Exhibition: untitled Arrangement

Bureau is pleased to present untitled Arrangement, a group show featuring Tom Holmes, Kyung-Me, Brandon Ndife, Christine Rebet and Julia Rommel. 

The exhibition title is borrowed from the paintings presented by Tom Holmes. Holmes’s reference to arrangements broadly stems from a set of categories that Holmes has used over many years to title works according to a kind of funerary index of urns, plots, reliquaries, or in this case floral arrangements. In one of these untitled Arrangements, Holmes paints an impressive rendering of colorful bell-like paper flowers, which bloom in a field of abstract gestures. In a second painting a vase of red angel’s trumpet sits next to a Tweety bird mug, their faint reflections echoing below. The blue-black surface of the table consumes most of the canvas as the image collapses into gesture towards its perimeter. 

Kyung-Me’s meticulous pen drawings depict placeless interiors void of inhabitants. These empty rooms are filled with ornate millwork and furnishings rendered in perspective, hatched and cross-hatched with intensity. The precise symmetry in Siamese VII is broken by a Victorian footstool, bearing an embroidery of Elijah and the ravens, displaced as if a body hurriedly exited the scene. There is an eeriness— a sense of confinement in the work, the colorless vignette leading to an architectural maze with no clear exit. 

Brandon Ndife’s sculptures feel primordial; muck sloshes at the edge of a cabinet drawer as tuber-appendages rise upwards from their bed of compost. The tidy wooden exterior houses a soil bed nearly bursting from its container. Though convincing as real, Ndife’s objects are made to mimic a seismic event, appearing crafted by the Earth or dredged from the sea. In Nantucket, wooden planks swell and crack as if inundated with saltwater, a vegetal growth emerges on its surface. These excavations hang as reminders, or warnings, of uncontrollable forces. 

In a film by Christine Rebet a metamorphosis plays out on screen: feet in sandals become claws, wings, hoofs, then mechanized; mountains rise and collapse, their trees throb like vascular systems. Rebet’s stop-motion animation follows a monk’s descent from a mountaintop to the sea, rendered in colorful ink drawings that capture the transformation of the landscape and spiritual transition of the monk. A voiceover narration, inspired by conversations with the philosopher Emanuele Coccia, ruminates on life’s transitive state. Accompanying the film are a series of ink drawings of related imagery, the sea, the mountains, the temple, static in comparison to the jittering screen. The images exist both in motion and in stasis, like our narrator’s envy of the caterpillar with its ability to pass from one existence to another without having to die.  

Julia Rommel’s canvases bear the history of their making. Their compositions are exhumed by the process, Rommel’s doing and undoing, folding and stapling, layer upon layer of gesso and paint. Hues bump against each other, delineated creases in the linen keep the pigment contained, a formal boundary drawn by a folded edge. In one work a thick off-white sheet of paint slides on its stretcher, the wooden corners exposed and painted to match. Bisected by a vertical crease, a field of peach washes over previous attempts at harmony; greens, blues and grays exposed at the canvas edge, innumerable paintings hidden underneath its final coat.

Tom Holmes (b. Ozona, Texas, lives and works in Cannon County and Jackson County, TN) received a BFA from the University of Texas, Austin and an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles. Solo exhibitions include REALTREE® , Bureau, New York, 2019; L’EGGO MY EGGO®, Bureau, New York, 2017; Temporary Monument, Kunsthalle Bern, Bern, 2013. Holmes’s work is in the collections of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Stiftung Kunsthalle Bern, FRAC Bourgogne, and the Tang Museum at Skidmore College. The artist wishes to extend special gratitude to 100 W Corsicana, The Joan Mitchell Foundation, The Adolph & Esther Gottlieb Foundation, and CERF+.

Kyung-Me (b. 1991 Conyers, GA; lives and works in New York) received her MFA from the Yale School of Art. Solo and two-person exhibitions include Coniunctio with Harry Gould Harvey IV, Bureau, New York 2019; Poor Thing with Sydney Shen, Hotel Art Pavilion, Brooklyn, 2018; Theatre of Cruelty with Ashton Hudgins, Museum Gallery, Brooklyn, 2018. She is the author of Bad Korean, published by Spaceface Books 2016, and Copy Kitty, published by 2d Cloud, 2020.

Brandon Ndife (b. 1991 Hammond, IN lives and works between Brooklyn, New York and Jersey City, NJ) received a BFA from The Cooper Union and an MFA from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College. Solo and two-person exhibitions include MY ZONE, Bureau, New York, 2020; Minor twin worlds with Diane Severin Nguyen, Bureau, New York, 2019; Just Passin’ Thru, Interstate Projects, Brooklyn, 2016; Meanderthal, Species, Atlanta, 2016. He will participate in the 2021 New Museum Triennial, New York.

Christine Rebet (b. Lyon France, lives and works between Paris and New York) received her MFA from Columbia University and her BFA from Central Saint Martins School of Art and Design, London. Solo exhibitions include Time Levitation, Parasol Unit, London, 2020; Thunderbird, Bureau, New York, 2018; Paysage Fautif, Bureau, New York, 2015. Her work is in the collections of the Centre Pompidou, Musée d’Art Contemporain du Val-de-Marne, and KADIST. In 2021 she will have a solo exhibition at the Musée d’art contemporain de Lyon, France.

Julia Rommel (b. 1980 in Salisbury MD, lives and works in New York) received her MFA from American University in Washington D.C. Solo exhibitions include Long Leash, Overduin & Co., Los Angeles, 2020; Fall Guy, Standard (Oslo), Oslo, 2019; Candy Jail, Bureau, New York, 2019; Twin Bed, Bureau at Tanya Leighton, Berlin, 2018; Man Alive, Bureau, New York, 2016; Two Italians, Six Lifeguards, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, 2015. Her work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Albright Knox Art Gallery, Hammer Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Walker Art Center.