Mel Bochner 1940-2025

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Conceptual Art, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters
Feb 282025
 

“Oh Well”, 2013, acrylic on canvas

The above paintings are from Mel Bochner‘s 2024 exhibition ALL SALES FINAL! at TOTAH, in NYC. Sadly, the artist passed away this month at the age of 84.

Bochner was a conceptual artist with a career filled with works that challenged expectations. His work incorporated photography, installation pieces, and later the text-based paintings for which he became well known.

Border Crossings Magazine has an excellent interview with the artist from 2018 where he discusses his work and process, his early days writing about art, his famous Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant To Be Viewed As Art from 1966, and more.

Below are a few excerpts-

On the text paintings and the viewer-

The “Thesaurus” paintings are a lot about voice, about who’s speaking and the tone of one’s voice. I don’t think it is anything that painting has dealt with very well. It’s one of the places where colour comes in because colour sets a tone, in an aural as well as visual sense. The viewer becomes a reader, a very different sense of involvement. The words grab the viewer. Once they see there is something to read, they’re liable to stop and read it. They engage with the painting in a different way, because seeing and reading take place in separate parts of the brain.

On where the words come from-

So is the process one in which you’ll get a word in your head from reading or overhearing something, and that will be the ignition for that particular painting?

I like that “point of ignition,” but you never know when it’s going to happen. Many years ago when both my kids were living at home, one was in high school and one was in grade school, listening to them talk was like living in a language factory. I would hear stuff and say, “Wow, that is a really interesting word, I can use that.” Sometimes I would overhear a conversation on the subway or read something in the newspaper and that would get me thinking. The words could come from anywhere. What I was trying to understand is how we talk now.

And here he discusses his use of color in the text works, specifically in Oh Well (2010)-

Is all language necessarily a palimpsest, so that when you enter its terrain, you’re always entering previously occupied spaces?

Yes. The thing with synonyms, which Roget himself first said, is that no two words ever mean the same thing. You’re moving through different shades and approximations of meaning. That was something I was thinking about in regards to the colour in the “Thesaurus” paintings. I never used the same colour twice in the same painting. They all had to shade off somehow, like synonyms. I would make a drawing recording every colour that went into every letter, and there are a couple of hundred letters in each painting. For example, Oh Well (2010). “Oh” was in Old Holland yellow green, “well” was in Williamsburg brilliant yellow, plus pale grey and cadmium yellow medium. “That’s” was in Gamblin quinacridone violet with a touch of Holbein grey and white. “Goes” was Williamsburg persian rose pure. Some of them got really complicated. “To” was Holbein light red earth and Old Holland yellow ochre deep and Williams cadmium orange and Gamblin Portland grey medium and Old Holland warm grey light plus white, plus Williams quinacridone maroon. This was my shopping list.

He also discusses his interest in philosophy and in this section he discusses Edmund Husserl‘s idea of brackets and applies it to creating art-

…When you can’t figure something out in math, you set it aside by putting it in brackets. You haven’t eliminated it; you haven’t discarded it; it’s just there waiting for you. So as I started reducing my work more and more, I put all those things aside: “Right now I can’t deal with colour; I can’t deal with shape; I can’t deal with surface. So what can I deal with; what can I do that feels authentic to me?” In the beginning it was just drawing numbers or writing words. Then as time went on I wanted to add things back in to increase the range and depth of the work.

To take them out of the brackets?

To move them into the equation. As you get older you build up a body of work and gradually give yourself more permission. I always thought that if Mondrian in his most classical year—1923 or 1924—if somebody had shown him Victory Boogie Woogie (1944), unfinished with all that masking tape, and said, “You’re going to paint this in 20 years,” he would have said, “You’re out of your mind, there’s no way I’m going to do that. It’ll never happen.” Or he would have had a heart attack and dropped dead on the spot. So if you’re fortunate to work for a certain length of time, there’s a trajectory but it’s not direct. If you want to continue making things that surprise you, you have to go against your own sensibility and see where the contradictions will take you.

The deferral that is contained within the brackets is a lovely notion. Does it mean that the act of being an artist is an engagement with contingency?

Yes, but there are always limits to contingency. Look, if you come into your studio, day after day, year after year, you want to have the feeling by the end of that day that you might have done something you’ve never seen before, something unexpected. If it’s the same old thing, then what are you doing? The place to be is where you don’t know where your work is going. If it doesn’t go anywhere today, that’s okay, too, because maybe it will tomorrow.

 

Weekend Watch- “Perfect Days”

 Art, Artists, Films, Photographers / Photography, Video and Film
Feb 172025
 

Wim Wenders‘ 2023 film Perfect Days, stars Kōji Yakusho as Hirayama, a toilet cleaner in Tokyo who leads a solitary but seemingly contented life. He spends his time outside of work reading, listening to music on cassette tapes, taking care of his plants, and taking analog photos of trees. This simple life begins to change as smaller and larger moments with others expand his world and alter his routines.

The quiet film focuses on a few of these people- including his coworker and later the surprise arrival of his niece. Watching them together as they spend his previously solitary days mirroring each other unconsciously, is especially lovely. After her departure there is another interaction that leaves the viewer to wonder if Hirayama will continue to live this simple life or embrace potential changes to his “perfect days”.

