Abstract Artist

Antoni Tapies Passes Away at the Age of 88

admin — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 05:38:32 +0000

Catalan painter and sculptor Antoni Tapies, one of the world’s top contemporary art figures, died Feb. 6 in Barcelona. He was 88.

A statement from the government of his native northeastern Catalonia region confirmed the death but did not disclose the cause.

Mr. Tapies — who won many awards, including the 2003 Velazquez Prize, Spain’s top art award — was known for sprawling, abstract works that sometimes featured discarded everyday materials and graffiti-like scrawls.

More about Antoni Tapies and a gallery of his work.

Helen Frankenthaler, American abstract artist, dead at 83

admin — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 04:28:50 +0000

Helen Frankenthaler, whose abstract paintings helped define the Color Field movement, has died at age 83, according to news reports.

Shedied today at her home in Darien, Conn., after a long illness, her nephew said.

Frankenthaler was known for “creating sensitively colored abstract works using thinned washes of translucent paint that stained her raw canvases, achieving qualities similar to watercolor but often on a vast scale,” The Boston Globe writes in its obituary (subscription required).

Her 1952 painting Mountains and Sea hangs in the National Gallery of Art in Washington. In 2002, she was awarded the National Medal of Arts.

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The Largest Miro Exhibition in 20 Years at The Joan Miro Foundation, Barcelona

admin — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 01:20:47 +0000

The Joan Miro Foundation in Barcelona Spain is presenting Joan Miro: The Ladder of Escape, featuring over 170 works spanning the career of one of the most important in influential artists of the 20th century. It is said to be the most comprehensive exhibition of Joan Miro’s work in 20 years.

The exhibition draws its work from public and private collections around the world. The exhibition is a collaborated effort of the Tate Modern of London, and the Joan Miro, Foundation in Barcelona.

Joan Miro: The Ladder of Escape takes a look back at a career that spanned more than sixty years and focuses on the artists interpretation of his environment. From his youth spent in his native Catalonia to his reaction to the political turmoil and war that enveloped Spain during the first half of the 20th century and beyond.

After its presentation in Barcelona, it will move to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, where it will be on display until May 2012.

More information about this exhibition here.
Learn more about Joan Miro.

American Modern Masters from the Smithsonian at Reynolda House Museum

admin — Sun, 09 Oct 2011 00:39:36 +0000

“Modern Masters from the Smithsonian American Art Museum,” which examines the complex nature of art in mid-century America, will be on view at Reynolda House Museum of American Art beginning Friday, October 7th through December 31, 2011.

Modern Masters from the Smithsonian American Art Museum features 31 of the most celebrated artists who gained prominence in the 1950s with 43 important paintings and sculptures selected from the Smithsonian American Art collection.

The exhibition is categorized based upon three loosely-conceived themes: “Significant Gestures” focuses on artwork executed with broad strokes of brilliant color which became the signature style for artists such as Franz Kline, Michael Goldberg, Hans Hofmann, Sam Francis, Joan Mitchell, and others who came to be known as abstract expressionists. “Optics and Order” focuses on Josef Albers and his examination of symmetrical proportion and carefully balanced color, and those who built on his ideas: Ilya Bolotowsky, Louise Nevelson, Esteban Vicente, Ad Reinhardt, and Anne Truitt. “New Images of Man” includes Nathan Oliveira, Romare Bearden, Larry Rivers, Jim Dine, David Driskell, and Grace Hartigan, each of whom searched their surroundings and personal lives for vignettes emblematic of larger universal concerns.

Stan Gregory

admin — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 14:00:53 +0000

Stan Gregory was born in Tallahassee, Florida on September 22, 1948. He received a Graduate degree in painting at the University of South Florida, Tampa, Florida in 1980, thereafter, moving to New York City and setting up his studio…initially in Astoria, Queens and later in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. While in Tampa he helped found and was Director of the Artists Alliance Gallery, a cooperative gallery of 500 artists.

After moving to New York in the mid-1980’s he began to transfer the linear, graphic qualities of his etchings and lithographs to canvas, subsequently foregoing printmaking and focusing on the formal aspects of painting. Early paintings relied heavily on Cubist space but quickly became more reductive and focused. However, referring to his work as Minimal or austere misses what is arguably the primary intent of the work: the singular relationship between mark-making, surface considerations and color, coupled with the artists’ graphic, sensual touch.

Historical references can be tracked from Medieval manuscripts and Japanese calligraphy, to the early phases of American modernism, and to the whimsy of urban graffiti.

The work is included in many prominent collections and has been shown in one person and group exhibitions worldwide.

Lean more about Stan Gregory at his website.

A New Rothko Exhibit at the Chrysler Museum

admin — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 02:39:08 +0000

The Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia has announced an exhibition entitled Mark Rothko: Perceptions of Being. The exhibition is scheduled from Sept. 28 until Jan. 8, 2012.

