Tuesday, March 20, 2018

Matthew Wong at Karma


Matthew Wong, Origin, watercolor on paper, 12 X 9 inches, 2018

Matthew Wong
March 22–April 29, 2018
Opening reception: Thursday March 22, 6–8pm
Karma
188 E 2nd Street
New York, NY 10009



Karma is pleased to present Matthew Wong’s first one-person exhibition. Working with equal curiosity and confidence in oils and watercolors, Wong deploys a wide-ranging color, tonal, and mark-making vocabulary to delineate psychological and metaphysical spaces at once familiar and uncannily strange. The use of planar space, contrast between wet and dry, as well as the application of dots and rudimentary marks in Chinese ink painting have influenced Wong’s conception of painting as an activity for mark-making and color application. 

The artist often employs seemingly contradictory modes side by side or one on top of the other. He allows for the simultaneity of a thick daub of orange with willowy strips of green, and the spaces they appear to delineate invite exploration over time. In that sense, these works on paper and canvas use the framework of landscape and narrative composition to think through and with time. This is the time spent walking, living, looking, thinking, drawing, and painting. The horizontal bands of color in Pink Sunset, 2018, evoke the perceptual sensation of watching the light change as a day wears on, while the flames in Somewhere, 2017 bring to mind an intense and fleeting perceptual sensation. The spaces in time created by Wong’s activity allow a world to emerge that has never existed but that seem familiar: landscapes, presences, lived environments, human existences are traversed and collectively form a map without boundaries.

Karma has published a catalog of Wong’s recent paintings and works on paper, with a poem by Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, to accompany the exhibition. (pre order here)

Matthew Wong (b. 1984) lives and works in Edmonton, Canada.  

Monday, March 19, 2018

Art Uncovered Interview




I was recently interviewed by Kimberly Ruth for her podcast Art Uncovered.
Follow the link below to listen in on or conversation.




Paul Behnke, My Nightmare of Irma Vep, 2017, acrylic on canvas, 64 x 60 in.

Friday, March 16, 2018

A Studio Visit with Ana Wieder Blank





Recently I had the great pleasure to pay a visit to the studio of a painter I very much admire.

Ana Wieder Blank combines religion, myth, and the act of protest to produce highly personal, expressive paintings, sculptures and performances. 

In the resulting works, aforementioned mediums are blurred allowing each discipline to conjure a myriad of formal and conceptual concerns alluding to modernist leanings while lending a strong, unique voice in reaction to the very contemporary and ongoing injustices that women, LGBTQ, people of color and immigrants live and work under every day.

Ana is from Silver Springs, MD and studied at The American University and Pratt Institute.
She lives and works in New York City.

For more information on Ana Wieder Blank's work, including her striking and recent mural project, please visit her website.













Ana Wieder Blank in her studio in Long Island City, 2018


The Artist's Statement


My current project is a series of oil paintings, ceramic sculptures, performances, and works on paper interpreting mythology with a feminist analysis  These components sometimes  come together to create installation pieces. I change, distort, and extend narratives past their end to create contemporary political allegory. I paint these paintings as if they were taking place in contemporary times.
I take narratives from the bible, Greek, Mexican and Indian Mythologies, and fairy tales.  These stories are loaded with political, gender and sexual allegories that are as potent today as they ever were. I am particularly interested in narratives that deal with ideas of outsider marginalization, queer sexuality, environmental concerns and issues of rape and consent.    I couple womyn characters together and explore dynamics of hidden and overt love, jealousy and escape of patriarchy.
Rape plays a big part in the paintings and performances that combined and explored the similar stories of Dina and Persephone.  These characters’s transformation from children to victims to activists is politically and personally resonant to me.  Rape is also used as metaphor and allegory for environmental issues like Fracking and Nuclear Power Development that interest me.
I am very interested in the way that myths of different cultures echo each other in theme, and character.  I take characters from multiple narratives and extend, compare, and intertwine their stories. Other stories that I have explored are Judith and her lover and the assassination of Holofernes, Miriam and Moses, Dianna and Actaeon and Eve, Lilith and Adam, each of these narratives resonate with me on a personal and political frequency.
I reference events from 9/11 to the Occupy movement, to fracking, and the recent protests against police brutality.  As an activist, I have an inside understanding of these protest movements.
My work is visually influenced by artists ranging from the German expressionists to Joan Brown and Elizabeth Murray.  Contemporary artists who have influenced me include Nicole Eisenman, Judith Linhares, Dana Schutz ,Maria Lassnig, Valerie Hegarty, Arlene Shechet,  Allison Schulnik and.  I also am very influenced by outsider art.



