In recent years, meaning in art is rarely discussed by critics in terms of abstract painting. The implication is that the survival of meaning in art hovers somewhere outside of abstract painting. The alternatives range from illustration on canvas to digital photography, from deconstructive texts to destructive installations, from kitsch assemblages to interactive cyber-pods. Is the concept of meaning in art long-gone, out-of-fashion, overspoiled? In theoretical jargon, it may appear too close to epistemology, as if epistemology—being the study of knowledge—has been inadvertently removed from the aesthetic, conceptual, and productive components of making art. In the wake of this insouciant exhaustion of consciousness, is it possible that substance in art may have reverted back to abstract painting? After two visits to Pace Wildenstein Gallery, the site of the recent Thomas Nozkowski exhibition, I am willing to place my bet that abstract painting is back in the saddle not because of the market, but that it means something…

…To paint abstract form suggests an intuitive process by way of a carefully constructed dexterity. This may or may not add up to being epistemological or even ontological. But is it still about meaning. In abstract painting—in the formalist sense—meaning is closely related to the result obtained from the process, that is, whether the coherence of shape, color, line, and texture hold together. Whether the mediumistic definition of abstract painting is essentially practical is finally the artist’s decision. While meaning may refer deductively to the material, pigment, and process, this does not negate the possibility that whatever appears as form is subsequently about meaning. Meaning is ultimately a linguistic extension of the manner in which the work is painted. This relates to a sense of connoisseurship in art, a pre-Modernist idea that suddenly is beginning to appear again, as if something had been missing for decades, and no one seemed to know exactly what was missing. This may sound like a standard definition of late Modernism—which, perhaps, it is. Yet there are exceptions to this hackneyed paradigm that occasionally come into view. These exceptions subvert the quotidian semiotic nuances, such as the quixotic manner in which palsy-ridden theories and ornery hybrids begin to ascend to the constellation of speculation and investment, relinquishing aesthetics and epistemology along the way. [Read More…]

Sat, May 17, 2008 | 3:00 PM
New Museum theater

In conjunction with the current exhibition by Tomma Abts, Kraus Family Senior Curator Laura Hoptman will moderate a discussion on abstraction as a method and idea with artists Thomas Nozkowski and Dana Schutz.

Thomas Nozkowski is a painter who has had sixty-eight one-person shows. His most recent exhibitions include an installation of new work at the 2007 Venice Biennial, a midcareer survey at the Ludwig Museum in Koblenz, Germany, 2007 and the Fisher-Landau Center, New York, 2008, and a one-person exhibition at Pace Wildenstein, New York, 2008. The New York Studio School presented a twenty-five-year survey of his drawings in January 2003. His work is represented in the collections of the Addison Gallery of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the High Museum of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Phillips Collection among many others. Currently, Nozkowski is the Bob and Happy Doran Visiting Artist at the Yale University Art Gallery. He is also Professor of Painting at the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University. Forthcoming one-person exhibitions include The Douglas Hyde Gallery of Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland and the Musée d’art contemporain, Montreal, Canada.

Dana Schutz was born in Michigan in 1976 and currently lives and works in New York. Her work has been featured in solo exhibitions in commercial galleries in New York, Boston, and Paris. Schutz’s paintings have also been presented in a number of group exhibitions including “Eclipse: Art in a Dark Age,” Moderna Museet, Stockholm, 2008; “USA TODAY,” The Hermitage, St. Petersburg, 2007; “Fractured Figure,” DESTE Foundation, Athens, 2007; “Art in America: 300 Years of Innovation,” Shanghai Museum, Shanghai, 2007; “Closer to Home,” 48th Corcoran Biennial, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 2005; “Greater New York,” PS1, Queens, (2005); “The Triumph of Painting,” The Saatchi Gallery, London, 2005; and the Venice Biennial, 2003. Her work is represented in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and many others. Currently, a group of new work by Schutz is on display at Contemporary Fine Arts in Berlin. In July, she will participate in “After Nature,” a group exhibition at the New Museum.

*This event is free with Museum admission but tickets are required.

The drawings and paintings are light and airy. The sculptures and installation pieces brought a smile to my face. Like a child encountering and fascinated by the surrounding world populated with birds, butterflies, and a myriad of other flying creatures.

Rebecca Horn’s exhibition will be comprised of both new large-scale paintings on paper and a group of signature sculptures. These important new paintings, the scale of which are determined by the extent of the artist’s physical reach, evoke personal, metaphorical, and metaphysical influences orchestrated through dynamic gesture. The new paintings on paper clearly relate to Horn’s seminal early performance pieces in which she sculpturally extended the body into space. In an accompanying catalog essay Doris von Drathen explains: “Against this backdrop, the paintings on paper assembled here under the title Cosmic Maps are more that just ‘recent works.’ As a group, these paintings from the last few years plot oscillations, for the first time opening out a pictorial space that hazards to sever all connection to topographical space ….”

