Malcolm Mooney Exhibition @ Ulrick, NYC - WORKS: 1970–1986

Malcolm Mooney 

WORKS: 1970–1986 

Ulrick, New York

May 26 – July 2, 2022 

WORKS: 1970–1986 is MALCOLM MOONEY’s first solo exhibition in New York in eleven years.

Malcolm Mooney produced his first geometric works in 1970 as set designs for a theater play titled “Harlem Angel,” which was never actually staged. The motif, however, would prove highly productive for Malcolm Mooney. Shortly after he began work on a series of eponymous silk screens at his father’s print shop in Yonkers, New York. He describes the origin of these pieces as developed from an image of kente cloth viewed under a microscope.

This image continued to inform his paintings and drawings of grids throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Malcolm Mooney’s interest evolved further through his encounter with the 1972 exhibition “African Textiles and Decorative Arts” at the Museum of Modern Art, his friendship with textile curator and shopkeeper Sara Penn as well as his own work in the mechanical processes of textile design.

From experiments with utilitarian objects to stage and lighting design, from graphic design to work with textiles, clothing, and even runway shows, there persists an ongoing migration between the applied and “high art” in Malcolm Mooney’s work which intentionally cross-pollinates both.

The metaphoric potential of darkness and shadow is another theme which appears throughout Malcolm Mooney’s work, as is the case in The Abyss, Space in the Night, from 1974. Originally one of Mooney’s early grid works, it has been almost entirely painted over, cloaking the image in a diaphanous black cloud.

In the same years that minimalists and conceptualists were developing an approach to the grid as an airless, puritanical matrix, Malcolm Mooney's grids were building from an investment in color and tactility, as well as design and craft tradition.

MALCOLM MOONEY (b. 1944 in Yonkers) is an artist, poet, singer and lyricist. He is currently based in Calgary, Canada. He received an MFA from California State University, and a BFA from Boston University’s School of Fine Arts and Applied Arts. Malcolm Mooney has exhibited his work over the past five decades. Solo and group exhibitions of his work include Winterfest, Aspen Art Museum, Aspen (2021), curated by Saim Demircan, as well as White Room, White Columns, New York (2011), organized by Matthew Higgs. Malcolm Mooney is currently an instructor of painting at Alberta University of the Arts.

ULRIK

453 W 17 St, New York, NY 10011

www.ulrik.nyc

Ernesto Neto @ Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, NYC - Between Earth and Sky

Ernesto Neto: Between Earth and Sky

Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York

May 14 - June 16, 2022

Since the 1990s Ernesto Neto has created a distinct body of work— an ongoing formal inquiry into space, volume, balance, and gravity that is equally informed by sensuality, energy, and spirituality. Drawing on biomorphism, Arte Povera and Minimalist sculpture, along with Neo-concretism and other Brazilian vanguard movements of the 1960s and 1970s, Ernesto Neto’s work incorporates organic shapes and materials that engage all five senses. He is inspired by a wide range of sources– from Brazilian avant-garde artists such as Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Clark, through the Modernist abstraction of Alexander Calder and Constantin Brancusi, to the natural world, shamanism and craft culture.

earthtreelifelove in the downstairs gallery is the culmination of Ernesto Neto’s ongoing exploration of the relationship between humans and the environment as inseparable entities. The cotton crochet carpet is made with spiral formations that represent the earth and the ocean, and the top of the sculpture represents the sky and leaves falling from a tree, highlighting the cycle of nature. Viewers are able to take off their shoes, lie down on the carpet and gaze up to experience a moment of meditation and contemplate their connection with the natural world. In Steps and Leaves, over 520 knotted cotton formations are attached directly to the surrounding walls in the main gallery, representing human steps moving through the earth. Combining his signature biomorphic shapes, and using weight and gravity to dictate form, Neto creates an alluring environment of color, texture, and smell that collapses the distance between viewer and artwork, and human and nature.

