Geo/Metric at MoMA, Part 2

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Geo/Metric at MoMA, Part 1 

Geo/Metric at MoMa, Part 3  

Geo/Metric at MoMa, Part 4 

The entrance to Gallery 2. A Bridget Riley print is flanked by a grid of nine ink-on-paper works by Tony Smith, and a gouache-on-paper drawing by Jo Baer. Most of the work in this gallery is from the Fifties and Sixties

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If my first post reads more like a travelogue of the gallery than a discussion of the work, it’s because I really don’t know how to talk about that early-in-the-last-century work.  Here in the second gallery, my art history is a bit better. This is more contemporary work—though by “contemporary” we’re talking late Fifties and Sixties. Work in black and white is installed in the four corners. The dialog between and among these works, mediated by everything else in the gallery, is animated. You join in visually, the way you might join a conversation at a cocktail party, a bit here, a bit there. Because the space is small—and because this unsung show is almost deserted—it is easy to maneuver, and there are many such conversations to join.

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Bridget Riley. Untitled (Fragment 1) from a series of seven screenprints on Perspex, 1965

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So let’s enter the gallery. The optically invigorating screenprint on Perspex (that’s plexiglass to you and me) by Bridget Riley is crisp and fresh, though it dates from 1965. Riley has mellowed in recent years but I remain enamored of the painter who muscled her way into the art scene of the Sixties with her retinally explosive Op paintings. This print, all aggressive angles and vigorous energy, is a fitting metaphor for what it must have taken for a young woman to create a place for herself back then. Plus it’s fabulous.

Over your left shoulder is a black and white work by Myron Stout, one of the great albeit not-so-well-known painters of modernist geometry (or is it geometric modernism?). You’ll see it in a bit as we swing around the gallery. Visible to your left is a wall of gouache and ink works by Ellsworth Kelly. I’m lukewarm about Kelly’s mature work, but these early paintings and collages I love. Their small size and wonderful color, and Kelly's exploration of related shapes and hues, and the dialog between the color and the black and white is still snappy after all these years.

Ellsworth Kelly. Line Form Color, 1951, ink on paper (the black and white work) and colored and pasted colored paper on colored paper. Kelly described the works--from a group of 40 that he created--as "an alphabet of plastic pictorial elements."
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Below: Tony Smith, 4/26/61 (a suite of nine drawings), 1961, ink on paper. (Beyond the wall is a peek at one of a series of small works by Martin Creed in the next gallery)

The gridded installation format continues with the ink-on-paper works of Tony Smith. Is it me or do the photographs of Berndt and Hilla Becher come to mind? Certainly it’s the installation, but it’s also the architectural quality of the images, the black and white, and the slight variations, each worthy of close viewing, within the theme.

A doorway to the large third gallery comes next, but we’re going to continue our tour around Gallery 2 and stop at the two gems by Jo Baer, both gouache on paper. You see the small one on the right when you enter the gallery; it and a partial view of the Smiths flank Riley’s print in a pas de trois of angular black and white.

Up close you can appreciate the energy of the lines in Baer's small work, brushed on confidently with a free hand—and that red line, not quite tentative, yet not fully assertive, traverses the length of the inside space just under the defining upper edge. There’s just the tiniest bit of space between the light red line and the bolder black swipe above it. Then you notice its counterpart at the bottom of the frame. It sits atop the black line there. Is it resting or lying in wait? What energy and equipoise contained in such a tiny space! (See Carol Diehl's review in AiA of what Baer has been up to more recently.)

Two by Jo Baer, both untitled, from 1965 and 1963, gouache on paper. ( Peeking into Gallery 3, we see Gabriel Orozco's digital print wallpaper)

Below, the untitled work from 1963, 5.5 x 7 inches sans frame

Continuing around, we see works by the Brazilians Helio Oiticica, most gouache on board, that are beauties of modernist geometry, and Lygia Clark, whose two black-and-white collages are placed in the diagonally opposite corner to the Tony Smiths and opposite the Jo Baers. The balance of content and placement is this exhibition is staggeringly good!

