40th Anniversary at Andre Zarre Gallery

I wanted to get some images from Andre Zarre Gallery's 40th Anniversary exhibition. Up now.

Peter Reginato: Whom you've heard many times of my appreciation for. This time his painting has a ring of commentary on what seems to be pissing a lot of people off, the whole idea of Zombie Formalism. In Peter's painting, the dots are the zombies taking over the world, or the art world. A gorgeous painting with a great commentary on contemporary art life.

Ellen Banks: This is my first painting I have seen from her. I quite like it. I can't tell if it's encaustic or just oil mediums mixed with wax, ala Brice Marden. Either way, it's what she does with the mediums that count here. Very sensual painting that makes me wonder just how powerful they could be scaled up.

Dee Shapiro: This is my first Shapiro that I have witnessed in person and I have to say i'm quite impressed. I did hear that she doesn't do many of these and I think that's a shame as they are painting that I would like to see more of. It looks like she uses an extruder in these paintings and just the thought of her using a different method of paint application gets me more into it. As you know, I have a love for irregular paint applications.

Robert Swain: Finally got to see a work in person by this color maestro. Guys like Swain have such a control over their colors that it really becomes as amazing to see the interior of their studios and all those jars of color they mix. I now wish I had seen the exhibitions at Minus Space and at Hunter College. (video courtesy of James Kalm AKA Loren Munk)

The next two paintings are by painters that really dig texture in their work. Textural painting really gets my eye going. And these two paintings by Don Hazlitt and Joy Walker both get the eye candy idea going in me.

There's not a lot I can say about these two paintings, but what I can tell you is they are works that NEED to be seen in person. No amount of camera work is going to extrapolate what one can and will see in person.

Dee Solin: You know me, you know I dig the work of Solin. I've watched her painting grow over the last three years and she continues to surprise me with her radiant paintings. My only regret is that she doesn't make 8ft paintings. Something to truly engulf the viewer, as I believe these truly would. They are micro and macrocosm's at the same time. Dee talks about her paintings like a scientist and you don't get much of that these days, people always seem to talk about work that it does this and that, which usually just sounds like artspeak and turns people off. But Dee's commentary is as lucid and together as her paintings. I just wanna take a swim in them. Over the years I've been privy to see the mastery of her brush, as she has come from a photorealist background and is so intense with structure of her paintings. I do believe she is working on a new body of paintings for a solo exhibition to come at Zarre...THE BERKELEY PAINTINGS MARCH 3 - APRIL 4, 2015

I hope that you are able to take the exhibition in for yourself. It's a very sparsely hung exhibition with lots of room between paintings. A really great group exhibition. It's on until January 24th 2015.

Disconnected: Bishop/Hantai/Marioni @ Paul Rodgers 9W NYC

After my time at Petzel. I headed over to Hauser & Wirth to witness the Thomas Houseago exhibition. Than it was onto Zwirner to see what they had, which turned out to be a Serra work on paper show. Unfortunately they were doing work downstairs and the smell from whatever chemicals they were using was ruining my enjoyment of Serra's work. I had to get out of there quick.

Right beside Zwirner is the legendary gallery building at 529 W. 20th Street. There were two exhibitions I knew I didn't want to miss in that building this time around. This is the first one.

Paul Rodgers 9W is, as you can tell, on the 9th floor, West side. It is a gallery that usually flies under the radar of most gallery hoppers. Which is unfortunate, especially when people are talking about a Simon Hantai or James Bishop show at one of the majors, or a show of Joseph Marioni and no one is mentioning the better exhibition at Rodgers' gallery. Paul is an incredible historian and very keen on making grand exhibitions that keep the notion of space to a maximum. This particular exhibition up now is titled DISCONNECTED: Bishop/Hantai/Marioni and is quite a minimal exhibition with one painting per painter. Each from a distinct period in the artists oeuvre. Especially with the painting from Bishop, who doesn't work very much in dark paintings such as the one on view.

To your left when you walk in is a wonderful mid period Hantai, if you get the chance to when you visit, ask the gentleman behind the desk to tell you a bit about Hantai, or if Paul is there, he can really tell you a lot about this genius, and I don't use that word often.

Hantai is the originator of a technique called Pliage. It's a method of folding a canvas, crumpling it up sometimes, but mostly concentrated folding, painting on what is left after all the folds have been brought together, and then releasing the fold and seeing the result. It is known as the next great technique for painting after Jackson Pollock.

