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Happy Holidays! Have a Wonderful 2008!
Carmen Herrera
Carmen Herrera is a highly accomplished Cuban artist whose career has spanned over five decades, and whose work has been exhibited widely in the Americas and Europe. Estructuras presents a survey of her three dimensional works from the seventies through today.
The Complexity of the Simple
L&M Arts presents The Complexity of the Simple, an exhibition of more than twenty important works by twenty artists of international renown. The show demonstrates the broad range open to a systematic abstraction viewed over nearly five decades. Artists represented include such mid-century masters as Mark Rothko, Agnes Martin, Ellsworth Kelly and Josef Albers, and also critical figures of more recent date such as Felix Gonzales-Torres, Liza Lou, Anselm Reyle and Tom Friedman.
Dynamic Impulse: The Drawings of Stuart Davis
Hollis Taggart Galleries presents Dynamic Impulse: The Drawings of Stuart Davis, an exhibition of approximately sixty works that will examine the artist’s drawings from as early as 1909 to the year of the artists death in 1964. This important exhibition will offer a compelling opportunity to study Davis’s drawings and to understand this critical portion of his oeuvre in a larger context. Davis (1892–1964), who considered drawing and painting synonymous and believed color simply reinforced the spaces he delineated in his drawing, produced a powerful and original art that responded to the experience of the twentieth century. For more than five decades his bold colors and syncopated rhythms conveyed the rapid pulse of modern life. Like the jazz music he loved, his art is hot and cool—energetic and lively, as well as quietly distilled—but always sophisticated.
Olle Bærtling: A Modern Classic
As a concrete-abstract painter during the 1950s and 60s, Olle Bærtling (1911-1981) developed a personal pictorial universe, while also occupying a firm position among the "Salon des Realités Nouvelles" and Galerie Denise René in Paris. His work was highly influential to American Op artists and Minimalists like Donald Judd. Introduction by Ustvedt Nilsson, John Peter Øystein. Text by David Birnbaum, Daniel Raskin. Price $40.
Alan Saret: Gang Drawings
Alan Saret: Gang Drawings marks the first major museum exhibition of Saret's work in 17 years. Saret was a vital part of the Soho alternative art scene in the late 1960s and 70s, as well as an important figure in the history of process art and post-minimal art. The exhibition will focus on the artist’s “gang drawings,” made from fistfuls (“gangs”) of colored pencils swept across the page, spanning from the 1960s to the present. Organized in close collaboration with Saret himself, the exhibition will feature never before seen work drawn from the artist's own archive.
Moriko Mori: Tom Na H-iu
Deitch projects presents Tom Na H-iu, an exhibition of new work by Mariko Mori. The title of the exhibition draws its name from the monumental 4.5 meter sculpture, which will be exhibited along with two other large-scale sculptures, Flatstone and Roundstone. The works develop Mori’s continued interest in a fusion of art and technology, and the idea of universal spiritual consciousness. Drawing from ancient rituals and symbols, Mori uses cutting edge technology and material to create a striking vision for the 21st century.
Australia: Contemporary Non-Objective Art
Developed in collaboration between raum 2810 and Gesellschaft für Kunst und Gestaltung e.V., this is the first survey exhibition of Australian non-objective art in Germany and includes 17 artists. Participating artists: Justin Andrews, Daniel Argyle, Richard Dunn, Michael Graeve, Billy Gruner, Melinda Harper, Andrew Huston, Kyle Jenkins, Sarah Keighery, Melanie E. Khava, Andrew Leslie, John Nixon, Robert Owen, Kerrie Poliness, Trevor Richards, Quentin Sprague and David Thomas. An extensive bi-lingual exhibition catalogue is published by Verlag Hachemannedition, Bremen, and is available for the price of 24 Euro plus postage.
Art Market Watch: Victor Vasarely, by Deborah Ripley
"In 1965, following his starring role in the Museum of Modern Art’s now-famous The Responsive Eye exhibition, Hungarian artist and Op Art inventor Victor Vasarely (1906–1996) became an international art superstar. For the next 15 years, the public’s appetite for Vasarely’s dizzying designs seemed insatiable. In an effort to meet demand, as well as to bring his art to the masses, he maintained a studio that presaged those of Jeff Koons or Damien Hirst, employing legions of assistants to pump out paintings from his maquettes, as well as creating graphic editions and multiples. He sold prints directly in his Vasarely Center on Madison Avenue in New York City, and also made large editions for Circle Fine Art, a "fine art retailer" with a chain of galleries nationwide..."
Und Jetzt
The inaugural exhibition at IS featuring international artists Richard van der Aa, Justin Andrews, Sanne Bruggink, Christoph Dahlhausen, Matthew Deleget, Iemke van Dijk, Jasper van der Graaf, Billy Gruner, Clemens Hollerer, Kyle Jenkins, Sarah Keighery, Gracia Khouw, Arjan Janssen, Maike Mei Lan, Rossana Martinez, Jan van der Ploeg, Perry Roberts, Tilman, Jan Maarten Voskuil and Guido Winkler. Includes original texts by Billy Gruner and Jan Maarten Voskuil.
Tobias Abel: Malerei
Can You Dig It?, by Jerry Saltz
New York Magazine art critic Jerry Saltz reviews Urs Fischer's You at Gavin Brown's Enterprise. "Urs Fischer has reduced Gavin Brown’s Enterprise to a hole in the ground, and it is one of the most splendid things to have happened in a New York gallery in a while. Experientially rich, buzzing with energy and entropy, crammed with chaos and contradiction, and topped off with the saga of subversion that is central both to the history of the empty-gallery-as-a-work-of-art but also to the Gavin Brown experience itself, this work is brimming with meaning and mojo. It was also a Herculean project..."
