Louise Fishman, the preeminent American painter, died on July 26th at the age of 82 with Ingrid Nyeboe, her spouse, at her side.

Born in 1939 in Philadelphia, Fishman translated her life experiences into radiant, muscular works of art. The highly personal abstract style that she evolved was born of her physical power, intellect, and engagement with art history.

In her youth she had been a competitive athlete, which helped shape her gestural idiom. She was both the daughter and niece of practicing artists, Gertrude Fisher-Fishman (1916-2013) and Razel Kapustin (1908-1968) respectively, both of whom studied at The Barnes Foundation, then in Merion, Pennsylvania. Fishman was steeped in the works of such European modernists as Matisse, Cézanne, and Soutine through catalogues from the Barnes in her mother’s library.

Fishman loved music of all genres and could often be seen in a rapt state, sitting beside Ingrid, her beloved, at performances. She became a part of my life several years ago through our mutual friend, pianist Idith Meshulam, who performed music by my spouse, Laura Kaminsky at a concert at Tenri Cultural Institute in 2013.  Louise was deeply moved, and this became the catalyst for a few special gatherings and conversations that we treasure. Her absence is going to have a profound impact on those who treasured her alto speaking voice, radiant smile, and the depth of expression in her eyes that made everyone feel that they were clearly seen and heard.

Though in her mature paintings she employed tools such as drywall knives and trowels, Fishman’s command of the traditional materials and techniques of oil painting came through her academic training at the Philadelphia College of Art, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Tyler School of Fine Arts, and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign where in 1965 she completed her MFA before heading to New York City in her Nash Rambler.

During the late 1960s and early 1970s, she confronted gender discrimination in the art world, and further isolation as a lesbian. Working as a proofreader and editor, she painted at night and on the weekends and became involved in the feminist and queer activist movements. As if to destroy the influence of the male-dominated art power structure, she cut her canvases apart, reworking them into small sculptures that incorporated stitching, dying and weaving. She experimented with liquid rubber, inspired by Eva Hesse’s 1971 memorial exhibition in work at the School of Visual Arts.

In 1973, curator Marcia Tucker included Fishman’s work in the Whitney Biennial.  Exhilarated by this professional recognition, she was nevertheless ambivalent about this inclusion, when it was not extended to  other women artists in her life. Her Angry Women Paintings of that year were an expression of self-awareness, unleashed in a series of 30 text-based works, inscribed with the names of her heroines and friends in bold letters obscured by drips and slashes.

A 1988 visit to the concentration camps at Auschwitz and Terezín had a profound impact on Fishman who transformed her grief into a series titled Remembrance and Renewal. Fishman mixed silt collected from the Pond of Ashes at Auschwitz into her paint in elegiac works that embodied her belief in painting’s capacity to reflect psychological and physical states of being.

For There She Was (1998), one of my favorite works, is a darkly shimmering painting whose title is taken from Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway. The relationship between two characters who metaphorically merge into one comes to mind, as every color becomes another. With interlocking passages of blue, gray-violet, and black shot through with cadmium red and burnt sienna, Fishman painted a vibrating field that evokes a Chinese garden at dusk. The artist was a collector of Chinese scholar’s rocks, and farm stools. She was sustained by her Buddhist practice as well as the years that she spent walking the landscape surrounding her old farmhouse in upstate New York.

In the last few years, Fishman enjoyed long-overdue recognition, including publications and solo exhibitions at Vielmetter, Los Angeles; Locks Gallery, Philadelphia, and Karma, New York, and retrospective exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia and the Neuberger Museum of Art at Purchase College. We can expect more exhibitions and research to examine her unique contribution to the language of gestural abstraction, one that fuses, in her unique way, elements of tenderness, fury, and joy.

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September 10 to October 19, 2019
45 East 78th Street, between Madison and Park avenues
New York City, mnuchingallery.com

Earth, Wind & Fire’s 1975 album, “That’s the Way of the World,” sits beside a stereo speaker, atop an antique English mahogany pier table, beneath Alma Thomas’s, Skylight, 1973, an abstract painting in sapphire blue hues. This painting (pictured in an Architectural Digest photograph) had been chosen by First Lady Michelle Obama in 2009 for the private spaces of the White House. Today, Alma Thomas: Resurrection, on view at Mnuchin Gallery in New York, takes its title from another painting with a White House association. Acquired in 2014 and hung in the Old Family Dining Room, Resurrection was the first work of art by an African-American woman to enter the collection.

Mnuchin’s show, which is curated by Sukanya Rajaratnam, is Thomas’s first on the Upper East Side since 1976. Taking up the baton of recent Alma Thomas exhibitions at the Tang Teaching Museum and the Studio Museum in Harlem, Rajaratnam focuses on works from 1959 to 1976 that represent her mature style, distinguishing her from Washington Color School contemporaries such as Morris Louis and Gene Davis. By including rarely-seen works on paper, the curator also highlights Thomas’s iterative process, and her experimental studies on fine-quality watercolor papers.

Born in Columbus, Georgia, Alma Woodsey Thomas (1891-1978) was still painting in the small Victorian house that her family had occupied since 1907 in Washington, DC when she died at the age of 86. Thomas was born with a hearing and speech impediment. Her mother, a dress designer, believed that Alma’s condition was caused by the trauma that occurred during her pregnancy when a lynching party with ropes and dogs approached the family’s house. The family moved north in 1907.  In 2021-22, the Columbus Museum  in her hometown and the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Va., will present an Alma Thomas retrospective that will broadly explore her creative life—her artistic practice, as well as her interest in gardening, fashion, costume design, and graphic design.

In the still-segregated nation’s capital, Thomas attended Armstrong High School where her dream was to become an architect and in 1924 became one of the first graduates of Howard University’s fine arts program. Loïs Mailou Jones, who taught in the department, invited Thomas to join the Little Paris Group, a salon that she cofounded with Céline Tabary, to discuss theories of modernism with other African-American artists, and to promote the artistic practice of art teachers. This must have been a lifeline for Thomas, who for 35 years worked as a devoted middle-school art teacher. She taught her students the latest dances, took them to lectures at the black-owned Barnett-Aden Gallery, designed marionette productions, and opposed the school board mandate to teach only vocational drawing to the “colored division” students. During summers, she rigorously pursued her own artistic education, earning a master’s degree at Columbia University in 1934, and studying painting at American University in the 1950s. While she worked representationally, I believe that all along she was experimenting within a continuum of abstraction that crystallized into a mature vocabulary around 1960, the year she retired and could devote herself full time to her art. Severe arthritis threatened this plan, but when in 1964, Howard University offered her a retrospective, she rallied and launched full force into the project.

One year after her retirement, she painted Blue Abstraction, 1961, with vigorously applied blocks of cobalt and marine blue, moss green, and red held in check by areas of bluish-black and white. Suggesting architectural forms or flickering lights at night, the interplay of horizontal and vertical strokes with encrusted textures remind me of Philip Guston’s pure abstractions of the mid 1950s.

