Quick study: Greg Allen's @TheRealHennessy tweet paintings, MESS, working conditions, more

Greg Allen is making paintings again, and this time he's painting them himself. According to AnimalNY,

Artist, critic and our go-to appropriation expert Greg Allen has turned joke tweets by artist Jayson Musson (and sometimes internet art critic “Hennessy Youngman”) into paintings. Jokes such as, “I think Moby is on the N train rn but you just can’t go asking small bald white men if they’re Moby. That’s racist.” Ha! Naturally, Allen has done so without permission. He has, however, credited  @TheRealHennessy and announced the painting series on his website. And, they’re selling! For four figures!

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In Hyperallergic's weekly Weekend Words column, Thomas Micchelli considers the word "mess." He quotes national security analyst Gary Samore, who told the NY Times that the world is "very tangled mess."  Micchelli includes one of my favorite Beckett quotes: "To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now.”

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More bad news for colleges and universities as administrations are "Doubling Down on the Exploitation of Adjunct Faculty." When I used to have a full-time professorship, adjuncts were members of AAUP, so I always wondered why they didn't take over the leadership. They certainly have become the majority. (via The Academe Blog).

And Artnet reports that in France, nude art models rally for better working conditions.


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New gallery on the LES:  Kristen Lorello has opened at 195 Chrystie Street, 6th floor. Previously Lorello was the associate director at Eleven Rivington and she also worked at Greenberg Van Doren. “Site/Displace” (installation view above) is on view through August 15th. The show includes work by Goldschmied & Chiari, Zipora Fried, Nadia Haji Omar, Halsey Hathaway, Kristen Jensen Malcolm McClain, David Mramor, Ian Pedigo, Peter Rostovsky, Josh Slater, Letha Wilson. Note that the hours are M-F, 11-6 pm.

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Quoting an interview with writer John Gardner from the 1970s, The Paris Review has sparked a discussion about artists' roles as leaders and public intellectuals: "I think that the difference right now between good art and bad art is that the good artists are the people who are, in one way or another, creating, out of deep and honest concern, a vision of life in the twentieth century that is worth pursuing. And the bad artists, of whom there are many, are whining or moaning or staring, because it’s fashionable, into the dark abyss." Is it enough for artists to "find a form that accommodates the mess" or do we need to do more?

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Food and beverage art: Coates, FOODshed, Honeycutt, Beavers, and more

In the early 1990s, Rikrit Tiravanija began organizing exhibitions around cooking Thai food. A practitioner of what ultimately came to be known as Relational Aesthetics, Tiravanija was interested in the social interaction that revolved around cooking and eating. Today, artists are more likely to be thinking about our complex relationship with food itself--how we produce it, distribute it and consume it.

[Image:  Jennifer Coates, Picnic, 48 x 48 inches, 2013

 Giuseppe Arcimboldo, Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II, c. 1590, as Vertumnus, the Roman God of plant life, growth, and the change of seasons.

For instance, this summer at Smack Mellon Amy Lipton curated "FOODShed," a group exhibition (open through this weekend) that explores aspects of food production and sustainability.  Joy Garnett contributed home-fermented red wine vinegar concocted from old family recipes. Elaine Tin Nyo baked a sour cherry pie each day through the month of July until she had used all the cherries she picked at a farm upstate. Kristyna and Marek Milde created a temporary vegetable garden using shopping carts, soil, and plants to experience the process of growing food instead of buying it.

As someone who cooks rarely and once broke off a long-term relationship because I was "tired of being the kitchen director," I am surprised that so many women (Lipton guesses 90% of food and beverage artists today are female) are returning to the household and redefining farming, food production, and meals as art forms. Perhaps because raising kids is no longer considered a career killer, more artists, now mothers, find themselves back in the kitchen where they take a meta approach to their homemaking tasks. There's nothing like shopping for and preparing three meals a day, every day, to make an artist think more deeply about the American obsession with food.

