REINVENTING ABSTRACTION

Posted on 2013-08-19

This exhibition focuses on New York abstraction in the 1980s as practiced by a generation of painters born between 1939 and 1949. Official accounts of the 1980s, the decade when most of these artists either emerged or solidified their approaches, tend to ignore the individualistic abstraction exemplified by these painters in favor
of more easily identifiable movements and styles (Neo-Expressionism, Appropriation Art, Neo-Geo etc). For these artists, who were in their 30s and 40s during the 1980s, it was not a question of a “return to painting,” but, rather, of finding a bridge between the radical, deconstructive abstraction of the late 1960s and 1970s (which many of them had been marked by) with a larger painting history and more subjective approaches. They opened their work to elements that had been largely excluded from abstraction in the previous decade, beginning with a reinvestigation of the conventional rectangular support. They were unafraid to explore gesture, improvisation, relational compositions, allusions to figuration and landscape, as well as art historical and cultural allusions, high and low.

The 1939-1949 bracket encompasses a generation marked by the 1960s, by the social and political upheavals of the period. Rejecting formalism, these artists found diverse means of introducing new content into their work; their abstraction was frequently an impure abstraction. In the early 1980s, biomorphic imagery began to appear in the paintings of Carroll Dunham, Bill Jensen, Thomas Nozkowski and Terry Winters. Other artists such as Elizabeth Murray, Joan Snyder and Mary Heilmann injected autobiography into their work. Explicit references to historical events appeared in the paintings of Louise Fishman and Jack Whitten. In the 1980s, painters such as Stanley Whitney and Stephen Mueller were fighting their way out of Color Field painting, gradually assembling the components of noteworthy personal styles.

Exhibition runs through to August 30th, 2013

CHEIM & READ
547 West 25th Street
New York
NY
10001

www.cheimread.com

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MAPPING THE ABSTRACTION

Posted on 2013-08-19

Mapping the Abstract presents three artists who approach abstract painting with a remarkably fresh perspective. While today the idea of The Abstract typically provokes notions of technology and digital media, each Benjamin Brett, Blake Daniels, and Robert Fry consider abstraction as an organic and gestural process – proving that perhaps painting – one of the most conventional of disciplines – ultimately triumphs as perhaps the most experimental, exhilarating, and enduring of all media.

Perhaps the beings in Blake Daniels’ works come across as the most overtly humanoid and narrative based, yet his paintings are concerned with what is happening on a much more complex scale in which he is omniscient creator of his own diegesis. His works depict bodies and spaces that have been dislocated and fragmented through the externalization of imagined space. But is narrative of any importance here at all? Certainly any linear-narrative takes a secondary role to the relationship that occurs tangentially: their textural quality, their daring and off-kilter compositions, the abundance of oblong shapes that might suggest limbs, tongues, plants, animals, or viscera, or conversely, that may exist within the confines of the painting just because.

Similarly, Myriam Blundell writes that Robert Fry’s “enduring preoccupation is to find a visual equivalent to the metaphysical space separating the act of representation from the language of abstraction”. While the suggestion of the figure is central to Fry’s practice, it is the relationship between the being, the surrounding, and the paint itself wherein which Fry finds his locus. Here we are most drawn into his mark-making, the atypical color-choices and painterly confidence that affirm Fry’s world. The omnipresence of variations on a deep purple color (while un-gendered, is historically linked to royalty and piety) becomes Fry’s trademark of-sorts, where shadows, anatomical extensions, and dismembered body parts strangely summon thoughts of deepened psychological states, not unlike Rorschach inkblots. But something about his color choice becomes undeniably carnal – references to Bacon, Guston, Twombly, (and, in Man with Vesalius Skeleton, even Dutch anatomist Andreas Vesalius) – but the languages and landscapes emerge as undoubtedly Fry’s own creation. 



Exhibition runs through to September 21st, 2013

Beers.Lambert Contemporary Art
1 Baldwin Street
London
EC1V 9NU
United Kingdom

www.beerslambert.com

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