July 10 to August 17, 2018
510 West 25th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, pacegallery.com

Fred Wilson’s “Afro Kismet” is seeing its third iteration. Made for the 2017 Istanbul Biennial, it was also presented earlier this year by Pace in London. The installation follows the now familiar strategy Wilson pioneered in his breakthrough 1992 project, “Mining the Museum,” in which he reconfigured the Maryland Historical Society’s collection to focus on its exclusions and thereby illuminate the history of slavery in the United States. “Afro Kismet” expands on this idea, turning attention toward Venice and the Ottoman Empire to consider the African diaspora on a global scale.  

Wilson employs an extensive range of materials and strategies to explore this ambitious theme, exploiting his signature technique of blending the historical and the contemporary to its fullest extent. There are both appropriated historic tribal artifacts, such as a Yoruba Gelede mask, and objects that the artist has created, such as painted museum reproductions or works on raw canvas. Stand-outs – in terms of drama and scale – include a pair of large, opulent Ottoman-style black chandeliers hanging overhead. These not only add needed light to the space, but also, with their hefty chains, a sense of grounding. Black is deployed so forcefully throughout the show that it has the weight of a material in its own right. Historical prints – framed or encased with a sprinkling of cowrie shells – have been altered, as the black figures are spotlit through the near-erasure of white people under opaque vellum. Blackness is both textual reference and color choice in two tile walls emblazoned in Arabic letters with the phrases “Black is Beautiful” and “Mother Africa,” respectively. The African tribal pieces, in scattered vitrines,  are paired with quotes, in black vinyl, either from James Baldwin (who himself lived in Istanbul for a time) or from Othello, Shakespeare’s racially charged play partially set in Venice.

Wilson’s more delicate touches carry their own kind of unique power. Trade Winds (2017), a tabletop plastic globe, poetically and powerfully illustrates the worldwide movement of abducted Africans through criss-crossing black brushstrokes. The vaguest outlines of nations and continents remain visible through some of the thinner strokes, inviting viewers to step closer and see the path of the natural phenomenon of wind turned unnatural through the trading of flesh. Works from Wilson’s “drips” series frame the center of the gallery. These are arrangements on the wall of individual blown-glass elements that the artist has described as reminiscent of oil, ink, or tears. Regardless of what they bring to mind, these glossy black clusters add an elegant, crafted touch to the referential, appropriated objects in “Afro Kismet,” and attune the space to specific emotions. The cascading arrangement of frozen-in-time shapes imbues us with a heavy sense of loss, sadness, and disintegration.

Adjacent to “Afro Kismet” is a gallery of related recent glass works. In contrast to the abundance  of found and created objects next door, the more abstract glass works form a streamlined presentation of three “drips,” three “mirrors,” and Wilson’s most recent chandelier. This latter, A Moth of Peace (2018), hung at eye level in the center of the room, serves as a foil to the other chandeliers. It has a Venetian look, more organic than the Ottoman-inspired geometry of the other two, and is made of white and clear glass that extends upward, antigravitational in its vine-like progression. Wilson’s belief in “beauty in service to meaning and beauty as a seductive material that draws you in” feels particularly vindicated in this captivating work. Upon close inspection, one finds that it is not pure white, but that in fact there are a few small details of the design where a white piece has been replaced with a black one. These black bits prompt the eye to consider the rest of the room. The large, layered mirrors, each titled for moments in Othello, feature an intensely black high-gloss surface. Their dark mirroring allows visitors to see themselves in the work, particularly due to the light provided by the chandelier, which is itself always visible in the reflection as a looming white mass behind the viewer. The considerations of blackness that Wilson explores in “Afro Kismet” are thus distilled in this side of the gallery: whiteness is at the center of the room, and even when one turns away it is always looming close behind. The shadows of imperialism and colonialism remain, and, as “Afro Kismet” explores, they linger not only over the United States, but also above other historically slave-holding areas.

Wilson is not the only artist who uses black as both a subject and a material. His Where’s-Waldo-esque engravings bring to mind Kara Walker’s silhouette cutouts, while Rashid Johnson’s frequent use of black soap resonates with Wilson’s flags of African nations, reduced to black acrylic on raw canvas and hung across the highest point of the gallery walls, reducing people and nations to a few lines rendered in a single color. Kerry James Marshall’s mastery of black acrylic paint has cemented his signature style in his portraits, infusing them with individual personality and collective pride. Wilson’s pure black Murano glass, used in both the “drips” series and mirror works, achieves a similar effect. Such connections place this exhibition in a larger context of ongoing conversations of representation and identity politics.

The hopeful antidote to this legacy seems to come from the joy in Wilson’s pair of tiled walls (Mother Africa, 2017, and Black is Beautiful, 2017). After all, the installation is called “Afro Kismet,” which this viewer read as a redemptive view rather than accusatory history lesson. Like the “drips,” which tie together the two parts of the Pace show in their materiality, these walls can literally be seen in both parts of the gallery – monumentally in “Afro Kismet,” and framed within the doorway from the glass room. At nine feet tall and nineteen feet across, these gorgeously painted walls are more than just a backdrop for selfies (a popular phenomenon on this reviewer’s visit). Wilson adopts a rallying cry from the 1960s civil rights movement in the United States, and brings it face-to-face with a phrase symbolic of the history of displacement and reality of the vastness of the African diaspora. The traditional Turkish floral design of the tiles’ background offsets the almost-neon quality of the huge blue text. The deep purple, blue, and black tones of the walls, illuminated under the chandelier Eclipse (2017), diffuse a rich glow through the space.

Standing between these elegant walls, I felt embraced in the energy of the pattern and the light, causing peripheral thoughts to be subsumed by a profound sense of coming together. This might seem ironic, staged between two walls. Yet still, this space became an open channel for reconciliation, bridging the gap between “selfie” and “other.”

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May 4 to August 17, 2018
537 West 24th Street and 510 West 25th Street, both between 10th and 11th avenues
New York CIty, pacegallery.com

At first glance, the tiny wriggling strokes repeated in line formation in each of Michal Rovner’s large video-based tableaux appear to be legs, or the balletically pointed toes, perhaps, of variously jerking and swaying dancers. (Rovner’s technique entails an ingenious capture of what look to be vignettes of individual video deployed in an extended grid.) But these gyrating limbs could also be chromosomes bouncing back and forth. Or maybe some kind of inkblot test, eluding identification. Whatever these simplified human shapes are, they’re stripped of uniqueness.

