Artists April Gornik and Eric Fischl team up with architect Lee Skolnick to create an incubator for artists in Sag Harbor.

Artist Eric Fischl is standing under the eaves of Sag Harbor’s deconsecrated First Methodist Church, currently a construction site he visits almost daily. More than a year ago, Fischl and his wife, artist April Gornik, purchased the building to return it to its original intent as a community gathering place.

It was a crisp early autumn day that I drove to Judy Pfaff’s home and studios near Tivoli. She lives and works in a series of barns and outbuildings that still have the rough-and-tumble sense of a working fam, with areas that have the cool geometric feel of a setting for contemporary art. Upon hearing me near the door, two big dogs barked and wagged their tails at the same time, jumping all over me once the door opened. At seventy-two, Judy has the air of a woman at least fifteen years younger, and I’m immediately put at easy while she yells orders to her dogs but laughs as they continue to lurch toward me.

Victor Cassidy interviews Jacob Hashimoto for Sculpture Magazine.

Featuring works by gallery artists Inka Essenhigh, April Gornik, Amy Bennett, and Isca Greenfield-Sanders, new book Landscape Painting Now: From Pop Abstraction to New Romanticism presents a global survey of landscape painting in the 21st century. Including work by more than 80 outstanding artists, the book highlights the thriving genre of landscape painting in the contemporary world, while also reflecting upon its origins.

In 1903, Hans Hofmann (1880 - 1966) moved from Munich to Paris where he saw the influential Paul Cézanne retrospective at the Salon d'Automne in 1907, worked with Henri Matisse, and became friends with George Braque, Robert and Sonia Delaunay and Pablo Picasso, eventually fusing Fauvism and Cubism to new effect, and later adding Wassily Kandinsky to the influential mix. Though he was present at the birth of abstract painting in the early twentieth century, he was not one of its midwives, but rather a synthesizer of their ideas, opening what is generally regarded as the first school of modern art in 1915. He settled in the United States in 1932 and finally found his own artistic voice.

Judy Pfaff’s recent show featured five major wall reliefs (all 2018) that resemble discrete exhibitions unto themselves. The series is titled “Quartet,” with works numbered one though four and a fifth designated Quartet + 1. Demonstrating the artist’s distinctive merger of painting and sculpture, these assemblages—which average some ten by fourteen feet and bear elements that extend up to five feet into the gallery space—feature rhythmical arrangements of found objects and items made by Pfaff against backgrounds of digitally abstracted photographic imagery mounted on fiberboard panels. Conflict between technology and the environment, artifice and nature, seems to be a theme of the works, which combine melted plastic buckets and pictures of flowers, wire fencing and biomorphic forms, geometric patterns and expressive painterly gestures.

Each week, artists, art historians and authors join host Tyler Green to discuss their work on The Modern Arts Notes Podcast

Episode No. 382 of The Modern Art Notes Podcast features artist Allen Ruppersberg in the first segment and curator Lucinda Barnes in the second segment discussing “Hans Hofmann: The Nature of Abstraction," currently on view at BAMPFA through 21 July 2019.

"Sculptors ReCollected" turns the Massry Gallery at the College of Saint Rose into what is almost a primer on contemporary sculpture and sculptural installation. Francis Cape, James Clark, and Judy Pfaff are each given a third of the gallery to make very different dimensional statements as part of a splashy 10th anniversary celebration of the Massry.

Many people scoff at abstract art, saying that it requires no skill to make. But new studies show that even the untrained eye detects the differences that set apart the work of real artists.

A few years back, Evan Maurer visited James Hayward at his farm in Moorpark, California, for a barbeque.

Maurer, a curious sort who was the Minneapolis Institute of Art’s director and president from 1988-2005 and a long-time friend of the artist, entered Hayward’s studio to check out some of his art – including a series Hayward had painted depicting the Stations of the Cross. The 14 pieces have never been shown in public.

Maurer told Hayward he had the perfect place to show them – Saint John’s University.

Miles McEnery Gallery is featuring works by Beverly Fishman at the New York venue.

The inviting, and deeply intriguing wall reliefs on view through November 10, 2018 at Miles McEnery Gallery are a continuation of a series Fishman began in 2012.

The works on display are made using urethane paint on cut wood panels.

Their large size and bright color palette are confrontational and bursting with tensions that beguile the viewer’s senses. By painting the edges of the pieces with gleaming fluorescent tones, the colors interact with the white of the wall behind it and give the illusion of a neon glow.

Renowned abstract painter Emily Mason to speak at BMAC on Friday, 19 October

Free talk by the 86-year-old artist is presented in connection with a major exhibition of her work at Brattleboro Museum & Art Center

Inka Essenhigh creates beautiful, whimsical worlds populated with fluid, ambiguous figures. Their playfulness invites us into their delightful, other-worldly realm of melting dreams. 

In a unique survey exhibition that SCHAUWERK Sindelfingen shows exclusively works by artists from the collection Schaufler. More than 30 well-known women of contemporary art, including Sylvie Fleury, Isa Genzken, Katharina Grosse, Roni Horn, Barbara Kruger, Sherrie Levine, Jessica Stockholder and Rosemarie Trockel, are entitled LADIES FIRST! united. The approximately 100 works presented include photography, video, painting and installation. At the same time illustrate the different approaches, such as taking artists who sometimes still male-dominated art scene for themselves.

A Lesson in Geometry By Jean Cohen

Listen to Patrick Wilson, see his new paintings in Chelsea (at Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe) and take away some art history. What Wilson has done for 20 years—works of elegant color, flatness and right angles—may seem, at first, the offspring of other art born out of geometry since the mid-20th century. But paintings by Wilson look like no one else's.  

Collector Profile: Harry and Margaret Anderson

When Hunk Anderson was a senior at Hobart College in Geneva, New York, in 1948, he and two enterprising classmates started providing meals for students who were hungry after dining-hall hours. Initially investing $500 each, the three partners grew Saga, their grassroots business, into the nation’s largest college food-service contractor. In 1962 they moved their headquarters to Menlo Park, California, adjacent to Stanford University.

As pioneering West Coast art collectors, Harry W. Anderson, who still goes by his beefy nickname, and his wife, Mary Margaret, known as Moo, have shown the same sort of American pluck and ingenuity that made Saga so successful. “We were absolute novices,” says Hunk, recalling a 1964 visit to the Louvre. “On our way home from Paris, we decided to see if we could become knowledgeable about art and put together a dozen paintings and sculptures.” They began a process of self-education that blossomed into a passion around which they have structured their lives for 50 years. The result: one of the most significant private collections of postwar American art in the world, with more than 800 works displayed throughout their ranch-style home in the Northern California Bay Area—built in 1969 with art installation in mind—and a nearby nine-building office campus designed in 1964. (Saga was sold to Marriott in 1986, but Hunk retained his office and continues to exhibit art throughout the hilltop complex, renamed Quadrus.)

Last month, Norwegian artist Margrethe Aanestad spoke with fellow artist Franklin Evans about his artistic practice and an upcoming exhibition he is organizing for the Prosjektrom Normanns in Stavanger. Below, Aanestad talks with Evans about his past projects, current work, and plans for coming to Stavanger.

This fall, on the occasion of the New York Studio School’s 50th Anniversary, Steven Kasher Gallery is pleased to present 12 Painters: The Studio School, 1974/2014. This dynamic exhibition brings together painting by six artists who studied at the New York Studio School in the early 1970s: Andrea Belag, Robert Bordo, Joyce Pensato, David Reed, Adam Simon, and Christopher Wool; and six Studio School teachers who influenced them:Nicolas Carone, Philip Guston, Mercedes Matter, George McNeil, Steven Sloman, and Jack Tworkov.  The exhibition will be on view from November 20th, 2014 through January 10th, 2015 at Steven Kasher Gallery, exploring the connections/dissonances of artists from the Studio School across generations.

