Tag Archives: Contemporary Art

Book Launch | William Scott: A Family History by Cardwell McClure

The Friends of Fermanagh County Museum is organising a book launch on Saturday, 22 April, at Enniskillen Castle, showcasing Cardwell’s “William Scott: A Family History” publication.

Every Picture Tells a Story (90 mins) feature film based on the early life of William Scott, directed by James Scott with Alex Norton, Phyllis Logan and Natasha Richardson will be shown as part of this event.

Enniskillen Castle Facebook Page

Enniskillen Castle Fermanagh County Museum Twitter

ABOUT THE BOOK:

The author of this family history is Cardwell McClure, son of Mary McClure, née Scott, the younger sister of renowned artist William Scott CBE, RA.  Cardwell remembers how his mother told him that William, when a teenager, would get his younger sister to sit for him lacking any other willing members of the family.

This book provides a first hand experience of the family’s trials through poverty, tragedy, war and fame.

There are twelve chapters in the book, eleven of which are devoted to each child, while the first chapter outlines the family beginnings in Glasgow, Scotland.

As Paul Teggart, the editor of the book says:  “It is a wonderful story of triumph over adversity, sadness and happiness, and family loyalty.  I can say, without a doubt, that the book is a labour of love and has only been completed after many years of dedicated research and a fine eye to detail by its author Cardwell McClure. It makes good reading whether you look at it from a family point of view or from an educational standpoint in examining the life and work of William Scott the artist.”   A chronology of the Scott family dating from 1887 to 2022 is also being published alongside the Family History.

The Family History book can be bought on Amazon via the following link: www.amazon.co.uk

William Scott: A Family History which has taken many years in research, writing and editing partly due to the ill health of the author, Cardwell McClure, is lavishly illustrated with paintings by William Scott CBE RA.

View Event Website

View on AnitaRogersGallery.com

Meer Spotlights Jack Martin Rogers

Jack Martin Rogers, Knossos, c. 1974, Oil on canvas, 56 1/2h x 84w in

Anita Rogers Gallery is proud to present Peregrination: from past to present, a solo exhibition of paintings and works on paper by British artist Jack Martin Rogers (1943-2001).

Peregrination takes the viewer on a journey through the artist’s lifetime and his travels through Britain, Turkey, Italy, and the Greek islands. Through paintings, sketches, and watercolor studies spanning over forty years, the exhibition offers insight into the mind of a painter, musician, and philosopher. Birds of prey play a prominent role in Greek mythology and ancient Greek texts; indeed, Homer often uses them as omens or signs from the gods, and Calchas, the seer introduced at the beginning of the Iliad, is said to “scan the flight of birds” to understand “all things that are past and all that are to come.”

It seems fitting then that Rogers would have been drawn to observing and painting this celestial subject; the artist was a profound thinker who spent his life studying history and classical literature, alongside science, anatomy, and technology. This interest in time and the interconnectedness of past and present is evident in his work, which often depicts historical and modern themes alongside one another.

View More on AnitaRogersGallery.com

View More on Meer.com

Greek City Times Highlights Jack Martin Rogers

Jack Martin Rogers, Nude, c.1964, Oil on canvas, 29 3/4″ x 24 1/2″

NEW YORK – Anita Rogers Gallery presents ‘Peregrination: From Past to Present’, a solo exhibition of paintings and works on paper by British artist Jack Martin Rogers (1943-2001) on view March 22 through April 22 at 494 Greenwich Street in Manhattan. The gallery will host an opening reception on Wednesday, March 22, 6-8 PM.

Peregrination takes the viewer on a journey through the artist’s lifetime and his travels through Britain, Turkey, Italy, and the Greek islands. Through paintings, sketches, and watercolor studies spanning over forty years, the exhibition offers insight into the mind of a painter, musician, and philosopher.

Birds of prey play a prominent role in Greek mythology and ancient Greek texts; indeed, Homer often uses them as omens or signs from the gods, and Calchas, the seer introduced at the beginning of the Iliad, is said to “scan the flight of birds” to understand “all things that are past and all that are to come.” It seems fitting then that Rogers would have been drawn to observing and painting this celestial subject; the artist was a profound thinker who spent his life studying history and classical literature, alongside science, anatomy, and technology. This interest in time and the interconnectedness of past and present is evident in his work, which often depicts historical and modern themes alongside one another.

The show highlights major oil paintings the artist completed while living in Greece, as well as watercolor works on paper, and preliminary sketches.  A curious and intuitive man who traveled extensively, crafted his own instruments, raised a family, and dedicated himself to art, Rogers spent his life seeking light, truth, and beauty in a turbulent world. In 1984, his family home fell victim to arson and much of his work was lost. Select examples of surviving works from that time can be seen in this exhibition, complete with evidence of the devastating fire; others exist now only in photographs. The exhibition aims to provide visitors with an overview of the artist’s career, from the early 1960s through his final years painting in the 1990s.

