Jul 032023
 

There are currently two exhibitions in New York celebrating Richard Avedon’s photography. At The Metropolitan Museum of Art is Richard Avedon: Murals. Pictured above are two of the large murals included. The first is of Andy Warhol and members of The Factory and the other is of members of the Mission Council in Saigon.

From The Met’s website about the show-

In 1969, Richard Avedon was at a crossroads. After a five-year hiatus, the photographer started making portraits again, this time with a new camera and a new sense of scale. Trading his handheld Rolleiflex for a larger, tripod-mounted device, he reinvented his studio dynamic. Instead of dancing around his subjects from behind a viewfinder, as he had in his lively fashion pictures, he could now stand beside a stationary camera and meet them head-on. Facing down groups of the era’s preeminent artists, activists, and politicians, he made huge photomural portraits, befitting their outsized cultural influence. On the centennial of the photographer’s birth, Richard Avedon: MURALS will bring together three of these monumental works, some as wide as 35 feet. For Avedon, the murals expanded the artistic possibilities of photography, radically reorienting viewers and subjects in a subsuming, larger-than-life view.

The murals are society portraits. In them, Avedon assembles giants of the late twentieth century—members of Andy Warhol’s Factory, architects of the Vietnam war, and demonstrators against that war—who together shaped an extraordinarily turbulent era of American life. Presented in one gallery, their enormous portraits will stage an unlikely conversation among historically opposed camps, as well as contemporary viewers. The formal innovations of Avedon’s high style—of starkly lit bodies in an unsparing white surround—are best realized in these works, where subjects jostle and crowd the frame, and bright voids between them crackle with tension. Uniting the murals with session outtakes and contemporaneous projects, the exhibition will track Avedon’s evolving approach to group portraiture, through which he so transformed the conventions of the genre.

About Andy Warhol and members of The Factory

Avedon fantasized about throwing an annual fete for New York society and watching the group evolve over time. This mural is his downtown take on such a party, featuring a new “smart set” of sexual revolutionaries. They were affiliated with Andy Warhol’s Factory, the studio and gathering place for a coterie of avant-garde filmmakers, artists, and socialites. Avedon summoned them to his own studio, where they met over a series of weeks. Working in his most directorial mode, he arranged his subjects—including transgender actress Candy Darling and adult film star Joe Dallesandro—in a lateral frieze across adjoining frames, the fracture and repetition of their bodies in space suggesting the filmic passage of time.

The culmination of much trial and error, the mural’s composition took time to perfect, as evidenced by session outtakes displayed nearby. Avedon later praised the professionalism of his cast but joked, “You couldn’t keep the clothes on anybody in those years. . . . Before you could say ‘hello,’ they were nude and ready to ride.” If this unabashed undress tests gallery decorum, it is a provocation grounded in art history: in the central panel Avedon presents a male version of the “three graces,” riffing on a gendered tradition in allegorical painting with an ironic, Warholian wink.

About The Mission Council, Saigon, South Vietnam

Avedon knew he would have mere minutes to photograph the U.S. generals, ambassadors, and policy experts who ran the war in Vietnam—not the weeks he spent refining his first mural. Planning in advance, he requested the heights of the men known collectively as the Mission Council and mapped out their positions, with careful attention to rank and influence. He rigged a makeshift studio at the embassy in Saigon, and recalled that once assembled, they “lined up like high school boys. They all wanted to be in the picture.” This is true of all but Ted Shackley, the camera-averse CIA station chief known to colleagues as the Blond Ghost, who begged out of the sitting for “a meeting,” leaving a void in the rightmost panel.

As blunt and procedural as a police lineup, the mural recalls Avedon’s first photography gig as a teenager in the Merchant Marine, where he made mugshot-style portraits of new recruits. Here, scrutinizing the faces of the war’s top brass, Avedon invokes their unseen operatives and victims. When the work was later published, one critic deemed it “a terrifying picture of business as usual.”

This exhibition closes 10/1/23.

For a more comprehensive look at Avedon’s career, Gagosian’s Chelsea location is showing Avedon 100, “a collection of Avedon photographs was selected by more than 150 people—including prominent artists, designers, musicians, writers, curators, and fashion world representatives—who elaborate on the impact of the photographer’s work today.”

The gallery’s website has a video of the installation that is well worth checking out, especially if you can’t see the exhibition in person.

This exhibition will close on Friday, 7/7/23.

Jun 232023
 


Closing tomorrow, 6/24, is Cross Communication, an exhibition of Chris Burden’s relics, films, video works, and other materials that document his early performances at Gagosian’s 75th and Park location in NYC.

Walking into the gallery and hearing one of his TV commercials in which he reads off the names of famous artists followed by his own name (Chris Burden Promo (1976)), is a humorous introduction to Burden’s often audacious work. Poem for LA from 1975, which follows with the messages- “SCIENCE HAS FAILED”, “HEAT IS LIFE” and “TIME KILLS” still resonates today.

Check out the video below to see the commercials and hear Burden discuss the work.

Other videos included have him crawling across glass; lying between two sheets of glass that are on set on fire (Icarus); and one of his most infamous- being shot in the arm (Shoot, 1971). The less outrageous works are great too, including Disappearing (1971), pictured above.

For more on the artist, the excellent documentary Burden, by Richard Dewey and Timothy Marrinan, follows his career from these earlier works to the large scale sculptures like Metropolis II and Urban Light that came later. Both of these installations are on view in Los Angeles at LACMA.

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.