Summer at its Best, 1968, exemplifies Thomas’s signature formal language and her insistence on beauty and exuberance—the experiences she sought in the seasons of her gardens, thunderstorms, or the mysteries of space exploration. Here, vertical curtains of saturated color are built up with short, inflected brushstrokes over a ground of white. The strokes, at times resembling dance steps or mosaic tesserae, follow an under drawing of pale pencil lines (like the warp threads in weaving) that subdivide the canvas. By overpainting with white here and there, Thomas controlled the swellings and attenuations of the color bands, and modified the intervals of light peeking through the colors. Her palette of marigold, chocolate brown, and goldenrod, shot through with cedar green, turns our thinking toward late summer landscapes, when a temperature drop stimulates one last push for trees to set winter buds and berries.

Her banner year was 1972, when Thomas became the first African-American woman to receive a solo exhibition at The Whitney Museum of American Art. There she is in a photograph at the opening, turned out in the grooviest, patchwork-printed gown, holding a pair of white gloves with the self-possessed bearing of an artist who has worked very hard to rise above marginalization and achieve such recognition.

The Apollo Space Missions captured Thomas’s imagination, and her interest in the cosmos was translated into works such as New Galaxy, 1970. There is a majestic restraint in this work, defined by the chromatic interweaving of closely related blues and pinks—the colors of water, moonlight, and sunrise. And here, the horizon is turned on its side, as if seen from the rotating capsule of the spacecraft.

As in Springtime in Washington, 1971, Thomas infused her mandala or circular-motif paintings with a radiance that pulsates like music throbbing through a subwoofer. The white background evokes the hues of marble and sandstone of the buildings—exemplars of an ideal democracy— on The National Mall, while concentric rings are painted in the tones of candied fruits. It is these paintings from the early 1970s that perfectly meld Thomas’s belief in the redeeming power of color with her internalization of the Bauhaus teacher Johannes Itten’s color theories.

In 1985, I was the art teacher at Diocesan Educational Campus, an all-Black, Catholic middle school in the Fruit Belt, a struggling but historically significant neighborhood in Buffalo, New York. Art class always involved dance breaks to the music of Earth, Wind & Fire. I wish that I had known then about the life of Alma Thomas, because my students and I needed to hear the stories of many more African-American artists who circumvented substantial odds in order to create singular works of art that were steeped in their understanding of our complicated, shared history.

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3 Beekman Street, Beacon, New York 12508, diaart.org

“You don’t see birds’ nests along here anymore and I used to find hundreds along the Hudson River. It really troubles me.” Dorothea Rockburne and I are driving from New York City on the Palisades Parkway north toward Beacon, when she points out the absence of songbirds, a critical indicator of intact woodlands. I’m watching how she looks out the window, looking at her eyes—transparent pools of turquoise and malachite, anchored by the sharpest pupils.

Absence, presence, retrieval of the natural world, and our relationship to the universe are the topics that we discuss over several visits from July, 2018 until our December excursion.  At Dia:Beacon, Rockburne will spend the day refining the final installation phase of her long-term exhibition, which opened last year with a presentation of the artist’s large-scale works from the late 1960s and early 1970s. In January, it reopens with newly added galleries, featuring works produced in the early 1970s through the early 1980s.

Dorothea Rockburne, organized by chief curator Courtney Martin, encompasses a body of work that is informed by the artist’s lifelong investigations of astronomy, dance movement, mathematics, Egyptian and Classical art, and architecture. Existing paintings and works on paper are juxtaposed with recreated works made by the artist, and with Dia staff under her rigorous direction. Guided by her work diaries from the 1970s and documentary images of the original works when they were shown at the Spoleto Festival in Italy and New York’s Bykert Gallery, the exhibition catalyzes a set of questions about our capacity to perceive light, space and form, and to “…develop an empathic recognition of the human condition that is the substance of art.

For several months, Rockburne commuted to Beacon to experiment with new materials that replaced the original, non-art, industrial substances. In the late 1960s working from a studio on Chambers Street with little money to buy expensive art supplies, the artist found at the hardware store crude oil, cup grease, and chipboard, materials that mimicked the earth pigments of Renaissance painting. Today, reimagining works that were never really made to last underscores how deeply Rockburne continues to interweave her knowledge of ancient art and modern dance.

Receiving her early education at the École des Beaux-Arts and the Montreal Museum School, Rockburne studied at Black Mountain College, moved to New York in the mid-1950s and waited tables while raising a daughter. At the Metropolitan Museum of Art she worked in the finance office while helping to catalog the collection of Egyptian antiquities. She later worked for Robert Rauschenberg, remaining deeply devoted to him as a friend for years. In 1960, she participated in the Judson Dance Theatre, working with pioneers Steve Paxton, Yvonne Rainer, and Lucinda Childs. The experimental vocabulary of dance that was being developed at Judson reconnected Rockburne with her growing up years in Quebec, and the athleticism she experienced in skiing and swimming. Her leitmotifs for the next two decades —the folding movements of the body and its engagement with gravity and space—were inspired by her joy in the activation of her own limbs in the domain of dance.

Today, the energy quickens in the cavernous yet inviting galleries of Dia:Beacon as Rockburne, self-directed and moving with steady power at 86, re-enters work mode. She is greeted by Heidie Giannotti, Dia’s director of exhibition design and installation, and her team as they discuss a checklist of final tasks to accomplish during the next several hours. The atmosphere is companionable, with an edge of intense concentration that feels like musicians tuning before performing a Bartók string quartet. A lot of decisions involving complicated processes have to be made in a short time frame, and these will depend upon how the new materials that have been painstakingly tested over the past several months respond to the humidity, light, and gravity. Like ancient Egyptian laborers who positioned the benben (the top stone of a pyramid), the strength and skill of Giannotti’s team is impressive. Everyone is invested in the project’s success, and Rockburne, who has developed precise (even poetic) instructions for the presentation/recreation of her works, appreciates their individual contribution.

Standing at the opposite end of a large gallery, Rockburne scrutinizes a group of four art handlers who are executing the placement of the components of Set (1970), a work that spans a huge wall. They gradually raise and lower an unwieldy rectangle of chipboard that will anchor a large sheet of ibis-colored white paper against the wall. Rockburne judges its placement, Giannotti looks at Rockburne, nods decisively, and everyone channels their effort so that the revealed vertical edges of the paper will curl just-so (for the love of Pythagorus, don’t tear!). Board, paper, and nails ultimately form a set of harmonious positive and negative shapes that visually interlock with the wall.

Classical Greek architects utilized entasis, a sophisticated geometry to correct for optical illusions or distortions in their temples, and Rockburne similarly adjusts her elements to solve the equation of perfection within her mind’s eye. “Set Theory,” the artist explains, “signifies the desire to classify group situations, both numerically and symbolically. The ancient Greeks were the first to value groups of things like people, angels, and numbers. But the German mathematician Georg Cantor articulated this as a mathematical form to describe this principle, in 1874.” Do not underestimate the mental repetition required to engrave remarks like this into this writer’s brain.

