Ron Cooper @ Franklin Parrasch Gallery, NYC

Ron Cooper

Franklin Parrasch Gallery, NYC

January 29 - March 13, 2015

Franklin Parrasch Gallery (New York) presents an exhibition of recent works by New Mexico-based artist Ron Cooper. Not keen to indulge the expectations of others, Cooper is a true Renaissance man: artist, homesteader, producer of superlative mezcal, vehicle enthusiast, lone wolf. It’s no wonder his work deftly rides the fine line between the “Light and Space” and “Finish Fetish” monikers, both conceptually hard hitting and eye candy-tasty. Cooper - like his contemporaries Robert Irwin, James Turrell, and Doug Wheeler - is fluent in the uniquely Southern Californian minimalist visual language; yet he does not limit his art making to any certain boundaries.

Ron Cooper emerged into the Los Angeles art scene in the mid-1960s following study at Chouinard Art Institute with fellow students Mary Corse, Allan Ruppersberg, and Wheeler. At this time, Cooper directed his focus upon two geometric forms: the square – shallow, poured-resin constructions he named “Light Traps”, and the rectangle – exaggerated “Vertical Bar” forms made of Plexiglas, upon which smooth, translucent mica-laden pigments were applied “like the exhalation of a breath.” Impelled to make pieces relating to a human scale, and inspired by the full-swing growth of 1960s SoCal tract housing developments, Cooper conceived of these bodies of work with stock building materials in mind. The “Light Trap” pieces consider the depth of 2x4 framing with standard drywall facing; the “Vertical Bar” series, the actual measurements of the common 4x4 lumber stock.

These bars, acknowledged early on by visionary gallerist Richard Bellamy, were first exhibited in a group show entitled “Arp to Artschwager” (cur. Bellamy at Noah Goldowsky Gallery, 1967); soon thereafter, they were the focus of a solo exhibition at Los Angeles’ ACE Gallery. The current grouping of Vertical Bars in this exhibition recall the proportions and structure of the early bars; in this series, however, Ron Cooper has employed contemporary surface pigments that allow greater potential and range in their chatoyant properties.

Franklin Parrasch Gallery

53 East 64th Street, New York

www.franklinparrasch.com

Lee Krasner & Norman Lewis exhibition at The Jewish Museum, NYC

From the Margins: Lee Krasner | Norman Lewis, 1945–1952 

The Jewish Museum, New York 

September 12, 2014 - February 1, 2015 

Lee Krasner (1908-1984) and Norman Lewis (1909-1979) were major contributors to Abstract Expressionism but as a woman and as an African American, respectively, they were often overlooked by the leading critics of their time. From September 12, 2014 through February 1, 2015, the Jewish Museum will present From the Margins: Lee Krasner l Norman Lewis, 1945-1952, a survey of key 1940s and 1950s works by these two powerful painters. This was a transformative period in American painting when both artists were experimenting with approaches that joined abstraction and cultural specificity. 

Their works have intriguing formal similarities while reflecting each artist’s personal sources. Krasner’s Little Image pictures relate to her childhood upbringing and study of Hebrew. Lewis’s Little People paintings reference African American cultural heritage, urban life, jazz, and textiles.

Lee Krasner and Norman Lewis were important to the development of the Abstract Expressionist artistic and social scene in New York but remained tangential to mainstream criticism during the formative period of the 1940s and early 1950s. Both artists' work of this formative period embodied the allover approach characteristic of the style. Yet, rather than the bold, gestural strokes of their peers they focused on smaller, repeated images with self-reflective cultural references. Their paintings—brimming with gesture, image, and incident—remained modest in scale compared with the canvases of many of their contemporaries. 

Lee Krasner, better known at the time as the wife of Jackson Pollock, created innovative systems and iconographies within the overall painting style of Abstract Expressionism. In her Little Image paintings, Krasner worked with small repeated pictographs that she systematically painted onto the canvas from right to left, as she was taught to write Hebrew. The shapes are not recognizable images, yet evoke letters, signs, or symbols. Meticulously crafted and intimately scaled, the Little Image works reflect her deft control of unorthodox painting methods such as applying pigments with sticks and palette knives or straight from the tube. Her art celebrates painting as a primal means of communication through an analogy with picture-based writing systems.

Norman Lewis produced unique linear abstractions that shared much conceptually and aesthetically with the work of celebrated Abstract Expressionist painters, such as Ad Reinhardt and Mark Tobey, while expressing his own identity and sources from African American culture. His Little People paintings, with their highly abstracted formal structures, make reference to the urban experience, musical structures, jazz, and African textiles. 

The paintings of Lee Krasner and Norman Lewis selected for this exhibition suggest several parallels. Developed within a key period in American art and culture, their works offer scope for reflection on interrelated themes: art and modernity; issues of artistic expression and identity, whether of class, gender, ethnicity or race; and the relations of the mainstream and the excluded. 

From the Margins: Lee Krasner l Norman Lewis, 1945-1952 is organized by Norman L. Kleeblatt, Susan and Elihu Rose Chief Curator at the Jewish Museum, and Stephen Brown, Assistant Curator. 

LEE KRASNER was one of the most radical of the first generation of Abstract Expressionist painters. Through six decades, she continually explored innovative approaches to painting and collage. Born in Brooklyn, New York, to an Orthodox Jewish family from Russia, Krasner pursued formal art training at several New York City institutions and also studied with the influential German abstract painter Hans Hofmann. She was a muralist in the Federal Arts Project and a member of the Artists Union and American Abstract Artists. Krasner married painter Jackson Pollock in 1945. Though overshadowed by Pollock, Krasner was an experienced artist well before she met him. Active in the New York art scene of the 1930s and 1940s, she introduced Pollock to the artist Willem de Kooning and critic Clement Greenberg, among others. During her time with Pollock at their home in Springs, Long Island, Krasner developed her Little Image paintings. These works are today considered among her most significant contributions to Abstract Expressionism. 

NORMAN LEWIS was the second of three sons of immigrant parents from Bermuda. His family lived on Lenox Avenue, near 132nd Street, in Harlem. Lewis studied drawing and commercial design in high school before joining the merchant marine and sailing through the Caribbean and off the coast of South America. Back in New York in the early 1930s, Lewis met Augusta Savage, the founder and director of an important art school, the Savage Studio of Arts and Crafts. From 1933 to 1935, he participated in Savage’s studio and attended Columbia University. Lewis was active in the Federal Arts Project, and was a member of the artists’ group 306, which met in the studios of Charles Alston, Henry Bannarn, and Ad Bates at 306 West 141st Street. The group formed a nucleus for creative life in Harlem and included Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence, Augusta Savage, and Richard Wright. The relationship between the artist and society was a frequent theme of discussion, yet from a style grounded in social realism, Lewis moved, during the early 1940s, toward abstraction. Around 1946 he began exploring an overall gestural approach to abstraction, establishing himself as the only African American among the first generation of Abstract Expressionist artists. Inspired by sources in music, nature, Asian and African art, and modern painters from Wassily Kandinsky to Mark Tobey, Lewis experimented with a wide variety of approaches to abstraction. His paintings from this time are devoid of realistic imagery while often referring to African American settings and culture. Beneath the formal elegance of Lewis’s paintings runs a characteristically subtle inflection of his lifelong social conscience and humanitarian concerns.

