art – Page 3

Men Apart

On the left of the wall, Antony Gormley‘s Apart X (2003); on the right, a man apart

The Flowering Desert

Palm Springs Art Museum, California

At the Art Museum we saw glass works by Lino Tagliapietra, from the series, Il Deserto Fiorito.

Click any image to see them all enlarged.

But the highlight of the Chelsea gallery crawl has to have been seeing, for the first time, the brilliant work of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye at the Jack Shainman Gallery, In Lieu of a Louder Love. I can’t recommend this more highly. Unfortunately, it closed on the 16th, the day we were there, but if you can get to see her work somewhere, run, don’t walk. Here are just a couple of examples and the photographs don’t begin to do justice to the quality of the painting, the texture and the depth of feeling.

Jack Shainman Gallery, West 20th Street, New York

a Bed, a Chair, a Chest of Drawers, a Lamp, a Table, and a Window

Garth Greenan Gallery, West 20th Street, New York

Another installation that left me cold, although I couldn’t resist the opportunity of this illusive self portrait.

Art Center

Upper East Side, New York

My mother’s selection of oils at her painting class’ annual exhibition. Click any painting to see them all enlarged. And see her web-site here.

Student Art

Urban Wild Life

The Apotheosis of the Absorption of the Ambient

Gerhard Richter.

“…Purged of all evidence of the maker’s presence, they absorb as their content the ambient world before them in all its transitory serendipity. Subsuming spectators into that fluctuating matrix, depriving them of any clear, fixed, stable relationship to space and place, his mirrors seductively undermine the viewers’ authorial independence and autonomy by dissembling traditional hieratic perspectival systems of perception.” Read more…

Cold, Northern Self-Portrait

Joseph Beuys.

“…Besides the panels of photographs, he incorporated three panes of colored glass—two in royal blue, evoking the cold northern sky, and one in golden yellow, redolent of the southern sun—that might be thought of as filters through which the remaining panels are seen.”

Famous Cream Song

Robert Ryman

The principal concern of Robert Ryman’s painting can be illuminated by an observation the artist made in the late 1960s, that “there is never a question of what to paint, but only how to paint.” For Ryman, this “how” of painting has always been about what he has described as “getting the paint across”—meaning, literally, getting the paint across the surface, but also, more idiomatically, getting the idea of the painting across to the viewer. “What is done with paint is the essence of all painting,” he once declared. “What painting is, is exactly what people see.” Read more…