July 10 to September 18, 2021
1395 Boston Corners Rd, Millerton, NY 12546
thereinstitute.com

“Only connect,” E.M. Forster once famously wrote. How many times in the last year and a half have we heard the declaration, “We are all connected,” despite a period forever defined by the intolerable hardship of “social distancing,” when many families suffered enforced separation from their loved ones, and many people tragically died alone? The global pandemic has dramatically proven that our categorical “connection” is both a bane and a boon—while we can potentially all infect each other, we can—and must—also attempt to reach out to each other.

Brenda Zlamany’s extraordinary array of 500 portraits in The Itinerant Portraitist, on view through September 18 at the Re Institute in Millerton, New York, provides a powerful and poignant testament to our connected humanity. In an era when selfishness, and the “selfie” have ruled, her work, going back a decade, redefines the contemporary notion of “face time.” Indeed, one could consider each of the individual faces in her myriad, rainbow coalition of physiognomies, the ultimate un-selfie.

Zlamany’s pictorial project began in 2011, funded by a Fulbright grant. The earliest works in the show were done in over 30 aboriginal villages in Taiwan, which she visited with her young daughter, Oona. The artist travelled light: Zlamany, an accomplished oil painter whose commissioned work is on permanent display at Yale University, stripped her practice down to the bare and portable minimum; paper, pencil and watercolors.

Aided by a time-honored tool, an old-fashioned camera lucida –a technique she learned from David Hockney, a close friend whom she met when she worked as a printmaker in the 1980s- Zlamany sits face to face with her subject and sketches a basic outline. Then, over the course of a single hour, during which she sensitively but persistently prompts her sitter to divulge deeply personal stories, she finishes the form, rendering the portrait in quick, expressive watercolor strokes. Think of it as speed portrait painting (a much more intimate interaction than speed dating.) The subject, while the focal point, is also engaged in a kind of confessional. “I am trying to capture something that happens between us over the hour of listening to them,” Zlamany says.

The completed portraits brim with life in all its stages, from cradle to grave. But they also serve as a memento mori. They are quintessentially ephemeral, a delicate layer of pigment on paper that captures a fleeting moment of time. Zlamany’s chosen medium and technique perfectly convey the transience of human life.

The exhibit has been divided into groups of portraits of indigenous people living in far flung locations, from Alaska to Saudi Arabia, from the Hebrew Home for the Aged in Riverdale, New York, to the sunny vineyards of Sonoma, California. They include Cuban taxi drivers, Alaskan national park rangers , girls from an Abu Dhabi orphanage, and New York art world denizens. They start with infants, and move on to the very old, one of whom died the day she was painted.

The approach is egalitarian. “Art is a like an elevator,” the artist says, “And I wanted to stop on every floor. Everyone has a chance to get involved.” At the end of each session, Zlamany documents it with a photograph of the subject proudly holding their own portrait, which they, rather than the artist, has signed.

The exhibit begins with a bang: an enormous image of Noura, an Arab woman in a hijab, proudly festooned on the entrance to the vintage red barn that houses the gallery. (And sure to provoke local Trumpsters.) Inside the gallery, the walls are papered with rows and rows of hundreds of faces, cheek by jowl, creating a tessellated effect. The hanging isn’t random but organized so that the various indigenous groups are differentiated by the dominant colors in their portraits. Alaska, for instance, includes images mostly done in green; Saudi Arabia mostly done in black. The first impression of this vast display is overwhelming, but soon the eye focuses on the individual faces, in all their many differences.

As she travelled to more than a dozen destinations over the last decade, Zlamany clearly honed her craft. One of the first images, of a sleeping baby, is tentative and impressionistic, the artist’s brush barely grazing the page. By the time she painted the images of the elderly in the Hebrew Home, done in 2017, Zlamany has mastered her form, creating decisive works that powerfully portray her subjects, simultaneously signaling the political and social implications of their specific habitats (climate change, for instance, as seen in Alaska and Sonoma wine country; the quality of life in nursing homes.)

Covid-induced masking also provided Zlamany with fertile ground: in Zlamany’s work, both masked and unmasked, the eyes emphatically have it. “Eye contact is an exciting element and helps you gain trust. And from my Saudi paintings I knew how to get a likeness with just the eyes,” she says. “But this was a lot of fun, because instead of focusing on facial features, there was so much pattern and decoration and abstraction. It was a great break.”

Despite her initial terror at being in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, an epicenter of the virus, Zlamany did a series of 85 socially-distanced portraits of mask wearers on her building’s loading platform, a welcome release from isolation for both the artist and her subjects. And in her most recent series, done in 2020-21, she captured more mask-wearers in upstate New York, some of which are among her liveliest paintings. Take her portrait of Gary, his vibrant blue eyes seen through round black designer glasses, his “Exit Trump” mask in red and white and black color-coordinated with his shirt.

From traditional-costume wearers in Taiwan, (one woman in an ornate headdress) to weathered firefighters in Alaska to young concertgoers in Oxfordshire, Zlamany has documented a swath of the globe in all its diversity. And while the stark images of the nearly obscured Saudi Women in Hijab are haunting, the watercolors of the workers in Alaska, Cuba and Sonoma, humbling, and the portraits of the New York art world members engaging (Zlamany did one a day for an entire year; check out Deborah Kass, Katherine Bradford, Alex Katz, Lilly Wei, David Ebony, Peter Drake, Linda Yablonsky) perhaps the most moving series in the show is “100/100:” the end-of-life portraits done at the Hebrew Home in Riverdale, which has been given its own wall.

Unlike the other portraits – meticulous high-quality prints of the original watercolors considered too fragile to hang – these are the original works, previously framed by the Hebrew Home. Says the artist of this 100-portrait project, “It was probably one of the most emotionally challenging things I’ve ever done in my life. To go in there and deal with life and death at that level. Some people died before I painted them, some people died shortly afterwards. I painted a Holocaust survivor who had been in the camps with her twin sister. I listened to stories that were heartbreaking, but then there were some incredible lessons. All portraits are about mortality, but in many cases these were literally final moments. When I got home, I would be emotionally spent, often in a fetal position. For me it was life-changing.”

Despite their pain and disability, and even the “post-verbal” condition of these subjects, Zlamany has managed to capture not only their frailty but their remarkable level of dignity. The portrait of Mabel, crowned with a blue turban, and looking, it seems, into infinity, is regal. And although Ruth wears oxygen-tank tubes and cannot hold her elderly head erect, the half-smile on her face brings it to life. For Zlamany, this was revelatory. “I never painted wheelchairs before, in the beginning, I tried to flatter people. But then I started to paint what I saw. And people loved it. Instead of having me flatter them, they wanted to see how they looked to me. They wanted to discover who they were through my eyes. They wanted that honesty. Ruth is a painting that tells you that. That is someone who is being seen at the end of their life, with their breathing tubes, yet she is truly delighted by her portrait. I tried to find the person who was there.”

With The Itinerant Portraits project, Zlamany has created a multifaceted celebration of life. The show ends as it begins, with a bang: hanging from the ceiling, so that in order to exit the gallery, you either have to push past her or genuflect below her, is a larger-than-life image of gallerist Julie Torres, wearing a pink “Pussy Power” t-shirt.

“It’s just a subtle thing about the power of women,” Zlamany says. “I am a female artist painting portraits, and traditionally portraiture has been the domain of men. And so I just wanted to assert the power of women: Noura on the front of the barn—a Saudi woman who just got the right to drive. And the power of my own vision as a female artist: the female gaze on the world.” And then some.

The post The Ultimate Un-Selfie: Brenda Zlamany in Millerton appeared first on artcritical.

April 15 to May 15, 2021
60 Lispenard Street, between Church Street and Broadway
New York City, canadanewyork.com

Alexi Worth moderated an ad hoc roundtable on the new social media Clubhouse May 13, under the auspices of Dumbo Open Studios in Two Coats of Paint publisher Sharon Butler’s “room”, in which he asked a few critics and artists to give shout outs for current shows that struck then as memorable and groundbreaking. This naturally gave rise to more general discourse on what constitutes anything so august. Blake Gopnik, distinguished former critic of the Washington Post and author of the recent Warhol biography, who offers a daily pic at his website and is thus to the manor born of bestowing aesthetic imprimatur, sounded a pessimistic view on art of significance in our moment, suggesting that like the waning days of mannerism before the advent of the baroque, or the (to his mind) benighted year 1895, art is treading water: lots of people do fine stuff but there is nothing truly important happening.

Well, I beg to differ, and would offer as singular proof of a multiple truth my own clarion choice, Katherine Bradford, whose show at CANADA, her third at that gallery since 2016, closes tomorrow. Grab your vax certificates and don’t let niceties of social distancing prevent you from seeing art history in the making. A show by Bradford, an artist at the height of her powers, is an event.

