Artist Archives | Art Dallas Contemporary Art Fair

June 26, 2020 In Art By Hannah Smith for Art Dallas

Richard Caldicott, Sous Les Etoiles Gallery

With a profound sense of method and extreme rigor bases on the direct drive and the precision of gesture, Richard Caldicott approaches the medium of photography as an endless enigma. “Iterations” is a series about overlaying, scaling, repeating, and multiplying. Through the process of duplication, replication and the subtle adjustments of color, his images follow a discernible linear compositional logic. Forms, surfaces and colors are developed according to his experience and vision that invite us to dive into his universe at any moment. Other existing works – from his archive – have been manipulated in a post-photography, post-production experimental way of working. Incidental marks and processes overlap. The artist explores issues of layering, or over-writing, as in a palimpsest, but his starting point is always the hand made method. The sense of recycling echoes Jasper John’s work and his famous sketchbook quote: “Take an object. Do something to it. Do something else to it.” Introducing a new chromatic range, simple in form, yet meticulously focuses and detailed, each work provides a sense of continuity that develops a richness in complexity of space, surface and texture. Reflections and counterpoint structures also create delicate impressions. In “Iterations”, Richard Caldicott reveals once again his jubilant pleasure of exploration and enchanted lyricism of combinations. Since the artist’s acclaimed series featuring Tupperware in the 1990s, Richard Caldicott has continually challenged photographic codes of representation in favor of new aesthetic and symbolic intentions. Employing traditional analog photography methods, Caldicott imbues his minimalist set of components with rich, vibrant color. Richard Caldicott’s work has been acquired in several significant public and private collections, including The David Kronn Collection; Peter C. Ruppert Collection; Museum im Kulturspeicher, Germany; Goss-Michael Foundation, Dallas, TX; Goldman Sachs International, London; Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany; Sir Elton John Collection / Ann and Jürgen Wilde, Köln; and Fidelity Worldwide Investment, London, among others. His work has been exhibited extensively in solo and group shows, as well as several art fairs, including Art Basel, Photo Miami, Paris Photo, FIAC, The AIPAD Photography Show, and the Venice Biennale. Richard Caldicott (b. 1962) graduated from The Royal College of Art in 1987 and currently lives in London.

http://www.souslesetoilesgallery.net/exhibitions/richard-caldicott2

May 29, 2020 In Art By Hannah Smith for Art Dallas

Sam Gilliam, Aaron Galleries

Sam Gilliam was born in 1933 in Tupelo, Mississippi, and is one of the great innovators in postwar American painting. He emerged from the Washington, D.C. scene in the mid-1960s with works that elaborated upon and disrupted the ethos of Color School painting. A series of formal breakthroughs would soon result in his canonical Drape paintings, which expanded upon the tenets of Abstract Expressionism in entirely new ways. Suspending stretcherless lengths of painted canvas from the walls or ceilings of exhibition spaces, Gilliam transformed his medium and the contexts in which it was viewed. For an African-American artist in the nation’s capital at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, this was not merely an aesthetic proposition; it was a way of defining art’s role in a society undergoing dramatic change. Gilliam has subsequently pursued a pioneering course in which experimentation has been the only constant. Inspired by the improvisatory ethos of jazz, his lyrical abstractions continue to take on an increasing variety of forms, moods, and materials.

Sam Gilliam currently has a long-term installation on view at Dia: Beacon, Beacon, New York, which opened in 2019. In addition to a traveling retrospective organized by the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. in 2005, Sam Gilliam has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland (2018); Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. (2011); J.B. Speed Memorial Museum, Louisville, Kentucky (1996); Whitney Museum of American Art, Philip Morris Branch, New York (1993); The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (1982); and the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1971), among many other institutions. His work is included in over fifty public collections, including those of the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Tate Modern, London; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and the Art Institute of Chicago. He lives and works in Washington, D.C.

https://aarongalleries.com/product-category/artists/sam-gilliam/

May 15, 2020 In Art By Hannah Smith for Art Dallas

Kristin Moore, The Public Trust

Kristin Moore, a native Texan, completed her MFA at Otis College of Art & Design in Los Angeles in 2016. Her work explores the landscapes of California, Texas, and the highways in between. Influenced by artists such as Ed Ruscha, Moore explores Americana, pop culture, and nostalgia through the lens of architecture and cityscapes. As a homage to Hollywood, Moore also finds inspiration in the world of film from visionaries such as Ridley Scott, Sophia Coppola, Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, and more.

She has been named one of Saatchi Art’s 20 Artists to Watch in 2020, and a top 10 finalist in the New Western Talent juried exhibition currently on view with Western Gallery in Dallas. Moore’s paintings can be found in collections across the U.S. and Europe. Her work has been exhibited at The Other Art Fair in Dallas, and in group exhibitions with Jonathan Ferrara Gallery in New Orleans, the Bolsky Gallery in Los Angeles, and the Yards Collective in New York, among others. She has had solo exhibitions in Los Angeles and Austin. Moore currently lives and works in Dallas, TX, and is a studio artist at The Cedars Union.

https://www.trustthepublic.com/

February 19, 2020 In Art By Hannah Smith for Art Dallas

Artist Deborah Butterfield, Greg Kucera Gallery

Along with her artist-husband John Buck, Deborah Butterfield divides her time between a farm in Montana, and studio space in Hawaii. She is known for her sculptures of horses made from found objects, like metal, and especially pieces of wood. Butterfield’s work has been exhibited widely and there is demand among art collectors for her sculptures. One of her most prestigious galleries is the Greg Kucera Gallery in Seattle, Washington.

Bronze hasn’t always been Butterfield’s choice of materials. In fact, her earliest works from the mid-1970s were made from sticks and natural detritus gathered on her property in Montana. She explains: “The materials and images were meant to suggest that the horses were both figures and ground, merging external world with the subject. I first used the horse images as a metaphorical substitute for myself–it was a way of doing a self-portrait one step removed from the specificity of Deborah Butterfield.” She began building full-size horses from metal salvaged from scrap yards in the early 1980s. She would sculpt a piece using metal, wood, and other materials fastened together with wire, then photograph the piece from all angles so as to be able to reassemble the piece in metal.

Still using her found object process today, it’s easy to see that the unevenly rusted surface of the found metal work suggests the coloring of types of horses—an appaloosa, chestnut or perhaps a dapple-gray. Butterfield is clearly not obsessed with replicating any aspect of the horse specifically, but in any one of the sculptures, the architectural structure, contour, and mass of the horse are readily apparent. Often, the weighty and crumpled metal pieces used for the shoulders and rump suggest powerful muscles. Carefully choosing from her scrap yard of parts and pieces, she suggests some of the most delicate and surprising aspects of the horse. A massive metal fire escape was twisted into a powerful stallion in a large work that is part of the collection of the Seattle Art Museum. In another work, the curve of an industrial part suggests the neck and mane of the horse in a most uncanny way.

The artist collects metal from wrecked cars, industrial salvage yards, demolished buildings and construction sites and combines them in her Montana studio to create these equine sculptures. Some of the works have utilized three-dimensional letters scavenged from commercial signage bringing an unexpected new element into play. Butterfield has also recently used painted metal from flat signage. Occasionally, recognizable elements such as a child’s tricycle can still be identified within the tangled assemblage of metal parts.

In constructing her horses Butterfield tries to alter the found shape of the metal pieces as little as possible. The separate parts are not often individually important but gain an elegant context in the artist’s ability to meld them into such a suggestive sculpture. She has said that her horses are intended to make a feminist statement. “I wanted to do these big, beautiful mares that were as strong and imposing as stallions but capable of creation and nourishing life. It was a very personal feminist statement.”

Butterfield also creates small sculptures, measuring roughly three feet tall by four feet in length, a size that the artist relates to ancient Chinese ceramic sculptures of the Tang Dynasty. They are not intended to be seen as colts or as baby horses, but as miniatures relating to artworks depicting horses. Butterfield has never been interested in the naturalistic depiction of horses in the common sense of realism in the art world. She prefers that her small works be viewed on pedestals to alleviate any confusion as to her intention regarding the abstract nature of her sculpture.

