September 28, 2015 Look Skirting the Issue By Dan Piepenbring Six paintings from Matthew Brannon’s “Skirting the Issue,” an exhibition at Casey Kaplan Gallery through October 24. In this series, Brannon uses traditional printmaking methods—letterpress, silkscreening—to depict the domestic and cultural trappings of America during the Vietnam War, when he was born: “I had entered a world battered from events that left the country’s identity in jeopardy,” he writes, “and Luce’s concept of the American Century shattered.” Brannon’s work is consumed with the question of “how America is its own worst enemy.” Matthew Brannon, Bad Check, 2015, 59″ x 42″. Read More
September 22, 2015 Look Charles Keeping’s Beowulf By Dan Piepenbring The British illustrator Charles Keeping (1924–88) is remembered largely for his work with children’s books. But his morbid style—his first book commission was Why Die of Heart Disease?—often felt better suited to adult fare, and his long career also saw him illustrate Wuthering Heights, All Quiet on the Western Front, The Idiot, and—most impressive—the complete works of Dickens, from Pickwick clean through to Chuzzlewit. The series took him a decade. In 1982, he contributed these inspired illustrations to an adaptation of Beowulf for ages nine and up. (You can see more of the drawings at Book Graphics.) If your nine-year-old can handle a bleary, ceaselessly gray world in which the sun is a soot-black blot and humans roam the earth in a miasma of hair and stink, have at it. Read More
September 14, 2015 Look I Just Paint By Robert Anthony Siegel Billy Childish’s sincere, deeply unselfconscious paintings. Billy Childish, Nude Reclining, 2015, oil and charcoal on linen, 72″ x 120″. Courtesy Lehmann Maupin Punk rock icon, poet, novelist, luftmensch, wearer of extraordinary hats and Edwardian mustaches—Billy Childish is a multiplicity of things, a British renaissance man. But first and foremost he is a marvelous painter, as can be seen at the Lehmann Maupin Gallery through October 31. If you’re coming from his unabashedly confessional writing or his music, the restraint in his work might surprise you. Childish’s paintings generally revolve around the figure isolated in landscape: oystermen on heavy flat riverboats; a woman and children riding a sleigh in the nineteenth-century Yukon; the Swiss writer Robert Walser dead in the snow outside the psychiatric hospital where he was a patient. Most affecting, perhaps, is a series of recent paintings of the artist walking with his young daughter through fields or trees, or standing in a lush garden. Typically positioned in the center of the canvas, father and daughter look straight out at the viewer and yet retain a deep emotional inwardness. We take them in, but the mystery of their individuality remains intact. Read More
September 8, 2015 Look Good Old Neon By Dan Piepenbring Iván Navarro, Bomb, Bomb, Bomb (Matte Black and Warm White), 2014, neon, wood, formica, drum hardware and electric energy, 72″ x 32″. Iván Navarro was born in Chile, in 1972, the year before Pinochet came to power. He grew up with the fear of being disappeared, and so it’s fitting, in a way, that he’s chosen light as his medium. From his studio in Brooklyn, Navarro makes sculptures of fluorescent tubes. “I make spaces in a fictional way to deal with my own psychological anxiety,” he’s said. He’s created neon men and doors, neon words and portals. Ladders of light. Shopping carts of light. Fences, basketball hoops, and water towers of light. There’s an unnerving, geometric precision to these objects. Coming away from them, you begin to see doorways and boundaries with their same nefarious glow; every act of exiting and entering becomes freighted. Many of his works seem to stretch into infinity, as if beckoning you, against your will, into another dimension—a mise-en-abyme effect that’s sometimes deliberately disconcerting, as in one work that shows you the word BOMB receding toward the horizon. It’s seductive signage: you want to go toward the bomb. Through October 18, CorpArtes is hosting his first retrospective in his native Chile. These images are drawn from the works on display there. You can see more of his work at Paul Kasmin Gallery’s Web site. Read More
August 27, 2015 Look Poultry Suite By Dan Piepenbring Jean Pagliuso, Black #5, 2005. Jean Pagliuso takes pictures of chickens. It’s a risky subject—to hear about it, you’d worry you were dealing with the same kitschy, quasi-ironic veneration of farm and fowl that animates many an Etsy shop—but there’s nothing decorative or trite about these portraits. On the contrary, they’re warm and almost perturbingly sincere. In part you can thank the artist’s pedigree for that; Pagliuso has enjoyed a long career in fashion photography, having shot everyone from Richard Gere to Sophia Loren for Vogue and Rolling Stone, and she worked with Robert Altman for a while, too. Having shown these pictures in galleries the past few years, she’s now assembled a book, Poultry Suite, out this month. Pagliuso was inspired in all this by memories of her late father’s avocation: he raised show chickens, and after he died, she wanted to photograph one in memoriam. One, it turned out, did not suffice. She uses Thai Mulberry paper and a silver gelatin emulsion technique to confer a jarring dignity on her subjects, which seem paradoxically more alive than they would in full color. They’re chickens and owls, sure. But they’re—elegant? That’s it. They’re elegant. And in the time of “Put a Bird on It!”, that’s a remarkable thing. Read More
August 24, 2015 Look The Book Cover in the Weimar Republic By Dan Piepenbring Oskar Garvens, 1925. Compared to other aspects of the book arts—typography, binding, tooling—the dust jacket is a pretty recent innovation. Depending on whom you ask, it was born either in 1833, to adorn an English novel called Heath’s Keepsake, or it was an earlier, French invention, a maturation of the yellow paper jackets their softcover books often came wrapped in. In any case, the dust jacket didn’t come to Germany until around 1900—but by the birth of the Weimar Republic, nineteen years later, German artists were doing incredible things with the medium. The Book Cover in the Weimar Republic is a catalogue of the Jürgen and Waltraud Holstein collection, comprising the covers of a thousand books published between 1919 and 1933 by some 250 houses in Berlin. Between the two world wars, the city enjoyed an astonishing expansion in its book production and its libraries: from 1920 to 1927, about three hundred new publishing houses emerged, many of them intent on printing books that experimented with the latest advances in art and design. As Steven Heller explains at Design Observer, there was a practical reason for the design boom, too: Read More