Azure Development's $2,190,000 show house in Delray Beach hosts thirteen artworks from Sponder Gallery's roster of important artists.

Artists Include:

Stanley Boxer, Dan Christensen, Max-Steven Grossman, Kysa Johnson, Jane Manus, Donald Martiny, James Austin Murray, Udo Noger, Tigran Tsitoghdzyan and James Walsh

Visitors to the Edmond J. Safra campus of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem who walk by the Goodman Brain Sciences building will notice a statue by the world-renowned artist, the late Boaz Vaadia. This figure, titled Ahiam 2nd, will make most people stop and stare at this representation of humanity. The pose in Ahiam 2nd is contemplative and serene, creating an overall calm atmosphere, which Vaadia so often stated was an important goal. It is recommended to visit Ahiam 2nd in the middle of a hectic day at the office or the lab. Who knows, maybe his serenity will rub off on his visitors. 

Ahiam 2nd is an iconic sculpture for Boaz Vaadia, and perhaps one of his most seminal. The figure in Ahiam 2nd is in a reclining pose that Vaadia revisited frequently, starting in 1985 when he first began figurative work in the style for which he is internationally known. Vaadia later combined the same figural pose with a boulder, such as exists in Ahiam 2nd, when he moved to his Williamsburg, Brooklyn studio. Ahiam 2nd was completed in 2006.

Dynamic Sublimity:  Donald Martiny's Brushstrokes by Donald Kuspit

Initially in Turner, Delacroix, and the Barbizon School, the brush stroke was made more noticeable, and this appearance was to increase under impressionist.  The imitative or descriptive function of painting was increasingly diminished by the growing prominence of the physical substance of which a painting is made, the paint...Finally the whole brush stroke leaps forth dramatically in the work of van Gogh.

The brush stroke now becomes for the first time a distinct, separate unit of artistic expression.
James Mann, Beyond Post-Modernism:  Manifesto of Vandalism(1) We call that sublime which is absolutely great.  Beauty is connected with the form of the object, having boundaries, while the sublime is to be found in a formless object, represented by a pointlessness.

Crystal Clear | Glitz, spirituality and rebellion coexist in Metis Atash’s sparkling sculptures

BY JOHN THOMASON

AT FIRST BLUSH, Metis Atash’s career appears to have swung from one end of the spectrum to the other. She forged her career in finance, working in private equity for 15 years, mostly in her native Ger- many. It was exhausting, right-brain labor—consult- ing, preparing documents, filing annual reports—and it consumed her for up to 80 hours a week.

While traveling during a yearlong sabbatical from her job in 2004, Atash experienced something like an epiphany. “I stayed six months in Bali and met my business partner,” she recalls. “We became friends, not really thinking much, just realizing there was more to my life than what I’ve lived.” 

Her future business partner was a furniture ex- porter, and Atash began to create art on his inven- tory, applying paint, lacquer and Swarovski crystals. Around the same time, Atash, a practicing Buddhist, imported Balinese Buddha heads, and painted and crystallized those as well.

Best known for his ‘frozen’ brushstrokes, Donald Martiny’s large scale abstractions manage to be both sculptural and painterly, while somehow effecting the action of performance art. It is no wonder then that Open, Martiny’s latest solo exhibition on view till January 2nd at the Dimmitt Contemporary Art in Houston, continues the artist’s exploration of the "gesture," which is made to exist forever in the present. Katarina at ARS sat down with the artist to talk contemporary culture, artistic influences, and the surprisingly delightful taste of a blue crayon.

KATARINA: Your newest show at the Dimmit Contemporary Art is called “OPEN,” which the curator writes is a reference to “the action of the viewer, rather than the object itself.” For all your viewers out there, what do you think we can all be a little more 'open' to and why?

This venue allows the gallery to provide museum quality works for acquisition, while adding an educational and cultural enhancement to the property. The gallery's 30 year history has focused on post-war and contemporary paintings, sculpture and works on paper, while maintaining an inventory of strong secondary market work. Artists who display innovative techniques and a unique approach to materials are paramount to the gallery's aesthetic. Sponder Gallery is a member of the Fine Art Dealers Association (FADA) and offers personalized support and consulting in all aspects of collecting and appraisal services.

BY THE BOOK | by Jon Thomason

MAX STEVEN Grossman is a celebrated digital photographer. But he’s also, in a more unorthodox sense, a librarian.

