Louise Fishman @ Van Doren Waxter, NYC - "always stand ajar" Exhibition

Louise Fishman

always stand ajar

Van Doren Waxter, New York

April 10 – June 27, 2025 

LOUISE FISHMAN 

Loose the Flood, 2009 

Oil on jute, 66 x 39 in (167.6 x 99.1 cm) (LF 48)

© Louise Fishman Foundation, courtesy Van Doren Waxter

Van Doren Waxter presents LOUISE FISHMAN: always stand ajar, an exhibition of paintings and works on paper by the venerable American painter organized with the Louise Fishman Foundation. This is the gallery’s first exhibition of the artist since the announcement of representation in 2024. Accompanied by a fully illustrated catalog that includes an essay by poet Nathan Kernan, this exhibition highlights Fishman’s works titled after Emily Dickinson and Wallace Stevens’ poems and the artist’s long-standing curiosity about the synthesis of paintings and written language.

 

Over six decades, Louise Fishman dedicated her career to the pursuit of original, complex, and sincere imagery. As painter Amy Sillman wrote, Fishman was “a serious-ass painter” who held herself to the highest standard of experiment and self-reflection in her studio, tackling each painting with the fullest intention to connect with the surface, the paint, and the movement of her body. Alongside her rigorous and disciplined studio practice, Louise Fishman nurtured friendships with writers and activists such as Bertha Harris, Jill Johnston, and Esther Newton, who created pioneering works in lesbian and queer studies which informed the multifariousness of Fishman’s identity as an artist. While Louise Fishman resonated with the gestural and geometric language of abstract painting, she persistently challenged the boundaries of Abstract Expressionism and averted the disposition towards the removal of personhood in the movement. She maintained consciousness of her state of being, in her own words, “a working-class Jewish Lesbian” and of the impossibility of separating the paintings from her greater experience as a human. Fishman’s energetic yet precisely organized brushstrokes are an advertent extension of her athleticism, caring hands, and earnest inquiry into the mystery of what makes a painting.

 

The exhibition showcases Fishman’s refined and magisterial works from the final twenty years of her life, which she titled after phrases from poems by American poets Emily Dickinson and Wallace Stevens. She was first introduced to poetry by her paternal aunt, Razel Kapustin, who was also a painter. During her time at Tyler School of Fine Arts, Fishman learned from poet Gerald Stern, with whom she became lifelong friends. She took inspiration from the works of poets, as Grace Hartigan did with Frank O’Hara and Jane Freilicher with John Ashbery. Intuitively and profoundly, Fishman understood the pictorial roots of language and the parallel between text and brushstroke, the legible and illegible.

LOUISE FISHMAN was born in 1939 in Philadelphia. In 1956, she began studying art at the Philadelphia Museum School of Art, then at Stella Elkins Tyler School of Art, where she earned her BFA in Painting and Printmaking and a B.S. in Art Education in 1963. She completed her MFA in Painting and Printmaking at the University of Illinois in Champaign/Urbana and headed directly to New York in 1965, where she lived and worked until her passing in 2021. Her work is represented in many public collections, including: the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburg, PA; the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia; and the Jewish Museum, New York, among many others. 

VAN DOREN WAXTER, NEW YORK

23 East 73rd Street, New York, NY 10021

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Artist Richard Diebenkorn Exhibition @ Van Doren Waxter, New York - "Figures and Faces" - Organized with the Richard Diebenkorn Foundation

Richard Diebenkorn

Figures and Faces

Van Doren Waxter, New York

May 2 – June 28, 2024

RICHARD DIEBENKORN in the Stanford Studio, 

Stanford University, Palo Alto, Calif., 1963.

Photograph by Leo Holub 

Courtesy Estate of Leo Holub

“With the small paintings of heads, I would like the expression of the whole surface to be felt as the nature of the subject's character (as opposed to the facial expression and the facial form presenting the character).” – Richard Diebenkorn

Van Doren Waxter presents Richard Diebenkorn: Faces and Figures on view at the gallery’s 1907 townhouse at 23 East 73rd Street. Organized with the Richard Diebenkorn Foundation, the exhibition includes a sweep of taut, psychologically complex portraits made during the distinguished American painter, draftsman, and printmaker’s mature representational period, an output that Jane Livingston, writing in the artist’s catalogue raisonné, remarks “exceeds in number that of almost every other group of drawings and paintings he made, even in the prolific Ocean Park period.” The artist has been represented by Van Doren Waxter since its founding 25 years ago in 1999, with the gallery’s inaugural exhibition devoted to his paintings from his epic Ocean Park cycle.

