June 30 to July 29, 2016
535 West 22nd Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 647 1044

“The Woman Destroyed,” a group exhibition at P.P.O.W, titled after Simone de Beauvoir’s work of fiction, is a latently hostile display of frustration aimed toward overused, female-unfriendly tropes. Picking up where De Beauvoir leaves off in her book, which focuses on the lives of middle-aged women and their unsexy encounters with betrayal, failure, and various crises, these six artists each embody a unique and complicated experience that emerges from such a disadvantage.

Perhaps the poster image for this exhibition is Bag Lady (2016) by Robin F. Williams. According to urban slang, a Bag Lady is a homeless and/or crazy woman who carries all her possessions in an assortment of bags. Another colloquialism explains that if a man wishes to have sex with an ugly woman that he may better his experience by putting a bag over her head. In this painting, the insulting act of hooding her subject with a bag is muffled by the trippy palette, the stormy, gray atmosphere blooming in the distance, and by the subject’s relaxed attitude, which lets the viewer know that she’s been through this sort of thing at least a thousand times. She’s a self-proclaimed Bag Lady that put the bag on her own damn head. Maybe it’s her way of saying that her mind is her only true possession — and that men finding her sexually attractive is not her main occupation. Williams’s other painting in the show, In the Gutter (2015), is a similar display of bad-assery. The model in this picture looks as though she walked off a billboard of naked women selling watches or shoes, and assumed a squat right over a gutter, as if to say “Sell this.” The crass gesture, coupled with her beautiful form adorned in golden shoes and matching belt, reinforce the simultaneously sad and unapologetic situation: a strong, capable woman stuck playing one of the most intellectually underwhelming roles of her life.

Elizabeth Glaessner’s 20 small paintings (all 2016) slip into a deeper, psychological realm. The space is internal, slow, and sludgy; each picture resembles a snapshot from a psychedelic vision or nightmare. Circling, for instance, reads like a creepy transcription of the Three Fates. The color emits a curious internal light and is often applied with direct, gestural mark-making. Helping a Friend has raised, red iron oxide hands in the immediate foreground, which suggest that the dreamer is falling away from, or calling out to, the two figures struggling in the mid ground. De Beauvoir wrote, in The Second Sex (1949), that, “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” These images feel as though they move from the emergence to dissimilation of a woman — that a lifetime of memories and experience produce a psyche that is irreconcilable with reality perceived at face value. Glaessner’s figures appear to be forgetting their womanhood.

A similar disparate culling of inner thought and outer being can be found in David Mramor’s work. Mramor, who sometimes goes by his feminine pseudonym, Enid Ellen, features photographs of his late mother. The images, printed on canvas are embellished with smudges and lines of acrylic to create a juxtaposition of reality and painted marks. Ambiguous yet provoking, the pictures seem to point to an inability to access his mother, his inner womanhood, or even a comfortable synthesis of his his male and female attributes. The blatant clashing of language in his work corresponds to a dichotomous sensibility weighted by melancholy.

Moving from male-female to female-animal, Centaurette in Forest (2015), by Alison Schulnik, is a visceral, chunky rendering of a lady centaur. Not a bull in a china shop, but a centaurette in a cake shop, the frantic creature grasping at the sides of her head appears as though she herself is an amalgamation of frosting, wading through the surrounding flora, which is equally goopy. Historically, female centaurs rarely appear in mythology but are occasionally found in Greek and Roman mosaics. Conceivably, this work speaks to the nature of existing without the power to communicate — of being trapped. Similar in both form and content, Lauren Kelly’s digital print, Wall Flower (2011), depicts a constructed mini dancehall. A doll, whose face is cropped out of the shot, sits amid a cluster of empty chairs, wearing a billowing dress literally made of cake frosting. What was made to be tasted and enjoyed by others goes unsampled, either because her choice to withhold it, or by rejection of others.

Looking at Jessica Stoller’s sculpture, Slip (2016), we see again the persistent theme of dessert. The subject of a porcelain bust rears her head, smiling as she balances various pastries, sweets, and plates that have been plopped on top. But unlike Schulnik or Kelly’s females, who are either frantic or lonely, and different even from Williams’s cool and collected women, the figure here appears content — as though she’s merely wearing an extravagant hat to a Surrealist costume ball. Ultimately, what the various dispositions portrayed have in common is a post-angry dissatisfaction with the onslaught of slangs and expectations that women remarkably deal with.

