September 6 to October 6, 2018
535 West 22nd Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, dcmooregallery.com

In a 2013 interview with Robert Kushner, Barbara Takenaga relayed her process in nautical terms: “I feel like I am on this really giant ocean liner, and I’ve got this little tiny steering wheel, and I’m turning and turning and turning it.” In this analogy, she describes the shifting directions and momentum through both individual paintings and her entire body of work. She’s also talking about navigating between control and the changes she courts to explore new territory.

This image was on my mind viewing Takenaga’s new show, “Outset,” at DC Moore, her fifth with the gallery. The ship seems straightened now, leaner, and many familiar motifs appear to be thrown overboard. The tarmacs of Nebraska are long behind her, horizon lines have all but disappeared, and with them allusions to her home state skies, suburban hallucinatory wonder, and a certain kind of intentional goofiness. Ahead is somewhere unknown, and acceleration is palpable.

As with earlier work, we are flying, floating, or dreaming through hyperconsciousness, o maybe all of these at once. References to explosions, ecstasy, space travel, aerial views of drifting land masses, and microbiology are well established elements of Takenaga’s vocabulary, as is her ability to deliver this iconography with masterful, exquisite clarity. The surface of the painting is a statement in itself– her signature palette of steel blue-gray delivered in taut flawless satin, a sheet touched and frosted everywhere with iridescence, sometimes in fuschia.

Takenaga plays through octaves of weight. Tiny brushstrokes, hairlines, and rendered dots of white are made with the lightest touch, skittering across a heavy lava flow of poured and puddled acrylic. She knows her chemistry. Untold hours of attention, focus and devotion to her craft are haptically present, the paintings suggest strenuous concentration and, like mediation, allow the viewer to escape the pressures of time and distraction. Takenaga has practiced and honed these qualities through decades, and now she thoroughly owns them.

As Takenaga has recently been categorized as a “mature” artist, like the battered ship and stormy skies of Thomas Cole’s allegorical “The Voyage of Life: Manhood,” she seems to be veering into deep and confrontational turbulence, ready to relinquish some control, take more chances and partner with chaos. The “black holes” of Aeaea (all works, 2018) and Hello rip into the center of her compositions and in this body of work she not only allows them to stay, she cultivates them into the strongest figure-ground relationships in her work to date. Black centered pours cover a third of these two canvases, and the backgrounds have the least amount of pattern. Takenaga embellishes the pour in Hello outlining the shape with thin white and yellow lines, a kind of halo. While working on Aeaea she noticed a long accidental drip along the right side—an outlier of iridescent insect-leaf green—which she incorporated it into the composition. The black shape stretches from left to right, and pulls to all four directions, vaguely figurative and certainly muscular. Delicate Japanese patterns spring forth to inhabit its wildness with waves of fish scales or mountains, a net of pattern that gently tames and lands the form into the blue-gray ground. Her boldness is confirmed in Manifold 5, a sprawling five-paneled painting suggestive of rupture and emotional separation. An immense phallic ellipse divides a pitch black void. Takenaga is unabashedly poetic here and invites, or rather incites, the viewer’s imagination to follow hers. She riffs wonderfully on associations between Japanese screens and patterns, candles floating on the Ganges, submarines, and Whistler’s nocturnes.

As a young artist Takenaga found inspiration in Japanese prints, patterns, Indian painting and mandalas, as well as the work of Sol Lewitt, Eva Hesse, and Yayoi Kusama. It’s interesting to note that while Takenaga was a student at the University of Colorado, Boulder during the mid 1970s, the pattern focused Criss-Cross artists’ collective was still very active. In an interview with Leslie Wayne for “Two Coats of Paint,” Takenaga lets us in on a personal dimension embedded in her use of patterns: “References to my grandmother were coded into mountain shapes … Lots of hiding and coding. The whole series of dot mandalas from 2001-2009 were about my mother, sliding away into space.” In her new show, paintings like Serrulata spell it out for us in rhythmic, ebullient language. Sumi ink-like splotches on a shell pink ground make a koan of cherry blossoms and time, and like the work of another great student of Japanese art, Roland Flexner, the painting coalesenses before our eyes. Taking a cue from the vision of time revealed to Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita, Takenaga has seen her universe blow open, and she’s taking action.

