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Arts and Culture

Modern Art Monday Presents: Screen Burn By Avery Singer

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screen burn by avery singer photo by gail worley
Photo By Gail

Avery Singer (b. 1987), who was named for American painter Milton Avery (1885 – 1965) by her artist parents began using an airbrush in 2012 to expand onto canvas the geometric illustrations she composed in the open-source computer program SketchUp, a favorite of designers and architects for three-dimensional rendering.

Enlarging these imagined, gridded interiors by hand into paintings such as Screen Burn (2019) is a central part of the artist’s work, in which she deftly combines digital rendering and analog studio practice for a new generation.

Photographed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC.

Arts and Culture

Modern Art Monday Presents: Hans Hofmann, Deep Within The Ravine

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deep within the ravine phot by gail worley
Photo By Gail

In his writing, teaching, and powerful abstract works, Hans Hofmann advocated for what he called the dynamic “push and pull” of color, light, and shape as the best means for achieving a sense of space, movement, and emotion in painting. Filled with bold strokes the in some cases join to form larger, irregular blocks of color, Deep Within the Ravine (1965) features a pool of deep blue-black that appears compressed by passages of green and orange around it. Exhibiting Hofmann’s interest in complementary hues (blue / orange and green / red) for their inherent contrast, the painting is part of The Renate Series, a group of nine compositions he created as a tribute to his wife in 1965.

Photographed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC.

Arts and Culture

Modern Art Monday Presents: Spring in Central Park By William Zorach

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spring in central park photo by gail worley
Photo By Gail

Best known for his later work as a sculptor, William Zorach spent two years studying painting in Paris, returning to New York in 1912. He wrote that his depictions of NYC’s most famous park in Spring in Central Park (1914) were “painted at home from the imagination . . . in all wild colors, peopled with exotic nudes,“ but the bold hues in undulating outlines recall the work of the Fauves, notably Henri Matisse and Andre Derain, whose canvases he had seen in Paris. With his wife, Marguerite, an avant-garde painter herself, Zorach associated with many of America’s earliest Modernists in New York in the late 1910s, including Max Weber, Marsden Hartley, and John Maren. In 1913 both Zorachs exhibited at the prestigious international exhibition of modern art,  known as the Armory Show.

Photographed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC.

Arts and Culture

Modern Art Monday Presents: Tomma Abts, Kobo

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tomma abts kobo photo by gail worley
Photo By Gail

Tomma Abts (German, b 1967) produces her paintings following a strict, self-imposed procedure. For almost twenty years, she has used vertical canvases measuring precisely 48 by 38 centimeters (19 by 15 inches) for her paintings. Rather than begin with a preconceived structure in mind, she allows her abstract compositions to take shape as she works, sometimes over the course of several years. She paints with the support cradled in her arm, not on an easel.  As seen here, the surfaces of Abts’ canvases are composed of many layers of paint, with the ghosts of past compositions just barely visible underneath subsequent coats of acrylic and oil.  This work’s title, Kobo (1999) is pulled, like all of her titles, from an encyclopedia of German surnames.

Photographed in The Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC. 

Arts and Culture

Modern Art Monday Presents: Short Haired Cheese By Robert Gober

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short haired cheese photo by robert gober
All Photos By Gail

As with so many of Robert Gober’s classic works of the 1990s, the artist approached Short Haired Cheese (1992 – 93)  by researching the archetypal forms of his chosen subject, landing here on an unmistakable, yellow-tinged wedge of Swiss cheese, complete with air bubble holes.

short haired cheese installation view photo by gail worley
The Cheese Stands Alone . . .

The hair that appears to grow out of the rind  (clippings from one of his studio assistants) adds a haunting, anthropomorphic cast. Throughout this artist’s work, impeccably rendered objects  associated with a nostalgic, mid-twentieth century domesticity — comestibles such as butter, gin or donuts, or home-maintenance products like house paint, light bulbs, or rat poison — are made strange, even unsettlingly queasy, through the artist’s distinctive interventions and allusions to a body in pieces.

Photographed in The Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC.

short haired cheese photo by gail worley

Arts and Culture

Modern Art Monday Presents: Sam Gilliam, Carousel State

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carousel state photo by gail worley
Photos By Gail

Liberated from its stretcher, Carousel State (1968) explores the material and chromatic possibilities of canvas, a traditional painting support. Gilliam developed his unique approach in the 1960s while working with the Washington Color School, whose compositions emphasized the flatness of the picture plane. This is an early example of the artist’s signature ‘Drape Paintings,” made through a novel process of dripping, smearing, staining, and splashing paint onto raw canvas.

Colors often spread and merged as Gilliam pressed and folded the fabric. He has described this as a kind of equilibrium: “This liquidity of the colors is reinforced by the fluidity of the canvas.” The final step in the creation of Carousel State is its installation, suspended and extending into space.

carousel state detail photo by gail worley

Photographed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC.

Arts and Culture

Modern Art Monday Presents: Yves Tanguy, My Life, Black and White

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yves tanguy my life black and white photo by gail worley
Photo By Gail

Interlocking organic shapes of dull and sharp appendages support one another like a monument in the characteristic space of Yves Tanguy’s  My Life, Black and White (1944).  Having met the poet Andre Breton in 1925, Tanguy remained true to the Surrealist movement throughout his work, borrowing shapes and motifs from Jean Arp and Joan Miro.

Photographed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC.