Ebon Fisher Interviewed on Yale Radio

Brainard Carey of Yale Radio talks with Immersive pioneer Ebon Fisher about Immersionist culture, memes, and media organisms, starting with Fisher's early work at the MIT Media Lab, and leading up to his role in Immersionism in Williamsburg in the 90s, and beyond. The discussion is about Fisher's work, but it loops around all kinds of interesting developments in Brooklyn back in the day.

Boundless Space, Vanishing Space

A new painting by Rafael Gomez Luna

Eagle Eye Rafael Gomez Luna 2016

The Children's School in Park Slope is one of the best grade schools in the city. It feels like a private school when you walk in. But this is PS 372, which just had its annual fundraising gala and art auction. "My daughter is in a class of twenty-five, and they have six teachers, for 25 children," Rafael Gomez Luna tells me. "We are really lucky to have her in this school, and I am grateful, really grateful. That's why I do so much for the school."

Immersionism Book Underway

Ebon Fisher and Ilene Zori Magaras are the editors of an upcoming book about the Immersionist movement in Brooklyn in the 1990s, it's influences and outcomes. The book will be replete with photographs from the era, and writing by key Immersionists.

morphopolis – new paintings by Robert Egert

Robert Egert – Bleeding Hearts and Distraught Souls Cannot Prevail
Against Economic Systems Designed by Non-Human Constructs
oil, acrylic, tempera on canvas 60 x 48 in. 2015

Catalog essay by Laura J. Padgett

with an afterword by Ethan Pettit

Oct 3 – Dec 19 – 2015

with Guest Artists Chris Fiore and Tobias Tak

Oct 3 | 7–9:30 PM | Opening Night
Performance by (NOS) (a genre-fluid mental health tribute band)

Andrea Egert LSW – vocals
Jack Schwartz PhD – guitar
Billy Paige CpD – drums

Nov 14 | 8:00–10 PM | Movie Night
with Eva Schicker and Chris Fiore

Dec 19 | 7–10 PM | Closing Party

Shapes have a memory of their own, a life of their own. The creator of a particular shape conjures a life force within the shape. Not a life force recorded by the process of painting but rather inherent in the shape itself by using line and form to bring a shape with agency into being. — RE


The Paintings of Robert Egert

Laura J. Padgett

Let’s have a look at this. Let’s observe closely. When we regard any kind of artwork today we can identify a plethora of references: art historical, cultural, societal, some visual. How can we contemplate what an artwork is about while at the same time see what it is? How do non-visual references influence, not what an artwork looks like, but how we see it? How do we know what something is about? How do we inform ourselves as viewers to be educated enough to know what we are comprehending when viewing an artwork?

These are questions that immediately run through my mind when I look at art, especially Robert Egert’s — and I have been looking at his work throughout his entire career. Is what we see a story, a satire, a microscopic enlargement, an analysis of DNA or patterns taken from a satellite view?

Robert Egert is an artist who thrives from the confluence of many arteries. When I met him during foundation year at Pratt Institute. I was impressed that he was born and raised in Brooklyn. Still, I don’t know if I was more impressed by his knowledge of Greek and Roman myths, I think they kind of balanced each other out.

This is important. This is important to be able to see Robert Egert’s work. He is grounded in the here and now, with a knowledge that runs through antiquity to contemporary science fiction. I don’t want to be too specific, but we can talk about rhizomes, fracking, Pan, the Loreley, Russian cinema, the Golden Age, artificial intelligence and gun control.

Robert Egert – We Need a Working Session
acrylic, dyed glue, tempera on canvas • 30 x 34 in • 2015
collection of Sean Briski

Robert Egert – 26 Females – oil on canvas 28 x 36 in. 2015

All kinds of things are in his head when he paints. He thinks a lot when he works. He doesn’t make it easy on himself. The arteries that nourish his system can contradict each other, can almost cancel each other out, only to join together to strengthen each other. His work has evolved from narrative to abstract to abstract narrative. It is fluid in an overlapping viscous kind of way.

