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2/10/2009

Four Exhibitions

Chelsea Art Museum, New York

Jean Miotte: What A Beautiful World

"Abstraction is the figuration of the soul," says Jean Miotte. He points to a momento, a snapshot or mirror of an intense emotion. Paralleling his biography with the phases in his work, he creates monochromatic black paintings while he suffers with his Hungarian friends who were confronted with Russian tanks in 1956. He opened his studio for his Hungarian friends, who found refuge there. It is not astonishing that Jean Miotte was the subject of the only one-man exhibition Hungary organized for the 40-year memorial of 1956.

And how can one explain that he painted black-and-white paintings when he was invited for the inauguration of the re-opening of the Museum Sursock in Beirut? He had decided to paint - acknowledging that he was invited as a strong colorist – especially colorful paintings which would convey the idea of a possible future. But each time he stood in front of an empty canvas and set out to prepare a work, a black-and-white painting emerged. As a young man he started to paint with the intense wish to be able to capture the energetic beauty of choreographers and dancers in the Russian ballets in London in the 40s.

These are three examples which deny the general idea about abstraction. Abstract painting can express in three words what others describe in a complete novel. Miotte’s abstraction is the immediate profound reaction to his surrounding, to the world in a philosophical, not immediately understandable representation. It (not he, the artist) translates and brings onto the canvas what happens in the most intimate reverberations:
"Arising from interior conflicts, my painting is a projection, a succession of acute and intense moments. Painting is not a speculation of the intellect, it is a gesture which comes from within."

Miotte has been invited to show his work in one-man exhibitions in 45 internationally recognized museums. The most unusual was surely the invitation to exhibit in Beijing as early as May 1980, and thus to compare his paintings of the 70s to the works of Asian artists. While he had started off with completely filled canvases which could be classified as “abstract expressionism,” Miotte developed a more and more minimal gestural abstraction which resembled calligraphic Eastern paintings even though the artist had never studied Zen philosophy or paintings from the Far East. Effectively the Chinese artists discovered a familiarity in these works; and they sensed at the same time the differences - where Miotte came from and where they came from - meeting in gestural works which were understandable by both sides. This cultural bridge for which Miotte's work stands makes him unique.

Jean Miotte is a painter who definitely crossed borders in a geographical sense, with his life in Europe and America and his wide acceptance in Asia, but he goes far beyond being a globetrotter in the geographical sense. He paints from within, reaching to and touching souls, who could easily identify themselves with his art. Because his art comes genuinely from within, he touches the inner emotions of art lovers and spectators from anywhere in this world. Thus, we can state that he is universally accepted.

October 3 - January 2, 2010

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Mimmo Rotella: Recycling and Ready Made

Rotella is the first of the three artists qualified as "affichistes". He used/re-used existing materials for his creations long before "recycling" was becoming a prominent discussion. New Yorkers know him from the shows in the Guggenheim Museum and Museum of Modern Art.

The collection of the Chelsea Art Museum consists of very early works of Mimmo Rotella (burned paper stuck on canvas), e.g. from his Marilyn series and advertising posters, as well as "soprapintura" on torn posters, still on their zinc support. Other works in the collection are more recent; his Berlin series and his ready mades, i.e. his oil cans ("Shell" in Japanese is "Rotella"). One of the highlights of our collection was highlighted in a joint exhibition of the graffitti artist José Parla with works of Rotella whom he admired and classified as his godfather.

October 3 - January 2, 2010

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Shirley West, Discovery: A Retrospective

The Chelsea Art Museum – Home of the Miotte Foundation - is pleased to present an exhibition featuring sculptor and painter Shirley West. In 1949 West earned an Associate of Arts degree from Stephens College; after that degree, she went to the University of Colorado, Boulder, to study with the great German painter Max Beckmann. She continued to do so until his death in late 1950s. West then went back to school, receiving her degree in 1952 from Smith College, where she studied English literature, art history, painting, and sculpture. Later on, in the 1950s, West started to show her work in New York, at spaces like Brata and Avant Garde Ltd. In 1961, she held her first one-person show at the Museum of Modern Art in Miami. Then, in the next two decades, West took courses from the anatomy professor Robert Beverly Hale, who taught at the Art Students League in New York City. Toward the end of the ‘60s, she built three very large outdoor concrete sculptures in Gainesville and Micanopy, Florida: The Prairie Woman (1968-69); Yin/Yang (1969); and The Embrace (1969-70). Since that time, West has concentrated on making sculptures, including small ones capable of being held in the hand, which look like maquettes and are part of her current exhibition.

An ambitious woman artist, West nonetheless belongs to a generation that was more than fairly macho in its sentiments and posturings. To an extent, then, the artist was pushed to the side, even when she was in her abstract-expressionist period in the 1940s and ‘50s and again, later on in her career. Her passionate, rough-edged abstract paintings remain compelling; their thick swathes of paint roll across the canvas, as if they had been driven by the winds of a storm. The language of these works of art transcends gender, in a way that emphasizes not only the achievements of the expressionist movement, but also the accomplishments of West herself. Given that mythic presences run through abstract expressionism, it would make sense that West’s paintings and sculpture, both of them created in organic form, might partake of the general exuberance and virtuosity intrinsic to the New York School. Sadly, art history has only just begun to place important women artists into the narrative of nonobjective painting after the Second World War, and it is only now that artists like Lee Krassner are finally receiving full-fledged academic attention. West, who has not shown in some time, now can be seen as someone who embraced the fray of New York, slowly but surely building on her emphatically conceived, wellmade art.

