Georg Baselitz em seu estúdio. foto de Ealan Wingate.

The estate of Arakawa, the mononymous painter, sculptor, and proto-conceptualist who blurred boundaries so fully that even architecture and poetry could align in his work, is now represented by Gagosian Gallery. Early plans for the partnership will focus on photographing and cleaning decades’ worth of work held in storage by the artist, who died in 2010, at 73, with the aim of staging an initial show—likely centered on his painting, drawing, and printmaking—by 2018.

Artist: Alan Turner

Venue: Parker Gallery, Los Angeles

Exhibition Title: Paintings, 1979-2009

Curated by: Dan Nadel

Date: November 11, 2018 – January 12, 2019

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Full gallery of images, press release and link available after the jump.

Images:

Images courtesy of Parker Gallery, Los Angeles

Press Release:

Nothing less than dignity and truth emanates from these 30 years of paintings by Alan Turner. This is an artist, a Jewish artist, as he is careful and fearless (two more good words for Alan) to point out, who seemed bent on discovering the truth of his own mind, of the way he could see things that others could not: of sex, of culture and of the aesthetics of moral and actual violence. In other words, Alan is a subtle philosopher not unlike his friends John Cage and Jasper Johns. Do I need to note that the truth is not always pleasing? Alan’s images, and even the way they are brushed, and later, drawn, have the look of an artist touching his canvases repeatedly, with control, but with great intention not to make a mark that might live in some zone of painting, but rather to continue the depiction of a thing that needs actualizing. Which is to say, these are not meant to be beautiful objects, but they are real, honest, and gloriously solid. They contain all the information any viewer would need.

Alan Turner was born in the Bronx and lived there until he was 21. He attended UC Berkeley for his master’s degree, where he found favor with Dore Ashton and David Hockney, the latter offering his flat in London, where Alan moved to avoid the draft. When he returned to New York in the early 1970s, Alan met Johns and Cage and began exhibiting his work. In the late 1970s, the paintings held luminous trees with slightly mysterious shadows and viewpoints. They have the feeling of walking the woods, eyes forward with no end in sight, the bark as important as the air around it. I wonder if Alan wanted to visualize the old forest/trees conundrum, and then he solved it by finding iridescent picnic-goers in the intimacy of friendship.

Those bodies, stripped to their own bark, would gradually meld into the humanoid masses – think John Carpenter meets (avowed Turner admirer) Robert Gober – that are among Alan’s masterpieces. Treating skin as an expanse as another artist might treat the ocean, Alan introduced images at once erotic, in the literal coming together of carnal forms, and terrifying in the isolation of skins. I think here of Philip Roth’s Zuckerman fantasizing about an affair with a grown Anne Frank. Carroll Dunham, from whom I first learned about Alan, absorbed some of Turner’s lessons in frankness, and returned the favor by posing with his eldest daughter for a couple of paintings on the subject of paternal dignity. In these and most of his paintings, Turner began with heavily crosshatched drawings, perhaps of just a single aspect – a clothespin piercing a veil of flesh, a tightly hung bucket, floral wallpaper – which he would then alter with a photocopier and arrange on large sheets of paper, perhaps drawing over top of any given composition. With the image settled, Turner would begin painting.

In the mid-1990s, Alan began to move away from the flesh and into the possibilities of plasticine as a bodily stand-in. He molded biomorphic forms into which he then gradually reintroduced human physical and psychological elements. A braid, one like Alan’s sister wore, appears. A hand, tentatively holding an alien form – images here of gentle poetic yearning. In the latter part of the decade, Turner, inspired by archeological digs, began making paintings and drawings that seem to document other civilizations, as though the artist was taking rubbings on some far-flung site. In fact, he was pressing his body and some possessions into the plasticine that was once his subject and taking rubbings from the resultant impressions, turning himself into his own site for discovery. In the wake of 9/11 he returned to trees, but now they’d absorbed the picnickers and become unto flesh itself. From there, Alan began spending time in Rome and initiated a final sequence of ideas – neo-Classical forms blended with the historic forms around him, like a Surrealist cutaway map of cultural history.

tory. And finally, the boxes. Alan, always noticing, began taking account of the boxes New York’s homeless population uses as shelters. He also noticed how cats flitted in and out of boxes in Rome. Then the box idea expanded, as another surface and idea – the vessels that house fragments, bodies, entire memory stocks of civilizations. These paintings, which gradually shifted to entirely graphite processes, are among Alan’s most moving and ambiguous.

