NYC Art Shows- Nikki Maloof at Perrotin

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters
Apr 142023
 

“As the Crow Flies”, 2022

“As the Crow Flies”, 2022 (detail)

“As the Crow Flies”, 2022 (detail)

“As the Crow Flies”, 2022 (detail)

“Skunk Hour”, 2022

“Dogwood”, 2022

“Dogwood”, 2022 (detail)

There’s more to Nikki Maloof’s paintings than meets the eye in her exhibition Skunk Hour at Perrotin. The more you look, the more details- often dark- begin to emerge.

From the press release-

For Nikki Maloof, painting is a way to convey the experience of existing in the world—the light, the dark, and all the shadows in between. Her language is figuration: she started out with portraits of individual animals, progressing onto still lifes and, most recently, domestic interiors and landscapes populated with a mix of creatures—human and non-human; alive, dead, and inanimate. These subjects, on one level, have an everyday familiarity. Indeed, they are in many instances collected from Maloof’s immediate environment: for the past few years, her house and studio in rural Massachusetts. But the resulting depictions, however vivid, never feel quite real. The colors are bright, the shapes cartoonish, the compositions often implausible. Everything is emotionally charged. The eyes of dead fish seem to brim with sadness, the oversized blade of a knife glints with menace. A woman who shares Maloof’s physical features stands at a window with a glum expression, her face only just visible behind a tree dense with apples. Looking at these canvases is like looking at a series of dreams, governed by a mysterious logic, their characters and events freighted with ambiguous symbolism.

Of course, unlike in a dream, Maloof chooses what to paint: hers is a conscious artistry. We see evidence of this in her equally accomplished graphite works on paper, in which images are carefully worked out before she embarks on the larger oils on linen. (It’s fun to play spot the difference between the versions in pencil and paint: notice how a glass of wine materializes on a countertop; how a cat relocates from the landing to the stairs.) Perhaps her work is more akin to confessional poetry, intensely personal yet meticulously crafted. The title of this exhibition, “Skunk Hour,” is borrowed from a well-known poem by Robert Lowell, published in 1959, which begins as a light-hearted description of a seaside town in Maine and culminates in a self-portrait of a mind in turmoil. “I myself am hell,” wrote Lowell, “nobody’s here— / only skunks, that search / in the moonlight for a bite to eat.” Similarly, Maloof describes the scenes she constructs as “vessels,” giving tangible form to psychological states or particular thoughts and feelings.

The idea for this new series of paintings hatched last spring, when one morning the artist stumbled upon the birth of a fawn near her home, and later that day witnessed the body of a recently deceased neighbor being removed from his home. She decided that she wanted to capture the weight of being made simultaneously aware of the beginning and the end of life, as well as the tension between the mundane and extraordinary. There are no laboring deer or body bags here: instead, we get paintings like Life Cycles (2022), in which five plates are arranged in a circle, showing the progression of fishes’ lives from small orange roe on crackers to clean-picked bones. Or Burning Bush (2022), in which an empty bird’s nest rests inches away from a hawk dismembering its prey on a branch of the same tree. Whether taking the form of conventional still lifes or more expansive house-and-garden scenes, Maloof’s coded pictures make clear reference to the conventions of Western religious vanitas painting, with its representations of physical objects—flowers, food, skulls—to symbolize the transience of earthly pleasures.

If this sounds unremittingly heavy, it’s not. Maloof’s paintings also offer up many of their own pleasures, both intellectual and sensuous. It would be remiss, for instance, to ignore the slapstick wit in the detail of a rolled joint on a kitchen shelf in the work entitled Skunk Hour (2022): skunk here signifying not the foul-odored mammal but the just-as-pungent strain of cannabis. Life, as Maloof understands, is nearly always funny, even when things are pretty bad. And if you’re not in the mood to laugh, well, just try to resist the delights of the paintings themselves—their profusions of color, pattern, and texture. Extending the culinary theme, we might describe her work as a feast for the eyes. See how the coiling smoke from the lit joint rhymes with the squiggles of steam rising above a pair of artichokes in a colander; notice the thick scraped impasto of the howling cat’s bristling fur. Maloof is unabashedly maximalist in her approach to her canvases, layering both imagery and brushstrokes, at times threatening to overwhelm her subjects through an abundance of painterly gesture. This makes perfect sense. In such moments it becomes clear that, despite the universality of their themes, Maloof’s paintings are a vision of the world as seen through the eyes of a singular artist.

This exhibition will close 4/15/23.

NYC Art Shows- Sean Landers at Petzel Gallery

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Conceptual Art, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters
Apr 132023
 

Closing on 4/15/23 is Sean Landers’ exhibition Adrift at Petzel Gallery in NYC.

