David Hockney: A Bigger Picture, Royal Academy of Arts, review
Whatever game David Hockney is playing in his hotly anticipated Royal Academy show eludes me, says Alastair Sooke.
It is 50 years since David Hockney graduated from the Royal College of Art wearing a gold lamé jacket. Within a few years he had earned a reputation as an enfant terrible whose risqué autobiographical work touched upon the taboo subject of homosexuality. With his oversized spectacles and hair dyed silvery blond, he became Brit art’s first celebrity: a charmer whose personality beguiled the public as much as his work.
Fast-forward half a century, and Hockney is still feted and adored. He shed his skin of provocative wunderkind long ago, fashioning instead a role as a plain-speaking chain-smoker specialising in common sense. Following the death of Lucian Freud, he is routinely described as Britain’s greatest living painter. He is certainly the most popular: there have reportedly been more advance ticket sales for his new exhibition at the Royal Academy than there were for the gallery’s blockbuster Van Gogh exhibition in 2010.
David Hockney: A Bigger Picture is devoted to a single genre: landscape. It came about after the artist showed Bigger Trees near Warter – a gargantuan landscape covering 50 canvases that is now in the collection of the Tate – at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in 2007. After it caused a splash , the RA offered Hockney the full suite of main galleries for a show of landscapes. The resulting exhibition contains more than 150 works, mostly created within the past decade.
Many were painted outdoors and depict the countryside around Bridlington, the small Yorkshire seaside town where Hockney has lived for seven years. There are bright oil paintings of wheat fields and tree-lined country lanes. There are multi-canvas vistas of woodland seen in different seasons. There are watercolours of hedgerows and haystacks, charcoal sketches of copses and logs, and more than 50 colourful “drawings”, created using an iPad and printed on to paper, documenting the onset of spring along an old Roman road that runs out of Bridlington. There are even nine- and 18-screen video works that record the fluctuating appearance of Woldgate Woods: captured using high-definition cameras ingeniously rigged on to Hockney’s Jeep, they subject the natural world to the kind of scrutiny that the German artist Albrecht Dürer once lavished upon a clump of turf. Generally the mood is upbeat, homely yet wonderstruck. I half expected to hear a cuckoo sing. The colours are citrus-sharp.
You would be forgiven for asking: what happened? After all, Hockney is best known as the raunchy Californian sensualist who painted sun-kissed boys gliding through the azure swimming pools of Los Angeles in the Sixties. And yet here he presents himself as a modest pastoralist, content to hymn the bounty of nature with quiet exultation – dancing, like Wordsworth, among the daffodils. Once inspired by distant destinations such as Egypt, China and America’s West Coast, he now seems happy pottering about a neglected nook of England. The prodigal son has returned to within 65 miles of Bradford, where he was born in 1937, and settled down. The internationalist has turned parochial. The radical has come over all conservative.
As if to explain this transformation, the second room of the exhibition presents a mini-retrospective of earlier landscapes. We see two dingy paintings from the Fifties, a smattering of stylish canvases from the Sixties and Seventies, and several views of California and the Grand Canyon, including one gigantic work full of oranges and reds so scorching you can practically feel your retina burning up. The gallery functions as a kind of airlock, inviting us to shed our perceptions and consider Hockney afresh as a landscape artist, before venturing forth to look at his more recent work.
Whether or not we accept this argument, the simple truth is that the show is far too big. Like a sprawling oak in need of a tree surgeon, it required a stronger curator prepared to lop off the deadwood. I could happily have done without the watercolours recording midsummer in east Yorkshire in 2004, or the suite of smallish oil paintings from the following year.
Read more at: David Hockney succumbs to hubris
Largest and most colourful lithographs ever made by David Hockney at Alan Cristea Gallery
David Hockney, Amaryllis in Vase, 1984. Lithograph. Paper and image 127.0 x 91.4 cm. Edition of 80. Photo: Courtesy of Alan Cristea Gallery.
