5/08/2007

Donna Huanca

26 comments:

Painter said...

Donna Huanca @
Susan Inglett Gallery
534 W 22
NY, NY 10011

zipthwung said...

Unforntunately it reminds me of Dana Schutz. But the people seem to have personality, or presence, unlike schutz's vacancies. In that sense this is portraiture and schutz is more like dekooning's abstraction or non-objective objectivity or something.

or whatever

zipthwung said...

Zapatista
International
Polly Apfelbaum
Paint By Numbers
Pattern

off topic but interesting:
polly

similar to (recent) takashi murakami, or Mike Kelley's show at metro with the kiwanis Elks and other fraternal orders. Or japanese heraldry, or branding.

youth--less said...

These would be interesting if they were paintings, but i guess they are fabric collages, which is what they look like.

Tatiana said...

(psst. speaking of schutz, i wonder when we'll see her new show featured on the blog.)

youth--less said...

more like this

Nomi Lubin said...

"(psst. speaking of schutz, i wonder when we'll see her new show featured on the blog.)"

Me too.

miss12 said...

cool image. i like the eyes.

zipthwung said...

zapatista landscape by diego rivera. Im a huge fan of painted plywood. I wouldn't do it, but you can.

the eyes are the best aprt - like the Yoshimoto nara cat eyes posted here - they are expressive.

Unfortunately thats not enough.

(pssst- shutz is a cartoonist. Don't tell anyone)

A common approach is the large eyes style drawn on many anime characters, credited to the influence of Osamu Tezuka, who was inspired by the exaggerated features of American cartoon characters such as Betty Boop and Mickey Mouse and from Disney's Bambi. Tezuka found that large eyes style allowed his characters to show emotions distinctly. Cultural anthropologist Matt Thorn argues that Japanese animators and audiences do not perceive such stylized eyes as inherently more or less foreign.

CAP said...

Hey Closeuup I like your link, who’s the artist?
The Huanca quilt thing is again puzzling as far as scale goes (and scale in this stuff definitely influences meaning).
What is it with websites that skip dimensions?
Don’t they know there’s a price to be paid for that?
At first I was thinking it’s a feminist take on the nuclear family, patched together raggedly in hard times etc, or maybe painting ripped to shreds by The Generalissimo’s new free trade agreement in representation.
It’s always tricky when you want to treat it as a painting - especially to painters - but there isn’t actually any painting involved.
I mean, where do you draw the line? Schnabel can add plates, antlers and much else, Salle liked his Eames accessories, Kiefer goes for the fistful of straw and a few palms more riff, Rauschenberg made a point of crossing any line anyone else might care to draw. These Texans!
But say it’s a link to community/folk art – to the D-I-Y banner – The Illegal Aliens protest to Congress, number. That’s when scale kicks in. These people don’t respect paint because they can’t afford it, and they can’t afford to. ‘These people’ live not too far from here. And when you think it’s just a cosy little family deal for Pedro when he’s home on leave – check out the second of Ms Huanca’s works on the Inglett website – The Man with the 1000 yard stare is only doing his job, and he’s watching you.

zipthwung said...

Once Steve mumford gets off his Iraq kick he should do some reportage on the Sandinistas or something.

make a mumford the border!

CAP said...

Vote For Pedro

zipthwung said...

Dear domestic terrorists,

Learn to burn your own DVD's.

He said that the three men and the others, named as Mohamad Shnewer, Serdar Tatar and Agron Abdullahu, were identified from a videotape that the F.B.I described as firing assault weapons in a “militia-like style while calling for jihad and shouting Allah Akbar (God is Great).” Mr. Christie said the men made the mistake of taking the tape to a local video store and requesting that it be dubbed to DVD. A clerk who watched the tape called the local police, who alerted the F.B.I.

CAP said...

Steve Mumford is so embedded he keeps forgetting that thing in his hand is a paint brush.

youth--less said...

OG--click on the link and look up in the blue bar--good stuff

Unknown said...

zipperhead said
(pssst- shutz is a cartoonist. Don't tell anyone)

I think you could say this more about Yuskavage I think. But not really. But hmmm, cartoons? Expensive freeking cartoons huh?

I don't see Schutz as a cartoonist though. I see much more abstract figuratism in her work a-la the bay area painters of the 60s. But updated and modified. And sometimes brighter. I don't see any big eyes here: http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artists/dana_schutz.htm - She did do a painting called "myopic" with a big eye ...because well that's the point of the painting.


