2013—
Abstract Critical
Painterly Pasted Pictures
by Sam Cornish
Monday, April 22, 2013
More collage! At Freedman Art in New York E.A Carmean, Jr has organised an exhibition of ‘painterly’ approaches to the medium (is collage a ‘medium’? – perhaps a technique, or an attitude?). Amongst the artists included are Willem de Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler, Ellsworth Kelly, Franz Kline, Al Leslie, Robert Motherwell, Anne Ryan, Kurt Schwitters, Frank Stella, Jack Youngerman, Susan Roth, Esteban Vicente and Adja Junkers.
(An Appropriate Distance) From The Mayor's Doorstep
4 Definite Plusses
by Piri Halasz
Monday, April 15, 2013
Not all the Manhattan gallery shows worthy of discussion are in Chelsea, SoHo or the Lower East Side. There are still hardy survivors in midtown and on the Upper East Side, and four exhibitions in particular have provided enjoyment for me as winter—at long last—is giving way to spring. Three of them are – or were – at Spanierman, which has been claiming so much of my attention in the last year or so that some readers may be getting suspicious—but really, there is nothing to be suspicious about. The gallery simply seems to be displaying better taste than almost every other.
The Independent, UK
Great Works: ...an den Ufern der Aar (Felder) (1998) by Frank Stella
by Michael Glover
Friday, April 12, 2013
Is it a crooning junkyard angel of the kind that Bob Dylan once praised in "From a Buick 6"? The mood of this bruising sculpture by Frank Stella is one of explosive visual excess, from its bucking, roller-coasterish shapeliness to its blaring, fruity tones.
The New Criterion
"Painterly Pasted Pictures" at FreedmanArt
by Brendan Dooley
Tuesday, April 9th, 2013
On view through May 31, “Painterly Pasted Pictures” at FreedmanArt in New York is a small but smart exhibition that brings together a group of collages from the 20th century united by the stylistic trait of “painterliness.” Popularized by Swiss art historian Heinrich Wolfflin, painterliness describes paintings that are loosely and openly styled, with emphasis placed on visible brushstrokes and the application of paint rather than on the sharp delineation of forms and objects. Featuring rare collages from Willem de Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler, Franz Kline, Alfred Leslie, Robert Motherwell, Anne Ryan, Kurt Schwitters, Jack Youngerman, Frank Stella, and Ellsworth Kelly, among others, the show has been carefully selected to demonstrate different manifestations of painterliness in the collage form.
The Menil Collection
Lee Bontecou: Drawn Worlds
A Retrospective of Drawings by Lee Bontecou, January 25 - May 18, 2014
Thursday, March 14, 2013
Spanning over 50 years, the career of American artist Lee Bontecou (b. 1931) has been defined by her pioneering sculptures of fiberglass, cloth and rubber stretched over metal armatures. Shown at Leo Castelli Gallery in New York in 1960, her work was praised by artist Donald Judd as powerful, awesome, menacing and entirely unique. Less known, her drawings are an equally vital component of her work, a form of making she continues to produce, and a practice that forcefully reveals the artist’s importance within the history of art.
FreedmanArt
Painterly Pasted Pictures: Braque and Arp to Stella and Kelly
by E. A. Carmean, Jr.
Thursday, February 21, 2013
The exhibition entitled Painterly Pasted Pictures at the FreedmanArt Gallery brings together a group of
collages that share the formal trait of "painterliness," either in part or whole. This stylistic characteristic, the
opposite of crisp (cut) profiles and simple, balanced compositional layouts, is one not usually associated with
the standard idea of the modern collage. But, "painterliness" is nonetheless an essential feature of many
collages made by the Abstract Expressionists, including their works featured in this show.
ARTDAILY
Painterly Pasted Pictures curated by E.A. Carmean, Jr. opens at FreedmanArt
Thursday, February 21, 2013
NEW YORK, NY.- FreedmanArt presents 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. The exhibition will feature important collages by Willem deKooning, Helen Frankenthaler, Ellsworth Kelly, Franz Kline, Al Leslie, Robert Motherwell, Ann Ryan, Kurt Schwitters, Frank Stella, Jack Youngerman, Robert Rauchenberg, as well as works by other artists.
The Reading Eagle
Art review: Jules Olitski's abstract exhibition proves masterful
By Ron Schira
Sunday, February 17, 2013
With all of the information available online, one would think it would be nothing at all to write an article about the renowned painter Jules Olitski. Yet even with as much information as one can gather, it does nothing to satisfy the senses as much as actually being in front of his physical and luminescent abstractions, which for much of his career have been of epic dimensions.
Press Release
Painterly Pasted Pictures
Thursday, January 16, 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.
