There’s a delayed shock built into the work of sculptor and video artist Yeshaiahu Rabinowitz, which is all the more effective for not being immediately apparent. Underlying his work, which at first seems playful, is a quiet but no less searing reflection of how it might feel to be a gentle, slightly built Israeli male facing the prospect of army service.

Rabinowitz makes sculpture out of soft materials like felt and cardboard to deal with hard subjects, including violence and war, fear and vulnerability. He keeps his subjects at a distance; the action is offstage. But it is Rabinowitz’s sense of drama that attracts attention to his work, starting with the life-size sculpture of a fallen horse made of cardboard sheeting, which he presented at his degree show two years ago — which led to almost immediate showings of his work at the prestigious Herzliya and Israel Museums.

His first solo exhibition, “Attributes of a Hero,” was staged at Hansen House, Jerusalem, earlier this year. The space was built as a leper hospital in the late 19^th century, and still retains a spooky, historic atmospheric even after being reinvented as an art center. Rabinowitz’s sculptures of hand-sewn, made-to-measure body parts — or coverings for body parts — are well suited to the venue, a stone-walled gallery space with domed ceiling and cobbled floor. And it’s not just because of the association of leprosy and losing limbs. The dim, cell-like space, with spotlights that cause the shadows of sculpture and viewers to move across the walls, adds to the theatricality of the work, but also — if I’m not looking too deeply into it — its melodrama, fakeness and subversive joke.

The limp, tailored shapes are scaled and segmented, like pieces of human and animal armor, momentarily bringing to mind Claes Oldenberg’s big, soft replicas of everyday commodities, being both strange and out of context, yet immediately familiar. Instead of a hamburger or household plug, we discover a bit of human torso, a horse’s muzzle, pair of legs, horns. As shells sloughed off by a living body, or waiting to be used, they emphasize a need for protection — not that they would be of any more use than the plug or hamburger.

These pieces could be theatre props, perhaps from an amateurish Shakespearian production, either abandoned or waiting to be used in a play. Then the gallery space could be a scene in Macbeth’s castle. In discussion, Rabinowitz says that indeed, Shakespeare and his views on the complexities of heroism are an intrinsic part of his plot.

The organically shaped shells or molds are casually but expertly cut and sewn. Rabinowitz trained as a tailor after his obligatory national service as a soldier in the Israeli army, and says he “entered the art world through the back door.” Conceptualism comes naturally to him. He makes his art out of the unlikely combination of soldiering and sewing, uses it to express irony and an eager enjoyment of being an artist, and expresses a worldview that is tragic, naïve and knowing, all at once.

In the exhibition’s eponymous video, Rabinowitz shows himself trying to become a hero. An observant Jew with a yarmulka on his mop of curly hair, he first dresses carefully in white shirt and trousers, the modest clothes of a yeshiva student, while telling about biblical war heroes. His personal training exercise turns out to be running around in circles in a disused city space, crouched forwards with his fingers raised like the horns of a bull. The gentleness of the smiling young man and the futility of his personal exercise are offset by fierce energy and determination, and undermined by his own amusement. It’s the histrionics of heroism: weakness and foolishness fueled by heroic fantasy and will power. It’s a far-reaching metaphor that includes the collapsing horse. War is a subject often returned to by Israeli artists, but Rabinowitz has his own way of making a lot of suggestions about it, and leaving them in the air.

The post Heroic Fantasy: Yeshaiahu Rabinowitz at Hansen House appeared first on artcritical.

Moscow’s Garage Museum of Contemporary Art is the first privately funded art and culture center in the country dedicated to promoting Russian art, sponsoring research and publication, educating art viewers, and globalizing the local art scene. It was founded in 2008 by Dasha Zhukova — who combines stylishness and seriousness, as does the museum — and has the backing of her husband, Roman Aronovich, an oligarch and owner of Britain’s Chelsea Football Club.

