#dnapaintings

"DNA:Study:I" (2014, collection of Debra and Dennis Scholl) is from 'McArthur Binion: DNA,' published @delmonico_books⁠⠀ ⁠⠀ The book contains an interview between Binion and Franklin Sirmans. Here's an excerpt:⁠⠀ ⁠⠀ FS: I’m curious about the process that goes into the 'DNA' works, about how you actually make them. And I’d like to talk about not just process, but also content. I’m sitting here looking at Mary Boone’s name, and Ronald Bladen’s name, and others. So, I’d like to get a sense of everything, to tie it together with the concept. ⁠⠀ ⁠⠀ MB: It took me ten and fifteen years to figure out how to use my phone book. Along the way, one of the things I recognized was that it would visualize my entire social DNA. Everybody I ever met. Everybody I ever sold a piece to, everybody I’d ever gone out with, the whole thing. That was a difficult part of it. I wanted to have some kind of space away from the reality of it. When I hired my first assistant, who is still with me now, Ben, he was twenty-two years old. That was about eight years ago. He had no idea who anyone was; the only person he had ever heard of in the book was Jean-Michel Basquiat. ⁠⠀ ⁠⠀ FS: That’s hilarious. ⁠⠀ ⁠⠀ MB: He was able to apply the collage with no emotion. So that was good because I never planned them out…⁠⠀ ⁠⠀ Read more via linkinbio.⁠⠀ ⁠⠀ Edited with text by @nawinawinawi ⁠⠀ Text by @_free_forms_ & @michaelstonerichards⁠⠀ Interview by #FranklinSirmans⁠⠀ ⁠⠀ @mcarthurbinion #mcarthurbinion #dnapaintings #dnastudy #dna https://www.instagram.com/p/CJHT68Ap1yO/?igshid=ezgkh43rnqa3

"DNA:Study:VI," 2014, is from 'McArthur Binion: DNA,' published @delmonico_books⁠⠀ ⁠⠀ "Seeing the work—the paintings—of McArthur Binion is to be struck in many ways, almost simultaneously, by their muted tones of gray, brown, black, blue and sometimes tones of green, and by a palette and texture the feel and atmosphere of still life," Michael Stone Richards writes. "Like the most accomplished still lifes, the paintings are the very embodiment of austerity and the ideal of an autonomous art in which it is understood that the work stands alone, resists manipulation, and is a thing among things requiring a language of appreciation unaffiliated with commodities. There is a coolness in the sense of restraint and withholding in the works, something all the more emphasized when they are seen in person in the artist’s studio or in a gallery space such as @lehmannmaupin In other words, the works do not advertise anything, they bear no striking images to pull in even the most casual of viewers… The surfaces in Binion’s works are mute, and even as one begins to perceive lines, those lines do not at first stand out as lines but rather are grasped as movements embedded in the surface. It is as if from the surface there emerge planes of uneven movement and so, yes, if there are planes there should be implied lines as well, but the planes begin to move because the lines are hand-drawn, often through and across the surface. Each work in the ongoing 'DNA' series, begun in 2013, no matter its palette or scale, is marked by a hand-drawn grid, the lines of which are not always aligned as might at first seem to be the case in, for example, works by Agnes Martin, and so can seem syncopated. This approach to the works takes time. As one is held to and held back by the surface of the works, there is a sense of being held in check at the surface, as if one is not initially invited 'into' a work where there seems to be no entry, only a gallery of surfaces, marked in every case by the presence of a grid…"⁠⠀ ⁠⠀ Edited with text by @nawinawinawi ⁠⠀ Text by @_free_forms_ & @michaelstonerichards⁠⠀ Interview by #FranklinSirmans⁠⠀ ⁠⠀ @mcarthurbinion #mcarthurbinion #dnapaintings #dnastudy #dna https://www.instagram.com/p/CJHJNTkJuGH/?igshid=5dcdgat7y68

This detail of "DNA:Study:X," 2014, is reproduced from 'McArthur Binion: DNA,' a new release this week published by @delmonico_books⁠⠀ ⁠⠀ @nawinawinawi writes, "The DNA series emerged from Binion’s interest in making use of an address book he had kept since 1972, in which he had handwritten and continuously updated and annotated the contact information of his family, friends, colleagues, and acquaintances (fig.1). The book includes printed pages that he filled out over the course of nineteen years in New York and during the initial years following his move to Chicago in the early 1990s. It contains, as the artist has said, “the loves, the hates, everything I am,” and can also be read as a primary source document for the social webs of the art world and adjacent, interconnected cultural scenes.1 Binion eventually decided to create color copies—laser prints—of each page and cut them into squares that he tiled on the surface of wooden panels in alternating vertical and horizontal patterns, creating a smooth, seamless collaged ground upon which he drew the hallmark grid patterns of the series. Thus began the DNA works."⁠⠀ ⁠⠀ Read more via linkinbio.⁠⠀ ⁠⠀ Please order from your local independent #bookstorehero !!⁠⠀ ⁠⠀ Edited with text by @nawinawinawi Text by @_free_forms_ & @michaelstonerichards⁠⠀ Interview by #FranklinSirmans⁠⠀ ⁠⠀ @mcarthurbinion #mcarthurbinion #dnapaintings #dnastudy #dna https://www.instagram.com/p/CJGyeEWJnpv/?igshid=1bszslt832e95

"DNA:Study:Zero" (2014, courtesy The Joyner/Giuffrida Collection) is reproduced from staff favorite new release, 'McArthur Binion: DNA,' published by @delmonico_books⁠⠀ ⁠⠀ Collecting the artist's minimalist "DNA" paintings collaged over copies of personal documents and photographs, this volume explores the series through the lenses of art history, labor, music and writing. "Part of the satisfaction of engaging with the DNA series derives from the kinship the works have with musical improvisation," Grace Deveney writes. "The subtleties and quiet variations of the visual tactile pleasure they offer necessarily exceed the language created to describe them because of their dynamic relationship between rigid structures and free play. This pleasure also derives from the possibility that there is something in these works that defies expectations about the very nature of repetition and the practice of everyday life. The result feels directly related to the outcomes of improvisation in jazz and experimental music, or the new grammars of poetry that are touchstones for Binion. When the artist arrives at the studio to add to the DNA series, he cocreates with the past—the network of contacts from his address book, his familial origins evoked by his birth certificate, and finally, with the limits of his hand and the forms and materials he has engaged with since the 1970s. The DNA series gestures to both the internal facets of each painting, as well as the world beyond the studio." ⁠⠀ ⁠⠀ Read more via linkinbio.⁠⠀ ⁠⠀ Please order from your local independent #bookstorehero !!⁠⠀ ⁠⠀ Edited with text by @nawinawinawi ⁠⠀ Text by @_free_forms_ & @michaelstonerichards⁠⠀ Interview by #FranklinSirmans⁠⠀ ⁠⠀ @mcarthurbinion #mcarthurbinion #dnapaintings #dnastudy #dna https://www.instagram.com/p/CJGjrBwJ9c-/?igshid=159mmgd5rpwgj