The presentation includes seven paintings and fourteen works on paper made by the artist between 1955 and 1967, including a rare acrylic painted on a 1964 poster promoting the artist's drawing exhibition at Stanford University Art Gallery that year. A must-see for aficionados of Richard Diebenkorn, the show marks the first time his rarely seen Two Nudes, 1960—a beguiling, seven foot tall oil that anticipates the scale of the monumental Ocean Park abstractions he would begin in 1967—has been on view in 60 years. “A meandering blue background,” enthuses art historian Stephanie Lebas Huber in the show’s accompanying essay, “sculpts the figural pair by cutting into the flesh-tones with layers of blue, in some cases even defining their bodies with a contour line of the same hue.” Huber writes that Henri Matisse’s “long-standing influence over Diebenkorn’s color palette and subject matter is evident,” noting that he  began looking at the painter in the 1940s during trips to the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. and had viewed a 1952 Matisse retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Art that included his hero’s coloristic Male Model, c. 1900 and the sublime The Dance, 1909.

RICHARD DIEBENKORN

Girl with Glasses (CR no 3358), 1963 

Oil on canvas, 14 3/4 x 10 7/8 in (37.5 x 27.6 cm)

© Richard Diebenkorn Foundation 

Courtesy Van Doren Waxter

 

A young Richard Diebenkorn and his family returned from living in the southwest, midwest, and briefly, New York City, to California in 1953, which “allowed the artist to see with fresh eyes a familiar structure that centered itself on a perpetual state of becoming,” writes Huber, “...the flicker of an eye, or the turn of a nose drawn from the immediacy of his intuitive brushwork.” In the enigmatic 1963 oil, Girl with Glasses, which was most recently reproduced in the monograph Richard Diebenkorn: A Retrospective (Rizzoli, 2019), “the subject’s helmet-like mass of hair is lacquered in a grey glaze; her black lenses are blotted out by an abbreviated reflection.” The artist’s indelible figures from this period “stand behind masks,” Huber suggests, but “occasionally the figure penetrates the mask,” as in the 1958 canvas Head (Portrait of a Friend), in which “the sitter’s eyes appear open and accessible beneath a shelf of violet; the mask seems to be coming loose, no longer integral to the face.”

RICHARD DIEBENKORN

David Park on a Hot Day (CR no. 2083), 1956 

Oil on canvas, 13 3/4 x 17 in ( 34.9 x 43.2 cm)

© Richard Diebenkorn Foundation 

Courtesy Van Doren Waxter

A glowing portrait of David Park on a Hot Day, 1956, was painted a year after he and the Bay Area Figurative legend formed a weekly drawing session from the live model. “A sun that is felt but not seen cuts through the fog,” Huber asserts of the oil. “The atmospheric temporality transforms Park, bleaching the sitter’s torso.” In his lifetime, Richard Diebenkorn remarked of his close friend, “he was the complete painter, besides which he had a first rate mind—critically, intellectually, ethically—and he had a strong, if quirky, sense of and appreciation for people which begins to explain his power with human figures.”

The exhibition includes several arresting examples of the artist’s nudes, a subject matter so relentless for the artist that Livingston in the catalogue raisonné described him as “tireless, exhaustive, in his life drawing of the human body.” An emotionally charged and visually electric charcoal and ink on paper (c. 1955–67) depicts a female nude figure seated on a chair with a leg crossed, and prefigures the lyrical geometry that is to come in the artist’s eventual return to abstraction.

