Sabine Hornig at Galleri Lars Bohman, Stockholm

Sabine Hornig: Balkong (Balcony)
Galleri Lars Bohman, Stockholm
28 February - 28 March, 2004

Galleri Lars Bohman presents German artist Sabine Hornig’s first exhibition at the gallery. ‘Balkong’ (Balcony) consists of a sculptural installation and a series of large-format photographs.

Sabine Hornig often combines photography with sculpture, reconstructings everyday elements of architecture. Both her sculptures and photographs explore the membrane between the interior and the exterior. She stresses the difference between the inside and the outside of a given space often using the principle of doubling to invoke slight changes in the observer’s perception. The gallery space is always integral to and part of the work. 

Sabine Hornig’s constructions are built to subtly reconfigure viewer and object relations within exhibition spaces. Although not strictly site-specific, the installation sculptures are custom-made to suit the given exhibition situation and to address the visiting public. Her installations are based on existing structures or prototypes of architecture. The sculpture ‘Balkong’ (Balcony) represents a typical balcony as it can be seen on any modernist building. It is detached from its original setting, the exterior, and transferred into the interior. The balcony is covered with stucco, which - besides the clean, impersonal architecture - adds to its stereotypical features, characterising the balcony as a standard element of urban architecture. The balcony is attached by its narrow side to the wall and juts out into the gallery, - forming a barrier across the space. One can walk alongside and around the balcony and look over it and out of the gallery’s window. 

A balcony is the private space in a home that quite literally and physically projects privacy into the public realm. It is a holiday idyll and an observation point. Republics are proclaimed from balconies. In representational architecture the balcony is the platform for those who reign and for politicians to make public appearances from.

The interaction between interior and exterior within the exhibition is intensified by a series of large-format photographs depicting windows: double or single frame windows offer views into empty or abandoned storefronts, a common enough sight in Berlin. The reflections on the glass refer to the surrounding exterior. These photographs could be read as documenting the current economic situation. However, the ephemeral aspects of the reflections transcend the specificity of the place. 

In these complex compositions, that allow an examination of space through reflective surfaces, once again different levels link. Although the window allows a view into an interior, this view is distorted by the reflection of the exterior, the opposite space that is mirrored in the glass. Thus, the gallery walls transform into a façade on which the photographic image opens a window into another space. Finally, viewers become aware of their own reflections on the photograph’s surface and they are then, too, integrated into the virtuality of the image. The familiar experience of walking past storefront windows is rendered less familiar, and viewers are left to consider their place within these real and reflected spaces.

In 2003 Sabine Hornig mounted a major installation in the Project Space of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In this installation Hornig pushed the limits of the interplay with the layers of perception and reflection to its virtual extreme. In 1998-2000 she was a participating artist in the P.S.1 International Studio Program in New York, and in 1998 she was awarded the prestigious Karl Schmidt-Rotluff Stipendium.

Born in Baden-Würtemberg, Germany in 1964, Sabine Hornig currently lives and works in Berlin. She received her B. A. and M.F.A. from the Hochschule der Künste in Berlin. Hornig has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin (2000, 2002 and 2003), Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York, (2001 and 2002), and Malmö Konstmuseet, Malmö, Sweden (1996). 

GALLERI LARS BOHMAN
www.gallerilarsbohman.com

Matthew Brannon at John Connelly Presents, NYC - Exhausted Blood & Imitation Salt

Matthew Brannon 

Exhausted Blood & Imitation Salt 

John Connelly Presents, New York 

February 20 — March 27, 2004 

Exhausted Blood and Imitation Salt, an exhibition of new prints and tapestries, is Matthew Brannon's first solo show in New York. The mediums Matthew Brannon chooses are directly related to his interest in all things promotional, peripheral or removed from their original sources. While the structures of promotional sources of information such as movie posters and menus form the visual foundation of Brannon's prints and silk screens, the artist's hand stitched and stenciled tapestries are part of a dialect of dłcor and craft that is reflected in commercially printed fabrics, window displays, and wallpaper. The prevailing color scheme for Exhausted Blood and Imitation Salt is black, gold and pink. This black humored poetic palette is used to both endorse and pervert the art of persuasion found in the nonsensical text of the prints themselves and can be seen as a constructive response to the jungle of information one must navigate daily.

