Parallel
Occurrences

Bernd Lohaus 1940–2010

“For the last twenty-one years, I have been working on a self portrait in the form of a building. The building is fiction, but everything inside exists in reality. The building is like a gigantic stage set frozen in time with lots of rooms that all seem as if they have just been abandoned. There is no distinction between works of, let’s say, fifteen years ago and a work I finished yesterday. They are placed in the same time frame. "



-Mark Manders

Parallel
Occurrences


1. Bernd Lohaus (1940–2010) The German artist Bernd Lohaus passed away on November 4 in Antwerp. Lohaus studied at the Dusseldorf Art Academy with Joseph Beuys from 1963 to 1966. From 1964-65 he edited the magazine Happening News with Panamarenko, Hugo Heyman, and Wout Vercammen. While traveling in Spain in 1965, he met the art historian Anny de Decker. They married in 1966 and moved to Antwerp, where they created the gallery Wide White Space in the back of their house.


2. Mark Manders, at Hammer Museuml, Los Angeles now., Parallel Occurrences/Documented Assignments













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Sylvia Sleigh
1916- 2010

I wanted to give my perspective; portraying both sexes with dignity and humanism.
I don’t mind the ‘desire’ part, it’s the ‘object’ that’s not very nice.”

- Sylvia Sleigh
(repost from here.)

"Sylvia Sleigh, a British-born artist who put a feminist spin on the portrait genre by painting male nudes in poses that recalled the female subjects of Ingres, Velázquez and Titian,
died on Sunday at her home in Manhattan. She was 94. "

via here, and here...

"Sylvia Sleigh, 89, is best known for her valiant effort in the 1970's to institute a new genre of feminist painting by changing the gender of the traditional odalisque. Whether because of her limitations as a painter or some deeper sociocultural resistance, the idea never took hold.

Today her flatfootedly realist pictures of young, beautiful, extravagantly long-haired nude men in states of voluptuous relaxation remain fascinating artifacts of their time. Like other things about the 70's, they are embarrassing, unintentionally comical and oddly creepy, yet they remain somehow touching in their quixotic ambition to establish a new humanely erotic tradition for the heterosexual female gaze."









taken from NYT here..



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Nicolas Carone,
1917-2010

"One of the last surviving Abstract Expressionist painters,
died on July 15 at his home in Hudson, N.Y."
















"Mr. Carone was present at the beginning of the New York School and friends with Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko and Lee Krasner. But his best work may have come long after the style faded, in the large paintings in shades of black, white and gray that he made during the last two or three decades of his life. The shifting lines and layered brushwork of these works most completely integrated the classical figurative tradition he absorbed during his earliest art studies and the instinctive painting processes of Abstract Expressionism.



Mr. Carone was born in June 4, 1917, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, the eldest of seven children of Italian immigrants. He grew up in Hoboken, N.J., where his father was a bartender, and began drawing at age 4. When he was around 11, his mother sent him to the Leonardo da Vinci Art School on East 10th Street in Manhattan, which offered instruction for a small tuition. "




read Roberta Smith's NYT article here..







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Sigmar Polke
1941-2010

Sigmar Polke,
via NYTIMES



Sigmar Polke, an artist of infinite, often ravishing pictorial jest, whose sarcastic and vibrant layering of found images and maverick, chaos-provoking painting processes left an indelible mark on the last four decades of contemporary painting, died yesterday in Cologne, Germany. He was 69; the cause was complications of cancer, according to Gordon Veneklasen, a partner at the Michael Werner Gallery New York, the artist’s chief American representative.

"Sigmar Polke is an artist whose work defies easy definitions. He is one of the most significant painters of the post-war generation, yet his career has by no means been confined to painting. Since the early 1960s Polke has experimented with a wide range of styles and subject matter, bringing together imagery from contradictory or unexpected sources, both historical and contemporary, and using a variety of different materials and techniques. In fact Polke’s artistic diversity, and his resistance to any form of categorisation, has been seen as the only consistent theme in his work."

via the tate
modern....






--------------

Louise Bourgeois, 98. R. I. P.

You have to have the courage to take risks.
You have to have independence.
All these things are gifts.
They are blessings.

-Louise Bourgeois

Louise Bourgeois:
She taught me to look into the dark. To not fear the dark side.
To rejoice in emotion, and trust in my own intuition.
That sculpture and art can free us of our demons,
and point us to our path.

A sad day to hear about her passing....

"I only work when I feel the need to express something.
I may not be sure of exactly what it is,
but I know that something is cooking and when I am on the right track.
The need is very strong.
To express your emotions, you have to be very loose and receptive.
The unconscious will come to you, if you have that gift that artists have.
I only know if I'm inspired by the results."


Louise Bourgeois

Louise Bourgeois, the French-born American artist who gained fame only late in a long career, when her psychologically charged abstract sculptures, drawings and prints had a galvanizing effect on younger artists, particularly women,
died on Monday at the Beth Israel Medical Center in Manhattan.

She was 98.

NY Times...

Art is a privilege, a blessing, a relief.
Privilege means that you are a favorite, that what you do is not completely to your credit, not completely due to you, but is a favor conferred upon you.



