Thursday, December 30, 2010
Sunday, February 1, 2009
Imi Knoebel @ Mary Boone Gallery
Imi Knoebel @ Mary Boone Gallery
Imi Knoebel’s work is a bright spot in a dark world. Like the ad says,…’Add color to your life and your décor’. Not a bad thing to be in this, our hopefully long overdue, brave new world,…Maybe these are the first flutterings, the signs of a spring here,…Well Imi Knoebel is not a wound too tight kind of guy, or trussed up like Glenn Brown, or wound down to sludge but more like a lotus sprung bright out of fertile mud,…And he’s definitely from some mixed fertile beginnings, soil from the likes of Blinky Palermo, Sigmar Polke and Joseph Beuys. Imi Knoebel’s work goes casual, loosens it up, springs from the board of classic, lean modernism but more sprightly, louder and way less demanding,…uncomplicated. Like when you see orange and black, it doesn’t mean Halloween,…It’s just black as black and then orange as orange and yellow as yellow, green as green, etc.,…Stop looking for a problem to solve, a way in,…Take these paintings at face value,…Rootless no, cut loose from meaning, yes! Freshen up, press your re-fresh button now.
Like opening up your first box of fresh crayolas,…not iconic as Ellsworth Kelly or even wanting, needing to be now,…Knoebel makes that ethos seem frozen, while his organic, lung-ta’s fly round the gallery,…His forthright simple geometries of real color,…a pleasure. Front and center, suspended,…not so rigorous and chock full of the life that is not codified, structured or honed to a master plan,…presages new beginnings, keep it opened up,…anemones floating,…Simple, adroit,…It’s about the color!
Stephanie Bell Behnke
Imi Knoebel’s work is a bright spot in a dark world. Like the ad says,…’Add color to your life and your décor’. Not a bad thing to be in this, our hopefully long overdue, brave new world,…Maybe these are the first flutterings, the signs of a spring here,…Well Imi Knoebel is not a wound too tight kind of guy, or trussed up like Glenn Brown, or wound down to sludge but more like a lotus sprung bright out of fertile mud,…And he’s definitely from some mixed fertile beginnings, soil from the likes of Blinky Palermo, Sigmar Polke and Joseph Beuys. Imi Knoebel’s work goes casual, loosens it up, springs from the board of classic, lean modernism but more sprightly, louder and way less demanding,…uncomplicated. Like when you see orange and black, it doesn’t mean Halloween,…It’s just black as black and then orange as orange and yellow as yellow, green as green, etc.,…Stop looking for a problem to solve, a way in,…Take these paintings at face value,…Rootless no, cut loose from meaning, yes! Freshen up, press your re-fresh button now.
Like opening up your first box of fresh crayolas,…not iconic as Ellsworth Kelly or even wanting, needing to be now,…Knoebel makes that ethos seem frozen, while his organic, lung-ta’s fly round the gallery,…His forthright simple geometries of real color,…a pleasure. Front and center, suspended,…not so rigorous and chock full of the life that is not codified, structured or honed to a master plan,…presages new beginnings, keep it opened up,…anemones floating,…Simple, adroit,…It’s about the color!
