Painting / Painters – Page 48

NYC Art Shows- Jonas Wood at Gagosian

Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Printmaking

Feb 262023

Jonas Wood, “Kitchen Interior”, 2022

Jonas Wood, “Kitchen Interior”, 2022 (detail)

Prints 2, Jonas Wood’s exhibition at Gagosian Gallery in NYC, consists of over thirty prints made between 2018 and 2022, in a variety of styles and subject matter.

From the press release-

You have to build the print piece by piece. I just love the way it looks, the process, the whole feel of it. It’s irreplaceable.
—Jonas Wood

The works on view in Prints 2 feature Wood’s perennial motifs—plants, pottery, portraiture, interiors, landscapes, and basketball—reflecting the life of the artist through representations of home, studio, and natural spaces. They are united by Wood’s transformation of subject matter into images with skewed planar space, dense patterning, and vivid color. Developing his prints in parallel with his paintings, Wood has arrived at linked practices that continually inform one another.

Emphasizing the collaborative aspect of printmaking, Wood works with masters of traditional methods who have made innovative contributions to the field. Prints 2 features works made with Aliso Editions, Cirrus Gallery & Cirrus Editions Ltd., Counter Editions, Hamilton Press, Mixografía, and Pace Editions. In addition, Wood publishes and copublishes under his own imprint, WKS Editions.

The stylistic diversity of Wood’s prints results from his experimentation with pictorial effects, processes, and materials, effectively exploring the genre of printmaking itself. The methods used to produce the works in Prints 2 include hard-ground and soft-ground etching, lithography, screen printing, and woodcut, as well as various hybrid processes. Wood pairs these techniques with variations in mark making, color, texture, and density to harness and reveal the characteristics unique to the medium.

NYC Art Shows- Y.Z. Kami at Gagosian Gallery

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

Feb 262023

Y.Z. Kami “Woman in Dark Sweater, 2022

Y.Z. Kami “Woman in Dark Sweater, 2022 (detail)

Y.Z. Kami “Aïsha”, 2012-22

Y.Z. Kami “Messenger IV”, 2022

Y.Z. Kami “Night Painting XV”, 2022

For his exhibition Night and Day at Gagosian in NYC, Y.Z. Kami is presenting two distinct bodies of work, his portrait paintings and a newer series, Night Paintings, started in 2017.

From the press release-

Each of Kami’s large-scale painted portraits depicts a single face in muted colors on an opaque ground. Frontally composed and closely cropped, Kami’s self-absorbed subjects are removed from the specificity of context. From Aïsha (2021–22) and Lu (2022) to The Monk (2022) and Woman in Dark Sweater (2022), these paintings are titled by first names or descriptions, marking a continuum between individual identity and universality. Using layers of brushstrokes to blur his subjects’ features, Kami concentrates on the ineffability of individual presence. From longtime friends and acquaintances to strangers he has met in passing, his subjects form an ensemble of varied age, gender, and ethnicity. Kami’s introspective faces also recall the Fayum portraits of Roman-era Egypt—naturalistic likenesses of the deceased that were affixed to mummies. The works in Night and Day affirm—as do their ancient precedents—the common humanity in our observation of others.

Kami’s Night Paintings are made using a single shade of indigo—said to be the color of the night—which he blends with gradations of white to summon the sensorial dynamics of presence and absence. Each canvas is filled with apparitions that float just past the limits of materiality and concrete representation. Composed with hazy, tenebrous brushwork, these abstractions evoke a mental inner state. Their shifting outlines and hazy boundaries make manifest soft edges and shimmering biomorphic patterns, enticing the viewer to recognize elements from the human realm while ultimately confounding all attempts to do so. The Night Paintings thereby limn the boundaries between the earthly and the sublime.

Messenger IV (2022), a single painting that belongs to neither series, represents a cloaked figure seen from behind, painted in a soft-focus style. The anonymous subject appears in the foreground of a crossroads, a setting of passage and transition. Kami has positioned this figure using the classical compositional device of the Rückenfigur (back-figure), with which the viewer is encouraged to identify, thus implicating him or her in the space and narrative suggested.

Contrary to the instantaneity of a photograph, Kami composes his paintings over an extended period, his nuanced brushwork built up in many layers. Consequently, they reward sustained looking, revealing their character over time and bringing awareness both to perception as a process and to contemplation of the nature of being.

NYC Art Shows- TIDE at Ross + Kramer Gallery

Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Street Art

Feb 252023

TIDE- “SEA E”

TIDE- “DAYS” and “CALM”

Closing on 2/25 at Ross + Kramer in NYC is artist TIDE’s (Tatsuhiro Ide) debut solo exhibition, HAPPYSADEMPTYFULL.

