University of Wisconsin-Parkside Art Galleries
04 Wednesday May 2016
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inThe RAM Artist Fellowship Program aims to showcase the diversity and vitality of the Racine/Kenosha visual arts community by supporting the professional development of its artists. The third biennial exhibition features the work of the following artists:
Tim Abel, Kenosha
Martin Antaramian, Kenosha
Kirsten Bartel, Racine
Lisa Bigalke, Kenosha
Each of these four artists will be awarded $2,500, which may be used for any expenses that will assist in the development of new work and advance their artistic careers, such as equipment and supply purchases, studio rental, and travel.
Concurrent solo featuring each recipient’s work will be presented at RAM’s Wustum Museum of Fine Arts, August 25 through November 25, 2017. A color brochure will accompany this fellowship show. By increasing critical attention and exposure for recipients, the program fosters their continued creative and professional development.
The RAM Artist Fellowship application process will be repeated in 2017, with the next entry deadline in January 2018.
11 Friday Mar 2016
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Memory becomes fragmentary in time. As the past moves into the distance, memories become less distinct, reduced at times to images, colors or scents that evoke mnemonic awakenings. This is the creative realm where Tom Berenz works.
Tom Berenz’ recent exhibit at the Thelma Sadoff Center for the Arts in Fond du Lac was a small grouping of wonderful, at times poignant, paintings.
He calls his subjects “piles,” and indeed they are a mash-up of broken memories, an array of trendy painting gestures, heaps of forlorn junk and pop-culture references. “Lady Above the Garden” shows a cartoonish elderly woman broken to bits as if viewed while driving swiftly past cracked glass. She could be a lawn ornament. Her shards combine with gingham and leafy green projections, seemingly lit from above by an orange sun and a cloud doubling as a raw egg.
There is dripping paint, hard edged abstractions and realist gestures forced into a hot, jumbled mess. It reminded me of a blurry summer afernoon from long ago. There were strawberries, a garden and a figure whose face I’ve since forgotten.
This is not to say that the paintings rely on sentiment. They are an awful lot of fun, even if the subject matter is dark. The exhibit’s titular painting shows wild, extended limbs flailing under water. It recalls a near drowning experience and the viewer can see useless water wings, perhaps a life preserver and splayed hands absently chopping and splashing. I am reminded of the bitter humor of contemporary painter Dana Schutz and the cartoonish angst of Wisconsin artist T.L. Solien simultaneously.
Berenz is quickly becoming one of Wisconsin’s most distinctive emerging painters. I look forward to his deepening excavations of memory reconstructed in paint.
“Tom Berenz: Three Feet Under” was on view at the Thelma Sadoff Center for the Arts in Fond du Lac through last week. “Tom Berenz: Towards the North” will open at the James Watrous Gallery, 201 State St. in Madison on March 18 and be on view through May 8 alongside a solo exhibit by Shane Macadams.
Rafael Francisco Salas and Tom Berenz worked together for a time at Ripon College. Salas is a painter, a professor of art at Ripon College and a regular Art City contributor.
03 Thursday Mar 2016
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in03 Thursday Mar 2016
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inLast Thursday night, Luxembourg and Dayan’s Upper East Side townhouse buzzed with activity. Curators, collectors and writers flowed up and down the stairs of the three-story gallery to view “In the Making,” a new exhibition exploring the complex dynamics between artist and assistant. Compelling examples of mutual influence could be found on every floor. On the top level, Urs Fischer’s stray body parts dangled from the ceiling next to an equally surreal video piece by his former assistant Darren Bader. On the second Eric Brown’s painted collage echoed the appropriative voice of his boss Richard Prince. Tracing the matriculation of contemporary stars, like Messrs. Brown and Bader, the show juxtaposes the work of apprentice and master to gain new insight into the practice of both.
Before they opened the doors to the public, the evening’s host dealers, Daniella Luxembourg and Amalia Dayan, gathered guests on the first floor to introduce the show’s curator, Tamar Margalit, who pursued months of research to bring this once-in-a-lifetime exhibition to fruition.
Conversations between friends old and new drove the night. Artist George Condo took the floor from Ms. Margalit to tell a rousing anecdote from Andy Warhol’s factory—where the artist got a job first as a writer and then as a painter on the infamous assembly line. “There was a phone next to the silkscreen table. It would ring, and they would say, ‘It’s Mrs. Warhol. She wants the background to be green.’ I don’t know why they always referred to Andy that way, but they’d send me back to the closet to get cans of paint,” Mr. Condo said and laughed. A diamond duster at Warhol’s studio, Condo’s silkscreen hangs next to one he executed for the Pop Art legend. In recounting the predilections of his former boss, Mr. Condo recalled Warhol’s admiration for Robert Rauschenberg, whose work consumes the street level gallery alongside his Minimalist assistants, Dorothea Rockburne and Brice Marden.
Mr. Marden, who actually executed the Rauschenberg pieces, was not present, but Ms. Rockburne spoke highly of their times together. “I met Bob [Rauschenberg] at Black Mountain College, and we became good friends. For some reason he thought I was organized. One day I ran into him on the street, and he offered me a job,” said Ms. Rockburne, who promised Rauschenberg a six-month stint. “I hired Brice and saw that things got done. As everybody knows, I’m good at figures, so I balanced everything. The one thing about working for Bob is that his humor and intelligence were so superb.” Fond memories included an adaptation of Hamlet written by Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly with Ms. Rockburne cast as a long-haired Ophelia.
The exhibition presents Ms. Rockburne as a teacher as well as an assistant. Carroll Dunham, her assistant in the 1970s, credits the inspiration for his first mature body of work to Ms. Rockburne’s own experimentations with industrial materials, such as crude oil, chipboard and nails. The two are installed side by side on the first floor. “I’m still friends with Tip and Brice. I knew Bob until he died. These things just go on,” Ms. Rockburne said. “That is what I think is so important about this exhibition—everything is so much about market now, and nobody goes into what makes the work, how it comes about, what the human aspect of it is.”