Structure and Imagery: March 2013

Friday, March 29, 2013

In Process With Matthew Neil Gehring

Next in our In Process series is Brooklyn based painter, Matthew Neil Gehring.

Gehring is also the Art Department Chair at the Suffolk County Community College and is the Director of the school's Flecker Gallery in Selden, NY.

Gehring's use of color and form combine to produce a visual deception bordering on Op Art.

However, these works offer more than visual trickery and reveal themselves over time. The hierarchy created by color and form generates a stately presence more akin to Barnet Newman than Bridget Riley.

Here Gehring gives a look at the evolution of his recent painting, And the Vital Vigor Stood it's Ground, oil on linen, 90 x 78 in., 2013.

"This painting was stretched in Nov. 2012 with the awareness that it would leave the studio for my upcoming solo exhibition at the Dishman Art Museum in Beaumont, TX. The evolution is improvisational with decisions regarding colors and forms as primary, inseparable elements. These decisions tend to require much time spent looking and mixing color. Today, March 23rd, this piece is currently on a truck somewhere between New York and Houston, on its way to the museum."

- Matthew Neil Gehring

To view more of Matthew Neil Gehring's work follow the link. Beginning April 2, the piece featured here and more will be on view at The Dishman Art Museum in Beaumont, TX.

Matthew Neil Gehring: Brilliant Corners

Opening Reception: Friday, April 5, 6 - 9 PM

April 2 - April 30, 2013

Dishman Art Museum

1030 E Lavaca

Beaumont, TX 77705

Wednesday, March 27, 2013

Seriell @ Art Forum Ute Barth

From the Press Release:

This spring Gallery Art Forum Ute Barth presents a group exhibition featuring Kevin Finklea (*1958, lives and works in Philadelphia, USA), Lucia Coray (*1957, lives and works in Zurich, Switzerland) and Iryna Pryval (*1987, lives and works in Nuremberg and Munich); artists who share a commitment to both serial and pictorial strategies as the basis of their distinctive individual practices. Seriality, among the most revolutionary techniques of modern art to emerge in the early twentieth century with the painting of Monet, has since been used as an apparatus for the critique of conventional visual expression, methods, materials, compositional schemes, and even the politics of seeing and image. This exhibition focuses on pictorial seriality in the work of three contemporary artists, to highlight the diversity and profundity of work centered on the act of repetition as a stylistic, and hence political device, today.

The manifestation of repetition as both a formal and disruptive act is particularly relevant to American artist Kevin Finklea whose sculptural recycling of material from sculptures goes beyond reuse as a principle, to assert the subversive possibilities of creative assembly. Equally, Lucia Coray's optically destabilising drawings of the human face (the leitmotif of her work since the early 1980's), appear in innumerable variations. What initially began as sign-like elements ranked in strict grid formations, over time evolved into stylized abstract figures, layered together one across another in complex and oblique patterns. Finally Iryna Pryval's uncanny gray, black and pastel-coloured "wrinkle formations" are derived from the abstraction and transformation of baroque draperies: what at first appear playful sequences of folds, quickly assume a darker, unsettling character, stretched out across the walls of the gallery, real yet surreal in their frozen verisimilitude.

Seriell

with work by Lucia Coray, Kevin Finklea, and Iryna Pryval

March 27 - May 4, 2013

Gallery Art Forum Ute Barth

Kartausstrasse 8

CH-8008

Zürich, Switzerland

Saturday, March 23, 2013

In Process With Deborah Brown

In the 1950's Art News ran it's popular "Paints a Picture" feature. This fun and enlightening series showcased the innovative and important painters of the day (Hofmann, Mitchell, Tworkov, De Kooning, etc.) and chronicled the evolution of a single work by placing a camera in the artist's studio and having the painter snap a photo at crucial points during the development of the piece.

I thought it would be a great idea to continue the series, focusing on process oriented painters, showcasing the talent, hard work and the decision making that goes into each painting.

In this series I will feature a different painter once or twice a month giving insight into their art making, thinking process, and personalities.

The first painter in our series is Deborah Brown.
Deborah is an accomplished painter who's works explore the industrial landscape of car salvage lots, scrap metal yards and fabrication shops in Bushwick, the neighborhood where she has worked since 2006.
In 2012 Brown mounted a stunning show in Bushwick's The Active Space. She is represented in New York by Leslie Heller Workspace. In addition she also owns and directs Storefront Bushwick.

