My Art Guide
Press Release for “Slow Time and the Present”
June, 2012
Craigie Horsfield new exhibition Slow Time and the Present conceives of different ideas and perceptions of history as not being the thing of the past, separated from our experience, but as the expression of a profound present, a deep present which we together engender. The exhibition traces a complex array of notions of relation and conversation that recur in Horsfield’s work, of the negotiation and the understanding of the individual and the community, of “slow time” and of the present, and of the nature of consciousness and the material world.
For the exhibition at Kunsthalle Basel, Horsfield has created two large-scale works, using recently developed technology that transfers contemporary imagery into the historical medium of fresco and, on this occasion he has been working together with Andre Van Wassenhove for the preparation of data drawing from digital image material collected over a period of five years spent in Italy. The two new works Processione dei Gigli, Via Cocozza, Nola. June 2008 (2012) and At 99 Posse concert. Via Gianturco, Naples. February 2010 (2012), are the result of a collaboration with the artist Adam Lowe and his artists’ collective Factum Arte Madrid who are at the forefront of 3D facsimile production. These works are based on stills from films Horsfield made at “Festa dei Gigli” in Nola (Italy), and stills from a film made at a concert of the Italian group “99 Posse” in Naples.
The exhibition also includes three new tapestries conceived by Horsfield with his long time collaborators Marcos Luduena-Segre, and Roland and Christian Dekeukelaere at Flanders Tapestries in Belgium, The Arciconfraternity of Santa Monica, Chiesa SS. Annunziata. Sorrento, April 2010 (2012) and Above the Bay of Naples from Via Partenope, Naples, September 2008 (2012). The last tapestry, Broadway, 14th day, 18 minutes after dusk. New York, September 2001 (2012) has as its subject the site of Ground Zero shortly after September 11.
The New York Times
by Ken Johnson
June, 2012
In Paris in the mid-1950s the Swedish photographer Christer Strömholm (1918-2002) gravitated to the red-light district around the Place Blanche, where he was drawn to a subculture of cross-dressing young men, many of whom worked as prostitutes to earn enough money for sex-change operations. The stocky, middle-aged photographer with a beard and military haircut hung out with them for more than a decade and photographed them on the street at night and in bars and hotel rooms with a coolly affectionate eye.
In 1983, Strömholm’s noirish black-and-white pictures of his sexually ambiguous subjects were published in a volume that has since become a classic of book-length photographic essays, and it helped establish him as an eminence of post-World War IIphotography. “Les Amies de Place Blanche” at the International Center of Photography takes its title from that tome and presents 40 of the more than 140 pictures that appeared in it. An expanded edition of the hard-to-find first edition — with new essays, letters, contact sheets and autobiographic reminiscences — has recently been published. It is a fascinating time capsule.
Craigie Horsfield: Slow Time and the Present
June 10 - August 26, 2012
Kunsthalle Basel
Opening: Saturday, June 9, 7pm
Introduction by Adam Szymczyk, Director of Kunsthalle Basel
Guided tours through the exhibition: Each Sunday at 3pm
Further events of the education department:
Thu, 21.06., 16.08. and 23.08., 1pm: Art break - a short guided tour for lunch
Sun, 16.06., 3pm: Guided tour in English
Sun, 19.06., 3pm: I Spy with My Little Eye! - Guided tour for children
The exhibition is generously supported by LUMA Foundation. With the support of Stanley Thomas Johnson Stiftung.
Steinenberg 7 - CH-4051 Basel
Tel +41 61 206 99 00 - Fax +41 61 206 99 19info@kunsthallebasel.chhttp://www.kunsthallebasel.ch
Opening hours: Tue/Wed/Fri 11am-6pm · Thu 11am-8.30pm · Sat/Sun 11am-5pm
Admission: CHF 10.-/6.- incl. S AM Swiss Architecture Museum
Hyperallergic
by Hrag Vartanian
May, 2012
Painter, author and critic Mira Schor’s current show at Marvelli Gallery delves into the world of language. The works on linen and paper chart a world where the individual appears in a form of stasis, holding a book or laptop, looking at things — windows, paintings, screens — and generating rectangles (and the occasional oval) which seem to speak, label, think and even dream.
