Between: pace gallery

Showing posts with label pace gallery. Show all posts

Sunday, 10 October 2021

Mark Rothko: Mesmerising And Intimate Works On Paper

My latest review for Artlyst is of Mark Rothko, 1968: Clearing Away at Pace Gallery:

"Mark C. Taylor wrote in Disfiguring: Art, Architecture, Religion that, ‘All of the major abstract expressionists were deeply interested in religion and actively incorporated spiritual concerns in their work.’ In ‘The Spiritual in Twentieth-Century Art’ Roger Lipsey highlighted the work of Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Morris Louis and Ad Reinhardt, while in ‘A Theology of Artistic Sensibilities’ John Dillenberger discussed Arshile Gorky, Barnett Newman, Adolph Gottlieb, Rothko, Pollock, Reinhardt, Willem de Kooning and Robert Motherwell. With ‘The Spiritual Dynamic in Modern Art, ’ Charlene Spretnak added Clyfford Still, Sam Francis and Hans Hofmann. We can also include William Congdon, Richard Pousette-Dart, and, through his links to Pollock, Alfonso Ossorio, to the group of Abstract Expressionists who incorporated spiritual concerns in their work.

Rodolfo Balzarotti has noted that Rothko with his Houston Chapel paintings, Newman with his Stations of the Cross, and Congdon with his paintings of biblical and gospel subjects connected with Catholic liturgy were all painting these cycles in the same time period. Their ‘choice of a context or a theme that is openly, almost provocatively religious, “confessional” even,’ he writes, ‘has precisely the function of orienting how these works are received by reiterating in the most peremptory way their moral and religious, or better still, metaphysical content.’

Among Mark Rothko’s artistic philosophies, he held that painting was a deeply psychological and spiritual experience through which basic human emotions could be communicated. He famously commented to a critic that ‘the people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them’ and spoke of the ‘inner light’ in his paintings. His approach to painting enabled him to experiment with processes to develop a universal expression."

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John Prine - Your Flag Decal Won't Get You into Heaven Anymore.

Saturday, 21 March 2020

Slow Art: James Turell & Andy Warhol

The final chapter of Arden Reed’s 2017 book Slow Art: The Experience of Looking, Sacred Images to James Turrell compares and contrasts the work of Turrell and Andy Warhol in order to establish whether they are, respectively, ‘the Angel and Demon of Slow Art.’ It is of interest, therefore, that the exhibition of new works by Turrell at Pace Gallery overlapped briefly with the Warhol retrospective at Tate Modern, as this, too, enabled the opportunity to compare and contrast the work of both.

Slow art is structured to slow the viewer in order that greater attention is paid to the artwork generating a contemplative state. Reed argues therefore that ‘slow art is not a thing but an experience, an ongoing conversation between artwork and spectator.’ For Reed, the work of Turrell encapsulates slow art par excellence, while, for many, the perception of Warhol’s art and practice is the antithesis; being focused on ephemeral consumables – the instant and immediate. Reed, though, is aware of the way in which such stereotypes of Warhol’s art, as fast art, sell his actual practice short. Therefore, the overlapping of the Turrell and Warhol exhibitions in London at this time provide an opportunity to revisit the contrasts between the two, as made by Reed.

Turrell’s recent Constellation works, three of which are currently at Pace Gallery, are culminations of his lifelong pursuit of an art of light, space, and time. Presented in site-specific chambers, the works feature elliptical and circular shapes with a frosted glass surface animated by an array of technically advanced LED lights, which are mounted to a wall and generated by computer programming. With a run time of several hours, the programmes run on a loop that is imperceptible to the viewer generating light changes that are subtle and hypnotic, one colour morphing into the next.

The Constellation works generate what the artist has called ‘spaces within space.’ His luminous portals are instruments for altering our perception prompting a transcendental experience; gazing into them, as Oliver Shultz, Curatorial Director, Pace Gallery, notes, ‘results in the slow dissolution of the boundaries of the surrounding room, enveloping the viewer in the radiance of pure colour.’ That experience is not immediate, but is realised as the viewer settles in to the experience within a computer programmed loop running for hours, not minutes.