The post De Beauvouir’s Inheritors: “The Woman Destroyed” at PPOW appeared first on artcritical.

June 3 to July 16 2016
600 Washington Square South (at South 6th Street)
Philadelphia, PA, 215 629 1000

A day in the life of a dying metropolis: At noon, a building collapses under glaring sunlight. At dusk, an orange glow washes over an overgrown rail viaduct. At dawn, banners flutter in from every direction, carrying a cryptic message to the city’s empty streets. Suddenly, flying shards of material adhere to the sides of a crumbling warehouse, resurrecting it as a luxury loft. Such is the transformation that artist Tim Portlock depicts in his video 11th_St_City_Symphony.mp4 (2013), from the exhibition “Ash and Gold,” at Locks Gallery. It is a transformation one sees in cities throughout the United States, in which whole neighborhoods disintegrate and new development takes root at the blink of an eye.

Bookending Portlock’s video are two bodies of prints that blend photography and computer rendering, one based on blighted scenery from the East Coast, the other on similar landscape in the West. The older prints show a city derived from, but not identical to, Philadelphia. Salon (2011) overlooks a dramatic V-corner, denuded of most of its structures and populated by wild dogs. Abandoned factories loom in the background, and behind them a structure that resembles Philadelphia’s massive city hall clock tower — topped not by the statue of founder William Penn, but a hulking figure that might be a staggering corpse from The Walking Dead.

Anyone who has travelled to Philadelphia by rail will find this desolation familiar. Yet Salon is not one site in particular but a distillation of Philadelphia scenes, and by his own admission, the artist has omitted certain objects and inserted others to capture what he considers to be the city’s essence. Portlock has been deliberate about the alignment of details, putting, for example, the sun’s glowing fireball directly behind the menacing clock tower statue in — much the way Thomas Cole cast dramatic sunlight on figures locked in struggle in his 1836 painting Course of Empire: Destruction.

Although his images depict a cycle of decline and gentrification unique to today’s city, Portlock has stated that they are inspired by the 19th-century American landscape art of painters like Cole. Those Hudson River artists also manipulated the scenes they painted in order to embed in the landscape a deeper vision of the American character. They bathed mountains, rivers, and wild animals in a quasi-religious sunlight, identifying nature with broad themes such as sin, redemption, harmony and conflict.

If Portlock’s Philadelphia scenes are like a painted 19th-century jeremiad, his West Coast prints are more like the thin rants of a modern-day religious television show. Many are based on San Bernardino, California, where the washed out colors of the Mojave Desert create a relentlessly even light. Instead of color cast from the sun, the artist uses the artificial colors of signage and advertising to create visual drama. In Yellow Dancer (2015), for example, he inserts a deflated acid-yellow AirDancer in the foreground. Collapsed over a wire, the figure’s deformity, coupled with its artificially happy hue, embodies a void more profound than that of Philadelphia’s decay.

The AirDancer is the closest thing to a human presence in any of Portlock’s work. The artist has said that he omits the figure in order to avoid the tendency, seen in much realist art, to show people as embodiments of their victimhood rather than depicting them as human beings in full. Instead he draws attention to the forces that create such forlorn scenes. Like the fluttering banners in the video 11th_St_City_Symphony.mp4, the Air Dancers also serve as metaphor for the weightless condition of U.S. cities, in which stone, steel and asphalt float on the worthless paper of land deeds and advertisements. The trail of false promises these documents embody enables a landscape of endless freedom, and also of endless emptiness.

The post Death and Resurrection in the City: Tim Portlock at Locks Gallery appeared first on artcritical.

The River Keeps Talking at Ampersand Gallery & Fine Books

July 30 to  August 25, 2015
2916 NE Alberta Street, Suite B
Portland, OR, 503 805 5458

“The River Keeps Talking,” Ampersand Gallery’s recent summer exhibition, was an engaging one in what seems to be a string of impressively curated shows to grace Portland’s Alberta Arts District. This was a show of ecological and geometric forms carrying with them iconographic meanings both straightforward and conceptual, featuring work by Matthew F. Fisher, Clayton Cotterell and Ellen McFadden.