From the gallery’s press release-

Featuring over twenty new oil paintings by Landers, this largely allegorical exhibition illustrates the complexity of artistic mortality using four protagonists: dogs—depicted in single portraits and alone in rowboats unmoored at sea; lighthouses; the ocean; and sperm whale skeletons at rest on ocean shorelines. Each subject represents the dichotomy of freedom and trepidation involved in the act of releasing art to an unknown fate. “…a bit of the artist remains in their paintings, so in that way, a painting is like an artist adrift in time and space,” says Landers in an interview with writer Johanna Fateman for the exhibition catalogue.

A cornerstone of inspiration for Adrift is Landers’ long-term interest in the work of American painter Winslow Homer (b. 1836—d. 1920) and in particular Homer’s ocean paintings. The vast and unpredictable ocean marks time and space, a preeminent symbol used throughout the years in Landers’ paintings and art history. Homer’s style is emulated by Landers in paintings throughout the exhibition including Northeaster, Summer Squall, and Yellow Dog.

Each of these subjects can be seen as a character existing within the vicissitudes of artistic practice. The dogs, at attention and alone in their boats, symbolize the vulnerability of art against an unknown future. These works also parallel Joachim Patinir’s (b. 1483—d. 1524) painting Charon crossing the Styx in which a human soul is being transported by boat into afterlife. Landers sees this as symbolic for what a painting is—a vessel for the artist into afterlife.

Two lighthouses, Portland Lighthouse, US and Sunderland Lighthouse, UK, are both welcoming and warning beacons, allegories for institutions that signal to the public what art is worth preserving. This ruling system will determine the dogs’ fate as they head into the unknown of art history. The bare whale bones, epic in their repose on the sandy shore echo the finality in the lifespan of an artwork. Such relics are epitaphs and beginnings, a sentiment imparted in We Hover, where Landers’ text painted over a fierce ocean reads: And then we hover in between existence and nonexistence in our paintings and that is both terrifying and reassuring. For Landers, Adrift is the everlasting reminder that the artist, like Patinir’s soul, is forever navigating the here and hereafter.

For added perspective on the symbolism, this is from Landers’ Instagram account–

“The ocean represents time and space. The dog adrift in the boat is like an artwork adrift in time and space after the artist passes. The lighthouse is the institution that decides which art civilization will preserve. The whale skeleton is the fear of a life’s work gone unloved and allowed to die.”

NYC Art Shows- Timothy Lai at Jack Barrett Gallery

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters
Apr 132023
 

“Apologia, Apology”, 2023

“To Contain More…or Less”, 2023

“The Air Was Heavy”, 2023

“4:33 AM”, 2023

If a picture is worth a thousand words, Timothy Lai’s paintings for Double Wall at Jack Barrett may be worth a few more. Everything feels tense and uncertain in the work, leaving the viewer with questions that they must answer with their own stories.

From the press release-

“Memory is a choice. You said that once, with your back to me, the way a god would say it.” 

– Ocean Vuong

In Timothy Lai’s exhibition Double Wall, things left unsaid reside in waiting. Silence crouches as an omnipresent figure living within the familial unit, unleashed sometimes as performative protection, and at other times, leashed as a placeholder against emotions that cannot or will not be articulated. Amid this verbal lack, Lai’s work materially bristles. 

The works in Double Wall reflect their domestic setting, showing vignettes of encounters between family members. These encounters are pushed compositionally, almost theatrically, to the foreground, pulling the viewer to witness these skirmishes. The works in Double Wall teeter on the precipice between conflict and resolution. In Apologia, Apology, the figures reside in the margins, in a non-confrontational stasis of pause. The air vibrates with the “dot dot dot” of feelings inarticulable.  This tension Lai builds up in heavy impasto; the architectural negative space becomes an actor within the dynamic. 

If Lai’s previous body  of work centered around the misrecognition between father and son, Double Wall reads the effect these patriarchal structures have on the parental figure, and how inevitably, they are the heirlooms that make up the next generation’s inheritance. In Coronation, a person stands atop a stool with their back to us, arms hanging limp at their side as a shadowy figure in the background configures the suit jacket around their body.  The suit, a uniform to gain social currency, and a mantle of white-Western authority, trickles down patriarchal economics to bestow the role of family leader on a new individual. The sharp geometric lines of the suit trap the fleshiness of the central figure.  The transference uncovers the mutable masculine roles of father and son. Inherent in this piece is a subtle formal nod to the Crucifixion; Lai deftly gestures towards how the embodiment of these patriarchal roles can be similarly sacrificial, trading individuality to conform to the family unit, to become martyr.