Work in gouache on board from 1958 and 1959 by Helio Oiticica, above
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Below, more by Oiticica and by Lygia Clark in cut and pasted paper on paper. (To orient you: just to the right of the Clarks is the entrance to this gallery)

Now we back ourselves almost into Gallery 3 so that we can take in the foreground and background of this space. On the wall behind the Bridget Riley print is this gouache-on-paper painting by Mary Heilmann, below. Look at the dialog of blues between it and the Oiticica on the left. Pulling back farther, you see the Myron Stout drawing which had not been visible as we entered. The Stout work faces the Tony Smith grid; the exchange of positive and negative planes and spaces between these two installations is so compelling that you might be at a tennis game for the amount of head swinging you do. Through the doorway into Gallery 1 you can see the Hans Arp collage which I showed in the previous post.

Mary Heilmann, above and below, Davis Sliding Square, 1978, synthetic polymer paint on paper, 29 7/8 x 22 1/2
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Above, work by Oiticica is to the left of Heilmann's painting. Below, Myron Stout's choarcoal and pastel drawing is visible to the right, and beyond that, a collage by Hans Arp in Gallery 1

Heilmann is a personal favorite. I find her particular brand of geometry and color both rigorous and sensuous. Neither a minimalist nor a materialist (or perhaps a little of both), she knows exactly how much to put into every painting—or maybe exactly how much to leave out. This work, from 1978, is more recent than most of the other work in the room. Presumably that’s because it leads you into the large Gallery 3, the site of the newest work in the exhibition.

Heilmann's work faces this view of Gallery 3, which is where we’re going in the next post.

Next stop: Gallery 3

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Geo/Metric at MoMA, Part 1

Geo/Metric at MoMA, Part 2

Geo/Metric at MoMA, Part 3

Geo/Metric at MoMA, Part 4

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If you’re in New York this week and you have even a passing interest in geometry, get over to the new work-on-paper galleries on the second floor at MoMA to see Geo/Metric, up through the 18th. Travel is not in your plans? Well, get comfortable here in front of the monitor, as I have a lot of images to show you. The work in this show is from the MoMA collection, which means visitors were free to photograph it. I did, from every conceivable angle. The installation is beautifully thought out, so every angle permits visual connections between and among the works.

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A hallway on the second floor at MoMA leading to Geo/Metric. This work is from the untitled Forms Derived From a Cube, by Sol Lewitt, from a portfolio of etchings and aquatint

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The wall text describes the show as “an informal survey of the impulse toward geometric abstraction in visual art over the past century.” It’s a worthy premise represented by a wonderful selection of work. A wide-ranging show in four large galleries, it begins with the Cubists and Suprematists in the early 1900s; continues on to Minimalism, Op and hard-edge abstraction; and ends with new work by younger artists like Mark Grotjahn and Olaf Nicolai.

Starr Figura, the associate curator of prints and illustrated books, and Kathleen Curry, assistant curator for research and collections, are to be commended. Not only is the show beautifully selected, it’s installed in a way that from any vantage point you may see something of the historical range on exhibition. Moreover, they did not exclude the contributions of women artists to this genre. Sophie Taeuber Arp, Hannah Hoch and Lyubov Popova are in the first gallery; Bridget Riley, whose acute-angled print on plexiglass opens the second gallery, is followed with work by Jo Baer, Lygia Clark, Mary Heilmann, Agnes Martin and Dorothea Rockburne.

If you follow this blog, you know that color and abstract geometric work are two elements I seek out, so this exhibition is a little slice of heaven.

To orient you to the space as I take you around, know that the galleries for this exhibition are laid out geometrically. Envision a square divided in thirds horizontally. The bottom third is Gallery 1, where you enter (the two images below). The top third is Gallery 3. The middle third is divided in half vertically into the smaller Galleries 2 and 4. Galleries 1, 2 and 4 are painted light gray; the large gallery 3 is creamy white. Got that?