With works in museums and private collections across the country and around the world, Deborah Butterfield’s work is recognizable. See her most recent works to add to your collection at Art Dallas 2020 in the Greg Kucera Gallery Booth, April 16-19, 2020, at Dallas Market Hall in the Dallas Market Center.

https://gregkucera.com/butterfield_description.htm

February 18, 2020 In Art By Hannah Smith for Art Dallas

Artist Mary Abbott, McCormick Gallery

Mary Abbott always felt she was born to lead an artful life. Born in New York City in 1921, she was the great, great, great granddaughter of John Adams, the second president of the United States. Her family was not in politics, but rather her mother, Elizabeth Grinnell, was a poet and Hearst columnist, who clearly supported her artistic daughter’s ambitions.

Abbott was interested in art from and early age and studied with painters such as George Grosz at the Art Students League and Eugene Weiss from the Corcoran Museum School. In 1941, Abbott, who was a stunning woman, came out as a debutante at the Colony Club and became the belle of Manhattan. As a working model she appeared on the covers of Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, among others. She married and continued painting and studying throughout the War years.

In 1946, separated from her husband, Abbott set up a studio on Tenth Street in Manhattan. After meeting Willem de Kooning, whose studio was nearby, she became romantically involved with de Kooning and remained close with him until his death. At that time, she also enrolled in an experimental New York school and worked with founding artists Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, William Baziotes and David Hare. Through these associations Abbott moved into the heart of the New York avant-garde, becoming a member of the Artist’s Club, where she was one of only a few female members along with Perle Fine and Elaine de Kooning. Also in the early 1950’s, Abbott began to exhibit extensively with shows at celebrity galleries, including the Stable Gallery, Kootz, Tibor de Nagy, Tanager, and in three of the famous Stable Gallery Annuals.

Abbott and her second husband spent winters in Haiti and the U.S. Virgin Islands where the tropical environment influenced her many beautiful and inventive abstractions. Abbott was always serious about her painting career and declared her life’s work was “using the medium, paint, color and line [to define] the poetry of living space.” In 2016, Abbott was included in the game-changing exhibition, “Women of Abstract Expressionism” organized by the Denver Art Museum.

With her death at the age of 98 in August of 2019, she was one of the last survivors of the original AbEx generation. She left behind a legacy of bright, color infused work full of her characteristic sweeping and energetic brushwork. Today Mary Abbott’s work is represented by McCormick Gallery in Chicago.

https://www.thomasmccormick.com/artists/mary_abbott

Muriel Guepin Gallery - Isabelle-Menin_Rome-ou-la-tentation

February 17, 2020 In Art By Hannah Smith for Art Dallas

Artist Isabelle Menin, Muriel Guepin Gallery NYC

Belgian photographer Isabelle Menin creates portraits of flowers that are not only gorgeous in form and color, but also uniquely expressive. Fresh blossoms and withering blooms melt into each other in dreamy washes of color and hazy drips and swirls. Hues and flowers are reflected in pools of water, as forms disintegrate and reappear in trickles and indistinct glimmers of light. The resulting images are breathtaking interplays of light and shadow, form and reflections, and breathtaking colors and textures.

Looking at Menin’s vibrant and organic work, it isn’t surprising to learn that she has a background in painting. After exploring working with paint while developing a career as a graphic designer for over a decade, the artist turned to digital photography. Taking pictures, scanning pieces of nature, she constantly plays with textures and colors, transforming them, mixing them, in order to give shape to a fictional nature, dense and flamboyant at the same time. With rich colors, bold textures, and a stunning abstract quality, her creations look more like masterful illustrations and paintings than conventional photographs.

The complex outcome of every artwork is due to the digital manipulation that Menin loves using to transform and blend her images in order to create her beautifully moody works. As she explains: “Going digital allowed me to push back my limits, to find a much wider sphere of activity where things tied up fluidly and were reversible. I create a space that unfolds through the depth I get by accumulating layers, by light, by transparency and opacity; I put elements together that create a kind of fake landscape, I photograph and then manipulate them in order to twist them and show the sometimes hidden sides.”