Rebecca Horn, (born in Germany, 1944), is without question one of the seminal artists of our time. Historically, her work has ranged over an extensive variety of media, including film, performance, installation, photography and sculpture, whilst addressing themes of corporeality, perception and philosophy. The employment of such wide ranging interests as science and alchemy, the rational and the intuitive, the mechanical and the sensual, has occurred repeatedly in her work over the last three decades and has resulted in one of the most distinguished and individual oeuvres in recent memory. Horn has participated in the Venice Biennale on a number of occasions, she has had a retrospective at The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York and she is one of very few artists who has been selected to participate in Documenta on four separate occasions.

Rebecca Horn, Cosmic Maps, at Sean Kelly Gallery, 528 West 29th Street through June 14th

This one is for my friend Patou. It seems I’ve become enamored of the small canvas lately and Joan Mitchell on a small scale is fascinating and inviting. The thick luscious paint and pastels feel juicy and approachable, maybe it feels a bit more human. The big retrospective at the Whitney Museum a few years ago set in my head this idea of Mitchell as a monumental fierce-sensitive lioness - a larger than life woman and unmatchable painter. The physical scale and energy of her large canvases can be overwhelming. It’s nice to see this other side and helps gives me a more complete picture of the artist.

Joan Mitchell was a gifted painter. In her primary medium of oil paint, she created powerful and unforgettable works. Her paintings project an impressive physical energy and at monumental scale demonstrate the full measure of her ambitious goals. But oil paint was not her only medium; in addition to exploring etching and lithography, Mitchell embraced the medium of pastel and created a substantial body of work. This exhibition surveys her work in both paint and pastel between 1973 and 1983, a decade bracketed by two major cycles of paintings. During these years, a dynamic interaction between her paintings and pastels becomes increasingly apparent.

The exhibition will include nearly thirty works in both mediums. The paintings and drawings from the early and mid-1970s are atmospheric, and among them are two of the works in which Mitchell developed a composition in relation to a poem typed on the sheet of paper. During the next several years, she introduced an emphatic vertical mark into both pastels and paintings. In the exhibition are three pastels and one painting from the series titled Tilleuls, a group of works named for a mature and impressive linden tree that crowned the terrace of her home in the country outside of Paris. A brilliant yellow floats above hovering bands of blue in a large Untitled pastel from 1979.

In 1982, Mitchell produced a greater than usual number of small-scale paintings. A close look at the paintings of this period strongly suggests that she was seeking to achieve in oil paint a kind of light that resulted from bold juxtapositions of pastel pigments. The unprecedented and challenging color combinations of several series of paintings she titled Gently, Merrily and Petit Matin – green and orange, magenta and green, red and orange, yellow and pink – reflect the influence of her work in pastel. One of the six large paintings made that year is Buckwheat. Mitchell juxtaposed the heat of cadmium colors against cool cobalt and flashes of cerulean blue and established a shimmering radiance that clearly evokes her admiration for Van Gogh, and is titled in reference to his paintings of wheat fields.

Joan Mitchell, Paintings and Pastels 1973-1983, at Lennon, Weinberg, Inc., 514 w. 25th Street, through June 21

I hadn’t intended to walk into this show when I went down to Chelsea last week, but I’m glad I did, and I’ve been back a couple of times since. This is a great show. Unfortunately, the web images do a grave injustice to the paintings. These are paintings that you have to sit with and look at for a long time in an area where there is natural changing light. As the light changes the paintings change. This is oil painting at its richest. Each is a quiet contemplative, typically dark, space with reference to landscape. Landscape entered into Berthot’s painting following his move from from New York City to upstate New York in 1996. These new works continue to have the central deep meditative space of his earlier work, in the 1970’s a gently touched rectangle, in the 1980’s a bar or hovering oval, and now a quietly emerging tree or glimpse of light.

Entering from the street on a bright sunny day, at first, it was hard to see anything. Impenetrable dark rectangles on the wall, flat geometrical black masses. As my eyes adjusted the paintings slowly began to reveal themselves. In the dim lighting of the first room ochres and venetian reds began to glow, prussian blues flowing and vibrating, the solid masses of chromium oxide green standing still against all this movement - trees against the wind. I was mesmerized as my eyes strained to see more. To make out shapes and forms, a tree, a lake, a horizon, a forest, a scene. Dark moody lighting. Dusk. Ominous. Tumultuous nature. Contemporary echoes of the Hudson River School.

Jake Berthot at Betty Cuningham Gallery, 541 West 25th Street through 5/10

 Read John Yau’s review of the show in the Brooklyn Rail

Painting Process/Process Painting, MoMA, Carroll Dunham, 2

Rachel Feinstein / Army of God / 2008 / Copper and wood / 12 feet 3 inches x 17 feet x 7 feet 9 inches / Marianne Boesky Gallery

The Rachel Feinstein show at Marianne Boesky Gallery was a nice surprise that I walked into yesterday. I had come down to Gladstone Gallery to see the Dieter Roth drawings show and seeing that I still had time before needing to head back to work I decided to pop in. There are 7 pieces in the show and each is a bit creepy. There is one, Puritan’s Delight that feels like a carriage out of the Legend of Sleepy Hollow melting into the floor. I almost felt as if I was standing in a swamp on a foggy moonless night. I was particularly struck by Army of God. This piece really disrupted my sense of space as I moved in front of it. The reflection of light and sound of the thin sheets of copper felt like it embraced me and shifted my sense of bodily awareness. I felt the ground falling away and the heavens opening up. Well…ok maybe it wasn’t that dramatic, unless of course you dropped a tab of acid before stepping up in front of it, but it was still impressive.

