Abstraction Academy | artistvenu

The Indecipherable Mark-Making of Rosaire Appel

July 25, 2023 (updated July 26, 2023) Published by artistvenu

Detail of Rosaire Appel, “Backtalk”

Henri Michaux, Cy Twombly, and Xu Bing are widely celebrated for their explorations of asemic writing (writing with no semantic value), utilizing traditional materials and processes, such as ink on paper, oil painting, and woodblock prints. What these and many other creators of asemic works share is the use of the hand to make configurations that are linked to drawing and writing, but are not exactly either one. One extraordinary exception to this reliance on the hand is Rosaire Appel, who makes her work from digital files, which she prints on paper or clear acetate, sometimes on both sides. Subsequently, she will go back into these prints with ink and crayon, making each iteration unique. In addition to the sequential form of a comic strip, Appel has incorporated musical scores, as her interest is in structures that shape abstract elements, such as disparate visual languages and sounds. The result is a diverse body of work done largely in book form.

Rosaire Appel: Abstract Comics, her debut show at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects, presents another side of this artist’s eye-catching work. The six works (five pigment prints with ink and crayon additions and a two-panel laser print on acetate with acrylic backing) are either tall and narrow, like a Chinese ink painting, or short and wide, like a comic strip or scroll painting, but she has no need to develop a signature style as a comic-strip artist does.

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5 Abstract Painting Tips From a Professional Artist

July 20, 2023 (updated July 20, 2023) Published by artistvenu

Creating abstract artwork can be a freeing and liberating process. But, for many, it can be difficult to let go of the desire to paint a specifically recognizable “thing” or “object.” If you are looking for more clarity on how to paint abstractly, Megan Elizabeth is happy to help. The Maryland-based artist is known for her stunning abstract acrylic paintings that focus on capturing movement and light.

In her online course, Dappled Light: Learn Abstract Painting with Acrylics, she guides us through the process of creating two abstract paintings. As we paint along beside her, she reveals some of her tips and tricks for settling into the process and for embracing creative experimentation.

You’ll not only end up with two beautiful canvases, but you’ll also learn how to break down and translate a familiar object or a particular feeling into something abstract on the canvas. If you are still hesitant to begin, read on to get five tips from her course on how to paint abstractly. And then take the time to enroll in her course to get all the tools you need to feel confident when creating your own abstract art. The class is available on-demand, and you can watch as many times as you’d like, making it a lasting resource for artists of all skill levels.

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Kim Uchiyama Captures the Light of Sicily

July 18, 2023 (updated July 18, 2023) Published by artistvenu

Installation view of Kim Uchiyama: Heat and Shadow at 499 Park Avenue, The Lobby Gallery

New York, the birthplace of Minimalism, has not always been kind to artists striving to expand the genre’s reductive orthodoxies. Consider how long it took for this city’s art world to recognize the rigorous abstractions of Carmen Herrera, Virginia Jaramillo, and Mary Corse. Herrera was 102 and Corse was in her mid 70s when they had their first museum shows at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and Jaramillo was in her early 80s when she had her first solo museum show at the Menil Collection in Houston. Instead of seeing them as derivative, the art world began to recognize these artists as pioneers.

Born in 1955, a decade after Corse, Kim Uchiyama belongs to a generation of women abstract artists who have yet to receive the recognition they deserve. When I visited the exhibition Kim Uchiyama: Heat and Shadow at 499 Park Avenue, in the building’s lobby gallery, the artist’s first solo show in New York since 2014, I asked myself: What does Uchiyama do in paint that is her own?

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Painter Leon Polk Smith Turned to Abstraction to Explore Notions of Identity and Race

July 18, 2023 (updated July 18, 2023) Published by artistvenu

Leon Polk Smith: OK Territory, 1943. © LEON POLK SMITH FOUNDATION/COURTESY LISSON GALLERY, NEW YORK

Leon Polk Smith’s position in postwar art has always been ambiguous. One reason may be the myth that New York in the 1950s had no room for anything but Abstract Expressionism; as a contemporary of Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko, his work could seem an anomaly on the postwar American art scene. Smith, who died in 1996 and is currently the subject of a retrospective at Haus Konstruktiv in Zurich, seems ripe for reconsideration. While he has always been filed under the rubric of hard-edge abstraction, he blazed an independent path in pursuit of an abstract art responsive to the tensions and forces in and beyond form. His abstraction has a subject, based on his own life experience, and it has something to tell us about a theme that has become more topical in our time: identity.

