Robert Motherwell

M

1991

Acrylic and pasted papers on canvas mounted on board 50.8 x 40.6 cms (20 x 16 ins) This collage includes a fragment of a 1985 print, Burning Sun. Although Motherwell signed...

Robert Motherwell Elegy to the Spanish Republic No. 110C 1968 Acrylic and graphite on paper 15.2 x 20.3 cms (6 x 8 ins) Robert Motherwell's Elegies series represent one of the iconic motifs of Abstract Expressionism.  Based on a 1948 ink illustration the artist executed accompanying a Harold Rosenberg poem, “A Bird for every bird,” the drawing shows the hypnotically repetitive patterning of ovoids and vertical beams.  The stark contrast of the black ink on white paper references the symbolic use of the color black by artists such as Goya, Manet and Matisse to convey death, loss, and tragedy.  Motherwell was quite affected by the turbulence of the Spanish Civil War and alludes to the Spanish republic in his Elegies. Motherwell’s plumbing the depths of poetry, history, and primordial art in the Elegies is considered a hallmark of nascent Abstract Expressionist painting in its desire to "excavate" essential imagery of mankind. Motherwell, who originally trained as a philosophy scholar and later became of the great editors of 20th century art documents, grasped very early on the crucial importance that in order to contribute meaningfully to the canon of modern art, one must create a principle of aesthetics. Through the surrealist concept of automatism, the artist finally found the creative principle that eventually governed his extraordinary artistic output and produced the Elegies, one of the most salient, immediate painterly images of 20th century abstract painting. In fact, he has alluded to the fact that each one of his Elegies begins as an automatic drawing, and certain shapes are then blocked to create the signature armature of the vertical bars and ovals. The Elegies seem to possess the power of an archetypal image, an image the mind already grasps on a subconscious level. Motherwell's play of dualities of black and white as well as other dichotomies—the geometric versus the organic, chaos versus order, death versus life—was a condition of living through a tumultuous period in American history. During an interview, he vividly recalled the 1940s as the time when society was ordered by a set of contradictions.  In Motherwell's Elegies, he not only discovered an incredibly elastic pictorial language that would communicate on multiple levels but also acknowledged these contradictions in a manner that would resonate in abstract form.  The present work served as a model for a painting, Spanish Elegy...

Robert Motherwell The Studio 1987 Acrylic and charcoal on canvas 152.4 x 182.9 cms (60 x 72 ins) RM13966 P1140 When Motherwell made The Studio, in 1987, he was nearing the end of an...

Robert Motherwell Open Untitled (Yellow) 1981 Acrylic and charcoal on canvas 30.5 x 40.6 cms (12 x 16 ins) RM10045 P1019 Recto upper left: RM Verso not signed,not dated Artist's stu...

Robert Motherwell (1915-1991) Untitled 1990 Acrylic and coloured pencil on panel 40.6 x 50.8 cms (16 x 20 ins) RM13143 P1195 The composition of this painting is based on the left ...

Robert Motherwell Elegy to the Spanish Republic No. 163 1979-82 Acrylic and Conte crayon on board 59.1 x 74.3 cms (23 1/4 x 29 1/4 ins) RM14159 P1061 Elegy to the Spanish Republic No. 163 is a fine example of Robert Motherwell’s most acclaimed body of work, the Elegies to the Spanish Republic. As important as Barnett Newman’s zips and Jackson Pollock’s drips for their revolutionary contribution to art history, the Elegies are Motherwell’s most extensive series; he executed over 140 paintings using this motif, beginning in 1948 until his death in 1991. Nearly every major museum collection, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Museum of Modern Art, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum of Art, New York, and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, have in their permanent collection an Elegy to the Spanish Republic. Intended to be read as a lamentation or funeral song after the Spanish Civil War (1936-39), Motherwell’s Elegies to the Spanish Republic are a lyrical and poetic memorial to the immense human loss and suffering endured during these harrowing years. Motherwell was a young student of twenty-one when the horrors of the Spanish Civil War commenced in 1936, and he would later reflect that it was the most “moving political event” of his youth. In 1939, the Spanish Civil War concluded with the fall of Spain’s democratically elected socialist government, which was deposed by a fascist coalition led by dictator Francisco Franco, whose dictatorship would persist until 1975. In 1948 nearly a decade after the end of the Spanish Civil War, Motherwell created his first Elegy with a small drawing to accompany a poem by Harold Rosenberg. Over the next four decades, Motherwell would pursue this same structural and thematic motif relentlessly; taken as a whole, the Elegies confirm the resounding impact that this war had on the young artist, and indeed stand as a powerful monument to the overwhelming loss during and in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War. Motherwell stated: “I meant the word 'elegy' in the title. I was twenty-one in 1936, when the Spanish Civil War began…The Spanish Civil War was even more to my generation than Vietnam was to be thirty years later to its generation, and should not be forgotten, even though la guerre est finie.” (David Craven in Joan M...

