SHADOWBOXING: Photographs by Nona Faustine and Paintings by Kit White

October 11, 2019 - December 31, 2021

In 2018, Nona Faustine and Kit White were invited by curator Lisa Banner to share their work in a panel discussion at The Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. Though they work with different media and emerged from different backgrounds, their worked resonated. Both have a strong personal tie to history and view the revisiting of long held assumptions about the past as necessity to move forward. History is something alive and personal in their work; something which has forged individual identities and plays a critical role in how we perceive the present.

Kit White: Walls and Occupied Spaces

April 16, 2019 — August 31, 2019

Opening Reception: April 16, 2019, 6-8pm

Kit White, Fortress, 2019; Photo transfer and oil on linen; 67 x 76 inches

The spaces in these paintings exist as metaphorical landscapes occupied by linear structures derived from both the organic and inorganic.

Kit White’s new work incorporates photographic images into his paintings as poignant backdrops to abstract lines. The photograph provides a material, worldly context for the drawing, which, though abstract, represents the real as an analog mark.

This new series of works seek out images of land that have been scarred by conflict. Initially, the images were of contested spaces of what we have traditionally referred to as the Middle East, places where competing claims to land have led to war-like confrontations. Conflicts of all kinds, violent and non-violent, surround us and announce themselves through walls, barriers, and borders. These collisions, not always physical, are manifestations of the fraught politics of occupation, both actual and symbolic. The artist also found himself drawn to the photographs of Matthew Brady (1822 – 1896) and others of the Civil War, and meditating on the figurative wall born of that conflict, a psychological division that continues to separate us.

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PRESS

Selected Works

HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT

Objects Common & Curious - Sequel

September 27, 2018 — March 30, 2019

Opening Reception: September 27, 2018, 6-8pm

Joseph Cornell, Pocket Object, 1949-1950; mixed media construction; 3 1/2 x 2 1/4 x 3/4 inches

FreedmanArt is pleased to present its next exhibition, which explores the transformation of common objects. "Hiding in Plain Sight celebrates the artist's power to transform the ordinary. As revision becomes visionary, art becomes revelatory, and we begin to see common objects as the bearers of previously unimagined possibilities." - Carter Ratcliff

Traditionally, works of art have been made of marble, bronze, or oil paint on well- prepared canvases. Modernism turned artists’ attention to fugitive materials. At a Parisian dinner party, in 1925, Alexander Calder made the figure of a chicken from a piece of bread and a hairpin. A third option is to endow a disposable object with the permanence of art—as Calder did when he converted a Ballantine beer can intoSamba Rattle, circa 1948, a musical instrument complete with a wooden handle and noise-making pebbles.

Mounting a bicycle wheel atop a kitchen stool, Marcel Duchamp produced the first found-object sculpture. The year was 1913. Just a year earlier, Pablo Picasso and George Braque had pasted scraps of newsprint and wallpaper to the surfaces of their paintings. Dubbed collage, variations on Braque and Picasso’s innovation quickly proliferated in the work of Kurt Schwitters, Jean Arp, and scores of other artists. In three dimensions, Dadaists and Surrealists assembled common objects with wild exuberance. This incursion of the common, the found, and the readymade released artists from the obligation to employ traditional skills. The very idea of art was transformed.

Though we usually locate this development in the early decades of the twentieth century, there is no limit to the possibilities it unleashed. The potential of the common object is constantly renewed, as we see in work by the younger artists included in this exhibition.

With intricate, even meditative patterns of embroidery, Nicola Ginzel rescues cardboard boxes, paper coffee cups, and other ephemera from oblivion, thereby giving the disposable the permanence—and expressiveness—of art.

Finding new uses for common objects, artists redefine not only art but also life. If anything can be art, then the border between life and art becomes difficult to locate and may even vanish—or not. For we don’t usually feel that we are surrounded by artworks as we navigate the world of common objects. It is only when an artist gives a common object a new meaning, a meaning richer and more expansive than it usually has, that the art-life border vanishes, and we sense the possibility of seeing everything in an aesthetic light. As Joseph Cornell said, “the transformation of persons, places, objects” brings an “exaltation of experience.”

