Abstraction Academy | artistvenu

Richard Hull Completes the Picture

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

Richard Hull, “Teller” (2023)

CHICAGO — I first saw Richard Hull’s work in 1981 when he had his second New York show at the Phyllis Kind Gallery. We lost touch around the time Phyllis closed her gallery in 2009, and did not see each other again until 2016, when I wrote about visiting his studio in Chicago, where he has lived since the late 1970s. On my recent trip to Chicago, I did not think I would be able to see, much less write about, his current exhibition, Richard Hull: Mirror and Bone, at Western Exhibitions, running through April 22. I had not considered writing about Hull’s work because we were about to collaborate on monotypes at Manneken Press in Bloomington, Illinois — something we had never done before.

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Miyoko Ito’s Mysteries and Longings

March 13, 2023 (updated March 13, 2023) Published by artistvenu

Miyoko Ito, “Untitled” (1970), oil on canvas, 46 x 42 inches

More than 30 years after her death, Miyoko Ito is having her self-named debut show at the spacious Matthew Marks Gallery (February 24–April 15, 2023). That the show is at a blue-chip art-world establishment signals the merger of artistic achievement and financial viability, and brings long-deserved attention to a body of work that has been under-recognized in New York and should be better known in Chicago, where the artist lived. As much as the gallery has done to make Ito’s work widely visible, I believe that it should have done more, starting with the catalogue (with a chronology) accompanying the exhibition, as no essay provides context for her work.

From March 17 to April 30, 2006, the small Adam Baumgold gallery on the Upper East Side hosted a show of Ito’s work.

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Raging Against the Dying of the Light

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

Jake Berthot, “Night, Sea and the Rock” (c. 2014), oil on linen, 34 1/2 inches x 41 1/2 inches

In an interview between art critic Jennifer Samet and artist Jake Berthot (1939–2014), Berthot reveals that he had a hardscrabble life. He grew up with his grandparents on a truck farm in central Pennsylvania. One work of art was in the house — a double-sided piece. On one side was a line drawing of the horse; on the other a Victorian print of the Last Supper. When he describes his attraction to the drawing, he asks rhetorically, “How could someone make you feel a drawing that is not there?” He cannot believe that you can make a drawing of a real-life subject without having it in front of you. His puzzlement about the relationship between form and absence, what is there and not there, haunted him his entire life.

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Brenda Goodman, Scars and All

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

Brenda Goodman, “Above and Beyond” (2022), oil and mixed media on wood, 60 inches x 72 inches

A fresh, unexpected buoyancy comes through in Brenda Goodman’s recent abstract paintings, which mark her entrance into new territory. Goodman, who recently turned 80, has been making strong work since her student days in the mid-1960s at the College for Creative Studies (then the Society of Arts and Crafts) in Detroit. In 1976, she left Detroit, where she was part of the gritty Cass Corridor movement, and moved to New York. While her work was included in the 1979 Whitney Biennial, she did not start to exhibit regularly in New York until she was in her late 70s. Continuing to work in a way that did not fit into the art world’s commercial interests, Goodman flew largely under the radar until 2015, when her work was selected to be in the Academy of Arts and Letters’ annual exhibition and she received an award. In 2019, she had her first show at Sikkema Jenkins, which continues to represent her.

Goodman’s oeuvre can be divided into distinct periods, each characterized by a body of work that resembled nothing by her contemporaries. Between 1994 and 2007, she made a series of self-portraits portraying herself as an insatiable devourer that I have described as “one of the most powerful and disturbing achievements of portraiture in modern art.”

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Refreshing Abstraction in Marfa

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

John Pomara, “Pool Party 39” (2021), oil enamel, polyurethane and spray paint on aluminum panel, 15 x 11 1/2 inches (photo Alyce Santoro/Hyperallergic)

MARFA, Texas — Vision Pool is an immersive experience. While each fresh abstraction by Raychael Stine, Liz Trosper, and John Pomara is a luminous, dizzying, multidimensional world unto itself, the energy field the works generate in concert nearly causes the gallery to hover.

Though each artist’s set of pieces is distinct in media and style — oil on canvas, inkjet monoprints with resin and acrylic, and an alchemical mix of substances on corrugated aluminum panel, respectively — the works have in common elements that test perception. Solid or liquid, flat or dimensional, luminous or opaque, real or imagined?

To call such effects optical illusions or trompe l’oeil runs the risk of oversimplification, but the magic at work here is not entirely unrelated. What term can aptly describe a more sophisticated form of space-time alteration? Perhaps the best word is simply “art” — all three of these practitioners have mastered the craft of vision-shifting, of transporting viewers into the vibrant, fluid spaces of their imaginings.

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History Is Not an Open Book

February 10, 2023 (updated February 10, 2023) Published by artistvenu

Alma Thomas, “Carnival of Autumn Leaves” (1973), acrylic on canvas, 50 x 50 inches. Collection of halley k. harrisburg and Michael Rosenfeld, New York (courtesy Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY)

STONY BROOK, New York — University museums and galleries don’t often get the credit they deserve for the important roles they play in art history. I was reminded of this when I went to see the exhibition Revisiting 5 + 1 at the Paul W. Zuccaire Gallery at Stony Brook University (November 10, 2022–March 31, 2023), curated by Elise Armani, Amy Kahng, and Gabriella Shypula. Artist and Stony Brook professor Howardena Pindell, art historian and curator Katy Siegel, and the Zuccaire’s director and curator, Karen Levitov, also helped shape the exhibition. In Revisiting 5 + 1, the three curators examine and expand upon 5 + 1, a groundbreaking exhibition held at the State University of New York at Stony Brook (now Stony Brook University) in 1969. The timing of this exhibition resonates with the original on many levels.

