This week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast features painter Kaz Oshiro. His work is on view in “Lifelike” at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. In art speak, “Lifelike” “invites a close examination of artworks based on commonplace objects and situations, which are startlingly realistic, often playful, and sometimes surreal. This international, multigenerational group exhibition features artists variously using scale, unusual materials, and sly contextual devices to reveal the manner in which their subjects’ ‘authenticity’ is manufactured.” (Or it’s a contemporary trompe l’oeil show.) Organized by the Walker Art Center and curated by Siri Engberg, it’s on view at MCASD through May 27.
Oshiro is exhibiting new work at Honor Fraser gallery in Los Angeles in an exhibition on view through May 25. This is an installation shot of Still Life (2013). Honor Fraser just posted 20 installation shots of Oshiro’s show here.
On the second segment,Deb Sokolow discusses her narrative drawings and installations. Her work is the subject of two ongoing exhibitions: “Some concerns about the candidate” a “Matrix” exhibition at the Wadsworth Atheneum through June 30; and in a solo exhibition at Chicago’s Western Exhibitions gallery. It’s on view through April 20.
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This week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast features two of the top exhibits of Italian art on view in the United States: “Bernini: Sculpting in Clay” at the Kimbell Art Museum and “Piero della Francesca in America” at The Frick Collection. The first guest on the program is Kimbell curator of European art C.D. Dickerson III, who co-curated “Bernini” along with Frick director Ian Wardropper. Then “Piero” curator Nathaniel Silver joins me to discuss Piero. “Bernini” is at the Kimbell through April 14, while “Piero” is on view through May 19.
“Bernini” reveals how the artist developed his ideas in clay and on paper, ideas that resulted in some of the most dramatic statuary in Rome. It includes about 40 of Bernini’s terracotta sketch models together with about 30 drawings. Its rich catalogue was published by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and is distributed by Yale University Press. Silver’s show is the first monographic exhibition of Piero in the United States. It brings together seven works at the Frick (and an eighth, which is unable to travel, in the catalogue).
This week’s program will also feature a special bonus: An extended clip of Llyn Foulkes playing his Machine at the Hammer Museum on Feb. 26. The Hammer is featuring a retrospective of Foulkes’ work through May 19. The Machine is a Foulkes-created one-man apparatus featuring lots of horns, a water jug, cowbells, organ pipes and plenty more. You can view the entire performance — and it’s a blast — on the Hammer’s website.
How to listen: Download the show to your PC/mobile device. Subscribe to The MAN Podcast via iTunes, SoundCloud, Stitcher or RSS. See images of art discussed on the program.
Image: Bernini, Head of Saint Jerome (detail), 1661. Collection of the Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, Mass.
This screen-capture from the live webcam in the Museum of Modern Art’s atrium reveals that Wolfgang Laib’s Pollen from Hazelnut is just about installed! It opens to the public on Wednesday. At 18-by-21 feet, it will be the largest pollen field Laib has made.
This week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast features Laib, who is installing not one but two major works in the U.S. this season. The second will be at The Phillips Collection, which will open the Laib Wax Room, a new permanent installation, on March 2. It will be the first permanent installation at the Phillips since the museum opened its Rothko Room in 1960.
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This week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast features artists Emmet Gowin and Frank Gohlke. Their photographs taken after the 1980 eruption of Mount Saint Helens are on view at the Cleveland Museum of Art in the exhibition “American Vesuvius: The Aftermath of Mount Saint Helens by Frank Gohlke and Emmet Gowin.” The show opens Sunday and is on view through May 12.
On May 18, 1980 Mount Saint Helens erupted with a force equivalent to 1,600 of the atomic bombs that decimated Hiroshima, Japan. The eruption killed nearly sixty people and destroyed or damaged over 60,000 acres of wilderness.
This is a detail from one of Gohlke’s 1982 pictures of the area near Mount Saint Helens. It’s one of several pictures in which Gohlke presents a dramtically tilted landscape, a la Timothy O’Sullivan. On this week’s MAN Podcast, I asked Gohlke if he was consciously dipping into O’Sullivan’s bag of tricks, or if he was reflexively responding to the landscape he was in.
