frosch&portmann is pleased to present reCovered, a group exhibition with Rafael Grassi, Jessie Henson, Eva Lake, Thomas Lowe and Garrett Pruter.

Opening reception: Thursday, June 30 from 6 – 8PM

53 Stanton Street, New York, NY 10002 Summer hours: Wed – Sat, Noon – 6PM June 30 – August 21, 2011

reCovered brings together artists working with materials originally not intended for painting, gluing or cutting: Magazines, family photographs, shooting practice targets. The artists in the exhibition recombine and reinterpret their original found material and thus create a whole new imagery — a recovered picture. The works in the show play with the disappearance and fragmentation of the human figure; heads are covered with paint, faces pasted over, whole bodies cut out.

Rafael Grassi is a Spanish artist living and working in Switzerland. The male models in his modified fashion ads are faceless, headless or disappear all together. He carefully ‘paints out’ the most essential parts of the men, just to make them even more desirable and attractive. At the same time, the blank spaces add a vulnerable and ironic touch to these highly masculine images.

New York based artist Jessie Henson works with very personal material. Her collages consist of photographs from her family’s album. The family members are cut out and remain anonymous white silhouettes. The surroundings, typical interior designs of her childhood, become apparent and the main subject in Henson’s altered memorabilia.

In the early 70s, Eva Lake used to go to the rifle range late at night to steal practice targets. Around the same time, she was introduced to the first Interview magazines and was fascinated by the glamorous Hollywood beauties. The target has always been a prominent symbol in Lake’s collages. Now the Portland based artist is doing what has been in the back of her mind all along; she is focusing completely on “The Babe” and the target.

Thomas Lowe’s large-scale drawings are perforated with numerous peepholes, giving partial view of the collages pasted on from the back. What we see is either the artist’s own drawings or found imagery that compete with Lowe’s meticulous and detailed drawing style, showing accurate close ups of different body parts. Lowe (born in England, lives and works in New York) stimulates us with a filtered perception, his collages seem like brainwaves, like parts of a story — the viewer needs to imagine the rest.

New York based Garrett Pruter uses reprints of old LIFE magazine photographs for his collages. He cuts out triangular forms, which build up to a delicate meshwork, radiating from a red circular center. This red ball, painted on by the artist, covers details of the image that are essential to its understanding. Instead, unrelated pictures show through the grid from behind. Pruter combines different imagery; different times and worlds clash in his montages.