NYC Art Shows- Jonas Wood at Gagosian

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

Jonas Wood, “Kitchen Interior”, 2022

Jonas Wood, “Kitchen Interior”, 2022 (detail)

 

Prints 2, Jonas Wood’s exhibition at Gagosian Gallery in NYC, consists of over thirty prints made between 2018 and 2022, in a variety of styles and subject matter.

From the press release-

You have to build the print piece by piece. I just love the way it looks, the process, the whole feel of it. It’s irreplaceable.
—Jonas Wood

The works on view in Prints 2 feature Wood’s perennial motifs—plants, pottery, portraiture, interiors, landscapes, and basketball—reflecting the life of the artist through representations of home, studio, and natural spaces. They are united by Wood’s transformation of subject matter into images with skewed planar space, dense patterning, and vivid color. Developing his prints in parallel with his paintings, Wood has arrived at linked practices that continually inform one another.

Emphasizing the collaborative aspect of printmaking, Wood works with masters of traditional methods who have made innovative contributions to the field. Prints 2 features works made with Aliso Editions, Cirrus Gallery & Cirrus Editions Ltd., Counter Editions, Hamilton Press, Mixografía, and Pace Editions. In addition, Wood publishes and copublishes under his own imprint, WKS Editions.

The stylistic diversity of Wood’s prints results from his experimentation with pictorial effects, processes, and materials, effectively exploring the genre of printmaking itself. The methods used to produce the works in Prints 2 include hard-ground and soft-ground etching, lithography, screen printing, and woodcut, as well as various hybrid processes. Wood pairs these techniques with variations in mark making, color, texture, and density to harness and reveal the characteristics unique to the medium.

NYC Art Shows- Neil Welliver at Alexandre

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Printmaking, Quotes
Feb 232023
 

Neil Welliver, “Big Flowage”, 1979

Neil Welliver, “Big Flowage”, 1979 (detail)

Neil Welliver, “Marsh Shadow”, 1984

Neil Welliver quote on the gallery wall

Currently at Alexandre Gallery in NYC are Neil Welliver’s gorgeous paintings and works on paper, spanning his career from the late 1960s-2000, and including his last woodcut print, Stump.

From the gallery’s website–

In his 2005 New York Times obituary, Ken Johnson wrote:

Mr. Welliver came of age as an artist in the late 1950’s and 60’s, at a time when nonrepresentational styles of painting like Abstract Expressionism and, later, Color Field and Minimalism were accorded the highest critical prestige. Along with artists like Larry Rivers, Alex Katz and Philip Pearlstein, Mr. Welliver strove to paint representational images without sacrificing the formal innovations that the Abstract Expressionists Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning had introduced to modern painting.

Welliver’s lifelong friend, the American poet Mark Strand, wrote of his process in 2001:

What sets Welliver’s woods apart from the woods of others is that they are, of course, his. We see them and know instantly who painted them. That stream plunging and swirling around those gray rocks is familiar, so are those clouds parading in ragged order across that sky spreading a midday blue over those hills. They are all part of Welliver’s woods. The unaffectedness, the ease with which they are simply there, without a hint of what went into their making, without an indication anywhere of the turmoil that prompted them, is what sets them apart. Of course, we can see the many brush strokes in a large Welliver and believe that they—in their tireless application—tell us what goes into a Welliver, but we would be wrong, for there is much in a Welliver that we cannot see. In the past of each one are the long hikes into the woods, which Welliver takes, loaded down with easel, canvas, brushes, oil, thinner, and tubes of color, to the spot where he will paint; then there are the hours he stands, in all kinds of weather, and paints what will be the small preparatory paintings on which he bases the large drawings that lead finally to the large paintings.

This exhibition closes 2/25/23.