September 7 to October 14, 2017
185 Varick Street at King Street
New York City, geary.nyc/project-space

Shades of red, green, and blue familiar from children’s toys of yesteryear are stoked into a playful day-glow stack of hard-edged gumdrop shapes in the painting, Untitled (Eclipse) (2017), on view in Jason Stewart’s solo exhibition in Geary Contemporary’s project space. The paint itself is blocked slightly awkwardly in relationship to the architecture of the raised surfaces of shaped canvas structures that fit within a square format. There is no lack of sophistication here – the artist works with full intention and awareness of how every gesture matters. While puzzle-like, the flawless carpentry only serves to further the artist’s destabilizing tactics. It’s as though Stewart is creating rules with form in order to color outside of the topographic lines he so painstakingly crafts. The spatial dance enacted leaves the viewer with odd visual paradoxes to unravel.

In Untitled (Saratoga Hot) (2017) for instance, the oddly eye-like center of the painting appears to advance toward the viewer even though the powerful architecture of flat cadmium red that frames it would normally occupy the foreground in any other context. Instead, careful lighting and the raised topography of the central pale pink iris-like center are part of what keep it in check. The sharp geometry of the hunter green sclera offsetting the pink, however, thwarts a bodily reading with the kind of sharp geometry more often associated with the balsawood perfection of model airplane kits.

One of the most startling paintings in the exhibition is Untitled (Crosstown) (2017). An earlier version of it glimpsed in the artist’s studio was perhaps overly tasteful in the perfect white-on-white “U”-shaped architecture that could have easily been the handiwork of an Italian design studio had Stewart not added a surprise ending: a large split black and fluorescent yellow quadrilateral band extending across most of the top of the painting. Heedless of the architecture and conventional good taste, Stewart employs the kind of yellow that usually only Charlene von Heyl can wield successfully. Under Stewart’s brush, it functions like an irreverent decal or a Joseph Albers color theory transparency exercise gone haywire.

Although, at first glance, the hard-edged elements in Stewart bring 1960s Ellsworth Kelly to mind, Stewart’s destabilized sensibility and almost inappropriately punchy color choices feel contemporary. His knack for continual self-invention and risk taking is  rare in a mature artist. In fact, being able to maneuver abstraction in a manner that is sophisticated and surprising is a feat for an artist of any age. Should you make the trip to Geary Contemporary in West Soho, be sure to also ask to see all Stewart’s paintings as some of the best, in my view, are tucked away in the office and backroom.

The post Spatial Dance: Jason Stewart Color Reliefs at Geary Contemporary appeared first on artcritical.

September 16, 2016 to January 2, 2017
99 Gansevoort Street, between 10th Avenue and Washington Street
New York City, info@whitney.org

This exhibition is focused on a relatively short segment of Carmen Herrera’s long career (she is now 101), namely 1948 to 1978. It presents her painting in Paris during the years immediately after World War Two, and then her development when she moved to New York. In the first gallery you find Siete (1949), a relatively small painting with hard-edged yellow, red and black forms. The Parisian works in this room show her experimenting with hard-edge abstraction, moving quickly, restlessly seeking resolution, not always with entire success. Untitled (1947-48), for example, is a fussy-looking construction of many relatively small circles and geometric forms, an all-over composition which feels cramped; and Untitled (1948) a decorative display of intersecting rectangles lacking a clear resolution.

The second room, has paintings made in New York, (Horizontal, 1965, is the best, in my opinion) which simplify her earlier abstract constructions, creating large scale compositions which surely must owe something to American painting of this period. Then the next, larger gallery contains a roomful of her “Blanco y Verde” paintings, nine in all, made between 1959 and 1971. Constructed of green and white, with triangular wedges, these magnificent pictures show her in full command of a passionate visual idiom. Thus Blanco y Verde (1962) shows a narrow rising green triangle of color; and Irlanda (1965) is a diamond, with similar triangles of color at the bottom edges, and another green form coming down from the top. And then, in the next gallery you find four wooden sculptures from the 1960s, including Azul “Tres” (1971), a two-part construction in blue which really stands out. Finally, facing the elevator are her seven Days of the Week, large-scale hard edge abstractions from the 1970s. The last part of the show is less than impressive, as if she hadn’t figured out how to build upon her achievement in the 1960s.

As a woman and as a Cuban-born artist, Herrara was obviously treated unjustly by the art world in the period covered by this show. Complementing the Whitney’s belated attention, in a well-meaning act of reparation, Herrera is being much praised in the media. She certainly is a gifted artist—anyone can see that. But because this relatively small exhibition, which certainly doesn’t present her entire career, or even, so I imagine, identify her starting point, offers such a limited selection of her art, it’s impossible to offer a confident, critical evaluation. Compare, for example, her Green and Orange (1958) in this exhibition with the very similar-looking works by Ellsworth Kelly and other American men or women. Her picture is impressive, but it’s hard to place. How original was she? Did she borrow from Kelly, or did he learn from her? A third, tantalizing possibility is that they arrived at their results independently.

