, Pae explores interiors of the body as sensual architecture and machine, where fleshy soft bits and bodily fluids undulate and transform into otherness. The machine/body distinction is complicated further through her process. With the assistance of computer generated systems, Pae renders her compositions in three dimensions before painting them on canvas.Her imagery oscillates between representation and abstraction, micro and macro, biological and mechanical. Pae’s fluid gestures and undulating forms are used to create entangled, mysterious, asymmetric compositions where fleshy folds, dripping refractions of bodily fluids, and mechanical machine components create relationships and function symbiotically.