“The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World” (MOMA)

From MOMA : Forever Now presents the work of 17 artists whose paintings reflect a singular approach that characterizes our cultural moment at the beginning of this new millennium: they refuse to allow us to define or even meter our time by them. This phenomenon in culture was first identified by the science fiction writer William Gibson, who used the term “a-temporality” to describe a cultural product of our moment that paradoxically doesn’t represent, through style, through content, or through medium, the time from which it comes. ..

From a New Yorker Article about it, "Is there Anything Left to Paint"

... “Forever Now” is the first large survey strictly dedicated to new painting that MOMA has organized since 1958, when “The New American Painting,” a show of seventeen artists, including all the major Abstract Expressionists, went on to tour Europe and to revolutionize art everywhere. 

...painting has lost symbolic force and function in a culture of promiscuous knowledge and glutting information. Some of the painters in “Forever Now,” along with the show’s thoughtful curator, Laura Hoptman, face this fact.Don’t attend the show seeking easy joys.  

More about Atemporal:

a·tem·po·ral

āˈtemp(ə)rəl/

adjective

1. existing or considered without relation to time.

• SNIPS from:

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   Atemporality for the Creative Artist  
   

   • BY BRUCE STERLING   02.25.10 

   There are new asynchronous communication forms that are globalized and offshored, and there is the loss of a canon and a record. There is no single authoritative voice of history. Instead we get wildly empowered cranks, lunatics, and every kind of long-tail intellectual market appearing in network culture. Everything from brilliant insight to scurillous rumor....

   We can trace this now through genetics, we can trace it through archeology. Times before humanity existed. Cosmic chronology. The way we learn about our things, through non-literary sources such as garbage, pollen counts, environmental damage, even corpses. You can look at what’s been learned from the corpse of ‘Otzi,’ this Bronze-Age European. Fantastic things.... 

   "We are in a period which I think is dominated by two great cultural signifiers. An analog system that belonged to our parents, which has been shot full of holes. It is the symbol of the ruined castle. “Gothic High-Tech.” The ruins of the unsustainable. 

   And the other symbol is the favela slum, “Favela Chic,” the informalized, illegalized, heavily networked structure of the emergent new order. The things that the twenty first century is doing that are genuinely novel, that have not been domesticated or brought into sociality." 

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   Atemporality - rather like all of culture - globally, from all time frames, coming together and being mashed up - because so much is available to us. And because for the last 150 - 200 years - people have been throwing out the old culture - trying to create something new.  

   
   

   The examples given by the MOMA show - indicates this is the "American (Western-culture) version" With 13 Americans, 3 Germans, 1 Columbian (9 women & 8 men).

   
   

   Personally - I don't think that everything that has worked in the past has to be tossed out. And really, it hasn't been. The examples from MOMA are still pretty invested in the American style of Abstract Expressionism. I gravitate to the ones that can draw on nature in an abstract sense.

   
   

   The function of painting continues to be much the same as well - more or less expressing the philosophy of the times (or at least the philosophy of some - or what some think the philosophy of others - in power - is).

   
   

   
   

   Some Images from the MOMA show:

   
   

   

   
   

   Dianna Molzan. Untitled. 2009   Oil on canvas on fir, 24 x 20"

   
   

   

   
   
   

   Julie Mehretu. Invisible Sun (algorithm 5, second letter form). 2014   Ink and synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 9' 11 3/8" × 13' 11"

   
   

   
   

   

   
   

   Michaela Eichwald. Kunsthalle St. Gallen. 2012    Synthetic polymer paint, oil, crayon, and lacquer on cotton, 10’ 9 15/16” × 51 3/16” 

   
   

   

   
   

   
   

   Michael Williams. Wall Dog. 2013   Inkjet and synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 8' 1 1/4" x 6' 6 1/8" 

   
   

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Amrita Sher-Gil

I saw this article about Amrita Sher-Gil on the Telegraph.co.uk site - The Indian Frida Kahlo.

Amrita Sher-Gil (1913-1941) as Tahitian
She was the daughter of a "Sikh aristocrat and a Hungarian opera singer". Born in 1913, she grew up in Budapest and at the "family estate at Simla, in the foothills of the Himalayas", in the Punjab area. At age 16, she moved to Paris to study at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.

