Dancy: 20 Best Booths At Art Basel Hong Kong

Article:  20 Best Booths At Art Basel Hong Kong

(Artsy)

Night Gallery

With Works By Mira Dancy

WHY YOU SHOULD STOP

Last fall, we picked out Mira Dancy from the embarrassment of emerging art riches that was Frieze London. Less than half a year later, the New York-based painter has been a standout at nearly every major fair and survey since, with works quickly snapped up in the first few hours of every showing—as was the case at Independent earlier this month. But it’s no hype machine; Dancy’s paintings seriously just keep getting better—and at Art Basel in Hong Kong, a new highmark has been set again.

Ibrahim El-Salahi: The Pioneering Sudanese Artist That You Should Know

Article:  Ibrahim El-Salahi: The Pioneering Sudanese Artist That You Should Know

(Artsy)

Beginning in 2012 and through 2013, a traveling retrospective of one of the greatest living African artists made stops at museums in Sharjah, Doha, and ultimately, London, disseminating the powerful visual language of Ibrahim El-Salahi. The show was curated by Salah Hassan, who recognized the pioneering Sudanese artist’s pivotal role in African modernism—and the constraints of art history that have hindered his significance.

“El-Salahi is arguably one of the most important modern African artists alive,” said curator Elvira Dyangani Ose, who co-curated the retrospective at the Tate with Hassan. “His vibrant, experimental and enduring body of work helped to write one of the most critical chapters of Sudanese art, in particular, and African art, in general.”  But while the show made a triumphal final stop at the Tate Modern (it was the British institution’s first solo show dedicated to an African artist), and a handful of international galleries have shownthe artist, who is now 85 years old, over the past few years (London’s Vigo Gallery has givenhim two solo shows since 2014), El-Salahi has remained largely under-recognized in the U.S., perhaps until now.

Torey Thornton: Albright-Knox highlights red-hot work of painter Torey Thornton

Article:  Albright-Knox highlights red-hot work of painter Torey Thornton

(Buffalo.com)

Torey Thornton isn’t yet a household name, but he’s well on his way.

The 26-year-old Brooklyn-based artist has been steadily building buzz in the art world for his polyglot paintings, which distill a broad range of influences from street graffiti to art history into alluring compositions of form and color that are proving irresistible to collectors.

After a series of increasingly popular group exhibits and a strong showing at last year’s Armory Show in New York City, Thornton will receive his first solo exhibition in an American museum starting Feb. 27 in the Albright-Knox Art Gallery.

“Torey Thornton: Sir Veil,” organized by Albright-Knox curator Holly E. Hughes, will feature a compact selection of seven Thornton paintings and one work on paper going back to 2013 – which represents the bulk of the young artist’s professional career. He and Hughes will speak about his work at 7:15 p.m. Feb. 26 in the gallery’s auditorium as part of the Emerging Voices in Contemporary Art series.

16 Artists To Watch in 2016 (Mira Dancy & Daniel Crews-Chubb)

Article:  16 Artists To Watch In 2016

(NewAmericanPaintings.com)

The needs and priorities of artists are in constant flux. Art historians have attempted to document this flux by identifying a series of seismic shifts in aesthetics and attaching to each its defining characteristics. This practice has provided us with a litany of isms that stretch back centuries. Art history will continue to roll on, but it very well may be that the age of the ism is behind us. That’s not to say that there are not, and will not continue to be, clusters of like-minded artists whose combined efforts can generate an aesthetic critical mass that historians are able to delineate. But with instant global communication, the time in which new ideas are disseminated, assimilated, and ultimately disregarded is so compressed that the enterprise has been, at best, reduced to trend spotting.

The medium of painting, in particular, has always been prone to noticeable trends. For the better part of a decade, the trend of note has been the overwhelming amount of abstraction that has circulated, in particular that of the provisional, or de-skilled ilk. While there are some talented artists working in this vein––Richard Aldrich and Joe Bradley, to name two––much of the stuff is so hopelessly bland and devoid of meaningful content that it has garnered the moniker “zombie formalism.” In the past two years, however, the winds have shifted. Abstraction is out, and the figure is in; flatness is out, as artists begin to embrace a space that lies somewhere between reality and a digital simulacrum of it.

