Tag Archives: Anita Rogers Gallery

John Bingham Interviews Robert Szot

Robert Szot: Painting & Problem Solving
June 9, 2018

imageYour works appear chaotic and harmonious at the same time, tell us more about your working method. 

That’s a good read and I feel the same way about my work. I never approach a painting with a preconceived notion of where it will end up and the story my process is primarily about editing.  I have a hard time telling the difference between paintings on day one. They all look the same to me really. A lot of dark lines sectioning off the canvas, a bit of blotchy color here and there with no real indication of what’s to come. I struggle in the early stages because there are no real problems that I can solve, so I have to labor to create these problems. Day two is typically when a painting will begin to take on different and unique characteristics. After day two is where I excel and my process becomes very kaleidoscopic with one move opening up 10 moves and so on.

You’ve exhibited widely, including the Saatchi Gallery in London and you exhibited at Anita Rogers Gallery in New York earlier this year. How was this show, and do you become more and more selective with the places that you show as time goes by? 

The Anita Rogers Gallery was something that happened just this year and it is a relationship that I am very excited to be a part of. Anita is from an artist family and exudes an excitement for good work that is infectious. She has also put together a knowledgeable and ambitious crew that frankly have been nothing short of delightful to work with. The gallery itself is so old-school Soho and is a challenge I am looking forward to tackling when I have my solo there in 2019. My introductory show with Anita Rogers this last winter was great and has only bolstered my own desire to get back in there with even better work, frankly I am giddy at the thought of it. I also continue to work with Muriel Guepin who I have been with for 8 years now. She has recently moved to Soho and taken to being more of a dealer and less of an exhibition space. She has been a great foundation for me and we have come up together in a sense. I am also working with a few galleries in California now and will be exhibiting work in LA this June.

View the full post on anitarogersgallery.com

Two Coats of Paint Reviews “The Divine Joke”

Untitled-2016-Varda-Caivano-Anita-Rogers-GalleryTo better understand this concept of “the divine joke,” I turned to Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996), in which Carolyn Burke, Loy’s biographer, explains that Loy’s notion was that art could be a “‘divine joke’ which the public did not get because it had been trained to see things in just one way” whereas “the artist saw each object with fresh eyes.” Burke quotes Loy directly:

The artist is jolly and quite irresponsible. The artist is uneducated and seeing IT for the first time. The public and the artist can meet at every point except the – for the artist – vital one, that of pure, uneducated seeing.

This intelligence was enlightening, but still, as Burke admits, pretty abstract. I thought I should ask the curator directly what he was thinking about, so I sent him a note and asked him.

Schwabsky responded quickly:

The idea of “the divine joke” is not what I would call a premise for the show. The show does not illustrate a given theme. Rather, I used Mina Loy’s phrase as a way of talking about a certain lightness of spirit that I think the work in the show shares and that also, I hope, characterizes my attitude toward the art.

Ah! I thought. He was zoning in on the “jolly” and “irresponsible” élan of the artist, and holding out the hope that the artists he selected could, in fact, induce in the public “pure, uneducated seeing.” From this perspective, the show may be a welcome antidote to overthinking.

Read more at anitarogersgallery.com

ArtNet Editors’ Picks: “An Evening of Readings and Discussion with Barry Schwabsky and Friends”

blind man imageAnita Rogers Gallery and Ugly Duckling Presse are teaming up to celebrate the current exhibition “The Divine Joke,” curated by Barry Schwabsky and on view through June 2, as well as the publication of a new edition of The Blind Man, Marcel Duchamp‘s 1917 Dada magazine. Schwabsky will be joined by writer and artist Christopher Stackhouse, art critic and poet John Yau, The Blind Man editor Sophie Seita, author Diana Hamilton, artist James Hoff, and Ugly Duckling Press’s Matvei Yankelevich.

Location: Anita Rogers Gallery, 15 Greene Street
Price: Free with RSVP
Time: 6:30 p.m.–9:30 p.m.

—Sarah Cascone

More information at AnitaRogersGallery.com

The Divine Joke, Curated by Barry Schwabsky

April 25 – June 2, 2018

Anita Rogers Gallery

15 Greene Street, SoHo, NYC

Anita Rogers Gallery - Divine Joke Opening - selection-9

 

 

 

 

 

One hundred and one years ago—it seems like only yesterday! Or maybe it’s still tomorrow? April 10, 1917: Henri-Pierre Roché, collaborating with Marcel Duchamp and Beatrice Wood, published the first of what would be two issues of The Blind Man. A fourth contributor was the poet Mina Loy, who contributed the little magazine’s closing piece, titled “In . . . Formation.” There she wrote: “The Artist is jolly and quite irresponsible. Art is The Divine Joke, and any Public, and any Artist can see a nice, easy, simple joke, such as the sun; but only artists and serious critics can look at a grayish stickiness on smooth canvas.”

Reading this, I began to wonder: Would it be possible to go against the spirit of our time as Loy and her friends went against the spirit of theirs, and in so doing reclaim for art something of this solar humor, this celestial irresponsibility?—to present such a notion without entirely losing one’s status as a serious critic.

I thought I’d better try.

The idea would be to present some paintings, or works in the vicinity of painting (some of them are really photographs), that seem to me to embody the divine joke that Loy cracked a century ago. Some would be by artists whose work I’ve followed for some time, but others would come from practitioners I’ve only recently discovered—for spontaneity is essential to humor, isn’t it? In the end I chose a geographically and generationally dispersed six:

Hayley Barker lives in Los Angeles. Her visionary paintings are relentless storms of mark-making that always have a face; it might evade your glance or stare you down. Varda Caivano—born in Buenos Aires but a longtime Londoner—makes some of the most elusive paintings being done anywhere today; they turn their maker’s dissatisfaction with almost any solution into a kind of involuntary ecstasy. Embracing the ambiguity between figuration and abstraction, Brooklyn-based Sarah Faux creates visual metaphors for jouissance and they practice what they preach. Los Angeleno Adam Moskowitz also cultivates the edge where images go abstract, but his photographs printed on concrete bliss out on space and structure rather than dwelling in the organic. The ever-mutating fields of Francesco Polenghi’s paintings recall the sea, whose constantly fluctuating surface reflects its immovable depths: constant transformation as the appearance of a stable and unchanging underlying process is the subject of this Milanese artist’s work. Finally, Puerto Rican-born, Brooklyn-based Rafael Vega has spoken of wanting painting to “force its immediate past into a state of ‘vibration’ (try to imagine a delocalized electron), by small tweaks”; his recent unstretched canvases let that vibration get stronger than ever. All six of them fulfill Loy’s definition of The Artist—and yes, she always capitalized the word and put it in bold—as someone who can “never see the same thing twice.”

—Barry Schwabsky

More info and images on the gallery website. 

Medium.com Features “The Divine Joke” on Must-See Exhibition List

Counterform IntersectAnita Rogers Gallery at 15 Greene Street presents The Divine Joke, curated by Barry Schwabsky. One hundred and one years ago — it seems like only yesterday! Or maybe it’s still tomorrow? April 10, 1917: Henri-Pierre Roché, collaborating with Marcel Duchamp and Beatrice Wood, published the first of what would be two issues of The Blind Man.

View on AnitaRogersGallery.com

Virva Hinnemo Featured in New York Studio Conversations (Part II): 21 Women Talk About Art

For the third volume of this ongoing series entitled New York Studio Conversations (Part II) art historian Stephanie Buhmann conducted interviews with twenty artists, whose ages range from early 41 to 96. While the featured genres, processes and aesthetic approaches vary decisively, all participants have one thing in common: they work and usually live in New York.Conceived as a counter-balance to the notion of art as a commodity, which has spread in the media with ever-soaring auction records, the project further aims to provide a permanent forum for some of the inspiring female artists working today. To this end, Buhmann has visited the artists in their studios or on site of a major public installation, discussing their unique processes, individual philosophies, inspirational sources, and personal histories.

New York Studio Conversations (Part II) introduces the following artists: Mary Abbott, Ghada Amer, Petah Coyne, Louise Fishman, Judy Glantzman, Lorrie Goulet, Julie Heffernan, Alicia Henry, Virva Hinnemo, Sharon Horvath, Julie Mehretu, Keiko Narahashi, Shirin Neshat, Leslie Roberts, Carolee Schneemann, Shahzia Sikander, Rebecca Smith, Pat Steir, Jessica Stockholder, Kim Uchiyama.

In her interview, Virva Hinnemo discusses her practice, her children, her studio rituals and her inspirations.