To download the program to your PC/mobile device, click here. Subscribe to The MAN Podcast via iTunes, SoundCloud or RSS. To see dozens of images of the works discussed on this week’s program, visit Modern Art Notes.
Image: Frank Gohlke, Looking SW across Blowdown toward Valley of South Toutle River, 8 miles NW of Mount St. Helens, Washington (detail), 1982. Collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
This week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast features the new Museum of Fine Arts Houston exhibition “War Photography: Images of Armed Conflict and its Aftermath.” Anne Wilkes Tucker, the show’s co-curator (along with MFAH’s Will Michaels and Natalie Zelt) joins me to discuss the exhibition and the related 600-page book from the MFAH and the Yale University Press.
The show, which opens this weekend and runs through February 3, includes almost 500 objects, images by more than 280 photographers on six continents, all of it covering 165 years of war. The exhibition and catalogue are presented thematically, with sections on war-related topics such as recruitment, training, daily routine, patrol, the wait, the fight itself, leisure time and more.
On the second segment I talk with Sarah Oppenheimer, a New York-based artist whose architectural interventions challenge our perception of space. Next week the Baltimore Museum of Art will re-open its remodeled contemporary wing. As part of the re-opening the museum will unveil two commissioned works by Oppenheimer that will be on view permanently at the museum. Photographs of the installations were unavailable as of show-time. When they become available I’ll add them here and feature them via social media, especially on our new Facebook page.
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Image: Luis Sinco, Marlboro Marine (detail), November 8, 2004. Collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
This week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast features New York-based painter Jonathan Lasker.
I love these kinds of passages in Lasker’s paintings, places where flat meets frosting-like impasto, where colors meet non-color meets other colors, where straight lines meet curved ones, where overlaid paint-strokes meet single strokes. There’s so much going on, but somehow Lasker quiets it all down to a hush.
Lasker is featured in the exhibition “Conceptual Abstraction” at the Hunter College Art Galleries in New York. The exhibition takes as its jumping-off point a 1991 show of the same title at Sidney Janis Gallery, a show that aimed to introduce a new generation of abstract painters to New York. The Hunter exhibition reunites the same 20 painters via one work from around 1991 and one recent painting. The show is on view through November 10th. (Painter Valerie Jaudon has posted the catalogue for the exhibition on her website.)
Lasker exhibits regularly in the United States in Europe and in 1999 curator David Moos organized a survey of his work titled “Selective Identity.” Lasker’s work is in the collection of numerous museums including the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Ludwig and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Download the program to your PC/mobile device. Subscribe to The Modern Art Notes Podcast via iTunes or RSS. See images of artworks discussed on the program.
Image: Jonathan Lasker, Love Light and Dark (detail), 2009.
This week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast features New York-based painter Jonathan Lasker.
Among the topics Lasker and I discuss is his interest in building compositions not just in two dimensions, but in three dimensions. This detail from The Inability to Sublimate (2009) shows one way he does that: By building up big, thick, frosting-like brushstrokes next to super-flat parts of a painting.
Lasker is featured in the exhibition “Conceptual Abstraction” at the Hunter College Art Galleries in New York. The exhibition takes as its jumping-off point a 1991 show of the same title at Sidney Janis Gallery, a show that aimed to introduce a new generation of abstract painters to New York. The Hunter exhibition reunites the same 20 painters via one work from around 1991 and one recent painting. The show is on view through November 10th. (Painter Valerie Jaudon has posted the catalogue for the exhibition on her website.)
Lasker exhibits regularly in the United States in Europe and in 1999 curator David Moos organized a survey of his work titled “Selective Identity.” Lasker’s work is in the collection of numerous museums including the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Ludwig and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Download the program to your PC/mobile device. Subscribe to The Modern Art Notes Podcast via iTunes or RSS. See images of artworks discussed on the program.
The second segment of this week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast features painter Shirley Kaneda.
