Follow The Line
Charlotte Jackson Fine Art in collaboration with Tia Collection
Click here for a virtual tour of the show
The timing of this exhibition couldn’t really be more apt. Although art itself is timeless, able to offer us its own unique voice regardless of when it was created or when it is viewed – we are ourselves of course bound by time. We come through the door of a gallery or museum with the world trailing along behind us like streamers of chaos, concern, contentment, anxiety, and joy; with frenetic images and the blaring messages of our ever-present screens hovering always just nearby. We bring ourselves to quiet hallways and exhibition spaces and meet with the art there – forging an experience that is part now, part then, part art, part us. Follow the Line is an exceptionally quiet exhibition. It is dominated by soft neutral tones of gray, beige, earth colors, white, and black and the small amounts of color that pop out here and there are muted and gentle. The titular line of this exhibition is omnipresent – from the black coil of Richard Serra’s July #17 to the insectile spikes of Alexander Calder’s La Botte; from the burnished stripes of Johnnie Winona Ross’ Bear’s Ears Seep to the dramatic bisecting lines of Max Cole’s Greek Cross XXXII. Co-curated by Charlotte Jackson and Laura Finlay Smith of the Tia Collection, the exhibition includes an exclusive assembly of subtle and elegant works from the collection, with the addition of a small handful of pieces by Johnnie Winona Ross and Max Cole, who are represented by the gallery. Spanning time, style, and continents, the earliest works are two small glowing gelatin silver prints of contrasting geometric shapes by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. Max Cole’s haunting Crucifixion (1962) and a Pablo Picasso portrait in oil, Buste d’homme (1965) bring us to mid-twentieth century. Cy Twombly’s watery gouache Untitled (Ramification) from 1971 enters into a fascinating dialogue of horizontal and vertical with Bridget Riley’s 1976 gouache Light Grey with Small Twisted Curve.
The elusive lines of Johnnie Winona Ross’ Pass Creek Spring (with three small accompanying color studies) engage directly with the trio of Max Cole pieces across the gallery: color and line seeming to plait between them across the space. And finally, like the punctuation marks of the exhibition, the dynamism of the Calder sculpture’s irregular spikes seem to arc across the end of the gallery toward the muted gray-woven form of Ai Weiwei’s Bicycle Basket with Flowers (2014). The Tia Collection of Santa Fe, NM was created with the exclusive intent to share an individual collector’s love for art across a variety of genres. As the collector has said - “At its heart, the Tia Collection is a global collection. It is a reflection of my travels and of my deep admiration for art of all genres and geographical origins. It is not a collection only for my appreciation — that would be far too confining. These are works that must be displayed for the world to see, admire, acknowledge, celebrate and are a testimony to the value of diverse cultures, histories and aesthetics.” The collection is curated and administered by Laura Finlay Smith who works closely with the collector whose focus includes artworks by contemporary Native American artists, historic Western American paintings and sculptures, as well as South East Asian, French Impressionist and Post-War/Modern and Contemporary masterworks. This masterfully curated grouping of art works invites us to follow the line where it leads: to step through the chaos of daily life to hear what these works have to say to us. Whatever rages just outside the door, these works gently ease us into a moment of reflection, attention, and contemplation. - Michaela Kahn, PhD
Cy Twombly, Untitled (Ramification), 1971, gouache on paper, wax crayon, frame: 40.62 x 34.75 x 2.5 inches Tia Collection
Born in Lexington, Virginia, Cy Twombly belongs to the Post-Abstract Expressionist generation. He moved to New York in the early 1950s to attend the Art Students League, where he met artist Robert Rauschenberg (American, 1925–2008), who encouraged him to attend the Black Mountain College, then at the height of its influence. Inspired by the faculty and fellow students at these two institutions, Twombly’s early works draw on a gestural abstraction, similar to the work of Franz Kline (American, 1910–1962), but he quickly developed a personal graffiti-like style, laden with references to literature.
In 1957, after traveling around Europe, a stint the army, and briefly living in New York, Twombly settled permanently in Italy, which strengthened his engagement with classical literature, history, and mythology. He became most famous for his largescale scribbled graffiti paintings, which blur the line between drawing and painting, though he also created a number of sculptures that frequently refer to mythology. For many years, Twombly was better known in Europe than in the United States, but today he is recognized worldwide as one of the most inventive painters of his generation. (Artnet)
Johnnie Winona Ross, Bear’s Ears Seep (BES 02), September 2020, mineral pigments burnished on stretched linen, 48 x 46 inches
Johnnie Winona Ross came of age as an artist in a time when Abstract Expressionism was fading and Pop and Minimalism were taking hold. At Washington University in St. Louis, where he studied art, the professors ranged from AbEx and former Bauhaus painters to Minimalists. There were those whose influences were more “traditional” (Monet, Cezanne) and those whose direct lineage came from Albers or Arnheim. In this rich atmosphere of artistic and cultural change, Ross found his own way, citing an eclectic mix of influences, including Donald Judd, William De Kooning, Pierre Bonnard, Eva Hesse, and the Anasazi/Barrier Canyon Native American artists. Two artist residencies in Roswell, New Mexico further impacted the direction of his work, as well as prompting him, in 1999 to leave his post at the prestigious Maine College of Art and move to New Mexico to set up a studio. Note is often made of Ross’ “grid” pattern. Though the “grid” is present with Ross’ work in principle, it feels like a misleading analogy. Rather, Ross’ influence seems more natural – the process of water and mineral dripping through ground. The effects of water on stone and earth, the colored striations, mineral and salt deposits, all of these can be seen, not only in Ross’ canvases, but in his process. For Ross, the “ground” is white. Horizontal bands of gypsum, titanium, or zinc whites sweep across the canvas. The bars are structured, measured, changing in density from center to edge and back, creating a flow or focus toward the center. These white bars establish the geological matrix upon which Ross’ colored lines flow, vertically, freeform, down the canvas. The colored lines are created with water and mineral or burnt-bone pigments. Though the lines can seem almost uniform or planned – they are in fact drips, allowed to flow and move under and through the tonal bands of white. Once
dry, this first layer of whites and color are burnished with a pueblo potter’s stone. Then the process begins again. As many as 100 to 200 layers of paint are applied, usually burnished between every layer. Ross’ paintings, like the slow ancient seeps that create vertical “paintings” across canyon walls, take years to create. This process of time, building up the painting, burnishing it smooth, can all be seen in the sheen of the canvases and the depth of color. Each line– an aqua blue, a spring green, a burnt orange, is marked with the layers of what came before. Many of the lines read more like channels – with deeper color at the edges – the effect of minerals deposited and building up over time as the paint “seeps” occur again and again. Time itself is recorded on these paintings which seem like some fantastic balance between natural and human forces at work. The very physicality of the canvases, with their artisan basswood stretchers, textured linen, and hand-made copper tacks, supports the intense felt-presence of these works. But beyond the history and process that can be read on these canvases, there comes that quiet, the rhythmic breath that seems to emerge from within them. The finished effect of Ross’ work is almost elemental, suggesting some basic and essential interaction between humans and nature. As Ross has said, “Ultimately, I try to create the experience of sanctuary that is apart from the chaos and uncertainties of the world.” With their gentle color traces, eddied and precipitated into nuanced lines, with their breathing white ground, these paintings do create a sanctuary – like water in the desert. (Michaela Kahn, PhD, 2017)
Bridget Riley, Light Grey with Small Twisted Curve, 1976, gouache and pencil on paper, Frame: 42 x 31 x 1.75 in. Tia Collection
Bridget Riley is undoubtedly one of Britain’s most important and celebrated abstract artists. Born in London in 1931, Riley is one of the foremost exponents of Op Art. International in vision and scope and with a long and illustrious career spanning over five decades, her work explores optical effect, spatial illusion, and the interaction between movement, color and light. Op Art broke with artistic orthodoxy, acting as a deliberate counterpoint to the prevailing emotional spontaneity of Abstract Expressionism and the everyday reference points of Pop Art. Instead it concerned itself with spatial perception, employing the visual language of science and technological advancement to investigate how the human eye received and processed light. Riley was at the forefront of this visual revolution, receiving great critical acclaim for her work and gaining the distinction as the first living British artist and the first female artist to win the International Prize for Painting at the Venice Biennale, when she represented Britain in 1968. Although Riley’s first Op paintings, executed in 1961, were worked solely in black and white, the artist soon adopted the use of a tonal grey palette viewing it as a midway point, and then from 1967 she explored a much wider color spectrum. Initially daunted by the perceived instability of color pigment and the limitations it presented, Riley quickly embraced its elusive nature in direct opposition to the certainties which had been offered to her by monochrome. Although Riley had previously employed curved geometries in her work, from 1974 they defined her output until the end of the decade. Her curve paintings provided her with a less formal structural scheme, in a similar vein to her transition from monochrome to color, and allowed her to communicate more readily the perceptual sensation of light.
