November 20, 2019-January 25, 2020
9 White Street, between Sixth Avenue and West Broadway
New York City, ortuzarprojects.com
           

Art can be a disordering of life, disrupting its familiar flow. But seen another way, it can reveal that our lives are actually full of extraordinary moments that are both disjunctive and connective, simultaneously.

The hallmark of Suzanne Jackson’s work is poetic expression, bonding together pieces of experience into visceral, lyrical membranes. She uses physical and painterly means to conjure a meeting place of her inner life and the world. In her paintings and quasi-sculptural “anti-canvases”, she makes meaning out of layered images of humans and animals, and out of salvaged and translucent materials. There is the sense of recovery in Jackson’s art, of memory and history, and of feeling, through the act of making a single fabric of the sensory and the personal.

For some, this exhibition will serve as an introduction to Jackson’s work; it is her first solo show in New York. However, at 75 she has a long, distinguished career that has ranged from the West Coast to Savannah, GA, where her work was recently the subject of a retrospective at the Telfair Museums. Her prints, drawings, and paintings carry the traces of her earlier work as a costume designer, dancer, and poet. As a young artist in Los Angeles in the late 1960s, she founded the seminal Gallery 32 which showed work by emerging African-American artists such as Betye Saar, David Hammons, and Senga Nengudi.

The earliest pieces in Jackson’s exhibition are from the 1980s and the most recent are five revelatory works from the past few years, many of which are suspended from the gallery ceiling like cascading, luminous tapestries.

We can see her work in the context of artists such as Sam Gilliam, Alan Shields, and Joe Overstreet,who in the 1960s and 1970s began to make paintings that functioned as dimensional, sculptural objects. Jackson shares with these artists an improvisational engagement with materials, and an eschewing of regular stretched canvases in favor of loose, open hanging.

Exemplary of the imagistic vein in Jackson’s work is a history drawing-cracked wall (2016-2019). This large, horizontal work, over eleven feet in width, is a kind of compendium of memories, and includes many faces and hands, human figures, plant life, and a bird and a cat. They emerge from a matrix of lens-like cells that act as portals into a variety of times and places. There is a kind of hectic lightness that arises from the swiftly rendered forms, and the layered washes of acrylic and coffee.

In this drawing and in the three watercolors in the exhibition, we can see some of the recurring themes in Jackson’s work: a connection to the natural world, a diaristic impulse to remember and to commemorate, and a fluid way of working that expresses the vagaries of lived experience. In the large paintings, three on canvas and one on collaged paper, the pigment often becomes thicker and more gestural, but remaining are the color-drenched, abstracted human and animal forms, separate and merging. Especially touching is El Paradiso (1981-84), a painting done in brushy and flowing acrylic wash, with two semi-silhouetted heads in profile, almost but not quite kissing. Surrounding them are an Eden of color, with a flowering bird-of-paradise whose root is a bulging, bruised heart.

Jackson’s “anti-canvases” are an ongoing series of works, mostly from the past decade, that combine paint and found materials, both manufactured and organic, with expanses of built-up, clear acrylic medium. We look at the collaged and suspended matter, and through it at the same time. The hanging works have a front and back, and can be seen from both sides. These pieces are both limpid and distressed, as if we are confronted by a flood that carries along both beauty and destruction in its wake.

A very large piece, oldblueshanging, while she waits (2017), is constructed on a painting stretcher whose top is attached to the wall and then cants out from it on two legs. Built upon it are collaged skins of stained clear acrylic, drawings, curls of wood, sand, reflective bits, and palmetto leaves. There are open gaps in the crimped, rough surface left edge of which appears the almost hidden figure of a woman, along with the head of a cat. The overall impression is of a deluge of experiences, fragmented brokenness, and patched together survival.

The reference to the blues is key, with the African-American experience revealing itself in many forms in Jackson’s work. It is expressed in His and Hers (2018), a hanging flow of translucent acrylic resin that is the support for collaged elements. On the lowest register are paired pillow cases that evoke the artist’s parents, in the middle is rucked scenic Bogus paper, and above, and below, are bright radiating and fan-like pieces from her mother’s unfinished quilt. In all, the spirit is celebratory and valedictory, a sweet farewell.

Ebenezer Crossing (2017), another hanging, layered acrylic piece, recalls an atrocity during the Civil War in which hundreds of emancipated African-Americans were drowned due to the actions of a Union general. This tragic event, which took place near Savannah, is embodied in the torn, overlapping red netting, with a vaguely cruciform shape that emerges from it. Silencing Tides, Voices Whispering (1988) is an early example of Jackson’s work in clear acrylic, here with netting, woven tapes, mixed papers, and wood, a see-though scrim capturing what the artist terms “memory experiences”.

The purely abstract Light, Light into Being (2019) consists of a sheet of acrylic in which are suspended flows of color, leather, beads, and other materials. The work seems to embody this artist’s personal, material way of reaching for clarity and for the transcendent.

The post A Flood That Carries Along Beauty and Destruction: Suzanne Jackson at Ortuzar Projects appeared first on artcritical.

October 29 to November 23, 2019
547 West 27th Street, 5th Floor, between 10th and 11th streets
New York City, thepaintingcenter.org

Wonderment at the world is art’s perennial subject. Artists are always waking us up, not just to material phenomena themselves but to our own awareness of them. Representational art acts as a kind of lens, refracting the observable and allowing us to see it with a measure of the artist’s own vision.

