Meet the Artists ASPEN ART MUSEUM
SUMMER 2023 EDITION
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that change the way we see things, and that’s an interesting way of thinking about art.” Israel’s work is held in prominent collections around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; and the Centre Pompidou, Paris. Spencer Lewis Work kindly donated by the artist and Josh Lilley There is an explosive energy to Spencer Lewis’s paintings. Working with mixed media on either jute or card- board, Lewis himself speaks of attack- ing the surface. The violence of his mark-making is augmented by drag- ging and throwing the jute around the studio, imbuing the work with a sense of raw dynamism. Born in 1979 in Hartford, CT, Lewis studied first at Rhode Island School of Design, before completing an MFA at the University of California, Los Angeles—where he continues to live and work. The traces of an interest in postwar abstraction that began in Lewis’s youth are evident throughout his work; Hans Hofmann and Joan Mitchell come to mind, amongst others. However, writing in Mousse in 2022, Ben Street observes: “Easy as it is to see his paintings as straightforwardly inhabiting the territory of mid-century abstract painting, to do so would be to miss their play with its tropes.” He goes on to add that “Lewis marshals the trappings of modernist authenticity”, not in an attempt to subvert but instead “to prod them for signs of life”. Dense layers of vibrant strokes, emerge from the center of each canvas to form an unruly, abstract mass, in which each mark is seemingly vying for space, fighting for dominance. Wide and narrow lines and patches of yellow, orange, blue, green and pink crackle with energy atop the grungy brown ground of the natural jute or its paint- saturated surface. Speaking on the Deep Color podcast in February last year, Lewis commented, “part of being an artist is being opportunistic”. In his paintings this translates to an innate sense of freedom, and a visual expres- sion of an internal struggle to be in the moment and seize the opportunities it brings. Liza Lou Work kindly donated by the artist and Lehmann Maupin Liza Lou came to prominence in 1996, when she first showed Kitchen (1991–96) at the New Museum in New York. Five years in the making, this full-scale, highly detailed recreation of an American kitchen, in which the surface of every element is encrust- ed with tiny shimmering beads, is now in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Throughout her career, Lou has chal- lenged negative perceptions of craft and set out to give value and respect to labor—from a gendered perspective. The sense of wonder prompted by her beautiful, intricate works has always been undercut by an edge. In Kitchen ,
the side of the oven is adorned with a quote from Emily Dickinson: “She rose to his requirement, dropped the play- things of her life, to take the honorable work of woman and wife.” While Kitchen was a solitary endeavor, Lou subsequently extended her interest in labor into a practical concern by establishing a collective in Durban, South Africa, which she ran from 2005–20, where local women produced handstitched beaded cloth. Working across a variety of media, these glass beads became the corner- stone of Lou’s practice. In a more recent body of work, she has depicted cloud formations, and while she continues to paint on and chisel away at these woven beads, the finished works are far more minimal and delicate in palette, conjur- ing an ephemeral, ethereal beauty. Lou was born in NY and is now based in LA. She has exhibited exten sively around the world, including solo shows at the Aspen Art Museum (1998); Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf (2002); and the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (2013). She is a recipient of both a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship and an Anonymous Was a Woman Award.
Left Spencer Lewis.
Courtesy: the artist; photograph: Ruben Diaz
Howardena Pindell Work kindly donated by Garth Greenan
Painter, filmmaker, archivist, critic and activist, Howardena Pindell has been making and showing work for nearly 60 years. On graduating from universi- ty, where she studied painting, she took up a post for the next 12 years at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where she was the first Black curator. On leaving MoMA, she took on a teach- ing job at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, where she is now a full professor. And back in 1972, she was a member of the group of women who founded A.I.R Gallery in New York. Working across a variety of media, Pindell’s work engages with social issues of homelessness, AIDS, war, genocide, sexism, xenophobia and apartheid. The consistency of her concerns is note- worthy: working with spray paint and
Below Howardena Pindell. Courtesy: the artist; photograph: Nathan Keay
Right Liza Lou. Courtesy: the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, Seoul and London; photograph: Mick Haggerty
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