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Małgorzata Mirga-Tas Re-enchanting the World – the Polish Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale

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Małgorzata Mirga-Tas, Re-enchanting the World, Polish Pavillion, 59th Venice Art Biennale

As you enter the Polish Pavillion at the Venice Biennale 2022 you are surrounded by Małgorzata Mirga-Tas’ stunning floor-to-ceiling hand-stitched tapestry panels, richly depicting mostly female protagonists in everyday life. If you had a lucky chance to visit the Renaissance Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara, Italy, you would most likely soon discover in Mirga-Tas’ images myriad allusions to the Palazzo’s splendid ‘Hall of the Months’ cycle of frescoes portraying Olympian gods, astrological figures, and scenes from court life in Ferrara. The name of the Ferara palazzo derives from the phrase ‘schivar la noia’, meaning ‘escape from boredom’, which accurately defines the purpose of this splendid architectural gem—built for the leisure of the powerful Este family over 500 years ago.

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Motel in the Catskills

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The rural Catskill mountain village of Fleischmanns an unlikely a place to find a world-class contemporary art installation.

In the nineteenth century, the village was a flourishing, prosperous Catskill vacation spot for the New York well-to-do, resplendent with Victorian mansions and lodging houses, attracting both Jewish and non-Jewish summer residents. By the mid-twentieth century, the town had languished, and many properties had fallen into disrepair. Over time, Fleischmanns became a summer retreat for a large ultra-Orthodox Jewish community who juxtapose oddly with deer hunters, RV owners, motorcycle enthusiasts, and other locals. “Eclectic” is an understatement. If Fleischmanns were on a deli menu it would be an Everything Bagel.

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My Upstate Art Weekend Adventure

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Vanessa German,  Black on Black, 2021, Handmade folk art cloth Black woman pin cushion, glory, wood, love, astroturf, Black seed beads, confusion, Black rhinestone trim, Black bead trim, (they traded your grandmother for a handful of beads), vintage hand purse, rage, old doll parts, ptsd, the fallout from white supremacist delusion, cork, Black pigment, sorrow, vintage mirror, self loathing, cotton, a miracle, twine, tears, yarn, heartbreak, love. 26 x 18 x 9 1/2 in

Last weekend was the third annual Upstate Art Weekend, a wildly ambitious and fun three-day art fair that winds its way from Westchester to Catskill NY. Founded by impresario Helen Toomer in 2020, Upstate Art Weekend celebrates and promotes visual arts throughout the Hudson Valley. One hundred and forty venues participated this year, and there was everything from art in a big-box truck in Kerhonkson to the gallery/studio campus of Foreland in Catskill.  The intense heat of last week made this year’s event a challenge, but totally worth the sweat. Here is a brief travelogue of my schlep around the Hudson Valley: 

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Hew Locke: The Procession at the Tate Britain

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Each year The Tate Britain commissions a large-scale art installation for the iconic Duveen Galleries at the museum. This is a vast space, an art-filled hall, more than a typical gallery that winds its way down the center of the museum on the first floor. This year they tapped the Guyanese-British artist Hew Locke whose visual musings on migration, history, national identity and ritual are well known in the British art world. Locke has long worked these themes, but never on such a scale. It is a wildly ambitious vision that embraces his interests and presents a fully developed Universe.

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The Baroness at Mimosa House London

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Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (c. 1921-22), George Grantham Bain Collection, Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division, LC 5677-2. From digital scan of photograph.
Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (c. 1921-22), George Grantham Bain Collection, Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division, LC 5677-2. From digital scan of photograph.

The Baroness at Mimosa House in London is a group exhibition dedicated to Dada artist, the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (1874–1927). The exhibition manifests the ongoing influence of the Baroness on contemporary artists and poets, showcasing artworks and performative contributions created in homage to Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven or influenced by her radical work and effervescent personality. The show questions the legacy of Dada poetry and performance today, in a feminist and queer dimension in particular. How can artists navigate the art world, politics and society while creating a work which resists and disrupts the conventional canon? Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven becomes a role model and inspiration for international artists of different generations and media of work.