Stephanie Bell Behnke
Thursday, January 1, 2009
'Oh Happy New Year 2009' 'Consciousness, Cracking It Up and Get Your Wonder Back'
Oh Happy New Year 2009
‘Consciousness, Cracking It Up and Get Your Wonder Back’
What is it that Kate Gilmore, Pipilotti Rist, Gemma Smith and Urs Fischer all have in common,…??? They are charged energy, cracking it up, moving it out, crashing through walls and pushing us out of the box,…over the precipice, out through the garden, over the walls, under the earth, to the land of random, out of bounds, out of range, out of time and space and into the great beyond, a heady start for this auspicious new year,…change you can feel,…the uncategorized all coming at you,…Out with the old, visors off, eyes glinting from a wide opened sun filled retina…What does it mean,…Consciousness opened out,…Implications global,…old, worn out, political and social institutions giving way,…On all levels, artists are on the loose, moving out and heading toward each other, breaking away from the ancient pedigrees, turf wars,…fences are breaking. We are inexorably charging past the old markers, not charting the passage and claiming the universe as our infinite territory. Does that have us in free fall, bounding through space, no attachment, no state, no homeland,…A big resounding YES,…YES, YES!!! Will instinct rule, a Darwinian feed forward, survival of the fittest, vile Zombies with heat and no morals,…NO,…NO, NO!!!…Does the big bang look back,…Do the Zen masters not jump off the 100 foot pole. This is not chaos but the kind of life giving momentum that pulls us all off the sofa, out of the ditch, to a universal table large enough to feed, propagate and spread the life energy throughout the universe,…Get out your pick axes, your propellers, open your eyes wide artists and get going. Consciousness is waiting,…
Stephanie Bell Behnke 2009
‘Consciousness, Cracking It Up and Get Your Wonder Back’
What is it that Kate Gilmore, Pipilotti Rist, Gemma Smith and Urs Fischer all have in common,…??? They are charged energy, cracking it up, moving it out, crashing through walls and pushing us out of the box,…over the precipice, out through the garden, over the walls, under the earth, to the land of random, out of bounds, out of range, out of time and space and into the great beyond, a heady start for this auspicious new year,…change you can feel,…the uncategorized all coming at you,…Out with the old, visors off, eyes glinting from a wide opened sun filled retina…What does it mean,…Consciousness opened out,…Implications global,…old, worn out, political and social institutions giving way,…On all levels, artists are on the loose, moving out and heading toward each other, breaking away from the ancient pedigrees, turf wars,…fences are breaking. We are inexorably charging past the old markers, not charting the passage and claiming the universe as our infinite territory. Does that have us in free fall, bounding through space, no attachment, no state, no homeland,…A big resounding YES,…YES, YES!!! Will instinct rule, a Darwinian feed forward, survival of the fittest, vile Zombies with heat and no morals,…NO,…NO, NO!!!…Does the big bang look back,…Do the Zen masters not jump off the 100 foot pole. This is not chaos but the kind of life giving momentum that pulls us all off the sofa, out of the ditch, to a universal table large enough to feed, propagate and spread the life energy throughout the universe,…Get out your pick axes, your propellers, open your eyes wide artists and get going. Consciousness is waiting,…
Stephanie Bell Behnke 2009
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
That Tired Old Thing Called Vitality
We wander around in that ‘sluggish mishmash’ says Peter Schjeldahl, a so-called ‘mishmash’ which has prevailed and characterized contemporary art for over a decade now, where everything is possible and nothing is qualifiable. Art is wide open…coming now from the four corners of the globe, in fact there are no more four corners of the globe…mutating, materializing – the hierarchy of the patrimony of the Renaissance is not the gold standard – M. Kimmelman’s fretting over the so-called ‘value’ of ‘Il Ducio’’s madonna/child…this value has changed…hard pressed to find typical, traditional significance…art that emerges now is not hidebound by the indigenous, the specific…Yet in spite of the fluctuating parameters there really is a playing field and scale for determining quality….Are we finally tired of perusing the dusty corners, the nihilistic slackers, the sordid deadenders…give me some shit…but not the squalid kind like Gunter Brus, more like the earthy, full of life kind, like…the Chris Ofili kind…you know where I’m going here, the Vitality…
Well, it really does matter what you hang your hat on and even if your hat is not a pipe, ‘c’eci n’est pas un pipe’…all art conundrums aside there is either a heartbeat or a lack of one and that is the heart of the matter…talking about our old friend ‘vitality’, the fact that there either is a heart beating or not…witness Anish Kapoor ‘s 2005 folly (as in architectural structure) for World of Interior’s magazine ‘projects’ in the snow. It doesn’t just evoke, it IS, it relays a Tantric fervor…his newest piece is a teardrop, the back of a whale, a vermilion tikka – packed snow covered in a thick, red powder skin, a dense opaque membrane…it melts, a pool of dye, a transient puja, celebrated then gone…his work carries all the power and might of Mohenjo Daro…it is infinite, a womb with the bouyancy of water, a mysterious blend of clean, coherent modernism combined with the deep, ancient proportions of Hindu iconography…Now, look at the Bean in Chicago…heavy – the surface curves like the slow movement of an anaconda – full and voluptuous but rigorous and devoted to the energy of solid weighted matter. Here is no rising Mozartian filigree, no emotion, sweet temperament or Baroque frenzy – instead – the skin is not about to burst but glides, dense, compacted, a powerful dose of the universe compacted then reflected with the contained energy of a meteor. Mined from a deep vein of potent, universal prajna/energy…they are both pieces, seeds incarnate, energy unsprouted, totally not inert but hovering constructs of deep, contained vitality.
