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 

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/