Named after the Bakhmetevsky Bus Garage where it was first housed, Garage moved to its permanent home in Gorky Park in midsummer, designed by the thought-provoking Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, out of the burned shell of a huge 1968 Soviet Modernist restaurant, Vremena Goda (“Seasons of the Year”). Gorky Park was built by Stalin in 1923, the first park in Russia not intended for royalty, and until recently was strewn with abandoned structures — including an old space shuttle.

Koolhaas has retained the character and history of the building, leaving evidence of the fire and preserving some of its unfashionable original features — such as a partly destroyed mosaic mural, showing a female personification of Autumn — while giving it new beauty. The building is wrapped in an insulating layer of polycarbonate, as if ready for the freezer, which gives it a silvery, ethereal presence, and creates a reflective transparency between inside and outside.

The first exhibitions to launch Garage fulfill all of its promises, but there is a scarcity of new Russian art. To see contemporary and 20^th Century Russian painting, sculpture and video art, you must leave Gorky Park and cross the road to Tretyakov Gallery, where there is a satisfying display of it, spread across three generous floors.

At Garage right now, however, is a series of exhibitions focusing on the 1960s, looking at life and art, and the effects of politics. They are quietly, even staidly, presented, and require time and study, but the content, at least for a foreigner, is mind-blowing.

One ongoing project has students create fictional 1960s characters, based on old films and archives in Garage’s collection, in order to investigate how life really was for their uncommunicative grandparents. The life and history of each character is described on video. The Working Mother whose job depended on her being able to leave her child with an older neighbor free of charge; the Inspector who checked on the cleanliness of communal homes; the Scientist, kept in isolation, prohibited from traveling, and obliged to live in one of the closed cities known as “boxes”; and the Nonconformist, forced to undergo psychiatric treatment.

The model gadget-filled American kitchen, scene of the famed 1959 Kitchen Debate between Khrushchev and Nixon, is recreated. Together with the “Family of Man” exhibition and a painting by Jackson Pollock, it was part of “Face to Face,” the only cultural exchange between Moscow and Washington during the Cold War. Russians were then beginning to move into “Khrushchevkas,” tiny flats with the privacy, for the first time, of their own kitchen, a place to talk without fear of the neighbors. They became the center of culture and debate.

The same long lines wait patiently at Garage as they do in New York, London, or anywhere else people to immerse themselves in the sparkling mirrored installations of Yayoi Kusama, who has also covered the trees outside the museum with spots. Or to participate in a game of ping-pong or meal of Russian dumplings in Rirkrit Tiravanija’s exhibition, which turns the museum into a social hub, as the 1,200-seat restaurant originally was. Katharina Grosse’s spray-painted environment offers yet more opportunities for selfies and Instagram.

Eric Bulatov is one Russian artist who gets a good showing with two nine-meter-tall paintings at the entrance, telling the public in a slogan reminiscent of advertising posters from the 1920s by Soviet poet Vladimir Mayakovsky: “Come to Garage!” It’s also a reminder of the banners that were hung from the gigantic gates of Gorky Park when it first opened: “Life has become better! Life has become more cheerful!”

An atmosphere of teaching and learning and eagerness is somehow generated throughout, both in the local, introspective displays and the high profile international art. But a young couple I was speaking with told me: “Garage feels as if it’s not yet ready. It’s very cool, but it’s like a baby. Let’s see what it will look like in a couple of years.”

On September 25, a comprehensive exhibition of Louise Bourgeois: “Structures of Existence: The Cells,” will open at Garage, and on September 22. And an exhibition of sculpture by Anish Kapoor, “My Red Homeland,” will open at the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center, which is located at Bakhmetevsky Bus Garage, the original venue of Garage Museum. Both exhibitions will coincide with the 6th Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art.

The post The Garage Arrives: Report from a New Museum appeared first on artcritical.

Strange how it can happen that an artist whose work you are very familiar with, and have walked past in museums many times with no desire to linger, can suddenly sock you in the gut. Why I suddenly saw Clyfford Still or felt his emotional impact after all these years, when coming upon a painting in the Met on a particular day, I don’t know. Neither do I know why I had been immune to him for so long.

