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VAN BUREN AWARDED ETTL SCULPTURE PRIZE AT NATIONAL ACADEMY
February 2010Aucocisco Galleries is pleased to announce that Richard Van Buren of Perry, ME was invited to exhibit at the National Academy Museum in its distinguished
185th Annual: An Invitational Exhibition of Contemporary American Art. He was then subsequently awarded the
Alex Ettl Award for Sculpture for his piece Green Movement at last Tuesday’s opening reception. The prize is one of distinction, merit and a cash award of $4,000.
400 hundred artists were invited to submit three works for jury review whereupon only one work was selected from approximately sixty artists to be included into the exhibition. The panel of the jury selection committee then decided upon five awards; Richard Van Buren was chosen unanimously for being awarded the one sculpture prize.
It was said that this was the best annual in recent years and was likely the result of an effort to improve the invitational.
The 185th Annual: An Invitational Exhibition of Contemporary American Art will run through June 8, 2010.
185th Annual: An Invitational Exhibition of Contemporary American Art
February 17 – June 8, 2010
National Academy Museum and School of Fine Arts
1083 Fifth Avenue • New York City, N.Y. 10128-0114
212 369 4880 x 248 •
www.nationalacademy.org
FMI: visit the
HISTORY OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY ANNUAL EXHIBITION
website
A December Trifecta at
Aucocisco Galleries:
Scott Davis, Ken Greenleaf, Richard Van Buren
PORTLAND, MAINE—Three artists. Three distinct visions. Three far-reaching
careers. Aucocisco Galleries is proud to announce a unique triple-bill
featuring the work of Scott Davis, Ken Greenleaf, and Richard Van Buren.
This combination of artists—each over sixty years old and each working in
Maine—is nothing less than a visual trifecta.
Raised in Kansas and educated in California, Scott Davis began his art
career in earnest in 1970s New York City as part of the Whitney Museum
Studio Program. Today, Davis’s work is housed in museum collections across
the country, including the Guggenheim Museum (New York), Cincinnati Art
Museum (Ohio) and the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, La Jolla
(California).
Davis describes his spare, ethereal paintings as a visual combination of
Shaker furniture and Haiku poetry—they give viewers “the sense that there
is a real reason for their presence and that there is always an
undercurrent of narrative.”
“I have come to believe,” says Davis, “that my work incorporates the past,
the present, and the continuation of time—a sense of looking towards the
future.”
A resident of Maine since 1993, Davis’s work is already housed in the
collections of the Portland Museum of Art, the Farnsworth Art Museum, and
Colby College.
Artist Ken Greenleaf’s work resides in several of the same local
institutions as Davis’s, as well as nationally in museums such as the
Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), Ulrich Museum of Art (Kansas),
and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (Texas).
Here in Maine, Greenleaf’s name has been synonymous with art for decades.
His critical writings about art have long appeared in the Maine Sunday
Telegram and Portland Phoenix. As an artist, Greenleaf is the veteran of
over twenty solo exhibitions, including several shows at New York City’s
renowned Tibor de Nagy Gallery. His work has been reviewed in publications
such as the New York Times, Artforum, and ArtNews.
Greenleaf’s recent series of black-and-white drawings and paintings show a
great economy of line honed by his decades of experience. “I seek an art
that is without rhetoric, fiction, or illusion,” says the artist. “We can
apprehend shape, scale, and line in ways that are resonant, and quite
real.”
Like his colleagues, Davis and Greenleaf, Richard Van Buren has a long and
storied connection to the New York City art world—not long after his
relocation there in the mid-1960s, Van Buren was included in the seminal
exhibition Primary Structures at the Jewish Museum in 1966. He went on to
exhibit with the Bykert Gallery and the Paula Cooper Gallery.
Today, Van Buren is a denizen of Perry, Maine. His work can be found in
some of the country’s finest museums, such as the Museum of Modern Art
(New York), the Museum of Fine Arts (Massachusetts), and The National
Gallery (Washington, DC).
Known for creating brilliantly colored sculpture—which the New York Times
has described as having “a kind of monstrous opulence”—Van Buren will be
displaying two suites of black and white drawings at Aucocisco. In his
“Fundy Series,” Van Buren has drawn inspiration from the light, movement,
color, form, sound, and smell of Passamaquoddy Bay. The artist’s
“Headhunter” series examines what he calls humanity’s constant search “for
the re-affirmation of the human presence.”
Individually, Davis, Greenleaf, and Van Buren each create exceptional art
that bears the considered touch of their extensive and broad experiences.
Shown together, in a single gallery, the impact of their art will be
magnified. This triple-bill marks an exceptional finale to Aucocisco’s
2009 season.
Scott Davis, Ken Greenleaf, Richard Van Buren
First Friday Art Walk Reception: Friday, December 4, 5:00 – 8:00 PM
Showing: December 4 - 26, 2009
FMI and images please contact:
Aucocisco Galleries
Andres A. Verzosa
Owner/Director
Physical: 89 Exchange Street
Portland, ME 04101
Mail: P.O. Box 7897
Portland, Maine 04112
Phone: 207.775.2222
Email: director@aucocisco.com
Website: www.aucocisco.com <http://www.aucocisco.com/>
Gallery Hours:
Tuesday – Saturday, 10:00am to 6:00pm, and by appointment.
The Portland Phoenix
January 23, 2008
Off the wall:
Sculpture and craft intersect at Aucocisco
By KEN GREENLEAF
Sometime around 1970 I wandered into the art gallery at Vermont's
Bennington College and got a surprise. In those days I was just getting to
know contemporary art, and that solo show by Richard Van Buren very
quickly broadened my then-limited horizon, like hearing Charlie Parker for
the first time. The pieces were colored cast-plastic shapes hanging on the
wall in vertical strands. My idea of the possibilities of art broadened in
an instant. I still remember them vividly.
