Reflected
Art
The Art of Paper at Sundaram Tagore Gallery
The Art of Paper is a multi-artist exhibition currently on display Sundaram Tagore Gallery at their Chelsea location. The term “works on paper” often refers to drawing and print, but the medium and can be used in so many more ways. Each of the artists in the show uses paper in a very different way, showcasing its breadth and versatility as a raw material for art.
Korean artist Chun Kwang Young creates fantastic three-dimensional sculptures from mulberry paper. This thin and delicate paper is prized as an artistic
Some are flat and wall-mounted while others are freestanding. But in all cases, they are three-dimensional full of complex depth and texture.
The jagged triangular elements seem sharp, even a bit dangerous up close. But at the same time, they seem fragile, like delicate crystals that could fall apart among touch. When viewing closer, they seem soft, especially as the details of the paper come into view, including the original printed text from the source material. There is something almost science-fiction-y and other-worldly about the result that I find captivating.
Chun has a simultaneous solo exhibition from his Aggregations at the Brooklyn Museum, which we will be reviewing in a separate article.
The work of Anila Quayyum Agha also uses paper as a basis for sculpture with a very different set of styles, techniques, and sensibilities. She is best known for her works featuring paper laser-cut into large intricate forms. Many of the paper cuts are assembled into cubes placed in immersive spaces with light.
Being in the space of this piece and viewing it from all angles was a captivating experience. It doesn’t seem like paper, but rather intricately carved stone or metal. S
In contrast to Agha’s highly intricate designs, Miya Ando’s work is more subtle and spare. She is known for more abstract work in metal, but she brings that work to paper in her “moonlight” pieces for this show.
Paper is often white, but it can be many different whites and shades in between those gradations. The subtle changes give the round form a very natural feel in contrast to the stark white background.
There are several more artists in this show, more than we at CatSynth are able to cover in this article. For more information, please visit the gallery’s website. They are located at 547 West 27th Street, and the exhibition will be on display through December 15, 2018.
Mary Corse: A Survey in Light, Whitney Museum
We at CatSynth spent the better portion of a recent afternoon at the Whitney Museum of American Art, taking in the entire museum top to bottom. In the first of our reports, we start at the top with a survey of the work of artist Mary Corse.
The exhibition – Corse’s first solo survey at a major institution – focuses on her work in the mid-to-late 1960s as part of the West Coast Light and Space movement. Like many of her contemporaries, Corse was very interested in the use of light as a medium in itself, but her output of light works was almost entirely focused on flat art, i.e., the kind you can hang on walls. This made her a bit of an outlier in the movement.
At first glance, it might be tempting to dismiss her work as “another round of white-on-white paintings from the 1960s.” But what makes it interesting is that light is at the center, rather than texture or pigment; and that she delved into emerging technologies and media to move beyond painting.
The most intriguing pieces in the exhibition were those that used plexiglass and lighting technologies. Corse studied physics and engineering in preparation for this body of work. We see this in her series where custom Plexiglass elements of different depths are juxtaposed next to one another allowing different amounts of light to pass through.
It is a subtle but fascinating set, and I found myself moving back and forth and looking from either side in my own exploration.
Corse also made her own light elements with a variety of technologies, including this piece from 1968 which employed an argon light and frequency generator, once again with her own custom plexiglass. I would have loved to have seen it in
Looking at the bands within the light, I immediately found myself thinking of the amplitudes in a time-varying sound wave, or perhaps a frequency-domain spectrum. It would have been quite interesting to “hear” it.
The final set of work in the exhibition takes an abrupt turn, making the end of this period in Corse’s career. In 1970, she moved from Los Angeles to Topanga Canyon and embarked on her Black Earth Series of paintings.
canvas. 108 x 108 in. (274.3 x 274.3 cm). Collection of Sangbeom Kim and Sunjung Kim
Beyond the obvious switch from white to black, there is a break from technology and a return to working with more traditional materials and textures. The “black” in the Black Earth Series are ceramics made in her own kilns. The glossy material is reflective, but also thick and covered in bumps and curves. This is in stark contrast to the plexiglass surfaces of her earlier work and makes a fitting bookend for the survey.