We are left hungry for more insights into her situation within the Parisian art world. And much more information about how exactly she found herself in New York in the 1950s. This is neither a complaint about this exhibition nor a criticism of the artist, but rather, a plea for a fuller show and, also, for a more complete presentation of the historical context in which she developed. But a long journey must start somewhere, and this show is a welcome first step.

The post A Passionate Visual Idiom: Carmen Herrera at the Whitney appeared first on artcritical.

February 26 to April 30, 2016
523 West 24 Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, (212) 243-0200

Many of Ellsworth Kelly’s photographs, shown here in an exhibition of 31 gelatin silver prints, ingeniously feature the kind of geometric shapes that distinguish the late artist’s painting and sculpture: the triangle, trapezoid, rhombus, rectangle, curve and plank. Several prints are suggestive of the artist’s virtuosic plant drawings. The prints were produced under Kelly’s supervision just months before his death in 2015, and they were shot between 1950 to 1982. Over this long period, a singular attention to abstract elements in the everyday world remained constant whether the location was overseas or the US. In an essay from 1991 reprinted for the exhibition catalog, Kelly noted,

Two things interest me in particular; one is the way a frame — a window, an aperture — changes what you see. You can focus on things differently and frame them differently; your vision becomes fragmented. The other aspect is stereoptics — the fact that we have two eyes, and that we see things differently out of each. It’s very mysterious, but we tend to take that aspect of vision for granted.

Although the artist wasn’t referring to photography per se in this comment, his references to aperture, framing, and optics do relate to special things the camera can do, as well as to human vision. But no matter the tools or techniques, Kelly sought to study the world by cultivating his powers of observation. With regard to photography, he remarked,

Photography is for me a way of seeing things from another angle. I like the idea of the interplay of two or three dimensions. My photographs are simply records of my vision, how I see things. My ideas develop from seeing, not from photographs.

Kelly often noticed physical shapes in proximity to their shadows, or to voids. He made inventive use of camera optics and framing devices to translate ephemeral situations into enduring compositions. For example, the weathered, closed barn doors at the left of Barn, Southampton appear to be painted white, while the matching doors at right were folded open when the image was taken, so that the absence of light inside the barn printed black in the photo. Viewed across a wheat field, the barn’s middle gray tones offset this pair of white and black rectangles under a triangular roof. It may take a moment to register the roof and rectangles as abstract shapes within the scenery. But once you do, you’ve got your Ellsworth Kelly goggles on straight. As Kelly himself remarked: “Photography is about seeing in three dimensions and trying to bring it into two dimensions in a way that recalls the third. The process takes place in the mind.”

This comment is also pertinent to Doorway Shadow, Spencertown. A rhombus-shaped shadow falls from peaked boards onto a plywood sheet, where knots and grain gleam as if hand-polished. Their indexical texture is at odds with the flat black angle that dives to center. Seeing the world through the mind’s eye of Kelly’s camera offers an opportunity to understand a great artist’s work more fully.

The post A Process That Takes Place In The Mind: Ellsworth Kelly’s Photographs appeared first on artcritical.

In 1963 William Rubin identified in the work of Ellsworth Kelly “a particularly American combination of hedonism and the puritanical.” Kelly, who died December 27th, aged 92, at his home in Spencertown, NY, was, indeed, an artist who defied easy categorization. An exponent neither of minimal art, color field abstraction nor hard edge geometric abstraction, Kelly’s hybridity was equally typified by his diversity of medium, ranging from three dimensional layered canvases to free standing, flat, sometimes folded, painted metal objects. Always deceptively simple, the focused acuity of his work could be mistaken as reductionist, or purely formal, if viewed too quickly or carelessly. He settled early in his career into a preoccupation with observed line and shape, often realized in exactingly defined forms with intensely saturated color, or through the contrasts of black and white. He continued to explore such subject matter with the same urgency his entire life. In a recently -filmed interview we see him gesture towards paintings in his studio that he had to finish, he said, within his lifetime. There was no letting up, for this artist, exhibiting in all four of Matthew Marks’ gallery spaces in May and June of this year.

Before moving from Paris to New York, in 1954, Kelly had spent the previous six years working and traveling in France—a hugely formative experience that set him apart from the Abstract Expressionist scene, setting him up for the independent orientation that would characterize his position in the city he where he would soon be living and working. In France it was the non-performative abstraction of Piet Mondrian, Jean Arp and Constantin Brancusi that most absorbed Kelly. An appreciation of Romanesque churches, meanwhile, led to an awareness of painting’s relationship to architecture. The move to New York was, in part, inspired by a favorable review of Ad Reinhardt that signaled possibilities for his own distinctly non-gestural work back home.

