Justine Otto: Phillips Collection Emerging Artist Prize

Justine Otto with work_AW

Artist Justine Otto with her work recently acquired by The Phillips Collection.

This month, The Phillips Collection awarded its second Emerging Artist Prize, again selected from works on display at the (e)merge art fair, which closed October 5. This year’s winner is the 40-year-old Polish-born German artist Justine Otto, whose works were on view at the Hamburg-based gallery polarraum. Phillips Director Dorothy Kosinski, Senior Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art Vesela Sretenovič, and myself selected two small paintings by the artist: O.T. (Strich) and Ophto.

Otto.Justine_Emerging Artist Prize

Justine Otto, Ophto, 2014. Oil on canvas, 19.7 x 15.7 inches. Copyright Justine Otto

Justine Otto’s figurative paintings show some affinities with the so-called New Leipzig School of painting, although Otto studied at the Städelschule, the prestigious art academy in Frankfurt, and lives and works in Hamburg. Like the most prominent protagonist of the Leipzig school, Neo Rauch, Otto’s paintings, most of which are based on found photographs, owe some debt to both social realist painting and surrealism. However, Otto paints in a more expressionist style, with looser brushstrokes, and her paintings mostly depict women, children, and animals, creating narratives that are both puzzling and intriguing.

The oval–shaped painting O.T. (Strich) (Untitled, Line) depicts a group of children working on a long table suggestive of a classroom. The subtitle may refer to series of lines that frequently appear in Ottos’s paintings, giving her work a touch of conceptualism. Ophto features a young woman holding up an ophthalmological instrument to her right eye while standing in a forest. Both paintings evoke the style of German photographs from the 1940s.

Otto’s works are welcome additions to our growing holdings of contemporary German art, which include recent acquisitions by Wolfgang Laib, Walther Dahn, Franz Erhard Walther, Georg Baselitz, and Markus Lüpertz.

As in the previous year, the Phillips Emerging Artist Prize was made possible by the generous support of Hank and Carol Brown Goldberg.

Sijae Byun: Phillips Collection Emerging Artist Prize

Sijae Byun, Wind #7 in Jungle, 2013. Acrylic and ink on silk, 50 ½ x 37 ½ inches. The Phillips Collection; acquired with funds from Hank and Carol Brown Goldberg

Sijae Byun, Wind #7 in Jungle, 2013. Acrylic and ink on silk, 50 1/2 x 37 1/2 inches. The Phillips Collection. Acquired with funds from Hank and Carol Brown Goldberg

Following up on the successful purchase of our first work by a contemporary African artist, Aimée Mpane at last year’s (e)merge art fair (made possible by Gallerist’s Herb and Dorothy Vogel Award), one of our enthusiastic and generous trustees, Carol Brown Goldberg and her husband Hank, donated funds to purchase a work by an emerging artist from this year’s (e)merge art fair.

Once again, our director Dorothy Kosinski, my colleague Vesela Sretenovic, and I were given the task to select a work from the fair. We each spent hours roaming the rooms and corridors at the Capitol Skyline Hotel that were taken over by galleries and independent artists, but kept coming back to an installation of intriguing paintings on silk by a young Korean artist, Sijae Byun, that were on view in the room  occupied by the Washington Project for the Arts, an independent organization that since 1975 has served as a catalyst for emerging art.  One painting in particular stood out for all of us: Wind #7 in  Jungle (2013)—an aggregation of painted biomorphic shapes and moiré patterns produced by the superposition of multiple layers of pale purple silk. The artist, who received her training at  Kookmin University, Seoul, Korea and at the School of Visual Arts in New York, and is now based in Maryland, derives much of her imagery from the relationship of nature and architecture, inspired by the philosophical and religious tradition of Daoism, best known through its most influential text, the Chinese Tao Te Ching or Daodejing.

Sijae Byun’s painting is not the first work by a Korean artist to enter The Phillips Collection. The Phillips owns a painting by the pioneering abstract painter Kim Whan-ki (1913–1974), 27-II-70 (1970) and four photographs by the Korean photographer Nikki S. Lee. Interestingly, Duncan Phillips’s first transatlantic journey in 1910 was not to Europe, but an extended family vacation to Asia that was primarily spent in Japan. It had a profound and lasting influence on Phillips, sparking a  lifelong interest in merging an Eastern aesthetic with a Western sensibility in his own collection by acquiring American and European works that were attuned to Japanese formal values. In an article titled “The Problem of Art in Japan,” written in 1907 while he was a senior at Yale University, Phillips defined the principal difference between Western and Japanese art: “With us man is the cynosure of artistic eyes, while with them he is vouchsafed less attention than any bit of natural beauty, such as a spray of grass or a spring of cherry blossoms. Nature, not man is ever his inspiration.”

I believe that there is a good chance that Duncan Phillips would have approved of Sijae Byun’s painterly synthesis of natural beauty and man-made structures.

 

 

 

Director’s Desk: Meeting Aimé Mpane at (e)merge

Aimé Mpane, Mapasa (Twins), 2012. Photo: courtesy (e)merge art fair

Aimé Mpane, Mapasa (Twins), 2012. Photo: courtesy (e)merge art fair

(e)merge is such a great addition to the arts ecology of D.C. It generates excitement, knowledge, contacts, and, I dare say, a significant economic impact, as well. The Phillips is so proud to receive Gallerist‘s Herb and Dorothy Vogel Award and thrilled to add a work by the Belgian-Congolese artist Aimé Mpane to our collection. Phillips curators Vesela Sretenovic and Klaus Ottmann and I vetted many works at the fair. It was a hard decision, but we all fell in love with the diptych called Twins by Mpane. (I actually love his more straightforward portraits, too, and really hope we can find a way to add one of them to the collection on top of the diptych.)

One of Aimé Mpane's portraits on view in Nomad Gallery at (e)merge. Photo: Dorothy Kosinski

One of Aimé Mpane’s portraits also on view in Nomad Gallery at (e)merge. Photo: Dorothy Kosinski

It was very special to meet the artist and discuss his ideas and process at length. He showed us photos of himself working in Kinshasa in an open air studio surrounded by the kids whose spirit and energy he captures in his works. His process is especially fascinating. . . he uses a small pick or awl to gouge into the different colored layers of an ordinary piece of plywood. He captures with remarkable elegance the movement and character of each face through (or despite?) the primitive edges of the splintered wood. He is a skilled and highly trained artist who responds to the humble circumstances and traditional methods of the Congo. His work reflects a personal and historical voyage between continents and cultures. I can imagine this work in dialogue with Jacob Lawrence’s The Migration Series. At the same time, the highly patterned headdress and scarf that Mpane depicts makes me think of the dense patterning that Vuillard so favored. Needless to say, we’re excited to hang this new acquisition at the Phillips.

And we are grateful to Gallerist and (e)merge art fair for making this exciting and important new acquisition possible.

Dorothy Kosinski, Director