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Pat Passlof: At the apex of a leap
Pat Passlof, Hawthorne, 1999, oil on linen, 87 x 75 inches
Partially republished In congratulations to the Estate of Pat Passlof being newly represented by Eric Firestone Gallery
Contributed by Jason Andrew to Two Coasts of Paint originally on November 4, 2019
Before the painter Pat Passlof, who died in 2011, would allow me to visit her in her Forsyth Street studio, she insisted that I join her and her Tai chi class held in the park across the street. “Sounds just like my sister!” exclaimed Aileen Passloff (Pat dropped the second “f” early in her career after discovering when signing a painting that she didn’t leave enough room for two), the noted dancer, choreographer and Bard College professor. “She was fiercely demanding about art and about everything else, really.”
It was exciting that the first painting I encountered at her current survey at the Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation was the very same one that Pat had set aside for a show I curated. Titled Hawthorne and made in 1999, it is a stunning example of her distinctive talent. It’s well-chronicled that she studied with Willem de Kooning and was married to Resnick, and parallels are certainly decipherable in this exhibition. But it was Pat who straddled the canvas and directed the brush. While she was deeply connected to those figures, she was also a frimly independent artist. At last it’s exciting to see a major survey all within an institution that Pat built.
Curated by the venerable Karen Wilkin, the show fills three floors of Foundation. On each floor there is a non-chronological hang mixing the decades and revealing the diverse directions of Passlof’s nearly eighty-year career. For instance, on the first floor, fifty years separate one of the earliest works on view, Gulf (1949) from Hawthorne (1999). For those unfamiliar with Passlof’s work, this discontinuous approach to a survey could prove disorienting, even jarring. I found it liberating. The strategy does require patience. But, as Passlof said, “Painting is inconvenient. It is slow and may require a whole life.”
On the second floor, an untitled painting from 1995 greets us at the top of the stairs. It’s colorful, depicting a period when Passlof recorded dreams and explored myths. The painting features two horses with riders and one lone horse within a gestural landscape built up from bottom to top with painterly yellows, greens, and blues. A bright orange cloud reflects a setting sun. Aileen recently told me that before their father married, he was an officer in the mounted police. “My father rode six horses at once. He could pickup a handkerchief with his teeth – the horses all along galloping.” Aileen didn’t take to riding as Pat did. Perhaps Pat was teasing out an autobiographical lament: she rides with their father and Aileen’s horse waits for her to climb on.
AES Collaborates with Ron Gorchov Studio to Design and Launch a New Website and Social Media
Artist Estate Studio was please to collaborate with the studio of Ron Gorchov in the design and presentation of his website.
Born in Chicago in 1930, Ron Gorchov is an American artist known for his curved surface artworks. The artist helped spearhead the shaped canvas movement with his bowed wooden frames stretched with linen or canvas, bridging sculpture and abstract painting through his unique artistic creations.
Gorchov created his first shaped canvas work in Mark Rothko’s studio. His oil-on-linen paintings pair one or two biomorphic colored shapes against differently colored backgrounds. The patterns of the paintings resemble living organisms, telling the story of the beginning of a certain formative state. These questions of form and existence materialize into works of art through the use of bold brushstrokes, providing chromatic contrasts.
The artist then hangs the work on a shaped canvas stretcher that is at once concave and convex, similar to shields or saddles. The saddle-like canvas replaces the traditional rectangular base, utilizing the curved shape’s ability to catch the viewers’ attention faster than a rectangle. While the paintings themselves play with symmetry and asymmetry, the warped edges of Gorchov’s canvases create new dimensions and depth, disorienting the perception of the audience.
Gorchov’s distinctive and assertive saddle-like stretchers were created in the late 1960s as an alternative to the pervasive Greenbergian formalism of the time, evidenced in the dominance of minimalist sculpture. He belongs to a generation of artists in New York in the 1960s and 70s that includes Frank Stella, Richard Tuttle, Blinky Palermo, and Ellsworth Kelly, who pushed painting to its extreme. Gorchov is unique in his ability to unite form and content while preserving their tensions.
Following a first solo exhibition at New York’s Tibor de Nagy Gallery in 1960, Gorchov has since exhibited at prominent museums and galleries around the world, including New York: The Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, PS1, Queens Museum of Art, New Museum of Contemporary Art; Spain: Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno among other institutions. Gorchov’s recent solo exhibitions include Cheim & Read, New York (’19, ’17, ’12); Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis (’14); Maruani Mercier, Brussels (’19, ’18, ’17); Modern Art, London (’19); Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin (’18); Thomas Brambilla, Bergamo (’18, ‘15); and Vito Schnabel Projects, New York (’16, ’13, ’08, ‘05).
