Link to Post:
http://hyperallergic.com/64479/dispatches-from-hell-nancy-speros-cruel-beauty/
Thomas Micchelli reviews the exhibition Nancy Spero: From Victimage to Liberation: Works from the 1980s & 1990s at Galerie Lelong, New York, on view through February 16, 2013.
Micchelli writes: "The installation is, in a word, stunning — as spare and light-filled as the work itself. The collages, with their rhythmic interplay of repeating images, shimmer across expanses of paper with touches of jewel-like color when they’re not exploding in flashes of graphic intensity. That they can be so materially beautiful in spite of their often wrenching subject matter is one of the paradoxes that carries Spero’s work out of the times for which they were made and makes them invaluable for our own."
Link to Post:
http://elisabethcondon.blogspot.com/2012/12/chelsea-beautiful.html
Elisabeth Condon photoblogs current and recent exhibitions on view in Chelsea: Trenton Doyle Hancock: ...And Then It All Came Back To Me at James Cohan Gallery (closed Dec 22), Keltie Ferris at Mitchell, Inness & Nash (through January 12), Barnaby Furnas: If Fishes Were Fishes at Marianne Boesky Gallery (through January 9), David Humphrey: New Paintings at Fredrick and Freiser (through January 19), Stephen Mueller: Selected Works 2007 - 2011 at Lennon, Weinberg (closed Dec 22), works by Jennifer Wynne Reeves at Stux group show, Annie Attridge: Wanderlust at Asya Geisberg Gallery (thorugh Jan 26), and Al Loving: Torn Canvas at Gary Snyder Gallery (through Dec 29).
Link to Post:
http://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/retelling-history-through-art-an-interview-with-kimathi-donkor
Caroline Menezes interviews painter Kimathi Donkor whose works were recently on view in the exhibition Queens of the Undead, at Iniva, London.
Donkor comments: "I respect the viewer who goes to the gallery and wants to experience something that is uplifting or disturbing, that engages them intellectually. I am not just trying to put them into a dreamlike reverie. If you look at my paintings, they have got a very complex psychological and even spiritual element. I don’t think of them as being easy to read, they are difficult images, in a sort of surrealism sense... you can have an engagement with history; it is a necessary and valuable contribution to art, and vice-versa." He continues: "Part of it is just purely the joy of being able to have an overwhelming colour experience and to just abandon the constraints of naturalism. Then, it is about giving the viewer the opportunity to seriously question what is being presented. There are all these disruptions about place and time, there is a constant sort of jumping in the work, between today and yesterday, between here and there, there is this disorientating sense and I find it hard to not do it."
Link to Post:
http://www.bigredandshiny.com/cgi-bin/BRS.cgi?article=2012-10-07-073239343819559949
Brian Christopher Glaser writes about Pablo Picasso's Rape of the Sabine Women, painted in reaction to the Cuban Missle Crisis. The painting is now on view at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library & Museum, Boston, MA.
Glaser writes: "Distressed by what was unfolding and no stranger to war (he operated a studio in Paris during the German occupation of the city), Picasso contacted a friend in the city and asked for slides of two masterpieces - Nicolas Poussin’s Abduction of the Sabine Women and Jacques-Louis David’s Intervention of the Sabine Women. Over the next four months Picasso projected the slides on the walls of his studio and worked on three small paintings depicting the fabled tale before starting his 4th and final in the series. The large 6 by 4 foot canvass, Rape of the Sabine Women—now on view at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and museum—stands as Picasso’s last great "history painting" and outcry against the atrocities of war."
Link to Post:
http://thepaintingimperative.com/issue-5/carpaccio/
In a two part essay, Bernhard Gaul considers texts on Carpaccio (by Michel Serres and Andrey Tarkovsky) in relation to viewing Carpaccio's paintings.
