Art – Page 67 – longlistshort

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- Katy Cowan at Miles McEnery Gallery

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

Apr 212023

“when stone entwines”, 2023, Oil and enamel paint, graphite on cast aluminum, in two parts

“when stone entwines”, 2023, (detail)

“if only, if yet”, 2023, Oil and enamel paint, graphite on cast aluminum/painted wood

“if only, if yet”, 2023, detail

Miles McEnery Gallery is currently showing Katy Cowan’s colorful and intricate sculptures for her exhibition gods on a bridge.

From the press release-

gods on a bridge is Katy Cowan’s first exhibition of metalworks since relocating her artistic practice from California to Berlin. The resulting body of work is a culmination of her current experiences, coupled with engrained references to the historical presence of sculpture in the city.

Each work starts in a foundry where the artist casts solid aluminum forms, which are then adorned with a variety of mediums and methods: acrylic and enamel paints, sprayed and brushed. Cowan elects to retain the fractured casting bars, signaling a parallel to the remnants of the Berlin Wall. As personally described, a guiding principle in her process is to “combine a multitude of experiences onto one surface and find a way to seize that depiction.”

This overarching aim is realized when Cowan draws from natural and urban environment alike—the blooming trees, reflecting ponds, and embracing bodies. The most prominent of these influences are the stone sculptures that appear throughout the city, acting as constant fixtures in the landscape, changing with age, taking on the textures of time and layers of graffiti. In her essay, Stephanie Cristello cements their influence by the figurative turn in Cowan’s compositions, expressing that they “have manifested as sculptural abstractions and fragmented, embodied landscapes.”

Cowan translates this amalgamation of inspiration to her aluminum surfaces, contouring reflections with cast rope, painted lines and flowing points. “Each work constitutes at once a fleshing out of figures as much as a mapping of movements—whether bodies in a park or city street or marks that dance across the capacious plane of representation itself,” writes Stephanie Bailey. “[gods on a bridge is] where line, ground, and figure collapse into a vortex of intuitive becoming.”

This exhibition closes 4/22/23.

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.

NYC Art Shows- Kennedy Yanko at Jeffrey Deitch

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

Apr 202023

“Pink and green music”, 2023

“What we re-quire is…silence”, 2023

“Within the Lattice”, 2023

“An Ode to Hugs”, 2023

It’s the last week to see Kennedy Yanko’s exhibition, Humming on Life at Jeffrey Deitch gallery’s Wooster Street location.

Tonight, 4/20/23, she will be at the gallery discussing her work with Alteronce Gumby.

From the press release-

By employing paint skin and metal in ways that both transmute a bodily essence and reposition the weight of gravity, Kennedy Yanko wields materiality and abstraction with the possibility of intervening in the viewers’ perceptions. In Humming on Life, Yanko‘s first exhibition at Jeffrey Deitch, the artist continues this exploration.

Although the tactile quality and lyrical processuality of Yanko’s works emphasize their sculptural quality, the artist considers herself foremost a painter. In her new body of work, Yanko takes an approach to sculpture that reconnects it, and her, with painting. In recent years, the weathered paint and bruised patinas found on salvaged metal relics informed her palette for the paint skins. Now, the artist is introducing colors to the metal she finds. By painting the metal directly, underpainting, fire-cutting forms and compositions, and then crushing those new shapes, Yanko is expanding the definition of painting through her process. She remarks:

Working this way has been labor-intensive and has exposed me to sounds, like water thrashing inside a metal tank while cleaning it. Feeling that thrashing—hearing a power that felt like infinity incarnate—encouraged me to probe water as a medium and examine my intuitive method more closely, which seemingly only comes from physical exchange: input and output, expansion and contraction. In pulling water apart and becoming more curious about its behavior and participation, I’ve enjoyed revisiting the ways in which it’s a web of activation, a source, and information. It’s a cue and a salve and carries with it tinges of what it’s gone through.

