Bill’s Art Shows 2019 – Part Two

Here are five more notable art shows that I enjoyed in the past year:

Charles and Ray Eames at Oakland Museum of California

Charles and Ray Eames were influential designers of the twentieth century. They embraced the joy of trial and error, and saw no separation between life and work. They brought a synergy and aesthetic to to the design of many things. The Oakland Museum show contained many insights into their work through multi-media installations, films, rare prototypes, photography, furniture, toys, products, as well as personal letters, drawings, and artwork,

image: Early Charles & Ray Eames LCW Chair

Susan Hauptman, Irene Pijoan and Richard Sheehan at SFAI Ft. Mason

Each of the selected works in this group show (called A+) by Susan Hauptman, Irene Pijoan and Richard Sheehan at the San Francisco Art Institute‘s Ft. Mason campus are personal and grounded in their teaching, with a strict emphasis on the foundations of painting and drawing.

Hauptman works exclusively on paper with charcoal and pastel, and is best known for her stark, enigmatic, often expressionless self-portraits in which she depicted herself with alarmingly precise and candid detail and confronts cultural notions of beauty, reality, femininity and masculinity.

Pijoan‘s abstract paintings on canvas and large-scale mixed media and paper cut-out works with text evolved into large installations and commissions in aluminum.

Sheehan worked in bold, impasto strokes, outdoors from an old mail truck that carried his easel and canvases, painting overpasses, landscapes and signage.

left image: Susan Hauptman, Self Portrait (La Perla #1), charcoal on paper, 54″h x 40″w, 2006
center image: Irene Pijoan, Cutting from a Gradual, acrylic on paper with cut-outs, 130″h x 77″w, 1997
right image: Richard Sheehan, Express Bridge, Super Bowl Sunday, oil on prepared cotton duck, 92″h x 72″w, 1989

Jos Sances at Richmond Art Center

As someone who’s created more than his share of scratchboard illustrations, I appreciate the scope and scale of Jos Sances’ Whale with it’s hidden iconography and imagery of social movements. critical messages for social action, embedded with a history of capitalism in America,images of human and environmental exploitation. Covering a wall at the Richmond Art Center, it was inspired by Moby Dick and the history of whaling in America.

image: Jos Sances, Or, the Whale (detail), 2018-19

Claude Monet at the deYoung Museum

Claude Monet at age 70 never lost the vitality to paint. The exhibition at the deYoung Museum featured nearly 50 Late Period paintings of his own garden at Giverny, that  balanced representation and abstraction, that redefined him as the master of Impressionism as a forebear of modernism. ‘There was magic in my pond,’ he said.

image: Claude Monet, Corner of the Water-Lily Pond 1918-19

El Anatsui at Haus der Kunst

The immense El Anatsui hanging installations called Triumphant Scale at Haus der Kunst in Munich hold their own against the backdrop of the monumental fascist architecture of the building. While they have an obsessional quality, their materiality glows gracefully on the wall.

image: El Anatsui, 2019

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Golden Eye, 25”h. x 25”w., spray enamel on panel © Bill Russell