STUDIO-ONLINE

David Cahill, The Vision of St Kirsten, Oil on Panel, 60″ x 42″

This April Limner Gallery presents Juxtapositions. The group exhibition, which runs from April 3 - 26, is an analytical one. The artworks in the show make comparisons between reality and the imagination. They play against each other and with themselves.

In Ignatius Widiapradja’s digital photograph (pictured above), a figure in a moody Victorian setting is contrast with the figures face, which appears to be skinless and transforms the piece into something bizarre. A similar effect is created using a different medium in Lynette Vought’s, acrylic painting, Prelude and Fugue. In Prelude and Fugue Vought paints a serene Madonna and Child that is rendered bizarre by mechanical arms that protrude out and wrap themselves around the child. Other artists, such as Argentinean photographer Claudia Fainguersch, take ordinary objects, in this case a droplet of water, and through technique render them surreal and out of the ordinary. William O’Donnell, a sculptor from Glens Falls, NY, has carved a leather jacket out of wood in frighteningly realistic detail, with knots of wood peering out from the creases of the jacket.

The artists in Juxtapositions are broadly based, from seven states, Italy and Argentina. The media presented is varied; photography (digital and traditional), printmaking, drawing, sculpture and various forms of painting are all represented. Despite the variety of styles and mediums the show is held together by the content of the work and the relationships that have been offered by the gallery, contrasted differing works together in keeping with the theme of the show.

Limner Gallery
123 Warren Street,
Hudson, NY
Phone: 518-828-2343
Web: www.limnergallery.com/

Gallery hours: Wednesday to Saturday, 12 - 6pm and by appointment

Sisters 2008, Oil on canvas.

In her new series of oil paintings Norwegian painter, Anki King, extracts imagery through remembered experiences from childhood as well as other memory based work. The childhood paintings are 30″ x 24″ and smaller and are often cropped in unexpected ways to emphasize the narrow view of a child. The larger paintings contain mature life size figures in full view. The human form is used here as a way of expressing emotions and emotions are an essential force in Ms. King’s work. The figures are not tied to a specific place or time and so become a vehicle for the viewer to create their own metaphor.

Anki King enjoys paint as a living, physical and sensual medium. She describes it as “a collaborative process”. Her work emits enjoyment of discovery and surprise from the process itself. The colors are muted, but the strong and varied brush strokes make the visual experience forceful and lively.

Opening receptions: Saturday April 19, 6-8 PM
and Sunday April 20, 2-4 PM.

Something Unexpected Art Gallery
152 Main Street
Nyack, NY 10960
Phone: 845-358-1196 / 845-709-1756
Web: www.something-unexpected.com

Swell, acrylic, 6×6feet ©2008

ECHOES, a solo exhibition of paintings by Diana Schmertz will be on display during April at the K.B. Gallery. Within her large acrylic paintings Schmertz explores the human psyche through touch.

Using large bold marks, Schmertz creates the sensation of light falling across flesh of the body. The physical contact between the flesh of these bodies reveals the psychological relationship embodied beneath the surface of their skin. The application of paint is sensual, expressing an intimacy rooted in the connectedness of all things.

While Schmertz’s works are figurative and representational, the compositions create an abstracted image. There is confusion within the compositions, making one question where one person ends and the other begins. This confusion breaks down the mental fixation of singular entities and reinforces the notion of the interdependence of beings.

Schmertz was born and raised in New York City. After completing her BFA from Purchase College at age 19, she was accepted into De Ateliers 63 residency program and awarded a two-year grant to live and paint in Amsterdam, Holland. Since, has traveled extensively, completed two Masters in Science, and has exhibited frequently throughout America, including San Francisco, New York City, and Philadelphia. Most recently she received a Manhattan Community Arts Fund grant from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and a grant from the Northern Manhattan Arts Alliance.

K.B. Gallery:
875 West 181st Street & Riverside Drive.
New York, New York 10033
Phone: 212 543 2393

Sculpture, Video Installation and Painted Photography
By Rachel Harrison (maybe the best of the show)

If you want to see the state of American Art don’t visit this show, make time to visit studios when there are open studios, which is something these curators never appear to do. Almost nothing is this show can be classified as art, frankly I saw more artistic expression on “Project Runway” than inside the Whitney Museum or the Armory. As for the additional exhibits in the Armory, the actual rooms are more impressive than the things displayed within.

