Jean Miotte’s vocation as an artist began in the aftermath of World War II. His vast oeuvre – from his early figurative works and first exploration of color that marked his early abstraction, to the more minimal black & white works and the haunting beauty of the calligraphic strokes on raw canvas – reveals an artist constantly expanding the thresholds of discovery within his chosen practice. True to his articulation that art crosses boundaries and bridges cultures, his work breaks beyond national borders to create a truly international language. The power and transcultural appeal of his work was soon evident in its international reception. Miotte has exhibited throughout Europe, America and Asia and – in fact – was the first Western artist to be invited to exhibit in post-Mao China. Today, Miotte’s work continues to be represented in museums and private collections all over the world. [Image: Jean Miotte "Insurrection"] http://www.chelseaartmuseum.org/portfolios/jean-miotte-2/ Photo and review courtesy of NY ART BEAT. http://www.nyartbeat.com/event/2011/7C59
Gallery 151 presents John Platt for his second solo exhibition at its newest location in Chelsea, 132 W. 18th Street. This dynamic painter fuses together a world of abstract meeting realism in his latest series INTERCHANGE, creating a visual drama based on color, theme and gesture. A large part of his work is rooted in photography, fashion, architecture and film. We can look forward to Platt revealing his portraits of friends and family members, painted with an exquisitely sensitive eye, yet interchanged with his ideas on abstraction. Platt gives us a crisp sense of electricity and movement through his use of paint, something in which is both elusive and confrontational, much like the modern world we live in today. The artist uses our world to influence this new body of work. http://www.gallery151.com/ Photo and review courtesy of NY ART BEAT. http://www.nyartbeat.com/event/2011/A1B1
Balancing unbridled spontaneity and careful forethought, the work in our exhibition highlights the dynamic action painting that defined a new era in abstraction. With pieces by Robert Motherwell, Jack Tworkov, Hans Hofmann, Norman Bluhm , Richard Pousette-Dart, Sam Francis, and Mark Tobey, Gesture and Abstraction features paintings that explore unexpected color, vivid brushwork, and complex paint handling. [Image: Norman Bluhn (1921–1999) "Blue Blade (1961) Oil on Linen 70–1/5x60–1/2 in.] http://www.hollistaggart.com Photo and review courtesy of NY ART BEAT. http://www.nyartbeat.com/event/2011/B212
What can it mean when an abstract artist describes his pictures as “nouns”–as “simple” nouns, no less? – Mario Naves, Artist and Writer contributes an essay to Malbaurn’s exhibition, LEAN. Malbaurn’s new series takes on the chevron, an iconic form that is no stranger to contemporary art. In an accompanying essay to the exhibition, Mario Naves writes, “Like any keen student of history, like any painter worth his salt, Scott Malbaurn works within the shadow of precedent and toward the less certain precincts of possibility. Mining high modernism for its rigor and clarity, Malbaurn uncovers nuances of pictorial form within circumscribed parameters. Make that seemingly circumscribed: Malbaurn’s recent explorations of the chevron are proof that a given motif is viable to the extent in which an artist endows it with newfound (or idiosyncratic) purpose”. More than homage, Malbaurn views his series as participation in the dialogue of hard-edged, reductive painting. From a recent experience at the Sol Lewitt exhibition at MassMOCA, the passing of Kenneth Noland and the constant sight of city chevrons found in D.O.T. street markings and road signs, as well as the backsides of ambulances and fire trucks here in NYC, the chevron has recently pervaded Malbaurn’s conscience. Through his personal use of the materials, we see Malbaurn’s vocabulary speak through his palette and sensibilities. Mario Naves continues to write, “Malbaurn layers innumerable runs of transparent acrylic to create luminous fields of off-key, all but un-nameable color—wan earthy yellows, bottomless reds, and blues as dense and clear as amber”. A chevron, in Malbaurn’s hands, is always itself and something else altogether–a noun encompassing meanings that go beyond even the artist’s ken. If that sounds like a tall order, well, it is—an order Malbaurn embodies to bracing effect. http://www.janetkurnatowskigallery.com Photo and review courtesy of NY ART BEAT. http://www.nyartbeat.com/event/2011/0511
DODGEgallery presents, “Night Painter” an exhibition of new work by Ted Gahl. This is Gahl’s first solo exhibition in New York.