Exhibition Catalogue

In conjunction with the exhibition, the Jewish Museum is publishing a 96-page catalogue by Norman L. Kleeblatt and Stephen Brown, distributed by Yale University Press; with essays by Lisa Saltzman and Mia L. Bagneris. An introductory essay surveys the trajectories of Krasner and Lewis within an artistic community dominated by white men. This book offers a fresh view of the contributions of two highly significant abstract artists. Featuring 64 color illustrations, the book will be available worldwide and at the Jewish Museum’s Cooper Shop for $30.00.

From the Margins: Lee Krasner | Norman Lewis, 1945-1952 is made possible in part by The Peter Jay Sharp Exhibition Fund and The Pollock-Krasner Foundation. Endowment support is provided by The Skirball Fund for American Jewish Life Exhibitions. 

The Jewish Museum, New York 

www.thejewishmuseum.org

Ink Art: Past as Present in Contemporary China, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Ink Art: Past as Present in Contemporary China 

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 

Through April 6, 2014 

Zhang Huan, Chinese, born 1965

张洹家谱

Family Tree, 2001

Nine chromogenic prints

Sheet (each): 21 × 16 1/2 in. (53.3 × 41.9 cm)

Lent by The Walther Collection

Photo © Yale University Art Gallery

A major loan exhibition of contemporary Chinese art presenting works by 35 artists born in China is on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Featuring 70 works in various media—paintings, calligraphy, photographs, woodblock prints, video, and sculpture—that were created during the past three decades, Ink Art: Past as Present in Contemporary China demonstrates how China’s ancient pattern of seeking cultural renewal through the reinterpretation of past models remains a viable creative path. Although all of the artists have transformed their sources through new modes of expression, visitors can recognize thematic, aesthetic, or technical attributes in their creations that have meaningful links to China’s artistic past. The exhibition is organized thematically into four parts and includes such highlights as Xu Bing’s dramatic Book from the Sky (ca. 1988), an installation that fill an entire gallery; Family Tree (2000), a set of vivid photographs documenting a performance by Zhang Huan in which his facial features—and his identity—are obscured gradually by physiognomic texts that are inscribed directly onto his face; and Map of China (2006) by Ai Weiwei, which is constructed entirely of wood salvaged from demolished Qing dynasty temples.  

Maxwell K. Hearn, Douglas Dillon Chairman of the Metropolitan Museum’s Department of Asian Art, stated: “A unique feature of this landmark exhibition is the way in which it positions contemporary art from a non-Western culture within an encyclopedic art museum. Instead of being presented by the Metropolitan’s Department of Modern and Contemporary Art, Ink Art is curated by members of the Department of Asian Art and displayed in the Museum’s permanent galleries for Chinese painting and calligraphy, featuring artworks that may best be understood as part of the continuum of China’s traditional culture. While these works may also be appreciated from the perspective of global art, the curatorial argument is that, by examining them through the lens of Chinese historical artistic paradigms, layers of meaning and cultural significance that might otherwise go unnoticed are revealed. Ultimately, both points of view contribute to a more enriched understanding of these creations.” 

Liu Wei, Chinese, born 1965

刘炜花儿 (detail)

Untitled No. 6 "Flower", 2003

Accordion album of twenty-four leaves with silk brocade cover; pencil, acrylic, ink, and watercolor on paper

Image (each leaf): 9 5/8 × 6 1/2 in. (24.5 × 16.5 cm)

Lent by a private collection, New York

Photo courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Section 1: The Written Word

Writing is China’s highest form of artistic expression as well as its most fundamental means of communication. Valued for both its semantic content and aesthetic significance, the written word conveys personal as well as public meaning. Given the inherent power of this universal medium, the written word—particularly brush-written calligraphy—has been a rich terrain for artistic exploration in China. The exhibition features key early works by Xu Bing (b. 1955), Gu Wenda (b. 1955), Qiu Zhijie (b. 1969), and Zhang Huan (b. 1965)—all of whom have found ways to subvert the semantic and aesthetic functions of language.

Section 2: New Landscapes

For more than one thousand years, landscape imagery has been used to convey values and moral standards, both of individuals and of society as a whole. Today, as China is being transformed by modernization, artists continue to mine the symbolic potential of landscape imagery to comment on the changing face of China and to explore the “mind landscape” of the individual. A rich selection of paintings, photographs, videos, and films in this section highlighted the diverse ways in which contemporary artists have drawn inspiration from earlier compositions and themes. On view are works by Ren Jian (b. 1955), Liu Dan (b. 1953), and Yang Yongliang (b. 1980), all of whom have revived and transformed the monumental handscroll format with powerful new imagery. This section also displays works by Ai Weiwei (b. 1957), Shi Guorui (b. 1964), and Xing Danwen (b. 1967) that offer stark commentaries on the impersonal nature of China’s expanding urban landscapes; and works by Fang Lijun (b. 1963), Yang Fudong (b. 1971), and Qiu Anxiong (b. 1972), who use woodblock printing, film, or video to explore man’s increasing disconnection from the natural environment. 

Yang Fudong, Chinese, born 1971

杨福东 留兰

Still from Liu Lan, 2003

Single-channel video, 35mm black-and-white film transferred to DVD, with sound; 14 min.

Lent by Marian Goodman Gallery, New York

Photo courtesy the artist

Section 3: Abstraction

Abstraction is at the heart of Chinese painting and calligraphy. Because the brush mark has always been recognized as a record of the artist’s hand, in addition to performing a descriptive or semantic role, both painting and calligraphy have been valued for their abstract expressive potential. Benefitting from such a rich tradition of exploiting the abstract and symbolic qualities of painting and writing, contemporary Chinese artists have been able selectively to adopt Western notions of nonfigurative art to augment and expand their expressive goals. The work by classically trained calligrapher Wang Dongling (b. 1945) included in this section exemplify those artists who have used their command of traditional techniques to create large-scale abstractions emphasizing the dynamic gestural qualities of calligraphy while divorcing the work from any suggestion of semantic signification. Two examples on view from the Divine Light series by Zhang Yu (b. 1959) feature circular or rectilinear forms that evoke cosmic events—an exploding star or a planet coalescing from a sphere of gaseous elements—that are at once beautiful and terrifying. 

Wang Dongling, Chinese, born 1945

王冬龄 守白

Being Open and Empty, 2005

Hanging scroll; ink on paper

Image: 87 1/4 × 57 in. (221.6 × 144.8 cm)

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of the artist, 2013

Photo courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Section 4: Beyond the Brush

A final component of the exhibition introduces works that neither fit into the above three thematic categories nor derive their primary identity from traditional forms of ink art; yet they exhibit an ink art aesthetic through their rich associations with Chinese literati pastimes or patronage. Highlights in this section are two performance-related pieces: an album by Cai Guo-Qiang (b. 1957) that envisions his plan for Project to Extend the Great Wall of China by 10,000 Meters: Project for Extraterrestrials No. 10, presented together with a three-channel video of the actual event; and Huang Yongping’s (b. 1954) 43-foot-long handscroll documenting his installation pieces from 1985 to 2001. Other works on view includes scholars’ rocks made from silicone or stainless steel by Zhang Jianjun (b. 1955) and Zhan Wang (b. 1962) and a dragon robe made of polyvinyl chloride by Wang Jin (b. 1962). 

Ai Weiwei, Chinese, born 1957

艾未未浪

The Wave, 2005

Glazed ceramic

H. 6 1/8 (15.7 cm); W. 16 7/8 in. (42.9 cm); D. 14 3/4 in. (37.6 cm)

Lent by a private collection, New York

Photo courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Zhan Wang, Chinese, born 1962

展望假山石

Artificial Rock #10, August 8, 2001

Stainless steel; wood stand

H. 29 1/2 in. (75 cm); W. 17 11/16 in. (45 cm); D. 7 1/2 in. (19 cm)

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Friends of Asian Art Gifts, 2006

Photo courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art

In conjunction with the exhibition, the Museum will present a full-day public symposium with talks by leading scholars of Chinese contemporary art on February 21 and a Sunday at the Met program on February 23, as well as gallery talks, a studio workshop, an artist demonstration of calligraphy techniques, and a teen program called Ink Experiments.

