Jean-Pierre Sudre @ Gitterman Gallery, NYC

Jean-Pierre Sudre

Gitterman Gallery, New York

September 11 - November 9, 2019

Gitterman Gallery presents vintage photographic work from the 1960s-1970s by Jean-Pierre Sudre (1921–1997). 

A masterful technician in the darkroom, Jean-Pierre Sudre was enamored by the wonders of nature and the possibilities of photography. In the late 1950s his began to employ and create innovative techniques to amplify the abstract and visualize the building blocks of nature. This exhibition features these abstractions which exemplify his wonderment as well as his spiritual and metaphysical concerns.

His investigation began in the early 1950s photographing the dense forest floor. These photographs emphasize the infinite textures and patterns of nature. In the late 1950s and early 1960s his explorations turned toward the micro, creating crystals on glass plates that he would use as "negatives." On many of these prints Sudre employed the Mordançage technique, which he invented based on a late nineteenth century process known as etch-bleach.

Mordançage solution includes hydrogen peroxide, acetic acid and copper chloride. Once a fully processed gelatin silver print is put into the Mordançage solution, the darkest areas of the image (the areas with the greatest silver content) swell and soften. Sudre would then wipe them away leaving a relief of the mid-tones and the highlights. Next, he would thoroughly wash the print and redevelop it. He used a variety of different developers in various solutions and often made his own photographic chemistry. He was able to achieve a range of colors from the various toners he used and by letting the developer oxidize. His dynamic and expressive use of color became an integral part of his work.

Jean-Pierre Sudre was born in Paris in 1921. He studied at l’Ecole Nationale de Photographie et de Cinématographie and at l’Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques. Due to the limited opportunities in cinema, Sudre decided to become a professional photographer. Growing up, his family owned a property surrounded by woods; it was there that he became entranced by nature. In addition to his commitment to his own work, Sudre was an influential teacher in both traditional and experimental photography. He created the photographic department at the School of Graphic Art in Paris. In 1974 Jean-Pierre Sudre and his wife Claudine, a fine photographer and printer in her own right, moved to Lacoste and opened a research center, later named the Association for Professional Training and Research in Photography, where photographers would spend nine months immersed in photography.

During his lifetime Jean-Pierre Sudre's work was exhibited throughout Europe, including the Musée d'Art Moderne in Paris and the Palais de Beaux Arts in Brussels. He was featured in the Museum of Modern Art's exhibition A European Experiment in 1967 along with Denis Brihat and Pierre Cordier, an exhibition emphasizing color and texture and the physicality of photo-based work. Jean-Pierre Sudre’s work is represented in international institutional collections, including the Center for Creative Photography, Tucson; Cincinnati Art Museum; The Gernsheim Collection, University of Texas, Austin; The Morgan Library & Museum; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Princeton University Art Museum and the Saint Louis Art Museum; and the Victoria

& Albert Museum, London.

GITTERMAN GALLERY

41 East 57th Street, New York, NY 10022

www.gittermangallery.com

Mondrian figuratif @ Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris

Mondrian figuratif
Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris
12 septembre 2019 - 26 janvier 2020

PIET MONDRIAN

Dévotion, 1908

© Kunstmuseum Den Haag, The Hague, the Netherlands

La peinture figurative de Piet Mondrian (1872-1944) est longtemps restée méconnue. Pourtant, celui qui se distingue aujourd’hui comme le plus important collectionneur de l’artiste, Salomon Slijper (1884-1971) s’est passionné pour cet aspect longtemps oublié de son oeuvre. Ayant rencontré le maître aux Pays-Bas où il se réfugie pendant la Première Guerre mondiale, ce fils de diamantaire d’origine amstellodamoise réunit un ensemble unique de peintures et de dessins de l’artiste avec lequel il se lie d’amitié. Piet Mondrian procède lui-même à la sélection d’une suite représentative de sa production exécutée entre 1891 et 1918, enrichissant l’ensemble de quelques pièces abstraites ultérieures ; les majorités des acquisitions ayant lieu entre 1916 et 1920. Le soutien que Slijper apporte au peintre est de taille. Plus encore, il change sa vie. A une époque où Piet Mondrian ne parvient pas à vivre de son travail et fait des copies au Rijksmuseum pour joindre les deux bouts, les achats en nombre de son récent mécène lui ouvrent de nouvelles perspectives et lui permettent de financer son retour à Paris en juin 1919.

