Clement Greenberg definitely wouldn’t approve of the new exhibition Crossing Cultures at Dartmouth College’s Hood Museum in Hanover, New Hampshire. The works highlighted in the show, all created by indigenous Australian artists, present elaborate, striking abstractions that are compulsively addictive eye candy, but Abstract Expressionism this is certainly not.
Abstraction
Posted inArt
How to Be a Lady Painter
I think it’s funny that Patricia Albers’s recent and authoritative biography on Joan Mitchell was given the subtitle “Lady Painter.” It’s my only guess that Mitchell’s lifestyle and her painting were so out of character for the time that the term becomes ironic. The artist was known for her camaraderie with Cedar Tavern macho dudes like de Kooning and Pollock, her hangout sessions with beatnik poets, her ability to party, and her tendency to drink and sleep around with bravado. At the time these activities and attitudes were thought to be reserved for men. Mitchell gradually carved out a space for her paintings to be given the same treatment.
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Amazing New Graph Drawing Charts the Birth of Abstraction
The invention of abstraction was not the inspiration of a solitary protagonist, but a relay of ideas that moved through a network of artists and intellectuals working in different countries and different media and MoMA’s new graph drawing shows it in all its beauty.
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Hanging Art in a Broom Closet
On my last trip to Chelsea, hoping to find something unusual, I was largely disappointed. Making my way through the crowded beehive gallery building at 526 West 26th Street, I felt doom encroach upon my heart, as each show struck at me with numbing sameness. Then, I suddenly and happily stumbled upon a glaring abnormality: The nonprofit Art Bridge has opened a small “drawing room” in what used to be a broom closet. The exhibition space is beyond small, but it offers a refreshing retreat from its flashier, disappointing neighbors.
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From Landscape to Abstraction
Over the course of her 35-year career, Altoon Sultan has gone completely end-to-end across the landscape-abstraction continuum.
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Seeing Through the Crowds at the 2011 Venice Biennale Part II: The Arsenale
The Arsenale and its Corderie (Rope Walk) compose the remainder of the curatorial effort of the Biennale’s director. It is the sprawling nasty sibling of the Padiglione Centrale, and is somewhat of a chore to tackle. The entire layout of the Arsenale this year feels disjointed. On a whole, I felt like there was a dearth of strong work. I believe Curiger had aspirations to move beyond the trends of participatory art and ostentatious work seen everywhere else in Venice and other art fairs.
Posted inOpinion
Quayola Fractures a Roman Cathedral
Quayola is a multimedia artist based in London whose hybrid projects blur the line between photography and animation, the digital and the real. In this video, the artist filmed a cathedral in extreme high resolution, then used custom-programmed algorithms to fracture the image.