Mary Heilmann / Weave / 1992 / Oil on canvas / 40 1/8 x 30 inches / Spanierman Modern

Don Christensen / Eastbound / 2008 / Oil-based enamel on wood / 31 x 22 inches / Spanierman Modern

Chris Martin / Crystal / 2007 / Oil and spray paint on canvas / 31 x 26 inches / Spanierman Modern

Present Tense: A group exhibition curated by Don Christensen with Mary Heilmann
Spanierman Modern
June 12 – August 2, 2008

The works were selected on the basis of their ability to produce instant and visceral responses in the viewer, without the necessity of contextualization.  The artists included share a preoccupation with eccentric structures and tend toward the use of unexpected materials and techniques.  Working in the abstract formalist tradition, they seek new vocabulary and materials, redefining their boundaries, even to the degree of leaving the confines of the canvas altogether. Diverse in the methods by which they were created, the works in Present Tense reveal the boundless potential now associated with abstraction and demand our immediate engagement with the objects before us.

Gerhard Richter / Derwisch 12.3.97 / 1997 / 12.6 cm x 17.9 cm / Watercolour on paper / www.gerhard-richter.com

I did not know Richter worked with watercolor. The watercolor abstracts are interesting, seem lighter and more playful than his oil abstracts.

The 2001 Retrospective at MOMA displayed how diverse Richter’s paintings are. His early work is of blurred figurative paintings, both with and without colour followed by seductive abstract paintings, with a colour palette that is either brilliant or subdued. His surprisingly diverse range of work has received prolonged discussion from critics, especially due to Richter’s disregard for “traditional” stylistic progression and his use of photographs. [Read more...]

Shahzia Sikander / Pathology of Suspension #10 / 2005 / Ink and gouache on prepared paper / 77.5 x 51.5 in. / Sikkema Jenkins & Co.

Shahzia Sikander / Dissonance to Detour / 2005 / STILL from digital animation / Sikkema Jenkins & Co.

Watch video here…

I am a contemporary artist who grew up in Pakistan but my professional life has been outside of Pakistan from age 22. Though the early part of my career as an artist was established primarily in New York, I have been working on projects around the world in the last several years. I find the terminology and the referencing of work in terms of an east and west paradigm, simplistic and dated. It robs the work of all nuances in meaning. In fact these days the world is small and one should really consider work in terms of some sort of global context of ideas. Work I believe should stand on its own, irrespective of geography. I address the work primarily through the lens of an idea and a related project and there is no place where I could not work.

Shahzia Sikander

zhang daqian (chang dai-chien) / brown landscape

Unquestionably one of the most important Chinese painters of the Twentieth Century, Chang Daichien has been compared to Picasso in many exhibition essays and catalogs. That analogy is often accompanied by evidence of their ‘summit’ in 1956 at Picasso’s Mediterranean villa, La California, but is meant to more generally suggest the breadth of the artist’s fame, unparalleled productivity and stylistic variety, and charismatic personality.1 Unique in the mastery of historical styles dating back to the 9th Century, reintroduction of brilliant color with painterly modeling, and grand synthesis of these traditions with aspects of Euro-American Impressionism and Abstract Expressionism, Chang Dai-chien is a singular giant of Chinese painting.
Yet even though the artist lived half of his career in the West and a decade in California, his work remains virtually unknown in the American artworld except in the Chinese American community and among scholars. This obscurity is especially surprising in light of the high visibility afforded Asian American artists including Isamu Noguchi, Chang Dai-chien’s contemporary (1904-1988), and contemporary artist Hung Liu. Because ink painting is segregated academically and rarely presented in American museums, there is a widespread lack of familiarity about its traditions, aesthetics and practitioners. Perhaps as few non-Chinese can read inscriptions, rapid or casual appreciation is limited for many. James Cahill has written that Chinese paintings can appear “small and flat and hard to penetrate” to Westerners, in contrast with the seeming “forcefulness and immediacy” of European paintings; conversely, Cahill adds that Chinese painting experts sometimes complain about European painting lacking variety in brushwork.2 Chang Dai-chien felt quite differently, protesting “some people complain that Chinese landscapes are plain while the trees are flat. But this is absolutely false.3 Even though his work is resolutely rooted in Chinese painting traditions, Chang Dai-chien felt “there is no rigid line of demarcation between Chinese painting and Western painting,” except perhaps “in the media and materials of the painter” and “in regional divergence in custom. [Read more...]

Rebecca Horn / Tree of Winter Dew Drops / 2007 / pencil, colored pen, acrylic, and India ink on paper / paper: 71 5/8 x 59 1/8 inches (182 x 150 cm) framed: 81 1/2 x 68 3/4 inches / Sean Kelly Gallery

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

Bridget Riley

Music of Silence IV / 24” x 24” / 2007 / silverpoint / acrylic on wood / © Susan Schwalb. All Rights Reserved. www.susanschwalb.com

I have always been attracted to the mystery and luminosity in silverpoint drawings. I have experiemented with silverpoint and find the technique fascinating – from the delicacy of touch to the tarnishing. Schwalb’s work is the first I have seen where it used in abstraction and in combination with color. I find Schwalb’s work and Agnes Martin’s to be some of the best examples of minimalism.

Excerpt from Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art
Feminist Art Base: Susan Schwalb

Susan Schwalb is one of the foremost figures in the revival of the ancient technique of silverpoint drawing in America. Most of the contemporary artists who draw with a metal stylus continue the tradition of Leonardo and Durer by using the soft, delicate line for figurative imagery. By contrast, Schwalb’s work is resolutely abstract, and her handling of the technique is extremely innovative. Paper is torn and burned to provide an emotionally free and dramatic contrast to the precise linearity of silverpoint. In other works, silverpoint is combined with flat expanses of acrylic paint or gold leaf. Sometimes, subtle shifts of tone and color emerge from the juxtaposition of a wide variety of metals. In recent works, Schwalb abandons the stylus altogether in favor of wide metal bands that achieve a shimmering atmosphere reminiscent of the luminous transparency of watercolor. [Read more...]

www.susanschwalb.com