This gallery contains 15 photos.
Three mid-career artists with distinctive visions of abstract paintings will be featured in “Color, Form, Space,” opening from 6-10 p.m. Friday, Oct. 5th at ArtSpace/Virginia Miller Galleries in Coral Gables. The background of the artists is as varied as their … Continue reading
Huang Yan, Self Portrait, Archival Inkjet Print with Pochoir, Ed200, 2008, 31.75 x 23.5 inches
As the gallery’s current exhibition enters its final month two of its artists set international sales records for Contemporary Chinese works and the show was recognized in both national and regional art magazines.
“Portal” drew positive reviews in the April issues of Art News and Art Districts magazines. Writing in ArtNews, Margery Gordon calls it “this compelling show.” In her review in ArtDistricts Florida, Sophie Annie Videment refers to “this extremely rich exhibition.” Continue reading
Gallery director Virginia Miller was one of five speakers in a symposium on “East/West: Visually Speaking” the first group exhibition of contemporary Chinese art curated from the artists rather than from private collections.
Being held at the Paul and Lulu Hilliard University Art Museum, University of Louisiana at Lafayette from Jan. 22 through May 1st, the exhibition was coordinated by Miller, who has held three major exhibitions of Chinese contemporary works at ArtSpace/Virginia Miller Galleries.
The exhibition was curated over a two-year period by Dr. Lee Gray, who moderated the symposium. Also speaking were two of the show’s artists, Ma Baozhong and Luo Weiguo, along with the critic, curator and author Lilly Wei.
“East/West: Visually Speaking” is illustrated extensively in a 100-page catalog that includes essays by Lilly Wei and Dr. Gray. In its foreword, Museum Director Mark A. Tullos, Jr. states that “I particularly would like to thank Virginia Miller, whose experience and knowledge of the artists and their associated representatives was invaluable to the curatorial process.”
“As a university museum our mission is to offer exhibitions that provoke thought and create dialogue,” Tullos notes. “This is probably one of the most significant international projects undertaken by an American museum in the South.”
In her essay, Wei describes the exhibition as “a captivating and informative look at the globalized human and political comedy in which imported aesthetics collide with native ideologies to create strange and at times wonderful fusions.”
Events held in conjunction with the exhibition included a celebration of the Chinese New Year featuring acrobatic lion dancers.
For more information on the exhibition or to order a catalog, contact the museum online here.
Marco Tulio, Untitled, 57 x 64 1.4 inches, 2007, Oil on Canvas
A major article in the Christian Science Monitor (The heart of Latin art By Gloria Goodale) on the unprecedented number of major exhibitions of Latin American art around the nation features a painting by Marco Tulio and quotes a museum director who singles it out as an example of magical realism.
“La Montera” (The Bullfighter’s Hat”) depicts a pensive young woman draped in a sheet, seated in a bullfighting ring. Near her are flower petals and the toreador’s cap. His cape is draped across a nearby barrier. Looking on are two sinister characters, one holding a scythe.
The painting is one of the six loaned by ArtSpace/Virginia Miller Galleries to the Naples Museum of Art for its “Latin American Painting Now” exhibition of works by 50 artists being shown until Jan. 10th. The newspaper article states:
“The contemporary Latin American artists on display at the Naples (Fla.) Art Museum vividly carry forward many of the characteristics that have traditionally defined Latin art. ‘Vibrant colors, figurative imagery, and a joyful embrace of everyday objects,’ says director Michael Culver.
“He points to such artists as Marco Tulio, whose work ‘The Bullfighter’s Hat’ offers a contemporary spin on traditional elements of Latin American art. ‘He paints like the old masters with layers on layers that create a fine, wonderful surface that looks immaculate – almost like a photo – but also almost surreal in the way he places the object,’ says Mr. Culver, adding that it also evokes another traditional Latin theme — magical realism, in which simple objects take on meaning.”
Other paintings from the gallery loaned to the Naples exhibition are by Alfredo Arcia, Humberto Castro, Michelle Concepción, Ramón Oviedo and Elmar Rojas.