Rogers was born in Wiltshire, UK in 1943. He was classically trained in anatomy and fine art at the Birmingham School of Art. There, he developed his meticulous methods, especially evident in his preliminary drawings. He moved to the Greek island of Crete in 1962, where, inspired by the Greek landscape, history, and architecture, he entered his most prolific artistic period. He died in 2001, leaving behind an extraordinary body of work to his daughter, gallery owner Anita Rogers. This will be the artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery.

View on GreekCityTimes.com

Jack Martin Rogers Featured in The National Herald

Jack Martin Rogers, Peregrine Falcon, 1981, Gouache on paper, 10 1/2″ x 15″

NEW YORK – Anita Rogers Gallery presents ‘Peregrination: From Past to Present’, a solo exhibition of paintings and works on paper by British artist Jack Martin Rogers (1943-2001) on view March 22 through April 22 at 494 Greenwich Street in Manhattan. The gallery will host an opening reception on Wednesday, March 22, 6-8 PM.

Peregrination takes the viewer on a journey through the artist’s lifetime and his travels through Britain, Turkey, Italy, and the Greek islands. Through paintings, sketches, and watercolor studies spanning over forty years, the exhibition offers insight into the mind of a painter, musician, and philosopher.

View on TheNationalHerald.com

View on AnitaRogersGallery.com

Tussle Magazine Reviews Mahreen Zuberi

Mahreen Zuberi, Mapping (2), 2023, Gouache and pencil drawing on wasli, 10″ x 12″

Beyond the Surface

On Mahreen Zuberi’s Exercising the Border

At Anita Roger’s Gallery, NY

By Joanna Seifter

Meaning, an immaterial concept, is only made perceptible when merged with form, a material object–meaning’s diametric opposite. When an idea marries a surface, it creates a painting, a physical manifestation of the artist’s vision and insight. In turn, it can inspire countless meanings with audiences now and forever, inhibited to the surface’s length and width. But what if these restrictions are mitigated, even obliterated, unleashing meaning into the corporeal world in infinite directions?

These are the impenetrable concepts made accessible by “is/is not” and “in between 1/8”, the first two works featured in contemporary painter Mahreen Zuberi’s latest entry at Anita Rogers Gallery, “Exercising the Border”. Zuberi’s manifesto, deftly synthesizing metaphysical theory and poetry with fine art, is a fitting introduction to her solo show, a quietly momentous rumination on the relationship between artist and environment and the limitless potential of creativity when unfettered from imposed constraints.

The exhibition’s first illustrative painting, “is/is not (i)”, succinctly and brilliantly establishes a visual foundation that Zuberi and her audience can apply to her other works. “is/is not (i)” presents an austere, off-white rectangle on a sheet of A4 paper. “A piece of paper has 4 vertices joined by 4 lines that define its space,” proclaims text adjacent to the rectangle. Inside the rectangle reads, “Anything within the lines is paper,” establishing the shape as the surface’s focal point, a biosphere confined between the 4 vertices and 4 lines. Immediately underneath the preceding sentence and on the perimeter of the rectangle states, “Anything outside the lines is not paper,” eliminating the negative space entirely.

Each painting in Zuberi’s haunting “Crossing Over” series features geometric clusters of stars in an inky sky accented by a thick, blindingly white border, a simple yet strikingly stunning image. The borders do not outline the stars’ contours, nor do they contain them the way picture frames protect photographs. Rather, they overlap the star clusters as the forms trickle past them. When implementing Zuberi’s guidelines from “is/is not (i)”, the space surrounding the overlapping shapes and the frame is the physical world beyond the artist’s eye, the “not paper.”

The shapes’ continuance outside their white borders expands the seemingly self-contained frame, the immaterial “paper,” into the worldly realm. “Crossing Over (5)” ia a membranous structure made of stars underscores this point, suggesting its permeability. Zuberi also explores this thematic thread in her “Mapping” series. Each painting invokes colonial cartography (including aged paper and detailed studies of local fauna) while cleverly subverting its purpose (the series of lines that would ordinarily distinguish regions are fragmented, replacing divided territories with unified land), calling the arbitrarily restrictive nature of borders into question.

