Abstraction Academy | artistvenu

Looking Back at Vivian Browne’s Shift to Abstraction

June 21, 2022 (updated June 22, 2022) Published by artistvenu

Vivian Browne, “Umbrella Plant” (1971), oil on canvas, 48 3/4 x 40 3/4 inches (all images © Vivian Browne, courtesy RYAN LEE Gallery, New York, and Adobe Krow Archives, Los Angeles)

The eight paintings and five works on paper that comprise Vivian Browne: Africa Series 1971-1974, Browne’s second solo show at RYAN LEE Gallery, were prompted by the artist’s first trip to West Africa in 1971. At the time of her visit, the Florida-born, New York-based figurative painter and printmaker, then in her 40s, was at the tail end of her first major body of work: over 100 paintings and drawings of pathetic and grotesque Little Men, all of whom were White. As she labored over this scathingly clear-eyed series, Browne was hard at work outside the studio as well, pushing for a more equitable world.

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Neo-Concretism: the short-lived but influential art movement

June 20, 2022 (updated June 24, 2022) Published by artistvenu

Lygia Clark, Máscaras sensoriais, 1967. WIKIART. © LYGIA CLARK

The ground of art history is littered with manifestoes. Those documents, often written by art critics, poets, and artist-philosophers, explain the underlying motivations of a coalition of creatives and help identify who is “in” and who is “out” of the group.

In retrospect, these declarations often run parallel with the politics of a particular place and time. They are also usually a revolt against some earlier manifestation made by a different if tangentially related, group of artists. Such is the case of the Neo-Concrete Movement.

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Marta Minujín Looks Ugliness Right in the Face

June 1, 2022 (updated June 24, 2022) Published by artistvenu

Marta Minujín, “Gran mancha” (Big Stain) (c. 1959) (© Marta Minujín Archive. Photo by Arturo Sánchez)

Anyone who has known a teenager will recognize in Marta Minujín’s early work a spark of that distinctive rebellious spirit. When she was around 16 years old, the Argentine artist began making paintings in the Informalist vein, applying layer upon layer of muddy acrylic tones onto rough surfaces constructed of carpenter’s glue, sand, hardboard, chalk, and other substances unbecoming of fine art. Debasing not just her medium but her approach — eschewing the easel, she worked on the floor — Minujín distilled the essence of postwar disillusion and her immediate political reality, holding up a mirror to an ugly world indeed.

Unlike so many adolescent dabblings, however, Minujín’s foray into Informalismo was not just a phase — though transient, it was foundational, paving the way for the Pop interventions, environments, and happenings she is best known for today. This is the central thesis of Born of Informalismo: Marta Minujín and the Nascent Body of Performance, a compact exhibition on view at New York’s Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA).

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In Praise of Illegibility

May 4, 2022 (updated June 24, 2022) Published by artistvenu

Nadia Haji Omar, “December” (2017), ink and graphite on paper, 12 x 9 inches

There is a strain of abstract art that I don’t remember ever being the subject of an exhibition in New York, a city where more than 600 languages are spoken and written: asemic writing. An exhibition focusing on “writing without the smallest unit of meaning” could include works by Xu Bing, Henri Michaux, J. B. Murray, Cy Twombly, and Isidore Isou, founder of Lettrism. To this distinguished company, which transcends cultural boundaries, I would add Nadia Haji Omar, whose work I first wrote about in 2018.

Haji Omar, who was born in Melbourne, Australia, and raised in Sri Lanka, grew up learning different languages (Arabic, Sinhalese, Tamil, English, and French), some of which she studied after moving to the United States.

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Disquiet In The Abstract: The 2022 Whitney Biennial

May 3, 2022 (updated June 24, 2022) Published by artistvenu

Ralph Lemon, Untitled, 2021, oil and acrylic on paper, 26 by 40 inches.

The most significant aspect of this year’s Whitney Biennial is its exhibition design. For the first time since 2016, the museum’s fifth floor has been restored to its Renzo Piano-designed primordial state, forgoing walls in favor of a field of fragmented, Tetris-like half-walls arranged in no discernible order or pattern, bookended by city and Hudson River views. The sixth floor, by contrast, is a funereal warren of black walls and black carpet: a “dark video hallway,” as my friend put it. It’s a mess. But bless this mess; it’s the biennial postponed because of a global pandemic, following the Black Lives Matter protests, and at the dawn of what feels like another world war. With “Quiet as It’s Kept,”curators David Breslin and Adrienne Edwards peer into the broken mirror of the past three years, gathering shards to figure out what just happened, and where to go from here.

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Vera Palme’s self-operating subjects

May 2, 2022 (updated June 24, 2022) Published by artistvenu

Vera Palme, Time Stamp Painting (1), 2022. Courtesy of the artist and Braunsfelder.

