Writing project for artists

Over at the art blog Thinking About Art, J.T. Kirkland is looking for artists who like writing to participate in the upcoming Artists ‘Review’ Artists Project. According to Kirkland’s rules, artists will submit one jpeg image of recent work. The images will be randomly assigned to other artists without any identifying information, and each person has to write a short piece (100-500 words) reacting to the image. All approaches, whether analytical, intuitive, emotional, instructive, etc., are acceptable. “It can be positive or negative. It can be constructive or not,” Kirkland says. “While it can be anything you, the writer, wants it to be, it must address the provided work.” Read more about the project here.

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Percival De Luce painting discovered in the closet on the Cape

In Wicked Local Wellfleet Marilyn Miller reports that when Barbara Lovett donated a painting to a charity auction, she was surprised to learn it was actually worth something. “My grandfather was a member of the Salmagundi Club” Lovett said, referring to an art club in New York City that was founded in the 1870s. The members were businessmen who collected art and her grandfather was a member in the 1920s. She had planned to sell the ornate wooden frame that held the painting until a man, perusing the items for sale, told her the painting was worth at least $1,000."I didn't know what it was," she said. "It's an original oil that was in the family and I never took it seriously." (Read more.) A larger painting by the same artist, Percival De Luce, sold at Christie's 10 years ago for $14,000.

About the artist: After receiving art instruction in Antwerp, Brussels and Paris in the late 19th century, Percival De Luce returned to New York City where he began a successful career as a portrait and genre artist. He exhibited widely across many venues including the Brooklyn Art Association, 1871-1885, 1891; the National Academy of Design, 1872 - 1900; the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 1876-1899; and the Boston Art Club, 1881-1900. He studied at the National Academy in New York and was designated ANA in 1897. De Luce's daughter, Olive, also an artist, joined the faculty of Northwest Missouri State University in 1915. Following her death in 1970, De Luce left her entire art collection of 19th- and 20th- century painting, named The Percival De Luce Memorial Collection, to the University. The Fine Arts Center at NMSU is named after Olive, although little information is available about her own art.

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Painters who curate: Summer group shows

For painters like me, curating group shows, although time consuming, helps articulate more specifically what what we're investigating in our own work. Here are three good examples of shows curated by painters. Please feel free to leave links in the Comments section if you know of others.

"Present Tense," curated by Don Christensen with Mary Heilmann. Spanierman Modern, New York, NY. Through August 2, 2008. The paintings included in the show aim at producing instant and visceral responses in the viewer, without the necessity of background information or context. Each artist works in the abstract formalist tradition, but, through the development of new painterly vocabularies and use of unusual materials, attempts to redefine the boundaries of painting. Artists include Polly Apfebaum, Emery Blagdon, Don Christensen, John Duff, Hermine Ford, Joe Fyfe, Mary Heilman, Steve Keister, Chris Martin, Stephen Mueller, Arlene Shechet, Taro Suzuki, Stephen Westfall, and Stanley Whitney. Endorsed by Martin Bromirski at Anaba, with pictures.

"Echo, Implant, Imprint, Reverb," curated by Stephen Maine. A Viewing Room flatfile project at Frederieke Taylor Gallery, New York, NY. According to Maine these artists "derive rather than contrive their work's rhythm and traction, through the peculiarity and specificity of their improvisational, open-ended procedures. The risk of failure is ever present, but Gunn, Janowich, Keller and Kim seem preternaturally equipped to snatch form from the jaws of the void. As artifacts of that confrontation with chaos, their work is authentic, disarmed, and a bit alien, as if it just crawled out of the mouth of a cave, dazed and blinking in the hot flat light." Artists include Edwin J. Gunn, Ron Janowich, Marthe Keller and Joyce Kim. While you're there, check out Lisa Krivacka's new show, "Almost Utopia." Both shows are up through August 8.

"The Idea of Nature," curated by Bill Weiss. 33 Bond Gallery, New York, NY. Through July 31. The artists selected don't depict the natural world per se, but rather evoke the idea of nature through abstraction. Artists include Elisa D’Arrigo, Heather Hutchison, Andrew Masullo, Leslie Wayne, Bill Weiss, Stephen Westfall and Michael Pribich.

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Vilhelm Hammershøi in London

The Royal Academy of Art is presenting a retrospective of Danish painter Vilhelm Hammershøi(1864-1916), who was known for depicting austere interiors in a dour range of grays. Over sixty paintings, borrowed from museums and private collections in Europe, the United States and Japan will be presented. In The Guardian, Maev Kennedy reports that little is known of the enigmatic painter. "To call Hammershøi a quiet painter is a serious understatement: he had few friends and less conversation, and if he ever confided his private thoughts to a diary, he destroyed it. He usually skipped the openings of his own exhibitions. One painting, supposedly of a party at his house, shows some of his best friends gathered in near darkness around a table with a couple of bottles and an empty bowl, apparently in speechless gloom. His teacher, PS Kroyer - painter of all those colour-saturated images of exquisitely dressed middle-class Danes, strolling along beaches lit by the midnight sun, which have sold a million greeting cards and calendars - recognised a force of nature when he met one: 'I don't understand him - I think he will be big, so I try not to influence him.' In 1885, when the Danish Academy refused to give a portrait prize to Hammershøi's painting of his sister Anna, and turned down his next submission, artists got together a furious petition, and Krøyer wrote: 'Can we not find a way to blow that whole putrid box up?'" Read more. See images of the show.

"Vilhelm Hammershøi: the Poetry of Silence," Royal Academy London, June 28 - September 7. Travels to the National Museum of Western Art and Nikkei Inc., Tokyo.

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"Defiant sex suddenly mingles with mortality"

Christopher Knight's review steps lightly describing many of the paintings in Marlene Dumas' s show at the LA Museum of Modern Art. Does he like Dumas's work or not? At one point he finally asserts that her seductive paint handling feels repetitive. "Dumas often paints children, for example, but she's no Mary Cassatt -- or even Alice Neel. Her babies do not burble. In 'Reinhardt's Daughter' (1994), a brown-skinned child is shown upside-down, bent backward over an inexplicable form. The little girl's two dangling arms frame her tilted oval head, its eyes and mouth softly shut. She's either a blissfully innocent model of somnolent repose or else she's dead. The narrow painting is 6 feet tall, so the inverted child's body, truncated just below the waist, is larger than life. The figure is painted thinly, almost as if with a dry brush, while the space around it is thickly swept with deep, dark oil paint. Dumas' palette is black and bruised. The surrounding pigment suggests a murky pool, an ooze into which the fragile child is disappearing. This technique is encountered throughout the show, where the human body is mostly a negative space made visible by a forbidding, even oppressive context. Dramatically stated and powerfully seductive, it can nonetheless feel repetitive." Read more.

"Marlene Dumas: Measuring Your Own Grave," organized by Connie Bulter, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA), in association with The Museum of Modern Art, New York . Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA. Through Sept. 22. Traveling to MoMA, New York, December 14, 2008 -February 16, 2009, and The Menil Collection, Houston, -March 26 -June 21, 2009.

Related posts:
Marlene Dumas: Contented Bohemian
At Anaba Martin Bromirski keeps track of Dumas mentions and reviews in Marlene Dumas Tally Reaches Fever Pitch

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Art in America gets a makeover

In the NY Times Randy Kennedy reports that the longtime editor of Art in America magazine, Elizabeth C. Baker is stepping down. "Peter M. Brant, a newsprint magnate and art collector, took over Brant Publications, the magazine’s publisher, in January after buying out the 50 percent stake owned by his former wife, Sandra Brant. Mr. Brant appointed Fabien Baron and Glenn O’Brien as joint editorial directors of Art in America and the company’s two other publications, Interview and The Magazine Antiques. Ms. Baker, known as Betsy, took over the magazine in 1974. Under her leadership Art in America grew from a bimonthly publication with a circulation of around 45,000 to a monthly with a circulation of more than 75,000, featuring the writing of many influential critics. Marcia E. Vetrocq, who joined Art in America in 1998 as a senior editor, will take over as editor. Ms. Baker will become editor at large in charge of special projects, which will include book publishing and Web site development." According to Walter Robinson at artnet, AiA will probably try to reinvent itself as younger, fresher, shorter and more global. We can expect a redesign by the November issue. Might it be possible that someday we will be able to read the entire content of Art in America (gasp) online...?

Related posts:
Culturegrrl's take: News Flash: Official Announcement of Changes at Art in America Magazine

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Alexis Rockman's painterly turn at the Rose

In The Phoenix Greg Cook reports that Alexis Rockman, whose earlier work is often compared to the Museum of Natural History's diorama painting, has adopted an "expressionist action-painting style while holding to the disasters-of-global-climate-change theme. These paintings from 2005 to ’07 are a catalogue of The Day After Tomorrow–style weather calamities: a truck chugging through a blizzard; a fire throwing a big black cloud up at the horizon; the edges of neighborhoods collapsing into mudslides; rusting ships marooned in a desert that was once the Aral Sea; a car on a muddy road with its brake lights glowing as a great big brown beast of a tornado blenders the landscape. It’s like the Weather Channel’s greatest hits, with shout-outs to the 19th-century landscape paintings by the Hudson River School (those fellows who thought nothing was more sublime than getting caught in a downpour). All told, there are four great paintings here, several good ones, and a bunch of mediocre pieces. Too often Rockman’s brushwork and compositions feel generic." Read more.

In The Boston Globe Sebastian Smee writes that Rockman's attempts to marry this gutsy, semi-abstract idiom with more traditional representation don't quite come off. "Near the bottom of his huge, vertically oriented painting of a blizzard, for instance, is a minuscule snowplow, its switched-on headlights poignantly feeble in this vast, virtually lunar landscape. Other works contain a tiny airplane, a chairlift, irrigated fields, or wind farms. These figurative details, all fastidiously rendered, are dwarfed, in each case, by vast clouds of colored paint that swell, surge, suck, and stream. Despite Rockman's best attempts at uniting them, you can't help feeling that there are two different visual registers at work. And far from producing an interesting tension or dissonance, the clash produces a kind of distraction - a desire in the mind's eye to marry them that is continually frustrated." Read more.

“Alexis Rockman: The Weight of Air,” organized by Michael Rush.Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA. Through July 27.

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Secrets for posthumous success

Am I the only artist who loathes arranging studio visits with dealers? Apparently not. In the NY Times today Dorothy Spears writes about artists who may not have been good at cultivating dealers and collectors when they were alive, but now that they're dead, galleries are happy to represent them. According to Spears, if you're aiming for posthumous recognition, art market success isn't as important as gaining the respect of your peers. Of course you won't reap the financial rewards, but you don't have to arrange studio visits, attend the opening receptions for your shows, or cultivate collectors. Steve Parrino, Al Taylor and Jack Goldstein all refused to play to the market during their lifetimes, and are now experiencing fabulous success. "With the soaring prices of contemporary art, dealers admit that they have a strategic incentive to seek dead artists and give them recognition. 'It’s supply and demand,' said David Zwirner, the Chelsea dealer and co-owner in Zwirner & Wirth, which represents Mr. Taylor’s estate. He said the limited inventory imposed by an artist’s death can end up increasing prices. 'Although overall market conditions are not our only motivation, we are a for-profit gallery,' he added. 'There is a commercial angle, or we’d be going out of business...'

According to Al Taylor's widow, Al was lousy at the business of art. "He would have never gone around to David Zwirner and said, ‘Would you come to my studio?’ And he wouldn’t have let me do that while he was living. He wasn’t into the audition."

Related posts:
The backstory: Poons and Taylor
Steve Parrino's sex and death paintings
Jack Goldstein at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York, NY. Through August 1.

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Dunham donates his printmaking archive to his alma mater

Carroll Dunham donated his printmaking archive to The Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, his high school alma mater. The Addison Gallery is organizing a traveling exhibition of the prints, which will be the first museum study of Dunham's graphic work. The exhibition opened at the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College, and will be at the Addison until July 13. In The Boston Globe, new art critic Sebastian Smee reports that the decorous, connoisseur's atmosphere that swaddles most discussions of printmaking is simply obliterated by Carroll Dunham's prints. "There's comedy in the contradiction. There's also - in just a few cases - something aesthetically grating, as the feeling builds that Dunham may be a little too precious about materials and technique. If he really wants to blurt forth imagery of this kind, he should make it a genuine blurt, not a lithographed blurt on Fabriano Esportazione paper or an etched blurt with aquatint on fawn Stonehenge paper. Nonetheless, I found this show riveting. ...On occasion, Dunham sets out to challenge good taste not only in his imagery but in the medium itself. One series of phallic-nosed figures is printed as a wood engraving with embossing that pulls the outlines up from the surface. Everything about these works - the colors, the embossing, the dumb graphic simplicity of the style - is tacky, and I've no doubt Dunham wants it that way. It's kitsch, but knowing kitsch. And as such, it's hard not to like." Read more.

