Search Results for "adam simon"

Solo Shows

Adam Simon: Jostle, flux, and instability

Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Brooklyn-based conceptual painter Adam Simon is known for his cagey synthesis of the graphic symbols and tropes of commerce and civic life into elegant visual statements about the zeitgeist and, more grandly, the world as a whole. He can use text to penetrating effect, as in the small paintings he made a few years ago superimposing the edict “STEAL THIS ART” on the vintage silhouette of a policeman. In one not-quite-Hoffman-esque line and an evocative image, he captured the ambivalence and limbo of the art world between the establishment and the counterculture, having himself cultivated a live community in that space by organizing, with several other artists, the collaborative “Four Walls” events in Hoboken in the 1980s and Williamsburg in the 1990s. In “Great Figures,” his solo show now up at Osmos, he has continued in a searchingly ironic vein, now with a bemused fretfulness that affords it epochal resonance.

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Ideas & Influences

Artist’s notebook: Adam Simon

Adam Simon could best be described as a conceptual painter. Based in Brooklyn, he has been painting and organizing community projects like Four Walls and the Fine Art Adoption Network for more than 25 years. Lately, though, he’s put community projects aside to work in the studio, where his ironically elegant new abstract paintings riff on the imagery of commercial logos.

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Gallery shows

Bettina Blohm and Don Voisine: Affect as subject

Contributed by Adam Simon / Two galleries with a focus on abstract painting, a short walk from each other in downtown Manhattan, currently have exhibitions that share a vocabulary of basic geometric forms, directional brushwork, and an emphasis on color relationships. Both shows present the rectangle as a primary condition of most painting and the dynamic interplay of forms within the rectangle as a drama unfolding. Yet these two shows couldn’t be more different. Seeing one after the other, as I did, was a study of how affect itself, manifested through color choices and paint application, becomes a subject for abstract painting, analogous to but different from a subject for representational painting.

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Solo Shows

Curtis Mitchell’s powerfully oblivious dogs

Contributed by Adam Simon / I tend to rail against art openings. Few attendees of a crowded art opening ever get to really see the show; the glimpses they’re afforded are more like scrolling Instagram than anything approaching contemplation. I felt differently at the opening of Curtis Mitchell’s pop-up show “19 Black Dogs” at the untraditional talent agency called No Agency on Bowery. The work does lend itself to contemplation, but at the opening of this show, Mitchell’s sculptures – stuffed dogs he purchases on the internet and then abuses in various ways – were contextualized by a young, hip crowd, connected I assume to No Agency rather than to Mitchell. Some appeared to be fashion models. 

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Studio Visit

In Bed-Stuy with Cathy Nan Quinlan 

Recently, Adam Simon visited his longtime friend Cathy Nan Quinlan at her Bed-Stuy studio to see the latest paintings, inspired by Nicolas Poussin’s Bacchanalian Revel Before a Term (1632–1633), which hangs in London’s National Gallery. During the visit, they talked about The Temporary Museum, the Talking Pictures blog, and the salons Cathy has hosted in her home.

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Solo Shows

Medrie MacPhee: Upcycling

Contributed by Adam Simon / The five abstract paintings in Medrie MacPhee’s “The Repair,” at Tibor de Nagy, have just enough indications of figure/ground and observed reality to evoke landscape, interior space, aerial view, blueprint. What also connects these paintings to the physical world, as we perceive it, are minor shifts of line, contour, or color that activate the surface and keep the paintings from being flat. While the paintings are large, all but one measuring 64 x 84 inches, somehow the small gallery doesn’t feel crowded.

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Solo Shows

Barbara Friedman’s exquisite grotesquery

Contributed by Adam Simon / The modus operandi behind much of Barbara Friedman’s work, including her current exhibition “All Rude and Lumpy Matter” at Frosch & Co., has a name, pareidolia, which refers to finding images within abstraction. Think of the age-old pastime of finding faces in clouds.

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Museum Exhibitions

Call it Orphism

Contributed by Adam Simon / At a Four Walls event in Brooklyn in the early 1990s, Erik Oppenheim, at that time a young artist, stood up and said, “I’m starting an art movement. Anyone who wants to join, meet me in the back after the show.” It was a hilarious and audacious gesture, in part because no one joins an art movement on a whim, like a list-serve or an exercise class, but also because there hadn’t been any artist-initiated movements for a very long time. They proliferated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century with the advent of Impressionism, Surrealism, Futurism, and Dada, and enjoyed something of a resurgence in the 1960s with Fluxus in the United States, Supports/Surfaces and Zero in Europe, and the Gutai Group in Japan. Most of what we consider movements were proclaimed by an outside observer, usually a critic or curator, looking to group artists who had similar concerns and made work that fit the designation. For the artists themselves to rally around a specific cause, even an aesthetic one, was not required. 

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Art Fairs Interviews

Jennifer Dalton and William Powhida: The ZERO interview

Contributed by Adam Simon / This year’s Upstate Art Weekend (July 19 – 21) included a most unusual venue. The Zero Art Fair exhibited the work of over seventy artists in a barn in Elizaville, New York, owned by Manon Slome. All the work was available to take home and none of it was for sale once the fair began. Surprisingly, or not, many of the artists that were included normally sell their work for prices that would have been out of the question for most browsers at UAW. Yet here those browsers were taking art home for free. The Zero Art Fair was scheduled to last for three days but by the end of the second day almost nothing was left. The following is a Two Coats of Paint interview with Jennifer Dalton and William Powhida, the two people primarily responsible for the Zero Art Fair.

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