Daisy Youngblood, McKee Gallery, NYC - Ten Years 2006-2015

Daisy Youngblood: Ten Years 2006-2015

McKee Gallery, New York

April 2 – May 30, 2015

The McKee Gallery presents a ten-year survey exhibition of DAISY YOUNGBLOOD’s sculpture.

Daisy Youngblood has produced 14 sculptures over the last decade, in low-fire clay or in bronze cast from clay, all of which are on view. The work over the last 10 years reflects changes in her approach to making sculpture. Although she has used pieces of wood in many earlier works, found objects in nature are more decisively incorporated into the clay and the scale has increased. Stones are used as heads, eyes, noses, torsos; a long concave piece of oak is a body. They are all equal parts of a living whole for Daisy Youngblood.

The earliest piece in the exhibition is Budhi 2006, a moving portrait in clay of her daughter with Down’s syndrome; then Bear 2007, a gentle spirit in clay; Venus 2007, a fierce crouching figure that could be animal or human, blurring the lines between them; a series of orangutans in motion: Oladio 2009, Leaping I and Leaping II 2010. Anubis and the First Chakra 2012 is a major statement of materials and essence. There are three complex sculptures in different Yoga poses, and lastly, Chandrika 2014, a long reclining figure, seemingly moribund. The strong influence of Buddhism is evident.

The artist writes about these last works: “Some of the sculptures over the last ten years show signs of despair, anger, fright, none of which were intentional, but the feelings leaked through. I think the sculptures can be seen as my slow, persistent awakening to the realities of what may be in store for us on a rapidly heating planet.”

DAISY YOUNGBLOOD was born in Asheville, North Carolina, in 1945. She studied at The Richmond Professional Institute, Virginia, and received the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship in 2003. She has lived in New York City, Bisbee, Arizona, Santa Fe, New Mexico, and currently lives and works in Costa Rica. As she writes, “I live in Costa Rica on the side of a mountain with my husband and daughter. A big river runs around the farm, the old forest still breathes above us. I go down a steep trail to my studio every day, it’s a place of large boulders and riverlets.”

There is a 40-page catalogue available, with 25 color illustrations and an essay by Constance Lewallen.

MCKEE GALLERY

745 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10151

www.mckeegallery.com

Vija Celmins, McKee Gallery, New York - New Work

Vija Celmins: New Work

McKee Gallery, New York

April 29 – June 25, 2010

A highly-acclaimed and much-admired artist nationally and internationally, VIJA CELMINS is well-known for her paintings, drawings and prints of oceans, galaxies and webs. Throughout her artistic career she also has painted three-dimensional objects, such as pencils, erasers, a giant comb, puzzles, and houses of the 1960s, and in the early 1980s pairs of “identical” stones, one real, the other painted bronze, blurring the line between painting and sculpture, representation and abstraction, conceptual and physical realities.

The new body of work is a continuation and a departure for Vija Celmins. She taps into old sources with a fresh eye and extends that view over 3 media. Her work, as always, is both intimate and cosmic.

In the new objects the intimate is even more directly personal, using childhood memories as its subject. Schoolroom objects, such as slate tablets, globes, maps, have a poignant, old-fashioned bent. 16 of the tablets in the exhibition are made objects, either cast in bronze and then painted or painted wood to re-invent the old slates. They are stacked or lined up with found tablets, much as the earlier stones were, to tease the viewer into looking closely.

There are 4 paintings in the exhibition, 3 of which are of objects personally very special to the artist. Shell 2009-10 and Darwin 2008-10 are new images for Vija Celmins. Japanese Book 2007-10, related to a project she did for The Museum of Modern Art in 2005, is of an old book she found during a trip to Japan in 2003. The more familiar Dark Galaxy 2000-10 is the fourth painting in the show.

In addition to the objects and the paintings, Vija Celmins has produced 9 exceptional new prints—6 galaxy mezzotints, a web, a map and a globe, with the printer, Doris Simmelink.

VIJA CELMINS was born in Riga, Latvia, in 1938. She and her family were in Europe during World War II and several of her images in later paintings reflect the violence of that period. In 1948 the family came over to the United States and settled in Indianapolis.

She received her BFA from the Herron Institute in 1962 and her MFA from UCLA in 1965. Vija Celmins lived in Los Angeles from 1962-1980, when she moved to New York, where she still lives. She has received many awards, including the MacArthur Grant in 1997. Her first museum survey exhibition was organized in 1980 by the Newport Harbor Art Museum, California. In 1992 a full retrospective was organized by the ICA in Philadelphia and traveled to the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and MOCA, Los Angeles. In 1996 a European retrospective took place at the ICA, London, traveling to the Museo Nacional de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, the Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Switzerland, and the Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt. She also had a solo drawings exhibition at the Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel, in 2001 and a print retrospective at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, in 2002. More recently, a drawings retrospective was organized by the Centre Pompidou, Paris, in 2006 and traveled to the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, in 2007.

Vija Celmins will be the subject of a solo exhibition this November at the Menil Collection, Houston, Texas, entitled, “Vija Celmins: Television and Disaster,1964-68” including 16 paintings and painted objects, which will travel to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. In January 2011 the Ludwig Museum in Cologne, Germany, will open an exhibition of Vija Celmins’ prints and drawings entitled, “Wüste Meer und Sterne (Desert, Sea and Stars)” which will travel to the Louisiana Museum, Humlebæk, Denmark. A large, definitive retrospective of Vija Celmins’ paintings, drawings, objects and prints is scheduled for 2013/14.

