Harold Ancart at David Zwirner NYC

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters
Oct 102020
 

The Mountain, 2020

The Mountain, Center Painting

 

The Mountain, Center Painting, Detail

Untitled, 2020

Detail of the above painting

Untitled, 2020

Currently at David Zwirner’s 19th Street location is Traveling Light, an exhibition of new work by Belgian-born, New York–based artist Harold Ancart. The stunning large scale paintings were created using oil stick and graphite.

From the press release–

On view in one gallery space will be a new series of paintings that depicts trees. These works were painted between Ancart’s Brooklyn studio and a makeshift outdoor studio in Los Angeles, which he traveled to during lockdown. Pointing to references as varied as René Magritte, Egon Schiele, Gustav Klimt, and Piet Mondrian, who approached this subject matter in distinct ways, Ancart’s tree paintings blur form and color, figure and ground, and figuration and abstraction.

In the adjoining gallery space, there will be two multipanel canvases that situate the viewer between a mountain-scape and a seascape, both monumental in scale. These works are inspired in part by the artist’s encounter with the modernist landscape murals of the American painter Gottardo Piazzoni (1872–1945) permanently installed at the De Young Museum, San Francisco.

The exhibition constructs an immersive landscape experience, and together, the works on view comprise a meditation on the expansive possibilities of painting.

The two quotes from Ancart below (taken from the gallery’s website) describe the concept of the exhibition a bit more.

“It is a very strange time to think about traveling, and it is a strange time to think about freedom. I didn’t conceive the exhibition this way, but I guess meaning always catches up with you. I am opening this exhibition, Traveling Light, at a time when no one travels.… But there are always means of transportation, and I think painting is very much one of them.”

“I actually did conceive the exhibition as a walk.… I think it is very important, as a painter, that you can wander freely through paint. And I think it is very important as a viewer that you can wander equally freely through it. You don’t need to know where you are going.”

This exhibition closes 10/17/20.

 

Happy Birthday Betye Saar!

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Conceptual Art, Los Angeles Art Shows, Mixed Media, Sculptors / Sculpture
Jul 302020
 

Happy Birthday to Betye Saar who turned 94 today! This work Still Ticking, (2005), was part of LACMA’s exhibition Betye Saar: Call and Response which opened at the museum in September of 2019.

From the wall description of the work-

Made shortly before Saar’s seventy-eighth birthday, the assemblage includes years and astrological glyphs on the inner left side that correlate to various important dates in her life. The work’s title wittily refers both to the timepieces in the sculpture- which, of course, are not ticking; indeed they are either frozen in time or missing their hands- and to the artist herself, who is alive and well, still ticking, now at age ninety-three.

Drew Heitzler at Blum and Poe Los Angeles (2015)

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Los Angeles Art Shows, Los Angeles Art Shows, Painting / Painters
Jul 122020
 

One of the pieces from Drew Heitzler’s 2015 exhibition Pacific Palisades at Blum and Poe Los Angeles.

Mark Bradford’s “150 Portrait Tone” at LACMA

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Los Angeles Art Shows, Mixed Media, Painting / Painters
Jul 062020
 

Today, July 6th, is the four year anniversary of the fatal shooting of Philando Castile by a police officer during a traffic stop in Minnesota. Castile was shot five times while his girlfriend and her four year old daughter were in the car.

Mark Bradford’s 150 Portrait Tone, 2017, currently at LACMA, is a devastating large scale work that uses excerpts from Philando Castile’s girlfriend Diamond Reynolds’s dialogue from the video she live streamed on Facebook from the incident.

From LACMA’s wall description of the work-

Bradford notes that he was moved by the multiple subjects Reynolds simultaneously addressed and the different spaces they occupied: her boyfriend, Castile, next to her (“stay with me”); the officer outside the car (“please, officer, don’t tell me that you just did this”); God (“Lord, please Jesus, don’t tell me that he’s gone”); as well as the unknown receiver on the other side of her lifestream (“please don’t tell me he just went like that”).

