abstract art – Page 7

March 8, 2023March 4, 2023, by Flora Leigh

David Syre’s Black Drawings: The Inner Light

Artist Profile

A wall with pictures on it

Description automatically generated with medium confidence — Installation view, *David Syre: The Black Drawings*, SARAHCROWN New York, 2023.

The creative process is inexplicable. It doesn’t require anything but what the creator needs or chooses to use, and there are no guidelines as to how it works: Tolstoy felt he had to write “each day without fail.” Robert Rauschenberg often had The Young and the Restless on television at his studio. Virginia Woolf used to walk miles and miles. There is no telling what will ignite the process, but like a flash of lightning or fireworks in the night sky, it contains such a force that with the right conditions, generates sublime beauty. American outsider artist David Syre found this force when he was only a child in his Pacific Northwestern family home: The intuitive act of pushing crayons on paper on the floor of his grandmother’s kitchen remained in the heart of his practice. Syre’s art evolved and transformed in time, but the pastels remained––in the end, it turned into a persistent, continuing series of over 4500 pastel drawings on black paper. 40 of these drawings are now hanging on the walls of SARAHCROWN New York, a young contemporary gallery in Tribeca, and at the gallery’s booth at the Outsider Art Fair, gathered for two concurrent solo exhibitions titled David Syre: The Black Drawings.

March 6, 2023March 7, 2023, by Amy Talluto

Whisperings from the Wormhole with @talluts

Beware the Leave-It-Like-That

A picture containing text, outdoor, old

Description automatically generated — Moby Dick Illustration by Augustus Burnham Shute, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Gather round, me hearties, and let me tell you a tale: a tale about a much-dreaded comment received by many an artist on Instagram and during a studio visit. This comment can sound like a terrifying roar made by a fearsome beast. And it’s called—the “Leave-It-Like-That.

It’s the kind of comment we might receive on our works-in-progress (a struggling fawn just starting its wobbly walk). And we may have blithely thought to ourselves, “Hey, why don’t I post this WIP on the ‘Gram and give people a window into my process!” But…Beware ye who enter here. This generous sneak peek could attract a Leave-It-Like-That (or even its frightening brethren: the “Stop-Don’t-Touch-It” or the “Looks-Finished-To-Me”).

November 26, 2022November 26, 2022, by Meg Hitchcock

The Interaction of Light and Shadow: Susan English at Kathryn Markel

Graphical user interface

Description automatically generated with low confidence — *Susan English, Still Light, 2022, tinted polymer on Dibond panel, 34 x 35 in. Courtesy of Kathryn Markel Fine Arts*

To confront a person with their own shadow is to show them their own light.

– Carl Jung

In her current exhibition at Kathryn Markel Fine Arts, Light to Light, Susan English explores the vagaries of light as it penetrates layers of polymer and pigment. Subtle gradations in color are infused with radiant light, recalling the sfumato in Van Eyck’s translucent skies or Cimabue’s blushing Virgins. The seamless transitions are achieved through the artist’s unorthodox technique of pouring thin layers of tinted polymer onto panels, then tilting the panels while the pigments settle and dry. The multiple layers interact with light to create varying effects – sometimes luminous, sometimes opaque – which are punctuated by cracks and blemishes in the medium as it dries. These accidents are essential to the piece, as they provide a counterbalance to the exquisite surfaces and tight control of their execution. Indeed, English manipulates the panel in such a way that crackling is anticipated, and she views the result as a simulation of the fissures and fractures found in nature.

October 10, 2022October 10, 2022, by Etty Yaniv

Alice Zinnes: Inner landscapes of Light

Alice Zinnes in her studio, with charcoal drawings behind

Alice Zinne‘s paintings draw from literature and mythology to create dramatic landscapes in which light and dark interplay as main protagonists. Her oil paintings, watercolors, and drawings often depict floods of light intertwined with fragmented darker patches, evoking dense and fluid inner spaces.

September 24, 2022December 1, 2022, by Etty Yaniv

Luscious Wasteland: Cathy Diamond and Laurie Fader at Radiator Arts

In conversation with Patrick Neal, Cathy Diamond, and Laurie Fader

A hallway with art on the wall

Description automatically generated with low confidence — Installation of *Luscious Wasteland: Cathy Diamond and Laurie Fader* at Radiator Arts (All images courtesy Radiator Arts).

The two-person exhibition Luscious Wasteland at Radiator Arts features landscape paintings by Cathy Diamond and Laurie Fader. Both artists embed in their imagery elements from personal experience, nature, visual art, music, literature or science, to create intricate and imaginative landscapes. The exhibition opens Fri, September 16 and runs through October 23, 2022. Art Spiel invited the curator of the show, Patrick Neal, and the two artists, Cathy Diamond and Laurie Fader to reflect on the featured paintings as separate bodies of work and in relation to each other.