MCKEE GALLERY

745 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10151

www.mckeegallery.com

Richard Learoyd, McKee Gallery, NYC - Unique Photographs - Text by Martin Barnes

Richard Learoyd: Unique Photographs

McKee Gallery, New York

September 24 – October 31, 2009

McKee Gallery presents the first exhibition in America by the English photographer RICHARD LEAROYD. This is also the first ever exhibition of photographs at the McKee Gallery.

After graduating in photography from the Glasgow School of Art in 1992, Richard Learoyd has taught and lectured in various art schools, all the while experimenting in unconventional technique based on the principles of the ‘camera obscura’. The extraordinary results are best described by Martin Barnes, chief curator of photography at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, in his 2007 essay “Reverie and Presence.” Originally published in the book Richard Learoyd: Twenty-Two Photographs 2005/2007, the essay was later reprinted in Hot Shoe International Magazine: Fresh Perspectives on Contemporary Photography, February/March 2008, p. 18-27:

Richard Learoyd’s photographs have recently emerged into the art world seemingly from nowhere. Visually, they are bold, poised, and magnetically beautiful. Beneath their alluring appearance lies a deeply inquiring and subtle intellect. Although his images convey something of their power when reproduced, nothing can compare with the wonder and presence felt when seeing one of the original, large-scale photographs. By sheer force of visual impact, they initially jolted my default tools of critique out of kilter – and replaced them with the pure pleasure of the eye. Observing his work has reinvigorated for me the profound delight of simply looking at photographs…

I am reminded of the haunting thrill particular to looking at nineteenth-century daguerreotypes, the very first types of photographs introduced in 1839, on which the images is fixed on a highly polished and silver metal plate. In daguerreotypes we come face to face with the dead, seemingly resurrected through the act of looking at them in the surface of a mirror. Learoyd’s photographs feel uncannily similar. But where monochrome daguerreotypes fit in the palm of the hand, Learoyd’s over-life-sized color works have impact on the wall. His processes of production, subjects and sitters are modern; yet the feelings his images evoke seem to beckon from the dawn of photography. Learoyd rekindles something of the marvel of this creative collision of science and art that so captivated and bewitched the Victorians. His evident passion for experimentation, his knowledge and interest in the chemistry and optics of photography, comes across I image like those who were fired by the medium over one-hundred and sixty years ago…

Learoyd’s images occupy a unique place in the practice of contemporary fine art photography. I can think of no-one else working with the same methods or in quite the same way. His pictures are refreshingly, not conceptually driven; but neither do they fall as a result into mere decoration or technical display. They carry historical relevance, but they are undeniably f our time. Due to their visual impact, we cannot help but stare at them and feel perhaps even a mild embarrassment over the painfully sensuous proximity they reach in relation to our senses …

We come to know his subjects intimately, yet they remain paradoxically and beautifully mysterious…

MCKEE GALLERY

745 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10151

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Philip Guston: Mind and Matter, McKee Gallery, New York

Philip Guston: Mind and Matter 

McKee Gallery, New York 

November 11 - December 23, 2003 

From Plato to Descartes to the present time philosophy's inquiry into the duality of mind and matter was the basis for explaining human individual and social existence. The events of the mental world were absolute, pure and superior; the events of the physical world, received through the senses and nourished by our appetites, were impure, clumsy, chaotic. Although both mind and matter were parts of the human composition, mind was considered the higher order in life.

At the time Philip Guston broke through the prescriptions against figuration, mind was considered the higher order in art as well. Abstract Expressionism had a spiritual momentum and then Color Field dogma narrowed the artist's realm of possibilities. But Philip Guston had much more to say. He opened the door, believing that the whole truth of human existence, the world of the mind and the world of the senses, was the proper subject of art, and it alone could satisfy him as a human being and as an artist. He was comfortable in the perfect realm of the intellect, but he was a man in time and space as well, where the everyday life of painting, sleeping, eating, politics, his wife Musa, were essential.

The inspiration for this show is a painting called Pyramid and and Shoe 1976, currently on exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in which Philip Guston accepts the duality of mind and matter and redresses the imbalance. The pyramid is the symbol of absolute pure thought and the clumsy shoe stands beside it as an everyday imperfect object. They are on equal footing. From 1968 until his death in 1980, Philip Guston continued to paint forms derived from the intellect and forms derived from the material world. Unlike some critical assertions, he never abandoned either source as a fertile terrain for painting.

The first section of this exhibition is devoted to Matter: the physical world. Paintings such as Painter's Head 1975, Anxiety 1975, Eating 1977, Alfie in Small Town 1979, and drawings Untitled (pasta) 1969, Objects on Table 1976.

The second section is Mind: forms of the intellect. Balance 1979, To J.S. 1977 (the Surrealist poet, Jules Supervielle), Martyr 1978, Aegean 1978.

The third room includes work with related forms. Wall Forms and Blue Sea 1978 is the more mental version and Rock 1978 the more material one; Untitled 1968 and Untitled 1980, relate in the same way.

Philip Guston's figuration, now widely admired as some of the greatest work of 20th Century American art, was revolutionary in the 1970's. Guston wondered why people didn't understand the paintings, since, after all, they are about us.

A retrospective exhibition is currently at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, until January 4, 2004. It was organized by the Museum of Modern Art at Fort Worth, and will continue on to the Royal Academy, London, opening January 20, 2004.

MCKEE GALLERY

745 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10151

www.mckeegallery.com