Tag Archives: Helen Frankenthaler

NASTY WOMEN AT GAVLAK

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I don’t really look for inspiration. I just let it come to me, but I don’t stop working. Work comes from work. When I’m stuck I just keep working and make terrible looking things until something else comes out of it. That’s the creative process… You can’t think yourself out a right action. You have to act yourself into right thinking. You can’t sit there and smoke cigarettes and look at the wall waiting for inspiration. — Marilyn Minter

NASTY WOMEN—a celebratory group exhibition at Gavlak Los Angeles—”seeks to uplift communities underrepresented in contemporary art and American visual culture at large… [giving] a platform to a diverse array of perspectives and female voices throughout art history.”*

The show is dedicated to the memory of the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. See link below for details.

NASTY WOMEN*

Through December 12.

Gavlak Los Angeles

1700 South Santa Fe Avenue, Suite 440, downtown Los Angeles.

NASTY WOMEN features work by Tiffany Alfonseca, Candida Alvarez, Lisa Anne Auerbach, Judie Bamber, Whitney Bedford, Andrea Belag, April Bey, Delia Brown, Deborah Brown, Karen Carson, Elizabeth Catlett, Gisela Colón, Patricia Cronin, Kim Dacres, Linda Daniels, Vaginal Davis, Sonia Delaunay, Florence Derive, Nicole Eisenman, Judith Eisler, Anonymous (Emilian School), Beverly Fishman, Helen Frankenthaler, Viola Frey, Francesca Gabbiani, Vania Gunarti, Trulee Hall, Jenny Holzer, Deborah Kass, Angelica Kauffman, Rachel Kaye, Ella Kruglyanskaya, Becky Kolsrud, Marcia Kure, Yayoi Kusama, Nancy Lorenz, Ann Magnuson, Kate Millett, Anne Minich, Marilyn Minter, Jesse Mockrin, Betty Parsons, Ebony G. Patterson, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, Fay Ray, Katherine Read, Joan Semmel, Shinique Smith, Sylvia Snowden, Linda Stark, Sophie Tæuber-Arp, AlexisTeplin, Betty Tompkins, Patssi Valdez, Marnie Weber, Brenna Youngblood, and Lisa Yuskavage.

Nasty Women, Gavlak Los Angeles, October 31, 2020–December 31, 2020, from top: Lisa Anne Auerbach, Keep Your Rosaries Off My Ovaries, 2020, wool, image © Auerbach; Kim Dacres, Whitney, 2019, auto tires, bicycle tires, bicycle tubes, wood, bicycle parts, zip ties, and screws, photograph by Sebastian Bach, image © Dacres; Judie Bamber, Nancy Nielson (Miss April 1961), 2019, watercolor on paper, image © Bamber; Viola Frey, Stubborn Woman, Orange Hands, 2004, ceramic and glazes, photograph by Chris Watson, image © 2020 Frey and the Artists’ Legacy Foundation, licensed by ARS, New York; Nasty Women installation view; April Bey, Atlantica Archives (Earth’s Feminism) II, 2020, digitally printed woven blanket with hand-sewn “African” Chinese knock-off wax fabric and glitter, image © Bey; Karen Carson, Power Mad, 2011, acrylic on unstretched canvas, image © Carson; self-portrait Woman Artist Painting, circa mid-17th century, anonymous artist from the Emilian School, oil on canvas; Lisa Anne Auerbach, Karma is a Nasty Woman, 2020, wool, image © Auerbach. Images courtesy of the artists and Gavlak, Los Angeles and Palm Beach.

FRANKENTHALER IN VENICE

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PITTURA/PANORAMA—PAINTINGS BY HELEN FRANKENTHALER, 1952–1992—an exhibition at Palazzo Grimani—is the first presentation of her work in Venice since the 33rd Biennale in 1966.

Curated by John Elderfield, the show features fourteen works and “focuses on the artist’s development of the pittura (painting) and the panorama: the interplay between works like easel paintings, although made on the floor, and large, horizontal paintings that open onto shallow but expansive spaces, in the way that panoramas do.”*

“There are no rules. I’d rather risk an ugly surprise than rely on things I know I can do. Art has a will of its own. You have to know how to use the accident, how to recognize it, how to control it, and ways to eliminate it so that the whole surface looks felt and born all at once.” — Helen Frankenthaler

PITTURA/PANORAMA—PAINTINGS BY HELEN FRANKENTHALER, 1952–1992*

Through November 17.

Palazzo Grimani

Ramo Grimani 4858, Venice.

From top: Helen Frankenthaler, Riverhead, 1963, acrylic on canvas; Frankenthaler (center) in Venice in 1966 for the 33rd Biennale; Helen Frankenthaler, Maelstrom, 1992, acrylic on canvas; Helen Frankenthaler, For E.M., 1981, acrylic on canvas (“E.M.” is Édouard Manet); Frankenthaler pouring paint—her “soak-stain” technique—onto a large unprimed canvas, photographs by Ernest Haas (2): images from the exhibition catalog Pittura/Panorama: Paintings by Helen Frankenthaler, 1952–1992, published by Gagosian, 2019 (3); Helen Frankenthaler, Open Wall, 1953, oil on unsized, unprimed canvas; Frankenthaler in her studio at Third Avenue and East 94th Street, New York City, with  Mediterranean Thoughts (1960, in progress, left) and Figure with Thoughts (1960, in progress, center), March 1960, photograph by Tony Vaccaro. Images of Frankenthaler works were photographed by Rob McKeever and are courtesy and © the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, Inc., Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, and Gagosian, 2019.

LEE KRASNER

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The first major European retrospective of the artist’s work in half a century, LEE KRASNER—LIVING COLOUR brings together nearly 100 paintings, drawings, collages, and photographs by this pioneer of Abstract Expressionism.

A section of the exhibition at the Barbican reproduces Krasner’s small upstairs studio at the house in the Springs (East Hampton) she shared with Jackson Pollock during the decade of their marriage—from 1945 until Pollock’s death in a car crash in 1956—after which she took over Pollock’s studio and began her work on large, unstretched canvases.

After London, the show will travel to Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt.

LEE KRASNER—LIVING COLOUR

Through September 1.

Barbican Art Gallery

Silk Street, London.

See Mary Gabriel, Ninth Street Women—Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters and the Movement That Changed Modern Art (New York: Little, Brown, 2018).

From top: Lee Krasner, Polar Stampede, 1960, the Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, courtesy Kasmin Gallery, New York, photograph by Christopher Stach; Lee Krasner, Desert Moon, 1955, LACMA, © 2018, Digital Image Museum Associates, LACMA, Art Resource, New York, Scala, Florence; Krasner, circa 1938, photographer unknown; Lee Krasner, Palingenesis, 1971, courtesy Kasmin Gallery; Lee Krasner, Abstract No. 2, 1946–1948, Institut Valencià d’Art Modern, photograph provided by IVAM; Lee Krasner, Icarus, 1964, Thomson Family Collection, New York City, courtesy Kasmin Gallery, photograph by Diego Flores; Lee Krasner, Bald Eagle, 1955, collection of Audrey Irmas, Los Angeles, photograph by Jonathan Urban. Images courtesy and © the Pollock-Krasner Foundation.