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue.  

Ink Art: Past as Present in Contemporary China is curated by Maxwell K. Hearn. 

The exhibition is featured on the Museum’s website: www.metmuseum.org

Robert Indiana: Beyond Love, The Withney & McNay Art Museum

Robert Indiana: Beyond LOVE 
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Through January 5, 2014
McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas, February 5 - May 25, 2014

The Whitney Museum of American Art presents the first major American museum retrospective devoted to the work of ROBERT INDIANA. Organized by Whitney curator Barbara Haskell, the exhibition focuses on the powerful body of work created by Indiana over the past five decades, exploring his bold use of language, his continual questioning and dissection of American identity, and the multiple layers of personal history embedded in his art. The exhibition, Robert Indiana: Beyond LOVE, is on view in the Whitney’s fourth-floor Emily Fisher Landau Galleries through January 5, 2014. Following its Whitney presentation, the exhibition travels to San Antonio, Texas, to the McNay Art Museum, where it will be seen from February 5 to May 25, 2014.

Known the world over for his iconic LOVE, ROBERT INDIANA (b. 1928) early on embraced a vocabulary of highway signs and roadside entertainments, combining words with images to create art that was dazzlingly bold and visually kinetic. In the early 1960s, he was central to the emergence of Pop art, along with Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, James Rosenquist, and Andy Warhol. Like these contemporaries, he shared a desire to both critique and celebrate post-war American culture. Using a populist, quintessentially American style, he addressed in his work many of the fundamental issues facing humanity, including love, death, sin, forgiveness, and racial injustice.

Joining simple declarative words with bold, hard-edge graphics allowed Indiana to embed multiple layers of autobiographical and cultural references into his art. Although visually dazzling on the surface, his imagery has a psychologically disquieting subtext; it draws on the myths, history, art, and literature of the United States to raise questions about American identity and American values. “Indiana’s exploration of identity, racial injustice, and the illusion and disillusion of love give emotional poignancy and symbolic complexity to our ever-evolving understanding of the ambiguities of American democracy and the plight of the individual in the modern world,” says curator Barbara Haskell.

The success of LOVE eclipsed to a great extent the range and breadth of Indiana’s work. Robert Indiana: Beyond LOVE remedies this by placing well known works such as EAT/DIE (1962), Exploding Numbers (1964-66), and LOVE (1965) alongside more than seventy-five other works, from early pieces the artist made in 1955 to his Ninth American Dream (2001), the last piece in a series that has consumed him throughout his career. Also included are:

-- Indiana’s painted vertical wood sculptures, (called herms by the artist after anthropomorphic stone pillars in ancient Greece);

-- his abstract geometric paintings from the late 1950s and early 1960s;

-- his entire politically-charged Confederacy series, pinpointing sites of violent crimes

against African Americans and civil rights workers;

-- Indiana’s rarely seen papier-collé collages of costumes that he designed for the Bicentennial production of Virgil Thomson’s and Gertrude Stein’s operatic collaboration The Mother of Us All;

-- Indiana’s series of paintings using texts drawn from the American writers Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow;

-- paintings inspired by twentieth-century American masterworks by artists such as Joseph Stella, Charles Demuth, and Marsden Hartley.

By early 1960, the artist, known by then as Robert Indiana (having changed his name from Robert Clark in 1958), had begun to apply elementary words onto his vertical wooden sculptures or herms, using found stencils that had been employed in earlier times to affix trademarks and labels to commercial freight. The use of straightforward, everyday words allowed Indiana to work on multiple levels, creating works which were, on one hand, immediately understandable and direct and, on the other, akin to conceptually multilayered verbal-visual puzzles. “Indiana’s marriage of language and hard-edge abstraction was audacious,” says Haskell. “It was one thing to insinuate words into an overall composition or depict them with painterly brushstrokes, but to present them without mediation, in the style of advertisements, was unprecedented.”

Robert Indiana was thrust into the spotlight of the New York art world when Alfred Barr, director of the Museum of Modern Art, purchased American Dream 1 in 1961, before Pop art had coalesced as a movement. Two years later, Indiana’s status as one of the major artists of his generation was solidified by Dorothy Miller’s inclusion of his work in her exhibition of rising talents, Americans 1963. By the time Indiana was commissioned by Philip Johnson to make a work for the New York State Pavilion at the 1964 World’s Fair, he was considered one of the leading Pop artists of the day.

LOVE, with its stacked letters and tilted “O,” is Robert Indiana’s best-known but also his most controversial work. In taking a commonplace word and transforming it into a powerfully resonant art object onto which viewers could project their own spiritual, erotic, and personal experiences and associations, Indiana created one of the most famous images in 20th century art. LOVE appeared at the height of the countercultural revolution and instantly became a talisman of sexual freedom, with massive numbers of commercial products bearing the image produced without the artist’s permission. Over time, the plethora of objects bearing the LOVE logo, and Indiana’s almost exclusive identification with the image, muted recognition of the complexities and range of his art. 

A reassessment of Indiana’s career has been underway for several years. With this reevaluation has come recognition of the poignancy and complexity of Indiana’s work and its status as a precedent for the contemporary text-based art of younger artists such as Jenny Holzer, Mel Bochner, Glenn Ligon, Christopher Wool, and Barbara Kruger. Presenting the full sweep of Indiana’s work, this exhibition provides audiences with the opportunity to revisit the work of an artist central to the narrative of the 1960s as well as to contemporary practice.

ROBERT INDIANA: SHORT BIOGRAPHY

Born Robert Clark in New Castle, Indiana, in 1928, Robert Indiana was raised by adoptive parents who struggled financially during the Depression. Aesthetically precocious, his talent was remarked upon as early as the first grade. At Arsenal Technical High School in Indianapolis, he worked in the style of American artists such as Reginald Marsh, Charles Sheeler, and Edward Hopper. After high school, he enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Corps in order to be able to take advantage of the G.I. Bill, under which he studied at Chicago’s School of the Art Institute from 1949 to 1953. He moved to New York in the fall of 1954 and, after meeting Ellsworth Kelly, settled in Coenties Slip, at the southern tip of Manhattan, where he was closely associated with artists such as Agnes Martin, Lenore Tawney, Ann Wilson, Jack Youngerman, and Kelly himself. It was during this period, in 1958, that Indiana traded his surname – Clark– for a name that acknowledged his archetypically Midwestern American roots. Following his emergence in the 1960’s as one of the leading Pop artists of his day, Indiana left New York in 1978 for the island of Vinalhaven, Maine, where he lives and works to this day.

ROBERT INDIANA: BEYOND LOVE: CATALOGUE

In conjunction with Robert Indiana: Beyond LOVE, the Whitney and Yale University Press are publishing a fully-illustrated catalogue by Barbara Haskell. In addition to a chronology, exhibition history, and bibliography, the book includes essays by McNay Art Museum chief curator Rene Paul Barilleaux and independent scholar Sasha Nicholas, as well as the transcript of roundtable discussions on Indiana’s art by Thomas Crow, Robert Storr, John Wilmerding, Robert Pincus-Witten, Allison Unruh, Susan Elizabeth Ryan and Bill Katz. The catalogue also contains an appendix of statements, interviews, and writings by Robert Indiana.

