Link to Post:
http://sameoldart.tumblr.com/post/47571454375/jean-michel-basquiat-without-anger
A blog post that disputes the commonly held notion that Jean-Michel Basquiat was an "angry" artist.
"This designation is partly due to a 1983 interview with Henry Geldzahler where Basquiat described his work as being 80% about anger. But as a descriptor, 'anger' fails to explain the manifold conditions of art-making... You have to be determined, not angry, to produce anything close to the variation and quality of Basquiat’s work... in Basquiat’s work... I see a painter who raises questions while allowing his work to be open and infinite at the same time. In [La Jara] ] we are looking at a white police officer who is comic and vile. He is an everyday-life kind of beast and a beast made to fit the scale and ambition of painting."
Link to Post:
http://www.burnaway.org/2013/04/im-trying-my-best-to-be-well-balanced-studio-visit-with-shara-hughes/
Rachel Reese interviews painter Shara Hughes on the occasion of the exhibition Shara Hughes: Don’t Tell Anyone But…, at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, on view from April 19 - June 15, 2013.
Hughes comments: "Interiors became the foundation where I could lay all different artists who have come before me into and onto the painting. So I could paint a really detailed Renaissance painting inside of, on top of, a Bridgette Riley-esque type wallpaper thing. It opened up access for me to flow between everything I wanted to do, that I couldn’t do, because 'that looks like this' or 'that looks like that.' ... I would also look back in art history and see what kind of symbolism artists were using. For example, dogs are a symbol of protection. So, I would put a dog in my painting to talk about protection of myself, or some birds, or several other traditional symbols. And then I began to remove them, and I would bring in my own symbolism—broken trees or rocks that have been cut halfway. I continually create my own alphabet from my own symbols as my work progresses."
Link to Post:
http://blog.art21.org/2013/04/08/new-kids-on-the-block-summer-wheat-and-her-flight-from-the-cowboy-space-gangsters/
Jacquelyn Gleisner profiles painter Summer Wheat.
Referring to Wheat's recent show at Valentine Gallery, Gleisner writes that "Given the context, the documentation of work in the Valentine show pertains to the daily maintenance of personhood—that is, grooming. Inverting the art historical formula of female bathers painted by male artists such as Bonnard and Picasso, Wheat made several large paintings of male bathers as well as objects like mirrors, toothbrushes, and combs sculpted out of paint. Tension arises when the palpable delight of the work’s execution confronts the grotesque rendering of the forms as in Kiss... In this painting the squishy embrace of two massive heads is memorably depicted, subject matter matching the heft of the haptic aspects of the work. Wheat gropes touchy subjects as the materials and forms are raucously upended."
Link to Post:
http://elisabethcondon.blogspot.com/2013/04/jenny-dubnaus-studio.html
Elisabeth Condon photo blogs a visit to the studio of painter Jenny Dubnau.
Condon writes that "[Dubnau's] portraits combine the best of Chardin and David (someone she thinks about often), with photographs staged by Jenny in the studio. The combination of air-borne facture and photographic portraiture yields strange perceptual resonance, slowing the rapid scan of visual data to a fleshy crawl."
Link to Post:
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/112813/piero-della-francesca-frick-reviewed-jed-perl
Jed Perl questions the critical response to the exhibition Piero della Francesca in America at the Frick Collection, New York, on view through May 19, 2013.
"What troubles me isn’t that people are embracing Piero’s work," Perl writes, "I love much of it, too—it’s that they are reluctant to see that its power is inextricably bound with its limitations." Perl observes: "It is [the] skittishness about overt emotion, this desire to show what [art critic Adrian] Stokes called 'the separateness of ordered outer things,' that powers Piero’s art. Although we can probably never know what Piero’s contemporaries saw in his intricate compositions, what we see is not a perfect world but a problematical world, where form absorbs feeling, and the effort to create an ideal order is the only reasonable response to life’s everyday confusions."
