The Armory Show, an international art fair specializes in living artists. It occupies two piers 92 and 94 on the East River plus three off site satellite galleries like Pulse, Scope and Volta. Over 24 Texas artists in my book “Contemporary Texas Artists: The Bigger Picture” are represented in the New York and California galleries in this huge show, and in the art fair run by the Art Dealers Association of America’s The Art Show for its members that occupies the original Armory at 67th and Park Avenue.
Besides the fairs, in two and a half world-wind days, Christy Coltrin and I covered the Guggenheim to view the two-gallery spanning Cor-Ten steel Anish Kapoor breathtaking sculpture, the 75th Whitney Biennial featuring 55 mostly emerging artists, and the Surrealist pioneer Man Ray’s retrospective at the Jewish Museum recommended to us by Cay Rose at PaceWildenstein, the former assistant director of Mattingly Baker Gallery. Pace was showing Tony Feher – see my blog on this artist with strong Texas connections.
Christy, my traveling companion is Brad Oldham’s wife – check my blog on this talented and versatile young sculptor/ public artist. We truly had a wonderful time checking out everything. On the non-art side, activities we squeezed in were shopping at MoMA’s store, seeing a Broadway show, having cocktails at the “in” Ace Hotel and tea at the elegant Carlyle. To make it all even better, the weather was close to perfect for that time of year.
I’m pictured below next to a Kapoor stainless and gold plate disc dated 2009 at London’s Lisson Gallery’s space at the Armory Show on March 5. In the reflection, Lawrence Weiner’s wall painting is reflected upside-down on the opposite wall, and you can also see Christy taking the picture with her IPhone camera in hand.
Filed under: Contemporary Art , Armory Show
Sarah Williams “Truck Wash,”2009, oil on board, 30 x 30 inches
The painting above is at the moment in Sarah Williams’ one-person show titled “Population 4,769” at the McMurtrey Gallery in Houston. I first admired this artist’s powerful, perfectly executed, small scale landscape paintings in her salon style show late last year at Marty Walker’s gallery. An extremely talented recent MFA graduate of the University of North Texas, she serves at UNT as an adjunct professor.
As is true of many teaching artists at the onset of their careers, Williams composed an “Artist’s Statement” to share with admirers her inspiration to make art, a subject of immense interest to readers. So here are excerpts from her statement.
“This body of work is closely focused on my roots in the rural American Midwest. Being raised in a small town and then moving to an urban setting for my education has made me aware of the seemingly mundane, anonymous scenes existing on the periphery that tend to be ignored. Recently I have become conscious that I am compelled to paint what I know best which is the environment from which I come.”
“Aesthetically I am interested in light sources and the play of light on surfaces. This led me to paint nightscapes of familiar yet isolated and unremarkable buildings, rooms and scenes located in rural areas close to my home. I use darkness to edit out extraneous information and provide the viewer with the essence of place.”
“When I render my subject in a representational manner I like to fracture the form and accentuate the light through brushwork. I believe this approach makes these settings visually captivating and eerily mysterious at the same time.”
Sarah Williams “Brooks Street,”2009, oil on board, 18 x 18 inches
Filed under: Contemporary Art, Denton, Texas Art , Sarah Williams
Paul Booker “Balloon Form: Spiral #2, 2010, mixed media, varying dimensions, photograph courtesy of the artist
Booker, one of my favorite artists shows in Dallas with Dunn and Brown Contemporary and in Houston with Anya Tish. The University of North Texas awarded him his MFA and he’s an adjunct professor at the University of Texas at Dallas and at El Centro Community College.
He’s not afraid; my readers will emulate the way he makes his intricate and delicate sculptures. In brief, copying his words for the most part, with no preconceived ideas of what the finished piece will look like Booker makes compositional decisions on the way. He hand draws the image on Photoshop, a computer program and prints the image on Lexan. Each sculpture is built piece by piece directly on the wall using insect collecting pins with needle-nosed pliers in each hand, one to hold the pin and the other to hold the piece of plastic to press the pin through. The individual plastic pieces have a basic circular form which tends to turn into spirals, circles and spherical shapes. As to content, “the sculpture is as much about animal flocking behavior, text entry boxes, zoological anatomy, fluid dynamics and 19th century ornament as it is about architecture.”
Quite visibly, only Booker himself installs his translucent assemblages.
Balloon Form- Pink and Yellow (detail)
Filed under: Contemporary Art, Dallas/Ft Worth, Houston, Texas Art , Paul Booker
February 25, 2010 • 12:58 am
David Aylsworth, “Yes, the ‘S’ is For You (remix)”, 2010, oil on canvas, courtesy Inman Gallery, Houston
A prolific artist, Aylsworth makes soothing, soft, simple but romantic paintings installed on a wall that are a joy to experience often. Surprisingly, after studying a multitude of his stylized paintings, it becomes apparent each painting is decidedly different which is amazing unto itself. Aylsworth should be seen up close to appreciate his skill in applying the paint to create such gestural, tactile surfaces and create such an unusual, pleasant palette.