Both Kaneda and the show’s first guest, Jonathan Lasker, are featured in the exhibition “Conceptual Abstraction” at the Hunter College Art Galleries in New York. The exhibition takes as its jumping-off point a 1991 show of the same title at Sidney Janis Gallery, a show that aimed to introduce a new generation of abstract painters to New York. The Hunter exhibition reunites the same 20 painters as represented by a work from around 1991 as well as a more recent painting. The show is on view through November 10th.
On the program Kaneda talks about the tension between flatness and depth in her work, a tension that has increased in recent years. In addition to her painting practice, she is a professor at the Pratt Institute and regularly interviews artists for Bomb Magazine. Don’t miss her Q&As with Charline von Heyl, Robert Mangold, Fabian Marcaccio and Philip Taaffe. (Or with Jonathan Lasker!)
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Image: Shirley Kaneda, Plumb Askew (detail), 2011.
This is a detail from a great untitled 1957 Clyfford Still painting in the collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Before the opening of the Clyfford Still Museum last year, SFMOMA and the Albright-Knox had the two greatest troves of Still’s paintings thanks to substantial gifts from Still himself.
SFMOMA has done a nice job of putting its Stills online. The Albright’s Stills are online too, but as smaller JPEGs.
Still is the subject of the first segment of this week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast, on which I speak with one of the world’s top abstract expressionism scholars: David Anfam. In recent years Anfam has been working with the Still Museum on its collections and installations. He is also the author of the catalogue raisonnes of Mark Rothko’s paintings and Conrad Marca-Relli. The museum has also just published “Clyfford Still: The Artist’s Museum,” which features a major essay by Anfam on Still’s life and work. (Amazon offers the book for $25 off.)
Download the program to your PC/mobile device. Subscribe to The Modern Art Notes Podcast via iTunes or RSS. See images of artworks discussed on the program.
The second guest on this week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast is curator/historian Mia Fineman, who talks about her new Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition “Faking It: Manipulating Photography Before Photoshop.”
The show goes back to nearly the beginning of photography to reveal how artists have been manipulating their pictures since nearly the start of photography. (You can see a JPEG of just about every picture in the exhibition here.) The exhibition is accompanied by one of the best art history books of the season. It’s published by the Met and is distributed by the Yale University Press. It’s also almost $25 off via Amazon.
Photographic manipulation fascinated artists: According to Fineman, postcards such as this one fascinated the surrealist artists and poets. Paul Eluard amassed a large collection of fantasy postcards.
Download the program to your PC/mobile device. Subscribe to The Modern Art Notes Podcast via iTunes or RSS. See images of artworks discussed on the program.
Image: Unknown, Untitled [Couple with Figure of Cupid] (detail), 1910s. Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
The first guest on this week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast is one of the world’s top abstract expressionism scholars: David Anfam. In recent years Anfam has been working with the new Clyfford Still Museum on its collections and installations. The CSM is currently showing selections from its collection alongside “Vincent/Clyfford,” an installation that demonstrates how Still looked closely at van Gogh. The museum has also just published “Clyfford Still: The Artist’s Museum,” which features a major essay by Anfam on Still’s life and work. (Amazon offers the book for $25 off.)
Among the works we discuss is this superb untitled 1956 work on paper (detail) in MOCA’s collection. The new Still Museum has a gallery permanently devoted to Still’s works on paper, which were rarely seen before the CSM opened.
Download the program to your PC/mobile device. Subscribe to The Modern Art Notes Podcast via iTunes or RSS. See images of artworks discussed on the program.
This week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast features two art historians: David Anfam on Clyfford Still and Mia Fineman on her new Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition “Faking It: Manipulating Photography Before Photoshop.”
Anfam is one of the leading scholars of abstract expressionism and has compiled the catalogue raisonnes of Mark Rothko and Conrad Marca-Relli. He’s the adjunct curator at the Clyfford Still Museum in Denver, where he has worked with director Dean Sobel on the museum’s installations. The CSM is currently showing selections from its collection along side “Vincent/Clyfford,” an installation that demonstrates how Still looked closely at van Gogh. The museum has also just published “Clyfford Still: The Artist’s Museum,” which features a major essay by Anfam on Still’s life and work. (Amazon offers the book for $25 off.)
