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.

Katy Moran / Pecking Order / 2008 / Acrylic on canvas / 18 x 15 inches (46 x 38 cm) / © Katy Moran. All rights reserved. Courtesy of the artist and Andrea Rosen Gallery

Today I got over to Andrea Rosen Gallery to see the abstract paintings of UK artist Katy Moran. An artist of my own generation, it was great to see how she is struggling to find her own way in abstraction. Walking into the space I was pleasantly surprised to see tiny canvases hanging at eye level on the two-story bare walls. A quick loop around the gallery, at the relatively safe 5 ft to 6 ft distance from the canvases, left me feeling a bit disappointed – a disappointment that seemed to be magnified by a longer more considered glance across the room. My first response was that they paintings had no life. They appeared to lack spacial development, to be centralized compositions of oval or kidney shapes in a rectangle, the colors had no juice or luminosity.

However, first impressions are often deceiving and this is definitely the case with Katy Moran’s paintings. As I stood on the precipice, considering whether to wander on to another gallery, or stay and give her work a more considered visit, I asked myself, “What’s really going on here? What is she up to?” Having these thoughts, I stepped up to a painting titled Pecking Order and got in real tight – maybe I was a foot or 10 inches away. Suddenly the whole painting came alive. The space opened up, they gestures and strokes had energy and movement, the colors that a moment ago seemed washed out, tired, and just the plastic of acrylic, found some pizzaz. I could see the foam bubbles of acrylic paint too vigorously stirred, that had burst and been captured in the surface. I could see the lint and the studio dust and I felt compelled to brush off the surface, like brushing the lint on the back of a friend who has just taken off her sweater. I chuckled realizing that she had drawn me in. Brought me in physically and that in close proximity, Katy Moran and her paintings began to speak. Or maybe they always already had been speaking, just in a quiet and soft voice. I made another loop around the gallery, sliding right up close with my nose in the pictures.

After, I read the press release and the write-up on the web, my opinion is forget what they have to say because the person writing has no idea how to look at an abstract painting. The dichotomy between abstraction and realism is not relevant to the viewer’s experience of the painting. Sources and references to recognizable imagery seem to be only a curious piece of trivia. If trying to find the image is your game, then it is better to pick up a Where’s Waldo? book, you’ll have more success. Otherwise if you fall into that only too human trap of finding the image on the cave walls or in the clouds then you miss the whole experience of the paintings. You miss the intimacy of standing with Ms. Moran as she brushes her canvas.

Katy Moran is on view at Andrea Rosen Gallery thru April 23