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18/2/2015

Two Exhibitions

David Zwirner, New York

Alice Neel: Drawings and Watercolors 1927-1978

David Zwirner is pleased to present an exhibition of drawings and watercolors by Alice Neel (1900–1984). On view at 537 West 20th Street in New York, the works are selected from throughout her career and span five decades. A fully illustrated catalogue by David Zwirner Books, featuring essays by the independent curator and writer Jeremy Lewison and the award-winning novelist Claire Messud, is published to coincide with the show.

Drawing was a fundamental, stand-alone component of Neel’s practice, persistently pursued alongside painting, for which she is primarily known. As a medium, it enabled her to capture the immediacy of her visual experience—whether in front of her sitters or on the city streets—while also affording her a greater sense of experimentation and informality. As an exercise, it frequently made its way into her canvases in the form of outlines and delicately sketched backgrounds.

Neel chose the subjects for both her paintings and drawings from her family, friends, and a broad variety of fellow New Yorkers: writers, poets, artists, students, textile salesmen, cabaret singers, and homeless bohemians. Through her penetrative, forthright, and at times humorous touch, her work subtly engaged with political and social issues, including gender, racial inequality, and labor struggles. Not initially intended for public view, her drawings reveal a more private and intimate nature than her paintings and as such reflect her deep sensitivity to these subjects. Yet they are far from sentimental and she readily stripped her sitters of their masks, foregrounding rather the incongruous, the awkward, and, at times, the comical—Neel was a self-proclaimed admirer of Honoré Daumier. As Jeremy Lewison notes in his essay for the accompanying catalogue, “Unlike many of her social realist contemporaries…Neel skillfully avoided lachrymose sentiment and political hysteria….She could always find a way to get under the skin, to penetrate through to the psychological strengths and frailties of her sitters. Neel took an interest in the human condition and was as much a recorder of the contemporary American people as the celebrated photographers of the era, Walker Evans, Berenice Abbott, Dorothea Lange, Robert Frank, and Helen Levitt.

The exhibition provides an illuminating overview of the variety of themes and styles employed by Neel over the course of her career. While many of her earliest works on paper, along with paintings, were destroyed in rage by a former lover in 1934, those that survived testify to the influence of German artists of the period. A set of monochromatic illustrations to The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky from the late 1930s incorporate a greater sense of narrative than many of Neel’s other compositions and show the actors at various key stages of the existential drama; her own life is referenced in often richly colored, quotidian scenes depicting herself in the company of her lovers. The single portrait occurs more frequently from the 1940s and from hence on regularly include her children Richard and Hartley, and their subsequent families. In the 1960s and 1970s, her line appears more precise and detailed and the palette more monochrome. Yet Neel’s profound commitment to her subjects and to her art remains consistent over the decades, and although the appearance of many of her sitters change over the years, there is a timeless quality to the works. As Claire Messud notes in her reflections on the artist in the exhibition catalogue, “The complex emotions Neel evokes in her art are nothing less than the contradictions of life itself.

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Suzan Frecon 'oil paintings and sun'

David Zwirner is pleased to present an exhibition of paintings by Suzan Frecon, the artist’s third solo show at the gallery. On view at 525 West 19th Street in New York will be recent large-scale oil paintings.

For the past four decades, Frecon has become known for abstract oil paintings and watercolors that avoid facile explanations or recognizable visual associations. Instead, composition works with color, with surface, and with light to create an abstract visual reality that she intends to exist solely on its strength as art. In a deliberative and searching process, she works toward painting that provides a complex, powerful, and inexplicable experience for the viewer. As she has stated, “The physical reality and the spiritual content of my paintings are the same.”

The exhibition’s title, oil paintings and sun, conveys Frecon’s engagement in her studio practice with natural light, the always-varying subtleties of which she integrates into how the painting is created. The changeable and creative relations of sunlight to color, material, surface, and composition is integral to the painting as ongoing visual experience, capable of being seen in maximum possible dimensions.

From color, Frecon builds a composition rooted in geometric and volumetric proportions and precisely defined spatial relationships that incorporate asymmetry as a generatively unpredictable visual element. However, at times she will also develop color and composition together, varying colors and surfaces to achieve often great contrasts of immediacy and radiance. She derives her color palette from pigments ground in oil, particularly earth reds, the resonant vocabulary of which she explores in shifting degrees of matte and sheen, surface and depth, positive and negative. Every decision she makes is toward the greater visual entirety, reworking any element that does not contribute to the dissonant harmony of the whole.

Works in the exhibition include book of paint, which incorporates Frecon’s concept of paintings having a multidimensional relationship to light, with light coming from behind and within the painting, as opposed to light merely striking the surface in a flat way. The top panel’s mysterious shapes, painted in muted and sensitive reddish and yellowish earth pigments, contrasts with the bottom panel, containing an asymmetrical malachite-based arch and an area of lapis lazuli, which, in particular, involves the light at a mineral level, refracting at its core the blue’s many possibilities.

As its title indicates, the composition of another painting, terre verte, manifests a distilled orchestration of varying earth greens. At the top is a darkly luminous elliptical-like form; below are proportional sibling shapes that echo and amplify the correspondences between the painting’s elements of color, shapes and ground, void and form.

Each of the aforementioned oil paintings measures nine feet (108 inches) in height and consists of two stacked panels (54 inches). All areas of the paintings correspond in proportion to one another, as well as to the overall dimensions of the panels, but Frecon’s use of asymmetrical form and the essential inclusion of variable light keep the paintings permeable and transforming. The carefully determined measurements of her canvases are relatively scaled to the human form, and these works notably carry an air of intimacy seemingly counterintuitive to their large size.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue published by David Zwirner Books, featuring an essay by art critic David Cohen.

Suzan Frecon was born in 1941 in Mexico, Pennsylvania. Following a degree in fine arts from the Pennsylvania State University in 1963, she spent three years at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris.

Image: Self-Portrait, 1980, Oil on canvas, 54 x 40 inches (137.2 x 101.6 cm)

Press Contact:
Kim Donica +1 212 727 2070 kim@davidzwirner.com

Opening:
Thursday, February 19, 6 – 8 PM

David Zwirner
525 & 533 West 19th Street
New York
Tue - Sat 10am to 6pm

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