November 12 to December 22, 2017
188 East 2nd Street, between avenues A and B
New York City, karmakarma.org

With the distance that time affords, we can see communities of artists as neural networks, firing their energies into a nexus of human connections. Collectively they create a complex that nourishes and amplifies the efforts of each individual artist.

Jean Conner, Wally Hedrick, Deborah Remington, and Franklin Williams, the artists gathered together at Karma, emerged from a small, but vital art scene in Northern California in the 1950s and 1960s. Their compatriots included Bruce Conner (who was married to Jean Conner), Jay DeFeo (who was married to Wally Hedrick), Joan Brown, Michael McClure, Manuel Neri, and Wallace Berman, who all worked and exhibited together.

These artists are featured in Anastasia Aukeman’s book Welcome to Painterland: Bruce Conner and the Rat Bastard Protective Association (University of California Press, 2016), which explores the personal and artistic fermentation that animated their time together in San Francisco, and how it reflected the Beat scene, radical politics, and the emerging counterculture. In their relative isolation from a major center of art, these artists were able to develop both their own personal visions and a model of mutual support and scrappy self-reliance that still resonates today.

The exhibition at Karma gives us just a slice of the four artists’ individually diverse work, while capturing aspects of the spirit of Bay Area art of the period. A revelation for me was the work of Franklin Williams, who was based early on in Oakland and taught for many years at the San Francisco Art Institute. The artist is 78, and in this exhibition are a selection of nine works from the 1960s and 1970s that are fresh and pulsing with high key color and textural surfaces, made of paint, yarn, and crochet thread. With their freewheeling, obsessive funkiness, they have a particularly contemporary feeling.

See and Always Be Seen (1975) is a large-scale painting, composed of strips of painted paper, rearranged and sewn with yarn, whose hieratic lattice structure is filled by swarming brush strokes, whorled lines, and stylized flames. The effect is of a kind of crazed joy. Untitled (1968) is an exuberant party of a sculpture, with a pillow-like form whose surface vibrates with springy tendrils of multi-colored yarn.

Jean Conner, who is 84, and until recently has rarely shown her work publicly. Her twenty-two small collages in the exhibition, dating from the 1960s through the 1980s, are all are composed of images culled from magazines. They are beautiful works in rich, subtle colors that are surreal, refined, and subversive, all at the same time.

Some of the works, such as Are You a Springmade?, use advertising imagery; its title and female figures, both sleeping and cavorting, are drawn from a long-running ad campaign for a line of sheets. Like a number of Conner’s works, it questions women’s social identity as an icon of commerce or desire. Most of Conner’s collages employ images from the natural world, often combining different species and settings to dream-like effect.

The work of Deborah Remington, who died in 2010, is full of fierce painterly gestures and allusions to the landscape. They reflect her studying with the Abstract Expressionists Clyfford Still, Elmer Bischoff, and others at the California School of Fine Arts. The paintings, four of which are very large, express Remington’s sense of ambition and her desire to create pictorial experiences that confront and encompasses the viewer.

Dr. S (1962) is painting with black, slashing brush strokes in a field of yellow-orange. The blocky forms coalesce into an instable image that recalls the Pacific Ocean shoreline that Remington drew during her formative years as an artist. Winter (1963) has a similar structure, with black strokes emerging from cadmium red to create a looming presence. With their central, isolated masses and hints of secreted interior spaces, these painting anticipate the hard-edged, shield-like paintings that Remington would become celebrated for after her move to New York in 1965.

Wally Hedrick, who died in 2003, was an iconoclastic artist whose work ranged from assemblages, to proto-Pop paintings, to politically charged works. He was a central figure among the Bay Area artists, and along with Remington and four others organized the seminal Six Gallery, the site of Alan Ginsberg’s first reading of his poem “Howl” in 1955.

In this exhibition the intersection of art and activism in Hedrick’s work is embodied in four examples of his Black Paintings. He began the series in the 1960s as a protest to the Vietnam War by taking over 50 of his earlier canvases and painting them black. The Black Paintings continued into the 2000s with works that opposed the first Iraq War.
Hedrick’s Vietnam/Irac (1970, 2003) spans the two wars, and like the other related works, is a painting in mourning. A tondo, whose canvas is split at its equator, is over 10 feet in diameter, and thickly painted in oil. Its rough, monochromatic surface suggests a shroud of negation that covers over a field of buried evidence.

The gathering together of the four artists in this exhibition reconstitutes a moment in which a confluence of individual and collective efforts expanded into a stream of art that continues to reverberate. It reminds us that art from anywhere can become a watershed that flows beyond itself into time and space.

