abstract expressionism

The Floating Magic Eye

Millree Hughes — Tue, 25 Jun 2024 00:35:40 +0000

The Floating Magic Eye Millree Hughes June 24, 2024 - 20:35

Topics

Tags

Sharon Butler: Buildingdrawing
Furnace Art on Paper Archive
Falls Village, CT 06031
June 1 - July 6th

Familiar art movements: Abstract Expressionism, Surrealism, and American Realism are all back in the New York Art World, but in tidier packages. Maybe I'm going to the wrong galleries, but I rarely see any experimentation in how a show is hung anymore. So it's great to see Sharon Butler's show at Furnace Art on Paper in Falls Village, a quiet spot in an increasingly lively part of Connecticut.

The gallery's owner, Kathleen Kucka, is an exciting artist and open to new approaches.
Butler uses the familiar shapes of Early Modernism—rectilinear, triangle, spots—as her subject. But she has always questioned every part of formal abstraction. How the work is mounted, the stretcher bars, the canvas, the frame—every aspect is reformable.

In this show, the given that is being challenged is the presentation. How do you hang a show?

Small, unframed watercolors hang on clamps and chains from three black metal-wheeled clothes hangers similar to those in museum coat check rooms for holding bags and coats. Familiar objects hang next to them: a potato masher with a squiggly metal press and black plastic handle, a used hand truck has a delicate piece hanging by large circular chains from its handle, and objects from the kitchen and the studio: a mug, a stapler, a colander.

The artist's making double-sided pieces originally motivated the unmooring of the work from the wall. These have been contained in Perspex sleeves that allow you to see studies on both sides of the paper. They jut out perpendicularly, like hospital signs meant to designate room ordinances.

From there, she began to imagine multiple ways of seeing the work from different viewing points, eventually hanging them and placing them on moving carts.

It's as if El Lissitzky's sketchbook is scattering shapes. They fall like blossoms in new ways and new colors. In connection with a surface, they disrupt or dissolve. Or blend with something that was there before.

As I walked away from the gallery the first time, I imagined I could see the pieces suspended in a frozen vortex without the walls, the objects, or the trolleys. It reminded me of a camera technique from the late '90s that became a staple of martial arts movies: the players would leap into the air and stay there while the camera was free to move around them. I felt like Neo waking in the Matrix.

Perhaps I was light headed because the way art is exhibited in a gallery is usually so fixed. This arrangement is so unfamiliar.

The pieces are small rectangles with perhaps a patch of color—spots of color that have been used to monoprint another piece—or a single-stroke pencil-drawn triangle. They have a Paul Klee feel, although even lighter and less definite. They're beautiful in a way that makes choosing one over another very difficult.

Just as they are Casualist, they are equally Causalist.

Each action precipitates another effect. The values change when there is water on the surface of the paper. All of a sudden, geometrics are not stable. Pencil lines can create space or limit it. A brush with open separated tines traces a swathe of green across the paper.
But the old art adage of doing something, doing something to it, and so on has led to dissipation. Are they falling apart or is their evanescence due to their reaching for transcendence through revelation?

Either way, their fugaciousness is contrasted with the lumpen solidity of the objects and the trolleys.

There is Surrealist poetry to the use of everyday objects. The watercolors act like the formal aspects of poetry—syntax, meter, and scan. The objects are verbs/nouns, things that do things. The dots in the colanders, the hole punch, and the curving handle of a staple gun are part of the associations. However, they are doubly redundant; they have not helped to make the artworks, and they can no longer do their jobs.

Sharon Butler's work is familiar, and perhaps a return to art styles that once worked is happening because a moment of reconsideration is needed.

It could work, but only if the questions and the motivation for asking them are as new as they are.

