Signe career spans over fifty years. Her approach to art making relies on experimentation with painting materials and forms, often breaking from the standard rectangle and concepts of framing. Her work is featured in Mirage at Pie Projects along with August and others.
#signestuart
Julie at Hyperallergic has words about Weaving Abstraction at the Met which pays tribute to the designs and technical innovations of long-ago weavers and the 20th-century artists who took inspiration from them. The exhibit includes work by Lenore (posthumously) along with Sheila and some of the women of Bauhaus. Because of her unorthodox weaving methods, Tawney was spurned by both the craft and art worlds, but her distinct style attracted many devoted admirers (More).
#lenoretawney
Those of you that follow my instagram feed may have seen my post about recently relating strongly to a prior project while on vacation. Specifically, I took some snaps of some clouds, and it echoed for me from an Instagram project I did during 2017 that I titled and tagged #abstractionallaroundus (the images are all still up, just follow this link to my IG post).
What I loved about taking the photos of the clouds back then was their immediacy– you don’t need words to process your reaction to an amazing cloud formation- and also their fleeting nature. There was an element of chance- happenstance is really a better word- to them as each one will never exist again, a theme (impermanence) I’ve returned to since. Part of the reason I eventually stopped taking the images was that I felt I should be more present for the moments in which I stopped to experience awe, a concept I’ve visited on this blog as well.
The pretty amazing things water does in our atmosphere has to do with light, and I think my interest in the same may have been part of how my fascination developed. I hadn’t made the connection until I returned, and realized upon stepping into my studio, where I’ve been working with lighting as a material, that the connection was worth reflecting on (haha).
Regular readers know about my interest in contradiction and I am drawn to the idea that a work could literally have more than one appearance (given a change in lighting). The viewers act of changing the lighting also gives the work an experiential dimension.
Further, light and use of the same as a “material” points to opticality, at least in the visual arts. Similar to the way using cubes (for me) points at Modernism and formalist projects (and on towards contemplation), light and opticality points at the Light and Space movement which accomplishes much the same. Paint also takes on physicality when it is applied on glass, which points at its materiality. I think a nod in that direction is more appropriate for my practice which is centered in the experiential- an added bonus is that paint on a transparent surface offers a sort of contradiction in that the “painting” is on a surface and also now at least appears to be an object as well.
When writing about light recently, I made note of the influence that California Minimalism aka Light and Space has exerted on me. I’ve blogged about many of these artists and am somehow always discovering more. Peter is somewhat unique among his peers in his choice to paint on canvas. His gallery notes that he is fascinated by the uncertainty of human perception, and the duplicitous nature of vision, which can be both revealing and deceitful, and creates paintings that delve into this duality.
#peterlodato
is one of 7 artists that Artsy says stand out at this summer’s Venice Biennale (granted this is a posthumous honor in their case). Samia also gets a nod btw.
#ionesaldanha
Gwenaël at TUSSLE has words about the past and Christopher’s current choices. After unpacking all the troubling aspects of many of them they eventually point to the smallish wire sculptures which caught my eye and are “by far the most interesting pieces in the show.”
#christopherwool
I’ve had the pleasure of getting to work with Megan as we’re both members of Tiger Strikes Asteroid. Was pleased to see she has work up at Surface Noise. About her work, she writes “I make objects, paintings, and videos that abstract or oscillate between announcing and concealing meaning.
The resulting work cultivates unserious fields of imagery and installations that interrogate what it means to be visually critical in the 2020s and the future. I do this to playfully mimic, mock, and question the American confrontation between the public and the intertwined spectacle of journalism, political science, advertising, and propaganda.
The resulting work embraces the absurdity of painterly abstraction against fictional digital landscapes superimposed onto real landscapes.”
#meganbickel
Hrag at Hyperallergic says Chicago-born and Sag Harbor-based artist Claude has a strong love of jazz and that passion endows his large abstractions with a clear, rhythmic quality, and that his newest at Venus Over Manhattan is one 8 shows to see in NYC this May.
#claudelawrence
Artsy points out that four major art fairs opened last week in New York, raising the curtain on more than 300 presentations taking place across Chelsea and Midtown Manhattan. Kwadwo is one of their none favorite discoveries.
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#kwadwoasiedu
Somehow I published this post earlier before it was finished – the challenges of blogging from a phone… apologies for being bad at technology.
This weekend I found out about Frank Stella’s passing while I was down at Artfields showing and talking about a work titled Life’s Meaning is Enhanced by Its Fleeting and Transient Nature. Thanks, universe…
Frank had some training as an artist but it was not his major at Princeton, and he freely admitted to having no mimetic facility or interest. My point is that his practice was all about materiality- 100% abstractionist from the jump. I hadn’t realized that until I started reading up on him a bit for this blog. As someone who didn’t consider myself an artist until I discovered abstraction I certainly relate.
Like many art majors I met the “protractors” first. I didn’t make hard edge paintings early in my journey although I did end up there at one point. I didn’t realize until writing this blog that my reason for embracing a direct approach to opticality was also a reaction, in my case to the seriousness of an academic environment, in Frank’s to what turned out to be the broad strokes of Art history. And while those explorations were separated by half a century of time and a cultural gulf (I was reacting to the reaction to his reaction) our shared intent was to center the viewer on their perceptions- “what you see is what you see.” To put Frank’s famous quote in full context, “all I want anyone to get out of my paintings is the fact that you can see the whole idea without any conclusion”- with immediacy.
Blah blah blah- Jerry Saltz has much wiser things to say about him of course (had- article is from 2015). And I don’t just say that ’cause JS also thinks the Polish Village series is fire*. I also really liked this Megan O’Grady article from the NYT in 2020– link should get the first ten of you that use it past the pay wall.
*Here’s my Pinterest gallery of his work from the early ’70s which is some of my favorite.
#frankstella
Saw below at Artfields, about which Gary wrote “Fibonacci Series #2” is part of a larger, multi-part series of dye-sublimation digital prints on aluminum; each abstract image’s frame size is a 3 x 5 ratio, based on the Fibonacci Number Sequence. The digital paintings are made up of layers of scanned 3 x 5 negatives of photographs taken by my father during his years of service in the U.S. Air Force. Afterward, I generated digital paintings of the organic elements within those negatives and composited them together along with various gradient maps and textures I captured on various hikes during my own travels.More
#garymesagaido
wrote a recent Two Coats review of Ian. She is also a painter who showed recently with D.D.D.D.
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#annagregor
Anna at Two Coats of Paint says Ian’s immortal flub at New Collectors blurs the lines “between art, nature, and miracle, asking what painting’s vocation is at a moment when anything can be art.”
#ianmyers
Painting After Art is Dead 