Category: abstraction

Thomas Downing

Thomas Downing, “Untitled”, 1950, Acrylic on Unprimed Canvas, 243.8 x 225.4 cm, Private Collection

Born in 1928 in Suffolk, Virginia, American painter Thomas Downing initially studied English literature at Randolph-Mason College in Ashland, Virginia, receiving his Bachelor of Arts in 1948. After frequent visits to exhibitions held at Randolph-Mason and local museums, he eventually decided to study art. Downing moved to New York City to study at the Pratt Institute of Art, where he was influenced by the New York School of painters. With a grant given to him in 1950 by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, he was able to travel and study in Europe, briefly enrolling in the Académie Julien in Paris.

In Paris, Thomas Downing secured a position as a studio assistant for the painter Fernand Léger in 1951, eventually exhibiting a series of his own gouaches at Paris’ Galerie Huit. After a short service in the US Army, he moved in 1953 to Washington, DC, working as a high school teacher. Downing attended summer sessions at Catholic University, where he studied under and was influenced by painter Kenneth Nolan, one of the founders of the Washington Color School of painting, a flourishing abstract art movement emphasizing pure color. An established member of Washington’s art community by 1958, Downing had his first one-man show with the Sculptors Studio in 1959. By the early 1960s, he began producing canvases that were composed of grids and circles of dots of varying color, a motif which became recognizable as his body of work.

Thomas Downing’s work explores the formal possibilities of color and color-space, establishing that as the sole subject of his compositions. His circles of varying hues and colors seem to float in an undefined space, with each set of color appearing on a flat plane, but collectively presenting a depth of space. Downing’s specific color choices suggest the modern design principles of the Bauhaus movement, particularly the color-space theories of painter and instructor Josef Albers. 

Following a series of successful solo shows in the DC area, several of Downing’s dot paintings were included in Clement Greenberg’s 1964 traveling exhibition “Post-Painterly Abstraction” and the New York’s Museum of Modern Art’s influential 1965 exhibition “The Responsive Eye”. In 1966, Downing included a series of shaped canvases to his works in the “Systematic Painting” show at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. 

Downing taught at the Corcoran School of Art from 1965 to 1968, influencing artists such as Sam Gilliam and Rockne Krebs. He moved to New York to teach at the New School of Visual Art, and after a brief tenure at the University of Houston in 1975, settled in Provincetown, Massachusetts. In his later years, he had many exhibitions, including tow at the Osuna Gallery in Washington, DC, in 1979 and 1980,  and one at The Phillips Collection in 1985, the year of his death. 

Thomas Downing’s work is in a number of collections, both private and public, including the National Gallery of Art and the Phillips Collection, both in Washington, DC, and the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, California. 

Johan Wahlstrom

Paintings by Johan Wahlstrom

Top Image: Johan Wahlstrom, “Worn Out”, 2016, Urethan, Color Pigments on Canvas, 101.6 x 76.2 cm

Second Image:  “Room Mates”, 2016, Acrylic, Urethane, Color Pigments on Canvas, 76.2 c 76.2 cm

Third Image: “Life is Now”, 2016, Urethane, color Pigments on Canvas, 238.8 x 149.9 cm

Born in Stockholm, Johan Wahlstrom is a fifth-generation Swedish artist who began his creative life as a keyboardist and singer, performing with his own band as well as with musicians Ian Hunter and Graham Parker. Leaving the music stage after twenty years, he moved to a small village in France and began to pursue a life of visual art, painting part of the time under the tutelage of Swedish artist Lennart Nyström.

Inspired by the Art Brut movement and particulary Jean Dubuffet and Paul Klee, Johan Wahlstrom creates works combining abstraction and figurative forms. In his more figurative and narrative paintings, Wahlstrom presents his social and political commentaries; a strong critique of authoritarianism and fascism is a recurring theme that appears in many of his dark images of the contemporary world.

Johan Wahlstrom came to New York in 2015 and is currently living and working in Jersey City, New Jersey, with a studio located at the Mana Contemporary Arts Facility. He also has a second studio in Marbella, Spain. Wahlstrom started his theme of distorted faces in 2008 with his exhibition in Barcelona entitled “It’s Boring to Die”, which contained the above images. He continued this series until 2014, with exhibitions in New York, Bonn, and Zurich. This series had a limited pallette of colored pigments, mixing his distorted faces with layers of abstraction, gradually becoming more complex in the presentation.

