Wolf Fine Art - Colorado Springs

Art Institute of Chicago Exhibit – Told and Retold: Picture Book Artists from Studio Goodwin Sturges (May 12–October 28, 2012)

Andrew Wolf — Tue, 15 May 2012 13:30:17 +0000

The most popular children’s stories feature a familiar cast of characters such as princesses or pirates and are set in places like castles or faraway enchanted lands, but what happens when you turn these well-known tales on their heads? Told and Retold features works from Studio Goodwin Sturges that pick up the threads of seasoned stories and weave them into new contexts with unexpected twists. These artworks illustrate novel narratives about famous personalities like Puff the Magic Dragon or Mark Twain and invigorates oft-told tales with new characters and alternative places.

Studio Goodwin Sturges is an artists’ agency dedicated to nurturing creative talent and developing quality literature for children. Judy Sue Goodwin Sturges, owner and founder of the studio, is also a professor of illustration at Rhode Island School of Design, and she and her staff work to foster the growth of each artist in the studio. The agency works with children’s book publishers across the country and with more than 40 artists and authors from around the world.

For more information visit www.artic.edu

May 15, 2012

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Art Institute of Chicago Exhibit – Recent Acquisitions of Contemporary Japanese Art (May 9–October 28, 2012)

Andrew Wolf — Tue, 08 May 2012 13:30:02 +0000

For decades, the Art Institute has been at the forefront of collecting contemporary works by Japanese artists. Over 50 years ago it was one of the first museums to hold exhibitions of works by contemporary Japanese print artists who had revived an art form unpopular in their homeland, and today contemporary art is the fastest-growing area of the museum’s Japanese art collection. Bringing together significant acquisitions from the last two years, never before displayed at the museum, this exhibition showcases works of contemporary Japanese art that quote from the country’s rich past.

The ceramics on view focus on those that date from the 1960s through the last few years and either complement works already in the collection or add an entirely new understanding of the artists’ careers. The aesthetics of folk art permeate the ceramics by modern masters Hamada Shōji (1894–1978) and Kawai Kanjirō (1890–1966), while works by today’s ceramic artists, including a large jar by Kohara Yasuhiro (born 1954) and a plate by Hagiwara Yoshinori (born 1974), show that younger artists are still intrigued and challenged by the work of the humble craftsperson, now unabashedly heightened to fine art.

For more information visit www.artic.edu

May 8, 2012

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SmART Collecting – Collecting the Work of Emerging Artists

Andrew Wolf — Fri, 04 May 2012 13:30:03 +0000

Many art collectors and dealers seek out the work of emerging artists before they become stars and before the price of their work soars. Where do you find these emerging artists?

The hot places to discover new artists are through prominent Master of Fine Art programs where students are just beginning to share their visions with the world. The top MFA programs, particularly Columbia, Yale, and Hunter College, are springboards into the New York art world. Their MFA graduation shows or thesis exhibitions are considered the students’ coming-out party. At these shows dealers are looking for new artists to sign and collectors are literally buying things off the wall.

MFA shows are also a good place to learn more about contemporary art in general. If you attend a show, ask the students to tell you about their work, and also ask who else they think is good. Art students typically have a good sense of what’s new and innovative in the art world and enjoy talking about it.

A word of caution to collectors, buy only what you love. Don’t get caught up in the buying frenzy. Inexperienced collectors who think about art as an investment, like the stock market or real estate and follow a sheep mentality. There is no guarantee that the price of the students’ work will increase in the future.

May 4, 2012

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http://www.WolfFineArt.com

Art Institute of Chicago Exhibit – Dawoud Bey: Harlem, U.S.A. (May 2–September 9, 2012)

Andrew Wolf — Tue, 01 May 2012 13:30:42 +0000

In 1979 African American photographer Dawoud Bey (born 1953) held his first solo exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem, showing a suite of 25 photographs titled Harlem, U.S.A. Bey had been in residence at that museum for one year, and he had made the surrounding neighborhood a subject of study since 1975. Though raised in Queens, Bey and his family had roots in Harlem, and it was a youthful visit to the exhibition Harlem on My Mind at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1969, that had given Bey his determination to become an artist.

Harlem, U.S.A., which has never been shown complete since the Studio Museum exhibition, appears fresh today partly in its manifest difference from much of Bey’s later work. The prints are not large, not in color, and do not come in multiple parts; the subjects are not all adolescents, and they do not “sit” for the artist but were found by him on the street. And yet all these photographs are sensitively composed and radiate an emphasis on the calm and dignity that would become hallmarks of Bey’s approach. Like August Sander, Bey wanted to show the “types” of Harlem’s residents: the barber, the patrician, the church ladies, and the hip youth. He was searching for a way to combine the specificity of photography, which only knows how to record details, with the diversity of Harlem, a neighborhood as varied as any in the country. And he wanted to do this without courting stereotypes.

