January 25th to April 21st, 2018
23 South Front Street, Milton, PA 17847
Thursday, Friday, Saturday, 12-6PM

The Crash of 1929 has had at least one excellent consequence for art in the twenty-first century. In Milton, Pennsylvania the new bank that had just opened its doors was barely able to gasp on for a few years before going belly up. After a second life as a library, the bank building has been remade as an art exhibition space: The Milton Art Bank. Founded by artist and writer Brice Brown last year, their current exhibition, Trevor Winkfield: Early and Later, is a compact retrospective of thirty paintings and collages.

The exhibition spans the years 1968 through 2010. A number of these works have never been shown before nor reproduced. These previously aloof works offer their own perspective on how the ever-evolving Winkfield has changed over the past four decades.

Winfkield has been painting, first in his native England and the past few decades in New York City, since the early 1960s. A long hiatus in the early 1970s, during which he concentrated on writing had, in the end, greater implications for his art than for the world of literature. The writing star Winkfield followed during this period was the French eccentric Raymond Roussel who employed a number of verbal techniques—including puns, vowel shifts, taking a pen-nib cleaver to multisyllabic words, et al—to find bursts of inspiration to generate his writing. Winkfield mastered this approach in a number of quirky, humorous fictions, and kept it in mind when he returned to painting. For a number of years he constructed his works from Roussel-inspired chains of personal word and image associations. So seamlessly have these strands been braided together that we can almost never see evidence of the process. One instance where he has deliberately left it on the surface is The Painter and His Muse (1996), where an easel and an eagle confront one another, separated by a single consonant. More recently (Winkfield is smilingly evasive about the timeline) the construction has become more instinctive, while, as this exhibit illustrates, even more complex.

Circling the bright white rectangle of the room viewers can clearly see some changes over time, one example being how Winfkield’s color sense—saturated shades, ungraduated, with crisply defined edges—has remained individual (nothing straight from the tube, ever) even as it has gradually taken on more of a dynamo hum, brightened toward the neon. Other changes can be sensed, but evade dry analysis. Images and elements repeat, appear in more than one work, but never seem repetitive, the felt contexts of their new surrounds keeping them fresh.

Although the show is not hung chronologically, the first painting the visitor comes to is Cave (1976), which in turn was the first painting Winkfield did upon his return to painting. This small painting depicts the view from inside a cave, its exit blocked by a rickety grid of wood slats and looped rope. Is this an allegory, a p. o. v. self-portrait of an artist reemerging? Quite possibly, but with its striking contrasts of coal black and slate blue cave walls with the bright sky beyond, the painting is also a recognition of the lure of the painted image.. While Cave uses only five colors, this show as a whole reminds us that Winkfield has employed an almost uncountable range of colors over the years. (This is further highlighted by the Bank space, whose very tall walls are so white they almost glow.) Near Cave hangs one of the most chromatically rich paintings in the exhibition, First Prize: Three Apples (2001). This features two figures comprised, as are the best of Winkfield’s figures, of stacks and lively mobiles of curious objects, all precisely detailed, only a few identifiable. The colors range from a pale yellow ground to a deep black background sky.

Meticulously smooth surfaces, with each image laid in like a decal, are so consistently a feature of Winkfield’s paintings that the pieces here that have a more obvious material presence—a collage study for a magazine cover; a triangular clownish face in crisp papers; a study collage of stele proportions (17 inches wide, eight feet tall)—catch the viewer’s eye. The striking and eerie Eye, Tree, Prospect Park (2008) is an acrylic-on-paper collage study for a painting. Even the shallow degree of depth that the overlapping, stiff papers exhibit, like bright thin shale, conveys a not-quite-settled feeling in contrast to the characteristic Winfkield surface.

At times the tinkered-together arrays Winkfield assembles are painted with awkward couplings to convey a deliberate disjointedness  But only in one painting, Father and Son (1982), do the pieces fail to cohere with a common energy, seem randomly laid into the space; a snapshot of a worktable rather than a finished composition.

Father and Son is one of three works that hang in the Art Bank’s vault, a mini-exhibition space the size of a large elevator in which the viewer can feel immersed in Winkfield’s imaginary worlds, with works on three close-quartered sides. Also in the vault is Republic of Small Children I (1980), in the middle of which are two small children exclaiming something in a muddy town square, a scene simultaneously bright (though the pallet of this early work has a slight, deliberate, washed-out cast left behind in the more recent works) and somehow sinister. The third vault work is Home from Home (1984), a wholly successful, multi-planed painting with a terrifying witch-like figure front and center, her complexion resembling that of the moon in Le Voyage dans la lune, a 1902 film Winkfield admires.

