Tag Archives: SoHo NYC

Mark Webber at the Lauren Rogers Museum of Art

Artist Mark Webber to be featured in the exhibition, Paste and Cut: Contemporary Sculpture in Plaster, on view at the Lauren Rogers Museum in Laurel, Mississippi August 31 – November 7, 2021.

Visitors to the Lauren Rogers Museum of Art are greeted in a lobby richly decorated with golden oak paneling and cork floors. They may not notice that the ornamentation continues above, with a ceiling featuring beautiful plaster work.  The design was suggested by Charles J. Watson of the Chicago interior decorating firm Watson and Walton, created by Frederick Mottas, and executed by the French-American master craftsman Léon Herman. It features low relief depictions of flora, fauna, and celestial bodies.  In honor of this enchanting adornment, and in a continuation of a series of exhibitions that celebrate how artists are breathing new life into techniques and forms found in centuries-old art and design, the Museum presents this exhibition of works in plaster by contemporary artists Amy Kann, Jedediah Morfit, and Mark Webber. Their works show the effectiveness of utilizing the medium in traditional, conceptual, and abstract forms.

Read the further details about the exhibition on 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. 

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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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 CunninghamGloria 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 CUNNINGHAM2017.13

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

ArteFuse Highlights Jack Martin Rogers: Odyssey

The Anita Rogers Gallery in Soho is currently presenting a collection of work by Jack Martin Rogers for an exhibition entitled Odyssey. The show is the first U.S. solo exhibition of work by the late British painter and features a collection of his drawings and paintings throughout his career spanning 40 years. Rogers spent most of his life studying the relationship between time and its role in human experience and he also believed that the only way to move forward in creating art is to appreciate and learn from contributions of the past. He captures this belief in his work, which presents traditional subjects, such as classical and religious architecture, alongside modern ones.

JMR 026One of the artist’s most significant works on display is a large-scale six-part canvas painting of Knossos, the largest Bronze age archaeological site in located on the Greek Island of Crete. In this painting, Rogers pulls the ancient ruins from the past into the present by using abstract designs such as the periwinkle-blue floral patterns that frame the image and bold colors including the bright and dark shades of green on the surrounding grass.

Other notable works in the show include Rogers’ portraits which are meaningful character studies. One of the most notable of the pieces is a painting entitled Rosemary which evokes a sense of solitude as it depicts a young woman standing against an azure-blue colored background wearing a long, silky dress with shades of pink, purple, and blue. Her head is turned away from the viewer as her long, silky black hair hangs freely. She appears deep in thought as she holds a triangular artifact in one hand and a rectangular artifact in the other and rubs the two pieces together. Other portraits and character studies in the show include sketches such as Pencil Portrait, depicting a 19th-century style woman with her hair in a bun and wearing an old-fashioned dress, and the sketch Greek Papas depicting an older Greek gentleman with a long, thick white beard and small black hat gazing up and out into the distance.

Another noteworthy aspect of the show is the fact that some of Rogers’ paintings like Cretan Girl and Rhodes have clear outlines and shapes while others like Reclining Nude and Warwick have a more ethereal quality. Cretan Girl depicts a young girl wearing a pale blue dress with black and white stripes standing tall with her hands by her waist and as she her balance as while walking along the smooth edge of a rocky wall. Behind her leg is a figure of a vase and the background image consists of an orange circle covering nearly half the page depicting sunshine. The painting entitled Rhodes captures the classic landscape and architecture of Greece and its islands depicting a group of towers and dome-topped buildings surrounded by tress including one palm tree. A similar painting entitled Warwick also depicts a city but is painted in a dreamier matter. Reclining Nude is also painted in this same, elegant style featuring a young woman lying on her bed unclothed. The soft pales colors used such as the pure white of the bed, the skin color of the woman, and her golden blonde hair contrast with the black background.

Rogers was born in Warwickshire, England in 1945 and was classically trained in anatomy and fine art at the Birmingham School of Art where he developed his meticulous methods. He began his career creating a large body of preparatory drawings before moving on to paintings, offering the viewer a rare glimpse into his process. Rogers moved to Crete in 1962, which was his most successful and prolific period. Many of the works featured in the exhibition come from his time in Greece as he was greatly inspired by the landscape there, and was also inspired by classical literature and music. He died in 2001, leaving behind an extraordinary body of work.

-Alison Martin

JackMartinRogersSpace_032Visit the gallery’s website.

Read the full article on ArteFuse.com

Wall Street International Recommends Jack Martin Rogers: Odyssey

JMR 013The works in the exhibition span a period of over forty years, from some of the artist’s earliest work during art school to his final masterpieces. Throughout his life, Rogers continually examined the complex notion of time and its role in the human experience. He believed forward movement and discovery are accomplished through examining history and creating relevance from the past within the present.

View More on WSIMag.com

Learn more about Jack Martin Rogers at AnitaRogersGallery.com

Anita Rogers Gallery Named One of the Top Art Galleries in SoHo by TravelMag

ANITA ROGERS GALLERY

This hidden gem exhibits a wide range of emerging to mid-career artists in an elegant high-ceilinged space flooded in light, with an old-fashioned fireplace to boot. Highlights include the abstract minimalist paintings of George Negroponte on irregular pieces of cardboard. While they may appear slight at first, there’s a subtle beauty of geometric expression that shines through the longer you peer into these unique creations.ARGGN

– CHRISTOPHER KOMPANEK, TRAVELMAG

View the full list on TravelMag.com