Gopnik would have a point still if one could say that a solo show of new work by Bradford either breaks into a new genre for this mythopoeically heartfelt narrator in paint, but within what one would call the artist’s trademark painterly idiom, or intensifies that idiom exponentially but in reference to familiar motifs or tropes. But Bradford is not that kind of artist. Each of her three CANADA presentations constitutes a chapter in an unfolding chronicle in which form and content are mutually embedded in one another.

Her 2016 CANADA debut, “Fear of Waves”, put bathers into the cosmos amidst shooting star dabs and drips; these images managed to evoke Bonnard, Cézanne, Hödler, Chagall and Milton Avery, all with a native Mainer’s earthy humor and a Williamsburg habitué’s cunning iconoclasm. There is actually a bit of me that feels oafish speaking about Bradford’s profundity not because she lacks it, one iota, but because she is so funny as an image maker, so salty, so unprententious, that it feels like a betrayal of mood to write in terms that she nonetheless commands. It would be exalting Cardy B in language suited to Bob Dylan. But what can one do: these women are geniuses?

“Friends and Strangers,” her 2018 solo spot, not only moved to dry land, leaving the swimming pool in outer space and grounding characters in complex social interactions; it accentuated the themes of distention, distortion and elongation while following a less pictorial and more figural logic in determining tensions of space and color. A levitating personage is held afloat by vintage rocket engines, a raucous collision of the ethereal and the steam punk.

You (or Blake Gopnik) might want to say, OK so her pictorial language and thematics shift from show to show, but aren’t these just the incremental meanderings of any lively artist’s career? For sure, the sensibility is always, unmistakably, Bradford. A humorous humanism, a narrative feeling for color, an AbEx manipulation of forms until a composition gels: these constitute her modus operandi. But each turn is simultaneously two turns, of subject and style, and a combined turn in a direction, an insight, in which the artist’s restless search over five decades has not yet taken her. When the arc of her career is scrutinized, this is an artist, it emerges, disinclined towards repetition even as she digs deeper into familiarities.

And then comes the Mother paintings. I’m one of those gallery goers who reads the press release after seeing the show, not to allow gallerists (or even the artist) to police my reactions. What I saw on the walls were people, familiars, groups, relations, support systems. Unlike the levitator from “Friends and Strangers,” a supine old woman has no invisible or magical means of transport; she is carried by two all-too-human, dedicated ladies, who are most certainly not assisted by a ghostly, inverted third. There seems to be an elderly balding bloke in one painting looking particularly gormless in a cocktail dress. He bestows an ambivalent gaze upon three scrubbed-out gatherings around tables that somehow read as hieroglyphs of distressed communality.

More strikingly inventive but with no gratuitous stylization in evidence is a riff on the elongations in the last show which now have an anatomical-cum-psychological function, arms that reach further than nature intended so that a figure can embrace, or at least lay claims to, other figures beyond her singular reach. When we learn that the paintings depict “mother” it makes sense; unlike many-armed Indian goddesses,  Maine earth mothers have, instead of multiple arms, the ordinary two, it’s just that they’re longer. In Mother’s Lap, (2020) the larger-than-life maternal form is like a chunk of furniture, a right-angled entity, recalling for me Henry Moore’s madonnas which follows simultaneously vertical and horizontal thrusts; and like Moore, Bradford’s mothers are also hieratic and naturalistic, schematic and tender, in ways that elide the distinction between archetype and real human presence.

The English child psychologist D.W. Winnicott famously observed that what he found in his waiting room was not mothers and children but singular units of mother-child. This shouldn’t be understood as misogynist; he fully understood that the mother, as an adult, had a life apart, but the child is helplessly anchored in this duo. Winnicott formulated a theory of the environment-individual set up, a complex dynamism that at once entails and belies individuality. Without setting out to illustrate any textbook theories, Bradford’s painterly approach seems to mirror, or vindicate, this way of seeing while developing suitably non-binary scenarios of maternal support as befits an LGBT-icon who is also a mother and grandmother.

But Object Relations notwithstanding, in my pre-press release exposure to Bradford’s show I found myself luxuriating in a formal duality that has nothing immediately or obviously to do with motherhood. Color blazes in this show like never in Bradford’s oeuvre. Just to take the last three shows, ‘Waves’ had the almost ecclesiastical purples of night skies, while “Friends,” with its lemon and lime grounds, was weighted towards mustards and almost 1950s pinks. But color here has the ferocious autonomy of tachisme or art informel or Hans Hofmann at his most chromatically impertinent. And yet, as much as colors sing in their singularity, the tonality in Bradford is an equally powerful force in these paintings. The bold, emphatic contrasts in Bus Stop (2020) of both gender and hue – the discs of the female’s breasts, the alternating pink and yellow of the man’s pants – evolve amidst scruffy, distressed canvas-and-ground-baring scumble; if her color here is almost conceptual – as in the idea of such and such a color – her tones are contingent, mired, grounded, incremental.

Such is the purposiveness of every formal decision in Bradford, however, that this duality of chroma and tone actually feels like it has symbolic weight;  one that’s tethered to another duality, the archetypal and the all-too-human, that pervades her explorations of motherhood, of mother-offspring relations, mother-father, mother-environment. But this is not conceptual art. It is not a grand scheme of dualities and counterweighted abstractions. Bradford is about tentative, exploratory, possible, intuited meanings and values. Winnicott’s best known concept – again, not antifeminist (says this male critic!) – was the notion of the “good enough mother”. By this he meant the human mother whose “failings” are a gift to the growing child. In the same spirit, let’s say of Bradford’s Mother Paintings, groundbreaking and significant not simply for Bradford but for everyone who cares about painting and has or had a mother, that these are good enough masterpieces.

The post Good Enough: Katherine Bradford’s Mother Paintings at CANADA appeared first on artcritical.

September 14 to October 21, 2018
333 Broome Street, between Chrystie Street and Bowery
New York City, canadanewyork.com

At first glance, Katherine Bradford doesn’t seem eager to get too specific. Her figures often have no faces nor even much by way of hands. Gender and race feel indicated without necessarily being perfectly legible. And though maybe she is ingenuously concealing a lack of facility, it is more likely that it is precisely in that twilight between the apparent arbitrariness of a brush stroke and the haptic perception of a particular feeling that Bradford has staked her territory. Ambiguity plays a special role in complicating the tension between the ideas of painting and the way Bradford uses them to define sexuality, gender and race, and how that might influence the way we intuitively observe human relationships.

While this new show at Canada, Friends and Strangers, is not exactly a departure from the greater arc of her work, one thing that stands out is that she no longer feels the need to use overt themes like ships, superheroes, or bathers to unify a body of work. The eleven paintings here were done this year and range in size from 4 x 5 feet, to 6½ x 11 feet. They all contain at least one figure and up to around 13 (if you count fragments). But these paintings are not only large in size: The figures that inhabit them are also large-scale, and all the while Bradford paints them in a way that retains a genetic memory of color field abstraction.

Most of the paintings here employ abstract painting ideas to produce fantastic kinds of subject matter, where a figure may levitate, or levitate and squirt milk not just from her breasts, but also from the whole length of her body. Or sit on a giant firearm gathering snowball ammunition. Or drip heads from beneath a skirt. They just cry out for interpretation. But even the most simple and direct of the images here, a painting titled Couple No Shirts, demonstrates what might be at stake in the kinds of ambiguities Bradford constructs.

Nothing surreal is happening, just two people, sitting and facing out. Though for faces there are only large mauve brush strokes where eyes and mouths would be. At five feet, the height of the painting makes them slightly larger than their viewers.

The right sitter has arms folded over straight legs, and the other sits crossed-legged, with her left hand resting on the shoulder of the other figure. Though I am using the female pronoun, that assumption is just one of several that might end up a bit awkward, especially with these paintings. And especially right now in a cultural moment where categories that used to be quite clearly defined, like gender, sexuality, race, etc., are now much more fluid. We can’t be really certain whether this couple is two women, two men, or mixed. But our brains nevertheless seem compelled to leap to quick categorizations, which in Bradford’s pictorial reality become suspect upon scrutiny. Bradford seems to exploit this by getting fuzzy just at the instant where we make those assumptions.

“Couple No Shirts”: There is an implication of semi-nudity, relationship and sexuality in that title. But you can’t rely too much on the title because, despite the “no shirts” stipulation, one of the figures seems to sport an ultramarine one (or is it a jacket?) that is open in front. Exposed female breasts in paintings might be conventionally titillating, but the right figure’s shoulders are broad, hair short, and because the revealed breasts are also small, they could be male breasts.

And yet Bradford is really subtle about this ambiguity. That chest is a painted cloud of about three overlapping wan colors close in tone. There is a slightly darker brush stroke that runs just under the nipples which perhaps defines the shape of the breasts as female, but it is so matter-of-factly brushed that one may feel a little pervy for needing to look that closely.