Excerpt:

Buhmann: There’s always beauty in the act of giving new meaning to a throwaway object by stripping it off of its former context. Suddenly, all the details, including the remnants of graphics and lettering, gather new attention; they become a secret code of sorts.

Hinnemo: Right, it’s transformative. I feel that I have a real language at this point. My work looks abstract, but I find that my forms refer to landscape, the figure, or better, a figure/ground. On other occasions, they look like letters.

View the full post on Anita Rogers Gallery’s website. 

ArteFuse Highlights Virva Hinnemo: Four Feet

Virva Hinnemo lives far out on eastern Long Island, and her artwork looks very much like the art of the ab-ex painters who made that area so well known. Her art, overwhelmingly black and white, and sometimes on such proletarian surfaces as cardboard, has a touch of the primitive to it. The compositions are direct, unmannered and actively self-sufficient. They point to a time when such unfettered abstraction was the dominant idiom in the New York area; we pretend that is so still, although it is clear by now that the style is currently a matter of individual performance, practiced by talented persons such as Hinnemo. In such a show as this, where the work necessarily participates in a historical, indeed what amounts to a scholarly, situation, we must see it with a bit of a prepossessed eye. There is nothing wrong in doing so–in all the arts, it looks like artists are referencing the past if they are working with traditional idioms–it does mean that such painting takes place, inexorably, alongside what was distinguished before it. Foreign painters such as Hinnemo, who is Scandinavian by birth, inevitably align with previous efforts here (Franz Kline comes regularly to mind on seeing her paintings), even if she comes from far away.

VH 033 Road and River

Like many of the images, Road and River (2017) is small: 14 by 11 inches. It is very much Kline-like in its declaration–a bold, highly structured, but also intuitive design. The overall composition might resemble a person bending over, on his knees, but the title offers guidance toward a reading based on nature. Looking at the image as if one were above the landscape, as the painting’s name indicates, it does seem like a road is connecting two parts of a major waterway. The overall pattern of the image would then be viewed as if its audience was flying over it. Doing so would enhance the experience of the painting, but it would also lessen its abstract qualities when looking at it straight on. It has been remarked that abstraction occurs in realism, and the other way around; maybe this work illustrates the comment quite well. Still, it is impossible to see it as nonobjective or realist in the same moment; we shift from one perception to the other. The same is true with Four Feet (2017), which is larger at 24 by 28 inches. Again, the name of the painting orients us toward a view based in real life, but in visual terms, the work actually seems highly abstract–or at least poised between figuration and abstraction (it also looks a lot like a simplified landscape). Four Feet doesn’t make very clear the meaning of its title, but like Road and River it balances across the continuum of realism and nonobjective painting.

The acrylic-on-cardboard painting Horizon (2017) is also small: 5 ¼ by 6 ½ inches. It consists of a V-shaped stroke, on the left, and two columnar forms with tops, standing next to and slightly above the two circular holes cut into the brown ground of the cardboard. The work is whimsical and free, perhaps to the point of excessive freedom, although this kind of abandonment has been the staple of lyric abstraction in America for a long time. To fully acknowledge the success of the piece, the viewer also has to appreciate the act of its making, which is silently recorded in the painting. This is the key generally to abstract expressionism, and specifically to Hinnemo’s art. (The artist does this sort of thing very well, but its historical repetitiveness can also be noted.) Laundry I (22 by 30 inches) is one of the larger pieces in the show. It consists of a group of four very dark colored, reddish-black thick strokes imposed on thinner black lines, which describe an open, more or less vertical and horizontal structure. The design has been established on a piece of paper. With the help of the title, we can easily see the composition as clothes hanging on a line, although this tends to be done after we read the work abstractly. Whatever the criss-cross between abstraction and realism might be, Laundry I works as a painting, its ambitions accomplished both within recent art history and outside it. It looks like it is impossible for the work–and the show–to be other than historically minded even as Hinnemo rekindles life into a lyric idiom. But it may also be true that her work can stand alone, without support from the past; the show is strong enough to uphold this reading.

– Jonathan Goodman

View on AnitaRogersGallery.com

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The East Hampton Star: Emotion and Restraint in Hinnemo’s Paintings in NYC

The East Hampton Star Reviews Virva Hinnemo: Four Feet

Virva Hinnemo appears to enjoy blurring lines that have always defined classic formalism as well as the borders between pure abstraction and naturalism.

