Alice Neel: Freedom @ David Zwirner, New York

Alice Neel: Freedom

David Zwirner, New York

February 26 — April 13, 2019

ALICE NEEL

Joe Gould, 1933. 

© The Estate of Alice Neel 

Courtesy The Estate of Alice Neel and David Zwirner

Art is two things: a search for a road and a search for freedom. It’s very hard to get freedom. You know all these things in life keep crawling over you all the time, so it’s very hard to feel free.

—Alice Neel1

David Zwirner presents an exhibition of paintings and significant works on paper by ALICE NEEL (1900–1984).

Spanning six decades of the artist’s career, Alice Neel: Freedom is organized by Ginny Neel of The Estate of Alice Neel. The exhibition focuses on the artist’s portrayal of the nude figure and the ways in which Alice Neel resolutely challenged traditional perceptions of sexuality, motherhood, and beauty.

One of the foremost American figurative painters of the twentieth century, Alice Neel was a humanist—she was fascinated by people. She loved to paint them in all their complexities—to penetrate and reveal their fears and anxieties, their defiance and survival. She also loved to paint the unadorned human figure, and her nude portraits explore the body with frankness while celebrating the individuality of each of her subjects. Alice Neel broke through conventional gender expectations and restrictions in order to paint the way she saw the world, and these paintings exemplify the courage and the freedom with which she approached her work and her life. In their mastery of form, color, and implied social commentary, these works are as relevant today as when they were painted.

The exhibition comprises significant loans drawn from museum and private collections. Among the earliest works on view is Well Baby Clinic (1928–1929). Painted from memory by the artist shortly after having given birth to her second daughter, the work is as much personal as it is political in that it presents an ambivalent and deeply nuanced image of childbirth. Of this painting, Alice Neel would later recall her interest in "the purity of the nurses’ outfits, and the white walls of the hospital, so neat, and then sloppy humanity there, all ragged at the edges."2

Also included in the show are tender representations of infancy and childhood, such as Andrew (1978), a portrait of Alice Neel’s infant grandson, and Isabetta (1934), which depicts her young daughter at six years of age. Other works in the exhibition, including Symbols (Doll and Apple) (1932; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), Margaret Evans Pregnant (1978; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston), and the mother and child portrait Betty Homitzky and Jevin (1968) further complicate and challenge how pregnancy and motherhood could be envisioned and represented.

Among the works on view are depictions of friends and acquaintances, such as Nadya Nude (1933), shown lying on a bed of patterned and draped fabric. The pose is echoed in paintings such as John Perreault (1972; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York), which depicts the art critic and curator unclothed. These works upend and challenge the art-historical trope of the reclining nude with Alice Neel’s singular gaze and approach to the figure. Also included is Joe Gould (1933), which presents the eccentric bohemian with multiple penises, a painting that is at once shocking and affectionate.

As Helen Molesworth notes in a newly commissioned essay published in the accompanying exhibition catalogue, "Some of Neel’s abiding questions were: What is the gaze we have for nakedness? What is nakedness without sex? Is there a gaze that encompasses sexuality but is not necessarily about desire? Can desire exist without objectification? These questions are perhaps more apposite now than ever.… Perhaps this is why these pictures feel so relevant now. They are images of nakedness that are neither pornographic nor pathological, medical, clinical, patronizing, nor demeaning.… These are pictures of what it looks like to be curious about people when they are naked."3

ALICE NEEL was born in 1900 in Merion Square, Pennsylvania, and died in 1984 in New York. Although she exhibited sporadically early in her career, her work has been shown widely from the 1960s onwards. In 1971, a comprehensive solo exhibition of Alice Neel’s paintings was held at her alma mater, Moore College of Art and Design, Philadelphia, and in 1974, she had her first retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. It was followed by a large-scale presentation of eighty-three paintings in 1975 at the Georgia Museum of Art, The University of Georgia, Athens. In 1978, the Graham Gallery, New York, organized the first retrospective dedicated to the artist’s works on paper, and in 1979, a survey of her paintings was co-hosted by the Universit of Bridgeport and The Silvermine Guild of Artists in Connecticut.

To celebrate the centenary of the artist’s birth, the Philadelphia Museum of Art organized Alice Neel, a solo exhibition of Alice Neel’s work, which debuted in 2000 at the Whitney Museum of American Art before traveling to the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, among other venues. In 2010, the survey exhibition Alice Neel: Painted Truths was organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and traveled to the Whitechapel Gallery, London, and Moderna Museet Malmö, Sweden. In 2016, the Ateneum Art Museum, Helsinki, presented Alice Neel: Painter of Modern Life, which traveled to the Gemeentemuseum, The Hague, and the Fondation Vincent van Gogh in Arles, France, before concluding at the Deichtorhallen Hamburg. The artist’s work is included in numerous museum collections internationally. David Zwirner has represented The Estate of Alice Neel since 2008, and Alice Neel: Freedom marks the fifth solo exhibition of the artist’s work at the gallery.

1. Alice Neel, quoted in Patricia Hills, Alice Neel (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1983), p. 18.

2. Ibid., p. 23.

3. Helen Molesworth, "Looking with and Looking at Alice Neel," in Alice Neel: Freedom. Exh. cat. (New York: David Zwirner Books, 2019), pp. 16–17.

Alice Neel: Freedom

Exhibition Catalogue

Autor: Molesworth Helen

New York: David Zwirner Books, 2019

DAVID ZWIRNER

537 West 20th Street, New York

www.davidzwirner.com

Updated 09/10/2022

Garry Winogrand @ Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco: The Street Philosophy of Garry Winogrand

Garry Winogrand: The Street Philosophy of Garry Winogrand
Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
February 21 - March 16, 2019

GARRY WINOGRAND

New York, ca. 1968

Gelatin-silver print.

© The Estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Fraenkel Gallery presents The Street Philosophy of Garry Winogrand, an exhibition inspired by Geoff Dyer’s new book of the same title, published by University of Texas of Press. Touching on themes and subjects that Garry Winogrand explored over the course of his celebrated career, the images offer what Dyer claims for Winogrand’s photography: an education in seeing. 

The exhibition largely emphasizes lesser-known works from the 1960s and 1970s: New York street scenes as well as photographs from sports events, zoos, national parks, beaches, airports and other places where Garry Winogrand explored the chaotic and surreal social interactions that make up everyday life.

Garry Winogrand, who died in 1984, was exhibited as part of Fraenkel Gallery’s second season in 1980. The Street Philosophy of Garry Winogrand is the gallery’s 12th Winogrand exhibition, each of which has emphasized a different aspect of the artist whom John Szarkowski of the Museum of Modern Art called “the central photographer of his generation.” The Street Philosophy of Garry Winogrand precedes the broadcast premier of Sasha Waters Freyer’s award-winning documentary Garry Winogrand: All Things Are Photographable, which will be shown on PBS’s American Masters in April.

GARRY WINOGRAND (1928–1984) was born in New York, and was the recipient of numerous grants, including three Guggenheim Fellowships and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. His work was included in the Museum of Modern Art’s landmark 1967 “New Documents” exhibition, curated by John Szarkowski. In 2013, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art mounted a major retrospective of his work, which traveled to the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Jeu de Paume, Paris; and Fundacíon MAPFRE, Madrid. His work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., among many others. His numerous monographs include The Man in the Crowd: The Uneasy Streets of Garry Winogrand, The Animals, and Women are Beautiful, among others.

Fraenkel Gallery
49 Geary Street, San Francisco, CA 94108
www.fraenkelgallery.com

Maira Kalman @ High Museum of Art, Atlanta

The Pursuit of Everything: Maira Kalman’s Books for Children
High Museum of Art, Atlanta
June 22 - September 15, 2019

This summer, the High Museum of Art will premiere “The Pursuit of Everything: Maira Kalman’s Books for Children,” a colorful exhibition exploring the extensive catalog of Maira Kalman’s imaginative stories and illustrations, which have delighted readers of all ages for more than 30 years.