Add new comment

The Secret Language of Jian Kwon aka Solbi

Thalia Vrachopoulos — Tue, 17 May 2022 19:48:51 +0000

The Secret Language of Jian Kwon aka Solbi Thalia Vrachopoulos May 17, 2022 - 15:48

Topics

Art Review

Tags

abstract expressionism

Humming, 2022 (Mixed media on canvas, 50x50cm)

Systematized Language: Humming

Paris Koh Fine Arts - Fort Lee, NJ

Starting in the 1800s the invention of the underground language Polari helped its adherents to survive at a time when homosexuality was considered illegal and a criminal activity. The Bagande in Africa created a secret language called Bangime so they could remain hidden from slave traders. Cant the secret language of thieves and rogues begun in the 16^th Century, was used to circumspect the law. Such secret anti-languages as the one used by the Qumran people for the Dead Sea Scrolls and other documents, were invented as resistance of the oppressed to those in power. Jian Kwon’s solo show Systematized Language: Humming at Paris Koh Fine Arts features artworks dealing with cryptography. Ostensibly appearing as painted apples, or squiggly lines and candles, her works' elements hold meaning as secret communication that helps her fight against cyber-bullying.

Kwon is also known by her music persona Solbi, whose K-pop star fame only serves to intensify aggressive cyber-attacks. Over the years Kwon has melded music and art creating performances and artworks. As a music personality she is well-known so that everything she does including art-making, is open to public scrutiny and sometimes abusive attacks. When she created a 'cake' work she was cyber-attacked as a copycat of Jeff Koons's Play-Doh used for the purpose of sales. But Kwon was actually paying homage with a real cake to Koon's Play-Doh, a not for sale work. After the attacks the artist made a performance work consisting of eating her own version of the cake, and videotaped the act. The above is only one example of the type of cyber-violence and slander Kwon has experienced. To prevent any further abuse, she created her own secret language consisting of apple motifs, candles, and abstract lines.

As a response to another cyber comment "do you know how to draw an apple?" Kwon used the apple motif to systematize her own alphabet by assigning meaning to each color corresponding to a music pitch and then using it in messages. The first of these drawings on vellum is the language key that were it followed, would allow the viewer to read her comment. This interactive aspect in the Apple works is also indicative of installation art. She includes Tweets such as the mean one about Obama that states "is there any way we could fly Obama to some Golf course halfway around the world and just leave him there?" to which Obama responded with "I think that's a great idea". As a follow up and in her secret language the artist writes a similar message to Obama's with apples.

Music informs Kwon's art-making process in several ways such as 'humming' evidenced by the title of the show and as a continuous skein of white silicone lines around the gallery’s walls connecting one work to the next turning it into an installation. Part of what describes installation art is the fact that it is designed for a specific space which in this case its true. Kwon completed a residency at this space so that this body of work was made specifically for the gallery. The installation must be seen in situ and in total to be appreciated and is tied together through the subtitle Humming the equivalent of Kwon's own musical language and message. Music, according to Kandinsky and as seen in Kwon, is the most abstract of the arts thus can transcend the limitations of language. Consequently, Kwon found her independence by systematizing 'humming' as well into an aural language that is seen.

The Humming works are comprised of pure white melting candles and wax representing vigil ceremonies that entreat others to be kind. The skeins of silicone thread connect one piece to the next in peregrinating waves on the gallery's white walls. In her Humming, 2022 (Mixed media on canvas, 50x50cm) she uses horizontal lines to create jagged lines that appear almost like writing. The white textual references against the pure white backdrop surrounded by white frames, appear as if written with clouds or soft cotton. A diptych, one of her all-white Humming, 2022 series paintings comprise two partially melted white candles within a space filled with textual references that continue from the wall onto the painting's surface via wavy lines. The candles are guttered and one could almost hear their desperate sputtering flickers corresponding to the artist’s pleading for peace and civility.

When taking in the whole installation the effect is one of pristine purity and impeccable lightness. Through this work Kwon has found a way to profess her pain in order to do away with the hurtful experience of cyber-bullying. She dreams of a cyber utopia where people unload their pain by forgiving each other.

