NYC Art Shows- Miriam Schapiro at Eric Firestone Gallery

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Collage, Conceptual Art, Digital Art, Drawing, Fiber Arts, Mixed Media, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters
May 092023
 

“Curtains”, 1972, Acrylic and fabric on canvas

“Curtains”, 1972 (detail)

“Voyage”, 1973, Acrylic and collage on canvas

“Shrine: Homage to M.L.”, 1963, Oil on canvas

“Big Ox”, 1967, acrylic on canvas

There’s only a few days left to see Miriam Schapiro: The André Emmerich Years, Paintings from 1957–76 at Eric Firestone Gallery.

From the press release-

Miriam Schapiro (1923–2015) is now well-known as a pioneer of the Women’s Art Movement, and for her contribution to the Pattern and Decoration Movement. She fused craft work, traditionally made by women, with modern painting in collages termed “femmage.” However, this exhibition will additionally shed light on her early Abstract Expressionist canvases, and her pioneering approach utilizing computer technology to create Hard Edge geometric painting in the 1960s. Spotlighting the legacy of this feminist artist, the exhibition will explore three stylistic phases, with significant examples from these two decades of Schapiro’s career.

This exhibition closes 5/13/23.

NYC Art Shows- Ho Jae Kim at Harper’s

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Collage, Mixed Media, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters
May 042023
 

“Day 11: Flight Simulator”, 2023 Oil, inkjet transfer, enamel, and paper on canvas

“Carousel”, 2023 Oil, inkjet transfer, enamel, and paper on canvas

“Day 5: In Praise of Shadows”, 2023 Oil, inkjet transfer, enamel, and paper on canvas

“Day 3: Janitor”, 2022 Oil, inkjet transfer, enamel, and paper on canvas

Above are some of Ho Jae Kim’s enchanting mixed media works from his exhibition, Carousel at Harper’s gallery.

From the press release written by the artist-

The centerpiece of this exhibition, its namesake painting, depicts a carousel with 31 horses signifying the days of the month. For each of these “days,” I built a unique narrative in honor of liminal spaces, the mundane, and the quotidian. Just as life continues regardless of our psychology, the carousel will turn whether or not there is a rider. While I prepared for this exhibition, I thought of the displacement I’ve experienced by tragic events out of my control. One summer night in 2022, my stepfather committed suicide. He left a brief note for my mother before driving to a nearby railroad where he waited for a train to take his life. Since then, I have been plagued with a vision of the train’s headlights—a magnificent bright light that dissolves the contours of everything in its path. I became a prisoner to this light that exists within my dark fantasy.

We rely on fleeting moments of significance to define life, but the majority of our lives are shaped by non-moments of transition, endurance, and dormancy. For this reason, I chose to create representations of less significant moments in order to build a body of work that can paint a better picture of reality. Luxurious portrayals of life as depicted in movies and pop culture cultivate dreams of becoming a character in a fantasy, but these dreams are quickly shattered by the constraints and circumstances of daily life. We become psychologically displaced and rejected by the fantasies that once served as our vitality. We begin to live in a state of purgatory, caught between reality and our dreams.

In The Divine Comedy, during the transition from the Inferno to Purgatory, Dante turns right to see the light from the east on Easter Sunday, a day of resurrection. With this new orientation, Dante’s purgatory becomes a place of hope, where lost souls can choose to repent or find redemption. The horses on my carousel face to the left, in the direction of the spiraling Inferno, but if the audience chooses to imagine the mechanism rotating, the horses will eventually turn right as they continue their clockwise journey. Similarly, as the halos, arches, circles, and light in my paintings become juxtaposed with the mundanity of the subjects, they transform those quiet non-moments into divinity, and the prisoners of my narratives are granted redemption.

This body of work began as a tragedy, but it has the potential to become a comedy. And just as I wish for my loved ones to see the beauty that is within their souls, I hope that my divine scenes of nothingness can become a vehicle for others to redeem themselves in purgatory and indulge in the beauty that is inherent in every life.

