Pennsylvania Art Shows- Cy Twombly’s “Fifty Days at Iliam” at the Philadelphia Museum of Art

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Books, Conceptual Art, Drawing, Painting / Painters, Pennsylvania Art Shows, Philadelphia, Writers
Apr 252026
 

Cy Twombly “Fifty Days at Iliam: Shield of Achilles”, 1978

Cy Twombly “Fifty Days at Iliam”, 1978, oil, oil crayon, and graphite on canvas

“Fifty Days at Iliam: Achaeans in Battle”, 1978

“Fifty Days at Iliam: The Fire that Consumes All before It”, 1978

“Fifty Days at Iliam: Shades of Achilles, Patroclus and Hector”, 1978

“Fifty Days at Iliam: Shades of Eternal Night”, 1978

Cy Twombly was born today, April 25th, in 1928. One of his most famous works is Fifty Days at Iliam, his visual interpretation of Homer’s poem the Iliad. This “painting in ten parts” is currently on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and images of each of the individual works can be found on the museum’s website.

About Fifty Days at lliam from the museum-

The pinnacle of Twombly’s lifelong preoccupation with Greek and Roman mythology, Fifty Days at lliam is the artist’s rendition of the last fifty days of the Trojan War. The monumental series fuses elements of Homer’s epic poem The lliad, probably written before 700 BCE, and Alexander Pope’s translation of that poem from the 1700s.

The artist purposefully misspells the name of the besieged Trojan city as lliam, instead of the Latin llium or the Greek Ilion. The letter “a” stands as a symbol for the Greek warrior Achilles, whose rage sparked by the death of his friend Patroclus propels the end of the decade-long conflict.

Partaking in a long artistic tradition of depicting war, Twombly addresses themes of heroism and aggression, comradeship and revenge, jubilant victory and the mourning of the dead. The ten canvases can be encountered sequentially or experienced as an all-encompassing panorama that gives the sensation of witnessing the battle firsthand.

Twombly’s signature style combines the poignant gestures of abstraction with poetic allusions to classicism. Relocating from the United States to Italy in the 1950s proved decisive for Twombly’s art, which uses raw mark-making to allude to the myths of antiquity.

For a look at Twombly’s life and career, the 2018 documentary Cy Dear, is well worth a watch. The film begins with a discussion of Fifty Days at lliam, which was on view as part of a 2017 retrospective at Centre Pompidou in Paris. It also includes interviews with several of his friends and colleagues– including former assistants, his son Alessandro, art dealer Larry Gagosian, and photographer Sally Mann.

Happy Birthday Iggy Pop!

 Books, Music, Musicians / Bands, Writers
Apr 212026
 

Iggy Pop- The Passenger (Live in Paris in 1991)

Happy Birthday to music legend Iggy Pop, who turns 79 today! He most recently performed (shirtless, of course) at Coachella, leaving the stage theatrically in a coffin. His set included his popular solo hits, like The Passenger (which he sings in the above video), as well as a few from his time with The Stooges.

Below he reads Dylan Thomas‘s poem, Do not go gentle into that good night, a performance included on his 2019 album, Free.

 

Ohio Murals- Jake Kelly in Cleveland

 Art, Artists, Books, Cleveland, Drawing, Ohio Street Art, Painting / Painters, Public Art, Street Art, Writers
Dec 122025
 

Cleveland artist Jake Kelly‘s 2010 mural was inspired by the artwork and concepts of ArtsCollinwood‘s portfolio project students. Along with his numerous murals band posters, and fliers, he has also made several comics detailing darker moments from Cleveland’s history.

He also created the fictional series, The Lake Erie Monster, with fellow artist John G. A few issues are currently available online for free.

More about the series from their website-

The flagship story is an “adaptation” of a fake movie that J. Kelly developed for a series of Ten Imaginary Movie Posters. Set in the 1970s, we follow a cast of eclectic characters as they have to navigate the choppy waters stirred up by a Monster born out of the pollution from a city gone to seed. Along with the main title, each issue will feature at least one short back up story.

The Aither‘s 2023 interview with Kelly is also worth a read for more information on the artist.