As her style developed, upon her return to India, she 

synthesized European and Indian styles and sensibilities. She embraced sensuality. She painted straightforward, non-sentimental images of women.

Self-portrait as a Tahitian (1934) 

"Europe belongs to picasso, matisse and braque and many others. india belongs only to me."

She died at age 28 - probably of hemorrhaging following an abortion .

Amrita Sher-Gil, Sleep, 1932.

Amrita Sher-Gil, Three Girls, 1935. 

Leonora Carrington

Leonora Carrington, surrealist artist, has died at the age of 94 in Mexico

"She was the last great living surrealist," her friend, poet Homero Aridjis said. "She was a living legend."

"She was famed for haunting, dreamlike works focusing on strange ritual-like scenes with birds, cats, unicorn-like creatures and other animals."

She was born in Lancashire, England, in 1917 - her family was in the textile manufacturing industry. She painted, moved to Paris at the age of 20 where she met Surrealist painter Max Ernst as well as other artists - Salvador Dali, Marcel Duchamp, Joan Miro Andre Breton, Picasso and Man Ray. She went to Frida Kahlo's and Diego Rivera's wedding.


Carrington and Ernst were briefly together until he was arrested by the Gestapo in Nazi-occupied France. Peggy Guggenheim took an interest in Ernst and helped him escape to America (Gugenheim and Ernst were married from 42-46) In 1939 Carrington went to Spain, fell into a deep depression - her parents had her committed to a psychiatric hospital after she had a breakdown in Madrid.


She escaped to Lisbon, and was able to leave Europe by marrying poet and journalist Renato Leduc. After settling in Mexico, she married writer-photographer Emerico "Chiki" Weisz in 1946 and had two children.


She first exhibited her surrealist paintings in 1938 in Paris and Amsterdam. In 1947 she exhibited at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York City which gained her attention. She also wrote several books.


"She created mythical worlds in which magical beings and animals occupy the main stage, in which cobras merge with goats and blind crows become trees," the National Arts Council wrote. "These were some of the images that sprang from a mind obsessed with portraying a reality that transcends what can be seen."

Sylvia Sleigh

Working At Home (1969)

From the New York Times:

Sylvia Sleigh, the British-born artist who put a feminist spin on portrait painting, died on Sunday at her home in Manhattan. She was 94.

"Ms. Sleigh, who came to prominence as part of the surging feminist art movement of the 1970s, turned traditional portraiture on its head by presenting the male nude posed as a reclining Venus or odalisque, although she also painted both sexes, clothed and unclothed," writes William Grimes.

She was born in Wales in 1916, studied at the Brighton School of Art, lived in London for about 20 years and moved to the US in 1961.

Through her work with the Ad Hoc Committee of Women Artists and Women in the Arts, as well as her exhibitions with the SoHo 20 Gallery and A.I.R., she emerged in the 1970s as a prominent artist with an audacious take on traditional art history.

Not only were the sex roles reversed, but her paintings also wittily cast her all-too-human subjects in situations reserved for the gods of antiquity in Renaissance art.

Turkish Bath (1973)

Rosano Reclining (1974)

Annunciation (1975)

It was interesting to see the paintings posted with the NYT article - and the gardens that she included as part of her paintings - such as in "Annunciation". I don't remember seeing those before. A nice mix of flowers/gardens and people. I've just started adding people into my own paintings. I'm much more comfortable painting nature - having done so for years - but I enjoy the challenge of painting people, and it certainly changes the environment. People can overpower the painting, because of the way we, as people notice the people more. But it is evident in her paintings that she was very interested in the gardens. It's also interesting to see the figures in the modern dress of the day - the cut-offs.

A.I.R. 1978

This would be a good painting to show with the Zoffany piece - when doing art history. The A.I.R. group portrait (AIR = Artist In Residence).

I noticed her best work was done in her 50s :)

Larry Poons

Duetto (2007)

(2007)

(2008)

Not suprisingly - Poons liked Mondrian and Barnett Newman when he was making his (moving) dot paintings. And was influenced by music. Didn't know about Pollock at the time. Now his paintings have a more Pollock sense about them - but with some of the same ideas about colors.