This exhibition closes 5/6/23.

 

NYC Art Shows- Amy Lincoln at Sperone Westwater

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters
May 032023
 

“Sun and Moon Spectrum”, 2022

“Sun and Moon Spectrum”, 2022 (detail)

“Radiant Sun with Trees (Yellow, Pink, Green)”, 2023

“Gingko Trees (Gold and Violet)”, 2023

It’s the last few days to see Amy Lincoln’s exhibition of dreamy paintings at Sperone Westwater.

From the press release-

These large-scale seascapes and landscapes reference atmospheric elements—air, water, light and clouds—and engage concepts of light reflection and refraction. Working in a more expansive format, Lincoln continues her exploration of the cosmos.

Lincoln covers each of her wood panels with acrylic paint in gradations of colors from light to dark to develop a precise perspective and imply the illusion of space. Sun and Moon Spectrum, the centerpiece of the exhibition, measures over 11 feet wide, her largest seascape to date. “This painting moves sequentially through the colors of rainbow, starting at yellow, then to orange, red, magenta, purple and blue,” says Lincoln. “Bands of color progress from and divide the two glowing orbs of sun and moon, shifting from light to dark and back to light again, while also moving from warm to cool colors.” The visual conceit of moving through a color spectrum references Ellsworth Kelly’s work, a nod to the minimal abstraction that has influenced her recent practice.

In this new series, Lincoln also utilizes as subject matter botanical and forest imagery (for example, Radiant Sun with Trees (Yellow, Pink, Green), 2022). Like the waves in the seascape paintings, the fir and gingko trees repeated throughout the foreground and background serve to enhance depth and perspective. “This creates an overall simplicity and focus on color, pattern and space,” says Lincoln. “I also didn’t want to be too dependent on the seascape imagery as a formula. I wanted to apply the inventive approach to color I had learned in making the seascapes to a different set of imagery.”

This exhibition closes 5/6/23.

NYC Art Shows- Annie Bielski at Rachel Uffner

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Mixed Media, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters
Apr 282023
 

“My Gut”, 2022, acrylic, ink, marker, wax crayon, paracord, thread on canvas

“My Gut”, 2022 (detail)

“Bodybuilder”, 2023, acrylic, ink, wax crayon, paracord, thread on canvas

Annie Bielski’s dynamic mixed media paintings from her exhibition, Agita, are currently on view in Rachel Uffner Gallery’s upstairs space.

From the gallery’s press release-

Annie Bielski makes works that are big washes of feeling, then she goes in and fills in the shapes. The volumes need to be filled—satiated. Going over and over them with crayon or oil stick in repetitive gestures. This is to say that her paintings are both records of the artist’s bodily limits (the paintings go as far as my arm) and examples of the limitless potential of materials left to their own devices (the oil stick is cakey and glossy lipstick falling off and crumbling and being smooth). The drawing ends when the stick is worn down and there is nothing but residue left on your hands.

The result of this dialogue is evident in the forms that she generates. Each form is an organ: it has a specific function, processes in its own way the work’s shared fluids and biles—but compacts to mass when crammed together in the cavity of the canvas. The material challenging the body to collapse into its most erratic gestures, the body wondering if the material might ultimately generate some kind of meaning. Everything is always taut, ready to burst.

What happens next? Eating a hotdog from a cart in Central Park (beginning a painting) when suddenly the agita rises (heartburning) and the world immediately becomes askance, shifting off its axis to accommodate room for your pain. How do I make this okay?? / When will the painting be finished?? Needing to take off every thing that constricts you; unbuttoning your pants, loosening your bra, unwinding your braid, then going to lie down. A body would be sexy but it’s the byproduct of spasmodic internal combustion. Classic.

