David Cohen
Here are two memories of Thomas Nozkowski, picked at random from so many that remain vivid of this larger than life yet eminently down to earth man, epitomizing what exhilarating fun he made it to share for a moment in his aesthetic adventures. In 2003, I curated a retrospective of his drawings at the New York Studio School, the first in New York. I say curated, but as I went off to Europe in the preceding summer, after instigating the project, I returned to find that Tom had, impatiently, made a final selection of his own accord. I was, however, given carte blanche in the installation. Conscious of the age and delicacy of some of these works, I researched just how many lumens we could allow in the gallery. The only direction on the hang, besides a judicious last-minute exclusion, was to turn the lights up full blast. The eager-beaver curator tried to explain what he knew of the science, but Tom insisted the only thing that mattered was that they looked good to those who came to see them. “Let ‘em fry!” he exclaimed.

Years later, when I was selecting a show at a commercial gallery inspired by cinema, Tom enthusiastically – but with a promise of discretion – shared his ongoing catalogue of art in movies. With a reach and perspective that would have impressed any iconologist in its multifacetedness, Tom compiled extensive lists of artists as characters, preexisting artworks by known artists that make screen appearances, artworks made for films, and many other permutations. I begged him to allow me to publish it, but he couldn’t let it go to press so long as the research was ongoing—a lifelong pursuit.

Editing these tributes and reminiscences from a cross-section of artists, scholars and friends – again, a sampling – has the humbling effect of making clear that everyone else privileged to come into his orbit felt uniquely special, a confidant of his avuncular bonhomie and encyclopedic knowledge, and of the candor and curiosity he felt about his own artistic inquiries. His wit was kind and merciless in a single instance. He was democratic in that anyone could be included in the conversation and hierarchical in really caring about what was best, what was dispensable. Indifferent towards established canons of high and low, he was fastidious in the sense of quality.

For me, he was a paramount example of an artist who could go against the grain, but do so without rancor, and indeed be an exemplar of community even with a mainstream he might reject. This is what he was as a person and an artist—a maverick who was also a mensch.

Karen Wilkin
I knew Thomas Nozkowski’s work before I knew Tom. I was fascinated by those mysterious, small but commanding works that seemed to be about something very specific but impossible to pin down. I loved the range of paint applications, the delicacy of the incidents, and the surprising color. I’m still haunted by a work from the first Nozkowski exhibition I saw – at Max Protech Gallery about 1990. A wavy edged white shape, like a saddle made of curly sheepskin, hovered against a pale brushy ground. The image was odd, beautifully constructed, and both exquisitely and roughly painted. It was also ferociously intelligent, funny, and, as it turns out, unforgettable. When I got to know the author of this oddball image, I discovered that he shared many of the painting’s qualities, plus irresistible charm. Like the painting, he could seem deceptively off hand, someone who took his work very seriously indeed but didn’t take himself all that seriously. His comments about art were seasoned with throwaway lines like “Why two, if one will do?” and something about oil paint’s being “the queen” of materials.

It was clear that Tom’s elusive works were simultaneously discoveries that emerged from the act of making and distillations of experience. The sense of discovery made repeated motifs seem fresh and newly invented each time. There were loose family resemblances among groups of paintings – shared memories of the grid, repeated structures or background patterns – but color was always arresting and every configuration seemed unprecedented and indescribable: hors catégorie, like the steepest routes in bicycle races. I discovered that the underlying experience that, at some level, provoked the image could range from things glimpsed to things read, and much, much more. Tom made powerful images “about” arcane books on science and walks through the city. No wonder those enigmatic paintings seemed so specific and at the same time, unnameable. They were specific, just unidentifiable by us ordinary mortals. (I recall Tom’s saying that sometimes he found himself unable to remember exactly what had triggered a particular configuration, but if it still seemed resonant, he could use it.)

A few years ago, I invited Tom and Joyce to be visiting critics at Triangle Artists’ Workshop, an intense program of art making and discussion for international artists, held that summer in upstate New York, within striking distance but still a healthy drive from the Nozkowski-Robins home in High Falls. The pair generously spent the day with 20 or so artists from about half a dozen countries – a high point of the session, the artists said – and joined the gang for a fairly raucous dinner. We had offered Tom and Joyce accommodations after their strenuous day in the studios, but they insisted on returning home that night, as I knew they often did after New York openings. “We like driving,” Tom said. If those long nocturnal trips stimulated paintings, we are all the beneficiaries of his stamina behind the wheel.

Many students have told me how much they admired Tom’s work, but few seem to have responded to it directly. They’re wise not to try. Tom’s astonishing images could only have been made by someone with a mind as well-furnished as his, informed by his particular experience, and open to the possibilities suggested by his apparently limitless ways of putting on paint. Of great mathematics, the mathematician G.H. Hardy wrote: “There is a very high degree of unexpectedness, combined with inevitability and economy.” That’s a perfect description of Thomas Nozkowski’s art.

Marjorie Welish
A rare artisanal talent, Thomas Nozkowski developed an image, an image in the true sense of that word. What emerged in canvas after canvas, time after time, was no mere thing but rather entirely more strenuously inventive, as the object became a lapidary form through metamorphosis, in a practice spanning a half century. Very few artists can match that imaginative embodiment.

Robert Storr
Thomas Nozkowski was a wickedly intelligent man and an unrivaled painterly lyricist. The intelligence was natural and unpretentious. He read a lot and developed an astonishingly broad albeit usually understated frame of reference, which made it a delight to match wits with him when everyone else around seemed bent on showing off their readymade erudition. And in a period when many of his peers – though when it came to art itself he had precious few – favored arcane discourses with all their labored jargon he trusted in the American vernacular, a preference doubtless enriched by his consumption of detective stories and films noirs, passions we shared.

As a painter he was the ultimate come-from-behind kid, the day-job-wife-and-family man who paid for all his time in the studio by being his own patron. That job, which consisted of being a layout artist for Mad magazine, made him wary lest the art world ascribe his fanciful caprices for an extension of the house aesthetic. Or so I inferred. Nevertheless, I recall walking across town from MoMA to meet him at his office for lunch and it struck me as entirely natural that those two institutions should exist at the same urban latitude – you know, Low and High – with Tom alert and at home in both. In any event, he need not have feared that the discursive arabesques of his own painting and drawing would be explained away as “mere” cartooning, and worse as a stylistic off-shoot of the perpetually smart-aleck Mad manner: they were nothing of the kind.

Slow, steady maturation of an incrementally improvised, manifestly unprogramatic image was their essence. Working on smallish panels of several standard proportions, and frequently starting with nothing more than an ambiguous ground tone and an amorphous shape, Tom followed the organic growth and mutation of his intricate patterns, eccentric configurations and, by turns, exquisitely subtle and surprisingly bold polychromatic palette. The consistency of his method opened out to stunningly various pictorial vistas contained within irresistibly intimate formats. Looking at his paintings slows the clock and sharpens the eye and mind while massaging, tickling and pinching the haptic synapses. In the old days one might have called Nozkowski a “little master” but his scope was wide, his view long and his faith in his own ultimately immodest gifts was that huge: in short that of a master – period. Of how many contemporary artists can it be said that he or she never bored me or took my engagement for granted? Not many, but Tom was certainly one.

Joseph Masheck
As editor-in-chief of Artforum in the late ‘70s, I was pushing for painting, especially abstract painting, despite the political incorrectness of that. I also hated the art-commerce developing as philistine businessmen discovered art as a new continent for unregulated insider trading, so it was great to discover Tom’s work in shows at the artists’ coop 55 Mercer Street. In the ‘80s I wrote articles in three art magazines on Nozkowski, and curated a show of early drawings at Nature Morte (1983).

The essays were agonizing to write because, I now see, they reflect the kind of freewheeling conversations we had that depended on analogy: how one topic turned by analogy into another. That was all the more exciting because our respective analogies came from different stocks of experience as well as reading. There could be hearty disagreement, too, though Tom was not a dialectical kind of guy. His wide reading is legendary; but politically, his shockingly normal, art-world liberal line might have come out of The Whig Interpretation of History. Once he said that the greatest philosopher was Thomas Paine. Come on, Tom! No wonder why in one of my articles he reminded me of Santayana on Emerson: “There was a great catholicity in his reading . . . But he read transcendentally, not historically, to find what he himself felt, not what others might have felt before him” (Artforum, May 1981).

Now I have to think: maybe being so undialectical—stubborn!—kept the big bear calm and jolly. (Tom, I knew you would like a little roast, like an Irish wake. Oh, Tom . . .)

Jonathan Lasker
I don’t know what brought me to 55 Mercer Street Gallery in the Fall of 1979, but upon entering the gallery I felt that I had stumbled upon a wonderland of everything which I was hoping to see in painting, at that time. I remember increasing delight as I went from one picture to another. Upon leaving the gallery, I muttered to the guy sitting at the front desk that I thought this was a really great show. Of course, I was speaking to none other than Tom himself, who took my compliment for his exhibition with boyish delight. After that Tom and I traded studio visits and a long friendship began. Nonetheless, with each ensuing show by Tom, that feeling of being in a painting wonderland was always there. The feeling of “how did he think this up” and what will the next picture be like. It is very sad that Tom can no longer provide us with this expectation of wonder. Rest well Tom.

Merlin James
I tracked Tom down as soon as I got to New York. He’d stood for something, in my mind, since I was a student in London in the early ‘80s. A British painter, Garth Lewis, had introduced me to the work, via thin catalogues, a few slides and black and white reproductions. Somehow I ‘got it’, perhaps all the more intensely because of the sparseness of information. I got how this apparent modesty – of scale, productivity, pictorial proposition – was a Trojan horse for the greatest possible artistic ambition. I loved visiting Tom and Joyce at the ex-synagogue on Hester Street, eating and talking, listening to music, always aware of Tom’s easel standing a few yards away. Sometimes he’d take me over to look at the current painting. For me, Tom was among a very select band who at any one time keep painting alive.

