January 13 to February 19, 2011
730 Fifth Avenue at 57th Street
New York City, (212) 355-4545

The central theme of Brian Rutenberg’s paintings originated from his exploration of the South Carolina lowlands where he grew up. He has discussed its dreamlike power on his senses:  the merging of evanescent light and water and the pungent, tactile humidity that has a peculiar organic density.  In early works he painted tall rows of tree trunks and branches that expressively fade in and out of foggy atmosphere. In subsequent paintings a mysterious valley loomed abstractly in the center of the painting, emitting a moody, primordial light. The central “void” was often surrounded by the ghostly vestiges of trees symbolized as vertical hash marks or abstractly twisted branches. His palette got brighter as shapes expanded and contracted in dynamic play to the edges of his paintings, and as he laid down paint in thick swatches slathered on top of each other.  Heavily glazed areas in the center of his canvases took on a glowing viscosity. The artist has often mentioned his love of the Luminist American painting tradition of the 1850’s to 1870’s, particularly the work of Martin Johnson Heade who endowed landscape with a profound sense of melancholy and wonder.  Rutenberg’s art ever strives to straddle the divide between moody reminiscence of nature and a gradually evolving transformation of it into a Modernist-inspired vision.

His current exhibit at the Forum Gallery demonstrates a play of landscape and abstraction with renewed intensity, intermingling an ever-increasing assertion of boldly colored rectangular and triangular forms with his familiar compositional motifs. In one of the largest horizontal paintings, Low Dense (2010), willowy purple hash marks lay on top of a central brown and ocher space, laying out a staccato grid of lines that are almost jazzy in their spontaneity. On either side bright blocks of green, red, blue and purple burst into a crescendo of rhythmic improvisation, gradually fading into deep greens and navy blues towards the edges. His surfaces, with their brilliant blocks of color, bring to mind the high-keyed push-pull planes of Hans Hoffman. Slabs of paint, applied with a palette knife, generate a feeling of geological pressure that is broken up by more delicate painterly moments – a thin glaze or chance dripping – that break up the intensity of the surface and adds poetic variety and subtlety. Massed rectangles and triangles, compressed against each other and leaning on the edges of the canvas, balance relative gravities and weights of color, size and density. Energies at the edges provide subtle visual counterbalances while also guiding the eye across the span of the canvas with directional intent. It seems as though the artist’s inner vision of nature has taken a decisive abstract “Symbolist” turn, enhancing the mysterious luminosity of his previous work.

Rutenberg’s gradual transformation of nature into abstraction is an artistic tradition that has deep historical roots. J. M. W. Turner painted many of his seascapes with a romantic expressiveness that brought them close to the point of pure abstraction.  Claude Monet’s water lilies were the springboard that launched his brush into paroxysms of abstract color and gesture. However Rutenberg’s work has deeper ties to American forerunners of Abstract Expressionism like Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley and Charles Burchfield. Like them he seeks a subconscious and spiritual expression of nature in the American landscape through the discovery of abstract motifs and expressionism. Rutenberg’s unceasing play with color, value and painterly texture plants new possibilities within the expanding fields of his canvases.

Diane Thodos is and artist and art critic who lives in Evanston, IL. . She was the recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 2002. She has exhibited at the Kouros Gallery in New York City in 2011 and is represented by the Alex Rivault Gallery in Paris, the Traeger/Pinto Gallery in Mexico City, and the Thomas Masters Gallery in Chicago.

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February 12th to August 1, 2010
1852 West 19th Street
Chicago, 312-738-1503

Modernism was so underdeveloped in the United States in the early 1930s that the impact that the Mexican Muralists – Jose Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and Diego Rivera – was all the more decisive.  The employment of artists to paint WPA-funded murals in public spaces created a burst of activity that lead to the emergence of art communities and groups, including amongst them many future Abstract Expressionists.  Translating Revolution gives ample opportunity to review the course of this progression, and to see how it flowed from the Mexicans’ emphasis on themes of the common man engaged in political and social struggle.  It is not hard to see how the expressionist fury and Futurist intensity in the murals of Orozco and Siqueiros were suggestive to American artists during the Great Depression – a time of considerable social and political upheaval.  Diego Rivera’s tamer version of Social Realism also had significant impact.  He absorbed important lessons from Cubism which became part of his rhythmic compositions using flattened planar figures in densely populated mural scenes, a style that proved to be a very popular with WPA artists.

Edward Millman’s Detail Fresco, St Louis, MO Post Office (1942) observes many aspects of Orozco’s work.  Three counterpoised men stand and kneel in a wasteland of ruptured planks, a design clearly inspired by Orozco’s Zapata 1930 (not in the exhibition). Millman’s men have large knuckled hands that convey both supplication and anger.  This same symbolic device is apparent in the lithograph by Leopoldo Mendez, Murdered Teacher (1938), which presents a bound teacher being burned along with his books.   His struggling hands and the flames of fire surrounding him directly and simply convey the emotional impact of the scene.