Add new comment

Expression of More Struggles and Freedoms

Millree Hughes — Thu, 01 Apr 2021 00:00:58 +0000

Expression of More Struggles and Freedoms Millree Hughes March 31, 2021 - 20:00

Topics

Art Review

Tags

abstract expressionism

Courtesy of Thomas Erben Gallery, NYC

Dona Nelson: Stretchers Strung Out On Space

Thomas Erben Gallery

Saturday, February 20 - April 3, 2021

Dona Nelson's new show is an expression of more struggles and freedoms.

She's an American modern painter but it's no longer the beginning of modern Art -- like the black line of Franz Kline or the roar of Jimi Hendrix playing "Star Spangled Banner" at Woodstock. These are fervent times. You might complain if your neighbour has an American flag in their front garden.

Visiting the selections from the Whitney collection took me back to that place and helped me understand Dona as "from" and also "come far from" the breakout of American Art. Going from the room that separates the paintings of the 1940s into those of the '50s, it's like suddenly walking into the light. The Cadmuses and Burchfields are mulchy and intimate, but it's the white room that holds "The" DeFeo, a spectacular Kline, a killer Ed Clarke; like hearing jazz for the first time, dropping off the chorus into the solo. Like one of those GoPro videos of skydiving through the Alps. Painting cut loose for the first time. Free expression become the one true faith.

Perhaps that's why abstraction far from being another "just path" can seem like a truly adult proposal. No longer shackled to mimesis the artist is pitched only against her/his/their desires or lack of vision.

Going into Thomas Erben's gallery is quite different. The path is unbrushed. The strokes are thorny, viewable from both sides of the canvas so that the route through the work feels like negotiating through scenery, backstage.

Abstract painting seems all subjectivity, supposedly all interpretations are valid. When actually this kind of painting is all intention

It's what it does that's important.

However gnarly and cobwebby the injunctions are or how partial, they do want us to feel a certain way, to think of them a certain way.

And the more integrated or unified the system of explanation is the more intentional and "conscious" it is.

One of the new paintings is two lovely long rectangular panels of which one is called "Studio Portrait Over Time" 2020. It's mounted onto a base with the pieces not parallel with each other but fanning out at one side creating a rhomboid negative space on the stand. A space you have to peer into to see the images. One side presenting a figure made from a white fabric dipped in epoxy resin that keeps it hard when it sets.

These bunched areas stand in for impasto paint. Generally Dona prefers the indirect route to bringing out the image. The pour, the bunched fabric, thick thread pulled through the canvas that picks out figures in dots or stitches leaving loose ends hanging. The process might throw up new shapes in a way that the direct stroke hitting a canvas doesn't. As if directness was a fudge, not as brave as letting chance and the character of the materials have its way.

There's figuration here but it's treated as if copying nature was another branch of abstraction. Because narrative and the falling of light on an object are much less important than process. How the thing came to be. For example what looks like deckchair fabric is casually folded and stuck to the outline of a figure. The observance of volume is sacrificed so that graphic impact can happen.

"Olive and Reily" 2020 shows two figures and like most of the paintings in this show is viewable from both sides. But the reality of the people is secondary to the way it comes together. I was told by the gallery assistant that Dona stands behind (well, there is no real behind) with a studio assistant, threading these long, woolly cables through the canvas so that in the end two versions of the figure are available, one from each side.

In the book The Three Princes of Serendip, Horace Walpole suggests they are: "making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of..."

WOOd 2020.

It makes painting a foray into an experiment in crafts that's more casual than in a hot house studio. The gallery space has been arranged to feel more communal, like where a group might meet sometimes to do something. The sense of the space in action. Some chairs around a table. A canvas mounted onto a dias that slowly rotates. The use of soap boxes (Soap Boxes!) for the piece "WOOd" 2020

"WOOd" is a perfect Nelson proposal.

A "what if." In this case, a leisurely thrown action painting on one side. Paint splashed.

What if you stood back for a minute? Jumped back in with some loose weaving in one quadrant. And employed what looks like a leisurely "drag" of semi-transparent paint on the other side. After "Action" and "Free" expression, there is a reconsideration.

Dona's pieces are like proposals. Not written ones but visual ones. When you "read" materials, objects, the space, light, and style that paint creates; it's not proposed in a way that can be accepted or rejected. Things unlike words have their own immutability.