LONDON.- The Alan Cristea Gallery, Cork Street W1, will today unveil an exhibition of David Hockney’s largest and most colourful lithographs in an exhibition entitled ‘Moving Focus. A focal point of this free exhibition will be two views of the ‘Hotel Acatlán’ which the artist discovered when car trouble forced him to stop in the midst of a journey to Mexico City. Taking place from19 January until 18 February 2012 in the gallery’s space at No. 34 Cork Street, the exhibition is timed to coincide with the Royal Academy’s major new show of landscape works by Hockney, and is one of a number of art exhibitions and auctions celebrating the work of one of Britain’s best loved artists to take place this month.
In the mid-1970s, shortly after moving to California, David Hockney began his working relationship with master printer Kenneth Tyler. It was with Tyler, that Hockney created the Moving Focus series, which remains his largest and most ambitious series of colour lithographs. The series combines the Renaissance tradition of fixed-viewpoint painting with the Eastern aesthetic of multiple, narrative viewpoints within the same picture. The acknowledgement of the flatness of picture plane along with the exaggeration of perspective and foreshortening present in Tyler Dining Room, Amaryllis in Vase, Pembroke Studio Interior and, most didactically, The Perspective Lesson underscore Hockney’s questioning of the traditional western values in composition.
Hockney made the two Hotel prints featured in this exhibition after discovering the hotel Acatlán’ when car trouble forced him to stop en route to Mexico City. Hotel : Acatlán Second Day is based on sketches made of the hotel courtyard shortly after his arrival. Further sketches made when he revisited the hotel on the return leg of his journey resulted in Hotel Acatlán : Two Weeks Later. The figure in the lower right corner of this print refers to his 1954 portrait of his mother, Woman with a Sewing Machine.
The Hotel Acatlán also provided the subject matter for the three View of Hotel Well lithographs hanging in the exhibition, each one providing a different viewpoint of the central feature of the courtyard. The sense of distorted perspective is here enhanced by the skewed, hand-painted frames designed by Hockney himself.
David Hockney was born in 1937 in Bradford, where he studied at the Bradford School of Art before going on to graduate from the Royal College of Art in 1962. He was elected to the Royal Academy of Arts in 1991 and made a Companion of Honour in 1997. He was awarded an Order of Merit in this year’s New Year Honours list. Hockney is generally acknowledged to be one of the most important and influential artists working today and his paintings, prints and drawings have been the subject of numerous retrospectives at almost every major international museum. Examples of his work are held in most international public collections, and works from the Moving Focus series can be found in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Tate Collection, the National Gallery of Australia, the Government Art Collection, the Walker Art Centre, Minneapolis and the Smithsonian Museum, Washington DC amongst others.
Throughout his career, Hockney has been a gifted and prolific printmaker and some of his most iconic images have been realised in various print media. Alan Cristea Gallery always holds a wide and ever-changing selection of his prints in stock.
A Mixed Exhibition, including etchings and lithographs by Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, will be staged in the gallery space at No. 31 Cork Street to coincide with David Hockney: Moving Focus. Lithography, a method for printing using a stone or metal plate, was a medium which fascinated Picasso; During the 20th century, a group of celebrated artists including Chagall, Matisse, Miro and Picasso rediscovered the largely unexplored art form of lithography, thanks to the Mourlot Studios, a Parisian print-shop founded in 1852 by the Mourlot Family, which was transformed when the founder’s grandson, Fernand, invited a number of leading artists of the day to explore the complexities of fine art printing During the war Picasso had been starved of the associations so necessary to him with fellow artists, poets and craftsmen and one can speculate that the opportunity of renewing a daily relationship with a master printer was of great personal and professional appeal to him. Picasso made numerous single images during these years but, in most cases, he would develop and transform a theme through many stages of a stone or plate. One such example is Les deux Femmes nues, 1945, of which 6 different states are showcased in this exhibition.
