Martha Diamond Exhibition @ Harper's Gallery, East Hampton, NY - Broad Strokes

Martha Diamond: Broad Strokes 

Harper's Gallery, East Hampton, NY 

July 22 - August 15, 2017 

Harper’s presents Broad Strokes, an exhibition of work by New York-based painter MARTHA DIAMOND. Comprised of both historic and more recent paintings on linen.

On display on the first floor are two distinct bodies of work that Martha Diamond produced during the 1980s and the mid-2000s. In a series of large paintings on linen, Diamond loosely renders tall buildings and complex cityscapes. Her painterly vocabulary is assembled from saturated skeins of color, and thick, gestural brushwork that reveal the effect of light on the urban environment, including early morning fog, and the shadows of twilight. In her essay for Diamond’s 1990 show at Robert Miller Gallery, the poet Eileen Myles noted: “Martha Diamond seems to be painting ‘the present,’ whether it’s big or little parts of buildings, specks of dust or paint strokes floating in a raspberry sky...”

Martha Diamond relies as much on personal history as she does on direct observation to assemble her paintings, and her style is marked by the way in which she takes liberties with her subject matter. Façades and shadows function as generative material for Diamond’s expressionistic gestures, in a way that moves her paintings beyond more faithful forms of representation. Her pictures skirt the edge of legibility, and while certain works might telegraph the silhouette of a skyline, others disassemble into complex patterns of faceted planes. 

In another series of vertically oriented canvases, Martha Diamond abandons any pretense toward representation and works instead within a rigorous syntax of horizontal bands in black and white. Her reduced palette and rhythmic fields of parallel bars trade-in questions of surface and depth as they shuttle between flatness and deep space. Though radically different in their painterly strategies, both bodies of work exploit a particular brand of wet-on-wet painting, which has come to define Diamond’s mature style. Heavy impasto registered with wide brushes lends her work a chunky heft that compliments both her abstract and more representational compositions.

Martha Diamond is a longtime veteran of the downtown New York art world, and she’s maintained a studio practice in the same Bowery loft since she took up residence in 1969. Her signature approach to representational painting was forged in a crucible of artists and poets who championed the centrality of personal experience in creative production, paying particular attention to the ways in which one’s perceptions of New York City could be translated into art. Alongside painters like Lois Dodd, Alex Katz, and Larry Rivers, as well as poets like Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler, and Peter Schjeldahl, Diamond worked at the margins of the city at a time when light and space were in ample supply. In a manner that differentiates her from her counterparts, however, Diamond has continually chronicled the changing character of New York’s urban environment, recalling the city’s most celebrated documentarians, including photographers like Berenice Abbott, Walker Evans, and Paul Strand. From her Bowery loft, Diamond makes images of the built environment that teeter on the verge of dissolution, in the foggy glow of an early morning sunrise, or the incandescent pattern thrown from the windows of a residential high rise.

MARTHA DIAMOND (b. 1944, New York, NY) lives and works in New York City. Diamond received a BA from Carleton College, Northfield, MN and an MA from New York University. Her work has been the subject of numerous solo presentations, including Alexandre Gallery, New York; Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, ME; Brooke Alexander Gallery, New York; John Davis Gallery, Hudson, NY; Portland Museum of Art, Portland; Robert Miller Gallery, New York; and Sue Scott Gallery, New York. Diamond’s work is frequently featured in major group exhibitions both stateside and abroad, including shows at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York; Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn; Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, ME; CUE Art Foundation, New York; Nagoya Museum of Art, Nagoya, Japan; and the Whitney Museum, New York, among other institutions.

Martha Diamond’s work is held in numerous public collections, including the Brooklyn Museum; Fogg Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Pérez Art Museum, Miami; Staatliche Museum, Berlin; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

HARPER'S EAST HAMPTON

87 Newtown Lane, East Hampton, NY 11937

www.harpersgallery.com

Ettore Sottsass @ Vitra Design Museum, Weil am Rhein - Rebel and Poet

Ettore Sottsass – Rebel and Poet

Vitra Design Museum, Weil am Rhein

14 July – 24 September 2017

This year he would have celebrated his 100th birthday: the Austro-Italian designer ETTORE SOTTSASS (1917–2007), one of the most influential and unconventional figures in twentieth-century design. He gained renown with his designs for the office equipment manufacturer Olivetti, for his poetic, minimalist sculptural objects, and as the leading figure of the Memphis design collective in the 1980s. Over the course of his long career, Ettore Sottsass moved between disciplines, leaving behind a fascinating oeuvre that is represented by many objects in the collection of the Vitra Design Museum. The Vitra Schaudepot exhibition »Ettore Sottsass – Rebel and Poet« presents an overview of approximately 30 of his furniture designs, consumer products, as well as numerous photographs and writings. It pays tribute to an extraordinary designer who did not regard form and function as constraints, but rather viewed design as an opportunity to explore the nature of human existence.

