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ZONAMACO 2023
Summer Wheat | Merav Kamel and Halil Balabin -
Braverman Gallery is pleased to announce our participation in the 2023 edition of ZⓈONAMACO México Arte Contemporáneo, at the Centro Citibanamex in Mexico City. We will feature important works by American artist Summer Wheat (b. Oklahoma City, USA, 1977) and the Israeli duo Halil Balabin and Merav Kamel (b. Israel, 1987 and 1988), reflecting their different practices and research.We are especially thrilled to exhibit these artists and their new and recent work, aimed to create a contemporary language connecting ideas from the contribution of women across every aspect of society, to the unconscious, sex, mythology and current politics.Summer Wheat’s works are part of the series Cut and Paste from 2021. Each work is a mini-retrospective of sorts, as Wheat brings together disparate subjects, palettes, and formal qualities from her Beekeepers, Hunters, Gardeners, and Moneymaker series. Elements from these previous bodies of work are metaphorically “cut and pasted” to create new, densely layered compositions that visualize Wheat’s decades-long investigation into the historical documentation of women’s labor—and its absence.Halil Balabin and Merav Kamel present new and recent drawings and sculptures. Varying in sizes and material, the works represent an array of topics spanning the biographical, current events, mythology and the history of civilization.
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Summer Wheat, detail, Collision, acrylic on aluminum mesh, 119.4x172.7 cm, 2021 -
SUMMER WHEAT
Summer Wheat’s presented works are part of the series Cut and Paste from 2021. Each work is a mini retrospective of sorts, as Wheat brings together disparate subjects, palettes, and formal qualities from her Beekeepers, Hunters, Gardeners, and Moneymaker series. Elements from these previous bodies of work are metaphorically “cut and pasted” to create new, densely layered compositions that visualize Wheat’s decades-long investigation into the historical documentation of women’s labor—and its absence. Wheat’s narratives bear no specific time markers for the depicted events, but rather embody untold stories, revealing the whole truth behind the contribution of women across every aspect of society. Collision, the centerpiece of the exhibition, portrays female hunters, gardeners, and money makers (represented through currency) at varying scales, densely packed within the picture plane. Here, Wheat subverts the traditional portrayal of women as objects of desire and beauty and offers a more complex representation of femininity. Her subjects are depicted as breadwinners and caretakers who carry a heavy load for their communities while also enjoying the earthly pleasures of their lives.The works featured in Cut and Paste originated as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic and the time it offered for self-reflection. Looking back at her own practice, Wheat was inspired to create paintings that visualized the connective thread that runs through each serie— women, their buried stories, and the artist’s unrestrained utilization of color, line, and form. Drawing from a variety of art historical references, including Egyptian pictography, Native American art, medieval art, and 18th- and 19th-century paintings and etchings, this series is both contemporary and historical. Cut and Paste is, in essence, a compilation of all of the roles women play in Wheat’s vast universe. By bringing them together, the artist unifies these women into a powerful network, working together within a single narrative world. -
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Biography
Summer Wheat (b. 1977, Oklahoma City, OK) is known for her vibrant paintings, multifaceted sculptures, and immersive installations that weave together the history of materiality, figuration, and abstraction in both fine art and craft milieus. Each series engages individual and collective human experiences drawn from historical and contemporary sources, mediated through a variety of references ranging from ancient art and medieval tapestries, to etchings from the Renaissance, to modernist abstractions. Wheat’s work examines various manifestations of labor, leisure, commerce, and class through the depiction of numerous figures and archetypes such as farmers, hunters, beekeepers, gardeners, weavers, bankers, and movie stars. The artist’s densely populated “scapes” envision worlds where time seems to have collapsed and every person, regardless of social status, occupies a shared/equal space, in which both labor and leisure are paths to healing humanity. Using a tongue-in-cheek type of humor inspired by comic strips, Wheat subverts conventional hierarchical structures and stereotypes to create more expansive depictions of daily life throughout history.For Wheat, labor functions as both a conceptual and formal connective thread that runs throughout her oeuvre. This relates to her labor-intensive process of making a painting, the term’s definition, as well as its historic visual representation. Wheat’s work often employs the visualization of labor as a tool to expose gender and class inequality. For example, in Swamp Hunters (2017), two women carry a large net filled with their game from the day—rabbits, turtles, boars, and a large bobcat. The women are bent over with the net thrown over their shoulders, the weight of the load is palpable in their tired expressions. In the background is a dense network of foliage that the women are traversing through, giving the viewer a sense of the difficult environment they must navigate to survive. Inspired by medieval tapestries and historical tableaux in which human figures often contend with the natural world, Wheat depicts the successful aftermath of the hunt rather than the battle. By omitting the violence of the kill, she conflates the traditional hunter and gatherer roles, giving them equal footing.A signature aspect of Wheat’s work is her expressive use of color and unique method of building a painting, which integrates various tools, from her fingers, to syringes, to plastic scrapers, to cake decorating paraphernalia.Using vibrant, almost fluorescent colors of acrylic paint, she combines multiple physical techniques— pushing paint through wire mesh, painting directly onto a heavily impastoed surface, or applying select embellishments—that require her to move around her canvas, working both vertically and horizontally, on the front and the back of each piece.Wheat’s