Oranges and Sardines Walkthrough

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Babble Notes

Oranges and Sardines at the Hammer Museum

0:01:38

This exhibition approaches art through the eyes and minds of artists. As a curator I have found that artists look at art with a focus and scrutiny, a criticality and level of engagement that few of us are able to summon with the same intensity. Working with the six artists who have made this exhibition with me, I have been struck more than ever by the particularity of artists’ visions.

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Abstract Art

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Abstract art uses a visual language of form, color and line to create a composition which may exist with a degree of independence from visual references in the world. Western art had been, from the Renaissance up to the middle of the 19th century, underpinned by the logic of perspective and an attempt to reproduce an illusion of visible reality. The arts of cultures other than the European had become accessible and showed alternative ways of describing visual experience to the artist.

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Why I Am Not a Painter

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I am not a painter, I am a poet. Why? I think I would rather be a painter, but I am not. Well,

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Mary Heilmann

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Mary Heilmann is often included in exhibitions with artists under 40, though she is over 50 herself. She was an early admirer of Andy Warhol, and is sometimes referred to as a pioneer of postmodernism in art, but her work has no postmodern abrasiveness. One critic called it “delightfully vulgar and gaily carnal,” and another complimented the way she “can make a quickly flicked drip, a loosely brushed smudge or a solitary dollop of color seem like a big event.

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Peter Voulkos

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Peter Voulkos (January 29, 1924 – 2002) popular name of Panagiotis Voulkos, was an American artist of Greek descent. He is known for his Abstract Expressionist ceramic sculptures, which crossed the traditional divide between ceramic crafts and fine art.

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Jim Melchert

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James Melchert has been at the center of the Bay Area’s artistic growth and served as Visual Arts head at the NEA and Director of the American Academy at Rome. His work has been exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Oakland Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and the University Art Museum at UC Berkeley. Melchert has worked in a variety of media, including drawing, film, and ceramics.

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William T. Wiley

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Wiley’s art flows from a fertile foundation of imagination which is governed by abstract intuitions and concrete rules of order. Within the broad spectrum of his paintings, drawings, prints, and sculptural assemblages, meanings and insistently privatized symbols pile rhythmically one over the other. Within this tangle of contexts, individual parts cannot be readily separated from the whole. Wiley’s discourse, fabricated as a series of real-world notes on an abstract field, relies on establishing a symmetry between public and private, abstract and representational.

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Bruce Nauman

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Born in 1941 in Fort Wayne, Indiana, Bruce Nauman has been recognized since the early 1970s as one of the most innovative and provocative of America’s contemporary artists. Nauman finds inspiration in the activities, speech, and materials of everyday life.

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David Hockney

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David Hockney, CH, RA, (born 9 July 1937) is an English painter, draughtsman, printmaker, stage designer and photographer, based in Yorkshire, United Kingdom, although he also maintains a base in London. An important contributor to the Pop art movement of the 1960s, he is considered one of the most influential British artists of the twentieth century. His older sister who lives in Yorkshire, Margaret Hockney, is also an artist of still-life photos.

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Francis Bacon

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Francis Bacon (28 October 1909 – 28 April 1992) was an Irish-born British figurative painter. His artwork is known for its bold, austere, homoerotic and often violent or nightmarish imagery, which typically shows room-bound masculine figures isolated in glass or steel geometrical cages set against flat, nondescript backgrounds

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Amy Sillman

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“Painting is a physical thinking process to continue an interior dialogue,” Amy Sillman states, “a way to engage in a kind of internal discourse, or sub-linguistic mumbling…”. Amy Sillman’s canvases offer glimpses into a subliminal world. Strangely intimate, her abstractions negotiate a space of both ideas and feelings, inflected with an emotional empathy.

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The Hairy Who

0:08:21

The Chicago Imagists is the name of a group of representational artists associated with the School of the Art Institute of Chicago who exhibited at the Hyde Park Art Center in the late 1960s. Their work was known for grotesquerie, surrealism and complete uninvolvement with New York art world trends. Critic Ken Johnson referred to Chicago Imagism as "the postwar tradition of fantasy-based art making."[1] One remarkable thing about them was the high proportion of female artists among them.