James Hyde
I first met Tom at the artist cooperative gallery 55 Mercer. It was in the early eighties—the time of big heavy abstract work by the likes of Brice Marden and Richard Serra, as well as the bombast of Neo-Expressionism. While I really enjoyed meeting Tom and Joyce Robins, his paintings merely intrigued. Tom has made a point about the size of his paintings being a political choice. Small paintings, he argued, allowed people to have them in their homes and didn’t require support from big collectors and institutions. There’s an additional, subtle ethical point as well: Since small works don’t force, they at first must interest, then persuade.  Patience and observation are their essential values. Over the subsequent years Tom’s paintings persuaded and rewarded whenever I had the opportunity to see them.  So much so that when a painting from the year of the 55 Mercer show came up at auction, I stretched the budget and now have the pleasure of seeing it daily. Its cryptic shapes provide a Rubik’s Cube of associations, and with the colors alternating between murk and glow, the painting keeps surprising.

Coming out of concrete abstraction I‘ve considered the painting panel to be as evocative as what gets painted of the surface. Some years ago, I was explaining to a group of people that my paintings weren’t sculptural so much as “panel intensive”. Tom, who was there, didn’t miss a beat—“does that mean the paintings are surface-challenged?” It was classic Nozkowski – perfect timing, off kilter and a brilliant turn of phrase. And it was damn funny—funny enough to stick. I took Tom’s offhand remark as an imperative to up my surface game.

I have plenty of company in my enthusiasm for Tom’s paintings. He is legend in art schools and a touchstone for painters. Abstract paintings look different today than in the early eighties. While some are larger, splashier and flashier than Tom’s, it’s hard to find an abstract painting today that doesn’t bear some trace of Thomas Nozkowski’s painting DNA.

Raphael Rubinstein
That a painting is modest in size does not mean that it is modest in ambition—this is one of the many valuable things that Thomas Nozkowski had to tell us. In fact, Tom’s decision at the end of the 1970s to scale down his paintings may count as the most radical and influential aspect of his work, which offered a quiet but firm reproach to ego-driven or market-driven gigantism, and asserted intimacy as a supreme virtue. His downsizing was fundamentally ethical: he wanted to make paintings, as he said, that could never end up in bank lobbies.

The importance of scale in Tom’s work became clear to me in 2013 when I was curating an exhibition for Cheim & Read Gallery (“Reinventing Abstraction: New York Painting in the 1980s”). Tom was among the 15 artists I included in the show, each of whom would be represented by a single painting. I was happy to find that Tom’s New York gallery had several great 1980s paintings that could be borrowed for the show. Two in particular interested me. In my discussions with the gallery, the director encouraged me to take both paintings, and for a while that was my plan. After all, I thought, having two paintings instead of one would convey a fuller sense of Tom’s work, and since they were the smallest works in the show—which included a number of very large canvases—it seemed only fair to give the artist a little more wall space.  It was only late in the process, as I was planning out the installation, that it came to me: there must be only one Nozkowski painting in the show! It was crucial that I treat Tom exactly the way I was approaching the other artists; one work per artist, regardless of size. I understood that to include two of his paintings would be a betrayal of his work, an insult to his decades of insistence that a 16-by-20-inch painting could be just as great, just as important, as one measuring 16 by 20 feet.  In an era when the cost of over-consumption is becoming tragically clear, when spectacle continues its prolonged, asphyxiating stranglehold on our culture, we need to listen more than ever Tom Nozkowski’s plea for the beauty and power of small things.

Valerie Jaudon
Thomas Nozkowski was a key artist in the Conceptual Abstraction exhibition at the Sidney Janis Gallery in 1991, and a prescient figure for today’s abstract painting. Tom’s insistence on working at an easel painting scale created a deliberative arena for his extraordinary art making process. With his uncommonly prolific visual vocabulary and acute historical memory he was able to work freely and consciously, with a sense of contemplative and well-ordered spontaneity. Although his drawing and painting method had much in common with surrealist automatic writing, he was able to direct that spontaneity with considered invention, and to work instinctively and surely without the burden of the abstract expressionists’ often heavy-handed autographic gesture. Tom was a model for contemporary abstraction, but paradoxically one who could not really be imitated.

Catherine Murphy
I’m always puzzled when Thomas Nozskowski is referred to as a modest painter. From my first introduction to his work, his ambition and radical aspirations made me pay the utmost attention. The paintings are intentionally not huge. I’ve always thought that they were brain size, taken directly into the brain. His argument, was, for one thing, that the size was political: They are to be contemplated, put in a house, lived with. Early on, Tom put his neck on the block and when few dared, said paintings should be about the experience of living: Looking, thinking, remembering, learning. plans and games, things we love and things we hate. His work is a joyful complication, a life examined and translated into beautiful painting, food for my aching psyche.

Jennifer Riley
I teach visual studies to graduate students in architecture. Introducing them to abstraction, I guide them through some of the usual suspects of early modernism, up to Ellsworth Kelly, where it’s possible to show one way to arrive at an abstracted reality. Then I expose them to Tom’s work, among others. To my mind, Thomas Nozkowski represents one of the most approachable examples of a contemporary artist working from found forms, shapes or patterns, culled from myriad sources of nature and culture alike, which he morphed and transformed into images with his deft use of color, light, line, and atmosphere. These evocative paintings are at once deliberate and effortless, joyful and serious, specific and open-ended.

In my own practice when I’m chewing on a problem, I look at artworks to tune into a mindset of possibility. I will miss seeing Tom’s new works, as it had become routine to look at Tom’s work that reminds me not to be too serious, but to be deeply serious. To pay attention to the world, but to keep things utterly personal and yet avoid sentimentality. To unquestionably use the richness of any painterly approach or convention and then perhaps when necessary- simply subvert them.

I am not alone in feeling the gravity of this loss to our painting culture. Thankfully, there is John Yau’s very fine, recent monograph from Lund Humphries. With typical generosity, Tom inscribed my copy with words of ‘painterly’ solidarity and optimism along with a witty line drawing. A gesture, I’m sure, to which many fellow painters and friends were treated.

Sally Saul
The first time Peter [Saul] and I visited Tom and Joyce’s home in High Falls, there was a sumptuous Indian meal spread buffet style on the dining table, and a lively grouping of artists and writers clustered around the table and adjoining rooms, as well as art new to us that demanded the viewer’s attention, books and interesting objects. We were so surprised and grateful to realize our life on the other side of the river was not so isolated and remote as we thought. Tom’s openness, generosity, curiosity, and easy sharing of his knowledge and interests always generated conversation, a give and take. He recommended books, and art shows, movies and music. One time he gave Peter a disc of Jim Leonard playing the Super Saw which is still one of his favorites, the whistling sound floats through the studio. We will miss him greatly.\

Suzanne Joelson
Tom counted. His book of daily expenses and conversations was a record James Comey might admire. He knew the names of things, and their histories. One day the artist Mike Metz stopped by after a meeting at Chess records and repeated one of Marshall Chess’ stories about the early days in Chicago. Tom disputed it and found documentation to justify his version.

Tom played favorites. An evening could be spent debating a list of favorite visual artists, or filmmakers, Howard Hawk/John Ford, musicians, architects. He wondered “why Plecnik wasn’t in Moma’s “Toward a Concrete Utopia?” and then showed me favorite details from their four Plecnik monographs. His information seemed endless. What he did not know, Joyce did. And we – that is Gary Stephan and I—would invariably leave their house with a book and a list of new things to buy, research, remember.

When we hiked Tom knew the history, the legal disputes and former uses of the land. He could find the remnants of berry shacks and stone cellars, where discarded vehicles interrupted the reclaimed territory. He went on to map many of the lesser known trails which were published in the “Friends of the Shawangunks” newsletter.

At the end of one of our first day long hikes, Tom stunned me by asking, “What was your favorite part?” I had imagined the experience as a narrative, a layering of sensations and ideas, and had no answer.

Tom devoured information. In his paintings, those ways of knowing rubbed up against each other until the friction ignited an aberration. Maybe his paintings were a respite from counting and naming.  With brush or pencil in hand he could loosen his grip on how he knew the world. In the studio, he suspended judgment. Edges tangled, categories lapped, and a different discernment entered.

Then we gather at a Nozkowski opening. Each rectangle is a different subjective map and instead of my usual ways of considering art, I ask friends, “Which is your favorite?”

Harry Roseman
Thomas Nozkowski was a painter, a wonderful painter. My relationship with Tom spanned decades. It was during the last two and a half years, that, to me, something had shifted. I felt he was letting us all know that he wanted to live his life when possible, as usual, and that he wanted to be as productive as he could. If he referred to how he felt it was mentioned almost as a slight inconvenience. It was somewhere between a stiff upper lip and a particular pleasure in situations and in the people he was sharing this time with. I also know it became difficult for him to work as much as he would have liked. It was a privilege to see such courage as well as heartbreaking to see such a love of living. One thing I wasn’t expecting was seeing some of the paintings he did during this time. They are spectacular. Tom squeezed every last bit of life that was possible to have as it became available in smaller and smaller portions. Shorter, I should say, not smaller.

John Yau
All during the time that I was writing my monograph on him, Tom never complained about what he was going through. A few days before he died, he sent me an email telling me there had been a “glitch in his treatment,” and that he had spent the weekend in the hospital getting blood transfusions, but that there was nothing to worry about, and then thanked me for the DVD of Kaili Blues (2016), directed by Bi Gan, that I had sent to him and Joyce. The rest of the email was about where I could download the films of Mikio Naruse for free, and other related stuff. Tom wore his enthusiasm on his sleeve right up to the end. He spent part of one dinner recounting to John Ashbery, who was no slouch when it came to film, the plots of little-known movies directed by Gregory La Cava and later sent John DVDs of La Cava films that he had not seen. Tom seemed to have seen every film he ever talked about at least twice.  I have piles of books, DVDs, and lists of films he sent me. He was always excitedly pointing me towards something to read or see. I cannot imagine that I will ever go a day without remembering something he said to me.

