Emily Warner talks about the monumentality of small abstract paintings in her Brooklyn Rail review of Suitcase Paintings: Small Scale Abstract Expressionism

These works are particular in their details and insistent on the profusion they convey. Concurrent with the drive toward monumentality is a striving for the contracted and claustrophobic, a sort of qualitative smallness. In these pages, John Yau recently alluded to the “density” and “compactness” of Charles Seliger’s work, noting that “our eyes cannot take them in with one glance.” It is an observation one makes again and again with many of the works in Suitcase Paintings. You do not look at them but rather peer into their interiors, picking your way across their fictive and textural forms.

These denser, tighter works invite a focused and expansive gaze, penetrating and loose. If the monumental works assert their presence in our space (making an impact from across the room, or disturbing one’s sense of bodily orientation), these smaller ones pull us eyes first into their space. Of course, the dichotomy is not absolute. Like the Cubist grid that insidiously asserts itself in all-over gesture painting, density has an alarming way of precipitating the monumental, and vice versa. {Read More…}

Simone Lanzenstiel / O.T. / 2007 / Acrylic and spray paint on cotton / 200 cm x 230 cm  / Barbara Gross Galerie

From Art Knowledge News

The artist begins with imaginary and immediate elements, such as pavement, construction scaffolding, graffiti, or blotches of paint on the floor of her studio. This recourse to found markings is a breakaway move from the conventional means of painting.

Simone Lanzenstiel develops her painting as a series of actions on the canvas. She shakes, splashes, sprays, brushes, scrawls, and wipes – in an apparently accidental, fleeting manner. This creates free, open zones, light and soaring. In contrast, colors are varied and re-worked until they are finally condensed into painterly figures and powerful accents of color; this finely attuned balance lends rhythm to the work.

The artist prefers to work with acrylics and enamel sprays in predominantly cool, brilliant tones, such as blue, green, purple, and magenta. Each painting is specified by a precise color composition, dominated by white. White is used as ground and mask – it is a color and a non-color, passive and active. White simultaneously limits and intensifies the space in which all of the other colors are expressed. Strong and gentle color gradients cover the entire surface of the picture, only coming to an abrupt stop at the edges of the painting. Hence, the paintings seem to have been removed from a larger context, and yet they expand far into the space. {Read More…}

Simone Lanzenstiel’s work featured at Barbara Gross Galerie

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…}

From the ArtCollectors

Layered Days, Jose Parla’s latest exhibition and first solo show in New York, is on view now at Christina Grajales.  The show presents a new body of  paintings, adorned in layers upon layers of Parla’s signature abstract lettering and textures. Here, the artist’s graffiti roots combine with modern abstract expressionism, conjuring up recollections of both Cy Twombly and Jackson Pollock. In addition, a wall installation builds upon Parla’s themes of history and story telling, through an array of artifacts and photographs combined with original canvas, wood, and ceramic pieces. A hard cover catalog has been published to commemorate the exhibit, and Parla graciously decorated fan’s copies on opening night. Layered Days is on view till Dec. 20.

Jose Parla – Layered Days
Nov. 8 – Dec. 20
Christina Grajales Gallery
10 Green Street, 4th Floor
NY, NY 10013

Jeremy Gilbert Rolfe chats with David Shapiro in a 1987 Bomb Magazine interview

DS I guess the usual question asked of you, and we should hear your answer again, is why you intransigently keep to the idea of “good painting,” in an era of bad manners, Warholism, and absurdism. Since you have praised Smithson and Joel Shapiro, you are not dogmatically “about” abstract painting, but your response to abstraction is perhaps the C major of your work, or how would you deal with this topic?

JG-R I am of course pleased that you should ask me this question although at the same time I must say you’ve put it in a form which seems to me to be a little odd. I mean I make abstract paintings so my work is at that level not “about” abstract painting at all, it is abstract painting. As to my critical work, I hope I have by now made it reasonably clear that I don’t write about things from a point of view which, intentionally at least, seeks to valorize or privilege other things. I think I am mostly interested in thought, and seek to treat it properly with regards to its context and address wherever I might encounter it in an interesting form. As to abstraction, the questions which interest me are those having to do with the space of painting. Space as an invisibility made visible. That seems to me to be the province of abstract painting and, in my case, for the possibility of articulating relationships of non-relationship. I am interested in complexity, and it seems to me that abstract painting is an art in which one can have complexity as opposed to invoking it. {Read More…}

Eva Hesse / No title / c. 1962 / Oil on canvas / 49.5 x 49.5 inches / Andrea Rosen Gallery

Willem de Kooning
Lucio Fontana
Eva Hesse

In cooperation with
The Willem de Kooning Foundation and
The Estate of Eva Hesse

October 25 – December 6, 2008
Andrea Rosen Gallery
525 w 24th St.