One highpoint of the exhibition is a boldly sketched charcoal head study from Orozco’s  Man on Fire mural 1938 – 39 (in Guadalajara, Mexico) in which the brusquely rendered bald head of a furious prophet stares intently with piercing eyes.  His painting The Martyrdom of Saint Steven I (1943) shows the violent stoning of the saint by a bloodthirsty crowd: muscular sinews in the limbs and backs of his figures heighten the tension in the mob and add to the tone of existential violence and death so common in his art. In contrast to this particular work, much WPA art is infused with a populist sympathy for suffering.  The painting A Man to Remember (1939) by Charles Wilbert White presents a seated ragged amputee begging for alms.  The creased folds in his worn out face and clothes magnify the sense of pathos.  His approach seems inspired by Siquerios’ energetic use of abstract space around his figures, resembling a vortex of fire that is used to highlight the presence of intense feeling.

Two important early examples of Jackson Pollock’s work show his direct connection to the Mexicans. In Untitled (Bald Woman with Skeleton) (1938-41) a nightmare scene presents a faceless bald female nude bending over a disjointed animal skeleton.  She is surrounded by an hallucinatory mob with starving faces claustrophobically crammed on either side of her.  The intense gestures in Pollock’s brushstrokes and the bilious mix of yellow, green, blue and red makes this one of his darkest Orozco- inspired works.  In another equally turbulent painting, Untitled (Composition with Ritual Scene) (1938 – 41), the primitive theme of animal sacrifice is repeated.  By outlining his figures in heavy black angles and curves he abstractly suggests figures marching or intertwining in a tangle of movement. Pollock had participated in a political art workshop lead by Siqueiros in 1936, and though he never met Orozco he was deeply moved by his 1930 mural, Prometheus, which he had seen at Pomona College in Claremont, California.

Futurist-based circular and geometric divisions of space are visible in Philip Stein’s Battered (1983) where almost the entire vertical surface is filled with the curved torso of a nude woman rendered in heavy outline.   Her hands and arms are protectively raised as if to fend off an attack while her foreshortened face, pressed into the upper right corner, is reduced to an expressive oval.  Her pained and contorted expression rhythmically repeats in a series of curved brushstrokes. In a smaller work of Stein’s, The Cursed (1951), the metallic sheen of a phalanx of Conquistador helmets defensively glow with the cold hostility of machines used in warfare – a prevalent theme in Mexican Muralist art.

There are noteworthy works in the exhibition by Ben Shahn, Tina Modotti, Pablo O’Higgens, Elizabeth Catlett, and Eleanor Cohen and others.  The last room, however, has many contemporary, more conceptual works that are distant from the compositional and expressionist urgencies of the Mexican Muralists. Gone is the vitality with which “Los Tres Grandes” challenged American painters to connect with the social realities, emotions and conflicts of their time.

Diane Thodos is an artist and art critic who lives in Evanston, Illinois. The recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Grant in 2002, she will be exhibiting at the Kouros Gallery in New York City in 2011 and is represented by the Alex Rivault Gallery in Paris, the Traeger/Pinto Gallery in Mexico City, and the Thomas Masters Gallery in Chicago.

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The large ink brush paintings of Qigu Jiang have a monumental presence.  Expansive sheets of unframed rice paper are directly hung on the wall of the museum.  This method of hanging allows the artist’s marks to have maximum effect with minimal distraction and lends both serenity and focus to an atmosphere of silent reverence.  Jiang’s sensitive use of line and gesture, whether describing delicate flowing contours or jarring masses, underscores his impressive mastery of the ancient Chinese ink brush tradition in a modern expressionist mode.

His paintings depict figures in various states of action or resignation, at once  traumatic and sensual.  His main protagonists are male bodies with faceless heads that are sometimes obscured by puddles of black ink or splashed in red.  They grip their heads in pain, sometimes curled and collapsed or falling, while others stride forward with aggressive anger and purpose.  The figure is in constant conflict with the abstract marks that impede or attack him. Bold strokes act like imprisoning walls, depressive clouds furiously stain heads, and giant splatters define the trajectory of explosions. The breathing of the rice paper surface with the various densities and textures of line and brush stroke tell their own abstract drama.  Delicate line work describing hands and muscles are attacked by bolder forms that could have been drawn with a broom, expressing vulnerability, violence, and pathos.   Jiang’s figures seem trapped in an inescapable existential conflict like the tragic ancient Greek figure of Orestes besieged by the Furies.  Yet the artist has achieved his escape from fate through the articulate grace and power of his line.  Time and again his brush stroke transmits revelatory moments that point to direct emotional truth.

The most impressive of these traumatic male figures is a 16 foot high mural size ink painting entitled Figure A. Viewed from above, a gargantuan giant grips the massive cranium of his head in his large and sensitive hands.  Here, for once, Jiang has graced his figure with a downward looking face and closed eyes, as though the giant is attempting to meditatively find inner peace from outer turmoil.   This truly massive figure bears a heavy tragic symbolism which lies somewhere between the inner contemplation of the Buddha and Edvard Munch’s expressionist painting The Scream.

In a separate series of intimate works inspired by Renaissance sculptures of the male nude, most which are no larger than 8 by 7 inches, Jiang displays his shorthand mastery of ink brush technique.  A single flowing gesture describes the muscular contour of a torso and abstract calligraphic marks become the elegant curve of a spine.  A few female figures are also included.  The body defines a state of desire and rejuvenation that express sincere joy in movement.  These small works become an oasis of untroubled elegance standing in dialectical opposition to the artist’s large traumatized figures.