From the gallery’s website-

TIDE is a Tokyo-based artist renowned for his signature cat character, which he depicts in monochromatic, domestic settings. Beginning in 2019, TIDE has made grayscale paintings of this cat character, existing within various domestic environments, often punctuated with art historical references. In this newest body of work, the cat, perhaps an avatar for the artist himself, lounges in a cozy bed, swathed in blankets and layers of duvets.

The title of the exhibition comes from a painting, HAPPYSADEMPTYFULL, and reflects the cycles of feelings that one experiences throughout a day. The subject matter feels especially relevant given current events—a housecat, much like humans in a pandemic lockdown, has a somewhat narrowed spectrum of experience.

TIDE works in multiple layers, using airbrush and spray paint to express the illusion of depth in a delicate environment, and employs a variety of brush stroke techniques in order to create the appearance of texture and natural elements. TIDE’s work wonderfully demonstrates the value and richness of harmonious composition. His monochromatic palette, coupled with crisp yet gentle silhouettes, ignites a pronounced sense of nostalgia.

Florida Art Shows- Christopher Skura at Dunedin Fine Arts Center

Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Drawing, Dunedin, Florida Art Shows, Mixed Media, Painting / Painters, Pinellas County, Sculptors / Sculpture

Feb 252023

Christopher Skura, “Keep the Dream from Ending”, 2022

Christopher Skura, “Keep the Dream from Ending”, 2022 (detail)

Christopher Skura “Sketchbook Drawings”

Christopher Skura, “The Turnaround”, 2021; “Sketchbook Drawings”; “Head Cult”, 2022

Christopher Skura, “Story Bored (Cast of Characters)”, 2021

Christopher Skura, “Gob Stopper”, 2018

Christopher Skura’s exhibition The Beginner’s Mind (starting over after Covid) at Dunedin Fine Art Center is an interesting selection of his drawings, paintings and sculpture.

The artist’s statement on his work from the gallery wall-

Working in my Woodstock, NY studio during the 2020 Covid pandemic influenced my creative process by making my working method more direct and immediate. I have begun a routine of drawing everyday in sketchbooks. Out of these small drawings have come many sculptural ideas. Each imagined form serves as a kind of placeholder and represents someone we have lost. Drawing quickly with paint marker, my natural, hardwired shapes have become more pronounced. The goal is to work with a “beginner’s mind” and utilize the flow-state to achieve a direct expression.

All of my work comes out of extensive sketching and drawing. Very rarely do I recreate exact drawings as sculpture but I use them as a spring board to begin experimenting. Most of these drawings are small and done very quickly. By hesitating less, I have focused on completing an artwork in one or two sessions as opposed to laboring over it. The surfaces on the new works have become less concerned with refinement and I feel this has created a warmer and more active surface.

The style of my most recent artworks is influenced by the “street” art that blanketed my New York City neighborhood during lockdown. The images reference psychology, structural systems, emergence theory and the architecture of the human body. Improvisation and freehand drawing are emphasized for phenomenological effect and I try to capture the speed of living in Lower Manhattan. Some of my forms are organic and plant-like but others suggest the machinery of a man-made environment. This duality reflects my visual experiences growing up in the lush Florida landscape and my current life living in New York City.

The forms speak to the effects of time on the human body and the natural world. Each work imagined is a small psychological portrait of something struggling to survive or already gone.

NYC Art Shows- Danielle Roberts at Fredericks and Freiser

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

Feb 242023

Danielle Roberts “The sky weighs heavy through the night”, 2023

Danielle Roberts “Picnic on the Roof (Moon Bath)”, 2022

Danielle Roberts “Adrift”, 2022

Danielle Roberts “Sunshine Market”, 2023

Currently at Fredericks and Freiser in NYC is Evening All Day, an exhibition of paintings by Danielle Roberts.

From the gallery’s press release-

In her moody and atmospheric paintings, Roberts explores the various psychological states brought on by her generation’s societal instability. Roberts’ settings – strip mall parking lots, living room sofas, city rooftops, and outdoor parks – are familiar to wide audiences. Yet, when rendered with otherworldly color and dramatic chiaroscuro, they feel transitory and strange. Unstable emotions are communicated through uncanny lighting –both phenomenal and foreboding– and fragmented coloration that coalesces differently across canvases. Some figures are made up of geometric patches of hues that are visually delineated from each other. In contrast, other bodies are made up of a similar patchwork of coloration but by swaths that blur together slightly.