The art world boomed this year, with some of the most renowned, international creatives in the field exhibiting their new works around the globe. The artworks and installations shown have each immersed audiences in an impactful and significant experiential context — monumental in scale, discipline, and material. From Olafur Eliasson’s expansive and multi-faceted exhibition in paris’ gehry-designed fondation louis vuitton to the esteemed photojournalistic imagery of Steve McCurry, 2014′s presentations blew us away. take a look below at designboom’s most popular articles this year about exhibitions.Markus Linnenbrink: Off the Wall

A slight variation on a theme this one, although as the title to this AV collaboration between Brooklyn-based abstract pop artist Brian Alfred and longstanding Battles serviceman Ian Williams suggests, there’s Beauty In Danger. There’s danger in beauty too, but as precisionist blocks of automobile-themed pastel dart across the screen this one’s indubitably a question of the outwardly beautiful residing deep within the dangers of modern-day locomotion. The volatile flickering of restive traffic lights; the neon smear of speeding cars; the immoderate regard paid to the music booming from the tinny in-car stereo. In this instance, we’d implore you pay the most intimate of attentions to the music in question, for Williams has composed an electronically affected piece that’s as stark as Alfred’s itself engaging visual element: efficient and in certain respects rather Germanic, it correlates perfectly with his collaborator’s Autobahn-obligated auxiliary stimulant to make for a sensorial masterwork that’s racy as it is incontrovertibly well executed.

It has been a year of variety and surprises as to the range of shows we’ve covered. Any singular thing does not quantify the degree of how a show leaves a deep impression as it can be one tiny detail or a grand statement. Such trivial thoughts are best left to the wind as we have pinned down the Best of 2014 for all of our loyal and still growing readers. We raise a glass to 2014 for the year that was and here’s looking forward as AF keeps an eye always to the future. 

Selections from the Museum's Collection: Modern and Contemporary Art 

Selections from the Museum's Collection: Modern and Contemporary Art is part of a series highlighting the Museum’s exceptional holdings and showcasing works new to Houston audiences. This installation comprises major paintings and sculptures that span the early 20th century to the present. 

Todd Hebert: Selected Works 1999-2014

Xcel Energy Gallery, General Exhibition

In Todd Hebert: Selected Works 1999–2014, Plains Art Museum presents a 15 year survey of paintings and works on paper made by native North Dakotan Todd Hebert, who teaches in the Department of Art and Design at the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks.

Visitors to a Markus Linnenbrink exhibition will find it hard to believe that the German-born artist, now a resident of Brooklyn, once favoured black and white and shunned anything chromatic – even to the point of allegedly expressing a fear of color.

New Exhibition Brings Abstract Expressionist Esteban Vicente’s Signature Touch to Light:

In the hallowed canon of American abstract expressionists, the name Esteban Vicente is rarely included. And yet the Spanish-born artist—who moved to New York in 1936—put down roots in this country amidst the members of the New York School, participating in their seminal exhibitions at the Samuel Kootz, Sidney Janis, and Charles Egan Galleries, earning representation by ab-ex patron Leo Castelli, and later going on to found the New York Studio School, where he taught for 36 years.  

Mercury Retrograde: Animated Realities

Brian Alfred, Aline Bouvy, Cliff Evans, eteam (Franziska Lamprecht, Hajoe Moderegger), Scott Gelber, John Gillis, Jan Nalevka, Karina Aguilera Skvirsky

Curated by Željka Himbele and William Heath

Three or four times a year, the planet Mercury appears to move backward in its orbit when seen from Earth. This optical illusion is referred to as Mercury retrograde. In popular astrology, Mercury retrograde marks intense periods when things go awry, signaling the need for reflection and revision of our lives. This is a time for veering away from the past and taking cautious steps forward. Mercury’s cycle has been speculated as the cause of major course corrections for society; it gives us a chance to grow as humans, to raise critical awareness, and possibly make a movement towards radical change.

There’s a lot of product going on here,” I heard a woman say into her cell phone at the mega-art fair Art Basel Miami Beach 2014.

Still, even in the context of the vast amount of money changing hands at the Miami Beach Convention Center, where the main fair is taking place, there are pockets of resistantly antimaterialist art, and outside its walls some performance and film are to be found.

Some of the films were made available to me for advance viewing, and among them were many worth watching. Tabor Robak’s 20XX (2013) (Team Gallery) features a lush, unthreatening cityscape overrun by neon and Klieg lights and advertisements for media and game brands on the fantasy buildings. The resurgent Babette Mangolte’s Water Motor (1978) (Broadway 1602/Sikkema Jenkins) elegantly documents Trisha Brown’s loose-limbed dancing, with a seductive repetition of the sequence in slow motion. Leo Gabin’s Oh Baby (2013) (Elizabeth Dee/Peres Projects) is a low-tech, low-production value music video with some fun editing choices. Brian Alfred’s Under Thunder and Fluorescent Lights (2104) (Ameringer McEnery Yohe) is an animation involving allusions to landscape and architecture and a mutating, colored sun.

GOING SOLO

Miami artist Julio Larraz, 70, is having a busy year. The Cuban born painter, whose work sells for upward of a quarter of a million dollars, is one of few artists with a solo gallery showing at the convention center for Art Basel. His work is also featured in a new major motion picture, Same Kind Of Different Than Me, starring a brunette Renee Zellweger and Greg Kinnear and currently filming in Mississippi.

Wednesday was the day for the privileged few — relatively speaking — at Art Basel Miami Beach.

The fair thinned the crowd this year by limiting the guest list. “It’s been lovely,” Palm Beach collector Dale Anderson said about three hours into the preview. “I don’t think it’s frenetic.” As for the art, “I’ve seen some very interesting things, but the prices. They seem to have added zeroes,” she said.

Ameringer McEnery Yohe is showing dream-like narrative paintings by Miami-based Julio Larraz. The paintings of ships, fortresses, and sheer white cliffs falling into aquamarine seas are influenced by his Caribbean heritage. The artist’s family fled Cuba in 1961, when he was 16.

Brian Alfred, assistant professor of art, will exhibit his new animation "Under Thunder And Florescent Lights" on the 7,000-square-foot outdoor projection wall of the Frank Gehry-designed New World Center as part of Art Basel, in Miami Beach, Florida, Dec. 4 to 7. Art Basel stages the world's premier modern and contemporary art shows annually in Basel, Switzerland; Miami Beach; and Hong Kong. This is the second consecutive year Alfred has been selected for the Art Basel Miami Film program.

Selected by David Gryn, Director of Artprojx, the Film sector includes over 80 works by some of today's most exciting artists from Latin America, the United States, Europe, Asia and beyond.

Film presents works in both the outdoor setting of New World Center's SoundScape Park and on six touch-screen monitors within the newly designed Film Library at Art Basel's show.

Stephen Dean's film, OLE, will screen at the Film Library (Miami Beach Convention Center, Show Floor, Hall C).  

Selected by David Gryn, Director of Artprojx, the Film sector includes over 80 works by some of today's most exciting artists from Latin America, the United States, Europe, Asia and beyond.

Film presents works in both the outdoor setting of New World Center's SoundScape Park and on six touch-screen monitors within the newly designed Film Library at Art Basel's show.

