Tampa Art Shows- The 17th Annual Master of Fine Arts Graduation Exhibition at the USF Contemporary Art Museum

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Ceramic Art, Collage, Conceptual Art, Digital Art, Drawing, Fiber Arts, Florida Art Shows, Installation Art, Mixed Media, Painting / Painters, Photographers / Photography, Printmaking, Sculptors / Sculpture, Tampa, Video and Film
Apr 282023
 

Installation by Molly A. Duff

Work by Trinity Oribio (left) and Manon VanScoder (videos on right)

Currently on view at The USF Contemporary Art Museum is SOMEDAY YOU’LL HAVE TO SAY IT OUT LOUD, an exhibition of eight students graduating with MFA degrees from the USF School of Art and Art History.

The artists included are Molly Duff, Kai Holyoke, Caitlin Nobilé, Trinity Oribio, Rachel Treide, Manon VanScoder, Alicia Watkinson, and Willow Wells.

For the artists’ statements about their work, as well as more information on the exhibition, the museum has produced this PDF.

The show will be on view until 5/6/2023.

Installation by Molly A. Duff, another view

Alicia Watkinson, “Notations in Passing II”, 2023, plywood, lightbulbs, ceramic bases, timers. Duration of light set daily according to the previous day’s activities and observations

Alicia Watkinson, “Notations in Passing II”, 2023 (detail)

Photo transfer on glass by Rachel Treide

Still from video by Rachel Treide

Caitlin Nobilé, “The gap in the door”, 2023 triptych, acrylic on wood

Willow Wells, “Whispers”, 2023, oil painting on panel

Trinidad Oribio “Untitled”, 2023 oil on canvas

Trinidad Oribio, “La Trinidad”, 2023, archival pigment print

Video installation by Manon VanScoder

Manon VanScoder, “each day is an endless scroll”, 2023

Kai Holyoke “Paradise Lakes”, 2023

Kai Holyoke “Paradise Lakes”, 2023

 

 

NYC Art Shows- Robert Bechtle at Gladstone Gallery

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters
Apr 262023
 

“Nancy Reading”, 1963-1964, Oil on canvas

“60 T-Bird”, 1964, Oil on canvas

“60 T-Bird”, 1964 (detail)

“Potrero Table”, 1994, Oil on canvas

Gladstone Gallery is currently showing an exhibition of captivating work by the late Robert Bechtle. The show includes paintings, watercolors, and drawings.

From the press release-

In Bechtle’s works, classic cars, urban and suburban streetscapes of his native Bay Area in California, and portraits of himself and those close to him are transposed with a candor and familiarity that allows the viewer to absorb quotidian scenes with a heightened and sharpened awareness. Formally flawless, the artist captures every detail, shadow, and reflection to further draw the viewer into each quiet scene. While many of his works are depicted with realist precision, others are portrayed by employing a looser, Impressionistic technique, demonstrating the artist’s fluid ability to memorialize moments in time without one set approach. Beyond these physical attributes, Bechtle has an astute aptitude for bringing to life the unseen facets of an instance in time: isolation, emptiness, contemplativeness, and the passage of time and light are transformed from invisible characters to palpable features that seem to become secondary subjects of the works. Through an unmatched ability to depict light and details with the exactitude of a Renaissance painter, subtle details, and textures, these overlooked, everyday vignettes are transformed into significant life moments that tell a deeply personal story of contemporary life.

Another important component of this exhibition are a series of significant portraits and self-portraits made throughout his career. In Potrero Table (1994), Bechtle depicts himself and art historian Whitney Chadwick, his second wife of nearly 40 years, sitting at the dining table at their house in Potrero Hill. With astonishing clarity, the artist meticulously captures every detail of the late-night scene. Frequently turning the lens back onto himself for the entirety of his artistic practice, Bechtle’s self-portraits lay bare the process of aging, and the physical and psychological changes that come with the lived experience. These tender and honest chronicles are essential clues to understanding Bechtle’s overall artistic oeuvre, the care he had for Whitney, and highlight his ability to separate from the constantly moving and evolving world in order to pause and reflect on his surroundings with clarity and rigor. Through intense concentration and sensitivity, Bechtle’s wide-ranging body of work chronicles a remarkable life, filled with the beautiful, overlooked, and often discarded instances that make it so special.

