contemporary art – Page 54

September 27, 2021November 2, 2022, by Art Spiel

Burbville – New Works By Kumasi Barnett

Jac Lahav and Kumasi Barnett in Conversation

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In his first solo exhibition at 42 Social Club (Lyme CT), Kumasi Barnett explores American culture, police violence, and stereotypes through the lens of comic books. Barnett’s immaculate paintings over vintage comic book covers masterfully transform well-known superhero tropes into brutal social commentary. Kumasi Barnett and 42 Social Club founder, Jac Lahav, share their reflections on Barnet’s new work.

September 27, 2021September 27, 2021, by Etty Yaniv

Lauren Whearty: Slippage between Abstraction and Image

*Lauren Whearty in her Philadelphia Studio, August 2021, photo courtesy of the artist*

Lauren Whearty paints mostly still life from observation and preliminary sketches. Occasionally she takes photos of things which serve in her painting process as cues to spark a sense of memory rather than a source for likeness. She builds her compositions with a collage-like construction, adding and removing objects from both the paintings and the still life set ups. She loves the process of fitting things into the grid of the canvas, playing between representing objects and maintaining a close sense of the flat painted surface. “Color for me is expressive, connects to memory and play in the studio. In using repeated objects, the excitement in experimentation comes from how an object is painted, from their color to their expression and what I can get paint to do,” she says.

September 26, 2021November 2, 2022, by Art Spiel

Kate Dodd: MVA Open Studios

Adjusting “Sky Cache” on the Jersey City waterfront

Manufacturers Village Artist Studios, located in an 1880’s historic industrial complex at 356 Glenwood Avenue in East Orange, NJ, will feature the work of over 60 different artists at its annual open studios weekend, Friday 10/15 (VIP Preview) and Saturday thru Sunday from 11-5, 10/16 and 10/17.

September 24, 2021September 22, 2021, by Etty Yaniv

Tamara Kostianovsky – Between Wounds and Folds at Smack Mellon

Featured Artist

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Description automatically generated — 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.

September 20, 2021September 20, 2021, by Sophia Ma

Trusting Hands at Andrew Edlin Gallery

One finds a simple common thread between the three exhibitions of women artists in Andrew Edlin Gallery this fall 2021: spiritual internal guidance in the artistic process. The work of German artist and known medium healer Agatha Wojciechowsky (1896-1986), curated by Aurelie Bernard Wortsman, is in Spirits Among Us at the entry and main gallery space, while the work of French artist Margot (b. 1982) is in Margot’s Cosmic Sanctuary at the back gallery. The solo presentation of American artist Karla Knight (b. 1958) was at the recent Independent Art Fair in New York City, which briefly overlapped with these two fall season starters at the gallery. Led by their individual connection to the otherworldly, the artists make work that invites viewers to ponder the source of creation and artistic agency.

September 19, 2021November 2, 2022, by Art Spiel

Remade in Brooklyn by the Birdhouse Gallery

Art Spiel Photo Story

Back in about 2009 friends invited artist Sunny Chapman to a gallery opening in their apartment, a gallery of tiny art in an about 1 x 2 foot rectangular inset in one of their apartment walls. Sunny Chapman loved the idea and wanted to do one in her own apartment too but since they lived close by she thought it would be disrespectful. Yet, the idea of making a tiny gallery was always nagging at her.

September 18, 2021November 2, 2022, by Art Spiel

Fred Gutzeit Retrospective at Catherine Fosnot Art Gallery

Previewing – with gallery founder and curator Catherine Fosnot

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Description automatically generated — 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.

September 17, 2021September 17, 2021, by Etty Yaniv

Luisa Caldwell Infinite Butterfly at FiveMyles

In Dialogue with artist Luisa Caldwell

Luisa Caldwell installing Curtain Call at the University of Iowa 2019, photo: Justin Torner

Brooklyn based artist Luisa Caldwell began to exhibit her candy wrapper work in 2002. She collects candy wrappers, from her daily walk on the city sidewalks or gets them from friends who send them to her from all over the world. Caldwell says she likes cleaning up the earth one wrapper at a time. Her current show at FIveMyles runs from September 18^th through October 17^th.

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

Becky Yazdan: Finding the Edge of Experience

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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.

September 6, 2021December 6, 2024, by Etty Yaniv

Marya Kazoun: Trans-mutational Materiality#

*Steady Breath*, 2003, installation/ performance, bamboo, wool, fabric, thread, 320 cm x 300 cm x 228 cm , photo credit: Margerida Correia

Each of Marya Kazoun’s sculptures, performances, and installations evolves into its own open-ended narrative, deriving from the artist’s personal journey—childhood memories and cultural background. Throughout her versatile body of work, Marya Kazoun plays with the concepts of time and space by blurring their boundaries, excavating a wide array of imagery from the realms of the collective and the subconscious to form rich and poetic installations evoking parallel universes. The eclectic materials she is using in her work—fabric, bamboo, Murano glass, plastic, paper, and whatever inspires her—assume new life and new meaning within her idiosyncratic, imaginative, and elaborate visual vocabulary.