Tag: Paula Cooper

Artist's Notebook Opinion

Jennifer Bartlett’s demons 

Contributed by Patrick Neal / During the late 1980s and ‘90s, the painter Jennifer Bartlett produced four major series examining the classical elements of fire, air, earth, and water. The first three bodies of work, Fire Paintings, Air: 24 Hours, and Earth Paintings and Drawings, were exhibited at Paula Cooper’s Soho gallery, and Water, the last, at Gagosian in Los Angeles in 1997. In perusing images, it’s easy to find straightforward examples of fire, air, and water, but earth proves more elusive. What emerge instead are compositions of domestic scenes with strange people centered around homes, vacations, and holidays suggesting an underlying storyline. In Bartlett’s work, human presence is usually manifested through symbolic motifs or psychological traces, which makes the figures and narratives in the Earth paintings all the more intriguing. 

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Solo Shows

Beatrice Caracciolo: Exquisitely stealthy

Contributed by David Carrier / What does it mean for a contemporary artist to be inspired by an older text or artwork? The Gospel of Matthew 15:14 says: “If the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch.” Moved by those words in 1568, Pieter Bruegel the Elder painted The Blind Leading the Blind, which hangs in Museo di Capodimonte in Naples. Now stirred by that picture, Beatrice Caracciolo, a young artist who grew up in that city, has drawn The Blind 16: one large image of the blind beggars and several smaller details also derived from the Bruegel. Between Matthew and Bruegel and then Bruegel and Caracciolo, there’s a kind of creative slippage whereby the meaning of the prior statement is transformed. At each stage, Matthew’s basic conception is partly preserved while something is added or subtracted. He doesn’t specify, for instance, that there are six blind men. Caracciolo shows his entire work, but without color, in grisaille. In smaller rectangular works on paper, she focuses on the trees and on some of the individual blind men.

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Solo Shows

Carey Young’s visual jurisprudence

Contributed by Adam Simon / Carey Young’s exhibition “Appearance” at Paula Cooper is the latest installment of her more than 20-year artistic examination of the law as an institution. She is a leading progenitor of a growing cohort of artists who use research and analysis of institutions and systems in their work. In a video on the gallery website, Young states, “Law is too important to be left to lawyers… There are many ways to talk about it that haven’t been addressed.” Other reviews have focused on the information transmitted through the photos and video in the show. There remains the fundamental question of how, or if, an art exhibition can talk about a subject as prosaic as law in a constructively different way than a written or spoken medium. Does the language of visual art engage thought differently?

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