Yearly Archives: 2014

25 posts

February 18th, 2014: 8pm Richard Tuttle

For Ron, 2009

Richard Tuttle was born in Rahway, New Jersey, in 1941, the artist lives and works in Mount Desert, Maine; Abiquiu, New Mexico and New York City.

Tuttle’s work exists in the space between painting, sculpture, poetry, assemblage, and drawing. He draws beauty out of humble materials, reflecting the fragility of the world in his poetic works. Without a specific reference point, his investigations of line, volume, color, texture, shape, and form are imbued with a sense of spirituality and informed by a deep intellectual curiosity. Language, spatial relationship, and scale are also central concerns for the artist, who maintains an acute awareness for the viewer’s aesthetic experience.

Richard Tuttle’s work is held in nearly every collection worldwide, including in Europe at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Tate, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; and Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Switzerland; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution; the National Gallery of Art, DC; Museum of Modern Art, among many others.

Richard Tuttle currently has a show up at Pace Gallery, February 7th- March 15th.

System 2, Winter, 2011
Purple Octagonal, 1967

 

Boys Let’s Be Bad Boys (3), 1998

Interview with Richard Tuttle: http://bombsite.com/issues/41/articles/1580

[vimeo width=”500″ height=”400″]http://vimeo.com/55205315[/vimeo]

February 11th, 2014: Sangram Majumdar

Jessica’s Hair, 2011

Sangram Majumdar was born in Kolkata, India and received an MFA from Indiana University and a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design.  He lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.  Since 2003 he has been teaching painting and drawing full time at the Maryland Institute College of Art. He is represented by Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects, NY.

Sangram Majumdar is a studio-based painter whose work is rooted in careful and daily observation of his surroundings.  Done from perception and over multiple sessions, his subject ranges from found and fabricated objects, to people who are both familiar and strange, and the studio itself. Some of the paintings hold on to their naturalistic origins, an echo of the original experience. In others, the once found object or seen moment is transformed in favor of a place that is neither/or and both here and there.

Office Space, 2012
New Hair Cut, 2013

[youtube width=”640″ height=”480″]http://youtu.be/PUCBfePWPa4[/youtube]

Sangram Majumdar talking about his work.

February 4th, 2014: 8pm Brody Condon

To prove her zeal one woman ate mud, 2012
To prove her zeal one woman ate mud, 2012

www.tmpspace.com

Brody Condon (born 1974 Mexico) is an artist based in New York and recieved him MFA from the University of California, San Diego.

Condon creates performances, videos, and sculptures that relate to obsession with fantasy in contemporary culture, exploring the world of games, fiction, and collective experience.

He has exhibited at On Stellar Rays, Aldrich Contemporary Museum, LACMA, PS1 MoMA, and Hammer Museum. His awards include the Creative Capital Grant, the Franklin Furnace Grant, and the Interpolis N. V. Grant.

[vimeo width=”600″ height=”500″]http://vimeo.com/72605898[/vimeo]

Daughters of Decayed Tradesmen, 2013

[youtube width=”640″ height=”360″]http://youtu.be/lI8MEVnKd8E[/youtube]

Interview with Brody Condon

 

January 28, 2014, 8pm: Michael Jones McKean

Certain Principles of Light and Shapes Between Forms, 2012

www.michaeljonesmckean.com

Michael Jones McKean (b. 1976, Truk Island, Micronesia) lives and works in Richmond, VA. He received a MFA from Alfred University, Alfred, NY and a BFA from Marywood University, Scranton, PA.  Since 2006 he has taught in the Sculpture and Extended Media Department at Virigina Commonwealth University where he is an Associate Professor.

Functioning as a central location – where things are collected, moved, and absorbed –Michael Jones McKean’s work explores states of in-between-ness; the spaces between experience and perception, understanding and meaning, fantasy and reality, success and failure. Similarly, through his specific and eclectic ordering of materials and techniques, the artist’s work roams in the margins of theater, folklore, science, architecture, mysticism and sculpture itself. For McKean, the gaps between these coordinates become poetically charged spaces, harnessing an unseen valence momentarily bonding disparate objects in crystalline unison. The results of this process create a bridge allowing entrance to a world flickering between meaning, complexity, representation, and materiality. McKean’s manipulation of such pedestrian yet fantastic organic processes as rainbows also demonstrates our innate desire to physically seize and understand the natural world.

The Religion, 2013
Circles Become Spheres, 2012

 

Certain principles of light and solidarity between forms, 2008

January 21, 2014, 8pm: Ellen Altfest & Linda Nochlin

Ellen Altfest is a realist painter based in New York, she received an MFA from Yale University and studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.  Altfest always paints from life, drawn towards domestic plants, vegetables and male models. Altfest immerses herself in an intense analysis and personal engagement with the subject that pushes her vision beyond the real.

Ellen Altfest has become a highly regarded painter over the last decade for painstakingly labor-intensive canvases that look at things in the world — cactuses, tumbleweeds , rusted pipes, intimate expanses of men’s bodies- with an intensity that takes Ruskin’s exhortation to learn from nature, “rejecting nothing, selecting nothing and scorning nothing,” to levels that might have turned Ruskin to abstraction. In Altfest’s rendering of a gourd, no wrinkle or spot, of many thousands, goes unrecorded. In her view of a male armpit, every hair, stretch mark, pore and visible blood vessel that she observed in months of sitting inches from a model are there, tipping the real almost into the uncanny.

Head and Plant
2009-2010
10 x 11 in. (25.4 x 27.9 cm)
Oil on canvas

The Bent Leg
2008
8 x 12 in. (20.3 x 30.5 cm)
Oil on canvas

Interview with Ellen Altfest:

[youtube]http://youtu.be/AYdsA4tlFRI[/youtube]

White Cube

New York Times

 

Linda Nochlin is an American art historian, a writer, and professor. She is known for her ground-breaking work to advance the cause of women artists, beginning as early as 1971 with her article, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” Sparking a major development in art history and criticism, that early work led to the 1976 exhibition, Women Artists: 1550-1950, which Nochlin curated with Anne Sutherland Harris for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the show was accompanied by the catalogue of the same title co-authored by both scholars.  Nochlin has written numerous books and articles focusing our attention on social and political issues revealed in the work of artists, both male and female, from the modernist period to the present day. Her books: Representing Women, The Body in Pieces, Women, Art, and Power, and The Politics of Vision have directed and expanded the dialogue among art historians on the nature of viewing and have broadened the scope of our interpretation of the role of art and artists in society.