Jürgen Bergbauer

From top to bottom: Artificial Lawn in Ten Views (2011), Untitled no.3 (studies) (2008), Untitled (Parterre de Pieces Coupees I) (2004), Untitled (Parterre de Gazon I) (2004)

“Stephen Jay Gould once wrote that ‘the human mind delights in finding pattern – so much so that we often mistake coincidence or forced analogy for profound meaning. No other habit lies so deeply within the soul of a small creature trying to make sense of a complex world.’ This is the spirit that influences the work of Juergen Bergbauer, a German-born, RISD-educated photographer whose images highlight the tense harmonies that exist between man and his natural surroundings. ‘That’s my understanding of photography,’ Bergbauer says. ‘It’s about registering the visual world and endowing it with order and meaning. I’s a strong human desire.’

Bergbauer draws attention to the stark, irregular beauty of organic forms by photographing them in crisp monochrome, and altering the image, divorcing figure from ground. The artist’s technique is to juxtapose arrangements of objects that demand a natural context against a sterile, even, white blankness, the most antiseptic modernist tool. The resulting composition presents what might be considering mundane components (an assemblage of mildly chamfered stones, for instance, pocked and textured by time) in a new light, with all intent and arch-modernist jouissance of a Barbara Hepworth sculpture.

Earlier works by Bergbauer focused on the lushly-manicured gardens of the eighteenth- and nineteenth century Europe, with their strict axialities and topiary labyrinths. Channeling the adversarial relationship between Western man and his wild natural surroundings, the artist succeeded in abstracting the pure formalism and orthogonal willfulness of pre-modern landscape architecture, to mesmerizing effect.”

-Excerpt from text written by Kevin Greenberg for The Last Magazine Issue 10 (Full Text)

Sylvia Pilmack Mangold

From top to bottom: Untitled (View of Schunnemunk Mountain) (1980), The Maple Tree (1992-93), Trees at Pond (1983), The Maple Tres (Summer) (2006)

“Sylvia Plimack Mangold is the sort of admirable artist who discusses cobalt violet oil paint as if it were as tasty as crème fraîche. This is only partly a matter of visual delectation. She has been drawing and painting the trees on her property for over three decades, and this simple yet consuming project has caused her to develop a masterful sensitivity to the materials she uses.

Plimack Mangold’s work in the 1970s was laden with self-referential impulses that pushed her otherwise straight-forward realist paintings into conceptual territory. Landscape 1977, the earliest painting in this 30-year survey of the artist’s landscapes and trees, is a snowy view painted on paper that is held by masking tape to a canvas; rulers are adhered along its left and bottom edges. But what appears first as an assemblage is in fact trompe l’oeil: the tape and rulers are painted. While paying homage to artists of illusionistic tableaux like William Harnett, Plimack Mangold’s own artifice forces the viewer into a philosophical mode. Are the rulers illusions, strictly speaking, if they are marking off literal inches of height and width? Does the tape refer to the artist’s process or is it a fiction through and through?

…

This testing against visual experience brings Cézanne and Morandi to mind, but another important influence was Lovis Corinth, whose works Plimack Mangold began to acquire in the mid-’80s. Corinth devoted a suite of etchings and drawings to a single tree, and Plimack Mangold followed suit with her own drypoints and aquatints that presage The Elm Tree ( Winter). The probity and atmosphere in these are gripping. The same is true of her work in watercolor, which shares a similar precision, ensuring that her broader treatment in the oils has some discipline behind it. After years of emphasizing branches and the spaces between them, Plimack Mangold produced an image of a tree thick with foliage. Summer Maple 2009 is a delightful tangle of verdure, put down with lusciousness and aplomb on a wide rectangle. Winter Maple (2012) contrasts the tree’s limbs, bare again, against an evergreen pine behind it. A visual mode has supplanted the philosophical one, leaving the artist to work unimpeded with shape, color and the integrity of careful looking.”

