Anne Neely: Mopang: Recent Work at Lohin Geduld Gallery

September 7 to October 8, 2011
531 West 25th Street
New York City, 212-675-2656

A few years ago, a book titled Water: The Fate of Our Most Precious Resource by Marq de Villiers fell into the hands of Anne Neely, who maintains a studio in Washington County, Maine during the summer. There she read about the Mopang Aquifer, a subterranean water supply in Washington County that came under threat in the late 1980s when land above became the proposed site of an ash dump. Locals successfully defended the aquifer, but many other stories collected by de Villiers didn’t end as happily.

The book prompted Neely to contemplate water, below the earth and above. Her complex, diagrammatic, patchwork abstractions went from tall to wide. The horizon line, often implicit in her work, became recognizable as a geographic distance.

Neely’s adoption of the landscape motif clarified her paintings. She has an extraordinary appetite for details, and details can overwhelm a composition with clutter. Placing sky above and earth below forced her myriad little shapes into one or the other, and unified them.

Neely was ideally suited to the problem of painting groundwater, which one can only represent in a schematic. Her multicolored dots and dashes, her painted and scratched capillaries, and the translucent viscosity of her oils provided a complete vocabulary of analogues. Mopang (2010) seems to depict a cross-section of the planet’s crust. A thin line of distant hills confines a sky of lime and azure to the top fifth of the canvas. Earth lies beneath it in dirt-brown and sand-beige strata .

Towards the bottom, the brown drips over a background of indigo and lapis – water, presumably, but it is the earth that is liquid. There’s a particular grid of rounded rectangles that you get when you allow fluid paint to drip in one direction for a while, then turn the canvas sideways. The paint gathers at unpredictable points along the line of the drip, falls orthogonally, then flows into neighboring drips. Neely has executed this to lovely effect along the bottom quarter of Mopang, and filled the  rectangles in with ocher, violet, and earth green. The same colors reappear as hundreds of particles dotting the middle swath of the painting. It is as if the State of Maine’s Bureau of Land & Water Quality had hired Gustav Klimt as a geological surveyor.

Kettle Hole (2010-11) could be a forest under a night sky beyond a field of ice, or a bed of lake flora over another bed of limestone. Packets of color, formed by the knifing of white onto a fiendishly complicated background, cross the chilly scene. They look like coded messages, parcels en route to points east and west of the painting. The speeding, abstracted traffic brings Julie Mehretu to mind, though Neely does a more convincing job cohering the flurry of marks into a painting.

There’s a three-axis consideration to her use of materials that brings about this coherence. One runs from thin paint to thick, one runs from dry application to wet, and one runs from lean to fat, understood in the painterly way. (The addition of oil medium is fatter.) Neely exploits the whole range, resulting a technical dimensionality that one can pore over with great pleasure. Drips, glazes, impastos, and scrapes come together like elaborate embroidery.

Neely never allows the sentiment behind a work to turn into sentiment in the work. She has felt the problem with great depth, yet at no expense to her artistry. Thus she can produce paintings like Tidal (2010), a fiery Divisionist landscape under a sweeping orange sky. Its summery dots could be joyful. Its blue mass in the distance could be a scorched, disappearing lake. The painting understates the message, keeping within the borders of art, where it excels.

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After that it took us 45 minutes to travel three blocks, with Nick marveling at each new encounter. That is how it was with Nick. He possessed a complete alert attentiveness to the world around him, had a great passion for art, and his enthusiasm for life was all-encompassing.  He was completely immersed in the world of art precisely because, for him, art was life, art was experience and every moment contained the very present possibility of new ideas and new inspiration.

Nick was born in 1917 and grew up in Hoboken, NJ.  He began his studies in art at the age of 11 with the Leonardo DaVinci school in downtown Manhattan, and later he studied at the National Academy and served as Leon Kroll’s apprentice and model.  His classical training allowed him to develop a sure and elegant drawing hand.  He could carve out form beautifully.

But it was during the War years, when he was traveling at night from his post out on Long Island to 8th Street to study with Hans Hoffman that he developed his understanding of plastic space. And that understanding not only opened up a whole new world for him, but also launched him on a singularly creative career as an artist.

