Irene Hardwicke Olivieri: Some kind of wilderness

ACA Galleries will present Some kind of wilderness, an exhibition of new paintings and drawings by Irene Hardwicke Olivieri through May 1 through June 26.

Devils and their trumpets, female adventurers armed with quivers of paintbrushes, and bandoliers of paint roam the walls between large, personal portraits.

Themes of winner and outer wilderness–the true province of the artist–are projected outward for us to inhabit at her side.  The show's title can be heard as a howl of disbelief (the artist recently lost her father), or an exclamation of gratitude.  It conjures up heroic odysseys with their nude female heroines lifting paintbrushes and paint against harsh, ambiguous environments, reclaiming their lives.  Later, we see these same girls as strong, active and prepared "tree-top troopers"; explorers fully equipped with sable-tipped brushes, palettes, water jars, shiny tubes of pigment acting as talismans to create hope.  There's a sense of being "fully prepared," as in Better is the Ready, able to capture anything with her art, which may also serve in a child-like universe, as the best protection against misfortune.  Throughout the show, Hardwicke Olivieri explores the word wilderness turning it over emotionally and visually.  Paradisiacal events and long lines of writing, rattle or glide over many of the paintings, adding an archaic glaze while pouring out messages and secrets of the natural world.

Always in Irene's art can be found an ecstatic, clear-hearted vision, a world in which animals are understood and where humans provide sanctuary.  In Call from paradise, the arboreal, half man/half tree figure allows countless creatures a place among his branches.  Across his chest he wears the words Let us hold dear the lives of all species, a medieval banner.  He is virile, graceful; his grooved ponderosa bark and trunk add rootedness and stability.  All feel safe here even a shy lynx-girl nestles in his protecting arm.  The hand-built frame of incense-cedar, once the home of an ant colony, amplify the sense of sanctuary.

ACA Galleries is located at 529 West 20th Street, 5th Floor, New York, NY 10011.  For more information please call (212) 206-8080 or info@acagalleries.com.

Women In Picasso's Prints, 1905-1968

"Celebrating the Muse: Women in Picasso's Prints 1905-1968" opened at Marlborough Gallery on March 23 and included over 200 prints by Pablo Picasso in a variety of printmaking techniques – etching, drypoint, linocut and lithography – that explore the theme of woman as muse in these media.  Marlborough's exhibition is the first comprehensive overview of this subject as specifically depicted in Picasso's graphic oeuvre.  The show will feature works spanning his entire career from his first print, Le Repas frugal, 1905, to selections from the tour-de-force of his late period, the Suite 347 of 1968.  A notable lender to the Marlborough exhibition is Maya Widmaier Picasso, the artist's daughter.

Marlborough's exhibition will feature a number of early prints, including Picasso's drypoint Les Saltimbanques, 1905, that depicts a group of acrobats as rest and Salome, 1905, a scene from the same series in which the artist's focus is on the seductive young woman as she performs for Herod.  Both are very rare impressions before steel-facing, with a velvety, rich burr and luminous plate tones.

Fine examples of Picasso's later work will also be included in the exhibition.  Dans l'Atelier (February 7, 1964), an aquatint and etching, Femme assise dans un fauteuil (October 26-27, 1966), an etching combined with drypoint and aquatint, and Femme au chapeau a fleurs, 1962, a color linocut, are three works that depict Picasso's last muse, his wife Jacqueline Roque Hutin.  The latter work is one of a series of semi-abstract linocuts in a range of colors from earth tones to blue and red that depicts his wife.  She reappears in the beautiful Jacqueline lisant,a linocut from 1964, that will also be in the show.

Picasso's remarkable use of printmaking continued throughout his life, as evidenced in the Suite 347, which he produced between March 16 and October 5, 1968.  Comprising 347 prints, this series is, as McCully writes "a sequence of engravings mixing various printmaking techniques, which represented a compendium of characters from Picasso's world: bullfighters, musketeers, commedia dell'arte and circus characters, and many other favorites drawn from the artist's youth in Spain…"  Marlborough's exhibition will include a number of impressions from this suite such as the aquatints of May 27, 1968, Suite 347: No. 120 and No. 122, both with images of Celestina, and etchings No. 236, No. 238 and No. 239, all of August 3, 1968, in which Picasso depicts multiple figures.