True to his tradition, simplicity and directness become essence:  the brush cannot lie.  Jiang’s work is philosophy in motion embodying the irreducible core of spontaneous instinct that lies at the heart of the Chinese ink brush painting tradition where art and life have merged.  Essence of line and essence of modern truth are his constant themes.  His work is proof that emotion freed by the ancient tradition of the orient continues to nourish human needs and stands in distinct opposition to the intellectual strains of contemporary art.   On the periphery of the art world there are artists who are running in the opposite direction from postmodern influence, refusing to sacrifice the core of feeling, sometimes traumatically painful feeling, that reflects the truth of lived experience.  Qigu Jiang is one of them.

The post Ink Paintings by Qigu Jiang: Figures at The Koehnline Museum appeared first on artcritical.

Magdalena Abakanowicz is a contemporary sculptor renown for her groups of headless figures standing in rows and or striding as a mass, impelled by a compulsion that relates to the tragic elements of human instinct. She grew up in Poland where she experienced the chaotic violence of life during the Second World War. She first distinguished herself as a fiber artist and would later transfer a disturbing primordial organic sensibility, displayed in this earlier work, to surfaces of cast bronze. Currently she lives and works in Warsaw. Northwestern University’s Block Museum has arranged a compelling exhibit of her work, consisting mainly of Abakanowicz’s drawings created over three decades. These reveal a fascinating graphic firmament that the artist cultivated in conjunction with her sculpture.

In her drawings lines act like the ropes and woolen fiber used in her early woven pieces. These monumental drawings consist of interwoven lines made with charcoal or gouache that tangle and bind together to form strange organic beings. Forms allude to a tree trunk, a human torso, a flower, or an insect; they explore the ambivalence between nature’s capacity to produce the mysterious pulsating of life which is simultaneously haunted by the treachery of  death. This malevolent side of nature is made explicit in the work Drawing: Inside of Devious Tree (1988-1992), where the central trunk has sprouted flailing branches that embrace and devour all surrounding space on the page.

Throughout the exhibit Abakanowicz  repeats the use of egg shapes represently the swelling of a pregnant human belly, or the ovoid form of a flower or fly.  In the three drawings Body 81 A (1981), Body 82 A (1981), and Drawing from the Cycle Corps (1996) a monolithic unisex torso looks like a tree trunk, with neck and arms reaching beyond the limits of the paper like outstretched branches. Strange stirrings in its belly expand to a full pregnancy. As its title suggests the black body of Corps looks burnt and dead, even as of the intimations of life swell within it.  The Flower (1999) drawings depict black blooms that also allude to the female genitalia. Once again the human female organ that refers to the creation of life merges with a predestined tragedy and death.

Accompanying the drawings is a single installation of twelve burlap and resin figures from the artist’s Ragazzi series entitled Flock (1990).  These figures differ significantly from Abakanowicz’s massive outdoor sculpture Agora, her gift to the city of Chicago recorded in Agnes Masters documentary film that was shown in conjunction with the exhibit. Unlike the figures in Agora, these creatures do not tower or stride forward in a chaotic array of aimless aggression. They remain the headless bodies of young adolescents reaching shoulder height and standing straight with arms at their sides, like attentive cocoons in a pupal stage of development. Though more innocent and vulnerable, they seem to be doomed by fate.

The drawing series Faces Which Are Not Portraits (2004 – 2005) offers the vestige of a human face as a response to the headless figures that haunt the gallery. Egg shapes, echoed in other drawings, become phantoms of the human face. While the faces in this series reflect some of Abakanowicz’s features, they confront the viewer as depressed or terrified existential masks with hollowed eyes, sometimes expressing a deeply detached sense of withdrawal and inwardness. Their graphic power resides in the artist’s use of brusque strokes of black and white gouache that grasp at fleeting moments of intense emotion. The gestures are primitive and immediate, as though barely able to articulate and give form to the pain they bear witness to. The Faces are stark reminders that the exhibition’s title, The Reality of Dreams refers to the trauma and existential anxiety embodied by Abakanowicz’s life experiences and her disturbingly unforgettable symbols of the human condition.

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During the Modernist era many serious women artists were often excluded from art world consideration:  it was not until the Feminist movement of the 70’s that sculptors like Louise Bourgeious and Ruth Duckworth, who began their careers in the 50’s, started to gain serious notoriety within larger art and museum worlds contexts.  The importance of correcting these errors of exclusion is also evident in the resurgent interest in Lee Bontecou’s work, belatedly exhibited in a MoMA traveling retrospective during 2004.   Like Bourgeois, Duckworth, and Bontecou, Michele Russman’s sculpture reflects many of the same ideas from this same period of art: the Modernist basis preserved at its core deserves a similar retrospective recognition.

While Russman’s thin silver threads of wire sculptures have a less brooding psychological mood, all of these artists improvise on organic forms found in both nature and primitive art and commonly improvising from chthonic and totemic inspired forms.  Surrealistic organic shapes were often refined to simplicity, but not without leaving parts that are asymmetrical and expressively off balance within pared down forms.