Another who has embraced food and beverage art is Brece Honeycutt. Honeycutt, publisher of the fascinating blog On a Colonial Farm, has been researching the plants surrounding her 1792 Massachusetts home for several years. Using old recipes from colonial days, she makes beverages like Switchel and baked goods like rhubarb pie, and has begun exploring home remedies, which she will include in an upcoming exhibition in Massachusetts.

Pieter Claesz, Stilleven met een vis, 1647, olieverf op paneel, h 61.9cm × w 80.9cm. Via Rijksmuseum.

Gina Beavers, Kimchi Hot Dogs, 2014, acrylic on canvas, 30 x 30 inches.

For painters, the tradition of painting images of food undoubtedly extends as far back as cave painting. Memorable food paintings of yore include Giuseppe Arcimboldo's portraits (pictured above) from the 1500s, Pieter Claesz and the Dutch still life painters of the 1600s, Caravaggio's rotting fruit, the early Cubist still lifes of Picasso and Braque, Wayne Thiebaud's desserts from the 1960s, and Andy Warhol's iconic Campbell's Soup Cans.

Among contemporary painters, two artists stand out: Gina Beavers and Jennifer Coates. In paintings with raised relief, Beavers is reinventing the foodie still life thanks to Instagram, through which she tracks the #foodporn tag for imagery. According to the press release for a recent show at Retrospective in Hudson, NY, she selects images with "strong 'Da Vinci-an' compositions, intriguing ingredients, mystifying or amusing viewpoints, and novel framing." She has recently begun using other apps to create #foodporn collages that serve as the basis for her new paintings.

In her remarkable paintings, Jennifer Coates vivifies extreme close-ups of ordinary but unhealthy food like corned beef sandwiches, mac 'n' cheese, and candy bars with expressive, endearingly awkward paint handling. "It's almost like I'm looking to excavate religious feeling from the most unlikely vessels," Coates told me. "I'm trying to find what's ancient and urgent in the processed ingestible. Even if it's salad and more 'natural' it's still the product of millennia of human tinkering. What if your salad was animated with strange belief systems. Or your sandwich was a megalith with the sun rising behind it?"  Her work evokes our often irrepressible embrace of bad food: we eat it because it tastes so good, and then hate ourselves for doing so. Why does food have so much power over us?

Other food exhibitions include an upcoming show of 35 Brooklyn artists at the Brooklyn Museum. The press release doesn't mention which artists are included, but promises that local farmers will be selling fruits and vegetables out front on Thursdays. "Frozen Karaoke," a group exhibition at Outlet Fine Arts in Bushwick includes custom-made ice cream. At Jeff Bailey's new Hudson outpost, Jennifer Coates and  Rachel Schmidhofer have curated an exhibition called "Tossed" that opens August 16 and will feature work about salad.

Although all the artists mentioned above work in diverse media, from farm- and kitchen-based projects  to studio-based painting practices, each manages to capture how much our relationship to food has changed since Claesz was painting his glorious still lifes nearly 400 years ago.

Discussion questions: If you were going to make art about food and or beverages, what approach would you take? What are you having for lunch today?

Jennifer Coates, Bread, 2014, 48 x 48 inches.

 Jennifer Coates, Baby Ruth, 2014.

Related posts:
Neo-Maternalism: Contemporary artists' approach to motherhood

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On FILM: Richard Linklater’s school of life

Guest Contributor Jonathan Stevenson / Richard Linklater’s acclaimed movie Boyhood is as good as advertised – a forceful and mesmerizing story about growing up in America. Perhaps not incidentally, the movie also shows how an eventful and emotionally challenging childhood might yield an artist.

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EMAIL: Mike Cloud's shopping list

I recently received an announcement for "Bad Faith and Universal Technique," Mike Cloud's September solo show at Thomas Erben Gallery. Cloud, born in 1974 in Chicago, graduated from Yale MFA in 2003 and is an assistant professor at Brooklyn College. I have met him at the BC final critiques, where he has a gentle and insightful presence, offering resonant comments to each of the students as they presented their projects, but I've never seen any of his work. According to the press release:

Cloud appropriates well known symbols to reexamine historical events or phenomena, exploring the perspective of survivors rather than winners or losers. His paintings break out of the expected format, taking on irregular shapes and sculptural qualities, sometimes leaving the wall and venturing out into the exhibition space.

