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‘Prints’ Offers Peek Into Artists’ Minds

Des Moines Register, Michael Morain, April 14, 2010

The art dealer Steven Vail has been selling prints by Jaume Plensa for about five years, but it wasn’t until the Spanish artist’s 27-foot-tall “Nomade” figure took a seat in the middle of took a seat in the middle of the Pappajohn Sculpture Park that his artwork caught on with buyers here in Des Moines. “There’s a definite credibility factor,” Vail said. “Now people come in trying to educate me.”

Vail runs Steven Vail Fine Arts out of the second floor of the historic Teachout Building in the East Village and has busied himself this week with final preparations for “Sculptors’ Prints,” a new exhibition that showcases rare prints by 12 of the 19 artists whose work adorns the park on the other end of downtown. The show opens with a reception from 5-8 p.m. Thursday and remains through June.

One of the images is a maze of shaky red lines by Louise Bourgeois, who created the park’s giant spider. Another is a mechanical diagram, by Mark di Suvero, whose red-painted steel “T8” anchors the park’s southwest corner. A printed pattern of colored bricks, by the late Sol LeWitt, looks like the swirling mural he designed for the Pappajohn Higher Education Center at 12th Street and Grand Avenue.

Few of the prints relate directly to the artists’ sculptures, but they offer insights into the artists’ imaginations and creative process. With the prints, Vail said, the artists “are working on a more personal scale.  The prints are all about ideas, and they’re more accessible.”

They’re also less expensive. Vail’s prices range from $950 for a geometric blue print by Joel Shapiro to $15,000 for a wide black fan shaped design by Ellsworth Kelly and $18,000 for a polka-dotted circle by Damien Hirst, who isn’t one of the sculpture-park artists but an A-lister nonetheless.

“People here are familiar with Hirst because he cuts cows in half and whatnot, but it’s really a beautiful print,” Vail said.  Similarly, the exhibition includes a print of a red cherry by Claes Oldenburg, whose sculptures aren’t part of the park but are just as familiar. His “Crusoe Umbrella” dominates Nollen Plaza and his 24-foot-tall trowel digs into the lawn in front of Meredith Corp. His sculpture of a giant cherry, balanced on an equally large spoon has been a landmark at the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden for some 25 years.

“Sculptor’s Prints” is Vail’s third show in the East Village space, although he works with a network of clients, print publishers and artists on both coasts and beyond.

“We do as much business overseas and throughout the United States as in Iowa,” said Vail, a Des Moines native, “but it’s nice to have the doors open here.”

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Jan Frank and Robert Stanley at Steven Vail

Art in America, Dennis Raverty, April 2001

At first glance a show of paintings by Jan Frank and Robert Stanley seems an unlikely coupling: heavily worked, subtle abstractions versus brassy photo-realist nudes. It turns out, however, that these two artists share a certain fascination with the female body.

Working directly from nude models, Frank creates asensuous, quasi-abstract evocations of the female body through curving lines and fragmented marks. His paintings are full of erasures, redrawn lines and strokes partially covered with translucent white paint. For the careful observer, they offer a whole world of pentimenti. In contrast to his previous paintings, which were done on plywood or corrugated cardboard, Frank’s recent works are painted on finely woven linen primed with gesso that is intended to change color over time. As the ground grows from subdued white to warm gray over the next decade this change, says the artist, will have an enormous effect on the look of the paintings. As the ground darkens, the effect of the successive layers of drawn lines and overlaid transparencies wil become more pronounced. For all their sensuousness, these oblique evocations of the female body come across as emotionally removed; cool, detached, voyeuristic even.

In Stanley’s work, the theme of voyeurism is more evident. When he emerged in the early 1960s with works such as high-contrast, photo-based paintings of Beatles concerts, he was grouped with the Pop artists. In his later years, Stanley, who died in 1997, frequently painted highly sensual, vividly colored female nudes. A feminist reading of his later work, which sometimes walks a fien line between high-art traditions and commercial Playboy-style imagery, might consider these portraits of nude young women as the voyeuristic fantasies of an aging male painter. Indeed there is something shocking at first in the over-the-top sensuality of theses passionately painted women. One suspects that Stanley knew how objectionable these paintings might be to some viewers, and that impressive painterly virtuosity he brought to them was partially meant to forestall such criticism.

Despite the interesting, unexpected affinities between these two artists’ works, the bravado of Stanley’s paintings tended to overpower Frank’s smaller, more subtle canvases. But the show was effective in affirming the continuing importance of – and varied approaches to – the nude in contemporary art.

SG4, Jan Frank, 2001, Oil and alkyd paint on Linen