Gahl will present paintings of varying scale, some with constructed dimension, others flat with a characteristically thin application of paint, but all devoted to the impulses and versatility allowed by the medium. Gahl is a painter’s painter. He employs the brush with a trust and confidence that is part physical, taking on the action of drawing, and part conduit for his inner impulses. The imagery marking his compositions morphs between abstraction and things recognizable, but displaced and pocketed within abstraction. His paintings shift between flat and illusionary space, acting as a kind of storyboard for memory, detritus, artifacts of his consciousness. The impact of a room full of Gahl’s work is exhilarating.
Night Painting is a culmination of a body of work begun last spring about the experience of painting at night, about paintings made at night, about subjects that arise in the unfettered quiet and solitude of nighttime painting. Gahl’s work is unself-conscious, sometimes devious, always earnest, and gratifyingly unexpected.
Mark Rifkin, This Week in NYC:
Still in his late twenties, Gahl, who graduated from Pratt in 2006 and got his MFA from RISD last year, has already developed his own visual language involving doorways, hard-to-decipher human figures, waterborne vessels, and insomnia in tantalizing abstract works that demand extra attention.
Excerpt from Night Painter, by Bo Joseph:
For painter Gahl, the fall of night stills the external and stirs the internal: the outer world bombarded by media, information and imagery powers down as an inner world of memory, intimation and resonance awakens. Night seems to slow time and encourages a level of absorption that, in the artist’s words, “converts time into duration.” As time seems to suspend so does distraction, disbelief, cynicism and self-consciousness, spurring ever more inventive free-association.
The works in this show are tied together in part by a state of mind and in part by a condition of form. They are abstractions made at night about the experience of night. Darkness reigns in a palette of blues, grays and blacks, pierced here and there by slivers of saturated color or exposed canvas. They are paintings about light glimmering at the fringes of shadows, like fissures leaking murmurs of optimism from tenebrous depths. Part of the intrigue of Gahl’s work is the combination of a lighthearted, pleasant ease with a conflicted or convoluted culling of things darker, unsettled. They display a dark view of the world in collision with the sanguine outlook required to paint into the unknown. A Diebenkorn-esque fractured grid provides structure, offering ways of seeing that are organized in spite of the disorder of life…but never so organized as to risk ringing untrue.
Ted Gahl was born in 1983 in New Haven, CT. He received his BFA from Pratt Institute in 2006 and his MFA from Rhode Island School of Design in 2010.
[Image: Ted Gahl "Thief" (2011) acrylic, enamel, and oil pastel on unprimed canvas 72 x 66 in.] http://dodge-gallery.com/ Photo and review courtesy of NY ART BEAT. http://www.nyartbeat.com/event/2011/F21B
In the artists’ book vitrine, we will present “Just Painting” by Melissa Meyer, made specifically for BravinLee’s book program. This handmade book that consists of twelve luminous abstract watercolors on 100 percent rag paper, builds on Meyer’s past work. She combines visual structure with fluidity and finds influence in the art of dance, the structure of architecture, the tonal qualities of film noir and the gestural movement of actors.