Marlborough Gallery Inc. is located at 40 West 57th Street, New York, NY 10019.  For more information, please call (212) 541-4900 or www.marlboroughgallery.com.

Richard La Presti's Recent Paintings

Richard La Presti's Spring 2010 Show at the Bowery Gallery will include landscapes of the Catskill mountains and paintings of bathers at Jones Beach, Long Island.

La Presti is known for his series of paintings capturing sunbathers, many sunbathers, communing at the beach.  His landscapes are descriptive of the site but show a bold and rhythmic approach.  All of Richard La Presti's paintings convey his enthusiasm for what is seen and his exuberance for life.

Writing about La Presti's last show, Gabriel Laderman stated: "He is a very passionate man.  His paintings are, in fact meditative, but they are also full of passion.  Passion for…people,…the sky and the clouds…the land, the trees and foliage…(his work is) full of zest and verve."

Bowery Gallery is located at 530 West 25th Street, 4th Floor, New York, NY 10001.  For more information, please call (646) 230-6655 or visit BoweryGallery.org.

Ad Hoc: Works for the Nose by William Kentridge

Artist William Kentridge presents a selection of works generated by his new production of Shostakovich's The Nose, which has its Met premiere on March 5.  The exhibition, Ad Hoc: Works For The Nose, features a number of charcoal drawings, including one of Shostakovich himself.  Also on display will be a disintegrating wooden sculpture based on this drawing; this rotating sculpture will be projected on the front curtain before each performance of The Nose, seen while the orchestra is tuning up.  The exhibition will also feature 125 paper-and-wood costume cutouts, among other pieces, made by the artist and Greta Goiris, the costume designer.  The exhibition runs through May 17.
Kentridge's Met debut coincides with the Museum of Modern Art's career retrospective of his work, entitled William Kentridge: Five Themes, which will show the full breadth of the artist's output.
"How often does an artist have a major exhibition at MoMA and, simultaneously, direct and design a new production of the Metropolitan Opera?" said Gallery Met director Dodie Kazanjian.  "Kentridge is one of the world's most versatile artists, a master of filmmaking, theater, spectacle, and the graphic arts.  He is truly without parallel in today's proliferating art world."  The New Yorker, in a recent profile of Kentridge, stated "It's hard to remember when a visual artist has cut such a wide swath in the city's cultural life, or spanned so many disciplines with such aplomb."
Gallery Met is free and open to the public six days a week.  The hours are Monday through Friday 6:00 pm through the last intermission, and Saturdays from noon through the last intermission.  For more information, visit www.metopera.org/gallerymet.

Seven New Artists At Blue Mountain

The Blue Mountain Gallery presents the work of seven artists – new to the gallery – in a varied and exciting show.  It's located at 530 West 25th Street, 4th Floor, New York, NY.

California artist Suzie Buchholz's work is a joyous explosion of color, movement and light.  Her mixed media abstract paintings play vibrant colors against deeply layered drawings and artifacts.

Alakananda Mukerji grew up in India on the River Ganges.  She says memories, media, materials–bits of canvas, pieces of the past–anything she can get hold of become her art.  She works in watercolor, finding its free-flowing quality ideal for experimentation.

Geraldo Perez says that when he starts to work on a canvas, paper, board or object it is always a journey of discovery.  He uses photographs of people and things juxtaposed with marks that highlight, hide, push back and pull to achieve a unity of color and space that contains tensions and chaos.

Gina Sawin has found an intriguing motif in shore and water birds.  As they hover, ascend and descend, they connect earth, water and sky suggesting "delicate ecological balances and a spiritual–and perhaps tenuous–connection to the planet."

Barbara Segal works in New York City and in Springs on the East End of Long Island where the changing light and seasons inspire much of her work.  She works directly from nature, expressing her feelings for the light and rhythms of the natural world.

Jeanie Wing's paintings reflect her appreciation of the richness of nature's colors and the movement of light and shadow.  She is inspired by having spent time living in the woods as a child, observing wild flowers and feeling the beauty of the Earth.  She says "Here's to ecology."

Burton Van Deusen paints invented landscapes.  His recent work has mostly abandoned references to terra firma as such, with "narrative clouds struggling for color, movement, space, densities…fighting to claim their place."  He says of these landscapes "I paint them like Miles Davis plays his trumpet."

For further information, phone Blue Mountain Gallery at (646) 486-4730.