A TRIP BACK TO THE FUTURE (Tribeca Flashpoint Media Arts Academy)

A TRIP BACK TO THE FUTURE

                         (Tribeca Flashpoint Media Arts Academy)
          We decided to revisit mega-collector Howard Tullman’s newly-renamed college, now called Tribeca Flashpoint Media Arts Academy, to catch up on what new artists and works of art he’s added to the constantly rotating displays at the Academy which he selects from his own personal collection. We also wanted to see what, if anything, has changed since Robert DeNiro and his partners became major investors in the school and when we could expect to see a branch of Tribeca Flashpoint in the Big Apple.

          Tullman was his usual energetic self and he was quick to point out that many of the newer pieces on the walls were paintings by artists prominently featured in issues of the American Art Collector magazine which he continues to rely upon as a regular source for identifying new artists and selecting work for his extensive collection.

Tullman says that Alyssa Monks’ work continues to amaze and impress him and that he thinks she’s an important new voice in the New York arts community and tremendously dedicated and talented.

          As we started our walk through the main campus building (about 100,000 square feet of newly-renovated and very “green” space), it was immediately apparent that there were an astonishing number of additional works and many of which would be familiar to our readers as well as to anyone active in the arts markets and national fairs over the last three years. We recognized artists from the Midwest and both coasts and Tullman pointed out that there were also a number of new works from international artists – particularly Germany and Mexico which were major acquisitions.

Tullman says that this very large painting by German artist Jorg Lohse works on multiple levels – first it’s just amazingly well painted and then the students connect with the pop culture references as well.

          We were struck again by the fact that substantial works of art are literally everywhere your eyes wander and the fact that the views are simply amazing. A new initiative now includes printed and framed artists’ statements and comments about their work which are posted alongside a number of the pieces. As our tour continued through the various floors, we took extensive notes as well as a couple of rest breaks because there’s a real risk of simply being overpowered by the sheer size and scale of the presentations. In fact, we’re not sure - for pure stomach-wrenching visceral impact – that there’s a museum we’ve seen anywhere which can match the power and emotion of the Tribeca Flashpoint space. It just oozes energy and excitement.

          So much art and so little time. While he wasn’t especially interested in giving us a firm number, we learned that there are now more than 1400 individual paintings and drawings in the overall collection with more than 200 large-scale works on display at Tribeca Flashpoint alone. Several recent articles have noted that The Tullman Collection is now among the five largest collections of contemporary realist work in the United States even after giving effect to more than a million dollars of recent donations to museums and foundations throughout the country.

Cameron Gray’s “Oops! I Did It Again” with its prominent Britney Spears image is actually a collaboration organized over the Internet by the artist with hundreds of other artists. Tullman says it’s both iconic and also perfectly consistent with Tribeca Flashpoint’s emphasis on collaboration and team work.

The Stefanie Gutheil piece called “Birdcage” is somewhat of a departure for the collection, but Tullman says that the artist has so much imagination and such a special world of her own creation that it just felt like it belonged here with the animation students.

          But the simple numbers don’t begin to describe how the environment and the electric atmosphere of Tribeca Flashpoint surrounds you from the first instant you step into the space. It’s also immediately apparent that the students, staff and faculty share this energy and enthusiasm for great and beautifully-executed work in their everyday activities. The range and diversity of the collection is quite substantial, but almost every piece also seems to be a highly-focused reflection of Tullman’s very critical eye.

In examples like this Tim Okamura painting called “The Conversation”, the students are challenged to imagine and/or supply the narrative and try to explain the piece in their own words.

         As we continued walking through the space, Tullman mentioned specifically that powerful narrative continues to be an important consideration in his selections of new work. But, most importantly, each piece still needed to be executed in a fashion consistent with Tribeca Flashpoint’s overall theme of excellence.

         Tullman said that storytelling has always been and will always be a central concern of the visual arts (noting also that it’s become an increasingly important tool in education) and it’s really no different at Tribeca Flashpoint. He laughed and said: “I like to say that all the technology in the world won’t save a story that sucks.” But, he went on to say: “Even more crucial from an education standpoint – and especially for younger students – is how the requirement to “tell a story” engages students and gives them a sense of ownership and responsibility that simply talking “at” them will certainly no longer achieve – if it ever did.

         At Tribeca Flashpoint, working in constantly-changing teams across all four of the main digital disciplines, the students essentially construct their own learning approaches (aided, guided and abetted by the faculty) since everyone believes that it’s absolutely clear, in any creative group, that you’ll have a variety of people who learn at different paces and in different ways.

Tullman pointed out this striking Austin Parkhill painting and said that he expects that there will always be paintings that are confrontational and very much “in your face” just to keep things interesting.

          The real bottom line and the primary outcomes they look for from the graduates at Tribeca Flashpoint are pretty simple. Tullman says that they’re trying to build creative problem-solvers with great people skills for the next digital generation.

