Leslie Sacks Contemporary is pleased to announce a two-person exhibition of paintings and sculpture by Los Angeles based painter, Charles Christopher Hill and New Mexico based sculptor, Tom Waldron. The exhibition will feature Waldron’s voluminous welded steel sculptures alongside Hill’s sleek acrylic paintings and distressed works on paper mounted on canvas.
Charles Christopher Hill’s recent acrylic paintings on canvas continue the visual vocabulary of his deceptively minimal, striped compositions, but are rescaled in new proportions with slender singular bands of red, black or blue against broad fields of white. Hill’s slick acrylic surfaces immediately evoke Los Angeles’ iconic Finish Fetish aesthetic while demonstrating a meticulous process. The build up of countless layers of a full spectrum of color yields something that is more object than painting. The exhibition will also include new works on paper mounted on canvas, which echo Hill’s distressed, stitched tapestries of newsprint and fabric from the 1970’s. The current works, however are something of an illusion, with their apparently tactile, weatherworn surfaces. In fact, they have a visually contradictory smooth finished surface. As always, Hill addresses concerns of surface and texture through experimentation with his process and materials. Charles Christopher Hill’s work is included in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; Musée des Beaux Arts, Angers, France; and the Total Contemporary Art Museum, Seoul, Korea among other encyclopedic modern and contemporary institutional collections.
This exhibition marks Tom Waldron’s first gallery presentation in Los Angeles, featuring sculpture ranging in size from 3 to 6 feet, fabricated with steel, wood and concrete. Waldron’s welded sheet steel sculptures are dense with their richly finished bronze patinas, but are conversely hollow within. These forms reference the most fundamental structures and vessels people build—boats, water tanks, buildings and pots. In addition to his anthropological and philosophical concerns, Waldron employs geometric ratios- strength to weight and surface area to volume. The resulting objects seem born-at-once, but in fact require months of model making and calculations. For Waldron, the forms are meditative, much like the process of welding itself, where one holds a position intently in balance, moving indiscernibly in response to a flame. As an independent sculptor (he does not work with a foundry), each studio Waldron has occupied has directly informed the progression of his work. The 80s and early 90s were a time of complete immersion for Waldron as he both lived and worked in his studio, a dilapidated warehouse in downtown Albuquerque. A studio move in the 90s led to working with new materials: adobe, concrete, wood and plaster all of which he was concurrently using to build his home. In his current light-filled studio, the work is attuned to subtleties in surface quality, color and the interplay of form and light. Tom Waldron’s sculptures can be found in public collections across the United States, including Scripps Hospital in La Jolla, California and Cedars Sinai Hospital, Los Angeles.
Leslie Sacks Contemporary is located at the Bergamot Station Arts Center in Santa Monica (2525 Michigan Avenue, Suite B6, Santa Monica, CA 90404). The gallery is open Tuesday-Friday 10-6 and Saturday 11-6. Please visit our website at www.lesliesackscontemporary.com and feel free to call us at 310 264 0640 or email: info@lscontemporary.com.
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