So anyway is this "painting" fabric? I'm digging the flatness of the shapes fighting the carved out figures. The unicorn is a nice touch. And the headband on the mom is nice. Don't like the fingers though.

DarthFan said...
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DarthFan said...
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zipthwung said...

What is cartooning? I don't really know. It seems like cartoon = abstraction

The put down is facile, and I think you can say that work like this and anything abstract in a figurative sense runs the risk of being duck soup.

Schutz's palette is both the most interesting thing about her work and the most facile.

For example, I think a hallmark of the beginning or intermediate painter is the patchwork - expressionist paint handling.


Colorists are a dime a dozen - stay humble

Wabi Sabi?

nnillo said...

i like this painting.

jpegCritic said...

schutz is great....
as a colorist and as a clever orchestrator of space.
Brilliant show for schutz.

CAP said...

Apologies to Painter if this is too far off the topic, but there seems to be a stampede from it anyway.
Zip:
A cartoon, in the sense used above, is a level of abstraction – true – renders typical features often in exaggerated proportion for an object, place or person, in simplified and popular forms (the word derives from preparatory drawings). A cartoon now is usually assumed to be an animation, a comic its page equivalent. But not all abstractions are cartoons, not all cartoons especially interesting or art.
Pictures may be caricatures without being cartoons (or comics) where they use more complex or unusual forms of line, tone, color etc. But again, caricature is not necessarily art and where we draw the line between caricature and cartoon is not always clear cut or need be.
True also - resorting to the easy and obvious mannerism is a symptom of mediocrity. Then again clichés can sometimes be surprisingly relocated and resuscitated – putting Conan on the streets of Baghdad, for example.
Just because a painting refers to cartoons doesn’t make it interesting. That depends on what qualities it points out, connections it makes with other pictures and styles. To find children’s cartoons expressionist or expressionism childish is hardly enough, obviously. But if the focus is narrower, to say the kind of pictures by which children learn to identify important events – the How We Will/Would Do A Given Task type, then expressionism takes on a more loaded role, may start to look like a way of avoiding or fudging some issues.
The artist may be having fun, but there is another agenda there as well, and that complexity is interesting. And of course when the artist extends the events to something like How We Would Give Birth (http://www.zachfeuer.com/images/artists/danaschutz/2007/DS-Howwewouldgiveb06_b.jpg) the expressionism is correspondingly casting her as the learner, and not an especially willing one. Not for nothing does the mother in this picture keep her attention fixed on the painting over her bed.
There are weak passages, surely, but a certain unevenness also goes with the territory, is true of Sillman or Guston as well.
Is fiction abstraction? Yes again, by degree. But if the general trend I outline seems too confusing or vague, perhaps it works better, taking one picture at a time?
I have to stop here, the supervisor is coming over, a man devoid of a sense of humour and this may turn unpleasant.

zipthwung said...

You mmight also like: Chie Fueki, Force Field, the Quilts of Gees bend.

I dont know where you draw the line between abstraction and cartoon, is all. No clear demarcation point in my book.

I think it applies here as these figures are mannered.

Modigliani, Chagall, Guston. Mannered.

Roberta Smith the respected New York Times Critic and my imaginary supervisor, says:

"Ms. Schutz's oil paintings record passing moments devoid of history, including cartoonish portraits of women in the midst of image-obliterating coughs and sneezes, and still lifes of awkward undergraduate sculptures. The latter have a bit of Jörg Immendorf in them, which is nothing to be ashamed of."

Roberta means mannered right? Not cartoonish? Or does mannerish sound wrong.

I'm not a realist nut, or an objective magicalist or a magical realish or whatever, but I do wonder if these artists who get these huge reputations might not benefit from a little anatomy lesson, you know, to help develop their formal sea foam.

Because the ideas, or conceits are a dime a dozen - at least in my experience. Visual puns - easy. Metaphorical language - easy. Substitution codes? Easy. Rebuses? Plaids? patchworks?

This is not rocket science.

The birth picture is indeed refreshing as closeuup's image - curatorial studies programs await your practiced nuanced eye.
Call them. Right away - a loan officer is ready.

youth--less said...

Avoiding--fudging--duck soup. let's hear more on all that please. What would the abstractionist be avoiding?
Hard work and anatomy? Im unconvinced.

zipthwung said...

Arbeit Macht Frei. Im going to the next painting on this one.

Nomi Lubin said...

I don't think her sneeze paintings are cartoonish in any conventional modern sense of the word.