September 18 to November 1, 2014
514 West 25th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212 941 0012

Rigorous, flat, unpredictable, startling, deadpan, funny. These are all descriptions that can apply to Harriet Korman’s paintings. Among painters, she is esteemed for integrating in her abstract work a wide range of qualities from the clumsy and odd to the most gracious unities of jewel-pure color. Her first exhibition since winning a Guggenheim fellowship in 2013, composed of works from the past three years, feels like an exuberant engagement with the animating aspects of her work from the past two decades.

Essentially a suite of themes and variations, this exhibition of 10 drawings made with oil stick and 10 paintings are meditations on painting’s potential for unexpected encounter. They certainly compel and reward a meditative look.

The works avoid assuming any sort of posture — high-tech, ironic, romantic, or post-this or that — drawing upon honest studio experimentation. Colors, in their variety, combinations and sequences, reference lived experiences from garishness to mysticism, and it is this range that is key to their depth of feeling.

Most of the works on display differ from the output of Korman’s last few shows in that they include areas of plain white paint, as well as hand-painted linear elements. In the previous two shows, Korman’s paintings were constructed exclusively of highly saturated color areas. The colored lines in the new work let Korman respond to the optical activity at the edges of adjacent hues. Drawn lines and clusters of colored outlines are used to orchestrate color vibrations where areas of color meet.

Entering into the simple composition of each work it is possible to become engaged in contemplating mandala-like geometries. Untitled (2014) is symmetrical in layout but not in the weight of its colors. The central diamond creates a restrained color hum, while the surrounding four diamonds advance and expand. Some white areas are under pressure, while the corners are open. Many kinds of edge co-exist.

The new paintings originate in corresponding drawings. One can study ideas as they transform from the very personal oil stick works to the more austere, painted realizations, noting that they do so without loss of intimacy or immediacy. (The drawings are also beautiful on their own.) Compositions are built on simple layouts — diamonds intersecting cruciform shapes — but it is the complicating of these geometries through color that make the paintings happen. Color skews the symmetry of the layouts and sparks a dynamic, optical experience that takes us to a more complex, active order.

In this visual process, questions arise: how do those varieties of green differ? How are those glowing contrasts on one side of the painting offset the other? Are those oranges all the same or subtly different, and if so, and why? Structure is established, then repeatedly contravened by color, the visual impact of specific hues creating tension and imbalance. As we gaze, geometric configurations give way to sequences of extraordinary color, radiating, playing hopscotch, building glow upon glow.

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November 7 to December 14, 2013 at Loretta Howard Gallery, 525-531 West 26th Street?, New York City, (212) 695-0164
January 10 to February 8, 2014 at Danese/Corey, 511 West 22nd Street,  New York City, (212) 223-2227

If these shows of early and recent Larry Poons were the opening and closing rooms of a full-on career retrospective, they make a convincing case for organizing one, argues painter JILL NATHANSON

While each of these shows is a visual powerhouse, taken together, Loretta Howard’s December showing of Larry Poons’s early geometric and dot paintings and Danese/Corey’s exhibition of the veteran master’s latest works allow us to experience Poons’ devotion to radical experimentation with color in its unique, mercurial nature

Superficially, the two shows looked so different, the grid-based, controlled, flatly painted shapes on equally flatly painted overall fields of the works from the 1950s and ‘60s contrasting with large recent works made entirely of small painterly finger-and-brush marks, touching, scumbling, sparking, glowing in myriad random-seeming ways.  But Poons’s long painting life makes sense of this, going ever deeper into the pure craziness that is working with color.

The Dot Paintings at Loretta Howard looked fuller and more complex than I remembered after having seen them reproduced for decades as ‘60s icons.   The show also included many Geometric Paintings that had never been shown before, a selection of preparatory pencil on graph-paper drawings and a 1964 video interview with Poons.  In the video, and in conversations with me over the phone, Poons spoke of those days when he was seeking his way out of the prevalent Abstract Expressionist idiom.  He had spent a couple of years at New England Conservatory studying music composition before transferring to The School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

In his early days in New York City, encounters with two other artists would help him to find his direction.   A show of Barnett Newman at French and Company in 1959 “blew me away…they were like Beethoven”.  Poons says of these paintings that “they weren’t static, even though there were very few elements.  You’re not looking at a stationary object.”   They set a new standard: a pure painting space that would look vast and non-static, that would change–as Poons says all great painting does each time you look at it.  Another powerful experience, in the same year, was seeing Frank Stella’s paintings in Sixteen Americans at MoMA.  From Stella he received the sense of necessity, of how little is necessary to make a space unique to painting. Stella and Newman became his friends, helping him to secure his commitment to disciplined non-illusion.

