“I did not put the book together in the way a band might assemble a greatest hits package.” Instead, it’s an “idiosyncratic” collection that includes lesser-known artists, such as the now-defunct duo Wallace & Donohue, rather than, say, Jeff Koons.
Picture: "Changing My Tune" by Wallace & Donohue, 1980s.
Showing posts with label abstract. Show all posts
Showing posts with label abstract. Show all posts
Monday, March 26, 2012
Not a Greatest Hits Package-- Bob Nickas
Friday, March 16, 2012
See the Abstract Show Before Visit With Bob Nickas
You may wish to visit "Material Occupation," the UAlbany Art Museum's current exhibit on contemporary abstract art, in advance of a Bob Nickas's visit on Monday, March 26th.
The contrarian art critic and curator is widely regarded as America's leading authority on recent abstract art. He is also the author of the highly praised 2009 book, Painting Abstraction.
The reviewer for the San Francisco Chronicle called it, "a wild ride of a reference book.” The New York Times called it, “a lively survey… a useful tool in forming a sharper, broader sense of what is going on in the world of abstract painting.”
"Material Occupation" runs through April 7, 2012.
"The artists represented in Material Occupation challenge the idea that abstraction is a rarified concept that bears little relation to everyday experience. Using familiar patterns, structures, designs, and systems, these artists explore the cultural associations inherent in prosaic materials. Traditional art-making gestures are replaced by actions equated with manual labor, such as staining, pasting, bleaching, mending, stretching, taping, daubing, recycling, and tearing. Drawing on a wide range of materials and references, these artists apply a keen eye and a steady hand as they transform house paint, thread, old and newly woven fabric, industrial tape, and other ordinary materials into poetic abstract forms. The decorative, the contemplative, and the marginalized thus take precedence in work that proposes an alternative relationship to Modernist abstraction." More.
Friday, March 2, 2012
Writing About Abstract Painting
Art critic and curator Bob Nickas, who visits on March 26, talks about the meaning of contemporary abstract painting in Art in America:
PENN: What is it about abstract painting that compels you to write about it today?
NICKAS: Ad Reinhardt once said that it's more difficult to write about abstract painting than any other kind of painting because it's content is not in its subject matter but in the actual painting activity. I agree, but you have to keep in mind that he wrote this in 1943. Abstract painting today often has a subject beyond itself. When Wayne Gonzales makes a painting that, seen up close, is a proliferation of overlaid gray dots and ovals, but from a distance coheres as an aerial view of the Pentagon, he offers an image of power and the war. When Steven Parrino mis-stretches a large expanse of metallic silver canvas and titles it Death in America, he's not simply offering the world another shiny monochrome. This is a work that reminds us of abstraction's privileged relation to language. The very same painting, given a neutral title, or untitled, is simply not the same painting. Reinhardt's text posits abstraction against illustration. To my mind, there is absolutely nothing compelling about illustration. We all make our choices.
Read the 2009 interview in Art in America magazine.
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