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Front Burner: Highlights in Contemporary North Carolina Painting

March 7, 2020 – February 14, 2021

East Building, Level B, Joyce W. Pope Gallery, North Carolina Museum of Art

 Throughout modern art history, painting has been declared dead and later resuscitated so many times that the issue now tends to largely be ignored. Despite any debate over painting’s viability, artists continue to persevere in keeping the medium fresh and new. Currently painting is enjoying a revival in the art world, and innovative North Carolina artists are helping to maintain its vibrant place on the front burner.

View images of our recent collaboration with Wecselman Design at One Park Grove, Miami.

This stunning model unit includes work by Lluis Barba, Stanley Boxer, Lynn Chadwick, Dan Christensen, Max-Steven Grossman, Jane Manus, Donald Martiny, James Austin Murray, Udo Noger, Ernest Trova, Tigran Tsitoghdzyan and Bernar Venet.

By Nancy Stetson

When Jane Manus can't sleep, she puts together shapes in various combinations in her head: straight lines, squares, rectangles. Never circles. Never anything with curves. The West Palm Beach sculptor is attracted to geometric shapes and angles and strong lines that may jut out straight or bend sharply. And her work reflects that.

“I don’t do circles,” she says. “I don’t have anything against them. It’s just not me.”

When she first began creating her abstract sculpture, she originally worked in steel.

“Over the years, I found my own signature,” she says. “When people look at the work, or have seen a number of my sculptures, they can tell a piece of mine from someone else’s.

“I was working with these different pieces of metal and I was able to do what I wanted to do with them, to express what how I wanted the works to look with these materials. The more I worked with them, there seemed to be more shapes I could create.”

Even after almost 45 years of being a professional artist, she hasn’t run out of different ways to juxtapose these elements.

Donald Martiny will participate in the inaugural Summer Residency at Tivoli New York sponsored by the Pfaff Foundation, Judy Pfaff, and M. David & Co, Michael David.

Judy Pfaff, who was born in London, received her MFA from Yale University where she studied with Al Held. Her work spans across disciplines from painting to printmaking to sculpture to installation. She has work in the permanent collections of MoMA, Whitney Museum of Art, Tate Gallery, Brooklyn Museum of Art, and Detroit Institute of Arts, among many others. She is the recipient of numerous prestigious awards including Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Sculpture Center, the MacArthur Foundation Award, and the Guggenheim Fellowship. Pfaff lives and works in Tivoli, NY.

Michael David has exhibited with Sidney Janis Gallery and M. Knoedler & Co. His work is in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Guggenheim Museum in New York, The Brooklyn Museum, The Houston Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles among many others. Additionally David has established and directed two successful galleries in Brooklyn: Life on Mars and M. David & Co.

Azure Development's $2,190,000 show house in Delray Beach hosts thirteen artworks from Sponder Gallery's roster of important artists.

Artists Include:

Stanley Boxer, Dan Christensen, Max-Steven Grossman, Kysa Johnson, Jane Manus, Donald Martiny, James Austin Murray, Udo Noger, Tigran Tsitoghdzyan and James Walsh

Visitors to the Edmond J. Safra campus of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem who walk by the Goodman Brain Sciences building will notice a statue by the world-renowned artist, the late Boaz Vaadia. This figure, titled Ahiam 2nd, will make most people stop and stare at this representation of humanity. The pose in Ahiam 2nd is contemplative and serene, creating an overall calm atmosphere, which Vaadia so often stated was an important goal. It is recommended to visit Ahiam 2nd in the middle of a hectic day at the office or the lab. Who knows, maybe his serenity will rub off on his visitors. 

Ahiam 2nd is an iconic sculpture for Boaz Vaadia, and perhaps one of his most seminal. The figure in Ahiam 2nd is in a reclining pose that Vaadia revisited frequently, starting in 1985 when he first began figurative work in the style for which he is internationally known. Vaadia later combined the same figural pose with a boulder, such as exists in Ahiam 2nd, when he moved to his Williamsburg, Brooklyn studio. Ahiam 2nd was completed in 2006.

Dynamic Sublimity:  Donald Martiny's Brushstrokes by Donald Kuspit

Initially in Turner, Delacroix, and the Barbizon School, the brush stroke was made more noticeable, and this appearance was to increase under impressionist.  The imitative or descriptive function of painting was increasingly diminished by the growing prominence of the physical substance of which a painting is made, the paint...Finally the whole brush stroke leaps forth dramatically in the work of van Gogh.

The brush stroke now becomes for the first time a distinct, separate unit of artistic expression.
James Mann, Beyond Post-Modernism:  Manifesto of Vandalism(1) We call that sublime which is absolutely great.  Beauty is connected with the form of the object, having boundaries, while the sublime is to be found in a formless object, represented by a pointlessness.

Crystal Clear | Glitz, spirituality and rebellion coexist in Metis Atash’s sparkling sculptures

BY JOHN THOMASON

AT FIRST BLUSH, Metis Atash’s career appears to have swung from one end of the spectrum to the other. She forged her career in finance, working in private equity for 15 years, mostly in her native Ger- many. It was exhausting, right-brain labor—consult- ing, preparing documents, filing annual reports—and it consumed her for up to 80 hours a week.

While traveling during a yearlong sabbatical from her job in 2004, Atash experienced something like an epiphany. “I stayed six months in Bali and met my business partner,” she recalls. “We became friends, not really thinking much, just realizing there was more to my life than what I’ve lived.” 

Her future business partner was a furniture ex- porter, and Atash began to create art on his inven- tory, applying paint, lacquer and Swarovski crystals. Around the same time, Atash, a practicing Buddhist, imported Balinese Buddha heads, and painted and crystallized those as well.

THE REBIRTH OF THE DUTCH FLOWER, A NEW SERIES THAT HIGHLIGHTS THE PLIGHT OF THE FLOWER INDUSTRY

During the COVID-19 crisis, Dutch Fine Art Photographer Isabelle van Zeijl visited local flower growers to explore how she could shine a light on an industry that is suffering an 80% loss of income. The growers were keen on a collaboration with Van Zeijl with one grower suggesting that "life is cyclical, like nature. After every difficulty there is always ease. We choose to share, collaborate in order to grow together."

The Museum of Art and History, Lancaster CA

The Light of Space | February 8 - April 19, 2020

Solo exhibitions: Kysa Johnson, Laddie John Dill, Jay Mark Johnson, Shana Mabari, Ruth Pastine, Mary Anna Pomonis, Robert Standish

​Site specific installations: Gary Lang, Edwin Vasquez

​Video installation: Jeff Frost

​New Works by Ruth Pastine