Blain|Southern is delighted to announce Rosebuds & Rivers, Joan Snyder’s (b. 1940, New Jersey, US) first solo exhibition in the UK. Comprising new and recent paintings, the exhibition will include a group of monumental triptychs and diptychs alongside smaller-scale works. It offers an insight into the experimentation and visual language for which Snyder is celebrated.
One of the pre-eminent artists of her generation, Joan Snyder made her breakthrough in the late 1960s with her ‘stroke’ paintings – a body of abstractions developed from her experiments regarding the anatomy of a painting. She painted paint strokes and other dissected parts – gestures, drips and marks – and laid them over pencilled grids, using the structures as a basis from which to compose narratives. ‘At the time my idea was to study the anatomy of a stroke, isolating them and using them much like creating a symphony or a piece of music’.
The desire to put in more, not less, to tell her stories led Snyder to break with the prevailing male-dominated abstract movements of Minimalism and Colour Field painting. She began to work from a loose grid to create mixed media paintings which she felt drew from a female sensibility: ‘… our experiences are different, our bodies are different, our lives are different and if we’re going to write or make art it’s going to be different.’ Finding a new way to ‘speak’ by using non-art materials and personal symbolism, Snyder has over the past five decades developed a distinctive visual vocabulary. ‘I speak with symbols and marks and colours and material.’
Building up surfaces with paint and organic matter, Snyder creates paintings that are narratives of both personal and shared experiences. In the largest work in the exhibition, Fragments of a Soul (2018), pieces of Joan Snyder, Proserpina, 2013, Courtesy the artist and Blain|Southern bark, herbs, glitter and scribbles on tiny pieces of paper form a saga of totem-like figures in a vast landscape. Chinese herbs and amber resin adorn the canvas of Floating Soul (2018); the artist describes adding scraps of paper with hidden notes as ‘almost performative’, it ‘became like the Wailing Wall for me, where I was making little notes and then pinning them on and just being caught up in that process.’
Snyder’s paintings have a profound relationship with music. Music is often part of her process and informs the structure of her paintings. During concerts, Snyder makes preparatory sketches which are annotated and revised repeatedly. These sketches can exist for several years before she commits to working on canvas. ‘There’s a lot of structure involved and a lot of thought and planning but when they happen it’s a little bit like jazz music – they really HAPPEN.’ Rose & Vine (2018) was conceived at a Philip Glass concert, where the repetition in Glass’ compositions inspired the artist to imagine how a painting of endless roses would appear.
The inspiration for Proserpina (2013) comes from a Kate McGarrigle song about a mother who loses her daughter for a third of the year to Hades in the underworld. Ceres, her mother, searches in vain, turning the fields into stone and threatening to destroy the earth in her desperation to get her daughter back. Proserpina uses scrawled words to moving effect, invoking ‘EARTH’ and ‘STONE’ and ‘HEAT’ 1 – Snyder writes on paintings when she feels she can’t communicate any other way.
Many of Snyder’s paintings originate from sketches, but not all. Yellow Figure (2018), is a work that happened spontaneously. Composed of three figures, the painting is part of a series of works, relating to a motherdaughter saga of her own. She says of this recent work ‘I really love being in my studio as intense and difficult as the subject matter might be. I trust my process, I go on automatic pilot and use a language I’ve built up over many years. It isn't a verbal language that can be easily described, it often is coming from the collective unconscious. You can’t always put it in words … there’s a kind of magic that happens.’
Just yesterday Hudson Yards announced that it would officially open on March 15th, and when visitors first visit the mega-development, they’ll now have even more art to peruse. According to a press release from developer Related, the complex has unveiled large-scale contemporary art installations by three renowned artists–Jaume Plensa, Frank Stella, and Joel Shapiro. “I have always been passionate about the impact art, sculpture and design can have on our lives – the memorable experiences they create and the warmth they bring to the places we live and visit,” said Related chairman Stephen Ross.
"Epic Abstraction: Pollock to Herrera will begin in the 1940s and extend into the twenty-first century to explore large-scale abstract painting, sculpture, and assemblage through more than fifty works from The Met collection, a selection of loans, and promised gifts and new acquisitions. Iconic works from The Met collection, such as Jackson Pollock's classic "drip" painting Autumn Rhythm (1950) and Louise Nevelson's monumental Mrs. N's Palace (1964–77), will be shown in conversation with works by international artists, such as Japanese painter Kazuo Shiraga and the Hungarian artist Ilona Keserü. The exhibition will be punctuated with special loans of major works by Helen Frankenthaler, Carmen Herrera, Shiraga, Joan Snyder, and Cy Twombly."
