Yuko Ueda / Memento / 36 x 44 inches / mixed media on canvas / 2008 / yuukoueda.com

What I focus on is expressive colors and harmony of materials. I use plenty of water with acrylic paint, making many thin paint layers to achieve depth of color and luminousity. Inspiration always comes from nature, life and the human spirit. With acrylic paint, I often use pastel, sand, metals, fabrics, paper and pencil. I try to reach a beauty of natural harmony by combining these materials with various colors. {Read More…}

Zhao Chunxiang (Chao Chung Hsiang; 1910-1991) / Calling You / diptych, ink and acrylic on paper / 183 x 177 cm / Private collection

Chao Chung Hsiang, as he is usually known, graduated from the Hangzhou National Academy of Art in 1939, and the following year was appointed by the Ministry of Education to work in the Northwest Artifacts Survey Group. He moved to Taiwan in 1948 and then traveled in Europe before settling in the United States in 1958. This abstract expressionist painting, which combines Chinese ink and acrylic color, is typical of his work of the period. He returned from New York to Sichuan in 1990, and died in Taiwan the following year. This work exemplifies a recurring trend among Chinese painters who were familiar with Western modernism to find points of intersection between ink painting and Abstract Expressionism.{Read More…}

Chen Shen Ping / Green River Flowing Through the Mountains / 15″ x 19″  [21" x 25" with silk brocade mat] 39 cm x 48 cm  [55 cm x 64 cm with silk brocade mat] / chinesepaintings.com

I’m intrigued by his use of colour and how the drawing sets up the structure that holds the loose colour in the composition. I definitely see the influence of Zhang Daqian At this point, I think the tightness of the drawn elements competes for attention with the loose colour elements. It sets up a strong contrast, which may be the point, a sort of restrained exuberance. Personally I’d like to see it pushed further, with the tight elements much more deconstructed as well as on a much larger scale. I think the danger is that it can become formulaic very quickly, I want to know what happens next.

Zhang Daqian / Peach Blossom Spring / 1983 / hanging scroll, ink and color on paper / 209.1 x 92.4 cm / Cemac Ltd.

Chang Dai-chien continued to develop his remarkable range of techniques after he left China in 1949. One particularly important breakthrough was his development, in the 1960s, of a bold technique of splashing ink and color on his paper. Although the results might seem to resemble action painting, Chang maintained throughout his life that his technique was Chinese, having been described in Tang dynasty texts on painting. He did not, thus, use the splashed ink technique in a purely abstract manner, but only to suggest real or imaginary landscapes. In this superb painting of his final years, his blue-and-green pigment is used to suggest a mythical paradise, the Peach Blossom Spring, where human discord was unknown. Although he never returned to mainland China, his work was admired and emulated by younger artists who came to know it after the Cultural Revolution. {Read More…}

Gordon Fraser / untitled / 2008 / watercolour, pastel, guache on paper / 44 x 30 inches (2 Panels) / gordonfraserfinearts.com

Khaled Al-Saai / The Sea: Poem by Mahmoud Darwish / watercolour, aquarell on paper / 2006 / Kashya Hildebrand

Al Saai works in an astonishing range of styles, from decorous classical modes, which he often uses for quotations from poetry, to radically inventive compositions, in which lettering is fragmented into fantastical, almost pictorial compositions. The breathtaking beauty of his work makes it immediately accessible to all.

The Thulth style of calligraphy is the strongest of the Arabic calligraphy styes, created during the Abbasid period in the 9th century in Baghdad.  Most of the letters in this style are the shape of a triangle at the top and the vowels are added as decoration.

The Diwany Jalii and the Thulth styles are the most decorative. They are influenced by three Islamic schools of calligraphy (Arabic, Persian and Ottoman).  Diwany evolved during the Ottoman Era (1670 to 1700). {Read More…}

Kentaro Fujioka / Untitled / Kentaro Fujioka / Acrylic, paper and burlap on canvas / 56 by 50 inches / 2007  / kentarofujioka.com

In this series Colors in Destruction, I’m most interested in the tension between ‘Destruction’ and ‘Construction.’ Everything is impermanent. There is the effort I make in constructing something; there is also beauty in destroying it.

Beauty appears where there is a lot of energy, no matter whether it is from something negative or positive. I have discarded the idea that destruction is negative. In fact, the act of destruction is the main method of my working on this series. Destruction simply cuts through dimensions and time. It reveals the relationship between colors which have been applied in different times and contexts. It does destroy the relationship in the present composition, but it discovers other possibilities of existence.

