Weimar Dreams
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JGUNE/JAULY/ALLUGUST 2007 Ewww.galleryandstudiomagazine.comRY&ST U VOL. 9D NO. 5I NewO York The World of the Working Artist WEIMAR DREAMS George Grosz, “Barberina” From Berlin to Broadway at The Morgan Library & Museum (p.21) Plus: Art vs. Empathy (NY Notebook, centerfold) Ulla Novina Alberto Jiménez Winds of Change #1, Italian Marble “Daily Still Life” Oil on Canvas 100 x 81 represented by Icons in Stone On view through the Summer Months WORLD FINE ART GALLERY 511 West 25th Street, Ste 803 Broadfoot & Broadfoot Manhattan Gallery New York, N.Y. 10001 62 Greene Street, New York, N. Y. Phone: 646 336 1677 Hrs: Tues - Sat 12 - 6pm 646-808-7470 www.worldfineart.com [email protected] THE BROOME STREET GALLERY Ground floor, 1,300 sq. ft. Exhibition space rental available 498 Broome Street, New York, NY 10013 Tel: (212) 941-0130 GALLERY&STUDIO JUNE/JULY/AUGUST 2007 Sawaka Nagae WS C West Side Arts Coalition 1979 SALON 2007 Curated by Jennifer Holst and Berik Kulmamirov June 2 - 17, 2007 Reception: Saturday, June 2, 2:30-5:30 Artists: Elke Albrecht • Ash Almonte Carole Barlowe • Meg Boe Birns Joseph Isak Boss • Elinore Bucholtz Eduard Chernukhin • Susan Daniels Astrith Deyrup • Leila Elias K. A. Gibbons • Georgianna’s Gifts Irina Gorodetskaya • Carolyn S. Kaplan Berik Kulmamirov • Madi Lanier • Lori Lata Leanne Martinson • Margo Mead • Marsha Peruo “Pathetique #2” Encaustic on Wood Panel 12"x12" Shirley Z. Piniat • Olga Radjapova Carolyn Reus • Emily Rich • Anne Rudder Represented by Sima Schloss • Meyer Tannenbaum WORLD FINE ART GALLERY Marta Vaneva • Janice Wood Wetzel 511 West 25th Street, Ste 803 New York, N.Y. 10001 Broadway Mall Community Center Phone: 646 336 1677 Hrs: Tues - Sat 12 - 6pm 96th Street and Broadway, center island, NYC Gallery Hours: Wed. 6-8pm, Sat./Sun.12-6pm www.worldfineart.com [email protected] [email protected] 212-316-6024 www.wsacny.org G&S NYC GUIDE Everything Goes Book Cafe & Neighborhood Stage, at 208 Bay Street in Tompkinsville, Staten Island, continues to justify its name with a variety of free musical events, poetry readings, films, art exhibitions, and other community-oriented activities. On June 14 and 15, at 9 PM, Manhattan cognoscenti willing to brave the ferry can catch a performance piece involving lights, smoke, and audio by resident conceptual artist Steve Jones Daughs. Entitled “Mystic Portal,” it is billed as “a celebration of the New Moon.” Be there or be square! While on Staten Island don’t miss Cynthia von Buhler: Show & Tell at THE STATEN ISLAND MUSEUM, 75 Stuyvesant Place. Von Buhler, a resi- dent of the Island, creates interactive sculptures and surreal three-dimensional works that have won her a wide following in the New York art scene. She is also author of a highly acclaimed Children’s book, The Cat who Wouldn’t Come Inside (Houghton Mifflin, 2006). Through June 17. Call 718.727.1135 for museum hours and information. Al Hirschfeld Portraits on view at THE ART STUDENTS LEAGUE, 215 West 57th St., thru July 13. A former alumni of the League, Hirschfeld applied a line as sinuous as that of Aubrey Beardsley to the fine art of theatrical caricature. In a career that spanned more than 80 years, he became one of the most admired draftsmen in America. See an array of caricatures displayed for the first time, including Mick Jagger, The Beatles, and early media stars such as John Barrymore and Charlie Chaplin. www.theartsstudentsleague.org (cont’d p.20) G&S Highlights Alberto Jiménez, pg. 15 On the Cover: George Grosz (1893 –1959) Barberina, 1925 Watercolor on wove paper 25 1/2 x 37 1/4 inches (647 x 948 mm) The Pierpont Morgan Library, Bequest of Fred Ebb, Photography by Joseph Zehavi, 2006 © Estate of George Grosz /Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY –See Weimar Dreams, page 21 Verane Guerin, pg. 4 Ekatherina S, pg. 24 Stephanie Rauschenbusch, pg. 29 Bugatti, pg. 14 Cornelia MacFadyen, pg. 4 Miguel Sansón, pg. 20 Sawaka Nagae, pg. 5 New York Notebook, pg. 16 GALLERY&STUDIO Subscribe to An International Art Journal GALLERY&STUDIO PUBLISHED BY $22 Subscription $18 for additional Gift Subscription $44 International © EYE LEVEL, LTD. 2007 Mail check or Money Order to: ALL RIGHTS RESERVED GALLERY&STUDIO 217 East 85th Street, PMB 228, New York, NY 10028 217 East 85th St., PMB 228, New York, NY 10028 Phone: 212-861-6814 (212) 861-6814 E-mail: [email protected] Name EDITOR AND PUBLISHER Jeannie McCormack MANAGING EDITOR Ed McCormack Address SPECIAL EDITORIAL ADVISOR Margot Palmer-Poroner DESIGN AND PRODUCTION Karen Mullen City CONTRIBUTING EDITOR Maureen Flynn www.galleryandstudiomagazine.com State/Zip 2 GALLERY&STUDIO JUNE/JULY/AUGUST 2007 The Sculptor Ulla Novina’s Ancient Inspiration o enter the cavernous exhibition space ing herself humbly within the very oldest Tof