NYC Art Shows- Dial/ Hammons/ Rauschenberg at David Lewis

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Collage, Conceptual Art, Installation Art, Mixed Media, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Sculptors / Sculpture
Apr 142023
 

Thornton Dial, “Memory of the Ladies That Gave Us the Good Life”, 2004, Tin, carpet, wood, glove, washbasin, scrub brush, yard ornament, motor-oil bottle, paint brush, clothing, wire, enamel, and spray paint on wood

David Hammons, “Untitled”, 1976-77, Wire, rope, pipe cleaner, hair, rubber ball, mesh, aluminum, sand paper, thumb tack

Robert Rauschenberg, “Matt’s Defense (Scenarios)”, 2005, Pigment transfer on polylaminate

Dial / Hammons / Rauschenberg at David Lewis presents several works by the three artists that, although different in many ways, work together well.

From the press release-

This is the first-ever exhibition to solely bring together these three great American artists, each of whose conceptual ingenuity is expressed by way of material transformation and possibility. In particular, Dial / Hammons / Rauschenberg seeks to articulate the intersection between the American Duchampian legacy, as expressed in the material invention and possibilities of postwar Neo-Dada, and African-American traditions of redemptive, alchemical, and visionary practices based in found and discarded objects.

The exhibition ranges over more than 50 years; the earliest work presented is in Rauschenberg’s iconic 1962 assemblage Cartoon, then includes an early Duchampian wire, rope, pipe cleaner, hair, ball, and tack construction by David Hammons (Untitled, 1976-77), and then focuses on the 90s and 2000s, featuring four magisterial assemblages from Thornton Dial’s ‘high,’ most modernist phase of work, as well as an example of each of Hammons Kool-Aid and Tarp series from 2006 and 2007 and additional later Rauschenberg works. The exhibition also features two important sculptures: Dial’s Top of the World (1998), and Rauschenberg’s extraordinary The Lurid Attack of the Monsters from the Postal News, August, 1875 (Kabal American Zephyr) (1981). The largest work in the exhibition, Dial’s astonishing Master of Space (2004), conjures and critiques the iconography of American imperialism, military and corporate both (the eagle is made of neckties), while simultaneously calling upon and vengefully subverting the most classical of all modernist devices: the grid.

Every piece in the exhibition deploys, invents, and reflects upon the logic of assemblage: the Duchampian act of appropriation, transmuted in postwar America, into the language of assemblage, the Rauschenbergian combine. Dial / Hammons / Rauschenberg highlights these acts of American alchemy, and asks us to imagine their power and possibilities in ways which revise, expand, and complicate the history of modern and contemporary art, and weave a broader tapestry.

This exhibition closes 4/15/23.

NYC Art Shows- Sean Landers at Petzel Gallery

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Conceptual Art, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters
Apr 132023
 

Closing on 4/15/23 is Sean Landers’ exhibition Adrift at Petzel Gallery in NYC.

From the gallery’s press release-

Featuring over twenty new oil paintings by Landers, this largely allegorical exhibition illustrates the complexity of artistic mortality using four protagonists: dogs—depicted in single portraits and alone in rowboats unmoored at sea; lighthouses; the ocean; and sperm whale skeletons at rest on ocean shorelines. Each subject represents the dichotomy of freedom and trepidation involved in the act of releasing art to an unknown fate. “…a bit of the artist remains in their paintings, so in that way, a painting is like an artist adrift in time and space,” says Landers in an interview with writer Johanna Fateman for the exhibition catalogue.

A cornerstone of inspiration for Adrift is Landers’ long-term interest in the work of American painter Winslow Homer (b. 1836—d. 1920) and in particular Homer’s ocean paintings. The vast and unpredictable ocean marks time and space, a preeminent symbol used throughout the years in Landers’ paintings and art history. Homer’s style is emulated by Landers in paintings throughout the exhibition including Northeaster, Summer Squall, and Yellow Dog.

