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Beneath the Surface: Life + Exhibit

'Drawing with Code'

Drawing with Code brings together a selection of computer-generated art by the form's earliest and most important practitioners from the 1950s to today. The Providence-based collection of Anne and Michael Spalter is one of the largest and most important of its kind in the U.S. and shines a new light onto a darkened corner of the art historical record.

In our current digital environment when just about everyone holds the processing power of a full computer in their pocket, it is difficult to remember a time when computer technology was not involved in every aspect of our lives. In the arts—visual, cinematic, musical, dance, and theater—the computer has become not only an accepted, but in many cases, an intrinsic tool for artistic expression. The artists featured in Drawing with Code emerged in the early computer-era when the technology was rudimentary by current standards and its capabilities rarely extended beyond the world of computation. Merging their interests in art and coding, these practitioners came to be known as "Algorists," artists who employed original algorithms to create images.

Roses in the Snow

A View of the art installation, "The Roses", by artist Will Ryman on Park Avenue, NYC.

photo: Andrew Gombert

"Skye's the Limit"

The entrancing English trip-hop group Morcheeba broke big with its 1998 release, “Big Calm,” before losing its way and its lead vocalist, Skye Edwards.

Edwards has returned to Morcheeba, and she makes her first New York City appearance with the group in nearly a decade, at Irving Plaza, Feb. 11-12.

Read more HERE

Illustration By Kim DeMarco for The New Yorker

 

"Written All Over Your Face"

One of Zhang Huan's most powerful works,Family Tree was created two years after he left China to live and work abroad, leaving behind potential persecution as well as family and friends. Dealing with issues of cultural identity, familial relationships, and self-expression, this installation creates a moving image of the isolation felt with the loss of one's past. The artist had three Chinese calligraphers cover his face with poems, tales, and family names from his homeland, animating the traditionally silent portrait through language and performance.

As the series progresses (see the complete series), the calligraphy saturates his face; the linguistic mask takes on a suffocating presence. Staged solely for the camera, the event was documented over the course of a day, the passage of time captured with the increasing layers of ink and the changing light.

Born in 1965, Zhang Huan studied painting as a graduate student at Beijing's Central Fine Arts Academy. After graduation in 1993, he helped found the artist's enclave Beijing East Village. Zhang Huan subsequently became one of the most recognized Chinese artists engaged in a variety of media: performance, photography, sculpture, painting, and stage production. In 1998 Zhang Huan moved to the United States. His international reputation established, he returned to China in 2006 and opened Zhang Huan Studio in Shanghai. He now divides his time between New York and Shanghai.

"Mannerism and Modernism: The Kasper Collection of Drawings and Photographs"

The Morgan Library & Museum presents over one hundred drawings and photographs from the collection assembled by American fashion designer Herbert Kasper—known simply as Kasper. The collection, exceptional for its distinctive character and superb quality, is being exhibited to the public for the first time.

The unusual, tripartite nature of the holdings is a testament to both Kasper's personal taste and his desire to build a truly unique collection. It is focused in three areas: sixteenth- and seventeenth-century old master drawings from the Mannerist period, modern and contemporary drawings, and photography. Most of the great Mannerist draftsmen—primarily Italian but also Northern European—are represented, including Perino del Vaga, Polidoro da Caravaggio, Giorgio Vasari, and Hendrick Goltzius. 

"The golden age is before us, not behind us." ~ Sallust

In 1928, when poet William Butler Yeats was in his 60s, he wrote "Sailing to Byzantium," in which he laments, An aged man is but a paltry thing / A tattered coat upon a stick. Despite his harsh characterization of old age, Yeats himself continued to write late into his life.

Yeats' older years as a writer, and those of many other creative artists, are the subjects of Nicholas Delbanco's latest book, Lastingness: The Art of Old Age. Delbanco examines artists who either maintained or advanced their work past the age of 70 — from Claude Monet, to Giuseppe Verdi, to Georgia O'Keeffe.

"It's not the sort of book I would've been interested in writing, much less reading, 30 or 40 years ago," Delbanco, 68, tells NPR's Robert Siegel. "But for obvious reasons, the business of old age is of incremental interest to me."

French impressionist Claude Monet — who painted well into his 80s, even after his vision was clouded by cataracts — created some of his most well-known works in the last decades of his life. After a long career as a renowned and financially successful artist, Monet retreated to the beloved gardens of his home in Giverny, 20 miles outside of Paris. His gardens became his artistic obsession.

"Over the last 20-plus years of his life, he painted almost exclusively the natural world," says Delbanco. "He had made a lot of money, and quite a name for himself in his youth and mostly middle age. But he withdrew — and yet painted almost obsessively up until his death."

This inward concentration — Monet's drive to create art for his own private pleasure — says Delbanco, is characteristic of many artists in their old age. But even though older artists are perhaps freer to make their own artistic choices, their creativity is also constrained by their limited mobility and health.

Read more HERE

Monet sits beside the water lily pond in his home garden in Giverny, France, circa 1910.

Hulton Archive/Getty Images

'Human Bat'

Human Bat

 Oblong tray at John Derian.

50th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy's "ask not" inaugural address —

'Kufic'

Painted partly in her New York studio and partly in the barn at the Springs, this selection of Lee Krasner’s work veers from diffident, quasi-pictorial experiments (tellingly signed, in one instance, “L.K.”) to some assertive displays of real virtuosity. A number of 1950s gouaches bear the influence of Gorky and Pollock yet reveal a sensibility that Krasner would often take to her own, successful ends.

A painting of thick mustard lines against an unprimed canvas, Kufic, 1965, presumably alludes with its title to the work’s loopy, calligraphic evocations. The transparency and spareness of this painting contrast notably with slightly earlier pictures such as Bird Image and Flowering Limb, both 1963, which pack in a range of pigments via densely knit brushwork. The organic allusions of the paintings’ titles underscore the pullulation of their surfaces and textures—quite different from the more aerated and relaxed skeins of Kufic.

via: ARA H. MERJIAN for Artforum