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The DART Board: 02.15.2023

By Peggy Roalf   Wednesday February 15, 2023

Thursday, February 16, 6:00-8:00pm: Posturing | Kathy Osborn & Bradley Wood at Susan Eley

The word “posturing” is defined as calculated or affectatious behavior: aware of oneself and projecting a deliberate, specified image. For Kathy Osborn—her posturing is generated from a stage, a scene. She collects vintage dollhouses and sets up intricate vignettes in her studio. Each is precisely lit to add drama to the images she produces. Characters reside within; their relationships are the mystery. There is an Americana vibe–household interactions from the 1950s and 1960s. Above: Kathy Osborne, Vanity (2023); below: Bradley Wood, Discussion Needed (2023)

  

For Bradley Wood—his posturing is his stated approach to his paintings as if a playwright. He crafts what is “going on in the mind, or internal monologues” for each subject, which he considers “actors.” While the figures in Wood’s paintings remain anonymous, their energy is palpable—alluding to the moods, reactions and impulses that live within us all, those

Susan Eley Fine Art, 190 Orchard Street, New York, NY Info

 

 

Continuing: John Alexander Parks | Oceans and Seas at 532/Thomas Jaeckel

John Alexander Parks presents a set of new paintings that explore and revel in the time-honored challenge of representing the ocean. Riffing on historic renderings of naval battles, wrecks and catastrophic storms, Parks embraces the inherent artificiality of the genre, remaking the ocean in paint with extraordinary conviction.

In a very real way every representation of the sea until the late nineteenth century was a complete fabrication, an exercise in artifice.  And yet there was a continual demand for nautical subjects. The Dutch, Flemish and English fielded enormous fleets of both commercial and naval vessels and scenes of battles, storms, or simply glorious spectacles of ships at sea were much in demand from the late fifteenth century onwards. Artists strove to make their oceans convincing even if they were far from accurate. In quite another tradition, Chinese and Japanese artists found equally inventive solutions to representing the ocean and its movements.  Parks’ new paintings enter into the spirit of this creative task, to produce pictures that are playful, strangely affecting, often exciting and always visually rich.  

Gallery 532 Thomas Jaeckel, 532 West25th Street, New York, NY Info

 

Thursday, February 16, 6:00-8:00 pm: A Book By its Cover at Carter Burden

The exhibition features artist books created by Nancy Clark, Liz Curtin, Sandi Daniel, Irmari Nacht, Dolores Poacelli, and Ellen Wallenstein, as wells as paintings by Hilda O’Connell. From a disparate range of techniques and materials, including recycled thread, cardboard, wire, and paper, Liz Curtin has crafted her sculptural books (above) to tell stories of hope and love, despair, and loneliness, and ultimately, community and togetherness. 

Working in cyanotype, Sandi Daniel presents elegantly folded paper works both mounted to the wall and free standing, depicting leaves, flowers, butterflies, and other natural elements. Ellen Wallenstein’s books are a kind of visual diary of her personal journey over the last year, created using cloth cyanotypes that depict a constellation of the artists’ self-described inner workings. Utilizing books that may otherwise have been discarded, Irmari Nacht transforms them by painting, distressing, and cutting into slivers which curl and undulate, returning them to the tree-like shape from which the paper was made. 

Nancy Clark invites a play of thoughts on the familiar; it is this very sense of play, in its most dramatic sense, that has directed her work. Dolores Poacelli’s works focus on the relationships formed amongst color, shape texture, space, and tension, creating a connection between the viewer and the work; the universal and the personal. Hilda O’Connell’s canvases illuminate her research and interests in diverse slanguage and alphabets from across the world and time. Her process employs the palimpsest technique, a form of overwriting in which traces of marks are superimposed over a cluster of random letters, creating fragmented marks that represent a wordless language.  

Carter Burden Gallery, 548 West 28th Street, #534, New York, NY Info

  

Friday, February 17, 6:00-8:00pm: Robert Kushner | Then And Now at DC Moore

This exhibition brings together Robert Kushner’s fabric paintings from the 1970s and 1980s, many on view in the United States for the first time in forty years, alongside recent paintings on canvas. The artwork pairings in the exhibition invite the viewer to find resonances, or even discord, between the recent paintings and the early works. 

Throughout his career, several aspects of Kushner’s practice have remained constant: his use of color harmonies, pattern, an interest in expansive flatness, and the activation of surface texture, along with his continuous study of Henri Matisse. Looking at Sail Away (1983, above) and For Betty (2022) together, for instance, the curving patterns painted on draped fabric accentuate the sinuous lines of the objects in the still life.

In his new paintings, textiles remain a cornerstone, with patterned kimonos and suzani fabrics composing the layered backgrounds of the still-lifes, anchoring Kushner’s current practice to his early Pattern & Decoration roots. Kushner explains, “For me at this stage in my studio life, my own big picture is about pulling in as much as possible of my life experience. How wide a net, how big a panorama can I include in the works I am making now? … I am taking all my heroes and heroines and mentors and trying to pull them all together into a raucous colloquium.”

DC Moore, 535 West 22nd Street, New York, NY Info

 

 

Closing February 20: Alex Katz | Gathering at the Guggenheim

Alex Katz (b. 1927), the subject of an eight-decades retrospective, Gathering, currently filling the spiral ramps of the Guggenheim Museum, has had my respect and admiration since his mid-career retrospective at the Whitney, in 1986—and as much for going against the grain of contemporaneous art markets as for his luminous paintings.  

Katz grew up in a bohemian, first-generation Russian emigrant family in Brooklyn. In 1946 he entered The Cooper Union School of Art, where he studied until 1949, followed by two summers painting en plein air at the Skowhegan school for Painting and Sculpture, in Maine. The exhibition begins with his expressive subway drawings of commuters on their way to work in Manhattan (below), along with a loving portrayal of his mother, a performer in Yiddish theater. These two pieces from his school years set the pace for what is to come. Read the entire feature here

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1071 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY Info

  

Friday, February 17, 6:00-8:00pm: Damian Ding | Private Paintings at Denny

The fundamental desire to disclose meaning through painting from both the perspective of the artist as author, and the artwork as idea and object, have led Damien H. Ding on a journey to reconcile what he sees as the artwork’s inevitable failure to communicate.

As an avid student of art history, Ding is interested in art objects that challenge beliefs fed through the traditional canon of art history. With his own painting Ding investigates the interstice within beauty and the sublime, looking to figuratively and sometimes literally draw back the curtain to reveal something hidden, however awkward or inadvertent. 

His use of egg tempera suggests an intentional mechanism to step inside the historical narrative of painting—to uncover its meaning and veracity as artwork and object. Through this medium, light penetrates and reflects through the multiple layers of paint often inciting a comparison to precious stones and jewels. 

The title of this exhibition, “Private Paintings”, suggests that the work meets the viewer’s gaze with an intended shyness. The word “Private” also alludes to the furtive nature of each piece. Ding’s work directly deals with human fallibility, involving surreptitious desires and emotions that often go unspoken. Ding proposes that through painting, instead of seeking a singular meaning, the viewer can find contentment or even pleasure in their unknowing and in doing so, they accept the inevitable distance and realize comfort in their longing.

Denny Gallery, 32 Lispenard Street, New York, NY Info

 


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