Tag: Natasha Sweeten

Artist's Notebook

Jack Whitten: A force for upending

Contributed by Natasha Sweeten / Walk with me, backwards through time. See Jack Whitten painstakingly remove over two thousand tiles of hardened acrylic paint from his canvas. Watch as he assembles them into a large, flat plane, carefully unslices them from tiny squares, and then unsplatters and unpours the black and white paint. We’ve reached that final moment, in 1990, when the idea for The Messenger (for Art Blakey) is alive only in the artist’s mind. It is a fireball that has hurtled through years of searching, experimenting, suffering, loving, being lost, being overlooked, being angry — and now is ready to take hold….

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Solo Shows

Force field: Myron Stout’s drawings

Contributed by Natasha Sweeten / In the early 2000s, among the pines and solace of an artist residency, Polly Apfelbaum shared with me a small, well-thumbed through book. Right off the bat I took the isolated black-and-white image on its cover to possess talismanic powers. Such was my introduction to the work of Myron Stout. 

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Drawing

Elizabeth Murray’s wildly imaginative, electrified mind

Contributed by Natasha Sweeten / Like a car with its engine left running, Elizabeth Murray (1940–2007) seemed poised to dart in any direction on short notice. On view at Gladstone 64, Drawings (1974-2006), curated by Kathy Halbreich, boasts over 60 works of mostly pen, marker, and/or colored pencil on notebook-size paper (and actual notebook paper). Several are studies for larger works, others are on pages ripped from a binding, most all are imbued with a casualness but also intention. This show offers an enchanting glimpse into Murray’s wildly imaginative, electrified mind. I dare you to see it and not smile.

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Gallery shows Solo Shows

Joe Bradley: Merging night and day

Contributed by Natasha Sweeten / On a warm, sunny day that teased people outdoors, I stepped into Zwirner to catch Joe Bradley’s current exhibition, “Vom Abend.” Nine large paintings gleamed within the pristine gallery. I’d in fact been on my way to see another show, but at Zwirner I lingered and I looked, unexpectedly beguiled. Pretty soon I relaxed and accepted I’d be here a while.

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Solo Shows

Robert Moskowitz’s visual quartet

Contributed by Natasha Sweeten / One thought I had upon seeing Robert Moskowitz: Paintings and Drawings from Four Decades at Peter Freeman Inc. was that I could’ve been satisfied to encounter only the large wall of drawings. Arranged loosely yet thoughtfully, in a reconstruction of a wall from the artist’s studio, over sixty works of mostly oil or pastel on paper hang with a kind of majestic poise, each pinned by two thumbtacks in the top corners. Every drawing a vertical, together they present our city: here the finely ridged silhouette of the Empire State Building, there the graceful curve of the Flatiron Building, and, most engrossingly, the dense parallel bars of the World Trade Center from another lifetime ago. Pared down to their essential shapes, the buildings stand resolute in all seasons and moods, whether blue on blue or gray on fleshy pink or black on emerald. Occasionally a hazy ray of moonlight catches a cloud, a hint of atmosphere wafts nearby, or active fingerprints swarm across the paper. These quieter moments play off hard edges in a way that evokes walking home alone after a night out with friends, when New York is at its most still and you feel a flutter of wonder to live in it. What I mean to say is, the wall is a love song to the city.

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Solo Shows

David Hornung’s whispered secrets

Contributed by Natasha Sweeten / There should be a word for the glorious sensation you get when you realize the art in front of you is better than you’d expected, having initially seen it on a screen. You may scoff, “Isn’t everything better in person?,” but I beg to differ. These illuminated contraptions we carry around everywhere are remarkably good at turning life to 11. When I’m rewarded with this aforementioned word-I-don’t-yet-have, I chalk one up for being there.  So it was when I stepped into David Hornung’s “New Work,” the inaugural exhibition at JJ Murphy Gallery on the LES.

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Solo Shows

The sharp, solitary eye of Sonia Gechtoff

Contributed by Natasha Sweeten / The contemplative works of Ukrainian American artist Sonia Gechtoff (born in Philadelphia 1926, died in NYC 2018), now on view at Bortolami and Andrew Kreps Gallery, range from the 1960s to early 2000s, but for me they evoke the frontality of Russian iconography, the dynamism of Italian Futurism, and the fractal abstractions of Sonia Delaunay. Gechtoff was fond of muted primary colors and variations of white and black, and her palette is deliberate and often subdued. Delicate graphite hatch marks spill across painted areas, suggesting movement and depth while presenting isolated instances from curious vantage points.

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Solo Shows

The grit of Frank Auerbach

Contributed by Natasha Sweeten / As a young art student, I revered Frank Auerbach. His practice was a battle with inner demons, one of splayed brushstroke and open flesh that plunged deep into his psyche. The stories of him laboring countless hours on the same small portrait, painting and repainting, scraping it all off at day’s end – were they not the perfect embodiment of my own tortured soul? Were we not linked by artistic fury, the desire to express something frustratingly beyond our reach?

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Solo Shows

Colin Brant’s communion with the inconstant

Contributed by Natasha Sweeten / You might consider the title of Colin Brant’s quietly inspiring exhibition “Mountains Like Rivers,” currently on view at Platform Project Space, an invitation to a world flipped on its end: what’s inherently solid becomes liquid, what’s up is now down. You would not be entirely wrong. Indeed, in Lake Louise/Poppies, the eponymous body of water mirrors the snowy, majestic range that anchors the painting. Red and yellow poppies in the foreground form a joyous tassel punctuating the band of blue, their stems waving like the arms of children eager to be called on.

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Solo Shows

Ann Craven’s wistful nighttime tales

Contributed by Natasha Sweeten / As children, we learn that nighttime is for hushed voices, unlit rooms, and the chance to briefly disappear into our dreams. In her latest show “Night” at Karma, Ann Craven fully embraces the enchantment of the wee hours. Her paintings, swathed in darkness, capture quiet moments, and the imagery could easily have been conjured from bedtime stories. Yet they’re not all warm and fuzzy. 

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Solo Shows

Stephen Whisler: Smoke signals

Contributed by Natasha Sweeten / In Stephen Whisler’s solo show “Past is Prologue” at 325 Project Space, I seem to have stumbled onto an archeologist’s record of discovery, showcasing a vanished world. Three large black-and-white charcoal drawings are straightforward portraits isolating simple, mysterious organic structures. The two cast-iron sculptures strike me as rendering long-lost implements whole again. This work is imbued with a somber sense often associated with scientific research. Yet lurking within is a playfulness, and a tender, vulnerable unraveling.

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