While touring the galleries in Hudson, NY, I happened upon the serigraphic prints of David Roth at Hallam Bruner gallery. Roth’s works, which has roots in Bauhaus, fall somewhere between Conceptual Art and what was once called Neo Geo. All this aside, it was the uncanny similarity to the newly made LED art I saw just the evening before in New York City that had me thinking about collective consciousness.   Read more »

Bradley Rubenstein: I first encountered your work in the late eighties. I remember a painting of yours called Hunters that was quite memorable. It had the impact of something iconic, like an Eqyptian stele or a Barnett Newman piece. The work that you have done in the last several decades has continued to have that effect, in my opinion, and I have enjoyed following along on your trip through painting. Let’s go back, though, for a minute and fill in some of your history. You live and work in Chicago. Where did you study before then?

Wesley Kimler: Alright, well, I left home when I was fourteen years old (and actually if you look on Facebook I posted a bunch of stuff). I grew up in the old South of Market area of San Francisco, living in derelict single-room-occupancy hotels down there. 

I didn't go to high school -- I was a street kid, in other words -- but what I made myself do was take music lessons during that time as I was growing up. I studied baroque flute with the idea that I could [laughs] be a classical musician. As I grew a little bit older, in my late teens and early twenties, I was hanging around with a lot of pretty well-known jazz musicians—some really great jazz musicians, like Joe Henderson and Woody Shaw (the great hard bop trumpet player who was a mainstay with Art Blakey for many years) and the whole crowd of the Both And Jazz Club at Divisadero Street in San Francisco, which is where I grew up. I saw how hard their lives were, so i decided to become a painter. It looked more comfortable. It seemed like it wasn't as harsh as making art in a nightclub, with all the heroin and broken lives and so forth. Of course, it's no different, but I thought it would be. Read more »

Domenique Lévy and Emmanuel Perrotin have collaborated on presenting a survey of figurative sculptures by Germaine Richier, who Lévy, -- in perhaps, overly bold rhetoric -- claims to have been “the mother of post war sculpture in Europe.” It has been fifty seven years since her first one person show in New York at the Martha Jackson Gallery. Hardly a forgotten figure in France and Europe, during her lifetime she was in five consecutive Venice Biennales, and in recent decades her work has been seen in major surveys of the period: Paris-Paris (1981) at the Centre Pompidou, Aftermath (1982) at the Barbican Art Gallery, Paris Post War (1993) at the Tate Gallery and a retrospective at the Foundation Maeght, Saint-Paul (1996), followed by another at the Academie der Kunst in Berlin (1997). In America, she fell from sight after her untimely death in 1959. The exhibition is on three floors of the two galleries 73th street townhouse. The first floor is overfilled with large pieces; the second is just right; and the third floor holds only a few works which share the space with Gutai artist, Tsuyoshi Maekawa’s disappointing variations on Alberto Burri’s burlap reliefs. (What were they thinking?) Read more »

An Interview with Hijo Nam

Hijo Nam’s art projects an ability to seek and know. With knowledge can come an understanding that harmony is inner peace. This would account for the contemplative nature of the forms and combinations she chooses, the colors and accents she adds, and the surfaces and textures she reveres. Nam’s search often brings her to the lost and forgotten remnant of an outdated utilitarian mechanism. In her hands, a resurrection of a spirit occurs, and as a result, the object is moved beyond its thingness. This process, this journey then becomes transportive and transcendent as the object’s past, present, and future become one. Read more »

Although David Robilliard is now viewed with the gift of hindsight as being essentially a London artist, a closer examination of his life betrays that he stemmed from a more parochial soil, that of the Channel Islands. He no more represents '80's London by birth, than Andy Warhol embodies '60's Manhattan. It's their work and it's ethos that bequeaths them this status and blends them both so firmly into the fabric of their adoptive cities. Circumstance and happenstance gilded their evolution as gay men. Warhol escaped the confines of Pittsburgh for the heady promises of the Big Apple. Robilliard fled the stifling nature of island life, arriving in London in the early '70s become an artist and poet. Read more »

