Christine Tarkowski

"Wood, " Christine Tarkowski, Contemporary Female Artist, Urban Text Art

2007

Calvin Marcus Monument 8, 2018 Wood, glass, hot glue, cardboard, plastic, paper pulp, sulfur, ash, gesso, Cel-Vinyl, flashe, watercolor and other media sculpture 22" high x 13 1/4" w...

Larry Zox Lexington, 1973 Acrylic on canvas 61 x 49 inches Provenance: Andre Emmerich Gallery, New York Janie C. Lee Gallery, Houston, Texas Private Collection, Greenwood Village, Colorado Exhibited: New York, Andre Emmerich Gallery, Larry Zox: New Paintings, March 10 - 28, 1973. Houston, Texas, Janie C. Lee Gallery, Larry Zox, February - April, 1974. A painter who played an essential role in the Color Field discourse of the 1960s and 1970s, Larry Zox is best known for his intensely and brilliantly colored geometric abstractions, which question and violate symmetry. Zox stated in 1965: “Being contrary is the only way I can get at anything.” To Zox, this position was not necessarily arbitrary, but instead meant “responding to something in an examination of it [such as] using a mechanical format with X number of possibilities." What he sought was to “get at the specific character and quality of each painting in and for itself,” as James Monte stated in his introductory essay in the catalogue for Zox’s 1973–74 solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Zox also at times used a freer, more intuitive method, while maintaining coloristic autonomy, which became increasingly important to him in his later career. Zox began to receive attention in the 1960s, when he was included in several groundbreaking exhibitions of Color Field and Minimalist art, including Shape and Structure (1965), organized by Henry Geldzahler and Frank Stella for Tibor de Nagy, New York, and Systemic Painting (1966), organized by Lawrence Alloway for the Guggenheim Museum. In 1973–74, the Whitney’s solo exhibition of Zox’s work gave recognition to his significance in the art scene of the preceding decade. In the following year, he was represented in the inaugural exhibition of the Hirshhorn Museum, which acquired fourteen of his works. Zox was born in Des Moines, Iowa. He attended the University of Oklahoma and Drake University, and then studied under George Grosz at the Des Moines Art Center. In 1958, Zox moved to New York, joining the downtown art scene. His studio on 20th Street became a gathering place for artists, jazz musicians, bikers, and boxers. He occasionally sparred with visiting fighters. He later established a studio in East Hampton, a former black smithy used previously by Jackson Pollock. Zox’s earliest works were collages consisting of pieces of painted paper stapled onto sheets of plywood. He then produced paintings that were illusions of collages, including both torn- and trued-edged forms, to which he added a wide range of strong hues that created ambiguous surfaces. Next, he omitted the collage aspect of his work and applied flat color areas to create more complete statements of pure color and shape. He then replaced these torn and expressive edges with clean and impersonal lines that would define his work for the next decade. From 1962 to 1965, he produced his Rotation series, at first creating plywood and Plexiglas reliefs, which turned squares into dynamic polygons. He used these shapes in his paintings as well, employing white as a foil between colors to produce negative spaces that suggest that the colored shapes had only been cut out and laid down instead of painted. The New York Times noted in 1964: “The artist is hip, cool, adventurous, not content to stay with the mere exercise of sensibility that one sees in smaller works.” In 1965, he began the Scissors Jack series, in which he arranged opposing triangular shapes with inverted Vs of bare canvas at their centers that threaten to split their compositions apart. In several works from this series, Zox was inspired by ancient Chinese water vessels...

TORN series. Archival pigment piece with plexiglass mount. About the Artist: Andrew Schwartz is an internationally published, award winning photographer. Based in NYC, he is an alumni of The Rhode Island School of Design, and a veteran member of both The International Cinematographers Guild/ICG and The Society of Motion Picture Still Photographers/SMPSP. His work is on permanent collection at The Margret Herrick Gallery at The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and he has served as Unit Still Photographer on more than 75 films including School of Rock, Men In Black, Fatal Attraction, When Harry Met Sally...

In Ro Barragan's latest work we explore a production of typographic posters that seeks to highlight the multiplicity of meanings in everyday messages. Words meet, bifurcate, overlap, amalgamate and juxtapose in speeches and the context of communications. It is in this complex multiplicity, that manifests itself in a printed text, which also functions as an image. The material used is the same as the one historically used in urban advertising posters: the work is developed by using typographic printing methods, with mobile types of wood, in typographic families dating back to the last century. The works of art are printed on sulfite paper of various sizes. This piece comes displayed on a black contemporary frame under glass. Art measures 38.25 x 26.25 in Frame measures 43.5 x 31.5 in The machines of the early 20th century and manual presses of various sizes are used for printing, which still works in historical workshops in Argentina – Pucará printing shop in La Tablada - and in the Ilusión Gráfica workshop, owned by Ro Barragán, where it is sought to continue the tradition and the typographic trade, linking its production with artistic practices. Ro holds a Master in Aesthetics and Art Theory by the National University of La Plata, all while developing artistic activities since 1994. She has participated in collective and individual exhibitions in Painting, Engraving, Objects, Digital Art, Installations and Interactive Art, in Buenos Aires and other cities of Argentina, Bogotá, Rome, and Miami. She also has developed art activities in the context of the street, through stickers and posters. She is a Teacher of the Engraving and Complementary Printed Art Workshop at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the National University of La Plata and a teacher of the typography workshop at the Museo de Calcos y Escultura comparada Ernesto de la Cárcova, city of Buenos Aires. She is the creator of Ilusión Gráfica, a typographic printing company that seeks to preserve the tradition of printing with wooden mobile...