“Evolution” is shown at both the 24th and 25th Street locations of Pace Gallery. In both venues, Rovner’s compelling formats vary. The video-based tableaux predominate, but there are also several static images, printed on paper,Cipher 2 (2018), for example, that resemble  barcodes or smudged lines from a typewriter. There are video-based sculptural works and a full-room video installation, Mechanism (2018). The immersive experience of this last piece, though silent, synaesthetically conveys a visualization of static sound in the sudden shifting of the small black figures. Like Mechanism, but in tableau format, Matches 2 (2018) also features the abstracted human blobs, this time red instead of the ubiquitous black and white. They gesticulate like specimens trapped behind glass that are aware of being watched. The forms become an eye test: You try to make out letters or some recognizable hieroglyph within the constant movement, but the wiggling, blurred digits resist definition.  

In Urgency (2017), where the shapes are still writhing and waving, red splays across their blurry heads like a heat signature – splotchy and angry. These figures, in contrast to the vaguely  comical, insistent buoyancy that pervades the rest of this show, appear desperate, whether or not they know they are being targeted.

Elsewhere, the abstracted forms act like language. Take Gmara (2018), for example. This consists of a vitrine encasing a projection on stone tablet in which the person-smudges operate like lines of text. Gemara is the analysis and commentary section of the Talmud. This title, like so many of others in the show, complicates the meaning of the piece, casting not only archival, but also religious connotations. This referentiality, as well as the distinct line work that separates the blobs, connects “Evolution” to Rovner’s larger body of work by evoking  political and social issues: separation through borders and conflict, individual and societal relationships, and human migration. The restrained movements of the figures, as well as the lack of obvious personhood and individuality, might bring to mind the Israel-Palestine conflict, for instance, a topic on which Rovner (who is Israeli) has worked before, as in Makom (Place), 2006, which used rubble from both Israeli and Palestinian neighborhoods to create a new structure.

The proliferating interpretations brought to mind by Rovner’s abstracted forms complicate the title of the show. Does “Evolution” refer to human evolution, as in the growth of either an individual, a society, or a species? Or are we in the political realm, confronting issues of shifting alliances and leadership? Or perhaps there’s a quip here about a lack of evolution: human stubbornness, with the same indistinguishable blobs bouncing back and forth without making progress. Rovner’s rhythmically meditative and yet thematically challenging works encourage the kind of slow looking that allows for multiple interpretations. Her morphing forms legitimize each of these possibilities, as well as others.

At both venues varying dimness in the lighting creates spaces for thoughtful contemplation, as well as a mood which ultimately turns the viewer into a kind of embryo, allowing us, too, to evolve.

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ERIC SUTPHIN: How does collaboration function in relation to Modernism’s emphasis on the autonomy of the artist?

EMILIA AND ILYA KABAKOV: This is a very interesting question, especially considering that there are more and more artists working in pairs. Obviously there are reasons why in some cases a collaborative process can be better than those made in a solitary process. We can say that the personality of each artist, working in collaboration with the other reveals much more than when he/she works by his or herself.

One of your aims has been to restore painting’s tension, or its potential for rupture. One strategy for you is figuration, in particular, looking back to Baroque painting. What is it about figurative painting that contains the possibility for difficulty or conflict?

The return to painting and a Baroque approach has two sides: there are some elements that are working on rupture and others which are uniting everything on the canvas.

The first is a collage of all the elements of the painting, the fragmentary nature. This is the special technique that we use for such paintings in order to unite these elements. The elements of collage can consist of images from different times, but the wholeness is created by using one artistic approach for these elements stemming from different eras, in our case the style of Pierre Bonnard.

It seems that the increasing scale and ambition of your work — in particular the evolution from the 1995 Pompidou exhibition to the 2014 Monumenta presentation — has a direct correlation to an ever-expanding global art market. How has increasing globalization and decentralization of the “art world” affected your practice?

We come from a country where the art market did not exist and it is very easy to continue to disregard it. If this is about the art market, this is already such a covered territory that we are afraid to even start such a discussion. The same goes for globalization. In some aspects it does work very well, but in others it creates a catastrophe for artists, especially younger ones.

The scale of our work increases depending on the ideas and concepts and has nothing to do with the market, globalization or decentralization. The scale of the installation at the Pompidou in 1995 was in consideration of the idea we presented and the space that was available to us, the same as the project in 2014 at Monumenta.

How has the role of institutions affected the scope and scale of your projects?

That was the main factor of influence on our projects, both in museums and other art institutions. We do make a distinction between an exhibition at a museum and an exhibition at a gallery. A gallery can limit your scale and imagination, and in many cases takes an already existing work with the intention to sell. The museum, kunsthalle, kunstverein, or public space has a very specific aura and atmosphere. This stimulates your imagination and fantasy, giving you the freedom that comes with space. Unfortunately the only limit is the budget.

What scope do you hope to reach and how does ambition and scale relate to your notion of the art world as a utopian fantasy?

The most ideal result of what we are trying reach and achieve is our last exhibition at The Grand Palais for the 2014 Monumenta presentation. The Grand Palais was a utopian project, a glass palace from the end of the 19^th century. For us the possibility to realize a utopian, grandiose project in this superb space was and is the best, ideal project in the art world.

Do you see your work as nostalgic for a time when recognizable imagery had more currency than it may hold today?

The interest in painting is definitely a nostalgic interest, but at the same time there is always a hidden hope that the life of your paintings will belong to the future.

Can you discuss the ways in which representational painting functions as a conceptual, rather than purely narrative, device within your practice.

EMILIA: All the paintings are done on a project basis, as a concept as well as a narrative. Even if the narrative is used, there is a concept. But we should say that Russian conceptualism is built on narrative.

ILYA: All of my paintings are conceptual works. This means that those paintings are not only a method of explaining and representing myself as a traditional artist and painter who spends all his life working in one medium or one “visual corridor,” but rather presenting different projects which come to mind all the time. These appear not rationally, like any self-respecting artist would do, but spontaneously — one after another, or simultaneously.

Who are some artists who have been important to you?

ILYA: In the 1960s through the 1980s I did belong to a group of Moscow Conceptual artists and because of the complete isolation of the Soviet art world, I had very little knowledge of what was going on in the Western art world. In our circle the art works were always connected to a specific project. I did paintings or objects that were connected to either a Soviet bureaucratic design, a parody of official Soviet artworks, or paintings that appeared to be done by different artistic personae including characters such as the “untalented artist.”

The paintings now on view at Pace belong to the same kind of design but with a different context that we are interested in now. The concept of these paintings is to presume that there is now movement or new developments in contemporary art. As in the time of the Renaissance, we have to look back and start using the achievements of the past, remembering that the Renaissance artists used the achievements of the ancient Greeks.