The spare and rigorous beauty of Kelly’s paintings continued a process of refinement and depth that was unabated. The search for shapes and colors that correspond to the memory of selective visual events made his art thoroughly life-engaged, a way for memory to remain in the present tense in relationships between forms and colors. Though his paintings were often derived from things actually seen—the source admittedly not usually evident—in the sublime plant drawings the source was, of course, abundantly clear. But the same visual pleasure and intellectual curiosity in found or revealed form evident across his oeuvre, whether in drawings, paintings, collages, carved reliefs or painted objects. His works derive from, and bear, deep contemplation,

The select number of artists truly able to sustain passionate reverie in distilled form makes one realize, how difficult and rare is the ability to expose emotion and poise in subtly modulated, streamlined form. Blinky Palermo, himself indebted to Kelly, is one such artist. Another example would be the late cut papers of Matisse, . Kelly’s project for the design of a chapel offers comparison to Matisse’s own Chapelle du Rosaire de Vence on the Côte d’Azur. Kelly’s chapel designs, dating from the 1980s, were gifted by the artist earlier this year to the Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, Texas which is working towards its realization. Fittingly, the chapel brings full circle Kelly’s French connection. In 1951, he had made a trip to see Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation in Marseilles where he had noticed the large colored panels on the façade. “I didn’t want to use color for decoration but I liked the idea of color used in architecture,” he has said. After a lifetime of producing dynamically balanced paintings and sculptures, it is anticipated that architecture and the colored light from colored glass windows will add to and combine with the experience of a suite of black and white paintings in Kelly’s chapel. As with Matisse’s chapel, another great colorist and innovator will offer us an immersive, sensual encounter that amounts to the deletion of boundary between physically felt space and visually allusive color and light—a spirituality, embodied in the continuous present.

The post Embodied Presence: Ellsworth Kelly, 1923-2015 appeared first on artcritical.

June 3 to August 14, 2015
545 West 25th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York City, 212 206 0220

A group exhibition may be tightly focused, like a beam of light that penetrates the artfog to reveal a previously obscure order. Or it may cast a more diffuse glow, allowing the assembled works to illuminate one another, and viewers to intuit an order as they may. The latter curatorial style is just as rigorous as the former; if anything, a less programmatic exhibition requires (and rewards) heightened alertness to unexpected affinities among diverse works. Such an exhibition is the lively, elegant “Space Between,” on view through August 14 at the FLAG Art Foundation in Chelsea.

Curated by Louis Grachos, Executive Director of The Contemporary Austin, and FLAG Art Foundation Director Stephanie Roach, “Space Between” is ostensibly a consideration of objects in which the conventions of painting coexist with characteristics native to sculpture. This cross-generational exhibition of 33 works by 24 artists also reaches to photography to demonstrate the interplay of pictorial and physical space, exploring the fuzzy edges of this fruitfully gray area.

Of course, spatial ambiguity is not front-page news. Duchamp’s Bride Stripped Bare (1915 – 23) is but one illustrious 20th-century example, among many others. And then there is the ancient tradition of bas-relief, which transmutes ambient light into chiaroscuro. But “Space Between” doesn’t overplay this hand, as it touches also on the persistence of a certain shape-heavy, color-centric strain of abstraction and, by extension, urges viewers to think about art history in terms of continuity rather than wave upon wave of innovation, of radical newness.

Three relatively recent works by Ellsworth Kelly anchor the show. The most salient of these is Blue Relief Over Green (2004), two oil-on-canvas monochrome rectangles joined at a right angle and measuring about seven by six feet — plus, (the all-important third dimension) the two and three-quarters inches depth of the panels’ stretchers. The seemingly minor physical displacement of the picture plane interferes with the property of color — even Kelly’s full-throated hues — to appear to advance or recede in relation to one another. The visual tension is exquisite, and sets the tone for ”Space Between.”

Gazing down into Roni Horn’s Pink Around (B) (2008), a solid glass disk 40 inches in diameter and 15 inches high, the viewer is simultaneously impressed by its mass and beguiled by the blushing delicacy of its coloration. Sadie Benning’s compact wall pieces, such as Wipe, Montana Gold Banana and Ace Fluorescent Green (2011), embody color quite differently: on these small, plaster-covered panels, two distinct hues occupy the same physical plane while vying for illusionistic space. Meanwhile, the title divulges the object in Thomas Demand’s photographic triptych, Detail (Sportscar) (2005), in which extreme cropping renders unrecognizable these sleek orange forms.

In this context, attention to color doesn’t necessarily imply abundant chroma. The oldest work in the show is Mystry Man (1984) by Tony DeLap, a seven-foot-high wall construction made of canvas over an eccentrically shaped and beveled wood stretcher and painted a precise shade of gray. Nearby is Wyatt Kahn’s Untitled (2014), another painting/sculpture hybrid, in which the deadpan color of raw linen contrasts with the flat panels’ animated, undulating contours.

