Posts from the “1990s” Category

Peter Cain at Matthew Marks Gallery, Los Angeles

Posted on July 5, 2017

Artwork: Peter Cain. Sean Number Two, 1996. Oil on linen, 60 x 84 inches, 152 x 213 cm. © Peter Cain, Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery.

When painter Peter Cain died of a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of 37 at in 1997, he left the art world in a state of shock. His career, which he been on the rise for over a decade, had begun to transform into new realms. What remained was a body of work that comprised 63 paintings that reveal a life interrupted, full of promise and potency, an ability to transform the archetypes of the era into something equally compelling and curious.

Matthew Marks, which represented him during his life, now presents Peter Cain, a new exhibition of works at their Los Angeles galleries, currently on view through September 1, 2017. Featuring paintings, drawings, and collages made between the late 1980s and 1997, this is Cain’s first solo show in LA since 1990.

The breadth of the collection reveals Cain’s development and the directions he had been heading at the time of his death. His earlier works, which brought him to game, are sumptuous paintings of automobiles that combine aspects of Surrealism and Photorealism to stunning effect, luring us into a strange realm where nothing is quite what it seems, yet you’re apt to believe in its truth, just as you would in a dream.

Read the Full Story at Crave Online

Categories: 1980s, 1990s, Art, Crave, Exhibitions, Painting

Irving Penn: Centennial

Posted on May 30, 2017

Photo: Irving Penn, American, Plainfield, New Jersey, 1917–2009, New York. Three Asaro Mud Men, New Guinea, 1970, printed 1976 Platinum-palladium print. Image: 20 1/8 x 19 1/2 in. (51.1 x 49.6 cm.) Sheet: 24 15/16 x 22 1/16 in. (63.3 x 56 cm.) Mount: 26 1/16 x 22 1/16 in. (66.2 x 56 cm.) Overall: 26 1/16 x 22 1/16 in. (66.2 x 56 cm.) Promised Gift of The Irving Penn Foundation IP .154

“Photography is just the present stage of man’s visual history,” Irving Penn (1917-2009) sagely observed, recognizing the infinite possibilities of the human animal to create technology that would advance our ability to document, represent, and re-envision the world. As a master of the form, Penn understood that the only thing that limits us is imagination.

For seven decades he worked, becoming a master of studio photography with the ability to craft pictures of anything he wished. Here was a man who could transform his very first commission for Jell-o pudding into a resounding success, even though, as Penn realized, it was, “a abstract nothing, it’s just a blob of ectoplasm.”

Yet with that formless glob of goop crafted in a laboratory, Penn was able to entice consumers to buy and serve the product en masse. It’s precisely this ability to transcend the particulars that made Penn a master of whatever form he chose to shoot, be in portraits, fashion, still life, food, nudes, or flowers. He understood that the photograph was an invitation to engage, to gaze upon the world without actually having to interact with it.

Through the safety of distance in time and space, Penn asked us to look at the complex and extraordinary beauty of existence in its many forms, whether Miles Davis’ hand, the Asaro Mud Men of New Guinea, or the curious silhouettes of Japanese designer Issey Miyake.

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

Irving Penn, American, Plainfield, New Jersey, 1917–2009, New York. Two Miyake Warriors, New York. June 3, 1998, printed January-February, 1999. Platinum-palladium print. Image: 21 x 19 5/8 in. (53.4 x 49.8 cm.) Sheet: 23 1/4 x 21 9/16 in. (59 x 54.7 cm.) Mount: 23 1/4 x 21 9/16 in. (59 x 54.7 cm.) Overall: 23 1/4 x 21 9/16 in. (59 x 54.7 cm.) Promised Gift of The Irving Penn Foundation IP .166

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Exhibitions, Feature Shoot, Photography

Larry Sultan: Here and Home

Posted on May 26, 2017

Photo: Larry Sultan, Business Page, from the series Pictures From Home, 1985; chromogenic print. © Estate of Larry Sultan. Photos courtesy Casemore Kirkeby and Estate of Larry Sultan.

Home is a state of mind as much as it is a place. For some it can be a four-letter word of the very worst kind—or it can be synonymous with love. Home can be so many things, all of them deeply personal.

