HINDSIGHT - WRITE SOMETHING WORTH READING ABOUT OR DO SOMETHING WORTH WRITING ABOUT
Friday, June 11, 2010
TULLMAN COLLECTION ARTIST ORLY COGAN IN NEW SHOW AT CHARLIE JAMES
Culture Monster
All the Arts, All the Time
Art review: Orly Cogan @ Charlie James Gallery
June 10, 2010 | 8:00 pm
Like other domestic crafts, sewing has been a loaded medium for artists ever since the feminist revolution of the 1970s. So the widely used medium isn't so much the intriguing message in New York artist Orly Cogan's L.A. gallery debut, which consists of 12 embroideries, 16 decorated pillows and a sculpture of crocheted confections (pies, cakes, cookies, etc.) Domestic crafts instead stand for a historically mature, even establishment voice.
By contrast, what resonates in the show at Charlie James is Cogan's exuberant faith in sensual indulgence. Her stitchery turns up on baby blankets, vintage printed fabric, doilies and kitchen tablecloths. It depicts images with overtones both religious and pagan -- Eve lolling in the Garden, nymphs fondling frogs who may (or may not) be princes, Mom vacuuming the den in the nude.
Young women snort white powder off mirrors laid on the floor. A backyard picnic table groans with high-calorie yarn-goods. Frilly bed pillows carry platitudes and aphorisms ("We'll keep your resume on file;" "Is that what you're wearing?") spelled out amid pretty butterflies, lush flowers and frolicking horses.
Aligning extreme sensual pleasure with domestic crafts is a savvy move. The raw and the cooked collide and commingle in surprisingly eloquent ways.
--Christopher Knight
@twitter.com/KnightLAT
Charlie James Gallery, 975 Chung King Rd., Chinatown, (213) 687-0844, through June 19. Closed Sun.-Tues. www.cjamesgallery.com
Photo: Orly Cogan, installation view; Credit: Charlie James Gallery
Thursday, June 10, 2010
TULLMAN COLLECTION ARTIST JENNIFER NEHRBASS IN NEW SHOW AT KLAUDIA MARR GALLERY IN SANTA FE
WEEP AND WONDER
recent paintings
June 11 - July 11, 2010
Jennifer Nehrbass
WEEP AND WONDER
When Odysseus returned home after years of war and adventure, he brought with him a taste for revenge and violence. Suitors who had pursued Penelope where slaughtered while twelve of Penelope's handmaidens were strung by their necks from a gallows on the ship, examples of treachery and disloyalty to the absent master.
Inspired by Margaret Atwood's book, The Penelopiad, this series of paintings imagines each of the twelve maidens as oval cameo portraits expressive of modern dilemmas, simultaneously ancient and contemporary. Ambiguity, realism and fantasy play atmospherically in a narrative moment akin to magic realism.
Drawn from a Victorian obsession with sex and death, these portraits speak to forbidden thoughts and desires, suggesting that what is hidden from, and forbidden to the maidens, is ultimately denied to the viewer. What the portraits yield is an intimacy of time and place that meanders through rich details and nuanced perplexity. For the artist, bafflement is as necessary to experience as delicate reasoning.
recent paintings
June 11 - July 11, 2010
Jennifer Nehrbass
WEEP AND WONDER
When Odysseus returned home after years of war and adventure, he brought with him a taste for revenge and violence. Suitors who had pursued Penelope where slaughtered while twelve of Penelope's handmaidens were strung by their necks from a gallows on the ship, examples of treachery and disloyalty to the absent master.
Inspired by Margaret Atwood's book, The Penelopiad, this series of paintings imagines each of the twelve maidens as oval cameo portraits expressive of modern dilemmas, simultaneously ancient and contemporary. Ambiguity, realism and fantasy play atmospherically in a narrative moment akin to magic realism.
Drawn from a Victorian obsession with sex and death, these portraits speak to forbidden thoughts and desires, suggesting that what is hidden from, and forbidden to the maidens, is ultimately denied to the viewer. What the portraits yield is an intimacy of time and place that meanders through rich details and nuanced perplexity. For the artist, bafflement is as necessary to experience as delicate reasoning.
TULLMAN COLLECTION ARTIST STEPHANIE GUTHEIL WORK REVIEWED IN ART IN AMERICA
STEFANIE GUTHEIL
New York At age 30, the Berlin painter Stefanie Gutheil may not know, or care, that once upon a time Willem de Kooning said that flesh is the reason oil painting was invented. As Gutheil demonstrated in her New York solo debut (and first solo outside of Germany), pigmented grease also lends itself nicely to shit, sputum and vomit.