Like the best painting from cave art onwards, Still’s work is as alive and raw as if made today. His characteristic lightning shapes are a bit like the flashes that follow on the heels of Superman. They direct the eye, they activate the composition; actually they are the composition. They suggest a rip or wound in the skin of the paint, something damaged or hurt, while at the same time opening a window of light and color in the otherwise emptiness or murky impasto of the canvas. Still must have gone through countless gallons of black. Either pessimistically or optimistically, the rips and flashes seem to reveal an intimacy and vulnerability, creating a touching counterpoint to the bravado and strong ego that the work communicates — if you are open to being touched by it.

Still’s importance was quickly recognised by his peers when he arrived in New York in the 1940s, a fully formed abstract painter with his own distinctive visual language, of whom Jackson Pollock said, “Still makes the rest of us look academic.” The Metropolitan Museum, in 1979, described him as, “America’s most important, most significant and most daring artist,” as they presented the first big survey of his work. It was, in fact, the first big solo exhibition they had given any artist to date. Clement Greenberg said he was, “One of the most important and original painters of our time — perhaps the most original of all painters under 55, if not the best.” Still responded by saying that the critics were “butchers” and the galleries were “brothels.” Of the artists he said, “You know your brother has a knife, and will use it.” In the early 1950s, he broke all ties with the commercial galleries, and by the mid-1960s was living in Maryland, where he worked in isolation for the rest of his life.

Despite continuing acclaim as a pioneer of Abstract Expressionism, he has never had the fame or popularity of Pollock, Mark Rothko, Philip Guston or Willem de Kooning, his close contemporaries whose influence continues to ripple through painting. I was not the only one to walk past those big, jagged, ragged paintings, unmoved.

Since 2011, however, with the establishment of his own private fortress of a museum in Denver Colorado, Still has the edge over everyone. There, in strict conformity with the stipulations of his will, no other artist may be shown, and none of his works loaned, sold, given away or exchanged, but only exhibited and studied in a peaceful, spacious environment — without the distraction of a museum shop or café on the premises. Why Denver? Still was born in North Dakota; the land and the people of the Midwest were the subjects of his early work. Mostly, though, the civic leaders of Denver found themselves able and willing to accommodate his demands.

Only a matter of days after my epiphany at the Met, by coincidence, and without prior knowledge of the existence of the Clyfford Still Museum, I happened to be in Denver. The approach to the museum is through a small grove of trees, isolating it from its midtown surroundings, especially its attention-grabbing next-door neighbor, the exciting but dysfunctional Denver Art Museum, designed by Daniel Libeskind, where the sloping walls make it almost impossible to hang a painting.

How different the respectful atmosphere created at the Still Museum by Allied Works Architecture, headed by Brad Cloepfil, with his “drive to make, not new things, but excruciatingly specific things.” The study rooms are downstairs and the galleries upstairs in this textured concrete building. The paintings are bathed in natural light that filters through a perforated skylight, showing them at their best. The light invites you upstairs, and makes you feel good when you get there. The ceilings are lower than usual in today’s museums, more like the spaces where Still worked and exhibited in his lifetime, and they contribute to the sense of comfort and contemplation.

The work itself is almost literally electrifying, generating light and movement in the gray galleries. There’s an intense relationship between the paintings, and a conceptual narrative runs through them that would be broken by the inclusion of another artist. This larger-than-life, tough, totally self-assured painter was right to insist on having a museum to himself.

I was reminded of the words of a highly respected London gallerist, who told me (20 years ago) that he had been moved almost to tears by seeing Still’s work. This was so incomprehensible to me at the time that I have never forgotten it. But these monumental paintings do convey equally monumental emotion, which is both grandiose and completely sincere. To quote Still: “These are not paintings in the usual sense. They are life and death merging in fearful union. They kindle a fire; through them I breathe again, hold a golden cord, find my own revelation.”

The words could be Wagnerian. Whether the passion that Still put into his painting reflects his feelings in the aftermath of World War II, or the more direct, personal experience of a lonely, impoverished childhood, the sense of a heroic battle for survival is incorporated in the work. Still believed that art could and must change the world.

