Kimber Smith 'The Winged Life' James Graham & Sons

                 Kimber Smith's exhibition of paintings and drawings from the 1960s and 70s feels in its concerns and approach contemporary. The paintings of pyramids, slabs, blobs and squiggles takes primarily from the tradition of French Modernism established by Matisse and Picasso. In their handling and color sense, however, the paintings echo forward to painters who matured in the 70s including Joan Snyder and Mary Heilmann. The painting's disregard for finish and their spare roughness evocate contemporary painters Josh Smith, Richard Aldrich and Elizabeth Neel. The painting's palette of cobalt blue, dioxidine purple, cadmium red yellow and orange, viridian green and ivory black are applied in large washes of acrylic on raw cotton duck canvas. The works on paper, drawn in gouache and ink, parallel the paintings in their brush-marking. Both the paintings and works on paper approximate the force of drawing; the paintings in their slap-dash splatter and the works on paper in their focus on a search for form. Influences and cross pollination abound; the painting can be described as liquid Matisse or the kind of work Clyfford Still would have made if he had a sense of humor.

                  Kimber Smith was part of a group of American painters and writers living in Paris after the Second World War that included Joan Mitchell, Shirley Jaffe, Sam Francis and the poet John Ashbery. In Joe Fyfe's catalogue for the exhibition Ashbery is quoted as calling this group of artists 'apatrides' (stateless) artists who moved away from the United States but did not feel themselves 'expatriates' participating in the leftovers of the ecole de Paris. Regardless, Smith's work has had more success in Europe, France and Switzerland especially, than in New York. Smith's work during the heyday of Abstract Expressionism would have seemed too insouciant for the strenuous seriousness of the Formalist ethos. In the catalogue Smith is quoted as saying that the triangles in his paintings were inspired by the shape of his cat's ears. Further slabs of paint were, according to Smith, reminiscent of piano keys. Smith's painterly vocabulary has its antecedent in Matisse's The Music Lesson of 1917. Matisse, like the best paintings in this exhibition, are able to evaporate in their chromatic humidity while managing to remain rigidly in the viewers attention and memory.

Kimber Smith (1922-1981)
Red Smiles, 1973
Acrylic on canvas
85 x 68 inches

Kimber Smith (1922-1981)
Gray Clio, 1973
Acrylic on canvas
76 x 46 inches

Kimber Smith (1922-1981)
Untitled, 1973
Gouache on paper
24 x 18 inches

Kimber Smith (American 1922 - 1981)
Untitled, 1975
Watercolor on paper
19 x 15 1/2 inches

Kimber Smith (American 1922 - 1981)
Blue Bird, 1960
acrylic on canvas
78 1/2 x 58 1/2 inches

The Music Lesson (La lecon de musique)
1917
Oil on canvas
96 3/8 x 79 in. (244.7 x 200.7 cm)
Barnes Foundation, Merion, PA

 

Gregory Edwards ‘Edwards Gregory’ 47 Canal Street

Gregory Edwards ‘Edwards Gregory’ 47 Canal Street Gallery

Gregory Edwards’ first New York City solo exhibition attempts to make the everyday world around us new and aesthetically relevant. Edwards’ show at 47 Canal Street exhibit a group of medium sized abstract paintings that act as both material painted marks and depictions of forms. The paintings read as fabric patterns and also as window shades.  The everyday world of textiles, windows and home décor (on the floor is a rotating fan sounding a wind chime throughout the gallery) springboard his subject matter. Edwards’ representational language breaks down through their painted articulation; the strokes collapse or bleed into each other.  In another painting the patterns is covered in an enveloping orange curtain.

Edwards’ paintings evince the hope that they can juggle their own dichotomies. His stance towards painting is announced in his statement, “Perhaps paintings behave the same way, if only we would accept their polymorphic nature.  Dead and Alive, In and Out of style, Male and Female, Rich and Poor, Natural and Artificial, Generic and Specific, Old and New, etc…” Painting as quotidian investigation and dualistic language anchors this debut show.