This Biennial is more to do with who you know than to do with art. Apart from a few artists, most of the stuff found here is not done by artists, but by participating want-to-be artists, who failed miserably in showing any kind of artistic expression.

The installations, the sound effects, the videos can be summarized as “What are they thinking, are they thinking at all?”

If this show reflects American Art, then I put my money on Contemporary Chinese or Japanese Art. But as this show does not represent the new and inspiring work by contemporary American artists, I hope the Whitney hires better curators for their next Biennial.

From March 6 to 23, installations and performances will be presented at the Armory, 67th St. and Park Avenue.

Whitney Museum of American Art
945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street
New York, NY 10021
Website: www.whitney.org

By M.A.B.

Man and Woman, 2006, Silkscreen, drawing ink, watercolour.

Something Unexpected Gallery presents Secret Worlds, a solo exhibition of recent works by the Lithuanian artist Jurgita Gerlikaite.

Jurgita Gerlikaite eagerly took over the endless possibilities of the digital techniques. They let her continue and develop the experiments she has been performing through the years within more traditional graphic genre as woodcut and photogravure. All these experiments are related to the human world of imagination, also the visual and cognitive challenge of it. By the refined aesthetic means of the art piece we are attracted or, better to say, seduced into the world, where beside the fantastic surface basic human experiences of good and evil hides. Last but not least, the artist tackles such conceptions and terms as sin, evil, light, darkness, decline, resurrection, which we are forced to be related to, not only on the aesthetic, but also on the existential plan.

It is claimed that the new digital techniques either are too simple and shallow. Jurgita Gerlikaite’s compositions prove the opposite. In her hands the digital process transforms from means for playful experiment into a place for existential and metaphysical contemplations not losing a thing of the absolutely visual excitation. By this double grasp of aesthetic excitation and cognitive depth Jurgita Gerlikaite’s graphical art pieces are extremely exciting and competent. (Tom Jørgensen, Bachelor in Art History, art writer and author).

Jurgita Gerlikaite received BA in Art History and Theory in Vilnius Art Academy (Lithuania), studied printmaking and intaglio in Icelandic College of Arts & Crafts (Reykjavik, Iceland), Digital Imaging and Photopolymer film in The Printmakers’ Experimentarium with Henrik Bøegh in Copenhagen (Denmark). Now she is studying for her MA degree in UNESCO Cultural Management and Cultural Policy in Vilnius Art Academy.

Artist’s Reception with music and refreshments:
Saturday, March 15, 6 – 8 PM
Sunday, March 16, 2 – 4 PM

Something Unexpected Art Gallery
152 Main street,
Nyack, NY 10960
Phone: 845 358 1196
Website: www.something-unexpected.com

Alain Martinez is a young Cuban artist living and working in Bejucal, a small town in Havana province. His works have been shown in exhibitions in Chile, Germany and Spain. Recently, he took part in an exhibition in Havana in support of ‘World Aids Day’: CuidArte: Erotic Art, where his work was shown alongside that of other well-known Cuban artists, including Adigio Benitez, Roberto Fabelo, Nelson Dominguez, Choco, and Arturo Montoto.

Alain’s art is firmly rooted in the artistic traditions of Latin America – of Mexico, Cuba, Brazil, Argentina, and Venezuela. He absorbed European expressionism and recreated it in the context of local tradition. In doing so, he followed the path of Latin America’s leading painters, including the great Cuban artist Wilfredo Lam.

In the early decades of the 20th century, expressionism was adopted with enthusiasm by nationalist-minded artists who quickly realised that it could be fused with local ‘Indian’ culture to create a new Latin American art-form. The 1920s and 1930s, in particular, saw the flowering of this indigenismo. Soon, Latin expressionism – often leaning towards surrealism – became the leading art form throughout the continent.

Alain Martinez continues to work within this tradition.