In the other works, silence also sires assimilation. Mirrors appear often. In the work, To Contain Less… or More? a figure, bound up in the suit jacket, is caught between a chinoiserie and a colonial eagle mirror. Lai explores the triangulation of these three elements as a space that reflects the nuanced ontology of existing as a person of color in the United States. The figure departs the composition, leaving suit behind, alluding to the difficulty of choosing to engage, assimilate with and perform into these predetermined frameworks. 

The uncertain site between the binaries of stasis and movement, silence and conflict are a running theme throughout the show. Depictions of a window-framed outside world are too small to envision moving through. A hand held mirror resting on an armchair reflects a closed door. Double Wall makes this tension visible, and Lai offers us no clear resolution. We are forced to sit within the pauses, breath held and on the cusp of speech.

This exhibition closes 4/15/23.

Yolanda Sánchez’s “Out of Eden” at Creative Pinellas

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Conceptual Art, Fiber Arts, Florida Art Shows, Largo, Mixed Media, Painting / Painters, Pinellas County, Sculptors / Sculpture
Apr 122023
 

“With a Full Heart”

“Unforbidden Pleasures”

“Unforbidden Pleasures” (detail)

“Wild Nights”

Currently at the Creative Pinellas gallery is Yolanda Sánchez’s Out of Eden, a collection of her paintings and textile work. The gallery is filled bright pleasing colors and this is the perfect exhibition to celebrate the spring season.

On the Creative Pinellas website, Sánchez discusses her work in a detailed essay. Below is a section of that piece.

Whether in painting or textiles, my working instruments are rhythm and color. I am interested in the joyful, playful or even spiritual properties of light. I am reflecting the light and color of where I live, of my immediate environment.

This artistic practice is improvisational and process-oriented, abstract. The relationship of one color to another creates a rhythm and tempo and establishes the composition. Each color suggests the next color, almost like the “call and response” form found in many musical traditions. There is a continuous orchestration, as the colors converse with one another, suggesting a mood or vibe.

I am often not sure where it is going or going to go. It is a surprise at every turn. I shape my perception as I work.

My textile work is informed by the Korean art form known as Bojagi. Humble in its origins, nameless women made these traditional textiles as often extravagant visual pieces using mundane, leftover fabric from wrapping, storing and transporting goods. Over time, the nobility introduced finer, more delicate cloth.

In its traditional form, design characteristics include stitching and seams to create linear elements, especially with translucent fabrics. These features differentiate and distinguish Bojagi from patchwork textiles found in other cultural traditions. Nevertheless, Bojagi shares what feminist art historians identify as centuries-old histories of turning scraps of fabric into beautiful objects and ultimately shifting perspectives from private to public.

I pay homage to these unknown women, authenticating their domestic work – and I affirm their values of inclusion, pleasure, love, the familial, the decorative, the colorful and joyful, the spiritual and the everyday.

My Bojagi-inspired textile work – painting with thread and fabric – honors the Korean tradition. Still, while relying on the conventions and basic structure, these pieces extend and interpret the Bojagi into a more contemporary form. I offer a new direction by varying medium and size and utilizing color compositions and stitching techniques less anchored to established methods.

Material, color, texture and transparency are crucial elements in this work, as is the geometry inherent in the design. While geometry, in this case, emerges from a particular culture, the form does not demand a specific culture-dependent response. Its only function is beauty. It is about the sensual delight derived from looking – the viewer can ascribe or chose meaning, if at all.

As an order, rhythm and pattern are generated within the geometry, creating beauty through harmony and stability, color dominates as a suggestive poetic force, concurrently evoking a connection to my immediate tropical environment. It sets as my intention arousing a sense of place, a feeling, and the atmosphere of an abstract garden, or even a walk through a field of flowers.

It is the color but also the sensuousness of nature that I endeavor to suggest in both my paintings and textiles.

This exhibition closes 4/16/23.

NYC Art Shows- Hew Locke at P.P.O.W.

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, British Art Shows, Collage, Conceptual Art, Drawing, Installation Art, Mixed Media, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Photographers / Photography, Printmaking, Sculptors / Sculpture
Mar 292023
 

Hew Locke, “Listening to the Land” room view

“The Relic”, 2022

“The Relic” 2022 (another side)

“Raw Materials 3”, 2022

“Raw Materials 3”, 2022 (detail)

“Raw Materials 3”, 2022 (detail)

“Jumbie House 2”, 2022

“Jumbie House 2”, 2022

For Hew Locke’s exhibition, Listening to the Land, at P.P.O.W. he has created intricate sculptures and paintings that are fascinating in person.