Asked about the found objects in his sculptures. Mark di Suvero said that “the real object ... is like a springboard into dreams, poetry, and the feeling—the feeling of one’s life.” Whenever an artist finds a new use for a common object, it illuminates our lives as well, helping us see the potential for transformation everywhere, even—or especially—in ourselves.

In the Spring Collection series (2016) by Jean Shin, leather scraps produced by the Marc Jacobs fashion house have the impact of primary forms. Leftover from the manufacture of handbags, her materials have an unexpected formal power—and a physical presence that evokes metaphors of mapping, the body, and more.

- Carter Ratcliff, September 2018

Artists in exhibition include:

Thomas Hart Benton (1889-1975)
Alexander Calder (1898-1976)
Joseph Cornell (1903-1972)
Mark di Suvero (b. 1933)
Helen Frankenthaler (1928-2011)
Nancy Graves (1939-1995)
Nicola Ginzel (b. 1968)
Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)
Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948)
Jean Shin (b. 1971)
Richard Stankiewicz (1922-1983)
Frank Stella (b. 1936)
Richard Tuttle (b. 1941)
John Walker (b. 1939)

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PRESS

COLORS

February 15 - August 17, 2018

Including artwork by Josef Albers, Lee Bontecou, Jack Bush, Friedel Dzubas, Sam Francis, Helen Frankenthaler, Glenn Goldberg, Nancy Graves, Stephen Greene, Grace Hartigan, Hans Hofmann, Paul Jenkins, Alfred Leslie, Robert Motherwell, Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Larry Poons, Susan Roth, Kurt Schwitters, David Smith, Theodoros Stamos, Frank Stella, Esteban Vicente, John Walker, Kit White, and Jack Youngerman.

Kit White: The Nature of This Place

March 21, 2017 - September 30, 2017
Opening Reception: March 21, 2017, 5.30 - 7.30pm

FreedmanArt is pleased to present The Nature of This Place, an exhibition of paintings by Kit White, opening Tuesday, March 21, 2017. From 5:30pm to 7:30pm, FreedmanArt will host a reception and a book signing with the artist to celebrate the release of the new monograph by Carter Ratcliff, Kit White: Line Into Form.

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Kit White, Saboteur, 2004, Oil on wood, 19 x 23 inches

Personalized

Friendship, Celebration, Gratitude

October 19, 2016 - March 4, 2017

Jules Olitski, Embraced Cream, 2005; Acrylic on canvas; 29 1/4 x 40 inches

This jewel of an exhibition features 34 mostly small works that were given by the artists who created them to friends—fellow artists, dealers, collectors, curators and critics.

Most of the entries on the checklist list the owners demurely as “private collection,” but some of the inscriptions are more revealing.

Thus we have a colored postcard with a Kenneth Noland target image, cleverly decorated with verticals on either side of the target to suggest (to my twisted mind, at least) the impression of a place setting, with fork, plate and knife.

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Glenn Goldberg: Of Leaves and Clouds

Glenn Goldberg, From the Jungle (3), 2011, Watercolor and ink on paper, 9 1/6 x 6 1/2 inches

Of Leaves and Clouds

March 5, 2016 - September 24, 2016
Opening Reception: March 5, 2106, 5.30 - 8pm

FreedmanArt is pleased to present “Of Leaves and Clouds,” an invitational exhibition featuring paintings, works on paper, and collages by the New York artist Glenn Goldberg, opening Saturday, March 5, 2016, with a reception for the artist from 5:30pm-8:00pm. The subject, “Of Leaves and Clouds,” will include themes present throughout decades of Goldberg’s work.

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Passion and Commitment: The Art of Luther Brady

Sam Francis (1923-1994), Untitled #27, 1959, Oil and plastic emulsion on paper mounted to panel, 15 x 11 inches

October 30, 2015 - February 11, 2016

FreedmanArt takes great pleasure in presenting “Passion and Commitment: The Art of Luther Brady,” opening to the public October 30, 2015. Dr. Luther W. Brady, Jr. is a world renowned oncologist and honored arts patron.