 

Films to Watch- Andrei Tarkovsky’s “Nostalghia”

 Art, Artists, Films, Quotes, Video and Film
Nov 192025
 

In Andrei Tarkovsky‘s 1983 film, Nostalghia, a Russian author finds himself lost in memories of home while traveling in Italy researching the life of an 18th century Russian composer who committed suicide after returning to Russia from Italy. The film initially follows the author, Andrei Gorchakov, and his relationship with his attractive interpreter. Drifting between dreams of his family in Russia shot in black-and-white and the present day in color, he later becomes fascinated by a local man, Domenico, who struggles with complicated issues of his own.

Nostalghia features motifs Tarkovsky used in many of his films including reflections, mirrors, water, and birds. There are also several scenes reminiscent of Ingmar Bergman‘s work, including the dream scenes of his wife and the interpreter (seen below). Tarkovsky’s feelings while living in Italy, away from his homeland, are also mirrored by those of Gorchakov.

It is in the character of Domenico (played by actor Erland Josephson who was also in several Bergman films), his past, and his connection to the author, that the film takes a more interesting and tragic turn.

Through Domenico’s moving speech, given from on top of a statue of Marcus Aurelius in Rome, Tarkovsky comments on a culture he sees headed in the wrong direction.

“What ancestor speaks in me? I can’t live simultaneously in my head and in my body. That’s why I can’t be just one person. I can feel within myself countless things at once.

There are no great masters left. That’s the real evil of our time. The heart’s path is covered in shadow. We must listen to the voices that seem useless in brains full of long sewage pipes of school wall, tarmac and welfare papers. The buzzing of insects must enter. We must fill the eyes and ears of all of us with things that are the beginning of a great dream. Someone must shout that we’ll build the pyramids. It doesn’t matter if we don’t. We must fuel that wish and stretch the corners of the soul like an endless sheet.

If you want the world to go forward, we must hold hands. We must mix the so-called healthy with the so-called sick. You healthy ones! What does your health mean? The eyes of all mankind are looking at the pit into which we are plunging. Freedom is useless if you don’t have the courage to look us in the eye, to eat, drink and sleep with us! It’s the so-called healthy who have brought the world to the verge of ruin. Man, listen! In you water, fire and then ashes, and the bones in the ashes. The bones and the ashes!

Where am I when I’m not in reality or in my imagination? Here’s my new pact: it must be sunny at night and snowy in August. Great things end. Small things endure. Society must become united again instead of so disjointed. Just look at nature and you’ll see that life is simple. We must go back to where we were, to the point where we took the wrong turn. We must go back to the main foundations of life without dirtying the water. What kind of world is this if a madman tells you you must be ashamed of yourselves!

O Mother! The air is that light thing that moves around your head and becomes clearer when you laugh.”

Although written in the 1980s the speech feels relevant today, perhaps more than ever. Below is the re-release trailer.

Two for Tuesday- Public Art- Julian Voss-Andreae’s Sculptures in Palm Springs and Columbus, Ohio

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, California Art Shows, Columbus, Conceptual Art, History, Ohio Art Shows, Palm Springs, Palm Springs Art Shows, Public Art, Quotes, Sculptors / Sculpture
Jul 292025
 

Isabelle, by German sculptor Julian Voss-Andreae is located in Palm Springs, California. Voss-Andreae creates sculptures designed to change their appearance- disappearing at times when viewed at a certain angle. His background in science helped to influence this work when he went on to study art.

Below is a section of his biography from his website-

Prior to his art career, Julian Voss-Andreae studied quantum physics and philosophy at the Universities of Berlin and Edinburgh. As a graduate student at the University of Vienna, Voss-Andreae was one of the small team led by 2022 Nobel Prize Laureate Anton Zeilinger that conducted a ground-breaking experiment in quantum mechanics in 1999. The researchers showed that even molecules as big as C-60 “Buckyballs” can reveal their fundamentally quantum nature under the right conditions. Zeilinger’s group found that a beam of them, passed through a diffraction grating, will exhibit the purely wavelike property of interference. Subsequent experiments showed how interactions with the environment (in the form of infrared photons and background gas of different densities) will gradually wash away the ‘quantum-ness’ thanks to the process of decoherence, which is now recognized as the way the classical world emerges from the quantum.

Our Single Garment of Destiny, (pictured below) is located in  Washington Gladden Social Justice Park in Columbus, Ohio. It was specifically designed for the park and takes its name and inspiration from the Martin Luther King Jr. quote below.