The couple does sport the same milky blue hair color, though Left’s hairstyle is slightly longer and on a man would look like a Prince Valiant cut. Right is wearing pants that aren’t as tight as Left’s red pants that cling to her thin calves. Because of this fashion choice, the delicate, bare feet, and slightness of the upper torso (Bradford really outdoes herself in the economical painting of that slightly curved belly) I have already unconsciously registered Left as female. Though to further challenge masculine/feminine convention, if you examine Left’s lower calf, Bradford has painted a thin wash over tiny short dark marks to indicate hair.

Bradford continually lets us believe she is casually doing hardly anything when she is in fact subtly constructing significance through weight and volume. Looking closely at the way she paints the hand resting on the companion’s shoulder, even though the fingers are barely indicated, it is impossible not to feel tenderness in the way it rests so caressingly.

But who are these people and what is their relationship, and why is Bradford presenting them to us so anonymously yet so insistently? In my mind this is a lesbian couple. Further I conjecture it is a self-portrait of Bradford and her long time partner, Jane O’Wyatt, though I’m aware I have possibly gone way too far in making this hypothesis. Bradford, by coyly scattering conflicting signifiers wants viewers to question assumptions of gender, age, and relationship precisely such as this one. This constant questioning and recalibration process is the experience not only of looking at any Bradford painting, it also goes to the heart of how one forms attitudes and fantasies about other people in the world.

Bradford expresses her ambition not only through scale, but also through a desire for universality, to illuminate what it might be like to be alive at this moment. We want good art to feel universal, yet if we look around us these days just crossing the street, everyone we encounter projects signifiers of their own strange particularities, not just of socioeconomic status but of personal history, interests, attitudes, proclivities, pains, fears, desires. And body types to satisfy those desires of which universal norms no longer apply. To attend to the conversations of strangers might lead one to believe we could be living among aliens. So painting specific people to represent humanity can end up being unrelatable for large groups of people, and yet generalized depictions risk becoming boringly generic.

This is Katherine Bradford’s predicament. She confronts it with thoughtfulness, diligence, and humor. Her approach here seems threefold. Some of her paintings like Water Lady or Yellow Dress construct metaphors for private psychological states, which might not be specifically familiar, but are legible as the kind of specifically interior feelings we all have. And some of her paintings like Wedding Circle, Lunch Painting and Waiting Room, depict group experiences that in their anonymity could be familiarly alienating for everyone. But in a few of her paintings like One Man’s Tub, where a wide-eyed man in underpants lies stretched out beside his coffin-like bathtub, and Couple No Shirts, it feels like in their ordinariness there is a tacit acknowledgement, whether alone or as a couple, of what we all eventually must face.

The post Subtle Ambiguities: Katherine Bradford at CANADA appeared first on artcritical.

Hearne Pardee: I suggest we take a fresh look at the paintings on view — not just as a transition to the figurative work, or in terms of their historical context, but in terms of what stands out for you in this decade of painting.

Writing at the time, Bill Berkson commented on their “luminous” grays, which he compared to the “barrel of a gun” or to the “luster of old black and white movies.” Something that strikes me is a loosening up around the edges that takes over in the 1960s — Guston doesn’t work all the way to the border, so that the visual field is up for grabs along with everything in it; he no longer relies on the frame, or the “window” of the Renaissance painters he studied. Image and field are mutually dependent. Guston seems immersed in the midst of things, constantly looking for a piece of firm ground — a process he seems to have to undertake all over again with each painting. At the same time, there’s a progression underway.

Katherine Bradford: In addition to the “loosening up around the edges” that Hearne mentions I noticed that in the final galleries you also see amazing examples of a painter painting wet into wet, with what Roberta Smith in her review called “fat luscious strokes.” That a painter could take his palette of black, pink, white and red and mush it all together with no off-putting muddy areas earns my respect and awe. We don’t see many painters trying a wet into wet technique — I can think of Georg Baselitz, Andre Butzer and Bendix Harms — but none of them achieve the shimmering surfaces of these Gustons. Looking at the paintings, I imagined his brushes sitting in cans of medium and never washed clean. The brushes seemed loaded with the perfect mixture of paint and whatever it is he is using to keep things shiny. These aren’t the tools of a palette painter, these are the tools of an alchemist.

Jennifer Riley: Right Katherine, I was thinking about other work of the same time — work that Guston no doubt would have known or seen, in addition to his deep investment in the art of the past, especially Joan Mitchell’s pastels and paintings before her move to France. Her lines, marks, strokes and daggers retain their chromatic clarity, while the image, as in Guston’s work from 1960 forward, is drawn away from the frame edge. Her broad range of color is masterfully clear and, most often, only momentarily, minimally and intentionally muddied but poignantly mixed. Her surfaces, at times dry, evoke an entirely different inner panorama — minus the juicy shimmer that we see in the work of Guston in this exhibition.

David Humphrey: I like what Jennifer and Katherine are saying about Guston’s mark-making. It feels like he is stirring up a drama between black and white with psycho-mythic overtones. The turbulent field, or grey habitat, comes into being out of black and white’s struggle to mix with each other while the compressed tangle of isolated black protagonists are arrested at a moment just before or after a dissolution into the viscous surround. I think black, for Guston, is redolent with Morandi and de Chirico’s metaphysics of shadow; objects cast a dark double with substance and the power to disturb.

Hearne’s observation that Guston doesn’t “work all the way to the border” is worth talking about. Maybe the whiteness of the canvas has a radiant purity that casts the whole procedure of painting as a sustained besmirching; a mucking up of the clean thing. But in some ways the relation of the black blobs to their world is like the shaggily edged painting to the primed canvas. Guston muscularizes doubt to tell a story about flawed or incomplete personhood woven into a world made of the same slippery stuff. Could we call these works auto-metaphors? Representations of themselves?

David Rhodes: Hearne, I think in these 1960s paintings Guston is already beginning to question, self-critically, what is to be done about the issues of composition and content on the level of basic forms. Letting the brush marks appear as process and exposing the ground on which they are painted is Cézanne’s solution to the problem of transition to edge in a painting made up of relational parts. The interlocking of forms on the brink of dissolution recalls Morandi. It’s interesting that both Morandi and Guston were steeped in Quattrocento painting, in particular Piero della Francesca. The oddness of Piero’s outline of ambiguous positive/negative spaces is present in late Guston and Morandi paintings. For artists used to Guston’s painted fields of variegated marks, the confrontation with associative shapes like skulls/faces/heads during the ‘60s must have been as much liberating as confounding. The more form-driven Guston got, the more articulate and urgent his painting became.

Stephen Ellis: To me, Guston began as a moralist, became a sensualist under the influence of Monet and AbEx, and ended by synthesizing something original from the two—a sensual, ironic moralism, less didactic and more grounded in personal experience than the generalized outrage of his youthful paintings. The artist I associate with Guston’s early ambition is the angry, accusatory Goya of The Third of May, the one closest to the spirit of the late figurative work is the funny and unflinching Beckett of Krapp’s Last Tape, and the spirit-guide of Guston’s abstract paintings of the ‘60s is clearly Giacometti — the painter. The similarity between Giacometti’s portrait heads, dense and light-absorbing, like black holes embedded in luminous gray space, and Guston’s weirdly sentient matrices of black and gray is unmistakable. The flurries of background strokes in Giacometti’s portraits also trail off as they approach the edges, just as Hearne describes in Guston’s paintings. And the bleakness and sense of loss in Giacometti’s work is much closer to the looming, ominous feeling in Guston’s ‘60s paintings than the stillness of Morandi or the exuberance of Mitchell.

Of course Guston was interested in formal issues, but I think only as a means to an end — that end being the darker, more personal and powerful expressive language he searched for in the ‘60s. The proof of that goal is the novelistic world where the search ended, a place you’d be more likely to trip over Gregor Samsa than find yourself contemplating the eternal present with Morandi or mourning the fugitive present with Giacometti.

Riley: Stephen, I may be reading into the Gregor Samsa analogy too literally, but I see Guston as a body making a painting — trying to figure out how to move forward from his ‘50s paintings, where a main problem he addresses (to my mind ) is “surface.” His was a sustained engagement with the surface, challenged by the possibility of being both inside and outside of the painting at the same time. I also see the shift from “moralist to sensualist” as a natural development as he matures through lived exposure to a whole gang of artists — Kline, de Kooning, Newman, Rothko, the rise of Minimalism — in addition to new commercial potentials. He was interested in making paintings not products, trying to make a new “real” world.

Pardee: We should also recall the huge cultural and political shifts of the 1960s.

Gaby Collins-Fernandez: I’ve been trying to imagine what it felt like for those to be the last things Guston had made, the freshest and newest! Very intense and strange.