Via A Sky filled with Shooting Stars

From his interview with Robert Ayers:

When I think back, the dots used to blip around, they never stood still. If you looked at a dot picture and then turned away, your eyes got rested, so when you came back to it, it was an entirely different color until your eyes got saturated again. It changed. And some of these new paintings have that. They move around. They change visually. And I’m not talking about just a little thing, it’s the whole thing.

When I’m working on them sometimes I’ll put some color on and I walk away and I turn around, and I can’t even see it. It’s disappeared. When that happens I’m always quite happy because then I know that the painting is in a place where it’s on its own. It’s natural. And I am just a conduit between the paint and the canvas.

Paintings are mistakes. You put a mark on a canvas, and it’s a mistake. Of course it’s a mistake, otherwise it would be wonderful, because it would be finished. But it’s not. After maybe 50 or 60,000 mistakes, you give up. Like Leonardo said, “Works of art aren’t finished, they’re abandoned.” That’s absolutely true, art is never finished. People say, “Oh, that’s a nice romantic thing to say.” But it’s not romantic. It’s like saying that physics can be finished. Real art is never finished. With applied art at least you can say, “OK. You’ve learnt this lesson.” Illustration doesn’t even get into this no-man’s land. But that’s the only place that art lives, if it’s any good.

When you’re painting, then you’ve got nothing to paint until there’s something there, that first mistake. But once you see something – you’ll see a flow or a shape – then that’s what you’re painting, and that’s where paintings come from. And you just try to make them real. And they’re real when they look like they’ve been done all at once. When something happens so that everything that I’ve been looking at in the painting becomes something else very different. All of a sudden little things are visible, things that were invisible before, and the painting doesn’t look like it has a beginning or an end...

The art that we’re talking about is never finished. It can’t be. It isn’t in its nature. When things are finished isn’t a willful thing. Is a Mondrian finished? No. But is a [Fritz] Glarner? Yeah. That’s why a Mondrian’s better. And Mondrian or Glarner, they have no control over this. Beethoven had no control over being that good. Impossible. It wasn’t his fault he was that good. And it wasn’t Pollock’s fault that he was that wonderful. So if somebody says, “Oh, that’s good!” you can’t get a swelled head because you know that if perchance it is any good, that’s almost the way it is – it’s by chance!

...I don’t see them as any kind of paintings, but I do see landscape in them. I might think, “This looks like a mountain,” and I like that. Or something might look like an arm, or a figure, and I love it when it gets like that. It’s not that I put them there, but that’s what color does. Color is light, and that’s all that paintings are about: light. Painting is color. Color is light. The light that’s generated by your favorite painting, that’s what you’re responding to.

From the Tim Kane at the Times Union:

Larry Poons' multitude of searing colors -- chartreuse, construction-sign orange and stoplight red, among them -- jostle for dominance in his big and busy canvases. Ultimately, not a single one takes over, reaching an agreement, as if he's a conductor reigning in discordant voices in an atonal symphony.

The Art of Barry Gealt

EastPoint-PrinceEdwardIsland (2008)

Greenich Beach II-PEI (2008)


I noticed the Art of Barry Gealt perhaps 10 years ago or so.

He is a professor Emeritus from IU-Bloomington (lives in Owen County, Indiana).

I no doubt saw his paintings in a faculty exhibition there. Later I noticed IU's "Friends of Art" was offering a field trip to his studio and I went. I enjoyed seeing several large scale paintings he was working on - in the space that he had. I also noticed that he used a cold wax medium.

He has used various other things since to enhance the texture of his work. I believe that he builds up a texture and then begins painting. I think he used to build up layers of paint - which no doubt took a lot of paint and medium.

One thing that I've liked about his work is the way in which he uses the materials to suggest nature - in addition to the illusionistic use of paint. Some of his paintings are more abstract than others (ie. the center image).

Ilana Manolson

scratching in impermanence

winter clarity

Ilana Manolson Oil on panel
the wave

sundance

harbinger 3

big life small pond

Eva Lundsager

“Hermit Style” (2006). Oil on Linen.
Untitled 1994 Monotype
Untitled
watercolor
4 x 3.5 in.

