Month: November 2020

Sirbiladze’s background influenced her approach to painting: “Sirbiladze was exposed to art mostly through books‍—‌her home country had few museums. She knew early on that she wanted to be an artist, however, and cited the colors of the art she came across as the reason she ended up painting.” She told Forbes in a 2015 interview, “Searching for light and color is my main engagement”.

Sirbiladze made paintings known for their speed, and she sometimes incorporated text into her work. Her characteristic style merged the figurative and the gestural. Her paintings have been described as “highly expressive” with splashes of color “forming abstracted figures and patterns.” An Art in America review, a year before her death at age 45, remarks on the “energetic content” of her work, saying “Sirbiladze’s line is spare; abundant, creamy negative space supports the gentle diagonal flow of marks” anchored by unexpected forms. Critic Alex Greenberger said, “Sirbiladze’s paintings played with the division between figuration and abstraction, often melding the two in ambiguous images. Genitalia and bodies can be glanced in some, while in others, objects like jugs and fruits seem to materialize. Sirbiladze’s paintings recall the work of Henri Matisse and the Impressionists in their light, expressive brushwork.”

One of his Galleries puts it very well: Scott-Douglas’ work “situates itself at the confluence of a number of critical, socio-political, economic and aesthetic observations and investigations. Interrogating tensions between analogue and digital modes of production, he makes use of a wide range of techniques and media, from laser cutting, inkjet printing and photography, to numerical data and satellite mapping software. Across his practice, Scott-Douglas investigates the possibilities and limitations of the production of the photographic image at a turning point in the medium’s history, as it makes the conversion from modes of mechanical reproduction towards digital technologies. While formally elements of Scott-Douglas’ visual language resonate with recent developments in painting – particularly the process-orientated vocabulary of conceptual abstraction – his use of photographic media, from the old-fashioned cyanotype process favoured in his early career, to a juxtaposition of digital and print formats, reveals the close relationship his work shares with both the legacy and future of photography.”

Scott -Douglas has held solo exhibitions at Casey Kaplan in New York, Gallery Baton in Seoul and Blum and Poe in Tokyo and Los Angeles and Jessica Silverman Gallery (San Francisco). In addition he has participated in group shows at the Cordova Sculpture Park and Museum (Boston), the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art (Toronto), and most recently at the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University. His work is also featured in several public collections, including the Dallas Museum of Art. He is among the most closely watched artists to emerge in recent years.

Chris Succo’s crisp, cool abstraction is so wide-ranging that, as author Christopher Schreck has noted, a single exhibition could look like a group show. Yet whether the German artist is working in lacquered aluminum and oil on canvas or creating sculpture with steel piping, mesh, or boxing equipment, his work shares certain commonalities: a quest to find individuality within the repetition of forms and techniques, elements of appropriation (including the titles of his series), and a minimalist palette largely comprised of matte black and white. Some of the brighter works in his oeuvre, the “Flag Pieces” consist of three diagonal bands of color and texture created by applying lacquer to black-and-white photographs. In these, Succo divides the canvas in a style reminiscent of Hard-Edged painting, as well as Succo’s own “Nu Era” series of black-and-white lacquered aluminum works.