In Claire McConaughy’s exhibition of 15 paintings we find a freshness of spirit conveyed through closely cropped landscapes. Our attention is concentrated typically on a small area of land and water, often fronted by a solitary tree or just a branch. The effect is at first seems picturesque, with nature seemingly making a picture out of itself, just for our delectation. By editing from view anything that might compromise the sanctity of the scene, clarity and beauty prevail.

However, the more we look, the more it becomes apparent that within the pristine landscape a fraught sense of strangeness begins to emerge. There is the sense the paintings’ idealism, a faith in nature untouched by human depredation, is also a way of grasping tightly to the hope that it will persist.

Suede Blue Lake (2019) is a prime example of McConaughy’s approach, with the water described as a swirling yin/yang of blue and pale gray, reflecting the clouds in an azure sky. Auburn hills define the distant shore, while close to us are a scrubby pine and the branch of a deciduous tree, locking into place the painting’s spatial dynamics. Bravura paint handling paradoxically yields a chilled, slightly melancholy scene.

Especially satisfying in this painting, as in other works, are the remarkable deftness of McConaughy’s touch and the economy with which she creates the illusion of our being there, right along with the painter. Her identification with the natural world is manifest, and in this I am reminded of the way poet Mary Oliver was able to know herself through closely hewing to the world. As she writes in “Song for Autumn”, “Don’t you imagine the leaves dream now/how comfortable it will be to touch/the earth instead of the/nothingness of the air and the endless/freshets of wind?”

Cerulean Lake (2019) is a painting that again features loosely painted water in blue and white, with a thin line of the horizon, and a series of drooping bows of a pine tree in sharp focus. Like the branches, the viewer is suspended in space, levitated off the ground. The image has a sense of picture postcard gratification. McConaughy’s paintings have an open forthrightness, once thought of as typically American, and as well, a feeling of a time well before our own anxious, cynical moment.

In their painterly directness, the bold image-making, and the sense of abstraction, I connect these paintings with the work of venerable painters of the New York School like Alex Katz and Lois Dodd. In Appearance (2019) and Sweet Green View (2019), two paintings of tree trunks and the space beyond, the light touch and transparency of the image also recalls the work of Raoul Dufy. The depiction of natural forms with simplicity and attention echoes Chinese brush paintings of nature close up.

A number of McConaughy’s paintings push us, along with the artist, out of nature’s Eden, and embrace a particular sense of risk and wildness. In the small painting Redon and the Sun (2019), McConaughy’s appreciation of the French painter’s intoxicated colorism is invoked in an agitated scene with gesturally articulated trees set against an expanse of blue with just a suggestion of an illuminated shoreline.

In a similar vein, Dream Sunset (2019) features plunging branches silhouetted against a psychedelic sky of orange and magenta. Beach Pine (2019) has branches catching both the evening light, and an armada of pink clouds. Both paintings revel in nature’s poignant, gorgeous excess. In Interlaced Sunset (2019), a golden shaft of light penetrates a dark enveloping pine, beneath which is a cursorily limned building. The effect is strange and unnatural, charged with an ardent urgency. In these ambitious paintings, we have left behind the security of the familiar, and entered a new zone of awareness, where we see ordinary life as dreamlike and exalted.

The post “How Comfortable it will be to touch the Earth”: Claire McConaughy at the Painting Center appeared first on artcritical.

June 12 to August 9, 2019
335 West 38th Street, between 8th and 9th Avenues
New York City, https://www.sl.gallery/

Elizabeth Riley’s exhibition at SL Gallery is full of transmutations: from digital to material reality, from video to sculptural form, and from the concrete to the imaginal. Rather than a conceptual conundrum, this artist gives us intriguing visual and kinetic stimulation that impels us to consider who we are in relation to a variety of mediated experiences.

Riley presents an installation, along with the video it was derived from, as well as two sculptures which also involve the progressive generation of visual content. The short but compelling video, made while she was at a residency in Reykjavik, is a raucous affair comprised of quickly edited glimpses of the observable world, transformed into a fragmented, psychedelically colored flow.

Early in the video, curves of colored paper and mesh spin and lurch chaotically. Attention is focused on a number of small avatar-like forms, particularly an arced pattern that skitters across floorboards and through vivid, polarized interior spaces, accompanied by a clattering ambient soundtrack. The animated form, while moving constantly, is not a free agent; instead, puppet-like, it is manipulated by a silhouetted hand or controlled by means of a long, curving wire, like a cat toy.

The video is constantly changing with abstracted forms interrupting this mise-en-scène, which then quickly gives way to a new setting. Later in the video, we see a  production line where balls of yarn are being processed, reinforcing the sense of social control, specifically suggesting the constraints on the roles of women. The video concludes with a kind of apotheosis, with the flat avatar shivering in hyped-up color, as it evolves into a pair of white wings that hover over a roaring waterfall.

The video, deconstructed and rendered three-dimensionally, is the source material for The Dragons of Iceland Installation (2019), a large techno-funk assemblage. This free-standing sculpture includes six small video monitors playing excerpts from the original video (at times in monochrome), three upended old-fashioned looking tables, and draped strips of tiny video stills that resemble densely pattered fabric. The whole piece sits before a wall with an angled array of enlarged images culled from the video.