I was struck by the image (posted above) included with the announcement. Titled Shopping List, Cloud's painting combines two big structures, shaped like Stars of David, with painterly markmaking that seems to reference landscape. The words inscribed denote everyday items that might be on a grocery list, such as milk, cabbage, ketchup, oranges, and honey. In the lower right corner, a small geometric abstraction painted with a rainbow of colors hangs from the main painting.

I'm curious about the rest of the work in the show. Does Cloud explore other forms of religious imagery? Do everyday elements continue to collide with the iconic? What other kinds of text fragments does he use? I'm intrigued--I can't wait to see more of Cloud's work at Erben in September.

"Mike Cloud: Bad Faith and Universal Technique," Thomas Erben, Chelsea, New York, NY. September 11 through October 18, 2014.

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Snaps from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts

Last week I went to Philadelphia to visit the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, where I'll be teaching an MFA Seminar and serving as a Visiting Critic this fall. Program director and painter Clint Jukkala gave me a tour of the school facilities and the museum, and it was a grand one indeed.

[Image: Ashley Wick, Funny Guy, 2014. On display in a curated exhibition of recent graduates.]

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Otto Piene is dead

 According to BBC News, Otto Piene died on Thursday, shortly after the opening of an exhibition of his work at Berlin's Neue Nationalgalerie. He died in a taxi en route to the exhibition where he was working on "More Sky,"  a sky art event that is scheduled to take place tomorrow.

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Art and Fiction: Rachel Kushner’s molten optimism

Guest contributor Jonathan Stevenson / The view that the 1970s were culturally under-appreciated is now so firmly entrenched that they no longer are. With respect to the New York art world, Rachel Kushner’s audacious novel The Flamethrowers, set in 1975, amplifies the point by linking that percolating milieu with the full-boil political scene in Europe, where homegrown terrorism in half a dozen countries made the stateside Vietnam protests, Weather Underground operations, and Black Panther provocations of the 1960s look like high school pranks.

At a time when artists were beginning to realize that action and process could equal content, woman-child Reno heads to the Bonneville Salt Flats to make a land drawing with her motorcycle. She ends up setting the female motorcycle speed record, showing up her male artist friends in New York, whose sexism allows them to acknowledge her feat only with envy and condescension. With the help of her older boyfriend Sandro – a preening Italian artist and heir to Moto Valera, the company that makes her bike and is a Red Brigades target – Reno parlays her niche celebrity into a fledgling career as a filmmaker and photographer. Through Sandro the mysteries of art and the unsettling power of political violence come together. When she and Sandro visit his wealthy (and dysfunctional) family in Italy she asks herself why the Red Brigades’ shoddily drawn pentagram that she sees everywhere seems more threatening than a precisely drawn one. “It was the hand’s imperfection that made it menacing, I decided. But why that was, I didn’t know.” Kushner is deft enough to leave the thought there, as a spur rather than a snare.

Towards the end of this ass-kicking book, Kushner returns to the idea of menace and progress, now represented by the flamethrowing soldier of World War I, which Sandro’s father described to him as “a harbinger of death” when he was a child. “But then his father told him the flamethrowers were a hopeless lot.” The fuel tanks they carried on their backs “were cumbersome and heavy and they were obvious and slow-moving targets and if they were ever caught they were shown no mercy.”

This full disclosure tinges Sandro’s childish reverence for the flamethrowers with pity. Similarly, after their inevitable breakup, hearing the long roster of Sandro’s infidelities throttles Reno’s wistfulness into outright anguish. This is all testimony to how the full range of facts occlude any singular or pristine vision of the world, and thus to the substantial “uselessness of the truth,” which has only taught Reno how not to trust people or impressions. The truth is mainly awful, and mistrust is simply a tool of survival. But Kushner reaches the hard-earned conclusion that, as “a technique for inhabiting the world” and “for not dissolving into it,” making art keeps brighter possibilities of enlightenment alive.