Tropical Tan (1967-68), a severely elegant polyptych at 94 by 144 inches, reveals the artist’s concerns with light, weight, and the potential for apparently unchanging materials to exist as liquids or solids. Four pig iron (black steel) panels were sprayed with wrinkle-finish paint to form a contiguous horizontal band across their centers, with exposed bands of steel along their upper and lower edges. Inspired by air ducts in the artist’s studio, each panel was crimped, forming a low-relief cross (visualize the Roman numeral for ten) within the bend. Depending upon the light and your position, the steel takes on a blue cast against the soft, chamois-gold of the paint color. This chromatic duet, along with the employment of geometry evokes the drapery of figures in Giotto’s divine Scrovegni Chapel frescoes at Padua, an important touchstone for the artist.

In Domain of the Variable (1972-2018), a multifaceted installation, there is a small V-shaped groove carved into the wall around its entire perimeter. The groove sits about waist-high, referencing a proportion in Egyptian art but also suggesting a miniature version of the negative space in Barnett Newman’s Broken Obelisk. It takes time to absorb each element of this installation but for me—a painter and gardener—the effect of a gelatinous substance called lithium-complex red grease (the color of pomegranate seeds) that has been applied to and absorbed into a length of that luminous paper is deeply moving.

Follow that Egyptian groove, turn the corner, and enter a room whose floor and walls are painted an almost blinding white. Drawing Which Makes Itself (1972-73) exists in a continuum of time. The dirt particles deposited by your footwear on this continent of white will accrue with those of previous and future visitors, satisfying Rockburne’s intention for its completion by your presence. On the walls are the artist’s corresponding carbon paper drawings, which were motivated by her desire to “investigate the geometry intrinsic to every sheet of paper.” Rockburne developed a process for folding the matte, deep blue paper and transferring its mark onto the wall. These drawings remind me of the tracery of prairie grasses against a field of winter snow. Rockburne mentions how much she loved the lines of the modified white parachute that Robert Rauschenberg wore on his back in Pelican (1963), his first performance piece.

At Black Mountain College in 1950, Rockburne studied with Max Dehn, a mathematician who came to the United States as a refugee of Nazi Germany. Teaching “mathematics for artists” Rockburne credits him with igniting her lifelong pursuit of math and her efforts to develop a language of visual equivalencies. It should be noted that Rockburne does not believe that viewers of her work must be learned experts in math, because the experience of the work is ultimately visual, emotional and physical. Nevertheless, Rockburne herself does the math, as I witnessed when she pulled out a stack of equation-packed math notebooks from her studio bookshelf. “This is what I did late at night when all the guys were out partying!”

In the Golden Section Paintings, and the Egyptian Paintings Rockburne prepared her surfaces with chalk ground and gesso. She sees, in the rigor of construction, an expression of the unchanging proportions of beauty described by the Golden Mean, articulated in the temples of Pythagoras, and in the timelessness of abstraction in painting. Unrelenting in her process of refinement, she understands the limitations that time imposes on her vision. “My idea of divinity is that I am in this form only temporarily.”

When Greece was the superpower of the Mediterranean, Pythias (the Oracle at Delphi) answered inquiries about everything from the timing of a farmer’s cultivation to shifts in political power and natural disasters. Delphi as a result became the most important and wealthy shrine in Greece. To me, another form of wealth is the capacity that we have to perceive, limb by limb and to retrieve, effort by effort, the secrets of our universe.

At dusk, we gather our belongings to leave Dia: Beacon. A flock of swallows flies past the clerestory windows, casting brief shadows against a wall. The squeal of a power drill cuts through from an adjacent gallery. A preparator is staging the space for the return of Andy Warhol’s monumental work Shadows (1978-79) after a long absence. Eye’s flashing, Dorothea Rockburne says: “Good timing.”

The post “The Substance of Art”: Dorothea Rockburne in Beacon appeared first on artcritical.

Barbara Hammer: Evidentiary Bodies at the Leslie–Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art,

October 7, 2017 to January 28, 2018
Curated by Staci Bu Shea and Carmel Curtis26 Wooster Street, between Canal and Grand streets
New York City, leslielohman.org

Barbara Hammer jumps out of the rental car and sprints up Boulevard Jean Moulin, yelling Vous partez?! at the man who is unlocking his car. We are tangled in a spontaneous street protest in Marseille, as she attempts to flag down that parking spot we need. Typically, Hammer would wield a camera, but this time we’re on the lookout for the art supply store to buy drawing tools to take back to the artists’ retreat where we’re both working in an idyllic Mediterranean fishing village. On the winding drive back to Cassis, we talk about Resisting Paradise (2003), Hammer’s film about the French Resistance Movement here, and the artist’s role in times of conflict. She describes her initial research, especially a meeting with Lisa Fittko, who helped Jews and anti-Hitler resisters to escape Nazi-occupied France for Spain, where they took passage to safe havens. Fittko smuggled Walter Benjamin through this corridor. I have a boulder in my stomach recognizing that the body of water we look out over from the refuge of our retreat has been the death site of 5079 migrants fleeing Syria and Africa in 2016. Barbara Hammer’s desire to bear witness to the hidden and the endangered—her curiosity about the historical and political reality of a particular landscape—has been on my mind since that summer.

A flash of light pierces the hallway as Barbara opens the door, welcoming me to her studio at Westbeth in New York City. It is November 2017. We sit at a small table in front of windows overlooking a glistening Hudson River and the pilings, relics of submerged logs that once supported the piers along the Manhattan’s West Side. They draw they eye outward to the water, resembling film sprockets. Furnished simply with a desk and well-organized bookshelves, the studio contains an artwork suspended from the ceiling: a black steel and sheet-lead sculpture in the form of a girdle and bra by California-based artist Jann Nunn. Hammer and her partner Florrie Burke bought the work from the artist. As it dangles above Hammer’s head, I cannot figure out whether the material is leathery or hard, heavy or light. At Westbeth, the cooperative artists’ residence that was the once Bell Laboratories (1868-1966), Hammer had been on the waiting list for seven years and previously lived in two other spaces there. She says that this studio is the loveliest; it feels like living in a ship. The space is essentially empty of her own work because it is on view at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art. Barbara Hammer: Evidentiary Bodies is a multifaceted exhibition-project that includes a retrospective of work from the 1960s to the present, a series of performances and film screenings throughout New York, a companion show of her early photographs, and two new publications. Curated by Staci Bu Shea and Carmel Curtis, the exhibition is a cornucopia of archival material, previously unseen films, videos, paintings, drawings, collages, and installations that provide fresh insights into the life’s work of this pioneer of queer and experimental cinema, and the first living lesbian to have a retrospective at the museum. Hammer’s life-embracing, take-no-prisoners approach is a model of invention, endurance, and passion that would inspire anyone who seeks to live with undaunted courage and authenticity.

Born in 1939 in Hollywood, California, Barbara Hammer has, over the course of 40 years, created more than 80 works in film and video that have defied categorization and addressed subjects that had been invisible throughout history: lesbian sexuality and culture in particular, the nature of the artist and the space she works within, environmental and political injustice, and the process of living with cancer.

At Leslie-Lohman, an opening wall displays archival photographs of the performances—some hilarious and others profound—that Hammer has presented over the years. In one work, audience members roam around an inflated weather balloon, which is the projection surface for the film Bent Time (1983). Shot in high-energy locations such as Chaco Canyon and the Brooklyn Bridge, the film was influenced by the scientific theory that light rays curve at the outer edges of the universe, and by extension, that time also bends. “I used an extreme wide-angle lens of 9mm and one frame of film per foot of physical space to simulate the concept of time bending,” Hammer writes. The milky membrane of the balloon is a giant floating eye, staring back at us. Through silence or percussive sound, and in their unconventional modes of presentation, Hammer’s films demand an active viewer. Be prepared to feel awkward, to guffaw, to hear your neighbor’s breathing and your own digestive noise, to reconsider where film images belong, and at times to be eager for the stimulation to end.

In the short film Double Strength, (1978) the naked aerial dancer Terry Sendgraff swings and flies, performing strenuous acrobatic movements in suspension as Hammer films her from the ground, and from her own trapeze. Combining internal diegetic sound with found music, it is a lyrical essay in how the body interacts with gravity, as well as a meditation on the stages of a relationship from sexual awakening, through struggle, break-up, and enduring friendship. Considered alongside her film A Horse is not a Metaphor (2008), I see correspondences with the American artist Charles Demuth’s intimately scaled, homoerotic watercolors of circus performers, as well as the female equestriennes who worked within a vanished infrastructure of riding academies and horse shows in New York City after the Civil War.

Barbara Hammer’s drawings, paintings, collages and sculpture are intriguing elisions that reveal how the artist savors the metaphorical capacity of abstraction as well as the perceptual specificity of representation. Cancer Bones (1994) is a sculptural arrangement of thirty calf bones arranged on a low platform. Experimenting with the handcrafted potential of photography and sculpture, Hammer made Kodaliths of newspaper headlines which she projected onto the bones, then fixed them with photographic chemicals. Their desiccated shapes call to mind ancient pottery shards that scatter the landscape at Los Alamos, the birthplace of the atomic bomb. And remember all those bones that Georgia O’Keeffe painted in New Mexico? Hammer is pleased that her archives are now living near O’Keeffe’s letters, having recently been acquired by The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University.

During a cancer scare while travelling in Scotland in 2014, Hammer secretly staged a photo series at a former veterinary hospital (with visual artist Ingrid Christie). She combined the photographs taken amidst the abandoned medical equipment with x-ray images of her own body to construct a series of collages titled What You Are Not Supposed to Look At (2014). With imagery that evokes the isolation and medicalization of illness, Hammer’s sophisticated utilization of translucent color along with layered and doubled images of her body evoke Robert Rauschenberg’s ghostlike Hoarfrost collages as well as John Coplans’ photographs of his own aging flesh. Confessing that she never liked primary colors, Hammer is a nonetheless a learned and subtle colorist, whose earliest experiments with painting occurred when she was studying with William Moorhouse at San Francisco State in the early 1970s. There, painting directly onto 16mm film leader, she used a paint made for aquariums, a moment that catalyzed her sustained practice of breaking the barriers between painting, film, and photography. More recently, Blue Paint Film Scroll (2015) an 18-foot long digital print, originated from a 10-inch-long strip of 16mm film that Hammer treated with hydrochloric acid, salt crystals and paint. Burning and dodging her film in this new way, Hammer creates fizzy bubbles and pools of aquamarine blue, violet, and saffron yellow. Are these the insides of the lungs or pools of crude oil floating on the surface the Gulf of Mexico after the Deepwater Horizon disaster?

I first understood the obliterating power of water as a child, tiptoeing along the boulders of the breakwall in Ashtabula Harbor, Ohio, on Lake Erie. At 78, Barbara Hammer, stands on the treacherous side of the Marseilles seawall, proving that the risk of disappearing is worth the quest to find what more can be revealed when you tear down your defenses.

The post How Not to Vanish: Barbara Hammer’s Resilient Gaze appeared first on artcritical.

“Why Not Judy Chicago?” at CAPC/Musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux (March 10 through September 4, 2016)

Most people, when they see smoke, run in the opposite direction. Not so Judy Chicago. This Olympian of feminist art sprints toward fire–that is if she didn’t ignite it herself (literally, in her pyrotechnic works). With hair the color of smoldering embers and a razor-sharp wit, Judy Chicago is entering her 77th year with as much determination to combat prejudice and redress the deficit of women’s work in the art world as when she appeared in boxing drag in a Los Angeles gym. That was back in 1970, when women were still barred by law from the ring.

“Why Not Judy Chicago?” at CAPC in Bordeaux, France examines the artist’s career from her graduate student years in California in the mid-1960s, through her Resolutions series of early 2000. Organized in collaboration with Azkuna Zentroa in Bilbao and curated by Xabier Arakistain, the exhibition traces her multifaceted contributions as an artist, teacher, writer and activist. Arakistain, a longtime advocate for gender parity within museums and cultural institutions, has foregrounded two lines of Chicago’s work: her creation of a feminist iconography that denounces the oppression of women, and her efforts to invest the teaching of art and history with their contributions. It is particularly instructive to see this exhibition in France where the seeds of feminism were sown nearly two hundred years earlier than in the United States.

Presented in the Entrepôt Lainé, a vast warehouse built in 1824 for colonial goods (a story of dominance in itself), the exhibition unfolds through a sequence of arches and stone passageways. The diverse media and historic themes of Chicago’s oeuvre are well served by this cloistering, resonant architecture.

Mother Superette (1963), a work on paper made when Chicago was a graduate student, contains abstract figures that could be Cycladic female bench-pressers, but they also resemble Byzantine patterns from The Grammar of Ornament, Owen Jones’s monumental survey of international decorative design, published in England in 1856. Though situated securely within a tradition of architectural and design history, her work was criticized by male professors at UCLA for imagery that was “too-feminine.” Conflicted by her desire for acceptance while repeatedly being told that “you couldn’t be a woman and an artist too,” she switched gears and began to employ abstraction in a more subversive way. Her goal was to use color, surface texture, and form to develop a vocabulary of embedded meanings relating to women’s knowledge, sexual independence, and agency. She had by then changed her name (matching the city she grew up in) and enrolled in an auto body painting class — the only woman out of 250 students. There, she mastered lacquer and spray-painting techniques — de rigueur in LA’s car and surfboard culture — that became an aesthetic foundation for her work for the next several decades.

Pasadena Life Savers Yellow Series #2 (1969-70), rendered in airbrushed mists of blue/green, yellow, and violet on reflective acrylic panels, represents a crucial turn in Chicago’s investigation of the perceptual and emotional impact of color, geometric diagrams, and spatial systems. But these are not just intellectual Op-Art exercises. The iconography of the Life Savers paintings is a visual code that plays out on all quadrants of a complicated field. Circles and hexagons stood for the cunt in both word and image, challenging its socially constructed, demeaning connotation. At the same time, Chicago employed her brand of abstraction in the macho arena of Finish Fetish, the West Coast version of Minimalism. Finish Fetish artists were inspired by California’s surf culture, light, air, and smog, making slickly perfect sculpture in glass, polished metal, plastic, and resin. Chicago’s art reflected these prevailing ideas yet denounced the phallocentrism of a culture in which women artists were essentially absent from major gallery exhibitions, museum collections, and university professorships. Only recently have the women who worked in this milieu, such as Helen Pashgian and Mary Corse, been “rediscovered” in important museum exhibitions.