This exhibition closes 4/29/23.

NYC Art Shows- Gerhard Richter at David Zwirner

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Conceptual Art, Drawing, Mixed Media, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Sculptors / Sculpture
Apr 252023
 

It’s the last week to see the Gerhard Richter exhibition at David Zwirner. The show includes a group of Richter’s last paintings from 2016-17, two of which are pictured above, as well as a new glass sculpture and recent works on paper.

From the press release-

Celebrated worldwide as one of the most important artists of his generation, with a career spanning from the 1960s to the present, Richter has pursued a diverse and influential practice characterized by a decades-long commitment to painting and its formal and conceptual possibilities. The artist has consistently probed the relationship between painting and photography, engaging a variety of styles and innovative techniques in a complex repositioning of genres. In Richter’s work, dual modes of representation and abstraction fundamentally question the way in which we relate to images.

The exhibition will bring together a significant group of Richter’s last oil paintings, made in 2016–2017, a number of which will be shown in New York for the first time. Richter stopped making oil paintings in 2017, and the final work on canvas he made will be on view in the exhibition. Part of the artist’s Abstrakte Bilder (Abstract Paintings) series—a cornerstone of his practice since the 1970s—the works on view exemplify Richter’s investigations into chance occurrences and the painted medium’s historical and material properties. With their highly worked and intricately stratified surfaces, the last paintings foreground the sheer physical presence of paint and color, enacting a mode of composition that is aleatory yet deliberately planned.

Centrally featured will be 3 Scheiben (3 Panes) (2023), a new glass sculpture that continues Richter’s exploration of human perception and the built environment. Comprising three sequential rectangular panes of transparent yet reflective glass—each one positioned upright and measuring almost ten feet in height—the installation invites viewers to look at, through, and beyond its surface, revealing the inherently subjective and situational nature of perceived reality. Richter has consistently created glass and mirrored works since 1967, often presenting them alongside his paintings and drawings and placing them in the larger context of their surrounding architecture. Crucially, while sculptural, these free-standing glass works are also positioned as a literal reflection on painting and image-making; they respond to the art-historical notion of the painting as both a mirror and a window, while also acting as a powerful corollary to the blurred effect of Richter’s photo paintings, which the artist began experimenting with in the 1960s. As critic Hal Foster notes, “The felt analogy between a composed painting and a contemplative viewer is so fundamental that we are not aware of it until it is interfered with. And this is precisely what the glass pieces do: our reflection, in the sense of our mirrored image, disrupts our reflection, in the sense of our contemplation.”1

An expansive suite of new works on paper from 2021–2022—some made with ink and others with graphite and colored pencil—will also be on view. Richter’s drawings constitute a significant element of his practice, allowing him to explore another aspect of the role of the artist’s hand in the creation of a dynamic and abstract pictorial narrative. Many of these works feature passages of cloudy graphite rubbings juxtaposed with equally hazy semi-erased portions. The artist embeds a sparse network of crisscrossing arcs and lines amongst this backdrop, forming an enigmatic topography that seems to map out the very possibilities of image-making itself. Other drawings on view are composed of abstract monochrome washes of ink and graphite, taking on a decisively painterly appearance; as Richter describes, these works on paper chart out a parallel but complementary path to his painted oeuvre, much like that of “a poem and a novel by the same author.”2

Also on view will be mood, a group of inkjet prints that relate to a recent series of colored ink drawings by Richter, both of which debuted at the Fondation Beyeler in Basel in 2022. Part of the artist’s extensive career-long experiments with the iterative translation and interplay of mediums, these vibrant prints are almost indistinguishable from their ink counterparts, revealing Richter’s continued fascination with the possibilities of image reproduction.

