Search Results for "david carrier"

Solo Shows

Maki Na Kamura: “Caspar David Friedrich plus Hokusai minus Romanticism minus Japonisme”

Contributed by David Carrier / Born in Japan, Maki Na Kamura was trained in Germany, where she now lives and works. In that light, it’s not too surprising that she describes her work as “Caspar David Friedrich plus Hokusai minus Romanticism minus Japonisme.” Identifying herself as both a traditional painter and a contemporary artist, she notes that she might, on the same canvas, use both tempera and oil paint– two materials traditionally used separately. Her paintings and charcoal-on-paper drawings are poised between figuration and abstraction. The paintings are often centered on figures, but it’s not usually clear what’s happening in the work on view at Michael Werner. It may be hard to tell just what we are looking at, but it is obvious that her central concern is visual pleasure. 

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Museum Exhibitions

Rachel Ruysch: Late bloomer

Contributed by David Carrier / Significant twentieth-century artists occasionally depicted flowers. Andy Warhol was one, Ellsworth Kelly another. But it’s hard to think of any major painter today who focuses predominantly on them. Rachel Ruysch (1664–1750) lived in a very different world. Thanks to the bountiful worldwide empire of Golden Age Holland, even this stay-at-home painter could obtain an amazing variety of imported flowers. The Toledo Museum of Art’s “Nature into Art,” drawn from her 150 surviving works, is, improbably, the first major exhibition devoted to her. Botany thrived in Ruysch’s time due in part to Dutch imperialism. Flower painting became a major artistic genre, and she and her rivals enjoyed access to an enormous variety of exotic flowers (and insects). Critics rightfully consider her pre-eminent. “At her best,” the catalogue says, “Ruysch painted like a novelist, creating scenes within a framework at large.“ Indeed, her intricately crafted, remarkably varied paintings convey the story of Dutch capitalism. 

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Solo Shows

Maria Helena Vieira da Silva: Master of the grid

Contributed by David Carrier / Thanks to remarkably cultivated parents, Lisbon-born Maria Helena Vieira da Silva (1908–1992) was exposed to a lot of important art from early on. When she was just five, she saw the work of Paolo Uccello, a clear influence, in London’s National Gallery. Moving to France in 1928, Vieiro da Silva showed in Paris in the late 1920s and 1930s, took refuge from the German occupation during World War II in Brazil (her husband, Arpad Szenes, was a Hungarian Jew), and after the war returned to Paris, where she had a successful career. The expertly installed exhibition currently at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice aims to bring her art to the attention of contemporary audiences. 

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Museum Exhibitions

The mysterious Gertrude Abercrombie

Contributed by David Carrier / Gertrude Abercrombie (1909–1977) was a Chicago-based painter. Basically self-taught, she was inspired by Rene Magritte or perhaps Paul Delvaux to create small, highly distinctive Surrealist paintings. She was a great friend of jazz musicians and much written about by Chicago writers. She had real success in the local art market. Though gone for almost 50 years now, she has recently gained wider attention. In a deft exercise in revisionist taste, Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Art has mounted a substantial and intriguing display of her work. 

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Museum Exhibitions

“Project A Black Planet” – Enshrining a promised land

Contributed by David Carrier / Few human developments have been more consequential, in terms of both art history and broader cultural expansion, than the movement of Africans within and out of their own continent. The mammoth exhibition “Project A Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica,” now at the Art Institute of Chicago in twelve high-ceilinged contemporary galleries, includes more than 350 drawings, paintings, photographs, sculptures, installations, watercolors and prints, but also books, magazines, posters, and record albums, made from the 1920s onward. It’s a lot, but never too much.

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Solo Shows

Francesco Clemente’s visual facility

Contributed by David Carrier / I have been writing a book about art in the churches of Naples’ historic center. There I also visited the new Kunsthalle Madre, which contains an elaborate two-story permanent installation by Francesco Clemente called “Ave Ovo.” Like baroque Catholic art, Clemente’s work features elaborate symbolism. While the old masters employed it to present church dogma, his symbolism is personal and more elusive. In Naples, however, both exhibit a penchant for sensory overload: more is more. In his splendid show “Summer Love in the Fall,” now at Lévy Gorvy Dayan, Clemente still uses some of the same symbols – male and female body parts, his own portrait – but the colors in its 23 paintings are more subdued. The title may well refer to the psychic place of erotic images in his later life as well as the timing of this exhibition, for now his work seems more serene. 

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Solo Shows

Morandi’s pointed timelessness

Contributed by David Carrier / Giorgio Morandi was born in 1890 and died in 1964. After the 1910s, when his art had some affinities with that of Giorgio de Chirico, he painted only still lives – bottles or flowers – and landscapes. “Time Suspended, part II” at Mattia de Luca Gallery, part I having been staged earlier in Italy, is a blessedly large presentation of 45 paintings and fifteen works on paper that reveals how little other artists or current events – indeed, anything outside of his studio life – affected his work.

