Mike Solomon

Discussion with Mike Solomon about Syd Solomon: Views from Above
Cocktails & Collections
Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg
Thursday, November 15, 2018
5 - 7 PM
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“Please Send To: Ray Johnson” is predominently a collection of “Mail Art” Johnson sent to Ted Carey, left to the museum by Tito Spiga as part of his bequest. “Syd Solomon: Concealed and Revealed” operates as a retrospective of the artist, who died in 2004, using his archive to provide new context to his output from his early days before and after World War II, when he devised camouflage techniques for the military, to late work from the early 1990s. Finally, “Sara Mejia Kriendler: In Back of Beyond” will showcase the artist’s Colombian roots with sculptures in terra-cotta, plaster, and gold leaf that also reference today’s consumer culture. Ms. Kriendler was the recipient of top honors in the 2016 members show.

SYD SOLOMON and PLEASE SEND TO: RAY JOHNSON
Oct. 20-Dec. 17
Guild Hall

Through his New York Correspondence School in the 1950s, Ray Johnson started his own art movement — Mail Art. Johnson networked with other artists to whom he mailed drawings, poems and collages, asking them to add their touches and forward it to another member of the group. Guild Hall’s second major gallery will explore the career of Syd Solomon, self-described “Abstract Impressionist” whose paintings were inspired by the natural environment surrounding his homes in the Hamptons and Florida.

631-324-0806
guildhall.org

What made Mike Solomon’s talk about Alfonso Ossorio and the Creeks so captivating was that, as he put it, “It is a personal as well as a cultural history.” An overflow audience packed the Baldwin Family Lecture Room at the East Hampton Library to hear Mr. Solomon, an artist and founding director of the Ossorio Foundation, discuss Ossorio’s art, his generosity, and his influence in the art world of the 1950s and beyond.

The Solomon family — Syd, an important abstract painter, his wife, Annie, and their two children, Mike and Michele — lived at the Creeks, Ossorio’s 57-acre estate on Georgica Pond in East Hampton, for three months in 1959. Thirty years later, Mike returned to East Hampton with his wife and 2-year-old son to work as Ossorio’s studio assistant. After the artist’s death a year later, he became the director of the foundation established by Ted Dragon, Ossorio’s life partner and heir.

September 29, 2018 - January 20, 2019
Museum of Fine Arts
St. Petersburg, Florida

Syd Solomon’s (American, 1917–2004) gestural canvases are exemplary of the tenets of Abstract Expressionism, as seen in the large-scale painting Westcoastalscape (1968) currently on view in the Acheson Gallery.  He has stated, “I am interested in the immediate, the chance and the transitory aspects […] in my work.  The truth of the moment, I believe may frequently be the artist’s opening to permanent quality.”  His multilayered paintings, characterized by stunning sweeps of color contrasts, are inspired by nature, and specifically the Florida landscape.  This Spotlight exhibition brings together works ranging from 1945 through the 1980s, drawn from the Museum collection as well as the Estate of Syd Solomon, which has also loaned archival images and publications.

After serving in WWII, Solomon divided his time between Sarasota, where he established the Institute of Fine Art at New College, and East Hampton, New York. At his invitation, a distinguished group of artists taught at New College in the 1960s including Conrad Marca-Relli, Larry Rivers, and Philip Guston.

Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center: “The Permanent Collection: A 30-Year Survey”
August 2, 2018 through October 27, 2018

The Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center presents “The Permanent Collection: A 30-Year Survey” featuring highlights such Composition with Red Arc and Horses, a 1930’s painting by Jackson Pollock, and a wooden bird house made by Pollock in the 1940s.

In addition to art by Jackson Pollock, the survey includes artworks by Lee Krasner, Mike Bidlo, Thomas Hart Benton, James Brooks, Stanley William Hayter, David Slivka and Syd Solomon. Photography by Dan Budnik, Robert Giard, Bernard Gotfryd, Barbara Kasten, Fred McDarrah, Hans Namuth, Tony Vaccaro and Wilfrid Zogbaum are also part of the show.

The Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center is located at 830 Springs-Fireplace Road, East Hampton, NY 11937.

Click here for exhibition details

Along with passions for music and surfing, visual art—and his faith—have filled Solomon’s existence ever since. But, as with any artist, it’s been a complex journey to the point in his career where he stands now, with works in the permanent collections of the John & Mable Ringling Museum of Art, the Cantor Fitzgerald Collection in New York, the Guild Hall Museum in East Hampton and the Parrish Art Museum, among others, as well as the private collections of playwright Edward Albee, artist Dan Flavin, architect-artist Richard Meier and others.

New paintings by Mike Solomon embrace an unusual variety of formal ambiguity. Uniquely and unexpectedly reticent, his resin-constructed panels, most of which fall within easel scale, present the viewer with out of focus fields of color that are compelling while still offering resistance to optical navigation. Currently exhibited in "Mike Solomon: Immediate Splendor" at Berry Campbell in New York, these works insist instead on a viewer’s steady and indeterminate gaze. Objectively speaking, they may be said to cultivate a realization of Hans Hoffman’s push-and-pull that is frozen in time.

Mike Solomon creates beautiful, color saturated paintings that have a built-in grid reminiscent of early Larry Poons geometric accents, which contain an elegant veil of dreamlike mist. Solomon is a tastemaker if there ever was one, and coupled with his unusual acquaintances, including his experiences as a studio assistant to John Chamberlain, James Brooks and Charlotte Park, and collectors like Edward Albee, Beth DeWoody, Dan Flavin and Richard Meier, among others, this kind of professional support and relationships are simply golden, and it shows.