"In extraordinary recent paintings by Jean-Pierre Roy, purposeful men and women wrestle with amorphous forms, struggling to position them, or make adjustments to their actions. Sometimes the forms are geometrically structured, sometimes they are fungoid. They are always alien. What are these strange biomechanical devices? Their brightly colored music is foreign and frightening, and their unfamiliar structures are intimidating, and they seem to twist through multiple dimensions. Yet, as foreign as they are, they are beautiful, sensual, and attractive, and the initiates manipulating them show no signs of fear, even as they are changed by them."

"Tragedy often exerts a subtractive centrifugal force on a family, spinning apart and severing the bonds of those who remain. Often, but not always.

Take what happened after the groundbreaking artist Mary Ann Unger died in 1998, leaving behind her husband, the photographer Geoffrey Biddle, and their daughter Eve Biddle, then 16.

“We could have dumpstered everything,” Eve says of the nearly 1,000 artworks that her mother left behind after a 14-year battle with cancer that began when Eve was a toddler. “Looking back, that was in some ways a legitimate option, but it wasn’t for Dad. It wasn’t for me.”"

"The National Mall in Washington, which hosted the AIDS Memorial Quilt in 1987 and a remembrance for Covid-19 victims last year, will have its green acres transformed into a temporary exhibition next summer that reimagines the role of monuments in the telling of American history."

"While on family vacations between 1986 and 1994, Mary Ann Unger started plying brown wax into small, lumpy figurines. Eventually cast in bronze, they became the “Fragments” series—50 palm-size anthropomorphic sculptures that individually scream, dance, pray, stretch, and reach. In Unger’s retrospective “To Shape a Moon from Bone” (on view through December 22, 2022), 15 of these works are carefully displayed along an eye-level shelf, where their richly hand-worked surfaces can be best appreciated. Though among the smallest of Unger’s works in the exhibition, these forms offer outsize evidence of her powerful gestures and sensitive touch with materials. Curated by Horace Ballard and featuring works by artists who influenced Unger, as well as by her daughter, Eve Biddle, “To Shape a Moon from Bone” presents a practice infused with a feminist ethos of support."

"Tiffany Chung, who was born in Vietnam in 1969 and came to the United States in 1975 as a refugee, has long used mapmaking as a part of her rigorous research, analysis, and fieldwork, evincing a personal drive to process history. The works in “Terra Rouge: Circles, Traces of Time, Rebellious Solitude,” one of two bodies of work recently on view at Davidson Gallery in New York in collaboration with Tyler Rollins Fine Art, presented maps of a kind, centered on the Bình Long–Phu’ó’c Long plateau in southwestern Vietnam. The jewel-toned vellum sheets, meticulously marked and perforated, have a sculptural presence that their layering enhances. The overlapping sheets are attached only at the top, leaving the lower portions loose and slightly furled, like fabric hanging on a laundry line. Their thingness reminds the viewer that a map is an object to be physically contended with, not only a document to be studied and absorbed."

"Curatorial narratives about artists who died prematurely sometimes make the mistake of magnifying the significance of illness. The life and work of an artist—often one who is being rediscovered after years at the margins—can become wrongfully overdetermined by the tragic circumstances surrounding their death.

Because Mary Ann Unger (1945–1998) passed away at the age of fifty-three after a thirteen-year battle with breast cancer, one might be tempted to treat the artist—whose distinctive abstract sculptures and works on paper examine transcultural histories, imagery, and environmental issues—in this exact way. Yet what is so valuable about “To Shape a Moon from Bone,” Unger’s first solo museum presentation in more than twenty years, is the refusal of Horace D. Ballard, the show’s organizer, to fall into this trap, his insistence that great art emerges not from illness but through the wisdom that living is coextensive with dying. Indeed, cancer was the context, rather than the precondition, for Unger’s moving mature works."

"Known as one of Vietnam’s most renowned contemporary artists, Chung depicts human migration, conflict, displacement, urbanisation and human transformation through her art. She draws inspiration from her own life as a Vietnamese refugee in the US following the Vietnam War.

A graduate and master of Fine Arts, Chung uses her knowledge of archaeology and cartography to create paintings in the form of meticulously drawn maps chronicling geological events and recent humanitarian crises. Her 2019 solo exhibition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum titled Vietnam, Past is Prologue — comprising paintings, maps and videos presenting the stories of Vietnamese refugees spread around the world — is just one of the examples. Her art has been exhibited at Venice Biennale, Johann Jacobs Museum in Zurich, and Museum of Modern Art in New York as well as renowned museums in many other countries. She currently lives and works in Ho Chi Minh City, where she co-founded the independent non-profit gallery Sàn-Art."