Solitude follows Roberts’ figures as they amble across an urban landscape populated by friends, lovers, and passersby. These transitory moments, at once together yet disconnected, all seem to be anticipating something just out of reach. A cinematic atmosphere bolstered by an artificial light imbues these scenes with Roberts’ signature radiant glow. The vivid and dark mood matches the internal, untethered state of the figures who seem oddly stuck. They wander as if they are perpetually spending their last $20 on another round of drinks.

Roberts does not shy away from discomfort and awkwardness in her worlds. She hones in on the pathos of her own experiences and those of her peers which are at once individual, unique to each of Roberts’ figures, and universal, instantly recognizable to audiences. The artist does not retreat into her painted worlds as an escape from the overwhelming anxiety and instability coursing through contemporary society; instead, she pushes right up against them, opening those spaces onto her audiences. There is an insistence on life and desire, even if those desires are complicated. The people of her scenes – withdrawn and ambivalent – wade through the mess, surviving on their own terms.

This show closes 2/25/23.

Feb 242023

Micaela Amateau Amato, “Yoran Por Aire (contes brevas)”

Photographs by Amadia Shadow Rabbit

Film still from Kiara Mohammed Amin’s “Black Presence”

Film still from Kiara Mohammed Amin’s “Black Presence”

Soonoqo: We Become Body in Waves of Light and Sound at Dunedin Fine Art Center is a multimedia exhibition of 18 artists from around the world who “share a common desire for healing, communal growth and interdependence with nature” curated by S. Toxosi.

S. Toxosi’s statement about the exhibition (from the gallery wall)-

I do not possess the language to truly describe the be-holdings within Soonoqo. As a term within the Somali language, it would be difficult to translate into contemporary English. It considers a pluralistic worldview that allows ‘becoming and returning’ to bear witness of itself, within oneself while conjoining through space and time. Soonoqo, basks in the universal soul. Its otherness is imbued as the ‘physical cosmos’ and all its avatars and manifestations.

To speak in metaphor or in a sense of ‘poetic meditation’, one would engulf whirling vortexes, volcanoes and maelstroms that end up in other universes from which bring new revelations or images, The senses are engaged as viewed in Bruno Ferreira Abdala’s video art When Mother Breathes. It is here we can see a pluralist’s sensibility where the cohorts of Soonoqo ‘become and return’ with offerings that contend with the mythical genesis through the acknowledgement and practices of ancestral wisdom, queering mores, spirituality and love. Thus creating fission through initiating and remembering. There is a subtlety of conjuration, ritual, humility, vulnerability in K. Tauches’s Q.A.L. video-making that unfolds and reveals the sentience of a Nature that provides true sustainability.

Soonoqo is a web of interconnected lights in continuous synchrony. It enables manifestations from varied domains of areas of perceptibility through human inner weavings of life experiences and becomes a variety of communicative prowess that encompasses video arts, film, photography, the written word and sonic compositions. These forms all ultimately resonate with and point toward healing where one/all is purified, catalyzed and cleansed through cooperation with nature, technology, shadow matter, dark matter and invisible matter. As can be seen in the film Womb not Tomb by Dea, where she investigates and yields to the teaching of the four elements or in Kiara Mohammed Amin’s Black Presence, a short film of talismanic energy and transformation.

Artists included in the exhibition- Brandy Eve Allen, Viveka Krumm, Harry Wilson Kapatika, Cara Judea Alhadeff, Sadie Sheldon, Chelsea Rowe, Micaela Amateau Amato, Saudade Toxosi, Jennifer Pyron, Amadia Shadow Rabbit, K.Tauches, Javier T. Dones, Bruno Ferreira Abdala, Sall Lam Toro, Kiara Mohamed Amin, Nayetesi, Dea

For more information on this exhibition check out @soono.qo and this conversation with S. Toxosi and DFAC Curators Catherine Bergmann and Nathan Beard which is very informative.

NYC Art Shows- Neil Welliver at Alexandre

Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Printmaking, Quotes

Feb 232023

Neil Welliver, “Big Flowage”, 1979

Neil Welliver, “Big Flowage”, 1979 (detail)

Neil Welliver, “Marsh Shadow”, 1984

Neil Welliver quote on the gallery wall

Currently at Alexandre Gallery in NYC are Neil Welliver’s gorgeous paintings and works on paper, spanning his career from the late 1960s-2000, and including his last woodcut print, Stump.

