Abstraction Academy | artistvenu

Parallel Fields of Color Align in Daniel Mullen’s Precise Mathematical Paintings

December 8, 2021 (updated June 24, 2022) Published by artistvenu

“Future Monuments 10.” All images © Daniel Mullen

What are the visual impacts of converging planes of color? This question is central to Scottish artist Daniel Mullen’s most recent series of paintings, which displays stacks of thin, rectangular sheets in exacting, abstract structures. “I am looking more at Rothko’s body of work and studying the vibrations of color and the almost alchemic effect that his work has on the sense,” the Rotterdam-based artist tells Colossal.

Comprised of meticulous angles and lines on linen, the acrylic paintings are studies of precision, geometry, and perception, allowing each element to collide in a mathematically aligned composition.

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The Whirling, Spiritual Abstraction of June Edmonds

December 8, 2021 (updated June 24, 2022) Published by artistvenu

June Edmonds, “Caravan: Better Here Free” (2020), acrylic on canvas, 48 x 60 inches (collection of Alex Friedman & Erica Tennenbaum, copyright the artist, image courtesy Luis De Jesus Los Angeles and Laband Art Gallery)

LOS ANGELES — In sacred geometry, the “vesica piscis” symbol describes the almond shape nestled between two overlapping identical circles. The symbol, one of the oldest in the world, recurs across all cultures and faiths, and pops up frequently in religious paintings, architecture, and nature. It is often associated with divine femininity, birth, spiritual crossroads, sexuality, and unity. In Christianity, the fish-like shape represents Jesus of Nazareth. For the ancient Greeks and Romans, the circles corresponded to their mythological goddesses, Aphrodite and Venus. In more esoteric readings, the almond shape symbolizes a portal to the universe and/or a higher power. No matter the context, what’s fascinating about the vesica piscis is that it involves a joining of two or more energies that results in the creation of a third source, a door that leads to another realm, and by extension, a different way of being.

Los Angeles-based painter June Edmonds takes inspiration from the multiple inflections of the vesica pieces.

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Geometry in a State of Collapse

November 28, 2021 (updated June 24, 2022) Published by artistvenu

Stephen Westfall, “Samba da Lua” (2021), oil and alkyd on canvas, 45 x 38 inches

In an interview that I did with Stephen Westfall more than 15 years ago (The Brooklyn Rail, 2006), he made an observation that I think has grown in importance, particularly in this politically and socially turbulent climate. Speaking about the grid, he stated his interest in a destabilized structure: “like the whole [grid] could tremble and be knocked over […] which I guess you don’t really associate with planar abstraction.”

We can think of the grid as either a secure structure within which an artist seeks freedom of expression or one that is ultimately unstable. Within those parameters it is easy to point to artists who use the grid as a source of security and to the smaller, more adventuresome group who are too restless to settle into a signature form, even as it impacts their viability in the marketplace. Westfall belongs to the latter group. He is an antsy geometric abstract artist, which in some quarters might be thought of as an oxymoron.

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Keeping Vigil with no Loss to Poetry

November 12, 2021 (updated June 24, 2022) Published by artistvenu

Julie Mehretu, Epigraph, Damascus, 2016. Courtesy the artist, carlier | gebauer and Niels Borch Jensen.

The images and thoughts informing Mehretu’s recent work are from either far right anti-immigration rallies or detention centers for migrants at US borders. The issue of legal and illegal migration or the need to move in order to find a home or life elsewhere, is core to the work and the way Mehretu has been thinking through this time. Especially its complexities in relation to our global condition – with climate catastrophe getting worse and worse, a pandemic, and the ongoing struggle against the history of colonialism and neo-colonialism, among other crises.

Mehretu’s current exhibition at carlier gebauer gallery in Berlin is titled Metoikos (in between paintings), the Greek word meaning the strange in-between place or the strange in-between thing. It was used to refer to people from elsewhere who occupied an intermediate position between visiting foreigners and citizens in Greece. They were a recognized part of the community, but subject to restrictions on marriage, property ownership, voting, and more.

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A Transgenerational and Intercultural Look at Abstract Painting

November 3, 2021 (updated June 24, 2022) Published by artistvenu

Installation view of Color/Code at Morgan Presents gallery (all photos by the author)

A world steeped in abundant color and enticing designs, Color/Code at Morgan Presents embraces the mystery and expressive possibility of abstraction. Staging a visual dialogue between two artists of different generations — Sam Jablon and Odili Donald Odita — the exhibition is an invitation to ponder the chemistry between varied approaches to abstract painting. Largescale works are dispersed evenly throughout the white cube gallery with two on each side wall and one on a floating wall furthest from the entrance. From across the gallery, the painting facing the entrance is legible: “BAD BAD BAD” in yellow paint against a cloudy, midnight-blue-hued background. Evocation of such pessimism — BAD BAD BAD — is at first discombobulating in an exhibition replete with bold, happy colors. When exploring the other paintings, Color/Code becomes a riddle: There are no wall texts, but the QR-code-enabled press release includes a checklist. Deducing the artist of each painting is possible through recognizing each artist’s style or following the checklist like a scavenger hunt: the “BAD” textual paintings are by Jablon and the rainbow geometric designs are by Odita.