Featured in the exhibit is the Chrysler’s own No. 5 (Untitled), 1949 along with five additional paintings from National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. Mark Rothko: Perceptions of Being is a study on the evolution of this important American artist’s work over the course of his career.

The viewer’s perception and emotional relationship with his work were an essential concern for Rothko. This exhibition aims to reproduce the viewing experience that Rothko considered essential to fully experiencing his work. Rothko has been quoted as saying that his large canvases not simply to emphasize their grandiose quality, but to wrap the viewer in a “very intimate and human” visual environment.

More about Mark Rothko.

More information at Chrysler Museum of Art.

Newly Discovered Works by Reinhardt on Display

admin — Sun, 25 Sep 2011 21:03:24 +0000

Nearly 100 newly discovered early works from Ad Reinhardt are being shown for the first time. Ad Reinhardt: Works from 1935-1945 is being exhibited at the Pace Gallery in New York from Sept. 15th through Oct. 15th, 2011.

A cache of nearly one hundred of the artists oil’s, gouaches, drawings and collages that have been in storage since the artists death have recently been discovered and offer fresh insight into the development of one of Americas most creative minds at a time when Abstract Expressionism was still very new.

More information at Pace Gallery’s website.

Major de Kooning Retrospective at MoMA

admin — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 04:34:06 +0000

The Museum of Modern Art in New York has just opened the first major exhibition focused on the entire output of Willem de Kooning’s career. This major retrospective will be open to the public from September 18, 2011, until January 9, 2012.

This exhibition provides us with a once in a lifetime opportunity to examine the de Kooning’s artistic developments from a career that lasted nearly 70 years, beginning with his early works as an art student in Holland before moving to the U.S. in 1926, to the sparse abstract works of the late 1980s.

Consisting of nearly 200 works from collections all over the world, this massive retrospective is the first to take up the Museum’s entire 17,000 square feet sixth-floor exhibition space.

This retrospective represents every stage of de Kooning’s artistic output from 1916–17 to 1987, including paintings, sculptures, drawings, and prints.

Among the works on view are the artist’s most famous, landmark paintings-Pink Angels (c. 1945), Excavation (1950), and the celebrated third Woman series (1950–53)-plus in-depth presentations of all his most important series, ranging from his figurative paintings of the early 1940s to the breakthrough black-and-white compositions of 1948– 49, and from the urban abstractions of the mid 1950s to the artist’s return to figuration in the 1960s, as well as the large gestural abstractions of the following decade. Also included is de Kooning’s famous yet rarely seen theatrical backdrop, the 17-foot-square Labyrinth (1946).

More information at MoMA

Renata Bernal

admin — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 17:38:57 +0000

Born in Munich, Germany in 1937, Renata Bernal moved to the United States with her mother and settled in New York city at the age of 13.

She attended The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York City, and later moved to California where she received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the San Francisco Art Institute, and to Brown University in Providence Rhode Island where she earned her Masters in Art Education. She has exhibited in New York City, San Francisco, Providence (RI), and in several cities throughout upstate New York. She has also taught art to both adults and children through the Robertson Museum in New York.

While attending the San Francisco Art Institute, she studied lithography and etching under well known artist Nathan Oliveira. Her studies also included ink drawing and woodcuts. Throughout most of the 1950′s and 1960′s she created primarily abstract expressionist paintings using oil paint on canvas. In the late 1960′s she began experimenting with an acrylic airbrush. The paintings that followed are a dramatic departure from her earlier work. What were once canvases filled with bold expressive brushstrokes are now replaced with clean lines with an almost lyrical quality while still maintaining the rich color and luminosity found in her oil paintings. Bernal continued to use the air brush as her primary medium throughout the 1970′s, 80′s and into the 1990′s.

Bernal’s use of bold geometric shapes and linear arrangements often convey organic or cosmic themes. Her paintings show a bold yet refined sense of color and a profound mastery of line and form. Because of their massive scale, it was often difficult to find exhibition space to accommodate her paintings.

Renata Bernal is currently retired and lives in upstate New York where she continues to paint leisurely. She also writes poetry and participates in her local Unitarian Universalist congregation. You can see more of her work at her website.

Pop Art Icon Richard Hamilton Dead at 89

admin — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 15:30:46 +0000

The Gagosian Gallery announced that Pop Art pioneer Richard Hamilton passed away early Tuesday at the age of 89. As of this writing, the cause of death is still unknown.

Hamilton was a pioneering art figure and is accredited as the “Father of Pop Art,” a movement noted for its ironic and iconic use of pop-culture imagery.

His most famous work “Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing?” — a collage done in the 1950′s featuring a naked couple in a product-strewn home made him a celebrity. His images were thought provoking and often political, from Mick Jagger in handcuffs to Tony Blair as a cowboy.

The Gagosian Gallery said that Hamilton was busy working on a major retrospective of his work that was planned for Los Angeles, Philadelphia, London and Madrid in 2013-14.

He is survived by his wife, Rita Donagh, and son Rod.