January 12 to March 17, 2018
980 Madison Avenue, Third Floor, between 76th and 77th streets
New York City, nahmadcontemporary.com

Two major gallery presentations of the artist Hans Hartung (1904-1989) –  the exhibition under review here and Hans Hartung: A Constant Storm, Works from 1922-1989 at Perrotin, 130 Orchard Street (through Feburary 18) – are currently resolving a curious paradox. Since the 1970s, the groundbreaking and highly inventive modernist has been cited as an understudied figure on this side of the Atlantic. This observed neglect, however, hasn’t been remedied by comprehensive considerations of his oeuvre in American exhibitions, nor, for that matter, in English. The tide is now changing, as the two New York shows and a concurrent display at Simon Lee Gallery in London portend the artist’s rediscovery. The exhibition at Nahmad Contemporary, in particular, affirms the exigency and rewards of reviving Hartung.

This tightly curated exhibition showcases the German-born, post-war French artist as a veritable master of medium: An almost mathematical sensibility for line and composition are shown to tame his highly inventive artistic processes and violent automatic gestures. A mythology of isolated periods of genius has emerged around Hartung’s work, as he is most widely regarded for either the “long grasses” of his early career or his reinvention by way of frenetic spray-gun paintings during his senescence. Covering four decades of prolific production in fourteen works, the exhibition establishes coherence between the early experiments in regulated line and the later, anarchic spray-gun renderings by revealing the artist’s guiding principles and theoretical preoccupations.

In particular, the exhibition divulges Hartung’s enduring exploration of line as a central compositional device. Tracing his manipulation of line from the earliest work in the show, the 1952 monochrome T-1952-3, to a pairing of ambient works from 1982, illuminates the artist’s use of line as both formal structure and emotional envoy. Where T-1952-3 records Hartung’s gestural slashing of the canvas, for which he has become classified as an “action painter,” his later works T1982-H29 and T1982-K29 transpose torrid scrawls of mental exertion amid atmospheric zones. Searing his signature linear scratches atop bands of placid gradations of color in the later works produces a complex tonal register that moves from unbridled action to staid retrospection within a single canvas.

Though the artist’s fascination with line remains a constant throughout his career, he continually innovated around the line, both in its conceptual ideation and in his technical execution. The examples from 1982 evidence Hartung’s response to the growing Parisian interrogation of calligraphy, calling to mind the Eastern influences of Hartung’s Art Informel confreres Zao Wou-Ki and Lee Ungno. Perhaps owing to his colleagues’ deconstruction of traditional Eastern ideograms into sites of abstraction, Hartung’s conceptualization of calligraphy allows line, in his handling, to multiply in signification—all at once line is a test of malleability, a marker of vital emotion, and a conduit for language. Through its explorations of line, the exhibition also studies the artist’s changing methods of applying paint on canvas. In T1982-H29 and T1982-K29, for example, Hartung achieved his network of dynamic lines by thrashing the canvas with a paint-covered tree branch.

While Hartung’s quasi-calligraphic lines communicate his participation in Parisian modernism, they also symbolize his American relevancies. His unique tree branch painterly process, for example, immediately recalls Pollock’s drip. Similarly, his atmospheric backgrounds signal Rothko. Importantly, Hartung and Rothko recognized their shared artistic sensibilities and maintained a convivial friendship. Following Rothko’s death in 1970, Hartung even suggested that Rothko’s iconic paintings were galvanized by a trip to Hartung’s studio in the late 1940s: “[He] saw a painting in progress, in which large horizontal monochrome strips crossed the canvas; the painting was at an intermediate stage and I had not yet added the graphic elements. Rothko was especially interested and moved.” Maybe Hartung’s reputation as a connoisseur of line has been responsible for the lack of take up in America. The Nahmad show reveals Hartung’s equal attention to ambient atmospheres—in works like T1966-H11, T1980-R36, and T1982-E8—in a way that should more securely locate his achievement within an American sensibility.

