Surrealism and Its Legacy in the United States

Surrealism and Its Legacy in the United States

The Surrealist movement, launched with André Breton’s Manifesto of Surrealism in 1924, has undergone extensive re-evaluation in recent decades. While its origins lay in interwar Europe, contemporary scholarship emphasizes Surrealism’s transnational afterlife, including its profound yet diverse impact on U.S. art, politics, literature, and culture. This essay draws explore Surrealism’s evolving role in the American context.

Global and Multicultural Expansion of Surrealism

Recent studies have challenged the Eurocentric understanding of Surrealism by analyzing its global manifestations. The Journal of Surrealism and the Americas (2023) highlighted how Surrealism developed in Latin America alongside its reinterpretation in the United States (Caro Troncoso, 2023; Foucault, 2023). Additionally, Moretti-Langholz (2024) examined André Breton’s travels in the American Southwest, particularly his engagement with Indigenous cultures and symbols. This broadening of Surrealist scholarship reveals the movement as an evolving, inclusive mode of cultural production, not just an elite Parisian avant-garde.

Surrealism’s Remaking in the United States

Joanna Pawlik’s Remade in America (2021) offers one of the most significant contributions to understanding how Surrealism adapted within American cultural and political frameworks. Pawlik shows how postwar artists and activists repurposed Surrealist ideas to critique imperialism, racism, and capitalism. The Chicago Surrealists, the Beat poets, and feminist and Black Arts Movement figures drew on Surrealist methods to expand its political reach. Far from being an imported style, Surrealism became a flexible ideology of resistance.

From Elite to Popular: Surrealism in Mass Culture

Sandra Zalman’s Consuming Surrealism in American Culture (2017) explores how Surrealism, despite its radical origins, permeated American commercial and popular culture. Salvador Dalí’s collaborations with fashion designers, advertisers, and World’s Fair curators exemplify how Surrealist aesthetics entered the American mainstream. This commercialization of the movement blurred distinctions between avant-garde and kitsch, reshaping its cultural significance.

Artistic and Cross-Media Influence

Surrealist techniques like automatism, juxtaposition, and dream logic deeply influenced American visual culture. Artists such as Jackson Pollock and Arshile Gorky integrated Surrealist automatism into Abstract Expressionism. Photographers including Man Ray, Lee Miller, and Clarence John Laughlin extended Surrealist vision through solarization, montage, and uncanny composition (Conkelton, 1994). In cinema, Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) used dream imagery and disjointed narrative to explore psychological interiority. More recently, artists have turned to digital media to explore Surrealist aesthetics in relation to AI, climate crisis, and global anxieties.

Contemporary Re-Evaluations and Exhibitions

Major exhibitions and scholarly platforms have revisited Surrealism’s legacy through a transnational lens. The 2021–22 exhibition Surrealism Beyond Borders, co-organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Tate Modern and running from 2021 to 2022, (reviewed in the Journal of Surrealism and the Americas, 2021) questioned traditional geographic limits of the movement. This shift in curatorial and academic focus continues to decenter Paris as the epicenter and promotes recognition of marginalized Surrealist practices—from women Surrealists like Dorothea Tanning and Leonora Carrington to Indigenous and Caribbean visual traditions.

Surrealism in the United States was never merely derivative. It was transformed, hybridized, and deployed in uniquely American ways. Recent scholarship shows that Surrealism remains a living methodology, used by artists, filmmakers, and activists to explore subconscious, spiritual, and sociopolitical terrains. The transnational turn in Surrealist studies ensures that the movement continues to evolve as a global phenomenon.

References

Caro Troncoso, P. (Ed.) (2023) Surrealism and the 1960s Americas [Special issue]. Journal of Surrealism and the Americas, 14(1).

Conkelton, S. (1994). American Surrealist Photography. MoMA, 16, 20–22.

Foucault, A. (2023). Surrealist Utopias and the Cuban Revolution. Journal of Surrealism and the Americas, 14(1), 6–26.

Moretti-Langholz, D. (2024). Looking beyond himself: André Breton in the American Southwest. Journal of Surrealism and the Americas, 14(2).

Pawlik, J. (2021). Remade in America: Surrealist Art, Activism, and Politics, 1940–1978. University of California Press.

Zalman, S. (2017). Consuming Surrealism in American Culture: Dissident Modernism. Routledge.

Alwar Balasubramaniam @ Talwar Gallery, NYC - Becoming Nature

Alwar Balasubramaniam: Becoming Nature
Talwar Gallery, New York
Through August 23, 2019

Talwar Gallery New York presents Becoming Nature, an exhibition of recent works by ALWAR BALASUBRAMANIAM.

The works in Becoming Nature reflect the artist’s sustained and ever-deepening relationship with the natural world—not only its landscapes or physical elements, but the forces that surround us. Working across a range of media and materials, Alwar Balasubramaniam, known also as Bala, focuses these life-giving forces in ways that make them visible and tangible—bringing the geological and elemental to human-scale. Up in the air renders the invisible process of evaporation into delicate sculptural form, for example—concentric rings of pigment condensing many long, slow moments of exchange between the object and the atmosphere around it. In a similar way, unseen movements of wind and air are recorded viscerally in the stippled, textured reliefs of Wind Field while the seemingly cracked earth surface of I was like you, you will be like me speaks to the cyclical exchange among the most basic elements of our world. Perhaps most notably, a new series of paintings present elegant and vibrantly colored panels, light and fleetingly detectable as the patterns of a bird’s plumage. The result of several processes of accretion and erasure by Bala, these paintings make beauty a matter of constant movement and transformation.

Bala invites nature into these works, as participant as much as raw material—and invites us to meditate on processes that blur the lines between art and life, the natural and the aesthetic. The works that result represent neither the total control of the artist, nor his subordination to the sublime power of nature—but rather a thoughtful negotiation of the forces that extend beyond the control of any individual. Modeling a patient, playful, wonder-filled relationship to the world we dwell within, the works here exist as states momentarily excised from the ongoing flux and flow of life—the swells and tides, soft breezes and sudden inundations, that make the living world a matter of constant, unending change. .

Bala’s interest in the natural world has sustained his artistic practice for decades, but it became particularly focused after the artist’s move from urban Bangalore to a rural part of south India over five years ago. The move allowed for an intimate, close-up engagement with nature—an understanding of its processes born of daily observation and lived, corporeal familiarity. This kind of bodily knowing has been critical to Bala’s work over the course of his career—work which seeks continuously to investigate the possibilities of the senses to capture and engage with that which extends beyond them. With searching, always-curious attention, Bala probes our perception, pushing past normal habits of seeing, feeling, and relating – making visible what we otherwise overlook in the course of our daily living. Working across media—from intimate and barely perceptible to room-size installations—Bala harnesses the potentiality of each material to work in new and unexpected ways. In every case, his interest remains steady: to open our eyes and minds, quite literally, to the world around us.

BALA’s works have been featured in exhibitions worldwide, including The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC; Guggenheim Museum, New York; Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan; Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi, India; Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, Washington; École des Beaux Arts, Paris, France; Essl Museum, Austria; National Portrait Gallery, Canberra, Australia, 1st Singapore Biennale; and 18th Sydney Biennale. Bala has been a guest lecturer at the Art Department of Cornell University in Ithaca, NY and a featured speaker at TED.

Bala was born in 1971 in Tirunelveli, India, to where he recently returned to live and work.

TALWAR GALLERY, NEW YORK
108 East 16 Street, New York, NY 10003
talwargallery.com

Anthony Pearson @ Marianne Boesky Gallery, Aspen

Anthony Pearson
Marianne Boesky Gallery, Aspen
June 28 - July 20, 2019

Marianne Boesky Gallery presents Los Angeles-based artist ANTHONY PEARSON’s fifth solo exhibition with the gallery, at its location in Aspen, Colorado. The exhibition features works from Anthony Pearson’s Embedments, Etched Plasters, and Tablets series, each of which capture his sensitivity to the experience of light, texture, and color. Pearson’s work is powerful in its quietude, revealing layers of complexity as one explores the surface, patterning, and material closely and from a range of perspectives and environments. Pearson’s work feels particularly at home in Aspen, where set against the rugged landscape and open expanses, his evocations of light and materiality are further amplified and affecting. 