All the works are rather small — the drawings are often larger than the paintings — and they appear to meditate on the state of the artist and intellectual, both labels that fittingly describe Schor.
The show is titled Voice and Speech, but there’s an erie silence to these works. The artist’s hand is alway present and the paint is often treated like ink, flowing with a dark contrast across washes of paint, defining space and and giving each rectangle it’s own character.
What fascinated me about the show was her drive to collide language with imagery to create something new. Her cursive text tells a story but so do her characters. It’s a word of solitary contemplation, with words, with pictures, all coming together and making something new.
The New Yorker
by Elissa Curtis
April, 2012
For half a century, Larry Fink has captured unguarded moments in often highly orchestrated events: a wayward glance amid a star-studded Hollywood party; the quiet contemplation before a grand debut; the brush of a hand or nervous fidgeting under a tablecloth. And so in January, we commissioned Fink to cover Newt Gingrich’s run for the Republican Presidential nomination, and sent him to Florida to join Gingrich as he stumped across the state. Though Fink’s politics could not have been more divergent from those of the subject he was hired to cover, he put aside his ideological differences to cover the campaign as he saw it: in the gestures, the off-moments, and the relationships between the candidate and his supporters. “I am a merry maker just seeking to play within the midst of the energy of world events,” Fink told me.
As Gingrich prepares to bow out of the race, we take a look back at his campaign through this legendary photographer’s eye.
The New York Times
by Roberta Smith
April, 2012
Mira Schor’s small, sharp, quirky paintings have been thorns in the side of the medium for more than three decades now. Sparely cartoonish in style, at least partly feminist in intent and always linguistically inclined, they can evoke the elliptical eyeglass paintings of Michael Hurson and the prankish, word-punning early paintings of Neil Jenney that were grouped, in the long-ago 1970s, in a short-lived trend called New Image Painting.
Ms. Schor’s latest efforts are among her best yet. Abjuring largeness and portentous brushwork as before, these works tackle more directly the immense subject of creativity itself and diagram it in ways both pointedly humorous and expansive.
Their main character is a seemingly female stick figure whose rectilinear head could symbolize a blank canvas, page, screen or thought balloon. She appears against robustly worked monochromes of white, yellow or green that are equipped with occasional doors and windows, and imply rooms, studios or gardens of one’s own, available for private cultivation. The single red painting, a lightly hallucinatory work titled “The Song of the Cardinal,” suggests nature as a source of inspiration.
Artforum
by Britany Salsbury
April, 2012
Since the late 1970s, Mira Schor has integrated text into works that interrogate the formal and theoretical concerns of artistic production. Her current show could be a summation of this long-term project, as the paintings and drawings on view metaphorically depict transitions from thought to action, and from process to product. In many of the works, figures are seen reclining in space as if caught in reverie. Often the figure holds a book, which underscores the scholarly, meditative nature of the moment captured. Rendered in loosely drawn layers of lines, these barely-there surrogates for the artist are situated between words—such as VOICE and SPEECH, as well as THE SELF, THE WORK, and THE WORLD—in interconnected shapes suggesting the thought process.
The feminist concerns that so critically inform Schor’s output manifest most clearly in a small group of paintings that transfer the exhibition’s overarching theme of interiority to a broader social space and reinforce a connection between the personal and the political. The Dreams of All of Us (all works cited, 2012) shows a sleeping figure surrounded by the words of the title. In this instance, a fusion of individual and community implies the possibility of enacting social transformation, and this bond reinforces the importance of collectivity and empowerment within Schor’s practice. The work is hung alongside three others of identical size and similar composition; these four pieces, taken together, can be seen as a sequential progression into and out of darkness that culminates with the final yellow work, This Is the Future. In this work, the shapes that held words in the first painting have become incandescent and illuminate the awakened figure who now reads a book while assuming the reclining position featured in other paintings. The sequence resembles a summation of the political concerns in Schor’s oeuvre, namely the individual as an ideal site for the germination of resistance.