A hinge-point of this exhibition is the grouping of three captivating paintings from 1971 [see installation shot, above]. Taken individually, the works are as philosophically rigorous as they are spiritually evocative. Jewel-toned curvilinear masses orbit atop uniformly black backgrounds as rounded parallel black lines slice swaths of color with destabilizing precision. While some of these works touch upon a cosmological realm, Hartung also engages in what was a vibrant conversation at that time among contemporary painters about the modernist grid—the aesthetic ordering principle first promulgated by artists such as Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg. In this gesture, Hartung liberates the bound geometries of the grid, discards primary colors in favor of a daring palette, and casts them in a galaxy of their own design.

This highly meditative triad of works lends further insight into Hartung’s displacement of de Stijl’s rigid parameters. In T-1971-R19 and T-1971-R21, the artist brackets the vertical edge of the paintings with blocks of color, amplifying the assertion that these are paintings, rendered on canvas, contained by their own materiality. By defining the limits of the canvas, Hartung debunks the high modernist lore that grids radiate into infinity, extending beyond the work endlessly.

Hartung’s spray-gun paintings were a radical departure, instigated after a stroke limited the artist’s mobility in 1986. In the vein of Matisse’s cut-outs, Hartung’s adversity is often seen as the creative catalyst for his artistic reinvention in his last years. The robust presentation of his work at Nahmad Contemporary puts these seemingly divergent works back into conversation with his oeuvre as they have us seeing the frantically sprayed lines as continuations of his charged gestures with brush and branch. The selection of works in this show makes for a generously navigable understanding of the artist without limiting our sense of Hartung’s dynamic, indomitable explorations of concept and technique.

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October 22 to December 2, 2017
534 West 21st Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, paulacoopergallery.com

Instagram must, in part, be credited with the popularity craze for Yayoi Kusama in New York right now. In her whimsical multi-venue exhibition, “Festival of Light” the Japanese artist has cultivated the quintessential environment for the age of the selfie. Beyond the perfect selfie backdrop, these rooms foment a phenomenological encounter between participant and environment. The primary physical encounter with Kusama’s spaces induce mental stimulation, be it destabilization, escapism, or even simple enjoyment. And while there continue to be numerous painting shows this season, with the preponderance of Kusama-like immersive environments, contemporary painters are steeped in an art world that anticipates a certain kind of spectator immersion.

Perhaps this is why Cecily Brown’s new paintings, presented at Paula Cooper in her first solo show with the gallery, is such a revelation. Brown produces an absorptive mental and physical experience that rivals interactive art. Owing to the dictates of her elaborative painterly process, works in this exhibition ensnare the viewer in a state of sustained looking. This activity is not unidirectional as Brown’s undulating canvases simultaneously reveal and withhold visual data.

The centerpiece of the sold-out show is also its title piece: “A Day! Help! Help! Another Day!” (2016), a triptych, is the largest work to date in Brown’s oeuvre. While critics have pointed to the art historical references at play in this canvas, including a stated homage to the shipwreck scenes of Géricault and Delacroix, the philosophic underpinnings of Brown’s process are what unlock potential for sustained looking.

An heir of Francis Bacon, Brown is, as it were, an intellectual relation to Bacon’s great interpreter, Gilles Deleuze: her work echoes the French philosopher in the translation of sensation onto canvas. Brown’s most recent works seem especially in dialogue with Deleuze’s conception of the fold—an unrelenting maneuvering of existing material, inter alia the folding and refolding—which allows preexisting matter to transform into a form of expression. Brown’s processional practice, in which she continually remediates her strokes, covers her previous marks, and often returns to her works after months-long hiatuses, is an artistic translation of this philosophical concept. The artist’s additive process is an accumulation of luscious gestures and abrupt strokes, ultimately rendering an assemblage of fractured forms that produce a rhythmically pulsating whole.

Sifting through the canonical imagery of Géricault’s’ The Raft of the Medusa, Brown’s immersive method allows her to splice her art historical allusion with swaths of paint and encoded gesture which complicate the discrete categorization of her work as figurative or abstract. Relishing in the instability of her own mark-making, her phantom-like forms emerge from the depths of the painting, only to recede into the cyclonic mass of abstract forms. As the viewer walks from edge to edge of her painting (which is the only way to fully absorb the behemoth masterpiece) both body and eye activate as the ambulatory motion reveals recognizable traces of flesh, wreckage, and the elements. The single reading of the painting proves insufficient. Iterative looking is continuously rewarded in Brown’s canvases: each additional viewing unearths new discoveries and destabilizes old observations. Mirroring the artist’s own additive painterly method, the absorbed viewer returns to the same zones of the canvas only to see it anew. Whereas Brown is most frequently understood to be in dialogue with Willem de Kooning, another New York School name comes to mind at Paula Cooper: Barnett Newman, who avowed that the most salient aspect of his paintings was not their monumental measure but their relationship to human scale. These works were successful if they produced reverberations of the human figure and prompted an introspective consideration of one’s own bodily presence. Rendered to human scale, Brown’s A Day! Help! Help! Another Day! (2016), brings the physical body of the spectator into the mass of forms and flesh, implicating the viewer in the chaos of the shipwreck.

Beyond the physical absorption of the viewer, Brown’s content subsumes the visual field. In much the way that Newman’s iconic “zips” serve to orient the viewer at the center of the visual field, so too does Brown’s most clearly rendered human form near the center of her composition. Acting as an anchor, the figure both centers and envelops the viewer in the visual content. The distinction between painted figure and viewer is collapsed, a sensation heightened evermore by the orientation of the figure with back turned to the audience. Indeed, Brown’s most prominent figure seems to survey the damage of the shipwreck with the gallery-goer. This back-turned figure repeats in another painting in the exhibition, the equally enigmatic Madrepora (Shipwreck), (2016).

While Brown deals in plastic media, her mesmerizing canvases elicit the immersive environments and absorptive states which characterize the most successful installation art around today. Even more than these Instagram-friendly environments, Brown asks the viewer to slow down and participate in the unfolding of her canvases. A true interlocutor with artists and philosophers past, Brown’s subject matter nevertheless expresses an engagement with the demands of contemporary art. Where Kusama gives you infinity in a room, Brown paints you into her shipwreck: You are a material form in the process of becoming, alongside the flesh, wreckage, and masterfully applied brushstrokes.

The post Sensation to Canvas: Cecily Brown as Antidote to Instagram appeared first on artcritical.

September 7 to October 28, 2017
293 Tenth Avenue at 27th Street,
New York City, paulkasmingallery.com

Assessment of an artist’s early work can be a tricky business. Often this period will have been manipulated to cohere with an overarching narrative associated with the artist, with focus placed on unearthing traces of what would later epitomize the mature style. An entirely different problem, however, plagues the reception of early Robert Motherwell.

Motherwell took a circuitous path to becoming an artist, one peppered with forays into academia and punctuated by multiple decisions to change his course of study to assuage his hankering, though often repressed, desire to envelop himself in modern art. Motherwell’s abandoned doctoral dissertation has had a lasting impact on scholarly treatment of his early work. The enduring credo has it that Motherwell bypassed traditional juvenilia and was instead in possession of a mature style and decided artistic philosophy at the very outset of his career.

When he graduated from Stanford in 1937 with a philosophy degree, Motherwell immediately enrolled in the philosophy graduate program at Harvard. He preferred courses on art theory and aesthetics, and elected to research Eugène Delacroix at the University of Grenoble, France. He soon moved to Paris, however, where he pursued his interest in contemporary art, rubbing shoulders with members of the intelligentsia and studying firsthand the art of modern masters. Returning to the United States, he switched gears and entered the graduate program in art history at Columbia, run by the fabled Meyer Schapiro. Witnessing his student’s primary interest in creating his own work, Schapiro introduced Motherwell to the downtown émigré Surrealist crowd. Despite his youth and unmistakably American characteristics, Motherwell became fast friends with its luminaries. He made a transformative trip to Mexico, for instance, with Roberto Matta, by the end of which he would come to consider himself an artist.

The Mexican paintings are where Kasmin’s Robert Motherwell Early Paintings begins. Remarkably, this is only the second-ever exhibition of the artist’s early paintings.

