Hartje Gallery

Robert Longo’s “Men in the Cities” series in the exhibition “Sympathy for the Devil: Art and Rock and Roll Since 1967” at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago through Jan.6, 2008

“The exhibition displays Mr. Longo’s large-scale charcoal drawings from his “Men in the Cities” series…’Everyone working in the underground Lower Manhattan music scene was coming out of some art school…There were visual art students, filmmaking students. We were all basically middle-class kids who were college educated. Everyone was hip to appropriation, Minimalism and Conceptual art practices – and applying that to the music that was going down.’

New Wave and postpunk bands proved fertile ground for Mr. Longo. ‘Music was like the gasoline that you put in the engine to make the car go,’ he said in an interview at his Little Italy studio, where his art surrounded three guitars and a bass. ‘Talking Heads and Joy Division became the biggest fuel for my work. That was when I got really productive.’

Citing the multiple sources behind his 1980-82 ‘Men in the Cities’ drawings, Mr. Longo singled out a Contortions gig at CBGB. ’The way James Chance moved on-stage – in spasms, almost like psychotic impulses,’ he said. ‘It really moved me.’

(from the New York Times, Sunday, September 30, 2007, p. 30; audio and video from the artists in the exhibit at nytimes.com/music)

Francesco Clemente’s recent shows at Deitch Projects and Mary Boone gallery were reviewed in ARTNEWS in September, 2007 by Lilly Wei. “…Clemente’s Polaroids and his pencil, ink, gouache, and pastel drawings document the early evolution of his signature subjects (the eroticized body and self-portraiture) and attitudes (sensual, nervous, self-referential and provocative). There were many small-scale sketches or doodles that reflected the influence of arte povera and Post-Minimalism, styles that he would soon discard to pursue his gorgeously corolored Neo-Expressionist representations of the ‘80s.”

The Hartje Gallery loaned two works by Keith Haring to the show “From Street to Studio” at the Brattleboro Museum and Art Center, Brattleboro, Vt. From August 11 – December 21, 2007. The exhibition also features the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat, Scot Borofsky, Brian Gormley and Ken Hiratsuka. “In the early 1980s, young people, with art training or not, took to making art on the streets of New York City’s East Village. The street scene quickly moved to the center of the art world when urban poet and wall writer Jean-Michell Basquiat and stealth subway artist Keith Haring were featured in successive Whitney Biennial exhibits. They both died within a decade of their early successes…”