Product Description
Alyssa Monks “Push” Oil on Canvas 2006
ALYSSA MONKS (b.1977) USA
Push 2006
Oil on canvas
Signed: Alyssa Monks 2006 (on lower back of canvas)
Exhibited: DFN Gallery, New York 2006
Illustrated: American Art Collector, May 2006, p. 155
H: 30” x W: 56”
“Push” is somewhat of a response to the long tradition of bathtub paintings where a nude woman is displayed. However, the figure is me, the painter, so that the subject is also the artist, juxtaposing the objectification of women in that tradition. Also, the figure wears a black negligee and red lipstick, white makeup gently drips down the cheek, closing the door on naturalism.
At the New York Academy of Art, Alyssa Monks studied with Vincent Desiderio, Wade Schuman, Brenda Zlamany, John Jacobsmeyer, Harvey Citron, Deane Keller, Edward Schmidt, Steven Assael, Lisa Bartolozzi, Patrick Connors, Peter Cox, Jon DeMartin, Leonid Lerman, and Hong Nian Zhang. Alyssa’s sensibility of paint and color allows one to be seduced into the illusion of each image. Striving for anatomical and realistic accuracy, it is her intention to elicit a serious confrontation. The work requires attention to detail and a slow and rich execution. It is this artist’s concern to visually relate the contemporary human experience with sensitivity, empathy, and integrity.
Alyssa Monks “Push” Oil on Canvas 2006
KNOX MARTIN (1923-) USA
Eight 1958
Magna and oil on canvas
Signed: Knox Martin on lower left on front of canvas, Knox M on back of canvas
Marks: From: CORE, 38 Park Row, New York 38, NY, To: Martin, Knox, Eight, 1958, Magna/Oil, 30×40, 700. (paper label), Fischbach Gallery, 799 Madison Avenue, New York 21, Knox Martin, Eight, C.O.R.E., Price $700 (paper label), Mr. Ned L. Pines, 605 Park Ave., New York 21, NY (address label).
Exhibited: Fischbach Gallery, New York 1963; I. Jankowski Gallery, New York, 1975
Provenance: Personal Collection of the artist; Private Collection New York
Canvas: H: 40 1/4” x W: 26 1/4””
Framed: H: 52 3/8” x W: 38 3/8”
From 1957 to about 1964, the spirit of art in New York City was moving in directions for which Abstract Expressionism had not prepared us. By 1965, the strokes, swipes, drips, and splatters of New York painting had given way to cool, laconic representations of the most ordinary of ordinary objects. It was a transformation in artistic culture in which intellectual rewards replaced, or at least supplemented, visual ones, and the whole philosophical face of art was beginning to disclose itself in a particularly vivid way. I saw Knox Martin’s paintings as embodying this transformative moment. In them, I thought, the tension between the two rival philosophies of art could be felt. the way I saw them: they appeared at first glance to be collages, made of large, irregular, overlapping swatches of patterned cloth. Some of the swatches were striped, some appeared to be decorated with circles. It must be conceded that stripes and circles belong to the vocabulary of one kind of abstract art, while the irregular shapes, which felt as though they had been torn from bolts of material, belonged to another.
So one might properly claim that Martin was synthesizing an expressionist abstraction with a geometrical one. For me, however, Knox’s stripes and circles evoked the life of the circus: the striped tents, the loudly patterned costume of clowns. And Martin’s colors—pistachio, raspberry, banana—were festive and impudent. That is why I felt that the paintings referred to vernacular reality, as much so as Campbell Soup cans or Coca Cola bottles. The circus was a recurring theme in modernist art, and I thought it appropriate for late modernist painting to reduce the circus to patterned rags expressive of its raucous gaiety.
TIM LIDDY
“Oy Vey” (1979) The game where you become a JEWISH MOTHER! Get your sons to become doctors—Get your daughters married to doctors! If not, OY VEY! 2008
Oil and enamel on copper, plywood back
Signed in script: Tim Liddy, red circular ring, “circa 1979”, 2008
Provenance: William Shearburn Gallery, St. Louis, MO
H: 10 ¼” x W: 20 ½” x D: 1 ¾”
With his recent paintings, Liddy has both reasserted the construct of hyperrealist painting and developed a thoroughly unique advancement of that mode by extending the cultural reality of the indexed original. Based on the illustrated box lids of vintage board games, Liddy has recontextualized a subject, which evokes the underlying rules of life. Painted on copper or steel in the precise dimensions of the original, the metal is then manipulated to demonstrate the exact rips and tears from years of usage and includes trompe-l’oeil renditions of the scotch tape that might be holding the cardboard box together, the assorted stains, or the various graffiti of time. Liddy leaves no possibility of ambivalence, these works speak to a concurrent understanding of their original object identity and to themselves as works of art engaged in historical and psychological dialogue.