Perhaps best known for her quirky New Yorker magazine covers and brilliant pictorial essays, Maira Kalman (American, born 1949) has published more than a dozen books for adults and 18 acclaimed children’s books, beginning with the game-changing picture book “Stay Up Late” (1985), which gave visual form to the famous Talking Heads song from the album “Little Creatures.” Since then her works have followed the comic adventures of beloved characters, including a poet dog named Max Stravinsky and Pete the dog, and have addressed important historical people and events with books including “Looking at Lincoln” (2012) and the 9/11-inspired “Fireboat: The Heroic Adventures of the John J. Harvey” (2002).

“The Pursuit of Everything” provides an immersive panorama of Maira Kalman’s picture-book career spanning three decades. The more than 100 works on view will include original drawings and paintings from award-winning books including “Smartypants” (2003), about gluttonous canine Pete’s classroom antics, and “Next Stop Grand Central” (2001) as well as newer publications, among them “Bold & Brave: Ten Heroes Who Won Women the Right to Vote” (2018), authored by U.S. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, and the illustrated cookbook “Cake” (2018), written in collaboration with the food writer Barbara Scott-Goodman.

Maira Kalman’s stories weave a curious web of familiarity and imagination with illustrations that celebrate the visual splendor of everyday subjects through a lens that is all her own. Her books ignite curiosity and invite young readers to engage deeply with the world around them. Known for her surreal imagery, Maira Kalman expertly combines sophisticated and hilarious text with beautifully rendered pictures, readily acknowledging the interplay between her writing and painting practice. Her stories have deeply personal roots featuring characters, settings and story lines drawn from the artist’s life and whimsical imagination. Maira Kalman’s images reveal a profound curiosity about shared history and the human experience through themes of adventure, exploration, friendship, dreams and the search for meaning.

Maira Kalman paints with gouache on paper, favoring flat, highly saturated planes of color and an idiosyncratic use of space that imbue her works with surprises that will delight and excite the young and the young at heart. The exhibition will offer the opportunity for a different and satisfyingly intimate experience of Kalman’s art.

Maira Kalman says of her wide-ranging work, “The best children’s books are as appealing to adults as they are to children. There have to be different levels of humor, different levels of reference, which allow a dialogue between adults and children. If you live with children, the kinds of conversations you have during the day range from the surreal to the mundane to the insane to the pedantic. And that language can be duplicated in writing because the world is all of those things.”

“The Pursuit of Everything” marks the High’s fourth collaboration with The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art, which organized the show and will present it in Amherst, Mass., from October 13, 2019, through January 19, 2020.

“We are thrilled to partner again with the High to bring children’s picture book art to Atlanta,” said Ellen Keiter, chief curator at The Carle. “Kalman is an astute chronicler of our time as well as someone who makes history accessible. Museum visitors will revel in her lively imagery and witty observations, which vacillate between the comic and the profound.”

“Both captivating and moving, Kalman’s work challenges all of us to rediscover the childlike curiosity that lives deep down inside,” said Virginia Shearer, the High’s Eleanor McDonald Storza director of education. “We are delighted to welcome families back to the High for another exhibition that highlights the work of an acclaimed author and illustrator, and we’re honored to continue our multiyear collaboration with our colleagues at The Eric Carle Museum, who are such wonderful partners.”

In addition to original works from her books, also on view will be Maira Kalman’s illustrated correspondence with her two-year-old granddaughter Olive, fascinating personal notebooks, a colossal reproduction from New York’s Grand Central Terminal, manuscripts, dummy books and other ephemera, including Kalman’s collection of crazy-named candy bars arranged as haikus. The galleries will also feature sketches and images of Kalman’s pictorial essays and covers for The New Yorker.

To bring the audience closer to her artistic process, Maira Kalman repainted the opening scene from her Mikado-themed book “Sayonara, Mrs. Kackleman” (1989) expressly for the exhibition, and she will also create an installation of photographs and objects that inspire her, similar to the one in her studio.

“It is such a wonderful thing to meet a gifted illustrator or a talented writer, and Maira happens to be both,” said Jane Bayard Curley, the exhibition curator. “She is just like her work: funny, smart, and an undisputed champion for the universal appeal of the picture book. Her highly personal and somewhat eccentric worldview appeals to anyone who wants to be verbally and visually amused and challenged.”

Key works featured in the exhibition will include:

- Four hilariously surreal paintings from Kalman’s first picture book, “Stay Up Late,” a collaboration with David Byrne pairing Maira Kalman’s paintings with the lyrics to the popular Talking Heads song

- An early self-portrait of the artist at age 7 sitting in a tree in Henry Hudson Park, from “Chicken Soup, Boots”

- A series of lovingly rendered portraits illustrating the adventures of Maira Kalman’s beloved dog Pete

- Preliminary sketches and finished paintings from Maira Kalman’s popular book series featuring her alter ego, Max the poet dog

- Delicate yet powerfully moving portraits of Sojourner Truth and Inez Milholland from “Bold & Brave: Ten Heroes Who Won Women the Right to Vote,” Maira Kalman’s recent collaboration with U.S. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand.

In conjunction with the exhibition, the Alliance Theatre at The Woodruff Arts Center, of which the High is also an arts partner, will present the world premiere play “Max Makes a Million,” from June 20 to July 21, 2019. Poetry, dance, jazz, visual art and dreams coalesce in this theatrical adaptation combining Kalman’s most notable books, adapted and directed by Liz Diamond.

This collaboration is the fourth in a series presented by the High and the Alliance Theatre in partnership with The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art. The Kalman project follows the successful exhibition and theatre productions based on the work of children’s book authors and artists Ashley Bryan (2017), Eric Carle (2016) and Mo Willems (2015). The presentations are made possible through a grant to The Woodruff Arts Center from the Lettie Pate Evans Foundation to expand programming and increase access for family audiences.

“The Pursuit of Everything” will be presented on the lobby and second levels of the High’s Anne Cox Chambers Wing.

ABOUT MAIRA KALMAN

Born in 1949 in Tel Aviv, Israel, Maira Kalman moved to Riverdale in New York’s Bronx borough with her family at age four. Now a Manhattan resident, Kalman has written and illustrated 18 children’s books, including “Ooh-la-la (Max in Love),” “What Pete Ate,” “Fireboat: The Heroic Adventures of the John J. Harvey,” “13 Words” (a collaboration with Lemony Snicket), “Why We Broke Up” (with Daniel Handler), “Looking at Lincoln” and “Thomas Jefferson: Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Everything.”

She is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker magazine and is well known for her collaboration with Rick Meyerowitz on its “New Yorkistan” cover in 2001. Additional projects include illustrating Strunk and White’s classic “The Elements of Style.” Kalman also created two monthly online columns for The New York Times. The first, “The Principles of Uncertainty” (2006–07), was a narrative journal of her life. The second, “And the Pursuit of Happiness” (2009), was a yearlong exploration of American history and democracy. Both columns are now collected in book form, published by the Penguin Press.

Since 2003, Maira Kalman has had eight exhibitions at the Julie Saul Gallery in New York City, which represents her work. In 2010, The Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, organized a retrospective of Kalman’s work titled “Maira Kalman: Various Illuminations (of a Crazy World),” which traveled to the Contemporary Jewish Museum (San Francisco), the Skirball Cultural Center (Los Angeles) and the Jewish Museum in New York. Her work has appeared in books published by The Museum of Modern Art and the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, in connection with 2014 exhibition “Maira Kalman: My Favorite Things.” Her longstanding contributions to literature, art and design lent her the opportunity to serve as a resident at the American Academy in Rome and to present two renowned TED talks in 2007 and 2014. With her son Alex, Kalman co-curated the exhibition “Sara Berman’s Closet,” which debuted at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and is now traveling to other museums.