PIET MONDRIAN

Moulin dans la clarté du soleil, 1908

© Kunstmuseum Den Haag, The Hague, the Netherlands

Le devenir de la collection de Salomon Slijper n’est pas sans rappeler l’héritage de Michel Monet qui est l’un des fleurons du musée Marmottan Monet. Comme le fils de l’impressionniste, Salomon Slijper est resté sans enfant. Comme ce dernier, Slijper a institué un musée – le Kunstmuseum de La Haye (anciennement Gemeentemuseum) – son légataire. Comme le fonds Monet présenté dans l’hôtel particulier de la rue Louis Boilly, la collection Slijper constitue le premier fonds mondial de l’oeuvre de l’artiste.

Musée de collectionneurs ayant vocation à apporter un éclairage sur le rôle des amateurs dans la vie des arts, le musée Marmottan Monet a noué un partenariat exceptionnel avec le Kunstmuseum de La Haye pour organiser une exposition totalement inédite rendant hommage à Salomon Slijper et au Mondrian figuratif à travers la présentation de peintures et de dessins majeurs provenant exclusivement de la collection de l’amateur. Dans cette exposition, ce sont près de soixante-dix Mondrian qui ornent les cimaises de l’institution parisienne. L’exposition se distingue par le nombre et la qualité des toiles estampillées chefs-d’oeuvre par le musée de La Haye. Des 67 Mondrian présentés, la moitié voyage pour la première fois à Paris. Les autres sont tout aussi rares : 12 % n’y ont pas séjourné depuis un demi-siècle, 20 % depuis près de 20 ans. Jamais vu à Paris depuis près d’une génération, l’accrochage crée en soi l’événement. Un événement unique à plus d’un titre puisque certaines pièces phares sont déplacées pour la dernière fois en raison de leur fragilité. C’est le cas de l’iconique Moulin dans la clarté du soleil (1908). L’exposition de Marmottan offre ainsi une ultime opportunité de le découvrir à Paris avant son interdiction définitive de prêt.

Composition N° IV (1914) est présenté en ouverture. Première oeuvre acquise par Salomon Slijper, elle est aussi l’une des exceptions jalonnant le parcours puisque purement abstraite. L’acquisition d’une peinture récente fut sans doute un pré requis pour mettre l’artiste en confiance. Piet Mondrian sera dès lors heureux de céder ses toiles « naturalistes » à Salomon Slijper qui s’impose sans délai comme son mécène le plus fidèle. Faisant pendant, un lièvre mort de 1891 souligne les liens qui unissent Piet Mondrian à la tradition hollandaise à travers le genre de la nature morte. Pièce la plus ancienne de l’exposition – le peintre n’a que 19 ans quand il la signe – elle ouvre le parcours qui suit : chronologique et à dominante figurative.

La première section regroupe des paysages peints entre 1898 et 1905. Ce sont des vues de la région du Gooi à l’est d’Amsterdam, où l’artiste et le mécène résident un temps et se fréquentent. Ces oeuvres qui décrivent des lieux connus des deux hommes illustrent les talents précoces de Piet Mondrian : dessinateur hors pair et maître du clair obscur. Les thèmes choisis tout autant que l’attention portée au rendu de l’atmosphère le rattache à l’école de La Haye. Il est encore un héritier des « classiques ». Pourtant, la rapidité de son évolution, son renouvellement ininterrompu frappent. Bien que le peintre se limite à quelques thèmes – le moulin, l’arbre, la ferme, la fleur et le portrait – aucune oeuvre ne se ressemble. Il se réinvente sans cesse. Ainsi, le parcours est-il placé sous le signe de la diversité, du contraste et de la surprise.