Walking up at just the right hour, 5:30 pm on my most recent trip, I was pleased to be greeted by the shadow of palm fronds projected by the sunset via the gallery front window. Palm trees are uncommon in Portland, and for this particular show’s sequence of paintings and prints, the tree’s image is the perfect invenzioni when combined with what it provisionally flanks: the last in the sequence of Fisher’s surreal beachside acrylics.

These paintings are thick with saturated, bubblegum pop hues, nostalgia and style, recalling early summer heat and its light hazes. These and another thing: water, which is in itself becoming a rarity. (Is this an implicit reason for its center-stage position in this show?) Where there is water, it can be said, there are people there too. But not one bather is seen here. This, along with an occasion to test perception of image production, is part of the exhibition’s charm.

Looking at the paintings and what they might tell or ask of us, let’s also say that the appearance of the aforementioned palm-shadow has not only the one meaning, that the sun is low in the sky and what’s in its way’s been pinned up on the wall as a dark gray projection, but a second meaning, like that of the removal of one’s hat at a passerby to signal a hello. This show, at first glance, is just as good humored, and we can accept this meaning as a friendly handshake, paying attention to what is both obvious and also what is unknown. This was a good setup, at least for me, for the imagistic and (however loose) narratives found in Fisher’s paintings.

Taking the show on in reverse, the first acrylic is the show’s final one: Meaningless September (2014). The painting is a suitable point of entry for both Fisher’s own works and those of Cotterell and McFadden.

If Fisher’s subjects are maritime (though not specific to any era), they remain in limbo between loose and tight, specific and abstract, atmospheric and microscopic. In Meaningless, Fisher’s layer-by-layer process of painting is revealed through the curious buildup, or rollup, of the water’s edge up to a very granulated beach. This feature of water is highly strange, in that we can deduce its being water, though it also looks like something else. Plastic or rubber, in any case something you could peel away, roll back up and tuck under your arm. This version of the sea looks like daytime starlight as it ripples back toward the horizon line so famous in all of Fisher’s paintings. Fisher’s approach is presumably no-ideas, which leads him to certain subjects that might be precluded by more deliberation.

Another of Fisher’s apprehending canvases, Silly Boy, 2014, shows a single blade of seagrass as the tallest plant around. The simple leaf in this last painting, by this logic, takes on the importance of any subject ever painted. Here, by virtue of the shoot’s being presented in apparent reverence, the artist allows us to overstep the limits of

merely formal perception and imagine the ordinary as extraordinary or even otherworldly.

Likewise, the two large “drops” of water in Meaningless, hung magically aloft, loom large, and appear as mystical presences. In this way, Fisher’s simple subjects appear to us without much relation to his forebears or reference to painting itself and the impedimenta of career. In its stark everything-and-nothing, the painting recollects The Glass Bubbles (1850), by English poet Samuel Greenberg, who wrote:

The motion of gathering loops of water
Must either burst or remain in a moment.
The violet colors through the glass
Throw up little swellings that appear
And spatter as soon as another strikes
And is born; so pure are they of colored
Hues, that we feel the absent strength
Of its power. When they begin they gather
Like sand on the beach: each bubble
Contains a complete eye of water

Water is by now the overarching motif in this exhibition, and it shows up in various guises. The former imagistic synchronicity found in the Greenberg poem perhaps allows for some of the subtler and uncanny aspects of the element represented in all three of these artists’ works.

Fisher’s new imagery is cool, fun, and highly attractive to anyone keen on ocean views and graphics, and furthermore it is decisively mellow. These paintings give a more mystical sense, and, when juxtaposed with the comparatively more intense prints by Cotterell on the gallery’s facing wall, they look pretty dreamy.

Cotterell’s four collaged photographic pigment prints, in their flat-out dazzling compositional simplicity, make their subjects — water and landscape — full of surprise. In this first pigment print, Untitled (2015) Cotterell has made what looks like a wave in black, white, and silver, look like a tide is turning into a frozen tundra bedecked with stars. What appears to be the surf at another glance could then also be a snowy mountain range with charred stumps of trees at its further melted base. The prints depict movement while being compositionally static (being the prints they are), because of their effect upon the eye, which makes one guess again and again at what’s being shown. These works are reminders that what is commonly known can always become unfamiliar through experimentation, and thus contain the possibility to baffle, in a good way.

