Ryoga Katsuma / Ethan Cohen Fine Arts

“My way of painting is that first, I feel free to paint like a child, and then, I choose a favorite color and theme. The rebuilding of these ideas on canvas comes from infinite ideas that only innocent children can have. To have child’s spirit is a special skill, and also the painting technique that only some of the experienced adults can have is the source of my art works.” {Read More…}

SHABU SHABU: New Visions
A striking group exhibition in honor of ACAW featuring leading contemporary Asian artists. Includes works by Ushio Shinohara, Ryoga Katsuma, Huang Yan, Naoto Nakagawa, Noriko Shinohara, Vasan Sitthiket, Ali Kazim, Nguyen Mahn Hung, Tang Hui, Pan Xinglei and Hu Renyi. Don’t miss a knockout opening night performance by the young action painter, Ryoga Katsuma.

18 Jay St.
(Bet. Hudson and Greenwich St.) MAP
Tel: 212-625-1250‎
www.ecfa.com

Zhu Jinshi / The Distant Reaches Are Chaotic / 2007 / Oil on canvas / h: 39.5 x w: 47.2 in / h: 100.3 x w: 119.9 cm / M. Sutherland Fine Arts Ltd

As a factory worker in the 1970’s, Zhu Jinshi studied after-hours with an older artist, Li Zongjin, who had been trained in Western oil painting before the Anti-Rightist crackdown in the 1950’s. Zhu borrowed a book on Kandinsky and was transformed. After studying the text, Zhu realized that Western abstract art had ties to the two thousand year old intellectual and artistic traditions in China. From that point forward, Zhu has attempted to reconcile the two traditions in his artwork.

Zhu was part of the first influential avant-garde group of artists after the Cultural Revolution, the “Stars Group” (Xing Xing), who challenged both aesthetic convention and political authority. The Stars’ use of formerly banned Western styles from Post-Impressionism to Abstract Expressionism was an implicit criticism of the status quo. In 1985, Robert Rauschenberg exhibited a retrospective of his work in the National Gallery and traveled to Beijing to lecture and meet artists. Zhu recalls having a heated debate with Rauschenberg. Zhu attempted to explan that the theoretical bases of Abstract Expressionism, such as gesture and the expressive nature of the brush, were not new, and actually had been part of Chinese aesthetic theory for centuries.

Zhu and his wife, Qin Yufen, an installation and fiber artist, left for Berlin in 1986, a full three years before the fall of the Iron Curtain. Zhu stopped painting for a short time, instead immersing himself in the study of Joseph Beuys, the German performance artist and theorist who championed the power of universal human creativity. During his stay in Europe, Zhu was also greatly influenced by German New Expressionism. His paintings became thicker and more impasto, expressive abstracts. Zhu also collaborated with his wife on several installation projects, but always continued to develop his abstract painting. In 1994, he returned to Beijing and began traveling back and forth each year, as he does today.

Zhu uses various implements, from flat broad wallpaper brushes to wok spatulas, to apply paint in calligraphic, spontaneous strokes. Upon closer observation, one also sees the hectic strokes resembling Western action painting. The effect is one of luscious texture and strong gesture, yet with reference to specific environments, ranging from demolished old neighborhoods in Beijng to homage to Cezanne’s landscapes. In recent years, Zhu has preferred much larger scale canvases; some measuring over twenty feet by twelve feet. {Read More…}

Arshile Gorky / How My Mother's Embroidered Apron Unfolds in My Life / Oil on Canvas / 1944 / Seattle Art Museum

Great artists are not driven by theories or concepts, but by memory and sense impressions of hallucinatory vividness. Hence the centrality of the apron, the patterns of which foreshadow Gorky’s habit of drawing abstract forms from nature: “My Mother told me stories while I pressed my face into her long apron with my eyes closed.” In the painting named after it, the apron’s design is streaked and smeared, as if dissolved in the waters of memory and nostalgia: “All my life her stories and her embroidery kept unraveling pictures in my memory.” It is the unraveling that seems to be recorded in How My Mother’s Embroidered Apron Unfolds in My Life. {Read More…} -John Ash, ArtForum, Sept. 1995

Seattle Art Museum

Ingrid Calame / From #258 Drawing (Tracings from the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and the L.A. River) / 2007 / enamel paint on aluminum / 72 X 120 inches / James Cohan Gallery

I came across Ingrid’s work yesterday. I am not familiar with her and have never seen her work before. I spent some time looking at her work online trying to engage with the paintings themselves, which of course is impossible online. If nothing but intrigued, I read a bunch of reviews, mostly mixed with critics bemoaning the conceptualism of her work. This made me laugh because I had just read a piece by the poet and writer David Lehman this morning referring to the joke that if you crossed a mafioso and a deconstructionist, what you got was someone who makes you “an offer that you can’t understand.” So I began to think that maybe that’s why I couldn’t really make heads or tails of this work, because the deconstructionist mafioso got crossed with a painter, which is certain to be messy.