What’s more, Kasmin tackles a body of work that has been overshadowed by Motherwell’s critically lauded early explorations into collage and automatic drawing. Despite the commercial appeal of paintings and their prominence in Motherwell’s later career, his early paintings have long played second fiddle to artistic production in other media. It is only with the Elegy to the Spanish Republic series beginning in 1957 that Motherwell garnered a reputation as a painter. Kasmin’s exhibition therefore responds to a challenging mandate: to elevate both period and medium against received opinion.

Shining an isolated light on this body of work, with the help of impressive loans from the Dedalus Foundation, the exhibition has a rejuvenating effect. The downside of claiming that Motherwell arrived as an artist fully formed is the corollary assumption that early endeavors suffered from a lack of progress, not bearing the fruits of trial-and-error process that informs most artists. Instead, the 18 works selected for the exhibition, which emphasize serial groupings, attest to the radical development of the artist between the 1940s and ‘50s as we see him grapple with a cadre of influences from Surrealism and psychic automatism to Piet Mondrian and Joan Miró—retaining, rejecting, and remediating as he saw fit.

The most instructive example of his painterly development during this period is the triumvirate of works inspired by Mondrian. While the highlight of the first room of this two-room show might appear to be the first-ever public display of Three Figures, c. 1941 alongside his first complete painting, La Belle Mexicaine (Maria), 1941––a powerful figurative pairing given prominent gallery placement––moments of curatorial inspiration lay in other corners of the gallery. Recuerdo de Coyoacán, 1942, The Sentinel, 1942, and The Spanish Prison (Window), 1943-44 result from his encounter with Mondrian at the Dutchman’s first US solo exhibition at Valentine Dudensing Gallery in 1942. Motherwell was struck by Mondrian’s interrogation of the visual field as a zone to be simultaneously flattened and bisected.

Over time, the works grow progressively distant from the canonical grid paintings as each iteration allowed Motherwell to determine which aspects of Mondrian’s practice were pertinent to his program. The latest work, The Spanish Prison (Window)—its title referencing the Civil War—draws upon De Stijl’s detached, non-objective optical theory while distorting its anti-humanist position by introducing a quasi-figurative, imprisoned form. Blowing open Mondrian’s hermetic grid, this is a body contained and deconstructed by the confines of a vertical field.

More than a grouping of like works, positing these three paintings as a series demonstrates Motherwell’s preoccupation with variegating motifs as his central mode of artistic refinement. Furthermore, this trio challenges its very ontological classification as belonging to a discrete medium by virtue of the way in which the works reify the collagist practice that infiltrated Motherwell’s approach to painting. Linking disparate blocks of color amidst vibrant swaths of paint, Motherwell shows the capacity of paint to behave like torn and rejoined pieces of paper.

Nearing the end of the 1940s and delving into the 1950s, the second room of the exhibition charts another development in early Motherwell, his progressively becoming more abstract. Orange Personage, 1947 is situated against the back wall of the gallery, mirroring the placement of the figurative work La Belle Mexicaine (Maria) in the previous room. This application of parallel structure to the exhibition space clarifies the conceptual distance between the two figurative approaches: in the later work, Motherwell uses the vertical thrust of the canvas and simplistic geometric forms to describe the human form, drastically departing from the figurative, though abstractly obscured, painting of his first wife.

The revelation in Orange Personage, however, is to be had up-close. Covered with sand—likely from the beaches of East Hampton where the artist maintained a home—the work possesses visceral charge and local specificity. Incorporating found objects, natural and manufactured, into his works was a trademark of Motherwell’s collages. Living somewhere between painting, collage, and readymade, Orange Personage dissolves the boundaries of medium specificity.

While an exhibition of early paintings by a famous Abstract Expressionist might not seem anything out of the ordinary, this show is subtly subversive. Instead of simply making an argument for Motherwell’s painterly abilities, the collagist practice, serial pairings, and quotations of different artists at play here challenge notions that this is a show about paintings, a stylistically homogenous period, or Motherwell alone.

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