USA | SOFACQ Gallery

Copley William

William N. Copley (January 24, 1919 – May 7, 1996) also known as CPLY, was an American painter, writer, gallerist, collector, patron, publisher and art entrepreneur. His works as an artist have been classified as late Surrealist and precursory to Pop Art.

Galleries and foundation Copley and Ployardt tracked down Man Ray while living in Los Angeles. Ray then introduced them to Marcel Duchamp in New York City. There, Duchamp opened many doors for them, introducing the two to New York dealers in Surrealism. In 1948, Copley and Ployardt opened The Copley Galleries in Beverley Hills, displaying works by artists including René Magritte, Max Ernst, Yves Tanguy, Roberto Matta, Joseph Cornell, and Man Ray. However, Los Angeles had not yet caught on to the Surrealist scene as other locations such as New York City had done, and the Copley Galleries faced hardships in gaining popularity and sales.

Copley painted part-time during the gallery's running from the encouragement of friends Duchamp and Ernst and worked on painting full-time when the gallery closed after its first year. Copley moved to Paris in 1949–50, leaving behind his wife and two children to continue to paint.

In 1961, Copley was given an exhibition in Amsterdam by the Stedelijk Museum. The museum became the first public institution to add a Copley to their collection. Copley's paintings throughout the 1950s and 60s dealt with ironic and humorous images of stereotypical American symbols like the Western saloon, cowboys, and pin-up girls combined with flags. His works during this period were often considered a combination of American and Mexican folk art and melded in well with the new young POP movement occurring in America when he returned to New York in the 1960s. Artists like Andy Warhol, Christo, Roy Lichtenstein and many others were frequent visitors at Copley's studio on Lower Broadway. Copley believed that pop art had always interested him, claiming American pop art had much to do with "self-disgust" and "satire."

Copley William N. - Belgium Flag

Copley William N. - Flags of the Nations

Eckes Sacha

1971 - U.SA.

The parallel universe of Sacha Eckes operates according to a set of rules all its own. Its denizens seem to function in a constant state of failure, where success is measured by perversity of outcome. It even has a diabolical aspect – literally – because devils make sporadic appearances as agents for good or evil, depending on how you assess the situation. In this alternate world the dogmas and assumptions of our own world come in for a thorough drubbing – usually delivered lightly and with a kind of twisted grace.

Eckes works directly, impulsively, drawing inspiration from her surroundings, current events, life, love, her own work and most importantly the established art world, none of which escape the sting of mockery – often subtle, at times blatant. On that score her work is famously reactive, appropriating the pages of prestigious journals such as Art Forum and subjecting them to a highly personal process of transformation and pointed visual commentary. She has even been known to make over posters announcing the exhibitions of her famous peers – most recently Michael Borremans – subverting them in ways that verge on hilarious while exposing the mechanisms of artistic celebrity and commerce.

If the visual idiom of Eckes’ work is rooted in cartoons, it doesn’t stay put for long. What begins with the small format and graphically concise migrates across media, spilling over into paint and collage and expanding as needed to occupy different formats, different spaces. Her signature mark supplies the unifying factor, running like a neon thread throughout.

Eckes Sacha - Jan Fabre The Sceptic

2015 - 2016 - Acrylic on paper - 118,5 x 84 cm

Ellison Shaun

1984 - South-africa (Brooklyn resident)

Shaun Ellison 1984 Lives in New York, USA. Works in New York, USA. Represented by: Cherry Gallery My work is largely inspired by the textures of the urban landscape, especially graffiti. Texture in the city breathes and mysteriously makes the environment where it appears. In my work on canvas, the textures become the subject because they shape the life of the painting. I am also inspired by African stone carvings and the raw free expression of tribal art that speaks the language of spirit and ritual.

Ellison Shaun - Met Museum

Peterson Cleon

1973 - Washington

In most instances of Western, multi-figure history painting, a story is being told from a very particular point of view. Consider Jacques Louis David’s The Intervention of the Sabine Women (1799), or Francisco Goya’s The Third of May (1808), or even Pablo Picasso’s Guernica (1937); in each example, there feature clearly defined victims and aggressors, heroes (or heroines) and villains.

At first glance, Cleon Peterson’s large paintings and murals might seem to conform to this traditional genre of moralistic, politicized storytelling. Peterson’s scenes of carnage, in which one group of humanoid creatures inflicts appalling violence on another nearly identical group, push some deeply emotive buttons, including horror, disgust, anger, empathy, pathos and fear. In our hypersensitized age of knee-jerk partisan politics and permanent moral outrage, we automatically search the pictures for signs or symbols indicating how these scenes can be mapped onto real world situations, and thus how our emotional responses can be directed towards a certain contemporary grievance or issue. In Peterson’s art, however, no such signposts exist.

In a consistent and expansive body of work developed over the past several years, Peterson has created something quite rare in today’s climate: a study of oppression and victimhood that is objective, impartial, even amorally detached. Peterson is not concerned with questions of right and wrong, good and evil, truth and fallacy. Such simple (and often illusory) moralistic positions are beside the point.

Peterson Cleon - Flesh of the Wicked

2015 - Black and white acrylic on natural canvas H 91 x W 91 cm

Ross-Ho Amanda

1977 - Los Angeles

Amanda Ross-Ho (born 1975) is an artist based in Los Angeles that works in painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, photography and uses found objects.

She participated in the 2008 Whitney Biennial.[1] Ross-Ho was born in Chicago. Growing up in Chicago, Ross-Ho's parents – Laurel M. Ross and Ruyell Ho – were both working as artists throughout her childhood. Ross-Ho received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1998. After graduation from SAIC, she stayed in Chicago for seven years, working full-time at various jobs—including one as a textile designer—all the while making artwork and exhibiting locally.