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Showings in Four Dimensions

Showings in Four Dimensions (installation view L-R), Darius Yektai, Waiting For Death Or Slavery: After Delacroix, 2022, Elise Ansel, Celestial Lounge Chair, 2021, Darius Yektai, Untitled Falling Flowers, 2021 & Kyle Hittmeier Natural Le Coultre, 2022. Photo: AB NY Gallery

As soon as the formula codified that a contemporary artist could reach a new level of institutional engagement once they proclaimed their inspiration from generations of art historical masterpieces, the flood gates opened to practitioners solely deploying references to the canon to project their careers farther and faster. With encyclopedic museums refreshing their image by aligning themselves with the success of the contemporary art world’s darlings, by connecting their creative process to roots foregrounded in the rich mire of historical artworks, new publications and programming surfaced. Notably The Artist Project at The Metropolitan Museum of Art was launched in 2015, and most recently even the gilded age indulgence of The Frick Collection created their exhibition series Living Histories: Queer Views and Old Masters at their temporary home on Madison Avenue.

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GLASSTRESS 2022: State of Mind at Fondazione Berengo Art Space

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Jimmie Durham, Untitled (detail), 2020- Photo credit Francesco Allegretto, Courtesy of the artist’s estate (6)

Coinciding with the 59th Venice Biennale, the seventh edition of Glasstress, running from 3 of June to 27 of November 2022 in Venice, features a group of leading contemporary artists from Europe, the United States, Latin America and Africa in an ambitious exhibition who explore the infinite creative possibilities of glass. The artworks will be exhibited at the Fondazione Berengo Art Space in Murano, an old abandoned furnace that was transformed into a unique exhibition space a few years ago. This extensive group show, curated by Adriano Berengo and Koen Vanmechelen with the contribution of Ludovico Pratesi, channels diverse contemporary art through the ancient art of Murano glassblowing, aiming to search for new contemporary visual vocabulary in glass art.

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Meryl Meisler: QUIRKYVISION at the PORTRAIT(S) Festival in Vichy

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Meryl Meisler, Close Shave Family Grooming (The Mystery Club), Merrick, NY 1975

Meryl Meisler’s QUIRKYVISION will be featured at Le Palais des Congrès de Vichy during the PORTRAIT(S) Tenth Annual Festival in Vichy, France, from June 24 through September 4, 2022. Meisler’s images of sizzling disco nights and strip-tease clubs, domestic Jewish family in Long Island suburbia, or life in a public school in one of the roughest Brooklyn neighborhoods—encapsulate with humor and a sharp gaze life at the 1970s and 1980s New York City area.

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Healing- Mihee Nahm at Artspace 111 in Ft. Worth


Night Walk # 3, 2022, 60X40″, oil on canvas)

The foliate paintings of Texas artist Mihee Nahm evoke late 18th century pursuits of the sublime. They are at once botanical and reverential renderings. Nahm immerses the viewer in beyond-the-frame expansive space, a nod to an early hero, Pollock. But the broader macro implications are toward infinity. The mass of Nahm’s surface is composed of exquisitely detailed in-your-face foliage, like walking unexpectedly into low-hanging tree limbs, one’s head suddenly enveloped by unkempt nature.

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Shirley Jaffe: An American Woman in Paris at the Pompidou Center

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Shirley Jaffe, installation view, Pompidou Center, photo courtesy of Helene Mauri

It might be said for the most part, given the dominant ideology of Modernism, Shirley Jaffe has been overlooked for the standard reasons—her work was out of step with the times, it was derivative of Henri Matisse and Stuart Davis, it was too French, or too American—all according to who you speak with. Yet the gorilla in the room is she was an American woman of the post-war generation who had stayed on after almost everyone had gone home, who sought to get a foothold in the male dominated Parisian art world. Despite this, she persisted and gained respect and support among multi-generations of artists. As such she developed a reputation as an artists’ artist, yet despite her boosters and the fact that she is now being acknowledged with a retrospective exhibition at the Pompidou, Jaffe remains one of the best kept secrets of post-War abstract painting in France and remains unacknowledged in the States.

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