Twilight Before Dawn: Anna Zemánková

Twilight Before Dawn:  Anna Zemánková
January 7 – February 13, 2016
Opening reception: Thursday, January 7, 6-8pm

We are pleased to present Twilight Before Dawn: Anna Zemánková, an exhibition that illuminates a rarely seen aspect of her work from the Zemánková family’s personal collection.  They have kindly agreed to release these for this show for a limited amount of time.

Czech artist Anna Zemánková (1908 – 1986) is one of the great artists of the 20th century and is seen as one of the great female artists in the Art Brut pantheon, along with Jeanne Tripier, Madge Gill, Aloise Corbaz, and Emma Kuntz.  Her works were prominently displayed in The Encyclopedic Palace at the 2013 Venice biennale curated by Massimiliano Gioni, at Frieze Masters that same year, and in many other important museum exhibitions.  Her work is in the public collections of the Milwaukee Art Museum, WI; American Folk Art Museum, New York, NY; Museum of International Folk Art, Santa Fe, NM; Collection de l’art Brut, Lausanne, Switzerland; Arnulf Rainer Museum, Baden, Austria; and private collections including abcd collection, Paris, and The Museum of Everything, London, as well as other important private collections of contemporary art.  Cavin-Morris Gallery has been representing her work worldwide since 1992.

Her granddaughter, Terezie Zemánková wrote

Her obsession with details overruled her entirely after some time.  The tiny ornaments began to occupy more and more space.  Perhaps she found in the automatic repetition of the complex ornaments the peace she was longing for.  In this time, when she mastered the technique of drawing so well that she reached the ability to perfectly express the intended image and was able to carry it as far as the frontier of the yearned for perfection, she created a series of minute drawings, which resemble images created by some spiritualist psychics.  This similarity is slightly apparent in all phases of Zemánková’s creations.  In spite of the fact that she wasn’t inclined to the practices of spiritualism, she talked about a force that “led her”, when she--her mind in a creative trance--sat at her drawing table at dawn.

In the late sixties and thereafter Zemánková began to introduce other materials to her works in order to stretch the parameters.  She crocheted fantastically intricate textiles and satin strips into the drawings, conscious always of their otherworldly interplay between oceanic and terrestrial forms.  She was constantly reinventing Nature’s most sensual aspects.

We are proud to expose this masterful work to the American audience for the first time.

For further information please contact Cavin-Morris Gallery at info@cavinmorris.com, or phone: 212-226-3768.

Online catalog for Tantra, Anonymous, and Vyakul now available

Click here to view catalog:

Tantra, Anonymous, and Vyakul (December 3, 2015 - January 2, 2016)

TANTRA, ANONYMOUS, AND VYAKUL

DECEMBER 3, 2015 - JANUARY 2, 2016

Cavin-Morris is pleased to present an exhibition of tantric and tantrically influenced art works from India ranging from the sacred to the irreverent.

This exhibition presents the Tantra paintings of Acharya Vyakul (1930 – 2000, Jaipur and Rajasthan, India), several anonymous artists, and some contemporary miniaturists who wish to remain anonymous. 

The creator of the small Yantra, or mystical diagrams was also trained as a copyist of traditional Indian miniatures.  The artist chooses to remain anonymous in the spiritual act of making the paintings.  The materials used include vintage paper, and hand-ground colors including minerals, mother-of-pearl, coral, tree resin mixed with metals, and vegetal pastes. These small paintings come from a tradition in Tantric Hinduism, which began in the fifth or sixth century C.E.  After painting one, a devotee is to meditate on an image in order to manifest the divinity.  It is a practice that involves a separation from one’s ego. In Sanskrit tantra means “loom” or “weave,” but also “treatise.” The hand-written Tantra treatises date back at least to the seventeenth century, as do the paintings.  The Tantra treatises and paintings have been copied over many generations. The accompanying symbolic paintings evolved with the treatises.  Now many of them have been separated from the original treatises.

The Tantric philosophy does not separate spiritual, ascetic practices from the mundane experiences of daily life. A Tantrika, or practitioner of Tantra, is not expected to live a hermetic existence away from the pleasure and pain of the world. The continuum of ordinary life can provide true and ever-lasting fulfillment only when all the threads are woven according to the pattern designated by Nature. When we are born, life naturally forms itself around that pattern. But as we grow, our ignorance, desire, attachment, fear, and false images of others and ourselves tangle and tear the threads, disfiguring the fabric. Tantra practice reweaves the fabric, and restores the grace of the original pattern. 