While in graduate school at the University of Southern California, she began incorporating the studio process as part of her subject. She received her MFA from the University of Southern California in 2006. Early in her career, Ross-Ho shared a studio with a revolving cast of 10 to 15 other young artists — including Sterling Ruby and Kirsten Stoltmann — in the Hazard Park neighborhood. She later moved her studio into a former retail distribution warehouse just south of downtown that she shares with her artist partner, Erik Frydenborg. Ross-Ho works in painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, photography and uses found objects.

She takes images from a wide variety of cultural locations, placing disparate references alongside each other in work for walls and floors, and as freestanding objects. Her exhibitions locate sites of artistic action and personal significance, proposing relationships between a range of disparate objects and experiences. Though Ross-Ho often couches her practice in relation to painting, her work encompasses not just painting, but also photography, drawing, sculpture and installation. For the 2008 California Biennial, she transported the actual walls of her then-East L.A. studio into the galleries of the Orange County Museum of Art; she re-created the installation at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago in 2010. She later produced a series of individual works on poster-sized pieces of sheetrock — similar in appearance — that she conceived as "fictionalized" versions of the real studio walls. Ross-Ho's first outdoor public art project, The Character and Shape of Illuminated Things 2013–2014 at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, explores how photography is similar to the act of seeing.

Ross-Ho Amanda - 4 intersections

2006 - Ink jet prints on sintra, 4 parts - 66,04 x 50,80

Ryan Barry

Ryan Barry - Harvey Goldsmith (The Contract)

Manipulated silver gelatin print - 37,5 x 37,5

Scarpula Russel

1947 - USA

Scarpulla Russel - Flemish Green

1980 - Litograph

Somple Stephen
1980 - Ohio

Stephen Somple

b. 1980, Ohio

Lives and works in New York City

Education:

BA Kenyon College, 2003

Solo Exhibitions:

2020 - Linear Momentum, The Hole Gallery, New York

2019 - Discreet / Discrete, Colossal Youth Exhibitions, New York

2016 - Specific Objects - Egg Collective Showroom, New York

Group Exhibitions and Art Fairs:

2019 - Paper View, The Hole Gallery, New York, Ny.

2109 - Enter Art Fair, The Hole Gallery, Copenhagen, Denmark.

2019 - We Buy Gold, Good to Know, Miami, Fl

2019 - Material Matters, Egg Collective Showroom, New York, Ny.

2019 - Objects of Desire, Tiger Strike Asteroid, New York, Ny.

2018 - Code Art Fair, The Hole Gallery, Copenhagen, Denmark.

2018 - Superpositions, Joshua Liner Gallery, New York, Ny.

2018 - UNTITLED San Francisco, The Hole Gallery, San Francisco, Ca.

Somple Stephen - Dudd Stack I

2015 - Oxidized brass - 239 x 31 x 23 cm

Stella Frank
1936 - MAssachusetts

Frank Stella is an American artist best known for his use of geometric patterns and shapes in creating both paintings and sculptures. Arguably one of the most influential living American artists, Stella’s works utilize the formal properties of shape, color, and composition to explore non-literary narratives, as seen in his work Harrar II (1967) from the Protractor series. “Abstraction didn't have to be limited to a kind of rectilinear geometry or even a simple curve geometry. It could have a geometry that had a narrative impact. In other words, you could tell a story with the shapes,” he explained. “It wouldn't be a literal story, but the shapes and the interaction of the shapes and colors would give you a narrative sense. You could have a sense of an abstract piece flowing along and being part of an action or activity.”

Born on May 12, 1936 in Malden, MA, Stella went on to study history at Princeton University before moving to New York in 1958. Having moved to the city, Stella was immersed in the heyday Abstract Expressionism, but it was the work of Jasper Johns that inspired Stella’s Black Paintings of 1958-1960. These flatly painted, austere works, helped open up the doors to Minimalism. Through the following decades, Stella gained traction in the art world and in 1970 he became the youngest artist ever to be granted a solo exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art. He continues to work in New York, NY and commutes to his studio in Rock Tavern, New York. Today, Stella’s works are held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Kunstmuseum Basel, the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Tate Gallery in London, among others.

Stella Frank - Purple Series

Templeton ED
1972 - California

Frank Stella is an American artist best known for his use of geometric patterns and shapes in creating both paintings and sculptures. Arguably one of the most influential living American artists, Stella’s works utilize the formal properties of shape, color, and composition to explore non-literary narratives, as seen in his work Harrar II (1967) from the Protractor series. “Abstraction didn't have to be limited to a kind of rectilinear geometry or even a simple curve geometry. It could have a geometry that had a narrative impact. In other words, you could tell a story with the shapes,” he explained. “It wouldn't be a literal story, but the shapes and the interaction of the shapes and colors would give you a narrative sense. You could have a sense of an abstract piece flowing along and being part of an action or activity.”

Born on May 12, 1936 in Malden, MA, Stella went on to study history at Princeton University before moving to New York in 1958. Having moved to the city, Stella was immersed in the heyday Abstract Expressionism, but it was the work of Jasper Johns that inspired Stella’s Black Paintings of 1958-1960. These flatly painted, austere works, helped open up the doors to Minimalism. Through the following decades, Stella gained traction in the art world and in 1970 he became the youngest artist ever to be granted a solo exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art. He continues to work in New York, NY and commutes to his studio in Rock Tavern, New York. Today, Stella’s works are held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Kunstmuseum Basel, the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Tate Gallery in London, among others.