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Art in the Making

October 30, 2014 - April 18, 2015
Opening Reception: October 30, 2014, 6:00-8:30pm

FreedmanArt is pleased to present Art in the Making; an exhibition honoring art, the history of whose making is part of its meaning, with over twenty artists included. Art in the Making opens Thursday, October 30.

In a time of constant change and advances in the methods of “making,” this exhibition hopes to provide a lens into time-honored art institutions, as triggered by the overlapping of the 50th anniversary of the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting & Sculpture, and the 140th anniversary of The Art Students League of New York. This brings us to appreciate original and early approaches to teaching, learning, and making; as relevant today as in decades and centuries gone by.

 

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Art of the Making, 2014

Carved, Cast, Crushed, Constructed

March 8, 2014 - October 18, 2014

John Chamberlain, Scratched Echo, 1991; Painted and stainless steel; 7 3/4 x 10 1/2 x 9 5/8 inches

FreedmanArt is pleased to present Carved, Cast, Crushed, Constructed, an exhibition of a diverse group of artists seen through the lens of the many distinctive methods in the making of sculpture, from David Smith’s 1943 marble Sewing Machine to Frank Stella’s 2011 mixed media construction.

This exhibition highlights a choice selection of three-dimentional work, by approximately fifteen artists, whose sculpture can be further appreciated by the use of their inventive, creative techniques and materials.

The works on exhibition, with several significant loans, include Alexander Calder’s 1948 Samba Rattle; to the age old lost wax process of Nancy Graves’ poly-chromed sculpture; and to that of John Chamberlain’s 1991 crushed and colored metal forms.

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Jules Olitski on an Intimate Scale... and Friends

October 24, 2013 - February 22, 2014
Opening Reception: October 24, 2013, 5.30 - 7.30pm

FreedmanArt presents “Jules Olitski On An Intimate Scale… and Friends.” This exhibition opens Thursday, October 24. The more than thirty works in this exhibition present a retrospective overview of Olitski’s paintings through the artist’s distinctive periods: “Core/Stain” paintings; “Sprays”; “Baroque”; “High Baroque”; and the “Late” paintings. This exhibition demonstrates the immediacy of Olitski’s intimate and small-scale paintings.

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Natvar Bhavsar: Energy of Color

May 22 - October 19, 2013

Natvar Bhavsar: Energy of Color

Natvar Bhavsar uses dry pigment to create large, brilliantly colored, mural-like paintings. Critics often place the Indian-born artist in the context of the genesis of abstract art in America, comparing him with Abstract Expressionists and “color-field” painters like Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman. But Mr. Bhavsar’s method of building up surfaces through layers of dry pigment is his own. Though he harks back to India’s classical music and ancient aesthetics, Sanskrit literature and subcontinental seasons as sources of inspiration or fodder for his titles, his approach is modern American, not ethnic Indian.

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Painterly Pasted Pictures

February 21 - May 16, 2013

Painterly Pasted Pictures, 2013

FreedmanArt will present the exhibition Painterly Pasted Pictures opening February 21, 2013. This show features collages on loan from important private collections, with a concentration on works by the artists of the Abstract Expressionist generation as well as several artists of the broader successive movements.

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Anthony Caro and Jules Olitski

Masters of Abstraction Draw the Figure

October 11, 2012 - February 9, 2013

Anthony Caro and Jules Olitski, Masters of Abstraction Draw the Figure, 2012

FreedmanArt is pleased to present Caro and Oltaki: Masters of Abstraction Draw the Figure. These drawings, many seen for the first time, convincingly express for Anthony Caro and Jules Olitski their common interest and long commitment to working directly from the model, also known as “life drawing”.

Our exhibition is a reprisal of the one in 1996, held at The New York Studio School. An expanded selection and publication is being planned for institutional venues. Prime examples of the abstract work of Olitski and Caro will offer both a context, as well as further understanding to the relationships between their figurative and abstract forces.