Major support for Robert Indiana: Beyond LOVE is provided by Morgan Art Foundation. Generous support is provided by Shirley and William Lehman, The Lunder Foundation, and the Robert B. Mayer Family. Additional support is provided by The Gage Fund, Inc., Virginia and Herbert Lust, the Overbrook Foundation, and Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel. 

Whitney Museum of American Art

www.whitney.org

Ham Jin exhibition at Doosan Gallery New York

Ham Jin: Unseen 
DOOSAN Gallery New York 
November 14 - December 21, 2013 

DOOSAN Gallery New York announces korean artist HAM JIN’s solo exhibition Unseen. This exhibition will comprise of approximately fifty miniature sculptures from a recent series, all created using black polymer clay. 

Ham Jin’s installations of miniature sculptures constructed with materials such as collected dust particles, polymer clay, and dead insects satirize the contemporary condition of individuals trapped in the world of their own making. For his recent works, he employed only black polymer clay due to the material’s lightness and flexibility, which gave immediate form to Ham’s ideas, while limiting the color palette allowed him to focus on the forms and structures, and the properties of the material itself. 

Unseen denotes both that the works require up-close viewing to really see, as well as that the process of construction itself is not readily apparent to the viewer. In the recently finished Untitled series, abstract black sculptures appear as if they are black dots dispersed and floating inside the starkly white exhibition space. However, upon closer inspection, human faces emerge out of unidentifiable organisms, or in the urban series, New York City's buildings are standing aligned in rows, and sceneries that the artist directly saw and experienced are all part of Ham’s work. As in a poem where one word or one line could be interpreted and understood in countless ways, so is the nature of Ham Jin’s works.  

  

In this exhibition, Ham Jin’s intricate sculptures will provide a stimulating and pleasurable viewing experience that will occasion the opportunity to witness the artist’s unique vision and wit, along with the insight into another aspect and look at Korean contemporary art. 

HAM JIN (b. 1978) received a BFA in Sculpture from Kyungwon University. He has had solo exhibitions at pkm Gallery (2012/2011/2004, Seoul, Korea), Miki Wick Kim Contemporary Art (2008, Zurich, Switzerland), and Aomori Contemporary Art Centre (2007, Aomori, Japan). His works also have been included at Minsheng Art Museum (2010, Shanghai, China), Espace Culturel Louis Vuitton (2008, Paris, France), Rodin Gallery (2008, Seoul, Korea), Venice Biennale (2005, Venice, Italy), Mori Art Museum (2005, Tokyo, Japan), and de Appel Arts Centre (2003, Amsterdam, Netherlands). 

DOOSAN Gallery New York 

www.doosangallery.com

Chagall at The Jewish Museum, NYC, 2013-2014: Love, War, and Exile Exhibition

Chagall: Love, War, and Exile

The Jewish Museum, New York

September 15, 2013 - February 2, 2014 

The Jewish Museum in New York will present Chagall: Love, War, and Exile which, for the first time in the U.S., explores a significant but neglected period in the artist's career, from the rise of fascism in the 1930s through 1948, years spent in Paris and then in exile in New York.

MARC CHAGALL (1887-1985), one of the foremost modernists of the 20th century, created his unique style by drawing on elements from richly colored folk art motifs, the Russian Christian icon tradition, Cubism, and Surrealism. Beginning with the evocative paintings from his years in France, Chagall: Love, War, and Exile illuminates an artist deeply responsive to the suffering inflicted by war and to his own personal losses and concerns. Although he never abandoned a poetic sensibility, his art of the 1930s and 1940s reflects the political reality of the time. Most unexpected is the recurring appearance of the figure of the crucified Jesus as a metaphor for war and persecution. By the mid-1940s, Chagall returns to joyful, colorful compositions expressing the power of love. The exhibition includes 30 paintings and 24 works on paper, as well as selected letters, poems, photos, and ephemera. 

Escaping the hardships of Soviet life following the Revolution, Marc Chagall moved to Paris with his wife, Bella, and daughter, Ida. During this productive period, he assimilated the French artistic tradition, creating a series of portrait-like flower paintings, vibrant in color and texture.

Chagall's exile from Russia also inspired work based on memories of his childhood and of the Bolshevik Revolution. He depicted a cathedral that dominated the town of Vitebsk, and drew on a remembered storehouse of symbols meaningful to both Jews and Christians, presaging the Christian imagery-in particular the Crucifixion-in work to come. 

Like many Eastern European Jews who had fled to France, Chagall's world was threatened by the rise of Nazism. In 1941, with an invitation from Alfred Barr of the Museum of Modern Art, he and Bella escaped to New York City. With the onset of the war and this second exile in New York, themes of violence and disruption characterize Chagall's work. 

The most prevalent image used by Chagall during World War II was of Jesus and the Crucifixion. In Chagall's canvases Jesus was often depicted as a Jew. For the artist, the crucified Jesus was a symbol for victims of persecution, and an appeal to conscience that equated the martyrdom of Jesus with the suffering of the Jewish people. While other Jewish artists depicted the Crucifixion, for Chagall it became a frequent theme. 

Unlike his years in Paris, Chagall was never completely comfortable in New York City. The artist felt disconnected from the places he understood best-Russia and Paris. This feeling of alienation was compounded by a devastating personal tragedy-the sudden death of his wife, Bella, in September 1944. 

Marc Chagall soon established a new relationship with Virginia Haggard McNeil, moving with her to High Falls, New York in the mid-Hudson Valley. His work from this time often expresses a tension-between the memory of Bella and the new presence of Virginia-resulting in fraught but revealing compositions. Gradually, as the artist emerged from his sadness, and the horrors of war receded, the work from this period begins to reflect a more familiar Chagall expressed in joy-filled paintings replete with intense color and levitating figures.

The show brings together significant works from major institutions and collections throughout Europe, Israel, South America, and the United States. Chagall: Love, War, and Exile is organized by Susan Tumarkin Goodman, Senior Curator at The Jewish Museum.

Chagall: Love, War, and Exile Exhibition

Exhibition Catalogue

(c) 2013 Yale University Press

Chagall Exhibition Catalogue

In conjunction with the exhibition, The Jewish Museum and Yale University Press are co-publishing a 148-page catalogue by Ms. Goodman, with an essay by Kenneth E. Silver, Professor of Art History at New York University. Goodman and Silver analyze Chagall's complex iconography and phantasmagorical style, tracing the political, literary, and theological sources that inspired his art. Also included are 72 color reproductions, 27 black and white illustrations, and eleven of Chagall's rarely seen poems. 

The Jewish Museum, New York City

www.thejewishmuseum.org

Jack Goldstein x 10,000 at The Jewish Museum, NYC

Jack Goldstein x 10,000
The Jewish Museum, New York
Through September 29, 2013

JACK GOLDSTEIN 

Still from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1975 16mm film; color; sound; 3 min. 

Courtesy Galerie Daniel Buchholz, Berlin / Cologne and the Estate of Jack Goldstein

Jack Goldstein x 10,000 at the Jewish Museum in New York is the first American museum retrospective devoted to the work of Canadian-born artist JACK GOLDSTEIN (1945-2003). This comprehensive exhibition brings to light Jack Goldstein’s important legacy, revealing his central position in the Pictures Generation of artists of the 1970s and 1980s. The impressive range of the artist’s imagination is explored through Jack Goldstein’s influential films and paintings as well as his pioneering sound recordings, installations, and writings. Ten years after his untimely death in 2003, Jack Goldstein’s work is exerting fresh influence, especially among younger artists. With Jack Goldstein x 10,000, The Jewish Museum provides audiences who may not be familiar with his work an in-depth understanding of an extraordinary art innovator. 