Robert Egert’s fluidity develops from a concept. This is no flimsy use of the word. At Pratt in the seventies we enjoyed a rigorous education in minimalist and conceptual art, both in theory and practice. This underlies Robert Egert’s work no matter what it looks like. His early painting moved from constructed spatial objects to new takes on Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

In the early 1980s when the East Village was hip and dangerous, I saw his exhibition at Civilian Warfare. His paintings were large oil canvases, vernacular objects floated amidst a color field ground, weird perspectives generated a sense of insecure place. These works referenced the uncertainty of the times, a change in value systems, a world drifting towards an ambivalent future.

Years before artists like Neo Rauch appeared on the scene, Robert Egert was making paintings that collaged the mundane with the historical in a mix that said something about contemporary politics. Manifesting duplicity by referencing nostalgia, his work pinned down the eclecticism of the time, making images that were complex and unapologetic. Since then Robert Egert’s work has evolved to be more pondering, while reductive, dealing with questions that go beyond the contemporary. The years following the heady days of New York in the eighties took him in many directions.

Robert Egert – Exogenesis
dyed glue, oil, acrylic on canvas 28 x 36 in. 2015

Robert Egert – Short Palindromic Repetitions
oil on canvas 24 x 30 in. 2015
collection of ethan pettit gallery

Robert Egert went on to study philosophy and sociology, founded a family, wrote for art journals and has had a good look at corporate America. Inevitably, his approach to painting has become more encompassing as he incorporates experience gained outside the hermetics of the art world. His work revolves around questions like: What is life flow? What is humanity?

The sense of searching to make humanity palpable without obvious visual cues is a quest that Robert Egert has set out upon. When we look at the shapes in his paintings we see patterns interlocking and overlays of color. Sometimes we become aware of a figure. Is it human? Put simply, Egert’s paintings can be seen as a cartography of humanity. The body is ephemeral, fleeting and appearing, drifting and separating.

Robert Egert – Quarantine Summary
oil on canvas 22 x 28 in. 2015

Robert Egert – Tautology
pigmented glue, crayon, acrylic on canvas 24 x 28 in. 2015

The interchange of foreground and background is reminiscent of mutating cells. Yet there is also an all-encompassing skin. Is this a view from a petridish? Once again we see the flux from macro to micro, an interweaving of space in which scale becomes a nonissue.

If scale is a nonissue, we are directed to specific ideas that are important to Egert by his use of titles. Concepts that Octavia Butler developed in her trilogy “Lilith’s Brood” have occupied Egert while completing his most recent work. Writes Egert on his blog, “Her books posit interbreeding between an alien society and humans in the wake of a nuclear holocaust that essentially wipes out humans and destroys the earth. The aliens that come to save the few survivors on earth interbreed to create a new hybrid species.”

Robert Egert – We Will Be Reassembling at 5PM
mixed media on canvas 24 x 32 in. 2015
collection of Owen Berkowitz

Interbreeding, an attempt at rescuing while eliminating the original. All these thoughts connect Robert’s new work to his past work in regard to his concerns with dystopian society.

Perhaps we could call Robert Egert’s painting contemporary action painting, however not the kind of action painting by which the body directs the artist’s movements and marks made on the canvas. In Egert’s paintings the gesture is removed from the maker; it becomes a kind of meditative, autonomous painting, a kind of painting that is more related to the European tachism than American action painting.* The German “informel” artist Bernhard Schultze comes to mind with his figures wavering between human and animal forms.

And so we return to the questions one asks oneself when looking at an artwork. When does the decorative become something else? How can an artist translate the complexities of our being into paintings that are not just to be looked at? It comes down to the fact that we understand very little when we first look at an artwork. Therefore, if we see what we know, isn’t it better to know a little more? This is what makes us human. Or is it? This is the question that Robert Egert will continue to pose and continue to offer, at least partial, answers to.



