ART WRITING
CATALOGUE ESSAYS
Roger Edgar Gillet: The Figure Disfigured
Petzel Gallery, New York, 2022
One evening in 1971, at the end of a frustrating day in the studio, things suddenly begin to gel for Roger Edgar Gillet. In a mere 20 minutes he completes a 51-inch-square oil painting of a naked, hairless, nearly faceless figure spreading its weirdly atrophied legs to the viewer on a bare bed. Hovering in the background behind this bone-colored figure is an additional presence, a barely sketched-in froglike creature perched improbably on a trapeze swing. Contemplating this unexpected composition he has just created, Gillet realizes that the figure on the bed is “a horrible subject, absolutely horrible, even fairly ignoble, something that could have been in the Musée Dupuytren.” 1
Jason Stopa: Out of the Abyss
Jason Stopa: Joy Labyrinth, Morgan Lehman, New York, 2021
I’m tempted, I must admit, to embed an essay within this essay, just as Jason Stopa embeds paintings of paintings within his paintings. If I were to pursue this strategy, what sort of essay would be most suitable to insert into these pages? I guess it would have to be an essay about essays, or, more specifically, an essay about exhibition catalogue essays. I’m not sure anyone would want to read such an essay. I’m not even sure that I would want to ready such an essay. That’s quite opposite the case with Stopa’s paintings-of-paintings-within-paintings like those visible in The Gate or A Portrait of Luis Barragán. I’m only too happy to look again and again at these inserted compositions and to let myself be engaged by their spirited riffs on various modes of abstraction.
Franklin Evans: The Studio as Episteme
Franklin Evans: fugitivemisreadings, Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, 2021
Every artist, every writer, every practitioner in any creative field, assembles a pantheon of predecessors and contemporaries. The art gods that are given a place of honor in such aesthetic temples can be welcome influences or potent adversaries, they can be figures to emulate or foils to rebel against, or they can be all of these things at once. Various models have been theorized to describe how such relationships function. In his influential 1919 essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” T.S. Eliot argued that a poet’s full engagement with literary tradition entailed a process of depersonalization: “What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.” A little more than a half century later, Harold Bloom, in his 1973 book The Anxiety of Influence, depicted the dialogue with one’s predecessors as a Freudian battle for psychic and artistic dominance that often hinges on intentional misreadings.
Jane Irish, Painting the Historical Present
Jane Irish, Locks Art Publications, Locks Gallery, Philadelphia, 2021
For decades, Jane Irish has made the embrace of disparate moments a central, explicit theme in her paintings, but her ambition as an artist is not simply to offer philosophical meditations on time. Rather, she delves into the past, into various pasts, in order to address incredibly specific themes: geopolitical conflict, the legacy of colonialism, the atrocities of war. If this sounds like a grim set of subjects (and it is) the works themselves are anything but dour. Instead they exude a wonderful painterly verve: her depictions of ornate interiors and the delicate landscapes visible through their windows celebrate the decorative and the pastoral with seemingly effortless exuberance. Irish’s work also incorporates a self-reflexive discourse about cultural transmission and about art itself; along with their other concerns, these are paintings about painting. Ultimately, it is the intersection of all these elements that is the defining quality of Irish’s work.
Strange Beauty: The Drawings of Ahmed Alsoudani
Ahmed Alsoudani: Cut of Time, Marlborough Gallery, New York, 2021
One of the ways to recognize an artist of real substance is to ask whether they create a distinctive world. As we encounter each successive work, does another portion of a vivid and seemingly infinite realm reveal itself? Do we feel that the artist is both cosmogenic and cartographic, simultaneously creating a new world and mapping it out? Such universe-creating works come in a variety of modes: they can be pictorial (late Guston, for instance), or abstract (Stanley Whitney’s ever-refreshed combinatorial grids) or, sometimes, abstract and pictorial all at once (the florid gestural gardens of Joan Mitchell). This third hybrid approach is the one favored by Ahmed Alsoudani, a cosmogenic painter whose thronging, tumultuous compositions don’t so much erase the differences between the representational and the abstract as supercharge them into the most intense versions of themselves and set them loose to see what happens.