2012—
ArtDaily
Figure drawings by Anthony Caro and Jules Olitski on view in exhibition at FreedmanArt
By Karen Wilkin
Tuesday, November 20, 2012
British sculptor Anthony Caro and American painter Jules Olitski are an unlikely pair, each specializing in widely different forms of art from one another. However to the naked eye, the two men are closely linked in talent.
The Jewish Daily Forward
Painter Jules Olitski Enjoys a Second Life
By Menachem Wecker
Tuesday, October 29, 2012
It’s hard to explain the feeling one experiences when standing in front of, and contemplating the dynamic movement in, Jules Olitski’s paintings. Picture a beautiful yet quickly fleeting vision of creamer diffusing throughout a cup of coffee. If one freezes the frame when the cloudiness is at its height — just before the dairy explosion mixes fully with the coffee and becomes dull and monochromatic — you might begin to imagine the forms in some of Olitski’s paintings from the 1980s and ’90s.
The Washington Post
Revelation: Major Paintings by Jules Olitski
By Maura Judkis
Friday, October 12, 2012
Working with an unusual arsenal.
No artist could wield a brush quite like Jules Olitski. Critic Clement Greenberg once called him “the best painter alive.”
No one could wield a leaf blower quite like him, either. Considered a master of Color Field painting for his richly chromatic work, Olitski earned Greenberg’s accolade in part by embracing unorthodox tools. Squeegees, leaf blowers, paint guns and industrial brushes -- the implements of commercial painters and handymen -- were all in his arsenal, creating textured canvases that exude indulgence and restraint, sometimes simultaneously. His paint fell on his canvas as lightly as the fine mist of a sneeze, or as thick as icing on a cake.
PRESS RELEASE
Caro and Olitski: Masters of Abstraction Draw the Figure
October 11, 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 L996, 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.
The Pink Line Project
Jules Olitski: On an Intimate Scale
Exhibitions
Friday, September 21, 2012
This fall, three institutions are celebrating the art of Jules Olitski (1922-2007). Olitski, Kenneth Noland, Morris Louis and the British sculptor Anthony Caro were brought into public prominence by art critic Clement Greenberg, who coined the term "post-painterly abstraction." Olitski was a close friend and neighbor of Noland's, when Olitski taught at Bennington College, Bennington, Vermont, and Noland lived nearby. In the 1960s Olitski generally shared with Noland, and other members of the Washington Color School, an approach to painting in which the canvas is covered with pure areas of color, characterized, as well, by experimentation with color and pigments. Olitski applied the paint by staining, then spraying, and later used unconventional tools such as brooms, mops, and leaf blowers, among other things. His richly diverse surfaces diffused color and light, often with rich variations in texture.
Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg
Frank Stella – The Retrospective
Works 1958-2012
September 8, 2012 - January 20, 2013
Frank Stella (born 1936) is one of the last living heroes of American painting from the 1950s and 1960s. Stella’s recent works demonstrate yet again his compelling path in the direction of abstraction. Hardly twenty-years old, the young artist conquered the New York art scene in the late 1950s with a sensation: His large Black Paintings not only intensified the debate on Minimalism in painting but also prepared the way for the “exit from the picture into space.” But unlike his contemporaries, Stella took a completely independent path that led him to ever more opulent, ever more baroque reliefs. With his turn “from Minimalism to Maximalism,” Frank Stella developed into one of the most distinctive artists of the 20th century. Featuring circa 60 mostly large-format works as well as 30 drawings and sketches, the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg is honoring Frank Stella with a comprehensive exhibition that makes up the capstone to the wide range of presentations celebrating the artist’s 75th birthday.
artcritical
Frank Stella Evolves: The Scarlatti Series at Freedman Art
by Piri Halasz
Monday, August 20, 2012
Ernst Häckel’s famous theory that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny – the development of an organism, that is to say, mirrors the evolution of the species – applies to Frank Stella in relation to Western art since the Middle Ages. His severe but elegant “pinstripe” paintings of the late 1950s and early ‘60s, together with the gentler aluminum and bronze paintings that succeeded them, can be seen as his Quattrocento period (and, not surprisingly, won much praise when a group of all three series was shown at L & M Arts earlier this year).
Bloomberg
Perfume Bottle Nudes Inspire Stella’s Process: Interview
by James Tarmy
July 24, 2012
Wearing an old brown fedora, a shirt decorated with a marlin and rumpled khakis, Frank Stella, 76, walks through his show at the FreedmanArt Gallery on New York’s Upper East Side.
On view is a selection of his recent sculptures. Abstract and candy colored, with intricate frames suspended on metal armature, they were created through a process called rapid prototyping.
The Wall Street Journal
From an Abstract Giant to None
by James Panero
July 6, 2012
What does music look like? A century ago, the Theosophists, an esoteric group that influenced the early modernists, believed they could see colors floating above performances of Mendelssohn, Gounod and Wagner. The look of music drove Wassily Kandinsky to experiment with abstraction.
