Any sense of impending doom you may feel may evaporate after you view the luminous works of Martine Johanna during “Something’s Wrong,” the artist’s first solo exhibition at this New York Gallery.     

Martine Johanna’s first solo exhibition at Massey Lyuben Gallery in New York City is an intimate exploration of feminine youth that is sure to intrigue viewers. On view through June 10, “Something’s Wrong” is a vivid presentation of Johanna’s autobiographical works through both figurative and abstract techniques.

“The works portray idioms of youth that melt away,” the gallery suggests, “while other scenes feel like being swept away by dreamscapes. Naively drawn totem animals work as figments of the imagination. There is a distinct feeling of loss coupled with a gratifying effect of color, composition, and light. For the first time, several figures confront the viewer with a mixture of anger, coldness, grief, persistence, and distance.

“Martine Johanna is an artist known for her vivid paintings with both figurative and abstract elements. Her autobiographic works, seemingly lighthearted, explore the duality between youthful naivety and anxiety-riddled adulthood. The figures, fierce but fragile, crowd the compositions and occupy the majority of the space gazing distractedly into the beyond. Each of Johanna’s delicately rendered figures convey a sense of immersion within their own internal psychic landscape.

“The work is imbued with a mysterious narrative and sensation of knowing that each character in the work has a full and complex history that the viewer can never completely comprehend. The paintings have a signature prismatic palette, visually stimulating and playful while expressing an underlying sense of uncertainty and unrest.”

To learn more, visit Massey Lyuben Gallery.

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The Brooklyn Museum has graciously lent a spectacular body of 65 artworks for an exhibition that highlights France as the artistic center of international Modernism from the mid-19th to mid-20th centuries.

Ranging widely in scale, subject matter, and style, “Monet to Matisse: A Century of French Moderns” is a wonderful exhibition on view through June 4 at the McNay Museum in San Antonio, Texas. Loaned from the permanent holdings of the Brooklyn Museum in New York, “the works in the exhibition exemplify the avant-garde movements that defined modern art in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, tracing a shift from capturing the visual to evoking the idea, from an emphasis on naturalism to the rise of abstraction,” the McNay reports. “The exhibition explores the themes of portraiture, landscape, and still life, providing an opportunity for a multi-dimensional and flexible installation.”

Represented artists include Pierre Bonnard, Gustave Caillebotte, Paul Cézanne, Marc Chagall, Camille Corot, Gustave Courbet, Edgar Degas, Jean-Léon Gérôme, Fernand Léger, Édouard Manet, Henri Matisse, Jean-François Millet, Claude Monet, Berthe Morisot, Gabriele Münter, Odilon Redon, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Auguste Rodin, Yves Tanguy, and Édouard Vuillard.

To learn more, visit the McNay Art Museum.

This article was featured in Fine Art Today, a weekly e-newsletter from Fine Art Connoisseur magazine. To start receiving Fine Art Today for free, click here.

Bernarducci Meisel Gallery in New York City will soon mount an important exhibition that highlights the significant — and often subverted — role women have played in the development of contemporary American Realism. Don’t pass this up!

Curated by art historian Jody B. Cutler for New York City’s Bernarducci Meisel Gallery, “Painting the Visible World: American Women Realists” is a significant group exhibition that illuminates a fascinating narrative in the history of postwar art. Opening June 8 and on view through July 22, the exhibition builds upon the work of many feminist art scholars and curators: deconstructing categorical boundaries to address systemic exclusion through male-driven criteria, and correctives to patriarchic art historical narratives. While these endeavors can be extended to all eras and all genres, “Painting the Visible World” spotlights 16 formative female artists and their contributions to contemporary American Realism.

“The selection is meant to indicate the broader scope of potentially relevant material,” says Cutler, “and correlative to the production of male peers still more often associated with contemporary American Realism.” The gallery adds, “For those artists included, the visible world is both a starting point and a foothold. Attention to light effects tied to specific settings is notable across the landscapes, still lifes, architectural subjects, street scenes, and figure compositions featured; while individualistic, divergent sensibilities are also brought to the fore through this gathering.”

Included in the exhibition are works by Leigh Behnke, Jane Dickson, Martha Mayer Erlebacher, Audrey Flack, Nancy Hagin, Sylvia Maier, Sylvia Plimack Mangold, Idelle Weber, Martha Diamond, Lois Dodd, Janet Fish, Jane Freilicher, Yvonne Jacquette, Catherine Murphy, Joan Semmel, and Jane Wilson.

To learn more, visit Bernarducci Meisel Gallery.

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In celebration of its 27-year heritage of hosting workshops, Art in the Aspens has mounted a selling exhibition of small works by past and present instructors.

On view through June 3, “Small Works by Acclaimed American Artists” is a collector’s dream. For 27 years, Art in the Aspens has hosted countless workshops led by many of our nation’s greatest artists, and many of them feature in this small works exhibition.