The exhibition contains two new pieces from an ongoing series of mock haunted house movie posters (2000 -). Matthew Brannon has been using the classic haunted house film structure as a model for the artist's practice. The basic plot line follows a crack team of both skeptics & believers, hired to navigate and record the psychic energies of a supposed haunted house. The pieces are silk screened in small editions at various sizes.

Resulting from a uncomfortable relation to the permanence of words Matthew Brannon has created his own brand of surrealist poetry by placing a series of faux "credits" at the bottom of his prints. A typical credit reads: "Co-Starring: Divorce Magazine, The Guilt Which Organizes Your Fear, Black Am-Ex, etc..." These cut-ups are both appropriated from various sources; conversations, adverts, menus... and invented. This word play is also evident in four letter-pressed 'wine label' prints. Here the out-dated medium of the letterpress is beautifully revived to investigate alcohol's belligerent euphoria.

Matthew Brannon's tapestries began as "props" to the haunted house films. They since have grown into their own independent body. They are the outcome of years spent examining the un-resolvable tension between decoration and discourse he found in painting. Quoting bucolic elements such as swaying tree branches and hovering birds, they can also be read as "nature" once removed and controlled to now be used as décor. Not painting and not primary, the tapestries stem from a decorator's history and are self-conscious in their relation to space.

For Exhausted Blood & Imitation Salt, Matthew Brannon also invited Richard Phillips to produce a drawing for his announcement poster. The resulting image is both responsive to his work in attitude and themes while the act of commission remains a somewhat jarring subversion of artist promotion.

JOHN CONNELLY PRESENTS

526 West 26th Street, New York, NY 10001

www.johnconnellypresents.com

Bilan de la Foire des Antiquaires de Belgique 2004

Bilan de la Foire des Antiquaires de Belgique 2004

Le 15 février, la Foire des Antiquaires de Belgique 2004 fermait ses portes sur une édition exceptionnelle qui vit converger vers ses nouveaux quartiers quelques 29 000 visiteurs, dépassant de loin les objectifs avoués des organisateurs ! C’est en masse, en effet, qu’amateurs, collectionneurs et professionnels des Antiquités se sont rendus à cette 49ème édition qui, de l’avis unanime, fut un immense succès et renforce la dimension internationale de l’événement. Une sélection rigoureuse des exposants, un contrôle très strict effectué par de nombreux experts de même qu’une presse particulièrement élogieuse ont définitivement placé la foire dans le peloton de tête du calendrier des grandes manifestations européennes comme Maastricht ou la Biennale. 

  

‘Magnifique ! Merveilleuse ! Sublime ! Enchanteresse !’, les qualificatifs n’étaient jamais assez élogieux pour distinguer le très beau salon d’antiquités qui vient de se clôturer sur le site de Tour & Taxis. Depuis 1955, la Foire des Antiquaires de Belgique, l’une des plus anciennes au monde, organisée par la Chambre Royale des Antiquaires de Belgique, constitue un événement incontournable en matière d’antiquités. Chaque année, et 2004 a amplifié encore cet état de fait,  elle constitue pour les amateurs, l’occasion de regarder, s’informer, prendre la température du marché et faire de nouveaux contacts.

Le nouveau lieu d’accueil, les superbes et immenses halls du bâtiment A de l’ancienne gare de triage de Tour & Taxis, a été certes pour beaucoup dans le succès retentissant de cette édition. Chacun se félicitant de sa facilité d’accès, de son côté pratique comme de l’élégance de son bâti et du soin tout particulier que les décorateurs du bureau Volume (Nicolas de Liedekerke et Daniel Culot) ont apporté à la valorisation de l’espace architectural. Les antiquaires ne furent pas en reste puisque plusieurs stands furent particulièrement remarqués pour la somptuosité de leur mise en espace.