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Spots and Sharks and Maggots and Money
How Damien Hirst took over the world. By Jerry Saltz
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(Photo: Andrew Testa/The New York Times/Redux)
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Damien Hirst is the Elvis of the English art world, its ayatollah, deliverer, and big-thinking entrepreneurial potty-mouthed prophet and front man. Hirst synthesizes punk, Pop Art, Jeff Koons, Marcel Duchamp, Francis Bacon, and Catholicism. He’s the working-class hero who as a 23-year-old art student at the University of London’s Goldsmiths college organized “Freeze,” an exhibition of his artwork and that of fifteen school chums.
That show, and his own work featuring living flies and maggots, dead butterflies, and cut-up dead animals, de-islandized England, alerting the world that Britain was no longer a second-tier art nation. While Hirst did not act alone, it is almost impossible to imagine the Tate Modern or the “yBa” (young British artists) phenomenon of the nineties without his ambitions and aggression. Or his easy outrages: public drinking and drugging, saying things like “Women smell of kippers,” meeting a curator naked, or tucking a chicken bone into his foreskin at a bar.
Two decades in, the father of three sons, operator of six studios, boss of (he says) 160 employees, one of Britain’s wealthiest citizens, Hirst is back and blatant as ever. Next week he’ll open a retrospective of more than 300 of his multitudinous, assistant-made “spot paintings.” As Hirst has said, “I always … treat [art] as an all-or-nothing situation. There’s no way I’m going to settle for half.” Hence the survey will be mounted simultaneously worldwide at all eleven of Larry Gagosian’s galleries. For five weeks, the sun will never set on a Hirst spot.
Read more at: http://nymag.com/includes/3/arts/2012/01/hirst-timeline/index.html
Kianja Strobert Going on Foot at ZACH FEUER GALLERY
James Kalm strolled into the opening of Kianja Strobert’s debut show with this gallery moments before the doors closed. Strobert is a Yale graduate and is presenting two bodies of work, paintings and collage on paper, and floor bound sculptural pieces that employ pottery shards and threads of neon tubing. Though the texture and color of these works reflects the influence of Hans Hofmann’s New York School, there is also a hint of urban abjectness, and with the inclusion of chicken bones, tangles of thread and fruit peals, references to a folksy ghetto mojo.
Petersen, Hathaway and de Oude at STOREFRONT BUSHWICK
Opening on New Years Day January 1, 2012, the newly rechristened Storefront Bushwick Gallery presents an exhibition of works by three male painters with strong commitments to abstract composition and luscious color senses. Gary Petersen is known for his severe and angular abstractions. Their rigor is subverted by their sensual palette and whimsical quirks of design. Halsey Hathaway creates curving formats reminiscent of Art Nouveau and early Modernism that resonate with the saturated color of dyed and stained fabric. In the Project Room, a select group of recent small paintings by Rob de Oude seem to weave the artist’s brushstrokes into vibrating networks of radiant forms. This program includes brief comments from all three painters, and an introduction from Deborah Brown.
Exhibition of works by African American artists from the Flomenhaft Collection opens
Romare Bearden, Up at Minton’s, 1980, collage with painted elements, 39½ x 29½ inches.
NEW YORK, N.Y.- The Black artists’ selections on view share neither an artistic program nor a similar background. They are all of a different mettle. All create with an unremitting creative force that issues from their Black heritage, their American heritage, political or societal influences or from a poetic instinct. What is clear is that out of their shared heroic struggles have come some glorious art that feeds on life. The Flomenhaft Gallery collected works by wonderful Black artists and is making them available to the public. In the exhibit are: Emma Amos, Benny Andrew, Romare Bearden, Beverly Buchanan, Jacob Lawrence, Faith Ringgold, Charles Lloyd Tucker, and Carrie Mae Weems.