Exhibition Organization and Support: “The Pursuit of Everything: Maira Kalman’s Books for Children” is organized by The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art, Amherst, Massachusetts. Support for the High Museum’s presentation is provided by the Lettie Pate Evans Foundation. This exhibition is made possible by Exhibition Series Sponsors Delta Air Lines, Inc., and Turner; Premier Exhibition Series Supporters the Antinori Foundation, Sarah and Jim Kennedy, and Louise Sams and Jerome Grilhot; Benefactor Exhibition Series Supporter Anne Cox Chambers Foundation; Ambassador Exhibition Series Supporters Tom and Susan Wardell and Rod Westmoreland; and Contributing Exhibition Series Supporters the Ron and Lisa Brill Family Charitable Trust, Lucinda W. Bunnen, Corporate Environments, Marcia and John Donnell, W. Daniel Ebersole and Sarah Eby-Ebersole, Peggy Foreman, Robin and Hilton Howell, Mr. and Mrs. Baxter Jones, and Margot and Danny McCaul. Additional support is provided by 2018 Grandparents Circle of Support members Spring and Tom Asher, Anne Cox Chambers, Ann and Tom Cousins, Sandra and John Glover, Shearon and Taylor Glover, Sarah and Jim Kennedy, and Jane and Hicks Lanier and by Lavona Currie, Nena Griffith, Ellen and Tom Harbin, and Margaretta Taylor. Generous support is also provided by the Alfred and Adele Davis Exhibition Endowment Fund, Anne Cox Chambers Exhibition Fund, Barbara Stewart Exhibition Fund, Marjorie and Carter Crittenden, Dorothy Smith Hopkins Exhibition Endowment Fund, Eleanor McDonald Storza Exhibition Endowment Fund, The Fay and Barrett Howell Exhibition Fund, Forward Arts Foundation Exhibition Endowment Fund, Helen S. Lanier Endowment Fund, Isobel Anne Fraser–Nancy Fraser Parker Exhibition Endowment Fund, John H. and Wilhelmina D. Harland Exhibition Endowment Fund, Katherine Murphy Riley Special Exhibition Endowment Fund, Margaretta Taylor Exhibition Fund, RJR Nabisco Exhibition Endowment Fund, and Dr. Diane L. Wisebram.

HIGH MUSEUM OF ART
1280 Peachtree St NE, Atlanta, GA 30309
www.high.org

Expo Vasarely @ Centre Pompidou, Paris

Vasarely, Le partage des formes
Centre Pompidou, Paris

Jusqu'au 6 mai 2019

Le Centre Pompidou présente la première grande rétrospective française consacrée à Victor Vasarely. A travers trois cents oeuvres, objets et documents, l'exposition donne à voir et à comprendre le " continent Vasarely " et met ainsi en lumière l’ensemble des facettes de l'oeuvre foisonnant du père de l'art optique en présentant tous les aspects de sa production : peintures, sculptures, multiples, intégrations architecturales, tout comme les publicités et études des débuts.

Suivant un parcours tout à la fois chronologique et thématique, l’exposition aborde les grandes étapes de l’oeuvre, depuis la formation de l’artiste dans les traces du Bauhaus jusqu’aux dernières innovations formelles, d’inspiration science-fictionnelle, en passant par le projet d’un langage visuel universel et l’ambition d’un art à la large diffusion sociale.

Après une enfance et une jeunesse hongroises, Victor Vasarely (1906-1997) s’installe à Paris en 1930 où il travaille comme graphiste dans la publicité, avant de se consacrer pleinement à l’art au lendemain de la Guerre. L’abstraction qu’il pratique alors, procédant de l’observation du réel, va vite s’intéresser aux troubles et étrangetés de la vision. Dès le milieu des années 1950, il pose les fondements de ce qui deviendra, une décennie plus tard, l’Op Art. Moment capital de l’histoire de l’abstraction, l’art optico-cinétique propose, à partir de processus à la rigueur scientifique, des images instables avec lesquelles la peinture devient un art du temps au moins autant que de l’espace. Parallèlement, il s’attache à développer un vocabulaire formel permettant une multiplicité d’actualisations dans différentes situations, notamment architecturales.

L’oeuvre de Victor Vasarely s’inscrit pleinement dans le contexte scientifique, économique et social des années 1960 et 1970. L’exposition, en même temps qu’elle présente un grand nombre d’oeuvres, dont certaines jamais vues depuis plus d’un demi-siècle, s’attache à rendre compte de la prégnance de l’art de Vasarely dans la culture populaire de l’époque (mode, design, graphisme, cinéma, télévision…), soulignant sa place cardinale dans l’imaginaire des Trente Glorieuses.

Exposition organisée par le Centre Pompidou, Paris en collaboration avec le Städel Museum, Francfort.

Commissaires de l'exposition

Michel Gauthier, conservateur, service des collections contemporaines musée national d’art moderne,

Arnauld Pierre, professeur en histoire de l’art contemporain, Sorbonne Université

assistés de Mathilde Marchand, chargée de recherches au musée national d'art moderne

Chargée de production : Malika Noui
Scénographe : Camille Excoffon

PUBLICATIONS

Vasarely | Le Partage des formes

Catalogue de l'exposition

sous la direction de Michel Gauthier et Arnauld Pierre

24 x 28 cm - 232 pages - broché - 39.90€

Le catalogue comprend trois essais des deux commissaires de l'exposition, Michel Gauthier et Arnauld Pierre et de Jill Gasparina, critique d'art indépendante et spécialiste de l'art et de la mode. Il reprend également la structure de l'exposition avec sept textes correspondant à ses sections.

Vasarely

Album de l'exposition

sous la direction de Michel Gauthier et Arnauld Pierre,

avec la participation de Mathilde Marchand

27 x 27 cm - 60 pages - broché - 9.50€

L'album, un beau souvenir de l'exposition Vasarely. Il retrace en image le parcours de visite avec une sélection des oeuvres majeures de l'artiste éclairés de courts textes. Un ouvrage à destination du grand public, clair et concis.

CENTRE POMPIDOU, PARIS
www.centrepompidou.fr

Un Pays Nouveau. Henri Matisse (1868-1954) @ Centre Pompidou Málaga

Un Pays Nouveau. Henri Matisse (1868-1954)
Centre Pompidou Málaga
6 mars - 9 juin 2019

Le Centre Pompidou Málaga présente une sélection de chefs-d’oeuvre de Matisse (1869-1954). Cet ensemble permet de rendre compte de la position d’un artiste ayant bouleversé les codes picturaux de la modernité au 20e siècle, en une authentique révolution du regard. Cette exposition, baptisée Un pays nouveau. Henri Matisse (1869-1954), est le premier événement dans le cadre du 150e anniversaire de la naissance de l’artiste. 

Henri Matisse déclarait « faire corps avec la peinture ». L’exposition retrace sa trajectoire grâce à une sélection d’oeuvres iconiques faisant dialoguer peintures, sculptures et dessins. Six séquences chronologiques retracent ainsi le parcours de Matisse de ses débuts vers 1900 jusqu’à ses dernières oeuvres du début des années 1950, en une évocation de ses intérieurs de Vence et de son ultime ouvrage pour la chapelle du Rosaire, dans ce même lieu.

Un pays nouveau. Henri Matisse (1869-1954) s’appuie sur près de cinquante oeuvres, dont des chefs d’oeuvres tels que Le violoniste à sa fenêtre (1918) réalisé durant le premier séjour à Nice, le Nu rose assis (1935-1936) qui témoigne de la simplification radicale entreprise par l’artiste depuis ses débuts, ou bien encore un des tout premier papier gouachés découpés (Le Danseur, 1937).

Ce pays nouveau témoigne d’une vie vécue non pas dans la sérénité dont son art d’équilibre et de clarté semblait la promesse, mais à l’inverse au sein d’authentiques combats dans lesquels l’artiste a fini par trouver son accord le plus intime – un accord, dans le sens de cette métaphore musicale que Matisse empruntait si souvent pour parler de son art. Henri Matisse est bien ce « classique » de l’art moderne dont la radicalité surprend aujourd’hui encore.