On the second floor, Ernesto Neto has created a sculptural garden beneath the skylight that is comprised of spices, mulch, pebbles, soil, and plants. Ernesto Neto will invite the public to plant the garden in a special presentation, where visitors can connect with the natural environment and one another. Surrounded by an outline of bricks and crochet forms, Neto has created a sanctuary in which the plants can thrive. In the project room, new drawings and smaller sculptures are on display. Neto fills handknit crochet puffs with an array of spices and lays them on the ground so that the spices seep through and create patterns that resemble sun rays on the floor. In the drawing, Ernesto Neto takes a crochet sculpture filled with spices and throws it onto the paper to create the shape of the sun. By producing a trace of this action, Ernesto Neto challenges the static nature of sculpture and draws a connection between the human body and his work. 

Among the most influential artists of his generation, Ernesto Neto has become known for his immersive environments of vibrant color, fragrance and sound, and for his use of natural materials. While investigating the properties of the natural world, Ernesto Neto's work also functions as models of the social environment, creating new architectural settings that investigate scale and radically redefine the boundaries between the artwork and the viewer. 

Born in 1964 in Rio de Janeiro, the artist continues to live and work in Brazil. He studied at the city’s MAM Museum of Modern Art at Rio de Janeiro in 1984 through 1986, and also attended Escola de Artes Visuais do Parque Lage in 1987.

Ernesto Neto's work has been the subject of major museum exhibitions worldwide, including: SunForceOceanLife at The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2021), Mentre la vita ci respira at GAMeC, Bergamo, Italy (2021), Water Falls from the Breast to the Sky at Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago (2020), Ernesto Neto: Sopro (Blow) at Pinacoteca, São Paulo (traveled to Malba, Museum of Latin American Art, Buenos Aires, Argentina; Palacio de La Moneda Cultural Center, Santiago, Chile) (2019), Ernesto Neto: Rui Ni / Voices of the Earth at KUNSTEN Museum of Modern Art Aalborg, Denmark (2016), Ernesto Neto: Boa at Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki, Finland (2016), Ernesto Neto: Mother Body Emotional Densities, For Alive Temple Time Baby Son at MCA San Diego (2015), Ernesto Neto: Haux Haux at Arp Museum Bahnof Rolandseck, Germany (2014), Ernesto Neto: Gratitude at Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, CO (2014), Ernesto Neto: The body that carries me at Guggenheim, Bilbao, Spain (2014), Ernesto Neto: Madness is Part of Life at Espace Louis Vuitton, Tokyo (2012), Ernesto Neto: Cuddle on the Tightrope at Nasher Sculpture Center (2012), Ernesto Neto at Faena Arts Center in Buenos Aires, which traveled to Estação Leopoldina in Rio de Janeiro (2011-2012), Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre in London (2010) Museum of Modern Art in New York (2010), Ernesto Neto: Intimacy at Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art in Oslo (2010), Dengo at Sao Paulo Museum of Modern Art (2010), Ernesto Neto - Mentre niente accade/ while nothing happens at Museo d'Arte Contemporanea Roma in Italy (2008), Ernesto Neto at Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia (2002), Directions-Ernesto Neto, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. (2002), among others. 

His work has also been featured in numerous group exhibitions and biennials, most recently the 14th Biennale de Lyon, curated by Emma Lavigne (2017). In 2001 he represented Brazil at the 49th Venice Biennale, and in 2017 Neto was prominently featured in Vive Arte Viva at the 57th Venice Biennale curated by Christine Macel. Neto has been included in major group shows at Guggenheim Bilbao, Albright Knox Art Gallery, and Centre Pompidou-Metz. In summer 2018, a large installation, GaiaMotherTree was successfully shown at the Zurich train station, in collaboration with Fondation Beyeler, with a month-long corresponding public and education program that took place inside the work.

Ernesto Neto’s work is well represented in international museum collections, including those of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Tate Gallery in London, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, Museum Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam, Centre Pompidou in Paris, Hara Museum in Tokyo, Contemporary Art Center of Inhotim in Brazil, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., Milwaukee Art Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, among many others.