There are two corner pieces in the show. Untitled Still Life (2013) by Kaz Oshiro is a large, cherry-red, square canvas tipped 45 degrees, its left corner bent and crumpled where it meets the adjacent wall. It seems a bit reluctantly sculptural. Jim Hodges contributes Toward Great Becoming (orange/pink) (2014), in which two mirror-tiled panels — irregular polygons — reflect each other and complete themselves. It is dazzling, and makes you giddy.

Two adjoining galleries testify to the wide influence of Agnes Martin on the work of contemporary artists. One space houses Martin’s Peace and Happiness (2001), a wonderful 60-inch-square canvas comprising alternating horizontal bands of azure blue and dusty white, faintly delineated in pencil. The mirage-like effect is atmospheric one moment, concrete the next. In its proximity, Rebecca Ward’s clandestine (2015) — a five-foot-high work in which stitched sections of canvas, painted in pearly tones, are partially deconstructed to reveal the stretcher—shares this Martin’s split personality. The Sun, Chapter 1 [diagonal edge, horizontal stripe] (2001), a quiet stunner by R.H. Quaytman, also reflects on its own structure; the primary motif, a diagonal band, depicts in section the plywood panel on which it is painted. The interconnectedness of visuality and materiality is borne out in other splendid works in this gallery by Julia Rommel and Svenja Deininger.

A second Martin, the 12-inch-square Untitled #6 (1999), keeps company with a trippy, mirrored, space-confounding 2D work in glass, mirror and wood by Olafur Eliasson, Walk Through Wall (2005); a cast resin piece by Rachel Whiteread, titled A.M. (2011) — in homage to the Martin? — which seems to refer to a gridded windowpane; and two colored pencil drawings by Marc Grotjahn from his “butterfly” period of a decade or so ago. Rounding out the show are terrific works by Sarah Crowner, Liam Gillick, Sérgio Sister, Andreas Gursky, Blair Thurman, and Douglas Coupland (yes, the novelist).

In the mid-to-late 1950s, Kelly and Martin worked in a loft building on Coenties Slip in lower Manhattan. Contrary to the prevailing Abstract Expressionist autographic touch, improvisational composition and spatial flux, they concerned themselves with unbroken color and unambiguous, hard-edge shape. Decades of “isms” (and the neighborhood’s loft buildings) have fallen like dominoes since those days, but the deeper structures of contemporary art’s visual vocabulary remain intact and vital. As Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns are lauded for eliding painting and sculpture in the neo-Dada 1950s, so too do the efforts of Kelly and Martin (and other Coenties Slip figures like Jack Youngerman and Charles Hinman) echo today.

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Ellsworth Kelly: Chatham Series

May 23 to September 8, 2013

The Museum of Modern Art
The Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Painting and Sculpture Galleries, fourth floor
11 West 53rd Street
New York City, (212) 708-9400

Ellsworth Kelly, a leading practitioner of monochromatic painting in the last century, chose to distance himself from the ideological positions available to him. From his early work, based on observations of shadow, light, and natural forms, to the geometric panels of the late sixties—paintings that were not about geometry per se so much as the beauty of the curve—he has remained a painter whose work is accessible to a larger art viewing audience. Kelly’s vision, like that of Josef Albers, has always been a source of uncomplicated pleasure rooted in the optical varieties of visual experience. So to discover in the withering days of a sweltering New York July an entire series of the artist’s paintings at The Museum of Modern Art was as exhilarating as finding an available iced coffee vendor on sun-baked 53rd street. The exhibition serves as a welcome reminder that  great art does not always require a heavy dose of anxiety.

Completed in the early 1970s, the Chatham Series is a group of fourteen paintings Kelly worked on in the town of Chatham in upstate New York; a far cry from the Manhattan environment that had been the artist’s home since the 1950s. Unlike De Kooning’s move to Long Island at approximately the same time, Kelly’s relocating to rural solitude did not initiate noticeable changes in his palette, or generate pastoral themes. But it gave him what he needed: a larger workspace, fewer interruptions, and the luxury of working on extended projects. Each of the paintings in the Chatham Series is an upside-down “L” composed from two conjoined rectangular panels of different color. It is a simple and elegant, though not a pictorially intuitive choice, as each painting reads more as object than picture. Yet an important advantage gained by what might otherwise appear to be an arbitrary shape is how it seduces the viewer into considering its components as free-form collage elements, intensifying the interaction of the two colors without having to wrestle with the ever mystifying picture plane. The “L” shape amplifies color and proportion in a way that might otherwise have been subsumed into a more conventional and hence less effective pictorial language.

Typical of the series, Chatham VI: Red Blue, 1971 is a red horizontal panel sitting atop a shorter blue panel. The width of each panel seems equal, but the length of the red is greater, which feels counterintuitive. One would think the more intense red ought to be given less area than the blue, in order to balance the composition. Apparently—since its balance is flawless—either the horizontality has a diminishing effect on the red, or the blue panel, by occupying the lower region, reads as a counterweight for the cantilevered panel above, thus implying greater mass. Such questions enliven the proud simplicity of the series.

