Press

Rainer Gross‘ ‘Contact Logo’ paintings are a collection of pictures that utilise corprate brands – which we as consumers    in    a    capitalistic    and globalized world immediately recognize even in their smallest fragments – as part of his ongoing series of contact paintings. The use of logos by painters is not new – since    the    1940s corporate    brands    have played a large part in contemporary art – but what Gross does is new, his painting technique reduces a clean corporate identity to an image of decay, crumbling, peeling, weather worn, a criticism of
capitalism and corporate identity.

...Almost a week later, David and I made it to Chelsea, where our first stop was Margaret Thatcher Projects to see the Nan Swid exhibition In Formation (September 19- October 19). Truthfully I was very excited to take David to Thatcher Projects because I love, love, love this show. Swid has assembled various handmade or appropriated books and objects that are richly coated in encaustic, good enough to eat. It also speaks to so many things I find missing in today's art, including the Nan Swid surface detail as well as each section having its own contrasting identity.

I was pretty down on a lot of the art I saw at HFAF this year. But I did see art I liked. The thing is that good art takes time. It requires contemplation. And an art fair is an environment antithetical to that. The bad art tends to be unsubtle. It screams at you from the walls. It's like a spotlight shining on your face. It makes it hard to see anything else.

Combining fashion, art with her 125 glasses-of-champagne skirt. It turn out that Heidi Spector's sense of style is part other DNA: she is an artist. As we chatted, she told me she is showing her art in New York. Her work reminded me of Frank Stella and Herald Schmitz-Schmeizer with their colorful stripes.

Wow, what treat it was to be able to attend this past Thursday’s opening reception for Colombian-born, NYC-based artist Omar Chacon, who has returned to Margaret Thatcher Projects for his second solo show at the gallery in two years!

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FOWLER HAS A FETISH for lines. He is less enthusiastic about paper. The New York-based artist draws spiraling abstractions-think of more orderly Cy Twomby curlicues-in graphite and charcoal, ten meticulously excises the white space around the marks.

What follows is a list of fall gallery shows worldwide that we feel should not be missed. Making it onto the list was not easy; our selection was culled from hundreds of upcoming exhibitions. But we add the caveat that we could only choose from those that had been scheduled by our midsummer press deadline. That said, we’re sure these will delight you and keep you up-to-date.

Bill Thompson at Margaret Thatcher Projects, October 25–December 22

We like to think that we just made up the term Photoreal Pointillism (although a tad redundant), but we love these acrylic pieces by William Betts. Instead of creating work with 19th century subject matter, Betts paints security camera footage instead. The artist has work on display at Kunstmuseum Stuttgart through October 7, 2012.

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In this post I'm looking at construction, physical and compositional. Carlos Estrada-Vega and Gregory Johnston build their paintings from multiple elements. Harriet Korman constructs hers from geometric compositional elements, while Max Gimblett creates a flat painting on a sculptural form.

Carlos Estrada-Vega, whose work opens this post, builds his paintings block by painted block. There's a small magnet at the back of each block, and Estrada-Vega creates grids by the placement of the blocks. It's not an interactive painting--he places them as he wants them--but the manner of construction is sculptural (also a bit like quiltmaking.)

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The matter-of-fact blank stare of the modernist grid peers back out at the viewer, blocking his or her view into image space with an undeniably flat plane, reiterating the two dimensionality of the painting surface. A consistently reoccurring item in painterly discourse, it asks us to investigate beyond merely what one sees and to reach back into our own semblance of painting history.