It flips it back on you to consider it. To use your time on these "its."

But equally, Dona makes the gallery open and available.

So that you're not put on the spot -- I think -- to create this space she even downplays her own undoubted chops.

It still brings back for me, the cultural moment when America broke with Europe, culminating in the high '60s. The flame not only lighting the way forward but burning the protagonist: think Janis Joplin or Pollock. The artist is still the artist, you have to do this thing alone. But the way through isn’t clear like it was. It requires so much more reflection and consideration.

Dona Nelson's toolbox is more full of tools. Spider Stratagems and Oblique Strategies can help us to see beyond our desires and visions. But there is no path that we can instinctually navigate. We may have to talk this through. Go through the wood together.

Add new comment

Cubed By Eozen

Mary Hrbacek — Thu, 06 Dec 2018 17:22:25 +0000

Cubed By Eozen Mary Hrbacek December 6, 2018 - 12:22

Topics

Art Review

Tags

abstract expressionism

Eozen Agopian: The Fabric of Space

Greek Consulate, New York

November 15 – 30, 2018

The Fabric of Space, curated by Thalia Vrachopoulos, conveys an unusual vision by Eozen Agopian that borrows from Cubist art without in any way replicating its intensions. At first glance the similar-sized shapes in Agopian's works spark the link that soon dissolves as the intricacies of her elaborate overlapping configurations of colored fabric and skeins of thread invade one’s senses. The intelligence of these spaces and movements quickly takes precedence over the superficial initial impressions of the moment. In a city where abstract art reigns, and holdovers of gestural abstraction from the heyday of Abstract Expressionism remain intact for decades, it is a pleasure and a relief to discover an artist whose convictions are backed by the strength of her individuality.

Elaborate networks of interlocking and overlapping thread charm and captivate the eye with fleeting recollections of electrical lines or even intertwined networks of roots, maps of roads or the webs of spiders. The artist forges universal comparisons that give full play to viewer imagination and participation in the interpretation of her visually expansive orchestrated cloth ensembles. Because the works are not connected with conceptual art they are free of a planned or prescribed narrative. One may meander visually through the forest of shapes that differ in color, to contemplate their meanings. The square shape is said to symbolize matter, the earth, and stability. In Islam it denotes the heart of a normal human being open to four paths of influence, which include the human, the divine, the angelic, and the diabolic. ("1000 Symbols," p. 335, Rowena + Rupert Shepherd, Thames + Hudson.) The square forms mirror the complexities one might discover within a maquette of the human mind with its quick, shimmering apprehensions of data that are continually entering its portals

Agopian succeeds in bringing the canvas beneath the cloth labyrinths to the surface of the works via the cream and off-white colored heaps of vertically and diagonally fixed multiple mounds and hills of directed threads. Thread suggests diverse implications, from narrative literary fables to mythic fates that measure and cut the threads of an individual human life. Threads establish boundaries of alignment in the mazes of the mind. They are indiscernible transmitters of sound, light, memory and emotion. Looped and tied threads conjure intertwining associations and dependencies. Inter-winding knots appear to have no beginnings or ends, implying the process of evolution and the power of destiny. Knots combine as well as entangle. Themes of entrapment arise in the surface of the works, which do not read as morose; rather they present moderated emotions with egalitarian feeling states. Knotting and unknotting reflect the psychic method of analysis and synthesis of the threads of the individual personality. (The Book of Symbols, p. 518, Taschen.)

Fabric is often compared in literature to the "stuff" of life. Life is created through threads of experience as fabric is created through the weaving of cloth. In this sense, these works are universal metaphors for life; they resound with the richness and vibrancy of sight and touch that our senses respond most to. The artist’s small works grouped in series are especially compelling as they relate intricately with each other, as if carrying on complex conversations. There is a sense of urgent energy that flickers palpably among them.

Nets are typically symbolic of binding, capture and entanglements. In certain types of Buddhism, earthly existence is regarded as a net that entraps the human spirit. The net is also regarded as a marshalling force that transforms irreconcilable energies. Networks reference connectedness whether it applies to business, personal, social, or to communication in the World Wide Web. (The Book of Symbols, p. 518, Taschen.)