Each of these subjects can be seen as a character existing within the vicissitudes of artistic practice. The dogs, at attention and alone in their boats, symbolize the vulnerability of art against an unknown future. These works also parallel Joachim Patinir’s (b. 1483—d. 1524) painting Charon crossing the Styx in which a human soul is being transported by boat into afterlife. Landers sees this as symbolic for what a painting is—a vessel for the artist into afterlife.

Two lighthouses, Portland Lighthouse, US and Sunderland Lighthouse, UK, are both welcoming and warning beacons, allegories for institutions that signal to the public what art is worth preserving. This ruling system will determine the dogs’ fate as they head into the unknown of art history. The bare whale bones, epic in their repose on the sandy shore echo the finality in the lifespan of an artwork. Such relics are epitaphs and beginnings, a sentiment imparted in We Hover, where Landers’ text painted over a fierce ocean reads: And then we hover in between existence and nonexistence in our paintings and that is both terrifying and reassuring. For Landers, Adrift is the everlasting reminder that the artist, like Patinir’s soul, is forever navigating the here and hereafter.

For added perspective on the symbolism, this is from Landers’ Instagram account–

“The ocean represents time and space. The dog adrift in the boat is like an artwork adrift in time and space after the artist passes. The lighthouse is the institution that decides which art civilization will preserve. The whale skeleton is the fear of a life’s work gone unloved and allowed to die.”

NYC Art Shows- Yael Bartana at Petzel

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Conceptual Art, New York Art Shows, Video and Film
Apr 122023
 

 

How does one truly reckon with history?  The imagery in Yael Bartana’s three channel film Malka Germania at Petzel Gallery draws you in and presents you with this question for the entire 43 minutes. Drifting along with the film’s protagonist, scenes of beauty and destruction unfold- but seeing the eagle rise from the water as Hitler and Albert Speer’s proposed Volkshalle continues to emerge, you feel as stunned as those on the beach.

From the press release-

Malka Germania investigates the longing for collective redemption for German and Jewish histories as a response to an age of anxiety.

Malka Germania is Hebrew for “Queen Germany.” The name references a female designation for the Messiah: Malka Meshichah, or the “Anointed Queen.” In Bartana’s film, a new androgynous Messiah, Malka Germania, joins forces with the Israeli Army to liberate Berlin from its collective traumas, memories, and inherited pasts.

The 3-channel video portrays Malka as she walks through Berlin’s haunted landscape, revisiting historical events that seamlessly blend with contemporary scenes. The film weaves subconscious elements through surreal hallucinations, the biblical and mystical to leave questions of redemption, national myths and collective identities for the viewer to contemplate.

This exhibition closes 4/15/23.

 

Yolanda Sánchez’s “Out of Eden” at Creative Pinellas

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Conceptual Art, Fiber Arts, Florida Art Shows, Largo, Mixed Media, Painting / Painters, Pinellas County, Sculptors / Sculpture
Apr 122023
 

“With a Full Heart”

“Unforbidden Pleasures”

“Unforbidden Pleasures” (detail)

“Wild Nights”

Currently at the Creative Pinellas gallery is Yolanda Sánchez’s Out of Eden, a collection of her paintings and textile work. The gallery is filled bright pleasing colors and this is the perfect exhibition to celebrate the spring season.

On the Creative Pinellas website, Sánchez discusses her work in a detailed essay. Below is a section of that piece.

Whether in painting or textiles, my working instruments are rhythm and color. I am interested in the joyful, playful or even spiritual properties of light. I am reflecting the light and color of where I live, of my immediate environment.

This artistic practice is improvisational and process-oriented, abstract. The relationship of one color to another creates a rhythm and tempo and establishes the composition. Each color suggests the next color, almost like the “call and response” form found in many musical traditions. There is a continuous orchestration, as the colors converse with one another, suggesting a mood or vibe.

I am often not sure where it is going or going to go. It is a surprise at every turn. I shape my perception as I work.

My textile work is informed by the Korean art form known as Bojagi. Humble in its origins, nameless women made these traditional textiles as often extravagant visual pieces using mundane, leftover fabric from wrapping, storing and transporting goods. Over time, the nobility introduced finer, more delicate cloth.