So which model from the past can contemporary artists today use as an example? We are thankful that such an example from the past can be the Baroque movement. The strange combination of Baroque art and contemporary can be what we need in order to solve the problems in contemporary painting. If we are wrong, well, we will just move on to the next concept.

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Throughout her life, Agnes Martin repeated a reticence to, and even rejection of, biography. Her resistance puts Martin’s biographer in a difficult position. In her biography of Martin, Agnes Martin: Her Life and Art (Thames & Hudson, 2015), Nancy Princenthal masterfully meets the challenge with a sensitive, open and compassionate account. Princenthal presents the confusing and often-contradictory accounts of Martin’s life without judgment. Nonetheless, Princenthal is not ambiguous or dispassionate in her language, and she draws forceful conclusions and opens up rich avenues of inquiry and critical thought about Martin’s art. Martin’s mental illness and sexuality, two tropes that might have easily been sensationalized under less skilled hands, have been thoughtfully written about as a complement to Martin’s work, not a defining presence. Princenthal pulls from a haze of privacy and a smokescreen of mystery someone tangible: Agnes Martin.

Princenthal is upfront in her ever-increasing concerns at writing Martin’s biography, writing that she has “qualms about violating [Martin’s] privacy, which have grown in the writing of this volume.” Martin’s silence, exhorting close friends to guard the details of her life even after her death, was both personal and to protect her art from easy biographical interpretation. Princenthal elucidates: “Martin late in her life elicited pledges from friends that they wouldn’t talk about her after she was gone. Whether or not sworn to secrecy, many have honored her wish—a wish that is also plainly apparent in her deeply reticent work and even more explicit in her writing. Her paramount injunctions, against pride and ego, have continued to shape attempts to bring her life into focus.”

This hesitancy in undertaking the writing of Martin’s biography only increases the tenacity needed to write the book. The roadblocks Princenthal encounters are many and varied, not least is Martin’s injunction to her friends. Martin often and unsentimentally destroyed work that failed her exacting vision. During her first stay in Taos, New Mexico in the 1940s, there was a yearly bonfire: “At Taos I wasn’t satisfied with my paintings and at the end of every year I’d have a big fire and burn them all.” As a result, the evolution of Martin as an artist and painter is difficult, though Princenthal shows, not impossible, to trace.

Among the many forms of protest Martin used against biography, most challenging is her obfuscation of personal history while emphasizing her own mythos. Martin was born in 1912 in frontier Western Canada to Scottish emigrants, Malcolm and Margaret. There are specific confusions concerning Martin’s family, including the circumstances around the departure of Malcolm (when Martin was three years old). Princenthal carefully picks through the evidence of Malcolm Martin’s absence — variously suggested as death in the Boer War or syphilis, or just skipping town — by analyzing court records and Saskatchewan homestead records. Despite this diligence, the “particulars” remain murky.

In another example, the tantalizing yet baffling conflation between biography and myth is seen after Martin’s graduation from high school in Vancouver. For unclear reasons, Martin relocated to Bellingham, WA, arriving south of the border for the first time. Ostensibly, Martin said she had come to Bellingham to help her sister Maribel during a difficult pregnancy, though Princenthal is unconvinced by this reason: “It is an odd explanation, with conspicuous holes. (Where was Glen Sires, whom Maribel married in 1930? How precisely could Agnes, still a teenager, have been of help?)” Moreover, and this is where the story becomes stranger, while in Bellingham, Martin somehow ended up in California:

“At some point in 1930 or 1931, she took a job in Los Angeles offered by an employment agency—in another version of the story, she saw a sign offering a position while on a bus back to Vancouver—as household cook to a woman named Rhea Gore, and she wound up serving as a driver for Gore’s roughly 25-year-old son, John Huston. Soon to become a famous film director, Huston was then a budding screenwriter and miscreant (he’d been arrested for drunk driving a few times). Having been involved in a fatal car accident that was ‘something of a scandal,’ according to his son, Tony Huston—he’d struck a pedestrian—John Huston’s license was suspended, and during the trial that ensued, Martin drove him to court each day.”

Princenthal again and again makes clear discrepancies and ambiguities within Martin’s biography and the difficulties in writing that life. But the potential confusions nevertheless serve to sharpen Princenthal’s portrait. The “shape of myth,” a phrase Princenthal uses, provides scaffolding through which she builds Martin’s life.

Martin was a teacher in small towns throughout the Pacific Northwest and came to New York City to Teacher’s College (though she said Columbia) in 1941. She moved repeatedly during the next 15 years, including stints in Taos, the Pacific Northwest, Delaware and New York City. In 1957, she came back to New York City, and established a studio in Coenties Slip, with neighbors who “included Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Indiana, and Jasper Johns…” Martin was in her 40s when she began to work with the grids she is so well known for and, more importantly, “that, she felt, represented her true vision.”

Through evocative and spare language, Princenthal skillfully evokes Martin’s paintings, particularly the dependence of the work “on the observer’s response.” Princenthal’s account of viewing The Tree (1964) is the lived experience of one of Martin’s paintings: a symbiotic and mercurial relationship. The Tree was the first Martin painting Princenthal saw, and “has stayed with [her] ever since.” However, when Princenthal returned to the painting as she wrote this biography, she was disappointed to find it “static and coldly white.” “It was a dismaying moment; I sat on a bench with pad and pen in hand and saw nothing but pencil lines and paint.” Princenthal felt she was “failing” the painting. During another visit, her response shifted again:

It was again an image of nature sublimated into the radiance of geometry. Like the majestic pump that a big tree is, sucking water from the earth and moving it toward sunlight, the painting once more seemed to breathe visibly, with its biaxial double-stroke of inspiration and exhalation. A painting can create an updraft and take you with it. It can also be a buffer for the kind of shattering, screaming beauty that may swallow you whole, as I believe Martin often felt her sensorium threatened to do. The business of response is a delicate, willed operation, a deep but unstable joy even when it succeeds.

Princenthal wrote to Martin when she was an undergraduate at Hunter College. Martin’s letter in response exhorts Princenthal to “Write your true response.” Princenthal does just that in her mutating responses to The Tree; a formal description would have been meaningless. Princenthal’s biography of Martin could have had the same tenor as a formal description of one of Martin’s paintings, and would have been as disposable. Instead, Princenthal writes a “true response” to the art and life of Agnes Martin: a whole yet tenuous biography with myths and obscurities, intimacies and challenges. Moreover, it is most crucially that Princenthal’s “true response” aids our own such observations of Martin’s work.