"Ron Gorchov’s paintings are among the most fully and graciously embodied being made today. They engage our whole bodies from our first encounter with them and sustain this enegement over time. You have to move to see them, and when you move, they come alive. With one’s whole body involved, the mind is also free to move, and does.”
—David Levi Strauss“In Ron Gorchov’s paintings we find the argument that he created for himself is his poetic flight, and within the argument of lightness (his imagery) and weightiness (his structure) there arises his fine balance that truly obscures the differences between form and content. He is painting-in-between.”
—Phong Bui
AES Collaborates with Judy Dolnick Studio to Design and Launch a New Website and Social Media
Artist Estate Studio was please to collaborate with the studio of Judy Dolnick in the first ever design and presentation of her website.
Judy Dolnick (b. 1934) has been working and exhibiting her lush abstract paintings since the late 1950s where, upon her return to Chicago with her art degree from Stanford, she alongside artists Robert Natkin (whom she would marry in 1957), Gerald van de Wiele, and Ann Mattingly opened the Wells Street Gallery, as a reaction to the lack of opportunities for emerging artists to exhibit the expressionistic paintings they were making at the time. With the struggling folk singer Odetta rehearsing upstairs, Dolnick and her crew created what critic Max Kozloff called "an avant-garde exhibition place filled with the most advanced abstractions in town.” The Wells Street Gallery is credited for giving many of the group, including the sculptor John Chamberlain, their first solo exhibition.
Dolnick moved to New York City in 1959 and began exhibiting alongside such seminal abstract artists as Willem de Kooning, Richard Diebenkorn and Franz Kline at the prestigious Poindexter Gallery. In the 1980s, she was represented by Gimpel & Weitzenhoffer Gallery. Her last solo exhibition there in 1987 and was reviewed by Michael Brenson in The New York Times who called her work the answer to “Matisse, Kandinsky and Dufy.”
Dolnick is most influenced by expressionism, and her works pay homage to Van Gogh (with whom she shares a birthday), Gauguin, and Redon. Except for the slight pull of nostalgia, Dolnick's nonfigurative paintings are without a hint of gravity. Her seemingly endless expression of color is spontaneous and intuitive. In a mode of receptive reverie, Dolnick offers a surreal world dense with bucolic, ambiguous and semi-familiar shapes that suggest landscapes through scattered pulses of paint. Rhythm and gesture play a critical role in the process of Dolnick's work, a process she has continued to develop despite of her absence from the New York art world. This selection of paintings are like bright daydream fantasies.
There clearly are developments of Dolnick’s more recent work and nobody could now speak of it as ‘feminine’ […] It is as though at some point Dolnick decided to pull her images apart from each other in order to investigate their meaning in isolation. …[now] She has begun to bring them closer together, so that there is a stronger relationship between image and ground. There are subtle movements also, at first undetectable, but eventually the viewer becomes concious of hidden pendulums, oscillations along circular or elliptical paths. There is something exceedingly strange…in Dolnick’s work that I find captivating.
– Lawrence Campbell, Art in America, February 1988
Judith Dolnick (b.1934, Chicago, IL) graduated from Stanford University and studied art in Chicago. Recent group exhibitions include To be a Lady: forty-five women in the arts, 1285 Avenue of the Americas Gallery, New York, NY ('12); Arshile Gorky and a selection of contemporary drawings, Outlet Fine Art, Brooklyn, NY ('14); The Wells Street Gallery Revisited, Lesley Helley Workspace (’12). Solo exhibitions include Well Street Gallery, Chicago, IL (’57, ’58, ’59), Poindexter Gallery, New York, NY (’76), Hoshour Gallery, Albuquerque, NM (’79); Gimpel & Weitzenhoffer, New York, NY (’83, ’87); Outlet Fine Art (‘15). Dolnick’s work can be found in the permanent collections of Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC, The Mint Museum of Art, Mint, Charlotte, NC and The Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS to name a few. Dolnick lives and works in New York City.
#AppalachiaNow curated by Jason Andrew opens the newly renovated Asheville Art Museum
Jason Andrew organizes Appalachia Now! An Interdisciplinary Survey of Contemporary Art in Southern Appalachia the inaugural exhibition of the newly renovated Asheville Art Museum.
