Aaron Garber-Maikovska: Cushion of Air
Book Launch and Artist Talk
With Aaron Garber-Maikovska and Jan Tumlir
Join us for a book launch and artist talk celebrating Cushion of Air, the first monograph on Los Angeles–based artist Aaron Garber-Maikovska. Garber-Maikovska will be joined in conversation by Jan Tumlir.
Cushion of Air features over 150 plates, video stills, and images from Garber-Maikovska’s research and daily life, and includes an essay by Cathleen Chaffee on performance and the body, an essay by Tumlir exploring depth and delight in his paintings, and an interview between the artist and Orit Gat in an immersive exploration of his multifaceted practice.
This event is free and open to all. RSVP is encouraged.
Please note this event will be filmed; by attending, participants and visitors consent to video and audio recording and its publication and reproduction.
Limited parking available. Rideshare highly encouraged.
Click here to RSVP.
Saturday, October 19
2pm
BLUM Los Angeles
About Aaron Garber-Maikovska
The work of Aaron Garber-Maikovska encompasses painting, drawing, performance, and video—interconnected modes of communicating a vernacular of somatic expression. Garber-Maikovska describes the site of the body and its role in making art not simply as a tool with which to navigate our world, but as “a centralized perceptive sphere of emotional, physical, conceptual, and spiritual inquiry.”
The gestural bravado, movement, and visual language present in this multi-faceted practice are synthesized in an effort to forge a new lexicon in painting. Working on the floor, Garber-Maikovska layers the surfaces of bright white ten-foot gatorboard or fluted polypropylene with electric color from pastels or oil sticks made of raw pigments, wax, and oil by the artist himself, giving rise to intricate compositions of abstract forms. Using the artist’s own body as a site of investigation, these works are corporal articulations yielded from a mantra-like exercise in muscle memory, an attempt to carve out a space for creative freedom in the midst of the social engineering and spatial division of the postmodern world.
About Jan Tumlir
Jan Tumlir is an art writer and teacher based in Los Angeles. He is a founding editor of the local art journal X-TRA and a long-time regular contributor to Artforum and Frieze. More recently, he has joined the editorial team at Effects, a London-based journal devoted to “aesthetics in the shadows of the contemporary." Tumlir has written extensively on such artists as Bas Jan Ader, Uta Barth, John Divola, Cyprien Gaillard, Allen Ruppersberg, and James Welling. His books include: LA Artland, a survey of contemporary art in Los Angeles co-written with Chris Kraus and Jane McFadden (Black Dog Press, 2005); Hyenas Are…, a monograph on the work of Matthew Brannon (Mousse, 2011); The Magic Circle: On The Beatles, Pop Art, Art-Rock and Records (Onomatopee, 2015); and Conversations, produced in discussion with Jorge Pardo (Inventory Press, 2021). A book-length study of the role of gesture in painting is forthcoming. Tumlir has served as a faculty member of the Fine Art and Humanities and Sciences departments at Art Center College of Design since 1999. In 2022, he joined the faculty of SCI-Arc as resident art historian.