By Ruth Lilienstein-Gatton

Where spirituality and political activism intersect, there is also a place for visual art.

Rosa Naparstek’s newest exhibition “what is your function…?” is on display through the end of June at the Rio Penthouse Gallery. The artist has built a set of arresting visual works around personally transformative texts. Running the lengths of the inner gallery walls, sheets of type are orderly set side-by- side. The sheets contain text fromThe Pathwork Lectures (the famously “channeled” work of Eva Pierrakos); writings by Rumi, a 13^th-century Persian poet and mystic; and essays by civil rights leader Grace Lee Boggs– all which have contributed essentially to the artist’s spiritual evolution.

Across the printed pages, larger and hand-written by the artist, run well-known quotes by Karl Marx and Saul Alinsky, again invoking social reform.

Biographically, the text-over- text format can be seen to chart a journey through Naparstek’s lifetime involvement in social and political causes (in Detroit, California, and New York), interwoven with an embrace of metaphysical thinking that has critically informed her ideas about social and political change.

Naparstek wants to share a truth– that the change we seek on a global societal level is dependent on, if

not meaningless without, our personal transformations.

In another part of the installation, the artist shares these truths in a heap of crumpled pages on the gallery floor. More of the same texts, they are meant to be picked up and absorbed at random by observers, who are invited to take a seat around the pile. On a wall outside the gallery, more crumpled pages are affixed to the wall, mirroring the format of the smooth ones within, as though suggesting that the ideas contained in them can withstand physical transformation.

The ideas embedded in the texts can be “read” into Naparstek’s accompanying found-object sculptures, a sampling of newer and older works of this type for which the artist is known. Naparstek fabricates from collected natural and man-made items—animal horns, dolls, doorknobs, seashells, scrap metal-sometimes framing (as with reclaimed picture frames or canvases) and sometimes assembling the ordinary into the sacred, as when a doorknob set inside bicycle gears, mounted on a bicycle seat becomes a “Third Eye.” Objects worn through human or elemental use form assemblages that can evoke nostalgia, psychological urges, and sometimes humor (used teabags hang like genitals on a male dressmaker’s form); but the artist’s compassion, the same instinct which directs her search for the divine and desire for a just society, are present in each sculpture.

“what is your function…?” connects individual self-actualization as part of the quest for a just society with abandoned objects remade into art. Naparstek asks us equally to question the function of a thing or a person as part of a narrative of meaning.

The artist will be at the gallery this Sun., Jun. 26^th from 3:00 p.m. – 6:00 p.m.

The Rio Penthouse Gallery is located at 10 Fort Washington Avenue, between 159^th and 160^th Streets.

For more information, please visit bit.ly/28M3mSI.

 
Curated by Kasia Redzisz and Lauren Barnes, the exhibition brings together works that share the artist’s particular device of framing his figures. For such a long time we have all focused on Bacon’s preoccupation with the visceral subversion of our physical form, while certainly paying less attention to the artist’s spatial constructs: the world in which his figures reside. This architectural form serves to isolate Bacon’s raw screaming lumps of meat – this we already knew. But the artist’s cages are his recurring ‘leitmotif’ embodying a specific idea: that Bacon’s approach to space was of equal importance to the artist’s approach to the human form. The space frame was the essential context for his existentially wrought bodies.

Seated Figure 1961 Francis Bacon 1909-1992 Presented by J. Sainsbury Ltd 1961 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/T00459

This is never more apparent than in Bacon’s ‘Man in Blue IV, 1954′ and ‘Man in Blue V, 1954′, displayed midway through the exhibition – devoid of the artist’s later cavorting carcuses – instead the central lone figure of each painting is placed in an abstracted space evocative of a room-like environment through the demarcation of space. The faces of these two figures [The paintings being placed together in situ] are closer to traditional portraiture than in other works by the artist, but with a ghostly transparency. These are reminiscent of many other of Bacon’s works from the 50’s, where there is a subtlety to the figures that would later become unusual: forms slightly closer to traditional figuration which would be discarded in later paintings. This gives rise to an increased focus on the spatial environment of the painting; a mixture of representational and abstract lines. The isolated male figure, possibly Bacon’s lover Peter Lacy – is thought to reference the ongoing illegality of homosexuality during the period – leans trapped in an architectural space: a dark and empty room inundated with a superabundance of claustrophobia and social estrangement. With these works the device of the cage is highlighted, the power of Bacon’s space frames are apparent and create that essential context.

