Sarah Grilo’s Prescient Abstraction

Featured image: Sarah Grilo, “Pines, Ochres and Green” (1963), oil on canvas, 44 x 50 inches (© The Estate of Sarah Grilo; image courtesy Galerie Lelong & Co.)

Among the 17 paintings by artist Sarah Grilo in Galerie Lelong’s The New York Years, 1962–1970, one work most dramatically prophesizes the dread-inducing news alerts of our time. The brushwork in beiges, browns, greens, and grays in “America’s going…” (1967) is overlain by red lettering that the artist transferred from newspapers, eerily resembling those red chyrons that flash on our phones and stream across cable news today.

Born in Argentina in 1917, Grilo was creating introspective art amid social and political unrest well before she moved to New York. Through the group Artistas Modernos de la Argentina, she became an important painter amid the male-dominated Buenos Aires art scene of the 1950s, singled out for her monochromatic, geometric, and expressionistic approaches to lyrical abstraction.

Read the original article here… and return to share your comments below.

Will Hutnick’s ‘Glitchy’ Paintings Investigate Gaps in Perception

Featured image: Will Hutnick, Weather Patterns (2024). Courtesy of Geary, Millerton, New York.

Every month, hundreds of galleries add newly available works by thousands of artists to the Artnet Gallery Network—and every week, we shine a spotlight on one artist or exhibition you should know. Check out what we have in store, and inquire for more with one simple click.

What You Need to Know: Opening February 24, 2024, artist Will Hutnick will be the subject of the solo exhibition “SATELLITE” at Geary in Millerton, New York. Featuring a range of new and recent paintings, the exhibition highlights Hutnick’s experimental practice, with each work containing various techniques such as using plants, stencils, and rollers to create complex layers that, together, blur the boundary between the abstract and representational. On view through April 7, the show mirrors the malleability of our present reality, particularly regarding the tensions between the digital and corporeal worlds. Speaking of these gaps in perception and understanding, Hutnick said, “There is something inherently queer about these glitch-type spaces that seem to be filled with potential; they’re shape-shifting, constantly reinventing themselves, not tied to the present but rather circumnavigating both the past and present.”

Read the original article here… an return to share your comments below.

Tracey Emin’s Portrait of Love After Death

Tracey Emin’s Lovers Grave is a visual treatise on how hope perseveres through grief. Emin has long been an iconic artist. Her evolution from Royal College of Art student to acclaimed YBA and Commander (CBE) of the British Empire by appointment of Queen Elizabeth II are among her more obvious achievements. In her personal life, she survived an aggressive bladder cancer and subsequent hysterectomy and cystectomy.

With Lovers Grave at White Cube’s New York location, Emin comes full circle from “Exorcism of the Last Painting I Ever Made” (1996), a confessional work in which the artist grapples with grief, guilt, and anxiety following two abortions.

The five large-scale paintings on the gallery’s first floor, rendered in red, white, black, and blue, confront viewers with details of the artist’s personal life as if we’re privy to her private diary. At an artist talk last November, Emin explained that the works emerged from a 2019 painting of a couple entwined in a coffin. Scenes of ecstasy spill across all four corners of each canvas, leaving little between the lovers to the imagination.

Featured image: Tracey Emin, “Is Nothing Sacred” (2023)

Read the original article here… and return to share your comments below.

Maki Na Kamura: “Caspar David Friedrich plus Hokusai minus Romanticism minus Japonisme”

Contributed by David Carrier / Born in Japan, Maki Na Kamura was trained in Germany, where she now lives and works. In that light, it’s not too surprising that she describes her work as “Caspar David Friedrich plus Hokusai minus Romanticism minus Japonisme.” Identifying herself as both a traditional painter and a contemporary artist, she notes that she might, on the same canvas, use both tempera and oil paint– two materials traditionally used separately. Her paintings and charcoal-on-paper drawings are poised between figuration and abstraction. The paintings are often centered on figures, but it’s not usually clear what action they are engaged in. Na Kamura’s titles are similarly enigmatic, as is the title of this nonetheless spellbinding exhibition: “Standing on One Hand” at Michael Werner. It may be hard to tell just what we are looking at, but it is obvious that her central concern is visual pleasure.