Riley was born at Norwood, London, the daughter of a businessman. Her childhood was spent in Cornwall and Lincolnshire. She studied at Goldsmiths’ College from 1949 to 1952, and at the Royal College of Art from 1952 to 1955. She began painting figure subjects in a semi-impressionist manner, then changed to pointillism around 1958, mainly producing landscapes. In 1960 she evolved a style in which she explored the dynamic potentialities of optical phenomena. These so-called ‘Op-art’ pieces, such as Fall, 1963 (Tate Gallery T00616), produce a disorienting physical effect on the eye. Riley taught children for two years before joining the Loughborough School of Art, where she initiated a basic design course in 1959. She then taught at Hornsey School of Art, and from 1962 at Croydon School of Art. She worked for the J. Walter Thompson Group advertising agency from 1960, but gave up teaching and advertising agency work in 1963-4. Group shows include Young Contemporaries, London, 1955; Diversion, South London Art Gallery 1958; an Arts Council Touring Exhibition, 1962; Tooth’s Critics Choice Exhibition, selected by Edward Lucie-Smith, 1963; John Moores’ Exhibition, Liverpool, 1963; The New Generation, Whitechapel Gallery 1964; Movement, Hanover Gallery, London, 1964; Painting and Sculpture of a Decade 1954-1964, Tate Gallery, 1964; and Op Art, touring Ireland in 1967. Her numerous European and American exhibitions include The Sixties Collection Revisited, Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, Connecticut, 1978. Riley was awarded the AICA Critics Prize in 1963 and also that year a John Moores’, Liverpool Open Section prize. In 1964 she was awarded a Peter Stuyvesant Foundation Travel bursary to the USA. In 1968 she won an International Painting Prize at the Venice Biennale. Her first solo exhibition was held at Gallery One in 1962 with a second solo show the following year. Other solo shows were held at Nottingham University, 1963; Richard Feigen Gallery, New York and Feigen Palmer Gallery, Los Angeles, 1965; Museum of Modern Art, New York, with US tour, 1966; Venice Biennale, British Pavilion (with Phillip King), 1968; Hayward Gallery, London, 1971; National Gallery, Prague, 1971; Hayward Gallery and Kunsthalle Nuremberg, 1992; Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, 1995; and Waddington Galleries, London, 1996. (Tate website)
Johnnie Winona Ross, Pass Creek Spring, June 2020, mineral pigments burnished on stretched linen, 73 x 69.6 inches
Johnnie Winona Ross, Colour Studies for Pass Creek Spring, June 2020, mineral pigment painted on Birch Panel, 11.5 x 10.5 in. each
I’ve spent a year working on Pass Creek...not full-time, but it has been on the wall, in front of me, so nearly every morning I look at it, many times adding to the visual conversation. During the past year I have also worked on a series of 11-inch, birch panels that didn’t use the visual component of paint drips that weave through the horizontals and atmospheric ground. Those panels were engaging. The paring down of visual components to the essential, then strengthening each to create a rich emotional experience seemed to parallel a lifestyle that questions ‘what is essential, necessary, true’ in this complex era.