Poons’s last geometric painting, Florentine, (1958) allows one to follow his path as an experimenter.  It has a jagged  “lightning bolt” lay out.  In this flat two-color painting shapes connect points from sixty-four small grids.  His planning was apparent in the nearby pencil drawings.  After Florentine, however, he eschewed big shapes.  The painting that followed used only points on the construction grids, without connecting them.  The geometric shapes gave way to unconnected points set as if moving either clockwise or counter-clockwise.  These points, painted on a 56” canvas in close value on a high-keyed solid ground, set up a pulsing color structure:  the first ‘Dot’. “The pulsing was a door prize; it was not the point, but it didn’t bother me so I left it”.  An early ‘Dot’ at this size was in the exhibition.  Subsequent paintings got very big, fast.

Large Dot paintings from the mid ‘60’s at Loretta Howard had a good deal more coloristic variation among the dots.  One can see how colors were repeatedly changed, like orchestration transformed, during the painting process.

Looking at The Dots from a few feet back, and given a minute or two of focus, dots hum, fields fluctuate due to simultaneous contrast and after images, ellipses zip around – their direction determined by clockwise or counter-clockwise orientation.  The buzz and movement is a matter of specific color and value relationships.  With all the zipping, the wholeness doesn’t give way to internal sub-plots but  just keeps integrating anew.

Over the years, I’ve thought of these paintings as embodiments (not illustrations) of quantum uncertainty: paintings in which the energy of color gets to look and act (on us) as energy, getting as close to the underlying nature of matter (us included) as painting can get.  On talking with Poons, I found that modern physics was not on his mind, but I maintain its significance, which bears on the importance of these paintings as works about color and the strangeness of painting.  They’re certainly not like other works of Op or Color Field paintings.

Poons moved on from the “Dots.  In subsequent work, pigment — material color in tension with color as light — became the way to generate movement and unity.  From the 1970s to the ‘90s Poons threw paint onto walls of vertical canvas and let it cascade, color building on color, the compositions “found” afterwards through a cropping process done over weeks.   The cropping rigorously avoided familiar compositional devices in favor of color’s leading role.  In the 2000s, Poons left off throwing and began constructing with small marks, building the painting through color-on-color accretions.

These new works integrate Poons’s mastery of counterpoint construction, developed through the Dots and subsequent decades of painting.  I would suggest that no other painter is able to mentally/visually construct color relationships across a huge canvas and through the duration of the working process like Poons.  Without relying on underlying pattern, system, design, composition or narrative, he keeps the eye’s responses to hue, scale and saturation in play using value to amplify intensity.  Shape never overshadows the starring role of color as broken light.

Prior to the current show I had sometimes felt Poons’s new work to be less radical than what came before.  The brush and finger marks seemed more familiar than the cascades or Dots.  So many colors are used, including many outside the bounds of my own retro-tastefulness.

Perhaps I looked harder at this exhibition, but the works in this show all hit me as intensely pleasurable experiences of a place quite new.  Each small area of color interaction seems visually crisper and more specific, while the softer modulations of color/light have become more insistent. This especially comes across in the way small marks interface against larger areas of modulating, glowing light, wrangling with randomness while integrating weight-defying, interactional dynamics. The openness to using all colors results in amazing mixtures and events.

The post Orchestration Transformed: Larry Poons, Early and New appeared first on artcritical.

Fellow artists often speak of collectors in hushed tones as if referring to some exotic species, one that is difficult to understand let alone  attract. The press might in part be responsible for spreading myths about collectors delighting in stories describing herd behavior at art fairs and, as described in an article in The New York Observer, “The Rise of the Insta-collector.”

But some collectors I know are of another breed.  Or more to the point, they are actually individuals: thoughtful people, confident in their ability to learn and make up their own minds about anything, including art.   These are people who want to live with art they love, and are committed to learning by looking as widely and deeply as necessary to allow them to live with serious art made in their moment.  They’re curating — often for their kids — a space of honest cultural values, rather than investing in commodities.

I want to argue that one way this can happen is when collectors develop their “eye” often with the help of someone in the art world who will take time to show them lots of art intelligently, respectfully and without undue self-interest.   More people would buy art in this way, I would like to suggest, if they could learn about art in non-manipulative settings: the opposite of the “art as investment” teaching model.

