Showing posts with label Chicago Imagists. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Chicago Imagists. Show all posts

25/10/23

IFPDA Print Fair 2023 Highlights - 30th anniversary edition - Javits Center, New York

IFPDA Print Fair 2023 Highlights
Javits Center, New York
October 26 – 29, 2023

The IFPDA Print Fair—the largest art fair in the world dedicated to prints and printmaking—announces the exhibitor and public programme’s highlights for its 30th anniversary edition.  In its strongest edition to date, the Fair will be welcoming over 90 exhibitors from 7 countries—from the world’s best print studios and dealers to renowned publishers—who will showcase over 550 years of printmaking, from Old Masters to contemporary works.
“Printmaking can be simultaneously one of the most democratic mediums and also create some of the rarest and most costly works of art,” said Jenny Gibbs, Executive Director of the IFPDA. “We are celebrating our 30th anniversary with programming that explores all facets of printmaking and connoisseurship, from Yashua Klos, with his take on Diego Rivera’s Detroit murals and the printmaking practice of Nuyorican artist/activist Juan Sanchez, to new scholarship from art historian Susan Dackerman on Albrecht Dürer’s fascination with the Islamic East and a highly anticipated conversation between Ed Ruscha and Christophe Cherix from MoMA. We are so thankful for our friends and cultural partners who worked with us to create this robust calendar of programs, both in-person at the fair and online for Print Month.”

“The IFPDA Print Fair is the annual, must-attend event for print curators and serious print collectors from all over the world. This year’s 30th anniversary edition features an extraordinary number of highly rare old master works alongside classic, iconic modern prints, drawings, and new discoveries by young artists,” said David Tunick, President of the IFPDA. “We’re also very excited to be offering public programming with distinguished speakers that complements the range of material on view.”
Julie Mehretu
Julie Mehretu  
Treatises on the Executed (from Robin’s Intimacy), 2022. 
10-panel etching/aquatint from 50 plates 93
1/2 x 173 1/8" (237.5 x 439.7 cm). Edition of 22. 
Image courtesy of Gemini G.E.L. at Joni Moisant Weyl

WOMEN IN PRINT

Over 20 exhibitors at the IFPDA Print Fair will showcase pioneering women printmakers from across time and around the world, with many artists who explore women’s identity and sexuality. David Zwirner will present recently published works by Hayley Barker and breakout artist Cynthia Talmadge, alongside upcoming new releases. The booth will also feature historical prints made by Ruth Asawa at the Tamarind Lithography Workshop. Hauser & Wirth exhibits a range of celebrated women artists including Amy Sherald, Louise Bourgeois, Nicole Eisenman, Mary Heilmann, and Jenny Holzer.

Gemini G.E.L. at Joni Moisant Weyl showcases Julie Mehretu’s Treatises on the Executed (from Robin’s Intimacy), a monumental etching comprising 10 panels. LeRoy Neiman Center for Print Studies, Harlan & Weaver, and Krakow Witkin Gallery will all present prints by Kiki Smith, one of the most influential artists of her generation, to exemplify how she stretched the printmaking medium in exciting new ways.

Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE) will show new groups of etchings by Marina Adams and Charline von Heyl, as each artist continues explorations in abstract forms, ranging from paper shape cutouts to dense layering applied to intaglio and relief printing. . In addition, ULAE will show Sarah Crowner’s debut lithograph editions. Marlborough Graphics will present Louise Bourgeois, whose work with printmaking allowed her to fully indulge in experimentation through the reworking and reprinting of plates. Gallery Neptune and Brown will be presenting Night Sky screenprints by Latvian-American artist Vija Celmins. 

Tamarind Institute will present a monotype by Danielle Orchard, who depicts women in their daily lives, painting their nails, washing thongs in the sink, alongside a five-lithograph series by Henni Alftan—a Paris-based artist known for her intimate depictions of hands, knitwear, hosiery and fur—and lithographs by Native American visual artist Jaune Quick-to-See-Smith.

José Clemente Orozco
José Clemente Orozco 
Image courtesy of Childs Gallery

MODERNISTS AND THEIR CONTEMPORARIES

Gemini G.E.L. at Joni Moisant Weyl—the famed Los Angeles print publisher—will spotlight a presentation of lithographs by Ellsworth Kelly in celebration of the artist’s centennial, alongside works by Richard Serra that exemplify his 50 years of collaborations with Gemini and a new series of prints by Frank Gehry. Childs Gallery will showcase works by American realist artist Edward Hopper and esteemed Mexican muralist, painter, and lithographer José Clemente Orozco.

William P. Carl Fine Prints—which specializes in modern prints from 1880–1960—will present iconic images by Charles Sheeler, Joan Miró, and Grant Wood, among others. Ursus Books will offer a selection of publications demonstrating the involvement of artists in book making, including Henri Matisse’s illustrations of Mallarmé’s poems and Jasper John's masterful illustrations of Beckett’s Fizzles. Additionally, Ursus will exhibit a group of major books illustrated by women artists, namely: Joan Mitchell, Vija Celmins, and Beatriz Milhazes.

