summer is wrapping up and we are looking forward to fall. first up gallery artist donald martiny was just featured on 1st dibs as obsession of the week. clearly hbg has been obsessed with donald’s sculptures for quite some time and we are looking forward to his next solo exhibition at the gallery in november. gallery artist sherrie wolfe had a large retrospective exhibition this summer at the schneider museum of art in portland, oregon. huge congrats sherrie and countdown to your solo show of new paintings at hbg in spring 2024.
hidell brooks is super excited for our fall lineup of exhibitions. first up selena beaudry:new collages and david kroll:recent paintings opens in september. october brings our first exhibition for richmond based painter cameron ritcher along with solo exhibitions for north carolina professor of art at unc-greensboro barbara campbell thomas and recent ice cream paintings by super realist painter kim testone. along with wall sculptures by donald martiny November also brings cityscape paintings by francis livingston. as always we are continually receiving new work by all gallery artists. follow us on instagram to see previews of weekly arrivals!
DONALD MARTINY’S JUMBO BRUSHSTROKES MAGNIFY THE UNDENIABLE PERSONALITY OF PAINT
How can a few simple gestures — writ extra, extra, extra large — contain so much beauty and drama?
BY CAROL KINO
Donald Martiny crafts his giant gestural paintings by pulling and pushing a massive brush loaded with polymer medium across an aluminum “canvas,” creating thick, colorful brushstrokes. He then cuts each stroke free, mounts it on brackets and hangs it on the wall, thereby “making a gesture into an object,” he says.
The work shown here, Bonheur de Vivre (2023), comprises six separate brushstrokes, in mustard yellow, cocoa brown, pale azure, millennial pink and two grassy shades of green, assembled in a composition that pulsates with energy.
Conceived for “Urpflanze,” his recent solo show at Madison Gallery, in Solana Beach, California, Bonheur de Vivre was inspired by Martiny’s longtime study of Henri Matisse’s painting of the same name, which lives at the Barnes Foundation, in Philadelphia, and portrays naked figures dancing, playing music and otherwise disporting themselves in nature.
“I wanted to make a painting that showed peace and love,” says Martiny, who works in a barnlike studio in Connecticut near his home. “I look at art history all the time, and this is probably one of the loveliest ideas I could possibly think of when there are so many negative things going on in the world.”
The piece was made at the tail end of an exciting year, filled with what Martiny calls “a cyclone of work,” including two enormous commissions: one for Dubai’s new über-blingy resort Atlantis The Royal and another for the glass-fronted lobby of the Visa building in Atlanta.
He also joined the illustrious list of artists, such as Alex Katz and Ellsworth Kelly, who have worked with the Paul Taylor Dance Company, creating sets and collaborating on costume color choices for Somewhere in the Middle, choreographed by Amy Hall Garner, which premiered last November.
The New York Times called the dance’s message “mainly unabashed joy,” and that’s what Martiny was aiming for here. “My paintings are a celebration of color and form and life,” he says. “Life is movement.”
SCHNEIDER MUSEUM OF ART
SHERRIE WOLF:
TO INSTILL LIFE
On View: June 6 – August 5, 2023
Sherrie Wolf graduated from the Museum Art School, now the Pacific Northwest College of Art, Portland, OR, in 1974 and received an MA from the Chelsea College of Art in London, England in 1975. She began exhibiting her work in the mid 1970s while teaching art at PNCA. Her work is included in such collections as The Vivian and Gordon Gilkey Center for Graphic Arts, Portland Art Museum; Hallie Ford Museum, Salem, OR; the Tacoma Art Museum, Washington; City of Seattle; and Washington State Art Collection. Wolf has also been included in multiple curated group exhibitions across the country. In 2012, Wolf’s work was presented in a solo exhibition at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, and earlier in 2014 she was featured in a solo show at the Long Beach Museum of Art in Southern California.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Early in my college art education, I was lightning-struck by a retrospective in San Francisco of Georgia O’Keeffe paintings. Her huge, boldly beautiful still-life images inspired my belief in a life as a successful woman painter. Around then, historians began revealing many women artists that had been overlooked throughout history. Successful careers of artists such as Rosa Bonheur, Artemisia Gentileschi, and Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun provided needed role models for me.