Aylsworth came to Houston in 1989 when honored as an artist-in-residence (Core Fellow) at the Glassell School of Art connected to Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts who now owns a painting as does the Dallas Museum of Art.
David Alysworth, "Low and Lazy," 2009, photograph courtesy Holly Johnson Gallery, Dallas
Filed under: Contemporary Art, Dallas/Ft Worth, Houston, Texas Art , David Aylsworth
February 22, 2010 • 12:32 am
Sean Smith, Vicious Venue #1 at the Lawndale Art Center, Houston, Courtesy d. berman Gallery, Austin, and Craighead Green Gallery, Dallas
Who can explain the motivation to make art better than the artist?
“My recent work explores my interest in birds of prey as a source of conceptual inspiration and analogy. I am fascinated by vultures and the visceral way most people react to them …What would a digital-vulture eat if it was somehow trapped inside this reality? “Vicious Venue” is a sculptural installation consisting of a group of life-size pixilated vultures devouring an analog office full of obsolete technologies (like a typewriter, rolodex and a rotary phone). The viewer becomes an intruder into the space, as if they are stumbling into the middle of the ongoing carnage as the vultures pick the office’s carcass clean.”
And who can explain the artful procedures other than the artist?
“I find images of my subjects online and then create three dimensional sculptural representations of these two-dimensional images. I Build my “Re-things’ pixel by pixel to find out how each pixel plays a crucial role in the identity of an object. Through the process of pixilation, color is distilled, some bits of information are lost, and the form is abstracted. Making the intangible tangible, I view my building process as an experiment in alchemy, using man-made composite and recycled materials to represent natural forms.”
Smith earned his MFA and the California College of the Arts. This sculptor lives in Austin where d. berman represents him. Craighead-Green is his gallery in Dallas. Lawndale, in Houston’s museum district, distinguishes itself alternative space that focuses on Texas artists with proximity to Houston.
Shawn Smith. Vicious Venue (detail)
Filed under: Austin, Contemporary Art, Dallas/Ft Worth , Shawn Smith
February 19, 2010 • 9:36 pm
Charles Mary Kubricht, Installation in her Marfa Studio, Fall 2009, Photograph courtesy Branton K. Ellerbee
Charles Mary Kubricht was traveling in Europe upon my last trip to Marfa; even so she made arrangements for me to visit her studio with my photographer. The other day I get an email from Betty Moody picturing a painting in Kubricht’s opening show that looks quite similar to the one we photographed in Marfa. However, under observation, except for the black and white stripes, it is different. What is different is not only the direction of the stripes is that for the gallery Kubricht installs the canvas on a wall and paints on it and in her studio she paints directly onto the wall, sort of as a study for the final creation emphasizing figure-ground relationships.
Her new show is appropriately titled “Taxomity Events on the Mountain,” which shows off her painting, photography and prints, a today’s typical artist’s multi-media output. A special event honoring the Nature Conservancy of Texas was held to announce that the proceeds of the sale of the archival, limited edition print portfolios would go to the chapter of the Conservancy in the Davis Mountains near Marfa. This non-profit receives a percentage to purchase property in order to protect it from development. Since 1989, Kubricht’s been working on preserving Mount Livermore, 50 miles from the U.S./Mexico border and a former landmark for drug traffickers.
Kubricht, a Houstonian, received her MFA from the University of Houston and works out of studios in New York and Marfa. She’s had one-person exhibitions at the Austin Museum of Art, Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston and the Art Museum of South Texas in Corpus Christi.
Charles Mary Kubricht, Installation in Moody Gallery, February 2010, courtesy Moody Gallery, Houston
Filed under: Contemporary Art, Houston, Marfa, Texas, Texas Art , Charles Mary Kubricht
February 17, 2010 • 11:23 am
Between his business pursuits, Tobolowsky finds the time to compose sculptures worthy of the attention from the top drawer staff of the Nasher Sculpture Center. Pictured above in 2009, this native Dallasite stands next to one of his brand new pieces in his studio in Mountain Springs, Texas, with Jed Morse, the Curator, and Jeremy Strick, the Director of the Nasher.
It’s quite interesting to me that I knew two of the artists who influenced Tobolowsky’s art – Isaac Witkin who taught at Bennington College and David Smith who lived near Bennington and visited an instructor of mine. Another inspiration Tobolowsky mentions, James Surls, his instructor at Southern Methodist University is an early entry in regularmain.com.
A crowded but impressive schedule faces Tobolowsky. “Face and Form: Modern and Contemporary Sculpture,” a group exhibition at SMU’s Meadows Museum was one of the highlights of 2009. The Grace Museum in Abilene in 2010 is giving him a one-person accompanied by a catalog with an essay by Jed Morse. Two solo exhibits will take place in 2011, one at Blue Star Contemporary Art Center in San Antonio with a major sculpture commission for the Botanical Garden, and one at the Tyler Museum of Art along with a catalog.