Without going into too much detail of the dialogue which Pass Creek Spring engages, the ground is more atmospheric, made of several colours, creating a more complex relationship with the white horizontal bands which have their own conversation about values, clarity, and strength. The three panels are studies/notes for myself. I was asking visual questions about composition, especially rhythm, atmosphere and translucency. I wanted to push the gypsum (top) band of each unit back into the colour ground and wood grain, like looking into a spring and seeing something several feet below the surface. There is a rawness in the brush stroke and surface that I knew would be resolved in the finished six-foot painting. (Johnnie Winona Ross, 2020)
Ai Weiwei, Bicycle Basket with Flowers, 2014, porcelain, 13.5 x 14.5 x 11 in. Tia Collection
As Ai Weiwei posted on his website - From 30th November 2013, I will place a bouquet of fresh flowers in the basket of a bicycle outside No. 258 Caochangdi studio every morning until I regain the right to travel freely. For more than a year and a half, China’s infamous dissident artist arranged his blooms in a daily demonstration against the confiscation of his passport. Titled With Flowers, the work was part-protest, part-performance art. But no longer: After four years, the artist announced on Instagram on Wednesday, July 22, 2015 that the Chinese government had returned his passport. Since 2011, after Ai was arrested on charges of tax evasion, jailed for 81 days, and then released, the government had kept it confiscated, and refused him any other travel papers.
With Flowers endured for about 600 days. Ai started the performance on November 30, 2013, more than two years into his confinement. The demonstration serves as an extraordinary record of his imprisonment: He placed the flowers outside the aquamarine door at 258 Caochangdi, home to his art studio as well as his design and architecture firm, FAKE Design. They were mighty arrangements, rarely modest, all formally documented on Flickr. Ai is both active and savvy on social media (which is part of what prompted his trouble with the authorities), and his flowers traveled far beyond the plastic basket on his black Giant bike via posts on Flickr, Instagram, and Twitter. (The Atlantic, July 22, 2015) Notes: This delicate work, incredibly precise, has been made in Jingdezhen, which is known as the ‘Porcelain Capital’ due to its long history of pottery production.
Alexander Calder, La Botte (maquette), c. 1959, sheet metal, rivets, gesso, black oil paint, 19 x 18 x 11.5 in. Tia Collection
Alexander Calder is best known for creating mobiles—sculptures composed of abstract shapes moving through space. Born in 1898, in the Philadelphia area, Calder came from a family of artists. Both his father and his grandfather were sculptors. After graduating from the Stevens Institute of Technology in 1919 with a degree in mechanical engineering, “Sandy” (as he was known by his friends) held various jobs before entering the Art Students League of New York in 1923. At first a painter, he studied under Thomas Hart Benton, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and John Sloan, and was a classmate of John Graham. In the early 1920s he worked as an illustrator, covering such events as the circus. His sketches of circus acts rekindled his childhood fascination with animals, a subject that became central to his art. In 1926 he went to Paris for the first time and stayed there until the fall of 1927. An active participant in the avant-garde milieu of Paris between the two World Wars, Calder had a wide circle of friends and colleagues in the arts. He met many of them through performances of his entourage of small sculptures, Circus, in the late twenties and through his membership from 1931 in the Abstraction-Création group, a loose alliance of artists promoting diverse multi-national trends in abstract art. It was at this time that he began making small moveable animal figures in wood and in wire, using the wire as if he were drawing in space. By 1928, Calder was exhibiting his wire sculptures both in the United States and in France, where he resided periodically throughout his life. Calder created his first abstract wire sculptures in the spring of 1931, and that year Galerie Percier in Paris held an exhibition of these works, which Arp called “stabiles.” By 1932, Calder was composing his forms with the intention of making them move through space. First he experimented with motorized sculptures. But soon, by precisely adjusting the weight and balance of each shape, he created works that floated through space, propelled only by air currents. Known as mobiles, the term was coined by Calder’s fellow artist, Marcel Duchamp. Dividing his time between homes in Roxbury, Connecticut, and Saché, France, Calder produced a large body of works in a wide variety of mediums. His work was exhibited in several large retrospectives at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (1964), the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris (1965), the Museum of