-Franklin Einspruch for Art in America

Karen Kilimnik

From top to bottom: The Matterhorn at Night, Dreamland, 9pm, 3am, Zermatt (2007), The Perch (2003), Candle Burning (1996), The North Face (2005)

“Kilimnik was first acclaimed for her so-called scatter-art installations of various bits of pop cultural detritus strewn about a gallery space to create a sensibility somewhere between the postminimalism of Robert Morris and Barry Le Va and the backstage of a fashion preview. She has recently become recognized for paintings that combine art historical tradition, modish topicality, and an awkward intimacy and fragility.

Kilimnik’s work cultivates an unabashed sense of romanticism yet retains a knowing criticality and awareness of the personal desire that we invest in both vaunted works of visual art and the more fleeting intrigue of celebrities and superstars. It also draws on the literary traditions of gothic mystery and fairy tales, presenting narratives that unfold over the course of a series of related paintings. Her expansive approach to cultural forms and the convincing inventiveness of her installations has had a profound effect on many young artists working today”

-Excerpt from Exhibition Text at MCA Chicago

Anne Truitt

From top to bottom: A Wall of Apricots (1968), Catawba (1962), Morning Choice (1968), Parva XXXIII (1993)

“Born in 1921 in Baltimore and raised on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, Truitt was inspired by the natural and architectural environment of her childhood. After a stint in clinical psychology and fiction writing, Anne Truitt began her art career in the late 1940s, sculpting figurative objects with clay, cast cement and stone. It wasn’t until she was exposed to the paintings of Ad Reinhardt and Barnett Newman in a 1961 Guggenheim exhibition that her concentration on abstract, minimalist sculptures took form.

It was “an epiphany…that led her to feel that art should be oriented toward concept rather than material,” Kristen Hileman explained. Later, Truitt’s abstract figures of the 1950s shifted to wood sculptures painted with acrylic paint, a stylistic continuity that persisted from 1961 to her death in 2004.

Yet finding a fit for Truitt within any 20th century movement isn’t an easy task. Hileman points out the individuality of Truitt’s work, taking elements from both minimalism and abstract art, while maintaining an artistic uniqueness. Also a factor was her reluctance to promote her own work.

“She developed an independent art that has elements that resonate with…larger movements in American art,” Hileman said. “And I think that’s one of the reasons she’s so important, because she demonstrates an alternative kind of minimal abstraction.”

It wasn’t merely Truitt’s artistic discipline that inspired students, colleagues and friends, [Tim] Gunn and [Jem] Cohen insisted, but it was also her integrity and spirit, which make the retrospective even more compelling, rich and overdue.”

-Excerpt from PBS’s Art Beat by Meaghan Wilson and Talea Miller

Bridget Riley

From top to bottom: Cataract IV (1967), Fission (1964), Molecey (1976), Kiss (1961)

“Riley was born at Norwood, London, the daughter of a businessman. Her childhood was spent in Cornwall and Lincolnshire. She studied at Goldsmiths’ College from 1949 to 1952, and at the Royal College of Art from 1952 to 1955. She began painting figure subjects in a semi-impressionist manner, then changed to pointillism around 1958, mainly producing landscapes. In 1960 she evolved a style in which she explored the dynamic potentialities of optical phenomena. These so-called ‘Op-art’ pieces, such asFall, 1963, produce a disorienting physical effect on the eye.

Riley was awarded the AICA Critics Prize in 1963 and also that year a John Moores’, Liverpool Open Section prize. In 1964 she was awarded a Peter Stuyvesant Foundation Travel bursary to the USA. In 1968 she won an International Painting Prize at the Venice Biennale.

Her first solo exhibition was held at Gallery One in 1962 with a second solo show the following year. Other solo shows were held at Nottingham University, 1963; Richard Feigen Gallery, New York and Feigen Palmer Gallery, Los Angeles, 1965; Museum of Modern Art, New York, with US tour, 1966; Venice Biennale, British Pavilion (with Phillip King), 1968; Hayward Gallery, London, 1971; National Gallery, Prague, 1971; Hayward Gallery and Kunsthalle Nuremberg, 1992; Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, 1995; and Waddington Galleries, London, 1996.”