Valerie Jaudon: The Knight’s Tour and the Continuous Line
Valerie Jaudon: Prepositions, D.C. Moore, New York, 2020
music, the titles of these paintings tell us, was on the artist’s mind and, we can easily imagine, playing in her studio while she was at work, suffusing that space so generously supplied in natural light near the eastern end of Long Island with a presence that was as purely invisible as its painterly counterparts here in front of us are so purely visible; music on the mind of an artist who as a child learned to play the flute and piccolo for the Greenville, Mississippi, High School Band, …
Albert Oehlen’s Mirror Paintings, An Inescapable Contingency
Albert Oehlen: Spiegelbilder. Mirror Paintings 1982–1990 exh. cat.
Galerie Max Hetzler Berlin | Paris | London / Nahmad Contemporary and Holzwarth Publications, Berlin 2020
Imagine, for a moment, that it’s 1982 and you are a young painter working in West Germany. You find yourself in an exciting yet complex situation. Since the end of the 1970s, painting, especially figurative painting, has “returned” with a vengeance throughout the West. The medium’s resurgence has been confirmed and further empowered by large-scale exhibitions like A New Spirit in Painting at London’s Royal Academy in 1981, or two more recent shows closer to home, Zeitgeist in Berlin and Documenta 7 in Kassel. Among the stars of these exhibitions are many German painters, including Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke, Georg Baselitz, Jörg Immendorf, Markus Lüpertz, A.R. Penck, and Anselm Kiefer. In Germany much of the attention is going to the so-called Neue Wilde, a wave of young neo-expressionist painters whose canvases are filled with anguished figures, slashing brushstrokes, and bold colors. After a decade or more when painting was considered by many to be outmoded and reactionary, it’s suddenly a good time to be a painter, at least if you are a young white male (most of these shows do notably poor jobs of including women and minorities).
Pierre Buraglio: An artist of the No Yes
Musée d’art moderne, Saint-Etienne Métropole, France, March 2019
Let’s recall the situation for a young painter emerging in Western Europe or North America in the early 1960s. Leaving aside for the moment the question of national and regional specificity (a painter in New York didn’t face exactly the same conditions as one in Paris, whose experience wasn’t identical to a contemporary in Nice, and so on), most young painters felt that gestural abstraction, the mode that had been dominant for the previous decade, was looking exhausted. This apparent decline of abstract-expressionist/informel painting coincided with (and was partly provoked by) the emergence of Nouveau Réalisme and Neo-Dada, which rejected not just gestural painting but painting tout court. It’s true that in the early years of the decade Pop art reanimated painting, but only by relying on a new kind of content and an acknowledgement that mechanical reproduction had to be addressed…
An Ardent, Burning Neutrality: Albert Oehlen’s Gray Paintings
in Albert Oehlen: Grau, Nahmad Contemporary / Hate Cantz, 2018
Abstraction and Its Others
Since embracing abstraction in the late 1980s, Albert Oehlen has largely refrained from painting in a figurative mode (apart from a few one-offs such as the 2006 painting Self-portrait as Spring). He has been harshly dismissive of his early figurative work: “I wanted to be an abstract painter. I never took figurative work seriously, even when I did it. I thought it was bullshit. The early self-portraits are highly ironic.” Curiously, however, one body of work has escaped the general ban on figuration: the Grauen Bilder (Gray Paintings). Nowhere else in his post-1990 work do we find motifs such as the big-eared creature in the middle of Smoker (1999), the bulbous head in Chemical Schmutzli (2004), the bust-length portrait in C.C., or the woman seen in profile in Bath. And it’s not only in the human or humanoid figures that we encounter figurative mode: floating throughout the Gray Paintings are weird objects rendered, albeit with some deliberately casual brushwork, with the illusionistic techniques of representational painting.
Drew Shiflett: Eccentric Modularity
in Drew Shiflett, Lesley Heller Workspace, New York, 2017
I wonder when the great variety of process entered the field of art. When did certain artists begin to invent their own ways of making, when did many of them choose to act as idiosyncratic inventors, extending their innovative spirit beyond the boundaries of inherited mediums and formats? Among the earliest of these defectors from the realms of conventional painting and sculpture were Kurt Schwitters and the Picasso of Cubist collage. Once the walls had been breached, many more followed, from Joseph Cornell to Meret Oppenheim. At the same time, a parallel zone of technical variety was established by many artists we would now categorize as self-taught or outsider artists bricoleurs who made art from whatever was at hand. By the 1960s, self-invented processes had become pervasive, as exemplified by artists such as Eva Hesse, Lee Bontecou, Daniel Spoerri and Ruth Asawa. One way to think of this transformation of art-making is to acknowledge that the term “self-taught” can now be applied to all kinds of artists, including many who have been “taught” in universities and art schools. It is also not by accident that many of the innovators from the 1960s on have been women whose work draws on the previously marginalized realms of craft and domestic “women’s work.”
