Here TOday
Athens, Rome, Paris, London, New York
by Wendy Artin
November 3rd – December 10th, 2017
Wendy Artin’s new exhibition, HERE TODAY - Athens, Rome, Paris, London, New York, features vibrant, spirited paintings of fugitive urban walls.
Beautifully stained stencils, torn posters, printouts, spray-painted marks, drips, cracks, rust, hinges, beloved faces peering out of flat walls: these urban accumulations occur in many streets in many cities. We often walk by oblivious to their accidental beauty—but with her forty-plus watercolor paintings of captivating wallscapes, Artin invites us to pause and contemplate the ephemeral, the vulnerable, the fragile.
In large, medium, and small-scale format, Artin’s wallscapes will be on display until December 10, together with a selection of blossoming branches and quick figure paintings.
“These are walls that I love to look at and take detours to see again,” says Artin. “Unlike the bas-reliefs from antiquity that I have painted in the past, they will disappear in a matter of months. Like a wild garden, they have no one designer, no master architect. I have taken some liberties moving things around and swapping out certain images, but this is basically how the real walls were as I stood in front of them.
“I try to make the paintings both elegant and clumsy – full of information, but not trompe-l’oeil – in and out of focus, crisp here and watery there. As diverse as faces in a city crowd, there are line drawings, paintings, stencils, photographs — all different ways of portraying people, in all different sizes, like a fairytale. Artistically this gives me freedom to play, to paint in a variety of different ways. I can change the color, the focus; I can allow the watercolor to shine with its full versatility. I can stay right on the edge of illusion, with the image moving back and forth between 2D and 3D: very hand-made paintings of usually machine-generated postings. The layering and different focal points are like improvisational jazz where the sweet themes that you recognize shift and change as you become carried away by the next bit till suddenly there is a new tune, a new picture, a new face.
Many of the walls have images of famous people who died too young: Amy Winehouse, John Lennon, David Bowie, Marilyn Monroe, Audrey Hepburn, Muhammed Ali. They are posted or painted in order to remember, to have the people live on, but they are so temporary — pasted paper, stencils! There is something quite touching about the fragility of these pieces of paper that are trying to prolong the too short lives of these idols.“ Fleeting lives, fleeting images — along with the well-known icons are glimpses of Artin’s husband, Bruno Boschin, who died in 2014.
Paradoxically, it was Artin’s trip to Athens to see the Parthenon frieze at the new Acropolis Museum that began this new series. On her way to visit the famous sculptures she doubled back to admire a fragment of a wall, with Greek graffiti and a tiny Madonna stencil. The urge to put faces on facades reaches back in time and across cultures – but is their purpose similar?
And in today’s fast traveling world, is there a difference between the walls of different countries? “In Rome, it is almost as though it is just one polite person posting, since there is a respectful space around each image,” Artin notes. “In Paris, there are often images of scantily clad seductive women. In New York, the walls have an irresistible ME FIRST! energy, chaotic layers covering up earlier offerings. Why are they here? Was someone randomly standing by that wall, looking at a magazine, when it occurred to him to cut out and paste up photos of his favorite cars? Did he do it with foresight, intention, a message, a mission? Where did he get the glue? I am interested in what the people who posted were thinking, but even more I am interested in the ultimate combination of different layers and messages and images—the sheer visual joy of marks on a wall that I have sought to translate into marks on a page.”
Artin’s paintings are time capsules and travel pieces. Viewed from one angle, they tell stories that draw you in and want to be completed, and from another become pure dynamism and raw beauty. The mix is dizzying and mysterious like city life seen for the first time.