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Solo Shows

Sylvia Plimack Mangold: Inside to outside

Contributed by David Carrier / As the title “Tapes, Fields, and Trees” indicates, the exhibition of ten works by Sylvia Plimack Mangold at Craig Starr Gallery draws on three bodies of her early work. In the mid-1970s, she made Minimalist paintings of tape measures. Pieces like Taped Over Twenty-Four-Inch Exact Rule on Light Floor, however, reveal a surprising poetry in seemingly prosaic subjects. Then she painted grids, like the one in Painted Graph Paper. Finally, in a remarkable transition, she drew a window looking out on a landscape….

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Gallery shows

Bernice Bing’s unsung talents

Contributed by David Carrier / Bernice Bing (1936–1998), a gay Chinese American woman, grew up in San Francisco. She had a difficult childhood. Her mother died when she was five and lived in no fewer than 17 predominantly white orphanages. She attended local schools, got her MFA at the San Francisco Art Institute, and actively participated in the local art scene. Her teachers included Richard Diebenkorn as well as celebrated local artists, and Bing exhibited widely in Northern California. Now, thanks to Berry Campbell Gallery, which has provided a magnificent catalogue with a fine essay by John Yau, her work is being brought to New York’s attention. 

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Museum Exhibitions

New Spain’s inventive painters

Contributed by David Carrier / When the Metropolitan Museum of Art recently rehung its permanent European collection, the galleries devoted to Spanish art included an abundant selection of work from “New Spain,” as the vast Spanish empire was known during the colonial period. From 1521 to 1821, its territory included, among much more, what is now Mexico, Central America, and the US Southwest. Much of the art consisted of sacred baroque painting – arguably the first truly international art style. “Saints & Santos: Picturing the Holy in New Spain,” on view at the New Mexico Museum of Art, does it justice.

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Museum Exhibitions Out of Town

Guillaume Lethière’s historical resonance

Contributed by David Carrier / Guillaume Lethière (1760–1832) was a very good French neoclassical painter. Respected and honored in the French art world, he served as director of the French Academy in Rome and was admired as a teacher. Consistent with this stature, the eponymous exhibition currently on view at The Clark Art Institute is robustly curated. In addition to abundantly contextualizing Lethière’s work, the exhibition materials document a life that embodied much of France’s complicated colonial history. 

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Solo Shows

Alessandro Twombly: Strikingly original, richly allusive

Contributed by David Carrier / Alessandro Twombly’s twelve large new paintings, now on view at Amanita Gallery, all employ one basic, immensely fruitful motif: knots of color resembling enlarged floral forms, depicted in high-pitched, gesturally painted oranges, pinks, reds, and blacks on bright turquoise backgrounds. An artist friend nicknamed these pictures ‘Tiepolo in the Sky,” which accurately describes them. Twombly’s abstract images look like drastically enlarged figures you might find in a work by the eighteenth-century Italian painter Giovanni Battista Tiepolo. They are strikingly original yet richly allusive. 

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Remembrance

The Wild Art of Barbara Westman

Contributed by David Carrier / Just to the left of my writing desk is a painting of a magnificent tree with bright orange blossoms. Below it is a now faded postcard of a drawing of Barbara Westman, who died earlier this year at age 95, and her husband Arthur Danto sitting on a sofa with their dogs Charlotte and Emilia. To the right, a work on paper shows Danto taking the dogs for a walk in Manhattan. These Westman pieces more than hold their own against the prints of old European master works, Japanese woodcut, and Bill Anthony drawings that surround them. Anytime I feel discouraged by the slow progress of my work or the political news, I need only look at them to be cheerful again. 

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Museum Exhibitions

What makes a good painting?

Contributed by David Carrier / What is the present state of painting? For as long as I have been writing art criticism, that question has been much discussed. Some critics have said painting was dead, perhaps to be replaced by Minimalist or conceptual art. Others have argued that because painting is an inherently bourgeois art form, it can continue only as long as it is politically tinged. The Milwaukee Art Museum’s show “50 Paintings” takes an essentially empirical approach to the question. Co-curators Margaret Andera and Michelle Grabner gathered mostly mid-sized recent paintings by artists well-known in the New York art world and demonstrated how varied and how good painting is today. There are abstractions by Peter Halley and Mary Heilmann, a landscape by April Gornik, and figurative paintings by Cecily Brown and Nicole Eisenman. It’s natural for a visiting critic to pick favorites. Mindful of the unhappy fate of Paris, whose judgment about which goddess was most beautiful triggered the Trojan War, I dare to name mine.

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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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