Sara Schnadt: Connectivity
A web developer and performance installation artist, Sara Schnadt is creating a network built from an impressive quantity of vividly-colored found and donated fiber material (string, thread, twine, and wire) that represents the "new collective activity" of creating and sharing information online. She will be performing in the gallery for three days a week to plot the network onto and between two large maps across the space. One map shows a massive array of text including search terms and text fragments from hundreds of searches, while the other offers a geographic overview of global internet access.
Every Room (for 16 saxophones) by The Nebrellim Sensorium Saxophone Orchestra
Abaton Book Company releases it newest limited edition, a 7-inch lathe cut recording entitled Every Room (for 16 saxophones) by Ben Miller's Nebrellim Sensorium Saxophone Orchestra. Produced in a limited edition of 30 copies, each sleeve features two graphic images, (cover sleeve and insert) by MINUS SPACE artist Don Voisine.
Sérvulo Esmeraldo: Les Excitables 1966–1975
Sicardi Gallery presents the first solo exhibition in the United States of the work of Sérvulo Esmeraldo. Originally from Brazil, Esmeraldo moved to Paris in 1957 where he lived and work until 1979. The exhibition features the Excitables Esmeraldo created in Paris between the years 1966–1975. The viewer has to “activate” the work by rubbing the surface which generates static electricity to create the movement. The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue with text by Matthieu Poirier.
David Reed: New Paintings
Max Protetch presents an exhibition of new work by David Reed. Occupying both the main gallery and the Project Space, the exhibition will feature paintings in several formats, including narrow vertically-oriented canvases that recall Reed’s earliest brushstroke paintings; medium-format horizontal paintings that seem to relate to the scale of television and large-format ones that maintain dialogue with the proportions of Cinemascope; large-scale vertical paintings; and #27, a narrow vertical painting from 1974. In a departure for Reed, most of the paintings in the exhibition will inhabit a consistent range of colors, based in both warm and cool grays and blacks.
Jan van der Ploeg
Heimo Zobernig
Lovett/Codagnone: Interruption of a Course of Action
P.S.1 presents Interruption of a Course of Action, the first U.S. museum exhibition for the artist duo Lovett/Codagnone. Best known for their performances, videos, and photographs that combine elements of S&M gay subculture with everyday domestic scenes, the artist team will further their ongoing exploration of power relations, as manifested in explicit cultural signifiers as well as clandestine or unconscious practices. Expanding upon their interest in the political ramifications of conflating public and private, Lovett/Codagnone’s new works depart from self-reflexive strategies to address issues of collective identity and the absorption of underground tactics of resistance.
Daniel Göttin: Düsseldorf Tape
Lars Breuer, Sebastian Freytag, Guido Münch:
Ward Denys: The Complete Video Set
The art of Ward Denys (b. 1975, Izegem, Belgium) covers a wide field of media: sculpture, photography and installation. Through a visual language that is quintessentially minimalist, the artist addresses notions of physical and mental experience, topography and memory. In CCNOA Denys has created The complete video exhibition set, an installation comprising a monumental black box and a series of small gadgets (pencils, postcards and tape). The complete video exhibition set constantly shifts the boundaries between the inside and the outside, the natural and the artificial. A window extending towards the exterior of the gallery space assumes the role of a video wall; in the house, facing the gallery, an old super 8 movie of a child is playing. Just as the image is being spatially deferred and in this way is widened and opened up, the anonymous video image with regards to its meaning awaits the interference of the viewer. The complete video exhibition set illustrates Denys’ interest in architecture. It identifies the development stage as the basic site of creativity: the air shafts and the portal of the black box are made, as if temporarily, out of cardboard. The accompanying series of gadgets draw from the same logic. As working tools they play an integral part in this set for video exhibition design.
Louis Cameron
For his second solo exhibition at I-20, Louis Cameron will exhibit two series of paintings and a video that continue his work—started in 2004—in abstracting the color charts of consumer product identities.
Lucie Renneboog
Jasper Niens & Jan van der Ploeg
Ed Moses: Primal and Primary Paintings 1975
Ed Moses flatly posits that he is not an artist. "I'm a painter, inventive, activated. An abstract painting is not a reference; it's not a picture; it's a perception of the painting. It goes back to Barnett Newman's Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow, and Blue?" For Moses, his monochromatic paintings "are a conceptual ideal of an abstract painting, existing on a two-dimensional plane. They are not painterly paintings, not painted by hand. They are the physical evidence of an abstract painting as a physical phenomenon. They have no reference nor do they exist as a referent to anything other than how they visually exist. Those paintings were executed in 1975." Today, he works obsessively, over and over, in exploring abstract painting as a physical phenomenon. His "monos" are ephemera-like Newman's, the subject is pure and vibrant color on a surface. However, Moses goes one further, reducing his surfaces to murmured discourses about the nature of painting itself. One could say they are illusions of paintings, and serve to identify a mass of pigment and form upon a two-dimensional scaffold as painting. The difference, as Moses sees it, between being an artist and a painter is one of discernment: He would contend that an artist makes things that look like, or at the very least make allusion to, other things. Moses, on the other hand, sees his job as reducing everything to one color, one surface, one painting. With two assistants keeping him constantly busy in the studio, he works "wet on wet," like a geneticist ever in pursuit of that spark of life that activates our DNA. What is it, Moses would have the viewer ask, that characterizes a painting?...