Study for a Portrait 1952 Francis Bacon 1909-1992. Bequeathed by Simon Sainsbury 2006, accessioned 2008 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/T12616

It is now no wonder the artist considered creating sculpture (and why Damien Hirst ‘converted’ certain paintings by Bacon into vitrine-enclosed three-dimensional works). Perhaps Bacon could have worked with ‘actual’ space in light of his interior design background, which obviously had a greater influence on his later work than was ever truly realised. As here there is an acute awareness of the spatial properties of the artist’s compositions. Bacon understood and manipulated the architectural space of his paintings to effect his figures. While our eyes were all focused on twisted meat and screaming nurses, Bacon was manipulating their place in the psychological halls of our minds, adding pathos and isolation to the violence of the flesh.

These space frames of late 50s have a greater complexity in later works as the ongoing motif evolves. With ‘Three Figures and Portrait, 1975′ elliptical and circular ‘lenses’ focus on the corrupt body of a suicidal George Dyer with a sense of sadomasochistic voyeurism. These architectural devices not only focus our attention, but also the intent of the artist’s vision, in this particular work the device is a reflection of  the artist’s own history with the subject. When British art critic and curator David Sylvester asked Bacon about the artist’s cages and space frames, Bacon replied: “I cut down the scale of the canvas by drawing in these rectangles which concentrate the image down. They are there to highlight, to focus, to point to the figure. They are intensifiers.”

Francis Bacon, 1909–1992 Portrait of Isabel Rawsthorne Standing in a Street in Soho 1967 Oil paint on canvas 1980 x 1475 mm © The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved. DACS 2016. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie. Acquired by the state of Berlin

These cubic cages give a solitary existential angst to the artist’s contorted flesh, as behind the visceral screams simmers  a neurosis. The rawness of ‘being’ belies paranoia, angst, loneliness and loss. A theatrical stage for the artist’s writhing spines and tortured faces: there is nothing beyond those walls. Nothing beyond the frame. Cages, chambers, and fenced frames lock Bacon’s subjects into a temporal Godless eternity. The flesh rendered all the more futile because of its architectural prison.

The curatorial decisions made in this exhibition highlight the artist’s Godless architecture. It is apparent that Bacon’s ‘theatre’ was of the same importance as the artist’s ‘players’. With all of the myth surrounding Bacon as an instinctive painter, immediate and visceral – from the existential angst of the 50’s to what is sometimes described as almost the self-parody of the artist’s final works – Bacon maintained the physiological complexity and considered structure of his spaces. The real existential horror of the artist’s environments was never really to be found in Bacon’s renditions of screaming haunted meat, but in the voids surrounding them.

By Paul Black
NY Arts
 
Francis Bacon: Invisible Rooms –  Tate Liverpool, UK – until 18 September 2016

Hauser & Wirth to Present the Group Exhibition
‘A Modest Proposal’

‘A Modest Proposal’
Hauser & Wirth
511 West 18th Street Showroom
New York City
23 June – 29 July 2016

New York NY… Beginning 23 June, Hauser & Wirth is pleased to present ‘A Modest Proposal’, featuring work by artists Lucas Blalock, Naotaka Hiro, Sanya Kantarovsky, Nicola L, Tala Madani, and Jakub Julian Ziolkowski – artists who humorously critique our relationship to the bodily and abject. The exhibition takes its title from Jonathan Swift’s satirical essay of 1729, commenting upon the extreme poverty and famine in Ireland. His proposed solution is simple: eat the children.

‘A Modest Proposal’ will be on view in the Showroom at the gallery’s West 18th Street location through 29 July 2016.

