October 8 - November 13, 2010

Some 100 years after Picasso’s emergence, his influence continues among contemporary Northwest artists who build on the themes, innovations and ideas in Picasso’s work.

Artists included are:
Gretchen Bennett, Deborah Butterfield, Jacob Lawrence, Isaac Layman, Margie Livingston, Matthew Offenbacher, Joseph Park, Michael Spafford, Whiting Tennis, and Robert Yoder

GRETCHEN BENNETT
LAST NIGHT A DJ SAVED MY LIFE (WITH THE LIGHTS OUT), 2010
Collected cardboard
Dimensions variable
SOLD

Picasso plays with object planes that interpenetrate one another. He deals us splinters, never the whole story, but multiple views, each without end. He works with a dynamic, the propulsion of which is to constantly defer meaning, one thing to another. And that is the propulsion of my work.

I've been working with mirror glass and found cardboard, using these as stand-ins for pixilated digital light, made into still depictions of the same.

I divide and map. Hand-made tape loosely presents ceremonial trappings, delineating sacred space, mapping invisible planes.
Picasso's contemporaries, the Czech Cubists, influence me. Jože Ple?nik created his masterworks during the same time, and has been a reliable filter for me. Like Picasso, like Braque and Gris, he presents everything as familiar, but raw, new, impossibly solved and arranged into crystalline perfection. —Gretchen Bennett

GRETCHEN BENNETT
RUNNER (FROM THE MUDDY BANKS OF THE WISHKAH), 2010
Hand-made tape
Dimensions variable, 2 inches wide

DEBORAH BUTTERFIELD
ALL BALL, 2010
Found steel, welded
39 x 45.5 x 17 inches
SOLD

Additional view 1	Additional view 2	Additional view 3

In 1943, Picasso dramatically changed the nature of sculpture when he constructed his "Bull's Head" from a found bicycle seat and handlebars that were cast in bronze. In that moment, he brought a long tradition of folk art sculpture in to the legitimizing light of the high art world. A few decades later, Deborah Butterfield began to further Picasso’s redemption of found material.

In her welded steel works Butterfield, through the unlikely means of re-combining the detritus of our industrial culture, creates surprisingly descriptive imagery of horses.

She re-figures Picasso's innovation in the bronze work by similarly taking pieces of found sticks, decayed lumber, and parts of trees and vines and casting them in metal. She departs from Picasso by then applying paint and patina to suggest their original surfaces and colors.

As individual parts these elements barely suggest more than themselves. In her transformative hands the parts are combined and re-configured to suggest the most intimate details of "horse-ness" as only someone with her keen eye can accomplish. —Deborah Butterfield

MATTHEW OFFENBACHER UNTITLED (seated figure), 2010 Graphite on paper 9.75 x 8.5 inches	MATTHEW OFFENBACHER UNTITLED (figure painting), 2010 Graphite on paper 9.75 x 8.5 inches	MATTHEW OFFENBACHER UNTITLED (two-faced figure), 2010 Graphite on paper 9.75 x 8.5 inches	MATTHEW OFFENBACHER UNTITLED (smiling cat), 2010 Graphite on paper 9.75 x 8.5 inches
MATTHEW OFFENBACHER UNTITLED (woman with statue), 2010 Graphite on paper 9.75 x 8.5 inches	MATTHEW OFFENBACHER UNTITLED (bowl), 2010 Graphite on paper 9.75 x 8.5 inches	MATTHEW OFFENBACHER UNTITLED (bowl of fruit with champagne), 2010 Graphite on paper 9.75 x 8.5 inches	MATTHEW OFFENBACHER UNTITLED (bowl of flowers), 2010 Graphite on paper 9.75 x 8.5 inches

I read this the other day in a Restoration Hardware catalog: "Pablo Picasso, one of the world's preeminent artists and influencers of the 20th century, repeatedly broke down stylistic conventions and was undaunted by the art world’s status quo.... During the collapse of the global economy, we drew inspiration from Picasso and chose not to listen to the conventional wisdom encouraging us to follow the pack.... We saw an opportunity to be liberated, abandoning our past to embrace the future....We've destroyed the previous iteration of ourselves, clearing the way to express our brand in a never-before-seen fashion." This sums up pretty well what I find most pernicious about Picasso’s influence. He is the epitome of the once radical, now highly-capitalized notion of romantic individualism.

Picasso stands in for the idea that a great artist expresses their innermost self through their work, apart from history, society, or commerce. This leads to the repulsive notion that great artistic pursuits allow artists to be misogynist egomaniacs. Picasso's work is great—but not because he expressed his brand in a never-before-seen fashion. —Matthew Offenbacher

JOSEPH PARK
HALLUCINATION A, 2010
Oil on panel
36 x 24 inches
Courtesy of Rena Bransten Gallery

JOSEPH PARK
LEAVE IT ON THE DANCE FLOOR, 2008
Oil on panel
24 x 18 inches
Courtesy of Rena Bransten Gallery
$6,000
SOLD

JOSEPH PARK
PRIZM (KEVIN LEVRONE), 2009
Oil on panel
24 x 18 inches
Courtesy of Rena Bransten Gallery
$6,000
SOLD

As a young artist following in the footsteps of Picasso's Cubist tendencies, I felt destined, as did many, to pick up where Cubism left off. Fast forward to today. After rejecting modernist philosophies and making work that is a testimony to that conversion, I have devised a method that allows me to re-open that door I closed long ago. I call this 'Prizmism' -- an ideology sprung from today, yet tethered to the visual strategies of yesteryear -- in particular, Cubism's employment of multiple perspectives in the rendering of form. —Joseph Park

JACOB LAWRENCE
STUDY FOR PAINTING - THE BUILDERS, 1985
Gouache, crayon and pencil on paper
24 x 18 inches
Private Collection

Lawrence views Cubist-Expressionist representationalism in terms of a fundamental exploitation harnessed to straight narrative needs. In this, Lawrence demonstrated the vitality of a style which was long thought to be purely decorative. In Lawrence’s hands that conceptual complex is transformed into Carpenter Cubism, as serviceable and malleable as the situation warrants.

JACOB LAWRENCE
TRACK MEET, 1975-1996
Pencil, crayon and inkwash on paper
22.25 x 30 inches
Private Collection

ISAAC LAYMAN
EXTENSION CORD, 2006
Archival inkjet print
48 x 75 inches
Edition of 8
Courtesy of Lawrimore Project
POR

ISAAC LAYMAN
LAUNDRY, 2007
Archival inkjet print
35 x 48 inches
Edition of 5
Courtesy of Lawrimore Project
POR

MARGIE LIVINGSTON
STUDY FOR WAFER BOARD (trimmed and melted), 2010
Acrylic
Reversible
8 x 8 x 0.75 inches
SOLD

MARGIE LIVINGSTON
STUDY FOR WAFER BOARD (untrimmed), 2010
Acrylic
10 x 10 x 0.75 inches
$1,700
SOLD

These pieces are part of a new body of work in which I’ve been using paint as a sculptural medium. I wanted the new works to do two things—surprise me, and point to their historical roots. And in this case, even the scraps left over from cutting some of my recent sculptural paintings, notably the paintblocks, have their uses—I’ve been reconstituting the scraps and shavings as flat shapes reminiscent of waferboard (OSB), a process that can be traced to Picasso’s collages.

Both Picasso and Braque used collage and coined the word from the French "coller" meaning to glue). According to an on-line article by the Guggenheim Museum, they &;quot;methodically reexamined painting and sculpture and gave each medium some of the characteristics of the other. In the process they invented collage."

This intersection between painting and sculpture is the focus of my studio practice right now. The waferboard pieces are descendants of Picasso’s early experiments, since they use "found objects" from my studio. —Margie Livingston

MICHAEL SPAFFORD
MINOTAUR TRIPTYCH I, 1988
Oil on canvas
93 x 216 inches
Courtesy of Francine Seders Gallery

In the second year of high school Latin I read excerpts from Julius Caesar, Virgil and Ovid. It was then that I began to develop an interest in mythology and the imagery that I looked at was from paintings on ancient Greek and Roman pottery. After we were married, knowing that I liked Ovid, Elizabeth gave me "The Metamorphoses of Ovid-An English Version by A.E. Watts with the Etchings of Pablo Picasso". It was a wonderful gift. It not only was an encyclopedia of ancient mythology, it may have been the first time I associated Picasso with Greco-Roman mythology. In 1987/88, when I was working on this first of many minotaur triptychs, I was fully aware of Picasso's beautiful erotic drawings and prints of minotaur and maiden as well as the works of many other artists who used the minotaur image.

It was neither his subject matter nor his facility that first attracted me to Picasso’s work when I was a young painter, rather it was his ability to see and act visually. No matter what the medium or style of his work and no matter how much he distorted or systematized the pictorial basis of his images, his work always looked complete and good. He seemed to have the visual equivalent of perfect pitch. —Michael Spafford

WHITING TENNIS
MAN WITH GUITAR, 2010
Acrylic and collage on canvas
68 x 46 inches
$8,500
SOLD

Picasso is the best artist, and this annoys some people, and I think this goes to the heart of why he's the best artist. Rather than speculate about why some people (artist friends of mine included), dislike his artwork and/or resent his status, I'll mention some of the things that I think give it the power it has and see if a connection suggests itself. Maybe I'm wrong; it's just an idea, and of course this list omits the obvious and benign things that even Picasso-haters would agree are great. Picasso's art is polluted with ambition, lust, narcissism, envy, competitiveness, deceit, vanity, pride, contempt, the stolen, the hoarded, the borrowed and never returned, and lastly and, perhaps, most notably, fear. I don't have the space, the time nor the writing skills to express how each of these individually add to his work, but I do think that Picasso was comfortable with the idea that art is impure. This allowed him to do..... (a zillion brilliant words here) ...what he did.

And finally, what is more pure than the fear of death? Picasso's talent and confidence were the closest thing to magic that there ever was in this world, and yet with it, he could not stave off death. This infused his work with a fury which I can see right in the paint, and it inspires me to the point of distraction every time I'm in front of it. It's the deadly sins in Picasso's life and art, the worldliness of his motives, and most of all, the mortality of the artist himself which make his work so potent. —Whiting Tennis

WHITING TENNIS
DRUMMER, 2007
Acrylic and paper collage on wood panel
27.5 x 21.25 inches
Private Collection

ROBERT YODER
CARMELITE, 2008
Collage and vinyl on paper
30 x 22 inches
Courtesy of Platform Gallery

ROBERT YODER
HAMMOCK, 2009
Collage and vinyl on paper
44 x 66 inches
Courtesy of Platform Gallery

ROBERT YODER
THE HEAVY, 2009
Collage and vinyl on paper
30 x 22 inches
Courtesy of Platform Gallery