TANYA BONAKDAR GALLERY

521 West 21st Street, New York, NY 10011

www.tanyabonakdargallery.com

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Common Ground: UCCA 15th Anniversary Patrons Collection Exhibition @ UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing

Common Ground: UCCA 15th Anniversary Patrons Collection Exhibition

UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing

April 16 - July 3, 2022

Opening a season of celebration of UCCA’s fifteenth anniversary, this exhibition, drawn from the collections of UCCA patrons, includes nearly 100 works by 53 Chinese and international artists/groups. Grouped into sections on the fluidity of landscape, individual subjectivity, the instability of tradition, the power of the image, and the legacy of conceptualism, it surveys trends and offers perspectives on Chinese and global contemporary art.

This year marks the fifteenth anniversary of UCCA’s opening to the public, as well as the tenth anniversary of its individual giving program. A series of special programs has been planned in celebration of this milestone, beginning with the large-scale group show “Common Ground: UCCA 15th Anniversary Patrons Collection Exhibition.” Curated by members of the UCCA curatorial team from the extensive collections of members of the UCCA Foundation Council, the exhibition showcases nearly 100 works by 53 Chinese and international artists/groups that reflect recent trends in contemporary art. Divided into five sections—“The Fluid Landscape,” “Epiphany of the Individual,” “Whose Tradition,” “Images and Forgetting,” and “Rethinking the Conceptual”—“Common Ground” seeks to situate these works within the historical contexts of their making and the current narratives of contemporary art, while opening up new lines of inquiry.

In keeping with its founding mission, UCCA has actively shaped and witnessed the development of contemporary art in China since its opening in 2007, growing to become the institution we know today. In 2012, the UCCA Patrons Council was founded, the first program of its kind among art museums in China. This program has matured into a community of like-minded supporters who together enable UCCA to present a diverse and substantive exhibition program to ever larger audiences across three venues. In turn, UCCA has furnished its patrons, many of whom are art collectors themselves, with a platform for dialogue and study.

“We are delighted to begin a season of anniversary celebrations by looking to the connections between UCCA’s most devoted group of supporters and the contemporary art scene we are all together committed to creating. In addition to showing great art, UCCA has always been committed to forging new models of institutional practice. Now as ever, the special interplay between artists and UCCA’s patrons, teams, and visitors creates a ‘Common Ground’ on which we can all come together,” notes UCCA Director and CEO Philip Tinari.

Situating works collected by members of the UCCA Foundation Council (the highest tier of UCCA’s individual giving program) within current narratives of contemporary art, the curatorial team, led by Guo Xi, has structured the exhibition in five sections. The opening section, “The Fluid Landscape,” curated by Ara Qiu, looks at landscape as a dynamic medium. The landscape has long been portrayed in art as an object endowed with aesthetic significance, and continues to evolve in meaning to this day. From the reconstruction of natural landscapes on a universal or atmospheric scale—as in the works by artist such as Cui Jie, Jake Longstreth, Liu Xiaodong, Liu Wei, Zhang Enli, and Zhao Yao—to bird’s-eye views of manmade megastructures and the depiction of inner landscapes shaped by the symbolic projection of emotions, the works in this section explore how the significance of landscapes is constantly shifting as they become enmeshed with our cultural and social constructs. In viewing these works, viewers might come to ask, might curiosity and self-reflection grant us access to a beautiful and secluded clearing of our own?

Turning towards the interior, “Epiphany of the Individual,” curated by Yan Fang, focuses on affect and spirituality within artworks, featuring works by artists representing different countries and eras including Qiu Xiaofei, Jia Aili, William Kentridge, Ma Qiusha, Jörg Immendorff, and Yu Hong. These pieces take off from the artists’ respective historical backgrounds, cultural contexts, and individual experiences, conveying their concerns and aspirations for the fate of humankind. Collectively, the works in this section pose the question: Can art once again taken up a seemingly ancient responsibility of helping people to, through concrete experiences and emotions, trace out, reread, and spiritually transcend the progression of history folded within complex temporalities?