When the War was over Nick was honored with the Prix de Rome and a Fulbright Fellowship, and those prizes enabled him to work in Italy for several years.  He met a wide range of artists, including Matta, who introduced him to the surrealists and, as a result, became a major influence on his work and life.

Back in New York Nick reconnected with friends from his time in Italy, including Conrad Marcarelli, Philip Pavia and Philip Guston, and took part in the famous 9th Street Show, helping to usher in a new era of painting in New York. He began to work with Eleanor Ward as a director of the Stable Gallery, and created the hugely successful Stable Annual Show, which was modeled on the 9th Street Show, and he brought new young artists into the Stable giving Cy Twombly, Joseph Cornell and Robert Rauschenberg their first one-man shows.  He also brought John Graham into the fold.  Nick himself had two solo shows at the Stable, and then moved to Staempfli Gallery.

He was a sought after educator, teaching at Cooper Union, Yale, Brandeis, Cornell, Columbia, S.V.A.  and the New York Studio School, where he was a founding faculty member and taught for 20 years.  Later, he founded his own art School in Umbria, Italy, the International School of Art.

And while the hundreds of students he taught through the years would easily testify that he was a dynamo in the class room, it was after he retired from teaching that his work gained an astonishing new energy and momentum.  Several recent shows at Lohin Geduld Gallery and Chelsea, and at Washburn Gallery on 57th Street, showed an artist at the absolute peak of his powers.

In 2007 Lohin Geduld Gallery showed monumental head sculptures that Nick carved from field stones that he found on the ground around his house in Umbria. The heads are haunting, shocking, emotive, and with their hypnotic gaze they demand a connection with the viewer on a real human level.  Nick claimed that the heads were already present in the stone, and that he simply liberated them into the light of  the present day. Perhaps that’s why they have all the enigmatic appeal of the ancient and archaic, while remaining, in the end, entirely modern.

When it comes to Nick’s work, it’s exciting to know that there is a lot more to explore: three small wax figures featured in that same show give just a hint at a branch of his oeuvre which hasn’t yet been shown to its best advantage.  These fragile, subtle wax sculptures are torsos – some with limbs some without – which are some of his most intimate and sensual works.  They beg to be held in the hand and turned.  I was lucky enough to visit him in the studio while he was working on these sculptures, and my small glimpse into his process is now etched on my brain.  He laid the sculptures out on his work table, some individually, some seemingly in a pile, next to a Bunsen burner, some pots of wax, and a series of strange bottles and jars filled with odd mixtures. The forms that he touched into being were tightly crafted, and they were almost translucent, literally shining in the light. I’d like to see them cast and exhibited.

New large-scale abstract paintings shown at Washburn Gallery in 2009 were bold, lyrical, and mesmerizing in black and white and muted tones.  John Yau wrote of them in the Brooklyn Rail: “Every move is purposeful, while all of it feels improvised; this is the magic that Carone has achieved in the syntax of Abstract Expressionism, particularly because he has made that language specific to his concerns. His lines are simultaneously elegant, unhurried, understated, and child-like.”

Nick’s painted “Psychic” portraits – that is portraits of men and women who never existed – that have been included in group shows, but have not yet been given a solo showcase.  And that’s a pity. Nick spent 50 years making these paintings, starting with his early years in Italy and continuing on to the end of his life.  You could say they are strange – because they are – and you’d have to admit that they are more than a little bit interesting. Some of them are clowns, and others are temptresses, ogres, aristocrats, sages, androgines, and modernized renaissance men. They fall somewhere between figments of the imagination and flights of fancy. Like the very best portraits, they seem to encapsulate a lifetime of experience, which is fascinating since their subjects never drew a breath outside of Nick’s imagination. They also have the strong undercurrrent of Eros that permeated all of Nick’s work – something akin to the tension and longing that occupies the moment before a first kiss – and all of those factors demand that they be treated to a truly ambitious show in the near term.

But through his career, the figure was enormously important to Nick. It was his fuel, his inspiration, his tool. The figure is the building block that shapes and drives the abstract painting: the figure is the process and the figure is the form.