In Lucas Blalock’s recent work, the artist uses a large-format camera to create digitally distorted still-lifes of mundane household items, flea market finds, and other junk. These images often appear as though someone has just tampered with the composition, creating a palpable sense of interference and a distinct unease to the scene. Through unexpected juxtapositions, Blalock challenges viewers’ tendency to look at an image too quickly.

Naotaka Hiro’s self-casting sculptures begin with a performative act: the artist sculpts his own body, confronting limitations of putting oneself into a plaster mold. Hiro created ‘Sixteen Terminals’ (2016) by drawing lines of plaster from the top of his head to the end of each appendage. Cast fingers and toes became deformed and fell off in this challenging and lengthy process. The resulting sculpture is an abstract representation, somewhere between the artist’s actual form and internal self-image. As Hiro puts it, it’s ‘me versus me.’

Sanya Kantarovsky’s richly colored paintings offer a glimpse into deceptively quotidien scenes of single figures at an uncanny moment. Plucked from a narrative context, his figures are trapped within their frames in atmospheres tense with anticipation. In his largest works on paper to date, Kantarovsky contemplates the everyday confrontation between the self and the external world.

Concerned with body politics and human relationships, Nicole L’s Penetrables are canvases that take the form of bodies suspended from the wall like flayed skins. With mouths agape, ‘Antarctica Penetrables’ (1980) and ‘Fire Penetrables’ (1980) are manifestations of unease, frustration, and thwarted protest. In another series called Functional Objects, Nicola L offers surreal representations of the human form to humorous and dreamlike effect. These works offer a pointed critique of our relationships to one another. Part of this series is ‘Femme Commode White’ (1968), a dresser shaped like a woman whose corpus has been broken into drawers with knobs in all the right places.

The self-abasing characters in Tala Madani’s paintings confront their bodies and sexuality to create witty and messy – and sometimes-deadly – scenes of self-discovery. In Madani’s work, revelations of pleasure are also realizations of mortality. ‘The Ritual’ (2016), presents Madani’s recurring characters Dick and Jane in a signature cinematic style, with red and green deployed to suggest a 3-D effect. The viewer witnesses a deadly shift in power between these two characters: smears of paint on canvas suggest the shapes of bodies in the repetition of a cycle, a closed loop from which there is no exit.

Jakub Julian Ziolkowski paints hallucinatory scenes that are simultaneously fantastical and terrifying. In his lurid and meticulously painted images, surreal bodily forms reveal primitive interests and impulses. In ‘Untitled’ (2015), the bodies of two faceless figures morph into a landscape that stretches from the glimmering heavens to the depths of hell. Observing Ziolkowski’s psychosexual universe, the viewer is left to wonder if these figures are enjoying themselves and one another, or if this is a contemporary re-envisioning of Bosch’s ‘The Garden of Earthy Delights.’

Hauser & Wirth’s Summer Hours:
20 June – 29 July 2016
Monday – Friday 10 am – 6 pm

Hauser & Wirth New York will be closed Monday 4 July 2016

Cortesey of Hauser & Wirth New York

6 July – 30 October 2016

A rare opportunity to see over 100 remarkable paintings by this pioneer of twentieth-century art

Georgia O’Keeffe is best known for her paintings of magnified flowers, animal skulls, and New Mexico desert landscapes. This exhibition brings together some of her most important works, including Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1 1932, the most expensive painting by a female artist ever sold at auction.

Making her debut a century ago, in 1916, O’Keeffe was immediately recognised as a trailblazing artist, while today her legacy as an American art icon and a pioneer of twentieth-century art is widely recognised.

Georgia O’Keeffe
Abstraction White Rose
1927
Oil on canvas
36 x 30 (91.4 x 76.2)
Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. Gift of The Burnett Foundation and Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation
© Georgia O’Keeffe Museum

With no works by O’Keeffe in UK public collections this exhibition is a rare chance to see the beauty and skill of her remarkable paintings outside the US.

Men put me down as the best woman painter…
…I think I’m one of the best painters.
Georgia O’Keeffe

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Courtesy of Tate Modern

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