Turrell is, therefore, an artist of duration for whom ‘experiencing is the object’ and whose installations enable us to ‘perceive ourselves perceiving.’ He creates theatres of perception in which light shows are performed. Reed writes that this is like ‘watching a play in which little happens – one by Samuel Beckett, say – we sit (or stand, or lie down) and look at a stage where Turrell makes “light shows” – makes light show.’

In this way, he ritualizes looking by asking us to submit to the art and enter the experience. He says, ‘I don’t think I ask too much. I ask you to wait.’ Again, ‘I’m a slow guy. I like slow planes … In a way that’s true with art, too. Things that require more time give back more. I think it’s okay to take time. It seems more direct actually.’

Sleep, made over several nights in summer and autumn 1963 with a 16mm camera and shown at the start of the Tate’s retrospective, is a clear demonstration of Warhol as an artist of duration; as with Turrell, a slow artist. The film shows 22 close-ups of the poet John Giorno, who was briefly Warhol’s lover, as he sleeps in the nude. Warhol shot around 50 reels of film for Sleep, each one lasting only three minutes. He edited them to fashion a movie without movement. The final version repeats many scenes and lasts over five hours. It is projected in slow motion, giving a dream-like feel. Giorno said that Warhol made the movie Sleep ‘into an abstract painting: the body of a man as a field of light and shadow.’

Reed notes that the pacing and length of a work like Sleep ‘call to mind meditative practices.’ He quotes Jonas Mekas reflecting on Warhol’s use of cinema:

‘Film is transported to a plane that is outside the suspense, outside the plot, outside the climaxes … We study, watch, contemplate, listen – not so much for the ‘big actions’ but for the small words, intonations, colors of voices, colors of words … We begin to realize that we have never, really, seen haircutting, or eating,’ because ‘we watch a Warhol movie with no hurry. The first thing he does is to stop us from running.’

Mekas brings us to a second element of Warhol’s practice as a slow artist, which is to enable us to stop and see the fast, ephemeral or mundane aspects of our existence as though for the first time. Warhol said that ‘Pop artists did images that anybody walking down Broadway could recognize in a split second – comics, picnic tables, men’s trousers, celebrities, shower curtains, refrigerators, Coke bottles – all the great modern things that the Abstract Expressionists tried so hard not to notice at all.’ Artists notice things that others don’t and bring those things to our attention. So, while Pop art images could be recognized in a split second, they were not intended to be viewed in a split second. Instead, they enable us to realize that we have never really seen comics, picnic tables, men’s trousers, celebrities, shower curtains, refrigerators, Coke bottles etc. because we had only previously recognized them in a split second without paying them the attention that is their due.

Eugene McCarraher noted, in The Enchantments of Mammon, that Warhol said, ‘“Pop Art is a way of liking things,” a celebration of those “great modern things” that comprise the humble matter of everyday life – a realm where, in Orthodox tradition, the divine always manifests itself sacramentally.’ This aspect of Warhol’s art was immediately apparent to Sister Corita Kent on a visit in 1962 to the Ferus Gallery in LA to see Warhol’s breakthrough exhibition of Campbell’s Soup Cans. ‘Coming home,’ she said, ‘you saw everything like Andy Warhol.’ As a result, Kent found inspiration in signs and advertising for vibrant screen-printed banners and posters that provided an opportunity to show the sacred in the most mundane.

The Tate Retrospective explores the extent to which themes of faith recur throughout Warhol’s life, including concluding the exhibition with his vast 10-metre wide canvas Sixty Last Suppers created in 1986, a few months before the artist died in his sleep while recovering from gall bladder surgery. This poignant meditation on faith, death, immortality and the afterlife, depicts six rows of ten silkscreened images, each a black-and-white reproduction of Leonardo da Vinci’s iconic mural The Last Supper depicting Christ’s last meal with his disciples before the crucifixion. A copy of the image had hung in the Warhola family kitchen as Warhol was growing up. Warhol noted, ‘It’s a good picture … It’s something you see all the time. You don’t think about it.’ To make people see it and think about it, Warhol reproduced it 60 times. Thereby, he also evoked the re-enactment of the Last Supper that takes place during every Mass.

