Malcolm T. Liepke "About....Face"Venue: Arcadia Fine Arts
Schedule: From 2009-07-23 To 2009-08-06
Address: 51 Greene St., New York, NY 10013
Phone: 212-965-1387 Fax: 212-965-8638
So this was the first gallery that I ran into in NYC. It was in Soho, which is this crazy area on the fringe of Chinatown. One second I'm walking through Chinatown with street side vendors and Chinese lettering everywhere, and the next there is suddenly this ritzy architecture with columns around me. Little bit of a flip but I was able to find the place easily enough. They let me take photos in this gallery so I got some nice pics to show you.
They were good portraits. If you looked at them by themselves, and ignored the price tag attached to them, which if you ask me are a bit overpriced. though if they sold then that just shows you that it wasn't overpriced. Traditional modeling on the face with what looked like several layers of glazing to get that ghostly glass finish. Then the backgrounds were slapped on with an overused palette knife technique. This basically describes all of his work. They grab the eye certainly. There is a lot of nice contrast in them that I can appreciate, but seeing maybe 20 or so portraits in front of me with almost no progression. The guy wasn't solving any problems. He figured out what he was going to do then he did it 20 times. I went to this gallery 'cause I enjoy portraiture and the image below caught my eye online. Getting there seeing the paintings, they were nice but after about a minute of staring I was bored. There was paintings later on which got me more excited. I may of rushed through this gallery though, who knows. Maybe more time standing in front of these paintings would of brought a better appreciation for his stuff.
I guess you could say that these pieces are nice, but standing in the gallery with all of these portraits around me his technique became pretty transparent fairly quickly. The fact that the guy was 50 something and painting all these portraits of women might of been something that tweaked me also.
The gallery had some art books of the artist at the reception desk, which showed the artist having a portfolio that dated back to the early 70's. So at least that was something. Probably the reason why the paintings were going for so much money, or it might of been the area the gallery was in, who knows.
Once I found my way to the back of the gallery I saw some stuff that was a bit more interesting. Whenever I go through galleries, the back rooms always have some stuff that is more interesting than whats being shown in the main room. That might just be a case of not seeing the same idea being repeated several times in front of me.
So that's what I have for today. I'm going to see if I can do this as a daily update, until I'm out of galleries to talk about. We'll see how that goes.
Comments would be appreciated
I agree with the problem of galleries and their repetative displays, but you can probably agree that that's where they make their sales. Just like a DJ may be loved for delivering exactly what the crowd wanted, over and over, without identifying new routes of intelligent progress. I did really enjoy the portraits though; they aren't unlike Kent Williams.
ReplyDeleteI would say that Kent Williams seems to be a bit farther ahead.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.kentwilliams.com/images/img_full/142.jpg
stuff like that is amazing to me. The tools that he uses in every painting give him enough room to experiment with each painting that there seems to be variety. Worth a look at.
I understand that galleries function that way. Where the artist finds a popular niche and sticks with it because that is what sells, and people would be upset if an artist ran out of a certain type of painting. I'm just not sure if this guy has enough breadth for his own solo show. There were other galleries, albeit group shows that got me more excited.
Unfortunately I haven't seen his paintings, only photos of them. Any good university art instructor will tell their students that they have to have a body of work. That translates to a regular, predictable product. Liepke delivers that. He has imitated techniques of historically popular artists like Sargent and others who's work I've seen. Liepke's colors are not realistic and features are exaggerated. That's a major part of the impressionist mantra. If one compares Liepke to the hyper-realists, there is more to his work than technical execution. Liepke keeps the size of his works reasonable as opposed to the hyper-realists who rely on huge scale over subject interest to create some sort of emotion--grotesqueness for me. The most important lesson I've learned from Liepke is that he paints very tight, blended color paintings and then adds a few strokes that make the paintings look spontaneous. He learned that from Sargent. His bodies and hair are much more carelessly painted. The focal points of all his works are the faces. The roughly painted surrounding areas make the whole painting look far more spontaneous than they really are. He's still an illustrator, but a good one, and illustration-like art is popular now. Thank God I can look at representational works again instead of all the abstract minimalist s*** which was just a joke on people with more money than brains.
ReplyDeleteI tripped over Malcolm Liepke's work about 1990, close to the opening of his home base gallery, Arcadia Fine Arts in Soho. I fell in instant love. Malcolm paints men, women, situations. His colors and grasp of the moment in his paintings struck me so. Quiet pensive moments, joys, sensuality galore, love. I've watched his paintings climb from $6,000 per, way up and out of sight. Luckily, I've collecting them digitally from the 90's and have a huge collection. I love art and follow many artists. Malcolm remains my favorite.
ReplyDeleteI have known Liepke's work for longer than I can say. I can say he has always progressed as well as hit the periods in need of a "break through". It would not surprise me... if he has over a thousand paintings. His early work was fabulous, chromatic grays, beautiful color, not unlike Degas or Whistler. He has already been where most artist aspire to be. He has worked to create work with minimal brush strokes, and a master at color. As with any artist it is easy to criticize until you see the total catalog and volume of work. I would guess he is the most imitated living artist. It's much like comparing Picasso's early realism and portraiture and the work he became known for. He has a passion for painting, and it's easy to see his love for even the paint itself. As with the era of impressionist, also criticized for unconventional style, some not valued until much later. I see someone that has grown far beyond the illustrator, through the mastering of his medium and created work unlike any previous artist. I don't believe in labels. If you were to ask anyone who their favorite artist was, they will name a singer, not Sargent. And know many self proclaimed artist I would label something else.
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