For photographer Larry Sultan (1946-2009), home was where he created work, lush images of suburban California that are as American as Hostess cupcakes. There’s something delightfully unnatural about it all, something that comforts us with soothing visions of a naïve faith in the possibilities of the contrived. Here, the element of control reveals itself, that deeply seductive belief that we run this.

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

Photo: Larry Sultan, Practicing Golf Swing, from the series Pictures from Home, 1986; chromogenic print. © Estate of Larry Sultan. Photos courtesy Casemore Kirkeby and Estate of Larry Sultan.

Photo: Larry Sultan, My Mother Posing for Me, from the series Pictures From Home, 1984; chromogenic print. © Estate of Larry Sultan. Photos courtesy Casemore Kirkeby and Estate of Larry Sultan.

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Exhibitions, Feature Shoot, Photography

Art/Africa: A Nouvel Atelier

Posted on May 25, 2017

Artwork: Kudzanai Chiurai. Revelations V. 145 x 200 cm. 2011. © Kudzanai Chiurai © Courtesy de l’artiste et Marian Goodman Gallery, Paris et Marian Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg.

In recent years, the arts of Africa have taken the world stage by storm as the diverse peoples and cultures of the continent offer a distinctive vantage point and approach to creativity that is as singular as it is breathtaking. In celebration of the diverse arts of the land, Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, presents Art/Africa, le nouvel atelier, a series of three exhibitions currently on view now through August 28, 2017.

Art/Africa looks at the response of artists to the movements of the past fifty years, as independence from imperialist powers restored self-determination and freedom to the peoples whose homelands had been occupied by foreign invaders for centuries. The works look at the responses to colonialism, apartheid, issues of gender, family, and identity, and activism.

Read the Full Story at Crave Online

Artwork: Moké. Skol Primus. 177 x 131 cm. 1991. © Moké © Courtesy CAAC – The Pigozzi Collection.

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Africa, Art, Crave, Exhibitions, Painting, Photography

Michael Lavine: The Notorious B.I.G. – Life After Death

Posted on May 20, 2017

Photo: Michael Lavine. The Notorious B.I.G., Life After Death.

Twenty years have passed, but the shock is still fresh — and still incomprehensible. On March 9, 1997, Christopher Wallace, aka The Notorious B.I.G., was gunned down in a drive-by shooting. It remains unsolved.

At 12:30 a.m., Wallace left a Vibe magazine Soul Train Music Awards after-party at Los Angeles’ Petersen Automotive Museum. The SUV in which he was traveling stopped at a red light just 50 yards from the venue. A dark Chevrolet Impala SS pulled up along the passenger side. The driver rolled down his window, drew his weapon and fired. Four bullets struck Wallace. He was rushed to nearby Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and was pronounced dead at 1:15 a.m.

Not long afterward, The Notorious B.I.G. rose again: The double album Life After Death was released March 25. It sold 700,000 hard copies almost immediately, jumping from No. 176 to No. 1 on the Billboard 200 in the space of a week. The album’s cover art featured the man formerly known as Biggie Smalls in a long black coat and black bowler. He stared us in the face while leaning against a hearse that bore the license plate “B.I.G.” There were no sunglasses to hide his lazy eye. He wore it full and proud, looking over his shoulder as if he already knew. He wasn’t smiling. But he wasn’t mad. He was just stating the facts from the other side of the grave.

It seemed like a prophecy.

Read the Full Story at The Undefeated

Categories: 1990s, Art, Brooklyn, Music, Photography, The Undefeated

Martha Cooper at Steven Kasher Gallery, New York

Posted on May 16, 2017

Photo: Japanese girl with tattoo, Tokyo, 1970. © Martha Cooper.

Photographer Martha Cooper has always lived life on her own term. After graduating high school at 16 and Grinnell College at 19, the Baltimore-native decided to see the world so she joined the Peace Corps and traveled to Thailand, where she taught English for a spell. Then she hopped on a motorcycle and hightailed it from Bangkok to London, taking all along the way.

She received a diploma in anthropology from Oxford, which speaks to her truest sensibilities: her passion for documenting the creative fruits of the human experience. In her hands, the camera is not merely a tool to create an image for aesthetic pleasure, it does something more; it bears witness to a time and place that is inherently ephemeral: street art and culture, which is inherently urban folk art.

