Diagonal Curve

Bridget Riley - Untitled (Diagonal Curve) 1966

Derrick Adams

Derrick Adams is a multidisciplinary New York-based artist working in performance, video, sound and 2D and 3D realms.  His practice focuses on the fragmentation and manipulation of structure and surface, exploring self image and forward projection.  

A recipient of a 2009 Louis Comfort Tiffany Award, and 2014 S.J. Weiler Award, Adams received his MFA from Columbia University, BFA from Pratt Institute, and is a Skowhegan and Marie Walsh Sharpe alum.  

His exhibition and performance highlights include: Greater New York '05, MoMA PS1; Open House: Working In Brooklyn '04, Brooklyn Museum of Art; PERFORMA ‘05, ‘13, ‘15; Radical Presence & The Shadows Took Shape, Studio Museum in Harlem; The Channel, Brooklyn Academy of Music; and is in the permanent collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Studio Museum in Harlem, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and the Birmingham Museum of Art.  

His work can be seen in New York at Tilton Gallery; Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago; Gallerie Anne de Villepoix, Paris; and Vigo Gallery, London.

Go Stand Next to the Mountain (Ask the President) from Derrick Adams on Vimeo.

An unscripted performance "Ask The President" uses the image of the dollar as the framework to reflect the monument/mountain while the artist animates the hectic duties of our leader presented as a lesson in how to apply the 5 W's we once learned as children. This performance is set to an original soundtrack entitled, The President’s March.

Go Stand Next to the Mountain (Video Interludes) from Derrick Adams on Vimeo.

“Go Stand Next to the Mountain” is a live performance with a portable 5 sided sculpture and video projections presented at The Kitchen, NYC in 2010. This selected video component was presented as projected interludes between acts and borrows from a style mostly inspired by educational television programming. The performance compares man to mountain, mountain to monument and monument to monumental figure. The 5 short interludes: “GO,” “Stand,” “Next,” “M is for...,” and “Word Play”; reinforce the theme as well as deconstruct the concept of the performance.

Current Mood

Keith Haring - Untitled (1982)

Selected Small Paintings

Ralph Goings is a realist painter who has exhibited in the USA, Europe and Japan and is represented in museums and private collections here and abroad. He is recognized as one of the original members of the Hyper-Realist or Photo-Realist group of the late 1960’s.

10 am is When You Come to Me

10 am is When You Come to Me is a multipart work, consisting of twenty hand-painted sheets of musical score paper depicting the hands of the artist and those of her assistant Jerry Gorovoy. The artist’s hands are discerned by her wedding ring. Bourgeois’s and Gorovoy’s hands, painted in various shades of red and pink or outlined in black, adopt a number of poses. Sometimes only Bourgeois or Gorovoy’s hands are represented, at others they reach across toward each other or meet. The etching in the top left corner depicts a clock, with hands set at 10 am. The hands of the clock are composed of a nude male and female figure, with the nude male in the place of the minute hand and the nude female in the place of the hour hand. Across the image of the clock the title of the work, ‘10AM is when you come to me’, is written in red paint. Each sheet is framed individually and hung in a grid with five rows of four frames each. Bourgeois produced this work in 2006. The artist made ten unique versions, including a larger-scale one featuring forty sheets.

Gorovoy was a frequent model for other works by Bourgeois that feature hands. For instance the sculpture The Welcoming Hands 1996 (Jardin des Tuileries, Paris), which depicts the artist’s hands clutching Gorovoy’s in bronze. Bourgeois met Gorovoy in the late 1970s; he was her assistant, close friend and confidant for over thirty years. She remarked of him: ‘When you are at the bottom of the well, you look around and say, who is going to get me out? In this case it is Jerry who comes and he presents a rope, and I hook myself on the rope and he pulls me out.’ (Quoted in Morris 2007, p.150.) The depiction of hands and arms reaching across the expanses of paper in this work parallels Bourgeois’s description of being pulled out of a well, suggesting that Gorovoy’s presence remedied the artist’s feeling of isolation. The title of the work, 10 am is When You Come to Me, is a reference to the time of the morning when Gorovoy would arrive at Bourgeois’s studio or home to begin their working day together and thus reflects the reliability and familiarity of their daily routine. Indeed because the work was made by drawing around their hands, it could also be seen as a direct record or index of their shared time in the studio. Yet while it is possible to read a personal narrative into this work, the interplay of the two sets of hands also reflects the nature of close friendships in general. This theme appears differently in other works by Bourgeois that use the motif of the hand to symbolise dependency and support, such Nature Study 1986 (Tate AL00228).