Outre le fait que la superficie, quatre fois supérieure à celle du Palais des Beaux-Arts,  permit le rassemblement de près du double d’exposants (97), c’est surtout la rigueur de la sélection et l’attention toute particulière portée aux journées d’expertise, le fameux ‘vetting’, effectué pour la première fois en Belgique par un comité d’experts totalement indépendants des exposants, qui permirent de rencontrer à ce point les attentes qualitatives de l’exigeant public du salon. L’offre artistique variant toujours de l’Antiquité au classicisme moderne, le souci de qualité et d’exception constitue l’une des préoccupations majeures des organisateurs. La 49ème édition de la foire a donné raison à leur souci d’excellence.

Le renforcement de la qualité s’est ainsi traduit par un maintien sensible du volume des ventes. La peinture et les arts dits non européens étant particulièrement prisés cette année. Ainsi chez Jan De Maere où, entre autre, une oeuvre de Joyant, Venise le Grand Canal, a été payée 16.000 €. Chez Zeberg, plusieurs meubles italiens de la Haute Epoque ont été vendus tandis que, actualité oblige, Harold T’Kint se séparait de trois œuvres de Khnopff dont l’exceptionnelle Apollonide et un merveilleux petit Paysage à Fosset. Chez Lancz, on a vendu une très belle gouache et pastel de la main de Théo Van Rysselberghe, le Couvent des  Ursulines a noté un intérêt tout particulier pour le mobilier Charles X, dont il s’est fait la spécialité, tandis que Bernard De Leye se réjouissait de la vente de plusieurs boîtes exceptionnelles en or ainsi que de la fameuse décoration de la Toison d’Or offerte par Louis-Philippe au Duc de Nemours.

La Foire des Antiquaires de Belgique est toujours l’occasion de découvertes exceptionnelles. Rendez-vous est d’ores et déjà pris pour le Cinquantième anniversaire de l’événement, du 21 au 30 janvier 2005, sur le site de Tour et Taxis.

Chambre Royale des Antiquaires de Belgique
Rue Ernest Allard 32, 1000 Bruxelles
www.antiques-fair.be

Carl Andre at Paula Cooper Gallery, NYC - Lament for the Children

Carl Andre
Lament for the Children
Paula Cooper Gallery, New York
February 20 - April 3, 2004

Lament for the Children consists of one hundred concrete blocks standing vertically in rows of ten at the intersections of a grid. The sculpture was originally created and exhibited in the abandoned playground at P.S.1 in 1976, for the Contemporary Art Center’s inaugural show, ‘Rooms’. The grid formation of the piece was derived from the interval between the joints in the paving of the playground. Lament for the Children was subsequently destroyed and remade in 1996 for an exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg in Germany. This exhibition marks the first time the piece has been shown in New York since its creation in 1976.

Possessing a somber presence, the piece bears a visual resemblance to a field of gravestones, or an army of sentinels in grid formation. Besides relating to the piece’s original location in a children’s playground, the title Lament for the Children refers to a seventeenth-century Scottish dirge about the death of five children by fire. The tune, composed for the bagpipe by Patrick Mor MacCrimmon, has been described as the greatest single line melody in European music, and Andre’s reference to it suggests his admiration for traditional and classical culture. This is Carl Andre’s second use of the title: in 1965, he composed the three-page poem 144 Times, which bore the parenthetical title Lament for the Children.

Carl Andre was born September 16, 1935, in Quincy, Massachusetts. From 1951 to 1953, he attended the Phillips Academy, Andover, with Frank Stella and Hollis Frampton (with whom he shared a lasting interest in poetry). In 1957, he settled in New York and shortly thereafter began to create wood sculptures influenced by Brancusi. He progressively moved on to the use of sets of identical elements, and to materials such as granite, limestone, steel, lead and copper. His sculptures, often floor pieces, tend to depart from the traditional principles of sculpture such as verticality and monumentality.

Carl Andre’s first one-person show was held in 1965 at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York, and the following year his work was included in Kynaston McShine’s and Lucy Lippard’s seminal exhibition Primary Structures at the Jewish Museum. He was, with Donald Judd, Dan Flavin and Sol Lewitt, one of the leading artists of the 1960s, often associated with Minimalism. In the 1970s, the artist created large installations, such as 144 Blocks and Stones (1973) for the Portland Center for the Visual Arts, Oregon, and outdoor works such as Stone Field Sculpture (1977) in downtown Hartford, Conn.

