Claudette Johnson @ Ortuzar Projects, NYC - Drawn Out

Claudette Johnson: Drawn Out

Ortuzar Projects, New York

March 9 – April 22, 2023

Ortuzar Projects presents Claudette Johnson: Drawn Out, an exhibition of new works by London-based artist Claudette Johnson (b.1959, Manchester, UK). The exhibition is the artist’s first solo presentation in the United States.

Since beginning her career in the early 1980s, Claudette Johnson has challenged traditional representations of gender and Blackness in Western art history. Johnson’s studies of women, and, more recently, men, insist on demanding the acknowledgement of the Black body through often life-sized portraits—a presence that is, in the artist’s words, historically “distorted, hidden, and denied.” Often free-floating within fields of flat color or the white of the page, Johnson imbues her figures with power and subjectivity as she invites them to “take up space in a way that is reflective of who they are.”

In this new body of work, Claudette Johnson continues her exploration of portraiture. Many of her works are drawn from life, including friends and fellow artists, as well as self portraits of Johnson herself. Photographs and found media inform other works. Through a balance of carefully rendered faces, hands, and clothing, contrasted with sketchier and more gestural mark-making, Johnson’s compositions grasp disposition, personality, and mood. Many of Johnson’s subjects look directly at the viewer, recreating an intimate encounter with the artist. In a departure from her usual solo portraits, the exhibition includes three double portraits of friends or historical figures. Through the depiction of two friends posing together, Johnson introduces an additional layer of intimacy within the work: the intimacy and vulnerability of sitting for an artist, as well as the intimacy shared between the subjects. The negative space in-between bodies also introduces a new formal dynamic to the work. Johnson intends for her viewers to encounter the sitters on their own terms as strangers, rarely naming them or revealing biographical information. Her interest, to quote the artist, is stimulated by “what the image shows of their relationship rather than their relative celebrity.”

While traditionally working with pastel, watercolor and gouache, Claudette Johnson’s recent works have increasingly explored oil, oil stick, and egg tempera. This expanded repertoire has allowed Claudette Johnson to move fluidly between the acts of drawing and painting, as well as to work her compositions over a longer duration. These new mediums introduce a vibrancy and material density that sits in stark contrast to the fields of unpainted white ground. In the tension of positive and negative space is a sense of incompleteness that recreates the feeling of the live session. In an exploration of vulnerability, comfort, candidness, and ease, Johnson foregrounds the complexity of humanity in any shared encounter, granting her subjects their right to selfhood in the experience of being seen.

Claudette Johnson was an early member of the BLK Art Group, an association of young Black artists who examined, through their work, issues of race, gender, and the politics of representation. In an effort to bring young Black artists from Wolverhampton University together, the BLK Art Group organized the historic First National Black Art Convention in 1982, attended by several influential contemporary Black artists like Frank Bowling, Lubiana Himid, Rasheed Araeen, and Sonia Boyce. The lecture that Johnson delivered at the convention on the depiction of Black female figures within Western art history—notably the only presentation by a female artist—erupted into a heated dialogue. The discussion catalyzed the formation of a network of women artists at the forefront of the British Black Art Movement.

CLAUDETTE JOHNSON’s recent solo exhibitions include Still Here, Hollybush Gardens, London (2021); Claudette Johnson: I Came to Dance, Modern Art Oxford (2019); and Claudette Johnson, Hollybush Gardens, London (2017). She has participated in numerous group exhibitions including Courtauld Connections: Works from our National Partners, The Courtauld Gallery, London (2022); Drawing Closer, RISD Museum, Providence, Rhode Island (2022); Life Between Islands: Caribbean-British Art 50s — Now, Tate Britain, London (2021); From Hockney to Himid: Sixty Years of British Printmaking, Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, England (2021); Close: Drawn Portraits, The Drawing Room, London (2018); The Place Is Here, South London Gallery and Nottingham Contemporary, London (2017); No Colour Bar: Black British Art in Action 1960-1990, Guildhall Art Gallery, London (2015-16); and Thin Black Line(s), Tate Britain, London (2012). Her work is held in numerous public collections, including Tate, London; British Council Collection; Manchester Art Gallery; and Wolverhampton Art Gallery.

