Contemporary Art and Culture
Alice Zinne‘s paintings draw from literature and mythology to create dramatic landscapes in which light and dark interplay as main protagonists. Her oil paintings, watercolors, and drawings often depict floods of light intertwined with fragmented darker patches, evoking dense and fluid inner spaces.
Continue reading “Alice Zinnes: Inner landscapes of Light”
Zinaida is one of the most important Ukrainian artists working today. Her practice revolves around the study of mythologies, national symbols, archaic imagery, and the role of women as carriers of sacred knowledge, stemming from the Kyiv-based artist’s extensive ethnographic research and close collaboration with indigenous communities in remote areas of her country. Marina Abromović has described Zinaida’s practice as subtly balancing her work “at the juncture of historical symbolism and modernity. She uses traditional imagery, rituals and crafts to convey meanings that are relevant to a vibrant and fluid culture. Zinaida is a rebel. She was in many dangerous zones (on Maidan during the Revolution of Dignity, Chornobyl, in the war zone in the Eastern Ukraine). To me she is like a Ukrainian “Guerilla Girl.” Zinaida’s work is currently on view in Venice and New York.
Zinaida’s solo pavilion Without Women is an official Ukrainian Collateral Event at the Venice Biennale. The exhibition’s curator, Dallas Contemporary Executive Director Peter Doroshenko, introduced Zinaida as “a national cultural figure for Ukraine.” He says that over the last fifteen years, she has “summarized, documented and interpreted contemporary Ukrainian society through her work. Zinaida’s works have become an important and seminal influence for all the contemporary Ukrainian artists.”
Continue reading “Zinaida: Ukrainian Artist With Important Works in Venice and New York”
It is perhaps in this state of “not knowing” that we first encounter the works in artist Nishiki Sugawara-Beda’s current solo exhibition Somewhere Around There, on view at the Amos Eno gallery. The exhibition, which presents works from the artist’s KuroKuroShiro series (‘black-black-white’ in Japanese), features dynamic shapes in shaded monochrome that seem to alternately emerge and recede from view. Faced with this shifting visual field, the viewer gradually develops a kind of intimacy with these unknown forms, opening up new possibilities for interpretation and engagement.
Continue reading “Not knowing is most intimate at Amos Eno”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.
Continue reading “Trusting Hands at Andrew Edlin Gallery”In Dialogue with Holly Wong
Phoenix, Holly Wong’s first solo show in the San Francisco Bay area is scheduled from April 1, 2021 through May 31, 2021 at SLATE in Oakland, features work she has created during the shelter in place order over the past year. These body of work reflects her spiritual and visual responses to the pandemic, and her sense of need for personal and social transformation through a wide variety of expressions, which include Phoenix, the large-scale drawing-based installation, other larger scale paintings on paper, a series of more intimate works on paper, and assemblages. Holly Wong says that as a response to her deep sense of loss and grief at the state of world affairs, she created a large mythical bird as a metaphor for her own body—”In Phoenix I see my desire for purification, cleansing and rebirth,” she says. When the artist thinks of the central theme of the show, she remembers excerpts from the Buddha’s Fire Sermon:
“The mind is burning, ideas are burning, mind-consciousness is burning, mind-contact is burning…” “Burning with what? Burning with the fire of lust, with the fire of hate, with the fire of delusion.”
Continue reading “Holly Wong: Phoenix at SLATE Contemporary”
Brian Wood’s drawings are literally visionary. They derive from what the artist describes as a “trance-like” state, where the ego is consumed by the image, as the inner mind and hand become vital conduits for arising images. This inner process results in drawings that invoke nuanced mental states, fragmented memories, and perhaps most important, a glimpse at the unknown. Holland Cotter wrote in his NY Times review of Brian Wood’s 2014 solo show Enceinte that the artist creates “a kind of Symbolist world in which emerging into life and being devoured by it are part of the same inexorable process.” In a cynical age with ubiquitously ironic art, this unabashed approach to the spiritual elements in the process of art making is quite refreshing.
Continue reading “Brian Wood Drawings: Visions of Hyperawareness”
Douglas Florian‘s paintings resonate with hypnotic chants – repetitive texts or letters resemble spells or curses, a child’s scribbles, or ancient liturgical notes. His marks and vibrant pigments form altogether abstracted and rhythmic fields which entice you to take a close look, read, and simultaneously listen to your own inner voice. Douglas Florian shares with Art Spiel some background and ideas behind his work.
Continue reading “Douglas Florian – Seeing Words”
Curated by Katerina Lanfranco, “Liminal Worlds,” the upcoming show at Trestle features four artists who reflect on the fluid dividing line between the multiple realities we experience as part of the human condition. Anne Polashenski and Greg Thielker examine notions of “self and other” through ethnography, immigrant experiences, and national borders. Ashley Hope and Elizabeth Insogna explore the elusive notions of spirit and afterlife. Altogether, through their artworks, these artists invite us to venture into territories that make us contemplate not only politics, but also the potential for deeper self-awareness. Continue reading “Liminal Worlds at Trestle Gallery”