What water did for me in that moment was to point back to the livingness of my medium — of the metal and paint skin I rely on — and wash away the binary between life and matter. Erasing this divide expands the possibility of experience; it gives materiality an abstract power that we yield to. It’s that vitality, found in color, form, attention and consciousness, that I hope this work can be a language for.

The “Illuminating Sound” presented apart of the exhibition, composed by Samuel Kareem, is derived from audio Yanko recorded while working in the yard. Kareem expanded one striation of sound within the clip—one small element he excavated from the layers of water, metal, paint and movement—and created 10 ten unique soundscapes. Each of the scapes corresponds with a sculpture within the show, and illuminates it. Listen to “Illuminating Sound” here.

NYC Art Shows- Amoako Boafo at Gagosian Gallery

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

Apr 202023

Closing on 4/22/23 is Amoako Boafo’s exhibition, what could possibly go wrong, if we tell it like it is, at Gagosian gallery’s Madison Avenue location.

From the press release-

When I’m making paintings, I want the characters to be strong, I want them to be free, I want them to be independent, I want them to be unapologetic.
—Amoako Boafo

Boafo’s large-scale portraits portray his friends and those he admires with candor, joy, and individuality. Focused on Black identity, his monumental paintings have already become key works in the representation of contemporary Africa and the African diaspora.

Boafo paints the faces and bodies of his subjects with his fingertips rather than a brush, the directness of his touch enhancing their expressive qualities. The works’ surfaces feature a gestural facture which the artist uses to model the figures’ anatomy. Making eye contact, Boafo’s subjects return the gaze of the viewer in an assertion of presence and identity, reflecting the artist’s interest in conveying charisma and individuality. The characters occupy domestic interiors, their casual grace reinforced by the familiarity of these settings.

NYC Art Shows- Jeremy Shockley at The Hole

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

Apr 202023

“Double Double”, 2023

“Creep”, 2023

“The Switch”, 2023

“Under The Sea”, 2023

“Under The Sea”, 2023 (detail)

“Hour Glass”, 2023

Currently at The Hole gallery’s Tribeca location are Jeremy Shockley’s imaginative paintings for his exhibition, Well, Look At That.

From the press release-

Across eleven large canvasses, Shockley depicts the intersection of painting as a window into landscape and painting as a cloth stretched over some wood slats.

Shockley, who has a background in art conservation, was helping to restore a Lucio Fontana painting when he decided to incorporate the renowned Spatialist’s slashed-canvas imagery into his own practice. After experimenting with actual cuts he arrived at his signature trompe l’oeil technique, beginning each canvas in big exuberant strokes with four- or five-inch housepainting brushes then progressing to eyelash-thin ones to simulate frayed threads along fake slits in the canvas.

He describes his first large series—painted flaps suggesting two eyes and a smiling mouth—as a response to the renaissance in portraiture that coincided with COVID lockdown. “I put faces on the beautiful landscapes as a way of saying that in the future people may want to go back to looking at them instead of people. We might be all right,” he says, “but perhaps the landscapes won’t be.”

The works in this show push the theme further: the natural world becomes a curtain to be tugged, a veneer to be peeled back, or a series of ever-darkening portals that nonetheless contain a dose of optimism. We are invited to think about alternate dimensions, about the structural materiality of the painted canvas, and about our kitten-like propensity to just “hang in there.”

This exhibition closes 4/22/23.

NYC Art Shows- Uta Barth at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery

Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Conceptual Art, Digital Art, Installation Art, New York Art Shows, Photographers / Photography

Apr 192023

“…from dawn to dusk, (January)”, 2022

“…from dawn to dusk, (May)”, 2022

“…from dawn to dusk, (December)”, 2022

“white blind (bright red) (02.13)”, 2002

“white blind/bright red (02.6)”, 2002

“Untitled (98.5)”, 1998

From “nowhere near” Untitled (NW 18), 1999

“… and to draw a bright white line with light (Untitled 11.10)”, 2011

Uta Barth’s two part exhibition at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery is a fascinating look at the artist’s work. It includes the New York debut of her most recent piece, …from dawn to dusk, a nearly 360-degree installation of images commissioned by the J. Paul Getty Trust.

