Miriam Shapiro / The Twinning of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden / 1989 / 80″ x 116″, (triptych) / Acrylic on Canvas / Flomenhaft Gallery

I entered the Flomenhaft Gallery knowing Miriam Shapiro’s name but unable to recall any images of her work or even how I knew her name. I probably read about her in an art history book, as she is undoubtedly a pioneer and significant figure in the feminist art movement. Growing up in an upper-middle class university town, it could have easily been that I had seen her work, either originals or reproductions, or, if not her work, derivative pieces hanging on the walls in my friends houses. It may even have even been that I had an art teacher in elementary, middle-, or high school that assigned us a project based on her work, echoing and speaking to her influence and importance.

I mention this because the first association I had walking through the gallery was a strong feeling of American Jewish womanhood, coming of age in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, and living in the present. It made me think of my friends’ mothers, or other women I know in this demographic. That is in no way meant to diminish the work, categorize it, and put it in a nice easy to handle historically and culturally situated box. It speaks to me of women, struggling to stitch together narratives of identity and self-hood, to redefine femininity and womanhood.

In her work, historical and cultural symbols and artifacts are patched together, personalized and given new meaning. Stories are reinterpreted and retold. Fabric, cloth, and thread are woven together with acrylic and a host of other materials to create rich and exciting surfaces. The colors are lush, saturated, and full of life. The overall effect is that her work can feel simultaneously challenging and comforting, familiar and unfamiliar, radical and ordinary. I would guess, an important piece of our response to Miriam’s work, is determined by our own history, our own identity – whether or not we can see parts of ourselves and our own stuggles with identity reflected in her work, and how we think and feel about what we she reveals to us.

Miriam Schapiro’s Mini-Retrospective, March 13 – April 26, 2008, Flomenhaft Gallery, 547 West 27th Street, Suite 308

Amy Sillman on John Chamberlain
6:30 Monday 28 April 2008
Dia Art Foundation – 535 West 22nd Street New York, NY
$6

This Monday, 28 April, painter Amy Sillman will give a public talk on the art of American sculptor John Chamberlain, whose work is currently on view at Dia Beacon. The program is part of Dia Foundation’s Artists on Artist series where artists are invited to speak about the work of older colleagues.

Katy Moran / Smokers Junction / 2008 / Acrylic on canvas / 18 x 15 inches (46 x 38 cm) / Andrea Rosen Gallery

Roberta Smith of the New York Times picks up on an issue I’ve been thinking about and struggling with in my own work.

Excerpted from the NY Times 

Small may be beautiful, but where abstract painting is concerned, it is rarely fashionable. Big has held center stage at least since Jackson Pollock; the small abstractions of painters like Myron Stout, Forrest Bess and Steve Wheeler are mostly relegated to the wings, there to be considered eccentric or overly precious. Paul Klee was arguably the last genius of small abstraction to be granted full-fledged membership in the Modernist canon.

But what is marginalized can also become a form of dissent, a way to counter the prevailing arguments and sidestep their pitfalls. It is hard, for example, to work small and indulge in the mind-boggling degree of spectacle that afflicts so much art today. In a time of glut and waste on every front, compression and economy have undeniable appeal. And if a great work of art is one that is essential in all its parts, that has nothing superfluous or that can be subtracted, working small may improve the odds.

Small paintings of the abstract kind are having a moment right now in New York, with a luminous exhibition at the New Museum of Contemporary Art spotlighting the wry, fastidiously wrought work of the German painter Tomma Abts; and PaceWildenstein presenting in Chelsea the latest efforts of James Siena and Thomas Nozkowski, two older American whizzes at undersize abstraction. Even post-war Modernism could be downsized a bit, with a show titled “Suitcase Paintings: Small Scale Abstract Expressionism” opening next month at Baruch College.

Four young painters who embrace smallness are now having solo shows — three of them New York debuts — that challenge the importance of the big canvas.

