Fine Art Connoisseur March/April 2021

From childhood I remember the celebration when my Uncle Hugh bought one of the first televisions in our town. The extended family gathered around that small screen, about the size of a book, with its scratchy black-and-white images. We eventually got one, too, and then the first color TV when it came out, making Bonanza so much more enjoyable. Of course, screens have evolved to take over our lives, commanding our eyes every second of the day. I go from working on a big monitor in my office to looking at a bigger screen for entertainment at home, all while looking at the small screen in my hand as I scroll through hundreds of comments and videos. I can remember clearly the first time I saw a giant flat-screen television,…

My favorite issue of the year is the one that highlights real-world collectors of contemporary realist art. This is that issue, and we hope you will enjoy “meeting” the individuals and couples who have so generously opened their doors (see pages 96–115). These folks now join 72 others we have profiled since 2015, and we are honored and grateful to welcome them to this community. Why do we do this? First, people need role models, in any walk of life. We play football better after watching Tom Brady, and we cook more effectively after Rachael Ray demonstrates the recipe. It’s harder with art collecting because there is no single way to do it, and unfortunately the best-known collectors are financiers and movie stars paying millions at auction for a Koons…

JEREMY MIRANDA (b. 1980) is an environmentalist, but not in the strict textbook sense. As an artist who waxes poetic about his immediate surroundings through paint, he endeavors to make sense of, and bring broader meaning to, the everyday spaces and places we inhabit. In particular, he’s interested in closely observing the play of light and intricate color patterns he sees around him in the hope of unearthing some quiet corner or hidden narrative. While environmentalists try to solve such problems as how to eliminate pollution and protect nature, Miranda is helping to solve such visual dilemmas as cursory glances and our tendency to overlook. A recent painting titled Home Remedy is a good example. The brightly blazing fire in the foreground could symbolize numerous things, and often the artist…

The soft sensibility that radiates from David Rem-fry belies a strength of purpose that has taken him from struggling teenage art student to one of Britain’s most respected artists. “I was always going to be an artist,” he remembers, smiling out from his London studio during our pandemic-necessitated Zoom conversation. From the start, Remfry resisted the pressure to train as a teacher in order to earn his living. “I’d seen that route. Whatever I did” — one job was sweeping up cockroaches at night in a seedy hotel — “I made sure I always had eight hours a day back in the studio being an artist.” It paid off. Remfry is equally esteemed in Britain and the U.S., where he lived for 18 years. His work is in more than…

As much as we all love painting, sculpture, drawing, and printmaking, the most public of all visual art forms is architecture. Whether we want to or not, we must look at the buildings around us: we cannot turn them toward the wall or hide them in a closet if they prove to be unattractive. That’s one reason great architects are so appreciated, even by people born centuries later who don’t know their names yet can patently see the artistry they conveyed through stone, brick, or steel. This season we invited artists across America to show us which buildings they have been examining from the outside (rather than the inside, where so many of us have been confined lately). We were thrilled with the images they shared, ranging from famous historical…

Viewers in search of experiential art need look no further than Alina Grasmann’s paintings from Sculpting in Time, the solo show that New York City’s Fridman Gallery devoted to her recently. Born in 1989, Grasmann grew up on the outskirts of Munich, the German city where she now lives and works. Earlier in life, Grasmann studied at Munich’s Academy of Fine Arts, including a stint at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, yet somehow her work is distinctly American. Thus it’s only fitting that New York was where Grasmann chose to present Sculpting in Time, which actually contained two new series of large paintings — a curated blend of places both real and imaginary, emblematic of the artist’s fascination with American mythology. The first series — titled The Montauk…