In photographs Still looks self-conscious, posing in profile to survey his Maryland property, or before one of his paintings. His long, white-streaked hair and deep-set, angst-ridden eyes give him a rather haunted look. And the house itself could be the creepy creation of Alfred Hitchcock, or Edward Hopper.

Still died in 1980, leaving an incredible 3,182 canvases and works on paper, many of which remain rolled up in the Clyfford Still Museum, having been seen by only a handful of people. Only 500 or so works have so far been shown, but they more than justify the judgement of his contemporaries. The value of the paintings is estimated to be over $1 billion — just as Still always knew. But they can never be sold.

The post Lightning Bolt: A Realization of Clyfford Still appeared first on artcritical.

Living in a land where every year the light veers from one melodramatic extreme to the other has to play havoc with the senses, especially of a painter. The Finnish artist Rafael Wardi expresses an almost greedy desire for light and color in his paintings, making some of them look as if they might glow in the dark. Wardi’s emotional response to light is clearly the real subject of his work, giving it life and strength. He is a painter of people, places and objects that look as if they matter to him — brooding individuals, moody landscapes, personal things scattered on a table — and yet everything seems a flimsy excuse to get his hands on color, the whole spectrum of it, especially yellow. Wardi has said that if he could, he would like to throw yellow into the world, and he lavishes it on his paintings. But instead of his subjects looking as if they were bathed in sunshine they seem, more interestingly, to be suspended in a kind of suffocating miasma.

Encrustations of intense chrome, lemon and lime pervade the work, seeming to coat the canvas in solid heat. Neon yellows and oranges isolate figures, or link them, creating a liquid, mobile environment in which everything seems to float or swim. And at the other side of the spectrum, when Wardi takes a subject like the midwinter sun hovering fleetingly on the horizon, or a figure standing in the gloom, the darkness seems electric and menacing. In a recent series of self-portraits, he shows himself as a vulnerable presence trying to hold its own against blackness that presses down on all sides.

Born in 1928, Wardi is eager, youthful and spontaneous in his creativity as only the best old painters can be. I met him at his gallery in Helsinki, an unrehabilitated old-fashioned space, where his gestural pastel drawings seemed to flicker with their own light in the grey day. He reminded me of a haunted pixie, all eyes and cheekbones, dressed in black, his face alight with enthusiasm as he spoke about the artists he loves. Bonnard, Morandi, Poliakoff, Turner. But the artists whose catalogues he pores over these days are Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff, and I recognised a similar scribbling, investigative line in the pastels I was looking at. Strands of color mesh and intertwine in his work like ravelling and unravelling tapestries. And the colors themselves have a gleeful quality that reminded me of being given a bumper box of Crayola as a child. Wardi gives simple, unfussy explanations of his work: this is where he lives, this is what he found.

Nothing could be further from Rafael Wardi’s tentative, quirky, investigative way of working than Marimekko, the famous Finnish fabric company whose clear-cut designs, mostly based on abstracted plants and flowers, are widely familiar. And yet there are connections. The color taken to extremes – you could call it a hectic enjoyment of color — is defiant in the local context. It has a different character, for instance, from the intense colors used easily and naturally in African art and craft. Marimekko was launched in 1951, which is the same time that Wardi emerged as an abstract painter, one of the first in Finland. It was in the aftermath of World War II when there must have been feelings of escapism and bravado, and a need to brighten things up.

In 1961 Wardi was invited to be part of an exhibition of local and international art held in Helsinki, which had the clear aim of introducing modernism to the Finns and bringing them up to date. But by then he had moved on to figurative painting believing it was a better way to capture light. He remains an artist true to his own vision. In the 1990s his wife became ill with Alzheimer’s and was moved into a care home, where Wardi would spend days drawing her and the other patients. This is when he turned to using pastels. Again there is an affiliation with the gaze of Kossoff and Auerbach, and also with Giaccometti, with portraits that seem always to be in a state of approaching the subject while never quite settling the matter; and where a solid personal presence is established while the surface drawing remains alive and searching, as if still in process.