Contemporary Art, Chicago (1974), and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1976). In November 1976, soon after the opening of this last retrospective, which he personally installed, Calder died in New York. -The Phillips Collection, Adapted from Eye, LBW Notes: This work is registered in the archives of the Calder Foundation, New York, under application A11069. Calder created “La botte” in 1959, during a period in which he dramatically increased his production of stabiles as both stand-alone works and as maquette for his monumental pieces. Art historian Milly Glimcher commented “Whereas the standing mobile’s base mediates between the earth and the air, the stabiles remain rooted to the earth, as does man himself. Like the mobiles, they activate the surrounding space and share their quality of animation, which derives from the organic character of the shapes and the lively outlines of the forms (a quality hard to actually define but essential in all the work.) But the stabiles are also the reverse of the mobiles - static, with the potential for movement but not moving. the sense of ‘potential energy’ of energy barely contained, endows them with a powerful presence.” (“Alexander Calder: Toward Monumentalism”, Alexander Calder: The 50s, Pace Wildenstein, exhibition. cat. , 1995, p-16-17.) The title of the work may be translated several ways, each a unique interpretation of the combination of shapes. “La botte” can mean a jack boot (perhaps seen on its side horizontally), or a bunch or bale, or a thrust. La botte is a maquette for a monumental sculpture of the same name that is in the collection of the Museum Ludwig in Cologne.
Max Cole, Crucifixion, 1962, oil and collage on linen, 69 x 53 in.
Cole has long been known for the exquisite precision of her work stacking alternating bands of horizontal lines, many of which are made up of tiny, hand-drawn vertical lines. Her paintings suggest an approach to infinity through the use of vertical repetitive lines, a record of intense focus that is said to contain energy as embedded content. Cole describes this process, which she has worked in for over 50 years, as meditative. “There is no other way to produce the work except for a depth of engagement requiring the abandonment of self,” she has explained, “and this process opens the door to infinity enabling reach outside the physical. For me art must transcend the material.” (Artnet) Cole’s painting, Crucifixion, 1962 has only once been previously exhibited, in her 2013 solo exhibition, Meditations, at the Church of St. Peter in Cologne, Germany:
“… Max Cole stated that, for her, working on paintings is almost like praying. In this regard, being able to view her works at the Kunst-Station Sankt Peter amounts to a special encounter between contemporary art and practiced religion. Alongside more recent works of the past few years, to which the thoughts expressed above refer, the artist is also showing a work that is over 50 years old. That picture does not rank among her abstract works and has not been publicly displayed since 1962, the year of its creation, which makes it a gift of sorts and demonstrates the artist’s great respect for the sacred space of the Church of St. Peter. Created during a phase of leave-taking and mourning, Crucifixion constitutes and exciting counterpart not only to the painting Kreuzigung Petri [Crucifixion of St. Peter] by Peter Paul Reubens – which Max Cole has held in high esteem for years and which she visited on each of her trips to the Rhineland – but also to the liturgical events in the ever-changing interior of this centuries-old church, which has defied the rigors of time. All the works displayed in the sacred context at ground level, in the church gallery above, and in the enclosed room of the medieval church tower transform their respective surroundings in their own way; they not only raise questions, but also captivate the viewer in a very subtle way. Furthermore, the artist’s cited remarks are virtually an invitation to immerse oneself in meditative contemplation of the paintings.” (Guido Schlimbach, Exhibition Catalog for Max Cole. Meditations, 2013)
Max Cole, Greek Cross XXXII, 2018, acrylic on linen, 39 x 39 in. Max Cole, Greek Cross XXXI, 2018, acrylic on linen, 39 x 39 in.
