Over the course of five decades Richard Pitts has migrated through the margins of New York City’s art world despite a flourishing career that began in the early 1970s and lasted until the late 1980s, when the popularity of the art market crashed. Once confidence fell, figurative art lost its elevated grace, became more human as a form, more literal and translatable, reflecting different degrees of self-doubt, loathing and inner shame. The weight of pluralism led to the loss of meaning. Painting was considered dead, a new cliché at the time. Richard Pitts stepped away from figurative art and entered into a long-term reflection that focused upon works he had made in the early 1960s while living in Germany, serving in the U.S. Army. [Read more…]
Dan Herschlein’s Safe As Houses
JTT Gallery, NYC
Reviewed by Michael Hilsman
Dan Herschlein’s current exhibition, “Safe as Houses,” at JTT Gallery in New York’s Lower East Side, consists of wall works, sculptures, and works on paper. Situated in the center of the gallery floor is a work titled The Tenant, which, like much of the sculptural work in the exhibition, is made from pigmented wood, plaster, and pigmented joint compound painted in thin washes of milk paint, a type of paint similar to casein and used by early American furniture makers. [Read more…]
On The Art Of Scott Burton
No one said anything, or even guessed. Everyone waited for it, what could come after abstract expressionism, which had died alongside Jackson Pollock in a senseless, drunken car crash on August 11, 1956. There weren’t any theories on how artists could further the surface of a canvas with paint and tool. The growing meaninglessness of abstract painting merely ramified after numerous aesthetic dead ends. Unquestionably, no American painter could replace Pollock. However, what would come next didn’t need a spokesman, or a macho flâneur with an anger problem for that matter. The art world was about to explode with an androgynous art wave imbued with the spirit of Duchamp, who said: “The whole trend of painting was something I didn’t care to continue” (Tomkins, 2014, p. 100). Many artists of the next generation excoriated the canvas, turned away from the emotive and toward the cerebral. For them, experience became the creator and the artwork. [Read more…]
A Quiet, Cutting Torch Toward Activism
An Interview With Jael Hoffmann
By Rachel Reid Wilkie
Jael Hoffmann is a metal sculpture artist living in the Northern Mojave Desert, just north of Los Angeles. Her rough, nearly primitive sculptures stand at highway’s edge like creatures in a mythic scene, their anointed god a sleepy chief who towers just west in the form of 12,132’ Olancha Peak. Large, wind-worn, lively on the land, they are in constant, animated banter with drivers who speed past, and all the more friendly and engaging for those who stop, stretch their legs, and stroll about the land. Rachel Reid Wilkie spoke with Jael on a gorgeous winter day following heavy snowfall in the Sierras. [Read more…]