The New York Times
Frank Stella : ‘New Work’
by Roberta Smith
July 5, 2012
It takes awhile to appreciate the sheer formal intelligence of Frank Stella’s hyperactive polychrome wall pieces. Their spiraling forms, shot through with hairpin and curving rods of thin painted tubing, are inspired by the pell-mell music of Scarlatti and the crisp complexities of late Kandinsky. If you look closely, many of them feature ribbons of color that twist and ripple outward from one or two central points: configurations that might almost have been lifted from earlier Stella stripe paintings, unleashed into three dimensions.
The Wall Street Journal
Sculpting Sound: Stella Riffs on Scarlatti Sonatas
by Kelly Crow
Saturday/Sunday, June 30 - July 1, 2012
New York artist Frank Stella's new sculptures come with their own soundtrack.
Mr. Stella rose to fame a half-century ago by painting pinstripes on canvases cut to look like geometric shapes—a move that helped push postwar art beyond the roiling brush strokes of Abstract Expressionism toward the flatter simplicity of Minimalism. He later created prints and sculptures that explore ideas of geometric abstraction.
Revelation: Major Paintings by Jules Olitski
May 31, 2012
This exhibition draws together more than 30 significant works from public and highlights important periods and themes from Olitski’s career. With works from his early Stain Paintings of the 1960s to his Late Paintings, this is the first exhibition of the artist’s paintings since his death in 2007. Russian-born artist Jules Olitski (1922–2007) first received international acclaim as a Color Field painter and continued to experiment throughout his career. A fully illustrated catalogue will accompany the exhibition, organized by the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art and curated by E.A. Carmean Jr., Alison de Lima Greene, and Karen Wilkin. After its showing at the Kemper Museum, the exhibition traveled to The Museum of Fine Arts-Houston, is currently at Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio, and will travel to American University Museum, Washington, D.C.
PRESS RELEASE
Frank Stella: New Work
April 20, 2012
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.
artcritical
Jack Bush at FreedmanArt
by David Cohen
March 24, 2012
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.
Jack Bush: New York Visit at FreedmanArt, February 18 to April 28, 2012.
The New Yorker
Lee Bontecou
Goings on About Town: Art
February 7, 2012
The great, uncategorizable American sculptor, now eighty-one, continues to surprise and enchant. Dirigible-like forms hang from the ceiling, dangling beaded tails. Two sandboxes, of the type the artist uses in her Pennsylvania studio to experiment with the arrangement of objects – feathers, shells, animal skeletons fashioned from porcelain, serpentine forms made of mesh- are being exhibited here for the first time.
The New Criterion
Gallery Chronicle: Lee Bontecou
by James Panero
February 1, 2012
Finally this month offers up our last chance to see the art world’s original alternative in her current show. Lee Bontecou always refused to be taken in. After bursting onto the scene in the 1960’s with her singular and haunting wall sculptures of layered canvases, often stitched around gaping voids, she retreated entirely from public view. Yet she never stopped making art. Now in her eighties, she is as inventive and singular as ever. Her exhibition of drawings and sculptures on view at FreedmanArt through February 11 is not to be missed.
ARTnews
Lee Bontecou at FreedmanArt
by Barbara Pollack
January 1, 2012
Sailing into the future with a fleet of fantastic mobiles , this magnificent exhibition would indicate that Lee Bontecou has no intention of slowing down. The works here are at once delicate and powerful, modernist and contemporary, serene and frightening. It is a difficult balance, but Bontecou handles the contradictions with a masterful use of unconventional materials.
2011—
The Wall Street Journal
Abstract (Semi) and Phantasmagorical
by Peter Plagens
December 24, 2011
The centerpieces of this gallery exhibition are four hanging sculptures, each about a yard long, that look like amalgams of clipper ships and jellyfish. They're ingeniously balanced with hanging fishing weights of different sizes and shapes. The nice touch of dirtying up the rear surfaces of the mobiles' "sails" adds to their feeling of soaring optimistically through the air. But the nicest touch is simply Ms. Bontecou's matchless deftness in combining volumetric and linear form to wring an awful lot of emotive response from nothing but untitled things.
The New York Times
Art in Review: Lee Bontecou
by Ken Johnson
December 15, 2011
Now 80, Lee Bontecou has traveled a long way since her militaristic reliefs of bent rods, wire and canvas made her famous in the late 1950s and ’60s. In subsequent decades she traded brutalist confrontation for formal delicacy and mental travel into fabulous other universes.
The Village Voice
Best in Show: Lee Bontecou at FreedmanArt
by Robert Shuster
November 9, 2011
For more than half a century, Lee Bontecou has been peering into the cosmos. Her famously imposing three-dimensional vortexes of the early 1960s—grungy swaths of canvas stitched onto spiraling armatures—grabbed your attention with the gravitational strength of black holes.
