Link to Post:
http://mnaves.wordpress.com/2013/06/01/albrecht-durer-master-drawings-watercolors-and-prints-from-the-albertina-at-the-national-gallery-of-art-washington-d-c/
Mario Naves reviews the exhibition Albrecht Dürer: Master Drawings, Watercolors, and Prints from the Albertina at the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., on view through June 9, 2013.
Naves writes that "the curatorial point is obvious: Dürer was a phenomenon. Is a phenomenon, if the response of the crowds attending the show is any indication. Huddling around the works, viewers can’t look closely enough at the images—because of their small size, sure, but mostly because of Dürer’s huge talent. Ensconced, as it is, in the East Wing, the section of the museum dedicated to modern and contemporary art, the exhibition may (as a friend suggested) prompt doubts about the progress of art: Sixteenth-century Northern Europeans had the meticulous intensity of Dürer; we have to settle for the decorative flourishes of Ellsworth Kelly, the subject of a concurrent exhibition at The National Gallery. An apples and oranges comparison, perhaps, and any museum-goer seeking proof of art’s forward march will inevitably be frustrated. But if Dürer the man is history, then Dürer the artist is forever our contemporary, a figure whose virtuosity—at once both clinical and deeply intimate—withstands anything so mundane as time passing."
Link to Post:
http://newamericanpaintings.wordpress.com/2013/05/15/a-conversation-judy-glantzman/
Arthur Peña talks to painter Judy Glantzman about the work in her recent exhibition at Betty Cuningham Gallery, New York.
Glantzman comments: " I am looking for 'shorthand' symbols that speak of war. The large collages are very physical, so the intuitive process has a lot to do with tearing and layering. Chance plays a big part in the collages. I want the work to 'show me' so I often glue things together that happened to fall together on the floor. I think of the collages like a haiku, where the 'right' combination creates a perpetual dynamic. My definition of art is that the artist (me) creates a paradoxical dynamic that, like the yin and yang, perpetually goes back and forth. A space is made; like the white line that is made when you combine complementary colors or when opposite magnets resist each other... I want to build a back and forth that creates a feeling, and then I stop."
Link to Post:
http://icallitoranges.blogspot.com/2013/05/richard-serra.html
Ed Schad reviews the exhibition Richard Serra: Double Rifts at Gagosian, Beverly Hills, on view through June 1, 2013.
Schad writes that Serra's drawings engender for him simultaneous thoughts of the "universal" and the "local." Schad notes that viewing the exhibition, "I think of how a Newman zip could send Walter Di Maria to the Southwest and James Turrell to a crater with a backhoe. On the other hand, I think of every moment I am at loss for words in relation to the world, how a loss splits me from the world and takes me to a loneliness that I would like to think is important but probably isn’t, how those that I have lost simply go away and how the world rises around me threatening and dangerous and glorious, and how it is both a comfort and a terror to think that nature doesn’t care about something so decidedly un-glorious as me."
Link to Post:
http://hyperallergic.com/69690/durer-in-dc-some-observations-on-the-great-observer/
Thomas Micchelli reviews the exhibition Albrecht Dürer: Master Drawings, Watercolors, and Prints from the Albertina at the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., on view through June 9, 2013.
Micchelli writes: "Dürer’s boldness with his materials is evidenced in what is probably the most emblematic image to come from the Great Observer, namely 'The Great Piece of Turf' (1503)... The work is minimal in its color choices — tonal gradations of raw umber and mint green, with dabs of aquamarine and amber — and if you continue to look closely at it, raising your eyes inch by inch up through the weeds, it can seem like a dull profusion of busy green verticals. Take one step back, however, and the whole thing pulls together, not unlike a Jackson Pollock or a Joan Mitchell, with the blank backdrop suggesting a field of hazy, ambient light while simultaneously behaving as an undisguised paper support. The great piece of turf looks virtually collaged to that support, its dry densities of paint creating a hyper-real alternative reality to the paper’s all-too-real, blank tactility."
Link to Post:
http://www.theartblog.org/2013/04/brian-cyphers-science-fueled-lines-spaces-and-shapes-at-bushwicks-new-schema-projects/
Elizabeth Johnson reviews the exhibition Brian Cypher: Survey, works on paper at Schema Projects, Bushwick, Brooklyn, on view through April 28, 2013.
