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The art and evolution of puppetry has a long historical record dating back to 4,000 years. B. C. In India, it is written about in the Mahabharata.  In fact, “the Sanskrit terms sutradhara (he who holds the strings) and sutraprota (puppet), denote the earliest written accounts of puppetry in world literature.”  In early ritualistic ceremonies, puppets or inanimate figures were used as stand-ins or surrogates for humans and/or deities. 

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In today’s era of immediate gratification and hi-speed internet, where the word has become tantamount to extinction, shortened to the barest of acronyms and further replaced by emojis and gifs, paper collage artist Meg Hitchcock is a savior, or at the very least an advocate for the lost art of literary reference and reverence. The creation, deconstruction and resurrection of the word through Hitchcock’s analogue process of typing, cutting out and pasting, in what some would call an obsessive (others devoted) methodology verges on madness. 

FIGMENT, the Emerging New York Architects Committee (ENYA) of the American Institute of Architects New York Chapter (AIANY), and the Structural Engineers Association of New York (SEAoNY) are excited to announce the winning design in the seventh annual City of Dream Pavilion Competition: Oculi by Austin + Mergold in collaboration with Maria Park (Cornell) and consulting engineers Chris Earls (Cornell) and Scott Hughes (Sillman). Pending approvals and fundraising, this temporary art structure will be assembled on Governors Island and open to the public for the summer 2018 season on Governors Island.

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It is the case that Ted Larsen, an American artist who made his debut solo exhibition in Europe at the Private View Gallery of Turin, was born in 1964, the same year as the famous text from Donald Judd, Specific Objects. The new works exhibited here, created especially for the gallery spaces, presenting the artist's research, which springs precisely out of American minimalist art of those years. On display are a series of bas-reliefs, hybrids halfway between painting and sculpture, where Larsen comes away from the minimalist Dogma and retrieves a manual craft: each piece is in fact selected, cut and assembled according to the artist's own sensibility.

On display are a series of bas-reliefs, hybrids halfway between painting and sculpture, where Larsen comes away from the minimalist Dogma and retrieves a manual craft: each piece is in fact selected, cut and assembled according to the artist's own sensibility.

Reusing materials from old waste, such as sheet metal from cars and other materials, Larsen creates small paintings of composite geometries in which simple forms become complex agglutinations of polygons that expand and occupying space with their own visual projection and material footprint.

Arranged in the environment, the works create a measured path and rhythmically punctuated by projecting volumes from the walls; among them are chromatic references that guide the observer from one work to another. Color is important and Larsen devotes particular attention to it; using it, at times, to build a visual route, both inside the work and throughout the installation; others works recall the visual sensations of memory: the dull colors of old cars and Formica dinner tables of Americans who, with the marks of their use, carrying the ideas and universal references of the past.

Another element embodied by these works is the oxymoron tension created in the titles like Awfully Nice or Same Difference or True Fiction (all 2016); with these semantic juxtapositions, with no bearing on what the work is, Larsen gives uniqueness to each work and suggests an intuitive understanding and a sense beyond the brain and logic.

"I'm interested in slowing down the speed in which an image is viewed or consumed," says Maria Park, associate professor in the Department of Art. That was the aim of a mural installed last summer on a 150-foot temporary barricade adjacent to the construction of the Central Subway Chinatown Station on Stockton Street in San Francisco.

Titled Sight Plan, the mural incorporates images of sky and clouds inspired by and painted from 150 photographs Park took over the last 10 years. It was commissioned by the San Francisco Arts Commission in partnership with the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency.

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Oh my. This is the insanely detailed and thoughtful work of Brooklyn based artist Meg Hitchcock. Most of her work combines different religious texts, but I just had to include that first stunning piece which is made up of excerpts from her grandmother’s diary and letters cut from the Kama Sutra. Amazing! Here are Meg’s words about this beautiful work:

“In my text drawings I examine and dissect the word of God. I deconstruct a sacred text by cutting its individual letters, and reassemble them to form a passage from another holy book. The Koran is transformed into the Bible, the Bible into the Bhagavad Gita, and so on. I discourage a literal reading of the text by eliminating punctuation and spacing; a sentence from one text merges with a passage from another. By bringing together the sacred writings of diverse religions, I undermine their authority and speak to the common thread that weaves through all scripture.”

…Head two blocks south to Margaret Thatcher Projects on 25th St. and be transported by MTP’sSummer Breeze show. (hint: the gallery owner is not being ironic- Margaret Thatcher is her real name). Upon entering the gallery, a small blue and white painting by Teo Gonzalez mesmerized us. We don’t know if it was artist’s intention, but the painting transported us immediately to the beach, and we imagined our feet in the fresh cool bubbly water... 

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Sunbathers enjoying a midday tan, friends goofing off in a pool, a few swimmers hanging by the rocks… these idyllic images take on an entirely different meaning when presented by painter William Betts. In his new show, SPLASH, up until mid-July at Margaret Thatcher Projects, Betts uses photography at a distance to capture his subjects at play, and then converts those images into pointillated works using a CNC machine. The result is a happy moment captured through a hidden lens, in which the artist calls into question everything we take for granted while out enjoying a sunny day. Phoning in from his home in sunny Miami Beach, Betts tells us about the illusion of privacy and mixing the mundane, the cheerful, with the sinister.

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William Betts’ current exhibition, entitled Splash, at Margaret Thatcher Projects offers a subtle peek at the limits of privacy, cased in the guise of celebrating summer fun in the sun. Adapted from security footage gathered at public pools and the like in the artist’s hometown of Miami, the paintings focus on the waterborne activities of everyday people, blissfully unaware that their fun is being caught on camera. Thus, the content of Splash hedges the line between ethereality and permanence, the sinister and the light-hearted, and voyeurism and celebration, in its dual embrace of Big Brother-like surveillance and the simple quotidian pleasures of the individuals at play in the paintings.

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“A work needs only to be interesting,” wrote minimalist sculptor Donald Judd in “Specific Objects.” Judd’s seminal 1965 essay comes to mind at Ted Larsen’s exhibition “New Works,” on show at Nüart Gallery. The New Mexico artist grew up in South Haven, Michigan and Santa Fe, and spent years painting color studies of landscapes and buildings before switching to sculpture. He hammers out elegant geometric forms from the grittiest of materials: steel that is salvaged from junked cars. Larsen shapes these weathered bits of metal into patchwork patterns around substructures made from marine-grade plywood. In “New Works,” there are off-kilter cubes, simple wedges and ambiguous, undulating forms, all small enough to hold in your hands. They are mounted on the walls in a neat line, projecting out far enough to cast playful shadows beneath them.

At David Mann’s solo exhibition Sympathetic Strings, the artist drew a rich visual and metaphorical connection between his art and sympathetic strings. Sympathetic strings lie beneath the strings touched by a musician. They’re activated through the strings’ vibration, and appear in various instruments, including, most notably, the sitar. Mann uses these strings to visually create his multilayered paintings, and at the same time, his works pulsate with a unique energy and lyrical musicality, reminiscent of both nebulous forms under a microscope and the stellar vastness of space.

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Using CCTV footage, traffic cams, and other surveillance footage, Houston-based artist William Betts creates pixelated paintings with a CNC printer.His subjects are oblivious to the cameras watching them. Although the video frames are seemingly mundane, Betts abstracts and deconstructs the images further through his printing process, reflecting the inherent anxiety of “security” cameras.“I look at images as a collection of data,” the former software industry professional has said. “I use that data, either abstracting it or modifying it or manipulating it, to arrive at the image that I want.”

 

Having reviewed and written about William Steiger’s work during an earlier stage of his career, I am taken by the fact that his subject matter and his point of view appear to uphold a consistency.  I am not entirely certain as to what this means by today’s standards, but it seems to imply the artist’s ability to sustain a certain ethos, meaning that he returns again and again to explore and investigate both the visual and conceptual terms that carry these dated architectural and playland entertainment phenomena into the age of the Internet. Therefore, the transition between the Post-Industrial and the Informational Age appears all the more pronounced, if not, deftly poignant in articulating a shift in our consciousness through a painterly means of arbitration. 

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New York based artist, David Mann presents an exhibition of paintings inspired by the sympathetic strings found on instruments, such as the sitar, that are only heard when touched by the vibrations of other strings. The sounds of which are only but also covered by a top layer. This feeling of intimacy and immensity resonates throughout the show. The paintings are lacquered with layers of acrylic, oil and translucent glazes. Gradients of colour saunter across the expansive surfaces, which erupt with mineral spirit bubbles and are contoured by taut white lines. The paintings are aesthetically liberating but also carefully restrained, offering the viewer a precise yet ambiguous artistic experience.