The widow of Richard Diebenkorn, the late Phyllis Diebenkorn, entrusted the stewardship of the artist’s legacy to the gallery in 1999. Then Lawrence Rubin Greenberg Van Doren, the gallery’s inaugural exhibition, Richard Diebenkorn: Ocean Park Paintings, took place at its former home at 730 Fifth Avenue. John Van Doren and Dorsey Waxter later formed Van Doren Waxter on the piano nobile of a converted historic townhouse at 23 East 73rd Street designed to privilege art and the viewing experience. Together with the family of the artist and ultimately, the Richard Diebenkorn Foundation, Van Doren Waxter has contributed to the study and understanding of the artist through a twenty-five year arc of exhibitions, programs, and fresh scholarship of every period, medium, and body of work. More recently in 2020, the gallery mounted an exhibition devoted to the artist’s early stylistic and technical origins in oil, watercolor, gouache, ink, crayon, and collage that had never been shown in the Northeast and served as host for the debut of the artist’s monograph, Richard Diebenkorn: A Retrospective (Rizzoli, 2019). And with a special loan of archival material from the Foundation, a sumptuous retrospective of the artist's work on paper took place during Diebenkorn’s centennial celebration across all floors of the gallery that included rarely seen drawings evincing his love of mark marking and use of paper as a medium.

RICHARD DIEBENKORN was born in Portland, Oregon in 1922. He attended Stanford University from 1940 to 1943 and was awarded his Bachelor of Arts in 1949. He studied at the University of California, Berkeley in 1943 and attended California School of Fine Arts in 1946. He received his Master of Arts from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque in 1951. The artist’s earliest abstractions were made while he lived in Sausalito, California (1946–1949), Albuquerque (1950–1952) and Urbana, Illinois (1952–1953). In 1953 he moved to Berkeley, continuing his work in abstraction. The year 1955 marks the beginning of a period of more than a decade that the artist worked from direct observation making figurative works from a model, along with still lifes, landscapes, and interiors. From 1966 to 1988 he lived in Santa Monica, taught at the University of California, Los Angeles from 1966 to 1973, and began his Ocean Park cycle in 1967. He moved to Healdsburg, California in 1988 where he worked exclusively on drawings and prints until his death in 1993.

Recent museum exhibitions include Richard Diebenkorn: The Sketchbooks Revealed (2015–2016), Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University; Matisse/Diebenkorn (2016–2017), organized by the Baltimore Museum of Art and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and Richard Diebenkorn: Beginnings, 1942–1955 (2017–2019), organized by the Richard Diebenkorn Foundation in Berkeley in conjunction with the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, which traveled to David Owsley Museum of Art, Ball State University, Muncie, Indiana; Portland Art Museum, Oregon; Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art, Pepperdine University, Malibu, California; and Academy Art Museum, Easton, Maryland.

Richard Diebenkorn: The Catalogue Raisonné (Yale University Press), the definitive resource of the artist’s sketches; drawings; paintings on paper, board, canvas; and sculptural objects, was published in 2016. Forthcoming in 2025, Richard Diebenkorn: The Catalogue Raisonné of Prints (Yale University Press) will be the first comprehensive examination of the artist’s printmaking output spanning 1946 to 1992.

Richard Diebenkorn: Faces and Figures

Exhibition Catalogue

Published by Van Doren Waxter, 2024

VAN DOREN WAXTER

23 East 73rd Street, New York, NY 10021

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Tales of Brave Ulysses @ Garth Greenan Gallery & Van Doren Waxter, NYC - With Al Loving, Howardena Pindell, Alan Shields, Richard Van Buren

Tales of Brave Ulysses 

Al Loving, Howardena Pindell, Alan Shields, Richard Van Buhren

Garth Greenan Gallery, NYC 

Through December 16, 2023

Van Doren Waxter, NYC 

Through December 22, 2023

Garth Greenan Gallery and Van Doren Waxter present Tales of Brave Ulysses, a two-venue exhibition which explores the personal and working relationships of four prominent Post-War American artists: Al Loving, Howardena Pindell, Alan Shields, and Richard Van Buren.

During the late 1960s and early 1970s, the dominant art world ideology of formalist abstraction, with its roots in Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism, was being challenged by a new generation of artists. Centered in downtown New York, their artistic and moral values were tempered by the intense social and political struggles of the day. Eschewing Minimalism’s impersonal methods and dogmatic prescriptions, these four artists instead embraced craft and process— cutting, sewing, tacking, and pouring— upending traditional distinctions between media and rethinking established roles of artist and viewer. Loving, Pindell, Shields, and Van Buren were at the vanguard of this material revolution in contemporary art, a loosely defined artistic movement since referred to by critics as Post-Minimalism or New Informalism.

