January 25 to March 10, 2018
520 West 27th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, nancyhoffmangallery.com

In writing about this exhibition of eight paintings and three collages by Peter Plagens at Nancy Hoffman Gallery, I happily abandon any pretense of objectivity. My point of view comes from nearly 37 years of marriage to the artist, more than three decades of sharing a studio with him, and our ongoing conversations and arguments—big and small—about painting and its meaning. That Peter doesn’t know I’m writing this essay, and won’t know about it until after it’s published, makes clear, I hope, that I alone am responsible for any errors in description of either his studio practice or artistic intentions.

At first glance, Peter’s paintings and collages seem poles apart. At one end, we’re talking enormous, aggressively vibrant abstract paintings; at the other, restrained, elegant collages containing words and images. That said, it’s not hard to suss out that Peter is on a quest to reconcile opposites—clean and messy, refined and rough, colorful and neutral, abstract and figurative, orderly and anarchic, certain and uncertain.

With over a thousand art reviews and essays about art to his credit, Peter has probably written more words about art than any other serious practicing American artist. His art criticism is clear, jargon-free, and peppered with cheeky turns of phrases (“the shitification of the art world,” or “the calculated indolence of a road crew”), easy colloquialisms (“punches above his weight,” or “a second body blow delivered to art”), and snappy references to popular culture (in a recent review of an exhibition, he referred to the artist as “the Sara Lee of the art world”).

This rough and tumble attitude in his writing also shows up in his painting, which he’s been tenaciously going at for more than fifty years. When he slathers wet paint across the surface of a canvas, oblivious to the possibility of “mistakes,” or when he decides a color, once chosen, cannot be altered, he’s opening up his art to the peculiar beauties of randomness. Even so, he lets paint off its leash only briefly; most of the time, his work rests on deft brush handling, acute awareness of the properties of color, and close attention to detail. It’s no surprise that his favorite artists are the Flems.

Peter begins his collages by tacking a piece of paper to the floor. Next, he slowly nudges pools of different hues around its edges. After the paper dries, he places it on his table and slaps down an image in the center—a word or phrase cut from an artist’s announcement, a little snippet from a piece of paper found on the street, an image cut from a photograph or an advertisement. From then on, his task becomes one of bridging the gap between the concrete image in the center and the indeterminate colors hovering along the paper’s edges. His method is always to gradually surround the center with collaged bits of colored paper and painted abstract shapes until, like Goldilocks, he finally senses things are “just right.”

Peter’s paintings, from the start, are made on the wall. He begins by covering the surface with loose and squiggly Gorky-esque marks, letting drips fall where they may. After this dries, he applies successive layers of paint to make a large, rough-hewn shape—sometimes a neutral gray, sometimes a saturated color—that sits on the original messy ground. Last comes a geometric form, drawn intuitively and placed approximately in the middle of the painting, and divided into six or seven shapes; these he fills in with pre-determined colors. His rule in painting, as in his collages, is to never correct anything.

Peter is not a formalist. His art is an impassioned, full-blown expression of his worldview. He understands the universe to be indecipherable, unfathomable, unknowable—existentially speaking, absurd. To deny this, in his mind, would be both foolish and futile. Painting makes him feel he’s among the lucky ones, for in wrestling with the wordlessness of paint, the ineffable wonders of color, and the chance-driven associations generated by making collages, he finds a way to assert meaning. If one of his paintings or collages manages to generate a small, shivering sensation of beauty along the way, he’s fully satisfied. Blathering on about its social or metaphysical properties would only muck things up.

The post Insider Criticism: Mrs. Peter Plagens Reveals All appeared first on artcritical.

May 9 to June 15, 2013
520 West 27th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212-966-6676

“Glorious” was a word heard frequently at Robert Zakanitch’s opening in response to his unexpectedly large (eight by five feet) gouaches on paper hangings that suit his imagery so magnificently: great expanses of often small budding blossoms, curtains of pale wisterias in full bloom, bittersweet, and glowing dandelion puffs–or maybe fireflies, willfully indeterminate in bursts of light.  If Beauty (with an upper case `B’) has gone out of style, no one told this artist, a longtime proponent of such traditionally and immediately appealing subjects — lace, jewels, cherubs, sunset landscapes, and now gardens — bypassed, if not scoffed at, in recent decades. But John DeFazio, in a fine catalogue essay, actually thanks Zakanitch for “daring” to be gentle, sweet, and pretty.   Perhaps we’ve come around to understanding that beauty is no longer déclassé.

The series, named after the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, wonder of the Ancient World, exudes a mythic quality in the evocative and irreal proliferation of plants removed from materiality by his blanched colors, flattening of form, and wonderfully rhythmic and decorative flowery festoons.  The delicacy of his petalled plants answer to the matte, chalky colors that serve them.  Their fragility is enhanced by the painting technique and the medium itself, with luminosity glanced in the interstices among the abundant blooms.  While entirely authentic and superbly observed, not for a moment are these florid items realistic.

These exhilarating compositions are often topped by decorative grids or by ornamental arabesques of bordering trellises, with the lower portions left contrastingly unfinished.  Drips of paint accentuate the lusciousness of these images.  Though the artist is in absolute command of his medium, there is an insistent lack of pretentiousness, most obvious, perhaps, in the almost offhand, contour-lined lattices or the occasional bit of writing, as in his simple, slanting signature.  That the viewer is allowed to see the transformation as strokes and dribbles of paint metamorphose into ravishing flora imagery seems like one more gift from this generous artist.