Installation View: Andrew Scott Ross, Gallery of the Thieves, 2019, Acrylic paint, charcoal, mud, paper, and wood. Photo: Andrew Scott Ross
Curated by guest curator Jason Andrew, Appalachia Now! An Interdisciplinary Survey of Contemporary Art in Southern Appalachia is the inaugural exhibition of the newly renovated Asheville Art Museum. The exhibition provides a regional snapshot of the art of our time—a collective survey of contemporary Southern Appalachian culture.
This exhibition explores the amalgamation of tradition and present-day perspectives extant in contemporary artistic representations of life in this region. Appalachia Now! situates artists within a regional and national dialogue that spans time and socio-economic status. Whether works are bio-bibliographical, or address larger, universal themes, this cross-disciplinary exhibition invites visitors to participate in the individual experiences that make this part of the world so unique. It will celebrate contemporary artists living and working in Southern Appalachia, focusing on Asheville as a nucleus of creativity within the broader area of its adjacent states of Georgia, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia.
Formerly isolated by geography, and sometimes intentionally so, Appalachia remains culturally rich and yet is more globally connected than ever before. Whereas past community and cultural exchanges took place through face-to-face, physical interaction, it is now possible to connect and access the world digitally. What was once a day’s journey from one town to the next has been replaced by the swipe and tap of a mobile phone. The diversity and magnitude of art-making in the region expands our understanding of the world today from the perspective of Southern Appalachia. Appalachia, while its roots are deep, has outlived its regionalism and is deserving of a new nuance of narrative. — Jason Andrew, curator
Appalachia Now! builds upon the Museum’s mission of collecting and interpreting 20th- and 21st-century American art in all media relevant to/produced in the Southeast and WNC. Inclusive and ambitious in scope, the exhibition will present a survey of works by emerging and established artists selected by Jason Andrew, a curator and juror of national renown. Andrew and Curatorial Assistant Lola Clairmont drove over 40 hours around the Southeast and made 54 studio visits with artists. In order to promote underrecognized and emerging artists, Appalachia Now! will feature artists whose work is not yet represented in the Museum’s Collection.
I am excited to share the many stylistic approaches and concerns of artists in this exhibition—their ages varied, their origins diverse. — Jason Andrew, curator
The following 50 artists have been selected through recommendations from regional museums, curators, and art organizations and through an open submission process. The overwhelming regional interest in this exhibition was demonstrated in the participation of artists in the free, public open call; over 400 artists applied through the call. Overall, the Museum and Andrew researched over 700 artists for consideration in the exhibition. The selected artists represent all media, including painting, sculpture, new media, dance, and film.
RELATED PRESS:
ARTSY.
Amy Beth Wright. “Artists of Appalachia Push Back on Regional Stereotypes.” Nov 22, 2019
Metropolis.
Joanne O’Sullivan. “Appalachia Makers Tell Their Own Story in New Exhibition.” Nov 22, 2019
HiFructose.
Andy Smith. “Asheville Art Museum Opens New Building in North Carolina.” Nov 18, 2019
Citizen Times.
Paul Moon. “Asheville Art Museum reopening highlights Madison County’s past, present and future.” Nov 12, 2019
Mountain Xpress.
Arnold Wengrow. “Asheville Art Museum readies for its grand reopening.” Oct 11, 2019
American Craft (Dec-Jan 2020)
”Appalachia Now! An Interdisciplinary Survey of Contemporary Art in Southern Appalachia.”
And these spotlights:
WMYA TV40.
John Le. “Man who one guarded Asheville Art Museum now has a piece on display there.” Nov 18, 2019
The Museum would like to thank the donors that make this exhibition possible: the John & Robyn Horn Foundation, The Community Foundation of Western North Carolina, Parsec Financial, The Chaddick Foundation, the Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation, Hollis Taggart, the Maurer Family Foundation, and the Judy Appleton Memorial Fund. This project is also supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.
The Museum would like to extend a special thanks to local partners Blue Ridge Printing, Asheville Color & Imaging, Mountain Paint & Decorating, and The Old Wood Co.
The Museum also thanks the following individuals for their support of this project: Jason Andrew, Chris Brooks, Lola Clairmont, Jenine Culligan, Emma-Leigh Evors, Beccy Hamm, Chesnee Klein, Nandini Makrandi, Jolene Mechanic, Amy G. Moorefield, Susan Rhew, and Stephen C. Wicks.