An exhibition at the Phillips collection in Washington, D.C. this summer of 33 internationally renowned figurative painters will include works by Alice Neel and Arnaldo Roche-Rabell.
“We presently are offering truly outstanding works by both Neel and Roche-Bell,” noted gallery owner-director Virginia Miller. “These may be seen on our web site, virginiamiller.com, by clicking under Artists and then Masters.”
According to an article in the April 14, 2009 online art review, artdaily.org, the exhibition “Paint Made Flesh” presents works created between 1952 and 2006 in Europe and the United States tracing “figurative paintings powerful personal and social commentary.” The article goes on to state:
“ Artists such as Alice Neel, whose unflinching paintings are among the most powerful portraits of the 20th century, distorted the anatomy of their subjects and used an unusual color palette to express the themes of poverty, despair, and turmoil.” For more information on Neel, see our Feb. 20, 2009 gallery blog, which includes her 1927 watercolor titled “Contrasts,” in which the lifelong socialist depicts the dominance of an affluent society matron over a diminutive, less fortunate woman.
For more information on Arnaldo Roche-Rabell, one of the leading artists of Puerto Rico, see his gallery blog dated Oct. 26, 2007, which includes an illustration of a major work available at the gallery. “This incredibly powerful painting catches viewers in its swirls of furious movement,” says Virginia Miller.
The article further notes that “Paint Made Flesh was organized by the Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville, Tennessee. The curator is Mark W. Scala, chief curator of the Frist. After its presentation at the Phillips, the exhibition will be on view at the Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester, N.Y., from Oct. 25 to Jan. 3, 2010.”
“Autocycles,” the latest twists in the lifelong evolution of paintings by Matt Carone, will open at ArtSpace/Virginia Miller Galleries at 7 p.m. Friday, Mar. 6th.
Largely inspired by his 45-year friendship with the famed Chilean painter Roberto Matta, Carone’s paintings recently took a turn toward a more patterned abstraction.
According to the artist, the new subtly toned works “seem to be an opening of a new door of automatism.
“The approach is similar to the past works but the image is arrived at more spontaneously and graphically,” Carone says. “Subconscious symbols and rhythmic gestures relating to each other or canceling each other out seem to be the building blocks to the final statement.
“The seed,” he acknowledges, “was planted by Matta.”
Like the abstract expressionists, Carone seeks “a spontaneous image as a consequence of a gesture…dictated more by the subconscious than by a rational, disclplined procedure.”
Carone became interested in art as an adolescent during the summer of 1944, when he was asked to model for Hans Hoffman. His older brother, the well-known painter Nicolas Carone, was studying with Hoffman.
Through his brother and years of involvement in art, Carone has had a close association with many of the era’s most famous artists and critics, including Conrad Marca-Relli, James Brooks, Paul Jenkins, Sandro Chia, Larry Rivers, Balcolm Greene, James Rosenquist, Duane Hanson, Thomas Hoving, Clement Greenberg and many others.
His extensive professional biography lists one-person exhibitions in such museums as the Fort Lauderdale Museum of Art, the Boca Raton Museum, and the Palazzo Panni Museum in Arco di Trento, Italy, along with numerous leading private galleries.
View artworks here
Josephine Haden, 48 x 60 inches, Exaltation, 1999, Acrylic on Canvas
Gallery artist Josephine Haden continues to rack up impressive awards and exhibitions. Her work will be featured in a one-person exhibition at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, Virginia, from June to September 2009.
Haden also was awarded the prestigious Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Fellowship for 2008-09, juried by Jeffrey Grove, Curator of Modern & Contemporary Art, High Museum of Art, Atlanta. Previous recipients include Cy Twombly.
Haden also was juried into two important publications: “2008 New American Paintings,” the annual exhibition-in-print, and “Studio Visit” magazine, which featured her works twice in 2008.
Haden’s major solo exhibition at the McLean Project for the Arts in McLean, Virginia, was accompanied by a catalog with an essay by the renowned Donald Kuspit, who has been termed “one of America’s most distinguished art critics.”