Held in the studio where the workshops take place, this show reflects the experiences and memories developed by both instructors and students. Among the exhibitors are Joe Anna Arnett, Albert Bakun, Kang Cho, Bill Davidson, Kim English, Howard Friedland, Don Hamilton, Terrie Lombardi, Michael J. Lynch, Kim Mackey, Ned Mueller, Dave Santillanes, Cheryl St. John, Nathan Solano, George Strickland, Michelle Torrez, Teresa Vito, and Dan Young.

To learn more, visit Art in the Aspens.

This article was featured in Fine Art Today, a weekly e-newsletter from Fine Art Connoisseur magazine. To start receiving Fine Art Today for free, click here.

Savoring spring is the message Ann Korologos Gallery is projecting to the public with a magnetic exhibition “Spring in the West,” which features a dazzling array of local and national creativity.

The season of rebirth doesn’t take long to evolve into the dog days of summer, so Ann Korologos Gallery in Basalt, Colorado, invites you to savor spring through the brilliant works of 30 accomplished artists. Titled “Spring in the West,” the show is a premier showcase for Western contemporary art and includes an assorted array of styles.

On view through June 9, the exhibition includes bold post-expressionist still lifes by Angus Wilson, drypoint monoprints by Paula Schuette Kraemer, linocuts by Sherrie York, classical yet contemporary horses by Amy Laugesen, and photography by Tom Korologos. Other represented artists include Devin Pool, Dan Young, Gayle C. Waterman, Squire Broel, Marie Figge Wise, Kathryn Rabinow, Michael Kessler, Leon Loughridge, Anne Sherwood Pundyk, Peggy Judy, Brett Scheifflee, and Heather Foster.

To learn more, visit Ann Korologos Gallery.

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An extraordinary marble sculpture by modernist icon Auguste Rodin with an equally intriguing history heads to the auction block in one week.

On May 30, Artcurial will make available a stunning marble sculpture by Auguste Rodin. Titled “Andromède,” the sculpture displays a nude young female, draped over a rock — arguably one of the most beautiful and sensual examples of its mythological subject. The sculpture has been with the same family since its production in 1888 — over 130 years.

Other examples of the striking sculpture exist today, housed in important Rodin collections all over the globe, including the Rodin Museum in Philadelphia, the Musée Rodin in Paris, and the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Buenos Aires. Scholars suggest the original is the most accomplished in its naturalist transcription.

Auction estimates are between €800,000 and €1,200,000. To learn more, visit Artcurial.

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Whether you believe technology is a blessing or a curse, there can be no doubt that it has greatly enhanced our ability to understand how artists worked, the materials they used, and perhaps mistakes they made. This exciting exhibition highlights a few cases in point.

“What Lies Beneath” is a fascinating show at the Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA) that investigates the stories that paintings have under the pigments we can see. On view through August 6, “What Lies Beneath” is, in fact, the second of a two-part exhibition series by the museum that focuses on the science behind conservation. “The exhibition illustrates how X-ray and infrared imaging technologies can reveal important clues hidden beneath the surface,” writes the museum, “clues that provide curators, conservators, and conservation scientists with critical information on the authenticity of the work and original intent of the artist.”

Three paintings were specially selected for the exhibition, considering the interesting facts they’ve recently revealed when examined using X-ray and infrared. Continuing, the museum said, “Through an interactive touch screen, guests can see the hidden objects and details that were discovered beneath layers of the paintings. When revealed, a new scene emerges.”

Senior conservation scientist at the IMA Greg Smith adds, “Many people think of the arts and the sciences as two opposing worldviews, but the Conservation Science Indianapolis series shows the rich interface between the two that has existed throughout history and continues to be relevant today. The art museum becomes a fantastic place to teach and learn about STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) concepts.”

To learn more, visit the Indianapolis Museum of Art.

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It was a time of political upheaval, cultural transformation, and a spectrum of artistic movements in Europe during the last half of the 19th century, especially in the art capital of the world: Paris. How artists reflected and captured this era was truly extraordinary.

An incredible array of late-19th-century paintings are currently on view at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. On view through September 17, “Paris, Fin De Siècle” centers on how a group of seminal artists and their contemporaries captured a period of vibrant — and sometimes chaotic — transformation.

The exhibition revolves around three artists: Paul Signac, Odilon Redon, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. “By the late 1880s, a generation of artists had emerged that included Neo-Impressionists, Symbolists, and Nabis,” the museum reports. “Their subject matter remained largely the same as that of their still-active Impressionist forebears: landscapes, the modern city, and leisure-time activities; however, these scenes were joined by introspective and fantastical visions, and the treatment of these familiar subjects shifted. The avant-garde ambition to spontaneously capture a fleeting moment of contemporary life ceded to the pursuit of carefully crafted works that were anti-naturalistic in form and execution, and which sought to elicit emotions, sensations, and psychic changes in the viewer.

“Despite their sometimes contradictory stances, these artists shared the goal of creating art with a universal resonance, and there was even overlap among members of the groups. Surveyed together, the idioms of this tumultuous decade map a complex terrain of divergent and collective aesthetic and philosophical theories, while charting the destabilizing events on the cusp of two centuries.”

To learn more, visit the Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao.

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