"Carroll Dunham Prints: A Survey," curated by Allison N. Kemmerer. The Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, MA. Through July 13.

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Protect and preserve: Contemporary art conservation

Issues relating to preservation and restoration are on my mind because I've just written an article for the July Rail about Imi Knoebel's 1977 installation "24 Colors--For Blinky," which has recently been restored and installed at Dia:Beacon. Check out NPR's Science Friday to hear a story about painting preservation. "Light, temperature and air pollution can wreck works of art. How do museums protect and preserve artistic and historic artifacts for the ages? It's a complicated field, including everything from studying the chemical makeup of paints to optimizing the temperature, humidity and lighting conditions in museum galleries. Timothy P. Whalen, director of the Getty Conservation Institute, and James Druzik, senior scientist at the Getty Conservation Institute, talk about the fine art of art preservation." Listen here.

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Field trip to Williamstown to contemplate the soft side

James McNeill Whistler: “Paint should not be applied thick. It should be like breath on the surface of a pane of glass.”

Ken Johnson reports in the NY Times that Marc Simpson, the Clark Art Institute's curator of American art, has gathered 41 paintings, dating from the 1870s to 1919, by 15 Americans for their current exhibition “Like Breath on Glass: Whistler, Inness, and the Art of Painting Softly." "The works are mostly landscapes in which painterly gestures, sharp edges and other signs of technical effort are minimized. Quiet, blurrily luminous scenes of natural calm by Whistler, George Inness, John Twachtman and Thomas Wilmer Dewing, among others, appear like mirages, as though they’d magically materialized on canvas....The show includes no female artists, but women are subjects of several paintings. William Merritt Chase’s gorgeous, mostly red painting of a young woman relaxing in profile in an armchair is undoubtedly a hedonistic response to his friend Whistler’s famous portrait of his formidably upright mother. Gender is most conspicuously at issue in the works of Dewing, who painted young women in neo-Classical garb in vaporous pastoral environments. These women are fashionable beauties, but they are also nature goddesses. From today’s perspective his paintings may seem laughably sexist and vapidly decorative. But consider the times, a period of explosive industrial and economic growth driven by ruthlessly ambitious men. Dewing’s paintings — and soft painting in general — might represent an alternative way of being, a 'feminine' state of sensuous receptivity, soulful indolence and communion with nature. So, while soft painting may seem superficially disengaged from gritty social reality, a deeper view might interpret it as a cry for attention from the repressed feminine side of America’s male-dominated collective psyche. That, at least, is one way to account for the tantalizing effect of this exhibition." Read more.

Another reason to make the trip besides the beautiful setting: CAI has a new building by the Pritzker Prize-winning Japanese architect Tadao Ando.

“Like Breath on Glass: Whistler, Inness, and the Art of Painting Softly," curated by Marc Simpson. Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA. Through Oct. 19. Includes work by including Whistler, Inness, William Merritt Chase, Thomas Wilmer Dewing, John Twachtman, Eduard Steichen, "and others." (Why don't museums and galleries list all the artists on the website?)

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Sports writers on art, art critics on sport

The Guardian's arts critics and sports writers swapped roles. Yesterday the critics got a taste of the sporting life, while today the sports team is set loose on the contemporary arts world. (Via Art News Blog)

Jonathan Jones, visual art critic, on football
Hull City v Bristol City at Wembley, May 24
"Watching football is, in theory, a bit like looking at art. The view from my seat (which has its own little TV monitor) might be compared to looking down on a vast green abstract canvas laid flat, with dots oscillating about like some 1960s piece of kinetic art. But while I can find deep meaning in, say, an abstract by Jackson Pollock, the game of football has always been as indecipherable to me as some people profess to find modern art. I am a football philistine." Read more.

Steve Bierley, tennis correspondent, on visual art Louise Bourgeois at the Pompidou Centre, Paris, May 31
"From the top of the Pompidou Centre, Roland Garros - the home of the French Open tennis championship, and my home for a fortnight every spring - was lost in the morning mist. Sport is essentially about youth, and about absolutes. Sport makes you feel elated or depressed. The works of Louise Bourgeois, 97 years old this December, make you feel unsettled, repelled. Roland Garros seemed a million miles away. Faced with a new sport, which is unusual these days, my first instinct is to ignore the detail. Observe and record; don't get bogged down in too many facts or statistics. So I came to Bourgeois with no prior knowledge of her work, no inkling of the deeply disturbing web she was about to wind around me. Her huge spider, installed on the ground floor, should have been a hint." Read more.

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Van Gogh image banned at US Army bases

In the New Haven Advocate, reporter Brianna Snyder chats with David Sedaris about the Van Gogh painting featured on the cover of his new collection of essays, When You Are Engulfed in Flames. "I just put it in my living room and I walk by and I look at it every now and then and I think, 'Oh that's interesting.' I try to pretend that I didn't know what was on my book cover. And I try to imagine what it might look like if I didn't already know what it looked like—you know what I mean? If I walked into someone's house and saw that lying on a coffee table, what would I think?...I knew a year ago that I had to turn the book in but I didn't know what the cover was going to look like. Although, I've had that post card for, I don't know, a couple years.
Where did you get it?Amsterdam. It's a Van Gogh painting from, I think, the Van Gogh museum. I don't go to museums, I just go to museum gift shops. If someone said to me, 'Oh that's a Van Gogh painting on the cover,' I'd go, 'Yeeesh,' [laughs] but I think that's like a really good Van Gogh painting. I just found out army bases don't want to carry the book because they think the skeleton's smoking a joint. So the publisher had to call them and explain that the painting was done in like 18-something and that they didn't have joints then—it's a hand-rolled cigarette. But that's pretty silly to me. Soldiers, American soldiers...you don't want to tempt them with a joint. You also don't see books with black covers too often. Well, the Bible. ...And I think it looks really good—all that black on the cover." Read more.