This exhibition closes 4/29/23.

NYC Art Shows- Olivia Jia at Margot Samel

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters
Apr 212023
 

“Star study, portrait of my mother”, 2023

“Night reading (garden path, a pear halved, portrait of my mother, two birds)”, 2023

“Page unfolded (stoneware vase with peony scroll)”,2023

“Night studio (kingfisher, bone comb, moon through clouds, ink lily)”, 2023

“Night reading (moonscapes, garden window)”, 2023

Margot Samel is currently showing Perimeter, a series of dreamy, personal paintings by Olivia Jia.

From the press release-

Painted in what the artist has described as a ‘nocturnal’ palette, these works have a somnambulant quality, appearing as if scenes encountered in a state between sleep and waking. Each is constructed around a tableau that the artist has arranged, often incorporating material collected by herself, or in the possession of family members. Ideas of kinship and heritage – in this instance informing Jia’s own diasporic identity, as the child of Chinese immigrants to the United States – are negotiated through the constellations of elements she gathers together in her compositions. Staged in a studio workspace, depicted either late at night, or in an imagined facsimile of that location, these paintings act as tools with which a greater degree of self-recognition might be arrived at.

It could be said that our sense of belonging is partly understood in relation to our belongings, and the belongings of those closest to us. This is a principle that Jia employs to reconcile personal narratives with broader cultural dynamics. Artifacts resembling family heirlooms, lost during periods of political upheaval, are sought out in the annals of art history. Genres, be that of the Still-life, Huaniaohua, the Chinese tradition of ‘Bird and Flower’ painting, or American Naturalist illustration become prospective frameworks to be infused with anecdote or biographical allusions, and mined for accidentally shared motifs. What is being honed in these paintings is an iconographic system, one that reflects on the points at which individual experience intersects with collective accounts.

Images, carefully folded for storage, and books left open at resonant pages, frequently act as framing devices within Jia’s compositions. These devices draw our attention to the mechanics of printed reproduction, and its capacity as an authoritative repository for knowledge. What they also highlight, however, is how affect can be produced through combinations of such factual information. The sombrely lit surfaces upon which these objects and images are depicted are at once tabletops or pinboards upon which objects might be placed, and psychic spaces onto which desire might be projected. Here, the act of painting itself is presented as analogous to the nature of Jia’s arrangements of collected material: as it too constitutes an archival structure in which the objective properties of documents and the subjective nature of memory are able to coalesce.

This exhibition closes 4/22/23.

NYC Art Shows- Mary Jones at High Noon Gallery

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Collage, Mixed Media, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Printmaking
Apr 212023
 

“Cocteau and Table”, 2023,oil on archival inkjet printed canvas

“The Seasons Between”, 2023, oil on archival inkjet printed canvas

High Noon Gallery is currently showing Les Problémes du Confort, an exhibition of work by Mary Jones.

From the press release-

Jones began this most recent body of work, collectively called simply, “Interior Design,” by painting Sumi ink over the black and white printed pages of a comprehensive French Interior Design publication from the 1960s. “[I chose the series’ title] not only to underscore the attributes of the original images, but to address their psychological component: the topos of dreams, so notably analyzed by Gaston Bachelard and James Hillman, spaces we conjure to discover the elements of our inner lives. Homes and interiors are not only spaces we remember, but also labyrinths of symbolism, familiar to all of us as emotionally charged experiences,” she explains.

The addition of her signature mark making started as an exercise to identify patterns in the tonal pages, separate from the context of the imagery. It seemed to act as a compositional barometer of sorts, deflecting the space in certain areas and illuminating it in others. The painted catalog images were then collaged, blown up, printed on canvas, and painted again, further conflating space and gesture, and inhabiting the vacant interiors with a visible energy. In doing so, Jones satisfies the principles of high design with the paintings’ harmonic beauty, and also the open systems of fine art by positioning the work as cultural critique that challenges the colonialist motifs that permeate the aesthetic sensibility of many of the spaces.