What had been upper level offices in banking days has been walled off and three large canvases—the largest being Voyage 1 (1995), four by six feet of brightly colored Muybridge- like rhythmic progress— hang there, floating above viewers’ heads. Also included here, resting on a window ledge, is the most successful of Winkfield’s occasional series of 12 by 12 inch works I’ve seen, Upwardly Dripping (2009). Where most of these small works strike the viewer as tweezed-out selections-from or samplers—that is, suggest they are lifted from more complete works—Upwardly Dripping, divided as it is along the horizontal, generates enough tension between its top and bottom halves, which seem to be fleeing one another, that is is very much able to stand as a complete work on its own. So much so that the window to the wider world just behind it merits not even a passing glance in comparison.

Winkfield enthusiasts should also note that a show of his recent paintings has recently opened at Tibor de Nagy in New York City. Anyone able to attend both exhibitions will be afforded a rare opportunity to observe Winkfield’s evolution over a span of more than forty years.

The post A Credit-Worthy Show of Trevor Winkfield, at Milton Art Bank, Milton, PA appeared first on artcritical.

In an artist statement from a few years ago, MacPhee wrote that “My work has always been about survival both personal and as part of a species.” Not surprisingly, those collapsing cityscapes were made five years after the attacks of September 11, 2001, a length of time it seems that a lot of artists have taken to absorb that day into their psyche and their work. Since then her paintings have become more and more abstract, but held fast to her interest in both architecture and the body, in a really ingenious and personal way, I might add, by using pieces of fabric to create compositional form.

LESLIE WAYNE: Medrie, we’ve known each other for a very long time. I’m always fascinated by how the trajectory of one’s development keeps circling back on the same fundamental themes, in spite of how different the work may appear over the course of time. I recall so clearly falling in love with your paintings in the mid 80s, of large and surreal architectural landscapes. Since then, I’ve seen those water towers, industrial silos and stovepipes morph into highly chromed body parts floating in space, and later back into architecture in scenes of urban landscape subject to the forces of nature – and culture – at their most apocalyptic.

The story goes that you have a secret other life as a fantasy clothing designer. Is this right?

Medrie MacPhee: Yes indeed! Back in 2011 at a Christmas party instead of doing the usual re-gift at a Secret Santa event, I made a hat sculpture. That is, a collaged hat made out of a number of hats and notions. The impulse to collage has always been there no matter what body of work I was engaged in. For me collage is deeply rooted. Not within the classic intentions of collage. But collage/collaging as representing an idea of how one’s life is cobbled together. Barely holding often, but a tenuous balance where the parts and the whole are critical. The bringing together of disparate parts, the things that shouldn’t go together but must, the fragments etc. was more of an existential process rather than purely visual. That was the genesis. Or maybe it was my English mother who grew up in London at a time when one apprenticed and she wanted to be a hat maker! In any case my concoctions became a big hit with artist friends and hats lead to tops, vests, one-piece outfits and the idea of a clothing line called “Relax” with comfort being primary. “Comfort clothing for a fraught time.”

Well it’s fascinating, don’t you think, that here you’ve brought together the two things that have dominated your work for years – body parts and architecture, by ripping apart clothing and using the pieces – the sleeve, or the pant leg, to piece together architectural form. It’s brilliant. But I know you and I would venture to guess that you never set out to formally or conceptually plan this approach in advance. So tell me, how did you get here? And were you aware of this psychological process at work?

As you say, in the beginning there was no idea that the clothing/sculpture would be anything other than what it was.

Artists have often wondered why I didn’t make sculpture because my focus so engaged with architecture and forms in space. But I was resolutely a painter and – like many of my generation – interested in the edge between abstraction and representation. It was the measuring of a painting space between a full-on Renaissance perspective – painting as window – and everything in between that obsessed me.

Also, the older I’ve gotten, the more – as a woman of my time – identity politics and feminism have shaped me. Every woman struggles with how to expand the language of painting and yet must inevitably deal with the burden of a mostly male history.

My intention – in working with clothing – wasn’t overtly feminist, yet that said, it definitely felt transgressive. Fashion, style, sewing, clothing as identity have always been oppressive to me. My preferred style is “building management!”

Yes I know! This is one of the funnier aspects of our friendship – my obsession with fashion and your complete disregard for it. But we could segue very easily into a discussion about fashion and feminism as a socio-political construct, and then we’d be getting a little off the point. But tell me how the pieces of dismembered clothing made their way – from a “fashion line” – into your painting. Was it purely formal, was it process driven, or were you always thinking about the idea of clothing from the get-go as a metaphor for something else?