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Shafrazi uses two coats of paint

I'd be a negligent blogger if I didn't applaud Jerry Saltz's fabulous article title in this week's New York,"Two Coats of Painting." Saltz writes that Tony Shafrazi's current show, "Who's Afraid of Jasper Johns," centers on a collaboration by the two impresario-organizers, gallerist Gavin Brown and artist Urs Fischer. "It is all about memory, morals, redemption, tribal loyalty, and railing against cozy cliché. One of its causes can be traced to February 28, 1974, the infamous day when Tony Shafrazi, a 30-year-old Iranian-born artist, entered the Museum of Modern Art, yelled, 'Call the curator. I am an artist,' and spray-painted KILL LIES ALL in red letters across Picasso’s 'Guernica.' I’d always assumed Shafrazi meant to paint 'All Lies Kill.'However, he recently told me he wrote exactly what he wanted to write, and that it was meant to be read in 'a Finnegans Wake way' so that it said something whichever way you read it. (It’s still gibberish to me. Whatever.) Asked about it later, Shafrazi stated he wanted to bring Guernica 'absolutely up to date, to retrieve it from art history and give it life.' Regardless, the painting had a protective coating, was cleaned soon after, and now hangs at the Reina Sofía in Madrid. Shafrazi was arrested, charged with 'criminal mischief,' and released on $1,000 bail."

Whether 'Who's Afraid' is successful or not, Saltz reports that something freeing did happen the night of the opening. "It was Shafrazi’s birthday. At the large after-party, Brown and Fischer presented him with a five-foot-long cake decorated with a perfect rendition of Guernica. Brown climbed atop a table and, amid much yelling, toasted Shafrazi. He then thrust a cake decorator filled with red icing into Shafrazi’s hands. As the crowd screamed, Brown implored, 'Write, Tony! Write!' Shafrazi started moving the device over the cake. Slowly he wrote the words I AM SORRY. Time stood still. It was like an angel of redemption had entered the room to take away Shafrazi’s guilt. The room went silent. I was shocked. Then, Shafrazi began writing again. He wrote one more word: not! It was like the Sopranos finale. Just as you thought everything was going to change, everything only became more of what it already was." Read more.

"Who's Afraid of Jasper Johns," conceived by Urs Fischer and Gavin Brown. Tony Shafrazi Gallery, New York, NY. Through July 12.

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Flying colors at OK Harris

Blogger Steven Alexander strongly recommends "No Chromophobia" at OK Harris."Curated by Richard Witter, this show focuses on color as content in abstract painting, and brings together thirty-three painters in a stunning array of discerning concept and sensuous chroma.... There is a conspicuous absence of irony – these artists are engaged in painting not as pastiche, but as a deeply intelligent exploration of visual and tactile properties. In addition to the focus on color, the show is unified and driven by reductive form, and what could be described as succinct construction -- delicate balancing of the analytical and the sensuous -- surfaces and objects that are beautifully and specifically crafted, infused with sagacious knowledge of the medium and the language, with absolutely no fluff – direct painting, deceptive in its simplicity. Looking around the galleries from a distance, this show is a feast for the eyes as the vibrant hues resonate from one piece to the next around the rooms. Up close, the distinctiveness of each artist’s approach presents one rich encounter after another. Anyone who really loves painting would be hard pressed to find a more satisfying group exhibition." Read more.

"No Chromophobia," curated by Richard Witter, OK Harris, New York, NY. Through July 11, then Sept. 2-6. Artists include Carla Aurich, Diane Ayott, Kate Beck, Siri Berg, Sharon Brant, Cathleen Daley, Julie Gross, Molly Heron, Kazuko Inoue, Marthe Keller, Joanne Klein, Pat Lipsky, Joanne Mattera, Lynn McCarty, Joan Mellon, Margaret Neill, Mary Obering, Doug Ohlson, Rose Olson, Paula Overbay, Susan Post, Cora Roth, Rebecca Salter, Susan Schwalb, Yuko Shiraishi, Louise P. Sloane, Linda Stillman, Rella Stuart-Hunt, Soonae Tark, Li Trincere, Suzanne Ulrich, Jean Wolff, Tamar Zinn.

Related post:
Awash in Color: "No Chromophobia"

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For the fall reading list

Seven Days in the Art World, Sarah Thornton. Norton, $24.95 (256p) ISBN 978-0-393-06722-4. November release.
According to Publishers Weekly, Sarah Thornton offers an elegant, evocative, sardonic view into some of the art world's most prestigious institutions. "The hot, hip contemporary art world, argues sociologist Thornton, is a cluster of intermingling subcultures unified by the belief, whether genuine or feigned, that 'nothing is more important than the art itself.' It is a conviction, she asserts, that has transformed contemporary art into 'a kind of alternative religion for atheists.' Thornton, a contributor to Artforum.com and the New Yorker, presents an astute and often entertaining ethnography of this status-driven world. Each of the seven chapters is a keenly observed profile of that world's highest echelons: a Christie's auction, a 'crit' session at the California Institute of the Arts and the Art Basel art fair. The chapter on auctions (where one auction-goer explains, '[I]t's dangerous to wear Prada.... You might get caught in the same outfit as three members of Christie's staff') is one of the book's strongest; the author's conversations about the role of the art critic with Artforum editor-in-chief Tim Griffin and the New Yorker's Peter Schjeldahl are edifying. 8 illus."

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Hackett on Seattle artist Sherry Markovitz

Sherry Markovitz, 60, currently has a retrospective at the Bellevue Arts Center and a show of recent work at Greg Kucera. The Seattle artist is best known for her beaded, richly-adorned papier-mâché animal head trophies and dolls, which explore art and craft, life and death and metaphors of gender and identity. In the Seattle P-I Regina Hackett writes that Markovitz's work is labor intensive, but the labor doesn't show. "Encrusted as they are, they are spare with a serene confidence in their ability to express the complexities that are their reasons for being. Lately, she is painting in gouache on silk, loading the surfaces before tossing the results in the washing machine and painting again, hanging them on clotheslines to dry with 'the right amount of wrinkle.' Because the silk retains impressions from earlier painting, they are in the end ghostly shadows of other faces beside the faces that dominate. These silks hang lightly on the wall, and the paintings on them could be dreams, half of dolls and half of people, dolls and people merged. In 'Mother and Daughter' (gouache, velvet and beads on silk), she and her mother are both separate and fused, two people whose bond causes their boundaries to blur. Hung around the front room of the Greg Kucera Gallery, the paintings remind her of her first major exhibit at and/or, the photos that wrapped the room to tell a story. The Bellevue Arts Museum has never looked so light and contemplative as it does with her work in it. The Kucera show features recent work, including the paintings on silk. Having just taken a number of them to Chicago for the Chicago Art Fair, Kucera was startled when people came up to him and asked, 'Is this artist Jewish?'
'Yes,' he said, mystified as to how they knew. The weight of her culture is in her work, and her brilliance is that she makes it float." Read more.