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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.

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Had Eva Hesse lived, she would now be 80. In Marcie Begleiter’s new documentary profile we are treated to the story of her life and a textured portrait of the New York art world in the 1960s. It was Hesse’s good fortune to be part of a supportive art community that included Sol Lewitt, Richard Serra, Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt, Carl Andre, Mel Bochner, Robert and Sylvia Mangold among others. Their focus was on art as self-discovery, rather than on art as commodity.

In order to tell Hesse’s story, the film moves back and forth among her past, present, and future. The film opens and closes with artists, critics, curators, and museum directors talking about her legacy and the widespread appeal of her poignant work. This contribution is evident at a recent opening of Hesse’s work in London at the Lisson Gallery where young artists were particularly drawn to the relevance of her accomplishment, which changed the landscape of what we mean by art, and, which continues to open up new options. Regrettably, Hesse could not exploit these options due to her premature death at the age of 34.

There is no omniscient narrator in the film.   Using a series of videotaped segments, we hear poignant stories about Eva’s struggles and successes from her closest friends, Rosie Goldman, Gioia Timpanelli and Sol Lewitt. We also learn how some of her masterpieces, conceptualized and designed by Hesse, were realized with the help of Doug Johns, a plastics expert, who was her assistant in the final two years of her life. Helen Hesse Charash, Eva’s sister, provides valuable insights on how Eva’s life was plagued by feelings of abandonment and how she courageously faced death in her last months.

The three key figures who are no longer alive—Eva, her father, and Sol Lewitt—speak to us through the voices of unseen actors against the backdrops of hundreds of photographs and silent video segments.   The script is entirely from primary sources, i.e., diaries, letters, and interviews.   These multiple vantage points allow us to observe the trajectory of Hesse’s development and gain insight into the intricacies of the generative art-world that surrounded her.

Begleiter and Shapiro faced two significant challenges in crafting this film: how to avoid making Eva’s life into a soap opera and how to introduce a mass audience to a body of work which eschews beauty while exploring a powerful but often twisted path to aesthetic truth. They successfully walk these tightropes by showing scores of Eva’s works, evolving from expressionist painting to quasi-minimalist sculpture to non-art which “let it all hang out.”

Particularly well handled is Eva’s visit to Germany, the place from which she fled in 1938 and to which she returned in 1964 for 15 months with her husband, Tom Doyle, who accepted an all expenses-paid residency to work on his sculpture. These segments effectively trace how the shadow of the Holocaust penetrated every phase of Hesse’s life and aesthetic practice. Faced with nightmares and her inability to work, she was inspired by the encouraging letters of Sol Lewitt who told her to “Just DO!” Heeding his advice, Hesse, during the next months, made a crucial switch from being a painter to being a proto-sculptor, by exploiting the discarded materials around her.   Eva’s correspondence with Sol Lewitt provided some of the most tender and personal aspects of the film. The close relationship between these two artists is movingly portrayed beyond Germany. Friends expressed their disappointment when Sol’s romantic feelings for Eva were not reciprocated.

In the film, several artists described how Eva liked to use unusual materials such as polyester resin, latex, fiberglass and rope as well as industrial materials like metal washers and shell casings. She often played with them for long periods before deciding what form they wanted to take. In one of Hesse’s greatest works, Rope Piece, order comports with disorder, as was true in her own life. Using the force of gravity, Eva lets the wet sections of rope determine their own structure. In the film, Elizabeth Sussman suggests that there is no one right way to hang this rope piece. Such openness was a trademark of the new genre Hesse was creating, one in which her sculpture vacillated between comic tragedies and tragic comedies.

Finally, it is hard not to be moved by Hesse’s tragic death, due to a series of brain tumors, which cut short her relentless desire to keep producing great art. The film is at its best when it allows us to see how her aesthetic accomplishment and her fearlessness in the face of death were interwoven. Hesse’s life and art are embodied in the aphorism of Samuel Beckett, whose absurdist humor Hesse readily acknowledged: “I can’t go on; I will go on”.

