Nancy Spero with her husband, painter Leon Golub, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1995. She depicted war’s horrors in pictures using gouache, ink, and collage on paper. (Sara Krulwich/ NY Times)
NEW YORK – Nancy Spero, an American artist and feminist whose tough, exquisite figurative art addressed the realities of political violence, died Sunday in Manhattan. She was 83 and lived in Manhattan.
The cause was respiratory complications of an infection, her son Philip said.
Born in Cleveland in 1926, Ms. Spero studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and there met her husband, the painter Leon Golub, to whom she was married for 53 years, until his death in 2004.
The couple moved to Paris in 1959, where Ms. Spero steeped herself in European existentialism and produced a series of oil paintings she had begun in Chicago on the themes of night, motherhood, and eroticism. When they settled in New York City, which became their permanent home, in 1964, the Vietnam War and the social changes it was creating in America profoundly affected Ms. Spero.
To come to grips with those realities, Ms. Spero, who always viewed art as inseparable from life, developed a distinctive kind of political work. Polemical but symbolic, it combined drawing and painting with craft-based techniques like collage and printmaking seldom associated with traditional Western notions of high art and mastery.
Read more at: Nancy Spero; feminist artist addressed political violence
From plinth to People’s Republic: Antony Gormley invades China
October 24, 2009
Having turned Britons into living statues, the sculptor has now filled a Beijing gallery with an army of human forms. He shows Jonathan Watts around – and explains why he has designs on the 2012 London Olympics
A silvery spider’s web … Antony Gormley stands in front of his sculpture, Another Singularity, in Beijing. Photograph: Oak Taylor-Smith
Antony Gormley is rather pleased at the outcome of One and Other, the 100-day celebration of British democracy, eccentricity and ordinariness that recently finished on Trafalgar Square’s fourth plinth. So pleased, in fact, that he can’t resist the suggestion that it could be transplanted elsewhere.
“I think they should do it on Tiananmen Square,” he says with a mischievous smile. “It would be very good to do it in Moscow, too. You could remove Mayakovsky and use that plinth. Or you could remove Karl Marx.”
It is a joke, of course, but it’s somewhat close to the bone. We are talking in Beijing, where the government recently staged a Tiananmen Square celebration to mark 60 years of the People’s Republic with a huge parade of goose-stepping soldiers and nuclear weapons. It’s hard to imagine a starker contrast between the nudists, lap dancers and charity campaigners who appeared on the London plinth with the event staged by the Chinese authorities, which the government decreed should only be watched on TV, with phalanxes of soldiers reduced to well-choreographed pixels.
“As a sculptor, it is the thing that I am working against,” he says. “It’s the state deciding that it wants to virtualise the physical nature of its power. Now that China owns the world, maybe this is the new order. There is something deeply worrying about the pixel in the hand of the propagandist.”
Read more at The Guardian:
From plinth to People’s Republic
Joan Snyder, Another Painter Extraordinaire
October 22, 2009
A couple of weeks ago I purchased a book of Joan Snyder’s work (Joan Snyder by Hayden Herrera). I have been aware of her painting for decades and have always admired it, and her book had been on my “wish-list” for quite some time, but when I opened it I was more than hooked. It’s a delicious tome that I lug around just about wherever I go turning each page with a slowness I’m not used to, making sure I don’t miss a thing. And I haven’t only been examining the luscious photos of her paintings, but poring over every word to understand her work more fully. A cover to cover endeavor, almost unheard of for me regarding a book like this. And the more I read and refer to the paintings mentioned, the more enthralled I become.
From artnet and Betty Cuningham Gallery
PAINT THE HOUSE, 1970 Color chalk, ink, pencil, oil pastel and gouache on paper, h: 30 x w: 22 in
Joan Snyder was born April 16, 1940 in Highland Park, New Jersey. A painter and print-maker , she is both a MacArthur Fellow and Guggenheim Fellow. In 1966 she received an M.F.A. from Rutgers, The State University, New Brunswick, NJ
From The Jewish Museum
SQUARES, 1972 Oil, acrylic, and flock on canvas 48″ x 48″
According to a 2008 City Beat (Cincinnati) review by Matt Morris: Her paintings are positioned in the discourse of Postmodernism and the circular argument of “post-post” we are treading presently. Her vocabulary of strokes, blossoms and chunky blocks is the tamest element of the paintings. Plant matter, paper pulp and who-knows-what have been collaged onto most of the surfaces. “Flow,” for example is initially colored with the blue-green shades of a babbling brook. But seeds glitter and a swath of cheesecloth have been embedded into paint that sometimes gets transparent and gelatinous enough to resemble splatters of vomit.