It was not consciously any of those things. That said, I was on the move between 2009-14. At that time I was making intensely colorful and active paintings that had all of the architectural references upended and floating/exploding in space. Could have been the outcome of a disaster or a reordering of everything. I was on the lookout – but for what I didn’t know. Then I made a conscious decision to take the color out and basically mimic the minimal color in the works on paper focusing instead on structure and then surface. Somewhere in the middle of that process I had a sudden and powerful urge to put in a real object of clothing. It went in but like many times before when I have been ahead of myself it didn’t go anywhere for another year or so. At a certain moment I was convinced that the addition of the clothing provided that thing I was looking for. Even though (especially now) the paintings appear abstract, I still think of them as representations. For me, the clothing brings the paintings back into a context that tangibly refers to the world and to people. Additionally, as a way forward and a way of thinking about process differently, I settled on an idea of

the architecture of language. Using all of the inherent metaphors of language to visually suggest things like what is real and what is imaginary. What is the subplot? Is there transparency or opaqueness? Do these colors suggest something urgent/edgy or is the attitude more of stillness?

So as I understand it, the materials and the process presented themselves as metaphors for the architecture of language and that as you started seeing how the pieces of fabric could work, your mind opened up to the formal possibilities and the full measure of painting’s conceptual potential – beyond the normal confines of what we think of as paintings. Would that be accurate?

Well perhaps. I don’t think of decisions in painting as being so clearly linear. One thing is certain though, adding clothing and other collaged items (like the large acrylic transfers) took me out of my normal game into something entirely different. Even my idea about when a painting is finished became something new.

In a show we saw together years ago – it was the Brazilian artist Beatriz Milhazes – you explained the process of acrylic transfer – painting on plastic and peeling the painted skin off when dry. This was just “shop talk” between us at the time. Much later it occurred to me to bring this transfer process into my works on paper. The transfers initially presented themselves to me as enigmatic gaps/voids that within the context of architecture as language are inchoate.

In recent work they have taken on a dimensional aspect – more like characters but disruptive like the clothing. The heavy flat acrylic next to the transparency of the oil is a subtle discontinuity in the surface of the painting.

For me meaning and matter are inextricably bound up together. I don’t know what comes first. That said, now that my “palette” has stretched to include everything a seamstress/designer would use, it has radically changed my process.

So the pieces of clothing are functioning in a similar way as a collage material, to the peeled up pieces of acrylic paint you were making earlier. Except that clothing is a very different kettle of fish. The references are far more complex and far-reaching than paint. How do you see those references playing out in your work, particularly given that you are generally – can I say hostile toward – or perhaps just disinterested in fashion as a signifier? After all, even clothing for comfort makes a statement.

Of course. Once sweatsuits and jeans come into play issues of class do as well. This was not my original intention back in 2016 but inescapable as a theme given everything going on politically.

Comfort clothing is something you wear when the usual fashion signifiers don’t apply – which isn’t to say aesthetics aren’t involved. It is more personal and certainly more rebellious.

For the most part I am disinterested in women’s clothing and uncomfortable with the fraught nature of being on “display.” Signifiers inherent in women’s fashion – sexualizing oneself – are, at best, not interesting to me.

That said, in the past I probably wouldn’t have made the effort to see the Comme des Garcons show at the Met. The imagination, the humor, the startling combinations are truly inspiring. This definitely is not comfort clothing yet blurring boundaries between male/female/other appeals to me.

Blurring gender boundaries and blurring the boundaries that normally dictate how we define painting and sculpture is an interesting conflation. Do you want viewers to see that the fabric pieces are clothing, and is it important to you that the clothing be identified as “comfort” wear?

If the paintings were only seen online you might miss their dimensionality but it would be difficult to look at them in this show and not know clothes are involved. For example, in “Out of Pocket” – the largest painting in the show – there is an unpainted strip of blue jean with two pockets. Once identified, the seams and notions in the other paintings become obvious. Ideas of “comfort wear” started with the clothing but the idea that this extends into the paintings doesn’t concern me.

A couple of years ago I had an opportunity to be in Russia and found myself really engaged by their equivalent of the German Bauhaus, Vkhutemas (“Higher Arts and Technical School”). Like the Bauhaus, the school combined the art faculty teaching graphics, sculpture and architecture while the industrial faculty taught printing, textiles, ceramics, woodworking, and metalworking. Nowadays you have to be careful about admitting to Russian influences but I confess that these artists, including Malevich, Lissitzky, Popova, Rodchenko, Goncharova, Larionov and Stepanova, had a huge impact on meat that moment. I had been looking for something that was outside the strict confines of painting–not in any way a new idea but something that personally made sense to me. Indeed, the confines of a strictly painted language have been breeched in much more dramatic ways than by introducing clothing. That said, something organic and dramatic happened and I am just at the beginning.

The post “Comfort Clothing for Fraught Times”: Medrie MacPhee in conversation with Leslie Wayne appeared first on artcritical.

The Art of Collaboration: Poets, Artists, Books (Cuneiform, 2015) delves into collaboration between visual artists and writers, and the production and publishing of artists’ books. The complex relationships between writer, artist and audience are inseparable here, in compelling essays that bear charmingly anecdotal voices. The collection was occasioned by a 2011 symposium at the University of Caen in France entitled Collaboration and the Artist’s Book: a Transatlantic Perspective. The book was edited by Anca Cristofovici and Barbara Montefalcone.

