JOHN ZURIER INTERVIEWED BY KQED

Visual Arts: Interview KQED

 John Zurier on Iceland, Light, and Landscape

John Zurier. Votilækur, Cold July, and Finnbogi. 2014; Courtesy of the artist and Lawrence Markey Gallery, Peter Blum Gallery, and Gallery Paule Anglim, respectively

By Matthew Harrison Tedford Oct. 6, 2014

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Berkeley-based painter John Zurier’s first solo museum exhibition, Matrix 255, on view at the Berkeley Art Museum, includes twenty-two new paintings that demonstrate a subtle effect on the viewer, which builds the more time one spends with the work. Stark simplicity gives way to an understanding of the hours, weeks, and months of work that go into these paintings. Nearly imperceptible brushstrokes are unearthed only if one wishes to find them. Slight changes in color tone yield the power to create emotions or summon associations.
The works in Matrix 255 all arise from Zurier’s time painting in Iceland and are embedded with personal experiences, emotions, and recollections. Viewers can sometimes gain access to these elements through contemplation or through the works’ titles, but just as often one would need entry into Zurier’s private thoughts. Though the paintings may appear to be total abstractions, they are grounded quite firmly in the Icelandic landscape and Zurier’s experiences there. The lines, paint drops, and blurs in each of these pieces insinuate some specific phenomenon, location, or impression. I sat down with Zurier to talk about Iceland and how it materializes in his work.

John Zurier, Afternoon (S.H.G.), 2014; Courtesy of the artist and Peter Blum Gallery, New York

MHT: I’m interested in this idea of you working in a landscape rather than depicting the landscape itself. Can you tell me what this means for your work?
JZ: For me, you experience nature whole. It just comes to you. With the landscape, the things you can’t reproduce are what are interesting to me. You’re dealing with these forces and energies and then try and make a painting that’s an equivalent of that. That’s what I mean about painting in the landscape.
I worked for a couple of years in Iceland making watercolors, but I wasn’t making paintings. It took me a while to figure out how I could make paintings there. One of the things that draws me to Iceland is the light, which is so different for me growing up in California. In California, it’s a really intense Mediterranean light with really strong contrasts. In Iceland, there’s very little contrast in the lights, and some of the things are so subtle. For example, the ocean at twilight will often be lighter than the sky, and there are these subtle color contrasts that happen that are almost at the threshold of visibility. I thought, “How can you paint something like this?”
MHT: Much of your work in Matrix 255 was created in Iceland. What’s your relationship with the country and how did that start?
JZ: My wife Nina and I went to Iceland in 2002 on a horseback trip. We rode through the center of Iceland in the highlands. It was one of the most moving trips of my life. But I didn’t go back until 2011. California College of the Arts asked me to teach a summer class there and I knew I wanted to go back. As soon as I got there, I realized it was perfect. I knew I wanted to be there. We’ve been there for the last four summers, arriving in late May to teach a class for students from CCA, and then Nina and I stay on through July and then go back for Christmas.

John Zurier, Icelandic Painting (12 Drops), 2014; Collection of the artist

MHT: I was only aware of you going in the summer. Are any of the works inspired by your experiences in the winter as well? I imagine that changes things completely.
JZ: Some of the watercolors were made in the winter in Reykjavík. And predominantly the works made in Iceland were made during the summer. The winter gets into the work. A lot of the way I work is through memory of things — memory of color, experiences. I come back and start a painting and it’s through the painting of it that I realize, “Oh, I know where this is. I know what this is. This relates to this point here.” So I can’t say what is winter experience versus what is a summer experience. It’s very important to have two experiences, between this extended period of light and then this real short period of light, which is very, very dark.
MHT: Can you tell me a little bit about Héraðsdalur, which many of the paintings are named after.
JZ: That group of work is titled after the farm, where I was living and working this past summer. Héraðsdalur is located in a broad valley in the north of Iceland in a region called Skagafjörður. I met a group of Icelandic artists this summer and they talked about the special light in Skagafjörður. It’s famous for its light.
They told me a story about a nineteenth-century painter from Denmark who came to Skagafjörður because he had heard about the light and wanted to paint this famous light. He got himself a hotel room in the town nearby. Everyday he’d go out, set up his easel, and start a painting. He did this every day for a month and then one day he just packed everything up and went home. He couldn’t capture the light. This is what I was trying to say. The light is the thing that is the most subtle and the most interesting. It’s so special and yet it can’t be captured. How do you put it into form?
MHT: I sense this sort of solitude or unsentimental loneliness in many of these works. Is that something that’s in the landscape too?

