Curated by studio artist / writer / DJ Dennis Kane
Robert Moskowitz
Minimal Conceptions
Swimmer, 1984. Whitney Museum of American Art.
Robert Moskowitz’s work is minimal and bears some associations to Pop and new image painting, but inhabits a unique territory, reduced signs hover in a blank field, the dynamic of the images presentation putting a pause on easy absorption, both sign and reading of it are pushed into a new theater, like encountering Samuel Becket’s clipped repeated text, we examine both the thing and our mechanics of perceiving it.-Dennis Kane
“Moskowitz’s spaces are unmodulated for the most part. He was able to lock himself into a room conceived with the solidity of acrylic paint. He built interior spaces with right angles and the illusion of corners and elevations. The surfaces can appear close to seamless. It’s ultimately Moskowitz’s own architectural domain nestled in his mind: warm, embracing, and claustrophobic.” - Barbara A. MacAdam
Untitled (Chain), 1991
Pastel on paper
115 x 74 in (292.1 x 188 cm)
MacAdam, Barbara A. “Robert Moskowitz: Paintings and Drawings From Four Decades | the Brooklyn Rail.” The Brooklyn Rail, 30 Apr. 2024, brooklynrail.org/2024/05/artseen/Robert-Moskowitz-Paintings-and-Drawings-from-Four-Decades.
“Robert Moskowitz.” Whitney Museum of American Art, whitney.org/artists/922.
“Works — Robert Moskowitz.” Robert Moskowitz, www.robertmoskowitz.org/works.
Christian Boltanski
meditations on memory
This week’s art post features the work of French conceptual artist Christian Boltanski (1944-2021). Boltanski’s work has a contemplative, poetic, ethnological quality. Absence, the remains and impact of war, the silenced subject, and the power of memory all are investigated, as is a quiet celebration of the dignity and poetics inherent in the mundane.
“His work was rich in visual and aural impact, and open-ended in its invitation to the viewer to contemplate the past and partake in the present moment — for what has been lost and what endures.”
Photo Credit:
MetaLocus, BOLTANSKI AT IVAM: DÉPART - ARRIVÉE
Jupiter Art, CHRISTIAN BOLTANSKI:THEATRE D'OMBRES
Art Dex, Memory and Mortality: Christian Boltanski
Art Review, The Spectres of Christian Boltanski
Nowness Asia, Everyone and No One, The Art of Christian Boltanski
Merrian Goodman Gallery, Depart-Arrive
Merrian Goodman Gallery, Christian Boltanski Selected Works
Portrait Credit: Art Dex, Memory and Mortality: Christian Boltanski
Charles Gaines
aesthetics, politics and philosophy
This week’s art selection features the work on noted conceptual artist and teacher Charles Gaines. Gainses’s work engages formulas that interrogate relationships between objective and subjective realms. Using many forms - photography, musical composition, sculpture, video, etc. - Gaines examines identity and power and the fault lines of capital’s utopia. His is some of the most engaged and ambitious work being made today.
“His work belongs to a branch of conceptual art concerned with processes and systems. The aim was to remove subjectivity from art by following self-determined rules and procedures. His breakthrough came in 1973, with his “Regression” series, in which he wrote sequential numbers in the squares of a hand-drawn grid to generate an amorphous form that grows from drawing to drawing, each generating the next. ‘One of the joys was the fact that I could experience things that I couldn’t predict, that I couldn’t anticipate.’”
Photo Credit:
Colossal,Through Monumental Sculpture of Moving Chains, Artist Charles Gaines Confronts the Enduring Legacy of American Slavery
Paula Cooper Gallery, Charles Gaines
ARTFORUM, Differing Equations: The Art of Charles Gaines
LA Times, How the dense grids of artist Charles Gaines took the ego out of art, Carolina A. Miranda
Jonathon Griffin, Charles Gaines