Broadfoot & Broadfoot, at 62 tradition of human endeavor. Indeed, as Greene Street, and encounter the sculp- William Zimmer, an art critic for The New tures of the Swedish-born American artist York Times once pointed out in an essay Ulla Novina, on view through the summer on her work, “She sees as early months, is to feel oneself in the presence antecedents manifestations such as of the sacred. To put it quite simply, the imprints of hands on rock faces made by forms that Novina coaxes with her chisel paleolithic people and slabs of rock that from massive slabs of marble are state- contain Viking runes––things that declare ments of grace. Without alluding to any- ‘I am here.’” thing in the known world they command Perhaps no piece of Novina’s addresses space with an innate majesty that makes our origins more explicitly than the piece the viewer hungry for the timeless narra- that she calls “Lucy #1.” The title refers to tive submerged within the surface of the the name given by the famed anthropolo- stone. Their economy of form enhances gist Louis Leakey to the most complete their mute power. skeleton of an early ancestor of humans Skane, the province of Sweden where ever found, excavated in Ethiopia. Since Novina was born is legendary for its this fossil is believed to be female, Novina expansive spirit and boisterous humor. Her refers to her as “our Primordial Mother,” biography tells us that she also spent some and pays tribute with this work in Mexican of her formative years in Varmland, a place onyx, a material with an off-white hue, of “mysterious forests and deep lakes,” suggesting very old bone. Although and also “the county of dreamers, story- Novina began her career with the human tellers, musicians, painters and sculptors.” figure, first as a painter and then when she Both places formed her personality as discovered her true vocation as a sculptor, well as her sculptural sensibility. She is a she has evolved a personal vocabulary of gregarious woman, given to witticisms, forms that transcend literal representation. wild enthusiasms, and easy laughter. But Yet, here again, the two roughly rectangu- there is also a serene stillness at her center, lar forms that she has carved into the a contemplative quality that makes it pos- stone, supported by a columnar “neck,” sible to imagine her sitting for many long are decidedly anthropomorphic, suggest- hours in her studio, where every surface is ing a primitive monument. covered with a thin film of marble dust, “Vessel of the Muse” Even when suggestions of the figure are evoking the timeless silence of the not explicit, as in “Morning Dialogue,” a snowy forests of her youth in Sweden, scale of the gallery space (the polar oppo- particularly craggy work in Italian marble, communing with monolithic slabs of stone site of the ubiquitous “white cube” that which she has scored along its top edge until they tell her in their mute way what the real estate crunch has imposed on with deep grooves, a human element they will become. much of today’s art), her pieces have plen- invariably enters into Novina’s sculptural For Novina has stated in no uncertain ty of space to breathe and exude an atmos- thinking. Here it takes the form of the terms that she regards her stones as sen- phere of pregnant power. “Stately” is the imaginative dialogue she envisages tient beings. She speaks of the “connec- term that springs most readily to mind. between the contrasting deep maroon and tion” between herself and her materials The totemic work in red Italian marble taupe stratifications and striations in the and insists that the dialogue that she has “Vessel of the Muse” grabbed and held stone at the time of their creation in pre- with it is reciprocal: “Together the stone me first, not only because it is the one history. and I tell a story. .This awareness cre- closest to the entryway, but because its tall And while it would be no more charac- ates a feeling in me of kinship with the vertical shape suggests an ancient tablet teristic of Novina’s mature aesthetic to stone which I express in my art by inte- with an almost anthropomorphic presence. imitate the superficial particulars of nature grating the natural with my sculptural As one moves around the piece, dramatic than to detail the individual features of the statement. If successful, self and stone are tactile contrasts become apparent between human figure, she creates a powerful held in shared embrace.” the smoothness of the surface facing the material metaphor in “Forest Portals,” in Admittedly, one does often not hear door and its opposite side, where Novina which two adjoining columns of dark artists talking in such terms, passion being has carved away the white stone to Italian marble, carved with precise lines the last taboo in our current climate of unearth the inner core of its white grain.