Kuspit observes that the “blues, browns and greens of her landscapes have a radiance all their own, independent of the nature they represent…Haden moves easily between the rough, raw, rounded and smooth, refined, flat—they nonetheless fit together, strangely yet seamlessly, like pieces of a trialectial puzzle.”
Kuspit clearly is equally impressed with Haden’s figurative work, referring to her as “an allegorist of alienation” whose “works resonate with the melancholy of the Sublime.”
As part of its Spring Collection 08, ArtSlant, “the #1 contemporary art network,” chose Haden along with four other artists to be showcased with a feature article. It notes that her paintings are included in private, public, and corporate collections in the United States and France, including the William J. Clinton Presidential Library and Museum.
The gallery web site features Haden’s works in five categories: Abstracts on Wood, Figures on Wood, Figures on Canvas & Paper, Landscapes on Canvas and Treescapes on Canvas.
During the early years of the Great Depression, Alice Neel was one of the 3,749 artists who participated in the predecessor to the Federal Arts Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), the Public Works of Art Project, which operated during 1933-34.
During that period, Neel was among the artists who were given a free meal every day in Greenwich Village. In the book “Alice Neel” by Patricia Hills, (Harry N. Abrams, Inc., New York, 1983 and reprinted 1995), she recalls:
“Contrasts,” 12 x 9 inches, 1927, Watercolor on Paper
“Then, at the end of 1933, I got on the PWAP. I received a letter to come down to the Whitney Museum, and there I was interviewed by a very nice young man who said, ‘How would you like to receive $30 a week for painting pictures?’ Oh, I said, I’d love it. And I came home and I felt so happy that I painted Snow on Cornelia Street. When I had $30 a week I didn’t need a free meal.”
Neel’s paintings were included in two 1977 exhibitions of WPA artists of the 1930s. One was a travelling exhibition organized by the Gallery Association of New York; another was held at Parsons School of Design.
Patricia Hills’ biography includes a photograph of Neel with her grandchildren, Olivia and Elizabeth, prominently printed on page 201, taken by Bill DuPriest during the Feb. 11, 1978 opening reception of Virginia Miller Galleries’ exhibition, “Alice Neel: Retrospective Works on Paper 1926-1977.”
Other photos of Neel during the opening reception at Virginia Miller Galleries in Coconut Grove, Florida, show her laughing uproariously during the viewing of the award-winning public television film, “Alice Neel: Collector of Souls.”
The historic exhibition, Neel’s first show in a private gallery in the South, featured several of the works illustrated in the book, including the 1931 pencil and watercolor “Kenneth Doolittle” shown on page 43; the 1932 watercolor and collage titled “Christopher Lazar” on page 47; the 1958 oil on paper of John Rothschild titled “Man in Striped Shirt” on page 74; and both of the 1949 ink on paper drawings of “Judge Medina” and “Angela Calomaris” on page 87.
One of the works sold from the exhibition, a 12-by-9-inch 1927 watercolor titled “Contrasts,” presently is being offered on the gallery web site under the “Masters” category of “Artists.”
“Alice was acutely aware of the enormous gap between the wealthy and the poor and working-class people back in the 1920s,” observes gallery owner Virginia Miller. “Several of the works that I curated into her exhibition showed underprivileged people in hospitals and elsewhere. This charming watercolor is an important example of Alice Neel’s deep awareness of the gap between the social classes, and how the wealthy dominated society in those days.”
Another watercolor in the show, the 1927 work titled “The Grandchild,” is printed in the Patricia Hills biography on page 19. It also illustrated a review of the Neel exhibition by Dr. Marilyn Schmitt, a University of Miami art professor, in “ARTSmagazine.”
In her review, Dr. Schmitt noted that the artist’s social concerns were lifelong. “Her early socialist convictions, scarcely mellowed today one senses, provide the thread of continuity for several drawings in strikingly different styles. Where the political message is strongest, as in The Bowery (early 1950s) and the caricature of the hated Communist-chaser Judge Harold R. Medina and his witness Angela Calomeris (1949), the technique is at its most strident, unpleasant, and laborious in its avoidance of grace.
