Tag Archives: Virva Hinnemo

Hinnemo and Negroponte Featured at Keyes Art

Work by Virva Hinnemo and George Negroponte is currently being shown alongside John Battle at Keyes Art in Sag Harbor. The exhibit, Eyewitness, is on view to the public October 9 – November 28, 2021.

Eyewitness is an exhibit meant to confirm that Modernism is alive and well: art-making immersed in a visual and pictorial language, aspiring to convey meaning with ancient tools. Embedded in these works is a struggle to clarify purpose and the urge to ignore the cheeky posturing of the zeitgeist of the 1960s.

~George Negroponte October 2021

Eyewitness

Opening Reception: Saturday, October 9th, 6-8pm
Open from October 9th – November 28, 2021

Keyes Art Gallery
45 Main Street
At the American Hotel
Sag Harbor, NY

Pictured above: Virva Hinnemo, View from a Tent, 2021, oil on linen.

View more on JulieKeyesArt.com

View on AnitaRogersGallery.com

Sag Harbor Express Interviews Virva Hinnemo

By Annette Hinkle

Virva Hinnemo (b. 1976), an artist  in the Parrish exhibition “Affinities for Abstraction,” was born in Finland and now lives and works in Springs.

Q: As a female Abstract painter, did you face hurdles in what was initially a very male-dominated field?

I think this is a difficult question to answer. Yes, in some ways, the issue of being a woman painter has always been “there” for me. In school, the boys/men muscled their way. Many women students found a way to turn their womanhood into their artistic subject. I never wanted to hit the viewer over the head with that kind of a subject. I ask a lot from those who look at my work. My husband would call it “the long, slow look.”

I was always aware that I had stepped into a male-dominated world, and as a very young painter, I was conscious of not wanting to “paint like a girl.” A young painter does think some silly things: “Why can’t I paint like Guston? I don’t want my work to be pretty.”

Read the full interview on AnitaRogersGallery.com

Virva Hinnemo and George Negroponte Featured in ‘Consummate Plush’ at the MOCA L.I.

The enigmatic genius of Emily Dickinson has been studied for over a century, yet she remains a beguiling literary and literal conundrum. Part mystic, part heretic, she wrote in metaphor with aching clarity. Dickinson envisioned the mind and spiritless as concepts than as actual places; she feigned conventionality in her dress and manner yet was an early feminist, and her use of language and grammar upended literary convention. She questioned faith, morality, pain, and ecstasy. A botany aficionado and gardener, the poet also assembled an herbarium of 424 flowers, now residing at the Harvard Houghton Rare Book Library. Her posthumous success revealed Dickinson to be one of the great modernist voices in American poetry.

Consummate Plush is a response to Dickinson’s quiet yet radical oeuvre, her flexible use of structure, and the depth of her self-inquiry. Judith Page’s veiled figures and Daniel Wiener’s fantastical motifs possess vestiges of the Gothic, touching on Dickinson’s plastic sense of identity and mortality. Christa Maiwald’s embroidered images recall the stitched bundles of poetry found in Dickinson’s bureau after her death. Lucy Winton and Charles Yuen share a sense of the dreamscape – places where the chimerical exists alongside this-ness and otherness. Virva Hinnemo’s use of gesture and spatial depth transport us to an environment in which writing and imagery coexist. Bonnie Rychlak’s subversive drains offer both a sense of escape and reflection, and Linda Miller’s examinations of organic form elude to abstract figuration and the monumental. For George Negroponte, an incisive use of pastiche and tight, visual reciprocity conjures Dickinson’s startling poetic structure. In Laurie Lambrecht’s embroidered, photographic images, it is the poet’s genteel life in the botanical that confers a sense of natural wonder, order, and reverence.

Selected artists include Virva Hinnemo, Laurie Lambrecht, Christa Maiwald, Linda Miller, George Negroponte, Judith Page, Bonnie Rychlak, Daniel Wiener, Lucy Winton, and Charles Yuen.

Join curator Janet Goleas and selected artists on Saturday, March 28th from 10:00 AM – 12:00 PM for a gallery breakfast and discussion, sponsored by the Patchogue Medford Library.

Patchogue Arts Council • MOCA L.I.
20 Terry St, Suite 116, Patchogue, NY 11772

Virva Hinnemo and George Negroponte Featured in The East Hampton Star

Virva Hinnemo and George Negroponte Featured in The East Hampton Star

By Jennifer Landes

There is something loose and special about the Sag Harbor art gallery community, which can treat its art shows as intuitive and impromptu affairs. Often an open forum, it is not unusual for artists and curators to join the spaces in a last-minute collaboration.

Something akin to kismet is happening currently there as the Keyes Art and Sara Nightingale galleries are both offering exhibitions that had their origins in the local artistic community and now find themselves sharing artists and a similar ethos.