Minimalism and After I:
The Daimler Art Collection presents the exhibition Minimalism and Applied I at Daimler Contemporary, Haus Huth, Potsdamer Platz in Berlin. The exhibition explores the relationship that exists between minimalist formal language and applied art. As the subtitle of the exhibition suggests these 'transfers' can be useful for imagination, association and play. Our exhibition at the same time represents the beginning of a new thematic focus to be continued in the next future. Approaching the theme from the perspective of the collection's history, the exhibition aims at encouraging a dialogue between the developments in the areas as an open dialogue. We have abstained from providing a pure comparative presentation of art and design and have opted to place the main focus on artists of our collection who have been active in both areas. These range from names such as Josef Albers and Arakawa/Gins to contemporary position like Andrea Zittel, Heimo Zobernig and Leonor Antunes. The works by these 25 artists are complemented pars pro toto by designs from Renzo Piano, the architect of Potsdamer Platz, as well as by design products from Gerrit Rietveld, Herbert Krenchel, Charles Eames and Konstantin Grcic. As one can derive from these names the aspects of applied art are represented in the fields of architecture, graphic design, logos and branding, as well as furniture design. Participating artists include Josef Albers (D), Ruby Anemic (D), Leonor Antunes (P), Arakawa/Gins (J/USA), Eva Berendes (D), Max Bill (CH), Martin Boyce (GB), Krysten Cunningham (USA), Stéphane Dafflon (F), Karl Duschek (D), Maria Eichhorn (D), Ossi Fink (I), Konstantin Grcic (D), Nic Hess (CH), Donald Judd (USA), Kazuo Katase (J), Imi Knoebel (D), Herbert Krenchel (DK), Sylvan Lionni (USA), Alexander Liberman (USA), Richard Merkle (D), Isamu Noguchi (J), Danica Phelps (USA), Renzo Piano (I), Gerrit Rietveld (NL), Meg Shirayama (GB), Anton Stankowski (D), Franz Erhard Walther (D), Franz West (A), Georg Winter (D), Lars Wolter (D), Andrea Zittel (USA), Heimo Zobernig (A).
Joseph Marioni: Liquid Light
The Wild One, by Jerry Saltz
"It took me 20 years to get Steven Parrino’s work. From the time I first saw his art, in the mid-80s, I almost always dismissed it as mannered, Romantic, formulaic, conceptualist-formalist heavy-metal boy-art abstraction. But thanks to a very large survey of his work in no fewer than seven of Gagosian’s handsome Madison Avenue galleries, I’ve come around. Yes, he is mannered and repetitive, but that’s on purpose. He’s an important bridge to a subsequent generation of mostly male artists, including Banks Violette, Terence Koh, Gardar Eide Einarsson, Dash Snow and Nate Lowman. And the fact of his death at 46, in 2005, means it’s a complete body of work..."
The Panza Collection: An Experience of Color and Light
The Panza Collection: An Experience of Color and Light includes more than seventy works of art from the Panza Collection, which is now dispersed in Varese, Verona, New York, and Los Angeles. In consultation with Count Giuseppe Panza di Biumo, whose vision has guided the project from the start, Gallery Director Louis Grachos and Senior Curator Douglas Dreishpoon have selected the objects and artists to be featured. Color and light are the key concepts used to select and organize this exhibition, which explores the use of these elements by artists from the 1960s to the present. Beginning with artworks by pioneers in the use of actual light – fluorescent light in works by Dan Flavin and Robert Irwin, and Bruce Nauman’s use of neon light – the exhibition continues to the present with the visual light embodied in monochromatic paintings and sculptures by such artists as Daniel Levine, David Simpson, Phil Sims, Anne Truitt, and Anne Appleby. The exhibition not only traces this historical development of color and light in contemporary art, it also illuminates the continuing evolution of Panza’s philosophic interest in these elements, as realized in many of the works of art he has collected since 1956. A discrete installation is devoted to each of the sixteen artists, highlighting Panza’s penchant for collecting an artist’s work in-depth and allowing for more concentrated study of each artist included.
Color as Field: American Painting, 1950-1975
Color field paintings are expansive canvases washed with flat areas of solid color. Color as Field is the first exhibition to bring together the works of major color field painters. The show features about 40 color field paintings and explores their sources, meaning, and impact. The exhibition includes paintings by color field artists such as Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Larry Poons, and Frank Stella, along with their precursors, important abstract expressionists, including Sam Francis, Mark Rothko, and Clyfford Still.
Painting or Object?
Gallery Sonja Roesch presents Painting or Object? featuring artists Garland Fielder, Mick Johnson, Josef Adam Moser, and Dirk Rathke. The exhibition investigates the borderlines between what constitutes a painting or an object. This question, though mainly used for classification and description of work, has been the subject of many discussions. The critical split occurs due to color being more important to painting, whereas form is more important to an object. But what happens when color and form join together holding an equally important position?
Verus Painters
Tobey Fine Arts is presents the second exhibition of works by the international group of artists calling themselves the Verus Painters, whom are John Aslanidis, Susann Brännström, Peter Köhler, Karen Schifano and Lorraine Williams. The Verus Painters are the new generation of painters working with a wealth of painterly history and ideas accumulated over the last century. They approach painting as a laboratory where experiments are conducted. What has brought these artists together is their shared commitment to the veracity in painting. The most important question in their endeavor is the evolution of the individual producing it. Thus their approach to painting is in emphasizing its deepest, most subtle qualities, while trying to strip away everything that is unessential.
Pam Aitken
Aitken is interested in expanding the inventive and formal aspects of the line and the grid through painting and installation. Monuments of Nothingness has an uncertain vision of the structured grid. This vision has indeterminacy, ambiguity and irrationality, a combination that ultimately leads to non-structure. Repetition is a condition of action before it is a concept of reflection. We produce something new only on condition that we repeat. Monuments of Nothingness will expand the expectation of perception of vision, leading to a new ability to see something in the nothing.
Blinky Palermo
The Kunsthalle Düsseldorf and the Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen present the first comprehensive exhibition of Blinky Palermo’s work in Düsseldorf, Germany. Palermo came to Düsseldorf in 1962 in order to study at the Academy initially under Bruno Goller and then under Joseph Beuys. He developed his unmistakeable abstract pictorial language here and later in the USA (1973-1976) that decisively extended the concept of the picture and explored a new relationship between composition and space.
