Tag Archives: New York City

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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10 Must-Watch Documentaries That Will Inspire Your Kids to Change the World

By Sara Ahmed

If your kids have any kind of device — phones, gaming systems, tablets, what have you — it can feel like you’re constantly fighting for their attention. It becomes harder and harder to share experiences with them, but one thing they usually can’t deny? Movies. Sure, watching a big blockbuster is always fun, but documentaries can be an incredible way for a family to connect.

Watching these films with your children is a compelling way to help nurture their sense of curiosity and compassion without feeling tedious (or, God forbid, educational). From inspiring stories of Muslim high school football players in Michigan to the haunting tale of Tilikum, the killer whale in captivity, a good documentary can alter your child’s perception through the power of empathy. Keep reading for a list of the most powerful documentaries to watch with your kiddos during your next movie night.

1. He Named Me Malala:

He Named Me Malala tells the poignant story of a young Pakistani girl and her fight for education. Your kids won’t fuss about going to school after watching this documentary.

Appropriate For Ages: 12+

Read the full list on British American Household Staffing’s blog.

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 Week artnetlogo

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.

***

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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Virva Hinnemo: Four Feet

VH 020

February 21 – April 21, 2018

Anita Rogers Gallery presents Four Feet, an exhibition of new work by Swedish/Finnish artist Virva Hinnemo. The exhibition will be on view February 21- April 21, 2018 at 15 Greene Street, Ground Floor in SoHo, New York. There will be an opening reception on Wednesday, February 21, 6-8pm. RSVP Required. Please RSVP to info@anitarogersgallery.com.

I’m not saying I am a cave woman but on a subliminal level I get what she painted in her cave. I fill my studio walls with marks: at times awkward and careless looking ones. I submit to an internal drive to move, to be physical and to be alone. I want to leave a trail of light and atmosphere that defies my doubt. Ideas can’t do this for me; I need to re-route my energy and tap into something else, somewhere beneath the surface. I’m wide-awake watching my paintings as if they might leap out at me.

More information on the gallery’s website.

Hamptons Art Hub’s NYC Gallery Scene Features Anita Rogers Gallery’s Winter Group Exhibition

Anita Rogers Gallery will present “Winter Group Exhibition,” showcasing works by Jan Cunningham, Gloria Ortiz-Hernández and Robert Szot, artists who are new to the gallery.

The exhibition will showcase drawings by Gloria Ortiz-Hernández, a Colombian artist whose work is included in the permanent collections of museums such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York and in private collections throughout the United States and in Switzerland, Brazil and Colombia. Robert Szot, an artist from Texas currently based in Brooklyn, will show collages and paintings. Jan Cunningham, an American artist, will show her “Arabesque Paintings” of 2016 and 2017, celebrating the materiality of color and light and juxtaposing the anticipated with the unexpected.

View on the gallery’s website.

View on HamptonsArtHub.com

Winter Group Exhibition

Introducing Jan Cunningham, Gloria Ortiz-Hernández and Robert Szot

Extended Through February 17, 2018

Anita Rogers Gallery is thrilled to announce its 2018 Winter Group Exhibition, a collection of work by three artists new to the gallery: Jan Cunningham, Gloria Ortiz-Hernández and Robert Szot. The exhibition will be on view January 3 – February 3, 2018 at the gallery’s new location at 15 Greene Street, Ground Floor in SoHo, New York. There will be an opening reception on Wednesday, January 3, 6-8pm.

JAN CUNNINGHAM

Cunningham was born in Lufkin, Texas in 1956. She received her BFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1979, and her MFA in Painting from the Yale University School of Art in 1985. On the work in this exhibition, Cunningham states:

The Arabesque Paintings of 2016 and 2017 evolved in response to the Arabesque Drawings of 2015 – 2016. The paintings invite the lines of the circle and the ellipse to join with a language of painting that celebrates the materiality of color and light, the juxtaposition of the anticipated with the unexpected, and the affirmation of depth by close attention to process.

Over many years, the paintings have focused on the most elemental aspects of the picture plane. On a square canvas, the dialogue between and among the dimensions of the picture plane -divided into thirds and fourths – has offered a productive way to study the mysteries of such a simple space. Recently these meditations have expanded to include the golden section rectangle, within the square and beyond it. These simple meditations I call Considerations.

Looking at the paintings becomes a matter of reseeing, of reviewing: a corner of a room in shadow; light coming in through a window; a pattern of trees silhouetted in the first light of day; the moon’s light in the surface of a lake; wonder at what might be beneath that surface. It is an experience of folding open, folding closed. Breathing in, breathing out. Resting in the depths, looking up toward the surface, through the surface of the painting.

GLORIA ORTIZ-HERNÁNDEZ

Colombian artist Gloria Ortiz-Hernández’s drawings and sculptures have been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions. Her work is in the permanent collections of a number of institutions including The Museum of Modern Art (NY), The Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University (MA), Art Museums Cambridge (MA), The Morgan Library (NY), The Menil Drawing Institute and Study Center (TX ), and The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MA). Her work is also in private collections throughout the United States and in Basel, Switzerland, Sao Paolo, Brazil, and Bogota, Colombia. She currently has a drawing (Plate/Shift #10) on view at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York City.

ROBERT SZOT

Robert Szot was born in 1976 in Houston, Texas. He has exhibited his work in many galleries across the United States from New York to Los Angeles and Texas. Szot’s paintings have been exhibited in the Saatchi Gallery in London and, in 2014, the artist was invited to participate in the Whitney Museum Art Party. His work is in public collections, including Credit Suisse, and numerous private collections, such as Beth DeWoody and the Bass Family. The artist currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

View on AnitaRogersGallery.com

Anita Rogers Interviewed by The National Herald

Jack Martin Rogers – Artist, Philhellene, Father at Anita Rogers Gallery in NYC

Hellas has been enchanting artists, scholars, and writers for hundreds of years. Among them were Henry Miller, was drawn from Brooklyn to Marousi, and Lawrence Durrell, raised in British India, who fell in love with Corfu. In 1962 Jack Martin Rogers, who was born in Warwickshire, England found himself pulled into the magical island of Crete, and this winter some of his paintings – mainly with Greek themes – were lovingly exhibited by his daughter at her Anita Rogers Gallery in Manhattan.

The first thing on the minds of visitors is determining which of the paintings filling the four walls belonged to Rogers. They appeared to reflect a variety of styles and artistic visions, with items ranging from fully figurative to abstract – but they are all by Rogers. “He spanned over 55 years” Anita Rogers said by way of explanation – but the works appear to have been created by distinct artistic personalities. She acknowledged that, and pointed out that was also the case with Picasso – “you would not know his works were by the same artist.” She added Bob Dylan was also like that musically, and Rogers admired both.

Rogers was an avid reader and thus explorer of different worlds. “He stuck with a genre and created within it, then he stopped, Anita said. “He would travel, go to Chania, think about a new style, and he would change. He never copied – everything dad did was original.”

By Constantine S. Sirigos, The National Herald

December 30 – January 5, 2017 Issue

View more on the gallery’s website.

Visit The National Herald’s website.