Visual Arts

Georgetowner • February 1, 2013

Each month, interior designer Cynthia Reed and style-savvy publisher Sonya Bernhardt will collaborate on a window of inspiration, while celebrating a story inspired by the best of culture, cuisine and homegoods.

CELEBRATE VALENTINE’S DAY
Whether you’re in a romantic relationship or not, this year celebrate the loves in your life. Valentine’s Day, the holiday of love, is for all that you love. Our inspiration is a treat of churros y chocolate, a long-standing tradition from Spain. Churros, a crunchy donut-like pastry, gets dunked in a thick and velvety dark chocolate sauce. We set our table with elegant porcelain, light linen, napkins and luscious throw and, most importantly, our friends. We’ve paired our beautiful chocolate with orange and red, colors of love and warmth. Here are recipes and places where you can indulge.

To purchase Items in the photo:

The Tables and bench are available in any size. wood, and finish. Please contact Bernhardt & Reed for more information.

Linen, throws and napkins are available at Timothy Paul Bedding

CHURROS Y CHOCOLATE

Ingredients

For the churros

•3 oz (ounce) caster sugar

?•1 tablespoon(s) Ground cinnamon

•4 oz (ounce) Plain flour?

•4 oz (ounce) Self raising flour

?•1 pinch of sea salt?

•2 tablespoon(s) olive oil

?•1.76 pint(s) sunflower oil (for frying)

For the chocolate sauce

•7 oz (ounce) dark chocolate (roughly chopped)

•2 oz (ounce) Milk chocolate (roughly chopped)

•2 tablespoon(s) Golden syrup

?•10.53 fl oz (fluid ounces) double cream

Method

1. Mix the sugar and cinnamon together and set aside.

2. Make the chocolate sauce. Put all the chocolate in a heavy-bottomed saucepan with the golden syrup and cream and heat over a low heat, stirring continuously, to melt the chocolate, being careful not to let it burn. Alternatively, heat with short bursts in the microwave, stirring between each burst.

3. Sift the flours with a good pinch of salt into a metal or heat-proof bowl and make a well in the center.

4. In a separate bowl, mix the olive oil and 450ml boiling water together, and pour into the well, beating it well with a fork to get rid of any lumps. The dough should be slightly soft and sticky to touch. Let it rest for 10 minutes.

5. Fill a large, heavy bottomed saucepan with the sunflower oil – it should be about one-third full. Heat the oil to 325 F or until a small piece of bread browns in less than 30 seconds.

6. Add the dough to a piping bag with a star- shaped nozzle and squeeze out churros directly into the hot oil, cutting them with a pair of scissors into the length you want. Be careful?not to cook more than three at any one time, or they will all stick together. Fry for about 3 to 4 minutes until crispy and golden. Remove from the oil with a slotted spoon and drain on kitchen paper. Sprinkle with the cinnamon sugar. Reheat the chocolate sauce and pour into little cups for dipping with the churros.

This recipe comes from Mexican Food Made Simple by Thomasina Miers

Where to find churros y?chocolate in Washington, D.C.

?If you don’t feel like making your own churros, you can find them at many restaurants in the area.

BODEGA

3116 M St. NW

BOQUERIA

1837 M St NW

DOLCEZZA ARTISANAL GELATO (2 LOCATIONS)

1560 Wisconsin Ave. NW

1704 Connecticut Ave. NW

FARMERS FISHERS BAKERS

Washington Harbour, 3000 K St. NW

CHURRERIA MADRID

2505 Champlain St. NW
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Ari Post • January 17, 2013

Over thousands of years, portraiture has taken on a history and life of its own. In Egypt and other ancient societies, portraits of gods and rulers were ubiquitous. Though no examples remain today, ancient Greek painting is known to have developed a highly accurate portrait style, the evidence remaining in sculpted Hellenistic portrait busts of emperors and historical personalities from Alexander the Great to Socrates. By the zenith of the Roman Empire, portraiture had absorbed and propelled Greek and Etruscan traditions with artistic advancements and imbued them with senatorial political currents and religious and ancestral usage.

Skip ahead a few 1,000 years, past the Renaissance and the Dutch masters, the dreamy exuberance of the Baroque, the self-aggrandizing methodology of the Enlightenment and the emotional revolt of the Romantics, through roiling, ungodly tides of Impressionism—throw the invention of the personal camera and the cinematograph in there somewhere—and over the Vienna Secession, Cubism, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, Post-Modernism, Warhol, Conceptualism, and into the thick of the Information Age, where the plugged-in masses can cast their picture-phone portraits into a depthless technological sea as quickly and frequently as they can take them.