“All [people] are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.  Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”  – Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail (1963)

The video below explains his process when creating the sculptures.

Video Games- “Kentucky Route Zero” by Cardboard Computer

 Animation, Architecture, Art, Artists, Books, Conceptual Art, Design, Digital Art, Drawing, Illustration, Music, Musicians / Bands, Quotes, Video and Film, Video Games
Jul 162025
 

Kentucky Route Zero  is a point-and-click adventure game created by Jake Elliott, Tamas Kemenczy, and musician Ben Babbitt working together as Cardboard Computer. Started in 2011 with Kickstarter funding, it contains five parts and four interludes that were released over several years, with the final section completed in 2020.

The game begins with a truck driver named Conway arriving at a highway gas station with his dog. He is having trouble finding the address he was given for his delivery. From there you travel with him over various roads, an underground highway, and eventually even by boat. Along the way you stop at museums, an abandoned mine, local bars, an odd office building, a cave filled with bats, and more while meeting several of the area’s residents. You can choose to learn more about the characters and often join them to explore locations. The story unfolds with no sense of urgency and you are often given the choice to move on or to stay and explore further.

Filled with magical realist elements, it is often a world that can still feel depressingly familiar. Most of the characters are struggling in some way with the effects a failing economy, something that feels even more relevant since 2020. But there are also glimmers of hope in the ways the characters show up for each other- adapting, creating, and forming communities.

Below are a few selections from the game’s interludes that provide engaging breaks from the main story.

In Limits and Demonstrations three characters visit an art museum. You can check out several artworks including- Overdubbed Nam June Paik installation in the style of Edward Packard, which pays homage to Nam June Paik’s 1963 work, Random Access.

Scenes from The Entertainment– a play directed by one of the characters-

One of the phones from Here and There Along The Echo– you dial the number and the character Will (played by musician Will Oldham) reads information from the Echo River’s Bureau of Secret Tourism.

Scenes from Un Pueblo De Nada take place at the public access station- you can also find a live action version here.

Kentucky Route Zero is a game that stays with you long after it finishes. There are lots of things to discover and it’s worth playing more than once to find them. The website Highway Zero is good for things you may have missed.

The game is available for purchase on their website and can also currently be found on Netflix.

 

NYC Art Shows- Robert Natkin at Sundaram Tagore Gallery

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Quotes, Video and Film, Writers
Apr 242025
 

“I Like How the Left Side Modulates Up”, 1989, acrylic on canvas (from the “Hitchcock” series)

“Apollo, 617”, 1982, acrylic on canvas

Sundaram Tagore Gallery is currently showing the paintings of the late Robert Natkin for the exhibition A Better Place. The colorful abstract works are from the several series he produced during his lifetime.

Natkin used his artwork to explore different concepts and influences, many of which are listed in the press release below and in the information provided alongside several of the artworks.

“The Beloved (Field Mouse)”, 1969, acrylic on linen

Here, for example, is the information provided for the painting above, from his Field Mouse series-

Natkin explored motile, fragmentary shapes from 1967 onward in the “Field Mouse” series, a reference to a poem by Ezra Pound about the passage of time. These visualizations of fleeting life-experience, with which Natkin sought to form a new emotional vocabulary, often resemble microscopic views of teeming organisms. For him, they were complex emotional landscapes, reflecting a romantic turn when the Natkin family moved from New York to the quiet of rural Connecticut in 1970.

And the Days Are Not Full Enough

And the days are not full enough
And the nights are not full enough
And life slips by like a field mouse
Not shaking the grass
–Ezra Pound

More from the gallery’s press release-

Robert Natkin is internationally recognized as an unsurpassed colorist and for the beauty of his large-scale abstract canvases. He was represented by blue-chip New York gallerists Elinor Poindexter in the 1960s and André Emmerich in the 1970s. Today, his work is in the collections of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Guggenheim Museum and Whitney Museum of American Art, among others.

Born to a poor and unhappy Russian-Jewish family in Chicago during the Great Depression, Natkin would transcend his traumatic upbringing, often finding refuge in the color and splendor of the movies, charting an industrious course through public art education and briefly co-founding a gallery, to become one of the foremost American abstract colorist painters of the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s. His paintings are life-affirming, sensual celebrations of visual delight, of glorious Hollywood Technicolor, of fascinating surface effects, enticing layers, and sunny outlooks.