In another untitled print by Cotterell, the largest in the show, we get a mid-ocean view with the horizon abandoning itself for the sky. Looking at this I get the feeling of standing on the edge of a high cliff, or on a boat out to sea, that the world has taken on a characteristic of limitlessness. It’s what people since the Ancient Greeks (as far back as we have record) felt when they looked out over a cliffside, overwhelmed at all there was to take in, with simultaneous doubt with regard to possibility or passibility. We either can’t believe what we are seeing, or it’s too much to take in.

Standing as close as allowable to the print, starting at its left hand corner, one has the desire to take in the composition little by little to know its very details. Is it wind that causes the more intense wavelets in this area of the water, or has it something more to do with the chosen medium or some other texture collaged in? Moving the eye upward toward the sky, the water’s calm is described by both its smoothness and this portion of the print’s lightening shade.

Cotterell’s third untitled print is a splash, in the same black/white/silver of the previous two. This is all the intensity and energy of the second print, condensed to 18 x 22 inches. The flow is green, white, and incensed. In person, this print looks like the splash or whirlpool it is, except with the strange detail that the edges appear to be glass or plastic. What is water? It is temporarily rechanneled through what amounts to experiments with forms and mediums, into the perceptions of this show’s viewers.

In the back room of the gallery are three large acrylic paintings by McFadden. They’re brightly hued and geometric, belying a pure abstraction that they only partially contain. This exhibit is McFadden’s third exhibition in the span of a year. These works reflect McFadden’s memories and perspectives on Northwest waterways, which are in her words “nearly dead today.” Do I know this because I read the leaflet? Only partially, as this “information” is also translated into her paintings.

In these vibrant configurations of line and color, McFadden shows the icon of nuclear effect upon water, in a creative direction she describes on her website as “constructive.” For McFadden, “the paintings serving a purpose of two dimensional surface as the basis for tension and interaction with shape and the four outside edges. Color is a part of that interaction,” but because these aren’t pedantic ecological narratives, the viewer is also a part of the interaction, adding to an already congenial aesthetic experience.

In Solkuks Wanapum and Wanapum (both 2015), river water cools as the rectangular shapes (representing water) change from jasper red to salvia blue and violet, the further away they get from toxicity. In the former composition, skinny, black rectangles represent the nuclear plants the water flows among, “not unlike the confluence of the Snake and Columbia Rivers, downstream from where the Wanapum Indians once lived and fished before being displaced by dams in the 1950s,” McFadden says. Work and life are apparent in these canvases, but you have to take a good look. As the hues and geometries change and converge from painting to painting, a concern for the occupied, precarious, and sublime states of water are displayed and enter our experience. Ellen McFadden’s ecological concerns and keenness to the problematic of production began early on, when she worked at a cannery as a young child. This combination of idea and practice makes McFadden’s paintings part of a dialogue.

If the emblem of Modern Art was to abandon formalist conventions, then the art of our era (whatever you want to call it) takes reference in lieu of illusionist figuration, fragments in place of “clear” statements, questions over answers, and dialogue instead of solitude: all of which can be found in the pictures seen in the above exhibition. One of the pleasures of recognizable subjects like these in The River Keeps Talking, is their ability to be riven, abstracted, rearranged, and collaged all while remaining perceptible. To me, this is what accounts for the hospitableness of shows like this; there’s point of entry but we’re not told exactly what to see or how to see it.

The post A Complete Eye of Water: A Summer Show at Ampersand Gallery appeared first on artcritical.

May 16 to August 3, 2015
2025 Benjamin Franklin Pkwy (at North 20th Street)
Philadelphia, PA, 215 278 7200

The Barnes Foundation’s recent exhibit, “The Order of Things,” in their contemporary gallery, is at once dynamic and problematic. Intended to relate to Barnes’s enigmatic approach to exhibition design, fantasy and appropriation abound. Installations by three renowned artists — Mark Dion, Judy Pfaff and Fred Wilson — mine varying aspects of Barnes’s approach to installing artifacts and paintings. His system for exhibiting work was intended to be carried into in perpetuity and is mimicked in the work of the artists selected for this project.