Robert Moskowitz: The Meaning of Leaning
in Robert Moskowitz Drawings, Lawrence Markey, San Antonio, 2017
When you are standing in front of Robert Moskowitz’s pastel drawings, you might ask yourself “What are these?” One possibility might be “buildings.” Another thought, after a moment’s pause, is “skylines,” which might seem a more precise one. But that, too, doesn’t tell the whole story. If we read the drawings as representations of silhouetted buildings (a reasonable and accurate thing to do) we have to acknowledge that in nearly every single drawing the black forms depicting architectural motifs occupy much less of the paper’s surface than do the empty white spaces above or alongside them—spaces that are, let’s quickly add, neither empty nor white but, on the contrary, indelibly activated with countless random and inevitable traces of the artist’s tainted fingertips. So maybe it would be still more accurate to say that Moskowitz’s subject matter is neither buildings nor skylines but the skies above a city, and that these skyline images serve only to indicate where those skies stop.
Jacob El Hanani: Infinite Territories
in Jacob El Hanani Linescape: Four Decades, Acquavella Galleries, New York, 2017
In a 1964 lecture at the Leo Baeck Institute in New York, the great scholar of Jewish mysticism Gershom Scholem memorialized his friendship with Walter Benjamin, then dead for nearly a quarter century. At the time Benjamin was still little known in the English-speaking world though, as Scholem pointed out to his audience, his star had steadily been rising in Germany since the posthumous publication of a volume of his writings in 1955. Of course, Benjamin’s impact was soon to spread far and wide as his prescient essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” became required reading for every art student and his Arcades Project furnished countless writers and artists with tools for making critical assessments of modernity…
Nahum Tevet: Orchestral Maneuvers
in Efrat Natan/Nahum Tevet, Villa Stuck, Munich,Germany, 2017
Difficulties of Seeing
A good subtitle for Nahum Tevet’s Seven Walks might be, to borrow a phrase from Merleau-Ponty, the Visible and the Invisible. As our eyes scan back and forth over this crowded gathering of objects, and into and out of it, we constantly encounter obstacles and blockages, barriers and shields, obstructions and interruptions of all kinds. Everything within Tevet’s tightly clustered assemblage appears to be standing in the way of something else; each element, whether it is a solid form or an openwork object, obscures our view, either partially or totally, of its neighbors.
Teresa Serrano: In the Presence of Absence
in Teresa Serrano, Museo Amparo, Puebla, Mexico, 2017
Teresa Serrano claimed her artistic identity, began to articulate it, not in her native Mexico, but in New York City. Many artists before and since have found that geographical and cultural displacement can be liberating, whether it is simply a matter of escaping from the oppressive society of a small town to the welcoming anonymity of a big city or of journeying across an ocean to a land where nothing is familiar, from food to cuisine to religion. Early during her time in New York, Serrano obsessively walked throughout the streets of the city, taking in the life and architecture of her new home. This experience is recalled in a 1990 painting titled The Island, where Manhattan is littered with bluish-gray strips inspired by how the buildings along Manhattan’s streets frame slivers of sky. It’s important to note that when Serrano moved from Mexico City to New York City in the early 1980s she was beginning her career not as a student fresh out of art school but as a woman who had unexpectedly discovered her creative powers and artistic ambition after years of marriage and child-raising. In this, Serrano must be seen as part of the wave of women artists who were empowered by the Feminist movement to reject the traditional social roles that stood in the way of their artistic progress.