Natkin’s painterly journey can be seen through its distinct and loosely phased series as he accumulated years of psychotherapy and read and looked voraciously. They reveal his drive for redemption not just through introspection, but by consistently forging new stylistic syntheses.

FEATURED SERIES

The vigorous, gestural brushwork of Natkin’s early abstractions reflects the seismic impact of the Abstract Expressionists, including Willem de Kooning, and Jackson Pollock, whose work he encountered in an article about Abstract Expressionism in Life magazine in 1949. Natkin also found inspiration in French artists Matisse and Bonnard, among others in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago where he studied from 1948–1952.

In 1957, Natkin married the painter Judith Dolnick and together they founded the Wells Street Gallery in downtown Chicago, exhibiting cooperatively with a group of young contemporaries who similarly explored free-form abstraction, including the sculptor John Chamberlain, Ann Mattingly, Gerald van de Wiele and friend Ernest Dieringer. Wells Street Gallery made its cultural mark but was commercially unsuccessful, closing two years later, whereupon Natkin and Dolnick moved to New York.

In New York, Natkin’s vigorously abstract paintings took on more rectilinear qualities, decisively so with his Apollo series, characterized by loose vertical bands of color. The series began in the early 1960s under the inspiration of Rilke’s poem Archaic Torso of Apollo, based on a sculptural fragment in the Louvre, with its final imperative: “You have to change your life.” Named after the Greek god of the sun, the arts and healing, the Apollos established for Natkin the purpose of his art as a means of transformation for self and society.

The Apollo series was long-lived, spanning the 1960s and revived in the mid-1970s. The later instances incorporated Natkin’s distinctive technique of applying acrylic paint with a sponge covered in cloths of various textures, which he discovered in 1971. At his Dolnick’s suggestion, Natkin made a painting on a dishcloth because she had seen him make little paintings on handkerchiefs to give to friends, and then came up with the idea of effectively printing from it. The technique increased his productivity and transformed his aesthetic.

The pointillistic, gauzy effect of this technique came into its own in the more muted, diaphanous visions of the Bath series, so named for the English city where Natkin was to have an exhibition. The subtle, atmospheric nature of the Bath paintings are akin to his earlier Intimate Lighting series, which ran through much of the 1970s, and were described by British art critic Peter Fuller as possessing hints of portraiture in their central focus and inspired by Cubism in the clearly applied blocks of sponge-and-cloth-painting.

Natkin’s Straight Edge and Step paintings emerged from a period in the mid-1960s when he was preparing to teach a course on color at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and read Josef Albers’ theories on its interaction. They also channel the modernist architecture of his native Chicago, his love of jazz singers Billie Holiday and Nina Simone, and the dynamic grid-pattern streets of New York.

He explored motile, fragmentary shapes from 1967 onward in the Field Mouse series, a reference to a poem by Ezra Pound about the passage of time. These visualizations of fleeting life-experience, by which Natkin sought to form a new emotional vocabulary, often resembled microscopic views of teeming organisms and organelles. For him, they were also complex emotional landscapes, reflecting a more romantic turn when the Natkin family moved from New York to the quiet of rural Connecticut in 1970.

In 1977, Natkin produced the Bern series, named for the Swiss capital where the Klee Foundation is located and where Natkin spent many hours among Paul Klee’s works. In this series, he uses more sharply delineated shapes against expansive fields of intense color. Perhaps the boldest colors and shapes appear in the 1980s in the Hitchcock series, an homage to the great director and the movie-theater origins of his artistic journey. Hitchcock’s interest in psychoanalytic themes where dark secrets often drive the narrative, and his charging of the carefully crafted scenery and props with menacing symbolism appealed to Natkin.

Robert Natkin died in 2010 after several years of declining health. Over the course of his career, he demonstrated a remarkable capability of spanning beauty and ugliness in his art, though he dedicated his prime to the struggle of the former over the latter, to the Apollonian ascendancy of light over darkness.