Princenthal, Nancy. Agnes Martin: Her Life and Art. (New York and London: Thames & Hudson, 2015). ISBN-13: 978-0500093900, 320 pages, $39.95

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April 9 to May 9, 2015
547 West 25th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York City, 212 242 7727

How can abstract painting develop — and what kind of history can this art form have? Figurative painting proceeds by identifying new subjects, and, also of course, by painting familiar subjects in unfamiliar ways. Obviously non-figurative art cannot develop in an exactly similar way. Kandinsky and Mondrian backed into abstraction by stages, as did Jackson Pollock. And then once abstraction became an ongoing tradition, working in series provided one way of keeping going. Such otherwise diverse figures as Frank Stella, Richard Diebenkorn and Robert Mangold develop a composition, rework it until it is exhausted, and then move on. What abstract artists legitimately fear nowadays is falling into a signature style, the repetition of a basic composition in varied colors — Kenneth Noland’s chevrons in various colors would be a good example of that. If abstract art is to transcend mere decoration, it is essential for it to find some deeply imaginative way of developing.

Sometimes an exhibition review must deal with such general questions. The gallery publicity for “Transgressions” cites Bill Jensen’s very numerous inspirations — African tribal art, Chinese poetry and philosophy, Michelangelo’s The Last Judgment, and Russian films. And it offers an eloquent description of his surrender to a fascination with process, and his striving to avoid “preconceived outcomes.” The critical question, then, is how these very disparate influences can be synthesized in his paintings. We have the heavy black line drawing of Transgressions (Flesh) (2013), the brilliant colors of the triptych Loom of Origins (2014 – 15), the blood reds of Mountain Tiger-Sky (2013); and the drips and painted hands of Angelico, Angelico (2012-15). And the nearly all black Now I believe it peak (Huangshan Mountain) (2014 – 15). Each of these paintings is splendid — each of them could, I believe, be one work in a strong show. But seeing them together is like seeing a group show of oddly diverse artists.

Jensen is a much admired senior artist. By sticking to his guns at times when abstraction has been beleaguered, he earned our respect — and the right to be boldly experimental. That said, this is the strangest show, by miles, of a famous artist that I have seen in a major gallery. It’s a very daring exhibition, for it’s as if Jensen wants to put everything in his paintings. Up the street from Cheim & Read is Thomas Nozkowski’s show at Pace. Nozkowski is regularly praised (or blamed) for the variety of his compositions, for his refusal ever to adopt a signature style. His pictures are very varied, and yet, a Nozkowski is always identifiable. What, by contrast, I find in Jensen’s show is a boldly promising incoherence. This is why I admire Transformations even as I fail to understand it. But who knows what I’m missing: I have been wrong about ambitious artists before.

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At his opening, I told Thomas Nozkowski that his latest show at Pace Gallery — almost entirely the work of the last year or two despite its amplitude, with densely hung drawings and paintings of different sizes — had the feel less of a commercial gallery show of new work, and more of a kind of scholarly museum exhibition. His jocular response was something along the lines that if institutions aren’t doing it he needed to himself. This seems a good starting point for a discussion about an abstract painter who breathes new life into that most hackneyed and over-used of phrases, the painter’s painter. Why does his phenomenal following among artists barely register with museums, or make much of a dent in the pocketbooks of collectors even? But I’m imposing already with such a leading question. Let me back up and ask my distinguished guests — artists, curators, critics — the same question more circumspectly: what is Nozkowski’s status, and does that status in your opinion do him justice? How do you view this current show: does a close-knit, almost narrative hang serve the work best? What, in your opinion, is the relationship of painting to drawing in his oeuvre? Where does Nozkowski come from, stylistically and intellectually, and where is he going, in terms of influence and impact upon painting culture?

I asked my participants to choose an image from the show they would like reproduced with their submissions. For the record, Marjorie Welish declined to do so, explaining that “I’d truly prefer not to choose one above the rest but instead allow other respondents’ choices to represent the body of works, so that readers are challenged to engage the ideas across the show as a whole.” Alexander Ross chose as his image the installation shot above.  DAVID COHEN

JOSEPH MASHECK: What a beautiful show just to “regard”: it almost seems like self-indulgence to write about it. It was awfully nice of Tom to mention me at his Rob Storr-moderated conversation (with artist James Siena, April 10) because I have to say that it ticks me off when somebody thinks your writing was actually too early for the stage-management of the career. The dealer of the English painter Jeremy Moon [1934-1973] was once doing an exhibit in a vitrine of Moon’s press cuttings but didn’t really want my Studio International article of 1969 because the prematurely dead artist is only now to be rediscovered! Anyway, it’s a matter of disclosure to say that I published on Nozkowski in 1981, 1985, 1988, and 2008, and curated a show at Nature Morte in 1983.

I like the question of this artist’s ambiguity of status: whether we want to elect him a master and kowtow or whether we want him to be like a nice accessible democratic personality in the way John Dewey might have liked, when America aspired to be a leader of democracy (but now that there’s only one game in town …) — which he is. For example: I have a constitutional distaste for “sublimity” as a term of approbation; and confess, by way of illustration, that Serra’s late way of hitting me over the head is distasteful (no wonder “the suits” like it). I think this is a way of saying that, though I would never be prescriptive about scale, the fairly small size of most Nozkowskis is fine with me. In fact, this show — which is better than the last because the drawings don’t seem to be so didactically related to the paintings, as before and after — positively gains by having the drawings be smaller still than the otherwise normal-sized paintings.

As soon as I got acquainted with it, the show made me conscious that I have always had an, I think, interesting problem in my head when it comes to Nozkowski’s sense of “variety,” even though that is also part of a distinct personal style: that is, how like Klee he is in this. I mean, only insofar as we are considering the shape of the overall oeuvre, because Tom isn’t really an expressionist — he is too concerned with what effect the next mark will have on what’s already there. But then again, don’t we all put the Klee slides (if you still have any!) apart until the end of our planned lecture on expressionism, because they have a similar quality? I don’t want to overemphasize this because I don’t want style to be the key thing, but there is a connective strand, I think: (a) a chamber-music scale that is most clearly like one person’s addressing another, or a few (John Russell once said that Schubert would not have understood the idea of a concert in a “hall full of fee-paying strangers”); and (b) a funny way of admitting constructive ideas if they can be sort of “melted” into the DIY orthodox-expressionist mix.

I didn’t mean to use up three paragraphs in generalities, because always I love the “object” of painting, especially when it’s as good as we have here.

DAVID BRODY: I’m going to reach a little here and say, about Tom Nozkowski’s consistently excellent body of work, that there’s something distinctively American about it: the matter-of-factness, the nakedness of the process, the humble sources of ecstatic revelation — I’m thinking of the lineage of Arthur Dove, Charles Burchfield and Mitlon Avery, and also more broadly of Stuart Davis, Charles Demuth, Agnes Martin, Agnes Pelton and Al Held. All these visionary modernists share a quasi-religious drive for simplicity, which seeks the small in the large and the large in the small. What makes them especially American is their skepticism about systems of belief, their rejection of received rules, their yeoman/DIY empiricism, and the courage to entertain naïveté.

