Houston’s Rothko Chapel Is a Transcendent Artwork—But the Path to Create It Was Long and Difficult

ARTNEWS
Tessa Solomon

In a 1966 letter to the collectors John and Dominique de Menil, Mark Rothko wrote that the chapel commission “is teaching me to extend myself beyond what I thought was possible for me.”

Mark Rothko was known to be a perfectionist, but even by his own standards, creating the iconic abstract murals that now appear in a chapel in Houston, Texas, was a laborious process. Collectors John and Dominique de Menil had commissioned him to do the works in 1964, and according to some accounts, he dedicated a month to half an inch of canvas for the paintings for the chapel. He asserted so much control over the murals that, according to a 2018 biography of the Menils by William Middleton, his patrons never even got to preview Rothko’s work until 1967, when the painter invited them to see his paintings in progress. [More] 

Aboriginal Women Artists and Their Visions of Infinity

HYPERALLERGIC
By Bansie Vasvani

Angelina Pwerle, “Bush Plum,” detail

Despite the million-dollar auction price for works by Aboriginal Australian artists in 2007, the controversy about whether or not Australian Aboriginal art should be included in the Western canon hasn’t been entirely resolved. But the new exhibition Marking the Infinite, comprised of several commissioned works by nine Aboriginal women artists from the Denis and Debra Scholl collection at the Newcomb Art Museum of Tulane University, should put these conundrums to rest. Marking the Infinite gives voice and equal footing to Aboriginal artists as artists the world over. [More]

RELIGIOUS ART | NEWS OF WEEK -- Artist Patrick Dougher

ALPHA OMEGA ARTS
By Gregory & Ernest Disney-Britton

Patrick Dougher's “We are funding our own oppression” (Black Disaster Capitalism III)-Collage/Acrylic on paper- 10” x 10”

Before COVID-19 living on Zoom, we were already collecting faces. Not the awkward photos of Olan Mills, but impressionistic portraits that reveal an inner significance. We see it daily in the Heinrich Hofmann print in our Jesus Room, and we saw it this week in the portraits of self-taught artist Patrick Dougher. His Instagram is loaded with portraits, including recent collages of poised subjects masked with halos reflecting both their personal significance and the significance of this moment. Patrick Dougher's masked portraits are our collector tip of the week.

Divine Nature and Spiritual Activism in the Work of Self-Taught Artist Patrick Dougher

INSTAGRAM

“We Are Funding Our Own Oppression” (Black Disaster Capitalism III)-Collage/Acrylic on paper- 10” x 10”. Image courtesy of the artist's instagram

Born and raised in Brooklyn NY, Patrick Dougher is a self-taught Artist, Musician, Poet, Educator & Spiritual Activist. Patrick has played and recorded with Grammy award winners Sade, Chuck D (Public Enemy) and Dan Zanes as well as many other notables. He is the drummer on “Dub Side as the Moon” one of the best selling Reggae LP’s of all time. He has worked as a Teaching Artist in NYC public schools, as an Art Therapist working with HIV positive children and as the Director of community arts organizations. Through his art Patrick seeks to inspire and to celebrate the noble beauty and divine nature of people of African descent and to connect urban African American culture to its roots in sacred African art, spirituality and ritual. [More]

‘Beyond the Visible: Hilma af Klint’ Review: What Did She See, and When?

THE NEW YORK TIMES
By A.O. Scott

Halina Dyrschka’s documentary “Beyond the Visible: Hilma af Klint” explores the artist’s life and work, which includes paintings like “Group X, No. 1, Altarpiece” (1915).Zeitgeist Films

The career-spanning exhibition of the work of Hilma af Klint that toured the world a few years ago — including a sojourn at the Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan — upended the conventional narrative of modern art history. “Beyond the Visible: Hilma af Klint,” a documentary by Halina Dyrschka, provides a thoughtful survey of its subject. It’s enriched by the dazzling charisma of her art and limited by the scarcity of biographical material.She was drawn to the Theosophy of Helena Blavatsky and to the teachings of the Austrian spiritualist Rudolf Steiner, with whom she corresponded. [More]

Roy De Forest’s Greatness Shines Even in a Virtual Display

THE NEW YORK TIMES
By Roberta Smith

“Painting the Big Painting” (1993) has echoes of Picasso’s “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.”Credit...Roy De Forest Estate/Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York; via Venus Over Manhattan