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David Mann explores the evocative properties of color and light as he works in the gap between abstraction and representation. His best paintings provide a visual experience that is richly visual and psychologically engaging. With their luminous depths and mystery of means they sometimes provoke the kind of surprising disorientation one feels when stumbling upon a dramatic scene of natural beauty. The summary effect is paradoxical: paintings that are both lucid and enigmatic. This compelling duality has long been and continues to be a defining characteristic of Mann’s work.

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New York-based artist David Mann has been making art for decades, with his most recent work exploring abstract shapes configured in such a way that they appear both microscopic and galactic. For his latest exhibition, Sympathetic Strings, his first solo show, Mann explores the idea of sympathetic strings, or those found on instruments like a sitar, that lie just below the strings that are struck by the musician. These sympathetic strings are triggered only by the vibrations of the played strings.

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PULSE Miami Beach cleared their decks and closed on Saturday but the memory of the art seen continues on. The art fair expanded considerably from last year's edition by adding a second tent to its art fair set by the sea. PULSE plans an equal expansion for its upcoming edition in New York City in March 2016. With the expansion in Miami Beach also came a more polished fair. Video art played a much smaller part than last year but otherwise the fair kept steady in quality and booth presentation.

I became enamored with paintings by Tegene Kunbi after seeing them at PULSE New York in 2014. At that art fair, Margaret Thatcher Projects presented a solo show of the work. Channeling a variety of cultural influences, Kunbi creates paintings with bands of thick color made from thick brush strokes that infuse the works with texture.

By the time I passed by the booth at PULSE Miami Beach, there were only a few paintings remaining by Tegene Kunbi. Having seen an extensive array of paintings previously, the paintings remained strong and were standouts at this year's booth.

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Kunbi’s chosen vehicles of expression in this exhibition are stripes of many different colors. It might appear as though stripes are an overly familiar vehicle, having already been employed with such magnificence by Kenneth Noland, as well as by lesser artists like Gene Davis, Bridget Riley, & Gerhard Richter.

Kunbi’s stripes are different.

For one thing, his paint surfaces are rougher and freer (he works with a mixture of rollers and brushes, and often on several paintings at one time). There is a real textural interest here...

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The sun has yet to pass high noon with the career of the artist represented in “Tegene Kunbi: Danjerus Cable” at Margaret Thatcher Projects (extended through July 17). Born in Ethiopia in 1980, Kunbi is still only in his 35th year. 

After receiving his BFA from the University of Addis Ababa in 2004, he continued his education at the Universitȁt der Kűnste Berlin, and continues to be Berlin-based.

This is his second solo exhibition with Margaret Thatcher, and the explanation for its title (which is also the title of one of its finest paintings) is something he has yet to share with his gallery. Never mind. The radiance of his color schemes more than compensates for the mystery of some of his titles. 

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Sometimes you need to stay in your own backyard...  

Thanks to Clayton Colvin for the great studio visit, to Nelson at Stewart Perry Construction for the private tour of the historic Lyric Theatre that is currently under renovation, and to Michael Straus for giving us the opportunity to curate Drift.  We were happy to share opening night with Jo Nigoghossian who unveiled her commission Mast (Alabama).  

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Opening: “Tegene Kunbi: Danjerus Cable” at Margaret Thatcher Projects
A talented abstract artist, Ethiopian-born, Berlin-based Tegene Kunbi makes luscious paintings with richly textured surfaces and linear blocks of vibrant color. Translating the palette of his African roots, Kunbi creates a visual language that can be understood universally. 

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Situated in an old walk-up apartment block in a quiet suburban meighborhood, Gary Carsley's latest exhibition lends another sense to the notion of the contemplation garden. Here an IKEA Gilbert chair - selected for its playful link to Gilbert & George, who in Carsley's words "make works that allowed the viewerd to be with and in the art" - sits in front of a round Chinese garden gate, Astria Portia 4 (Moongate/Stargate) (all works 2014); this lifesize lambda print... (Download PDF for complete article)

I came to New York from Japan in March 1963 after a few months stay in Chicago. I found a lodging in an apartment on West 88th Street off Broadway, where an elderly Japanese man had a lease. It was a so-called railroad shack, and I rented a middle room. I sat on the bed and placed a canvas on the windowsill and made my first few paintings in America. Those, my earliest paintings in New York, were kind of the extension of what I was doing in Tokyo, but with limited material: one small brush and five tubes of cheap oil paint. From there, over a half century of my journey as an artist in New York began....

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Vivianite: Your use of motion, light and color is truly stunning, how did you invent or learn your technique?

Alex Kanevsky: I didn’t really invent or learn it as a technique. I am a slow learner, so it developed over a long time. I am also fairly slow when it comes to actual painting. Slow but impatient. That can be a problem, but over time I figured out how to turn this contradiction into my own way of working. I can’t do slow and methodical accumulation painting: I get bored with careful, planned sort of activity. I also depend on freshness of perception, what zen-buddists call “beginner’s mind”. That is difficult to sustain over a long period. After a while you are just not a beginner. So I work fast, trying to hit the right note every time...

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Pace Prints is pleased to present William Steiger: Explorations & Surveys, on view at Pace Prints Chelsea through February 21, 2015. In the artist’s most recent body of work, he transforms his collection of vintage lithographs by means of collage, altering the narrative of each image. The exhibition will include Silvercup (2014), the artist’s newest aquatint and soft ground edition. The print exemplifies Steiger’s interest in graphic qualities of familiar architectural structures in the modern landscape.

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William Steiger’s collages are wondrous, often humorous refractions of early American landscapes. They traffic in a very particular kind of anachronism, grafting zeppelins, prop planes, gondolas, bridges, and the gleaming apparatus of the steam age onto the vast plains and prairies of the nineteenth-century frontier. The images dare us to reconcile two equally innocent visions of American life. One is taut, sleek, and brimming with technological optimism; the other is lush, free, and unspoiled. Neither, it goes without saying, have quite panned out as our forebears hoped they might...

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In his recent television series, "Cosmos," astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson discussed the human talent for pattern recognition as a double-edged sword. "We're especially good at finding patterns, even when they aren't there," he said, explaining that this helps us makes sense of the world. It's the same thing that drives creativity. In the current show at Troy's Collar Works Gallery, four artists explore patterns through painting and drawing. "Discernible Regularities," which includes Omar Chacon, Amanda Kates, Fernando Orellana and Kenny Rivero, is a sample of the distinctive ways artists might approach patterning, as well as color.

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We joined Matthias van Arkel and Anna Camner; two artists with distinctive practices, for a drink at the bustling social hub that is Hotel Rival in Stockholm, allowing them to adopt dual roles as interviewer and interviewee with each other, and learned about a shared working past going years back in time. Conversation takes the course from transatlantic journies and fantasies that are yet to be fulfilled to memories from a time that once was... 

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I first became familiar with Ted Larsen’s work through art fairs. I am not a big fan of art fairs for many reasons which I won’t get into here but I have been to some of them. Ted’s works at the fairs were not big flashy pieces; they were modestly sized and rather quiet. But they all had very solid presences to stop me and to make me want to ask about the artist. And I had asked about Ted Larsen not once but probably at least three times at different fairs before I solidly registered his name in my head to make me go “oh that’s the artist I like” when I see the work. That might sound like I have no brain to memorize or his works are so unmemorable. Of course that is not my intention. The point I’m making is that it is close to impossible for me to come out remembering names or the works by particular people from going through numbers of art fairs which include thousands of art works in less than ideal viewing conditions. After a while, many works get categorized and generalized into certain types with generally unflattering connotations in my head. But good works by good artists do stand out repeatedly even if they are rather rare. Ted’s work was one of those. The work projects a recognizable atmosphere with its very efficient, smooth and potent visual narratives, most of them are very brief, economical and most of all very effective.

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Once upon a time, before the word ‘awesome’ began to be used to describe just about everything, it was reserved for things that were grand, or particularly admirable, or possibly even those inspiring an overwhelming feeling of reverence. It’s this kind of description that matches the awesomeness of Sciencefictive, Gary Carsley’s ‘interior garden’ at Brisbane’s Institute of Modern Art.

 Influenced by a project in Singapore, which matched the planets of the solar system with the gardens of that small island nation, Carsley has installed his fantasy ‘Mappa Mundi’ (or map of the world, medieval style) in two large gallery spaces. Placing his hometown of Brisbane at the imaginary ‘centre of the world’, viewers are led through this fantasy display via a winding path painted on the floor.