During the 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the people of Cuba experienced severe hardships – economic and social – which were reflected in the work of Cuban artists. Many of them, including some of the most prominent, left the country and achieved success abroad. A new generation came to the fore as the economy recovered, but their art had changed, influenced by international trends such as conceptualism. Alain, however, working in Bejucal, pursued his own path.

Alain’s paintings exude a passion unusual even for Cuban art. At first you see the flamboyant colour, the festive dance. Then the darker mood emerges, the despair, the furtive sexual longings. Key to these paintings is the mask motif, the disguise. It tells you that nothing here is what it seems. A critic writing in El Habanero of Martinez’s solo exhibition in Cuba last October, remarked on his “figurative expressionism” and his “extraordinary dramatic force”.

Many of his pictures suggest a narrative, but he insists that he doesn’t tell stories. “My paintings are moments, ephemeral situations that were significant for me. But I’d rather not tell a story – maybe just insinuate it. I’m pleased if some of my memories are framed and hanging from the wall, subject to whatever interpretations they might suggest.”

This exhibition is the first showing of Martinez’s work in the UK. The artist will be coming to London from Cuba.

The Chanbers Gallery
23 Long Lane,
London EC1A 9HL
Telephome: 0207 778 1600
Website: www.thechambersgallery.co.uk

Alice Stepanek and Steven Maslin have been working together for over twenty years, painting studies and comments on the subject of Nature. This new body of paintings is primarily concerned with the environment and issues related to global warming.Stepanek and Maslin’s most recent work addresses the subject of humankind’s paradoxical relationship to its natural environment. In the moment when climate change denial has finally crumbled, the paintings have gained a great poignancy. Since the 1980’s scientific research has left no doubt about the consequences of human carbon dioxide output upon the environment. Stepanek and Maslin have followed this research with keen interest and it has found expression in their images in a variety of forms.

Last year the horizon line returned to Stepanek and Maslin’s work. A passing glimpse might register the paintings as conventional landscapes, but when the viewer lingers a moment longer they are quickly caught up in a mass of visual subterfuge. This is not a horizon line stretching serenely from one edge of the canvas to another, confirming the human’s place in the world. Instead the viewer is confronted with segmented landscapes, divided by bold verticals of tree trunks, which invade the foreground and split the canvas into a series of “frames”, each containing disparate scenes of nature. At times the segments are nominally linked, at others they disregard visual sense and convention, the horizon jumping from one level to another as the length of the painting is traversed.

The nature portrayed is still beautiful in its individual elements, nothing is ugly or shocking. The images are not “catastrophic” (a term now used with pornographic abandon when referring to climate). Yet the paintings are disturbing because of their quirkiness and restlessness, the viewer is left trying to piece together some sense, attempting to retrieve harmony and order.

Common with their work of the 1990’s and beyond, the paintings remain an uninhabitated stage. Indeed it is from the absence of humanity that they derive part of their tension. It is the viewer who must create the story; the artists have simply provided the set. There are different paths and ways within the new works, which enable a variety of scenarios and outcomes. The observer is left to decide on the direction, to face the choice of which path to follow and risk taking the wrong track.

The compositions appear photographic or computer manipulated, “cut and paste” comes to mind, but while the paintings are constructed from an array of images, which Stepanek and Maslin have photographed themselves, the computer doesn’t play a role. The paintings are composed on the canvas, built up from individual elements to create a complete image. Each element finds its place in an ongoing process of decision making between the artists in front of the canvas. They reiterate that the reworking of images is an artistic process with hundreds of years of history, not the result of the recent development of computer software.

The artists create a painted space where it is difficult to judge in which moment, or state, we stand. It is neither the ideal paradise nor the post-human order. Using simple compositional devices they create a familiar yet chaotic world, a vision simultaneously utopic and dystopic, manouevering between culture and nature, asking to what degree these opposites are mutually dependent.

We live in a world in which natural beauty is idealised and revered, and concurrently neglected and extinguished. The consequence of our actions, of our indifference, is becoming forever more foreseeable and unpredictable. Stepanek and Maslin’s paintings are a reminder of all that we should strive to keep when we find ourselves in a process of rapid loss.