In myth and legends, the patience represented by the stitching process leads to redemption; it mends the torn fabric of the psyche and repairs the beguiled circumstances. Sewing links us to the notion of the weaving of life and the strands of fate. (The Book of Symbols, p. 460, Taschen.)

Cloth is perhaps associated historically with women who have created such things as garments, lacework, quilts, bedding, embroidery; the list goes on. But Agopian makes no move to produce careful stitchery or utilitarian or even "fine" handiwork or objects. She is a quirky artist who is having her own say in a language of her ingenious invention, much as Judy Chicago has done in 1974 - 79 in her "Dinner Party" piece. Agopian does not confine her materials to thread and cloth; she also applies paint to her works to provide a rich array of multiple medias whose interplay connects her pieces to the ebullient art of painting. The richness of the paint on the strands of the canvas provides a textural contrast, which augments the artistic revelations and historic comparisons that it stimulates. Agopian's art is tactile and visual; it appeals directly to our senses in an effective fusion of forms that reinforce the abiding power of its intelligent underpinnings.

Add new comment

Sara Conca - The Dusty Wright Show

Dusty Wright — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 01:41:42 +0000

Sara Conca - The Dusty Wright Show Dusty Wright August 3, 2010 - 21:41

Topics

Vidcast

Tags

Sara Conca

painter

abstract expressionism

Former model and abstract expressionistic painter Sara Conca chats with Dusty Wright about life, art, and the pursuit of the perfect colors.

Subscribe via Youtube or Subscribe via Feedburner

Terrain

Dusty Wright — Thu, 08 Jun 2006 23:37:29 +0000

Terrain Dusty Wright June 8, 2006 - 19:37

Topics

Art Review

Tags

abstract expressionism

Image courtesy of Kim Foster Gallery

Kim Foster Gallery

529 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10012

Open Tuesday - Saturday

June 3rd - July 6th, 2006

For those of us squashed into uncomfortably tight areas of space in New York City, we either loathe or appreciate the value of land, regardless how small or large our domiciles might actually be, or how grand we wishfully imagine them. Kim Foster's comfortably spacious Chelsea gallery affords twelve contemporary artists ample territory to define and display their own landscapes, one of the oldest themes in art. Micro or macro, small or large parcels. Land, vistas, plateaus; canyons of steel, even relief work that is indistinguishable from any vantage can all be called terrain. Be clear, these are not the conventional landscape paintings of the early Hudson Valley masters. One of my favorite pieces is the three-dimensional "Aggregation" by Korea-based Kwang-Young Chun. Each tiny node/triangle is a hand-wrapped, century-old, handmade mulberry paper from medicinal bottles arranged in such fashion as to create a relief map of some mythic landscape. Depending on one's vantage, it is either an exhilarating interpretation of an aerial topography of some nearly-known continent or a close up of a moisture-deprived surface.

By contrast, the cropped vantages of Antonio Petracca's two oil pieces offer tantalizingly detailed glimpses of very real places. The spin is how he's purposely cropped off large chunks of information (and canvas), letting the viewer fill in the remaining terrain. "Lake Louise," his oil on wood construction, might be the view from a speeding train in some European country, that moment when you look up from your book and catch a glimpse of the idyllic countryside quickly slipping past you.

The exhilarating voyeuristic paintings by Louis Renzoni depict strangers alone in a landscape caught in a moment of intoxicating bliss or paranoiac anxiety. His large oil canvas "Out of the Loop" (image above) glows with a midsummer's haze of the blossoming sensuality of young maidens (picnicking nymphs?) unfurling into unsuspecting sexual sirens amidst nature. Theirs is the blissful terra firma of youth and vitality, a terrain that the old and wise cherish with each passing year.

With New York and other sprawling metropolises being squeezed upward, these artists have invented alternative vistas to supplant the pinched urban provinces that have become for many just a distant memory. For certain, there is much to be mined in these domains.