Art thoughts

John Nixon

1949-2020

‘John Nixon is Australia’s most influential conceptual artist, exhibiting nationally and internationally since the mid-1970s. Nixon attended the National Gallery of Victoria Art School in Melbourne (1969-1970), establishing a reputation for his minimalist abstract paintings from the early 1970s.’ Ocula website

Untitled (Red and White Cross), 2014, Enamel and wood on canvas, 25 × 25 cm (Image Artsy)

As an art student I chose John Nixon to interview for Art Theory. I’ll always remember the length of time he spoke to me at little notice about all things including how his work related to both Russian Constructivism and Australian culture. At the time he was sitting his solo exhibition (artist run space) in Hardware Lane, Melbourne, 1980s.

Steven Harvey

Under Beckett's Bridge

30 July - 22 August 2020
Liverpool Street Gallery
Sydney
https://www.liverpoolstgallery.com.au/

Dusk Painting no. 2, 2020, acrylic on compressed cement 180 x 144.5 cm (diptych)

Installation image

Shadow and Light Forms - Unrendered Room no.1, 2020, acrylic on compressed cement, 29 x 39 cm.

Images Liverpool Street Gallery

Elisabeth Bodey

Spectral : songs for a new age
To June 13
Five Walls

http://fivewalls.com.au/

Elisabeth Bodey, MKH, 2020, acrylic on linen on board, 70 x 60 cm.

'My paintings continue what has been my focus for the last ten years: representations of the convergence of different aspects shared between music and painting: synchronous relations such as harmony and dissonance, markings of time and space, sound and silence, chromatic values etc. Though obviously very different physical forms, they communicate via form, structure, materiality and conceptual aspects.

My process is one of interweaving, exploring or wandering between these different levels in space. There is for me an endlessness, an openness to this investigative process through both aesthetic and conceptual means but as the one who is in the more material realm, it is an on ongoing process of re-presencing what is heard and what is felt.' Elisabeth Bodey.

Elisabeth Bodey, Devotion, 2020, acrylic on linen on board, 70 x 60 cm.

Elisabeth Bodey, Vespers, 2020, acrylic on linen on board, 70 x 60 cm.

Elisabeth Bodey, installation image (Vespers 1 and 2).

Elisabeth Bodey, opening night.

Also on show:

Ariana Luca
A Glimpse of a Process

‘A Glimpse of a Process’ is a series of works on paper that explore the process of constructing an abstract composition. Through these works I explore how a drawing can reflect and capture an artist’s movements, gestures, decisions and ideas within the surface of the paper ... As they progress, the drawings record each moment in the history of their own making. Each work captures my continually evolving practice of creating endless iterations of abstract shapes and patterns.' Ariana Luca.

Ariana Luca, Unfold, Stretch and Rearrange, Watecolour, gouache and graphite on paper.

Sebastian Ingram
I Have Never Seen a Blackhole

‘I Have Never Seen A Black Hole’ explores the idea that thousands of images being used to try and reconstruct a ‘whole’, in a singular moment, seems to diffuse the referent object rather than suspend it in time and space. Through the diffusion of a myriad of representations, the work aims to question our relationship between the sensory experience of representations and their referent objects' Sebastian Ingram.

Sebastian Ingram, Untitled (diffuse 001), 2020,
materials including fabricated Steel, acrylic and laser print, dimensions variable.

In the stockroom:

Andrew Leslie, Loop, acrylic on aluminium, 120 x 120 cm.

Chris Packer, Parthenope, manipulated fabric, 70 x 50 cm (approx).

Individual artist's text; Five Walls website.

Helen Booth

Painter based in Wales

Helen Booth portrait, photo Chip Skingley

Booth working recently in plein air, photo Leia Morrison.

Recent residency: 2020 Hafnarborg Residency Iceland

artist’s studio

‘My recent paintings concentrate on the limitless variations of the single dot and how the individual marks when placed side by side create a dialogue....The internal alchemy, the human condition, of being and not being, of life and death are what I am striving to capture within my work. Agnes Martin stated succinctly in her Beauty is a Mystery of Life lecture in 1989 that “it is commonly thought that everything that is, can be put into words. But there is a wide range of emotional response that we make that cannot be put into words. We are so used to making these emotional responses that we are not consciously aware of them till they are represented in art work’. Excerpts artist website

Erased, oil and wax on wood panel, 16 x 16 cm.