In its traditional form, design characteristics include stitching and seams to create linear elements, especially with translucent fabrics. These features differentiate and distinguish Bojagi from patchwork textiles found in other cultural traditions. Nevertheless, Bojagi shares what feminist art historians identify as centuries-old histories of turning scraps of fabric into beautiful objects and ultimately shifting perspectives from private to public.

I pay homage to these unknown women, authenticating their domestic work – and I affirm their values of inclusion, pleasure, love, the familial, the decorative, the colorful and joyful, the spiritual and the everyday.

My Bojagi-inspired textile work – painting with thread and fabric – honors the Korean tradition. Still, while relying on the conventions and basic structure, these pieces extend and interpret the Bojagi into a more contemporary form. I offer a new direction by varying medium and size and utilizing color compositions and stitching techniques less anchored to established methods.

Material, color, texture and transparency are crucial elements in this work, as is the geometry inherent in the design. While geometry, in this case, emerges from a particular culture, the form does not demand a specific culture-dependent response. Its only function is beauty. It is about the sensual delight derived from looking – the viewer can ascribe or chose meaning, if at all.

As an order, rhythm and pattern are generated within the geometry, creating beauty through harmony and stability, color dominates as a suggestive poetic force, concurrently evoking a connection to my immediate tropical environment. It sets as my intention arousing a sense of place, a feeling, and the atmosphere of an abstract garden, or even a walk through a field of flowers.

It is the color but also the sensuousness of nature that I endeavor to suggest in both my paintings and textiles.

This exhibition closes 4/16/23.

NYC Art Shows- Hew Locke at P.P.O.W.

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, British Art Shows, Collage, Conceptual Art, Drawing, Installation Art, Mixed Media, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Photographers / Photography, Printmaking, Sculptors / Sculpture
Mar 292023
 

Hew Locke, “Listening to the Land” room view

“The Relic”, 2022

“The Relic” 2022 (another side)

“Raw Materials 3”, 2022

“Raw Materials 3”, 2022 (detail)

“Raw Materials 3”, 2022 (detail)

“Jumbie House 2”, 2022

“Jumbie House 2”, 2022

For Hew Locke’s exhibition, Listening to the Land, at P.P.O.W. he has created intricate sculptures and paintings that are fascinating in person.

From the press release-

Locke is known for exploring the languages of colonial and post-colonial power, and the symbols through which different cultures assume and assert identity. Furthering the themes explored in his celebrated commission The Procession at Tate Britain, and his concurrent installation Gilt on the façade of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, this exhibit engages with contemporary and historical inequities while reflecting on the landscape and history of the Caribbean. The exhibition draws its title from a poem by Guyanese political activist and poet Martin Carter which situates itself between two opposing forces of the landscape – sea and forest. Locke’s show features new sculptures and wall works with recurring motifs of stilt-houses, boats, memento mori, and share certificates referencing tensions between the land, the sea, and economic power. Reflecting on these links, Locke notes, “The land was created to generate money for colonial power, now the sea wants it back.”

Translating to ‘land of many waters,’ Guyana and its physical, economic, and political landscape serve as one of the primary sources for Locke’s work. Having spent his childhood in this newly independent nation, the artist witnessed first-hand an era of radical transformation. Now, the country teeters on the precipice of an oil boom and is one of the world’s fastest growing economies. Juxtaposing personal meditations on the climate crisis with political commentary on the history of a globalized world, Locke contemplates the ways in which colonies were exploited to accumulate capital, and observes how Guyana’s economic future lies in the exploitation of its waters. Locke’s new boat sculptures The Relic and The Survivor embody this broad worldview as the two battered wrecks drift through time and history. Evoking the fragmented and diverse legacies of the global diaspora, the boats’ patchwork sails are interspersed with photo transfers of 19th Century cane cutters and banana boat loaders, while their decks are loaded with cargo that could allude to colonial plunder, trade goods or personal belongings.