Like the lines in “Mapping”, “Crossing Over’s” frames also presents a series of directional lines invoking architectural drawings of three-point perspective, each of which begins outside the white border and elongates past the works’ perimeter. Zuberi also includes these lines in her “Limits” series, geometric forms atop multi-axis graphs. “The lines that stop at the edge of the paper extend beyond infinitely when extended into the imagination,” she explains in “Limit 1/8”. These directional lines are also present in Zuberi’s “Borders” series, which, like “Crossing Over”, also features starry skies. Unlike Crossing Over, Borders’ white structures vary in width, stretching from painting to painting. The frames in “Borders” resemble the negative space in film strips–ostensibly a sequence of vignettes–capturing a specific duration, implying that “Borders” is a continuous narrative as opposed to isolated images.

Series like “Borders” are a conduit to employ Zuberi’s artistic and philosophical framework to our conceptualization of time itself. “The night sky allows us to see the many pasts in cohesion,” writes Zuberi in “Possibilities 1/8”. “By developing the capacity to practice pushing borders we may find that within the limit is that which is unlimited.” “Exercising the Border” reflects Mahreen Zuberi’s keen ability to represent time surpasses intervals or even life cycles–her artworks, small in scale yet immensely powerful in scope, encompass billions of years, traversing the past, present and whatever the future may.

View the full review on TussleMagazine.com

Kolaj Art Features Mahreen Zuberi: Exercising the Border

Installation view of Mahreen Zuberi: Exercising the Border

Photo by Jon-Paul Rodriguez

Anita Rogers Gallery is pleased to present Exercising the Border, a solo exhibition of new works on paper by Pakistani artist Mahreen Zuberi. The exhibition will be on view from February 1 through March 11, 2023 at 494 Greenwich Street, GFL, New York, NY 10013.

Zuberi was born in 1981 in Karachi, Pakistan. She completed her Bachelor of Fine Arts with distinction at the National College of Arts, Lahore, specializing in miniature painting with minors in printmaking and photography. Her work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions including in Karachi, Islamabad, Milan, Dubai, and Morocco. Zuberi’s new compositions on wasli, handmade paper in use since the tenth century, are geometrically precise and yet open-ended as the night sky. In the artist’s own words:

We can measure the speed at which light travels by measuring how long it takes for it to travel from one point to another. The light from the sun takes 8.3 minutes to travel to Earth. Light travels approximately 6 million miles in one year. This is called a light year. The light from Proxima Centauri, the closest star to the sun, takes over 4 light years to reach us. The light from Deneb, the brightest star we can see with our naked eye, takes 1500 light years.  

The stars as we see them in the night sky are in the state in which they were 4 to 1500 years ago. We know that in the temporal realm time moves forward. It is not possible to see the past. However the stars, as we see them in the night sky are dioramas emanating from a distant past. 

In the night sky the distance between our eye and the many stars is not singular. The light emitted from the various stars reaches us in different numbers of light years. When we gaze up into the night sky we are witnessing events that are happening in many different temporalities, as a singular event. The night sky allows us to see the many pasts in cohesion. Time as we perceive it in the sensory or physical world is disrupted because of the very laws that govern it:

1) that light travels and 2) that the distance between our naked eye and an object emitting and reflecting light determines when we will see it. 

Though the limits of the sensory world are tied up in the laws that govern it, the positioning of the stars in the cosmos is a reminder that even within the fixed are possibilities that defy the limits set by the material world. By developing the capacity to practice pushing borders we may find that within the limits is that which is unlimited. 

For further information and photographs, please contact Elizabeth Thompson at elizabeth.thompson@anitarogersgallery.com, or call 347.604.2346. The gallery is open Tuesday through Saturday 10am – 6pm.

View on Kolaj Art

Insider’s Edition: Art events not to miss!

Installation image of Mahreen Zuberi: Exercising the Border

Insider’s Edition: Art events not to miss!

Compiled by Avalon Ashley Bellos

 

Mahreen Zuberi

Feb. 1 at Anita Rogers Gallery (494 Greenwich St., Ground Floor)

Check out a body of post-modern and contemporary work from Pakistani artist Mahreen Zuberi.

 

Justin Cloud

Feb. 2 at George Segal Gallery (1 Normal Ave.)

Check out work from this newcomer to the art scene.

 

Fer Da Silva: Love is Inside

Feb. 3 at DTR Modern Gallery (458 W. Broadway)

Kick off this Valentine’s Day with a Solo Exhibition of Venezuelan/Portuguese abstract expressionist Fer Da Silva.

View More on AMNY The Villager

View on AnitaRogersGallery.com

Mandy Vahabzadeh Exhibition at Leica Geneva

Mandy Vahabzadeh is exhibiting a solo exhibition of black and white photographs at Leica Geneva through January 17, 2023.

From Leica (FR):

Photographier, toujours en argentique et de manière bienveillante, des femmes et des hommes à travers le monde. Voilà l’ambition de Mandy Vahabzadeh, qui réussit à allier habilement sensibilité et esthétique. Une exposition organisée à Genève rend hommage à son travail.