Stephanie Bell Behnke
We wander around in that ‘sluggish mishmash’ says Peter Schjeldahl, a so-called ‘mishmash’ which has prevailed and characterized contemporary art for over a decade now, where everything is possible and nothing is qualifiable. Art is wide open…coming now from the four corners of the globe, in fact there are no more four corners of the globe…mutating, materializing – the hierarchy of the patrimony of the Renaissance is not the gold standard – M. Kimmelman’s fretting over the so-called ‘value’ of ‘Il Ducio’’s madonna/child…this value has changed…hard pressed to find typical, traditional significance…art that emerges now is not hidebound by the indigenous, the specific…Yet in spite of the fluctuating parameters there really is a playing field and scale for determining quality….Are we finally tired of perusing the dusty corners, the nihilistic slackers, the sordid deadenders…give me some shit…but not the squalid kind like Gunter Brus, more like the earthy, full of life kind, like…the Chris Ofili kind…you know where I’m going here, the Vitality…
Well, it really does matter what you hang your hat on and even if your hat is not a pipe, ‘c’eci n’est pas un pipe’…all art conundrums aside there is either a heartbeat or a lack of one and that is the heart of the matter…talking about our old friend ‘vitality’, the fact that there either is a heart beating or not…witness Anish Kapoor ‘s 2005 folly (as in architectural structure) for World of Interior’s magazine ‘projects’ in the snow. It doesn’t just evoke, it IS, it relays a Tantric fervor…his newest piece is a teardrop, the back of a whale, a vermilion tikka – packed snow covered in a thick, red powder skin, a dense opaque membrane…it melts, a pool of dye, a transient puja, celebrated then gone…his work carries all the power and might of Mohenjo Daro…it is infinite, a womb with the bouyancy of water, a mysterious blend of clean, coherent modernism combined with the deep, ancient proportions of Hindu iconography…Now, look at the Bean in Chicago…heavy – the surface curves like the slow movement of an anaconda – full and voluptuous but rigorous and devoted to the energy of solid weighted matter. Here is no rising Mozartian filigree, no emotion, sweet temperament or Baroque frenzy – instead – the skin is not about to burst but glides, dense, compacted, a powerful dose of the universe compacted then reflected with the contained energy of a meteor. Mined from a deep vein of potent, universal prajna/energy…they are both pieces, seeds incarnate, energy unsprouted, totally not inert but hovering constructs of deep, contained vitality.
Stephanie Bell Behnke
Hard Wired/Hot Wired
Anish Kapoor’s Raw Voltage
Works on Paper 2007/Gladstone Gallery/NYC
Anish Kapoor’s ‘Works on Paper’ exhibition now at NYC’s Gladstone Gallery is a display of several similar and incandescent, deeply colored images…not your crayola box of primary colors, these are primal, sacred color…red, electric blue, black, purple, paste white…dense and reminiscent of Holi celebrations or Hindu puja. This is saturated color seen behind the closed eye, posited in the mind’s interior. The pieces are done in gouche which provides for a rich, powdery and sensuous depth of surface. Small but nevertheless potent the paintings create a tangible vortex and the way into a charged construct that knows no boundary. Each painting is a meditation of connection and nexus whether it be a sprouting, tuberous, vegetal form, luminescent egg, slippery knot of blood, or wired neuron.