David Goerk
In 2015, Thomas Nozkowski and I visited Ruth Root’s exhibition of new paintings at Andrew Kreps gallery. Tom was familiar with the artist’s work and obviously intrigued by the new paintings. He signed the guest book as he always did and picked up a catalogue of her artist-in-residence exhibition from the previous year. Tom flipped through the publication, studying each page, and as we were leaving the gallery he mentioned that he liked the new work. After a pause, he asked me if I had ever seen her smoking paintings. I hadn’t. Tom took a certain delight in explaining how Root’s smoking paintings appeared to be taking a much-needed cigarette break, as if being a painting was a difficult job and hanging on a gallery wall all day required some downtime. Tom was truly amused by this notion, he related and really loved the idea.

Whenever Tom visited the city to see exhibitions, he had a checklist in his pocket of exhibitions he wanted to see. He studied the list and proceeded to see as many of the shows as the day allowed. When I had time, I joined him on these gallery outings, appreciating his company and insights – every chance I had to look at art with Tom was special. Sometimes he pointed out a particular moment within an artwork or walked over to see what I was drawn to, other times he slowly circumnavigated the gallery on his own. As we finished up at one gallery and moved on to our next destination, we always discussed a story or observation connected to what we had just seen.

When Tom and I spoke, which was often, he never failed to ask me how I was doing before we discussed the business of the day. The sound of his voice, familiar and reassuring, was that of a teacher. His excitement and enthusiasm inspired, no matter the subject. I had the tremendous pleasure and honor of working with Tom for many years and have never known anyone as generous, genuine or knowledgeable.
[Editor’s Note: Mr. Goerk, a painter, was a director at Pace Gallery assigned to look after Thomas Nozkowski.

Alain Kirili
Tom was a dear friend to me and Ariane, and we were able to see many of his shows, including one of his last, at Art Omi in Gent, NY, last year. Despite his great and encyclopedic love of music, including jazz, Tom was not especially familiar with Free Improvisation, the genre of jazz that for many years my wife and I have featured in presentations in our Tribeca loft. But when I ask him to lend a painting to dialogue with a musical duo, he immediately accepted and had his gallery, Pace, deliver and install the piece. I knew that it would work beautifully. The duo was Michael Attias, saxophone and Mary Halvorson, guitar, and the whole thing was superb! What worked so well was the size of the painting with the two musicians: Tom was such a master at working small and creating dissonances within that restricted size, a combination of skills he shared with the duo. Chamber music, a duo, was a perfect fit with the aesthetic of Thomas Nozkowski! I will never forget that night: He was enchanted and so was our audience. There was a standing ovation. The music and the painting will stay with all of us forever. Merci, Tom.

Peter Saul
I first met Thomas Nozkowski ten years ago when we were both inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was a famous artist with a reputation for stubbornly refusing to let any of his pictures be larger than a certain small size. Then, we both served on a jury charged with giving money to young artists and I got to know Tom better. He was so logical and unprejudiced in wanting to reward artists of different styles. Tom stands as an example of how to behave on an art jury: To be fair, give money to the one whose pictures are best, forget the career stuff. I regret very much not getting to know Tom better.

Elizabeth Hazan
For painters who find imagery as we work, Thomas Nozkowski was a master. His forms sing with reminders of pleasure and possibility. Tom had an endless ability to resolve his paintings in new ways. Yet he told me once he had some he put away for as long as ten years until he could figure out how to make them work. At times that’s been an enormous help to keep in mind. Like de Kooning, Nozkowski had a high batting average for words that resonate in artists’ studios.

It might be surprising to know that Tom felt a strong affinity with the late still life paintings of my mother, Jane Freilicher, and he wrote perceptively about her.  Once you see the connections it gives new insight into both artists’ work: her shapes in front of a cityscape evoke how he saw his own figure/ground relationships. Much of what he wrote about her integrity as an artist applies to his own life and work. Tom was asked to give the tribute for her at the American Academy when she died.  He noted that she apparently never wrote an artist’s statement, which he’d been searching for while writing his remarks.  At the dinner afterwards, he leaned over and said, “I think it’s terrific that Jane got as far she did without writing one of those fucking things.”

Peter Schjeldahl
Tom got along more than well with just about everybody, even me. Our tastes differed, as did our politics and, really, whole worldviews. I revered, and still do, his art; but he amiably shrugged off compliments. Our friendship could seem a sort of dance, amazingly pleasurable, through a minefield. Only once that I recall, at the tail end of a tired and emotional summer evening, was there a blowup; and it was over in what, 30 seconds? Less than a minute, capped by one of Tom’s wry little philosophical smiles that as much as said, “The way things are includes wishes that they were otherwise. But hey, we’re alive.” You don’t hear much these days about strength of character, but Tom had that, with kindness backed by confidence. As well, he was free and brave: a dissenting but platonic American. Maybe because I couldn’t make it to the funeral, he isn’t gone for me yet but as if withdrawn for a spell in the studio, actualizing surprises. I won’t say I “loved” him, because I love him still.

Richard Kalina
I, like many others, knew Tom Nozkowski for many years and liked him immensely. How could you not? He was good company, sure of himself but properly modest, low-keyed, generous, kind, smart, hardworking, and of course talented and endlessly inventive. He was also a very droll fellow and, in many ways, that was key to his art. Tom was bemused rather than ironic – intuitively aware of the inherent skew of the world, a master of mining the inherent, subtle, and inevitable discontinuities of form and intent that present themselves to those attuned to them.  As we know, he preferred to work on an intimate scale – the better I believe to inhabit his paintings rather than address them. His drollness enabled him to keep a quizzical distance from the visual pleasures that he was so adept at providing. He worked through a painting rather than at it, on the continual lookout for the animating and sudden loss of traction that sends a work of art skidding to a desired but completely unexpected place. Looking at a Thomas Nozkowski painting elicits an almost neural jolt of surprise and recognition, and I am sure that will be as true 50 years from now as it is today.

The post “He Was Free and Brave”: A Garland of Tributes for Thomas Nozkowski appeared first on artcritical.

May 31 to July 10, 2016
8 West 8th Street, between Fifth and Sixth avenues
New York City (212) 673-6466

Driving on winding country roads one often sees the cautionary yet poetic sounding sign “Bridge Freezes Before the Road”. You know to check your speed, pay attention to the surface and be warned for vehicles to spontaneously spin out of control on black ice or hidden pockets of slush in otherwise apparently normal circumstances. As a show title, “Bridge Freezes Before the Road” alerts us to slippery conditions and challenging possibilities of Cora Cohen’s paper surface.

Cohen is a formidable abstract painter who is known for deploying several different mediums and approaches within a single work. Recent bodies of work strive to make the act of perceiving or making the major preoccupation of the work. There are hints of her historical influences, whether Jean Fautrier, Henri Michaux, Wols, art brut, art informel, New York School painting or Far Eastern art, to name a few, but her subjects, choice of materials and themes come from her own reserves.

This show, which was curated by Karen Wilkin, is a perfect opportunity to glimpse at how the artist might see drawings as they are being made in her studio, as, unframed, they are informally pinned up and hung in groups that may or may not relate to a larger painting or signal a nascent theme. The show comprises 27 works from the last decade made on synthetic and natural papers, in sizes ranging from 9 by 12 to 22 by 30 inches with titles such as “Hybrid Indexical Adventure Series” or named according to dates in action or completion. The titles are unambiguous despite the somewhat generic dating. They underscore, as does the title of the exhibition that the artist works from her experiences of first sight, combined with a very wide range of influences that she draws away from as the works themselves develop. I list the materials: graphite, acrylic gesso, acrylic medium, watercolor, crayon, colored pencil, pastel, Flashe, archival ink-jet, wood-veneer, pigment – not because the amount of them is so extraordinary by today’s standards, but because of how well she knows them and in turn coaxes freshness out of them in drawings of delightfully unexpected combinations and poetic compositions.

In 08-15, (2015) fragmented sinewy crayon lines meander over a richly developed whitish surface. Traces of lines can be found below areas of added colors of minty green, blue, yellow and coral. At a glance an image of a figure in a squatting position with a large right foot at the bottom of the page might be found but as your eye slows and the upper half of the page is explored, now an aerial view of land in which solid forms begin to appear as pattern. Maps, seasons, climate changes and such seem to be collecting on the page. Washes of grey have the effect of toning down clacking yellows, while dry pastel seems to be blanketing the lower portion. Something that is very powerful in this particular work is the way it can make us feel engaged in discovery as we look. The surprise of seeing entire worlds encircled below certain areas with marks and textural shifts keep us searching for more. It is as if the sounds of a full orchestra are made by just a clutch of instruments. And as in a concert hall, the worlds one viewer finds won’t necessarily correspond to the discoveries of another.

In 015-11, (2011) veils of delicately hued liquid cover much of the off-square format. Brushstrokes sink into the creamy paper: successive layers lighten some areas while in other places pigments bleed and pool to make natural edges for new shapes. Drips and splatters become attributes or relationships rather than signifiers of process because in Cohen’s work, everything gets worked into the image. A big swath of a cloudy medium collects and dries in the lower left half of the page forming crystalline shapes like those found on freezing windows. Four or five biomorphic forms, hovering atop it all, are significantly more densely colored than the environment they occupy. Their edges are circumnavigated by colored pencil and graphite in repeated routes that frequently slip away from the forms they describe, to instead create areas that invite the viewer to mentally fill them in. There is a smoldering awareness that as these floating things resolve into one form or object then like a cloud they can becomes another. It is something of this world, with its allusions to atmosphere, lichen, algae, crystalline forms and geological peaks and something of an altogether alien plane, a hybrid existence.

The post Slippery Conditions: A Show of Drawings by Cora Cohen appeared first on artcritical.

Hearne Pardee: I suggest we take a fresh look at the paintings on view — not just as a transition to the figurative work, or in terms of their historical context, but in terms of what stands out for you in this decade of painting.