"Sherry Markovitz: Shimmer," curated by Chris Bruce and Keith Wells at Washington State University. Bellevue Arts Museum, Bellevue, WA. Through Sept. 7. Travels to Schneider Museum of Art, Southern Oregon University, Ashland, WA, September 25, 2008 - December 13, 2008.
"Sherry Markovitz: The True Story," Greg Kucera, Seattle, WA. Through June 28, 2008.

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Marlene Dumas: Contented Bohemian

In the NY Times Magazine Deborah Soloman profiles Marlene Dumas. "'I never learned to ride a bicycle, and it is too late now,' Dumas told me with a hint of pride, before going on to list her other negative achievements. 'I never learned to drive. I never learned to swim.' At 54, Dumas is a jovial and garrulous presence, with a tangle of blond curls and fair skin. She speaks English with a heavy accent, in a wheezing, thinned-out voice. 'I was so pleased when I read that Rossellini loved to lie in bed,' she continued, referring to the Italian filmmaker, a confirmed hypochondriac who, she discovered, would take to his bed for two or three days at a time, reading thick novels. 'Now people do exercise, and they have hobbies, and they take holidays,' she said. 'I am not one of those. I don’t go to a psychiatrist. I don’t go to a gym. I run away from my accountant, I run away from my dentist. They are all supposed to help you, but I like to stay in bed, where I have a chance to reflect, like Rossellini.'" Read more. Check out the slide show.

"Marlene Dumas: Measuring Your Own Grave," Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA. Opens June 22.

Related posts:
At Anaba Martin Bromirski keeps track of Dumas mentions and reviews in Marlene Dumas Tally Reaches Fever Pitch

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Delia Brown's children

According to Brown the title of her new show at D'Amelio Terras, 'Precious,' refers to gendered attitudes toward painting. In art school during the late 80s, students were told not to be ‘precious,' which was a way of saying that paintings had to be bold, muscular, unattached, unsentimental – in a word, masculine. Brown embraces the taboo, and like a satirical Mary Cassatt, presents a rarefied, sentimental notion of maternity, propping children on her hip and reading bedtime stories. In Frieze, Morgan Falconer writes that the work is reminiscent of Jeff Koons’ "occasional satires on the baubles of the rich. Her parodies are not quite so successful, though, since they could probably pass unnoticed alongside the work of those artists who really do service the vulgar end of the market. One also misses the fascinating clashes of genre and gender that have lit up Brown’s pictures in the past: these scenes are essentially modernized, ‘feminized’ genre scenes, and they don’t give off the sparks of some of Brown’s Hopperesque scenes of women alone in the city. But her new work continues to mount a strong argument for the critical potential of figurative painting, and Brown continues to look like a girl’s best bet to take on John Currin on his own turf and kick him in the balls. It’s just a matter of time, and aim." Read more.

"Delia Brown: Precious" D'Amelio Terras, New York, NY. Through June 21.

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Basquiat painting inspires U2

Bloomberg art reporter Scott Reyburn writes that the Irish rock band U2 may get up to 6 million pounds ($11.7 million) from the sale of a painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat which has been hanging in its Dublin studio for nearly two decades, said Sotheby's. "Untitled (Pecho/Oreja),'' featuring Basquiat's trademark primitive mask motif, is expected to fetch at least 4 million pounds in the London sale on July 1, the auction house said in an e-mailed statement. The 6-foot-square acrylic, oil stick and collage canvas dates from 1982, when the artist was 22 years old, said Sotheby's. The band jointly acquired the painting in 1989 after bassist Adam Clayton saw it at the Robert Miller Gallery in New York. Read more.

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Ellsworth Kelly: Paint for the future, not the market

Mark Rappolt chatted with Ellsworth Kelly about contemporary painting at Art Basel last week. "How does the man inspired by the past feel about exhibiting alongside the stars of today? 'Art has changed so much over the past 10 or 15 years,' Kelly says. 'Young people are making it in a different way. They’re doing work that has changed the way you look at pictures – installation work. It’s different from looking at Soutine. That’s more my style. I’ve known those paintings all my life. If I see a Cézanne painting, even the same one several times, I see it differently every time.' Kelly is diplomatic, yet it’s clear that he doesn’t completely approve of their art. 'I’m not so sure that young painters are thinking about permanence,' he says. 'They’re thinking of something more fashionable, that’s part of the style right now. But you want your pictures to be part of the future.' " Read more.

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Kerry James Marshall's romance

In The Village Voice R.C. Baker calls Marshall's paintings defiant kitsch. "Kerry James Marshall's paintings of black people simply being human stand out in an art-industrial complex where subjects, artists, purveyors, and consumers are pretty much white folk. In his series of five large grisaille paintings, he imagines a young man lifting his girl through the air in graceful arcs. The lovers are seen from different angles, and viewing the panels in quick succession conveys a swirling, physical joy. This romantic vision is complicated by such kitsch as floating hearts, Black Power fists, and rococo cascades of flowers entwining the word 'LOVE.' Marshall masterfully leavens old-school pictorial space with poster-shop sentiment, demanding classical vigor from his compositions while also embracing Everyman tastes." Read more.

"Kerry James Marshall: Black Romantic," Jack Shainman Gallery, New York, NY. Through July 3.