The effect of this installation is to wake us from the video’s immersive clangor into a multi-media theater set, with the audience circling and re-experiencing elements of the dream-like, filmic world. We are reminded by this work that the origin of virtual wonders lies in our own space and our own bodily encounters.

Some of the same kind of mode-shifting obtains in two large wall reliefs that Riley has constructed from inkjet prints of highly processed video stills. In Structure of Light (2019), which is nearly twelve feet in width, long narrow strips of paper are affixed flat to the wall, and then allowed to undulate in rolling, dimensional curves. The paper is printed on both sides with softly modulated lines of orange, yellow, mauve, tan, and sea green, occasionally interrupted by small inset lattices of intense color.

The second wall piece, Configuring Video (2019), shares with the previous work the same sculptural approach of moving from flat to bulging forms, again secured by small pins whose heads in bright hues serve as a visual counterpoint to the printed, linear expanses. In this work there is a layered, ovular focal point, like a test pattern, that stands in contrast to the rest of the visually mobile surface. Both works delight in the interaction of shape and pattern – a playful formalism that constructs space out of sheets of color.

In the two sculptural reliefs, in the video, and in the installation, there is something distinctly contemporary in the ease with which Riley uses technology as an expressive medium, allowing the human spirit to speak through it. Her works posit the idea that the virtual and the physical are fungible categories, and they model for us a way of being in the world. There is a willingness to exploring the new with admirable curiosity, rather than just adopting either an automatic allegiance or a fear of its dominating effect. In this sense Riley harks back to an early hope of abstract art, to make of our world a place of promise, where the modern spirit of discovery and agency would inform emergent technologies to a bracing, liberating effect.

The post Mode Shifting: Elizabeth Riley at SL Gallery appeared first on artcritical.

April 26 to June 2, 2019
56 Bogart St, between Harrison Place and Grattan Street
Brooklyn, mdavidandco.com

Art can seem like magical thinking, in which an artist’s hopes and desires are ostensibly projected out into the world. Artists have faith that their individual consciousness can telepathically hook up with each one of us in a kind of mind-melding fictive reality.

Such thoughts are stimulated by two concurrent exhibitions M. David & Co. by Len Bellinger and Denise Sfraga, artists of distinctive look and psychological register who are married to one another. They share a joining of the visual and the physical, and an emotional urgency that implicates viewers in the theater of their personal visions.

Len Bellinger’s paintings are psychically intense and materially animated, gnarly with plaster, modeling paste, sawdust, staples, and other materials. The surfaces, which are often in high relief, carry bold abstract shapes that function as energetic personages suspended in indeterminate space.

In Bellinger’s painting kinch (2017-2019), a spiky and looping black form floats before a quasi-landscape in softly painted, scabrous plaster. The title means loop or noose in Scottish, and also is Buck Mulligan’s nickname for Stephen Dedalus, comparing him to a knife blade, in Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce, an author favored by Bellinger for his multivalent wordplay.

The title of the large painting lotus eater (1997-2019) is presumably a reference to the fifth episode in Joyce’s Ulysses. The two large flower-like forms, rendered in tangled lines of oil paint, suggest the pressed flower that Leopold Bloom, using his pseudonym Henry Flowers, receives from his hoped-to-be lover Martha. The whole painting captures the humid, languorous eroticism of both Homer’s original and Joyce’s retelling.

Bellinger’s painting tmm.marga (2016-2019) is one of his ongoing series of works inspired by the shadows in Goya’s bullfighting etchings, the Tauromaquila. When looking at this large painting, the reference is obscure – what remains is a queasy, pulsing atmosphere of overlapping shadows set against shifting yellow-orange, successively rendered in thickly textured pigment, then modeled color, pours of paint, and finally a dripping silhouette thickened with embedded materials.

Jemez (2018-2019) is a smaller painting with a specked yellow form on a purple and black ground, flanked by two bright, mottled margins. The form is erect, vaguely pelvic, and funny, with a large bifurcated head and a single spindly leg. It stands bravely naked and undeterred. Like much of  Bellinger’s works, this painting induces a sense of anxiety, but one in which existential dilemmas are confronted with a spirited embrace. The same impression is to be had in his many small drawings, which emphasize the human body transmuted into abstract forms, while retaining its sense of vulnerability and perseverance.

Stylistically, Bellinger works harks back to Miró in their organic, evocative forms, and their insistence on the primacy of the imagination. Abstract Expressionism is an influence seen in the highly worked surfaces and poetic materiality. And there is an echo of the Neo-Expressionism of the 1980s, with its display of self-generated symbology. But at the core of these works is something original and personal – the sense of a hard-won realization that has at last emerged.

In her exhibition Poison Garden, Denise Sfraga has painted the walls of the gallery’s project space a sepulchral purple, and covered them with many small drawings and a few larger works. The show’s title refers to plants that are dangerous, and although the botanical is a recurring motif, the clear implication in the work is that the human condition is a garden whose blooms can be as harmful as they are beautiful.

Sfraga works combine feelings of the malign, the humorous, and the eerie. Imagine if the Addams Family collected modern art, and you will begin to get the idea. Although these works use the language of modernist biomorphic art, their originality lies in their emotional immediacy.