Nozkowski embodies this tradition for me in abstract paintings that are far too smart to get caught up in nostalgia about any of that. If he lets “nature” into the work, it’s just another sign along a country road crowded with billboards. Or the billboards might be crumbling relics, their diagrams and ideology overtaken by kudzu. On top of this caricatural grip on semiology, in which all signs are equal, Nozkowski’s practice lays on a second nostalgia-proof coating: an anti-masterpiece stance — beginning in a ‘60s ideological context, as he has explained, of modest paintings suitable for his friends’ tenement apartments and continuing with a scorn for laboriousness, in favor of daily production. Add to that the way he interbreeds motifs and techniques from work to work, and from year to year almost serialistically — painterly abstraction absorbing the spirit, while expunging the letter, of Sol Lewitt.

The sheer profusion of Nozkowski’s enormous output of paintings, drawings, and prints (the prints should ideally be shown alongside!) can even put one in mind of the neutrality of Richard Tuttle or John Baldessari: one thing next to another. The distance between the good, the bad, and the ugly of Nozkowski is a hair’s breadth — ironically, as a result of his nearly perfect pitch and his superb craftsmanship, but also by the design of his disdain for the great, the anxious, the impossible work.

Sometimes this bothers me. Does one ever NOT like a Nozkowski? Is his color ever less than completely digestible? (All painters should have this problem.) Take two of my least favorite paintings in the show, Untitled (9-32) and Untitled (L-38). The first is a little too delightfully Mattissian, and the second feels like bubble gum that Nozkowski could chew in his sleep. They are both still really beautiful and interesting paintings. They might be the best in the show, just for the way they irritate me. The painting I’d pick as my favorite, though, is Untitled (L-37) which seems to combine Turner, Klee and Burchfield — talk about nostalgia. How did we get here?

When I think about Nozkowski’s long employment at Mad Magazine, and the crucial disruption of generations of young minds accomplished by that lonely bastion of unhinged cartooning — it’s as if the universe, out of curiosity, placed a perfectly equipped painter-philosopher at ground zero of a cultural explosion. Did “being a spy in the house of Mad,” as I asked in my artcritical review of Nozkowski’s 2010 show at Pace, allow him to resist the widespread awe of cartoonists, “as cultural magicians rather than versatile deadline professionals?” Did his workaday knowledge inoculate Nozkowski from the cascading effects of Zap Comix and of Philip Guston’s return to his own cartoon sources, after which the dam of imagistic American painterliness had burst? Similarly, perhaps, Burchfield’s day job as a wallpaper designer made him, if anything, cannily resistant to the seductions of pure patterned abstraction, favored by Theosophically inclined modernists since Mondrian.

ALEXANDER ROSS: Here we are once again engaging with words to further grasp something about what an artist has already shown us directly. There are at least two kinds of knowing; the naming, hashing verbal kind, and the picturing way. So, using the former method I will champion the latter! Nozkowski is an excellent example of the visually intuitive, brain-training kind of artist. By that I mean if you do something over and over again for many decades, even if what you do is leaping this way and that with full faith in intuitive moves and a responsive eye to visual inventiveness, you will establish your own beautifully stubborn neuronal pathways that will lead, perforce, to more of the same. In his case, it is often remarked that there seems to be no end of novelty in his works, and yet they somehow always look like Nozkowskis. And here’s why: there is a naturally occurring restraint located at the edge of what Noskowski would never think of doing, but within which Nozkowski has endless freedom of invention. These paintings and drawings are boundary markers of his uniquely habitual brain ruts. The man simply has the healthy habit of trying to break habits that he will in a larger way always be bound to, and we enjoy his tireless attempts, yet unconsciously sense his natural limits. His awesome contribution is to have achieved a distinguished visual persona solely via the trust placed in the brain’s natural tendency to show itself pictorially when given the means. It is that unashamed directness of showing that gives his works such inherent high quality, and it’s the high quality of the works that, like a least-expected miracle, make a sudden parting of the (mostly) dreadful contemporary art waters and allow for the firm establishment of island Nozkowski. Anachronistic work? Yes, perhaps, in the grand sweep of the buzzing “now”, but no less than other great, out-of-synch actors like Bonnard or Balthus. Strong and solid things do tend to last, I’ve noticed.

MARJORIE WELISH: The informality of the display is the perfect rhetorical complement to certain aspects of Nozkowski’s signature style: not scholarly because more intuitively grouped than would be desired in an explanatory retrospective led through an argument of some kind, this hang found a way to make a commercial gallery into a studio with a sense of process fresh on the walls.

Process here, however, enters in the sense of image always uppermost in Tom’s work for as long as I have known it. If anything, the painterliness of his early images is much less here as than in recent shows: much less impasto and pigmental wet-in-wet stuff on the canvas and rather more in evidence is the drawing — that is to say, design, and with design, a willful undermining or exaggerating error or swagger. The concetto puts good design on notice. Meanwhile, the layering of ground and relation of figure to ground is consistently contrastive, however apparently diverse appear the devices and the color. One of Tom’s strengths has always been that he does indeed understand the nature of an image to be, not an object seen in actuality, but a metamorphosis. He understands that only insofar as metamorphosis of the data has occurred does an image come about.

So knowing something of his generation is quite informative since this knowledge supplies something of an answer concerning Nozkowski’s culture and style. Joseph Masheck really should say something about that, given that as Editor-in-Chief he was instrumental in selecting Tom’s art for the pages of Artforum yet also in selecting some others who are still even now quite compatible stylistically.

As against the art constructs of Minimal or even Postminimal kinds, and certainly as a defense against Conceptual procedures, some artists adhered to a vernacular rendering, at times focusing on image driven through a folkloric or outsider stance, primitivist in nature. Decidedly not bijou, Nozkowski’s canvases early on expressed — can one say espoused? — this sensibility. In any event, this characterization provides some sense of orientation to his personal style and culture.

Other narratives of our contemporary moment would persuade us that art is not personal but impersonal, insofar as aesthetic ideology and/or an ahistorical thesis necessitates art’s coming into being. Further discussion could engage this argument.

JENNIFER RILEY: I have a large capacity for viewing and taking in works made by others, but this show was too big in a great way. I often visit shows I like sometimes two, three, four times, but seldom simply to finish seeing the whole show, as was the case here.

