Art From online: Early Spring 2019
- Charlie Parsons
- Aug 4, 2019
- 6 min read
This is from an ongoing series where I round up art from my instagram feed that stands out to me and excerpt quotations about the art works, with some of my own thoughts interspersed. I'm gonna try really hard to get the embed working in the next post, but for now i encourage you to click the links.
The Umbilical Cord of the Earth is the Moon
Luchita Hurtado, 1977, Oil on canvas
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“Hurtado also produced a number of landscape paintings wherein the human body merges with the desert or mountains—breasts become sand dunes and a navel doubles as a hole in the ground. These works challenge the binary notion that humans are disconnected from the natural world, proposing instead that the earth is a living and breathing thing. Another prominent element in some of her landscape paintings from this period—feathers—relates to a ritual that Hurtado witnessed, where feathers are placed over a bonfire and left to float in midair. Hung together in Made in L.A. 2018, Hurtado’s self-portraits and landscapes shed light on a pivotal moment in her expansive practice.”
-hammer museum
Spiral Jerry
Eleanor Ray
Glisteo (Agnes Martin)
Eleanor Ray
Nicelle beauchene press release:
Nicelle Beauchene is pleased to announce Eleanor Ray’s first solo exhibition at the gallery. Ray's small-scale paintings bring the viewer into an intimate conversation with landscapes and interiors, both ordinary and well known.
The paintings give form to a state of close attention, presenting specific places in series. Ray spends time with each location both in person and in memory, working from her drawings and photographs collected over time. Expansive views are contained on small surfaces, and succinct compositions become foundations for color, light, and space. Geometry materializes in the warmth of the visible world, as open horizons contrast with the rigid horizontals and verticals of architecture. Each painting is direct in its depiction of a nameable place, but subjective in scale and cropping, locating the viewer in a sense of place beyond an initial impression.
These paintings remind me of Morandi’s careful repetitions of still life, so close and peaceful. I love her cropping and textures too. They just feel slow. Reminds me of sitting still for a very long time and seeing what i notice. Plus I’ve wanted to visit spiral jetty for so damn long dude pls take me to the salt lake.
Madonna of the Clouds
Donatello, about 1425-1429
MFA Boston
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“Donatello was one of the most innovative sculptors in the history of European sculpture. He carved this image in flattened relief (rilievo schiacciato), a technique, which he invented, in which a sculptor could create the illusion of volumetric forms set into deep, continuous space with the most subtle and shallow carving. The Madonna sits as if on the ground, to convey the idea of humility, but Donatello sets her in the clouds, so she also becomes Queen of Heaven. A feeling of weighty foreboding is expressed in the Madonna’s somber profile, which seems to look into the Christ Child’s tragic future.”
-mfa site
This one is cheating because it’s from my renaissance art class. It’s wild how many levels of depth Donatello achieves in such low relief. I love the sensitive faces and hands, particularly the baby Christ’s outreached arm. The Madonna’s firm presence seems to float outside timespace among the less deeply incised clouds surrounding her
Xinyi cheng
Coiffeur, 2017
Balice Hertling
Hmm maybe intimacy is a running theme here, but this feels super sweet and intimate too. I like that the smooth brush strokes prompt the way my eye moves about the canvas.
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Simone Leigh
The Village Series #4, 2018
Lurhig Augustine:
“Leigh has described her work as investigating ‘black women as containers of knowledge and as containers of trauma.’”
I think Simone Leigh is an artist making consistently stunning work right now.
From Aruna D’souza’s fourcolumns.org review:
“It is the work that has haunted me most in the days since my visit. As with many of the salt-fired pieces here, the glazing is the real story: the slightly matte, creamy white surface is covered with holes, ranging from tiny pinpricks to smallish perforations, in an irregular pattern. Reading at once as freckles, pockmarks, and the Milky Way, the pitting is repulsive and gorgeous, the very definition of sublimity.
