Sun Xun, a Chinese artist born in 1980 and living in Hangzhou, creates animations that combine hand-drawn renderings and traditional materials with new media. He studied printmaking at the China Academy of Fine Arts, but a burgeoning interest in moving images led him to found his own animation studio in 2006. To create his meticulous animations, Sun Xun produces a multitude of drawings that incorporate text within the image. His subjects range from elements found in world history and politics, to natural organisms. He then films the drawings, sequentially one at a time, to create a sense of movement and suggest the passing of time, the machinations of history, and the beauty inherent in simple forms. For over a week, Sun Xun will inhabit the Vault Gallery to develop a new animated, site-related video and drawing installation.
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Between Earth and Heaven: The Architecture of John Lautner
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Tomma Abts creates small, severe paintings that provide an intriguing antidote to the florid figuration that has dominated the contemporary painting discourse in the last decade. The exhibition, organized for the New Museum in New York by Laura Hoptman, Kraus Family Senior Curator, includes fourteen paintings, all of them the same size (19.8 x 15 inches), made over the past ten years. The exhibition at the Hammer Museum will also include a selection of pencil and color pencil drawings.

Abts won the Turner Prize in 2006 and this exhibition is the first individual presentation of the artist's work in a United States museum. Abts's commitment to abstraction is absolute. Her paintings are non-representational and free from all reference to nature or to the world at large. In the present contemporary art climate, these paintings may seem strange, aberrant, and even shocking. In their stab at profundity, the paintings are also intensely moving and relevant to our uncertain times. The exhibition will be accompanied by an illustrated catalog which will include more than fifty reproductions of the artist's paintings and drawings as well as feature essays by critics Jan Verwoert and Bruce Hainley, and curator Laura Hoptman.

Born in Kiel, Germany in 1967, Abts lives and works in London. She has had solo exhibitions at Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland, Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin and Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (with Vincent Fecteau), and she’s been included in major international exhibitions including the 54th Carnegie International, the 4th berlin biennale and the 2006 Shanghai Biennale.
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Ryan Trecartin’s videos uncannily reflect his generation, which was raised using the Internet, digital television, and interactive video games. He mixes cheap special effects with absurd narratives in which he and his cast of collaborator-friends act out a sort of Lord of the Flies for the 21st Century. He tells sad love stories and bizarre family dramas utilizing technology to heighten the action and reflect the information overload we all experience today. In his latest work I-Be-Area, 2007, Trecartin weaves together several unruly stories with fast-moving, fast-talking characters that deal with such themes as cloning, adoption, self-mediation, life-style options, virtual identities and larger questions of an existential nature. I-Be-Area (108 min) will be shown on the hour every other hour in the Hammer’s Video Gallery.
This exhibition is organized by Hammer Curator Ali Subotnick
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The exhibition examines the woodcut medium within a variety of genres, from the fine art print, to street banners serving social activism, and the use of woodcuts for popular cults and devotional purposes. A cross-cultural survey, it explores the adoption of this readily available and relatively cheap print form in countries across the world. The exhibition ranges in breadth from the use of woodcuts in the West by modern masters such as Paul Gauguin and Edvard Munch, to anonymous or little known artists who service a demand for imagery in bazaars in India and Brazil or in monasteries in Tibet. Most of the artists represented allow the wood to "speak" so that the grain of the wood forms an intentional part in the design.
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Oranges and Sardines: Conversations on Abstract Painting with Mark Grotjahn, Wade Guyton, Mary Heilmann, Amy Sillman, Charline von Heyl, and Christopher Wool

Oranges and Sardines will examine how art can illuminate art, exploring the impact of approaching art through the eyes and minds of artists. Six contemporary abstract painters—Mark Grotjahn, Wade Guyton, Mary Heilmann, Amy Sillman, Charline von Heyl, and Christopher Wool—have been asked to select one of their own recent paintings as well as works by other artists who have been significant in their thinking about their work. Six separate and generous galleries will present their choices in a constellation of diverse works to include Paul Klee, Felix Gonzales-Torres, Francis Bacon, David Hockney, Willem de Kooning, Philip Guston, Eva Hesse, Pablo Picasso, and Dieter Roth, and artists less well known to the public. The artists’ choices have developed through many conversations with curator Gary Garrels about the issues of their work, their studio process, their appraisal of art history, and the contemporary situation of art. Throughout this process, a distinct distillation of choices has developed for each artist that is wide ranging but very specific—works that are figurative as well as abstract have been chosen, sculptures and some works on paper have been selected in addition to painting; and historical as well as more contemporary works will be juxtaposed. Shown together, these works will engage in a “conversation” with each other, provoking fresh insights into artists who are well known and opening consideration of artists that may be more obscure.
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