contemporary art – Page 42

March 20, 2023February 13, 2023, by Etty Yaniv

David Dempewolf: Between Optics and Daydreams

David Dempewolf, imago 02 (bird’s eye self portrait), 2013 aqueous media and wax pencil on paper, 10” X 14”, courtesy of artist

Most artists’ studios give us a glimpse into their thought and work process but wandering through David Dempewolf’s studio gives more than a glimpse. It is an experience of entering a wonderous world— a hidden niche reveals a station for experimental animation, a corner serves as a station for wood printmaking, a quaint staircase to a small attic leads to imaginative series of drawings, and a “peephole” in a wall further guides our gaze below, to Marginal Utility, the non-for-profit gallery space he runs with his partner and spouse Yuka Yokoyam. It feels like entering a Borgeisan world where the artist’s thoughts and the endless possibilities of “cataloging” entangle and materialize into a new entity in a tangible space.

March 11, 2023May 12, 2024, by Saul Ostrow

Beyond the Digital at Venus Over Manhattan (uptown)

Opinion

Installation view of "Beyond Digital", Venus Over Manhattan, 2022 — Installation view of “Beyond Digital”, Venus Over Manhattan, 2022. Photo courtesy of Venus Over Manhattan

Artists have been working with technology since the beginning of the 20^th Century. This represents an important moment in artmaking’s evolution, which until recently collectors and institutions haven’t wanted much to do with—the result is a lack of historical presence for such works. Without recourse to a history, every few decades promoters herald the emergence of an exciting new realm of expression or experimentation related to a new media, which appears to the uninformed to be without precedence—most recently it was the crypto-driven NFT market. It is this lack of a sense of history that makes it possible for the organizers of Beyond Digital to claim that this exhibition brings together pioneering artists whose works explore the possibilities of bridging the digital and physical realms. Problematically, this project is more than 50 years old and is built upon one that dates back to the start of the 20th century, when artists working in the modernist tradition started to adapt technology to art to produce light organs, slideshows and kinetic art.

March 10, 2023March 7, 2023, by Art Spiel

Kahori Kamiya: Long Eclipse at Amos Eno

Featured Artist

Kahori Kamiya, Solo show Long Eclipse Installation view at Amos Eno Gallery

Long Eclipse, Kahori Kamiya’s NY debut solo exhibition currently showing at Amos Eno Gallery, delves into the artist’s deeply personal experience of motherhood, breastfeeding, and the impact of the pandemic. Through paintings and sculptures, Kamiya explores the emotions and challenges of this unique time in her life, while also reflecting on themes of racial discrimination and grief. Her organic shapes run through semi-figurative drawings and painted sculptures, resonating with ancient Japanese spirituality and its relation to nature. The show runs through March 26, 2023.

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 2, 2023March 1, 2023, by Art Spiel

Melanie Daniel at Mindy Solomon SHADOW WEAVING

Featured Artist

C:\Users\mdani\Pictures\All PAINTINGS\Mindy February 2023 SHADOW WEAVING\Edited Mindy Feb 2023\smaller shadow weaving\Melanie in studio February 2022 SM.jpg — Artist in studio, 2022

The oil paintings featured in Shadow Weaving, Melanie Daniel’s second solo show at Mindy Solomon, depict magical landscapes of forests, ponds, and their inhabitants—a moth, a pair of coyotes, a beetle, an occasional mystical spirits. The paintings begin for her as meditations and transform into fleeting environments—both hallucinatory and recognizable. The show runs through March 18th. 2023.

