May 4 to June 16, 2018
525 West 21st St, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, tinakimgallery.com

It is not uncommon among contemporary Korean artists to find the same title used repeatedly for different paintings, often over a period of several years. Although one might find a number sequence to differentiate one painting from the next, for the most part the repetition of the title is perennial.

This practice began with artists in the early 1970s associated with Dansaekhwa (monochrome). While Park Seo-Bo, Lee Ufan, Yun Hyung-Keun, and Ha Chong-Hyun never conceived themselves as a collective, each of them focused on the use of a single word-sign in their work that served as a kind of thematic structure. In Ha’s case, Conjunction was the signifier of choice. For the western viewer this might suggest a conceptual underpinning to the artist’s work, but, even if true, the idea of conceptually underpinning work has a Korean precedent that has nothing to do with Conceptual Art.

For those familiar with East Asian brush painting, the abstract (empty) mind always plays a formative role in relation to the brush and ink. Space exists primarily as an idea sublimated at the service of both. In this context, there is no such thing as material divorced from idea. Instead, they are inextricably bound together–in contrast, for example, to western Color Field painting where the formalist dictum determines more or less what happens on the surface. In the latter case, any idea beyond the visual construct is taken (for the most part) as a literary adjunct and therefore exists outside the concerns of what a painting should be or will become.  Among the Dansaekhwa painters, things are different.

Ha’s recent works at Tina Kim make for a beautiful show in much the way that works by Morris Louis or Sam Gilliam might be perceived as beautiful, but the terms of their respective beauty emerge from different cultural strata, where the painterly language – whether formalist or otherwise – plays a role in ways unique to those cultures. In relation to Ha, emphasis needs to be given to an Eastern point of view that carries its own history and  ideas related to color and form. For example, Ha’s paintings begin as verso before they become recto. Such works as the blue Conjunction (16-322) and the red Conjunction (17- 25) go back as early as the 17th Century to the Chosun Dynasty when painters began to push their mineral pigments through the weave of hemp cloth to the frontal side, giving the color density as it so. Ha applies blackened smoke to the surface before beginning to spread his monotones in separate units that connect obliquely to one another as a loose geometry.

In Conjunction 16-382, once the blackened smoke had tinted the surface, Ha began pulling white paint diagonally from the left side to the top edge and eventually from the bottom edge to the right side, completely enshrouding the surface with a dense linear construction of white lines.  In contrast, Conjunction 16-321, which is black, is done by way of vertical globs of thick paint that intensity the relief quality of the surface applying forms derived from Hangul, the Korean language system that also has its roots in the Chosun era.

In his work, Ha is not merely playing with the idea of monochrome variations. Rather he is intensely searching out ways and mannerisms in which his paintings can take him to the nth degree of his Korean identity.  The question that confronts Ha in each of his paintings is, essentially, Where – rather than what – is my identity? This was the tormented interior question that emerged among the Dansaekhwa painters, each according to their own means, in the 1970s. They were living through a period of military dictatorship in their country and had suddenly become strangers to themselves. Ha’s ruggedly refined paintings, the reductive surface plays an indefatigable role in relation to the artist’s stolen identity.

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March 9 to April 14, 2018
504 West 24th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, lissongallery.com

By the time of Ted Stamm’s premature passing in 1984, his Wooster paintings were becoming known in the New York art world, especially among younger aficionados in the SoHo art district (then the center of the avant-garde in New York). While Stamm rarely traveled outside the metropolitan New York area, the Wooster paintings were often seen in group and occasionally solo exhibitions, including Documenta 6 (1977), and were presented at the Guggenheim Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, MoMA – PS 1, and the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, among others. Thanks to the tireless advocacy of Danish New York-based curator Per Jensen, a stalwart against years of art world neglect, we have a show at Lisson Gallery that affords these works some interpretative clarity. Stamm was born and raised in New York. He was an avid conversationalist and a faithful correspondent. His manner of letter writing was always in longhand and seemed to follow a comparable direction to the Woosters. At the outset the paintings appeared more static, but as they developed after 1979, as in the Lo Woosters, they began to take on the appearance of speed. By comparison, his hand-written letters also began to extend laterally to three or four words stretched across one line on the page. In the process, the speed and intensity of the words took on a new meaning. A further example of his speed might be attributed to Stamm’s consistently dressing in black except for his glistening white tennis shoes. I have few recollections of Stamm sitting still, but many of his appearance standing in a conversation continually in a state of motion as if transporting words through the sudden movements of his body.

