Joey Wolf

Project Room: Theo Triantafyllidis

Depart Foundation is pleased to announce two new exhibitions. On view in the main gallery, Weekends features paintings by Los Angeles based artist Joey Wolf. Tiny Tsunami, featuring video works by artist and architect Theo Triantafyllidis, will be presented in the project room. In addition to these exhibitions, the Depart Foundation shop will debut a new collaboration with Artflash, Curatorial Hub, and Lapis Press.

Weekends at Depart Foundation marks Joey Wolf’s first solo exhibition. Working with oil on canvas and watercolor on paper, Wolf presents familiar scenes that capture southern California living while also presenting a very personal snapshot into the artist’s life and circle of friends. The vignettes–a guy’s weekend in Palm Springs, a day at the beach, camping trips, and more intimate scenes from his painting studio–are often pieced together from multiple photographs taken by Wolf that he mentally ‘Photoshops’ to form the final composition. The large and life-like works on canvas are energized by a vibrant palette and dense application of paint that sometimes hangs beyond the frame of the canvas. In contrast are the smaller watercolor works on paper that have a delicate quality and often depict more serene memories.

Joey Wolf (Born. 1987, Newport Beach, CA) currently lives and works in Los Angeles. Wolf received his Bachelor’s degree in Fine Art from Otis College of Art and Design, in Los Angeles in 2010. His recent group exhibitions include Look at Us at GNYP Gallery, Berlin, and his work is also included in several private collections as well as the collection at International Creative Management.

On view in the project room, Theo Triantafyllidis (b. 1988) is an artist and architect from Greece. He received his Master of Fine Arts from UCLA in Design | Media Arts under scholarships by UCLA and the Onassis Foundation, presenting for his thesis a guide called “how to everything”. Previously, he received his Diploma of Architecture from the National Technical University of Athens. Humor, lush visuals and gaming tropes provide an entry point to his work. Computer simulations, improvisations and failures, awkward interactions and precarious physics are employed to produce visual gags. By manipulating emerging technologies, he is searching for their potential emotional impact and the designated limits of their use, often trying to break them. Webpages, virtual and augmented reality, games and interactive installations are his mediums of choice for this. At the point of their climax, his pieces often becoming overwhelming, exaggerated or outrageous, trying to expose the audience to the underlying themes that inform his practice. These are strongly related to internet culture and include isolation, sexuality, violence, addiction and fear of missing out. Together with a general overflow of information and its nonsensical natures, this is the part of the internet that he considers the context for his work.

Triantafyllidis has shown at the Hammer Museum in LA and NRW Forum in Dusseldorf, DE and various galleries such as Meredith Rosen Gallery, the Breeder, Sargent’s Daughters, Young Projects, New Wright and Intelligentsia Gallery in North America, Europe and Asia. He was part of Hyper Pavilion in the 2017 Venice Biennale.

Triantafyllidis currently has work on view in “Still Human” at the Rubell Family Collection Miami, FL through August 25, 2018 and will be included in “Nature of Justice: A Visual Arts Response to the Birds” organized by the Onassis Foundation, USA curated by Mari Spirito at St. Anne’s Warehouse, Brooklyn NY from May 2-13, 2018