So, considering as many things up to this point, I often wonder what a drawn or painted portrait has to do with anything anymore. It can feel like a stuffy tradition, as dated as muskets and cravats, most often employed as an exercise by art students or as social posturing by royal families and self-important dignitaries. Frankly, compared with a good photographic portrait, a fine art portrait today looks a little awkward, out of place and self-conscious (Did anyone catch the recent Kate Middleton portrait fiasco?).

“Portraiture Now: Drawing on the Edge,” at the National Portrait Gallery, takes on the challenge of portraiture’s fate, pulling together a collection of contemporary artists who are moving the subject forward with fresh relevance. The artists featured in this exhibit use both timeless and modern techniques to deal with portraiture’s historical baggage as well as its inherently personal nature, presenting a cross-cultural smattering of identities and legacies for our time. The artists explore who we are and who surround us, where we come from and where we might go, and grapple with rendering the likeness of a broader, more disparate society that can no longer be cleanly identified.

Mequitta Ahuja is an African American and South Asian artist born in Grand Rapids, Mich. Her self-portraits are large, colorful fusions of her religious and cultural backgrounds, which she patches together to create her own personal history. It is a series of expansive, quilt-like canvases, which look as if they grew organically as more space was needed, cluttered with stamps, marks and washes of color. She places herself in the center of the compositions, surrounded by vaguely mythological plants, cryptic hieroglyphics, and a variety of symbolic markers from Eastern and Western traditions. Collectively, the works are enchantingly amorphous, offering a singular portrait of one woman’s bold emergence from her wild and untamed heritage.

The small, uniform, nearly translucent graphite portraits by Rob Matthews are on the opposite end of the spectrum from Ahuja’s self-portraits. With a softness and precision of light that recalls Vermeer and an unsettling emotional hollowness, Matthews renders meticulously detailed graphite drawings of his friends and family that consecrate the mundane affectations of our lives. His subjects each hold an object, a reference to medieval saints, but in place of bibles, swords or quills, they hold basketballs, crocheted skulls, house cats and turntables. The blank, distant stares of his portraits are like an acceptance of mortality, and the portraits turn into odd memorials of the “pre-deceased.”

Like Matthews, Ben Durham makes portraits of the people from his hometown, though he is further distanced from his subjects. Born in Lexington, Ky., he derives his source material from the local police blotter. These are people he knew in his childhood, some now arrested for traffic violations, others for assault or murder. Durham writes out his memories of them on thick handmade paper, using the mug shots as guidelines for his words. As he reconstructs his memories, a portrait composed of entirely handwritten text emerges. The clarity of the portraits are stunning, but the effect of a written story rendered unreadable from physically running over itself is an altogether beautiful sensation. Without being overwrought, these works pose the eternal question of what it is that defines each one of us, and illuminate the inescapable ripple effects of our past.

Adam Chapman’s digital works do not privilege the finished artwork over the pieces of it. His digital animations aggregate 150 of his own portrait sketches, and proceed to pull and push about their disassembled elements of line and shape on an LED screen. The moving pieces float in and out of the screen, occasionally and briefly reformulating into one of the portraits. Chapman custom-built the software, and according to the artist’s statement, every second of the installation is original, and every time a portrait is formed it is altered, shifted in some way from its initial incarnation. The portraits are continually forming, dissolving and reforming, sometimes without coming together at all. Like moments of clarity amidst the overwhelming malaise of a waking life, only briefly do the mechanics of the world flash brilliantly into focus.

So, what does portraiture have to do with anything anymore? Perhaps nothing. But if we take the time and exert the effort, it can offer us perspectives on our own lives that ultimately define the way we experience things—from our relationships with friends and family, to the effects our past, to the small rituals we unknowingly create to help us through our lives. Surely it is worth a look.

“Portraiture Now: Drawing on the Edge,” is at the National Portrait Gallery through Aug. 18. For more information, visit www.npg.si.edu

Gary Tischler • December 11, 2012

If you’re dreaming of a white Christmas, you might wander over to the Ralls Collection before it’s too late.

You have until Dec. 15 to catch the exhibition, “The Photographs of Frank Hurley.” You want white—you’ve got white—the white of Antarctic ice, icebergs, ice floes and snow and blizzards, as endured by the men of 360-foot wooden ship Endurance, all part of a mission by English explorer Ernest Shackleton, who set sail for the Antarctic in August of 1914 with his crew and official photographer, an Australian by the name of Frank Hurley. They were leaving behind England and Europe, where World War I was just beginning.