Allison Schulnik’s second New York solo exhibition at ZieherSmith, Eager, included a startling array of painting, sculpture, drawing, and film, creating a beautiful, yet haunting world. Schulnik talks with Bradley Rubenstein about her new show, her dance background, the difference between working in New York and Los Angeles, and, of course, cats.  Read more »

Color has impact. It can repel or attract, program our opinions, set moods, even control traffic. In some ways color effects us based on our individual experiences and environment, yet there remains a systemic interpretation, prejudice or preconception about color that concerned artist Linda Vallejo addresses in her series Make 'Em All Mexican. By employing the color brown to change the ethnicity of mostly American Icons that appear here in the form of dozens of sculptures and figurines, a few paintings and a number of photographs, prints and postcards, Vallejo subconsciously moves racial stereotyping of Latinos to our collective front and center.  Read more »

Most paintings, the instant you see them, they become familiar and then it's too late.- William Gaddis, The Recognitions Read more »

Maria Lassnig

"Man is the measure of all things: of things which are, that they are, and of things which are not, that they are not."  Protagoras, quoted in Plato's Theaetetus 

"Both the motor and sensory homunculi usually appear as a small man superimposed over the top of the precentral or postcentral gyrus, for motor and sensory, respectively. The homunculus is oriented with feet medial and shoulders lateral on top of both the precentral and the postcentral gyrus (for both motor and sensory). The man's head is depicted upside down in relation to the rest of the body such that the forehead is closest to the shoulders. The lips, hands, feet and sex organs have more sensory neurons than other parts of the body, so the homunculus has correspondingly large lips, hands, feet, and genitals. The motor homunculus is very similar to the sensory homunculus, but differs in several ways. Specifically, the motor homunculus has a portion for the tongue most lateral while the sensory homunculus has an area for genitalia most medial and an area for visceral organs most lateral. Well known in the field of neurology, this is also commonly called 'the little man inside the brain.' This scientific model is known as the cortical homunculus." Cambridge University Dictionary of Medical Diagnostics (Dr. Philip Kennedy, Editor, 2013 edition) Read more »

Rose Marcus

Rose Marcus’s recent overlapping exhibitions of color photographs speak to the city’s telling and accumulated uncertainties as well as its pleasures. The first series of medium-sized photographs at KnowMoreGames, with their reflective perspectives, its glints and glimmers and facets, has as its subject the porous city and the shifting relationships between interior and exterior spaces, between public and private. Marcus points to the ambiguous hallucinatory city, the city of glass, reflective of a variety of texts. Read more »

Jasper Johns: Regrets

The image is dead. The icon is dead. The painting is dead. - Patricia Cronin

Keep everything on the surface, even with the knowledge that the surface fades and can't be held together forever -- take advantage before the expiration date appears in the nearing distance. - Bret Easton Ellis, Imperial Bedrooms Read more »

"I think of the media as a cannibalistic river… that absorbs everything." Gretchen Bender

"The image is dead. The icon is dead. The painting is dead." Patricia Cronin

"I am a deeply superficial person." Andy Warhol Read more »

Angela Dufresne was born in Connecticut and grew up in Kansas. She studied painting and video at the Kansas City Art Institute and painting at Tyler School of Art. She did residencies at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown in 2002–2004 and 2003–2004 and at Yaddo this year. She taught painting, and culture at large, in various places: Sarah Lawrence, Princeton University, and Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). Dufresne curated several show and video screenings nationally, including Portraiture for the Silicon Enlightenment: (Fuckheads); Negative Joy, a video screening at 443 PAS, New York; and Available, a show about still life at Monya Rowe Gallery. She has exhibited her work in various group shows in museums: The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, the Rose Museum, Mills College Art Museum, Richmond University Museum of Art, and MoMA PS1. She has also had various solo shows nationally and internationally: a project at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles in 2006 and spontaneous shows at CRG Gallery and Monya Rowe Gallery in New York City in 2009 and 2012. Read more »

Korean native Jinju Lee paints existential narratives of making do and coming-to-terms in arduously solitary indoor and outdoor conditions. Lee’s stories have allegorical implications as the situations and environment she depicts with so much precision and clarity seem to have as to do with the mental as well as the territorial landscape in which the subject (or is it victim?) finds herself. Read more »