-Terry Riggs for the Tate Museum

Audrey Flack

From top to bottom: Spitfire (1973), Chanel (1964), Wheel of Fortune (1977), Marilyn (Vanitas) (1977)

Long considered one of the innovators of photorealism, Audrey Flack emerged on the scene in the late 1960s with paintings that embraced magazine reproductions of movie stars along with Matza cracker boxes and other mundane objects, that referred ironically to Pop Art. As one of the first of these artists to enter the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, Flack later came to excel in vanitas paintings that combined painted renderings of black and white photographs along with detailed arrangements of elegant objects including fruits, cakes, chocolates, strings of pearls, lipsticks, tubes of paint, and glass wine goblets.  In works such as Wheel of Fortune (1977-78), she would represent decks of playing cards and other ephemera related to gambling, adding a mirror and human skull, for good measure.  Her recent exhibition of Cibachrome prints, curated by Garth Greenan for Gary Snyder Project Space, is titled “Audrey Flack Paints A Picture” and is accompanied by five actual paintings.  This show reveals the painstaking process employed in making these fresh and original paintings from the late 1970s through the early 1980s during a highly significant and intensely productive period of her career.

-Robert C. Morgan for Art Critical

Leon Dabo

From top to bottom: The River Seine (c. 1900), The Seashore (c. 1900), Evening on the Hudson (1909), The Hudson in Winter (1910)

“Leon Dabo’s own descendants have heard little about him. Dabo, a French-born painter, died in 1960, at 96, after a restless career living in and around New York and in Europe and exhibiting in hundreds of group and solo shows. His early subjects were saints, and later he favored twilit riverbanks, battlefields, bouquets and eerie pastures striped with dead trees.

Dabo ended up estranged from his family, and he has largely fallen off the radar of art historians. Albert Douglas, 91, Dabo’s only grandson, told art dealers during a recent filmed interview that he hardly knew his grandfather. He does remember a debonair gentleman fond of expensive liqueurs and chronically short of cash who could “paint like a stream.”

In Dabo’s seven-decade career he hobnobbed with celebrities like Marc Chagall and George Bernard Shaw. At the 1913 Armory show in New York, Theodore Roosevelt admired Dabo’s scene of a Canadian snowfall. Helen Hay Whitney wrote a poem about the canvas’s “old lost stars to rise and gleam” and “secret, haunting theme.”

Major institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Newark Museum and the Brooklyn Museum acquired his work. But he has had few shows since his death, partly because so many of his significant works and archival material were hidden away. Stephanie Ofental Dabo did donate some of his papers to institutions like the Smithsonian and the New York Public Library. But her collection of hundreds of paintings by her husband ended up bequeathed to a sister and then a succession of family friends, inaccessible to scholars.”

-excerpted NYT Article by Eve M. Kahn

Andre Kertesz

From top to bottom: Mondrian’s Glasses and Pipe, Paris (1926), New York. Central Park Boat Basin (1944), Paris (1929), January 1, Martinique (1972)

“Known for his extended study of Washington Square Park and his distorted nudes of the 1930s, Andre Kertesz was a quiet but important influence on the coming of age of photojournalism and the art of photography. For more than seventy years, his subtle and penetrating vision helped to define a medium in its infancy. Though he spent most of his life in the United States, his European modernist sensibility is what made him great, and that is what he is remembered for today…

… By 1927 Kertesz’s scenes of the streets of Paris were beginning to attract a great deal of attention, and he had his first show at an avant-garde gallery. His humor and subtle humanity seemed to personify even the stone walls of Paris. Throughout the 1930s he remained in Paris studying the people and their inhabitation of the streets, and the play of light and shadow that so dramatically filled the urban landscape. In 1936, after the death of his mother and his marriage to Elizabeth Saly, he moved to New York, where he had been engaged by the Keyston Agency. Though he canceled the contract only a year later, the progress of the war made his return to Paris impossible. Unable to leave and treated like an enemy by the government (which prevented him from publishing for several years), Kertesz was caught in tragic uncompromising circumstances. When the war ended Kertesz had lost the momentum of a supportive artistic community, but continued to live in the States due to health and familial considerations.