The artist makes deft use of Flashe, acrylic, marker, colored pencil, and pastel to create softly modulated forms that seem to emerge glowing from a surrounding darkness. Her nuanced, unusual color is mysteriously expressive.

In her small drawing Whimper (2019),  a lobed form in a gloomy chartreuse shadowed in red-purple curls upon itself in an embodiment of resignation. The pod-like interior of the sac is a recurring motif in Sfraga’s work, and suggests the potential of growth and expression that has been either protected or sequestered. In Choke (2017), a headful of brick-red eggs is stoppered from the neck up by a mechanical form from a collaged photograph. The use of abstract photographic imagery, combined with handmade forms, creates a strange frisson, worthy of further exploration.

The mood of sadness and thwarted utterance continues with Weep (2018), a large work on paper, with a large green form resembling a stingray, emitting tiny ovoid tears, while sheltering a litter of larger round forms. This melding of funk and finesse recalls Elizabeth Murray’s unpredictable imagistic abstraction.

Suicide Tree (2019)and New Mourn (2018) share a deep sense of loss held in mask-like forms. The former work has central tree-like spine within a mushroom shape topped by red nipple. The underside of the overarching form reveals two empty eye sockets. Similarly, New Mourn has a dominating inverted heart, with hollow, sightless eyes. Indeed, eyes abound in Sfraga’s work: alarmed, indicting, sore, and cutting.

But for all the danger implied in these works, they are also suffused by joy. In the painting Hollow (2018), typically, Sfraga’s sense of darkness becomes a portal, surrounded by enfolding color.

The artists will discuss their work with Alexandra Rutsch Brock and Paul D’Agostino at the gallery at 4pm on Sunday, June 2

The post Dual Visions: Len Bellinger and Denise Sfraga in Bushwick appeared first on artcritical.

January 30 to March 9, 2019
121 Orchard Street, between
New York Cirty, galerierichard.com

“What are we seeing?” That is the fundamental question that always seems to bedevil us when we look at risk-taking art. We are asked not simply to experience a work but to intuit a whole constellation of intentions: aesthetic, ideological, and poetic. In the case of Dennis Hollingsworth, we have our work cut out for us, in spades. That is not to say that the effort to know his work is a slog – far from it. In these paintings are delights and conundrums, both brain-twisting and eye-popping.

There is an antic, psychedelic spirit at work in the eighteen pieces which comprise this exhibition. Hollingsworth arrives at the derangement of the senses via multifarious stimuli – stylized organic ornamentation, phrases spelled out in large letters, intense patterns, and paint, marbleized and in thick, dripping impasto. These and other motifs are layered in compositions that seem joyful and fraught in equal measure.

The works – primarily paintings, along with two wall pieces, and a sculptural vitrine – share a dimensional quality, both in their construction and their surface treatment. This projective thrust is central to Hollingsworth’s project, a baroque celebration of painting’s capacity to impinge upon our space and our consciousness.

Among the most intriguing of the pieces are the constructed paintings, including So That We Could See (2018), a white convex form, like the sectioned canopy of an umbrella, covered with the words of the title, and thick skeins of paint. The effect is a praise song for vision itself. The same spirit animates Dazzling Treasures (2018), which has ten circular panels, each like a separate screen or a unit of an insect’s compound eye, displaying blossoms, webs, drips of paint, and words, including STARS, SUN and WE.

Looking Back to Look Forward (2019), is quite a production, a kind of theater set of paintings within a painting. Easier to apprehend than to describe, this work begins with an abstract shield-like form, in front of which projects an array of ovoids with thick or flowing paint. Ensconced above the main forms is a miniature version of the painting, like the artist’s original thought presiding over the completed work. The painting’s elements are attached to a wood scaffolding that is curiously neutral and functional  in a work whose elements are otherwise so thoroughly active.

Perhaps the best way to read the built support is to see it in terms of the modernist grid that informs many of the works in the exhibitions. The painting’s title reminds us that Hollingsworth is scanning the history of the past century’s painting, picking up signals from stars, both nearer and more distant: Matisse in the leaf and flower forms, Pollock in the use of paint as its own living corpus, Ryman in the appeal to conceptual rigor, and Lawrence Weiner in the cryptic language.

But beyond any received wisdom, these paintings possess an essential originality and weirdness, in the best sense. They seem to allude to an intense awareness, where touch and vision are at play together. In Deep Body (2018) the crenelated black oval, filled with shivering lines and dark forms, reads like a tantric embodiment of this state of inner harmony. In this heightened condition, building up and breaking down appear as equally desirable. In We Are…Secrets (2018), a field of red and yellow lines has been eaten away, leaving a star-like neural network, behind which is a band of letters, the partially visible title.

The painting Square Cube (2019), is a high-style vamp, with an array of the artist’s favored elements of leaves, words, and elongated asterisks mostly covered by engulfing waves of red, studded with extruded paint that resembles spiny sea urchins. This painting, although recent, seems to hark back to some of the earlier works in the exhibition, displayed in the back gallery – such as Minerva’s Serpents (2015) and Limitlessness and Strange Desire (2015) – with their extravagant, totalizing approach to a continuous field that is continually being interrupted.