John Zurier, Summer Still (The Same Shadow), 2014; Courtesy of the artist and Peter Blum Gallery, New York

JZ: I didn’t go to Iceland searching for unsentimental sense of solitude, but I certainly found that when I was there. I think that’s one of the things about landscape. When you see landscapes of Iceland it’s usually spectacular. It’s usually these amazing waterfalls and amazing glaciers, and I’m not really interested in that kind of picturesque quality. Up in Skagafjörður it’s softer, it’s different.
MHT: It seems that names have an important role in your work and could even impact how one feels about a particular painting. For example, I might feel differently about Summer Still (The Same Shadow), which is one of my favorite works in the exhibition, if it was named Across the River or Avalanche, which both seem reasonable for that work. For you, what’s the relationship between a painting and the title you eventually give it?
JZ: It’s often a very specific memory for me. I feel the title can give a different entry into the work. For Duchamp, he thought a title was like adding another color. But the titles have to fit with the energy of the painting. I couldn’t call it Avalanche because it doesn’t have anything to do with it, even though they seem as if they could be random. They’re not random to me at all. Summer Still has to do with the kind of movement and stillness within.
But also, the “Summer Still” was also this idea that it is still summer. It’s a sudden realization that summer isn’t over. It also relates to a poem from an Icelandic poet named Stefán Hörður Grímsson. He has a poem called “Summer Still” and I really wanted to use this title, but I’d used it already for another painting, so that’s why it’s parenthetical. It seemed to me that when you say “Summer Still” and then you call it “The Same Shadow,” somehow those lines get activated.

John Zurier, Héraðsdalur 13 (Avalanche), 2014; Courtesy of the artist and Peter Blum Gallery, New York

In the case of Avalanche, I stretch the canvas, it’s primed, and it’s sitting over on the side of the wall. I’m looking at it and I want to do something on it, but I have to just wait for a while. So I’m working on other things and then once I look at it out of the corner of my eye and all of a sudden I see these things appear. It’s as if all of a sudden, I could take this whole image and put it down.
But also there was this feeling of instability. [The lines in the painting] are not perfectly poised formal balances. There’s something a little bit fragile about them. There are avalanche protectors up on the hills and the fjords, especially in a town near where I was staying. It’s a very steep fjord and the towns are right at the bottom; they are prone to being destroyed by avalanches. So they built these structures and they’re in these angles that just go up. It reminded me of that — something that seems so tenuous and fragile but is able to hold some big force.
MHT: Avalanche was another work I wanted to talk about in relationship to this idea of the title being an entry. When I first approached that work, before looking at the title, I didn’t feel what I would associate with the violence of an avalanche. But then after seeing the title I stared at the painting a little longer. Then, as opposed to the instability you felt, I could sense a sort of calm or quietness after an avalanche.
JZ: That’s really interesting because I realize I do this for myself and I wonder how is this going to be perceived. I realize that I have my own relationships with the paintings. Someone else will relate to them too, but they’re going to bring something completely different. None of this was thought out in a logical way. I wasn’t thinking about the calm after the avalanche because avalanches are horrific. You’re in this town, it’s a beautiful sunny day, and you see these things that are there to protect and to stop. It’s essentially this thing that’s waiting for some incredible force. It’s this fragile object that could be destroyed so quickly. In a way, I think painting is like that.
And Lighthouse… You title it Lighthouse and all of a sudden it’s easy to see it as a representation of a lighthouse, of a color. Some of the lighthouses in Iceland are painted that orange. But I just like the idea of a “lighthouse.” Just the word itself. The house does exactly what it does: it emits light. And that painting emits light. It’s very, very opaque. The way it’s so solid and it emits light… it just felt right.