Looking at them, I got the sense of someone trying to make emotional room in painting from physical, spatial terms that weren’t available in the dominant painting discourse of the time. I read the shadows and the way the forms feel heavy and connected to gravity in terms of a desire to understand forms in relation to recognizable physical-causal dynamics — to make abstract, all-over mark-making compete with gravity, light, and the kinds of environmental conditions that stuff, matter, and people have to deal with, outside of blank, white surfaces. A lot of those early forms inside the grays look like they have feet.

Even though there is a lot of gestural energy in the work, I see Guston’s marks in relation to drawing, to drafting both the dimensions and air of this new emotional space. That’s also a connection to the early Renaissance, and the sense that those artists were visualizing a new operating concept of space in painting through drawn perspective.

There is certainly an openness about doubt in these works that runs contra the more heroic mid-century narrative about painting. Focusing on doubt and dependency exposes “the autonomy of the art object” as an ideological delusion: it forces the artist to account for art within existing social dynamics in which very few things exist independently from everything else.

Humphrey: What I think is so exciting about this show is the way Guston articulates and celebrates incipience, the potential for a thing to come into being. He lays out the basic terms that will later be used to more emphatically name things, but things still haunted by a prior incipience. The blunt forms that after 1968 become books, canvases, shoes or heads, bear the memory of and often slip back into undifferentiated muck — or sometimes, after some scraping or smushing, an entirely different object. The habitats emerge tactilely, the way one imagines a space by means of blind groping. I like thinking of his work as ham-handed — that corporeal seeing is performed through touch and makes cured meat of our paws. His work argues that we are made of the same stuff as the things we make or consume.

Pardee: Is there a particular painting that stands out for you? Katherine mentions alchemy, and there’s a great 1960 painting called Alchemist with a stew of colors. Path II, also from 1960, seems to subdue the color interactions into blue and red, dominated by gray, after which the black and white take over. These are among my favorites.

Riley: Ah! Very hard to pick just one painting as a favorite from this exhibition. I suppose if the building were on fire I’d try to drag May Sixty-Five (1965) with me. This painting has a large rectangular black form coming to rest off-center, lower right , upon a cloudy zone of pink, red and grey. The color in the lower foreground seems to be filtered through the black form as it passes through to the upper central ground evoking a sense of air, time, distance and compression simultaneously. The roundish, pink form nestled to the left of the black rectangle opens a door that hints at looming inchoate emotions and a potential narrative. The tautness of that relationship, the slippery light and shimmering, icy grays, enchant me.

Pardee: That one seems like a still-life. I like the small red dot showing through the veil of gray — both behind and in front. A lot seems to have to do with just the contrasting directions of the brush-strokes — the compact black ones opposed to the vigorous gray “erasing marks” just above it.

Riley: I didn’t see still life at all — but I could stretch to go there — the scale, marks and forms cued me toward reading it as a non-objective abstraction with landscape referents. Do you see Guston at this time also still struggling against his natural abilities that make elegant and beautiful paintings?

Pardee: I see more struggle in the earlier works in the show — the colored shapes seem tortured, overworked. The release from color that leads into gray seems to help open up the process of painting itself. Here he seems comfortable to me — there’s elegance in the variations of brushstrokes and the adjustments of scale. Perhaps he’s getting too comfortable in this sort of balance between field and form?

Your reference to landscape as opposed to still-life gets into a metaphorical dimension — relations of similarity, of what it looks like. I think there’s also a strong element of metonymy at work in these paintings, or relationships of meaning set up by proximity — how brushstrokes interact and suggest meanings by contrasts of direction and scale. Finding meaning through the sort of blind groping Gaby and David Humphrey describe.

Rhodes: Proximity and metonymy play vital roles, particularly in the 1960s paintings. Here, for example, in Position I (1965), the white of the primed canvas is the third tone in a scale of white to black, and contributes to the light of the painting. The spatial quality of so much manipulated paint simply runs out, appearing as just an accumulation of brush marks toward the outer edge of the physical support. Each facet is in relation to the other, its suggestion of representation not undermining its existential impact, but rather amplifying it. By the time Guston leaves for Rome in 1970 the paintings and drawings are a clear reflection on his environment. The drawings here, though enigmatic and fragmentary, still attach to a seen environment more than the paintings, which of course was soon to change.

Ellis: Honestly, I don’t have a favorite painting in the Hauser & Wirth bunch. I enjoy them more as an ensemble from which one or another emerges as you move through the show. That’s a function of the open-endedness of the paintings, one of my favorite aspects of them. Of all Guston’s work, these are the ones with the most “negative capability” in the Keatsian sense, the most ambiguous and immanent. Your reading of them from portrait or figure to still life or pure abstraction is constantly shifting as your attention moves back and forth from the marvelous surfaces to the images the surfaces form. There’s a quality of being in the moment in these paintings that’s different from the more resolved images of the later work. The strokes, as everyone points out, are alive—not merely in a formal way, but mysteriously as a psychic presence, a physical record of the hand moving in thought. You can’t fake that transmutation of the inert matter of paint into the gossamer stuff of thought, and when it’s real, it’s magic.

Humphrey: My favorite painting in the show changes at every turn. I love the determined contingency of all of them, as though each decision was a response to the question “what if?” I’m with him when he decides to completely exclude color, then around the corner a rare green surprises. Pink hovers from the margins or beneath, sometimes fleshy, sometimes crepuscular. Blue reminds us that these are picture spaces, haunted by the outdoors.

Collins-Fernandez: The painting I’ve looked at most since visiting the show, in reproduction, is Fable II (1957) which ended up clarifying Guston’s transition in terms of internal organization as well as style. In that small painting, colors become forms that are undefined but open to association. I can read those forms as a mask, a city-scape, a still life, but I don’t have to — they lend themselves to interpretation around kinds of groups without making claims to specific genre or subjects. The composition, in terms of how the forms hold together, is close to the ’50s, “shimmery” abstractions. But the impetus to shift is there. In the later and sparser black and gray paintings from the show, the shapes that appear (often singularly) are more definite in having a kind of objectness/identity. There’s a big difference, which may be best characterized grammatically: in Fable II, forms emerge which function like adjectives, inflecting one another, the general composition, and possibilities of signification, whereas by the time Guston makes paintings like Position I (1965) and Portrait I (1965), the forms which appear are more like nouns, concrete objects with a kind of “person-place-or-thing”-ness.

In an extension of the comments around metonymy, I would argue that in the mid-60s, Guston is moving from the more metonymical (part of x might=y) meaning-structure of the earlier abstractions to a structure more based on metaphor (x=y), which will then carry through to the kind of assertive, definitional vocabulary of the drawings.

Pardee: Just isolating one shape is already a move in the direction of representation, eliminating what you call the “adjectives.” It goes back to your earlier remark about Guston’s lending weight and dimension to abstract forms, much as the artists he admired in the Renaissance did for the space of the world around them. There’s a grammar and phenomenology of painting.

Bradford: Hearne mentions the “tortured” look of Guston’s earlier paintings, which is apt because it evokes the “doubt” Gaby mentions, without the satisfying search more evident in the later galleries. Hearne also remarks that it seems Guston cannot find his forms until he lets go of color and turns to gray paintings with black rock-like forms. In the earlier group, I see the color egging Guston on to give us more line than form, as if he could not bring himself to admit to colored “stuff” only colored “mark.” I think of Christopher Wool here, also an obsessive master of “erasure,” especially Wool’s most recent gray/black/white paintings, because I perceive them as not containing “doubt.” They look more like the presentation of an experiment whereas I see Guston performing in the moment, truly searching for something that in fact does not appear, and this gives his work the pathos that we find so endearing.

Pardee: Do the drawings shed light on what’s going on in the paintings? Are they more metaphorical?

Collins-Fernandez: The more I think about the drawings, the more I see them as a relational alphabet, bringing the viewer from dot to line to window to squiggle. There seems to be no hierarchy; a cluster of lines has the same importance as a building or as a rough rectangle. The consistency of Guston’s line in width and character is not about expression, per se, but seemingly about a kind of existential attitude. The works carry ideas about doubt, etc., in the line, rather than in some explicit drama. It seems that this idea about line comes directly from the way that Guston builds up the surface in the works in this show — ie, from painting: the line in the drawing compresses all of the energy of his earlier fields into one single mark. The effect is of an infiltrating tone, a “show-don’t-tell” kind of move, which underscores his late-style relationship to comic illustrations.

Humphrey: The drawings are unburdened by his roiling brushstroke fields. They don’t emerge out of wetness but crawl directly across the clean expanse of the store-bought paper with slug-trail deliberateness. The drawings have a show-off audacity, perhaps fueled by minimalist permissions, but also as caricatures of that younger movement’s severe reductions. I imagine Guston chuckling, followed by a feeling that this might be the royal road to new freedoms.