Writing at the time, Bill Berkson commented on their “luminous” grays, which he compared to the “barrel of a gun” or to the “luster of old black and white movies.” Something that strikes me is a loosening up around the edges that takes over in the 1960s — Guston doesn’t work all the way to the border, so that the visual field is up for grabs along with everything in it; he no longer relies on the frame, or the “window” of the Renaissance painters he studied. Image and field are mutually dependent. Guston seems immersed in the midst of things, constantly looking for a piece of firm ground — a process he seems to have to undertake all over again with each painting. At the same time, there’s a progression underway.

Katherine Bradford: In addition to the “loosening up around the edges” that Hearne mentions I noticed that in the final galleries you also see amazing examples of a painter painting wet into wet, with what Roberta Smith in her review called “fat luscious strokes.” That a painter could take his palette of black, pink, white and red and mush it all together with no off-putting muddy areas earns my respect and awe. We don’t see many painters trying a wet into wet technique — I can think of Georg Baselitz, Andre Butzer and Bendix Harms — but none of them achieve the shimmering surfaces of these Gustons. Looking at the paintings, I imagined his brushes sitting in cans of medium and never washed clean. The brushes seemed loaded with the perfect mixture of paint and whatever it is he is using to keep things shiny. These aren’t the tools of a palette painter, these are the tools of an alchemist.

Jennifer Riley: Right Katherine, I was thinking about other work of the same time — work that Guston no doubt would have known or seen, in addition to his deep investment in the art of the past, especially Joan Mitchell’s pastels and paintings before her move to France. Her lines, marks, strokes and daggers retain their chromatic clarity, while the image, as in Guston’s work from 1960 forward, is drawn away from the frame edge. Her broad range of color is masterfully clear and, most often, only momentarily, minimally and intentionally muddied but poignantly mixed. Her surfaces, at times dry, evoke an entirely different inner panorama — minus the juicy shimmer that we see in the work of Guston in this exhibition.

David Humphrey: I like what Jennifer and Katherine are saying about Guston’s mark-making. It feels like he is stirring up a drama between black and white with psycho-mythic overtones. The turbulent field, or grey habitat, comes into being out of black and white’s struggle to mix with each other while the compressed tangle of isolated black protagonists are arrested at a moment just before or after a dissolution into the viscous surround. I think black, for Guston, is redolent with Morandi and de Chirico’s metaphysics of shadow; objects cast a dark double with substance and the power to disturb.

Hearne’s observation that Guston doesn’t “work all the way to the border” is worth talking about. Maybe the whiteness of the canvas has a radiant purity that casts the whole procedure of painting as a sustained besmirching; a mucking up of the clean thing. But in some ways the relation of the black blobs to their world is like the shaggily edged painting to the primed canvas. Guston muscularizes doubt to tell a story about flawed or incomplete personhood woven into a world made of the same slippery stuff. Could we call these works auto-metaphors? Representations of themselves?

David Rhodes: Hearne, I think in these 1960s paintings Guston is already beginning to question, self-critically, what is to be done about the issues of composition and content on the level of basic forms. Letting the brush marks appear as process and exposing the ground on which they are painted is Cézanne’s solution to the problem of transition to edge in a painting made up of relational parts. The interlocking of forms on the brink of dissolution recalls Morandi. It’s interesting that both Morandi and Guston were steeped in Quattrocento painting, in particular Piero della Francesca. The oddness of Piero’s outline of ambiguous positive/negative spaces is present in late Guston and Morandi paintings. For artists used to Guston’s painted fields of variegated marks, the confrontation with associative shapes like skulls/faces/heads during the ‘60s must have been as much liberating as confounding. The more form-driven Guston got, the more articulate and urgent his painting became.

Stephen Ellis: To me, Guston began as a moralist, became a sensualist under the influence of Monet and AbEx, and ended by synthesizing something original from the two—a sensual, ironic moralism, less didactic and more grounded in personal experience than the generalized outrage of his youthful paintings. The artist I associate with Guston’s early ambition is the angry, accusatory Goya of The Third of May, the one closest to the spirit of the late figurative work is the funny and unflinching Beckett of Krapp’s Last Tape, and the spirit-guide of Guston’s abstract paintings of the ‘60s is clearly Giacometti — the painter. The similarity between Giacometti’s portrait heads, dense and light-absorbing, like black holes embedded in luminous gray space, and Guston’s weirdly sentient matrices of black and gray is unmistakable. The flurries of background strokes in Giacometti’s portraits also trail off as they approach the edges, just as Hearne describes in Guston’s paintings. And the bleakness and sense of loss in Giacometti’s work is much closer to the looming, ominous feeling in Guston’s ‘60s paintings than the stillness of Morandi or the exuberance of Mitchell.

Of course Guston was interested in formal issues, but I think only as a means to an end — that end being the darker, more personal and powerful expressive language he searched for in the ‘60s. The proof of that goal is the novelistic world where the search ended, a place you’d be more likely to trip over Gregor Samsa than find yourself contemplating the eternal present with Morandi or mourning the fugitive present with Giacometti.

Riley: Stephen, I may be reading into the Gregor Samsa analogy too literally, but I see Guston as a body making a painting — trying to figure out how to move forward from his ‘50s paintings, where a main problem he addresses (to my mind ) is “surface.” His was a sustained engagement with the surface, challenged by the possibility of being both inside and outside of the painting at the same time. I also see the shift from “moralist to sensualist” as a natural development as he matures through lived exposure to a whole gang of artists — Kline, de Kooning, Newman, Rothko, the rise of Minimalism — in addition to new commercial potentials. He was interested in making paintings not products, trying to make a new “real” world.

Pardee: We should also recall the huge cultural and political shifts of the 1960s.

Gaby Collins-Fernandez: I’ve been trying to imagine what it felt like for those to be the last things Guston had made, the freshest and newest! Very intense and strange.

Looking at them, I got the sense of someone trying to make emotional room in painting from physical, spatial terms that weren’t available in the dominant painting discourse of the time. I read the shadows and the way the forms feel heavy and connected to gravity in terms of a desire to understand forms in relation to recognizable physical-causal dynamics — to make abstract, all-over mark-making compete with gravity, light, and the kinds of environmental conditions that stuff, matter, and people have to deal with, outside of blank, white surfaces. A lot of those early forms inside the grays look like they have feet.

Even though there is a lot of gestural energy in the work, I see Guston’s marks in relation to drawing, to drafting both the dimensions and air of this new emotional space. That’s also a connection to the early Renaissance, and the sense that those artists were visualizing a new operating concept of space in painting through drawn perspective.

There is certainly an openness about doubt in these works that runs contra the more heroic mid-century narrative about painting. Focusing on doubt and dependency exposes “the autonomy of the art object” as an ideological delusion: it forces the artist to account for art within existing social dynamics in which very few things exist independently from everything else.

Humphrey: What I think is so exciting about this show is the way Guston articulates and celebrates incipience, the potential for a thing to come into being. He lays out the basic terms that will later be used to more emphatically name things, but things still haunted by a prior incipience. The blunt forms that after 1968 become books, canvases, shoes or heads, bear the memory of and often slip back into undifferentiated muck — or sometimes, after some scraping or smushing, an entirely different object. The habitats emerge tactilely, the way one imagines a space by means of blind groping. I like thinking of his work as ham-handed — that corporeal seeing is performed through touch and makes cured meat of our paws. His work argues that we are made of the same stuff as the things we make or consume.

Pardee: Is there a particular painting that stands out for you? Katherine mentions alchemy, and there’s a great 1960 painting called Alchemist with a stew of colors. Path II, also from 1960, seems to subdue the color interactions into blue and red, dominated by gray, after which the black and white take over. These are among my favorites.

Riley: Ah! Very hard to pick just one painting as a favorite from this exhibition. I suppose if the building were on fire I’d try to drag May Sixty-Five (1965) with me. This painting has a large rectangular black form coming to rest off-center, lower right , upon a cloudy zone of pink, red and grey. The color in the lower foreground seems to be filtered through the black form as it passes through to the upper central ground evoking a sense of air, time, distance and compression simultaneously. The roundish, pink form nestled to the left of the black rectangle opens a door that hints at looming inchoate emotions and a potential narrative. The tautness of that relationship, the slippery light and shimmering, icy grays, enchant me.

Pardee: That one seems like a still-life. I like the small red dot showing through the veil of gray — both behind and in front. A lot seems to have to do with just the contrasting directions of the brush-strokes — the compact black ones opposed to the vigorous gray “erasing marks” just above it.

Riley: I didn’t see still life at all — but I could stretch to go there — the scale, marks and forms cued me toward reading it as a non-objective abstraction with landscape referents. Do you see Guston at this time also still struggling against his natural abilities that make elegant and beautiful paintings?

Pardee: I see more struggle in the earlier works in the show — the colored shapes seem tortured, overworked. The release from color that leads into gray seems to help open up the process of painting itself. Here he seems comfortable to me — there’s elegance in the variations of brushstrokes and the adjustments of scale. Perhaps he’s getting too comfortable in this sort of balance between field and form?

Your reference to landscape as opposed to still-life gets into a metaphorical dimension — relations of similarity, of what it looks like. I think there’s also a strong element of metonymy at work in these paintings, or relationships of meaning set up by proximity — how brushstrokes interact and suggest meanings by contrasts of direction and scale. Finding meaning through the sort of blind groping Gaby and David Humphrey describe.

Rhodes: Proximity and metonymy play vital roles, particularly in the 1960s paintings. Here, for example, in Position I (1965), the white of the primed canvas is the third tone in a scale of white to black, and contributes to the light of the painting. The spatial quality of so much manipulated paint simply runs out, appearing as just an accumulation of brush marks toward the outer edge of the physical support. Each facet is in relation to the other, its suggestion of representation not undermining its existential impact, but rather amplifying it. By the time Guston leaves for Rome in 1970 the paintings and drawings are a clear reflection on his environment. The drawings here, though enigmatic and fragmentary, still attach to a seen environment more than the paintings, which of course was soon to change.