Link to Post:
http://notesonlooking.com/2013/04/brad-eberhard-history-process-and-metaphor-in-dissolve-at-tom-solomon/
Geoff Tuck blogs about the work of Brad Eberhard on view in the exhibition Brad Eberhard (dis-solve) at Thomas Solomon Gallery, Los Angeles, through Apr 20, 2013.
Tuck writes that "looking at these new paintings, Paul Klee comes to my mind and also Gustav Klimt. Each artist employs a somewhat lapidary way of painting, with carefully defined patches of color that, in the aggregate, make pictures. Klee also comes to mind because Eberhard seems to be developing language, or a glossary, with the evidence of process that he reveals. Much in the way the Swiss artist, whose work was rooted in Surrealist fusion of psychology and myth, used personal hieroglyphs to convey larger meanings through interpretation and association, I think the scratches and erasures – in addition to the colors and narratives – in Eberhard’s paintings point to the mechanics, the processes and the history of painting as metaphors for life."
Link to Post:
http://elisabethcondon.blogspot.com/2013/04/basquiat-using-similar-opaque-covering.html
Elisabeth Condon photo blogs visits to recent and current painting shows in Chelsea including two shows at Gagosian, Jean-Michel Basquiat (through April 6) and Helen Frankenthaler (through April 13), Painting Advanced at Edward Thorp (through April 20), Al Held at Cheim and Read (through April 20), Susanna Heller at Magnan Metz (through April 20), Barkley Hendricks at Jack Shainman (through April 6), and several images of paintings by Mary Jones recently on view in her studio exhibition.
Link to Post:
http://paintingperceptions.com/guest-posts/philip-guston-a-problematic-centennial
Thaddeus Radell reviews the exhibition Philip Guston: A Centennial Exhibition at McKee Gallery, New York, on view through April 20th, 2013.
Impressed by the show, though not by every picture in it, Radell writes that the exhibition "is an inspiring, if problematic, offering from one of the most pictorially demanding and ‘image-ridden’ painters of the second half of the last century. The current exhibition marks the centennial of his birth and seemingly celebrates the artist’s rebirth into figuration. All of the works, except the impressive The Year (1964), date from the late period during which Guston began to draw and paint single objects in a highly condensed manner. His boldly colored figurative narratives are solidly removed from the subtle tonal resonances established in his mid-career abstractions. The Year remains a resilient and potent statement of Guston’s ability to address key issues of the New York School while enigmatically retaining and nourishing a commitment to simple, massive forms that are, quite obviously, figuration."
Link to Post:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-seed/anne-harris-new-paintings_b_2985056.html
John Seed interviews painter Anne Harris on the occasion of her exhibition of new paintings at Alexandre Gallery, New York, on view from April 6 through May 11, 2013.
Seed writes: "The gradual evanescence of Harris's imagery is occurring as a feature of what she acknowledges is a 'long standing evolution.' She confides that 'over the years I have become more and more interested in the the idea that I am painting a slice of air.'... Emotionally, technically and stylistically Harris is walking a tightrope, and she seems genuinely thrilled to be there. Describing one of the 'invisibles' to me on the phone, she tells me that, 'the figure might have less weight than the air: I love trying to paint dense air. The entire painting becomes the body. It is exciting to me that everything is skin and air.'"
Link to Post:
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/culture/la-et-cm-review-brad-eberhard-thomas-solomon-20130321,0,4440821.story
Christopher Knight reviews the exhibition Brad Eberhard (dis-solve) at Thomas Solomon Gallery, Los Angeles, on view through Apr 20, 2013.
Knight writes: "'Way Out,' the most beautiful of the six [paintings on view], is a cave painting. Blood-red pigment was poured along the upper edge of the 4-foot-square canvas and ran down the surface, recalling methods used by Jackson Pollock and Morris Louis. The dribbles provided the initial contours of an irregular pattern of abstract, organic shapes, which cover the entire canvas. Eberhard filled in the shapes with pink, green, ochre and brown, sometimes scraping off the paint and starting over from scratch. Adding and subtracting forms and colors yields a rough but elegant look. The result is an abstract Color Field painting with oddly figurative overtones."