The exhibition coincides with the release of the Anthony Pearson’s new monograph, featuring a substantive essay on the artist’s vision and approach, written by Alex Klein, Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia’s Dorothy and Stephen R. Weber Curator, as well as a wide selection of images highlighting the range of his practice.

Anthony Pearson’s practice is fueled by a longstanding engagement with the dichotomies of lightness and darkness—first sparked by his early work as a photographer. His explorations manifest through a spectrum of processes with materials such as clay, bronze, and gypsum cement, which he develops methodically and contemplatively through time to yield a wide range of visual effects. His innate ability to capture the sensation of light emanating from deep within his materials positions him within the trajectory of California’s Light and Space Movement, which has concerned itself with the effects of form and light on viewer perception and experience.

Further underlying Anthony Pearson’s practice is an experimentation with physicality, which results in works that behave in instances as both sculpture and painting as well as both object and image. This interplay between formal vocabularies is particularly felt as one experiences and considers the progression of his distinct series, starting with the Tablets, which Anthony Pearson produced between 2010 and 2014. Abstract sculptural works that are affixed to the wall, the Tablets appear as soft organic forms folding onto themselves or as small bundles of volumetric cylinders. Handcrafted in clay, cast in bronze, and coated with cobalt and silver nitrate patina, the Tablets actively respond to their environment, absorbing and reflecting the light within the space. While their physicality positions them clearly within the trajectory of sculpture, their placement on the wall retains some suggestion of the experience of painting.

Anthony Pearson’s development of the Tablets series gave way to an extensive exploration of the formal possibilities of hydrocal, a gypsum cement, which continues to today. To create the Etched Plasters—the second of his hydrocal series—Anthony Pearson pours the material, mixed with colored pigment, into a frame and then uses a carbide knife and custom-made wood guides to make incisions into the surface. The finished pieces are distinguished by the intricate interplay of line and density, as the subtle and precise cuts stand in dynamic contrast to the solidity of the hyrocal. Here, Anthony Pearson’s work on the surface replicates the expression of paint on canvas or pencil on paper, while the material itself provides the dimensionality of sculpture—fusing the two media into a new kind of object. The incisions, which actively read as line drawings, are executed in rich, arabesque-ing patterns that evoke vibrant energy and fluid movement. As the mica-based pigments in the hydrocal catch the light, this sensation is heightened, and the lines take on the quality of rays of light or wisps of sand flowing through one’s fingers.                                                   

With his Embedments series, Anthony Pearson more fully embraces the language of free-form gesture, most often associated with painting. In this most recent series, Pearson pours the differently colored hydrocal in layers, into a mold backed by a stretched canvas. In instances, Pearson shifts the mold, while in others he allows the cement to settle organically. This action results in the creation of rich color fields that weave together to suggest abstract landscapes. In this way, the painterly gesture is inextricably tied to the physicality of the work itself, which is also emphasized by the textural impressions and traces of fiber filament left on the surface from the stretched canvas that is removed upon the material’s hardening. These actions shift Anthony Pearson’s work more directly into the space between object and image, with the formal qualities of painting and sculpture coalescing into a new whole. At the same time, these newest works retain their sense of light, as they allude to the setting sun and the desert and ocean views of California.

Anthony Pearson (b. 1969, Los Angeles) is well-known for his highly formalized and sensitive use of both process and materials. By experimenting with the formal limits of photography, where his practice originated, he found a visual vocabulary rooted in abstraction that explores the balances between positive and negative, lightness and darkness. He continues to investigate these dichotomies across a range of media. Anthony Pearson has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York, NY (2018), David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2017), the Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis, MO (2012), and Midway Contemporary Art, Minneapolis, MN (2008), among numerous others. Group exhibitions include Tantric drawings: sites of transformation, Drawing Room, London, UK, and Peninsula Arts, Plymouth University, Plymouth, UK (2016-17); L.A. Exuberance: New Gifts by Artists, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA (2016-17); The Sun Placed in the Abyss, Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH (2016); Variations: Conversations in and Around Abstract Paintings, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA (2014); second nature: abstract photography then and now, deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, MA (2012); and The Anxiety of Photography, Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, CO, and Arthouse at the Jones Center, Austin, TX (2011). Anthony Pearson lives and works in Los Angeles.

MARIANNE BOESKY GALLERY - ASPEN
100 South Spring Street, Aspen, CO 81611
www.marianneboeskygallery.com

RongRong @ The Walther Collection, NYC - Day After Day. RongRong and the Beijing East Village - Exhibition + Book

Day After Day. RongRong and the Beijing East Village
The Walther Collection, New York
Through October 12, 2019

RONGRONG

1994 No. 20 (Zhang Huan, "12 Square Meters"), 1994. 

© RongRong. Courtesy the artist and Three Shadows Photography Art Centre, Beijing.

But here in the East Village, we do almost everything. Curse plays rock music and writes poetry. Kongbu curates and writes criticism. Zhang Huan, Ma Liuming, and Zhu Ming do performances … But I am the only photographer. Everyone left their hometown and seeks dreams here from afar. We are all children who left home, which makes us constantly hungry …–RongRong

The Walther Collection, with Three Shadows Photography Art Centre in Beijing, presents Day After Day: RongRong and the Beijing East Village. The exhibition features 40 of RongRong’s seminal photographs from 1993-1998 portraying the Beijing East Village—an artistic community poignantly described as “a meteor in the history of contemporary Chinese art.” (Silvia Fok, “Photography, Performance Art, and the Beijing East Village,” in RongRong’s Diary: Beijing East Village (Göttingen: Steidl Verlag, 2019). Day After Day coincides with the publication of RongRong’s Diary: Beijing East Village by The Walther Collection and Steidl.

Nearly four years after the Tiananmen student protests in 1989, RongRong, then a 25-year-old from the southern province of Fujian, joined a group of young and struggling bohemian artists who settled in a desolate village on the outskirts of Beijing. RongRong captured the quotidian yet eruptive life of this community, as many of his fellow artists pushed their bodies to the brink to create radical and subversive performances. Considered highly disruptive by political authorities, these artists lived under constant fear of harassment, raids, and arrests. Both as a  principal photographer and essential collaborator, RongRong faithfully documented what remain some of the most powerful and important performance works of Chinese contemporary art, by artists such as Zhang Huan, Ma Liuming, and Ai Weiwei.

The exhibition Day After Day emphasizes these explosive performance art activities in the village, before and after it was forcefully evacuated in the summer of 1994. RongRong’s emotive photographs will be paired with excerpts from a diary that RongRong kept during his stay in the village, as well as his present-day recollections. Such writings provide essential insight into the performances as they were being conceptualized and carried out, such as the extreme heat and squalid conditions of the public latrine that was the setting for Zhang Huan’s 12 Square Meters; the ominous arrest of artists and viewers that followed Ma Liuming’s groundbreaking nude performance Fen-Ma Liuming’s Lunch; and the chilly evening when the collaborative Primordial Sounds took place beneath a Beijing overpass.

RongRong’s Diary: Beijing East Village

150 pages, 124 images

26 x 21 cm, Cloth-bound hardcover

Published by Steidl / The Walther Collection; June 2019

The Walther Collection has worked closely with RongRong to produce the monograph RongRong’s Diary, which features a near-comprehensive compilation of the artist’s writings from this period. In short journal entries and personal correspondence with his sister, RongRong recounts his blossoming friendships with fellow artists, memorable outings and incidents, and their guerrilla approaches to staging new works. In doing so, he offers reflections both mundane and profound: adjusting to his new life in Beijing, deep anxiety about police backlash, and wavering faith in what photography can achieve in turbulent times. With over 120 images, RongRong’s Diary includes never-before-seen photographs selected by RongRong to highlight everyday life in the Beijing East Village and to call attention to a number of lesser-known performances. The book’s interplay between RongRong’s images and texts creates an absorbing personal narrative of an artist coming into his own.