Collectors who buy work that is critically esteemed but not necessarily a good investment are essential to the real life of art, yet they are generally “under the radar.”  These are not people who want something for “over the couch.”  They often use an advisor or consultant to start out, but their goal is to learn to trust their own responses.

This may seem so natural that it doesn’t bear saying, but while the art fairs are multiplying, this “normal” collecting, though less prevalent, might be on the rise.  There are many intelligent adults of middle age who loved and even bought art when they were young.  They left off in the 1980s when it all got complicated: trend followed trend while gallerists learned “attitude’ and price manipulation at auction.  When these art lovers return to the gallery scene now, usually with a friend or some kinds of guide, they’re amazed by how much work speaks to them.  And they are equally amazed that there is good work that is affordable, having read in the newspapers the astronomical prices art goes for at auction.  I’d like to describe two of the collectors I know who buy for love.

Joel and Ulrika bought a painting of mine in 2002 when I was showing at Elizabeth Harris Gallery.  At that time, they had a respectable collection that included abstract painters from Sweden where they were born and three great modernist drawings.  Early on, Joel was shown around by David Neuman, who went on to found Magasin 3 Konsthall in Stokholm.   Once together, Ulrika and Joel bought a number of abstract expressionist works: a Robert de Niro, Sr., an Esteban Vicente, some beautiful Hans Hofmann drawings, a small Louise Nevelson, a Louise Fishman, a Robert Therrien sculpture, set next to work by total unknowns.  The question of current prices came up, to which Joel said, ”I don’t know and I don’t care”.  The collection, which is a sort of family, goes off in various directions, and they now have a Michal Rovner video piece that lives very well with the rest.   Joel speaks disparagingly of collectors who match their art with the period of their décor or who ”buy the brand names, the Warhol or whatever”.

A few years ago, Mayann Butler, a long-time dealer and friend, introduced them to Lori Bookstein and the paintings of John Dubrow, specifically his portraits.  They had never been interested in the idea of portraits before (Ulrika said she found them “weird” when she sees them in homes) but they loved Dubrow’s work and began to think: first one, then a second teenager would soon fly the coop for college.  So they commissioned Dubrow to paint their family of five.  Dubrow doesn’t use photographs so the family sat for three months, once a week.  The teenagers had to be out of their rooms with their family, the apples had to be the same in the bowl and clothing and light had to be consistent.  The result is a masterwork. The painting’s structure, so formal yet utterly relaxed, realizes the uniqueness of the moment for the family and for each sitter.

I can’t think of another family who would have commissioned such a painting or gone through the demanding process of being painted. Process and product both reflect the couple’s total confidence in their judgment and in the painter’s work, as well as their experience of living with works of art  that have held up over decades.

Marcy and Bennett  were busy with life and three kids too.  They didn’t buy any art until the kid were teens. They first bought a painting from me because we knew one another and they liked it.  They asked me to show them around and I did.  We went to many shows; ones I would have wanted to see anyway and ones I might have skipped. I just exposed them to work.  It wasn’t long before they were able to compare the works they saw to one another and make distinctions.  Looking at reviews, they saw that their own responses were often corroborated. They found they were learning about themselves through the process; there was a lot they liked but what they chose to live with reflected what they each cared about.  They began to trust themselves, but they thought hard about each painting and continued looking broadly.  They responded to a Leon Berkowitz at Gary Snyder, an Atta Kwami at Howard Scott, a Melissa Meyer in a show at the New York Studio School.  They bought works on paper by Ellsworth Kelly, Serra and Marden  through a consultant; but also a David Poppy from Pavel Zoubek, another small Nathanson from Messineo/Wyman and an Elizabeth Huey from Thorpe.  Over about eight years, they have put together a unique contemporary collection of works that touched them personally; this has a value quite distinct from buying “brand names” for investment.  The collection has a distinct personality; a group of works full of surprising decisions that seem to be built of both paradox and light.

Some collectors, while not buying as an investment, would nonetheless like their art to retain its value at auction, should they ever need to recoup the expense.  But others  realize that since many contemporary artists don’t have a record of sales at auction, this concern will radically narrow the field.

When people begin to collect they have a lot to learn and there are seemingly endless options.  There’s risk involved:  you might buy something you later dislike. It’s easy to confuse this concern with fear of financial risk.  The art world moves fast, making judgment a challenge.  Artists, curators, writers and patient gallerists can communicate what we know to collectors who are excited about looking at and discussing art, balancing the influence of the art-as-speculation environment

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