Neutra's Kaufmann House For Sale
Commissioned by Edgar J. Kaufmann Sr., the Pittsburgh department store magnate who had commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright about a decade earlier to build Fallingwater in Pennsylvania, the house was designed by Richard Neutra in 1946 as a desert retreat in Palm Springs, California. The house's current owners plan to auction the house at Christie's in New York in May 2008. Its presale estimate is $15 to $25 million.
SNO 33
SNO 33 features installations by Daniel Göttin (Switzerland), Matt Shoemaker (USA), and a collaborative project by Salvatore Panatteri (Australia) and Kjell Bjørgeengen (Norway).
INDICA
Nyehaus presents INDICA. Acknowledged as the first experimental art space in London, John Dunbar's Indica gallery, in existence from November '65 - November '67, was born into a far more uncynical time. Open for barely two full years, Indica (from 'Indications' - somewhere to go) set the controls for the heart of experimental art in Britain. During its short life, Indica encouraged collaboration and 'free flow' rather than competition. With groundbreaking shows by Takis, Mark Boyle, Julio Le Parc, Liliane Lijn, Jesus Rafael Soto, Carlos Cruz-Diez and Yoko Ono, Indica was very much 'of the moment'. A teenage Marc Bolan ran errands, Paul McCartney helped knock in nails. Polanski and Antonioni, Burroughs and Ginsberg hung out. International Times got started in the basement. John met Yoko there. So Indica re-appears at Nyehaus, exhibiting one piece of work by each of the artists shown in the original gallery alongside a selection of responses by London’s and New York's most adventurous and imaginative young art stars. Nyehaus becomes Indica. Temporarily. A chance to relive, revise and read up almost forty years to the day. The story begins Thursday, November 8th. Don't miss it this time around. Features work by The Action, Baschet Brothers, Boyle Family, Lourdes Castro, Carlos Cruz-Diez, Mark Dagley, Michael English, Juan Fontanive, Jaime Gili, The Graham Bond Organisation, Hapshash and the Coloured Coat, Michael Horovitz, Janfamily, Nina Jan Beier, Marie Jan Lund, Chosil Kil, Aishleen Lester, Liliane Lijn, Francois Morellet, Yoko Ono, Takis, and Peter Whitehead.
David Thomas:
David Thomas lives and works in Melbourne where he currently lectures as an Associate professor in painting at RMIT. In his practice which includes painting, photopainting and installations, Thomas engages with the monochrome in an at once speculative and reflexive, reverential yet unorthodox way. He employs monochrome in conjunction with other elements - painting and photography - situating them 'in the world', as intervals in the fabric of everyday life. Thomas refers to his works as 'composites' enabling things, which are different, to be reconciled over the time of viewing as they reveal shifts in perception and reading. By situating the monochrome in relationship to other codes, the artist allows apparently contradictory impulses to coexist: material and metaphysical, pictorial and spatial issues are brought into a relational context, capable of being read and understood over time. Thomas' reflection paintings are a screen or surface on which to stage the play of light, the drama of space, and the experience of looking. His recent series of 'photopaintings' encourage temporal readings and convey a sense of ambiguous space, of figuration and abstraction, and of complex space/time relationships embedded with a single image: ordinary photographs of public sites are obscured in part by geometric fields of monochrome paint, which evenly rest like a reflective skin on the surface of the work and interrupt the illusion of deep space forcing the viewer to glimpse around corners, to augment the image from memory. Thomas' works sit between categories and provoke consideration of the idea of spectatorship and photography.
Francisco Sobrino, Horacio Garcia Rossi
Sicardi Gallery presents the works of three of the founding members of the art group Centre de recherche d’art visuel (CRAV): Francisco Sobrino, Horacio Garcia Rossi, and Hugo Demarco. CRAV, later known as GRAV (Groupe de recherche d’art visuel) which also included Julio Le Parc, Vera and Francois Molnar, Francois Morellet, and Yvaral among others, was founded in Paris July 1960 when several artist’s gathered to discuss their collective research and came up with the manifesto to liberate from the work of art the ego of the creators. They strove to create a new visual situation based on the field of peripheral vision instability, limiting the artwork to a strictly visual condition and regarding it as something provisional. The participation of the viewer was integral to the works. The group disbanded in 1968. Garcia Rossi and Demarco were both born in Argentina and immigrated to Paris in the late 50’s. Sobrino, born in Spain, spent much of his youth in Argentina before relocating to Paris.
John Stephan: Paintings from the 1970s
Burgoyne Diller and Hard-Edged Abstraction: Underpinnings and Continuity
Winston Roeth
Andreas Christen
Chris Martin: Recent Paintings
Charles G. Shaw
Michael Rosenfeld Gallery presents Charles G. Shaw, a landmark exhibition featuring thirty five major paintings from the 1930s and 1940s. Charles Green Shaw (American, 1892-1974) was a preeminent American abstract artist whose painting and writing contributed greatly to the social, artistic, and cultural dynamism of America. Works featured in this exhibition share the distinguished Charles H. Carpenter provenance; many have not been exhibited since the 1930s and 1940s, while others have never been shown at all.
Abstraction 6
Robert Irwin: Primaries & Secondaries
The largest exhibition of Irwin’s work since 1993, Robert Irwin: Primaries and Secondaries features five new major installation works created specifically for the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego’s downtown galleries, and is drawn almost exclusively of works from the Museum’s collection. The exhibition, a survey spanning more than 50 years of work, is curated by Hugh M. Davies, The David C. Copley Director at MCASD, and is on view at both the new Joan and Irwin Jacobs Building (through February 23, 2008) and 1001 Kettner galleries (through April 13, 2008) in downtown San Diego.
