Tag Archives: George Negroponte

ArtCritical Pick: George Negroponte at Anita Rogers Gallery

Despite the show’s title, an alluring softness pervades George Negroponte’s new work in his exhibition, “Gravel Road,” at Anita Rogers Gallery in Soho through January 7. Shaped bits and pieces of cardboard serve as his support. Porous and absorbent as this material is by nature, the deep tan of the cardboard radiates a muted, soothing light recalling the earthen grounds of Vuillard, like whom the work is understated, inviting, intimate. Warmth of ground is balanced, in Negroponte, by a predominately cool palette, though occasionally a fire engine red blasts out from his deep browns, rich greens, blacks and whites. The irregularities of these disassembled boxes makes unpredictability a given. The rounded, overlapping, disk-like forms in the exhibition’s title work, for instance, may suggest stacked vessels, but they find themselves in an interior space rather than the cosmos. As in earlier work, Negroponte will occasionally pair smaller pieces in intriguing combinations. The ensuing dialogue has the animated tension of children sizing each other up in the playground.

ERIC HOLZMAN

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Eric Holzman’s Essay on George Negroponte Featured in Steven Alexander Journal

George Negroponte comes to making art with a pure love of painting. His aim has never been to turn over the apple cart, or in Al Held’s words, reinvent the wheel. As such, he has been compelled to paint his way through various modes and approaches, learning and searching for authenticity and resonance.

In his current show [at Anita Rogers Gallery]… Negroponte uses shaped bits and pieces of cardboard as his support. The work feels softer than the previous body of work as the material itself is porous and absorbent in nature and the deep tan color of the cardboard radiates a warm muted soothing light, in a way similar to Vuillard who often used earth colored grounds to inform and unify the colors in his composition. Like Vuillard the work tends to be understated, approachable and intimate. These works are small, all under 20” in height, on the longer side. The warmth of the ground is balanced by a predominately cool palette, though occasionally he uses a hard fire engine red and there are also whites, deep browns, rich greens, and black as well. As in his last show Negroponte occasionally uses pairings of smaller pieces in combination. The dialogue is intriguing…

Read the full piece on Steven Alexander Journal

George Negroponte: Gravel Road Reviewed by Douglas Turner

George is obviously a venerable artist. My early impressions of his latest (re)+work are very positive. Keeping all of this in mind, I’m certain my reflections are influenced by the number of pieces shown, the symmetry of how the pieces are hung, and the architectural qualities and layout of the gallery, and of course the pieces themselves having a constructed efficacious quality; all giving a sense of a utilitarian longing. That is to say, many of the pieces seem to replicate die-cast mechanical objects and at the same time undeniably evanescent cardboard.

This is accomplished by the shapes of the parts and of the objects as a whole, as well as color choices. So rather than the antecedent of things, I see an assembling of finished objects when viewing the entirety of the body of work.

Read the full review on The Architecture of Tomorrow

George Negroponte: Straddling the Studio and the Museum

GN 021 Four Shapes for RdK, 2016, 14x4 inMany notable artists — among them Dan Flavin, Sol LeWitt, and Brice Marden — worked at museums early in their careers, usually as security guards, but few kept one foot in the studio and one in a museum for three decades. George Negroponte managed to do just that.

Since his first show at the Drawing Center in SoHo in 1977, his work has appeared in dozens of museum and gallery exhibitions throughout the world. Impressed by the breadth and clarity of the Drawing Center’s mission, he joined the staff in 1977 and eventually organized exhibitions, served on its board from 1991 to 2002, and as its president from 2002 until 2007. He remains a trustee emeritus.

“I had fantastic dealers in New York, but somewhere in the back of my mind I probably felt some dissatisfaction with the marketplace and with my own work,” he said during a recent talk at his Springs studio. “So I did those two things, my art and the Drawing Center. It was fascinating to experience both the institution and my own studio.”

Mark Segal, The East Hampton Star

View Full Article on EastHamptonStar.Com

George Negroponte: Gravel Road

October 19 – November 30, 2016

On view at Anita Rogers Gallery

A man can look at this little pile on his bureau for thirty years and never once see it. It is as invisible as his own hand. Once I saw it, however, the search became possible.

– Walker Percy, The Moviegoer

GN 004 Gravel Road 2016. 18 12 x 7 incehes.When I was a child I imprinted on Cezanne’s Bather at MOMA, just like those incubator-hatched goslings fixated on the wading boots of the Austrian ornithologist Konrad Lorenz in 1935. It was love at first sight as Lorenz brilliantly directed his babies into the lake for their very first swimming lesson. For me too, the image of that Cezanne was instantly and permanently engraved on my brain: a slender body with hands firmly grasped on his hips and two clumsy feet poised to move forward. Additionally, I detected an echo of my own face and head: skewed downward and resolutely self-righteous and I loved the young man’s expression of cagey dissent. That painting created a void in me the size of the universe. How to fill it?

