Tag: Brigitte Bentele

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A visual paean to New York at A Space

Contributed by Mary Sargent / John Berger declared that every image embodies a way of seeing, and the way that images gathered in “Amongst Other Things,” a recent group exhibition at A Space, embody is slow, sustained, and irreducibly human. The premise of the show was simple and deliberately unfashionable: to depict the landscape of New York through direct, on-site observation. Each of the twenty artists’ works channels a span of looking that may have taken hours, in the manner of artists such as Lois Dodd, Rackstraw Downes, and David Hockney, who spent decades exploring and refining it. As they record their surroundings in paint, the canvases accumulate memories and feelings.

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Bodies of work: The human figure as cultural constant

Contributed by Mary Sargent / There is something endearingly ambitious about an exhibition that takes the human body not as subject matter but as unifying argument. “Figurative as Concept,” at A Space Gallery, was curated by Alina Khalitova, an artist who trained in art history in St. Petersburg, Russia, and currently divides her time between the United Kingdom and the United States. She assembled sixteen artists whose origins spanned, from east to west, China, India, Russia, Germany, Italy, and the United States. The wide geographic sweep was integral to the show. Every tradition represented has its own history of what and how the figure represents.