John Zurier, Héraðsdalur 12 (Lighthouse), 2014; Courtesy of the artist and Peter Blum Gallery, New York

MHT: That was another title that I thought was interesting. When I saw the work and its title it made sense. It’s vertical, it’s kind of the color of a light, and so it makes sense. Then afterwards I read in the brochure that this is the color of many lighthouses in Iceland. And because I compulsively look everything up, I went home and looked up Icelandic lighthouses and saw these images with glaciers, icebergs, the sea, and then these totally incongruously colored lighthouses. The painting then worked on another level in the exhibition because it too stood out against the mostly light blues and greens, as if the whole gallery was that landscape. So it made sense on one level, but when I learned a little bit of the back story it had an additional meaning.
JZ: What I love is that you think about this the way I do. I’m like, “Oh, I like this so I’m going to look up this and I found out this,” and then all of a sudden these meanings start to develop. I love the idea that you can have a painting in a show that will illuminate all the other paintings. So that if you just had a series of paintings and you add one painting to it all of a sudden it makes us look at all the other paintings differently.
John Zurier / MATRIX 255 runs through December 21, 2014 at the Berkeley Art Museum. For more information visit bampfa.berkeley.edu.

Bridget Riley

Click here for a link on Bridget Riley's are and life.

Thomas Scheibitz:Studio Imaginaire at TANYA BONAKDAR GALLERY

Chris Martin Recent Work at ANTON KERN

When it Pours in the New Yorker

Check out this article in the New Yorker on the work of Helen Frankenthaler and Morris Louis:

WHEN IT POURS
The work of Helen Frankenthaler and Morris Louis

Jim Hodges

Anthony Meier Fine Arts is pleased to share the following review of Jim Hodges’s exhibition, on view through 25 April 2014.    Another last-minute viewing opportunity By Kenneth Baker San Francisco Chronicle 22 April 2014 Installation shot showing “Toward Great Becoming (blue/blue)” and “Toward Great Becoming (orange/pink)”, both 2014, by Jim Hodges [photo: Keith Petersen] Here is the latter half of last Saturday’s unpublished (don’t ask) review column: Jim Hodges: Wall works in mirrored panel. Through April 25. Anthony Meier Fine Arts, 1969 California St., S.F. (415) 351-1400, www.anthonymeierfinearts.com. The five new works by New Yorker Jim Hodges at Anthony Meier’s have an almost formalistic bent for someone who made his name using materials such as silk flowers, gossamer scrim, gold leaf and cast glass. Hodges came to prominence during the grief-clouded aftermath of the AIDS crisis’ first decade, working in a key avowedly elegiac, even sentimental. But the sentimentality in Hodges’ work, like the irony-free sweetness in that of his friend Felix Gonzalez-Torres (1957-1996), stood not for false feeling but for the inescapability of feeling, against which synthetic emotions and their triggers serve as futile defenses. Hodges began using the sort of mirror mosaics that adorn disco balls years ago. When he blankets flat forms with them, as in the works at Meier, the faceted surfaces suggest flayed, flattened disco balls, evoking an end, perhaps a fatal end, of festivity. The disco reference has subsided in the new work, and with it the key of mourning associated with club scene erotic reverie vanquished by a plague. “Toward Great Becoming (blue/blue)” (2014), like several other pieces here, consists of irregular polygons tessellated with tiny mirrors, meeting at the corner of a room so that their overall shapes reflect and distort one another. The adjoining panels in three works here differ in color and the reflections they pick up multiply those differences. Often in Hodges’ past uses of mirrors, he has confronted viewers with themselves — atomized. The huge “Untitled (grey ellipse)” (2013) offers something of this experience. Its shimmering grey darkness can suggest a portal to some magical elsewhere or merely, as gang slang would have it, “getting smoked.” The corner polygons might symbolize the crippled symmetry of people who try to discern themselves reflected in one another. Might that be the best we can hope to do? The intricate designs and shatter patterns of Hodges’ surfaces reprise his use of spider web imagery, but they also recall the more abstract interest in surface geometry of much older artists such as Robert Mangold and Dorothea Rockburne, who have long used ingrown composition to figure forth the integrity of a self.   To read the full text, please visit SF Chronicle's website.