“In others, the social message is subsumed in human and aesthetic concerns. In The Men From Bleeker Street (1933) and the death portrait of Mother Bloor in her casket (1951), drawings united by strongly leftist preoccupations despite almost 20 years’ separation, the sense of humanity dominates, and the delicate line is correspondingly
sensitive and appealing.”
Only one oil on canvas was in the exhibition, the five-foot portrait that Alice did of Virginia Miller just a few months before her Coconut Grove show.
“Alice asked me to sit for her when we met at a two-day seminar at the New School in late 1977,” recalls Miller. “I was on a panel on functioning in the art world with Louise Nevelson, the art dealer Jacques Truman, art insurer Huntington Block, and several others. Alice was on another panel that included art dealer Ivan Karp and the prominent curator and critic Henry Geldzahler.
“When Alice complained that Geldzahler had not included her work in a recent exhibition, he explained it was because she was ‘not modern.’ This infuriated Alice, and when she resumed work on my portrait she splashed several broad strokes of green paint across the background and told me, ‘I’ll show him who’s modern!’”
Miller, who had braved thigh-deep snowdrifts in that year’s famous blizzard to struggle from midtown to Alice’s apartment in Spanish Harlem, says the expressionist onslaught had her worried, but Alice soon calmed down and the portrait is an unflattering but excellent likeness that exaggerates Miller’s six-foot angularity. It may be seen on the gallery web site under “Gallery.”
“As far as I know, mine is the only painting Alice Neel ever did with that sort of abstract expressionist background,” Miller says.
Dr. Schmitt’s review also covered a concurrent exhibition of Alice Neel’s canvases at the Fort Lauderdale Museum of Art. She observes that “the portraits on canvas might well be called extensions of Neel’s drawings, for their initiating outlines survive in the finished products and the changes of mind are left, as in a sketch.” She adds that Neel “is a major artist of the 20th century. We can judge for ourselves an art world that celebrated far weaker stuff while ignoring her. Against that backdrop, Alice Neel is a giant.”
Gallery artist Soledad Salamé will open a one-person exhibition that explores how global warming is changing the Maryland coastline at the Contemporary Museum in Baltimore on March 26th. Marianne and Robert Taylor will hold a champagne brunch fundraiser for the project on March 8th in their waterfront home in Pasadena, Maryland. The artist will speak about her forthcoming exhibition at the event, to be co-hosted by the Taylor’s daughter, Kymberly Taylor, and the museum’s deputy director, Robert E. Haywood.
ArtSpace/Virginia Miller Galleries regularly exhibits the work of Colombian painter Marco Tulio in its group exhibitions of Latin American artists as well as at such expos as the 2008 Bridge Art Fair during Art Basel Miami Beach and at Arteaméricas, the annual Latin American art fair.
Tulio’s stylized, surrealistic paintings have been described as “magic realism” reminiscent of the literary works of his countryman, Gabriel Garcia Márquez.
Rod Drown, editor and publisher of the popular blog “Muse Views,” writes that Tulio “achieves a quality of heightened reality. He has a refined skill at presenting archetypal forms within the painting that, although subtle and nuanced, are accessible to close observation.”
Drown goes on to describe the three triangular shapes that form the composition of one of Tulio’s paintings, and notes that “in Buddhist philosophy, geometry and symbolism are the means whereby all spiritual facts are expressed, and through which they are to be interpreted. The set of three is the triad in which is expressed the triple nature of the manifested soul” and that whether or not the artist composed the painting in this manner, “Tulio’s discerning use of geometry and symbolism characterizes his mental state,” which he suggests was “a religious state of mind—and, in a sense, (he) painted an icon.”
At the conclusion of his lengthy article, Drown observes that in recent years, Tulio did a number of paintings for the Vancouver Opera Society. Several of them, including works depicting leading characters from “Madame Butterfly” and “A Masked Ball,” are included here