From the gallery’s website–

In his 2005 New York Times obituary, Ken Johnson wrote:

Mr. Welliver came of age as an artist in the late 1950’s and 60’s, at a time when nonrepresentational styles of painting like Abstract Expressionism and, later, Color Field and Minimalism were accorded the highest critical prestige. Along with artists like Larry Rivers, Alex Katz and Philip Pearlstein, Mr. Welliver strove to paint representational images without sacrificing the formal innovations that the Abstract Expressionists Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning had introduced to modern painting.

Welliver’s lifelong friend, the American poet Mark Strand, wrote of his process in 2001:

What sets Welliver’s woods apart from the woods of others is that they are, of course, his. We see them and know instantly who painted them. That stream plunging and swirling around those gray rocks is familiar, so are those clouds parading in ragged order across that sky spreading a midday blue over those hills. They are all part of Welliver’s woods. The unaffectedness, the ease with which they are simply there, without a hint of what went into their making, without an indication anywhere of the turmoil that prompted them, is what sets them apart. Of course, we can see the many brush strokes in a large Welliver and believe that they—in their tireless application—tell us what goes into a Welliver, but we would be wrong, for there is much in a Welliver that we cannot see. In the past of each one are the long hikes into the woods, which Welliver takes, loaded down with easel, canvas, brushes, oil, thinner, and tubes of color, to the spot where he will paint; then there are the hours he stands, in all kinds of weather, and paints what will be the small preparatory paintings on which he bases the large drawings that lead finally to the large paintings.

This exhibition closes 2/25/23.

NYC Art Shows- Cynthia Talmadge at Bortolami

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

Feb 232023

Cynthia Talmadge, “Goodbye to All This: Alan Smithee Off Broadway”, 2023 installation view

Cynthia Talmadge, “ACT 2: The Cabana”, 2022

Cynthia Talmadge, “Maserati (Dream Sequence)”, 2022

Cynthia Talmadge, “Maserati (The Strasberg Institute)”, 2022

Cynthia Talmadge, “Walk of Fame” 2023

Currently in Bortolami’s upstairs gallery is Cynthia Talmadge’s imaginative exhibition, Goodbye to All This: Alan Smithee Off Broadway.

From Bortolami’s press release-

“We find the narcissist in a reflective mood.” — stage directions penciled into a draft of act III, scene 1 of Alan Smithee’s Goodbye to All This

“Alan Smithee” is a pseudonym used by Hollywood directors to remove their names from movies over which they have lost creative control. In this exhibition Cynthia Talmadge animates Smithee, imagining him in the mid-1980s as a down-on-his-luck, middle-aged baby boomer, trying, elaborately but ineptly, to revive a career defined by burned bridges, bad behavior, and commercial failure. The show takes as its premise a fictitious play, an autobiographical avant-garde off-broadway Bildungsroman written and directed by Smithee in an effort to engineer his come back. The play–entitled Goodbye to All This is what Talmadge imagines as Smithee’s clumsy inversion of the title of Joan Didion’s essay about leaving New York for California – tells Smithee’s version of his rise and fall in Hollywood and his subsequent departure for New York, culminating in his redemption as a New York theater artist.

The only substance to the real-world “Smithee” is an extensive filmography of more than 80 credits. Talmadge takes this output at face value, envisioning for us the detailed biography and personality of a director whose career persists despite every job he’s done having gone badly awry amidst professional conflict. For Talmadge, this makes him a dubious American icon: an epitome of privilege and unwarranted confidence; a guy who – at least until recently – could only ever fail up.

Several Los Angeles and New York landmarks and former landmarks are included in the paintings along with Smithee’s Maserati- the Director’s Guild building, Chasen’s, the Friars Club, Scientology Celebrity Center, and the Beverly Hilton in Los Angeles and Elaine’s and The Lee Strasbourg Institute in New York. The Maserati’s final destination is 39 Walker in NYC, the address of the gallery.

The Playbill paintings have an incredible amount of detail within them and highlight the three acts of Smithee’s journey. The room includes a fallen column, a box of headshots, and Smithee’s set design model for Goodbye to All This, his autobiographical play.

Both Bortolami and Talmadge’s Instagram pages expand on the Smithee story in a few of their posts and are worth taking a look at as well.

This exhibition closes 2/25/23.

NYC Art Shows- Robert Yasuda at Sundaram Tagore

Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Mixed Media, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Sculptors / Sculpture

Feb 222023

Robert Yasuda, “Boundary” 2010-2020

Robert Yasuda, “Boundary” 2010-2020 (detail)

Robert Yasuda, “Pele”, 2022

Robert Yasuda, “Pele”, 2022 (side view)

Robert Yasuda, “Maluhia”, 2022

Robert Yasuda, “Pipeline”, 2022

Currently at Sundaram Tagore gallery in New York are Robert Yasuda’s sculptural paintings for his exhibition Transparent and Translucent.