MoMA’s presentation is both generous and appropriate. As you walk from one painting to another, the wish to compare becomes overwhelming. Yet doing so runs the risk of trivializing the artist’s achievement regarding each painting’s unique solution. To address this problem, curator Ann Temkin installed the Chatham paintings in several adjoining rooms, taxing one’s visual memory of what has just been seen, and thus animating the effect of whichever canvas is under present scrutiny. A visitor cannot help but become sensitive to the subtle adjustments leading to each painting’s resolution. You begin to notice for example that none of the black panels are really black. Each is in fact a darkish grey, adjusted, one assumes, to whichever color is abutted against it. Even in the ones paired with a white panel, its contrasting black appears appropriately attuned.

As an expression of the universal mysteries of color and perception, Kelly’s Chatham Series offers the harried museum visitor a chance to relax in color, quiet their mind, and consider the factual beauty of a certain yellow bordering a certain blue.

The post When Two Colors Meet: Ellsworth Kelly at MoMA appeared first on artcritical.

Josephine Baker-Heaslip:

To: Tilted Arc
Federal Plaza
New York City

03/15/1989

Since hearing the news of your immanent sentence, I am now aware that I have left it too late to write this letter. Your presence in my life has been unavoidable, and perhaps we may not have one last moment together before your removal. I know that most people don’t understand you and consider you an eyesore, but I appreciate your beauty and your seemingly precarious existence enthralls me. Although many have objected to your austere and uncompromising appearances, I must say I admire your integrity to not conceal your physical properties – unpolished steel is nothing to be ashamed of.

When you’re here I feel that every move I make with you resonates in the whole environment we inhabit. Every step I take is a new experience, every surface a voyage of discovery. You continuously challenge my very impressions of space, but because of this I hope you will not consider conscious human emotion too conventional. I understand that your manner of expression does not allude to or promote romantic acuity, yet I cannot help asking: You must be aware of what you are doing to me, and no doubt to many others! If your conditions for creation are abstract, then perhaps you empathize with such emotions that defy figuration and resolution?

Despite your immeasurable size, I think together we could achieve a balance – my love for you is on par with the city itself. When I am closely navigating your slender bulk, you sensuously curve toward me as if in an open embrace. You exist in a perpetual climax, which never grants a resolution or even closure to our relationship – sometimes I feel that my love for you is more of a hindrance than you are to the public.

I can understand that the specificity of the site is paramount to your existence, for it is the medium with which you have been created, but why should the conditions of your maker still prescribe your individual life? You cannot live without the direct experience you have been made to create, as I cannot live without experiencing you.

———————————————————————————————————–

Jim Walsh:

Dear Blue,

I nearly missed you in Matisse’s Red Studio, tucked up there in the corner.
And with Picasso it was all about you, wasn’t it? The closest I could get was being Rose…
Kelly brought us together, side by side, if only for a moment, but too close as the purple gulf ensued that always happens when we mix.
I’ll find you again, Cerulean Majesty, please rely on that! And then the sparks will fly!

Always burning for you,

Red

The post Love Letters: Winners of artcritical’s Valentine’s Day Competition appeared first on artcritical.

AXA Gallery, until August 14, 2006
787 Seventh Ave at 51st Street, New York, 212 554 4818

Think of a typical Ellsworth Kelly, of the kind of work that makes him probably the best known living abstract artist, and what comes to mind is a sail-like shaped canvas, perhaps, or a freestanding aluminum form, in a strident, singular, retina-saturating color.  Or, going back to his classic, hard-edge geometric abstractions of the 1950s and ‘60s, severe rectangles, again in no-nonsense chromatic solids.  You could say he is an echt minimalist: a stylish, diffident advocate of the less is more aesthetic.

Repair to the AXA Gallery at the midtown AXA-Equitable Building, and you might have a change of heart: The hardnosed abstractionist has a soft underbelly in the form of forty years of exquisite nature studies.  The exhibition is organized by the Grand Rapids Art Museum, who possess a definitive collection of all his plant lithographs from his “Suite of Plant Lithographs” (1964-66) up through half a dozen prints from 2004.  In it, Mr. Kelly emerges as the Redouté of High Modernism, leaving no leaf unturned, covering cyclamens to camelias, ailanthus to algae, melons to magnolias, sunflowers to string beans.

There are seventy two prints in the show, and collectively they make for a powerful statement.  There is actually remarkably little formal development over his career of as plant portraitist—or, to make the same point positively, he achieved formal maturity in this idiom from the outset.  The prints are mostly big, at around two by three feet, with the depicted plant, leaf or fruit centered on the off-white page and rendered with tight economy strictly in outline.