Although the cardboard she adopted as a primary medium a few years ago is still present in the Anita Rogers Gallery in SoHo, Virva Hinnemo’s focus has lately shifted back to paper and, ultimately, to canvas.

In the solo show “Four Feet,” the Springs artist moves back and forth freely between mediums and different forms of supports, including a rather complicated piece, “Under the House,” which is painted on framed plywood and propped up with wooden blocks, resembling sculpture on an improvised and unusual pedestal.

The artist appears to enjoy blurring lines that have always defined classic formalism as well as the borders between pure abstraction and naturalism. How else to explain works with titles such as “Waterfront,” “Still Life,” and “Laundry” that also evoke those subjects in the subtlest ways?

Recycling and repurposing are appealing trends in art-making and they don’t appear to be losing steam. As humans create more and more detritus, artists have seized the day and the trash, to transform it into something more pleasantly enduring. These pieces can deliver both depth, with their inherent cultural critique, and a sense of aesthetic surprise and delight (“See what they did with that tire, radio, computer monitor, etc.?”).

Ms. Hinnemo’s cardboard pieces include a bit of play, as well. The wide daubs that make up her painting “Still Life” actually come from a bright blue-and-white striped box top. It can be debated whether those are Cezanne apples in a bowl or Morandi vases, but what is indisputable is that the piece has an air of lighthearted fun.

“Two Plus Two” looks like a face. The artist’s cutouts — both those she made herself, as in “Close to the Wall,” and prefabricated, as in “Horizon” — address the sculptural properties of the support, introducing an air of uncertainty about how ultimately to define these objects.

Nowhere is that uncertainty more apparent than in “Under the House,” in which her acrylic paint seems to evoke flames in a stove or furnace, with the black, gray, and white palette looking like coal and ash. The title could be reassuring (hearth and home) or ominous (what lies beneath? unchecked passions or peril?). A simple panel is not a radical support for a painting, but what of the framing? It could be a shed or cellar door or some other found bit of hardware. The rough blocks that keep it upright don’t appear to be part of the piece; their measurements are not included in the work’s description. Yet, purely functional or not, it is hard to divorce their presence from the overall impression of the piece.

In “Laundry,” a work on paper, she places paper over a painted section in the tradition of collage, but the beige paper matches the background in the way correction tape covers up mistakes in text. That there is still a hint of the painting concealed beneath it gives the piece a mysterious air. What was the motivation to hide what is underneath?

Those pieces leave a lot to contemplate, but the canvas paintings are the real treat in the show. They, too, benefit from extended viewing. A quick pass might offer hints of Robert Motherwell, Franz Kline, even Mark Tobey, but it wouldn’t reveal the depth of the artist’s unique approach. Seemingly just black and white with shadings of gray, almost all of them have some color in their underpainting. In “Ground Glow,” it is a purplish red, maybe wine, maybe something more sanguine. In the piece that shares the title of the show, “Four Feet,” it is a lovely, peaceful blue thinned with white.

In some canvases, central portions are left blank, creating voids and pauses in the composition. “The Crossing,” a rare vertical piece in the show, seems to suggest all manner of meanings, from the soaring spires of the architectural crossing of a medieval church to the harrowing journey war refugees are still undertaking to leave their ravaged countries. Or, to take it down a notch, it could be the energy of a busy city intersection. That so much allusion could be packed into these paintings speaks to their emotive qualities and to their restraint.

The exhibition will remain on view through April 21.VH 031 copy

by Jennifer Landes

Read on EastHamptonStar.com
View more information on the exhibition on AnitaRogersGallery.com

ArtNet Editors’ Picks: “Women & the Art World” at Anita Rogers Gallery

Editors’ Picks: 14 Things to See in New York This Weekartnetlogo

by Sarah Cascone

Each week, we search New York City for the most exciting and thought-provoking shows, screenings, and events. See them below.

1. “Women & the Art World” at Anita Rogers Gallery
Women of Culture & ELNYA present a panel discussion about what it means to be a woman working in the male-dominated art world, featuring art dealer Anita Rogers; Danika Druttman, director of creative programming at the Roger Smith Hotel and Lisa Small, senior curator of European art at the Brooklyn Museum. The evening will include wine, snacks, and a chance to see the gallery’s current exhibition, “Virva Hinnemo: Four Feet” (on view through April 21).

View more on the gallery’s website. 

