Tomma Abts, Ginny Bishton, Whitney Claflin,
Carlfriedrich Claus, Ralston Crawford, Norman Lewis,
Agnes Martin, Mohammad Nasrallah, Daniela Ortiz,
Luis Inca Ramos, Kay Sage, Max Hooper Schneider,
Ben Shahn, Hedda Sterne, Gili Tal, Stewart Uoo,
Alice Valenti, Ulla Wiggen

Vista View
an exhibition curated by
Caleb Considine

31 January 2019 -
20 April 2019

opening reception on Wednesday,
30 January, 6-8 pm

Vista View

 

Tomma Abts, Ginny Bishton, Whitney Claflin, Carlfriedrich Claus, Ralston Crawford,
Norman Lewis, Agnes Martin, Mohammad Nasrallah, Daniela Ortiz, Luis Inca Ramos,
Kay Sage, Max Hooper Schneider, Ben Shahn, Hedda Sterne, Gili Tal, Stewart Uoo,
Alice Valenti, Ulla Wiggen

 

an exhibition curated by Caleb Considine

 

31 January - 20 April 2019
Opening Wednesday, 30 January, 6-8 pm

 

The works in “Vista View” are grouped around landscape and its abstraction, or alternately abstractions oriented toward terrain and space (as opposed to gesture with its invocation of figure). This is a very broad theme, and the curatorial process (my first) was in large part aesthetic. At first I wasn’t sure what this might mean, but a friend recommended that we try reading Max Raphael, who had an idea of materialist aesthetics written in the 30’s which did appeal to me. For Raphael, a materialist aesthetics meant not just decoding the ideological myths to which art gives form as the imaginary shared material interest between the ruling class and everyone else; materiality was also just as important as literal art materials, a “means of representation” not necessarily alienated like the means of production and communication, but potentially disalienating by engaging the active viewer in infinite reconstruction. The work of art leads to the process of creation: this was his signature inversion. Sense perception in aesthetics was important to Raphael not as an isolated, medium-specific category like opticality, but the opposite, as part of bringing together many faculties, a voluntarism that he explains when writing about Cézanne’s Mont Saint-Victoire: “The artist’s will must intervene because there is an antinomy between the subject’s aspiration to exercise all his faculties and the world of things which had become fragmentary and specialized in Cézanne’s period - the antinomy between the mind that resists its historically determined self-alienation and a world of objects which has already become alienated.”(1) For Raphael, aesthetics spoke of our relationship to the material outside world by crystalizing its own intricate interior logic, not in a “private mythology” but rather “reality enhanced.”

 

This was interesting to me, and it could be applied in the way he meant it - as a predominantly formal theory - to some of the work in the show. The way he writes about solid shapes of color in tension creating a ‘fullness’ of space in Cézanne recalled for me Alice Valenti’s tree paintings, an atmosphere with depth but constructed from blocks of color that push back on one another in their own quasi-autonomous logic. There’s a byzantine complexity to the logic of Raphael’s aesthetic criteria, which may be part of why he’s so under-known today (despite pleas from John Tagg, John Berger, and Michèle Barrett, who wrote by far the best study on him in English); but it does make sense, and the kind of forceful hermeneutic he describes in detail made me think of Tomma Abts: “In the case of works that do achieve effective form, we are impelled to view them over and over, recreating them each time; the process may go on indefinitely.”(2) This is especially true of Abts, from whose work I learned to look at painting this way.

 

Of course Raphael’s unyielding Marxism didn’t do him any favors in his life, nor in the appraisal of his work since his suicide in penury in 1952. Carlfriedrich Clauss, also a lifelong Marxist, was nonetheless spurned by the GDR, and his work, too, has found little footing in the west. While aesthetically he diverges from Raphael’s scope, in system of belief they distinctly share a universalist humanist revolutionary outlook, whose pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will leaned toward the later. Politically, Mohammad Nasrallah and Daniela Ortiz come up against real enemies in different ways, one imaginative, looking to the future, one directly confrontational. Ortiz’s “97 House Maids” casts the dehumanization of domestic labor back at the most cherished possession of the ruling class, its children, while the “1st of May Camp” broadcasts owners’ homes in the workers’ quarters as a public threat to this order of property.

 

From 1963 to 1969 Ulla Wiggen painted the interiority of machines. Small enough to become abstract and open outwards to an evocation of larger socio-technical organization, these circuit boards confuse our sense of scale. Made just prior to developments in nanotechnology and atomic science which shrank machine functions to a scale categorically inapprehensible to the human senses, the curious metaphysical dimension to Wiggen’s paintings comes from the feeling that you could touch these tiny machines and thereby experience their systematic largess. The paintings have genuine originality in this probing machinic interiority, a quality which Raphael did not think was a myth, and he sharply distinguished from the “petty bourgeois fiction” of artistic inspiration: “Originality of constitution is not the urge to be different from others, to produce something entirely new; it is (in the etymological sense) the grasping of the origin, the roots of both ourselves and things.”(3)

 

Caleb Considine

 

(1) Max Raphael, The Demands of Art, trans. Norbert Guterman (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968), p. 33.
(2) Ibid., p. 224.
(3) Ibid., p. 196.

