Tag Archives: Arts

Middle East Institute at Columbia University Shares Anas Albraehe’s Solo Exhibition

Anita Rogers Gallery is thrilled to present The Dreamer, a solo exhibition of work by Syrian painter Anas Albraehe.

The exhibition will be on view June 29 through August 27 at 494 Greenwich Street, Ground Floor in New York City.

The gallery will welcome visitors on the evening of Wednesday, June 29, 6-8pm for a reception.

You can read the poem that accompanies the exhibition here.

Albraehe paints expressive portraits of men asleep – these are laborers and refugees enjoying a brief respite from the day to day. There is a historical precedent for painting sleeping figures – and men in particular (vs the ubiquitous reclining female nude) – artists from Goya to Bacon to Van Gogh have broached the topic. Born in Syria in 1991, Albraehe is a multidisciplinary artist focused on painting and theatre. He graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in Painting and Drawing from Damascus University of Fine Arts in Syria in 2014. After the beginning of the war in Syria, he moved to Lebanon where he obtained a Master’s degree in Psychology and Art Therapy from the Lebanese University in 2015. His recent work combines his interests in the fields of art and psychology to produce a portrait that explores the psychology of color and the gaze of the Other. Albraehe has had solo exhibitions in Paris, Jordan, Beirut, and participated in group exhibitions worldwide. The artist’s work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of the Arab World in Paris (IMA) and he is a member of the French Artists Syndicate. He now lives and works in Beirut.

View more on Columbia’s website. 

View on AnitaRogersGallery.com 

Mark Webber: Material Guy

Mark Webber: Material Guy

Making sculptural works from an array of mixed media

by Kelly Velocci

Mark Webber Anita Rogers Gallery Hamptons Cottages and Gardens
Mark Webber practices two very different kinds of work. His vocation: custom cabinetry fabricated for high-end Hamptons homes. His avocation: sculptures made with Hydrocal, a plaster-like material, and a mélange of found objects from construction sites and other sources. Although these two endeavors are vastly disparate, both are rooted in the art of fabrication. “There’s a craftsmanship aspect to cabinetmaking, whereas sculpture requires you to be more creative,” says Webber, a Connecticut native and longtime resident of Sag Harbor. “Sculpture does not have an inherent purpose, like a cabinet does. I have to think about different things when I’m making either one.”

Webber graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from SUNY Purchase in 1980, but soon shifted his focus to cabinetmaking to make a living. Around five years ago, however, he decided to “acknowledge my creativity again” and began experimenting with sculpture. He started working on wooden forms before transitioning to plaster and, more recently, Hydrocal, which he casts or shapes with hand tools, such as spatulas and knives. “All those years as a cabinetmaker gave me a solid base from which to start making sculpture,” Webber says. “It was like my springboard back into fine arts.” He has lately been pushing the boundaries of his pieces further, incorporating found objects— steel scraps, bricks, rubber—in order to bring a sense of tension and balance or create “an interesting compositional relationship.”

 

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View on Cottages & Gardens website

William Scott: Abstracting and Appreciating the Everyday

William Scott: Abstracting and Appreciating the Everyday

by Chloë Ashby

 

William Scott: Abstracting and Appreciating the Everyday

Five Pears 1976
William Scott (1913–1989)
British Council Collection

 

Art UK:

To some art critics, the twentieth-century British artist William Scott’s kitchen-table still lifes are too timid – as Roberta Smith wrote in The New York Times, they can be seen as ‘abstract paintings for people who don’t like abstraction’. Others, myself included, find them enticingly reduced and for the most part easily readable, which is part of their charm.

Scott’s compositions are striking in their simplicity, and somehow both pleasurable and puritan, sensuous and serene. A few boiled eggs, a couple of ripe pears, fresh mackerel on a plate, pots and pans, a bunch of grapes: these are his humble subjects. As he once said, ‘I find beauty in plainness’.

Born in Scotland in 1913 and brought up in Northern Ireland, Scott’s surroundings were grey and barren, his upbringing strictly Presbyterian. The objects he painted in an often-sombre palette were, he said, ‘the symbols of the life I knew best’.

After his father died trying to save some folk from a burning building, the local council raised funds to send the 15-year-old to Belfast College of Art. From there, he won a scholarship to study at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, where he bunked up with the poet Dylan Thomas and two other Welshmen and married fellow student Mary Lucas. In the Second World War, he was a cartographer, and in its wake, he was a pioneer of British abstraction.

