It’s Not Old Jersey: “The New Jersey Show” of the Art Students League of New York
Jersey City, N.J. –Works from more 30 New Jersey artists will be featured June 12-14 at the “The New Jersey Show,” at the 113 Design Co., 930 Newark Avenue, Loft #6 in Jersey City. Organized by the Exhibition Outreach program of the Art Students League of New York, the show includes traditional and contemporary work in all media and demonstrates the range of art-making happening both in Jersey and at the League.

Curated by the League’s John Baber, the show features works by Tim Anderson, Konstantine Angelopoulos*, Sherwin Banfield *, Marlene Bloom*, Elizabeth Bolden*, Dave Bruno, Sauman Choy*, Carole Dakake*, C.L. DeMedeiros*, Ricardo Devia*, Julieanne Dellert*, Christian Dobish, John Doyle*, George Ebbinghousen*, Lilian R. Engel, Mitsuko Finkelstein, Gordon Fraser*, Alex French*, Ed Giorgano*, Jean Graham*, Akihiro Ito, Jaine Jacobs*, Sharon Kendrick*, Joan Lesemann*, Tony Loftman*, John Mandile, Carole McDermott*, Laura Mae Noble, Berto Noso*, Satoshi Okada*, Adina Padden*, James Renzie Prater*, Louise A. Reid*, Cristian Ramirez, Ed Rochat*, Allon Schemool, Geoff Schmit, Brent Scowden*, Hanna Seiman*, Ella Sherman*, Margie Steinmann, Yoko Suetsugu, Tom Tacik*, Josh Torin*, Edward Vander Veld*, Matt White*, and Juan Gabriel Zorilla*.
(* Denotes New Jersey artists.)

Hours June 12-14 are: Friday reception: 6-10pm (free shuttle bus from the show to Journal Square PATH station); Saturday: 12-5 pm, and Sunday: 12-4 pm.

This exhibition is generously supported by the George A Ohl, Jr. Trust Foundation.

About the Art Students League
Founded in 1875 by artists, for artists, the Art Students League of New York provides affordable, studio-based art education of the highest quality to anyone with the interest in making art. Great artists have trained, taught, and exhibited at the League and enriched its community. Apprenticeships, classes, lectures, workshops, exhibitions, and residencies uphold the League’s commitments to support “artists and students who intend to make art a profession” and to cultivate “a spirit of fraternity among art students.”

Google Map:
930 Newark Ave, Jersey City, NJ 07306

I’ll have four pieces in the show…sneek peak here

Today seems to be about color, but as I look around my cube all I see is black white and gray. OH NO……… I’ve got to get out and get down to see this exhibit at the Painting Center in Soho.

Placing Color is an exhibition that explores painting as both a place of action and destination. The exhibition presents paintings by three artists: Brett Baker, Kayla Mohammadi, and Carrie Patterson. Seen together, the artists’ intensely individual approaches create places that are both intimate and immense, unified by sensitivity to the means of painting in ways of touch and color.

Painting, the simple means of placing color on a flat surface, is extraordinary in its ability to transport us from the context of our daily existence to new places – complete, vibrant worlds within the boundaries of a two-dimensional frame. Placing Color seeks to reposition the works by the participating artists beyond an interpretation of painting as a site of illusion. The exhibition extends the notion of the painted surface itself as a location or a destination that is defined by the artist’s actions upon it.{Read More…}

Brett Baker / untitled / oil on canvas / 96 x 108 inches / 2006 / www.brettbakerpaintings.com

www.brettbakerpaintings.com

Carrie Patterson / 18 Feet St. Francis Xavier / Acrylic on Linen / 2008 / www.carriepatterson.com

www.carriepatterson.com

Kayla Mohammadi / Here and Now II / 2006 / oil on canvas / 30" x 40" / www.kaylamohammadi.com

www.kaylamohammadi.com

Leon Berkowitz / Cathedral #3/23 / c 1966 / oil on canvas / 90 x 72 inches / Gary Snyder Art Projects

Leon Berkowitz was one of the early abstract artists in the Washington DC area, and he helped organize the Washington Workshop, which brought together Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, Thomas Downing, Howard Mehring and Gene Davis in the 1950s. He was chairman of the painting department at The Corcoran Gallery’s School of Art from 1969 until his death.