Artinfo
by Chloe Wyma
April, 2012
Name: Mira Schor
Age: 61
Occupation: Artist and writer
City/Neighborhood: New York — recently returned to childhood home on Upper West Side.
What project are you working on now?
I want to follow up on some ideas that came up in the last series of paintings I finished this winter for my current show at Marvelli Gallery, “The Dreams of All of Us” series. The last one is an intense cadmium yellow light and I called it “This Is the Future.” I was thinking of the Occupy movement and chose to give the series (which follows a collective dreaming sleeper through the darkest night) an optimistic outcome, but the title also refers to the immediate future of my work: I want to use more intense color. I have a show planned for CB1 Gallery in Los Angeles next year and I think it would be great to have vibrant, intense hues for that show, but I also may end up following the path of darkness, so I can’t be sure where the work will go. Mainly I just want to re-immerse myself in the rhythm of working. I also hope to get back to writing for my blog, “A Year of Positive Thinking,” which I had to put on hold while I prepared for the show while also teaching.
This is your first solo show in New York in some time. How has your work developed since your “Book/s of Pages” in 2010?
“Book/s of Pages” included big digital prints made from very hi-res scans of the small notebook drawings that are an important part of my process. It’s all part of my quest for one of the holy grails of painting, how to bring the freedom, spontaneity, and investigative spirit of drawing into the sculptural materiality of paint.
Many of the paintings feature a little stick figure reading or sleeping. Who is this figure and what does she or he represent?
The figure is a sketchily drawn avatar of myself, wearing glasses because at this point my reading glasses are so much an organic part of my head that I sometimes forget to take them off when I turn out the light at night. Interesting that you ask “he or she” because the figure is indeed barely gendered, even barely embodied: when I formulated an agenda for my work when I was in my early twenties, it was to bring the experience of living inside a female body — with a mind — into high art in as intact a form as possible. I’m so glad I was so prescient in adding “with a mind,” because once woman moves past nubile youthfulness, her body is of no interest to representation and maybe even to herself, so I assured myself a lifetime of possibilities. My avatar is a thinking person walking around, sleeping, reading, looking. She is a scholar, an ancient philosopher, and an eight-year old girl vividly perceiving the world’s beauties and its terrors.
Two Coats of Paint
by Sharon Butler
April, 2012
Inspired by Raphael Rubenstein’s approach to the Artseen section of The Brooklyn Rail, EMAIL is a new section featuring short posts based on notes written to other artists.
Hi Mira,
I stopped by your show on Saturday and particularly love the white painting on the wall near the office: esp. the relative chalkiness of the paint, the visible decision-making around the feet, and the whoosh of..whatever that is (!) going through the windows. The tension between text and image as well as the small scale successfully address the urge to make work that’s personal, political and conceptual (all at once) that you talked about during your lecture at American University. Sometimes words, especially for writer-artists, are so important to the process, they can’t be eliminated—even in a medium as visual as painting. But, interestingly, I find the pieces with faint or no text the most compelling…and yet, they need to be seen alongside the text-ier ones for the lightness (and absence) to be as powerful. That thin, yellow-y tracing paper is a perfect choice for the ink studies in the backroom—the flimsiness is intriguing…and lovely. Congratulations on a fine show. But perhaps I should be posting this to the blog…?
Anyway, please tell your students I enjoyed visiting their studios on Friday—thanks for the invitation. I will print and sign the PDF and put it in the mail today or tomorrow.
All best,
Sharon
The Huffington Post
by Roger Denson
April, 2012
There seems to be something structurally incongruent if not absurdly wrong with an analogy between painting and the human voice, even more so between painting and speech. Comparing an instrument of sound and the collective faculty for shared, spoken language with a manipulation of visual, formal components built up into graphic signs is apt to be riddled with unbridgeable voids of difference. And yet Mira Schor, a prominent New York critic-painter for the past three decades, has made an alleged correspondence of voice, speech and painting the thematic center and motivating ethos for her latest series of paintings, all of which she has compiled under the coyly taunting title, Voice and Speech.