Ellis: Honestly, I don’t have a favorite painting in the Hauser & Wirth bunch. I enjoy them more as an ensemble from which one or another emerges as you move through the show. That’s a function of the open-endedness of the paintings, one of my favorite aspects of them. Of all Guston’s work, these are the ones with the most “negative capability” in the Keatsian sense, the most ambiguous and immanent. Your reading of them from portrait or figure to still life or pure abstraction is constantly shifting as your attention moves back and forth from the marvelous surfaces to the images the surfaces form. There’s a quality of being in the moment in these paintings that’s different from the more resolved images of the later work. The strokes, as everyone points out, are alive—not merely in a formal way, but mysteriously as a psychic presence, a physical record of the hand moving in thought. You can’t fake that transmutation of the inert matter of paint into the gossamer stuff of thought, and when it’s real, it’s magic.

Humphrey: My favorite painting in the show changes at every turn. I love the determined contingency of all of them, as though each decision was a response to the question “what if?” I’m with him when he decides to completely exclude color, then around the corner a rare green surprises. Pink hovers from the margins or beneath, sometimes fleshy, sometimes crepuscular. Blue reminds us that these are picture spaces, haunted by the outdoors.

Collins-Fernandez: The painting I’ve looked at most since visiting the show, in reproduction, is Fable II (1957) which ended up clarifying Guston’s transition in terms of internal organization as well as style. In that small painting, colors become forms that are undefined but open to association. I can read those forms as a mask, a city-scape, a still life, but I don’t have to — they lend themselves to interpretation around kinds of groups without making claims to specific genre or subjects. The composition, in terms of how the forms hold together, is close to the ’50s, “shimmery” abstractions. But the impetus to shift is there. In the later and sparser black and gray paintings from the show, the shapes that appear (often singularly) are more definite in having a kind of objectness/identity. There’s a big difference, which may be best characterized grammatically: in Fable II, forms emerge which function like adjectives, inflecting one another, the general composition, and possibilities of signification, whereas by the time Guston makes paintings like Position I (1965) and Portrait I (1965), the forms which appear are more like nouns, concrete objects with a kind of “person-place-or-thing”-ness.

In an extension of the comments around metonymy, I would argue that in the mid-60s, Guston is moving from the more metonymical (part of x might=y) meaning-structure of the earlier abstractions to a structure more based on metaphor (x=y), which will then carry through to the kind of assertive, definitional vocabulary of the drawings.

Pardee: Just isolating one shape is already a move in the direction of representation, eliminating what you call the “adjectives.” It goes back to your earlier remark about Guston’s lending weight and dimension to abstract forms, much as the artists he admired in the Renaissance did for the space of the world around them. There’s a grammar and phenomenology of painting.

Bradford: Hearne mentions the “tortured” look of Guston’s earlier paintings, which is apt because it evokes the “doubt” Gaby mentions, without the satisfying search more evident in the later galleries. Hearne also remarks that it seems Guston cannot find his forms until he lets go of color and turns to gray paintings with black rock-like forms. In the earlier group, I see the color egging Guston on to give us more line than form, as if he could not bring himself to admit to colored “stuff” only colored “mark.” I think of Christopher Wool here, also an obsessive master of “erasure,” especially Wool’s most recent gray/black/white paintings, because I perceive them as not containing “doubt.” They look more like the presentation of an experiment whereas I see Guston performing in the moment, truly searching for something that in fact does not appear, and this gives his work the pathos that we find so endearing.

Pardee: Do the drawings shed light on what’s going on in the paintings? Are they more metaphorical?

Collins-Fernandez: The more I think about the drawings, the more I see them as a relational alphabet, bringing the viewer from dot to line to window to squiggle. There seems to be no hierarchy; a cluster of lines has the same importance as a building or as a rough rectangle. The consistency of Guston’s line in width and character is not about expression, per se, but seemingly about a kind of existential attitude. The works carry ideas about doubt, etc., in the line, rather than in some explicit drama. It seems that this idea about line comes directly from the way that Guston builds up the surface in the works in this show — ie, from painting: the line in the drawing compresses all of the energy of his earlier fields into one single mark. The effect is of an infiltrating tone, a “show-don’t-tell” kind of move, which underscores his late-style relationship to comic illustrations.

Humphrey: The drawings are unburdened by his roiling brushstroke fields. They don’t emerge out of wetness but crawl directly across the clean expanse of the store-bought paper with slug-trail deliberateness. The drawings have a show-off audacity, perhaps fueled by minimalist permissions, but also as caricatures of that younger movement’s severe reductions. I imagine Guston chuckling, followed by a feeling that this might be the royal road to new freedoms.

Bradford: Are the drawings more confident than the paintings — with David’s “show-off audacity” — or are they evidence of an artist going back to ground zero, needing to reset himself after having lost his belief in the “roiling brushstroke fields”? That he left each one so spare says to me that he’s not chuckling at all, he’s testing all that’s gone before and coming up with very short answers.

Humphrey: Of course I am projecting, imagining that Guston’s drawing of a right angle is a precursor to his later drawing of Richard Nixon. His “short answers” surely lay out the constituent elements of the work that will be made one year later or less.

Pardee: Maybe we should step back now and look at the larger historical context, including Guston’s relation to the contemporary scene: what sort of context does the history that this show brings to light provide for other shows currently on view in New York? I’m thinking of Gerhard Richter, who ranges from abstract to representational, or Nicole Eisenman, who develops vernacular narratives, just to pick two extremes. Or you might want to pick up on some other topic suggested in the comments that hasn’t received its due.

Ellis: Looking at the historical context, I’d like to talk about an issue that’s come up once or twice—the notion of the “dominant discourse” of that time, something that’s often misunderstood. The idea of a confident, triumphalist Greenbergian discourse dominating American painting from the early ‘50s on conflates several generations and schools of artists in a way that from my memory of the period is simply false. The older AbEX artists — specifically de Kooning and later Pollock rebelled early against Greenberg’s obsession with self-referentiality — de Kooning with the “Women” and Pollock with his later figurative work. With their talk of philosophical and mythopoeic themes (Newman, Rothko) or erotic, landscape and other-worldly references, it’s hard to see how they would accept Greenberg’s ideal of formal autonomy.

By the late ‘60s, Judd’s ideas were far more fashionable than Greenberg’s, and the Abstract Expressionists, especially the older ones — with the exception of Pollock, who served as a conceptual model for non-painting practices a-borning — were widely seen as irrelevant. Like Guston, they were closer to Surrealism and Existentialism than to Greenbergianism. They saw their work as engaging broad and fundamental questions of existence. Guston talked of many things in his Studio School visits. He had certain subjects and certain artists he returned to obsessively—Morandi, Ensor, Piero, de Chirico, Kafka. I can’t remember him ever mentioning Greenberg. I doubt if he ever thought about him, except maybe, if asked, to harrumph, “Greenberg, that asshole?” The Studio School circa ’68–75 and the other painting programs Guston taught in were very fringe places. Not fashionable, not even close. I know he was bitter about having to teach so much after such a long career and bitter, I think, at being regarded by the young art world as an eminence very grise.

The point I’m making is that the history of their times: poverty, immigration, two wars, the Depression, lack of recognition, political strife (Spain, Communism in the ‘30s, McCarthyism) — did not create a bunch of triumphalist Greenbergians; it created a bunch of skeptical, tenacious, idiosyncratic, ambitious idealists — an alarming number of whom committed suicide, either actively or passively. So, let’s separate these two world of experience and of ideas. Maybe Olitski, Poons, and Louis can be understood under the sign of Greenberg and fit into the Mad Men moment of the Pax Americana, but the Abstract Expressionists in general and Guston in particular do not belong there. Nothing could be clearer proof of that than his late work, which is not a departure from Greenberg, but a separate track altogether.

Rhodes: I agree with Stephen’s remarks about Greenberg. A great writer whose influence was a strand, certainly almost only a New York strand, not a European one. Europe post-World War II was a wreck, very unlike America at the same moment. There was an extreme skepticism of any dogma. I think Guston shared this; as he said, “I’m sick and tired of all this purity.” His use of the vernacular idiom of comic strips and political cartoons was seen as kitsch by many abstractionists, Greenbergian or not. Were his early paintings also seen as Soviet Socialist Realism as opposed to American abstraction during the Cold War period? In any case, the figuration emerging in this exhibition was seen as a betrayal. Here, Guston works with ambivalence between formal abstraction and objectification.

Pardee: Perhaps with a nod to Greenberg’s concern for the medium, the show is subtitled “Painter,” and it appeals to painters in particular, both for Guston’s engagement with the material but also for his unabashed enthusiasm for the painters he admired — I recall a story I think he told of meeting a Russian man at the Accademia in Venice; they shared no language, but just shouted out “Rembrandt!” “Giotto!” “Caravaggio!” etc. Seeing these paintings today raises the perennial question of painting’s place. What does it mean for Hauser & Wirth to devote such a lavish show to painting? Has painting become spectacle?

Riley: I find that the art world of our context is not unlike this transitional phase in Guston’s career. The coin of the realm, so to speak — Painting — is also (once again) surprisingly not dead. It is very much alive amid increasing competition for art world attention. Painting today has expanded way beyond the barriers of Guston’s time — as Stephen mentioned the plurality of expressive forms and approaches in painting. The spirit of Guston’s work of this period may be may be our own epoch’s true character.

I also think it’s not surprising that this exhibition is here in NYC, which is an absolutely unique creative environment in all of the world, where the constant influx of new talent, and blunt market forces, generate ideas, innovation and new approaches. That painting garners such attention today in both its pure or conventional form and as part of multi-platform work is one reason why I believe H&W found it an opportune time for this exhibition. Another might be the profusion of recent scholarship, such as Peter Benson Miller’s terrific exhibition and catalogue of 2010, at the Museo Carlo Bilotti in Rome, “Philip Guston, Roma,” focusing largely on Guston’s works on paper made during his return to Rome in ’70–71 after the Marlborough show. It was at that time Guston developed original images fusing the vestiges of antiquity, Roman Gardens, Fellini films, Piero and De Chirico underscoring his lifelong attentiveness to Italian culture and art that we sensed in these ’60s paintings and which play out subsequently in oeuvre. Now seems a perfect time to take stock in this earlier, less known and often misunderstood period of Guston’s work. Also to reassess his legacy just a few years after the centennial of his birth in 1913 and to coincide with the release of the revised edition of Night Studio: A Memoir of Philip Guston by his daughter, Musa Kim.

