Wackadoodle @ Ethan Pettit Contemporary

To Be A Lady Curated By Jason Andrew @1285 Avenue Of The Americas Art Gallery

New In The Studio This Week

Between Numbers Four and Five, 2012, acrylic on canvas, 50 x 48 in.

Between Numbers Four and Five (detail)

Between Numbers Four and Five (detail)

Between Numbers Four and Five (detail)

Between Numbers Four and Five (detail)

Robin's Red, 2012, acrylic on canvas, 50 x 48 in.

Robin's Red (detail)

Robin's Red (detail)

Robin's Red (detail)

*All artwork © Paul Behnke 2012.

Carolanna Parlato @ Elizabeth Harris Gallery

Sea Wall, 2012, acrylic and spray paint on canvas, 20 x 20 in.

Above and Below, 2012, acrylic and spray paint on canvas, 52 x 55 in.

Echo, 2012, acrylic and spray paint on canvas, 28 x 42 in.

From the Press Release:

An illustrated catalogue with an essay by Matthew Guy Nichols will accompany the exhibition.

Elizabeth Harris Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings titled behind the sun by Carolanna Parlato. This will be her third exhibition with the gallery.

Carolanna Parlato will exhibit recent abstract works on canvas. Ms. Parlato’s paintings are instinctive and process based. Although predominantly abstract they concern themselves with the processes and forces of nature. The physical movement intrinsic to her process remains evident in this new body of work. Her actions propel the paint; large gestural sweeps of brushes, sanded and rubbed in passages, raw color poured onto the surface are all elements of her repertoire.

Carolanna Parlato has exhibited her work widely in New York and nationally. She received her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. Parlato has been written about in Art in America, the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the Brooklyn Rail and the New York Sun.   Solo exhibitions of her paintings have been shown at the Islip Art Museum OH+T Gallery (Boston), the Phatory (NYC) and Elizabeth Harris Gallery in NYC. Her work will be in the upcoming exhibition, Pour originating at the Florida Atlantic University and traveling to the Lesley Heller Workspace in 2013. She has exhibited in numerous group exhibitions including Material Colorat the Hunterdon Art Museum, Open House at the Brooklyn Museum, Splat at the Sabina Lee Gallery (Los Angeles), Sandroni Rey (Los Angeles), Amy Simon Fine Art (Westport, CT), OH+T Gallery (Boston). Parlatos paintings are represented in many private and public collections, including the Brooklyn Museum, the Francis Greenburger Collection, Islip Art Museum, Readers Digest, and Pfizer Inc. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn. 

High Summer, 2012, acrylic and spray paint on canvas, 64 x 78 in.

July, 2012, acrylic and spray paint on canvas, 20 x 24 in.

Mirage, 2012, acrylic and spray paint on canvas, 20 x 20 in.

Side Streaming, 2012, acrylic and spray paint on canvas, 63 x 72 in.

Sudden, 2012, acrylic and spray paint on canvas, 36 x 36 in.

Unfolding, 2012, acrylic and spray paint on canvas, 45 x 48 in.

Orbit, 2012, acrylic and spray paint on canvas, 24 x 24 in.

Behind The Sun - New Paintings by Carolanna Parlato

Opening: Thursdy, September 6, 6 - 8 PM

Sepetmber 6 - October 6

Elizabeth Harris Gallery

529 West 20th Street

New York, NY 10001

*All images courtesy of the artist.

The Lure Of Paris @ The Loretta Howard Gallery

Loretta Howard Gallery is pleased to present The Lure of Paris. Driven by the city’s rich artistic history and funded largely by the GI bill, American artists took root in Paris starting after 1945. As excerpted from the exhibition essay by Sol Ostrow: In the 1950s, with the triumph of the New York School, the United States for the first time in history had produced visual art of international consequence. Yet, artists from the United States and from all over Europe continued to flock to Paris just as the center of the western art world was shifting to New York,. Funded by the GI Bill, those from the States came with the intent of studying at such schools as the Académie Julian, Académie de la Grande Chaumièr and L’ecole des Beaux Arts, or at the atelier of Jacques Villon or Fernand Leger’s Studio. Their reasons varied. Some saw it as an opportunity to be cosmopolitan or to satisfy their wanderlust; others may have imagined the Paris of Le Jazz Hot, café society, and the romance of the pre-war avant-garde, or the chance to see works by Vuillard, Bonnard, Matisse, etc., that they knew only from black and white reproductions.  In most cases the women artists had accompanied their significant others, while like the generation before them, the Afro-American artists, sought to escape the racism that was endemic in the States. For more information contact Howard Hurst: Howard@lorettahoward.com.