For her, the conditions that painting creates are tragicomic. This understanding is traced in wavering—moments of gravity or self-seriousness are transmuted into a bunch of bananas or a floral motif. But each little disaster is kept in check by a kind of logic, perhaps provisional, a pact with the inherent nature of all unruly things to meander. It is ultimately a win-win contract between generosity and flexibility, a willingness on her part to accept the mess of point A to point B.

The result is a series of works that are bright and unsettled, grotesque and pulsating, alive with the pure tension of compromise. Rachel Uffner Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new paintings and drawings by artist Annie Bielski. The show is titled Agita, and if you know, you know.

This exhibition closes 4/29/23.

Tampa Art Shows- The 17th Annual Master of Fine Arts Graduation Exhibition at the USF Contemporary Art Museum

 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, Printmaking, Sculptors / Sculpture, Tampa, Video and Film
Apr 282023
 

Installation by Molly A. Duff

Work by Trinity Oribio (left) and Manon VanScoder (videos on right)

Currently on view at The USF Contemporary Art Museum is SOMEDAY YOU’LL HAVE TO SAY IT OUT LOUD, an exhibition of eight students graduating with MFA degrees from the USF School of Art and Art History.

The artists included are Molly Duff, Kai Holyoke, Caitlin Nobilé, Trinity Oribio, Rachel Treide, Manon VanScoder, Alicia Watkinson, and Willow Wells.

For the artists’ statements about their work, as well as more information on the exhibition, the museum has produced this PDF.

The show will be on view until 5/6/2023.

Installation by Molly A. Duff, another view

Alicia Watkinson, “Notations in Passing II”, 2023, plywood, lightbulbs, ceramic bases, timers. Duration of light set daily according to the previous day’s activities and observations

Alicia Watkinson, “Notations in Passing II”, 2023 (detail)

Photo transfer on glass by Rachel Treide

Still from video by Rachel Treide

Caitlin Nobilé, “The gap in the door”, 2023 triptych, acrylic on wood

Willow Wells, “Whispers”, 2023, oil painting on panel

Trinidad Oribio “Untitled”, 2023 oil on canvas

Trinidad Oribio, “La Trinidad”, 2023, archival pigment print

Video installation by Manon VanScoder

Manon VanScoder, “each day is an endless scroll”, 2023

Kai Holyoke “Paradise Lakes”, 2023

Kai Holyoke “Paradise Lakes”, 2023

 

 

NYC Art Shows- Robert Bechtle at Gladstone Gallery

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters
Apr 262023
 

“Nancy Reading”, 1963-1964, Oil on canvas

“60 T-Bird”, 1964, Oil on canvas

“60 T-Bird”, 1964 (detail)

“Potrero Table”, 1994, Oil on canvas

Gladstone Gallery is currently showing an exhibition of captivating work by the late Robert Bechtle. The show includes paintings, watercolors, and drawings.

From the press release-

In Bechtle’s works, classic cars, urban and suburban streetscapes of his native Bay Area in California, and portraits of himself and those close to him are transposed with a candor and familiarity that allows the viewer to absorb quotidian scenes with a heightened and sharpened awareness. Formally flawless, the artist captures every detail, shadow, and reflection to further draw the viewer into each quiet scene. While many of his works are depicted with realist precision, others are portrayed by employing a looser, Impressionistic technique, demonstrating the artist’s fluid ability to memorialize moments in time without one set approach. Beyond these physical attributes, Bechtle has an astute aptitude for bringing to life the unseen facets of an instance in time: isolation, emptiness, contemplativeness, and the passage of time and light are transformed from invisible characters to palpable features that seem to become secondary subjects of the works. Through an unmatched ability to depict light and details with the exactitude of a Renaissance painter, subtle details, and textures, these overlooked, everyday vignettes are transformed into significant life moments that tell a deeply personal story of contemporary life.

