Tag: Saul Ostrow

Solo Shows

Ted Stamm’s conceptual adventurism

Contributed by Saul Ostrow / When Ted Stamm’s career was cut short by his death at age 39 in 1984, he had already begun to attract attention in the United States and internationally. Critics including Edit deAk, Peter Frank, Robert Morgan, and Kay Larson recognized Stamm’s ability to bridge formal rigor with playful urban references. In 1975, deAk wrote in Artforum that “Stamm’s work confounds its own apparent simplicity; the shape’s tense complexity and stubborn definition of itself make it totally the artist’s like an insignia. The color is equally personal, and the painting’s presence is quietly assertive. This is certainly not the elegant nihilism of reductive solutions.” Conceptual endeavors were central to his ambition of making the border between art and everyday life porous.

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Opinion

Art’s political economy: A response to Dean Kissick

Contributed by Saul Ostrow / In “The Painted Protest: How Politics Destroyed Contemporary Art” in the December issue of Harper’s, Dean Kissick presents a provocative critique, arguing that since the 1990s art’s politicized expressions of discomfort have diminished its quality and impact. As a remedy, he calls for artists to return to romantic ideals of beauty, strangeness, and emotion. He contends that artists should prioritize innovation and aesthetic rigor while focusing on universal human experience rather than political correctness. While his case is compelling on the surface, Kissick overlooks crucial historical and economic factors that have affected the art world. The shift in art’s focus is a result of not only political engagement but also a complex interplay of post-industrial social, economic, and cultural forces that emerged in the 1960s and have led to changes in how art is created, valued, and consumed.

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Ideas about Painting

A (mostly appreciative) response to Saul Ostrow

Contributed by Adam Simon / I was struck by the last two sentences of Saul Ostrow’s essay, “Painting simulacra: Brice Marden, David Reed, and Gerhard Richter.” He writes: “Marden, Reed, and Richter have sustained abstract painting’s aesthetic and cultural value as a mode of resistive thinking. In most cases, though, this has been misread or at least subsumed by its own model, thereby giving rise to the kind of acritical aestheticism and nostalgia that bolsters painters who promote gestural abstraction as a genre or motif rather than a mode of inquiry.” It took a minute to unpack this statement and allow it to sink in. Ostrow’s critique is dense, and appears to implicate most contemporary gestural abstract painters as well as contemporary criticism that dismisses the possibility of radical formalism.

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Ideas about Painting

Painting simulacra: Brice Marden, David Reed, and Gerhard Richter

Contributed by Saul Ostrow / “Let the Painting Make You,” the exhibition of Brice Marden’s last paintings; at Gagosian Gallery, set me to thinking about the relationship between Marden’s earlier gestural works and Gerhardt Richter’s process-oriented abstract paintings, which in turn led me to consider the connection of their works to those of David Reed and then to the French artists Simon Hantai and Bernard Frize who, like Reed, creates the illusion of an impossible spontaneity. Slowly, I came to focus on the question of why Richter is identified with post-modernism, while Marden and Reed’s works are most often critically identified as being quintessentially modernist and formalist. While Hantai (the modernist?) and Frieze (the post-modernist?) fit the question of what constitutes post-modern abstract painting, their references and histories are different for consideration here. Instead, I decided I would focus on Richter, Reed and Marden all who seem to transgress the formalist and modernist dictums that were generated in the 1950s and 1960s in the United States and then exported abroad, as such Hantai and Frize are part of another genealogy.  

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Solo Shows

Li Trincere in context

Contributed by Saul Ostrow / Seeing a selection of Li Trincere’s works from 1986–90 and 2020-21, I realized to review her show one would have to establish a context for her work. Thinking about that, I realized she is part of a lost generation of abstract painters, which consist of various groupings of artists working in styles rooted in the hard-edge, geometric tradition. What these artists have in common is they resist the industrial aesthetic of Pop and Minimalism. 

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