Representational & Figurative Art

Who Was René Magritte and Why Is He Still So Important?

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

René Magritte, The Treachery of Images (This Is Not a Pipe), 1929, oil on canvas, 25 3/8 x 37 inches.
COPYRIGHT © ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK. DIGITAL IMAGE © COPYRIGHT MUSEUM ASSOCIATES / LACMA. LICENSED BY ART RESOURCE, NEW YORK.

In the meticulously rendered paintings of René Magritte, nothing’s really as it seems. The Belgian Surrealist famously insisted, for instance, in his painting The Treachery of Images (1928–1929) that the pipe it depicts was not actually a pipe, inscribing Ceci n’est pas une pipe in cursive letters below it.

Through his art, Magritte contended that appearances are deceptive. Making viewers and artists scratch their heads since his 20th-century heyday, Magritte’s enigmatic images portray everyday things in uncanny ways. A bright daytime sky might blaze above a street at dusk, a country landscape may actually be a canvas, and the blue of an eye could just be a reflection of an azure sky. “Everything we see hides another thing,” said Magritte in an interview toward the end of his life. “We always want to see what is hidden by what we see, but it is impossible.”

What we do see in his work is a deliberate lack of painterliness; his canvases are flatly realistic, deflecting our interest in their execution. Instead, our attention is held by the strangeness of what’s depicted.

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BILL TRAYLOR: PLAIN SIGHT

April 22, 2023 (updated April 22, 2023) Published by artistvenu

APRIL 27 – JUNE 3, 2023

OPENING RECEPTION:
THURSDAY, APRIL 27: 6 – 8 PM
EMPTY HEADING

Ricco/Maresca’s history with Bill Traylor is almost as long as the gallery’s history itself. Our book Bill Traylor: His Art, His Life, the first volume devoted to the artist, was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1991. Since then, we have mounted three one-person Traylor shows (in our Hudson Street, Wooster Street, and Chelsea spaces respectively), sold the first Traylor work acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, built William Louis-Dreyfus’s Traylor collection (the best ever assembled), and published the catalog Bill Traylor: Observing Life (1997).

It is now our privilege to present Bill Traylor: Plain Sight. This exhibition is a touchstone in the gallery’s longstanding endeavor to earn the American self-taught master the recognition he has always deserved. Bill Traylor: Plain Sight follows more than 45 solo gallery and museum exhibitions, including the major retrospective Between Worlds: The Art of Bill Traylor, curated by Leslie Umberger at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (2018)—whose eponymous book is the most comprehensive scholarly publication on the artist’s life and work.

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Trompe l’Oeil Below Canal Street

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

Kye Christensen-Knowles, “Painting” (2023) 60 x 45 inches

It seems that the “Cubism/ Trompe l’Oeil” show at The Met has had immediate effect——well, not the Cubism part, just the trompe l’oeil part, three out of four galleries I visited the other day were showing it. Whether it’s the artists who have been inspired to create the illusions or it’s the curators who have decided to show it, I’m not sure.
The way Jeremy Shockley does it is by combining scenic painting (meant to be seen at a distance and as a background to another activity) with close-up detailing—the cut edge of the canvas has a delicate fringe. It doesn’t quite work because of the difference in scale and because as in Show Me…, the large area of the painted sky is slipshod. Once you’ve “gotten it”—i.e., recognized the happy face—there is nothing more to see. He is painting a defaced canvas but he leaves out half of the joke of it—which is that it was a painting of the sky to begin with.

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In Monica Rohan’s ‘Disappearing Act,’ Free-Floating Fabrics Disguise Landscapes Under Threat

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

“Riverbank” (2023), oil on board, framed, 120 x 90 centimeters

Draped over invisible clotheslines, vintage fabrics conceal seaside vistas, meadows teeming with dried grasses, and craggy walls of stone in Monica Rohan’s latest works. The artist (previously) renders the vast landscapes of her native Australia in a new series of oil paintings as part of Disappearing Act, her solo show on view later this month at Jan Murphy Gallery in Fortitude Valley, Queensland.

Known for her deft portrayals of pattern and the dimensions of folded textiles, Rohan continues to contrast domestic, human-made material with more organic surroundings. In this series, disembodied limbs draw back the suspended curtains, slowly uncovering the otherwise concealed landscapes. Rohan refers to these small reveals as “portals to seemingly idyllic environments beyond” that accentuate the way paintings—and art, more broadly—intervene in how we experience our surroundings.

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Wangechi Mutu’s Magically Intertwined World

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

COURTESY NEW MUSEUM. PHOTO: DARIO LASAGNI
“Wangechi Mutu: Intertwined,” 2023. Exhibition view: New Museum, New York.