In 1958, as a young art student, Max Cole first encountered the work of Kazimir Malevich – in particular his work based on the Greek Cross. The philosophy of Malevich’s Russian Suprematism movement, which united mysticism and art, affected her deeply and has influenced her art throughout her career. For Cole, the spiritual is the bridge necessary to transcend the intellectual and emotional within art. In 2015 – one hundred years after Malevich’s painting of the Greek Cross, Max Cole was invited to participate in a portfolio of prints honoring Malevich’s Black Square. Cole made a print based on Malevich’s Greek Cross, which had inspired her and served as a leaping off point for her own work back when she was an art student. It felt like a natural step to return to her beginnings and revisit the form – honoring both his work, and coming full circle with her own. Geometrically, the Greek Cross is a square cut into thirds both horizontally and vertically – creating a perfect equilibrium of form. Each of Cole’s paintings is on a
square format. The cross form is sometimes quite clear – for example, a bold black form bisecting the canvas vertically and horizontally. In other instances, however, the form is only implied – black blocks hovering above and below a gray band, bands of black ghosting beneath an over-layer of white. In addition to Cole’s signature use of minute, intricate hand-drawn vertical lines, she also uses areas of thick paint with various surface textures. These layered areas work architecturally to create additional lines of light and shadows across the canvas. Cole’s work, though based on the geometry of the Greek Cross and Malevich’s original, upsets the inherent equilibrium of the form by gently distorting its perfect symmetry, creating tension. As with Cole’s horizontal band pieces, the strain between vertical and horizontal are here resolved in an intuitive and visceral balancing of tensions rather than in a perfecting of the form itself. For Cole, this reflects the inherent and necessary balance between opposing forces, like Yin and Yang. (Michaela Kahn, PhD, 2018)
Pablo Picasso, Buste d’homme, 1965, oil on canvas, frame: 42.25 x 35.5 x 0.87 in. Tia Collection
Picasso painted numerous portraits of male friends and colleagues during his early career. While he occasionally drew portraits of male literary friends and a few other men after the mid-1920s, he never painted them, and only rarely depicted anonymous male subjects. The heads, busts and figures of men and boys suddenly abound, however, among his late works in all media. Who, then, is the unnamed fellow in this Buste d’homme, which Picasso painted in 1965, and what may his presence signify in the artist’s oeuvre? With the emergence in 1963 of his artist and model series, Picasso had forged the highly charged sexual dynamic that would galvanize the full compass of his late work. He assumed a more mercurial role in his pursuit of the creative life, taking on a diversely protean nature as the character types into which he projected his male presence. Picasso had been painting his artist and model series for less than a year when he transformed his chosen painted persona from the artist absorbed in his studio work into other noticeably different male types, usually workingmen who labored outdoors, in the full glare and open air of the outside world. These may be men young, old or somewhere in between. There are fellows who smoke, a habit Picasso had recently been compelled to give up. Back in August 1938, Picasso painted some brawny mariners sucking like children on ice cream cones, oblivious to the fact that
Europe was edging toward war. The curly haired young man Picasso has depicted in this Buste d’homme is one of the capably active, virile men who began to appear in droves among Picasso’s paintings and drawings beginning in the spring of 1964. During certain periods they outnumbered his female subjects. This fellow is of an indeterminate age—he is neither a beardless youth, nor quite yet a much older, seasoned and all-too-wise man of the world. He appears, in any case, ready and eager for the task at hand. He is one such type that Picasso and Jaqueline might have encountered in Cannes and its environs during the mid-1960s, someone who likely made his livelihood from the Mediterranean, as an able-bodied sailor, a dock worker, a fisherman or fishmonger. Or, as John Richardson has noted, in early 1965 Picasso employed Maurice Bresnu as his driver “Henceforth Bresnu-like men with curly beards and blobs of dark hair would appear ever more frequently in the artist’s imagery.” Indeed, this unshaven fellow is in the classic Mediterranean mold, of a type as old as antiquity. His forbears in earlier millennia might have joined the Argive expedition to the shores of Troy, accompanied Theseus on his quest for the Golden Fleece, or in real history been traders between southern Europe and the Levant. He might have helped turn the tide of battle aboard the galleys at Salamis, Actium or Lepanto. Picasso
could easily relate to this kind of man—the sea was in his blood, too. He been born by the Mediterranean, in Málaga, Spain. He grew up in La Coruña, on the Atlantic coast; his family subsequently moved to Barcelona, again on the Mediterranean. When as a family man during the 1920s and 1930s he needed a vacation away from Paris, he normally chose destinations on the Atlantic or Mediterranean coasts. If there is a single emblematic archetype for this hardy, ancient man of the sea, one might choose clever Odysseus, or in a more youthful guise, his faithful son Telemachus. The mythical element is always present when Picasso evokes the sea and its lore. This Buste d’homme shows off the mirada fuerte, the strong gaze, for which Picasso was famous, an indication that the artist has in some way projected himself into this character, as a surrogate or an alter ego; elsewhere the artist attired these men in the striped fisherman’s jersey he liked to wear at home. These powerful eyes are one of the most striking and beguiling features seen in the ancient portraiture to which Picasso here has likely alluded, the mummy portraits painted two millennia ago in the Fayum region of Graeco-Roman Egypt, which he and other modern painters had studied in the Louvre.
