Category: Painting

Modern Art, Painting

Picasso: 14 Sketchbooks, 1900-1959

Pace Gallery, New York, November 10 – December 23, 2023

A fascinating show of Picasso’s sketchbooks ranging through his career at Pace.

From the Gallery’s site:

Organized in collaboration with the Fundación Almine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso, Madrid (FABA)—with whom our gallery has maintained a longstanding relationship—this exhibition of Picasso’s sketchbooks will offer a unique and intimate view of the ways in which the artist worked, tracing the evolution of his observations and ideas into plans for his compositions across painting and sculpture.


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Contemporary Art, Painting

Georg Baselitz: “The Painter in his Bed”

Gagosian, New York, November 9–December 22, 2023

Georg Baselitz, a stag from "The Painter in his Bed"
Georg Baselitz, a bed with stockings from "The Painter in his Bed"
Georg Baselitz, a stag from "The Painter in his Bed"
Georg Baselitz, stags from "The Painter in his Bed"
Georg Baselitz, a stag from "The Painter in his Bed"
Georg Baselitz, a stag from "The Painter in his Bed"
Gagosian Gallery opening for Baselitz

Georg Baselitz (born Hans-Georg Kern, 1938) is a German painter and sculptor, commonly known for painting his subjects upside down. He took this approach as a pivot in his career in 1969, with a show of inverted portraits that soon became his signature gesture.

This exhibit is series of neo-expressionist paintings, paired subjects of figures in a bed and inverted deer stags.

The compelling works featured in The Painter in His Bed focus on two motifs: figures in bed and the stag. Defining human and animal anatomy with raw expression, Baselitz negotiates apperception of these subjects through his distinctive painterly approach. Vigorously applying layers of paint, he affixes stretched nylon stockings and sheets of gauze across the upper parts of the paintings or makes monoprinted impressions of their shapes. With these additions, Baselitz extends the innovation of Springtime, his 2021 exhibition in the same space in New York. Dedicated to the spirited provocations of Hannah Höch, Kurt Schwitters, and other Dadaists, the works in Springtime draw upon these artists’ irreverent introduction of everyday materials into the realm of art. Whereas many of the Springtime paintings are exuberantly colored, the new works are dominated by elemental contrasts of black and white.

Gagosian Gallery
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Modern Art, Painting

Robert Ryman: 1961-1964

David Zwirner, New York, November 9, 2023—February 3, 2024

Robert Ryman (May 30, 1930 – February 8, 2019) was an American conceptual artist closely identified with the high modernist Minimalist mode of painting in the 1960’s. Interestingly he did not attend an art school or program of art studies at a university. Instead, his visual interests began when he worked as a security guard at MoMA, befriending fellow employees Sol Lewitt and Dan Flavin.

From the David Zwirner exhibition text:

Ryman gained initial recognition for the work he made in the late 1960s and early 1970s. As a result, his paintings created prior to this period remain less well known to this day. Yet it was during the early 1960s that Ryman began to firmly establish the broad parameters of his radical and inventive practice. His paintings from these years reflect how, even at this early point, Ryman was already looking to interrogate and reinterpret the fundamental precepts of painting by experimenting with different supports and materials; deconstructing the relationship between frame and wall; and more broadly, investigating the visual, material, and experiential qualities that define the conditions in which a work of art is encountered. It was also at this time that the artist settled on the square as the primary format for his art and began experimenting with scale, a consequence, in part, of his move around 1961 to a studio space that afforded him the ability to work in larger formats.

David Zwirner Gallery
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Contemporary Art, Painting, Sculpture

Diana Al-Hadid: “Women, Bronze, and Dangerous Things

Kasmin Gallery, New York, November 2 – December 22, 2023

A sculpture by Diana Al-Hadid

Al-Hadid is a Brooklyn based artist. Born in Aleppo, Syria, Diana Al-Hadid emigrated to the United States when she was five years old, growing up in Ohio. There she received a BA at Kent State and then went on to earn an MFA at Virginia Commonwealth University.

The exhibition work spans a number of media, including rigid board, styrene, bronze, and wax. Commenting on the mythological content of the subject matter, the gallery writes:

“Across Al-Hadid’s use of motifs in this exhibition—which includes figures from Greek mythology alongside protagonists in Islamic and Christian narratives—the artist’s contemporary interpretations intuitively navigate different attempts of reading the future through our past. Constructions in nature such as mountains and caves reappear as emblematic elements of landscape tied to the social, psychological, and religious narratives that have been absorbed into dominant culture over the centuries. Indifferent to where these narratives find their origin in theology, Al-Hadid’s method of retrieving stories both communicate with history and imagine them anew. At once prophetic and autobiographical, Al-Hadid’s sensitive installation across two sites of the gallery’s architecture articulates a realm that manifests, both physically and metaphorically, above ground and below.”

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Contemporary Art, Painting, Sculpture

Anish Kapoor

Lisson Gallery, New York, New York, November 2 â€“ December 16, 2023

Okay let’s get to the paintings first, because… they are so, so BAD. Poorly drawn, acid combinations of colors that frankly would probably not be exhibited without considering the artist’s established reputation as a sculptor. Many painters and sculptors that cross over into the other’s discipline fail to make powerful works in the alternative medium and that’s okay, they can be interesting failures. And every once in a while, an artist can pull it off (Sara Sze comes to mind since she was recently exhibited in this very room).

On a brighter note the sculptures are intriguing as objects. This is the first exhibit of Anish Kapoor’s trademark gimmick, the Vanta Black pigment that approximates absolute black. The spatial effect of light dying into a form is quite interesting. One work is a rough pile of the stuff heaped on the floor, and the mounds of form and contour can only be seen as silhouette. As you walk around the piece you see that it must have misshapen lumps here and there but they can only see them as a perimeter outline – the light does not reflect back to allow you to perceive any other spatial depth looking into the form itself.

