Abstraction Academy | artistvenu

Back in the Spotlight, Suzanne Jackson Pushes the Boundaries of What Paint Can Do

August 29, 2023 (updated August 29, 2023) Published by artistvenu

Suzanne Jackson in her studio. PHOTO PETER FRANK EDWARDS

The day after Donald Trump was elected president, Suzanne Jackson’s son, an actor and film producer named Rafiki Smith, died. He had suffered a heart attack earlier in the year, but he had still been running around Savannah, Georgia, where he and Jackson lived, to help get out the vote. The two of them watched Hillary Clinton’s concession speech, and that night, as the gloom descended, he had a second heart attack. He was 45. “A lot of younger people, and older people, went out at that time,” Jackson told me, mentioning the husband of an acquaintance who crashed while flying his plane and a woman in Savannah whose three sons overdosed, one after another. “It was a dark time, a terrible time.” What saved Jackson in the short term, she said, was that her son “was such a silly joker, and within an hour all his friends were calling and were on my front porch, and I was consoling them.” What saved her in the longer term was her art.

Jackson’s home and studio are in a rambling 19th-century house near Savannah’s historic district. In the front yard, behind an old iron fence, stands a memorial to her son, set up by his friends. She recently had to put up a sign warning people to keep out, after someone went in there to use her water spigot and managed to upset an arrangement of shells. Jackson said an interviewer lately asked her what had been the chief creative sparks in her life. Her answer: “When my son was born, and when my son passed away.”

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Digital Abstraction: Eric Sanders

August 16, 2023 (updated August 16, 2023) Published by artistvenu

Colour Field Painting emerged in the 1950s and was characterised by large areas of a single colour. The term was originally applied to American abstract expressionist painters such as Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman and Clyfford Still, known for their expressive block-style forms. The movement then went on to encompass other pure abstract artists such as Helen Frakenthaler and Morris Louis. Painters like these focused on flat space, using techniques such as pouring oil and soaking canvases to create a luminous, colour-washed effect, distinct in its pigment and textures. As Tate explains, the new movement eliminated any traces of “emotional or mythical content.” Instead, pieces relied on real and concrete compositions. Today the question arises – what happens when we apply Colour Field to the contemporary world? How does the process of painting transform in the digital age? What role does technology play in art?

The result finds ground in Eric Sanders’ (b. 1963) exhibition at Los Angeles-gallery Eastern Projects in Chinatown, from 9 September, to the end of the month. The Philadelphia-born artist employs a distinct approach toward image-making, combining geometric abstraction with playful exuberance.

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A Moving Meditation on Mortality in Brice Marden’s Late Paintings

August 12, 2023 (updated August 12, 2023) Published by artistvenu

Brice Marden’s recent paintings and drawings are tentative, tender, heartbreaking, angry, vulnerable, and open. As his work requires him to engage the surface with gesture, pressure, and movement — which has been true since the beginning of his career — it is tied to what he can physically accomplish. Looking back at the career of this preeminent artist, I see three basic periods. In the first, which lasted from 1964 to the mid-1980s, he worked monochromatically and was known for the thoroughness of his attention to surface and the palpable yet elusive color he could attain with encaustic. There was an unmistakable physicality to his muted paintings, a tension between the expressive and the understated.

In the second period he re-envisioned how he used line and how he painted, and traded the subtle tactility of encaustic for diluted oil and drawing in what he once described to me as “dirty turpentine.” This period was inspired by his window designs for the Basel Cathedral; his travels in North Africa, where he looked at Islamic architecture in Fez and Marrakesh; a trip to Thailand, where he started collecting seashells, particularly volutes, and made layered drawings loosely inspired by their markings; and by the exhibition Masters of Japanese Calligraphy, 8th–19th Century, at the Japan House Gallery and Asia Society, New York (October 4, 1984–January 6, 1985).