Commissaire de l'exposition : Aurélie Verdier, Conservatrice, Musée national d’art Moderne

Centre Pompidou Málaga 

Pasaje Dr. Carrillo Casaux (Muelle Uno), Puerto de Málaga, 29016 Málaga, España
centrepompidou-malaga.eu

Fernand Khnopff @ Petit Palais, Paris

Fernand Khnopff, Le maître de l’énigme
Petit Palais, Paris
Jusqu' au 17 mars 2019

Fernand Khnopff

Une Ville morte (Avec Georges Rodenbach), 1889

Pastel, crayons de couleurs et rehauts blancs sur papier

Collection The Hearn Family Trust, New York.

Le Petit Palais présente actuellement une exposition inédite dédiée à Fernand Khnopff conçue en collaboration avec les Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique. Artiste rare, le maître du Symbolisme belge n’a pas bénéficié de rétrospective à Paris depuis près de quarante ans. L’exposition du Petit Palais, empruntant dans de nombreux musées, comme le Metropolitan Museum de New York, la Neue Pinakothek de Munich, l’Albertina de Vienne mais aussi auprès de nombreuses collections privées, rassemble près de 150 pièces. Elle offre un panorama emblématique de l’esthétique singulière de Fernand Khnopff, à la fois peintre, dessinateur, graveur, sculpteur et metteur en scène de son oeuvre. L’exposition évoque par sa scénographie le parcours initiatique de sa fausse demeure qui lui servait d’atelier et aborde les grands thèmes qui parcourent son oeuvre, des paysages aux portraits d’enfants, des rêveries inspirés des Primitifs flamands aux souvenirs de Bruges-la-Morte, des usages complexes de la photographie jusqu’aux mythologies personnelles placées sous le signe d’Hypnos.

Fernand Khnopff

A Fosset, l’entrée du village, 1885

Huile sur toile

Collection particulière

Fernand Khnopff

Un hortensia, 1884 

Huile sur toile

Metropolitain Museum of Art, New York

Photo Metropolitan Museum of Art

A la fois point de départ et fil rouge de l’exposition, la maison-atelier de Fernand Khnopff est un véritable « temple du Moi » au sein duquel s’exprime pleinement sa personnalité complexe. A travers une scénographie qui reprend les couleurs de son intérieur – bleu, noir, blanc et or, le parcours évoque les obsessions et les figures chères à l’artiste : du portrait aux souvenirs oniriques, du fantasme au nu. Après une salle introductive recréant le vestibule de son atelier et évoquant la demeure même de l’artiste, le parcours débute avec la présentation de peintures de paysages représentant Fosset, petit hameau des Ardennes belges où Fernand Khnopff passe plusieurs étés avec sa famille. De ces paysages de petit format, saisis sur le vif, on perçoit tout de suite chez l’artiste un goût pour l’introspection et la solitude.

Une autre facette de son oeuvre, plus connue du grand public, est son travail de portraitiste. Fernand Khnopff représente des proches comme sa mère, des enfants qu’il dépeint avec le sérieux d’adultes, parfois des hommes. Mais il affectionne surtout les figures féminines, toutes en intériorité et nimbées de mystère. Sa soeur Marguerite avec qui il noue une secrète complicité devient son modèle et sa muse. Marguerite est également le sujet de nombreux portraits photographiques. Fernand Khnopff s’intéresse à ce médium avec beaucoup d’intérêt. L’artiste utilise ce procédé moderne au service de son art afin d’étudier la pose et la gestuelle de son modèle favori qu’il déguise en princesse de légende ou en divinité orientale. Il fait également photographier un certain nombre de ses oeuvres par un photographe de renom Albert-Edouard Drains dit Alexandre et retravaille les tirages avec des rehauts de crayon, d’aquarelle ou de pastel.

Fernand Khnopff

Sleeping Medusa ou Méduse endormie, 1896

Pastel sur papier

Collection Particulière

Comme d’autres peintres symbolistes, l’artiste est fasciné par les mythes antiques. Parmi ses obsessions, la figure d’Hypnos, le dieu du Sommeil apparaît de manière récurrente. La petite tête à l’aile teintée en bleu, couleur du rêve, est représentée la première fois en 1891 dans le tableau I Lock My Door Upon Myself. Hypnos est l’objet de plusieurs tableaux tout comme la Méduse ou bien encore OEdipe qui esquisse dans le tableau Des caresses un étrange dialogue avec un sphinx à corps de guépard.

Fernand Khnopff consacre également différents tableaux à Bruges, ville elle aussi énigmatique, où il vécut jusqu’à l’âge de six ans. La nostalgie de ces années d’enfance mêlée à une admiration pour le primitif flamand Memling donne naissance à plusieurs tableaux. Fernand Khnopff exécute aussi des vues de Bruges qu’il associe à un portrait de femme ou à un objet symbolique renvoyant à la cité des Flandres.

Fernand Khnopff

Souvenir de Flandre. Un canal, 1904

Craie et pastel sur papier.

Collection The Hearn Family Trust, New York

En fin de parcours, une série de dessins et de tableaux de nus sensuels évoquent son rapport à la féminité. Ces femmes à la chevelure rousse, vaporeuse, au regard insistant, représentées dans un halo semblent tout droit sorties d’un songe. Contrairement aux héroïnes de Klimt peintes à la même époque, elles ne paraissent aucunement en proie aux tourments de la chair. Elles ne sont que les représentations de l’« éternel féminin ».

Commissaires de l'exposition :
Michel Draguet, directeur des Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique
Christophe Leribault, directeur du Petit Palais
Dominique Morel, conservateur général au Petit Palais

A lire, l'album de l'exposition :

Fernand Khnopff, Le maître de l’énigme

Textes de Michel Draguet et Dominique Morel

Éditions Paris Musées

22/28 cm - 96 pages - Broché - 75 illustrations 

A lire également :

Fernand Khnopff

Textes de Michel Draguet

Éditions Fonds Mercator

24/27 cm - 304 pages - Relié

PETIT PALAIS
Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris
Avenue Winston-Churchill - 75008 Paris
www.petitpalais.fr

Theodora Allen @ Kasmin Gallery, NYC

Theodora Allen: weald
Kasmin Gallery, New York
Through March 9, 2019

THEODORA ALLEN 

Monument, No. 1, 2018

67x57 inches, oil and watercolor on linen.

Photo by Heather Rasmussen

Courtesy of the artist and Kasmin Gallery, New York

Kasmin presents weald, an exhibition of new paintings by Los Angeles based artist THEODORA ALLEN. The exhibition is on view at 515 West 27th Street, New York.

For her first exhibition with the gallery and debut New York solo show, Theodora Allen presents two bodies of work: Shields (dwale) and Monuments (weald). Dwale from Old Norse, meaning deep sleep or trance; weald from the Old English for forest. The two words are anagrams, both archaic; one is landscape and the other mindscape.

The Shield paintings are a suite of intimately scaled still lifes, each variation set within the iconic shape of medieval armor. Executed in a muted palette of jewel-toned hues, the plants are both isolated and adorned, akin to scientific botanical illustrations used in early herbals and pharmacopeia. The storied herbage belong to a world of remedies, aphrodisiacs, sacraments, and poisons. They are killers or curers, sinners or saints. As emblems they are elusive, and carry the weight of existential inquiry.

In the adjoining room, the Monument series continues the theme of plants defined through time and ideology. Realized in a near-monochrome palette, this body of work takes on the symbols of a cup, a coin, a sword, and a branch—icons gleaned from allegorical card games of the middle ages through the 19th century. These subjects are bright white and cold, stone-like, set in a dense and overgrown forest of psychotropic plants. The luminous statuaries rest at the entrance of an arched passageway, seemingly between past and future.

