COMING SOON: Inside the Painter's Studio · Jun 16, 09:39 AM
Inside the Painter’s Studio by Joe Fig won’t be out until October, but in the meantime, Fig’s new exhibition is up at Carroll and Sons gallery in Boston. Here is an excerpt from a recent Boston Globe review:
“The artist’s studio can be seen as a hallowed place, a physical manifestation of the artist’s imagination – the space in which ideas sprout and take form. Re-creating images from the studio as works of art is a gutsy leap. Is a copy of a palette or a work table an original artwork in its own right? There are also digital prints here of some of Fig’s sculptures. All these iterations trumpet Fig’s obsession, but they also probe questions of authorship: Who is the auteur here, Fig or his subject? Where does the art begin, or end? Is this art or documentary? The sculptor is canny about it all, making him a clever conceptual artist as well as a realist.”
“Fig’s technical chops and intensity of purpose imbue his works with the easy charm of intricate miniature worlds, appealing to anyone who wanders in. “Ross Bleckner 2007” shows us that artist’s capacious, orderly studio from the outside; to see the artist at work, surrounded by canvases, we have to peer in the windows. The details Fig offers fascinate: A lineup of “Palette Paintings” dares to posit the accumulated schmears of pigment as paintings in themselves, although they lack any forethought. It’s impossible to resist comparing Close’s discrete puddles of tone with Inka Essenhigh’s morass of hot red, or Jane Freilicher’s storm of slanting dabs, which looks like a blown-up detail from an Impressionist painting. The fastidious sculptural reproduction of Essenhigh’s paint-speckled, trash-scattered drop cloth and James Siena’s work table, crowded with jars, cups, and stirrers candy-coated with bright paint, is mind-boggling. It’s an absorbing show…”
JOE FIG: In the Painter’s Studio
At: Carroll and Sons,
450 Harrison Ave., through June 27. 617-482-2477,
www.carrollandsons.net
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