Bradford: Are the drawings more confident than the paintings — with David’s “show-off audacity” — or are they evidence of an artist going back to ground zero, needing to reset himself after having lost his belief in the “roiling brushstroke fields”? That he left each one so spare says to me that he’s not chuckling at all, he’s testing all that’s gone before and coming up with very short answers.

Humphrey: Of course I am projecting, imagining that Guston’s drawing of a right angle is a precursor to his later drawing of Richard Nixon. His “short answers” surely lay out the constituent elements of the work that will be made one year later or less.

Pardee: Maybe we should step back now and look at the larger historical context, including Guston’s relation to the contemporary scene: what sort of context does the history that this show brings to light provide for other shows currently on view in New York? I’m thinking of Gerhard Richter, who ranges from abstract to representational, or Nicole Eisenman, who develops vernacular narratives, just to pick two extremes. Or you might want to pick up on some other topic suggested in the comments that hasn’t received its due.

Ellis: Looking at the historical context, I’d like to talk about an issue that’s come up once or twice—the notion of the “dominant discourse” of that time, something that’s often misunderstood. The idea of a confident, triumphalist Greenbergian discourse dominating American painting from the early ‘50s on conflates several generations and schools of artists in a way that from my memory of the period is simply false. The older AbEX artists — specifically de Kooning and later Pollock rebelled early against Greenberg’s obsession with self-referentiality — de Kooning with the “Women” and Pollock with his later figurative work. With their talk of philosophical and mythopoeic themes (Newman, Rothko) or erotic, landscape and other-worldly references, it’s hard to see how they would accept Greenberg’s ideal of formal autonomy.

By the late ‘60s, Judd’s ideas were far more fashionable than Greenberg’s, and the Abstract Expressionists, especially the older ones — with the exception of Pollock, who served as a conceptual model for non-painting practices a-borning — were widely seen as irrelevant. Like Guston, they were closer to Surrealism and Existentialism than to Greenbergianism. They saw their work as engaging broad and fundamental questions of existence. Guston talked of many things in his Studio School visits. He had certain subjects and certain artists he returned to obsessively—Morandi, Ensor, Piero, de Chirico, Kafka. I can’t remember him ever mentioning Greenberg. I doubt if he ever thought about him, except maybe, if asked, to harrumph, “Greenberg, that asshole?” The Studio School circa ’68–75 and the other painting programs Guston taught in were very fringe places. Not fashionable, not even close. I know he was bitter about having to teach so much after such a long career and bitter, I think, at being regarded by the young art world as an eminence very grise.

The point I’m making is that the history of their times: poverty, immigration, two wars, the Depression, lack of recognition, political strife (Spain, Communism in the ‘30s, McCarthyism) — did not create a bunch of triumphalist Greenbergians; it created a bunch of skeptical, tenacious, idiosyncratic, ambitious idealists — an alarming number of whom committed suicide, either actively or passively. So, let’s separate these two world of experience and of ideas. Maybe Olitski, Poons, and Louis can be understood under the sign of Greenberg and fit into the Mad Men moment of the Pax Americana, but the Abstract Expressionists in general and Guston in particular do not belong there. Nothing could be clearer proof of that than his late work, which is not a departure from Greenberg, but a separate track altogether.

Rhodes: I agree with Stephen’s remarks about Greenberg. A great writer whose influence was a strand, certainly almost only a New York strand, not a European one. Europe post-World War II was a wreck, very unlike America at the same moment. There was an extreme skepticism of any dogma. I think Guston shared this; as he said, “I’m sick and tired of all this purity.” His use of the vernacular idiom of comic strips and political cartoons was seen as kitsch by many abstractionists, Greenbergian or not. Were his early paintings also seen as Soviet Socialist Realism as opposed to American abstraction during the Cold War period? In any case, the figuration emerging in this exhibition was seen as a betrayal. Here, Guston works with ambivalence between formal abstraction and objectification.

Pardee: Perhaps with a nod to Greenberg’s concern for the medium, the show is subtitled “Painter,” and it appeals to painters in particular, both for Guston’s engagement with the material but also for his unabashed enthusiasm for the painters he admired — I recall a story I think he told of meeting a Russian man at the Accademia in Venice; they shared no language, but just shouted out “Rembrandt!” “Giotto!” “Caravaggio!” etc. Seeing these paintings today raises the perennial question of painting’s place. What does it mean for Hauser & Wirth to devote such a lavish show to painting? Has painting become spectacle?

Riley: I find that the art world of our context is not unlike this transitional phase in Guston’s career. The coin of the realm, so to speak — Painting — is also (once again) surprisingly not dead. It is very much alive amid increasing competition for art world attention. Painting today has expanded way beyond the barriers of Guston’s time — as Stephen mentioned the plurality of expressive forms and approaches in painting. The spirit of Guston’s work of this period may be may be our own epoch’s true character.

I also think it’s not surprising that this exhibition is here in NYC, which is an absolutely unique creative environment in all of the world, where the constant influx of new talent, and blunt market forces, generate ideas, innovation and new approaches. That painting garners such attention today in both its pure or conventional form and as part of multi-platform work is one reason why I believe H&W found it an opportune time for this exhibition. Another might be the profusion of recent scholarship, such as Peter Benson Miller’s terrific exhibition and catalogue of 2010, at the Museo Carlo Bilotti in Rome, “Philip Guston, Roma,” focusing largely on Guston’s works on paper made during his return to Rome in ’70–71 after the Marlborough show. It was at that time Guston developed original images fusing the vestiges of antiquity, Roman Gardens, Fellini films, Piero and De Chirico underscoring his lifelong attentiveness to Italian culture and art that we sensed in these ’60s paintings and which play out subsequently in oeuvre. Now seems a perfect time to take stock in this earlier, less known and often misunderstood period of Guston’s work. Also to reassess his legacy just a few years after the centennial of his birth in 1913 and to coincide with the release of the revised edition of Night Studio: A Memoir of Philip Guston by his daughter, Musa Kim.

Bradford: Just to add a footnote to Jennifer’s excellent answer to Hearne’s question about why a lavish Guston show now, I’d say there are a good number of leading painters who want to speak to Guston with their work and are probably quite pleased when he’s mentioned as an influence. At Nicole Eisenman’s current New Museum show the painting Selfie (2014) shows a large Guston head with a giant eye looking into an iPhone screen. Both Amy Sillman and Dana Schutz are frequently mentioned in the same sentence as Guston and were part of a show that Steven Zevitas mounted last summer in Boston called the “The Guston Effect.” It had work by 45 mostly New York painters and every single one (of us) were happy as can be to be included.

Rhodes: Certainly Guston argues for a continuity with the day to day world through painting, but with no conceit about actually knowing exactly what that might mean. The corporeality we share with objects and the back and forth between what we see and what we touch and how we feel about that seems to be a two way street.

However unfashionable it may sound, it’s fine, though very unnerving, to not know what you are painting, to forget an imposed narrative and let the content assert itself retrospectively through dialogue with the painting process. Paintings should be smarter than the artist, or what’s the point? Guston is a difficult act to follow; no one paints like he did because his paintings are the results of his personal endeavor. Christopher Wool is an interesting case as he continues with gestural painting without resorting to mimicry, re-coining this form of abstract painting in his own voice. The automatism implicit in Guston is there in Wool also, and in both artists it’s only part of the story, but a vital one.

I’d like to conclude by quoting from the discussion between Berkson and Guston in 1964:

Berkson: “Much modern painting has denied that the ‘eye’ is the receiver and judge of painting. Delectation is an afterthought. Paintings as realized thought… They are perceived intellectually.”

Guston: “It seems to me the only thing you can ask is: ‘What are you doing?’ ‘What is it?’ and ‘When are you finished?’ To find out ‘what’ is the only thing you can do.”

Guston is proposing and working through an ontology of painting.

Pardee: We could add “ontology” to Gaby’s idea of Guston’s building up a visual structure for abstract “things” and a grammar to go with it — a sort of phenomenology of painting.

Collins-Fernandez: I’ve been thinking a lot about a certain distance I felt from the show. I love Guston’s work, and felt the richness looking at the works individually, but also felt a bit unsettled by it — and I thought this conversation could be a good place to lay some of these thoughts out a bit.

My first impulse when looking at the show was to think of it historically, more a document of Guston’s evolution than immediately relevant. Not just because the distinction between abstraction and figuration is played out, but because Guston’s invention, creating unification through connected material relations, feels removed from my own experience, where materiality dissociates and does not conform with representation.

Like David and David, I find the late works in the show and Guston’s subsequent paintings to be descriptive of a more or less monadic universe. The material bleed between foreground and background in the mid-’60s foreshadows the later life-art blurriness of Guston’s paint and imagery: painter and painting; objects and representations — all are, for better and for worse, inseparable.