Fineman a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Her new show, “Faking It, Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop,” goes back to nearly the beginning of photography to reveal how artists have been manipulating their pictures since nearly the start of photography. (You can see a JPEG of just about every picture in the exhibition here.) The exhibition is accompanied by a terrific book, one of the best art history books of the season. It’s published by the Met and is distributed by the Yale University Press. It’s also almost $25 off via Amazon.
Download the program to your PC/mobile device. Subscribe to The Modern Art Notes Podcast via iTunes or RSS. See images of artworks discussed on the program.
Image: Unknown American, Man on Rooftop with Eleven Men in Formation on His Shoulders (detail), ca. 1930. Collection of the George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film, Rochester, New York.
The Roy Lichtenstein retrospective organized by curators James Rondeau and Sheena Wagstaff has arrived at its second venue: The National Gallery of Art, where it will be on view through January 13, 2013. The show originated at the Art Institute of Chicago over the summer and will travel to the Tate Modern and the Centre Pompidou next year. The exhibition is accompanied by an excellent, readable catalogue, from Yale University Press. Amazon offers it for $25 off.
Exhibition co-curator James Rondeau was the lead guest on Episode No. 28 of The Modern Art Notes Podcast. We discussed Lichtenstein’s intense mining of art history as well as how he zig-zagged away from the art-historical landmarks he chose to examine.
Download the Lichtenstein program to your PC/mobile device. Subscribe to The Modern Art Notes Podcast via iTunes or RSS. See images of artworks discussed on the program.
Image: Roy Lichtenstein, Brushstroke with Spatter (detail), 1966. Collection of the Art Institute of Chicago.
This week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast features one of Europe’s best-known and most admired artists: Olafur Eliasson. Awesome bonus: Eliasson’s work is featured all day today on must-follow Tumblr Cave to Canvas.
An exhibition of Eliasson’s newest photographs — featuring his ancestral homeland of Iceland — opens next week at Chelsea’s Tanya Bonakdar Gallery. Also, Taschen has just published a new edition of “Studio Olafur Eliasson,” a 532-page ‘encylopedia’ of Eliasson’s studio practice. (It’s available on Amazon for $25, a 40 percent discount.)
Eliasson is one of the world’s most famous artists. His projects include The Weather Project, a 2003 installation at the Tate Modern and “Take Your Time: Olafur Eliasson,” a 2007-08 retrospective that was curated by Madeline Grynsztejn for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The show traveled to the Museum of Modern Art, New York and its PS1 satellite as well as to the MCA Chicago and the Dallas Museum of Art. A full (and long) list of Eliasson’s exhibitions and projects is available at his excellent website. Learn more about his Little Sun project here.
Download the program to your PC/mobile device. Subscribe to The Modern Art Notes Podcast via iTunes or RSS. See images of artworks discussed on the program.
“Origin of the Universe,” a survey exhibition of Mickalene Thomas’s work, just opened at the Brooklyn Museum. It’s an expanded version of the show that debuted at the Santa Monica Museum of Art this past summer. Don’t miss Roberta Smith’s smart NYT review of the Brooklyn show.
Mickalene Thomas was the lead guest on Episode No. 30 of The Modern Art Notes Podcast. We discussed her art, her interest in art history and how her relationship with her mother has fed her work. If you’re interested in the art and themes in the Brooklyn show, you’ll love the podcast.
(Bonus! The photo of Thomas above provides a neat tie-in to this week’s MAN Podcast, which features Carrie Mae Weems. Thomas’s t-shirt — click here to see the large version of the picture and then scroll down a bit — puts Thomas and artists of her generation, including Kara (Walker) and Wangechi (Mutu) in the context of the previous generation of black women artists, including Lorna (Simpson) and Weems.)
Download the MAN Podcast featuring Thomas to your PC/mobile device. Subscribe on iTunes or via RSS. See images of artworks Thomas and I discussed on the show.
Image: Mickalene Thomas by Philip Montgomery for the Wall Street Journal.