Kasarian Dane: Stripes and Divisions
Kees Visser
Kate Shepherd: No Title Here
In her unique approach to painting, Shepherd applies threadlike lines of oil paint upon highly saturated and glossy layers of enamel. The refined lines suggest common structures and patterns—a scaffold, a trapeze, lace, rain—which are recognizable and invoke personal associations and recollections. The delicate and intimately familiar forms are juxtaposed against the slick, durable enamel, a paint often used for architectural and industrial surfaces. Furthermore, joined wood panels, rather than canvas, are the base of Shepherd’s paintings, creating a structure out of the painting itself. The subtle seams between panels often represent shifts between literal or figurative ideas, separating sky from sea, a window from its sill, or different perspectives. Formally precise yet highly expressive, the paintings speak of collective experiences and environments. In the alluring, reflective surfaces, the viewer can literally be drawn into the statuesque or expansive paintings. The drawn line, though, is what characterizes Shepherd’s practice and individualizes each work. “Line,” says the artist, “is the voice of the painting: its moment, personality, and imperfections.” In Shepherd’s new works are developments in her treatment of the line, as she diverges from her usual white line to incorporate different hues and represents movement in an approach unseen in previous works. Created with a minimalist sensibility and a forthright hand, Shepherd’s works are at once quiet, candid, and compelling.
Paul Kelpe: Paintings and Works on Paper, 1925-1935
Thomas Downing: Washington Color School Painter
Gary Snyder’s first year of programming will focus on Hard-Edge Abstraction circa 1955–1975. The first show features Thomas Downing (1928–1985), who with Kenneth Noland and Gene Davis established a “Washington School” known for combining the influence of Morris Louis’s staining of unprimed canvas with a new interest in geometry. Downing was in many of the seminal exhibitions of the 1960s, including Post Painterly Abstraction, LACMA 1964, The Responsive Eye, MOMA 1965, and Systemic Painting at the Guggenheim in 1966. His work was recently featured in the Optic Nerve exhibition at the Columbus Museum of Art.
Steven Parrino
Gagosian Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of works by Steven Parrino. The show will feature paintings, drawings and sculptures as a selective view across the career of an artist who lived and worked in New York up until his untimely death in a motorcycle accident in 2005. "When I started making paintings, the word on painting was "PAINTING IS DEAD." I saw this as an interesting place for painting… death can be refreshing, so I started engaging in necrophilia….. Approaching history in the same way that Dr. Frankenstein approaches body parts… Nature Morte… my contemporaries were NO WAVERS… BLACK FLAG-ERS… and this death painting thing led to a sex and death painting thing… that became an existence thing… that became a "Cease to Exist" thing… A kind of post-punk existentialism. I am still concerned with "art about art", but I am also aware that "art about art" still reflects the time in which it was made. Content is not denied… Content is not obvious… Content is sustained in the air or the vibe of the work." -- Steven Parrino, 2003
Birth of the Cool:
Birth of the Cool examines the broad cultural zeitgeist of “cool” that influenced the visual arts, graphic and decorative arts, architecture, music, and film produced in California in the 1950s and early 1960s. The widespread influences of such midcentury architects and designers as Harry Bertoia, Charles and Ray Eames, John Lautner, and Richard Neutra, have been well-documented. Less well-known, however, are the innovations of a group of Hard-Edge painters working during this period including Karl Benjamin, Lorser Feitelson, Fredrick Hammersley, Helen Lundberg and John McLaughlin, whose work retains a freshness and relevance today. Birth of the Cool revisits this scene, providing a visual and cultural context for West Coast geometric abstract painting within the other dynamic art forms of this time.
Frozen Gestures: The Art of Peter Upward
Australian modernist Peter Upward’s calculated gestures and considered processes contradict the idea that Abstract Expressionism was an art of spontaneous self-expression. Frozen Gestures will be the first retrospective of this important, yet underknown artist. Often described as the purest of Australia's abstractionists, this exhibition celebrates Upward and will features more than fifty works including paintings, screen prints and posters from the late 1950s through to the early 1980s. Frozen Gestures is curated by Australian artist Christopher Dean.
SNO32
SNO's 32nd installment includes the following exhibitions: * Vicente Butron (Sydney)
Kenneth Martin & Mary Martin: Constructed Works
Constructed Works brings together two of Britain's key post-war abstract artists, Kenneth Martin (1905-1984) and Mary Martin (1907-1969). In the first joint public-gallery exhibition since 1971, the show presents a focused body of work by each artist, highlighting the correspondences and differences between their practice. Living and working together, they continually exchanged ideas, although rarely collaborated in their lifetimes. Foremost among the generation of British artists who 'rediscovered' abstraction during the 1940s, the Martins studied painting at the Royal College of Art, where they met, and worked as designers early in their careers before producing their first abstract paintings. These experiments in abstraction quickly translated into three dimensions, taking the form of abstract relief-sculptures, mobiles and constructions. They developed their constructions through relationships of simple, harmonic and repeated forms using mathematical progression and rules of proportion. Their interest in modern industrial materials and the possibilities of science and technology imbues their work with a sense of optimism for the future, while also acknowledging the legacy of past technologies, and the importance of the hand-made. This touring exhibition, organised by Camden Arts Centre, London and De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill, focuses on Kenneth Martin's mobiles from the 1950s onwards and his later Chance and Order series of abstract paintings, alongside Mary Martin's elegant relief-sculptures. A fully-illustrated catalogue has been produced which brings new perspectives to the Martins' work through specially commissioned texts by Toby Paterson, James Hugonin and writer and art historian Sam Gathercole.
Paul Morrison
Thornton Willis: Painting 40 Years
Jill Baroff: Like Things
Colour Matters Exhibition Catalogs
Kunstruimte 09 in Groningen, The Netherlands, has recently published two catalogs relating to their four-part exhibition Colour Matters. You can purchase the catalogs Colour Matters and Colour Matters 2 online at Amazon.de.
