Kejoo Park is a Korean-American artist, landscape artist and architect. In her works, Park focuses on the duality of the internal and external worlds and her paintings, objects and installations manifest the alienation between man and nature; they address external nature, which is revealed in what man did not create himself. However, its potential and uniqueness lie in its creative ideas and actions, which develop through the influence of external structures and the engagement with culture and society.
Artists in residence in a training session at the Golden Lab
In 2012, the Sam & Adele Golden Foundation for the Arts introduced a one-of-a-kind residency program dedicated to the art of paint. Situated in the heart of central New York, mere steps from the Golden Artist Colors manufacturing facility, a 19th-century barn was transformed into a space that seamlessly blends history and modernity. It offers spacious studios and private apartments, providing a haven for artists to engage with materials and technologies that define contemporary artistic practice. The Golden Foundation Residency Program is a deliberate endeavor to aid professional artists in their quest to explore and master innovative materials and techniques. Each year, the Foundation hosts six Exploratory Residency Sessions, each lasting four weeks and accommodating three artists at a time.
Naomi Okubo has been creating works that explore the themes of identity and relationships with others. Her paintings, sculptures, and installations often feature multiple portraits of herself in imaginary, fantasized settings full of decorative patterns and vibrant colors that blur the boundary between the self and the surrounding environment. This ambiguity regarding identity stems from her experiences of struggling to establish selfhood in relation to others during her adolescence. One of her turning points was when she developed her interest in Wardian cases or what she calls “closely glazed spaces.”
Caída del peñón, 2024, Acrylic and polyurethane on wood, 15 67/100 × 20 7/25 in
In a recent conversation at Barro Gallery in New York, the Sue and Eugene Mercy assistant curator Ana Torok (MoMA, prints and drawings), likened Matías Duville’s artistic process to “throwing a lance” at the canvas. Indeed, Duville is not kind to his materials. His artistic oeuvre is replete with scratched metal and burned wood. For his paper works, charcoal is inflicted, not applied. When I had the good fortune to speak with the artist about his current exhibition at Barro Gallery, Vertices of Time, I asked what kinds of materials he had used for his paintings. One material stuck out as particularly harsh: “heat gun.”
Installation view Womanhood 102 (with Lesley Bodzy’s Soft Embrace I, 2022. Acrylic. 69 x 43 x 11 inches, on the left and works by Katie Commodore in the middle and on the right). Courtesy of the curator.
A golden, shimmering drapery cascades from the wall—the skin-like surface of Soft Embrace is from Lesley Bodzy’s experimental work with acrylic paint. She uses the liquid pigment as a sculptural material, shaped into a malleable cloth, reminding of Lynda Benglis’s poured latex on the floor or Eva Hesse’s visceral and alluring sculptures. The sensuous object evokes a tactile experience, an imagination of how touching it might feel, through looking. Matter surprises, entering a threshold between fluid and solid, elasticity and delicacy. Jamaica Kincaid’s 1978 story Girl tells a mother-daughter dispute about how a girl should behave. “…on Sundays try to walk like a lady and not like the slut you are so bent on becoming…” The mother’s advice seems endless and castigating, instructing every aspect of daily living. Side-by-side, Bodzy’s curved drapery recalls ‘how girls should behave,’ as it seemingly hides things beneath and its smooth surface presents an image of flawless elegancy, concealing feelings in a muted position.
View of Maurizio Cattelan’s 2024 exhibition “Sunday” at Gagosian, New York. Photo Maris Hutchinson
The conjunction of art and politics is a confusing and often compromised enterprise. The commentator Ben Davis argues that as our society regresses under the politics of neoliberalism, such art serves a “compensatory role.” Much explicitly political art is either pedantic or satirical. There’s a long history dating back to the Incoherents and Decadents, the late 19th-century artists who embraced absurdity, irrationality, and the grotesque to protest against emerging bourgeois values and the academic practice of art. They used parody, satire, the carnivalesque, as well as didactic and pedantic jokes to expose cultural ideocracies and societal flaws. This was followed by the Dadaists in the early 20th century, who expressly mixed real-world politics and provocative, anti-art gestures with the intention of undermining social and artistic conventions and setting the groundwork for a social and cultural revolution. Since then, and as an avant-garde compliment to social realism, there has grown up a tradition of the trickster artist—pranksters using absurdity, parody, and gestures to scandalize and provoke their audiences.
Matthias Franz (German, born 1984), infantile gestures, 2024, Oil on canvas, 170 x 160 cm. (66.9 x 63 in.) courtesy of GRIMM Gallery
From dark and moody to blithe and bright, gestural painting is having a resurgent moment at the Independent Art Fair this year. Representational, abstract, and everything in between, artists showcase a wide range of motions and gesticulations of the artists’ hand tell the stories.
Installation view, Joe Bradley: Vom Abend, David Zwirner, New York, 2024. Photo courtesy of the gallery
The ten paintings in Vom Abend, Joe Bradley’s current show at David Zwirner, measure up to 93 x 120 inches and are all dated 2023-2024. They are big and, with one exception, are in landscape orientations. Framed with white oak strips, they have stately feel, yet they are hardly genteel. They are full of crusty skins of dry paint that seem randomly attached to the surfaces. They are creased and folded. They reek of oil paint. And while the color is buoyant, joyous even, they are also dark. Bradley isn’t afraid of black, and he explores shit brown with an alarming gusto. There are passages where the paint seems to have been aggressively ripped off the surface of the canvas, only to be tenderly painted over again. There are staccato stippling marks. There is erasure and heavy impasto in stretches. Although this may sound like the paintings are heavily labored and full of themselves, they aren’t. And careful examination reveals worlds to explore.
Ernesto Renda and Katie Hector in their studios. Images courtesy of the artists.
Ernesto Renda and I first met on the internet, as more and more artists do. A follow turned into likes, which developed into mutual curiosity and respect for each other’s practice. Renda, who lives in New York, and I in Los Angeles, kept in touch for months, viewing miniature backlit versions of the other’s work while each suspecting there was more than met the eye. As fate would have it, Renda’s solo exhibition, The Moment of Truth, opened at Moskowitz Bayse in Los Angeles; subsequently, my solo exhibition, EGO RIP, opened at Management in New York City two weeks later. Viewing the work in person was enlightening and generated conversations around material play, intuition, and the verisimilitude of our subjects. These brief yet poignant chats inspired us to pose the questions below from the perspective of one visual practitioner to another.
Installation view. Photo courtesy of The Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation
The exhibition Accommodating the Object of paintings by Elizabeth Yamin and Bosiljka Raditsa is presented by The Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation in New York and was curated by William Corwin, who describes this exhibition as an intimate survey that offers the viewer an opportunity to compare the works of these two artists, who were active during the latter part of the twentieth century without attaining prominent careers.