Laura J. Padgett is an American-born artist, photographer, filmmaker, and educator currently based in Frankfurt/Main, Germany. Since 1991, Padgett’s work has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions, and her films have been screened at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the House of World Cultures in Berlin, and at the Städel Museum in Frankfurt. Her photography has been widely published. Since 1994, Padgett has held appointments as a lecturer on art theory and criticism at the Bauhaus-Universität in Weimar, the Hochschule für Gestaltung at Offenbach, the Hochschule-Rhein-Main at Wiesbaden, and at Paderborn University. Padgett also writes about film, art, and aesthetic theory. Since 2000 she has been a contributing editor of the film journal Frauen und Film.


* Tachism: a style of painting adopted by some French artists around the 1940s, involving dabs or splotches of color, a process of action and reaction.



Behold. Morphopolis. Transfigured City. Synthetic Turn.

Ethan Pettit

Robert Egert’s career coincides with the transfiguration of New York. He and I knew each other in Williamsburg back in the 90s. We renewed our friendship when he joined the gallery three years ago, when we were located in Bushwick. In the intervening years we witnessed the morphopolis, the city that morphs with impunity. The city that swells and balloons with in-filled and up-zoned urbanity.

Robert Egert – Pendulum
conté on printmaking paper 14 x 21 in. 2012
This work is not on display in the show morphopolis

Though we may decry this event, the early Brooklyn art scene anticipated it. Unwittingly, but certainly, the Brooklyn scene anticipated the hyper-gentrified, neo-liberal accretion that marks our times. For it was a creed of the scene that things should morph. Toward the end of the last century, when “downtown” migrated to Brooklyn, the mode of artistic production began to shift as well. The postmodern art of the 1980s gave way to the unearthly formalism of Brooklyn in the 1990s.

The “immersive” environments of the warehouses as well as a recrudescent abstraction in the plastic arts were emblematic of Brooklyn art. And this was an art given to formal inventiveness, to transforming space, to unknown instead of known culture. It was a “synthetic mode of production,” as distinct from the “analytic” mode of the 1980s that was as yet more astringent, allegorical, and seated in a downtown avant-garde of a hundred years standing.

We might call it “the synthetic turn.” And in its enthusiasm for synthesis, for the breeding of forms and systems, Brooklyn art comported with the transformation of the borough, guided it even, lent to it a utopian zeal, even as the art itself struggled to stay in Brooklyn.

Hence the morphopolitan experience that gives the name to our show. Robert Egert’s career spans the whole of it. He began as an exemplary East Village painter, with the keen reflexive instincts of that school. Those instincts, analytic in nature, in time found expression in singular

shapes that are redolent of the synthoid moment of Brooklyn. His is a rare and vital passage to which people have tended to pay attention. Robert Egert is a draw, of that there is no doubt, and for that we are lucky to have him on board. He resonates with a generation that belongs to the morphopolis.

Robert Egert – Knot
oil on canvas 56 x 48 in. circa 1986
This work is not on display in the show morphopolis

Download the catalog

Robert Egert's profile on this website

Deportraiture – Barbara Friedman

Recent paintings and drawings

April 20 - June 29, 2014

Barbara Friedman's profile on this site

Big Collar 1 oil on linen 60 x 48 in. 2014

Big Collar 2 oil on linen 60 x 48 in. 2014

Big Collar 3 oil on linen 60 x 48 in. 2014

catalog (pdf download 4.2 MB)

Portrait of Gertrude van Limborch
(after Thomas de Keyser) oil on wood 24 x 18 in. 2014

Over the past two years I’ve parked my easel at the Brooklyn Museum, often in front of Thomas de Keyser’s portrait of Gertrude van Limborch (1632). When I am there I paint my own versions of the portrait, letting my rendition verge on disappearing, or else allowing some features to spring into focus, in a way that threatens to make the source unrecognizable.

These “versions” of the de Keyser contain a trace of Gertrude van Limborch’s face. She is the touchstone for any variations I produce, as the subjects are in other portraits from that era. My purpose in working from these old paintings is to serve both their makers and their subjects: not just to bring de Keyser back into view but van Limborch too, and every other person now long dead who was lively and aware when the painters portrayed them.