In Somewhere Over the Rainbow, a 1982 documentary by award-winning filmmaker Mike Dibb, Natkin says, “In one sense, I want to be superhuman, but in another sense, I feel I’m barely an animal. And it’s a practice that I think if I don’t always maintain, juggle both these kinds of reality, I could then very easily be done in by the very kind of reparation that I use to make myself and that I hope will help the rest of the world to become a better place. I want to become a better place! Not a person: I want to become a better place, because as a person, I’m going to be gone in—I don’t know—ten minutes or ten years, but I want to become a better place.”

This exhibition closes 4/26/25.

 

NYC Art Shows- Sharon Core at Yancey Richardson

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Books, Conceptual Art, Illustration, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Photographers / Photography, Sculptors / Sculpture
Apr 112025
 

For Facsimile, currently on view at Yancey Richardson, Sharon Core has reproduced Flowers, the famous 1980 book of photographs by photographer Irving Penn. Instead of using photographs, however, she has recreated the images by painting them using Epson printer inks and photo paper. These paintings were then photographed to create replicas of the book. The work investigates issues of memory, reproduction, and the authorship of images, while also creating works that are beautiful objects in themselves.

From the gallery-

Through the meticulous recreation of historical still-life paintings, along with more recent artworks rendered through the medium of photography, her work explores the tension between reality and its photographic representation. In Facsimile, Core expands these themes by subverting her usual process. Rather than reproducing painted still-lifes through photography, she has instead turned to Irving Penn’s iconic Flowers series—a masterful collection of photographic still-lifes—and reinterpreted them through painting. This ambitious project both deepens and reframes Core’s exploration of the still-life genre by posing questions not only about photography in the digital age, but about material specificity and the status of the reproduction as well.

At the center of Facsimile is a hand-made reproduction of Penn’s 1980 book Flowers, which originated from a commission for Vogue magazine for its annual Christmas edition in 1967. Each year from 1967 to 1973, Penn focused on a different flower—beginning with tulips and moving on to poppies, peonies, roses and other blooms—capturing their ephemeral beauty in various states of perfection and decay. In 1980, these images were compiled into the popular and widely available book Flowers, published by Harmony Books, now out of print. Core’s Facsimile: “Irving Penn, Flowers” resurrects and reimagines the book as a tactile, meticulously handcrafted object that visitors are invited to handle. Alongside this edition, Core presents a selection of her 73 hand-painted recreations of Penn’s photographs, displayed throughout the gallery to offer a closer look at her reinterpretations of the original works. Rather than a departure, we might see this as a return for Core, who originally trained as a painter. The interplay between painting and photography has always been central to her practice and Facsimile brings this dialogue into sharper focus.

Core’s process for Facsimile is as intricate as it is conceptually layered. Each of Penn’s photographs is recreated as a painting using Epson UltraChrome inks on Canson Photo Rag paper, materials typically associated with digital photographic printing. Through this method, Core subverts the intended use of contemporary materials, transforming them into tools for painting. She then photographed her painted pages, designed a layout replicating that of the original book and bound the final prints into an edition of seven. In Core’s words, “the book is a multiple sculpture or a three-dimensional print that must be handled and touched to experience. My name is nowhere in the ‘book,’ therefore it is not an artist book, per se, but in fact a converted replica or facsimile.” By humanizing and rarifying a mass-produced object, Core’s “three-dimensional print” calls for a different kind of attention from the viewer. It cannot be experienced via a screen and must instead be encountered physically. In this generous gesture, the now out-of-print book is given a new lease on life, taking on a different meaning through a complex process of conversion: transforming photographs into paintings, which are then re-photographed, printed and bound into a book.

Visually, Facsimile diverges from Penn’s original photographs through Core’s expressive, painterly approach. Unlike her earlier series, in which she precisely reproduced certain still-life paintings in three-dimensions and photographed the results, effectively posing questions about the boundaries between illusion and reality, here Core seeks to emphasize the handcrafted nature of all photographs. As she notes, “Ever more so, the photograph is manipulated and collaged and is printed not through time and light, as in analog process, but with a fluid medium on paper. It becomes a machine assisted drawing or painting.” In Facsimile, Core makes explicit the artistry behind the work: the hand-lettered text is visibly imperfect and the images, while faithful to Penn’s compositions, are imbued with the texture and fluidity of the artist’s brushwork. Even the colors in the paintings result from a rigorous process of mixing and diluting the digital hues of cyan, yellow, magenta and black.