As a man of mixed race, Smith must have felt something of an outsider in the New York art world. He was born in what was Indian Territory in 1906, the year before it was admitted to the union as Oklahoma, the 46th state. His parents, both partly of Cherokee extraction, had moved there from Tennessee; the people among whom he grew up were predominantly Choctaw and Chickasaw, members (like Smith’s Cherokee ancestors) of the “Five Civilized Tribes” that had been forcibly removed from the Southeast in the 1830s. After graduating from high school, he worked as a rancher, among other jobs, before heading to Oklahoma’s East Central State Normal School (now East Central University) in 1931 for a degree in English, and it was there, in his final year, that—having never set foot in a museum, met an artist, or seen a serious work of painting—he took an art class and experienced it as a revelation: “I felt very strongly … that I had always been an artist,” he said in a 1985 interview.

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David Amico Brings LA’s Streets Into the Gallery

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

David Amico, “Untitled Blue” (2007), oil on canvas, 108 x 144 inches

LOS ANGELES — After spending the good part of three days in David Amico’s studio, looking at work he’s made since he was a student at California State Fullerton, I have been thinking about how to characterize his paintings and his career, both of which have remained under the radar. Are the paintings he has made since the mid-1980s, when he hit his stride, abstract or representational or both? Would it be accurate to say that Amico is an observational abstract painter working in the sphere of artists as different as Catherine Murphy and Peter Dreher? How should we regard his use of the camera and overhead projector? Would it be accurate to say that he is a photo-based abstract painter working in counterpoint to Robert Bechtle? After all, many of Amico’s source images come from particular neighborhoods, just as Bechtle’s stark, moody paintings were inspired by the empty streets of San Francisco’s Potrero Hill. Can an artist working this way still be true to paint’s multiple identities?

This is what I like about Amico’s paintings. They don’t fit into any of the categories established by the art world. I can say what I see in individual works, and even guess the sources of many, but I have never come up with an umbrella category for them as a group, nor has he has ever developed a signature style or been part of a trend. Now in his early 70s, Amico is an under-recognized artist whose works warrant a museum exhibition and monograph.

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Like an ‘Exposed Nervous System,’ Ilana Savdie’s Whitney Show Captures Collective Dread

July 15, 2023 (updated July 15, 2023) Published by artistvenu

Ilana Savdie: Las Tinieblas, 2023. COURTESY KOHN GALLERY, LOS ANGELES AND WHITE CUBE, LONDON. PHOTO LANCE BREWER

If you’re wishing to connect over a barrage of disparaging news and a general feeling of tumult, look no further than the paintings and works on paper in Ilana Savdie’s exhibition “Radical Contradictions” at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Growing up between Barranquilla, Colombia, and Miami, Florida, Savdie’s electrifying tableaus take up the current moment, while continuing to highlight themes of the carnival and the grotesque. As the United States has seen the overturning of Roe v. Wade and anti-LGBTQIA+ legislation, the works pick up on power dynamics, teetering somewhere between fantastical dream and hellscape. Here, Savdie discusses how the works came together, including her studio practice and environmental inspiration.

How did you go about choosing the works for the show?

Originally, I started with the idea of making a few new works and primarily having some loaned pieces, as the show is a continued investigation of themes I have been working with. But I started to realize that there was a slight variation and something new was happening. I decided to let it pour out and ended up making all new works for the show within a few months’ time.