From the press release-

Barth’s expansive 2022 series … from dawn to dusk focuses on the intersection of Southern California light with the architecture of the Getty Center. It traces the changing light at one location of the Richard Meier built campus, for the period of one year. The location was photographed every five minutes, from dawn to dusk, on two days each month, for the entirety of the year. Made with a GigaPan, over 64,000 images were captured and a Timelapse video sequence now shows the progression of this movement of light. As the view repeats from panel to panel, there are subtle changes in light as well as more dramatic blurring and color shifts, which invoke inverted optical afterimages and other visual phenomena that occur when staring at a fixed point for a prolonged period of time. Presented as twelve consecutive single views, the video is embedded among the still images of the installation, and it comes as a surprise to discover what one first assumes to be a still photograph to actually be the moving summation of the show.

In the upstairs galleries, Elizabeth Smith’s selection of work reveals the foundations of the artist’s renowned and influential practice, as well as the trajectory that led to the explorations found in …from dawn to dusk. Elizabeth Smith shared her thoughts on Barth’s practice as she approached this exhibition:

It’s been almost thirty years since I worked with Uta Barth to present her first solo museum show at MOCA in 1995. In relation to her newest project, the gallery’s invitation to select some key examples from both her early series and subsequent ones has offered a welcome opportunity to reengage with and consider the full trajectory of her work. From her earliest to her most recent photographs, Barth’s practice has centered on a nuanced investigation of visual experience, free from narrative. Light, color, the passage of time, and the shifting nature of the process of vision through bodily experience are the ongoing subjects of her resonant images, probed in various ways over decades.

Throughout her career, Uta Barth has made visual perception the subject of her work. Regarded for her “empty” images that reference painterly abstraction, the artist carefully renders blurred backgrounds, cropped frames and the natural qualities of light to capture incidental and fleeting moments, those which exist almost exclusively within our periphery. With a deliberate disregard for both the conventional photographic subject and the point-and-shoot role of the camera, Barth’s work delicately deconstructs conventions of visual representation by calling our attention to the limits of the human eye.

As Leah Ollman writes in her recent Los Angeles Times profile of the artist,

From her earliest years as an artist, Barth’s attention has been drawn to the eye’s behavior: what attracts it, what makes it stay, what causes it to double back, what generates after-images and optical fatigue. Learning to photograph was, for her, a way of learning to see.

This exhibition closes 4/22/23.

NYC Art Shows- Rachel Whiteread at Luhring Augustine

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

Apr 182023

“Untitled (Thicket)”, 2022, Steel, wood and paint

“Untitled”, 2020-22, Bronze and paint (two parts)

“Untitled (Fence I)”, 2020, Papier mache

Rachel Whiteread’s sculptures at Luhring Augustine’s Tribeca location draw the eye in with their textures, colors, and in some the unique combinations of items. They are even more intriguing when you discover they are often not what they first appear to be.

From the press release-

As is typical in Whiteread’s work, the sculptures in this exhibition communicate a high-low dialogue: discarded, seemingly inconsequential items are rendered in often precious, high-art materials, which transforms and elevates them from their original context and reading. The eye is tricked, and careful observation is required of the viewer. What appears to be spray-painted cardboard is in reality patinated bronze or silver, or shimmering metallic papier-mache, and assemblages of found materials are in reality amalgams of both found objects and hand-crafted simulacra. Cartons, boxes, branches, crates, cardboard, packing materials, and pipes overlap and interchange, creating an installation that becomes a pleasing visual puzzle. Whiteread created the works for this exhibition specifically with the light-filled, high-ceilinged Tribeca gallery in mind, so a beautiful optical play with colors and materials punctuates the space and draws the viewer into close examination of these human-scaled pieces. Silver and bronze casts of empty, anonymous boxes have a weighty presence, in contrast to the disposable nature of their form. The floor pieces are ghostly white assemblages of both found and cast objects, mostly debris; sitting wraithlike on the floor, each beckons the viewer to circle them and decode their elements.

This exhibition closes 4/22/23.