Through a rigorous painting process, Theodora Allen’s evocative imagery becomes whisper thin. Translucent coats of oil paint are applied and removed, until the fabric itself shows the weather of its making. Pools of spilled watercolor are also visible among thin layers of oil paint. Allen plays with the tension between the organic lines of the watery edge against the linear and tight weave of linen. Evanescent subjects, polluted spectrums, and radiant blues animate the forces of surface and depth, darkness and light.

Drawing from music, literature, myth and nature, Theodora Allen’s still lifes highlight essentialism and contemplate the human condition. Time and place are slippery—each painting suggests a world within itself, where transformative plants and figural relics underscore our earthly existence. References to the past take the form of ruins; a shield for protection, a cup to replenish, a weapon to fight. Citing a rich fin de siècle era, these symbols mark a turning point, embodying the knowledge of the bygone while standing on the threshold of a new century. They offer the reminder that in the chaos and tumult of the present, this too shall pass.  Theodora Allen’s fascination with these enduring themes are rooted in Humanist thought; they reflect on the fundamental desire to search for meaning and purpose in life, to know that which is unknowable, and the cyclical and essential nature of these pursuits.

THEODORA ALLEN (b. 1985, Los Angeles, CA) holds an MFA in painting from the University of California, Los Angeles, a BFA in painting from Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, CA, and has completed a residency at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Skowhegan, ME. Her work has been exhibited domestically and abroad, including at the Museum of Contemporary Art (Tucson, AZ), New Wight Gallery, UCLA (Los Angeles, CA), Blum & Poe (Los Angeles, CA), Sprüth Magers (Berlin, Germany), Almine Rech (New York, NY), and Berggruen Gallery (San Francisco, CA).

KASMIN GALLERY
www.kasmingallery.com

Les Lalanne @ Kasmin Gallery, New York

Les Lalanne
Kasmin Gallery, New York
Through March 9, 2019

Kasmin presents a new exhibition of work by French sculptors Les Lalanne. Designed in a unique collaboration with world-renowned landscape architect Louis Benech, the presentation kick off the year’s programming at Kasmin’s recently opened flagship gallery in Chelsea, New York (509 West 27th Street).

Over forty sculptures by Claude and Francois-Xavier Lalanne, each hand-picked by Louis Benech, transform the interior of Kasmin’s newest gallery space in an installation featuring passageways reminiscent of the artists’ studio garden in Ury, France. The exhibition includes one of Claude’s rare chandeliers, Structure Vegetale avec Singes (2012), as well as a Miroir (2010)—a work from a series famously collected by Yves Saint Laurent for his “room of mirrors” in Paris. Francois-Xavier’s iconic monkeys (including Babouin (1984/1990) and the large-scale bronze Singe Avise (grand) (2005), a herd of the artist’s sheep, and his Oiseaux de Marbre (1974) chairs (originally made for legendary art dealer Alexander Iolas) explore the contrasting solidity that can be found in the natural world.

Louis Benech, who has designed the exhibition in collaboration with Kasmin and Claude Lalanne, says of his long-standing relationship with the artists: “I often had to work in places with sheep grazing, I mean, Lalanne’s sheep grazing—in Meautry, La Mormaire, Montfort-l’Amaury. Thereafter, I rapidly met Claude and François-Xavier. They were designing with a friend the Jardin des enfants above the forum des Halles, right behind the church of Saint-Eustache. One day, we left ad lib to Ury for dinner. I thus discovered the grace of Claude’s garden, with dogwoods, hostas, and self-sowing hogweeds—which she uses for her sculptures and jewels. From that moment on, we consistently saw each other at least two times a year. Most of the time during a plant fair in Courson. It was there that Claude and François-Xavier usually found the plants flourishing in their garden, adorning Claude’s table or setting themselves in bronze or brass for an eternity of happiness. I miss François-Xavier, but Claude’s fantasy and voice lift my spirits up and bring back in memory the unique bond uniting them.”

ABOUT LOUIS BENECH

Over three decades, Louis Benech has designed, planted and maintained some of the globe’s most grand and historic estates including Paris’ Jardin des Tuileries and the Chateau de Versailles (the latter is the first new garden in the grounds since the 18th century). With over 300 projects in countries such as Korea, Panama, Peru, Canada, the United States, Portugal, Greece, and Morocco, Louis Benech has consistently managed to achieve a distinctive harmony between the new design and its architectural and natural environment. He is considered to be France's most revered landscape designer.

ABOUT LES LALANNE

Known individually and collectively since the 1960s as Les Lalanne, the couple have developed a style that defines inventive, poetic and surrealist sculpture. Having rediscovered the Renaissance art of casting forms from life, then employing contemporary electro-plating techniques, Claude Lalanne achieves a delicacy and sensitivity in her work unparalleled in cast bronze. François-Xavier Lalanne similarly found inspiration for his works in nature. In his words, "The animal world constitutes the richest and most varied forms on the planet." His subjects consist of a menagerie of animals, stylized forms oftentimes married with functionality.

Les Lalanne have exhibited in New York on Park Avenue and at the Getty Station; have been the subject of major retrospectives at Les Arts Decoratifs in Paris; included in the sale of the collection of Yves Saint Laurent and Jacques Grange; and are in major collections including the Cooper Hewitt Museum in New York, the Musée Nationale d’Art Moderne/Centre Georges Pompidou and the Musée d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris, the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, the City of Paris, the City of Santa Monica, and the City of Jerusalem.

KASMIN GALLERY
www.kasmingallery.com

Art after Stonewall, 1969-1989 @ Grey Art Gallery, NYU & Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, New York

Art after Stonewall, 1969 – 1989
Grey Art Gallery, New York University
Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, New York
April 24 – July 20-21, 2019

Coinciding with the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Uprisings, Art after Stonewall, 1969–1989 is a long-awaited and groundbreaking survey that features over 200 works of art and related visual materials exploring the impact of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ) liberation movement on visual culture. Presented in two parts—at New York University’s Grey Art Gallery and the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art—the exhibition features artworks by openly LGBTQ artists such as Vaginal Davis, Louise Fishman, Nan Goldin, Lyle Ashton Harris, Barbara Hammer, Holly Hughes, Greer Lankton, Robert Mapplethorpe, Catherine Opie, Joan Snyder, and Andy Warhol. On view at the Grey Art Gallery from April 24 through July 20, 2019 and at the Leslie-Lohman Museum from April 24 through July 21, 2019, the exhibition is organized by the Columbus Museum of Art.

“Art after Stonewall resists systematic classifications or traditional notions of what is a work of art. Crucial queer cultural practices were created beyond the institutions of the art world,” observes curator Jonathan Weinberg. “Cutting across disciplines and hierarchies of media and taste, this exhibition mixes performance, photographs, painting, sculpture, film clips, video, and music with historic documents and images taken from magazines, newspapers, and television.”

The Stonewall Uprisings, in historian Martin Duberman’s words, “are now generally taken to mark the birth of the modern gay and lesbian political movement… As such, ‘Stonewall’ has become an empowering symbol of global proportions.” Much has been written on the impact of the LGBTQ movement on American society and yet, fifty years after Stonewall, key artists in that story and their works are little known. Art after Stonewall brings together an unprecedented number of artists and activists in dialogue with LGBTQ issues. Art after Stonewall juxtaposes works—many of which elude categorization—and music with historical documents and images taken from magazines, newspapers, and television. In fact, the ambition and scope of the exhibition is so grand, it is presented across two New York venues, loosely divided chronologically. The presentation at the Leslie-Lohman Museum concentrates on work from the first decade after the events of Stonewall, and the Grey Art Gallery focuses on the second decade.

Grey Art Gallery Director Lynn Gumpert adds, “Considering the Grey is located in the heart of Greenwich Village, we are thrilled to be joining with Leslie-Lohman to celebrate the diverse group of artists and activists who intersected with and contributed to the modern LGBTQ movement. Art after Stonewall is a crucial contribution to our growing understanding of that watershed moment in civil rights.”