Matisse Etc. (part 2)

Amy Feldman, Stanley Whitney, Bernard Piffaretti, Laura Owens, Michael Krebber, Matt Connors, Rebecca Morris, Patricia Treib, Lori Ellison, Franklin Evans)

How is it that someone who dreamed of “an art of balance, of purity, of serenity, devoid of troubling and depressing subject matter” became a source of relentless innovation and provided a map for the deconstruction (with Supports/Surfaces, Pattern & Decoration and artists as diverse as Simon Hantaï, Al Loving and Jessica Stockholder) of the very medium through which he hoped to achieve serenity? French scholar Rémi Labrusse has described Matisse’s “radical decoration” as the result of his staged confrontation between Western mimesis and Eastern decoration. Clement Greenberg, who dreamed of an avant-garde pastoral, attributed Matisse’s impact to “the paint, the disinterested paint.”

THEGRASSISALWAYSGREENER is the title of the exhibition of Linnenbrink´s most recent works at Max Estrella Gallery (the second in this space).

Colors move us. Very few people are capable of viewing the colors that surround them with indifference. They may stimulate or pacify; they can trigger unpleasant states of mind or pleasant sensations. For Goethe, seeing colors was an experience based on reciprocal energies between nature and the observer. It was a phenomenon that did something to the observer, something linking a man´s innermost being to the world around him via the detour of the seeing eye.

For this Los Angeles artist, the process of painting is highly physical, building up layers of color and then cutting away.

From a distance, David Allan Peter’s small-scale abstract paintings appear to buzz with dashes of vibrant color.  These kaleidoscopic patterns may radiate over the entire panel in starburst formations, as in Untitled #13, or abutting triangles, as in Untitled #7, both made this year. But when seen up close, what look like Impressionistic brushstrokes reveal themselves to be tiny but precise indentations, carved into surfaces that have been built up with dozens of shimmering layers of acrylic paint. 

In the paintings of Los Angeles-based artist Patrick Wilson, layered squares of color attain unbelievable levels of transparency and rich density. Wilson uses humble tools: he applies acrylic paint with a drywall knife or house paint roller to geometric areas of canvas edged by masking tape. Yet, in both large-scale canvases and smaller works on panel, the works’ spatial constraints seem only to distill and enhance the pigment. 

Many of the artists I have selected are ones whom I already collect and admire. When I look at works to buy, I approach them with an open mind and go with instinct. Buy what you love and can’t live without! 

Few contemporary artists seem as able as Los Angeles-based Tam Van Tran to confirm Picasso’s definition, “A painting is a sum of destructions.” See the selection of his recent work at Anthony Meier’s.

Whether on the scale of a big canvas such as “Flower Offerings” (2014) or the small untitled one on view, Tran gives a convincing account of abstraction as free-wheeling performance, a possibility supposedly played out 60-odd years ago, certainly no later than the deaths of greats such as Joan Mitchell (1925-1992) and Nicholas Carone (1917-2010).

The Moss Arts Center at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University just celebrated its one-year anniversary in October. Designed by the Norwegian firm Snøhetta, the 150,000-square-foot building has a distinct glass facade comprising numerous hexagonal panels, a recurring geometric motif that shaped the theme of “Evolving Geometries: Line, Form, and Color,” curated by Margo Crutchfield.

The exhibition [September 25- November 20] features works that engage the building’s architecture by Patrick Wilson of Los Angeles, Odili Donald Odita of Philadelphia, and German-born, New York-based Manfred Mohr. (One could just as easily have selected examples by such female artists as Sarah Morris, Franziska Holstein, or Tomma Abts.)

Painting and photography have always had a complex relationship.

Conceived as an adjunct to painting in the earliest years of its development in the first decades of the 19th century, when many painters discovered how useful photographs could be in composing their canvases, photography quickly assumed an artistic presence and legitimacy of its own (albeit one that often still took its cues from traditional painterly modes of representation).

A mind-blowing painting exhibit titled "Photorealism:The Sydney and Walda Besthoff Collection" opens to the public Saturday (Nov. 8) at the New Orleans Museum of Art. Unlike many contemporary shows, it's not an exhibit that proffers a social concept or psychological sub-text.

It's an exhibit that's about painting the skin of a tangerine so perfectly that you can almost smell the tangy scent. It's about capturing those psychedelic landscapes that you see mirrored in the curves of a polished motorcycle. It's about the everyday "Through the Looking Glass" reflections in shop windows that seem to defy space and perspective. It's about the subtle allure of fluorescent lights, saltshakers and pinballs. It's about obsessive realism that's so real it's positively weird. 

In her spare, monochromatic reliefs, collages, and sculptures, Spanish-born artist Rosana Castrillo Diaz conveys rich emotional and intellectual content. Testament to this is an exhibition of the San Francisco-based artist’s recent work, which is now on view at Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe in New York. Castrillo Diaz explains, “In this body of work there is a direct connection between memory, emotions, and the physical hand at work. Each mark is a feeling, a chord, each drawing a score witness to a moment in time, a mood, a place. In the silence and introspection engendered, the quietest gesture may very well be the loudest.” And indeed, her spare, all-white wall-mounted works are often contemplative, with moments of more riotous form.

39;With Artist Franklin Evans, An Immersive Experience,' by Cate McQuaid

Franklin Evans drops viewers into his own weird wonderland. Once you’re down the rabbit hole, you may be as awed and dismayed as Alice herself.

Evans has two shows up now, at Montserrat College of Art Gallery and Steven Zevitas Gallery. Walk into his installation at Montserrat, and it’s like stepping inside a painting. Colors and lines are everywhere: on walls, on the ceiling and floor; in corridors of vertical strips of colored tape. The same is true, on a more modest scale, at Zevitas.

New Orleans, LA— The New Orleans Museum of Art is pleased to present Photorealism: The Sydney and Walda Besthoff Collection, the most extensive presentation to-date of the Photorealist painting collection of Sydney and Walda Besthoff. Unveiled with the Odyssey Gala on Friday, November 7, this exhibition will highlight one of the finest photorealist collections in the United States, based in New Orleans, featuring over 75 works.

The Photorealist collection built by Sydney and Walda Besthoff includes many of the artists associated with the first wave of Photorealism in the late 1960s and early 1970s, such as the renowned Chuck Close, Richard Estes, and John DeAndrea, and also encompasses works by more recent generations who are pushing the boundaries of Photorealism. The collection also features a broad range of engaging subject matter, from detailed cityscapes and portraits, to convincingly real close-ups of objects such as motorcycles, cars, toys, fruit, and flowers.

New Orleans, LA— The New Orleans Museum of Art is pleased to present Photorealism: The Sydney and Walda Besthoff Collection, the most extensive presentation to-date of the Photorealist painting collection of Sydney and Walda Besthoff. Unveiled with the Odyssey Gala on Friday, November 7, this exhibition will highlight one of the finest photorealist collections in the United States, based in New Orleans, featuring over 75 works.

The Photorealist collection built by Sydney and Walda Besthoff includes many of the artists associated with the first wave of Photorealism in the late 1960s and early 1970s, such as the renowned Chuck Close, Richard Estes, and John DeAndrea, and also encompasses works by more recent generations who are pushing the boundaries of Photorealism. The collection also features a broad range of engaging subject matter, from detailed cityscapes and portraits, to convincingly real close-ups of objects such as motorcycles, cars, toys, fruit, and flowers.

Steven Zevitas Gallery is pleased to present juddpaintings, an exhibition of new work by New York-based artist Franklin Evans.  The exhibition will be on view from Friday 24 October through Saturday 13 December, 2014, with an opening reception Friday 7 November. 