In 1970, Cooper found herself walking along a street in Tokyo when she spotted a man in a crowd. On his back was a Japanese tattoo, with figures drawn in the style of a woodblock print. Entranced, Cooper followed him until he disappeared, then began asking her friend about tattoos—a touchy subject. Tattooing had been outlawed in 1872, then legalized again in 1948, then quickly became a status symbol for the yakuza and the Japanese underworld. But Cooper is not one to give up when she has her sights set, and so she pursued her quest to completion: entrance to the studio of Horibun I, a tattoo master.

It is here, in his studio that Cooper made the photographs that comprise the earliest work in the exhibition Martha Cooper, currently on view at Steven Kasher Gallery, New York, through June 3, 2017.

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

Photo: Christopher Sawyer breaking, Upper West Side, NYC, 1983. © Martha Cooper.

Photo: Woman with white pants on 180th Street platform, Bronx, NYC, 1980. © Martha Cooper.

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Bronx, Exhibitions, Feature Shoot, Graffiti, Manhattan, Photography

Robin Schartz: Like Us

Posted on May 12, 2017

Photo: Robin Schwartz, Charlie, 1988, Chimpanzee, female, 5 years old, Copyright Robin Schwartz.

Last month, The New Indian Express recently reported the capture of a young girl who had been living with a troop of monkeys in the jungles of Katrraniyaghat, India. The world press went wild for the story of a feral child, with visions of Rudyard Kipling’s Mowgli dancing in their prose.

“She behaves like an ape and screams loudly if doctors try to reach out to her,” says Dr. DK Singh, chief medical superintendent, Bahraich District Hospital, told the newspaper, adding that she walks, eats, and sits like monkeys.

But the fantastical tale was short-lived as The Washington Post soon reported that the girl had been abandoned a mere hours or days before being recovered. It has been suggested her parents left her near an outpost, forsaking an unwanted daughter in a society that prized sons.

Invariably, what occurred speaks to a distinctly human trait: a complete lack of interest in viable offspring, discarded and left for death because the gender has been so degraded by the society in which it exists. What’s telling is that this aspect of the story was disregarded in favor of playing up unfounded rumors of interspecies relationships.

Read the Full Story at Crave Online

Categories: 1980s, 1990s, Crave, Exhibitions, Photography

Larry Clark: White Trash

Posted on May 10, 2017

Artwork: Christopher Wool, “Untitled”, 1987 enamel on paper 18 3/4 x 14 3/4 inches – framed. © Christopher Wool; courtesy of the artist, and Luhring Augustine, New York.

“People are boring unless they’re extremists,” Jenny Holzer exhorts from a laundry list of aphorisms she made in 1978. Her words perfectly describe the spirit of artist, filmmaker, and writer Larry Clark – and his obsessive passion for collecting. Since his first girlfriend gave him a portrait she made of him in 1961, Clark has amassed a vast panoply of art, objects, and artifacts that he keeps piled up in his Tribeca loft, creating a warren of glorious stuff.

“You should enjoy yourself because you can’t change anything anyway,” Holzer notes on that same list, which is one of the many works in White Trash, an exhibition culled from Clark’s collection, now on view at Luhring Augustine, Brooklyn, through June 18. As you stroll through the show, you feel the pleasure, the pain, and the poignancy of the works that have called to Clark over the years.

From a high corner, Alberto Korda’s portrait of Che Guevara hangs, gazing above the scene, which includes an impressive array of paintings, prints, photographs, sculptures, film and music posters, skateboards, furniture, books, vintage pieces, and neon signs like a Jack Pierson sculpture that flashes the word “APPLAUSE.”

“Learn to trust your own eyes,” Holzer advises as you proceed through the show, taking in works by Helmut Newton, Andy Warhol, Richard Prince, Raymond Pettibon, Jack Pierson, Jeff Koons, Mark Gonzales, Max Blagg, and Ralph Gibson, to name just a few. White Trash becomes a visual memoir of Clark’s travels on earth – but it is the presence of his studio door, which stands perpendicular to the wall, feels the most intimate and sacred object in the entire show.

“Slipping into madness is valuable for the sake of passion,” Holzer concludes, and you can’t really argue that sentiment while standing in this room. There’s much to be said for letting desire lead the way. Clark speaks with Dazed about his unconditional love for collecting, and the power of living with art.

Read the Full Story at Dazed Digital

Bottom Artwork: Christy Rupp, “The Rat Patrol”, 1979. offset print 10 5/8 x 22 7/16 inches (framed). © Christy Rupp, courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Dazed, Exhibitions, Painting, Photography

More Than a Picture

Posted on May 8, 2017

Photograph by: James H. Karales Printed by: Rick Rhodes Photography & Imaging, LLC Subject of: Lewis “Big June” Marshall. Lewis “Big June” Marshall Carrying the U.S. Flag, Selma to Montgomery. March, March 21, 1965 (detail). H x W: 3356pixels × 4200pixels (3356pixels × 4200pixels). Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Gift of Monica Karales and the Estate of James Karales © Estate of James Karales.

Photograph: Created by: Roderick Terry. Subject of: Unidentified Man or Men. Printed by: Penn Camera Positive. Reflections, October 16, 1995, silver and photographic gelatin on photographic paper. H x W (Image): 10 5/8 x 13 11/16 in. (27 x 34.8 cm). H x W (Image and Sheet): 11 x 14 in. (27.9 x 35.6 cm). Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Gift of Roderick Terry © Roderick Terry.

A photograph is more than a picture—far more than mere art. Photography bears witness to an event as it unfolds, creating a document of the moment that becomes part of the historical record. It is equal parts memory and evidence. In many cases it is proof, as in the new standard bearer: “Pics or it didn’t happen.” In this way, the photograph can transform our understanding of life by speaking in all languages at the same time without ever saying a word.

Photography radically democratized the act of representation. Once the provenance of the wealthy elite and the power structure, the photograph liberated the picture plane from those who used it to support highly biased histories, mythologies, and narratives. Art in the age of mechanical reproduction enabled the image to be created at a much lower cost, be duplicated en masse, and distributed widely. It put the power of picture making in more people’s hands, and once freed from the strictures of the academy, the discipline flourished.

Read the Full Story at Crave Online

Photograph by: John Johnson Subject of: George W. Butcher. Subject of: Unidentified Man or Men Created by: Douglas R. Keister. Scan of George W. Butcher and friend wearing suits and leaning on canes 1919-1925; scanned 2012. H x W: 8112 pixels x 5772 pixels. Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture © Douglas Keister.

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Crave, Exhibitions, Photography

Most Scandalous Art Shows of All Time

Posted on April 27, 2017

Gran Fury for ACT UP

The best art upends expectations and social mores, challenging the status quo by transgressing the boundaries of polite society. Because, let’s face it, truth isn’t kind to those who lie to themselves. But like the sun and the moon, the truth will always out.

Great art is a vessel for truth, allowing artists to speak freely without ever uttering a word. The immediacy of sight and the way it work on the brain allows it to change the way we perceive the world by upending the power of words to articulate and explain. “Seeing is believing” as the old proverb goes, and with that in mind, artists can change your mind without giving you a chance to argue. In celebration of the power of art, Crave has compiled a list of the most scandalous art shows of all time.

Read the Full Story at Crave Online

Categories: 1980s, 1990s, Art, Crave, Exhibitions, Photography

Jamel Shabazz: Crossing 125th

Posted on April 26, 2017

Harlem is the heart and soul of New York, the epicenter of African-American life, culture, history, and hustle. At the turn of the twentieth-century, this vast tract of land in upper Manhattan quickly became the destination for black folks leaving the South en masse during the Great Migration. Here, folks created a town within a city entirely its own, dominating the wide boulevards and stately homes with a style and approach to life that combined the very best of the North and the South.

It was during this first wave that the Harlem Renaissance was born, giving rise to a flourishing movement of a wide array of arts from literature, poetry, and drama to music, dance, and theater. Visual artists also took root, creating images that bespoke not just the times but also the rich and textured history of African-American life as seen through the eyes of the people.

Among the great artists of the era was James Van DerZee, one of the premier photographers of the twentieth century. During the 1920 and ‘30s, he crafted a compelling pictures of Harlem’s emerging middle class that employed the elements of traditional Victorian portraiture—but took them to new heights but connecting with the spirit of his subjects and bringing out their glamorous inner light. Van DerZee’s photographs came to define Harlem in a way that few other photographers ever could, and in doing so, he influenced generations to come—including the great Jamel Shabazz.

Read the Full Story at Crave Online

Categories: 1980s, 1990s, Art, Crave, Exhibitions, Manhattan, Photography