 

Apr 142023
 

“The Rake’s Progress”, 1991

“The Rake’s Progress”, 1991 (detail)

“Magnet”, 1992

“Magnet”, 1992 (detail)

“Stella Polaris”, 1990

Currently at Gagosian in NYC is Helen Frankenthaler’s Drawing within Nature: Paintings from the 1990s. The exhibition includes twelve paintings and two large scale works on paper.

From the press release-

My pictures are full of climates, abstract climates, and not nature per se. But a feeling. And the feeling of an order that is associated more with nature. Nature in seasons, maybe; but nature in, well, an order. And I think art itself is order out of chaos.
—Helen Frankenthaler

Frankenthaler’s celebrated 1952 composition, Mountains and Sea, was the first of her soak-stained canvases and was highly influential in the development of 1960s Color Field painting. By the 1970s, though, she had amplified her methods to include the expressive possibilities of surface inflection and density. Over the course of the 1980s, highly painterly canvases became her principal pictorial means, soon resulting in, during what would be her final decade, canvases of the greatest dramatic impact of her entire career, some of an unexpectedly large size.

Drawing within Nature features works dating from 1990 through 1995, made following Frankenthaler’s paintings retrospective which opened in 1989 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Composed in her studios in New York; Stamford, Connecticut; and Santa Fe, New Mexico—where she held a summer teaching residency at the Santa Fe Institute of Art in 1990 and 1991—these abstractions are inspired by the artist’s experience of landscapes.

Works in the exhibition include Poseidon (1990), more than eight feet wide, which calls on qualities of Frankenthaler’s earlier soak-stained canvases to evoke ocean currents, with its wet-on-wet passages of aqua, white, and green. The even larger Stella Polaris (1990) sets streams and patches of dense cloudlike white paint beneath the starlight of its title. Western Roadmap (1991) transforms the desert rock and glowing sunsets of the American Southwest into a stratified abstraction that hangs within an almost nine-foot-wide panorama. Reef and Spellbound (both 1991) lay out washes of rich, glowing color of varying density across dark grounds. The verdant hues of The Rake’s Progress (1991) suggest a garden in bloom, and show how Frankenthaler began to use gel to thicken her paint as well as combing and raking tools to create tracks bearing the imprint of the energy passing over the surface.

Painted a few years later, in acrylic on large sheets of paper, Flirt and Aerie (both 1995) are less grounded in memories of landscape vistas. Rather, their open, cursive forms invoke vividly colored and magnified details of drawing within nature.

This exhibition closes 4/22/23.

Mar 162023
 

Cy Gavin, “Untitled (Yellow pine),” 2023

Cy Gavin, “Untitled (Crossroads/meadow), 2022

Cy Gavin, “Untitled (Crossroads/meadow), 2022

Cy Gavin, “Untitled (Crossroads/meadow), 2022 (detail)

It’s the last week to see Cy Gavin’s painting exhibition at Gagosian’s 21st location in NYC.

From the gallery’s press release-

Gavin’s landscape paintings transmute subjective responses to specific places into expansive works with striking palettes and fluid, gestural brushwork. Composed in dimensions that are in keeping with the scale of experience, these paintings interpret the sites and processes of the natural world. In this body of work, Gavin concentrates on subjects he finds in the vicinity of his studio in New York’s Hudson Valley. He proposes a conception of landscape in relation to his status as a citizen and steward of the land, developing ways to explore themes of growth, renewal, and belonging.

Gavin’s paintings respond to the land as he finds it, which he endeavors to preserve and rewild. Made following the artist’s move to his current studio in early 2020, these works are also undergirded by the tensions of our time, which are marked by periods of solitude and upheaval.

Operating both as a gestural abstraction and as a painterly interpretation of a patch of ground near his studio, Untitled (Crossroads/meadow) (2022) depicts the intersection of paths bordered by tall grass in a fiery palette dominated by yellows, oranges, and pinks, evoking the blazing heat and brightness of the late summer sun. Along with the traditional symbolism of directionality and decision-making that is inherent to crossroads, this view presents a previously manicured lawn that the artist allowed to regrow into a meadow, with mown paths allowing access through it.

The verdant Untitled (Paths in a meadow) (2022) revisits the motif, placing the viewer low to the ground so that burgeoning grass and wildflowers divide the picture plane. Untitled (Paths, crossing—blue) (2022) is a nocturnal scene that conveys the enveloping darkness of a moonlit night. Gavin composed the painting with shades of blue that range from the diffuse washes over raw canvas in its foreground to dark, opaque passages that demarcate a tree line and open up to a star-filled sky. In a related palette of blues, Floor Painting #1 (Natural spring) (2023) is a mural-size work inspired by the dynamic waters of a spring. Displayed horizontally, the painting’s surface conveys the experience of looking down into the roiling currents, light variably revealing its depths and movements.

The themes of boundaries and borders are also prominent in Untitled (Rhododendron border) (2022), a painting in which sweeping brushstrokes describe the leaves of a woodland shrub on a dark ground, beyond which nothing can be seen. Its opacity expresses its function: the privacy achieved by a hedge the artist sited along the thoroughfare adjoining his property.

Other conceptions of time, place, and growth emerge in Untitled (Baldcypress) (2022), a painting in complementary hues that expresses the robust growth of one of the many saplings that Gavin has planted on his property. Outside its current natural range, this ancient species of tree once thrived in New York State, with this specimen now brought back to the area. Reflecting a mix of natural forces and the history of human interventions that defines the land, Untitled (Grass growing on a weir) (2022) depicts currents of water as they pass over the concrete slabs of a former dam that is now fully submerged. Simultaneously revealing and concealing visual information, the painting exists as an amalgam of past and present that defines the specificities of this place.

This exhibition closes 3/18/2023.

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.