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Mark Grotjahn: Untitled (Captain America) at Gagosian
January 19 to February 20, 2016
980 Madison Avenue (between 76th and 77th streets)
New York, 212 744 2313

The title of Mark Grotjahn’s show at Gagosian is “Captain America,” after the comic book character created in 1941, the year of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the beginning of America’s involvement in World War II. In the comic, Captain America fought against the Axis powers, knocking out Nazis and Japanese soldiers in storylines that promoted extreme patriotic fervor. It’s a strange thing that this suite of 10 drawings is noted in the gallery’s press materials as “first shown in the Kaikai Kiki Gallery in Tokyo,” as if embedded within Grotjahn’s works is a parallel heroic narrative.

For this series (it is only necessary here to describe one, as the other nine are essentially the same with slight variation) Grotjahn used the red, white and blue Captain America color scheme. The drawings distill motifs from his two major bodies of work: the “Butterfly” and “Face” paintings, seen in his oeuvre since the early 2000s. Each piece presents a “Butterfly”-like radial of alternating red and blue bands against a chalky white surface. The bands radiate from, or recede into, a central vanishing point. Over the image, hastily painted yellow eye shapes cover the surface at random. These “eyes” (a recurrent motif in Grotjahn’s “Face” paintings), though omnipresent across the series, are faint and barely register against the bold design of the main image. The vitality and ecstasy that are so primal in those earlier works has given way to bland seriality in the new series. While the title evokes a spirit of play, it also feels a bit sinister as it flags the artist as a hyper-masculine, self-proclaimed hero.

On Great Jones Street Grotjahn’s “Sign Exchange” project was presented at Karma, a gallery that often shows decidedly un-auspicious projects and DIY projects by artists of stature, including Brice Marden, Julian Schnabel, Rudolf Stingel, Stanley Whitney, Chris Martin. Between 1993 and 1998, Grotjahn, just out of UC Berkeley, began replicating liquor store and bodega signs from his neighborhood. He would then trade the shop owners his copies for their originals, which are on view. The result is an archive of signs and hand-painted advertisements resplendent in their low-budget glory. The tightly curated sampling of these signs (as well as several pastel painted flower stands) feels precious in a way that the then-25-year-old Grotjahn likely never intended. At the right of the entrance, a long line of multicolored index card-sized ads were hung end-to end in a kind of continuous banner of liquor brands, prices and keyed-up color; I was reminded of the nearly 10-foot-long line of paint chips that horizontally bisects Rauschenberg’s 1955 opus Rebus.

The “Sign Exchange” project is a relational aesthetics experiment wrapped in a post-Duchampian gesture: the signs register as Art because the artist dubs them as such. Ten years ago, as Grotjahn was hitting his stride, achieving critical and market success, the “Signs” project might have thrown institutions and collectors off of his scent. Grotjahn’s success is as a formalist painter; now, with his work firmly in the canon of aughts-abstraction, galleries and curators have more freedom to exhibit examples of his less conventional (i.e. less collectible) output. In 2014, Grotjahn’s painted bronze “Head” sculptures (originally conceived as studio experiments made with discarded beer boxes and toilet paper roles) were shown at the Nasher Museum in Dallas, concurrent with a survey of his “Butterfly” paintings at Blum + Poe’s Upper East Side outpost.

Grotjahn is the ideal artist for our time. He presents an image of authenticity: his work seems approachable enough — it’s AbEx without the heartache — and is systematic with the just the right inflection of happy accident to present an air of humanity. It was prescient that Grotjahn had, in the early to mid 1990s, become so interested in advertising and signage (their main function is to broadcast prices and sell goods). The work in the Gagosian show does the same thing, though its messaging is subtler. Advertising has long been free game for artists to use in their work but Grotjahn actually presents original ads in “Sign Exchange,” a gesture that seems all the more potent given his rapidly rising star. But the shadow side of Grotjahn’s success is seen in the redundant, conceptually thin uptown show at Gagosian (not to mention his self-consciously scrappy “Head” sculptures at Anton Kern on view just three months ago). For the last three years, Grotjhan has shown his work non-stop in museums and galleries (often with ambitious, concurrent exhibitions) and this frenzied exhibitionism seems to have culminated in his fatigue.

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Karma: June 15 to August 30, 2015
39 Great Jones Street, between Lafayette Street and Bowery
New York City, 917-675- 7508

Harlem: July 16 to October 25, 2015
144 West 125th Street between Lenox Avenue (Malcolm X Boulevard) and Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. Boulevard (7th Avenue
New York City, 646-242-2142

Two exhibitions, running concurrently, afford an exciting opportunity to think about Stanley Whitney. A selection of works from the 1990s are on view at Karma Books and Gallery while more recent works, from 2008 to 2015, can be seen at the Studio Museum in Harlem. The downtown exhibition, marking the publication of a sizable book on Whitney’s work by Karma Books (reviewed earlier this summer at artcritical) is comprised of five large paintings in the main gallery and 84 small paintings and works on paper salon hung in the entrance space. At the Studio Museum, 29 paintings, six color gouaches and five black gouaches afford ample indication of where Whitney is right now.

