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.

 

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.

David Lynch 1946-2025

 Art, Artists, Books, Films, Miscellaneous, Mixed Media, Painting / Painters, Quotes, Television, Video and Film
Jan 202025
 

Still from “Mulholland Drive”

Club Silencio scene with Rebekah Del Rio from David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive

Today would have been artist and filmmaker David Lynch’s 79th birthday.

Although it was sad to hear of his passing, it was such a joy to spend the weekend looking through his artwork, reading the tributes from those who knew him, and rewatching his films and the documentary about him, The Art Life.

He also wrote Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity, a short book filled with his thoughts on transcendental meditation, his films, digital video, creativity and more- worth checking out. Below is a short clip from one of his interviews with The Atlantic.

He also acted occasionally, both in his Twin Peaks series and in other projects. Below he plays another famous director, John Ford, in a clip from Steven Spielberg’s semi-autobiographical film The Fabelmans.

And here he is on Louis C.K.’s show Louie.

David Lynch’s creative legacy will continue to influence and inspire people for many years to come. He was one of the greats.

Weekend Watch- “Le Samourai”

 Artists, Films, Video and Film
Aug 182024
 

Famous French actor Alain Delon passed away on Sunday, 8/18.

The stills above are from his film Le Samourai from 1967, directed by Jean-Pierre Melville.  The beautifully shot film follows a mostly silent Delon as an assassin trying to discover who is trying to kill him. It also stars his then wife Nathalie Delon.

Weekend Watch- Robert Altman’s “3 Women”

 Art, Artists, Films, Video and Film
Aug 122024
 

After hearing the sad news of Shelley Duvall’s passing, I decided to watch a few films from her filmography and started with 3 Women, released in 1977. Based on a dream writer/director Robert Altman had, the film follows Duvall and Sissy Spacek as their lives and identities intertwine in the California desert. Later a third woman played by Janice Rule, becomes more important in the pair’s world.

Using reflections, water, mirrors, mirrored actions, and twins, Altman creates a mysterious space for these women to inhabit. Adding to the unsettling energy of the film are a series of murals created by artist Bodhi Wind (Charles Kuklis).

It’s definitely worth a watch, with an ambiguous ending that has been subject to many interpretations.

 

 

NYC Art Shows- Frank Stella at Deitch

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Conceptual Art, Installation Art, Mixed Media, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Sculptors / Sculpture
May 222024
 

There’s only a few days left to see Frank Stella’s recent sculptures at Deitch’s New York location. The large colorful works look drastically different depending on the angle with which they are viewed.

Stella sadly passed away at the beginning of this month. Although it is sad that we won’t be able to see what he would have come up with next, these sculptures help demonstrate how inventive he remained throughout his career.

From the gallery’s website-

Double wide flatbed trucks navigated the bridges into Manhattan to transport five monumental works by Frank Stella to Jeffrey Deitch’s SoHo gallery.

They are among the most ambitious and most radical works being made by any artist today. They extend Stella’s forms even further into three dimensions. The works are not painted sculptures or relief paintings. They completely fuse painting and sculpture in a way that has never been achieved before. The sculptures have never been shown in New York City.

Frank Stella said that one of the objectives of his recent artistic approach has been to “build a painting rather than painting a painting.” The new work is a realization of this ambition. Stella combines traditional artists’ techniques with high technology to create his new work. His monumental sculptures begin with computer models that are transformed into a series of small sculptural maquettes through 3-D printing. The artist refines these models in the studio and then sends them to fabricators in the Netherlands and Belgium where they are engineered and constructed using technology derived from shipbuilding. The sections are then shipped to Stella’s studio in the Hudson Valley where they are refined and painted with automotive paint.

The exhibition features works from two series, Scarlatti Sonata Kirkpatrick from 2014, and Atlantic Salmon Rivers from 2021-23. The Scarlatti Sonata Kirkpatrick sculptures are created with high density foam covered in fiberglass. The Grand Cascapedia, inspired by the Canadian river known for salmon fishing, is made from aluminum. As in all of Stella’s work, the forms embody their materials. The materials inspire the forms.

