Surrealism – Page 3

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November 8, 2021November 8, 2021, by Etty Yaniv

High + Low: D. Dominick Lombardi Retrospective at Marie Walsh Sharpe Gallery

In Dialogue

*Visiting Artists & Critics Series Lecture Reception for Artist + Curator*, UCCS GOCA’s Marie Walsh Sharpe Gallery of Contemporary Art, Ent Center for the Arts. Photos: Allison Daniell Moix, Stellar Propeller Studio

High + Low: D. Dominick Lombardi Retrospective at the Marie Walsh Sharpe Gallery in Colorado Springs, features 20 distinct chapters of Lombardi’s career, with artworks spanning nearly five decades. Curated by T. Michael Martin, Director of the Clara M. Eagle Gallery at Murray State University in Kentucky, the exhibition highlights the common thread throughout Lombardi’s work—an interest in blending qualities of highbrow and lowbrow art, through experimentation with various media. Lombardi’s life-long journey began with his exposure to modern art when he first saw a reproduction of Picasso’s Guernica (1939) at a very young age and continued with his introduction to the seductive world of Zap Comix in 1968. Curator T. Michael Martin says, “Lombardi’s masterful mix of high and low culture is as current as the day it was created, showing how little the aesthetics of human behavior have changed. In some ways, Lombardi’s distortions are a more truthful look at society than our daily facade of polite policy and political correctness, especially in the way we prompt contention, as Lombardi offers a much-needed change and disruption through his unique sense of humor.”

November 3, 2021November 2, 2022, by Art Spiel

Jim Condron and Ilse Sørensen Murdock – Toss at Platform Project Space

Art Spiel Photo Story

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Installation view, Jim Condron (front), Ilse Sorensen Murdock (back)

At first glance, Jim Condron’s whimsical sculptures and Sørensen Murdock’s landscape paintings are an unexpected match for a two-person exhibition. Yet, in Toss, the current show at Platform Project Space, artist and curator Elizabeth Hazan made it into an engaging duet. The show runs the gamut from landscape paintings on canvas to paintings and sculptures made of scavenged materials, but regardless of the used media, both artists prioritize color, texture, and composition.

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.

August 16, 2021August 16, 2021, by Etty Yaniv

Todd Bartel: an Omni-coupler

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Description automatically generated with medium confidence — *Todd Bartel in front of Pollination of Devonia, (Synterial series), 2002, gallery talk, L(and) exhibition, Room 83, Watertown, MA, photo courtesy of Ellen Wineberg*

Todd Bartel came to serious collage because of an assignment he received on the first day of his first class as a freshman at RISD. He recalls the desks were strewn with magazines, and as soon as the course started, Professor Hardu Keck gave the students a prompt, “Create five collages that work with the following sentence: Surrealism is the chance happening of finding an umbrella and a sewing machine on a dissecting table.” Keck did not mention he was quoting Andre Breton, who was quoting Comte de Lautréamont (Isidore Lucien Ducasse). He expected his students to work with the strangeness of visual combination and found imagery. That was Todd Bartel’s introduction to Surrealism and chance coupling. He fell in love with collage immediately, coming up with forty-five collages by the first week. One of the key elements that draws him to collage is that it can involve a vast array of analog and digital technologies. “I consider myself an Omni-coupler,” he says.

June 23, 2021November 2, 2022, by Art Spiel

Melissa Stern: Stronger than Dirt: A twenty year Retrospective

Art Spiel Photo Story

Stronger than Dirt: Melissa Stern at the Lockwood Gallery, installation shot

Walking into The Lockwood Gallery in Kingston NY one is instantly transported into another Universe. One populated by people and things who clearly are living in a world parallel to ours, but profoundly different. Smiling figures stand tall, grinning at the world, while all the time missing a limb or two. Or having their feet nailed to the ground. Images from vintage magazines merge seamlessly with Melissa Stern’s drawings. Her world is populated with folks who exhibit a stubborn resilience in the face of cosmic obstacles. Hence the exhibition’s title – Stronger Than Dirt.