The story of Tom being an insider’s artist who slowly became visible is so well known that the notion of his ambiguous status worries me. I believe its a matter of minutes not decades before we will see or learn of major museum retrospectives. Tom simply occupies a sizable plot in the hearts and minds of the city’s artistic cognoscenti. Everyone wins when the good guy wins.

Tom is highly regarded by many artists because his work sits outside of fashion trends but always feels smart and of the moment. He is a studio worker who sustains a practice that clearly engages and activates his own imagination at full tilt.

I love the inclusion of both types of drawings in this exhibit, suggesting a nonhierarchical regard towards the artist’s output. I find it extremely satisfying to see drawings that inform paintings and vice versa. This offers opportunity to consider an image-group and discover the alternate attitudes of the various approaches.

I’d wager that few of us enjoy reading wall texts and looking at inkjet printouts on a wall yet thankfully from time to time we have an intensely rich, delightfully overhung, complicated show of a fierce and independently-minded individual who happens to be a master colorist, humorist and aesthete all in one.

To consider the question of where Nozkowski comes from, stylistically and intellectually, and where is he going, I immediately go to the beginning of Modern art: Picasso, Matisse, Gris, Leger, Braque, Villon, Klee, Mondrian and on over to America to artists still current and working when Tom was coming up, such as Albert Stadler, Walter Darby Bannard, Paul Feeley but also Nicholas Krushenick among many others. I am not sure of those influences- that is to say, whether or not they were his influences — but I make my own connections and nothing would surprise me more than to find out from Tom who he’s looking at or thinking about now. Recently it was Watteau!

He knows painting culture and art history, and he knows how to engage with it fruitfully. And then there are the comic books, cartoons, Mad Magazine, and graphic design. The variety of imagery that Tom presents only seems rarer today because there has been a narrowing influence — either from the academies (the professionalism of art) or from the marketplace (the speculation on art and artists careers) or both — in gallery exhibitions.

My concern is more for young artists entering the field who have not had time to deepen their initial projects and yet are vacuumed up into the machinery of art. I see a return to very handmade things in some groups of younger artists but I also hear and see a disconnect due to recent decades of de-skilling. Several younger artists have turned away from using technology altogether in their practices and have begun to teach themselves how to draw, paint and sculpt. I find this to be a good thing. Those who work with their hands, not machines or who do not rely on the labor of others to make their work, who don’t care to merely illustrate ideas or curator’s objectives may find Nozkowski to be a perfect role model. Tom’s work however is so much his own that I put him in a category with Cézanne: it is a branch few can walk out on.

RAPHAEL RUBINSTEIN: Yes, Thomas Nozkowski should be getting serious attention from U.S. museums, and should have gotten it long ago, as should many other New York abstract painters of his generation. I suspect that most of them have all but given up on the hope of full-scale retrospectives (at least in their hometown) and probably would echo Nozkowski’s DIY sentiment. Alas, they are probably right. Despite the market’s seemingly boundless enthusiasm for painting (especially, of late, for abstract modes), and despite the expansion of museums in number and size, there has been almost no interest in examining the recent history of New York painting. The only two exceptions that come to mind are “High Times Hard Times,” Katy Siegel’s 2006 exhibition at the National Academy, and my own “Reinventing Abstraction: New York Painting in the 1980s,” at Cheim and Read in 2013, which included a work by Nozkowski. Significantly, neither of these historically-themed shows happened in the mainstream museum world.

Putting aside for the moment the question of why Nozkowski and others have been subject to official neglect, let’s turn to the show at hand. The quantity, and the quality of this quantity and, perhaps most importantly, its diversity, come across as a major statement, which is rather surprising for this artist who, as our compère rightly notes, seems to fit nicely into the category of the “painter’s painter.” One of the requirements for being a “painter’s painter” is reticence, developing a style that seems, at least superficially, modest, declining all bombast, and any hint of wanting to make a big art-historical statement. It also helps to paint small. Nozkowski has met these superficial requirements, working at a consistently small scale (which has grown in nearly imperceptible increments over the decades), issuing no explicit challenges in technique or content to the legacy of modernist abstraction, exhibiting no hunger for iconoclasm or transgression. Of course, if one looks at the work more closely, there are all kinds of innovations and transgressions in Nozkowski’s work but they are always subtle and never announce themselves as such.

Nozkowski’s avoidance of high drama can lead viewers to discount his work. I have to confess that, for many years, this was my attitude. I never doubted that he was a “good” painter, one whose paint-handling and ability to create spatially complex compositions were impressive, but I mistakenly equated the small scale and the absence of attitude with lack of art-historical ambition; I was also confused by his unprogrammatic diversity, his sheer self-permissiveness. I believed (again, mistakenly) that an important contemporary painter was one who grappled with difficult contemporary themes, set out to demolish some cherished aspect of the medium, engaged in some Oepidal struggle or otherwise emulated historic avant-gardes.

Eventually, I saw the error of my ways and became, like nearly every artist I know in New York, a Nozkowski fan. As for the scale of his ambition—the current show is dizzyingly audacious. Each painting or work on paper in it could plausibly be the foundation of another artist’s entire career. Every few steps one discovers that the artist has yet again shattered the components of his art and reassembled them in an entirely new configuration. A dark ground gridded with pinhole points of jewel-like colors might give way to a neo-Cubist design of pastel hues and black lines while nearby Matisse’s Blue Nudes join a troupe of daredevil acrobats. Every few steps the kaleidoscope shakes and turns and there’s a new tangle of bifurcating rhizomes, Byzantine mosaics rearranged by some mescaline logic, gossamer textiles, baroque doodles, coral reefs, fractal enlay, star maps, fractured puzzles, Suprematist patches, flowering ornaments of every possible variety. If this show can be said to be about any one thing, it’s the necessity of growth. This has been a long winter, but now, the artist is reminding us, it’s the turn of spring.

CONTRIBUTORS

Joseph Masheck, editor in chief of Artforum from 1977-80 and longstanding contributing editor of Art in America, is the author, most recently, of Texts on (Texts on) Art, 2011. David Brody is a painter and filmmaker who exhibits at Pierogi Gallery as well as a longstanding contributor to artcritical.com. Alexander Ross is an internationally-exhibited painter who shows at David Nolan Gallery, New York. Marjorie Welish, a poet, painter and art critic, is the author of Signifying Art: Essays on Art After 1960 (1999), among other works. Jennifer Riley is a painter and writer and a longstanding contributor to artcritical.com. Poet and art critic Raphael Rubinstein teaches critical studies at the University of Houston. His numerous publications include, recently, The Miraculous (2014) and a monograph on Shirley Jaffe (2015).