Like many of Bradford’s works, the mural-size composition contains elements of both abstraction and realism. In places, layers of manipulated paint render the text almost illegible. The dark form in the background, however, evokes all-too-real associations with the horrific shooting, such as Castile’s twisted arm and the dark-red bloodstain spread across his white shirt, both visible in the live stream feed.

The title, “150 Portrait Tone”, refers to the name and color code of the pink acrylic used throughout the painting (most conspicuous in a large patch at the work’s bottom edge). Like the now-obsolete “flesh” crayon in the Crayola 64 box (the color was renamed “peach” in 1962), the color “portrait tone” carries inherent assumptions about who, exactly, is being depicted. In the context of Bradford’s painting, the title presents a sobering commentary on power and representation.

Titus Kaphar at Jack Shainman Gallery 2017

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Conceptual Art, Mixed Media, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Politics, Sculptors / Sculpture
Jul 032020
 

Absconded From the Household of the President of the United States, 2016

Billy Lee: Portrait in Tar, 2016

Twisted Tropes, 2016

Monumental Inversions: George Washington, 2016

The above images are from Titus Kaphar’s exhibition Shifting Skies at Jack Shainman Gallery in 2017. Kaphar recently created the cover of the June 15th issue of Time Magazine covering the George Floyd protests.

John Tottenham at Maloney Fine Art Los Angeles 2014

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Drawing, Los Angeles Art Shows
Jun 222020
 

Everything is falling apart according to plan, one of artist and writer John Tottenham’s works from his show The Indifferent Sublime, at Maloney Fine Art in Culver City in 2014.

Nina Chanel Abney at Mary Boone Gallery NYC

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Conceptual Art, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters
May 302020
 

Nina Chanel Abney’s In the Land Without Feelings (2017) from her 2017 exhibition Safe House at Mary Boone Gallery in collaboration with Jack Shainman Gallery.

From the press release-

Safe House is so termed for being a place of refuge. It is also a phrase used more colloquially as a space where one escapes the dangers affiliated with the law. With these eight single-panel paintings, Abney invites us into a place of reprieve, showing us people partaking in everyday activities. Abney’s scenarios offer sincere portrayals that counter how black life is represented in the mainstream media. The decision intentionally explores black joy as a means of resistance.

A deeply accomplished artist associated with innovating history painting, Abney took a multipart strategy to reclaim a space for creativity for this exhibition. To begin, she sourced graphics from posters dating from the 1960s that addressed aspects of safety for occupation, home, and leisure, abstracted these, and made them grounds for large-scale compositions. Then, against this backdrop Abney painted figures, objects, and letters to articulate the complex dynamics of contemporary urban life. She unequivocally is in pursuit of a depiction of commonplace activities and things. With each intuitively developed composition, each element such as the figures is often obfuscated by another element such as text, which in turn is challenged by a direction, such as an arrow. The imagery is reminiscent of sign painting, and each move made by Abney necessitates another. This chain of forms turns each element over to a type of writing, which opens a narrative and its reception to many readings. The abstracted source material (safety posters), combined with the abounding narratives from the detailed scenes, returns us to the title of the exhibition. The phrase prompts us to ask directly or obliquely: What caution and care are these narratives invoking and advocating? What danger might not be readily apparent to the viewer here?

David Hockney at The Metropolitan Museum of Art (plus COVID-19 Online Programming)

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters
May 292020
 

Pictured above is David Hockney’s Rubber Ring Floating in a Swimming Pool (1971), from his excellent exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2018.

From the show’s wall caption-

Hockney was impressed with how a photograph he had taken of a red pool toy floating in the water in Cadaqués, Spain looked nearly abstract, “like a Max Ernst,” he said. “I thought, it’s marvelous, I could just paint it.” He pointed out later that while the picture may look completely abstract at first glance, once the viewer reads its title, the work changes completely.

The Met has a lot of great online programming due to the closures for COVID-19, including virtual tours of iconic spaces in the museum and their current exhibitions; talks, performances, and concerts; over 500 free books; art instructions; six seasons of The Artist Project- short videos from contemporary artists discussing art that inspires them; coloring pages; a full length feature documentary film on Gerhard Richter (he has an exhibition currently at The Met Breuer) and more.

 

 

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