More Articles...
Print
Willem de Kooning and John Chamberlain: Influence and Transformation
by Rachel YouensPACEWILDENSTEIN | SEPTEMBER 21 - OCTOBER 20, 2001
De Kooning had surged past “Excavation” when John Chamberlain entered the New York scene. In the upcoming fall show at PaceWildenstein Gallery, Willem de Kooning and John Chamberlain: Influence and Transformation, three to four decades of paintings and sculpture will be selected to yield a mixture of high energy contrasts between de Kooning’s originating gestures and Chamberlain’s almost rhetorical proliferation of modernism’s language of fragmentation and redemption. It should be a chance to take a backwards glance at the discrepancies and continuities behind the Age of Anxiety’s heroic self-image, a path Chamberlain chose to emulate rather than the move toward the minimalism of his contemporaries.
While de Kooning could have coined the term “metaphysical worker” in his studio on Tenth Street, Chamberlain took up his heroic challenge from the other side of the continent, but both could be said to have approached Buckminster Fuller’s problem of how to put two jagged irregular lumps of metal together to form a perfect cube (by looking for the least logical way!) One can imagine de Kooning watching each color find its own way to black as he walked through the oil-splattered streets of Manhattan on rainy nights, observing the continuing blurring and subtracting of light and form. Chamberlain, on the other hand and on the other coast, seems to have put in sweating and industrious days of clarification and addition: welding, joining, and willing form into industrial metallic waste.
De Kooning the immigrant who said, “Paint as though every stroke might be your last,” layered and delayered each planar middle-ground of each canvas, while the fresh-faced American John Chamberlain worked exuberantly in a mode of overproduction, tearing apart the prefabricated wholeness of the car, the ultimate American vehicle, and rejoining it into an endless dance of undulating and reflective surface. His metallic curvatures reflect light to such an extent that they appear buoyant with the sense of gliding and giddy travel.
Chamberlain’s metaphors of endless and synthetic expansion should be interesting against de Kooning’s analytic of loss and light.
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES
ALI BANISADR: Trust in the Future
by Jessica HolmesJUL-AUG 2017 | ArtSeen
A convergence of influences is at play across painter Ali Banisadr’s body of work. In writing dedicated to his paintings a reader will find frequent reference to Northern Renaissance and Venetian art, Persian miniatures, as well as more modern touchstones like Francis Bacon and Willem de Kooning. Banisadr has acknowledged the effects of literature and cinema upon his thinking, and although these influences are apparent in his recent exhibition, Trust in the Future, certain paintings achieve something different—and more exciting.
When Artists Choose Artists
by Joyce BeckensteinDEC 16-JAN 17 | Art
From the late 1940s through the ’60s, New York artists, restless and in pursuit of what they had yet to discover about themselves, headed for Long Island’s East End. The titans who at the time had yet to learn they were titans—Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Clyfford Still, Mark Rothko, and Robert Motherwell—were among the visual artists who, when not sequestered in their hushed studios, hung out on the beach, smoking, drinking, cooking, canoeing, clamming, and coveting one another’s lovers and spouses.
Tales of Transformation
by Jurriaan BenschopJUNE 2017 | ArtSeen
During the opening days of the Venice Biennale, in a classic hotel on the Grand Canal, U.S. artist Mark Bradford was reflecting on the issue of inclusive art history. An interesting conversation evolved about how an artist can, against his will, be stereotypically tied to a generalized identity, and be excluded from institutions, or included in discourses where he does not feel at home.
Eye of the Sixties: Richard Bellamy and the Transformation of Modern Art & Serious Bidness: The Letters of Richard Bellamy
by James MillerNOV 2016 | Art Books
The painter Larry Poons once described Dick Bellamy as “the wrong man at the right time.” Best remembered, if remembered at all, as the founding director of the Green Gallery in the early 1960s, Bellamy responded intuitively to the art that flared up after Abstract Expressionism’s moment passed.
RSS