Licht - Glas - Transparenz
A group exhibition about light with works by Christoph Dahlhausen (Germany), Dan Graham (USA), David Thomas (Australia), Brigitte Kowanz (Austria), Yvo Hartmann (Switzerland), Regine Schumann (Germany), Nir Alon (Israel), and Spencer Finch (USA).
Merrill Wagner: Peach Sky Paintings
"I have for years been fascinated by looking at farms. Close valued greens, browns, and yellows cause me to stare in contemplation of colors and linear shapes created in the landscape by human beings. Rows are straight and formal in design. Their purpose is to provide food for a community. This year I have also been looking at the sky, including it in compositions when painting from nature outdoors. Often the sky appears to hold emotional content – the ominous sky, the overcast sky, the peach sky." — Merrill Wagner
Maik & Dirk Löbbert:
Art and reality – these are the two central poles in the work of Maik and Dirk Löbbert. Their aim: to break down the separation between the two areas so that they fluently merge to form one entity. Their works often consist of only minimal changes, hardly perceptible interventions which always adapt to their surroundings like a chameleon and therefore mostly first become visible on second glance. These site-specific interventions are the result of intensive examination of the circumstances of the respective situation. The two brothers carefully analyse what is on site in order to filter out the distinctive feature of the respective place, its characteristic and specific peculiarities. For their "subversive interventions" the artists then primarily use materials and elements which are already on site and which constitute its character. In this way they manage to create an inseparable unity between the artwork and its surroundings, in which the difference between what is given and what is designed is dissolved and the polarity of art and reality is led to a symbiosis: the context becomes the content of the work and the work becomes a component of the context. For their third solo exhibition at Galerie Mezzanin Maik and Dirk Löbbert have developed a multi-part work which is especially conceived for the gallery spaces and reflects the exhibition situation on various levels. Single, originally autonomous elements – a cupboard, a carpet, a chain and others – are placed in the rooms in such a way that they fit into the situation in a site-specific manner and direct attention to the architectonic design: the floor, the wall, the mezzanine, the passage and the ceiling. The function of the space as an exhibition location for art is also taken as a theme: because the elements introduced by Maik and Dirk Löbbert are minimally changed, a tense interplay arises between two-dimensionality and volume, sculpture and painting, the seen and the unseen. The two brothers reflect and simultaneously subvert the fact that the gallery is also an art business location: during this exhibition visitors can take with them a free multiple with the title "Virus Marketing" which is produced in an edition of 1,000.
Peter Dudek: New Monuments to My Lovelife
New Monuments to My Lovelife is an elaboration on and expansion of several ongoing projects. Each project takes the shape of an installation containing various and sundry drawings, sculptures and photographs that are dispersed throughout the gallery and, periodically, shifted about during the course of the exhibition. At Smack Mellon sections of these projects are brought together for the first time. New parts are added and original compositions are reconfigured to play off of the considerable size of Smack Mellon’s space. Laid out before the viewer is an expansively comparative intermingling of ready-made and handcrafted components. Amidst this sprawling network of low-tech assemblages an intentional blurring between the found and the fabricated is at play, resulting in a rambling and discursive junction where modern architecture, design, and modes of presentation intermix.
Sputnik I: 50th Anniversary
On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union successfully launched Sputnik I, the world's first artificial satellite. It was about the size of a basketball, weighed only 183 pounds, and took about 98 minutes to orbit the Earth on its elliptical path. Sputnik's launch ushered in new political, military, technological, and scientific developments. It marked the start of the space age and the US / Soviet space race.
Karen Schifano Launches New Web Site
Stuart Davis: A Catalogue Raisonné
Edited by Ani Boyajian and Mark Rutkoski with essays by William C. Agee and Karen Wilkin, these volumes are the definitive reference on Stuart Davis' paintings, watercolors, drawings, and published illustrations.
The Geometry of Hope: Latin American Abstract Art
Colorful and playful kinetic sculptures, experimental objects designed to be catalysts for community building, manifestos calling for joy and the negation of melancholy: these are the elements that have shaped The Geometry of Hope. The title of this richly illustrated, 340-page volume brings together two threads that epitomize postwar abstract art from Latin America: on the one hand, geometry, precision, clarity and reason; on the other, a utopian sense of hope. The book contains new scholarship by an international cast, with examinations of six key cities--Montevideo, Buenos Aires, Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Caracas and Paris--as well as insightful essays on individual works of art. It comes to us via the Cisneros Graduate Seminar, a collaborative program of the Blanton Museum in Austin, Texas, and the renowned Fundacion Cisneros, and covers more than four decades of art-making with works by 52 artists, among them Lygia Clark, Gego, Jesus Rafael Soto and Helio Oiticica.
Daniel Göttin: Objekte und Tafeln
New Advances in Abstract Painting: Richard Bell, Matthew Deleget, Joseph Haske, Lorraine Williams
Tobey Fine Arts presents New Advances in Abstract Painting, an exhibition featuring the works of four contemporary painters, Richard Bell, Matthew Deleget, Joseph Haske and Lorraine Williams. Representing several new approaches emerging from the wealth of painterly history and ideas accumulated over the last century, these artists combine various elements such as conceptual art, post-painterly abstraction, reductive strategies, mysticism and cultural commentary in a visually and intellectually provocative collection of paintings.
Ultramoderne
Fall Exhibition Highlights Lines, Grids, Stains, Words James Lee Byars: The Art of Writing Focus: Ellsworth Kelly 50 Years of Helvetica
New Edition by Tilman
Kevin Finklea: I Know What I Want
and I'm Certain I Can't Have It
Salvatore Panatteri: Untitled (To Dan Flavin)
In this current exhibition Untitled (To Dan Flavin), Salvatore Panatteri is transforming the virtually ‘invisible’, or non-colour, into concrete form so it becomes the focal point of his work. Produced by exposing sheets of photographic paper to the colour temperature of fluorescent light, the resulting series of monochromatic works look at the implication of light to the given environment.
