NEWSgrist - where spin is art: Posts from April 2013

‘David Diao: TMI’ at Postmasters (Never Too Much)

Countdown:

David Diao, one of my favorite artists, and Postmasters, one of my favorite galleries, are enjoying their final week in their Chelsea space before the 'big move' downtown. Here are a few reviews, an image or two (grabbed from Postmasters' Facebook album 'David Diao TMI') -- just a few tidbits and info to whet your appetites before you head over.....

(through Saturday, April 27)

NYTimes, Galleries: Chelsea (4/19/13)

David Diao: ‘TMI’ (through April 27) Postmasters, one of Chelsea’s few consensus-aversive spaces, is leaving the neighborhood, and on just the right note, with a survey of work by the painter David Diao, who first showed at the gallery in 1985. In his work Mr. Diao has been teasing, rebuking, adoring and dissing the formal and institutional history of modern art for all these decades, and here we see him in action from 1991 to 2013, with wry, needle-sharp, passive-aggressive homages to Duchamp, Barnett Newman, MoMA, the current art market and himself. It’s good to know that wherever Postmasters lands — and it will — he’ll be there too. Postmasters, 459 West 19th Street, Chelsea, (212) 727-3323, postmastersart.com. (Cotter)

From GalleristNY:

‘David Diao: TMI’ at Postmasters

By Andrew Russeth 4/02 3:25pm

In an art world that equates money with success, the conventional wisdom is that there are few things more humiliating for an artist (and his or her dealer) than an artwork going up on the auction block and very publicly flopping. The iconoclastic artist David Diao has made such a moment a key element in Twice Hammered (2011), one of the paintings in his witty show at Postmasters, his 11th with the gallery. The painting is a diagram, with a miniature version of his 1990 work Barnett Newman: The Paintings—itself a painted chart of the Abstract Expressionist’s complete oeuvre—and its auction catalog entry when it was offered on the block in May 2005 at Christie’s Hong Kong with an estimate of $51,000 to $77,000. The lot had no reserve—the lowest price at which the house will sell the work—and his painting was hammered for the price scrawled at the bottom of the page: a measly $7,000 ($7,715 with buyer’s premium).

Mr. Diao has long been concerned with the afterlife of paintings—the journeys they go on after they leave an artist’s studio and the meanings they take on along the way. This approach has become fashionable lately, and Yale art historian David Joselit has termed it “transitive painting.” Mr. Diao stands out for bringing a great self-deprecating panache to the project.

Some of the history, as recounted in the Postmasters show, is real, and some of it is fiction. Yes, one of his early abstract paintings once hung in a boardroom at MoMA, a moment he has memorialized by painting it across a silkscreen of those rooms. But, alas, he has never had a MoMA retrospective—the trustees declined to acquire that piece—and so the invitation for a 40-year Diao retrospective at the museum, depicted in one, is fake. (It’s modeled on a card for a Picasso exhibition at MoMA.) And he never had the $550,000 market triumph depicted in the painting Auction Record (2011). Sales (small) (1991) shows his actual market performance up to the year of its making—a peak of 24 sales in 1970, with a dry spell from 1981 to 1985, when he stopped painting.

A 1993 work that looks like a Richard Prince joke painting—blue capital letters on a green monochrome—also addresses art history, though of a more sweeping variety (and demonstrates his skill as a colorist). It reads, “What Ever Happened to Hedda Sterne?” Though she was the lone female Ab-Ex painter to pose for that famous “Irascibles” photograph, Sterne was virtually unknown for most of her life, but her work enjoyed a very slow, modest rise in recognition in the years leading up to her death in 2011. The message of Mr. Diao’s painting today could very well be “keep working.”

As it happens, Barnett Newman: The Paintings is set to hit the block again, at a Shanghai auction house on April 6, this time with an estimate of roughly $16,000 to $28,000. Regardless of the result, it’s clear that Mr. Diao is going to have a ball dealing with it. Here’s hoping it ends up in the right hands.

From Postmasters' website:

DAVID DIAO has been showing with Postmasters since its founding in 1985. He will have the gallery's final show before the move from Chelsea to new quarters. This will be his eleventh solo with the gallery.

For over 40 years Diao has nurtured a practice which looks critically at painting and its history. He questions how value is assigned to art and artists, and often implicates himself in the contradictions of this process.

The show will have selections from 1991 to the present. Double Rejection, 2012, documents a moment when his painting hung in the board room at MoMA. The newest work Spine 1, 2013, is based on the abraded spine of the catalog of Barnett Newman's Stations of the Cross which has been in Diao's possession since its publication in 1966. He will also present some very small copies of several of his favorite geometric paintings from the 70s in the manner of Duchamp's Boite-en-valise.

In the fall of 2012 Diao showed works from his Melnikov series in a 2 person show with Walid Raad at Paula Cooper Gallery. Holland Cotter writing in the NYTimes about this show reached back to praise Diao's 2009 show at Postmasters as one of the most moving of that year.

Last month he was invited to speak on Barnett Newman for DIA Art Foundation in their Artists on Artists Lecture series.

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