Here we are in Gallery 1. Above: The entrance to the exhibition is behind us, and we’re looking toward the right. (Pay no attention to the Albers prints; they’re in Gallery 4 and we’ll get to them later.) Arranged around the wall to the right of the Albers prints are works by Kandinsky, Malevich and Alexandr Vesnin

.Below, the view continues on the far wall with work by El Lissitsky and, on the right wall, Moholy-Nagy. I particularly like the drawings by Malevich and the lithos by Moholy Nagy. In the vitrine are small works by Aleksei Kruchenykh and Vasilii Kamenskii

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Two from Kazemir Malevich, above: Suprematist Elements: Squares, 1923, pencil on paper, 19 3/4 x 14 1/4; and Suprematist Element: Circle, 1923, pencil on paper, 18 1/2 by 14 3/8

Below: Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Untitled from Konstruktionen, 1923, lithograph, 23 9/16 x 17 5/6 inches. This is one from a portfolio of six lithographs

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Turning to the left side of the room there’s work by Lyubov Popova and Frantisek Kupka. I find the installation of these works jarring. The placement of the sixth Popova on the wall above the line of five seems like an afterthought, and I would have liked a more formal installation of the Kupka works, in keeping with the rest of the show. (Pay no attention to the glimpse of Ellsworth Kelly gouaches in Gallery 2; we’ll get to them in the next post.)

On the wall at left, gouache and ink paintings on paper by Frantisek Kupka from 1912. On the wall at right, linoleum block prints with gouache and watercolor by Lyubov Popova. (I never heard of them either, but it was interesting to see the work in the context of this exhibition.)

Below, a work from Popova's Untitled from Six Prints, 1916-1917,13.5 by 10.25. This image from MoMA's feature on the artist

The wall on which the Kupkas are hung is a divider. (Each of the four galleries has a divider, however those in the other galleries are placed in the geographic center, whereas this one is placed so that it creates a vestibule for the second entrance to the exhibition. We'll get behind the wall in a moment.) To the left of the Kupka wall are small works by Jean (Hans) Arp, Hannah Hoch and Sophie Taeuber Arp.

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Left: Jean (Hans) Arp, Untitled (Collage with Squares Arranged According to the Laws of Chance), 1916-17, no size given but you can see the scale in the installation above

Right: Sophie Taeuber Arp, Echelonnement Desaxe, 1934, gouache on paper, 13 7/8 x 10 5/8. Both images from the MoMA website

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Mondrian before the boogie woogie: Pier and Ocean 5 (Sea and Starry Sky, 1915, charcoal and watercolor on paper, 34 5/8 x 44 inches

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On the other side of the Kupka wall is the Mondrian. I love the intersecting verticals and horizontals in an oval field, the whole contained with the horizontal rectangle of the frame placed against the larger vertical rectangle of the wall.

Behind your left shoulder as you look at the Mondrian are a collage each by Braque and Picasso, continuing their eternal conversation about Cubism. To the right of the Picasso is the entrance to Gallery 2, which is where we’re going in the next post.

Above: Georges Braque, Guitar, 1913, cut and pasted printed and painted paper, charcoal, pencil and gouache on gessoed canvas, 39 1/4 x 25 5/8 inches. Right, Pablo Picasso, Guitar, cut and pasted paper and printed paper, charcoal, ink and chalk on colored paper on board, 26 1/8 x 19 1/2 inches

Below: The entrance to Gallery 2, with a screenprint on plexiglass by Bridget Riley. This is where we'll begin next time

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Gee-Oh!-Graphic

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Every once in a while the government does something really great. The pictures taken from the Landsat satellite are such an example. They’re wonderful, artful and very beautiful. The satellite snaps pictures as it passes over the earth, and then the images of cities and the larger landscape are colorized to convey all kinds of scientific information: temperature, ocean currents, crops and land cover, deforestation, location of fires, before-and-after views of Katrina-affected land, erosion, the polar ice cover, atmospheric conditions, snow, altitude. The geographic information is accurate, while the colors—vivid, even garish, almost hallucinogenic (and you know the government will love that description)— are rendered in ways that allow clarity for the various geological disciplines. They’re a mapmaker's dream and an artist’s inspiration.

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Here are a few of the ones I liked. The images are in the public domain (hey, we paid for them) with the credit noted at the bottom of this post. I pulled most of the images from the web simply by Googling “Landsat,” but you can see a more edited and informative grouping as part of an exhibition supported by the Library of Congress. And you can learn more about the project at NASA.

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Who knew our tax dollars could be put to such good use?