Your support helps the Asheville Art Museum develop community-driven programming and exhibitions. To contribute to Appalachia Now!, please visit our Donations page, select Upcoming Exhibitions, and type “Appalachia Now” in the Notes.
AES pairs up with Artists’ Legacy Foundation to host discussion on studio management and legacy planning for artists
Artist Estate Studio, LLC + Artists' Legacy Foundation present
SHOP TALK:
an evening of discussion + exchange focused on presenting strategies for artist studio managers and their archivists
Hosted by:
Jason Andrew, Founding Partner, Artist Estate Studio, LLC
&
Julia Schwartz, Co-Director, Artists’ Legacy Foundation
Date: Tues, Nov 5, 6-8:30PM
6:00PM Cocktails + Light Fare
6:30PM Introductions
6:45PM Discussion and exchange
8:00-8:30PM Post shop talk mingle
Seating limited please RSVP
Location: 88 Pine Street, Brooklyn, NY 11208
Directions: J Train to Brooklyn / Crescent Street Stop
AES Collaborates with The Estate of George McNeil to Design and Launch a New Website and Social Media
Artist Estate Studio was please to collaborate with the Estate of George McNeil in the design and presentation of his website.
George J. McNeil (1908-1995) was a vital and influential artist whose career spanned the whole of the Post-war American art era. He attended Pratt Institute and the Art Students' League, where he studied with Jan Matulka and Vaclav Vytlacil. From 1933-37 he studied with Hans Hofmann, becoming Hofmann's monitor (assistant). He worked for the W.P.A. Federal Art Project and in 1936 he became one of the founding members of the American Abstract Artists group; at the New York World's Fair in 1939, he was one of the few abstract artists whose work was selected. During World War II he served in the U.S. Navy.
In the late 1940s McNeil taught at the University of Wyoming and then taught art and art history at Pratt Institute until 1981, and at the New York Studio School until 1981, influencing generations of young artists. In 1989 McNeil was elected to the American Institute of Arts and Letters.
A pioneer Abstract Expressionist of the New York School, McNeil had over forty solo exhibitions during his lifetime, beginning with the Egan Gallery in 1950. His art grows from the abstract: in his pure abstractions through the early 1960s, the subject matter is passionate metaphor. Later, dynamic situations involving dancers, bathers, discos, New York City, football or graffiti gyrate around the canvas. This high-energy content is expressed through virtuoso oil paint technique in which rich texture and color define complex abstract volumes. McNeil used his comprehensive authority over oil paint to push for an ever-deeper exploration of sensation.
George J. McNeil's work is included in numerous museum collections around the country, including the Museum of Modern Art, NY, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, the Whitney Museum, NY, the San Francisco Museum of Art, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art and the Walker Art Center, MN, amongst many others.
Ursula Davila-Villa joins AES as "Legacy Specialist"
Photo: Elfie Semotan
New York, NY – Artist Estate Studio, LLC, the organization that manages the Estates of Jack Tworkov and Elizabeth Murray as well as the studios of living artists Joan Witek and Robert Zakanitch among others, is excited to announce that Ursula Davila-Villa has joined its team as Legacy Specialist.
In the growing field of artist estate management, Ursula has quickly become a leader in legacy planning. Her varied background, elite curatorial and research skills, as well has her worldwide wealth of contacts in the gallery and museum sector, positions her as an effective force and advocate for artists and their estates. Ursula will be a valuable member of our team. - Jason Andrew, Founding Partner, Artist Estate Studio, LLC
Expanding into legacy planning and stewardship comes as a natural evolution to the organization which strongly believes in empowering living artists and those involved with caring for artists’ estates by advocating for their interests and their legacies with integrity, empathy, and imagination.
About Ursula Davila-Villa.
Ursula Davila-Villa co-manages the Kurt Kocherscheidt Estate and has worked on an advisory role with artists such as Luis Camnitzer, Lorraine O’Grady, Carolee Schneemann, Elfie Semotan, and the Estate of Serge Spitzer. From 2012 to 2017 she was a Partner at Alexander Gray Associates where she managed the artistic and operational areas of the gallery including: artists liaison and career development, exhibitions, publications, institutional acquisitions, curatorial and research projects, and supervision of gallery staff.
