Nigel Cooke at Pace New York

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters
Feb 272020
 

Currently at Pace Gallery in New York are Nigel Cooke’s ten large-scale paintings. The paintings have an exuberant intensity to them. Close up the shades of varying color, layers of paint, and the textures created by the brush strokes, show the detail that went in to creating the overall effect of the work.

From the press release-

Completed over the past year, these ten new large-scale paintings mark a significant shift in the artist’s direction toward a more performative, energetic, and abstract approach to figuration. This shift was propelled by a recent residency in the city, where Cooke remarked that “the entire philosophy of what it is I am doing has been adjusted.” These works, which reference actions, places, and people, exist as matrices in which the artist’s free and open process meets wider themes of metaphor, spirit, nature, representation, and the living material quality of paint. In this way, these new works draw on the legacies of American artists such as Willem de Kooning and Clyfford Still as well as Abstract Expressionism, British Figuration, Spanish painting, and Chinese silk painting.

…These dynamic compositions become transitional grids that unfix and multiply the idea of what a figure is, reflecting a complex interplay of vigor, chance, and intuition. They begin with a single color drawn in a loose structure that drives the painting process forward. Building up the canvas in lines and washes, the paintings move away from a defined image, resulting in a myriad of possibilities from the mud and grit of real landscapes to atmospheric emanations or presences. As such, they do not depend on a fixed viewpoint but drift between states, contradicting themselves over time and allowing for the possibility of transformation.

Furthering Cooke’s radical shift in his practice, the paintings were executed on raw canvas—a first for the artist. The natural linen endows the paintings with a unique brownish ground and a textured weave that is seen throughout the works. This material quality also impacts Cooke’s mark-making as washes develop into thickets of dark staining and lines that taper off and sometimes produce kasure or “flying white,” an ancient Chinese silk painting technique known for its ribbon-like strokes that sputter and appear to leap off of the surface of the canvas.

This exhibition closes 2/29/20.

Mircea Suciu at Blain Southern New York

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Mixed Media, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Photographers / Photography
Feb 212020
 

Currently at Blain Southern gallery’s New York location is  Mircea Suciu’s Universal Fatigue.

From the press release-

Part of the Cluj School, Mircea Suciu (b. 1978, Baia Mare, Romania) is regarded as one of Romania’s leading artists. During his formative years he witnessed the country’s tumultuous transition after the only violent overthrow of a communist government in the 1989 revolutions. Describing himself as an image creator rather than a traditional painter, Suciu mines and references art history and contemporary imagery, reducing down the elements and adding colour coded symbolism. He has ‘his own complex way of making things in which painting, photography, drawing and print all cooperate while playing their individual parts’ 1

Inspired by his former studies on the restoration of Baroque paintings, Suciu has developed a process he calls ‘monoprinting’. A photographic image is split into a grid of A4 surfaces, each one printed onto an acetate sheet onto which a layer of acrylic paint is applied. The paint acts as a ‘glue’ that adheres to directly to the canvas and once dry, the acetate sheet is peeled off. The result is a transference of the printed image with associated faults and imperfections which Suciu then ‘restores’ by re-painting with oil and acrylic paint. Sometimes, as with works in the Disintegration series, he overlays the image multiple times using various colours until he creates a surface that is barely recognisable from the original. As a final stage the whole image is repainted. This multi-layered process creates compositions of reinvented images which allude to history, memory and eventual dissolution of all things.

‘A characteristic of my work is frailty, not regarding the subject but the relationship between the surfaces that constitute the ensemble of the whole picture.’ – Mircea Suciu

This exhibition closes 2/21/20.

 

Yayoi Kusama at Mucciaccia Gallery NYC

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Conceptual Art, Drawing, Mixed Media, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Sculptors / Sculpture
Feb 132020
 

For its inaugural exhibition at its Chelsea New York location, Mucciaccia Gallery is showing the work of Yayoi Kusama. The show includes sculptures, her signature infinity polka dot paintings, and several of her works on paper.

This exhibition closes 2/15/20.

Swoon at Deitch New York

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Conceptual Art, Drawing, Mixed Media, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Sculptors / Sculpture, Video and Film
Jan 302020
 

It’s the last week to see Swoon: Cicada at Jeffrey Deitch’s New York location. This exhibition of Caledonia Dance Curry (aka Swoon)’s work includes a sculptural installation, drawings, and a stop motion film.

From the gallery’s website-

Cicada marks a new development in Swoon’s practice. A celebration of rebirth and transformation, the exhibition at 76 Grand Street features recent films, drawings, and installations in which her personal story becomes more central.

Moving away from her street pasted portraits that encouraged the viewer to imagine a background story, Swoon now creates narratives that draw from her personal history as well as classical mythologies. She is also inspired by the handcrafted quality of silent era and 20th-century folkloric films. In her stop-motion animations, fragments of the subconscious coalesce into subliminal images. Open-ended stories unfold and weave recurring motifs such as birth, divination, trauma, and healing.

Swoon’s stop-motion films emphasize the body’s ability to serve as a vessel carrying memories and traditions. A house, a ship, and human figures split and open to liberate a cast of imaginative and mythological creatures trapped inside. The central figure is the “Tarantula Mother,” a half-human, half-spider allegory that evokes traumatic memories from childhood. Swoon’s response to parts of her family history – and the legacy of her parents’ addiction and substance abuse – has recurred throughout her work. These components inflict a strong element of realism to the films, grounding the otherwise- whimsical atmospheres of Cicada.

