Abstraction Academy | artistvenu

DAMIEN HIRST TO BURN 10,000 COPIES OF ‘THE CURRENCY’

July 27, 2022 (updated July 27, 2022) Published by artistvenu

The Currency by Damien Hirst

Collectors of Damien Hirst are not allowed to own both the digital NFT and physical copy of his artwork ‘The Currency’, priced at 2,000 USD each. They can only choose one type among the 10,000 unique paintings. If they chose the NFT copy, the British artist will burn the physical one and vice-versa on a daily basis starting September 2022. Each of the 10,000 NFTs corresponds to the original work on paper manually done by the artist. Hirst and gallery HENI will hold an exhibition this year to burn the 10,000 NFT and physical artworks of ‘The Currency’. Buyers can decide whether they will keep the digital art or the physical copy of his public artwork only until 3PM BST today. The gallery reminds everyone who wants to participate that the whole process is a one-way exchange and to ‘choose wisely.’

The Currency is the first NFT collection of Damien Hirst, presented by HENI. The British artist, who is famed for his formaldehyde sculptures and installations, has mentioned his openness to adopting new technologies, and NFT piqued his interest about four years ago. He decided to put forward The Currency as his entrance to digital art, which challenges the concept of value through money and art. Ever a provocative artist, Hirst toys with the idea of daring his audience on the perception of value and how it affects their overall decision. With the time limit being imposed, he tests the boundaries between physical and digital art and how a collector uses their art and currency in modern times.

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Pace Gallery Takes on Virginia Jaramillo, Abstract Painter Whose Work Has Recently Seen a Resurgence

July 25, 2022 (updated July 25, 2022) Published by artistvenu

Virginia Jaramillo, Green Space, 1974.PHOTO: FRANK OUDEMAN

Pace Gallery now represents Virginia Jaramillo, a pioneering abstract painter who has been making work for over six decades but has only recently seen a resurgence in interest. Jaramillo will continue to work with Hales Gallery, which has locations in London and New York.

With this representation, Jaramillo will become one of the few U.S.-born Latina artists to be represented by a mega-gallery. Pace will present her work at its booth at the inaugural edition of Frieze Seoul in September and will mount a solo show of her work at its forthcoming Los Angeles space in May 2023. The Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City is currently at work organizing a career retrospective of her work.

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‘There Aren’t Any Reasons for Painting. That’s What’s Special’: Watch Artist Christopher Le Brun Walk Through His Latest Body of Work

July 16, 2022 (updated July 16, 2022) Published by artistvenu

Installation view, Christopher Le Brun, “Momentarium.”

British artist Christopher Le Brun recently celebrated his 70th birthday, but despite having been painting for decades, the artist remains as deeply curious about why he paints and where his inspirations come from as when he started. In fact, in his London home and studio, the artist keeps a framed drawing he made in his younger years, the dash-like passages in the sketch echoing the mark-making in his most recent gestural canvases.

Now, with his third exhibition with Lisson Gallery, “Momentarium,” Le Brun is presenting a group of ambitiously scaled canvases—including, for the first time, monumental triptychs and diptychs.

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The Biggest Lie About Abstract Expressionism

July 12, 2022 (updated July 13, 2022) Published by artistvenu

Anne Ryan, “Untitled” (1951), mixed media collage on paper (image courtesy Vallarino Fine Art, New York, and Huxley-Parlour Gallery, London, © Estate of Anne Ryan)

Abstract Expressionism is a storied movement continually re-told at blockbuster museums: We think we know it so well. The story, however, is still wrong. There are no women in it. The most recent show in the United Kingdom was at the Royal Academ y of Arts in London in 2017. The exhibition projected an outdated image of the swaggering machismo the movement has come to be known for. Lee Krasner was the only woman exhibited.

More recently, a bold exhibition at Huxley-Parlour Gallery in London entitled Women and the Void, hoped to correct this.

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7 Questions for British Artist George Morton-Clark About Not Having a Backup Plan and How Instagram Freed Him to Paint

July 7, 2022 (updated July 7, 2022) Published by artistvenu

George Morton-Clark, I Feel Sorry for the Rewind Button (2022). Courtesy of Eternity Gallery.

British artist George Morton-Clark’s paintings are filled with familiar cartoon characters painted energetically anew—Dumbo, Tweety Bird, and many others look provocatively fresh in bright colors rendered in visceral, sprawling lines.

This juxtaposition of pop-culture imagery and gestural abstraction is oddly captivating in Morton-Clark’s hand, creating tension between the perceived simplicity of the characters themselves and his graphic linework.

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Olivia Guterson Carries Ancestral Patterns Into Contemporary Art

June 27, 2022 (updated June 28, 2022) Published by artistvenu

Olivia Guterson and Laura Earle, “Night Menorah” (2020) (photo courtesy the artist)

Not all stories are written with words. Some are encoded in patterns — swirling, squiggly, and zig-zagged lines that have been engraved in stone or woven into cloth for generations in nearly every culture. Olivia Guterson, also known as Midnight Olive, carries these ancient patterning traditions into contemporary art, drawing from her Russian, Ukrainian, Jewish, and African American roots to create a dazzling new ornamental language.