For these male heads and busts Picasso devised a particular set of facial traits, a physiognomy comprised of swerving, overlaid and intersecting strokes of a loaded brush, to suggest the shape of the nose, the shadow on a cheek, the wide-open eyes and raised brow. A dual array of small circles represents the man’s curly hair; crisscrossing strands of paint describe his thickly woven pullover. “A few lines,” Picasso declared, “that’s enough isn’t it? What more need I do?... What has to happen, when you finally look at it, is that drawing and colour are the same thing” (quoted in Late Picasso, exh. cat., The Tate Gallery, London, 1988, p. 85). These descriptive, gestural lineaments of color merged with more varied and summary means of applying paint to canvas that would comprise Picasso’s very late style at the end of the 1960s. The brawny, unshaven workingmen of the mid-1960s soon gave way in early 1967 to the elegantly pointed moustaches and goatees of Picasso’s newly favored personae, characters in the heraldic costume of cavaliers and mousquetaires that he lifted from the Spanish Siglo de Oro and the northern Baroque of Rembrandt, Rubens, and Hals. In this guise of mock-historical role-playing Picasso presented himself to the world during the final years of his life. (Christie’s)
Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Aluminiumbild, 1926, gelatin silver print, frame: 16.62 x 14.25 x 1 in. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Konstruction, 1923, gelatin silver print, frame: 15.75 x 15.56 in. Tia Collection
László Moholy-Nagy was a Hungarian painter and photographer as well as a professor in the Bauhaus school. He was highly influenced by constructivism and a strong advocate of the integration of technology and industry into the arts. His interest in photography encouraged his belief that artists’ understanding of vision had to specialize and modernize. Artists used to be dependent on the tools of perspective drawing, but with the advent of the camera they had to learn to see again. They had to renounce the classical training of previous centuries, which encouraged them to think about the history of art and to reproduce old formulas and experiment with vision, thus stretching human capacity to new tasks.
Richard Serra, July #17, 2011, paintstick on handmade paper, frame: 46 x 37.125 x 3 in. Tia Collection
Obsession is what it comes down to. It is difficult to think without obsession, and it is impossible to create something without a foundation that is rigorous, incontrovertible, and, in fact, to some degree repetitive. Repetition is the ritual of obsession. Repetition is a way to jumpstart the indecision of beginning. To persevere and to begin over and over again is to continue the obsession with work. Work comes out of work. In order to work you must already be working. —Richard Serra Drawing provides a space, a place for me to go where I can concentrate on an activity that is satisfying in and of itself. - Richard Serra
Richard Serra is among the leading artists of his generation. Known for his large-scale, site-specific sculptures, the artist has consistently created drawings throughout his decades long career. Since 1971, the artist has used black paintstick (compressed oil paint, wax, and pigment) to produce drawings that defy any associations. Characterized by his longstanding concerns with weight and process, these works avoid any specific connotation, reveling instead in the physical qualities of the drawings’ material. Born in 1938 in San Francisco, Serra now lives and works in New York and on the North Fork of Long Island. He attended the University of California, Berkeley before transferring to the University of California, Santa Barbara graduating with a BA in English literature. He then studied painting at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut completing both a BFA and MFA. He began showing with the now legendary art dealer Leo Castelli in 1968, and his first solo exhibition in New York was held at the Leo Castelli Warehouse the following year. His first solo museum exhibition was held at the Pasadena Art Museum, California, in 1970. In the early 1970s, Serra drew primarily with ink, charcoal, and lithographic crayon on paper. At first, a means for the artist to explore form and perceptual relations between his sculpture and the viewer, the drawings eventually became their own works of art. He increased them to human scale and created bold forms with black paintstick exploding the boundaries of the paper support. In the mid-1970s, Serra
