#friezespotlight

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Margit Szilvitzky

Margit Szilvitzky (1931 – 2018) graduated from the textile and fashion design department of the University of Applied Arts Budapest in 1954. She worked as a fashion designer before beginning to experiment with fabric. 

Following her early artistic period, inspired by the history of clothing, folk art and the neo-secessionist style, Szilvitzky turned to white canvases in the second half of the seventies. It was also during this time that her attention was shifted to the square, and to a methodology of folding that reflects the influence of Josef Albers’s paper studies. 

Spanning five decades, her artistic approach articulated in various media such as drawing, painting and art books as well. Szilvitzky’s serial works and process art pieces, which represented a shift toward minimal and conceptual art, drew her system-seeking attention not only to the examination of the sculptural potential of textiles, but also to the exploration of interrelation of light and shadow. She was a regular participant in international exhibitions of Hungarian fibre art (Aalborg, Helsinki, etc.), and she also took part in several graphic and artists’ book shows.

Image 1: Margit Szilvitzky, Floor Object 1, 1977

Image 2: Margit Szilvitzky, Evidence No. 2, 1976

Image 3: Artist Margit Szilvitzky. Photo by Miklós Sulyok

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Marthe Wéry

"There is no need to perfect, but always to complete, to continue, " born in Brussels in 1930, Marthe Wéry was a self-taught artist, visiting many museums and galleries, and going to the artistic environments of her era. In 1966, she showed her first works, geometric engravings, at the Saint-Laurent gallery in Brussels. She then taught engraving at the Institut Saint-Luc in Brussels before the engraving studio was merged with the painting studio, at her initiative. She helped train many artists. Teaching was an important part of her life. 

During a trip to the USA, Marthe Wéry discovered American Minimalism, as well as, and especially Unism, which Polish Wladyslaw Strzeminski theorised during the interwar period. She considered the painting as a whole made of equal parts.

Colour itself became her way of thinking and doing. Wéry pushes the limits of painting, exploring all its basic components. Inspired by artists such as Kazimir Malevich or Barnett Newman, her work evolved from geometrical studies and minimalistic work on paper to monochromes that are marked by colour, the interplay of light, transparency and structure provides her paintings tactility and poetry, moving her away from sterile minimalism.

By the end of the 1970s, Wéry start to achieve international recognition. Among her numerous exhibitions, we could note the Venice Biennale in 1982 with a solo show in the Belgium Pavillion.

Image 1:  Marthe Wéry, Untitled, 1998

Image 2: Marthe Wéry, Série Tournai, 2004

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Daniela Vinopalová

Daniela Vinopalová was born in Opava, Czechoslovakia, in 1928 and died in Prague in 2017. She grew up and experienced the turbulence of the 20th-cerntury, living through the German occupation 1939-1945, followed by the republic’s assimilation into the Eastern Bloc from 1948 to 1989. She witnessed the period of liberalization in 1968, known as the Prague Spring, which violently ended when the troops of the Warsaw Pact invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968. Communist rule came to an end with the Velvet Revolution in 1989 and the re-establishment of a democratic parliamentary republic. Vinopalová therefore lived and created her work in conditions in which it was difficult to be an artist and in which life itself was difficult.

Despite this or perhaps because of it, Vinopalová created extraordinary abstract sculptures, in a variety of media, in her Prague apartment-studio, which expressed her spiritual and emotional engagement with the world around her. The birth of something that she could genuinely regard as her own sculptural idiom occurred in the early 1960s as soon as she began to mark out space through the medium of clay, a material so symbolic of human civilisation. Vinopalová tried to discover forms that would emerge from deep within herself. This challenging pursuit gave rise to the original ‘sculpture-vase’.  These non-figurative sculptures resemble a vase but are based on a figure and have no connection with decorative vases.

Her legacy continues with the efforts of the artist’s family and the London based artist estate advisory Stephenson art. 