James Pilgrim, curator of the Corcoran exhibition, wrote about the Cathedral series:

“In his Cathedral series Berkowitz established a pictorial format through which he could use light to create form. The narrow white triangle that splits the canvas acts, symbolically, as a light source. Light seems to move laterally from this core, creating changes in color intensity (the changes actually result from light reflecting through varying densities of pigment). Light also seems to move horizontally through subtle color changes from cold to warm to cold. The changes in color and intensity produce an undulating spatial effect, a feeling of advance and recession from the picture plane. These horizontal movements are balanced by the tendency of light to shoot upward through shimmering columns of color. Thus a formal tension is established between the horizontal and the vertical.”

Open through May 2nd @ Gary Snyder Project Space 250 West 26th Street, www.garysnyderart.com

On a bitterly cold Thurday night, I scampered into Betty Cunningham and saw Clytie Alexander’s punched aluminum Diaphans. The pieces seemed to have a quiet serenity to them and remained aloof to the all the hubbub and commotion of the opening. I’d like to go back and watch them for a while with the changing light of day that filters in through the roof of the gallery.

While Art Green’s abstract paintings did not seem to get as much attention as Clark V. Fox’s  Obama portraits in the back gallery space, the saturated colours got me thinking about animation cells again.

Coming on the heals of the Obama Art discussion with Sharon Butler at Pocket Utopia, here are some Obama portraits by Clark V. Fox currently on view at the Cue Art Foundation.

I went to the New Museum on Saturday to see the Mary Heilmann, To be Someone and Elizabeth Peyton,  Live Forever shows, which I hadn’t had a chance to get to before. I started up on the 4th floor in the Peyton exhibit and walked my way down.  I’ve always been attracted to the colours and sensitivity of Elizabeth Peyton’s work, especially the drawings. However, probably because I don’t really care about Kurt Cobain or Jarvis, I found myself on Saturday really looking at the grounds of her paintings and how she prepares the surface. In fact, I found the thick, sometimes smooth sometimes uneven white grounds with rough edges to be the most interesting aspect of the paintings. They provided both an interesting textural contrast to the really loose and thin paint that she uses and added a brightness/luminosity to her colours. My wife, Sauman, who’s not a huge fan or Peyton’s work, pointed out to me that none of her subjects smile, ever, which gave a strong sense of sadness or loneliness or isolation, despite the seeming intimacy of the people and everyday scenes depicted in her work.

It was such a contrast then to walk into the galleries of the Mary Heilmann exhibition which struck me as fun, playful, light and airy. I had never heard of Mary Heilmann before this exhibition and I am not familiar  at all with her work beyond the little bit that I read, but it really struck me as lacking any of the pretension of a lot of contemporary abstraction of the last 30 years. The zen phrase “nothing special,” that is used to refer to the ordinariness or everyday mind, kept popping into my head as I walked through the exhibition. I don’t know why that kept coming up, maybe because I could just relax and really enjoy the paintings visually rather than having to think about them too hard, or that they had a playful everday presence about them. Sauman, on the other hand, wanted to know what was special about her paintings because it reminded her a lot of the work of some of our peers at the ASL or other work she has seen in Chelsea, whereas the ceramic work she found exciting.

There is an excerpt from an interview conducted by Richard Flood on the New Museum website that I found intersting:

RF: I’m sitting here looking at these amazing glazes on your ceramics. Do they have great importance to your use of paint?

MH: Right. In fact, when I went into painting, I really came in with a sculptor’s attitude and used the paint in a way that you use the clay. I thought of it as a physical thing. And so I really didn’t think of doing painting the way you think of drawing and painting, but more like the way you do sculpture. Pouring, casting, pressing, moulding. And then a color, red or orange or black, would be a physical material rather than a color you paint on. It’s a different way of configuring it.

