Latest news with #GalerieThaddaeusRopac
The Guardian
a day ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘Painting's dangerous work!' The artist whose tools are brushes and power sanders
'I'm just trying to get one step ahead of my paintings,' says Megan Rooney, who is surrounded by the vibrant, gestural abstract works in her studio. She moves through the space restlessly as we chat, rocking on to her tiptoes and arching her arms through the air in an echo of the curving strokes in the paintings. She calls it 'dangerous work', her slow, fraught process of creation. 'After a decade of serious painting,' she says, 'I still feel bewildered and beguiled.' Rooney, 40, grew up in Canada and now lives in London, where she is preparing for her forthcoming show at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac. She has a unique approach of adding and subtracting. She begins by adding paint to a blank canvas, then removes it with power sanders, then adds more on top, then removes it again, in a painstaking, almost bloody battle to find her way to the finished work. Each painting ends up with 10 or 15 other works beneath it. 'In the beginning of a painting's life,' she says, 'it's like meeting new people – superficial. Eventually they have something to tell me. In knowing and searching, the work finds its legs.' She seems both tortured and enraptured by the process. Its slowness sets her apart from many abstract painters, who tend to work in a rapid expressionist way. Rooney pushes back at being compared to them. Her paintings are defined by the prolonged accumulation of both paint, she says, and lived experiences, until they become strong enough to stand alone. 'I think that if you threw them out of the car on the highway, they'd just sprout legs and walk.' Most of the works are the same size, matching the wingspan of the average woman, although Rooney does make huge ones too, as well as murals. She refers to the works as 'people', telling me about their personalities and lineages. Heavily influenced by the seasons and the weather, they reflect the colour palette of their surroundings. 'The city is my main collaborator,' she says, although her works have a lot in common with much less urban paintings, too. There is a lot of late Monet here, and some of Joan Mitchell's verdant gestural brushstrokes. (An exhibition bringing Rooney and Mitchell together is open until October at Espace Louis Vuitton Beijing.) The magnetic, bright and varied colours pull you in. Each shade is so exact, so bright and flat: the warm, clay reds in Old Rome, painted this year, are set against the perfect cerulean and purple of an early evening Italian sky; the oddly matte lavenders that dot many of Rooney's new works are an icily satisfying periwinkle; the pale pinks make me think of French rococo painting and Gainsborough's aristocratic skirts. The canvases seem to glow. They are already old souls when they are first exhibited, after so many iterations on the way to the finish line. As we pace around the studio, pausing in front of works to survey them, Rooney tells me about the importance of movement in her practice. She has a background in dance, which is immediately apparent in the poised way she seems to move through the studio beside me, and she often commissions dance performances to accompany her exhibitions. A new one will take place at the opening of her new show, building on the ongoing story she has constructed of a doomed love between a moth and a spider. Rooney seems an unflinchingly serious artist. She is uninterested in self-promotion, although her work is critically acclaimed and has found both commercial and institutional support. 'The pursuit of art is a serious calling,' she says. 'If you don't care about it really fucking intensely, why should anybody else?' As she tells me about the relentlessness of her practice, it's clear that this isn't just something she says. 'You just have to sacrifice all the other things you wanted to do with your life,' she says. 'Painting is too demanding.' Rooney's attitude is refreshing amid an overly online culture that seems obsessed with easily digestible content and a quick laugh. Her paintings are beautiful (a word she doesn't shy away from) but also substantive. 'Beautiful is intellectual,' she tells me, recognising the complexity of humanity's capacity to create and seek it. 'The fight of producing culture isn't something to be taken lightly.' Surveying one of her paintings carefully, she nods and says quietly, almost to herself: 'I think that's a good painting.' Megan Rooney: Yellow Yellow Blue is at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, London, from 12 June to 2 August
The Guardian
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘I paint extreme emotions': Rachel Jones on her riotously colourful paintings – and her obsession with mouths