Snyder exaggerates every potential element of abstract painting, toying with decoration, assemblage and ugly beauty. A stunning diptych, “Primary Fields” courts a lazy grid on a white ground with a fiery canvas of rosy and bloody reds. On the left, little rectangles of dripping paint are arranged on bars like musical compositions or penmanship exercises. The right canvas is like a Monet set aflame with juicy spots that look like gaping wounds. It is a Baroque and metaphysical painting.
From artnet and Betty Cuningham Gallery
FREE TO IMAGINE / LIKE MY CHILD (diptych) 1985 Oil, acrylic, pencil on paper on canvas, h: 36 x w: 72 in
“Making art is, for me, practicing a religion. … My work is my pride, creates for me a heritage. It is a place to struggle freely at my altar.” These words were spoken by Joan Snyder for the Fortieth Biennial Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting held at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C. in 1987. Twenty-five years earlier Snyder experienced an epiphany, which she expressed with these words, “I felt like my whole life, I had never spoken … had never been heard … had never said anything that had any meaning. When I started painting, it was like I was speaking for the first time.” Joan Snyder is known for the intensity of her feelings. A true Expressionist and feminist in her life and art, this veteran painter uses the broadest possible palette to paint the canvas of her life. From Jewish Women’s Arcive
ORATORIO, 1997, oil, acrylic, plastic grapes, feathers, fabric nails, mud, herbs, paper mache, graphite and paper on canvas, 72″ x 114″
From absolutearts.com: A Painting Survey, 1969-2005
Snyder gained early recognition with her “stroke paintings” which she made between 1969 and 1973. These works relied on the repeated gesture of a paint-laden brush applied over a grid penciled on the canvas. With the physicality of their drips and marks, the stroke paintings exploited new opportunities for narrative within abstraction. The tension between narrative content and formalism in these works may be seen in the larger context of the art world of the late 1960s, in which cool, hard-edged minimalism was pervasive and painting with any emotional reference was suspect. The artist has said that the strokes are about paint itself—paint moving across the canvas; paint as medium for feelings, sensations, or sounds; paint suggesting a storyline. After making these abstractions, Snyder felt the need to create more complex works, which express her political and social concerns. She moved on to paintings that integrate personal associations she has with her family, feminism, her Jewish heritage, spirituality, and the environment. Consequently her work moved from an implied narrative about the act of making art to a more personal narrative.
From artnet and Betty Cuningham Gallery
STILL/LIFE, 2002 Oil, acrylic, herbs & fabric on wood panel h: 42 x w: 66 in
From: THE Magazine – Los Angeles: SolwayJones
BLOOD ON OUR HANDS, 2003 acrylic, cloth, glitter, pencil, photographic image on panel, 16 x 16 inches
Excerpted from MacArthur Fellows 2007
Joan Snyder is an accomplished artist whose abstract paintings defy categorization and traverse genres. Over the four decades of her prolific career, Snyder’s body of work has continually evolved in style and form. Beginning with her early “stroke” paintings – intense swaths of color painted over pencil-drawn grids – her works have been essentially narratives of both personal and communal experiences. In these paintings, each brush stroke is like a character in a story, pulsing with emotion and vitality. After abandoning formal grids as the basic structure of her paintings, Snyder’s work became more explicitly gestural and rooted in memory, while at the same time more complex materially. She began to incorporate text scrawled into the paint or frames, as well as found objects such as herbs, sticks, feathers, mud, and nails, to create works saturated with feeling. InThe Cherry Tree (1993), for instance, a work expressing Snyder’s grief surrounding her father’s death, she uses paint, papier-mâché, and straw to render an image that is both elegiac and thriving. While her paintings mirror her personal experience, the visual messages she provides through her images convey universal and readily understood emotions. Through a fiercely individual approach and persistent experimentation with technique and materials, Snyder has extended the expressive potential of abstract painting and inspired a generation of emerging artists.
From artnet and Betty Cuningham Gallery
DREAMTIME FOR EAS , 2006 Acrylic, oil, paper-mache, cloth, herbs, glitter, h: 60 x w: 78 in
From LA Times, Culture Monster, Joan Snyder Review:
LIFE OF A TREE 2007, oil, acrylic, cloth, berries, papier-mâché, glitter, nails, pastel, on linen.
The six paintings and four prints in veteran New York artist Joan Snyder’s L.A. solo debut are vintage Snyder: chewy clots of mismatched materials wrestled into abstract images that are lyrical without being lightweight, visceral without being heavy-handed.
