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The Guardian
09-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘There's so much beauty': artists celebrate California in the wake of tragedy
The California artist Dashiell Manley had been at work for over a year on the paintings he was to exhibit at Marianne Boesky Gallery's elegant new show California Is Somewhere Else when fate intervened. In early January, he set the works to dry in his studio in Altadena – and two days later nearby Eaton Canyon was engulfed in flames, part of recent California wildfires. 'My sense of security was shattered around 11pm on January 7th,' Manley told me via video interview. 'I went in the studio and it was smoky, and all the paintings were wet.' That night, Manley's thoughts were more preoccupied with protecting his family and grabbing on to what precious mementoes he could take with him as he fled the fires. His studio was ultimately spared, but the paintings were not: smoke and other particles embedded into the still-wet surface, ruining the pieces. 'I don't know that I've processed that these 10 paintings that I've spent a year working on are gone,' he told me. 'They smell like a camp fire, and there's lead particles in the surface – I don't want to touch them. It's weird how they're gone but they're not.' In lieu of those works, Manley is showing a suite of vibrantly colorful, intricately layered oil pieces, in which he uses a palette knife to painstakingly carve innumerable overlapping objects resembling a folding fan into the paint. Using the back of his hand for a palette, Manley works quickly, layering up color upon color on to the linen canvass. 'I go back into them multiple times, it's a very additive and layered process,' he said. 'It's largely muscle memory and intuition at this point. I could duplicate the painting but I couldn't tell you how.' The resultant pieces have a structural quality reminiscent of the layered paintings of Jay DeFeo. There are many points for the eye to access them, pleasurably wandering around throughout the intricate networks of color and texture. 'I've always wanted to make work that has as many entry points to the viewer as possible,' Manley said. The colors comprising Manley's paintings are analogous to those that encompass the tones of a southern California sky from dawn to dusk: a range of blues, reds, oranges and yellows. Flecks of green are mixed in, along with veins and pops of black that provide structure and weight to the overall composition. 'I've been struck by beauty being a counterpoint to grief,' he said. 'Working on these paintings has become a kind of routine, in a good way. I noticed how meaningful that routine was for me after the Eaton fire, and how this is something I can never really stop doing.' The Haas Brothers' gorgeous, art nouveau Moon Towers sit comfortably alongside Dashiell Manley's paintings in the exhibition. Nikolai Haas and his twin brother, Simon, have always felt deeply influenced by the southern California landscape and way of life. Together, they create dreamy, tactile sculptures informed by a lifelong connection to the California way of being. 'It's just like, things come from nothing here,' Nikolai told me while musing on the feeling of being a Californian. 'There's something about the landscape and the vibe and the energy here. There's something about California being so geographically removed from rest of the US historically, it being so difficult to get here. It's its own kind of place.' The Moon Towers are inspired by actual streetlights that were a common part of cityscapes throughout the 1800s but that went into decline around the turn of the century. A few such streetlights still existed in Austin in the 1990s, where the Haas Brothers spent several youthful years. Once they returned to California, they brought memories of the towers with them and began working on their own takes on the structures. 'In the 90s, Austin was at the top of its alt moment,' Nikolai said. 'It was a very 90s, grunge stoner culture. For us the Moon Tower is the hero of that moment in our upbringing. Going back home, we wanted to make something that signified our creative growing up.' Simon added: 'If I could city plan Los Angeles, I'd do a lot of things, and one would be to install Moon Towers. They're so big that they light up whole neighborhoods, but the lighting is low-key, moonlike. We're trying to capture that feeling and pay homage to this different perspective. Moodwise we're leaning into this dreaminess, the safety and fantasy and sheer LA of it.' Inspired by snowbells, the pieces rise up in lithe, sinuous columns of jade green, then droop over at the top, where a lightbulb is inserted, casting a carefully chosen hue. Some of them rise up to almost 9ft in height, while others would fit comfortably on to an end table. The brothers worked carefully to find just the right temperature of lightbulb to give their sculptures a transportive glow for any who stand within their light. 'We want to create an experience,' said Nikolai. 