methods and engagement with the emotive nature of color embrace intuition and felt experience over conventional reason and logic, destabilizing the boundaries between figure and ground, representation and abstraction, portrait and landscape, and fine art and craft. The result is tactile, vivid work that engages process, form, and narrative equally, creating layered, non-linear compositions that offer alternative versions of history, mythology, and folklore.Wheat received a B.A. from the University of Central Oklahoma and an M.F.A. from Savannah College of Art and Design. Solo exhibitions of her work have been organized at the Mint Museum, Charlotte, NC (2021); Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO (2020); KMAC Museum, Louisville, KY (2019); Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles, CA (2018); Smack Mellon, New York, NY (2018); Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle, WA (2017); and Oklahoma Contemporary, Oklahoma City, OK (2016). Select group exhibitions featuring her work include,Yaro Pickers, Harper’s Books, New York, NY (2020); Summer Wheat and Hirosuke Yabe, Wasserman Projects, Detroit, MI (2019); America Will Be! Surveying the Contemporary Landscape, Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX (2019); The Magnetic Fields, Gio Marconi, Milan, Italy (2019); SEED, Paul Kasmin Gallery, New York, NY (2018); More Material, Salon 94, New York, NY (2014); Expanding the Field of Abstraction, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA (2013-14); beyond the stretcher, deCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, Lincoln, MA (2013); and Paradox Maintenance Technicians: A comprehensive technical manual to contemporary painting from Los Angeles and Beyond, Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, CA (2013). Wheat’s work is in numerous public and private collections, including the Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA; Peréz Art Museum Miami, Miami, FL; The Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington, Seattle, WA; The Mint Museum, Charlotte, NC; and the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, KY. Wheat has received several awards and prizes including, the Northern Trust Purchase Prize at EXPO Chicago (2019) and the New York NADA Artadia Award (2016). -
Merav Kamel and Halil Balabin, detail, Painter and his model, Fabric and wood, 38x55x70 cm, 2019
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Merav Kamel and Halil Balabin
Balabin and Kamel’s paintings are gathered into one unintentional, intuitive and continuous mural painting. It is a broken narrative, like doing a puzzle without knowing the final image. Each painting has lines that go beyond its paper, and only in the adjacent painting can you know its course. Their technique of infinite and continuous painting allows them to create numerous points of view that challenge the law of the “scientific” perspective. It aspires to be a realistic description, in the sense that it describes our overall experience of the world, like a scroll, a diorama, a Byzantine, Egyptian, Japanese or Persian painting before the invention of the linear perspective.The painted figures blend with one another, flow from one thing to the next, object and subject blur, chaos against order. The technique of engraving a soaked paper with watercolors requires high concentration and intuitive work, like a Zen drawing.The fabric sculptures of Kamel and Balabin are a result of a slow and concentrated learning of what can and cannot be done with material. They represent an array of topics spanning the biographical, current events, mythology and the history of civilization. Varying in size, these lanky figurines are sewn and crafted by hand and appear solo or in ensembles – mostly personifications, but sometimes monstrosities or beasts.They echo folkloric traditions of doll craft which the artist’s turn into a contemporary language connected to ideas of the unconscious, sex, mythology and current politics. The stitched bodies speak of cheeky jokes, witticisms, wordplay, and twisted historical quotes. The cautious handcraft of the sculptures and their tenderly made attributes mixed with a sometimes crappy human truth they depict, creates a contradiction. Sweetly seductive, and then thought provoking. -
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Merav Kamel and Halil Balabin
Sabzi, 2023Engraving in aquarelle on paper
380 x 228 cm
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Biography
Merav Kamel (born in 1988, Israel) and Halil Balabin (born in 1987, Israel) live and work in Tel Aviv. They received their BFA from Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem (Kamel in 2012, Balabin in 2014).They have been working together since 2012. Their interdisciplinary work shifts among different techniques and practices, from hand-sewing hybrid figures, to drawing, painting, sculpture and site-specific installations. Their research investigates human society and modern culture through a provocative yet ironic practice – at times surrealistic and folkloristic, but also critical and serious – that focuses on gender issues, sexuality, power and control, and represents fears, weaknesses and desires of our contemporaneity.Their work has been exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including: Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Buchum Museum, Germany; Tel Aviv Museum; Bat Yam Museum; Herzliya Museum; Brno house of art, Czech; Pram Gallery, Prague; PM gallery, Dusseldorf; Circle 1 Gallery, Berlin; Untitled art fair, Miami; Artport, Tel Aviv; Dada Museum, Ein Hod; Ha’Kibbutz Gallery, Tel Aviv; Givon Gallery, Tel Aviv; Basis Gallery, Herzliya; Inga Gallery, Tel aviv; among many other venues.Their work is included in many public and private collections such as the Tel Aviv Museum of Art; the Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Philara collection; Carry and Dan Bronner collection; Discount Bank collection; Roni and Allen Baharaff collection; Shoken collection; Ann and Ari Rosenblatt collection; Dubi Shiff collection and other private ones.Both were awarded from Beatrice S. Kolliner Award for a Young Israeli Artist, Israel Museum, Israel Ministry of Culture, Young Artist Award (Kamel in 2018, Balabin on 2016); Artis Grant for Exceptional Work in Uncertain Times; “Elhanani” Prize from Bezalel Academy of Art; America-Israel cultural Foundation award for extraordinary artistic achievement.
ZONAMACO 2023: Summer Wheat | Merav Kamel and Halil Balabin
Past viewing_room