All of the works in this exhibition display a sense of violence, uncertainty and aggression, and yet, are bound together by their abundantly joyful palette. Evoking a tension between abstraction and figuration, the figure in all of these works is present as much as it is not.

Hesse’s work in this exhibition were made following a much more figurative body of paintings and just precede her transition to a sculptural practice and like so much painting being made in the early 1960s, have an indebtedness to de Kooning and his ethereal line between abstraction and figuration. As Helen Molesworth astutely notes, Hesse’s early production is marked by “jumbles of energetic abstraction held in a kind of violent contrapusto with figuration.” {Read More…}

Duston Spear / MONSTERS NIGHT / Collaged oil paintings, work clothes, spray paint, wax on canvas / 67 X 76 inches / 2008 / Sara Tecchia Roma Gallery

 RORSCHACH TALES
Duston Spear’s most recent series of paintings, ‘Rorschach Tales’ will make up her third solo exhibition with STRNY (September – October 2009). In these works Spear has combined the applied graffiti of ‘Read’,(2005), with the iconic imagery of ‘Delivered’, (2007) and added the narrative intent of Japanese scroll paintings to assemble a codex of fictional battles. Miniature warriors fill the flattened scene charging on yellow grounds, the thin blue horizon line marks the ageless conflict below. The center of each canvas is dominated by a Rorschach-like form filled with her old paint clothes stenciled with words that are unreadable in this palimpsest incarnation. Tiny figures are curved out of cut up paintings and collaged onto the surface- horses rear, bulls race across the stage, archers toss their painted arrows, battalions of warriors shoot spray paint from their rifles at the unknown Rorschachian thing that stales the armies. The scene is frozen in it’s activity, the site is abstract in its figuration. {Read More…}

Judith Godwin Early Abstractions
September 3, 2008 – January 4, 2009, Tobin Theatre Arts Gallery, Brown Gallery, www.mcnayart.org

The earliest paintings in the show resemble cell structures, with graphic black lines defining the interlocking forms within a matrix of colors that seem to refer to cubism. Another early work, “Nucleus IV,” contains references to the nude figure. “Male Study” and “Woman” are more complex arrangements that resemble early de Kooning. But more neutral space became a key part of her style when she began to experiment with pours and stains, such as “Ode to Kenzo,” which introduces an element of Asian minimalism.

Gradually, her style becomes looser, more painterly and more dramatic. “Purple Mountain” has a peak punching through the top of the picture plane, with the landscape defined by broad, dark brushstrokes. “Night” and “Blue Storm” use dark blues and blacks with accents of gold and brown to suggest the fierce energy of nature. “Black Cross” features a soaring black cross with a broken arm.

A few of the strongest works deal more with psychological states, such as “Longing.” More horizontal paintings with dramatic dark blotches against a white background such as “Into the Depth” and “Maze” seem to be maps of the artist’s subconscious, with dark, violent emotions pushing and pulling against a curtain of light. In these later paintings, Godwin pared down color and emphasized dramatic brush marks.

However, as Sims explains in his essay, while Godwin’s early work seemed to avoid anything that can be described as feminine, her more recent work has more womanly touches — introducing collage elements, such as black sequins and ribbons set into the pigments, and using rounder, more organic shapes. She also uses lighter colors. {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

Cecily Brown / Skulldiver IV / 2006-2007 / Oil on linen / 85 x 89 inches  (215.9 x 226.1 cm) / gagosian.com

Willem de Kooning. (American, born the Netherlands. 1904-1997). Woman, I. 1950-52. Oil on canvas, 6′ 3 7/8″ x 58″ (192.7 x 147.3 cm). Purchase. © 2008 The Willem de Kooning Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. moma.org

So I’ve been thinking this week about these two paintings and painters, specifically about how they develop their forms and the space of the paintings. If we look first at Skulldiver IV  we see that the figural elements are drawn and painted to develop a sense of volume. The legs and arms are cylindrical, in fact, the forshortening on her arm reminds me of the outstretched arms of the figure in Caravaggio’s Supper at Emmaeus that wants to reach out of the canvas. In the same way, the figure in Skulldiver IV nearly wants to fall out of the bottom of the canvas on to the floor of the gallery. This is important because it functions to draw the viewer into the scene as a voyeur or participant standing in the room with the copulating figures.

More to come…