There is no trompe l’oeil effect at play here, nor any photorealist painting technique either and the result is therefore not an exact replica but a layered gesture that urges us to reflect on the evolving nature of representation in the digital age. By moving from a mechanical form of reproduction to an analogue process, while using a medium of mass production, Core questions the role of materiality in image-making. This finely crafted body of work seems to slip between painting, photography and sculpture, casting new light on Penn’s original photographs and book, while posing deeper questions about image-making technologies and their supposed ties to representing reality in this post-truth era.

This exhibition closes 4/12/25.

NYC Art Shows- Joan Jonas at Gladstone Gallery

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Books, Conceptual Art, Drawing, Installation Art, Mixed Media, New York Art Shows, Quotes, Sculptors / Sculpture, Video and Film
Apr 102025
 

Joan Jonas’s exhibition Empty Rooms at Gladstone Gallery combines drawings, sculptures, video projection, and a score by musician and composer Jason Moran to explore issues of loss.

From the gallery-

“I didn’t see a difference between a poem, a sculpture, a film, or a dance. A gesture has for me the same weight as a drawing: draw, erase, draw, erase —memory erased.”

—Joan Jonas, In the Shadow of a Shadow

This presentation includes new work while also exploring the artist’s process of revival. In Empty Rooms, Jonas’ cultivation of a resonant, fragmented space brings together objects and imagery that invite viewers to contemplate the throughlines that connect familiarity with loss.

Typical of Jonas’ practice, her work is not illustrative but highly interpretive; meaning is not fixed but emerges and recedes in poetic layers. Central to the exhibition are a series of 12 hanging sculptures constructed of handmade Japanese Torinoko paper sewn onto custom designed steel wire frames. Simple, white, and austere without adornment or embellishment, the 12 aerial sculptures embody the titular “empty rooms” and float above visitors as specters of absence. Felt as deeply as they are seen, these powerful vestiges vibrate in their repetition and multiplicity.

Jonas includes a video, quoted from the performance aspect of the installation, shown in the U.S. Pavilion, at the 2015 Venice Biennale They Come to Us without a Word. Projected on one wall of the gallery space, this sequence was partly inspired by the ghost stories of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, where Jonas has visited and worked since the early 70s. Incorporating drawings, video, and sound, this performance was restaged at The Kitchen in 2016.

For its most recent installment at Gladstone, Jonas’ long-time collaborator, musician and composer, Jason Moran, will present a newly-configured score. Through the artist’s practice of revisiting and reconfiguring past elements, she enacts a process of transmission and produces a visual archive that has shaped her unwaveringly experimental body of work.

This exhibition closes 4/12/25.

NYC Art Shows- “The Writing’s on the Wall” at Hill Art Foundation, Curated by Hilton Als

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Books, Ceramic Art, Collage, Conceptual Art, Design, Digital Art, Drawing, Fiber Arts, Glasswork, Illustration, Installation Art, Mixed Media, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Photographers / Photography, Printmaking, Quotes, Sculptors / Sculpture, Sound Art, Video and Film, Writers
Mar 262025
 

Jennie C. Jones, “Fluid Red Tone (in the break)”, 2022, Architectural felt, acoustic panel, and acrylic on canvas (left) and Steve Wolfe, “Untitled (Bookends)”, 1990, Bronze, lacquer (bottom right)

Unrecorded Betsi-Nzaman artist, Fang peoples Male Reliquary Guardian Figure (Eyema Byeri), 19th Century Wood, metal, pigment (center sculpture), Andy Warhol, “Close Cover Before Striking”, 1962 Acrylic and collage on linen, (right) and Judy Linn “James Joyce on 23rd st.”, early 1970s, Archival pigment print (on window)

Ronny Quevedo, “body and soul (Reflection Eternal)”, 2022, Pattern paper, gold leaf, and metal leaf on muslin (left) and Christian Marclay and Steve Wolfe, “La Voix Humaine”, 1991, Wood console, oil and screenprint on aluminum (right)

Larry Wolhandler, “Bust of James Baldwin”, 1975, Bronze, and Rudolf Stingel, “Untitled”, 2016, Electroformed copper, plated nickel, stainless steel frame (right)

Medardo Rosso, “Rieuse”, 1890, Wax on plaster, and picture of Joan Didion

Ellen Gallagher “DeLuxe”, 2004–2005 Grid of 60 photogravure, etching, aquatint and drypoints with lithography, screenprint, embossing, tattoo-machine engraving; some with additions of plasticine, watercolor, pomade and toy eyeballs

Writer Hilton Als has brought together a wonderful collection of works exploring art and language for The Writing’s on the Wall: Language and Silence in the Visual Arts at Hill Art Foundation.  Quotes from several authors are included alongside the art, adding another dimension to the show.