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Where are you right now? Indoors or outdoors? What if it could be both - or like,neither, man. That's the question the Gary Carsley's new exhibition at the Institute of Modern Art asks, bringing the constructed ideas of garden and galley together. Two galley spaces will be punctured by 'Moondoors' (much less murderous than the Game Of Thrones kind) turning the traditional white walled art space into a window into gardens from around the world. Running from May 31 to July 26, the exhibition also features re-surfaced Ikea furniture and other pieces to disrupt our ideas of inside and out.

Brisbane-born, Sydney-based artist Gary Carsley has become internationally recognised for his large digital photographs, where he swaps out tonal areas in the image (usually a landscape) for similarly toned woodgrain patterns. He calls these posterised images "draguerrotypes" (referring to an early form of photography) because they are like photography in drag: photography dressed as impressionist painting.

The drageurrotypes collapse and conflate the analogue into the digital, the old-fashioned into the new-fangled, painting into photography, and conceptualism into craft. 

Carsley's show will take the form of a large landscape garden that articulates values common to the garden traditions of both East and West. It will contain follies, water features and paths, and several moongates (or stargates) that magically link remote parts of the world to each other.

Coincidences and relationships connect like a web in Gary Carsley’s new exhibition 'Sciencefictive’ (2014) at the Institute of Modern Art in Brisbane. Here, East meets West, exterior meets interior, art meets science, global meets local, and natural meets constructed.

Carsley’s immersive work spreads out across two galleries, the walls punctuated by ‘Moongates’. Rendered in a combination of textures and colours, including wood panelling, linoleum and marble, these ‘moongate’ apertures open onto natural vistas for an effect that is simultaneously familiar and alien.

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Gary Carsley’s new installation at IMA places Brisbane at the centre of landscape traditions.

Sciencefictive is a new installation by artist Gary Carsley, opening at Brisbane’s Institute of Modern Art (IMA) this weekend, Saturday 31 May.

Brisbane-born Carsley has become known for his modular furniture installations that create spatial gardens, illusions inserted into the gallery, museum and art fair to contest and question our perception and relationship to the natural environment.

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An interview with cover artist Bill Thompson in the June issue of Sculpture Magazine, by Christopher Hart Chambers. 

Blacktown Arts Centre will host a discussion about the legacy of Gough Whitlam, who chose the suburb to launch the ''It's Time'' federal election campaign in 1972.

A panel of writers and artists will share their thoughts on the former Labor prime minister, who introduced free university education, Medibank (Medicare's predecessor), FM radio and the Australia Council for the Arts, at the free Sydney Writers' Festival event on May 23.

They include authors Jane Caro and Fiona McGregor, film producer Gary Paramanthan and artist Gary Carsley, who curated the current related It's Timely exhibition.

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...Eye-catching paintings included Clayton Colvin’s probing multilayered works shown by Beta Pictoris (Birmingham, AL), Diana Copperwhite’s colorful but lugubrious canvases at 532 Gallery Thomas Jaeckel, the acid-distressed oils of Sara Hoppe from Dresden’s M2A gallery, Ethiopian painter Tegene Kunbi’s strangely doleful striations of color at Margaret Thatcher Gallery’s booth, Chris Trueman’s hypnotically undulating grids from Adah Rose Gallery (Kensington, MD), and a brace of small paintings by Jill Baroff, Astrid Bowlby, and Allyson Strafella at Philadelphia’s Gallery Joe.

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...PULSE and NADA feature smaller, younger galleries who in turn discover new talent.  I encountered several artists for the first time whose work I look forward to following for years to come, but the "whoa! stop-me-in-my-tracks" moment was seeing from a distance the luminous color-field paintings by Tegene Kunbi in the Margaret Thatcher Projects booth at PULSE.  Call it the instantaneous seduction of artwork, the hunger to throw oneself into the art-- I cast fair decorum aside and nearly jogged into the Thatcher booth to see Kunbi's paintings. 

The images here do not convey the richness of Kunbi's color schemes, how the colors jump into the eye, how he sets one block in conversation with another and with the viewer.  Kunbi layers and articulates, and unabashedly shows us the artist's hand with his brushwork.  He evokes worlds--he is an alchemist like Klee, Rothko, Mitchell, Diebenkorn, Frankenthaler.  Kunbi had me thinking of Kandinsky on the spirituality of art.  Kunbi reminds us how powerful painting can be in the hands of a confident practitioner.  And, in an age wedded to irony and pusillanimous when it comes to any talk of artistic verities, Kunbi unironically presents us with Beauty-- surely still one of the main points of Art.

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A charcoal line, crumbly and raw, is easy to see without illusion.

When I was an undergrad, I would try to find demo tapes of bands, usually sold by street table vendors, or maybe a live album (usually referred to as a “European Release”). Some of the demo tapes were shit quality, but they usually had some edge that I craved.  The best one was a demo of the Pixies first album. It was even more Pixies than the produced release. The form was wonderfully awkward and plastic. I prefer the raw and untethered to the artificially perfect.

I don’t think there is a necessary distinction between drawing and painting. Neither is isolated. Both, always, are in flux with the world. I work between drawing and painting on purpose.  I am interested in feelings, flawed and visceral. I am fragile. I am amazed. I am thankful. It is dirty stuff...

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The nine paintings that comprise Birmingham, Alabama–based Clayton Colvin’s “Put Down Your Stars” operate within that inchoate space between stoic, Apollonian formalism and exuberant figural expression. Shapes—particularly squares, rhombi, strokes, and arabesques—vibrate and twist on the canvas in response to Colvin’s manipulations of color, depth, and repetition. At times, painting seems to give way to drawing, and at other times, drawing seems to give way to painting. Erasures and additions reveal and conceal other layers, complicating ideas of before and after, original and addition, right-side up and upside down. The paintings thrive in paradox: They can seem crowded and full of movement, a sense of unsettled energy populating their spaces; after sustained viewing, however, a calm and measured contemplativeness saturates the canvases.

The dreary and gray winter mitigates a splash of color to rouse up our dull stupor from this never ending cold spell. Thank God for Margaret Thatcher Projects in presenting dual shows where their artists are bold significant users of color meant to chase away the winter blues.

Last March 27^th, AF came to the opening of Clayton Colvin: Put Down Your Stars and Tegene Kunbi: Melting Pot. Softness in the application of color on linen was key in the work of Colvin where a sense of space seemed to take one into another plane that makes it a transcendental experience. Kunbi with his blocks of mid-range tone color defined spaces and sections where one explored places within the quadrant. Both were a visual treat to the senses and a real color laden palette that punctuates a breath of verve to decrease the desolate feeling of that last grasp of winter.

I recently visited the studio of Clayton Colvin in Birmingham, Alabama.  The conversation below took place during the visit and through an exchange of emails over a period of time.

Brian Edmonds: Clayton, could you explain your studio routine?  I know you recently moved into a new studio space.  Has this affected your work, if so then how?

Clayton Colvin: I work in a studio at my home, which makes it possible for me to work when time presents itself. I try to work 4-5 hours, 5 days a week, but it is not so predictable.

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Upon first glance, “Color Virus,” the third solo exhibition of Belgian artist Jus Juchtmans currently up at Margaret Thatcher Projects, seems to speak to or qualify itself within the monochrome painting movement. Each of Juchtmans’ pieces is a kind of meditation on a color: one blue, another red, another yellow, another white. As such, the show seems to beg the question of what significance can be found in a monochrome painting made today, many decades after the heyday of monochrome painters like Yves Klein or Kazimir Malevich.

Pouring it On gives us the opportunity to examine how both of these statements from over sixty years ago can, in the context of contemporary painting, coexist rather than contradict one another...Cathy Choi pours layers of acrylic and resin on her canvas, creating a luminous surface of fluidity and movement. The qauntity and excess of material discharged onto the canvas are restrained in a kind of untertow. She engages in a conversation with the material, more or less as an equal partner. The resin and acrylic flow inevitably to the bottom, gravity asserts itself, and the point of termination bends light—perfectly. The total effect is that, within the limitless reservoir of color and light, we have serenity in abundance.

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Pouring it On gives us the opportunity to examine how both of these statements from over sixty years ago can, in the context of contemporary painting, coexist rather than contradict one another...Informed by his degrees in Painting, Art History, and Religious Studies, Robert Sagerman discovers the meditative dimensions of emplacing paint on a surface. The strict structure allows profuse paint application and maximum saturation of color. This explosion in front of the surface is excessive, or would be, were it not for his process. Individual color blobs, squeezed onto the surface and terminating in pointy extensions, are almost fluorescent. His work focuses on the materiality of paint with the effect of transcending it and transforming it into a metaphysical event.

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Cathy Choi is a sculptural painter based in Bushwick and she recently participated in BOS ’11. For this post, I’ve posed a few questions about Choi’s practice and views of our community in contrast to the other art communities she’s experienced abroad.

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This collection of William Betts artwork shows off the artist’s ability to create extremely realistic paintings using the pointillism style of painting. Rather than using just any photo as his reference to create his works, Betts uses security camera footage instead.

The pieces give the viewer the feeling that they are spying on someone. The pointillism technique adds to the grainy security cam theme that the paintings portray. The ideas of security and privacy make these paintings particularly relevant in the post-modern period.

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Freddy Chandra: Tuning In: This Bay Area sculptor, who often works with light, presents wall-bound abstractions in cast acrylic. Tightly clustered vertically or horizontally, their color bars vary in transparency and finish, and in length and thickness. They change subtly with the viewer's position and with time of day. Some of them can act like wind chimes for the eye.

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Maria Park: Composition: Inspired by François Truffaut's 1966 film "Fahrenheit 451," and by current anxieties about the future of literacy and the book, this East Coast artist has abstracted details from the film in painted objects that suggest the fading of cultural memory and attachment.

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Art gallery Scream London showcases Telling Tales, a group exhibition featuring local UK and international artists whose crafts dissect and reassemble words from different languages. Schön! had the opportunity to talk with two artists, who both use the printed word in their artwork, but in completely different ways.

Meg Hitchcock does more than examine the word of God; she slices and dices the heart of religion to highlight the universal forces holding society together. Hitchcock literally cuts letters from holy books to create other sacred texts. The Koran is transformed into the Bible, the Bible turns into the Bhagavad Gita, and so on.

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Frank Badur: The process of making a drawing begins with an impulse. Very often my drawings stem from my interest in architecture or in nature. I may also be thinking about music, Asian philosophy, or Asian poetry. But—and this is important—my work is never narrative; those sources provide only the impulse to start my drawings.

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Meg Hitchcock, a Brooklyn-based artist, celebrates the human need to reach outside ourselves, through sacred language honouring Christianity, Judaism and Islam with a cross-pollination of text from the Bible, the Torah and the Qur’an. Dismantling the texts a letter at a time, she transforms them into intricate threads of text. The visual dissection of the word of God runs off the page and provokes us to question our own belief structure.

Hitchcock spoke about her work to Kate Tiernan from her studio in Brooklyn. The following is an excerpt from a longer conversation.

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Miami Project, a fair out of Williamsburg, Brooklyn enjoying its second year in Miami and located in an undistinguished tent down the block from Art Miami, showed some of the best work anywhere. Dedicated to U.S. galleries with a “serious commitment to important living artists” or “extensive involvement with remarkable estates,” Miami Project lived up to its claims. After seeing Dustin Yellin’s apocalyptic vision, which was like John Martin’s The Deluge encased in glass, at Phong Bui’s magisterial exhibition “Surviving Sandy,” I was excited for Yellin’s smaller works at Richard Heller Gallery. A large Chuck Webster from his recent show at Betty Cuningham made an appearance at Steven Zevitas. The geometric abstractions of Devin Powers—an artist to watch—looked great at Lesley Heller. Margaret Thatcher Projects had exquisite colored sculptures by Heidi Spector.

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This rich yet restrained exhibition included wall reliefs made of weathered rectangular objects, such as old books, ledgers and wooden boxes, that had been drenched in encaustic paint and then assembled into compositions. When the works were viewed from the front, the seductive power of their variegated matte surfaces appeared paramount, although the identity of the objects themselves was veiled.

Maria Park’s solo exhibition “Composition” at Toomey Tourell is inspired by Francois Truffaut’s 1966 film “Fahrenheit 451” which is based upon the science fiction novel by Ray Bradbury. Simply put, the movie is about government book-burning and the eradication of language and knowledge for the polis at large. The implications of the story weigh heavily toward censorship and the existential angst of those who dare to question fascist mediocrity in a dystopic society. However, Park’s work leans toward the art of film and emphasizes fragments of scenes through the representation of specific objects. Her choices for subjects in her work are emblematic of the film’s general theme while at the same time emphasizing the impact of film itself. The result is a collection of works that capture the sadness of extremes in moments of loss.

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Although color is a subject that is endeared in his heart and he uses up to 200 colors in a painting, colors are not the central thing in Robert Sagerman's paintings. The process is most important and Robert hopes the viewer will look at it long enough to wonder why a painter would use such an intensive technique to create a painting. It's a meditative process.

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Teo Gonzalez, from Spain currently living in Brooklyn, is an artist who produces wonderful, provocative non-representational pieces. They are also pieces that, even more than is the norm do not seem to translate from reality into a photo and onto a website. His work is compelling on the page or online but it is much more so in person. He is showing work at Miami Project (December 3 to 8, 2013) via Brian Gross Fine Art at Miami Project (Booth 803).

As the Daft Punk’s catchy chorus on that song, “I’m up all night to get lucky!” Well AF did start the night with a fortunate choice last October 24th at Margaret Thatcher Projects with the ninth solo show of William Steiger entitled what else? - LUCKY.

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Best known for Swid Powell, a design firm famed for tableware created in collaboration with architects such as Frank Gehry and Zaha Hadid, Nan Swid has recently begun to show her own artworks in galleries in New York and Miami.

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Here at AF we always try to get the 411 aka information on all the art worth seeing all over Manhattan and beyond. At Margaret Thatcher Projects last September 19th, we got  the In Formation on the latest show by Nan Swid. She has shown in group exhibitions before at the gallery but now her solo show brought into focus the breadth of her oeuvre.

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Jus Juchtmans' intriguing composition of abstract painting weirdly gave me a flashback of

my childhood. Perhaps it was the shiny acrylic surface reminded me of metallic origami paper which I used to cover up the surface of my cardboard ballet pointe shoes! It’s great when art makes you reflect on your personal experience and bring back your memories.

Utilizing a cunning ability to compose marks in both two-dimensional and low relief space, paired with a zen-like concentration abilities and a steady hand. Adam Fowler frees the mark from the page with the help of a sickly sharp blade. 

Utilizing the sacred text of various religions, Meg Hitchcock weaves a tapestry of inspired writings that transcends words. Each work of art is what Hitchcock calls ‘a visual mantra of devotion’—a continuous line of text forms the words and run-on sentences without spaces or punctuation. The end result is a multi-layered narrative that culminates into the human need for connection with the sacred.

In anticipation of her upcoming group show at Design Matters Gallery entitled ‘Word Play’, I had the chance to chat with this unique artist. Here Meg talks about her Christian background, growing up in a New England town, and the message behind her work.

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Spector's paintings, composed of liquitex acrylic painted as bands of color on Russian birch, are topped with resin, creating a surface where candy like colors pulse and dance together, alluding to the impact of popular music on her work.

It's a fact of life that we're constantly spied on by CCTV, those electronic eyes peering down at us and monitoring everything we do. But as Orwellian as all the machine-vision seems, this invasion of privacy and erosion of our civil liberties can serve as a source for art. Art like Time Arnall's short film Robot Readable World culled from found footage and art like the paintings of William Betts.

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Contemporary Wing is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new paintings by Teo González. González’s minimal paintings have historically juxtaposed chaos and order, movement and stasis, or depth and flatness. For this new series, González states that his source of inspiration “has been the night sky, those images of deep space that we can witness, thanks to the most advanced telescopes. What I have tried to do is to see those images through the lens of my working process.”... Continue to full story

Badur produces richly colored compositions of austere, rectangular forms and softer grids, while Miller creates optically vibrant grids of hundreds of floating, precisely sized and spaced diagonal dashes. Such rigor is also found with Roeth, who, in multi panel paintings, builds up layers of tempera pigment with intense, devotional care.

Working with paper, Fowler produces complex geometry, intently constructed sculptural compositions that transform into three dimensional rigid constructions. Fowler uses an X-Acto knife to cut precisely all the negative space from each piece, creating a refined paper lace of graphite lines. By looping these lines he transforms them into organic drawings. Fawler’s works could be described as “sculptural drawing” that shows subtle intricacy and graceful depth.

SAN FRANCISCO, CA.- Brian Gross Fine Art announced an exhibition of recent paintings by New York artist Teo González, opening Thursday, March 7, 2013 with a reception from 5:30 to 7:30 pm. On view will be González’s signature abstract field paintings achieved through the meticulous application of thousands of contrasting dots of paint on canvas. The exhibition will be on view through April 20, 2013...Read Full Story

27 March 2013 | Sydney artist Gary Carsley has a new work exhibited inAgainst the Grain: Wood in Contemporary Art, Craft and Design at the Museum of Art and Design (MAD) in New York. Carsley’s large-scale work, entitled D.100 A Tree Struck by Lightening (Wave Hill), was selected for the exhibition as part of MAD’s focus on material and processes in contemporary art.

“Being a painter who no longer paints leaves me open to many different paths” is the way Ted Larsen describes his sculptural process. And indeed his lovely metal works have a painterly feel as much as they do three-dimensional objects. For his latest series of works that make up “Gimcrack” at Pan American Art Projects, he has crafted mostly pre-painted, salvaged-steel scraps into sculptures – a choice of material that could lend itself to a literally heavy output, but these look far more delicate.

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Geoform is an online scholarly resource and curatorial project whose focus is the use of geometric form and structure in contemporary abstract art being made by artists from around the world.

Geoform explores, documents and celebrates the rich diversity of style and aesthetic intent that characterizes this broad vein of contemporary non-objective abstraction. Such diversity attests to the profound resonance that geometric form and structure have had for people across time and place.

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Gallery Renate Bender brings minimal, monochrome and abstract expressionist from Munich, Germany. We had a quick chat with their represented artist Peter Weber.

Please tell us about the work of Jus Juchtmans.

Jus Juchtmans is a Belgian artist who uses extremely shiny acrylic to cover his canvases in many layers. The various layers shine through as some colors mix and others compliment each other. Beautiful aesthetics.

Bill Thompson makes easy (on the eye) relief sculpture the hard way. He starts with a two-dimensional shape rendered onto a block of polyurethane. Then he digs at, and smooths down, the block with power tools. After the form has been further finished by hand, the artist applies up to 20 coats of auto paint (glossy, with tiny sparkles) in colors made to order.

Yesterday I went down to Michael’s to lunch with Nan Swid. Nan is a longtime New Yorker who hails from Kansas City or thereabouts. She’s lived here most of her life, however, married to a native New Yorker Stephen Swid who is a well known businessman/entrepreneur; and she is also a mother and a grandmother... Continue to full article

Writing on Brice Brown’s work for the accompanying catalogue, Alpesh Kantilal Patel states:

"Brice Brown’s works are queer. They are unstablesignifiers that exist in between here and there as well as now and then; and operate ona meta-level through the production of a palpable destabilizing affect. In the process, theseworks make felt the impossibility of the closure of identity, broadly construed."

Click to download exhibition catalogue.  

Omar Chacon uses small droplets of acrylic paint to create pieces so vivid and colorful they look like they belong in a dream.

Each painting is comprised of small, technicolor ovals that come together to form abstract paintings, so textured that you can see every layer of paint that goes into the work.

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Rainer Gross‘ ‘Contact Logo’ paintings are a collection of pictures that utilise corprate brands – which we as consumers    in    a    capitalistic    and globalized world immediately recognize even in their smallest fragments – as part of his ongoing series of contact paintings. The use of logos by painters is not new – since    the    1940s corporate    brands    have played a large part in contemporary art – but what Gross does is new, his painting technique reduces a clean corporate identity to an image of decay, crumbling, peeling, weather worn, a criticism of
capitalism and corporate identity.

...Almost a week later, David and I made it to Chelsea, where our first stop was Margaret Thatcher Projects to see the Nan Swid exhibition In Formation (September 19- October 19). Truthfully I was very excited to take David to Thatcher Projects because I love, love, love this show. Swid has assembled various handmade or appropriated books and objects that are richly coated in encaustic, good enough to eat. It also speaks to so many things I find missing in today's art, including the Nan Swid surface detail as well as each section having its own contrasting identity.

I was pretty down on a lot of the art I saw at HFAF this year. But I did see art I liked. The thing is that good art takes time. It requires contemplation. And an art fair is an environment antithetical to that. The bad art tends to be unsubtle. It screams at you from the walls. It's like a spotlight shining on your face. It makes it hard to see anything else.

Combining fashion, art with her 125 glasses-of-champagne skirt. It turn out that Heidi Spector's sense of style is part other DNA: she is an artist. As we chatted, she told me she is showing her art in New York. Her work reminded me of Frank Stella and Herald Schmitz-Schmeizer with their colorful stripes.

Wow, what treat it was to be able to attend this past Thursday’s opening reception for Colombian-born, NYC-based artist Omar Chacon, who has returned to Margaret Thatcher Projects for his second solo show at the gallery in two years!

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FOWLER HAS A FETISH for lines. He is less enthusiastic about paper. The New York-based artist draws spiraling abstractions-think of more orderly Cy Twomby curlicues-in graphite and charcoal, ten meticulously excises the white space around the marks.

What follows is a list of fall gallery shows worldwide that we feel should not be missed. Making it onto the list was not easy; our selection was culled from hundreds of upcoming exhibitions. But we add the caveat that we could only choose from those that had been scheduled by our midsummer press deadline. That said, we’re sure these will delight you and keep you up-to-date.

Bill Thompson at Margaret Thatcher Projects, October 25–December 22

We like to think that we just made up the term Photoreal Pointillism (although a tad redundant), but we love these acrylic pieces by William Betts. Instead of creating work with 19th century subject matter, Betts paints security camera footage instead. The artist has work on display at Kunstmuseum Stuttgart through October 7, 2012.

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In this post I'm looking at construction, physical and compositional. Carlos Estrada-Vega and Gregory Johnston build their paintings from multiple elements. Harriet Korman constructs hers from geometric compositional elements, while Max Gimblett creates a flat painting on a sculptural form.

Carlos Estrada-Vega, whose work opens this post, builds his paintings block by painted block. There's a small magnet at the back of each block, and Estrada-Vega creates grids by the placement of the blocks. It's not an interactive painting--he places them as he wants them--but the manner of construction is sculptural (also a bit like quiltmaking.)

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The matter-of-fact blank stare of the modernist grid peers back out at the viewer, blocking his or her view into image space with an undeniably flat plane, reiterating the two dimensionality of the painting surface. A consistently reoccurring item in painterly discourse, it asks us to investigate beyond merely what one sees and to reach back into our own semblance of painting history.

New York artist Adam Fowler's work at Brian Gross brings that of Cy Twombly (1928- 2011) to mind and, like some of Twombly's work, it will surely provoke responses of the my-kid-could-do-that variety. But only from people not paying proper attention.

On Thursday, May 10th I had the privilege of attending an amazing paper exhibition at the Christopher Henry Gallery entitled A Cut Above: 12 Paper Masters. This group exhibition, curated by Diana Ewer, is celebrating the renaissance of cut paper as an artistic medium where 12 international artists have been featured, each working in their in particular expertise whether it be a carefully sliced book or an intricately cut piece of paper...

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My introduction to Giampietro Gallery in New Haven came at the Scope Fair during Armory week in New York City. Though I was unfamiliar with the gallery, I was impressed with the work: strong paintings and sculptures by established midcareer artists. So when I learned that my friend Kevin Finklea, who shows at Pentimenti in Philadelphia and Thatcher Projects on 23rd Street, would be having a solo show there, I made a point of going to see it. I drove, but you could easily take Amtrak (hint, hint). The show, titled All the things that cannot be said, is up through May 25.

Much like most art worth talking about, being in the presence of the new paintings by Robert Sagerman is the only way to really feel their significance. Recently on view at Margaret
Thatcher Projects, the show is fittingly titled "It's Time."

Many readers are familiar with Alex Kanevsky’s work but perhaps not all of his details. The internet offers a great deal of information about Mr. Kanevsky but unfortunately much of it is, if not false, not exactly accurate either. I was recently fortunate enough to visit Mr. Kavnevsky in his studio and I got the sense from him that this situation didn’t bother him, and that perhaps he even found it amusing.

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Margaret Thatcher Projects is currently exhibiting the eye popping and mesmerizing works by Robert Sagerman. Sagerman’s work consists of intense sculptural color daubs. He builds
up the lush surfaces by carefully applying thousands of thick strokes of oil paint to the canvas.