Consider, for example, Camp VIII. It’s easy to identify the two seated figures center to the left, but what of the enclosure behind them? Or look at the exquisite Shan Shui VI, where the small standing man at the upper right is submerged in a violet, yellow, and green landscape. As Richard Diebenkorn could transition from figuration to abstraction in successive paintings, Na Kamura can do so within a single work. What, then, holds it together? In a word, the answer may be color. Claim of Joseph I plays a large expanse of ocher against green, blue, and dark red in a stunning gestural composition. Unit VIII sets two shades of green against myriad colors, mostly dark.

Featured image: Maki Na Kamura, “Shan Shui VI”, 2015/2023, oil, tempera on canvas, 59 x 78 3/4 inches, 150 x 200 cm

Read the original article here… and return to share your comments below.

See Artist Gregor Gleiwitz’s New Paintings That Abstract Nature to Expressive Effect

A new series of large-scale abstract paintings by Gregor Gleiwitz at Setareh Gallery in Düsseldorf are inspired by the natural world, which may not seem obvious at first glance. The works are filled with whirling organic forms, but these contain a frenetic expressivity and vibrant palette that feels entirely hyperreal. Rather than reflecting the world back at us, Gleiwitz has succeeded in capturing the unpredictable, all-enveloping tenor of our emotional responses to it.

Born in Poland in 1977, Gleiwitz currently lives and works in Berlin. He recalled venturing out for long walks in the fields near his studio to make watercolor studies en plein air, which left him inspired by how the sun’s rays bring lightness and, with it, meaning to our lives. “The canvas is the light space in which the experienced world takes on a new form as a result of the stream of consciousness,” he said.

Featured image: Gregor Gleiwitz, 08.10.2023 (2023). Image courtesy of Setareh Gallery, Berlin.

Read the original article here… and return to share your comments below.

The Vibrant Paintings of Andrew Kuo Hone in on the Tender Side of ‘Quantitative Aesthetics’

Among the slate of early winter shows this year, Broadway Gallery’s “Me, Lately,” an offering of new paintings by Andrew Kuo, was a highlight amid the downtown scene. The vibrant and cerebral offerings span the artist’s sense of humor, affinity for cultural references, and propensity for self-reflection.

Tucked below the paintings with layers of jagged circles, the viewer finds that they are, in fact, looking at pie graphs. In the work Things I Could Be we see several slices: “optimistic,” “pessimistic,” “right but sad,” “wrong but happy.”

Featured image: Andrew Kuo, Things I Could Do (8/1/2023) , 2023. Courtesy of the artist and Broadway Gallery.

View the original post here… and return to share your comments on artistvenu below

Artist Debbie Ma’s Abstract Works Recall Historic Movements With a Contemporary Spin

Every month, hundreds of galleries add newly available works by thousands of artists to the Artnet Gallery Network—and every week, we shine a spotlight on one artist or exhibition you should know. Check out what we have in store, and inquire for more with one simple click.

What You Need to Know: Right now, the David Owsley Museum of Art, part of Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana, is presenting the solo exhibition “Rising to the Surface: Paintings by Debbie Ma.” On view through December 21, 2023, the exhibition features a range of works from the Philippines-born, American artist’s oeuvre, highlighting her subtly evolving practice and ongoing experimentation with color and texture. In many ways evoking aspects of 20th-century Modernism like geometric abstraction, and Abstract Expressionism—namely the mark making by Cy Twombly and gesturality of Jackson Pollock—Ma brings a distinctive nuance to her use of pattern and materiality.4

Featured image: Debbie Ma, Chez Henri (2021).