Viewers may find Rachel Jones's paintings 'beautiful', but they should be warned: the artist herself doesn't love that word. 'In our culture, the idea of beauty sadly isn't discussed in a critical, rich way – it's much more reductive as a term,' says the 34 year old. 'I hope that when people describe the work as beautiful, it doesn't just stop there.' Her aim, she says, is to pull viewers in deeper, beyond the surface of the work. Despite her youth, Jones is already preparing to open a major retrospective. Her forthcoming show at Dulwich Picture Gallery will see her large-scale, gloriously colourful abstractions hung alongside works from the museum's collection. It will be Jones's first institutional solo show in the UK, and also the museum's first solo show of a contemporary artist in its main exhibition space. 'The opportunity I have to look at everything as a whole is incredible,' she says. 'It's not often that you get to do that at such an early stage in your career. It's a real gift and privilege to look back at what I've done in the last six years or so.' After graduating from the Royal Academy Schools in 2019, Jones was picked up by Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, had a work acquired by the Tate, and was part of solo or group exhibitions at Chisenhale Gallery, the Hayward Gallery and the Hepworth Wakefield, as well as galleries and institutions around North America, Europe and Asia. In the past couple of years, though, she has slowed down. She is no longer represented by a gallery and has broadened her practice to include sound and performance as well as painting. 'It's good to learn those different ways of making and how they influence each other,' she says, telling me that sound practice has become more embedded in her day-to-day thinking. Her first big sound work, a short opera called Hey Maudie, was performed at St James's Piccadilly in 2023. She is now working on expanding it into a full-length opera. 'I also want to pour more energy into my karaoke performances,' she says, smiling. 'In my personal life, I love to sing karaoke whenever I can, but it's something I haven't been able to explore as much as I would like to in my work.' Jones's cosy studio in Ilford, east London, is stuffed with the accumulation of six years' work. 'Each series of paintings moves forward,' she says, 'but it's happening more drastically in the last year in ways that are quite surprising to me, but really exciting.' She frames such rapid change around learning: she is using colours she is less confident with to give herself a challenge, and pushing herself to be more comfortable using negative space in her paintings, where the canvas is left visible. She works on raw linen now, rather than cotton canvas, giving her works an earthier, organic texture and tone. 'Even if I don't fully understand what I'm doing, I know to trust my impulses,' she says. 'I can wrestle with the process more.' There is a sense of peeling back and then building from the ground up in Jones's attitude, and in the work itself. When young artists receive the kind of immediate acclaim and scrutiny that Jones did after art school, it can be hard to find the space to reflect. Jones has worked hard to cultivate that space, and her experience of quick fame has trained her to articulate her practice carefully. 'There's a huge desire for artists to embed their work in a narrative,' she says. 'I don't think that's as useful as people think it is.' As she tells me about the evolutions and experimentations in her latest work, for the Dulwich show and for a site-specific commission at the Courtauld Gallery opening in September, she talks almost entirely about formal elements, rather than storytelling: new ways she uses her medium of oil pastels or new intentions behind her mark-making, not her personal narrative. But there is also a bit of figuration in Jones's largely abstract practice. From the beginning of her career, she has worked with the motif of the mouth. Her earlier works, such as lick your teeth, they so clutch (2021), now in Tate's collection, are bright colour fields that use the outlines of teeth to frame form and colour. In the new work, the mouth has become a more defining form. 'There is a little bit more vulnerability in the way that I'm using the mouth as a symbol now,' Jones says. Using cartoons as her main visual references, Jones sees the mouths in her latest work as open, maybe yelling or laughing or screaming or crying. 'Those are quite extreme emotions,' she says, explaining the way mouths doing those things are usually attached to a body that is dysregulated or overwhelmed. Jones is so adept at describing her process and intention as an artist, but leaves the meaning of her work more open-ended. Each viewer will have their own response to the work: 'My way is just one way,' she says. 'So many people are intimidated by visual art. I want people to feel like the works invite them to speak.' Rachel Jones: Gated Canyons will be at Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, 10 June to 19 October; her commission for the Courtauld Gallery, London, opens on 25 September
Forbes
10-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
TEFAF New York Illuminates Art Week With Mastery Of Vivid, Radiant Color