In the midst of this radical upheaval in art practice and criticism, these four artists forged an enduring personal and creative bond. While deeply influencing each other in both spirit and in style, each artist nevertheless maintained a distinctly singular voice and practice.

From the late 1960s onwards, Shields’s studio served as a frequent gathering place. He was famous for his boisterous persona and uncanny ability to do high-quality work while in the company of friends, behavior which aptly earned him the moniker, “Mr. Partytime.” This sensibility is reflected in his colorful large-scale installation, Maze (1981-1982), constructed of painted aluminum piping wrapped with vibrantly dyed and sewn canvases. One could interpret such a work as a playful riff on Minimalist predecessors, like Tony Smith’s imposing geometric monochrome Maze from 1967.

The artists’ individual relationships had their own flavor and function. Shields and Loving often had protracted conversations about art and art history. Shields and Van Buren, by contrast, almost never discussed art, save for the occasional shop talk about dealers and galleries. Despite the amount of time these four artists spent together, their visual lexicons would remain highly distinct.

Many of these artists describe influence as if it were occurring beneath the work itself, at a foundational level. “Influences are who you spend your time with,” Van Buren has said. The group always supported each other with camaraderie and good humor. Their differing sensibilities continuously demonstrated new possibilities for their individual practices. Van Buren— who notes that a family member’s intrusion into the studio during work hours can launch him into a “complete state of fear”—still tries to channel Shields’s preternatural ease in the studio. In a 1975 interview with Shields, originally published in The Print Collector’s Newsletter, Pindell broached what she called the “hostile question” directly, asking him which artists he admired. He quipped that it was H.C. Westermann, primarily for his acrobatic ability to “walk on his hands.” Clarifying his cryptic response, Shields went on to describe the enigmatic character of influence as something stemming from residual feelings one gets from another’s work—feelings that can be played with for a time, but not so long as to fundamentally alter one’s own personal expression.

Nevertheless, it would be impossible to deny obvious parallels among these artists’ respective crafts. Canvases have been freed from their rigid stretchers, which we see both in Pindell’s early monochromatic painting Untitled (1976) as well as in Shields’s Space Sisters (1972-1974). Some works recast the iconic Minimalist grid in new light, like Pindell’s cut-and- sewn painting Untitled #24 (1978-1979), Loving’s vivid quilted painting, Square (1973-1974), or Shields’s monumental delicately-threaded painting Hart Sunkist Lie (1969). One might say the same of Van Buren’s sculptural installation Untitled (1969/2023), where scintillating globs of translucent polyester are hung from the wall in orderly but irregular rows from bundles of fiberglass strands, like organic specimens in some scientist’s lab.

According to art historian Jenni Sorkin, for several of these artists, “embracing the historically low status of textiles was a way to reclaim personal histories and embed individual artistic practices with sublimated narrative content.” For Pindell and Loving in particular, craft was often seen also as a stand-in for race or gender, which would become major contexts for showcasing their work.

The Whitney Museum of American Art was a singular institution in facilitating these discourses. In 1969 and 1970 the museum acquired two of Shields’s works, and in 1969 he was included in their annual exhibition, the same year as his solo show at Paula Cooper Gallery. Loving had his first solo exhibition of hard-edge paintings at the museum from December 1969 to January 1970, a body of work he would soon abandon. Feeling constrained formally and conceptually, and feeling his work neglected to reflect his lived experience, Loving tore up his geometric canvases before stitching them back together again in improvised compositions. This act would catalyze an aesthetic he retained for the rest of his career, exemplified by iconic paintings such as Untitled (1973). Despite enjoying similar early success with his Minimalist sculpture, Van Buren would soon abandon it, producing delicate cast polyester sculptures that demonstrate a persistent fascination with chance, process, and the generative capacity of art. In 1971, Loving and Pindell would both be included in the Whitney’s controversial exhibition, Contemporary Black Artists in America, and the following year, Pindell, Loving, and Shields would appear together in the museum’s annual exhibition.

