Spanierman Modern Exhibits A Variety of Mediums 'On Paper'

Tuesday, 14 November 2006 23:30

New York City - Spanierman Modern exhibits On Paper, featuring works from the 1880s to the present.  Ranging from small figural studies to large-scale abstractions, rendered in a wide variety of mediums, the exhibition demonstrates the way that works on paper have fully come into their own, leaving their once-perceived relegation to secondary status far in the past.  In addition to featuring several noted and rising contemporary artists, such as Carolyn Carr, Dan Christensen, Jasmina Danowski, Teo González, Susan Jamison, and Gary Komarin, the prominent artists represented include Ilya Bolotowsky, Alexander Calder, Arthur B. Davies, Willem de Kooning, Arthur Wesley Dow, Jasper Johns, Franz Kline, Georgia O’Keeffe, Philip Pearlstein, George Segal, James McNeill Whistler, and Andrew Wyeth.

Among the highlights of the exhibition, Georgia O’Keeffe’s Red and Green, No. III (1916) was produced during the period just after the artist was discovered by Alfred Stieglitz and given a show at his gallery, 291.  It was during this time when O’Keeffe, in turning from charcoal to watercolor, began to explore the properties of color to their fullest, drawing on the inspiration of Vassily Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art.  This watercolor’s iridescent surface makes it seem fully abstract, yet the work, in fact, presents a partial view of a collared harlequin’s melancholy face.  While part of the suite of “figurative watercolors” O’Keeffe created at the time, the work, with its flowing washes, luminosity, and organic metaphors looks more toward her art of the future than the other works she created at the time.

The figurative and abstract also come together in Gary Komarin’s Cake, Blood Red (2005). A New York-born artist who studied with Philip Guston, Komarin works within an Abstract Expressionist trajectory, exploring known shapes that seem simultaneously strange and familiar.  In his Cakes series, he draws on his memories of the cakes made by his mother, a Viennese writer who often baked cakes during his childhood, many of which were misshapen and lumpy, but delicious.  In these works, Komarin also invokes his father, an architect.  As the artist noted, the paper bags on which he created Cake, Blood Red “function at some level as building blocks or stones that ‘receive’ the cake painting or drawing on top.”  He observes that he continues to produce these images because of how the “two elements come together in ways that have surprised and delighted me.”

A personal sensibility is similarly reflected in Carolyn Carr’s Garden Path (2004).  While inspired by Carr’s contemplation of her grandmother’s formal garden, the looping, colliding rhythm of its two flat, wide lines evoke a decorative choreographed dance on its own terms, one that is both playful and elegant.  According to the artist, the work is reflective of the “routes and meanderings” she would take in going between the fancy world of her grandmother outside the city to her home in the heart of Atlanta, where she is surrounded by graffiti.  Other notable works in the show include that of the Spanish-born artist Teo González, who applies droplets of color in gridded structures to produce shimmering surfaces that, while seemingly uniform, are in fact full of subtle textural and luminous variation, and that of the German-born artist Jasmina Danowski, whose Australia, VII (2004) is part of a series inspired by a time when she had quit her job of fourteen years.

Spanierman Modern’s first show of works on paper, this exhibition reveals the continuity over the decades in the way that artists have explored such mediums as pencil, pastel, and watercolor, while demonstrating the infinite array of possibilities within these forms that have led to new inventive and expressive approaches.  Visit : www.spaniermanmodern.com