Just last June Nick said to me “Don’t forget.  With the figure, anything is possible.”  I saw this idea come to life in that visit when Claude and Chris Carone, Nick’s sons, showed me his last psychic portraits, which were filled with the physical intensity, turmoil and anxiety of an artist struggling to continue his work at the end of his life, and even then, unafraid to go into the metaphysical realm.

Nick was a living legend, and that he was not out in the forefront of the art world was always hard for me to understand. But I believe that his low profile freed him enormously, and there is no question that when he re-emerged with the shows at Lohin Geduld and Washburn his work was triumphant. No question – here was an artist who was at the very height of his career, whose work was, and is – thoroughly contemporary, multidimensional and unapologetic.

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CALDER: FROM MODEL TO MONUMENT
PaceWildenstein thru March 4, 545 W 22

PHILIP GRAUSMAN
Lohin, Geduld thru March 11, 531 W25, 212 675 2656

Monuments maybe every sculptor’s dream, but they can be a mixed blessing. They communicate beyond the artworld with a big public, and put the sculptor in a line from Stonehenge, the Gothic Cathedrals, Rodin.  But they consume disproportionate energies to their aeshetic return.

A sculptor can have any number of  new ideas in the maquette studio for the time and energy, usually demanding assistance, needed to realise a single piece at a monumental scale.  A maquette, thanks in part to the dollshouse effect, inspires a natural empathy: literally issuing from the hand, it conveys tangible emotion, a felt quality, that will inevitably get lost when transformed into a relatively depersonalized monolith.  The biggie is seen by more people, but people who are rushing to catch a train, or sit with their backs to the piece to enjoy a sandwich, or delinquent kids looking for a surface on which to skateboard or graffiti.  Alienation, starting with the production process, is felt all around.

The other problem with monuments is that often the artist is making them has become a monument, too: self-important, fixed in their ways.  The paradigm of the modern sculptor ruined by success is Henry Moore—or that at least is a received wisdom endorsed recently by Rachel Whiteread, explaining in interview why she didn’t want to be typecast as the kind of artist who makes memorials.  This expectation arose in part from her successful, widely admired Memorial to the Victims of the Holocaust in Vienna’s Judenplatz, inaugurated in 2000 after years of planning and negotiations. You could say that her new series at Luhring Augustine represents a struggle to find a post-monumental identity.

Ms. Whiteread was a natural for the Holocaust commission (won in competition) because her often poignant art deals inherently with memory and literally with loss.  It is a strength and weakness alike of her work that her career is predicated on a singular sculptural strategy: To make solid the negative space surrounding, or more intriguingly, sometimes, inhabiting the objects from which her works are cast.

The irony with Ms. Whiteread is that, unlike 9 out of 10 sculptors, she is far more effective when struggling to produce a big, public statement than when (no pun intended) casting around for smaller ideas, making sketches, exploring tentative explorations.  The projects that really extended her are the ones that also extend her medium and the viewer’s notion of sculpture or of the very experience of things. Besides the Holocaust memorial, this would include “House,” (1993), a cast of an entire terraced house in London’s East End, shamefully demolished weeks after completion by a philistine municipality; the similar treatment of individual rooms and staircases; and her contribution to an ongoing series of temporary pieces on the vacant fourth pedestal in London’s Trafalgar Square—her solution was to cast the plinth in transparent resin and mount it in reverse upon its original, a temporary apotheosis of the support, the ultimate celebration of the overlooked.

On a smaller scale, and in the works that seem spinoffs of her ambitious projects, Ms. Whiteread’s aesthetic can quickly degenerate into a boutique-version echo of itself: Elegant, occasionally suggestive, but gnawingly banal.  The Holocaust Memorial teased-out the negative space behind shelved books, a multilayered evocation of the People of the Book, the sense of missing volumes, of untold tales, of cruel statistics.  Following the commission, Ms. Whiteread turned out smaller works and variations which cheapened the memory of her original insight., At her best, Ms. Whiteread’s sculpture exploits and thus transcends the mundanity of the things in the world that occasion it; at second best, which never lurks far behind, mundanity claims her art for itself.  Maybe it is because the Whiteread casting process pushes literalism to such an extreme that it results in an aesthetic binary: the sculpture will be extraordinary or all too ordinary.