ORTUZAR PROJECTS

9 White Street, New York, NY 10013

www.ortuzarprojects.com

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Joey Terrill @ Ortuzar Projects, NYC - Cute and Paste

Joey Terrill: Cute and Paste

Ortuzar Projects, New York

January 19 – February 25, 2023

Ortuzar Projects presents Cut and Paste, a survey of collage and related works by JOEY TERRILL from the late 1970s to the present, organized by Rafael Barrientos Martínez. Raised in Highland Park and East Los Angeles, Joey Terrill was part of a small group of Chicano artists who in the 1970s and 80s created works that diverged from traditional Chicano-based imagery and subject matter to include visual representations reflecting his queer lived experiences. Utilizing the existing image culture that surrounded him, Joey Terrill combines personal photographs, found pop cultural imagery, and reproductions of artworks by queer predecessors, including Diane Arbus, Robert Mapplethorpe and Wilhelm von Gloeden, to conjure utopic spaces. Spanning from his earliest explorations to substantial new works, Cut and Paste reveals collage as a foundational element to Joey Terrill’s expanded artistic practice.

Beginning with abstract collages and silkscreens made while Joey Terrill was an undergraduate at Immaculate Heart College—an art department still heavily influenced by the graphic artist and activist Sister Corita Kent—the exhibition draws out the interconnectivity of illustration, collage, and printmaking in Terrill’s work and their influence upon the characteristically flat style of his early paintings. Like many artists who came of age in the wake of Pop, he found refuge within the fantasies of American image culture–his earliest artworks covering his bedroom walls, which he transformed with a mix of drawings, photographs, and clippings of comic books, film starlets, and music icons. His silkscreens from the mid-1970s–a medium central to the larger Chicano art movement–find him applying a graphic sensibility to not only representations of brown bodies, but queer desire, an impulse he would continue to explore in his episodic Homeboy Beautiful proto-zines from the end of the decade.

At the center of the exhibition is an installation of unframed Xerox, acrylic, and glitter collages–collectively titled It’s Halloween Party Time–originally created as decorations for Halloween parties Joey Terrill threw at his home from 1989 to 1991. These ephemeral objects–not originally conceived as works of art but dutifully preserved–speak to the ways in which art and life are always playfully entangled within Joey Terrill’s practice. The collages combine imagery of grotesque gargoyles and classical sculptures, contemporary nude figures lifted from magazines, Michelangelo’s David, pre-Columbian drawings, and Tom of Finland characters, to create immersive psychedelic environments. Held at the height of the AIDS Crisis, and shortly following his own HIV diagnosis, Joey Terrill’s parties played host to his inner circle of friends and family, including many who were dealing with HIV and AIDS, becoming a safe space for all. Photos from these parties would later be transformed by Joey Terrill into hyper-realistic paintings, a survivor’s account of how humor and mourning, celebration and sickness, commemoration and loss, can be held within the same apartment. These artifacts–alongside photographs and fliers–point towards the lasting power found in creating seemingly ephemeral spaces for the marginalized within a culture characterized by homophobia and racism.

Since the 1990s Joey Terrill has increasingly integrated collage into his art practice. In When I Was Young (1993), the artist paints himself from a photograph lifted from the cover of his second and final issue of Homeboy Beautiful (1979), taken by frequent collaborator Teddy Sandoval, who would die just two years later of AIDS related complications. Depicting the artist wearing a jacket identifying him as an East Angeleno and carrying a lit cartoon bomb, the original photocomic casts Joey Terrill as an undercover reporter exposing a secret network of homeboys/homegirls terrorizing an upper-class Westwood family. As does much of his work, When I Was Young blurs the line between autobiography and fantasy, taking the image of his fictionalized character and recognizing the real-life radicalism of his youth as an artist and activist. In Being Near Him Joey Terrill combines reference to an elementary-school crush and his forever love, actor Richard Gere; in Marky and Billy (both 1993) he overlays two sex symbols, Mark Wahlberg and Billy Baldwin, at that time in the media for homophobic comments, emblazoned in silver glitter with the Spanish translation of “Two guys that I’d let blow me.”

