Link to Post:
http://youtu.be/Zwzbhf0vHZo
James Kalm provides an up-close view of the exhibition Philip Guston: Centennial Exhibition at McKee Gallery, New York, on view through April 20th, 2013.
As the gallery notes, the exhibition "is not a retrospective but a spontaneous celebration, attempting to expand our understanding of Guston with works which have not been widely exhibited, interspersed with some Guston classics which have been shown and reproduced all over the world. This exhibition is meant to surprise us as well as to satisfy us, marking the centenary of one of our great artists."
Link to Post:
http://www.artillerymag.com/featured-articles/entry.php?id=all-over-the-map-the-peripatetic-aesthetic-of-joyce-kozloff
On the occasion of the exhibition Joyce Kozloff: Other Geographies at CB1 Gallery, Los Angeles (through February 17, 2013), Betty Ann Brown interviews Joyce Kozloff about her history as a political artist and her recent series of paintings.
Although Kozloff has worked in a variety of media she remarks: "I've always painted. Whether I paint on tiles or on canvas, the brush has been my primary tool. However, I stopped painting on canvas in 1977 and worked in other media for 20 years. Now I paint on canvas. I also paint on panels, paper and fabric. I draw and do collage. For me, there are no hierarchies among media. I don't call myself a painter. I call myself an artist."
Link to Post:
http://miamirail.org/visual-arts/zhu-jinshi/
Hunter Braithwaite writes about Zhu Jinshi's monumental triptch 权力与江山 (Power and Country) on view in the exhibition Alone Together at the Rubell Family Collection, Miami through August 2, 2013.
Braithwaite begins: "You smell the paintings in the back of your throat and try to take shallow breaths. The three 16-foot-tall oils strive upwards to the ideal of unsullied negative space. On average, the paintings weigh half a ton. The canvas at the top of the frames is stretched gale-taught. At the bottom, the weight of the paint has distended the surface to a slack edema. And while the triptych has the undeniable outline of a 山 (shan), the simplified character for mountain, the artist insists that it be displayed 3-2-1, with the peak still centered and the slopes switched. This choice, coupled with a palate of broad swathes of green littered with more muted industrial hues, evokes the cities surrounding the Yangtze that were abandoned and submerged during the earth-moving Three Gorges Dam project."
Link to Post:
http://sameoldart.tumblr.com/post/32629051433/the-power-of-the-fixed-image
An argument for painting's ongoing potential as a medium for social commentary.
"There is no reason for today’s painting - even in the age of multi-media, performance or interdisciplinary artists - to step down and limit its activity to what is believed to be its unaltered or eternal essence. The fixed image, may it be produced in drawing, painting or in print, can do much more than be 'content with a material-based practice.' All of the [works mentioned in the post] of traditional art share the following: they mastered their medium and they were socially relevant if not transformative. Why should not the same be true for painting and painters today?"
Link to Post:
http://writingwithoutpaper.blogspot.com/2012/09/looking-at-miro.html
Maureen Doallas posts a video detailing painter Joan Miró's career in relation to world events including the Spanish Civil War, the rise of Fascism, and World War II. The film also documents the radical technical freedoms Miró developed in his work to combat the lack of freedom in everyday life.
The film includes fascinating footage of Miro creating his Burnt Canvases with techniques described in his studio notes: "treat the big white canvases in this spirit: burn them partially, throw stones at them and stab them to break them open. Cut them into pieces. Pour on pots of paint. Walk on top of them."
Link to Post:
http://hyperallergic.com/55073/joan-miro-the-ladder-of-escape-national-gallery-of-art/
James Gibbons writes about the link between Miró’s politics and the experimental nature of his paintings as seen in the exhibition Joan Miró: The Ladder of Escape is on view at the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. through August 12, 2012.
"Seeking to understand the politics of Miró’s art, as the Ladder of Escape exhibition asks us to do, we discern Miró searching for unexpected means to confront, or sometimes simply to cope with, the difficult realities of Spain during the civil war and Franco’s dictatorship... the broad scope of Miró’s politics, which is often indistinguishable from his ethos of exploration, restlessness, invention, and rebelliousness as an artist, the latter quality most famously captured in his remark 'I want to assassinate painting.' And to do so by painting: Miró was always committed to keeping open varying possibilities, often in tension with each other. This is why we can speak of his art’s freedom and vitality without these words sounding like platitudes."
Link to Post:
http://thesilo.raphaelrubinstein.com/artists/georges
Raphael Rubinstein writes about Paul Georges, an overlooked New York School figurative painter. Georges' work, in addition to its commitment to political themes, is "a marvelous amalgam of painterly French modernism, Rococo exuberance, Northern European brooding and New York street attitude. Georges's achievement in any single of the modes he explored would be enough to make his name; taken as a whole his oeuvre presents a grandness of ambition that few viewers during his lifetime could understand."