Considérant que « les couleurs de la nature ne peuvent être imitées sur la toile », Piet Mondrian aborde dès 1907 un tournant moderne privilégiant les aplats et les contrastes colorés poussés à l’extrême. Moulin dans le crépuscule (1907-1908) explore – à travers des registres aux tonalités franches : jaune, bleu, vert – une poétique de la peinture. Avec Bois près d’Oele (1908) l’artiste passe un nouveau cap. Lignes courbes, arabesques et couleurs irréelles confinent au mystique. Membre de l’association théosophique, Piet Mondrian se dépeint alors tel un illuminé. Trois autoportraits inédits le montrent à l’âge trente-six ans, cheveux longs, barbe noire et le regard pénétrant des êtres habités.

Dévotion (1908) témoigne par le biais du portrait d’enfant de la portée spirituelle de son oeuvre. Certaines des toiles les plus illustres du maître lui font face. Marquées par l’exemple des fauves et des divisionnistes Moulin dans le crépuscule, Dunes ou Arum (1908-1909) se font de plus en plus rayonnantes et vibrantes. Deux critères propres à définir la beauté d’une toile selon Piet Mondrian.

La spectaculaire église rose de Domburg (Clocher en Zélande, 1911) et le monumental Moulin rouge (1911) éclatant sur un fond bleu profond exaltent les couleurs pures vers 1911. La géométrisation des formes des deux monuments annonce l’abstraction. Au même moment, Piet Mondrian réinterprète d’ailleurs le cubisme de Braque et Picasso dont il adopte la palette ocre – gris comme le montrent Arbre gris (1911) et Paysage (1912).

Figuration et abstraction se font également face dans la section suivante. Trois exceptionnels grands formats représentant à l’huile et au fusain le moulin de Blaricum (1917) où réside Salomon Slijper et Ferme près de Duivendrecht (1916) reprenant un motif de jeunesse visible dans la première section tranchent avec trois toiles purement abstraites de 1914.

Terminant le parcours et en guise de conclusion, un autoportrait de Piet Mondrian posant devant une toile abstraite en damier (1918) fait face à une oeuvre du même genre : Composition avec grille 8 : composition en damier aux couleurs foncées (1919) que Salomon Slijper acquiert l’année de sa création. Les oeuvres se font écho autant qu’elles font contraste : les couleurs vives – rouges et bleus – étant réservées exclusivement à la peinture en damier tandis qu’un camaïeu de bruns suffit à la représentation « naturaliste » du peintre dans son atelier.

En épilogue, Composition, toile néoplasticiste de 1921 voisine avec six tableaux de fleurs exécutés entre 1918 et 1921 : chrysanthèmes, roses et arums. La juxtaposition de ces oeuvres achève de démontrer que l’évolution de Mondrian est plus complexe qu’il n’y paraît. Elle ne peut se définir comme un strict passage de la figuration à l’abstraction ou du noir à la couleur. Au contraire, le naturalisme reste et demeure une constante de l’oeuvre de Piet Mondrian, l’érigeant au rang – méconnu et pourtant essentiel – de grand maître de la peinture figurative du XXe siècle.

Commissariat de l'exposition : Marianne Mathieu, Directeur scientifique du musée Marmottan Monet.

MUSEE MARMOTTAN MONET
2 rue Louis-Boilly, 75016 Paris
www.marmottan.fr

Gladys Nilsson @ Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago - New Work

Gladys Nilsson: New Work

Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago

September 13 - November 2, 2019

“I’m not interested in classical beauty—or, I am interested in classical beauty, it’s just that my idea of classical beauty might  be completely different from someone else’s.”

—Gladys Nilsson

Rhona Hoffman Gallery presents its first exhibition with GLADYS NILSSON, one of the foremost Chicago artists of her generation and a member of the Hairy Who, the venerable group that came to prominence through a series of radical exhibitions at the Hyde Park Art Center on Chicago’s South Side in the late 1960s. Featuring paintings and works on paper made in the last five years, the exhibition highlights Gladys Nilsson’s continued experiments with form, color, and figuration.