Virva Hinnemo’s small oils in “As the Crow Flies” at Sara Nightingale Gallery include this unusual oil-on-metal painting, “One More Thought.”
Photo Courtesy of EastHamptonStar.com

For “As the Crow Flies” at Nightingale, the dealer wanted to highlight the geographical closeness and interconnectedness of the South Fork art community. She asked three artists who have shown at her gallery to choose another artist whose work she did not know. Janet Goleas, Laurie Lambrecht, and Ross Watts served as the “jurors” and respectively chose Priscilla Heine, Virva Hinnemo, and Jeremy Grosvenor.

Ms. Nightingale acknowledged her debt to the Parrish Art Museum’s “Artists Choose Artists” show, which employs a similar tactic and is currently on view in Water Mill. Yet, the correspondences do not stop there. Both Ms. Goleas and Ms. Heine are included in the museum’s current iteration of the triennial exhibition.

The Venn diagram continues across the street at Keyes Art, where Julie Keyes invited Ms. Hinnemo and her husband, George Negroponte, to be guest curators for a show they call “One Stop: The Slow Slope of Modernism.” There, the focus is on how East End artists steeped in modernism continue to address the tenets of its various movements.

View full story on EastHamptonStar.com

One Stop: The Slow Slope of Modernism

Organized by Virva Hinnemo & George Negroponte

One Stop: The Slow Slope of Modernism

Pablo Picasso died on April 8, 1973 at the age of 91. That was the day Modernism made a pronounced pivot away from the mythical to the merely mortal; the divine wheel of culture got badly poked. Andy Warhol’s wizardry of mass media made a mad dash to fill the void and the ensuing years witnessed piles of debris not unlike an Indiana State Fair Demolition Derby. It is no wonder that by the mid-1970s TV Guide’s circulation reached more than 19 million while a quarter of the galleries at The Metropolitan Museum were shuttered due to lack of funds and visitors. The cruelty of neglect cast aside many of the most innovative artists of Modernism: Andre Derain, Georges Rouault, El Lissitzky, Maurice de Vlaminck, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Emile Nolde, Jacques Villon, August Mack, Franz Marc, Max Beckman, Vorticism, Pittura Metafisica, and on and on. Without these artists the story of modern art remains wholly unrecognizable and all the while generational amnesia keeps history downgraded to the back seat.

This exhibit of small works includes 30 artists and is taking place 106.9 miles from NYC. It won’t show up on a Richter scale measuring earthquakes but it does make a deep and meaningful gesture towards the 20th century. There is an odd troglodyte tendency throughout all these works along with the assertion that the ancient highway of “Painting and Sculpture’ really does still exist. And yes, it’s paved with ruts, potholes, regrets and splendor. Each and every artist in this show knows these risks because immunity won’t be delivered on a golden platter. Each work is a physical claim taking up the appropriate amount of space while its meaning is embedded beneath a surface of nuanced substance. If given the chance to speak in unison all these works would proudly deliver the same and insistent message: “I’m real!”

– George Negroponte

Mark Webber. Untitled Structure. 2019. Hydrocal and steel. 12″ x 9″ x 8″

October 2019

One Stop:
The Slow Slope of Modernism

Opening Reception
November 23rd, 5pm

Keyes Art Gallery
45 Main Street
At the American Hotel
Sag Harbor, NY

Virva Hinnemo Receives Pollock-Krasner Foundation 2018-19 Artist Grant

The Pollock-Krasner Foundation announced today it has awarded $3,168,000 to 111 artists and 12 organizations during its 2018-2019 grant cycle. The 124 grants provided invaluable support to national and international artists and not-for-profit organizations. This year’s grantees and award recipients include artists from 18 states, Puerto Rico, and 17 countries. These grants provide critical professional support to artists around the globe, enabling them to create new work, offset living expenses, and prepare for exhibitions. The Foundation has also provided Emergency Relief Grants to artists affected by recent hurricanes and California wildfires. Since its inception in 1985, the Foundation has awarded more than 4,510 grants in 77 countries, for a total of nearly $74 million.

Visit anitarogersgallery.com to find out more.

Virva Hinnemo, Excavation, 2017, Acrylic on canvas, 44" x 52" at Anita Rogers Gallery

Virva Hinnemo, Excavation, 2017, Acrylic on canvas, 44″ x 52″

George Negroponte Featured in The East Hampton Star

Excerpt from “The Art Scene 3.14.19”

“When Love Comes to Town,” an exhibition of mixed-media paintings by George Negroponte, is at the Anita Rogers Gallery in SoHo through April 27. Created over the last several years, the works use house paint, Spackle, gesso, wallpaper, dirt, enamel, inventory labels, and spray paint on canvas, as well as found objects from the woods surrounding his house in Springs.

The show will also include works on paper, first begun in Sweden in 2008 and then set aside for a decade before being revisited this past year in collaboration with his wife, the artist Virva Hinnemo.

Read more about the exhibition at AnitaRogersGallery.com

East Hampton Star's The Art Scene 03.14.19

My Rothko. 2018. Mixed Media on Canvas. 8″ x 8″ Photo by Jenny Gorman

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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

Visit ArteFuse

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