Review of Flanders 2007 Show
Review by Mary Abbe in the Minneapolis StarTribune, March 1, 2007.
Wisconsin artist Steve Firkins continues his antic musings on art and life via a curious installation of “shrines” to various faiths and philosophies. They consist of old-fashioned whatnot shelves on which he has neatly arranged everything from perfume bottles (shrine to his grandmother) to African carvings, patent medicines, Buddhas, Christian nativity scenes and crucifixions. There are also meticulous paintings representing Cubism and his own concoction, Curvism.
To view pictures of the show click here.
Art Show at Flanders
The Art of Curvism: Heaven and Earth
Shrines and Sacred Objects
January 27th – March 10th, 2007
Flanders Contemporary Art
3012 Lyndale Avenue South
Minneapolis, MN 55408
612-344-1700
CURVISM
Heaven and Earth – Artist Statement
In the beginning we were connected to heaven and earth, unified with Nature. We then made a world of our own, separated from Nature; isolated within our square, rectangular, cubed confines. Science and technology significantly transformed us.
The art and philosophy of Curvism has long been on a journey exploring what it means to be human. Curvism asks:
Who are we?
What have we lost to postmodern life?
Has science and commerce killed wisdom and compassion, God and the gods?
Has life been demystified?
Are there still questions that science alone cannot answer?
What is sacred?
What is the purpose of art?
What is the connection between the material and the spiritual?
Why do so many believe that only heaven is sacred and not the earth?
When does the spiritual and the material, heaven and earth, unite as one?
How can the masculine and the feminine live in balance and harmony to make humanity whole?
Do most of the world’s religions and wisdom traditions point the way to seeing the same mystery?
Can wisdom, love, and compassion heal and save humans from the ignorance, arrogance, and domination of their scientific knowledge?
Are there still questions without answers?
Can life still be a marvelous mystery?
Curvism seeks to help restore the human relationship with Nature. Curvism sees the circle and the ellipse as symbols of Nature. Curvism believes we need to look towards and through the symbols of the circle and the ellipse for a renewed vision of what it means to be human.
Heaven and Earth offers a perspective on the issues of our times through shrines and sacred objects, paintings, drawings and the newly published book Curvism: The Journey of an Artist.
Steve Firkins 2007
Past review of Curvism (Minnesota Daily 1998)
NEW ART OR OLD KITSCH?
STEVE FIRKINS THROWS ART A CURVEBALL
By Peter S. Scholtes
Birch Bark Mask
by Steve Firkins
If you’re not too jaded by years of bad shows, there’s no denying the romance of the art opening. As corks pop, friends of the artist make the rounds, and hipsters and would-be buyers don their Saturday-night best to see if some local prodigy will be the scene’s next Basquiat. Flanders is one of the more interesting and accessible galleries around, with both a prime downtown location on the first floor of the gallery-infested Wyman building and an admirable commitment to showing strictly contemporary art.
Steve Firkins’ The Theory of Curvism
Flanders Contemporary Art Gallery
400 First Avenue N., Mpls.
Through February 21, 1998
On Saturday night, Flanders is teeming, the buzz funneling around “curvist” painter-sculptor Steve Firkins. It’s usually off-putting to be required to read about an artist’s ideas before taking in his work. But Firkins’ “philosophy” takes mere moments to digest: In essence, if cubism fathered modern art, with straight lines evoking a modern, man-made world, then the recurring ellipses and arcs of Firkins’ “curvism” seek to reclaim art for the natural, spiritual world.
Personally, I like my conceptual art deep, fun and easy to grasp. Firkins fits the bill on all three counts. Take his particularly illustrative twin paintings, Cubist Figure (1996) and Curvist Figure (1996). Each are flat, “flesh-colored” (as in, Caucasian) Picasso-like figures set against a straight-from-the-tube blue background. The cubist nude reclines in front of a TV-looking cube; the curvist figure lounges under an elliptical moon. When I ask the artist himself about these Picasso knock-offs, he points at a circle in the middle of the TV cube, explaining that it’s “spirituality trapped.” In other words, Firkins presents your basic nature vs. artificial representation dichotomy.
Curvist Figure (1996)
by Steve Firkins
Reading all of Firkins’ works along these lines can be fun: The artist will paint nude figures sometimes with angular genitals, sometimes with curved ones, and you’re left to ponder why. The first painting that wins me over, though, shows a twin set of nude male-female couples, each painted angularly. The first couple is rendered in black and stands next to a curved, Buddha-looking statue; the second pair is painted in (once again) “flesh” color, standing next to (once again) a TV-like cube. A giant cross stands between the two couples. I interpret the painting in this way: Before Christianity-slash-modernism-slash-imperialism, humanity worshipped the spirit; but after all those slashes, humanity turned to the trapped spirit in modern media. That’s just my guess, though: Firkins hilariously titles the painting The Crucifixion of the Last Artist, throwing us all for a curve, so to speak.
Such conceptual impishness could be dismissed as yet more cheeky kitsch in lieu of real creation — my date writes off the whole show as affrontery masking as art. (She does have kind words for Firkins’ pretentiously-titled 1992 piece, Window into Time and Space, mostly because it utilizes the untested medium of wallpaper squares pasted against a wooden background.)