Another important component of this exhibition are a series of significant portraits and self-portraits made throughout his career. In Potrero Table (1994), Bechtle depicts himself and art historian Whitney Chadwick, his second wife of nearly 40 years, sitting at the dining table at their house in Potrero Hill. With astonishing clarity, the artist meticulously captures every detail of the late-night scene. Frequently turning the lens back onto himself for the entirety of his artistic practice, Bechtle’s self-portraits lay bare the process of aging, and the physical and psychological changes that come with the lived experience. These tender and honest chronicles are essential clues to understanding Bechtle’s overall artistic oeuvre, the care he had for Whitney, and highlight his ability to separate from the constantly moving and evolving world in order to pause and reflect on his surroundings with clarity and rigor. Through intense concentration and sensitivity, Bechtle’s wide-ranging body of work chronicles a remarkable life, filled with the beautiful, overlooked, and often discarded instances that make it so special.

This exhibition closes 4/29/23.

NYC Art Shows- Gerhard Richter at David Zwirner

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Conceptual Art, Drawing, Mixed Media, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Sculptors / Sculpture
Apr 252023
 

It’s the last week to see the Gerhard Richter exhibition at David Zwirner. The show includes a group of Richter’s last paintings from 2016-17, two of which are pictured above, as well as a new glass sculpture and recent works on paper.

From the press release-

Celebrated worldwide as one of the most important artists of his generation, with a career spanning from the 1960s to the present, Richter has pursued a diverse and influential practice characterized by a decades-long commitment to painting and its formal and conceptual possibilities. The artist has consistently probed the relationship between painting and photography, engaging a variety of styles and innovative techniques in a complex repositioning of genres. In Richter’s work, dual modes of representation and abstraction fundamentally question the way in which we relate to images.

The exhibition will bring together a significant group of Richter’s last oil paintings, made in 2016–2017, a number of which will be shown in New York for the first time. Richter stopped making oil paintings in 2017, and the final work on canvas he made will be on view in the exhibition. Part of the artist’s Abstrakte Bilder (Abstract Paintings) series—a cornerstone of his practice since the 1970s—the works on view exemplify Richter’s investigations into chance occurrences and the painted medium’s historical and material properties. With their highly worked and intricately stratified surfaces, the last paintings foreground the sheer physical presence of paint and color, enacting a mode of composition that is aleatory yet deliberately planned.

Centrally featured will be 3 Scheiben (3 Panes) (2023), a new glass sculpture that continues Richter’s exploration of human perception and the built environment. Comprising three sequential rectangular panes of transparent yet reflective glass—each one positioned upright and measuring almost ten feet in height—the installation invites viewers to look at, through, and beyond its surface, revealing the inherently subjective and situational nature of perceived reality. Richter has consistently created glass and mirrored works since 1967, often presenting them alongside his paintings and drawings and placing them in the larger context of their surrounding architecture. Crucially, while sculptural, these free-standing glass works are also positioned as a literal reflection on painting and image-making; they respond to the art-historical notion of the painting as both a mirror and a window, while also acting as a powerful corollary to the blurred effect of Richter’s photo paintings, which the artist began experimenting with in the 1960s. As critic Hal Foster notes, “The felt analogy between a composed painting and a contemplative viewer is so fundamental that we are not aware of it until it is interfered with. And this is precisely what the glass pieces do: our reflection, in the sense of our mirrored image, disrupts our reflection, in the sense of our contemplation.”1

An expansive suite of new works on paper from 2021–2022—some made with ink and others with graphite and colored pencil—will also be on view. Richter’s drawings constitute a significant element of his practice, allowing him to explore another aspect of the role of the artist’s hand in the creation of a dynamic and abstract pictorial narrative. Many of these works feature passages of cloudy graphite rubbings juxtaposed with equally hazy semi-erased portions. The artist embeds a sparse network of crisscrossing arcs and lines amongst this backdrop, forming an enigmatic topography that seems to map out the very possibilities of image-making itself. Other drawings on view are composed of abstract monochrome washes of ink and graphite, taking on a decisively painterly appearance; as Richter describes, these works on paper chart out a parallel but complementary path to his painted oeuvre, much like that of “a poem and a novel by the same author.”2

Also on view will be mood, a group of inkjet prints that relate to a recent series of colored ink drawings by Richter, both of which debuted at the Fondation Beyeler in Basel in 2022. Part of the artist’s extensive career-long experiments with the iterative translation and interplay of mediums, these vibrant prints are almost indistinguishable from their ink counterparts, revealing Richter’s continued fascination with the possibilities of image reproduction.