This show is in collaboration with Lennon Weinberg Gallery, NYC where Meyer will exhibit new paintings and watercolors opening on September 15th. Meyer’s lengthy exhibition history includes solo shows at Elizabeth Harris Gallery, New York; Holly Solomon Gallery, New York and Galerie Renee Ziegler, Zurich, Switzerland. [Image: Melissa Meyer 12 watercolors on 100% rag paper book without words painted in New York 18 x 40½ in. open] http://www.bravinlee.com Photo and review courtesy of NY ART BEAT. http://www.nyartbeat.com/event/2011/EF9F
On display will be five mid-sized and large colorful, textured canvases by each of the two artists. The artists’ styles vary, but the common vocabulary here of shape, color and texture, essential to the overall process of each painter, guides their respective compositional developments. This pairing creates an explosion of color and mood. Both artists’ palettes are earthy, but d’Inverno’s are soft and subtle while Gwaltney’s are bold and energy-filled. Both saturate their canvases with expansive swatches of cinnabar red, turquoise, orange, green, and blue. The colors stretch and swirl energetically within the confines of the canvases, and at the same time seem to spill off and fill the surrounding space. Layering, scraping, and changing direction are all part of the process. The final result is always unexpected. According to d’Inverno, “Up in the Air” speaks of possibilities of expression and of surprise. The work is primarily about story telling and how words appear on a page to tell the story. “I love how poetry looks on paper and I’m interested in Cuneiform and Etruscan letters/words. When I paint, words are like colors in my mind, so I try to translate that on the painting.” Ms. d’Inverno’s primary technique is “wet on wet” – not waiting for the layers of oil paint to dry until the work is completed. As she also notes, “chance plays a vital part in the development of the work.”
For Gwaltney there is also an element of surprise in the creation, and he finds “pleasure in the arguments created from color combinations.” In discussing the painters who have influenced his work, he names Twombly, Mitchell, Serra, de Kooning, Deibenkorn and Still. “The splatterers, doodlers and sloppy scribblers interest me and I distrust too high a degree of finish”. As it relates to his own work, he likes to “let the paint do what it will” although he “still gets in the way”. Ultimately, he claims to be a better editor then inventor. He uses horizontal bands of paint in his work to “contain or constrain the chaos beneath.” The final product is thus one of both process and chance. http://www.triagallerynyc.com/current.htm Photo and review courtesy of NY ART BEAT. http://www.nyartbeat.com/event/2011/D5A0
This exhibition “ACTION POP” features Shinohara’s new body of works that he calls “Blow by Blow – New Action Painting”. It combines the artist’s famous action painting, drawing and his love of 3D Pop.
Shinohara, born in Koji-machi Tokyo in 1932, was one of the radical artists of Japan’s post-war era. He co-founded theNeo Dadaism Organizers Group, one of the most avant-garde collectives in the late 1950’ and 1960’s. In 1960, in front of journalists, including Nobel Prize Laureate- Oe Kenzaburo, Shinohara sporting a Mohawk and stripped to the waist, cut his white t-shirt, wrapped his hands to form makeshift boxing gloves, dipped them in paint and went on to hit the paper on the studio walls. Shinohara invented performative boxing painting. Shinohara says he was in pursuit of “pure action” an ephemeral art form that was a critical departure from Abstract Expressionism. The curator Reiko Tomii writes“…this distinguished Shinohara from other artists like Jackson Pollock, George Mathieu and Gutai’s Shiraga Kazuo, who also used action to create paintings.”
In 1963-64, Shinohara, created a new genre of Pop Art- “Imitation Pop” which was inspired by images of art works by Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns and other pop artists seen in Japanese art magazines. Shinohara was the forerunner to the anime artists Takashi Murakami and Yoshitomo Nara.
A Rockefeller Foundation grant brought Shinohara to New York City in 1969. In New York, he and his wife Noriko, a distinguished painter in her own right, have lived a bohemian life dedicated to making art. Currently a documentary film is being producing on this dynamic couple titled “The Boxer and Cutie”. http://www.ecfa.com/site/main.php Photo and review courtesy of NY ART BEAT. http://www.nyartbeat.com/event/2011/F183
This exhibition contains a diverse group of works representing the dynamism and richness of a key post-war conceptual and abstract artist. Comprised of paintings and sculptures within an installation of painted shadows, this show revisits the accomplishments of a seminal figure in contemporary American art.
The works in the exhibition define painting and sculpture as a diverse set of interconnected practices central to Kovachevich’s esthetic. To emphasize his desire that his works be viewed in relation to each other and to their surroundings, the artist will create an installation responding to the gallery’s particular environment.