There is nothing else like them. They, like all of Alan’s work, depict and are containers of a labyrinthian consciousness that flows and flows. -DN, 2018

Alan Turner (b. 1943 Bronx, New York, lives and works in New York City). Select solo exhibitions include Mitchell Algus Gallery, New York, NY (2015), ITINERIES, The Graduate Center at CUNY, New York, NY (2009), Lennon, Weinberg, Inc., New York, NY (1996-2003), Ealan Wingate Gallery, New York, NY (1990-91), Brooke Alexander Gallery, New York, NY (1982-83), Carl Solway Gallery, New York, NY (1974-77) and Galerie Neuendorf, Cologne, Germany (1971). His work in the permanent collections of Denver Art Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others.

Link: Alan Turner at Parker Gallery

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After A Long Legal Battle, An Austrian Court Has Ruled In Favor Of Franz West's Children

In the hospital, West signed a document creating a foundation a few days before he died. "Those on the family’s side say that individuals with a financial stake in the estate, including Gagosian dealer Ealan Wingate, who was at the hospital during West's final days, 'wanted to make sure with the foundation that the heirs would not be in conflict' with the gallery’s interests, Kerres says. As a result, 'the lawyer did a rushed job, just writing something by hand and forgetting major parts of an agreement.'"

Article source here:Arts Journal

Georg Baselitz at Gagosian Hong Kong

May 8, 2020

GEORG BASELITZ Years Later Opening reception: Thursday, May 21, 5–8pm May 21–August 8, 2020 7/F Pedder Building, 12 Pedder Street, Central, Hong Kong __________ Art is visceral and vulgar—it’s an eruption. —Georg Baselitz Gagosian is pleased to present Years later, an exhibition of new paintings and works on paper by Georg Baselitz. This is his first solo exhibition with the gallery in Hong Kong. Significantly, it is also the first exhibition to open to the public within our international network of galleries since the global COVID-19 lockdown. We are grateful to once again be able to present physical artworks in an exhibition conceived specifically for the Hong Kong gallery and its context, and we look forward to welcoming the public back to view and celebrate the work of a great living master. An early pioneer of the Neo-Expressionist movement that had its origins in postwar Germany, Baselitz combines a vigorous and direct approach to art making with a sensitivity to art historical lineages. He counts Willem de Kooning and Philip Guston among his key influences, and is known for his uncompromising approach and critical stance. In 1969, he began to compose his images upside down to slow the processes of making, looking, and comprehending. Over the past fifty years, often referring to and reinterpreting his own body of work, he has further augmented his visual language with a range of formal and historical allusions yet has consistently returned to the human figure as his central motif.

This exhibition is focused on a set of thirteen large oil paintings that Baselitz made using a “contact-printing” technique related to the one applied in his series, What if… (2019), which was exhibited at Gagosian San Francisco earlier this year. To create each new black-and-gold painting he uses a stencil to render inverted figures on blank canvas, painting just the panel’s background to generate bold negative silhouettes. Against this ground he presses a black canvas, lifting this second support to produce an image distinguished by a slightly softer look than those made more directly. The hybrid result not only stresses medium over image, but is also distinguished by an element of unpredictability that bespeaks freedom and vitality. In a single painting in pink, the figures are rendered without a stencil as positive images.

With part of their material substance surrendered to the transfer technique, the works in Years later incorporate a palpable sense of organic change and variation; they juxtapose traces of Baselitz’s haptic intervention with marks derived specifically from the contact-printing process. This lends their surfaces a specific tension, while the play of subtle similarities and differences from one panel to the next adds a dynamic rhythm to the series as a whole—a nod to the idea of the human frame in motion. As one image begets another, the figures become less and less distinct and gradually merge with their backgrounds, dissolving subject into context, humanity into reality at large. In these paintings, the dark, chaotic nature of this reality finds its full expression.

A fully illustrated catalogue with a foreword by Zeng Fanzhi and an essay by Lu Mingjun will accompany the exhibition.

A Note to Our Visitors The gallery will reopen in compliance with the Hong Kong government’s health guidelines regarding social distancing and visitor and staff protection. _____ Georg Baselitz’s studio, Ammersee, Germany, 2019. Artwork © Georg Baselitz. Photo: Ealan Wingate