This committed artist produces complex forms for sculptures from indoor tabletop to monumental outdoor works. For his assemblages he uses heavy industrial steel and stainless steel castoffs, his medium, found in scrap yards and fabrication plants. An average of 1,000 pounds of bent, molded, extruded, colored and punched objects are scavenged weekly. Tobolowsky prefers this method to traditional casting. After cleaning the metal he welds the appropriate pieces together to see how they relate to each other and in the process creates innovative abstract, unusually tactile but beautifully balanced compositions. Tongue and cheek titles, “The Auditors,” and “Dealbreaker.” refer to his other life.
Filed under: Contemporary Art, Dallas/Ft Worth, Nasher Sculpture Center, Texas, Texas Art , George Tobolowsky
February 15, 2010 • 12:40 pm
Lance Letscher, “The Perfect Machine,” 2010, d. berman Gallery Austin provided the photograph
Letscher’s personally embellished, one of a kind motorcycle in the world will be the centerpiece of his show opening April 1st at David Berman’s. The minute the show officially closes on May 15 the ecstatic buyer can gear up his machine and ride it out the double doors of the gallery into unbeatable weather and streets packed with envious bicycle-riding university students. Since this is a pre-press release its impossible for me to give details about this about-to-be trendsetting and stop dead in your tracks artwork.
An artist rising to the midcareer level would refer to the 2009 hardcover publication on Letscher by the University of Texas Press in Austin, the 10 galleries from New York to San Francisco, Paris to Barcelona that represent him, and, his career as a full-time artist with a commodious studio in the back of his Austin home.
Selected collections who have acquired Letscher’s work include: the Austin Museum of Art; American Airlines Admirals Club in Austin; Blanton Museum of Art in Austin; Dell Children’s Hospital, Austin; the Houston Museum of Fine Arts; Museum of Southeast Texas, Beaumont; Neiman Marcus, Austin; Temple Emanuel, Houston; Texas Children’s Hospital, Houston; and Tyler Museum of Art, Tyler.
Filed under: Austin, Contemporary Art, Texas, Texas Art , Lance Letscher
February 13, 2010 • 4:25 pm
Erika Blumenfeld, Antarctica Volume 3, The Polar Project, photographs, 2009, 17×22 inches, portfolio of eight prints
Photograph by Branton K. Ellerbee
Atmospheric and elegant photographs that blend “art, science, and the environment” are trademarks of Blumenfeld’s artistry. The Polar Project relates to her four weeks last January as the artist-in-residence with ITASC (Interpolar Transnational Art Science Constellation) which is a part of SANAP (South African National Antarctic Program) during the summertime in Eastern Antarctica. In the coldest continent, she documented the vast ice fields, shimmering glaciers and ephemeral landscapes using state of the art technology to make a combination of photographs and real time video footage from nature. The photo-based techniques she developed methodically record the subtle changes that light, sky and sound make over time in this raw yet fragile environment.
Blumenfeld’s objective is to make the viewer aware of the magnificent scenery that will be lost if we’re not inspired to preserve it by making immediate changes in the way we continue to mistreat our world.
Another of her unconventional studios occurred in 2004 when Blumenfeld recorded a full lunar cycle at the McDonald Observatory in Fort Davis, in close proximity to Marfa, where she lives. She holds a BFA from the Parsons School of Design in New York, is a recent recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, has been featured in Art in America and ARTnews, and is one of the artists in The Polaroid Book published by Taschen. Her work is in permanent museum collections and has been exhibited in the U.S. and abroad. Her next endeavor is an exhibition at the New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe.
Filed under: Contemporary Art, Marfa, Texas, Texas Art , Erika Blumenfeld
February 12, 2010 • 4:50 pm
Tony Feher, “Blossoms,” 2009, each example 4 feet tall x 8 feet wide, photograph courtesy of D’Amelio Terras Gallery, New York
The accordion-like forms have hinged pleats that effortlessly support the exaggerated scale of these featherweight sculptures. The form of the “Blossoms,” five soft pink monochromatic fans was “dictated by the chosen material, extruded polystyrene, notable in the industry for its well-established reputation for the term reliability and superior resistance to the elemental forces of nature: time, water, cold, heat, and pressure.” Though not a minimalist artist, Feher uses as little as possible in a finished work.
“An established master” of contemporary disposable goods such as glass bottles with the labels removed, plastic grocery bags and cheap plastic flowers. Feher relies “on intuition and improvisation to observe and appreciate the beauty in everyday objects that surround them – the incidental, the ordinary, the commonplace, and what many regard as mundane.” One time he attached an aluminized non-stretch polyester rescue blanket to the wall with a binder clip and thumbtack.
Feher, a graduate of the University of Texas in Austin left Corpus Christi in 1981 for New York. His New York galleries are Pace Wildenstein and D’Amelio Terras. He’s been featured in 140 gallery and museum exhibitions worldwide. In Texas alone, in 2007, for The Art Museum of South Texas in Corpus Christi he created an installation especially for the museum and in 2005 he was the featured artist at the Chinati Foundation’s Open House in Marfa. Museums who own his art include the Guggenheim, the Walker Art Center, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney, and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.
Filed under: Contemporary Art, Corpus Christi, Texas Art , Tony Feher