Nicole Eisenman (among others who Katherine mentioned in her response) is a good example of a painter continuing to work in this mode of material thinking in relation to technological devices. While looking at Guston’s work, though, I kept thinking about how the kind of continuity between our selves and our images he’s positing would be much more complicated and perhaps fractured in our world of digital avatars and proxies, which serve representational and imagistic functions through largely abstracted (although still material) processes.

The show’s title (“Painter”) establishes a sense of continuity through the practice of painting. While as a painter I am heartened by this, I also find myself comparing the show to Hauser Wirth & Schimmel’s concurrent show in LA of abstract sculptures by women, which they titled “Revolution in the Making.” Rhetorically, these are very different strategies, with the latter evoking rupture, change. I wonder whether the conversation in New York is really furthered by folding Guston into a tradition and the shifts in his paintings into the very occupation of painting, when his breaks and turns through good taste, style, and art history have caused such a long-lasting and fruitful ruckus.

Bradford: Reading through Gaby’s summary statement I got to the last sentence and wondered where she was going to go with it. To end with the word “ruckus” seems perfect.

Pardee: I like “monadic painting” and speculations about technology. I’d be curious to see Guston’s work exhibited in relation to other contemporary artists.

Riley: We use tradition to help us invent, not to maintain it. That’s why I find an advantage in placing Philip Guston in the tradition he was working in, as he simultaneously busted moves and widened the net of painting and practice. Thus, a delightful consequence of debate, permissions, and possibilities is available to scores of artists in all kinds of disciplines, including poetry, sculpture and so on. We cannot help but embrace and express the conditions of our time and one could find Guston’s invention(s) no longer very useful as our problems are different. However, to my mind, as David Rhodes emphasized in his Guston quote, “To find out ‘what’ is the only thing you can do.” Indeed Katherine, what a beautiful ruckus!

Humphrey: It’s true, as Gaby suggests, that Guston’s paintings don’t immediately suggest the fracturing effects of “proxies and avatars.” As an artist I don’t look to him as a guide through the possibilities of techno-virtuality and the unfolding prosthetic imaginary. But his relevance is still determined by how much he moves us or motivates changes in our work, which I feel he does. Guston’s swampy ambivalence matters to me, and tugs with a certain moral gravity at my own anarchic tendencies in the semio-romper room of a computer-inflected studio.

Pardee: So we’ve talked about the “Early Renaissance” of Philip Guston — its philosophical and literary background and its semiology and poetics of materials. What remains is for a museum to revisit his “High Renaissance” and set it in the context of the contemporary artists we’ve mentioned. I’d welcome that opportunity to reconvene our discussion!

Participants — in their own words:

Hearne Pardee [moderator]
I first encountered Guston as a student at the Studio School in 1970, when he gave a slide talk on his Ku Klux Klan paintings, just before setting off for a year in Rome. I subsequently worked with him in a seminar in 1972–73, when he inspired me to undertake large, semi-abstract paintings, setting up a back-and-forth struggle which continues today. For that reason I’m particularly interested in this current show, with its focus on a period when Guston seemed to hold conflicting tendencies in suspension.

Katherine Bradford
Guston revealed himself to me slowly; at first through pictures and then at David McKee gallery. I was living in Maine in the ’70s and traveled to New York to see the shows at McKee. To my eye they looked full blown and masterful. I wanted what he had: a fluid, paint-filled stroke; personal imagery and secret underpainting showing through. My own paintings at that time were small and beige with no personal imagery and no sense of mystery or light.

Gaby Collins-Fernandez
I encountered the mythology around Guston first and then his paintings of Klansmen, and so I’ve carried the idea of him as a “painter’s painter” (endurance) and social artist (stickiness of subject matter to context) with me to all of the work. I’ve always liked the way the work slips from routine into indulgence, whether in brushwork or cigarettes or existential probing. Guston’s focus on habits good, bad, and ugly over taste reminds me to stay accountable to the day in and day out. I aspire to his generous — and self-implicating — sense of humor.

Stephen Ellis
The first Gustons I saw were the “Monet” abstractions of the ‘50s. Later, I ran across the catalog for the 1970 Marlborough show. I hated the paintings! So crude and goofy and slapstick — ugh! I hated them so much I went back to look at the catalog again the next day — and the next and the one after that, until I’d decided these were the only contemporary paintings I was really interested in. the only paintings that seemed to seize the moment by the throat. I sought him at the Studio School; he was by far the most influential painting teacher I ever had.

David Humphrey
In 1974–75 I was a sophomore at MICA. Late Picasso and Max Beckmann emerged as guides to the psychologically charged pictorial imaginary I was eager to inhabit. One day, while trolling the library stacks, I stumbled on catalogs of Guston shows at Marlborough and McKee. I was stunned by work that seemed to be calling from my future. But he was making this now! I spent my junior year at the New York Studio School hoping he would visit, but happy to catch the smell of barely-dry work straight from his Woodstock studio at McKee’s space in the Barbizon Hotel.

David Rhodes
I first saw a substantial group of Guston paintings at the Hayward gallery, London in an exhibition called “New Paintings—New York”; it was 1979. His room of paintings was instantaneously compelling. And the effect of these works increased, I had the thought, “How could anyone have a painting like one of these on their wall at home?” They were so powerful. Both in the imagery, and the way they were painted. I hadn’t seen anything quite like them before. They were nothing like the paintings I was making, and this didn’t matter.

Jennifer Riley
I saw Guston’s work for the first time when I was a student in France, deeply invested in art history and drawing from classical figures, literally. So Guston’s work of that time reminded me a little of Monet — but without images or his color yet — all atmosphere. Later, people started saying they saw Guston and Picasso influences in my blocky, thickly painted shapes. I didn’t think my spirit was in the same place at all, but I was excited, puzzled and unnerved by Guston’s figures, shapes, brutal use of paint and pared down palette.

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click any image to view in slide show with captions

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Brenda Zlamany has long been known for exploring and revitalizing traditional portraiture. Her technique is impressively old world (Rembrandt and Holbein are cited influences) and her command of oil painting affirms serious dedication and mastery of the medium. But Zlamany’s work is decidedly contemporary in the way it questions and sometimes confounds the usual relationship between subject and artist.

This exchange is central to Zlamany’s current work, which has become more openly interactive than ever, even performative, as she paints the portrait in front of the subject as they observe her. For a project in Taiwan funded by a Fulbright grant in 2011, the artist painted 888 watercolor portraits on location, which led to 12 paintings of aboriginal teenage boys. Now, she’s taken on an equally difficult demographic: the New York art world. Her year-long project, “Watercolor Portrait a Day,” is actively underway with artists, friends, family and casual acquaintances all coming through the studio in an intricate web of connections. Each sitting is concluded with the artist taking a photograph of the subject holding his or her portrait. The photo is then posted to Facebook and Instagram, one portrait every day.

It’s become quite the phenomenon. She gets hundreds of “likes,” comments and criticism with each post and was thrown off Instagram once for a day, (see the posting of day 193). No money changes hands and the portraits remain Zlamany’s property.

And every subject entering the artist’s studio encounters the nemesis and progenitor for this project: an imposing oil painting, in progress, of seven women in 19th-century costume. This is a commissioned portrait from the Yale Women Faculty Forum, and the depicted women are the first women to receive PhDs from Yale, in 1894. The painting is set to hang in Yale’s prestigious Sterling Memorial Library.

I met with Brenda in her Williamsburg studio in late November where she lives with her 15-year-old daughter, Oona. At the time, the “Watercolor Portrait a Day” count was in the low 200s.

MARY JONES: You’ve said this project began as a way to counteract the pull and the gravitas of the Yale commissioned portrait. The women in the Yale painting are all historical, they’ve felt like ghosts, people that you’re divining or bringing to life, and you wanted some live people coming through as a counter balance.

BRENDA ZLAMANY: It’s coming along, don’t you think? I knew the Yale women were going to want a lot from me, this painting was going to take me to the depths. I needed to keep one foot out the door and a portrait-a-day project would keep me from getting over involved. It was such an injustice they weren’t painted in their lifetime that I do feel there’s a pull from these women, such a desire to be painted. I want it to seem like I know each and every one of them. I have to know them to the point that I’m dreaming about them and they’re real to me–that’s part of the technique. Most of my reference photos of the actual women aren’t very good and there’s too few of them. To create their personalities I’ve got to place them all into a certain age that’s quite different than my source photos. I have to create the color, make hairstyle adjustments and they need clothing. I have to imagine their bodies, and to do that convincingly I’ve researched and found living surrogates for each of them.

It seems like the Yale commission is very private, and the “Watercolor Portrait a Day” project is very public. We see pictures of it every day on Facebook.

But the “Watercolor Portrait a Day” project has made the Yale girls public too, because everyone who sits comments on the painting and on the women. So the portrait-a-day feeds the Yale commission but it also makes me anxious. The “Watercolor Portrait a Day” is dangerous because it’s freaking Oona out, it’s hard on her to have all these people coming through the studio. She even referred to a sitter as “fucker” the other day, and these girls also would not like it to be here. So I’m struggling against different interests.