The next section, “Whose Tradition” curated by Neil Zhang, features works by artists caught in the gap between globalization and cultural specificity. As the development of contemporary art paralleled the rise of globalization and postcolonialism, artists in this section such as Liang Yuanwei, Ji Dachun, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Akira Yamaguchi, Shi Xinji, and Sun Xun reflect on the ostensibly binary opposition between the classical and the contemporary through the form and content of their works, while interrogating whose tradition is ultimately at stake in the struggle and pursuit of cultural identity.

Likewise in a critical look at the present, “Images and Forgetting,” curated by Bian Ka, assembles works by artists including Beeple, Li Songsong, Shi Chong, Yang Fudong, Zhang Ding, and Zhang Xiaogang. Under markedly divergent circumstances from the past, today, images are shaped by the trends of globalization and financialization and authenticated by encryption. This section centers on the primacy of images to examine the concepts of “new” and “old” in images, as well as the meaning of images as they become complicated by human memories and knowledge. What new meanings have been imputed upon artists and images along with the development of our times and changes in our knowledge of the world?

Finally, “Rethinking the Conceptual,” curated by Luan Shixuan, returns to a discussion of the art of the concept itself. Since the first wave of conceptual art in America in the late 1960s, contemporary art has undergone a shift in its forms, styles, and media. Through the works of artists such as Dahn Vo, Barbara Kruger, Song Dong, Shu Qun, Qu Shanzhuan, and Wang Guangyi, this section studies the rich lineage of conceptual art across eras, regions, and cultures to explore the subtle tensions within this field, surveying the various creative strategies and development of conceptual art. 

Participating artists: Doug Aitken, Danielle Orchard, Tony Oursler, Stephan Balkenhol, Beeple, Chen Fei, Chen Wenji, Cui Jie, Hao Jingfang & Wang Lingjie, Danh Vo, Hoo Mojong, Hu Xiaoyuan, Ji Dachun, Jia Aili, Anne Collier, Barbara Kruger, William Kentridge, Jake Longstreth, Li Songsong, Liang Yuanwei, Liu Xiaodong, Liu Wei, Liu Wei, Liu Ye, Ma Qiusha, Victor Man, Giuseppe Penone, Hilary Pecis, Qiu Xiaofei, Wilhelm Sasnal, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Akira Yamaguchi, Shi Chong, Shi Xinji, Shu Qun, Song Dong, Sun Xun, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Cy Twombly, Inga Svala Thórsdóttir, Wang Guangyi, Wang Jianwei, Wang Qiang, Wu Shanzhuan, Yang Fudong, Yang Xinguang, Jörg Immendorff, Yu Hong, Yu Ji, Zhang Enli, Zhang Ding, Zhang Xiaogang, Zhao Yao.

UCCA Center for Contemporary Art

798 Art District, No. 4 Jiuxianqiao Lu, Chaoyang District, Beijing

ucca.org.cn

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Ines Sederholm @ Galerie Forsblom, Helsinki - Coexistence

Ines Sederholm: Coexistence

Galerie Forsblom, Helsinki

6 May - 5 june 2022

Ines Sederholm (b. 1991) belongs to a younger generation of artists with a background in street art who have become established in the gallery world. Her characteristic style is illustrative with bright colors and bold graphic patterns. The exhibition at Galerie Forsblom combines Ines Sederholm's older production - now on display in Finland for the first time - with new works that originated. At the same time, the artist lived in the French Alps.

Ines Sederholm spent 2018-2020 living in Chamonix in the French Alps, where the pace of life follows the rhythm of nature. Living in an alpine village with only a few thousand inhabitants is a grounding experience but also electrifying and even perilous in extreme conditions. The works in Ines Sederholm’s new show are based on sketches from her Chamonix notebooks, which depict Chamonix’s avian community and chronicle the vicissitudes, perils, and surprises of alpine life. Her work exudes a palpable tension born of the artist’s love of the Alps and simultaneous longing to return to the dynamic pace of city life. This paradoxical state is captured by juxtaposing organic forms and natural materials with the shiny surfaces and metallic sheen of urban street art.

The Marine-themed paintings on display in the exhibition are from 2018. Ines Sederholm’s starting point was the relationship between humankind and the oceans. She illuminates the environmental problems we currently face due to human impact: the warming and acidification of the oceans, coral reef bleaching, plastic pollution, and the consequences of deep-sea oil drilling. Her work also comments on eradicating marine species, food chains, and entire ecosystems. While the paintings are thematically profound, their execution is playful and detailed. Sharp black lines meander across the surface, and various animals with curious eyes appear as melting ice floes, plastic bottles, and garbage are floating in the background. The paintings' titles are short poems and offer an idea of what the artist wishes to convey and unlock the viewer’s interpretations regarding each piece.

Ines Sederholm is supported by the Arts Promotion Center Finland.

GALERIE FORSBLOM

Yrjönkatu 22 - 00120 Helsinki

www.galerieforsblom.com

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Vera Lutter @ Alfonso Artiaco, Naples - Between Then and Now

Vera Lutter: Between Then and Now

Alfonso Artiaco, Naples

May 9 - June 25, 2022

For her third solo show at the Alfonso Artiaco gallery, VERA LUTTER has developed a path from her most iconic photographic series to her latest projects.

Her photographs are made using the antiquated camera obscura process in which a large room, a shipping container, or even a small wooden box replaces the photographic device we normally think of as a camera. Each image requires long exposure times and is imprinted directly on photo sensitive paper, causing the image to be not only a negative of its subject but also a unique piece that testifies to the permanence of time passed and the slow passage of light across its subjects.

The exhibition includes 17 black and white works: not a retrospective but, as the title suggests, an extensive journey through the most significant works realized "between yesterday and today." It is no coincidence that some works from the New York series are included, with strong, recognizable subjects from the architecture of the Big Apple and its unique metropolitan landscapes to the impressive view of the MOMA sculpture garden as well as the Chrysler and Grace buildings.

In the gallery’s largest room are five pieces from the artist’s body of work created at LACMA in Los Angeles on the occasion of her solo exhibition Museum in the Camera (2021). In this series, Lutter shifts her focus from architecture to the artworks in the LACMA collection, photographing them over her two-year residency at the museum. Vera Lutter made photographs of paintings by artists such as Jackson Pollock and Georges de la Tour, as well as artifacts ranging from African statues to the Hindu God Vishnu, these already remarkable artworks are then recontextualized through Vera Lutter’s process in ethereal and timeless black and white tones.

And Vera Lutter has also given much attention to Italy: “It feels – says the artist - as though Italy were ingrained into my DNA. Early childhood memories take me to Rome and Sienna, to the Duomo of Milano and the Amphitheater in Verona. Italy remained a place I returned to all my life. The ancient sites, be they Greek, Roman, Byzantine or Etruscan resonate with my heart and speak to me of that Europe thousands of years old. A place of fluctuating boarders, cultures and peoples. What captures me most is what I eventually wish to preserve in an image. This exhibition presents some of my attempts to render, revisit and capture such sites”.

On display the first works made during her stay in Naples, unusual views of the city and the archaeological sites of Pozzuoli.

Two rooms are dedicated to Rome.The artist, with her camera obscura, photographed a suggestive view of Piazza del Popolo and then turned her lens-less camera onto the unique architecture of the Pantheon, photographing outside and, with three different views and exposures, inside.

The exhibition is completed by a work from Vera Lutter’s most recent series, taken at the Acropolis in Athens. This project continues to demonstrate the artist's versatility and her ability to make universally recognized subjects feel unique.

VERA LUTTER was born in Kaiserslautern, Germany, in 1960. She lives and works in New York. Her work has been featured in group and solo exhibitions at recognized institutions including the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Dia:Beacon, Beacon; Kunsthalle, Basel; MoMA, New York; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Her photographs are part of the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the MoMA, The National Gallery of Art, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, among others.