While New York City played a formative role for all of these artists, in the early 1980s Van Buren and Shields would leave the city for secluded Maine and Shelter Island, respectively. Nevertheless, their mutual creative and personal bonds would persist for decades.

Garth Greenan Gallery represents Howardena Pindell, Richard Van Buren, and the Estate of Al Loving. Van Doren Waxter represents the Estate of Alan Shields.

Tales of Brave Ulysses

Al Loving, Howardena Pindell, Alan Shields, Richard Van Buren

Van Doren Waxter and Garth Greenan Gallery co-published a fully illustrated catalogue to accompany the exhibition Tales of Brave Ulysses with two essays by Sarah Cowan (Assistant Professor of Art and Art History at DePauw University and author of Howardena Pindell: Reclaiming Abstraction, Yale University Press, 2022) and Amy Rahn (Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Maine at Augusta). ISBN: 978-0-9988755-4-5 - Softcover: 248 pages

GARTH GREENAN GALLERY

545 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011

www.garthgreenan.com

VAN DOREN WAXTER

23 East 73rd Street, New York, NY 10021

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Tales of Brave Ulysses - Opened November 9, 2023

Gareth Nyandoro @ Van Doren Waxter, NYC - MAWORKS

Gareth Nyandoro: MAWORKS

Van Doren Waxter, New York

Through August 6, 2021

GARETH NYANDORO

Kubatana Fence Makers (detail), 2021 

Ink on cut paper mounted on canvas

320 x 260 cm

© Gareth Nyandoro, courtesy Van Doren Waxter

Van Doren Waxter presents an exhibition of new mixed media works by Zimbabwean artist GARETH NYANDORO. Titled MAWORKS, this is the artist’s second exhibition in New York, and features four large-scale pieces (measuring over 100 inches) mounted on canvas alongside recent small panel pieces. The artist is appreciated internationally for his vivid, sensitive compositions. 

The foundation of Gareth Nyandoro’s imagery remains anchored in the observation of daily life in Harare and its surroundings -its storefronts and markets, its street life and outskirts, which are all meaningful sites of labor, production, and commercial exchange. The artist pictures these essential scenes using sharp blades in his signature and painstaking ink and cut paper technique (‘kucheka-cheka’, after the Sona verb ‘to cut’), which are mounted on raw cut canvas; these unstretched works often spill out of their two-dimensional format onto the floor, which conveys openness and accessibility in connecting with the space of the viewer. 

Gareth Nyandoro’s distinctive practice – which negotiates printing, drawing, painting and installation techniques – is stimulated by the energy and liveliness of Harare’s commercial activity, and his sensitive portrayal of its workers and laborers. In these recent works, Gareth Nyandoro presents images of everyday scenes observed during the past year’s pandemic. He has titled the show MAWORKS – which is a colloquialism; in street language, it roughly translates to mean working or producing for the everyday, and making what you need to survive, and to be able to carry on.

In the panoramic work Kubatana Fence Makers (all works dated 2021), two workhands wearing safety-yellow garments are seen carefully clipping a metal wire fence; one figure is wearing a mask while the other has it pulled down to around his neck as he cuts with a pair of carefully held scissors. In another, titled Nyange, Gareth Nyandoro depicts a worker as he walks with a large shovel carried over his shoulder, next to a sign advertising river sand. The artist focuses on scenes of informal labor, in which people do what is necessary to earn and make a daily living, and to continue to work with grace and dignity - what the artist has described as “a series of artworks that tell a story of struggle and persistence to survive.”

