In the Archives: Lowell Boyers

Red Boat, White Paint, Still Travelling, 2010

Going through my drafts archives, I found this unposted image of a Lowell Boyer's painting. More of the artist's mixed media works on paper and canvas can be found on his website, all a bit phantasmagorical, beautiful layered, even decorative like a China pattern gone wrong. I believe I saw this at the Von Lintel Gallery's booth at an art fair last year...but much like the figures in these works, the memory is unclear.

Off-kilter Occult: Hernan Bas

I was excited to see that Hernan Bas's had a new show up at Lehmann Maupin after first seeing his work at their downtown location in 2009. Even if I hadn't, I would have been a sucker for the Baudelaire quote in the press release; “The loveliest trick of the Devil is to persuade you that he does not exist." The Miami-born, Detroit-based painter examines lore and legends of the devil in this new group of paintings.

Tartini's Dream (The Devil's Trill)

I really enjoy his dense compositions, like the one above where intersecting branches cover every part of the picture plane, as if they are trying to force their way out. His works tend to suggest complex narratives, suggested by the strange landscapes and dramatic little figures as much as their titles.

A Devil's Bridge

The rainbow of colors used here is representative of his work, and the very bright and light hues he uses manage to seem subsumed into his overall dark composition. I love the figure in the foreground looking out over the water, while a shadowy figure lurks under the bridge behind him. It's cliche, perhaps, but it exists in a vividly colored and slightly off-kilter alternate world.

Detail, A Devil's Bridge

Detail, A Devil's Bridge

Recently in a interview Bas said of his more recent work:

The best way that anyone has described the work so far was in an interview with Maurizio Cattelan titled “Something Off,” which really sums up these thoughts again on how I view the more successful aspects of the work—there’s always something off about them, and I strive towards that off-ness whenever I’m painting. It can come from how I render the figures or skewing the scale; something just always has to be a little wrong. I don’t want to make right painting. 

More from his interview with Art21 here.

A Satanist on a Tuesday

"Occult Contemporary" is up at Lehmann Maupin Gallery in Chelsea through April 21.

Sunflower in the Hall: Dorothea Tanning

Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, 1943, Dorothea Tanning 

It has been years since I've been to the Tate Modern, but I remember coming home afterward and trying to google a painting featuring little girls in a hallways with what seemed like a very dangerous and large sunflower. I couldn't find anything about it.

Recently I happened across the image in a blog post about Dorothea Tanning, and all mysteries were revealed. Dorothea Tanning was speaking about her painting (my mystery image) when she said:

At night one imagines all sorts of happenings in the shadows of the darkness. A hotel bedroom is both intimate and unfamiliar, almost alienation, and this can conjure a feeling of menace and unknown forces at play. But these unknown forces are a projection of our own imaginations: our own private nightmares.
     —Dorothea Tanning in an interview with Victoria Carruthers, Art, History and the Senses: 1830 to the Present, 2010, p. 112.

Well, perhaps not all mysteries.

For the benefit of all future mes, I added "girls in hallway" and "sunflower" as tags to this post.

More graphite: James Busby at Stux

Wingspan, 2012

James Busby also uses graphite to create a monochromatic palette in his works. Busby's Wingspan: New Works exhibition up at Stux Gallery through March 17 shows many large, textured graphite panels. Wingspan, above, shows the artist manipulating the wet graphite over white gesso to create a beautifully textured surface. The lines are painstakingly hand tooled.

Disc 2, 2011

The artist's previous work in graphite was smaller, like the work above. Busby used a layer of graphite that he then ground down to a smooth sheen as a surface. In works like this, the colors that come out so clearly in this photograph are more subdued and vary depending on the angle you look at them. After moving to a larger studio, his work also got bigger. Cart, below, show him "framing" one of his polished graphite surfaces with a cart he found in this new studio, already covered in flecks of fiberglass. 

Cart, 2012

The texture of the fiberglass somehow migrates to Busby's large newer works. I greatly prefer the traces of the human hand left in the mark-making of works like 3 Panel, with its expansive 96 x 144 inch surface.

3 Panel, 2011

Frankenthaler, Colors

Warming Trend, 2002

Speaking about colors, here are some colors dyed straight into the canvas. Helen Frankenthaler was one of the early, and female, pioneers of abstract expressionism, and she passed away this week at age 83. Good WSJ and NY Times articles on her career.

Mauve District, 2009

de Kooning's Women

Woman I

Check out my new article on de Kooning's Woman paintings and violence of them over at Escape Into Life magazine.

Regional Favorites from the Georgia Museum of Art

Horizons, Steinunn Þórarinsdóttir

My hometown, Athens, Georgia, doesn't always change much, but when I visited recently the Georgia Museum of Art was showing off its new renovation, which featured an extensive addition to show more of the permanent collection.  It's a beautiful renovation in general and it was fantastic to see the new galleries showing so much of the permanent collection. 

There is also a new sculpture garden, currently filled with bronze sculptures by Icelandic artist Steinunn Þórarinsdóttir (don't ask me how to pronounce that.) However, one of the noticeable features of the permanent collections was a regional focus in the works. It felt like home--and it also felt refreshingly different from so much of the work I see here in New York.

