Heather James Fine Art – Montecito Gallery Tour

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Heather James Fine Art – Montecito Gallery Tour

Visit the Montecito gallery

TAKASHI MURAKAMI - Want to Hold You - acrylic and platinum leaf on canvas mounted on board - 59 x 59 in.

TAKASHI MURAKAMI

Combining sculptural elements on a canvas work, "Vanity Unfair for Gordon Matta Clark" evokes the experimental nature of the Pop Art movement. Created as a tribute to his close friend, Gordon Matta Clark, the present work is a layered creation, each element having significance and a deeper symbolic meaning.
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<br>Starting as a commercial sign painter, Rosenquist learned the power of large-scale bold images. These large images, vibrant colors, and recognizable imagery would be the mainstay of Rosenquist's artistic output. "Much of the aesthetic of my work comes from doing commercial art," the artist once said. "I painted pieces of bread, Arrow shirts, movie stars. It was very interesting. Before I came to New York I wanted to paint the Sistine Chapel. I thought this is where the school of mural painting exists."
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<br>Rosenquist's works are held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Tate Gallery in London, among many others.

JAMES ROSENQUIST

BARBARA HEPWORTH - Five Forms with Three Circles - white marble - 9 1/2 x 4 1/4 x 5 1/2 in.

BARBARA HEPWORTH

Carl Andre’s floor sculptures are typically made from glowing tiles of lead, zinc, or copper. They differ from most other minimalist artwork in their accessibility: they are meant to be walked on. Art historically, Andre places himself in the lineage of Constantin Brancusi and Henry Moore. Andre continues in their tradition of reducing the vocabulary of sculpture to its most vital and simple forms. The works also speak to Donald Judd’s idea of “specific objects,” which emphasized the phenomenological experience of the viewer and an exploration of structure and space.

CARL ANDRE

LARRY RIVERS

PABLO PICASSO - Deux Femmes avec un Vase a Fleurs - linocut printed in color on Arches vellum paper with Arches watermark and linocut printed cream over - State I and II: 24 3/4 x 29 1/2 in. ; state IV: 24 1/2 x 29 1/2 in.; and 25 1/2 x 30 1/2 in.

PABLO PICASSO

The only known extant Diebenkorn sculpture, this welded iron form is a brilliant example of his artistic development and the creative energy of his early work.
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<br>This rare sculpture comes from a period of experimentation and a burst of lyrical creativity that the artist experienced while in graduate school at the University of New Mexico. It was likely included in his 1951 Master's Degree Exhibition at that institution. Like many American artists before him, Diebenkorn was enthralled with the atmosphere and landscape of the Southwest. He produced energetic and unpredictable canvases with bold, warm colors, barely contained within their underlying geometric structure. This iron sculpture demonstrates the far reaches of the artist’s exploration, establishing the essential linear framework that would come to characterize his later work.
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<br>This piece was the only sculpture included in the 2008 exhibition "Diebenkorn in New Mexico" at the UNM Harwood Museum of Art in Taos. Since his first retrospective in 1976 at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York, Diebenkorn has found a place in over 50 museum collections worldwide and is recognized as a major creative force of the 20th Century.

RICHARD DIEBENKORN

FRANCISCO ZUNIGA - Desnudo Reclinado de Dolores - bronze with green patina - 21 x 43 1/4 x 21 1/2 in.

FRANCISCO ZUNIGA

This "Untitled" enamel painting by David Hammons is a precursor to the artist’s famous body prints of the late 1960s and ‘70s, as well as compelling recent works. The painting was completed just before Hammons enrolled at the Chouinard Institute in Los Angeles (now CalArts). By this time, Hammons had studied with the realist activist Charles White and was influenced by the found-object assemblages of Dada, the humble materials of Arte Povera, and the politically charged imagery of the Black Arts Movement. For his body prints, Hammons created life-sized representations of his own body by slicking himself with margarine, baby oil, and other greasy substances, and pressing himself against surfaces, creating imagery in which viewers can discern the face and clothes of the artist.
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<br>After moving to New York City in 1974, Hammons partook in assemblage, installation, and performance work but, in recent years, he has returned to the two-dimensional support. In his "Kool-Aid" series, the sumptuously colored and fluid style seen in this early enamel painting reappears, and in his "Basketball" series, dark smudges are the product of a basketball dribbled on the paper support. Poured enamel and cheap powdered drink, dribbled balls covered in “Harlem dirt”, and the press of a body against support all are inflected by chance. Fugitive materiality recurs in Hammons practice, nuancing his political commentary on the African American experience.