Electric, charged…the paintings are hard wired, hot wired…ancient, cosmic force fields…rooted in earth or spinning in space…crackling raw voltage or heavy earth bound sprouting forms…
Anish Kapoor’s work is a feed on energy…potent, primal vitality at the heart of the world or the source of the universe…the nerve like tendrils reach and turn, grasp and flex, vibrate and rattle our retina. They mesmerize and expand vision by providing a sink hole for unrestrained consciousness…
FYI, the following is a previous article on Anish Kapoor…
Witness Anish Kapoor ‘s 2005 folly (as in architectural structure) for World of Interior’s magazine ‘projects’ in the snow. It doesn’t just evoke, it IS, it relays a Tantric fervor…his newest piece is a teardrop, the back of a whale, a vermilion tikka – packed snow covered in a thick, red powder skin, a dense opaque membrane…it melts, a pool of dye, a transient puja, celebrated then gone…his work carries all the power and might of Mohenjo Daro…it is infinite, a womb with the bouyancy of water, a mysterious blend of clean, coherent modernism combined with the deep, ancient proportions of Hindu iconography…Now, look at the Bean in Chicago…heavy – the surface curves like the slow movement of an anaconda – full and voluptuous but rigorous and devoted to the energy of solid weighted matter. Here is no rising Mozartian filigree, no emotion, sweet temperament or Baroque frenzy – instead – the skin is not about to burst but glides, dense, compacted, a powerful dose of the universe compacted then reflected with the contained energy of a meteor. Mined from a deep vein of potent, universal prajna/energy…they are both pieces, seeds incarnate, energy unsprouted, totally not inert but hovering constructs of deep, contained vitality.
Stephanie Bell Behnke
Anish Kapoor’s Raw Voltage
Works on Paper 2007/Gladstone Gallery/NYC
Anish Kapoor’s ‘Works on Paper’ exhibition now at NYC’s Gladstone Gallery is a display of several similar and incandescent, deeply colored images…not your crayola box of primary colors, these are primal, sacred color…red, electric blue, black, purple, paste white…dense and reminiscent of Holi celebrations or Hindu puja. This is saturated color seen behind the closed eye, posited in the mind’s interior. The pieces are done in gouche which provides for a rich, powdery and sensuous depth of surface. Small but nevertheless potent the paintings create a tangible vortex and the way into a charged construct that knows no boundary. Each painting is a meditation of connection and nexus whether it be a sprouting, tuberous, vegetal form, luminescent egg, slippery knot of blood, or wired neuron.
Electric, charged…the paintings are hard wired, hot wired…ancient, cosmic force fields…rooted in earth or spinning in space…crackling raw voltage or heavy earth bound sprouting forms…
Anish Kapoor’s work is a feed on energy…potent, primal vitality at the heart of the world or the source of the universe…the nerve like tendrils reach and turn, grasp and flex, vibrate and rattle our retina. They mesmerize and expand vision by providing a sink hole for unrestrained consciousness…
FYI, the following is a previous article on Anish Kapoor…
Witness Anish Kapoor ‘s 2005 folly (as in architectural structure) for World of Interior’s magazine ‘projects’ in the snow. It doesn’t just evoke, it IS, it relays a Tantric fervor…his newest piece is a teardrop, the back of a whale, a vermilion tikka – packed snow covered in a thick, red powder skin, a dense opaque membrane…it melts, a pool of dye, a transient puja, celebrated then gone…his work carries all the power and might of Mohenjo Daro…it is infinite, a womb with the bouyancy of water, a mysterious blend of clean, coherent modernism combined with the deep, ancient proportions of Hindu iconography…Now, look at the Bean in Chicago…heavy – the surface curves like the slow movement of an anaconda – full and voluptuous but rigorous and devoted to the energy of solid weighted matter. Here is no rising Mozartian filigree, no emotion, sweet temperament or Baroque frenzy – instead – the skin is not about to burst but glides, dense, compacted, a powerful dose of the universe compacted then reflected with the contained energy of a meteor. Mined from a deep vein of potent, universal prajna/energy…they are both pieces, seeds incarnate, energy unsprouted, totally not inert but hovering constructs of deep, contained vitality.
Stephanie Bell Behnke
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