Aspect/Ratio is pleased to present Vampire’s Kiss, a new group exhibition featuring works by EJ Hauser, Erin Hayden, Albert Oehlen, Laura Owens, and Siebren Versteeg. The title is taken from a 2003 quote by the artist David Reed, in which he considers painting’s relationship to photography, new media, and other processes of mechanical reproduction. Reed declares that these technologies “have been like a vampire’s kiss that makes painting immortal.”

The exhibition will consider these implications more broadly and with a 21st century lens, featuring artists who variously utilize, reference, suggest, or sublimate computer aided gestures or digital visual motifs. By continually rethinking their own relationships to conventional painting and drawing processes, the artists in Vampire’s Kiss complicate traditional modes of abstraction and ideas of painterly surface. Computer screen-made marks are intermixed with hand-applied impasto, paper, fixed algorithms, found imagery, printed ink, stretched canvas, and drawn pencil, often leading to dexterous, complex compositional layers, pictorial pairings, seductive color mash-ups, or jubilant, untethered abstraction.

Erin Hayden is an artist based in Chicago. She received her MFA in Art Theory and Practice at Northwestern University in 2016. Her work and performances have been exhibited across the United States and internationally, including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2018, 2017); GAM – Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea and Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Turin (2017); Terrain Biennial, Chicago (2017); Mana Contemporary, Chicago (2017, 2016); Randy Alexander Gallery, Chicago (2017); Stony Island Arts Bank, Chicago (2016); Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago (2016), and Julius Caesar, Chicago (2016); among others. This summer, her work will be included in the major exhibition I Was Raised on the Internet at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.
EJ Hauser is an artist in New York City. Her work has been exhibited at Cheim & Read, Gavin Brown’s enterprise, Sperone Westwater, The Journal, and Regina Rex. In 2018, she will present her work in exhibitions at Yossi Milo Gallery, New York; Tops Gallery, Memphis; and Galleri Thomassen, Gothenburg, Sweden. Her work has been discussed in The New York Times, New York magazine, Art in America, and The Brooklyn Rail. She teaches at Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA), Hunter College, and Columbia University. This fall, she will serve as acting head of the painting department at the Cranbrook Academy of Art.
Albert Oehlen was born in 1954 in Krefeld, Germany. His work has been exhibited in major institutions across the world, with recent presentations including the Marciano Art Foundation, Los Angeles (2018); The Cleveland Museum of Art (2016); Whitechapel Gallery, London (2016); Museum Brandhorst, Munich (2015); the New Museum, New York (2015); Kunsthalle Zürich (2015); Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2014); Biennale di Venezia (2013); The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2012); and the Museum Contemporary Art, Chicago (2012), among many others. His works are included in numerous public collections, including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Broad, Los Angeles; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Saatchi Gallery, London; the De la Cruz Collection, Miami; MMK – Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt; and Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain, Strasbourg, among many others. His work can currently be seen in a major survey at the Pinault Collection’s Palazzo Grassi in Venice.
Laura Owens was born in 1970 in Euclid, Ohio. She is currently the subject of a major traveling retrospective exhibition that includes stops at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the Dallas Museum of Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Owens’s works are included in many public collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Dallas Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and the Tate Modern, London; among others. She currently lives and works in Los Angeles.
Siebren Versteeg was born in 1971 in New Haven, Connecticut. He received a MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2002. Versteeg’s works have been presented in solo and group exhibitions across the United States and abroad, with highlights including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; The Renaissance Society, Chicago; Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita, KS; the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus; DePaul Art Museum, Chicago; Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago; bitforms, New York; and James Cohan Gallery, New York; among many others. He is included in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Yale University Art Gallery, and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, among others. Versteeg currently lives and works in New York.

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Tags: Albert Oehlen, Aspect Ratio, Chicago, ej hauser, Erin Hayden, Laura Owens, Siebren Versteeg, Tyler Blackwell, vampires kiss, West Town