 

Mark Wallinger

Mark Wallinger, Three of the “Id Paintings” Series, 2015-2016, Paint on Canvas

Mark Wallinger is a British artist, best known for his 1999 sculpture, “Ecco Homo” in Trafalgar Square and his 2007 “State Britain” at Tate Britain. He won the Turner Prize, an annual prize presented to British visual artists, in 2007.

The “id Paintings” have grown out of Wallinger’s extensive series of self-portraits, and they reference the artist’s own body. His height – and therefore his arm span – is the basis of the canvas size. They are exactly this measurement in width and double in height. Wallinger uses symmetrical bodily gestures on the two halves of the canvas to mirror one another, recalling the bilateral symmetry of Leonardo da Vinci’s “Vitruvian Man”.

Created by sweeping paint-laden hands across the canvas in active freeform gestures, the “id Paintings” bear the evidence of their making and of the artist’s encounter with the surface. In recognising figures and shapes in the material, the viewer reveals their own desires and predilections while trying to interpret those of the artist.

Calendar: October 5

 

A Year: Day to Day Men: 5th of October

The Garden Brocade

October 5, 1887 was the birthdate of German painter and graphic artist Max Ackermann.

Max Ackermann studied under Henry van de Velde, one of the main founders of the Art Nouveau movement in Belgium, at his studio in Weimar and at the Deresden studio of Impressionist Gotthardt Kuehl. In 1912, at the age of twenty five, Ackermann attended the State Academy of Fine Arts in Stuttgart, under an apprenticeship of Adolf Hölzel, who introduced Ackermann to non-representational painting.

In 1921, Ackermann met pioneer of abstract dance Rudolf von Laban who inspired Ackermann to try rhythmic blind paintings. Throughout the 1920s, Ackermann worked as an artist in Stuttgart and had his first show of figurative and abstract paintings, pastels, and drawings. In 1926 he spent time in Paris, where he became friends with Piet Mondrian and Adolf Loos, an Austrian architect and influential theorist of modern architecture. Ackermann met Wassily Kandinsky at this time and was encouraged in his quest for absolute painting.

Ackermann set up a training workshop for new artists in his studio and hosted seminars for young art teachers. In 1930 , he introduced a seminar on “Absolute Painting”, giving lectures in 1933 on this topic at Stuttgart’s Valentien Gallery. Ackermann was considered degenerate by the new Nazi authorities and was forbidden from exhibiting in 1933, and from teaching in 1936, both by decrees. His graphics and paintings displayed in the state gallery of Stuttgart were confiscated. Leaving Stuttgart, Ackermann continued his abstract painting at an artist colony at Hornstaad on Lake Constance near the Swiss border.

Many of Ackermann’s early works were destroyed when his studio was bombed during a Second World War air raid. After the war Ackermann had one-man shows in West German cities and collective shows in Paris and Zurich. With German composer and conductor Wolfgang Fortner, Ackermann held a seminar on music and painting in 1952. A year later he took part in an event with “organic” architect Hugo Häring and Kurt Leonhart on the subject of painting and architecture.

Max Ackermann was appointed Professor by the German Ministry of Culture in 1957; and in 1964, he was honored by the German Academy. He died in the spa town of Bad Liebenzell in the Black Forest of Germany on November 14, 1975, at the age of 88.

Alice Lex-Nerlinger

Alice Lex-Nerlinger, “Racecar Driver”, 1926, Vintage Silver Print from an Original Photogram, Private Collection

Alice Lex-Nerlinger, was born in 1893 to the owner of a gas lamp factory on Moritzplatz in Berlin-Kreuzberg. Between 1911 and 1916, she studied painting and graphic art at the Teaching Institute of the Museum of Arts and Crafts under painter and lithographer Emil Orlik and other teachers. 

Personal experience of the First World War and the atmosphere of artistic experiment in 1920s Berlin created provided a source of ideas for Alice Lex-Nerlinger’s artistic works: heroism versus the soldier’s death, man and machine, capital and labour, state and censor, and not least, the misogynist. She found stimulus and confirmation in groups of artists with similar attitudes such as the Abstrakten (the Abstracts) and the Association of Revolutionary Fine Artists in Germany founded in 1928. Like Alice Lex, these groups rejected Expressionism, Cubism and Dadaism as bourgeois art. She expressed her political convictions by joining the German Communist Party (KPD) along with her husband Oskar Nerlinger in 1928.