February 27, 2023July 1, 2023, by Elisabeth Condon

Elisabeth Condon Describes a Painting – Wanderings, Bilbao

WANDERINGS: BILBAO, ORANGE, YELLOW AND BLUE, 45 1/2 X 39 1/2, Acrylic on Canvas, 2004 //Jules Olitski Art Foundation Inc. / 2022 Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY — Jules Olitski ,Wanderings: Bilbao, Orange, Yellow and Blue, 2004, acrylic on canvas, 45 ½ x 39 1/2 inches, from the exhibition Jules Olitski: Late Works at the Sam and Adele Golden Gallery on the campus of Golden Artist Colors in New Berlin, New York

Painter Elisabeth Condon’s reflections on a painting by Jules Olitski she had seen at the exhibition Jules Olitski: Late Works—were initially presented in the first episode of Elisabeth Condon Describes a Painting, a new series artist Amy Talluto has recently launched in her podcast Pep Talks for Artists. In each episode in this series Elisabeth Condon shares her way of looking at one painting, here, at the acrylic painting (2004) Wanderings, Bilbao: Orange Yellow and Blue, by Ukrainian- American artist Jules Olitski. The show at the Sam and Adele Golden Gallery in New Berlin, NY is up until March 2023 and another concurrent show of his works was up at Yares Gallery in New York (till February 11, 2023).

February 20, 2023January 26, 2023, by Etty Yaniv

Frances McCormack: Wonder and Limitations

Paintings are the products of imagination whose language is feeling and form. My paintings describe an interior theatre where the relationship of energy to limitation unfolds in a drama that is primarily optical. The work references the natural world filtered through the lens of the marvelous and invites the viewers’ participation and interpretation…. a task ideally suited to painting.

– Frances McCormack, 2020

February 17, 2023February 17, 2023, by Melissa Stern

Myrlande Constant: Drapo at Fort Gansevoort

:HAITI:Constant Morts piece.jpg — Reincarnation Des Morts 110 x 111 inchex. Beads, sequins, tassels on fabric. 2022.

Fort Gansevoort Gallery in New York’s Meatpacking District has long been one of my favorite galleries. Housed in an old three-story building, they have been presenting some of the freshest and most original shows in the city. The current exhibition, Myrlande Constant: Drapo is one of their best. Constant is a Haitian artist who works in textiles, taking a traditional form called “drapo” and rocketing it into the realm of contemporary art. Drapo is based on a 19^th century embroidery technique developed in France, called tambour. Fabric is stretched tautly over a wooden frame and embroidery, using sequins and beads done from the reverse side.

February 10, 2023May 12, 2024, by Saul Ostrow

Impossible Failures at Zwirner

Opinion

A photo of Pope.L in his studio, dated 2022 — Pope.L, studio, 2022, photo courtesy of David Zwirner Gallery 52 Walker

When I heard about Impossible Failures it promised to be an exciting exhibition, in that it was to bring together Gordon Matta-Clark (1943–1978), a White post-Minimalist artist best known for his site-specific works of cutting through buildings and homes, and Pope.L (b.1955), a Black artist who used to describe himself as the friendliest Black man in America, and is known for his public performances and installations, which address Black racial stereotyping and other such hypocrisies. In a not un-interesting way, the resulting exhibition is a curatorial mash-up in which the works in it are overwhelmed. As such, this is not an exhibition where the works of each artist supply a context for the other, nor does it explore Matta-Clark’s legacy by focusing on Pope.L’s overlapping strategies. Instead it might be thought of as a collaborative installation authored by the curator Ebony L. Haynes.

February 8, 2023February 7, 2023, by Art Spiel

Scaling Nature at the Bronx River Art Center

Art Spiel Photo Story

A picture containing indoor, floor, room, colonnade

Description automatically generated — *Left: Wildriana Paulino, Right: Linda Cunningham. Photo courtesy of Michele Brody*

Scaling Nature at the Bronx River Art Center features large-scale mixed-media installation works by three artists: Michele Brody, Linda Cunningham and Wildriana Paulino. Curated by Gail Nathan, the premise of this show is to represent nature as a force of nurture and destruction through the use of materials from the ephemeral to the concrete. Paulino and Brody both work with cast handmade paper that hangs from the gallery ceiling to command the space. Their massive artworks invite the viewer to be engulfed by a feeling of being one with nature and simultaneously wary of the effects of climate change.