RongRong was born in Fujian Province, China, in 1968. He was a key member of the Beijing East Village group, experimenting with photography and documenting the performances of his fellow artists in the early 1990s. These works have attained an almost mythic status in the history of contemporary Chinese experimental art. In 2007 RongRong and his wife and photographic partner inri founded Three Shadows Photography Art Centre in Beijing, emphasizing international collaborations and the creation of a sustainable infrastructure for young Chinese artists. RongRong’s best-known works include the 1990s East Village and Ruins series, as well as his collaborations with inri since 2000 such as In Fujisan, Liulitun, and Tsumari Story. Their joint work explores the beauty of the human body in nature and the urban environment, as well as the development of their family. His work has been exhibited worldwide during the past three decades, and is held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; the Myriam and Guy Ullens Foundation, Beijing; the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, and several distinguished private foundations.

The Walther Collection Project Space
526 West 26th Street, Suite 718, New York, NY 10001
www.walthercollection.com

Catherine Wagner: San José Museum of Art, California - Paradox Observed

Catherine Wagner: Paradox Observed
San José Museum of Art, California
Through August 18, 2019

Catherine Wagner: Paradox Observed is a visual investigation of science to critically examine the systems through which we attempt to decipher the codes and structures of human existence. Catherine Wagner borrows tools and methods of scientific research, using imaging devices like the magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine and scanning electron microscope (SEM) as a camera to capture biological matter—the cross section of an onion and the textured surface of a shark’s tooth—with analytical clarity and larger-than-life scale. In the hands of an artist, scientific tools and the data they record evade their perceived objectivity, suggesting a paradoxical conception of the scientific endeavor and its desire and struggle to empirically understand the nature of our being.

“Catherine Wagner encourages the visitor to reexamine the everyday. Pomegranate Wall lends itself to considering her creative process of studying, composing, and creating. At San José Museum of Art, we are committed to fostering awareness of artists’ contributions to society. As we present this exhibition, we invite the public to reflect on Wagner’s examinations of the every day,” S. Sayre Batton, Oshman Executive Director, San José Museum of Art.

Catherine Wagner’s immersive installation Pomegranate Wall is the center of the exhibition, a glowing 8-by-40-foot arc of photographs taken with an MRI machine. Made following a two-year Artist Residency Fellowship SJMA awarded Catherine Wagner in 1997, Pomegranate Wall is the culmination of her exploration into scientific institutions where her photographic documentation and use of technologies like the MRI machine act as a counterpart to scientific research. Imaged in reverse of a camera—from the inside out, rather than the outside in—cross-section scans of pomegranates resemble human cells under a microscope. Monumentally scaled and clinically backlit in Pomegranate Wall, Catherine Wagner’s images possess the authoritative weight of scientific inquiry. But their abstraction presents a paradox: these seemingly pure images are constructed. Though composed of real data, their order and classification—the modes of analyzing visual information—are fundamentally impacted by the observer.

Catherine Wagner was born in 1953 in San Francisco. She received her BA in 1975 and MA in 1981, both from San Francisco State University. She is the recipient of major awards, including the Rome Prize (2013–14), a Guggenheim Fellowship, NEA Fellowships, and the Ferguson Award. Her work is included in major museum collections including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Fine Art, Houston; and the San José Museum of Art.

SAN JOSE MUSEUM OF ART
110 South Market Street, San José, California
sjmusart.org

Tony Lewis @ Blum & Poe, Los Angeles - Charlatan And Ultimately A Boring Man

Tony Lewis: Charlatan And Ultimately A Boring Man
Blum & Poe, Los Angeles
Through July 6, 2019

"What is dangerous here is a turning away from...the turning away from...anything any white American says. ...But I don't know, and neither does Martin Luther King—none of us know—how to deal with those other people...who don't believe anything the white world says, and don't entirely believe anything I or Martin say." — James Baldwin

Blum & Poe presents the gallery’s second solo exhibition with Chicago-based artist Tony Lewis, entitled Charlatan and Ultimately A Boring Man. This exhibition showcases disparate facets of Tony Lewis’ practice, harnessed here together to confront a fraught milestone in contemporary intellectual history that the artist has long grappled with—William F. Buckley’s argument in the historic 1965 debate with James Baldwin on the motion “the American dream is at the expense of the American Negro.”

This exhibition conceptually and formally responds to work Tony Lewis began as far back as 2011—the transcript and video documentation of the Baldwin v. Buckley debate is source material the artist revisits cyclically. Prompted by the words of James Baldwin, Tony Lewis engages with the notion of “turning away from” by actively challenging his natural feelings of repulsion and anger registered when analyzing William F. Buckley’s language, thesis, and rhetorical strategies. Endeavoring to confront the greater apparatus of racism and white conservative psychology, here Tony Lewis meditates on the entirety of Buckley’s argument, and more specifically on one pivotal line from which he has extracted his exhibition title:

"There is no instant cure for the race problem in America, and anyone who tells you that there is…is a charlatan and ultimately a boring man—a boring man precisely because he is then speaking in the kind of abstractions that do not relate to the human experience."

William F. Buckley’s words echo throughout the exhibition, his likeness is projected directly on the gallery wall. This demanding subject matter carries forward Tony Lewis’ established practice of utilizing the medium of graphite to investigate language linked to structures of power and their inherent systems of exclusion, and to puncture such social and political issues as race, communication, and labor. With Charlatan and Ultimately A Boring Man, the viewer first encounters the artist’s shorthand drawings—a visual and gestural lexicon adopted from the John R. Gregg shorthand glyph system of dictation—the works all share the graphite phonemes for the word “boring.” The following gallery houses Lewis’ original site-specific floor drawing from 2011, a graphite-coated sculptural work on paper, with a new collage poem entitled “Man.” As a conceptual refuge in an adjacent room, a labor-intensive drawing rendered in black screws threaded with graphite-soaked rubber bands takes its shape from the shorthand gesture for the name “James.” Beyond a projection of William F. Buckley’s monologue, we encounter another floor drawing from 2014, this time erected and haunting, alongside another shorthand drawing handwritten directly on the gallery wall, “charlatan.” Finally, a second new collage poem created exclusively for this exhibition—the longest of the artist’s to date, a very personal and emotional response to Buckley’s argument.

TONY LEWIS (b. 1986, Los Angeles) lives and works in Chicago. His work has been the subject of recent solo exhibitions including Anthology 2014-2016, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C. (2018); Plunder, Rose Art Museum, Waltham, MA (2017); Alms, Comity and Plunder, Museo Marino Marini, Florence, Italy (2016); and nomenclature movement free pressure power weight, Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, OH (2015). His work has been featured in numerous museum group exhibitions including The Revolution Will Not Be Gray, Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, CO (2016); Walls and Words, Museum at Eldridge Street, New York, NY (2014); LUMP Projects, organized by John Neff, Raleigh, NC (2013); People of Color, Gene Siskel Film Center, Chicago, IL (2012); and Ground Floor, Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago, IL (2012). Tony Lewis participated in the 2014 iteration of the Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and was the recipient of the 2017-2018 Ruth Ann and Nathan Perlmutter Artist-in-Residence Award at the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University. His work is represented in notable public collections including the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Washington D.C.; and the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY.

