Roi James

Construct 7.2.23

2023

Call and Response: Like most of my work, my paintings are painted “ alla prima”. “alla prima (Italian, meaning at first attempt), direct painting or au premier coup,[1] is a pain...

In James' paintings, he explores how uncertainty can lead to meaning and understanding. How harmony can be experienced even within tension and chaos and how the recognizable can rise out of purely abstract form. In his abstract paintings he responds to these phenomena by creating contemporary icons – works meant to encourage contemplation and meditation. James' more recent works have evolved from the romantic representational ideal into the symbolic, abstract archetype. He comes from a classical background inspired by the great romantic landscape painters such as Turner, Lorrain, Friedrich and Moran, his recent work is more influenced by the work of artists like Klee, Miro, Rothko, Pollock, Riley and Richter. James creates complex abstractions layered in familiarity and veiled in mysteriousness. The unorthodox methods he uses to apply and move oil paint allow him to create compositions that are formally beautiful – infused with tension and drama but also expressive of the spiritual, symbolic, mysterious and eternal. James' work counters...

The paintings in this "Cutout Series" are highly patterned hand painted pieces involving small, fast, intuitive sketches that are scaled up and “cut out” of the existing pattern.

Ann Thornycroft was born and raised in England. She earned her BA from the Central School of Art in London and a Higher Diploma in art at the Chelsea S...

Cahill strives to extend the historical conversation with line and elevate the integral role it has played in art, design, and the sciences since its early appearance in rock and cav...

According to the artist, "everything in life inspires me, not quite with direct interpretation, but as I see and experience faces, words, gestures, colors and shapes – all of it – I ...

Hand signed verso, mixed media on two sections of joined canvas Work is titled "Ego Wall with Mess," circa 1983. Provenance: Brooke Alexander Gallery, New York, New York. bearing their label verso. 24 x 30 x 3-3/4 inches (61.0 x 76.2 x 9.5 cm) Hand signed on the reverse: Judy Rifka Judy Rifka (born 1945) is an American woman artist active since the 1970s as a painter and video artist. She works heavily in New York City's Tribeca and Lower East Side and has associated with movements coming out of the area in the 1970s and 1980s such as Colab and the East Village, Manhattan art scene. A video artist, book artist and abstract painter, Rifka is a multi-faceted artist who has worked in a variety of media in addition to her painting and printmaking. She was born in 1945 in New York City and studied art at Hunter College, the New York Studio School and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. Rifka took part in the 1980 Times Square Show, (Organized by Collaborative Projects, Inc. in 1980 at what was once a massage parlor, with now-famous participants such as Jenny Holzer, Nan Goldin, Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Kiki Smith, the roster of the exhibition reads like a who’s who of the art world), two Whitney Museum Biennials (1975, 1983), Documenta 7, Just Another Asshole (1981), curated by Carlo McCormick and received the cover of Art in America in 1984 for her series, "Architecture," which employed the three-dimensional stretchers that she adopted in exhibitions dating to 1982; in a 1985 review in the New York Times, Vivien Raynor noted Rifka's shift to large paintings of the female nude, which also employed the three-dimensional stretchers. In a 1985 episode of Miami Vice, Bianca Jagger played a character attacked in front of Rifka's three-dimensional nude still-life, "Bacchanaal", which was on display at the Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale. Rene Ricard wrote about Rifka in his influential December 1987 Art Forum article about the iconic identity of artists from Van Gogh to Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, The Radiant Child.The untitled acrylic painting on plywood, in the collection of the Honolulu Museum of Art, demonstrates the artist's use of plywood as a substrate for painting. Artist and writer Mark Bloch called her work "imaginative surfaces that support experimental laboratories for interferences in sensuous pigment." According to artist and curator Greg de la Haba, Judy Rifka's irregular polygons on plywood "are among the most important paintings of the decade". In 2013, Rifka's daily posts on Facebook garnered a large social media audience for her imaginative "selfies," erudite friendly comments, and widely attended solo and group exhibitions, Judy Rifka's pop art figuration is noted for its nervous line and frenetic pace. In the January 1998 issue of Art in America, Vincent Carducci echoed Masheck, “Rifka reworks the neo-classical and the pop, setting all sources in quotation for today’s art-world cognoscenti.” Rifka, along with artists like David Wojnarowicz, helped to take Pop sensibility into a milieu that incorporated politics and high art into Postmodernism; Robert Pincus-Witten stated in his 1988 essay, Corinthian Crackerjacks & Passing Go that "Rifka’s commitment to process and discovery, doctrine with Abstract Expressionist practice, is of paramount concern though there is nothing dogmatic or pious about Rifka’s use of method. Playful rapidity and delight in discovery is everywhere evident in her painting." In 2016, a large retrospective of Rifka's art was shown at the Jean-Paul Najar Foundation in Dubai. In 2017, Gregory de la Haba presented a Rifka retrospective at the Amstel Gallery in The Yard, a section of Manhattan described as "a labyrinth of small cubicles, conference rooms and small office spaces that are rented out to young entrepreneurs, professionals and hipsters". In 2019 her video Bubble Dancers New Space Ritual was selected for the International Istanbul Bienali. Alexandra Goldman Talks To Judy Rifka About Ionic Ironic: Mythos from the '80s at CORE:Club and the Inexistence of "Feminist Art" Whitehot Magazine of Contemporary Art. She was included in "50 Contemporary Women Artists", a book comprising a refined selection of current and impactful artists. The foreword is by Elizabeth Sackler of the Brooklyn Museum’s Sackler Center for Feminist Art. Additional names in the book include sculptor and carver Barbara Segal...

Exhibited in "Benji Stiles: A Human Day" at Reeves Art + Design. In “A Human Day,” a solo show dedicated to the work of contemporary multidisciplinary artist Benji Stiles, we explor...

Sally is a self taught artist who has pursued art for as long as she can remember. She grew up in Shelbyville, KY, and now calls Birmingham, AL home. Her work as an artist began on ...

Sally is a self taught artist who has pursued art for as long as she can remember. She grew up in Shelbyville, KY, and now calls Birmingham, AL home. Her work as an artist began on ...

Sally is a self taught artist who has pursued art for as long as she can remember. She grew up in Shelbyville, KY, and now calls Birmingham, AL home. Her work as an artist began on ...

Linda King Ferguson describes her "Equivalence Series" as social bodies; a re-thinking of Modernist figurative abstraction. They are a discursive formal and reductive language. As fi...