Ida Kohlmeyer

Ida Kohlmeyer News: Editors' Picks: 11 Things Not to Miss in the Virtual Art World This Week | Ida Kohlmeyer: Cloistered, April  7, 2020 - Katie White for Artnet News

Editors' Picks: 11 Things Not to Miss in the Virtual Art World This Week | Ida Kohlmeyer: Cloistered

April 7, 2020 - Katie White for Artnet News

9. “Ida Kohlmeyer: Cloistered” at Berry Campbell Gallery

During her lifetime, the New Orleans painter Ida Kohlmeyer won acclaim in her native Louisiana for her abstract, often jubilantly colored canvases that hovered between gridded arrangements of Rothko-esque fields of color (in fact, she counted the AbEx giant as a friend and mentor) and the mark-making lyricism of Cy Twombly. 

A much different and little-known set of her early works can be glimpsed in “Cloistered,” a new online exhibition at Berry Campbell. Made in 1968–69, these paintings almost have the appearance of aerial maps of ancient citadels with concentric bands of geometric shapes surrounding a point of central focus. While showing the influences of Georgia O’Keeffe in places and contemporaries like Kenneth Noland in others, the works also speak to the artist’s fascination with interest in Mesoamerican art (which she voraciously collected) and in cultivating a vocabulary of hieroglyphs, emblems, and ritual meaning, which here collide into a feminine vision of Abstract Expressionism. 

—Katie White

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Ida Kohlmeyer News: Ida Kohlmeyer Exhibition Reviewed in The New York Times by Roberta Smith, April  2, 2020 - Roberta Smith for the New York Times

Ida Kohlmeyer Exhibition Reviewed in The New York Times by Roberta Smith

April 2, 2020 - Roberta Smith for the New York Times

I learned of the artist Ida Kohlmeyer (1912-97) primarily as a teacher at Newcomb College, the women’s college at Tulane University in New Orleans, from one of her former students, the Post-Minimalist shape-shifter Lynda Benglis. In the 1970s Kohlmeyer developed a style of multihued pictographs, usually organized on a grid. Pleasantly derivative, they suggested well-behaved Joan Snyder paintings. Kohlmeyer seemed to be a journeyman artist who kept up with the latest trends; had a good color sense and a solid touch; but who never put the pedal to the metal to find out what she could do that no other artist could.
 
Then the announcement for “Cloistered,” the first Kohlmeyer exhibition at Berry Campbell, arrived by email and I stood corrected. Pedal and metal had made contact. Kohlmeyer had done something that was way above her usual average, something simple and intense. In 1968 and ’69, she produced a group of symmetrical geometric abstract paintings in a rich, winy palette. Hand drawn, their harsh shapes begin at the center of the painting’s edges, widening into diamond or chevron shapes at the center. They suggest the plans for ancient forts, and appropriately so. Cocooned at the center of this symmetry was softer symbol of vulnerability: a simple circle, or occasionally an ellipse, as in the yolk yellow one that, like the air bubble in a carpenter’s level, forms the living heart of the remarkable “Cloistered,” protected by concentric bands of deep red.

Almost never exhibited, these works may be derivative but they are gloriously so. They’re so full of the work of disparate artists that they become overarching, laying waste to the term. The gallery’s press material invites comparison with the work of Georgia O’Keeffe and Agnes Pelton. That’s fine, but more contemporary references come to mind, like Jasper Johns’s and Kenneth Noland’s targets, Billy Al Bengston’s centered irises and sundry Frank Stella paintings. Then Kohlmeyer’s efforts turn away from the men to evoke the early work of Eva Hesse and Agnes Martin, Judy Chicago’s built-up dinner plates, the dark reliefs of Lee Bontecou. The list could go on.
 
One of my favorites is an untitled work that features a plushy five-point star in shades of light brown enclosed in a red pentagon that fades to pink. These paintings stunningly sum up a moment when Minimalism was giving way to or being complicated by something more emotionally challenging and implicitly feminine and feminist. They could hang in any museum. There is much more to know about Kohlmeyer, a late-blooming artist who had a successful career even without her best work — the “Cloistered” paintings — whose possibilities she unfortunately chose not to explore. ROBERTA SMITH
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Ida Kohlmeyer News: Berry Campbell Celebrates Women's History Month, March 30, 2020 - Berry Campbell

Berry Campbell Celebrates Women's History Month

March 30, 2020 - Berry Campbell

Berry Campbell Celebrates Women's History Month

Ida Kohlmeyer
VIDEO: Virtual Exhibition Walkthrough

Women of Abstract Expressionism
 
Inventory Highlights
View Exhibition

Ann Purcell
Upcoming Exhibition: Kali Poems
View Works by Ann Purcell

Judith Godwin
Forbes Magazine: Add to Your list of '5 Women Artists' at These Museums Around The United States
by Chadd Scott

Charlotte Park
Client Testimonial: 
"Extremely gratifying to see Paul Kasmin Gallery's eye-opening summer show, Painters of the East End reviewed by Erin Kimmel in this month's Art in America . And smiled extra wide that AbEx talent Charlotte Park is written up in the same paragraph as — and holds her own with— Joan Mitchell. 'Park's virtuosic oil and crayon compositions (ca. 1965 and 1967) feature dendrite-like configurations in a palette of bright pinks, yellows and blues that appear frozen mid twist.' Ten years ago Christine Berry, owner of one of the most engaging and provocative galleries in Chelsea, Berry Campbell, thankfully introduced me to the work of Charlotte Park, who died in 2010 at age 92 in Montauk, where she lived and painted. She was the wife of artist James Brooks, supporting his career at the expense of her own, and dear friends and neighbors of Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner." 
-Adam Beckerman
View Works by Charlotte Park 

Yvonne Thomas
Eazel Interactive Exhibition | Yvonne Thomas: Windows and Variations (1963-1965) 

Susan Vecsey
blue. 
Nassau County Museum of Art, Roslyn Harbor, New York
View Works by Susan Vecsey

Jill Nathanson
LINEA: Studio Notes from the Art Students League of New York
Artist Snapshot: Jill Nathanson 

Perle Fine
What We See, How We See
Through April 2021
Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, New York
View Works by Perle Fine

Joyce Weinstein
Postwar Women
Curated by William Corwin
The Art Students League, New York
View Works by Joyce Weinstein

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Ida Kohlmeyer News: Berry Campbell is Now Representing Ida Kohlmeyer (1912-1997) in Conjunction with Arthur Roger Gallery, New Orleans, November 16, 2019 - Berry Campbell

Berry Campbell is Now Representing Ida Kohlmeyer (1912-1997) in Conjunction with Arthur Roger Gallery, New Orleans

November 16, 2019 - Berry Campbell

Berry Campbell is pleased to announce the representation of the Estate of Ida Kohlmeyer (1912-1997) In conjunction with Arthur Roger Gallery, New Orleans.
 
Exhibition Forthcoming in March 2020
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