Art after Stonewall is organized in seven sections. The first, Coming Out, explores how post-Stonewall LGBTQ artists addressed the imperative to reject hiding their sexual identity. Sexual Outlaws extends the concept of visibility to works of art that radically challenge mainstream concepts of decorum and decency, considering artworks with blatant sexual content from a new vantage point. Inspired by Audre Lorde’s eponymous 1983 essay, The Uses of the Erotic examines how LGBTQ artists re-conceptualized both sex and the sensual. Consistent with Lorde’s view that women’s sense of the erotic is not defined by genital contact, artworks in this section convey a body-like physicality and sensuality. Gender and Body reveals how cross-dressing and gender-bending influenced art of the 1970s and 80s, and features works by artists who employed gender as performance as they negotiated a new world with more fluid identities and sexualities. Things Are Queer explores how the concept of queerness was developed as a way to resist categorizing people as straight or gay, female or male. If Stonewall represented liberation and the imperative to come out, new generations of LGBTQ artists were increasingly suspicious of categories. AIDS and Activism observes how an epidemic that was initially viewed as a disease of homosexuals affected the gay community, artistic communities, and the world in general. The works in the final section We’re Here celebrate how, by the end of the 1980s, LGBTQ people had permeated and influenced all aspects of everyday life: queerness could no longer be marginalized in American culture.

As Gonzalo Casals, Executive Director of the Leslie-Lohman Museum, notes, “We are very proud to present this important exhibition on the occasion of the 50th Anniversary of the Stonewall Inn riots. We believe that shows like Art after Stonewall play an important role in bringing visibility to our communities, expanding the understanding of the history of our city, and empowering newer generations of queer individuals to continue to fight for LGBTQ civil rights. Our collaboration with NYU’s Grey Art Gallery allows us to expand the reach of the exhibition’s message beyond our community, as LGBTQ history is New York history.”

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully-illustrated 300-page catalogue with essays by more than 20 established and emerging scholars and artists, including Anna Conlan, Andrew Durbin, Harmony Hammond, Richard Meyer, Alpesh Patel, Flavia Rando, Christopher Reed, Chris Vargas, and Margaret Rose Vendryes. The catalogue is published by Rizzoli Electa.

Art after Stonewall, 1969-1989 (c) Rizzoli Electa

The exhibition is curated by artist and art historian Jonathan Weinberg, currently a critic at the Yale School of Art, in concert with Tyler Cann, CMA’s Head of Exhibitions and Pizzuti Curator of Contemporary Art, and Drew Sawyer, the Phillip Leonian and Edith Rosenbaum Leonian Curator of Photography at the Brooklyn Museum (formerly Associate Curator of Photography at CMA). 

The exhibition opens in New York City at the Grey Art Gallery, New York University (April 24–July 20, 2019) and the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art (April 24–July 21, 2019), before being presented at The Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum in Miami, Florida (September 14, 2019–January 6, 2020), and the Columbus Museum of Art (February 14–May 17, 2020) in Columbus, Ohio. 

Major support for the exhibition is provided by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the Keith Haring Foundation, Inc. Key support for the presentation at the Grey Art Gallery is provided by Deloitte. Additional support is generously provided by the Charina Foundation; Gregory C. Albanis and Richard Harrison; the Abby Weed Grey Trust; and the Grey’s Director’s Circle, Inter/National Council, and Friends. Funding for the presentation at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art has been received in part from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature; and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.

Grey Art Gallery, New York University
100 Washington Square East, New York, NY 10003
greyartgallery.nyu.edu

Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art
26 Wooster St, New York, NY 10013
www.leslielohman.org

Judy Pfaff @ Miles McEnery Gallery, NYC

Judy Pfaff
Miles McEnery Gallery, New York
Through 9 March 2019

JUDY PFAFF

Quartet One, 2018

Photographic inspired image, wire frame, acrylic, aluminium discs, fungus, paper, glitter. Styrofoam, fluorescent light, drawing in artist's frame

120.75 x 156 x 32 inches. 306.7 x 396.2 x 81.3 cm

Courtesy of the artist and Miles McEnery Gallery, New York

MILES MCENERY GALLERY presents an exhibition of works by JUDY PFAFF, on view at 520 West 21st Street. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, featuring an essay by David Levi Strauss.

Often considered a pioneer of installation art, Judy Pfaff’s limitlessly innovative work evades categorization and breaks boundaries. In the early 1970s, while she was enrolled in the painting MFA program at Yale, renowned artist Al Held became her lifelong mentor and encouraged her to move beyond the limitations of the picture plane—an idea which she took to exceptional new heights. Oscillating between the two- dimensional and three-dimensional, Judy Pfaff’s installations react to and penetrate the spaces they inhabit, transforming them into explosively dynamic environments that entice and engage the viewers’ senses.

Pulling from a variety of disciplines—including sculpture, painting, and printmaking—Judy Pfaff’s works are unrestricted by the use of a single medium. In utilizing a diverse range of materials, Judy Pfaff is able to draw inspiration from the realms of both the natural and the spiritual, as well as art historical imagery, and represent their essence in a distinctive and engaging manner.

The title of Irving Sandler’s monograph, Judy Pfaff: Tracking the Cosmos, hints at the broad reach of Judy Pfaff’s art. Quartet, her major work in the exhibition at Miles McEnery Gallery, is the newest manifestation of the artist’s ambitious quest to investigate nature, life, and human experience to their fullest. Created from a rich primordial soup of materials, the artist has produced an opulent set of works that she refers to as “wall installs”— tamer translations of the installations she is known for. Forever thinking outside of the box, Judy Pfaff uses a tsunami of materials and objects made and found; photographically derived digital images on paper to aluminum disks, wire fencing, acrylic, melted plastic, paper lanterns, fungus, artificial flowers, electric lighting, encaustics, and more. Complex and captivating, they create an experience that is both visual and tactile, inviting focused contemplation to fully perceive their many intricate parts.

Keeping in line with her oeuvre, Judy Pfaff’s two-dimensional works on paper are far from flat. In her most recent pieces, she transforms handwritten account ledgers from India and sales receipts from a druggist in New York into canvases upon which to paint and draw. As David Levi Strauss suggests, “these works are always becoming, moving from one state of things to another, and the state of change extends as well into these works’ frames, individually activated and illuminated by fragments of gold and silver leaf.”

This notion holds true for all of Judy Pfaff’s beautifully uncontained works: always changing and inspiring, and wholly liberated from boundaries of any kind.

Miles McEnery Gallery will also present a coinciding solo booth of Judy Pfaff’s work at the ADAA’s The Art Show, from 28 February through 3 March, 2019, at the Park Avenue Armory.

JUDY PFAFF was born in London in 1946. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Washington University in St. Louis, MO in 1971 and graduated from Yale University with a Master of Fine Arts degree in 1973.

Judy Pfaff has had over 100 major solo installations across the country and abroad at such venues as the Chazen Museum of Art, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI; the Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO; the St. Louis Art Museum, St. Louis, MO; the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, OH; and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.

Judy Pfaff was the represented artist for the United States in the 1998 São Paolo Biennial. Her work is included in many public and private collections including the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, MI; High Museum of Art , Atlanta, G A; Chazen Museum of Art , Madison, WI; Museum of Modern Art , New York, N Y; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY and National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.

Judy Pfaff is the recipient of numerous awards including the Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Sculpture Center (2014); a MacArthur Fellowship (2004); an Award of Merit Gold Medal for Sculpture from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York (2002); a Bessie Award (1984); and a Guggenheim Fellowship (1983), as well as two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts (1979 and 1986). She is the Richard B. Fisher Professor in the Arts and Co-Chair of the Studio Arts Program at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY.

Recently, Judy Pfaff was the visiting artist in the Walter Gropius Master Artist Series at the Huntington Museum of Art in Huntington, WV. The artist currently lives and works in Kingston and Tivoli, NY.

