“A New Realism,” New Orleans Art Review – Winter/Spring 2012
Review of January 2012 exhibit “Aspects of a New Kind of Realism,” a group exhibition curated by Michael Klein.
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.
Allison Stewart is well known to Mobile art lovers, having shown her work at the Eichold Gallery and Space 301, among other venues. She recently completed work for a large one-person exhibit at Southeastern University of Louisiana in Hammond. The exhibit will be on view during June at the Contemporary Art Gallery on the university campus.“In addition to paintings on canvas, I will have two installations of drawings and large paintings on drafting film,” she says. “I’ve been experimenting with new materials and approaches and am looking forward to seeing the work installed.”
The mission of Lesley Dill’s ‘Faith & the Devil’ could not be any more ambitious: the artist aims to examine the eternal struggle between faith and evil in philosophy and literature. To us, this sounds like the college thesis from hell, and standing amidst the installation, you start to get the feeling the artist began to go mad in the process.
Though long absent from the New York art scene, Frederick James Brown, the Georgia-born, Chicago-bred expressionist painter who died on May 5 at age 67 from cancer in Scottsdale, Arizona, carved out a significant niche in the early days of SoHo.
Frederick J. Brown had a long and prolific career producing work on religious, historical and urban themes in addition to his portraiture. His work is represented in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, Mo.
It has been said, most famously by the 17th-century poet John Donne, that “No man is an island.” And while no doubt true in the philosophical sense that Donne intended, human history has largely been defined by the things that isolate and divide us as individuals and communities, not the least of which are the ideological and geographical divisions that confront us in everyday life. In ways both physical and metaphorical, Luis Cruz Azaceta has long been an artist of islands. Born in Havana, Cuba, in 1942, he emigrated to this country in 1960, where he studied at the School of Visual Arts and made a name for himself on another island, Manhattan, as he rose to prominence in the Neo-Expressionist movement of the 1970s and 1980s.
Dallas artist David Bates may be the finest painter his hometown has ever produced, but when it comes to his favorite sport, he heads to Louisiana and the remote extremities of Plaquemines Parish. While the paintings in this Down Highway 23 series reflect the everyday lives of fishermen, they were inspired by a trip he made in 2010, when instead of the usual scenes of shrimpers, oystermen and boats laden with the day’s catch, he encountered a coastal dystopia defined by reporters, politicians, tar balls, oil slicks and clean up crews in hazmat suits. Evidence of the BP oil disaster was everywhere in a coastal landscape transformed into something nightmarish, but amid the chaos he began to spot the familiar faces of those who derived their living from those waters. What he saw in them was not defeat but the same resilience that had faced many hurricanes and come back for more.