"Eva Lundsager paints abstracted iconic landscapes whose imagery lingers somewhere between familiar and otherworldly.

In small- to medium-sized works, Lundsager uses a complex palette that defines each piece’s distinct atmosphere, from somber browns, deeply saturated cobalt blues and glowing reds, to soothingly lighthearted pastels (it is interesting to note that green is infrequently used). Compositionally, vast skyscapes are usually employed as epic backdrops for more detailed conglomerates of vivid lines and broken-up forms, generating an overall sense of dialogue between universal grandeur and microcosmic existence...

One of the exhibit’s most successful paintings, “Hermit Style,” contrasts expansive color fields with confined areas of great detail. A light rose and yellow tinted sky, reminiscent of a spring sunrise, adds a strangely soft glow to the otherwise predominantly ash gray grounds. However, this soil is far from infertile, and various mysterious structures made of dotted lines and curvilinear swirls have begun to populate the scenery. As they thrive, so might our trust in the eternal cycle of life, which proves that even a lava field will at some point serve as a breeding ground for new life forms.

Looking at Lundsager’s works it becomes clear that it is the moment of transition, when nature morphs from one state to another—like the time before a thunder storm when the darkening clouds foreshadow the theatrical release to come, for example—that remains the most inspiring touchstone for her painting."

Marlene Dumas

I was painting figures in ink and a model mentioned Marlene Dumas to me. She is from Cape Town - lives in Amsterdam. I noticed that she mostly paints figures. She uses polaroids of friends, magazine images, and film stills, etc. I like the way she makes the looseless in the ink/paint work.


Supermodel


Passion


Self-portrait/Photo


Marlene Dumas has a show at MOMA through 2/16/09. Measuring Your Own Grave.
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Joan Giordano "Presences"

I also found Joan Giordano from the list of artists at the Tenri Cultural Institute. I think we must be on a similar wavelength.

I'm taking a sculpture class in addition to painting and drawing - and Joan uses some of the materials that I'm interested in - plus has a sense of the natural.

From Tenri

Giordano’s work is part of a continuing series of sculptures that relate to the energies of nature and a deeply felt affinity for the delicate balance between the fragility of the human condition and the power of humanity. Giordano fuses disparate elements such as metal, straw, paper, wire, wood, and other materials that work together in dialogue. In combining these various objects both man-made and natural, she references states of transformation between nature and urban life. Giordano’s work parallels states of growth and deterioration as well as the elements – wind, fire and rain that alter and transform her work’s surfaces while dealing with the processes integral to the evolution of life.

I noticed on Joan's site that she creates paintings (some on handmade paper), monoprints, wall sculptures, and outdoor sculptures.

Joan Snyder

'Lines and Strokes' (1969).

I was browsing and noticed that Joan Snyder had won the The MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" in 2007. That's cool.

She often uses materials similar to what I do such as: Acrylic, oil, paper-mache, cloth, herbs, glitter.

I expect that her art work has a bit more impact in real life. The dimensionality does not show up much in photos.

From the New York Sun on the occasion of her award:

The leadership of the MacArthur Foundation is notoriously reticent to disclose nomination and selection criteria, but they cited Ms. Snyder's "fiercely individual approach and persistent experimentation with technique and materials."

"At least two major museums in New York own my work, and it sits in the basement," she said, referring to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art. "And now the Guggenheim has one, and I hope they hang it."

For some reason - the only images of hers that would post were the pink ones. It wasn't my intention - I had chosen a couple of blue ones originally. A person could get the impression that most of works are pink - and that is not the case at all.

Friedensreich Hundertwasser

The Boy With Green Hair

Exodus Into Space

The False Eyelid

A friend of mine mentioned this artist - as being his favorite - so I looked him up. Hundertwasser ended up becoming more famous for his architecture. He prefers the organic - so even his floors are undulated. According to the Wikipedia page about him, "The common themes in his work utilised bright colours, organic forms, a reconciliation of humans with nature, and a strong individualism, rejecting straight lines." Which, of course, I can totally relate to.

Born in Vienna 1928 -he eventually settled in New Zealand. He died in 2000.
Hot springs, Bad Blumau (Austria)