Why would the Yale women object to the “Watercolor Portrait a Day?”

I don’t want to seem like a mystical person, but you can’t help but get into these women. They want my undivided attention, and they would squeeze every ounce of painting ability out of me if they could. Things in the late 19th Century weren’t good for a lot of people, and these women had such privileged lives that you don’t have to feel sorry for them. They were educated, they traveled, but they were not welcomed by the boys at Yale. One of the reasons that I’m right for this job is that I know to get this done well I have to subjugate my ego. I’m a vehicle for them; this painting is not about me, or my art.

So is the “Watercolor Portrait a Day” about you?

It’s about relationships. In the Yale project, I might spend a whole day on a detail, like an eyebrow, trying to figure out, “Is this person thoughtful, angry, or happy?” and make all sorts of changes. But the “Watercolor Portrait a Day” has rules. Among the rules are that I have to accept whatever I get and I can’t change it after the person leaves. I’m not driving it intellectually. The Yale painting is a purely intellectual pursuit. All the pistons have to be firing 100% for me to do it. If I feel distracted or tired I could lose somebody. I could lose a face, I could lose a personality. I was working on Cornelia till midnight last night, painting her and then photographing the work every hour. I kept going over the photos on the screen to see if I was losing something because I could see she was starting to come into being. I saw the glimmer of who she was going to be and it was really fragile.

But the other thing about the “Watercolor Portrait a Day,” and I was talking to Alex Katz about this yesterday, is that I’m learning you can get incredible things if you let go of control. If you can see things without intellectualizing them it might be more than what you could have done if you were trying to stay in control. So it’s interesting to have one project that requires such focus and control up against this other project, which is about accepting what happens.

And you open up yourself and your home and encounter all kinds of people.

Portraits are really an intense experience and most people who come want something more than just a portrait. It can be anything, something to divulge or confess, or something to prove for so many reasons. Sometimes they have an agenda, and it can be really big. Most of the people I’ve painted are artists and they tell me about their careers, or their lack of a career, their rent, their illnesses and their fears. Do I secretly believe I have any healing powers? Maybe I do a little bit. I feel it’s important to have this kind of interaction. It’s not a product-oriented project although I like it when the portraits are good. It’s experiential, we’re sitting down and we’re trying to achieve some kind of closeness. Whatever happens on the page is the evidence of that. You never know what you’re going to get, and sometimes it’s more than you’ve bargained for and I take that into the day. It all happens in a very short time, and I have to think on so many levels and stay focused to actually make the art. I let them talk the entire time and I’ve heard a lot about people and their lives. But it’s a two-way street: I’m talking too, and confessing things, too. I find myself telling something to someone that I’ve never said before. It does create closeness, but right now I don’t know if it will last.

How do you connect to the subject’s appearance and character?

At any given moment you can choose what you want to see. Recently I painted a woman who at first looked nondescript or even plain. In fact, she came in telling me that she wasn’t attractive and that she wasn’t photogenic, either. I was really conscious that there was a side of her that could be attractive; you can go either way with anybody. I worked on the angle. I saw that her lips were full and her eye color was beautiful. Right away I could see her best lines and most attractive features and I knew that not only could I paint it but that I could photograph it, too.

I see the photographs as a collaboration, and sometimes a compromise between you and the subject. You want the portrait to look good, but your subject is also invested in having the photograph be flattering.

The photos are just as hard as the painting. Nothing is accidental. I usually take about 100 photos and they’re really careful and discussed. The photo begins with the painting. I have things I’ve learned to do, some conscious, some unconscious, to put the subject at ease. I know the problem areas and how to address them in a particular way to relax the person. They’re telling me things without knowing it. I’ m reading them and taking a lot of cues from watching their face as they’re watching me paint them. When you’re painting someone and they’re watching and judging how you see them, you also become the subject in some way.

After painting all these people, has it changed the way you judge character?

I used to hitchhike everyday after high school for fun, and that’s how I became a good judge of character. I got out of school at 1 PM and I had nothing to do so I just hitchhiked till dinnertime. You put your head in the car and you look at the person’s face. You have to decide in 10 seconds whether you’ll get into that car, if it’ll be a good conversation or whether you’ll get raped or murdered. That’s good training for portraiture.

Did your parents know?

My parents weren’t paying attention, they had an infant at home, and I was a teenager and they didn’t notice. I was invisible to my parents.

You got yourself into art school away from home at an early age, 14. How?

It came out of hitchhiking. Somehow I ended up at the home of Allan Shestack of the Yale University Art Gallery. He and his wife Nancy had some Jim Dine prints, so I showed them my drawings. They were impressed and hooked me up with the Educational Center for the Arts in New Haven, and the Yale College Before College Program. I hitchhiked an hour every day to New Haven to go there, and gradually I just didn’t go home.

You also got yourself to the San Francisco Art Institute for a summer when you were just 15. How did that come about?

I had a fake ID that said I was 18, and I applied with it and I got in. It was a good thing that I wasn’t on my parent’s radar at that time, they would have stood in my way, and I wouldn’t have been able to get anything done.

That’s an unusual way to start. It’s also kind of unusual to see someone working today with a camera lucida. You’ve told me they’re pretty hard to find. How did you discover it?

I was in David Hockney’s studio in the late ‘80s when he got his camera lucida and Maurice Payne, his printer, also spontaneously gave one to me. I later heard that David wasn’t too pleased about this, and maybe felt Maurice was giving away trade secrets. I kept it in storage for years. I was curious about it but didn’t use it; I was busy with other projects. When I went to Taiwan to paint aboriginal Taiwanese people I thought to use the instrument so they could see the painting happening. I practiced before I left, and really learned to use it there.

What does it add to the current project?

It’s about speed. Because you plot the points, you can go very quickly and you also cover the whole page. But you still have to redraw it and paint it, so it’s not going to give you any art. It does help shorten the phase of looking at the blank page and thinking about what to do. Still, I spend about 5 minutes with the blank page figuring out the best angle and how I want to compose it. But then immediately it’s on, and you have to move. It gets you moving very quickly and that’s really useful.

How do you organize and choose the subjects?

I’m only booked a week ahead. Every Sunday I panic that I haven’t gotten it all lined out. I really can’t fall behind and, so far, I haven’t. I worry about a cancellation on a day without a back-up person. There’s always someone who wants to be painted but I have to manage the schedule and set it up. The more I go into the “Watercolor Portrait a Day,” the less it becomes about the product. It’s about the ritual, about somebody sitting down and me making them comfortable, my contacting them and their response, posting it on Facebook and their friends all seeing it and commenting. The portrait is a very small part of it, but now having done so many I have more control and they’re getting better. Now I know I can do it, and I think more about what I can bring to the table, what I can learn about them and how I can say it in the portrait.

You’re known for your portraits of men. You’ve painted Chuck Close a number of times, also David Hockney, Glenn Ligon, Alex Katz, James Siena and Leonardo Drew, just to name a few. Now with the Yale portrait, and the “Watercolor Portrait a Day” project, you’ve also painted lots of women. What are the differences?

Before, I felt there was something about male beauty — or, let’s say male vanity — that’s more painterly. Also, I really like, and am interested in, men. But now after painting these Yale women, and having talked to so many women through the project, most of them over 40, I’ve become interested in women as they age. I don’t think we’ve looked at them enough. The next body of work will be portraits of 24 women. From the “Watercolor Portrait a Day,” I’m less afraid of dealing with the emotions of female vanity. When I post the paintings of really pretty women there are always comments that “she’s prettier in real life.” So if you’re painting someone really beautiful the portrait is never going to be good enough. We really judge women. I never wanted to take that on before.

And the men on your radar?

Fred Wilson — I’ve gotten really good at painting hair. I love his hair, I love his face. I think he’s a terrific artist. He’s got all the elements that I want. And I want to paint Dawoud Bey, because he’s a portraitist. He’s fabulous looking and I love to paint the portraitist. He said he would do it, but I have to get him when he’s in town. He’s amazing, and he’s a really big guy. But I also want to paint Oona in her latest phase. And I’m due for a self-portrait.

The post A Portrait A Day — And Back In The Day: A Studio Visit with Brenda Zlamany appeared first on artcritical.

Katherine Bradford: New Work at Edward Thorp Gallery
April 19 to June 9, 2012
210 Eleventh Avenue, 6th Floor, between 24th and 25th streets
New York City,  212-691-6565

The First Great Depression bequeathed the common culture a pantheon of superheroes now making a spectacular “comeback” – although of course they never went away – in the Second. But as Hollywood slicks up the golems of yesteryear in new layers of spandex, visual artists have a different take on these valiant personages.  In 2012, in two remarkable shows, Superman and Batman stormed Gotham’s gallery scene.