In juddpaintings, Evans presents a new installation comprised of wall painting, collage, paintings, digital prints, tape, process notes, and laminations. The exhibition presents the decomposition of his installation practice to the primary object subject of his practice: Painting. Upon entering the exhibition, the viewer passes through a threshold of a floor to ceiling installation of paint, images and process and into a gallery of walls painted bands of the color spectrum that dissolves to white. Paintings are hung on the walls and move from varying degrees of contextual mediation to an uninterrupted object on a white wall. 

In the 1950s, Alan Turing, mathematician and computing pioneer, developed the Reaction-Diffusion Model, which deals with morphology—the study of how creatures take their biological forms. Using morphology in creating art isn't exactly new, but citing the visionary Turing as an influence might just be en vogue.

La Fondation Salomon is pleased to announce Abstraction, an exhibition of works by Sadie Benning, Pierrette Block, Angela Bulloch, Philippe Decrauzat, Franklin Evans, Pierre Ferrarini, Ceal Floyer, Bernard Frize, David Hominal, Steven Hull, Renée Levi, and François Morellet from the collection of Claudine and Jean-Marc Salomon. 

The exhibition opens on 30 October and will be on view through 14 December 2014.

http://www.fondation-salomon.com/exposition-art-contemporain/abstraction-3110-14122014.html

Any combining, mixing, adding, diluting, exploiting, vulgarizing or popularizing of abstract art deprives art of its essence and depraves the artist's artistic consciousness. Art is free, but it is not a free-for-all. The one struggle in art is the struggle of artists against artists, of artist against artist, of the artist-as-artist within and against the artist-as-man, -animal or -vegetable. Artists who claim their artwork comes from nature, life, reality, earth or heaven, as “mirrors of the soul” or “reflections of conditions” or “instruments of the universe,” who cook up “new images of man”—figures and “nature-in-abstraction”—pictures, are subjectively and objectively, rascals or rustics.  -Donald Judd, American Dialog, Vol. 1-5

Donald Judd was an exquisite contrarian. Call him a minimalist and he’d say, no, he wasn’t. To be fair, the term itself was widely rejected by artists working at this narrow-end of the artistic spectrum, and so it was only natural that what started out as an explanation of the work, became the rules that governed both its wider understanding and presentation. Looking back, what’s become clear is that the dialogues that emerged from this era were as intrinsic to the work (from the artist’s perspective) as the work itself. In part, it was the apparatus of distinction—the breaking with old ideas that felt stale and over-used. It was a carving down to the essential nature of an object that interested Judd, but it required sensitivity to some rules-based order.

From 25 October to 30 November, the MAC exhibits the works of the finalists of the 2014 LISSONE PRIZE, an international competition for young artists under 35. 

Among the practices that characterize the most current developments in painting has been inserted the "Expanded Painting," novelty item that distinguishes this year's edition. For the first time it was set up a Selection Committee which will complement the official jury in assigning the Grand Prize for painting, the Critics Award and many other awards purchase. In addition to the exhibition of selected, the newly renovated exhibition formula also includes two sections by invitation, at a national and international level, which is not eligible for prizes in money. Finally, a room will be reserved for an important teacher of the last century, as well as they used to in the sixties, with retrospective exhibitions devoted to Atanasio Soldati, Licini Osvaldo and Mario Sironi.

Anthony Meier Fine Arts is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new work by Los Angeles-based artist Tam Van Tran.  Exhibiting at the gallery for the fourth time, Tran’s latest works mark a departure from the obsessive process of earlier series.  Embracing the collision of opposites - addition and subtraction, miniaturization and expansiveness, natural and manmade, tranquility and chaos - Tran continues past conversations with inspired force.

Throughout his career, each body of Tran’s work has abstractly reflected on moments in his own history.  In this new series, Tran shares elements of his experience of dislocation and struggle connected to his crossing by boat from Vietnam to the United States at the age of nine years.

Curated by Cristiana Perrella and Paola Ugolini

An opportunity for reflecting on sport, a subject of ever-increasing relevance in its anthropological, social, educational, economic and cultural aspects.

Determinant for physical wellbeing, sport is one of the most effective means of stimulating encounters, exchange, passion, enthusiasm and tension.

Via diverse media and with closer or more distant ties through the various historical periods, the relationship between sport and art can be seen throughout the development of western culture. Art now finds in the sporting disciplines a fertile source of cues for reflection on a number of aspects of modern society.

Helen Frankenthaler (American, 1928–2011) had her first solo exhibition at Tibor de Nagy Gallery in 1951, an exhibition that synthesized the most radical aspects of works by Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning, and Jackson Pollock, with ambitious canvases of textured surfaces, pale color, and calligraphic drawing. The following year, with Mountains and Sea, 1952, she created another kind of painterly space by staining unprimed canvas with oil paint while allowing telltale signs of drawing to remain.

Uniting painting with architecture, New York based artist MarkusLinnenbrink has transformed two exhibition spaces at the kunsthalle, nürnberg into a walk-all-over canvas. The floors, walls and ceiling of the german site have been pigmented with vibrantly-hued parallel streaks, traversing through the gallery’s rooms.The specific arrangement of the tones and their linear movement sees the line between two-dimensionality dissolve, simultaneously suggesting the idea of an endlessly expanding space. This color adaptation, which linnenbrink has titled ‘wasserscheide(desireallputtogether)’, evokes a wild and psychedelic sense of mobility, with an intensity that the viewer’s eye can hardly follow.

It was Heraclitus who proclaimed, “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” This aphorism echoes through the work of Monique van Genderen. For her solo exhibition at Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe in New York, the artist has created the large-scale painting Untitled (2014), alongside six smaller paintings comprising extracts of the first. Together they form a body of work of continuous movement and endlessly shifting grounds.

Even just setting your eyes upon an optical illusion can be a disorienting experience. Just imagine what it would be like to be fully engulfed within one.

That's exactly what viewers find out upon entering Markus Linnenbrink's "WASSERSCHEIDE(DESIREALLPUTTOGETHER)," which recently showed at Germany's Kunsthalle Nuernberg. Bold streaks of fuchsia, navy blue, aquamarine and yellow swallow the entire windowless museum space, locking viewers in a mind-melting display of colors gone wild. The technicolor display, although rendered in acrylic paint covered in epoxy on resin, looks as if a box of super-sized Crayola crayons overheated and exploded all at once.

The Bilbao Fine Arts Museum is pleased to announce Hyperrealism 1967-2013, an exhibition with works by Davis Cone, among others.  The exhibition will open on 7 October 2014 and be on view through 19 January 2015.

In the late nineteen-sixties, a group of artists made a name for themselves in the United States by using photography as a basis for painting everyday scenes and objects with extraordinary realism. They gelled into what became known as the Hyperrealist movement, which took flight at the 1972 Kassel Documenta and remains airborne today.

Possessing a fascinating oeuvre that includes paintings, sculptors and caricatures, Julio Larraz is now recognised as one of the most important contemporary Latin American artists of our time. Born in Havana, Cuba in 1941, Larraz and his family found themselves politically exiled, and so fled to America. Here Larraz began his artistic career, drawing political caricatures that were featured in The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune and Vogue, amongst other prominent American publications. Only some years later did Larraz assume his place as a full-time painter, and held a number of solo exhibitions across North America. Larraz was warmly received by the American art scene, and he too embraced American art; citing a number of New York artists as influences, particularly that of Burt Silverman.

Brattleboro, VT -- Wolf Kahn views himself as a liberator. The contemporary American artist said he aims to bring "landscape painting up to date" by liberating color, being free in his application and just generally trying to be "more modern than most landscape painters are."