The painting presented here is Slag, 2013, oil on canvas, 70 x 80 inches.

According to Brown: "(This is) a painting I worked on intensely for the last five months that went through a lot of changes."

Deborah Brown with her work at The Active Space last June.

photo credit: Joshua Bright, The New York Times

Artist's Statement:

My paintings reflect the industrial landscape of car salvage lots, scrap metal yards and fabrication shops in Bushwick, the neighborhood where I have worked since 2006. The paintings bear the traces of this subject matter--smashed cars, torqued debris and aggregated junk. After years of working from material that I actually observed, in the new work I leave the narrative space of objective reality in favor of abstraction and anthropomorphism. The paintings depict architectural and industrial structures in a futuristic world of garish colors and uncertain horizons. Unidentified forms lurch at precarious angles, recalling the construction cranes and sea-side amusement rides twisted by Super Storm Sandy or some other natural or man-made disaster. The paintings reference failed systems of architecture, manufacturing and human biology. Some images like the “tetes” resemble human heads and the divided nature of identity.

While I am working, I often turn the paintings upside down and work on them from another vantage point, which provides me with a fresh perspective and subverts the choices I make habitually and uncritically. This was the case with “Slag,” which changed orientation, color and spatial organization many times. I use vigorous additive and subtractive paint application to alter, conceal and reveal traces of the painting’s history. What emerges is a hybrid of the mechanical and the organic—a metaphor for contemporary human reality.

- Deborah Brown

Thursday, March 21, 2013

Frank Bowling Interview On Abstract Critical

Robin Greenwood spoke with Frank Bowling on the occasion of an exhibition of his poured paintings at Tate Britain, which runs until March 2013. Bowling discusses his move away from figuration, his relation to American art, his adoption of abstraction, and his attitude to symbol, amongst other things. Perhaps of particular interest are Bowling’s comments on his ‘interest in architecture and sculpture’, and insistence that painting by ‘specific’ and exist as an ‘object’.

View the video here on Abstract Critical.

Bowling's current exhibit @ Spanierman Modern runs through April 28, 2013.

Wednesday, March 20, 2013

Jane Freilicher @ Tibor de Nagy

Jane Freilicher: Painter Among Poets

Opening Reception: Saturday April 13, 4 - 6 PM

April 13 - June 14, 2013

Tibor de Nagy

724 Fifth Avenue

New York, NY 10019

Frank Bowling @ Spanierman Modern

Upright, 2012, acrylic on canvas, 74 x 53 in.

(image courtesy of the artist and Spanierman Modern)

Frank Bowling: Paintings, 1967 - 2012

March 21 - April 20, 2013

Spanierman Modern

53 East 58th Street

New York, NY 10022

*More upcoming Bowling events . . . .

Frank Bowling in the Larry Rivers Symposium at New York University Fales Library

The Symposium will celebrate the acquisition, processing, and opening of the Larry Rivers Papers for study and research at New York University's Fales Library & Special Collections. On March 29, from 9am to 10 am. Frank Bowling, Barbara Goldsmith, David Joel, and David Levy with Helen Harrison as moderator, will address Rivers's importance as a visual artist.

Frank Bowling Gallery Talk at the Philadelphia Museum of Art

On April 3, 2013at 6:30 pm, Frank Bowling will give a gallery talk about his life and work at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Chiaroscuro @ Novella

Matthew Fisher, Goldens Bridge, 2012, acrylic on canvas, 15 x 16 in.

Chiaroscuro
A group show curated by JJ Manford and Steve Rivera

Featuring work by: Gina Beavers, Katherine Bernhardt, Katherine Bradford, Erik Den Breegen, Paul Demuro, Matthew Fisher, Tamara Gonzalez, Zach Harris, and Siebren Versteeg.

March 16 - April 14, 2013

Novella
164 Orchard Street
New York, NY 10002

Tuesday, March 19, 2013

@SexistCasual: Follow on Twitter!

In light of recent events in the news and following an election cycle that cast light on many politicians' horrendous attitudes toward women, many more subtle forms of discrimination can go unnoticed and undiscussed.

To help remedy this, Brooklyn based artist and curator, Julie Torres, has started a new Twitter feed to document and discuss this inferred and deeply engrained wrong.

Be part of the discussion here @sexistcasual.