Small abstractions avoid the long realist tradition of painting as a window, and also the shorter, late-Modernist one of painting as a flat wall. Instead these smaller works align themselves with less vaunted (and sometimes less masculine) conventions: the printed page, illuminated manuscripts, icons and plaques.

And yet, as each of these four exhibitions demonstrates, abstraction allows a serious exploration of process despite the limited real estate. This expands the already considerable pleasure of looking at paintings that are not much larger than your head. [Read more...]

Frank Stella’s “Red River Valley,” one of the works he created in 1958 before embarking on his Black Paintings.
© President and Fellows of Harvard College

Frank Stella / Morro Castle / 1958 / Kunstmuseum Basel

Yesterday I got an email from Brian in North Carolina in which he mentioned the Frank Stella 1958, the touring survey of 20 works made by the celebrated contemporary painter in the year that he graduated from Princeton University, organized by Harry Cooper and Megan R. Luke that began at the Arthur M. Sackler Museum and traveled to the Menil Collection in Houston and the Wexner Center in Columbus back in 2006. While I did not see the show, I remember reading the review in the NY Times and decided to see what I could dig up this morning. Below are some excerpts from three reviews.

Exerpted from Frank Stella 1958 by William Corbett in the Brooklyn Rail
Harvard’s Fogg Museum has long owned “Red River Valley,” the catalogue’s cover image. At 7’ 7” x 6’ 7”, it is the scale of New York abstract painting at that time, and it bears the signature flecks and drips of the period. From a pattern of alternating green and black stripes, a red column appears at the right and tapers toward the painting’s top. You can see the blue and black underpainting, like mud in a river, beneath the column and the uneven stripes. The image has a clumsy, awkward appeal—homely and hand-wrought. It is a painting you can sink into, read and roam around in. Fraught with emotional associations, “Red River Valley” is a painting that says more than, “What you see is what you see.”

It is also a painting, like all the others in this show, that seems to have failed for Stella precisely because it succeeded. We’ve seen paintings like these before and since—the work of Jack Tworkov comes to mind, as well as Sean Scully (although, had he been interested, Stella’s cheap paint would not have allowed for Scully’s lavish handling, a world in itself). You can see this “failed success” most clearly in “Morro Castle,” the direct antecedent of the black paintings selected by Dorothy Miller for MoMA’s “Sixteen Americans” show. Here the stripes drift off-center, like lines in a handwritten letter that the writer had been unconcerned and/or unable to keep straight. As with “Red River Valley,” the stripes form an image and invite an interpretive reading. They could depict boxes within boxes or an architectural plan of a stepped plaza or perhaps an abstracted imagining of the real Morro Castle, a fort at the entrance to Havana’s harbor.

What Stella did nowhere in 1958 was make the sort of annihilating black pictures that brought him instant fame. These objects, elegant as a banker’s (or gangster’s) suit, take painting into the realm of architecture. They have an authoritarian force that Stella seems to acknowledge with titles referring to Nazi Germany, even once labeling the pictures as having “a certain fascist element.” The landscape references found in the work from 1958 have been obliterated, along with the window figures in “West Broadway,” “Grape Island” and “Coney Island.” It may be that the part of Stella that looked out onto the world had been purged by these paintings, freeing him to pursue what he saw inside himself: that which could not be read but would stand still, obdurate and implacable, courting no viewer. [Read more...]

Excerpt from A BEAUTIFUL MIND by Phyllis Tuchman on artnet Magazine
In “Frank Stella 1958,” we can see an artist poised precisely on the threshold between Abstract-Expressionism and Minimalism, a moment when compositions of brushily painted stripes could be replete with meaning. The multifarious Ab-Ex space fills with slimmed-down, gestural stripes. Box-like shapes loom in the center of some canvases, move to the corners and then disappear, unneeded. The work becomes monochromatic, the canvas field filling with horizontal blue stripes or stripes of mustard yellow. The bands turn black, skewing and turning to form geometric patterns. And we are there, at Stella’s epochal “Black Paintings,” a source for much Minimalist sculpture as well as many formalist paintings to follow. [Read more...]