From 2005-2012, she was Associate Curator of Latin American Art at The Blanton Museum of Art at The University of Texas at Austin where she directed and supervised exhibitions, permanent collection, acquisitions, publications, ongoing research, and established the first international artist-in-residence program. She curated several exhibitions at the Blanton, among them The New York Graphic Workshop 1964–1970: Luis Camnitzer, Liliana Porter y José Guillermo Castillo (2008), Eclipses for Austin a project by Pablo Vargas Lugo (2009), Recovering Beauty: The 1990s in Buenos Aires (2011), The Nearest Air: A Survey of Works by Waltercio Caldas (2013), among others. In 2012, she was co-curator of El Panal/The Hive: Third Poli/Gráfica Triennal of San Juan de Puerto Rico. In 2008 she curated a mid-career survey of Mexican artist Yoshua Okon at the Städtische Kunsthalle Munich, Germany. Previously, she worked as project and archival researcher for artist Cai Guo-Qiang at Cai Studio, as public programs assistant at the Guggenheim Museum, as curatorial assistant at Art in General (all in New York), and Manager of International Art Fairs at Galería OMR (in Mexico City).
She completed her M.A. in Museum Studies at New York University in 2005, and holds a BA in architecture and urbanism from the Instituto Tecnologico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey, Mexico, Université Laval, Quebec, Canada, and the Technische Universiteit Delft, Netherlands. She has lectured and published internationally on contemporary art and museum studies. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
About Artist Estate Studio, LLC.
Founded in 2017 by Jason Andrew and Julia K. Gleich, Artist Estate Studio, LLC, services artists and the estates of artists in the management and cataloguing of their art and the promotion of their legacy. With the artist and their studio as our core focus, we specialize in promotion and preservation. Whether our client is emerging, established, or an estate of an artist, we aim to provide full management associated with all aspects of the life and work of the artist. This includes strategic planning, promotion and marketing, overseeing agreements and contracts, licensing, inventory management, assistance with appraisals, legacy and estate planning, overseeing and development of catalogue raisonné projects, and the collection, preservation, and placement of the artist’s archives.
Our team brings together first-hand knowledge and more than eight decades of accumulated experience in the curatorial, archival, academic, performance arts, publishing, and market fields. We believe in empowering artists by representing their interests and stewarding their legacies with integrity, empathy and imagination.
(Via Press Release) Hauser & Wirth Announces Independent Non-Profit Institute
Franz Kline, Wanamaker Block, 1955.Y ale University Art Gallery, Gift of Richard Brown Baker, B.A. 1935. © 2018 The Franz Kline Estate / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
New York - Iwan Wirth, President and Manuela Wirth, Co-Founders of Hauser & Wirth, and Marc Payot, Partner and Vice President, today announced the establishment of Hauser & Wirth Institute, an independent non-profit 501(c)(3) private operating foundation dedicated to supporting art historical scholarship and to preserving and advancing the legacies of modern and contemporary artists through enabling greater public access to their archives for research.
To pursue its mission, the Institute will create a study center for the preservation, expedient cataloguing, and digitization of primary research materials for direct study and free online public access to these resources. It will seek to nurture innovation and substance in art historical research through the funding of fellowships in partnership with artists’ estates, foundations, and educational institutions. Another core activity of the Institute will be the production of online catalogues raisonnés and print publications that advance the highest academic standards in order to strengthen the field of modern and contemporary art history. The organization will also present public programs, including exhibitions of archival material and symposia that engage scholars, archivists, artists, collectors, curators, estate managers, gallerists, and the general public in dialogues about the obligations and opportunities inherent in archive stewardship.
The activities of Hauser & Wirth Institute will include both projects connected with artists represented by Hauser & Wirth and artists who are unaffiliated with the gallery.
The Institute is under the leadership of Executive Director Jennifer Gross, formerly Chief Curator and Deputy Director of deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts. Previous to her work at deCordova, Gross served as Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, Connecticut; Curator of Contemporary Art at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, Massachusetts; and Founding Director of the Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art in Portland, Maine.
Hauser & Wirth Institute is governed by a Board of Directors with guidance provided by an independent Advisory Board of artists, advisors to artists’ estates, scholars, and archivists.
“The work of Hauser & Wirth Institute is a natural extension of our gallery’s support of living artists and the noteworthy estates and foundations we have represented for over 25 years,” Iwan Wirth said. “The art world has accelerated and globalized its exhibition and publishing activities so dramatically. In creating the Institute, we hope to make resources available to support similar growth in the areas of art historical research and the sharing of essential knowledge that fuel a richer understanding of art, artists, and the creative processes central to the history of culture for future generations. We are honored to have the opportunity to create an organization to do this work, and so grateful to our Advisors for joining in the effort.”