Photographs, newspaper clippings and strikingly contrasted colors, such as red and blue, provided the ingredients for Lex-Nerlinger’s socially critical montages, specializing in photomontages and colored spray painting. Her work was often produced in sequential series creating rhythm and multi-dimensionality. Lex-Nerlinger succeeded in translating the complexity of political statements into simply structured individual images or compositions which prompted discussion and inquiry.

In 1933 Lex-Nerlinger was expelled from the German Association of Fine Artists by the National Socialists and banned from practicing her profession and from exhibiting her artwork. Censorship and this ban on her artwork drove her into engaging in underground political activities against the regime. 

Alice Lex-Nerlinger did manage to survive during National Socialism in Germany; but, fearful of persecution and house searches, she destroyed some of her artworks. After the Second World War, she worked in the German Democratic Republic primarily on official portrait commissions. She was honored with a honorary pension in 1960, which she received with the support of the Germany Academy of Arts, and was honored with the Patriotic Order of Merit of the GDR in 1974. 

Pierre Soulages

Pierre Soulages, “Lithograph Number 3″, 1957, 25 x 19 Inches, Museum of Modern Art, New York

As a child, Pierre Soulages was fascinated by the Celtic carvings in the local museum and the architecture of the abbey of Sainte-Foy in nearby Conques, and these early impressions would continue to surface throughout his career. In 1938, inspired by the works of Cezanne and Picasso, he enrolled in the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris, but he was disappointed by the traditional instruction and soon moved back to his childhood home of Rodez.

In 1946, Soulages returned to Paris and set up a small studio in Courbevoie. He began to paint in a wholly abstract style, producing canvases with overlapping black, barlike strokes on a glowing white or colored, ground, which he exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants in 1947.

Though his rejection of bright color in favor of black set him in opposition to the major trends in French abstract painting of the time, Pierre Soulages was nevertheless a prominent exemplar of the Jeune École de Paris (Young School of Paris), an umbrella term for the gestural or post-Cubist abstraction. in contrast to the gestural approach of his American counterparts, Soulages deliberately constructed his compositions to create a formal balance.

Donald Laycock

Donald Laycock, “In the Beginning”, 1956, Enamel on Composition Board, 122 x 91 cm, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia

“Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”

-Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species

W.C. Richardson

Paintings by W. C. Richardson

W.C. Richardson has been making abstract paintings for over 30 years. He received a BFA in 1975 from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and an MFA in 1977 from Washington University, St. Louis, MO. He began teaching at the University of Maryland, College Park in 1978 and is currently an Associate Professor there. Richardson’s awards include four Individual Artist’s Awards from the Maryland State Arts Council. Since 1976, his work has been widely exhibited in museums and galleries throughout the U.S., as well as in Russia, Belgium, Turkey and Jordan.

“Color is one of the most intuitive aspects of my work. I build the color in my paintings through trial and error, responding to unpredictable interactions. I’m conscious of the spatial properties of different hues and values, and use their advancing and receding properties to locate them in space. I also use color to differentiate or connect elements in a complex surface. I commonly play intense, saturated colors against neutrals, with black and white used for emphasis and punctuation.” – WC Richardson

Charles Seliger

Charles Seliger, “Earthscape”, 2000, Ink and Acrylic Gel and Oil on Pressed Board

Charles Seliger was an American abstract expressionist painter. He was born in Manhattan June 3, 1926, and he died on 1 October 2009, in Westchester County, New York. Seliger was one of the original generation of Abstract expressionist painters connected with the New York School

Seliger began his career in 1945 as one of the youngest artists to exhibit at The Art of This Century Gallery, and as the youngest artist associated with the Abstract expressionist movement. The Art of This Century gallery was opened in New York City during World War II in 1942 by Peggy Guggenheim who was then married to the surrealist painter Max Ernst. In 1943, Seliger met and befriended Jimmy Ernst the son of Max Ernst, and who at the age of 23 years was just a few years older than Seliger.

Seliger was drawn into the circle of the avant-garde through his friendship with Ernst. His paintings attracted the attention of Howard Putzel who worked with Peggy Guggenheim. At 19, Seliger was included in Putzel’s groundbreaking exhibition ‘A Problem for Critics’ at the 67 Gallery. .Also in 1945 he had his first solo show at the Art of This Century Gallery. Seliger showed his paintings there until 1947 when Guggenheim closed the gallery and returned to Europe. At 20 the Museum of Modern Art acquired his painting “Natural History: Form within Rock” for their permanent collection.