The artist’s use of red in 10 am is When You Come to Me is characteristic of her work on paper. Bourgeois said: ‘Red is an affirmation at any cost – regardless of the dangers in fighting – of contradiction, of aggression. It’s symbolic of the intensity of the emotions involved.’ (Quoted in Askew and d’Offay 2013, p.85.) The colour red here might symbolise the emotional intensity and passion present in this intimate friendship as well as the warmth, both literal and figurative, of two bodies interacting. The sequence of different poses in this work also demonstrates the quotidian quality of Bourgeois and Gorovoy’s relationship. The distinct composition of each sheet alludes to moments of disconnection as well as connection, perhaps suggesting another reading of the work as a map of their working relationship and the varied successes of artist and assistant to realise a work. Indeed the process of making is highlighted in the splatters and impressions of paint marking the paper.

The use of musical score paper further emphasises the rhythm of Bourgeois and Gorovoy’s relationship, although the absence of notes suggests the unscripted openness of their interaction. When the full extent of the grid is visible, the staves become almost imperceptible and the multiple gestures read more like choreography. In this way the work elevates the habitual gestures of touching, reaching and holding into a dance.

The Reader

John Koch (American, 1909–1978) - The Reader (c.1955)

Intimités

Félix Vallotton - Intimités

From the moment they were printed, the series of woodcuts with the title Intimités was considered to be a prestigious project. When the avant-garde publication La Revue blanche printed the series in an exclusive edition of 25 in 1898, the modern art of printmaking was more popular than ever in the Paris art world. Among his fellow printmakers, Félix Vallotton was one of the most renowned artists. He was recognized as an innovator of the medium of the woodcut and his prints dating from 1896 to 1898 are the culmination of his career.

Intimités has always been recognized as his most impressive work and even in his own time they were already more appreciated than his paintings. With these ten dark woodcuts, their black surfaces cut through by a few white lines, Vallotton probed the emotional lives of the Paris bourgeoisie. He portrayed the eternal struggle between man and woman by means of theatrical scenes and suggestive titles, such as The Lie, The Money and The Irreparable. Vallotton brought to the surface his cynical view on love. Women are portrayed as superficial, calculating creatures: cruel, insatiable and triumphing.

Repose

John White Alexander - Repose,1895

Alexander, who lived in Paris during the 1890s, achieved international success with his studies of female figures gracefully posed in elegant interiors. In this example, the provocative facial expression and supple curves reflect the contemporary French taste for sensual images of women as well as the undulating linear rhythms of Art Nouveau. With its model decoratively attired in a sweep of white fabric, "Repose" was lampooned in a French magazine as a portrayal of Loïe Fuller (1862–1928), the American dancer famous for manipulating swirling folds of silk in her performances at the Folies Bergère in Paris.

Dahye Choi

From "It's Nice That":

For a lot of artists, the first brush with paint usually comes at an early age. This was not too dissimilar for Seoul-based artist Dahye Choi, who graduated from art college and “rarely thought about anything other than art.” At this time, 2009, she was exhibiting her first solo show and worked across both illustration and painting. She thought that “without a doubt” painting was the best thing she could do – but little did she know that she would come to regret it.

Concerning Pollock

The Nerdwriter - How Art Arrived At Jackson Pollock

There’s an overlooked reason for Pollock’s fame. Even if you love him, you might not know the name of the man who made him famous.

Jackson Pollock is one of the 20th century’s most famous artists. But do you know the critic who made his reputation?

Clement Greenberg is a well-known name in the art world, but not necessarily to art fans. However, he earned a reputation as one of the most influential art critics in the 20th century, whose legacy included the canonization of Jackson Pollock.

Abstract expressionist art needed vocal champions to support challenging, unique work, and Greenberg was the most powerful and vocal in his defense of the art and, in particular, Jackson Pollock. Greenberg went from tie salesman to intellectual in less than a decade, thanks to strongly worded arguments for a new artform. Jackson Pollock was one of his favorite artists, and the two spent time together socially as they simultaneously climbed in the art world.

Is Clement Greenberg the reason that Jackson Pollock is so famous? He’s definitely a part of it — and understanding the role of Greenberg and critics like him can be a useful tool to understanding art in the 20th century.

Overrated is a series that takes a look at the things we all know — the books, the trends, and the ideas that have become iconic — and answers the question: “Why is this so famous"?

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