Tag Archives: abstract painting

Arts and Culture

Modern Art Monday Presents: Walter Price, The Things That Horse Ourselves for Uncertainty

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The Things That Horse Ourselves for Uncertainty Photo By Gail
Photo By Gail

With elements of both figuration and abstraction, Walter Price’s paintings shift between everyday realities and invented worlds. Couches and cars float and merge into landscapes as space expands and contracts. Price’s subjects are drawn from his own experiences as well as familiar cultural symbols. The artist’s fluency with color, texture, and form gives physical weight to these liminal, dreamlike spaces. In making each new series of works, Price also sets limits. Sometimes he challenges himself to create a big impact on a small scale; in other paintings, as with The Things That Horse Ourselves for Uncertainty (2018), he reduces his palette to only a few colors. Mixing fragments of memory, recurring signs and symbols, and abstract figures engaged in unclear, ambiguous interactions, the paintings refuse the viewer’s efforts to find a fixed perspective or narrative.

Photographed in the Whitney Museum in NYC.

Arts and Culture

Modern Art Monday Presents: Maria Freire, Untitled (1954)

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Maria Freire Untitled 1954 By Gail Worley
Photo By Gail

“At the start of the fifties, Uruguayan artist Maria Freire (1917 – 2015) recalled, “I abandoned figuration for the perspective of the imagination, anxious to create a new space.” To develop her own style of abstraction, she initially experimented with sculpture, creating virtual volumes through a single, dynamic line. Complex spatial effects also characterize her abstract paintings, such as this Untitled piece from 1954. Though free of perspective, Freire’s painted interwoven forms seem to recede, even dance, in an ambiguous space in tension with the painting’s flat surface.

Photographed in the Museum of Modern Art in NYC.

Arts and Culture

Modern Art Monday Presents: Stuart Davis, The Mellow Pad

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The Mellow Pad
Photo By Gail

The starting point for this lively patterned abstraction was an earlier canvas by Stuart Davis (1892 – 1964) entitled House and Street (1931). Treating each subsequent version as a  riff on a jazz theme, Davis moved further and further away from his original composition to establish independent, rhythmic color patterns that retained only a few direct visual cues to the initial design. The Mellow Pad (1945 – 51) refers to the phrase “the mellow pad” — jazz lingo for the “cool” place to be. The pulsating colors and meandering forms seen here effectively mimic the dynamic rhythms of jazz. Davis developed his own style of Synthetic Cubism in which he dissolved figure and ground and referenced popular culture, adding a distinctly American sensibility to his abstractions

Photographed in the Brooklyn Museum.

Arts and Culture

Modern Art Monday Presents: Stanton Macdonald-Wright, Synchromy No. 3

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Synchromy No 3
Photo By Gail

Although this abstract composition, Synchromy No. 3 (1917), bears many traces of European Cubism — angular shapes, fragmented forms, and multiple perspectives — it asserts the primacy of color as a key component of space and form. In 1912, Stanton Macdonald-Wright, together with the painter Morgan Russell, coined the term Synchromism to describe abstract compositions primarily concerned with the rhythmic use of color — a phenomenon they likened to a symphony’s use of sound. Synchromism was one of many diverse approaches to abstraction that flourished in the Americas and Europe on the 1910s, radically departing from traditional vocabularies of painting and sculpture

Photographed in The Brooklyn Museum.

Arts and Culture

Modern Art Monday Present: Hilma af Klint, The Dove No. 1 (One of a Series)

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Helma af Klimt The Dove No 1
Photo By Gail

Hilma af Klint (1862 – 1944) was a Swedish artist and mystic whose paintings were among the first abstract art. af Klint often incorporated insights gleaned from color theory in her paintings, while endowing colors with unique symbolic significances. In The Dove (1915), a group that depicts the creation of matter from light, she used a combination that reoccurs in much of her work: blue and yellow. In the artist’s symbolic vocabulary, blue represents the female, and yellow stands for the male. Though the gendering of these colors was was specific to af Klint, that belief that these two colors represent an essential dichotomy likely derived from Johannn Wolfgang von Geothe’s Theory of Colors (1810), a book found in af Klint’s library.

In Goethe’s theory, colors are made by the mixture of flight and shadow, with blue emerging from the darkness and yellow from the dulling of light; green was their harmonious union. Geothe further claimed that colors were associated with human qualities, aligning blue with baseness and gloom, and yellow with goodness. Though af Klint frequently began groups with this color pairing, the works regularly give way to a spectrum of color

Photographed in the Guggenheim Museum as Part of the Exhibit, Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future, On View Through April 23rd, 2019.