Chicago’s pyrotechnic works addressed another set of concerns about war, the environment, and women’s rituals. In Immolation IV (1971) Faith Wilding is engulfed by orange smoke from burning flares that encircle her grey-tinted seated figure. This was one of Chicago’s Atmospheres (Duration Performances with Fireworks) of 1968-74, staged throughout California, sometimes with her students as participants. Utilizing colored smoke to soften and feminize the landscape, these ephemeral performances also called attention to the bombing campaigns in Vietnam, and the self-immolation of monks in protest of the war. Haunting documentary footage of the Atmospheres (accompanied by the music of Miriam Cutler) combines Impressionist fascination with the obscuring effects of smoke and fog and a contemporary artist’s outcry against violence in its many forms.

The revolutionary, pedagogical experiment of the Feminist Art Program at Cal Arts is displayed in a series of documents from Womanhouse (1972) and never-before exhibited works by students of Chicago and co-founder Miriam Schapiro. Their inclusion in the exhibition is important in signaling the impact of the other women students who were part of the program. Collaborators Dori Atlantis, Nancy Youdelman and Karen LeCocq, for instance, were staging cheeky photographs that skewered gender stereotypes several years before Cindy Sherman began making photographs of constructed feminine identities in her Untitled Film Stills.

Rarely seen test plates portraying the physician Elizabeth Blackwell and the astronomer Caroline Herschel represent Chicago’s best known work, The Dinner Party (1974-79), her epic tribute to 1038 women who shaped the history of Western civilization. Vintage exhibition posters tell the story of the artwork’s international impact, the hundreds of volunteers and skilled artisans who contributed to its production, and its reverberating power as a cultural monument, now permanently housed at the Brooklyn Museum.

But beyond The Dinner Party, Chicago has yet to be fully assessed in relation to the socio-political history of narrative and mural painting in America. In Cartoon for the Fall (1987) images of labor, violence, and religion are delineated in the model for a monumental tapestry (woven by Audrey Cowan) for The Holocaust Project: From Darkness into Light (1985-93). The project was the outcome of extensive research into Chicago’s Jewish heritage and created in collaboration with her husband, the photographer Donald Woodman, together with skilled artisans. I see the Cartoon as philosophically and visually linked to Thomas Hart Benton’s mural America Today (1930-31), and Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series (1940-41). Benton’s mural represents the utopian dream of a new society but it also warns of the dangers of overconsumption. Lawrence’s narrative cycle (although more intimate in scale) confronts the harrowing journey of African Americans seeking economic and social equality during the interwar years.

The 18th-century French playwright Olympia de Gouze was a self-educated butcher’s daughter who in 1791 wrote The Declaration of the Rights of Women. “The purpose of all political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of woman and man,” she argued. “These rights are liberty, property, security, and especially resistance to oppression.” Judy Chicago, the daughter of a medical secretary and post office employee who embraced civil rights, still runs with a torch that illuminates the achievements of women, and resists oppression in all its forms. If only there were a way to bring this exhibition to America.

The post The Boxer: Judy Chicago Retrospective in Bordeaux, France appeared first on artcritical.

Paper Louise Tiny Fishman Rock at the Institute of Contemporary Art
April 29 to August 14, 2016
118 South 36th Street (at Sansom Street)
Philadelphia, 215 898 7108

Entering “Louise Fishman: A Retrospective,” at the Neuberger Museum in Purchase, NY, feels like balancing on a raft that is inadequate to cross the ocean it is floating on. The exhibition, organized by chief curator Helaine Posner, comprises more than 50 paintings and drawings created between 1968 and the present, and demonstrates the achievement of an artist whose work has invigorated the language of abstract painting. A concurrent exhibition, “Paper Louise Tiny Fishman Rock,” at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, offers an instructive companion to this long-overdue survey. That show, curated by Ingrid Shaffner, explores a selection of small sculptures, leporellos (folded artist’s books), and five large paintings that reveal the breadth and scale of Fishman’s oeuvre.

My respect for Fishman’s work did not come automatically, as I initially perceived a bluntness in the work; it resisted entry. Over time, and with experience in the thicket of artmaking, her paintings have worked me over, and the Neuberger retrospective’s tight selection facilitates this effort. Posner’s mindful arrangement within the museum’s galleries gives Fishman’s work plenty of room to breathe, explicating the artist’s conceptual and spiritual concerns and revealing her creative trajectory. Smaller works on paper, arranged on freestanding walls in the center of the main gallery are less effectively supported. In the cavernous space of this gallery, they may have resonated more powerfully if positioned in tighter clusters. Seen in its entirety, however, the retrospective inspires a sense of awe, and finally, situates Louise Fishman within the tradition of American painting rooted in Abstract Expressionism and furthered through her singular vision and endeavor.

The earliest work in the exhibition, In and Out (1968), contains four wing-like shapes, flatly painted in pinks and black that open in an irregular symmetry from an implied vertical line at the canvas’s center. Graphite lines visible through the white ground reveal subtle adjustments to the hard-edged shapes as color creates a strong spatial pulse. To my eye, the painting speaks to the central core imagery that was being developed by feminist artists such as Judy Chicago, though Fishman attributes it more directly a response to Al Held’s black-and-white abstractions of 1967–69.

During the 1970s, in the crucible of New York’s emerging feminist movement, Fishman became acutely aware of gender discrimination and acknowledged her own isolation as a lesbian. As if to destroy the influence of the male-artist power structure, Fishman cut apart her canvases, reworking them into small sculptures oriented along a grid. Confronting her disdain for traditionally feminine work, she employed stitching, dying, and weaving. Untitled (1971), reminiscent of an abacus, is made of rubber, graphite, string, and staples on tracing paper. Transversed by a twisted thread, the amber hue of the rubber resembles skin knitting itself together or the ruled lines of an illuminated manuscript, influenced by Fishman’s childhood exposure to Hebrew texts. Fishman knew Eva Hesse, but her encounter with the 1971 memorial exhibition of Hesse’s work at the School of Visual Arts was the catalyst for her decision to work with that material.

The Angry Paintings of 1973 came out of Fishman’s deepening self-awareness in the consciousness-raising gatherings she attended. Her pain and rage were unleashed in a series of 30 text-based paintings identifying the artist’s contemporaries and predecessors. Ti-Grace Atkinson and Djuna Barnes were among those whose names were inscribed in bold letters obscured by slashes and drips. While they are the least formally interesting of Fishman’s works to me, these protestations are nevertheless unique documents of the living history of feminism, even today, when women who express anger still risk stigma.

