To call someone an artists’ artist is often just a craven way of saying, “Sorry about your career.” But over the past two decades the Houston painter and punk propagandist Mark Flood, 54, has fit the bill, beating a fevered pulse beneath the work of many younger artists, who have been inspired by his anarchic humor and disturbing vision of contemporary culture.
George Dureau’s Black, at Higher Pictures through July 13 is a jewel of an exhibition comprised of only 15 black-and-white prints. Though the artist is in his eighties, and though the photos on view are from the ’70s and ’80s, for many of us, this small show serves as an introduction to Dureau’s work.
The first New York exhibition of George Dureau’s black-and-white photographs, mostly of bare-chested or nude young men, is long overdue. Mr. Dureau, who was born in New Orleans in 1930 and has lived most of his life there, began taking them in the early 1970s. The photographs were partly intended as studies for his figurative paintings, which they tend to overshadow.
What is more impressive than one psychedelic spectral pour painting by Holton Rower? 19 of them. New York’s The Hole gallery presents the latest in the artist’s beautifully vivid, process-driven works that reveal the time that made them like the rings of a tree while simultaneously appearing as if a particularly chromatic work of art had melted on its plinth.
“Paint here is truly on parade,” says the gallery of the collected works. Individually they are the product of a high experimentation and pre-meditation; the properties of each cascading colour creating a singular, accumulative path that blends, moves about and pushes, vacillating form and direction and finally settling into autonomous and unexpected beauty.
Rower’s method is structured and demanding – paint must be poured at a specific rate lest colours merge too quickly and drying time be compromised – but the results are unexpected and often dramatic. Colour combinations are premeditated, mostly, but inevitable experimentation reveals myriad new colourways, played out in fractious zig zags and waterfalls reminiscent of any number of different things – Rorschach tests, for example, or mitochondria or the colourful surfaces of faraway planets.
Review of March 2012 exhibits “Francis X. Pavy: 200 – Art Inspired by 200 Years of Louisiana Statehood” and “Keith Perelli: Mosquito Muerto”.
Review of January 2012 exhibit “Aspects of a New Kind of Realism,” a group exhibition curated by Michael Klein.
In the aftermath of the Japanese earthquake and tsunami, artists are creating works that document the event, give aid to the victims and express their own complex feelings.