Image 1: Daniela Vinopalová, Spatial Study II, 1959-1960

Image 2: Daniela Vinopalová, Sculpture vase

Image 3: Daniela Vinopalová in her studio. Photograph by Miroslav Hak

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Sylvia Snowden

Sylvia Snowden is an African-American artist, who lives and works in Washington D.C. 

“I do not believe in an artist’s statement for me because it seems to narrow the viewer’s reaction and direct him/her to draw specific limitations. In my work, I hope to evoke stimulating responses.” - Sylvia Snowden 

Snowden decided to make portraits of people around her all of whom she encountered in her Shaw neighborhood in Washington, D.C. They look abstract and don’t see faces in these portraits. The drama of Snowden’s subjects, and the sheer grace of their ability to survive and thrive, references the strength and delicate beauty in the human figure that her art celebrates. From dark and earthy tones to the vibrant and artificial, Snowden’s command of chromatic range is the fuel of her expressionistic style. She encapsulates the psychological essence of her subjects; their deliberations, triumphs, angst, and joy are all laid bare.

Sylvia Snowden holds both Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts degrees from Howard University (Washington, D.C.). Snowden has taught at Cornell University (Ithaca, NY), Howard University (Washington, D.C.), and Yale University (New Haven, CT). In 2018, Snowden’s work was notably featured in the landmark exhibition Magnetic Fields: Expanding American Abstraction, 1960-Today at the National Museum for Women in the Arts (Washington, D.C.). Her works have been shown globally in Chile, the Netherlands, Ethiopia, Australia, the Bahamas, France, Mexico, Italy and Japan.

Image 1: Sylvia Snowden, ‘Brown - Yo II’, 1989

Image 2: Sylvia Snowden, ‘M Street - Francine 11 (Haberon Series)’, c. 1978

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Katie van Scherpenberg

Katie van Scherpenberg, born in São Paulo in 1940, spent her formative years between Brazil and Europe, completed her studies in England, and a two-year scholarship was granted by the German government in 1961-63 that allowed her to study painting in Munich with Georg Brenninger (1909-1988) and in Salzburg with Oskar Kokoshcka (1816-1986). 

In 1968 she took the radical decision to move and settle in the remote Amazonian island of Ilha de Santana, where she spent most of the next 17 years. The absolute lack of professional art materials drove her to research ways to make natural pigments from soil. Speaking about this period her life, the artist recounted: ‘You could say that the river was, among other things, so much paint, for it contained a large quantity of pigments (ferrous oxides) from faraway places, and together with this paint it brought me a whole lot of information. In this sense, the river is somewhat like a painting…A river is like life, it is never stable, by its very nature - particularly the Amazon.’

Exploring the dynamics of the relationship between support and material, she prepared mixtures made with gesso, tempera, sawdust, wax, and other materials onto plywood boards, adding pigments onto the surface to create abstract works in which form and materiality are highlighted. Speaking about this period, van Scherpenberg stated that these works gave rise to ‘the idea of a succession of forms leading to the unknown, the fundamental, the sacred thing, and finally painting as a road to knowledge.’

Since August 2019, Katie van Scherpenberg has been exclusively represented by Cecilia Brunson Projects. 

Image: Katie van Scherpenberg, ‘Study,’ 1986

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Mary Corse

Mary Corse investigates materiality, abstraction, and perception through the subtly gestural and precisely geometric paintings that she has made over her fifty-year career. She developed her initial work during the emergence of the Light and Space movement in Southern California. She shared with her contemporaries a deep fascination with perception and with the possibility that light itself could serve as both a subject and material of art. Yet while others moved towards sculptural and environmental projects, Corse approached the question of light through painting. 

Throughout the 1960s, she experimented with unconventional media and supports, producing shaped canvases, works with plexiglass, and illuminated boxes. The realization that she could conjure this sensation of light using reflective glass beads changed the trajectory of Corse’s career. In 1968, she discovered glass microspheres, an industrial material used in street signs and dividing lines on highways. 