The Woosters employ an unusual rectangular theme that extends into a triangular hinge on the left side. These works were both drawn in graphite and painted in black and white (and, later in silver). At the outset (1978), it seemed that few observers were aware of Stamm’s discovery of this rather obtuse form. Given the analytical orientation of the times, many assumed it was based on some complex mathematical derivation; but, in fact, it was quite the opposite. Stamm, being a man of the streets, with bicycle in tow, discovered this abbreviated form one day on the sidewalk near his loft. The fact that he could not decipher its use or origin piqued his curiosity enough to accept it as what might be called an unknown readymade.

The exhibition catches both the artist’s consistency as well as his complex reprieve from an all-over spatial reduction, replacing it with a series of modular variations. Examples of this would include 78 W – 4 (Wooster) and 78 SW – 22 (Small Wooster) (both oil on canvas from 1978). The difference between the two is not only the shift in scale in relation to identical forms, but also the enclosure of the black band that moves around the edge of otherwise white paintings. In the first, larger version, the band descends from the upper side and follows along the upper diagonal slide of the triangle before it extends back along the bottom edge. The second, smaller form carries the exact same proportions except that the black band completely encloses the white surface, which makes the interior shape a smaller version of the larger one that extends outside the black frame.

Beyond these modular variations, Stamm began to move from stasis to kinesis. LW – 2H (Lo Wooster) and LW – 2A (Lo Wooster), both graphite on paper from 1979, are flattened versions of the rectangle and its adjacent triangle that optically incite leftward movement. In either case, this suggests they are studies that precede the large low-hanging oils mounted at the entrance that dominates the wall as one enters the Lisson Gallery.

The space within the Woosters was gradually evolving into space/time. By 1980, he had returned to the origin of the Woosters as he became conceptually involved in placing red stickers of his familiar sign, which he called “Wooster Designations,” on bumpers and license plates of parked cars with the intention of transmitting the message throughout New York in the directions in which they would drive.

Some two years later (1982), Stamm began sending out cards on which the message “Painting Advance 1990” was printed. In my reading of this, Stamm was saying that painting would move towards another level, a higher level of sensory cognition, in less than a decade. Sadly, Ted never reached 1990. But he showed the potential of painting to move beyond stasis and connect with urban time – not simply as a representation, but as bright new awareness of how we think and see and how we come together through painting.

The post From Stasis to Kinesis: The Woosters of Ted Stamm appeared first on artcritical.

January 5 to February 4, 2018
327 Broome Street, between Bowery & Chrystie Street
New York City, nicellebeauchene.com

Is painting in monochrome in 2018 retrograde? Jim Lee’s solo exhibition Half Off at Nicelle Beauchene seems to suggest as much as it fixates on the absurdity of this investigation. Lee explicates the perverse nature of painting monochromes (or painting itself) through tongue-in-cheek illustration of them. The paintings become physical manifestations of his casual approach and slapstick process and efforts to undermine the stoicism historically found in painting.

Uneven in texture, saturation, and hue, Lee’s paintings boast their apparent ineptitude: He unabashedly folds, staples, and tears lopsided seams, which feels irreverent given their nod to color-field abstraction and notions of purity. This is made meaningful by Lee’s use of different historically class-laden materials, such as oil paint and linen, intermixed with crass interlopers—Flashe, zone marking paint, visible staples, glitter, acrylic: lowbrow materials that feel deliberately applied to expensive supports that have been previously agitated and aggressively handled. The lowbrow materials occasionally impersonate highbrow ones or gesture over them, denouncing any aura of opulence implied by high quality. Lee’s works are biting their thumb at the elitism and purity bound to the stuffy history of the monochrome.

Highlighting the texture of the raw canvas or the slick plastic sheen of acrylic, mimicry and illusionism in Lee’s gestures double as surface depictions. Registered quickly for their tactile surface, their substance draws from deeper-rooted content, heavily contingent upon a viewer’s diligence. That they ask for a patient and persistent viewer can be seen in the paintings’ multifaceted intersections – these arise as time is spent with the works—whether between the digital and physical, humor and solemnity, elitism and the egalitarian. Lee’s surface quality, materials, gestures, and handling juggle anecdotes of the heavy baggage paintings can carry.