And this message of free expression is the basis of a lecture titled "Control and Letting Go," which he plans to deliver at the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center at 7 p.m. today. A book and memorabilia signing will follow. Kahn told the Reformer he typically gives a lecture at the museum once a year and always intends to give guests their money's worth. Reservations are $10 for the general public, $5 for BMAC members, and can be made by calling 802-257-0124, ext. 101, or visiting www.brattleboromuseum.org to reserve online.

The University Art Galleries (UAG) will mount a solo exhibition of paintings by Ed Moses, utilizing all three galleries and featuring works from the 1960s to the present. Cross-Section will trace the common thematic thread binding Moses’s prolific and continuous act of exploration. In so doing, the philosophical continuity of the artist’s disparate visual strategies will be framed, strategies the artist has repeated and contradicted, as his investigation into the painted form has changed direction or reversed course over the past five decades. The curatorial perspective, in turn, will provide a rhizomatic framework to Moses’s oeuvre – a genealogy of these strategies – in place of the conventional, chronological account typically used by institutions to situate an artist’s work within historical movements alone. An accompanying exhibition catalogue, featuring dynamic color plates of the work and scholarly essays by the curators as well as the legendary art historian Barbara Rose, provides the cultural context for Moses’s mutational practice.

Art=Text=Art: Private Languages / Public Systems has been re-curated for UB Anderson Gallery by graduate students Sarah JM Kolberg, Cat Dawson, and Maddie Phinney, under the direction of Jonathan D. Katz, Director of the Doctoral Program in Visual Studies at the University at Buffalo, The State University of New York. This new presentation explores the advent of language in the visual arts in post-war America and the simultaneous emergence of concrete poetry. These practices embraced language’s ability to carry multiple, even contradictory meanings, thus creating a space for individual acts of anti-conformist thought. Through words in art, flirtations with ideas unauthorized by then-dominant socio-political realities were allowed expression, especially among an early generation of LGBTQ artists.

5 Artists on the Enduring Qualities of Representational Painting

Tucked away in her secluded Northern California home and studio, Sandra Mendelsohn Rubin has plenty of time to think about the importance of what she does on this planet:

From the beginning of human history, making marks depicting the physical world has been a constant. Our ability to question the meaning and purpose of our existence is what differentiates us from other animal species. Representation in painting touches on this core human truth. It is as much a part of our existence as storytelling and poetry. No matter the subject or content - how complex or how minimal - representational painting incorporates the gift of a narrative. That being said, representation cannot stand alone. The true poetry lies in the orchestration of a good composition combined with the skillful use of paint and color, all driven by sensory perception, intuition and memory. No matter the time in history, when done masterfully, it is timeless. In daily life, we 'look' but we do not always 'see'. We are physical beings in a tactile three dimensional world. Representation makes us pay attention to our surroundings as well as to ideas and relationships. We all have a story to tell. It is my firm belief that representational painting will always be new no matter the trends or curatorial leanings of the times."

The Bilbao Fine Arts Museum is pleased to announce Hyperrealism 1967-2013, an exhibition with works by Rod Penner, among others.  The exhibition will open on 7 October 2014 and be on view through 19 January 2015.

In the late nineteen-sixties, a group of artists made a name for themselves in the United States by using photography as a basis for painting everyday scenes and objects with extraordinary realism. They gelled into what became known as the Hyperrealist movement, which took flight at the 1972 Kassel Documenta and remains airborne today.

Thanks to Wolf Kahn, the hills, forests, farms, and barns of southern Vermont may be seen in many of the world's finest art galleries, museums, and private collections. For nearly 50 years the beloved landscape painter, a leading figure in contemporary American art, has spent summers on a hillside farm in West Brattleboro. He has traveled the back roads and unmarked lanes of Windham County with pastels and sketchbook in tow, depicting the landscape in a signature style that hovers between abstraction and figuration. On Saturday, October 11 at 7 p.m., a week after his 87th birthday, Kahn will give a talk entitled "Control and Letting Go" at the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center (BMAC). Reservations are $10 for the general public, $5 for BMAC members. Call 802-257-0124, ext. 101 or visit www.brattleboromuseum.org to reserve online. A book and memorabilia signing will follow.

Tampa, September 5, 2014 – The USF Contemporary Art Museum is pleased to present the exhibition Making Sense: Rochelle Feinstein, Deborah Grant, Iva Gueorguieva, Dona Nelson open September 27 through December 12, 2014.

Making Sense brings together four artists who make distinctive contributions to contemporary painting. Through a range of approaches, they explore painting as a medium, a set of techniques, an historical institution and a framework for making sense. Inspired by WWII-era Enigma decoding machines, Rochelle Feinstein takes on puzzling figures of speech, inscrutable ideas and encrypted social codes as challenges for painterly representation. Using a method she calls “Random Select,” Deborah Grant creates imagined, non-linear narrative encounters between historical artists, interwoven with her own varied humanistic interests from literature to religion. Iva Gueorguieva adapts the visual language of modern abstraction to create tumultuous, energetic spaces on canvas; her process of building up paintings by layering torn cloth with pigment and color washes produces spontaneous, dynamic compositions rooted in personal stories. Dona Nelson’s two-sided paintings, stained and layered with strands of cheesecloth, invite viewers to encounter them as freestanding forms. Making Sense includes new works produced by Feinstein and Gueorguieva at Graphicstudio, the 45-year-old collaborative printmaking and sculpture atelier of the USF Institute for Research In Art. Curated by Margaret Miller, Director, USF Institute for Research in Art, and Megan Voeller, Associate Curator of Education, USF Contemporary Art Museum; organized by USF Contemporary Art Museum.

Roy Dowell, Iva Guerorguieva, Julia Haft-Candell, Rachel Lachowicz, Michael Reafsnyder, Jim Richards, Steve Roden, Tessie Whitmore

Opening Reception: Tuesday September 2, 6-9PM Claremont Graduate University 251 E. Tenth Street, Claremont, CA 91711 Gallery Hours: Monday- Friday 10am - 5pm

EXPO Projects IN/SITU provides exhibiting galleries the opportunity to showcase large-scale installations and site-specific works by leading artists during EXPO CHICAGO. Curated by Renaud Proch, Executive Director of Independent Curators International (ICI), the 2014 edition of the program is a reflection on artistic practice in Chicago, and on the intense exchange of ideas that the city generates.

Building on the rich tradition of geometric abstraction, three one-person exhibitions take the visual language of line, form, and color in compelling directions. In the first part of the 20th century, artists such as Wassily Kandinksky (1866-1944), Kasimir Malevich (1878-1935), and Piet Mondrian (1872-1944) explored a vocabulary of simple geometric forms—rectangles, triangles, squares, and line—in abstract compositions that addressed universal truths and utopian ideas. This tradition, carried forth, expanded, and transformed over the course of the 20th century, continues into the present with innovative approaches to the genre by:

Franklin Evans’ site-specific, all-encompassing environments include unstretched canvases, wall paintings, photos, sound and theoretical texts. Celebrating connections over divisions, Evans’s work brings images and ideas together through indexing, cataloguing and mapping. 

Montserrat College of Art is proud to present juddrules featuring New York-based artist Franklin Evans. While Evans considers himself first and foremost a painter his works are process-based physical environments, surrounded by the very source materials that conceptually inform his paintings. “It’s like walking into a painting,” describes Evans, anticipating how Montserrat Gallery will evolve into a ‘landscape’ of ephemeral and factual materials over the course of his three week residency.