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Frank Stella

New Work

May 12 - September 29, 2012

Frank Stella, k.162, 2011, Mixed Media, 22 x 22 x 24 inches

The gallery is pleased to present newly created work by Frank Stella for our upcoming exhibition, opening on Thursday May 17, 2012. Frank Stella, widely acclaimed as one of America’s most original, influential, and inventive artists, continues to explore and forge  new ground with his most recent relief sculpture, the Scarlatti Kirkpatrick series, initiated in 2006. This bold new chapter, in an exceptional six-decade career, was inspired by the harpsichord sonatas of eighteenth-century Italian composer, Dominico Scarlatti, and the writings of twentieth-century American musicologist, Ralph Kirkpatrick.

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Jack Bush

New York Visit

February 18 - April 28, 2012
Opening Reception: February 18, 2012, 6 - 8pm

Jack Bush, New York Visit, 1961, Magna on Canvas, 70 x 55 inches, Private Collection

The paintings of Jack Bush were once described by Hilton Kramer as “a garden for the eye,” an apt analogy for images that balance chromatic vibrancy and earthiness. Canada’s participant in Color Field Painting held an obstinate remove from either the geometric hard edges or the ethereal sprays and stains of his confreres south of the border. His paintings impact the retina with a dull thud. Color is intense but somehow un-ingratiating, as if mixed with soot and chalk. The oafishness of his shapes and strokes and the uneasy back and forth between painterliness and pictoriality – foreground gesture and background expanse – make him provincial for the period in which he worked and uncannily relevant for the present. Sing Sing Sing (1974) arrays a fluttering string of rough-torn ribbons – an anti-spectrum of anonymous color samples – against an agitated, nauseatingly meat-like, marbled ground. Beauty and the Beast. – David, Cohen, ArtCritical.

Jack Bush: New York Visit at FreedmanArt, February 18 to April 28, 2012.

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Lee Bontecou

Recent Work: Sculpture and Drawing

October 27, 2011 - February 11, 2012
Opening Reception: October 27, 2011, 6-9pm

Lee Bontecou, Untitled, 2005 - 2011, Mixed media in sandbox, 44 x 48 x 39 inches.

As Reviewed in:
The New York Times
The Village Voice
The Wall Street Journal

FreedmanArt is pleased to present, Lee Bontecou: Recent Work: Sculpture and Drawing, opening on Thursday, October 27, 2011

 The exhibition features four newly completed hanging sculptures, in context with approximately fifteen works on paper. Additionally, there will be two special floor installations of “sandpits”, originally created, and transferred directly from the artist’s studio. Suspended in space, the four abstract hanging sculptures incorporate both organic and figurative references as seen in her earlier work. Composed of intricate networks of wire mesh, porcelain and canvas, they build and expand on Bontecou’s continuing investigation of the natural, out of nature, as well as by the hand made.

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Her Passionate Eye

Works from a Family Collection

September 22 - October 22, 2011
Opening Reception: September 22, 2011, 6 - 8pm

Hans Hofman, Pink Phantasie, 1950, Oil on panel with painting on reverse, 14 3/4 x 20 1/4 inches.

FreedmanArt is pleased to present our next exhibition "Her Passionate Eye: Works From a Family Collection" opening on Thursday, September 22, 2011.

Drawn from the private collection of the late Millicent Freedman, with additional works from the extended family, this exhibition features intimate, (both in scale and feeling), paintings, works on paper, and sculpture, by seminal artists including; Milton Avery, Richard Diebenkorn, Sam Francis, Helen Frankenthaler, Hans Hofmann, and Jules Olitski.

The exhibition also brings together a personal story of one woman, whose ardent collecting was inspired by a family friendship; an endearing and enduring bond of shared values, and abiding belief in art.

Millicent Freedman's sensitivity to the artistic world was imbued by her refined taste and her instinctive vision. She was ever drawn to beauty and felt increasingly engaged with works of art, which captured that sensibility.

These works, selectively gathered over a thirty year period, have graced a home filled by the love of family, they will now be viewed publicly; a fitting tribute to Millicent Freedman's "Passionate Eye."

Her Passionate Eye: Works from a Family Collection will continue through October 22nd.

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