Pfaff created a sprawling installation in the main space of the gallery. Center stage, this work honors Laura Barnes’s arboretum, which she cultivated alongside Albert Barnes and a cluster of specialists. The arboretum is an extensive garden of hundreds of rare trees and flora from around the world, still flourishing at the Foundation’s original museum in Lower Merion. Pfaff’s Scene I: The Garden, Enter Mrs. Barnes (2015) is a dazzling psychedelic display of photos of the arboretum and Henri Rousseau’s paintings gone awry. Perhaps an abject backdrop to Alice in Wonderland, the installation is replete with digital prints on plastic and vinyl, poured pigmented foam, natural wood and steel. Swirling renditions of a simulated pond’s edge and bank are constructed using wood and liquid foam. Repeated in several key locations within the installation, these frothy sea-green islands create a sense of boundaries and depth. Punctuating this expansive landscape are leafy steel structures, painted white.

Incongruent elements abound, with white steel chandeliers overhead and neon lights that are, disappointingly, never illuminated. An installation of plastic wallpaper with distorted floral patterns is strategically placed on the gallery’s southern wall. Plastic floor panels extend across the space and were based on Henri Rousseau’s paintings; they serve as a conceptual bridge between Pfaff’s installation and the collection. Other connections include an area over the eastern wall of the gallery that alludes to the framed lunettes of Henri Matisse’s The Dance (1910).

Laura Barnes was integrally involved in the development of the arboretum at the original Barnes Foundation. She cultivated an expansive array of flora from areas within the states and other countries. Laura Barnes selected blooming plants that were considered difficult to grow in the Pennsylvania’s blistery winters of Pennsylvania such as southern magnolias, etc. Her approach to constructing the Foundation’s gardens paralleled the landscapes found in the work of Calude Monet, Paul Cezanne and other landscape paintings in the collection. Pfaff’s title channels the contribution of Laura Barnes to the development of the Foundation’s botanical gardens.

Fred Wilson’s rooms, located to the right of the entrance, are conglomerates of staged tableaux, some more successful than others. At the entrance three scenes are created in a sparse, modernist fashion, using furniture borrowed from the Merion offices, desks chairs and even an early Dell computer. The interior rooms hold greater intrigue; these spaces represent a sculptural approach to furniture, art objects and glass works from the collection. While visitors walk through these spaces, African drums and chanting waft through the air. Wilson inserts the African presence through sound rather than including it materially in his installation. Perhaps using African art directly would have been too obvious a move for Wilson, based on his past installations at museums throughout America. The soundscape is a compilation tape. Wilson has chosen not to disclose its origin or name the people recorded. Nameless voices surround the viewer — the ubiquitous presence of Africa is in our midst.

In his 1983 book Flash of the Spirit, Robert Farris Thompson uses the metaphor that if aliens descended on earth and sampled the music produced around the world, overridingly the music from Africa and the African Diaspora would be the most prevalent. Wilson has reconstructed this reality for us in Trace. However, it is interesting that he has chosen not to name the African cultural groups represented in his compilation tape. Is this again an example of a Western intervention that includes the artistry of Africa and deciding to render it anonymous?

Mark Dion’s installation is delightful, yet foreboding, in its inclusion of guns, knives and the like; however, would these be included in the collection of a naturalist? These emblems are contrasted with butterfly nets, fishnets, satchels and garden tools. Dion’s The Incomplete Naturalist is a tour de force in symmetry. According to the curator, Dion’s use of symmetry is mimetic of Barnes’s aesthetic. Like an archeologist, he puts everything in order and builds relationships to construct a narrative.

Overall, the Order of Things was a fascinating array of dissonant styles of installation art brought together. Therein lies its intrigue. Each artist serves as an individual conduit into the mind of Albert and Laura Barnes.