'Something to take someone a little out of their reality.' The show is rounded out by Anthony Pearson's minimalist sculpture, whose seeming simplicity belies an exacting technique that leaves the surfaces of his pieces covered in networks of densely worked texture. These are deeply meditative works that draw in a viewer's eye with their beguiling plays of light, and that reward careful, lengthy examination. As Taney Roniger put it in The Brooklyn Rail: 'the strongest unifying thread here is the sense of mystery and wonder that these works exude … [T]hese pieces encourage a shift away from discursive reason toward deeper, more intuitive reflection, and the effect is a rich contemplative experience.' What makes California Is Somewhere Else such a remarkable success is how its works so effortlessly showcase the sublimity that lives in California – both in its landscape and its cityscape – and that is a key ingredient in the psyche of the Golden state. A place of excesses and enormities, it nonetheless inspires a sense of safety and familiarity that gives rise to fantastic flights of artistic fancy. As Manley put it: 'When I feel like I'm out of my body, I go to the mountains, I have this hike with these giant rocks. I lay on these rocks, and everything that is so monumentally large in those moments becomes small. I feel small, everything becomes small. There's so much beauty in this experience.' California Is Somewhere Else is now on show at the Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York until 19 April
New York Times
03-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
TEFAF Maastricht, a Fair Known for Old Masters, Courts Young Collectors
In the art world, getting younger people to look at very old paintings and sculptures has proved challenging. How can a delicate Renaissance sculpture compete with the immediacy of artists posting on Instagram about work they're doing right now? The art fair put on by the European Fine Art Foundation in Maastricht, the Netherlands, has taken some concrete steps to attract younger collectors. The latest edition of the fair will run March 15-20 at the Maastricht Exhibition and Conference Center with 273 dealers on hand. Although the fair is always chockablock with old masters and other artworks made before the 20th century, it has increased the presence of modern and contemporary work over the years — if you can't beat 'em, join 'em — which now comprises around 30 percent of the offerings. 'Because of our participation, and a few other contemporary art dealers, we see more younger collectors at TEFAF every year,' said Nathalie Obadia, a Paris dealer who is showing at the fair for the fourth time. She added that the younger cohort is especially noticeable on the weekend, since those collectors are more likely to have full-time jobs. The booth of her namesake gallery, Galerie Nathalie Obadia, which also has a branch in Brussels, will feature 'Le Dernier Dimanche' ('Last Sunday') (2024), an oil by the French-born painter Johanna Mirabel, and 'The Red, the White and the Blue' (1964), an oil by the American abstract artist Shirley Jaffe, among around 30 works by eight artists. Obadia said that it was precisely the eclectic, centuries-spanning art offered in Maastricht that worked for her, and for younger clients. 'Collectors are really curious to know contemporary art better, and in a way, Art Basel is too specialized,' she said. 'The mix at TEFAF is a great introduction.' It is also a reassuring context for buyers of any age to branch out, Obadia said. A couple of years ago at Maastricht, she noted, an old master collector who does not frequent contemporary art fairs stopped by her booth and ended up buying a sculpture by Wang Keping, a Chinese-born artist who now works in Paris. Other contemporary specialists at this year's fair include Marianne Boesky Gallery of New York and Galerie Lelong & Co., which has headquarters in Paris and a branch in New York. Both are among the 37 first-time exhibitors. As part of the push toward involving younger patrons, fair organizers are emphasizing the pleasures of multigenerational collecting in families with a panel discussion on March 14 featuring Ilone and George Kremer, collectors of Dutch and Flemish old masters, and their son Joël Kremer, who has helped them create a virtual reality museum that allows others to experience their trove of treasures. 'Recently, we launched a web version of the museum on our website, allowing visitors without a VR headset to explore the collection,' Joël Kremer said in an email. 'In addition, we've opened a new virtual gallery space, where we are currently showcasing the 24 works acquired since the museum's launch in 2017.' Another digital innovation had a test run at last year's Maastricht fair and at last year's New York edition of TEFAF, which takes place in May. A select few collectors were offered a special guide to the fair, the Insider's Guide to Collecting — a 'secret map,' said Hidde van Seggelen, chairman of TEFAF's executive committee. Getting access to the digital map — part of TEFAF's Emerging Collector Program, its effort to develop younger buyers — is by invitation only, and galleries decide who can have one. 