“There are no rules. That is how art is born, how breakthroughs happen,” said Helen Frankenthaler (b. 1928) “Go against the rules or ignore the rules. That is what invention is about.”
For over six decades, Frankenthaler went against the rules, pioneering new techniques which launched the second generation of Color Field painting.
Her poured works were created by diluting paints to the delicate consistency of watercolors. The opaque stains spread into the fibers of the canvas, creating vivid veils of color—simultaneously bright yet soft abstract representations of real or imaginary landscapes.
“What concerns me when I work, is not whether the picture is a landscape, or whether it’s pastoral, or whether somebody will see a sunset in it,” Frankenthaler explains. “What concerns me is – did I make a beautiful picture?”
To learn more about this artwork, please inquire or contact us at 505-982-8111
Scroll below to see more works by Frankenthaler in our collection.
“For me,” says Bridget Riley (b. 1931.) “Nature is not landscape, but the dynamism of visual forces.”
Riley channels these forces into illusory studies of color and line—devising lithe imagery which is equally peaceful and emotional.
An icon of abstract painting, Riley has maintained a momentous and clear vision of optical phenomena for nearly seven decades.
Image: Ida Kar
Her prints and paintings are meticulously planned; envisioned through preparatory sketches and collages, then realized with precise forms and curves.
“Sometimes you have to let forms do what they want,” Riley explains. “I build up to a sensation, accumulating tension until it releases a perceptual experience.”
To add this work by Bridget Riley to your collection,
please inquire or contact us at 505-982-8111
Curator Kylee Aragon, who served as the interim gallery director of Albuquerque’s nonprofit lithography center Tamarind Institute before joining Zane Bennett’s staff, selected work from Zane Bennett’s formidable collection of masterworks on paper, highlighting iconic artists who have used highly tactile printmaking techniques to reflect the textures, patterns, and colors of textiles.
To preview works in the exhibition, click here. Scroll below for more information.
Zane Bennett moved to a fully online model in 2016, after more than a decade as a brick-and-mortar gallery. In its stead came a new gallery, form & concept, but they’ll officially split exhibition space for the first time this evening.
Stitched Ink coincides with the reception for form & concept’s fiber art show Nika Feldman: Spirits in the Material World. The exhibition is Zane Bennett’s first formal, in-gallery display since 2015, and launches a curatorial program of seasonal exhibitions.
“We all know what paper feels like, but to make paper look like something else is a hard thing to do,” Aragon says. “When you’re making a print inspired by a textile, how do you create that sense of dimensionality and flowing movement on a two-dimensional surface?”
To answer these questions, Aragon selected works on paper that alchemically reflect the dynamism of textiles. Stitched Ink features thirteen pieces by six premier artists in our collection and is on view through March 23.
Ghada Amer & Reza Farkhondeh, Kiss Cross, Lithograph with Hand Sewn Elements, 24 x 30 in
El Anatsui, Blue Variation, pigment print with hand collage and copper wire, 25 x 32 x 4
“Art is regarded as life and life is not a static thing,” says El Anatsui (b. 1944.) “[Art] should come in a form that you can play around with and manipulate and change as the location demands.”
El Anatsui rose to prominence in the 90s, subverting the notion that metal is a stiff, rigid medium by manipulating the material into soft, pliable forms that arch and curve throughout their environment.
The Ghanian artist’s Blue Variation exemplifies this creed, as the print curves upon itself, revealing an undulating fringe of silver.
Woven with recycled aluminum and copper wire, Anatsui’s iconic garment-like sculptures have been exhibited internationally, with a recent installation on the facade of the Carnegie Museum. In 2015, he was awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement by the Venice Biennale. He is the first Ghanian to receive the Praemium Imperiale.
Composed of hand-collaged paper elements and linked, like his prolific bottle cap sculptures, with copper wire, Blue Variation is notable for its unfixed orientation. Each distinct side can be experienced from multiple points of view.
To add this work by El Anatsui to your collection, please inquire or contact us at 505-982-8111.
Trick or treat! We’ve conjured a batch of ghostly art from our collection. Beware Mimmo Paladino’s sinister skeletons, Jim Dine’s rogue raven, and James Drake’s malevolent monsters!
“I like to use light as a material, but my medium is actually perception,” said James Turrell (b. 1943). “I want you to sense yourself sensing —to see yourself seeing.” Turrell’s exhibition at the Guggenheim in 2013 was his first solo display in New York City since the 1980’s, and he was ready to catch Manhattan’s eye. In his skyscape titled Aten Reign, the Light and Space artist transformed the museum’s iconic rotunda into an enormous oculus that could only be viewed from the ground floor. The installation emanated the full spectrum of color, hypnotically shifting from hue to hue.
