Abstraction Academy | artistvenu

What is Orphism? The Modern Art Movement Explained

April 7, 2022 (updated June 24, 2022) Published by artistvenu

Sonia Delaunay-Terk, Rhythme, 1938.

Art critic and poet Guillaume Apollinaire first encountered a group of Robert Delaunay’s canvases of swirling, colorful, and largely non-representational shapes in 1912. Apollinaire immediately connected the works to the multidisciplinary Ancient Greek singer and poet Orpheus, around whom developed a Mystery Cult called Orphism. Orphists believed that Orpheus used music to enter the otherwise-inaccessible underworld. Music, according to this understanding, had otherworldly powers, and could be injected into other art forms to enhance their effects.

Apollinaire co-opted the term Orphism to describe how Delaunay, and soon a group of other like-minded artists, borrowed elements from music and science to inject powerful sensations into their paintings. The results helped pave the way for abstract art as we now know it.

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Who Was Leonora Carrington? The Story of the Singular Surrealist Whose Occult Visions Shaped the 2022 Venice Biennale

March 28, 2022 (updated June 24, 2022) Published by artistvenu

Leonora Carrington’s The Giantess by Leonora Carrington during the media preview May 26, 2009 at the Christie’s Latin American Sale in New York. (Photo by Timothy A. Clary/AFP via Getty Images)

The 1985 publication of Whitney Chadwick’s Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement radically upended art historians’ understanding of surrealism. Though women had been part of the Surrealist entourage since its inception and were included in a number of exhibitions, their role tended to be circumscribed. The movement’s male founders regarded women as natural embodiments of the irrationality that they themselves laboriously strived to cultivate. Idolized as muses, women were sidelined as creators both by the male surrealists and by subsequent art historians. Chadwick’s book changed all that by drawing attention to a raft of fascinating women associated with the Surrealist movement who are now recognized as remarkable innovators in their own right.

One of these in particular, Leonora Carrington, is having a moment now. Included in the Metropolitan Museum’s recent “Surrealism Beyond Borders”—itself a piece of ground-breaking revisionism—she has for some time been the subject of an academic cottage industry

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Julia Fish’s Architectural Abstractions Are Joyful Enigmas

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

Julia Fish, “Score for Threshold, SouthEast – Two [ spectrum in violet ]” (2020-2022), oil on canvas, 23 x 18 inches (all images courtesy the Artist and David Nolan Gallery)

I did not begin following Julia Fish’s work until after she and her husband, the sculptor Richard Rezac, moved into a two-story brick storefront on Hermitage Street in Chicago, designed by Theodore Steuben and built in 1922. In 1992, Fish began contemplating the particulars of her physical environment — her home and studio — starting with the milky white hexagonal tiles in the entryway, which connected the house to both the building’s interior and the outside world, to here and there. Fish’s acts of slow, concentrated looking, and of reflecting upon what she has seen — whether it is the aura of the light extending beyond its hexagonal glass fixture or the building’s siding — became recurring themes in her work. What has changed in it is the relationship between the paint and the references.

In her early work, in which she responded to the tiles in her entryway, Fish would make a drawing based on a one-to-one relationship. Over time, she began transforming her perceptions of surface, pattern, texture, light, detail, and structure into abstract signs, diagrams, and spectral light, resulting in a synthesis of geometry and evanescence.

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The Deeply Satisfying Pleasures of Harriet Korman’s Paintings

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

Harriet Korman, “Untitled” (2019), oil stick on paper, 12 x 16 inches

You don’t need to use a lot of colors to be a great colorist. This became obvious when I saw the exhibition Harriet Korman: New Work at Thomas Erben Gallery (February 24–April 9, 2022), her fourth with the gallery. To further define the singularity of Korman’s achievement, in contrast to many other abstract artists of her generation (she was born in the 1940s) who have been in pursuit of color, she does not nod to pop culture in her color choices, nor does she have a signature structure into which she drops her hues. Rather, she works in distinct series without any ostensible subject matter. As a consequence, she has not developed either a signature style or palette, those conventional access points the art world seems to crave. She wants the viewer to have a more direct and open encounter with her work, which is a seldom-traveled road these days.

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Why Everyone Wants (and Needs) Brazilian Artist Marina Perez Simão’s Dreamlike Landscapes Right Now

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

Marina Perez Simão, Untitled, 2021. © Marina Perez Simão Courtesy of the artist, Mendes Wood DM, and Pace Gallery.

The past two years have had many of us not only dreaming of our next vacations, but also looking to more expansive and extraordinary territories—to landscapes of memory, emotion, spirituality, and imagination. We’ve been scouting locations for more clarity, for metaphysical understanding, for what is most important.

Brazilian artist Marina Perez Simão outlines these landscapes in her paintings, gliding between figuration and abstraction, showing us colors and shapes we understand so that we can begin mapping out realms beyond our grasp.

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Seven artworks exploding the myth of a movement

March 10, 2022 (updated March 10, 2022) Published by artistvenu

Bélial Empereur des Mooches (1948) by Wilfredo Lam (Private collection / SDO Wifredo Lam/ DACS, 2022)

From its beginnings, Surrealism’s objective was to subvert the things most people believed to be the very foundations of modern civilization: logic, convention and reasoning. Surrealism promised intellectual liberty to its followers – initially writers, and only latterly visual artists. These artists aimed to open doorways on to worlds that political authorities can’t penetrate: the imagination, impulses and dreams.