John Szoke Gallery will offer lithography and linocuts by Pablo Picasso from the 1940s–60s. Peter Blum Galley plans to exhibit work by Alex Katz, Louise Bourgeois, Eric Fischl, Yukinori Yanagi, James Turrell, Kimsooja, and Philip Taaffe, all of whom have collaborated with Peter Blum and Peter Blum Edition to create individual prints or portfolios over the last four decades. Long-Sharp Gallery will feature over two dozen works by Andy Warhol that examine the artist’s work in and about the fashion industry from his first years in New York to his last.

Albrecht Dürer
Albrecht Dürer 
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, 1498 
Image courtesy of David Tunick, Inc.

OLD MASTERS FROM DÜRER TO REMBRANDT

David Tunick, Inc.—the world-renowned gallery specializing in fine prints and drawings from the 15th to the mid-20th century—will exhibit a range of works by Old Masters, including Albrecht Dürer, Rembrandt, and Lucas Cranach the Elder. Brigitta Laube presents an engraving by Pieter van der Heyden, The Stone Operation or the Witch of Mallegem (after Pieter Bruegel the Elder), alongside works by Dürer.

Childs Gallery offers works by Old Master artists like Francisco Goya, Rembrandt, and Albrecht Dürer, alongside prints by contemporary artists, providing a thoughtful look at the commonalities and distinctions between old and new, traditional and experimental. Contemporary woodblock printmaker and political artist William Evertson presents two new pieces, Ginni and the Supremes and Samuel Beset by Dürer's Witch, emphasizing the current politicization of the Supreme Court by referencing historical prints by John Faed and Dürer, respectively.

On Friday, October 27, the IFPDA will feature a lecture by Susan Dackerman, titled “Durer's Prints and the Islamic East,” exploring three of the artist’s most enigmatic print projects: the engraved Sea Monster, woodcut Knots, and etched Landscape with Cannon.

Dindga McCannon
Dindga McCannon 
If you want to speak to God, Speak to the Winds. 2022. 
Image courtesy of Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop

AFRICAN ARTISTS AND ARTISTS OF THE DIASPORA

A wide variety of African visual artists and artists of the African diaspora will be on view at the Print Fair. Crown Point Press will present new works by Nigerian-American artist Odili Donald Odita that represent his first exploration into intaglio printing. Gemini G.E.L. at Joni Moisant Weyl showcases a monumental etching comprising 10 panels by Ethiopian-American artist Julie Mehretu.

Hauser & Wirth will exhibit works by world-renowned artists Mark Bradford, Rashid Johnson, and Amy Sherald. Paulson Fontaine will present new works by McArthur Binion and Torkwase Dyson, two African-American artists that use abstraction to distill stories of oppression and Black liberation. Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop will exhibit a new series of prints by Dindga McCannon inspired by a publication the artist illustrated, Speak to the Winds: Proverbs from Africa. The booth will include folk art-inspired lithographs by Michael Kelly Williams, woodblock prints by Otto Neals, and lithographs by Michele Godwin.

Black Women of Print exhibits six contemporary Black women printmakers including LaToya M. Hobbs, Deborah R. Grayson, Althea Murphy-Price, Karen J. Revis, Stephanie M. Santana, and Tanekeya Word. Galerie Myrtis will offer works by Delita Martin, a master printmaker who often depicts women that have been marginalized, offering a different perspective of the lives of Black women. The booth will also include a serigraph by Nelson Stevens, a significant member of AfriCOBRA (African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists).

Jeffrey Gibson
Jeffrey Gibson 
SAY A PRAYER, 2021 
Twenty-one color lithograph with chine collé elements  
Paper Size: 39 x 30 1/4 inches 
Collaborating Printers: Valpuri Remling and Lindsey Sigmon  
Edition of 20 
Image courtesy of Tamarind Institute

INDIGENOUS PERSPECTIVES

Tamarind Institute presents work by prominent Indigenous artists, including Jaune Quick-To-See-Smith, who adopts aspects of traditional Indigenous art styles with more current pictorial aesthetics and imagery drawn from contemporary American pop culture. On the heels of her Whitney Museum solo exhibition, Tamarind offers lithographs from Quick-to-See-Smith’s nine-color lithograph series Coyote in Quarantine. Tamarind will also present recent work by Jeffrey Gibson, who was recently selected to represent the United States at the next rendition of the Venice Biennale, making him one of the first Indigenous artists to represent the country. His twenty-one color lithograph with chine collé elements, SAY A PRAYER, is produced in an edition of 20 and will be on view.

In addition, Peter Blum Gallery will exhibit monotypes by Nicholas Galanin, a Tlingit and Unangax̂ multi-disciplinary artist and musician from Alaska, who aims to redress the widespread misappropriation of Indigenous visual culture and the impact of colonialism in his work.