Joanne Mattera Art Blog: Fifty Shades Of Gray

Joanne Mattera, Untitled (for now), 2012, graphite on 300 hotpres Fabriano, 22 x 30 in.

Joanne Mattera has posted an online exhibition that showcases, in depth, how fifty artists have explored the possibilities of the achromatic hue.

Mattera curated the grouping by choosing works submitted by Facebook friends and from elsewhere on the web.

I'm very happy to  be included along with so many terrific artists.

Visit Joanne's blog and view all the work here .

Slow Correspondence @ Fjord

(click to enlarge)

The Art Is Falling Apart: Terrace 7TH Annual 2012

Installation view, 2012

Last year’s 6th Terrace Annual attracted more than 200 entries and brought together a group of over 50 artists whose work was installed alongside the previous years 120 entries and shown outdoors in a walled 2000 sq/ft former piece of wasteland.
The exhibition has remained in the space, exposed to the elements and has shifted, faded, broken, rotted, remained and, in some cases, disappeared over the past 4 years. 

Selected Previous Artists: Paul Behnke, Maxine Beuret, Diane Bielik, Karl Bielik, Kiera Blakey, Boyle&Shaw, Annabelle Dalby, Annie Davey, Julia Defferary, Rob Flowers, Adrian Galpin, Matt Golden, Julia Hamilton, Ross Hansen, Alex Hermon, Russell Heron, Zarah Hunt, Eemyun Kang, David Leapman, Heidi Locher, Vibeke Luther, Andrea Medjesi-Jones, Lorna Milburn, Nicola Morrison, Danka Nisevic, Emer O'Brien,  Joanna Peace, Andrew Robertson, Matthew Robinson, Will Robson- Scott, Rachel Russell, Matthew Saunders, Emma-Jane Spain, Marianne Spurr, Sabine Tress, Clair Undy, Marijke Vasey, Maxwell Wade, James White, Phil Wise and Elizabeth Wright. 

‘The Art is Falling Apart'’ 

Curated by Karl Bielik
The 7th Terrace Annual 2012
4-17 Frederick Terrace, London E8 4EW
3-7pm Saturday the 25^th of August 2012
  

For Immediate Release: Like Giants @ The Rosenfeld Gallery

I'm very happy to share the details of my upcoming, one person show in Philadelphia...

Ariele's Table, 2012, acrylic on canvas, 60 x 60 inches.

Paul Behnke: Like Giants
an illustrated catalog will be available with an essay by John Yau
Opening Reception: Sunday, September 9, 12 - 5 PM
September 9 - 30, 2012
The Rosenfeld Gallery
113 Arch Street, Philadelphia, PA 19106

Spaces @ One Twelve Gallery

Helen Ferguson Crawford, Zero to Bone, acrylic, oil and graphite, 12 x 12 in.

