Monday, November 30, 2015

Recent Work in the Studio


Vision: Angel with Third Eye, 2015, acrylic on panel, 10 x 8 in.



Son of the Morning, 2015, acrylic on panel, 7 x 5 in.



O Day Star!, 2015, acrylic on panel, 7 x 5 in.



Vision 2: Green Angel, 2015, acrylic on panel, 10 x 8 in.



Eye of Agamotto, 2015, acrylic on panel, 7 x 5 in.



Einhorn, 2015, acrylic on panel, 7 x 5 in.




All paintings © Paul Behnke

Violent Storm


Käthe Kollwitz, Tod and Frau (Death Seizing a Woman), 1910, 17 1/2 x 17 in. Etching on paper. Pomona College Collection. Gift of the Culley Collection




Violent Storm  by Mark Strand

Those who have chosen to pass the night
Entertaining friends
And intimate ideas in the bright,
Commodious rooms of dreams
Will not feel the slightest tremor
Or be wakened by what seems
Only a quirk in the dry run
Of conventional weather. For them,
The long night sweeping over these trees
And houses will have been no more than one
In a series whose end
Only the nervous or morbid consider.
But for us, the wide-awake, who tend
To believe the worst is always waiting
Around the next corner or hiding in the dry,
Unsteady branch of a sick tree, debating
Whether or not to fell the passerby,
It has a sinister air.
How we wish we were sunning ourselves
In a world of familiar views
And fixed conditions, confined
By what we know, and able to refuse
Entry to the unaccounted for. For now,
Deeper and darker than ever, the night unveils
Its dubious plans, and the rain
Beats down in gales
Against the roof. We sit behind
Closed windows, bolted doors,
Unsure and ill at ease
While the loose, untied wind,
Making an almost human sound, pours
Through the open chambers of the trees.
We cannot take ourselves or what belongs
To us for granted. No longer the exclusive,
Last resorts in which we could unwind,
Lounging in easy chairs,
Recalling the various wrongs
We had been done or spared, our rooms
Seem suddenly mixed up in our affairs.
We do not feel protected
By the walls, nor can we hide
Before the duplicating presence
Of their mirrors, pretending we are the ones who stare
From the other side, collected
In the glassy air.
A cold we never knew invades our bones.
We shake as though the storm were going to hurl us down
Against the flat stones
Of our lives. All other nights
Seem pale compared to this, and the brilliant rise
Of morning after morning seems unthinkable.
Already now the lights
That shared our wakefulness are dimming
And the dark brushes against our eyes.



Alfred A. Knopf, 2007, 267 pages
ISBN 0307262979, 9780307262974

Melissa Staiger at Trestle Gallery


Melissa Staiger, Built to Spin, 2015, mixed media on panel, 20 x 16 inches.



Melissa Staiger: Push with the Tide
curated by Katerina Lanfranco

Opening Reception: Sunday December 6, 6 - 9 p

Trestle Gallery

Wednesday, November 25, 2015

Devotion Co-Curated by William Corwin at Catinca Tabacaru Gallery

Clockwise: 17th century icon, artist unknown, Will Corwin, Justin Orvis Steimer, Gail Stoicheff, Elizabeth Kley (wallpainting) Rachel Monosov.



Clockwise: Roxy Paine, Rachel Monosov, Carin Riley, Rico Gatson, Elizabeth Kley (lanterns), Joyce Pensato (Elmos in back), Serra Victoria Bothwell Fels (Rood screen), Rico Gatson (throne), Mike Ballou (rug)



Clockwise: Rico Gaston, Elizabeth Kley (wallpainting and Lantern) Carin Riley, Rachel Monosov, Justin Orvis Steimer, Roxy Paine, Paul Anthony Smith, Kati Preti.
All photos courtesy David Riley



Devotion 
co-curated by William Corwin

featuring work by:  Mike Ballou, Joe Brittain, William Corwin, Serra Victoria Bothwell Fels, Elizabeth Ferry, Rico Gatson, Elisabeth Kley, Rachel Monosov, Roxy Paine, Joyce Pensato, Katie Bond Pretti, Carin Riley, Paul Anthony Smith, Justin Orvis Steimer, Gail Stoicheff and Sophia Wallace


Through January 17, 2015

Catinca Tabacaru Gallery


Monday, November 23, 2015

Contemporary British Drawing at the Xi'an Academy of Fine Arts



Rose Wylie



Contemporary British Drawing
featuring work by Karl Bielik, Lucian Freud, David Hockney, Rose Wylie and others.