Atlanta born artist, Emma Amos once said “For me, a black artist, to walk into the studio is a political act.” She received her BFA at Antioch College studying fine arts and textile weaving. She also worked as an illustrator for Sesame Street and as a textile designer for the very prestigious Dorothy Liebes. She was the only female artist in the Spiral Group formed by Romare Bearden and his peers. The Spiral group recently was celebrated in a superb show at the Studio Museum in Harlem. Three of Emma’s works in our exhibit are: Let Me Off Uptown, Josephine and the Ostrich, and Beauty. Her pastel painting Josephine and the Ostrich (1984) is a tribute to Josephine Baker, world famed American born French dancer, singer and actress who was carried through a boulevard in Budapest, sitting aloft her carriage and pulled by an ostrich.
Benny Andrews’ ink drawing from 1974, MacDowell Colony/Across the Water, was created 10 years after Congress gave President Lyndon Johnson the right to do whatever he deemed necessary to defend South East Asia. Those ten years of bloodshed in Vietnam resulted in 50,000 American servicemen coming home in body bags, others coming home disabled, and pilots and crews of downed American aircrafts being taken to horrific prisons. With terse linear forms, Andrews drew a mother standing at the edge of a cliff screaming perhaps for her son lying dead in a pool of blood across a deep chasm, a black cloud looming above. It could just as well be a passionate depiction of any mother today bereft because of a son or daughter killed or maimed in Iraq or Afghanistan.
Romare Bearden was born in North Carolina in 1911 and grew up in Harlem. His centennial is currently being celebrated in many museums and galleries. His mother was actively engaged in social issues, and great black writers, musicians and politicians often visited their home. He had a degree in education, but his first love was art. He is arguably one of the great masters of the collage. It is worth making a pilgrimage to our exhibit if only to see Up at Minton’s (1980) a collage with painted elements for which Bearden is renowned. His work offers a microcosmic view of the jazz musician’s life during the Harlem Renaissance days, when after their gigs, they went to Minton’s and played their hearts out by the light of the moon. It was the work chosen by the Bearden Foundation for a picture puzzle sold in many museums and for their 2005 engagement book cover. Another work, Maternity/Ancestral Legend (1972), a watercolor and collage on board, is a metaphor for motherhood that freezes the images in our minds. When UNICEF was searching for the essence of a Black Madonna and Child for Christmas cards, at least 20 years ago, they asked to reproduce this one. It is still used as one of their holiday images.
Beverly Buchanan’s shack architecture in paintings such as Ferry Road Shacks (1988), oil pastel on paper, and her sculptures are poetic works as rich in dignity as they are in complexity. They evoke the spectra of people, places and a culture that was fast disappearing in the byways of North and South Carolina, of people that could neither read nor write but raised children who became doctors, lawyers and all kinds of creative adults. Each of her makeshift sculptures, created out of scavenged materials, she calls a “portrait,” an homage to people who may have lived in a shack, or for a friend she made along her trek. Buchanan is also a poet and for a work in our exhibit Coming Home the Back Way (1991), wood and mixed media, she wrote a poetic legend which will be on view.
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Jerry Saltz: On Helen Frankenthaler, 1928-2011
Helen Frankenthaler at work, 1969.
The sailing wasn’t easy. Frankenthaler was often belittled, her work called merely decorative. Critics said she made pretty wallpaper. Her marriage to A-list artist Robert Motherwell was often sniggered about, as was her five-year relationship with the critic Clement Greenberg. Charges of being a privileged rich girl were common, as were the laughably literal readings of her work, which said she was “about menstruation and the liquid world of the feminine.” Frankenthaler had to read dismissals of her work, often contrasting it with Pollock’s, like this: “Her work excites without quite satisfying…she can make a paint-mass spurt like a dike and yet control it till it laps the canvas like a spent wave.” Others fretted over the differences between ejaculation and menstruation. (Oy.) Yet Frankenthaler’s formal accomplishments somehow broke free of all of this.