From the press release-

Locke is known for exploring the languages of colonial and post-colonial power, and the symbols through which different cultures assume and assert identity. Furthering the themes explored in his celebrated commission The Procession at Tate Britain, and his concurrent installation Gilt on the façade of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, this exhibit engages with contemporary and historical inequities while reflecting on the landscape and history of the Caribbean. The exhibition draws its title from a poem by Guyanese political activist and poet Martin Carter which situates itself between two opposing forces of the landscape – sea and forest. Locke’s show features new sculptures and wall works with recurring motifs of stilt-houses, boats, memento mori, and share certificates referencing tensions between the land, the sea, and economic power. Reflecting on these links, Locke notes, “The land was created to generate money for colonial power, now the sea wants it back.”

Translating to ‘land of many waters,’ Guyana and its physical, economic, and political landscape serve as one of the primary sources for Locke’s work. Having spent his childhood in this newly independent nation, the artist witnessed first-hand an era of radical transformation. Now, the country teeters on the precipice of an oil boom and is one of the world’s fastest growing economies. Juxtaposing personal meditations on the climate crisis with political commentary on the history of a globalized world, Locke contemplates the ways in which colonies were exploited to accumulate capital, and observes how Guyana’s economic future lies in the exploitation of its waters. Locke’s new boat sculptures The Relic and The Survivor embody this broad worldview as the two battered wrecks drift through time and history. Evoking the fragmented and diverse legacies of the global diaspora, the boats’ patchwork sails are interspersed with photo transfers of 19th Century cane cutters and banana boat loaders, while their decks are loaded with cargo that could allude to colonial plunder, trade goods or personal belongings.

Based on an abandoned plantation house, Locke’s newest sculpture Jumbie House 2 features layered images that unveil the spirits that haunt this colonial vestige. Presented alongside are a series of painted photographs of dilapidated vernacular architecture across Georgetown and rural Guyana. Constantly under threat of being washed away by storms or rising sea levels, these crumbling structures echo anxieties surrounding climate change and historical erasure. A new series of mixed media wall works, Raw Materials, is derived from antique share certificates and bonds. Locke richly decorates the appliques with acrylic, beads, and patchwork to draw attention to the complex ways in which the past shapes the present. The image of an 1898 Chinese Imperial Gold Loan behind painted Congolese figures connects the global economy at the height of Empire to current Sino-African trade networks. In another work, a painted representation of a Nigerian Ife mask, alongside an image of David Livingstone, is layered on a French-African Mortgage Bond from 1923, connecting exploration and exploitation of African land, to current conversations surrounding the repatriation of artifacts. Taken together, the works in Locke’s Listening to the Land echo William Faulkner’s adage “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

This exhibition closes 4/1/23.

The Procession, mentioned above, can now be seen at Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, in Gateshead, England until June 11th, 2023.

Gilt, also mentioned above, is on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art until May 30th, 2023.

 

NYC Art Shows- Charles Gaines at Hauser & Wirth

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Conceptual Art, Drawing, Mixed Media, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Photographers / Photography
Mar 282023
 

Charles Gaines’ work never fails to impress and his recent exhibition, Southern Trees, at Hauser and Wirth in NYC, is no exception.

From the press release-

One of the most important conceptual artists working today, the show explores the evolution of Gaines’s complex practice, demonstrating how he has continued to forge new paths within the innovative framework of two of his most acclaimed series, Numbers and Trees and Walnut Tree Orchard. The exhibition’s title, ‘Southern Trees,’ alludes directly to the 150-year-old pecan trees pictured in the new works, and symbolically to the opening lyrics of ‘Strange Fruit,’ Billie Holiday’s haunting protest anthem from the 1930s.

The image of the tree has been central to Gaines’s practice since he first began the Walnut Tree Orchard series in the 1970s. In ‘Southern Trees,’ Gaines advances the series using pecan trees photographed on a visit to Boone Hall Plantation in Charleston County, South Carolina––not far from where the artist was born and lived until he was five years old. Presented alongside a key early example from the walnut tree series, eight new triptych works on paper revisit and expand upon this significant original body of work.

‘Walnut Tree Orchard: Set M’ (1977), on loan from the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, pairs a black and white photograph of a walnut tree with two drawings derived from it––an ink outline of the same tree and a grayscale grid that plots all of the trees included in the series up until that point. The newest series, titled Pecan Trees (2022), begins similarly, with a stark black and white photograph of a tree; yet in the drawings that accompany it, Gaines has filled in the outline of the tree with solid ink and used vibrant watercolors to plot all the previous trees in the final drawing. These successive modifications to scale, color and background demonstrate Gaines’s theory that while ‘the system has never changed, the outcome is always different.’

