The Collective: New York State of Mind

by Kelli Armstrong

The Art Scene in New York has been breaking creative ground long before Patti Smith was hanging out at Andy Warhol’s Factory. But now it’s not just locals finding success in the industry… we meet five Australian gallerists curating in the city.

Caroline Tilleard Co-Director, Cuevas Tilleard Projects, Lower East Side. Opened: December 2013

After meeting at New York’s famed Upper East Side space Skarstedt Gallery where they both worked, Caroline and Anna Maria Gonzalez Cuevas found a shared love of emerging art and launched a pop-up exhibition, Changing With The Stars, before securing a permanent space.

“Our focus is to put the artists and young collectors together so everyone can champion each other,” says Caroline.

The Space

The two-story, white-walled space is located on Manhattan’s Lower East. It’s a really supportive community. The works we show are sold for between US$2000 and US$5000 because we’re looking at attracting young collectors; our peers who want to acquire affordable art.

How Did You End Up in New York?

I studied architecture in Melbourne but realized I didn’t want to work as an architect so I came to New York in 2009 and studied art history and art business. I got an internship at MoMA in the painting and sculpture department and worked on a Picasso show. That’s the moment I decided I wanted to stay.

How Are the Opportunities Different Here?

New York really is the centre of the art world. The number of artists, galleries, museums, auction houses and art fairs that exist here is amazing! People travel to New York to make art, to see art, to sell art - at all different levels. I get to venture into Brooklyn warehouses to visit studios of recent MFA grad students, to hang out with the artists of my generation. I don’t know how I would do this at home.

Where Would You Send Visitors to in NYC?

I always send people to some ‘hidden’ art spots in Soho (a break from shopping!) - Walter De Maria’s Earth Room and Broken Kilometer.

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by Ona Abelis, Editorial Apprentice

Argentine painter Matias Cuevas plays with fire, and the result is glorious—as seen in his dramatic, eye-catching solo show titled The Fire in the Mirror that quietly opened at the Lower East Side’s Cuevas Tilleard Projects on Thursday (on view until June 28th). Partly the result of an epiphany Cuevas had in a hardware store and partly a nod to Cuevas’ classical training, the twelve paintings are a unique exploration beyond the traditional boundaries of medium. Using everyday items like buckets and household carpeting alongside acrylics and paint thinner (plus the aforementioned fire), Cuevas transforms a familiar texture (carpet) into a series of unexpectedly striking, polychromatic works of art.

Wall Street International: Painting Problems

Cuevas Tilleard Projects is pleased to present Painting Problems , an exhibition of work by Andrea Bergart, Benjamin Edmiston, and Jason Karolak.

This exhibition brings together three artists who invest their everyday contemporary painting performance with a selfconscious modernist attitude. By deliberately calling attention to the inevitable limits and flatness of their canvases, Bergart, Edmiston, and Karolak ask the viewer to appreciate and focus on the act of painting itself.

Painting Problems highlights trouble-making as an essential value and attitude to the ever developing conversation around painting and to the tradition of the medium itself. At work in their studio, Bergamot, Edmiston, and Karolak carefully define a set of rules, constructing boundaries and barriers. Yet as soon as these structures are in place, each artist willfully works to break what they created.

Spatial ambiguity, mark-making strategies, and the routine (continual) ambition to try to create depth on a flat surface are - for all three of them - nothing but a starting point. And while their conceptual or formal narratives exist in total isolation, Bergart, Edmiston, and Karolak share a common optimism for the possibilities of the medium itself. They are using painting as a playful and dynamic form of self-expression, rather than a medium to achieve absolute truth. If any sense of truth arises, it is their individual commitment to the everyday performance of painting.

Painting Problems , in the end, might not be so much about finding neither absolute or provisional solutions but exploring personal ways of expression in an ever flattening contemporary cultural landscape.

The artists will be present for an opening reception on Thursday, March 26 from 6:30 to 9:30pm.

Billabout: Chancing With The Stars

Pablo Picasso said the purpose of art is to wash the dust of daily life off our souls. By Thursday, most of us living in the world’s cultural capital start feeling a little dusty, which is why we suggest you wash your soul with some art (and a drink!) to celebrate the launch of independent pop-up gallery Cuevas Tilleard Projects. It’s the work of Australian Caroline Tilleard, a Melburnian in New York since 2009, and her American colleague Anna Maria Cuevas. When it comes to art, these ladies know the score: Caroline has both a Masters of Architecture and of Art History, while Anna Maria majored in Art History at Williams College. They both have day jobs at Skarstedt, a secondary-market contemporary art gallery on New York’s Upper East Side, but have teamed up to find the best and brightest young emerging artists through Cuevas Tilleard Projects. In curating a series of short-run exhibitions, they hope to squeeze their favorite collector friends, favorite artworks, and favorite artists into temporary spaces downtown for pop-up events. The first of these is ‘Chancing With The Stars,’ an exhibition of work by Matias Cuevas, Rob Davis and Max Warsh. The artists will be present at the opening party on Thursday night, so you can learn more about their work by discussing it with them, or with Caroline and Anna Maria. They love art even more than they love dressing up like Wayne and Garth.