10 Must-See Painting Shows In The US:
Summer Heat Edition
Posted: 7/18/11 01:31 AM ET
Steven Zevitas, Publisher, New American Paintings
Painting, Alfred Jensen, Andrew Masullo, Chris Dorland, Chris Johanson, Jaqueline Cedar, John Sonsini, Katherine Bernhardt, Leidy Churchman, Lesley Vance, Merlin James, New American Paintings, Nicole Eisenman, Slidepollajax, Arts News
The summer months are traditionally a slow period for commercial galleries, as collectors abandon large cities and migrate to vacation destinations around the country. With this in mind, galleries are bit more willing to experiment with their programming. And so, July and August have become a popular time to mount group exhibitions. In some cases these shows are little more than a chance to bring languishing inventory out of the back room, but, fortunately, many galleries mount serious thematic exhibitions that are well worth a visit.
IN THE STUDIO: JAQUELINE CEDAR
December 10, 2010, 1:00 pm
Way down in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, in a studio building a stone's throw from the water's edge of Gowanus Bay, Jaqueline Cedar is pushing pink paint around on a canvas. Included in edition #73 of New American Paintings, Cedar teaches painting at Columbia and works in the education department of the Guggenheim, but her most important role is working as an artist. And her recent work is pretty exciting.
Fascinated by Arshile Gorky and Orphic Cubism, Cedar's work pushes and pulls figures back and forth between rich geometric backdrops of abstraction, constantly toying with figuration, color, form, and space. She often works on several paintings at a time, and Cedar isn't afraid of constantly moving around. She lives in Little Italy, works uptown, and commutes to her studio not far from the tail end of the N train in Brooklyn. I stopped by for a studio visit this week. More photos after the jump. - Evan J. Garza
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Jaqueline Cedar & Kyoung Eun Kang
Downlaod press release as a PDF.
A.M. Richard Fine Arts
(5/8 – 6/13, 2010)
328 Berry Street, Brooklyn NY 11212
Review by Robert Egert
It’s unusual and refreshing to see ambitious, large-scale paintings today, especially from an artist just starting her career. Jaqueline Cedar’s new paintings manifest an admirable attempt to synthesize and reinvigorate figurative abstraction and to reconnect with themes and formal issues that have mostly been retired into art history books.
Citing Paul Klee and Orphism (If like me, you need a refresher, Orphism was an art movement of the early twentieth century that focused on bright, colorful abstraction in a shallow, lenticular space), Cedar uses the figure as a starting point for a fragmented environment filled with light, color and movement. Cedar’s paintings are reliant upon large scale for the optical effects that happen when the viewers’ field of vision is practically filled with the canvas.
Unlike the Orphists however, Cedar never relinquishes her hold on the figures. While they become visually fragmented and non-specific, gestures and placement take a dominant role. These compositions suggest narratives that are not so much about real world events but rather theoretical or symbolic in nature. For example, they may refer metaphorically to stages of psychosocial development that occur over a decade in a child’s life. Alternatively they may stand for stages of emotional evolution that occur through ritual or life-altering events. In fact, the painterly treatment of the figures is so non-specific (feet disappear, facial features are merely suggested) that we are forced to understand the figures as representations of concepts.
While Cedar still has many career chapters ahead, her paintings are admirable for their ambition, color handling and seemingly effortless integration of esoteric themes. In an interview accompanying the exhibition, Cedar states that she intends on developing much smaller scale paintings. It will be interesting to see how her work morphs as the smaller scale will likely require an entirely different formal approach.
C L I F F O R D
C H A N C E
For the nineteenth exhibition in the Projects at Clifford Chance series, we are pleased to present a show of new figurative paintings, Forms of Figuration.
Dinaburg Arts LLC
Curator, Clifford Chance US LLP
31 West 52nd Street
New York, NY 10019
forms of figuration
jaqueline cedar / amy
pleasant / casey ruble /
bettina sellmann
1/22/08 – 3/31/08
The potential of figurative painting for intimacy and narrative emphasis, as well as thematic exploration is brought to bear in the paintings of Jaqueline Cedar. Pairing a figurative style with self-generated imagery and formal composition appropriated from her photographic practice, Cedar’s paintings combine painterly gestures with articulated surfaces, oblique perspective shifts with flatness–the scenes wavering between depiction, memory, and fantasy.
João Ribas is an art critic, curator, and editor based in New York.