'Rise Over Run' and 'WILD WILD'

August 9 - September 6, 2019

St. Louis, MO — Monaco is pleased to present two exhibitions opening on Friday, August 9, 2019 from 7:00 – 10:00pm: Rise Over Run and WILD WILD.

Rise Over Run is a group exhibition that features Kansas City-based artists Marcie Miller Gross, Armin Mühsam, Warren Rosser, and Caleb Taylor. WILD WILD, a project by St. Louis artist Rachel Youn, will be presented in the Monaco Project Gallery. Both exhibitions run through Friday, September 6.

Rise Over Run

With their combined sensibilities for constructed space, four Kansas City artists present ‘Rise Over Run,’ an exhibition investigating the structural potential of site, structure, and the connections existing between their practices.  Each artist’s work is an extended dialogue with content raised by contemporary architecture – modularity, mass and void, physicality and site response – underlining the idea that all manners of art-making are acts of construction.  These concentrations for all four developed over a career of looking, thinking, and a passion for materiality: Rosser with geometric abstractions that make room for the gestural; Taylor and Miller Gross with compositions that each allude to architecture but go their separate ways with the content it expresses; Mühsam with work investigating the dynamics between landscape, representation, and abstraction.

The strongest common factor in the sculptor’s and the three painters’ diverse bodies of work is their preoccupation with the built form and an aesthetic that rewards close and sustained attention.  Their shared sensibility for shape, line, hue, interval, and edge is a result of their dedication to the modernist tenet that a painting or sculpture is first and foremost about the history of its making, and their insistence on the primacy of the perceptual way of experiencing art. Significantly, the three painters are also working three-dimensionally, while Miller Gross augments her sculptures with photography.  Together, they see their intersections as the foundation for exploring how an ensemble of their work can reflect and add to discourse regarding constructed environments.

Marcie Miller Gross has pursued her artistic and academic career in Kansas City since receiving her MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 1990.  Her accumulative objects, installations and drawings evolve from elemental, abstract form.  Through an incremental means of building with pliable, collected utilitarian materials, she examines the visceral relationship of mass and void, of physicality and weight, and the extraordinary within the ordinary.

Her work has been exhibited extensively including: Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen, Cranbrook Art Museum, Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, National Museum of Women in the Arts/Epsten Gallery, Dolphin, Byron Cohen Gallery, and Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art. She has received honors including: Charlotte Street Foundation Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts, ArtsKC Fund Inspiration Grant, Studios Inc. Residency.  Her work has been reviewed in numerous publications including:  Art in America, Outpost Journal, Sculpture, Art Papers, Review, Kansas City Star, and Politiken, Copenhagen, and is held in collections including American Institute of Architects/Kansas City, Daum Museum of Contemporary Art, Andrews McMeel Universal Publishing, Missouri Bank, Helix Architecture & Design, National Center for Drug Free Sport, and private collections in New York City, Seattle, Los Angeles, Detroit, and Kansas City.

Armin Mühsam graduated with a BFA from the University of Applied Sciences in Munich, Germany (1994) and with an MFA from Montana State University in Bozeman (1997). Since 2000, he has been teaching at Northwest Missouri State University, in Maryville, MO, where he is currently Professor of Painting. Mühsam is a recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant and has been the subject of over thirty solo exhibition in the United States, Germany, Romania, and Hungary. His work has been reviewed and featured in Art Papers and New American Painting. Mühsam lives and maintains a studio in Kansas City.

Warren Rosser was the William T. Kemper Distinguished Professor of Painting, recently retired as Chair of the Painting Department at the Kansas City Art Institute after 28 years. Born in South Wales in the UK, Rosser moved to the US in 1972. Although trained as a painter, for many years he made sculpture and mixed media constructions. In 1998 he returned to painting, which he views in the broadest sense. His work continues to explore constructed elements that can exist on the wall, but just as easily on the floor. The work examines an abstract language, exploring architectural forms and constructed space with particular attention being paid to color and its transitions and subtleties. Printmaking is a tool Rosser utilizes to explore different attitudes to form and, particularly in his most recent monoprints, the multi-layer of color transparences creating the deep implied space. Selected solo exhibitions have included: Parade: Parallel Tracks at University of Leeds, England, and Jan Weiner Gallery in Kansas City; Repeat Offender at Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis; Counterpoint at Epsten Gallery, Kansas City Jewish Museum; Hybrid View at Albrecht Kemper Museum, St Joseph, Missouri; and AlternateTracking at Bemis Center for Contemporary Art at Omaha, Nebraska. Previously he has exhibited his work at the Tate Gallery, London, the KunstMuseum, Düsseldorf, Germany; the Galleria Del Cavallino, Venice, Italy; and at the Edinburgh Festival, Edinburgh, Scotland.

Caleb Taylor is a 2010 Charlotte Street Foundation Fellow whose practice freely navigates the disciplines of painting, collage, photography, and sculpture. He is the recipient of the prestigious Joan Mitchell Foundation MFA Grant, and has completed residencies at Vermont Studio Center, Joan Mitchell Center, and Ucross Foundation.  His paintings and drawings are published in New American Painting and have been exhibited at numerous venues including the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Grand Arts (KC), Weatherspoon Art Museum (NC), and Tiger Strikes Asteroid (NY). Taylor’s work is included in the public collections of the Nerman MoCA, KU Medical Center, and Polsinelli Law Firm (KC). He received his MFA in painting from Montana State University-Bozeman (2008) and his BFA from Northwest Missouri State University (2004.) Taylor is Associate Professor in the Foundation Department at the Kansas City Art Institute. In addition to his studio practice, Taylor is a founding member of PLUG Projects, a curatorial collaboration in the Stockyards District of Kansas City. PLUG is a recipient of a 2011 Rocket Grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation, Spencer Museum of Art, and Charlotte Street Foundation.

All artists featured in this exhibition are represented by Haw Contemporary in Kansas City.

WILD WILD

The Monaco Project Gallery presents Wild Wild by Rachel Youn, an artist working in St. Louis, MO.

Youn has had solo exhibitions at the Bermuda Project (Ferguson, MO), Porch House Gallery (Fayetteville, AR), Erica Popp Studios + Gallery and the Millitzer Gallery (St. Louis, MO). Their work has been included in group exhibitions in St. Louis at the Sheldon Art Galleries, Parapet Real Humans, the Luminary and Flood Plain. Additional group exhibitions include Tiger Strikes Asteroid (Los Angeles, CA), Granite City Art and Design District (Granite City, IL), Here/There (Portland, OR), Open House (Kansas City, MO) and CICA Museum (Gyeonggi-do, South Korea). Youn is a recipient of the Regional Arts Commission Artist Support Grant, the Vermont Studio Center Fellowship and the 2020 Great Rivers Biennial Award. Youn received their BFA from Washington University in St. Louis in 2017.