The pictures of the trees throughout the film capture the Japanese word “komorebi”. The word is defined at the end of the film, after the credits, as “the shimmering of light and shadows that is created by leaves swaying in the wind”. These images continue in Hirayama’s black and white dreams, created by Wenders’ wife Donata.

Wim Wenders is currently showing two bodies of work at Howard Greenberg Gallery in NYC- Written in the West, from his roadtrip to the American West in 1983 and Once, a series of works from his travels and encounters with Hollywood. This exhibition will be on view until 3/15/25.

 

Jo Baer (1929-2025)

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters
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 Gallery– The 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.

Los Angeles Art- Olafur Eliasson at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, California Art Shows, Conceptual Art, Installation Art, Los Angeles Art Shows, New York Art Shows, Sculptors / Sculpture
Dec 122024
 

The above work is Olafur Eliasson’s Edgy but perfect kinship sphere, 2020, spotted at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery’s Los Angeles location.

Eliasson is showing work in a solo exhibition at the gallery’s New York location that includes two new light installations, one of which includes sound, a series of recent watercolors, and two new sculptures. That exhibition will be on view until 12/19/24.

In Los Angeles he has a solo exhibition at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, on view until July 2025. This show is part of the PST ART: Art and Science Collide programming taking place throughout Southern California.

NYC Art Shows- Petrit Halilaj at The Metropolitan Museum of Art

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Conceptual Art, Installation Art, New York Art Shows, Sculptors / Sculpture
Oct 242024
 

For Petrit Halilaj‘s installation Abatare at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, he used children’s doodles found on desks in his former school in Kosovo to create  sculptures that bring these drawings to life around the outdoor garden. As a former refugee these drawings he found were personal to him and you can sense that in the way they are grouped together and his use of birds and flowers.

From the museum-

Halilaj was inspired by children’s doodles, drawings, and scribblings found on desks at the school he attended in Runik, Kosovo. For The Met commission, he expanded his research to other schools in Albania and countries from the former Yugoslavia, which are now undergoing significant cultural and sociopolitical change. Furtive drawings from kids’ desks have been enlarged into three-dimensional metal sculptures, each retaining the trace of the original. Together, they bring to public view the collective memory and imaginative power of generations of students whose lives were marked by traumatic conflicts and territorial divisions. Kosovo experienced the last of a series of wars in the Balkan region in the 1990s, during which many children were denied access to education on ideological grounds. Abetare borrows its title from the book the artist and his peers used to learn the alphabet at school, each letter linked to a lesson in pictures and text.

In Abetare, culturally specific references to different political ideologies, religions, and local heroes coexist with more universal symbols and playful nods to pop culture, art history, and sports. Spread around The Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden, the “drawings in space” merge with the surrounding architecture and landscape to create a multivocal scenography with an open-ended narrative. A celebration of the shared impulse for personal expression and mark making, Abetare is an opportunity for discovery and an invitation to expand our capacity to imagine transformative futures.

In the video below from The Met, Halilaj discusses the work with curator Iria Candela, including the discovery of the desks, and shares some of his personal history.

This exhibition closes 10/27/24.

Flashback- NYC Art Shows- Ulla Scheinemann at Susan Eley Fine Art

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters
Sep 202024
 

The two paintings above by Ulla Scheinemann are from the group show Femme, on view at Susan Eley Fine Art this past May.

From the gallery’s Instagram about her work-

Ulla Scheinemann’s paintings are intimate and intuitive. She explains this process, “I am quite curious about trying out new things while painting. I always try to contribute something new. The painting I like the most is therefore always the painting that I am currently working on. My paintings sometimes make me wonder, where the figurative stops and the abstraction begins and I like to be in between terms of “style”. The paintings are a way of expressing my view of the world. The figures are to some degree an expression of the human condition every individual lives by. It is not something that I plan, it just seems to end up that way in the process. I can’t be dishonest, while I am painting.Paintings never lie.”

NYC Art Shows- Isaac Julien at the Museum of Modern Art

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Films, New York Art Shows, Video and Film
Sep 202024
 

Isaac Julien’s video installations use multiple images on different sized screens to tell complicated stories. For Lessons of the Hour, currently on view at MoMA, he is telling the story of American abolitionist Frederick Douglass. The work presents this history in a thought-provoking way that is also visually stunning.

From the museum-

In Lessons of the Hour (2019), Sir Isaac Julien presents an immersive portrait of abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who obtained freedom from chattel slavery in 1838 and became one of the most important orators, writers, and statespersons of the 19th century. Across the 10 screens of this video installation, a nonlinear narrative melds Douglass’s life and work with excerpts from several of his speeches, literary works, and personal correspondence. The most photographed American of his era, Douglass understood that portraiture could challenge racist tropes and advance the freedom and civil rights of Black Americans and subjugated people around the world.