Shackleton was attempting to become the first man to lead an expedition that would walk across the Antarctic from the Weddell to the Ross Sea. His expedition—named the Imperial Transantarctic Expedition—never accomplished that. Instead, the Endurance—it was named after a Shackleton family motto–was trapped in the ice along with the crew, which remained on the ship for a year until it sank. The men were then forced to live in what they managed to construct out of what was left of the lifeboats, subsisting on penguin and sea lion meat, until they were eating boiled bones. They moved to a barren island from which Shackleton set sail with five men on one of the lifeboats to try and reach a whaling station in the South Atlantic. After a harrowing 800-mile journey, he returned with help to rescue the rest of his crew, including Hurley. All of the members of the expedition survived.

Shackleton’s journey was a failure but in an age of brave exploration his survival and the rescue of his crew became a legendary story—a legend built on solid, black-and-white evidence that came with almost artful emotional content.

Marsha Ralls bought 35 of Hurley’s photos from the National Geographic Society 35 years ago and ended up keeping them. Hanging on the walls of her gallery in Georgetown, the images make an odd assemblage—they’re full of the kind of grandeur and stories that keep trying to escape the boundaries of their frames and edges. Each pictures seems to contain a frozen story.

Hurley was no stranger to the Antarctic, having accompanied Australian explorer Douglas Mawson on a trip to the Antarctic on the Nimrod. His photographic results led to his appointment on the Endurance.

The photographs in the Ralls exhibition appear to encompass the first year of the crew’s stay on the Endurance before it sank. The look is almost fantastic, like a visual tall tale, except, of course, that they’re real images, especially the photographs of the ship frozen in tundras of ice. The ship seems at once a powerful contraption and one totally in the grip of helplessness. Against the vast expanse of ice, the ship at times seems like a toy, the men working on the ice stick figures. Especially haunting is an image of the Endurance at night.

Hurley’s pictures—including one showing him draped across a mast, or underneath the ship, at work—are famous. There have been books about the expedition, stories and tales and pictures, all of which has elevated the failed expedition to the realm of legend. But it’s the pictures that tell the story, keep it alive in the mind as fact, a living fact of what men can endure, of how precious and powerful the earth is, we and the creatures in it (In one image, a group of king penguins seem to be in conference.).

According to stories about Hurley, he was a taciturn sort of Australian who was a doer, a great maker of pictures and also maker of makeshift environments —a dark room on the ship. He was without question brave—he dove into icy waters to save negatives, then returned from his ordeal with the expeditions to jump into the midst of World War I, chronicling the fortunes and misfortunes of the Australian troops in France and at the battle of Ypres.

“The Photographs of Frank Hurley” through Dec. 15 — The Ralls Collection, 1516 31st St., NW; 202-342-1298.
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Gary Tischler •

Before the color school, before there was such a thing as a Washington art scene to speak of, there was Benjamin Abramowitz.

The prolific Abramowitz began his life as an artist with a commission of work from the Works Progress Administration during the Depression when he was only 19 and never stopped until he passed away at the age of 94 in 2011.

For a few days more (until November 28), you can sample a small part of the amazingly large output and legacy of this unique artistic figure in Washington and the nation at the Woman’s National Democratic Club’s Whittemore House Museum at Dupont Circle called “Out of the Vault: Early Prints and Drawings, Benjamin Abramowitz, 1917-2011”.

The exhibition, co-curated by Nuzhat Sultan and Susan Abramowitz Rosenbaum—the only living daughter of the artist—contains 15 original lithographs and drawings. Among them are three works that are part of the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as well as a series of intimate, familial portraits, some of them of Rosenbaum in her adolescence, childhood and youth.

“These works by Benjamin Abramowitz, a W.P.A. artists who established himself in Washington for six decades, exhibit his social and political observations,” Nuzhat Sultan, the co-curator said. The works are reminiscent of Honore Daumier.” Daumier was great and caustic recorder of early 19th-century French society)

Even among the way-too-few works present, you can sense Abramowitz’s restless interests and generous compassion, his feel for the energy in the furious winds of the times he lived in—there are thickly and energetically drawn portraits of electioneering, union rallies, children gathered together, workers in the field and the like, accurate captures of the rural and urban scenes.

His name resounds in Washington, where he rose to prominence with solo exhibitions at the Corcoran Gallery, Howard University and other institutions and galleries over the years. Through the course of his life he had over 100 exhibitions, on the East Cost, through ART in Embassies.