She blurred the borders between geometry, order, chaos, the body, atmosphere, and ground. She shunned the overemotional hysteria of Abstract Expressionism, pouring thinned, watered down, and turpentine-laden mixes of color directly onto raw canvas. Her structures and shapes were open, controlled by natural forces while also describing them. Her paint and canvass became one surface. This was a big deal back in the day. Edges evaporated; accident was visible; so were her means and intentions. Pooling paint created varying viscosities of thickness and thinness; paint dried into imagistic river beds, isolated islands, clouds, continental masses that all evoked landscape without depicting it or engaging any abstract sublime. There was no paint-flinging or implied dance around the canvas. There was picture-making, pure and simple. And beauty. Lots of it. Which of course made people run back to labels like feminine.
Read more at: Jerry Saltz: On Helen Frankenthaler, 1928-2011
The Glass Ceiling Shattered, 30 Years – 3 Great American Women Artists at Alan Avery Art Company
Louise Nevelson, NS Relief, Black cast paper relief, 27 x 31.
ATLANTA, GA.- Alan Avery Art Company will celebrate their 30th anniversary with the exhibition The Glass Ceiling Shattered, 30 Years – 3 Great American Women Artists, featuring work from Louise Nevelson, Helen Frankenthaler and Kara Walker. The exhibition has opened to the public Saturday, December 3, 2011. The exhibition continues through Friday, February 10, 2012.
For the past three decades as an art dealer, Alan Avery has strived to bring a different voice and a new perspective to Atlanta’s collecting audience by bringing artists and great works to a city that may otherwise not be seen on southern soil. To celebrate Alan Avery Art Company’s landmark 30th anniversary, Alan wanted something that had not been done before, something that would not only speak about who he is as a dealer, but also offer the city an opportunity to learn, grow and expand their knowledge in the world of art and collecting great works of art.
Throughout history, not only in the arts, the contributions of women have been over-looked. In the 20th century this perception began to change. With the women’s movement in the late 1960s and early 70s female artists garnered further acceptance and critical praise from the art world and general public. Associations like the Woman’s Caucus for Art provided venues for their art, giving them the visibility that has long been denied them.
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Substance and Spectacle
YOU can complain all you want about the art-world money-go-round and the celebrity circus spinning in its widening gyre. Prices are up; so are mentions of Art Basel Miami on Page Six. Artworks seem only to get bigger and shinier, and spectacle — participatory or not — is becoming the new normal at museum exhibitions of contemporary art. Note the record crowds lining up to gawk at Maurizio Cattelan’s career immolation at the Guggenheim or whiz down Carsten Höller’s tubular slide at the New Museum.
Tom Powel Imaging/L&M Arts
David Hammons’s show at L&M Arts (including his untitled piece) was among the year’s standout gallery exhibitions. More Photos »
The year was full of dismaying sights, as the art world kept jumping the shark. Who can forget Francesco Vezzoli’s dreadfully slick, churchlike installation at the Gagosian Gallery in Chelsea in February? Who can remember? There’s been so much sludge under the bridge since then. Art and life imitated each other in countless, sometimes hair-raising ways. Not least: At this year’s Venice Biennale the oligarchic yachts moored outside the Giardini were answered from within by a huge upturned military tank. It was the most ostentatious element in the extremely expensive, and thus institutionally dependent, institutional critique offered by Allora & Calzadilla at the American pavilion.
And yet there were also close encounters with artworks past and present in all mediums for which to be deeply grateful. I was mostly in New York, which — despite the booming success of the Hong Kong art fair, a wealth of interesting-sounding exhibitions in Europe (especially London) this fall and the multifaceted curatorial triumph of “Pacific Standard Time” in and around Los Angeles — remains the art capital where the greatest number of people participate in the largest, most random multi-tiered scene. There is certainly more art in New York’s museums, galleries, alternative spaces and outlying artist-run showplaces than any one person can see, much less digest.