BLUM & POE, LOS ANGELES
2727 S. La Cienega Boulevard, Los Angeles, California 90034
www.blumandpoe.com

Kenneth Blom @ Jason McCoy Gallery, New York - Intruder

Kenneth Blom: INTRUDER
Jason McCoy Gallery, New York
Through July 12, 2019

KENNETH BLOM

Tiger, 2019

Oil on canvas, 55 x 63 inches, 140 x 160 cm

Image courtesy of the artist and Jason McCoy Gallery, New York

Jason McCoy Gallery presents INTRUDER, an installation of new paintings by Norwegian painter KENNETH BLOM.

Vast landscapes, architectural framework, and human isolation loom large in Kenneth Blom’s oeuvre. Shuffling these ingredients masterfully, he establishes an atmosphere that captures a key aspect of contemporary life: a sense of forlornness as humanity continues to stray away from nature. In contrast to the ideal put forth by the 19th Century Romantic movement, namely the immersion of the figure in a glorious natural environment, Kenneth Blom focuses on the opposite. Frequently encapsulated and therefore defined by manmade structures, his figures manifest as intruders.

With Kenneth Blom, the uncertainty between modern man’s relationship to nature also extends towards inter-human relationships. The figures seen here seem to blend into their surroundings, dissolving into thin air as the complexity of their constellations increases. Having drawn inspiration from the modern Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, for example, Kenneth Blom remains interested in the human psyche, especially as it can be conveyed by human relationships. As Kenneth Blom states: “It is the experience of being disconnected from each other but also from oneself that is the essence of these paintings.”

KENNETH BLOM

Born in 1967 in Roskilde, Denmark, Kenneth Blom moved to Norway as a child. He studied at the Statens Kunstakademi in Oslo (1990-1994), as well as at the Düsseldorf Academy of Fine Arts (1994-1995). He has shown extensively in Europe, including as a featured artist at Sotheby’s New Bond Street in London, at the Henie Onstad Kunstsenter in Norway, and regularly at Galeri Haaken in Oslo. He is the subject of the forthcoming documentary Forventninger/Anticipation by filmmaker Tommy Normann. Kenneth Blom lives and works in Oslo.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue with an essay by Stephanie Buhmann. 

JASON MCCOY GALLERY
41 East 57th Street, New York, NY 10022, 11th floor
www.jasonmaccoyinc.com

Pace Gallery's Inaugural Exhibitions at New Chelsea Gallery, NYC

Pace Announces Inaugural Exhibition
Program for New Flagship Chelsea Gallery Opening September 2019

PACE GALLERY'S NEW CHELSEA BUILDING

Architectural rendering of the southeast façade 

of 540 West 25th Street, New York

Courtesy of Bonetti / Kozerksi Architecture

Pace Gallery announces its inaugural season of programming for its new flagship gallery in New York City, located at 540 West 25th Street. After almost six decades of history in Manhattan, Pace will cement its commitment to Chelsea with a new global headquarters in the heart of the neighborhood. Open to the public on September 14, 2019, Pace will present a series of exhibitions throughout the new building, including: an exhibition dedicated to twentieth century master Alexander Calder occupying the first floor gallery; a show of new paintings by celebrated New York-based artist Loie Hollowell on the second floor; an installation of new work by David Hockney on the third floor; and a presentation charting the evolution of Fred Wilson’s chandelier sculptures installed on the seventh floor. The inaugural exhibition represents several firsts, including Loie Hollowell’s premiere exhibition with Pace in New York. Additional details on each exhibition, accompanying publications, and related programming will be announced over the course of the summer.

“For nearly six decades, Pace has celebrated and advanced the work of creative pioneers,” said Marc Glimcher, Pace Gallery President and CEO. “They are our inspiration, mission, and the source of our vision. Pace has designed and crafted every element of our new global headquarters to provide a vehicle for artists to tell their stories as richly as they deserve to be told and as dynamically as our communities deserve to experience them. It is an honor to inaugurate this gallery with the work of artists who have been so instrumental in creating the fabric of our program; representing both our vibrant history and our exciting future.”

Pace’s new global headquarters is being developed by Weinberg Properties and designed by Bonetti / Kozerski Architecture, in close collaboration with Marc Glimcher. Spanning eight stories and measuring approximately 75,000 square feet, Pace’s new building more than doubles its current exhibition space in New York and features five distinct galleries, including both indoor and outdoor spaces. Each gallery allows for a broad range of installation styles and artistic media, with features such as an entirely column-free design, high loading capacities, and flexible lighting plans creating extraordinarily nimble galleries that can support a diverse approach to exhibition programming.

Inaugural Exhibitions

First Floor:

Alexander Calder

In close collaboration with the Calder Foundation, New York, Pace will inaugurate the 3,600-square-foot first-floor gallery with a focused exhibition dedicated to Alexander Calder. The exhibition will examine the breadth of the artist’s practice beginning in the mid-1920s and leading up to his creation in 1931 of the mobile—an unprecedented form of kinetic sculpture that created a true rupture in the trajectory of art. From his gestural Animal Sketchings and massless wire portraits of the 1920s to his abstract oil paintings of 1930 and the swift progression to motorized objects and hanging mobiles, this exhibition will capture the remarkable transition from potential to actual energy in Calder’s work and underscore his relentless pursuit of the vitality and life force in art.

Second Floor:

Loie Hollowell

The artist’s premiere exhibition with Pace in New York will take place in the new building’s second floor gallery. The exhibition will showcase a series of new large-scale paintings that continue Loie Hollowell’s investigation of bodily landscapes and sacred iconography through allusions to the human form. Drawing inspiration from artists like Agnes Pelton, Georgie O’Keefe, and Judy Chicago, Hollowell’s works abstract the most intimate parts of the human body into primal shapes, such as the mandora and the lingam, in an examination of sexuality, conception, birth, and motherhood. In each work, the artist utilizes color and dimensionality—at times manipulating the canvas with three-dimensional forms—to amplify the phenomenological presence of her corporeal compositions.

Third Floor:

David Hockney

The third-floor gallery will be dedicated to an exhibition of new work by David Hockney. This exhibition will present a 24-panel panoramic drawing and four additional individual drawings. Capturing the arrival of spring in Normandy, these works emphasize Hockney’s ability to unite multiple spatial and temporal experiences of a place into a single image. Influenced by such disparate sources as traditional Chinese scroll painting, contemporary time-based art, and the medieval Bayeux Tapestry, produced in England and housed nearby in Normandy, these new works showcase Hockney’s continued experimentation with the representation of space.

Sixth Floor:

Alexander Calder, Joel Shapiro, and Tony Smith

Offering panoramic views of the Manhattan skyline, the entire sixth floor is devoted to a 4,800 square-foot outdoor exhibition space that can accommodate large-scale sculptural installations. Partially covered by the seventh floor, the design of this space creates the sense of an outdoor room. Exhibitions on the sixth floor will rotate two to three times per year, and for the inaugural installation, Pace will present three monumental outdoor sculptures by three generations of sculptors: Alexander Calder, Joel Shapiro, and Tony Smith. 

Seventh Floor:

Fred Wilson

The seventh-floor exhibition will showcase the evolution of Fred Wilson’s celebrated chandelier sculptures, which the artist began in 2003 when he represented the United States at the 50th Venice Biennale with Speak of Me as I Am. Since then, Wilson’s Murano glass chandeliers, with their evolving shifts in scale, materials, and complexity, have become vehicles for the artist’s meditations on blackness, death, and beauty. Installed hanging from the gallery’s 19-foot-high ceilings, the presentation will include five chandelier sculptures from the artist’s first to his most recent, conceived for the 15th Istanbul Biennial in Fall of 2017.

Looking Ahead to 2019 and 2020

Taking full advantage of the dynamic programming the new building will support, Pace is planning a robust series of exhibitions over the course of 2019 and 2020 and will launch a new interdisciplinary series of live and moving-image programming.

In the late fall of 2019, Pace will present exhibitions dedicated to Mary Corse on the first floor; Chinese painter Li Songsong on the second; and longstanding gallery artist Richard Tuttle on the third. Corse’s exhibition of new paintings will be her first with the gallery in New York since joining Pace in 2018.