The Elizabeth Peyton show closed yesterday, but the Mary Heilmann is up of another couple of weeks and is a fun treat.

Mary Heilmann, To Be Someone @ New Museum, 235 Bowery, thru 1/28

Katy Moran / Carla’s Garden  / 2007

Coming back to a contemporary abstract painter I have written about before, and whose work I was struck by back in the spring at the Andrea Rosen Gallery, I was google-stalking the London based painter Katy Moran. Hoping to find some new work or upcoming shows or something, I came across a video interview on the Tate website for an exhibition back in Feb-April 2008 called Strange Solution. Anyway, I thought Katy had some interesting comments on abstract painting, issues that Paul Ching-Bor and I, along some other painters, have been discussing recently at the Art Students League, particularly working from photos and images and pushing toward abstraction. Around the 1:05 mark she comments that for her it is about finding an image that is interesting enough to get started and then leaving that image at the right point. Check out the video here since I can’t post it to the blog. Below is a snippet of what she had to say.

‘They’re finished when I can see a figurative element in them … through the paint I’m searching for the thing it reminded me of, or suggested to me, and trying to get close to that thing.’ The exuberant spontaneity of the gesture is genuine rather than contrived, Moran comments, ‘When I’m making a painting, I get quite excited by how close to awful I can push it, while getting something quite lovely from it as well’.  {Read More…}

Crazy old coots make the train ride to the cubicle that much more enjoyable, especially if they are French, because they take themselves so seriously, of course…Wait, I do that…does that make me French???¿ So, I’m reading this book Colours by David Batchelor…Oh, and if you haven’t bought the book already go out and by it because I’m not going to key in the whole goddamn thing for you because that just wouldn’t be right, even though this IS the internets and nobody reads this thing anyway, I’m just plain lazy, who wants to do all that typing. So just buy the book, I mean I know we’re in THE RECESSION, and you lost all your monies to those fancy Wall Streeters and their ponzi schemes, but David Batchelor is an artist, even though he puts together these fancy books, and could use your money just like those guys at Merrill. And if you have some extra monies in your pocket buys a few copies for all your starving artist friends. But they have to be painters, because otherwise if it doesn’t have fancy words like Baudrillard or Roland Barthes or Julia Kristeva or Derrida or Adorno or Deluze or Yoko Ono or post-modern, then they won’t be interested. Oh, but they’re in here? Who knew that they had anything interesting to say about colour? Is everything always already colourful? How pomo!

Anyway, I digress….where was I…oh yes, crazy old french coots named Max Nordau who HATE colour and have giant stiff things rammed up their cooters.

…The curious style of certain recent painters – ‘impressionists,’ ‘stipplers,’ or ‘mosaists,’ ‘papilloteurs’ or ‘quiverers,’ [this guy is so gay isn't he?] ‘roaring’ coulourists, dyers in grey and faded tints – becomes at once intelligible to us if we keep in view the researches of the Charcot school into the visual derangements in degeneration and hysteria. The painters who assure us that they are sincere, and reproduce nature as they see it, speak the truth. The degenerate artist who suffers from nystagmus, or trembling of the eyeball, will in fact, perceive the phenomena of nature trembling, restless, devoid of firm outline, and if he is a conscientious painter, will give us pictures reminding us of the mode practised by the draughtsmen of the Fliegende Batter when they represent a wet dog shaking himself vigorously. If his pictures fail to produce a comic effect, it is only because the attentive beholder reads in them the desperate effort to reproduce fully an impression incapable of reproduction by the expedients of the painter’s art as devised by men of normal vision.