Gregory Edwards ‘Edwards Gregory’ 47 Canal Street

Gregory Edwards ‘Edwards Gregory’ 47 Canal Street

Gregory Edwards ‘Edwards Gregory’ 47 Canal Street

Mark Grotjhan 'Nine Faces' at Anton Kern

Mark Grotjahn Nine Faces

Anton Kern Gallery

The paintings of Nine Faces are redolent of the anarchism and energy of early Modernism while still maintaining the diction, accents and punctuation of contemporary painting. Grotjahn’s painting Untitled (Lotus Paul Signac Face 41.31) references the Post-Impressionist's Portrait of Félix Fénéon through its swirling form, surface facture and saturated color. The painting from 1890 depicts the author Félix Fénéon holding a lilly amidst a swirling cavalcade of riotous color. Fénéon, anarchist and art critic, wrote Novels in Three Lines that captures the qualities Grotjahn's paintings exhibits in Nine Faces. His Novels in Three Lines, like Grotjahn's work, are short terse epigrams filled with violence that point to a history of calamity. Fénéon's description of a burnt woman applies to Grotjahn's cinnamon-red, charred-toast color palette, “A burnt carcass is what Mme Desmeat of Alfortville resembled after she was set ablaze by a gas lamp. And yet she is still breathing.”

If Nine Faces recalls the energy and anarchism of Modernism, then as viewers we can ask how that danger informs contemporary painting, especially Grotjahn's work. The question Grotjahn's painting asks is how paint can continue to be energetic and spontaneous. His answer is to give us paintings that fall into a tension; neither truly abstract or representational; neither fully improvised nor completely schematic. Instead his paintings are all these things; the color feels mixed in the moment and needed. The paintings are non-representational except they depict faces, masks, feathers, mandalas and landscapes. The paintings are hand made and improvised and yet fall into a predictable sequence of compositional strategies. Grotjahn's work comes down in favor of the paint. The surfaces are rich and laden with pigment. The paint in this exhibition is troweled onto the surface, built up into lariat-like fissures that tie the paintings to their blue-black ground. Grotjahn scrawls his name and date into some of the paintings. Grotjahn's paint runs in cavalcade verticals and horizontals across the surface in millimeter thick ropes. Thick globular pustules are applied randomly on some paintings, littering the surface with acned pimples of paint. Grotjahn is besotted with the possibilities of linseed oil mixed with pigment. Grotjahn's paintings have been set ablaze by the qualities supplied by paint. The danger inherent in conflagration is present in this body of work; the possibility that the blaze could overtake the work, burn away the meaning or balance needed for success. An yet the painting is still breathing.

Mark Grotjahn

Untitled (Lotus Paul Signac Face 41.31), 2010

Oil on cardboard mounted on linen

93 1/4 x 72 3/8 inches

Courtesy Anton Kern Gallery, NY

Opus 217. Against the Enamel of a Background Rhythmic with Beats and Angles, Tones, and Tints Portrait of M. Félix Fénéon in 1890

Paul Signac (1890).

Courtesy Museum of Modern Art

Installation View

Mark Grotjhan Nine Faces

Courtesy of Anton Kern Gallery 

Amelie von Wulffen Greene Naftali

Amelie von Wulffen
Greene Naftali
May 12-June 18

       Amelie von Wulffen’s third exhibition of paintings and drawings at Greene Naftali combines Bavarian Black Forest Romanticism with limpid psychedelic ennui. Little Red Riding Hood got lost in the Wilstermarsch and has joined the 13th Floor Elevators. Her exhibition at Greene Neftali displays two bodies of work; her medium sized paintings (all 78 ¾ X 55 ¼) and a month long pictorial narrative of her life in November.  Her paintings employ nearly all painterly media, watercolor, ink, acrylic, pastel and oil; she rolls, brushes squeegees, dollops pools and puddles the paint into globular forms that can then be formed into eyes, ears, shapes and body parts. In one painting squid like arms ooze out of a breezily painted haze to play the piano in front of a window that looks out onto nothing. Her paintings all titled Ohne Titel (untitled) depict landscapes and figures that recall the love colonies of an earlier German expressionism the Ernst Ludwig Kirchner could have visited and painted. The drawings depict the artist and friends talking and looking bored in various Teutonic art world activities. The drawing style runs towards the simple and reminds me of a book of drawings I could find at a yard sale or found underneath the seat of a bus, but in German.  From across the gallery her paintings congeal together, up close the work almost falls apart into doodling enjoyment. The drawings are also presented in a book with an English translation next to one of her sculptures made with seashells, glass
and eyeglasses.