ALFONSO ARTIACO

Piazzetta Nilo n.7 - 80134 Napoli

www.alfonsoartiaco.com

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Linus Bill + Adrien Horni @ Ellen de Bruijne Projects, Amsterdam - Midlife Painting

Linus Bill + Adrien Horni 

Midlife Painting 

Ellen de Bruijne Projects, Amsterdam 

May 11 – June 18, 2022 

Linus Bill + Adrien Horni’s Studio

Photo courtesy of Ellen de Bruijne Projects

There is always more than meets the eye in the work of the artist duo LINUS BILL + ADRIEN HORNI (both b. 1982, CH). What is seemingly a conventionally looking abstract painting bears extensive processes of transformation, revaluation, and experimentation that subvert painting itself. Despite their appearance, it could be argued that their works resemble paintings, yet they are not. Rather, they are images in perpetual modification which, among different processes, have been painted on. As a matter of fact, Linus Bill + Adrien Horni do not consider themselves painters: Bill studied photography, while Horni is trained a graphic designer. Nonetheless, they chose painting as their medium since they first started working together in 2011. In their continuous quest to repurpose and expand their work, Midlife Painting is the result of an intuitive revaluation of existing images in which the circumstance of failure leads to success.

For this solo presentation, the artists are presenting a series of “paintings” that were put aside in their studio throughout the years for not being convincing enough but nevertheless having material value. Recently, the artists turned back to those works with a desire to revise them in order to achieve better versions. Not working for an actual exhibition gave them the freedom of not needing a result. No need to succeed was very liberating: they would work outside, in front of the studio, on the floor, putting them aside to dry and look at them another day and decide whether or not to keep working on them. By interfering in try-outs and rejected works digitally and materially, their artistic practice is in constant motion and revision. To repeat, to alter, to modify, to layer, to transfer: a shifting interaction that destabilises romantic notions of painting and responds to a society where reality is pictorially altered at all times.

Linus Bill + Adrien Horni’s practice is liberated from technical burdens and schematic behaviours. They work in a rather visceral way, without a clear result in mind. Laying on their studio floor, the works present themselves as canvases ready to be altered throughout an indefinite stretch of time. There is no rush, precision and satisfaction do not come hastened, just like an artistic practice as a duo requires a suiting pace for conversation, (dis)agreement, and cross-pollination. That is not to say their practice is left to randomness. In reality, the presence of chance in their work is the result of a conscientious approach to replicate how in the digital world images are replicated, appropriated, deformed, and repurposed.

Interested in stripping bare the artistic and its traditional notions of originality, genius, and uniqueness, they create by multiplying images, in a most digitally common action of copy/paste, to afterwards merge them layer upon layer. Avoiding the art world’s diligent formula for creation - documentation - distribution, the artists approach their own process as their commissions to efficiently reproduce their own piece. The process of choosing and (re)making a painting requires a formula of action and reaction, of tossing the digital image to one another, of swapping works which to work on, to ultimately amalgamate all the interventions into a final result. Yet the work keeps on living, ready to be given another look, to be transformed yet again.

Both born in 1982, one in Geneva (CH) and the other in Jegenstorf (CH), Adrien Horni and Linus Bill live and work in Biel, Switzerland. Linus Bill + Adrien Horni were the winners of the Swiss Art Award in 2013. Recent presentations of their work include La fine ligne. Kunsthalle Saint Gallen, Saint Gallen, CH (2020), Un été indien. FRAC Normandie-Caen, Caen, FR (2020), Cantonale Berne Jura. La Nef, Le Noirmont, CH (2019), Linus Bill + Adrien Horni. La Salle de Bains, Lyon, FR (2018), Das Glied. ACRUSH, Zurich, CH (2018).