made the first of these monumentally scaled installation drawings, the artist’s original version of the dialectic between radical scale and technique in an architectural context. Working on site, he attached Belgian linen directly to the wall. Paintstick, melted down and re-formed in large heavy blocks, was applied using repetitive and vigorous physical gestures. The resulting fields of black disrupt and complement existent spaces and began to occupy entire rooms towards the late 1970s. In the last 25 years, Serra has continued to invent new drawing techniques. In the late 1980s he explored how to further articulate the tension of weight and gravity by placing pairs of overlapping sheets of paper saturated with paintstick in horizontal and vertical compositions. Since the 1990s, he has embarked on numerous series with a remarkable variety of surface effects. Often working on the floor and using a mesh screen as an intermediary between the gesture and the transfer of pigment to the paper, he achieves effects that offer new ways to consider drawing. In short, Serra is among a significant group of artists whose transformative work irrevocably changed the practice and definition of modernist drawing, and challenged drawing’s role in the traditional hierarchy of media. Richard Serra was born in 1938 in San Francisco, California. He studied at the University of California (Berkeley and Santa Barbara) and at Yale University. His first
solo gallery exhibitions were held at Galleria La Salita, Rome (1966), and at the Leo Castelli Warehouse, New York (1969). His first solo museum exhibition was presented at Pasadena Art Museum (1970). Serra’s work has since been the subject of in numerous solo museum exhibitions, including those at Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (1977); Centre Pompidou, Paris (1984); Museum of Modern Art, New York (1986 and 2007); among many others in Europe, the U.S., and Latin America. A traveling survey of Serra’s drawings was on view in 2011–12 at Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and Menil Collection, Houston. Serra has participated in several Documenta exhibitions (Kassel, 1972, 1977, 1982, and 1987), and in the Venice Biennales of 1980, 1984, 2001, and 2013. In 2005, eight largescale works were permanently installed at Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. In 2014, Serra installed a major permanent landscape sculpture in the desert of the Brouq Nature Reserve in western Qatar. Serra was awarded Les Insignes de Chevalier de l’Ordre national de la Légion d’honneur, France’s highest government honor, in 2015. Serra lives and works in New York and Nova Scotia, Canada. (Gagosian Gallery)
Max Cole, Somerset, CA
Johnnie Winona Ross, Arroyo Seco, NM, 2015
Charlotte Jackson Fine Art, established in 1989, has a clearly defined and highly respected program that affords critics, scholars, and collectors the chance to see a wide variety of color-oriented painting and sculpture. The gallery, based in Santa Fe New Mexico, specializes in Monochrome painting, Light and Space, California Modernism, and Color Field painting. By adhering to this specific focus, Charlotte Jackson Fine Art stands apart from other galleries, and the program is hailed internationally.
The Tia Collection of Santa Fe, NM was created with the exclusive intent to share an individual collector’s love for art across a variety of genres. As the collector has said - “At its heart, the Tia Collection is a global collection. It is a reflection of my travels and of my deep admiration for art of all genres and geographical origins. It is not a collection only for my appreciation — that would be far too confining. These are works that must be displayed for the world to see, admire, acknowledge, celebrate and are a testimony to the value of diverse cultures, histories and aesthetics.” The collection is curated and administered by Laura Finlay Smith who works closely with the collector whose focus includes artworks by contemporary Native American artists, historic Western American paintings and sculptures, as well as South East Asian, French Impressionist and Post-War/Modern and Contemporary masterworks.
CHARLOTTE JACKSON FINE ART 554 South Guadalupe Street, Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501 | Tel 505.989.8688 | www.charlottejackson.com ©Charlotte Jackson Fine Art, Inc.