Unfortunately I missed the Leon Golub show at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, I like what  Jonathan Smit has to say in his Brooklyn Rail review of the show.

It’s no doubt commonplace to say that selection is an intrinsic aspect of the creative process. Artists make choices and the sum of the choices they make defines them. Someone who has chosen to be a painter, say, rather than a composer, or a poet, or, more immediately, a sculptor, must then choose how to paint and what to paint. It is at this point, if not previously, that the complexities of fashion and the marketplace, the terms of the artist’s engagement with their historical moment, the influences of predecessors and peers, ambition, aesthetic, and philosophical affinities, and probably most importantly, the artist’s notion of the value and function of art, of culture, enter the equation. {Read More…}

A Discussion About Abstraction with Thomas Nozkowski and Dana Schutz

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.

Stanley Whitney / SunRa / 2006 / oil on linen / 40 x 40 in.(cm. 102 x 102) / © Stanley Whitney. Courtesy of Stanley Whitney and Esso Gallery

Thanks to Tyler Green at Modern Art Notes for directing me to Stanley Whitney’s work. Having been inspired by the Color Charts exhibition at MoMA, I’ve been in the studio experimenting with the color exercises of Joseph Albers so I was quite struck with Whitney’s paintings and his use of colors.

John Yau in the Brooklyn Rail has a good review of an exhibition of Whitney’s paintings back in 2006. While he focuses mostly on composition and the rhythmatic effect of the juxtaposition of colors, I am curious to see the surface and how the colors are applied. Are the colors opaque, transparent, layered, mixed, pure, etc. Also, with the Albers exercises, I have been studying the light quality of colors and how the character of the color and the light of the color is changed by juxtapositions. Color is light and color is relative. As Hans Hofmann states, “Color in itself is light. In nature, light creates the color; in the picture, color creates light. Every color shade emanates a very characteristic light–no substitute is possible.” I am interested to see character of the light in Whitney’s paintings. How the colors interact, how each color is changed by its neighbors, and finally how the fit together as a whole the color effect of the whole piece.

Excerpt from John Yau’s review,

Whitney works out of a tradition that includes Mondrian, Jackson Pollock, and Alma Thomas. He is a fiercely independent painter who makes no attempt to charm or impress the viewer, and in that regard is the peer of Bill Jensen and Harriet Korman, self-determined abstract artists who have never been swayed by fashion.[Read more...]