Women of Culture & ELNYA Present: Women & The Art World

On Monday March 12th, you are invited to join Women of Culture and the Emerging Leaders of New York Arts (ELNYA) for a Conversation About Women & The Art World. Part of the Women of Culture Conversation series, this evening of networking and discussion will be an amazing opportunity to get a behind-the-scenes look at the world of fine art through the perspective of the women who work in it.

While historically women have played a huge role in building arts institutions and collections (think Peggy Guggenheim, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, and Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, among others) the industry as a whole is still predominantly run by men. According to Artsy, women working across arts professions make almost $20,000 less per year than men and ArtReview’s 2017 Power 100 list of the “most influential people in the contemporary art world” was only 38% women. Additionally, work by women artists makes up only 3–5% of major permanent collections in the U.S. and Europe (Guardian), and only 30% of artists represented by commercial galleries are women (Hyperallergic).

But women like our three panelists: Anita Rogers, Danika Druttman and Lisa Small, are all working against these odds and forging successful careers in the arts nonetheless. We will get a sneak peek into three different facets of the art world, learn about their unique careers and discuss how they have each overcome some of the hurdles women face in this male-dominated industry.

There will be wine, snacks and goody bags for all as well as plenty of time for networking and viewing the current exhibit entitled Four Feet by Swedish/Finnish artist Verva Hinnemo. Artists, Arts Administrotors and Arts Enthusiasts of all kinds will benefit from this vibrant and relevant discussion.

$20 through March 9th; $25 thereafter.
Tickets can also be purchased directly through the Women of Culture site here.

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Full Schedule:
6:30-7pm | Check-in & networking
7-8pm | Panel & Conversation
8-8:30pm | Networking & exhibition-viewing

More about the Panelists:
Anita Rogers is the Founder of Anita Rogers Gallery and British American Household Staffing, the nation’s leading domestic staffing and childcare agency. She was born in the United Kingdom but raised in Greece, which she considers home. She holds a degree in Ethnomusicology from The School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) as well as a degree in Western Classical Composition from King’s College London. She is a classically trained harpist and opera singer.

Danika Druttman is a cultural consultant based in New York City. As Director of Cultural Programming at Roger Smith Hotel, she has produced over 40 exhibitions, 5 years of monthly storytelling, poetry, music and performance events; conceptualized and run Window at 125 exhibition space; and developed the RS Artist Residency and fellowship opportunities. She is the founder of Mira Muse, a consultancy that specializes in conceptualizing and producing arts programming and cultural initiatives for organizations within a non institutional context.

Lisa Small is the Senior Curator of European Art at the Brooklyn Museum. Most recently, she organized the exhibition and edited the catalogue for Killer Heels: The Art of the High-Heeled Shoe(2014). She also co-curated the traveling exhibition French Moderns: Monet to Matisse, 1850–1950 (2017) as well as the Brooklyn Museum’s presentations of Georgia O’Keeffe: Living Modern (2017), The Rise of Sneaker Culture (2015), The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier: From the Sidewalk to the Catwalk(2013), and Jean-Michel Othoniel: My Way (2012). She has also taught art history and the history of photography at Hunter College, Brooklyn College, and the School of Visual Arts.

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More about the Anita Rogers Gallery & the exhibit on view:
Anita Rogers Gallery represents a diverse roster of emerging, mid career and posthumous artists whose work speaks to the contemporary landscape of the 20th and 21st centuries. The gallery, active in both primary and secondary markets, strives to cultivate the careers of exceptional painters and sculptors, both figurative and abstract, who have earned their place in the contemporary art market.

Virva Hinnemo continues to make eloquent, evocative paintings that link her uniquely physical process to a visual territory all her own. Hinnemo’s images are intimate and sublimated translations of things and objects delivered from a reservoir of visual annotations. Her language is spare and unaffected. Only what she genuinely intuits is for us to see. The virtues of paint are abundant but frugal, open-ended yet tough-minded. Hinnemo’s attitude is straightforward and not-to-be denied. If Motherwell made enduring images, Hinnemo makes hers persistent and resolute; her lyricism is of another kind. Hinnemo’s blunt inscriptions are made exclusively by hand and give the impression of signs or symbols observed directly from life and always on her own terms. She does nothing lightly.

More about ELNYA:
ELNYA is a multidisciplinary arts network and professional development group for creative leaders in their 20s and 30s. Through innovative programing, open dialogue, and a collaborative community, we redefine what it means to be an emerging arts leader in New York City.

 

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