Whether on canvas, plastic, paper, or a combination of these materials, the work investigates the line between the physical and the metaphysical. The works are anchored by complex forms articulated in nature and carry a radical intensity of observation. The intimate universe of his work, including performance, belies larger questions of time and decay, evanescence and permanence.
Born in Detroit, New York based Kovachevich is both an artist and a physician. In 2002 he had an exhibition at the Santa Monica Museum of Art that included a plethora of his small scale painted plastics and a large installation comprised of paper tape. His earliest presentation of shadow paintings was in 1973, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. He has had other solo exhibitions in museums and galleries in the US and Europe including The Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Albert and Vera List Center at MIT, and the Centre de la Vieille Charité, Musees de Marseille. His works have also been included in numerous group shows such as at the Museum of Modern Art, Documenta 5, The Art Institute of Chicago, the Detroit Institute of Art, Musee d’art et d’histoire, Geneva, the Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, Switzerland, as well as in many galleries. Most recently his performances have been presented at the Sculpture Center, NY, the Santa Monica Museum of Art, Lincoln Center and the Bowery Poetry Club. In 1977 The Drawing Center in New York presented his performances nightly for six weeks. An artist book, Between the Area and the Source, was published this year by Regency Arts Press. [Image: Thomas Kovachevich "Encyclopedia" (2010) Acrylic and plastic on linen 30 x 20 in.] http://callicoonfinearts.com/ Photo and review courtesy of NY ART BEAT. http://www.nyartbeat.com/event/2011/F742
Cristin Tierney presents an exhibition of new paintings by Jorge Tacla entitled Altered Remains. In his newest body of work Tacla engages the idea of social rupture, situating it at the crux of a new architecture that arises in the wake of natural and man-made disasters. Tacla perceives the devastation that results from such events as an opportunity to investigate structural systems that would otherwise remain unseen. In a painting such as Altered Remains 1, the composition is derived from images of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. Tacla’s deliberate evocation of such a horrific event, experienced by most of us only through news reports and media outlets, forces us to consider our relationship to that catastrophe. Influenced by the writings of the forensic anthropologist Roxana Ferllini and the Hungarian psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi, the artist effectively translates the pictorial space of the canvas into a psychological one. To signify such unsettled worlds he uses an obsessive pictorial language, repeating the same gesture in the same space many times until the visual register is analogous to the trauma that prompts it. Tacla is best known for large-scale pictures, neither abstract nor figurative, but always haunted by history. Spatially complex and visually fantastic, Tacla’s paintings possess a morbid beauty and a conceptual elegance that sets them apart from the tradition of modern abstraction. The critic and scholar, Donald Kuspit, has written that Tacla’s work “stretches the limits of objective representation until it breaks down into subjective abstraction, allowing the expression of unconscious feelings that factual representation tends to repress.” Born in Santiago, Chile in 1958, Tacla studied at the Escuela de Bellas Artes, Universidad de Chile in Santiago, before moving to New York in 1981. His most recent exhibitions include Sharjah Biennial 10 in Sharjah, UAE, Hidden Identity, González y González, in Santiago, Chile, and the Dublin Contemporary 2011 in Dublin, Ireland. Tacla is a recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (1988) and a New York Foundation of the Arts Grant (1987, 1991) and he has exhibited internationally since the early eighties. Other notable exhibitions have included Jorge Tacla: Papel at the Galería Animal, Santiago, Chile in 2010 and The Man Who Fell to Earth at the 798 Biennale in Beijing, China in 2009. His most recent catalogue, published in 2010 by Galería Animal, features an essay by Francesca Pietropaolo. Other recent publications include Jorge Tacla: Pinturas/Paintings, which includes an essay by Donald Kuspit and Raul Zamudio Taylor, printed in 2008. His work is included in many public collections, including the Drawing Center, New York, High Museum of Art, Atlanta, the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City, and the Museo de la Memoria y Derechos Humanos, Santiago, Chile. http://www.cristintierney.com/ Photo and review courtesy of NY ART BEAT. http://www.nyartbeat.com/event/2011/067B