Abstract Exhibits in SF

Some viewing suggestions from Manuel + a query:

today went to modernism and saw:

http://www.modernisminc.com/artists/Charles_ARNOLDI/

and at toomey-tourell:

http://www.toomey-tourell.com/zoom/?img=1333

very different shows although both abstract

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I have this artist that I am interested in but can't figure his work out Bernard Piffaretti who paints this:

http://www.bernardpiffaretti.com/peintures.html

Garry Stephan New Work at SUSAN INGLETT GALLERY

Review of 'Jasper Johns: Regrets,' a New Series at MoMa
check out the slide show.

A Lens Catches; a Painter Converts

‘Jasper Johns: Regrets,’ a New Series at MoMA

By HOLLAND COTTER 

MARCH 21, 2014

What do you do if you’re a busy museum, and an eminent and famously enigmatic artist in late career tells you he’s prepared to go public with new work? You shake up your schedule, clear out some space and move the stuff in, pronto.

That’s more or less what the Museum of Modern Art did for its straight-from-the studio show called “Jasper Johns: Regrets.” Haste can make waste. It can also make magic. And magic, of a peculiarly somber, meditative kind, is what we have here.

A little over a year and a half ago, Mr. Johns, 83, was looking through a Christie’s London sales catalog of work by the British artist Francis Bacon and came across photographs of the painter Lucian Freud. They had been taken in 1964 by the photographer John Deakin at the request of Bacon, who was planning to do a portrait of Freud but didn’t like working with live models. (Bacon’s triptych “Three Studies of Lucian Freud” sold for $142 million last year.)

One photo in particular caught Mr. Johns’s eye. In it, Freud is sitting on a quilt-covered brass bed in the corner of a room with soiled walls. He has one leg folded under the other; his head is bowed, his face obscured by a raised hand. His stoop-shouldered, folded-in pose suggests exhaustion, despair. He could be weeping.

The sense of abjection was compounded by the distressed condition of the photographic print, found in Bacon’s cluttered studio after his death in 1992. It had seen hard use. It had been creased and stained with paint; a large, roughly rectangular section of its lower left corner had been torn and folded back, and secured with a paper clip. (The original print, on loan from the Bacon estate, is in the MoMA show.)

It is on this photograph — not just the image of Freud, but the beat-up print itself — that Mr. Johns has based a cohesive group of nearly two dozen painting, drawings and prints. The precise appeal the picture held for him is hard to pin down. But then, the impulses behind much of his work have been complicated and elusive: a childhood memory, a dream, a detail from an old master painting, or from his own work. His choices of subjects have felt both arbitrary and deliberate, prosaic and loaded, like Duchamp ready-mades.

More important than the images he chooses, though, is what he does with them, the formal and conceptual changes he puts them through. And to the “Regrets” series he has brought a full arsenal of transforming maneuvers used in the past.

As always, in developing a series, he juggles several media, including oil paint, acrylic, watercolor, charcoal, graphite, colored pencil, ink on paper, ink on plastic, printing ink and photocopying. And his idea of doing variations on a theme is close to dissection: cutting an image open, picking apart its essence, moving bits around, throwing some out, squeezing others into new shapes, in the end restoring wholeness, but not in its initial form.

The show — organized by the MoMA curators Christophe Cherix and Ann Temkin, with Ingrid Langston, a curatorial assistant — is a record of such a process, and its value, as such, is far greater than that of any single work in it, painting or otherwise.

One of the earliest pieces is a small, unemphatic pencil sketch of the Bacon print, with Freud’s figure simplified, and the missing lower corner rendered as a solid dark shape. Three words written in ink below the drawing — “Goya? Bats? Dreams?” — suggest at least one feature that drew Mr. Johns to the picture, an association with art history. Freud’s face-hiding pose somewhat resembles that of the artist who sits dozing away, swarmed by owls and bats, in “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters,” the renowned etching by Francisco Goya, an artist Mr. Johns has long admired.

With a second early piece, “Study for Regrets,” an intense manipulation of material begins. Here, Freud’s figure has been doubled into facing mirror images, with the one on the right painted as a kind of jigsaw puzzle of colored fragments. And new elements have been added: the word “Regrets” and a scribbled signature, both looking handwritten, but, in reality, produced with an inked stamp that Mr. Johns designed to reply to social invitations.