Wardi is famous in Finland and Sweden but still almost unknown to the rest of the world. This year he was honored with a retrospective exhibition at the Ateneum Art Museum, Finland’s national gallery, which spanned 60 years of his painting while focusing on current work. In April he will be showing new work at Konstsalongen Backsbacka, Helsinki, and he has an important exhibition coming up at the Edsvik Konsthall, Stockholm in 2015.

Wardi has great — even loving — support from his community, and every reason to feel settled and secure as an artist. But the fact that he relates to artists in other countries rather than his own shows a certain isolation. He lives and works on an island that is part of Helsinki, connected by a bridge, having returned to the place where he grew up. He is the opposite of smug, with the wondering openness of someone always on the lookout for a new adventure.

Wardi’s exhibition at the Ateneum National Art Museum took place December 12, 2013 to February 3, 2014

The post Light Up Gold: The Work of Rafael Wardi appeared first on artcritical.

Palestinian artist Jawad al Malhi watches the activity on the street from his balcony in the Shufhat Refugee Camp in East Jerusalem, where he was born and still lives. At times it mirrors what he sees in television coverage of events across the Middle East, and it reminds him of his own fervent engagement with politics in the past. Young men on the street, mostly adolescents, stand around nervously waiting for something to happen, for an encounter that will set off an action in which they can participate. When it does, individuals who may not even know each other suddenly come together as a group, expressing their passion and acting as one. But when the event is over the solidarity disappears and they drift apart, uncertain and without purpose.

This fleeting moment after an event — the atmosphere, the body movements, the gestures and facial expressions —is what al Malhi seeks to capture in his paintings, viewing the crowd as if through a wide-angle camera lens, and using large canvases with minimal colour. It must be rather like trying to paint the sea after a wave has crashed, when for a moment the waters seem to have no clear direction.

There is hardly a hint of the environment in these paintings, and a powerful absence of architectural space, just the dust and glare of an exposed public space. The boys seem to be wandering around nowhere. This is in total contrast to Al-Malhi’s previous body of work, a series of panoramic long-distance photographs that show the buildings of Shufhat packed claustrophobically close, and with no sign of people. Entitled “House No. 197,” they were exhibited at the recent Helsinki Photography Biennial, and at the Venice Biennale in 2009.

The youths depicted in his current exhibition, “Measures of Uncertainty,” could be hanging out near the Israeli checkpoint a short distance from al Malhi’s house, but in conversation the artist says that they are not necessarily Palestinian: they could be in Cairo, or Istanbul, or anywhere in the Middle East. Dressed in the generic t-shirts, hooded jackets and jeans of kids anywhere, they live in what he calls “Coca-Cola time,” perhaps meaning a mixture of expectation and emptiness, a mood as international as their clothes.

Coming into the elegantly renovated Al-Ma’mal gallery, a former tile factory, in Jerusalem’s Old City, the bleached, creamy colours of the paintings almost merge into the stone walls and there is a general sense of stillness, suggesting peace and harmony. At first sight, you could be looking at all-male scenes on the fringe of a football or cricket field. But a closer study shows the deep, naked unease in the expressions and body movements of people caught in suspense, floating in a toxic, anonymous haze.

There is a pervading sense of watchfulness. The characters watch each other and us. They seem aware of being watched — by the artist, by television cameras, by the international community. Sometimes a gaze catches the viewer’s eye and creates an emotional link. We find ourselves watching rather than viewing them, but with all this attention, they don’t know what to do. Many of the characters are portraits of people al Malhi knows — boys who work in a local garage or tire factory, for instance — which invests a strong, contemporaneous reality to the work. The characters express confusion and bafflement; they scratch their heads and look around, seem lost, stunned, mildly indignant, filled with trepidation. Each one seems isolated in his own restless dream.

But the dream, says al Malhi, doesn’t exist. What does exist is the huge potential energy, even power, within the crowds on the street. “They are looking for answers,” he says, “but perhaps should be trying to find questions.”

The post “They are looking for answers”: Jawad al Malhi at Al-Ma’mal Foundation appeared first on artcritical.