The overall rhythmic patterns of the lush carpets of flowers give way to enormous variety when further examined.  Buds are at different stages of opening, their sizes and tonalities varying.  Some petals are flush with pale pinks or lilacs while others are awash with transparency.  One flower droops or is somewhat turned, clusters are more or less tight. Zakanitch was one of the founders of Pattern and Decoration in the 1970s which accounts perhaps  for the importance of repeated flat design to his work.  But P&D is a reductive and therefore not very astute term in relation to Zakanitch, failing to take into account just how painterly his surfaces are, and never simply homogenized.  The tender, sometimes impish wit presented in his variations recall Dutch seventeenth-century still life painting: careful looking is rewarded by the discovery that the cascades of flowers are very much alive, abuzz with small insects, tiny lady bugs among them.  Meanwhile there may be a silhouetted misty bird hovering nearby. The work holds attention and is sumptuously satisfying at differing viewing distances.  This is true, as well, of the small gouaches also included in the show that yield their own extravagant pleasure.   Happily, the commendable exhibition catalogue acknowledges the importance of seeing works both as a whole and in detail by reproducing close-ups at several different degrees.

Robert Zakanitch, without pretentiousness or folderol, truly goes to bat for beauty.

The post Daring to be Beautiful: Robert Zakanitch at Nancy Hoffman appeared first on artcritical.

A question for arcritical readers: Has a married couple ever had overlapping, solo exhibitions at separate galleries in Manhattan? Laurie Fendrich and Peter Plagens couldn’t think of one, and nor could I. If their case is indeed unique, then her exhibition at Gary Snyder Project Space and his at Nancy Hoffman Gallery, which overlap for nine days, is an item for the record books. Adding a delicious romantic twists is the fact that the overlap includes Valentine’s Day.

The two were wed in 1981 and they share a painting studio in a barn in upstate New York. There is also discussion of renovating a room in their Tribeca apartment so that she can work on her drawings and he on his collages while they’re in the city. “Actually, ‘renovating’ is too strong a word,” says Plagens. ‘Ridding of junk’ would be more accurate.” Both of them have had storied independent careers. He was art critic for Newsweek from 1989 to 2003, has received Guggenheim and NEA fellowships, and has shown with Hoffman since 1974. She is a professor at Hofstra University, writes for the Chronicle of Higher Education, and was recently the subject of a two-decade career overview at Scripps College in Claremont, California that will travel to the University of Montana in March.

They bring disparate sensibilities to their painting practices. Plagens’ work – with its gestural application and improvisatory attitude – has roots in Abstract Expressionism. The abrasions in his paint surfaces are signs of happy accident and copious correction.   He resolves his disorderly backgrounds by laying geometric elements on top of them. Multicolored polygons, dubbed “badges” by Nancy Hoffman, take on the role of Hans Hofmann’s structure-imposing rectangles.

Fendrich’s work, while no less improvised, builds more slowly, in a manner recalling Cubists like Juan Gris and California hard-edge painters like Frederick Hammersley. Using oils, she glazes her surfaces into a reproduction-defying shimmer, while enclosing her geometric shapes with a painted line that takes its soft, textured character from hard pastels. The day after viewing the 1993 Seurat exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum she went out and bought a box of Conté crayons. Her drawings, also on view at Gary Snyder,are constructed in the same careful manner, resulting in a smoldering intensity.

“Laurie is the optimist who keeps Jane Austen novels and Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations by her bedside,” explains Plagens. “I’m the card-carrying existentialist who thinks that the universe is held together with chewing gum and baling wire and could fall apart at any moment. My paintings reflect that sense of barely contained order. Hers assume more order from the beginning.”

But having worked alongside one another for many years, some inevitable exchange has occurred, suggesting a productive if subtle collaboration. Plagens’s works show increasing decision and clarity between 2007 and 2010, while Fendrich’s grow in contrast and whimsy. “Laurie’s paintings may have become a little more playful over the years as a consequence of my work having been around the studio,” says Plagens. Fendrich adds, “I may have prompted him to clean up his act a little bit.” But they don’t offer each other unsolicited critiques. Creative support takes the form instead of an occasional shoulder rub.

Are there any problems with sharing a studio?

“Only the music, sometimes,” says Plagens. “Laurie can listen to anything except rock ‘n roll. I can listen to anything except, well…”

“Regina Spektor, for instance,” she finishes. “I like girl music.”

“She’ll also put her iPod on the dock and set one song to play on repeat. She’ll start working, and I’ll come back into the studio a couple of hours later and the same song is still playing. I get myself out of there.”

They laugh, as they often do.

Peter Plagens: I Don’t Give a Damn/Every Moment Counts, at Nancy Hoffman Gallery
January 20 – February 19, 2011.  520 West 27 Street, between 10th and 11th avenues, New York City, (212) 966-6676

Laurie Fendrich: Recent Paintings, at Gary Snyder Project Space.
February 10 – April 2, 2011. 250 West 26 Street, between 7th and 8th avenues.  New York City, (212) 929-1351

The post Star-Crossed Painters: Laurie Fendrich and Peter Plagens appeared first on artcritical.