Mike Kelley’s Playroom Décor, 1995, from the exhibition Timeless Painting at Hauser and Wirth in NYC in 2019.
Oct 312020
Oct 102020
The Mountain, 2020
The Mountain, Center Painting
The Mountain, Center Painting, Detail
Untitled, 2020
Detail of the above painting
Untitled, 2020
Currently at David Zwirner’s 19th Street location is Traveling Light, an exhibition of new work by Belgian-born, New York–based artist Harold Ancart. The stunning large scale paintings were created using oil stick and graphite.
From the press release–
On view in one gallery space will be a new series of paintings that depicts trees. These works were painted between Ancart’s Brooklyn studio and a makeshift outdoor studio in Los Angeles, which he traveled to during lockdown. Pointing to references as varied as René Magritte, Egon Schiele, Gustav Klimt, and Piet Mondrian, who approached this subject matter in distinct ways, Ancart’s tree paintings blur form and color, figure and ground, and figuration and abstraction.
In the adjoining gallery space, there will be two multipanel canvases that situate the viewer between a mountain-scape and a seascape, both monumental in scale. These works are inspired in part by the artist’s encounter with the modernist landscape murals of the American painter Gottardo Piazzoni (1872–1945) permanently installed at the De Young Museum, San Francisco.
The exhibition constructs an immersive landscape experience, and together, the works on view comprise a meditation on the expansive possibilities of painting.
The two quotes from Ancart below (taken from the gallery’s website) describe the concept of the exhibition a bit more.
“It is a very strange time to think about traveling, and it is a strange time to think about freedom. I didn’t conceive the exhibition this way, but I guess meaning always catches up with you. I am opening this exhibition, Traveling Light, at a time when no one travels.… But there are always means of transportation, and I think painting is very much one of them.”
“I actually did conceive the exhibition as a walk.… I think it is very important, as a painter, that you can wander freely through paint. And I think it is very important as a viewer that you can wander equally freely through it. You don’t need to know where you are going.”
This exhibition closes 10/17/20.
Jul 302020
Happy Birthday to Betye Saar who turned 94 today! This work Still Ticking, (2005), was part of LACMA’s exhibition Betye Saar: Call and Response which opened at the museum in September of 2019.
From the wall description of the work-
Made shortly before Saar’s seventy-eighth birthday, the assemblage includes years and astrological glyphs on the inner left side that correlate to various important dates in her life. The work’s title wittily refers both to the timepieces in the sculpture- which, of course, are not ticking; indeed they are either frozen in time or missing their hands- and to the artist herself, who is alive and well, still ticking, now at age ninety-three.
Jul 122020
One of the pieces from Drew Heitzler’s 2015 exhibition Pacific Palisades at Blum and Poe Los Angeles.
Jun 222020
Everything is falling apart according to plan, one of artist and writer John Tottenham’s works from his show The Indifferent Sublime, at Maloney Fine Art in Culver City in 2014.
May 232020
Jamie Fales contributed this painting to the Cat Art Show, in Los Angeles in 2016.