Ed Ruscha 
Castiron Calendar, 2023 
Color direct gravure. 26 1/4 × 42 in | 66.7 × 106.7 cm
Edition of 40
Image courtesy of Crown Point Press

LEGACY AND INFLUENCE: LIVING LEGENDS OF PRINTMAKING

The IFPDA Print Fair regularly presents standout works by legendary, living artists with decades-long legacies in printmaking. Crown Point Press presents a 2023 print, Castiron Calendar, by Ed Ruscha (b. 1938) that reflects his use of words as subject matter. The words play against each other: “calendar” marks the passage of time, while “cast iron,” in its heaviness and solidity, endures. The booth will also feature prints by preeminent abstract artist Mary Heilmann (b. 1940).

Krakow Witkin Gallery, who will be exhibiting online, will display a wide selection of prints by world-renowned living artists, including 1970s lithographs by Richard Serra (b. 1938), etchings from the ‘90s by James Turrell (b. 1943), and silkscreen prints from the ‘70s by Robert Mangold (b. 1937).

Gallery Neptune and Brown offers important screenprints by Vija Celmins (b. 1938), while Kunst Kunz Gallery Editions will present historical works by German Neo-Expressionist artist Karl Horst Hödicke (b. 1938).

Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop will exhibit a new series of prints by Dindga McCannon (b. 1947) inspired by a publication the artist illustrated, Speak to the Winds: Proverbs from Africa.

Roger Brown
Roger Brown 
The Fisherman, Lithograph, c. 1970 
Image courtesy of Aaron Galleries

HAIRY WHO & THE CHICAGO IMAGISTS

Aaron Galleries will exhibit a selection of prints from leading artists of the Chicago Imagists—an unofficial group that formed around the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the 1960s and rejected the approach of the New York art world, then dominated by Pop art. Instead, the Imagists looked to self-taught artists, Japanese woodblock prints, comic books, storefront window displays, and advertisements in magazines to inform their irreverent works, which featured grotesque figures, vibrant colors, and elements of Surrealism.

Chicago Imagists including Jim Nutt, Roger Brown, and Karl Wirsum are eatured in the Aaron Galleries booth. Both Nutt and Wirsum were graduates of School of the Art Institute of Chicago and began mounting exhibitions alongside four other artists, who together made up the “Hairy Who.” United through humor and the emotional power of imagery, the collective exhibited together for only three years (1966–69), but their contribution to art history is long lasting. The Hairy Who drew international attention to the Chicago artists during the 60s and catalyzed the broader Chicago Imagist movement, which extended into the 1980s.

James Tissot
James Tissot
(1836-1902) 
Le Journal (W. 73)”, 1883 
Etching and drypoint 
Edition about 100 
Image courtesy of Georgina Kelman

MUSES, FEMALE FORM, AND REPRESENTATION ACROSS THE CENTURIES

A range of exhibitors offers works that trace the historic representation of women across time in a variety of media. Georgina Kelman :: Works on Paper will exhibit women-focused works by Henri Evenepoel, Peter Ilsted, Eugène Delâtre, alongside artist James Tissot, who is perhaps best known for his “La femme à Paris” series that documented what made the modern Parisian woman unique in late nineteenth-century cosmopolitan society. One exemplary Tissot work on view with Georgina Kelman, Le Journal, depicts a fashionable female sitter digesting the latest news, and observes the changing ambitions of women before the turn of the century.

Galerie Henze & Ketterer presents a booth focused exclusively on Erich Heckel, one of the founders of Die Brücke, and his muses. From girlfriends, companions, dancers, actresses to casual acquaintances, in the graphic work of Heckel, the twentieth-century woman is often at the center. The female body inspired Heckel to create woodcuts, lithographs and etchings, in which he found inspiration for motif and style. They all testify to the artist's intense engagement with the theme of femininity—one of the oldest motifs in art—and its translation into modernity at the onset of the twentieth-century. Together with Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Fritz Bleyl and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, he rebelled against rigid bourgeois traditions and found in the female, liberated nude a metaphor for breaking away from conventions.

Elizabeth Catlett
Elizabeth Catlett 
Links Together, 1996
Lithograph, A/P
Image courtesy of Dolan:Maxwell

Dolan:Maxwell offers an important lithograph by Elizabeth Catlett, Links Together, which depicts three Black women connected through hand holding. Catlett taught art at Dillard University in New Orleans—where she battled discrimination daily—and met her first husband, artist Charles White, while living in Chicago. She later studied lithography under Jacob Lawrence in New York City, and produced a number of works on paper that center mothers, daughters, and other images of dignified women. “The thing that I knew the most about was Black women, because I am one, and I lived with them all my life, so that’s what I started working with,” Catlett once said.

Black Women of Print presents six contemporary, twenty-first century, Black women printmakers who use experimental and traditional printmaking techniques on paper, wood, and textiles. In Need of Rest, a mixed media woodcut by LaToya M. Hobbs—a painter and printmaker who uses representational, figurative, imagery that centers Black womanhood in ways that dismantle prevailing stereotypes—depicts the psychological weight placed on contemporary women of color. A new quilting cotton screenprint by Stephanie M. Santana uses family photos and imagery from the Jim Crow Era and the United States Civil Rights Movement to invoke the legacies of Black resilience. The Santana work, When Called Upon / Gathering in the Wake, excises archival images and repurposes them to depict a stately, matriarchal figure alongside two Black children.

Ana Benaroya
Ana Benaroya
 
The Swans, 2023 
19 color silkscreen with gold and silver leaf, 48 x 71 inches
Edition of 15
Courtesy of the artist and Two Palms, NY

THE NEXT GENERATION OF PRINTMAKERS

The Print Fair features numerous young printmakers experimenting with the medium (some for the first time), revealing a new generation of artists exploring the potential of collaboration with a master printer. Famed publisher Two Palms presents new silkscreen works by Ana Benaroya (b. 1986) that feature 19 layers of luminous color and gold and silver leaf to create shimmering stars. Harlan & Weaver offers a new publication by Haitian-born artist Didier William (b. 1983) whose work explores his Haitian heritage and the Black body, further defined by intersectional relationships to gender, sexuality, place, space, and time.

Jungle Press Editions offers a recent lithograph series by Tunji Adeniyi-Jones (b. 1992) that feature abstract depictions of figures in small groups or pairs that are characteristic of the artist’s fluid, rhythmic compositions. Krakow Witkin Gallery presents recent salt prints by celebrated photographer Paul Mpagi Sepuya (b. 1982).

Tamarind Institute presents prints by young artists Henni Alftan (b. 1979) and Danielle Orchard (b. 1985), while Planthouse exhibits solid glass sculptures by Victoire Bourgois (b. 1987).

On Saturday, October 28, the IFPDA will feature a panel discussion with young printmakers: “Printing Contemporary; A Conversation with the Next Generation of Artists Making Print an Essential Part of Their Practice” with artists Jameson Green (b.1992) and Didier William (b. 1983) in conversation Elleree Erdos, Director of Prints and Multiples at David Zwirner.

Giambattista Tiepolo
Giambattista Tiepolo
(1696–1770) 
Centaur carrying off a female faun. 
Pen and brown ink and brown wash, over an underdrawing in black chalk 
Image courtesy of Stephen Ongpin Fine Art

DRAWINGS FOR PRINTS: PROCESS AND INFLUENCE

Master Drawings New York (MDNY)—one of the largest art fairs for drawings and works on paper—will present a shared booth of the most important international drawings dealers at the IFPDA Print Fair. Offering a curated concept, Drawings for Prints: Process and Influence will explore the process of printmaking through the lens of preparatory drawings.

Including Stephen Ongpin Fine Art, Agnew’s Works on Paper, Christopher Bishop Fine Art, Libson and Yarker Ltd., and Mireille Mosler Ltd., the booth will feature a number of side-by-side juxtapositions of prints and their preparatory drawings. These works are particularly important in illuminating not only the process by which prints were made, but also the ways in which artists often worked side-by-side—correcting prints together in order to ensure the quality of the final prints. The showcase will include artists such as Jean-Baptiste Le Prince, Stefano Della Bella, Giambattista Tiepolo, Pietro Antonio Novelli, il Guercino, Carlo Maratta, Salvator Rosa and more.

The exhibition aims to explore the way in which the established aesthetic of prints influenced the practice of draftsmanship and vice versa. Throughout the centuries, many printmakers were draftsmen and many draftsmen (and women) made prints. This relationship of practice began to affect not only their ways of working, but also their ways of seeing, a theme which will be explored with a panel presentation at the fair with curators Nadine Orenstein (The Metropolitan Museum of Art), Jamie Gabbarelli (Art Institute of Chicago), and Kim Conaty (Whitney Museum of American Art).

