This work is distinctively Grossmann, yet palpably different. While the events of the past six months are not the subject matter of Angela Grossmann’s new body of work, Old School, one immediately apprehends her figures as post-September 11.
Over her two decades of art-making, Grossmann’s faces have looked down. They have looked out. They have looked back. Now they look in.
The faces in her latest work turn inward with the new knowledge — that we now all have — that bold assurances are no longer possible. Holding up to us our reluctantly acquired vulnerability, Grossmann, again, as she has done consistently over the years, keys into the sensibility of the times, showing us what we have recently come to know — that we most surely live in a world without guarantees. In her previous exhibition at Diane Farris Gallery in November 2000, Looking Back, she showed us the face of women’s newfound assurance. Few of us, male or female, are now capable of that same unassailable confidence.
Grossmann renders the works in this exhibition in three formats — very small postcard-size photographs upon which she has worked; long, narrow vertical scrolls on which she appears to evoke rather than depict figures and faces; and large canvases of mostly female figures, yielded reflexively.
With the small works there is the double sense of looking in — the viewer looks in to the small space to share the introspection of the figures painted on, and with, the photograph. With these works she continues her ongoing conversation with those in photographs, using old ones she has found, as she has done before in previous bodies of work, revisiting and reinventing them with paint. In a 1992 artist’s statement, Grossmann described this process as “using a mixture of their time and current techniques” to bring the faces into her time.
The work on long, narrow scrolls with their dark shadowy forms summons up most powerfully for this viewer both the now destroyed World Trade Centre towers and the ghosts this destruction created. While not very large, these pieces hold the wall with their vastness.
The large canvasses signal our new apprehension and inward turn writ large. And it is in this format that we discover most clearly the title of the exhibition with Grossmann’s reminder that painting is by no means Old School. Those who sneer at painting and its practitioners as “old school’ could find their medium of privilege jeered at as easily by that which follows their not-so-new-anymore mode. Indeed, can the very term “old school’ hold any meaning in the ever transforming 21st century?
As she did in her previous series, Looking Back, Grossmann again joins together two ways of working — and adds a third with the long, vertical scrolls.
During her years as a student, and immediately following her graduation in 1985, the works were large, and figurative. Some years later, in Amsterdam, when she was pregnant with her son Sebastiaan and no longer able to work with large canvasses, Grossmann turned to working at a far smaller scale, often using photographs, carefully selected, which she then made her own within the work she produced.
The tower-like scrolls — piano-player scrolls from the old piano players — comprise material found umarked except for the narrow cuts found in the this very early data-processing forms of the former digital age, with words, now so apt for our times, of songs written in non-sequential order running down the sides of the scrolls.
With this new work, Grossmann makes visible our new sensibility as she holds up for fresh review an old art-making form, and we as viewer look in on art practices and transforming selves.
©S Fuller 2011