Several connecting threads run through the show, promised to contain both regional and larger world themes. Many artists explore the variegation of human condition, ranging from politics and racial identity to grief and humor. Yet some so embrace or distance themselves from their source material that they create cerebral, technical works.
Art Galleries & Museums
Leslie Parke brings her large, textured abstractions to Gremillion and Company, Fine Arts, Inc in Houston this month. Her canvasses, some measuring more than seven feet across, and photographs offer rich tapestries of texture and color.
Upon seeing the first daguerreotype around 1840, the French painter Paul Delaroche (1797-1856), declared: “From today, painting is dead.” Painting did not die that day, but photography was born, disrupting the world and its social order through the creation of new ways to see, understand, and explore.
For nearly four decades, Chippewa aritst David Bradley has been a major participant in and critic of the Santa Fe art scene. Luckily, Bradley has a biting sense of humor, and he brings this and a vibrant palate to his paintings that honor his Native heritage, stand up for it in the face of commodification, and poke fun at the community he calls home.
A multi-part ongoing exhibition is reexposing Americans to an influential period of modern Japanese art. Nonaka-Hill and Blum & Poe, both in Los Angeles, are mid-way through a comprehensive three-part exhibition series bringing pivotal Japanese art to America.
This month the National Gallery of Art (NGA) in Washington, DC, presents a comprehensive study of one of the greatest painters of the 16th century. Jacopo Tintoretto (c. 1519–1594) was one of the most prominent painters of Venice during his lifetime.
Self-portraits fulfill two purposes: not only do they give insight into the art of one particular time period, but they also shed light onto the self-perception of the artist. A new exhibition at the Neue Galerie in New York, The Self-Portrait: From Schiele to Beckmann, showcases how the genre lent itself to a wide variety of interpretations and artistic freedoms between Germany and Austria from 1900 to 1945. Quite expectedly, given the cultural and historical upheaval that consumed these two countries in that time period, variations on that theme abound.
La Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP) celebrates the artistic journey of Ren Hang (1987-2017), one of the most influential Chinese photographers of his generation. The exhibition Love, Ren Hang is a luscious, melancholic, and provocative journey through bold colors, animals, naked bodies, and nocturnal shots.
Pioneering photographer Oscar Gustaf Rejlander wrote, “It is the mind of the artist, and not the nature of his materials, which makes his production a work of art.”
The photographer behind one of the most iconic images of the 20th century, Dorothea Lange’s images remain as powerful and relevant as they were 80 years ago.