Read the original article here… and return to share your comments on artistvenu below

Deb Sokolow’s Wackadoodle World of Design

CHICAGO — A random survey of recent architectural news items includes descriptions of: eco-certified ultra-luxury resorts in the Red Sea, the fact that less than half of one percent of licensed architects in the United States are Black women, and an analysis of how Russia has targeted historic landmarks as part of its war on Ukraine.

In times like these, Deb Sokolow is an artist we very much deserve.

Sokolow, who was born in 1974 in Davis, California, but has lived in Chicago since 1996, makes architectural drawings. Well, not really. She uses graphite, wax crayons, colored pencils, ink, and collage to create two-and-a-half-dimensional artworks whose parts resemble the floor plans, sections, and elevations found in the traditional working drawings of architects — the extra half-dimension is for shallow folded paper components that pop out perpendicular to her otherwise flat surfaces. Plenty are the overlapping geometric shapes, handy perspectival lines, orderly grid markings, blueprint-like effects, and neat squarish handwriting. But you could sooner construct a building from my lunch than from Sokolow’s diagrams.

Featured image: Deb Sokolow, “Visualizing Building Materials Constructed from Mycelia” (2023), graphite, crayon, colored pencil, ink, and collage on Arches paper, 22 x 30 x 1 inches

Read the original article here… and return to share your comments on artistvenu below

In His Final Works, Brice Marden Found Freedom

Dated between 2020 and 2023, the artworks in Brice Marden: Let the painting make you at Gagosian are the artist’s final ones. In 2017, Marden, who died this August at the age of 84, learned that he had rectal cancer. When asked about this, he told the New York Times in 2019, “[it] hasn’t made me work any differently. It’s just an extra thing to think about.” Marden, who has often been credited with rejuvenating painting in the mid-1960s, knew that painting and drawing were physical acts for him, the result of movements made by the hand, wrist, arm, and active body. More than 30 years ago, in a prescient interview with the artist Pat Steir printed in a brochure for the 1991–1992 exhibition Brice Marden: Cold Mountain at Dia Chelsea, Marden stated: “I am 5’8 1/2″, and I weigh this much, and I am left handed, and I’m a certain age. That has a big effect on what a thing looks like. The kind of mark I can make physically.”

And in a 2015 conversation about the Nevis Stele series (2007–15), Marden told the artist Matt Connors, “I’m getting to the point where I do things I ordinarily wouldn’t have allowed myself to do. Now I’m a little bit older, so I figure I can do anything I want.”

Featured image: Brice Marden, “Blue Painting” (2022–23), oil on linen, 72 x 96 inches (all images © 2023 Estate of Brice Marden / Artists Rights Society (ARS) New York; photos Rob McKeever, courtesy Gagosian)

Read the original article here… and return to share your thoughts on artistvenu below

5 Artists Offer Unique Takes on Contemporary Abstraction in a New Brussels Exhibition

What You Need to Know: Brussels-based Galerie Sept presents the group exhibition “Dialogues in Abstraction,” a brand new exhibition on view through January 21, 2024. The show features the work of five diverse contemporary artists: Katrin Fridriks, Lee Hyun Joung, Nikodem Szpunar, Nicolas Dubreuille, and Daniele Basso. The presentation marks the gallery debut of Fridriks, an Icelandic artist whose work focuses on the intersection of humans and natural forces, such as gravity. Her work is juxtaposed with that by Lee Hyun Joung, who mines both her South Korean heritage and traditional materials to create ink-on-paper works. French artist Nicolas Dubreuille works frequently in sculpture, creating works that relay his background in graphic design, and tap into the painting tradition of geometric abstraction. Also frequently working in sculpture, Daniele Basso, who hails from Italy, investigates the meaning of symbols and life through the material of mirror-finished stainless steel. Another newcomer to Galerie Sept’s program is Polish artist Nikodem Szpunar, whose Minimalistic, volumetric paintings convey his experience in furniture and product design.

Featured image: Nicolas Dubreuille, Untitled (2023). Courtesy of Galerie Sept, Brussels.

Read the original article here… and return to share your comments on artistvenu below