Haunch of Venison, London, UK
Frank Stella: Connections
September 30, 2011
Haunch of Venison London is delighted to present Frank Stella: Connections, the most extensive exhibition of Stella’s work in the UK to date. This exhibition will examine Stella’s long and extraordinarily diverse career and will include works from 1958 to the present day.
In collaboration with FreedmanArt, New York, US. Fall 2011
ARTnews
Circle in the Square
by Barbara A. MacAdam
August 8, 2011
Throughout his career, Jules Olitski stood just off-center of the core American Abstract Expressionists. This enlightening (all puns intended) exhibition, “Embracing Circles 1959–1964,” shows the artist at a concentrated moment in a career marked by various styles, the most signature being his multi-toned, spray-painted works.
The New Criterion
Gallery Chronicle: FreedmanArt
by James Panero
June 24, 2011
In an age of gallery closings, it's nice to welcome an opening, especially when the opener is the inimitable Ann Freedman, the former director of Knoedler and Company. FreedmanArt is her new venture with several familiar names.
Art in America Magazine
The Lookout: A Weekly Guide to Shows You Don't Want to Miss
by Leigh Anne Miller
June 21, 2011
Pairs of jiggly biomorphic circles jostle in richly hued fields in 10 large, super-mod abstractions from the early 1960s, a key period in Jules Olitski's career. Seeing these paintings in person helps you understand why Clement Greenberg and legions of other admirers fell head-over-heels for Olitski's work
Phillips Collection, Washington, DC
Stella Sounds: The Scarlatti K Series
June 11, 2011
For the first time in a museum exhibition, The Phillips Collection presents recent works from Frank Stella's K series inspired by the 18th-century composer Domenico Scarlatti's harpsichord sonatas.
Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Missouri
Revelation: Major Paintings by Jules Olitski
June 11 2010
This exhibition draws together more than 30 significant works from public and highlights important periods and themes from Olitski’s career. With works from his early Stain Paintings of the 1960s to his Late Paintings, this is the first exhibition of the artist’s paintings since his death in 2007. Russian-born artist Jules Olitski (1922–2007) first received international acclaim as a Color Field painter and continued to experiment throughout his career. A fully illustrated catalogue will accompany the exhibition, organized by the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art and curated by E.A. Carmean Jr., Alison de Lima Greene, and Karen Wilkin. After its showing at the Kemper Museum, the exhibition travels to The Museum of Fine Arts-Houston; Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio; and American University Museum, Washington, D.C.; in 2012.
Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art Weblink
ZKM | Museum of Contemporary Art, Karlsruhe, Germany
Lee Bontecou: Insights, ZKM
May 27th, 2011
For the first time in thirty years and to mark the occasion of her 80th birthday, the work of US-American artist Lee Bontecou is to be honored by an exhibition held at the ZKM | Museum of Contemporary Art. The exhibition provides insights into the Bontecou’s innovative work of the 1960s.
The New York Sun
Embracing Jules Olitski
by Franklin Einspruch
May 13th, 2011
The inaugural exhibition of FreemdanArt begins today with a series of large-scale paintings by Jules Olitski that until recently have been kept out of view.
The International Sculpture Center
International Sculpture Center Lifetime Achievement Award Honoring Frank Stella
April 26, 2011
The ISC's Board of Trustees established the Lifetime Achievement Award in 1991 to recognized individual sculptors who have made exemplary contributions to the field of sculpture. Candidates for the award are masters of sculptural processes and techniques who have devoted their careers to the development of a laudable body of sculptural work as well as to the advancement of the sculpture field as a whole.
Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, Germany
Stella & Calatrava: The Michael Kohlhaas Curtain
April 15, 2011
Two-person collaborative exhibition with Frank Stella and Santiago Calatrava
Neue Nationalgalerie Weblink
Neue Nationalgalerie Video Link (DW-TV Arts 21, Summit Meeting)
ARTnewsletter
Ann Freedman Plans to Open Manhattan Gallery
by Eileen Kinsella
February 8, 2011
NEW YORK — Ann Freedman, former director and president of Knoedler & Company, told ARTnewsletter she plans to launch a new gallery on the Upper East Side of Manhattan next season, where she will work with artists including Lee Bontecou and Frank Stella, as well as the estate of color-field painter Jules Olitski.
2010—
Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, Ohio
Frank Stella: Irregular Polygons
October 9, 2010
The Toledo exhibition of his Irregular Polygons, curated by Brian Kennedy, organized and originally shown at the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College on October 9, 2010–March 13, 2011
Lecture: An Evening with Frank Stella Weblink
Masters Series: An Evening with Frank Stella Video Link
Toledo Museum of Art Weblink