News, Reviews, and Exhibitions

Kiki Smith - Guide, 2013
Jacquard tapestry, 116 x 75 in. Edition of 10
We were pleased to see that Artforum magazine chose "Kiki Smith: Woven Tales” at Peters Projects in Santa Fe, NM as a Critic’s Pick. “Woven Tales” was the first exhibition collecting all of Kiki Smith’s tapestries to date with Magnolia Editions. Please visit Artforum to read the review.

Bruce Conner - DOUBLE ANGEL, 2004/1991
Jacquard tapestry, State 1: 105 x 115 in. Edition of 6
Meanwhile, following the recent exhibition of tapestries by Bruce Conner at Paula Cooper Gallery in New York, work by Conner published by Magnolia Editions appears in "BRUCE CONNER: IT’S ALL TRUE" at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

"IT’S ALL TRUE" is the artist’s first monographic museum exhibition in New York, the first large survey of his work in 16 years, and the first complete retrospective of his 50-year career. It brings together over 250 objects, from film and video to painting, assemblage, drawing, prints, photography, photograms, and performance, and runs through October 2, 2016; the show will then travel to San Francisco's MOMA in late October.

Bruce Conner at Magnolia Editions in the early 2000s.
The prolific Colombian artist Santiago Montoya also has work created at Magnolia featured in several exhibitions, including his third solo show at London's Halcyon Gallery and an upcoming show in Oaxaca, Mexico in October; please stay tuned for more details.

Heather Peters and Santiago Montoya in the Magnolia Editions paper mill.

New work in progress by Santiago Montoya.
More art by Santiago Montoya from Halcyon Gallery
More art by Kiki Smith from Magnolia Editions
More art by Bruce Conner from Magnolia Editions

Kiki Smith review in Artforum

Kiki Smith - Fortune, 2014
Jacquard tapestry with hand painting - 116 x 78 in. Edition of 10
Kiki Smith's show "Wonder" at Pace Gallery has been drawing critical raves, and snapshots of work from the show are popping up all over Twitter.

In particular, Smith's tapestry editions (published by Magnolia Editions) have been receiving favorable attention. Artforum reviewer Paige Bradley selected Smith's "Wonder" show for the magazine's Picks section, writing:

“Wonder,” the title of Kiki Smith’s latest New York exhibition, suitably describes both the excitement in first encountering Smith’s garden of earthly delights and an astonished curiosity at their craft-intensive processes. [...]

Three nearly ten-foot-long tapestries, all 2014, make the grandest gesture in the exhibition. Portraying almost Edenic scenes of a nude girl and a fawn, as in Congregation, or spiderwebs flecked with gold and silver leaf among shooting plants in Spinners, the medium is dusted off and made contemporary by virtue of the vibrantly abstract, cut-up collage borders. Translated into a crisply precise (and a forerunner of digital technology) Jacquard weave, they reflect the heterogeneous textures of Smith’s drawings and set these extraordinary works apart from any mere nostalgia or worship of antiquated forms.

"Wonder" is on view through March 29th at Pace's 510 West 25th Street location. For more information, please visit the Pace Gallery website. To read more about the process behind Smith's tapestries, check out this interview with the Denton Record-Chronicle.

More art by Kiki Smith at Magnolia Editions

Review: Chuck Close at Guild Hall

Installation view of watercolor prints by Chuck Close, printed and published by Magnolia Editions. Photo by Gary Mamay
Artist and writer Mike Solomon offers a considered and appreciative assessment of Chuck Close's current exhibition at Guild Hall in his review for Hamptons Art Hub.

Solomon singles out the watercolor prints created at Magnolia Editions for special attention, writing:

Other works in the east gallery at Guild Hall show how Close has confronted the newest of media challenges, digital printing, which has since its inception revolutionized the art world. His archival watercolor pigment prints — large portraits of Cindy, 2012, Kiki, 2012, Cecily, 2012, and Zhang I, 2012 — are among the most sumptuous of his works I have ever seen.

Playing with the techniques of watercolor, in which tonalities are made when light penetrates the medium and then reflects back to the eye, carrying with it the color and tone the medium has bestowed, Close brings to bear in these absolutely gorgeous works all the associations a viewer might have about watercolors. There are echoes here of Cezanne, Turner, Homer and Klee.

Through the computer, he is able to assign tinted values in each square of the grid and, I suspect, to print these “washes” in layers, through multiple passes, to arrive at the tones he wants. Through this technology, he achieves the same effects earlier artists developed manually, with a brush.

The use of the digital domain to reinvent watercolor is the kind of thing many in the art world hoped for when the digital revolution started, but there have been too few examples of this kind of innovation. These works certainly change all that. I suspect an entirely new genre of watercolor painting will be derived from them. They are that important.

Notice the size of the grid, too, as its variation determines the kind of focus the viewer experiences of the image. In Cindy, 2012, the grid size is about one and half inches, so the abstraction of the work dominates until the viewer moves back quite a distance from the surface. Cecily, 2012, has an even larger grid of about two inches, so the “immediate splendor” (Alfonso Ossorio’s wonderful phrase) is what the viewer gets from its abstraction until moving to the opposite side of the gallery. Then the representation finally comes into focus. In Kiki, 2012 and Zhang I, 2012, the grid is smaller, about three quarters of an inch. In these two, the images are tighter and the focus moves closer to the surface of the work.

This choice of grid size is another one of those areas that Close plays with, and it begs, along with the beauty of the watercolor tints, the kind of contemplation that keeps one involved in the work.

To read the full review, please visit the Hamptons Art Hub website.

Tapestries by Chuck Close, published by Magnolia Editions, at Guild Hall. Photo by Gary Mamay
For more details on the show and associated events, please see this entry; for information on visiting Guild Hall, please check their website.

More art by Chuck Close from Magnolia Editions