Bradford: Just to add a footnote to Jennifer’s excellent answer to Hearne’s question about why a lavish Guston show now, I’d say there are a good number of leading painters who want to speak to Guston with their work and are probably quite pleased when he’s mentioned as an influence. At Nicole Eisenman’s current New Museum show the painting Selfie (2014) shows a large Guston head with a giant eye looking into an iPhone screen. Both Amy Sillman and Dana Schutz are frequently mentioned in the same sentence as Guston and were part of a show that Steven Zevitas mounted last summer in Boston called the “The Guston Effect.” It had work by 45 mostly New York painters and every single one (of us) were happy as can be to be included.

Rhodes: Certainly Guston argues for a continuity with the day to day world through painting, but with no conceit about actually knowing exactly what that might mean. The corporeality we share with objects and the back and forth between what we see and what we touch and how we feel about that seems to be a two way street.

However unfashionable it may sound, it’s fine, though very unnerving, to not know what you are painting, to forget an imposed narrative and let the content assert itself retrospectively through dialogue with the painting process. Paintings should be smarter than the artist, or what’s the point? Guston is a difficult act to follow; no one paints like he did because his paintings are the results of his personal endeavor. Christopher Wool is an interesting case as he continues with gestural painting without resorting to mimicry, re-coining this form of abstract painting in his own voice. The automatism implicit in Guston is there in Wool also, and in both artists it’s only part of the story, but a vital one.

I’d like to conclude by quoting from the discussion between Berkson and Guston in 1964:

Berkson: “Much modern painting has denied that the ‘eye’ is the receiver and judge of painting. Delectation is an afterthought. Paintings as realized thought… They are perceived intellectually.”

Guston: “It seems to me the only thing you can ask is: ‘What are you doing?’ ‘What is it?’ and ‘When are you finished?’ To find out ‘what’ is the only thing you can do.”

Guston is proposing and working through an ontology of painting.

Pardee: We could add “ontology” to Gaby’s idea of Guston’s building up a visual structure for abstract “things” and a grammar to go with it — a sort of phenomenology of painting.

Collins-Fernandez: I’ve been thinking a lot about a certain distance I felt from the show. I love Guston’s work, and felt the richness looking at the works individually, but also felt a bit unsettled by it — and I thought this conversation could be a good place to lay some of these thoughts out a bit.

My first impulse when looking at the show was to think of it historically, more a document of Guston’s evolution than immediately relevant. Not just because the distinction between abstraction and figuration is played out, but because Guston’s invention, creating unification through connected material relations, feels removed from my own experience, where materiality dissociates and does not conform with representation.

Like David and David, I find the late works in the show and Guston’s subsequent paintings to be descriptive of a more or less monadic universe. The material bleed between foreground and background in the mid-’60s foreshadows the later life-art blurriness of Guston’s paint and imagery: painter and painting; objects and representations — all are, for better and for worse, inseparable.

Nicole Eisenman (among others who Katherine mentioned in her response) is a good example of a painter continuing to work in this mode of material thinking in relation to technological devices. While looking at Guston’s work, though, I kept thinking about how the kind of continuity between our selves and our images he’s positing would be much more complicated and perhaps fractured in our world of digital avatars and proxies, which serve representational and imagistic functions through largely abstracted (although still material) processes.

The show’s title (“Painter”) establishes a sense of continuity through the practice of painting. While as a painter I am heartened by this, I also find myself comparing the show to Hauser Wirth & Schimmel’s concurrent show in LA of abstract sculptures by women, which they titled “Revolution in the Making.” Rhetorically, these are very different strategies, with the latter evoking rupture, change. I wonder whether the conversation in New York is really furthered by folding Guston into a tradition and the shifts in his paintings into the very occupation of painting, when his breaks and turns through good taste, style, and art history have caused such a long-lasting and fruitful ruckus.

Bradford: Reading through Gaby’s summary statement I got to the last sentence and wondered where she was going to go with it. To end with the word “ruckus” seems perfect.

Pardee: I like “monadic painting” and speculations about technology. I’d be curious to see Guston’s work exhibited in relation to other contemporary artists.

Riley: We use tradition to help us invent, not to maintain it. That’s why I find an advantage in placing Philip Guston in the tradition he was working in, as he simultaneously busted moves and widened the net of painting and practice. Thus, a delightful consequence of debate, permissions, and possibilities is available to scores of artists in all kinds of disciplines, including poetry, sculpture and so on. We cannot help but embrace and express the conditions of our time and one could find Guston’s invention(s) no longer very useful as our problems are different. However, to my mind, as David Rhodes emphasized in his Guston quote, “To find out ‘what’ is the only thing you can do.” Indeed Katherine, what a beautiful ruckus!

Humphrey: It’s true, as Gaby suggests, that Guston’s paintings don’t immediately suggest the fracturing effects of “proxies and avatars.” As an artist I don’t look to him as a guide through the possibilities of techno-virtuality and the unfolding prosthetic imaginary. But his relevance is still determined by how much he moves us or motivates changes in our work, which I feel he does. Guston’s swampy ambivalence matters to me, and tugs with a certain moral gravity at my own anarchic tendencies in the semio-romper room of a computer-inflected studio.

Pardee: So we’ve talked about the “Early Renaissance” of Philip Guston — its philosophical and literary background and its semiology and poetics of materials. What remains is for a museum to revisit his “High Renaissance” and set it in the context of the contemporary artists we’ve mentioned. I’d welcome that opportunity to reconvene our discussion!

Participants — in their own words:

Hearne Pardee [moderator]
I first encountered Guston as a student at the Studio School in 1970, when he gave a slide talk on his Ku Klux Klan paintings, just before setting off for a year in Rome. I subsequently worked with him in a seminar in 1972–73, when he inspired me to undertake large, semi-abstract paintings, setting up a back-and-forth struggle which continues today. For that reason I’m particularly interested in this current show, with its focus on a period when Guston seemed to hold conflicting tendencies in suspension.

Katherine Bradford
Guston revealed himself to me slowly; at first through pictures and then at David McKee gallery. I was living in Maine in the ’70s and traveled to New York to see the shows at McKee. To my eye they looked full blown and masterful. I wanted what he had: a fluid, paint-filled stroke; personal imagery and secret underpainting showing through. My own paintings at that time were small and beige with no personal imagery and no sense of mystery or light.

Gaby Collins-Fernandez
I encountered the mythology around Guston first and then his paintings of Klansmen, and so I’ve carried the idea of him as a “painter’s painter” (endurance) and social artist (stickiness of subject matter to context) with me to all of the work. I’ve always liked the way the work slips from routine into indulgence, whether in brushwork or cigarettes or existential probing. Guston’s focus on habits good, bad, and ugly over taste reminds me to stay accountable to the day in and day out. I aspire to his generous — and self-implicating — sense of humor.

Stephen Ellis
The first Gustons I saw were the “Monet” abstractions of the ‘50s. Later, I ran across the catalog for the 1970 Marlborough show. I hated the paintings! So crude and goofy and slapstick — ugh! I hated them so much I went back to look at the catalog again the next day — and the next and the one after that, until I’d decided these were the only contemporary paintings I was really interested in. the only paintings that seemed to seize the moment by the throat. I sought him at the Studio School; he was by far the most influential painting teacher I ever had.

David Humphrey
In 1974–75 I was a sophomore at MICA. Late Picasso and Max Beckmann emerged as guides to the psychologically charged pictorial imaginary I was eager to inhabit. One day, while trolling the library stacks, I stumbled on catalogs of Guston shows at Marlborough and McKee. I was stunned by work that seemed to be calling from my future. But he was making this now! I spent my junior year at the New York Studio School hoping he would visit, but happy to catch the smell of barely-dry work straight from his Woodstock studio at McKee’s space in the Barbizon Hotel.

David Rhodes
I first saw a substantial group of Guston paintings at the Hayward gallery, London in an exhibition called “New Paintings—New York”; it was 1979. His room of paintings was instantaneously compelling. And the effect of these works increased, I had the thought, “How could anyone have a painting like one of these on their wall at home?” They were so powerful. Both in the imagery, and the way they were painted. I hadn’t seen anything quite like them before. They were nothing like the paintings I was making, and this didn’t matter.

Jennifer Riley
I saw Guston’s work for the first time when I was a student in France, deeply invested in art history and drawing from classical figures, literally. So Guston’s work of that time reminded me a little of Monet — but without images or his color yet — all atmosphere. Later, people started saying they saw Guston and Picasso influences in my blocky, thickly painted shapes. I didn’t think my spirit was in the same place at all, but I was excited, puzzled and unnerved by Guston’s figures, shapes, brutal use of paint and pared down palette.

The post Roundtable: Philip Guston at Hauser & Wirth appeared first on artcritical.

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).

The post Enquette: Thomas Nozkowski at Pace Gallery appeared first on artcritical.

March 12 through April 18, 2015
443 West 37th Street (between 9th and 10th avenues)
New York, 212 967 4972

Oh the grid! The enduring inheritance of Africa, absorbed by the West through Modernism, the grid continues to be a beguiling structure for abstract painters today, the uses ranging from sophisticated play with the grid as trope to culturally driven references to textiles, patterns, architecture, urbanism.

The grid paintings of Russell Roberts belong to a line with roots to Hans Hofmann and branches to such contemporaries as Joan Waltemath, Stanley Whitney and Stephen Westfall, albeit that each of these artists have very different aesthetic intentions in their work with the grid.