Intentionally or otherwise, Lee’s work often imitates the behavior or interaction a user has with an interface, such as manipulated screens that press against the picture plane and simultaneously recede into a deep space. A Cream Divide, split in half by conjoined canvas and linen, recalls a Photoshop preview dialogue box, de-saturating an image on the right half of its surface. The bright red panel on the left has a soft, blotchy red coating, unevenly mirrored by a seemingly darker red shaded by the underlying linen on the right panel. Similarly, in Safety and Senegal, Lee connects two distinct yellow surfaces of different prismatic intensity, sheen, and texture. Comprised of Flashe and zone marking paint, the lighter yellow intensified by its dark linen support, and conversely its light beige canvas, amplifies the deeper yellow. The physical and conceptual subtleties in Lee’s work invite the viewer to spend time with them, contradicting our expedited relationships to the information available via the screens alluded to in some of his works. Other paintings, such as Rutting Moon and Mr. Pleasant, inch closer to a “truer” monochrome with only a single color applied scrappily to a cobbled surface, appearing simple but still jabbing at traditional color-field painting.

Lee has provided his own bench from which viewers can fully absorb his faux monochromes. The same size as the paintings, the bench has printed on its seat a story from the artist’s hometown about a peeping tom and inevitable chaos that ensued. There is humor in peering around seated visitors in an attempt to read the text, mimicking a peeping tom’s mannerisms oneself. Looking back up at the paintings after reading the story feels like a violation of the paintings’ and artist’s privacy, and removes the deified objecthood to which works of art aspire. Paintings as an extension of oneself splayed out in a sterile gallery space is now re-imagined as unwelcome trespassing, but also realized as a necessary evil of continuing a sustainable art practice within a capitalist society. In this vein, the artist has provided a take home tee shirt emblazoned with the text “FCKER” for visitors to purchase. Who is the real fucker here?

The post Biting a Thumb at Monochrome: Jim Lee at Nicelle Beauchene appeared first on artcritical.

April 7 to May 14, 2017
221 Madison Street, between Rutgers and Jefferson street
New York City, reginarex.org

If the first impression of this exhibition is that these are standard monochrome painting that would be understandable. The ten works on display, most of which are two by three feet, are dark gray and harbor nothing we’d call images. But give them some time and they take on a very different aspect, as Haynes orchestrates light and dark pigment to form, as the press release stated, an “investigation into the painted illusion of light”. Most of her canvases are demarcated by a left/ right blended fade between various blacks and shades of gray creating a luminous effect. Brush marks inhere at the top and bottom of the canvas, tactile reminders of her painting process that also function as painterly highlights. With Haynes’s emphasis emphatic use of chiaroscuro the paintings evoke dawn and twilight and exude elegiac, romantic atmosphere.

Nancy Haynes emerged as a painter at the beginning of the 1970s. At that time much was made of the “death of painting” but in distinction to that discourse there was, for a number of artists, the conviction that painting—and its historical mode—deeply mattered. It’s hard to imagine that urgency today but abstraction at that time wasn’t so much a stylistic choice as a commitment with the gravitas of political belief or religion. Like older generation painters Robert Ryman and Marcia Hafif, Haynes keeps the faith even as she reworks the orthodoxies of that most severe form of painting—Minimalist monochrome—to her own ends. This show embodied a fascinating tension between Haynes’s half century commitment to the concrete specifics of material and process connoted by monochrome painting and her own interests in metaphor, poetry, philosophy and pictorial abstraction.

While it is possible to view these paintings as pictures of light, Haynes is also deeply interested in intrinsic material qualities of paint. The sides of the panels are often painted in tune with the picture front. Haynes adjusts the matt and gloss of her painting mediums such that the surface reflects more or less light depending on the angle of vision, generating a phenomenological analogue for Haynes’s rendered shading.

And even as one is persuaded that light is being rendered in Haynes’s paintings, the work never reaches the threshold of a convincing illusion of light. Nor is it possible to say if Haynes’s light is of the interior or landscape variety—indeed each painting is so adjusted, that, like the interchangeable image of the duck-rabbit, Haynes’s portrayal of light alternates between atmospheric gloaming and the deflection of light from architectural surfaces. Oddly, rather than making the light seem general or vague with prolonged observation the light in each painting becomes more particular. In final consideration, the light of Haynes paintings is specific only to her paintings.

Through a metaphysical sleight of hand Haynes’s paintings succeed through their ultimate failure to create illusion or to portray. With the collapse of these pictorial conventions it is the paintings themselves that are left to develop a related but independent vision of light. Haynes exploits the insight that paintings are, in essence objects that variously filter, absorb and reflect light. Haynes signifies light in her paintings even as actual light in the room is required to see them. The specific critical term for this recursion of form embedded with its facsimile is Mise-en-abyme. Indeed, one of the paintings in the show bears that title.