DAVID HAMMONS

Gabriel Orozco’s body of work is multidimensional, reaching across the media of painting, sculpture, printmaking, photography, and installation. Born in Mexico in 1962, he attended the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico City, and then studied at the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid. A blend of inspirations is evident in his work, from Conceptualism and the readymades of Marcel Duchamp to the artistic traditions of Mexico. Often pairing found objects with unusual arrangements and geometric patterns, Orozco studies the relationship of everyday objects to human beings.
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<br>Orozco’s series centering on athletics, games, and gambling explore entertainment and leisure activities through images clipped from newspapers, overlayed with neatly arranged circles and semicircles. The art historical lineage of these geometric interventions can be traced to the groundbreaking abstraction of Kazimir Malevich or the playful appropriation of John Baldessari. Orozco’s brightly colored patterns, often dictated by mathematical formula, interrupt a familiar format and challenge the viewer’s expectations – a theme paralleled in many of his interactive installation pieces.
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<br>Orozco’s work has been included in the Venice Biennale, the Whitney Biennial, and in solo exhibitions at the most prestigious institutions worldwide, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, The Museum of Modern Art New York, the Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris, Museo Nacional Centre de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. and many others. The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, presented a solo exhibition of Orozco’s work in 2000. Three of the six variations of Orozco’s “UK. Athletics II” were featured in that exhibition.

GABRIEL OROZCO

Ross Bleckner is a celebrated American painter whose works reference loss, memory, and change such as explorations of the cell during the AIDS epidemic or in response to his father’s cancer diagnosis. The 1965 MoMA exhibition that brought Op Art to the fore, The Responsive Eye and included artists Richard Anuszkiewicz, Tadasky, and Francis Celentano, had a profound influence on him as an artist. This painting, like his other immersive, large-scale works, elicit a powerful, hypnotic, dizzying effect. Aesthetically pleasing, Bleckner’s canvases explore perception – visual, emotional, physical, time. Bleckner is part of the same generation of and friends with Julian Schnabel, David Salle, Eric Fischl, and Peter Halley, all of whom returned painterly technique to the canvas.

ROSS BLECKNER

DONALD ROLLER WILSON - Looking For the Virgin in the Woods (What Is a Mother to Do With the Children Acting Bad) - oil on canvas - 30 x 86 1/2 in.

DONALD ROLLER WILSON

Takashi Murakami is one of the most celebrated contemporary and Japanese artists. Murakami developed the theoretical and visual language of “Superflat”. He based his art movement on the Japanese “flat” art aesthetic and of anime and manga fused with commentary on the Kawaii tendency in postmodern Japan.
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<br>Murakami and his art have chartered new ground in infiltrating and merging high and low culture. The painting features a proliferation of eyes in his trademark style. No two eyes are exactly alike, and each are in various states of opening or closing. Like his art, these eyes have hidden depth – the irises contain a multitude of miniature concentric circles. The painting seems to combine elements of pop culture, cartoons, technology, and fashion into a singular plane.

TAKASHI MURAKAMI

"View of the Mountains from the Nihon Alps Salada Road" from 2007 is a stylized video work reminiscent of 19th-century Japanese woodblock prints. Roadways, highways, and country roads have long been a favored subject for Opie; here, this interest is brought to life with a fresh and crisp 21st-century aesthetic.
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<br>Opie is a master at setting up environments in his art; the idea of place and setting are crucial to his message. Opie discusses his work as an evolution, a circle of sorts. Each piece leaves an impact on all future works, even if it is in a small way. A 2020 solo exhibition of Opie's work at the Berardo Museum in Lisbon, Portugal, featured several video pieces comparable to the present work.

JULIAN OPIE

ALEX KATZ - Window 5 - oil on masonite - 24 x 24 in.

ALEX KATZ

Rodney McMillian is multidisciplinary artist working in sculpture, painting, performance, and video. Born in South Carolina, McMillian has lived in Southern California since 2000 where he is now Professor of Sculpture at the UCLA School of Arts and Architecture at the University of California, Los Angeles. "Lollipop" (2001-2002) represents one of the earliest works from the artist, who graduated with an MFA from CalArts in 2002.
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<br>McMillian shapes his work around the socio-political history of the United States even through abstraction. At first glance, "Lollipop" appears to be a continuation of Abstract Expressionism in its layered flow of paint. For these works, like abstract expressionists of yore, McMillian pours and drips paints. Nevertheless, on closer inspection, many of his works appear to suggest a map or landscape and thus, the history of struggle and power inherent to mapmaking and landscape painting. Who makes maps and for whom? Who owns the land and at what cost? What happens in that land? Furthermore, in using household paint and other industrial materials, McMillian mines issues of economy, accessibility, and even temporality as the materials are inherently unstable and non-archival.
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<br>McMillian's work is collected by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Hammer Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles among others, and his work was featured in the 2008 Whitney Biennial. In 2019, McMillian's work was exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art: “New York: Rodney McMillian”, Feb. 9-Jun. 9, 2019.