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Willem de Kooning

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Willem de Kooning was born in 1904 in Rotterdam, Holland. From 1916 till 1925 he studied at the Rotterdam Academy of Arts. Little works from these years have survived. The earliest reproductions include three still lifes: two oil paintings attributed to 1917, and a drawing from 1921. Both are perfectly executed academic pieces with pots, cups and bowls, showing De Kooning's capacities for realistic works. Then there's a Male portrait drawing and a Jugendstil like drawing entitled The Kiss.

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Philip Guston

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Philip Guston was in a tangle his whole life between the two motions had by every person, and so grandly comprehended by Eli Siegel: the constant desire to respect the world—the intense, imaginative, relation of oneself and the world which is the source of all art—and that motion away from the world, a contempt for things in order to give oneself "a false glory" a superiority to, and a scorn for the very things that give us life. Contempt, "the addition to self through the lessening of something else," is the enemy of art, and against life itsel

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Alice Neel

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Alice Neel was one of the great American painters of the twentieth century. She was also a pioneer among women artists. A painter of people, landscape and still life, Neel was never fashionable or in step with avant-garde movements. Sympathetic to the expressionist spirit of northern Europe and Scandinavia and to the darker arts of Spanish painting, she painted in a style and with an approach distinctively her own.

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Christopher Wool

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Christopher Wool was born in Chicago, in 1955. Wool now lives and works in New York. Wool is best known for his paintings of large, black, stenciled letters on white canvases. However, Wool possesses a wide range of style – using a combined array of painterly techniques, including spray paint, silkscreen, and hand painting. Wool provides tension between painting and erasing, gesture and removal, depth and flatness.

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Dieter Roth

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Dieter Roth (April 21, 1930 - June 5, 1998) was a Swiss-German artist best known for his artist's books and for his sculptures and pictures made with rotting food stuffs. He was also known as Dieter Rot and Diter Rot.

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Albert Oehlen

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In an optical contention between surface and depth, Albert Oehlen exposes the limitations of both abstraction and representation to denounce and eulogise artistic tradition. In a literal depiction of a graveyard, Albert Oehlen presents painting as a hallowed myth, resonant beyond its expiration.

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Charline von Heyl

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Charline con Heyl's paintings reveal a unique language developed in the face of information streams and image overload.

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Paul Thek

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Paul Thek occupied a place between high art and low art, between the epic and the everyday. During his brief life (1933-1988), he went against the grain of art world trends, humanizing the institutional spaces of art with the force of his humor, spirituality, and character. Twenty years after Thek's death from AIDS, we can now recognize his influence on contemporary artists ranging from Vito Acconci and Bruce Nauman to Matthew Barney, Mike Kelley, and Paul McCarthy, as well as Kai Althoff, Jonathan Meese, and Thomas Hirschhorn.

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Malcolm Morley

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Malcolm Morley was born in London in 1931. His childhood memories of the Blitz would continue to shape his repertoire of motifs: the bombed city, the Royal Navy, a model airplane he played with. After an adolescence spent in the bleak post-war years, during which Morley even had a brief stint in prison for theft, he attended the Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts in 1952-53 and the Royal College of Art from 1954 until 1957. Drawn to Abstract Expressionism, Morley finally left London for New York in 1958.

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School of Athens

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The School of Athens ( 5.77 m * 8.14 m ) was painted by the 27 year old Raphael (Raffaelo) Sanzio (or Santi) for Pope Julius II (1503-1513). In 1508 the young native of Urbino had been recommended to Julius II by Donato Bramante, the pope's architect, and also a native of Urbino. So enthusiastic was the pope when he saw the fresco that Raphael received the commission to paint the entire papal suite. The Stanza della Segnatura was to be Julius' library, Bibiotheca Iulia, which would house a small collection of books intended for his personal use.