The main lobby at Tribeca Flashpoint features this large painting by Canadian artist William Lazos

          He continued and noted that “In many ways, our students and graduates will face the same kind of challenges and issues that every artist confronts each time he or she sets up in front of a blank canvas. The fundamental questions never really change regardless of the medium of expression. They will always be:

What do I want to say?

How can I best say it?

What will it take to get the job done?

Do I have what it takes?

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.

TULLMAN COLLECTION ARTIST STEPHANIE GUTHEIL SHOW "KOPFTHEATER" AT MIKE WEISS GALLERY

Stefanie Gutheil: Kopftheater

Opening Thursday January 14, 6 - 8pm
January 14 - February 20, 2010

Mike Weiss Gallery presents Kopftheater, a new exhibition of paintings by Berlin based artist Stefanie Gutheil. This is the artist’s first exhibition in New York and at Mike Weiss Gallery. Stefanie’s bold, multi-dimensional paintings are tactile depictions of her own life. The patterns of unexpected fabrics and aluminum foil adhere to the oils, acrylics and spray paint applied to the surface and come together to form scenes from the artist’s excessive imagination, both playful and grotesque. Her paintings provide the cast and set for her own kopf theater, or theatre of the mind.



Stefanie Gutheil / Hasen / 2009 / oil and mixed media on canvas / 71 x 59 inches

Born and raised in a small conservative town in southwest Germany, Stefanie moved to Berlin ten years ago and since that time has witnessed the growth of Berlin’s contemporary art scene; an international mish-mash of artists converging on the city after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Her monsters and creatures, both miniature and giant, are gross caricatures of the people in her daily life; artists, musicians, dancers, poets and revelers in the city of Berlin. Tucked into the center of the city’s nightlife pocket, the scene around the artist’s studio provides the visual fodder for what becomes her larger than life imagery.



Stefanie Gutheil / Der Neuling / 2009 / oil and mixed media on canvas / 90 x 90 inches

Influences from the chaotic and cramped compositions of Bosch and Brueghel are evident. In Berg I and Berg II, a massive heap of excrement and bodies rises up from the marred landscape of skulls and stumps; pyramid shaped in subtle homage to Brueghel’s The Tower of Babel. Mostly dirt colored in appearance; the landscapes are punctuated by flecks of silvery aluminum foil and hints of glitter and cheeky floral fabrics. In Kopftheater, for which the exhibition is titled, a Boschian landscape of monsters and gnarled animals peek and crawl out of the angular cave-like structures, one losing its eye in a cinematic projectile thrust from its socket.



Stefanie Gutheil / Berg III / 2009 / oil and mixed media on canvas / 35 x 35 inches

The applications of materials to the canvas denote object and action. Sticky, dripped acrylic froths from the mouths of radioactive dogs; globs of oil, shot like bullets at the canvas, spew vomit from the mouths of behemoth monsters; stark geometric, bright floral or swirling blue textiles glued flat and then painted on top of indicate plant life, sea and sky or rooted structure. The diverse stylistic processes used on each painting’s surface bond the chaos within the imagery. Through their variety, they are united, much like the characters in Stefanie’s own life that inspired these scenes.



Stefanie Gutheil / Koi / 2009 / oil and mized media on canvas / 98 x 79 inches

Stefanie Gutheil lives and works in Berlin, Germany. The artist received her Masters of Art and Bachelors of Art at the Universität der Künste, Berlin. She has exhibited previously throughout Germany and Europe and this is her first exhibition in New York.


April Issue of Modern Painters, "The Painting Issue."



Stefanie Gutheil in her Berlin Studio

Come to the Cabaret
By Marisa Bartolucci

When Stefanie Gutheil was a girl she was always painting. Art was what she was good at, not school. Yet she never thought seriously about becoming an artist. Growing up as she did in Kressbronn, a resort village on Lake Constance in southern Germany, bounded as much by tradition as by the alps, her horizons were limited. “It’s a place,” the 30-year-old Gutheil says in her lilting, Swabian-accented English, “where people expect you to do something noooormal.”

But this pretty, pixieish brunette wasn’t noooormal—not by Kressbronn’s standards, at least. Not only was she a budding artist, but she was gay. When she was 15, she “escaped” to Ulm, a nearby university town, which despite its postcard-pretty medieval architecture, happened to also have a Bauhaus-influenced design tradition. Trying to figure out what to do with her life, Gutheil thought graphic design might be a compromise career; however, she hated the hours spent in front of the computer screen. Inspired by the stone artistry of the city’s fabled Gothic cathedral, she considered becoming a stonemason until she was discouraged by the guild’s long waiting list for membership and the masons’ scoffing at such a petite tomboy tackling their muscular trade.

Set design was a more realistic alternative, offering both creative and physical engagement. Before she committed herself, Gutheil decided to travel after graduating from high school. She headed to Australia and its vast horizons, only to discover that the wide-open spaces between its cities didn’t hold enough “culture” for her taste.



