Dear Friends,

Welcome to the blog for the Marcia Wood Gallery. This new blog is our way of staying in touch with you in a more personal manner than we can do on our website (though we hope you’ll visit it, too). Since the blog is new, it will surely evolve. For now, we’ve got updates on what our artists have been doing—we’re posting new information weekly—and what we’re doing as a gallery in terms of fairs and travel. Eventually we hope to include interviews with our artists, and some first-person pieces, maybe even special projects, by our artists and gallery friends.

 

If you’re going to be in New York at the end of the month, come by and say Hey. We’ll be at the Pulse Fair, booth #I-12.

Best,

Marcia

Tuesday, February 26, 2008

Amanda Hughen


Here is what happened with Amanda Hughen in 2007:

She had solo shows at Galerie Immanence, in Paris, France; Johansson Projects in Oakland, CA; and at the Marcia Wood Gallery. A collaborative project with Jennifer Starkweather and commissioned by the San Francisco Arts Commission was featured in 24 large kiosk posters throughout downtown San Francisco for 4 months in 2007. Electric Works, in San Francisco, created limited edition prints of the collaborative works and exhibited them in July.

Amanda was in group shows at the Triton Museum of Art, ("Drawing: Visions, Surfaces and Beyond") in Santa Clara, CA; at the Oakland Museum of California at the Oakland Airport, ("Convergence") in Oakland, CA; and Electric Works ("Civil Twilight") in San Francisco.

Her work was featured in a catalogue published by the San Francisco Arts Commission: "Between above and below: Amanda Hughen and Jennifer Starkweather".

Amanda's work was reviewed in Art & Antiques, the Atlanta Journal ConstitutionRuby Mag (Buenos Aires), the San Francisco Bay Guardian, and was on the cover of Artweek

She was a guest lecturer at California College of the Arts.

Amanda's work has been acquired by individuals and corporate collections, including Genentech, Charles Schwab, and Barclays Global Investors.

Philip Carpenter

After Durer, 2007, Colored Pencils on Paper, 24 x 20

Recent New's on Philip Carpenter

Philip Carpenter’s artwork and biography are included in the online artist registry www.SouthernArtistry.org sponsored by Georgia Council for the Arts and the Southern Arts Federation.

He exhibited work in “Innovations: New Work by Contemporary Georgia Artists”, the inaugural exhibition at Gallery Walk at Terminus, October 24, 2007-January 19, 2008.

He exhibited drawings in “Manipulating the Ordinary” at Swan Coach House Gallery, August 9-September 22, 2007.

In her review in the Atlanta Journal Constitution (September 2, 2007) Debra Wolf wrote, “ On the lighter side, Philip Carpenter skillfully juxtaposes pop culture icons and classical paintings. Mickey Mouse takes on the Renaissance in “Art in America”, while “After Durer” stars Bugs Bunny pointing a know-it-all finger at Albrecht Durer’s famous hare.”

In her review in Creative Loafing (August 16-22, 2007) Felicia Feaster wrote, “Along with Philip Carpenter’s wonderfully wise-ass drawings of pop culture kiddie toys and cartoons juxtaposed with classical paintings, this quartet in particular shows how our banal surroundings can allow for both soul-destroying superficiality and spiritual striving.”

Philip gave a gallery talk for “Drawn in Georgia: Works on Paper from the Collection” at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia at Suntrust Plaza (November 2, 2006-January 20, 2007).

Joanne Mattera

 
Uttar 291, 2006, encaustic on panel, 48 x50 inches, in three panels
Joanne Mattera 2007 News 

Curated Luxe, Calme et Volupte: A Meditation on Visual Pleasure, at 14-artist exhibit for the gallery, which focused on beauty in contemporary art.

. You can see the catalog online at http://www.marciawoodgallery.com/luxe_calme/index.html

. Read Joanne’s essay at http://www.marciawoodgallery.com/luxe_calme/essay.html

. Review: Debra Wolf in The Atlanta Journal Constitution, July 2007: "Order and beauty form the organizing principle in an engaging new exhibition at Marcia Wood Gallery....Using Baudelaire and Matisse as a springboard for contemporary expression, Mattera's premise is both clever and effective. Fastidious process (order) is essential to aesthetic outcome (beauty). Mattera's selections are smart and pleasing in a show that combines control and creativity, visual and tactile harmony, and individual refrains of luxe, calme et volupte....Verdict: Intelligent and pleasurable."

  

Uttar 290, 2005 encaustic on panel, 35 x 35 inches

20th Career solo at OK Harris Gallery, New York, in April

. Review: Maureen Mullarkey, The New York Sun, May 3, 2007:   “If Jasper Johns put encaustic back on the map in the 1950’s and ‘60s, Joanne Mattera has been a prime mover in making the technique accessible to a new generation of painters. . .The medium itself is very much the subject of Silk Road, Ms. Mattera’s series of small encaustic panels. Each panel is a simple expanse of what appears, at quick glance, to be a single color. But owing to the opalescent properties of pigmented beeswax applied in layers, these radiant fields are irreducible to monochrome. . .resonance from within lends depth to understated surface patterns. Viewed in ensemble, there is nothing minimal about them.”

