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VOTE NOW! New American Paintings' Annual Prize: Reader’s Choice Poll

Written by Andrew Katz Katz

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Our final New American Paintings' issue of 2011 is out on newsstands, so it's once again time to ask our readers who they think deserves some extra attention. We are pleased to present the New American Paintings' Second Annual Prize, which includes two components:
  1. $1,000 cash prize and a $500 gift certificate, sponsored by BLICK Art Materials, will be awarded to one of New American Paintings' 12 Noteworthy artists featured this year. The winner will be determined by a panel of distinguished curators (Stay tuned  to learn more about our panel soon).
  2. $500 gift certificate sponsored by BLICK Art Materials, with the winner decided by YOU, our reader! Take a look at all 12 of this year’s Noteworthy artists after the jump and VOTE NOW!
Thanks to our sponsor Next Art Chicago, the two winners will also be prominently displayed at the Next Art Chicago fair at the Merchandise Mart, April 27th - April 29th, 2012. Voting is open through January 7 (one vote per computer) The winner of the Reader’s Choice will be announced by Friday, January 13th, and the winner of the Annual Prize will be announced January 20. [polldaddy poll=4242090] _____________________________ William Betts - Editor's Pick
William Betts | Untitled, Miami International Airport, acrylic on canvas, 52 x 70 inches
The recent paintings of William Betts are—at once—both a copy and an original. Using technology-based, industrial production methods, Betts manipulates surveillance video stills from the Miami International Airport to incredible effect and immense scale. Effectively engaged with technology and the documented image, and the nature of their structural and social makeup, Betts’ paintings are surgically precise investigations into the meaning behind specific collections of color, a curiosity that propels additional bodies of the artist’s work. With each engineered and painted pixel, Betts further unravels these organizational constructs until the implications of data and chromatic specificity become synonymous with social understanding and meaning. – New American Paintings _____________________________ Joe Bussell - Juror's Pick
Joe Bussell | Silver Series, gouache, acrylic, and archival tape, 11 x 14 inches
When I think about painting, I often remember Yves-Alain Bois’ question: “Can one think in painting as one can dream in color?” Joe Bussell’s work in particular recalled this poetic dichotomy for me. Bussell navigates the language of painting so gracefully in his work that one cannot help but be struck by the lusciousness of his precisely orchestrated pools of color and subtle graphic counterpoints. He seems to revel in the liquidity of his medium. Each work operates as a kind of haiku of color and composition, offering moments of carefully nuanced intersections of form and texture that communicate a palpable range of emotions and references. – Cassandra Coblentz _____________________________ Jeremy Couillard - Editor's Pick
Jeremy Couillard | Company Jet, acrylic on canvas over panel, 48 x 48 inches
In the early 20th century, a group of painters working under the umbrella of an artistic and social movement known as Futurism attempted to give visual form to a world that was being rapidly altered and accelerated by an overload of new technology. A century later, we find ourselves coming to terms with information overload, and it is not surprising that an increasing number of artists are interested in addressing this situation through their work. Jeremy Couillard’s maximal paintings put forth such a glut of visual information that they—by their very facture—offer a visual analog to what we collectively experience on a daily basis. There is something both inviting and disturbing about the spaces that Couillard invites us into; his paintings teasingly suggest that we can somehow find order in chaos, but simultaneously thwart any attempt to do so. – New American Paintings _____________________________ Marcus Jansen - Juror's Pick
Marcus Jansen | Creeping Obstacles in Kansas, oil enamel collage on canvas, 90 x 135 inches
There is something distinctly apocalyptic about Marcus Jansen’s paintings, which characteristically depict interiors that have been opened to the outside, often by way of an absent or partly shattered ceiling, but also by an ambiguous depiction of space itself. The rooms in his pictures are blocked in with slab-like planes of paint, which often seem to dwarf the solitary figure huddled inside. Very often the viewer has the impression that multiple spaces are crowded into one frame, vying for attention while also partly canceling each other out. What holds the compositions together are their strongly rectilinear structures, as well as the artist’s expressionistic paint handling. Through this combination of the familiar and the impossible, Jensen suggests a future in which all of the creature comforts that we take for granted may end up collapsing before our eyes. – Dan Cameron _____________________________ Marcus Kenney - Editor's Pick
Marcus Kenney | The Return of Metacom, mixed media on canvas, 48 x 48 inches
A native of rural Louisiana, Marcus Kenney’s multidisciplinary practice clamors with a diverse material explosivity evocative of the syrupy richness of the Deep South. His recent paintings retain the busy optical intensity of his three-dimensional assemblages, which seem to operate as both sculptures and shamanistic altars to the magical detritus of back swamp Georgia. Based in Savannah, Kenney uses found materials to create his mixed media paintings and collages, siphoning muted narratives of spirituality, redemption, loss, and temporality through cartoon-like characters and compositions. Like the nature of his reclaimed materials, his works speak to an unspoken folkloric sumptuousness that carries with it a multitude of histories, both humorous and dark. – New American Paintings _____________________________ Erik Parker - Juror's Pick
Erik Parker | Think Twice, mixed media on canvas, 52 x 42 x 3.75 inches