IFPDA Print Fair 2023 Exhibitor List

Aaron Galleries
Alice Adam
Allinson Gallery, Inc
Anderson Ranch Arts Center*
Atelier-Galerie A. Piroir
August Laube Buch- und Kunstantiquariat
Black Women of Print*
Burnet Editions
C.G. Boerner LLC
Cade Tompkins Projects
Carolina Nitsch
Childs Gallery
Cirrus Gallery
Conrad Graeber
Crown Point Press
David Tunick, Inc.
David Zwirner
Dolan/Maxwell
Durham Press, Inc.
EFA Robert Blackburn Printmaking* Workshop
Eminence Grise Editions (Michael Steinberg
Fine Art)
Flying Horse Editions
Galerie Henze & Ketterer
Galerie Lelong
Galerie Maximillian
Galerie Myrtis Fine Art & Advisory
Gallery Neptune and Brown
Gemini G.E.L. at Joni Moisant Weyl
Georgina Kelman :: Works on Paper
Gilden's Art Gallery
Goya Contemporary Gallery/ Goya-Girl Press
Graphicstudio/USF
Harlan and Weaver, Inc
Harris Schrank
Hauser & Wirth
Hill-Stone
Isselbacher Gallery
Jacobson Gallery
Jan Johnson, Old Master & Modern Prints
Jim Kempner Fine Art
John Szoke Gallery
Jörg Maas Kunsthandel
Josh Pazda Hiram Butler
Jungle Press Editions
Keith Sheridan LLC
Knust Kunz Gallery Editions
Krakow Witkin Gallery
LeRoy Neiman Center for Print Studies,
Columbia University
Long-Sharp Gallery
Lower East Side Printshop
Lyndsey Ingram
Marlborough Graphics
Master Drawings New York (+4)*
Mixografia
Moeller Fine Art
Noire Editions
Pace / Pace Verso*
Paramour Fine Arts
Parkett*
Paulson Fontaine Press
Peter Blum Edition
PIA GALLO LLC
Planthouse
Pratt Contemporary
RENÉ SCHMITT
Roger Genser - The Prints & The Pauper
Ruiz-Healy Art
Sarah Sauvin
Scholten Japanese Art
Shapero Modern
Shark's Ink.
SHORE PUBLISHING
Solo Impression
Stewart & Stewart
Stoney Road Press
Susan Teller Gallery
Tamarind Institute
The Paris Review*
Tandem Press
The Old Print Shop, Inc.
The Tolman Collection
Two Palms NY
Universal Limited Art Editions
Ursus Books
Weyhe Gallery
Wildwood Press
William P. Carl Fine Prints
Wingate Studio
Zucker Art Books*

*Invitational Exhibitors

IFPDA PRINT FAIR 2023
River Pavilion, Javits Center, 11th Avenue at 35th Street, New York

01/09/23

Art Green @ Garth Greenan Gallery, NYC - Hairy Who?

Art Green: Hairy Who?
Garth Greenan Gallery, New York
September 8 – October 21, 2023

Art Green
ART GREEN
Immoderate Abstention, 1969 
Oil on canvas, 66 x 55 1/2 inches
© Art Green
Courtesy of Garth Greenan Gallery

Garth Greenan Gallery presents Art Green: Hairy Who? The exhibition provides an overview of the artist’s work of the 1960s, his most formative decade.

In 1961, Art Green enrolled at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with the intention of studying industrial design. In his first year, however, the artist made a fateful shift to painting and drawing. Art Green’s career, and those of five other recent SAIC graduates (James Falconer, Gladys Nilsson, Jim Nutt, Suellen Rocca, and Karl Wirsum), was quick to launch. In 1966, these alumni held the first of what would become a legendary series of group exhibitions called the Hairy Who. The artists’ styles were assertively idiosyncratic, but most had trained with professors Kathleen Blackshear and Paul  Wieghardt and adapted some of their respective Surrealist and German Expressionist tendencies—features particularly noticeable in Art Green’s work. Green adds that teachers Vera Berdich, Tom Kapsalis, and Ray Yoshida had integral influence. By the end of the packed decade in 1969, Art Green accepted a teaching position at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Halifax, marrying Natalie Novotny in the same year, whose Art Institute education in pattern and fabric design became a strong and continuing influence on his work.

The work in the exhibition demonstrates the remarkable speed with which Art Green established a rich personal iconography consisting of archetypal images of ice cream cones, wood grain patterns, billowing flames, and perfectly polished fingernails. These same totemic images populate his work to this day.

In Absolute Purity (1967) Art Green places a supersized cone of soft serve dangerously close to a plump female leg that billows flames and smoke like an industrial chimney. To add to the confusion, the artist freely mixes visual modes from the photorealistic to the cartoonish. The result is an uneasy, centrifugal chaos. As the Canadian artist and critic Gary Michael Dault said of the painting, “there is so much going on it all has to be lashed together to keep it, you feel, from flying in your face.”

Art Green’s work is packed with paradoxes and impossibilities. Each is phantasmagoric but orderly. Items are fastened and balanced in agreement with the strict but inscrutable mechanical rules that undergird each universe. In paintings like Disclosing Enclosure (1968), Green ties spatial dimensions into a Gordian Knot. Two disembodied fingers unzip a two-dimensional face—revealing ice cream that oxymoronically bursts into flames. When an object is zipped open, showing itself to be a two-dimensional surface, it becomes three-dimensional in its new configuration. The counterintuitive logic and potent symbolism beg to be decoded, but any attempt results in a recursive paradox. The paintings are themselves a cycle of perpetual reconciliation and rupture.

Art Green’s work has been the subject of over 26 solo exhibitions, including nine at Phyllis Kind Gallery (1974, 1976, 1976–1977, 1978, 1979, 1980, 1981–1982, 1983, 1986, Chicago and New York), three at Bau-Xi Gallery (1974, 1979, and 1983, Vancouver and Toronto), and one at Corbett vs. Dempsey (2011–2012, Chicago). His work has also been featured in more than 120 group exhibitions, including Human Response/Personal Torment (1969, Whitney Museum of American Art); Who Chicago? (1981, Camden Art Center, London); 12 Chicago Artists (1995, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.); and Chicago Imagists (2011, Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Wisconsin). In 2005, the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery, Ontario mounted Heavy Weather, the artist’s first career retrospective. In early 2009, the CUE Art Foundation, New York hosted a solo exhibition of Art Green’s work, curated by Jim Nutt.

In the last decade, Art Green’s work was featured in What Nerve! Alternative Figures in American Art, 1960 to Present (2014, RISD Museum, Providence); Homegrown: The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the Permanent Collection (2015–2016, Art Institute of Chicago); The Next Generation: Chicago Imagists from the Smart Collection (2016, Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago); Hairy Who? 1966–1969 (2018–2019, School of the Art Institute of Chicago), and How Chicago! Imagists 1960s–1970s (2019, Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art, University of London).

Art Green’s paintings are featured in the collections of major museums around the world, including: the Art Institute of Chicago; the Smart Museum of Art, the University of Chicago; the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Wisconsin; the Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; and the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut.

Garth Greenan Gallery represents Art Green.

GARTH GREENAN GALLERY
545 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011

03/10/21

Chicago Imagists @ Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields - Private Eye: The Imagist Impulse in Chicago Art

Private Eye: The Imagist Impulse in Chicago Art 
Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields, Indianapolis
Through December 5, 2021. 

Gladys Nilsson
Gladys Nilsson (American, b. 1940)
Mt. Vondervoman: during turest rush, 1967
Watercolor on paper, 36-1/2 × 28-1/2 × 2 in. (framed)
Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields, 
Promised Gift of Michael J. Robertson and Christopher A. Slapak 
© Gladys Nilsson. Courtesy of the artist and Garth Greenan Gallery, New York

A group of artists began exhibiting at the Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago in the mid 1960s. Their distinctive work drew on many resources such as comic books and popular culture, and their audacious, highly idiosyncratic, and personal approach set them apart from contemporaries working on either the East or West Coast. By the mid-1970s, after numerous exhibitions had launched their work on an unsuspecting public, the artists were dubbed ‘The Chicago Imagists’. Now, more than 50 years after their first appearance, the Chicago Imagists are regarded as among the most important postwar American artists.
"Chicago artists in the Imagist vein were not following trends," say guest curators John Corbett and Jim Dempsey. "They were all fierce individualists, which has led to them being characterized as eccentric or idiosyncratic. In fact, the original Imagists were pioneers, but the lag between their innovative approach to image making and widespread recognition has been measured in decades rather than years, as their major contribution to American art is only now getting its proper due. Private Eye seeks to understand Imagism in as liberal a way as possible, casting a wide net and looking at antecedents, fellow travelers, later acolytes, as well as the group of artists who banded together to exhibit their work half a century ago.”
Private Eye features more than 120 works of art by artists who comprise the original Imagist exhibition groups, such as The Hairy Who and the Nonplussed Some, as well as by Chicago-based artists from the preceding generation, known as the Monster Roster, and a complementary selection of Imagist-influenced artists.


Private Eye - The Imagist Impulse in Chicago Art
Private Eye - The Imagist Impulse in Chicago Art
A 208-page publication, Private Eye: The Imagist Impulse in Chicago, accompanies the exhibition. The catalogue includes original essays by the exhibition curators, John Corbett and Jim Dempsey, along with Thea Liberty Nichols. It also includes a reprint of a think-piece written by the late critic Dennis Adrian, along with an interview with the collectors and a timeline that plots the collection against important historical events in the art world.
Private Eye is drawn entirely from the collection of Drs. Michael J. Robertson and Christopher A. Slapak, one of the most comprehensive private collections of Chicago Imagist art, which has been promised to the IMA with some pieces already donated to the Museum.

Private Eye is guest curated by John Corbett and Jim Dempsey who are curators and co-owners of Corbett vs. Dempsey art gallery in Chicago. 

INDIANAPOLIS MUSEUM OF ART
Newfields, 4000 Michigan Road, Indianapolis, Indiana 46208

15/09/19

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

08/11/14

Miyoko Ito (1918 - 1983): Paintings, Adam Baumgold Gallery, New York

Miyoko Ito (1918 - 1983): Paintings
Adam Baumgold Gallery, New York
November 7 - December 19, 2014

Adam Baumgold Gallery presents an exhibition of paintings by MIYOKO ITO (1918-1983). This is Ito’s second New York solo exhibition since 1978. Miyoko Ito was born to Japanese parents in Berkeley, CA in 1918. She studied art at the University of California at Berkeley for a short time until she was imprisoned in a Japanese-American camp after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Ito continued her education in prison and afterwards went to Smith College. After college, she was given a scholarship to attend the Art Institute of Chicago. It was in Chicago that Ito's career as an artist flourished; exploring cubism and latent abstraction in her works. Miyoko Ito stayed in Chicago until her death in 1983.