Gaul writes: "Carpaccio doesn’t appear to be that high up on the hit list of currently popular painters. Even in Venice, the painter’s home town, his work appears to be marketed as something that is also there, in the shadow of much bigger names like Titian, Tintoretto, Tiepolo and Veronese or, of course, Canaletto – rather than a principle reason to visit. I assume this may have to do with the impression that in much of Carpaccio’s work painting bears all the hallmarks of a craft – it appears more rooted in community than being the domain of an eccentric individual (like Caravaggio or van Gogh), while we have become accustomed to expect that it takes the latter to create paintings of real meaning, that speak to us directly..."
Link to Post:
http://berkshirereview.net/2012/09/05/turner-tate/
Huntley Dent writes about the newly hung Turner Galleries at Tate Britain which house selections from the bequest of painter J.M.W. Turner, who left his estate, which included 30,000 works of art on paper and 300 oil paintings, to the country in 1856.
Dent writes: "The newly hung galleries can’t help but open your eyes. Turner left hundreds of unfinished paintings to the Tate and thousands of drawings and water colors, so any angle a curator wants to take can be illustrated, and still the torrent of imagination has only been caught in a teacup. At 21 and 22 Turner made his first Royal Academy pictures, both depictions of moonlight, a notoriously difficult illumination to capture on canvas. You have to lean in to squint at the astonishing detail that he has carefully inscribed in subtle shades of black and brown, a really virtuoso effect. But then, with Turner as with Paganini, one expects the virtuosic as his stock in trade. Quite literally he might do an avalanche before lunch and a cataclysm after tea while sketching in the defeat of Hannibal on the side."
Link to Post:
http://art-rated.com/?p=564
Jonathan Beer interviews painter Jochen Plogsties about his work and development as an artist.
Plogsties, whose practice includes appropriation and re-interpreting existing paintings, comments: "the more I want to make an accurate copy, the more I see my individuality. The closer I get, the farther away I feel. Before I started making this work, I had a pretty clear definition of what a copy was. But the more I do now, I become more and more unsure. Is it even possible to make a copy of a painting? Everyone talks as if that is a possibility but I think it really isn’t possible. You could never really figure out the layering or the materials. There are so many ways to get close to the original, and if ten different people can do it differently, the question arises of whether there might be way to actually copy something."
Link to Post:
http://youtu.be/CNpa3dEyxKY
James Kalm visits the exhibition Painting Is History at Winkleman Gallery, New York, featuring work by Charles Browning, The Chadwicks, David Fertig, Joe Fig, Valerie Hegarty, and Steve Mumford, on view through August 10, 2012.
Kalm notes that the exhibition theme "plays off the traditional roll of painting as the recorder of history, and how, through creative intervention, it's used to create and distort that function. This tightly selected group of paintings veers from the slap stick humor of Joe Fig's, 'Study for Napoleon 1814,' 2009, to the painterly Romanticism of David Fertig's, 'Battle of the Pyramids,' 2012 and includes the brutally real battle scene 'The Battle in Baquba,' by Steve Mumford."
Link to Post:
http://notesonlooking.com/?p=11484
Geoff Tuck reviews the exhibition Daniel Richter: A concert of purpose and action at Regen Projects II, Los Angeles, on view through February 18, 2012.
Tuck writes that: "the paintings in this show alternate between the quiet and the chaotic: landscapes that are represented like in comics and topographical maps – on a soft colored ground lines are drawn with paint, the figures are much smaller than life size and feel like quotes from movies... [Richter] draws seamlessly from our common cultures of art, entertainment, violence, music, etc., and plants these things in his paintings."
Link to Post:
http://lacma.wordpress.com/2012/01/12/the-influence-of-japanese-art-on-colonial-mexican-painting/
Sofía Sanabrais explores the relationship between Japanese screens and spanish colonial "biombo" paintings.
She writes that biombo is "a Portuguese and Spanish transliteration of the Japanese word for folding screen, byōbu–the Mexican artform was inspired by its Japanese prototype. The versatility of the folding screen contributed to its quick adaptation to daily life; because the biombo was freestanding, portable, multi-paneled, and could be painted on both sides, it provided an ideal surface on which to paint."