Hase, Hund Tanzen Nicht / 2009 / Oil and mixed media on canvas / 79 x 70 inches (200.66 x 177.8 cm)

Telling this story amuses Gutheil. She chuckles about journeying all the way down under when she could have found new lands—and cultural riches—in nearby France or Italy. After she returned home, she was still hungry for new sights and experiences, so she went off to Berlin, a bohemian paradise of cheap rents and freewheeling dreams. “And I’m still there,” she says.

As you might have gathered, Gutheil arrives at life’s destinations by roundabout routes. “I must learn by doing,” she says with a giggle. “I’m not so good in theory.” In fact, she typically becomes obsessed with things she once despised, like the color pink and eyes, both of which feature prominently in her recent paintings.
Like so many before her, Gutheil found a home in Berlin’s gay club scene. She had “a very romantic idea” of tending bar or working at a shop and painting on the side, but an artist she met in a pub urged her to get serious and apply to art school. The encouragement ultimately led to Gutheil’s attending Berlin’s highly respected Universität der Künste. There she was energized by the lively artistic debates, the exposure to art history and theory, and the camaraderie of her talented studio mates. Painting went from a hobby to an all-encompassing vocation.

By the time Gutheil graduated with her MFA, in 2007, she was making figurative paintings in fauvist hues that satirized classical works. “I play with history,” she says. “I take it and use it. It’s a never-ending story, like cooking. And for cooking, you need passion.”

A lover of collage, she applied patterned fabrics, embroideries, and foils to her paintings to give them a three-dimensional quality. She points out that it would be faster to paint these effects, but says, “I like texture.” She also notes that “fabric is graphic, not art. I wanted to use it as part of my palette, like the way Matisse used cutouts.” And like the French painter, she wants the effect to be light and joyous, without any hint of the effort involved.

Then one day a cow she was painting transmogrified into a creature that was a mix of “the comic book and expressionism.” She stayed with this subconscious eruption, and from her brush appeared a picture of weird creatures and monsters. Gutheil channeled a visual language of vibrant grotesquerie, part Brueghel, part Bosch, part Grosz, and all her own. Excited by what was emerging, for the next year and a half she worked in a creative frenzy, painting over finished canvases while conserving bits and pieces of the originals. These palimpsest collages, strong in graphic imagery, told definite stories that nevertheless were open to every viewer’s interpretation. Unlike her old neighbors in Kressbronn, Gutheil is not interested in dictating to anybody.

“This is not Conceptual art,” she says of these paintings, in case you had any doubt. “Kopftheater” (theater of the mind), as she calls the series, was “created very much in the moment. While I have a composition in mind, there are accidents. I like imperfect things, but done in a perfect way.”



Kopftheater / 2009 / Oil and mixed media on canvas / 102 x 158 inches (259.08 x 401.32 cm)

Collectors have responded to her Rabelais-meets–Otto Dix vision. When she made her U.S. debut, at the Scope booth of New York’s Mike Weiss Gallery last December, 14 of the paintings in the “Kopftheater” series sold within four days, to buyers like the Japanese art dealer Masashi Shiobara and the well-known collectors Marti and Tony Oppenheimer, purchasing on behalf of the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, in Overland Park, Kansas. (She currently has a show up at Mike Weiss Gallery, closing February 20.)

“The paintings are the stories of my life,” Gutheil says. “What happens every day.” The figures of the rabbit, the fish, and the fly are people in disguise, and those characters with big noses and ears represent the false faces Gutheil sees on people at parties. The imagery she borrowed from the allegorical masks worn by actors in medieval plays, in which a Pinocchio nose might represent a liar, a big mouth a gossip, and so on. “They are the monsters we all have inside of us,” she says. And she finds their depiction therapeutic: “I’m in the homosexual scene, but I don’t want to do homosexual or emancipation art. I want to do art for me, for my emancipation. It’s serious fun. And in a way it’s political.”

Gutheil admits to sometimes being slow at deciphering the symbols in her own work. Three of her most startling canvases, titled Berg (“mountain”), depict massifs of shit animated by creatures within them. It took a while, she says, for her to recall the Swiss Alps her family used to gaze at while watching the sunset. Her father later told her that one of the fairy-tale mountains capped with snow was honeycombed with tunnels that, during World War II, held a stockpile of armaments to protect the Swiss from a German attack.



Berg I / 2009 / Oil and mixed media on canvas / 98 x 79 inches (248.92 x 200.66 cm)

The peak, it turned out, wasn’t so pretty after all. Now when Gutheil looks at her painted mounds, she hears raspberry sounds. “Not because I eat beans,” she laughs. “The mountain is ugly, but it’s funny too.”

Mountains, alas, like people, may not always be what they seem, but Stefanie Gutheil can at least turn them into paintings.