An intricate surface design drapes effortlessly over Guterson’s sculptures, almost as if it emerged organically. If you haven’t crafted patterns before, you might think it gets tedious to mark the same shape over and over again. Rather, she finds it healing, telling Hyperallergic, “This meditative practice feels so spiritual and ancestral — it’s almost as if it’s like the language of everyone I came from.” She treats the pattern as another form of language, pulling in symbols and memories from her multicultural family. Her Ashkenazi grandmother was a quilter and even stitched her own doilies.

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Sam Gilliam, Groundbreaking Abstractionist, Dies at 88

June 27, 2022 (updated June 28, 2022) Published by artistvenu

Sam Gilliam, “10/27/69” (1969), acrylic on canvas installation, collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York (photo by Fredrik Nilsen Studio)

Sam Gilliam, whose draping, color-drenched canvases insisted on the radical potential of abstraction, died at the age of 88 this Saturday, June 25. The cause was kidney failure. The news was confirmed by Pace and David Kordansky, the two galleries that jointly represent the artist.

Emerging at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, a time when many Black American artists harnessed figuration to represent their reality and spur social change, Gilliam did not just pursue non-representational art but managed to turn it on its head. Inspired in part by women he saw hanging laundry on clotheslines from his studio window, he freed the canvas from the stretcher for his pivotal “Drape” paintings, suspending them from the ceiling or on the wall in sensual configurations that embrace the organic folds of fabric. It was the zenith of American postwar painting: Abstract Expressionism, the New York School, and the Color Field movement collided in a frenzy of drips, splashes, and egos, mostly those of a rather male and White coterie of artists. Gilliam, along with contemporaries like Howardena Pindell and Alma Thomas, made their mark on the medium while asserting the creative autonomy of Black artists in the United States.

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Alison Hall’s Hypnotic Paintings Invite Slow Looking

June 25, 2022 (updated June 25, 2022) Published by artistvenu

Alison Hall, “A Ballad (for this pain in my heart), (2022), oil, graphite, and plaster on panel; artist frame, Virginia maple and plaster, 9 1/2 x 7 1/2 inches (all photos by Lacey Leonard, courtesy the artist and SOCO Gallery)

The artists who many critics cite when writing about Alison Hall’s paintings are Agnes Martin, Sol LeWitt, and Ad Reinhardt. Hall is one of the few contemporary abstract painters that I know of whose highly formal paintings do not diminish in the company of such rigorous ascetics. This is because her slow, mesmerizing, monochromatic works provoke a state of exalted seeing that is unlike anyone else’s, including the aforementioned artists. Working within her established limits, which she set early in her career, Hall keeps finding ways to pull willing viewers closer, to encourage them to get lost in looking as well as reflect upon this experience. This is one of the reasons that I have continued to follow her work.

Her current exhibition, Alison Hall: Cold-Eyed and Mean, in a new project space in Chinatown opened by SOCO Gallery (May 20–June 30), features 14 paintings divided into two groups: a suite of 11 intimately scaled ultramarine paintings collectively titled A Ballad, and four black paintings in three different sizes.

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Geometric Abstraction for a Shattered World

June 22, 2022 (updated June 22, 2022) Published by artistvenu

Gary Petersen, “Both of Us” (2022), acrylic and oil on canvas, 54 x 90 inches (all images courtesy McKenzie Fine Art, New York; photos by Jason Mandella)

I have been following Gary Petersen’s work since his debut exhibition at McKenzie Fine Art in 2016. I attribute the difference between the works he has previously shown at this gallery (and which I reviewed) and the ones in his current exhibition there, Gary Petersen (May 20–June 26, 2022), to a growing confidence in his ability to further skew his layered geometric compositions. Having begun with a vocabulary of solid-colored, stacked quadrilaterals, Petersen has introduced new elements with each exhibition. These elements suggest that he is trying to find ways to undermine the painting’s rectangular authority without resorting to shaped canvases, as did previous generations.

As complex as Petersen’s compositions are, it is not surprising to learn that drawings lead the way. Working in either black, white, and gray or colored pencil, the drawings in the current show convey the artist’s constant probing for possibilities.

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The Endless Realities of Evelyn Statsinger’s Art

June 21, 2022 (updated June 22, 2022) Published by artistvenu

Evelyn Statsinger, “Central Forces” (1985), oil on linen, 24 1/4 × 26 inches

Evelyn Statsinger (1927–2016), who was born in Brooklyn and studied at the High School of Music and Art and the Art Students League in New York, and the University of Toledo in Ohio, moved to Chicago in the late 1940s to study at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). The school’s proximity to the Art Institute of Chicago, and its encyclopedic art collection, was one of the draws for Statsinger, who once said about herself: “I look at everything.”

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