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Jorg Immendorff

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In later paintings Jorg Immendorff turns his concerns to the politics of the art world, drawing reference from and adding to a critical lexicon of art history. In Door to the Sun, his theatre is seen from backstage. The haloed silhouette of his mentor Beuys, dominating the arena, is rendered as a Wizard of Oz construction: not a man, but a museum, being slowly uncrated into the form of Jorg Immendorff. His ice forms, which previously symbolised the freezing decay of a nation, now embody the tools of painting.

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Wade Guyton

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Wade Guyton is the perfect artist for these nightmarish times. He makes black monochromes using a large format Epson printer; the “paintings” are printed on pre-primed linen. In order to fit the linen into the printer, which is forty-four inches wide, the linen is folded, resulting in a thin, irregular, white space (or “line”) dividing the “painting” into two, slightly different halves. The repeated overprinting causes slight ocular shifts. All ten paintings in this exhibition are the same size, untitled, and nine of them are black.

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Felix Gonzalez-Torres

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Felix Gonzalez-Torres combined the impulses of Conceptual art, Minimalism, political activism, and chance to produce a number of "democratic artworks"--- including public billboards, give-away piles of candies, and stacks of paper available to the viewer as souvenirs. These works, often sensuous and directly audience-centered, complicate the questions of public and private space, authorship, originality and the role of institutionalized meaning.

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Isa Genzken

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Isa Genzken (born 1948, Bad Oldesloe, Schleswig-Holstein) is an artist based in Berlin. Genzken studied at the Hamburg College of Fine Arts from 1969-1971, the Berlin University of Fine Arts from 1971-1973 and Dusseldorf Art Academy from 1973-1977. She won the International Art Prize (Cultural Donation of SSK Munich) in 2004 and the Wolfgang-Hahn-Prize (Museum Ludwig, Cologne) in 2002. She has exhibited at many important galleries and museums including Palais des Beaux Arts in Brussels, Museum Haus Lange,Krefeld, P.S. in New York and Hauser & Wirth in London.

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Mark Grotjahn

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Mark Grotjahn's Untitled evokes a sense of the metaphysical. Set atop an effused abstracted ground, his forms stretch and recede in the convoluted logic of linear perspective. Executed in coloured pencil, the optical illusion of adjoining rainbow-toned lines becomes compounded as a feat of concentration. Each band painstakingly filled by the artist's hand, Grotjahn's geometric form is delineated by the embossed traces of his endeavour, imprinting his personal gestures within an emblem of perfection.

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Yayoi Kusama

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Kusama produced her first huge paintings as a young, struggling artist in New York in the late fifties, who often skipped meals and sleep in her incessant drive to cover the vast canvases with uneven tracts of small, thickly painted loops. The inherent philosophical paradox of these works -- that "infinity" could be quantified within the arbitrary framework of a readymade canvas — combined with the more subjective and obsessional implications of their process, distinguished them from the Minimalist abstraction that would dominate the local scene several years later.

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Piet Mondrian

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Escaping to New York after the start of World War II, Mondrian delighted in the city's architecture, and, an adept dancer, was fascinated by American jazz, particularly boogie–woogie.

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Sync

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Channels: Amy Sillman Charline von Heyl Christopher Wool Contemporary Art Mark Grotjahn Mary Heilmann Painting Wade Guyton

The title for the exhibition was borrowed from American poet Frank O’Hara’s poem Why I Am Not a Painter, which reflects on the elusiveness of the creative process, often resulting in a finished work that bears no resemblance to its initial inspiration. Oranges and Sardines: Conversations on Abstract Painting hoped to offer manifold examples of abstraction's inventive potential and will suggest varied reasons why it remains vital and essential to contemporary art. Similarly, the works of the six artists who developed the exhibition may be viewed with more complex appreciation and more insightful understanding. Curator Gary Garrels gives a walkthrough.

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Oranges and Sardines Walkthrough

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