Mark Sheinkman @ Lennon, Weinberg, NYC

Mark Sheinkman: New Paintings
Lennon, Weinberg, New York
Through May 18, 2019

MARK SHEINKMAN

Montauk, 2019 

18 x 14”, oil on linen

(c) Mark Sheinkman, Courtesy Lennon, Weinberg, New York

Mark Sheinkman’s paintings have long been characterized by sinuous linear marks, created by a subtractive technique of erasure through a layer of graphite and oil over a white ground. For quite some time, the gestures were relaxed, smoky and curvy, but the works in his first exhibition at Lennon, Weinberg in 2017 were dense with gestural activity, more layered, twisty, sometimes spiky, with more incidents of painterly, additive paint application.

His signature tonal gradation has now been upended by a return to color, an element he hasn’t used in a long time. But it is interesting in hindsight to look at certain paintings that had been in our 2017 show, and recognize that a significant evolution had already appeared on the horizon. Structures organized around tight bundles of lines, in works such as Hooper, have now been separated by color, testing the cohesiveness of the compositions. It’s good to push against the boundaries of our comfort zones and, to his credit, Mark Sheinkman has been doing exactly that.

The colors he has chosen for the new paintings are both nuanced and specific. A few of them, Forbell and Montauk for example, are largely monochromatic and therefore not so distant from the noncolored paintings that preceded them. Two other paintings, Hull and Cozine, are two-color blue and orange paintings with asymmetric compositions that entwine the complementary pairings into an unstable yet resolved dialogue. Hampton is an outlier in that color serves not only as the figure but also fills the ground, and the tiny Linwood is a lovely and spare capture of a single, continuous gesture over a pentimenti, a shadow of a painting behind.

In the other paintings in the show, including the largest, Hendrix, red, blue, yellow and orange gather in clusters over white grounds, with hazy atmospheres resulting from the layering of additive and subtractive processes. The compositions are equally considered and improvisatory, the gestural marks less sculpted and more forthrightly painted than in his previous works. Mark Sheinkman is a painter who has tended to adapt and advance within self-imposed restrictions. These paintings result from a welcome, if not inevitable, phase of an artist’s progress when it’s time to be less deliberative and just let it fly. The paintings in this show are evidence that by widening his horizon to include color, he has found a fertile direction for the future evolution of his distinctive work.

MARK SHEINKMAN

Hendrix, 2019

84 x 76”, oil on linen

(c) Mark Sheinkman, Courtesy Lennon, Weinberg, New York

MARK SHEINKMAN was born in New York in 1963 and received a B.A. from Princeton University. He began exhibiting his work in New York in 1989, and before long had solo shows at galleries in Houston, London and Belgium. In 1997, he began a long association with Von Lintel Gallery in Munich, later located in New York and Los Angeles where he has had three exhibitions since 2014. He also exhibits regularly at Steven Zevitas Gallery in Boston. He had solo exhibitions at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, Missouri in 2005, the Grand Rapids Art Museum, Michigan in 2008 and the Museum Gegenstandsfreier Kunst, Otterndorf, Germany in 2009.

In recent years, his work has been included in group exhibitions at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Crocker Museum in Sacramento and the Grand Rapids Art Museum.

His work is included in the permanent collections of numerous museums including the Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum in New York, the National Gallery in Washington, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Cleveland Museum of Art, Grand Rapids Museum of Art, the Harvard University Art Museum in Cambridge, Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, and the Weatherspoon Art Gallery in Greensboro, North Carolina.

LENNON, WEINBERG
514 West 25th Street, New York, NY 10001
www.lennonweinberg.com

Richard Kalina @ Lennon, Weinberg Gallery, NYC - Panamax

Richard Kalina: Panamax 

Lennon, Weinberg Gallery, New York 

February 18 – March 26, 2016 

RICHARD KALINA

Cyrex 1, 2015 

40 x 40”, collage, acrylic, flashe on linen

© Richard Kalina, courtesy the artist and Lennon, Weinberg

RICHARD KALINA

Utilion 2, 2015

48 x 48”, collage, acrylic, flashe on linen

© Richard Kalina, courtesy the artist and Lennon, Weinberg

Lennon, Weinberg has been exhibiting the work of Richard Kalina since 1992. While certain aspects of the work remain the same – constructing paintings with a unique process of collage along with his sense of color – the works in this exhibition show Richard Kalina creating an entirely interconnected body of work. It’s a different way of improvising within systems of his own invention that has long governed the creative logic of his work.