For nearly twenty years his gifts remained relatively unrecognized in New York. It was not until 1964, when John Sarkowski, curator at the Museum of Modern Art, organized a one man show that Kertesz’s career was reawakened. Over the preceding years, art photography in the United States made serious leaps and began to recognize the advances of earlier European artists. It was this renewed interest that eventually brought an otherwise forgotten genius back into the public eye. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Kertesz was shown regularly at the major international museums — having one-man shows in Paris, Tokyo, London, Stockholm, Budapest and Helsinki. In 1983 the French government awarded him the Legion of Honor, and the following year he passed away in his New York home. Very few artists are able to witness the formation of their own artistic medium. Kertesz was not only able to witness much of the beginnings of hand-held photography, but had a profound effect on it. With subtle and whimsical artistry, he took full advantage of a medium not yet sure of its own potential, and for that, contemporary photography remains in his debt.”

-Excerpted from PBS: American Masters

Liubov’ Popova

“In 1912 and 1913 Lyubov Popova studied in Paris. So she was very familiar with the developments of Cubism. She also made trips to Italy where she saw Futurist work firsthand. But unlike either Cubism or Futurism she really takes a jump and severs this connection with the visual world to try to make truly abstract pictures.

This picture was made in 1917, the very year of the Russian Revolution, which shook the established order of things at its foundation. And Popova, like many of the other artists of the Russian avant-garde, ended up allying herself with the new Bolshevik government.

If you were going to have a revolution you’d have to start over from the beginning. So there’s this idea that painting could serve as a special kind of laboratory or incubator space for developing ideas about what the visual forms of this new world might look like. And in this she finds the metaphor of architecture very helpful. And the series of work she made in 1916 and 1917, Painterly Architectonic, she develops her own style of painting where she layers these skewed geometric forms on top of each other to create these very dynamic, brightly colored compositions.”

–Leah Dickerman for MoMA

Erik Bulatov

From top to bottom: Not to be Leaned On (1987), People in a Landscape (1976), Two Landscapes on a Red Background (1972-74), Horizon (1971-72)

“Eric Bulatov was born in Sverdlovsk in 1933 and was raised in Moscow. He began his studies at the Moscow School of Art and finished at the Surikov Institute in 1958. After working several years as a children’s book illustrator for the State, Bulatov’s disillusionment with the creative and political restrictions of his position inspired him to begin making unofficial works of art. This exhibition, the first comprehensive showing of a major contemporary Soviet artist in Chicago, consists of twenty-three large-scale works painted between 1967 and 1988, all executed ‘unofficially’ within the context of Soviet society and it’s government.

Bulatov’s paintings are large, colorful, realistic images of landscapes, skies, urban settings, and people, many of which are painted over and partially obscured by wry words or phrases. Metaphorically rich and poetic blue skies are overlaid with Russian texts that translate: Glory to the U.S.S.R. or Trademark. Lush, green landscapes toil under the labels Not To Be Leaned On or Caution.

Bulatov’s subject matter is broad. Equally broad is his perception of the government’s role in the classification and control of everything. Bulatov symbolizes the government through his use of language as a system of order and control, the foundation of written law and constraint which he then plasters on every tree and rock. It is in this sense that Bulatov’s paintings may take on a more universal accuracy and a more populist appeal. His emphasis on only the public and external aspects of life–the street, the land, the State television broadcast–reinforces the notion that one’s thoughts and feelings are (still) one’s own. the psychological and emotional are beyond the confines of words, language and law.

This literal irony and contradiction is symbolically enriched and layered through Bulatov’s deft use of Social Realism, the government’s traditional mechanism for pictorial communication. His wordless images of Brezhnev have all the trappings of officialdom: a crisp pose, a heroic gaze, the flags of the communist States. However, the calculated flatness and lack of flourish in Bulatov’s style tends to rub off on his subjects, making them seem the victims of their own constraints. Bulatov’s paintings are unflattering without being overtly critical; his sly matter-of factness is too accurate to be false.”

-Joe Scanlan for the Renaissance Society