At the Koehnline Museum a large group of Russman’s wire sculptures dangle from the ceiling into the square exhibition room, glinting like silver threads of light turning in space.  The room is filled with effects of elemental sounds such as running water, bells and crunching snow from a sound track created by Mark Nelson.  A number of wire sculptures sit upon the floor or are pinned to the wall, projecting into the space from all sides.  They outwardly resemble simplified forms derived from cell life, plant forms, or totemic figures, but are compressed into linear hieroglyphic shapes.  The artist’s abstract sensibility owes something to Wassily Kandinsky’s geometric motifs while improvising on Bauhuas inspired constructions for propping themselves off the floor or walls into space.  The wall hanging wire sculptures are particularly dynamic and inventive in their angular projection:  they effectively play symmetrical forms off the third dimension, often with no more than a simple but clever twist in direction.

Many works play analytical lines against biomorphic curves, sometimes filling the space with a diaphanous and undulating movement.  Some have shrimp like bodies, flagella, or short pitched arms and antennae.  The sculptures merge into a community of enlarged microscopic forms; unearthly in their freedom from gravity and using even the shadows they cast to give a sense of weightless being.

The combination of Russman’s ghost-like hangings and Nelson’s punctuating sounds combine to give a sense of abstract nature as Japanese Noh Theater.  It has the strange effect of making time stand still and matter seem ethereal.  The entire room is suffused with a pervasive quietism, lightness, and verticality, emphasizing the spaces between the sculptures as well as the spaces between the sounds.  The large size of some of these works, some getting up to 8 feet tall, creates a monumental mood.  It is as though silence could be trapped and crystallized into a vertical form.   Without a trace of irony the artist succeeds in generating a genuine sense of both Modernist purity and oriental mysticism.  Nelson’s tonal sound environment turn Russman’s wire sculptures into abstract Haikus that eloquently play with the Modernist dialectic of simplicity and asymmetry to create a sincere transcendental mood.

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The Block Museum of Art
40 Arts Circle Drive
Evanston, IL   60208
(847) 491-4000

April 17 – June 18   2006

Jim Dine’s  art –  his emblematic hearts, bathrobes, tools, and paintbrushes – is typically associated with the Pop Art movement of the 1960s.  The Block Museum’s exhibition of monumental drawings has a very different story to tell, taking its cue from the artist’s remarkable self-reinvention as a draughtsman of the human figure and portrait beginning in the 1970s.  Most of these unsettlingly expressive works are fraught with  dark intensity,  giving vent to a range of emotions.  “Anger is part of my medium,” said Dine. “I like to walk alongside of it.”

The drawings impress with both their large scale and expressive line.  In some drawings the layers of charcoal are so densely erased and reworked they resemble ash left from some kind of immolation, an elegaic residue of intense emotional combustion.  This is particularly apparent in Dine’s self-portrait series Looking in the Dark and his 1996 portrait Nancy.  These darkened faces have eyes that are full of hard intensity, frozen into expressions of accusation, anger, or wild anxiety.  This same mood is reflected in drawings of sculptures from antiquity such as Homer and Socrates (1989).  The face of Socrates on the top of the drawing is a mask of hard black stone, open-eyed, impenetrable and defiant.  The portrait of Homer just below reflects the opposite mood: the blind poet’s eyes are closed while his face is rendered with a smoky softness that is inward, ghostly, and vulnerable.

This same inarticulate fragility appears in the drawing A Variation of Jessie Learning Things from a Man (1976).  A woman looks over her shoulder to a man seated next her.  Her face is defined by deep shadows whereas the man’s face is practically erased: his tightly closed eyes hold some impenetrable secret.  In Fading Away(1993) the face of a female cat gently holds the chin of her male monkey companion whose face has become a mass of erased charcoal dust.  In both images the female counterparts seem to be the sympathetic witnesses of their partner’s unspeakable melancholy and dissolution.

A number of works feature hearts, trees, skulls, owls, and plants which resonate as comparisons with the human figure and anatomy.  In Drawing from Van GoghII(1983) a frightening tree trunk with breast-like tumors and short clawing branches draws an association with the female figure.  In Study for the Venus in Black and Grey (1983), a voluptuous sculpture from antiquity has  transformed into a monstrous mass of black chiseled rock.  This same Venus is present in a panel from Childhood (First Version) (1989), except the softer arms and head of a woman have been added, completing the figure.  This powerful six-panel piece has other female figures which link her naked body to erotic desire and death symbolized by the image of a skull.  Dine’s unforgettable 1976 drawing A Study From Blake places the skull directly on the body of his nude female subject.  Other works such as Hair (1970) and depictions of plants such as orchids in Mid-Summer, Paris (2002) imply female genitalia.  Plant life becomes erotic, imbued with a mysterious and soft tactility.