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Wildfires on the Sioux Reservation, South Dakota

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Northern Russia

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Great Sandy Desert, Australia

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The Andes

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Northern Tundra, Russia

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Guinea-Bissau

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Bolivian deforestation

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The city of Tucson

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Kent County, Maryland

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Namibia desert

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Lena River Delta, Russia

Images courtesy of USGS National Center for EROS and NASA Landsat Project Science Office

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More Color and Geometry

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I'm using this opportunity to post more images from artists who have either sent me links to their websites from the last time I did a post like this (Your Turn: Color, Geometry and More) or whose work I've been wanting to post when the time and opportunity presented itself. The focus this time is on symmetry.
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Louise P. Sloane. VioletVioletAqua, 2008, acrylic polymers and pigment on aluminum, 32 x 28 inches. Louise and I are both included in No Chromophobia at OK Harris, which will resume in September after a summer hiatus. See more on her website

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....Matthew Langley. Celebrated Summer, 2006, oil on canvas, 60 x 50 inches. See more at Matthew Langley.com

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. Henry Brown. Counterbalance, 2005, acrylic, pencil, gesso on canvas, 60 x 60 inches. See more on Henry Brown.com. (Henry was included in a recent group show, Machine Learning, which you can read about here and Minus Space

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.James Brittingham. Ketchfeelins, 2006, acrylic on Dura-lar, 81 inches high. See more on Scott's Flickr site

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.Geoffrey Todd Smith. Everything U Fuck Turns 2 Math, 2007, ink and gouache on paper, 16" w x 20 inches. Read an interview with him at Fecal Face (hey, I don't make up these titles) and see more at Western Exhibitions in Chicago
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Grace DeGennaro. Weaving, 2007, oil on linen, 26 x 16 inches. "My labor-intensive working process reflects and supports the recurrent themes of ritual, growth, and the passage of time. The dots also reference Byzantine mosaics, Australian Aboriginal Art, tatoos, mehndi, beading and weaving," says Grace in an interview with Julie Karabenick on Geoform. See more on gracedegennaro.com

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If you have work that deals with color and geometry, feel free to leave your post in the Comments section so that we can all take a look. Down the road I'll compile another selection.

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Two Artists' Projects in the Blogosphere

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There are two interesting collaborative artists’ projects (that I know of) now taking place in Cyberspace in which visual artists are writing about art. Both projects involve artists who are geographically and conceptually diverse, and both broaden the conversation about art in a non-hierarchical way.

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Color Chunks

At Color Chunks, known for its images of chunks, bits, slices, balls, discs and sheets of color, artist John Tallman has just introduced his Artists Words project. Tallman has come up with a list of words that interest him and invited artists to write about one as it relates to their own practice. I’m involved in this project—in fact, I’m the first artist whose essay is posted (I wrote about "arrangement") — but I would have noted it anyway. The collusion, perhap collision, of artist and idea is sure to shed some light onto the creative process.

Tallman is adopting a laissez-faire approach to the written material he receives: "I'm more interested in observing how things shape themselves, rather than achieving some kind of coherence from the top down."

Root Temperature Chance Syntax Organization Sponges Posture Mess Transition Practice Temperature Series Correction Strategy

Some of the words from Tallman's list

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Artists Review Artists

Over at Thinking About Art, JT Kirkland launched his Artists Review Artists project on June 30. The idea is to give artists an opportunity to have their work viewed and reviewed by another artist. It’s an interesting concept and an open invitation: an artist submits an image and agrees to have it be reviewed, and in turn will then write a review. The pairings are not reciprocal; Kirkland arranges the matches.

You’ll see a range of work and read a range of reviews. Some reviews are more generous than others (and some, to be honest, are not that well written) but that diversity is part of what makes this project interesting. The project gives artists a chance to have their work considered critically. It's an opportunity for artists to emerge from the safety of their studios and proffer the work for comment--a huge step if you haven't done it before-- and, equally, to step outside the box to put word to image.

Gail Vollrath. Gas, 2007, oil, china marker on paper, 7.5 x 7 inches

Art on the Street

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This is not the first time I've posted images of Chelsea's street color, but it's the first time I've commented on the references to Steir, Indiana, Pollock and Rothko.

Steir on the Street? Shot on 21st Street, outside Eyebeam Gallery

Same location, different reference




A few Pollockian drips on 20th Street

Rothko on a dumpster?

These images were taken over the course of several months, so they may not be there now.