 Both of these trends were widely visible in 2015. As I wandered though the various art fairs that make up Miami’s art week in early December I was overwhelmed by the amount of figurative painting on view…much of if it at galleries that have rarely, if ever, exhibited such work. The figure is everywhere, and being addressed with all manner of stylistic intonation. Even more conspicuous was the number of artists who, whatever their subject matter, are conjuring a kind of space that seems teasingly “real,” yet clearly relies on life as experienced through the computer screen more than the living room window. Perhaps this is not a surprise, given that a generation of artists weaned on the Internet is now coming of age.

 Before getting in to this year’s list of Artists to Watch, I want to say how pleased I am to see the success of all of the artists featured on last year’s list. Sadie Benning had a knockout show at Susanne Vielmetter in Los Angeles that was critically acclaimed. Katherine Bernhardt took it to the next level with her outing at Venus Over Manhattan. Daniel Heidkamp, who just gets better and better, was heavily in demand. Eddie Martinez, whose current show at Mitchell-Innes & Nash is his best to date, is now firmly on the radar of serious international collectors. Most exciting to me is the attention given to mature painter, Katherine Bradford. Bradford has been making her quirky, extraordinary paintings for years and, finally, the world has caught up. Her work looked completely of-the-moment at NADA Miami, and her subsequent one-woman show at CANADA in New York City was a huge commercial and critical success. – Steven Zevitas, Editor/Publisher

Daniel Crews-Chubb

Crews-Chubb was a Miami discovery for me this year. His solo presentation at UNTITLED was one of the highlights of the fair. It would be overstating it to call Crews-Chubb an expressionist per se, but the fluid and aggressive manner with which he handles paint certainly owes something to the legacy of de Kooning and others. There is no artifice to his paintings…what you see is what you get. In them, roughly hewn figures jostle for dominance over each other and the picture plane. I am a huge fan of how this guy paints feet.

 Mira Dancy

I first saw Dancy’s work in 2013 at Kansas Gallery in New York City. Having graduated from Columbia’s MFA program in 2009, Dancy is a solid member of the new generation of figurative painters, many of whom are quickly gaining attention. She focuses on the female body with a vengeance. It is almost as if she is trying to wrest it from the hands of the mostly male cast of artists who have laid claim to it over the years. In the past few years her compositional sense has gotten ever more sophisticated. I am excited to see how she grows.

  (more at New American Paintings)

The Mistake Room: TMR Guadalajara

The Mistake Room (TMR) is pleased to announce the launch of TMR Guadalajara—a new yearlong initiative of residency-based exhibitions and artist projects in Mexico’s second largest city. Artists will spend a month living and working at Museo Taller Jose Clemente Orozco—the historic former residence and workshop of the late Mexican muralist. At the culmination of their residency the work produced will be installed in the space — transforming the site into an exhibition. This project will be done in collaboration with PAOS (Programa Anual de Open Studios)—a residency and alternative cultural education organization supported by the State of Jalisco’s Ministry of Culture and the Instituto Cultural Cabañas. Over the past year that it has resided at Museo Taller Jose Clemente Orozco PAOS has helped strengthen the development of conceptual art in Mexico by advocating for and implementing experimental discursive programs.

TMR Guadalajara will complement PAOS by introducing international rotations into their residency component. The inaugural project of TMR Guadalajara will be a residency-based exhibition by artist Henry Taylor. Taylor will conduct his residency in January 2016 and present an exhibition that will open to the public on January 30th and remain on view through April 2nd, 2016. Future artist participants for the remainder of 2016 will be announced in late Spring.

TMR Guadalajara will launch in January 2016 to coincide with the inauguration of The Mistake Room’s new group exhibition,Histories of a Vanishing Present, opening at its Downtown LA location on January 6, 2016.

TMR Guadalajara: Henry Taylor is organized by The Mistake Room and curated by Cesar Garcia, TMR Director and Chief Curator. 