"Across two floors of Davidson’s 26th Street location, Vietnamese artist Tiffany Chung questions whether displacement is a historical inevitability. The maps and drawings in Archaeology of Future Remembrance, displayed around windows that look out to the Manhattan skyline, explore how US colonialism directly influenced present redevelopment in her hometown of Ho Chi Minh City. Beneath this, the colorful paintings in Terra Rouge hearken to ancient earthworks excavated from a site where both 19th-century French colonialists planted their first rubber trees and the People’s Army of Vietnam launched its 1972 Easter Offensive against the US military. Together, these bodies of work posit that no state structure has an intrinsic right to any land and that colonialism embeds itself deep into culture long after its departure."

Davidson Gallery is pleased to announce that the Museum of Fine Arts Houston has acquired HR.25.17 by Sam Messenger, part of his Horizon series. HR.25.17 becomes the fifth work by Messenger in the MFAH permanent collection. The Museum also holds four of Messenger’s Veil drawings which were included in the inaugural exhibition of the Nancy and Rich Kinder Building in 2020 
 
The Horizon series exhibits Messenger’s signature ink-washed paper – paper that has been pushed to its limit, soaked in ink, water, and sometimes even left out to the elements. The black ink grounds provide an abyssal backdrop onto which Messenger applies his drawing, painstakingly adding and connecting white lines. The lines themselves seemed applied at random, though they begin to meet at a particular latitude, slowly joining to form the titular horizon line.


Pictured right: Sam Messenger, HR.25.17, 2017, Ink on paper, 22 x 30 in.

The Arts Council of Big Sky and artist Pedro de Movellán will host the ribbon cutting ceremony for “Gibbous,” a permanent art sculpture at 3 p.m. on Saturday, Oct. 9 at the Huntley Drive roundabout. Located by Roxy’s Market and the Big Sky Town Center Plaza, the kinetic sculpture will be dedicated to the Big Sky community to “uplift and inspire everyone who sees it, and to enliven the built environment around it” according to the arts council. This public art acquisition is funded entirely by private donations.

Through large-scale sculptural installations of rooftops and porches, Heather Hart transforms exhibition spaces into interactive sites, inviting visitors to contemplate what it means to create a Black space of joy and reflection. Growing up with a carpenter father, she witnessed how lumber can demarcate and frame spaces, and how these spaces become containers for social relations and memories.

In the exhibition Heather Hart: Afrotecture (Re)Collection at UB Art Galleries, the artist’s sculptural installation “Sweet Lorraine” (2021) explores a space neither wholly interior nor exterior: a balcony. The work directly “quotes” — to use Hart’s word — the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, where the civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968.

AbStranded features ten contemporary American artists—Polly Apfelbaum, Paolo Arao, Sanford Biggers, Samantha Bittman, Julia Bland, Rachel B. Hayes, Elana Herzog, Anne Lindberg, Sheila Pepe, and Sarah Zapata—who use fiber-based materials to investigate the complex lineage of abstraction. Utilizing a diverse variety of methods, styles, and forms, these artists uncover and co-opt textile traditions and material sources in order to re-assert their validity and relevance in an increasingly global-industrial culture. A prominent use of the hand looms large—through knitting, weaving, quilting, and more—and suggests an alternative mode of communication within today’s digital society. Together, the works reveal how artists employ the language of abstraction to speak about the intertwined histories and politics of craft, race, and gender.

Pictured: Samantha Bittman, Untitled, 2019, Acrylic on hand-woven textile, 30 x 24 inches, Courtesy of the artist

“It was a bit of an accident. We decided we wanted to move to France and find somewhere a bit more connected to nature than life in Berlin. We had thought about being near the sea—either on the Atlantic coast or on the Mediterranean—and we did a road trip. But we had to get from one water to the next and ended up traversing the Pyrenees and sleeping one night just outside of Argeles—Gazost. We just fell in love with it. We’d never been to the Pyrenees before. I think it was the wildness. We hadn’t realized there was these incredible wild mountains so close to airports. Toulouse is so close you can still live in nature but you are still very much connected with the rest of the world.”

