Contemporary Art and Culture
Rhonda Wall‘s collaged paintings depict surreal landscapes where the wacky and the tragic co-exist. Her topsy-turvy worlds, in which enigmatic and often over the top cartoony characters go on with their daily business, are idiosyncratic and current. Rhonda Wall shares with Art Spiel her downtown NYC art world experience during the 80s, her work process and ideas.
Continue reading “Rhonda Wall: Survival in Delirium States”
Selfies in domestic interiors, mobile phones, and computer screens are ubiquitous throughout Laura Karetzky‘s paintings. Her fragmented figures inhabit familiar interior spaces such as a bedroom or a work space, resonating altogether the uncanny in our daily experiences in this digital age, where the boundaries between space, time, self and other become increasingly blurred and at times even disorienting. In
this interview with Art Spiel Laura Karetzky reflects on her figurative painting roots, her process, and her upcoming projects.
Curated by Michael David and Martin Dull
January 11 – January 27, 2019
Opening Reception Friday Jan 11, 6-9PM
All images by Sharilyn Neidhardt
The work in “New Narrative Now,” curated by Michael David and Martin Dull at M David & Co. is united by a particularly muscular and aggressive kind of paint handling – unsurprising from a gallery well-known for cultivating abstract expressionist work. The paintings also share lyrical and mythical storytelling qualities. Recognizable figures flicker and bend across these canvases, wading through turgid waters, or wrestling with ropes of paint, or bathing in dreamy color. Animals and toys crowd some canvases, women stretch tortured forms across others. Personal mythologies illuminate and infuse each canvas, casting a mysterious spell for the viewer.
Continue reading “New Narrative Now at M David & Co.”Melissa Stern‘s artworks depict abstracted narratives with complex emotional layers, projecting altogether an urgent psychological presence. The figures in her drawings and sculptures inhabit an absurd universe which is darkly funny in a deeply felt way. Her imagery is precise, poetic, and overall underscores a close affinity with language – bringing to mind an artist who is both an acute observer and a witty commentator. That said, it is Stern’s sensibility of raw and expressive forms that makes her not only an observant narrator but also an empathetic participant in her own human comedy. The artist shares with Art Spiel her modes of thinking, process of making, and some plans, including her solo show opening on Oct 11 at Garvey Simon Gallery.
Mary DeVincentis paintings conjure worlds that are simultaneously inner and cosmic, personal and universal, unexpected yet strangely familiar. Some of the core concepts of Buddhism, such as impermanence, emptiness, interdependence and the origins of suffering, aversion and ignorance, often surface in her work in allegorical forms. Her imagery, conveyed with a remarkable fluidity of color and form, takes the viewer deep into their own inner worlds. The artist shared with Art Spiel some of the experiences that led her to art, some of the ideas behind her work, and her overall process.
In response to Arshile Gorky’s colored drawings exhibition, an ARTnewsreviewer back in March 1947 declared that Gorky is in no sense a draftsman and that his drawings “must be appraised as doodlings, for psychological rather than formal interest.” More than sixty years later, an exquisite Gorky drawing from 1946 on loan to Outlet gallery, serves as a starting point for a vibrant dialogue between more than thirty contemporary artists with strong and distinct personal iconography and some shared formal concerns. Continue reading “Dialogue between Art and Life: suggestion, that is the dream”