The paintings of Monique van Genderen are something to move into: spaces defined by shape, color, depth, and motion. Van Genderen, a self-described nonobjective abstractionist, is hard to pin down to a particular genre or art movement, although her work touches on quite a few — including Abstract Expressionism, color-field painting, and Abstract Illusionism — while remaining in a class by itself. “I am working with a lot of elements of illusion, specifically conceptual illusions, playing with people’s expectations of what they’re looking at,” she told Pasatiempo. “Sometimes I landed in the color-field genre because I was making more reduced paintings with shapes I collaged together. But I’m really attempting to make every painting pretty different.” With notable, well-received exhibits on both coasts under her belt, van Genderen, a Los Angeles-based artist, comes to Santa Fe for her inaugural show at TAI Modern.

This exhibition of new acquisitions brings together recent gifts to the Roanoke College's Permanent Art Collection that augments the strengths of the College's diverse holdings. Works represent internationally and nationally known artists: Derrick Adam, Ricky Allman, Michelle Arcilia, Dennis Ashbaugh, Pattie Lee Becker, Alex Brown, N. Dash, Franklin Evans, Clare Gill, Tatsuro Kiuchi, Mike Montero, Carrie Marill, Gary Peterson, Valerie Roybal, Mark Uriksen, and Firooz Zahedi.

Entering Ameringer McEnery & Yohe, those who have followed Franklin Evans’s work over the last 10 years will recognize the artist’s application of readily accessible, process-spun materials to the gallery walls and floor. Materials that might otherwise be pulled from a painter’s trashcan, including paint-scuffed masking tape, clippings from photo albums and incomplete works on paper, are positioned in bursts of action that may at first seem disorganized. The solo exhibition, “paintingassupermodel,” is Evans’s first at Ameringer and succeeds as a personal rumination on Yve Alain Bois’s 1990 bookPainting as Model. Celebrated abstract paintings by Matisse, Mondrian and Newman, which Bois discusses in his book, make appearances in the exhibition.

German American Abstract ExpressionistHans Hofmann credited his time teaching painting at UC Berkeley in the early 1930s for his "start in America as a teacher and artist."

Hofmann thanked the university with a gift of nearly 50 paintings representing the breadth of his life work, from Surrealist-influenced compositions to more physical and abstract images. The paintings are on display at the UC Berkeley Art Museum through Dec. 21 and represent the largest collection of the noted painter's work in any museum.

A thought-provoking exhibition of twenty-first century painting, sculpture, video and furnishings representing the newest abstract work from today’s best artists. NOW-ISM features international emerging stars like Sarah Cain, Diana Al-Hadid and Florian Meisenberg and established artists including Columbus’ own art star Ann Hamilton, Jim Hodges, Teresita Fernández, Jason Middlebrook, Carrie Moyer and Pia Fries. The show will include more than 100 works spanning all three floors of the space.

A thought-provoking exhibition of twenty-first century painting, sculpture, video and furnishings representing the newest abstract work from today’s best artists. NOW-ISM features international emerging stars like Sarah Cain, Diana Al-Hadid and Florian Meisenberg and established artists including Columbus’ own art star Ann Hamilton, Jim Hodges, Teresita Fernández, Jason Middlebrook, Carrie Moyer and Pia Fries. The show will include more than 100 works spanning all three floors of the space.

A time-lapse video of Markus Linnenbrink painting the installation THERIDENEVERENDS. The painting was completed over the course of seven days in June, 2014.

In an attention-compromised age when images are instant and prevalent, abstract painting serves as a contradiction, acting as a conduit for the mark of the original, individual artist. While most of the work in the exhibition has been recently created and acquired, additional paintings culled from LACMA’s collection illustrate how artists have reanimated techniques and forms using other sources that are appropriated from popular culture, photography, and collage, essentially creating a new variation of abstract painting.

Franklin Evans, “paintingassupermodel,” at Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe through August 1

Understated and subtle are two adjectives that will never be applied to Evans’s work. For his debut at this gallery, he cannibalizes the entire space — including the floors — creating a massively dense, referential installation that’s terrifically entertaining to get lost within. Paint-spattered tape, computer print-outs, enlarged-and-stretched digital photos, and architectural schematics cover the walls; Plexi vitrines hold photographs and tiny sculptural odds-and-ends.

Daily Pic: Franklin Evans Shows Us Painting Today

This is a view into a manic installation called “paintingassupermodel,” by Franklin Evans. It’s now filling the Ameringer McEnery Yohe gallery in New York. The title is a clever updating of “Painting as Model,” the name of a famous 1993 book by art historian Yve-Alain Bois, sped up to the pace of the 21st century. There’s not even time for a break between words.

Evan’s installation does a pretty good job conjuring the feel of art as it is now experienced, as a ceaseless barrage of image and information and commerce that we’re supposed to take as-is, without too much processing or doubt. “Paintingassupermodel” levels the playing field between Matisse and Photoshop. What I couldn’t decide, as I took in the piece, was whether its frantic complexities acted as an invitation to dig deep to figure them out, or to skim along across their surfaces.

Light3 at the Fridman Gallery in New York, curated by Lilly Wei, is a must-see for anyone interested in the multiple ways in which light challenges our perception of colour, form and structure. The exhibition features the work of Stephen Dean, Jan Tichy and Ethan Ryman, three artists with very different sensibilities, who employ light as a means of defamiliarising what we see. Studio International had the opportunity to speak with Dean and Tichy about their work at the gallery. Ryman answered our questions via email.

Yve-Alain Bois’s book Painting as Model was written twenty-odd years ago and continues to be an important text, providing conceptual fodder for many contemporary art practices. A case in point is the current exhibition of painting and installation by the artist Franklin Evans where a physical copy of Painting as Modelsits up front and center on the gallery floor while material unleashed from the book orbits about the space.

With installations of Cornelia Baltes, Benjamin Houlihan, Markus Linnenbrink, Claudia & Julia Müller, Christine Streuli and Alexander Wolff

Traditionally, based on two-dimensional painting, and can only reflect the image of a three-dimensional space. The group exhibition  Off the Wall! Image spaces and space forming but r presents positions of contemporary painting that make these classic two-dimensional self-conscious questioning. The invited artists expand the painting, by not restricting their works on the flat image carrier, but include the external architectural surroundings with. Her painting is the volume way up, expands and reaches into the third dimension. It occupies the exhibition space, for example through sculptural and installation-process or by the exhibition space - including the walls and floors - is at an all-over painting. "! Off the Wall" The exhibition title is always ambiguous to understand: In its literal translation it means as much as, but at the same time is in the English language for "unorthodox" or "" Off the Wall "" Off the Wall! " unconventional ".

The contemporary New York art world has a backstory, rarely consulted, that begins in the optimistic 1920s and moves on to the bleak 1930s, a decade of Depression and institutional indifference to such local figures as Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko. Then came the 1940s, with its succession of astonishing breakthroughs, followed by the ’50s, which trained the spotlights of critical recognition and market success on so many of the pioneers, who by that time had been gathered under the Abstract Expressionist label. As the ’60s began, even some of the second-generation practitioners of AbEx—Alfred Leslie, Joan Mitchell—were acquiring high profiles. But not George McNeil, even though he belonged to the first generation.

The studio is where it's at - that's ground zero where the artist's thought process and experimentation explode into fruition.  Now what if you take that investigation into the gallery interior and set it free all over?  AF walked into the solo exhibition of Franklin Evans for paintingsassupermodel last week to witness the full color explosion come to life.  Maybe there was no Gisele Bundchen or Chanel Iman aka Super Models present but art was definitely making itself known in Super Sized doses. 