Her latest works derive from “Embankment,” (2005), an installation (which I am yet to see) in the gargantuan Turbine Hall of London’s Tate Modern, on view through April.  This work is made around 14,000 white plaster casts of different cartons, stacked to varying heights, amongst which visitors walk.  At the smaller but still voluminous Luhring Augustine, where individual sculptures are sparsely installed, there are two bodies of work: “pure” cartons, and cartons stacked in relationship with actual, appropriated furniture.

The problem with the carton motif is that there isn’t a significant differentiation between its exterior and its interior.  In a Whiteread there can be a crucial difference between a thing cast from without and within, to imply surrounding or vacated space.  The difference with a carton is academic—wherever the cast is taken, the result in a lumpen box that looks just like a carton only it isn’t empty and isn’t made out of cardboard.

The relationship of cast to actual in works like “Wait,” (2005), where six plaster units surround a chair, or “Surface,” where a table cohabits space with four carton-shapes, seems gratuitous.  There is none of the sinister poetics of the Columbian Doris Salcedo’s collisions of cement and furniture.

For Ms. Whiteread, attention to small, banal things produces results that are small and banal.  She is no Chardin, nor even Richard Tuttle.  The act of variation merely produces upscale tschotkas.  In small fry mode she mimics her  conceptualist mentors in the casting of negative space, Bruce Nauman and Joseph Beuys, whereas when confronting complexities, both thematic and technical, she can tap a richer vein of metaphor and association.  But don’t despair of Rachel Whiteread—just wait for the next monument.

Alexander Calder ought to be an example of a sculptor ruined by success: He was extraordinarily fecund in his early years, pioneering new sculptural forms with the mobile, the stabile, wire construction.  But exploring these further and making them bigger was no kiss of death, as a stunning show at PaceWildenstein’s second Chelsea space, leased from the Dia Foundation, makes clear.

The beauty and intrigue of Calder often has a lot to do with an inherent tension between human touch and machinist impersonality.  The son and grandson of sculptors and a trained engineer, his genius melted the distinction between art and technology.  His mobiles were “drawn” in wire, metal, found objects, often revealing a nervous, wobbly line, but then “worked,” miraculous staying aloft, floating, shimmering.

A similar dualism comes across in his late stabiles, the subject of this show.  These mammoth steel plate pieces arose from lucrative sculptural commissions during the building booms of the 1960s and 1970s.  Far from leaden or officious, however, they extended the elastic, exuberance of his mobile inventions. Actually, they knowingly riff a sense of the ponderous as circus-clown imitations of elephants and whales.  Beefy, bolted-together forms force an equation between heavy engineering and animal stockiness.

Most of the show is of working maquettes.  It is fascinating to chart upward progressions in scale when there are intermediate models to hand: “Jerusalem Stabile” (1976), for instance, a red-painted steel 1:3 model, which just shy of 12 feet high dominates the show.  A must see show, but who can explain the bizarre, pretentious catalogue which represents the works in scaleless, surfaceless, computerized graphics—defeating the whole point, I would have thought, of this otherwise thoughtful exhibition?

When it comes to a debate about intimacy and monumentality, Philip Grausman portrait sculpture throws a cat among the pigeons.  He makes images of people which are at once familiar and depersonalized, obviously born of observation and yet coolly hieratic.  They are installed in Lohin Geduld’s cramped quarters with the same dramatic effect as Ms. Whiteread and Calder are in their respective, sprawling art barns.

The heads in stainless steel are set on tubular pedestals of the same material, crowded into a back room like some Roman mausoleum.  There is something martial, even vaguely fascistic, in their polished metallic surface.  They look a bit like life masks at first, but have an animation that is only possible from sculpture worked ex nihilo.  Still, they elude the old category distinction of carving versus modeling in the way they are at once severe and fluid.