. Review: Joseph Walentiny, Abstract Art Online, May 15, 2007: “Mattera combines conceptual order, as embodied in the structure of the grid, with beauty.”

Work appears in Geoform, an online curatorial project focused on geometric form and structure in contemporary abstract art. A 2005 interview with Joanne by the editor Julie Karabenick was expanded in 2007. You can read the revised interview at http://www.geoform.net/features/features_mattera.html

Joanne Mattera Art Blog covers artists, exhibitions and art events around the country, including the recent fairs in Miami. You can read more at www.joannemattera.blogspot.com

Founded the National Conference of Encaustic Painting at Montserrat College of Art, Beverly, Mass. The first and only event of its kind, this conference attracted participants from throughout North America, for three days of panels, lectures and demonstrations. Joanne continues for 2008 as conference director.

Jason Fulford

"Finding Form", Group exhibition curated by Stuart Horodner, Atlanta contemporary Art Center, October 2007

News New on JASON FULFORD finishing out 2007
LECTURES / IN PUBLIC
Nov 6, 2007
AIGA, New York (American Institute of Graphic Arts)
with
Tamara Shopsin in the series “Small Talks”
October 2007
ACP, Atlanta – reviewer
Sept 25, 2007
LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art) with curator Charlotte Cotton in the series “Conversations with Artists”
Spring 2007
Photolucida, Portland, OR - reviewer
April 24, 2007
Mass Art, Boston - guest lecturer

EXHIBITIONS
Oct 1-31, 2007
ACP, Atlanta – curator of public art project “Paper Placemats (ATL)”
October, 2007
Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, Atlanta – “Finding Form” group exhibition curated by Stuart Horodner
Summer 2007
Blancpain Art Contemporain, Genève – “What We Do Is Secret” group exhibition curated by Amy O’Neill
Spring 2007 Quality Pictures, Portland, OR – solo exhibition
Spring 2007 Salvation Gallery, NYC – “You Can Have It All” – group exhibition
Winter 2007 Marcia Wood Gallery, Atlanta, GA – solo exhibition

WORK PUBLISHED
November 2007
Harper’s Magazine – 8 page photo essay on Dubai
Summer 2007
Blind Spot – cover plus 10 pages inside (co-editor of issue)
Aug 7, 2007
The New York Times – Op-Ed
June 24, 2007
The New York Times – Book Review
March 11, 2007
The New York Times – Book Review
May 2007
Harper’s Magazine – 8 page photo essay about the Prelinger Library

EDITING / CURATING / DESIGN
New
J&L titles 

Saturday, February 23, 2008

Robert Sagerman

(detail of painting)

Current Solo Exhibition
January 24 - March 1, 2008

Robert Sagerman is based in New York; he exhibits regularly in New York, San Francisco, German and Atlanta, and has shown in gallery and museum exhibitions in Tokyo, Shanghai, Singapore, Chicago and Cleveland.  Sagerman holds three master's degrees - in painting, art history, and religious studies - and is currently working toward his doctorate degree in Hebrew and Judaic studies at New York University.  

The titles of Sagerman's paintings derive from the number of applied daubs of paint that make up each work.  His rigorous process involves the application of thousands of 'marks' of oil paint using dozens of colors he mixes and applies in thick, textural layers often resembling dense, three-dimensional materials like astroturf, mounds of confetti, candles, ribbon, textiles and so on.   Sagerman laboriously builds the paintings mark by mark with a painstaking precision, resulting in a completely balanced array of colors to create a perfectly unified color-field.  The final achievement is an energetic and fascinating work that radiates an imposing physical, spiritual and intellectual presence.  

"My understanding of my own work has continued to develop over time," Sagerman describes in a recent statement, "and it is that shift in perception that has led to the changes that gradually make their way into the work itself.  I have come to sense three distinct ways in which my work functions, all of which hand in a kind of balance reinforcing one another.  First, there are the evocations that give the work its emotional weight, whether these involve landscape associations or naturalistic ones, relating to textures or to processes of growth.  Second, there is that aspect that points not to the outside world but inwards, towards my own self.  My fixation upon process - both in terms of my laborious method (apparent in the physical work itself) and my practice of numerical documentation - has helped me to concentrate on this meditative phase of the work, and has also served to highlight it for others.  Lastly, there is an aspect of my work that points neither to the outside world nor to my own inner one but, as it seems to me, beyond either.  It is with this final aspect that I time and again find the solutions to the conundrums that, for me at least, my work raises:  There is a sense in which each painted work resonates as its own self, as a kind of being that partakes - paradoxically, given the sheer weight of each work's material substance - of a transcendent immateriality.  So it is that painting for me is neither simply a reformulated and abstracted mode of landscape painting nor an exercise in tautological self-absorption.  I return often to the feeling that my work for me is a calling into being of independent entities which partake of their own meaningful existence."
  4,103 (copper), 2008, silicone, pigment on canvas, 26 x 25 inches