Purdy Hicks Gallery
65 Hopton Street
London
SE1 9GZ
Telephone: 44 207 401 9229
Website: www.purdyhicks.com

Frida Kahlo, Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird (Autorretrato con collar de espinas y colibrí), 1940
Oil on canvas. 24 5/8 x 18 7/8 inches
Nickolas Muray Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin.
© 2007 Banco de México Diego Rivera & Frida Kahlo Museums Trust. Av. Cinco de Mayo No. 2, Col. Centro, Del. Cuauhtémoc 06059, México, D.F.

Mexican artist Frida Kahlo’s stature as one of the most original, remarkable and soul-stirring artists of the 20th century is confirmed by an upcoming exhibit that examines the full range of her talents.

To celebrate the 100th anniversary of Kahlo’s birth, the Philadelphia Museum of Art has organized the first major display of her work in the U.S. in nearly fifteen years. Rendered in vivid colors and realistic detail, the more than 40 of Kahlo’s self-portraits, still lifes and portraits date from the beginning of her career in 1926 until her death in 1954. Many of the works come from more than 30 private and institutional collections in the U.S., Mexico, France and Japan, with several of them on view in the U.S. for the first time. Visitors will also see a selection of nearly 100 photographs of Kahlo and her husband, Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, taken by international photographers of the period, including Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Lola Alvarez Bravo, Gisele Freund, Tina Modotti and Nickolas Muray, and personal snapshots of the artist with family and friends, for example, André Breton and Leon Trotsky.

Philadelphia Museum of Art
26th Street and the Benjamin Franklin Parkway
Philadelphia, PA
Telephone: (215) 763-8100
Web site: www.philamuseum.org

The Dead Girl, 1938
Juan Soriano, Mexican
Oil on panel
18 1/2 x 31 1/2 inches (47 x 80 cm)
Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Henry Clifford, 1947
1947-29-3

Fragile Demon: Juan Soriano in Mexico, 1935–1950, the first exhibition of its kind in a major museum in the US, examines the early work of one of modern Mexico’s most intriguing artists. Although Soriano (1920–2006) played a pivotal role in the development of Mexican painting and sculpture from the 1930s until his recent death, his art is almost unknown outside of Mexico. While recent exhibitions of Soriano’s works have examined his paintings and sculpture from 1950 forward, few have focused on the artist’s paintings from the 1930s and 1940s. These works—portraits of friends and family, images of children, still-lifes, and landscapes—offer a distinctive variation on the themes and artistic styles that preoccupied Soriano’s contemporaries. When Soriano moved to Mexico City in 1935, he began visual and personal dialogues with Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, Jose Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros, among others. In his own works, Soriano responded to the works of these prominent Mexican artists, while he drew upon his deep interest in popular and indigenous arts, as well as Cubism, German Expressionism, Fauvism, and Surrealism, to create a personal style of romantic realism.

Philadelphia Museum of Art
26th Street and the Benjamin Franklin Parkway
Philadelphia, PA
Telephone: (215) 763-8100
Web site: www.philamuseum.org

The Five Gods of the Five Sciences
Sipe Rignga
Tibet; 18th century; Mineral pigments on cloth; 14 x 55 1/8 in.
Rubin Museum of Art
C2006.66.53

Bon: The Magic Word is the first art exhibit to illuminate the Bon, a religious and cultural group living in the Himalayas and Central Asia and a group almost unknown in the Western world. Bon culture and religion pre-date the northern advance of Buddhism onto the Tibetan Plateau in the 7th century. Despite Buddhism’s growth in popularity since the 11th century, the Bon religion and culture have survived and thrived to this day. This eye-opening exhibition highlights a belief in the spirits of place and natural formations—mountains, sky, rivers, stones, and lakes—springing from Bon that runs through the edifices of religions in the region. It will also begin to train the eye to see distinctive Bon features in the arts of the Himalayas and surrounding regions.

Rubin Museum of Art
150 W. 17th St. (off of Seventh Avenue)
New York, NY
Telephone: (212) 620-5000
Web site: www.rmanyc.org