The first time I saw Hantai's work was at the Wexner Center exhibition AS/Painting, curated by Philip Armstrong, Laura Lisbon, and Stephen Melville, which ran May 11-August 12, 2001. They made sure to include an early Hantai where he was beginning his development of the pliage method, up to the late paintings. So it was a major eye opener for someone like me that was just in the beginning stages of my own development with the uses of texture and color.

Any of you that know me, know of my deep appreciation for the paintings of Joseph Marioni. I was surprised to learn that after looking at the painting included in the exhibition, a gorgeous orange painting from 1977 that it was the one recently sold at auction. This just showed me how much contact he has with his collectors, they purchased the painting and immediately had it brought to Paul Rodgers' gallery for this exhibition. I was blown away by the swiftness of them getting it there. I think it was sweetest because I remember wishing I could have seen the preview, because most of these works sold at auction hardly ever go into public view, or at least not that I've seen. I felt I was given a second chance to see it, I was glad. 

The James Bishop painting was something I never thought i'd see either. Especially a dark painting of his, because there aren't many. I tell ya this one is a feast for the eyes of the painter who admires it. It's like a volcano is going off in the interior of the paint. It just sits on the wall still glowing from it's birth.

These are the best photos my iphone 4 could get. There are some really nice ones online, but I wanted to get views that only I took. Most galleries won't take photos of the side of the painting, but we painters love seeing things like that.

Until next time.

Sean Landers at Petzel

Second gallery on my day in Chelsea, I decided to stop by Petzel Gallery and see what was going on. Having not remembered that it was to be a Sean Landers exhibition. Sean is the painter that got wide ranging acclaim for his humongous painting of a white whale. Granted I write most of this from a place of never really knowing much about Landers' work, especially in person. Having not been a big fan of the so called "photo realists" painters of the 80's,  now and again one comes around with something new and fresh, Sean is one of those people. With Damien Loeb, Landers is now one of my two favorite photo realist painters.

One thing that stinks about the way galleries and museums let us online see the work, it's only through installation, or single front facing images. These two methods of reproduction do almost nothing for a painter like myself, far away from any chance of viewing these paintings in person. It's one of the reasons I had so many changes of mind how I enjoy a certain painter. So much that I began to stop thinking in one way or another about an artist I only know online. When people like myself get to see the work in person, we usually take photos that have a closer ability for you the online viewer to extrapolate what paintings look like in person. I hope you will enjoy these images along with their details to give a deeper sense that you won't find anywhere else online.

Sean is a poetic painter who is really into history and natural history. It seems he sees this poetry with the eye of a surrealist. Composing paintings that look kitschy and at the same time deeply poetic. I decided first to go into the library room, where I was met with a group of paintings that if seen from a distance, you might think you were looking at a group of book cases, peppered with the language of a poet and painter searching his heart for meaning in his life. I included one detail of how he grows his poetry on the book spines, as I want you the viewer to go down there yourself and dig into it. Unfortunately you can't now as the show was almost over when I got there. Included in these shelves are snow globes of imagery from paintings in the next room over. Granted these are not painted in the same fashion the main paintings are, they give me the sense that I would love to have one of these snow globes for myself. Quite intimate and a bit on the sad side, there is an underlying sense of the questioning of life in these paintings. I have Sean as a facebook friend and right away I sent him a nice message telling him some of my thoughts on the exhibition.

The room of the animals with their surrealist skins are by far the most kitschy work in the exhibition, peppered with plaid covered animals in dreamy natural backgrounds. I feel my favorite was the hog walking away from someone attempting to hunt it. The hog smirking as to say..."ha ha...you idiot".

The far room was a tribute to Moby Dick and the white whale. I could talk about this room and it's paintings for a while, but i'd rather you go in there yourself and take it in. The photos I hope will entice you to go in for a visit or three. I now wish I had visited it at least one more time.

Click on this one ^^ to get some of the poetry Landers does on the book spines. I refused to take more pics as I felt it was something that needed to be seen in person. So for you, the online only viewer, you'll just have to wait till the next time these paintings come around and you can see them. It'll make the trip for you that much sweeter.

The Moby Dick room begins below. Enjoy the imagery, the poetry and the sadness of this great story. Click on the images to see more of the photos, they are quite large when viewed as they were taken.

As I finish up this writing, I think back to the feels that welled up while viewing this exhibition, seeing it definitely gives Sean Landers a higher place in my book. Thanks for the experience, Sean Landers and Friedrich Petzel.