Minimalism and Applied:
The artists engaged in minimalist, reduced aesthetics - from Josef Albers' time as a lecturer at the Bauhaus in the 1920s through to contemporary positions, from Franz Erhard Walther and Heimo Zobernig through to Andrea Zittel and Leonor Antunes - have always worked on the transfer of their rigorous artistic concepts to the applied arts. These 'transfers' can be practically applicable but might as well just ask for an imaginative, associative and playful 'use'. Approaching the theme from the perspective of the collection's history, the exhibition aims at encouraging a dialogue between the developments in the areas as an open dialogue. Includes MINUS SPACE artist Sylvan Lionni.
Don Driver & Julian Dashper
Marcie Miller Gross Launches New Web Site
Richard Bottwin: Storage
Richard Bottwin's sculptures fold, hinge, and spring off the wall, creating a staccato, playful movement. Constructed out of plywood, the surfaces are detailed with directional wood grain or painted with bright acrylic colors. Each piece reveals surprising shapes and patterns based on a modernist repertoire that shift according to the viewer's perspective. A sense of disorientation, implied weightlessness, and the element of surprise enliven the reductive forms and counter the modernist vocabulary of the constructions.
Breaking the White Light
Curated by artist Scott Malbaurn, Breaking the White Light features eight artists ranging from emerging to mid and late career. They work with abstraction and processes associated with this practice. This show is an attempt to put forth a manner of abstraction that crosses formal and conceptual ideas. Many of these artists pull from abstraction's history. They bridge paradigms that have risen from abstraction such as minimalism, geometric abstraction, suprematist and color field painting. Participating artists include Timothy App, Michael Brennan, John Cox, Matthew Deleget, Linda Francis, Gerry Hayes, Changha Hwang, and Rosanna Martinez.
Material Matter
Curated by Kat Griefen, Director of AIR Gallery, from the membership of American Abstract Artists, the artists in Material Matter affirm the group’s openness to difference, both in form and theory, and its non-party line approach. Here, the organization’s legacy is manifested in the artists’ use of unlikely materials or use of traditional materials in unlikely ways. In itself, each work holds a multiplicity of meanings. Some challenge an aspect of American culture that privileges the answer over the question. Some choose the means over the ends. Each work is literally or figuratively open ended, subscribing only to its internal logic and suggesting one important aspect of abstraction's currency - its potential to counter-balance the dogmatic. The 22 artists in the exhibition are Alice Adams, Sharon Brant, Susan Bonfils, James O. Clark, Matthew Deleget, Gail Gregg, Lynne Harlow, Phillis Ideal, Marthe Keller, Stephen Maine, Nancy Manter, Rossana Martinez, Creighton Michael, Ray Oglesby, John Phillips, Lucio Pozzi, Leo Rabkin, James Seawright, Edward Shalala, Clover Vail, Rob van Erve, and Don Voisine. Works on view cover a range of mediums including painting, video, installation, and sculpture.
Manfred Mohr: Klangfarben
Terry Haggerty
Terry Haggerty’s vibrant wall paintings conjure nostalgic associations from the mustard yellow and avocado décor of the 1960s and 1970s, to optical art, to the precise lines of sugar icing on pastries. He combines humorous and historical references to form abstract compositions that electrify and manipulate the space around them. Haggerty applies multiple coats of paint to create sleek surfaces and utilizes simple lines which, when viewed together, create masterful geometries that seem to blend and curve each wall.
Profile: Sydney Non Objective Group
Colour Matters, Part Four
Group exhibition of constructivistic and fundamental art by 11 artists. Accompinied by a book containing images of artworks and stamentes by 21 artists who participated in the exhibitions Colour Matters - Part Three and Four.
Lesley Giovanelli
In the development of immersive environments, Giovanelli responds to and works with the surrounding architecture using techniques that are both painterly and sculptural. The exhibition space becomes a studio during installation. It bring into it pre-made elements, as well as soft, highly coloured materials; wools, foams, and cotton wadding. The process to define outcomes and allow strategies such as imprecision, informality and spontaneity is part of the work. Inspiration comes from architecture, art history, Indian miniatures and Chinese gardens. The resulting environments consist of amorphous structures on the verge of disintegration - blobs, flows, floats and dissolves which play with form and anti form, order and disorder. They provide the viewer with shifts between spectatorship and inspection mode and work to reinforce the loss of a sense of self.
Against the Modern World
Mark Williams
Mark Williams emphasizes the intellectual subtleties of line, form and its edges as they meet the surface of a canvas. At first glance, intersecting lines and rectilinear forms seem to display a faultless and perfect image. However, upon closer examination, viewers discover an imperfect composition - one that propagates the illusion of the precise.
Alma Tischler & Tilman
Alma Tischler and Tilman were both master students from Guenther Fruhtrunk at the MA Academy in Munich. He is known for his radiating colorful geometrically structured paintings. While rejecting the figure reference, the structure of parallel lines in different thicknesses becomes a pattern where color becomes form as well as figure. Even though both Tischler and Tilman went their own way to develop their artistic identity, Fruhtrunk’s influence can be seen in their work.
Tilman Launches New Web Site
Brussels-based artist Tilman launches a cool new web site. Tilman will mount a solo exhibition at MINUS SPACE project space on September 29-30, 2007.
Stealing Time
Curated by Christa Blatchford, Chad Nelson, and Pierre Obando, the exhibition features Harrell Fletcher, Josh Greene, Fritzia Irizar Rojo, Clifford Owens, John Pilson, Nick Stillman, and MS artiist Michael Zahn.