Amelie von Wulffen Installation view Greene Naftali 

Amelie von Wulffen Ohne Titel

Watercolor, pastel, and acrylic on canvas

79 x 55 1/4 inches 200.7 x 140.3 cm

Amelie von Wulffen 

November 

Richard Serra Drawing: A Retrospective

Richard Serra Drawing: A Retrospective

Metropolitan Museum

 April 13, 2011–August 28, 2011
The Tisch Galleries, 2nd floor

Richard Serra, the proverbial ‘man of steel’ is also it seems, the man of gooey black oil crayon. Walking into the exhibition, ‘Richard Serra Drawings: A Retrospective’ one is met with the smell of oil crayon filling the galleries. The drawings invite the viewer to not so much look at them as get close and take a whiff. Smell is a vital element of Serra’s art and I find that it is usually one of the first bodily considerations with his work. In the case of the drawings at the Metropolitan Museum it is the linseed oil. With the three dimensional work it is the metal tang that can be tasted and smelled as one walks through the immense valleys of metal planks. The large drawings operate more as paintings that employ an oil crayon generously applied to a Belgian linen support that is smoothed over with a trowel for a uniform ground. The drawings go from floor to ceiling, acting as wall hanging corollaries to his twisting torqued three dimensional sculptures.

Aggressiveness has been a hallmark of Serra’s art both physically and formally. Viewers are acutely aware that they can be crushed like a centipede if one of his sculptures falls over. The physical construction of his work at an exhibition requires a team of expert welders to help with instillation. The drawings partake in the same aggressiveness in their scale and use of materials. The cost alone of the oil stick must be enormous and the care these objects demand after their exhibition would require further extravagant funds.

Towards the end of the exhibition the curators have displayed a series of notebooks Serra takes around with him to sketch at worksites or in front of works of art. The notebook drawings crystalized the failings of Serra’s work. Whether Serra is sketching the Saqqara Pyramid, a fjord, or Le Corbusier’s Notre Dame Du Haut the line quality remains the same speed, intensity and directness. No matter what stunning visual phenomena is in front of him, Serra has a tendency to Serra-ize it, to bend all works of art and visual phenomena the same into his drawings. The two dimensional work in the show blur together in monotonous goo of super hero materiality. Serra speaks of presence and the place of the viewer’s body to his work. Viewing this show the only place my body wanted to be was out of the presence of the drawing’s overwhelming ivory black ego.

Richard Serra Notebook: Le Corbusier, Notre Dame Du Haut, 1991

Richard Serra Out of Round X 1999 

Richard Serra Taraval Beach 1977/2011

Arshile Gorky, 1947/ Picasso and Marie Therese Gagosian Gallery

Soutine/Bacon follows a recent trend of exhibitions in New York that feel more like museum exhibitions than gallery shows. The reigning champion of putting-on-better-museum-shows-than-a-museum-but-still-a-gallery is Larry Gagosian’s outfit. Two exhibitions up in Manhattan right now are at his Gagosian gallery, one uptown on Madison Avenue and one in Chelsea.

The uptown show, Arshile Gorky 1947, is constructed around one painting recently discovered that the artist made in 1947, the year before he died at his own hand. The press release states that the painting Untitled (Pastoral) was made and then covered up by another canvas and left for the next sixty-four years and recently discovered by a conservator. The work in this exhibition, drawings and paintings of landscape and organic pod like forms, is Gorky at his most Gorky, after he had moved through several masters, including Cezanne and Picasso. The work in this exhibition still shows heavy influence of Matta and the surrealists, artists seeking refuge in New York from Fascist Europe that Gorky had befriended. The painting’s formal impact and deeply personal and idiosyncratic content interweaves his artistic influences and the observed Virginia landscape he had recently relocated. The color is rich and dramatic, with clay reds and verdant black-greens and the drawing is so weird and precise, with finely hatched and meandering lines, that I am reminded of sci-fi illustrations from the sixties.