GARETH NYANDORO (b. 1982, Bikita, Zimbabwe) lives in and works in Harare. His recent solo exhibitions include “RUWA” at Tiwani Contemporary, London, UK (2020) and “JUGGLING SKILLS” at SMAC Gallery, Johannesburg, South Africa (2019). Gareth Nyandoro co-represented Zimbabwe at the 56th Venice Biennale (2015) and is the winner of the Emerging Voices Award in Art from the Financial Times / Oppenheimier Funds, London. The artist studied at Harare Polytechnic College and the Chinhoyi University of Technology (Zimbabwe). Gareth Nyandoro was a resident at the Rijksakademie, Amsterdam (2014 - 2015) and SAM Art Projects, Paris (2016). Other previous solo exhibitions include: “Stalls of Fame” (2017) at Palais de Tokyo, Paris; “Gareth Nyandoro”, Galerie 23, Stichting Beeldende Kunst, Amsterdam (2015); “Weaving Life”, Gallery Delta, Harare (2013); and “Mutariri”, National Gallery of Zimbabwe, Harare (2012). The artist is represented in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

VAN DOREN WAXTER

23 East 73rd Street, New York, NY 10021

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Volker Hüller @ Van Doren Waxter, NYC - Birds

Volker Hüller: Birds

Van Doren Waxter, New York

May 6 – July 2, 2021

VOLKER HULLER

Black Moon, 2021

Oil on canvas, 52 x 42 in (132.1 x 106.7 cm)

© Volker Hüller, courtesy Van Doren Waxter

Van Doren Waxter presents Birds, a solo exhibition of a brand-new series of oil on canvas paintings by Brooklyn-based, German artist VOLKER HULLER. The artist creates an immersive and color-saturated installation as a backdrop for the paintings on the 3rd floor of the gallery’s 1907 townhouse. The show presents a suite of recently completed works (all 2021) which Volker Hüller began in 2020, as the artist and his wife welcomed the birth of their first child during the middle of a pandemic. “Hope,” the poet Emily Dickinson wrote, “is a thing with feathers / That perches in the soul” – and these images of birds allude to a contemplative and hopeful view of the world. The artist, noted for his intricately layered canvases characterized by their multidimensional surfaces and materiality, has painted several of these birds in the presence of the moon, and as pictures, they act as moody ciphers of nature, of travel, and of renewal. This is the artist’s sixth solo exhibition in New York.

In a practice that often reveals scenes from the artist’s personal life, as well as misadventure and mythology, Volker Hüller’s work always vacillates between representation and stylized abstraction; and in these new paintings, the bird image becomes a poetic – and even humorous – image for the artist to communicate ideas about contemplating ways of being and the act of painting. Akin to previous bodies of work by the artist, his loaded, compressed worlds are filled with symbols, the subconscious, and allusions to art and history.

As with most natural creatures, birds are all around us, appearing and disappearing; yet they are also messengers of spring and symbols of migration, landing gracefully, and perhaps perching awkwardly, before us after a long sojourn. Like the act of painting, they convey universal ideas about searching and looking, while also alluding to place and travel, such as the work titled Rockaway Beach, 2021. The light of a distinct sun or moon (seen here as orange, black, and blue orbs) helps to define the weather and the surrounding atmosphere, lushly painted with short, dappled strokes and delicate line work in the blue-tinged In the Still of the Night, 2021, in which a pair of raptors with sharp, pointed beaks sit prone as if on a high perch in the darkness. The birds in Volker Hüller’s new pictures help to locate the viewer – and painter - to stand in place to look out and imagine and picture a site beyond our current condition.

VOLKER HULLER was born in 1976 in Forchheim, Germany and currently works in NY, where he has lived in Brooklyn since 2014. Hüller currently has a solo exhibition at Grimm Gallery, Amsterdam (Spring 2021) and has a forthcoming one at Produzentengalerie, Hamburg (2022). The artist studied under the late Norbert Schwontkowski at the Academy of Fine Arts, Hamburg. Past solo exhibitions include Timothy Taylor, London (2010, 2013); Produzentengalerie, Hamburg (2009, 2012, 2017); 11R - Eleven Rivington, NY (2009, 2011, 2013, 2016, 2018); Grimm Gallery, Amsterdam (2009, 2012, 2014, 2016, 2019); and group shows at Nicelle Beauchene, NY; Saatchi Gallery, London; the Falckenberg Collection, Hamburg; and Weserburg Museum, Bremen. The artist’s work has been featured and reviewed in Artforum, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Time Out New York, and Modern Painters, among other publications. Hüller’swork is included in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, NY; Dallas Museum of Art, TX; and the Israel Museum.

VAN DOREN WAXTER

23 East 73rd Street, New York, NY 10021

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