new york artists

SRO Gallery, Brooklyn, NY, with ‘Photo-A-GoGo’: It’s Elementary

Photo-A-GoGo presents art that has photography as an element, whether it is predominant or used as a minor accent, to show how the creative process now parallels or responds to the ubiquitous social digital/exchange mentality. We have the MIME, Instagram, Snapchat, all the ways we express or project our ideas or self-image – so the photograph, instead of being “worth a thousand words” is now as common as a mosquito in July. However, that does not mean that art or the intention behind it or the imagery utilized is, in the end, benign.

Left: Don Doe, Fille Sans Dot, Fille Avec Dot (2017), giclee, 22 x 15″More

New York Theatre: Renee Taylor Returns, ‘My Life on a Diet’

Renee Taylor, in “My Life on a Diet” Photo by Edward Rubin

Most famous people who are long in the tooth–if they are not dead, quietly retired, or resting on their well-earned laurels–tend keep a very low profile. You rarely hear about them. But not the indefatigable, 85-year- old Renee Taylor, an Energizer bunny, whose funny and bittersweet autobiographical, one-woman-show, My Life on a Diet, is currently playing to full houses at St. Clement’s Theatre, here in New York City.More

Manhattan’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Presents “Giacometti”

The meticulously curated Giacometti exhibition on view at the Guggenheim Museum spans the artist’s early years during his involvement with the Surrealist group (1920s) through his later period when he became associated with the French Existentialist movement in the 1940’s. The exhibition is organized by Megan Fontanella, Curator, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Catherine Grenier, Director, Fondation Giacometti, Mathilde Lecuyer-Maillé, Associate Curator, Fondation Giacometti, and Samantha Small, Curatorial Assistant, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

Above: Alberto Giacometti – Walking Man I (Homme qui marche I), 1960. Bronze, 180.5 x 27 x 97 cm. Fondation Giacometti, Paris © 2018 Alberto Giacometti Estate/Licensed by VAGA and ARS, New York.
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Parallel Fields: Three Artists at Manhattan’s Lichtundfire Gallery

Processing information, data and imagery that accumulates or is set aside from our dominant thinking forms our beliefs, opinions and behaviors. You stub your toe and for the next few hours or so you tread more carefully. You get a speeding ticket and the next time you’re on that particular road you drive more carefully. You stargaze one evening and experience one of the century’s greatest meteor showers, so you continue to look skyward every chance you get. Those very specific lessons both short term and long become bigger, more life changing if you fixate over them. That tendency to obsess, that hyper focus on the mundane to the miraculous is what leads to exceptional thought, creative foretelling and compelling art of modern and contemporary times.More

A Match Made: Jim St Clair at New York’s Waterfront Museum

The Waterfront Museum is located afloat, on the waterfront in Red Hook, NY, aboard the landmark-designated, Lehigh Valley Barge #79.

For the past twenty years the Waterfront Museum, which floats on the edge of New York Harbor about a mile south east of the Statue of Liberty, has featured numerous exhibitions that concern our waterways and coastline. The current exhibition, Derelicts: Oil Paintings by Jim St. Clair, is thanks to the film, theater and television production designer, Dean Taucher who met the museum’s president, David Sharps, and quickly organized the exhibition matching St. Clair’s gritty and highly tactile paintings with this unique and wonderful institution.More

Yangyang Pan: ‘The Unveiling,’ at Madelyn Jordon Fine Art

Yangyang Pan, ‘In Between the Blossom,’ 2018, Oil on linen, 42 x 72 in.

Yangyang Pan, who was born in 1976, spent the first 30 years of her life in Central China where the meanderings of the Yangtze River, traditional Chinese art and art education shaped her thinking. She even taught art where she studied, at the Sichuan Fine Art Institute, but never realized her full potential as a painter until she moved west to Canada in 2006. At that time, Pan quickly found new inspiration in the work of Willem de Kooning, Joan Mitchell and Philip Guston, opening up her eyes, mind and emotions through the freedom of Abstract Expressionism.More

‘Hugo Fontela: Nowhere Island’ at New York’s Marlborough Gallery

Hugo Fontela, ‘Nowhere Island XIII’ (2018), mixed media on canvas, 39 1/4” sq.

Marlborough Gallery recently presented, ‘Hugo Fontela: Nowhere Island,’ an exhibition of new mixed media paintings whose enigmatic title conveys an air of mystery that stirs curiosity on the metaphysical issues inherent in the unusual leitmotif. In an era in the art world when individuality has long been depleted by appropriation, when trends devised with no evident antecedents rule, and cronyism perpetuates outdated art modes, a fresh voice is a lifeline. As the art market is increasingly distorted by inflated commercialism, and only the top of the highest end art stars flourish, it is noteworthy that with clarity and cogency, Hugo Fontela offers a symbolic vision that explores associations which lead to speculation on the very essence of being and existence, in pared down pristine environmental formats.More

Art Gallery Ontario, with Artists Mitchell/Riopelle: ‘Nothing in Moderation’

On my way to this exhibition I was thinking of Joan Mitchell (1925-1992) and Jean-Paul Riopelle (1923-2002), as a golden couple in a post-war, Golden Age. Paris retained its charm and New York was newly ascendant after World War II. Riopelle seemed a ‘golden boy,’ irresistible and charming with his expensive race cars — including Bugattis — boats, properties and artistic success. Mitchell brimmed with athletic confidence, and was not at all shy about her body. Looking at photographs with her lovers, we can’t miss seeing the sexual magnetism she radiated. Theirs was a good match in many ways—but on careful examination, they were anything but a golden couple.More

Concordia College’s OSilas Gallery with Serdar Arat: ‘Departing Skies’ (1987-2017)

Serdar Arat, ‘Departing Skies’ (2004), acrylic on wood, 20 x 47 x 2”.

I believe the first time I had the opportunity to write about the work of Serdar Arat was in 1999. I was with The New York Times a little over a year back then when and I discovered this little gem of an exhibition program in the lower level of the Concordia College’s library. At that time, I wrote his painting was “somewhere between peaceful and puzzling.” I saw his work as representations of “tomorrows vistas”, and in fact, one of the works in that exhibition, his hauntingly beautiful The Island (1998), which is an homage to Isle of the Dead (1880) by Arnold Böcklin, has another, even more recent and beautiful version in Shadow of the Island (2011) in this wonderful exhibition titled Departing Skies: Serdar Arat 1987-2017. More

From Nature: An Interview with Val Kilmer, by D. Dominick Lombardi

Val Kilmer, Photo by Hank O’Neal (all images courtesy of Woodward Gallery, NYC)

Val Kilmer, well-known actor, director and producer is also an accomplished poet and visual artist. In all instances, the diversely and abundantly talented Kilmer must manage his creative energies in many different ways, but for him it is in the visual arts, like poetry, where there is more of a need or want for experimentation, chance and enlightenment, as poetry and the visual arts are the ultimate internal process.

Kilmer brings everything to the table, even the very core of our being, as thoughts of God and the origins of the universe vie for his and our attention in his art. I recently had the pleasure of asking Kilmer a few questions to help clarify his process and intent in the following Q & A.More