Tag: Gerhard Richter

Solo Shows

Joseph Fucigna: No designated endpoint

Contributed by Richard Klein / The ellipsis in the title of Joseph Fucigna’s current show “In Process …” at G-Town Arts signifies a story unfolding. Known for abstract, biomorphic sculpture made with everyday plastic materials, he has given up sculpture for painting. He had, to be sure, ventured into painting earlier with pieces like Indian Yellow_Green Gold_Black Wash Drip, importing onto canvas gravity-induced sags and drips that occurred in his sculpture. But in newer paintings such as Untitled 2_22, which incorporates scraped and sanded acrylic, he reveled immersively in what materials and labor could produce strictly on a two-dimensional surface. In creating the Pressed and Squeezed series from 2024, he employed monoprinting techniques and controlled accidents, applying acrylic paint to homemade clay board panels and then manipulating them to leave an irregular skin of paint that he then pressed onto the painting’s surface, causing wet paint to ooze through the gaps and tears.

Continue Reading →
Solo Shows

Lindsay Walt: No guru, no method, no teacher

Contributed by Adam Simon / At one time I would have said the paintings of Lindsay Walt fell within the domain of Minimalism. It’s clear from her current show at Helm Contemporary that the designation doesn’t fit. More representative of that genre was the inspired pairing at the same gallery of Russell Maltz and Li Trincere back in June. By contrast, Walt’s atmospheric grounds paired with geometric forms don’t fit the austerity of Minimalism from the 1960s and 1970s. Instead, these works fuse opposites in a dialectic that tilts towards the infinite space and transcendentalism of an artist like Hilma Af Klint.

Continue Reading →
Solo Shows

Peter Bradley: Pleasure and provocation

Contributed by David Rhodes / In Peter Bradley’s third solo exhibition with Karma, all the paintings are from the previous 12 months, ranging in size from 36 inches square to 104 x 82 inches. They feature a thrilling abundance of color and paint, reaching the senses of both sight and touch. The regularity of the dimensions and emphasis on the square to rectangle format sharpens the comparative extremes within each painting. Lean, empty areas sometimes transition slowly, sometimes abruptly. Anomalous space – that is, pictorial space played off against real surface, canvas and paint – is always synchronous and flowing.

Continue Reading →
Solo Shows

Su-Mei Tse, composer and orchestrator

Contributed by Joe Fyfe / A large souvenir brochure accompanied Leonard Cohen’s “I’m Your Man” tour in the late 1980s. It included, among an assortment of photographs of him and reproductions of his sketches, a thousand-word essay titled “How To Speak Poetry” that has had a second life on the internet. In this singular artistic manifesto, Cohen admonishes singers that they are “among the people. Then be modest. Speak the words, convey the data, step aside.” On the next page, he tells them to “think of the words as science, not as art. They are a report.” If an audience appreciates the event, “it will be in the data and the quiet organization of your presence.” Su-Mei Tse’s current exhibition at Peter Blum Gallery seems to freshly embody Cohen’s abiding concern with presentation and how an artist must address an audience.

Continue Reading →
Gallery shows

Elias Wessel: Exposing social media 

Contributed by Chunbum Park / At Picture Theory in Chelsea, Elias Wessel has assembled provocative installations titled “It’s Complicated” and, with composer and musician Natalia Kiёs, “Systems at Play.“ In “It’s Complicated,” busy photographs that document surfing and scrolling behavior stand on pedestals. Holstered at their sides are headphones piping cacophonic sounds and words – styled “Is Possibly Art” – that AI-based text-recognition software has distilled from the long-exposure images.

Continue Reading →
Ideas about Painting

A (mostly appreciative) response to Saul Ostrow

Contributed by Adam Simon / I was struck by the last two sentences of Saul Ostrow’s essay, “Painting simulacra: Brice Marden, David Reed, and Gerhard Richter.” He writes: “Marden, Reed, and Richter have sustained abstract painting’s aesthetic and cultural value as a mode of resistive thinking. In most cases, though, this has been misread or at least subsumed by its own model, thereby giving rise to the kind of acritical aestheticism and nostalgia that bolsters painters who promote gestural abstraction as a genre or motif rather than a mode of inquiry.” It took a minute to unpack this statement and allow it to sink in. Ostrow’s critique is dense, and appears to implicate most contemporary gestural abstract painters as well as contemporary criticism that dismisses the possibility of radical formalism.

Continue Reading →
Ideas about Painting

Painting simulacra: Brice Marden, David Reed, and Gerhard Richter

Contributed by Saul Ostrow / “Let the Painting Make You,” the exhibition of Brice Marden’s last paintings; at Gagosian Gallery, set me to thinking about the relationship between Marden’s earlier gestural works and Gerhardt Richter’s process-oriented abstract paintings, which in turn led me to consider the connection of their works to those of David Reed and then to the French artists Simon Hantai and Bernard Frize who, like Reed, creates the illusion of an impossible spontaneity. Slowly, I came to focus on the question of why Richter is identified with post-modernism, while Marden and Reed’s works are most often critically identified as being quintessentially modernist and formalist. While Hantai (the modernist?) and Frieze (the post-modernist?) fit the question of what constitutes post-modern abstract painting, their references and histories are different for consideration here. Instead, I decided I would focus on Richter, Reed and Marden all who seem to transgress the formalist and modernist dictums that were generated in the 1950s and 1960s in the United States and then exported abroad, as such Hantai and Frize are part of another genealogy.  

Continue Reading →