The exhibition examines football - nicknamed "the beautiful game" by one sports commentator - and its significance in societies around the world.  As a subject, football touches on issues of nationalism and identity, globalism and mass spectacle, as well as the common human experience shared by spectators from many cultures.  Celebrating the sport on the eve of the 2014 World Cup in Brazil, the exhibition includes approximately thirty artists from around the world who work in video, photography, painting and sculpture.  Two room-sized video, photography, painting and sculpture.  Two room-sized video installations - Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait, by the artists Philippe Parreno and Douglas Gordon, and Volta by Stephen Dean - anchor the exhibition.  Other works by artists including Miguel Calderon (whose 2004 video Mexico v. Brasil represents a 17-0 victory for Mexico). Robin Rhode, Kehinde Wiley, and Andy Warhol provide a sense of the miraculous possibilities of the sport as universal conversation piece. 

Closing their season, the Bedford Gallery will narrow its focus to the physical and historical world of the skull. The Skull Show examines the role that skulls have played in the historical register, as memento mori, traditional religious icons, and vanitas themes in still life paintings. The Skull Show will also highlight the role the skull has played in the contemporary arts, exploring its appearance in counter cultures such as skate, surf, tattoo, as well as urban graffiti projects. 

The title 200 Years in Power represents both the name of the show and the painting on the cover.  Julio has always wanted the viewer to establish a narrative based on their own imagination.  The characters in the painting should also be left for the viewer to contemplate and determine for themselves, but the simple meaning of the title and the work is the "usurpation of power, or the abuse of power".  Julio's characters are hand picked and may not relate directly to the subject matter at all.  Other times, there is a crystal clear connection that forces ones imagination in a certain direction.

Julio's inspiration is often unique and distant.  In The Mind's Eye he discusses how images come to him as if in a dream and his constant attempt to capture them before they disappear.  His works are generally combinations of visual images that come to him mixed with philosophical questions that he is contemplating internally.  Julio prefers to not discuss too much of the visions and complexity within his imagination, as he prefers to allow the work to be a question, provoking thought and investigation within ones own imagination.

As part of the launch of its new office, Morrison & Foerster commissioned prominent New York artist Markus Linnenbrink to produce eight original 9-X-42-foot paintings for the space. Each of the oversized works will adorn one of the firm’s eight elevator lobby areas. The paintings reflect Linnenbrink’s trademark style of using the medium of acrylic and a myriad of pigments to form a full spectrum of colors on wood panels.

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While light has long been associated with the spiritual and metaphysical, Stephen Dean, Ethan Ryman and Jan Tichy emphasize its more phenomenal and psychological qualities. In their work, it is treated analytically—although not without a sense of the poetic—as a means to comprehend and engage with the world.

Markus Linnenbrink will be exhibiting in his neighborhood of Bushwick for the first time, showing his large-­‐scale painting MEINWILDEHERZ and other recent work. MEINWILDEHERZ embodies layers of emotion, memory and a passion for the gestural abstraction of the mid-­‐20th century Abstract Expressionists.

There’s nothing soothing about Iva Gueorguieva’s dense, elastic, collaged paintings at Samson. Many of them have the look of a city imploding. Lines tangle, planes twist and bend; forms shatter. With colors, collisions, and veering angles, she sends a viewer’s eye ricocheting.

Caribbean: Crossroads of the World will highlight over two centuries of rarely seen works—from paintings and sculptures to prints, photographs, installations, films, and videos—dating from the Haitian Revolution to the present. This exhibition employs an inter-disciplinary approach to advance our understanding of the Caribbean and its artistic heritage and contemporary practices. It focuses on four central themes: Fluid Motions, Counterpoints, Shades of History, and Kingdoms of this World. These interconnected frameworks allow insight into the complex context from which the vital and varied artistic production of the region has emerged, illuminating the multiple histories of the region.

Julio Larraz's featured work from 2013 is titled Traffic.

The earliest painting on view in Wolf Kahn: Six Decades is a large landscape-derived abstraction from 1960 titled “Into a Clearing.” It features a loose, pulsing welter of brushstrokes that coalesce into lush zones of breathing, blooming color. “Weaving Gray and Yellow,” another oil on canvas completed fifty-four years later, and also on display in “Six Decades” shows a similar gestural approach but with added notes of linearity and a little less painterly vapor.  Consistently in love with landscape — and the idea of landscape as an abstraction — Wolf Kahn has lovingly built a very vivid and beautiful oeuvre since first exhibiting his paintings at the Hansa Gallery, one of New York’s first co-op galleries, nearly sixty years ago.

Curated by Li Zhenhua, director and founder of Beijing Art Lab, the Film sector presents an exciting program of films by and about artists. 

Screenings take place in the agnès b. cinema at the Hong Kong Arts Centre.

At 86, Wolf Kahn is still a firecracker. The painter — who has spent the majority of his life in New York, and who is known for vibrantly colored landscapes and nature scenes — is the subject of a six-decade retrospective on view at Ameringer McEnery Yohe through May 31. “The earlier the painting is, the better it seems to me to be,” Kahn deadpanned, thinking back to some of the canvases he produced in the early ’60s. “I think I’ve gone downhill ever since.” On a more serious note, he’s proud of himself for not resting on his laurels: “Here I am, still trying to do things that I don’t know how to do, strike out in new directions. I think that’s very healthy, and I consider myself fortunate.”

The work of New York-based artist Brian Alfred examines the relations between the media and the real, underscoring the gap between reportage and first-person experience.  Alfred's sources of reference range from news items, which aspire to etch their images in the consciousness of all, to sights taken by Alfred himself while traveling.  Two primary means to his work - fragmentation and abstraction - take us back in their directness to the experimental works of early modernism.  Alfred uses the fragment to claim the viewer's alertness, but as opposed to the avant-garde artists, the world from which he reports appears to be already saturated with and inured to sensations. 

Don't be fooled: they're not pretty.  They might be harmonic, but dissonance dominates.  And while they're birthed in a series of personal reveries, every time in the outcome they're social.  I recall Adorno thought Schoenberg was valid because his meticulously-fractured, mathematically-battered structures perfectly mapped the world from which they withdrew.  And later it was: yes to poetry after Auschwitz...provided it's a scream.  You might think this too heavy given the living color and the hypnotic-magnetic allure of Iva's toppling geometries.  But that's why I start with a warning.  Don't look away; trust the nauseous corner of your eye.  Three out of four paintings are mean and the fourth one is an apocalypse.  

For nearly 35 years, while the art world has hemmed and hawed, painter Sandra Mendelsohn Rubin has steered a steady course. As Rubin's subject matter has progressed -- most recently Rubin has been painting aerial views -- her technique has remained consistently spellbinding. Rubin builds up the surfaces of her work with undiluted, unglazed layers of oil paint applied with uncanny precision. The resulting paintings, which are often small in scale, demonstrate the artist's deeply felt exploration of her surroundings and also her sense of their underlying energies.

Western Project is proud to present the third solo exhibition by Los Angeles artist, Patrick Lee. For over ten years Lee has worked on his series Deadly Friends; an investigation into the lives of men on the streets of America. Looking to understand the subtle and often forceful appearances of men the artist has created a body of work this time inspired by the environs around LA City Jail and the nearby Union Station.

Timepaths, a process-based multi-media installation by Reno-born artist Franklin Evans, served as the inspiration and the backdrop for RENO Magazine’s spring fashion spread. The installation, housed at the Nevada Museum of Art through April 20, investigates the complex paths Evans has taken as a contemporary artist.

