Painterly Pasted Pictures curated by E.A. Carmean, Jr. opens at FreedmanArt

ArtDaily

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.

Art Review: Jules Olitski's abstract exhibition proves masterful

The Reading Eagle
by Ron Schira

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.

Painterly Pasted Pictures

Press Release

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.

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Painter Jules Olitski Enjoys a Second Life

The Jewish Daily Forward
by Menachem Wecker

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.

Revelation: Major Paintings by Jules Olitski

The Washington Post
by Maura Judkis

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.

Carlo and Olitski: Masters of Abstraction Draw the Figure

Press Release

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.

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Jules Olitski: On an Intimate Scale

The Pink Line Project

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.

Frank Stella – The Retrospective. Works 1958-2012

Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg

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.

Frank Stella Evolves: The Scarlatti Series at FreedmanArt

ArtCritical
by Piri Halasz

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).

Perfume Bottle Nudes Inspire Stella's Process: Interview

Bloomberg
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.

Frank Stella: "New Work"

The New York Times
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.

Sculpting Sounds: Stella Riffs on Scarlatti Sonatas

The Wall Street Journal
by Kelly Crow

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.

Jules Olitski, Installation at Tower 49®

Tower 49®, 12 East 49th Street, New York 10017

June 26, 2013

The Jules Olitski family and FreedmanArt are pleased to present eight paintings and two sculptures by Jules Olitski, spanning the years 1965 – 1982. All works are from the Olitski family collection. The artist himself might well agree that the modernist design and open spaces provide an extraordinary setting for this selection of large-scale painting and rarely seen sculptures for this special installation. We are most grateful for the opportunity to collaborate with Tower 49® and to be sharing the seminal work of Olitski in this extraordinary public venue. In honor of Jules Olitski, Installation at Tower 49®, FreedmanArt and the Jules Olitski Family invite you for a reception hosted by Tower 49® Wednesday, June 26, from 5:30 - 7:30 pm.

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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.

Frank Stella: New Work

Press Release

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.

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Jack Bush at FreedmanArt

ArtCritical
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.

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Goings on About Town: Art

The New Yorker

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.

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Gallery Chronicle: Lee Bontecou

The New Criterion
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.

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