Life has been drained from the tempered grays, ashen blacks, and steel blues of Fishman’s Remembrance and Renewal series. Inspired by a 1988 visit to the concentration camps at Auschwitz and Terezín, Fishman made a group of paintings that were given Hebrew titles from Passover. Into her colors, Fishman mixed silt collected from the Pond of Ashes at Auschwitz, creating the granular surface of Haggadah (1988). Dybbuk (1990) comprises a reddish-black grid, like prison bars enclosing a sequence of dimly lit windows — the result of swiping brushstrokes dragged through the oily pigments. In Jewish folklore, a dybbuk is the earthbound soul of someone who has died, unable to be released. These elegiac works reflect Fishman’s concern with painting’s capacity to reflect psychological and physical states of imprisonment, just as they became a medium for transforming her grief upon witnessing the Holocaust sites.

Seven monochromatic paintings from the early 1990s represent an exponential leap in subject matter, scale, and surging physical gesture. Iron Sharpens Iron (1993) contains three charcoal-black bands on a white ground that stretch 10 feet up the canvas, then diverge. Fishman’s use of drywall knives and trowels yields a textural vocabulary of scraped and crusted surfaces, absorbing and reflecting light like hammered or rusted metal. The title, from a passage in the Book of Proverbs, means that through interaction and conflict we sharpen one another. Her history as a competitive athlete is also embedded within the aesthetic concerns of this work. Fishman relates her command of the boundaries of the canvas, gestural velocity, and physical confidence to pitching hardball and playing basketball as a teenager.

For There She Was is a magnificent, darkly luminous painting of 1998, whose title is appropriated from the last sentence in Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway (1925). The relationship between two characters who metaphorically merge into one comes to mind, as every color is turning into another. With interlocking passages of blue, gray-violet and black shot through with cadmium red-orange and burnt sienna, Fishman has created a vibrating field that reminds me of a Chinese garden at dusk. A collector of Chinese scholar’s rocks, Fishman also acknowledges that the landscape surrounding her old farmhouse upstate, as well as the practice of Buddhism has given her the ability to better understand her work as an artist.

Using paint’s viscosity as a metaphor for the power of water to buoy, submerge, and destroy, Fishman’s arm makes rapid swipes, cuts, and scrapes throughout her Raft of the Medusa (2011) and The Salty-Wavy Tumult (2012). J.M.W. Turner’s gory whaling pictures, with their allover facture, were not far from the artist’s mind as she smeared and twisted her reds around spumes of white in Margate (2015). Kreisleriana, (2015), divides the canvas into vertical bands of fiery yellows, reds, and blues that suggest the emotional contrasts of Robert Schumann’s work for solo piano. Because music is the most abstract art form, paintings in response to it can often be lame (illustrative) equivalents. That doesn’t happen here.

I see Fishman’s paintings in this domain as a reflection of her deep intellect and nuanced understanding of spatial and rhythmic structure. They are influenced by the focus and attention of a deep listener, but they are independent objects. At the top of her game, Louise Fishman translates aural, physical, and visual experiences into radiant and muscular works of art whose tension is maintained by the grid that anchors her fierce gesture. Her hard-won joie de vivre, born of new travels, immersion in music, and a contented relationship, underscore this substantive, if belated retrospective.

The post Fully Fathoming Louise Fishman: Two Surveys of Her Work appeared first on artcritical.

National Academy: February 4 to May 8, 2016
1083 Fifth Avenue at 89th Street
New York City,  (212) 369-4880

Firestone: February 4 to March 6, 2016
4 Great Jones Street, between Broadway and Lafayette Street
New York City, (917) 324-3386

In 1972, the year that Miriam Schapiro and Judy Chicago were creating Womanhouse with their students at Cal Arts, my older cousin Annie taught me a game called Masculine/Feminine. Two players would alternate, pointing to an object and asking, “Masculine, or feminine?” Telephone, driveway, rec-room: masculine. Paint brush, river, rhinestone: feminine. This game was a lot of fun, but it was also strange, because, as a ten-year-old kid, I couldn’t understand why things would have a gender. Two concurrent exhibitions of the work of Miriam Schapiro (1923–2015) in New York have me playing this game all over again. As I stand in front of her iconic Dollhouse (1972), on view at the National Academy Museum, I think about the broader impact of Schapiro’s legacy, as well as the new knowledge that we can acquire by focusing on a distinct period in the work of this luminary of feminist art.

Miriam Schapiro: The California Years, 1967-1975 inaugurates the Eric Firestone Loft at 4 Great Jones Street, a fourth-floor walk-up that is redolent with the histories of artists including Walter De Maria, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Keith Haring, who once had studios nearby. Firestone now handles the Schapiro estate, and his commitment to scholarly research is commendable. Installed within a long, whitewashed space flooded with winter light, this tightly curated exhibition provides a view onto a lesser-known body of Schapiro’s work, created during an eight-year period when the artist was living on the West Coast. The Firestone show establishes a connective thread from Schapiro’s Abstract Expressionist works, to the “shrines” of the early 1960s, to the geometric abstractions, to the femmage works that are on view uptown, in a concentrated if modest survey curated by Maura Reilly at the National Academy Museum.

By the time Schapiro arrived in California in 1967 with her husband, the painter Paul Brach, she was already a successful New York artist. She had attended meetings at the Eighth Street Club (where, like the other few women in attendance, she never spoke up) and was friends with artists such as Jack Tworkov, Joan Mitchell, Jane Wilson, and John Gruen. During the 1950s she exhibited at the Tanager and Stable Galleries before joining André Emmerich, one of the rare serious galleries to include women in his stable, where she showed regularly from 1958 to 1976.

The heroic scale and gestural reach of her paintings in the 1950s demonstrate Schapiro’s ambition to be reckoned with alongside the Ab-Ex big boys. Two works in the National Academy exhibition, Fanfare (1958) and Façade (1959), exemplify Schapiro’s engagement with the ideas of her generation and antecedents (Hans Hofmann, Arshile Gorky, Mitchell). However technically accomplished, these paintings feel derivative; they demonstrate what Paul Brach (including his own work) meant when he wrote “Perhaps our generation was starting to realize that we had inherited a successful revolution,” and that “Our gestural abstractions came too easily. They needed some resistance. In Mimi’s case it was geometry.” In 1962, Schapiro began a series of “shrine” paintings with stacked compartments that contained icons of the studio and femininity (paint tubes: masculine, egg: feminine). The shrines remind me of Medieval altarpieces with their classical arches and precious metals, just as they reference the artist’s painful quest for a unified identity, and self-acceptance as a woman and an artist. The cool purity of Silver Windows (1967), with its mitered grid lays down the rules of the game for the geometric works to follow.

In 1967 Mimi and Paul moved to California where he became chair of the art department at the University of California San Diego. When they arrived, the man who had promised a position for Mimi told him that there was none. Paul threatened to break his contract, and a lecturer position was found for Mimi. Working with David Nabilof, a young physicist at the university, Schapiro was able to manipulate and transform her geometric drawings. She harnessed the new technology to try new compositional variations after painting Big Ox (1967) on view at the National Academy.