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Roberta Smith on "current painting tactics"

In her NYTimes review of Daniel Heidkamp's show at White Columns, Roberta Smith articulates one of the problems she sees with contemporary painting: that artists are playing it too safe.

[Image at top: Daniel Heidkamp ]

She writes:

The three main shows at White Columns form a meditation on current painting tactics. In one small gallery, Patrick Berran very capably meets the demand for Minimalist paintings made by largely hands-off methods — in his case, layers of photocopy transfers dominated by a pattern that reads as leopard skin or moisture condensation, depending on its size. Nearby, Jennifer Nichols works with thin, bright acrylic, creating abstract tumults of transparent brushwork and, more recently, calmer arrangements of letterlike shapes. Both artists show promise, but so far they are operating within fashionable styles rather than making the work that only they can make.

In the large central gallery, Daniel Heidkamp makes paintings that seem fully his own, while doing more than his bit for a wryly self-conscious representational painting. (Other practitioners include Jonas Wood, Dana Schutz, Josephine Halvorson, Leidy Churchman, Aliza Nisenbaum.) He operates with an effortless, loose-limbed flair and even a bit of newness in an area that would seem pretty exhausted: plein-air landscape painting.

 Jennifer Nichols

 Patrick Berran

 Daniel Heidkamp

Smith has a point--a lot of painting these days has a common aesthetic-- perhaps because artists perceive that they are facing a kind of Catch-22. If their paintings aren't aesthetically unusual enough, painters are accused of bowing to trends and ultimately to the market. Last month Jerry Saltz lambasted galleries for promoting artists who produce "brand-name reductivist canvases, all more or less handsome, harmless, supposedly metacritical, and just 'new' or 'dangerous'-looking enough not to violate anyone’s sense of what 'new' or 'dangerous' really is, all of it impersonal, mimicking a set of preapproved influences." On the other hand, if artists make paintings that are too idiosyncratic, galleries and curators are less likely to put their work in exhibitions, and they risk being left outside the current cultural conversation.

What artists may be overlooking is the value of patience. Rather than catering to current biases, emerging artists today might consider simply forging ahead and developing their own vision in the sensible belief that the dialogue will eventually come around to them. Art history proves that it takes time for pioneering artists to win over the critical and collecting communities. The fact that critics are tired of "current painting tactics" would seem to validate a much more personal, less formulaic approach.

Related posts:
Responses to "Zombie Formalism"
Speculating on Andy Boot

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Recommended: Summer Group Shows

I love spending summers in NYC. For artists who stick around and work in their studios during July and August,  NYC is one big art party, featuring a slew of group shows, each with openings, closings and often other events in between. Since list-maker Andrew Ginzel is on hiatus until September, I put together this modest linky list of recommended group shows. Please feel free to add more events (with links, please!) in the comments section.

[Image at top: Gerasimos Floratos, Breathing Temple, 2014, oil, acrylic, spray paint, glue & cotton on canvas, 52 x 62 inches. At Novella]


It’s A Small World, But Not If You Have To Clean It curated by James Prez thru 7/20 / R.Jampol / 191 Henry

Let’s Go, Let Go: In Memoriam: Hudson organized by Jane Kim / 33 Orchard / 33b Orchard / thru 7/26 Opening 6/25

Daughter of Bad Girls / Nichtssagend / 54 Ludlow / thru 7/26

Quality of Life: Aliza Nisenbaum; Claudia Cortinez + Carlos Vela-Prado; Daniel Bejar; Ethan Breckenridge; Reka Reisinger / Bosi / 48 Orchard / thru 7/19 Opening 6/19

Color as Structure / McKenzie / 55 Orchard / thru 8/2 Opening 6/20

Sargent's Daughters / Sargent’s Daughters / 179 East Broadway / thru 7/26

Not A Force But A Curvature curated by Ryan Schneider / Novella / thru 7/20 Opening 6/19