This exhibition closes 4/29/23.

NYC Art Shows- Olivia Jia at Margot Samel

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters
Apr 212023
 

“Star study, portrait of my mother”, 2023

“Night reading (garden path, a pear halved, portrait of my mother, two birds)”, 2023

“Page unfolded (stoneware vase with peony scroll)”,2023

“Night studio (kingfisher, bone comb, moon through clouds, ink lily)”, 2023

“Night reading (moonscapes, garden window)”, 2023

Margot Samel is currently showing Perimeter, a series of dreamy, personal paintings by Olivia Jia.

From the press release-

Painted in what the artist has described as a ‘nocturnal’ palette, these works have a somnambulant quality, appearing as if scenes encountered in a state between sleep and waking. Each is constructed around a tableau that the artist has arranged, often incorporating material collected by herself, or in the possession of family members. Ideas of kinship and heritage – in this instance informing Jia’s own diasporic identity, as the child of Chinese immigrants to the United States – are negotiated through the constellations of elements she gathers together in her compositions. Staged in a studio workspace, depicted either late at night, or in an imagined facsimile of that location, these paintings act as tools with which a greater degree of self-recognition might be arrived at.

It could be said that our sense of belonging is partly understood in relation to our belongings, and the belongings of those closest to us. This is a principle that Jia employs to reconcile personal narratives with broader cultural dynamics. Artifacts resembling family heirlooms, lost during periods of political upheaval, are sought out in the annals of art history. Genres, be that of the Still-life, Huaniaohua, the Chinese tradition of ‘Bird and Flower’ painting, or American Naturalist illustration become prospective frameworks to be infused with anecdote or biographical allusions, and mined for accidentally shared motifs. What is being honed in these paintings is an iconographic system, one that reflects on the points at which individual experience intersects with collective accounts.

Images, carefully folded for storage, and books left open at resonant pages, frequently act as framing devices within Jia’s compositions. These devices draw our attention to the mechanics of printed reproduction, and its capacity as an authoritative repository for knowledge. What they also highlight, however, is how affect can be produced through combinations of such factual information. The sombrely lit surfaces upon which these objects and images are depicted are at once tabletops or pinboards upon which objects might be placed, and psychic spaces onto which desire might be projected. Here, the act of painting itself is presented as analogous to the nature of Jia’s arrangements of collected material: as it too constitutes an archival structure in which the objective properties of documents and the subjective nature of memory are able to coalesce.

This exhibition closes 4/22/23.

NYC Art Shows- Mary Jones at High Noon Gallery

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Collage, Mixed Media, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Printmaking
Apr 212023
 

“Cocteau and Table”, 2023,oil on archival inkjet printed canvas

“The Seasons Between”, 2023, oil on archival inkjet printed canvas

High Noon Gallery is currently showing Les Problémes du Confort, an exhibition of work by Mary Jones.

From the press release-

Jones began this most recent body of work, collectively called simply, “Interior Design,” by painting Sumi ink over the black and white printed pages of a comprehensive French Interior Design publication from the 1960s. “[I chose the series’ title] not only to underscore the attributes of the original images, but to address their psychological component: the topos of dreams, so notably analyzed by Gaston Bachelard and James Hillman, spaces we conjure to discover the elements of our inner lives. Homes and interiors are not only spaces we remember, but also labyrinths of symbolism, familiar to all of us as emotionally charged experiences,” she explains.