MILES MCENERY GALLERY
525 W 22nd Street New York, NY 10011
520 W 21st Street New York, NY 10011
www.milesmcenery.com

Markus Linnenbrink @ Miles McEnery Gallery, NYC

Markus Linnenbrink
Miles McEnery Gallery, New York
Through 9 March 2019

MARKUS LINNENBRINK

THEDEVILSGOTMYNUMBER, 2018 

Epoxy resin and pigments on wood

72 x 72 inches, 182.9 x 182.9 cm

Courtesy the artist and Miles McEnery Gallery, New York

MILES MCENERY GALLERY presents an exhibition of new works by MARKUS LINNENBRINK for his fourth solo show with the gallery. The exhibition is on view at 525 West 22nd Street. It is accompanied by a fully illustrated publication, featuring an essay by Frédéric Caillard.

Markus Linnenbrink’s energetic, three-dimensional paintings and sculptures are an experience of time and color. In this series of works, Markus Linnenbrink challenges viewers to contemplate the idea of time in art: how a moment may be captured and sustained within an arrangement of color.

To create his glossy and brightly colored “drips”, the artist blends epoxy resin with powdered pigments, and then applies the medium to a wood panel over a watercolor-like background painting or an old personal photograph. This process creates a curtain of color that allows Linnenbrink to provocatively invite viewers into the depth of his paintings. The liquid interacts with gravitational force to render vertical stripes over his chosen back grounds. Additionally, Linnenbrink utilizes the nature of this process and transforms the overflow to create other signature paintings. These three-dimensional paintings are made by layering this pigmented resin which the artist drills and carves deep jagged rifts that result in a magni cent geological topography.

For this exhibition, Markus Linnenbrink also presents “DAYLIGHTTEARSTOMYEYES.” Fusing together acrylic, pigment, and sumi ink on wood and aluminum core, Markus Linnenbrink pushes his installation practice further. Black and white on the exterior–and color on the interior, his “room within a room” is an expansive, three-dimensional work that adapts to both the allowances and limitations of its environment.

Through his exploration of color and its impact on visual beauty, Markus Linnenbrink continues to emphasize the emotional, expressive, and pictorial qualities that are found in abstract art, using shapes, colors, forms, and gestural marks to achieve his desired effects. As Frédéric Caillard describes, Markus Linnenbrink’s works are “...a celebration of life, of its inner mechanism, of its ability to learn from history but also of its tendency to repeat the same mistakes, to regenerate, to grow on its own ashes. This very contrast–between the earnest and the joyful–is at the core of his practice.”

MARKUS LINNENBRINK (b. in Dortmund, Germany in 1961) attended The Gesamthochschule in Kassel and later the Academy of Fine Arts in Berlin. In 2016, Markus Linnenbrink completed two permanent public installations: an outdoor wall-painting at SLS Brickell Hotel and Residences, Miami, FL, and a series of paintings for 75 Rockefeller Plaza, New York, NY.

His most recent solo exhibitions include “THEREAINTNOEASY WAYOUT,” Galeria Maurizio Caldirola, Monza, Italy; “HEREIS TANDKNOCKINGON YOURDOOR, ” Taubert Contemporary, Berlin, Germany; “THEFIRSTONEISCR AZ YANDTHESECONDONEISNUTS,” Wasserman Projects, Detroit, MI; “THEGRASSISALWAYSGREENER,” Max Estrella Gallery, Madrid, Spain; “ THERIDENE VERENDS, ” Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts Museum, Philadelphia, P A; “SUNANDWATER” Patricia Sweetow Gallery, San Francisco, CA.

Recent group exhibitions include “Abstraction and Architecture,” University of Strasbourg, France; “Abstract Remix,” Taubert Contemporary at New Art Projects, London, United Kingdom; “Deck Voyage,” Borusan Contemporary, Istanbul, Turkey, curated by Necmi Sönmez; “Revisiones,” Galeria Impakto, Lima, Peru; “Off The Wall!,” Kunsthalle Nürnberg, Germany; “Selections of the Cleve Carney Collection,” Cleve Carney Art Gallery, College of DuPage, Glen Ellyn, IL; “3+4 B/W,” Taubert Contemporary, Berlin, Germany; “Local Color,” San Jose Museum of Art, CA; and “ROY G BIV,” Waterhouse & Dodd Gallery, New York, NY; among others.

His work is included in the permanent collections of The Hague, Ministry of Culture, The Netherlands; Hood Museum, Dartmouth College, NH; Neue Galerie, Kassel, Germany; NBC Rockefeller Center, New York, NY; Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts Museum, Philadelphia, PA; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; San Jose Museum of Art, CA; UCLA Hammer Museum, University of California Los Angeles, CA; Herzlya Museum of Art, Israel; West Collection, Philadelphia, PA; and Jorge Perez Collection, Miami, FL; among others.

Markus Linnenbrink lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. 

Artist's website: www.markuslinnenbrink.com

MILES MCENERY GALLERY
525 W 22nd Street New York, NY 10011
520 W 21st Street New York, NY 10011
www.milesmcenery.com

Matvey Levenstein @ Kasmin Gallery, NYC

Matvey Levenstein
Kasmin Gallery, New York
Through March 2, 2019

MATVEY LEVENSTEIN

Orient, 2018 

Oil on linen, 37 1/8 x 48 inches, 94.3 x 121.9 cm. 

Courtesy of the artist and Kasmin Gallery, New York

Kasmin presents an exhibition of new works by MATVEY LEVENSTEIN, on view at 293 Tenth Avenue. Matvey Levenstein’s work depicts scenes from his life on the North Fork of Long Island and explores themes of history and representation. The paintings speak to the relevance of Romanticism in the 21st Century, and act as quiet meditations on the immigrant experience filtered through the most traditional painterly genres: the landscape, the still life and the portrait. Imbued with a distinctly literary sensitivity and sincerity, the exhibition brings together a selection of new works ranging in size and materials, including large sumi ink drawings, and smaller, delicate works realized on linen, copper, and wood. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition at the gallery.

Matvey Levenstein’s interest in sites that have a largely unexplored historical significance has led him to old pilgrim cemeteries and to views towards Gardiners Bay. Beginning with snapshots, Matvey Levenstein is able to quickly capture a scene’s formal properties before beginning his material investigation. Working with a limited palette on toned grounds, Matvey Levenstein’s distinctive compositions are characterized by the layers of paint built up and scraped back slowly and meticulously over many months, and their foregrounding of nature in all its dramatic variety: the looming power of a stormcloud, tree branches dissecting a winter sky, and more quietly, a vase of cut flowers sitting on a dinner table. In Pink Moon (2018) a tiny orb hangs amidst a luminous sunset as two telephone poles, resembling crucifixes, emerge tentatively from the bottom of the picture plane.

Working in the lineage of landscape painters such as Caspar David Friedrich, Matvey Levenstein is at his most consciously Romantic in Storm (2018), which foregoes an easily intelligible subject matter in favor of the psychological intensity of a semi-abstract seascape. In other works in the exhibition, the artist’s wife makes a cameo, dressed in a bathrobe while watching an approaching storm (White Bathrobe, 2015). In another cinematic image, she appears in profile against winter fields (LY, 2018). As in Friedrich’s iconic Wanderer Above The Sea, the decisive interruption of the landscape by the human body serves to put the unintelligibility of nature into context, locating it in contemporary life. This sincere engagement with nature, combined with the prevalent cinematic aspects of Matvey Levenstein’s work, call to mind radical 20th-century filmmakers such as Andrei Tarkovsky and Ingmar Bergman. Viewed together, the striking, poetic imagery of the works can be interpreted as ‘scenes’; diaristic flashes of a potential nonlinear narrative.

MATVEY LEVENSTEIN was born in 1960 in Moscow, U.S.S.R. and lives and works in New York City and Orient, NY. He received his M.F.A. at Yale School of Art, New Haven, CT, after attaining a B.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL, and the Moscow Architectural Institute, Moscow, U.S.S.R. Matvey Levenstein teaches at the School of Visual Art, New York, NY. He will be included in the forthcoming publication “Landscape Painting Now” by Todd Bradway.