Although many of the writers and artists speaking are American, the essays venture to other parts of the world to show a more diverse sampling of works from this and the last century. It seemed it was then that painters quit scribbling signatures on their paintings, and today, artists and writers suddenly have more interfaces than ever to co-create. The inherited illusion of medium-specificity is being forgotten; artists are working alongside one another, sharing materials, duties, and authorship. This collaborative attribute of contemporary artists and writers distinguishes them from many of their precursors. As the poet Bill Berkson has put it, “such sociability is what puts the work in the world.” It’s maybe in identifying with others through the work (often from totally different, sometimes opposing positions) that we find our current zeitgeist.

Most, if not all, of the contributors to the book are regular collaborators, whose collections are often peppered with idiosyncratic, rare, livres d’artistes. Many of the more hard-to-find artist’s books were and are still made in small print runs for small, even niche, audiences. Working to “reaffirm a sort of Renaissance of the ‘book object,’” and point out what is now often central to us as readers — collaboration in its many guises — we hear from Gervais Jassaud, Vincent Katz, Bill Berkson, Susan Bee, Raphael Rubinstein, and editor Kyle Schlesinger, to name a handful.

It should be said that poet-painter collaborations are nothing new; the Banquet Years for some of the featured American collaborators took shape a half-century ago in New York (surprise, surprise). This period constitutes the classical moment of artistic collaboration in the 20th century — with Frank O’Hara, Larry Rivers, Joe Brainard, Ted Berrigan, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and others providing a lasting effect on the poetry and art that has been written since these appearances. That all this is nothing new makes following generations’ collaborations, a great sampling of which is covered here, all the more thrilling. Collaborations by Bill Berkson and Joe Brainard, Berkson and Philip Guston, Ron Padgett and George Schneeman, sparked new and wilder joint works by artists who innovated with new technologies, and concomitant new opportunities. As Schlesinger notes, “Exquisite typography, printing, editing, binding, materials, etc. even when highly understated or reserved, are an equally important form of collaboration.”

Many of the essays do a good job of describing the nuances of collaboration outside of conventional norms, with a wide range of interactions between arts, and of considering how “visibility and new reading experiences contribute to the construction of figures of thought.” The book’s handsomely designed cover bears a photograph of one of the stranger works by Alex Katz: Edwin and Rudy, cutout (1968), a painting on cutout panel, of the poet and dance critic Edwin Denby and Rudy Burckhardt. The job of working “to produce non-identical books in a world of increasingly mass-produced, look-alike consumable products,” Gervais Jassaud nails in his essay entitled “New Aspects in the Making of Artists’ Books.”

Kyle Schlesinger, Cuneiform Press’s publisher and a contributor to this volume, emerges from a rich lineage of creative practitioners who’ve opted for a more collaborative mode in their work, with figures from Black Mountain College (John Cage, Robert Creeley, Cy Twombly, Robert Rauschenberg, etc.) as a jumping off point. Schlesinger’s dictum, “Separate but equal. Together but not the same,” is worth repeating here or tacking up someplace at home. And his curious observation that “there are nearly as many horses in the United States today as there were one hundred years ago,” takes us by way of contextual analogy from the era of horseless carriages to one of new media. Despite certain traditional sensibilities, being a letterpress designer and a typewriter composer, Schlesinger wisely points out the necessity of adaptation to changing media forms. Collaboration is a “primal, and necessary survival instinct,” he says, “and as far as book arts is concerned, ‘here to stay.’” Schlesinger has published several collaborative books: one, composed mostly via text messages between he and James Yeary, called The Do How (Great Fainting Spells, 2014), and one between himself and Deborah Poe (GFS, 2015). He also co-edits Mimeo Mimeo, a journal that focuses on artists’ books, typography and the mimeograph format.

Katz discusses artists’ books and the tradition, which Black Mountain College had a large part in, “taking control of the means of production” so that one would be “able to put one’s own work into the world very quickly, and in the way that one wanted to.” This perspective sheds light on artistic view that seems more utilitarian, in that product was not only beautiful, but was often also useful, too. Katz’s collaborations with Burckhardt in the book Boulevard Transportation (Tibor de Nagy Editions, 1997) are shown here in a couple of black and white photographic spreads, one a quotidian cityscape, and the other depicting reeds in a glinting lake. The collaborators intended to describe or interpret scenes with their chosen mediums: for Burckhardt, the photograph, and for Katz, poems (which would also interpret Burckhardt’s photographs). “I often wonder if these poems could live apart from this book, because they are really so linked to the photographs,” Katz muses, and it’s clear by the samplings given here that the two were, as the best collaborations will evince, totally in tune.