This extends to Gaines’s new Numbers and Trees Plexiglas series, which begin with the artist assigning each tree a distinctive color and numbered grid––breaking down the composition into individual cells that reflect the full form of the tree depicted in the photograph on the surface. However, Gaines reverses his signature process in this new series by overlaying the forms of the trees one at a time and in progression on the back panel of the work rather than on the front. He then brings the photograph to the surface by printing an enlarged detail of the most recently added tree on the work’s Plexiglas surface. This approach brings the tree’s shadowy branches to the foreground, highlighting its textural details and contrasting tones while obscuring the colorful numbered grids painted underneath it. This reversal produces a dramatically different effect, igniting a more somber, yet stirring, reaction to the work as the austere branches, dripping with moss, dominate the picture.

Created through carefully considered systems rather than through the artist’s own imagination or intuition, these new works remove the artist’s subjectivity by following a set of self-determined rules and procedures. The works call into question both the objective nature of the trees and the subjective natural and material human actions that surround them. The fastidious layering process allows Gaines to reveal the differences between the trees’ shapes where the forms do not align. These differences, highlighted by the artist’s systems, suggest the arbitrary nature of other manufactured systems in our society––such as politics, gender, race and class.

This exhibition closes 4/1/23.

Affordable Art Fair- NYC- March 2023

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Ceramic Art, Collage, Digital Art, Drawing, Fiber Arts, Mixed Media, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Photographers / Photography, Printmaking, Sculptors / Sculpture, Video and Film
Mar 262023
 

Kirsty Wither “Tumbling Crowd”

Yelena Lezhen “Clockwork Bird Song”

Esther Rosa “Goes around, comes around III”

This weekend is the Affordable Art Fair in NYC. It’s a chance to check out and buy art at reasonable prices.The fair goes to Hampstead, London next, and will return to New York in September of 2023.

For more on the artists pictured above and their galleries-

Kirsty Wither runs the London gallery Cameron Contemporary with her husband, Robin Cameron.

Yelena Lezhen’s work was shown by Barcelona gallery Manifest Destiny Art. Check out her Instagram for current work.

Esther Rosa’s sculpture was part of InSight Artspace’s booth. Her Instagram is also a good place to see her work.

 

 

NYC Art Shows- Rajan Krishnan at Aicon Contemporary

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters
Mar 222023
 

Rajan Krishnan, “House and a Little Cashew Tree”, 2010

Rajan Krishnan, “Language of Woods”, 2009

Rajan Krishnan, “Language of Woods”, 2009 (detail)

Rajan Krishnan “Bird from the Grove by the River”, 2011

Beautiful paintings by the late Rajan Krishnan from his exhibition Ecologue at Aicon Contemporary.

From the press release-

A play on the word eclogue, a genre of short poems about pastoral life, the suffix ‘logue’ denotes discourse of a specific type, ‘Ecologue’ then is an ecological discourse. This specific conversation about the ecological happens through contact between coarse canvas and the paint on the bristles of Rajan Krishnan’s brush, it is a document : a letter, a journal, a portrait, a story, a manual.

Krishnan’s paintings have been described by his wife and journalist Renu Ramnath as “documents of change.” The careful renderings of Kerala’s agrarian landscape (trees, birds, forests, rivers) are engrossed in larger themes of societal transition and movement – progress and decay, each individual painting freezing a moment in time. In this series of paintings, Krishnan visualizes a vibrant world so full of detail, yet isolated, in an aura of nothingness, compressed, with no backgrounds or foregrounds. His paintings bring the viewer in to meditate on existence. A boat, a fish, a tree, a house, a monkey just as they are.

The artist’s commitment to his home state of Kerala is admirable, as a topography to be both admired and critiqued as a landscape full of possibility. Andrew Shea recalls, for “those who knew him and those who admired his spirit and work, the palpable absence of the artist himself wanes slightly amidst the remarkable body of work he has left behind and his legacy as a pioneer of the uniquely collaborative and welcoming community of artists he nurtured within Kochi and further afield.”

Art historian Kathleen Wyma writes “Krishnan’s paintings seize on sites of crystallized memory as critical interventions into the present. Re-calling and re-recollecting the flow and ebb of time (both real and imagined). His images simultaneously evoke the will to remember and the desire to heed the accretions of localized time.” In our current moment, as questions of climate worsen and the illusion of development as progress remains, every intentional stroke of Krishnan’s brush acts as a tool for contemplation. Scenes of dried up rivers, singular fish, and labyrinth-like groves invite us to reflect on the past, present, and future.

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