 

Read the full article on ArtUK.org

James Scott Films Streaming This Summer

James Scott Films Streaming This Summer

James Scott’s Summer Streaming continues with the following schedule:

July 6 – 12: The Great Ice Cream Robbery (1971) 40 mins
July 13 – 19: Coilin and Platonida (1976)  80 mins
July 20 – 26: Nightcleaners (1975) 90 mins
July 27 – August 2: ’36 to ’77  (1978) 85 mins
August 3 – 9: Fragments (2019) 43 mins

To view any of the films in the summer’s rotating schedule, go to https://vimeo.com/404435215/27ac239848.

In The Great Ice Cream Robbery (1971), which was proposed to the Arts Council as a two-screen film, the idea was to mirror the language and philosophy of Oldenburg towards temporality and ephemerality in the nature of the work: happenings, soft materials, impermanence. With two 16mm projectors and separate sound systems, its form of presentation would insure the potential of change every time the film was shown. Sadly, it meant that over the years, the film was rarely screened except by risk-averse and totally dedicated curators. Now for the first time in the digital age, it is actually possible to see this as a two-screen presentation as close as possible to how it was originally intended to be seen. We suggest using headphones or a stereo sound system for viewing.

As we were editing The Great Ice Cream Robbery, I also started to work with my friend Marc Karlin on a political documentary about janitors (mostly immigrant women of colour and Irish women) who worked through the night, cleaning office buildings. Little did we realize that we had embarked on a five-year project. We were joined by Humphry Trevelyan and Mary Kelly and called ourselves the Berwick Street Film Collective. Nightcleaners came out in 1975 at the Edinburgh Film Festival.

After the intensity of Nightcleaners, I wanted to move to a completely different kind of film and in 1975 began Coilin and Platonida for German television. This was to be a silent narrative film set in a remote part of Ireland at the turn of the century and based on a Russian short story by Leskov. I had come across the story in Walter Benjamin’s essay on storytelling. This essay very much influenced my filmic approach using 8mm refilmed to 16mm. I found local non-professionals to play the parts as well as using my two young children.

Upon completing Coilin and Platonida, Marc drew me back once more into the Nightcleaners story.  It had been a struggle without an end. The victory strike at the Ministry of Defense had come too late to be included in ‘Part 1’ and so the new film, ‘36 to ‘77 (1978) was to take this victory, and through the eyes of Myrtle, one of the janitors, look back on the campaign and reflect on how it had changed her life.

We end up with my last film Fragments, which in some ways connects to the first art film with David Hockney, Love’s Presentation. Fragments is a film about the painter Derek Boshier preparing for a new exhibition. Both Love’s Presentation and Fragments are films about process, but separated by over 50 years. Derek and David first met at the Royal College of Art and remain friends to this day. Both started as ‘pop’ artists and then followed very different trajectories.

Fragments was completed at the end of last year and premiered in January 2020 at the Rotterdam International Film Festival.

– James Scott

Visit james-scott.com/

Discussion Between Anita Rogers and Robert Szot

On June 4, 2020, gallery owner Anita Rogers and painter Robert Szot sat down on Instagram Live to discuss art-making during quarantine, the gallery/artist relationship and the pandemic’s effect on the art world.

The Lyman Allyn Art Museum Acquires Work by Jan Cunningham

We are pleased to announce that the Lyman Allyn Art Museum in New London, CT has added a drawing (right) by Jan Cunningham to their permanent collection.

ABOUT LYMAN ALLYN ART MUSEUM:

The Lyman Allyn Art Museum is located in New London, Connecticut and was founded in 1926 by Lyman Allyn’s daughter Harriet Upson Allyn. The collection includes European and non-Western art as well as American fine and decorative art, 17th-century European works on paper, 19th-century American paintings, and contemporary art. The museum also conducts educational programs.

Lyman Allyn’s permanent collection consists of approximately 10,000 objects. Much of this collection was developed by the Museum’s first Director Winslow Ames, who acquired works dating from the 16th through the 19th centuries. It includes works by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, as well as works by Frederic Leighton, François Boucher, Nicholas Poussin, Gustave Courbet, Charles LeBrun, and Tiepolo. Featured artists include Rembrandt Peale, Benjamin West, Gilbert Stuart, John Trumbull, Thomas Cole, Frederick Edwin Church, and Albert Bierstadt.[

ABOUT THE WORK:

Jan Cunningham

Untitled (abstraction)
2000
Charcoal and thread on paper
7.5″ x 7.5″

Visit the museum’s website

Gordon Moore Featured in Hyperallergic

Artists Quarantine With Their Art Collections

Gordon Moore in Lauren Henkin’s Collection

BY STEPHEN MAINE

AUTHOR’S NOTE: Continuing my inquiry into the ways that artists look at the work they live with, I’ve been asking the following questions: In the context of rampant disease, do you look at your personal collection differently now, and which works in particular? Is there one that especially resonates with you at this weird, frightening moment? And does it take on new meaning?