Eccentric Abstraction curated by Bill Weiss with David Hayward; Douglas Florian; Leslie Wayne; Mamie Holst; Richard; Allen Morris; Bill Weiss / Frosch and Portmann / 53 Stanton St, New York, NY 10002 / thru 8/3

Marquee Moon: Rachel Beach; John Bianchi; Amy Feldman; Derek Franklin; Ted Gah; Dave Hardy; Toulu Hassani; Benjamin Horns; Tiziano Martini; Augustus Nazzaro; Rita Sobral Campos;  Jamie Sneider; Bas van den Hurk  / Thierry Goldberg / 103 Norfolk / thru 8/15 / opens 7/10

Eric's Trip curated by Cynthia Daignault and Mark Loiacono  with Victoria Fu; Sheila Hicks; David Kennedy-Cutler; José Lerma; Margaret Lee;  Judith Linhares; Rory Mulligan;  Kamau Amu Patton; Nancy Shaver;  and Mathew Zefeldt  / Lisa Cooley / 107 Norfolk Street / thru 8/1

This is what sculpture looks like / Postmasters / 54 Franklin (new location) / thru 8/2

Frameshift: Wendy White; Barry Stone; Pieter Schoolwerth; Erin O’Keefe, Lorne Blythe; Heather Cleary / Denny / 261 Broome / thru 7/20

Rose Wylie, So does everybody, 2014, watercolor and collage on paper, 35 x 25 1/8 inches. At Zieher Smith

All a tremulous heart requires: M.Eichner; I.Ekblad; T.Gahl; J.McAllister; D.Schutz; F.West; R.Wylie / ZieherSmith / 516 W 20 / thru 8/15

Summer invitational: Rick Klauber; Joanne Mattera; Paul Mogensen; Gary Petersen; Sarah Walker / Harris / 529 W 20 - floor 6 / thru 7/25

Show #21: Momento Mori curated by Deborah Brown / Field Projects / 526 W 26th Street, #807 / thru 8/10 / opens 7/10

 Gilfilen and Reid @ Morgan Lehman

Conversations curated by Sharon Louden with David Ryan; Jean Shin; Timothy Nolan; Cody Ryman; Amy Rathbone; Louise Belcourt; Zachary Keeting; Samantha Bittman; Elizabeth Gilfilin; Laurie Reid  / Morgan Lehman / 535 W 22 - floor 6 / thru 8/22 / opens 7/9

Don’t Look Now Joshua Abelow; Gina Beavers; Brian Belott; Katherine Bernhardt; Charles Burchfield; Caitlin Cherry; Ann Craven; Cynthia Daignault; Mira Dancy; Nicole Eisenman; Al Freeman; Ted Gahl; Van Hanos; Daniel Heidkamp; Jamian Juliano-Villani; Nikki Maloof; Keith Mayerson; John McAllister; Torey Thornton / Feuer / 548 W 22 / thru 7/26

New Hells curated by Isaac Lyles with Huma Bhabha; Violet Dennison; Mark Flood; Jason Fox; Jesse Greenberg; Nancy Grossman; Max Klinger; Ajay Kurian; Peter Linde Busk; Rose Marcus; Lionel Maunz; Félicien Rops; Brad Troemel; Jean Veber; Jamian Juliano-Villani; Julia Wachtel; Michael Wang; Ivan Witenstein / Derek Eller / 615 West 27th / thru 8/8 / opens 7/9

 Installation view @ Asya Geisberg

About a Mountain curated by Holly Jarrett / Asya Geisberg / 537b W 23 / thru 8/15

Another Look at Detroit curated by Todd Levin / Boesky / 509 W 24 / thru 8/8

Another Look at Detroit curated by Todd Levin / Marlborough / 545 W 25 - floors 1&2 / thru 8/8 Opening 6/26