Contemporary mixed media (acrylic, pastel, pencil, and collage) abstract floral painting by emerging artist Federica Aiello Pini, exploring nature...

This work is a continuation of Bianca Wellwood's abstract collage process. It is about a woman dancing and feeling free. Ready to hang: yes, suspensio...

A Scottish Glasgow School Abstract Expressionist mixed media painting by Grant McTavish. The work is signed and dated bottom right and is resigned and dedicated to the backboard. The...

This work is a part of the "Chaos and Control Theory" Series - the artist's signature series. It was created with the pages from an Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. This technique gi...

This work is a part of the "Chaos and Control Theory" Series - the artist's signature series. It was created with the pages from an Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. This technique gives a special character to the work - you can play with it by asking questions, pointing to any part of the work, and you will get a meaningful phrase or a word. The work has blue and white colors. Great for the modern interior. The work is unstretched and will be shipped in a roll. -- "Chaos and Control Theory" Series is about depth and space. It’s about information overload, and what information looks like when you take out a meaning. I create lots of layers, using found materials and printed materials. I do an abstract expressionism painting on a surface first before I apply the printed and found materials. And then I begin to organize the surface, ultimately thinking about balance and flow and how the piece is going to contribute to the space it is going to be hanging in. -- Zach Touchon is an American contemporary abstract expressionist artist and muralist based in Los Angeles, CA. Besides that, Touchon is also an actor, a singer, a screenwriter, and a writer. Zach Touchon is an artist in the second generation. By rethinking abstract expressionism ideas, using different media he creates large abstract artwork along with small collages, huge...

Elizabeth Riley’s work addresses questions concerning the complex and changing world we inhabit and our “mixed reality,” living between physical and digital/virtual contexts – are we our everyday, familiar, material past, or our digital future, and is this apparent “mixed reality” of the moment to be embraced or resisted. Is the digital present the bells and whistles of an unchanged and familiar humanity or does it define us, and the future. This project is embodied in tabletop cityscapes, structural wall works and installations including video, inkjet-printed video stills, and found home furnishings. Other continuing threads at play in my body of work are the struggle to overcome oppression as a woman – and a relationship with the urban environment and constructed space, as both personal and paradigmatic space. Exhibited in Excessive Frugalities, Digital Feet and Rocking Posture are three dimensional wall works made from multicolored video stills inkjet-printed on paper, and paint on the tough mylar-like material, duralar. These work combine illusionistic space with constructed elements in a multidimensional mashup of traditional and new mediums. . A long time New Yorker, Elizabeth Riley graduated from Barnard College and received an MFA from Hunter College. In April 2017, the site-specific participatory installation, City Remix, appeared in the exhibition Reconstruct at LIU, in Brooklyn, and in June 2017 the 20 x 20 ft installation, Paper Dragons, Broolyn, which functions as a walk-in, physical video, appeared in Bigger Bolder Better at 470 Vanderbilt Ave, Brooklyn, sponsored by Chashama. In 2016 a multipart tabletop cItyscape, Video City, appeared in the exhibition, Land, Air, Place at Project ARTspace in Manhattan. In 2014-2015 large-scale installations by the artist appeared in exhibitions of site-specific work in Brooklyn at Storefront Ten Eyck, curated by Karin Bravin, and in Atlanta and Duluth, Georgia presented by Dashboard. In 2011-2013 her work was exhibited in a number of 2- and 3-person shows or screenings, including at Kijdome, Boston, and dB Visual Artist Series / Dungeon Beach, Storefront Bushwick, Creon Gallery and Studio Salon curated by David Gibson, all in New York City. Groups shows include exhibitions at Denise Bibro Fine Arts, Lesley Heller Workspace, Van Der Plas Gallery, Janet Kurnatowski Gallery, Norte Maar, Associated Gallery, Brooklyn Fire Proof, Active Space, Sugar in Bushwick, NY Studio Gallery, Sideshow Gallery, PS 122, and Nurtureart. Elizabeth Riley's videos have appeared in screenings at home and abroad, including venues in England, Madrid, Copenhagen and Berlin. She was awarded a BRIC Media Arts Fellowship in 2014 and has been honored with twelve artist residencies, including the Heliker-Lahotan Residency, Great Cranberry Island...