Carl Andre’s work has been the subject of several retrospectives, most notably at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 1970; the Laguna Gloria Art Museum, Austin, Texas, in 1978; the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, in 1978; the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, in 1987; the Haus Lange und Haus Esters, Krefeld and the Kunstmuseum, Wolfsburg, in 1996; and the Musée Cantini, Marseilles, in 1997. He lives in New York.

Paula Cooper Gallery

534 West 21st Street, New York
www.paulacoopergallery.com

Cecil Beaton, National Portrait Gallery, London - Portraits - Retrospective Exhibition

Cecil Beaton: Portraits

National Portrait Gallery, London

5 February - 31 May 2004

Cecil Beaton (1904-1980) is one of the most celebrated of British portrait photographers and is renowned for his images of elegance, glamour and style. His influence on portrait photography was profound and lives on today in the work of many contemporary photographers including David Bailey and Mario Testino. Cecil Beaton: Portraits marks the centenary of Beaton's birth and coincides with a revival of interest in his work occasioned in part by the publication of his unexpurgated diaries and the recent release of Stephen Fry's film Bright Young Things. This is the first major overview of Beaton's portraits since Sir Roy Strong's ground-breaking exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in 1968.

This major retrospective exhibition brings together over 100 portraits from the five remarkable decades of Cecil Beaton's career, including iconic images as well as those never seen before. Beaton captures 50 years of fashion, art and celebrity, from the Sitwells in the 1920s to the Rolling Stones in the late 1960s. Definitive portraits of 20th century celebrities are shown alongside more sombre works from his time as a war photographer.

Highlights of the exhibition include Cecil Beaton`s 1956 portrait of Marilyn Monroe, from her own collection, which is accompanied by his handwritten eulogy about her. Pages from Cecil Beaton's snapshot album of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor's wedding, showing idyllically situated portraits of Wallis Simpson in the grounds of the Château de Candé, France, are on public display for the first time.

Cecil Beaton acquired his first camera aged 11 and the exhibition opens with a portrait of his sister Baba, taken a few years later, in 1922. A number of vintage prints from Beaton's first exhibition (1927), notable for their striking red Beaton signature, have been reunited, including a celebrated portrait of Edith Sitwell posed as a gothic tomb sculpture. Edith Sitwell and her family's patronage confirmed Beaton's position as the most fashionable young photographer of the day and led to a number of exciting commissions, including a contract with Vogue, with whom Beaton was associated for over 50 years.

Other significant portraits from this early period include Nancy Cunard in front of a polka dot backdrop, the writers and poets Sylvia Townsend Warner, Stephen Tennant and Siegfried Sassoon, and bright young things including the Jungman twins, Tallulah Bankhead, and three young debutantes posing as "Soapsuds".

The exhibition features work taken from Cecil Beaton's first four Hollywood visits including images of Gary Cooper, Loretta Young, Marlene Dietrich and Johnny Weissmuler, preparing for his first Tarzan film. Other works from the 1930s include French subjects taken in Paris, such as the fashion designers Coco Chanel and Elsa Schiaparelli, and the artists Beaton befriended such as Jean Cocteau and Pablo Picasso.

Cecil Beaton received the ultimate establishment seal of approval when he was commissioned by the Royal Family in 1939. The exhibition includes two studies of HM Queen Elizabeth, later the Queen Mother, at Buckingham Palace, taken in dappled light and offering fairytale romance.

With the outbreak of the Second World War, Beaton devoted himself to his work as an official war photographer. The Home Front is represented by pictures of land girls and Cecil Beaton's unforgettable portrait of the 3 year-old blitz victim Eileen Dunne (1940) in a hospital bed in the north of England. During this period Beaton also captured wartime artists such as the poet Cecil Day Lewis, composer Benjamin Britten and the memorable study of the elderly Walter Sickert and his wife Therese Lessore in their garden near Bath in 1940.

In the post-war period Beaton photographed existentialist writers Albert Camus and Jean Paul Sartre in Paris, and emerging actors in America, the 21 year old Marlon Brando and Yul Brynner, and the reclusive Greta Garbo, the subject of Cecil Beaton`s long-term romance.