Over the ensuing years I
saw a number of shows of Van Buren’s work, as did anyone with a serious
interest in sculpture. I lost track of his work over the last dozen years
or so, and was delighted to learn there would be a show in Portland at
Aucocisco. Van Buren is sharing the space with David Moses Bridges, his
neighbor in Perry, Maine. Bridges builds birch-bark canoes and makes
traditional baskets. Their work is quite different but there are deeper
themes that bring them together.
Van Buren’s current work
comes off the wall with almost aggressive ambiguity. The busy shapes and
hollows of highly, almost garishly, colored thermoplastic are profoundly
artificial even while they seem to relate to natural shapes, to trees or
roots or seaweed. There’s more than a hint of Passamaquoddy Bay in these
works, plus a bit of the high finish of custom cars. Shapes dip and
crumble and create convoluted interior spaces in a rococo fantasy gone
berserk. Little nodules and pieces cluster together, piling bright blues
on pinks mixed with bits of gold. Little smooth, modeled shapes change
into rough textures and solid areas morph into sections of lacy airiness.
It is the task of the
sculptor make an object that feels inevitable, as if it was always there
but hadn’t been discovered yet. Van Buren piles contradiction on
contradiction in these pieces in an apparently discordant jumble,
demonstrating that harmony exists where we had not thought to look for it.
These are the successful works of a mature artist who has thought long and
well about how we look at what is around us.
David Moses Bridges
engages his surroundings quite differently. He makes canoes and baskets
using traditional techniques and materials from birch bark, spruce, cedar,
and other materials from the Passamaquoddy environment. His grandfather
was a canoe builder, and with inherited knowledge and tools augmented by
experience gained from Maine boatbuilding shops he now builds canoes using
techniques that go back centuries.
There are no metal
fasteners in these pieces. The canoe in the gallery was made from the bark
of a single birch tree with spruce frames and planking, and is held
together with lashings made from strips of spruce root and waterproofed
with pitch and bear grease. It is light and solid, is a joy to look at,
and looks like it would be a joy to use.
The baskets are made with
thick birch bark that has been molded into shapes and lashed with spruce
root strips. Bridges decorates them with patterns or images by lightly
carving the outer, dark layer to reveal a lighter layer below. The
engraved graphic works are done the same way, with the image produced by
revealing the contrasting lower layer. These are calm, graceful works of
undeniable beauty.
It was an inspired idea to
put the work of these two artists in the same rooms. Bridges’s work
reclaims techniques that were rooted in the history of people in that area
for a thousand years, and were almost lost. Van Buren uses modern
industrial materials and ideas rooted in jazz and art in the European
tradition, with hints of Los Angeles. They react to their environment in
very different but complementary ways.
Engaging significant works
of art allows us to encounter the world the in the way that the artist
sees it. Seeing these two artists together presents the opportunity look
for what they share, rather than what separates them. It’s not an easy
process, but it is well worth the effort.
Reviews of "High Times, Hard Times":
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/16/arts/design/16high.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss
http://nymag.com/arts/art/reviews/30627/
http://www.brooklynrail.org/2007/3/artseen/high-times
Other Reviews:
Portland Phoenix:
http://69.25.198.13/Portland/Arts/55043-ONLY-CONNECT/
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D06E3DD103EF93BA15755C0A9649C8B63
ONLY
CONNECT:
Richard Van Buren & David Moses Bridges
January 23 –
March 1, 2008
First Friday
Art Walk Reception, February 1, 5 – 8 pm
Aucocisco Galleries is proud to present an
exhibition of the sculpture Richard Van Buren and the traditional
basketwork and wood etching of David Moses Bridges. The simplest yet
deepest of connections bind these very diverse artists: the thread of
friendship; a love of place in Downeast Perry, Maine; an abiding concern
for nature and natural forms; and an embracing of family ties. Though
their sculptural work could not be more different in media and form, these
connections engender a spirit of creativity and artistic vitality.
Richard Van Buren, a major figure in the
development of contemporary sculpture in New York in the 1960-70s, now
lives and works in Perry, Maine. His sculpture, always oriented in
process and materials, is carefully crafted in thermoplastic, the forms
built up and shaped by hand. When the desired form is achieved, Van Buren
paints the sculptures in engagingly harmonious palettes, most recently
inspired by (and incorporating) smooth shells and stones of jasper and
agate. When mounted, these sculptures appear to grow from the wall,
calling to mind coral reefs, stalactites, organic matter with varied
textures and shifting hues. These sculptures are given titles that refer
to his wife and children, local townspeople, and words from the
Passamaquoddy language.
David Moses Bridges learned his craft from
his Passamaquoddy grandparents, developing an early respect for traditions
that have been passed down through families for centuries. A
sixteen-foot, hand hewn birch-bark canoe takes center stage, its sides
delicately etched with traditional abstract motifs. Carefully harvesting
the structural supports from maple and cedar trees, the skin from a single
sheet of birch bark, and tied together with red spruce roots, this
ocean-going canoe is built entirely with natural material by hand. With
the same attention to detail and tradition, Bridges pieces together folded
and cylindrical baskets with lacing and surface etching. Most recently,
he has created a series of two-dimensional etchings on birch-bark,
renderings of animals native to Maine with intricate abstract markings.
“David’s Dancing
Fingers” is collaborative work, a large lidded basket by Bridges with
thermoplastic and acrylic elements by Van Buren. The works of these
artists invite intimate engagement from the viewer, and encourage
thoughtful connection to the past, and the future, of three-dimensional
objects.