The irony of the image of Wahlberg being sourced from Andy Warhol’s Interview Magazine is emphasized in Joey Terrill’s ongoing series of works derived from Caravaggio’s The Entombment of Christ, which he duplicates with a Warholian vacuity; the repeated martyrdom of Christ a stand-in for the innumerable lives lost to AIDS. As if in repudiation of any criminalization of his queerness, his recent large-scale work, Here I am / Estoy Aquí, presents a baby photo of the artist at the center of a meteor coursing across the sky. This seminal moment finds the infant Joey Terrill surrounded by strings of pearls and details taken from Mapplethorpe photographs of calla lilies and skulls, motifs repeated throughout the artist’s oeuvre that situate himself within the endless cycle of creation and death.

JOEY TERRILL (b. 1955) lives in Los Angeles, California, where he recently retired as the Director of Global Advocacy & Partnerships for the AIDS Healthcare Foundation. Recent solo exhibitions include Self-Portraits, Clones, Icons, and Homages, 1980–1993, Park View/ Paul Soto, Los Angeles (2022); Once Upon a Time: Paintings, 1981–2015, Ortuzar Projects, New York (2021); and Just What is it That Makes Today’s Homos So Different, So Appealing, ONE Gallery, West Hollywood (2013). Recent institutional surveys include the touring Axis Mundo: Queer Networks in Chicano L.A., organized by Museum of Contemporary Art and ONE Gallery, Los Angeles (2017–2022); ESTAMOS BIEN–La Trienal 20/21, El Museo del Barrio, New York (2020–21); Touching History: Stonewall 50, Palm Springs Art Museum, Palm Springs (2019); Through Positive Eyes, Fowler Museum, University of California, Los Angeles (2019); and ASCO: Elite of the Obscure, A Retrospective, 1972–1987, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2011). His work has recently joined the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; El Museo del Barrio, New York; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, among others.

ORTUZAR PROJECTS

9 White Street, New York, NY 10013

www.ortuzarprojects.com

Cathy Wilkes @ Ortuzar Projects Gallery, NYC

Cathy Wilkes

Ortuzar Projects, New York

September 9 – October 22, 2022

Ortuzar Projects presents an exhibition by Cathy Wilkes, the artist’s first presentation in New York since her acclaimed solo exhibition at MoMA PS1 in 2017. The new installation combines subtle paintings, objects, and Cathy Wilkes’ characteristic papier-mâché figures. Inchoate visions of landscapes and interiors from her childhood are often recognizable in the work, collapsing and reforming time and space repeatedly. Employing what the artist has called “hypostatic abstraction and intense social realism,” the exhibition conveys themes of separation, suffering, infancy, and fragility.

Cathy Wilkes grew up in Northern Ireland. Her new work contends with the lingering after effects of her childhood, meditating on brutality, loss, and continuity. The softness of her presentation creates a zone of eerie uncertainty, anxiety, and empathy—a space of contemplation in which viewers are invited to look and look anew. Quietly preternatural objects—modestly intimate in their presentation—gradually accumulate in “a process of open concentration and waiting.”

Evoking the banalities of a lived life and the pathos inherent to it, Wilkes builds an enigmatic language told through objects and the oft-unperceived emotional states that accompany them. The evocative assemblages give access to a fiercely private inner world, disturbing and reassigning the relationship between subject and object.

The smallest particle of suffering is the object, and I, the subject who acts upon the object, am every atom unfolding from the womb. An atom here among us and another atom in a far away galaxy are inseparable epitomes of the same.

I solemnise and dignify the ghosts of interference which proceed from their origin and whip themselves up before me. I observe, they nucleate and propagate. If I could disappear, how fluid, how graceful and unending, how undisturbed and unpredictable would be the changing patterns thereabout.

On both the left and on the right there is nothing worth seeing and nothing worth hearing. I return home to wait in place and draw forth what is yet to come.

In proximity to so much violence and death, propinquity resulted in introversion. So much talk on that line and all the worry about it buried us all. We weren’t used to looking at things in what you would call, the light.