Like Warhol wanting us to stop and really see, Turrell is also concerned to take away the distance between ‘quotidian and spiritual,’ ‘beholder and beheld,’ in order to ‘bring the cosmos down’ in order that we call our everyday existence ‘a spiritual plane.’ His Quaker experience of ‘going to greet the light’ is, as Adam Gopnik has argued, to see that ‘the mystic’s white light and ecstasies are not dim apprehensions of another realm but experiences as real and as open to investigation as sleeping, eating and breathing.’

James Turrell, Pace Gallery, until 27 March 2020
Andy Warhol, Tate Modern, until 6 September 2020

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Velvet Underground & Nico - Sunday Morning.

Thursday, 5 March 2020

Exhibition update

Pace Gallery has a solo exhibition of new works by Light and Space master JamesTurrell at 6 Burlington Gardens. On view until 27 March 2020, the exhibition features three new works from his Constellation series.

Turrell investigates the immateriality of light itself. With these new pieces, Turrell continues his exploration of technological possibilities combined with sensory practices and gradient colours. Presented in site-specific chambers, the works feature elliptical and circular shapes with a frosted glass surface animated by an array of technically advanced LED lights, which are mounted to a wall and generated by computer programming. The light changes are subtle and hypnotic, one colour morphing into the next. The programme runs on a loop that is imperceptible to the viewer, prompting a transcendental experience.

Turrell was raised a Quaker and has come back to being active. He says that being a Quaker influences how he lives his life and what he values. Noting that people tend to relate any work in light to the spiritual, he suggests we greet light in three major ways that aren’t necessarily partitioned:

'There is a psychological aspect, a physical aspect, and a spiritual aspect. In terms of the physical, we drink light as Vitamin D, so it’s literally a food that has a major effect on our well-being. The strong psychological effects of light can readily be felt in particular spaces. One can feel this in Gasworks—it expresses the powerful quality of light. In terms of the spiritual, there are very few religious or spiritual experiences that people don’t use the vocabulary of light to describe.'

Goodman Gallery is presenting Land of Dreams, the UK premiere of Shirin Neshat’s most recent body of work. The Iranian-born New York-based artist has dedicated her practice to progressing understandings of the religious and political forces of power that shapes human existence and has gained a reputation as one of the most significant artists working today.

The exhibition comprises photographic portraits and two video installations. For the first time, both mediums converge into one immersive experience to present a portrait of contemporary America under the Trump administration.

In the first video we follow Simin, an estranged Iranian photographer, who travels through rural America knocking on citizens’ doors to shoot their portraits and to document their dreams. For the second, we enter the clinical dystopian interiors of a bureaucratic Iranian colony housed within the mountains. Here Simin’s portraits and dream documents are logged and analysed by the protagonist alongside fellow Iranians in lab coats.

Combining striking imagery with political satire, the videos evoke a shared humanity among those living under social, political and economic injustice. The series also deepens Neshat’s long- standing interest in the duality between the ephemeral nature of dreams and the tangibility of political issues.

The photographic portraits represent the photographs that the fictional protagonist Simin would have taken during her interviews. They capture the diversity of American identities, including Native Americans, African Americans and Hispanics of varying ages and genders. A number of the portraits are inscribed with hand-written Farsi calligraphy, which annotates the subjects’ dreams or notes their name, place and date of birth.

For the artist, America is on the verge of a paradigm shift: “We are seeing a reshuffling of the cards of power and its players. With the rise of white supremacy and the present threat against immigrants, I now turn my lens towards my host country, America. This new series of work investigates how these changes ultimately rupture individual lives”.