The works on view range from large paintings on canvas to intimately scaled watercolors and collages. In sprawling canvases like Repose (2017) and Painting Nature (2018), Gladys Nilsson offers her signature spin on the central tenets of the Chicago Imagist style: distorted figuration, densely layered compositions, and an electric color palette. Meanwhile, smaller works on paper like those from the “Head on a Plate” series highlight Gladys Nilsson’s sense of humor and whimsy, incorporating a playful mix of figurative drawing, abstract washes, and collaged elements. Gladys Nilsson’s newest featured works, Out After Dark and Still Scape (both 2019), depict abstracted and obscured landscapes replete with references to the body.

In light of renewed awareness of the Imagists—thanks in part to the Art Institute of Chicago’s 2018 exhibition “Hairy Who? 1966–1969”—this exhibition offers a look at an artist who remains connected with her historical lineage but has never stopped developing her unique visual language.

GLADYS NILSSON BIOGRAPHY

Born in Chicago in 1940, Gladys Nilsson studied painting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She first came to prominence in 1966, when she joined five other recent Art Institute graduates (Jim Falconer, Art Green, Jim Nutt, Suellen Rocca, and Karl Wirsum) for the first of a series of group exhibitions called the Hairy Who. In 1973, she became one of the first women to have a solo-exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. In 1990, she accepted a teaching position at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she is now a professor.

Gladys Nilsson is known for her densely layered and meticulously constructed watercolors and collages. Like many of the Hairy Who artists, Nilsson employed a type of horror vacui; many of her works feel filled to the brim with winding, playful imagery. Her work often focuses on aspects of human sexuality and its inherent contradictions.

Since 1966, Gladys Nilsson’s work has been the subject of over 50 solo exhibitions, including sixteen at Phyllis Kind Gallery (1970–1979, 1981–1983, 1987, 1991, and 1994, Chicago and New York), and two at The Candy Store (1971 and 1987, Folsom, California). Her work has also been featured in many important museum exhibitions, such as: Human Concern/Personal Torment (1969, Whitney Museum of American Art); Who Chicago? (1981, Camden Art Center, London); Parallel Visions: Modern Artists and Outsider Art (1992, Los Angeles County Museum of Art); and Chicago Imagists (2011, Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Wisconsin); and What Nerve! Alternative Figures in American Art, 1960 to the Present (2014, Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence).

Gladys Nilsson’s work is featured in the collections of major museums around the world, including: the Art Institute of Chicago; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Morgan Library, New York; the Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Museum of Modern Art; the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Wisconsin; the Milwaukee Art Museum; and the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut.

RHONA HOFFMAN GALLERY

1711 West Chicago Avenue, Chicago, Illinois 60622

www.rhoffmangallery.com

Sarah Sze @ Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, NYC

Sarah Sze
Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York
September 5 — October 19, 2019

Tanya Bonakdar Gallery presents a solo exhibition with artist Sarah Sze at the gallery’s New York location. This is the artist’s third solo show with the gallery and her first exhibition in New York since 2015.

“In the age of the image, a painting is a sculpture.”
Sarah Sze (2019) 

“After the rupture, after the apocalypse, amid the ruin of cables and wires, someone might ask: what was the purpose of all of those images within and through which we lived?”
Zadie Smith “The Tattered Ruins of the Map” Sarah Sze: Centrifuge (2018)

For more than two decades, Sarah Sze’s work has defied the limitations of artistic media, employing with equal facility sculpture, installation, video, photography, printmaking and painting. Sze has been credited with dismantling and re-envisioning the very potential of objects, simultaneously celebrating the particular relevance of sculpture in contemporary visual culture, while also expanding its definition. However, her focus has been equally tuned to images, considering their materiality, transmutability, and ease of circulation in our increasingly digital existence. Originally trained as a painter, she has consistently looked through the lens of two-dimensionality, including color, line, form and image-making, to consider aspects of sculpture and installation.

Sarah Sze’s latest body of work frays “the seam between the real and the image” (Smith). Through complex constellations of objects and a proliferation of images, Sze expands upon the never- ending stream of visual narratives that we negotiate daily, from magazines and newspapers, television and iPhones, to cyberspace and outer space. The works evoke the generative and recursive process of image-making in a world where consumption and production are more interdependent, where the beginning of one idea is the ending of another—and where sculpture gives rise to images, and images to sculpture.

