Painting Process/Process Painting, MoMA, Carroll Dunham, 1

Painting Process/Process Painting, MoMA, Carroll Dunham, 2

A vivid biomorphic style and uniquely tragic personal history define Arshile Gorky as a major figure in twentieth-century modernism. While often classified as late Surrealism or as a precursor of Abstract Expressionism, his emotionally charged abstract style holds a distinct place among the explorations of the avant-garde.

Born in Armenia, Gorky emigrated to the United States as teenager in 1920. He and his family left their native land under duress after the genocide and massive displacement of Armenians during the World War I. Gorky’s mother starved to death as a result of their forced march—later, her memory inspired a series of family portraits. Although the upheaval of his early life profoundly shaped his art, Gorky took pains to obscure his Armenian heritage. Born Vosdanig Manoog Adoian, the artist abandoned his given name for a more Russian-sounding pseudonym after coming to the United States. To perpetuate the deception, he even claimed to be a cousin of the writer Maxim Gorky. As a young man, Gorky studied at the New School of Design in Boston and, later, the Grand Central School of Art in New York, where he taught from 1925 to 1931.

In the 1920s and 1930s Gorky embarked on a self-directed effort to retrace the artistic revolutions of Cézanne and Picasso. He had relatively little interest in Analytic Cubism, but was particularly interested in Picasso’s flat, richly painted, and deeply colored Synthetic Cubist paintings of the 1920s. Gorky’s acquaintance with Synthetic Cubist work–specifically that by Picasso–came primarily through his familiarity with paintings in museums and in publications such as Cahiers d’Art, a leading periodical that featured reproductions of works by both Braque and Picasso.

During his first decade in the United States, Gorky befriended Stuart Davis and John Graham, two artists who were also pursuing Cubist motifs. Gorky, Graham, and Davis came to be known as the “three musketeers.” Graham became a particularly important influence on Gorky in the 1930s, providing Gorky with stylistic and intellectual material that would complement Gorky’s understanding of Cubism. Gorky also developed a close relationship with Willem de Kooning soon after the Dutch-born artist arrived in the United States in 1926, and he helped introduce him other artists working in New York.

In the mid to late 1930s, Gorky moved away from Cubism and toward the looser, more emotional style he would explore for the rest of his career. The Garden in Sochi series, created from 1936 to 1942, marked an important new direction for him, both artistically and personally. The series was inspired by the Gorky family’s garden in Khorkom, the Armenian village where Gorky was born and spent his early childhood. Biomorphic shapes reflect the strong influence of Joan Miró on the artist during this period. The colorful shapes scattered across the solid-colored ground are generally understood to contain symbolic references to Gorky’s life. These forms are rendered so abstract, however, that explicit narrative readings of these works are impossible.

Just as he reached artistic maturity in the mid-1940s, Gorky was beset by series of tragedies: a studio fire that resulted in the loss of much of his work, a diagnosis of throat cancer, a car crash, and the breakup of his second marriage. He committed suicide in 1948, still relatively unknown outside art world circles. By 1951, when the Whitney Museum of American Art mounted “Arshile Gorky: Memorial Exhibition,” Gorky’s stature as an important modernist painter was secure.

References
Herrera, Hayden. Arshile Gorky: His Life and Work. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2003).

Rand, Harry. Arshile Gorky: The Implications of Symbols. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).

© Copyright 2007 Hollis Taggart Galleries

Martin Golland / Blue Room / 2008 / oil on canvas / 43 x 36 in / © Martin Golland Courtesy of the Artist and Birch Libralto

Shapeshift
March 15th – April 19th
Opening reception Saturday March 15th 2–5 PM
Birch Libralato
www.birchlibralato.com

‘Shapeshift’ will be Martin Golland’s debut show with Birch Libralato. Golland’s paintings (drawn upon the traditions of Surrealism and Cubism) attempt to create engulfing architectural spaces that evoke sensation, discovery and disorientation. These slipshod spaces, emptied of figures, suggest the residue of nameless ritual activity.

Golland explains that, “My work is built from a collection of gestures and painting languages that respond to the histories of abstraction and representation. [It] depicts overlooked architectural spaces that trigger experiences of the uncanny. The scenes presented in my work are emptied of figures, leaving only traces of hidden activity. My intent is to mark out the slippage between elements of safety and fear that are revealed in these scenarios.

I use a selection of competing modes of painting that function at various degrees of abstraction and representation. I work with a sourced inventory of leftover modernist styles and my own photography as departure points for my painting. I treat the photograph as a departure point for an improvised fiction. As I translate these elements into painting, the materiality of the paint warps representation and asserts its own pictorial logic through competing ranges of gesture, texture and form.

The discreet transitions between the various zones of the painting act as a metaphor for the fractured phenomenon of perception. Bent perspective and idiosyncratic colour work at cross-purposes to one another but provide temporary cohesion. Despite their disjunctive make-up, the engulfing spaces create an occasion for immersive experience. Each work presents a heightened moment – an upsurge of the visible – where the relationship between what is represented and what is seen becomes problematic and the consistency of the world wavers. As a result, the fugitive shifts of space act as a metaphor for the mind’s sway between reverie and dread.”

Mark Dutcher, Worlds Apart, 2007, acrylic, oil, and spray paint on canvas, 80 x 92 inches. © Courtesy the Artist and SolwayJones Gallery

Articulate, emotional and committed, Mark Dutcher is a painter’s painter. Dutcher is deeply immersed in the process and act of painting. He is one of those artists whose drive to create is demanding and relentless. Over time, his work has grown and matured, and he easily walks that line between abstraction, expressionism, surrealism and pop. Read more of ArtSlant founder Georgia Fee’s interview with Mark Dutcher at ArtSlant.com.

The more I look at Mark Dutcher’s work the more I enjoy it. There are similarities with Carroll Dunham’s work that I posted yesterday and Fionna Rae’s work as well. It’s a poppy cartoonish abstraction that comes through in the flat synthetic colors, the acrylic textures and floating compositions.

markdutcher.com
www.solwayjonesgallery.com

Carroll Dunham. (American, born 1949). Age of Rectangles. 1983-85. Casein, dry pigment, vinyl paint, casein emulsion, color pencil, charcoal, carbon pencil, and ink on rosewood, birch, ash, and mahogany, three panels and one inset, 7′ 8″ x 58″ (233.7 x 147.3 cm). Gift of Emily Fisher Landau. © 2008 Carroll Dunham. www.moma.org

Today is a Carroll Dunham day. After coming across Sharon Butler’s post on Two Coats of Paint I started trolling around and came across this painting on moma’s site. Dunham’s work is a lot of fun to look at and I can spend a long time with his work. His use of materials is fascinating and inspires me to push and develop my own work. It’s also funny that the title of this painting alludes to my point yesterday when describing my impressions of the Color Charts: Reinventing Color 1950 to Today currently showing at MOMA and I said that the dominate forms seem to be rectangles, squares, or pixels.

Excerpt from moma.org

American painter. He completed a BA at Trinity College, Hartford, CT, in 1971 and later settled in New York. Initially influenced by Post-Minimalism, process art and conceptual art, he was soon attracted to the tactility and allusions to the body in the work of Brice Marden, Robert Mangold and Robert Ryman. Spurred on by the revival of interest in Surrealism in the 1970s, Dunham began to make abstract, biomorphic paintings reminiscent of the work of Arshile Gorky and André Masson, executed with a comic twist enhanced by lurid colours and the suggestion of contemporary psychedelia. In the 1980s he began to paint on wood veneer and rose to prominence in the context of a broader return to painting in the period. Age of Rectangles (1983–5; New York, MOMA) is a highly abstract composition of differing forms, symptomatic of his work at this time: geometric sketches co-exist with eroticized organic shapes while the forms of the wood veneer show through the surface of the paint to suggest surging forces. Towards the end of the 1980s he began to move towards single, dominating motifs; wave-like forms were particularly common. In the Integrated Paintings series he applied paint-covered balls and chips to the surface of the canvas to further develop the sense of organic life. Mound A (1991; priv. col.) is typical of Dunham’s work of the early 1990s in which his forms began to resemble mounds of live matter, covered in orifices. Around 1993 his paintings began to feature schematic, cartoon figures which suggest the influence of Philip Guston.

Morgan Falconer
From Grove Art Online

© 2007 Oxford University Press

A detail from Carroll Dunham, “Fourth Pine” (1982-84), which was painted on knotty wood. The grain is worked into the composition. Skarstedt Gallery

Kudos to Sharon Butler at Two Coats of Paint for bringing the Carroll Dunham exhibition to my attention. [Read more...]

In 1983 Klaus Kertess described the aesthetic of these paintings as “self-hallucination which initially suggests a multiple organ transplant performed by a surgeon with a degree in Surrealism.” Although admittedly having drawn inspiration from the likes of Yves Tanguy and Salvador Dali, Dunham’s thought process was purely abstract. The sublime nature of the distinguishable figures in these paintings namely the phalluses (Fourth Pine, 1982-84), knobby nipples (Fifth Pine, 1984-85), the tree sprout (Untitled, 1984) allude to a primordial pool, an abstraction of consciousness and formation. In a recent interview regarding this body of work Dunham states, “I was obviously aware I was drawing phalluses (I wasn’t that far gone), but I saw them as symbols, almost as boundary markers, or maybe radioactive objects in a kind of natural environment.”

Carroll Dunham: Paintings on Wood, 1982-87” continues through April 5 at Skarstedt Gallery, 20 East 79th Street, Manhattan; (212) 737-2060, skarstedt.com