Hot and Cool - Abstractions, 1940s to the Present    Apr 8 - May 16, 2009

Alexander Calder - Louisa Chase - Dan Christensen - Burgoyne Diller - Jimmy Ernst - John Ferren - Gary Komarin - Charlotte Park - Betty Parsons - Renee Radell - Charles Green Shaw - Theodore Stamos - Neil Williams - Frank Wimberley

PRESS RELEASE

Spanierman Modern is pleased to announce the opening on April 8, 2009 of Hot and Cool: Abstractions, 1940s to the Present. The show exemplifies the ways American artists from the mid-twentieth century onward have often combined the heated dynamics and intuitive gestural qualities of Abstract Expressionism with more controlled, analytical approaches, transcending traditional categories of abstract art. Each artist has found within this fusion a means of vital, flexible, and individualistic expression.

One who has consistently parried between these approaches is Frank Wimberley, as he demonstrates in Conclusion (2006), in which the optically vibrating combination of thick, buttery, overlapping red strokes are adjacent to striated green drags, the accumulating textures of thick paint building intensity. A balance of polarities is also apparent in the freeform compositions of Jimmy Ernst (the son of Surrealist Max Ernst), who applied his paint with a meticulous patterning compared by author Kurt Vonnegut, to the method of a “jeweler using a magnifying glass.” In Momenta (1975) this approach evokes the self-generating forces within the cosmos.

Betty Parsons, the legendary art dealer who launched the careers of such groundbreaking artists as Jackson Pollock and Robert Rauschenberg, used the language of Abstract Expressionism in a free-spirited way, often breaking from the non-objective dictum to convey her responses to nature. This is suggested in Green No. 1 (1971), which evokes a memory of light on the sea, that she loved to contemplate during walks along the beach near her home in Southold, on the eastern end of Long Island. Charlotte Park is one of the overlooked female pioneers of Abstract Expressionism. She was married to James Brooks and a friend of Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner. Park used the pure painting methods of this movement to reshape reality. In some works, hot, impassioned hues flow and barely cohere, while in others, her palette and shapes are more forcibly constrained, revealing a combination of “whimsicality and architectonic structure in the manner of Paul Klee,” as was noted in a recent review of her work.

An artist who has never viewed abstraction as a formal dead-end, Gary Komarin adheres to the idea of his early mentor Philip Guston that abstract images “include more” than recognizable ones. In Between Blue and You and Then Some (2007), his drips and scrawled forms are resonant with childhood memories combined with purposefully referential associations to culture today.

Toward the cool end of the spectrum is the work of Neil Williams who, like his friend and studio-mate Frank Stella sought to treat a painting’s structure as synonymous with its image. His Blue Monday (1966) is a shaped canvas of conjoined diamonds, on which diamond shapes maintain the work’s planar integrity.

Works by Dan Christensen, Louisa Chase, and Theodore Stamos reveal other ways that artists have used the evolving language of abstraction to form their own personal interpretations of the age-old clash between reason and emotion.