Featuring: Joanne Greenbaum Elliott Levine Aga Ousseinov Yuh-Shioh Wong

Both Joanne Greenbaum and Yuh-Shioh Wong explore sculpture as an adjunct to their primary medium of painting.

Joanne Greenbaum has been making “tabletop” sculptures in clay and sculpey, as well as porcelain, terra cotta and stoneware, for several years. The sculptures in this exhibition were produced this summer during a residency at Greenwich House Pottery, in New York City. Her most recent solo shows have been at greengrassi in London and Nicolas Krupp in Basel, Switzerland. She will be included in The Painted World at P.S.1/MoMA this fall, and The Triumph of Painting at the Saatchi Collection in 2006. She is represented by D’Amelio Terras in New York.

Yuh-Shioh Wong transposes some of the same concerns that inform her paintings – such as memory, landscape, abstraction, organic forms, psychological states, and so on – into the three dimensions of an object. The sculptures evolve organically, without premeditation, as she applies herself to the materials at hand. Whether with styrofoam, papier-mache, or found materials, Wong invents narratives straddling the difference between real and abstract. Her works evoke a sense of someone trying to explain to themself what they are looking at, as we are permitted to watch. She had her first solo exhibition at ATM Gallery in 2004, and has exhibited at Pierogi, Sixty-Seven, Deitch Projects, and Foxy Production. She is represented by Foxy Production, where a forthcoming solo exhibition will feature paintings. Concurrent to this exhibition Wong is participating in an exhibition at the Storefront for Art and Architecture.

Aga Ousseinov and Elliott Levine both devote their creative and artistic energies exclusively to sculpture.

Elliott Levine works in clay, with which he forms shapes that come close to evoking some recognizable object, but just as you think you know what it is it veers off into mystery. As with Greenbaum, he makes tabletop-size pieces, managing to make small seem large. The objects evoke the look of artifacts, treasures hauled from the deep, rusted and banged up. One can almost see the seaweed dangling from them. Though they begin as organic shapes, flora and fauna, they end in abstraction. Levine has spent the summer as an artist-in-residence at Yaddo, Saratoga Springs.

Aga Ousseinov was born, raised and educated in Russia. He has been living and working in New York City since 1992. His work investigates mechanical inventions throughout history, their misuse, their rediscovery and their change in status into artifacts. Assembled with simple materials such as wood, wire, cloth and plaster, cameras, planes and submarines are reincarnated as sculptures. While tampering with various fabrication processes, these works cross the border between Etruscan antiquities and Futurism, enabling the morphing of references into myth. He has exhibited his work both here and abroad, in 2004 in a solo exhibition at MC Gallery in New York City, and more recently at MC Gallery in a group exhibition; and this summer at the Polytechnic in Milan, Italy.