Deborah's blog

Decades before Jackson Pollock did away with a single center of focus, even longer before Warhol concentrated on consumer goods, there was Stuart Davis.

For anyone interested in seeing the life work of this true American innovator amid an exciting riot of color and myriad undulating shapes, the Stuart Davis show at the Whitney is the place to be.

“Eva Hesse”, a Documentary

Eva Hesse, the documentary by filmmaker Marcie Begleiter, tells the story of the short life of this unique artist who died of brain cancer at age thirty-four.

The film provides an intimate vision of her category- confounding work, and the thought process and techniques that she used to create it. Hesse created her own idiosyncratic style that often combined opposing elements. The film shows an artist searching for self -discovery and then mastering and excelling in all that she produced.

I am such a big fan of Pop Art that last week I went from New York to Philadelphia to see the major new show at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, “International Pop.”

For those who think Pop Art is mostly an America and British phenomenon, think again. This show’s 150 works come from the U.S. and the U.K., but also Brazil, Argentina, Germany, France, Italy, Slovakia, and Japan. It includes painting, sculpture, prints, collage, assemblage, installation and film spanning from 1956- 1972.

We all know that artists have been interpreting the naked body for as long as art has been produced. Maybe this is because our relationship with our bodies is constant and always open to new and varied interpretation. The infant body, the growing body, the female, the male body, the aging body are all subjects to observe and visually define. Sexuality and gender politics are subjects of discussion and debate wherever you might turn.

How fortunate I was to catch the last day of an arresting exhibition in New York of Beatriz Milhazes, a Brazilian abstract artist painting in acrylic. The title of the show at the James Cohan Gallery was Marola, which refers to the ripples in the water that come after the passing of a large wave. That is just what the paintings presented: reverberating rhythms of water, and undulating bodies of color, layer upon layer. You could feel Brazil’s lush tropical vegetation with blooming flowers and the riotous Carnival colors.

Barbara Rossi’s exhibition at the New Museum in New York marks her first New York museum show, and it’s a can’t-miss show: a small but exceptional example of an artist who has not followed artistic trends but has formulated a unique system of drawing and painting. Rossi first exhibited her work in Chicago in the late 1960’s where she joined ranks with a group of artists who were known as the Chicago Imagists. As a group, the Imagists were influenced by outsider art, non-traditional art, comic books, pulp fiction and advertisements.

Amalia Pica is an Argentinian artist whose work “Stabile (with confetti) #2" presents a simple gesture that has an immense impact. A mass of confetti has been scattered onto the gallery floor. Every single piece of the hundreds of paper circles are fixed to the floor with clear tape so that the air currents and crowd movements do not move them. The windblown effect we expect does not happen. This piece plays with the ideas of randomness, permanence, and the ephemeral.

Great news for all of us who make visual images that are not computer screen-based. The New York Art Book Fair recently ended it’s sixth year at MOMA PS1 in Queens, NY with 370 booksellers, distribution companies, zines, and artist-run publishing houses from 30 countries. If you think printed matter attracts just baby boomers, think again. The median age of people coming out for this print show was anywhere from 20 to 35. Here, sorting through works on paper, were two or three generations of young people who have grown up with computers. The Printed Matter Inc.

There have always been links between the comic book medium and the visual arts. Artists have incorporated and pushed the packet between the “low” and “high” forms of expression for decades and it was during the 50’s and the 60’s that we really began to see the appropriation of comic motifs and the structural formats associated with them. These images can present social criticism, humor, alternate social realities as well as many other interpretations of fiction. Personally I have always been drawn to the comic medium as a basic route of expression.

The paranoiac critical method was the invention of Salvador Dali and is based on the idea of the “ double-image.” One can see, or persuade others to see, all sorts of images in a cloud: a horse, a human body, a dragon, a house. Any object in the physical world can be treated in this way. The premise according to Marcel Jean is that it’s impossible to concede any value whatsoever to immediate reality, since it may represent or mean anything at all. The point is to persuade oneself and others of the authenticity of these transformations so that the real world loses it’s validity.