Many words have been spilled recently, by artists in particular, over the perennial question: New York or Los Angeles? On the occasion of Kevin Appel’s first solo exhibition in NYC since 2009, and his first ever with Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe it seems we may have found one of the more levelheaded voices yet to enter the conversation. “Los Angeles has always had a bit of an identity crisis, partially due to the external view of L.A. as having this superficial mentality tied to the film industry,” explains the photographer-cum-painter, an Angeleno for all his life save for a brief stint studying in Manhattan. “It doesn’t have a long lineage of a canonical or intellectual history, as opposed to New York.”

Nearly 50 visits in and I finally made it across the river to draw, spending the day with Franklin Evans in his studio in the Lower East Side a couple of Saturdays ago. After making my way down Bowery, I looked up to see short neon strips of tape and painted pieces of paper that were missing their center squares, dangling from the inside of windows of a second floor apartment building. I knew I was in the right place. I had the overwhelming feeling of having been in this studio before when I walked in to his space. I soon realized I was thinking back to the strong impression his elaborate mixed-media exhibition at Sue Scott Gallery had on me in the spring of 2012. It was a memorable glimpse into the artist's mind, studio, and process. Evans was breaking the fourth wall with that exhibition and remembering it made me even more eager to begin my drawing.

Material Images” brings together 10 artists whose practices encompass a diverse range of formal and procedural strategies. Tying them together are their concerns with abstraction and issues of materialization surrounding the status of images today.

Kari Altmann, Trudy Benson, Petra Cortright, Franklin Evans, Lauren Luloff, Michael Manning, Jessica Sanders, Kate Steciw, Rebecca Ward and Jeff Zilm

Iva Gueorguieva’s (NAP #73) paintings, on view at Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe in New York, bring a breathe of California sun to our frigid New York winter. Working up the surfaces of her large canvases into almost a fetishized frenzy, the paintings are abstract, yet indicative of movement. By denying viewers the ability to rest their eyes on any one component for too long, her works are both mesmerizing and disconcerting, inducing frustration as one tries to pinpoint figures or structures within the compositions. Fractions, edges, and suggestions of such imagery exist, but are ungraspable as they dissolve into the chaos of each scene.

Arthur Peña: The role of history plays a big part in your work. This operates in two modes of objective history such as art historical content and the broader negotiation with our past and also the subjective history of your decisions that rest within the painting. How do you mediate between these two sets of history as content?

Iva Gueorguieva: I believe that we all carry within our flesh the memories, desires and traumas of the previous generations. There is a muscle memory that becomes alive in the act of painting and I feel it.

You think I’m describing your lover to you, exactly the night you met, twenty years ago. “But what about...” you begin, and think better of it, allowing me my impressions, limited and one-dimensional compared to yours—you, who sought and found all the ecstatic tickling flutters and sudden despairs of the heart, explored every hill and dale of their form, caught every nuance of manner and nervous tick.

But I’m not writing about your lover. This is about the paintings and sculpture of Iva Gueorguieva, the emotionally rife and viscerally electrifying works with which you, I, or anyone else, may become intimately acquainted in very personal and differing ways. You may see the small patch of blue that makes you want to cry; I, the red flutter of lines that burns magnetic like solar flares; someone else, the dark, dark lagoon harboring a gravitational pull like the center of the galaxy. Her marks and shapes feels more like moments in time – a millisecond in the midst of furious activity – than like areas of space filled with paint. If you really get to know Women and the Ocean (2013) or Suitor (2013), as you would a partner, you’ll find that these paintings have lives of their own.

Rod Penner's small, meticulously painted landscapes of Texas and its environs, all from the last three years, pack a hefty amount of big sky and small town into their abbreviated formats. Penner pictures cafes (including a beautiful one showing a neon "Mexican Food" sign's reflection shimmering green on the rain-slicked surface of the parking lot), as well as convenience stores, laundromats, garages, houses along highways, nondescript main streets, and strip malls. Numerous gas stations are shown that might or might not be abandoned.

Julio Larraz was born in Havana, Cuba, 12 March 1944. The son of a newspaper editor, he began drawing at a very early age. In 1961 his whole family moved to Miami, Florida. In 1962 they moved to Washington, DC, and in 1964 to New York. There he began to draw political caricatures that were published by The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune and Vogue magazine, among others.

If Patrick Wilson tossed a pebble into a pond, the ripples that emanated from it would probably take the shape of perfectly formed squares or nicely proportioned rectangles. That is the image his exhibition, “Steak Night,” leaves the viewer: an impossible change to the laws of nature that brings you face to face with a world more beautiful that the real one. 

In the realm of high-modern abstract painting, the color purple rarely gets the spotlight. The hue doesn't have its own Picasso phase, like rose or blue. And let's face it: Jackson Pollock's "Lavender Mist" is light on the lavender and heavy on the black and white. So it's exciting to watch Hans Hofmann play with purple and give it center stage in a pair of works on view right now at Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe.

Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects is pleased to announce the gallery's first solo exhibition with Los Angeles-based painter, Michael Reafsnyder.

Inspired by the CoBrA movement and abstract expressionism, Reafsnyder's paintings are thick with paint, exuberant gestures, and vibrant color. He uses indulgent amounts of acrylic to build compositions that prioritize the surface of the canvas; proposing an experience of painting that is as tactile as it is visual. Concerned with pleasure, joy, and frivolity, his work galvinizes sensory experiences and challenges historical cliches of the artist's psychic self-expression and metaphysical drama. 

Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects is pleased to announce the gallery's sixth solo exhibition for new work by Patrick Wilson. Wilson is known for creating finely calibrated, luminous abstract paintings composed of lines and quadrilaterals. He uses a simple and straightforward medium, paint on canvas, to build a richly layered composition of complex spatial dynamics. 

On January 15, 2014, the Montclair Art Museum will celebrate its centennial. On view will be a collection-based exhibition throughout the Museum and its grounds, with 100 works reflecting its rich cultural history and legacy. 

timepaths is a process-based, multi-media installation by Reno-born artist Franklin Evans that investigates the complex paths he’s taken as a contemporary artist. Now living in New York and showing in galleries internationally, Evans first started painting at Stanford University as an undergraduate in 1987. At that time university art programs tended to maintain distinct boundaries between various media. Evans, however, sought a more complex visual language and began to explore the dissolution of distinct media through collaborations with choreographers, writers, and curators. His resulting installations take on the appearance of labyrinthine studio spaces where materials from diverse times and places in his life provide context and are given equal attention.

Devoted exclusively to papier collés and related works on paper from the 1940s and early 1950s by Robert Motherwell, this exhibition features nearly sixty artworks and examines the American artist's origins and his engagement with collage. The exhibition also honors Peggy Guggenheim's early patronage of the artist. At her urging, and under the tutelage of émigré Surrealist artist Matta, Motherwell first experimented with the papier collé technique. He recalled years later: "I might never have done it otherwise, and it was here that I found...my 'identity.'" By cutting, tearing, and layering pasted papers, Motherwell reflected the tumult and violence of the modern world, establishing him as an essential and original voice in postwar American art. Motherwell initially produced both figural and abstract collages, but by the early 1950s Surrealist influences prevalent in these first works had given way to his distinctive mature style, which was firmly rooted in Abstract Expressionism. "Robert Motherwell: Early Collages" will be presented at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, May 26 - September 8, 2013, before traveling to its second and final venue, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, September 27, 2013 - January 5, 2014.

This exhibition is organized by Susan Davidson, Senior Curator, Collections and Exhibitions, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.