NEW YORK, NY.- Stephen Haller Gallery presents an exhibition of dynamic new work by Nobu Fukui, collage paintings vibrant with invention Fukui’s work reads as non-objective painting at a distance, yet on closer observation intrigues with surprising imagery that suggests narrative. The eye plays across the surface of his work as if watching a video game in giddy visual delight. Paint, collage, three-dimensional beads: these are some of the ingredients of this exciting work. Benjamin Genocchio in the New York Times wrote: “In fact, some works are so densely layered that they are a bit like bubbling cauldrons of imagery. It is part Pop Art, part potpourri…” Read Full Story

According to Margaret Thatcher Projects, “From the beginning of his attraction to abstract painting, an interest in its sensed metaphysical content guided and influenced Robert Sagerman,” who holds a PhD in Hebrew and Judaic Studies from New York University, and whose paintings are on exhibit at the gallery.

Spector’s new works include sculptural paintings and the addition of new materials, including polished stainless steel. Her oil paintings are made on Belgian linen with canvas stretchers and alkyd and resin finishes, which provide a high-gloss finish. The reflective resin surface and polished stainless steel reflect the image of the viewer.

BACANALES is the first solo show of the young Colombian, New York based, artist Omar Chacon (b.1979) at Margaret Thatcher Projects. Bacanales, as the title suggests, alludes to carnivalesque representations or collective festivities. 

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Brent Hallard: I think we live in a funny color world: I mean the hills and trees, they are green, rust, brown, hay, and they are soothing. The bay, well that has every personality under the sun, and the moon... and I think of your work, and I think of the light that is much less in the hills and more in the bay, while also a refection of the synthetic.

Freddy Chandra: For me the color of things becomes more poignant when its perceptual presence asserts some kind of independence from its source. Bluish dusk framed by a window... or driving in the rain with water drops obscuring as you look out the window at the glowing red light: these are all recognized. But how do these things translate from recognition to sensational experiences? Being awash in blue, red, violet, or any other colors: even if only in the space of the mind. I often have a hard time answering questions about the use of color in my work. The process itself is intuitive, maybe to the point where the colors in a specific piece become a given, as if there was no other choice. And maybe it’s always a reflection of the synthetic, as in everything has to be synthesized to start with.

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William Steiger seems to understand this dynamic thoroughly and seriously: the act of experiencing art is at least half the viewer, what he brings to the table, and art (or any other process of interaction and meaning) need not get in the way with a bulldozer of intentions.

When Mia Feroleto opened Green + Blue Gallery on Stowe’s Mountain Road last fall, it was with the fanfare of intrigue and great promise. Not only was she planning to exhibit national and Vermont artists in a variety of contemporary styles; Feroleto also proposed an ambitious plan to bring urban artists north à la the Fresh Air Fund. That is, to find studio spaces in private homes in which participating artists could work for a brief sojourn, giving their host patron a piece of art as payment.

... William Steiger's paintings, which are built out of similar reveries. His work, of course, is produced with a level of focus, clarity and skill far beyond the casual doodles we were cranking out, but there is something similar in the gee-whiz adoration of mechanically complicated contraptions, and moreover in the way the paintings show more-or-less plausible objects that sometimes belie their own origin in an objective world of fact.

In her book, River of Shadows: Edward Muybridge and the Technological Wild West, Rebecca Solnit explores the temporal and spatial characteristics of sublimity as an intermediary - - or sensation -- between nature, culture, and technology. Like an intrepid explorer who traverses codified and enigmatic spaces, familiar and unknown phenomena, Solnit navigates emergent infatuations with technology and the captivating spectacle of nature in the 19th century American west...

Is there anyone who hasn’t enjoyed making an abstract drawing — an elaborate classroom doodle, a Spirograph masterpiece, a tic-tac-toe game? Marking up a blank piece of paper, even in these pixel-fixated times, seems an inherently human activity. But the stunning new exhibition of abstract — or mostly abstract — drawings at the Katonah Museum of Art reveals the elements of the sublime in this sometimes mundane pursuit...

My drawings start where the spoken word fails and where language breaks down in the attempt to formulate and express my specific perceptions and sensibilities. (Badur, 2007)

A postcard from an artist, sent in the mail, arrives at the office of a friend. Instead of writing a message, the artist – being an artist – has composed a drawing. This drawing is a series of lines in a pattern. Start with a red line drawn with a ruler. Follow with a freehand line drawn with a pencil. Then another freehand line, this time drawn in blue. Next, another freehand line drawn in pencil. Conclude as started, with a red line made with a ruler. Repeat four times. At the top of the drawing, the artist writes the date, Aug 30, 2005, and the salutation, Dear Wynn. Below the drawn lines, the artist closes with his name, Frank. This small, playful postcard drawing is balanced and symmetrical in its control and repetition.

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Surface tension
Abstract painters Wlodzimierz Ksiazek and Rainer Gross, in a show at Alpha Gallery, both manipulate the surfaces of their paintings. Ksiazek, using oil paint and cold wax, carves into his surface, making sculptural paintings. They are like the ghosts of architectural edifices, scarred and scored and brooding. Most are largely monochromatic with hints of other tones.

Stratigraphy is the branch of geology that focuses on rock and soil strata. It's a discipline we're all reminded of occasionally, when windows and nerves get rattled by twitchy tectonic plates. Within the context ofStratigraphic, which premiered atGordon Huether's Hay Barn Gallery in Napa in September, the word takes on gentler meanings, invoking, according to the gallery's press release, "hidden strata, stories untold, passages of time, and fleeting moments." The five artists featured — Macyn Bolt, Brian Caraway, Omar Chacón, Jr., Danielle Mysliwiec, and David Allan Peters — apply paint in unorthodox ways, i.e., with unusual tools like grout and pastry guns or clay extruders...

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SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO — Eight Modern is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibition, Teo González: New Work.  Teo González, a Spanish-born painter based in Brooklyn, is known for his minimalist compositions on square canvases....Read Full Story

The recent works of Teo González at Brian Gross mark a logical next step for a painter who 15 years ago began each picture by ruling on it a strict, tight grid, whose cells he then filled with tiny dollops of color. The color blobs, varying slightly in size, shape and density, created unplannable pulsations throughout each picture's surface. González later extended the same practice to filling freehand grids, producing more dramatic optical warps of the picture plane....Read Full Story

The quarter-size ovals that splatter Teo Gonzalez' latest canvases are hypnotic. In turquoise, charcoal, satin red, and other colors, they snake and meander like jewels from a necklace in search of a home. A raised drip of paint dots the center of many ovals, giving the canvases — from the side, anyway — the appearance of armored plates....Read Full Story

In their own ways, Nan Swid and Donald Kaufman have always been enablers. A founder of the design company Swid Powell, Swid worked with an A-list of artists and architects like Frank Gehry, Richard Meier and Ettore Sottsass to produce all manner of tabletop objects.

Originally from Bogota, Colombia, Omar Chacon received his MFA from SFAI. While in art school, Omar became captivated by the paintings of his maternal grandfather, Mario Suarez Negrelli.

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From the papyrus rolls of ancient Egypt to the first sheets of tree pulp manufactured in 19th-century Europe and beyond, paper has been central to the evolution of knowledge, art and commerce. It’s almost impossible to imagine life without it.

Diana Knoblauch: Can you tell me about the artistic process of these two drawings?

Tad Mike: Each work needs to be about a place. In New York City I work in Inwood Hill Park, a beautiful forest really. The works in this exhibition were created while I was an artist-in-residence at the Robert M. MacNamara Foundation on Westport Island, Maine. It was a perfect landscape to create work with wonderful people working there on your behalf...

NEW YORK, NY.- Stephen Haller Gallery presents a solo exhibition of dynamic new work by Nobu Fukui - canvases vibrant with invention. The exhibition is accompanied by a full color catalogue with essay by Carter Ratcliff. Fukui’s work reads as non-objective painting at a distance, yet on closer observation beguiles with surprising imagery that suggests narrative. The eye plays across the surface of his work as if watching a video game in giddy visual delight. Oil paint, acrylics, three-dimensional beads, collage: these are some of the ingredients of this exciting work...Read Full Story

Frank Badur has been part of the Berlin scene from the time he studied here, between 1963 and 1969. He became a professor at the University of Art in 1985, and, like many other German artists who maintain successful international careers, he has continued to teach. This has resulted in a certain continuity in German art, which makes it less subject to the vagaries of fashion that affect places like London so damagingly. 