The effect works almost as well in the other pieces, which are simpler form and have different formal interests in absorbing the ambient light. They are interesting, but seemingly one liners and these pieces might not be anywhere near the heights of great art. I can’t imagine, for instance, the idea of their having an influence on another generation of artists. They feel like a dead end.

Such is the power of these miserable paintings that they affect my evaluation of the more familiar sculptures presented here – maybe this is unfair but it’s hard to swim hanging on to an anchor. I try to only review exhibits that I like, and so why include this one? As I said the Vanta Black creates an interesting object, and it’s worth considering. There is perhaps a difference between an interesting object and a worthy work of art, and if it weren’t for the paintings I would consider that.

Anish Kapoor was born in 1954 in Mumbai, India, and works in London and Venice. He currently is exhibiting the show “Untrue Unreal” in the Palazzo Strozzi, in Florence.

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Contemporary Art, Painting

Ed Ruscha: “Now Then”

Museum of Modern Art, New York, Oct 1 2023 to January 13 2024

A mammoth multimedia retrospective of fellow Oklahoman Ed Ruscha’s artistic output, this exhibition spans six decades across his career. The show emphasizes the unique combination of abstraction and pop imagery in his art. Ruscha is known for his bold text across images, and features these images around aspects of the American West.

Ruscha’s career has also proved influential, as his unique combination of text and images continues to resonate with other artists.

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Contemporary Art, Painting

Bridget Riley Drawings: From the Artist’s Studio

Abstract sketch by Bridget Riley

Morgan Library, New York, June 23 through October 8, 2023.

I have never really considered that preparatory drawings might be an important part of Bridget Riley’s workflow, but this exhibit at the Morgan proves it. The works are all donated for the show by the artist herself, from her personal collection.

Riley is one of the most accomplished abstract artists of the period, and live in a middle range between Op Art and Minimalism. Seeing the discipline of these small sketches as generators of the larger finished ideas is a revelation.

The exhibition introduction notes that this is the first show of Riley’s drawings in fifty years.

Drawing is having an eye at the end of a pencil

-Riley

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Contemporary Art, Painting

Michela Martello, in “The Divine, The Passion, and the Magic”

Visitor Center, Newburgh, New York, June 24 to August 19, 2023

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I was given a tour of the Visitor Center by the director Eva Zanardi, an eloquent advocate of the Center. It was a group show, but I attended to see the incredible installation by Michela Martello.

This installation is a collection of pieces she worked on during a fellowship in Taiwan, working on these divinities on large scale filter paper. The works subject and style is a riff on the local religious traditions, and feminine divinity, but worked across large sheets of luminous filter paper. The resulting light-soaked space formed by shaping the papers into a circle is at once monumental and ephemeral, spiritual and fleeting.

The effect combines a fascinating level of detail and inventiveness, which also shifts to larger architectural scale as an installation shaping the space. The enclosure and filtered light were gorgeous.

Martello is a surpremely gifted draftsman, she has a lovely sense of line and balance of detail to large gesture. The portraits of the figures receive the most careful and nuanced attention with line, with other areas rapidly worked to describe texture or pattern.

Martello is from Grosseto, Italy but now based in New York City. I became personally acquainted with her work through its representation by Pen and Brush, where she has contributed beautiful and inventive work.

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Contemporary Art, Painting, Sculpture

Yayoi Kusama, “I Spend Each Day Embracing Flowers”

David Zwirner Gallery, New York, May 11 – Friday, July 21, 2023

Yayoi Kusama is one of Japanese Pop-Art’s leading lights, combining monumental works with a minimal, feminist, and conceptual blend of sculpture and painting. Her signature gesture is a field of dots, in the case of this show applied to monumental abstracted squash / biomorphic shapes. The effects range from bland to transcendent.

The New York Times comments on her instagram-perfect immersive scenarios:

“It’s a beautiful effect. (Or it was for me, alone in the room; you’ll be sharing the experience with up to three other visitors at a time.) But you needn’t be Dr. Freud to diagnose that the narcissism of a new selfie-devoted public has canceled, utterly, the goals of self-obliteration that Ms. Kusama intends her infinite installations to achieve. The self cannot dissolve when the selfie is the goal.”

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Contemporary Art, Drawing, Painting, Sculpture

“Bodies, Bodies, Bodies: Raffish Vulnerability and Profane Ambivalence”

Pen + Brush, New York, June 15 to August 26 2023

Suzanne Unrein “The Animals Are Dancing” 2020
Alfa Ros Petursdottir, “Women’s Parliament” 2023
Heather Goodwind, “Veiled Eye, Right” 2013

“‘Bodies’ represents the authentic and earnest ways in which these artists buck convention so thoroughly that the final product appears unabashed, even crude. The body is literally what binds us, yet here, and contemporarily, it also separates us as we inevitably react to this public and radical display. This show forces viewers to reckon with their own perspectives, values, boundaries, and biases” -Curator Parker Daley Garcia.

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Contemporary Art, Painting

Nina Simone House

Group show benefit auction, Pace Gallery, New York, May 12 2023

Sarah Sze “Spell” 2023
Rashid Johnson “NIna’s Blues” 2023

This show presents 11 works for a benefit auction, on behalf of the National Trust for Historic Preservation to restore Nina Simone’s childhood home. The auction was run by Sotheby’s and co-curated artist Adam Pendelton and by Venus Williams.

Full list of artists:

Cecily Brown
Ellen Gallagher
Rashid Johnson
Robert Longo
Julie Mehretu
Adam Pendleton
Martin Puryear
Sarah Sze
Mary Weatherford
Stanley Whitney
Anicka Yi

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