Another presence is my mother, who used many aliases during her eventful life. It was only after her death that I discovered that as a child she went by the name Gertrude. She invented so much about her life that her adult existence became a distorted portrait she had painted of herself, barely showing the girl Gertrude she had started out as.

One prominent feature of many of these paintings is the Dutch ruff collar. This was a big starched and pleated collar, a style that lasted from about 1550 to 1650. A “pinwheel” around the neck, the ruff was also used on sleeve cuffs. The discovery of starch allowed ruffs to be formed in elaborate figure-eights. The ruff held one’s head up in a haughty pose, aristocratically, with obvious appeal for wealthy Europeans of the time. Queen Elizabeth I wore a ruff, but she issued decrees that limited the size and even the colors of ruffs that could be worn by commoners outside the royal court. In some of the newest paintings from this series the collar is extremely exaggerated.

Although these paintings still riff off my museum studies, they play more aggressively with scale and color, and bring the ornate ruff collar into the territory of gender, class, and body issues.

— Barbara Friedman, April 2014

Portrait of Gertrude van Limborch
Thomas de Keyser
(Dutch 1596/97–1667) at the Brooklyn Museum

Cropped Gertrude
oil on linen 48 x 16 in 2014

The “portrait” has been Barbara Friedman’s idiom of choice in recent years, and yet portraiture is only one dimension of what the critic Lilly Wei calls, without exaggeration, a “formally inventive” approach to painting. These are instinctive and erudite paintings, and they summon a formidable range of strategies. Friedman sets up her easel in museums and pretends to copy the old masters, a trope she associates with “lady” painters. Then comes a subtle but unrelenting process of distortion, destruction, and recovery.

Friedman is a professor at Pace University, a resident of lower Manhattan, and a veteran of the East Village scene. I met Barbara a few years ago when she visited our showroom in Bushwick. Soon after that she became represented at our gallery, and since then she has also showed at Valentine, Studio 10, and Storefront Ten Eyck. Her unearthly portraits have cast a prolonged gaze into this inscrutable demimonde. They are tuned to the habits and the jitters of people who prowl the galleries of Brooklyn and downtown at the present time. And this quality sets them off, distinguishes them as a keen synthesis of painterly and temporal issues.

We are thrilled to be opening Deportraiture on April 19th, a large show of Friedman’s recent work. This show will occupy the front and back rooms of our gallery, it is a thorough display of the work of a painter who has already made a strong showing in Brooklyn. We are honored and proud to host this show, and I hope you will join us for the opening.

— Ethan Pettit, April 2014

Portrait of Gertrude van Limborch
(after Thomas de Keyser) oil on wood 24 x 18 in. 2014

Portrait of a Dutch Woman oil on linen 48 x 46 in. 2014

A Ruff Meditation

Ethan Pettit

The salient of that febrile mind that tossed and turned between the afflatus of Shakespeare and the appearance of Isaac Newton, was the ruff collar. By some accounts an article of fashion not to be outdone until the 1970s, it was a sartorial pinwheel that couched the head and doubtless gyrated to Kepler’s laws of planetary motion.

At the dawn of empire it sprang from the throat. “Sooner may one guess who shall bear away The Infanta of London, heir to an India,” wrote Donne, than one may guess, “What fashioned hats, or ruffs, or suits next year our subtle-witted antic youths will wear.”

They wore the ruff for about another twenty or thirty years, until the middle of the 1600s. It was an Elizabethan accessory that survived the Thirty Years War, the Eighty Years War, the Civil War, for it was laden with starch. The ruff went out of fashion as the scientific awakening began, but long before the time of the Bach family and the awakening in arts and letters that is still with us, or should be.