Privilege entitles you when you deserve nothing. Privilege is something you have and others don’t. Art was a privilege given to me, and I had to pursue it, even more than the privilege of having children.

The whole art mechanism is the result of many privileges, and it was a privilege to be part of it…The privilege was the access to the unconscious. It is a fantastic privilege to have access to the unconscious. I had to be worthy of this privilege, and to exercise it. It was a privilege also to be able to sublimate. A lot of people cannot sublimate. They have no access to their unconscious.

There is something very special in being able to sublimate your unconscious, and something very painful in the access to it.....







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"With hints of amber sundowns and muted thunderstorms
A sunken barge's horns with the cold rusty bells ."










"May your shade be sweet
And float upon the lakes
Where the sun will be
Made of honey

May your shade be sweet
And float upon the lakes
Where the sun will be
Made of honey"

lyrics, by Mark, of Sparklehorse.
rest in peace.
your music brings lightness to many,
and gave me hope on many dark days.
you will be missed.

















.











.

J.D. Salinger, 1919-2010

-


"Don't ever tell anybody anything.
If you do, you start missing everybody."
the catcher in the rye, last lines.

“There is a marvelous peace in not publishing. It’s peaceful. Still. Publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy. I like to write. I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure.”

J.D. Salinger, 1974

"In 1953 Mr. Salinger, who had been living on East 57th Street in Manhattan, fled the literary world altogether and moved to a 90-acre compound on a wooded hillside in Cornish, N.H. He seemed to be fulfilling Holden’s desire to build himself “a little cabin somewhere with the dough I made and live there for the rest of my life,” away from “any goddam stupid conversation with anybody.”

"A series of fourteen letters written by J.D. Salinger

the reclusive author of "Catcher in the Rye," to the 18-year-old Joyce Maynard

were sold at Sotheby's New York Fine Books

nd Manuscripts auction in New York in 1999. Salinger died Thursday at the age of 91."

"Mr. Salinger’s privacy was further punctured in 1998 and again in 2000 with the publication of memoirs by, first, Joyce Maynard — with whom he had a 10-month affair in 1973, when Ms. Maynard was a college freshman — and then his daughter, Margaret. Some critics complained that both women were trying to exploit and profit from their history with Mr. Salinger, and Mr. Salinger’s son, Matthew, wrote in a letter to The New York Observer that his sister had “a troubled mind” and that he didn’t recognize the man portrayed in her account. But both books nevertheless added a creepy, Howard Hughesish element to the Salinger legend.

Mr. Salinger was controlling and sexually manipulative, Ms. Maynard wrote, and a health nut obsessed with homeopathic medicine and with his diet (frozen peas for breakfast, undercooked lamb burger for dinner). Ms. Salinger said that her father was pathologically self-centered and abusive toward her mother, and to the homeopathy and food fads she added a long list of other exotic enthusiasms: Zen Buddhism, Vedanta Hinduism, Christian Science, Scientology and acupuncture. Mr. Salinger drank his own urine, she wrote, and sat for hours in an orgone box."

all text taken from NY Times article, here, by Charles McGrath

"Its power lies in its use of color."


"He was one of the great colorists of the 20th century"

cadmium radiance 1963

kenneth noland...






from ny times article,
by william grimes.

"With the rise of Pop Art, Minimalism and postmodernism Mr. Noland’s work, with its formalist rigor, fell out of critical favor. “Starting in the 1970s, there was a terrific reaction against Color Field painting and abstract art in general, which was in turn a rejection of Clement Greenberg,” said the art historian and critic Michael Fried, who organized the exhibition “Three American Painters: Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Frank Stella” at the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard in 1965. “He remains a great painter.”

Mr. Noland continued to pursue his high modernist program, undeterred and confident about the future of abstract art. “It’s a fertile field that we barely have explored, and young artists will return to it,” he said at a symposium in 1994. “I’m certain.”

Jeanne-Claude, 74, American artist and resident of New York City, died suddenly November 18, 2009 as a result of of complications due to a ruptured brain aneurysm.

Christo is deeply saddened by the passing of his wife, partner and collaborator and is committed to honor the promise they made to each other many years ago: The art of Christo and Jeanne-Claude will continue.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude met in Paris, France in November, 1958, sharing the same date of birth and have worked together for 51 years creating temporary works of art.

go here for more info...

their first outdoor environmental work, 1961...

CHRISTO AND JEANNE-CLAUDE DOCKSIDE PACKAGES, COLOGNE HARBOR, 1961 At the same time as Christo‚s first personal exhibition, at the Haro Lauhus Gallery, in Cologne in 1961, Christo and Jeanne-Claude created their first temporary outdoor environmental work of art. The gallery was near the waterfront of the Rhine River. For the Dockside Packages the artists used several stacks of oil barrels and large rolls of industrial paper covering them with tarpaulins which they secured with ropes. With the permission from the Port Authority all the materials were borrowed from the dockworkers. Dockside Packages was composed of separate parts of various sizes, each approximately 5 x 2 x 10 meters (16.4 x 6.5 x 32.8 feet). The temporary work of art remained for two weeks.



see the work here.