Mr. Kelly’s engagement with flora dates back to the outset of his career.  In 1949, while living in Paris, he drew seaweeds and algae from life, influenced in his choice of subject by his School of Paris mentors, Matisse and Arp, (he met the latter.)  It is a drawback of the exhibition not to include some of these earlier drawings, even in the catalogue, to show the more varied notation of these detailed, yet still streamlined sketches.  By the early 1950s, experimentation with increasingly schematic line, cutout, collage led Mr. Kelly towards a severe, reductive abstraction, first of grid systems, then of geometric forms.  It was only in the mid-1960s, back in France, that he was ready to readmit representation as an aspect of his work in the form of printmaking.

When you get used to the fact that Mr. Kelly is drawing plants from life, then actually what emerges is a feeling of business as usual: in many ways, these drawings are of a piece with his geometric abstraction.  The look is singular, uncompromising, confident, stylish, and personal.  The tone is even, consistent, and not despite but because of its severity, sumptuously absorbing.  The cream walls and blond frames, and the expanses of paper supporting marks of similar quality, induce a sense of serenity and order.  With not a hint of green in sight, you are in the world’s coollest hothouse.

The fact that he sticks to outline and denies himself any form of modeling suggests a degree of abstraction even in observational drawing.  His concern is with the essence of each plant he is working on, rather than the given living thing that engages his vision in a particular time and place. In this sense, the prints are true to their botanical forebears in their high-minded typology.  The lack of color and the insistence on line gives a scientific gravitas to the enterprise—like black and white photography—even though, in fact, the sleekness denies information—a reminder that less is only more aesthetically.

Mr. Kelly treats his leaves and plants in isolation from their trees but as if still hanging to them—again, revealing an aeshetic sensibility that accords with a scientific approach.  This is even the case with “Oranges,” from the 1964-66 suite of 28 images, the only lithograph that depicts fruits without surrounding foliage: Viewed in their fullness from below, only a couple of nipples ensure that they are read as oranges at all.  Other fruits, like “Grapefruit,” “Tangerine,” and “Lemon” in the same portfolio, come with their stalk and a few leaves to ensure a credible sense of attachment.  While the images are insistently flat, there is enough of a sense of roundness, depth and overlap in the forms to suggest credible volume.

Mr. Kelly’s line quality nestles, throughout this body of work, in a distinctive middle-ground that’s at once assured and tentative.  There is a strong sense of slow, deliberate observation—these are not dashed off, bravura lines, nor stylised approximations.  There is some variety of pressure in his lines, but an overall consistency and evenness. Sometimes there is tension or awkwardness in the curves and joins, but there is no evidence of pentimenti, or rubbing out or going over.  It is as if he is cautious about what he puts down, but fearless in then standing by it.

In “Pear III” from the same portfolio, for instance, the fruit is rendered in a single, continuous line that fluctuates in a way that reads, very credibly, as the organic shape of the fruit.  The leaves have stray lines that don’t quite meet, but that serves to suggest their quivering, flickering quality, just as the crude strength of lines depicting the branches conveys their delicacy and resilience.

These prints can suggest both abstraction and naturalism.  The scale ensures that you engage with the images on the maker’s terms: Too big to turn comfortably by hand in a portfolio, you must grant them the dignity of a wall.  Unlike botonical studies from Leonardo to Ruskin that notate on a reduced scale, these actually blow up their subject beyond life-size.  This might seem to place them at the level of the decorative and the schematic, but it also means you sense the originating hand, arm, whole body of the artist.  They are not “of” nature but “in” nature, in the sense of the distinction drawn by Jackson Pollock.

Mr. Kelly’s modus operandi, likewise, can come across as direct or indirect. Original sketches are made in situ in gardens or parks.  These are then copied in the studio, on specially treated papers which are then transferred in the print shop to the lithographic plate so that the printed impression inverts back again to the original drawing orientation.  Lithography is the printmaking medium truest to the instrinsic quality of the original line, the crumbliness of the crayon.  At every level, in other words, Mr. Kelly places himself at a remove – from direct observation, from the give and take of printmaking experimentation – in order, ironically, to arrive at freshness and a sense of truth.

The Plant Lithographs are among several activities that underscore Mr. Kelly’s attachment to the observed world.  He has made collages in which his characteristic color shapes are applied as torn fragments of paper to views of New York or reproductions of favorite works of art, a means by which to accentuate through obliteration.  He draws self-portraits.  And he photographs the man made environment—shadows on steps, a curved horizon line in a snowy field, a hangar doorway, a manhole—finding readymade Kelly-like shapes and forms as a vindication of his own formal vocabularly.  These engagements with nature and observation inevitably force a rethink of the remoteness and artifice of his abstraction.

