Daniel Ludwig at Alan Stone Gallery
Exhibition by Mass. Artist April 24 to June 5
By: Bob Fowler - Apr 21, 2010
Daniel Ludwig
Paradigms Lost
Allan Stone Gallery
113 East 90th Street New York, NY 10128
Tel 212 987 4997 Fax 212 987 1655
The Allan Stone Gallery is presenting Paradigms Lost, an exhibition of recent paintings by Daniel Ludwig. The exhibition will be on view at the gallery from April 24 through June 5, 2010. The new work is a dramatic departure from the artist’s last exhibition at the gallery in 2003 when his pictures featured nudes in interiors rendered with great clarity of form and a rich painterly touch that conveyed a sense of strangely classical calm.
Ludwig’s new work literally shreds this vision. He now engages a far broader and more difficult world, shedding serenity in favor of a highly charged and sometimes cacophonous disquietude. Consistency of space has been jettisoned in favor of abruptly collaged elements. The selectively exaggerated color of earlier paintings is now used as a powerful expressive tool, emphasizing difference and distance between elements. The painterly, carefully built surfaces further emphasize that aspect. Deer Hunt - a composition reminiscent of Delacroix - literally explodes with action as a group of figures, nude and half-clothed, drive spears into a pair of hapless deer. Distortions and exaggerations of figures recall works of the great Mannerists; late Michelangelo or Bronzino’s fresco The Martyrdom of Saint Lawrence.
Ludwig accounts for the change in his work by pointing to experiences in his own life. Already disturbed by political events, he was suddenly confronted by extraordinary personal loss. “Painting in the manner of my past became increasingly undermined by my everyday grief and anger,” Ludwig says. Searching for a language sufficient to accommodate his new outlook, the artist began to reconstitute the world in a very different way. “Eventually,” he says, “a new direction evolved by picking up the broken pieces of my past work, taking a leg here, a torso there, a stormy sky from early landscapes. As I mashed these parts together with photos I had cut from the newspaper and images from the Internet– randomly at first, then editing and resizing –compositions emerged whose frameworks evoked that of a classical painting.”
Working on Raft, a pyramidal form developed that brought to the artist’s mind Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa. Similarly, early developments in painting Disfruta began to conjure forms from Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam and Masaccio’s Expulsion of Adam and Eve. Making this somewhat loose association with great paintings of the past gave Ludwig a means to organize his new imagery while anchoring it to an artistic context. This strategy also allows for new opportunities in conveying meaning as the artist riffs on old narratives in new and unexpected ways. While avoiding a simple linear reading, the new paintings take on many of the universal themes of humanity. The baby held aloft in Raft, a figure based on the artist’s daughter, offers an image of hope against the harsh jumble of fractured bodies beneath. And the hand of God in Disfruta hints at a broader idea of divine forgiveness.
Ludwig calls this new body of work “at once a cannibalization, a recapitulation, and a re-examination of my artistic life.”
Paradigms Lost marks Ludwig’s fourth solo exhibition at the Allan Stone Gallery. He first showed with the gallery in 1988. Ludwig, (b. 1959, Colorado), received a BFA in Sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design, and an MFA in Painting from the University of Cincinnati. From 1986 to 2002, Ludwig taught Painting and Drawing at The Salve Regina University in Newport, RI. He has had numerous solo and group exhibition in the US and abroad including exhibitions at The Frye Art Museum, Seattle, WA; DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, Lincoln, MA; R.I.S.D., Providence, RI; The Art Museum of the University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY; The Speed Art Museum, Louisville, KY; Virginia Lynch Gallery, Tiverton, RI; Cadogan Contemporary, London, England, et al. Ludwig is a two-time MacDowell Colony Residency recipient.
Daniel Ludwig lives and works in Massachusetts.