William Steiger at Margaret Thatcher Projects

Josephine Halvorson at Sikkema Jenkins & Co

Meredith Allen at Edward Thorp Gallery

Katia Santibañez at Danese

Willard Boepple at Lori Bookstein Fine Art

Patricia Treib at John Connelly Presents

Ying Li at the Painting Center

GIORGIO MORANDI: Resistence and Persistence BY SEAN SCULLY On the occasion of Giorgio Morandi 1890-1964 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, September 16 to December 14, 2008, we post abstract painter Sean Scully’s 2005 essay on his Italian forebear. This essay was first published in Sean ScullyResistance and Persistence: Selected Writings Edited by Florence Ingleby, (Merrell, … Continued

I was reading about Frederick Church and that he had visited the American West and South America– these, which were at the time, very exotic places. And then he made paintings of these places that people had never seen before. And in doing so, introduced this entirely new landscape to the public that people were very excited to see. And I thought, Wow, that’s exactly what I want to do: to build a table-top landscape in the studio and then make paintings of it. So the paintings become a record of this exotic place that existed temporarily, but something no one will ever see in person.

I had Kiki Smith over when I had just finished these and she said, You know, you should approach some galleries from a revisionist point of view because usually it’s a male in the studio with a model, or a male at the easel, and here you’re a nude figure in your own studio with all your paintings and your tools around you. There aren’t many paintings like that, she said. So I thought, well that’s interesting, that’s not something I was thinking about—I was thinking about what I feel in my studio, the vulnerability.