From the gallery’s press release-

The artist’s latest body of work is a culmination of his decades-long exploration of perception, light and space. On view will be a series of atmospheric paintings rooted in his early encounters with nature in Hawaii where he was born and raised.

Yasuda’s iridescent paintings are composed of translucent veil-like fields of color layered on slabs of wood that protrude from the wall or nestle into corners. Several works are constructed to cast a reflected glow of colored light into the surrounding space. Depending on where you stand, the surfaces of the paintings shift in color and temperature.

“For many people, looking at a painting for 20 seconds can be extremely long but these are pieces that reveal themselves over time,” says Yasuda, who invites viewers to pause and immerse themselves in the work in order to perceive these subtle transformations.

Yasuda begins by shaping wooden panels, which are up to two inches thick, with chisels and grinders. Softening harsh vertical lines, he introduces bowed and gently sloping edges as well as sharply upturned corners. After painting a base layer onto the wood, he wraps the wood in diaphanous cotton. Adding as many as 40 layers of pearlescent acrylic paint, he suspends the fabric amid layers of luminous color. Most of his works are multi-paneled, with intricately wrought and detailed seams, and mounted on cradle-like structures that push them away from the wall.

Several of the works on view feature aqueous expanses of rich blues and lush greens evoking the ocean. In other pieces, sensuous swathes of paint evoke sunsets or the iridescent lining of seashells. “My entire childhood I saw myriad greens in the countryside of Hawaii and I spent a great deal of time diving…These works are connected with that point of view and the process of meditating on nature,” says Yasuda.

This exhibition closes 2/25/23.

NYC Art Shows- “The Midnight Hour” at The Hole NYC

Art, Art Shows by Location, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters

Feb 212023

Nastaran Shahbazi, “In The Cold Nights, We Were Red As Blood”, 2022

Sung Hwa Kim, “When The Evening Song Begins, Everything Turns Into Nothing. From Nothing, You Find Everything.”, 2022

Sung Hwa Kim, “When The Evening Song Begins, Everything Turns Into Nothing. From Nothing, You Find Everything.”, 2022 (detail)

Lindsay Merril, “Come To Me”, 2022

Krzysztof Grzybacz, “Affection”, 2022

Jason Birmingham, “Path of Totality”, 2022

Dan Attoe, “Full Moon Rock Harvest”, 2022

Susan Metrican, “Cast, Cast”, 2022

For The Midnight Hour at The Hole NYC, curating team Scroll (Julien Pomerleau and Rachel Ng), assembled a gorgeous selection of paintings- it was difficult to narrow down which ones to post.

From The Hole’s press release-

The Midnight Hour is about nighttime rendered in landscape, domestic settings, still life, and portraiture. In these paintings, darkness is uniquely dimensional, with celestial blues and blacks composed of—and deepened by—a range of hues. Here you’ll find the coolness of the night sky offset by the warm incandescence of street lights and shop windows, or the silvery light of the moon. Inside glows a candle or a lamp.

The works depict all facets of the night, from nocturnal contemplation and solitude to after-hours festivities, some barely glimpsed in the shadows, some vivid and bustling. Not all the subjects in these paintings appear to partake in the recommended eight hours of sleep. Instead, The Midnight Hour presents happenings mostly outside of the bedroom, from Dan Attoe’s moonlit foragers to Paul-Sebastian Japaz’s late-night cigarette smokers. Whether through interpretations of dreams or by picturing the people we become once the sun sets, the exhibition reveals all that goes unseen during the day.

The lineup of artists welcomes both new talent and familiar names: Olga Abeleva, Dan Attoe, Jason Birmingham, Jose Bonell, Krzysztof Grzybacz, David Hamilton, Anthony Iacono, Paul-Sebastian Japaz, Claudia Keep, Sung Hwa Kim, Jean Lee, Lindsay Merrill, Susan Metrican, Keita Morimoto, Francesco Pirazzi, Cait Porter, Nastaran Shahbazi, Masamitsu Shigeta, Aaron Michael Skolnick, Mai Ta, James Ulmer, and Mikey Yates.

Founded by Julien Pomerleau and Rachel Ng, Scroll is a New York–based curatorial project focused on fostering community and uplifting the works of emerging and overlooked artists. Following first exhibitions in September and November 2022, The Midnight Hour is its largest show to date, bringing together twenty-two artists from around the world.

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