Based on an abandoned plantation house, Locke’s newest sculpture Jumbie House 2 features layered images that unveil the spirits that haunt this colonial vestige. Presented alongside are a series of painted photographs of dilapidated vernacular architecture across Georgetown and rural Guyana. Constantly under threat of being washed away by storms or rising sea levels, these crumbling structures echo anxieties surrounding climate change and historical erasure. A new series of mixed media wall works, Raw Materials, is derived from antique share certificates and bonds. Locke richly decorates the appliques with acrylic, beads, and patchwork to draw attention to the complex ways in which the past shapes the present. The image of an 1898 Chinese Imperial Gold Loan behind painted Congolese figures connects the global economy at the height of Empire to current Sino-African trade networks. In another work, a painted representation of a Nigerian Ife mask, alongside an image of David Livingstone, is layered on a French-African Mortgage Bond from 1923, connecting exploration and exploitation of African land, to current conversations surrounding the repatriation of artifacts. Taken together, the works in Locke’s Listening to the Land echo William Faulkner’s adage “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

This exhibition closes 4/1/23.

The Procession, mentioned above, can now be seen at Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, in Gateshead, England until June 11th, 2023.

Gilt, also mentioned above, is on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art until May 30th, 2023.

 

NYC Art Shows- Charles Gaines at Hauser & Wirth

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Conceptual Art, Drawing, Mixed Media, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Photographers / Photography
Mar 282023
 

Charles Gaines’ work never fails to impress and his recent exhibition, Southern Trees, at Hauser and Wirth in NYC, is no exception.

From the press release-

One of the most important conceptual artists working today, the show explores the evolution of Gaines’s complex practice, demonstrating how he has continued to forge new paths within the innovative framework of two of his most acclaimed series, Numbers and Trees and Walnut Tree Orchard. The exhibition’s title, ‘Southern Trees,’ alludes directly to the 150-year-old pecan trees pictured in the new works, and symbolically to the opening lyrics of ‘Strange Fruit,’ Billie Holiday’s haunting protest anthem from the 1930s.

The image of the tree has been central to Gaines’s practice since he first began the Walnut Tree Orchard series in the 1970s. In ‘Southern Trees,’ Gaines advances the series using pecan trees photographed on a visit to Boone Hall Plantation in Charleston County, South Carolina––not far from where the artist was born and lived until he was five years old. Presented alongside a key early example from the walnut tree series, eight new triptych works on paper revisit and expand upon this significant original body of work.

‘Walnut Tree Orchard: Set M’ (1977), on loan from the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, pairs a black and white photograph of a walnut tree with two drawings derived from it––an ink outline of the same tree and a grayscale grid that plots all of the trees included in the series up until that point. The newest series, titled Pecan Trees (2022), begins similarly, with a stark black and white photograph of a tree; yet in the drawings that accompany it, Gaines has filled in the outline of the tree with solid ink and used vibrant watercolors to plot all the previous trees in the final drawing. These successive modifications to scale, color and background demonstrate Gaines’s theory that while ‘the system has never changed, the outcome is always different.’

This extends to Gaines’s new Numbers and Trees Plexiglas series, which begin with the artist assigning each tree a distinctive color and numbered grid––breaking down the composition into individual cells that reflect the full form of the tree depicted in the photograph on the surface. However, Gaines reverses his signature process in this new series by overlaying the forms of the trees one at a time and in progression on the back panel of the work rather than on the front. He then brings the photograph to the surface by printing an enlarged detail of the most recently added tree on the work’s Plexiglas surface. This approach brings the tree’s shadowy branches to the foreground, highlighting its textural details and contrasting tones while obscuring the colorful numbered grids painted underneath it. This reversal produces a dramatically different effect, igniting a more somber, yet stirring, reaction to the work as the austere branches, dripping with moss, dominate the picture.

Created through carefully considered systems rather than through the artist’s own imagination or intuition, these new works remove the artist’s subjectivity by following a set of self-determined rules and procedures. The works call into question both the objective nature of the trees and the subjective natural and material human actions that surround them. The fastidious layering process allows Gaines to reveal the differences between the trees’ shapes where the forms do not align. These differences, highlighted by the artist’s systems, suggest the arbitrary nature of other manufactured systems in our society––such as politics, gender, race and class.

This exhibition closes 4/1/23.

