Link to Post:
http://thepaintedwrd.wordpress.com/2012/12/21/till-the-world-ends/
An essay that proposes links between pop culture attitudes (music and dance in particular) and the "provisional" trend in contemporary painting.
"Dancing, at least as it might happen in a club to the tune of Kesha’s songs, is a kind of ecstatic yet responsive expression, the physical enactment of an internal reaction to an external stimulus. Something similar might be said of abstract painting, both in regard to the process of making it and to the process of viewing it, both of which can be emotional and even rapturous. In thinking about the relationship between pop music’s fascination with end times and life in post-crash America, I couldn’t help thinking about the a similar rise in visibility of abstract work concurrent with pop music’s 'apocalyptic abandon.' In the past two years, several critics attempted to theorize practices in this very broad vein, most prominently Raphael Rubinstein and Sharon Butler, whose respective terms of 'Provisional Painting' and 'The New Casualists' focus on the unfinished appearance of such work. Butler describes this tendency as 'calculated tentativeness,' but I would like to propose the opposite: what if we think of such work not as trying to look incomplete, but as rejecting completion as a contemporarily relevant state in a late capitalist society where instability and precariousness reign? Here, even perfection won’t help you get a job, and it certainly won’t save you from getting laid off. In this view, we might think of contemporary abstract painting more like music, and particularly dance music: remixed and faded into the tracks before and after it such that it never ends and becomes instead a perpetual experience of the present."
Link to Post:
http://www.twocoatsofpaint.com/2012/12/tatiana-bergs-picks-from-miami-part-ii.html
In a two part post, Tatiana Berg photo blogs paintings on display at the Miami Art Fairs: Art Basel in post one and NADA and Untitled in post two.
Berg notes that the photos are her "personal highlights and completely subjective, biased favorites. As much as there is to complain about art fairs they remain a pretty efficient way to see a ton of work all at once, before you fill up and fall over and die from exhaustion... Getting to walk around and stumble upon a piece by an artist you love is fun in a celebrity-sighting kind of way, and occasionally you get grabbed by something you've never seen before."
Link to Post:
http://www.gorkysgranddaughter.com/2012/11/tatiana-berg-nov-2012.html
Christopher Joy and Zachary Keeting visit the studio of painter Tatiana Berg. Berg's work is currently on view in the exhibition Surfaces/Supports at Storefront Bushwick, Brooklyn, on view through December 23, 2012.
Berg's work is described in the press release as "fast, active, and smooth... For Berg, the space of the surface of a painting is 'performative' and her process an energetic jumping back and forth from canvas to canvas." In this interview Berg discusses her new paintings, her "tents," and the relationship between the two modes of working.
Link to Post:
http://www.nyartsmagazine.com/?p=8749
David Harper previews the exhibition Surfaces, Supports: Tatiana Berg and Evan Nesbit at Storefront Bushwick, on view November 16 – December 23, 2012.
"Berg's work is fast, active, and smooth. She has described her work as being about an 'indulgent painterly lust.' For Berg, the space of the surface of a painting is 'performative' and her process an energetic jumping back and forth from canvas to canvas. On the other hand, Nesbit's process appears slower, with a strong relation to gravity. It feels organic, tactile, methodical, and philosophical. His distinctive method strives to subvert traditional picture making by painting the canvas the wrong way, pushing paint from the back towards the front."
Link to Post:
http://www.paintersbread.com/2012/09/painting-how-you-feel-not-how-you-should.html
Michael Rutherford writes about a selection of painters whose instincts are leading them to make work beyond the limits of "the plane."
Rutherford writes: "Professional skateboarders have a saying, 'skate how you feel, not how you should,' and the most experimental and engaging artists have always operated just like that - working how they feel, not how they should. Currently, I see painters and others asserting their freedom and pushing the progression of painting in increasingly fresher ways. Specifically, I’m noticing more loosely hung, sometimes radically altered or reattached swaths of canvas (among other things) without need of being held taut and hung into place by stretchers. In other examples, the stretcher bars remain, but they’ve been reconfigured in diverse ways with vastly different intentions. But in the most arcane instances, paint has been applied to other objects altogether: utensils, detritus, you name it. It’s clear there’s no further pushing of the picture plane here, but some rather bracing yet energizing examples of painting post-plane."
Link to Post:
http://joshuaabelow.blogspot.com/2012/08/primary-nudashank-baltimore.html
Joshua Abelow blogs images of the exhibition Primary at Nudashank, Baltimore, MD, on view through September 14, 2012.
The gallery materials state that "Working against convention, these artists are putting into practice an 'abject expressionism' in respect to materials, composition, color and form, sharing a rogue sense of what constitutes beauty. Among other things, the works in this exhibition reflect an instinctual acting upon surfaces or materials. The artists’ touches are visible, active, and at times assertive--each tear, scrape, twist and drip intentional and impactful."
Link to Post:
http://www.artfagcity.com/2012/05/31/recommended-bushwick-open-studio-tatiana-berg/
As part of their coverage of Bushwick Open Studios, Paddy Johnson and Whitney Kimball visit the studio of painter Tatiana Berg and interview her about her work.
Asked about her three-dimensional "tent" paintings Berg comments: "My tent-paintings arose from a curiosity wondering what a painting looked like broken open, its interior structures and materials exposed. All two-dimensional work indulges in illusionism to some degree, but the tents allow me to get line and color off the wall and into corporeal space. They’re made of all the same stuff as a regular painting—canvas, wood, staples, hardware, paint—but all remain determindly visible. To me the fun is in knowing; if the wonder’s gone when the truth is shown, there was never any wonder in the first place. In brutalizing and exposing the material structures of painting, I think the wonder remains, and that’s encouraging."
Link to Post:
http://www.twocoatsofpaint.com/2011/12/claude-viallat-exploring-casualist.html
Sharon Butler blogs about painter Claude Viallat and the Supports/Surfaces group in relation to contemporary painting.
Butler remarks that Viallat's work "strikes me as a precursor to the Casualist aesthetic... I find Viallat's relationship to the Casualist abstraction of artists such as Chris Martin, Rochelle Feinstein, Tatiana Berg, and Lauren Luloff fascinating."
Link to Post:
http://www.twocoatsofpaint.com/2011/10/good-painting-tatiana-berg-and-sarah.html
Sharon Butler blogs about the exhibition Tatiana Berg and Sarah Faux: Dank, at Tomkins Projects, Brooklyn, NY, on view through October 22, 2011.
Along with installation photos, Butler notes that Berg and Faux "embrace a haphazard, accidental approach to painting in which 'stripes of spray-paint and globs of oil chase a perverse formalism to the edge of every canvas.' "