In 2018, artists and curators across the United States have been crafting brilliant exhibitions across the US, exploring themes of identity and community in innovative ways. Ebony G. Patterson made a maximalist tribute to victims of violence in her home country of Jamaica, while Joel Otterson crafted work recalling his parents’ professions as a seamstress and plumber. Indigenous artists took the stage at the Anchorage Museum’s Unsettled and Jeffrey Gibson’s This is the Day at the Wellin Museum. The enthralling official Obama portraits, painted by Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald, were revealed at the National Gallery in DC, putting Black fine artists into the national consciousness. This list is an insight into the tastes of our US writers and the shows that moved them.

6. Scalar, A Solo Exhibition by Torkwase Dyson at the Usdan Gallery

Torkwase Dyson’s paintings in Scalar crash like waves in the dark, as seismic as they are surreptitious, creating intimate frameworks for rethinking materiality, form, and spatial and environmental politics in the process. Two onyx-black panels, one mounted and the other leaning on a tiny chrome balance beam, make up “I Can Feel You Now (Accumulation/Distribution)” (2018), a 12 by 20-foot diptych painted on site at Bennington College. It both commands the room and draws viewers close with blips of white paint suggesting some code or measurement of scale. The works in Scalar, which was curated by Anne Thompson, question how forms in our landscape become subconscious and serialized, and either help or hinder Black bodies moving through it. Dyson’s tondos in Scalar can also be seen as pipelines through the earth cleaved open, runnels of paint revealing the hand as gesture — but more importantly, the hand as conscious and considerate of what it touches and builds, or destroys and leaves behind. —Alex Jen 

It can be difficult for artists to express stories of magic and personal memories through their practice, while most of us tend to believe fictional narratives when they are served on a silver plate. Nicky Broekhuysen, who works and lives in Berlin, translates one of these highly personal and perhaps even non-logical stories into the artistic project "The Channeling" that she will be presenting at Davidson Gallery in New York. The project is based on a story involving Nicky's grandmother Marge Hugo and her relationship to the impressionist painter Claude Monet. Merging painting and binary code, while referencing her grandmother's practice of channeling and spiritual awareness, Nicky's various artistic techniques accompany her through a journey from the past into the future. Her practice is a reminder of how art is still the most powerful tool for magical narratives and ways of remembering inspiring people. 

Text courtesy of Artfridge.de

The technique of photomontage entered the vernacular of modern art in 1916, at the hands of the German Dadaists George Grosz and John Heartfield. Over the years, artists in every era and region, from Hannah Höch to Aleksandr Rodchenko to Wangechi Mutu, have adopted the practice of splicing old images into new meanings. Among the most recent of these is Joe Rudko, a young Seattle-based artist who brings elegant, trippy nuances to the twentieth-century form.

This exhibition brings together artists from across the United States—Carolina Caycedo, Demian DinéYazhi´ with Ginger Dunnill, Torkwase Dyson, Cy Gavin, Lena Henke, and Erin Jane Nelson—whose work responds to the precarious state of the environment through a personal lens. Experimenting with form and narrative in painting, video, and sculpture, these artists address how ideology—as much as technology, industry, and architecture—impacts all living things.

Though each contends with facts or histories that are real and observable, none takes a documentary approach. Rather, these artists adopt a highly subjective position, embracing emotion, intuition, spirituality, and myth to help understand our intrinsic place within the “natural” world. They share the sense that scientific, or “rational,” thought can reinforce a limited view of our planet and its inhabitants—one that assumes they can and should be controlled.

The works present a wide range of subjects, from communities affected by hydroelectric-dam construction in South America to those displaced during the controversial transformation of New York in the mid-twentieth century by city official Robert Moses. They draw from distinct visual traditions, including Southern handcraft, sixteenth-century architecture, history painting, and hard-edge abstraction. Through their varied interests and formal approaches, all of these artists assert the relevance of individual experience and perspective to address concerns that are global in scale and effect. In the words of artist Torkwase Dyson, this exhibition is not just about “the way we connect...but understanding also the waters that are between us.”

The exhibition is organized by Elisabeth Sherman, assistant curator, and Margaret Kross, curatorial assistant.

