Color Becomes an Agent of Transmutation in Shaping Color @ VSF in Los Angeles

VSF’s exhibition Shaping Color, conceived by LA-based textile artist Diedrick Brackens, brings together six artists to explore the relationships between color and process in their respective practices. Many works in the exhibition are monochromes or utilize a restricted palette. Historically monochromes often signal an intent to emphasize mastery and skill; also, in parting with all information save the essential, artists attempt to access the ineffable and the spiritual.

Color, as employed by these makers, is intrinsically tied to their mediums and modes of production. Color becomes an agent of transmutation, not just a mere surface or mask for form; these objects are altered in ways that inform their subjects radically and color is treated as material rather than surface or ornamentation.

Shaping Color is on view through September 16 @ VSF, 812 N HIGHLAND AVE, LOS ANGELES

 
 

André Butzer @ Metro Pictures in New York

A exhibition of nine large, vibrant new paintings by artist André Butzer is now on view at Metro Pictures. Butzer’s latest paintings employ vivid color and his signature figures bringing to mind motifs and approaches that predate the stark abstraction and distinctive brushwork of his N-Bilder, begun in 2010. However, Butzer asserts that everything he does is unified by an exploration of color and that this new series is a natural continuation of his work. This exhibition continues Butzer’s longstanding investigation into the medium of painting, while pushing the limits of his oeuvre, and furthers the ideas explored throughout his career from art history to consumer culture.

André Butzer is on view through August 9 at Metro Pictures 519 West 24th Street New York, NY. photographs courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York

Spilling Over: Painting Color in the 1960s @ the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York

Spilling Over: Painting Color in the 1960s gathers paintings from the 1960s and early 1970s that inventively use bold, saturated, and even hallucinatory color to activate perception. Many artists during this era adopted acrylic paint—a newly available, plastic-based medium—and explored its expansive technical possibilities and wider range of hues. Color Field painters poured paint and stained unprimed canvas, dramatizing materiality and visual force of painting. At the same historical moment, an emerging generation of artists of color and women explored color’s capacity to ignite new questions about perception, specifically its relation to race, gender, and the coding of space. Spilling Over looks to the divergent ways color can be equally a formal problem and a political statement.

Spilling Over: Painting Color in the 1960s is on view through August 18 at the Whitney Museum of American Art 99 Gansevoort Street New York, NY. photographs courtesy of the Whitney Museum of American Art

Garry Winogrand: Color @ Brooklyn Museum

Garry Winogrand: Color sheds new light on the influential career of twentieth-century photographer Garry Winogrand (1928–1984) as the first exhibition dedicated to the artist’s color photographs. While almost exclusively known for his black-and-white images that pioneered a “snapshot aesthetic” in contemporary art, Winogrand also produced more than 45,000 color slides between the early 1950s and late 1960s. The exhibition features an enveloping installation of seventeen projections comprising more than 450 rarely or never- before seen color photographs that demonstrate the artist’s commitment to color, with which he experimented for nearly 20 years. Also included are 25 gelatin silver photographs drawn from the Museum’s extensive holdings of works by the artist.

Garry Winogrand: Color is on view through December 8 at Brooklyn Museum 200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, NY 11238. photographs courtesy of Brooklyn Museum and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Frank Bowling @ Tate Britain in London

Frank Bowling’s first major retrospective at the Tate Britain offers the chance to experience work created throughout all six decades of the artist’s career. Bowling has relentlessly explored the properties and possibilities of paint, experimenting with staining, pouring, layering, as well as a variety of materials. The exhibition includes paintings from his respectively more personal and abstract series in which Bowling has investigated the tension between geometry and fluidity. At 85 years-old, the artist continues to paint everyday creating work that relies on technical skill while embracing change and the unpredictable.

Frank Bowling is on view through August 26 at Tate Britain Millbank, Westminster, London. photographs courtesy of Tate Britain

Joan Mitchell: "I carry my landscapes around with me" @ David Zwirner New York

Joan Mitchell’s “I carry my landscapes around with me” is the first exhibition to focus on the artist’s multi-paneled paintings created across four decades. Mitchell established a singular approach to abstraction over the course of her career through her inventive interpretation of the traditional figure-ground relationship and synesthetic use of color. Her emotionally charged compositions evoke individuals, observations, places, and points in time. The horizontally oriented, panoramic expanse of Mitchell’s polyptych panels is ideally suited for landscapes—a poignant subject for the artist that she linked directly to memory. The exhibition features paintings from both public and private collections, as well as works drawn from the Joan Mitchell Foundation. “I carry my landscapes around with me” is on view through July 12 at David Zwirner 537 West 20th Street, New York. photographs courtesy of David Zwirner New York.

Holton Rower "Cutaways" @ Venus LA In Los Angeles

Venus Los Angeles presents Cutaways, an exhibition of new work by Holton Rower. The show, comprised of sculptures and wall-based works, will be on view from January 14th through February 24th, 2017. Cutaways marks Rower’s debut exhibition in Los Angeles. Rower’s work has long been concerned with notions of accumulation and sequencing. With this most recent body of work, he begins his process by designing a rigorous order and color scheme for the paint, which he applies layer upon layer onto a base. After the paint has built up considerable mass, Rower carves networks of intuitively placed marks into the material. These violent cuts reveal the nearly geological strata of his layered paint, which create intricate optical patterns that impart perceptibly changing frequencies to the viewer. photographs by Oliver Maxwell Kupper