Rubinstein’s essay reminds us that collaborations are often the best at their strangest. He gives the crazy anecdote of Jacques Derrida’s unlikely collaborator the Italian painter Valerio Adami, where the latter imitated former’s handwriting to offer friendship and spark cooperation. Can you imagine someone coming to you with a piece of art wherein they’ve imitated your handwriting? Nonetheless, the inspired “collaboration” turned out a success.

Looking at my favorite example of collaboration from this book, in Adami’s imitations and Derrida’s essay “+R into the bargain,” from the 1975 edition of Derrière le Miroir, Rubinstein comments “It’s hard to think of any other artist-writer encounter where the two participants have become so completely intertwined.” He goes on to mention collaborations and artist’s books of his own, which may be unfamiliar to some readers: with Enrico Baj, Shirley Jaffe, Fabian Marcaccio, and Jane Hammond. Rubinstein worked in a spirit that was “simultaneously collaborative and anonymous, which allowed us to surprise each other throughout the process.” His comment pins down what’s best about collaboration, and goes likewise for a reader.

Dick Higgins is quoted in an essay by Montefalcone, saying, “The hardest thing about the artist’s book is to find the right way to talk about it.” This is kind of a funny insight, because The Art of Collaboration goes to endless lengths to discuss the subject’s intricacies, but it manages to avoid sounding too scholarly or droning, to which we can credit the editors’ mutual eye for stellar contributors.

However easy it is to note the limitations of handling subjects like this, its authors present scenarios and constructions that were often hitherto unpublished, in an engaging, generous manner. The contributors are at their best when offering specific collaborative and artistic illustrations, and of course the examples are contagious. Like the memories of Marcel Proust or the inventions of Raymond Roussel, the coherent examples in The Art of Collaboration seem to produce like and better examples, to make for a read that’s pretty exciting.

Cristofovici, Anca and Barbara Montefalcone (eds.) The Art of Collaboration: Poets, Artists, Books (Victoria, TX: Cuneiform Press, 2015). ISBN-13: 978-0-9860040-5-6. 198 pages, $40

The post Working Together: A New Book on Words and Art appeared first on artcritical.

September 10 to October 17, 2015
724 Fifth Avenue, between 56th and 57th streets
New York City, (212) 262-5050

In her still life paintings, Susan Jane Walp exhibits a unique way of blending the delicate with the dynamic, and the empathetic with the strategic. The artist clearly has a predilection for square, nearly symmetrical compositions viewed from above, with a single colorful object – a bowl of blueberries, or half of a sliced orange – placed icon-like at center. Supporting the bowl physically, and visually surrounding it, there might be a sheet or two of paper, accompanied by a kitchen knife, scrunchie or other familiar object. Though subtle in color and modeling, her paintings hum with a singleness of purpose.

The artist renders all of these atmospherically, so that an airy depth seems to hover around her objects. Small movements acquire a palpable dimension: the lip of a bowl rises sturdily above a handful of nuts, and one can almost hear the rustling of the papers beneath. These images feel devotional, but in an artistic rather than clerical fashion. Walp seems dedicated ultimately less to symbolism than to the manner in which forms emerge as momentous optical events.

Walp’s fifth show with Tibor de Nagy is the first to concentrate on works on paper. On close inspection, a number of the paintings reveal a slightly looser approach, with brushier marks and portions of the ground showing through the brushstrokes. But their attitude closely follows that of the artist’s paintings on canvas. Walp’s strongest suit remains her empathy for her subjects and her gift for characterizing them with color and discreet detail, and these animate the nearly square and symmetrical painting Three Zinnias in a Glass of Water (2012), with its vivid portrayal of blossoms – swirling pressures of orange tints and deeper reds — that shift like small galaxies above the reflecting facets of a vase.

Some works, however, depart from the usual square format. Gerbera I (2014) captures with especial vigor the effect of a single flower sprouting through space. And, more strikingly, some of the recent works completely cast aside the strategy of near-symmetry. In several, oppositions of objects across the surface replace the concentric arrays. In Glass Vase with Etruscan Kantharos and Drapery (2014), for example, two objects – a bowl with long, diverging twin handles, and a narrow-necked vase – compete from either side to dominate the center. The artist has reduced her palette to grayed blue-greens and earth hues, but she has made every one of them count. Weighted by their particular density of color, each movement takes on a subtle pictorial urgency. The extravagant gestures of the bowl handles, stretching through space, encounter and barely overtake the broader, sturdier arc of a background fabric on one side, and the rim of the vase – a thin ellipse, tightening beneath the handle’s swoop – on the other. The objects become distinct, not through illustrational methods but, rather, through the counter-play of their internal energies.

At a few points in the exhibition, the strategizing of forms eclipses their actual rhythmic potential: a vase’s brim may coincide, all too statically, with the top of a box. Occasionally colors depict rather than embody pictorial events. But the best paintings here confirm what we may have already suspected of Walp’s work, which is that its power derives not from a strategy of centered, symmetric arrays but through something more intuitive: a comprehension of the rhythmic character of her subjects. This would be a painter’s truest kind of devotion, not one of merely assigning symbols of significance but of uncovering the momentousness of the purely visual.