The addition of her signature mark making started as an exercise to identify patterns in the tonal pages, separate from the context of the imagery. It seemed to act as a compositional barometer of sorts, deflecting the space in certain areas and illuminating it in others. The painted catalog images were then collaged, blown up, printed on canvas, and painted again, further conflating space and gesture, and inhabiting the vacant interiors with a visible energy. In doing so, Jones satisfies the principles of high design with the paintings’ harmonic beauty, and also the open systems of fine art by positioning the work as cultural critique that challenges the colonialist motifs that permeate the aesthetic sensibility of many of the spaces.

Jones’s work has long gnawed at the malleability of subject matter. She consistently uses legible imagery to anchor her abstractions, prodding at the fickle divide between the two modalities. Her sensitivity to painting’s illusionistic properties is connected to her experience as a faux painter, freelance work she’s done for 25 years. While the object of faux painting is to not let the artist’s hand show, Jones riffs on her craft by skillfully merging gesture and image in ways that are largely indistinguishable. She allows the marks to emulate form and object, playing on the viewer’s expectations of pictorial logic and slyly addressing the disparity between fine art and design, as for many decades— and especially during painting’s theoretical heyday in the second half of the 20th century— they shared a tenuous opposition. Design is associated with expense, and American society is perpetually transfixed by the Romantic notion of the artist as a working class hero.

Ionic Memories (2023), depicts a decadent room steeped in Roman busts and columns, the title a tongue-in-cheek reference to the science of memory and the unstable nature of artistic movements and empires alike. Jones echoes the velvety matte blacks of the printed image in her direct painting gestures, mixing a near perfect replica of the tone and texture for her to set up a meta tromp-l’oeil effect. In the foreground, a collaged brush stroke swipes away at the interior revealing a snowy landscape wherein a bush and modernist cabin are obscured by a swath of pink oil paint. In the context of the whole, the landscape reads as decorative forms within the room, such as fan coral and glass spheres. Other works such as Cocteau and Table (2023) make greater use of a fragmented effect wherein decisively multiversal looking forms cut through the composition like a glimpse into a parallel reality. Through a mix of painterly and faux elements, Jones takes care to merge her augmented realities just enough to allow the viewer to believe the image exists in one picture plane.

Perhaps to be comfortable is to momentarily resist time, to be temporarily impervious to the clamors for change. In Les Problémes du Confort, Jones reminds us that the arrangements we make with ourselves are transitory, constructed illusions to describe and reflect a sense of our place in the world we know, and that improvisational beauty can be found in transitions, in languages we don’t know, and in uncertainty.

This exhibition closes 4/23/23.

NYC Art Shows- Josephine Halvorson at Sikkema Jenkins

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters
Apr 202023
 

“Last Words”, 2022

“Butterfly”, 2022

“Peony”, 2022

“Station Meter”, 2023

 

“Peony”, 2022 (detail)

Josephine Halvorson’s paintings for Unforgotten at Sikkema Jenkins, contain an amazing amount of detail and encourage the viewer to take in the little details of things they might ordinarily not pay much mind to.

From the press release-

Josephine Halvorson’s paintings emerge from chance or repeated encounters with objects the artist comes across while wandering and traveling. Her practice often takes place outdoors, naturally relating to daylight, geography, and season. The works in this show center on still life and memento mori, artistic genres that, for Halvorson, “hover between liveliness and decay.” She is drawn to things which have little apparent value—objects and spaces that have been, or may be, forgotten. Sharing the same air and hours with a subject, Halvorson finds within them latent expressions and buried meanings.

Since 2018, Halvorson has been painting with acrylic gouache on absorbent grounds. Inspired by fresco painting’s ability to indelibly hold color and mark, the artist has sought to make a sensitive surface that preserves her observations in real time. Painting in longhand, Halvorson works in a verité style, documenting the subtle shifts of shadow and thought. As she says, “I want to make a painting that remembers better than I can.”

This exhibition closes 4/22/23.

 

 Older Entries  Newer Entries