Jones’s work has long gnawed at the malleability of subject matter. She consistently uses legible imagery to anchor her abstractions, prodding at the fickle divide between the two modalities. Her sensitivity to painting’s illusionistic properties is connected to her experience as a faux painter, freelance work she’s done for 25 years. While the object of faux painting is to not let the artist’s hand show, Jones riffs on her craft by skillfully merging gesture and image in ways that are largely indistinguishable. She allows the marks to emulate form and object, playing on the viewer’s expectations of pictorial logic and slyly addressing the disparity between fine art and design, as for many decades— and especially during painting’s theoretical heyday in the second half of the 20th century— they shared a tenuous opposition. Design is associated with expense, and American society is perpetually transfixed by the Romantic notion of the artist as a working class hero.

Ionic Memories (2023), depicts a decadent room steeped in Roman busts and columns, the title a tongue-in-cheek reference to the science of memory and the unstable nature of artistic movements and empires alike. Jones echoes the velvety matte blacks of the printed image in her direct painting gestures, mixing a near perfect replica of the tone and texture for her to set up a meta tromp-l’oeil effect. In the foreground, a collaged brush stroke swipes away at the interior revealing a snowy landscape wherein a bush and modernist cabin are obscured by a swath of pink oil paint. In the context of the whole, the landscape reads as decorative forms within the room, such as fan coral and glass spheres. Other works such as Cocteau and Table (2023) make greater use of a fragmented effect wherein decisively multiversal looking forms cut through the composition like a glimpse into a parallel reality. Through a mix of painterly and faux elements, Jones takes care to merge her augmented realities just enough to allow the viewer to believe the image exists in one picture plane.

Perhaps to be comfortable is to momentarily resist time, to be temporarily impervious to the clamors for change. In Les Problémes du Confort, Jones reminds us that the arrangements we make with ourselves are transitory, constructed illusions to describe and reflect a sense of our place in the world we know, and that improvisational beauty can be found in transitions, in languages we don’t know, and in uncertainty.

This exhibition closes 4/23/23.

NYC Art Shows- Josephine Halvorson at Sikkema Jenkins

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters
Apr 202023
 

“Last Words”, 2022

“Butterfly”, 2022

“Peony”, 2022

“Station Meter”, 2023

 

“Peony”, 2022 (detail)

Josephine Halvorson’s paintings for Unforgotten at Sikkema Jenkins, contain an amazing amount of detail and encourage the viewer to take in the little details of things they might ordinarily not pay much mind to.

From the press release-

Josephine Halvorson’s paintings emerge from chance or repeated encounters with objects the artist comes across while wandering and traveling. Her practice often takes place outdoors, naturally relating to daylight, geography, and season. The works in this show center on still life and memento mori, artistic genres that, for Halvorson, “hover between liveliness and decay.” She is drawn to things which have little apparent value—objects and spaces that have been, or may be, forgotten. Sharing the same air and hours with a subject, Halvorson finds within them latent expressions and buried meanings.

Since 2018, Halvorson has been painting with acrylic gouache on absorbent grounds. Inspired by fresco painting’s ability to indelibly hold color and mark, the artist has sought to make a sensitive surface that preserves her observations in real time. Painting in longhand, Halvorson works in a verité style, documenting the subtle shifts of shadow and thought. As she says, “I want to make a painting that remembers better than I can.”

This exhibition closes 4/22/23.

 

NYC Art Shows- Kennedy Yanko at Jeffrey Deitch

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Installation Art, Mixed Media, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Sculptors / Sculpture, Sound Art
Apr 202023
 

“Pink and green music”, 2023

“What we re-quire is…silence”, 2023

“Within the Lattice”, 2023

“An Ode to Hugs”, 2023

It’s the last week to see Kennedy Yanko’s exhibition, Humming on Life at Jeffrey Deitch gallery’s Wooster Street location.