In contrast to the 1960s Minimalists whom he formally anticipated, he is really a much gentler spirit, an old fashioned abstractionist whose forms—however severe looking—are rooted in nature.  His plant lithographs, like his postcard collages and photographs, reveal a shape sensualist who looks at the world.  But just as surely, his naturalism has the sharp, cool cerebralness of a master of abstraction.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, June 8, 2006

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October 15 through November 22, 2003

This show encompasses a number of different styles and formats, namely cutouts and collage, and the definition of “cutout” is meant to be multi-faceted.. Cutout generally means cutting out shapes and placing them on some sort of background. Cutouts allow artists to draw without the use of chiaroscuro. Crisp edged cutout forms have been used by artists to emphasize color and outline. Cutout has also been an essential part of modern art because of the way it flattens out forms and the picture space. Collage on the other hand, creates ambiguity in two-dimensional space. Photos, text, drawing, painting, and other materials, such as wallpaper, pieces of construction paper, and candy and food wrappers can be combined in the same composition. Through collage, artists have been able to subvert subject matter, add psychological or political dimensions to their work, approach drawing and painting in new ways, suggest new kinds of pictorial space, introduce text into their work, and redefine pictorial realism.

In Kara Walker’s work and the small pieces by Alex Katz in this show, notions of foreground and background are presented unambiguously; the picture plane is not deconstructed. The cutout is used either to sharpen the contrast between picture planes (Walker) or to heighten the tension between two-dimensional space and the suggestion of three-dimensional forms (Katz).

Walker uses stenciled cutouts to create a jarring contrast between fore and background, which makes her work more disturbing and surreal. The black stenciled forms she places on a solid white background (“Jockey,” 1995) have political implications, but also fool us into thinking we can easily read the action and the figures. In fact it is not clear exactly what we are looking at. The gender of the figures, what they are wearing and holding and doing is unclear. We are not sure how the figures are interacting with one another, even though their outlines are crisp.

Three small collages by Alex Katz from the fifties (“Cat,’ 1959, “Roadmaster,” 1955-56, and “Two Figures,” 1955) are perfect examples of how artists use simple means, snipping away at tiny pieces of colored paper, to portray complex relationships. The trimmed edges of the colored paper capture the nuances of the figure of a sleeping cat, two lovers lounging on the grass, and a parked car. Katz’s Rowboat, 1964, is a piece made of painted wood cutouts of two people in a rowboat floating on calmly rippling water. The cutout figures have been painted black, and when placed on a white background, create the illusion of three dimensional space, rippling water, shadow, and solid form and figure, without resorting to line drawing or the modulation of colors.

The isolating effect produced by the cut-out can be used in a variety of ways. One of Katz’s full length portrait cutouts of friends and colleagues (“Frank O’Hara,” 1959-60) transforms the gallery space into a background for the figure. The cut aluminum figure by William King (“Magic,” 1972) has a ghostly erotic presence. From one angle the shape looks like a female figure, bending to the floor with her rear end in the air. Viewed from another angle, this reading falls apart and the shape becomes completely abstract.

Like many artists in this show, Robert Motherwell uses collage to enhance the drawing process and reinvent form. Drawn or painted elements commingle with newspaper clippings, images, and text to form an agitated whole. Ellsworth Kelly juxtaposes different materials,a fragment of a naked woman over a row of mountains (“Horizontal Nude,” 1974), a bar of color pasted over the Statue of Liberty (“Statue of Liberty,” 1957) to create new kinds of pictorial space and to recontextualize cultural icons. A few artists in this show follow in the tradition of cubist collage and make new forms and new spaces using fragments of observed reality and patterns and textures such as Lee Krasner’s “Study for Mosaic at 2 Broadway, New York,” 1959, and Frank Stella’s “Lanckorona,” 1972.

The most exciting rarities in this show are “Woman,” 1969-70, by Willem de Kooning, believed to be an armature or study aid for a sculpture he never made, and a small but beautiful gouache découpée by Matisse (“Alga on Green Background,” 1947). An India ink drawing on a wood cutout, “Woman” is immediately recognizable as a de Kooning because of the familiar high heel shoes and flailing breast shapes. This object was probably one of the many fragments of unfinished projects or ideas the artist had strewn about his various work spaces. The Matisse consists of a purple tendril shape (which appears in many of Matisse’s late works) placed on a green background. The piece has an aqueous feel to it, and the colors are enchanting.

This show makes it clear that artists used collage and cutout to disrupt or flatten or complicate the picture plane and to introduce different materials into the same composition. Photography undermined the realism welded by painters and draftsman for centuries, but collage and cutout allowed visual artists to manipulate two-dimensional space in ways not available to the photographer, at least, notprior to the invention of graphics software. Collage and cutout transformed the very notions of abstraction and realism, and the works in this show exemplify the liberating spirit they brought to modern draftsmanship and painting.