There are two possible hints of the direction that Hollingworth’s recent work might open up. The sculptural wall reliefs, Laocoön (2018) and Second Order Revelation (2018), both make manifest the wood support hidden in other works, here functioning like a cross upon which is screwed the living body of looping lines of canvas. A second path is displayed in the painting CMB (2018), which suggests a via negativa, a way of knowing that rejects the material certainty of Hollingsworth’s mostly emphatic works. Here we see what seems to be a truncated mandorla, an almond shape that recurs in religious art, composed of wisps and phantom residues of paint on raw canvas, apparently the result of multiple off-printings of an empty sperm-like form. It is as if a tender, existential recognition has unexpectedly made itself known.

The post Building Up and Breaking Down: Dennis Hollingsworth at Galerie Richard appeared first on artcritical.

October 30 to November 24, 2018
547 West 27th St #500, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, thepaintingcenter.org

Writing about art is a form of synesthesia, a confounding of mental faculties. But instead of musical notes or numbers appearing as colors, the visual and the verbal scramble, so that “what I saw” becomes “what I wrote”, which in turn becomes “what I know” about the work at hand. This process becomes even more perplexing when one is considering art that is made of both text and image, as is the case at The Painting Center with Monique Johannet.

“Intimations”, her exhibition in the gallery’s project space, is a sampler of Johannet’s astringent, witty, and provocative art. The seven paintings, sculptures, and drawings combine words with a pop sensibility, translating the personal and the emotional into graphic icons. Johannet has developed this approach over the past twenty years, and her work shares a mordant humor and social critique with a range of contemporary artists including Rochelle Feinstein, Suzanne McClelland, and Michelle Vaughan. For Johannet, as with these other artists, language is incarnated in material reality, becoming something literally in your face.

This feeling of confronting the unavoidable runs through Johannet’s work, beginning with the first piece we see here, Pink Inch; Pink Yard (2013), which pairs a very small and a very large canvas. Both feature a wide cobalt margin, a shocking pink center square, and the title inscribed over them in a perky retro cursive.

The work plays on the statement by Matisse, “a centimeter squared of blue isn’t as blue as a meter squared of the same blue.” At the same time, one can’t help but connect the title with the phrase, “If you give them an inch, they’ll take a yard”, and how it speaks to the fear engendered when the powerless claim a bit of power. In the context of Johannet’s concern with the iconography of gender, the piece resonates with the wide-spread activism that has put sexual politics at the center of public consciousness.

The next work in the exhibition, He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not (2011) resembles a child’s letter blocks strung together, spelling out the title with black letters on pink cubes. Lying on the floor, it is a tangle of desire and regret, a game of romantic expectations ready to go wrong.

We then encounter a large, boldly colored diptych, Sorry… So? (2014) with a cartoon speech bubble that fills the left panel reading “sorry…” in red script on yellow, against an aqua field, and the right panel with “so?” in black letters on a white bubble, with a magenta background. The effect is of seeing a private conversation writ large, with both an apology and a question that challenges its efficacy. The painting recalls the current public ritual of the confession of sexual abuse that often has at its core a bid for absolution and restoring the status quo. As with Johannet’s entire oeuvre, this work embodies an awareness of the tenuousness of intimate relationships, and brings to mind an acerbic dialogue in a play by Samuel Beckett or Edward Albee.

It should be noted that “Sorry… So? is painted with a kind of minimalist precision, and expanses of sheer, intense color. Only on the crisp edges of forms do we sometimes see a tiny gap of white, or a rim of exposed color, a slippage which suggests both a sense of dimension and a space opening beyond the surface. Johannet’s work resembles a sign, a graphical interface between the world at large and inner subjectivity that painting connotes.

On the far end of the project space is a large sculptural piece, a white wood panel with a pale blue speech bubble that had been cut from it and placed on the floor. The raised words on the panel read, “A HOLE THAT NEEDS TO BE FEELED”. The sense of loss, unspoken, becomes the voice of this piece from 2011, carrying a tinge of childhood combined with word play, as if Gertrude Stein had returned to try out a stand-up routine. This work parodies the essentialist trope that identifies the female body with specific psychological impulses.

The two smaller works that follow, while independent, can be seen as a “her and his” pairing. In Cuntrol Freak (2012), the title is painted in a thick red script onto which is affixed a thin layer of hair. The assertion of agency, with a nasty edge, plays off against the politeness of the light blue background. Jerk (2012), the drawing that reads as its companion piece, has a drippy jewelry chain sewn to paper, spelling out the title. The piece seems to constitute a warning about the guy whose love is a tie that binds like a golden chain, attractive and exploitative.

The exhibition’s final piece, Silent Treatment (2018), has two bulbous forms in cadmium red on an ultramarine blue background. Wired to the canvas are jingle bells, spelling out the title, the revenge of the oppressed and the repressed, that with a nudge can be shaken joyfully to life.

The post The Painted Word: Monique Johannet at The Painting Center appeared first on artcritical.