A crown of ropy braids tops this head. This braiding appears in four nonrepresentational works sitting directly on the floor in the front room, too—bell-shaped cloches seamed with plaits, ranging from sixteen to twenty-five inches high, also part of The Village Series. The slippage between bodies and architecture alluded to in the title of a series comprising both figurative and abstract forms—is a village a collection of people or an accumulation of dwellings?—is reiterated throughout the show…”
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Toyin ojih odutola
My country has no name, 2013
Jack Shainman, showing at the Jewish Museum LA
“ Odutola’s focus shifts to the transcendence of skin (color) and placement (origin), opening a field for the viewer to place themselves in the work; finding spaces to belong or to reject, to possess, to implant one’s self or to find freedom from the rejection of that space.”
Jane Dickson
Terminal Bar, 2017
James fuentes
“Since the 1980s, starting at Times Square, she has chronicled and memorialized scenes of life in America, from the glittering spectacles of Las Vegas casinos and demolition derbies, to the monotony of strip malls, highways, and suburban sprawl
“In Dickson’s own words, “I paint to locate baseline reality within an unstable world.””
Ed Ruscha
The End, 1991
Moma
“The End evokes a split second of film projection on the big screen. The effect of instantaneity is enhanced by the imperfections and vertical lines in the gray field, which are intended to resemble the tiny scratches, scrapes, and particles of dust that can mar film and projector lenses. The fuzzy, out-of-focus contours of the airbrushed letters, split between the top and bottom of the canvas, suggest that something is amiss in the projection of this particular movie reel; the illusion of continuity is not being created. This "illustration of an out-of-sync mode," as the artist has described it, refers to the past (the Old English typescript recalls medieval manuscripts and the Bible) and the future — once the technology of celluloid film is obsolete, if not totally forgotten, will the painting be recognizable? The title and subject of the work remind us that the continuum of time is composed of the momentary; a flash of ending differentiates past from present and present from future, and a final, apocalyptic end would render time meaningless.”
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Pretty cool huh? Maybe I’m an airbrush chump.
Sherrie Levine,
“Monocrhomes After Mondrian”
Sherrie Levine’s "Monochromes After Mondrian”, 2012 is part of the Dallas Museum of Art Collection.
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“"The work 'Monochromes after Mondrian: 1–16' comprises sixteen uniformly sized panels of mahogany, each painted a distinctly unmodulated block of color using Flashe paint. In format, it relates abstractly to Mondrian’s famous later style, in which he discarded representational painting for abstraction using only black and primary colors; however, in this group of paintings Levine references the modernist painter’s earlier body of work from 1905–1911, which often depicted murky or twilight scenes of trees, houses, windmills, and still bodies of water. The muted grays, browns, and purples Levine employs are typical of Mondrian’s early palette. -
Whether working through photographic reproduction, drawing, watercolor, or sculpture, Sherrie Levine has continually defined her practice by making new versions of others’ art and placing them in new contexts. Through her process of appropriation and manipulation, Levine essentially erases the hallmark style for which modernist painters like Mondrian have historically been lauded. In doing so, she reduces Mondrian’s work to nothing more than a color palette and a name in order to question the mythology of the male artistic “genius” in modern art.” (excerpt from Anna Katherine Brodbeck, ed., 'TWO X TWO X TWENTY: Two Decades Supporting Contemporary Art at the Dallas Museum of Art’ (Dallas: Dallas Museum of Art), 2018, 204-205.) -”
“Levine’s works from this series tell the story of our perpetually dashed hopes to create meaning, the inability to recapture the past, and our own lost illusions.” https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/267214
I think it’s cool because these provide that sweet pomo commentary and also look good.
Nasa Doesn’t Seem to Understand This
Esther Pearl Watson, 2018
“This is visual memoir. The series is a vehicle through which the artist revisits episodes from her unconventional childhood, propelled by an eccentric but apparently charismatic father who not only believed in UFOs, but actually built them in the backyard. Soaked in narrative that enchants even where disturbing threads glimmer through, Watson’s paintings require little need for interpretation, with painted captions and descriptive titles, which provide detailed insight into the often bizarre story behind the images.” - Meghan Abrams for Whitehot
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