For the first time, historical objects directly related to Lessons of the Hour will be on view alongside the work. They include albumen silver print portraits of Douglass, pamphlets of his speeches, first editions of his memoirs, a facsimile of a rare manuscript laying out his ideas about photography, and a specially designed wallpaper composed of period newspaper clippings, broadsides, magazine illustrations, and scrapbook pages. These objects reveal how Douglass’s image and words circulated in the transatlantic, 19th-century world, and also bear out Julien’s insight in Lessons of the Hour: that Douglass’s ideas about citizenship, democracy, and human dignity remain timeless.

This exhibition closes 9/28/24

NYC Art Shows- “Don’t Forget To Call Your Mother” at The Metropolitan Museum of Art

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Collage, Conceptual Art, Digital Art, Installation Art, Mixed Media, New York Art Shows, Photographers / Photography, Sculptors / Sculpture, Video and Film
Sep 132024
 

Sadie Barnette, “Photo Bar”, 2022 (left) and Annette Messager “My Vows (Mes Voeux)”,1990, 106 gelatin silver prints, bound between glass and cardboard, black tape, twine and acrylic push pins (right)

The group exhibition Don’t Forget to Call Your Mother, currently at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, presents a variety of photography work from the museum’s collection. The artists explore new ways to take the medium further while exploring a wide range of subjects, often with a focus on capturing the past.

From the museum-

At a time when photographs are primarily shared and saved digitally, many artists are returning to the physicality of snapshots in an album or pictures in an archive as a source of inspiration. Drawing its title, Don’t Forget to Call Your Mother, from a photograph by Italian provocateur Maurizio Cattelan, the exhibition consists of works in The Met collection from the 1970s to today that reflect upon the complicated feelings of nostalgia and sentimentality that these objects conjure, while underlining the power of the found object.

Among the featured artists is Sadie Barnette, for whom photographs provide a portal to illuminate the forgotten history of the first Black-owned gay bar in San Francisco and her own father’s life as her 2022 work Photo Bar powerfully illustrates. Like Barnette, many of the artists in the exhibition seek to fortify the legacy of family histories, to emphasize the importance of intergenerational relationships, and to consider the ways in which knowledge and respect for the past can inform our current moment. Some artists such as Sophie Calle and Larry Sultan explore their own narratives to reveal the construction of desire, while others including Taryn Simon and Hank Willis Thomas examine histories that have shaped cultural and political dialogue. For some, including Darrel Ellis who utilized family pictures to negotiate the trauma of police violence, the personal is political. Deploying various strategies, these artists consider how a collection of images—like a talisman or an altarpiece—build relationships across time and can transform our understanding of the present.

Larry Sultan “Untitled Film Stills”, 1989, Chromogenic prints

Larry Sultan’s work stood out, as did the museum’s caption (below) that included quotes from the artist.

“It was as if my parents had projected their dreams onto film emulsion. I was in my mid-thirties and longing for the intimacy, security, and comfort that I associated with home. But whose home? Which version of the family?”
-Larry Sultan, 1992

In the late 1980s Sultan rephotographed and enlarged single frames from 8mm films his parents made during family vacations three decades earlier.

The artist later explained the genesis of the work:

“I can remember when I first conceived of this project. It was 1982 and I was in Los Angeles visiting my parents. One night, instead of renting a videotape, we pulled out a box of home movies that none of us had seen in years. Sitting in the living room, we watched thirty years of folktales-epic celebrations of the family. They were remarkable, more like a record of hopes and fantasies than of actual events.”

This exhibition closes 9/15/24. The museum’s website also includes images of all of works included.

Flashback- NYC Art Shows- Susan Bee at A.I.R. Gallery in Brooklyn

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Brooklyn, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters
Sep 132024
 

The paintings above are from Susan Bee’s 2023 exhibition Apocalypses, Fables, and Reveries, at A.I.R. Gallery in Brooklyn.

From the gallery about this exhibition-

The exhibition centers on paintings depicting figures—particularly women—engaged in battle with demons, dragons, and other beasts, inspired by medieval mythology.

Twelfth-century illuminated manuscripts and hagiography serve as Bee’s primary source materials. Seven of these paintings playfully reinterpret imagery of multi-headed monsters taunting religious populaces in apocalyptic scenarios. Others show Saint Martha taming the fearsome dragon the Tarasque, and Saint Margaret praying beside the dead dragon whose belly she managed to escape from after being swallowed whole. In earlier eras, these figures were seen as icons of devotion. But in Bee’s treatment, they transmogrify into prescient myth: their stories presage the end-time fears and social injustices that plague our more secular times.

The medieval-inspired paintings are augmented by canvases offering a different vision of how we might engage with nature and fantastical “others.” These paintings feature witches and birds flying alongside one another across the daytime sky, as well as trees whose limbs culminate in eyes, hands, and other appendages. They imagine landscapes where friends might meet, or where humans and animals might find themselves in unexpected affinity.

As in her past paintings, Bee uses a mixture of linear and eccentric shapes, building up layers of oil and enamel in intensely vivid color. Blending familiar gestures with the unexpected, these works ask us to confront our present while paying homage to the past. The syncretic blend of the remembered and remade turns monumentality on its head.

Her current solo exhibition Susan Bee: Eye of the Storm, Selected Works, 1981-2023 is on view at Provincetown Art Association and Museum until 11/17/2024.

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