Abstraction Academy | artistvenu

Maggi Hambling’s Visceral Abstractions Reflect Environmental Destruction

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

Maggi Hambling, “The last baboon” (2018) oil on canvas, 67 x 48 inches

I first learned of Maggi Hambling from her polarizing public sculptures. A bust of writer Oscar Wilde lounges in a green granite coffin, smoking a cigarette and laughing at passersby behind St. Martins in the Field in London. A nude, silvered bronze statue of 18th-century feminist thinker Mary Wollstonecraft emerges from an undulating silver plinth, whose sides jut out like free-floating hips, in North London. There’s an irreverence to those sculptures, a cheekiness that refuses one-dimensional worship. But there’s nothing cheeky about Real Time, her first exhibition in New York City, now on view at Marlborough Gallery. Instead, the swirling, gestural, and surprisingly moving landscapes, seascapes, and portraits offer more somber reflections on climate change and death.

In indigo, black, and gray, Hambling’s paintings blend elements of abstract action painting with unmistakable representations of mountains, rivers, and animals.

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Portraitist Nujoom Al-Ghanem on Inspiration in the Individual

April 19, 2022 (updated June 24, 2022) Published by artistvenu

Nujoom Al-Ghanem, The Prince.

Nujoom Al-Ghanem is, unquestionably, one of the pioneering artists of the UAE. She began her career as a poet and journalist, and she has since moved into multiple other mediums; she has published numerous collections, directed several films, and has represented the UAE at the Venice Biennale. As Art & Object interviewed Al-Ghanem about her participation in Museum in the Sky, it became clear that what connects the various facets of her career is an unabiding interest in people, their stories, and the experiences that make us individuals. Her works—whether through film, language or painting—are portraits that put us face-to-face with her subjects.

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Abstractions That Record the Scars of Trauma

April 15, 2022 (updated June 24, 2022) Published by artistvenu

Kwon Young-Woo, “Untitled” (1985), gouache, Chinese ink on Korean paper, 45.47 x 38.98 inches

The more I learn about artists associated with the Dansaekhwa movement that began flourishing in Korea in the late 1960s, the more I realize how deeply inextricable the work is from the country’s struggle for liberation and independence. While the artists considered central to the movement are not above criticism, particularly given the patriarchal structures governing the country, the emergence of women artists and poets during the 1980s in Korea suggests that major changes had long been underway. At the same time, Korea’s engagement with modernism and postmodernism has most often been seen through a Western lens, typically by juxtaposing Korean monochromatic painters with American minimalists in a Western gallery setting. These pairings tend to focus on similarities and flatten out difference.

This is one reason to see the exhibition Kwon Young-Woo: Gestures in Hanji at Tina Kim Gallery (March 24–April 30, 2022).

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How Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Sisters Organized an Exhibition Dedicated to Their Brother’s Life and Legacy, Full of Works Unseen for Decades

April 14, 2022 (updated June 24, 2022) Published by artistvenu

Installation view of “Jean-Michel Basquiat: King Pleasure,” 2022, at Starrett-Lehigh Building.PHOTO: IVANE KATAMASHVILI

“King Pleasure,” a massive exhibition and homage to Jean-Michel Basquiat organized by the late artist’s two sisters, Lisane Basquiat and Jeanine Heriveaux, is comprised of some 100 paintings and drawings long cloistered by the artist’s estate and rarely, if ever exhibited.

Designed by starchitect Sir David Adjaye and featuring movie set–like re-creations of the family’s Brooklyn home as well as the artist’s famed Great Jones Street studio, the exhibition, which opened on Saturday at the Starrett-Lehigh Building in West Chelsea, feels a bit like visiting Marcel Proust’s bedroom at the Musée Carnivalet or Brancusi’s studio at the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

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Is It an Artificial Paradise or an Artificial Hell or Both?

April 14, 2022 (updated June 24, 2022) Published by artistvenu

Elliott Green, “Shout” (2021), oil on linen, 76 x 92 inches

Over the past 30-plus years, Elliott Green has defined a path in painting and drawing that is unlike any other. For that alone you might think that he would be better known, but this would mean the art world has turned its back on branding, signature styles, and dependability — capitalist mainstays — in favor of change, the unexpected, and the uncanny. Between 1989 and 2009, he depicted human and animal figures with rubbery, infinitely stretchable limbs engaged in unnamable interactions, at once sexual, scatological, inexplicable, and sinister. The fantasies were unsettling because they required viewers to complete them, thus partially exposing their own awareness of the links between insecurity and aggression. In these years, Green evoked an alternative world populated by humans and animals that possessed amazing contortionist powers. In retrospect, what is striking about this body of work is that he never developed a signature motif, alter ego, or caricature. He did not brand himself.