Lauren Henkin (Rockland, Maine): I first saw Gordon Moore’s work in an exhibition at Betty Cuningham Gallery in 2014. The show included paintings and photo emulsion drawings. Both were compelling, but the drawings struck a chord. There is a lushness to the grounds — beautifully printed photographs toned in warm yellows and grays — which, combined with marks of ink and gouache, suggest a velvet canvas scorched by electricity. It was as if the artist had formed a wire sculpture and then tracked its slow progress of shadow-making across a concrete surface, his hand creating furcated markings of time passing.

Quarantine has forced on me a strange relationship to time. One moment is filled with reflection and pause; the next, a casual glint of thought tossed into the wind. Mon-day, Tues-day, Wednes-day are no more. All that remain are day and night.

One of Gordon’s drawings hangs on the wall beside my desk. I see it whenever l look up from my computer. Throughout the day, I can see how light engages the work. In the morning, the sun buoys the light areas of the drawing. At night, the dark tones recede deeper into space.

The drawing has replaced my clock. It’s a beautiful and needed reminder that time can be measured not by seconds, hours, or days but by marks, tone, and depth.

To view the full article, visit anitarogersgallery.com or Hyperallergic.

Jack Martin Rogers: Drawing – Digital Catalog Now Available

Anita Rogers Gallery is proud to present a selection of works on paper by British artist Jack Martin Rogers (1943-2001). Anita Rogers, the owner of the gallery, is the daughter of the artist and now owns seventy-five percent of his estate. This will be the artist’s second major solo exhibition in the U.S. and the first to highlight the artist’s creative process and the centrality of drawing in his practice. The show will debut online in April 2020 and continue in the gallery when we are able to reopen.

The collection features a selection of preparatory drawings, never before seen by the public, that reveal Rogers’ immense dedication to observation and detail. The artist studied anatomy and fine art at the Birmingham School of Art in the UK, often dissecting and sketching bodies of the deceased to learn how to better illustrate the human form. While in school, his meticulous methods took root and they remained at the heart of his work for the rest of his life.

In conjunction with the show, the gallery has released a digital catalog highlighting over thirty works by the artist, the majority of which have never before been seen by the public. Download the digital catalog here.

Email us to pre-order your print copy ($20).

Download PDF

Gordon Moore Awarded a 2020 Guggenheim Fellowship

On April 8, 2020, the Board of Trustees of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation approved the awarding of Guggenheim Fellowships to a diverse group of 175 scholars, artists, and writers. Appointed on the basis of prior achievement and exceptional promise, the successful candidates were chosen from a group of almost 3,000 applicants in the Foundation’s ninety-sixth competition.

 

 

 

 

GORDON ENNIS MOORE:

Born in Iowa and raised in Kansas, Gordon Moore began painting pictures at the age of 6 and has never stopped. Being a product of the Great Plains the dominant thematic in his work has long been informed by that experience and that environment and can be defined to this day quite simply as: Space. The creation of which, in an abstract Painting and Drawing idiom, is the fuel which drives his imagination. After finishing the Academic requirements of a formal education in Art, first at the University of Washington in Seattle and then at Yale in New Haven, he moved to the TRUE University of Art and Life In 1972: New York City, where he has lived ever since. In the ensuing years Moore’ work has developed an interest in a refined clarity of edge vaguely redolent of Architectonic space as well as fragments of shapes found from the street experience, most notably – the Bowery, close to which he has lived for nearly half a Century. His work has been most often shown in one-person showings since 2000 and he has received a number of awards and fellowships.

View all 2020 Fellows

ArtNet: 13 of Our Favorite Gallery Shows From Coast to Coast That You Can Visit Virtually

Art galleries provide necessary spaces for creative discovery and connection—experiences we all may be seeking in our current existences. Luckily, many galleries across the country can still be visited virtually, and at your work-from-home leisure through Artnet Galleries.

If you’re in need of an art break, here are 13 of our favorite exhibitions, from New York to California, that you can gallery hop through your laptop.

2. “Mark Webber: We Shall Be City Upon a Hill” at Anita Rogers Gallery, New York

Free

Time: All day, every day

Take a virtual tour of Mark Webber’s exhibition here. 

View select pieces from Mark Webber’s solo exhibition.

View the full list
Installation view of “Mark Webber: We Shall be a City Upon a Hill.” Photo by Jon-Paul Rodriguez

Installation view of “Mark Webber: We Shall be a City Upon a Hill.” Photo by Jon-Paul Rodriguez