No matter how steady I held my camera, the lights inside Alexandra Pacula’s paintings just wouldn’t hold still. They’re now part of an exhibition at Gallery Henoch on New York City’s West Side, arranged alongside the abstracted figurative works of Gary Ruddell. The two create a balance between people andlandscapes, rural and urban.
Alexandra gives us the urban landscapes – dynamic shots of New York City that set a dizzying scene in motion – the paint wet like the city and the lights of buildings and cars streaming like we’re racing across the sky. The multicolored lights are a manmade rainbow in the dark – a testament to advancements in technology and architecture.
Online art is an interesting concept, especially since that means it can be accessed anywhere by anyone with an internet connection. I’m not talking about pictures of sculptures and paintings posted online, but art with “website” as its medium – the art of coding that manifests in a webpage with a simple interactive function. Andrey Yazev has been making website art for a while now, using JavaScript and GUI like scroll bars, check boxes and tables to create interesting, beautiful visuals that visitors can interact with.
Almost everything we do is done with our hands. We type, eat, lift and hold with a palm surrounded by four dextrous fingers and a very useful thumb. Hands mean action – when they’re at work, so are we. Here, artists show us hands detached from the bodies they belong to so that we see them as our hands, our mother’s and our brother’s hands. Things as basic as body parts bring us together, show us what we have in common. These artworks give our hands imagined abilities we’d never have considered, letting us for a moment feel attentive, skilled, connected, trapped and powerful all at once.
The 16th century German philosopher Immanuel Kant said, “The hand is the visible part of the brain.” These paintings and drawings and photographs let us see the outcome of what’s within.
[zl_mate_code name=”Orange Dynamic” label=”3″ count=”1″ who=”div” text=”In a world of swirling brushstrokes, a single hand reaches down with fingers curled.
The hand carefully scratches a blue line against the orange, spreading its soft color deeper into a fire of orange and red.”]
[zl_mate_code name=”Pink Dynamic” label=”1″ count=”1″ who=”div” text=”In a photograph printed on elastic strings, two pairs of hands reach a cross the distance, grabbing wrists and doubling the bond by pulling gently, elegantly forward with the other hand. “]
[zl_mate_code name=”Blue Dynamic” label=”2″ count=”1″ who=”div” text=”This hand extends from the bottom in the same way, but it’s joined by a scratchy vine of black and grey that surrounds it and the pencil it holds.
Does the creepy vine carry the words for the pencil to write or prohibit them?”]
[zl_mate_code name=”Green Dynamic” label=”4″ count=”1″ who=”div” text=”A hand breaks through a wall, dramatically pulling itself through the hole it made.
The wall drips black and the hand is hunched forward like it’s on the prowl for more wall to break.”]
Graphic designer Saul Bass would have been 93 today. The pioneering artist brought design aesthetics to film, designing the title sequences of legendary movies like Vertigo and West Side Story. He created a style that still sticks in our brains decades later.
He worked with Alfred Hitchcock, Billy Wilder, Stanley Kubrick and Martin Scorsese, and for more than 40 years he brought his one-of-a-kind aesthetic to the big screen. The graphics in Catch Me if You Can and Mad Men pay homage to his style and innovation.
The Morgan Library and Museum in New York is transitioning two of their main galleries right now, so if you visit before May 10th, the only temporary installation you’ll find is the second floor room currently holding Degas, Miss La La, and the Cirque Fernando.
The entire exhibit is based on a single painting hung in the center of the back wall: Degas’ “Miss La La at the Cirque Fernando” painted in oil in 1879, and the only work Degas ever painted with a circus subject. As you walk clockwise around the room, you’re first greeted with the pastel and oil studies completed in preparation for the final work, but after you pass the painting, you find Henry Gabriel Ibels’ lithographs of circus rings from the 1860s, followed by late nineteenth century circus posters – two of which feature Miss La La.
Miss La La was an aerialist traveling with the Troupe Kaira who performed for Degas during their appearance at the Cirque Fernando in Paris from December 1878 to February of the following year. In the painting she’s performing one of her signature acts: gripping a rope with her teeth and flying through the air.
Books lay open under glass in the gallery’s center – a novel about the circus that a friend of Degas wrote around the same time and glossaries of infamous circus performers and tricks of the trade. The exhibit ends with a far-reaching connection to Renaissance representations of the angels in ceiling paintings, calling Miss La La a “secular angel” because her occupation also involves people craning their necks to see her. The four brown wash drawings by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo completed centuries before the rest of the exhibit’s work seemed like too obvious a filler, especially for an institution whose holdings lie predominantly in drawings.
As you leave the exhibit it hits you that the whole thing only takes up half of the room because its entrance is blocked off by large introductory walls. It’s difficult to curate an entire show around a singular work, especially when it’s the only one where the artist worked that subject matter. Seeing the different studies that led up to the final piece is definitely the highlight, but it could have been rounded out with paintings and studies from other artists who painted more circus scenes, even though their names might not have the booming resonance of da Vinci or Degas.
From left, The Trustees of the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham; Tate, London/Art Resource, New York; National Gallery, London/Art Resource, New York. via NYTimes.
Collection Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, Museum Miss La La around 1880. via NYTimes.
Degas’ “Miss La La at the Cirque Fernando” via Wikipaintings.