NYC Art Shows- Stefan Kürten and Rita McBride at Alexander and Bonin

 Art, Artists, Conceptual Art, Drawing, Fiber Arts, Installation Art, Mixed Media, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Sculptors / Sculpture
Mar 232023
 

Stefan Kürten, “We are all made of stars”, 2013

Stefan Kürten, “Running to Stand Still”, 2014

Stefan Kürten, “Running to Stand Still”, 2014 (detail)

Stefan Kürten, “Fine Wrinkles”, 2000

Rita McBride, “Mae West Mandala (Oaxaca), 2009 and “Color Test (Green Bar)”, 2009

Stefan Kürten’s paintings of houses and Rita McBride’s wall coverings (and other sculptures) work with each other to question the concept of home, as well as the objects you might find within one. The exhibition, titled I Continue To Live In My Glass House, is on view at Alexander and Bonin until 3/25/23.

From the press release-

Stefan Kürten is known for detailed depictions of homes. Although constructed from both found and invented imagery, his homes feel known or experienced. The slippage between archetypes, memories, and dreams are central to his compositions. Set in lush landscapes and mysteriously unpeopled, Kürten’s homes evoke modern art or design museums with iconic sculptures and furniture viewable inside and outside of their transparent walls.

Rita McBride’s work invites us to reconsider structures and design elements such as ductwork, awnings, wall coverings and other utilitarian objects. McBride represents a bentwood chair in Murano glass, fastened together by a material that evokes spun candy or plastic wrap. Chair (1999) comments on the life of a domestic object whose usage necessitates an inventive approach to repair or stabilization.
McBride is also showing Particulates, an art installation that combines lasers with ambient dust and water molecules, will be on view at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles starting 3/27/23.

 

Florida Art Shows- The Werk Gallery in St. Pete

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Ceramic Art, Collage, Conceptual Art, Digital Art, Drawing, Fiber Arts, Florida Art Shows, Installation Art, Mixed Media, Painting / Painters, Photographers / Photography, Pinellas County, Printmaking, Sculptors / Sculpture, St. Pete
Mar 162023
 

Eric “ESH” Hornsby, “Living Daylights 1″and “Living Daylights 2”

Adam Christopher Reed, “The Judge”

Nikita Rosalind, “Peace in the Wild Waves”

The Werk Gallery is an exciting new space in St. Pete that hosts monthly exhibitions in one half and the owners’ curated mix of vintage and modern items in the other. The photos above are from Shiny & New, the first gallery’s first show.

Artists from this exhibition pictured above- Adam Christopher Reed, Nikita Rosalind, and Eric “ESH” Hornsby

Currently the gallery is showing Rite of Spring, featuring artists Kenny Jensen, Nathan Beard, Samson Huang, Laura Spencer (Miss Crit), John Gascot, and Leafmore Studios (Becca McCoy and Justin Groom).

The gallery is open Thursday- Sunday from 12-5 pm.

NYC Art Shows- Martín Touzón at Kates Ferri Projects

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Conceptual Art, Installation Art, Mixed Media, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Sculptors / Sculpture
Mar 092023
 

For Martín Touzón’s exhibition DISSOLUTION, at Kates Ferri Projects in NYC, each work plays a part in the one that comes next. Moving from work on Wet Wipes, to neon, to painting and back again- the more you look at them, the more you can see their connection to each other.

From the press release-

As an artist who normally rejects his previously established rules from one project to the next, he turns the table on this pattern as well, dissolving his own methodologies. Touzón says that “Change comes from noticing a difference in the feeling towards something.” Being an economist-turned-artist, he studies the impact of altering one variable on another. In the process he unconsciously opens a dialogue between arts and economics, relating at some point to the accumulation and fuite, trade, exchange, barter and surplus, production and circulation.

“The unfolding between the series came quite intuitively,” says Touzón. While on board the train to his residency in Turin (the city of Arte Povera) in 2017, he picked up bits of text and shapes from a magazine using acrylic markers and sharpies. He had to work fast so that the image would not be muddled because of the bleed of colors on the wipes. Lacking full control over the final image, the artist then lets them dry inside the same magazine. This technique underlies the paintings on Wet Wipes in the exhibition.