Anonymous paintings such as these have been exhibited most recently at the Outsider Art Fair in New York; at the Venice Biennale in 2013; The Drawing Center, New York, in 2005-6; Feature Gallery, New York in 2012,

The next group of drawings is by Acharya Vyakul, who is known for his eccentric variations on traditional Tantric drawings.  In the context of the tantric pictorial tradition, codified by unchanging archetypes, the work of Vyakul distinguishes itself by its freedom of execution, its aspect of free improvisation, a spontaneity fed by a secular tradition. Vyakul considered himself a modern painter working in the abstract tradition.  Unlike 99.9 percent of painters of yantra, Vyakul signed his name.  His paintings were brought to Western awareness by French poet Andre Jamme, who lent some to the groundbreaking exhibition, Magiciens de la Terre, organized by Jean-Hubert Martin, at Centre Georges Pompidou in 1989.  

The third group are artists who have been given bookplates by two American friends and then choose which areas on the bookplates to paint in miniature style.  These artists also wish to remain anonymous.  The results are astonishing as they transform some iconic Western imagery through the visual expression of Indian culture.  The results are less of a culture clash than culture fusion as can be seen in the famous photograph of Marilyn Monroe standing on the breezy grate.  In this version, her white dress becomes a colorful textile decorated with Indian motifs, and the grate below her an elaborate Indian rug.  All the other elements in the image have been left alone.  The result is a complete retelling of a classic story.

For further information please call the gallery at 212-226-3768, or e-mail: info@cavinmorris.com.

SPIRITED WOMEN: Drawing Down Fire

Click here to view the online catalog for Spirited Women:

Ghyslaine and Sylvain Staëlens Catalog

Cavin-Morris Gallery is pleased to announce the publication of the catalog: Ghyslaine and Sylvain Staëlens with essays by Laurent Danchin, Jean-Michel Chesné, Nadine Servant, and Randall Morris. To purchase a copy of the catalog please contact info@cavinmorris.com

Huffington Post Article on Spirited Women

Click here to read the article.

Cavin-Morris Spotlight

Solange Knopf changed Cavin-Morris Gallery. I don't say this facetiously. Just before we saw her work for the first time we were being drowned in a sea of false horror-vacuui and cultural appropriations that bore no relationship or knowledge of the cultures they were so freely quoting from; mainly Vodun. We wanted some new work in the gallery but not at the expense of the visionary content we have always tried to find and expose. We didn't believe the real thing had disappeared with the commercialization of the market...how could it? Spirit never dies. Then one day I saw a small drawing by Solange Knopf online that was made over a page from a book of decadent poetry. It struck us immediately and we contacted her and immediately felt the vast deep pool of her consciousness, this incredible mix of pain and insight, wonder and ineffable joy. Those drawings were small. Some time later her first large drawings arrived and we were home. Hers is a mind that floats through this word capturing like no other the decadent sensuality of temptation and redemption. This drawing is one from that most recent series. She, like Sefolosha and Zemankova have pushed the field to a place few female artists, trained or untrained, have gone before...Her impact on the field will only grow greater as scholars catch up to those whose work in this field is most authentic rather than generic.

-Randall Morris

SOLANGE KNOPF

Cavin-Morris Spotlight

Helen Butler Wells and Norma Oliver were a New York phenomenon in the earlier part of the 20th C. It was considered unladylike for Society women to take part in the arts but it was socially ok for them to engage in Spiritualism and draw through the agency of spirits and mediumistic experiences. They formed the Jansenists and met in an apartment on Riverside Drive. Each had a Spirit guide named Eswald who guided her hand and who signed their works with a stamp made for him. The Society channeled aliens, slaves, historical figures like Socrates, Native Americans and others. The drawings often had laminated plastic on them to protect them. Norma Oliver was the adopted daughter ofWells and her mandalas were spirit portraits of various members of the Jansen Society. The drawings were discovered in the 26th Street flea market a number of years ago. Though they are represented in European collections like ABCD they have not yet been appreciated really by museums in the US. They are really an important example of American Art brut and also spiritualist New York history. We also have some of the Society's archives.