Her exhibition was titled “Kopftheater” (roughly, “theater of the mind”), and the 19 canvases (2009), many of them large, presented a bizarre demimonde that is equal parts memory and nightmare. Berg I, Berg II and Berg III are each dominated by a fecal mountain inhabited by joyless creatures. Gutheil sticks a lot of printed fabric and metallic foil onto her paintings, as in Öl Mischtechnik Leinwand (Oil Mixed-Technique Canvas), which features a hunky Cyclops wearing collaged flower-print shorts and standing knee-deep in a tin-foil ebbtide. The character spews technicolor chunks as a serpentine alien springs from his chest, likewise blowing chunks. A wide-mouthed shark circles below, gobbling up the runoff. Gross, right? One of the trio of figures in Pyjamaparty has lost his head, which lies wide-eyed and open-mouthed on the floor amid random litter and arbitrary stripes. Fraught relationships among apparently psychically damaged individuals in claustrophobic spaces really shouldn’t be this much fun.
Hokusai meets Kirchner in Koi. Under the steely gaze of a vulture that appears to grow out of his shoulder, a hunchbacked, musclebound troglodyte with nipples like eyeballs grabs a walleyed fish by the tail. The lower half of the painting is graphically complex, as delicate as the upper half is ham-handed. Waves of oil paint, fabric and foil lap against the big fish’s face while a couple of other sea creatures gambol in the surf. Meanwhile, it was hard to know which of the 10 jumpy, angst-ridden characters in another work is the “newcomer” the title Der Neuling refers to; maybe it’s the viewer. The serene soul at the painting’s center, who gazes lovingly at a little ball in his hands, is the one figure in the entire exhibition who seemed at ease.
Sure, there are problems: too many pop-eyed goofuses, too many fingernails and brushy knuckles, too much undigested Bosch, Beckmann and Ensor. Kopftheater, the largest painting at roughly 8½ by 13 feet, was not the show-stopper it should have been. Full of good stuff, including a leering black dog foaming green at the mouth, the composition got away from Gutheil a bit. But you figure that with this much material panache, pictorial inquisitiveness, youth and iconographical nerve, she’s just warming up.
Photo: Charles Seliger: Ways of Nature: 17, 2008, acrylic, pen and mixed mediums on Masonite, 16 by 20 inches; at Michael Rosenfeld.
Artist Peregrine Honig Debuts on Reality Show, "Work of Art"
Artist Peregrine Honig Debuts on Reality Show, "Work of Art"
Kansas City based artist, entrepreneur, and curator Peregrine Honig made her debut this week as one of 14 contestants on the Bravo reality show "Work of Art: The Next Great Artist."
by Laura Spencer
Kansas City, MO
Each contestant competes for a $100,000 prize and a solo show at the Brooklyn Museum of Art.
KCUR's Laura Spencer caught up with Peregrine Honig outside her lingerie shop, birdies, in the Crossroads Arts District.
"Work of Art: The Next Great Artist" viewing party, Wednesdays at 10 pm at the Brick, 1727 McGee, Kansas City, Mo.
Listen to NPR's Morning Edition story about "Work of Art" by clicking on title of post above.
Sunday, June 06, 2010
THUNK! VIDEOS FROM TRIBECA FLASHPOINT ACADEMY GRADUATION 2010
THUNK! AT TRIBECA FLASHPOINT ACADEMY GRADUATION 2010 - SONG 10 from HOWARD TULLMAN on Vimeo.
THUNK! AT TRIBECA FLASHPOINT ACADEMY GRADUATION 2010 - SONG 7 from HOWARD TULLMAN on Vimeo.
THUNK! AT TRIBECA FLASHPOINT ACADEMY GRADUATION 2010 - SONG 8 from HOWARD TULLMAN on Vimeo.
THUNK! AT TRIBECA FLASHPOINT ACADEMY GRADUATION 2010 - SONG 6 from HOWARD TULLMAN on Vimeo.
THUNK AT TRIBECA FLASHPOINT ACADEMY GRADUATION 2010 - SONG 5 from HOWARD TULLMAN on Vimeo.
THUNK! AT TRIBECA FLASHPOINT ACADEMY GRADUATION 2010 - SONG 4 from HOWARD TULLMAN on Vimeo.
THUNK! AT TRIBECA FLASHPOINT GRADUATION - songs 1-3 from HOWARD TULLMAN on Vimeo.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)