Powerfully accessible and modern in a characteristically American way by style and content, Abramowitz raised his family in what was then rural Greenbelt in Maryland, where he lived and worked for almost half a century. His genius was his singular work but also a gift for multi-tasking and constant curiosity. He would draw, paint, created sculptures, but also found time to study history and philosophy and learn seven languages, Greek and Latin among them.

His output was prodigious as his daughter Susan Rosenbaum, who cared for her father until his death at 94. Working on a registry of her father’s work. By this year, she had accounted for nearly 8,000 works, including 433 paintings, and 162 sculptures.

Rosenbaum is an arts consultant, worked as an external affairs officer at the Corcoran Gallery of Art and is currently Chair of the Board of Trustees of Arts for the Aging.
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Ari Post • September 21, 2012

Unique things are happening in Georgetown’s gallery community. From microscopic sculptures, to affordable contemporary art sales, to themed shows devoted to relationships and natural wonders, it’s a great time to get involved with the local gallery scene before the fall art season kicks into high gear. Don’t miss these late summer exhibitions.

Addison/Ripley Fine Art
On view through Aug. 31, Addison/Ripley Fine Art is presenting a group exhibition guest curated by gallery artist Dan Treado. In his work, Treado uses squeegees, scrapers, and invented brushes to build up many thin layers of paint that produce taut, skin-like surfaces that have almost no evidence of a mark of the hand. Often individual images are combined to form a single larger painting. Treado also takes on interactive projects with friends and fellow artists and has worked on a few series with the theme: “All My Friends Are…” The latest project, titled “All My Friends Are Painters,” a continuation of this theme, is currently on view at Addison/Ripley. Artists include W.C. Richardson, Jeffrey Smith, Tom Bunnell, Steve Cushner, Colin Treado, Katherine Mann, Chris Gregson and Maggie Mitchell.

1670 Wisconsin Ave., NW – www.AddisonRipleyFineArt.com

Heiner Contemporary
“Winging It,” a group exhibition devoted to all things ornithological, has been extended through Aug. 24 at Heiner Contemporary. The exhibition takes as its starting point three works by American naturalist painter and ornithologist Roger Tory Peterson. Peterson’s 1934 field guide, “A Field Guide to the Birds,” was the first available to amateurs, which revolutionized and popularized bird watching through a new identification system. “Winging It” brings together Peterson’s bird studies with work by a new generation of artists who share his fascination and appreciation of the natural world and its feathered inhabitants.

1675 Wisconsin Ave., NW — www.HeinerContemporary.com

Parish Gallery
Parish Gallery is exhibiting the pea-sized work of Willard Wigan in “The Half Century Collection,” on view through Jan. 31, 2013. To the naked eye, Wigan’s work is virtually invisible. Yet when viewed through magnification, the effect is truly mesmerizing. Wigan’s micro-sculptures are so minute that they are only visible through a microscope—each piece commonly sits within the eye of a needle or atop a pinhead. To create his art, Wigan enters a meditative state in which his heartbeat slows, allowing him to reduce hand tremors and sculpt between pulse beats. Even the reverberation caused by outside traffic can affect Wigan’s work. So, he often works through the night when there is minimal disruption. Wigan has been honored throughout the world for his work and his exhibitions frequently sell out. Washington is lucky to have such an intimate venue available to view the work of this micro-visionary.

Canal Square, 1054 31st St., NW — www.ParishGallery.com

The Old Print Gallery
The Old Print Gallery, like Heiner Contemporary, is featuring a themed show devoted to nature’s beauty. “Water,” a group exhibit featuring prints by local, national and international contemporary artists, yields both personal and universal interpretations among artists, which turns into a very natural and effecting conversation with viewers. No matter how it is represented—abstracted or literal, meticulously detailed or vaguely suggested in loose and emotionally charged compositions—its capacity to mesmerize and captivate artists’ attention is undeniable. It’s a swell viewers are sure to get caught up in as well. “Water” is on view through September 14.

1220 31st St., NW — www.OldPrintGallery.com

Susan Calloway Fine Art
Susan Calloway Fine Arts is presenting a new exhibition tailored to new collectors and first-time art buyers. “You Too Can Buy Art: Affordable Art for Young Collectors” will open on Friday, Aug. 17, with a reception from 6 to 8 p.m. The exhibit features a selection of affordable contemporary and vintage artworks, hung in an assemblage style—in other words, there’s a lot to see. Since she opened her doors almost 20 years ago, Susan Calloway’s unswerving commitment to quality, along with a sharp eye for curating an array of periods and styles, has earned her a following. This exhibit will showcase the gallery’s taste in unique fashion—and allow anyone to join in the experience. The show runs through Sept. 8. To RSVP to the opening, call 202-965-4601.