Menin calls her work “inland photographs and disordered landscapes” in reference to the strange complexity of nature, which reminds her of human complexity. She says, “The uncontrolled forces, the shapes’ complexity, the inter-weavings and the synergy of the elements, they all look to me like a mirror of human spirit. We are not straight lines, we are like nature, a very large network of interferences that work together to produce something which sometimes looks accomplished and then gets destroyed in a perpetual coming and going between order and disorder.”

In the past five years, Isabelle Menin has had numerous exhibitions in Europe and internationally, both at art fairs and museums. Isabelle Menin lives and works in Brussels, Belgium, and is represented by the Muriel Guépin Gallery.

http://www.murielguepingallery.com/artists/isabelle-menin

February 13, 2020 In Art By Hannah Smith for Art Dallas

Artist Gene Davis, Vallarino Fine Art

Gene Davis was born in Washington, D.C. in 1920 and spent nearly all his life there. While he is most famous as an American abstract painter, painting lively compositions of thin, vibrantly colored vertical stripes, before he began to paint in 1949, he worked as a sportswriter, covering the Washington Redskins and other local teams. Working as a journalist in the late 1940s, he covered the Roosevelt and Truman presidential administrations, and was often President Truman’s partner for poker games.

Davis considered his nonacademic background a blessing that freed him from the limitations of a traditional art school orientation. His early paintings and drawings—though they show the influence of such artists as the Swiss painter Paul Klee and the American abstractionist Arshile Gorky—display a distinct improvisational quality. His preference for spontaneity and fascinated by color relationships, Davis delighted in alternating thin bright vertical stripes to create syncopated patterns reminiscent of jazz and bebop. Despite their calculated appearance, Davis’s stripe works were not based on conscious use of theories or formulas. Davis often compared himself to a jazz musician who plays by ear, describing his approach to painting as “playing by eye.”

In the 1960s, art critics identified Davis as a leader of the Washington Color School, a loosely connected group of Washington, D.C. painters who created abstract compositions in acrylic colors on unprimed canvas. Their work exemplified what the critic Barbara Rose defined as the “primacy of color” in abstract painting. And while he took up abstract painting in the 1940s as a hobby, and was featured in a few local shows, he was never successful enough to devote his full time to art until, after 35 years in journalism, he finally turned to it 1968.

“The idea of my ever making a livelihood out of painting was the farthest thing from my mind,” he said in a 1981 interview. But he hit on something—a parade of brightly-colored, edge-to-edge stripes—that not only made his name and changed his career, it put him at the forefront at the only major art movement to emanate from the nation’s capital, the Washington Color School.

In contrast, Davis experimented with complex schemes that lend themselves to sustained periods of viewing. Davis suggested that “instead of simply glancing at the work, select a specific color and take the time to see how it operates across the painting.” In discussing his stripe work, Davis spoke not simply about the importance of color, but about “color interval:” the rhythmic, almost musical, effects caused by the irregular appearance of colors or shades within a composition. Davis is known primarily for the stripe works that span twenty-seven years, but he was a versatile artist who worked in a variety of formats and media.

In keeping with his unorthodox attitudes, Davis’s works do not follow in an orderly sequence. Davis described his method as “a tendency to raid my past without guilt, going back and picking up on some idea that I flirted with briefly, say fifteen or twenty years ago. I will then take this idea and explore it more in depth, almost as if no time had elapsed between the present and the time of its original conception.” As a result, similar works may be separated by years or even decades. Davis’s works, which resonate with his romantic, free-wheeling approach to art-making, reveal a seriousness balanced by whimsy and an unpredictability that is always a source of joy.

In 1972 Davis created Franklin’s Footpath, which was at the time the world’s largest artwork, by painting colorful stripes on the street in front of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the world’s largest painting, Niagara (43,680 square feet), in a parking lot in Lewiston, NY. His “micro-paintings”, at the other extreme, were as small as 3/8 of an inch square.

A lifelong Washington, D.C. resident, Davis died in his hometown on April 6, 1985, and his work is included among the collections of important institutions, such as the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Guggenheim Museum in New York, and The Phillips Collection and Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. Today, his work is represented by Vallarino Fine Art in New York City.

http://www.vallarinofineart.com/modern#/gene-davis