We lived hoping nothing would happen. I was the oppressor, how could I be the liberator? We associated resistance with violence and destitution. Nobody resisted if they could help it. We were hiding, believing erroneously that nothing could be done. In a blockade of inimical forces, one moved quietly and carefully so as not to disturb anything. As a child I wanted to be as small as an atom, even a lepton or a quark. I am an epitome and a subsistent operator.

CATHY WILKES (b. 1966, Belfast) has been the subject of solo exhibitions at The Modern Institute, Glasgow, Scotland (2021), Xavier Hufkens, Brussels, Belgium (2021); BQ, Berlin, Germany (2021); Venice Biennale, British Pavilion, Venice, Italy (2019); and MoMA PS1, New York (2017). Select group exhibitions include One is always a plural, Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich, Switzerland (2021), Psychic Wounds: On Art & Trauma, The Warehouse, Dallas, Texas (2021), and The State We Are In. Collection of the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw at the Galeria Labirynt in Lublin, Galeria Labirynt, Lublin, Poland (2018). Her work is in the public collections of the Royal Ulster Museum, Belfast, Northern Ireland, Tate, London, England, Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Warsaw, Poland, Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York, among many others. She lives and works in Glasgow.

ORTUZAR PROJECTS

9 White Street, New York, NY 10013

www.ortuzarprojects.com

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Anita Steckel @ Ortuzar Projects Gallery, NYC - My Town

Anita Steckel: My Town

Ortuzar Projects, New York

May 17 – July 16, 2022

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

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

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

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

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

ORTUZAR PROJECTS

9 White Street, New York, NY 10013

www.ortuzarprojects.com

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Michel Parmentier: Paintings & Works on Paper @ Ortuzar Projects, New York - Gallery Inaugural Exhibition

Michel Parmentier 

Paintings & Works on Paper 

Ortuzar Projects, New York 

February 16 – April 7, 2018 

Ortuzar Projects presents its inaugural exhibition, Michel Parmentier: Paintings & Works on Paper. Featuring works produced between 1966 and 1993, this is Michel Parmentier’s first solo show in the United States.

Grounding his practice on a denial of gesture and narrative, MICHEL PARMENTIER (1938–2000) was an active and influential figure within the postwar critique on traditional modes of art-making. He is best known for the highly standardized, horizontally-striped canvases that he painted between 1965 and 1968. These works, produced through the pliage technique of folding the ground before the color is applied, are comprised of perfectly even, 38-centimeter bands which Parmentier varied in color annually (blue in 1966, gray in 1967, red in 1968 and black after 1983).

In January 1967, Michel Parmentier formalized his attack on painterly subjectivity when he co-founded the group subsequently known as ‘BMPT’ with Daniel Buren, Olivier Mosset and Niele Toroni. Fusing minimalism and institutional critique, Buren, Mosset, Parmentier and Toroni interrogated what they collectively considered to be bourgeois artistic sensibility in a series of four painting-performance ‘manifestations’. Parmentier broke from this collective in December 1967 and, in August 1968, from painting altogether. His practice remained dormant until 1983, when he resumed with a series of black paintings.

By 1986, Michel Parmentier had turned his focus to large-scale, freehand work on paper. Utilizing graphite, charcoal, pastel and oil stick, this body of work broadened his practice while remaining committed to the same motivations that had fueled his career in the 1960s.

MICHEL PARMENTIER studied at the École des Métiers d’Art and both lived and worked in Paris, France. He is represented in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Centre Pompidou, Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris; Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; FRAC Bretagne, Rennes; Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nantes; Fondation La Caixa, Spain; and the François Pinault Collection, Paris. Michel Parmentier was the subject of major retrospectives at the Centre National des Arts Plastiques, Paris (1988) and Villa Tamaris Centre d’art, La Seyne-sur-Mer (2014).

A select number of works in the exhibition will subsequently travel to the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University for Michel Parmentier’s first US institutional retrospective. The exhibition is accompanied by the English translation of an expanded edition of Michel Parmentier, Décembre 1965 – 20 Novembre 1999 – Une retrospective (ed. Guy Massaux), co-published by Ales Ortuzar and Éditions Loevenbruck, Paris.

ORTUZAR PROJECTS

9 White Street, New York, NY 10013

www.ortuzarprojects.com