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Mar 27, 2015 – Apr 25, 2015
508 West 25th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 989 4258

Lee Ann Norman: There are a few different things happening here in this exhibition: the bronzes that you fabricated at the Walla Walla Foundry, the bamboo works on the wall and on pedestals, and the smaller toothpick and grape stem works, but I think most people know you as a painter. What prompted you to gather these sculptures together and show them now?

James Siena: I’ve been talking about doing this for a long time, but when the technology came along to scan and print the small works on a larger scale, I really started thinking more seriously about it. That was about two years ago. I remember saying back in the 80s when I was making the smaller ones — all of which are destroyed now — that it would be really nice to make these in metal so that they would be more permanent. The technology wasn’t there in ’85, ’86 when I was gluing toothpicks to grape stems.

In the paintings, prints, and drawings, you tend to give yourself certain constraints as part of the process. Did that way of working having any effect on these sculptures?

I did follow certain procedures specific to the grape stem structures. The bamboo sculptures, which I started making in the last year and half, are more related to my painting procedures. They are rigorously geometric. In the bamboo ones, I tend to work from the outside in, like I do in a painting. The non-stem toothpick works used various means to create volume and structure: Villa Aurelia (one and two) were built around sticks, Margaret Atwood, Charles Babbage, and Dan Schmidt were built around chopstick sections, and Dorothy Vogel, Anthony Braxton, J.D. Bernal, and Eschatologist were all toothpick, made initially in plane geometry mode and built up from that condition.

Of the bamboo ones displayed here, did one give you particular trouble as you made it? When I look at them, I see the geometric precision alongside the presence of your hand in their free form structure. I have a friend who is a sculptor, but has a background in urban planning. I’ve always admired the freehand straight lines he draws in this nerdy kind of way (laughter). I guess I appreciate precision that is not machined.

There is a little bit of slippage that has to do with the inherent qualities of the bamboo. Some of the sticks are severely warped, so I choose the ones that are the straightest to put into the sculptures. I think Morthanveld: Inspiral, Coalescence, Ringdown (2014-15) was one of the most challenging ones to make. It wasn’t based on right angles, and I was pleased, as I built it, to find a second pentagon being iterated by the outer one and then the smaller pentagons alternating internally, creating a decahedron. I used a process that I employ in other works, which is dividing a surface again and again and again in different ways. In this sculpture, volume is divided.

You were talking about surprises that come up, and yet you give yourself constraints . . . in some ways, that sets you into a direction, but you don’t ever really have an end goal when you make the work.

No. With this one, I was just trying to make a column out of shifted pentagons. Freeman Dyson (2014) came out of these two smaller works, Katherine Dalsimer, and Just the Washing Instructions on Life’s Rich Tapestry, and a motif I used in a painting called Conversation from ’93. It’s one that I’ve worked with and distorted over the years. I thought I could do it in three dimensions, and I think it’s pretty successful. On this larger scale, it reached a level of intensity that I did not anticipate.

Sculpture is not painting, but what do I know about sculpture…? In painting, your eye can take a walk, but in sculpture, your eye has to climb around. Or it has to fly. In a painting, I’m often worried about leaving empty or open space, but in a sculpture it seems to make sense. The density or compression I put into my paintings — that desire can be satisfied with these tight areas in the sculptures where the knots coincide. The openness of these sculptures surprised me despite the fact that they are relatively complex.

I think that’s part of their beauty and appeal. The sculptures are dense but there are these areas of space and lightness within them. As we think through the progress of the sculptures, should we sequence them as first the toothpick and grape stem works, then to the bamboo, and then the bronzes?

I started working on the bronzes in the fall of 2013. I made five trips to Walla Walla. I started the bamboo sculptures when I was doing a residency at the American Academy in Rome. I was working on toothpick things, and we would buy our own groceries, so I would go into the grocery stores and hunt for toothpicks. I never liked the round toothpicks, which was all they had. I had to have flat, tapered ones sent over from the States. But what I did find at the supermarket were bamboo skewers for the barbecue. Knotting the joints with string was born of necessity.

Were you in Rome specifically to work though that idea?

No, it was just an open residency and I wanted to work on light things. I was in the mood to draw. Rome didn’t influence me directly, but I like to think it seeped into my bones. The Baroque in particular — Rome is a Baroque city in spite of its ancient past. The Baroque is ecstatic, broad, and architectural. Perhaps there’s a little Bernini in the bamboo works, come to think of it. Particularly Morthanveld…

Tell me about deciding to work in bronze. That seems like a big step away from the other materials.

I’ve always liked the notion of permanence. I try to make things that last a long time, and the bronzes would survive a fire as long as it didn’t get too hot (laughter). I also just wanted to see what would happen. I still want to see what happens if I make a small work in bronze…just how that would feel in the hand. After awhile, it became more and more necessary for me to include the toothpick works because they inform the process of how these were made. I want to take the clothes off the process. The bronzes are mysterious, and the toothpick works mitigate that.

Contents May Differ (2014) in particular was made in the same way as the smaller sculptures. We scanned and cast toothpicks for me to weld together. I cut them to the right length and worked with a master welder to make the welds. I polished and ground away all of these joints to make them smooth There’s no patina on this one — it’s just sanded, polished, and waxed so it has a different presence than the others, although I really like the outcome of the 3-D printing process. The striations on the bronze — they’re all a result of the printing process.

How long did it take to print them?

Printing the plastic-wax from which the bronze was cast? Many hours, depending on the complexity. I would only go to the foundry once the casting was done to work on the patina. I tend to embrace labor in the work. There is labor in making the original, and there’s labor in doing the patina, but it’s unusual for me to just watch this whole process happen.

Right. This kind of going away and coming back to work on something…

And there’s the leaving it to others. But I love making prints with master printers, and Walla Walla Foundry presents similar opportunities and challenges. The metalsmiths and woodworkers are collaborators more than fabricators. They made suggestions that I really responded to, like how much metal I needed to put on a joint and introducing me to new tools and techniques.

The work titles are unusual. It seems like a lot of different influences and interests inform them.

Most of the works are titled after people, places, or enigmatic word combinations. For example, Mark Strand was a friend of mine and a great poet. There are also historical figures. Barbara Tuchman is a very important historian. She wrote about the First World War, and reading The Guns of August got me started on studying that conflict. It’s an important subject of mine…does it make its way into the work? I’d like to think that it does…strategic geometry, perhaps? R.D. Laing is known for a book from the ‘70s called Knots, which is about psychological conundrums and people getting stuck in cycles of confusion. Anthony Braxton is an experimental musician who occasionally writes compositions using very unconventional notation. I think codifying thought through improvisational form is a very fertile field. In some ways I’m talking about neural connections and using the grape stem as a metaphor for that, but it also has to do with homage and pointing to the fact that abstraction doesn’t really exist.