September 6 to October 7, 2018 (extended)
1144 Dean Street, between Rogers and Nostrand avenues
Brooklyn, srogallery.com

Galleries and project spaces run by artists have proliferated in recent years. They constitute an essential aspect of art in New York – generative, transient, and democratic in the best sense. These are spaces where works by artists can appear, often without the high quotient of risk and reward by which market-oriented galleries can be burdened. Venues such as Centotto, ODETTA, 490 Atlantic, National Exemplar, and Sideshow, the seminal project of the late Richard Timperio, are both a community unto themselves and crucial to the ecology of art in this city. Artists Don Doe and Cecilia Whittaker-Doe run SRO Gallery in the parlor of their Crown Heights brownstone. Their exhibition of monoprints by painter Jeffery Bishop, a revelation in its visual inventiveness, confirms the value of intimate, personal exhibition spaces.

For the last four years, Bishop has spent a number of days each summer working with master printer Myrna Burks in Orient Point, NY. The prints that they produced have evolved during this period, but they all share a kind of antic, anxious energy, and a promiscuous technical ingenuity. As monoprints, each piece is unique, combining the direct manipulation of printing ink on shaped plastic plates, with silkscreen, digital printing, watercolor, and chine collé, in this case the collaging of a printed image on rice paper. There is an improvisational spirit at work here, with motifs arising, and then riffed upon and transfigured in later works.

The earliest prints are the most aggressive, or perhaps defensive, in their feeling. They are full of spiky points, including excerpts of an eccentrically checkered matrix of intersecting spears, a signature emblem of Bishop’s paintings. In most of the prints, the forms float on the paper’s white space, and although abstract they carry a psychological charge, evoking internal struggles transmuted into high-wire aesthetic play.

Early on in the prints, Bishop developed figural forms, both bulbous and pointy, like birds or bodies, fighting or flying. Within their crisp borders they contain within themselves fluid, miasmic currents. In Monoprint #42 (2016), we experience a real sense of vertigo with an avian figure diving over a fragment of a field below. In Monoprint 22 (2018), the central figure is a liquid form that seems haunted by its own mortality, as diagonal vectors that delimit squeegeed zig-zags count down its final moments.

As the prints developed, the dominating image became a digitally-derived, sinuous wave form that is distorted until it degrades, like a puddle of mercury. These avatars are the distant descendants of op-art and 1960s psychedelic rock poster imagery and its art nouveau antecedents, but with a contemporary vibe. Originating in mathematically precise figures, they yield to a liquid, vibratory vulnerability. Particularly affecting is Monoprint 51 (2016), with its two, dripping fountain-like forms in black and white that flank a watercolor flow in a bilious yellow, tinged with lavender.

Monoprint 68 (2018), is one of a number of very strong works in which the molten forms layer and twist around a central axis, like a caduceus on acid. In Monoprint 56 (2018) the flowing forms solidify into a sculptural presence whose lobes and protrusions continue to bear the traces of its digital DNA.

All of the strongly vertical works suggest the merging of the mechanistic and the biological into a two-dimensional cybernetic organism, well on its way to full autonomy. In graphic experiments that combine the hand and the computer, Bishop seems to be trying out possible scenarios of the analogue and the digital in a yet unresolved coexistence.

In the most recent work, these elongated elements are transformed into a digitally generated form, reptilian with a slippery dimensionality. In Monoprint 65 (2018), the being and its optical shadow, suspended above a square of pebbly ochre, seem to be dreaming of a material reality that is now part of their ancient history. In Monoprint 71 (2018), the same animated being pulses red with psycho-sexual energy, recalling the Surrealist poetics that inform Bishop’s art.

In Bishop’s prints we witness visual ideas and urgent expression realizing themselves in forms that have an animistic energy: corporeal, unsettling, elegant, and alive.

The post Flight or Fight: Jeffrey Bishop’s Monoprints at SRO Gallery appeared first on artcritical.

November 12 to December 22, 2017
188 East 2nd Street, between avenues A and B
New York City, karmakarma.org

With the distance that time affords, we can see communities of artists as neural networks, firing their energies into a nexus of human connections. Collectively they create a complex that nourishes and amplifies the efforts of each individual artist.

Jean Conner, Wally Hedrick, Deborah Remington, and Franklin Williams, the artists gathered together at Karma, emerged from a small, but vital art scene in Northern California in the 1950s and 1960s. Their compatriots included Bruce Conner (who was married to Jean Conner), Jay DeFeo (who was married to Wally Hedrick), Joan Brown, Michael McClure, Manuel Neri, and Wallace Berman, who all worked and exhibited together.

These artists are featured in Anastasia Aukeman’s book Welcome to Painterland: Bruce Conner and the Rat Bastard Protective Association (University of California Press, 2016), which explores the personal and artistic fermentation that animated their time together in San Francisco, and how it reflected the Beat scene, radical politics, and the emerging counterculture. In their relative isolation from a major center of art, these artists were able to develop both their own personal visions and a model of mutual support and scrappy self-reliance that still resonates today.

The exhibition at Karma gives us just a slice of the four artists’ individually diverse work, while capturing aspects of the spirit of Bay Area art of the period. A revelation for me was the work of Franklin Williams, who was based early on in Oakland and taught for many years at the San Francisco Art Institute. The artist is 78, and in this exhibition are a selection of nine works from the 1960s and 1970s that are fresh and pulsing with high key color and textural surfaces, made of paint, yarn, and crochet thread. With their freewheeling, obsessive funkiness, they have a particularly contemporary feeling.