Batman arrived at Frederick Petzel Gallery in January on the cape tails of Joyce Pensato. This artist’s trademark idiom, established over a long career, is the full-blown, angst and splatter rendering of cartoon characters, a style that not only simultaneously critiques and renews Abstract Expressionism but also recalls the shared roots of DC Comics and the New York School.

Superman stars in a show from an artist of the same age as Pensato but, thanks to a late start and contrasting outlook, a totally different generation: Katherine Bradford.  Where the dark knight gets bombast, the man of steel’s ascent is fuelled by fey sweetness.

Indeed, Bradford delivers an oxymoronically saftig übermensch.  But the deflated catsuit and soft limbs are in no way meant to imply an antihero: he is simply a cuddly hero.  Nor in his middle age spread should he be misread as a mere mortal in a rented Halloween costume, a figure – in other words – of bathos. His astral travels are for real as he ascends upon a schematic spiral or hovers in the night sky.  His depiction is of a piece with an overall paint handling that has the angst-free awkwardness of outsider art.  Like the best of naïve painting, only in her case knowingly hard won, Bradford’s images are shot through with effortless abstract harmony and disconcerting observational acumen. The hero’s buttocks and thighs in Superman Responds (2011), for instance, are conveyed by a few loose, carefree-seeming dabs of electric crimson and ultramarine against a generalized creamy ground that nonetheless get across with anatomical precision a convincing if gender-bent voluptuousness.

Everything Bradford paints is shot through with humor: sometimes whimsical, sometimes poignant, sometimes earthy and raucous, other times ethereal, but tellingly, never ironic. Superman as wimp could so easily be a satire of something: masculinity, militarism, even Painting with a capital P.  But Bradford invests the two motifs in her show – the other being ocean liners – with such warmth and evident personal significance as to defeat any such end.

These paintings are big and intimate.  Big in energy, implied scale, the busy way worked surfaces and agitated depths connote imagery found in decisions and revisions.  Intimate in the localness of color contrasts, the rapport with surface, the unfussy finesse of loved details—albeit ones modestly veiled with the appearance of chance discoveries and happy accidents.  This collision of gestures that are at once bold and poignant is what gives Bradford’s work its essential character, its tension.

She is one of those very contemporary artists intent on having her cake and eating it.  There is the peculiar poetic charm of provisional painting – a sense of blah, of nonchalance, of not quite caring about the slapdash, scruffy, Brooklyn-esque “work in progress” look. But, on the other hand, there is also the energy, seriousness, and resolve of classic abstract painting.  The happy marriage of naïveté and abstraction can feel at times as if a Chagall, Janice Biala or Aristodimos Kaldis has been pressed through a de Kooning sieve.  Actually, forget that messy analogy: just recall that Wassily Kandinsky made naïve woodcuts before he invented abstraction. Or else bring to mind the reverse, high-abstraction-to-low-realism trajectory of Philip Guston.

Guston is indeed the logical port of call for anyone making sense of Bradford’s journey to action heroes and cruise ships.  A very late starter, she had begun in abstraction when, in the course of her development, she felt a painterly, rather than existential, need for subject matter.  But ocean liners and Superman, at least as she treats them, are, on two counts, the opposite of Guston’s Klansmen, cigarette stubs, or old boots: her romantic, heartfelt subjects are neither quotidian nor dark.  Similarly, The Moon and Sixpence meets A Doll’s House scenario suggested by her delayed career launch is belied by her anything-but-outsider status as an artist.  Bradford is little short of a cultural heroine to a younger generation of Brooklyn painters making up the phenomenal attendance of her lecture at the New York Studio School earlier this season and the opening of the exhibition under review.

As I say, Bradford’s Superman and her ships are non-ironic and non-satirical, but clearly, the limp action hero and the capsized liner somehow battling on are powerful, fecund symbols of vulnerable strength and strength in vulnerability.  Found in the process of abstract painting, could they in fact be symbols of that very art historical legacy she treasures but also deconstructs: ciphers for painterly explorations that are personal and collective, provisional and heroic, their grandeur grander for being – literally, in her scumble and pentimenti – faded?

This would bridge the gap between the bulky ships at sea and the hero zipping through the sky. It would draw stray images in this compelling show into a gently suggestive lost-and-found narrative of danger and adventure: a Madame-X-like Lady Liberty (2011); a collage featuring the doomed aviatrix Amelia Earhart (2011-12); the silhouette of a ship against a pink sea and orange sky in S.O.S (2012).

Maybe it could even make sense of the cryptic (though neither Kryptonian nor marine) New Men (2011), a mirrored, quasi-palindrome arrangement of the words of its title.  In her lecture, in reference to this work, Bradford alluded to an appreciation of the strong sensitive men  she was starting to notice around her –  bearded Brooklyn Rail-reading metrosexuals flooded this audience member’s mind – perhaps, indeed, the very courtiers of the new order who throng her events.

All I can say is that Bradford is my personal discovery (so far) for 2012.  She makes me optimistic about the future of painting.  I left her show a new man.

The post A New Hero: Katherine Bradford at Edward Thorp appeared first on artcritical.

November 18 to December 18, 2011
205 Norman Avenue at Humboldt Street
Brooklyn, (718) 383-9380

Craig Olson, a painter of bright lyrical abstractions, has brought together artists spanning several generations for the group exhibition he has curated at Janet Kurnatowski’s, Idiot’s Delight, from recent MFA grads to established mid-career artists.  His people are unafraid to experiment, remaining equally unfettered by tradition or trend.Where there is humor in this show it is in the service of engagement with something of substance. Katherine Bradford’s Invisible Underpants, with its coarsely-hewn superhero figure and bold palette, is worked in the artist’s familiar conciseness, in what is currently called a “provisional” technique, accomplishing a lot with a little. The see-through underpants reveal the weave of raw canvas, and it splits and dissolves our super hero into figure and ground, analogy and smears of paints. It’s a fragile balance but the risks pay off.

Chris Martin uses the opposite approach with his For the Protection of Amy Winehouse, piling paint can lid-sized circles of dried paint onto a thick impasto ground to create a mausoleum with quarter-sized plastic gemstones, paper towel, an image of Winehouse and innumerable other detritus. Dated 2007- 2010, one can’t help but see the morbid failure implicit in the title in the crowded surface of the painting.

In Peter Acheson’s small, untitledpiece the entry point is the painted text “Hawk Feather” on an upside down newspaper clipping. This starts a cascade of memory and association, which further opens the reading of the painting as an experience and the record of an experience.

A funny remark overheard at the opening  rang true: the work here is “retinal non-retinal.”  The reference, of course, is to Duchamp’s call for non-retinal conceptualism. Olson includes works by pseudonymous artists S.H. and Ishmael Bubble: a candle wax and dried tea rose combine, and a signed UTZ red hot potato chips bag, adding to the sense of Duchampian mischief.

EJ Hauser’s subverted portrait Paul, a gestural and muddy bust traversed by red green and yellow horizontal lines, both engages and obstructs the gaze charging the piece with a winning punk energy, while Deirdre Sword’s rich umber and orange painting, Untitled (Holly Fool’s Sceptre), hovers between an Abstract Expressionist field and a palimpsest of script. Like oil soaked mud, the painting is both beautiful and foreboding.

J.J. Manford’s One Can’t Think of One’s Soul While Eating feels like two paintings clinging to each other and vying for their attention. The uneasy tension created at the sharp borders between color plains shakes the stability of the composition to near breaking point. But like the other work in the show, Manford manages to keep the counterpoints from vibrating the painting apart.

Ben La Rocco’s Voodoo’s Kustoms exhibits an understated modernism with playfully irreverent marks dispersed on the surface that look like hand drawn maps or bar napkin doodles. Paired with Portal, a bright green drawer face with the broken text “tradition” and scores reminiscent of the marks made to pass the days in solitary confinement, he hints at the idea of art both liberated from and indebted to history.  Tamara Gonzales displays similar ambivalence towards the past in Mariastein with its layered bright spray paint using lace as its stencil.

There is a nice dialogue between the two large sculptures in the show and the remaining small paintings by Linnea Paskow and Thomas Micchellii. Elisa Soliven’s Untitled Portrait is a charismatic bust reminiscent both of Picasso’s Head of Marie Therese and a Huma Bhabha sculpture. The white plaster used to form the head echoes Micchellii’s small work Thrice, with its three-quarter profile of a face painted red on white. James Clark’s Thermal Specialist is a construction blending the textures of found surfaces and applied marks into a figure that isn’t quite organic or robotic. Formal elements in the sculpture, including a long rectangular box lit from within and a green wooden ball, compliment the palette and circular shape in Paskow’s Red Ball, exuding the satisfying freedom found elsewhere in Idiot’s Delight.

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