Hats off to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for the extraordinary cultural revelation of its new and expanded Arab Lands galleries and to the Museum of Modern Art for its once-in-a-lifetime de Kooning retrospective, memorializing an artist who never stopped trying in a show that never lets us down. The Modern also deserves our thanks for continuing to aerate its permanent collection with artists previously absent from its overly compact version of art history.
In addition there was the Whitney’s retrospective of Glenn Ligon’s serene but barbed art; the New Museum’s summation of Lynda Benglis’s subversive sculptural tendencies, as well as “Ostalgia,” its examination of recent art from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet republics. At MoMA PS1 antic videos by Ryan Trecartin and Lizzie Fitch, screened among their equally antic assemblages of Ikea furniture, felt alive and of the moment.
Read more at: In the New York Art Scene, Spectacle and Substance Both Wow
Wide range of Donald Baechler’s artwork in two and three dimensions at Fisher Landau Center for Art
Donald Baechler, Priceless, Wordless, Loveless, 1987-88, acrylic, oil & collage on linen, 111 x 111 inches. Tree, 1988, cast bronze, 80 x 26-1⁄2 inches. Photo: Light Blue Studio.
NEW YORK, N.Y.- Fisher Landau Center for Art announces an exhibition exploring a wide range of Donald Baechler’s artwork in two and three dimensions, created over the last 25 years. In the mid 1980′s, the subject matter of his large-scale paintings began quite literally to jump off the walls, transforming into monumental bronze sculptures. Installed on two floors of the Center, the exhibition is made up of work from Fisher Landau Center for Art, supplemented by work from Donald Baecher’s personal collection, highlighting the interplay of recurring motifs as they transform from the painted surface to objects in space.
Born in Hartford, Connecticut in 1956, Baechler’s artistic training took place in New York, Baltimore, and Germany. In the early 80s, Baechler came into prominence alongside Basquiat, Haring, Condo and the German artists – Dokoupil and Kippenberger. He has exhibited internationally since the outset of his career and is renowned for a distinctive practice, evoking a child-like fascination with cultural symbols and commonplace elements. Emily Fisher Landau began collecting his artwork in 1985 with the purchase of “Globe”, 1984/85, a 52 inch square canvas whose surface is made with acrylic, cotton, paper & rhoplex. Since that time Mrs. Landau has added close to 30 pieces, comprising a selection of painting, sculpture & works on paper that form a cohesive cross section of Baechler’s thematic vocabulary.
Included in the installation are “Priceless, Wordless, Loveless”, 1987-88, (111 x 111 inches), exhibited in the 1989 Whitney Biennial, a painting on linen that became the inspiration for “Tree”, 1988, one of Baechler’s first sculptures cast in bronze. Other paintings on display include “Deep North”, 1989, also included in the 1989 Whitney Biennial, a seminal example of his textural layering process using acrylic, oil and fabric collage on linen, as well as “Autonomy or Anarchy #1″ (102 ½ x 117 3/4 inches) & “Autonomy or Anarchy #2″ (99 x 114 inches), both 2003, enormous works on paper depicting disembodied horse heads, facing each other and floating on a frenetic field of collaged paper and fabric, and mounted to linen. “Scarecrow”, 2006, (136 x 70 x 37 inches) a towering bronze installed on the outdoor entry ramp, welcomes the viewers to the Center with a passive demeanor that belies its aggressive scale. The third floor gallery presents an oversized landscape made up of Baechler’s bronze “Plants”, 2003-04 and “Flowers”, 2003-07, ranging in size up to seven feet tall. Forming a progression in space, they lead to “Bather (large version)”, 1997 (78 x 66 x 60 inches), a fountain of cast bronze featuring an archetypal Baechler figure, immersed in an enormous water-filled bucket.
Housed in a former parachute harness factory, Fisher Landau Center for Art was designed by Max Gordon in association with Bill Katz and is devoted to the exhibition and study of the contemporary art collection of Emily Fisher Landau.
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