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Shepard Fairey: #Obey at Palazzo delle Arti Naples (PAN)
December 6, 2014 to February 28, 2015
Via dei Mille, 60, 80121 Napoli, Italy

There is a vital distinction to be made between the kinds of works of art that are made to be shown in galleries and museums and what Joachim Pissarro and I have called “wild art” (in our 2013 book of that title from Phaidon Press), art that is initially presented outside this art world system. There is a great deal of wild art—for example, graffiti, tattoos and most of the art displayed in hotels and restaurants. But since in the contemporary art scene there is actually no significant difference in kind, besides location, between this wild art and art-world art, works of art can move between these two kinds of display sites. This distinction is important, however, because normally the art world—a system that relies upon exclusion to justify its aesthetic values—holds wild art at a distance. Occasionally, however, the distinction breaks down—and that is what has happened in this most instructive exhibition when Shepard Fairey’s graffiti was presented in a Neapolitan kunsthalle. The goal of what he calls his ongoing experiment in phenomenology, Fairey has explained, “is to reawaken a sense of wonder about one’s environment.” Thus his OBEY sticker attempts to stimulate curiosity and “bring people to question […] their relationship with their surroundings.” He wishes to cause them “to consider the details and meanings of (these) surroundings. In the name of fun and observation,” a self-description that makes him sound like a modernist landscape painter or many other art museum artists.

This large-scale exhibition provided the welcome opportunity to trace Fairey’s stylistic development. In 1997 and 1998 he did images of Stalin, Mao, Lenin, with the politically ambiguous “Obey” logo attached, ironical takes on images of familiar leftist heroes. Marylin Warhol (2000) made an explicit allusion to art-world art, a procedure which didn’t really come off, however, as this image superimposing a depiction of Warhol on a Warholesque picture of Marilyn Monroe is weaker than Warhol’s own depictions of Monroe or himself. Fairey was more successful in Malcolm X (2006) and his screen prints, Nixon Money, Mao Money, Lenin Money (2003)—punchier images with a clear political impact, as he was in his Uncle Scam (2007), Rise Above Cop (2007) and, most especially Two Sides of Capitalism: Good and Two Sides of Capitalism: Bad (2007) which complicate his earlier concerns by juxtaposing words and images. He became internationally famous for the advertising image of Barack Obama for the 2008 presidential race, an image of which was acquired by the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C. Thanks to his fame, he was invited to do beautifully decorative all-over red images of Angela Davis, Arab revolutionaries and St. Mark’s Horses for his show in Venice, 2009. The stunning mixed media collages Eye Alert Cream and Eye Alert Red (2010), close ups of faces with a dollar sign in the tear and a skull reflected in the eyeball, represent a new, richly suggestive development of his portraits.

Like any successful art world artist, Fairey has a developed personal style. His posters looked great in this site. Street artists normally seek one-off effects—you see their graffiti, and then stroll on. But when wild art moves into a gallery, it inevitably gets seen differently, in the context of an artist’s development and, also, in relation to that of contemporaries. Although a gifted designer of visually striking two-tone frontal images, Fairey’s development is relatively limited in formal terms, and yet the introduction by stages of more complex subjects makes for a visually rewarding retrospective. He has moved a long distance from his striking point. It was appropriate, surely, that I discovered the exhibition not through publicity in some art magazine or web site, but by seeing his ad in the streets. Open your eyes and you will discover that there’s a lot of wild art out there! Palazzo delle Arti is located in the upscale neighborhood of Chiaja, the one place in graffiti-filled Naples where little street art is found. “#Obey” reveals how art is transformed when wild art become art-world art. And so, now, as you can see from the upscale catalogue, his art is found in many private Italian collections.

The post Be Wild and Obey: Shepard Fairey in Naples appeared first on artcritical.

Decades before Tracey Emin showed the world her messy bed, and made confessional art a “thing,” Dorothy Iannone was quietly making work about sex, love, friends, and the mundane tasks of our everyday. Iannone’s work (which was often censored over the years and dismissed for its simple, comic book-like style and graphic sexual content) has received renewed interest from the art world recently. In 2009, the New Museum presented her first solo exhibition at a US art venue, which was followed by wide-ranging gallery exhibitions and additional museum shows in Paris, London, and Berlin. A new publication, You Who Read Me with Passion Now Must Forever Be My Friends (Siglio Press, 2014) builds on that interest. The book assembles rare and out-of-print artist books, drawings, etchings, and unpublished texts spanning Iannone’s more than 40-year career, and reproduces many of them in their entirety. Included also are a number familiar works like On+On (1979), A Cookbook (1969), and I Was Thinking of You (1975), along with excerpts of a 2011 interview with artist Maurizio Cattelan, as well as conversations with critic Trinie Dalton (who also contributes an essay), and writer Noa Jones.