At this point, we’re on familiar Johns turf, defined by a mix of high and low, serious and humorous, its essence distilled in a gloomster Freud decked out in harlequin colors. But the tone soon shifts, darkens. In other drawings, Freud’s figures recede in prominence, and, again in mirror reflection, the dark shapes representing the torn section of the print merge into a Rorschach-like whole, a large rectangle that sits at the center of the composition.

A shape that was once an indicator of emptiness is now, suddenly, a monument, somewhat architectural, with its two pronglike turrets, but also, increasingly, funereal. As the series grows, moving from drawings into paintings, and then into prints, Freud’s figures become mere tangles of line, and from those tangles another image emerges: a human skull with big, empty eyes. It rests on top of the dark rectangle, which now might be read as the door of a tomb, opened onto blackness, oblivion.

Skulls have turned up in Mr. Johns’s work since the early 1960s. Some scholars say they’ve been inspired by the skulls that frequently appear in the still lifes of one his favorite artists, Cézanne. Another explanation may simply be that Mr. Johns is one of the few contemporary artists who has persisted, over a long career, in taking mortality seriously as a subject. And he has become more forthright in concentrating on it, and personalizing it, over time.

In this regard, his art can feel almost Victorian, a sensibility America still doesn’t understand, which may explain arguments that Mr. Johns’s work is obscurant and repressed. When I think “Victorian,” I think Melville and Dickinson: passionate, sardonic moral thinkers, too in love with beauty to be morbid. I see Mr. Johns in that light. Much of “Regrets” is really beautiful, with half-hidden rainbow colors, tonal subtleties and a mesmerizing diversity of line.

Because of the title of the series, and the fact that an octogenarian produced it, there’s a tendency to view the show as a valedictory gesture, the end of something. But it doesn’t feel that way at all. It feels assured and centered, quiet but with lots of give, sagely alive.

“Jasper Johns: Regrets” continues through Sept. 1 at the Museum of Modern Art; 212-708-9400, moma.org.

ABOVE AND BELOW THE SURFACE at JOHN BERGGRUEN GALLERY

If you can, please try to see this show: ABOVE AND BELOW THE SURFACE at

 

john berggruen gallery

Contact

John Berggruen Gallery
228 Grant Avenue
San Francisco, CA 94108

Hours:
Monday through Friday:
9:30am - 5:30pm
Saturday:
10:30am - 5:00pm

Suzanne McClelland
Ed Corney (Ideal Proportions), 2013
Dry pigment, gesso, polymer and oil paint on portrait linen
84 x 72 inches

Joshua Aster's work and influences

I visited Josh's studio before his show at Edward Cella and got to see a lot of the influences that went into these paintings.  a major influence was the generic green basked that fruit comes in at the supermarket.  He drew these from different angles and the triangles you see in the large paintings are distortions of the grid.

Joshua Aster at Edward Cella

Joshua Aster, Wistful Thinking, 2014
Oil on linen, 78 x 82 in

Joshua Aster, Panes, 2013
Oil on linen, 72 x 60 in.

Andrew Masullo Recent Paintings at FEATURE INC

EMILIA AZCARATE 'LIMINAL'

Art & Design

Emilia Azcárate: ‘Liminal’

MARCH 13, 2014

Photo

“Untitled,” 2012, from the series “Practicables,” by Emilia Azcárate, at Henrique Faria. Credit Henrique Faria, New York

Art in Review

By HOLLAND COTTER

Henrique Faria Fine Art

35 East 67th Street, fourth floor,

Manhattan

Through March 22

Developments in Emilia Azcárate’s art appear to reflect changes in her spiritual life. Born in Venezuela in 1964, now living in Spain, Ms. Azcárate was raised Roman Catholic, joined the Krishna consciousness movement in her 20s, and more recently became a devotee of Nichiren Buddhism. All three disciplines are ritual-intensive, and so, in different ways, is the work in Ms. Azcárate’s first New York solo.

The circular shape, in essence an interfaith form, predominates. One example fills a wall: Its radiating and concentric lines are composed of metal bottle caps the artist has collected in her travels, each flattened and cut into spiky florets representing Hindu and Buddhist chakras or wheels. A few small pictures on paper have designs worked out from strings of alphabetical letters typed on an old typewriter.

A group of dozens of watercolor paintings on wood panels seems, with the works’ bright colors and busy patterns, designed far less to focus the eye or mind than to keep both on the move. And the grouping itself is kinetic. The different-size panels are ganged together upright and free-standing on a shelf, and visitors are invited to rearrange them as they please.