Anthony McCall & Imi Knoebel:
Anthony McCall and Imi Knoebel both have used deceptively simple projections with strikingly complex effects. You and I, Horizontal (2005), a digital projection — and recent SFMOMA acquisition — by McCall, draws on his 1970s-era solid-light film installations to create an engaging experience of light as a three-dimensional beam and wall animation. Projektion X (1971-72) and Projektion X Remake (2005), two versions of the same video concept by Knoebel, each feature a continuous stream of nighttime streetscapes, illuminated only by a powerful X-shaped beam of light.
Julian Dashper: Much More Minimal
Salvatore Panatteri: Untitled (To Dan Flavin)
"We see squares of colour, a hue, a hint of what we imagine alludes to the existence of some other thing. Something that is other than what is unambiguously in this instance light, or better, its effect on a chemical process, leaving what we hope to construe as marks or traces of reference on a surface that we call photography. For what Salvatore Panatteri’s new work entails is simply that, the process of the effect of light in itself reacting chemically on photographic paper. These works are squares of photographic paper that are exposed in a darkroom to the light source, the specific properties of which are those of the colour temperature of fluorescent lights. What eventuates is chemically constructed, so to speak, by the vagaries of this condition of a light source affecting the medium. Simply put, this is done without any other intermediary source...." — Vicente Butron (excerpt from exhibition catalog)
Small Differences Make All the Difference
MINUS SPACE artist Lynne Harlow discusses Kirk Varnedoe's last book Pictures of Nothing: Abstract Art since Pollock, a transcription of his 2003 Mellon Lectures at the National Gallery in Washington. Harlow will present a project at MINUS SPACE project space in December 2007.
The Geometry of Hope: Latin American Abstract Art
The Geometry of Hope comprises some 125 works of art from the collection of Patricia Phelps de Cisneros (CPPC) and provides the most comprehensive scholarly overview to date of Latin American Geometric Abstraction from the 1930s-1970s. Organized chronologically, The Geometry of Hope will focus on key cities in the development of abstraction in the Americas: Montevideo (1930s), Buenos Aires (1940s), São Paulo (1950s), Rio de Janeiro (1950s–60s), Paris (1960s), and Caracas (1960s–70s). In tracing the development of ideas from one socio-geographic context to another, the exhibition will challenge the view of Latin American art as a single phenomenon, revealing important differences and tensions among various artistic proposals articulated during the decades under examination. The exhibition will include works by approximately 40 artists. Among them are Joaquín Torres-García, from Montevideo; Gyula Kosice and Tomás Maldonado, from Buenos Aires; Geraldo de Barros and Waldemar Cordeiro, from São Paulo; Hélio Oiticia and Lygia Clark, from Rio de Janeiro; and Jesús Rafael Soto and Carlos Cruz-Diez, from Caracas. The exhibition will also include a 300-page bilingual catalogue. By the way, the Grey Art Gallery's programming over the next year looks quite interesting, including the exhibitions Diebenkorn in New Mexico, dealing with the period 1950-1952 (January-April 2008); New York Cool: Paintings and Sculptures from the NYU Art Collection (April-July 2008); and Icons of the Desert: Early Paintings from Papunya, surveying Aboriginal art from the 1970s.
West Coast Abstraction
Orpheus Selection: In Search of Darkness
P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center presents the first of an ongoing series, Orpheus Selection, inspired by the museum's unique basement boiler room and the classical myth of Orpheus, the bard who attempted, unsuccessfully, to rescue his bride Eurydice from the underworld. Like the poet's descent into hell, Orpheus Selection: In Search of Darkness is an exploration into the unearthly and unknown, where both abstract and figurative works are charged with unsettling energy. The exhibition includes paintings, drawings, installations, sculptures, video works, and photographs by an intergenerational group of artists who are primarily based in the United States. Curated by Phong Bui, the exhibition includes MINUS SPACE artists Don Voisine and Joan Waltemath.
Andrew Leslie: New Installation
Suddenly One Summer
Features MINUS SPACE artist Mick Johnson.
Julian Dashper: To the Unknown New Zealander
A new exhibition by MINUS SPACE artist Julian Dashper.
Elizabeth Murray: In Memoriam, 1940-2007
What's This Shit Called Love?
The summer of 1967 made for perhaps the most mythical American season of the 20th century’s latter half. It was the Summer of Love, the summer of “Light My Fire” and “Incense and Peppermints.” The summer of San Francisco. An era of idealization that is often still idealized by the generation that experienced it, a sentiment fueling the Whitney Museum’s current Summer of Love exhibition. This project by artist Michael Zahn is the first of a series commissioned by NYFA Current asking artists to curate an online exhibition dealing with the 40th anniversary of the summer of ’67...
Terry Haggerty Installation
Wallpaper covers the creation of Terry Haggerty's new wall painting at Munich Re's offices in London. Includes a brief interview with the artist and photos of his process from start to finish.
Mary Heilman: To Be Someone
The Orange County Museum of Art presents the first retrospective of work by influential New York-based painter Mary Heilmann. A pioneer of infusing abstract painting with influences from popular culture and craft traditions, Mary Heilmann (b. 1940) is one of the most important yet least recognized artists in the United States today. One of the very few female abstract painters of her generation, she has nevertheless maintained a steadfast commitment to producing eccentric, engaging, visceral paintings over a 30-year period. The retrospective highlights her development of a deceptively simple, even offhand approach to painting-at once asserting ease, complexity, and boundless potentiality-that now permeates contemporary abstraction. Mary Heilmann includes 75 works from 1972 to the present, along with key earlier works. The exhibition will also examine Heilmann's interest in ceramics, decorative arts, film, and music. Also, check out:
New Anne Truitt (1921-2004) Web Site
Sydney Non Objective Contemporary Art Projects Launches New Web Site
Sydney Ball: Structures 2, Abstract Architecture
Milan Mrkusich & John Nixon |