At the Solway-Jones Gallery, the fleshy physicality and broken-bones impact begins with the stuff Snyder uses. Into her gooey mixes of dripping acrylics and runny oils she sprinkles seeds, herbs, twigs, glitter and nails. She contains these stews with nest-like enclosures sculpted from papier-mâché and torn strips of fabric. When they dry, they have the presence of wounded flesh, freshly scabbed over yet too sensitive to touch. Think of these parts of her paintings as scars in the making.
The soaring lyricism in Snyder’s otherwise dark art comes through via her capacity to make paint sing. She slaps gestures together with the best of them without wasting a move or missing a beat.
There’s a no-nonsense frugality to her funky art, which is nothing if not serious. There’s also great pleasure, which comes with the wisdom of knowing what you can do and then doing more than that for reasons you can’t quite explain.
It’s odd for an artist of Snyder’s stature to be having her first solo show in L.A. It’s doubly so because her go-it-alone, category-be-damned, DIY-style rhymes so well with so much of the best painting made in L.A. — David Pagel
Snyder’s work can be seen in New York City in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Jewish Museum which featured a major survey of Snyder’s work in 2005. Museums throughout the country include The High Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and The Dallas Museum of Fine Arts.
Grayson Perry’s The Walthamstow Tapestry goes on display in London
October 21, 2009
Detail from The Walthamstow Tapestry by Grayson Perry. Photograph: Linda Nylind
Aside from his way of appearing in public dressed in elaborate couture party frocks, Grayson Perry, who won the 2003 Turner prize, is best known for his beautifully crafted pots decorated with often uncomfortable scenes of modern life.
But now he has turned his hand to textiles, and has produced a vast tapestry decorated with hundreds of brand names – including the Guardian – which goes on display at a London gallery on Friday.
The work, which measures fifteen metres by three metres, was inspired by Perry’s enthusiasm for the elaborate imagery of early 20th-century Sumatran batik fabrics.
The Walthamstow Tapestry, as he has named it, can be read from left to right. It starts with a graphically bloody scene of childbirth and then continues with depictions of the seven ages of man, through childhood, adulthood and eventually to death.
But the devil is in the detail. Around these large human figures teem hundreds of smaller images and words. The words are brand names, detached from their products but leaving behind them, Perry says, the aroma of the particular values they convey.
Read more at The Guardian:
Art and design
Fiona Rae, British painter
October 20, 2009
Richard Russo
October 19, 2009
David Hockney’s Long Road Home
October 18, 2009
Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima
By CAROL KINO
IT was a brilliantly sunny autumn day in East Yorkshire, and the artist David Hockney was taking me for a drive through the countryside. “What it is I’m going to show you is an alleyway of trees,” he said in his gruff Yorkshire burr as he turned his open-topped Audi roadster off the one-lane road into an even narrower byway bordered by swaying beech, sycamore and ash trees. “When I moved up here, I recognized this is really very rare and beautiful.”
Because Mr. Hockney has been going deaf since his early 40s, he tends toward opinionated monologues, often delivered as he gesticulates with a cigarette. But at 72, even with hearing aids in both ears, he remains lively, gregarious and enthusiastic — especially when it comes to looking at the world, thinking about the world and making art out of what he sees.
As we drew close to the trees, he fretted over the sun’s position. “The lighting is made for going the other way,” he complained. Then he slowed down so we had time to appreciate each tree individually, and began issuing orders about how to look.
“Watch!” he called out. “The ash tree now comes in — look at the shape of it! And now then on the right, another tree. There’s a point where each one stands on its own. There. Now. It’s surrounded by sky. Now the next one, and it stands on its own. You see?” It was as though he were giving director’s notes.
Read more at The New York Times: David Hockney’s Long Road Home
David Hockney’s iPhone Passion
October 17, 2009
By Lawrence Weschler
See the related podcast and the accompanying audio slide show.
After two decades of regularly finding himself caught up in all sorts of seemingly extraneous side-passions (photocollages, operatic stage design, fax extravaganzas, homemade photocopier print runs, a controversial revisionist art-historical investigation, and a watercolor idyll), David Hockney, now age seventy-two, has finally taken to painting once again, doing so, over the past three or four years, with a vividness and a sheer productivity perhaps never before seen in his career. This recent body of work consists almost entirely of seasonal landscapes of the rolling hills, hedgerows, tree stands, valley wolds, and farm fields surrounding the somewhat déclassé onetime summer seaside resort of Bridlington, England, on the North Sea coast, where he now lives. Some are intimately scaled but many are among the largest, most ambitious canvases of his entire career.