Several works are haunted by the brooding presence of skulls that appear in combination with many of Dine’s past themes.  When Dine’s insignia hearts appear with skulls they set up an intense symbolic tension between love and death.  The skull makes a mockery of Dine’s brightly colored Pop Art bathrobe in the drawingDancer (1997).  A skeleton wearing a blue bathrobe has his arms outstretched as if caught spinning in the middle of a dance.  The most moving depiction of a skull is in the drawing Walking With Me (1997) showing the skeleton in a suit carrying a Pinocchio doll on his back.  Here is the artist’s symbol of pop optimism, youth, and innocence merged with existential death.  The contrast creates a powerful synthesis of Dine’s past and present themes,  becoming a poignant reminder of the fragility and brevity of human existence.

Questions of suffering and melancholy abound in images of sculptures from antiquity.  Many of these corroded visages ask age-old questions through their solemn silence.  The Portrait Bust of the Emperor Trajan (1989) seems rueful with disgust as he looks imperiously out of blank stone eyes.  Large Drawing of a Small Statue (1978) shows an Egyptian pharaoh bearing an ashen expression of wounded sadness.  Study For Europe (1987) depicts a wide-eyed female portrait reminiscent of painted Roman tomb masks.  Her closed mouth seems pregnant with tragic words that cannot be said: only her large glinting eyes seem to speak over the silence of ages.

In retrospect Dine’s Pop Art work did not reflect the true emotional identity he sought to develop and of which he was capable.  Though this earlier work served the purpose of garnering him art world attention it was only a prelude to the artist’s development as a draughtsman with a deeper expressive purpose in the human subject.  Dine hit his stride when he confronted sexuality and death as the major themes of his work.   The Block Museum exhibit shows Dine flourishing in the realm of life’s deeper and darker mysteries, looking to the art of antiquity, its Eros andThanatos, as a meditation on time, desire, and human suffering.

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Bettina Blohm’s paintings are Haiku-like visual landscapes that distill emotion into abstract form. They reflect a love of Eastern art with its focus on intuitive states of mind. Blohm’s paintings also engage with a Matisse inspired sense of color and an Abstract Expressionist scale, both of which come across especially within her compositional placement of gesture and shape. Enigmatic shapes or nature forms often seem to imply human presences. In earlier works where the human silhouette is depicted, more tensions arise which are emphasized by color contrasts and the formal placement of figures in relation to each other.

The following excerpts from an extended interview reveal the philosophy and approach she developed over 20 years as a painter and graphic artist. Her work forges together influences from Modernist and Asian art into a personal approach which is stands in opposition to prevailing postmodern and conceptual trends.

I am interested in your dedication to painting with historical roots in an aesthetic and Modernist tradition.

I work in the Modernist tradition. Someone once called me a third generation Abstract Expressionist. I believe the formal language is still relevant and can be built on. In the best Abstract Expressionist works there is a unity between the act of painting and their feeling and the world.

You clearly love the expansiveness of Abstract Expressionist scale and Matissean color.

Matisse is the greatest painter of the 20th century to me. Nobody else even comes close. Of course I love his color, but also his variety of formal solutions, his way of arresting shapes on canvas, and how each form is alive. His paintings are complex yet look simple.

I tend to see a close analogy to your work in Milton Avery’s landscapes where elements become compressed in simple abstract motifs.

I like Avery’s color and the generosity in his later paintings. In those late works he achieves a beautiful synthesis between formal rigor and looseness and an exquisite poetic sense. In some paintings the motif becomes so compressed it is like a metaphor: a black and white bird hovering over a gray sea in Plunging Gull 1960 or the green horizon line which seems to contain the sea like a bathtub in Dunes and Sea 1960.

You have talked about your interest in Asian landscape painting and the abstract work of the Japanese American artist Miyoko Ito.

My first real encounter with Asian art was in 1992 in London at the exhibit of woodcuts by Hokusai at the Royal Academy. Certain images responded to my search for abstraction in figuration. Because Asian art was never that concerned with imitating nature the artists developed a greater individual freedom and expressiveness in their gesturers. I love the sense of poetry, of spareness, of essence, of humanity that I feel in these paintings. My ideas come from the visual world, or more specifically for the last 10 years from landscape, and that gives me something to push against. This is one of the pleasures I get from looking at Miyoko Ito’s paintings. Her mature work is abstract and completely self contained yet it is obvious how hard she looked at the movement of water or the spatial construction of a landscape.

When you arrived in New York in 1984 you were making paintings of trees with a kind of Expressionist fervor. What did these early tree works signify to you?

I came to new York right after finishing art school in Munich. I chose the tree as a motif because I had a strong emotional connection with trees. I would walk around the city’s parks and photograph different trees and then paint them in my studio. They were urban trees with chopped off branches which made them seem more human.

Human figure and silhouettes appear in your later paintings like Where Are They Going? from 1992. I cannot help feeling a sense of anonymity and distance in these figural works, with a rumble of emotional intensity just palpable below the surface. What was going through your mind?

At that time I hid my more emotional gestures under layers of flat paint and only at the borders between shapes could one see this undercurrent of turmoil. Formally it was a way to create depth. I wanted flat shapes but I also wanted to retain a sense of emotional urgency. Where Are They Going? was done at the time of the first Gulf war and the title reflects my feeling of hopelessness, the sense that everybody just followed mindlessly.

It seems nature and abstraction have given you a way for you to reflect on interior states of mind – a reflective space that at times balances between solitude and loneliness. Do you feel this too?

I always separate things. Every shape has a clear outline and there are borders; nowhere does one thing “bleed” into another. That may give a sense of isolation that you mention. I have a very strong sense of human loneliness and isolation: nature, however, offers me a sense of wholeness and connectedness.

I am struck by the difference between your works on paper and your paintings, especially because the paper works are more expressively stark and don’t often use color.

I rarely use color because drawing, for me, is about mark making. Drawing is the most direct, honest or humble visual medium. You cannot lie with drawing. From a drawn line you can immediately see the temperament of the artist. This is one of the pleasures I have with Classical Chinese landscape painting: after many centuries and over vast cultural differences you can still see the individual artist at work.

How has growing up in Germany shaped your art? What are the things you see as distinctive about having a European background that are still with you living in New York?

Growing up in Europe I may have a stronger feeling for painting as a medium with a long history. But its a specific culture, in my case German. I only became conscious of it when I moved here. Being European I may have a stronger sense of the precarious nature of the world. Life is not black and white but has gray zones. I loved New York city as soon as I arrived. I loved the nervousness and chaos of the city. I also loved that women were treated as equal and one had the sense that it was still possible to add something to the history of art. Today I have a nice combination of both worlds. I work in New York and travel 2 – 3 times a year to Germany where I have had some success with shows.

You have been a committed painter for over 20 years with a consciousness of what is going on in the contemporary art world in New York over a long period of time. What is your view of present affairs?

As a friend of mine says: today artists are like racehorses. Again and again artists are destroyed through commercialization. It is a fundamental problem in the American art world and not new. Eugene O’Neill describes in his play Long Day’s Journey into Night a gifted actor who got seduced by money and fame into playing the same part over and over.

And art education?

I believe art education has become too academic. Powerful emotions are at the basis of all art making. Today we do not have a compelling formal language as other times did and young artists have to find their way through a jungle of possibilities. The result is often an anxious obedience to the latest fashion.

What do you attribute this to?

Art movements have always been connected to political environments. There has been a feeling of apathy and cynicism, a feeling that nothing mattered but money that has been dominant in the art world and in the political system. The esthetic of an artist like John Currin is closely linked to the politics of George Bush; it is based on an all-pervasive contempt for people. If the political situation changes it may bring back some idealism and belief in art.

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“Time is a state: the flame in which there lives the salamander of the human soul.” -Andrei Tarkovsky

Chicago-based artist Audrey Niffenegger has always had a strong sense of storytelling: A compelling grasp of contradiction, humor, tragedy, and fantasy permeates the twenty odd years of her visual art career. Her work, an affirmation of Chicago’s surrealist-inspired tradition, is marked by her own ineluctable narrative style and a sense of metaphor, taking the form of prints, visual books, drawings, and paintings. Last September her first attempt at writing a novel, “The Time Traveler’s Wife” was released by MacAdam/Cage to considerable acclaim, hitting the #9 position on the New York Times bestseller list. The fantasy realism of Niffenegger’s philosophical fable uses time travel as a means of exposing the painful, uncontrollable, but emotionally essential realities of human existence developed through the two central characters of Henry and Claire. At the time her novel was released Niffenegger’s exhibit of drawings entitled Ferocious Bon Bons opened at the Printworks Gallery in Chicago where the artist shows regularly. The following are excerpts from a one hour interview about the intertwining of her visual and literary worlds, and the kind of sustained imaginative potential she has cultivated between them for over two decades.

Diane Thodos: Your images have a way of giving me a story that I want to know. They have an inherent narrative quality that draws me in. I feel your visual books “The Adventuress” and “The Three Incestuous Sisters,” which have etching prints accompanied by text, have common elements with your current novel in a basic way. What is the common thread you see in all three?

Audrey Niffenegger: The two visual books by necessity tell simpler stories, because when you are trying to tell something in pictures you can’t load on the detail the same way you can when you write everything. To some extent all three of them use the idea of lovers who can’t be together. All of them ask for suspension of disbelief. They all involve something implausible or impossible as their basic premise. The paranormal is a common thread.

DT: I find them all playful with surrealism.

AN: Yeah, surrealism is my favorite fun thing. My feeling has always been why make something that merely replicates reality when you can have reality. My own interest lies in things that are impossible in some way.

DT: Who are the artists you admire, Surrealist or otherwise?

AN: Remedios Varo, Max Ernst, Charlotte Salomon, Goya, Aubrey Beardsley. Beardsley is not so much about the impossible as he is about freaks and deformities, but those are interesting to me too.

DT: In Magic Realism as both literature and visual art the necessity of fantasy is intertwined with the inescapable condition of the real. In “The Time Traveler’s Wife” I find it interesting that this is the hinge upon which both the romance develops and tragedy finally unfolds. It’s interesting for audiences – this concretion of the real and this fantasy of escape.

AN: Something which people seem to miss about the book is that it is actually a very stark view of the way things work. It certainly does not hold out any utopia or promise of a better world – it’s just to clarify this sort of feeling I had about time. You live in it all your life and yet you never really experience it directly. You can only see its effects – you can’t taste or touch it. The novel is essentially a kind of prism to get people to think about time.

DT: Can you talk about how dreams were part of your work and how they developed into your writing and visual art?

AN: Dreams are important to me because they are so irrational. I’m attracted to things which seem to fit together but don’t in fact make any sense. Dreams didn’t really have a lot to do with the novel whereas “The Adventuress,” which was my first visual book, is almost entirely based on dreams. I had ten more or less random drawings and then I thought well, I’ll make a plot that connects all of them. “The Three Incestuous Sisters” was kind of the same. The three characters appeared in a dream and I knew who they were.

DT: “The Three Incestuous Sisters” has how many etchings?

AN: Eighty.

DT: Which is a phenomenal amount of work. You must have the patience of a saint to make such delicate acquatints and lines.

AN: I’m attracted to the line and tonal quality that acquatint and etching have which no other medium has.

DT: The Chicago art writer and historian Franz Schulze has described Chicago art and Imagist art as narrative and Surrealist in its basis. Do you feel this is part of your background?

AN: Actually Franz Schulze’s book “Fantastic Images” had a lot of impact on me. Mark Pascale turned me on to that book when I was twenty years old. It was really interesting to see all this art in one place and to have somebody articulate a theory of Chicago art since I already had a real predilection towards Dada and Surrealism. Chicago is just teeming with kooky, whacked-out artists, and I’m one of them in my own sedate way.

DT: When I returned to Chicago after living in New York City I sensed there was something quite distinctive about being an artist in Chicago and the kind of consciousness you could carry about who you want to be. I’m starting to think it’s a privilege to be on the periphery because you can create the circumstances of your own freedom just from the aspect of “benign neglect.”

AN: Yes, certainly. I think that’s definitely true. I think anyone who has chosen to stay in Chicago is embracing that idea, one way or another. The fact that you don’t go to one of the theoretically more important art cities says something about your independence, your ability to resist the urge to conform.

DT: Current audiences picking up your book find a lot of meaning in it. It is your first published novel and has been very successful. It is even currently being developed into a screenplay for Brad Pitt’s and Jennifer Aniston’s production company. I feel like you’ve connected with something in the present state of mind.

AN: I think that a lot of people have a longing to move out of the present. The present is very constricting. You can’t go back to your past, you can’t go ahead to see what’s in your future, so you have to put up with whatever is here now. People have a deep longing to think about something else and move into a fictional world and also to feel there are other possibilities than just everyday reality. I don’t think time travel is actually possible, but as a metaphor it is interesting.

DT: In the novel it seems like there’s a definite sense that emotions are the most meaningful things because they are the only thing that these characters can have given the fragile and random nature of existence. I’m intrigued by this psychological use of time.

AN: Certainly if there’s any underlying message in the book it’s something simple like “don’t take things for granted” and “be conscious.” These characters are always on the verge of losing each other so they are always extra conscious of each other’s presence. I think that’s not a bad thing to be reminded of . Be aware. Be present. Be here now.

“Ferocious Bon Bons” was seen at Printworks Gallery,
Chicago in September 2003

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The paintings in Riva Lehrer’s exhibit Circle Stories include overtly personal and political themes. The catalog essay describes Lehrer, a Chicago painter for over 20 years, as a person who has lived with a condition known as spina bifida since birth and has had to endure scores of operations over the years. Her transformation into an artist who combined personal and activist content began when she came to Chicago in 1980 and saw the work of artists like Judy Chicago and Hollis Sigler. The emergence of the Circle Stories series began when she joined a disabled artists group in 1997. As the artist recounted in “Pink Pages” (Spring 2004): “My entire life changed…I met all these really amazing people. It is one of those things when you learn that you don’t know how badly you need something until all of a sudden it is there.” The portraits in this exhibit serve as homage to the achievements and spirit of the people in this group.

Each image portrays the subject in a setting of their choice that is occasionally realistic, but more often imagined. Their professions vary widely;a fellow painter, a dancer/choreographer, an actress/playwright, a theater teacher, a political activist, a performance artist, a Fulbright scholar/psychologist, and a poet. Several of her subjects are “little people” (the preferred designation within the disability community for people formerly referred to as dwarfs), while some are in wheelchairs or on crutches. At times the portraits do not definitively reveal what the subject’s disability is without referring to written material.

The intensity of Lehrer’s technique, with its crisply observed realism mixed with fantastically contrived settings, has a peculiar surrealistic quality with Magic Realist undertones. The name Magic Realism was originally coined by the German critic Franz Roh in 1925 and is most prevalent today in Latin American art and writing. Improbable and fantastical elements are combined with realistic elements, deeply embedding the two opposite and contradictory forces. Fantasy is used to escape deep and intolerable oppression, as a means of psychological survival but also as a way to surrealistically express and transform the emotional meaning of suffering. The “magic” in these paintings does not provide the excuse for arbitrary transformations but has an allegorical purpose. In America several important artists such as George Tooker, who worked during the Great Depression, used Magic Realism to comment on social and economic inequality and prejudice. Lehrer’s work is part of this tradition along with contemporary American artists Vincent Disiderio, James Valerio, and John Sebraw.