1643 Wisconsin Ave., NW — www.CallowayArt.com
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Ari Post •

The American cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead was a keen observer of the riches of modern city life. She spoke of a city as a center “Where any day in any year there may be a fresh encounter with a new talent, a keen mind or a gifted specialist. This is essential to the life of a country.”

“To play this role,” she noted, “a city must have a soul — a university, a great art or music school, a cathedral or a great mosque or temple, a great laboratory or scientific center, as well as … libraries and museums and galleries …”

Scrolling through Mead’s list of highest urban attributes, Washington hits all the marks. We have the schools, the religious and scientific institutions. We are awash in great museums and historic libraries.

By its very nature, the District is a kaleidoscope of history and progression, holding onto our tenets while moving ever into the 21st Century.

And we have galleries. Boy, do we ever. In the heart of this city, encircling Gallery Place and Metro Center amid the glistening glass and steel of arenas, storefronts, apartments and office buildings, art galleries flare against the cultural skyline. Like the Viennese salons of the late 19th Century, there is always someone admiring the artwork worth their weight in conversational gold.

“A city must be a place where groups of women and men are seeking and developing the highest things they know,” said Mead.

In the galleries listed below, the lifeblood of Mead’s persevering philosophy runs strong, proffering the visual arts as a channel to understanding our history, our surroundings and our collective selves.
Plus, they’re just great venues to see some damn cool stuff. ?

Adamson Gallery

1515 14th Street NW, Suite 202,

www.AdamsonGallery.com

“Wild Things,” the summerlong exhibition at Adamson Gallery, is certainly wild, but don’t go in with the expectation of seeing much in the way of the living. This collection of animal photographs showcase the inhabitants of our oceans and wilderness in a not-so-lifelike light (save the charming Weimaraner portraits of William Wegman). Granted, this is not just an arbitrary portrayal of animals post-mortem. For instance, Martin d’Orgeval’s photograph of an owl is an eerie beakless specimen, perched on a dirty pedestal. This image comes from his project to document the aftermath of a 2008 fire in a 170-year-old taxidermy shop in Paris. The artist photographed everything from singed butterflies to charred bears, offering an interesting observation into the nature of what was — or wasn’t — really destroyed in the fire, while showcasing life’s breathtaking diversity. Other notable artists included in the exhibit include Annie Leibovitz, Jim Dine, Roberto Longo and Roni Horn.

Touchstone Gallery

901 New York Avenue NW,

www.TouchstoneGallery.com

Two simultaneous exhibits at Touchstone Gallery show that traditional practices can still thrive in contemporary art. In his exhibit “Being Affected” (through July 29), Charles St. Charles gives us rows of faces with varied reactions to shared circumstances. The show is influenced by work Charles has done in theater and improvisation, where a satisfying portrayal of reality depends on the actor being affected by the other characters and the environment. Charles skillfully uses color, facial expressions and distortions to reflect the status interplays that result in increasingly crammed physical or psychological spaces.
“A 3D Collage the Adventure” is the work of David Alfuth, a longtime art educator who began this series as a class project for his students. The lesson, which used old prints and engraving, “allowed the students to create a surrealistic situation to present to the viewer,” he writes. “The addition of the 3-dimensional qualities allowed for a world of variety and interest.” The works represent a collective narrative journey, dealing with space, architecture and its effects on human experience: relief sculptures with bizarre and funny titles such as, “They landed on the Moon, planted the flag, and then they left. That is when the party got started;” cubist-like constructions of architectural spaces; and simple, powerful line drawings of architectural elements.

Civilian Art Projects

1019 7th Street NW,

www.CivilianArtProjects.com

Civilian Art Projects has enough to keep patrons busy for a while to come, presenting installations by three acclaimed artists working in a variety of media through July 28. Richard Chartier is a sound artist, considered one of the key figures in the current movement of reductionist electronic sound art, termed “microsound,” or Neo-Modernism. Chartier’s minimalist digital work explores the inter-relationships between the spatial nature of sound, silence, focus, perception and the act of listening itself. In his exhibit “Interior Field,” he transforms the center gallery at Civilian Art into a darkened space where a visitor may relax and focus to this sound composition. A significant portion of this piece utilizes several audio recordings made at the 1905 McMillan Sand Filtration Site in Washington, D.C. during a sudden heavy rainstorm.

Bridget Sue Lambert is exhibiting a photographic series of large-scale prints in which she explores and emphasizes the complicated nature of relationships through the humorously messy rooms of a dollhouse, which she has been working with for the last three years. In them, she has constructed and captured scenes that simulate the emotional and physical clutter that surrounds romantic relationships, as well as a woman’s relationship with herself.

Finally, Shamus Ian Fatzinger presents his show ‘Personal Frontier,’ a series of photographs created from negatives found in a cardboard box belonging to his mother that tell the story of the artist’s childhood, and his family’s move West. What emerges is at once a collection of seminal mid-century American snapshots and a lens into our own grainy, beautiful pasts — weird and sexy, vague and pointed, and somehow very familiar.

Flashpoint Gallery

916 G Street NW,

www.CulturalDC.org

From July 20 to August 18, Flashpoint Gallery will exhibit the work of Interdisciplinary artists Hana Kim and Shana Kim, who join forces to work between the disciplines of architecture and interactive media to create an immersive environmental installation. The show, “Atmospheric Front,” combines pulleys, motors, hand-knit textiles and wires that expand and contract in time with sound and light projections. The texture and movement of the multidimensional piece reference biological and natural systems, which evoke breathing cycles, pulse and emotion. For more information on the process behind their work, visit their blog: AtmosphericFront.wordpress.com.

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Ari Post •

The moment I saw the paintings of Richard Diebenkorn for the first time was one that shifted the course of my life as an artist. I was an 18-year-old student wrestling with things like color, form and, more onerously, ways to convey my ideas and break free from the self-aggrandizing egotism that artistic practice so easily brings about. Something in the style of my complaints must have triggered my teacher to offer me a book of Diebenkorn’s work. I had never been so affected by paintings.

Even in the cramped dimensions of a catalogue, his works felt huge—they carried the visual grandness of a mural in a few square inches. His endless washes of color, falling through and beneath one another in farm-like grids, conveyed a vibrant and somehow weathered atmosphere, like sunlight piercing through morning fog. It was dilapidated doors, smoke, hot asphalt, sweat, fields, style, color, shape, geography, line, form, joy, peace, war. It was paint. And it had never looked better to me.

I remember wanting to run my hands all over these paintings, these fields and strips of color that looked like Mondrian charged with a scuffed, pulsing static. I wanted to lift up the veils of yellow paint to explore the oceans of red ochre and blue-grey beneath the surface. Diebenkorn lets viewers into his process in this way, allowing us to know his paintings inside and out—and he offers this portal to us without reservation or anxiety. In his time, Diebenkorn was a famously generous and patient teacher, and this comes out in his work—even his paintings are good teachers.

Unlike so many artists of the past century who went to great lengths to hide their techniques, Diebenkorn unveils his methods to us garnished on a plate. This was a man who wanted painting to survive when others denounced it as dead, to move the arts into the future in a way that connected and involved audiences.

For the second half of the 20th century, Diebenkorn was the painter’s painter. You would be hard pressed to find a working artist today that does not adore this man’s work. It is painting as the idea in itself, which seems to speak about everything—about an artist in his environment, but also about things transcending any singular time, place or individual. “The idea is to get everything right,” Diebenkorn once said, rather prophetically. “It’s not just color or form or space or line—it’s everything all at once.”

Take a moment to spend time in front of his paintings and you will know what he’s talking about.

Through the end of September, the Corcoran Gallery of Art is hosting “Richard Diebenkorn: The Ocean Park Series,” a retrospective of the artist’s landmark series made between 1967 and 1988, which marks the first major museum exhibition focused on these luminous, grid-like paintings. Small works on paper, prints, drawings and collages—even some “cigar box” studies—share space with his signature massive canvases, many of which are over eight feet tall.

“These works are powerful investigations of space, light, composition, and the fundamental principles of modern abstraction,” said Philip Brookman, chief curator and head of research at the Corcoran. “Diebenkorn investigated the tension between the real world and his own interior landscape… These are not landscapes or architectural interiors but topographically rooted abstractions in which a sense of the skewed light and place of that time emerges through the painting process.”

A lifelong inhabitant of the west coast, Diebenkorn (1922 – 1993) served in the U.S. Marine Corps after attending Stanford University and afterwards took advantage of the G.I. bill to study art at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco. Among his teachers was Mark Rothko, the acclaimed abstract expressionist who doubtlessly effected his perception of modern art. A look at Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park series leaves no doubt that Rothko influenced his sense of composition and color palette. (And as The Georgetowner’s Gary Tischler often points out, “Washington is the Rothko City.” All the more reason to welcome this show to our town.)

As a young painter in the 1950s, it was no small feat to reckon with the wild assault of abstract expressionism on the contemporary art scene. To come into your own at the tail end of one of art history’s most explosive, brazen and contentious periods was a considerable strain on many emerging artists. But with that pressure came a certain liberation for Diebenkorn. Willem De Kooning later would say that the abstract expressionists (and Jackson Pollock, specifically) “broke the ice”; afterwards, art could go anywhere and be almost anything.

During this time, however, Diebenkorn did a rather unusual thing: he pioneered a representational movement, at once a gesture to the tradition of art history and an outright rejection of modern art critics like Clement Greenberg, who argued for “advanced art” that renounced subject matter and representation for the “purity” of abstraction.

Along with fellow artists such as Wayne Thiebaud—most recognized for his over-saturated paintings of cakes and patisserie treats— they together founded The Bay Area Figurative Movement, which pioneered an expressive, representational style that brought together the thick, lustrous brushwork and wanton impasto of abstract expressionism with the earthy romance of the Impressionists.

Though a far cry from his later work with the Ocean Park series, Diebenkorn began in his early paintings a pattern of weaving the threads of familiar people, family members and California landscapes with a grand intimacy that connected his quiet, precise observations to the collective subconscious of postwar America. It was a mutual search for peace, balance and beauty. He learned what it meant to be a modern painter as the world around him learned to see as a modern audience. His work was met with acclaim from critics, viewers and patrons alike.

In the mid 1960s, Diebenkorn took a teaching position at UCLA, moving from San Francisco to Santa Monica. It was during this time that he moved away from his figurative style, for which he had by now become quite popular, and began work on his Ocean Park paintings, a pursuit that would last him the rest of his life and become one of the most influential bodies of work in the second half of the 20th century.

Named for the beachside community where he set up his studio, the Ocean Park series cemented Diebenkorn at the forefront of his generation as an artist dedicated not just to his own work, but to the history and future of his medium.

The shift happened gradually but surprisingly, according to the artist, and in a way he always had trouble explaining. “Maybe someone from the outside observing what I was doing would have known what was about to happen,” he said in an interview in the late ’60s. “But I didn’t. I didn’t see the signs. Then, one day, I was thinking about abstract painting again… I did about four large canvases—still representation, but, again, much flatter. Then, suddenly, I abandoned the figure altogether.”

But looking at these paintings, what we see in fact is an unprecedented balance of abstraction and representation. These paintings are not just shapes that resemble things, like looking up at the sky and seeing a cloud shaped like a poodle. They are distillations of whole environments from which they are born.

Within the canvases are the layouts of suburban neighborhoods, the aluminum siding and split-level houses of mid-20th century America, power lines and clotheslines, interstates and parklands, oceans and shorelines, even the great frontiers of the Wild West. But while these visual tropes are tangible and intriguing, no one theme sits within any particular canvas. You will not find a painting in this exhibit titled “House by the Sea.” Diebenkorn named each piece in this series with a number in the order by which he made them.

The numbers become markers of the passage of time that denote the changing and shifting of the artist’s environment as he lived it. Just as Monet painted the Rouen Cathedral in different lights of day and Matisse evoked the emotional sentiments of his era with the wild, dissonant color palette of Fauvism, so did Diebenkorn acknowledge his time and place by sweeping his brush across his own physical and cultural landscape. He captured the grand, clean-shaven, perhaps diluted idealism of his time in wash- worn, infinitely expansive color fields, cut up with arbitrary vanishing points and the stark measurements of clean, straight lines.

Still, the paintings impose almost nothing upon us as viewers. We are free to explore the pictures in our own way and at our own pace. Diebenkorn’s postwar American abstraction offers glimpses of harmony and calm, a generalization of that “American Dream,” the sincerity and earnestness of which has not really been seen since.

I still wrestle with the same issues as I did when I was first introduced to Diebenkorn’s work, but he helped me to learn that these artistic dilemmas are not just equations that you solve and move past. These issues are themselves the pursuit of art. Diebenkorn’s work inspired me beyond myself. When that happens, you cannot help but to believe in art. ? [gallery ids="100901,128322,128315,128302,128310" nav="thumbs"]

Ari Post • August 10, 2012

Between the sculpture gardens at the National Gallery, the Kreeger Museum and Hirshhorn, there’s a lot to see around the streets of Washington. Throw in the fraternity of bronze-cast historic figures scattered throughout the city and there’s an all-star cast of artistic and historic characters around every corner. You’ll see Henri Moore and Henry Longfellow, Giacometti and Ghandi, Alexander Calder and Alexander Hamilton.