Combining these tiny refractive beads with acrylic paint, she creates paintings that appear to radiate light from within and produce shifts in appearance contingent on their surroundings and the viewer’s position. “When I put in light and the brushwork, the viewer’s position and movement actually creates the painting,” Mary Corse said.

Recently, after thirty years of working monochromatically, she reintroduced primary colours into her paintings based on her understanding of colour as constitutive of white light. Corse’s art emphasizes the abstract nature of human perception, expanding beyond the visual to include subtleties of feeling and awareness.

Image 1: Mary Corse,Untitled (Space + Electric Light), 1968 © Mary Corse

Image 2: Mary Corse, Untitled (White, Black Band (Narrow), Beveled), 2019 © Mary Corse

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Geneviève Claisse

Geneviève Claisse, a self-taught French painter, born in 1935 in Quiévy, discovered geometric abstraction by reading various art magazines such as “Art d’Aujourd’hui,” which praised certain avant-garde pictorial currents. Her first works were lyrical abstractions treated in vivid patches of solid colour. She later expanded her vocabulary in her search for movement and multiple spaces that would animate the flatness of the painted surface. 

Claisse understood intuitively that painting was vital, and that abstraction was the only possible path for her. The artist rejected the reality of everyday objects, the recognizable. She has emphatically stated “I was really born the day I discovered abstraction."

The best-known compositions of her graphic repertoire are the circles, single, double, underlined with black; concentric, unequal, off-centred and painted with interiority. They are juxtaposed and associated with strong colours. They create an impression of movement and provoke a staggering force of attraction. This tension, in which the liveliness of the colours plays a primordial role, gives life to the works. It is the key element that makes inertia disappear.

Geneviève Claisse pursued her research on geometric shapes over the decades, using titles that are not evocative of what they represent, but simply used to group her work into series. This journey, which she described with great simplicity, was not as easy as it seemed, because the simpler the rules, the harder it is to hide. Each colour, each line, each shape, are so stable, that it is impossible to find an imbalance. The colour is flawless.

Image: Geneviève Claisse, Meson, 1975 © A&R Fleury, © ADAGP, Paris

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Dadamaino

Eduarda Emilia Maino, known under her pseudonym Dadamaino, was an Italian artist from the Milan avant-garde of the 1960s. Throughout her works, her irrepressible ability to perpetuate a refined lightness is evident. 

"I was also interested in movement, in the Volumes where I cut out almost everything was seen behind the wall, you could see the shadows, with the light it seemed that everything was moving. [...] At the gaps I followed a closer rhythm at the holes, an order and put a bottom so that the lights and shadows could 'project' their presence by changing the work.” – Dadamaino, 2003

Dadamaino’s art include the black or white painted canvases with hand-cut holes in them, focusing on an absence of matter. The psychedelic-optical works of the Oggetto Ottico Dinamico series, which create meticulous specifications on size, milling, ratio of filled and empty parts of the work and arrangement of the plates, followed by the Ricerca del colore series, in which she undertook scrupulous analyses of the solar spectrum’s chromatic combinations.

In the 1970s Dadamaino took a different direction as she developed a set of invented signs. Most notable among these is L’Alfabeto della mente, a series of seven alphabet-like signs, where she filled her compositions with her invented signs, repeating each one endlessly. 

She had been a member of Piero Manzoni's Azimuth Gallery in Milan, which was in close contact with other artist groups such as the German Zero Group, the Dutch Group Nul and the French Group Motus. Later she joined the Nouvelle Tendance movement. Today, Dadamaino is considered one of Italy's most progressive artists and has emerged as a pioneer in the avant-garde movements of her time.

Image 1: Dadamaino, Volume, 1959 © Archivio Dadamaino Image 2: Dadamaino, Volume a moduli sfasati, 1960 © Archivio Dadamaino