Yes. I think we’re all trying to find some sort of signifier for “things,” but there are only so many “things” (laughter). We can shuffle them around a little bit, but…

There are many combinations, and I think that’s what makes it so interesting. For quite some time, I did not have any titles for these works, but then I started assigning names to them — invented or real — and thinking about how that could nudge the viewer towards my mind. It’s not just naming them Julius Caesar or Martin Luther King though. I thought about what might happen if someone finds a sculpture named Richard Fynman (2014), and they wonder who that is. There’s a little bit of perversity in that kind of misdirection…

What really moves us leads us to other things. It’s the good kind of rabbit hole to go down.

I really like the trestle tables and pedestals that you used to display the work. Was that your idea to install the work on them?

In my studio, I like to work standing up, so my tables are pretty high. As these began to accumulate, I needed more table space so I bought a hollow core door that I put up on some carts, but they were a little low. Then I went to an estate sale for Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof. There were four sawhorses, but I only bought two because I thought I didn’t have that much space and because I’m an idiot.(laughter) They were a perfect height with the door set on them. Having the air underneath the sculptures felt necessary. These pedestals aren’t standard — they’re two different colors, the base and the top, and there’s an overhang. I think these could be installed in a different way, and I wouldn’t have any requirements.

Now that you have a group done, do you feel like this is something you will continue to do?

I’ve been working on this show for such a long while. I need some time to reflect. I’ve been working on some ink drawings lately, and I have an ongoing group of typewriter drawings I started when I was in Rome. I have about 10 other sculptures I didn’t include in this show, so I will continue with those, and I have a painting that’s in the works… I don’t think I’ve ever been in a place like this: a new show of completely new work that almost nobody saw prior…

This idea of transformation through technology is really exciting, but it’s almost too soon to talk about. We’re entering a time where 3-D printing is really in its infancy. When this technology gets ubiquitous, stuff is going to happen that we can’t predict.

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This “Hub” linking artcritical articles on Thomas Nozkowski by five writers in the last twelve years is re-presented on the occasion of the three-decade survey of his legendary 16 x 20 inch tableau by BravinLee programs at VOLTA, the art fair at Pier 90 next door to the Armory Show, on view in New York City through Sunday March 8.

artcritical writers on Thomas Nozkowski:

Nora Griffin, 2013
David Brody, 2010
David Cohen, 2010
David Cohen, 2008
David Cohen, 2006
David Cohen, 2003
Sherman Sam, 2003
Joe Fyfe, 2003

and Thomas Nozkowski on Jane Freilicher, 2014

More information on the artist can be found at Pace

Full index entry for “Nozkowski” at artcritical

“HUBS” presents artists and subjects discussed multiple times at artcritical 

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Shirley Kaneda: Space Without Space
May 1 to May 28, 2014
514 West 24th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212-510-8181

Robert Mangold
April 4 to May 03, 2014
510 West 25th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212-255-4044

A great deal of contemporary art mimics advertising images, which seek to deliver a potent visual punch all-at-once. The abstract paintings of Shirley Kaneda and Robert Mangold – a very different style of visual art– solicit close slow looking. Thanks to happy circumstance, these exhibitions were both at galleries on the ground floor, just a block apart, for a day or two of brief overlap. And so it was natural and suggestive to look back and forth, in order to make comparisons, which proved very suggestive.  In the world of Chelsea where there are so many shows of installation art, photography and video, Kaneda and Mangold may seem very similar, but look more closely and the contrasts reveal very different sensibilities.

Robert Mangold’s shaped canvases contain flat areas of pale color: yellows, ochre, orange and red, bounded by regular curves, drawn black pencil lines which circle the composition. Some of his paintings are square, while others are shaped—Angled Ring I,  (2011) for example, is a pentagon. The lines in Square with Open Circle  (2011) form a spiral, as do those lines in Framed Square with Open Center III (2013), which run around the empty center. The open centers of Mangold’s pictures focus your attention on a centrifugal structure. In the 1960s, Michael Fried proposed the concept of deductive structure to describe the way the internal structure of shaped pictures could be ‘deduced’ from the frame. Here, by contrast, you find yourself observing the antagonistic relationship between the shape of the canvas and the drawing that it contains.

Kaneda uses rectangular canvases, though of  varied size—the smallest can easily be held in one hand, while the larger ones are regular easel paintings. Although these shapes are thus simpler than Mangold’s, their interior activity is more complicated. Kaneda’s sensibility comes closest to that revealed in Mangold’s shaped canvases in her Untitled  (2013), with its series of circles around the center, and in Restrained Decadence, (2014), which also is centered on a circle. Sometimes she deploys areas of plaid orswirls reminiscent of James Rosenquist’s Pop imagery—Sanguine Apathy  (2014) for example. Or, in other works, she sets shaped areas of solid color running across or up and down in the picture, as in Plus Minus (2013). And occasionally, she presents odd organic shapes, of which Confident Apprehension (2013), is an example. Unlike Mangold, she always creates illusionistic depth; and, again, unlike him, her abstract images are full of cuts, breaks, and layering. To put this contrast in familiar formalist terms, he is a linear painter while she a painterly painter.

There are abstract painters who work in series and those who do not. Mangold proceeds as if he was trying to paint many variations on one painting. (This procedure was more evident in his previous exhibitions of recent work than this one.)  By contrast, Kaneda offers a more open vision of the processes of art making, for her activity isn’t bounded by any pre-determined structure. Mangold’s structures, like the ripples created by a stone cast in water, encourage you to look by moving your eyes from the outside of his pictures into the empty center. Kaneda, who has a very different visual susceptibility, keeps your eye on the entire surface of her all-over compositions.

As should be apparent, the contrast between Mangold’s and Kaneda’s sensibilities is evident also in the contrast between his matter-of-fact titles and hers, which usually are expressive and metaphorical. He is ‘a prose painter,’ and she ‘a poetic painter,’ which isn’t to say that one style of visual thinking is superior to the other, but only to identify important differences. What was often thought to discredit formal analysis—such as I am practicing here—was that it was concerned only with the art itself, and not with larger questions of its meaning and context. By now it should be obvious how misleading this judgment is. Imagine that both Mangold and Kaneda took up creative writing—what markedly distinct literary structures would appropriately express such different visions of artistic activity.

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Joined moderator David Cohen to discuss Tam Van Tran at Ameringer, McEnery, Yohe, Shinique Smith at James Cohan, Ragnar Kjartansson at Luhring Augustine, and Bernard Frize at Pace Gallery

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