In the Meditations Descartes says not simply that he thinks therefore he is. Had he said only that he would have vanished. He says more poignantly that he exists because he can be deceived. If all that he knows and feels is suspect, then he is deceived. But for something to be deceived there must be something to deceive, hence something exists. Here is the astringent reduction, the first picture of the “thing that thinks” which Spinoza would rehearse as well somewhat later.

Most careful attention must have been paid to the head when it had lost trust in its body and the world around it and knew not yet what laws governed bodies in the world. Hence the accordion that unfolds from the neck and buffers the brain in a provisional sphere.

And even among the protestant divines of New England, with their immensely complex interior lives, you find that radiant countenance framed in the ruff. Though here the broad flat collar largely replaced the ruff, still it is on the first governor of Massachusetts. On John Smith of Virginia it is, shockingly, as bizarre as the headdress of Powhatan.

It was in the other Dutch colony, the one north of Flushing Avenue, that Barbara Friedman’s unearthly portraits drew attention to the reflexes of the picture-viewing public. It was an unnerving appearance. And in this new range of portraits her distortions are joined to a beguiling anachronism, a separation of the head by a device from the far side of the modern repertoire, and which sweeps away with not a little pomp all of the tropes that are supposed to populate a canvas.

Portrait of Gertrude van Limborch
Thomas de Keyser
(Dutch 1596/97 - 1667) oil on canvas, 1632

Gertrude with Green Collar on Red
oil on linen36 x 27 in. 2014

Big Portrait of a Dutch Man (after Jacob Backer)
oil on linen 48 x 46 in. 2014

Big Collar with Child oil on linen 27 x 36 in. 2014

Big Collar 4 oil on linen 60 x 48 in. 2014

Interleaf Drawings charcoal on glassine on paper 2013

Gertrude’s Collar Over an Alpine Village
oil on linen 2012-14

Gertrude’s Forehead oil on wood 24 x 18 in. 2014

The Zone

 

The Zone was an abandoned factory located at 104 South 4th Street between Bedford Avenue and Berry Street. In the mid 1980s the seven-storey building had three "tenants," only one of whom paid rent. On the top floor were the artists and punks who squatted the place for studio space. Some of them even lived there. A local Puerto Rican gang had the 4th floor. On the ground floor was the last legal tenant, Klaus, a German engineer in his 60s at least, who puttered around in a labyrinth of machinery. And if anything dubious happened in the Zone, which it did, Klaus did a good imitation of Sergeant Schultz from Hogan's Heros — "I KNOW NOTH-INK!"

Ideogram and Morphism - Robert Egert

Inversion blue chalk, blue conté on printmaking paper, 11 x 17 in. 2012

The underworld, a world unknown by any living person, is imagined as an extension of our own world but perversely altered. It exists in a parallel universe–a magical place that obeys the laws of conventional, three dimensional space but yet cannot be accessed save by passing through the transformation of death. Like a mirror to our own world, the underworld is often depicted as an inverted reflection of our living reality. An inverted torch, a window that slides open from the top, a bed that clings to the ceiling. - R.E.

Robert Egert’s biomorphic, blue chalk drawings took me by surprise – full of magma energy, wit, and speculations on the body, on science, on nature mimicking art. His images are Darwin’s dreams, Philip Guston’s party-jokes, or Frida Kahlo’s sighs of grief. They hold underworlds of swirly vessels, Klein bottles (non-orientable, mathematical surfaces), slaughterhouse slurry turned into bone meal, and pumping diastolic hearts. While classically beautiful, they shocked me to subservience – I was suddenly alone, at 30,000 feet, where I could hear a pin drop.

— William Allen, WG Magazine, September 2012

Robert Egert grew up riding his bicycle through Bushwick in the 1970s. Twenty years later he was living in Williamsburg and was one of the handful of artists who founded the artists’ community there. Williamsburg’s early bohemians share an intense bond. They are like family to me. And even if I might not know them well, as friends in the ordinary sense, I know them deeply in connection with our shared philosophical roots.