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Painting Between the Machine and the Hand

August 11, 2023 (updated August 11, 2023) Published by artistvenu

Lydia Dona, “Levels in Momentum” (2012), oil, acrylic, metallic and sign paint on canvas, 84 x 64 inches

For part of May 2023, Lydia Dona’s abstract art could be seen in three separate New York exhibitions, each of which offered a different perspective on what she has been up to since 2008, 30 years after she moved to New York in the late 1970s from Jerusalem and began making a name for herself. Although Dona had her first solo show in New York in 1979, she did not begin exhibiting regularly until the mid-1980s, when the art world’s attention was dominated by Neo-Expressionism and Neo-Geo, and many artists were playing out the end of Modernism.

From the mid-’80s until the early ’90s, Dona exhibited often in New York, but her shows became more sporadic after that, and her work never became branded, like that of others of her generation, such as Peter Halley. With her three May exhibitions, including a group show, Schema: World as Diagram at Marlborough Gallery, curated by Raphael Rubinstein and Heather Bause Rubinstein, I had the opportunity to get a fresh perspective on a well-known artist of the 1980s.

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How To Become a Surrealist – A Manual to Psychic Automatism

August 11, 2023 (updated August 11, 2023) Published by artistvenu

André Masson, Automatic Drawing, 1924, Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, USA.

In 1924, André Breton defined a completely new word – Surrealism – in his First Manifesto of Surrealism. It wasn’t a trend in art or literature, but rather a way of life, he explained. Based on his dictionary-like entry on Surrealism, I compiled a short manual that can help you follow this philosophy and become a full-time Surrealist.

SURREALISM, n. Pure psychic automatism through which it is intended to express, either verbally or in writing, or in any other manner, the true functioning of thought.

A group of friends, who later became Surrealists, influenced by the groundbreaking studies of psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud, searched to unlock the potential of the unconscious and imagination. The “true functioning of thought” was in other words a way how our minds work, how we make different associations and how our subconscious shapes us.

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Sthenjwa Luthuli Evokes Ancient African Traditions and Spirit Worlds in Meticulously Carved Paintings

August 7, 2023 (updated August 7, 2023) Published by artistvenu

“Great Pyramid” (2023), hand-carved super wood block, mixed media, and paint, 92 x 136 x 4 centimeters

In the Mpumalanga region of South Africa, a mysterious, human-built structure known locally as Inzalo Ye Langa rests in the hills. Three monolithic dolomites complement a network of stone circles, which like other monuments of its kind around the world, align with the celestial calendar. Also referred to as “Adam’s Calendar” or the “Birthplace of the Sun,” the site provides a well of inspiration for artist Sthenjwa Luthuli’s newest body of work, now on view at Unit London.

Luthuli’s exhibition Inzalo Ye Langa: Birthplace of the Sun draws on the rich fabric of African culture, history, and folklore, exploring ancestral connections and ancient heritage. He creates meticulously hand-carved surfaces from wood in a meditative process that reveals intricate geometries and fluid figures. The painted circular patterns are influenced by traditional African healing methods, which often utilize colorful beads arranged in various formations to treat ailments and chase away bad spirits.

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Alexandra Metcalf and the totalities of current life

August 1, 2023 (updated August 1, 2023) Published by artistvenu

Alexandra Metcalf, “Labile”, 2023. Oil and decoupage on linen in artist frame, 153cm x 122cm. Courtesy of the artist and Ginny on Frederick, London

Complexity rules the art of Alexandra Metcalf the same way it rules the cycle of life. We live through infancy, we come of age, we mature and die: a process that could be effortless, were it not for the emotional, bodily, and semantic obstacles we or others put in front of us. Peter Wessel Zapffe said humans are overequipped for this life – too clever for what they need to go through – but forgot about the pleasure of being lost, wondering. Standing in front of a Metcalf painting, there is a certain feeling of wonder, its richness taking you by surprise.

