Photo By Gail
During his short but prolific career, David Wojnarowicz worked in writing, painting, photography, film, music, performance and installation. Unapologetically making art about homosexuality during the peak of the AIDS crisis in New York, Wojnarowicz exposed the marginalization and suppression of a stigmatized community.
Continue reading Modern Art Monday Presents: David Wojnarowicz, The Newspaper as National Voodoo: A Brief History of the U.S.A.
Photo By Gail
Many of Charles Ray’s best-known works are remakes of objects and people taken from the real world. Small but significant alterations to familiar situations give Ray’s practice a disquieting tension. Cloaked in simplicity, his often humorous creations comment on sculpture’s history, from its austere formal issues to its surreal psychological consequences.
Continue reading Pink Thing of The Day: Charles Ray’s Fall ’91
Photo By Gail
John Baldessari (1931 – 2022) never touched this painting. He did not paint it. He did not write the text. “There is a certain kind of work one could do that didn’t require a studio,” Baldessari said, “it’s work that is done in one’s head. The artists could be the facilitator of the work; executing it was another matter.” This concept – that an artist could present an idea rather than a material object from their own hand – was a way for Baldessari to take apart the notion of what art could be. In 1966 art meant painting, sculpture, or drawing, and with wry humor, Baldessari challenges this expectation. The viewer receives a painting in Tips for Artists Who Want to Sell (1966 – 68), but the painting is completed by sign painters. The viewer is presented with a painting’s content, but the content is text taken from an art trade magazine dictating what content should be. Clever!
Photographed in the Broad Museum in Los Angeles.
Photo By Gail
Albert Oehlen (b. 1954) exaggerates and distorts the conventions of abstract painting, breaking rules as a way to critique traditions based on taste and canonized art historical narratives. His paintings are steeped in an aesthetic of extravagance and indulgence, often containing jarring color combinations, half-baked forms, and decorative touches.
Oehlen’s Ziggy Stardust (2001) pays homage in its title to musician David Bowie, who used his lavish alter-ego, Ziggy Stardust, to examine the power — and the destructive nature — of Rock and Roll. By channeling Bowie, Oehlen draws attention to the excesses of painting.
Beginning with an austere architectural CAD drawing, Oehlen the launches an assault on the canvas with bilious color, sludgy forms, and clashing techniques. Combining computer-generated and gestural marks, Oehlen prods at the very idea of the artist’s hand and supposed creative genius.
Photographed in The Broad Museum in Downtown Los Angeles.
Photo By Gail
Minimalist pioneer Ellsworth Kelly passed away at age 92 on December 27th, and we miss him already. I was just out in LA and had the chance to visit the fabulous new Broad Museum, where I took the above photo of one of Kelly’s famous works. Throughout the late 1950s and early ’60s, Ellsworth Kelly worked with shapes and solid colors deployed flatly across single canvases. Finding inspiration in both nature and art, he was drawn to the oddity of forms and the various conditions that create visual interest in unlikely ways. In this spirit, Green Blue Red (1963) abstains from the balance and harmony of traditional painting and reflects an impulse to build a surface of visual tension out of the contrasts of color and shape and the containment of an edge.
Kelly’s works of this period depict the jarring difference between colors and the unusual placement of shapes, energizing the visual experience in creating and disorienting optical effect. The green rectangle and blue oval are vibrant and foreign against a red background. Kelly does not construct balance or resolve; he creates compositions that are alive in their idiosyncrasies.
Photographed at the Broad Museum in Los Angeles.