The gallery asked Richard Kalina to provide some insight into his intentions for the new work and have included his statement in the booklet published to accompany the show. In his own words:

The paintings are built from a toolkit of components – rearranged differently in each work or group of works: panels, bars, circles, complex linear connectors, and a variety of grounds. Certain things were carried over from my previous paintings – most of the paintings in the show are constructed, as they were in the past, from painted rice paper layered and collaged on canvas. It is a complicated and rather tedious process but it allows for a particular matte surface and transparent color (paired with plaster-like whites and blacks) that is very difficult to achieve in any other way. There is also a governing logic common to much of my earlier paintings – a way of putting a rational order on sets of intuitive processes. In this case, the number of the internal panels matches the number of the color bars (and no color bar repeats) and the circles always come in two of each color. But there are some major variations. A number of the works are monochromatic or bichromatic and are painted in oil on linen. In these works the focus is on the overall border of the forms rather than on the internal divisions. There are seven distinct series within the larger group.

Panamax, by the way, is the term for the size limits for ships travelling through the Panama Canal. Those constraints have shaped the dimensions and design of the different ships that now traverse the canal. The rules that Richard Kalina has imposed on this particular cycle of work have had a similar effect in determining the resulting paintings.

RICHARD KALINA was born in 1946 and began showing his work in New York and elsewhere in 1969. His works are included in many museum collections including the Arkansas Art Center, Grey Art Gallery, Guild Hall Museum, Fogg Art Museum, Indianapolis Museum of Art, Milwaukee Art Museum, Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, National Museum of American Art, Norton Gallery, Parrish Museum, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Rutgers University Art Museum, the Wadsworth Atheneum and Yale University Art Gallery. Richard Kalina is a respected art critic, a member of the National Academy and a Professor of Art at Fordham University in New York, where he teaches studio art and art history.

LENNON, WEINBERG

514 West 25 Street, New York, NY 10001

www.lennonweinberg

Laura Larson @ Lennon, Weinberg, NYC - Photographs 1996 – 2012

Laura Larson: Photographs 1996 – 2012 

Lennon, Weinberg, Inc, New York 

July 10 – September 13, 2014 

This exhibition includes selections from several series of photographs that Laura Larson has taken since she completed the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in 1995. The curatorial selection is intended to explore the ways in which her approach to subject and theme has evolved in her work.

The earliest series, begun in 1996, is called Domestic Interiors. These small format gelatin silver prints are pictures of the interiors of exquisite dollhouses and focus on the suggestive traces of hypothetical inhabitants as clues to the narratives that these spaces invoke.

The period rooms and historic homes of the next series, Well Appointed (1998-99), are, in a way, very much like the dollhouses. They are carefully constructed tableaux that embody the taste and lifestyle of various places and times long passed. These spaces are associated with specific, often famous, former occupants and the rooms reverberate as much with their absence as much as the presence of their historic possessions. Laura Larson’s medium size black and white photographs evidence a keen eye for subtle detail and a formidable command of technique.

A darker side of the crafted domestic environment is explored in the following series, My Dark Places (1999), in which Larson photographed a collection of scalemodeled crime scenes. Built by an amateur sleuth and based on actual events, they were used to train forensic pathologists at Harvard during the 1940s. Unlike the idealized dollhouses and period rooms that project the comforts of social standing, these rooms are disordered and disturbing. But rather than exploit tabloid-style views of these strange dioramas, Larson distances the viewer from the characters of the dramas and the grisly traces they leave behind through her use of focus and depth of field, and what is by now a signature use of mirrors, doors and windows to investigate the framing and flattening of the photographed space.

Laura Larson then takes the theme of what is left behind to a completely different simulation of a domestic environment – the hotel room. For the series, Complimentary (2000), she travelled to hotels in various cities and photographed certain rooms after the guests had departed but before the rooms were cleaned. She captured not only the reassuring conventions of these transient spaces, but also the inscrutable narratives suggested by the specifics of disarray in which the rooms were left.

The next three series are closely related. In Apparition (2003), Laura Larson took on for the first time a theme that has long been of interest to her. Situated in dense forest, she used these photographs to explore the idea of the spirit photographer as a performer who conjures an image before the viewer’s eyes, recalling how magic and truth became indistinguishable in photography for 19th Century audiences. 