Xi'an Academy of Fine Arts




Karl Bielik

Richard Gorman at Assab One



Richard Gorman, Untitled, 2015, oil on linen.
Ph. Salvatore Licitra



Richard Gorman: KAN

Assab One


Sunday, November 22, 2015

Chronicles in Wait: A Centotto interstizio exhibit at The Buggy Factory


Installation view with work by Nathaniel Lieb, Jack Henry and David Henderson.
Photo by George Gilliand



Chronicles in Wait
curated by Paul D'Agostino

A Centotto interstizio exhibit at the Buggy Factory

*

Histories concealed
within forms.

Discoverable in sutures,
molds, cavities.

Tales in hems,nooks
and holes.

In shadows of themselves.
Waiting to be told.

And heard.

*

Includes sculptures and sound pieces by David Henderson, Jack Henry, Oliver Jones and Nathaniel Lieb.

Last day to view: Today, Sunday, November 22, 4 - 8 p

Please check the link below for information on a closing reception to be announced.


View a short instagram video of the installation here.




Sunday, November 15, 2015

William Perehudoff: A Retrospective at Berry Campbell


William Perehudoff, AC-81-039, 1981, acrylic on canvas, 53 1/3 x 53 in.
Image courtesy of Berry Campbell and the William Perehudoff Estate



William Perehudoff: A Retrospective
On view through November 21, 2015
Berry Campbell 

Jill Levine: Wall Drawings at Hionas Gallery


Levine at work on her exhibit, Wall Drawings, at the Hionas Gallery on the Lower East Side, November 2015. Photo courtesy of Hionas Gallery.



Jill Levine: Wall Drawings
On view through December 6, 2015
Hionas Gallery

info

Saturday, November 14, 2015

Some Skeletons from Georges Rouault's Miserere et Guerre


Georges Rouault, Paris, 1957 by Arnold Newman



"For me, painting is a way to forget life.
It is a cry in the night, a strangled laugh."


















"Nothing is old, nothing is new, save the light of grace underneath which beats a human heart. The way of feeling, of understanding, of loving; the way of seeing the country,
the faces that your father saw, that your mother knew.
The rest is chimerical."



Georges Rouault's Miserere
The series of prints known as the Miserere by Georges Rouault (1871-1958) was commissioned originally as one of numerous, illustrated book projects conceived by the Parisian dealer Ambrose Vollard (1865-1939), who after 1916 functioned as the artist's sole agent and employer. To be titled Miserere et Guerre the proposed two volumes, each with fifty prints by Rouault and text by his friend, the poet Andre Suares (1866-1948), were never completed as planned. Suares, who contended that Vollard's treatment of Rouault was exploitative, withdrew from the project and advised the artist to limit the title to Miserere. As a result of the multitude of projects on which Rouault worked simultaneously and Vollard's shifting demands, only sixty-five of the 100 prints on which he worked between 1916-1917 and. 1920-1927 were completed. It was not until 1948 that fifty-eight of them were published in the definitive one volume edition of 450 copies at the Editions de I'Etoile in Paris.
In his preface to the Miserere, Rouault recounts that upon his submission of the preparatory ink drawings, he was asked by Vollard to use them as studies for paintings. Subsequently these paintings were photographically transferred onto copper plates for printing. In order to preserve the rhythm and design of the originals, the artist reworked each plate using almost every intaglio technique.' Throughout this lengthy process, working proofs were pulled during as many as fifteen consecutive trial states.
More than any other of his print series and illustrations, the Miserere folio conveys the artist's spiritual legacy of faith. The theme of human suffering that connects each single image in the portfolio relates closely to the artist's own spiritual outlook. It simultaneously provides an indictment of the spiritual crisis of Rouault's France, which found it's inception in an age marked by Nietzsche's nihilism, and culminated in a staunchly anti-clerical Republican government and the horrors of World War I.
Rouault moved among the members of the circle around the Catholic renewal movement, the Renouveau Catholique, which, in opposition to positivism and materialism, orientated itself towards a more orthodox Catholicism of the medieval past. The artist's religious outlook was strongly influenced by two major theosophists: Leon Bloy (1846-1917), whom he befriended, was a leading figure of the Renouveau Catholique and a disciple of the mystic Ernest Hallo (1828-1885); and Felicite Robert de Lamenais (1782-1854), a Catholic social revolutionary whose doctrines had been followed by Rouault's father and grandfather. Their social-mystic understanding of history as part of the suffering of God in Christ spiritualized social conditions and history itself. Rouault's work, therefore, does not aim at criticizing social conditions or at evoking pity, but invites the spectator to join in sharing all aspects of human suffering in order to find salvation and purification.
-Johann J.K. Reusch

