Friday 7 October 2016

Art on a Postcard Secret Auction



I am pleased to be supporting this auction with one of my works to raise money for The Hepatitis C Trust.

The exhibition takes place at Maddox Gallery, 9 Maddox Street, Mayfair, London from 12 - 17 November 2016. The secret auction takes place on 17 November 2016 from 3pm.

Art on a Postcard has partnered with Dreweatt and Bloomsbury Auctions to show the auction live via a webcast on 17 November. Online bidding will also be possible. 

Members of the public will be able to view the postcards in person at Maddox Gallery and online from Thursday 27th October at www.theauctionroom.com

With around 400 collectable postcard sized works of art up for auction, including works by Grayson Perry, Maggie Hambling, Oliver Jeffers, Peter Blake, Harland Miller, Gilbert and George, John Wragg, Paul Huxley and Steven Farthing. 

Website: www.artonapostcard.com/secret-auction-2016

Sunday 11 September 2016

Car Breaker Gallery



Excerpt from my memoir:

"In the summer of 1980 I was offered my first solo exhibition in London at the Car Breaker Gallery in an area of West London called Frestonia. Originally home to 120 squatters with many artists, actors, writers and musicians among its residents, Frestonia was part of the counterculture and had an interesting history. It had declared itself a free republic. But I felt comfortable among all this anarchy and mayhem, enjoying the creativity that came with it.

The exhibition proved a memorable event although the opening day was rather shambolic. We hung the paintings in the morning then shared a meal in the gallery that evening, followed by the most dysfunctional private view I can remember. As it grew dark, we turned out the lights and viewed the exhibition by candlelight. Later, one of the residents gave an impromptu performance in the middle of the room. It seemed like the whole street was squeezed into the gallery that night."

Excerpt from 'Art, Life and Everything' (unpublished memoir) by Julie Umerle, edited by Anna McNay.


To read further excerpts from my memoir, please see:



Copyright © Julie Umerle

Sunday 4 September 2016

'Julie Umerle: Rewind' at Art Bermondsey Project Space. Installation Views

Installation views of 'Julie Umerle: Rewind', my solo exhibition at Art Bermondsey Project Space, London, supported by Arts Council England. All photographs were taken by Peter Abrahams. The exhibition runs until 10 September. Please do visit the show!
© Julie Umerle

© Julie Umerle
© Julie Umerle
© Julie Umerle
© Julie Umerle
© Julie Umerle
© Julie Umerle
© Julie Umerle


Tuesday 30 August 2016

Julie Umerle: An Exploration of Mark-Making

An essay by Anna McNay on the occasion of Julie Umerle's solo exhibition 'Rewind' at Art Bermondsey Project Space, London 

31 August - 10 September 2016

‘First and foremost, “mark” is a product as well as a process,’ writes Kelly Baum.1 ‘More specifically, it is an end that cannot be separated from its means.’ Marks may issue directly from the artist’s hand, via a brush or a palette knife in contact with the canvas, or there may be some attempt on the part of the artist to hand over control and distance him- or herself from the process. Even so, the resultant marks are the traces of an artist’s action. When Jackson Pollock poured his paint directly from the can, or dripped it from a stick, for example, his direct influence might have become less apparent, but, nevertheless, it was still his bodily movement that choreographed the encounter between paint and canvas. Harold Rosenberg spoke of the abstract expressionists as producing ‘events’ rather than ‘pictures’. ‘The painter,’ he wrote, ‘no longer approached his easel with an image in his mind; he went up to it with material in his hand to do something to that other piece of material in front of him. The image would be the result of this encounter.’2 For Julie Umerle, this assertion might hold in part, but, influenced by minimalism and post-minimalism as well as the ‘new American painting’, her work is an exploration of mark-making of many different types.


Drift III. Julie Umerle
© Julie Umerle
The works closest in spirit to the ‘encounter’ alluded to by Rosenberg are those in her Transoxide series (2015-16), built up on wet stretched paper with a coloured ground, as a successive layering of white paint and flicked splatters of ink. With the initial colour pulled across the sheet with a large brush, forming a ‘grid’, the accumulated layers veil this underlying order with their seemingly haphazard clusters. Suggestive of multiplying cells, reproducing bacteria, or dark stars in a bright sky, there is an element of the organic, echoed also by the splitting and cracking of the ink on the surface, varying in degree according to the specific mixture used in each case.
Transoxide III. Julie Umerle
© Julie Umerle
These paintings are an experiment, both in mark-making and materials, and typical of the way in which Umerle works: progressing from one piece to the next, continuing an idea, cycling through open-ended series, pushing boundaries and exploring elements that fascinate her along the way. The physicality of the medium and her attention to surface are countered, however, by a strong compositional element within the structure of the paintings.