The show is dominated, however, by “Susanna,” (1996-99) a ten foot high version of a female head in fiberglass.  Dwarfing its surrounding space, it brings to mind Magritte’s surrealist fantasy of a comb and shaving brush in mammoth disproportion to its bedroom, or else romantic meditations of people amidst monumental classical ruins.  The white material has an ethereal, weightless quality, giving the woman’s serene expression a Buddha-like calm.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, March 2, 2006

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Until April 23

One of the appeals of Outsider Art is its apparent sincerity–the relief it offers from Postmodernist detachment and appropriation. The problem lies in verifying its authenticity, because a skilled artist can find ways to appropriate even the appearance of sincerity. After all, how hard is it to apply a naïve technique to naive subject matter?

Actually, it’s as difficult as any other kind of painting if you have any convictions about how a painting goes together. This is part of the intrigue of Mark Heyer’s quietly oddball paintings. One would think it impossible in 2005 to produce, with the careful-clumsy mannerisms of the self-taught, scenes of circuses, cabarets, and nineteenth-century whaling adventures without descending to mere quaintness. Yet by and large Heyer pulls it off.

His antique frames help, as do one or two idiosyncrasies of modeling—indulgent curlicues in a tornado’s funnel, for instance. And yes, there’s a certain slyness in his selection of motifs. But he’s helped most of all by a sure feeling for qualities of light and composition. “Getting Ready” depicts a woman hoisting her bare leg onto a bench to (perhaps) adjust her garter, a gesture that in an Eric Fischl painting would hint darkly at sleazy, unknown events, or in a painting by the nineteenth-century academician William Bouguereau would amount to pure fluff. Heyer, however, seems uninterested in such titillations; there’s a degree of innocence here, evidenced by an almost stately attention to the visual facts of the scene. His modeling and perspective are awkward, but Heyer’s sure feeling for the weight of light locates everything convincingly. Warm fleshtones set off the figure to just the right extent from the surrounding, cooler walls; the figure’s shadow–though unlikely in its shape–turns the rich red of the floor to a persuasive dark of unnamable hue. Subtle colors neatly catch the illumination, direct and reflected, on a nearby desk.

Heyer’s experience shows in the way he applies such insights to a wide variety of subjects, from landscapes to seascapes to interior scenes. Some even depict actual scenes from Greenpoint, Brooklyn; these have exactly the same ungainly authenticity as other images, leaving one to marvel at this balancing act between innocent perception and sophisticated synthesis.

At some points, the high-wire act falls a little flat: the midnight blues and spindly trees of “Going to Market” make the indebtedness to Henri Rousseau all too explicit. Still, such are Heyer’s powers that a kooky scene of a family, lined up for a group portrait with a huge lion standing peaceably in their midst, seems neither jokey nor affected. Similarly, his images of city nightlife don’t seem at all like commentaries on immoral culture—nor on our over-moralizing about it. The subjects, like the artist, seem to be simply preoccupied with tasks at hand.

These small, intriguing paintings show that clumsy rendering doesn’t compromise an image’s basic truthfulness. Of course, the reverse is also true; all the savoir-faire in the world won’t disguise a lack of conviction. Even in 2005, a discrete language of painting remains alive and accessible.

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Languor: A Group Show Curated by Kevin Wixted
Lohin-Geduld Gallery until July 17
531 West 25th Street, 212 675 2656

Night New York
Elizabeth Harris Gallery until July 23
529 West 20 Street, 212 463 9666

This article first appeared in the New York Sun, June 24, 2004

Before Lucian Freud there was Stanley Spencer, one of the most important English artists of the twentieth century and perhaps the most original anywhere. Look at any one of Spencer’s paintings from life-any nude, any portrait- and you recognize Freud’s derivations. His figures add little to Spencer’s lead beyond the physical weight of pigment. Of the two, Spencer was the more daring and inventive.

And he had a beautiful hand, on view at CDS in an intimate gem of an exhibition. The first show of his work in New York in over a decade, it offers 25 drawings, mostly studies from the 1920s to the ’50s. Attendance is obligatory. But do not come looking for color. There is only a single painting here: “King’s Cookham Rise,” (1947) a backyard view on loan from the Metropolitan. The exhibition hinges on the grace of Mr. Spencer’s line and the fertile wit and ambition of his compositions.