KASMIN GALLERY
www.kasmingallery.com

Andy Warhol @ Kasmin Gallery, NYC

Andy Warhol: Polaroid Portraits
Kasmin Gallery, New York
Through March 2, 2019

Kasmin presents an exhibition of Andy Warhol’s polaroid portraits, on view at 297 Tenth Avenue, New York.

Beginning in the 1960s, Andy Warhol carried a camera with him almost constantly, obsessively documenting both his personal life and the daily goings on in his studio, The Factory. These images, artworks in their own right, also acted as visual references and formed the basis of many of the artist’s drawings, silkscreens, and paintings. Highlighting the integral contribution of photography to his art-making process, Andy Warhol referred to his Polaroid Big Shot camera (which he purchased in 1970) as his “pencil and paper.”

Taken between 1974 and 1985, the works feature notable figures such as Liza Minnelli, Muhammad Ali, Bianca Jagger, Dolly Parton, Debbie Harry, and Robert Mapplethorpe, as well as a selection of self-portraits. Bringing together some of the most recognizable faces of an era, the exhibition illuminates Andy Warhol’s longstanding fascination with celebrities and famous movie stars—a motif that went on to define his oeuvre. Andy Warhol was sensitively attuned to the potential of the image—in particular, photography—to shape meaning and to both reflect and reaffirm the wider cultural obsessions of the American public.

Andy Warhol’s fascination with the transience of consumer and popular culture, as well as his concern with appearances and representation, make the polaroid a fitting medium. Notoriously socially awkward, Andy Warhol could use the camera to mediate his interaction with the world, helping him balance between inclusion and exclusion. These works, developed instantaneously, were born in a particular place and moment in time. Their rarity, coupled with the dwindling production of Polaroid film, capture a crucial period in Andy Warhol's practice and recall a nostalgic moment in the history of photography.

KASMIN GALLERY
www.kasmingallery.com

Jeffrey Gibson @ Seattle Art Museum

Jeffrey Gibson: Like a Hammer
Seattle Art Museum
February 28 – May 12, 2019

JEFFREY GIBSON

Like A Hammer, 2014

Jeffrey Gibson, Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians/Cherokee, b. 1972 

Elk hide, glass beads, artificial sinew, wool blanket, metal studs, steel, found pinewood block, and fur, 56 × 24 × 11 in.

Collection of Tracy Richelle High and Roman Johnson, courtesy of Marc Straus Gallery, New York.

Image courtesy of Jeffrey Gibson Studio and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles, California.

Photo: Peter Mauney.

The Seattle Art Museum presents Jeffrey Gibson: Like a Hammer, a major survey of works from 2011 to the present that reflects the artist’s deepening exploration of his Indigenous heritage, legacies of abstraction, and popular and alternative cultures. Organized by the Denver Art Museum, the exhibition features over 65 works produced during a pivotal time in the Jeffrey Gibson’s career, including abstract geometric paintings on rawhide and canvas, beaded punching bags, sculptures, wall hangings, and video. Reflecting the complexity of modern identity, Jeffrey Gibson’s work envisions a more inclusive future.

A contemporary artist of Cherokee heritage and a citizen of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, Jeffrey Gibson grew up in the US and urban centers in Europe and South Korea. As a young adult, he was involved in queer club culture and interested in popular music, fashion, and design. These experiences inform his vision of exuberant hybridity, in which glass beads, metal jingles, ribbons, song lyrics, and abstract geometric patterns come together. Gibson’s use of materials and references that resonate in modern and contemporary Western art, as well as Indigenous and ancient cultures, establishes a unique visual vocabulary that gives rise to new possibilities and points of connection.

A highlight of the exhibition is 15 punching bags, most of which are from the Everlast series that marked an artistic breakthrough for Jeffrey Gibson. Intricately adorned in beads, fringe, and jingles, and often incorporating text, the punching bags shift gender associations between the masculine and the feminine. They also prompt reflection about the history of violence against Indigenous cultures and signal a call for resilience and perseverance. Like a Hammer also features IF I RULED THE WORLD (2018), which was recently acquired by the Seattle Art Museum for its permanent collection.

JEFFREY GIBSON

I PUT A SPELL ON YOU, 2015 

Jeffrey Gibson, Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians/Cherokee, b. 1972

Repurposed punching bag, glass beads, artificial sinew, and steel; 40 × 14 × 14 in.

Collection of the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina. 

Museum purchase, 2015.11.1.

Image courtesy of Jeffrey Gibson Studio and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles, California.

Photo: Peter Mauney

Language plays an important role in Jeffrey Gibson's work, with lines from pop songs and other sources adorning vibrant woven and patterned wall hangings and punching bags. Taken from such diverse sources as James Baldwin, Pete Seeger, Culture Club, and Public Enemy, among others, the phrases take on multiple meanings and speak to resistance, reclamation, and celebration.

Like a Hammer features many of Jeffrey Gibson’s abstract geometric paintings on canvas and rawhide, in which he explores pattern, light, and color, prompting the viewer to see abstraction through the lens of Indigeneity. Also on view are midsize and large figurative sculptures. The colorful “club kid” figures are inspired by his experiences in the queer club scenes of South Korea, London, and New York in the 1980s and ’90s and connect to his interest in performance, theatricality, and communal experiences. By contrast, his “ancestor” figures are draped with elaborately ornamented cloaks and topped with clay heads reminiscent of skulls or ancient Mississippian culture effigy heads. While visually fierce, these works are seen by the artist as teachers and culture-bearers.

JEFFREY GIBSON

Someone Great Is Gone, 2013 

Jeffrey Gibson, Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians/Cherokee, b. 1972 

Elk hide, acrylic paint, and graphite, 91 x 59 in.

Private collection, New York, courtesy of Marc Straus Gallery, New York 

Image courtesy of Jeffrey Gibson Studio and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles, California.

Photo: Peter Mauney.

One gallery is dedicated to the West Coast debut of DON’T MAKE ME OVER, a multimedia installation consisting of cascades of diaphanous rainbow-colored curtains embedded with lyrics from Burt Bacharach’s 1962 song about love and acceptance, made legendary by Dionne Warwick. The curtains encircle an oversized garment adorned with bells and jingles, and a nearby projection plays a video of Jeffrey Gibson wearing the garment, chanting and drumming as he moves within the enclosed curtained space. A series of irregularly shaped diptych paintings on rawhide complete this installation.

At the end of the exhibition is a reading room, where visitors can reflect and read books—including selections for children and young adults—related to the topics explored in Jeffrey Gibson’s work, such as history, politics, culture, and music.

“Jeffrey Gibson’s art is fearless yet playful. His wide-ranging mind transforms myriad influences into provocative work that defies categorization,” says Barbara Brotherton, Curator of Native American Art. “With Gibson, more is more,” adds Catharina Manchanda, Jon & Mary Shirley Curator of Modern & Contemporary Art. “His work is visually and conceptually exhilarating, full of nuance and complexity. Be prepared for a mind-altering experience.”

A 144-page exhibition catalogue (including 106 color illustrations) published by Denver Art Museum and Prestel will be available for purchase in SAM Shop ($39.95). Also titled Jeffrey Gibson: Like a Hammer (ISBN: 978-3-7913-5733-1), it presents six essays on themes found in the artist’s work by Glenn Adamson, Roy Boney Jr., Anne Ellegood, America Meredith, Sara Raza, and John P. Lukavic, the Andrew W. Mellon Curator of Native Arts at the Denver Art Museum, who curated the exhibition and also edited the catalogue. Like a Hammer also features an interview with the artist by Jen Mergel.

Jeffrey Gibson: Like a Hammer is organized by the Denver Art Museum. The exhibition premiered at the Denver Art Museum (May 13, 2018–August 12, 2018) and then traveled to the Mississippi Museum of Art (September 8, 2018 – January 20, 2019). After SAM, its heads to the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art (June 7–September 14, 2019).

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