Frame Work
A few thoughts about frames...
Whenever I think of art trends I feel a bit like Bill Cunningham. Bill and I don’t have much in common, but I’ve always revered his talent for being able to string together small details in what people were wearing to complete a larger pattern, (not to mention his cycling ability, unshared by me, and his love of blue chore coats- shared by me).
These trends have run the gamut, you name it I’ve seen it; eggs, luxury logos, neon, hotel formalist abstraction, re-inventions of Dutch interiors and still-lives, and, what feels like the same brushy investigation of the female nude over and over. Although my reading on this may on its face sound disparaging it is not; it’s always interesting to see what has grabbed hold of the imagination of both artist and viewer, and see how these trends influence the art market. All industries have their trends- particularly other so-called “glamour” industries. How many cycles of Top Chef have I sat through where chefs threw yogurt on a plate, or made 18 variations of a crudo? “millennial pink” took over advertising and interior design for a short time, and so forth.
One trend I’ve been really excited by as of late is the use of frames in contemporary art. A far cry from the ornate frames hanging around works in places like The Met, or the modernist and sleek frames found in contemporary stores (and chains like Framebridge) that certainly don’t distract nor detract from the art within, more and more artists are utilizing the frame as an extension of the work itself.
In early 2023, on a blisteringly cold polar-vortex day, I tromped around to Silke Lindner Gallery in Tribeca to see the Emma Kohlmann show. A longtime fan of Emma’s work, there’s pretty much no Emma pilgrimage I won’t make. Amid her rusty reds, sapphire blues, and goldenrod yellows, semi-abstracted forms and symbols take shape on Kohlmann’s surfaces. The figures take some of their inspiration from Greek and Roman (as well as Etruscan for that matter), art, but quickly take on a visual language all their own; visual motifs like faces, vines, and even simplified animals like horses are commonly featured alongside a mélange of squiggly vegetation- used as almost connective-tissue between one image and the next. The show at SL however, was the first time I noticed the same sprawling vine and vegetation motifs curled along the edges of the thin-wood frames on each work. In, “Cow”, the vines appear in a consistent decorative pattern around a very central work with only one figure in sight. In a break with traditional frames and framing, the etchings on the frames serve as a continuation of the artist’s own hand, demonstrating an artistic autonomy over the vision of the work as a whole, as well as different mediums.
Artist Larissa Lockshin’s abstract paintings utilize recognizable signs for the millennial set (hearts, four and five-petaled flowers), while playing with two levels of central tension; her harried brushstrokes appear as if she’s passionately digging into the canvas’s surface, which has an underlying layer of sheen, allowing the strokes to almost float above a pearlescent underbelly, violence countered by softness. Like Kohlmann, Lockshin carves and “draws” images in the sides of her tightly framed works; ranging from little rain clouds to planets to squiggles, the drawings maintain Lockshin’s childlike visual lexicon while pushing her work out of abstraction and into a playful semi-representation.
Further, the frames themselves also display a similar type of tension to the one expressed in her surfaces- the frames themselves are flushed closely to each work, however, in many pieces, wooden elements of the frame emerge from the sides of the work onto the canvas mitigating close looking to reveal (quickly) a more robust and obvious sculptural element. One such work on Lockshin’s website broke this pattern- in which knobs akin to those found on bedframes, rolling pins (and if I’m honest, Torah scrolls?) jut out from the longitudinal sides of the work, disrupting Lockshin’s previously set “rules” and the silhouette of the work altogether.
Sculptural elements in and of themselves are also having a moment in the frame game. Jenna Rothstein, an artist who is quickly becoming a multi-hyphenate (sculpting, designing clothing, making giant hot dogs, a photographer putting out a truly hilarious and fabulous themed calendar in irreverent outfits with her family dog let alone painter- iconic) has been interrogating her own brand of funky frames to surround her darkly humorous paintings. Using ceramic, aqua resin, and, plaster, and pieces of plastic, Rothstein envelops her works in jagged spikes, oblong fingers, and pseudo-mosaics. The frames generally have little connection to the paintings attached to them, however despite this, they function not in competition with one another but as a whole work. Rothstein doesn’t choose to make frames for all her works, but those that do possess the frames appear precious and almost treasure-like in their hybridity.
Thrumming with energy, Stephanie Temma Hier’s work picks up where Rothstein’s works begin to take shape. Life-sized lobsters grace the flanks of a painting of a google-image type search of people yawning, a giant cherry pie houses a small chunk of a painting of fruit behind a wire fence, and in a particularly thrilling work seen at an art fair, an entire cake designed to look like a savory version of a birthday cake with prawns, asparagus, and brown bread -and dill laden tea sandwiches in the cross-section shows of a small painting of women from the neck down in garden-fresh bikini tops and skirts (the whole thing is reminiscent of the Victory Garden parties and general post-war retro ethos). Kitsch, nostalgia, and the connection of thoughts are prevalent and abiding themes in Hier’s work, melding together images in paint and in ceramic that may at first appear to be disparate. The connections between frame to painting vary; in “Her psychology today” it’s easy to understand where the pink roses and sugary frosting of the frame might connect to the depictions of the smashed wedding cake and legs of women all in black shoes mesh, others are less easily reconciled. No matter the strength of the connective tissue, the electric combination of larger-than-life- ceramic figuration with equally adept painting is its own kind of cacophonous revelation. Each piece could function independently from the other but is much more impactful as a part of a whole.
In any of the above examples there is no dissolving the frame from the art which helps frame (ugh) how we can think about art as a holistic process. There is a deep sentimentality, a strange mother-and-child tenderness to having a frame and work within it as being symbiotic (or as the case may be, dependent) on one another. I don’t think that this direction is “good” or “bad” by any stretch- rather, it’s just an alternative way of considering the entire package of a piece of art that separates much of contemporary art from the canon of art history. Even when one steps into a modern wing of a museum as opposed to the European wing (truly anything that isn’t from the early 20th C. and prior) one can see the stark difference in how most modern and contemporary paintings are displayed. I wonder (and I’m sure I’ll have a more studied and astute reader who can tell me specifically) what the lack of frames besides a display frame or packing frame indicates about the state of contemporary painting (if there is any commentary to be found). Frame-as-accessory seems to be over. Frame-as-sidekick, frame-as-skin might be here to stay.