Ana Carolina Mönnaco

Lost at Sea

2022

Robert Motherwell Elegy to the Spanish Republic No. 110C 1968 Acrylic and graphite on paper 15.2 x 20.3 cms (6 x 8 ins) Robert Motherwell's Elegies series represent one of the iconic motifs of Abstract Expressionism.  Based on a 1948 ink illustration the artist executed accompanying a Harold Rosenberg poem, “A Bird for every bird,” the drawing shows the hypnotically repetitive patterning of ovoids and vertical beams.  The stark contrast of the black ink on white paper references the symbolic use of the color black by artists such as Goya, Manet and Matisse to convey death, loss, and tragedy.  Motherwell was quite affected by the turbulence of the Spanish Civil War and alludes to the Spanish republic in his Elegies. Motherwell’s plumbing the depths of poetry, history, and primordial art in the Elegies is considered a hallmark of nascent Abstract Expressionist painting in its desire to "excavate" essential imagery of mankind. Motherwell, who originally trained as a philosophy scholar and later became of the great editors of 20th century art documents, grasped very early on the crucial importance that in order to contribute meaningfully to the canon of modern art, one must create a principle of aesthetics. Through the surrealist concept of automatism, the artist finally found the creative principle that eventually governed his extraordinary artistic output and produced the Elegies, one of the most salient, immediate painterly images of 20th century abstract painting. In fact, he has alluded to the fact that each one of his Elegies begins as an automatic drawing, and certain shapes are then blocked to create the signature armature of the vertical bars and ovals. The Elegies seem to possess the power of an archetypal image, an image the mind already grasps on a subconscious level. Motherwell's play of dualities of black and white as well as other dichotomies—the geometric versus the organic, chaos versus order, death versus life—was a condition of living through a tumultuous period in American history. During an interview, he vividly recalled the 1940s as the time when society was ordered by a set of contradictions.  In Motherwell's Elegies, he not only discovered an incredibly elastic pictorial language that would communicate on multiple levels but also acknowledged these contradictions in a manner that would resonate in abstract form.  The present work served as a model for a painting, Spanish Elegy...

Comes framed and ready to hang in professional wood black floater frame. Artist’s Statement: “I have been working on more formal and restrained paintings lately, and decided to loos...

Comes framed and ready to hang in black floater frame. Artist’s Statement: “These paintings are technically challenging, as they combine wax (encaustic), tar, oil, acrylic, powdered...

Comes framed and ready to hang in professional wood black floater frame. Artist’s Statement: “I have been working on more formal and restrained paintings lately, and decided to loos...

Comes framed and ready to hang in black floater frame. (Note: photographed in natural light which gave the painting a bluish cast; it's more white in person. The picture shot at an ...

Comes framed and ready to hang in professional wood black floater frame. This painting was a Finalist in the Grey Cube Gallery's City Art International Art Exhibition: "Out of all ...

Comes framed and ready to hang. Artist’s Statement: “I have been working on more formal and restrained paintings lately, and decided to loosen up by revisiting a series I did a few ...

Comes framed and ready to hang in professional wood black floater frame. Artist’s Statement: “I have been working on more formal and restrained paintings lately, and decided to loos...

(Comes float-framed behind glass.) Artist's Statement: "I was working on my "Gridish" paintings (you can find them in a search on the term "Gridish" on this site) when I became fascinated with certain materials I was working with - a new type of super-flat, super-black paint; powdered graphite; and iron oxide pigment. I had a small canvas ready to go, and shifted my attention to concentrating on just one of the rectangular forms I had been using in the Gridish series, and applying these materials in a way that pleased me. That sort of industrial sheen on the surface of the rectangle is really beautiful to me. This was a second I made, on paper. Quite obviously the mood given off by these works is greatly different from the colorful Gridish paintings that spawned them. My daughter, studying design at RISD, said she found the pic I...

(Painted on thick gallery-wrapped professional canvas, ready to hang or be framed if you prefer. A video has been included to provide a dimensional view of the piece.) Artist's Stat...