Drift III (2016), for example, is a reworking of an earlier piece that got damaged. Attempting to recapture what it was she loved about the previous work, Umerle has, nevertheless, both subtly repositioned the looming black shapes, and, per force, submitted to the will of gravity and the pull of the paint itself as it drips down the canvas. Here, as is also the case for Naples Orange (2013) and Buff Titanium (2013), the drips result directly from the pressure of the brush as it is swept across the softly coloured, divided ground – an interesting contrast in terms of direct contact to the remote mark-making of the Transoxide series’ flicking approach, treading that fine line between directing what you want the paint to do and letting it do its own thing; between precision and chance.

The Rewind series (2014-16) sets out to isolate and refine the marks from the Drift paintings, positioning them tightly within the square frame of an unprimed canvas, exploiting the pictorial space to the max. With the omission of the drips, the process is obliterated, and the mark-making becomes defined instead by technique. Similarly, the loss of action asserts both the flat forms and the flatness of the canvas itself. This is, as Charles Harrison termed it, ‘painterliness, freed of depicting function’.3 First in black, and then, in the later paintings, in red, the series invites the viewer to hit the pause button and observe in still meditation. With the black shapes, it is like looking through space, aiming towards infinity, while, in contrast, the red shapes appear to jump forwards, escaping the pictorial frame and entering the viewer’s own personal space. As the ‘painter of black’, Pierre Soulages, said: ‘It’s important to experience aesthetic shock, which sets in motion our imagination, our emotions, our feelings, and our thoughts. That’s the purpose of a painting and of art in general.’4 Umerle certainly achieves this, both by her stripping bare of these shapes – revealing the ‘nakedness’ that Robert Motherwell attributed to abstract art – and by the large scale of many of her works, which seem to shout out to you, compelling you to stop and look, engaging you in what Mark Rothko described as ‘an immediate transaction’, drawing you in ‘to create a state of intimacy’.5


Rewind II. Julie Umerle
© Julie Umerle
Early in her career, Umerle was advised by Robert Ryman to avoid naming her works after feelings and, indeed, she describes her feelings as being shut off when she is at work, as she becomes engrossed in the creative process. Viewers’ responses are always subjective, and any associations they make, be they figurative or emotional, are entirely their own. The black Rewind triptych offers something of an enigma code, suggesting an order in which the hieroglyphs might be read, inviting the viewer to attempt an interpretation. Take note, however, that, as with the Holy Trinity, each of these three entities might be more than one thing at once and, overall, no satisfactory understanding might be attained: it is, perhaps, equally a matter of submission and belief.
Buff Titanium. Julie Umerle
© Julie Umerle
Just as Motherwell saw his work in terms of ‘a dialectic between the conscious (straight lines, designed shapes, weighted colours, abstract language) and the unconscious (soft lines, obscured shapes, automatism) resolved into a synthesis which differs as a whole from either’6, so Umerle’s work treads a similar path, proving that formal and spontaneous procedures are not necessarily incompatible and that mark-making truly is both a means to an end and an end in itself. 
 

Anna McNay, July 2016
© Anna McNay


Notes:

1. Kelly Baum, ‘Rothko to Richter/ Mark-Making in Abstract Painting from the Collection of Preston H. Haskell, Class of 1960.’ Essay to accompany the exhibition of the same name at Princeton University Art Museum, 2014. Available online at: http://artmuseum.princeton.edu/story/rothko-richter-mark-making-abstract-painting-collection-preston-h-haskell-class-1960 [Accessed 18/07/16]

2. Harold Rosenberg, ‘The American Action Painters’, 1952, reprinted in Ellen G Landau (ed), Reading Abstract Expressionism. Context and Critique, Yale University Press, 2005, pp189-197, p190

3. Charles Harrison, ‘Abstract Expressionism’ in Tony Richardson & Nikos Stangos (eds), Concepts of Modern Art, Penguin, 1974, pp168-210, p172

4. Zoe Stillpass, interview with Pierre Soulages in Interview magazine, published 05/08/14. Available online at: http://www.interviewmagazine.com/art/pierre-soulages/#_ [Accessed 18/07/16]

5. Mark Rothko, from excerpts from a lecture given at the Pratt Institute in 1958, noted by Dore Ashton and published in Cimaise, December 1958. Cited in Harrison (1974), p195


6. From a statement in Sidney Janis, Abstract and Surrealist Art in America, New York, 1944, cited in Harrison (1974), p170

Friday 12 August 2016

Julie Umerle 'Rewind': Book Reading and In Conversation

Anna McNay will be hosting a 'Book Reading and In Conversation' event at Art Bermondsey Project Space on the afternoon of Saturday 3rd September, from 2 - 4 pm, on the occasion of Julie Umerle's solo exhibition 'Rewind'. Julie Umerle will be reading passages from the manuscript of 'Art, Life and Everything', her unpublished memoir edited by Anna McNay. Please join us at the gallery for this event: Art Bermondsey Project Space, 183 - 185 Bermondsey Street, London SE1 3UW.