Whatever trajectory Green seemed to be defining changed when he stopped exhibiting for nearly a decade (2009-17). Among the events that precipitated this change were moving out of Manhattan and receiving the 2011 Jules Guerin Rome Prize at the American Academy (strongly supported by Thomas Nozkowski, an independent artist who remains under-recognized).

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Surreal Things

April 13, 2022 (updated June 24, 2022) Published by artistvenu

Lauren Satlowski: Lily Vase with Faces, 2020, oil on linen, 27 by 22 inches.

JILL MULLEADY’S PAINTING SOLUS LOCUS (2018) is a dream of a bivalve Venus: an oyster on the pearlescent half-shell spreads across the picture, lusciously plump, its striated folds rendered as tongues and lips. The shell dwarfs the hand reaching in from the upper left, gloved in slick black, wrist cocked as if ready to play the oyster like a harp. Of course, in many dreams, you don’t get the things you want. Anxious dreams are a series of near misses, like shucking an oyster only to find dry meat. You usually don’t get the things you want in waking life, either—or at least getting them isn’t often as satisfying as you’d hoped. A painting like Mulleady’s offers a certain consummation of the dream; but also emphasizes this absence, being, after all, only a picture, no matter how much the genre of still life implies possession. What you really have is art. The image is poised on the moment of waking, between having and not having, the unconscious and the conscious, the dream and the world.

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What Was Surrealism?

April 10, 2022 (updated June 24, 2022) Published by artistvenu

SURREALISM RECEIVED THE MUSEUM TREATMENT early in its history—early enough that André Breton, the movement’s charismatic ringleader and chief evangelist, was aggrieved at learning that he would not be allowed to dictate the selection and presentation of works, as he had for virtually every other Surrealist exhibition since the group’s 1925 debut at Galerie Pierre in Paris. Organized by Alfred H. Barr Jr., at the Museum of Modern Art in 1936, the show, “Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism,” was conceived as a companion to “Cubism and Abstract Art,” held at the museum earlier that year, both part of a series of exhibitions that would, according to Barr, “present in an objective and historical manner the principal movements of modern art.” Yet if Barr recognized that Surrealism must be reckoned with, he was nevertheless equivocal about its significance, in a way that he was decidedly not about Cubism’s: “When [Surrealism] is no longer a cause or a cockpit of controversy,” he writes in the catalogue, “it will doubtless be seen to have produced a mass of mediocre and capricious pictures and objects, a fair number of excellent and enduring works of art, and even a few masterpieces.”

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The Immersive Universe of Bridget Riley, the Artist That Hypnotized the World

April 9, 2022 (updated June 24, 2022) Published by artistvenu

Almost synonymous with the Op Art movement for her distinctive black and white paintings, Bridget Riley far exceeded the boundaries of purely optical art. Her works, governed by geometrical forms and structural shapes such as ovals, squares, parallel stripes, and curves create immersive environments where the viewers are perceptually involved through the masterful use of optical illusions. Bridget Riley’s work evokes sensations of movement that produce physical as well as psychological and emotional reactions that are associated with psychedelic effects, challenging the notion of the mind-body duality.

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Chellis Baird: The Touch of Red at The National Arts Club

April 9, 2022 (updated June 24, 2022) Published by artistvenu

Chellis Baird, Smile, 2021, fabrics, plaster, wire, acrylic on birch panel, 50 x 40 x 10 inches.

Last week, NC-born and NYC-based multimedia artist Chellis Baird celebrated her latest solo show at The National Arts Club following her fellowship with the Gramercy Park institution. Titled The Touch of Red, Baird’s show honors visible light’s most provocative hue. Seductive, threatening, and determined, red permeates pop culture through idioms—“the mean reds,”“red scare,” and the ever-alluring “lady in red.” Like Chris Brown sings on “I Can Transform Ya,” “red lips, red dress, like ‘em like a fire truck.” This kind of intensity creates metamorphosis.

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Surface Work review – women abstract artists dazzle in historic show

April 8, 2022 (updated June 24, 2022) Published by artistvenu

here are certain shows that change one’s sense of art. Surface Work is one of them. Spread across two sites, it is nothing less than an anthology of abstract painting spanning an entire century, from early constructivism to post-digital sampling, in which every work holds its own and every work is by a woman. This is a rare and historic event.

It is also clear proof, if more were needed, of the institutional bias of the art world. So many of these women’s names are unfamiliar, so many have been stinted, forgotten or ignored, that it is quite possible to walk through rooms full of magnificent works without having heard of their makers. Abstract painting, roughly as represented in British museums, tends to run from Kandinsky, Malevich and Mondrian to Pollock, Rothko and Barnett Newman, through to Richard Diebenkorn, Cy Twombly and – if you’re very lucky – Joan Mitchell, an artist easily as great as Twombly yet appallingly neglected in this country.

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