For more ephemeral art, visit Joy Garnett's Newsgrist. She's got a series of Found Art--fleeting "installations" like this, this, this and this.

Update, August 3: In his blog, In it for Life, Tim McFarlane shows a fabulous "Rothko Wall" in Philly.

Awash in Color: My Own

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If you happen to be in San Francisco, stop in at Adler &Co. Gallery , 77 Geary Street, to see this installation. The work is from my Silk Road series, each 12 x 12 inches, encaustic on panel.

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Phew!

Greek-American Paul Thymou, resident of the Aegean island of Lesbos, holds a banner reading: "If you are not from Lesbos, you are not a Lesbian," outside of an Athens courthouse on on June 10

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Oh, this is just too good! Reuters reports that we can continue to be "lesbians," lowercase L. Here's the story:

ATHENS - A Greek court has dismissed a request by residents of the Aegean island of Lesbos to ban the use of the word lesbian to describe gay women, according to a court ruling made public on Tuesday.

Three residents of Lesbos, the birthplace of the ancient Greek poetess Sappho whose love poems inspired the term lesbian, brought a case last month arguing the use of the term in reference to gay women insulted their identity.

In a July 18 decision, the Athens court said the word did not define the identity of the residents of the island, and so it could be validly used by gay groups in Greece and abroad.The ruling ordered the plaintiffs to pay court expenses of $366.

"This is a good decision for lesbians everywhere," Vassilis Chirdaris, lawyer for the Gay and Lesbian Union of Greece, told Reuters. "A court in Athens could not stop people around the world from using it. It was ridiculous."

He said the plaintiffs were free to appeal the decision in a higher court.

Lesbos, which lies just off the Turkish Coast, has become a gathering spot for gay women from around the world, especially at the village of Eressos which is regarded as the birthplace of the poet in the 7th century B.C.

Several residents testified during the trial that the use of the word lesbian had brought recognition to the island and boosted its tourist trade.

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In ridiculously related news, ClaireTrageser reports in the Seattle P.I. blog that the American Family Association's OneNewsNow (I'm not even giving you that link; why encourage them?) has a strict policy of substituting the word "gay" with "homosexual"via automatic editing. Thus the Christian news outlet repeatedly described the sprinter Tyson Gay, whose record-breaking Olympic time trials will send him to Beijing, as "Tyson Homosexual."

Anish Kapoor in New York

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Anish Kapoor at the Barbara Gladstone Gallery, through August 15. Reflection and distortion challenge your spatial perceptions, so you back up, edge forward, circle around and repeat, engaged by the illusion and the reality of the massive forms before you

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I first saw Anish Kapoor’s work in 1990 at the Venice Biennale. He was representing Britain, and his work filled that country’s “pavilion,” a small building that consists of gallery rooms. (Each represented country has a building of its own design that remains permanently on the ground of the Giardini, the gardens, where the Biennale is set.) There were a number of sculptures, abstract forms of human scale.

Looking at my photographs from the exhibition reminds me that there was a room of carved stone blocks, about three feet in any direction, with voids of various sizes in their centers, so that as you peered in you didn’t know just how deep or shallow the negative space was. There was a disc the diameter of an armspan covered in midnight blue pigment; you couldn’t tell if it was concave or convex and you didn’t want to get too close because of the powdered pigment on its surface. And there were piles of that same midnight blue pigment; looking at these I remember thinking, “Yves Klein at a spice market.”

I’d never heard of this artist, but I responded to the simplicity and materiality of his work. Since then I’ve encountered his work, as I'm sure you have, with increasing frequency. The surfaces are always interesting; and more than most dimensional work, his forms challenge your spatial perceptions of dimension and direction.

These concerns continue in two recent exhibitions at the Barbara Gladstone galleries in New York City. Red predominated in Gladstone’s 24th Street “flagship” space (the show is now closed); reflection and distortion in the 21st Street space, where the show remains on view until August 15.

Anish Kapoor at Barbara Gladstone. My shot of the installation is above, showing Drip, Double Corner, and in the foreground, Bloodstick. All are resin and paint

A gallery shot of Bloodstick is below, where you get a better sense of the color and of the scale, some 401.57 inches--a little over 33 feet long

Read my whole report, A Tale of Two Cities: Anish Kapoor in Boston and New York, at the ARTtistics blog.

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