On view in the gallery at 502 West 22nd Street is a painting called Ru Ware Project, 2007-2012, made up of nine small panels painted in different shades of pale blues. The legendary Ru ware is the rarest of all ancient Chinese pottery.
Installation view. Opens March 3, 2011 Making Histories: Changing Views of the Collection explores how a museum collection constructs and embodies histories to be reconsidered over time, offering various views into the museum’s own history and its collections right up to the present day, through monographic installations of individual works or bodies of work by key artists and designers, thematic surveys, archival research projects, special projects and recent acquisitions. The exhibition showcases the breadth of [...]
Al Taylor, Station of the Cross, 1990 Formica laminate and wire 42 x 25 x 23 inches January 21 – April 16, 2011 Al Taylor: Wire Instruments and Pet Stains is the first American survey of work by this important and prolific artist. The exhibition features two major series in Taylor’s vast oeuvre: Wire Instruments (1989-1990) and Pet Stains (1989-1992). These distinctive bodies of work will illustrate the importance of Taylor’s process and creative breadth. [...]
John Zinsser, Geometry and Ego, 2007 Enamel and oil on canvas 30 x 28 inches December 18, 2010 – February 12, 2011 Get Me to the Church on Time It was a simple enough assignment, drive the painter Marcia Hafif to her opening at Larry Becker Contemporary Art in Philadelphia. What I couldn’t have predicted was that a massive wreck on I-95 would shut down the highway completely. The trip became a seven-and-a-half hour odyssey, [...]
Brice Marden, Letters October 29 – December 23, 2010 Matthew Marks is pleased to announce Brice Marden: Letters, the next exhibition in his gallery at 522 West 22nd Street. This will be the artist’s first one-person exhibition in New York since his 2006 Museum of Modern Art retrospective. While his MoMA retrospective was still on view, Marden embarked on a round-the-world trip. His first stop was Taipei, where he saw a Sung dynasty poem by [...]
Installation view of Salotto – Villa Panza Museum, Varese, Italy (l to r) Ruth Ann Fredenthal, Untitled 130, 1987-1988 Multilayered oil on Oyster linen, 60 x 60 inches Ruth Ann Fredenthal, Untitled 121, 1984-1985 Multilayered oil on Oyster linen, 66 x 60 inches The Panza Collection (Photo: David Sotnik) Count Giuseppe Panza di Biumo, 1923-2010 “Most people who have any interest in Post-War American art, whether Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, Minimalism, Environmental Art, Conceptualism or Monochromism [...]
Peter Forakis, Atlanta Gateway, 1967 From The New York Times, December 17, 2009 Peter Forakis, a sculptor who helped found Park Place, a prominent New York artists’ cooperative gallery of the 1960s, died on Nov. 26 in Petaluma, Calif. He was 82 and lived in Petaluma. His death was announced by the Togonon Gallery in San Francisco, which has represented him since 2007. Mr. Forakis was one of many young artists in the late ’50s [...]
Installation view September 1-26, 2009 The Paula Cooper Gallery presents an exhibition of work by David Novros. Six paintings dating from 1965 to 1969 will be shown, some of which have not been seen in public for over forty years. An original member of Park Place, the historic New York artist collective, Novros is well known for his large, abstract paintings on irregularly shaped, multipaneled canvases. With their sensuous and reflective surfaces created with multiple [...]
Max Gimblett, Orpheus, 2004 Gesso, polyurethane, pencil, epoxy, pigment, moon gold leaf on wood panel 70 x 70 inches June 19 – August 1, 2009 Hamish Morrison Gallery presents, for the first time in Germany, New Zealand artist Max Gimblett (* 1935). His work enjoys special recognition in his home country with which he has retained many links, but especially in the United States where he has lived since the 1970s. This year his works [...]
Installation view March 19 – May 3, 2009 Kjell Varvin (born 1939) creates both drawings and paintings, but is best known for his sculptures and installations. This exhibition focuses on a large selection of sculptures made of welded steel and produced over the last fifteen years. Together with the sculptures, a number of drawings on veneer will be on show and the exhibition thereby comprises the largest presentation of Varvin’s work so far. Kjell [...]
Purchase on Amazon.com Since it was founded in 1976, Art Monthly magazine has consistently published interviews with leading contemporary artists. The interviews collected in this book offer unique insights into the thought processes and working practices of artists. From Russian Constructivists of the 1920s to Turner Prize winners, this collection of interviews constitutes an entertaining and alternative history of 20th-century art written in the first person. Contributors include: Naum Gabo, Clement Greenberg, Victor Pasmore, [...]
In his series of lectures, Pictures of Nothing: Abstract Art since Pollock, Kirk Varnedoe asks tough questions. Why abstract art? What is abstract art good for? These questions, the topic of his six lectures, are familiar. It seems to me that they are asked, and in a sense answered, every time an artist makes an abstract work. They are the questions that artists ask as we wrestle with the history of abstraction and as we [...]
Ward Jackson at Kay-Mar Gallery, NY, 1964 Transit & Garden 1 (left to right) Quite simply, you have to know about Ward Jackson and his work — he was an innovative abstract painter, a maverick editor and arts administrator, and a key member of New York City’s artist community. I recently had the pleasure of speaking with Ward’s nephew, artist Julian Jackson, about his uncle’s life and work. Our discussion that follows [...]
Although he has shown extensively in Europe for many years, it’s only in the past decade, when he began showing with Peter Blum, that his stature in America has grown large in a more public way. This, despite the fact that Marioni exhibited his work at Bykert Gallery in the 70’s, was tapped by Brice Marden for a show at Artists Space, and was included in a recent Whitney Biennial. However, it took the New [...]
Harvey Quaytman kept a secret. He had a display case in his studio, which was often obscured from plain view that contained handcrafted models of vintage aircraft. The late Quaytman was no Bluebeard, but he did prefer to keep his hobby to himself—perhaps because he was afraid that it might lead to a literal reading of his abstract paintings. Clearly Quaytman’s work is not all about airplanes but, in fact, both his art and his [...]
How do two planes meet? Forget Henny Youngman for a second, this is the kind of question that painters often worry over. Granted it’s an issue that most people today are oblivious to, especially masons, judging from the snaggletooth brick face one sees on any new building. This subject of planes-the transition of form within painting-has been given great and careful consideration by the painter Joanna Pousette-Dart. This was Pousette-Dart’s first solo show in nearly [...]
Let’s begin by dropping some stock material. Abandoning, for a moment, dystopia, information theory, or recalling Piranesi’s prison etchings for the umpteenth time, along with metastasizing mutatis mutandis and all of the Popular Science pseudo-scientific (scientistic really) rhetoric that sticks so easily to the toothy surfaces of Terry Winters’ work. Winters is an important artist. His paintings have proven relevant because they reveal the often invisible operations of the wilder, real and artless avant-gardes informing [...]
I like looking at Bill Jensen’s paintings the same way I like watching little league baseball players. In both cases, all of their emotions are right on the surface. Emotional investment is an increasingly uncommon quality in the world today, but it was visibly evident in Jensen’s latest exhibition of paintings at Mary Boone’s gallery uptown. This show, which closed just recently, was the latest in a series that has defined the painter’s newfound and [...]