The exhibition focuses on Miyoko Ito’s paintings from the 1960’s to 1970’s. These paintings with their subtle mix of abstraction and figuration share the spirit of Matisse’s “Piano Lesson,” the linearity of Diebenkorn’s “Ocean Park” paintings and Paul Klee’s “ability to imbue his images with an inner life that is compelling and magical,” yet Ito’s paintings retain an obstinate independence and original vision that were an inspiration and bridge for generations of abstract and imagist artists in Chicago.
In his essay for the exhibition, Len Klekner says, “Ito’s paintings are in the main abstract, creating and maintaining an alternative universe as a whole distinctly set off from the world we inhabit. But many of her forms are allusive, suggestive of bits and pieces of bodies and the furnishings of our everyday lives. These elements are never resolved enough to overpower the imaginative arenas of her abstract fields. But they are suggestive enough, and perhaps even jarring enough, to lend another level of frisson to her works. Her forms are also often playful, quirky, and even goofy-to the point of contrasting markedly with the quiet authority of her sensitive backgrounds and resonant facture.”
Miyoko Ito’s work has been included in all major surveys of Chicago art including the exhibition “Art in Chicago 1945-1995.” A retrospective of her work was held at The Rennaisance Society at The University of Chicago in 1980. Ito was also included in the Whitney Biennial in 1975, and the Carnegie Insititute’s “International Exhibition of Contemporary Painting.” Her work is in the collections of The Art Institute of Chicago, The National Academy of Design, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, The Smart Museum of Art, Chicago, and The Whitney Museum of American Art, among others.

ADAM BAUMGOLD
60 East 66th Street, New York, NY 10065
www.adambaumgoldgallery.com

10/09/11

Chicago Imagists at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art

Chicago Imagists
at the Madison Museum 
of Contemporary Art
September 11, 2011 – January 15, 2012

The Madison Museum of Contemporary Art (MMoCA) presents a major exhibition of works by the Chicago Imagists. On view in the museum’s main galleries, Chicago Imagists at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art includes more than 75 works in a variety of media: paintings; watercolors; collages; prints; sculptures; and artists’ ephemera, including comic books and decals.

A key component of Chicago Imagists at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art are consummate paintings, sculptures, and unique works on paper from the museum’s Bill McClain Collection of Chicago Imagism. Many of the nearly 100 works made available to the museum by Bill McClain in 2010 will be presented to a public audience for the first time as part of the exhibition. William H. McClain, Halvorson Professor of Bacteriology, Emeritus, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, built his exceptional holdings of Chicago Imagist works over thirty years of close contact with the artists. The exhibition also features a number of major gifts to MMoCA from the Raymond K. Yoshida Living Trust and Kohler Foundation, Inc.

Imagist History

In the late 1960s, art audiences were introduced to a vibrant new group of artists who would soon be identified collectively as the Chicago Imagists. The Imagists initially showed their work between 1966 and 1971 at the Hyde Park Art Center. Don Baum, artist and director of the center, facilitated several exhibitions that included the work of, most significantly, Roger Brown, Sarah Canright, James Falconer, Ed Flood, Art Green, Philip Hanson, Gladys Nilsson, Jim Nutt, Ed Paschke, Christina Ramberg, Suellen Rocca, Barbara Rossi, and Karl Wirsum. These young artists banded together variously to present their art in a series of exhibitions with titles such as Hairy Who, Nonplussed Some, False Image, Marriage Chicago Style, and Chicago Antigua. Most of the artists were native to Chicago, in their later twenties, and current or former students at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). One-third of the artists group were women, an unusual percentage for the period, and a marked contrast to the male-dominant field of modern art in New York City and elsewhere.

Pivotal to the Imagists’ development were the SAIC instructors who urged their students to explore a great variety of traditions in art, both western and non-western. Most notable in this respect was the artist Ray Yoshida, who began teaching at the school in 1959. Yoshida encouraged his students to seek visual experiences outside of the fine arts—drawing especially from popular culture as exemplified by magazines, comics, and what Yoshida called “trash treasures” gathered from outdoor flea markets such as Chicago’s Maxwell Market.

Although the Pop artists in New York, Los Angeles, and London, who were a generation older, also drew inspiration from the everyday urban world and popular culture, the Imagists nevertheless crafted an original art. Their works were characterized by personal fantasy and executed with brilliant color, graphic strength, free line, and exceptional workmanship. With broader sources of inspiration than the Pop artists, and a brand of exuberant and irreverent satire all their own, the Imagists spoke to the political and social foibles—as well as the absurdities and whimsy—of the tumultuous late 1960s and early 1970s. Audiences quickly caught the unique character of their art.

Characteristics of Imagist Art

Comic-book style plays an important role in Roger Brown’s Sudden Avalanche (1972), where a cartoon town of brightly colored, toylike structures, is threatened with a natural disaster that does not seem to interfere with the self-absorbed dramas of the men and women silhouetted in the windows. Although amusing, the scene is disquieting, a frequent state of things in Imagist art that is also true for Philip Hanson’s Mezzanine (1969). In a mysterious and child-like setting reminiscent of Giorgio di Chirico’s empty, surrealist plazas, the four steps of a blue staircase may lead to a mezzanine. Beckoned to ascend, the viewer is unsure of what lies beyond: is it danger or pleasure?