RODNEY MCMILLIAN

Richard Diebenkorn once explained, “All paintings start out of a mood, out of a relationship with things or people, out of a complete visual impression.” Known for his defining role in the Bay Area Figurative Art movement, a counter to the abstraction dominating post-war New York City, Diebenkorn often oscillated between figuration and abstraction. In 1952, he took a faculty position at the University of Illinois in Urbana for one academic year. There, he taught beginning drawing to architecture students and used one of the bedrooms in his house as a studio. This period from 1952-53, known as the Urbana series, was a productive and pivotal time in the development of Diebenkorn's style. His innovative exploration of figuration through abstraction began in these crucial early years and would come to full realization in his widely celebrated Ocean Park series of the late 1960s-80s.

RICHARD DIEBENKORN

CHARLES ARNOLDI - Sticky Wicket - acrylic, modeling paste and sticks on plywood - 44 1/4 x 91 x 3 in.

CHARLES ARNOLDI

LEONID LAMM - State Power - oil on canvas - 68 3/8 x 66 x 1 in.

LEONID LAMM

"Bringing in the Ears" is a composition drawing for an advertisement for Niblets Corn, published in the August 10, 1942 edition of Life magazine. This drawing has been in the same family collection since 1970.
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<br>Among the most noteworthy illustrators this country has ever produced, Wyeth is also the patriarch of one of America’s most esteemed artistic dynasties. His son Andrew and grandson Jamie rank among the most respected artists of their generations, heavily influenced by other artists in the extended Wyeth family. N.C. Wyeth, in addition to illustrating more than 100 books, including adventure classics like Treasure Island, Kidnapped, Robinson Crusoe, and The Last of the Mohicans, was also a highly regarded muralist, receiving numerous commissions for prestigious corporate and government buildings throughout the United States.
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<br>Wyeth’s style, honed by early work at the Saturday Evening Post and Scribner’s, demonstrates his keen awareness of the revealing gesture, allowing readers to instantly grasp the essence of a scene. He possessed a rare ability to depict subjects and events from a child’s point of view, and is particularly known for dramatizing characters by the use of long shadow, a technique that is said to have influenced the epic moviemaking style of the 1940s. In addition to providing supplementary drama and excitement to the written word, Wyeth’s works have become classics in and of themselves.

N.C. WYETH

PABLO PICASSO - Original Copper Plate and Engraving from Carmen - copper plate and engraving - 14 1/4 x 11 in.

PABLO PICASSO

PHILIP GUSTON - Untitled - ink on paper - 11 7/8 x 16 1/8 in.

PHILIP GUSTON

“Painting is a need, not a choice.” – Leonora Carrington
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<br>Leonora Carrington was a key figure of Surrealism, the art movement that used the human subconscious to create dreamlike and fantastical scenes. Carrington was born in the England in 1917. Rebellious and artistic as a child, she eventually met Max Ernst, one of the leaders of Surrealism, with whom she would move to Paris. The outbreak of WWII interrupted their relationship as Ernst fled to the U.S. while Carrington escaped the Nazis to Madrid where she was institutionalized. She fled again with her new husband, a Mexican diplomat, to New York where they divorced, and she moved a final time to Mexico City. It was in Mexico City that she flourished with her Surrealist paintings, making friends with fellow artists including Remedios Varo, and where she would find fame, exhibiting in prestigious shows at the Museum of Modern Art and Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century Gallery.
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<br>Carrington’s paintings are populated by strange humans and fantastical animals pulling from myths, mysticism, and her own imagination. Running through her works are ideas of transformation and a divine feminine quality. This work features a figure setting down an unusual prayer rug. The title is reference to an Arabic and Persian word meaning “statement” or “exposition” and could also be a reference to the work of Báb, a central figure of the Baha’I faith. The word points to a clarity of eloquence, much as Carrington strived for that same eloquence and clarity of expression.

LEONORA CARRINGTON

ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG - Prime Pump from ROCI USA (Wax Fire Works Series) - color screenprint on paper and Lexan - 63 1/2 X 44 1/4 IN.

ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG

CINDY SHERMAN - Untitled No. 110 - c-print - 45 x 30 in.

CINDY SHERMAN

ZAHA HADID - Untitled - metal and plexiglass - 35 3/4 x 16 1/4 x 16 1/4 in.

ZAHA HADID

LOUISE NEVELSON - Untitled - painted wood, violin key and clothespin - 4 3/8 x 7 3/8 x 4 1/4 in.

LOUISE NEVELSON

VIK MUNIZ - Trajetoria Adultera - silver gelatin print, in three parts, and foam cords - element A: 8 x 20 in.; element B: 12 1/2 x 20 in.; element C: 16 1/8 x 8 1/2 in.

VIK MUNIZ

ROBERT NATKIN - Bern Series (#421) - acrylic on canvas - 34 x 46 in.

ROBERT NATKIN

NORMAN BLUHM - Untitled - oil on paper mounted on board - 20 1/8 x 22 in.

NORMAN BLUHM

JEFF KOONS - Cracked Egg - anodized aluminum - 4 3/4 x 3 1/4 x 3 1/4 in.

JEFF KOONS

MARINE HUGONNIER - Mountain With No Name 3 (still from Ariana) - lambda print - 50 x 46 3/4 in.

MARINE HUGONNIER