NICOLA VERLATO – HOW THE WEST WAS WON

Posted on 2012-04-02

Verlato’s dramatic allegorical compositions are rendered with remarkable use of perspective, reminiscent of the Renaissance-era. The show title, How the West Was Won, refers to the culture clash between monotheism and polytheism throughout human history, a battle that the artist believes to be at the very roots of the development of western civilization. In Verlato’s words: “Figurative art is intrinsically related to a polytheistic attitude (cult of idols) while the monotheistic one prohibits graven images, as written in the bible. Monotheism clearly won in most aspects of western culture but polytheism still survives in pop culture.”

One of the paintings is inspired by a medieval legend in which a Christian knight kills a Pagan knight but is castrated by his victim in the process. This symbolizes the loss of “wisdom of the body,” when polytheistic cultures succumb to religious conversion and assimilation into monotheistic ideals. Verlato transposes this narrative into the American Wild West of the 19th Century in his painting Conquest of the West, where a cowboy representing the monotheist attacks a Native American woman, representing the polytheist, who exacts revenge just before she dies. This epic battle scene is the most literal interpretation of the exhibition’s overarching theme, although the connection is looser in many of the other works.

Exhibition runs through to May 5th, 2012

Jonathan LeVine Gallery
529 West 20th Street
9th floor
New York
NY 10011

jonathanlevinegallery.com

  

JULES OLITSKI – REVELATION

Posted on 2012-04-02

Widely regarded as one of America’s last classic modern painters, Jules Olitski (1922–2007) created brilliant color harmonies and chromatic shifts that became one of the hallmarks of Color Field painting. Olitski enjoyed enormous acclaim in the 1960s and 1970s, and in 1969 he was the first living American artist to be given a solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Revelation: Major Paintings by Jules Olitski draws together more than 30 monumental canvases from public and private collections. The exhibition examines five decades of creative endeavor, ranging from the artist’s first essays into stain painting beginning in 1959 to his visionary last compositions in 2007. This glorious presentation highlights the series that define Olitski’s major advances: Stain paintings, Spray paintings, Baroque paintings, High Baroque paintings, and the last great series, titled “With Love and Disregard.”

Exhibition runs through to May 6th, 2012

The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
Law Building
Mezzanine
1001 Bissonnet
Houston
Texas
77005

mfah.org

  

ANTONY MICALLEF – A LITTLE PIECE OF ME

Posted on 2012-03-26

A Little Piece of Me’ consists of ten new examples based on his ongoing ‘Head’ series, each titled ‘A Little Piece of Me’ one to ten. Antony paints his Head pieces at the beginning of a painting process and is his way of getting his creative juices flowing, they serve as a way of capturings a certain sentiment – or vehemence.

Antony’s relationship with the Head paintings is spontaneous, intimate and physical: “The end result is never known before I begin. The mark making creates the expression of the face, changing it with each stroke. I’m constantly picking up the canvas, turning it around, trying to control the drips and throwing it back down.” The Head paintings endure a rigorous edit, and many are destroyed before they make it on to gallery walls.

Exhibition runs through to April 28th, 2012

The Outsiders
8 Greek Street
Soho
London
W1D 4DG

www.theoutsiders.net

  

CORINNE WASMUHT

Posted on 2012-03-26

Wasmuht is widely known for her large-scale, multi-layered oil paintings. Her work derives from an array of pictorial inventions, culminating in an aesthetic tension that aims to reconcile what the artist refers to as the “dualism of modernism,” a melding of representational and abstract structures in painting. The paintings’ images are generated from an array of abstracted and overlapping photographic imagery that Wasmuht sources from a combination of the Internet and her own personal photographs.

The images, both appropriated and her own, mine daily life, nature, science and art, fusing into staged abstracted productions. As Wasmuht describes her process, “In a film, one image is followed by another, whereas I pile the images up on top of one another.” Above all, her labor-intensive painting technique characterizes her work. She applies countless translucent thin layers of paint onto wooden boards that have been repeatedly whitewashed and polished, making her pictures shine and appear to be illuminated from behind while giving their surfaces an immateriality that is full of movement.

Opposite – Transverse NXL, 2012

Exhibition runs through to April 28th, 2012

Friedrich Petzel Gallery
537 West 22nd Street
New York
10011

www.petzel.com

  

KENNY SCHARF – HODGEPODGE

Posted on 2012-03-26

For this exhibition, Scharf has created several new bodies of work that survey his particular aesthetic approaches and sensibilities. The show features paintings, sculptures, a Cosmic Cavern installation, and a customized Cadillac, as well as an opening night performance by longtime collaborator, Ann Magnuson.

As a child Scharf was fascinated by television and consumer culture. Sitting only inches from the television screen, young Scharf became obsessed with vibrant and surreal imagery of cartoons and low budget sci-fi films. Optimism oozed from these dewy forms of popular culture, reflecting an era when the medium of television was still new and shiny. The outlook towards the future during the 1950s and early 1960s was a lustrous one filled with invention, cutting-edge products, space travel, and an unabashed vision of a better life. Coming on the heels of World War II, the hopefulness of this era was authentic. Various new industries and the jobs they developed were flourishing alongside the comforts of peace and suburbia. There was an aura of progress and prosperity, creating a seemingly realistic expectation of eternal euphoria. This feeling of positivity unhinged is threaded throughout all of the works in Hodgepodge.

Opposite – Globomundo, 2011

Exhibition runs from April 14th to May 19th, 2012

Honor Fraser
2622 S. La Cienega Blvd
Los Angeles
California
90034

www.honorfraser.com

  

CARLOS CORREIA

Posted on 2012-03-19

Carlos Correia presents a meta-discursive body of work that, rather than addressing general issues, poses questions that are intrinsic to the painting practice itself, using the medium to question its (im)possibilities. In this exhibition any attempt to discover a thread aside from these suppositions will be futile, since the clues provided are eclectic and preclude the establishment of a linear narrative structure.

Those clues function as keys offered to the viewer, though unfortunately they are not master keys: they do not even open any doors. Take for example the paintings that refer more or less directly to the current economic crisis: the popular protests, colourless Greece, ostentatious Chinese power, and so on. Instead of adorning the current political and economic situation with any commentary, these works speak of the possibilities (or impossibilities) of painting to continue reflecting reality in a conscious and rel evant manner.The exhibition title Survival refers to the artist’s continued critical stance with regard to the painting tradition.

Opposite – S/T (OCCUPY 002), 2012

Exhibition runs through to April 21st, 2012

Fucares Gallery
Conde de Xiquena, 12 1º Izq.
28004
Madrid
Spain

www.fucares.com/esp