Image via Complex Original
RH Contemporary Art, launched by Restoration Hardware, is exhibiting the work of new artists in New York today. Starting on Nov. 9 and running until Jan. 25, five different artists, Nathan Baker, Toby Christian, Peter Demos, Samantha Thomas and Natasha Wheat, will each have solo shows at RH Contemporary Art's Chelsea location. These innovative artists work in multiple mediums and have shown their work numerous times. While they work in distinct styles, they all use a limited color palate to comment on image creation in an abstract or conceptual manner. Learn about these Five Emerging Artists From RH Contemporary Art before you check out the show.
RH Contemporary Art opens in New York on Nov. 9, 2013 and is open until Jan. 25, 2014. The exhibition is located in Chelsea at 437 West 16th Street. It will be open six days a week, Monday through Saturday, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.
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Natasha Wheat
Age: 32
From: Los Angeles, Calif.
Natasha Wheat has a Masters of Fine Arts in Sculpture from the California College of the Arts and Bachelors in Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Now a New Yorker, she is a very multi-faceted artist. Some of her exhibitions include shows at the Museum of Folk and Craft Art in San Francisco, the Kadist Art Foundation in the same city, Clarke Gallery in Berlin, and Chicago's Mess Hall. She had her first museum exhibition at Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art in 2010 where she created a work that lasted seven days and involved audience involvement to understand how historic citrus gardens could be used to explore themes such as social status and agriculture.
Natasha Wheat's exhibition for RH Contemporary Art is called "Field Without Color." It is an almost Rothko-esque series that uses intense solid blocks of fabric and pigments. She explores the tension between industrial and organic through her choice of materials: carbon, bone char, graphite, and silk. This minimalist series invokes a meditative stillness in the viewers, which resonates through the atmosphere around the pieces.
Samantha Thomas
Age: 33
From: McAllen, Texas
Thomas is currently based out of LA. She graduated from the Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, Calif. in 2004. Her solo exhibitions have taken place at LAXART, New York's Mike Weiss Gallery, Patricia Faure Gallery in Santa Monica, and New Gallery/Thom Andriola in Houston. Aside from her solo exhibitions, her work has been shown at MOCA, L&M Arts in Venice, Calif., and Miami's Fredric Snitzer Gallery.
Thomas explores modern urbanism and cities in her series for RH Contemporary Art called "Landscapification." She distorts and plays with canvas, paint, enamel, sandpaper, and thread to create an abstract topographical map of Los Angeles. The series tests the boundaries of painting, sculpture, and the urban landscape with her three-dimensional pieces. The pieces are minimal in color but create a maximum impact. The juxtaposition created between the man-made and the natural in a city in one monochromatic form takes this series to the next level.
Peter Demos
Age: 31
From: White Ridge, Colo.
Brooklynite Peter Demos is an alumnus of the CUNY Hunter College and the Kansas City Art Institute. His solo exhibitions have taken place at his native city's The Journal Gallery and David Richard Contemporary in Santa Fe, N.M. He has also exhibited his work with other artists all over the country in places in New York like Deitch Projects, The Sculpture Center, and Mixed Greens. Demos has already started a very promising career and received recognition from the 2011 Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation Studio Residency and the 2009 Tony Smith Award.
In his exhibition for RH Contemporary Art, Demos uses layering to blend traditional painting and digital image creation in a way that is so simple yet so complex. His large abstractions are made with different shades of black dyes that create a beautiful consciousness of movement. Demos is a master of texture, tones and details. The more time one spends looking at one of his pieces, the more curious they become. It is the epitome of subtlety, but in a delicate yet captivating way.
Toby Christian
Age: 30
From: London, UK
Artist and Glasgow resident Toby Christian is definitely an emerging artist, both Frieze Magazine and Modern Painters Magazine have posted articles about that fact alone. Christian excelled at the Royal Academy School, London. His recent projects are "An Arrangement in White," at the XO Gallery in Leeds (2013), "Unseen Blows," at London's Seventeen (2012), and a reading called "The Lounge, The Book, The Routine," also in London (2012). Christian is currently working on a book called Measures. He will be working in New York this month before the RH Contemporary Art gallery opening.
Christian is the first participant in RH Contemporary Art's ongoing artist-in-residence program. Christian has two type of pieces—ones that go on the floor and ones that go on the wall. His floor pieces are an exploration of architectural forms to create a dialogue between the work and its location. His wall pieces are panels made from chalk, string and paint. They bring together his study of objects and spaces with text in a way that confuses but alters the viewer's perspective.
Nathan Baker
Age: 34
From: Grand Rapids, Mich.
Baker, an alumnus of Bard College and Columbia College, lives and works in both Brooklyn and Berlin. He is an up-and-coming artist with an international presence. His solo shows have taken place at Berlin's Galerie im Regierungsviertel, Prague's Objektiv Gallery, Prague, and Galerie Kaune in Poland. His other exhibitions include Kavi Gupta Gallery in Berlin and the Philadelphia Center for Photography. He is also one of the cofounders of The White Room Art Gallery.
Baker's RH Contemporary Art exhibition features a series of works that question the very nature of how images are created and what images are actually for. He uses multiple mediums (painting, photography, and performance) together to create organic forms that have a sort of rhythm. The monochromatic series uses materials like digital inkjet prints, tape, and sandpaper. To make these pieces, he literally uses his body to wrestle with them.