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Is paper passé? Your answer will most likely depend on whether you’re reading this sentence on newsprint or on a screen. But it’s safe to say that artists and designers aren’t ready to quit the stuff, at least by the measure of the latest show at the Museum of Arts and Design.

“Listening Sequence,” Freddy Chandra’s solo debut at Brian Gross Fine Art, is a synethesthetic meditation built on Minimalist forms, and evoking multivalent layers of sound. Manipulating the clarity and tonality of deceptively simple blocks on the wall, Chandra composes delicate rhythms of shadow, color, and empty air.

Inspired by the ArtPrize competition she wrote about recently, Nancy Tobin interviewed Heidi Van Weiren, who caught her eye because she was able to break into the New York art market as an outsider.

As I was perusing the myriad artists who will be showing their stuff for September’s ArtPrize event in my hometown of Grand Rapids, Mich., I was delighted to see that Heidi Van Weiren will be participating. I’ve followed her mesmerizing work through one of my favorite Chelsea galleries, Margaret Thatcher Projects.

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Heidi van Wieren's current compositions investigate the variegated skies of South Dakota’s Badlands. Working with an unusual set of materials—Elmer’s glue, pigment, and droplets of ink—the artist builds up layers that contain what seems to be an infinite number of stars in a night-time sky. In the case of the “Badlands” series, the drops of ink, which occur in a spectrum of sizes, from very small to rather large, are scattered across the paper or panel.

Tad Mike walks in wooded areas, such as the Maine woods and Florida forests. He picks up bits of organic matter as he walks. Using what he finds, these accumulations become mark-making tools. He likens his selection to combing a beach for shells – one shell sparkles, sings out, is swooped up. What impulse determines this particular selection?

Paradox ripples through Bill Thompson's luscious objects much like their brilliant, seductive surfaces shift and distort reflected images. They are mysterious and beautiful. There is something alien, yet entirely familiar about them.

From digitally manipulated photographs to works that began as digital images, or were produced via computer programs, technology is at the root of the processes of many contemporary artists.

Stemming from Roy Lichtenstein who used references to graphic art and the methods of mass production to lampoon artists from Monet to the abstract expressionists, his work challenges the romantic notion that art’s value lay in the heroic marks of the artist-genius. Today, however, with the commonplace use of digital technology comes a manifest tension between deeply entrenched romantic ideals and computer-enabled methods.

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William Steiger continues to explore topics of landscape, architecture and evolvement of the early 20th century in this series of new oil paintings and works on paper. In this series of new oil paintings and works on paper.

You could spend a summer's day getting lost in these 33 dense abstractions, gathered from a score of artists. David Ambrose pin-pricks his paper to create delicately textured surfaces over which he paints vibrant, fluid forms; Adam Fowler draws sinuous lines on paper, excises the negative spaces with a knife, and then layers various sheets into overlapping webs.

David Mann's exquisitley rendered works seem to represent gravity-defying phenonmena that could be unfoldeding on a galatic or molecular level.  The 10 glowing canvases in his third show at McKenzie feature flexible white loops and elipses that look as if they were suspended in space or liquid.  They are readable as cosmic formations viewed through a telescope or as cells seen through a microscope....

If you can overlook the limitations of the Molloy College Art Gallery, a hallway in an administrative building where paintings are occasionally hung, there is a terrific selection of works in “Words Become Pictures.” It is a group show looking at the use of words in contemporary art, especially painting, sometimes to enhance the viewer’s understanding and sometimes as purely abstract visual symbols...Read Full Story

The exhibition of drawings at the Garrison Art Center gets a welcome blast of spring color from a collage made of strips of paper and plastic by Jeesoo Lee installed at the entrance. But the austerity of black on white is dominant in the dozen works here, making this show look and feel like an essay in contemporary minimalism.

Closer inspection reveals a greater formal diversity, with the practice of drawing explored from many points of view. There is also an absorbing short video of the artists in their studios, produced by the curators Susan English and Jaanika Peerna in an effort to reveal the artists’ working processes. It brings the studio into the gallery. It also reminds you that until quite recently, drawing was viewed as a preliminary process in the evolution of a work of art — a method of thinking through ideas, a tool for mapping out structure — rather than as an end in itself. These days, drawings are often displayed as independent artworks.

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NEW YORK CITY - Margaret Thatcher Projects is hosting the first New York solo exhibition of new paintings by Belgian artist Jus Juchtmans  through February 16.

In a city known more for its colonial history than for contemporary art, local artist Bill Thompson makes contributions to the field that'll take you way off the Freedom Trail. At his exhibition “Dialects,” on view at Barbara Krakow Gallery until next Wednesday, works like Loop (2007)—a shiny green form that is not as 3-D as a cube, not as flat as a rectangle, and has rounded edges that give relevance to its title—seem to reinvent shapes.

Minimalist artists Peter Weber and Bill Thompson create accessible art by deceptively
simple means. Both artists have a singularly controlled vision defined by visually
compelling abstract elements that send an immediate message. There is nothing in the
art of either left to chance. That the works are well crafted and fully resolved adds to
their soothing yet stimulating effect; the finish alone inspires admiration. As one
observes each piece, the inventive elaboration involved in the choices made by each
artist illuminates the scope and uniqueness of his inspired creative endeavor.

One of the largest landscape artworks in NSW has been installed at the $330 million Parramatta Justice Precinct.

The 22.4-metre wide and 6.3-metre high artwork, entitled Pharmacopeia of the Burramatta occupies an entire wall of the lobby at the new Justice Precinct Offices.

Internationally renowned artist, Gary Carsley said the landscape of Parramatta Park was the largest assignment he had undertaken.

...William Steiger the owner of an orderly eye if ever there were one, who selects only the most pleasing and succinct details from a tacky and complicated American landscape and paints those in flat color and high relief against otherwise blazingly blank backgrounds of whiteness.

As the wall-mounted sculptural abstractions of Vadim Katznelson: Interiority of Paint reveal, at times there are pleasures simply in pure color and form. Formed entirely of hard-drying acrylic resin, Katzenelson's aggregations of brightly colored, flower-like bursts are at once suggestive of solid, synthetic plasticity and the fractures or fissions of organic process...Continue to full story

In his most recent exhibition, "226,085 Drops," Spanish-born, Brooklyn-based artist Teo González proved himself capable of coaxing transcendent moments from mere daubs of paint. González's square grids are composed of tight clusters of thousands of miniscule "drops-within-drops."

Something must be wrong with my math. Irvine Contemporary's exhibition of the work of Teo González, two of whose obsessive-compulsive dot-patterned paintings have been acquired recently by the National Gallery of Art and the Corcoran Gallery of Art, is called "226,085 Drops," but I can account for only 199,314. Don't be silly, I didn't count them all myself. ...Read Full Story

Omar Chacon's paintings are deceptive and can be considered sculptural in that he builds them up using pieces of paint as the compositional elements.

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Philadelphia artist and friend of artblog Kevin Finklea has four paintings on show at the Eagle Gallery in London. Each painting is on a solid board, either of plexiglass or MDF. No framing necessary. Each painting consists of a rectangle of darker color set against a lighter background. The rectangles are each off center to the left, in reference to British driving habits. In two of the paintings the rectangles are biased up, and in two, down. 

Verdict: Delectable and resonant abstractions. If you have an appetite for sensuous experiences, head to Marcia Wood Gallery. Rainer Gross' paintings are scrumptious.

With a master surgeon’s touch, Fowler knifes out all the negative space around the thin, swooping arcs of his abstract pencil drawings and then combines three or more layers to achieve a fractured surface crisscrossed with the shadows cast by the tiny webs of paper. The silvery energy of these works echoes Pollock’s airy vitality, but their laborious construction results in a quieter, more mediated beauty.

Brice Brown has blown apart the rigid scheme of the sestina, the elaborate and tricky verse form invented by the 12th-century French troubadour Arnaut Daniel, to juggle vestiges of symbols (a bird, a heart, a crown, a figure eight and such) so that they produce quirky visual rhythms. Hard-edge lines and shapes inflect softer, squigglier lines and free-form structures behind them, perceived at varying depths.

Even at their most relaxed, Park's pictures at Toomey Tourell look brittle with immobility, thanks to the laborious process of their making. Beginning with a photograph, Park translates it roughly into flat shapes of which she then makes contact-paper stencils. Using the stencils, she transfers the shapes to a panel of PVCX, which resembles extra-firm foam core.

