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“PHRANC” “RON LINDEN” ON VIEW AT CUE ART FOUNDATION avv/lsb set 12-3 #721198

NEW YORK CITY — Cue Art Foundation presents “Phranc,” curated by Ann Magnuson, and “Ron Linden,” curated by Peter Plasens. Both exhibits are on view through January 26.

Phranc champions the Pop tradition pioneered by Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg of making the everyday object extraordinary by blending the concerns and methods of appropriation art and craftmaking to create her personal form of advertising/packaging, food and fashion iconography. She weaves together the literal with the whimsical in order to explore and express her identity through the guise of daily popular culture.

The more than 20, life-size, two- and three-dimensional cardboard and paper constructions/sculptures, made of found cardboard and craft paper, paper bags, pencil, gouache, tempera and acrylic on view explore contemporary obsessions with food, merchandizing and gender labels both obvious and implied.

A self-proclaimed “Cardboard Cobbler,” Phranc’s visual art and music encompass a personal form of storytelling full of humorous observations aimed at raising consciousness, triggering response, stimulating memories and provoking discussion.

In her first New York solo exhibition, works on view comprise objects of desire that the artist once had, wished she had or wishes she could have. Forms of cultural nostalgia, identity badges and symbols of both economic elitism and pluralism from three-dimensional, cardboard renditions of souvenirs, clothing and accessories, to luxury-brand sweets and jewelry will be installed on the walls, as freestanding sculptures, as a partial recreation of the artist’s studio — in the form of a mock retailing display throughout the exhibition.

Rife with diagrams and illusions of perception, Ron Linden’s paintings both mine and undermine the vocabulary of Abstract Expressionist and Conceptual art, as well as Modernist sculpture and design.

This selection of 12 to 14 small- to medium-scale acrylic and graphite on wood and acrylic and graphite on canvas abstract paintings spans more than 30 years of Linden’s career and features a range of signature imagery — biomorphic shapes, graphic elements and schematically rendered items of furniture, books and draftsman’s tools — that invite multiple readings.

The exhibition begins with a selection of paintings from the late 1970s to 80s — a period in which uncluttered, monochrome works marked Linden’s wry investigations of two- and three-dimensional forms. Part of a series of depictions of isolated objects in empty spaces, in “Mum’s Muteyness,” 1977, for example, Linden questions the relationship of pictorial structure to “real” space by challenging perspective and contradicting perception through forms that appear to be both receding and advancing.

The artist’s penchant for plotting surrogate maps from patterns comprising mechanical and graphic elements flourishes in his most recent paintings, as exemplified by the ellipses and exclamation point featured in “Phook,” 2007.

The gallery is at 511 West 25th Street. For information, www.cueartfoundation.org or 212-206-3583.