Looking ahead to 2020—the 60th anniversary of the gallery—Pace’s new headquarters will host major exhibitions by a diverse range of the gallery’s artists, including debut New York shows for new additions to Pace, such as Lynda Benglis and Arlene Shechet, as well as exhibitions dedicated to pioneers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, such as Jean Dubuffet, Isamu Noguchi, and Robert Ryman.

Pace is a leading contemporary art gallery representing many of the most significant international artists and estates of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Under the leadership of President and CEO Marc Glimcher, Pace is a vital force within the art world and plays a critical role in shaping the history, creation, and engagement with modern and contemporary art. Since its founding by Arne Glimcher in 1960, Pace has developed a distinguished legacy for vibrant and dedicated relationships with renowned artists. As the gallery approaches the start of its seventh decade, Pace’s mission continues to be inspired by our drive to support the world’s most influential and innovative artists and to share their visionary work with people around the world.

Pace advances this mission through its dynamic global program, comprising ambitious exhibitions, artist projects, public installations, institutional collaborations, and curatorial research and writing. Today, Pace has nine locations worldwide: two galleries in New York; one in London; one in Geneva; one in Palo Alto, California; one in Beijing; two in Hong Kong; and one in Seoul. 

PACE GALLERY
www.pacegallery.com

City of Workers, City of Struggle @ Museum of the City of New York - How Labor Movements Changed New York

City of Workers, City of Struggle: How Labor Movements Changed New York 
Museum of the City of New York
Through January 5, 2020

ILGWU President David Dubinsky and Liberal Party leader Alex Rose rally voters for LBJ, RFK, and Hubert Humphrey, Seventh Avenue. Burton Berinsky, 1964.  Courtesy Kheel Center for Labor‐Management Documentation & Archives, Cornell University

City of Workers, City of Struggle: How Labor Movements Changed New York at the Museum of the City of New York traces how New York became the most unionized large city in the United States. For more than two centuries, New York City has been an incubator and battleground of movements by and for working people and today, 24 percent of New York City workers are unionized, compared to the national average of 11 percent. This exhibition examines the social, political, and economic story of the diverse workers and movements in New York through rare documents, artifacts, photographs, archival film footage, and interactive features.

“You cannot understand the history of New York City without understanding the history of labor movements here,” said Whitney Donhauser, Ronay Menschel Director and President of the Museum of the City of New York. “Through this exhibition, visitors will learn how labor movements evolved over two centuries in New York, the current state of affairs for workers, and what the future may hold.”

New York City—Grand Demonstration of Workingmen, Sept 5th—The Procession Passing the Reviewing Stand at Union‐Square. Published in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, September 16, 1882. Wood engraving. Courtesy Private Collection

"Labor movements have been central to the rise of the city that we know today. It's exciting that City of Workers, City of Struggle explores New York’s rich labor history, and also gives voice to contemporary labor activists and working people as they face the opportunities and challenges of a rapidly changing urban economy," said Steven H. Jaffe, curator of the exhibition.

City of Workers, City of Struggle follows the progression of the labor movement by breaking the history into four segments and then looking toward the future. The exhibition begins with the section “In Union There is Strength,” which documents the 19th century when there was a shift from the artisan to wage worker through the development of new patterns of work and employment, as well as new technology. This will be exemplified in the exhibition by an enormous wrench used to build the Brooklyn Bridge. It will also include an illustration of the day in 1882 when New York’s Central Labor Union launched the nation’s first Labor Day to underscore Labor’s efforts to secure better pay, hours, and working conditions.

The exhibition moves on to the period of 1900–1965 with the section “Labor Will Rule,” looking at an era when New York’s unions gained monumental power. By 1950, New York City had about one million union members representing at least a quarter of the entire workforce. However, this power was not equally shared as female, African American, Latino, and Asian American New Yorkers still fought obstacles to their presence in union ranks and leadership.

Picketing ILGWU members outside Macy's department store urge shoppers not to buy Judy Bond blouses. Circa 1965. Courtesy Kheel Center for Labor‐Management Documentation & Archives, Cornell University

“Sea Change,” the third section, focuses on the years between 1965 and 2001. Over the preceding decades, hundreds of thousands of new immigrants had joined African Americans from the South and Puerto Ricans in coming to New York to seek opportunity. The city’s fiscal crisis in 1975, and a growing anti‐union mood in local and national politics, led to challenges for the movement to organize labor. These developments coincided with court and federal agency decisions that scaled back legal protections earlier won by organized labor. Together, they began a long weakening of unions’ economic and political power, as many New Yorkers worried about the costs of union contracts to the city and as the number of unionized workers declined nationwide. Between 1960 and 2000, New York City lost more than 650,000 manufacturing and port jobs as businesses automated or moved away in pursuit of lower wages and taxes, and fewer regulations.

By the 1970s, a new militancy fueled the activism of previously marginalized workers: women, African Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Asian Americans were challenging union establishments. As union membership declined in private industry, organizations of government employees and service workers (hospital, maintenance, security, clerical, and others) increasingly became engines of upward mobility for thousands of New Yorkers.

The last section, “New Challenges,” looks at how New York activists after 2001 continued to reshape the future of labor by broadening the agenda to confront issues ranging from racial profiling to sexual violence, LGBTQ equality, environmental safety, and citizenship status. Worker Centers and other new community organizations used foundation grants, legal action, and public pressure to help non‐unionized and undocumented workers. In a changing economy, this “Alt Labor” or “New Labor” movement also mobilized people who worked as freelancers or in a succession of jobs.

Although New York remains the most unionized city in the United States today, current realities are challenging. Conflicting visions for the city’s future have sometimes pitted different groups of organized workers against each other. Yet local labor activists have also achieved important recent victories, including paid family leave, guaranteed sick leave, and a $15 minimum wage.

The exhibition is organized by curator Steven H. Jaffe with the help of a distinguished panel of scholars.

Scholarly Advisory Committee: Joshua B. Freeman, chair, Rachel Bernstein, Michelle Chen, Margaret Chin, Richard Greenwald, Louis Hyman, Alice Kessler‐Harris, Richard Lieberman, Stephen McFarland, Premilla Nadasen, Kimberly Phillips‐Fein, Christopher Rhomberg, Aldo Lauria Santiago, Robert W. Snyder, Michael Spear and Clarence Taylor.

City of Workers, City of Struggle

How Labor Movement changed New York

Edited by Joshua B. Freeman

Columbia University Press

A companion publication takes a deeper dive into some of the topics touched in the exhibition. City of Workers, City of Struggle features essays by leading historians of New York along with vivid depictions of work, daily life, and political struggle. Edited by Joshua B. Freeman, Distinguished Professor of History at Queens College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, it is published by Columbia University Press and is available for $40 in the Museum shop.

City of Workers, City of Struggle is presented in collaboration with the Kheel Center at the School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University and the Tamiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives at NYU.

Exhibition Committee:

Governor David A. Paterson, Co‐Chair

Patricia Smith, Co‐Chair, Senior Counsel, National Employment Law Project Law Project; former New York State Commissioner of Labor

Vincent Alvarez, President, New York City Central Labor Council, AFL‐CIO

Esta R. Bigler, Director, Labor and Employment Law Program, Cornell University ILR School

Marco Carrión, Commissioner, Mayor’s Office of Community Affairs

Janella T. Hinds, UFT Vice President, Academic High schools, United Federation of Teachers

Ed Ott, Active in the Labor Movement for more than 50 years

Roberta Reardon, Commissioner, New York State Department of Labor

Lorelei Salas, Commissioner, New York City Department of Consumer and Worker Protection

Maritza Silva‐Farrell, Executive Director, ALIGN: The Alliance for a Greater New York

Lara Skinner, Executive Director, The Worker Institute, Cornell University ILR School

Kathryn Wylde, President and CEO, Partnership for New York City

MUSEUM OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK
1220 Fifth Ave at 103rd St., New York, NY 10029
www.mcny.org

Shall Not Be Denied: Women Fight for the Vote @ Library of Congress, Washington DC

Shall Not Be Denied: Women Fight for the Vote
Library of Congress, Washington DC
June 4 - September 2020

Shall Not Be Denied: Women Fight for the Vote

© Library of Congress, Washington DC

Handwritten letters, speeches, photographs and scrapbooks, created by American suffragists who persisted for more than 70 years to win voting rights for women, are featured in a new exhibition at the Library of Congress. “Shall Not Be Denied: Women Fight for the Vote” tells the story of the largest reform movement in American history with documents and artifacts from the women who changed political history 100 years ago.