In 1956 Beaton started work on the costume designs for the first version of My Fair Lady for the American stage with Julie Andrews and Rex Harrison and was to continue with the production in its various forms until his own Oscar-winning work for the film version starring Audrey Hepburn in 1964. In the midst of this he also won an Oscar for his work on another great film musical Gigi (1957) with Leslie Caron.

In the 1950s Beaton produced many of his most famous portraits of women including Audrey Hepburn, Maria Callas, Elizabeth Taylor, Grace Kelly and Ingrid Bergman. Male subjects included Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, John Betjeman, Sugar Ray Robinson, Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr and Dean Martin.

It is testament to Cecil Beaton's flexibility and skill that he reinvented his photographic style for a new decade. In the 1960s he was revitalised by working with some of the era`s brightest cult figures such as David Hockney, Jean Shrimpton, Rudolf Nureyev and most importantly Mick Jagger. Up until a paralysing stroke in 1974, Beaton continued a punishing work schedule, whether working on the Barbra Streisand's film On a Clear Day You Can See Forever or photographing Warhol and his entourage in New York.

The exhibition concludes with Cecil Beaton's late poignant portraits of Ralph Richardson and Louise Nevelson, and a recumbent Bianca Jagger photographed in the conservatory of Cecil Beaton's home at Reddish.

Cecil Beaton: Portraits is curated by Terence Pepper, Curator of Photographs at the National Portrait Gallery. Pepper first met Cecil Beaton in 1978 and was subsequently assistant curator on the 1984 Barbican Art Gallery Cecil Beaton exhibition. He has organised a wide range of exhibitions on individual photographers including Norman Parkinson (1981), Lewis Morley (1989), Dorothy Wilding (1991), Henri Cartier-Bresson (1998) and Horst (2001).

Tour: The exhibition will tour to the Kunstmuseum, Wolfsburg, from 11 March - 6 June 2005.

Publication: The exhibition is accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalogue entitled Beaton: Portraits with a foreword by Sir Roy Strong and essay by Peter Conrad. 240 pages, over 200 illustrations, published February 2004, price £35 hardback.

Exhibition at Sotheby's: To coincide with Cecil Beaton: Portraits there is a complementary exhibition at Sotheby's New Bond Street from 10th­-20th February 2004. Beaton at Large presents a selection of Beaton's most celebrated images, printed on a grand scale.

NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY

St Martin's Place, London WC2H OHE

www.npg.org.uk

Peter Saul: Homage to Dalí, Nolan Eckman Gallery, NYC

Peter Saul: Homage to Dalí
Nolan/Eckman Gallery, New York
February 12 – March 13, 2004

Peter Saul’s work could be described as the product of the collision of challenging visual elements with social and political satire. No subject daunts him. With hearty cheer he assaults taste, violates taboo, and defies convention (sometimes all three within one picture).

Peter Saul is literally and figuratively a man of many parts: a critic of society's crueler preoccupations, a diarist of the vulgar and profane, an appropriator, a history painter, and a provocateur. Peter Saul’s cartoon transgressions are his way of shaking us awake from our quotidian stupor. To those who are offended by his images, he might say, “I’m an optimist. My paintings are pure fantasy. The genuinely appalling things happening in the world are real.”

Peter Saul was born in 1934 and currently lives in upstate New York. After attending art school, he went to Europe, where he lived from 1956 to 1964. His first one man exhibition was in 1961 at Allan Frumkin Gallery in Chicago. This is his fourth exhibition at Nolan Eckman.

NOLAN/ECKMAN GALLERY
560 Broadway, New York, NY 10012
www.nolaneckman.com

David Rabinowitch au Musée des beaux-arts du Canada

David Rabinowitch au Musée des beaux-arts du Canada

6 février - 16 mai 2004

Le Musée des beaux-arts du Canada présente l’une des premières manifestations d’envergure au Canada de l’artiste contemporain DAVID RABINOWITCH. L’exposition met à l’honneur un ensemble de sculptures, de dessins et d’estampes.