From the gallery-

This group exhibition presents artists whose work explores the relationships between communication and language. In the curatorial text, Als explains: “for this exhibition, I wanted to show what silence looked like—at least to me—and what words looked like to artists.”

“Writing and erasure have been important sources of inspiration for many of the artists in my family’s collection, including Christopher Wool, Rudolf Stingel, Vija Celmins, and Cy Twombly,” says J. Tomilson Hill, President of the Hill Art Foundation. “Hilton Als has identified a fascinating motif and introduced important loans to illustrate the rich history of these lines of inquiry into the present day.”

In his accompanying essay, Poetics of Silence, Als probes the power of visual art to skirt the written or spoken word. The works included convey “the sense we have when language isn’t working,” evoke “EKGs of rhythm followed by silence, or surrounded by it,” reveal “painting as language’s subtext,” illustrate “what we mean to say as opposed to what gets said,” and “find beauty in the tools that one uses to erase words—and then to make new ones.” He reflects on his own entry into the art world as an art history student at Columbia in the 1980s, and his efforts as a writer and curator to create a democratic “language of perception” that transcends traditional connoisseurship.

The Writing’s on the Wall encompasses a range of mediums, from video installation to printed zine. Artists in the exhibition include Ina Archer, Kevin Beasley, Jared Buckhiester, Vija Celmins, Sarah Charlesworth, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Fang: Betsi-Nzaman, Ellen Gallagher, Joel Gibb and Paul P., Rachel Harrison, Ray Johnson, G.B. Jones and Paul P., Jennie C. Jones, Christopher Knowles, Willem de Kooning, Sherrie Levine, Judy Linn, Christian Marclay, Brice Marden, Agnes Martin, Claes Oldenburg, Ronny Quevedo, Irving Penn, Umar Rashid, Medardo Rosso, David Salle, Rudolf Stingel, Cy Twombly, Andy Warhol, Steve Wolfe, Larry Wolhandler, and Christopher Wool.

Als’ essay provides not only more information on the show and the art included, but also his own experience of learning about and experiencing art.

Below is a brief excerpt but it is well worth it to read the essay in its entirety.

Part of the experience I hope to evoke here draws a line between language, which is to say active contemplation, and being, which requires nothing more than your presence first and language second (or third). You know what being is. It happens to you all the time. You may be in a museum, or a public park, or sitting dully in your house, with “nothing” on your mind, and then there you are—a kind of walking phenomenology, language-free, but not feeling. In fact, you are suffused with feeling. Your feet are on the ground, and your body, released from the chatter of the everyday, is porous to the surrounding world with its various silences—a world where everything and nothing speaks to you. The clouds; some pictures on a white wall; a beautiful, hitherto-unknown sculpture reaching for eternity; that blank wall standing between you and the wonders of a garden that manages to grow right here in the middle of Manhattan—they all became part of your being, the self that is always on the verge of discovery, if only you can listen to its silences.

Silence says so much, if you listen. (From Marianne Moore’s 1924 poem “Silence”: “The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence; not in silence, but restraint.”) And since I have been a writer all my life, it’s a relief not to think in words sometimes, and to look at pictures, which do not so much deny verbalization but are without language, only the experience of here and now. Sometimes being simply means that we are somewhere, and we are porous to contemplation. When we think about visual culture or production, words aren’t the first things that come to mind. What does is the thing itself. And for this exhibition, I wanted to show what silence looked like—at least to me—and what words looked like to artists. The struggle to speak, to say, to reveal language or an attempt at language—communication—in a visual medium that has a complicated relationship to speech.

Als’ website includes his older writing ,but you can read more of his recent essays and reviews on The New Yorker’s website and he frequently posts on Instagram.

This exhibition closes 3/29/25.

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