Drawing from the personal collections of Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucy Stone, Mary Church Terrell, Carrie Chapman Catt, Harriet Stanton Blatch and others, along with the records of the National American Woman Suffrage Association and National Woman’s Party – all donated to the national library years ago – the exhibition explores women’s long struggle for equality. “Shall Not Be Denied” will trace the movement from before the first women’s rights convention at Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848, through the divergent political strategies and internal divisions the suffragists overcame, the parades and pickets they orchestrated for voting rights, and the legacy of the 19th Amendment that was finally ratified in 1920.

“As institutions in Washington and across the country mark the centennial of women’s suffrage, now is a great time to learn more about women’s history. At the Library of Congress, we are so thrilled to share this new exhibition at this moment of national reflection,” said Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden. “Through the personal collections of many extraordinary women who helped shape this country, you will get a more intimate view into the struggles, the rivalries and ultimately the triumphs of this 70-year movement.”  

The exhibition is part of a yearlong initiative in 2019 inviting visitors to Explore America’s Changemakers. It will explore the stories of dozens of diverse women who shaped the suffrage movement and made history.

Highlights of the exhibition include marquee records, images, music, merchandise, cartoons and ephemera of the movement. Key items include:  

- Abigail Adams’s letter from 1799 refusing to consign women to an inferior status;

- A rare printed version of the “Declaration of Sentiments,” a listing of demands Elizabeth Cady Stanton read to more than 300 at Seneca Falls, and the proceedings of a larger national women’s rights meeting two years later in Worcester, Massachusetts, that drew more than 1,000 suffrage supporters;

- A sculpture of Susan B. Anthony (portrait bust) that she hoped would one day be displayed in the Library of Congress, now on loan for the first time from the Belmont-Paul Women’s Equality National Monument;

- An original broadside of the Declaration of Rights for Women that suffragists distributed in Philadelphia in 1876, disrupting the nation’s centennial celebration when Anthony presented the declaration on stage to acting Vice President Thomas Ferry;

- A draft manuscript of Stanton’s controversial and best-selling “The Woman’s Bible” that paired Biblical text with feminist commentary;

- Suffrage sheet music and merchandise used to “sell” the idea of suffrage;

- Images and film footage of political activity on the streets, including the first national parade for suffrage in 1913 in Washington, D.C., which exposed racial divides in the movement and was disrupted by an unruly mob;

- Banners, pins and a cap and cape worn by suffragists during parades and demonstrations;

- Photographs of early picketing at the White House and documentation of suffragists’ subsequent arrests, imprisonment and force feeding;

- Carrie Chapman Catt’s Ratification Notebook with notes on her strategy to win ratification of the 19th Amendment in each state; and

- An interactive display on suffragists who helped win the vote state by state.

“Shall Not Be Denied” is part of the national commemoration of the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage, marking major milestones in 2019 and 2020. The exhibition opens on the 100th anniversary of the U.S. Senate’s passage of the suffrage amendment that would become the 19th Amendment once it was ratified by three-quarters of the states on Aug. 26, 1920.

An online crowdsourcing campaign to transcribe documents within the Library’s unique suffrage-related collections to make them more searchable and accessible will be ongoing during the exhibition. For more information go to the By the People website: crowd.loc.gov.

“Shall Not Be Denied: Women Fight for the Vote” is made possible by the Library of Congress James Madison Council, with additional support from 1st Financial Bank USA, Democracy Fund, Thomas V. Girardi, AARP, the Barbara Lee Family Foundation Fund at the Boston Foundation, HISTORY® and Roger and Julie Baskes.

The Library is inviting visitors to Explore America’s Changemakers through a series of exhibitions, events and programs. Exhibitions drawing from the Library’s collections will also explore Rosa Parks’ groundbreaking role in civil rights history and artists’ responses to major issues of the day. Other events throughout 2019 will explore changemakers through music, performances and public programs. 

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
101 Independence Ave., SE - Washington, D.C. 20540
www.loc.gov

Sarah Halpern @ Microscope Gallery, Brooklyn - The Changing Room

Sarah Halpern: The Changing Room
Microscope Gallery, Brooklyn
October 23 – November 29, 2015

Microscope Gallery presents The Changing Room, the second solo exhibition at the gallery by Sarah Halpern featuring new works on paper and installation that utilize imagery – both still and moving – from film related sources including classic Hollywood movies and books that were made into movies. Inspired by a joke her father would repeat when family members said they needed “to change” before heading out the door: “Don’t change, I like you just the way you are”, Halpern reflects upon notions of transformation involving identity, society, relationships between the sexes and in the mediums themselves. In both works on paper and moving image, Halpern frees Hollywood characters and scenes from their usual contexts.

In many of the nine works on paper, text passages from a vintage copy of Cornell Woolrich’s novel “The Bride Wore Black” (1940) – also the inspiration for the 1968 François Truffaut movie in which the protagonist repeatedly disguises herself to avenge each of her husband’s murderers – are combined with settings and characters from other iconic works such as John Ford’s “Stagecoach” to create new and alternative identities and story lines. Backs are turned, scenes are duplicated at different scales, and faces, including those of stars Jean Harlow and Bette Davis, have been removed or otherwise obscured through coloring, cut out, scratching or other methods as a way to convey invisibility though paper, allowing them to serve as surfaces for the projection of dreams, expectations, and social concerns of today.

Similarly, Sarah Halpern combines text from the 1958 novel “The Leopard” by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa and footage from the 1963 movie of the same name directed by Luchino Visconti in her video/16mm film moving image installation “Chapters”. A two and ½ minute hand-processed color film containing shots of the pages of the artist’s vintage copy of the novel as well as reshot footage from the movie projects onto a laptop screen, on which a video of the famously glorious 45-minute ballroom scene is playing.

Elements of dualism and the process of death and regeneration – also referenced in The Leopard famous quote “everything needs to change, so that everything can stay the same” – are echoed in the rotations of the dancers, images repeated on both film and video meeting on a single screen, as well as in the text from the turning pages projected onto the computer’s keyboard. The artist adds: “The story of the disintegrating aristocracy during the time of the Italian Risorgimento is also used as a metaphor for the shifting dominance of one medium over another throughout the last hundred years; from printed books and film, to computers.”

SARAH HALPERN works with paper, 16mm film, 35mm slides, sound and performance. Her work often finds sources in classic cinema imagery in the form of books or celluloid film, and has been previously shown at The Museum of Moving Image, The Kitchen, Participant Inc, Anthology Film Archives, the New York Film Festival, and Microscope Gallery, among others. She holds a B.A. in Film and Electronic Arts from Bard College, and was a recipient of the 2014 MacDowell Colony Fellowship. Halpern lives and works in Ridgewood, Queens, NY.

MICROSCOPE GALLERY
1329 Willoughby Avenue, 2B, Brooklyn, NY 11237
www.microscopegallery.com

Tony Matelli at Davis Museum, Wellesley College, Wellesley, Mass.