A Texan by birth and a student of the great American master of painterly social commentary, Peter Saul, Parker has developed a unique figurative language that draws on Saul’s inspired grotesqueries and psychedelic palette, but also comics and 1960s graphic design as seen on album covers and posters. In the past, Parker incorporated words into his highly detailed compositions in a manner that recalled medieval book illumination. His recent work retains this connection to illustration and to vernacular art forms. The incorporation of the illustrative and the unashamed inspiration of popular art are hallmarks of American painting at the turn of the century, and Parker’s works demonstrate these tendencies with a liveliness and humor that belie their compositional complexity. – Laura Hoptman _____________________________ Erin Payne - Juror's Pick
Erin Payne | Just my Lucky, acrylic and oil on canvas, 84 x 109 inches
Realistically rendered heaps of fabric are incongruously, inexplicably dropped into a naturalistically painted landscape in Erin Payne’s series of images—fabric that is itself painted so as to be both faithful to conventions of representation and also colorfully, exuberantly abstract. Lovely drips turn convincing three-dimensional illusion into passages of pure paint and pattern in a way that appeals to my love for color, fabric, and absurdity. There seems to be a narrative here, or some tongue-in-cheek conceptual project of inserting piles of fabric into a variety of situations, but the purpose is ultimately purely visual, as is the “action” apparently depicted. I am tempted to jump right into these pictures. – Randi Hopkins _____________________________ Josh Reames - Editor's Pick
Josh Reames | Hyperbox, acrylic and cardboard on canvase, 40 x 32 inches
Josh Reames operates with a spatial sensibility that would make some sculptors jealous. An MFA candidate at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Reames turns painting on its head, effectively making each work a bona fide object that is not only immediately reverent to its materials, but which also carries with it a sharp, witty dialogue about the properties of—and relationship between—paint and paper. Echoing the chromatically restrained painterly devices of Robert Ryman, Reames’ works are three-dimensional hybridizations of image and object, extending well beyond the spatial confines traditionally set forth by the painting medium. They occupy a necessary place in this current moment in contemporary painting, where sculptural forms continue to reveal remarkable painterly qualities. – New American Paintings _____________________________ Daniela Rivera - Editor's Pick
Daniela Rivera | Reina Sofia Wall #1, oil on canvas, 48 x 72 inches
Rivera’s Accidental Memling Gul (oriental rug), featured in the 2010 James & Audrey Foster Prize exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, is one of the most incredible paintings I’ve seen this year—not for its incredible scale (which certainly doesn’t hurt), but for its subtle, unexpected brilliance. What at first appears as a custom cut oriental carpet on a large suspended canvas is in fact an explosive splatter of paint in the exact pattern of a Turkish rug. Rivera’s work is highly experiential and often informed by cultural histories and the exhibition space in which it’s featured, conflating the utilitarian use of paint with surprising application and exceptional wit. – New American Paintings _____________________________ Brion Nuda Rosch - Editor's Pick
Brion Nuda Rosch | Snake Face, acrylic on found book page, 9 x 6 inches
The abstraction in the collages and found paper paintings of Brion Nuda Rosch takes on not only a material form but is ultimately a kind of perceptive abstraction. Marrying disparate images from found book pages with a vernacular of collage, color blocking, and sharply abbreviated painterly gestures, Rosch elevates the mundane to its highest possible form with minimal effort. Occasionally installed on tall pedestals, these newly formed monuments to the commonplace are imbued with formalist structures and value that would not otherwise be assigned to his materials. Rosch’s works are at once banal and extraordinary, revealing that spatial undertakings in physical abstraction don’t necessarily require a third dimension for maximum impact. – New American Paintings _____________________________ Maja Ruznic - Juror's Pick
Maja Ruznic | Self Portrait as Emotional Trash Can, mixed media on paper, 8 x 8 inches
I am struck by the rawness and honesty of Maja Ruznic’s paintings. Their intimate scale belies their powerful punch, each portrait a study of the intricacies of the human psyche. Working on paper with wet pigments provides a sense of immediacy and spontaneity to the work, and Ruznic is adept at punctuating her imagery with moments of color that are both seductive and almost alarming. The masked face in Self Portrait as the Mother of All Evil is initially disturbing, but this feeling is quickly followed by a sense of affinity, as the awareness that we all wear different masks throughout our lives (indeed, throughout the day) sets in. The artist describes her subjects as “those who live along the interstices of society—homeless, drug addicts, prostitutes, derelicts, and vagabonds” and yet these absorbing characters do not feel like outsiders. We can see ourselves reflected in her portrayals. – Anne Ellegood _____________________________ Ann Toebbe - Juror's Pick
Ann Toebbe | Washing the Windows, 2010, gouache and oil on panel, 24 x 30 inches
I’m fascinated by Ann Toebbe’s meticulously detailed paintings, collages, and drawings of domestic interiors that depict space from multiple viewpoints simultaneously. With an aesthetic that recalls elements of Russian icon painting, children’s book illustrations, medieval painting, Cubism, and folk art, she fastidiously details the stuff that fills our homes in a manner that is seductive yet also disorienting. The edges of the chairs, tables, rugs, plants, etc. dissolve and flatten into an environment of brightly colored blocks of colors and pattern that straddles representation and abstraction. Her vivid visions of domestic spaces bring to life the often overlooked details of our environment that we become numb to in daily life, but which become the cornerstones of our memories. – Julie Rodrigues Widholm
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