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July 3 to 21, 2015
216a Main Street
Amagansett, NY, 631 905 9894

“Vice Versa,” Eric Brown’s exhibition in Amagansett, initially made me think of crisply pressed and elegantly embellished men’s shirts that cry out to be unfolded. Brightly illuminated against the whitewashed walls of the gallery, the shimmying plaids and high-keyed, off-kilter stripes of these paintings have the pulsating energy of Scandinavian or African textiles. While their sources and influences are deep and varied, they strike me as having a relationship to fabrics, music, and architecture as well as the history of abstract painting through the lineage of Kazimir Malevich, Piet Mondrian, Myron Stout, and Alice Trumbull Mason. Bridget Riley, though spoiling the alliteration, should also be included in this lineup. Despite these various affinities, Brown’s intimately scaled paintings have a self-containment and reserved exuberance that is taut and refreshing, if sometimes overly modest.

Playful strategies in the game of figure/ground are at work in a trifecta of paintings on the gallery’s southwest wall. In Red and Blue Rectangles (2014), Red Envelope (2015), and The Red Oval (2015), you think you know where one geometric shape begins and another ends, but on closer inspection such assumptions are up-ended. Electric cherry red and traffic cone orange fields are kept in check by black, cobalt blue, and grey discs, quarter-rounds, and triangles. Here, we see Brown’s effort at wrangling color, contour, and proportion as a means of articulating the space of the painting and generating sensations of openness and enclosure, depth and projection. Several paintings include shapes that wrap around the sides of the stretcher, a device that visually links the work to the wall. I am usually not a fan of paint that intentionally travels around edges (it becomes too much like sculpture). Rather, I wish that the construction of the corner folds had been razor-sharp right angles to reinforce the staccato movements on the front surfaces, although this is truly difficult to accomplish when stretching cloth over wood. Framing may achieve that level of precision, but then you lose the painted edges. I think the paintings would stand up just fine without the edge embellishments.

Ups and Downs (2014-2015) offers a horizontally undergirded stack of persimmon and black half-rounds that toggle spatially. Such graduated arrangements of color and reversing patterns evoke for me the rhythms of sprechstimme, the expressive vocal style that combines singing and speech, as used, for instance, in Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire. In his score for that piece Schoenberg instructs the performer to become “acutely aware of the difference between singing tone and speaking tone: singing tone unalterably stays on the pitch, whereas speaking tone gives the pitch but immediately leaves it again by falling or rising.” Color, in a way, is the painter’s equivalent of timbre, and it is hard not to think that Brown had music in mind when he placed 12 truncated quarter notes up and down a five-bar staff.

Disassemble and Shift (both 2015) have, in my view, a resounding relationship to the formal principles of Bauhaus and Black Mountain textiles, particularly the works of Gunta Stölzl and Anni Albers. In their experiments with multi-layered weave constructions that utilized linens, silks and newly invented synthetic fibers, these artist/designers elevated geometric abstraction to a high art, even as they reflected the dissenting social and political precepts of Weimar Germany. I see an aesthetic kinship here, in Brown’s management of the dual identity of his colors, in the way they stand independently while attaining dynamic interaction with their neighbors. Brown also makes visible the fine weave (think Black Mountain designer Don Page) of the linen support through his deft handling of multiple, turpentine-thinned layers of pigment.

Like other artists who have supported themselves for years doing other things — while steadily and quietly developing their own oeuvre — Brown has worked (in his role as a principal at Tibor de Nagy Gallery) to support a number of eminent American artists, and these associations have undoubtedly permeated his thinking and his independent commitment to painting. Friendships with poets and painters including John Ashbery and the late Jane Freilicher have certainly imbued Brown’s sensitivity to texture, light, and language and we are, in turn, the beneficiaries of those exchanges. In “Vice Versa,” Brown continues to fold his knowledge of their accomplishments into his own distinct vision.

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May 7 to June 13, 2015
724 Fifth Avenue, between 56th and 57th streets
New York City, 212 262 5050

Tom Burckhardt’s recent paintings are very aware of their own provenance. They can be described as a manifestation of a particular strain of locally sourced New York abstract painting. From the 1913 Armory Show to the advent of Abstract Expressionism, American painting was boisterous, mixed and visually complex. Burckhardt gets that, knows the territory, and plunders the treasure. He emerged as a painter in the waning shadow of what had been posited as the death of painting (he graduated SUNY Purchase and Skowhegan in 1986) and in a knowing nod in the direction of painterly doubt, employs cast plastic as a surface support for the smaller paintings here. Previously, his interest in painting as a humorous sculptural object resulted in a delightful “ruckus” of installations informed by life in the studio. His current paintings hang on the wall and seem to say to the viewer, “I know you know I know about doubt, so I’m just gonna keep painting,” which he does with wit, intelligence, and kid-in-the-candy-store joy.

