FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
The Box LA
Frieze London
Booth G4
Judith Bernstein, Simone Forti & Wally Hedrick
October 5 – 9, 2016
This year at Frieze, The Box LA will exhibit a selection of political work by Judith Bernstein, Simone Forti and Wally Hedrick. All three artists have created a very individual body of work over the past several decades; we have focused on each artist’s perspective of America’s involvement in war.
Over the past fifty years, Judith Bernstein’s (b. 1942) powerful feminist paintings and drawings address unjust war, represented by a larger-than-life phallus. Bernstein’s early work was inspired by the graffiti she observed in the men’s restroom at Yale University. Afterwards, Bernstein began making American flag drawings, considering the U.S. involvement in Vietnam. In all of these pieces, language was a key element – the vernacular was often scatological and full of rage.
Since the mid-1980s, Simone Forti (b. 1935) has been ‘dancing with the news’ – moving and speaking with piles of daily newspapers. Sometimes tossing the papers around the space while hurling her body with them, or delicately laying sheets of newsprint, like a blanket, on top of herself, Forti creates poetry from mass media, understanding abstracted events of the larger world through the movement of her own body. The Box will exhibit Forti’s drawings and a performative video related to this body of work entitled, News Animations.
Wally Hedrick (1928 – 2003) was an artist with strong ties to the San Francisco counterculture. A forerunner in conceptual art, Hedrick was included in the Sixteen Americans show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York early on in his career. In 1957, Hedrick began the series entitled Black Paintings – in which he covered previous works in a viscous coat of black paint – in protest to America’s early involvement in Vietnam; a series that he continued until his death in 2003.
For more information please visit our website at theboxla.com and/or email us at info@theboxla.com.