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What Quilts Mean Now

October 27, 2021 (updated June 24, 2022) Published by artistvenu

Virginia Jacobs, Krakow Kabuki Waltz, 1987, cotton plain weave, pieced and quilted, 7 feet in diameter.COURTESY THE ARTIST. PHOTO © MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, BOSTON.

The goal of the new exhibition “Fabric of a Nation: American Quilt Stories” (on view through January 17, 2022) at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, seems—at first glance—straightforward enough. The show reflects the history of the United States over the course of some three hundred years through fifty-eight objects drawn primarily from the MFA’s own collection. Previous exhibitions have primed us to accept that quilts hold history in their very threads. Yet quilts are multivalent things; they speak different words to different ears. Do quilts function as autobiography, a manifestation of the maker’s vision, or a fundamentally communal expression of purpose and meaning? Do they visualize broader aesthetic trends and evolving techniques? Are they embodiments of economic forces that bring commercially produced cloth into homes? Do they represent gendered training and its possible subversion? The answer to each of these questions is “yes and . . .”; quilts illuminate multiple facets of life.

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The Democracy of Abstraction

October 25, 2021 (updated June 24, 2022) Published by artistvenu

Thomas Nozkowski, “Untitled (9-69)” (2019), oil on linen on panel 22 × 28 inches (all images © Thomas Nozkowski, courtesy Pace Gallery)

Thomas Nozkowski (1944–2019) never hedged his bets. One bet was that abstract painting did not have to be elitist; it could be as open to subject matter as Andy Warhol supposedly was. The difference is that Nozkowski was not interested in the second-hand experiences we all supposedly share. He believed that each person’s experience of the everyday was fundamentally unique and set out to honor that in his work.

By 1974, when making large-scale paintings had become commonplace, and subject matter had largely been banished from abstraction in favor of paint-as-paint, he had formulated an alternative approach based on two conclusions. First, he decided to work on a 16-by-20-inch format using prepared canvas boards, which are available in any art supply store, implicitly rejecting the masterpiece tradition and the belief in the artist as a heroic figure.

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Joan Mitchell’s Resplendent Paintings: How the Abstract Expressionist Resolved the Unresolvable

September 6, 2021 (updated June 24, 2022) Published by artistvenu

There was no turning back when, in 1950, Joan Mitchell completed Figure and City, a painting in which an abstracted figure emerges from the canvas amid a crush of cuboidal forms. Prior to this breakthrough, Mitchell had been working in a semi-figurative mode, producing still lifes and urban landscapes in which anything and everything could be reduced to geometric shapes. Then, after Figure and City, she leapt into the void and began working in abstraction. “I knew it was the last figure I would ever paint,” Mitchell said of the female shown in Figure and City. “I just knew. And it was.”

In the decade afterward, Mitchell would come to refine the style for which she is now known. Many of the canvases she produced during the ’50s feature dazzling arrays of brushstrokes assembled against stark white backgrounds. Mitchell always made sure to leave her paint chunky and her colors pure and bright. The hues that she used would grow hotter as her career went on, and her gestural strokes would sometimes coalesce to form masses that appear to cluster in the center of her canvases. Impressionism and poetry, as well as nature and the cast of art-world A-listers that surrounded her, haunt her works—though their subject matter is often only revealed by their titles.

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Chery Baird – Dictionary of Marks

August 25, 2021 (updated June 24, 2022) Published by jayInStudio

Chery Baird talks with Jay Zerbe about her 2 books (so far!) of collages made from leftover scraps from her other 3 collage series (see my prior blog for more info about those).

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Brenda Goodman’s Abstraction and Pain

August 16, 2021 (updated June 24, 2022) Published by artistvenu

Brenda Goodman, “Not Long Now” (2021), oil and mixed media on board, 12 x 16 inches

HUDSON, NY — Many of the paintings in the exhibition Brenda Goodman: Travelin’ Down That Painted Road, at Pamela Salisbury Gallery (July 31–August 29, 2021), were made since the COVID-19 pandemic required New York to go under lockdown. I thought about that enforced isolation because the exhibition’s title reminded me of the long dirt road that the artist Elliott Greene drove me down a few summers ago when we went to visit Goodman and her wife, Linda Dunne, and their dog and cat.

The four of them live in a farmhouse next to her studio in a wooded rural setting where the nearest neighbor was not within shouting distance. It seemed to me that Goodman’s life — already lived in relative isolation — did not change radically because of the pandemic. A conversation with her confirmed that feeling.

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Category: Abstraction Academy

Parallel Fields of Color Align in Daniel Mullen’s Precise Mathematical Paintings

The Whirling, Spiritual Abstraction of June Edmonds

Geometry in a State of Collapse

Keeping Vigil with no Loss to Poetry

A Transgenerational and Intercultural Look at Abstract Painting

What Quilts Mean Now

The Democracy of Abstraction

Joan Mitchell’s Resplendent Paintings: How the Abstract Expressionist Resolved the Unresolvable

Chery Baird – Dictionary of Marks

Inspiring Art Topic Discussion Like This with Me & "Private" Community Artist Members

Brenda Goodman’s Abstraction and Pain

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