Burckhardt runs an idiosyncratic gamut of biomorphic and cubist geometries, breathing new life into these historic idioms. Incognito is a punchy mash-up of grid and pattern. Burckhardt juggles raucous white, purple and green tones as he flattens, twists and then gives volume to shape into a game of spatial hide-and-seek. As compositional elements of design flip, slide and exchange negative and positive values, our eye is ushered from one unique passage to another. It is as if he is making the case that spatial ambiguity is a kind of gateway drug to new conceptual openings in painting.

Avid Antics looks like Burckhardt flattened a carburetor and proceeded to paint the resulting form. Filling larger forms with incremental detail, he teases out totemic personas reminiscent of the Pacific Northwest Native imagery popular with painters of 1930s and ’40s New York. His mediating line is always live; it carries direction and various potential legibilities that can morph into a descriptive shape or gesture, or empty into a plane. In this case, his design suggests a totemic mask that contains spatially recessive Ben-Day dots that contrast against a uniformly dotted background. Burckhardt’s crisply cut, curvilinear lines, share common cause with those employed by contemporaries Joanna Pousette-Dart and Elliot Green, and extend a New York School tradition. De Kooning’s own late-career summations reconsolidated his precisely cut line and curve, traces of which have rubbed off in a painting here titled Bourgeois Melodies. One can only imagine how Gorky might also have reprised such line had he lived another few decades and created a Summation II.

Tangential Meditation, Burckhardt’s showstopper, seems to pulse to the rhythms of New York City’s physicality. If one were to update Charles Sheeler and Stuart Davis for 2015 this would be the result. Burckhardt overlaid an arterial network that stretches edge to edge on the forefront of the picture plane and functions as a framing device. As in a multi-pictured postcard in a souvenir shop, several portals are revealed that showcase different abstract industrial silhouettes in shades of both dawn’s and dusk’s most arresting colors. Roof vents, air ducts, chimneys are nearly identifiable. The central hub functions as a circuit or axis from which branching arms extend and frame the proceedings, exerting surface tension, syncopation and dynamic spin. A group of smaller shapes that look like migrating stretcher bar keys circulates, punctuating the movement of the viewer’s eye across the surface.

The dominant form in The Incredible Think is a bit like something from a Rorschach test. It could be a geometric cyborg animal in mid-stride, or perhaps a version of Stan Lee’s The Thing caged by the support edge. Consisting of thickly outlined green, yellow and ochre blocks, the viewer is reminded of the boldness of Jonathan Lasker or Nicholas Krushenick. It also makes a timely comparison with Nozkowski’s Untitled (9-34), exhibited last month at Pace Gallery. Neither painter shrinks from agitating Neo-plasticism’s essentials. Nozkowski’s delicately hewn surfaces evoke the careful consideration given to each step of the delicate arrangement of composition, and then genteelly sweep up after themselves. In contrast, Burckhardt explores and builds additional possibilities while letting us in on his process. Burckhardt’s humorous, Gustonian inclusion of a red stretcher bar in the top third of the canvas suggests the back of another painting in the studio. Additionally a smaller painting seems tacked to the top of the stretcher bar and just hangs there, presumably because that sometimes happens in the studio, too. This device welcomes us into the creative world of studio activity beyond “practice.” His painterly versatility and sculptural incursions have expanded the territory of painting.

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b. 1924, Brooklyn, NY; d. 2014, Manhattan, NY

Tribute by Thomas Nozkowski, 2014

Review by Franklin Einspruch, 2011

Review by Hearne Pardee, 2009

The Review Panel, with David Cohen, James Gardner, Barry Schwabsky and Robert Storr, 2008

Review by Maureen Mullarkey, 2005

More information on the artist can be found at Tibor de Nagy

Full index of listings for “Jane Freilicher” at artcritical

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Are we experiencing a summer of love for ceramic sculpture?  In the last couple of months there has been a critical mass of shows by sculptors that exploit, in vessel-free form, the timeless medium with zany, inventive, lusciously glazed and chromatically exuberant results on view in New York. We’ve seen exquisite essays in eccentric dexterity from Kathy Butterly at Tibor de Nagy; sumptuous, monumental biomorphs by the late Ken Price at Matthew Marks; restrained yet insouciant clay reliefs by Joyce Robins at Theodore:Art in Bushwick. Not to be missed in this rich, sweet vein, in a somewhat under the radar gem of a show at a stunning little space in Williamsburg, Ventana 244 at 244  North 6th Street on the corner of Roebling, through June 14 — is Californian ceramic sculptor Annabeth Rosen in her second New York outing since 2010.  These monumentally goofy tours de force of constructional complexity and formal singularity include sculptural personae that are as defiantly present as they are elsusive or ambivalent to characterize.  A garden gnome that  could a scholar’s rock; a Guston painting come to life that is also an explosing of loo rolls and fruits; and in Mallo, 2013, a crackle-glazed and cracking up (what a riotous conceit) molten snowman who is revealed to have a heart of bubble-gum.  DAVID COHEN