It should also be noted that while West leans in the direction of abstraction, she has worked figuratively as well. There are two portraits, one in clay and the other in plaster, of Joe Stapleton, an artist friend. Made in the early to mid-1960s, they show West to be a compelling realist, skilled both in naturalism and caricature. In both works, Stapleton’s large nose and bearded face come through with a vigor that belies the age of the man. In some of the early still life paintings, done in 1950-52, we see the influence of Cubism and Morandi. In these paintings, jugs, vases, and coffee pots take on the aura of poetry, despite the fact that West is in a learning phase. The feeling of these still lifes is European, yet there is also a directness of purpose that brings them a bit into the American esthetic. The point is that West makes sense as an artist in the overall arc of her career, from the early work to the most recent. As a sculptor, she is a natural, but her paintings are also important in understanding her as an artist. This survey of her art shows West to be a strong proponent of figurative expressiveness, as well as an abstract sculptor of considerable achievement.

Earth Bound, constructed from welded rods, mesh, burlap, and Ultracal, looks like the mockup of a 1950s spaceship, with a roughly conical shape that narrows as it rises. Its title perhaps gives us a clue to its meaning; the sculpture has power as a still-born metaphor, a rocket meant to pierce space but which is in fact rooted in the ground. Related to the oversize white plaster forms of her Texas outdoor work, Earth Bound reminds us that, rhetorically speaking, West can work very small—as happens with the clay and steel hand sculptures—and larger than life—as occurs with Earth Bound. But the art is connected in all cases by West’s visionary sensibility, taken as it is with expressing passion and free-flung form. Indeed, her esthetic stands as in contrast to, and even as a corrective for, the often pallid, nonvisual nature of much contemporary art made today. West’s art doesn’t enlist a cause; instead, it is capable of making formal points based upon the command of shapes she has at her disposal. The real question facing her—and those who are taken with her work—is whether expressionism can survive along with the art of the present day, when so much in the art world has become conceptual or politicized.

In the works of the mid-1990s we can see that the artist has continued to find painterly values and abstract motion cause for delight. Creating a visionary rhetoric that refers to the four directions, West gives us the sense, in almost Blakean terms, that the directions are spiritual realms, doors to perception of the unseen and spiritual mysteries.

October 3 - November 14, 2009

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Marlene Tseng Yu: Forces of Nature

The Chelsea Art Museum – Home of the Miotte Foundation – is pleased to present an exhibition featuring the recent works of painter Marlene Tseng Yu: one of the outstanding leaders of the green movement in art. The exhibition, the artist’s 60th major solo show, includes the Glacier Melting Series from the early 1970s, providing viewers with the opportunity to see how her powerful vision of a pure and untrammeled nature grounded in a unique synthesis of abstract and realist values in Chinese and Western cultural influences, anticipated key concerns of the conservation movement today with global warming. This series also highlights the artist’s experimentation with acrylic medium and the invention of new brush techniques that she began developing four decades ago. The paintings on display from the late 1990s and 2000s, including a number of the artist’s internationally celebrated monumental canvases – as large as 12 feet high and 36 feet long – are indicative of a wide range of natural phenomena, from avalanches to forests to underwater treasures, which serve as the subjects of the multiple and simultaneous ongoing series comprising Forces of Nature, the artist’s central theme.

Born in Taiwan in 1937, the artist received her BFA and MFA degrees in fine arts from National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei, and the University of Colorado, Boulder. The artist has shown extensively since the 1960s throughout Asia, Europe, and the United States. The National Gallery in Prague, Czech Republic, and the National Art Museum of China, Beijing, are among the venues of her most recent exhibitions. A new solo exhibition will open concurrently in October at Today Art Museum, Beijing. The artist’s work has been widely reviewed in nine languages in more than 140 publications, including Artforum, Art in America, and Art News, by leading art critics Lawrence Campbell, Ronny Cohen, Jonathan Goodman, Gerrit Henry, April Kingsley, Donald Kuspit, Robert Morgan, Cynthia Nadelman, Carter Ratcliff, Lily Wei, and Jeffrey Wright. From 1969 to 2007, the artist lived and worked in Soho, New York, and in 2008 opened a studio in Long Island City, New York. Since 1995, the artist has curated Forces of Nature group exhibitions and poetry readings in praise of rain forests highlighting the green movement in art.

October 3 - November 14, 2009

Image: Shirley West, Earth Woman 21. 12 1/2"h, 11"w, 8"d. Clay, Electric Fired. 2000.

Opening 3 October 2009

The Chelsea Art Museum
556 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011
open Tuesday through Saturday 11am to 6pm
Thursday 11am to 8pm
closed Sunday and Monday
$8 adults, $4 students and seniors, free for members and visitors 16 and under

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