Excerpted from A Vivid Back Story for a Stella Legend by Roberta Smith in the New York Times
“Frank Stella 1958″ suggests, completely inadvertently, that the obscurity of the Black Paintings may be partly their own fault. They and Mr. Stella’s subsequent striped shaped paintings are the most implacable and withholding of his production and, in many ways, the least characteristic of his sensibility. They are handsome works of great historical weight, but they don’t seem to have held the artist’s interest for very long, so why should they hold ours? All the more reason to examine what came before the Black Paintings, to better fathom what followed them. [Read more...]

Stuart Davis (American, 1894–1964) / The Mellow Pad / 1945–51 / Oil on canvas / 26 1/4 x 42 1/8 in. (66.7 x 107 cm) / Brooklyn Museum, Bequest of Edith and Milton Lowenthal, 1992.11.6 / www.brooklynmuseum.org

This morning I was reading Hans Hofmann’s essay, ”The Color Problem in Pure Painting-Its Creative Origin,” which I can read over and over and get something new every time I read it. But, today it got me to thinking about Stuart Davis, a pioneer of American Modernism and abstract painting, who wrote extensively about abstraction, but whose writings are not easy to come by. Davis identified what termed the “color-space” problem. While I’ve been unable to study his writings, metmuseum.org writes the following:

Davis postulated that color could be used to indicate spatial relationships through its positioning next to other colors. Some colors advance, while others recede, which suggests the illusion of a three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional surface. [Read more...]

Now this theory sounds a lot like what Hofmann discusses, and while it is not important who was first, it is helpful to see that two important 20th abstract painters were thinking deeply about color and we know their ideas have had a significant impact on contemporary painters over the last 50 years. In fact, it was Stuart Davis’ paintings, more so than Picasso or Matisse, that first got me excited about the possibilities of abstraction. While I was in art school studying illustration, heavily involved in anatomy and figure drawing, I went to the Brooklyn Museum and was completely transfixed by Davis’ The Mellow Pad. I stood in front staring at the piece for about 20 or 30 min and it was all I could think about for days – the movement, the colors, the energy, the shapes and forms dancing and swinging across the surface were a revelation to me at the time.

In terms of abstract paintings that are built on flat shapes/planes of color, Davis’ work offers and interesting contrast with the work of Stanley Whitney’s or Hans Hofmann’s. While all three artists use flat planes of color to create spacial tensions and rhythmatic movements across the surface, in the examples of both Hofmann and Whitney we see color formed into geometrical shapes and planes, while Davis’ shapes are more organic (not biomorphic like Miro). The expression in each is totally different and unique.

Ghada Amer (American, born Egypt, 1963) / Red Diagonales / 2000 / Acrylic, embroidery, and gel medium on canvas / © Ghada Amer, Courtesy Gagosian Gallery. Private collection

February 16–October 19, 2008
Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, 4th Floor
Brooklyn Museum
www.brooklynmuseum.org

Ghada Amer: Love Has No End, the first U.S. survey of the renowned artist’s work, features some fifty pieces from every aspect of Amer’s career as a painter, sculptor, illustrator, performer, garden designer, and installation artist. These include the iconic Barbie Loves Ken, Ken Loves Barbie (1995/2002), The Reign of Terror (2005), and Big Black Kansas City Painting—RFGA (2005), as well as a generous selection of works never before exhibited in this country.

While she describes herself as a painter and has won international recognition for her abstract canvases embroidered with erotic motifs, Ghada Amer is a multimedia artist whose entire body of work is infused with the same ideological and aesthetic concerns. The submission of women to the tyranny of domestic life, the celebration of female sexuality and pleasure, the incomprehensibility of love, the foolishness of war and violence, and an overall quest for formal beauty, constitute the territory that she explores and expresses in her art. In addition to the erotic paintings for which she is most famous, numerous works devoted to world politics are exhibited, including some of her more recent antiwar pieces.