Whether my material is oil paint, clay or performance I explore the materials and content with a combination of dark humor, joy and tragedy.  I am a pronounced maximalist; I love color, texture, gesture and a painterly aesthetic in my work.  .  Recently I have become interested in bringing different media together in installations that attempt to engage the viewer/audience in a complete work of art, each medium provoking a unique experience in the making and viewing that cannot be replicated in any other medium. Politics and playfulness dance together in my work.  I take great joy in experimentation and playfulness within the work.
-Ana Wieder Blank




Tuesday, March 13, 2018

Roy Oxlade at Alison Jacques Gallery




From the Press Release:

Alison Jacques Gallery is delighted to present a solo show of paintings by British artist Roy Oxlade. This is the first solo exhibition of Oxlade's work since his death in February 2014 aged 85. The paintings shown were all made in the 1980s and 1990s and expand our understanding of the themes and metaphors which are central to Oxlade's practice along with his use of bold colour and improvised image. His home and studio in Kent formed the basis of his subject matter, with anglepoise lamps, lemon squeezers and his wife Rose Wylie as some of the recurring themes. As Roy Oxlade stated a year before he died:

 'Painting to me is like a room of the imagination. It's up to me what I do with it. I choose its size and its materials - usually canvas and oil paint. At the beginning its relationships don't amount to much - it's a rectangle in a jumble of art history I relate to […] There would not be much fun in leaving the room empty […] I have put in some other stuff, some characters, some actors - tables, pots, colours, easels, lamps, scribbles, figures and faces to interact with each other. I adjust the temperature, open the windows, shut the windows, throw things out, change the lighting.'

Roy Oxlade (b. 1929; London, UK; d. 2014; Kent, UK) emerged in the 1950s as one of a distinguished group of painters that included Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff, who studied under David Bomberg at Borough Polytechnic, London (1951 – 53). Oxlade completed his MA at the Royal College of Art, London (1974–76) returning in 1981 to complete his PhD.

Oxlade’s first major solo exhibition was at the Vancouver Art Gallery in Canada in 1963 and his work has been exhibited in various group exhibitions including the John Moores exhibition at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool (1962), the Hayward Annual (1982) and EAST International at Norwich University (1991). In 2000 Oxlade was included in British Painting: A Selected Exhibition at the Velan Centro di Ate Contemporanea, Turin and most recently Towards Night at the Towner Art Gallery, Eastbourne (2016).

A prolific writer, Oxlade contributed regularly to Modern Painters, Art Monthly, Blunt Edge and The London Magazine. In 2010 Ziggurat Books published Art & Instinct, Selected Writings of Roy Oxlade. He was an outstanding and influential figure in Arts education and in 2012 Oxlade and his wife, the artist Rose Wylie, were the subject of the award winning documentary Rose & Roy by filmmakers Adolfo Doring and Claudia Baez. 









Roy Oxlade: Works from the 80s and 90s

On view through April 7, 2018

Alison Jacques Gallery
16-18 Berners Street
London W1T 3LN


All Images: COPYRIGHT © 2018 ALISON JACQUES GALLERY

Wednesday, March 7, 2018

Four Exhibits to Catch and See


Nate Plotkin, Mineral Composition, 2017, graphite on paper, 11 x 14 in.

Nate Plotkin: Mystery Channels

On view through March 11, 2018

Shrine
191 Henry Street
New York, NY 10002




Susan Cantrick

Susan Cantrick: Impure Situation(s)

Opening March 22, 6:30 pm

March 23 - April 3, 2018

The Pave D'orsay
48 Rue de Lille
75007
Paris, France




Daniel John Gadd,
Untitled, 2017, oil, aluminum, mirrored glass, mastic and metal leaf on wooden panels, 106x70 in.

Daniel John Gadd: Volta NY 2018 (Booth D10)

March 7 - 11, 2018

David & Schweitzer Contemporary

Volta takes place at Peir 90 (West 50th Street)
New York, NY10019




Brenda Goodman and Amy Pleasant


Brenda Goodman and Amy Pleasant: NADA New York (Booth 2.30)

March 8 - 11, 2018

Jeff Bailey Gallery

NADA takes place at 550 Washington Street
New York, NY