Jack Mottram in The Hearld writes:

Explosion of work on the Richter scale
Next come the abstracts of the 1980s, huge works full of eye-popping colour, with paint spread in dense layers only to be removed, revealing the progression from blank canvas to completed work. These are not just abstract paintings, but a commentary on abstract painting. Richter has no time for the boozy heroics of Jackson Pollock; instead, he has developed a series of actions and processes to produce abstract images emphasised by his layering and removal of paint.{Read More…}

There are layers of satire, too, with Richter undermining the anarchic, intense stereotypes of abstract expressionism with his precise manipulation of surfaces, and pointing wryly to the blurring of his paintings from photographs each time he scrapes his squeegee across a canvas to form a hard-edged line. {Read More…}

I just got to see an excellent small exhibit right now at Tina Kim Gallery juxteposing 2 paintings each of De Kooning, Mitchell, and Richter from the 1980s. There are a couple of things I find interesting about comparing the work of these three artists. First, we see three distinct possibilities for abstraction – abstracting the figure (De Kooning); abstracting landscape (Mitchell); invented or created realities (Richter). Second, we see the development of three distinct treatments of pictorial space. De Kooning’s space is shallow, hovering right at the picture plane, built up with overlapping shapes and the interplay of positive and negative space. Mitchell’s space is voluminous, built up with broken strokes of color on color, and swelling out of the picture plane. Richter creates a deep atmospheric space through the relation of differing paint applications, color, and surface texture.

Despite their differences in gender, nationality and age, each worked solitarily throughout this era that was dominated largely by bombastic new voices, quietly producing what are still regarded as some of the most virtuosic works in their respective oeuvres. Though all of the works in this exhibition can be categorized under the same general rubric of “abstract painting”, each artist approached the canvas from a unique perspective. This juxtaposition of these six large-scale works provokes questions of process, intent and composition that are among the most fundamental to the genre of painting.

Willem de Kooning (1904-1997) / Untitled XII / 1985 / Oil on canvas / 79 9/10 x 70 1/10 inches, 203 x 178 cm / tinakimgallery.com

Joan Mitchell (1925-1992) / Grande Vallée II (Amaryllis) / 1983 / Oil on canvas / 86 x 75 1/2 inches, 218.4 x 191.8 cm / tinakimgallery.com

Gerhard Richter / Georg / 1981 / Oil on canvas / 78 3/4 x 78 3/4 inches, 200 x 200 cm / tinakimgallery.com

De Kooning, Mitchell, Richter @ Tina Kim Gallery, 545 West 25th Street, 3rd Floor through 11/15

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...]

Tyler Green at Modern Art Notes has just finished his week long review/discussion of the Amy Sillman show currently at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. We can’t
get enough…

Amy Sillman layers paint over layers of paint the way Richard Diebenkorn did. Sometimes she loads up her brush like Park, Bischoff or other Bay Area School types. She shmears wet paint across a canvas like Gerhard Richter. Sometimes she dabs it on almost tentatively, as Guston did in his great Turneresque abstractions.

Then there are the compositions themselves. Her diagonals reject a painter’s tendency to grid, the same way Diebenkorn’s did circa Ocean Park. This one recalls Lee Bontecou’s delicate, small hanging sculptures from 1967. A green, red and gray section on the right-hand side of I (2008, below) seems informed by those atmospheric Gustons. The vaguely cartoony shapes in several of the paintings here (including this one) abstract Carroll Dunham’s body parts. And Sillman’s stitching together of seemingly disparate swatches of sometimes garish color and pattern recall 1980s David Hockney. Sillman’s rejection of a traditional, harmonious, palette reminds me of of abstraction from about that period, including Howard Hodgkin, Jonathan Lasker and Thomas Nozkowski.

Critical Response
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

I finally got up to Moma to see the Color Charts exhibition. The first thought I had when I walked in was how much our experience of color has been influenced by technology. Pixels. It’s as if artists have been reduced to pixels pushers in our use of color. Then it dawned on me that the rectangle (pixel) has become the primary gestalt in the last 60 years. The subtext of the show is definitely about rectangles, grids, and squares, or in the terms of the curator, charts.

What’s interesting is that the title of the show Color Charts: Reinventing Color 1950 to Today seems to imply that artists have been engaged in a radical project of color exploration or that our knowledge of color and the use of color has been greatly expanded. Actually I found the opposite to be the case. With a few exceptions, the artists in the show use color in a rather homogeneous and limited manner. But, I guess that’s the point standardization, mechanization, commercialization. For the most part color is the stuff for conceptual and perceptual games. The stuff of entertainment or decoration. The spice of consumption. An accent.

As a painter, the show reminded me of the importance of color exercises the need to develop and nurture color sensitivity, but that there is a limit to the exercises and that exercises are just that exercises and not works of art. The methods of Johannes Itten and Joseph Albers for the Bauhaus and that have now become standard fare at art schools are helpful in developing color sensitivity, but they are limited. Color cannot be studied in isolation. It is interdependent with our materials. The color of paper and its use in collage is different than the color of pigment and its use in paint. Or the color of pixels and their use in video. Color is a language, a language that great painters master. The use of color is a craft skill developed simultaneously with the other craft skills of painting. The pieces in the show helped stimulate my awareness of color, and when I left and wandered through the other galleries of Moma I felt blown away by the use of color by painters up until 1950. Matisse, Gorky, Mitchell, Diebenkorn, just to name a few. Much more diverse and much more sophisticated and much more sensitive. In their hands color is not just a concept, a game, or a decorative element, but the stuff painterly expression. They give color life and the color gives life to their paintings. Finally, and more importantly, we see that color comes in many shapes and forms, not just rectangles, squares, and grids. It is the language they speak, not just an accent.