Each photograph in his signa- ture series, Bookscapes, is a col- lage of related books—extravagant coffee-table tomes, biographies, critical compendiums, art-history surveys—that do not exist outside the artist’s imagination. As art professor Natalia Brizuela wrote
in a 2017 essay about Grossman’s work, “Books in every image have never quite been placed in that way except in the virtual space of his computer. ... When looked at from a close distance, you can see that each book spine has a distinct image quality, revealing their dif- ferent provenance.”

Architecture Imitates Art at Jonathan Prince’s Berkshire County Home

By Nancy Keates

From one angle, Jonathan Prince's white, circa-1900 farmhouse, reached through an arch of maple trees, blends perfectly into rural Berkshire County's winding roads, stone walls, barns and summer camps.

But get closer, and it is clear somthing is unusual: The neatly trimmed yard, irrigated to stay emerald green, is mowed in different directions, creating a sense of movement. A long path to the kitchen door has piecces of bluestone jetting off to the side at different lengths, leaving dark lines that look like shadows in the grass. And the pristine rectangular swiming pool is a preternatural deep blue, flickering with light reflectiing off what appear to be pebbles.

The intended effect is "numinius" or mystical, says Mr. Prince, a 67 year-old sculptor, whose latest work, a series called "Shatter" currently displayed at Christie's Sculpture Garden in New York, consists of smooth steel water pipes, opened up to reveal reflective, highly polished stainless steel insides resembling broken glass. Three of Mr. Prince's sculptures are currently on sale at Christie's for $675,000 each. A work he sold for $350,000 called "Vestigial Block" is on permanent display at the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University in East Lansing, a donaton of Julie and Edward J. Minskoff.

Frost Tower Fort Worth has commissioned artist Donald Martiny to create a unique work of art for the building’s ground floor lobby. Martiny’s work is internationally known for its unique approach to painting in which standard rectilinear canvases are forgone in favor of a form that is defined by large-scale brushstrokes. Swaths of paint many feet in length construe works that obscure the line between painting and sculpture, inviting viewers for closer inspection and a more dynamic interaction with a work of art. At 14 by 17 feet, the commissioned work must be created on-site, requiring the artist to set up a temporary studio in the lobby at 640 Taylor Street where he will create the piece over the course of a week beginning on November 18th.

Uncanny Portraits: Tigran Tsitoghdzyan's Realism
By Donald Kuspit

What are we to make of Tigran Tsitoghdzyan's "Mirrors" — big, bold portraits, confrontationally large, and black and white, like the negative of a photograph, the colors of life enigmatically erased as though in a melancholy underworld? They are clearly masterpieces, but for all the beauty of the female model peculiarly bleak. However well-realized—empirically precise, insistently descriptive—her appearance, she seems peculiarly unreal. The hands that hide her face, yet let her piercing eyes magically see through them, suggest she is a delusion. Ambiguously transparent and opaque, her hands convey the ambivalence built into the artist's "handling" of her.

The grandeur of Tigran's paintings suggests that she is a delusion of grandeur—that he is deluded about her grandeur, has made her grander and more mysterious than she is in everyday reality. He has mystified her, so that she becomes the mythical eternal feminine, the embodiment of the mystery that is woman, and with that becomes larger than life, a visionary presence yet still a particular person—Tigran's wife, the model who is in fact a professional model, posing for photographers. Tigran begins his portraits with a photograph—today taking the place of the preparatory drawing—and ends with a portrait that however photograph-like has the nuanced touches of a refined painting. Carefully constructed of tonal shadows, it has the emotional subtlety that an everyday photograph lacks. Tigran's portraits lend themselves to reflection, invite lingering contemplation, as a matter-of-fact photograph rarely does. I think this is because each of his portraits, however labor intensive, have the quality of a "primary delusion, i.e., one that arises as an immediate experience, out of the blue, with no external or objective cause or explanation, but nonetheless with a strong feeling of conviction". Out of the blue, in Tigran's portraits out of the black, that is, the haunting female face arises out of the unconscious depths however much it is heightened by consciousness. Tigran's female face is always yonder, at an immense distance, symbolized by its intimidating immensity, however close and impinging it may be. It is a transfixing, perversely sublime spectacle that the spectator only dare view in a mirror–see through a glass darkly, as it were—the way Perseus saw the Medusa's face reflected in the mirror of his shield, so that he would not be petrified by its stare.