Jan 242025
 

“Snow-Laden Primeval (Meditations, on Log Phase and Decline rampant with Flatulent Cows and Carbon Cars)”, 2020, oil paint on canvas

Blockade ‘The Risen’, 1960-1961/2019, Oil on canvas / RISEN from the New York 1960-1961 painting, reconstructed in Amsterdam in 2019

Artist Jo Baer passed away this Tuesday at the age of 95. Her long career was marked by her transition away from the abstract works she became known for to figuration. She destroyed several of her original minimalist paintings but would later reproduce them in 2019 from archival images.

The works above are from her 2020 concurrent exhibitions at Pace GalleryThe Risen/Originals.

More on her life and career from Pace Gallery

Born in Seattle in 1929, Baer studied biology at the University of Washington—where she also enrolled in introductory painting and drawing courses—and earned a graduate degree in psychology from the New School for Social Research in New York. She began her artistic career in Los Angeles in the early 1950s before returning to New York in 1960. There, she would become a key figure in the city’s burgeoning minimalist scene with her hard-edge paintings featuring bands of color around their edges. She also painted symbols and objects in some of her early works, often examining sexual and gender politics in these more figurative compositions.

Over the course of the 1960s, her paintings were exhibited alongside works by her mostly male peers—including Kenneth Noland, Robert Mangold, Frank Stella, Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, Robert Morris, and Sol LeWitt—and she presented her first-ever solo show at Fischbach Gallery in New York in 1966. Following her mid-career retrospective at the Whitney Museum in 1975, she relocated to Europe, first living in England and Ireland before settling in Amsterdam in 1984.

Baer’s search for renewal in the 1970s brought her to “radical figuration,” a term she coined in her now famous 1983 letter to Art in America, declaring that she was “no longer an abstract artist.” The term, which the artist later moved away from, describes a midway point between abstraction and figuration in which she could utilize partial, edited, or layered images—both found and created—to generate space for a new language within painting.

During her years in England and Ireland, Baer departed from pure abstraction in her work, developing a new aesthetic grounded in images, text, and prehistoric signs that combined the new, the old, and the mythical. Over the nine years she spent living in Smarmore Castle in County Louth in Ireland, Baer became fascinated by the region’s Neolithic history, opening her practice up to ancient histories of civilization. Seeing painting as a continually evolving tradition that could not be easily broken down into neat stylistic or periodic categories, Baer found as much inspiration in archaeology, anthropology, astronomy, and geography as in contemporary culture.

“I wanted more subject matter and more meaning,” the artist once said of her decision to move away from Minimalism. “There was an awful lot going on in the world, and I didn’t just want to sit there and draw straight lines.”

Below, in this video from the gallery, she discusses her body of work.

Oct 242023
 

Ermin Tabakovic has created an intriguing world with his geometric paintings for Transcending Space, on view at Morean Arts Center in St. Pete.

From the gallery’s website-

Ermin Tabakovic was born in 1980 in former Yugoslavia (now Bosnia). In 1993 he and his family moved to Berlin, Germany where they lived between 1993-1998. As a teenager in Berlin, Ermin was involved in the city’s vibrant graffiti art scene and completed numerous murals. In 1998 he and his family emigrated to the United States, settling in the Tampa Bay area. Upon arrival in the US, Ermin took on painting and studied at St. Petersburg College where he focused on art and architecture. He went on to study art at the University of Central Florida in Orlando where he completed his BFA in Art Studio with Minors in Graphic Design and Art History.

Ermin actively exhibited his work between 2000-2008, taking part in many shows throughout Florida. He stopped painting in 2008 due to health issues and picked it up again in 2020 with a new vigor and a new vision. His new works are mature, colorful and bold representations of his core vision and aesthetic steeped in geometric form and a structural sensibility. Currently Ermin resides in Tampa with his wife Lisa and their beloved cat Maximus.

“Modern geometric painting has had a very big influence on my work, especially the Constructivist artists such as Malevich and El Lissitzky and the various other modern Art movements of the 20th century such as Cubism, Neoplasticism, Minimalism, and Surrealism. In my current work I tend to fuse all these different influences and combine them with my own personal aesthetic to create a new visual language that transcends the past and points to something new and different. We live in a digital age, so there is that digital touch to my compositions as well by using the hard-edge approach.

“I want the works to be visually striking, thus my use of vibrant colors, contrast, pure and robust geometric forms, clean lines, etc. I also like to add a surreal touch to my works to give them a sense of mystery and visual drama. Furthermore, I seek to create visual paradoxes by intertwining 2D and 3D space to add tension and ambiguity. My aim is to challenge the viewer’s perception of space and test the boundaries of what is possible by juxtaposing the seemingly impossible.”

This exhibition closes 10/26/23.

May 092023
 

“Curtains”, 1972, Acrylic and fabric on canvas

“Curtains”, 1972 (detail)

“Voyage”, 1973, Acrylic and collage on canvas

“Shrine: Homage to M.L.”, 1963, Oil on canvas

“Big Ox”, 1967, acrylic on canvas

There’s only a few days left to see Miriam Schapiro: The André Emmerich Years, Paintings from 1957–76 at Eric Firestone Gallery.

From the press release-

Miriam Schapiro (1923–2015) is now well-known as a pioneer of the Women’s Art Movement, and for her contribution to the Pattern and Decoration Movement. She fused craft work, traditionally made by women, with modern painting in collages termed “femmage.” However, this exhibition will additionally shed light on her early Abstract Expressionist canvases, and her pioneering approach utilizing computer technology to create Hard Edge geometric painting in the 1960s. Spotlighting the legacy of this feminist artist, the exhibition will explore three stylistic phases, with significant examples from these two decades of Schapiro’s career.

This exhibition closes 5/13/23.