Born in the UK in 1992, growing up between London and Florida, Metcalf currently lives in New York, managing a studio in her home. Interested in crafts from a young age, she toys with woodworking and stained glass for her sculpture beside her painting and assemblage. She told me she sometimes wishes she lived in Los Angeles, [1] where one can weld metal or fire glass in their backyard without running into major trouble with the law.

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Making Time: Mildred Thompson’s Magnetic Fields

August 1, 2023 (updated August 1, 2023) Published by artistvenu

Mildred Thompson, Magnetic Fields, installation detail, 1991, oil on canvas, triptych, 70.5 x 150 inches [photo: Caroline Philippone; courtesy of The Estate of Mildred Thompson and Galerie Lelong & Co., New York]

Color, line, form move toward an undefined but perceived center—by moving out of it. Density builds, decimates, then replenishes. There’s a knot threading.

Ten feet? Twenty feet? The implication is forever. Blue anchors and guides the eye. The yellow is a blanket. It is the proper height, density, and protrusion in relation to the floor. In relation to the ceiling. In relation to the body. In relation to space. It floats. It sings. It stills—although it won’t stop moving. The blue is nearly sublimated, though I see it threading through. Is there a barrier hidden? One may not want to evoke volatility. Or ruse.

The painting expands. It contracts. It’s breathing. The lower right side of the painting looks edible, looks, specifically, like I can eat it. Here’s a flaunting of Wayne Thiebaud. There’s a shadow visible along the bottom of the painting—otherwise one might think it recessed into the wall. The image feels apportioned. Dissevered. As if I’m only getting a glimpse of something. The layering of color and line gives the impression of the minutiae of an idea and the audacity of one grand statement. The painting is immersive. Subversive. It’s disarming. Grind these colors to a pulp. Put them out in the sun (or moon) for 800 days and you get Rothko. It’s too easy to say that Thompson’s painting dazzles.

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5 Paintings by Piet Mondrian You Wouldn’t Believe Were His

July 30, 2023 (updated July 30, 2023) Published by artistvenu

Piet Mondrian, Still Life with Ginger Jar I, 1911-1912, Kunstmuseum Den Haag, Hague, Netherlands. Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

Piet Mondrian, one of the founders of the Dutch modern movement De Stijl, is mostly known for his pure abstractions from the 1920s, reduced to lines, rectangles, and primary colors. You know what I mean, the not-very-surprising Mondrian paintings:

However, before Piet Mondrian came to this he was trying to find his way. He tried various styles of painting. A turning point in his career was in 1911 when he arrived in Paris from the Netherlands. He started to experiment with Cubism and integrated himself into the Parisian Avant-garde. At one point he removed an “a” from the Dutch spelling of his name (Mondriaan). That led him to his abstract ideas.

Cubism sounds close when you think about DeStijl and Neoplasticism, but Symbolism? Post-impressionism? Here you will find five surprising Mondrian paintings from the collection of Kunstmuseum Den Haag which is filled with works from his early period that you wouldn’t expect!

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The Enigmatic Genius of Magalie Guérin’s Paintings

July 26, 2023 (updated July 26, 2023) Published by artistvenu

Magalie Guérin, “Untitled (PB)” (2023), oil on canvas, 45 x 36 inches

In a 2019 interview with artist Sangram Majumdar, Magalie Guérin stated:

“I don’t think of [my paintings] in abstract terms. I think of them as constructions of shapes that exist in the world, even though you can’t recognize them. You don’t know what they are, but you sense that they ARE. […] There’s gravity. There’s a ground. A figure-ground relationship. There’s a logical sense of construction“.

Embracing all the possibilities that all-over abstraction supposedly rendered obsolete, Guérin’s statement resonated with something that Thomas Nozkowski said to me in an interview in 2010, when I asked him if his paintings came from personal experience:

“Yes, but taking that idea in the broadest possible way. Events, things, ideas — anything. Objects and places in the visual continuum, sure, but also from other arts and abstract systems“.

Both Guérin and Nozkowski are abstract artists who explore a subjective space that the latter helped open up, starting in the mid-1970s, when Conceptual art superseded painting.

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