Dancy, Mack, Mahama, Kantarovsky: The Top 15 Emerging Artists of 2015

Article:  The Top 15 Emerging Artists of 2015

(Artsy)

You’ve likely spotted one of Dancy’s languid, muscular female nudes around the art world this year. In myriad forms, including murals, drawings in neon, paintings, and shower curtains, Dancy’s nudes have cropped up at Frieze, FIAC, Art Basel in Miami Beach (in Artsy Projects: Nautilus), L.A.’s Night Gallery, and across from feminist pioneer Mary Beth Edelson at MoMA PS1’s “Greater New York,” the renowned bellwether of emerging talent, in 2015 alone. “Mira Dancy’s work packs a lot of punch!,” Mia Locks, one of the exhibition’s curators told Artsy. “Her bright and bold imagery is full of women with tremendous attitude and psychological power, and I’m particularly taken with the conflicted positions her figures occupy. They feel simultaneously exposed and empowered, beautiful but also distorted or unhinged.”   more at Artsy

Alex Becerra Interview

Article: Alex Becerra Interview

(GNYP)

MG: LA is becoming famous for its concentration of artistic talents. Was it a conscious choice or a coincidence that you are living and working here? 
AB: It so nice about LA that it is so spread apart. On the Westside where I’m living now I can be a kind of recluse and don’t need to deal with anyone except my dog and my work. I got my undergraduate here in Otis in 2011 so I’ve been on this part of town since 2008.

MG: Did you move to LA to study? 
AB: Yes. I grew in this very little farming town Piru just outside LA County, where the majority of the population are Mexican immigrants. I was born in the US but all my family is from Mexico.

MG: What is your first language?

AB: Spanish. I was in school speaking Spanish until I was about 7 years old. The town I grew up in was maybe a thousand people; most of the kids were Latinos. Their parents were mainly farmers and pickers; my father was a picker as well before he became a truck driver.

MG: How did you go into art? 
AB: Probably through the local liquor store. It had these magazines, teen angel or something, which published drawings and letters from prison inmates; drawings of women, which the prisoners were trying to draw from photos of their girlfriends. They were really ugly in a good way you know.  (more at GNYP)

Alex Becerra

Article: Alex Becerra

(Frieze Magazine)

"Alex Becerra is a young painter who seems to value freedom over pretty much everything else, even at the expense of such musty old notions as moral responsibility or restraint. Left to its own devices, his mind goes, most often, to the naked human form: to pictures of fulsome ladies in compromising positions, up-skirt shots caught in mirrors, women with legs akimbo, examining themselves. In this exhibition, Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) is evoked more than once. Becerra makes unapologetically reckless pictures that are, at their best, thrilling to look at and, at their worst, vexing to think about. In this exhibition, there is never a dull moment." (more at Frieze Magazine)

Hayal Pozanti on Her Data-Driven Paintings and What It Means to Be Human

Article:  Hayal Pozanti on Her Data-Driven Paintings and What It Means to Be Human

(Artsy)

"By now, Pozanti’s personal lexicon—a language of 31 shapes, titled “Instant Paradise,” that repeat tirelessly throughout her work—is understood among members of the art world. But where she once combined shapes randomly, the artist has become drastically more systematic, embedding each painting with particular significance. When I arrive at her studio, high in an old factory warehouse overlooking Manhattan, the ebullient Pozanti shuffles in with a leather sack spilling open with books—Race Against the Machine, How to Create a Mind among them—telling of the newfound infatuations laced within her paintings."

Art-World Insiders Pick Art Basel in Miami Beach’s Artists to Watch

Article: Art-World Insiders Pick Art Basel in Miami Beach’s Artists to Watch

(Artsy)

New York-based artist Hank Willis Thomas, whose own work (a giant speech-bubble bench) is installed outside in the fair’s Public sector, stopped short at the sight of a neon piece by Tavares Strachan at Fergus McCaffrey—a Venn diagram connecting the words “Us,” “We,” and “Them.” “I’m in a show called ‘Us is Them,’” he said, thoughtfully, of a current exhibition at Ohio’s Pizzuti Collection. “It’s a statement I’ve been saying for a long time.” It’s also one he wrote about last week in an essay for Creative Time Reports. Strachan’s neon, included in the Bahamas-born artist’s first exhibition at the gallery’s St. Barths location, explores invisibility—or fitting in—within society. “Tavares is an artist whose work I’ve known for 10 years, but it’s new for it to be in an art fair, and it’s always hard to grasp,” Thomas said. “It’s interesting to see something that you’ve been mulling over in your brain for a while, manifested in the work of a different artist.” After a stroll through Positions, having circled back to the work, he elaborated on the draw to Strachan. “He’s using text in an engaging way. It seems like the work is a lot about intersections, and not using text for text’s sake but also to draw connections—both visually and conceptually—to things that are often seen as disparate.”