Thematically and stylistically, Wangechi Mutu’s art is a bubbling stew of ingredients that don’t always cohere. Part Afro-Futurism, part cyber-punk, and part body horror, Mutu’s sculptures, collages, and mixed-media paintings cover a lot of ground. They weigh in on gender, race, colonialism, climate change, and globalism, and all of it is linked by a dense web of folkloric references that are often arcane, if not obtuse. Still, there’s no doubting the visual impact of the artist’s work if you don’t let its busyness get in your way.

“Wangechi Mutu: Intertwined” at the New Museum takes comprehensive stock of Mutu’s thirty-year career and occupies the entire building with over a hundred works spanning painting, collage, drawing, sculpture, and film.

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The Artist Who Sailed With Saints

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

Nikifor, “Railway Station in Nowy Sacz”

On the second floor of the Ukrainian Museum in the East Village, visitors are transported to the distinctive landscape of the Carpathian Mountains through more than 100 watercolors and sketches by the self-taught artist Nikifor (1895–1968). Born with a speech impediment that made him unintelligible to many people, Nikifor turned to drawing as a means of communication. He almost obsessively depicted the world around him, creating anywhere from a dozen to 100 sketches and paintings a day. Orphaned and born into poverty, he would sketch on whatever paper he could find: discarded packaging, old posterboard, used administrative forms, and other scrap paper. To call him prolific is an understatement: he produced an estimated 30,000 works in his lifetime. The pieces on view at the Ukrainian Museum represent just a tiny fraction of Nikifor’s output, but with The Ultimate Outsider curator Myroslava Mudrak has grouped them into five sections that provide a compelling introduction to the artist, who is largely unknown in the United States despite being one of Central Europe’s most famous outsider artists.

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An Introduction to “Afrogallonism”

March 28, 2023 (updated March 28, 2023) Published by artistvenu

Serge Attukwei Clottey, “Headlines” (2020), plastic and copper wire, 83 x 88 inches

LONDON — In Serge Attukwei Clottey’s exhibition, Crossroads at Simon Lee gallery, the Accra-based multidisciplinary artist uses found materials to explore Ghanaian culture and identity. Several of his large-scale pieces are brightly colored mosaics Clottey created by bounding together square pieces of plastic from Kufuor gallons. Named after Ghana’s then-president John Agyekum Kufuor, these jerrycans were used to collect and store water when the country was suffering from severe shortages in the 2000s. The artist calls the usage and exploration of this material Afrogallonism, for the way this practice highlights the gallon as, at once, a ubiquitous symbol of recent Ghanaian cultural history, a representation of the environmental injustice of water scarcity across the continent, and an object that tells the story of exchange between Ghana and the West. As such, these large, vibrant orange-yellow tapestries appear repeatedly across the two floors of the exhibition like a motif.

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Magic and Myth Arise from Kristin Kwan’s Surreal Oil Paintings

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

Kristin Kwan coaxes the magic out of nature in her dreamlike oil paintings. Emphasizing a quiet surrealism centered on plants, animals, and Earth’s landscapes, her works draw on allegories, symbolism, and myth. Suffused with fantastical details, each painting begins “devoid of meaning,” Kwan shares, saying that while they reflect her own musings, she hopes the resulting pieces are open-ended.

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Order and Chaos Converge in Yool Kim’s Emotionally Charged Works

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

Yool Kim seizes the disarray of our inner emotional landscapes by trapping energetically impassioned characters in her color-blocked works. Contorted bodies, floating heads, and abstractly shaped cut-outs reveal a range of moods and feelings all compacted into the rectangular canvas. Centered on linework and simple shapes the Seoul-based artist scratches into the composition, the mixed-media works feature stylized figures who emphasize play, sadness, and malaise.

Where pattern signals an underlying sense of order, the characters’ facial expressions veer in the opposite direction. “I draw myself.

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Bewildering Reflections and Perspectives Shift in the Hyperrealistic Oil Paintings of Nathan Walsh

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

“Monarchs Drift” (2022), oil on linen, 121 x 153 centimeters

In his intricate oil paintings, Nathan Walsh captures the textural sheen of rain on city streets and luminescent reflections in cafe windows. The artist has previously explored different vantage points in elaborate cityscapes, rendering the corners of buildings, corridors of skyscrapers, and expansive bridges in detailed, two-point perspective. Recently, he has further honed ideas around perception and the way the built environment presents uncanny optical illusions in the interplay of people and objects, light, and reflections.

The ideas for Walsh’s compositions often form as he wanders the streets of cities like New York and Paris, making sketches and taking photographs that he brings back to his studio, a converted Welsh Methodist chapel. “Up until last year, my work had been exclusively devoted to the urban landscape,” he tells Colossal, sharing that various objects like those spotted in an antique shop window in Paris’s 7th arrondissement signaled new references to his ideas around place and familiarity.

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