Composed of four enormous truss-like “limbs” intersecting a central, open octagon, Big Ox, and its companion painting Side Ox (at Firestone) are realized in electric hues of cadmium orange, silver, and pink acrylic paint so saturated that these paintings have an almost sonic impact, like a jackhammer pulverizing concrete. Schapiro’s radical pinks— from the rosy hues of Giovanni Sassetta’s altarpieces to the intestinal color of Pepto Bismol—were all about secrets and private places. This work also looks like a direct response to Ronald Bladen’s X, (1967), a monumental aluminum sculpture that had been exhibited at the Corcoran Gallery that year.

The Ox paintings became icons of female power, eventually claimed by Schapiro and Judy Chicago (her partner in founding the Feminist Art Program at Cal Arts) as the first example of “central core imagery.” While in 1968 she explained that Big Ox was inspired “by the thought of a large, imposing sense of landscape coming toward the viewer and inviting him to become part of it, Schapiro later described it as her “explicit cunt painting (that) was a real cry in the darkness…for something besides the symbol of the phallus.” Indeed, for many early feminist artists geometric abstraction was a formal device for encoding the ideas of a female aesthetic domain that would eventually challenge the hegemony of a male-dominated art world.

In California, the slick surfaces associated with industrial fabrication, spray painting techniques, automotive lacquers, and plastics were very much in vogue among the artists associated with Finish-Fetish and Light and Space who placed a West Coast stamp on East Coast minimalism. But Schapiro, who could see the Pacific Ocean from her rented La Jolla house, was inspired by the light and water of her adopted environment. Keyhole, whose monumental, synthetic “body” projects like an industrial piston into the viewer’s space, also floats on a vapor-sprayed ground that could equally be a sky from Tiepolo or Venice Beach.

By 1972, when she created Dollhouse (installed within Womanhouse) in collaboration with artist Sherry Brody, Schapiro had redefined collage as femmage, establishing a continuity between high art collage and works made by anonymous women using traditional craft materials. In their playfully illustrated essay “Waste Not, Want Not: An Inquiry into What Women Saved and Assembled,” a classic feminist text that was first published in the magazine Heresies, Schapiro and artist Melissa Meyer laid out historic precedents and criteria for femmage. As Meyer remembers it, during a meeting at Joyce Kozloff’s loft, Mimi had a phone call with the art critic Grace Glueck and together they coined the term “femmage.”

Reflecting this deepening interest in domestic materials, Flying Carpet (1972), at Eric Firestone, reveals the fragment of a staircase seen through a tear in a tilted rectangle (carpet). This transitional work includes bits and pieces of Japanese paper and calico-patterned wallpapers and fabrics that break through the painting’s interior boundaries. With its allusion to Middle-Eastern textiles and myth, Schapiro must have been charged up about the fact that she was finding a way to move beyond the pure, hard-edged abstractions by way of materials that were cut, torn, frayed and literally pliable.

From the mid to late 1970s, Schapiro was a leader of Pattern and Decoration movement. Coming to a variety of conclusions in their own work, these artists were nevertheless unified by the consciousness-raising dialogues of the Women’s Movement as well as a shared interest in the ornament and decorative arts traditions (especially ceramics, textiles, and gardens, and architecture) from around the world.

Schapiro’s dedication to forging an artistic language that would recast women’s work, along with the varied phases of her production, has yielded a rich inheritance. Look at Carrie Moyer’s poured and stenciled paintings, the arena for what she describes an “erotics of craft,” or Mickalene Thomas’s explorations of female erotic power and mind-bending domestic interiors that incorporate (gender-indeterminate) rhinestones, copper pots, animal prints, and fake wood paneling. Consciously or not, these artists channel Schapiro who can be thought of as their enabling Athena.

The post Icons of Female Power: Early Works of Miriam Schapiro appeared first on artcritical.

At the recent memorial service for Robert Berlind, who died December 17th after a long illness, friends and family members spoke movingly of Robert’s profound generosity of spirit, his equanimity, and his unflagging determination to experience life’s gifts even in his last weeks.

Over a fifty-year career Berlind produced an expansive and refined body of work that was rooted in landscape, reflecting a scholar’s knowledge of the history of art, and a contemporary artist’s relentless effort to understand how we perceive and integrate the visible and interior worlds. This effort was almost entirely camouflaged by the deceptive simplicity of his work, and yet it could be sensed in the considered organization of forms, and in the tensions he created across the surfaces and within the layers of his paintings.

The movement of Berlind’s vision reminded me of the gestures of a Tai Chi practitioner, gradually encompassing all dimensions of space (and time). We sense the scanning and tracking motion of his eyes as he sought and isolated particular fragments of the landscape. The artist Mary Lucier, Berlind’s wife of 22 years, beautifully captured his tight concentration in her video Summer, or Grief (1998), as his head moves quickly back and forth between the motif and the canvas he is painting. This working method resulted in a way of saying – through his paintings – Here, look at this. Pay attention—this snow shadow, this shivering reflection is really magnificent.

Berlind’s particular contribution came through the manner in which he superimposed layers of space and distance, foreground and background, as though the substances within each spatial level were compressed under a microscope’s cover slide, or seen through sheets of Mylar, one above the other. This layering and flattening of the levels of space contributed to a straightforward coolness and precision in his work can bring to mind Winslow Homer’s ravens waiting to attack a fox in the snow, or his hunted ducks careening above waves in mid-air. For me, Berlind’s approach to pictorial depth also metaphorically suggested that all things are (ideally) created equal, and that the hierarchies we impose on life are essentially artificial and divisive.

His ingenuity also came through in his articulation of the edges of things, either softened by movement or distance, or crisply delineated—as in the branches of Studio Roof #4, 2015, a painting to be shown in his scheduled solo exhibition next month at Lennon, Weinberg, Inc., his New York gallery. In the monumental (5 x 17 foot) Passage (2007), Berlind created a shimmering grid of interwoven branches and fluttering leaves that alternate between blurred and crisp focus, not unlike the dizzying sensation of watching a filmmaker pulling focus. Berlind’s mastery of subtle color reflected his affinity with such peers and mentors as Harriet Shorr and Robert Kushner, Alex Katz and Lois Dodd, but his greens were the envy of many painters, as he captured the symphonic range of hues reflected in stream beds, rice seedlings, and winter branches according to their position in the light, the time of day, or the season.

In addition to his work as a distinguished professor, and writer of art criticism, Berlind was also a supportive colleague in quieter and less visible ways. One day in 2005 while crossing Fifth Avenue I bumped into Bob as we were both heading up to see his exhibition at Tibor de Nagy. With his flashing blue eyes, laugh lines, and regal elegance Bob always resembled an 18th-century portrait of Voltaire. Immediately launching into animated conversation about studio problems, we became so engrossed that we almost got run over by a taxi.

Remarkably, Bob made a recording of his thoughts on dying and expressions of gratitude to be played at his memorial service, a gesture that conveyed the tremendous grace and awareness possible within loss. He will be remembered as an artist who was always interested in locating what was most alive in others’ work, and who scrutinized the world with searching curiosity, devotion, and love.

Robert Berlind: Kyoto/Cochecton opens Saturday, January 9, 5-7 pm, at Lennon, Weinberg, Inc., 514 West 25th Street, New York.