ELLEN DE BRUIJNE PROJECTS

Singel 372, 1016 AH, Amsterdam

www.edbprojects.com

Anita Steckel @ Ortuzar Projects Gallery, NYC - My Town

Anita Steckel: My Town

Ortuzar Projects, New York

May 17 – July 16, 2022

Ortuzar Projects presents Anita Steckel: My Town, the artist’s first solo exhibition in New York since 2013. An artist, teacher, feminist, and satirist, Anita Steckel (b. 1930, Brooklyn; d. 2012, New York) experimented liberally across media—from pencil and oil to collage, photomontage, silkscreen, Xerox, assemblage sculpture, and poetry—in an exploration of the sexism of Western art history and the prudishness of postwar American society. The exhibition presents her best known works from the late 1960s through the early 70s, which address taboo notions of female pleasure and eroticism, as well as her lesser-known, earlier drawings and paintings.

A lifelong New Yorker, much of Anita Steckel’s work reflects on women’s experience of modernity set within the urban landscape. Drawing upon popular culture, politics, and her own biography, Steckel developed her uniquely sardonic voice amongst the thriving downtown scene of the 1950s and 60s in close dialogue with fellow collagists such as Allen Ginsberg, Ray Johnson, Stan VanDerBeek, and Sari Dienes. In an intimate series of works from the 1960s, Anita Steckel explores the division between the public-facing roles women were expected to perform and the rich complexity of their interior lives. In The Big Rip-Up (1964) she overpaints a black-and-white photograph of herself as a teenager, her youthful yet deliberate gaze out towards the viewer subsumed by a copulating crowd of nude bodies and contorted faces rendered in graphite, her right eye bloodshot and crying a technicolor stream of tears. In a series of works on paper, which were included in her first solo exhibition in 1961, she creates Rorschach tests by folding papers blotted with brown ink, out of which she draws ghoulish expressions. In oil paintings made in the second half of the decade, outlines of women’s profiles are filled with kaleidoscopic arrays of nude forms, whose bodies swirl across the canvas like thoughts going through one’s head. Appearing both claustrophobic and anxious, sensuous and seemingly carefree, Anita Steckel’s women give form to the tension between the only burgeoning women’s liberation movement and the still pervasive constraints of patriarchy.

In Giant Women on New York (c. 1969–74), female colossus tower over spaces typically ruled by social decorum. While initially painted, Steckel later adorned these work with her own face in an innovative use of photomontage and self representation. The works vary from bitingly political–such as in Murder by Church Sanctioned Illegal Abortion, in which she is crucified within what appears to be Saint Patrick’s Cathedral–and humorous, such as in another simply titled Subway, in which she sits topless between two men, masturbating herself with one hand and the man to her right with the other. Inspired by her regular exposure to flashers on the subway as a teen, these playful yet divisive works were met with great fanfare when first shown at the Kozmopolitan Gallery in 1969. In her next body of work, the monumental New York Skyline series (1970–80), silkscreened views of the city are overpainted with dancing and distraught bodies, a sphinx, and fluid-spurting penises and breasts, giving form to the vivid libidinal landscape that resides within the visible architectural one.

When Anita Steckel showed these works in a 1972 solo exhibition at Rockland Community College, pointedly titled The Feminist Art of Sexual Politics, she was met with impassioned debate around her work’s perceived eroticism, with calls from local politicians to close the show on the grounds of obscenity. Spurring support from the university community, critics, curators, and fellow artists who argued that the shock value of her images was a fundamental part of their artistic merit and intellectual power, Steckel rallied female colleagues—including Louise Bourgeois, Judith Bernstein, Martha Edelheit, Juanita McNeely, Joan Semmel, and Hannah Wilke—to form the Fight Censorship group to protest institutional double standards. “If the erect penis is not wholesome enough to go into museums,” Steckel wrote in the group’s manifesto, “it should not be considered wholesome enough to go into women.” With her work collected by many notable second wave feminists (including Gloria Steinem, Flo Kennedy, Honor Moore and Ti Grace Atkinson), Steckel nonetheless complicated the prevailing push toward’s women’s autonomy from men, instead placing the emphasis on women’s ownership of their own pleasure, regardless of whether men are involved. A pioneering but long overlooked figure, Anita Steckel’s early work provides insight into her nuanced perspective and exemplary draftsmanship, which remain foundational to her more sensational and incisive feminist critiques.