Each portrait expresses a particular mood. Lehrer uses Magic Realism to transmit a sense of darkness and pain as well as a will to find metaphysical relief in an imagined world. There is something frightening about the pitch darkness that envelopes the subject Tekki Lomnikki, who is sharply lit from the side and stepping on a floor littered with paper doll cutout clothes. There are stalactites that look like fangs in the cave-like background in Hollis Sigler’s portrait. The picture of the little person Rebecca Maskos (she is a victim of Osteogenesis Imperfecta) sitting on a wall with a bare winter tree behind her that entraps a blue jay is also stark. But the subject has a penetrating expression emanating from her face as she points to the palm of her hand. She is a symbolic figure, a harbinger of fate bearing a question.

Other works lie on the opposite side of the emotional spectrum and move towards healing or release. The portrait of William Shannon standing on his crutches as he reaches for some invisible presence that seems to move in the shimmering shadows next to him is mysterious and touching. This image is a sign of entry into another world. The most powerful painting in the show is the portrait of Eli Claire which depicts the artist in symbolic communion with a densely lust forest landscape. Here Lehrer is at her most memorable. Every leaf, branch, flower, and ripple of water is so intensely observed that one cannot help feeling the condensation of time in looking at the scene. This painting is moving because in it, nature and its tremendously powerful presence resolves the balance between pain and existence while affirming a wondrously regenerative meaning to life.

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In the two years since 9/11 mainstream American artists have failed to confront the tragedy in any significant emotional depth. Peter Plagen’s statement in a 2002 Newsweek web exclusive, that “so far no impressive works about the attack have made it to public view,” essentially remains true. Arguably, it is the deconstructive bent of the art world with it’s focus on irony has suppressed the possibility of direct emotional content. In contrast, contemporary South African artists like William Kentridge, Marlene Dumas, and Lorna Marsh have made emotionally significant art about trauma and social tragedy. Just as these artists have developed their perceptions on the periphery of South African society, so, it could be argued, their expressionism remains outside the conceptually based mainstream of contemporary art. Both forms of marginalization are a source of strength.

All three artists share a similar artistic background, with the classical approach to drawing which was standard in South Africa. The emotional impact of their work comes from shared desperation born of social and political turmoil but tempered through the perceptions of individual lives. “It’s because of the social repression,” Marsh states “that our emotional core is the same. It’s pretty much the same experience the German Expressionists had. The social mindset was very “verkrampte’ which means narrow minded in Afrikaans.” Lorna Marsh continues by saying that South African society was “controlling, repressive and very Calvinistic in a way that people in America don’t have a consciousness of. You don’t want your sexuality, place in society, and personal choices legislated for you, and this is what they did.”

Marsh avoids postmodern distancing devices. Consequently the emotional invective found in her work does not become anemic or insubstantial. This point cannot be underestimated, particularly because the narrative elements in her work is informed by the unsettling pulse of the artist as a living witness to unresolved dilemmas and dangerous turmoil. Marsh creates parables of a destroyed world using invented symbols and situations in much the same way that Eastern European animated films from the 60’s and 70’s commented on the folly of human nature trapped within the political Communist dystopia of that time.

In her current exhibition, Marsh examines the repercussions of living in a state of imprisonment. As in her previous exhibits Africa Within and Birds of Prey, Marsh uses animals to express the condition of society while portraying human beings as insubstantial shadows bent on their own self destruction. A similarly bleak and unredeemable view of humanity is found in Kentridge’s animated films where the only symbols of hope are the constellations in the sky which are far from earth. Previously the animals in Marsh’s paintings portrayed the violence of instinctively wild predators, or became prey as decapitated or limbless victims. Her current images are ghostly disembodied forms of animals who are muzzled and caged. They are imprisoned as much by literal cages as by symbolic ones of social iconography, where mounted heads and tamed “bunnies” exist as empty signs of the animals wild counterparts. With instinct lost, the animal’s memories of their previously wild nature does not survive the conditioning process they have been put through. Comparing previous exhibits to the current one, it is as though the volcanic intensity of the artist’s burning landscapes have erupted into a white blanket of ash that has covered the stage of her work, freezing feeling imbedded within her painting’s surfaces and snuffing out the sense of life.

Marsh’s work has also always engaged issues surrounding the role of women within rigidly Calvinist South African society. This is a theme she shares in common with Marlene Dumas which is most acutely portrayed Marsh’s Eve series from 2001. The current exhibit portrays women as caged and conditioned creatures in much the same way her animals are portrayed. In Woman With Her Head in a Box a nude female has covered her head in a box so as not to see a menacing snake twined around her ankles that threatens to violate her. Clearly Lorna Marsh is presenting a cautionary tale about women not taking a part in their own empowerment; by accepting repressive socially dictated roles women can also become blind to the social and cultural traps which victimize them.

Marsh adopts a direct approach to her materials, refusing to fetishize them. Her handling of paint and media shows a kind of rawness and brutality that reflects the society she wishes to portray. Her scratched, smudged, and scumbled surfaces become a metaphorical way of showing the dirty underbelly of the world, presenting it as edifice supported by rusted scaffolding which has cracks in its plaster. In the Cage Paintings series her formerly expressive colors and marks on the canvas surface have curdled into a disquieting snowfall of numbness.

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