See and Always Be Seen (1975) is a large-scale painting, composed of strips of painted paper, rearranged and sewn with yarn, whose hieratic lattice structure is filled by swarming brush strokes, whorled lines, and stylized flames. The effect is of a kind of crazed joy. Untitled (1968) is an exuberant party of a sculpture, with a pillow-like form whose surface vibrates with springy tendrils of multi-colored yarn.

Jean Conner, who is 84, and until recently has rarely shown her work publicly. Her twenty-two small collages in the exhibition, dating from the 1960s through the 1980s, are all are composed of images culled from magazines. They are beautiful works in rich, subtle colors that are surreal, refined, and subversive, all at the same time.

Some of the works, such as Are You a Springmade?, use advertising imagery; its title and female figures, both sleeping and cavorting, are drawn from a long-running ad campaign for a line of sheets. Like a number of Conner’s works, it questions women’s social identity as an icon of commerce or desire. Most of Conner’s collages employ images from the natural world, often combining different species and settings to dream-like effect.

The work of Deborah Remington, who died in 2010, is full of fierce painterly gestures and allusions to the landscape. They reflect her studying with the Abstract Expressionists Clyfford Still, Elmer Bischoff, and others at the California School of Fine Arts. The paintings, four of which are very large, express Remington’s sense of ambition and her desire to create pictorial experiences that confront and encompasses the viewer.

Dr. S (1962) is painting with black, slashing brush strokes in a field of yellow-orange. The blocky forms coalesce into an instable image that recalls the Pacific Ocean shoreline that Remington drew during her formative years as an artist. Winter (1963) has a similar structure, with black strokes emerging from cadmium red to create a looming presence. With their central, isolated masses and hints of secreted interior spaces, these painting anticipate the hard-edged, shield-like paintings that Remington would become celebrated for after her move to New York in 1965.

Wally Hedrick, who died in 2003, was an iconoclastic artist whose work ranged from assemblages, to proto-Pop paintings, to politically charged works. He was a central figure among the Bay Area artists, and along with Remington and four others organized the seminal Six Gallery, the site of Alan Ginsberg’s first reading of his poem “Howl” in 1955.

In this exhibition the intersection of art and activism in Hedrick’s work is embodied in four examples of his Black Paintings. He began the series in the 1960s as a protest to the Vietnam War by taking over 50 of his earlier canvases and painting them black. The Black Paintings continued into the 2000s with works that opposed the first Iraq War.
Hedrick’s Vietnam/Irac (1970, 2003) spans the two wars, and like the other related works, is a painting in mourning. A tondo, whose canvas is split at its equator, is over 10 feet in diameter, and thickly painted in oil. Its rough, monochromatic surface suggests a shroud of negation that covers over a field of buried evidence.

The gathering together of the four artists in this exhibition reconstitutes a moment in which a confluence of individual and collective efforts expanded into a stream of art that continues to reverberate. It reminds us that art from anywhere can become a watershed that flows beyond itself into time and space.

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June 22 to July 24, 2017
291 West 19th Street, between 7th and 8th avenues
New York City, ecfa.com

Painters work within the conventions of their times, by which I do not just mean within a style or an aesthetic: they are bounded within modes of thinking and feeling that are so pervasive as to be virtually invisible. Some artists embrace these constraints or strain against them, while others both use and rebel against what is given.

DeShawn Dumas, in his exhibition Holocene Extinction, takes a number of the conventions of painting today, pushes them, and in the process makes something urgent. These include provocative use of materials, play of one visual system against another, and the presence of painterly gesture. But this work reaches beyond the formal into a zone of emotion and immersion that itself becomes a medium conveying the personal, the political, and the transcendent, and back again in a continuous loop of reference and contingency.

At the same time that he presents us with this multivalent psychic spectacle, Dumas seals it within glass or thermoplastic, surfaces that are occasionally broken. The transparent sheets both encase the works and carry paint on their reverse sides, in a contemporary version of traditional glass painting. The effect is to dramatize the artist’s and the viewer’s relationship to feeling: at once impassioned and distanced.

In this exhibition Dumas presents work in multiple modes, demonstrating painting’s capacity to unsettle itself, while working both within and beyond its known dimensions. Most striking are the artist’s large-scale paintings that layer reflective Mylar that has been distressed until it is full of holes and fissures. Enhanced with spray paint, these works are psychedelic fantasias, gorgeous and dangerous in their dissolution.

Once Upon the Amazon (Ayahuasca) (2017, all works in show), in a profusion of reflective greens and golds, evokes both the growing world and the inner space of drug-aided visions. The same spirit prevails in Destiny v. The Water Protectors, a work dominated by depths of blues and green. Particularly stirring among the three Mylar works is Hold in Mind (Whiteness and Western Transcendence – apolitical, ahistorical, postracial utopia). In chartreuse, scarlet, and powder blue, it gives us a glimpse of the sublime and simultaneously questions an aesthetic convention left untouched by a larger social awareness.

The painting’s title, as in the case of each of Dumas’s works, is essential in connecting us to the artist’s poetic intent. The exhibition’s title, Holocene Extinction, alerts us to the allusive role that language plays here, and refers to the current geological epoch marked by homo sapiens. Included in the effects are global climate change and the extinction of 30-50% of all species by mid-century.