For Haynes light is both the dynamic and the matter of painting: abstraction and concreteness. This has been a long running idea for her, as can be seen with her use of glow-in-the-dark pigment in works begun in the early ‘70s. While those luminescent paintings were firmly grounded in the discourse of monochromatic painting of their period, subsequent works advance a very different form of abstraction, one that Haynes constructs through distilling her observations of light. With her latest show Haynes entwines very different conceptions of abstract painting. We can enjoy at one and the same moment her love of brush and oil paint, her personal poetics and a philosophic reverie on the mechanics of light in painting.

The post Abstract and Concrete: The Monochromatic Paintings of Nancy Haynes appeared first on artcritical.

It feels at first like Tom Friedman’s exhibition of new work, on view at Luhring Augustine in Bushwick, might be playing a trick on viewers. But it isn’t smoke and mirrors, it’s paint and Styrofoam. All of it; there’s nothing but those two elements adorning the gallery walls and floor. Yet it appears like there must be something more in the mix. There’s so much precision, so much detail. A microphone, chair and guitar without strings stand in one corner. It takes pretty close inspection to confirm that the wood grain is, in fact, the work of a paintbrush. In faux-assemblage wall pieces like Blue (all 2014) and Toxic Green Luscious Green — each comprised of a single color, with a dense section of detritus either clinging to the top edge or falling to the bottom — it seems unbelievable that everything collected in the messy, three-dimensional pile of scraps is only made out of the materials proclaimed by the exhibition’s title. The apple-core, the slice of pizza, the paper plane — all from flimsy Styrofoam?

Since the early ‘90s Friedman has been exhibiting his brand of inventively fabricated sculptures, which have drawn comparisons to 1960s Conceptualism, Arte Povera and Minimalism. But his work fits into none of these categories completely. Taking many different forms, they are unified by the nature of the material they are made from — inexpensive, ubiquitous and disposable — and the great care Friedman takes in crafting them. Earlier works (not on display here) have included an untitled self-portrait from 2000, appearing to be the artist’s body splattered on the floor after a horrific accident; it is painstakingly cut out of colored construction paper. Another self-portrait is carved out of a single aspirin. Thirty-thousand toothpicks stuck together form a giant starburst. Fishing line, sugar cubes, plastic cups, chewed bubblegum, roasting pans and soap inlaid with pubic hair have all been fodder for Friedman’s transformative hand.

As with those earlier pieces, here it’s in making something to marvel at, using very ordinary elements, that delights viewers at the outset. Despite one’s skepticism, assistants at the gallery assure that all the works in “Paint and Styrofoam” are made purely from these two resources. And the works here really are marvelous, but for reasons beyond their material trickery.

Each wall piece is monochromatic — frame (also carved of Styrofoam) and all. Tonal variations are created by texture and shape. What becomes clear is that Friedman is, in effect, painting with form. In Blue Styrofoam Seascape, the distinction between ocean and sky is made by the cusp of a subtle, beveled vertex that juts out towards the viewer, drawing a horizon directly across the baby blue surface. The sea darkens as it recedes, forming a perfect division between water and air.

Similarly, the self-portrait created for this exhibition is painted meticulously. The artist wears glasses and has a feather in his hat, looking out over his shoulder. It’s also painted in a blindingly bright canary yellow. Detail comes from the paint’s texture, as it does in the work exhibited directly to the left. That painting, Night, is recognizable to the viewer at once. It’s Van Gogh’s 1889 masterpiece Starry Night replicated exactly, down to the folded canvas edges, but painted not on canvas, of course, and devoid of any color except for a tarry blackish-blue.

A bite-sized nick in the corner of the outwardly standard white plinth, upon which a bulbous, Pepto-Bismol pink sculpture snakes toward the ceiling, is the only moment that Friedman reveals what’s behind the curtain. About a foot off the ground, the break in the stand reveals just a few inches of the foamy, aerated plastic that’s all around, but covered everywhere else in a solid layer of acrylic paint.

Friedman refers to the wall works as “sculptures of paintings.” With the chipped plinth in mind, one can’t help but feel that the floor works are likewise sculptures of sculptures. They imitate what is traditionally found in an exhibition space: paint, canvases, frames, pedestals, items of worth and value because of their material expense, maker’s name, or historical significance. Some of these elements are here, legitimately. Others are a careful emulation of what we expect to see. But each piece asks to be questioned, opening exploration into the space between what is actually present and what can be seen.

The post What It Is: Juliet Helmke on Tom Friedman appeared first on artcritical.

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.

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