September 23, 2022November 2, 2022, by Alexandra Israel

Natale Adgnot: What We Are Really Seeing

A person sitting at a desk

Description automatically generated — Portrait of Natale Adgnot in the studio. Photo courtesy of the artist.

What does Cognitive Bias and Fallacy Look Like? Natale Adgnot’s Work Tests What We Are Really Seeing. Natale Adgnot’s work explores the power of psychology and the impact that cognitive bias has on our everyday life, routines and choices. Her work incorporates patterns and systems to explore different cognitive biases such as stereotyping and pareidolia (seeing patterns in random information) to reflect on the elusiveness of truth. Best known for wall sculptures made of painted thermoplastic adhered perpendicularly onto birch panels, she challenges the viewer to consider her work from multiple perspectives. Her new series, Bird Brains, continues to delve into her exploration of bias and fallacy. Bird Brains matches entries in the cognitive bias codex with the birds that best exemplify them. From black swan theory to the duck test to the proverbial canary in the coal mine, she taps into this rich language to point out the stunning variety and sheer magnitude of ways we humans misconstrue the world.

August 1, 2022December 30, 2022, by Etty Yaniv

Zachary Keeting: Reconciling Layered Energies

Zachary Keeting *coffee and cigarettes* 2016 acrylic on canvas (triptych) 48” x 124” photo courtesy the artist

In Zachary Keeting’s restless and complex paintings swirls of vivid purples, yellows, and reds float by or contained within geometric shapes of subdued browns and pinkish off-whites. Together they orchestrate distinct rhythms and create a sense of luminosity. Keeting’s alluring colors often generate dynamic pictorial spaces filled with an imaginative array of fragmented forms which remind me of mirror shards prisms against a shifting light, particles in a quantum physics lab, or visual transcriptions of sounds. Although each of these parts, whether biomorphic or geometric, appears to assume a distinct characteristic, the overall sense we get is—what we see now is on the verge of changing within the next second.

July 11, 2022December 30, 2022, by Etty Yaniv

Eric Wolf: When There is a Solid Fog on the Lake

Background pattern

Description automatically generated — Eric Wolf, Mooselookmeguntic Lake, 2016, ink on paper 22” x 30”. Courtesy of Pamela Salisbury Gallery

Eric Wolf’s landscape paintings are made with ink on paper and reference nature—water, sky, trees. In their sharp light and dark shapes they resemble woodcut, linoleum prints or even highly contrasted black and white photographs, but the more you look at them, the immediacy of the painted ink comes through—from the artist’s direct observation of nature, through his mind, to his hand—in a magical transformation ink flowing on paper fibers becomes river and white floating shapes become clouds.

May 6, 2022May 12, 2024, by Saul Ostrow

The Agreement: Chromatic Presences – Funky and Formal at Zurcher

A picture containing indoor, wall, ceiling, floor

Description automatically generated — Installation view of *The Agreement: Chromatic Presences*, curated by William Corwin at Zürcher Gallery. Photo: Adam Reich. Courtesy of Zürcher Gallery NY/Paris.

I’ll start with a question: does a critic have an obligation to propose a solution to an enigmatic puzzle an exhibition might pose? What has led to this, is reading William Corwin’s catalog essay for The Agreement: Chromatic Presences, in which he ignores recounting the history of sculpture and color—deemed for a very long time to be irreconcilable like fish and cheese. It is now common knowledge, sculpture till the time of the renaissance was largely polychromed, but a neo-classical notion of purity and essentialism came to be imposed upon it to differentiate it qualitatively from painting. As a result, sculpture came to be limited to the colors of its materials—marble, bronze and wood. In the West, this formalism was institutionalized by the Enlightenment’s and was the excepted norm until the mid-20^th century, when art’s traditional forms began to morph. Consequently, we must ask if there is a more contemporary issue concerning color and form at the heart of Corwin’s The Agreement: Chromatic Presences, and if so, what might it be?

April 4, 2022April 5, 2022, by Etty Yaniv

Jim Condron: Texts and Textures

Jim MacBook Air:Users:jimcondron:Desktop:Art Spiel :Photos:1b.Condron with work.JPG — Jim Condron installing Close to You, Karen Condron’s clothes, straw, yarrow, 50 x 30 x 30 inches at Wings over Wall Street, Chelsea, NY, 2019

In his sculptures and installations Jim Condron merges found objects—fragmented or whole—to create colorful and textural hybrid entities with distinct yet very open-ended textual undercurrents. Bed frames and tractors, furs and fabric, painted pieces of wood and plastic refuse, assert their past function and hint at potential narratives in playful variations, revealing the artist’s hand and his vivid imagination along the way.