Text taken from whitney.org

The Director of the RGR + ART Gallery , Ricardo Gonzalez Ramos spoke on the Kaleidoscope Titina on this project with the scenario of " Cromoconsferencia " Master Carlos Cruz Diez and artist Liu Bolin. He explained that the development of this work had been carried out for three years and lasted about 16 hours to complete the recreation of the work and to photograph. Cromointerferencia artists recreated on a wall, and then proceed to paint and it gave the illusion of " camouflage " between the lines that intertwine in this renowned work. This collaboration is a job for RGR + ART Gallery Gallery Marion and Panama.

Translated by Google

Exhibitor List annouced by The Observer

View Catalogue

"Let us get to the facts first. (I shall come to the reason in a bit). It is time for Expo Chicago. There is a reason why this story cannot start with a flowery, literary introduction. And it is not because of Fall, the season we tire ourselves out blowing off the leaves, getting ready to tend to new saplings. It is because of the man who everybody knows. He likes to get to the point straight down. No, he is not a sipper, he is a gulper.  That’s Tony Karman — the director and president of Expo Chicago “who tends to this extravagant art fair like an obsessive gardener. It is like a garden for me that needs constant attention and tending to. It is all I care about. Every year, I try to make it grow a little more, add a few new things, experiment, prune a bit here and there…” "

Text taken from BLOUINARTINFO

#2 - Carlos Cruz-Diez

Included: Sam Messenger, Aegyptus, 2014, Mixed media on canvas, 111 x 82 1/2 inches

"Organized by the Art Dealers Association of America, The Art Show, now in its 27th year, has earned its declarative name for steadfastly maintaining that the quality of art has little to do with hype and headlines, and it's clear that the thoughtfully selected mix of works, which mostly range from the 19th century to the present day, hold up to academic and aesthetic critique. Among the works exhibited by 72 participating galleries are a sculpture by Constantin Brâncuși, a painting by Claude Monet, works from 20th century masters like Pablo Picasso, Nam June Paik, and Chuck Close, and solo booths for contemporary stars like Wade Guyton, Lorna Simpson, and Michelle Grabner. The ADAA prides itself on its roster of esteemed dealers who continue to prove that, in the art market, good business means little without good taste."

In February 1965, The Museum of Modern Art mounted an exhibition titled The Responsive Eye, comprised of works by nearly 100 artists from around the world who were experimenting with Op-art before the term existed. The exhibition was groundbreaking, spanning international borders, yet rooted in established visual and color studies. It encompassed Optic, Kinetic, Conceptual, and Color Field art.

To commemorate this landmark exhibition, and to further examine Op-art’s current imprint on the art world, Maxwell Davidson Gallery presents The Responsive Eye at 50, with works by historical artists featured in the 1965 MoMA show, such as Victor Vasarely, Carlos Cruz-Diez, Bridget Riley, Yaacov Agam, and Luis Tomasello. The far-reaching influence of The Responsive Eye on today’s artists cannot be overlooked. As such, we will also show work by contemporary artists and artists influenced by the Op-art movement including Pedro S. De Movellan, Mary Ann Unger, Sanford Wurmfeld, Kevin Osmond, Ghost of a Dream, and Sam Messenger.

Hours:
Wednesday- Friday: 12 to 8pm
Saturday: 12 to 7pm
Sunday: 12 to 5pm

PIctured: Victor Vasarely, Méandres-Naissances, 1953, Acrylic on canvas, 70 1/4 x 61 inches

Maxwell Davidson Gallery and Davidson Contemporary artists have been well-represented in museum shows this year (and will continue to be into 2015).

 

Several works by Pedro S. de Movellàn and Tim Prentice are on view in Vero Beach Museum of Art’s exhibition Kinetic Sculpture: The Poetics of Motion, along with sculpture by George Rickey and several contemporary kinetic sculptors. The show closes January 4.

 

As part of the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art’s State of the Art exhibition, Davidson Contemporary artist collective Ghost of a Dream was selected out of over 1,000 artists to represent the Northeast region. The show opened in September and will be on view until January 19, 2015. The museum also acquired Forever, Almost, the title work and centerpiece of Ghost of a Dream’s first solo show at Davidson Contemporary. 

 

Finally, Sam Messenger will be included in Line: Making the Mark, at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. MFAH acquired four of Messengers drawings, and asked him to speak at the opening of the exhibition. Alongside Messenger, the show features a cavalcade of Modern and Contemporary artists including Josef Albers, Louise Bourgeois, Willem de Kooning, Sol LeWitt and Agnes Martin, among others. Line: Making the Mark opens today and runs through March 22, 2015.