Daniel Richter Angst, mein BROT, 2024 Oil on canvas 220 × 165 cm (86.61 × 64.96 in) A pair of anthropomorphic creatures embrace and appear ecstatic, one with round yellow lined eyes, the other seemingly squinting. Their entangled limbs float in a hot pink background, evoking a raucous frenzy. Daniel Richter's Angst, mein BROT (2024) draws viewers into a mosh pit of brazen colors and chaos, borrowing from the German artist's previous career designing posters and record sleeves for punk bands. Richter's monumental canvas elevates the fast tempos and raw, unpolished sound of punk music into complex compositions that pulsate with energy and emotion. The title, which literally translates into 'Fear, my BREAD' evokes absurdity and invites inquiry into the human, or post-human, condition. Alternative music fans will recall Richter's early artistic ethos from Sonic Youth's critically acclaimed, seminal 1988 album Daydream Nation using his1983 painting Kerze (Candle in English), and New Order's second studio album, Power, Corruption & Lies (1983), which was named after graffiti he spray painted on the exterior of the Kunsthalle during a 1981 exhibition. Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac of London, Paris, Salzburg, Milan, and Seoul is showcasing Richter's most recent series with a solo presentation at the 11th edition of TEFAF New York 2025, which is open to the public through May 13 at the Park Avenue Armory. A blockbuster opening for this year's U.S. engagement of the European Fine Art Foundation's preeminent global art fair was punctuated by explosive color across a wide array of art, a much needed boost amid geopolitical turmoil. Ninety-one leading dealers and galleries from 13 countries and four continents are celebrating Modern and Contemporary art, jewelry, antiquities and design, along with exclusive curated spaces in the Armory's 16 period rooms. As always, it's an art historical journey through the global art world, shining as the crown jewel amid a flurry of New York fairs. FEATURED | Frase ByForbes™ Unscramble The Anagram To Reveal The Phrase Pinpoint By Linkedin Guess The Category Queens By Linkedin Crown Each Region Crossclimb By Linkedin Unlock A Trivia Ladder 'It's been an extremely busy opening for this year, perhaps even more so than last year, and as we'd expect from TEFAF attendees, we're meeting with extremely sophisticated and informed collectors. Having a solo focus on Daniel Richter's new paintings has elicited a very positive response, reflected in collectors' swift decisions to buy. In the first couple of hours, we had sold most of the works on our booth,' said Thaddaeus Ropac. John Chamberlain (1927-2011) FRISKYOYSTER 1996 Painted and stainless steel 25.4x 26.7 x 26 cm (10 x ... More 10.5 x 10.25 in.) Collections From the estate of the artist New Yorkers and tourists may expect to encounter the work of John Chamberlain (1927-2011) at large scale, gazing up and walking aroun to admire FIDDLERSFORTUNE (Pink) (2010), BALMYWISECRACK (Copper) (2010), and RITZFROLIC (Green) on view at Center Plaza until May 29 as part of Chamberlain Goes Outdoors at Rockefeller Center. The renowned American sculptor was more accessible at a smaller scale with a formidable presence at TEFAF New York. The taut tangle of boldly painted stainless steel, FRISKYOYSTER (1996) at Thomas Gibson Fine Art, offered an infusion of nutrients for the soul in the form of humor. Inspired by Shelter Island, New York, where he lived and worked in his later years, Chamberlain fluidly whirled across Modern art, Abstract Expressionism, and Neo-Dada to evolve a singular style. Kehinde Wiley Portrait of Nelly Moudime and Najaee Hall, and Najaee Hall, 2020 Oil on linen 244 × ... More 183 cm — 96 × 72 in. unframed 271 × 212 × 9 cm — 106 3/4 × 83 1/2 × 3 4/7 in. framed Unique Contextualizing an art historical journey like no other living master, Kehinde Wiley traverses centuries of technique and references, culminating with the street culture that amplifies the everyday successes and struggles of Black people living today. Bursts of hot pink roses are woven into a colossal dual portrait, Portrait of Nelly Moudime and Najaee Hall (2020), where color amplifies the complicated narrative that borrows from and subverts classical portraiture with ornate backgrounds and historical poses that confront the systems of power and control presented with grandeur and excess. Hall in a plaid shirt and pants is seated in a demure pose, with overlapping hands plants on his knee, while Moudime, standing in a leopard-print jumpsuit exudes feminine power, both reclaiming their place in the art historical cannon. Wiley's elegant, elaborate floral background marries TEFAF's majestic fragrant arrangements woven into the fairs in Maastricht and New York. Discerning collectors and representatives from renowned institutions flooded the halls and booths during Thursday's dazzling preview, with attendance soaring more than 11% over last year. One-day entry costs $60 ($25 for students), or $80 for unlimited visits through Tuesday, a modest price for a magnificent experience to see masterpieces that may be on view for the first or last time. Fabulous floral arrangements greet discerning collectors and representatives of renowned ... More institutions to Thursday's preview of TEFAF New York at the Park Avenue Armory Besides the unsurprising demand for Richter, early standout sales include: Lee Bontecou's Untitled (1959) at Marc Selwyn Fine Art/Ortuzar for approximately $2 million The Hultmark Horus, a bronze antiquity sold by new exhibitor David Aaron for nearly $700,000 Multiple sales of Ruth Asawa's sculptures and drawings at David Zwirner, ranging up to $2.8 million Over 45 of George Condo's drawings at Gladstone Gallery