In this new exhibition, Sarah Sze expands her work by embedding her nuanced sculptural language into the material surfaces of painting and into the digital realm through the interplay of cloth, ink, wood, paper, metal, paint, found objects, light, sound and structural supports—collapsing distinctions between two, three and four dimensions. This body of work fundamentally alters our sense of time, place, and memory by transforming our experiences of the physical world around us. Both objects and images, Sze says, are “ultimately reminders of our own ephemerality”.

The exhibition is immediately visible on the gallery’s exterior storefront windows and fills both floors with an installation that utilizes all media and approaches to art making. On the lower level, the main space is filled with a Plato’s Cave of imagery, entitled Crescent (Timekeeper), which scatters out to the entryway, across the walls and onto floors. An immersive installation of light, sound, film, paintings and objects transforms our sense of materiality and the imaginary. Moving pictures, scenes, and flickering light surround viewers in loops of personal, researched and found scenes. The installation unfolds in fragments: a fire burns, a building collapses, a child sleeps, static image signals or “snow” overtakes a film clip mid-play. Sarah Sze splices together disparate content that viewers, upon moving through the space, edit together through the act of seeing and reading images to create their own narrative content in the work.

This interplay of images and content is juxtaposed on the first floor with a “studio space” filled with paintings and other visual elements, utilized by the artist in the making of the work itself. Here Sarah Sze debuts a layered painting process in which the medium functions as a portal into two- dimensional experimentation in time, space and memory. Traces of image-making techniques fuse and fade: silkscreen prints, collage, photographs and other elements mark the walls, suggesting the generative process of making in innumerable forms and the ways in which an image is burned into memory and unreliably persists, decaying over time.

In two galleries upstairs, painting, video, photography, sculpture likewise morph, with each assuming and absorbing the characteristics of other media and taking on new forms. Painting fills not only walls, but also the floor; paint is converted into a physical route laid on the floor plane and assumes the role of sculptural entity around which viewers maneuver physically. Sarah Sze further generates images of painting, and paintings of images that, in turn, are photographed, printed, recorded, and projected. Her sculpture generates images that are not only used in the paintings, but also fuel the video and installation in an endless feedback loop. Input and output feed the work in ways that confirm that the hierarchies of the originality no longer exist. Taken together, the intermingling of painting, sculpture, photography, video, and architecture become fertile ground for the process of seeing images in time and space—not unlike the way we experience them in the ever shifting, complex, material yet ephemeral world in which we exist.

SARAH SZE’s work has been the subject of major exhibitions worldwide, and in 2003 she was awarded the prestigious MacArthur fellowship. In 2013, she represented the United States at the 55th Venice Biennale with a presentation entitled Triple Point. Her work has also been presented in major solo exhibitions at Haus der Kunst, Munich, Germany (2017); Copenhagen Contemporary, Copenhagen, Denmark (2017); Rose Art Museum, Brandies University, Boston (2016); Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia (2014); Asia Society, New York (2011- 12); Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Newcastle, UK (2009); Malmo Konsthall, Malmo, Sweden (2006); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2003); Museum of Fine Arts Boston (2002); Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2002); Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (1999); Fondation Cartier, Paris (1999); and the Institute of Contemporary, London (1998).

In October 2019, Sarah Sze’s work will be featured in Surrounds: 11 Installations, a major group exhibition for the re-opening of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. In December 2019, Sarah Sze will have a solo exhibition at the Fondation Cartier in Paris, France.

Sarah Sze has completed major public commissions for New York's Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s 2nd Avenue subway line, 96th street station (2017), New York City’s High Line Park (2011-12), the Doris C. Freedman Plaza in New York City, organized by the Public Art Fund (2006), and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge (2004), and most recently for Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington (2019).

Her work is well represented in private and public collections worldwide, including Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Philadelphia Museum of Art; 21st Century Museum of Art, Kanazawa, Japan; Walker Art Center Minneapolis; Boston Museum of Fine Arts; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; National Gallery of Canada; Tate Collection, London; and the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art.

TANYA BONAKDAR GALLERY
521 West 21st Street New York, NY 10011
tanyabonakdargallery.com