Exposition Art Blog: September 2020

Dusti Bonge - Abstract Painting

 

 Dusti Bonge (1903–1993) was an American painter who worked from the 1930s through the early 1990s. She is considered Mississippi's first Abstract Expressionist painter and its first Modernist artist.
The years 1953-1956 mark a transitional period in her work as she moves fully into Abstract Expressionism, the style in which she seemed to find her greatest satisfaction. Some of the work from this period features angular forms and paint surfaces that are etched and textured. Betty Parsons gave her her first solo exhibition in April 1956.
Bongé continued to work in a similar abstract style in the 1960s, but with a darker palette. As a New York Herald Tribune critic noted in 1960: “Dusti Bongé, artist of the deep south, appears at the Betty Parsons Gallery with forceful and determinedly non-objective paintings. Having her third show here, Miss Bongé is perhaps more dramatic at this moment than she has ever been. Her canvases are extremely vigorous, dark-keyed and spacious.” Her final show at the Parsons gallery was in 1975, but she continued to create a very strong body of work, including some monumental oil paintings, through the next decade.Wikipedia

 













Dorothy Heller - Abstract Expressionism Painting

 

 Dorothy Heller (1917 – 2003) was an American painter.
Born in New York City,Heller was an Abstract Expressionist who studied at the Art Students League of New York and was a pupil of Hans Hoffman. She worked in acrylic, and exhibited widely during her career in solo and group shows throughout the United States. Three of her drawings, two nudes and a figure study, are owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art,and her work may also be found in the collections of the Wadsworth Athenaeum, the Allen Memorial Art Museum, and the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art. A collection of her papers and other miscellany is held by the Archives of American Art of the Smithsonian Institution.Wikipedia

 













Wolfgang Robert Paalen

 

 Wolfgang Robert Paalen ( 1905 in Vienna, Austria –1959 ) was a German-Austrian-Mexican painter, sculptor and art philosopher. A member of the Abstraction-Création group from 1934 to 1935, he joined the influential Surrealist movement in 1935 and was one of its prominent exponents until 1942. Whilst in exile in Mexico, he founded his own counter-surrealist art-magazine DYN, in which he summarized his critical attitude towards radical subjectivism and Freudo-Marxism in Surrealism with his philosophy of contingency. He rejoined the group between 1951 and 1954, during his sojourn in Paris.
....Important is that they transform the rhythmical appearance of the fumage imprints into a neo-cubist rhythm, which Paalen then compares with the fugue and jazz, through a mosaic-like fracture and complementary contrasts He wants to create the atmosphere of a deeply moving, gripping encounter with beings that themselves remain silent. There is no action, no metamorphosis in them and nothing happens with them in the space. The picture itself is the being, or a frozen resonance of it. Precisely because of this total silence, every topical expectation put to them is reflected as a question. In a cartoon published by Ad Reinhardt in the fifties, Paalen's suggestion from Form and Sense is repeated: "Paintings no longer represent; it is no longer the task of art to answer naive questions. Today it has become the role of the painting to look at the spectator and ask him: what do you represent?" Paalen understood his picture beings as a kind of pictorial version of the ancient choros tragicos, the tragic chorus effect, conceived in Nietzsche's writing on The Birth of Tragedy. It is the deep existential foundation of reality, what he is interested in. Although it becomes common practice after 1947, until this time, nobody had placed so much responsibility on the viewer as Paalen did with his rhetoric and pictorial language. Wikipedia

 










Joan Miró

 

 Joan Miró (1893 –1983) was a Spanish painter, sculptor, and ceramicist born in Barcelona. A museum dedicated to his work, the Fundació Joan Miró, was established in his native city of Barcelona in 1975, and another, the Fundació Pilar i Joan Miró, was established in his adoptive city of Palma de Mallorca in 1981.
Earning international acclaim, his work has been interpreted as Surrealism but with a personal style, sometimes also veering into Fauvism and Expressionism. He was notable for his interest in the unconscious or the subconscious mind, reflected in his re-creation of the childlike. His difficult to classify works also had a manifestation of Catalan pride. In numerous interviews dating from the 1930s onwards, Miró expressed contempt for conventional painting methods as a way of supporting bourgeois society, and declared an "assassination of painting" in favour of upsetting the visual elements of established painting.(Wikipedia)
"Via his own Surrealism-inspired exploration, Miró invented a new kind of pictorial space in which carefully rendered objects issuing strictly from the artist's imagination became juxtaposed with basic, recognizable forms. His use of interior emotion to drive abstract expression would become a great influence on the Abstract Expressionists.Even though he pared his forms to abstract schematics or pictorial signs and gestures Miró's art never settled into complete non-objectivity. Rather, he devoted his career to exploring various means by which to dismantle traditional precepts of representation.Miró balanced the kind of spontaneity and automatism encouraged by the Surrealists with meticulous planning and rendering to achieve finished works that, because of their precision, seemed plausibly representational despite their considerable level of abstraction.Miró often worked with a limited palette, yet the colors he used were bold and expressive. His chromatic explorations, which emphasized the potential of fields of unblended color to respond to one another, as well as his flat backgrounds with mild gradations of color, were valuable resources, providing inspiration for Color Field painters such as Helen Frankenthaler.Miró was a modern renegade who refused to limit himself to visual exploration in a single medium. While he explored certain themes such as that of Mother and Child repeatedly throughout his long career, he did so in a variety of media from painting and printmaking to sculpture and ceramics, often achieving surprising and disparate results."(theartstory.org)\

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