Piece by piece, there’s nothing formally new about Ms. Azcárate’s art, but the potential for hands-on interaction is appealing, as is the ritualistic ongoingness of her project. During the course of the show, new mandalas arrive at the gallery each week, painted and typed on postcards sent from her studio in Madrid, or from wherever she may be.

MATERIAL CHOICES

Material matters in the work of Ulrike Muller

Muller uses baked enamel on steel to create small compressed abstractions using a geometric abstractions.  The materiality of the cast enamel heightens the effect of these the hard-edged shapes, creating a "freshness" of seeing that ratchets up the viewing experience.

LEAH GLENN at ALTMAN SIEGEL GALLERY

Try do see this smart  show at Altman Siegel of the paintings of Leah Glenn if you can:

Laeh Glenn
"Ordinary Objects" January 9 – March 1, 2014
Altman Siegel is pleased to present its first solo show with Los Angeles based painter Laeh Glenn.
Laeh Glenn presents a series of paintings unified in size and materials but unique in the formal concerns they address. Engaging with Surrealism, illusionistic space, geometric abstraction, still-life and Minimalism, Glenn’s work directly addresses the traditions and formal tropes of painting with a nuanced awareness of contemporary culture’s excess of and accessibility to images.
If language can be seen as a construction - a combination of individual parts that create varied meaning, Glenn approaches her paintings in a similar fashion, by flattening and unifying genres and formal precedents, re-arranging them and creating new meaning with familiar vocabularies. Her choice of arrangement is a study in semantics; while each painting is an individual work, the tone, understanding and semiotic associations of each picture change according to proximity and placement.
The paintings range from minimal, sculptural monochromes to more rendered, representational work. Enclosed completely or partially by simple black frames, each composition extends beyond the edge of the painting and activates the site of exhibition, the architecture of the gallery but also the relationship between each discrete work.
Laeh Glenn lives and works in Los Angeles. She received her B.F.A. from California College of the Arts in 2008 and her M.F.A. from UCLA in 2012. She has been in several exhibitions including, “Made in Space,” Curated by Laura Owens and Peter Harawik, Night Gallery, Los Angeles, Gavin Brown’s Enterprise and Venus Over Manhattan, New York; “Territory: Week 5,” Thomas Duncan Gallery, Los Angeles; “Spectrum Suite,” Nicelle Beauchene, New York; “The Fishes” Laeh Glenn and Owen Kydd, CSA Space, Vancouver; and “Formwandler” Richard Telles, Los Angeles.
For more information, please contact Altman Siegel at 1-415-576-9300 or info@altmansiegel.com.

WOMEN PAINTERS IN WHITNEY

 

(for complete article go to the website) 

State of Our Art, According to Whitney

A Guide to the 2014 Whitney Museum Biennial

By CAROL VOGEL

 FEB. 27, 2014

WHITNEY Biennials can be daunting, confounding, exhausting and sometimes even outrageous. No matter how the curators organize this sprawling survey of what’s happening in American contemporary art right now, trying to navigate the museumwide exhibition and make sense of it all is a challenge, even for the pros.

For the Biennial’s finale in the Marcel Breuer building, the Whitney invited three outside curators to organize the show: Stuart Comer, chief curator of media and performance at the Museum of Modern Art; Anthony Elms, associate curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia; and Michelle Grabner, an artist and a professor in the painting and drawing department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In a break from years past, the three have each taken a floor and will present distinct visions, rather than one buildingwide narrative.(The schedule will be posted on the museum’s website.)

The Biennial that aims to capture what’s happening in American art. Themes inevitably emerge, delivered in different ways, in different mediums, by different curators. Here are a few to look out for during your visit.

WOMEN PAINTERS

Women are revitalizing abstract painting, and they are well represented here, with works by artists like Louise Fishman, Jacqueline Humphries, Molly Zuckerman-Hartung, Dona Nelson, Laura Owens and Amy Sillman.

“I am focusing on a handful of women artists who take on the authority of abstract painting — its history, its ambition and its relationship to power and gender,” Ms. Grabner said. “I wanted to put them together to underscore how different the language of abstract painting can be.”