“Aten Reign, a series of suspended oval armatures and sheer scrims that span the entire cavity of the building, is so overwhelming, meditative, beautiful and suited to the space that you actually forget you’re in the Guggenheim, where it’s almost architecturally impossible to do so,” wrote Times Quotidian of the work. Turrell joked that Frank Lloyd Wright might not have approved of this radical alteration of the structure’s design. His revolutionary but ephemeral artistic statement is captured in this large-scale archival pigment print. Like the masterwork it depicts, this 44-by-65-inch piece has its own gravitational pull.
Lu Xinjian, City DNA Santa Fe, acrylic on linen, 47.5 x 59.38 in, 2015
Can you find Zane Bennett Contemporary Art? Using aerial photos sourced from Google Earth, Lu Xinjian (b. 1977) meticulously depicted the streets of Santa Fe in acrylic on linen. City DNA SantaFe is part of a larger series by the Chinese artist, where he reduces far-flung metropolises into densely patterned abstractions. Lu Xinjian hasn’t visited many of the places that appear in the expansive City DNA series. He completes each immense painting in his studio in China, traveling the globe through his brush and imagination. From Beijing to New York City to Amsterdam, Lu Xinjian precisely and energetically captures each city’s visual rhythm.
Click here to browse the complete Zane Bennett Contemporary Art collection.
“Shape and color are my two strong things,” said Ellsworth Kelly (1923-2015). The New York artist’s position on his own work was as simple as that, but his influence on 20th century art was considerably more complex. Kelly was a key player in the evolution of hard-edge painting, Color Field painting, minimalism, and Pop Art, though he never willingly assumed the mantle of a particular movement. Quietly and diligently, he observed the built environment around him and captured his shifting perceptions on canvas and paper.
Kelly’s lithograph Blue and Orange and Green is poetic in its simplicity, a visual haiku consisting of three echoed forms in bright hues. “I wanted to give people joy,” Kelly said. His print, which is new to the Zane Bennett Contemporary Art Collection, is sure to brighten your day—and perhaps your living room.
“Being Latin American, you are made up of so many fragments from different cultures,” Arturo Herrera (b. 1959) told Art21 in a documentary called Play. The sequence shows the Venezuela-born, New York and Berlin-based artist sifting through an enormous pile of clippings from paintings, drawings, and printed materials. These are the puzzle pieces for his abstract collages, which incorporate undulating forms and dazzling colors into compositions that almost seem to emit an exuberant hum.
Herrera’s editioned, mixed-media collage Johannesis one such visual chorus. Created over two years in collaboration with the printers at Pace Editions, Johannes is a tour de force of printmaking experimentation. This mixed-media collage is composed of more than 100 separately printed elements in various printmaking techniques, including etching, aquatint, linocut, letterpress, collagraph, silkscreen and digital pigment print. Watch this video from Pace that details the fascinating process, and learn more about the print below.
Arturo Herrera, Johannes, mixed-media collage with various printmaking techniques and felt,
62.5 x 39.5 in., 2012
Click here to browse the complete Zane Bennett Contemporary Art collection.
Robert Rauschenberg, Earth Day, color silkscreen and color pochoir on wove paper, 64.25 x 42.75 in., 1990.
As an avid environmentalist, Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008) designed the first Earth Day poster to benefit the American Environment Foundation in Washington, D.C. in 1970. Twenty years later, Rauschenberg created this color silkscreen and color pochoir on wove paper to celebrate the success of the 1990 Earth Day, which had 200 million participants.
Click here to browse the complete Zane Bennett Contemporary Art collection.
“Believe it or not, I can actually draw,” said Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960 – 1988). After establishing himself as a musician, poet, and graffiti artist by the time he was 20, Basquiat debuted his paintings to critical acclaim in a group exhibition sponsored by Colab and Fashion Moda. He would have his first solo show a year later, which launched a prolific but tragically short career.
The artist’s signature, scrawling painting style often commented on systematic racism, class struggle, and power structures. Basquiat’s neo-expressionist paintings have been exhibited internationally since his death, often selling in the millions. In fact, the image from his 24-color screen print Flexible also appears in a 1984 painting that sold for $45.3 million at Phillips earlier this year. Look below to learn more about the print, which is new to our collection.
Jean-Michel Basquiat, Flexible,
24-color screenprint, 60.25 x 45.5 in, 2016
Click here to browse the complete Zane Bennett Contemporary Art collection.
