Richard Serra repost

This is the post I wrote for the First Street Gallery blog:

Richard Serra is one of my favorite minimalist artists. My first encounter, strangely enough, was a rather offensive steel structure at the Tate Modern and I remember distinctly thinking how dangerous and difficult it must have been to get that particular mass and weight up to the fourth floor. I was unnerved by the prospect of the process alone. Also I was very hesitant to go near it looking as unstable as it does.  
 

Trip Hammer, 1988, photo courtesy of http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/richard-serra-1923

  

The second time was Inside Out, 2013, Weatherproof steel, at the 21^st Street Gagosian. I was changed by walking through that installation sculpture. Again I thought about logistics at first, but there was a guard having a panic attack from standing at the center of the warped space and I could feel the manipulation of my own personal, comfortable space waxing and waning.   It was incredible.  Beautiful.  Indescribably intelligent.   As a painter, “manipulating the viewer” became a really important concept to how I viewed and made art.  Like all natural wonders, Inside Out made me feel insignificant. 

Image courtesy of Hyperallergic, http://hyperallergic.com/92340/mr-big-stuff-richard-serra-piles-it-on/

Richard Serra’s drawings, Vertical and Horizontal Reversals, at David Zwirner were just as incredible.  The black pigment spread thick like an exotic butter on raw whitepaper had my painting sensibilities enraptured. 

Photo courtesy of David Zwirner, http://www.davidzwirner.com/exhibition/richard-serra-vertical-and-horizontal-reversals-2/

Richard Serra: Equal at David Zwirner was just as incredible to me.  Like childhood blocks, stacked high only to be knocked down in a powerful swoop, giving the player confidence and building the ego, these blocks are stacked but reverse the power lesson.   These blocks cannot easily be knocked down.  They are massive, weigh tons, and impress the viewer with the wonder of those ideas.  Like natural wonders, the blocks effectively reduce the viewer to insignificance in the greater universe.

I do believe that Jerry Saltz put it best in his three sentence review.

Photo: Richard Serra: Equal, David Zwirner, New York, 2015 Photo by Tim Nighswander/IMAGING4ART, Courtesy of David Zwirner, New York/London Artwork ? 2015 Richard Serra/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Richard Serra: "Equal"
David Zwirner
537 W. 20th St., through July 24

“By now it's not unusual when confronting one of Richard Serra's gigantic, metrically menacing, magnetically mighty curving steel sculptures, which are simultaneously architectonic and geological, to walk all around its meandering curves, maybe spot lovers kissing in the center of one, look at it in utter awe, yawn, and say, "Great!" This new show consists of four huge stacks of two cubic slabs, one atop another, and find Serra's mastery of material, mass, gravity, density, and an almost uncanny not-thereness now joined by ideas of the empty spaces between these shapes of steel and the tremendous forces acting upon them — but nevertheless being empty presences, interstices that you can look into and know in your body. This is his best show in more than 15 years of great shows, and it resounds with a complexity and cosmic instability not seen in solitary objects since Giorgio Morandi's miraculous vibrating arrangements.” - Jerry Saltz

Richard Serra is at David Swirner until July 24 but if you’re like me, don’t just go once!

For more information go to: http://www.davidzwirner.com/exhibition/richard-serra-vertical-and-horizontal-reversals-2/

Elaine de Kooning

Elaine de Kooning, (left) “Ornette Coleman” (c. 1965), pencil on paper, 13 9/16 x 11 inches and (right) “Ornette Coleman” (c. 1965), graphite with stumping paper, 13 9/16 x 11 inches. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution (© Elaine de Kooning Trust)

Check out this article on Elaine De Kooning.  It is an interesting read for sure.  The image choices are great!  I don't know about you but seeing images like these puts me in a working mindset.  They make me want to draw. 

Friday in the City Part 2: Judy Glantzman at Betty Cunningham Gallery

Friday in the City Part 2: Judy Glantzman at Betty Cunningham Gallery

My first meeting with Judy Glantzman was when she came to my MFA program as a visiting artist.  She gave us a cohesive lecture about her work, her practices, her ideas, and experiences as an artist.  Afterwards she came around to each of our studios and gave us individual critiques.  She was brilliant, insightful, kind, and encouraging.  She was making paintings at the time that were on canvas and on paper, half drawings and half paintings.  The color and mark making was organically expressionist and packed a punch both in visually and in context.  She talked about sitting on the floor, on top of her canvas or paper, drawing and painting.  She said this helped to be physically as well as mentally involved in the process.  She spoke of the importance of working into the pieces over and over.  She was inspirational and opened doors in my mind about the ideas of process, of technique, of the artist work ethic, and when done is done.  Coming out of a Midwestern undergraduate drawing program and sweating my way through an east coast MFA painting program I felt uniquely connected to her and her work.  The thing about Glantzman is, though, that everyone feels uniquely connected to her work and that accessibility is why she is such a powerful and relevant artist. 

I walked in to Betty Cunningham and Glantzman was in the gallery giving a lecture to a group of art students.  I walked around the perimeter of the mass of students, and felt too close for comfort for the explosive nature of her new work.  At just under 200 pieces the show contains a collection of pen and ink drawings, sculpture, large works on paper, small canvases, and collages.  As a direct reaction to Glantzman seeing Picasso’s Guernica for the first time in person, the work reflected the terrible impact of war on a society. 

The collages were made through a process of taking multiple pieces of previously drawn on paper, deconstructing them, and reconstructing into forms physically bulging out from the wall taking all of the expressive mark making, paint handling, and ideas, and pushing it out into the viewer’s personal space.  The physicality of the work was also obvious in the mark making.  There black marks, red marks, flesh colored marks, heavy marks, pressed marks, light marks, all gestures made from the artist’s entire body being involved in the creative process. 

Along with the collages there was a collection of pen and ink drawings from Goya’s Los Caprichos series, ink drawings, and a shotgun blast of small, intimate, and powerful canvases in the back of the gallery.  Not to be forgotten were the plaster casts of imp faces attached to the wall speckled throughout the gallery.   The quantity of work was as intimidating as the execution and content.

In the background, I heard Glantzman, a small overwhelmingly approachable, nice woman, telling a story about a friend of hers that had given her a hand gun and an AK-47 to draw from.  The work is exploding with loaded imagery, aggressive use of space, and angry, kinetic energy.  It was all made while possessing the power to create chaos, destruction, or death/holding a gun.   All of this imagery was in similar to her previous body of work but what I had realized in the moment was that in the past, it had been all safely contained in the flat, traditional confines of a stretched canvas, mounted paper, or behind glass in a frame.  The current work is not.

Glantzman has always been interested in the impact of terror on the human psyche as well as each individual personality’s capacity for extreme duplicity.  The message: We all have a dark side and it is natural part of being human.  The effect on our highly malleable psyche, from outside sources such as violence in society and/or even from something as simple as holding a gun, a tool with the sole purpose of destruction, can make us all capable of anything. 

For more: http://www.bettycuninghamgallery.com/current_exhibition.aspx

Image: Judy Glantzman at Betty Cunningham Gallery screenshot