Tonight, 4/20/23, she will be at the gallery discussing her work with Alteronce Gumby.

From the press release-

By employing paint skin and metal in ways that both transmute a bodily essence and reposition the weight of gravity, Kennedy Yanko wields materiality and abstraction with the possibility of intervening in the viewers’ perceptions. In Humming on Life, Yanko‘s first exhibition at Jeffrey Deitch, the artist continues this exploration.

Although the tactile quality and lyrical processuality of Yanko’s works emphasize their sculptural quality, the artist considers herself foremost a painter. In her new body of work, Yanko takes an approach to sculpture that reconnects it, and her, with painting. In recent years, the weathered paint and bruised patinas found on salvaged metal relics informed her palette for the paint skins. Now, the artist is introducing colors to the metal she finds. By painting the metal directly, underpainting, fire-cutting forms and compositions, and then crushing those new shapes, Yanko is expanding the definition of painting through her process. She remarks:

Working this way has been labor-intensive and has exposed me to sounds, like water thrashing inside a metal tank while cleaning it. Feeling that thrashing—hearing a power that felt like infinity incarnate—encouraged me to probe water as a medium and examine my intuitive method more closely, which seemingly only comes from physical exchange: input and output, expansion and contraction. In pulling water apart and becoming more curious about its behavior and participation, I’ve enjoyed revisiting the ways in which it’s a web of activation, a source, and information. It’s a cue and a salve and carries with it tinges of what it’s gone through.

What water did for me in that moment was to point back to the livingness of my medium — of the metal and paint skin I rely on — and wash away the binary between life and matter. Erasing this divide expands the possibility of experience; it gives materiality an abstract power that we yield to. It’s that vitality, found in color, form, attention and consciousness, that I hope this work can be a language for.

The “Illuminating Sound” presented apart of the exhibition, composed by Samuel Kareem, is derived from audio Yanko recorded while working in the yard. Kareem expanded one striation of sound within the clip—one small element he excavated from the layers of water, metal, paint and movement—and created 10 ten unique soundscapes. Each of the scapes corresponds with a sculpture within the show, and illuminates it. Listen to “Illuminating Sound” here.

NYC Art Shows- Amoako Boafo at Gagosian Gallery

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

 

NYC Art Shows- Jeremy Shockley at The Hole

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters
Apr 202023
 

“Double Double”, 2023

“Creep”, 2023

“The Switch”, 2023

“Under The Sea”, 2023

“Under The Sea”, 2023 (detail)

“Hour Glass”, 2023

Currently at The Hole gallery’s Tribeca location are Jeremy Shockley’s imaginative paintings for his exhibition, Well, Look At That.

From the press release-

Across eleven large canvasses, Shockley depicts the intersection of painting as a window into landscape and painting as a cloth stretched over some wood slats.

Shockley, who has a background in art conservation, was helping to restore a Lucio Fontana painting when he decided to incorporate the renowned Spatialist’s slashed-canvas imagery into his own practice. After experimenting with actual cuts he arrived at his signature trompe l’oeil technique, beginning each canvas in big exuberant strokes with four- or five-inch housepainting brushes then progressing to eyelash-thin ones to simulate frayed threads along fake slits in the canvas.

He describes his first large series—painted flaps suggesting two eyes and a smiling mouth—as a response to the renaissance in portraiture that coincided with COVID lockdown. “I put faces on the beautiful landscapes as a way of saying that in the future people may want to go back to looking at them instead of people. We might be all right,” he says, “but perhaps the landscapes won’t be.”

The works in this show push the theme further: the natural world becomes a curtain to be tugged, a veneer to be peeled back, or a series of ever-darkening portals that nonetheless contain a dose of optimism. We are invited to think about alternate dimensions, about the structural materiality of the painted canvas, and about our kitten-like propensity to just “hang in there.”

This exhibition closes 4/22/23.

 

NYC Art Shows- Helen Frankenthaler at Gagosian

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

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