Helen Butler Wells
Automatic Drawing #89, 3/30/1926
Graphite/paper
6.75 x 9 inches
17.1 x 22.9 cm
HW 40

Helen Butler Wells
Spirit Drawing #60, Hernon Mosplaciados, c.1920
Graphite/paper
7.5 x 5.5 inches
19.1 x 14 cm
HW 41

Helen Butler Wells
Spirit Drawing #99 - "Lane", 1928
Graphite on paper
7.5 x 11 inches
19.1 x 27.9 cm
HW 55

Norma Oliver
Spiritual Portrait of Joseph Korpanty, 1950
Pencil, crayon/paper
11 x 8.5 inches
27.9 x 21.6 cm
OL 3

Norma Oliver
Spiritual Portrait of Catherine Grant, 1950
Pencil, crayon/paper
11 x 8.5 inches
27.9 x 21.6 cm
OL 6

Norma Oliver
Strongly in Deed, 1947
Mixed media, collage/paper
10.5 x 8 inches
26.7 x 20.3 cm
OL 14

Norma Oliver
Untitled Portrait #32, 1950
Mixed media, collage/paper
8 x 10.5 inches
20.3 x 26.7 cm
OL 15

RHIZOME (September 10 - October 10, 2015)

RHIZOME:  NEW GROWTH AT CAVIN-MORRIS GALLERY

September 10 - October 10, 2015

Cavin-Morris Gallery is pleased to welcome and highlight new work and a particularly rich group of new artists to the gallery in our Fall 2015 opening exhibition, Rhizome:  New Growth at Cavin-Morris Gallery.  The artists in this exhibition further expand our international Western and non-Western roster.

Some of the self-taught artists showing first time with us are Zinnia Nishikawa from California; Ilya Natarevich from St. Petersburg, Russia; Guyodo from Port-au-Prince, Haiti; Caroline Demangel from France; and Paul Kai Shröder and Anja Scheffler-Rehse from Germany.  We will be showing new or previously unseen works by trained and untrained artists, including Kriangkrai Konghanun from Bangkok, Thailand; Cuban-born José Bedia; Peruvian-born Kukuli Velarde; Angolan born Franck Lundangi; Luboš Plný and Karel Havlíček from Czech Republic; Noviadi Angkasapura from Indonesia; and USA artists Norbert Kox, JB Murray, Kevin Sampson, and Gregory Van Maanen. 

Weaving the works together is a sense of storytelling in a myriad of languages that become translated visually into universal forms.  Each artist takes an integral essence of his or her culture, usually mythical or visionary, and abstracts it into timeless contemporary forms.  We as viewers are given the privilege of appreciating the work on its deep formal values alone or by understanding the complex sources of its cultural conversations.  If we give it our full attention the roots expand ever outwards and we grow with it as well.

New book by gallery artist Christine Sefolosha

http://sefolosha.com/publications/

HYPERALLERGIC

Check out Edward Gomez's review of our summer shows in Hyperallergic!

http://hyperallergic.com/226050/a-chelsea-double-feature-paper-meets-clay-on-homegrounds-turf/

Check out this great interview with Gregory Van Maanen

Courtesy of Jeff Wolf

RAW VISION

c/o Raw Vision, Summer 2015, issue 86.

ENFLAMED: New Ceramics at Cavin-Morris Gallery

ENFLAMED: New Ceramics at Cavin-Morris Gallery

June 18 – August 14, 2015

We are pleased to present ENFLAMED: New Ceramics at Cavin-Morris Gallery.

The challenge of this exhibition was to continue showing ceramic sculpture outside its utilitarian function, yet still to be completely in touch with its original material: Earth.  We did not want the clay to serve merely as a platform for paint, or surface, or shape, but to continue speaking its own language.  We set out to find great artists for whom form, surface, and technique, no matter how abstract or sculptural, never lost its ceramic integrity; from the eternal simplicity of the work of Akihiro Nikaido with his classic forms and sophisticated patina while still showing his fingerprints and direct connection to his physical process, to the streamlined almost aerodynamic precision of Simcha Even-Chen's mastery of the dramatic raku process.  Also using raku firing to a completely different affect is Susan Halls, who manages to capture the quiet savageness of the animal forms she sculpts.