In Swoon’s work, the sea often constitutes the physical and metaphorical ground for possible encounters. In Cicada, underwater scenarios become a psychological space for introspection and subconscious explorations. Surrounded by new sculptures and her portrait series, Cicada allows viewers to immerse themselves into Swoon’s world, creating a vivid experience embedded in the present moment.

Swoon’s inner circle of friends is the subject of a new series of drawings included in the exhibition. The intimacy of these portraits recalls the romantic and humane spirit of her earlier street pasted works. A tableaux vivant of performers will accompany the exhibition on the opening night, renewing her interest in the counter culture of collectives and carnivals. Whether presented without permission or realized in a traditional gallery or institutional space, Swoon’s work connects with viewers on an emotional level.

The sculptural work is incredibly intricate and its amazing watching it come to life in the film.

This exhibition closes 2/1/20.

 

Richard Serra at Gagosian Gallery NYC

 Art, Art Shows by Location, New York Art Shows
Jan 102020
 

Gagosian is currently showing artist Richard Serra’s work at two of their locations. Above are works from Serra’s Rounds series and fill the entire West 24th Street location (closing 1/11/20), and in the 21st Street space is his Reverse Curve sculpture (closing 2/1/20).

Betye Saar at the Museum of Modern Art

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Drawing, Mixed Media, New York Art Shows, Sculptors / Sculpture
Jan 032020
 

Black Girls Window, 1969

Mystic Window for Leo, 1966

As part of MoMA’s Opening Season, they are showing Betye Saar’s 1969 work, Black Girl’s Window, along with several of her works on paper.

The exhibition “explores the relation between her experimental print practice and the new artistic language debuted in that famous work, tracing themes of family, history, and mysticism, which have been at the core of Saar’s work from its earliest days.”

This exhibition closes 1/4/20.

Rosson Crow at The Hole NYC

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Mixed Media, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters
Dec 272019
 

Volcanic Eruption At The Junk Yard, 2019

Standoff at the Bedrock Bunny Club, 2019

After The Rapture (Border Town), 2019

Rosson Crow’s paintings for her exhibition Trust Fall at The Hole are bright, chaotic, and very reflective of the times we are living in.

From the press release-

Rosson Crow is in one sense an American History Painter—capitalized—who has made paintings across a range of subjects, foreign and domestic, but always meditating on the American story and her place in it. Since her debut show at Canada Gallery in 2004 while still an undergrad, Crow has established herself as a big, brainy, macho painter who nonetheless maintains a performative seduction with color and content.

This new exhibition features ten immersive panorama paintings that meditate on our 2019 moment in America. In what is her most urgent and timely work to date, she grapples with the erosion of American institutions and even of reality and truth itself. “Chaos autopsies” she calls them, each taking on specific aspects of her thinking—or dreaming—about current issues. KonMari is about the latest trend of disciplinary minimalism but depicts a giant landfill of “fast fashion”; After the Rapture in a Border Town shows a human-free street at the Mexican border; Volcanic Eruption at the Junk Yard is a fierce, fiery pit of melting old cars, while Ocean Front Property in Arizona is pretty self explanatory. No humans are present in any of the works, unless a cardboard cutout or statue; in this trust fall there is no one to catch us.

Using luminous oil paint, spray paint and thrown enamel, Crow builds up the surfaces of her works as she layers their content; bleeding into one another, the paintings feel like a tinted vintage post card, hi-contrast outlines whose colors have melted with time. Using moments of photo transfer for snippets of text, bumper stickers or beer cans, the repeating transfers confer a sense of glitching in the painted image, heightening their theatrical illusionism while questioning their reality; has this image been photoshopped? Has this video been edited? How much can we trust our own eyes?

The paintings are topical but not didactic. Ignorance, absurdity and swirling misinformation make the current political landscape untraversable; to a civilian psyche it makes analysis and action extremely difficult.  The exhaustion that comes from this onslaught must make artmaking even harder; most retreat, make head-in-the-sand works that don’t attempt any sociopolitical issues. Crow has always made works that highlight the staged nature of space, that look at fake or contrived scenes, like the painting above; in this Garden of Eden recreation from a religious-themed creationism park, the plants look like they are from Home Depot not an actual tropical jungle. Looking “behind the curtain” at manipulated reality is a non-partisan issue that speaks to both sides of the cultural divide, as everyone is stuck in this morass together; everyone wants to unravel the myriad ways we are secretly controlled and how power is written into our lived and virtual environment.

This exhibition closes 12.29.19.

Li Songsong at Pace Gallery Chelsea

 Art, Art Shows by Location, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters
Dec 202019
 

The paintings in Li Songsong’s One of My Ancestors, at Pace Gallery in Chelsea, are rich in both color and texture. Li creates his paintings from found photographs, adding another dimension to the work.

From the press release-

In the process of reinterpreting found imagery drawn from public sources such as everyday news items, Li adopts an impartial attitude. “I did not deliberately look for these images,” he explains, “It just happened. For example, a friend of mine went to an old book stall in Beijing to buy old magazines. I saw a good photo, and then I used it. I don’t seem to care about the content of the image itself. Of course, they are a starting point, but they will affect you more on a psychological level than in a narrative way.”

Li is interested in the ways in which images can trigger memories and emotions—a psychological impact magnified by his technique. The use of impasto and the dense materiality of his brushstrokes elicit a potent haptic response, while his palette of cool shades of gray, green, and beige create an estrangement from his chosen subject matter, as seen in Little Brother (2017), South (2017), and Civil Rather than Military (2018). Through his signature use of compact blocks of color, Li deconstructs and reassembles images, pushing his art towards abstraction.

This exhibition closes 12/21/19.

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