Jack Goldstein x 10,000 was organized by the Orange County Museum of Art, where it was presented in 2012. The Jewish Museum in New York is the only other venue for the show, which includes nearly 40 works of art, along with rare writings providing a context for the reappraisal of Jack Goldstein’s contributions.

JACK GOLDSTEIN: BIOGRAPHY & EXHIBITION

Born to a Jewish family in Montreal in 1945, Jack Goldstein moved to Los Angeles as a child. A member of the first graduating class of the California Institute of Arts (CalArts), Goldstein emerged as a key figure in the Pictures Generation and as a peer of such celebrated figures as Cindy Sherman, Robert Longo, Sherrie Levine, and James Welling, among others, participated in a fundamental shift in American art during the late 1970s. Enthralled by mass culture, the Pictures Generation artists took photography, film and performance in new directions, and expanded the stylistic vocabulary of painting and drawing by appropriating images from books, magazines, advertisements, television and film.

In the late 1960s Goldstein made Minimalist sculpture, arrangements of wooden blocks and other objects precariously held together by gravity—a metaphor for the contingency and fragility of life. He soon turned to staged performances, several of which were performed in New York City in the mid-1970s. An example of Jack Goldstein’s sculpture as well as his performance portfolio is on view.

Jack Goldstein x 10,000 brings together 17 films, spanning the years 1971 to 1983. As art historian Douglas Crimp recalls in the exhibition catalogue, “They were quite unlike any other films I'd seen up to that point." Each film opens with a fixed, close-up view of an object on a plain background. Its detachment from its original context leaves a space in the viewer’s mind for new meanings to enter. Although short—from just over half a minute to about eleven minutes—the films tend to literalize the passage of time, often by requiring viewers to watch a single image or fragment that repeats itself over and over. Exhibition highlights include his celebrated 1975 film of the growling Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer lion. Another signature work is the 1978 film The Jump, featuring a leaping diver, performing a somersault and disintegrating into fragments.

Jack Goldstein also began to appropriate and remix recorded sound and image; by the mid-1970s he was producing vinyl records as artworks, editing together stock film-industry sound effects of unnerving or frightening moments. Thus, while his films are based on performed events his records have a more direct link to commercial culture. Jack Goldstein x 10,000 includes a selection of 19 records which visitors can see as well as listen to.

By 1980 Jack Goldstein was starting to paint. His first canvases, with their sleek surfaces, monumental size, and photographic gleam, retained the cinematic polish of his records and films. His images derive from appropriated pictures, ranging from World War II and nature photographs to computer-generated abstractions. He continued his exploration of mortality, depicting violent yet ethereal landscapes. He hired assistants to execute the paintings, giving them photographs and instructions. Implied in his disappearance from the artwork is his disappearance from the world; here as elsewhere a deep, existential anxiety permeates his work.

Throughout Goldstein’s career, words had been a presence in his work, particularly aphorisms and other short pas¬sages based on appropriated texts. He considered his final work, the immense, seventeen-volume Selected Writings, his autobiography. In the last decade of his life he lived in obscurity in East Los Angeles, voraciously reading philosophy books backwards. He extracted passages he found interesting and pieced them together to construct a personal narrative, an amalgamation of appropriated texts by other authors in which his own identity is deeply hidden within a chorus of voices.

The exhibition also includes a selection of photographs by James Welling of Jack Goldstein’s studio in Los Angeles. James Welling’s photographs offer a tantalizing look at the artist’s creative world – particularly fascinating for an artist who deliberately suppressed his own presence in his art.

With his films and paintings, Jack Goldstein achieved a level of art-world recognition and visibility. By the late 1980s, struggling with depression and a drug dependency, Goldstein returned to California, where he spent most of the next decade out of sight. He was planning an exhibition of paintings in Los Angeles at the time of his death by suicide in 2003.

Over the past decade interest in Jack Goldstein’s work has grown. The exhibition positions Goldstein as one of the leading artists of the 1970s and 1980s.

Exhibition Catalogue

The exhibition is accompanied by a 240-page, fully illustrated catalogue co-published with Prestel. Included are essays by Philipp Kaiser, Douglas Crimp, and Alexander Dumbadze, as well as a photo essay by James Welling. The catalogue also includes a previously unpublished 2001 interview with Goldstein by artist Meg Cranston. 

Related Program Highlights

The Jewish Museum is offering a diverse series of programs related to the Jack Goldstein exhibition featuring such artists and curators as John Baldessari, Douglas Crimp, and Robert Longo. On Thursday, May 23, 2013, Douglas Crimp, Critic and Fanny Knapp Allen Professor of Art History at the University of Rochester, and Jens Hoffmann, Deputy Director of Exhibitions and Public Programs at The Jewish Museum, will discuss Goldstein as a pioneer of conceptual art practices. Douglas Crimp curated a legendary Pictures exhibition in 1977. On Wednesday, September 11, 2013 in How is Jack Goldstein?, John Baldessari and R.H. Quaytman will share their reflections and impressions of Jack Goldstein in this intergenerational dialogue moderated by Jens Hoffmann. As Goldstein’s instructor at CalArts in the early 1970s, John Baldessari greatly informed the late artist’s work. R.H. Quaytman continues the tradition of appropriation and mechanical reproduction. On Sunday, September 22, 2013, as part of the symposium, Who is Jack Goldstein?, panel discussions will examine the circumstances of the art world during the 1970s and 1980s along with the impact of the Pictures Generation on artists today. Artist and filmmaker Morgan Fisher will present the keynote lecture and panelists will include artists Robert Longo, Matt Mullican, Troy Brauntuch, James Welling, and Kathryn Andrews, among others. More information on the museum's website.

Jack Goldstein x 10,000 was organized by the Orange County Museum of Art and curated by guest curator Philipp Kaiser. The Jewish Museum presentation has been organized by Joanna Montoya, Neubauer Family Foundation Assistant Curator. 

This exhibition is made possible by a grant from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. Additional support is provided by Jean and Tim Weiss, the National Endowment for the Arts, Barbara and Victor L. Klein, and Karyn D. Kohl. The Jewish Museum presentation is made possible by the Melva Bucksbaum Fund for Contemporary Art. Generous support is also provided by Venus Over Manhattan. 

Also on view at the Jewish Museum in NYC: As it were … So to speak. A Museum Collection in Dialogue with Barbara Bloom and Six Things: Sagmeister & Walsh, through August 4, 2013.

The Jewish Museum's website: www.thejewishmuseum.org

Photographer Dave Frieder, The Great bridges of NYC at Salmagundi

 

Dave Frieder, The Great Bridges of New York

Camera in hand, photographer DAVE FRIEDER has been scaling the Great Bridges of New York since 1993, using traditional film photography and some measure of courage to capture seldom seen details of these structures as well as historic views of New York City.

A PowerPoint Presentation on these unique giants that will take you breath away is oragnized at the Salmagundi Club (47 Fifh Ave @ 12th street, NYC 10003) on Friday, December 9. Admission is free and open to the public.

www.salmagundi.org

Sarah Braman: Yours, Mitchell-Innes & Nash NYC presents new sculptures and wall works

Sarah Braman: Yours
Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York
Through December 3, 2011

Sarah Braman: Yours features several new sculptures and wall works. For this exhibition at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York, Sarah Braman has deconstructed an entire camper and incorporated slices and chunks of it into a number of different works. The resulting sculptures collapse inside and outside in a way that’s funny and uncanny, familiar and resolutely odd. 