Flowers Gallery has an exhibition of new works by British artist Ishbel Myerscough. Grief, Longing and Love draws together intimate self-portraits and portraits of family to explore a universal journey of loss and longing. Myerscough is recognised for her highly detailed and meticulously observed portrayal of her subject matter, which over the past three decades has primarily included herself, her close friend and fellow artist Chantal Joffe, and their families. In this exhibition, Myerscough combines a focused study of youth and coming-of-age with adult experiences of parenthood, desire and bereavement, evoking the complex cycle of human experience.

In a brief but explosively inventive career, Alina Szapocznikow radically re-conceptualised sculpture as a vehicle for exploring, liberating and declaring bodily experience. ‘To Exalt the Ephemeral’, the title for this exhibition at Hauser & Wirth, comes from the 1972 manifesto that she wrote, summing up her goals and challenges as a sculptor. ‘My gesture is addressed to the human body, ‘that complete erogenous zone,’ to its most vague and ephemeral sensations. I want to exalt the ephemeral in the folds of our body in the traces of our passage.’

The exhibition begins with ‘Noga’ (‘Leg’) her first body cast, ‘Untitled’, the first cast of her mouth. It then moves through the scope of her experiments with different materials: bronze, resin, cement, car parts, polyurethane, and photography. The exhibition displays her interest in Pop Art and Surrealism, as well as her formal investigations of sculpture. described her work at the end: ‘‘Despite everything, I persist in trying to fix in resin the traces of our body: I am convinced that of all the manifestations of the ephemeral, the human body is the most vulnerable, the only source of all joy, all suffering, and all truth.’

In the expressive paintings of Dutch born, Belgian artist Bram Bogart at White Cube Mason's Yard, the focus is on paint as physical matter and the medium’s material possibilities. Primarily an abstract artist, Bogart explored how the ‘script’ of a painting or the ‘non-repetitive element of rhythmical brush strokes’ could imbue abstraction with meaning. During his long career, Bogart immersed himself in the formal concerns of painting, working through numerous stylistic shifts including an early period of figuration, followed by cubist geometric abstraction, gestural abstraction and finally sensually coloured sculptural paintings with heavy accumulations of paint, for which he became widely acclaimed. Through a process of ‘building’ with paint he fused gesture with matter, to produce powerfully physical paintings with a sculptural, three-dimensional presence.

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Anthony D'Amato - Good And Ready.

Saturday, 6 May 2017

Richard Tuttle: Forms imbued with a sense of spirituality

In The Spiritual Dynamic in Modern Art: Art History Reconsidered, 1800 to the Present, Charlene Spretnak argues that the 'history of modern art has generally been understood as a grand leap away from tradition, religion, and conventional norms, yielding decidedly secular art.' 'Yet a majority of the prominent modern artists in every period had strong interests in the spiritual dimension of life, which they expressed in the new art forms they created. The Spiritual Dynamic in Modern Art draws on direct statements by scores of leading artists – cited from little known historical documentation as well as contemporary interviews – to demonstrate that spirituality, far from being inconsequential in the terrain of modern art, is generative. This magisterial overview insightfully presents, for the first time, a chronological survey of the major art movements that weaves together spiritual profiles of numerous leading artists and situates their stories within the cultural context of each period. The result is a significantly expanded understanding of the cultural history of modern art.'

Richard Tuttle is one of the contemporary artists which Spretnak features in the book. Tuttle currently has two exhibitions in London:

Pace London is presenting The Critical Edge, an exhibition of recent works in fabric by Richard Tuttle, on view from 13 April to 13 May 2017 at 6 Burlington Gardens.
My Birthday Puzzle is Richard Tuttle’s fourth solo exhibition with Modern Art, for which he has made two new bodies of work. 31 March - 13 May.

'Without a specific reference point, Tuttle’s investigations of line, volume, color, texture, shape, and form are imbued with a sense of spirituality and informed by a deep intellectual curiosity. Teasing beauty out of humble materials, the artist reflects the fragility of the world in his poetic works, which he often presents at a scale antithetical to the art world.'

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Bruce Cockburn - Put It In Your Heart.