Praz-Delavallade, Paris

With numerous art schools, working artists teaching, prestigious museums and younger new institutions, Los Angeles has emerged as a new capital for creation within the visual arts. Since its creation, Praz-Delavallade has been committed to providing a platform to a lot of emerging and established LA-artists within Europe, and to creating a dialogue between European artists and artists from Los Angeles.

For its first participation to ART-O-RAMA Praz-Delavallade will present a group of works that is coherent with these axes that have been defining the identity of the gallery. The gallery therefore decided to confront the positions of two confirmed Los Angeles artists with two emerging Los Angeles positions.

Jim Shaw (born in 1952) belongs to a generation of American artists who have influenced the culture on the West Coast since the late 1980s. His work is full of elements of American popular culture and countless references to so-called highbrow culture. Sam Durant (born in 1961) explores the realms of pop culture, history and memoralization in order to question the values of American society. Joel Kyack’s (born 1972) interdisciplinary work is tapped directly in the precedent of Paul McCarthy, Chris Burden and Mike Kelley. Exploring Americana through performances, sculptures and drawings, Kyack brings forward a celebration of the body as object, and the DIY American spirit of agency. Ry Rocklen’s (born 1978) process-based studio practice seeks to illuminate the inherent singularity of the readymade. Collecting cast-off objects from the streets, dumps or thrift stores, he transforms them into sculptures charged with an eccentric delicacy that gives them a second, more poetic life.

http://www.praz-delavallade.com