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Inside Bushwick

At ArtCal Zine Hrag Vartanian reports on the Bushwick Open Studios & Art Festival that took place over the weekend in Brooklyn. "This year's three-day Bushwick Open Studios (BOS) – part of the larger Bushwick Open Studios & Arts Festival – landed on a blistering weekend in June that hindered studio hopping for everyone but the artistically most adventurous. The event demonstrated the growing presence of this north Brooklyn neighborhood in the city's artscape. A mixed bag of quality and vision, BOS has grown to include hundreds of artists in about 100 locations. From the neighborhood's new downtown area near the Morgan L stop to the cemeteries near Jackie Robinson parkway, this huge swathe of New York's most populous borough attracted over a thousand art tourists from near and far. Now with various non-profit institutions (Lumenhouse, 3rd Ward), four art galleries (Ad Hoc, English Kills, Pocket Utopia, Factory Fresh), a burgeoning downtown area (Morgantown) and an artistic energy that encourages experimentation, the latest installment of BOS may be proving that Bushwick is getting ready for a bigger role in the city's creative life." Check out his excellent slide show. For more coverage of the Bushwick Open Studios, check out BushwickBK, a site devoted to life in Bushwick.

Related posts:
Interview with Bushwick artist Deborah Brown
"What’s your favorite part of living in Bushwick?: I like the mix of people, the authenticity. I like the gritty landscape, the pockets of beauty, the eccentricity of the architecture, the clash of cultures and customs, the sense of possibilities. I like my neighbors. I love being part of the artistic community and getting to know other artists working here. I love what the organizers of Arts in Bushwick are doing."

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Resnick's resonance

Milton Resnick: "Art is not a learning process. It is the very reverse of learning.It is the unhinging of your soul from your sight."

In The Brooklyn Rail Tom Micchelli puts Resnick's paintings, on view at Cheim & Read, in their proper historic context. "More than a painter’s painter, Resnick (1917-2004) was an artist’s artist whose radical aesthetic drove him to extremes of spiritual purity in his work and genuine indifference, even hostility, to the makings of a career. As the youngest member of the original Abstract Expressionist vanguard, he has often been overlooked as a part of that generation—most recently, and inexplicably, by the current'Action/Abstraction' show at the Jewish Museum—even though he belonged to the 8^th Street Club and worked in close contact with Willem de Kooning, Philip Pavia, Franz Kline and others during the late 1940s and early 1950s....A fundamental difference becomes apparent between Resnick’s achievement and that of his AbEx peers. His paintings never reach a point of classical resolution (like de Kooning, Rothko or Newman) or a sensation of release (like Pollock, Kline or Still); rather, they feel suspended in a condition of precarious vulnerability. Their embrace of instability and their undertow of harrowing randomness (even at their most joyously colored) feel as contemporary as the Deconstructivist designs of Coop Himmelb(l)au and Peter Eisenman. The first artist I thought of when I saw the epic “Swan” (1961; from the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth) was not de Kooning, Pollock or Kline, but Mark Bradford, who was born the year it was painted." Read more.

"Milton Resnick: A Question of Seeing, Paintings 1958-1963," Cheim & Read, New York, NY. Through June 20.

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Susanne Kuhn in Denver

In her first solo museum show, Leipzig artist Susanne Kuhn presents six large-scale paintings at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver. Like the rest of the Leipzig contingent, Kuhn's work has that peculiar blend of realistic light effects, fantastic architecture, figuration, and landscape that suggests an elusive narrative. In the Denver Post, Kyle MacMillan writes that Kuhn's complex, psychologically charged paintings depict fanciful worlds, private and closed in many ways yet broadly resonant and open to a range of interpretations. "In slightly older works, such as 'Melanie in the Forest' (2005), Kühn created fictional landscapes, but in more recent works, she has turned to architectural realms, such as 'Katja's Dream' (2007), a sprawling diptych with almost endless depth. The foreground room converges through a doorway into an adjacent room and a central diagonal continues into the distant outdoors, with a tiny, barely perceptible figure running in the distance. Adding to the overall sense of ambiguity, Kühn stretches the line of sight to nearly the breaking point as she simultaneously flattens the perspective in fascinating ways, with a bed appearing to have almost no depth at all." Read more.

"Susanne Kuhn," organized by MCA Denver and Kunstverein Freiburg, Germany. Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, Denver, CO. Through August 10. NOTE: Beware the MCA Denver website--it's all animated Flash pages with no separate URLs. Argh.

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Catching up with Adam Cvijanovic

Back when I was an art student in Boston, everyone swooned over Adam Cvijanovic's amazing command over paint and powerful subjectmatter, so I'm looking forward to seeing his ambitious new show based on D. W. Griffith’s 1916 silent epic “Intolerance,” at Bellwether this month. In the NY Times, Carol Kino profiles the irrepressible painter.“'I’m basically making a painting about hubris,' Cvijanovic said, 'and it’s tempting fate to do that.' As he readily admits, he has been burned by hubris in the past. At the age of 17 he dropped out of high school in Cambridge, Mass., to devote himself to painting. 'I wanted to cut off my options,' he said. 'No teaching, no second profession, no out.' By his early 20s Mr. Cvijanovic had become well known in the Boston area for being 'a kind of prodigy making figurative paintings,' said Gary Garrels, chief curator of the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, who was working in Boston at the time. In 1985 Mr. Cvijanovic moved to New York, and his expressionistic narratives — one presented a mammoth Lower East Side streetscape filled with people — allowed him to crest the 1980s market boom.

"By the end of the decade, while living off a gallery credit card, he began to incorporate wire, fabric and even cars into his work. The resulting installations and reliefs were a critical flop, and his market began to dry up. He said he had been stunned and wounded by this fall from grace, something he now ascribes to hubris. But Mr. Garrels said he saw the situation differently. 'I think that Adam felt that painting came too easily to him,” he said. “His facility was so natural that he had to create problems that he had to solve.' During the art market crash of the early 1990s Mr. Cvijanovic turned to decorative painting to get by, and specialized in landscape murals. (One early client was the collector Henry Buhl; Mr. Cvijanovic’s trompe l’oeil painting helped transform Mr. Buhl’s SoHo loft into a Renaissance palazzo.) When Mr. Cvijanovic resurfaced in the art world some years later he was painting grandly scaled landscapes that seemed to embrace many of the conventions of 19th-century American painting, like its sublime take on nature and its awe-inspiring illusionism. Made with house paint and Flashe, a French vinyl acrylic, on Tyvek, the paintings could also be moved and reinstalled with ease. Mr. Cvijanovic referred to them as 'wallpapers,' a contrarian stance that put him precisely in tune with the post-postmodernist times." Read more.