Annabeth Rosen, Mallo, 2013.  Ceramic, 14 x 13 x 12.  Courtesy of the Artists and Ventana 244

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May 2 saw the season finale of The Review Panel at the Nationa Academy Museum. Stephanie Buhmann, Mario Naves and newcomer to the series Saul Ostrow joined moderator David Cohen to discuss shows dotted around Manhattan, taking us from the Lower East Side, via Soho and Chelsea to 57th Street.  The shows under review: David Maisel: History’s Shadow at Yancey Richardson, John Newman: Fit at Tibor de Nagy, Jackie Saccoccio at Eleven Rivington’s two spaces and Allan Wexler: Breaking Ground at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts.  The panel will be back for its tenth season at the National Academy in September.  Sign up to our bulletin to be the first to know the details.

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March 10 to June 3, 2011 (extended from originally advertised dates)
724 Fifth Ave, between 56th and 57th streets
New York City,  212 262 5050

Jane Freilicher commands unalloyed reverence from fellow painters. I learned from a gallery director at Tibor de Nagy, for instance, that Thomas Nozkowski, whose work featured in their recently concluded “Object/Image” show, expressed elation at being exhibited alongside her. Any decent painter with a lick of sense would. As one of the last true scions of Giorgio Morandi, she combines a probing touch with a keen color sense to produce paintings of visceral power out of all proportion to the delicacy and limits of her subject: namely, as it has been for decades, still lifes set up in front of a window.

One of the delights of “Jane Freilicher: Paintings and Prints” is that some of the works were finished mere weeks ago. Bouquets, an especially Morandian composition with vases of flowers against a shadowy background, doesn’t even have a frame on it. The most intense hues in the painting appear in the chalky yellow flowers in an ocher vase in the foreground, followed by an unidentifiable blossom, a puffball of subverted pink, behind it. Besides those, there are only variations of silvery gray, earth yellow, and smoky ultramarine. But despite the piece’s undeniable neutrality, it feels saturated. (The spirit of Matisse’s French Window at Collioure infuses it.) This is the mark of a master colorist. Layers build up in one thin application of oil over another, but the final result is not a stratum so much as an authoritative burnishing of atmosphere, softly adjusted a quarter-inch at a time.

Window, also from 2011, works a higher key with equal effectiveness. Probably the most overtly Cubist work in the exhibition, the vases of flowers divide the windowsill into vase-size units, turning the lower quarter of the painting into an evocative abstraction. The windowsill itself splits into four pieces without feeling the least bit disjointed, such is the artist’s gentleness. The window frame is gone, somewhere beyond the edges of the 32 x 32 inch canvas, freeing the uncontained cityscape of Manhattan to rise up as ghosts colored rose, dust, and sand. Repetitions of pink and yellow ochre between the still life and the buildings cause them to pervade each other.  The sky is at once blue and gray, a perfect capturing of the often unsure mid-Atlantic weather.

This leads us to Study in Blue and Gray, also 2011. Comparison between cityscapes shows her rearranging the architecture at will, this time into rectangular sections of undifferentiated depth, a quilt of neutrals tilting towards moss, mustard, and terracotta. A plangent blue vase filled with white blooms anchors the painting with its sharpness. An accompanying gray vase of unassuming lavender wildflowers seems like it would be content to disappear. They are contrasting characters. Blue and gray tie the still life to the sky overhead and lend the city between them marked warmth. A restrained light seems to be coming from everywhere at once.

Two color lithographs from 2010 and 2011 (although the images derive from earlier paintings) are in the exhibition, and my feelings about them remain mixed. Printmaking, in this case, seems to be forcing clarity upon an artist better suited to making a patchwork of indecision, as Picasso famously quipped about Bonnard. But Light Blue Above (2010), in which two vases of flowers have been positioned on the grass some ways off from a Long Island waterway, is a pleasure, and its flattening of Freilicher’s infinitely varied touch has a charm of its own.

I have a copy of a 1986 monograph for a Freilicher exhibition that originated at the Currier Gallery of Art in Manchester, New Hampshire. In one essay, John Ashbery wrote, “The artists of the world can be divided into two groups: those who organize and premeditate, and those who accept the tentative, the whatever happens along. And though neither method is inherently superior, and one must always proceed by cases, I probably prefer more works of art that fall in the latter category.” I would go further, and say that some achievements of art lie out of reach of premeditation. Nothing except an intuited search, undertaken for emotional reasons, resolved when the unforeseen has been discovered and recorded, will produce work of this sublimity.

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