Unfortunately, the exhibition is closing this weekend, but if you happen to be in New York I recommend checking it out. It makes a fine escape from the overwhelm and sensory overload of holiday season.
Wordless Wednesday: Ocean Beach (5454)
René Magritte: The Fifth Season at SFMOMA
We at CatSynth have been extraordinarily busy since the start of summer with work, music, and other obligations. As a result, our explorations of visual art have suffered a bit. But we start correcting that today with a report from the blockbuster René Magritte: The Fifth Season exhibition at SFMOMA. I’m glad I was able to get in to see it before it closes in two weeks!
The exhibition focuses on his later works, from World War II through the late 1960s. It is billed as “If you think you know Magritte (1898–1967), think again.” Yet, this period includes many of his most iconic works – other than perhaps his most famous La Trahison des images (aka “this is not a pipe”), including many of my favorites from the broader Magritte retrospective I had seen at SFMOMA in the early 2000s.
The work depicted above, Les valeurs personnelles, is perhaps my favorite of all. I find myself drawn to it not just because of the stark juxtaposition of larger-than-human-sized objects in a smaller-than-human-sized space, but for the various textures that defy painting. The objects themselves have the hyperrealistic sheen of graphics from the 1990s (we were all proud of our ability to render glass) with the more pedestrian room space and strangely realistic sky on the wall. These are the characteristics of many of Magritte’s pieces during his Hypertrophy period in the 1950s. It’s taken to an extreme in a piece that features one of his iconic green apples swelling to gargantuan proportions and pushing against the walls of a modest room.
And of course, there were many bowler-hatted gentlemen, some with green apples, some without.
The image of the bowler hat and the bowler-hatted man has appeared throughout Magritte’s career, but it was more closely associated with the artist himself in his later works, a form of
In addition to the green apple, we see many objects and concepts that appear in other works from this period applied to the bowler-hatted man, such as the small round stone, birds, and negative spaces.
In both sets of works, we see the discrete juxtaposition of elements that may or may not fit with real-life experience. I see this is as “quintessentially Magritte” and consistent throughout most of his career. In that sense, I disagree a bit with the thesis of the exhibition that this later period was a break with surrealism, but rather a reimagining of it with different subjects and techniques and without the heaviness of the
I would never have guessed these grotesque parodies of van-Gogh-style impressionism were his work if they were not presented and explained. At the same time, it is not surprising that the experience of the war (Magritte remained in his native Belgium during the Nazi occupation). It feels like his weakest and least memorable work, but one theory suggests that his retrograde style during this period helped avoid Nazi attention and persecution. We are certainly glad he returned to form in his later years.
One of late series, collectively called The Dominion of Light, brings together a nighttime city streetscape with a daytime sky.
It takes a moment of adjustment to realize the confounding of night and day in the image, as our eyes are so used to assumptions about the passing of time and light. The series is at once playful, but also a bit melancholy, pointing to the later years of a life and life’s work. Fortunately, there was one more chapter to come that was both more curious and more
This bizarre series of boulders floating in space or sitting isolated on an apartment terrace is a return to form, but also an exploration of time and gravity and even more fundamental assumptions that we make in everyday life. Their lightness and starkness also make an interesting statement at the end of a career that spanned several decades and saw the massive changes of the 20th century. We should note that the bowler-hat portraits featured in this article were done during the same late period, and are stronger both as works in themselves and as a career-spanning statement.
The exhibit was overall a delight to experience. It was hung in a minimalist but also warm style without too much crowding or overwhelm, and it weaved a narrative even as I took in the works as individuals. It also marked a return a place of solace, the museum, after a long period of intensity and focus on other practices. I won’t stay away as long again.
If you are in San Francisco over the next couple of weeks, I strongly recommend checking this exhibition out before it closes on October 28. For more information, please visit https://www.sfmoma.org/exhibition/rene-magritte/.
Wordless Wednesday: Sutro Baths Graffiti and Cliff House
Graffiti on some ruins in the Sutro Baths. The Cliff House restaurant is visible in the back.
You can see one of our previous photos from this Hipstamatic shoot in a previous Wordless Wednesday.