"Adam Cvijanovic's Colossal Spectacle," Bellwether, New York, NY. Through July 3.

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Lost in space: Art post-studio

The June issue of The Brooklyn Rail has gone online today. My contribution examines studio space, and how some artists making traditional art objects (painting, drawing, sculpture, etc.) are rethinking the studio paradigm. Read how Deborah Fisher, Austin Thomas, Simon Draper, Cindy Tower, and I are moving beyond the romanticized notion of the artist's loft.

"Renaissance artists were members of professional guilds, maintained studios known as workshops, and staffed them with assistants to help complete monumental commissions. But that was an era in which princes and popes extolled artists as the aesthetic lifeblood of the city-state and supported them accordingly. In modern times, artists haven’t been able to count on such public largess. Yet, in spite of reduced expectations, the compulsion in even unseasoned artists to secure dedicated workspace has persisted....When I was in my twenties, my friends and I yearned for square footage. Renting a loft was a rite of passage, and after graduation we all tried to find as much space as possible, preferably in an old sweatshop or other disused manufacturing building. Cavernous studio space, no matter how raw, cold, and uninviting, was the Holy Grail. We’d heard about the storied Coenties Slip in lower Manhattan, where Robert Indiana, Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, Fred Mitchell, Robert Rauschenberg, James Rosenquist, Lenore Tawney, Jack Youngerman, and others all homesteaded in the fifties. Older artists had already colonized Tribeca and Soho, so we expanded into Brooklyn, targeting DUMBO and Williamsburg. Being a genuine artist meant having a vast, if unheated, space close to Manhattan. No matter how skimpy the résumé, a capacious urban loft said you were a serious artist...." Read more.

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Studio update: Unplugged in Beacon

In the July/August issue of The Atlantic Nicholas Carr wonders how the Internet is affecting our brains. “What the Net seems to be doing is chipping away at my capacity for concentration and contemplation,” he writes. “My mind now expects to take information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.” Spending a couple days working in the studio shack in Beacon this week, where there isn’t any Internet, indeed, no electricity, made me realize that Carr is absolutely right: my thought process has become increasingly fragmented in the past few years. Even when I'm painting, the laptop stares at me from across the room, pinging when new notes or articles land in my inbox, and offering unlimited distraction in the form of Google searches and stat monitoring. Working without interruption was like defragging the hard drive; all the different blocks of brain power, which are usually spread over multiple tasks on any given day, were aimed at one activity: painting. Focusing in earnest, I completed numerous oil-on-paper color studies for a new series of paintings, which I started when I got home. I'd nearly forgotten the engrossing meditative state that the painting process can trigger until I unplugged at the shack in Beacon. The new series references the painting depicted above (oil on wood, with wood pieces attached, 20" x 16"), which my father painted in 1963, Strunk and White's The Elements of Style (which is beautifully written and relevant to both writing and painting), and formal studies based on the color wheel.

Related posts:
Studio update: Itinerant painter (May 9, 2008)
Habitat for Artists: Studio shack update (May 18, 2008)
Studio update: Unplugged in Beacon (June 6, 2008)
Studio update: Studio visits, exhibitions, new work (July 12, 2008)

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The importance of resourcefulness

In the June issue of Chronogram Beth Wilson writes about the artists' shantytown where I'll be working this summer. "Down in Beacon, and running through the rest of the summer, master shed builder Simon Draper has come up with a brilliant extension of his ecologically-inspired 'right-sizing' aesthetic with 'Habitat for Artists,' taking place in the parking lot of Spire Studios and sponsored by Ecoartspace. Draper has been making physically and metaphorically rich work for some time, creating modest, site-sensitive structures out of reclaimed materials (often including his own paintings). He’d reached a point with the work, as he told me, where he could 'see [him]self going on, building sheds occasionally here or there, or I could get back to the immediacy, the point of the idea, by opening the concept up to other artists.' Working with the motto 'How much/how little/the space to create,' and thinking explicitly of the toll taken by the wave of real estate speculation in Beacon in the wake of Dia:Beacon, he’s built a group of small sheds that will serve as improvised studio spaces for himself and 10 other artists over the summer. Small enough that they slide under the radar of local zoning and permitting requirements, each artist is personalizing and using the sheds to reflect his/her own interests and needs. Dar Williams will be writing and occasionally performing music in one, Kathy Feighery will focus on making drawings (to get away from toxic solvents used in oil painting during her pregnancy) in another, and so on.

"With limited amenities, the artists are restricting/rethinking their use of media, resorting to battery-powered hand tools, or even depending on the illumination provided by local street lamps passing through the translucent corrugated plastic panels of the roof to do their work by. Recognizing the limited nature of our resources, Draper’s project emphasizes the importance of resourcefulness instead. The compelling aesthetic (and ultimately, political/economic/ecological) question raised here is: How much can you go a long way with? In this extraordinary project, sustainability is transformed into a visionary aesthetic in its own right—as it must be, if we are to cope with the challenges ahead. "

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Catherine Murphy questions our relationship to the commonplace

In the NY Sun David Cohen writes that the real enigma of Murphy's treatment of the perceived world is that she is "neither hyperrealistic nor impressionistic, nor is she so remote from her own facture as to achieve — or seem to want to achieve — total verisimilitude. The Greeks had a concept of ekphrasis, of such extreme realism that, in a famous example, cherries were so perfectly rendered that birds were fooled into pecking at them. With Ms. Murphy, you always know that it is paint — you are not lured into a trompe l'oeil state of suspended disbelief. Her realism is deadpan but handmade....he drawings take Ms. Murphy and her viewers into an even deeper level of sheer depictive obsession. Her graphite has such minute yet specific marks (pinpricks of highly sharpened pencils) that it achieves an otherworldly surface in which you feel the material has been breathed onto the page rather than applied with any intentional force. There is something of the exalted monomania of an old banknote engraver about these images, also recalling the fastidious touch of Vija Celmins." Read more.

"Catherine Murphy: New Work," Knoedler, New York, NY. Through August 1.

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Paul Campbell's larger-than-life social networking pics

Blogger Tyler Green isn't the only one contemplating Facebook self-portraits lately. New York-based artist, Paul Campbell is also wondering what compels the 70 million active Facebook users to pick, or not pick, a particular profile picture."It's this aspect that people choose this one image that really fascinates me," said Campbell, who has an upcoming exhibition in Toronto called "Facebook Profiles II" featuring paintings based on people's profile images. "They're essentially self-portraits that I project, and the projection itself distorts them, but it turns them into this painted object that makes them different from the quick image one might view online." The exhibition at the Drabinsky Gallery in Yorkville will explore choice and intimacy in a digital world. (In May, Campbell showed the portraits in New York at Roebling Hall.) Campbell captures the spirit of the small social-networking profile pictures in his larger-than-life portrait paintings. The giant portraits, which average about 142 by 142cm are somewhat of a departure for Campbell, who over the past two decades has been better known for his abstract paintings. The artist began his Facebook series eight months ago and has done about a dozen portraits, each with its own story. (Via Solarina Ho in The Courier Mail)

"Paul Campbell: Facebook Profiles II," Drabinsky Gallery, Toronto, Canada. June 14 - July 12. "Paul Campbell: Facebook Profiles," Roebling Hall, New York, NY. April 10- May 10, 2008.

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Studio visit with Cy Twombly

"It is always a privilege to visit an artist in their studio." says Tate Director Nick Serota, who recently visited Cy Twombly in Rome and in his studio in Gaeta on the coast, halfway between Naples and Rome. "It is a challenge to be confronted with unfamiliar and new work, and to gain an insight into the creative process. It's one of the reasons I can't give up curating." Serota has been working with Nicholas Cullinan of the Courtauld Institute of Art on Tate Modern's Cy Twombly exhibition, called "Cycles and Seasons." Here are some excerpts from their conversation.
"I'm not too sensitive to colour, not really. I don't use it with any nuance that I know of. The form of the thing is more interesting to me than colour. I take the ­colour as primary - like, if it's the woods, it's green; if it's blood, it's red; if it's earth, it's brown....I'm not a professional painter, since I don't go to the studio and work nine to five like a lot of artists. When something hits me, or I see a painting, or when I see something in nature, it gives me a thing and I go for it. But I don't care if I don't go for three or four months. You know, when it comes it comes.... Graffiti is linear and it's done with a pencil, and it's like writing on walls. But [in my paintings] it's more lyrical. In those beautiful early paintings like Academy, it's graffiti but it's something else, too. I don't know how people ­react, but the feeling is more complicated, more elaborate. Graffiti is usually a protest - ink on walls - or has a reason for ­being naughty or aggressive. " Read more.

"Cy Twombly: Cycles and Seasons," organized by Nicholas Serota and Nicholas Cullinan. Tate ­Modern, London. June 19 through September 14.

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David Park: Sidelong awareness, immune to the skepticism of intense, central focus

In the San Francisco Chronicle Kenneth Baker reports that the work of David Park has "begun to have a restorative impact, rewarding in its viewers a humanistic taste discredited equally by avant-garde theory and by a degraded mass culture. Park died at 49 in 1960, but even then, long before art assumed the strange forms it has taken recently, he saw his commitment to humanity as a subject as a reparative effort, following his detour into abstraction. He wanted to reconnect painting to its forgotten moral function, as he understood it, of distilling individual experience into shareable essences. The exhibition of Park gouaches and drawings at Hackett-Freedman is weighted toward his final years. With cancer gnawing at his life, Park gave up oil painting for gouache, a less forgiving medium better suited to the economy of expression his work had been driving toward anyway. Just look at how much a few fat strokes accomplish in 'Man in a Rowboat'(1960) or 'Seated Man' (1960). In the latter, the red stripes of the man's shirt give a more distinct impression of presence than his facial features. The washy blue area at the upper right defines the void over the figure's shoulder, but it also doubles - at a different scale - as part of an intruding facial profile. Like so many Parks, 'Seated Man' evokes sidelong awareness, immune to the skepticism of intense, central focus. By an irony peculiar to modern experience - if we find corroboration in philosophy - we ought to trust our loose, bodily sense of human company more than our habits of scrutiny. The unique evolution of Park's style and his preoccupations left him positioned to express this understanding in handmade images. Do not miss them." Read more.

"David Park: Works on Paper 1930-1960," Hackett-Freedman, San Francisco, CA. Through June 28.

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Josie Merck: Inside and Out

I'm happy to report that my new aunt-in-law is a painter. Josie Merck's recent work is inspired by New England farmers, specifically those on Block Island (a tiny island off the shores of Rhode Island) who make hay within the boundaries of old stone walls. "It is about what lies inside and what lies outside the boundaries," Merck says. "Grasses are grown high, then mowed down, fluffed up (tedded), raked into long rows (windrows), and then collected up and packed into bales." In her current show at the Atlantic Gallery, Merck's paintings move in a more abstract direction than her previous work, which depicted shore birds, foxes, owls, and other wildlife.

"Josie Merck: Working the Lands," Atlantic Gallery, New York, NY. Through June 14.

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Degrees of decay and destruction at the Neuberger Museum

The Neuberger Museum presents work by artists who are taking a critical look at the state of the environment in "Future Tense: Reshaping the Landscape." Conveying current global realities in images (mostly paintings) that range from depictions of true-life events to fictional narratives and biting satire, sixty artists show their concerns with a constellation of factors that have caused global change. Some artists question the past, others forecast the future, and some provide solutions for alternative, potentially sustainable conditions for human life, while others present sobering information from recent events. In the NY Times Ben Genocchio writes that the paintings reveal —at times in nauseating detail — a moral imperative behind the environmental cause. "I mean, who would want to live in a world resembling the abject, repellent places depicted in the paintings here by Scott Anderson, Erik Benson, Kirsten Deirup, Angelina Gualdoni and others? These artists flirt with visions of dystopia, imagining the human world in ethereal degrees of decay and destruction. In Ms. Deirup’s 'Mayor of Doubt' (2006), the world is reduced basically to rubble. If nothing else, the bluntness and desperation suggest a widespread anxiety over the need for solutions to the serious problems we face, reminding us that environmental consciousness begins at home, and sometimes in the studio." Read more.

"Future Tense: Reshaping the Landscape," Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, Purchase, NY. Through July 20. Unfortunately for the artists, the museum's website doesn't include a full list of the artists included in the show.

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