But for Dumas, the question of extinction also points to the present danger of violence against African-Americans. This is made immediate and personal in the painting Frames of War (frameworks wherein certain lives are regarded as worthy of protection while others are not, precisely because they are not quite “lives.”). The painting is part of an installation that includes drawing on the wall and a small painting on the floor with shattered glass titled Black Mirror (in White). The paintings, along with a bouquet of purple flowers, comprise a memorial to the artist’s half-brother, who died in a police shooting and whose photograph leans against the larger work.

Two other Black Mirror paintings combine expressionist painting with a surface of shattered glass. Untitled (Broken Windows Policy) is a beautiful work that recalls this repressive law enforcement policy. But of the smaller works in the show Untitled (and we hate the po-po want to kill us in the street for show) is the most difficult. It is a bright red wound, with dripping paint the color of dried blood that stains the broken glass covering the surface of the painting.

The most cryptic work of the show is a large horizontal painting, Neoliberal Waltz (He dreamed that the four-leggeds were going back into the earth and that a strange race had woven a spider’s web all around the Lakotas. And he said: “When this happens, you shall live in square gray houses, in a barren land, and beside those square gray houses you shall starve.”) Incorporating the words of Black Elk, the Ogala Dakota medicine man and visionary teacher, the title connects genocide and unrestrained capitalism, embodied in the symbolic nexus of a fragmented gestural ground and a geometric net.

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November 17, 2016 to February 4, 2017
81 Barclay Street (at West Broadway)
New York, 212 220 8020

For over 50 years, Siri Berg has kept faith with abstract painting, creating a body of work of rigorous and lyrical beauty. The outlines of the oeuvre of this 95 year-old artist are traced in a retrospective of thirty-three paintings, drawings, and assemblages currently at the Shirley Fiterman Art Center.

Berg was born in Stockholm, Sweden, studied at the Institute of Art and Architecture at the University of Brussels, and has lived in the U.S. since 1940. The earliest work in the exhibition is Cycle of Life, a painting from 1967, with curvilinear forms that glow and morph in a swimming mass. It is distinctive among all the paintings for its sense of biomorphic animation. But it has qualities found throughout Berg’s work: form as an expressive, poetic medium, and color as a sensuous experience.

The circular forms of Cycle of Life recur in many of the works from the 1970s, including Progressions #3, with rows of circles that wax and wane like phases of the moon. This same sequence moves within the large painting Diptych (phase 22), with a similar palette of gray discs that become orange in five steps. In the smaller, intense La Ronde, figure and ground change from red-purple, brown, and red, to ochre, deep yellow, and lemon.

The sense of cosmic mysteries and the music of the spheres, found in many works from the 1970s, is most strongly present in the nocturnal Bottom Circle, in which a small dark disc partially eclipses a larger paler sphere, extracting from geometry a kind of mythic drama. This sense of the abstract at the service of an inner necessity is a living reality in Berg’s work, through a shifting series of modes and motifs, all inflected by both the lessons of the Bauhaus and the minimalism of the 1960s.

The title of the exhibition, Siri Berg: In Color, reflects the choice of curator Peter Hionas to focus on works in which color plays a significant role. There are whole series and decades of powerful paintings in black and white, represented by just a few examples, which can be seen in the small office gallery. But it is color that energizes this exhibition, with varying degrees of exuberance and restraint. Two large-scale paintings from 2011-13, both with the phrase “It’s all about color” in their titles, allow color to stand on its own, with progressions of pure hues. Individual canvases each have their own color, and Berg lays them out like keys of pure sensation, ready to be played. In these works, color becomes form, an object-like presence in our own space.

This approach – in which the optical takes on a sculptural reality – runs through Berg’s work. It can be found in many forms, including serial assemblages of found objects, such as the reflective CDs arrayed in rows in Sexy, from 2001-02. In the triptych Straight Line 1-3, an upper strip of colors tops fields of paint that move from flat to highly textured brush strokes as the tonality deepens.

Even when there is no explicit relief, abstract form takes on a kind of virtual physicality through the fineness of form and the force of color. Two paintings from 1996, Straight Lines and Bars, in their own way make the visual real. A progression of intense hues in blocks is flanked above and below by brown and gray rectangles that move in parallel. The effect is of a double-consciousness, negotiating two systems of perception simultaneously.

This notion of consciousness made visible is a subtle, persistent realization that comes with spending time with Berg’s work. She is a meticulous explorer, patiently entering into specific territories of formal relationships, finding a way there into the self. It may be easy to mistake her work for a kind of objectified abstraction, but the work is actually both more challenging and more giving than that would imply.

There are certain works that particularly demonstrate this paradox, including Phase of Grace, a large painting of two gray circles, one wholly and the other partially embedded in a field of blue, a simple arrangement of forms that is unaccountably touching. Stormy Weather is a diptych in nameless, depressive colors: the first panel is like an expanse of darkening sky, while the other, in the same hues with choppy brush strokes, captures a sense of inner turmoil.

A pair of collages, Work on Paper – Grid series II, III uses the simplest of means: a field of fluid watercolor captured by an overlaid grid of circles cut into a thin sheet of blue plastic. The effect is to fix the fugitive and the emotive, at least for the moment, in the bonds of form.

As in much of her oeuvre, over many years of assiduous practice, Siri Berg distills an austere, cerebral, and moving music that lets us see what Buddhists call “heart-mind” at work.

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