I paint in oil on canvas, and emphasize still-life objects interacting with references to historic art. Lately (since 2012 and through the decade) I have made large scale self-portraits to see myself as a “woman in history”. I have substituted myself for Courbet in his allegory “The Painter’s Studio” (with a nude man in place of Courbet’s muse), for Charles Wilson Peale in his museum self-portrait, for Velázquez in “Las Meninas”, and most recently for Rosa Bonheur in her studio.
My vocabulary of visual images is personal and intimate, and began with lingere, the ultimate feminine apparel, as a familiar subject linked to the female body: my body. In the late 1990s I started to use works by Artemisia Gentileschi as a backdrop for plates of fruit and other still-life material. The voluptuous curves of fruit created poignantly ironic juxtapositions against paintings like her powerful “Judith and Maidservant with the Head of Holofernes”.
Women persist to defy the boundaries set by family obligations and bias in exclusionary environments where male artists have historically achieved more success and exposure. Artistic expressions viewed as “feminine” or un-masculine sometime elicit disrespect. Beyond gender identity, I look to all my artistic predecessors for the fluidity of creativity which knows no sex or gender; and I have been finding other prejudicial boundaries such as race and class to probe, perhaps somewhat subliminally while distracting the viewer with emphasis on unapologetic lushness.
Struck by the current phobic reaction to immigration, my painting “Sea Of Tea” references my mother’s post-war voyage by ship from her New Zealand homeland to the United States. As with all my work, I employ personal symbolism, with a collection of inherited teacups to represent my family history. The dark blue satin fabric, like the vast ocean, serves as an undulating unsteady ground: an immigrant’s doubt. There could be concern that beautiful, large scale images of tea cups, tulips and other “feminine identified objects” might cast me as a dilettante who paints pretty pictures. I am undaunted by this, with O’Keeffe at my back.
Sherrie Wolf
Painting parallels world history and is never past its prime. I seek to position my own experiences in the present, yet with respectful and curious references to the past.
My still life paintings evolve out of my passion for arranging objects. I delight in the objects themselves, as well as the spaces between and within the objects. I marvel at their beauty, and I enjoy making visual and conceptual associations between objects in a form of viewable alliteration. My compositions are theatrical, as if the setting is a stage on which drama is being performed.
My current portraits reflect my 2012 series of close-up faces from important historical paintings. Capturing facial expression is challenging and the outward gaze can make the observer feel vulnerable. My still life arrangements combining articles of beauty and, dare I say, vanitas, invite the contemporary viewer to enter the painting and begin to look more closely.
Throughout the history of art, I observe a cyclical human nature in which emotions, experiences, and events tend to repeat. We can learn so much by viewing ourselves in the larger context of history. We can recognize a commonality that connects one generation to another, one era to another. My hope is to learn from our past by looking at it intensely.
I paint with oil on canvas over an acrylic ground. My 2015 series of hand-colored prints used etching and photogravure. I also work in watercolor, occasionally departing from my richly saturated palette by painting in black and white.
Over the past decade, my work has evolved in scale and intensity. In particular, I have made some very large self-portraits based on historical figures in painting. For example, I envisioned myself as the subject in Charles Peale’s The Artist in His Museum (1822). A frequent subject in my studio practice is still life arrangements set before references to historical paintings. Again, the size of my canvases and the complexity of the still life arrangements are ever-increasing.
This year I was honored by the Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation, which published a 148-page retrospective monograph on my work. This experience, especially the opportunity to view the arc of my past four+ decades as an artist, has given me the opportunity to reflect on how my oeuvre has simultaneously changed, while some elements have remained constant. My technical skills have improved and, while there are obvious through lines that connect my latest work with earlier works, my work has become more elaborate and intellectually vigorous.
-Sherrie Wolf