Roberts’ previous decades of work had no repeated structure or system, no set scale, frame or image, palette or approach. The paintings yielded multiple gestalts and were provocative explorations that combined painting history with personal imagery in terms that were unique to each painting. These new grid paintings, therefore, represent a dramatic departure for him. Roberts has reprised familiar elements of an older image of his own, one that sees complex blue grounds, violet shapes, and both rough hewn and delicate lines in orange and brown. In canvases nearly identical in scale, white or blue rectangles are deployed as modular components in a system of template-derived lines and areas that are intricately connected by fluid curvilinear lines.

These grid-based compositions are uniform from canvas to canvas but within the multiplicity of parts there is immense variation, and differences emerge. Roberts’ grid brings to mind rows of windows on a building in which each aperture describes the variable and the constant — rather than, say, evoking a checkerboard or gingham print. With an urban feel to them, they are about how people live, about chance encounters and social serendipity. Here, variously sized blue vertical or horizontal rectangles are stacked atop each other creating large zones or areas, producing dynamic pictorial relationships as well as a strong surface design.

Heskin Contemporary is a ground-level, north-of-Chelsea gallery space with an old-school downtown feel to it: its long narrow asymmetrical rooms are the antithesis of the white cube. Rather than overwhelming this cozy gallery, Roberts’ eight large, uniformly sized, off-square canvases and one medium sized outlier lent unexpected expansiveness to the space. The paintings are window-like in scale, structure and color alike, and the blue rectangles, painted and full of air, offer glimpses of deep space. A datum linking all eight paintings is formed by horizontal white or bare surfaces that define the top edges of the consistent lower third portion of each painting. The repetition of these strong “lines” link the paintings and reiterate the shape of the architecture of the gallery, visually unifying the latter’s disparate sections.

Roberts engages the unending argument between material and pictorial form using a broad spectrum of painterly techniques. This allows him to meet the challenge of making a new image by repeating the same structure with aplomb. Each painting is unique in mood and information despite Roberts’ self imposed repetition of shape, form, structure and color — yet success is really due to his deft brushwork and relentless attention to the drawing within the work. The paint application differs within each painting from carefully applied opaque layers to ones that evoke a brusque and provisional quality. This clash of high to low skill used in the same painting appears without any sense of cleverness, irony or nonchalance. Some canvases show evidence of a lot of rethinking, removing and re-painting contrasted with areas that the artist decided were perfect after the initial address, which expands the range of emotion and increases, at least to my mind, the notion of time in the work.

In these complex paintings, rich in complex spatial propositions, the main white and blue areas evoke Matissian plays of figure and ground, while within the smaller white or blue areas Roberts complicates foreground and background with shapes and lines that easily swap roles. Various marks and lines cut through and exit the box-like shapes. The light white areas contain orange and purple shapes, sinuous lines that can feel both comic and anthropomorphic. Occasional brownish-green shapes or strokes connote‘stuff’ tucked into interstitial spaces like closets, corridors or in-between walls. Each element is interconnected and dependent on other parts. Lines often toy or flirt with shapes, bisecting or breaking off, linking disparate areas, yet a strong sense of liberation and harmony is achieved. Perhaps Roberts has engaged these forms in this way to serve as an apt metaphor to describe the complexities of world we live in today.

The poetic title of the exhibition, “Paper Bed Concrete Head,” reverberates as sounds in the ear much in the way the forms and gestures in Roberts’ work themselves reappear and repeat in varied orientations and patterns. The enormous variety of lines, gestural marks, and organic and abstract forms spark associations with many modern art approaches and contemporary strategies: Roberts’ cobalt blues and vivid oranges bring de Kooning to mind, for instance.

An accomplished, mature artist long proven in the medium of oil paint, Roberts has undertaken something risky in this ambitious project. The results upend expectations of serial abstract painting.

The post Windows on a Complex World: Russell Roberts at Heskin Contemporary appeared first on artcritical.

November 13, 2014 to December 20, 2014
138 Tenth Avenue (between 18th and 19th streets)
New York City, 212 750 0949

The title of Helen Miranda Wilson’s recent project room exhibition of eight small paintings at Lori Bookstein, “Kuba Cuneiform Quilts” is, like the works themselves, factual, neat, and informational. Until, that is, one spends a bit of time contemplating the works and their titles.

An initial view of the paintings reflects the noted sources — quilts, Kuba culture, cuneiform script — and yet very quickly an imaginative place between language and object is evoked. The surface of each panel has been prepared to a smooth and pristine pale-toned ground upon which the artists has skillfully painted hundreds of shapes often nestling and linking into each other. The scale — none of the works are much larger than a book cover — invites one to step in and explore a universe of multiple unique families of colored triangles and squares arranged within a small and shallow space. At first glance this can read as a kind of visual braille, but then, Wilson’s titles and colors, suggestive of particularities of atmosphere and environment, evoke many possible readings.

Titles like Lexicon, Snow, Old Friend, 5 O’clock, Light Garden, Little Dusky Darling and Mercato allude to familiar, quotidian things and register well with the color sensations and qualities of the painting they belong to. Snow, for example, employs a loose grid more than any of the others and reminds this viewer of an urban snowstorm where yellow lights in frigid inky darkness of night are softened by a veil of snow. Mercato’s colors link easily to flowers, fruits and even synthetic hues of mass-produced goods. These sink into a pale terra cotta ground in a space that appears shallower than the others bringing to mind pottery and crafts rather than the atmosphere or the place of a market. Teetering between description and statement, Treasure Land is both a proper name and an imperative, a place to go to and a plea. Light Garden as well, could be interpreted as light in a garden, a garden made of lights, or even a local name for Provincetown at night.

What is so remarkable about these works is how they are simultaneously unassuming and completely dense. And it is uncanny that such a broad range of experiences is conjured with the reduced language of triangles and squares.

With deliberate clustering of similar-hued groups of her triangles and squares the artist suggests movements and counter-movements as close valued hue-sets placed adjacent to each other vibrate and subtle shifts in value create very slow ripple effects. One merely needs to stop, step in and look. Wilson’s achievement is in presenting us — the viewers — with a new kind of space, one that despite the modest size of these images continually expands, both perceptually and referentially. This surely is the experience viewers want most: to be brought to a new space carved out specifically for the mind to explore.

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Janet Kurnatowski’s Greenpoint basement gallery is often the locus of lively, even raucous installations.  In one packed group exhibition a guest curator even took to hanging works from the low ceiling.  In Soundings the volume is turned down and the music is all the more penetrating for it.

Abstract painters Elizabeth Hazan and Jennifer Riley make an exquisite duo.  The alternating hang accentuates the distinctions between Riley’s chirpy, lassoed forms in shrill, synthetic, hard-to-name colors and Hazan’s fuzzy, somewhat nebulous, yet contradictorily at the same time blocked-out, jigsawish compositions that lure you into unexpected depths of warmth and resonance.  But while the eye savors the individuality of each painter as an ear would the contrast of, say, piano and violin, so too it soon becomes apparent that a playful conversation of rare intelligence is underway, harmonizing with one another in allusions to the legacies of modernism and reaching teasing dissonances upon abstraction’s possibilities.

Presto: the show closes Sunday.

September 9 to October 9, 2011 at 205 Norman Avenue at Humboldt Street, Brooklyn, 718 383 9380.

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The Ghost in the Machine, Curated by Stephen Westfall: John McLaughlin, Nicholas Krushenick, Don Christensen, Harriet Korman, Don Voisine, Stephen Westfall, Jennifer Riley, Rachel Beach, Jackie Meier, Thomas Raggio is at Lennon, Weinberg, Inc., June 23 to August 19, 2011.

REVERIE, Curated by Stephen Westfall: Andrea Belag, Shirley Jaffe, Alix Le Méléder, Sylvan Lionni, Julia Rommel, Patricia Treib, Stephen Westfall, Stanley Whitney, at Zürcher Studio, 33 Bleecker Street, New York. NY 10012

The last thing you expect of cognitive dissonance is a harmonious feeling, and yet that is what you get when you consider Stephen Westfall’s mode of painting and his way of conducting himself in the world.  Rigorous, cool, hard-edged formal abstraction is his painting mode whereas his activities as an educator, critic, essayist and (this season) an especially busy curator of group exhibitions are marked by ecumenism: warmly inclusive and boundary-breaking in the people he selects to write about or to exhibit with/together, he often makes unexpected connections across mediums and styles, generations and allegiances.  His approach is non-dogmatic, suggesting that pragmatism rather than idealism lies at the heart of his aesthetics.

This season he has been the subject and instigator of three New York shows.  His sixth solo exhibition at Lennon, Weinberg, his Chelsea dealer, titled Seraphim for one of the paintings in the show, opened at the end of April and followed on from an exhibition at the American Academy in Rome, where he had been a fellow, in Summer 2010.  During his residency in the eternal city, Westfall became mesmerized by mosaic flooring in early medieval churches.  The result – an extended series of diamond-shaped bands of color, formats that recall Sol LeWitt, Jasper Johns and Frank Stella but in ways that, to paraphrase Klee, take the grid for a walk – captured praise from the influential husband and wife critics Roberta Smith and Jerry Saltz.  For Smith, in the New York Times, Westfall’s “syncopated progression of hues, which is more intuitive than systematic, creates a wonderful, jangling destabilization, warping space and confirming scale (not size) as the living energy source that it is.”  For Saltz, in New York Magazine, “it feels vibrantly alive, quirky, open, ever-mutating, and popping with color… Westfall’s work has never felt so free, confident, and his own.”

His New York solo show was followed in the same space by a group show he selected, Ghost in the Machine, that included a large work of his own, a show that juxtaposed artists all working within geometric abstraction but to sharply contrastive ends.  Coincidental with the Chelsea group show was Reverie at Zürcher Studio on Bleecker Street, in Greenwich Village, which again included a painting of his own amidst a diverse and intercontinental group. Zürcher is his longstanding representative in Paris.