Some of my favorites:

Tallulah Falls, 1841, George Cooke

My Forebearers Were Pioneers, 1939, Philip Evergood

The White House, 1945, Georges Schreiber

Seven Steps, 1994, Radcliffe Bailey

Detail, Seven Steps

Georgia II, 2008, Leo Twiggs

American Favorites from the Art Institute

Woman (Elevation), 1927, Bronze, Gaston Lachaise in front of A Vision, 1925, Joseph Stella

Cow's Skull with a Calico Rose, 1931, Georgia O'Keefe

Bouy, 1941, Peter Blume

Head of Pavlova, 1924, Malvina Hoffman

Three of the Greatest Painters of the Past 150 Years?

Now this is an exhibition I can get behind: Turner, Monet, Twombly: Later Paintings at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm promises to be a brilliant and insightful exhibition. I heard the title, and I immediately got it: the loose brushwork and rich colors that developed over their long careers can seem remarkably similar despite the very different times and places in which they worked.

 Twombly's 2008 Lepanto versue Monet's 1914 Waterlillies:

"J. M. W. Turner, Claude Monet and Cy Twombly are three of the greatest painters of the last 150 years. This groundbreaking exhibition focuses on their later work, examining not only the art historical links and affinities between them but also the common characteristics of and motivations underlying their late style." - More on the background to the exhibition here.

 Monet's Japanese Bridge (1918-1924) and Turner's Sunset:

I would love to see how they flesh it out--in the flesh, so to speak. Anyone want to plan a trip to Stockholm this October?

Li Songsong at Pace

These huge canvases with their impasto surfaces struck me as almost ugly at first: the colors, the quasi-photographic Gerhard Richter feel, the imagery. But by the time I left Pace these works by Chinese painter Li Songsong had not just grown on me, but wowed me.

I had a visceral reaction to the textured, thick application of paint.

The scale was humbling.

The imagery took on more context and nuance seen together, and the grids of color the images were reassembled in seemed less rigid and more poetic.

This one is incredibly layered both in the subdued pastel and sepia coloring and literally: As you can see below, the artist mounted separate metal panels and layered them on top of one another.

This canvas seems almost Impressionistic in the way it dabbles light through the trees. The subject, however, is anything but.

Up at Pace Gallery through August 5, and certainly worth a viewing this summer.

Picasso's Muse Marie-Thérèse Explored at Gagosian

Marie-Thérèse Walter was Picasso's lover, if not his wife, for most of her life. The exhibition Picasso and Marie-Thérèse: L'Amour Fou up at Gagosian through June 25th is a museum-quality exploration of Picasso's many iterations of the blonde, Grecian-nosed woman using works borrowed from private collections and prestigious museums. The likelihood of seeing such a gathering, especially some of the privately owned works again is rare, a reason in itself to visit.

The works themselves are of mixed quality, but there are some truly fantastic pieces in themselves. What I enjoyed even more was the story the show told; a romantic one of continuing if not untroubled love. Marie-Thérèse became Picasso's mistress at 17, bore him a child, and committed suicide after his death, 50 years after they met. He painted her throughout his life.

"I see you before me my lovely landscape MT and never tire of looking at you, stretched out on your back in the sand, my dear MT I love you. MT my devouring rising sun. You are always on me, MT mother of sparkling perfumes pungent with star jasmines. I love you more than the taste of your mouth, more than your look, more than your hands, more than your whole body, more and more and more and more than all my love for you will ever be able to love and I sign Picasso." - Letter to Marie-Thérèse from Picasso

A great slideshow on the WSJ site shows many of the pieces.

Amy Talluto at Black and White Gallery

White Pine, Oil on Canvas

I popped into Amy Talluto's show Huldra at Black and White Gallery this weekend, and her forest landscapes had me back to reminiscing about the trees, particularly the white birches, of Sweden. Not that there were any white birches in the show--rather the artist caught the light and the density of the forest while adding something evocative and mysterious. Perhaps a little like the childhood wonder I felt being alone in a forest where trolls might lurk among the mushrooms. In an odd coincidence, the title of the show comes from an old Swedish tale--a Huldra being a witch who lures men deep into the forest

Huldra, Oil on Canvas

Her surfaces alternate between being dense with intricate color, like the trunk of this tree appearing like the inside of oyster shells, and light-filled space like green background beyond.

Burn, 2006

Up at Black and Gallery through May 15 (and especially the bigger paintings like the one below appear much better there than in this small reproduction).

Sunset, Oil on canvas

Dutch Winter Landscapes are full of skaters

Hendrick Avercamp, Winter Scene on a Canal

Pieter Breughel, Winter Landscape with Skaters

Johannes Pieter van Wisselingh, Skaters in a Dutch Winter Landscape

These lovely ideals make me long for a world where winter is playful, joyful, and beautiful. Not to mention full of some of the most gorgeous trees. Then, however, for comparison's sake, I google "new york city winter." 

It looks like some ideals persist.