Sometimes viewing an art exhibition online isn’t so much an inconvenience as a comfortable buffer. Consider, for example, the irreverent, relentless visual cornucopia created by the great but under-known artist Roy De Forest (1930-2007), a large selection of which booms forth from the website of the Manhattan gallery Venus Over Manhattan. The show’s 37 paintings, drawings and assemblage wall reliefs span from 1960 to 2006 and constitute the largest De Forest show in New York since a 1975 survey at the Whitney Museum of American Art. De Forest’s artworks batter received ideas of taste and beauty no less today than they did when they were created. They eviscerate (perhaps definitively) the pejorative term “regionalist” with which New York art worlders used to label most postwar artists who lived west of New Jersey — Los Angeles excepted. [More]

'Agnes of the Desert" Joins Modernism's Pantheon

THE NEW YORK TIMES
By Roberta Smith

Agnes Pelton, Mother of Silence, 1933. Oil on canvas. Private Collection. Credit: Agnes Pelton, Mother of Silence, 1933. Oil on canvas. Private Collection.

A few years ago, I interrupted a panel discussion at the Guggenheim as it moved toward the dead-horse question of whether painting was still viable. Hindsight arrived one or two years later, when a largely unknown sector of that past was emphatically, unforgettably heard from — at the Guggenheim. This divine noise was the full-rotunda exhibition of the paintings of Hilma af Klint. A similar jolt — if not of that magnitude — can now be felt in “Agnes Pelton: Desert Transcendentalist,” an exhibition at the Whitney Museum. This career-spanning survey of 45 paintings offers a reminder that the history of modernist abstraction and women’s contribution to it is still being written. [More]

Something in the Stars? Art World Goes Spiritual

THE ART NEWSPAPER 

AA Bronson in front of "Anna and Mark, February 3, 2001, 2002", his portrait of his husband with their premature daughter when she was 10 days old. AA wears a hand-embroidered shirt by MJKVL.

Spirituality is on-trend. Tarot, the occult, astrology, meditation apps, crystals—as political turmoil surrounds us, interest in “new age spiritualism” is booming. And last week, the esoteric is in the ascendant at Frieze and in numerous exhibitions around London. The retreat from religion, particularly among the left-wing art world, is a driving factor behind this rise in spirituality. “Organised Christianity has proven itself largely morally bankrupt,” says the artist AA Bronson, who first became interested in shamanism and alternative belief systems at the age of seven. A work by Bronson’s collective General Idea is on show at Frieze London with Maureen Paley. [More]

Devan Shimoyama is the winner of the 2016 PULSE Prize

ARTNET NEWS
By Sarah Cascone

"Yves" (2016) by Devan Shimoyama. 38"x28". Oil, latex, color pencil, latex, sequins. Flashe on canvas

MIAMI, FL---Devan Shimoyama is the winner of the 2016 Miami Beach PULSE Prize at PULSE Miami Beach. The artist’s work was the subject of a solo presentation at the booth of Los Angeles’s Samuel Freeman Gallery, a first time exhibitor at the fair. “I renounce the notion of one’s body belonging to oneself. My body, inhabited by my spirit, serves as my home in which I maintain and utilize his functionality in order to navigate the world,” said Shimoyama of his work in a statement. The artist, who lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, was selected by a panel of jurors.... Shimoyama will receive a $2,500 cash prize. [link]

Outsider Art Fair Returns to Paris Focusing on the Spiritual

ARTNET NEWS
By Caroline Elbaor

Norbert H. Kox, Revive (2015). Courtesy Galerie Toxic.

PARIS---The 2016 Outsider Art Fair (OAF) previewed in Paris yesterday with an impressive display by 40 international galleries, most of them focused on “mediumistic” (or spiritual) themes. As such, the fair overall is permeated by a sense of the intangible and sublime. Originally founded in New York City in 1994, the Outsider Art Fair stretched its reach to Europe in 2012—the same year that its ownership changed hands to Wide Open Arts, headed by CEO and dealer Andrew Edlin— adding a Paris iteration. Under Edlin’s tenure, programming has expanded to include talks and curated sections. [link]