SARAH BRAMAN, Breakfast, studio view, 2011
Photo courtesy of the artist and Mitchell-Innes & Nash

Sarah Braman’s sculptures are monuments to everyday life, and to the interplay between sensory experience and emotional resonance. She combines parts scavenged from vehicles, old buildings, or furniture with translucent volumes of color and light to construct her precariously balanced sculptures. In their formal construction, they relate to the legacies of minimalism and color field painting. Yet they defy modernist tunnel vision with their joyful immersion in lived experience and emotional life: they suggest themes of home, family, and nature. Sarah Braman's use of materials also takes this dichotomy as a governing principle: colored plexi serves purely as a vehicle for light, volume, and color, while wood and cardboard bear evidence of use and wear.

Braman’s sculptural works are always experienced in the round, yielding multiple vantage points and endless variations. In creating these ever-shifting points of view, Braman asks the viewer to take an active part in creating meaning: the exhibition's title, Yours, connotes an offering or a salutation, but also alludes to the viewer's role in the work.

SARAH BRAMAN has exhibited in museums and institutions in the US and Europe. Her first European solo exhibition was on view in 2011 at MACRO in Rome, Italy. She was included in the 2010 Lisbon Biennal in Portugal and 2005 Greater New York at PS1 Contemporary Art Center in Long Island City, as well as exhibitions in Copenhagen, London, and Berlin. She has had New York solo exhibitions at Canada and Museum 52. She received her MFA from Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia in 1998, and her BFA from Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore in 1992.

Mitchell-Innes & Nash
534 W 26th Street, NYC
Web: www.miandn.com

Willem de Rooij: Crazy Repelled Firelight - Exhibition at Friedrich Petzel Gallery, NYC

NYC Contemporary Art Exhibition: Willem de Rooij, Crazy Repelled Firelight  

Friedrich Petzel Gallery, Chelsea, NYC

Crazy Repelled Firelight is a solo exhibition by Dutch artist Willem de Rooij in New York City at Friedrich Petzel Gallery.

Since 2007, Willem de Rooij has been producing abstract weavings that aim to generate meaning through the material they are made of, not through external references. The first weavings of this kind, originally produced for the 2009 Athens Biennale and shown in this exhibition, titled Silver to Gold (2009/2011). This artwork was industrially produced at Van Maele linen manufactures outside of Brussels and consists of five stretched pieces. The material developed for this work is a mixture of unbleached Belgian Linen and silver and gold-colored polyester threads. Through a step-by-step transition the monochromatic silver panels gradually change to gold through adjustments in the mixture.

Joining Silver to Gold in his exhibition, Willem de Rooij has produced four new handwoven works. These works show a gradual transformation in color through the production of the material they are made from. The first handwoven artwork, Black to Black (2011) gradates from shiny black to matte black. Rather than a treated surface, like that of a painting, this fabric panel is woven on a loom by placing black cotton lengthwise (the warp) and weaving 10 different mixtures of polyester sewing thread as well as reflecting synthetic strips crosswise (known as the woof). 

The second woven panel, Black to Brown (2011) also has a black cotton warp as a base that is then shot through with 10 different mixtures of black and brown polyester sewing thread, producing a slow gradation from black to brown. 

A third artwork, Digot Lovers (2011) an anagram of the words “silver to gold,” combines unbleached linen with silver and gold-colored polyester threads, gradating color from the unbleached linen to a combination of silver and gold thread which approach from either side of the lozenge. 

The fourth handwoven work on display, Mechanize Her Jenny (2011), is a pink monochrome produced from unbleached linen and a woof plied of 10 different shades of pink polyester sewing thread, so that the resulting image fluctuates in color depending on the physical position of the viewer. 

These four artworks were produced by Ulla Schünemann on a 200-year old loom at Handweberei Geltow outside Potsdam, Germany.

Willem de Rooij’s work is determined by the selection and combination of images in diverse media, such as sculpture, film, photography and text. His work analyzes the conventions of presentation and representation and assesses the tension between socio-political and autonomous image production. Where early film installations already had a sculptural quality, de Rooij's most recent exhibitions became works of art in their own right, often incorporating found materials or appropriated works of art. 

Bantar Gebang (2000), a 10-minute single take 35mm film, shows an early morning scene in a slum area in Jakarta, Indonesia. While the sun rises, the colors of the landscape are in constant flux. 

Orange (2004), a slideshow comprised of eighty-one 35mm slides that are all a different shade of orange, was shown at Friedrich Petzel Gallery in 2006. A wall text that accompanies this work associates prisoners’ attire on Guantanamo Bay with national identity in general and that of the Netherlands in particular. 

Bouquet V (2010) is a flower arrangement that exists of 95 different flowers, each individual species or type being present only once. 

Bouquet VI (2010) juxtaposes 100 black tulips with 100 white tulips. These works all test the capacity of supposedly objective entities (color, form, material) to simultaneously evoke and question social and political structures: difference, individuality, majority, change, and polarization. 

The notion of referentiality, and more specifically the development of strategies to bypass external references became important parameters in Willem de Rooij’s work over the last 5 years. Intolerance, shown at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin in the autumn of 2010 is the most recent in a series of temporary sculptural installations that investigate whether it is possible to produce new works out of existing objects and artworks, rather than to use them as references.

SHORT BIOGRAPHY: WILLEM DE ROOIJ (born in 1969 in Beverwijk, Holland) studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Akademie in Amsterdam from 1990-95 and at the Rijksakademie from 1997-98. He has been a tutor at De Ateliers in Amsterdam since 2002 and Professor of Fine Arts at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main since 2006. De Rooij lives and works in Berlin. De Rooij worked and exhibited together with Jeroen de Rijke untill 2006, followed by exhibitions at K 21, Düsseldorf (2007) and at the Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna (2008). He received a Robert Fulton Fellowship at Harvard University in 2004 and represented the Netherlands at the Venice Biennale in 2005. His works are in the collections of the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, MUMOK, Vienna, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. De Rooij will participate in group exhibitions at the Kröller Möller Museum, Otterloo, the Centro Galego de Arte de Arte Contemporanea, Santiago de Compostella, and PS1, New York later this year. A new installation at Bentheim Castle, Gemany and a large solo exhibition at the Kunstverein Munich, Germany will open early October.

Friedrich Petzel Gallery is located at 535 & 537 West 22nd Street, in Chelsea between 10th and 11th Avenues, New York, NY 10011. 

Website: www.petzel.com

Street Scenes paintings by Daria Deshuk in NYC at New World Stages

NYC Art Exhibition: Flashback: Street Scenes by Daria Deshuk - The Larry Rivers Years 
New World Stages, NYC 
July 11 - September, 2011 

DARIA DESHUK

Flashback: Street Scenes by Daria Deshuk The Larry Rivers Years is an exhibition of 24 original oil paintings by Daria Deshuk. The show is on view at Gallery at New World Stages in New York City through September 5th, 2011, with an Opening Reception on Thursday August 4th, from 5 to 7:30 p.m.

“This series is about creating snapshots of life, my chosen imagery takes that reality and depth of the viewer to a level of universal and subjective intimacy. With paint and brush I strive to capture the essence and atmosphere of the ordinary and mindless vignettes of daily life,” said Daria Deshuk. “The work explores Intensity, Interaction, Passion and Mediation, the individual references the collective and art is created. The artist as voyeur steals selectively from the public environment of streets, parks, images that define a New York City American experience. Far beyond the standardized interpretation of reality provided by photography, painting allows me to capture the essence of human experience condensed into the stolen moment, my choices as an artist extend reality by leading the eye in the re-orchestration of light space and the pure beauty of paint itself,” concluded Deshuk. 