Selon Pierre Théberge, directeur du Musée des beaux-arts du Canada : « David Rabinowitch est l’un des plus éminents sculpteurs du XXe siècle et nous sommes heureux de présenter l’exposition de cet artiste, qui innove tant dans son résultat, l’œuvre d’art, que dans l’expérience qu’elle fait vivre au visiteur. »

Cet artiste canadien, installé à New York, s’est fait connaître à l’étranger par ses sculptures d’acier de très grande dimension et ses œuvres connexes sur papier où se confrontent des réalités aussi essentielles que la gravité, la perception, la structure, l’espace et le temps. À travers ses sculptures, il explore également les rapports entre la forme, la masse, l’épaisseur, la structure, le plein et le vide. En s’adonnant à une sculpture qui ne s’érige pas mais s’allonge sur le sol et en multipliant les points de vue, Rabinowitch remet en cause les postulats traditionnels de son art.

L’exposition met en lumière les développements cycliques d’une pratique sculpturale et graphique rigoureuse et concise, tout entière nourrie des confluences de la science, de la littérature et de la philosophie.

« Le projet esthétique de David Rabinowitch est profondément original et, à certains égards, unique », souligne la commissaire de l’exposition, Josée Bélisle, du Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal. « Rabinowitch propose de crédibles objets sculpturaux et dessinés dont l’appréhension se fonde, d’une part, sur l’expérience obligée de multiples points de vue et, d’autre part, sur l’impossibilité de résoudre en une seule acception la complexité pourtant dévoilée de leur construction. »

Organisée par le Musée des beaux-arts du Canada et le Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, cette exposition se compose d’un ensemble d’une vingtaine de sculptures, ainsi que des dessins et estampes réalisés entre les années soixante et 1995.

La sélection des œuvres propose, pour la première fois au Canada, un bilan critique d’une œuvre qui s’est développée en cycles substantiels au cours de périodes chevauchant plusieurs décennies; les sculptures coniques, les sculptures métriques, les dessins épurés de Construction of Vision, ceux davantage foisonnants et « expressifs » des arbres, ceux d’églises romanes allemandes, entre autres.

Un catalogue entièrement illustré de 119 pages, publié par le Musée des beaux-arts du Canada et le Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, en éditions française et anglaise distinctes, accompagne l’exposition. ( ISBN 0-88884-771-8)

Musée des beaux-arts du Canada

380, promenade Sussex, Ottawa (Ontario)

www.gallery.ca

Peter Saul: Suburbia, Paintings and Drawings, 1965-1969, George Adams Gallery, NYC

Peter Saul: Suburbia, Paintings and Drawings, 1965-1969
George Adams Gallery, New York
February 13 – March 27, 2004

The George Adams Gallery presents Peter Saul: Suburbia, a selection of works by Peter Saul dating from 1965-1969. Upon his return from an 8-year sojourn in Europe, Saul, who was born in San Francisco, settled in Mill Valley, California in 1965.  From 1965 until approximately 1972, Peter Saul produced a series of works that featured images of Northern California suburbia--modern homes, cars, roads, the Golden Gate Bridge, and palm trees -- rendered in the artist's characteristic Day-Glo colors and cartoon inflected style.

Peter Saul: Suburbia features 10 related drawings and one large-scale painting. Produced at the same time as the protest paintings, which garnered Saul a reputation as a political painter, the suburbia series present the banality of Saul's everyday surroundings as a source of social critique. As David Zack observed in his 1969 Artnews article "That's Saul, Folks," "[In] Saul's new series of suburban houses the color and outline keep the scene from seeming macabre.  It is more the dispassionate humor of Magritte than the hysteria of Ensor." Included in the current exhibition, for example, is Suburban House II, c. 1969, which depicts an inter-connected community of luxury modern homes rendered in electric pinks and greens, while Suburban Houses I, with similar imagery, has the addition of real-estate values prominently noted next to each house.

The centerpiece of the exhibition is Upper Class Lower Class, 1966, a canvas that juxtaposes a superhero couple and a suburbanite couple, surrounded by roads leading nowhere, bridges made of dollar and cent symbols, and rainbow colored houses and buildings.  With a trenchant observation of the social and economic disparity between San Francisco and wealthier Marin County just over the Golden Gate Bridge, Saul plays out his critique in a cartoonish slightly grotesque style.  Other works echo this theme, including two drawings Cash, 1967-68 and Marfak, 1965 which focus on California's car culture with images of gas stations and gas guzzling automobiles.

