Link to Post:
http://wowhuh.com/archives/1135
Ezra Tessler reflects on Blinky Palermo's Grey Disk (1970).
Tessler writes: "Once Grey Disk made its way into my mind I had a hard time not seeing it everywhere. Turn Grey Disk on its side and walk through the Met: there it is in the rounded-faces of the lifelike Roman funerary portraits painted in encaustic on wood, in the hand-carved cameos of the late nineteenth-century, and so on down the halls. Or leave it horizontal and think of nearly any painting. It mimics the golden orb of the kneecap at the center of Caravaggio’s Narcissus, the shape of Braque’s Violin and Music Score, the dark cutout oval in Picasso’s guitar sculptures, the black elliptical sphere in Dana Schutz’s Guitar Girl, the biomorphic shapes in Ron Gorchov’s pieces, and the swollen lumps of elephant dung in Chris Ofili’s work. It’s the bowl of fruit in every still life from Claesz to Matisse, the muted and dusty grey saucer in Morandi’s Natura Morta II, the skulls in seventeenth-century vanitas paintings, the ominous cloud covering Gerhard Richter’s Table and the carnal orifice of his Mouth. Cloud, face, saucer, saddle, stage, shield, palette – how can one begin to capture everything that it invokes?"
Link to Post:
http://www.title-magazine.com/2013/02/studio-visit-with-anne-schaefer/
Cindy Stockton Moore visits the studio of painter Anne Schaefer.
Schaefer comments: "Much of the new work mines the imagery, pattern and chance forms created in the studio. Basically, I’m using the material refuse from the creation of work as the source material (or building blocks) of new work. The large-scale work is dimensionally specific. So, when I was working on installation-based projects, the essential building blocks included the scale of pattern based on size of the space, the location of the piece in relation to other architectural elements in the space, and the color required to achieve desired optical or sensorial effects. I have an ongoing interest in working with basic forms to generate a more complex visual experience."
Link to Post:
http://brenthallard.wordpress.com/2013/02/20/odd-things-guido-nieuwendijk/
Brent Hallard interviews painter Guido Nieuwendijk about his work and process.
Nieuwendijk comments: "With the wall paintings my curiousness is triggered with flatness: I only paint the walls and the image is super flat, but the surroundings do something with that to make it all real space. And, as such, the viewer navigates the space not only with flatness in mind but also becomes very conscious of the volume of space that the wall paintings inhabit. The panels work differently. They draw the viewer in to their little universe. Both the wall work and panel work have the same graphic imagery, but because of scale and a different sense of ‘objectness’ the graphic quality shifts considerably. The panels have all the tools to suck up a viewer. The paint is very matt, not shiny and reflecting, but absorbing. They also, as you said, are wrapped in color. And in that sense edge towards being an object, but are, and still stay in the realm of paintings, not sculpture."
Link to Post:
http://abstractcritical.com/note/lothar-gotz-the-line-of-beauty/
Sam Cornish interviews Lothar Götz on the occasion of the recent exhibition The Line of Beauty at Domobaal, London.
Götz discusses the particular challenges of creating site specific paintings. Asked about how his painting What Makes Boys Dance? altered the environment Götz comments: "What was interesting when we started to paint everything pink, it become not a very pleasant room. It changed from a very, very tasteful grey into something like an institutional colour, perhaps like when it was a lawyer’s office; and then we added the black and it was extremely graphic. We might have left it black – there are lots of stages where you think it can be left. What I find interesting with these site specific pieces is that at every stage is an option, you could do this, or you could do that. I could make a whole series of different pieces for a room and see how it reacts."
Link to Post:
http://www.gorkysgranddaughter.com/2011/07/nathan-lewis-july-2011.html
Christopher Joy and Zachary Keeting continue their video series with a fascinating visit with painter Nathan Lewis including video of the dilapidated architecture Lewis employs in his powerful figure paintings.
Link to Post:
http://www.brooklynrail.org/2011/06/art/painted-places-and-patronage
Transcript of painter David Novros' remarks at the Rothko Chapel, Houston, Texas on February 12, 2011. Novros' discusses the scarcity of place-specific painting and the necessary (and uncommon) patronage that brings places of painting into being. "John and Dominique [de Menil] created the circumstances and Rothko invented a magnificent painted place... Rothko (and his contemporaries, Pollock, Newman, Still, and Kline) would have been muralists in a better time." Novros also offers a critique of the chapel.
Link to Post:
http://inbetweennoise.blogspot.com/2011/05/blinky-on-my-mind.html
Artist Steve Roden posts some thoughts on the work of Blinky Palermo sparked by the juxtaposition of a Palermo work, Projektion, with one of Roden's own paintings in the exhibition Time Again at the Sculpture Center in Long Island City. Palermo's Projektion is "a photographic document of a projection of a red and blue painting onto the front of what appears to be the facade of an apartment building." Roden notes that Projektion "...seems to shift certain conditions of an existing architecture through the addition of color and light..." and writes about his own painting's relationship to architecture.
Link to Post:
http://www.spreadartculture.com/2010/12/24/kiki-smith/
A new stained-glass window co-designed by artist Kiki Smith and architect Deborah Gans graces the refurbished Eldridge Street Synagogue. Smith's design features symbols of both the United States and the Jewish faith "establishing the identity of the United States, and marrying symbolically the Jewish faith and the immigrant population of the Lower East Side that originally founded the 1887 synagogue."
Link to Post:
http://www.spreadartculture.com/2010/12/17/rauziers-labyrinths/
Spread Art Culture reports on the work of French photographer Jean-François Rauzier. With a painter's eye Rauzier creates fascinating large scale, painterly photographss that mix photography, collage, and technology. "Rauzier’s technique is to photograph his subjects for as long as two hours, capturing different areas in progression, the parts of a figure or a building for instance, and then to recompose the collage of images which sometimes include as many as 3500 individual close-ups."
Link to Post:
http://bigthink.com/ideas/25359
Bob Duggan reviews Joachim Poeschke’s Italian Mosaics: 300-1300. Duggan writes that Poeschke's book "demonstrates the seemingly eternal life of these pre-Renaissance mosaics, which contain some of the earliest images of Christian art. In this first published survey of the subject, Poeschke analyzes how religion and politics teamed up to produce these glories of artistry in words while allowing stunning photographs of the mosaics to speak for themselves."