Julie Umerle is an American-born abstract painter who lives and works in London and has exhibited in the UK and internationally. Umerle creates works that investigate the relationship between materials and the perception of the image. Her investigation focuses on the balance between precision and chance, exploring the materiality of paint and the processes of abstract painting.

Anna McNay is a freelance art writer and editor. She is Deputy Editor at State Media and former Arts Editor at DIVA magazine. She contributes regularly to Studio International, Photomonitor and The Mail on Sunday and has been widely published in a variety of other print and online art and photography journals and newspapers. She has written numerous catalogue essays.

The event is free and open to the public but seating is limited and will be allocated on a first come first served basis.This exhibition was made possible thanks to a Grants for the Arts award from Arts Council England.

'Buff Titanium', Acrylic on canvas. 54 x 60 in.
© Julie Umerle

Monday 8 August 2016

Rewind Exhibition Catalogue


Preparations for the catalogue to accompany my forthcoming solo exhibition, 'Rewind', at Art Bermondsey Project Space, London are well underway. It's a 32pp catalogue with 15 images, and is beginning to look really splendid.

A few weeks ago, the images were sent to State Media magazine who are kindly designing it for the show. Anna McNay has completed a critical essay about my work that will be included in the catalogue - informative and beautifully written. Plus I have supplied a few extracts from my memoir, 'Art, Life and Everything', which will also be included.

Last week we were proofing the text and artwork. This week it goes off to Arts Council of England for approval before finally being sent off to the printers. With only three weeks to go before the show opens, it is all very exciting and now I can't wait to see the catalogue in print!

'Rewind', Acrylic on unprimed canvas. 24 x 24 in.
© Julie Umerle

Wednesday 6 July 2016

Julie Umerle: Rewind

Naples Orange. 2013. Acrylic on canvas. 135 x 135 cm.

Rewind: Julie Umerle

Paintings and works on paper by London-based artist Julie Umerle whose approach to art has recently been described by New York Arts Magazine as a "new way of thinking with abstract painting".  At Rewind, Art Bermondsey Project Space is showing a a solo exhibition of her latest works: large-scale paintings, a series of smaller canvases and a series of works on paper.

The Rewind series is characterised by unprimed canvases, emphasising the simplicity of the image. The most immediate element of the work is actually the object itself, positioned very close to the edges of the canvas. Her series, Transoxide, was developed on wet stretched paper, where coloured grounds were layered with white paint and marks of black ink. The pressure of the brush, the viscosity of the paint and the speed of application are just some of the variables that play a part in her mark-making process.

“Julie Umerle’s paintings exist at the meeting point of decision and accident, as indeed do our lives.” Mark Westall, FAD Magazine.

Julie Umerle
Julie Umerle is an American-born artist raised in London. She studied fine art at Falmouth University, Cornwall, and graduated from Parsons School of Design, New York in 1998 with a MFA in painting. She then lived and worked between London and New York for a further five years. She is currently based in London. Her work has been included in major group shows such as 'British Abstract Art' at Flowers Galleries; the Royal Academy’s ‘Summer Exhibition’; ‘London Art Fair’; and '
Contemporary British Painting' at The Crypt Gallery, Marylebone. Her most recent solo show, 'Cosmos or Chaos', was held at studio1.1 in Redchurch Street. Exhibitions in the USA include 'Generations' at AIR Gallery, NYC; 'Night of 1000 Drawings' at Artists Space, NYC; 'Postcards from the Edge' at Metro Pictures, NYC; as well as Art Miami, Florida (Caridi Gallery). She has also shown in Paris and Berlin.

Rewind is funded by Arts Council England. A catalogue will be published to accompany the exhibition with an essay by Anna McNay.

Rewind: Julie Umerle
31 August – 10 September 2016

Art Bermondsey Project Space
183-185 Bermondsey St, London SE1 3UW
www.project-space.london
abps@project-space.london
Tel: 0203 441 5152

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Open: Tuesday - Saturday 11am-6pm
Travel: Tube: Borough; London Bridge. Bus: C10 Victoria to Canada Water (Stop F Bermondsey Street)