In their rows of rounded shapes and loosely brushed compartments Whitney’s earlier paintings resemble shelves or cavities, reading like sections of a catacomb or stacked fruit. Stacking is significant as the paintings are evidently constructed to accommodate color building with units or blocks of color; this has, indeed, become foundational to all his painting since the1990s. The artist spent five years living in Rome during the 1990s when he also visited Egypt and it seems clear that the nature of those built environments, including the Pyramids, were important constructive ideas for his subsequent development. The structure in the earliest of the large oil paintings at Karma, Radical Openness, (1991) evinces an already begun absorption in image making that combines drawing and painting through repetition and difference. By this I mean that, rather than change a basic structure from one painting to the next, the basic structure remains the same: graphic invention and shifts in color space become the painting’s subject. Though continued right through to the present day, there is no sign of this structure inhibiting or reducing the possibilities of emotional or intellectual expression, of inquiry through color and line. In fact, it becomes indexical of changes along the way. It is color that made this format necessary—emerging slowly, as can be seen in the 84 small works at Karma. Drawings indicate a range of possible directions, but it is color that definitively led to this particular structure.

The smaller paintings and drawings are like episodic, graphic narratives. Picasso’s The Dream and Lie of Franco, (1937) comes to mind, as might the way Bonnard uses drawing and mark making to define spatial elements in his paintings. In each new iteration, enough is carried from the last painting to the next to make the playoff between repetition and difference central to his effort. The sectional frontality and scale changes act like amplifications or diminutions of sound. The analogy with music is an obvious one, but no less relevant for that. The main difference, from the point of view of Whitney’s work, is that music occurs in a prescribed temporal sequence whereas in painting time only passes for the viewer: colors change as you look at them depending on where the eye is resting or moving.

Drawing is implicit in the way Whitney wields his brush: the degree to which he leaves traces of the latter visible indicates its role in the placement and organization of color. In the recent paintings this drawing element remains crucial although with the reduction of one color placed over another it is the individual color blocks that carry the energy. The color blocks are kinetic. It can be argued that nothing we see is static for our means of perception, but color complicates this, as it is already a fugitive phenomenon that operates between the phenomenological and the conceptual. There is nothing neutral when it comes to color, no known definitive form, and it is this that is so decisively at play in Whitney’s paintings. As Walter Benjamin put it, “Color does not relate to optics the way line relates to geometry.” In Lightnin, (2009), for instance, a 40 x 40 inch painting, one constellation of color supersedes another in even a few moments of looking. The vertical narrow rectangles of each side and the bottom edge pulsate, sending the eye on a rotating journey; adjacent colors pair up, blue and red on one side, green and yellow on the other. Similar animation happens everywhere across the painting: recombinations of color and pictorial space are endless. This transforms painting into something like a time-based medium in which time runs in every direction and at a constantly varying speed.

Whitney’s working method constitutes what could be described as lyrical pragmatism. The way the paintings look to have been made, from top left to bottom right, is analogous to reading script, or painting a wall methodically. He typically completes a picture over two sessions, with three to four drying days between. This speed of execution allows for surprises and time to absorb what is happening in the painting. Rather than the painting being the fulfillment of a set plan, therefore, it is a result of allowing any number of sources from life to inform and influence its outcome. The vitality of the paintings attests to the success of this strategy, leaving the viewer with a desire to see more, however much each completed painting refuses to be still and known. Repeated viewing appears to be a requirement, one that can sustain thought and pleasure in equal amounts.

The post Structured by Color: Stanley Whitney, Works from the 1990s and Now appeared first on artcritical.

Karma Books on Great Jones Street has a summer exhibition of works from the 1990s by Stanley Whitney to coincide with their publication of a 500 page doorstopper of a survey of the abstract painter’s career. The take home revelation of this show is that Whitney is a consummate draftsman. Drawings in water soluble crayon, graphite and other mediums and small oil sketches are presented salon style on an entire soaring wall of the front section of Karma’s Great Jones Street premises. It feels like a rare privilege even to be viewing pieces that evidence being torn from a notebook and were perhaps never intended for public eyes. Most of the drawings are in color, but even where they restrict themselves to graphite, color is an implied presence. “The drawings [are] very important to me,” Whitney has said in an interview. ”They [are] key to figuring out the space. Even now with the paintings, no matter how structured they are, the lucid stuff really belongs to drawing.” That “lucid stuff” maintains a quality that touches life in a concrete way, but for the viewer the experience is like zooming past a scene of people, lights and advertisements on a train. The eye moves quickly across stacks of containing lines that almost rattle by violently. Even if you can’t hold on to particular objects you sense, in the rush, that they are there.  Colors almost possess agency, as if they were not chosen but presented themselves.

Exhibition continues through August 30, 2015 at 39 Great Jones Street, between Lafayette Street and Bowery, New York City, 917-675-7508

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