My mother has spoken about being at an altar when she paints. “It is the altar I go to face myself.” And “Art,” she says, “became a form of worship. Those were my shrines,” speaking about her altar paintings made in the mid-sixties. 5 Her work is her self-created spirituality. It is her calling. She reaches new levels of comprehension about the meaning of life by throwing down herbs upon canvas, awash with glossy green paint and golden glitter. In the 1960s, when “the personal is political” became a rallying cry, my mother was in step with the times. Her early altar paintings from that decade were abstracted versions of the female body, and she would often add tacky materials like gold fringe or fake leopard skin.
For an artist who once famously shrugged off deep analysis of minimalism by saying, “What you see is what you see,” Frank Stella's Moby Dick prints are firework furies of expressionistic colors and pattern work. Currently on view at Anders Wahlstedt Fine Art, a selection of works from Stella’s Moby Dick series displays the artist’s entrancement with Melville’s epic tale.
The mixed-media intaglio prints of the Moby Dick engravings are solemn in their black and white tonalities enlivened with subtle washes of color. In abstract terms, Stella conveys a dramatic sense of roiling waters and breaching whales. The expressive gravity of this series is caught up in the title
“Jonah Historically regarded”, a reference to chapter 83 of the novel. The Old Testament story of Jonah, who deserts God and is thrown overboard during a storm at sea and swallowed by a whale, but who lives to submit to God’s will, is a central metaphor in Melville’s grand narrative.
NEW YORK, NY.- Anders Wahlstedt Fine Art is presenting an exhibition of selected prints by Frank Stella from his Moby Dick series.
Highlight on Hamptons Art Hub- https://hamptonsarthub.com/2018/09/17/exhibitions-nyc-gallery-scene-highlights-through-september-23-2018/
Anders Wahlstedt Fine Art: “Frank Stella / Selected Prints from the Moby Dick Series”
September 20 through October 26, 2018
Opening Reception: Thursday, September 20, from 6 to 8 p.m.
Thank you GalleriesNow for this wonderful 360° digital viewing experience of our current exhibition, 'Lisbeth McCoy / Selected Works, 2010-2018.'
Article by Victoria L. Valentine, June 10, 2018
Article by Andy Battaglia, June 8, 2018
Anders Wahlstedt Fine Art is pleased to announce the inclusion of David Finn’s Crazed Duck, 1984, in the groundbreaking Something Possible Everywhere: Pier 34 NYC 1983-1984 at the Hunter College Art Galleries.
In his latest exhibition Macdonald’s dense, wooden sculptures of the past are replaced with a lighter more whimsical medium.
As the gallery approaches its one-year anniversary, Anders Wahlstedt Fine Art is hosting an exhibit of one of America’s most iconic artists. “Frank Stella Circuits Prints” will be on view (and available for purchase) from May 19 to July 16 at the Upper East Side gallery. An artist proof of Pergusa Three, perhaps the most celebrated print the artist has ever made, will be included in the six-print show.
A lot has been said on the idea of “black genius” of late. In February, at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, Dr. Jordana Saggese, Kim Drew, Dr. David Clinton Wills and Juliana Huxtable were part a symposium titled “Basquiat and Contemporary Queer Art,” focusing on Jean-Michel Basquiat as a symbol of black genius. In March, critic Jason Parham, in a review of Kanye West’s Life of Pablo (2016) and Kendrick Lamar’s untitled unmastered (2016) for Fader, called “On the Occasion of Black Genius,” wrote at length about the concept.
Not sure what to get your loved ones for the holidays or looking to expand your library? You're in luck! December 1st - December 23rd we are having a special holiday art book sale.
Anders Wahlstedt Fine Art is pleased to announce the exhibition “Line Into Shape,” a group show with etchings, aquatints, and a watercolor by Peter Schuyff and Edda Renouf.
Anders Wahlstedt Fine Art is honored to be able to exhibit the complete set of the six prints Frank Stella made for the Exotic Bird Series in 1977. The exuberant lithograph/screenprints of the Exotic Bird Series were based on six configurations of the metal-relief-paintings by the same name. The more expansive and loosened drawing style and larger scale introduced in the Exotic Bird prints, qualities that would continue to characterize the later prints, were inherited from Stella's work in painting.