'The dealers can invite their young clients,' said van Seggelen, who is a contemporary art dealer in Hamburg, Germany. 'They can explore the fair with something that has been curated with them in mind.' The highlights for the new map were curated by the American decorator Remy Renzullo. Van Seggelen added that the selected works were 'at a slightly lower price point' than the most blue-chip pieces, to get across the point of accessibility. Asked what some of the highlights were, van Seggelen kept mum — the first rule of the secret map is, apparently: Don't talk too much about the secret map. One dealer of old master paintings, Patrick Williams of Adam Williams Fine Art in New York, said that he was seeing lots of interest from younger collectors even without a special map. 'TEFAF absolutely has more young and interested people attending, especially New Yorkers,' said Williams, 36, the son of the gallery's founder. 'We're seeing more action from people under 45 since the pandemic,' he added. The gallery has shown in Maastricht for the better part of 30 years, and this year will show around 20 works. In his experience, the subject of an old master painting makes a difference for younger buyers. He said that religious scenes did not sell as well. 'Part of the job is to find more secular imagery,' Williams said. 'Blood, sex and mythology are the themes that are working.' A measure of sex, or at least of flesh, is found in one of the works Williams is bringing, 'Diana and Actaeon' (circa 1615) by the Flemish painter Jacob Jordaens, which depicts a scene of Roman mythology from Ovid's 'Metamorphoses.' In the story, Diana, goddess of the hunt, and her nymphs are caught bathing in the forest by the mortal hunter Actaeon. Flustered, she splashes water on him and he is turned into a stag. Later, he is preyed upon by his own hounds and killed. Williams is also bringing 'Portrait of Johan Claesz Loo' (1650) by Frans Hals, among the best-known painters of the Dutch Golden Age, and 'Portrait of a Young Man' (1775) by Élisabeth Vigée le Brun, one of the handful women painters from her era to have made it into the historical art canon. Adam Williams Fine Art has been showing at TEFAF for decades, but a gallery of even longer standing is Vanderven Oriental Art, a specialist in Chinese works of art in 's-Hertogenbosch, the Netherlands. Vanderven was among the founding galleries of the fair, which held its first edition in 1988. Floris van der Ven, the gallery's director, emphasized how far ahead he worked on fair presentation — he said that he already had some material lined up for the 2026 edition of TEFAF Maastricht. This time, his booth includes a roughly four-foot-tall bodhisattva figure in limestone made during the Northern Qi dynasty some 1,500 years ago. 'It's especially rare in this size,' van der Ven said in a phone call during a visit to New York; he was about to look at some similar works at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Van der Ven noted that last year, he sold a comparable piece, also from the Northern Qi dynasty. 'It went to a Chinese collector for roughly $800,000,' he said. 'There are not that many Chinese buyers who come to Maastricht, but those who come are highly serious.' The London gallery Rolleston, which specializes in English furniture and Asian works of art, particularly from China and Japan, may offer traditional art, but at least one of its works may strike a chord with young newlyweds: an elaborately decorated gilt-copper and lacquer norimono made around 1857 in Japan's Edo period. A norimono, sometimes known as a palanquin, is a boxlike enclosed chair in which a bride would be carried to the groom's family home after a wedding. Lifting this norimono, with its 15-foot-long carrying beam, requires several attendants. And its interior has its original wallpaper, according to James Rolleston, the gallery's director. Rolleston said that the gallery found the piece at a London auction. 'It wasn't well cared for,' he said. 'This is where one's skills as a dealer come in. We cleaned it up and conserved it.' Rolleston was founded in 1955 but this is the first year it has participated in TEFAF Maastricht. Among its other offerings are a pair of George I needlework-covered armchairs (circa 1720) known as the Wanstead House Chairs. Rolleston said that the chairs were from an original set of 12 and that they had an 'unbroken provenance,' meaning that there was complete documentation of previous ownership — always a major plus, and sometimes difficult to find with older works. But the norimono may get a large share of visitor attention just for its size. 'It literally doesn't fit in our gallery,' Rolleston said, adding that before the fair, it was sitting in storage. It seemed to be an unlikely candidate for a spontaneous purchase for a private collector. 'I can't imagine whose house it would fit into,' Rolleston said. 'It's the size of my first flat.' Its dimensions may restrict possible buyers, but you never know. 'We're earmarking this for a museum,' he said. 'But we don't rule out a collector buying it.'