We chose sculptors whose work was as different from each other as possible.  We were fascinated by Mitch Iburg’s explorations of local clays fired to their ashy extremes, by the carved subtleties of Tim Rowan’s pieces which are always monumental despite size, by the wise rhythmic landscapes built through rough beautiful repetition in the large sculptures by Sarah Purvey, by the foamy mineral madness of Eddie Curtis' manipulations of porcelains, by Rafa Perez's unending shape-shifting, in this case combining metal and earth, by the innate spiritual poetry of Melanie Ferguson’s meditations on landscape and the sea, by the stark biomorphic undulations of Rebecca Buck’s abstractions, by the powerful conceptual yet very personal pulse-quickening figural sculptures of Kukuli Velardi, by the way Lesley McInally’s pieces refer to walls and street art and abstract painting and without losing sight of their clay origins, by the  almost Mesolithic structures of the work of Youngbin Lim introduced to us by Pragmata Gallery in Japan,  and the increasing surface power and abstraction of newly fired work by Akira Satake.

This is a global exploration.  We are privileged to work with these important artists and honored by their agreement to participate.

For further information, please call 212-226-3768, or e-mail info@cavinmorris.com.

JAPAN: ART BRUT

JAPAN: ART BRUT

June 18 – August 14, 2015

Cavin-Morris Gallery has been involved in showing Non-Mainstream art from Japan as part of its programs for close to eight years but it was not until we came across the work of the important visionary M'onma that the breadth of the work and the scope of future discoveries from Japan and all across Asia fell into place for us.

Japan is a country now first realizing it has this rich vein of artwork running through it with all the variety and nuances found in Western Art Brut.  It also very much speaks the language of Japanese culture.  Whether the artist spent his or her time walking the mountains and sleeping in Shinto Temples as M'onma did, or went to a facility that supplied materials and a shelter in which to create, the work has never lost its homeground.

We organized this by no means encyclopedic exhibition from our own archives as a precursor to a more definitive and wider ranging exhibition at a later date.  Featuring first the dream archaeology of M'onma we branched out to include the power and beauty of language as image and image as language.  M'onma actually often hides calligraphy in his work but it often only has a visual reference without a specific meaning.  In fact, this is part of the visual fascination of this exhibition in its showcasing the many facets of how an expanded sense of calligraphy can communicate.  Each of these ten artists: Akinori Yoshida, Eiichi Shibata, Hiroe Kittaka, Hirotaka Moriya, M'onma, Tae Takubo, Terao Katsuhiro, Yukio Miyashita and Yuich Saito talk to us in a universal tongue that maintains its indigenous integrity and yet draws us in essentially and completely.

ENFLAMED: NEW CERAMICS AT CAVIN-MORRIS

ENFLAMED: New Ceramics at Cavin-Morris Gallery

June 17 – August 14, 2015

We are pleased to present ENFLAMED: New Ceramics at Cavin-Morris Gallery.

The challenge of this exhibition was to continue showing ceramic sculpture outside its utilitarian function, yet still to be completely in touch with its original material: Earth.  We did not want the clay to serve merely as a platform for paint, or surface, or shape, but to continue speaking its own language.  We set out to find great artists for whom form, surface, and technique, no matter how abstract or sculptural, never lost its ceramic integrity; from the eternal simplicity of the work of Akihiro Nikaido with his classic forms and sophisticated patina while still showing his fingerprints and direct connection to his physical process, to the streamlined almost aerodynamic precision of Simcha Even-Chen's mastery of the dramatic raku process.  Also using raku firing to a completely different affect is Susan Halls, who manages to capture the quiet savageness of the animal forms she sculpts.

We chose sculptors whose work was as different from each other as possible.  We were fascinated by Mitch Iburg’s explorations of local clays fired to their ashy extremes, by the carved subtleties of Tim Rowan’s pieces which are always monumental despite size, by the wise rhythmic landscapes built through rough beautiful repetition in the large sculptures by Sarah Purvey, by the foamy mineral madness of Eddie Curtis' manipulations of porcelains, by Rafa Perez's unending shape-shifting, in this case combining metal and earth, by the innate spiritual poetry of Melanie Ferguson’s meditations on landscape and the sea, by the stark biomorphic undulations of Rebecca Buck’s abstractions, by the powerful conceptual yet very personal pulse-quickening figural sculptures of Kukuli Velardi, by the way Lesley McInally’s pieces refer to walls and street art and abstract painting and without losing sight of their clay origins, by the  almost Mesolithic structures of the work of Youngbin Lim introduced to us by Pragmata Gallery in Japan,  and the increasing surface power and abstraction of newly fired work by Akira Satake.

This is a global exploration.  We are privileged to work with these important artists and honored by their agreement to participate.

"Text Made Visible in the Works of Self-Taught Artists" by Brooke Davis Anderson

Click here to read the full article.