Viewing this show made me reflect on his large retrospective in Philadelphia two years ago. In it, one was very much made aware of how Gorky used Modern art as an overt tool of self-invention. Gorky (itself a name he cribbed from somewhere else) literally inhabited the artists consciousness, turning downtown depression New York into the Jas Du Buffon or the L’ecole de Paris. Gorky was in a sense projecting himself out of his own psychology and biography (he saw his mother starve to death in front of him and his sister) into Modern art. The disappearing act his art performs, especially in the early ‘derivative’ paintings, takes on a poignant reading of a man deeply traumatized by history who saw painting as a healing and regenerative practice. The paintings in this exhibition stitch together his many influences and biography into a tragic and personal set of paintings.   

                The Chelsea show, Picasso and Marie Therese L’Amour Fou, curated by the Picasso biographer John Richardson focuses on the years Picasso spent with his lover, Marie Therese Walter, whose granddaughter Diana Widmaier Picasso helped curate the show.  The years Picasso spent with Walter, roughly the late twenties to the late thirties, are a transitional time in his work, when he was firmly beyond his radical discoveries of cubism and not yet into the supremely personal ‘late Picasso’ work of the fifties, sixties and early seventies. That body of work was displayed at the same site two years ago in the exhibition Mosqueteros. The work in this show has Picasso camped out at the beach, both physically and formally. The paintings often show people at the beach, while the ballooning forms and ice-cream pastel colors make these paintings feel like they could literally float away through the ceiling. Most reviews of the show have compared this show to the Mosqueteros show and found Marie Therese lacking. From a certain topical perspective the Mosqueteros show was more important in that more young painters paint and see painting from the perspective of late Picasso than the Picasso of the Marie Therese years. Seeing the Mosqueteros show two years ago I was impressed how many forms and colors Picasso used forty, fifty or sixty years ago had simply stood up and walked over to a younger person’s canvas dodo bird like and made a home for themselves. I didn’t get a sense of that in this show. The paintings felt more ‘finished’ in that the ideas they offered where already thought and felt, and could only be admired by a young artist instead of actually implemented in the studio. But, perhaps, the topicality is not in the form or aesthetic ideas Picasso uses, but in his approach to subject matter. Picasso, deeply besotted by the sexuality of Marie Therese Walter, made paintings, drawings and sculpture that feel unmediated and impetuous, sentimental, whimsical, raw and audacious. Walking through the exhibition I had the sense with some of the paintings that I was looking in on Picasso with his girlfriend, a vast carefree artistic PDA. Perhaps young artists could use some of that intimacy, that sense that maybe we could float away on the beach ball of love.

http://hellynahmadgallery.com/

http://www.gagosian.com/

Soutine/Bacon Helly Nahmad Gallery

The exhibition Soutine/Bacon at Helly Nahmad reveals Francis Bacon to be a mediocre painter and Soutine to be an exceptionally creative painter. Both painters use similar subject matter (portraits, landscapes, and pictures of flayed or rotting meat) but whereas Bacon dresses his paintings up in finery, Soutine lets the paint sit right on the canvas as subject and object as the still lives in his paintings. Any exhibition that pairs two artists of similar temperament or background will inevitably beggar calls for value judgments, so I’ll get mine out of the way up front and say Soutine is hands down the finer painter.   The Francis Bacon paintings in this exhibition should be familiar to anyone who has followed his work for any amount of time; medium to largish paintings with flat monochrome backgrounds with sketchily laid in details representing a face, a landscape, a figure or a room. His colors in the beginning are expressionist blues and blacks in Seated Figure to taupe and beiges of the late sixties painting Lying Figure. Soutine’s colors run similar to Bacon’s, but whereas Bacon’s feel perfunctory and unfelt, Soutine’s feel observed and lived in from the inside out. Bacon’s paintings routinely feel like someone observing from the outside in, whereas Soutine’s paintings feel like something, the subject matter ontologically real to the viewer. From the ochers of Portrait of a Man with a Felt Hat from 1921-1922 to the symphony of blues in Portrait of the Sculptor, Oscar Miestchaninoff from 1923-1924 Soutine’s color angles elliptically at the viewer’s color sense. 

 

Agnes Martin

Thoughts That Cure Radically

Thoughts That Cure Radically

With regard to the meaning that repetition has for something, much can be said without making oneself

guilty of repetition.

Soren Kierkegaard, Repetition