Lekythoi No.6 tempera on archival paper 23 x 30 in. 2012

Williamsburg in the 90s was an oasis of weirdness at a time when art on the whole was very derivative. There was a movement here that advanced synthesis over analysis in art making. The neighborhood became known for hybrid forms and unearthly environments. There was a generative, organic quality to the art that was starkly different from the imagistic literalism of postmodernism. You can see this overall trend in Williamsburg in the work of Roxy Paine, Chris Martin, Amy Sillman, Ken Butler, Rachel Harrison, Ebon Fisher, to name a few. And you can also see in the history of this art scene a fusion between conceptualism and abstract painting.

To be sure, art writers invariably strain to find overarching narratives, and I would not attempt to do this, for example, with the new trends in painting in Bushwick, which in most cases I think are no more connected with old Williamsburg than they are with any number of other historical trends in painting. Still, we can point to some things that happened to New York Art at the turn of the century as the scene began to migrate across the East River. The appearance of certain esoteric and organic motifs in abstract painting in Greenpoint in the 1980s (James Harrison, Peter Acheson, Chris Martin). And the way in which certain conceits of minimalism merged with media art in the “warehouse movement” along the waterfront in the early 90s.

Robert Egert’s work provides a key to this transition. His work spans the whole of it. Some of his paintings even look like keys, or compact hybrids of organic life and language poised for an unraveling.

Torasik conté on printmaking paper, approx. 12 x 23 in. 2010-2011

A Klein Bottle is a mathematical construction that takes the form of a three-dimensional object. The Klein Bottle has a single continuous surface that coterminously includes both interior and exterior surfaces. Apposite to the basic nature of evolutionary biology, the Klein Bottle is in fact a primitive model for capture, consumption and digestion. - R.E.

Robert Egert oil on canvas, late 80s

Robert began his career in the postmodern East Village and Soho in the 80s. Then he was in the middle of the Brooklyn phenomenon in the 90s. He took a master’s degree in Marxist studies at the storied CUNY grad center under Marshall Berman, a right of passage of many thinkers and readers in the neighborhood at that time. And so even though there is a Brooklyn synthetic quality to his organic forms, there is also an analytic quality that comes through from the 80s fascination with history, power, the construction of knowledge (epistemology), and so forth.

Organ 1 conté on printmaking paper, 12 x 17 in. 2009

The delicate red and blue conté drawings remind me of those mysterious illustrations in the very first encyclopedias, like the drawings assembled by the brigade of draftsmen who accompanied Napoleon’s army to Egypt. Specimens from a naïve science.

Robert Egert oil on cavas, late 80s

Pendulum conté on printmaking paper, 11 x 17 in. 2012

The word pendulum can refer to the swinging part of a clock that acts to maintain and regulate movement. But the origin of the word comes from the latin, pendulus, hanging down. Our own gross (large) organs are concentrated in our chest, thorax, neck and head, and our appendages are largely composed of skeletal, muscular, adipose tissue, nerve, skin, etc. In the future, scientists will likely explore the implantation of sensory organs in our appendages to enhance our sensorial capacity. This will be especially useful in military applications. - R.E.

The conté drawings could also be rubbings from some alien fossil, or powdery carbon copies drawn out of some forgotten photomechanical process. One inspiration that Robert mentions are medical illustrations of vascular systems, where long arteries are truncated for easier viewing.

Somewhere between language and life form, Egert draws these entities as discrete symbols, carefully conjoined with their negative spaces. And then there are intricate details inside the shapes, rendering a deeper layer of anatomy. The drawings are done on a rough and allegedly extinct kind of laid printing paper. The pigment dust lies on the page a delicate powder, much like Odilon Redon’s use of charcoal.

They are pithy but not cynical. Actually they are affirmative and sincere. They hold out an ephemeral optimism against a disembodied modernity that they nonetheless acknowledge. Simply, the possibility of new aesthetic life against considerable odds. They remind me of the marks that a philosopher might make who has forsaken writing, but whose pictograms still contain the powder of the battlefield.

— Ethan Pettit, 25 September 2012

Robert Egert's profile on this website