March 3, 2021November 2, 2022, by Anna Mikaela Ekstrand

Heather McLeod: Hide and Seek

In Dialogue with Heather McLeod

Macintosh HD:Users:annamikaela:Downloads:Wreath VI.jpg — Heather V McLeod, Wreath IV, oil on canvas, 16” diameter, 2020. On view at and photograph courtesy of Trotter&Sholer.

Heather V McLeod is an artist exploring identity and the psychology by which we perceive others. Interested primarily in portraiture and representative work, McLeod creates pieces with the intent of capturing the character of the figure portrayed. She plays with the use of symbolism and concealment to enhance the narrative and evoke a playful yet ominous side to portraiture.

December 23, 2020November 2, 2022, by Alicia Puig

Ana Sophia Tristán: NaturalMente at Galería Matices in San José, Costa Rica

In Dialogue with Ana Sophia Tristán

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Description automatically generated — CO-VIDA, Acrylic on canvas, 2020, 48 x 35 inches

Costa Rican painter Ana Sophia Tristán was set to open her solo show NaturalMente in April, but as was the case with many art events scheduled for this year, the exhibition had to be postponed until further notice as a result of the pandemic. Fortunately by the end of September, Galería Matices – located within the halls of the historic Costa Rica Country Club, felt ready to revisit the task of mounting the emerging artist’s exhibition and Tristan was able to hold a socially-distanced vernissage in late October. NaturalMente had always planned to present paintings from her ongoing series of semi-surrealistic works of figures immersed in nature, but the several month delay allowed the artist to debut a few new pieces inspired by COVID-19 as well.

March 2, 2020May 30, 2020, by Riad Miah

Museum as Muse at the Flatiron Project Space

*Museum as Muse, Installation, Image courtesy of Leigh Behnke*

A favorite experience of mine is to visit the Metropolitan Museum without a show or work of art in mind to see. I enjoy wondering the galleries until I come across something I had not noticed before and then spend the time looking and analyzing the work. This experience is likened to one I have recently had at “Museum as Muse”, a show curated by Leigh Behnke, consisting of works by the artist herself, Joe Fig and Peter Hristoff. The show is not at a sprawling Chelsea gallery or at a small, but relevant Lower East Side venue. It is tucked away within the confines of an academic institution, School of Visual Art, located on 21^st Street in the SVA Flatiron Gallery Project Space. As the title suggests, all three artists have used the museum in some capacity as a starting point for their work.

December 4, 2019December 4, 2019, by Torey Akers

TRAPS! Ebecho Muslimova at Magenta Plains

Exhibition review by Torey Akers

Ebecho Muslimova, Fatebe Deep Frog Organza, 2019, oil and acrylic on cavas, 60” x 66”, courtesy of Magenta Plains

Human civilization has always maintained an uneasy relationship with female monstrosity—just watch the cavalcade of sirens, witches, harpies and hags that stalk the perimeters of every major mythology on earth, luring hapless men to their deaths. This hyper-visible, oft-storied, but deeply erasive marginalization has long plagued the non-normative woman; however, there’s a certain freedom in the fringes. Take Baubo, the Orphic goddess of chaos and mirth, whose paunchy, wizened appearance belied a frisky bawdiness that ancient Greeks adored. Ebecho Muslimova’s ‘Fatebe’ character, whom she has been drawing since 2011 and features vivaciously in her latest solo exhibition, TRAPS!, at Magenta Plains, New York, builds on Baubo’s cultural legacy with appropriately grotesque panache, taking a wide-eyed, manic approach to the tandem joys and pitfalls of embodiment.

September 2, 2019November 15, 2020, by Etty Yaniv

Zahra Nazari: Metamorphosing Gestures

Zahra Nazari, Tatlin’s Tower, 2018, acrylic on canvas, 68×56 inches, photo courtesy of the artist

In her lush paintings and complex installations Zahra Nazari draws largely on architecture and her Iranian roots both in terms of cultural heritage and personal experience as an immigrant, while utilizing gestural forms invoking early 20th modernists like Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) in Munich, or mid century Abstract Expressionists in NYC. This fertile amalgam of cultural cues makes her work current and thought provoking. Zahra Nazari shares with Art Spiel her experience as an artist, her approach to art making and some of her projects.