Paintings by poets often present mysterious correspondences, and a new opportunity to consider these arrives with a show of Mark Strand’s collages, about to open in the Lori Bookstein Gallery.
The exhibition includes fifteen collages Strand made in Madrid and New York between 2011 and 2013. He makes his own paper at Dieu Donné with the help of master papermaker Sue Gosin, combining his own blend of linen rag and Abaca pulp from the Philippines and painting the still-wet paper with his hands, paint brushes, and squirt bottles, before drying, tearing, and assembling it into collages. (You’ll be seeing one on the cover of Little Star #5, out this November.) Strand’s collages have also been exhibited at the James Cohan Gallery in Shanghai.
One is reminded of a recent exhibition at the Tibor de Nagy gallery of the paintings of Elizabeth Bishop (considered here by William Benton), which seemed at once so familiarly hers and so startling and new. The Tibor de Nagy gallery, for its part, has a storied history of chronicling the shared destinies of poets and painters.
Strand-watchers, meanwhile, may remember the series of enigmatic island etchings that he exhibited in the late 1990s. There are a few of them in Bowdoin’s art gallery, and a variant showed up on the cover of his book Blizzard of One (”to stare at nothing is to learn by heart / what all of us will be swept into”).
He has also written about Hopper, William Bailey, and figurative painting generally in The Art of the Real. Hear him speak about Vermeer and Chardin in this lecture at The Frick in 2010. (Strand’s most recent book of poems is Almost Invisible. Hear him read poems from it at a Little Star Salon in 2011.)
A common thread among these painters, Strand’s own art, and his poems might be found in a comment he made to More Intelligent Life a few years ago, “I do admire many of the same traits in poetry as in painting. Oddly enough, one of them is reticence.”
Mark Strand, Collage (2013).
Courtesy Lori Bookstein Fine Art
See Mark Strand’s collages on the cover of Little Star #5 and on Little Star Weekly for March 6, 2013, and December 6, 2013
MARK STRAND: COLLAGES
September 05, 2013–October 05, 2013
Lori Bookstein Fine Art | 138 Tenth Avenue | New York, NY 10011 | 212.750.0949 | info@loribooksteinfineart.com
A full-color catalogue of the exhibition with an essay by Francine Prose is available. A book of Strand’s collages is to be published by Vif Éditions, Paris, later this year.
Online Exhibition Press Release