Spaces

Helen Ferguson Crawford, Eva McGill-Oliver, Loretta Paraguassu, Martha Stiles

August 10 - October 21, 2012

One Twelve Gallery

112 Krog Street, Suite 5

Atlanta, Georgia 30307

404.606.0072

Tues - Fri: 11 - 4 PM or by appointment

To The Film Industry In Crisis By Frank O'Hara

Rudolph Valentino To the Film Industry in Crisis by Frank O'Hara Not you, lean quarterlies and swarthy periodicals with your studious incursions toward the pomposity of ants, nor you, experimental theatre in which Emotive Fruition is wedding Poetic Insight perpetually, nor you, promenading Grand Opera, obvious as an ear (though you are close to my heart), but you, Motion Picture Industry, it's you I love! In times of crisis, we must all decide again and again whom we love. And give credit where it's due: not to my starched nurse, who taught me how to be bad and not bad rather than good (and has lately availed herself of this information), not to the Catholic Church which is at best an oversolemn introduction to cosmic entertainment, not to the American Legion, which hates everybody, but to you, glorious Silver Screen, tragic Technicolor, amorous Cinemascope, stretching Vistavision and startling Stereophonic Sound, with all your heavenly dimensions and reverberations and iconoclasms! To Richard Barthelmess as the "tol'able" boy barefoot and in pants, Jeanette MacDonald of the flaming hair and lips and long, long neck, Sue Carroll as she sits for eternity on the damaged fender of a car and smiles, Ginger Rogers with her pageboy bob like a sausage on her shuffling shoulders, peach-melba-voiced Fred Astaire of the feet, Eric von Stroheim, the seducer of mountain-climbers' gasping spouses, the Tarzans, each and every one of you (I cannot bring myself to prefer Johnny Weissmuller to Lex Barker, I cannot!), Mae West in a furry sled, her bordello radiance and bland remarks, Rudolph Valentino of the moon, its crushing passions, and moonlike, too, the gentle Norma Shearer, Miriam Hopkins dropping her champagne glass off Joel McCrea's yacht, and crying into the dappled sea, Clark Gable rescuing Gene Tierney from Russia and Allan Jones rescuing Kitty Carlisle from Harpo Marx, Cornel Wilde coughing blood on the piano keys while Merle Oberon berates, Marilyn Monroe in her little spike heels reeling through Niagara Falls, Joseph Cotten puzzling and Orson Welles puzzled and Dolores del Rio eating orchids for lunch and breaking mirrors, Gloria Swanson reclining, and Jean Harlow reclining and wiggling, and Alice Faye reclining and wiggling and singing, Myrna Loy being calm and wise, William Powell in his stunning urbanity, Elizabeth Taylor blossoming, yes, to you and to all you others, the great, the near-great, the featured, the extras who pass quickly and return in dreams saying your one or two lines, my love! Long may you illumine space with your marvellous appearances, delays and enunciations, and may the money of the world glitteringly cover you as you rest after a long day under the kleig lights with your faces in packs for our edification, the way the clouds come often at night but the heavens operate on the star system. It is a divine precedent you perpetuate! Roll on, reels of celluloid, as the great earth rolls on!

Mel Gooding On Patrick Caulfield

A-Ah! This Life Is So Everyday, 1973, screenprint, 15.8 x 13.8 in.

"No artist of his generation has contemplated the comedy

of life with greater intelligence, wit

or courage than Patrick Caulfield."

-Mel Gooding

Portrait of the artist.

Robert Hughes 1938 - 2012

From the New York Times obituary on the Arts Beat Blog:

"Robert Hughes, the eloquent, combative art critic and historian who lived with an operatic flair and wrote with a sense of authority that owed more to Zola or Ruskin than to his own century, died Monday at Calvary Hospital in the Bronx. He was 74 and had lived for many years in Briarcliff Manor, N.Y.

He died after a long illness, according to his wife, Doris Downes."

by Randy Kennedy

Read the full entry here.

Lyrical Color @ Pocket Utopia

(click to enlarge)

Pocket Utopia

Mention By Jed Perl In The New Republic Review Of The Brucennial

Clocca (magenta form), 2012, acrylic on canvas, 48 x 46 in.

Happy to be mentioned in Jed Perl's review included in the August 2, 2012 issue of The New Republic.

From the article:

"I wrote down the names of artists whose work struck me with some poetic spark. . . .What held me in Paul Behnke’s cheeky canvas, with its few shapes in pink, yellow, and orange, was not the dose of zany irony that he brings to geometric abstraction so much as his freshness of attack and his feeling for the power of color to give a medium-sized painting a bold sense of scale."

Read the full review here.

Hamlett Dobbins: Meditative Jewels for M.M.Y.

Memphis based painter, Hamlett Dobbins has spent his summer in the studio producing ink and acrylic drawings based on meditations. The forms of the simpler compositions possess a tantric purity while the color evokes the layered, jewel like preciousness of Russian icons. 

Only in scale do Dobbins' drawings defy this reading. The medium size just begins to flower into the viewers space. And one can imagine the work larger still - becoming a quiet and all consuming consciousness.

Seven drawings from this series are currently on view through August 31 at David Lusk Gallery in Memphis, TN.

All works: Untitled (For M.M.Y.), 2012, ink and acrylic on paper, 30 x 22 in.

*Images © the artist.

Price Is Right @ David Lusk Gallery

Elizabeth Sheppell, Fat Series 17, 2012, oil on canvas, 6 x 6 in.

Hamlett Dobbins, 2012, Untitled (for M.M.Y.), ink and acrylic on paper, 30 x 22 in.

Dwayne Butcher, fried chicken tastes good, 2012, acrylic and ink on canvas, 8 x 10 in.

Price Is Right

Opening: Friday, August 3, 6 - 9 PM

August 1 - 31, 2012

David Lusk Gallery

4540 Poplar Avenue

Memphis, TN 38117

*All images courtesy of the artists and David Lusk Gallery.