The paintings have been widely exhibited—in London (at the Tate and the Royal Academy), in Los Angeles, a broad overview in a small museum in Germany this past summer—though not yet in New York, a situation that will be rectified in late October by a major show, his first there in ten years, slated to take up both the uptown and downtown spaces at PaceWildenstein.[1] The buildup toward these shows has found Hockney busier than ever (he is still in the process of completing a dozen fresh canvases as I write), but not so busy that he hasn’t managed to become fascinated by yet another new (and virtually diametrically opposite) technology, one that he is pursuing with almost as much verve and fascination: drawing on his iPhone.
Drawings by David Hockney, made with the Brushes application on his iPhone, 2009.
Hockney first became interested in iPhones about a year ago (he grabbed the one I happened to be using right out of my hands). He acquired one of his own and began using it as a high-powered reference tool, searching out paintings on the Web and cropping appropriate details as part of the occasional polemics or appreciations with which he is wont to shower his friends.
Read more at NYRB here.
Frieze art fair fringe: from Anselm Kiefer to Zoo
October 15, 2009
From major gallery openings to tiny pop-up projects, Frieze week is the busiest in the contemporary art calendar. Here’s our pick of the fringe
Strike a chord … Conrad Shawcross’s new art installation, viewable (by appointment only) in a former subway tunnel buried beneath the streets of London. Photograph: Katherine Rose
Later this week, Frieze art fair will make the London art world echo to the genteel smack of air-kissing, champagne corks popping at dawn and – so dealers hope – chequebooks rustling. This Mecca of art glamour has now become a crucial moment in the calendar not just for big-money collecting, but for everything from public institutions to independent guerrilla projects.
It’s also the cue for commercial galleries to flash their star turns, or showcase feted younger artists. At the more glittery end of the scale, Sadie Coles has hyper-realistic sculptures by Swiss polymath Ugo Rondinone, while White Cube has gone for Anselm Kiefer’s weighty Romanticism. Among the most interesting work by emerging talents are the visceral cartoonish paintings by Armen Eloyan at Timothy Taylor, and Walead Beshty’s ardently conceptual, process-fixated pictograms at Thomas Dane gallery.
Yet Frieze week has also become the moment for public galleries and museums to unveil major exhibitions. Leading the charge, an Ed Ruscha survey at the Hayward Gallery takes in 50 years of painting by the iconic chronicler of Californian dreams. The first UK retrospective of Sophie Calle’s voyeuristic work at the Whitechapel Gallery includes her celebrated installation Take Care of Yourself. For this collection of films, objects and text, Calle enlisted a crack force of female professionals, including a translator, ballerina and markswoman, to “interpret” a curt rejection email she’d received from an ex-lover. Tate Modern has opted for the austere work of Polish artist Miroslaw Balka for its major Turbine Hall commission, avoiding the funfair-like installations of recent years in these recession-dampened times. Sucking in everything from Samuel Beckett and black holes to Hell and the biblical plague of darkness, Balka’s gigantic, industrial-steel holding tank, How It Is, makes for a sinister, yawning sight.
But even that’s not an end. The foremost alternative to Frieze is its increasingly impressive baby sister, Zoo.
Read more at:
Damien Hirst’s paintings are deadly dull
October 14, 2009
Art review: He may have done them on his own, but these doomy, gloomy paintings look positively amateurish
In pictures: Tour the show for yourself
Damien Hirst’s The Meek Shall Inherit the Earth (2008) at the Wallace Collection. Photograph courtesy Damien Hirst and the Wallace Collection
Damien Hirst‘s paintings hang in a single, long space at the Wallace Collection, on walls covered in blue silk with a vertical stripe. The setting is extremely theatrical – just like the rest of the museum. Through a doorway, at a distance, is Nicolas Poussin’s late 1630s Dance to the Music of Time. This stares back at Hirst’s painting of a single skull, on a murky blue-black background.
Hirst locates himself at the sharp end of art history. This is brave. It is also hubristic. Three-hundred and seventy years stand between Hirst’s No Love Lost and Poussin. In the rooms beyond hang Titian and Frans Hals, Rembrandt and any number of gilded rococo fripperies. But the artist Hirst is really confronting here is Francis Bacon, the absent ghost at the feast.
Bacon’s pin-striped businessmen from the 1950s appear to provide Hirst’s model. Instead of anxious executives, though, Hirst gives us the skull without the skin: skull after skull floating in blue gloom, along with glass ashtrays, cigarettes and lighters and glasses of water – half-full or half-empty, like life itself. It’s the old mortality shtick. There’s a shark’s jaw, open like a man-trap, an iguana that looks more dead than alive, and the odd stag beetle.
Read more: Review: Hirst’s paintings are deadly dull
Islandlass's Weblog 