For more information visit www.artic.edu

May 1, 2012

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http://www.WolfFineArt.com

Smithsonian American Art museum Exhibit – African American Art: Harlem Renaissance, Civil Rights Era, and Beyond (April 27-September 3, 2012)

Andrew Wolf — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 13:30:18 +0000

African American Art: Harlem Renaissance, Civil Rights Era, and Beyond presents a selection of paintings, sculpture, prints, and photographs by forty-three black artists who explored the African American experience from the Harlem Renaissance through the Civil Rights era and the decades beyond, which saw tremendous social and political changes. In response, these artists created an image of America that recognizes individuals and community and acknowledges the role of art in celebrating the multivalent nature of American society.

The artworks in the exhibition lay out a vision of America from an African American viewpoint. These artists embrace many universal themes and also evoke specific aspects of the African American experience—the African Diaspora, jazz, and the persistent power of religion.

The artists work in styles as varied as documentary realism, abstraction, and postmodern assemblage of found objects to address a diverse array of subjects. Robert McNeill, Richmond Barthé, and Benny Andrews speak to the dignity and resilience of people who work the land. Jacob Lawrence, Roy DeCarava, and Thornton Dial, Sr. acknowledge the struggle for economic and civil rights. Sargent Johnson, Loïs Mailou Jones, and Melvin Edwards address the heritage of Africa, and images by Romare Bearden recast Christian themes in terms of black experience. James Porter and Alma Thomas explore beauty in the natural world.

All 100 artworks in the exhibition are drawn entirely from the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s rich collection of African American art. More than half of the featured works, including paintings by Benny Andrews, Jacob Lawrence, and Loïs Mailou Jones, and photographs by Roy DeCarava, Gordon Parks, Roland Freeman, and Marilyn Nance, are being exhibited and circulated by the museum for the first time, and ten works are recent acquisitions. The exhibition includes fifty-four photographs, which will be integrated into the display while also organizing the exhibition thematically. Individual object labels will connect the artists and their works with the artistic, social, and contextual factors that shaped their creation.

For more information visit www.americanart.si.edu

April 30, 2012

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Denver Art Museum Exhibit – Theodore Waddell’s Abstract Angus (May 20-November 18, 2012)

Andrew Wolf — Sun, 29 Apr 2012 13:30:01 +0000

Theodore Waddell arrived in New York in the early 1960s, only a short decade after abstract expressionists like Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, and Clyfford Still dominated the art world. Gleaning elements from this art movement, Waddell returned home to his native Montana and created works of nearly abstract backgrounds that suggest the landscape. By painting figures that symbolized cattle in snow-filled backgrounds, the painter walks the line of abstraction and realism. This exhibition of 26 works explores Waddell’s abstract paintings, sketches, and drawings that challenge the common perception that all western American art is created in a realistic style.

For more information visit www.denverartmuseum.org

April 29, 2012

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http://www.WolfFineArt.com

Art Institute of Chicago Exhibit – Katharina Fritsch (April 21–October 28, 2012)

Andrew Wolf — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 13:30:13 +0000

Katharina Fritsch is among the most respected, admired, and critically accomplished European sculptors of her generation, an artist who roots her work in the personal, often drawing from childhood memories of familiar circumstances or chance encounters. Her references engage broad aspects of German folklore and culture through meticulous reproductions of quotidian objects, many of which she formally manipulates with shifts in scale and color. Made strange by repetition and siting, her sculptural installations are both seductive and disturbing. In the Proustian sense of activating memory, Fritsch’s work creates an unnerving sense of familiarity that is subsequently disarmed by the realization that we might be seeing a form, a character, or an object for the first time.

For more information visit www.artic.edu

April 24, 2012

For more Art Collecting Tips and Resources, be sure to visit our website and follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

http://www.WolfFineArt.com

Fall Foliage

Andrew Wolf — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 13:30:59 +0000

Leslie J. Skelton (1848-1929)

Fall Foliage

Pastel on paper

5 3/4 x 8 3/4 inches

Signed lower left

Art Institute of Chicago Exhibit – Parcours (April 21–September 9, 2012)

Andrew Wolf — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 13:30:48 +0000

Parcours, on view in the Modern Wing’s Bucksbaum Gallery, is the result of a collaboration between artists Liz Deschenes (American, b. 1966) and Florian Pumhösl (Austrian, b. 1971), in dialogue with Matthew S. Witkovsky, Richard and Ellen Sandor Chair and Curator, Department of Photography. It takes inspiration from an unrealized exhibition proposal of the 1930s by Austrian-born Bauhaus designer Herbert Bayer. Bayer wanted a series of parallel walls that would turn the gallery space into a maze, with text and the works of art themselves serving visitors as a guiding thread. Expanding on that didactic premise, Deschenes and Pumhösl have chosen just a few photographs from the permanent collection of the Art Institute and placed them like route markers on temporary walls modified expressly for this show. The artists’ own works, a set of specially tempered glass panels by Pumhösl and lustrous photograms by Deschenes, will reflect these works and the surrounding space. In conjunction with the exhibition, a blog will provide both a chronology of the development of Parcours as well as a forum for discussion.

For more information visit www.artic.edu

For more Art Collecting Tips and Resources, be sure to visit our website and follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

http://www.WolfFineArt.com

April 17, 2012

Gladioli

Andrew Wolf — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 13:30:11 +0000

Daniel Sprick (1953-)

Gladioli

Oil on Canvas

24 x 20 inches

Signed & titled lower right