Friday, November 13, 2015

Volume 2: Black and White at Schema Projects


Debra RamsayThe effects of a fold on a line, graphite. 8 inch square, Kozo paper, graphite, 2013



Volume 2: Black and White
Co-curated by Mary Judge and Enrico Gomez

With work by: David Ambrose, Etamar Beglikter, Jerry Birchfield, Astrid Bowlby, Amélie de Beauffort, Lorrie Fredette, Liz Jaff, Christopher Michlig, Gelah Penn, Debra Ramsay, Lauren Seiden, Matthew Shelley, Barbara Siegel, Renee van der Stelt, Allan Wexler and Etty Yaniv

This exhibit is one bookend of a two-part exhibition exploring the ways in which artists respond to paper and transform it from the 2 dimensional into the 3 dimensional in innovative and engaging ways.

Through December 6th, 2015
Schema Projects

Tuesday, November 10, 2015

Newly Added to Our Collection


William Douglas McGee, Stary Night, 1986, oil on paper and collage.




William Douglas McGee, Stary Night (detail)




William Douglas McGee, Stary Night (verso)





William Douglas McGee, Origin, 1991, oil on panel.




 William Douglas McGee, Origin (detail)




William Douglas McGee, Origin (verso)





 William Douglas McGee, Vessel, 1989, oil on canvas.




William Douglas McGee, Vessel (detail)





William Douglas McGee, Vessel (verso)




The Artist: William Douglas McGee 






Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, Untitled, 2002, Polaroid.




The Artist: Genesis Breyer P-Orridge




Friday, November 6, 2015

Russell Floersch: Unseen at 57W57 Arts


Field, 2011-12, acrylic, graphite and modeling paste on canvas and canvas collage, 17 x 19 in.




Saltbox, 2009-14, acrylic and modeling paste on canvas and paper mâché, 21 x 19 in.



From the Press Release:

57W57Arts is pleased to present “Unseen,” a solo exhibition of paintings by Russell Floersch. The title owes some of its meaning to several works that were begun twenty years ago and never exhibited. In our Waiting Room project space, Floersch shows for the first time, a group of small canvasses he characterizes as Reconstructions. Although most of these were begun in 1997, many have been completed in the last few years. They combine found photo fragments that are taped to the surface of small abstractions. Floersch uses a flat paint meant to evoke humble wall surfaces, and typically reworks paintings for several years­­­partly out of a restless search, and because he identifies with what Chantal Akerman might have meant by characterizing repetitive everyday acts and gestures as a “dailiness.” The Reconstructions share a pictorial commonality: a pair of cropped figures who make contact through their hands. Their titles are all prefaced with this thematic description: “Clasp.” Floersch strives for a naturalness in the final state of the work­­­as if the painting and its surface were something you might encounter in your everyday­­­especially as it relates to the build­up of paint through repeated application by a tradesperson covering a surface simply to protect it or introduce a different color.
In the Main Gallery of 57W57Arts, the focus shifts to more current work. Throughout this group, the repeated layering of thin applications of the same color results in a blanket­like surface, the small relief elements and their sharper features often obscured. “The works bear the accretion of many layers of paint, built up to become an index of the span of time, of memory, and of the act of making that each of them seeks to preserve. The objects of this makerly process become transformed in the process, as they oscillate in a twilight space between thing and image.” (Beth E. Wilson, “from Denim,” exhibition essay for Rooster Gallery, NY, April 2014)
Since the mid­1980’s Floersch has been interested in painting as labor; responding to and collaborating with objects and images, often of unknown authorship; and the notion of specific interior place as a subset of landscape.
Russell Floersch is represented by Rooster Gallery, NY.

Tuesday, November 3, 2015