Stella’s work of the 1980s were characterized by its extension of two-dimensional painting into his version of baroque space. These new works extend beyond baroque space into outer space. The forms seem to float in anti-gravity. They ascend, transcending their weight. They do not have front or a back, existing in the round.

Frank Stella has expanded the art discourse for more that six decades. His new work continues to advance art into a place where it has never been before.

If you are able to see the work in person at the gallery, make sure to take the steps to the top where you will find a diorama containing the sculptural models (pictured below).

Faith Ringgold 1930-2024

 Art, Artists, Conceptual Art, Fiber Arts, Illustration, Mixed Media, Painting / Painters
Apr 192024
 

I was very sad to hear the news of artist and activist Faith Ringgold’s recent passing. Throughout her incredible career she created work in a variety of mediums including painting, sculpture, and narrative quilts. She also wrote and illustrated several children’s books- including the wonderful Tar Beach, based on one of the quilts, which won several awards.

Pictured above is American People Series #20: Die, 1967, currently on view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

From the museum about the work-

Recalling her motivation for making this work, Ringgold has explained, “I became fascinated with the ability of art to document the time, place, and cultural identity of the artist. How could l, as an African American woman artist, document what was happening around me?” Ringgold’s American People Series confronts race relations in the United States in the 1960s. This mural-sized painting evokes the civil uprisings erupting around the country at the time. On the canvas, blood spatters evenly across an interracial group of men, women, and children, suggesting that no one is free from this struggle.

Richard Serra 1938-2024

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, New York Art Shows, Sculptors / Sculpture
Mar 292024
 

Richard Serra passed away on Tuesday, 3/26/24. In the video above, as part of PBS News Hour, Serra takes an interviewer on a tour of his 2007 MoMA exhibition, Richard Serra: 40 Years.

The program also provides some background on his history and discusses a bit of his creative process. One technique was to use a list of verb actions. He would choose one from the list and apply that to different materials. He explains in the video how he used “to lift” for a rubber sculpture in the exhibition.

Richard Serra, “Verb List”, 1967 (image via MoMA)

If you are in Los Angeles, one of his most famous sculptures, Band (2006), is currently on view at LACMA. In NYC you can see Equal (2015), which consists of eight forged steel boxes stacked in pairs, at the Museum of Modern Art.

Sinéad O’Connor (1966-2023)

 Films, Music, Musicians / Bands
Jul 272023
 

Sinéad O’Connor- Feel So Different

Sad to hear of the passing of the brave, beautiful, and talented musician Sinéad O’Connor yesterday at 56 years old. A true artist with a phenomenal voice, she always stood firm in her convictions. The song above is from her second album, I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got released in 1990.

To learn more about O’Connor, her memoir Rememberings was released in 2021 and there is also the 2022 documentary,  Nothing Compares.

Rest in Peace.

Films to Watch- Richard Linklater’s “Slacker”

 Art, Artists, Films, Music, Musicians / Bands, Video and Film
Jul 072023
 

Richard Linklater’s 1990 film Slacker, is a wonderful trip back in time to the pre-Internet days and a celebration of American eccentricity. If you haven’t seen it, the film follows various different Austin locals in brief scenes and conversations, all within a 24 hour period in 1989.

The film opens on a monologue from Linklater himself describing his dream to a taxi driver and then moves on to a man who hits his mother with a car. The scenes flow from one character or group to a new one almost seamlessly. Conspiracy theorists, coffee shop philosophers, a man who collects televisions and disaster footage, a group of housemates reading a story on postcards from a former housemate left behind, and on and on as the day turns to night and then back to day again.

Linklater wrote these interactions and many of them are based on stories or projects from the people seen in the film. In his director’s commentary he gives the background for many of the involved participants. He also explains how he directed them not to treat any of the people speaking as if they are strange or odd. It’s another aspect of the film that makes it special, and a reminder of the way we should try to treat people.

Sadly Teresa Taylor (pictured in the above two photos center), aka Teresa Nervosa, one time drummer for the Butthole Surfers, died last month. Her image was used for the movie poster and promotional materials. Her scene in Slacker is one of the most memorable as well. She tells a story of a highway suicide and then attempts to sell what she claims is singer Madonna’s pap smear.

 

 

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