Born in 1933 in a multigenerational Catholic household, Iannone studied literature at Boston and Brandeis Universities before marrying painter James Upham in 1958. They traveled frequently to Asia, North Africa, and Europe, and she began to incorporate into her paintings the artistic styles from art she had seen during her travels: Japanese woodcuts, Indian erotica and paintings from Mughal Empire, Greek and Egyptian sculpture. Together, she and Upham opened Stryker Gallery in the heart of New York’s vibrant downtown art scene in 1963, and Iannone befriended several European and American ex-pat artists such as Robert Fillou and George Brecht. Soon, a trip to Iceland with another friend, the Fluxus artist and poet Emmett Williams, would forever change her life. She met and fell in love with artist Dieter Roth and after a brief return trip to New York, Iannone left her husband to move back to Reykjavík. She lived and worked with Roth there and in London, Basel and Düsseldorf until their relationship ended in 1974.

Iannone’s work evokes a youthful simplicity. Her images are filled with colorful decorative motifs like stars, flowers, rosebuds, and teardrop-like doodles that complement an abundance of florid texts that frequently accompany the explicit illustrations. While there are crude drawings of genitals on all of the figures whether they are clothed or not, the work isn’t necessarily just about sex. Iannone seems much more interested in exploring what it means to be devoted to someone or something. Flora and Fauna (1973), a drawing on Bristol board with felt pen, is a brilliantly colored scene featuring the mythical Dorothy and Dieter figures surrounded by a lush landscape. Dieter’s and Dorothy’s arms are covered in black patterned tattoo-like sleeves, and Dieter wears black “pants” with white, yellow, and crimson heart shaped figures containing text reflecting on deep commitment to another:

“I am your deepest lover
You cannot resist me
You cover my body with kisses
You touch me as often as possible. I am infinitely adorable
My face is bright and wise and intelligent and beautiful.
I am the only one . . . ”

In an interview with critic Trinie Dalton, Iannone says that when she spoke of “ecstatic unity” in the past, she thought that such a total union between oneself and the other could only happen erotically, but later realized that wasn’t true. “Much later, I glimpsed that this sense of completion was already within myself waiting to be realized […] When I read more recently that in Tibetan Buddhism, another word for enlightenment is ‘ecstatic unity,’ I was still as I let the pleasure of that knowledge silently and without thoughts spread through me,” she said.

Iannone’s art should be read neither as simple memoirs nor as mere erotica despite their frank references to sex and her personal life. The best art always begins with what we know and then expands — a concept Iannone seems to understand well. Although deeply personal, disquieting, and revealing, Iannone’s work somehow manages to make room for the universals in life: the sex, love, “death and taxes” of life. You Who Read Me With Passion Now Must Forever Be My Friends helps provide context and unifying arc to Iannone’s oeuvre, one focused on personal growth and discovery revealed through a blurring of public and private worlds.

Trinie Dalton and Dorothy Iannone, Dorothy Iannone: You Who Read Me With Passion Now Must Forever Be My Friends (New York: Siglio, 2014). Ed. Lisa Pearson. ISBN 978-1938221071, 320 pages, $31.30

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The small show of Vasily Kandinsky’s early work, now on view in the third floor annex of the Guggenheim Museum, offers an intimate, insightful glance at the more formative years of this celebrated artist’s career. The 16 paintings and woodcut prints included in the exhibition highlight a period of inquiry, exploration, and discovery, the decade during which Kandinsky began testing the boundaries of his aesthetic credo and barreling toward his eventual ascension into the heady realm of pure abstraction. And although the low ceiling, low lights, and somewhat disjointed hanging scheme do not quite do them justice, the works themselves are a joy to behold: not only are they lovely and challenging, but they reveal a great mind on the verge of genius, toiling to piece together the aspects of a grand puzzle whose total image would change the face of art and the modern paradigm forever after.