Inde. Vietnam. Indonésie. Laos. Japon. Sri Lanka. Depuis plus de trois décennies déjà, Mandy Vahabzadeh parcourt l’Asie notamment, en compagnie de ses fidèles appareils photographiques, des Leica M. Cette photographe professionnelle américano-suisse se concentre sur la pratique du portrait, jamais volés ni posés, prenant tout le temps nécessaire à traduire en image les personnages et les scènes qui retiennent son attention.

« Lorsqu’une personne est présente devant un appareil photo, gracieuse, le regard direct, sans la moindre trace de conscience de soi, c’est un cadeau pour le photographe qui disparaît alors. Un portrait, c’est une invitation à entrer en relation avec le spectateur. Avec la magie de la lumière, il devient alors poésie en noir et blanc », explique-t-elle.

C’est lors de son premier voyage en Inde – au Ladakh, en 1979 – qu’elle éprouve un choc, à la fois émotionnel et esthétique. « J’ai eu un véritable coup de foudre pour ce pays et pour son peuple », précise-t-elle. Si jusque-là elle photographiait en couleurs, le monochrome s’impose désormais à elle: à ses yeux, cette approche permet d’aller à l’essentiel.

Patiente et perfectionniste à la fois, Mandy Vahabzadeh sait parfaitement que, pour réunir les ingrédients essentiels d’une photographie réussie, il ne faut pas compter son temps. Faire des repérages minutieux. Et attendre le moment opportun. « En Asie, la population foisonnante impose au photographe son propre tempo. Il lui faut observer longuement son sujet, avant de savoir déclencher au meilleur instant, lorsque le triptyque personnage-composition-lumière s’avère idéal. »

En témoignent les magnifiques images présentées au Leica Store Genève dès le 15 décembre. Chacune d’elles montre à quel point la photographe établie à New York parvient à s’immerger dans l’environnement de ses sujets. Même de nuit, lorsque les conditions de lumière imposent une vitesse lente, un diaphragme grand ouvert, et que le contexte impose de la retenue. Comme sur cette image empreinte de sérénité où une femme prie debout, durant le Divali, la fête des lumières, les pieds dans le Gange, à côté d’une vendeuse de diya, ces lampes à huile traditionnelles.

Dans ce type de contexte, les Leica M s’avèrent de précieux alliés. La photographe utilise des M6 et M7 sur lesquels elle monte des objectifs de 50 et 75mm, ses longueurs focales préférées, et occasionnellement des 35 et 90mm. « Au début des années 80, je me suis tournée vers Leica en acquérant un M2, puis un M6 début 90. La raison s’avère très simple: la marque de Wetzlar constitue une référence indiscutable en matière de photographie plein format. Sans parler de l’esthétique de leurs produits, tout simplement unique. »

Mandy Vahabzadeh a d’ailleurs réservé un exemplaire du dernier Leica M6 – fidèle au modèle original sorti en 1984 – dès l’annonce de sa sortie. On ne change pas une équipe qui gagne!

Exposition au Leica Store Genève (Place de Saint-Gervais 1) dès le 15 décembre.

Biographie

Mandy Vahabzadeh est une photographe professionnelle américano-suisse, d’origine perse, résidant à New York depuis 1976. Elle a fréquenté le Pratt Institute, l’université de Columbia et la Parsons School of Design. Ses photographies – exposées à New York, Aspen, Santa Monica et Atlanta – ont donné lieu à la publication de deux ouvrages, Soul Unsold (Graystone Books, 1992) et un livre d’artiste (Small Editions, 2016), limité à 15 exemplaires.

 

View More on Leica’s Website (FR)

View on AnitaRogersGallery.com

Anita Rogers Juries NFT Design Awards

Launched in 2022, NFTDA is an international NFT design and development award platform that honors and showcases solo creators, studios and teams for innovation in the NFT design field.

NFTDA works with an international panel of expert judges. Winners are rewarded with official certificates, mentions in media and large industry newsletters along with thousands of daily visitors.

View more or submit your NFT project for review.

View on AnitaRogersGallery.com

Elizabeth Thompson Judges MIXMASTER @ The MATT

MIXMASTER is an exhibition that seeks to discover and recognize the talents of its artist members working in New England and the Tri-State region. Initiated to support and recognize contemporary art, MIXMASTER provides an opportunity for established and emerging artists to debut their most recent work, done in the last three years.

Works will be judged by Elizabeth Thompson Kirkpatrick, a Director at Anita Rogers Gallery in NYC.

View more on the Mattatuck Museum Website

View on AnitaRogersGallery.com