Tony Matelli: New Gravity
Davis Museum, Wellesley College, Wellesley, Mass.
February 5 - July 20, 2014

Tony Matelli: New Gravity, the artist’s first solo exhibition at a U.S museum, opens at the Davis Museum on February 5, 2014. Comprised of recent works from the past five years as well as new works created specifically for the Davis, the exhibition focuses on the artist’s discursive use of time, ambivalence, banality and wonder. In Matelli’s work the physical laws of objects are often reversed, upended or atomized, and with these deft manipulations of matter and gravity come profound reorientations in perspective and ways of seeing. Matelli creates a distortion field of sorts, a lens through which to question one reality and create another.

Installed in two parts at the Davis, the exhibition also sites two sculptures (Sleep Walker and Stray Dog) outdoors on campus. Tony Matelli: New Gravity will be on view February 5 - May 11, in the Bronfman & Chandler Galleries; and February 5 - July 20 in the Jobson & Tanner Galleries.

“Tony Matelli is a trader in combinatory illusions, a skilled manipulator of the restless mediation between metaphor, meaning and truth," said Lisa Fischman, Ruth Gordon Shapiro ’37 Director of the Davis and curator of the exhibition.

“His works are persistently surprising, inventive, powerful and playful – evoking complex sensations and inviting multiple viewings. We are delighted to present his first U.S. museum exhibition at the Davis and to introduce New England audiences to his work.”

Often employing a hyper-realistic idiom, Matelli’s work challenges our perceptions of reality. His sculptures create a disconcerting tension between uneasiness and humor, frequently suspending time and belief. Matelli imbues his art with layers of familiarity and discomfort, employing remarkable skill and technique to create works that ask us to take a critical look at ourselves and at the culture around us.

“There is a romantic impulse in my work, that strives to give form to my emotions and thoughts and the way I see the world,” commented Matelli. “I’m fascinated with that moment when you become aware of a perceptual shift in your environment, so what was a seemingly real-life experience becomes a complicated art experience. That approach to art is really powerful. It makes everything else seem like a prop that only pointed to an idea. The precision of praxis has a great impact on me, and my work operates in that spirit.”

Tony Matelli’s work is in numerous private and public collections including the Cranbrook Art Museum; FLAG Art Foundation; ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum; the National Centre of Contemporary Art, Moscow; Fundacion La Caixa, Madrid; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; and the Uppsala Konstmuseum, Sweden. Recent solo exhibitions have been presented at the Ku?nstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin and the Palais de Tokyo, Paris. A mid-career survey, Tony Matelli: A Human Echo, premiered at the ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum, Denmark in 2012 and traveled to the Bergen Kunstmuseum, Norway in 2013. The artist lives and works in Brooklyn, and is represented by Marlborough Chelsea, New York and Andreéhn-Schiptjenko, Stockholm.

Curated by Lisa Fischman, Ruth Gordon Shapiro ’37 Director of the Davis, Tony Matelli: New Gravity and the accompanying catalogue, designed by the artist with Conny Purtill, are generously supported by Wellesley College Friends of Art and the Anonymous ’70 Endowed Davis Museum Program Fund.

Davis Museum, Wellesley College
106 Central Street, Wellesley, MA 02481
www.wellesley.edu/davismuseum/

Previous post about TONY MATELLY on Wanafoto :
Tony Matelli - A HUMAN ECHO, ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum, Aarhus, Denmark, 31 August - 30 December 2012

Japanese Lacquer, Jacqueline Avant Collection at Crow Collection of Asian Art, Dallas

Gold on Black: Japanese Lacquer from the Jacqueline Avant Collection
Crow Collection of Asian Art, Dallas 
Through September 15, 2013

Showcasing the delicate beauty of Japanese lacquer dating from the early-17th to the early-20th century, Gold on Black: Japanese Lacquer from the Jacqueline Avant Collection on view at the Crow Collection of Asian Art in Dallas, USA, features over 40 Japanese lacquer items that would have been used primarily for arts and entertainment purposes. 

Ancient Japanese Lacquer

Writing Box (suzuribako) with design of Ono no Komachi, Japan, circa 1800. 

Lacquer, gold, silver, carved purple glass, black lacquered metal, gold metal on wood, suzu (tin alloy) rims

Courtesy The Jacqueline Avant Collection, Photograph Susan Einstein, Los Angeles.

Californian Japanese Art Collector Jacqueline Avant’s interest in collecting exquisite lacquer works used for poetry writing, poetry matching games, enjoyment of food or smoking, ceremonial display, wear, or personal care, such as boxes for combs, mirrors, tooth blackening powder, or incense, comprise the majority of the pieces selected for this exhibition. Also on view are boxes to hold objects of religious devotion, such as Buddhist holy texts (sutras), and even weapons for self-defense, including a decorated baton or knife.

“The Japanese have long been attributed with bringing the art of lacquer to its highest technical and aesthetic development,” says Crow Collection of Asian Art Executive Director Amy Lewis Hofland. “However, Japanese lacquer remains a subject rarely presented in American museums. When we learned of these works we knew our audiences would love the beauty and history of this painstakingly refined art form. It is a natural fit for the Crow Collection.”

Many works featured in Gold on Black originated from the dowries of feudal lord families, with family crests recording marriages of power and influence. Others were collected to delight wealthy merchants and reflect their personal tastes in dress and activities, from tea to smoking or composing poetry.

Recent finds suggest that lacquer has been employed in Japan as a protective film for at least 11,000 years. The lacquer is painstakingly harvested from twenty-year-old cultivated urushi trees; each tree is bled for its sap, producing less than a cup of liquid and giving up its life in the process of harvest. The lacquer is then filtered and applied in about thirty thin layers to a paulownia wood or lacquered hemp core. After each layer is polymerized in a humidor and then sanded, the upper layers are sprinkled with gold or silver powders and flecks to create designs. The final coat of clear lacquer is then ground down to reveal the metallic design. The care and skill required for application of both ground lacquer layers and design, and the rarity and expense of materials, meant that lacquer work was the most revered of family treasures in Japan, just as silver would have been in Europe or the Americas.

Hollis Goodall, curator of Japanese art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, selected the works featured in Gold on Black: Japanese Lacquer from the Jacqueline Avant Collection. 

China Through the Lens of John Thomson remains on view along with Peninsulas and Dragon Tails: Southeast Asian Art from the Crow Collection and with the acclaimed collection of Tantric sculpture from Trammell S. Crow’s private collection.

Trammell & Margaret Crow Collection of Asian Art Website: www.crowcollection.org

Mel Bochner Exhibition at the NGA Washington DC presents Thesaurus Works from one of the pionners of conceptual art

In the Tower: Mel Bochner 

National Gallery of Art, Washington DC 

Curator: James Meyer
November 6, 2011 - April 8, 2012

In the Tower: Mel Bochner is the latest installment of the National Gallery of Art series of exhibitions devoted to contemporary art, and the first to be devoted to the work of a living artist.

MEL BOCHNER

Sputter, 2010
oil on canvas
Courtesy of Hadley Martin Fisher Collection (HMF)
© Mel Bochner

Mel Bochner's renowned innovations in conceptual art come to life in the words he paints on canvas. In the Tower: Mel Bochner presents 43 thesaurus-inspired works from the last 45 years, including many new and unseen works from his studio. The exhibition provides a compelling view of Bochner's early and recent work—of the young as well as the mature artist.

"Bochner's thesaurus works force us to look at and think about the words we use; they are portraits of how we speak," said Earl A. Powell III, director, National Gallery of Art. "We are grateful to Mel for parting with so many drawings and paintings to make this exhibition possible."

Mel Bochner's thesaurus series is a format developed by the artist during the 1960s and reprised in the last decade. Born in Pittsburgh in 1940, Bochner received a BFA from the Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1962 and moved to New York City in 1964, where he became involved in two of the major movements of the period—minimal and conceptual art.