Other important aspects of Chicago Imagism are seen in Jim Nutt’s freewheeling portrait Rosie Comon (1967–1968), which catches the spontaneous line, love of caricature, and high wit of Imagist art. Rosie Comon (the title a pun on County Roscommon in Ireland and a reference to the Chicago Irish) is a brawling kind of reddish-haired guy, bare-chested with tattoos on his back. Both human and slightly bestial in the face, he has a nose sprouting a grotesque appendage of unknown function. If “Rosie” is a perfectly acceptable Irish nickname for a boy, carrying it must nonetheless encourage a certain toughness to succeed.

Reflecting feminist concerns, the tightly corseted figure cut off at the neck and legs in Ramberg’s Untitled #15 (1982) is a recurring motif in the artist’s work that explores gender stereotypes. In brash comic-book simplifications, the figure’s iconic presentation speaks to the fetisizing of the female form that produces both allure and cruelty.

Components of MMoCA’s Chicago Imagist Project

Chicago Imagists at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art will be accompanied by a complementary exhibition in the museum’s State Street Gallery. Titled Chicago School: Imagists in Context, this concurrent exhibition features works by artists who were geographically, philosophically, and artistically associated with the Imagists, including Robert Barnes, Phyllis Bramson, Don Baum, Leon Golub, Miyoko Ito, Ellen Lanyon, June Leaf, Robert Lostutter, Peter Saul, Hollis Sigler, and H.C. Westermann, among others. Both exhibitions were organized by the museum’s curator of collections, Richard H. Axsom; director, Stephen Fleischman; curatorial associate, Leah Kolb; and former curator of exhibitions, Jane Simon.
Chicago Imagists

Chicago Imagists, 
MMoCA, 2011 
The exhibition is accompanied by a major publication titled Chicago Imagists. This richly illustrated 168-page book is the most extensive reference available on the artists, their works, and the context within which the group emerged and flourished. The volume includes essays by Lynne Warren, curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Cécile Whiting, professor of art history at the University of California, Irvine; and the exhibition curators. 
MADISON MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART - MMoCA
227 State Street, Madison, WI 53703
mmoca.org

05/09/02

Artist Maryan, Adam Baumgold Gallery, NYC - Works from the 60s

Maryan: Works from the 60s
Adam Baumgold Gallery, New York
September 5 — October 12, 2002

Adam Baumgold Gallery presents the exhibition "Maryan:Works from the 60's". The artist's first New York solo show in twelve years will focus on paintings, works on paper and linoleum cuts that Maryan (1927-1977) executed after he moved to New York in 1962.

Born Pinchas Burstein in 1927 in Poland, Maryan and his family were arrested in 1939 and placed in various labor and concentration camps. When the Russians liberated the camps in 1945, Maryan had lost a leg but survived. None of his family lived. Maryan was 18. After the war, Maryan studied art in Jerusalem and moved to Paris in 1950 where he studied art again at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and established his reputation in Europe before moving to New York.

The "Personnages" work from the 1960's show solitary figures in often brutal, boisterous, aggressive, and theatrical poses that are always executed with heightened colors, deft draftsmanship and a formal elegance. The paintings and drawings depict figures caught in the comedy of the human condition somewhere between Beckett's "Endgame," Commedia del Arte characters, Kafka and Goya.

The exhibition features a large painting "Personnage," 1962, that shows the twisted upper torso of a man in military uniform - fingers bloody, tongue skewered defiantly to the side of his mouth with two solitary red chess pieces on either side of his body. A series of eight linoleum cuts from 1962 has costumed, seated figures with part comical, part maniacal facial expressions and wildly gesticulating hand movements. These works are done with a bold and crisp line that is the organizing force in all the drawings and works on paper in the exhibition.

Maryan's work was linked at times to movements such as CoBrA, Nouvelle Figuration, and other artists, among them Peter Saul, Philip Guston, and H.C. Westermann, as well as the Chicago Imagists, Jim Nutt and Ed Paschke, but the very personal nature of his oeuvre makes it unique and original. That Maryan was an artist provided him with the means to address his life experiences on his own terms - his "Truth Paintings," as he called them, are "autobiographical" - "I will be myself in any color I put on the canvas."

Maryan was included in such ground breaking exhibitions as "Human Condition/Personal Torment," at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1969, as well as "Ten Independents," in 1972, at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Maryan's work is in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, NY, Musee National d'Art Moderne Centre George Pompidou, Paris, The Art Institute of Chicago, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., among others.

*The essay "The Work of Maryan: An Injunction to See," written by Jeanne Marie Wasilik in the book "Maryan Behold a Man and His Work" was an important source for this press release.

ADAM BAUMGOLD GALLERY
74 East 79th Street, New York, NY 10021
www.adambaumgoldgallery.com