Last year, I curated an exhibition at Arthub in Copenhagen, which included a dozen of paintings by Vera Palme. One night, I had plans to take a friend out for dinner, but I wanted to show her the exhibition first. We spent a long time in front of SOS (1), 2020, a large canvas depicting what I happen to know is a jade green Chinese vase picked out of the catalogue of an auction house, but which, in this rendition and as suggested by the title, Palme has instilled with a sense of alarm. The vase struggles to maintain itself against the mud-coloured background; brush strokes are whirring in and around it as if in panic. My friend suddenly had to leave, she’d lost her appetite. The painting had done something to her, gone to her gut and settled there as a feeling of disquiet—in the best way, she assured me—asking questions that could not be answered over dinner.

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Major Shows of Matisse Open This Year. Here’s a Refresher on the Essential Modernist Artist

May 2, 2022 (updated June 24, 2022) Published by artistvenu

Henri Matisse, Dance (I), 1909.

Ripe fruit, luxurious fabrics, comely women, a window with a view of an ultramarine sea: the world of Henri Matisse is one of pleasures. Along with fellow modernist Pablo Picasso, he is one of the giants of the 20th-century avant-garde, a perennial subject of blockbuster exhibitions whose cut-paper figures are among the most famous images in art history.

According to several recent biographies, he was also a workaholic, a depressive, and a frequent punching bag for the Parisian intellectual vanguard, which ran hot and cold on his paintings’ busy patterning and lush palette. (His stalwart frenemy Picasso, upon seeing Matisse’s full-bodied Blue Nude from 1907, apparently sneered “If he wants to make a woman, let him make a woman. If he wants to make a design, let him make a design.”)

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Thornton Willis’s Aversion to Perfection

April 29, 2022 (updated June 24, 2022) Published by artistvenu

Thornton Willis, “Brooklyn Bridge” (1993), acrylic on canvas, 96 x 84 inches

I was not surprised to learn that the abstract artist Thornton Willis, who was born in Pensacola, Florida, in 1936, the son of an evangelical minister, has never had a survey show in New York. He belongs to the group of largely unaffiliated artists living in downtown New York between the late 1960s and late ’70s, who worked to make a space for themselves in painting after Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, Pop art, and the “death of painting,” when the art world was dominated by conceptual art and the anti-optical. Except for the eye-opening traveling exhibition, High Times, Hard Times: New York Painting 1967-1975 (2006), curated by Katy Siegel with David Reed’s input, the experimental abstraction of this decade has largely been overlooked. And even that show did not address the breadth of what was going on in abstraction during that period, as Thornton Willis’s Slat paintings were not included.

The 21 abstract paintings in Thornton Willis: A Painting Survey, Six Decades: Works from 1967 – 2017, at David Richard Gallery’s uptown and new Chelsea location (uptown: April 4–May 13; Chelsea: March 30–May 13, 2022), convey a restless artist working within the domain of geometric abstraction who never developed a signature format.

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Word Processing

April 23, 2022 (updated June 24, 2022) Published by artistvenu

AI Art Shop: Surreal Beauty, 2021, dimensions variable, digital file.COURTESY AI ART SHOP, LONDON

In the origin story for Surrealism that André Breton provides in his 1924 manifesto, he claims that “a rather strange phrase” came to him in the hypnagogic state before sleep: “There is a man cut in two by the window.” Easy as it is to link the phrase with Surrealism’s preoccupation with transgressing binaries and seeking passages between life’s apparently divided aspects (what if dreams are real and reality a dream?), Breton seems to ignore the phrase’s substance to fixate on the means of its arrival:

I realized I was dealing with an image of a fairly rare sort, and all I could think of was to incorporate it into my material for poetic construction. No sooner had I granted it this capacity than it was in fact succeeded by a whole series of phrases, with only brief pauses between them, which surprised me only slightly less and left me with the impression of their being so gratuitous that the control I had then exercised upon myself seemed to me illusory and all I could think of was putting an end to the interminable quarrel raging within me.

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Abstract Art in the Southwest Is as Vast as the Region’s Terrain

April 21, 2022 (updated June 24, 2022) Published by artistvenu

Sheldon Harvey, “Convergence” (2022), oil on canvas, 59 x 84 inches (all images courtesy Modern West Fine Art)

SALT LAKE CITY — Utah has never quite assimilated into the romantic lore of cowboys and Native American souvenir culture popularized by cities throughout the Southwest. Known instead for Mormon pioneers, sweeping mountains, and sprawling deserts, the state’s artistic variety is seemingly as vast as its terrain.

Modern West Fine Art was envisioned as a contemporary art gallery that caters to the large base of Western-focused collectors in the region, while cultivating the state’s abundance of local talent. The gallery, placed in a historic building west of downtown Salt Lake City, hosts titans of the Southwestern genre, Indigenous artists, and increasingly, a focus on contemporary artists who may or may not have a stylistic relationship to the region.

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