DARIA DESHUK studied art at Parson's School of Design she received her BFA in Painting in 1978. Daria found herself part of the exciting art scene in the early ‘80s living in the East Village, receiving a MFA in Painting from Hunter College. She was a member of PS 122 Artist Space, working and exhibiting for 10 years. Daria met the artist Larry Rivers and at the age of 22, began a companionship of 15 years. Their son Sam Deshuk Rivers was born in 1985.  Daria now resides in Bridgehampton, NY full-time, with her partner David Kushnir.

Gallery at New World Stages 
343 West 49th Street
NYC - USA

www.newworldstages.com

Richard Fleischner at Knoedler, NYC: Material /Process / Place: Works 1963-2011

Richard Fleischner

Material /Process / Place: Works 1963-2011 

Knoedler & Company, New York 

Throught April 30, 2011

RICHARD FLEISCHNER 

Untitled, 2004 

Gouache on paper, 17 x 16 3/4 inches

Courtesy KNOEDLER & COMPANY, New York

If a concept or idea is to be realized—not left in a conceptual form—the process that gives it its physical being becomes inseparable from its reading and therefore its meaning. My work grows out of the details that I recognize and acknowledge within the commonplace and universal. It is a practice that involves the juxtaposition and critical distancing between material interactions and placements. The understanding gained through working with different methods and materials—the crafting of glass, bronze, wood, wax and stone—is a part of a shared culture of labor that is irreplaceable to me. These interrelationships of intention, context and process and how they inform one another become the factors that are essential and irreducible in the elegantly refined forms that I most love. — Richard Fleischner, 2011

Knoedler & Company’s inaugural exhibition of the work of Richard Fleischner —RICHARD FLEISCHNER, MATERIAL / PROCESS / PLACE: WORKS 1963-2011, March 19 - April 30, 2011— is a survey spanning more than forty-five years, including works on paper, sculptures, and photographs, and focusing on a spectrum of unifying thematic currents and concerns that may be found in the artist’s work in all media, from his intimately scaled works to site-specific interventions and installations.

A critic once stated that Richard Fleischner “has seeded the country from coast coast with large-scale site-specific projects,” (Grace Glueck 2000) works that may be said to blur the boundaries between sculpture, architecture, and landscape. He figured, along with Alice Aycock, Michael Heizer, Richard Long, Mary Miss, Charles Simonds, Robert Smithson, and others, in two seminal exhibitions on site-specific art: Probing the Earth: Contemporary Land Projects (Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, 1977-1978) and Sitings (La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art and traveling, 1986). 

Among Richard Fleischner’s permanent installations are: courtyard projects at MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts (1980-1985 and 2008-2010) and the Dallas Museum of Art, Texas (1981-1983), Tufa Maze (1973), installed at Kykuit, the Rockefeller Estate, Pocantico Hills, New York; Sod Maze, originally created for the 1974 Monumenta exhibition, and permanently installed at Chateau-sur-Mer in Newport, Rhode Island; the Brown University War Memorial, Providence, Rhode Island (1996-1997); and the Marsh & McLennan Companies September 11, 2001 Memorial, New York (2002-2003). Most recently, he was commissioned to create a courtyard for the Baisillie School of International Affairs & The Centre for International Governance Innovation, in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.

Richard Fleischner’s geometries do not exist as disembodied abstractions, but rather organize and bring to light the special eccentricities of a space, drawing forth and quietly illuminating its potentiality. His lines, planes, points, edges, angles, and axes derive not from his head, but from an extension of his personal and very physical interaction with the space. All his projects have involved plotting by plodding and acting out the measurements and arrangements. From the earliest interventions in the open fields, he has paced, reacted, sensed, visualized, and actually experienced rather than set down any a priori notion on paper. (Katy Kline 1983)

Richard Fleischner’s small-scale sculptures, some of which are closely related to his site-specific works, have been created in diverse media, including terra cotta, wax and wood, steel, and cast bronze and lead. Works from the artist’s series of Lead Drawings (1973-1975) are on loan for this exhibition from the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego.In his drawings and gouaches, Fleischner achieves a subtle fusion of figure and ground, articulating in two dimensions fundamental forms and geometries that have engaged him since the 1960s, including the relationships and balances of the human presence and perception within a field—what the artist has referred to as “critical distances.” One critic referred to his “Arcadian dreams of balance between self and world.” (Ken Johnson 1999) Applying layers of color to handmade paper with a palette knife, Fleischner sands, rubs, scrapes, washes, repaints and rewashes his gouaches to develop subtle tones and worn patinas rich in texture and incident, with the look of weathered masonry. On the surfaces, he often scratches rough, irregular grids, with incised white lines. In some of the graphite drawings, he includes solid figures in the form of rectangles or crosses that recall the geometrics of certain Russian Constructivists, like Malevich.

Richard Fleischner's photographs: the artist is perhaps least known for his work in photography, which he considers an entirely integral aspect of his oeuvre. Included in Material/Process/Place will be a series of photographs, the earliest of which, Checkers, is dated 1963. In 2007, the artist made a trip to Africa, and in 2008 traveled to India, and works from his Mali and Mumbai series are exhibited here for the first time.

On view in Knoedler Project Space: RAUSCHENBERG x 4, Throught April 30, 2011

Next Exhibitions at Knoedler: 

Conrad Marca-Relli: City to Town, May 5 - July 29, 2011. Catalogue with essay by Carter Ratcliff

Project Space: Keith Mayerson: Abstracts, May 7 - June 17, 2011

KNOEDLER & COMPANY

19 East 70th Street, New York, NY 10021

www.knoedlergallery.com

ACAW 2011 NYC Asian Art Celebration

Asian Contemporary Art Week 2011

New York City 

March 21 - 31, 2011 

Now in its seventh year, Asian Contemporary Art Week celebrates and promotes Asian contemporary art through artist conversations, panels, screenings, book launches, exhibitions, and curator tours at over 35 museums and galleries. This year, ACAW take place throughout New York City, and opened on the first day of spring: March 21, also celebrated as the New Year in many countries of Central Asia. Events take place at various locations around NYC for ten days, ending on March 31. 

RACHID RANA

Rashid Rana, Aar Paar. 2000-2004. 

Collaborative project by Shilpa Gupta and Huma Mulji in Karachi.

“Asian Contemporary Art Week highlights the latest trends in contemporary art while recognizing that contemporary art in Asia doesn’t come out of nowhere,” says Asia Society Museum Director Melissa Chiu. “This year’s program showcases emerging artists and work never seen in the U.S., and also recognizes the enduring importance of influential artists such as M.F. Husain and Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, both participants in our series of artist discussions.” 

As part of its mission to educate the public and to increase the visibility of artists, ACAW 2011 features DIALOGUES IN ASIAN CONTEMPORARY ART, a series of talks with more than 25 leading artists and professionals in the field. “Over the course of the week, ACAW Dialogues will strive to disseminate broader, more thorough knowledge of art communities and artists’ activities within and outside of Asia,” notes ACAW director Leeza Ahmady. “Enthusiasm for this project continues to build and expand, with a U.S. West Coast-based consortium now coming together to plan similar initiatives in San Francisco.” 

With numerous exhibitions and artist dialogues, ACAW 2011 includes artists from the US and Asia. Among the countries represented are Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Burma, China, India, Indonesia, Iran, Japan, Kazakhstan and Pakistan. 