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The Ukrainian Museum Spotlights Abstract Expressionist Pioneer Artist Janet Sobel in New Show

July 5, 2023 (updated July 5, 2023) Published by artistvenu

Janet Sobel COURTESY OF GARY SNYDER

Ukrainian Jewish artist Janet Sobel made very few statements about her practice, but one that stands out for its uncommon forthrightness is, “I am intensely interested in people and everything that pertains to them.” Sobel’s innate curiosity about people thus serves as the through line of her first solo museum exhibition, “Wartime,” at the Ukrainian Museum in New York, taking place more than 50 years since her passing and nearly three quarters of a century since fading into obscurity.

Known, or rather unknown, by many names—including Jennie Wilson and Yevhenia Olechovska—Sobel has only recently begun to receive attention for her achievements, chief among them her foray into drip painting prior to Jackson Pollock. While documentation of her influence on Pollock is indisputable, transcribed by Clement Greenberg in his 1961 version of “American-Type Painting,” published in Art and Culture, this sensationalized anecdote does not do justice to the contributions she made to art history or the eccentricities of her story.

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“On the Road” An Interview with Ted Stanuga

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

Untitled, 2021. Oil on canvas, 54 x 48 inches. Photo courtesy of the artist.

here is a certain restlessness that personifies the paintings of Ted Stanuga. From the early representational works, through the later abstractions, there is a speed and intensity to the painting, where act and thought, seem perpetually in motion. Like the characters Dean and Sal from Jack Kerouac’s book “On the Road,” the journey is the destination, with an endless horizon that forever remains in the distance. This is the pleasure of Ted’s paintings, a thin line where beauty is tenuous, and where the work travels through the rivers and valleys of generations before yet emerges with a voice distinctively his own.

Artists know each other through friendship and through their work. In most ways, we are each other’s first and perhaps most important audience, as our words of encouragement and questioning become the foundation of an ongoing dialogue that becomes part and parcel of the creative process.

Such is the case with Ted Stanuga. Upon my moving to Chicago in 1979, we shortly found ourselves as neighbors in Pilsen. Ted was working at the time as the crew manager at the MCA, and I had recently completed my MFA at the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia. Although our initial interests and experiences were quite different, the frequency of studio visits as well as a shared artistic community created both collegiality and comradery, as we were both beginning our careers.

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Cecily Brown: Consideration and Reconsideration

June 23, 2023 (updated June 23, 2023) Published by artistvenu

“Nature Morte” (2020)

Roberta Smith didn’t like Cecily Brown’s paintings in 2000: “…uninteresting from any distance and ultimately vacuous” and now she does: “The more I looked at the paintings, the more they calmed down, opened up and differentiated themselves from one another in color and composition.”A painter friend made a cynical remark about this turnaround that involved “monetary values,” “advertising dollars” and “future auctions.”
A quote from A Gentleman in Moscow:
“By their very nature, human beings [and paintings] are so capricious, so complex, so delightfully contradictory, that they deserve not only our consideration, but our reconsideration…”

I plan to reconsider too at some point in the future but right now, “Death and the Maid” is a series of disappointments. The paintings are so promising at first glance; the strokes are lush and varied; the paintings seem to offer an invitation to be seen slowly and pieced together in the mind of the viewer. But what actually happens is that once objects and scenes are recognized, there is no pleasure in looking at them anymore.

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The Essentials: How to Understand Mark Bradford’s Art Through 4 Key Works Currently on View at Hauser and Wirth

June 23, 2023 (updated June 23, 2023) Published by artistvenu

Mark Bradford, Johnny the Jaguar (2023). Courtesy of the artist and Hauser and Wirth. Photograph by Joshua White.

“Me saying hi to you is me welcoming you into the space and saying I see you, I see you,” said Mark Bradford to those gathered at the opening of his new exhibition “You Don’t Have to Tell Me Twice” at Hauser & Wirth’s 22nd Street gallery (on view through July 28). Bradford’s warmth hearkens back to his early days as a hairstylist, when he’d wave to every new customer to walk through the door.

Expressive and down to earth, the 61-year-old Bradford is known for such genuine moments of connection, even as his work has become canonical. In 2017, he represented the United States at the Venice Biennale, and in 2018, his painting Helter Skelter set a world record for the highest purchase price ever paid for a single work by a living African American artist, when it sold at auction for $12 million with fees.

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