Slip / Mitchell-Innes & Nash / 534 W 26 / thru 7/18

On Being Solid: Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts MFA Exhibition with Matthew Carrieri; Matthew Herzog; Augustus Hoffman; Alexandra Jo Sutton; Tiffany Tate / Mixed Greens / 531 W 26 / thru 7/18 /opens 7/10 (NOTE: I'll be teaching at PAFA in the fall)

Some Artist’s Artists / Goodman / 24 W 57 – floor 4 / thru 8/22

Never Mind the Bollocks: Summer Invitational / Life on Mars / 56 Bogart / thru 8/10 

Legend Anew / Centotto / 250 Moore  #108 / thru Friday 7/11 / closing reception 7/11


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KIPPLE: First-rate intelligence proliferating in Dublin

Philip K. Dick coined the term "kipple" in his 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? to describe the insidious proliferation of man-made trash like junk mail and gum wrappers. In their exhibition at the National College of Art and Design Gallery in Dublin, artists Natasha Conway, Daniel Jackman, Eveleen Murphy, Andrew Simpson, and George Warren have adopted the word to describe the situation in the studio whereby objects materialize and dematerialize, seemingly unbidden. All recent grads, the artists feel a strong affinity to the intimate abstraction produced in the post-war years. They have dedicated the show to Raoul De Keyser, a painter they admire who died during their degree year. The following is a short essay I wrote for their exhibition catalogue.

[Image at top: Eveleen Murphy, Penance, 2014, acrylic on wood, 36 × 41 cms.]

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Images: Jessica Weiss

In Jessica Weiss's ruggedly handsome paintings, strange, puppet-like figures emerge and recede from floral wallpaper patterns that are vigorously screen-printed on large-scale canvases. For Weiss, the crowning virtue of these patterns is their aesthetic versatility: they are both abstract and gestural, and also refer to matters beyond the canvas. "Wallpaper, literally a piece of cultural fabric," Weiss says, "has become a major source of both content and formal concerns in my paintings."

 [Image at top: Jessica Weiss, Carnaval, 2013, screen print and acrylic on canvas, 54"x 42"]

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On Film: Space as antagonist, with Liam Gillick and Viviane Albertine in starring roles

 

Guest contributor Jonathan Stevenson / Space – for instance, the relationship between negative and positive space – has long presented compositional challenges to artists. In her slyly penetrating and  satirical film Exhibition, Joanna Hogg takes a bold step beyond from that rather bland observation and looks at how space can affect their personal lives and art practices.

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Philip von Zweck: Faith, futility and the problem of unexplainable phenomena

Appropriated texts and portraits of scientists, occultists, and historians are the starting points for many of Philip von Zweck’s challenging new paintings on view at Invisible Exports. Based in Chicago, von Zweck is known for a diverse art practice which, besides painting, includes performance, sound, participatory social projects, and Something Else, a radio show that ran for ten years. Though ostensibly and I think genuinely playful, von Zweck incorporates a serious, searching, and quite intellectual approach that teases out ideas about faith, futility, and the problem of unexplainable phenomena.

[Image at top:  Philip von Zweck, Billy Meier, 2014, acrylic on canvas, 12 x 16 inches.]

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Roundup: Abstraction in Connecticut

This summer painter Cary Smith takes a turn as a curator, organizing "This One’s Optimistic: Pincushion," a raucous, salon-style exhibition at the New Britain Museum of American Art featuring paintings by forty of his favorite artists. Focusing primarily on abstraction, Smith has included a little of everything--hard edge geometric, non-objective, painterly gestural, metaphorical, and more. According to the press release, he conceived the show like an old-school mixed tape:

Smith has long been interested in mashing seemingly differing entities together to try to create a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. Similar to the cassette mixed tapes he often made for friends in the 70s and 80s, which often combined wildly disparate sorts of music, abruptly shifting from track to track....Smith believes there is a heightened collective awareness that we share due to the immediate exchange of digital information among us. As one sits in front of their computer, he or she can view art from all over the world in short bits of time. This exhibition is a snippet of that world for all to view in real time and in real space. 