In the late 1960s, during a violent era marked by the Civil Rights movement, Vietnam War, and political assassinations, the English curator, art critic, and new Stony Brook professor Lawrence Alloway invited the Guyana-born British abstract artist and art critic Frank Bowling to curate a show of work by Black artists.

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Roscoe Mitchell Keeper of the Code: Paintings 1963-2022

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

Roscoe Mitchell, Brogans, 2022, acrylic on canvas, 48 x 48 inches. Photo: Robert Chase Heishman

PRESS RELEASE
Corbett vs. Dempsey is pleased to present Roscoe Mitchell, Keeper of the Code: Paintings 1963-2022. This is Mitchell’s first exhibition with CvsD.

Roscoe Mitchell (b. 1940) has been a leading figure in the performing arts for over 50 years. Keeper of the Code is the first solo exhibition to spotlight his work in the visual arts. Born and raised in Chicago, Mitchell formed the Roscoe Mitchell Art Ensemble in 1966, featuring Lester Bowie and Malachi Favors. Three years later, adding Joseph Jarman, upon their departure to Paris for a two-year sojourn the group transformed into the collective interdisciplinary troupe called the Art Ensemble of Chicago. By that time Mitchell had already recorded the first LP of music affiliated with the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), Sound (Delmark, 1966), and he had joined forces with St. Louis trumpeter Bowie for Numbers 1 & 2 (Nessa, 1967), which featured a painting by Mitchell on its cover. Indeed, Mitchell had been painting since 1963, and he continued on and off into the heyday of the Art Ensemble and through a hyper productive sequence of decades of solo music, improvised encounters, and music for Mitchell-led ensembles.

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Abstract Art Did Not Begin With Paul Cézanne

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

“Time and Space” (2022), acrylic latex paint on aluminum-core fabricated wood panel with reconstituted wood veneer, 50 x 50 x 3/4 inches (all images © Odili Donald Odita, courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York)

Odili Donald Odita challenges the long-held belief that abstract art began with Paul Cézanne, and that it is a purely Western tradition in which Pablo Picasso’s appropriation of African art played an important role. This is the tradition with which most abstract artists align themselves. In this narrative of art history, Europe is at the center and the rest of the world is on the margins. Starting in the 1940s, American artists and critics helped shift the center to New York. And critics such as Clement Greenberg, Donald Judd, and Rosalind Krauss helped to strengthen this perception.

Thankfully, not everyone agrees with this. Odita’s brightly colored geometric paintings on reconstituted wood veneer register all the different ways that he has stepped away from the white masterpiece tradition in which the artist applies oil paint to large swaths of canvas or linen.

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Shirley Jaffe’s Outlier Beginnings

January 17, 2023 (updated January 17, 2023) Published by artistvenu

Shirley Jaffe, “Untitled” (c. 1960), watercolor and gouache on paper, 13.98 x 11.61 inches

Shirley Jaffe is an outlier in the history of Abstract Expressionism. A member of the so-called “second generation,” she was born in Elizabeth, New Jersey, in 1923, and grew up in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn. She studied at the Cooper Union School of Art. In 1948, she saw the Pierre Bonnard retrospective at MoMA, which influenced a number of artists of her generation, and in 1949 she moved to Paris with her then-husband, Irving Jaffe. In Paris, she became part of a scene of expatriate artists that included Jean-Paul Riopelle, Sam Francis, Norman Bluhm, Jack Youngerman, Ed Clark, and, later, Janice Biala, Kimber Smith, and Al Held. Unlike the other Americans in this group, Jaffe, who passed away in 2016, never returned to the United States.

Jaffe began exhibiting her work in Paris in 1956, but she did not have her first solo show in New York until 1989. For those who have followed her art, the work in Shirley Jaffe: The 1950s and 1960s, Works on Paper and a Painting at Tibor de Nagy Gallery (December 10, 2022–January 21, 2023) is largely unknown in New York. The show includes 15 undated pieces on paper, likely from 1958–60, and a vertical oil painting, “Dominos 2” (1962).

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Looking Between the Lines of Max Cole’s Abstract Paintings

January 4, 2023 (updated January 4, 2023) Published by artistvenu

Detail of Max Cole, “Noble Nassau” (1981)

SANTA FE, N.Mex. — Endless Journey, a survey exhibition of Max Cole’s paintings and works on paper spanning 60 years (1962–2022) is a revelation of the potential for expressivity within strict formal parameters. Cole was born in Kansas in 1937, was raised and educated in the Southwest, and currently lives and works in Northern New Mexico. Though often compared to Agnes Martin, Cole’s work stands apart in that it is at once more earthy and more earthly than Martin’s, whose ethereal works, though rooted in the structure of the grid, appear lighter than air.

Cole’s predominant format of alternating horizontal bands in austere palettes of whites, grays, blacks, tawny raw linen, and the occasional ruddy red, alludes to the vast horizons of the American West and, obliquely, to Native American traditions of weaving and pottery decoration and perhaps Cole’s own distant Cherokee heritage.

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