It’s embarrassing to think that I haven’t posted since returning from NYC in early May but I’ve been glued to the sewing machine completing work for a September solo show. This past weekend, however, my husband and I took time off for a downtown art infusion.
The Denver Art Museum had a number of smaller shows on view. We started out on the top floor of the Hamilton building with Showing Off: Recent Modern and Contemporary Acquisitions, a very varied collection of artworks. Some of the artists whose work had been acquired had shows at the museum in the past year or two while others were well-known names, now mentioned in art history books.
Just inside the entrance to the gallery, Julian Opie’s stripped down paint and wood constructions referred to real places while, at the same time, acted as symbols of aspects of our contemporary culture.
Baroque Tower V 1996, Modern Tower 6 1999, You Pass An Office Building 6, 1996
In contrast to the economy of Opie’s work, Leonard Drew’s Number 162, 2012 exploded across the wall with all kinds of wooden shapes loosely attached to canvas.
With all of the video and installation art visible in many museums, it’s refreshing sometimes to see drawing-and humor. A great example was Self Portrait with Pricey Mountain Homes, 2008, a graphite work on paper by Bill Amundson.
Another drawing, Tongue-Cut Sparrows, 1996 by James Drake had an interesting explanation. Drake noticed that families and gang members communicated with prisoners in the El Paso, TX, County Jail by using sign language messages. After asking the people to translate a variety of poems into their sign language, he produced a video and a group of drawings documenting what they did.
I’d always admired Betty Woodman’s Japanese Lady ceramic sculpture at the DAM and so was pleased to see another ceramic sculpture as an acquisition choice. Annabeth Rosen’s Ztheo, 2009 (meaning “two” in Greek) had an interesting tension produced by the writhing ceramic forms held together with baling wire.
Back in the main contemporary gallery, I noticed two large Chinese paintings I hadn’t seen before. Occupying an entire gallery wall, Yang Shaobin’s Untitled (1999-4), 1999 was powerfully done and also hard to look at. I wondered whether the agony and pain depicted should be interpreted as personal to the artist or as a more general comment on the consequences to the Chinese people of the Cultural Revolution.
Mask Series No. 10, 1998 by Zeng Fanzhi showed some intriguing contrasts. Are the facial expression, unusual in Chinese painting, on the masks and what emotions are the masks hiding underneath? What is the relationship between these two rather prim and contained men? The museum’s label suggested that the painting alludes to the “loneliness and difficulties of being homosexual in China during the post-Cultural Revolution era.”
En route from the Hamilton building to the Ponti building we encountered a small but lovely group of paintings on the mezzanine level of the Ponti. Highlighted there was the work of Gunther Gerszo, a Mexican painter who drew inspiration from art history and the Mexican landscape. He developed a style of painting from 1960-1981 that portrayed overlapping planes of translucent color. In Southern Queen, 1963, these layers were reminiscent of ancient Maya faceted stone walls.
In Bajio, 1964, Gerzso utilized some of the techniques of Northern Renaissance artists, laying down layers of thin oil paint glazes.
From the DAM, we moved on to Redline Gallery and Artist Studios where the second part of a year long exhibition around the theme of Play was on view, Play Grounds.
It was impossible not to gape at the work of Dan Tobin Smith, present as an installation and also documented in large color photographs. Creating a path throughout the gallery and organizing the space was an enormous collection of found objects laid out on the floor in gradated values of consecutive colors melding from one to the next. The objects called “kipple” in The First Law of Kipple 2014 are discarded objects of everyday life, found or donated. The objects attract because of their familiarity and also keep the viewer at a distance because of their fragility.
After that cacophony of shape and color, Simplified World, 2014 by Agustina Woodgate was quite a contrast. Using sandpaper, the artist removed all the shapes and boundaries from a vintage world map, resulting in an object with a beautiful mysterious glow. What is she saying about the fickle nature of borders and countries?
Wrapping around several corners and meandering across an enormous wall was Conor McGarrigle’s Walking West, 2014. Walking 26.2 miles over some eight hours along the entire length of Colfax Avenue, a main east-west street in Denver, McGarrigle documented this piece with a video and a satellite photograph of the route.
Detail