In the process of my work, the act of ‘Destruction’ entails the act of ‘Construction’. I start my painting with stretching raw canvas on the stretcher, then I stain the canvas and prime it. After the base structure is made, I repeat the process of layering on the surface with paint, strips of wood, paper and fabric. The choice of the color and the order is carefully made, not so much by planning, but rather by intuitive selection after a long observation on the recorded images of the previous state. The stronger the wood or paper or fabric is applied on the canvas, the higher the tension between layers becomes, it makes the effect of the torn surface more interesting. After days or sometimes weeks of layering, I intuitively stop layering. (the number of layers depends on the process of each painting, usually 20 to 30.) Then I start tearing off. This is also an intuitive process. Some part of the layers is left, while most is removed. This act of tearing off is an essential part in the process. It reveals the layers underneath, exposing colors which have been applied previously in another composition. It makes the process far more complicated so the result would never be anything I expect. Occasionally I find that I have to get rid of the canvas entirely by completely destroying it. {Read More…}

Mario Naves / Postcard from Florida #69 / 2007 / acrylic paint and pasted paper / 5 x 6 in / Elizabeth Harris Gallery

Mario Naves, Postcards From Florida @ Elizabeth Harris Gallery, 529 w. 20th St., through 10/4

David Antonides / Transcoded / Watercolour on Paper / 49.75 x 38.5 inches / www.davidantonides.com

I’ve had the opportunity to work in the studio with David on a number of occasions and have learned a lot by watching him work.

Water for me is a medium which intermediates the tangible with emotion and spirit. It flows between my intention and its own laws of nature and serendipity – its a collaboration of sorts. I explore the contrast between the subtlety of complex colour transitions and the strength of dense, robust marks. Watercolour can make a strong statement and be monumental. It can have weight and gravity. [Read more...]

Shahzia Sikander / Pathology of Suspension #10 / 2005 / Ink and gouache on prepared paper / 77.5 x 51.5 in. / Sikkema Jenkins & Co.

Shahzia Sikander / Dissonance to Detour / 2005 / STILL from digital animation / Sikkema Jenkins & Co.

Watch video here…

I am a contemporary artist who grew up in Pakistan but my professional life has been outside of Pakistan from age 22. Though the early part of my career as an artist was established primarily in New York, I have been working on projects around the world in the last several years. I find the terminology and the referencing of work in terms of an east and west paradigm, simplistic and dated. It robs the work of all nuances in meaning. In fact these days the world is small and one should really consider work in terms of some sort of global context of ideas. Work I believe should stand on its own, irrespective of geography. I address the work primarily through the lens of an idea and a related project and there is no place where I could not work.

Shahzia Sikander

The drawings and paintings are light and airy. The sculptures and installation pieces brought a smile to my face. Like a child encountering and fascinated by the surrounding world populated with birds, butterflies, and a myriad of other flying creatures.

Rebecca Horn’s exhibition will be comprised of both new large-scale paintings on paper and a group of signature sculptures. These important new paintings, the scale of which are determined by the extent of the artist’s physical reach, evoke personal, metaphorical, and metaphysical influences orchestrated through dynamic gesture. The new paintings on paper clearly relate to Horn’s seminal early performance pieces in which she sculpturally extended the body into space. In an accompanying catalog essay Doris von Drathen explains: “Against this backdrop, the paintings on paper assembled here under the title Cosmic Maps are more that just ‘recent works.’ As a group, these paintings from the last few years plot oscillations, for the first time opening out a pictorial space that hazards to sever all connection to topographical space ….”

Rebecca Horn, (born in Germany, 1944), is without question one of the seminal artists of our time. Historically, her work has ranged over an extensive variety of media, including film, performance, installation, photography and sculpture, whilst addressing themes of corporeality, perception and philosophy. The employment of such wide ranging interests as science and alchemy, the rational and the intuitive, the mechanical and the sensual, has occurred repeatedly in her work over the last three decades and has resulted in one of the most distinguished and individual oeuvres in recent memory. Horn has participated in the Venice Biennale on a number of occasions, she has had a retrospective at The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York and she is one of very few artists who has been selected to participate in Documenta on four separate occasions.

Rebecca Horn, Cosmic Maps, at Sean Kelly Gallery, 528 West 29th Street through June 14th