ANITA STECKEL studied at Cooper Union and Alfred University, as well as the Art Students League of New York, where she taught from 1984 until her death. Since 1970 she lived at Westbeth Artists’ Housing in the West Village. She was recently the subject of solo exhibitions at the Stanford Art Gallery, Stanford (2022), curated by art historians Rachel Middleman and Richard Meyer, and at Hannah Hoffman Gallery, Los Angeles (2021). Previous exhibitions include Legal Gender: The Irreverent Art of Anita Steckel, Jacki Headley Art Gallery, California State University, Chico and Verge Center for the Arts, Sacramento (2018); Anita of New York, The Suzanne Geiss Company, New York (2013); Anita Steckel and Friends, Westbeth Gallery, New York (2012); and Mom Art: 1963–1965, Mitchell Algus Gallery, New York (2008). Her work featured in the recent institutional exhibitions Maskulinitäten, Bonner Kunstverein, Germany (2019); Cock, Paper, Scissors, ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives, Los Angeles (2016); Black Sheep Feminism: The Art of Sexual Politics, Dallas Contemporary (2016); and Identity Crisis: Authenticity, Attribution and Appropriation, The Heckscher Museum of Art, Huntington, NY (2011). She was the recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2005), a National Endowment for the Arts grant (1983), and a MacDowell Fellowship (1966). Her work is in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum, New York; Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania; Edwin A. Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita State University, Kansas; Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts; and Verbund Collection, Vienna, among others.

ORTUZAR PROJECTS

9 White Street, New York, NY 10013

www.ortuzarprojects.com

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Mel Bochner Drawings: A Retrospective @ Art Institute of Chicago

Mel Bochner Drawings: A Retrospective

Art Institute of Chicago

April 23 — August 22, 2022

At the forefront of Conceptual Art since the 1960s, MEL BOCHNER (American, born 1940) has produced works in almost every medium—painting, photography, sculpture, prints, and books—yet drawing has always been foundational to his practice. On view at the Art Institute of Chicago, Mel Bochner Drawings: A Retrospective is the first show of the artist’s work to use drawing as its principal organizing focus. Nearly 90 works, including several from the museum’s collection of Bochner’s earliest drawings, have been brought together to highlight all phases of the artist’s career.

Spanning traditional techniques on paper in ink, pencil, and charcoal; oil paint on newspaper; wall drawings in powder pigment; and even stones arranged on the floor, Mel Bochner’s pioneering works helped to redefine traditional boundaries of drawing. Often subversive and imbued with the artist’s signature sense of humor, they coax the viewer into comprehending what they mean.

“The materiality of a drawing is central to its meaning,” Mel Bochner has remarked. “Every medium reveals something but hides something else. A change of mediums can reveal what was hidden, permitting new thoughts to emerge.” 

In challenging any rigid definition of drawing, Mel Bochner and his work have insistently asked the question, “What isn’t a drawing?” The exhibition celebrates this question as it explores Mel Bochner’s central themes of language, numbers, measurement, shape, and visual perception, illuminating his evolving ideas about seriality, temporality, and the slippage between word and image.

Curator Kevin Salatino adds, “We are delighted to present the first comprehensive retrospective of Mel Bochner’s drawing practice, which spans nearly sixty years and draws heavily from his personal collection. Many works in the show have never left the artist’s studio and will be seen by the public for the very first time.”

Mel Bochner Drawings: A Retrospective is curated by the Art Institute’s Kevin Salatino, chair and Anne Vogt Fuller and Marion Titus Searle Curator, Prints and Drawings, and Emily Ziemba, director of curatorial administration, Prints and Drawings. 

ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO

111 South Michigan Avenue, Chicago, IL 60603

www.artic.edu

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