SONIA GECHTOFF

Posted on 2022-06-13

Gechtoff is best known for her atmospheric abstractions of swirling colors redolent of seas, skies or smoke. Inspired by the work of Clyfford Still, Gechtoff developed a distinct technique of palette knife painting. Her drawings were executed similarly, with long deliberate strokes of graphite that evoke windswept grasses and vegetation.

By the 1970s, Gechtoff had fully transitioned from oil paints to acrylic. Until this point, she had considered painting and drawing to be wholly separate, if equally important, aspects of her art practice. However, the flat, matte, and fast drying surfaces of acrylic provided new opportunities to combine painting and drawing media. Working on both paper and canvas, Gechtoff applied silvery graphite over most of her paintings for the last few decades of her life, contrasting flat planes of color with textural and compositional effects only possible through drawing.

Opposite – Celestial Red, 1994

Exhibition runs through to August 26th, 2022

Andrew Kreps Gallery
22 Cortlandt Alley
10013 New York
USA

www.andrewkreps.com

  

ON THE NATURE OF THINGS

Posted on 2022-06-13

On the Nature of Things looks to curator William Seitz’s landmark 1961 exhibition The Art of Assemblage at the Museum of Modern Art as a starting point that traced the origins of the medium from the early 20th century to the early 1960s, where it gained an increasing foothold across a variety of movements and styles. As Seitz said in the exhibition’s press release, “Every work of art is an incarnation: an investment of matter with spirit. The term ‘assemblage’ has been singled out with this duality in mind, to denote not only a specific technical procedure and form used in the literary and musical as well as the plastic arts, but also a complex of attitudes and ideas.” On The Nature of Things brings together several artists from Seitz’s 1961 exhibition including John Chamberlain, Bruce Conner, Joseph Cornell, Jean Dubuffet, Louise Nevelson, Alfonso Ossorio, Anne Ryan, Kurt Schwitters, and Lucas Samaras, while also exploring how the medium has been adopted and pushed in the years since the exhibition. In considering how artists speak with and through extant materials, On the Nature of Things includes works by a broad range of artistic voices from around the globe including significant loans from the Souls Grown Deep Foundation, which champions the work of Black Artists from the American South.

Opposite – Installation view

Exhibition runs through to August 6th, 2022

Andrew Kreps Gallery
22 Cortlandt Alley
10013 New York
USA

www.andrewkreps.com

  

LOUISE BONNET – ONSLAUGHT

Posted on 2022-06-06

In Onslaught, Bonnet focuses on corporeal fluids as objects of societal disgust, investigating art historical precedents for their depiction and considering the ways in which modern aesthetic and ideological conventions complicate the ways in which they are now received (“We are much more prudish about certain things now than people were in the 1500s,” she observes). The paintings explore our sense of mortification at our own bodies and the way they seem to betray us by leaking, sagging, or failing in various ways. “I’m interested in shame and the body in my paintings,” she states, “and bodily functions bring extra shame and embarrassment.”

Opposite – Projection 2, 2022

Exhibition runs through to August 6th, 2022

Gagosian
7/F Pedder Building
12 Pedder Street
Central Hong Kong
China

gagosian.com

  

JONGSUK YOON – YELLOW TO PINK

Posted on 2022-06-06

Traces can run parallel, cross each other, or be superimposed. In Jongsuk Yoon’s work, traces of condensed temporality, corporeality, memory, and biography intersect and result in idiosyncratic pictorial worlds that dis-play an impressive range of colors. The paintings by the artist, who was born in South Korea and has been living in Germany since the early 1990s, fuse the traditions of Asian landscape painting with a Western canon of art that is defined by abstraction, translating these elements into abstract landscapes that consist of large, overlapping forms.

Opposite – Installation view

Exhibition runs through to August 27th, 2022

Galerie nächst St. Stephan Rosemarie Schwarzwälder
Grünangergasse 1
1010 Vienna
Austria

www.schwarzwaelder.at

  

MICHAEL WILLIAMS – FROGS 1 – 9

Posted on 2022-06-06

In past bodies of work, Michael Williams has developed a suite of interconnected paintings out of a drawing, not uncommonly focused on a human figure or surrogate. In the case of Frogs 1 – 9, the source is Untitled (Frog) (2019–2020): a small sheet given over to a greying man-cum-jester, hollowed nostrils shaped like an electrical outlet and mouth agape, forming an unlikely heart. There, in his domestic sanctum, he dons a bell-tipped fool’s hat, historically, the triangular protrusions recapitulated asses’ ears—and gaudy checkered sweater. His thumb and middle finger pinch a splayed frog that stares back at its reciprocally confounded wide-eyed captor. The tone is jocular as befits its comic protagonist. But it also recalls the morality play of Puritan theology, as exemplified by Jonathan Edwards’ sermon equating the precarity of human life to that of a spider dangling over a fire (a none too subtle analogy for the proximity of Hell). The jester and frog reappear in related sketches suggesting defeat, Untitled (Wipeout) (2022) literally spells this out—and the cap ‘n’ bells transmogrifies into a fleshy body atop a goldrimmed plate in Untitled (Mar-A-Lago) (2022), a perfectly horrible cannibalistic feast.

Opposite – Frogs 1, 2022

Exhibition runs through to July 23rd, 2022

Galerie Eva Presenhuber
Lichtenfelsgasse 5
A-1010 Vienna
Austria

www.presenhuber.com

  

WHITNEY BEDFORD – VEDUTE

Posted on 2022-05-30

The artist’s latest series brings together what she calls Vedute , a set of landscape paintings inspired by paintings by masters of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – from Degas to Sérusier, Klimt or Van Gogh. As with her paintings of shipwrecks, icebergs or tropical forests, the Californian artist reappropriates this historical heritage and uses it as references for her autobiographical landscapes, contemporary allegories of social and environmental experiences.

Opposite – Veduta (Munch Red Rocks), 2022

Exhibition runs through to July 24th, 2022

Art : Concept
4, passage Sainte-Avoye
Access: gate at 8, rue Rambuteau
75003 Paris

www.galerieartconcept.com