Displaying items by tag: abstract art

In a visit with his daughters this past summer, President Obama spent nearly an hour at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the nation’s largest repository of paintings and sketches by Edward Hopper.

He also could have seen a few Hoppers at home.

“Le Onde: Waves of Italian Influence (1914–1971)” runs Aug. 22–Jan. 3, 2016, at the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. This exhibition of nearly 20 works from the museum’s collection follows Italian contributions to the transnational evolution of abstraction, through movements and tendencies such as futurism, spatialism, op art and kinetic art.

The exhibition includes several works that have been exhibited only rarely or not at all since entering the collection. Among those that have not been on view since the Hirshhorn’s inaugural exhibition in 1974–1975 are works by Zero group founder Heinz Mack, French op artist Yvaral and Italian painter Carlo Battaglia and several works by Italian artist Enrico Castellani.

Bay Area artist Richard Diebenkorn kept sketchbooks for his entire career; they served as a sort of nomadic studio where he experimented with visuals that bridged figurative and abstract ideas. Recently the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University acquired 29 of Diebenkorn’s sketchbooks, and this September they’re going on view to the public for the first time in Richard Diebenkorn: The Sketchbooks Revealed.

“The books are filled with stunningly gestural sketches of bits and pieces of daily life, both mundane capturing of everyday things, and powerful vignettes of intimate family moments,” Alison Gass, the Cantor’s associate director for collections, exhibitions, and curatorial affairs, told Hyperallergic.

Jackson Pollock: Blind Spots is a sensational exhibition – grand, exhilarating and so unexpected as to make the painter’s career look altogether different. It brings together nearly half of the semi-figurative Black Paintings from the early 1950s. This would be unique enough – they haven’t been shown together since Pollock’s death, drunk at the wheel of his Oldsmobile in 1956 – but here they appear among a tremendous selection of paintings from every period, to reveal a startling continuity between the figurative and the abstract in Pollock’s career.

“Russian Modernism: Cross-Currents of German and Russian Art, 1907-1917” at the Neue Galerie is a lively, scattershot exhibition, with numerous paintings of great interest, others of not so much and many by Russian artists most of us have barely heard of.

Containing 53 paintings and 21 works on paper, the show spans a decade when modern art movements were breaking out all over Europe — Fauvism, Expressionism, Cubism, Futurism, Dada and De Stijl. To the east, Russia was no exception. The show’s ambitious title introduces an immense subject that is beyond the resources of this small jewel-box museum.

The San Jose Museum of Art has received a major gift of 44 works of art from the collection of Barbara and Dixon Farley. Among the highlights are works by Jay DeFeo, Willem de Kooning, Richard Diebenkorn, Philip Guston, Henry Moore, Claes Oldenburg, Gay Outlaw, Richard Serra, James Siena, David Simpson, Richard Shaw, and Peter Wegner. This latest group of works joins the Farley’s earlier gift of 29 works given to the Museum following Mr. Farley’s death in 2012. SJMA will showcase the Farley’s gift in a fall 2015 exhibition.

“The Farleys built their collection with deep passion, independence, and a keen eye for abstraction. Their art filled their home and their life—as did their commitment to supporting the work of living artists,” said Susan Krane, Oshman Executive Director of SJMA.

"Adventures of the Black Square: Abstract Art and Society 1915 – 2015" is a major new exhibition tracing a century of Abstract art from 1915 to the present day, and is to open at the Whitechapel Gallery, London. The exhibition brings together over 100 works by 100 modern masters and contemporary artists including Carl Andre, David Batchelor, Dan Flavin, Andrea Fraser, Piet Mondrian, Gabriel Orozco, Hélio Oiticica, Aleksandr Rodchenko, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Rosemarie Trockel, Theo Van Doesburg and Andrea Zittel, taking over six exhibition spaces across the gallery.

The show is curated by Iwona Blazwick OBE, Director, and Magnus af Petersens, Curator at Large, Whitechapel Gallery, "Adventures of the Black Square: Abstract Art and Society 1915 – 2015," is international in its scope.

A Manhattan real estate agent wants answers from his gallerista step-sister on why she hawked a family-owned painting by a renowned abstract artist last year for a measly $375,000 when it re-sold months later for millions.

Cyrus Greenspon claims in court papers that her step-sister's mega-cheap sell-off of their late dad's Ad Reinhardt painting was shady and a conflict of interest — namely because she got her former boss, the president of swanky Pace Gallery, to vouch for its low value and had a friend and former colleague buy it.

It has been over a hundred years since abstraction was adopted in Western painting, and we’re still trying to make sense of it. Despite the rather clunky subtitle and the fact that the exhibition is drawn from a single collection, “Rothko to Richter: Mark-Making in Abstract Painting from the Collection of Preston H. Haskell” offers an excellent, compact survey of some of the key arguments.

One thing highlighted at the beginning of the show, which includes works by 23 painters, is that, along with the rise of abstract art, our concept of traditional art history — how one movement or artist invariably influences the next generation — has changed.

Austrian artist Maria Lassnig, whose brushy, psychologically tense, sometimes darkly comic paintings affected generations of artists over the course of her 70-plus-year career, died today at a hospital in Vienna. She was 94. Her death was confirmed by one of her galleries, Hauser and Wirth, and has been reported in the European press. She has no immediate survivors.

Lone figures typically occupy Ms. Lassnig’s paintings, often partially disfigured or abstracted and in the midst of all kinds of unspeakable mental and emotional trauma. Many are chilling, fleshy self-portraits. In one a plastic bag covers her head, in another she holds a gun up to her temple. A survey of them now on view at MoMA PS1 shows that, though tastes changed, her core devotion to her unflinching practice did not.