In contrast, the neon sculptures are very intentional. In his collaboration with a sign maker from Buenos Aires, Touzón must communicate quite specifically about how he wants the rings to look–almost misshapen. Translating from a 2D surface now into a 3D object, the artist is also playing with scale. The works on Wet Wipes are immediate and close to the hand, while the neon sculptures take up space and its light brings in the body.

As a next step, Touzón utilizes the neon shapes during the painting process. Laid on the canvases or over paper, they let the paint to diffuse on the wet surface, which in turn allows chance to play a role in the outcome. This gesture mimics the results in the Wet Wipes series, and yet the effect of the neon through paint or light is wholly distinct. Thus, he leads his work on the Escher stairs, seemingly returning to the same place, but ultimately, landing someplace new.

This whole process is an exciting new chapter in Touzón’s work. As an Argentina-based artist, Touzón has first-hand experience of an environment where instability is a constant of everyday life. Reason why his obsession for the careful study of transitions and changes. As the dissolution of society and systems come crumpling at our feet with the pandemic, climate change, and ongoing wars, the art world is also being reshaped by new artists and cultural producers. The holdouts for the old-world order or artistic hierarchies are also disillusioned, finding themselves in a new society that may look similar, but is fundamentally changed. Through his works, Touzón subtly suggests a way of perceiving through the cracks of this new normality and how one’s diluted perception of the world might not be an accurate reflection of others’ reality.

This exhibition closes 3/13/23.

 

 

NYC Art Shows- Chiharu Shiota at Templon Gallery

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Collage, Conceptual Art, Drawing, Fiber Arts, Installation Art, Mixed Media, New York Art Shows, Photographers / Photography, Sculptors / Sculpture
Mar 082023
 

Chiharu Shiota, “Connected to the Universe”, 2023

Chiharu Shiota, “Connected to the Universe”, 2023 (detail)

Chiharu Shiota, “Connected to the Universe”, 2023, detail

“Connected to the Universe”, 2023

Chiharu Shiota’s gorgeous installations are just one part of her engaging exhibition, Signs of Life, at Templon in NYC. The installations lead to other rooms of smaller sculptures as well as  paintings.

From the press release-

After a foundation degree in painting at Seika University in Kyoto, Chiharu Shiota chose to pursue her artistic studies in Berlin, focusing on performance. Her practice soon shifted towards site-specific installations. She skilfully weaves knotted threads to create fantastical scenes combining salvaged window frames, a piano, suitcases, books and used clothes. Bordering on drawing and sculpture, her fabulous ephemeral, immersive installations have become her signature. Since her impressive installation for the Japanese Pavilion at the Venice Bienniale in 2015, she has become one of the key figures on the international art scene and is regularly invited to show her work at museums worldwide.

In a hyper-connected world, Chiharu Shiota’s new exhibition questions the notion of the “web”, a living organism similar to the structures that make up the universe or the neurons our brains are built on. Created on-site over two weeks, a large-scale installation made of red threads symbolizes this permanent connection of information, collective memory and the world’s knowledge which cuts across cultures and continents. At the heart of the work are two arms, her own, placed on the ground. They are cast in bronze, palms facing up to the sky. “I always thought that if death took my body, I wouldn’t exist anymore,” explains the artist. “I’m now convinced that my spirit will continue to exist because there is more to me than a body. My consciousness is connected to everything around me and my art unfolds by way of people’s memory.”

The installation is followed by a series of sculptures. Enfolded at the centre of each one, as though frozen in place by the intertwined threads, are objects from daily life. “I feel that the objects we possess are like a third skin,” she says. “We accumulate these things and transpose our presence and our memory to them.” Often obsolete, weighed down by impenetrable histories, these objects — old suitcases, stained dolls, miniature pieces of furniture and tiny bottles — represent the treasures offered up by memory, to be seen but not touched.

“State of Being (Dress)”, 2022

State of Being (Photos), 2022

State of Being (Photos), 2022 (detail)

This exhibition closes 3/9/23.

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