Po Kim: Darkness and Arcadia
in Po Kim: Then and Now, Whanki Museum, Seoul, South Korea, 2017
The life and career of every noteworthy artist presents us with all kinds of questions, and the more substantial the achievement, the more we feel compelled seek out answers. Over time, many methods, from formalism to psychoanalysis, have been developed to provide the kind of full and deep understanding that seems to reside in great paintings and sculptures (or any other medium), or in the interstices between the oeuvre and the life, tantalizingly hidden away, camouflaged, immanent. Given our hunger for comprehension, it’s tempting to search for the single key that will unlock all the mysteries of an artist’s work, whatever our methodology. Far better, however, is to recognize that no single experience or conviction or condition governs the creative process, which is as shifting and contingent as any other aspect of existence. So while we must continue to identify the important questions that art imposes on us, we shouldn’t believe that any single one of them provides any kind of total revelation.
Gary Stephan: The Logic of Rotation
Susan Inglett, New York, 2016 (republished on twocoatsofpaint.com)
Some paintings pick arguments with art history. Some paintings pick arguments with their materials. Some paintings pick arguments with the other paintings around them in the artist’s studio. Some paintings pick arguments with the world at large. All these types of argumentative artworks can be incredibly engaging, and many of history’s masterpieces can be found among their number, but for me there is one particular type of argumentative painting that is the most stimulating, the most rewarding, the most exemplary: the painting that picks an argument with itself, and at the present moment it’s hard to think of another painter who exemplifies this kind of painting better than Gary Stephan.
The Contingency of Images: Jennifer Bartlett’s ‘Hospital’ Paintings
in Jennifer Bartlett: Hospital Paintings, Locks Publications, Philadelphia, 2015
Let’s begin with two remarks Jennifer Bartlett made to Sue Scott in a 1993 interview:
“I agree with Alex Katz; there is the subject matter and then there is the content of the painting. And the subject matter is a device, it’s a starting place. The content is something different.”
A little later, following a discussion about abstraction and figuration, Bartlett says:
“I’ve never seen a really sad abstract painting but for that matter I guess I’ve never seen a sad figurative painting. Bad of both but not sad. I guess painting by its nature is cheerful.”
Loren Munk: Reconnoitering: Cartography of an Art Enthusiast
in Loren Munk, Flecker Gallery, Suffolk County Community College, 2015
What is painting for? At the present moment there are many answers to this somewhat perennial question: self-expression, formal invention, social commentary, trancelike meditation, philosophical investigation, material experimentation, resisting digital media, assimilating digital media, rethinking art history, fueling an already over-heated art market. The paintings of Loren Munk partake of many of these options (though not—or at least not yet—the last one). At the same time his works, unabashedly diagrammatic and densely informational, depart dramatically from most contemporary painting practice, compelling viewers to find new ways of looking, and critics to find new modes of interpretation.
Jonathan Lasker: Signs of Experience
Cheim and Read, New York, 2015
What happens when someone is looking at a painting? This seems like it should be the primary question of art criticism, but in fact it is very rarely addressed. Instead, writers nearly always focus on the art object itself rather than on the experience of the spectator. The chief modes in which art criticism is written—descriptions of the work, accounts of the artist’s life and process, comparisons with other art works—tend to leave out what viewers think and feel as they look at a particular work of art. Now, it could be argued that a description of a painting is an account of how the author of the description has looked at the painting, and that this description, if it is by an informed, perceptive critic, could constitute a version of (or even model for) how any viewer might look at the work. The problem with this argument is that the physical facts of the work remain in charge since nearly all art writers pledge fidelity to the art object rather than to its beholders.
In Situ, In Transit: David Reed at Haus Lange
Verlag für Moderne Kunst, Krefeld, 2015
Dispersal
While there are few painters who do not, in one way or another, become concerned with architecture—for the simple reason that a painting exists within space and that the space in which it is usually made and encountered is that of architecture—certain painters are more aware than others of how their work responds to and inhabits the built world. The question of architecture and painting is hardly a minor one: it was, after all, the divorce of these two fields, the displacement of the fresco and the altarpiece by easel painting, that marked the origin of the Western painting tradition that has remained dominant for some five centuries. Yet, the mobility of geography, patronage and ideology that painters achieved with the advent of the nomadic easel painting has been perceived by some as a loss, a lamentable separation that needs to be repaired.
Pat Steir: Essay for Two Voices
Cheim and Read, New York, 2014
A: Are you able to look exclusively at one half of any of these paintings?
B: Wouldn’t that be like ignoring one side of a dialogue?
A: You’re not tempted to see each work as two monochrome paintings resting side by side?
B: These aren’t “monochromes.” There are multiple colors present that seem to coalesce into one.