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Frank Stella: Recent Work, Paul Kasmin Gallery, 293 Tenth Avenue, through June 28, 212-563-4474

Suzan Frecon Paintings, Lawrence Markey Gallery, 42 East 76th Street, through June 14, 212.517.9892

What happens to proto-minimalists when their creativity outspans their spawn’s? Ellsworth Kelly and Frank Stella, veterans of the extreme reductivism of the 1960s, inserted themselves into 101 Art History on the page just before Minimalism. But they managed to outlive – and arguably outgrow – such key minimalists as Donald Judd and Dan Flavin. They were both pioneers of the shaped canvas: monochrome in Mr. Kelly’s case, pinstriped in Mr. Stella’s.

Mr. Kelly’s work fills three separate spaces of the Matthew Marks Gallery, with paintings ranging from 1999 to this year and self-portrait drawings from 1944-92. The experience of seeing eight of the shaped and multi-paneled canvases in a grand industrial space is disconcertingly scaleless. One can stand at a similar proportional distance to these large works as a reader does to pictures in a book, and it is in the nature of Mr. Kelly’s depersonalized aesthetic that his monochrome shapes assume the emblematic quality of graphic design. For instance, “Red with White Relief” (2002), a near rectangle of red with a white triangle superimposed at the cut-away top left, reads like a shirt launderer’s logo. Other works, however, are richly satisfying in their subtle perceptual complexity. Not the prim rectangles of clinical color, so much as the more sumptuously colored trapezoids and curved forms. These free-float on the wall and in the imagination alike.

It is not unprecedented for Mr. Kelly or his curators to present works based on direct observation in relation to his severe geometric abstractions. The 1996 Guggenheim retrospective offered discrete rooms of his photographs, linear drawings of flora, and collages. At a banal level, these ameliorate the severity of his abstraction. In the case of the current exhibitions, however, the heightened shape-awareness induced by Mr. Kelly’s best paintings carries across to what would otherwise appear conventional, if accomplished, self-portraits. Harry Cooper deftly argues for such a reading of these self-images in the handsomely produced catalog.

There is an extraordinary range of styles in these drawings- including tight, illustrative realism, modern classicism, and hints of the modernism of Klee, Matisse, and Picasso. One from 1949 recalls the clipped angst of Lucian Freud, who was actually in Paris at the same time. Despite varieties of line-quality, from bold Chinese brushwork to spindly penmanship, and subtle fluctuations of emotion, from boyish aloofness to a suitable nervousness – in 1987, while strapped up at the Mayo Clinic – there is unmistakable unity of purpose and personality in this remarkable body of drawings.

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If Mr. Kelly anticipated Minimalism, Mr. Stella precipitated it. Where Mr. Kelly strove for the cool impersonality of Byzantine icons, Mr. Stella could coldly assert, “What you see is what you see.” It is not so surprising, therefore, that while Mr. Kelly’s career has glided along its serene path, Mr. Stella’s has been marked by violent oscillations and seeming contradictions. Formally speaking, the smart-assed cerebrality of the early, black-stripe paintings are a far cry from the histrionic graffiti-baroque reliefs of the 1980s and 1990s. But the differing styles connect at the level of provocation..

The new sculptures on view at Paul Kasmin are, by the standards of their immediate predecessors at the same gallery in winter 2001, relatively couth. The aluminum tubes, pipes, and trusses out of which they are made are uncolored – mercifully, as Mr. Stella is a consumate vulgarian in color. One piece from 1998-02, “Die Kurfurstin (The Electoress),” is from his von Kleist series and relates to the joyous extravaganza unveiled at the National Gallery in Washington in 2001. It uses a white fiberglass material to magical spiraling effect, recalling the Russian Constructivists as well as the roofs of various Guggenheims.

In similar playful mood, “Bamboo Trophy I” (2002), evokes the crown on the Statue of Liberty. But while whimsy, exuberance, and invention are in bountiful supply in these generally likeable works, it’s impossible to get too much sculptural purchase on them. In the absence of convincing structure and form relationship, his disposition of effects is ultimately gratuitous. The artist’s claim that his 3-D works are paintings not sculptures smacks of special pleading on behalf of scatter. Overload proves a poor surrogate for complexity.

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Suzan Frecon brings an intimist sensibility to the genre of hard-edge abstraction. A show of new work, which closes this weekend, offers a painterly antidote to the brutal elegance of Ellsworth Kelly. Even in pared down, minimal compositions, her touch is soft, subtle, and alive. In much the way that Mr. Kelly’s austere abstraction is somehow humanized by his drawings and photographs, appreciation of Ms. Frecon’s is augmented by her watercolors. They are not on view at Lawrence Markey this time, but their quirky deliberated handwriting and vaguely primitive, non-western shape vocabulary find equivalents in theinvested surfaces of her oil paintings and their subtle orientalism. (There are intimations of the turban, the scimitar, and Moorish archways among her new motifs.) Palette has a lot to do with Ms. Frecon’s tenderness: She abstains from the primaries or cool, clinical colors to explore wine reds and terra cottas and pulsating greens. Her painterly touch strikes a gorgeous balance between restraint and sensuality.

This article first appeared in The Sun, June 12, 2003

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