But contrary to first impressions, Firkins’ art is both sincere and mischievous, a combination I find missing in other, more heavy-handed conceptualist stuff. His Birch Bark Masks (1990-1993), which are literally masks made out of birch-tree bark and are hung alongside a photo of his naked self wearing such a mask, are simultaneously articles of the man’s odd faith and crafty objects of fun. Even the apparently abstract wallpaper art is conceptual in a fun way: Beneath the varying textures of wallpaper (commonly used to create pleasant, nondescript backgrounds) lies the smooth horizontal grain of nature. Kum-bah-yah, my lord.
Untitled (1990)
by Steve Firkins
But nowhere do Firkins’ underlying seriousness and sense of humor intersect more dramatically than in his War Crime Against Humanity (1996), a black and white painting featuring crudely (but neatly) rendered stick-man soldiers rounding up and executing other stick-men (perhaps civilians).
The stick-man death squad appears to be dumping the dead bodies into a pit full of other stick-men, as the nameless stick-man war rages on, with triangular bombs raining down on the triangular houses. All this takes place next to a church (topped by a stick-man crucifix), touching again on Firkins’ continual interest in religion.
This stick-figure Guernica is laughable at first glance: It might have taken a couple hours, tops, to paint. But once you spend some time with it, the stick-figures begin to look like a child’s rendering of a real atrocity, or some computerized plan for an atrocity yet to come. The painting looks like a sanitized horror show, made more unsavory by its humorous rendering.
I single out War Crimes Against Humanity because the poppy feel of Firkins’ numerous moon-and-landscape paintings (and his rock-and-tile sculptures) may sell well, but this pol-pop trash-art is what makes his work more than an amusing diversion — or a mere pit-stop on the Saturday-night art crawl.
Past review of Curvism (Minneapolis StarTribune 1998)
Wisconsin artist Steve Firkins throws a curve at 20th century
By Mary Abbe StarTribune Minneapolis, Minnesota January 27, 1998
New art movements are pretty rare in Minnesota. This is what you might call a low-theory environment. Artists may experiment a bit, but generally they stay inside the lines.
So the debut of Wisconsin painter Steve Firkins’ “theory of Curvism” at Flanders Contemporary Art is something of an occasion.
This is Firkins’ first major exhibition and it is appropriately ambitious. Spanning about 20 years, it includes paintings, sculptures, photographs and even birch-bark masks, all designed to explicate the artist’s ideas about the failings of late 20th-century life and art.
The problem, as Firkins sees it, is that the world is in thrall to the rectangle, the square, the triangle, the cube and other straight-lined forms. Along with such “unnatural” shapes come equally constricting and pernicious ideologies: an over reliance on reason, excessive materialism, much machinery and robotic behavior. Identifying Cubism as the artistic expression of this wrongheaded world view, Firkins set out to slay the Cubist dragon with Curvism.
Firkins derived Curvism from childhood observation of the natural world.
In practice, Firkins’ Curvism is a very linear art form with a restricted palette of white, gray, black, flesh and – in homage to his hometown of Blue Earth, Minn. – various shades of blue. Firkins’ images are pictographs, his style spare to the point of minimalism. The show includes glowing white canvases in the shapes of circles and ellipses, sometimes juxtaposed with dark rectangular canvases. He draws angular and curvaceous figures on solid backgrounds of white, blue or gray and makes abstract landscapes consisting of curved blue “horizon” lines on white.
Two large canvases embody Curvism’s confrontation with Cubism. One features five angular women evidently inspired by Picasso’s famous 1907 prototypical-Cubist canvas ”Demoiselles d’Avignon.” The other is a curvaceous interpretation of the same figures. In both, flat sky-blue backgrounds enhance the warm flesh tones of figures defined by narrow lines.
The refreshing graphic simplicity of Firkins’ paintings is surprisingly successful thanks to the quizzical grace of his lines. His figures, blessed with the winsome charm of James Thurber’s famous New York cartoons, seem genuinely puzzled, even curious about each other. There isn’t a contentious bone – or line – in them; given half a chance they’d all want to make peace, not war.
Firkins’ sculptures are similarly harmonious, consisting of small tables – painted in his usual palette – on which he’s arranged polished rocks and moveable glass ovals. Simple birch-bark masks and photos of Firkins wearing them are another manifestation of Firkins’ back-to-nature ideology. The artist , a counselor and family therapist, uses the masks in woodsy rituals near his Wisconsin home.
Given the vagaries and caprice of the contemporary art world, it’s unlikely that Curvism will set the world on its ear, as Cubism did nearly a century ago. But there’s something about these paintings that works. They do glow. The lines are winning, the paintings are more sophisticated than they at first appear, and Firkins has made a memorable debut.
Welcome to the Curvism Journal (Blog)
Thank you for visiting the Curvism site. I hope you have enjoyed and found interesting what you’ve seen and read. The Curvism Journal will present additional information and updates about Curvism. It will also include new essays and editorial opinions on current events along with new stories of artistic adventures. For past stories and essays (from 1997-2006) order my book Curvism: The Journey of an Artist found on the home page. The journey continues …