Gerhard Richter

Gerhard Richter, “Abstract Painting (613-3)”, Detail, Oil on Canvas, 1986, Collection of Preston H Haskell

The groundwork for pieces like Abstract Painting (613-3) was laid in the early 1970s, when Richter began a series of nonrepresentational paintings based on photographic enlargements of brushstrokes. Because they depict, in a highly illusionistic manner, reproductions of otherwise abstract marks, such paintings confuse the handmade and the technological, the original and the copy. Richter continued to duplicate brushstrokes until 1980, when he started to make actual abstract paintings, albeit in unconventional ways.

Abstract Painting (613-3) exemplifies the technique for which Richter is recognized today, one in which editing, subtraction, and cancellation play crucial roles. Here as elsewhere, the artist fleshed out a preliminary composition with ordinary brushes. As it was drying, he covered the hard edge of a squeegee with paint and dragged it across the surface of the canvas, an action that blended some layers but removed others, thereby revealing what was previously concealed. The resulting works are tapestries of abrasions and palimpsests, heterogeneous fields of visual incident.

Discontinuity is particularly evident in Abstract Painting (613-3), due to variations in the directionality of paint, the combination of cool and warm hues, and the presence of a vertical seam near the middle of the canvas. To the extent that it cedes some control to chance and introduces the specter of mechanicity, Richter’s process “muffles singular signs of personal expression” and trades existential drama for moderation, unlike the gestural, virtuosic canvases his paintings superficially resemble.

As with many of his abstractions after 1980, Abstract Painting (613-3)’s palette is bright and sumptuous in appearance but not necessarily in tone. For Richter, color does not signify “happiness,” he once said, but instead a “tense” or “artificial” “cheeriness” associated with “gritted teeth.”

Jackson Pollock

Jackson Pollock, “Blue Poles″, Enamel and Aluminium Paint with Glass on Canvas, 1952, National Gallery of Australia

“Blue Poles” was first exhibited at Pollock’s solo show at the Sidney Janis Gallery in 1952 where it was titled “Number 11, 1952″. Pollock’s decision to forego conventional descriptive titles and simply number his paintings, including the year of their execution, began with his 1949 exhibition at the Betty Parsons Gallery. Some paintings originally given number titles when they were first exhibited were later given more descriptive titles. For example, “Number 10, 1952″ became “Convergence”.

This is also the case with “Number 11, 1952″. The painting was first given the title “Blue Poles”, and dated separately as 1952, in the exhibition at the Sidney Janis Gallery in 1954. Sidney Janis recalled clearly that the new title came from Pollock himself. Thereafter the painting is usually referred to as “Blue Poles”, although occasionally the earlier and late titles are combined as “Blue Poles: Number 11, 1952″.

Note: An Interesting discussion of Pollock’s actual painting of “Blue Poles’:  http://nga.gov.au/International/Catalogue/Detail.cfm?IRN=36334&MnuID=2&GalID=1

Franz Kline

Franz Kline, Black and White Abstracts

An excerpt from the interview with British critic David Sylvester recorded March 1960 in New York City. It was edited for broadcasting by the BBC and first published in “Living Arts” in the spring of 1963:

FRANZ KLINE: It wasn’t a question of deciding to do black-and-white painting. I think there was a time when the original forms that finally came out in black and white were in colour and then as time went on I painted them out and make them black and white. And then, when they got that way, I just liked them, you know. I mean there was that marvellous twenty-minute experience of thinking, well, all my life has been wasted but this is marvellous – that sort of thing.

DAVID SYLVESTER: During the time that you were producing only black-and-white paintings, where you ever colour and then painting over it with black?

FRANZ KLINE: No, they started off that way. I didn’t have particularly a strong desire to use colour, say, in the lights or darks of a black-and-white painting, althought what happened is that accidentally they look that way. Sometimes a black, because of the quantity of it or the mass or the volume, looks at though it may be a blue-black, as if there were blue mixed in with the black, or as though it were a brown-black or a red-black. No, I didn’t have any idea of mixing up different kids of blacks. As a matter of fact, I just used any black that I could get ahold of.

DAVID SYLVESTER: And the whites the same say?

FRANZ KLINE: The whites the same way. The whites, of course, turned yellow, and many people call your attention to that, you know; they want white to stay white for ever. It doesn’t bother me whether it does or not. It’s still white compared to the black.