He drew contours with a fluid, unhesitating line resembling a stone cutter’s. It is fitting that sculptor Eric Gill, Spencer’s contemporary, counted him among the giants. There is surprising little pentimenti even in studies for complex arrangements. Every lovely mark is an ordered choice, confident in advance of its share of space on the page. Intuition of such caliber is impossible without mastery over the rythmic organization of masses and the language of graphite.

As much a Victorian child as D.H. Lawrence, Spencer enjoyed tweaking proprieties. A study for “The Last Day ” c. 1947, has men carrying women upsidedown by their ankles, knickers in the air. A delicious page of riffs on Leda and the swan puts Leda on her back, one stocking still on, with the swan bracing himself with webbed feet on just that spot where her garters should be.

Pay special attention to the intelligence and empathy of the portraits. His drawing of Mrs. Slessor is Holbeinesque in simplicity. In “Study of An Actor” (c. 1923) the planes of the face in profile-a draughtsman’s forte-are etched with rare surety and delicacy.

That phrase “curated by” is too stiff for this lively, eclectic show. Painter Kevin Wixted assembled a small group of friends and collegues and hung a party on Lohin- Geldud’s wall. As in any gathering, some guests are better company than others. It is the conversation between painters that keeps things going here. A vivacious trio, Barbara Grossman, Peter Hristoff and Stephanie McMahon accompany each other with brio.

All color, pattern and light, Ms. Grossman’s two figurative interiors complement each other in mood, the soothing cool of one answering the coloristic heat of the other. Both echo Matisse’s early years in Nice: languid women arranged amid ornamental motifs. Mr. Hristoff’s abstract works combine thin films of paint over a silkscreen base. His process yields subtle textures and dynamic designs. Ms. McMahon’s jubilant abstractions on large shaped panels go straight for the eyeballs.

Gene Baldini’s narrative rondels lead down a dark fairy tale path. “Capalbio” (2003) suggests an animal-no, bird-fable. “Allegory on Spring” (2004) hints at danger lurking. Like early editions of the Brothers Grimm, neither painting is aimed at children but both recollect the classic caution against speaking to strangers.

It is delightful to find a gallery that displays fabric art alongside painting. If only Judy Stevens’ yarn hangings were more interesting or coherent. Between them, knitting and crochet offer a palette of over 1,500 stitches. She relies on one or two in free-form sections that invoke the spaced-out days of macram‚. A Mon Tricot Sampler would be more interesting.

Elizabeth Harris closes the season with a lively sampler of New York nightscapes by 16 painters and photographers from galleries around town.

Ron Milewicz brings to his nocturne high pictorial agility and interpretive finesse. “Blackout” (2004), created for this show, views the Manhattan skyline from an industrial lot in Long Island City. Its pitch-perfect color and clever use of lateral perspective knock the lights out. One painting that holds its own against it is Richard Bosman’s dramatic “Cityscape” (1997-98), anchored by the Twin Towers and their reflection in the East River. The brooding coloration of Mr. Bosman’s skyline supports the elegaic quality history has lent it.

Yvonne Jacquette’s trademark motif is here: “Above times Square” (2003), an intricate composition rendered with a slight unsteadiness that suits the dizzying vantage point. Alex Katz cheats a bit on the theme but he is allowed. His “Rollins and John” (1981), a double head-shot, frames one man against a darkened window. Christine Ray’s off-beat take on a blackened subway entrance has a stark chill that feels just right. Doug Martin’s “Night Pearl” (2003) provides a graceful study of darkened buildings lit from below by unseen streetlights.

Simon Gaon’s rollicking “Times Square Night” (1998) seems oddly quaint. Times Square has straightened up since Mr. Gaon set it rocking. Paul Chojnowski’s scorched drawing “Twilight in the City” (2003) is burned into wet paper with a torch. An unsettling image sugggesting conflagration, it is eerily beautiful. “Frozen Brooklyn” (2004) is Daina Higgins’ hieratic treatment of a desolate Williamsburg street. Ms. Higgins sprays paint through a series of stencils over each color area, eliminating brush marks. If the process is tedious, the result is elegant.

Among photographers, Peter Henrick’s luminous c-print mounted on aluminum distinguishes itself by its painterliness. A square format enhances the abstract loveliness of spare builidings framing a clear sky just before nightfall.

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