The Guardian
05-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Configurations in Black: a stateless Rwandan refugee makes art out of his experience
Artist Serge Alain Nitegeka became a refugee of the Rwandan genocide in 1994 at age 11, when he began a years-long odyssey through multiple African nations, eventually arriving in South Africa, where he remains to this day. During his years in transit, Nitegeka began to create art – first while attending high school in Kenya, where he learned to 'make do', as he put it, a theme the rings throughout his artistic output, and then later though higher education in South Africa. Nitegeka engages singularly with the genocide, using almost completely abstract, minimalistic means to do so. His paintings and sculptures are dominated by just a few colors – he started with just black, white and red, eventually adding others such as blue, teal, green and gold. These hues are poured into mostly textureless, abstract shapes, making for art that can come across as quite flinty yet also fluid and even dreamlike. They are works that are hard to pin down. Audiences can now linger over these fascinating pieces at Marianne Boesky Gallery, which hosts Configurations in Black, showcasing Nitegeka's latest visual evolution. The fifth exhibition in the gallery's decade-plus relationship with the artist, it is a show that rewards patience and repeat viewings. Through Nitegeka's many years of traveling among nations – as well as in his years-long wait to attain valid citizenship in South Africa – he has learned to work with what is at hand, an ethos that has very much seeped into his art. 'When I first studied art in Kenya,' he told me, 'it wasn't a well-off school, so we had to make do. That point of making do has been a part of my work, going through university and beyond. It's a theme, I kind of make do.' This can be seen in the shipping containers that Nitegeka frequently paint his pieces on, as these were one of the few objects in ready supply to the artist. (Audiences can frequently see the word 'Fragile' as stamped on the crates in certain pieces.) Likewise, he has learned to make do by staging exhibitions from afar, as his legal status in South Africa makes it largely impossible for him to attend his own shows. As Nitegeka started to make art about the genocide in Rwanda, he found himself working with abstraction almost as a self-protective gesture. 'It was comfortable, something I could control,' he told me. 'Control was something I kept coming back to, I wanted to say a lot with so little. I didn't want to use things that people could outwardly connect to and say: 'Oh, this is a story about this and this.' I wanted to create something that could stand on its own and didn't need the artist.' Throughout his years of producing art, Nitegeka has proven himself to be methodical and deliberate in how he advances his style. Starting out working with just black, white and red, over the course of years he slowly added to his palette, color by color. He recalled that the birth of his daughter was a watershed moment that urged him to greatly expand his color choices: 'I felt an affinity to get more colors in my work,' he said, 'and I went to a hardware shop and looked at what colors I could get. I had them for a long time but never felt comfortable or ready to use them until my daughter was born.' In the studio, he will sit and stare into his pieces, in conversation with them, carefully trying to discern what color and shape he should apply next. 'I'm making decisions based on how things are looking on the surface,' he told me. 'There's no reference material. I'm just working with the colors, how they sit on the surface. Slowly, what is happening, the surface is revealing itself to me.' Earlier work of Nitegeka's greatly involved the gallery space itself. He would place enormous networks of long, black pieces of wood that he would build up into intricate obstacle-course-like constructs that audiences navigated through while viewing his art. For a previous show at Marianne Boesky, titled Black Migrant, the artist used soil, firewood and objects to create a large installation dominating the center of the gallery space. By contrast, Configurations in Black is much more straightforward, limiting itself to Nitegeka's paintings and sculptures. Largely gone from the paintings themselves are the long, black lines that typified much of his art – these pieces rely much more on blobs of color and sinuous human forms. As to the latter, audiences will see human figures, mostly in two-dimensional black, taking on a variety of poses, including standing straight up, reaching, bending, squatting, reaching, possibly even dancing. Some of them, depicted in brown with more texture and dimension, seem huddled together toward some purpose, their bodies partially hidden by other forms. These figures give the art at times a Kafkaesque feel, these bodies seeming as though they are lost in a maze or shuffling through the gears of a gigantic machine. On one level, the figures are representative of the journey made by those forced to flee war and repression, the paintings offering a sense of the confusion and ordeal of the journey away from danger. From a more purely aesthetic standpoint, they tend to draw the eye toward nodes scattered across the art works, creating a feeling of busyness and motion that does not exist in the purely abstract pieces in this show. As much as he has become a celebrated artist, Nitegeka remains stuck in a bureaucratic purgatory, still not legally a citizen of South Africa and so largely unable to travel outside of the country. (He did manage to make it out for a New York City residency in 2015, where he got 'a temperature of the streets' in the Big Apple.) The prospect of yet another exhibition that he cannot be at is one that he is, at least for now, resigned to and prepared for. 'At the end of the day the show must go on regardless,' he said. 'But it's not going to be like this forever. It's just a kind of phase I'm going through.' Serge Alain Nitegeka: Configurations in Black is on display at Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York until 8 March