From 1966 to 1968 Mel Bochner made portraits in ink on graph paper based on a descriptive word and its synonyms found in Roget's Thesaurus. The shapes and words of these drawings evoke such figures as Jorge Luis Borges, Marcel Duchamp, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, and Robert Smithson. Bochner's famous portrait of Eva Hesse from 1966, a circle of synonyms for the word "wrap," alluding to the rounded forms of Hesse's art, is on view for the first time in its original frame—a delicate tape and glass construction made by Hesse herself. Portrait of Robert Smithson (1966), based on the thesaurus entry for "repetition," suggests Smithson's interest in seriality. Several works in this group of drawings represent friends and acquaintances from the early days of the minimalist and conceptual art movements and have never been shown.

In 2001 Mel Bochner again turned to the thesaurus to develop a series of paintings and drawings derived from everyday speech. Writing out lists of words in his notebooks, he produced a new kind of drawing that ultimately led to the Thesaurus paintings. Boldly colored and impressive in scale, these works are among the most ambitious of his career. These recent drawings include bubbles and arrows that divulge his working method, revealing the paint colors he uses while completing a canvas.

Ten large paintings are installed in the main gallery of the Tower, including four major diptychs that are on view for the first time: Master of the Universe (2010), Oh Well (2010), Amazing! (2011), and Babble (2011). Unlike the black-and-white formats of the ink portraits of the 1960s, the large paintings revisit traditions of modernist painting such as the checkerboard works of Piet Mondrian and the Alphabet paintings of Jasper Johns while depicting everyday speech in a variety of color palettes.

Charcoals—including a second, larger portrait of Hesse from 2001—reveal Mel Bochner's process of erasure and covering up. Still drawn from Roget's Thesaurus and dictionaries of slang, the language in the later works is informal and crude, reflecting the evolution of spoken English since the 1960s and into the digital age.

The curator of the exhibition, James Meyer, is associate curator, modern and contemporary art, National Gallery of Art.

In the Tower: Mel Bochner was organized by the National Gallery of Art. The exhibition is made possible through the generous support of Suzanne F. Cohen and The Kraus Family Foundation. Additional support provided by Judith Racht and Irving Stenn Jr., The Exhibition Circle, and The Tower Project.

NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART, Washington, DC 

www.nga.gov

Marco Breuer, Hanno Otten, Heinz Hajek-Halke: Cameraless Photographs 1950 – 2004 at Marcia Wood Gallery, Atlanta

Marco Breuer, Hanno Otten, Heinz Hajek-Halke: Cameraless Photographs 1950 – 2004
Marcia Wood Gallery, Atlanta
September 18 – October 30, 2004

Marcia Wood Gallery presents an exhibition of photographs made without a camera by three German photographers well known for their work in this particular aspect of the medium. Each artist uses the form to make direct abstracted images that recall the most radical experiments by the Surrealists and Bauhaus artists, among others. This exhibition brings together the work of two contemporary German photographers, Hanno Otten and Marco Breuer, with vintage prints by Heinz Hajek-Halke, a leading practitioner of cameraless work in Germany from the wartime era through the 1950s and 60s. Although cameraless work has been increasingly prevalent among contemporary photographers, this exhibition will examine how the continued celebration of abstract photography in postwar Germany has affected the work of these younger artists.

HEINZ HAJEK-HALKE (1898-1983) was very active in the development of experimental photography in Germany from the 1920s until his death in 1983. Although he studied art in both classical and experimental venues, Heinz Hajek-Halke spent most of his professional and artistic career in photography. Picture editor, press photographer and graphic designer, he also made important experimental photocollages and photographs inspired by film, abstract art, and biological forms that were reproduced in several photographic journals. In the 1950s, he taught photography and actively exhibited in important exhibitions, including Otto Steinert’s Subjective Photography. In 1957, he published a book on his techniques for cameraless photography.

HANNO OTTEN (born 1954) has been photographing since the 1980s. His early work included black and white abstractions, but for many years, color has been at the heart of his art. He has been making color studies, in sculpture and straight photographic prints since the 1990s. The more recent photograms, large abstract compositions of rectangular forms in panorama format, are the purest form of color study. By manipulating large blocks of pure color and geometric form in his ever more complex compositions, Hanno Otten reconsiders basic tenets of modernism, allowing color and light to suggest musical themes or monumental architecture. Hanno Otten has exhibited widely in Europe and in New York. He lives in London and Cologne.

MARCO BREUER (born 1966) has several degrees in photography and has made cameraless photographs since the early 1990s. His current images result from direct physical contact with the photographic paper itself and record performance-like rituals in the darkroom. In his abstract images of striated patterns from the Tilt and Pan series, based on film techniques, Marco Breuer embraces experimental practice in the spirit of his mid 19th century forbearers. He teaches in the MFA program at Bard College. He has published and exhibited widely in the United States and Germany and is represented in widely represented museum collections. Marco Breuer currently lives in upstate New York.

This exhibition has been curated/organized by LISA KURZNER for Marcia Wood Gallery. Lisa Kurzner is a freelance curator and critic who recently relocated to Atlanta from Europe. She organized Under Different Circumstances at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center last winter. Previously she was the Newhall Curatorial Fellow in the Museum of Modern Art’s Department of Photography, and has worked with several international agencies supporting contemporary art.

MARCIA WOOD GALLERY
263 Walker Street, Atlanta, GA 30313
www.marciawoodgallery.com

Juan Perdiguero, Marcia Wood Gallery, Atlanta - Canes

Juan Perdiguero: Canes
Marcia Wood Gallery, Atlanta
July 16 - August 14, 2004

Marcia Wood Gallery presents it’s first solo exhibition with Spanish artist, Juan Perdiguero. A Madrid native, Juan Perdiguero earned degrees in painting and art conservation in Spain and S.U.N.Y., Buffalo, NY, where he currently lives and works. He has lived in the U.S. and exhibited internationally for the past fourteen years. He had a solo exhibition in 2002 at the Atlanta College of Art Gallery.

The word “Can” is the Spanish zoological/ scientific name for dog (perro); “Canes” is the plural form and means dogs. As the title suggests, Juan Perdiguero’s paintings of mixed media on photo emulsion are renderings of dogs, primarily greyhounds. Larger than life size silhouette’s race around the gallery walls with a startling intensity. The animal’s form is cut out of the picture plane and mounted directly onto the gallery walls which unleashes the image from the traditional ground and creates a vivid frozen moment of action as the dogs seem on the verge of leaping off the wall and into the room. In translating his training and regard for Baroque painting into a contemporary practice of mixed media the artist adheres to the appreciable importance of the dramatic rendering of motion in Baroque art. As well, Baroque works are the opposite of minimal and often considered productions in themselves. Perdiguero has derived a complex process that relies heavily on chiaroscuro to define the 3-dimensional quality of the dogs. Using photographs of hounds, he draws the dogs’ contours on acetate and makes cutouts onto which he collages images of flowers, lichen and other organic material he has photographed. Each patch, a wide range of vibrating color, size, and depth is placed to describe the precise form of a dog in action. He then covers the image with etching ink and linseed oil which is then carefully wiped off - reductively drawing the dogs features. The resulting chiaroscuro effect defines the dogs musculature and features by pulling out the darks and using the underlying photographs that are uncovered as the lights.

Juan Perdiguero is interested in the duality of the dog’s animal nature and the human qualities that we project onto them as well as the instinctive, subconscious animal qualities that are a part of human psychology. The artist states, “The energy in this new work is shifting. The greyhounds are part of a larger universe of images where emotions are diverse, isolation and alienation coexist with nostalgia and with curiosity always threatened by a sense of vulnerability…they speak about the animalistic side so much a part of their nature (the one they project onto us so we acknowledge the inner animal that lives in us) but also of a subtle human quality ( the one we project on to them).”

MARCIA WOOD GALLERY
263 Walker Street, Atlanta, GA 30313
www.marciawoodgallery.com