Not much happens very fast for me and I’ve come to understand Ad Reinhardt’s guidance: study ten thousand paintings and walk ten thousand miles and make no allowances for haste or, for that matter, anything else because along the way the search does get harder and the road becomes strewn with potholes, dents, regrets and ruts. I’ll take the long view because let’s face it subsidized freedom is for bankers.

Simply put, I admire the stoic and splendidly solemn. I use premixed hardware store paint and a cut-and-build method: stacking and superimposing discarded cardboard just like laying bricks right on top of each other. These blunt marks, poured, cut, slow and shaped, look to me like emblems or bodies longing for life of their own. They need from me no more than to be fixed, pinned down and secured in space, even if occasionally by chance or luck. Vertical, standing, and poised they want to suggest a presence or body or the impression of a handshake or gesture, like the greeting of an old friend. Some of these recently completed works (some started in 2007) have been repainted, reassembled and hammered out over long periods of time. My hope is their insistent physicality makes a reasonable claim for taking up space and that their relentless self-editing gives them bodily restitution, compensating for their acute (absurd) stubbornness. Their meaning is fixed by their own autonomy: they are artifacts, set apart, self-sufficient, and speaking on their own terms. In my better moments I consider them to be visible traces of my hand, rooted in the real, the not-manipulated, and the not-over-parented. So my parting words to them as I deliver them into the world: be like geese, stay calm on the surface and paddle like hell below.

George Negroponte summer, 2016

George Negroponte Interviewed by Hamptons Art Hub

Artist George Negroponte is about process. After almost four decades of making art, his work can be viewed in three distinct phases with the commitment to abstraction the essential connection across all. Born and raised in NYC, George Negroponte studied art at Yale with Bernie Chaet and William Bailey. His work is held in the collections of numerous museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and he has exhibited extensively in New York City and internationally since 1977.

The complete interview spans over a year and can be viewed in it’s entirety here. Excerpt below:

Pat Rogers: Here we are about 11 months later and a solo exhibit of your work opens at Anita Rogers Gallery in the middle of October. Can you tell me a little about the most recent work? Has your work evolved in the way you might have expected?

George Negroponte: Gosh, I’ve come to expect very little but I’m grateful my work has continued to move forward. A lot of the issues we discussed last October still feel very current and relevant. I’m on a much better track these days and I sense more of a steadiness and stability in the studio. Most of these new works happened virtually on their own terms. I stepped aside.

PR: What do you think accounts for the change in perspective?

GN: Well, imagine taking 10 years to get home and I hope that sounds familiar. My roots are from the island of Ithaca so I imagine Odysseus may have played a role in my story, too. But in hindsight I should say that making art is really hard. Franz Kline once said it’s like waking up in the morning and finding your arms stuck in the mattress. Making art requires insights that are altogether of a different kind, like needing to see better, hear better, and probably live better. And more than anything needing to know how to receive. This probably requires a sense of balance I can’t account for.

PR: It sounds tough. What do you feel is the most significant change in the new work?

GN: I made singular works that stand on their own. I took the paired panels and superimposed them on each other. Now they stand on their own and it feels like a declaration of independence.

PR: That is a change. Have your inspirations changed since we spoke last year? In essays written for your exhibitions, you reference Merleau Ponty, Phenomenology, Cezanne, zoology, Frank O’Hara, Vittore Carpaccio, geese, rubber boots and a host of all kinds of things.

GN: I’m motivated by the idea that the Enlightenment still matters and that art and culture once elevated us from the Dark Ages and inspired us to consider our own inner lives as important and vital. Nonetheless, today our resources are probably more likely contingent, small and fragile. I’m pretty sure I’ve come to understand that when I’m working well I’m able to get beyond what I call my own. I go somewhere else. In the meantime I depend upon everything I’ve come across and I’ll use anything and everything I can possibly muster up because knowledge and experience do matter.

PR: Does this mean smoother sailing ahead for your art making?

GN:  Who knows? My son came back from Sweden with a tee shirt that has a Franz Kafka quote: “If you see light at the end of the tunnel be sure it’s not a train.”

HAH: Funny. It’s a bit dark, though.

GN: Well, maybe not, because it’s cautionary, too. I’ve worked my entire life to learn a few things and that list isn’t that long. Making art is like getting clued in at a certain moment. It could be that simple, because for a moment in time you give up on yourself. You take a serious look at what really matters. Then, and only then, something starts to happen and you watch it like an observer. It’s magical because you don’t own it and you don’t control it. You can’t even help having it happen. And for a single, brief moment, you realize you’re free. That helps a lot.