Jennifer Gross commented, “We are thrilled to launch this unique and ambitious initiative at a time when there are fewer and fewer resources available to afford scholars the time and access needed for primary document research. It is a great privilege to care for and process archival materials. Even as the art world has become interested in these resources, it is critical to support public conversation about best stewardship and most effective and appropriate practices and partnerships. Technology should be enabling the sharing of intellectual and visual resources, but the speed at which the art world is operating now can preclude adequate attention to this work. We aim to broaden the art historical conversation to reflect the diversity of aesthetic and cultural values at hand today.”
Exhibition News: Biala opens at PAAM (Provincetown)
August 10-September 30, 2018
Opening reception: Friday, August 10, 8pm
Provincetown Art Association and Museum
460 Commercial Street
Provincetown, MA 02657
Provincetown Art Association and Museum presents Biala: Provincetown Summers: selected paintings and drawings. This historic exhibition is the first to focus entirely on the paintings and drawings by Janice Biala (1903-2000), which were created or inspired by her summers in Provincetown and on Cape Cod. The exhibition opens with a reception on Friday, August 10 at 8pm and will run through September 30 at Provincetown Art Association and Museum (460 Commercial Street, Provincetown, 508.487.1750 ext.17 / www.paam.org)
Organized and curated by Jason Andrew (Artist Estate Studio, LLC), the exhibition features twenty-seven paintings and twenty-three works on paper ranging in date from 1924 to 1985. Highlights include the earliest painting by the artist titled The Violin (c.1923-23) painted as an homage to her mentor and friend, Edwin Dickinson; Portrait of a Writer (Ford Madox Ford) (1938), who she met in 1930 and remained at his side until his death in 1939; The Beach (1958), a masterwork from the artist's most gestural period; a group of whimsical drawings of her grandnephew's first steps in Provincetown Bay; and Pilgrim Lake (1985), a pensive and contemplative painting that sublimely captures a layering of water, dunes, and the sky above. Works are on loan from the Estate of Janice Biala (courtesy Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York), as well as several major loans from private collections, The Art Collection of the Town of Provincetown, and the Provincetown Art Association and Museum.
Mr. Andrew will give a gallery talk on Tuesday, August 21 at 6pm
as part of the Fredi Schiff Levin Lectures.
An online catalogue with essay by curator Jason Andrew is available here by visiting www.janicebiala.org
Review (via NYTimes): Edith Schloss at Meredith Ward
Edith Schloss "Rignalla," 1967, Oil on canvas, 13 3/4 x 21 1/2 in.
We are very pleased that the exhibition, Edith Schloss, organized by Artist Estate Studio at Meredith Ward Fine Art has been reviewed in The New York Times by Robert Smith.
Exhibition News: Edith Schloss at Meredith Ward Fine Art opens Feb 8
Meredith Ward Fine Art is pleased to present Edith Schloss: By the Sea, an exhibition of 20 paintings and works on paper painted in Italy during the 1960s and 1970s (February 8 – March 30, 2018). This is the first exhibition of Schloss's work at the gallery and includes several paintings that will be on view for the first time. "Schloss's colorful and whimsical still lifes are a revelation," said Meredith Ward, President of the gallery. "They add an entirely new dimension to our understanding of figurative painting in the 1960s and 1970s." This exhibition was organized in collaboration with the Estate of Edith Schloss and with the support of Artist Estate Studio, LLC.
Intrinsically linked to the milieu of postwar American art, Edith Schloss was an integral member of the Chelsea-New York art world, which flourished around the New York School and include photographer and filmmaker Rudy Burckhardt (whom she married in 1947) and the Jane Street Group around Nell Blaine.
In 1962, having separated from Burckhardt, Schloss with her young son in tow, left New York City for Italy. There, with Rome as her base, she sought out the legendary Giorgio Morandi, befriending him and drawing inspiration from his subtle and calculated still lifes. Among the first paintings Schloss produced in Italy were a series of still lifes that are the focus of this special exhibition. In these paintings, which border on the bittersweet, fragile, and naïve, Schloss lines up vases, teapots, flowers, and other objects and paints them against the Mediterranean Sea.