The Hunterdon Art Museum is located in a 19th Century stone building that began life as a grist mill. MoMa it’s not—but then MoMA doesn’t have a river and waterfall outside its front door, either. About an hour west of Manhattan in Clinton, New Jersey, this solid, four-story building provides an unlikely but lovely environment for contemporary art, specifically Material Color, the subject of this post. The thick walls and shuttered windows remind you of its former life, as do the wooden floors, massive beams and solid staircases. Looking up you see the remains of what was once a chute that sent materials from one floor to another. Looking out, you see the Raritan river.

The Hunterdon Art Museum is located in a 19th Century stone building that began life as a grist mill. MoMa it’s not—but then MoMA doesn’t have a river and waterfall outside its front door, either. About an hour west of Manhattan in Clinton, New Jersey, this solid, four-story building provides an unlikely but lovely environment for contemporary art, specifically Material Color, the subject of this post. The thick walls and shuttered windows remind you of its former life, as do the wooden floors, massive beams and solid staircases. Looking up you see the remains of what was once a chute that sent materials from one floor to another. Looking out, you see the Raritan river.

As usual with the Drawing Center's twice-a-year exhibitions for emerging artists, this one stretches drawing almost beyond recognition. It includes traditional works like finely rendered, close views of woven fabric by Stefanie Victor and smooth, much enlarged drawings of human navels by Susan D'Amato. But a large cocoonlike structure by Monika Grzymala made of four miles of paper tape wrapped around three columns in the gallery could be taken by an innocent viewer for sculpture.

NEW YORK—Within the past year, paintings by Teo Gonzalez have entered the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, New York’s Museum of Modern Art and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C....Read Full Story

Ever wondered how many strokes it takes to make a painting? Ask Robert Sagerman Applying dollops of paint with a palette knife, he keeps track of every color and stroke of each of his dense, multicolored, abstract paintings.

By reducing landscape to simplified forms, New York-based William Steiger creates stark, cool paintings of often-archetypal subject matter. The 11 works (all 2004) in this show depict cable cars, grain elevators, a mill an aerial landscape or the Coney Island Wonder Wheel...

In his indispensable little 2000 book, "Chromophobia," the British artist David Batchelor demonstrated the degrees to which the Western imagination since antiquity has displayed a profound fear of color, as an agent of moral contamination or a sensual sign of corruption. By contrast, Carlos Estrada-Vega is an artist who might easily regard the garishly painted statuary of Hellenistic Athens as superior to the supposed "purity" of the museum-bound Elgin marbles.

Carlos Estrada Vega's paintings make me drool. I could blame the effect on the paintings’ superficial resemblance to stacks of confections at a dulceria. But that association is itself a rationalization, an attempt to get a handle on the ineffable synaesthetic kick these works deliver.

Kevin Finklea presents reductive panels of great beauty, each highlighting an obsessive adoration of color. The attachment to color lies in color's inconclusive nature. One can never know what it is exactly. Indeed, indeterminacy is at the core of Finklea's enterprise.

You can brush, trowel, press, throw, squirt, drip or pour paint onto a canvas, or stain it with diluted medium. It has all been done.
Rainer Gross makes paint adhere to the support in yet another way in order to arriving
at compelling abstract compositions. Since the early 90s this New York-based artist from Cologne has experimented with the monotype techniques, here adapting them to create the body of paintings ("Contact Paintings"), that he displayed -together with six monotypes on paper- at Axel Raben.

What seems at first to be little more than a mosaic color study reveals itself to be much more complex. Cralos Estrada-Vega draws parallels between his meticulous process and the monastic life. His unique methodology puts a twist on the concept of painting as object.

Every time I walk out the door and go visit galleries I find something I like, but as I was explaining to my son this afternoon, meaningful experiences don't always have to be positive - just real.

Adam Fowler draws loopy lines in graphite and charcoal that look like intricate webs. Then he takes blade to paper, cutting out the space between his lines as if fashioning a doily.

New York-based conceptualist Robert Sagerman is a young artist with degrees in painting, art history and religious studies. Even without understanding his intensely contemplative painting practice, viewers can be hypnotized by his work's vivid iteration of color field painting.

William Steiger's factories, silos, cable cars, and Ferris wheels are clean, serene, and iconic...Mr. Steiger gas a show of new paintings at Margaret Thatcher...

With eyes resting on an old pipe in a small room in a monstrous gallery building on the west side of Chelsea, its painted coating ravaged with cracks and flaking, my mind wandered back into memory. How many times had it been repainted? How many and why specific colors? What had happened since that last fresh coat? Who’d been born, or died? Why did I find myself thinking about the paintings of Rainer Gross?

The orderly grids that serve as the basis for Nobu Fukui's dense but rhythmic paintings are animated and almost obliterated by layers of newspaper clippings, patches of carnival color, swatches of fabric, beads and other embellishments. Their lively surfaces sometimes suggest game boards and at other times the heavily stylized nature symbolism of Japanese screens....Read Full Story

Painters who share a life as well as a studio, Brice Brown and Don Joint nevertheless have distinctly disparate abstract styles. Mr. Joint's is one of exuberant, high-key color laid down in hard-edge, geometric shapes, suggesting maybe the work of Patrick Henry Bruce. Mr. Brown's relates more to Abstract Expressionism and, say, de Kooning, with looser brushwork and a softer palette.

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In his essay for the catalouge which accompanies David Mann's show of new paintings at McKenzie Fine Art, Carter Ratcliff writes that Mann "is one of those artists whose art invites us to see ourselves seeing."

Yum, yum, yum! Luscious, glistening, wavy stripes of thick, white, acrylic paint mixed with rich blues, reds, yellows, greens, or browns. Every surface shimmers: the colors seem to change with the light. Some color fields have unlimited depth like the sky. Vague forms float through others. This work is so very tactile that the artist, Vadim Katznelson, was prompted to supply a sample of the paint he uses so visitors could hold it in their hands instead of touching his paintings.

The medium of sculpture started getting fuzzy around the edges in the early 1960's and has never stopped. It has borrowed from all kinds of adjacent mediums -- including video, ceramics, architecture, design and performance art -- and has at times merged with the environment, whether geological or social.

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This New York-based German artist makes sensuous abstract paintings by a process of his own invention that involves fusing two paintings face to face and then pulling them apart. Exhibited singly or as diptychs, the paintings look like flaking wall sections. They have lush, supersaturated colors and dry, crusty surfaces that look like velvet from a distance.

Face to face with a painting, we want to know first of all how it came into being. We wonder about technique, which is always fascinating, but what we really want to know is how a painter’s purpose guides technique. 

The eye might gravitate to Carlos Estrada-vega's paintings for their vibrant color, but the mind latches on to them as curious puzzles to be figured out, decoded. Their format appears simple enough: All are compositions based on the modular unit of the square. Some squares pair up to form rectangles, some quadruple to form larger squares, set among the smaller.

(UN)RESOLVED, Rosenberg and Kaufman, 115 Wooster Street, (212) 431-4838 (through Feb. 12). The ambiguous title is appropriate for this miscellaneous group exhibition. Among the more interesting works are exquisitely made drawings on music composition paper by Andrew Topolski; a soberly sensuous rectilinear composition made of red commercial primer paints on a sheet of steel by Merrill Wagner; and an abstract canvas with a curiously raised, netlike grid of green paint by Vadim Katznelson.

Car Culture

Jonathan Stephenson of Rocket Gallery in London organized a show called "Surface Speed" at Cirrus Gallery. Issues of desire in our consumer culture are central to the work of the Portuguese artist Augusto Alves da Silva, whose poignant photographs contrast Ferraris in the showroom to the obviously poor spectators peering in through the windows. Alves da Silva's photos go well with the Minimalist paintings of the Belgian artist Jus Juchtmans, whose fluorescent monochromes evoke high-gloss automotive finish.

Will abstract painting prove to have been just a 20th century folly?

No one knows yet, and that has made abstraction magnetic again as the century ends.

The work of Southern California painter Carlos Estrada-Vega at Brian Gross Fine Art reminds us that embodying color is one thing abstract painting can do uniquely well.

It all started with a movie, Gwyneth Paltrow’s Country Strong, to be precise. New York-based artist Jaq Belcher read about the Nashville apartment Paltrow and her family lived in during filming and liked some of the art from Tinney Contemporary featured in the spread. Belcher emailed the gallery and got a call from Susan Tinney a few minutes later. That was more than eighteen months ago; now Belcher is presenting her first Nashville show at the gallery. The nineteen-piece exhibition features large-scale cut-paper drawings, including Untitled: seeding, an installation in which the drawing’s 33,000 cutouts are arranged on the floor in front of it…

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