Eva Hesse (Dir. Marcie Begleiter, 2016; a Zeitgest Films release) at Film Forum, 209 West Houston Street, between Sixth Avenue and Varick Street, (212) 727-8110. Screenings at 12:30  2:45  5:10  7:30  9:50

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September 16, 2011 to January 8, 2012
200 Eastern Parkway
Brooklyn, (718) 638-5000

During the past decade, Eva Hesse (1936-1970) has finally begun to find the institutional attention she deserves. This resurgence was sparked by the traveling retrospective organized by the San Francisco Museum of Art in 2002, whose success soon prompted several specialized exhibitions such as those focused on Hesse’s drawings (Drawing Center and Menil Collection, 2006) and even her improvisational studioworks (Art Gallery of Ontario, 2010, and Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, 2011). It seemed like most chapters of Hesse’s brief career had been tackled, but  for a few early paintings the artist made in her mid-twenties. By featuring nineteen of these, Eva Hesse: Spectres 1960 manages to examine yet another nuance of this stunning oeuvre.

While the spectres do not compare in sophistication or innovation to Hesse’s mature work, they still reveal the searching spirit of an exceptional talent. Hesse had originally set out to become a painter, studying at Cooper Union and Yale University. It was not until after her graduation in 1964, when she and her husband at the time, the sculptor Tom Doyle, were invited by the textile manufacturer and collector F. Arnhard Scheidt to create works in his German factory, that her focus shifted towards wall-constructions and sculpture. While she continued to work on paper until the end of her life, she promptly turned away from traditional oil painting.

Keeping this in mind, one has to view the spectres as what they are: experimentations of a young artist. While not studies as such, they reflect Hesse’s struggles to formulate a language of her own. And yet, the paintings reveal an intriguing sensibility for composition. Though abstraction was favored during the time of their origin (Hesse studied with Josef Albers at Yale), the spectres are somewhat radical in that they incorporate figurative elements. By fusing representational with abstract forms, Hesse signals an aim to break with both the past and the currently fashionable. In the years to come, even her most minimal, truly abstract works would retain associations with the human body and its rhythms.

Despite their stylistic and material dissimilarities, the spectres’ use of palette already hints at Hesse’s most mature work. Overall de-saturation with occasional accentuation of primary color allows these paintings to seem subdued and yet to also glow. Their radiance emerges from the subtle contrasts of grays, creams and red, for example, in CITE WORK AND DATE, and provides them with a mysterious aura. At the Brooklyn Museum, the installation consciously enhances this attribute by veiling the works in dimmed, warm light.

E. Luanne McKinnon, director of the University of New Mexico Art Museum in Albuquerque, who organized the exhibition, is responsible for the term “spectre” , referring to an “image or apparition” in this body of work. While these paintings are far from minimalist, they are reductive. The suggestions of figures and human outlines partially dissolve into oceans of color. Overall, one can distinguish two general tendencies within this body of work: intimately scaled and loosely brushed paintings and larger canvases that feature a sole subject . In the first group, despite their spatial relationships the figures appear disconnected from each other. One of these compositions depicts a faceless bride in the background while a grey ghostlike creature hovers in the foreground to the left. Is this a Munchian rendition of the same individual, depicted through various stages of time? These compositions are dreamlike, half here and also nowhere. They do not render concrete scenarios, but capture a psychologically charged undercurrent.

In contrast, the larger paintings might be self-portraits or perhaps renditions of the interior life of fictitious female protagonists. As the shape of a sole figure dominates the plane our perception shifts towards the individual. Anonymous and yet with a clear sense of presence, they seem to embody Hesse’s attempt to turn the inward outward and to give shape to something as ethereal and abstract as human emotions. It is this inherent notion of humanity that makes Hesse’s work, no matter how abstract, deeply personal. Hesse was not simply a minimalist; she was a distiller, able to filter out anything unnecessary that could distract from the essence of form, movement and spatial relatonship. In her early and later works alike, there is nothing too much or too loud. Her abiding ambition to achieve self-contained harmony can be traced to the spectres. Here, she is beginning to articulate the concerns that would characterize gestures to come.

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