Mustard and Custard are both f*cking yellow, 2017, oil on canvas, 150 x 150 cm
exhibited in the group show ‘Roger Cecil + 4 contemporary painters at Oriel Myrddin Gallery

Group exhibition photo, ‘Roger Cecil + 4 contemporary painters at Oriel Myrddin Gallery

White Grid Painting, 2019, oil and gesso on canvas, 92 x 122 cm.

'Helen Booth studied Fine Art Painting at Wimbledon School of Art and graduated in 1989. She has exhibited extensively throughout the UK and Europe. In April 2019, she was awarded two prestigious New York awards – A Pollock Krasner award for painting and an Adolf and Esther Gottlieb Prize for Abstract Painting. Booth won the Glynn Vivian Prize for Welsh Painting at BEEP International Painting Prize 2018.’ Elysium Gallery website

Images courtesy of Helen Booth (mostly)

Germano Celant

Italian art critic 1940-2020

Veneto Uno, Milan.

‘Celant is most closely affiliated with arte povera, a term he coined in 1967 for the association of avant-garde artists who made meaning from mundane materials and challenged art’s symbolic function, formal conventions, and commodity status in postwar Italian culture.’ Excerpt artnet

Prada Foundation, Milan.

‘In 1997, he curated the Venice Biennale, and also held roles as a curator at the Guggenheim, a contributing editor of Artforum and Interview magazines, and was the artistic director of the Prada Foundation in Milan at the time of his death.’ Excerpt artnet

Yves Klein, La Vague, 1957 at the Prada Foundation.

It was an 'art' changing event for me to go to Rome in 2013 and see Modern Italian art and later in 2015 to see the Prada Foundation with Adriano Pascquali. Italian Modern and Contemporary art is amongst the best in the world.

Gregory Coates

Gregory Coates with his works, Afro Series 1 and 2, 2018, feathers acrylic on luan, 4 feet diameter.

‘I pride myself on not being “labeled,” especially as an artist of color. On the one hand if you keep traveling across several art historical movements you never feel you fit anywhere, on the flip side I am proud of that too. I am not done exploring and asking questions of what’s there and what may be.’ Excerpt: ‘Gregory Coates, Claiming Feathers’ interview with Etty Yamiv, Art Spiel, 2018.

Big Cover ups, 2017 (Studio shot), ink on card board, 12 × 12'.

Monument to Civil Rights, 2017, installation, cardboard, door, various markings.

‘Coates exploratory studio practice and compositional experiments with found objects have established him as a prolific artist with a compelling and extensive catalog. He studied at Corcoran School of Art in Washington, D.C. and has been exhibited at museums and galleries around the world including, the Smithsonian Institute of American Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, The Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts, Galerie Denkraum in Vienna, Austria, and Kamigamo Shrine in Kyoto, Japan among others.’ Excerpt ‘Abstract Truths: A studio visit with contemporary artist Gregory Coates’ Sugarcane Magazine 2018

Made in Harlem at my AIR at the studio museum, 1996-97,
tape, pigment, rubber, paper on shipping skids, 96 x 96 x 4”.

Photos courtesy of the artist.

Gregory Coates at N’Namdi Contemporary Miami

http://nnamdicontemporary.com/portfolio/gregory-coates/

Blank Boards

Art Thoughts has been missing shows in the real.

Spotted today on a walk a wall of billboards blanked out.

Made me think of the paintings of Steven Parrino and Robert Rauschenberg when he erased a de Kooning drawing.

Information about the de Kooning drawing can be found at the SFMOMA website: https://www.sfmoma.org/artwork/98.298/

Billboards Melbourne

PiscinaComunale

Milan

'In 2013 I thought we don't use cotton tissues anymore but we all have them in the drawer and so I asked artist friends to send me a work on a tissue, it was a very beautiful exhibition and installed in an equally beautiful way by Marco Church' auto translated. Adriano Pasquali

Selected images:

Art Thoughts goes retro ... with Adriano and Marinella

Louise P. Sloane

New Horizons
To March 28
Spanierman Modern
NYC NY

Gallery website: http://www.spaniermanmodern.com/

“The visual language of my paintings embraces the legacies of reductive and minimalist ideologies, while celebrating the beauty of color, and the human connection to mark making ...'' Louise P. Sloane, excerpt Spanierman Modern website.

Selected work: