June 07 to July 09, 2006.
The curator of the exhibition, 'Hands and Feet' is Joseph R. Wolin.
In 1997, Carl Ostendarp made a painting as an anniversary present for his wife, the artist Gail Fitzgerald. It featured one of his signature cartoony splats, with five fingerlike extrusions. Ostendarp added fingernails to the ends of the blobby appendages, and a ring to the fourth one, simultaneously commemorating his first year of marriage and creating his first hand painting. Inspired, in part, by the portraits of couples’ hands on display downstairs from his studio, in the storefront of the local photographer in his largely Latino neighborhood, he went on to create a series of paintings of pairs of hands with wedding rings. One hand was usually more flat and open, one more curvilinear; one was bigger, one smaller, suggesting the male-female dichotomies of traditional couplehood. Through his meticulous use of color and composition, Ostendarp tried to infuse these paintings with the awkwardness of new relationships as expressed in manual body language, as well as the crude sexual curiosity of certain hand gestures commonly made by schoolchildren. He gave hand paintings as gifts to his close friends from graduate school—John Currin, Sean Landers, and Richard Phillips—who were then embarking on marriages of their own. Somewhat later, as these friends moved off into their own conjoined lives and into conceptual, if not actual, suburbia, Ostendarp produced another series of images of paired hands—which he called Neighbors—without rings and gender distinctions, as a way of contemplating the changes in his own life and those of his contemporaries.
He also began a series of paintings of feet and legs. If the hand paintings represented love and friendship, the foot paintings alluded to more carnal desires. A single schematic foot on a ground of a contrasting color might be, in his words, “arched and orgasmic.” Pairs of crisscrossed legs and feet, often horizontal, suggested coital positions. These frank yet oblique portrayals of sex owed as much to Joan Miró’s depictions of figures with enormous feet, or the stylized characters in the illustrations of Dr. Seuss (two of Ostendarp’s greatest influences), as they did to Georges Bataille’s fetishistic writings about the baseness of the big toe. A bit later still, when he and Fitzgerald were expecting their first child, smaller-scaled arms and legs found their way into compositions in which they pushed against pregnant bulges or were enclosed within womblike spaces.
In 1999, for his exhibition at XL/Xavier LaBoulbenne Gallery in New York, Ostendarp filled the gallery with a single painting, The Navigator, which featured an enormous fuschia foot stepping from the righthand edge into an otherwise empty field of flat yellow. The artist stretched his canvas to exactly the same size as Miró’s 1950–51 Mural Painting, which had been commissioned by Harvard University to decorate the dining hall in the then new Harkness Commons building, designed by Walter Gropius. (Ten years later, Harvard replaced the painting, now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, with a less food-sensitive ceramic copy.) The foot in Ostendarp’s painting echoed the curling feet of a figure on the right side of Miró’s mural, but while The Navigator paid homage to a significant public monument in the career of Ostendarp’s artistic forebear, it simultaneously commemorated a private moment in the more personal history of his literal progeny, his eldest son, who was then taking his first wobbly steps.
Expanding his repertoire of images of hands in a series of paintings on paper in 2003, Ostendarp appropriated illustrations from a book of hand shadows—the shadows of recognizable images cast upon a wall by a certain positioning of the hands and fingers. Instead of the usual bunnies, birds, and dogs, however, these hand shadows pictured world leaders from the time of the book’s publication in the early 1960s: De Gaulle, J.F.K., Castro, Ben Gurion, Nasser, and, oddly, Stalin. Rendered in combinations of two off-tertiary colors—like flavors of slightly acidic sherbet—the shadows slyly reference the Color Field painting ascendant in art at the same time those politicians and generals dominated international affairs. Yet these images appealed to Ostendarp because the once powerful figures they pictured were, with the exception of the perennial Fidel, no longer relevant to current events of the twenty-first century, much as so many once lauded genres of abstract painting held little purchase in current art discourse. The silhouettes of famous people were images produced by delightfully low-tech means—the manipulation of hands in front of a light source—and, for the artist, this could be likened to other examples of unsophisticated aesthetic presentation, such as a child’s piano recital or a painting exhibition. Moreover, the hand shadows referred to the nature of shadows themselves, as a trace or a direct transcription of the real—i.e., that shadows, like footprints or photographs, are images produced by the actual impression of their subject onto a surface, in this case by the interruption of light—what some writers have called their “indexical” quality. The idea that these representational images could also be seen as somewhat abstract and accidental interested Ostendarp, as did the notion that they might have just “developed” on the paper without the agency of the artist.
Ostendarp’s paintings of hands and feet constitute a direct continuation of his longstanding interest in the intertwined legacies of Modernism, Surrealism, American abstract painting of the 1950s and ‘60s, Pop Art, and cartoons. At the same time, these paintings stand among the most personal works of his career. Their restricted, idiosyncratic palette, as well as their simultaneous interest in Greenbergian formalism and erotic comics, place them among the most original and serious reconsiderations of Modernist painting to have occurred in art since the 1980s.
Carl Ostendarp was born in 1961 and received his M.F.A. from the Yale School of the Arts in 1986. His work is included in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Art Institute of Chicago; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Denver Art Museum; the Walker Art Center; the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University; and the Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt. In 2003, the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in Ridgefield, Connecticut, presented a fifteen-year survey exhibition of his works on paper. Currently, Ostendarp teaches painting at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. The exhibition Carl Ostendarp: Hands and Feet is presented in cooperation with Elizabeth Dee Gallery, New York.
Joseph R. Wolin
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Untitled. Gouache on paper. 22
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Exhibitions
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