MONIR SHAHROUDY FARMANFARMAIAN

Monir Farmanfarmaian, Untitled, 2010. 

Mirror mosaic, reverse glass painting, 210 x 130 cm. 

Courtesy of the artist and Haines Gallery San Francisco 

HIGHLIGHTS OF THE ACAW DIALOGUES include: a discussion with Mariam Ghani at the Museum of Modern Art (March 21); Rashid Rana and Pooja Sood at Sotheby’s (March 22); M.F. Husain  and Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian at Asia Society Museum (March 23); David Elliott, Massimiliano Gioni and Suzanne Cotter at the Guggenheim Museum (March 25); Ushio Shinohara and Tomokazu Matsuyama at Asia Society Museum (March 28); Liu Xiaodong at the Guggenheim Museum (March 29); Xie Xiaoze interviewed by Robert Hobbs at China Institute (March 29); a discussion with Asian Cultural Council 2011 grantees/contemporary artists Rahraw and Manizhah Omarzad, Firoz Mahmud, Chaw Ei Thein, and Fong Wah Phoebe Hui led by Leeza Ahmady at Location One (March 29); Yang Jiechang and Zheng Shengtian in conversation with Jane DeBevoise at Museum of Chinese in the Americas (March 31) and Almagul Menlibayeva at Priska C. Juschka Fine Art (March 31). Another highlight is a dramatic installation by New York-based Korean artist ATTA KIM, who will create a 5 and 1/2-ft-tall, 1,300 pound ice sculpture of a seated Buddha that will slowly melt in Rubin Museum of Art’s spiral lobby, from March 25 through 27. ACAW Dialogues program is sponsored by Asian Cultural Council, New York.  

ACAW 2011 PARTICIPATING VENUES include: Aperture Gallery; Asia Art Archive; Asian Cultural Council; Asia Society and Museum; Bose Pacia; China Institute Chambers Fine Art; Ethan Cohen Fine Arts; Gallery Korea/Korean Cultural Service; Indo-American Arts Council; Jack Shainman Gallery; Japan Society; Leila Taghinia-Milani Heller Gallery; Location One; Meulensteen; Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA); Museum of Modern Art; Priska C. Juschka Fine Art; Queens Museum of Art; Rubin Museum of Art; sepia EYE; Sotheby’s; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; Sundaram Tagore Gallery; Taipei Cultural Center; Tally Beck Contemporary; Thomas Erben Gallery; Tyler Rollins Fine Art; and Zürcher Studio. 

Asian Contemporary Art Week is an initiative of the Asian Contemporary Art Consortium, which includes: Melissa Chiu and Miwako Tezuka, Asia Society Museum; Steve Pacia and Shumita Bose, Bose Pacia; Agnes Hsu, China Institute; Ethan Cohen, Ethan Cohen Fine Arts; Jean Kim, Gana Art Gallery; Jack Shainman, Jack Shainman Gallery; Joe Earle, Japan Society; Leila Heller, Leila Taghinia-Milani Heller Gallery; Esa Epstein, sepia EYE;  Alexandra Munroe and Sandhini Poddar, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; Barbara London, The Museum of Modern Art; Thomas Erben, Thomas Erben Gallery; Tyler Rollins, Tyler Rollins Fine Arts; Jack and Susy Wadsworth, Collectors; Xiaoming Zhang, Private Art Consultant; and Leeza Ahmady, ACAW Director (Independent Curator).

ACAW web site : www.acaw.net

New Art Photography

The Collector’s Guide to New Art Photography Vol. 2 

Chelsea Art Museum, NYC 

Curated by Vanessa Kramer

Through April 2, 2011 

This 216-page biennial sourcebook highlights some of the most challenging and innovative new photographic work from 100 photographers internationally. Edited by Humble Arts Foundation’s co-founders, amani olu and Jon Feinstein, with an introduction by Vanessa Kramer, Director of Photographs, Phillips de Pury & Company, The Collector’s Guide to New Art Photography Vol. 2 is a resource for collectors, gallerists, curators, art professionals, educators, and the public. This new volume continues Humble’s mission of introducing new talent to people of influence in contemporary art.

To launch THE COLLECTOR'S GUIDE TO NEW ART PHOTOGRAPHY Vol. 2, Humble Arts Foundation has collaborated with Chelsea Art Museum to present 100 images by all 100 artists included in the book, curated by Vanessa Kramer. The exhibition, which celebrates the publication’s innovation and diversity, opened with the book launch on March 4 and is on view through April 2, 2011.

FEATURED ARTISTS: Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili, Erica Allen, Ben Alper, Elizabeth Atterbury, Clint Baclawski, Flemming Ove Bech, Claire Beckett, Mathieu Bernard-Reymond, Eric Bessel, Magda Biernat, Lucas Blalock, Ryan Boatright, Paul Bobko, Andrey Bogush, Katharina Bosse, Brian Buckley, Christian Chaize, Elizabeth Chiles, Daniel W. Coburn, Christopher Colville, Helen Maurene Cooper, Joy Drury Cox, John Cyr, Erin Desmond, Beatriz Diaz Zurita, Maureen Drennan, Amy Eckert, Adam Ekberg, Sam Falls, Bradley Farwell, Maria L. Felixmüller, Jill Frank, Andy Freeberg, Michael Stuart Gaillard, Matthew Gamber, Gigi Gatewood, Christopher Gianunzio, Sarah Girner, Wendy Given, Maury Gortemiller, Peter Granser, Kristopher Graves, Joshua Dudley Greer, Matt Gunther, Stephanie Halmos, Sharon Harper, Jibade–Khalil Huffman, William Mebane & Martin Hyers, Nicola Kast, Emily Keegin, Ryan Kellman, Grace Kim, Anna Krachey, Jessica Labatte, Yvonne Lacet, Erika Larsen, Gillian Laub, Deana Lawson, David Leventi, Amy Lombard, Rita Maas, Katarzyna Majak, Charlott Markus, Aspen Mays, Avery McCarthy, Paula McCartney, Aaron McElroy, Casey McGonagle, Jeff McLane, Monika Merva, Samuel Morgan, Rachelle Mozman, Tricia Lawless Murray, Yamini Nayar, Nancy Newberry, Lizzy Oppenheimer, Georg Parthen, Jennifer Ray, Julian Röder, Irina Rozovsky, Adam Schreiber, Tina Schula, Robin Schwartz, Emily Shur, Mickey Smith, Kristopher Stallworth, Kate Steciw, Youngsuk Suh, Bill Sullivan, Jordan Tate, Kirsten Kay Thoen, Kevin Thrasher, Millee Tibbs, Corinne Vionnet, Nathaniel Ward, Greg Wasserstrom, Eric White, Ann Woo, and Tereza Zelenkova.

The Curator VANESSA KRAMER, based in New York, joined Phillips de Pury & Company in 2005. Specializing in global markets, she consistently helps to set auction records for international photographers while she continues to maintain Phillips reputation to be at the cutting edge of the art market. Kramer’s extensive experience in international business-getting as well as her strategic vision has proven as key tools to continually achieve new success levels in the Photographs market. She was a featured guest lecturer at the Foam_Fusion Festival at the Foam_Fotografiemuseum in Amsterdam and she is a regular speaker on collecting photography. She received her Bachelor of Arts cum laude from Colgate University in Art History and a post-graduate degree in American Fine and Decorative Arts from the Sotheby’s Institute of Art. Prior to her employment at Phillips de Pury & Company, she was a Museum Educator at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA and worked in Client Services at Sotheby’s.

CHELSEA ART MUSEUM

556 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011

www.chelseaartmuseum.org