The photographs of the Asylum (2005) series capture apparently paranormal events in the cells and hallways of the former Athens Lunatic Asylum in Athens, Ohio, where she is on the faculty of Ohio University. Working analog with film and props, as opposed to the readily available digital manipulation of images with software, she created ghostly presences in these mysterious and dramatically deteriorating spaces.

Her Ectoplasm (2003-05) photographs restage historical photographs of female spirit mediums, capturing the power of their theatrical performances while acknowledging the barely disguised fraud. For Larson there is a strong connection between these images and early feminist performance art. As she describes in the interview with Margaret Sundell published in the booklet that accompanies the show:

As a young artist, I struggled to find my identity within the legacies of first and second wave feminism. First wave, or 1970’s feminism, emphasized the inherent power of women and its rootedness in the female body, which was celebrated artistically. The second, postmodern, wave theorized feminine identity and its representation as cultural and psychological constructs rooted in patriarchal society. This raised the question of how to picture the female body critically, without reinforcing those constructs…. Ectoplasm became a way for me to return to those pioneering works—Hannah Wilke’s Starification series, Carolee Schneeman’s Interior Scroll, Yoko Ono’s Cut—and to cast these artists as latter day mediums, acknowledging both the force and poignance of their gestures.

Laura Larson’s video Electric Girls and the Invisible World (2008) brought these themes into the present. She cast a group of pubescent girls as friends who share an obsession with the spirit medium Eusapia Palladino and explore their own psychic powers. Three portrait photographs of the girls evidence their capacity to produce physical evidence of the extraordinary and reinforce a coming-of-age narrative of female identity.

The most recent work in the show is a small ambrotype, a mid-nineteenth century wet collodion process. The image shows a woman’s arm resting on the type of neck brace that would have been used at the time to stabilize a subject of a photographic portrait during the long exposures needed at the time. Laura Larson developed an interest in how the early photographic technologies were used and how they shaped the resulting image. Cabinet magazine published an article she wrote about “hidden mother” photographs and she has also curated an exhibition of these fascinating images.

LAURA LARSON’s work is represented by Lennon, Weinberg, Inc. and this is her fourth solo exhibition with the gallery. Laura Larson is a photographer who has exhibited her work both nationally and internationally, including Art in General, Bronx Museum of the Arts, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, SFCamerawork, Susanne Vielmetter/L.A. Projects, and Wexner Center for the Arts. She recently was awarded an Ohio Arts Council Excellence Award for Creative NonFiction for her manuscript “Hidden Mother.” She earned a BA in English from Oberlin College, a MFA in Visual Art from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University, and participated in the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, and Athens, Ohio, where she teaches photography in the School of Art at Ohio University.

LENNON, WEINBERG

514 West 25 Street, New York, NY 10001

www.lennonweinberg

Joan Mitchell at Lennon, Weinberg Gallery, New York - Selected Paintings 1975 - 1977

Joan Mitchell

Selected Paintings 1975 - 1977

Lennon, Weinberg Gallery, New York

April 22 – May 24, 1997

Twenty years ago, the painter JOAN MITCHELL was in the midst of a period of complex change and development in her work. Lennon, Weinberg have chosen eight of her monumental and magnificent “fields” and “territories” paintings of the early 1970’s and the strong and vivid “tilleul” (linden tree) paintings of the late 1970’s. The former group of work was shown in 1974 at the Whitney Museum and the latter group has as yet still been seen in depth only in France. Some of the paintings in the exhibition have never been shown in New York, and the others have been rarely seen in the twenty years since they were painted. 

Canada III (1975) carries a vestige of the “fields ” paintings in its juxtaposition of a deep brown flat mass with a lively, impastoed cloud of white and blue. Chris’ Dead Tree (1975) adds green to Canada III’s limited palette and along with Cypresses (1975) introduces a vertical brushstroke which derives from a shift in focus from Joan Mitchell’s reaching to embrace entire landscapes to considering the individual tree. In Red Tree and Green Tree (both 1976), these vertical gestures are elongated and increasingly entangled. An Island (1977) shows Joan Mitchell layering a shorter, staccato strokes over a thicket of longer movements, and into No Room at the End (1977) are tucked dashing marks of bright yellow and hot orange amongst the cooler blues and greens like sunlight sparkling through deep shade.

LENNON, WEINBERG

514 West 25 Street, New York, NY 10001

www.lennonweinberg