Tag: conceptual art

Posted on , by Etty Yaniv

High + Low: D. Dominick Lombardi Retrospective at Marie Walsh Sharpe Gallery

In Dialogue


Visiting Artists & Critics Series Lecture Reception for Artist + Curator, UCCS GOCA’s Marie Walsh Sharpe Gallery of Contemporary Art, Ent Center for the Arts. Photos: Allison Daniell Moix, Stellar Propeller Studio

High + Low: D. Dominick Lombardi Retrospective at the Marie Walsh Sharpe Gallery in Colorado Springs, features 20 distinct chapters of Lombardi’s career, with artworks spanning nearly five decades. Curated by T. Michael Martin, Director of the Clara M. Eagle Gallery at Murray State University in Kentucky, the exhibition highlights the common thread throughout Lombardi’s work—an interest in blending qualities of highbrow and lowbrow art, through experimentation with various media. Lombardi’s life-long journey began with his exposure to modern art when he first saw a reproduction of Picasso’s Guernica (1939) at a very young age and continued with his introduction to the seductive world of Zap Comix in 1968. Curator T. Michael Martin says, “Lombardi’s masterful mix of high and low culture is as current as the day it was created, showing how little the aesthetics of human behavior have changed. In some ways, Lombardi’s distortions are a more truthful look at society than our daily facade of polite policy and political correctness, especially in the way we prompt contention, as Lombardi offers a much-needed change and disruption through his unique sense of humor.”

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Posted on , by Etty Yaniv

Hedwig Brouckaert: Un-Informing

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Hedwig Brouckaert in her Studio in the Beginage in Ghent Belgium, August 2021

New York city based artist Hedwig Brouckaert is currently working on a body of work for two solo shows, one at the Emory & Henry College in Virginia, where she is invited as visiting artist in January 2022, and one for Galerie El in September in Belgium. She has been developing Peel (America), a collage series of magazine images of skin on marble tiles, which she started during the lockdown. She says the tiled walls in public spaces have become like skin surfaces that were feared during the pandemic, as touch has become complicated. She is fascinated by the contrast between the depth and time visible in a marble tile, created by age-old geographical processes, and the temporality of magazine paper. “Even though magazines – and mass media images in general – arrive as pristine, glowing objects in the mail or on the newsstand they are meant to disappear quickly and to become trash, to be replaced by the most recent up-to-date information,” she says.

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Posted on , by Etty Yaniv

Maggie Nowinski -Drawing (un)limited

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Maggie Nowinski, Be Spilled, My Heart, 2021 detail installation view with artist for scale, wHoles are acrylic and India ink on canvas, double sided, installation approximately 20’x30’x10’

About a decade ago, Maggie Nowinski shifted her focus from site specific project-based installation to her studio as the primary site of her work. She made this shift after realizing that her connection to the work had become too fragmented. She needed her studio work to become more accessible and her creativity more meditative. Since drawing has always been at the core of her work, focusing on drawing with limited materials and themes, enabled her to process a lot of the ideas she had been working through in her large-scale installations. “I was craving a way to immediately access creativity, to be in a place where if I had an hour I could walk into my studio and pick up where I’d left off on a drawing,” she says.

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Posted on , by Etty Yaniv

Tamara Kostianovsky – Between Wounds and Folds at Smack Mellon

Featured Artist

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The artist at Smack Mellon, photo courtesy of Rachel Vera Steinberg 

Between Wounds and Folds, Tamara Kostianovsky’s solo exhibition at Smack Mellon, features sculptures which link issues of gender-based violence, personal memory, and ecological destruction through consumption into a complex and speculative ecosystem. Her dimensional forms, both soft and brutal, combine discarded fabric with industrial materials, often drawing their shape from mutilated fauna and flora in various states of decay, including tree stumps, cow carcasses, and birds of prey.

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Posted on , by Art Spiel

Fred Gutzeit Retrospective at Catherine Fosnot Art Gallery

Previewing – with gallery founder and curator Catherine Fosnot

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Fred Gutzeit (2021) Future Life Puzzle, Acrylic on paper on canvas, 72” x 72”

The Opening Fall Season at the Fosnot Art Gallery will showcase Fred Gutzeit’s body of works from 1966-2021. Although he began as a painter of found objects and landscapes, Fred Gutzeit has never been satisfied with capturing the realism we “see“ in nature. He has continually sought a realism through abstraction that would capture the hidden complexity of nature juxtaposed with a human search for structure. Musings about complexity and chaos theories, string theory, mathematics modeling, and current scientific speculation about “multiverses” are employed as he explores consciousness, interaction, identity, and searches for structure. His bold use of color and dimensionality are wonderous and aesthetically pleasing allowing us to travel into the cosmos of his world.

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Posted on , by Amy Brady

An(other) Interview with Artist Katie Holten

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In this issue I have for you my second interview with artist Katie Holten. We first spoke back in 2019, when she created the NYC Tree Alphabet to draw greater attention to the threats that New York-area trees face. Now she’s created an alphabet for the trees of Ireland, her home country. In our interview below we discuss what inspired her latest alphabet, how she’s developed an accompanying tool for use in schools, and what to expect from Learning to be Better Lovers, her forthcoming exhibition about learning to love all creatures on the planet.

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Posted on , by Etty Yaniv

Todd Bartel: an Omni-coupler

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Todd Bartel in front of Pollination of Devonia, (Synterial series), 2002, gallery talk, L(and) exhibition, Room 83, Watertown, MA, photo courtesy of Ellen Wineberg

Todd Bartel came to serious collage because of an assignment he received on the first day of his first class as a freshman at RISD. He recalls the desks were strewn with magazines, and as soon as the course started, Professor Hardu Keck gave the students a prompt, “Create five collages that work with the following sentence: Surrealism is the chance happening of finding an umbrella and a sewing machine on a dissecting table.” Keck did not mention he was quoting Andre Breton, who was quoting Comte de Lautréamont (Isidore Lucien Ducasse). He expected his students to work with the strangeness of visual combination and found imagery. That was Todd Bartel’s introduction to Surrealism and chance coupling. He fell in love with collage immediately, coming up with forty-five collages by the first week. One of the key elements that draws him to collage is that it can involve a vast array of analog and digital technologies. “I consider myself an Omni-coupler,” he says.

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Posted on , by Katherine Earle

Overflowing Skies: Stephanie Eche at High Line Nine

Art Spiel Photo Story

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Agua/Cielo, 2021 Cotton, wool, indigo, wire and steel. Photo by Brian Schutza courtesy of the artist.

“…I try to follow the threads where they lead in order to track them and find their tangles and patterns crucial for staying with the trouble in real and particular places in time.”

– Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene.

The undulating asymmetry of Stephanie Eche’s weavings in her solo exhibition Handmade Landscapes: Ocean Meets Sky that ran through July 26th, 2021 at High Line Nine, leaves space for you to interpret. The first work that your eyes encounter, Agua/Cielo, mirrors staring out at an ocean horizon that becomes the air above, a direct embodiment of the show’s title. The loosely woven piece speaks to the cyclical nature of water; its evaporation and transformation into rain that returns it to earth. 

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