The four early landscapes — picturesque en-plein-air sketches of Munich and Amsterdam — are studious and impressionistic, their subject matter and thick, gestural brushwork emulating the work of Monet. Though the mastery of color that characterizes Kandinsky’s later blockbuster Compositions had yet to materialize, one can sense his curiosity and desire to push his palette further, to release each color from its expected role and see what it might otherwise be capable of. In Amsterdam – View from the Window (1904), for example, there is a palpable tension between tradition and innovation. For all its richness and loose suggestion of form, the painting is still a representational rendering of the empirical world, and everything in it is more or less as it should be: the grass is green, the bricks are red, the sky is blue, and the city sits comfortably on its axis, extending out from a level and distant horizon. Fishing Boats, Sestri (1905) and Pond in the Park (1906) find Kandinsky compressing the picture plane and honing his attention to color, creating increasingly delineated zones in unexpected hues like ochre and cerulean with a vigorous back-and-forth of the brush.

Also included in the show are six woodcuts — four black-and-white and two tinted with metallic paint (all 1907) — whose presence feels largely didactic, serving as stepping-stones into Kandinsky’s next, more pioneering painterly phase. By removing the necessity of color, the medium forced Kandinsky to focus on simplified shapes, careful composition, and the manipulation of space, both in regard to truncated perspective and the rhythmic alternation between inked and non-inked areas. A few of the later jewel-toned paintings, including Landscape near Murnau with locomotive (1909) and Landscape with Rolling Hills (1910), retain the woodcuts’ flat, blocky shapes and further manipulate the space within the picture plane, suspending gravity and tilting the ground at such a pitch that the trees, houses, and clouds seem as though at any moment they might float away or tumble right out of the canvas.

From 1908 onward, Kandinsky began to gradually abstract and strip away recognizable imagery in favor of placing the emphasis on painting itself. Group of Crinolines (1909) marks a major shift in this direction, depicting a luncheon party à la Manet in an expanded palette of vibrant pastels that leans toward the secondary, slanted hues of the Fauvists. On a distinctively larger canvas, eight men and women stand stiff and flat as paper dolls against a highly abstracted countryside, their faces rendered in shades of celery green, lilac, citrine, and ice blue. Close inspection rewards the viewer by revealing a pleasurable trick Kandinsky has played, for the near-neon hues are tempered not by black, but rather by colors that adroitly tip toward black: deep navy or teal, olivey green, or overripe plum. The brusque juxtapositions of Braque’s early landscapes are fused with the scribbled, aggressive marks of Kirchner, giving one the sense that the objects are still isolated but on the cusp of dissolving into a raucous din of color and light.

By the time he painted Pastorale (1911), Kandinsky was squarely en route to abandoning representation altogether, his female figures and their bucolic surroundings blurred into vague, fuzzy fields of buttery yellows and dusty whites accented here and there by saturated shades of blue, pink, and green. His use of color is more material and his composition loosens up, allowing for a new kind of space to enter the picture. As art historian John Golding once observed, this is the moment where:

Kandinsky’s blues, his reds, his yellows, are becoming nouns, objects, substances in their own right: blue is blue, red is red, yellow is yellow… and the pocketing of space, both visually and psychologically, suggests a space that can engulf us. To this extent the picture plane now carries with it implications of concavity; as our eyes penetrate into individual areas, compartments of visual activity, others swim out to the periphery or sides of our field of vision.[1]

Within his first decade as a serious painter, Kandinsky successfully unlocked and activated a realm of aesthetic experience that reverberates through the annals of art history and still has the capacity to inspire awe, and often render viewers speechless. In the year following Pastorale he went on to co-found Der Blaue Reiter and publish his seminal text, “Concerning the Spiritual in Art.” I, for one, am glad to live in an age where these breakthroughs are safely behind us, and can be brought together and marveled at simply for the price of admission.

[1] Golding, John, Paths to the Absolute. (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2000), 90.

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Peter Scott, 2014
The Review Panel, 2012
David Carrier, 2010
Eric Gelber, 2009
Deborah Garwood, 2009
David Cohen, 2004
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