Johnson writes: "Working like André Masson and other Surrealists à la Automatic Drawing, Cypher is content in that sweet spot of action without a plan; humorously, he parses fragments of the analytical, plan-based sciences and math and subverts their official purpose by dismantling order from within. Snipping, morphing and recombining parabolas, ellipses, triangles and squares, Cypher experiments with repeated line and color like a chemist."
Link to Post:
http://hyperallergic.com/67549/philip-gustons-line/
John Yau blogs about the exhibition Philip Guston: A Centennial Exhibition at McKee Gallery, New York, on view through April 20, 2013.
Yau writes that "the marvel of the exhibition [is that] — it is all done with line, drawn or in paint. Sometimes the line becomes a rounded shape (a cloud) or a circle (sun). Short horizontal strokes are words in a book or bristly hair sprouting from skinny, naked legs... This is what I love about Guston and his work. He was haunted and did not try to hide it. He had ugly feelings, and was often disappointed. He loved all kinds of things, as his collection of old irons, which frequently appear in his painting, suggests. He loved the old masters and cartoonists equally and was not afraid to bring that love into his work. All he relied on was a line. With it he painted hooded men driving around in cars, transporting corpses and art, as if there were no difference between the two. (They were his symbol for men who hide behind the cloak of dogma, which you would think we should be sick of by now but clearly aren’t.)"
Link to Post:
http://contemporarydrawingsalon.blogspot.com/2013/02/a-converstaion-with-artist-pete-schulte.html
Yifat Gat interviews artist Pete Schulte about his art and practice.
Gat notes that Schulte works "with graphite on paper but the result feel like 'a painting' not like 'a drawing'. " Schulte reponds, commenting that "artists from Bonnard to Richard Serra have linked the act of drawing to thinking – an observation with which I agree – however, I will take it a step further and say that for me drawing often precedes thought. The drawings occasionally act as my guides, they provide content and direction, and eventually cognition catches up. It has also been said that drawing essentially reveals the act of its making, while painting subsequently erases it. If one were to invest in this train of thought, then it is easy to see how much of my work could fit more readily into the category of painting."
Link to Post:
http://www.paintersbread.com/2013/03/amanda-friedman-interview.html
Michael Rutherford interviews painter Amanda Friedman about her work and studio practice. Friedman's work was recently on view at Eli Ping, New York.
Rutherford writes that "the expansive, sprawling swaths of paper that Amanda Friedman refers to as Thought-forms have pulled me into their orbit and provided plenty to think about. The painted surfaces, existing not on canvas but on pieced-together fields of paper, have a delicate and ephemeral feeling, as if they’re conveyors of fleeting things that cannot be uttered; things unsaid but definitely sensed visually. In the near future, I anticipate spotting more of these works—enigmatic continents of emotion adrift on seas of white spaces."
Link to Post:
http://joannemattera.blogspot.com/2013/02/suzan-frecon-paper-at-david-zwirner.html
Joanne Mattera blogs about the exhibition Suzan Frecon: paper at David Zwirner Gallery, New York, on view through March 23, 2013.
Mattera writes: "There's something appealing about seeing small work in a large space. The individual pieces are dwarfed, requiring you to move in close. Intimacy in a large space seems like an oxymoron, but Suzan Frecon's watercolors--reductive compositions on Indian ledger paper--simultaneously assert themselves while letting you in."
Link to Post:
http://bushwickdaily.com/2013/02/giacometti-takes-on-bushwick/
Allison Galgiani reviews the exhibition Giacometti and a Selection of Contemporary Drawings, at Norte Maar, Bushwick, Brooklyn, on view through February 17, 2013.
Galgiani writes: "The stubborn humanity and personality that can be seen in Giacometti’s sculpture, paintings and drawings, like his Double Sided Drawing featuring Double Portrait of Diego and Standing Man Arms Outstretched (c.1947-1950), featured in the Norte Maar exhibition, which through its juxtaposition with the various contemporary drawings proves to be timeless and undying... The exhibition features ten contemporary artists, most of whom work in Bushwick... most of the pieces possessed a similar sobriety to the Giacometti by which they were all so inspired... In this exhibition, Norte Maar presents a mature and thought-provoking dialogue between contemporary drawing and Giacometti’s mid-century oeuvre. Giacometti’s uncanny ability to toe the line between so many dichotomies - light and dark, material and space, figuration and abstraction, good and evil – will likely ring true for generations to come."