Anyway, John Yau, whose writtings I really enjoy, opened a review of Ingrid Calame’s work for the Brooklyn Rail with the following quote from James Hillman, “We sail against the imagination whenever we ask an image for its meaning—requiring that images be translated into concepts.” I thought this was a great thought/observation. He goes on to conclude with the follow:

When you stand close to one of Calame’s visually packed paintings, you are likely to forget that you are looking at a brightly colored copy of stains. It is in the small areas that the juxtapositions of color and layering become visually engaging, and you might get lost in the looking. Standing near to the surface, and narrowing your focus, you don’t see what looks like a big tire track and immediately think speedway. This enables you to overlook, if only briefly, that the painting is made up of literal signs that are meant to remind you of all the little details of everyday life that you failed to notice. After all, there is something contrived and didactic about this equation. With their faint traces of brushstrokes, Calame’s densely crammed surfaces really are something to look at. And spatially, the unpredictable shifts between small and large, near and far, defy any simple reading. The forms begin to float free from their literalness, while the staccato colors and asyndetic transitions bounce you all over the place. Calame ought to aim for more than being mentioned in the same sentence as Pollock, who has seldom been given credit for all the different ways in which he worked.  {Read More…}

Zhao Chunxiang (Chao Chung Hsiang; 1910-1991) / Calling You / diptych, ink and acrylic on paper / 183 x 177 cm / Private collection

Chao Chung Hsiang, as he is usually known, graduated from the Hangzhou National Academy of Art in 1939, and the following year was appointed by the Ministry of Education to work in the Northwest Artifacts Survey Group. He moved to Taiwan in 1948 and then traveled in Europe before settling in the United States in 1958. This abstract expressionist painting, which combines Chinese ink and acrylic color, is typical of his work of the period. He returned from New York to Sichuan in 1990, and died in Taiwan the following year. This work exemplifies a recurring trend among Chinese painters who were familiar with Western modernism to find points of intersection between ink painting and Abstract Expressionism.{Read More…}

 Annabel Emson / After Dark / oil on canvas / 2008 / 214 x 244 cm / Wyer Gallery

 Teetering on the edge of abstraction and representation, Emson’s paintings reflect the patterns that arise naturally in the structure of the world around us. However, despite drawing inspiration from both the natural and manmade environment, she does not depict recognizable landscapes in existence somewhere but, working intuitively and spontaneously from memory, alludes to some less tangible or fleeting place or space, rooted in memory perhaps but which has become something other, independent, self-determining and lawless.

Her paintings seem to reflect a joy taken in the physicality of painting as well as paint’s material possibilities. She plays with juxtaposition of colour, its temperature, intensity and emotional pitch; the manner and form of the application of paint and the part played by rhythm and sound, both in the process of painting itself and the form and structure of visual composition. This experimentation with the language and application of paint has lead to an ostensibly disparate note in a collection of canvases that differ in scale and style and where abstract works containing broad, energetic or gestural brushwork sit alongside others in which more considered figurative ideas have worked their way in alongside layers of abstraction to suggest a narrative or something more descriptive.

However diverse at times, the works are linked to each other by an index of recurring motifs and images, referencing and building upon each other as part of an extended conversation. Reduced to their core, these are paintings about their process and each work a consequence of a new question that is understood most fully in its relation to its counterparts.{Read More…}

These works are particular in their details and insistent on the profusion they convey. Concurrent with the drive toward monumentality is a striving for the contracted and claustrophobic, a sort of qualitative smallness. In these pages, John Yau recently alluded to the “density” and “compactness” of Charles Seliger’s work, noting that “our eyes cannot take them in with one glance.” It is an observation one makes again and again with many of the works in Suitcase Paintings. You do not look at them but rather peer into their interiors, picking your way across their fictive and textural forms.

These denser, tighter works invite a focused and expansive gaze, penetrating and loose. If the monumental works assert their presence in our space (making an impact from across the room, or disturbing one’s sense of bodily orientation), these smaller ones pull us eyes first into their space. Of course, the dichotomy is not absolute. Like the Cubist grid that insidiously asserts itself in all-over gesture painting, density has an alarming way of precipitating the monumental, and vice versa. {Read More…}

Explosion of work on the Richter scale
Next come the abstracts of the 1980s, huge works full of eye-popping colour, with paint spread in dense layers only to be removed, revealing the progression from blank canvas to completed work. These are not just abstract paintings, but a commentary on abstract painting. Richter has no time for the boozy heroics of Jackson Pollock; instead, he has developed a series of actions and processes to produce abstract images emphasised by his layering and removal of paint.{Read More…}

There are layers of satire, too, with Richter undermining the anarchic, intense stereotypes of abstract expressionism with his precise manipulation of surfaces, and pointing wryly to the blurring of his paintings from photographs each time he scrapes his squeegee across a canvas to form a hard-edged line. {Read More…}

Layered Days, Jose Parla’s latest exhibition and first solo show in New York, is on view now at Christina Grajales.  The show presents a new body of  paintings, adorned in layers upon layers of Parla’s signature abstract lettering and textures. Here, the artist’s graffiti roots combine with modern abstract expressionism, conjuring up recollections of both Cy Twombly and Jackson Pollock. In addition, a wall installation builds upon Parla’s themes of history and story telling, through an array of artifacts and photographs combined with original canvas, wood, and ceramic pieces. A hard cover catalog has been published to commemorate the exhibit, and Parla graciously decorated fan’s copies on opening night. Layered Days is on view till Dec. 20.

Jose Parla – Layered Days
Nov. 8 – Dec. 20
Christina Grajales Gallery
10 Green Street, 4th Floor
NY, NY 10013

Any challenge to canonical thinking is worthy of consideration and, in many cases, useful. It can help us see things fresh as well as rescue them from the dusty halls of history. In that regard, Anfam recognizes that the period he focuses on is still contested territory, and he weighs in on it by including work by Sam Francis, Charles Seliger, and Mark Tobey, as well as photographs. I have quibbles with the exhibition, but that is to be expected. Mostly they have to do with who is not included, particularly since Joan Mitchell and Hans Namuth had work in the exhibition, but Norman Bluhm and Rudy Burckhardt did not. But this was Anfam’s exhibition, not mine. And saying that I would have done it differently is hardly surprising.  {Read More…}