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July 3 to 21, 2015
216a Main Street
Amagansett, NY, 631 905 9894

“Vice Versa,” Eric Brown’s exhibition in Amagansett, initially made me think of crisply pressed and elegantly embellished men’s shirts that cry out to be unfolded. Brightly illuminated against the whitewashed walls of the gallery, the shimmying plaids and high-keyed, off-kilter stripes of these paintings have the pulsating energy of Scandinavian or African textiles. While their sources and influences are deep and varied, they strike me as having a relationship to fabrics, music, and architecture as well as the history of abstract painting through the lineage of Kazimir Malevich, Piet Mondrian, Myron Stout, and Alice Trumbull Mason. Bridget Riley, though spoiling the alliteration, should also be included in this lineup. Despite these various affinities, Brown’s intimately scaled paintings have a self-containment and reserved exuberance that is taut and refreshing, if sometimes overly modest.

Playful strategies in the game of figure/ground are at work in a trifecta of paintings on the gallery’s southwest wall. In Red and Blue Rectangles (2014), Red Envelope (2015), and The Red Oval (2015), you think you know where one geometric shape begins and another ends, but on closer inspection such assumptions are up-ended. Electric cherry red and traffic cone orange fields are kept in check by black, cobalt blue, and grey discs, quarter-rounds, and triangles. Here, we see Brown’s effort at wrangling color, contour, and proportion as a means of articulating the space of the painting and generating sensations of openness and enclosure, depth and projection. Several paintings include shapes that wrap around the sides of the stretcher, a device that visually links the work to the wall. I am usually not a fan of paint that intentionally travels around edges (it becomes too much like sculpture). Rather, I wish that the construction of the corner folds had been razor-sharp right angles to reinforce the staccato movements on the front surfaces, although this is truly difficult to accomplish when stretching cloth over wood. Framing may achieve that level of precision, but then you lose the painted edges. I think the paintings would stand up just fine without the edge embellishments.

Ups and Downs (2014-2015) offers a horizontally undergirded stack of persimmon and black half-rounds that toggle spatially. Such graduated arrangements of color and reversing patterns evoke for me the rhythms of sprechstimme, the expressive vocal style that combines singing and speech, as used, for instance, in Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire. In his score for that piece Schoenberg instructs the performer to become “acutely aware of the difference between singing tone and speaking tone: singing tone unalterably stays on the pitch, whereas speaking tone gives the pitch but immediately leaves it again by falling or rising.” Color, in a way, is the painter’s equivalent of timbre, and it is hard not to think that Brown had music in mind when he placed 12 truncated quarter notes up and down a five-bar staff.

Disassemble and Shift (both 2015) have, in my view, a resounding relationship to the formal principles of Bauhaus and Black Mountain textiles, particularly the works of Gunta Stölzl and Anni Albers. In their experiments with multi-layered weave constructions that utilized linens, silks and newly invented synthetic fibers, these artist/designers elevated geometric abstraction to a high art, even as they reflected the dissenting social and political precepts of Weimar Germany. I see an aesthetic kinship here, in Brown’s management of the dual identity of his colors, in the way they stand independently while attaining dynamic interaction with their neighbors. Brown also makes visible the fine weave (think Black Mountain designer Don Page) of the linen support through his deft handling of multiple, turpentine-thinned layers of pigment.

Like other artists who have supported themselves for years doing other things — while steadily and quietly developing their own oeuvre — Brown has worked (in his role as a principal at Tibor de Nagy Gallery) to support a number of eminent American artists, and these associations have undoubtedly permeated his thinking and his independent commitment to painting. Friendships with poets and painters including John Ashbery and the late Jane Freilicher have certainly imbued Brown’s sensitivity to texture, light, and language and we are, in turn, the beneficiaries of those exchanges. In “Vice Versa,” Brown continues to fold his knowledge of their accomplishments into his own distinct vision.

The post Playful Strategies: Eric Brown in Amagansett appeared first on artcritical.

May 19 to June 13, 2015
530 West 25th Streets, Fourth Floor, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 646-230-6655

Deborah Rosenthal is a painter deeply engaged in dialogues between past and present, between the world within and the domain beyond the studio. “Geography: Recent Paintings,” her current exhibition at the Bowery Gallery, encompasses familiar motifs from the past decade of her work, and introduces new lines of investigation spurred by her ongoing exploration of the nature of time, landscape, family bonds, and metaphors of sight and sensation. This expansive exhibition coheres readily on the walls while lending itself to unhurried contemplation of individual works. The body of work on view is unified by many of the influences that have shaped Rosenthal’s thinking: the spatial and temporal investigations of early modernists such as Georges Braque, Robert Delaunay, and Paul Klee, as well as an interest in Romanesque sculpture and 17th-century French landscape painting.

Rosenthal often emphasizes the metaphorical power of framing. Doubled Landscape (Familiar Sights) (2011) and Paired Scenes (2013) are each structured by meandering, scalloped, and angular lines that activate the borders of each canvas/world, and further enclose interior scenes that contain figures, houses, and landscape elements. This compositional device evokes the flags and fabrics of vintage French circus tents, whose billowy stripes entice spectators to approach and peek at what’s inside. Landscape in the Studio (2014) gives us Rosenthal’s signature M-shaped mountains, and then pops the ground plane forward (note the grisaille cast shadows) with a riot of spectral-colored forms that merge Robert Delaunay’s Simultaneous Windows of 1912 with Jean Hélion’s Mannequinerie en solde (1978). Rosenthal, incidentally, is one of the most learned writers on the work of Hélion, having curated an exhibition of his paintings in New York in 2012 and edited Double Rhythm, a collection of his writings on art, published in 2014 by Arcade.

Rosenthal is perpetually concerned with the “what-ifs” of the painting process. She considers the velocity with which our vision moves across a painted surface as well as the relationship of the center of vision to the periphery. Her attention to facture is evident in paint surfaces that are texturally rich and varied. I have always appreciated how Rosenthal arrives at the colors that we perceive. Look closely and you will see, as in Pierre Bonnard, that what appear to be shapes of solid color are actually shifting strokes, daubs, and veils of various hues that coalesce in the upper layers. This is particularly evident in Country Matters, where passages of scumbled black are actually mixtures of dark blue-violets, red-oranges, and greens that read as freshly-tilled soil — a possible reference to the artist’s familiarity with the rural landscape, and changing seasons of New York’s Sullivan County.

The Three of Them ties together a couple in classical profile looking in on an infant, in a triple-pendant of chartreuse greens, greyed pinks, and citron yellows. This boisterous baby inhabits her own bubble — a vortex that exerts a centrifugal force — as she stretches arms and legs against the boundaries of her enclosure. June, or What I Thought I Knew contains a figure whose regal, Roman head is clearly delineated and whose body — a loose arrangement of pale grey lines — dissolves within a milky white form that could be water, sky, or glacial crevasse. Another figure (a twin, or foil?) emerges from a cleft in the landscape, moving beyond this place with a more deliberate gesture.

Just as books open upon multiple narratives and surprising conclusions, and maps unfold to reveal enticing destinations, Deborah Rosenthal’s paintings, it seems to me, offer many points of departure from which to view our surroundings and our lives.

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