And subsequently a history was told by scholars to define Surrealism. This involved a condensed cast of (mostly male) heroes including the movement’s father André Breton, who had written the first Surrealist manifesto in 1924. Mostly, it involved his disciples – artists like Salvador Dalí, René Magritte and Max Ernst. It also became intimately linked with Western cities: particularly Paris and New York.

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Rich Linework in Black Ink Composes Meditative Mounds and Ridges in Lee Hyun-Joung’s Paintings

March 6, 2022 (updated June 24, 2022) Published by artistvenu

“Chemin Gris,” 100 x 140 x 3.5 centimeters

Artist Lee Hyun-Joung likens her meditative renderings to pathways that prompt the eye to travel along each line. Working with Korean ink and traditional pigments on handmade Hanji paper, Lee’s practice is as contemplative as the resulting pieces, which portray heaving mounds and supple ridges reminiscent of mountains and other land formations. “My universe is poetic,” she tells Colossal, “like an inner journey. I invite you to take a walk, to follow me in these aerial views. They were born from the breath of my Korean childhood, from my eternal taste for painting, my search for life.”

Composed with black and shades of green or blue, the abstracted works are rhythmic and methodical and evoke the texture of thread stitched in precise rows. A central ripple stretching from one end of the paper to the other bisects many of the pieces, with the sinuous markings connecting the two parts.

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The Layered History of Japanese Printmaking, Distilled in an Emerald Tapestry

February 22, 2022 (updated February 22, 2022) Published by artbizroad Guide

Taiko Chandler, “On and On #18” (2018), oil monoprint with stencils (image courtesy the artist)

DENVER — A striking tapestry ripples and swells from the gallery wall to illuminate layers of emerald, indigo, and violet hues that appear poised to spill on the floor and engulf the viewer. If Katsushika Hokusai had focused his subject on swirling tide pools instead of “The Great Wave,” it may have felt something like Taiko Chandler‘s “Blue Surge” (2021) in her solo show The Indelible Garden at the Denver Botanic Gardens. Chandler has previously referenced Hokusai’s iconic waves in her series One By One (2021), in which watery claws were achieved with dressmaker pins hammered into the weighted base of a traffic cone. But Hokusai was a ukiyo-e artist and Chandler’s abstractions, textures, and colors are an extension of Japan’s extraordinary printmakers from the 1950s and ’60s that were championed by artists of the Sōsaku-hanga (creative prints) movement. Unlike traditional printmaking models, these 20th-century printmakers acknowledged the individuality and labor of artists — an eloquent example for Chandler who confessed only art, not her home in the United States or her Japanese birthplace, gives her a sense of belonging.

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The Figural Ghosts of Oliver Lee Jackson’s Expressive Abstraction

February 20, 2022 (updated February 20, 2022) Published by artistvenu

Oliver Lee Jackson (American, born 1935) “No. 1, 2020 (6.14.20)” (2020), oil-based paints, chalk, fixative on gessoed panel, 96 x 96 inches (courtesy the artist 2021.92; © Oliver Lee Jackson, photo by M. Lee Fatherree)

Two silver birds above a thick pink sunset, a quiet smile from a lone cloud, a woman’s eyelids, a glimpse of a sleeping boy’s foot, two hands interlocked on a walk through a vertiginous meadow, a saffron skyline exploding on the wall.

To experience the work of artist Oliver Lee Jackson, born in 1935, is to pull at the seams of perception so as to see ourselves for the very first time. His two-dimensional surfaces lead us into a maze of shapes and visual gestures, yet tease us into recognizing the figures hidden within. Is that an azure ellipse or a man’s shoulder blade? An egg cracked into a void or a veil lifted by aged fingers? A beating heart or a crowded womb? Within each work emerge unbidden characters, the abstract haunted by the figural.

Curated by Simon Kelly and Hannah Klemm, and on view at the Saint Louis Art Museum through February 20, Oliver Lee Jackson presents over a half century of the artist’s oeuvre on luminous display — as tender as it is imposing, as unabashedly splashy as it is often subdued. In these 12 paintings, drawings, and prints from 1966 to 2020, Jackson’s early career is juxtaposed with his output from the past 15 years, evidencing his evolving experiments with color, shape, and the tension between figuration and abstraction.

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Germany Is Celebrating Gerhard Richter’s 90th Birthday With a Bonanza of Exhibitions. Here’s What to See

February 9, 2022 (updated February 11, 2022) Published by artistvenu

The world-famous artist Gerhard Richter turns 90 today, February 9, and Germany is celebrating his legacy with a group of exhibitions offering new angles on his decades-long career.

The trio of shows take place across three regions where the artist has strong connections.

In his hometown of Dresden, the artist has curated a show of personal works; in his current residential state of the North Rhine Westphalia, a museum-quality show of drawings, his current preferred medium, is on view at the commercial gallery Sies and Höke; and the to-be benefactor of much of his work, the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, is also tipping its hat to the artist via an unprecedented look at his artist books.

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