Three of the works also include extraneous drawing a revealing look at Peter Saul's compositional and conceptual process. In Modern Home ABCD, c. 1966, for example, a red Gumby figure foregrounds a fully rendered cut-away view of a suburban home, which is flanked by a swimming pool, a tree-house, and a low flying airplane all drawn in faint pencil. Similarly, Modern Home, c. 1969, shifts between simple line drawing and full color depicting several homes all architecturally styled on stilts to accommodate "the view" from a hill or ocean bluff. With characteristic humor and wit, Peter Saul's modern homes reveal the illogical construction of high-style Marin County architecture.

GEORGE ADAMS GALLERY
www.georgeadamsgallery.com

Pennsylvania Impressionism at Woodson Art Museum, Wausau, Wisconsin

Earth, River, and Light: Masterworks of Pennsylvania Impressionism
Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum, Wausau, WI
February 7 - April 10, 2004

Two exhibitions of American Impressionist paintings – one featuring historic works of Pennsylvania Impressionism, the other focusing on contemporary works from the Mid-Atlantic region – open February 7 at the Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum.

Earth, River, and Light: Masterworks of Pennsylvania Impressionism includes 47 works by a diverse collection of artists who became known collectively as the Pennsylvania Impressionists. The exhibition presents a comprehensive survey of this important 20th century American art movement that was fueled by a passion to capture on canvas the dynamic effects of light and atmosphere on the environment.

American Impressionism was firmly rooted in the American soil. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, artists increasingly spurned cities, preferring instead to live and work in the numerous art colonies that sprang up throughout the country. One of the best known of these colonies began in 1898 on the banks of the Delaware River north of Philadelphia, in the picturesque Bucks County village of New Hope. Here, artists found an ample supply of "painting-ready" bucolic settings featuring streams, pastures, quarries, farmhouse, and colonial villages.

The Pennsylvania Impressionists played a dominant role in the American art world of the teens and twenties. Their work was celebrated for its freedom from European influence and was praised as being the first truly national artistic expression. Many of the artists both studied and taught at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, and their stylistic roots hearkened back to the "Academy Realism" practiced by Thomas Eakins.

Edward Redfield (1969-1965), generally acknowledged as the stylistic leader of the New Hope painters, passionately believed that the vitality of a place could only be captured by an artist whose senses were actively engaged. Painters had to see, hear, smell, feel, and even taste what they put on their canvases. To accomplish this, he often endured great physical hardships while making his famous snow scenes, sometimes standing for hours in knee-deep snow with his canvas strapped to a tree.

Edward Redfield’s vigorously realistic, unsentimental brand of Impressionism influenced several generations of artists. However, what most characterized Pennsylvania Impressionism was not a single, unified style, but rather the emergence of many mature distinctive voices: Daniel Garber’s luminous, poetic renditions of the Delaware River; Fern Coppedge’s colorful village scenes; Robert Spencer’s Ashcan School-influenced views of mills and tenements; John Fulton Folinsbee’s moody snowscapes; and William L. Lathrop’s deeply felt, evocative Bucks County vistas.

Earth, River, and Light: Masterworks of Pennsylvania Impressionism is organized by the James A. Michener Art Museum, Doylestown, Pennsylvania, and is curated by Brian H. Peterson. The exhibition is accompanied by a major publication on Pennsylvania Impressionism, principally authored by Peterson.

As a complement to Earth, River, and Light, Woodson Art Museum curator Andrew McGivern has organized an exhibition of contemporary works by artists who are carrying on the traditions of the Pennsylvania Impressionists. "Sunlight and Shadow" presents 24 works by 11 members of the Mid-Atlantic Plein Air Painters Association. Like their predecessors, they, too, find endless inspiration in subjects bathed in natural light and enjoy the challenge of painting quickly outdoors in the face of changing atmospheric conditions. The group’s mission is to promote an appreciation of and participation in the art of outdoor painting.

LEIGH YAWKEY WOODSON ART MUSEUM
700 North 12th Street [Franklin and 12th Streets], Wausau, Wisconsin 54403-5007
www.lywam.org