These whimsical works display vitality, inventiveness, and a distinctive painterly abstraction.
Schloss wrote of her work, "What I really do is what any painter worth his salt has always done, I abstract color and line from life around me, and make another life out of it." Among the highlights of the exhibition are two paintings titled Rignalla, which are being exhibited here for the first time. Over several summers, Schloss accompanied her lover, the composer/musician Alvin Curran, to Florence where he had a gig playing Dixieland Jazz at the Red Garter. From her room along the via di Rignalla, she painted several still lifes, which became mementos of her sojourns there.
About Edith Schloss
Edith Schloss (1919-2011) was born in Offenbach, Germany. As a young woman she traveled extensively in Europe. Working as an au pair in London during the Blitz, she was evacuated to the United States and landed in New York City. There, she met the political refugee Heinz Langerhans, who introduced her to Bertolt Brecht, and other intellectuals at The New School for Social Research.
From 1942 to 1946, she studied at the Art Students League with Will Barnet, Harry Sternberg, and Morris Kantor. In 1945, Schloss met Willem de Kooning through her friend, the painter Fairfield Porter. Around the same time, she became connected with a group of artists, poets and filmmakers in Chelsea, including Ellen and Walter Auerbach, Nell Blaine, Edwin Denby, and Rudy Burchkhardt. She joined the Jane Street Group, New York's first artist cooperative gallery, and in 1947 had her first one-person show at the Ashby Gallery.
Schloss married Rudy Burckhardt in 1947 and the couple spent summers with Fairfield Porter and his family in Maine. In 1962, she and Burkhardt separated, and Schloss moved to Italy. Schloss’s paintings have been shown in exhibitions in Rome and New York and her work is represented in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Keats-Shelley House, Rome; the Hessisches Landsmuseum, Wiesbaden; and the Offenbacher Stadtmuseum, Offenbach, Germany.
In 2015, a landmark retrospective of work by Edith Schloss was curated by Jason Andrew and held at the Sundaram Tagore Gallery in New York. That exhibition marked the first show of the artist’s work in New York in twenty-five years. This exhibition at Meredith Ward, with a focused look on the works from the 1960s, continues the momentum and renewed interest in the artist’s work.
This exhibition was organized in collaboration with the Estate of Edith Schloss and with the support of Artist Estate Studio, LLC. The exhibition will be accompanied by an online catalogue.
About Meredith Ward Fine Art
Meredith Ward Fine Art opened in 2004 specializing in American art from the 19th century to the present. The gallery is the exclusive representative of the estates of John Marin, Larry Day, Steve Wheeler, and Flora Crockett. Meredith Ward Fine Art is located at 44 East 74th Street in New York City and is open to the public Tuesday through Friday, 10am to 5:30pm and Saturday by appointment.
For more information or images, contact Julia Wilcox at 212-744-7306 or
info@meredithwardfineart.com | www.meredithwardfineart.com
Lecture: "Biala: The Woman Painter Among Men" at ASL
Biala: The Woman Painter Among Men
Thurs, Jan 11, 6:30pm
RSVP (seating is limited)
Art Students League
215 West 57th Street
NYC
__________
Painter Janice Biala (1903-2000), known to history primarily by her surname, was an integral figure in the art scene of mid-twentieth century Manhattan. Sister of painter Jack Tworkov, friend of Willem de Kooning and critic Harold Rosenberg, Biala was in the thick of a milieu that gave rise to the New York School. But before all that, she was the lover of the English novelist Ford Madox Ford.
Curator Jason Andrew will trace the remarkable life and art of Biala from her early days of hitch-hiking to Provincetown in the ‘20s, to jumping on a boat to Paris and later her dramatic escape from Nazi occupied France in the ‘30s, to her early support of Willem de Kooning and participation in the New York School in the ’40s. Above all, she left a history of painting noted for its sublime assimilation of the School of Paris and the New York School of abstract expressionism.
This lecture coincides with the exhibition Biala and the Harvey and Phyllis Lichtenstein Collection, on view through February 10 at Tibor de Nagy Gallery, 15 Rivington Street, New York.
Announcing the formation of Artist Estate Studio, LLC
After many years of working independently as a consultant and estate representative, Jason Andrew has combined forces with his long time artistic collaborator of 25 years, Julia K. Gleich to form a new entity serving artists and estates of artists.
Based in Cypress Hills, Brooklyn, this newly formed team will consult and represent artists and estates of artists to further their careers and their legacies.