Ghada Amer: Love Has No End is organized for the Brooklyn Museum by Maura Reilly, Ph.D., Curator of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art.

Also check out this slides show of the installation: http://www.flickr.com/photos/brooklyn_museum/sets/72157603916575553/show/

Ron Ehrlich / Emerald Glimpse / 2006 / Oil, mixed media on panel / 59 x 59 inches
© Courtesy of the artist and Gallery Camino Real. www.gallerycaminoreal.net

Excerpt from Gallery Camino Real

American painter Ron Ehrlich achieves rich surfaces and subtleties of tone by melding the three dimensional techniques of vessel-making with the spontaneity and vitality of painting. Working on panel, wielding a blowtorch as well as a brush, the brilliant colorist creates an art both vigorous and contemplative.

Ehrlich attacks his work with an energy that is exciting to behold. Watching him paint is an electrifying experience – marking, gashing, splashing, burning, tossing, scraping, and brushing. Ehrlich moves around his studio with an astonishing vitality: enlisting paint, raw pigment, wax, and marble dust to add to the pastiche of his surface materials. He reaches to add an elegant curving line of crayon, hurls an industrial size brush-load of paint in a sudden graceful arcing toss, then meticulously blowtorches a melting stream of paint, flames trailing his gesture.

With a rare level of skill and this complex methodology he tackles his paintings with a contrasting muscularity and intellectual vigor.

The art of Ron Ehrlich is suffused with the vitality and power of nature, which seems to be his underlying narrative. [Read more...]

Carroll Dunham. (American, born 1949). Age of Rectangles. 1983-85. Casein, dry pigment, vinyl paint, casein emulsion, color pencil, charcoal, carbon pencil, and ink on rosewood, birch, ash, and mahogany, three panels and one inset, 7′ 8″ x 58″ (233.7 x 147.3 cm). Gift of Emily Fisher Landau. © 2008 Carroll Dunham. www.moma.org

Today is a Carroll Dunham day. After coming across Sharon Butler’s post on Two Coats of Paint I started trolling around and came across this painting on moma’s site. Dunham’s work is a lot of fun to look at and I can spend a long time with his work. His use of materials is fascinating and inspires me to push and develop my own work. It’s also funny that the title of this painting alludes to my point yesterday when describing my impressions of the Color Charts: Reinventing Color 1950 to Today currently showing at MOMA and I said that the dominate forms seem to be rectangles, squares, or pixels.

Excerpt from moma.org

American painter. He completed a BA at Trinity College, Hartford, CT, in 1971 and later settled in New York. Initially influenced by Post-Minimalism, process art and conceptual art, he was soon attracted to the tactility and allusions to the body in the work of Brice Marden, Robert Mangold and Robert Ryman. Spurred on by the revival of interest in Surrealism in the 1970s, Dunham began to make abstract, biomorphic paintings reminiscent of the work of Arshile Gorky and André Masson, executed with a comic twist enhanced by lurid colours and the suggestion of contemporary psychedelia. In the 1980s he began to paint on wood veneer and rose to prominence in the context of a broader return to painting in the period. Age of Rectangles (1983–5; New York, MOMA) is a highly abstract composition of differing forms, symptomatic of his work at this time: geometric sketches co-exist with eroticized organic shapes while the forms of the wood veneer show through the surface of the paint to suggest surging forces. Towards the end of the 1980s he began to move towards single, dominating motifs; wave-like forms were particularly common. In the Integrated Paintings series he applied paint-covered balls and chips to the surface of the canvas to further develop the sense of organic life. Mound A (1991; priv. col.) is typical of Dunham’s work of the early 1990s in which his forms began to resemble mounds of live matter, covered in orifices. Around 1993 his paintings began to feature schematic, cartoon figures which suggest the influence of Philip Guston.

Morgan Falconer
From Grove Art Online

© 2007 Oxford University Press