"This One’s Optimistic: Pincushion," curated by Cary Smith. Artists include John Phillip Abbott, Joshua Abelow, Lisa Beck, Trudy Benson, Timothy Bergstrom, Michael Berryhill, Ross Bleckner, Todd Chilton, Steve DiBenedetto, Amy Feldman, Michelle Grabner, Joanne Greenbaum, Clare Grill, Adam Henry, Daniel Hesidence, Xylor Jane, Bill Komoski, Joshua Marsh, Chris Martin, Andrew Masullo, Keith Mayerson, Douglas Melini, Tom Nozkowski, Carl Ostendarp, Ann Pibal, Josh Podoll, Lisa Sanditz, James Siena, Jennifer Wynne Reeves, Alexander Ross, Julie Ryan, Jackie Saccoccio, Russell Tyler, Dan Walsh, Chuck Webster, Garth Weiser, Stanley Whitney, Michael Williams, B. Wurtz, Tamara Zahaykevich. New Britain Museum of American Art, New Britain, CT. Through Septmeber 14, 2014.

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The Wave, an impressive and well-conceived interactive art project created by artists Susan Hoffman Fishman and Elena Kalman, has been traveling around the country (readers may have seen the installation at Allegra LaViola on the Lower East Side, pictured above), and on Saturday, July 12, it goes on display at the Wadsworth Atheneum. Participants will cut recyclable, polycarbonate film into wave-like shapes and add them to the wire flowing through the installation space. Fishman and Kalman hope the massive installation will remind us of our connection to both the mysterious beauty and the awesome power of water.

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At Real Art Ways, Olu Oguibe presents a series of paintings he made on his iPad. In 2010, after the death of a close friend, Oguibe fell into a deep depression, holing up at his house and resorting to a cheap graphics app on his iPad for companionship. "The Apple device enabled me to keep an record of a very dark and challenging period, and to slowly work my way through unimaginable grief," Oguibe says. The show comprises five large-scale and eight smaller pieces that embody the narrative of loss and recovery that he experienced. He says some took a few seconds to create, some a few minutes. "People like to have a dialogue with their work, a push-pull. I don't work that way," he said. "I'm done with them when I feel there is nothing more I can add to them."

According to a recent profile in the Hartford Courant:

Today, Oguibe is moving away from the abstracts and toward figurative work again, and toward dark themes. He said his next iPad project will be about Newtown or about his childhood in war-torn Nigeria. His hometown, Aba, is in the Biafra region, which seceded from Nigeria for two and a half years, from 1967 to 1970, but was re-absorbed by Nigeria after a bloody war.

"I am 49 years old. I will be 50 soon. When I was a child, there was no guarantee that anyone of my generation would survive the war. To live a half-century is a tremendous landmark," he said. "Once Nigeria defeated the secessionist state, you were forbidden to even mention it. Generations have been raised knowing nothing about it. That's not very healthy, for children to go through this traumatic experience and then they couldn't talk about it."

Oguibe said that even though English artist David Hockney helped popularize the idea of creating art on iPads, the going will still be slow. "I tried to get my students into it. They thought it was cute but not something they were particularly drawn to," he said. "I let it go."

 "Olu Oguibe: iPad Prints," Real Art Ways, Hartford, CT. Through July 6, 2014.

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“Painting is a reproduction of a mental pattern. I have to see the painting before I start.” Jack Whitten (image above) has work on view at the Aldrich Museum through July 6.

Readers: Please feel free to post links in the Comments section for other Connecticut abstraction shows that I haven't included.

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Jennifer Wynne Reeves: A Prayer for the Art World

Sad news: gifted painter Jennifer Wynne Reeves died yesterday at 51 after a relentless onslaught of tumors in her brain. Represented by BravinLee Programs, Reeves posted this prayer to the art world on her Facebook page in April.  

[Image: Jennifer Wynne Reeves, Grace Boat, 2013, gouache, wire, string and cloth on hard molding paste on paper, 10 x 12 inches.]

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