Ettore Sottsass’s most famous works are his furniture designs for the Memphis group, which created a sensation and ushered in the postmodern aesthetic of the 1980s. The shrill colours, patterns and forms of Memphis objects were inspired by motifs from everyday life, Pop culture and the non-European civilisations encountered by Ettore Sottsass during his extensive travels from the 1960s onward. This resulted in iconic objects like the Carlton bookcase (1981), the lamps Ashoka (1981) and Tahiti (1981), and the Tartar table (1985) – expressive objects that sought to communicate with the viewer and liberate themselves from a functionalist design approach.

Yet early signs of the pioneering Memphis aesthetic were already visible in Ettore Sottsass’s work from prior decades, beginning in the late 1950s. As Art Director at the furniture manufacturer Poltronova (1958–1974), Ettore Sottsass developed a signature style in furniture design by combining vivid colours and distinctive structures. During many decades of work for the office equipment manufacturer Olivetti (starting in 1957), he created legendary objects like the Valentine typewriter (1969), which became a symbol of Pop Ettore Sottsass continued his closely observed career path in the 1970s by taking on various roles – as a participant in the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition »Italy: The New Domestic Landscape« (1972), as a central figure of the design initiative Global Tools (1973-1975), or as a member of the design collective Alchimia (1976-1980). In all of these activities, Sottsass persistently challenged the established tastes of the middle class by confronting it with his poetic, unorthodox objects.

The exhibition illustrates this development with key works from the earlier periods: for example, the Califfo sofa (1964), the Kubirolo storage cabinets (1966-67), and pieces from the Mobili Grigi furniture series (1970) for Poltronova – or with rare objects like the Flying Carpet armchair Tappeto Volante (1974), a manifestation of the seemingly weightless connection Ettore Sottsass forged between Pop culture and hippie-era spirituality. Other objects, such as Seggiolina da Pranzo (1979-80) for Alchimia and many spectacular Memphis designs, demonstrate how Ettore Sottsass finally arrived at a personal and unique style.

The exhibition is supplemented by excerpts from the extensive body of poetic and literary texts written by Ettore Sottsass, as well as photographs from the Metafore series (1972-1979), which clearly reveal Ettore Sottsass’s search for meaningful answers to fundamental design issues. They show that his interest in spirituality and archaic cultures was a direct source of creative inspiration for his designs for Alchimia, Memphis, and even Olivetti, a manufacturer of industrial goods. This is what ultimately makes Sottsass stand out in the history of twentieth-century design: as a rebel and a poet, whose legacy continues to enrich our everyday lives.

Curator: Heng Zhi

VITRA DESIGN MUSEUM

Charles-Eames-Strasse 2, 79576 Weil am Rhein

www.design-museum.de

Paula Rego @ La Virreina Image Centre, Barcelona

Paula Rego: Family Sayings
La Virreina Image Centre, Barcelona
8 July - 8 October 2017

Heir to Goya’s expressionism and Hogarth’s mordant wit, the work of Paula Rego (Lisbon, 1935) has, over more than half a century, built an enduring fable on human nature. The artist’s paintings and drawings explore in detail how women organise spaces of historical disobedience against the cultural imaginaries imposed by the patriarchy.

The work of Paula Rego could be read as a great fable on human behaviour. Thus, the connections between dominion and dependency, anger in response to social injustices, the persecution of irreverent bodies and sexuality constrained by conservative moral standards are subjects that reappear cyclically in her paintings and imbue them with a certain existential character. In addition, Rego’s works establish an acerbic dialogue with history and the immediate present; they dispute the cultural legacy of the patriarchy; and they speak out against the aggressions perpetrated by the hierarchies of power. Over the course of her career lasting more than half a century, she has—through metaphors and broadsides, and by combining literary tales and personal experiences—created an energetic and anti-normative imaginary peopled with beings that leap from stupor to indiscipline, from coldness to violence.

Paula Rego’s artistic evolution is a veritable melting pot of disparities and reformulations. Her early pieces use an abstract language akin to that of Vieira da Silva and Dubuffet, while her later work, close to the School of London—Bacon, Freud, Kossoff, Auerbach and Andrews, among others—should be seen as heir to the expressionism of Goya and the sarcasm of Hogarth, together with Daumier and Gutiérrez Solana, and in keeping with the unsettling atmospheres of Balthus and the refined obscenity of Klossowski.

Unlike earlier artists, however, Pola Rego is not only more open to other sources outside of painting—for example, the theatre, opera, popular narratives and film—but has also engaged in a kind of far-reaching exploration of the way women have organised their spaces of historical dissidence.

Family Sayings, which takes its title from the novel of the same name by Natalia Ginzburg, is an exhibition that examines six decades of Paula Rego’s work: a period that extends from her drawings of the 1950s to a number of recent projects and which includes her series on the subject of abortion, Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë, and Misericordia, by Benito Pérez Galdós, as well as the pieces inspired by the plays of Martin McDonagh.

Curator: Valentín Roma

La Virreina Centre de la Imatge
Palau de la Virreina
La Rambla, 99. 08002 Barcelona
http://ajuntament.barcelona.cat