9/2/2023 0 Comments Franz kline black subjectivity![]() ![]() ![]() It still brings back for me, the cultural moment when America broke with Europe, culminating in the high '60s. So that you're not put on the spot - I think - to create this space she even downplays her own undoubted chops. To use your time on these "its."īut equally, Dona makes the gallery open and available. Things unlike words have their own immutability. When you "read" materials, objects, the space, light, and style that paint creates it's not proposed in a way that can be accepted or rejected. After "Action" and "Free" expression, there is a reconsideration.ĭona's pieces are like proposals. And employed what looks like a leisurely "drag" of semi-transparent paint on the other side. What if you stood back for a minute? Jumped back in with some loose weaving in one quadrant. The use of soap boxes (Soap Boxes!) for the piece "WOOd" 2020Ī "what if." In this case, a leisurely thrown action painting on one side. A canvas mounted onto a dias that slowly rotates. The gallery space has been arranged to feel more communal, like where a group might meet sometimes to do something. It makes painting a foray into an experiment in crafts that's more casual than in a hot house studio. In the book The Three Princes of Serendip, Horace Walpole suggests they are: "making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of." WOOd 2020. I was told by the gallery assistant that Dona stands behind (well, there is no real behind) with a studio assistant, threading these long, woolly cables through the canvas so that in the end two versions of the figure are available, one from each side. But the reality of the people is secondary to the way it comes together. "Olive and Reily" 2020 shows two figures and like most of the paintings in this show is viewable from both sides. The observance of volume is sacrificed so that graphic impact can happen. For example what looks like deckchair fabric is casually folded and stuck to the outline of a figure. Because narrative and the falling of light on an object are much less important than process. There's figuration here but it's treated as if copying nature was another branch of abstraction. ![]() As if directness was a fudge, not as brave as letting chance and the character of the materials have its way. The process might throw up new shapes in a way that the direct stroke hitting a canvas doesn't. The pour, the bunched fabric, thick thread pulled through the canvas that picks out figures in dots or stitches leaving loose ends hanging. Generally Dona prefers the indirect route to bringing out the image. These bunched areas stand in for impasto paint. One side presenting a figure made from a white fabric dipped in epoxy resin that keeps it hard when it sets. A space you have to peer into to see the images. It's mounted onto a base with the pieces not parallel with each other but fanning out at one side creating a rhomboid negative space on the stand. One of the new paintings is two lovely long rectangular panels of which one is called "Studio Portrait Over Time" 2020. However gnarly and cobwebby the injunctions are or how partial, they do want us to feel a certain way, to think of them a certain way.Īnd the more integrated or unified the system of explanation is the more intentional and "conscious" it is. When actually this kind of painting is all intention The strokes are thorny, viewable from both sides of the canvas so that the route through the work feels like negotiating through scenery, backstage.Ībstract painting seems all subjectivity, supposedly all interpretations are valid. ![]() Going into Thomas Erben's gallery is quite different. No longer shackled to mimesis the artist is pitched only against her/his/their desires or lack of vision. Perhaps that's why abstraction far from being another "just path" can seem like a truly adult proposal. Free expression become the one true faith. Like one of those GoPro videos of skydiving through the Alps. Painting cut loose for the first time. The Cadmuses and Burchfields are mulchy and intimate, but it's the white room that holds "The" DeFeo, a spectacular Kline, a killer Ed Clarke like hearing jazz for the first time, dropping off the chorus into the solo. Going from the room that separates the paintings of the 1940s into those of the '50s, it's like suddenly walking into the light. Visiting the selections from the Whitney collection took me back to that place and helped me understand Dona as "from" and also "come far from" the breakout of American Art. You might complain if your neighbour has an American flag in their front garden. She's an American modern painter but it's no longer the beginning of modern Art - like the black line of Franz Kline or the roar of Jimi Hendrix playing "Star Spangled Banner" at Woodstock. Dona Nelson: Stretchers Strung Out On Spaceĭona Nelson's new show is an expression of more struggles and freedoms. ![]()
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