Tomma Abts, Ginny Bishton, Whitney Claflin,
Carlfriedrich Claus, Ralston Crawford, Norman Lewis,
Agnes Martin, Mohammad Nasrallah, Daniela Ortiz,
Kay Sage, Max Hooper Schneider, Ben Shahn,
Hedda Sterne, Gili Tal, Stewart Uoo, Alice Valenti,
Ulla Wiggen

Vista View
an exhibition curated by
Caleb Considine
17 East 82nd Street, New York

Vista View
an exhibition curated by
Caleb Considine
installation view Galerie Buchholz, New York 2019

Ralston Crawford

Untitled, 1950
oil on canvas
51 x 63.5 cm
installation view Galerie Buchholz, New York 2019

Ralston Crawford

Untitled, 1950
oil on canvas
51 x 63.5 cm

Daniela Ortiz

“1st of May Camp”, 2012
c-print
40.5 x 70 cm
&
“97 House Maids”, 2010
artist book
installation view Galerie Buchholz, New York 2019

Vista View
an exhibition curated by
Caleb Considine
installation view Galerie Buchholz, New York 2019

Hedda Sterne

Untitled, c. 1950
oil and spray enamel on canvas
106.5 x 86.5 cm

Norman Lewis

Untitled, 1964
oil on paper
86.5 x 57 cm

Carlfriedrich Claus

“Handreflexion”, 1974
lithography on tracing paper, doublesided
48.5 x 37 cm

Vista View
an exhibition curated by
Caleb Considine
installation view Galerie Buchholz, New York 2019

Vista View
an exhibition curated by
Caleb Considine
installation view Galerie Buchholz, New York 2019

Agnes Martin

Untitled, 1963
ink on paper
20.5 x 19.5 cm

Ben Shahn

“Public Sale”, 1956
ink on paper
25.5 x 30.5 cm

Ben Shahn

“Bountiful Harvest”, 1944
tempera on board
96.5 x 71 cm

Vista View
an exhibition curated by
Caleb Considine
installation view Galerie Buchholz, New York 2019

Gili Tal

“The Spectacular Instant”, 2018
Lazertran and varnish on canvas
170 x 120 cm

Gili Tal

“London Is Open”, 2018
Lazertran and varnish on canvas
170 x 120 cm

Agnes Martin

Untitled, 1977
watercolor and graphite on paper
23 x 23 cm

Vista View
an exhibition curated by
Caleb Considine
installation view Galerie Buchholz, New York 2019

Vista View
an exhibition curated by
Caleb Considine
installation view Galerie Buchholz, New York 2019

Kay Sage

“Third Paragraph”, 1953
oil on canvas
98.5 x 81 cm

Stewart Uoo

“Vampire Transfusion (after Yoshiaki Kawajiri)”, 2019
sumi ink, watercolor on polypropylene paper
30.5 x 45.5 cm

Stewart Uoo

“Runway to the Vampire Castle Spacecraft (after Yoshiaki Kawajiri)”, 2019
sumi ink, watercolor on polypropylene paper
23 x 30.5 cm

Tomma Abts

“Ehme”, 2002
acrylic and oil on canvas
48 x 38 cm

Vista View
an exhibition curated by
Caleb Considine
installation view Galerie Buchholz, New York 2019

Alice Valenti

“Warm Night Trees #2”, 2018
oil on panel
25.5 x 20.5 cm

Alice Valenti

“Warm Night Trees #1”, 2018
oil on panel
25.5 x 20.5 cm

Alice Valenti

“Rock”, 2017
oil on panel
10 x 15 cm

Alice Valenti

“Rocks on the Windowsill”, 2017
oil on panel
12.5 x 18 cm

Carlfriedrich Claus

“Kombinat Nuklearblatt 4”, 1990
serigraph
image: 26 x 40.5 cm

Carlfriedrich Claus

“Eulenspiegel-Reflex”, 1974
offset lithography on tracing paper
72 x 50.5 cm

Vista View
an exhibition curated by
Caleb Considine
installation view Galerie Buchholz, New York 2019

Ulla Wiggen

“Planet”, 1968
acrylic on wood panel
28 x 32 cm

Ulla Wiggen

“Pulsgivare”, 1967
acrylic on wood panel
80 x 75 cm

Ulla Wiggen

“Kanalväljare”, 1967
acrylic on wood panel
60 x 80 cm

Ulla Wiggen

“Oändligt variabel”, 1968
acrylic on wood panel
53 x 60 cm

Ulla Wiggen

“Förstärkare”, 1964
gouache on wood panel and gauze
35 x 25 cm

Ulla Wiggen

“Motstånd”, 1967
acrylic on wood panel
70 x 70 cm

Vista View
an exhibition curated by
Caleb Considine
installation view Galerie Buchholz, New York 2019

Mohammad Nasrallah

Untitled, 2013
oil on paper
50 x 70 cm

Vista View
an exhibition curated by
Caleb Considine
installation view Galerie Buchholz, New York 2019

Luis Inca Ramos

“Mystery Tunnel”, 2015
acrylic and mixed media on canvas
61 x 76 cm

Max Hooper Schneider

“Enchanter’s Station”, 2012
marker and ink on paper, acrylic, hardware
paper: 23 x 30.5 cm
acrylic: 28 x 35.5 x 2.5 cm

Max Hooper Schneider

“Template Morphogenesis”, 2012
marker and ink on paper, acrylic, hardware
paper: 23 x 30.5 cm
acrylic: 28 x 35.5 x 2.5 cm

Vista View
an exhibition curated by
Caleb Considine
installation view Galerie Buchholz, New York 2019

Ginny Bishton

“Meadow”, 2007
photo collage on paper
71 x 105.5 cm

Whitney Claflin

“Sender”, 2019
oil on linen
35.5 x 41 cm

Ginny Bishton

“Walking 12”, 2001
photo collage on paper
76 x 81.5 cm

Ulla Wiggen

“Magnetiskt Minne”, 1968
acrylic on wood panel
52 x 52 cm