Indeed, there are so many longstanding outdoor fixtures that we miss on our daily commute alone (who among us has ever actually seen a Boundary Stone?), that it’s all too easy to overlook a new public installation. Doug Aitken’s “Song 1” at the Hirshhorn was a deserved success before it came down early last month, with projectors flashing a fully encompassing video around the building’s elliptical façade to a remixed exploration of the 1930s pop song “I Only Have Eyes for You.” It left audiences wanting more of that interactive, environmentally specific experience. Thankfully, the Hirshhorn isn’t lacking for new outdoor installations, and neither is the National Museum of Women in the Arts. And now is just the right time of year to be outside and experience them.

Chakaia Booker Scultures Roll Into New York Avenue

There is a peculiar group of sculptures on a well-kept, grassy median on New York Avenue between 12th and 13th Streets NW, amid the oil drum echoes of construction by Mount Vernon Square and the arterial bustle of downtown. Black and unusually textured, they appear almost aloof to their surroundings — curious as to what exactly is going on around them.

This is the work of sculptor Chakaia Booker, the second artist selected for the National Museum of Women in the Arts’ (NMWA) New York Avenue Sculpture Project, the only public art space featuring changing installations of contemporary works by women artists. Booker, by integrating discarded construction materials into large outdoor sculptures, works here with recycled tires which she slices, twists, weaves and rivets into radically new forms. Tires resonate with the artist for their versatility and rich historical and cultural legacy: The harvest and production of rubber is entwined with a history of brutal colonization, cultural injustices and slave labor in Africa and the world beyond.

Given the space they occupy, these sculptures are oddly modest in size, as if refusing to compete with surrounding noise and structures. They stick out from their environment by utter disassociation of urban aesthetics. They do not try to be big—and in this way they grow. These dancing forms, with interlacing planes that revolve through and around each other, are Brancusian in their suggestive shapes and movement, while their texture and tactility remain rooted somewhere firmly in the earth of this world.

They have the texture of nature, vines, bushes and nettles, like fictitious plants you might see in a Maurice Sendack illustration. Also like Sendack’s work, there is an undertow of darkness about them—a keyhole’s peek into a world of magnificent intrigue and epochal wrath. Perhaps it’s the wondrous patterns and textures against the sheer literality of the tires—once you get close to them, the sculptures are upfront about their material: masses of diced, slit rubber and hundreds of heavy screws securing them to their skeleton.

While there is a good chance you already passed them by without even noticing their presence, Chakaia’s sculptures are worth serious consideration. The good news is they will be on view through 2014, so there’s time to see them.

For more information visit www.NMWA.org.

Ai Weiwei Turns Heads at the Hirshhorn

“Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads” is the first major US public art project by internationally renowned Chinese artist and political activist Ai Weiwei. The installation comprises a dozen bronze sculptures, each roughly ten feet tall, that represent the signs of the Chinese zodiac (snake, horse, ram, monkey, rooster, dog, pig, rat, ox tiger, rabbit and dragon).

The sculptures are re-envisioned and enlarged versions of original eighteenth-century heads that were designed during the Qing dynasty for the fountain clock of the Yuanming Yuan (Garden of Perfect Brightness), an imperial, European-style retreat outside Beijing, which was pillaged in 1860. The Hirshhorn placed them encircling the fountain in the center of the Hirshhorn’s rounded courtyard.

Weiwei went to great pains to depict the animals with detail, down to the veins in the rabbit’s forehead and the chicken’s grainy crown, every surface suggestive of hair, feathers or skin. The heads cut off abruptly at the neck, the stanchions they are affixed to connecting rather artlessly underneath, as if they were each severed from the body and mounted on coarsely carved wooden spikes—like the pig’s head in William Golding’s “Lord of the Flies.”

There is always a lot of historical and political baggage when dealing with Ai Weiwei—and I mean that in the best possible way. A noted dissident, Weiwei has spent his career speaking up against social and political oppression in his homeland. He is a master of the conversation between abrasive confrontation (including a photographic series of his own middle finger interrupting otherwise innocuous snapshots of historic Chinese landmarks, such as Tiananmen Square) and subtle symbolism (covering the floor at London’s Tate Modern with hand-painted porcelain sunflower seeds—a comment on mass consumption, among countless other things).

Knowing this, why would Weiwei go to the effort of such odd and meticulous realism if he didn’t mean them to be perceived that way? Without forcing anything on the audience, the work raises questions about repatriation and intention as well as our own blindness to suffering, religious misinterpretation and historical injustice.

For more information visit www.Hirshhorn.si.edu. [gallery ids="100821,125482" nav="thumbs"]