Martha Diamond - New York Purple No. 1, 2000

Sam Gilliam - Rondo (1971)

Grapevine. Magdalena Suarez Frimkess, Michael Frimkess, John Mason, Ron Nagle, Peter Shire, Curated by Ricky Swallow, Photography by Fredrik Nilsen, Design by Sinisa Mackovic & Robert Milne, Rainoff, Amsterdam / David Kordansky Gallery, New York, NY, 2014 [Exhibition: David Kordansky Gallery, New York, NY, July 13 – August 17, 2013] [BOOKS@RET]

al things considered — when i post my masterpiece #1172

first posted in facebook march 29, 2023

jason fox -- "zues" (2018)

"terror has indeed become as real as life" ... barnett newman

"what a lamentable thing it is that men should blame the gods and regard us as the source of their troubles, when it is their own wickedness that brings them sufferings worse than any which destiny allots them" ... homer

"the deeply talented fox has modulated his formerly cartoonish style into varieties of semi-abstraction that are at once intense and devil-may-care. painted, mostly, in strident chinese red, brushed with browns as filmy as shadows, the pictures melt hints of faces, figures, or objects into minimally effortful gestural cadenzas. an effect of pressured but nonchalant subjectivity suggests snatches of normal conversation at a heavy-metal concert or stray thoughts in a burning building. fox’s is an uncannily companionable art, which can seem to have been waiting for you to show up. its mind-reading quality recalls the best early work of david salle, minus the archness" ... the new yorker

"intersections—whether between drawing and painting, or movies and modernism, or at a sketchy street corner in SoHo—fuel the wild imagination of jason fox, an exceedingly talented american painter whose new show, 'old wrld,' is on view at the david kordansky gallery through april 22" ... andrea k. scott

"if 'zues' and 'wrld' are any indication, i think jason fox just lost the spelling bee" ... al janik

Sam Gilliam - Starting I, 1972

acrylic on canvas (103 x 182 x 5 cm)

David Kordansky Gallery

Sam Gilliam (American, 1933 - 2022)

Annie - 2022

@ David Kordansky Gallery - LA, NY

David Altmejd, L’oeil, 2017.

Expanded polystyrene, epoxy dough, fiberglass, resin, epoxy gel, epoxy clay, synthetic hair, quartz, acrylic paint, glass eyes, steel, Sharpie, ballpoint pens, gold leaf, glass paint, artificial flower, and lighter, 37.25 x 30.5 x 26 in.

David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles

Betty Woodman: from the 2023 exhibition "Diptychs" in collaboration with the Woodman Family Foundation.

Betty Woodman (American, 1930–2018) was a pioneering artist whose groundbreaking approach to ceramics encompassed a wide range of global influences. Her symphonic understanding of the formal and cultural histories of the vessel gave her the space to experiment with techniques and compositional strategies borrowed from painting, sculpture, architecture, and other genres.

Beginning in the late 1980s, Woodman began to devote significant attention to the production of two-part ceramic sculptures in which paired vessels, with daringly constructed wings, served as supports for lush, detailed, and often figurative painting.

Betty Woodman: Diptychs is a focused survey of the artist’s explorations related to this type, which developed from her triptychs and her interest in the visual movement from one vessel to another. “I then became interested in thinking about these ideas with diptychs. The space in the middle became the center of the piece. The diptychs themselves also took on a new life,” she wrote. The exhibition charts the evolution of her ideas about the dynamics of positive and negative space in sculpture and painting, as well as her ever-shifting conceptualization of the ways in which vessel forms and the human figure are linked in the cultural imagination.

“Doyle Layne’s “weed pots,” circa 1960-78, glazed ceramic, at David Kordansky Gallery. “Lane didn’t invent the weed pot,” our critic says, “but as this exhibition proves, he perfected it.””

Credit...via David Kordansky Gallery; Photos by Jeff McLane

Derek Fordjour

Board Meeting (Brotherhood Smoke), 2021

acrylic, charcoal, cardboard, foil, glitter, and oil pastel on newspaper mounted on canvas

74 3/4 x 115 inches

David Kordansky Gallery

Sam Gilliam (November 30, 1933 – June 25, 2022)

Sam Gilliam, 10/27/69, 1969, acrylic on canvas, installation dimensions variable, approximate installation dimensions: 140 x 185 x 16 inches, (355.6 x 469.9 x 40.6 cm), Collection of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, Courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles, photography by Fredrik Nilsen Studio.

Artist research, Tom of Finland

Touko Valio Laaksonen, known by the pseudonym Tom of Finland, was a Finnish artist who made stylized highly masculinized homoerotic art, and influenced late 20th-century gay culture. He has been called the "most influential creator of gay pornographic images"

I like how unapologetic toms art is he is making gay art for himself and other likeminded and has no apology for anyone who objects.

A quote from the David kordansky gallery, “Tom gave form to an imaginative universe that in turn helped fuel real-world liberation movements and enabled gay men to access their strength in new ways.”

Little Mobile for Tuttle Pyramid

Actually, the Calder came first, so this is a Little Tuttle Q*Bert Plinth for Little Mobile for Table's Edge, from an Alexander Calder/Richard Tuttle show that just closed at Pace Gallery in LA (and David Kordansky, also in LA, but this was at Pace).

Altmejd, D. (2022). The Man and the Whale. [Sculpture]. White Cube Gallery. David Altmejd. "What makes sculpture different from every other art form is the fact that it exists in the same space as the viewer. It has the same presence in the world. In my mind, it sort of potentially functions like the body, like the body of a person. It's a finite object, but it contains infinity."

(Altmejd, D., 2020, 0:00)

David Altmejd is a Canadian sculptor who creates mixed media works, often using repeating elements such as eyes, noses, fingers and mixing natural and synthetic materials that result in the bending of reality and morphing together life and death, decay and rebirth. Altmejd, born in 1974 in Montreal, Quebec, earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Université du Québec à Montréal and later his Masters at Columbia University in 2001. He has since exhibited around the world, and is currently represented by Xavier Hufkens, White Cube, and David Kordansky Gallery.

Altmejd is a magician, an alchemist and a contemporary Victor Frankenstein. His creations resemble human form at a vague glance, but exist in worlds and realities that we can not define. As he pushes and pulls, adds and takes away, duplicates and hollows out, voids of time and space are created - like a glitching computer drifting the cosmos or a bombed building that has taken on a new form of life. They grow and they decay, as Altmejd plays god to these creatures he fashions together out of parts. He is self described as drawing energy from contrast in his work, which is vivid and clear with these themes that are constantly present within his sculptures, and that they manifest in a way that is similar to the relationship between a parent and a child, that although the initial process is under his control, there comes a point where they grow away from him, a phase where his role is only to facilitate them into their final form.

Altmejd, D. (2007). The New North. [Sculpture]. Saatchi Gallery. For me, Altmejd has become a Magnum Opus. As a teenager, I was fascinated with and consumed by alchemical science, the stories of transmutation, turning lead into gold, the Philosopher's stone. A practice which bridges between science and magic, with ideals and goals still explored and desired within a contemporary context. I feel to be a sculptor is to be an alchemist, to take the base materials and transmute them into objects of nobility, to give them a life and a form and a name. I carry these reflections on Altmejd as a well that I drink from in my heart and mind, a source of guidance and grounding that never dries up. There is certainly an infinity shared, an infinity of admiration and contemplation.

“Highway” (1984), Martha Diamond oil on linen.

Credit…Martha Diamond Trust, via David Kordansky Gallery

Check out Shahryar Nashat, Barre (your blood is an overheated factory) (2020), From David Kordansky Gallery