“Okie Dokie,” 2008, dyed cheesecloth and acrylic on canvas, by Dona Nelson

She isn’t alone; Mr. Elms has included two large-scale abstract paintings by Rebecca Morris on the second floor. Long a fan of Marcel Breuer’s Brutalist architecture, Mr. Elms said the works fit perfectly with the space.

“Untitled,” 2013, by Laura Owens, one of the women revitalizing abstract painting.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Optimists

I just saw The Optimists at Steven Wirtz Gallery.  The exhibit was suppose to end today, but Steven said it will probably up a little longer.  So, if you haven't seen it, there is still a chance.  Call first before you go at   (415) 433-6879 to make sure the show is still up.

SFAQ REVIEW

The Optimists

Maysha Mohamedi, Rebecca Morris, Ruby Neri, Laurie Reid

January 9 - February 22, 2014

Opening reception: Thursday, January 9, 5:30-7:30 PM

Press Release

Exhibition page

Installation views
   

SFAQ Review: “other thans” group exhibition featuring Mitzi Pederson, Laurie Reid and Alexander Wolff at Et al., San Francisco.

 Here is a review of the show: SFAQ

Forrest Bess at CHRISTIE'S and the WHITNEY MUSEUM

Ok, I posted three of James Kalm's video's today, but I think these were really important shows in abstraction: idiosyncratic abstractions, curent neo-plasticism via Mondrian, and artist in the 80's who have influenced current modes of abstractio. Also, I like the way he shoots gallery shows in that you get an idea of the dialogue between work in the exhibits, as well as how they occupy the space.

Andrew Masullo at MARY BOONE GALLERY

Reinventing Abstraction Curated by Raphael Rubinstein at CHEIM & READ

Check out this video by James Kalm, a working artist living in Brooklyn New York. He has been an active critic for over twelve years writing for the controversial Brooklyn Rail http://brooklynrail.org/.

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NEW YORK TIMES REVIEW:

July 11, 2013

‘Reinventing Abstraction: New York Painting in the 1980s’

By KEN JOHNSON

Cheim & Read

547 West 25th Street, Chelsea

Through Aug. 30

Painting today is not what it was. The last time painting seemed to be urgently important was the 1980s, when Neo-Expressionists like Julian Schnabel and Anselm Kiefer, Conceptualists like Peter Halley and Sherrie Levine, and fun-lovers like Kenny Scharf and Keith Haring were ascendant.

Organized by the critic Raphael Rubinstein, “Reinventing Abstraction: New York Painting in the 1980s” fruitfully if inconclusively reconsiders painters who did not fit into then fashionable categories. His 15 artists, all born between 1939 and 1949 and each represented by one piece from the ‘80s, are diverse. The show includes humorously updated Surrealism by Carroll Dunham and Elizabeth Murray and plays with Modernist devices by Thomas Nozkowski, Jonathan Lasker, Mary Heilmann and David Reed. Bill Jensen and Terry Winters introduce organic, vaguely botanical imagery, while Louise Fishman and Pat Steir revive Abstract Expressionist-type compositions. Joan Snyder and Stanley Whitney created wide, landscapelike works made of myriad paint strokes, and Gary Stephan, Jack Whitten and Stephen Mueller proffer different sorts of enigmatic symbolism.

Did these artists “reinvent” abstraction? That claim doesn’t sound right considering that they all deal in familiar formal vocabularies and that many of them folded in representational imagery. In his catalog essay Mr. Rubinstein rightly credits all with faith in a grand painting tradition dating to the early Renaissance. Implicitly he laments a widespread loss of faith among artists today. But why the medium no longer elicits such quasi-religious devotion from later generations of artists remains to be explained.

APPROACHES TO ABSTRACTION - DAY ONE

HERE ARE SOME HELPFUL LINKS TO IMAGE PRESENTATION:

JACKSON POLLOCK'S "ONE, NUMBER 31" RESTORED BY MOMA

PICASSO'S GUITARS 1912-1914 at MOMA

EVA HESSE - STUDIO WORK





 RICHARD DEIBENKORN

KENTE CLOTH

SEAN SCULLY

ALMA THOMAS

ALMA THOMAS

JOAN MITCHELL

CLYFFORD STILL

CLYFFORD STILL