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>Sandow
Birk
www.sandowbirk.com |
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| Raised on the beaches of
Southern California and currently living and working in Los Angeles,
Sandow Birk is a product of California culture. Well traveled and
a graduate of the Otis/Parson's Art Institute, his work has dealt
with Los Angeles in it's entirety. With an emphasis on social issues,
frequent themes of his past work have included daily life in L.A.'s
barrios, inner city violence, graffiti, various political issues,
surfing, and skateboarding. His work has been shown extensively throughout
the U.S. including a solo exhibition entitled "Carioca"
at the San Jose Museum of Art in 1998, and work in "It's Only
Rock'n'Roll", a nationally traveling exhibition organized by
the Phoenix Art Museum. He was a recipient of an NEA International
Travel Grant to Mexico City in 1995, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1996,
and a Fulbright Fellow to Rio de Janeiro for 1997. In 1999 he was
awarded a Getty Fellowship for painting. He is also a City of Los
Angeles (COLA) Fellowship recipient for 2001. Sandow is represented
by the Koplin Gallery in Los Angeles, Catharine Clark Gallery in San
Francisco, and the Debs and Co. Gallery in New York City. Sandow's
epic, pseudo-historical series of the "The Great War of the Californias",
in which Los Angeles and San Francisco wage all out war for control
of the Golden State, was featured at the Laguna Art Museum in 2000
and traveled to the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art in the San Francisco
Bay Area in the summer of 2002. He has collaborated to make “In
Smog and Thunder”, a 45 minute video “mockumentary”
about the war which was featured at the Slamdance Film Festival in
2003, among many others. His series of idyllic landscape paintings
of prisons was exhibited at the Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum
in 2001 and in New York in 2002. Last Gasp Publications has published
two books on his work, “In Smog and Thunder” and “Incarcerated:
Visions of California in the 21 st Century”. His latest project,
a rewriting and illustrating of Dante’s “Inferno”
set in contemporary urban America, was exhibited at the Koplin Gallery
in 2003. Chronicle Books will be publishing a trade version of the
project in 2004. |
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