Ghost in the Machine can be read as a kind of manifesto of “impurist” geometric abstraction in which popular culture and humor are celebrated as extensions of abstraction rather than its enemy.  “Some people think that artists deploy geometry as an austerity.  It ain’t necessarily so.” Westfall wrote in a statement accompanying the show.  “All the work here stands for more than one thing: swoony craft, optical dazzle, compression and expansion.” John McLaughlin, the Boston-born Californian whose proto-minimalist paintings have been the subject of recent rediscovery, might seem closest to a purest aesthetic with its allegiance to Mondrian, Malevich and Zen.  Even he allows his color and spatial decisions to be inflected by a Californian aesthetic of gloss and ease.  Jennifer Riley, one of the younger artists in the group, and a former student of Westfalls (he has taught for years at Bard College and at Rutgers, both important centers for abstract painting on the East Coast) makes the connection between her crystalline forms and a Pop aesthetic explicit, if extremely coded, in the title, Starburst for NK, (2009); NK is Nicholas Krushenick (1929-1999), also represented in the exhibition and held by many to be the father of pop abstraction.

If Ghost is a manifesto, Reverie is a visual poem; in place of the rigorous organizing principle of geometry – whether subversive or subverted – this show allows for greater diversity of touch and process, ranging in its modes of abstraction from monochrome (Julia Rommel ) to gestural (Andrea Belag) to minimal (Sylvan Lionni ) to organic (Patricia Treib).  Its presiding eminence grise was the Paris-based veteran Shirley Jaffe, represented by a monumental, tapestry-like collage of glyphs and decals, while another “lifer” – to quote Westfall’s witty euphemism from his supporting statement – was Stanley Whitney, whose gutsy grids are composed of wobbling lozenges of sharply contrastive colors and gently differentiating textures. Whitney’s found grid stood in instructive contract to the meticulously preplanned rigor of Westfall, but rather than suggesting an opposition, it seemed that Westfall enlisted Whitney to say that he, too, arrives at his patterns through feeling and whim as much as any formal logic.

Westfall has been known for years for his penchant for cheery, upbeat geometric abstraction that simultaneously registers order and disruption.  At first his compositions strike the viewer as well-behaved structures of pattern with decorative correlates in the applied arts, such as plaid, herringbone, chevrons.  Good humored populist titles like “My beautiful Laundrette” or “Candyman” and raucous color schemes hint at subversion of prim minimal grids or Color Field-redolent arrangements of parallel stripe.  But his visual wit goes beyond mere reference to recent abstract art history.  A key element in his vocabulary is the disruptive kink he will admit into his patterning that sets it off kilter; never quite subverting the flatness of the picture plane, he nonetheless allows a breeze or ripple to run across the composition.

The references to other art and the broader culture, coupled with his funky palette, might sound like Westfall belongs simply within the pop or deconstructive camp of Neo-Geo and its derivatives, making him a bedfellow, say, or Jonathan Lasker or Peter Halley.  And there are generational connections, as there are with other abstractionist wits like Mary Heilmann.  But somehow, in Westfall, the attachment to the positive, energetic, affirmative aspect of pattern and decoration always seems in earnest; the subversion is within pattern, rather than of pattern.  He recalls Ruskin’s dictum that “All beautiful lines are drawn under mathematical laws organically transgressed.” He leaves viewers feeling that his intention is to invigorate abstraction rather than to debunk it.  And this makes sense of the community he establishes around himself of fellow abstractionists, and workers within other styles, for whom wit is important but irony is to be avoided.

This article first appeared at the newly-launched website of Abstract Critical, a British not-for-profit organization dedicated to abstract art.  Despite a similarity in name, Abstract Critical is not connected with artcritical magazine, although artcritical editor David Cohen has agreed to submit quarterly reports to Abstract Critical with cross postings here at artcritical.

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LaViolaBank: March 26 to April 25, 2009
179 East Broadway at Canal Street (Seward Park),
New York City,
917 463 3901

Janet Kurnatowski’s current exhibition is as close as a group show gets to being a string quartet.  It is not merely that Kurnatowski offers a four person show or even that each artist is represented by a single piece whose size, character and demeanor corresponds to an instrument in a traditional quartet. Rather, what makes the show quartet-like (I’m thinking Haydn by the way) is the deeply satisfying meld of four distinct but manifestly related painterly voices, and the intimacy – in the sense of scale to the viewer, and togetherness among the four – that the show engenders.  These are artists who can be described as hard-edged but tender hearted; their “playing” – jointly or severally – has the high minded warmth of chamber music.

Mind you, it might not be so easy to ascribe each painting to a part.  Allowing that Zahn must be the cello, as his painting is sitting on the floor, and Voisine as the most upwardly aspiring and clean cut of the paintings a violin, it remains a challenge to determine whether Waltemath or Francis is the viola.  Francis is the tempting candidate in terms of size, as she is larger than Voisine and Waltemath, and sort of the same size as Zahn (his piece is comprised of two overlapping canvases, so it depends if you count the visible or the implied square inches of his work).  But I’m tempted, in fact, to have Francis be the first violin, so strikingly expository is she of a theme.  Waltemath’s picture, by contrast, is diminutive, enigmatic, and quietly instrumental (sorry) in creating the texture that binds the disparate elements of this show.

These are artists who have their form-content ratio pitch perfect.  They all work with pared-down structures, with relatively simple math, but not out of some minimalist-redux attempt to see how basic art can get, nor out of a quasi mystical attachment to geometry per se.  In each picture, there is a sense that the overt structure is a kind of plan for the making of the work, while the work is the exposition of that plan.  But, at the same time, the work is more than its own plan.

In Francis’s Neutron Star (2008), there are four sets of white, thinly drawn circles (of four circles in three sets, five in the fourth) each occupying a quarter of red ground; the paint surface is brushy though even, all-over and not impastoed.  The arrangements vary in the visual impact of the circles’ interaction, in the degree to which they are purely schematic or they generate optical illusion.

Voisine’s Debutant Twist (2009), a tall, thin painting, has two outer bands of pale blue that sandwich vertically stacked dark rectangles, the top one to the left of the bottom.  Underneath these ziggurat rectangles is a lighter-toned rectangular shape of the same hue that runs off kilter with all the other shapes at a slight diagonal, syncopating the plumb-line, playing Broadway to the avenues.

Zahn is the most zany of the four, but also the most physically present.  His Modern Times (2009), places a square canvas in front of a rectangular one (landscape oriented) that is just an inch or so higher on its shorter side, with both supported on foam bricks.  They are painted a somewhat obnoxious synthetic browns, with one central, bisecting line in a darker shade, on the horizontal in the rectangle, the vertical in the square.  There are then small return strips accenting the corners, inviting a read of the images as the backsides of wrapped flat packages.  A thin strip of bright color at one edge of each canvas hints at labeling.

Waltemath adds a painterly, imagistic element that sets her apart from her quartetmates.  Blue Highway (2007-08) seems, at first impression, to represent the grid aflame: there are overlapping planes recalling Voisine and Zahn, but the dominant, dark rectangle to right is filled by an agitated area of orange and red that reads like fire.  There is a sense that it could be city buildings, or some activity in a room spied through an open door.  A figure seems caught in silhouette in the furnace. But then again, the painterly portion could literally be painterliness if the planes are viewed, à la Zahn, as stacked canvases, in which case the fiery rectangle might be an AbEx painting in storage.

These four artists are conceptual or painterly to varying degrees, but in and between each work structure bounces the eye towards texture, idea towards plastic value, and so on.  The conceptual and the painterly are truly symbiotic.  They make music.

If members of this group want to branch into piano quartets, Jennifer Riley is their woman: Her fulsome, vibrant, upbeat paintings are, like a piano, symphonic in possibility while true to a core sound. Hers are grand paintings in scale and scope alike.

As with the Kurnatowski Quartet, Riley is a geometric painter whose forms tease representational possibilities without compromising abstract values.  Her pictures impart the feeling that they are worked algorithmically rather than programmatically, that process trumps result, however much the forms are legible, spatial and enticing. Rather than driving the composition, image goes along for the ride.

Typically she builds her forms from discernable though irregular blocks: shapes are generally four sided though trapezoids and parallelograms, or else triangulated shapes, predominate, rather than rectangles as such.   Shapes are either filled in with solid color (synthetic pastel hues rather than primaries, always sharp and chirpy) or with bands of thin, hand-drawn stripes against a white ground.

The striped sections can read like sides of forms whose faces alone reflect solid color.  This abets illusions of depth, whether shallow relief or deep space, while the overall surface of her paintings retain literal flatness.  Bernini, Eiffel, Obelisk (2009) describes a vertical form that, despite its crazy-paving irregularity, conforms with the upwardly mobile connotations of its titular citations. It has some sides in a pale pink solid (various tones), others in stripe, to strengthen associations of faceting.  A sense of adherence to a goofy logic in Riley’s forms can bring to mind Jean Dubuffet’s late sculptures with their heavy black outlines filled in with white and the occasional primary.

The pink in Bernini, Eiffel, Obelisk is also subtly fleshly, which perhaps justifies the Bernini allusion (think St. Theresa).  It also recalls the knowingly “feminine” palette of Riley’s earlier, more heraldically modernist-referencing abstract paintings (Kenneth Noland, Agnes Martin) where the unlikely colors lent the works a subversive edge, a characteristic that carries across in milder form in the current series, with its pop palette.

But her sensibility is a far cry from the irony of, say, Sarah Morris or Liam Gillick. The many stylistic and art historical references and allusions in Riley’s works, whether Hokusai, Philip Guston, modernist architecture, classical history and myth, all come across as high minded, enriching rather than curtailing her pictorial ambition.  References, like the forms themselves, are algorithmic in their elaboration.  Her images are organic, and it is their palpable sense of growth that allows them to grow on the viewer, too.

The post Linda Francis, Don Voisine, Joan Waltemath, Michael Zahn at Janet Kurnatowski Gallery, and Jennifer Riley: To Be A Thing In This World at LaViolaBank Gallery appeared first on artcritical.

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Stephanie Buhmann, James Kalm, Greg Lindquist and Jennifer Riley joined David Cohen to review Annie Leibovitz and Ron Mueck at the Brooklyn Museum, Darina Karpov at Pierogi, and Mark Esper at Dam, Stuhltrager.

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