Reisig and Taylor Contemporary is participating in the San Francisco Art Fair taking place this week, Thursday April 25 – Sunday April 28, 2024, at Fort Mason. The gallery is presenting a group show—To Market, to market—with new works by San Francisco-based artist Xiao He (b. 1998, Chengdu, China), past works by gallery-represented artist Rudik Ovsepyan (b. 1949 Leninakan, Armenia), and homegrown works by objet A.D along with Chris Reisig and Leeza Taylor. The selected pieces range from raw, expressively produced paintings and drawings, to ultra-refined digital mixed-media works with visual simulacra.

Refinement, Repair, Consumption, Appropriation, Incarceration, Hallucination…. Derailing ordinary encounters with these general economic impulses that energize material and psychic connections between bodies and markets, this trip to the market brings works that directly and obliquely (or surreptitiously) address forces of consumerism, drives of taste. Of hunger, eating, and starving. Appetites plucking at all the threads of laten(t) capitalisms, singing choruses of the market: ‘To market, to market—jiggety-jig….’

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About He’s exhibiting painting It’s Our Turn to Eat (2024):

“Inspired by George Orwell’s 1945 novel ‘Animal Farm’, the painting depicts a group gathered around a table, sharing a feast. The identities of the figures around the table are left obscured. It is up to the viewers to decide: are they beasts or are they humans, and who exactly are “us”? The ambiguity is the metaphor for the cyclical nature of power dynamics and societal shifts throughout human history. The title was adapted from journalist Michela Wrong’s 2009 book, “It’s Our Turn to Eat: The Story of a Kenyan Whistleblower.” {Artwork Statement Courtesy of the Artist.}

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Xiao He (b. 1998, Chengdu, China) is a multidisciplinary artist currently based in San Francisco. Xiao holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a master’s degree from Carnegie Mellon University. Xiao’s works have been exhibited internationally, including 2022 Art Capital (Paris, France), 2021 Biennale di Genova (Genoa, Italy), Upstream Gallery (New York, USA), Huacui Contemporary Art Center (Shanghai, China) and Zhou B Art Center (Chicago, USA). Her artist interviews have been featured on Al-Tiba9 Art Magazine, VoyageLA, and Vogue China, along with residencies awarded at the Cubberley Artist Studio Program (2024) and Kala Art Institute (2023). Her mixed media artists’ book A Collection of Random Thoughts is now part of the permanent collection of Joan Flasch Artists’ Book collection in Chicago. Xiao is also a member of Oil Painters of America and served on the Apex Art New York jury panel. {Biographical Text Courtesy of the Artist.}

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Born in 1949 in Leninakan, Armenia, Rudik Ovsepyan became a member of the Artists’ Union of the USSR (CCCP) in 1982, eventually being banned for his refusal to paint in the propagandistic style of “social(ist) realism” (while continuing to produce and show abstract works). From 1966-1969, he attended Terlemesyan Fine Art College in Armenia. In 1974, graduated from the prestigious state State Academy of Theatre and Fine Arts in Yerevan. Facing the widespread destruction of the 1988 Spitak earthquake, as well the evolving political turmoil surrounding his abstract painting, Ovsepyan and his family moved (by boat) to Germany in 1990, where he became a member of the Fine Art Association of Germany (in 1994). There, several solo and group presentations of his work occurred in gallery, state, and museum exhibitions. In 2000, a major exhibition of Ovsepyan’s abstract works with oil and paper produced between 1996-1999 was presented by the German ministry of Education, Science, Research and Culture of Schleswig-Holstein (presented in Kiel). Later that year, Ovsepyan immigrated to the United States and began working on new bodies of work, including Labyrinth, Magaxat, and Zaun, while also beginning to produce mixed-media sculptures.

Ovsepyan’s works are included in public and private collections in Russia, Europe, Israel, Canada, and the United States, including: UNESCO, Geneva, Switzerland; Pushkin Museum, Moscow; Museum of Modern Art, Armenia, Yerevan; Museum of Modern Art, Georgia, Tblisi; Sparkasse Schleswig-Holstein, Germany; Sparkasse, Muenster, Germany; Provincial Versicherung; Bundesministerium der Verteidigung, Kiel, Germany.

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A Note on Economy:

In the context of art fair exhibitions such as this, Reisig and Taylor Contemporary organizes shows as direct encounters with the market, and therefore as a unique way of facing the public and the economy. As a gallery which aims to focalize the often absent political-economic context of exhibitions as part of the literal material of the gallery-space, it is important that the gallery takes-up the space of an art fair as an opportunity to critically engage the economic structures governing the transaction and circulation of artwork. The gallery takes the context of the market as a question of how artworks circulate and what it means for an artwork to become a financial object that is wholly attached to the work of art (or at least its significance), while also having almost no relation to the object or encounter in itself. Therefore, there is the question of the work of art “before and after” the market—before it becomes something else, somewhere else. This particular problem-place of vision, desire, object, consumption, and exchange structures the critical formulation of the gallery’s art fair exhibitions.