…Thus originate the violet pictures of Manet and his school, which spring from no actually observable aspect of nature, but from a subjective view due to the condition of the nerves. When the entire surface of walls in salons and art exhibitions of the day appears veiled in uniform half-mourning, this predilection for violet is simply an expression of the nervous debility of the painter… {Read More…}

Because of isolation lasting centuries, Chinese artists have developed their own world of images, without connections to what is produced in Europe and the United States. The case of the Yi School is highly significant. Although it was born at the margin of the abstract art and conceptual art that have dominated the Western art world in recent decades, it maintains points of contact with these two. It is art lived as an experience of retreat and meditation that explores contemplation, unity and harmony. The extraordinary development of the People’s Republic of China in recent years and the opening of new pathways of communication and business with the West have stimulated the world’s interest in Chinese culture.  After its presentation in Barcelona, ”la Caixa” Social and Cultural Outreach Projects is taking to CaixaForum Madrid the first major exhibition of the Yi School outside China, organized jointly with the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Culture and the Beijing Culture & Art Foundation. The exhibition introduces eighty-two works by forty-eight Chinese artists of the last thirty years, divided into three periods. Yi art from the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) until the 1980s is characterized by an idealized humanism in opposition to the revolutionary slogans (Yi xiang, “mental image”). The second period is when art at a time of urban and cosmopolitan expansion recovers private spaces and incorporates Eastern symbols and writing (Yi li, “mental principle”). The third period, Maximalism (Yi chang, “mental environment”), arose at the end of the 1990s and devotes its main attention to the process and the context of the art work.

A few months ago, to coincide with the opening of a Representative Office of ”la Caixa” in Beijing, an exhibition of fifteen works by international artists from the ”la Caixa” Foundation’s Collection of Contemporary Art was put on at the Beijing Art Museum of Imperial City. The Yi School: Thirty Years of Chinese Abstract Art represents its counterpoint. It is designed to bring the general public in our country closer to an artistic school that has had decisive weight in Chinese plastic art from the 1970s until now and to make the work of some of today’s leading Chinese creative artists better known.

The Yi School is defined as an artistic tendency in China, based for the last three decades on the aesthetic essence of Yi. It is distinct both from contemporary literature and conceptual art and from Eastern abstract art. In Chinese aesthetics, Yi does not mean just subjective thought, even though it is a fruit of our mind. It is not precisely equivalent to the terms concept, idea or significance, but represents a state of contemplation and meditation by creative artists, the way that artists or poets think about their surroundings or observe them. In this respect, the Yi School is the artistic style best suited to expressing meditation.

If we think that Yi is related not just to the thought of the artists, but also to the real environment and the objectives of meditation, the Yi School cannot be defined by any modern Western concept such as realist art, conceptual art or abstract art, even though it may look like all these tendencies, especially abstract art. In reality, the Yi School brings together almost all the characteristics of these three tendencies without restricting itself to any one of them in particular. This responds to a norm that has always governed traditional Chinese aesthetics, to stop art becoming excessively diverted towards the extremes.

In terms of expression of Yi, the artists have focused in different periods on different aspects of Yi. For example, at the end of the 1970s, during the Cultural Revolution, a series of non-official artists sought individual freedom in opposition to Mao’s propagandistic art. In this context, the Yi School focused on the search for individual expression and for “pure art” against “conceptualized” political art. The Yi School was expressed in the aesthetic form of Yi xiang or “mental image”. Artists sought unity and harmony between concepts and objects of nature, during the process of thinking about and observing the external world. Then the representatives of the Yi School at the end of the 1980s paid greater attention to expressing their ideas about the way to reform reality and cultural modernity through cultural signs. In this period, the Yi School defended symbolic concepts, the essence and start of an ideal culture and society. As such, the Yi School during this period is called Yi li or “mental principle”. Thus the Yi School of this epoch represents Yi Chiang or “mental environment”. Creating works of art is equivalent to meditating in a private space.

Yi School – 30 Years of Chinese AbstractArt
4 June – 21 Sept 2008.
CaixaForum,
Av. Marqués de Comillas, 6-8
Barcelona

Read a nice review of the show at Blog on Art in Barcelona