Feinstein’s new sculptures depict a variety of subjects including mythic and religious iconography, amorphous figures, and a broken carriage, altogether pursuing themes of beauty, fantasy and ruination. Inspired by images of Brancusi’s studio showing the range of materials, forms and scale in his sculptures, Feinstein undertakes a similar diversity in her new works. Utilizing plywood, resin, and for the first time cement and copper, the artist allows each sculpture its own unique finish.

A felled wooden carriage, finished in black stain and fitted with a working lantern, takes its inspiration from 19th century Austrian royal stagecoaches. A trio of wreathed minstrel-like figures, connected to one another by a length of rope, offer a multi-faceted, Cubist viewpoint with cutouts of flattened shapes and forms jigsawed together. Other sculptures reconfigure putti and centaur-like figures, abstracting them almost beyond recognition.

In the main gallery will be a large-scale wall relief rendered in cut copper. The work, inspired in part by 15th century tapestries, depicts an abstracted Saint Michael slaying the dragon amid a tangled mess of wings, lances and tails. With its super thin copper construction and jagged, unfinished edges, the work evokes a seductiveness through the extravagant materiality and tormented surface. Each of the Feinstein’s sculptures retains its autonomy with an individual narrative, ultimately relating to the juxtaposed one in terms of the positive and negatives spaces of its form.

Rachel Feinstein is on view at Marianne Boesky Gallery, 509 West 24th Street through May 24th

I spent time at Reeves Contemporary Gallery yesterday and was impressed with the abstract paintings of Doug Trump. His work actually touches on a few of the issues I brought up in my piece about craft, I could see areas where the oil paint, laid on over ink or acrylic was cracking, but that does not take away from his work in the least. I plan on going back a few more times before the show closes. His transparent colors, hiding and revealing shapes forms and gestures, create quiet compelling spacial shifts and rhythms that are a visual treat. I’ll come back to this later….In the meantime, here’s what the gallery has to say:

Doug Trump’s newest oil paintings employ rich, industrial color and collaged surfaces, punctuated by gestural marks in pencil, ink, and charcoal. The artist continues over-painting, sanding back painted layers and then obscuring the surface again with new color fields, a process giving Trump’s works their complexity and depth. While the artist’s process remains consistent, the work no longer focuses upon a unified, balanced composition, but rather prizes expressionism as manifested through color and brushstroke. He is allowing his own energy – and thus the energy in the paintings – to jump from one area to another, without qualifying it, without constraining it within a preconceived or determined canvas. Through this spontaneous yet measured approach, Trump allows the paintings to breath in their own vitality. Ultimately, Trump is creating paintings with agitation and friction. For the viewer, there is ample room to move into the work, and receive its kinetic energy.

Doug Trump is on view at Reeves Contemporary, 534 w. 24th Street, through May 24th.

Anyway, the thought occurred to me last night that if I bought a new house, or had construction work done on a house, and within a few years it started to fall apart because of shoddy craftsmanship and materials, I would be suing the contractors and developers. I’m surprised there isn’t as much outrage when the same thing happens to works of art. If were going to drop $60,000 - $100,000 on a piece of artwork, I don’t care who the artist is, I would want to make damn sure that it would not fall apart in 5-10 years. Maybe there is and I just don’t know about it. Maybe from the collectors’ point of view it is just one of the risks of investment.

But in all fairness to the artists, there is so much stupid money out there right now. If someone is willing to pay me $20,000 for the newspaper I clean my brushes with, then god bless them and thanks for the money. It’s like a fox in the hen house. Anyway, I’d just make sure I’d sign a contract absolving me of all future responsibility for the condition.

Dropped in on Katherine Bernhardt and her friends at the month long sleepover party down at CANADA on the Lower East Side. These are bold fun paintings of fashion models and musicians. Heroines to be admired and lusted after. With lush paint slathered on the canvas with exuberance and energy we feel Ms. Bernhardt touching and fondling her idols. Like baby dolls she primps their hair, straightens their dresses and lines them up to show off and be observed. It’s star-gazing and it feels a little bit like a guilty pleasure. But there’s no shame in that. Unlike the fashion photography which she uses as reference, in which the models often feel lifeless posing zombies, these paintings imbue her women with a life-force and energy. They feel alive, breathing and moving, and any minute they could pop out of the flat surface of the canvas and start dancing and gyrating. Kate, Giselle, Natalia, Agyness, Simon, Kanye & George is a fun show and you can stop off and get some congee or dim sum after the party!

Katherine Bernhardt “Kate, Giselle, Natalia, Agyness, Simon, Kanye & George” is on view at CANADA Gallery through June 1, 2008