Contemporary Art and Culture
When my mother was very old, I wanted to tell her what it was like to be in the art world. I said, “It is a little like joining the carnival.” While not affording her much comfort, I tried to convey the disorderly balancing act of the ridiculous and the transcendent, the illusory and the real, the sincere and the piratical. I wanted to suggest a midway of precarious lives, thrill rides, and a dubious game of chance.
Continue reading “Phantom Attractions at Astor Weeks”
Who was Stephane Mandelbaum? A closeted gay man? The child of Holocaust survivors? A liar? A thief? A brilliant artist you’ve never heard of? All of the above and perhaps more.
The Drawing Center is presenting the first-ever show of Mandelbaum’s work in the US, and it is a show that left me gob-smacked. The combination of Mandelbaum’s brilliant drawing, deeply personal vision, and the complexity of his backstory is a tale made for cinema. Born in 1961 to a family of paternal Polish Holocaust survivors and maternal Belgian Armenians, Mandelbaum grew up in the town of Namur, about an hour and a half from Brussels. His Father, Ari, was a well-known painter, and his mother, Pili, was an illustrator. There is no record of siblings. A gifted draftsman from a young age but dyslexic and eccentric, Mandelbaum moved from Namur to Brussels, where he seemed to devote his time to making drawings and engaging in what is termed “petty crime.” He married a woman from Zaire (now called The Democratic Republic of Congo) and lived between the worlds of Belgian Africans, the Belgian crime underworld, and his own artistic imagination.
Continue reading “Stéphane Mandelbaum at The Drawing Center”During the Coronavirus pandemic, Art Spiel is reaching out to artists to learn how they are coping.
Margot Spindelman is a painter living in Brooklyn, New York, whose most recent work is an intimate exploration of disorder, rupture, security and loss, expressed in the language of collage, as painted pieces are torn, drawn, reassembled. She has had solo shows in New York at both the Perlow Gallery and Platform Gallery. Her work has been shown in many group shows in New York and elsewhere. Spindelman is a recipient of both a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Painting (2004) and a George Sugarman Foundation Grant (2007). She received her Bachelors degree in Fine Arts from the University of Michigan, and her Masters of Fine Arts from the San Francisco Art Institute. Her work is featured on line by Gibson Contemporary.
Continue reading “Artists on Coping: Margot Spindelman”