“Everything has an opposite pole,” said Jeff Koons (b. 1955) of his Luxury and Degradation sculptures. “If you just present optimism without a darker side… there’s no definition of optimism.” The 1986 series appropriates imagery from advertisements and memorabilia for alcoholic beverages—fertile ground to stir up ideas about class, commerce and nostalgia. These highly polished objects have an aura of opulence, but are in fact made from stainless steel. “To me, the stainless steel is the material of the proletarian, it’s what pots and pans are made of. It’s very hard material and it’s fake luxury,” Koons explained.
The artist’s crowning achievement from the body of work is Jim Beam J.B. Turner Engine, a 9.5-foot-long model of a steam engine that’s loaded with bottles of whiskey. “I find it a very powerful image,” Koons said. “An image about progress, about future, about strength.” As always, Koons hovers on the edge of sincerity: his inspiration for the artwork was not an actual locomotive, but rather a kitschy decanter in the shape of one. He included an image of the Jim Beam sculpture in a set of three photolithographs named for the series. The Luxury & Degradation portfolio (1986) depicts the artist’s renditions of the steam engine, a Baccarat crystal set and a fisherman golfer figurine. Scroll down to see the works and learn more.
Above: Jeff Koons, by Andrew Burton AFP.
Jeff Koons Luxury and Degradation
photolithograph (portfolio of three prints)
32 x 24 in. each
1986
Click here to browse the complete Zane Bennett Contemporary collection.
Manuel Amorim, Nuit Mauve, woodcut, 22.75 x 14.75 in., 2007.
You could win a work of art by Manuel Amorim (b. 1950)! Enter our free raffle for a chance to add his woodcut Nuit Mauve to your collection. Fragmented and existential, the Lisbon-born artist’s work centers on shadowy silhouettes moving solo through the universe.
Lovers of beautiful books, rejoice! Zane Bennett Contemporary Art is now an official seller of TASCHEN Books, the revolutionary German imprint that deserves its own art museum. TASCHEN has collaborated with the likes of David Hockney, Christo & Jeanne-Claude and Beatriz Milhazes to produce limited edition books that are true works of art. We’re particularly excited about their new title Murals of Tibet, an epic chronicle of some of the greatest treasures of Buddhist culture and Tibetan heritage.
For more than a decade, photographer Thomas Laird traveled the length, breadth, and far-flung corners of Tibet’s plateau to capture the land’s spectacular Buddhist murals. Deploying new multi-image digital photography, Laird compiled the world’s first archive of these artworks, some walls as wide as 10 meters, in life-size resolution. In recognition of this World Heritage landmark and preservation of Tibetan culture, His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama has signed all copies of this Collector’s Edition. As pictured, Murals of Tibetcomes with a stand designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect and humanitarian pioneer Shigeru Ban.
Click the images below to view more books from TASCHEN, now available from Zane Bennett Contemporary Art. Browse all of our TASCHEN titles and other books in our online shop.
Judy Chicago is having a moment. In the past few months, she’s been featured in an Artsy podcast, profiled in an article for W Magazine, and hailed as “The Godmother” in a recent piece by New York Times Magazine. Here’s an excerpt:
Once your eye is trained to see Chicago’s imprint, it is everywhere, and unmistakable. It’s in Petra Collins’s menstruation-positive T-shirts; in the forthcoming installation on Sunset Boulevard in L.A. by Zoe Buckman of a huge uterus drawn in neon tubing crowned with boxing gloves; in the pink “pussy hats” that are worn in opposition to Trump’s election. Images like these — symbolically overt, politically and anatomically in-your-face, forcing a public confrontation with sexism — are all descended from Chicago’s imagination.
Another article that appeared in the New York Times a few days ago analyzed the tumultuous legacy of critical perspectives on Chicago’s most iconic work, The Dinner Party:
[Chicago] said that despite the art media’s early disparagement of her work, her way of overcoming the disappointment was to go into her studio and continue making art. She found a supportive community in Southern California’s Ferus boys, notably the American artist and sculptor Billy Al Bengston, from whom she said she learned quite a bit. “Early on, he told me: ‘Never read reviews. Just count the column inches and the number of pictures,’ advice I heeded for many years. And given the vicissitudes of my career, it was really good advice.”
Chicago’s fiery feminist statement on the rebirth of humanity, Birth Tear / Tear, appeared at our sister gallery form & concept when Chicago visited last February. Watch our Q&A with her here, and inquire about the piece below.
