STEVEN ALEXANDER J O U R N A L: Brice Marden

Showing posts with label Brice Marden. Show all posts

27.1.23

Some Memorable Shows from 2021-2022

The past two plus years have been challenging in so many ways -- no travel, no restaurants, no openings, no hugs -- to mention only a few of the more minor Covid losses....Nevertheless, some important shows happened in New York, and I was able to get to a small fraction of them. Here are images from a few of the standouts. My sincere regrets to all my friends and colleagues whose shows I missed.

Jacqueline Humphries at Greene Naftale

Joan Mitchell at David Zwirner

Richard Pousette-Dart at Pace

Thornton Willis at David Richard

Michelle Stuart at Lelong

Ron Gorchov at Vito Schnabel

David Diao at Postmasters

Mary Obering at Bortolami

Frank Bowling at Hauser & Wirth

Svenja Deininger at Maryanne Boesky

Brice Marden at Gagosian

Maja Ruznic at Karma

Terry Winters at Matthew Marks

Jasper Johns at the Whitney Museum

19.1.21

ON PAINTING - In Time of Isolation #3

Lawrence Carroll

Suzan Frecon

Ron Gorchov

Harmony Hammond

Brice Marden

Mark Rothko

Nathlie Provosty

Stanley Whitney

31.12.19

More Memorable NY Shows from 2019

Squeak Carnwath at Jane Lombard

Mary Corse at Pace and Dia Beacon

Helen Frankenthaler at the Parrish Museum & Mnuchin

Peter Halley at Greene Naftali

Jasper Johns at Matthew Marks

Jasper Johns at Craig F. Starr (see post below)

Brice Marden at Gagosian (see post below)

Knox Martin at Hollis Taggart

Joanne Mattera at Odetta

Alice Neel at David Zwirner

Doug Ohlson at Washburn

Michelle Stuart at Galerie Lelong

John Zurier at Peter Blum

29.12.19

BRICE MARDEN at Gagosian

Brice Marden, Withwhite, 2018-19, oil on linen, 72 x 120 inches

Brice Marden, Withwhite (detail)

This exhibition of six new large paintings plus several smaller pieces and a group of drawings by Brice Marden at Gagosian uptown was, I believe, a watershed exhibition for Marden. The paintings in this show, which ended December 21, 2019, are masterworks -- the artist in total integration with his medium and his language -- loose and open, always digging deeper. They are both breathtakingly beautiful and beautifully offhanded, exuding a sense of release and utter joy.

Brice Marden, Yellow Painting, 2018-19, oil on linen, 72 x 120 inches

Brice Marden, Yellow Painting (detail)

Brice Marden, installation at Gagosian

Brice Marden, Nevis Study 3, 2017, oil on linen, 36 x 60 inches

Brice Marden, Nevis Night Drawing, 2018, Kremer inks on Arches paper, 30 x 22 inches

14.5.18

TEFAF NY 2018

Here are just a few of the many outstanding works shown at the TEFAF Fair, Park Avenue Armory, May 4-8, 2018.

Giorgio Morandi at David Zwirner

Joseph Albers at David Zwirner

Brice Marden at Gagosian

Pierre Bonnard at Wildenstein

6.5.12

Artist Documentation Program

Jasper Johns and Carol Mancusi-Ungaro

For painters, materials and processes are essential aspects of the total conception the work. Most artists quite like talking shop, and a discussion of materials can be a catalyst for reflection about attitudes and ideas that are at the core of an artist's thinking. That understanding is what makes the Artist Documentation Program so fascinating and so important. Initiated in 1990 by Carol Mancusi-Ungaro, the brilliant conservator who was responsible for salvaging the badly damaged Rothko Chapel paintings, the ADP is an ongoing series of videotaped interviews with prominent artists including Ann Hamilton, Jasper Johns, Brice Marden, Max Neuhaus, David Novros, Rudolf Stingel, Sarah Sze, Cy Twombly, and many more. Each session is more than an hour in duration, and begins with simple questions about the materials used in specific works, then ultimately expands into astonishingly candid and detailed discussions of the artist's intent.

David Novros, Untitled, 1976, 120 x 360 inches, oil on canvas

Ms. Mancusi-Ungaro is remarkably adept at asking questions that lead to revealing insights into each artist's thinking process as well as rarely glimpsed details about how certain works were made. For painters, as for conservators, this series is an almost endless well of technical and conceptual information.

Brice Marden and Carol Mancusi-Ungaro

26.5.09

Ranking Reverb #1:
MARTIN, MARDEN, PALERMO, TRUITT

When I was a kid, my brother and I used to speculate endlessly about what combination of great musicians would comprise the ultimate dream band. In that spirit, and just for fun, Ranking Reverb is conceived as an occasional series of online exhibitions -- dream shows if you will. So here is the first -- a group of Ranking artists who pioneered primary structures while exploring the nuances of materiality and color.

To quote Louise Fishman, "Agnes Martin is the Buddha". Her paintings are the visual equivalent of breath -- the weave of the canvas, dry pencil line, light wash of translucent color -- silent, still, inclusive -- nothing and everything. They convey an expansive stasis, an ineffable wholeness in the humble and patient frankness of her process.

Brice Marden's early monochromes and color panel paintings were at once conceptually rigorous and deeply sensual. His heavily worked oil and beeswax surfaces were inhabited by rich hybrid or fugitive colors arrived at through a process that was steeped in tradition and buzzing with intelligent intuition. As his configurations became more complex, his color became more adventurous, and impeccably refined -- and always surprising.
In the late 60s, Blinky Palermo arrived at an exquisite integration of color and material with his fabric paintings -- not really paintings, but colored fabric mounted on stretchers. He would continue to develop these concerns, exploring the inherent properties of various materials, shapes and colors, evolving into his last and most important work, To the People of New York City, which was shown at Heiner Friedrich in NY just after the artist's death in 1977. It was a concise group of paintings on aluminum panels with simple paired combinations of red, yellow and black, now permanently installed at Dia Beacon. In it's original setting at the Friedrich Gallery, the installation was a highly charged arrangement of stark and beautiful relations that revealed the mysterious associative power of color and material in an entirely new way.

Anne Truitt was a singular, and often overlooked figure in the world of sculpture, making works that I consider to be 3-dimensional paintings. Though certainly sculptural in their declarative presence, her elemental configurations employ a beautiful integration of color and shape as a source of archetypal resonance.

Ranking Reverb #1