abstract expressionism – Page 3

October 21, 2022November 2, 2022, by Anne Sherwood Pundyk

Rainer Gross: Double Take, Solo Exhibition at East End Arts, Riverhead, NY

Gallery view, East End Arts, Riverhead, NY. Courtesy East End Arts and the artist.

In Double Take, Rainer Gross’ solo show at East End Arts through November 5, 2022 in Riverhead, NY, the artist invites the viewer to take a step closer to his abstract, intensely colorful paintings. Gross offers the viewer the satisfying experience of engaging intellectually with the underlying organizing principle of his compositions while savoring a sumptuously layered array of the results. His paintings are comprised of two (sometimes four) identically sized, stretched rectangular canvases shown side-by-side. He applies pools, bands, bars and patches of saturated hues of oil paint on one canvas and water-based pigment on the other. While the colors are still wet, the paired canvases are then placed together, face to face. When pulled apart, the forms on one canvas imprint on the other creating a shared Rorschach-like result. The artist refers to his paintings as “twins.” The side-by-side canvases are nearly identical, yet their differences become an intriguing puzzle to recognize, trace and sort. This easy-to-grasp concept offers a frisson of delight for the viewer as they experience the variety of its execution.

June 1, 2022December 30, 2022, by Saul Ostrow

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

A room with art on the wall

Description automatically generated with low confidence — 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.

February 7, 2022November 2, 2022, by Art Spiel

Ellen Kozak – Vigil

Featured Artist

*Gallery View. Photo courtesy of David Richard Gallery*

Vigil, Ellen Kozak’s first solo painting exhibition with David Richard Gallery, featured two fully realized series of abstract oil paintings on panel. The painter, with studios in New York City and beside the Hudson River in Greene County, explores the relationship between the fluidity of paint and river surfaces affected by the intersection of natural and manmade phenomena. Altogether the paintings activated the gallery space into a cohesive site-responsive installation.

September 13, 2021August 2, 2021, by Etty Yaniv

Becky Yazdan: Finding the Edge of Experience

A person sitting in a chair

Description automatically generated with medium confidence — Becky Yazdan in studio, 2021

Becky Yazdan’s paintings are based on things she encounters in her daily life as well as her memory of events, feelings, and colors. For her the painting process is an active dialogue with the nature of things around her. “The paintings are like dreams—the events of the day reorganized and combined with other events and memories until a new, often surprising reality has taken shape,” she says.

August 22, 2021August 22, 2021, by Tansy Xiao

Wei Jia: The Remembrance of Ink

A picture containing text

Description automatically generated — Wei Jia, No. 19238, 2021. Gouache, Ink and Xuan Paper Collage on Paper, 31 ½ x 44 ¼ inches. ©Wei Jia, courtesy of Fou Gallery and Chambers Fine Art

At a certain point in one’s life, they stop making new marks or registering new memories. All that remains is a fluid, ever-changing assemblage of the fragments from the past. I would call it no stagnation: it is rather a moderate manner of growing at a different pace.

June 5, 2021June 3, 2021, by Etty Yaniv

Painting the Narrative at the National Arts Club

In Dialogue with Dee Shapiro

A picture containing indoor, floor, wall, ceiling

Description automatically generated — Installation view

In the group exhibition Painting the Narrative at the National Arts Club in New York City the artist Dee Shapiro brings together six contemporary artists who explore content and form of narrative painting ranging from interiors to landscapes, personal to imagined, realistic to fantastic. Featured artists: Jennifer Coates, Laura Karetzky, Judith Linhares, Ernesto Renda, Kyle Staver, and George Towne. The show runs through June 28^th.

November 16, 2020October 20, 2020, by Etty Yaniv

Bonny Leibowitz – Not This, Not That, Yet This and That

A close up of an animal

Description automatically generated — Bonny Leibowitz

Bonny Leibowitz makes site responsive sculptural installations with painterly sensibility – they hover in the air, spill on the floor, or sprawl on the walls. Her love of Baroque compositions, Abstract Expressionist gestures is underscored throughout her work. Bonny Leibowitz had a long-standing interest in the illusory nature of experience and the supposition of stability. In Terra Unfirma, her most recent body of work, she tackles what it means to deconstruct expectations and perceptions by using a variety of materials which play off one another – natural appearing manufactured, manufactured appearing natural – constructing environments which may feel ephemeral, eternal, fleeting, solid, light or looming at the same time. The artist refers to this quote: “Everything worth knowing is cloaked in paradox because everything substantial defies being revealed in its totality” – Mark Nepo

May 1, 2020May 1, 2020, by Etty Yaniv

Artists on Coping : Gregory Coates

During the Coronavirus pandemic, Art Spiel is reaching out to artists to learn how they are coping.

C:\Users\Kiki\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\INetCache\Content.Outlook\34M85MJB\IMG_2207.JPG — *Physical distance can translate into uncontested time—studio shot “Center left, Center right” acrylic, feathers 48×360” 2018*

Despite gaining recognition as an abstract expressionist for his bold sculptures, installations, and assemblages, Gregory Coates primarily defines himself as a painter. Coates exploratory studio practice and compositional experiments with found objects have established him as a prolific artist with a compelling and extensive catalog. He studied at Corcoran School of Art in Washington, D.C. and has been exhibited at museums and galleries around the world including, the Smithsonian Institute of American Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, The Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts, Galerie Denkraum in Vienna, Austria, and Kamigamo Shrine in Kyoto, Japan among others. Recent publications include an opening paragraph of “Abstract Truths” by Angela N. Carroll for Sugercane Magazine, Art Pulse, and White Hot Magazine. He is exhibiting with N’Namdi Contemporary, Miami.

March 16, 2020July 10, 2020, by Etty Yaniv

William Corwin – Flattening of Time

Pazuzu, 2018, hydrocal. Photo courtesy the artist

Experiencing William Corwin’s sculptures may resemble opening a time capsule filled with mysterious objects made of familiar materials like sand, rope, clay and wood. By drawing on references ranging from architecture to archaeology, totems to teeth, Corwin’s sculptures resonate with archaic civilizations — removed yet urgently present. William Corwin shares with Art Spiel what brought him to sculpture, takes a look at some of his projects, and sheds some light on his curatorial and art writing practices.

February 27, 2020May 30, 2020, by Peiyue Wu

Controlled Entropy, Taher Jaoui at 81 Leonard Gallery

*Taher Jaoui: Controlled Entropy installation view, photograph by Hannah Rozelle, photo courtesy of the artist*

One might find Taher Jaoui introverted the moment meeting him. It might be less about an aloof temperament commonly found in an artist than a reserved and prudent character often associated with a science person. The way in which Jaoui’s artworks act out follows a similar interpersonal pattern. Those scratchy mathematics signs and formulas are the most prominent elements of the new series of monochrome paintings featured in Taher’s current solo exhibition Controlled Entropy at 81 Leonard Gallery, co-hosted by Uncommon Beauty Gallery. The juxtaposition of the handwritings of mathematical formulas and the gestural brushwork in an abstract expressionist manner not only prompts questions about Jaoui’s background, but also problematizes the hostile split between art and mathematics. Reminding viewers of a lecturer running a mathematical calculation across the blackboard with chalk, this series of paintings highlights the performative elements in mathematics, as well as the craft aspects of labor invested in this intellectual activity.