Marjorie Welish, Takatani, 1984.

Marjorie Welish, Small Higher Valley 11, 1995. Oil on canvas. 4 x 5 feet.

"The nature of art affects musical instruments. We feel that it strives to establish and connect... to create a'dialogue' and want to know the rhythm of'what the other party thinks'."

What inspired the artist? More importantly, what inspired Marjorie Welish? Obviously, she ignited many sparks in diagrams and structures, drawings and plans, paintings and prints, prose and poetry—and many points of view, sharp, round and generous.

She thinks about incredible questions such as "Can art think?" And replied: "Yes, if it pays attention to principles. Yes, to a certain extent, formalism—that is, using lines and planes, surfaces and volumes—can expand its composition by integrating disciplinary structures other than art. field."

The artist/art critic has struggled with these ideas throughout her multifaceted career and brought them into the present, where the appearance of the digital world goes hand in hand with the slower analog world.

Her works are collected by the British Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Philadelphia Museum of Art, and have won scholarships and grants from the Adolf and Esther Gottlieb Foundation, the Elizabeth Foundation and other organizations for art. The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation and the Mutual Understanding Trust Fund, as well as the Fulbright Senior Expert Scholarship who teaches at the University of Frankfurt.

Marjorie Welish, Undecidability of Logo: Red, Yellow and Blue 18, 2007. Acrylic on the panel. 18 x 28 ¼ inches.

Like Sol LeWitt, Mel Bochner, Robert Mangold and Barry Le Va-her conceptual artist-she focuses on issues such as similarities and differences, and their relationships. Her visual dialogue takes us back and forth between modernism and contemporary culture, and demonstrates the tense connection between technology and its endless points of communication.

So, for example, her Blueprint series of charts layered grids, lines, and planes, while her "Undecidability of Symbols: Frame" series considered basic questions such as what is a line, and when the width increases, whether the line is Will it become a line? airplane?

She speculates, "Maybe it will also transfer from one figure to another based on where it is placed on the stand and its adjacent position. The edge of the edge and the gap between the diptych-what is the difference between the edge in the middle?" She Stimulate and sort out such connections, compare leftists and rightists, and look for changes and changes.

The elements in her work seem to be connected internally and with each other. She confirmed, "My painting series is still in progress: that's because the title of each series itself is generative and inspires initiative." Then, alternative methods to the work of art in progress may be tempting. She followed up with other works, such as paintings and works on paper. "It never ends," she elaborated. "In a sense, almost all completed projects are open work."

In Welish’s practice and contemplation, especially in her graphic art, we can see the paths she created and the paths she did not take, and experience them, for example, in her graphic rendering series "The Undecidability of Symbols" The serpentine "stitching" and geometric interception: yellow/black (2019 and in progress), where the depiction of barrier tape affected by acrylic paint hints at ambiguous content, symbolizing the complexity of visual and verbal communication.

The design method is graphical-to better communicate the sign language from prohibition to permission-but which one? We start with confidence and then intercept.

Speaking of interception, what is important to her contemporary diagrams is the method she shares with others, noting how she views Mel Bochner's thesis for structuralist strategies, and Jasper Johns for semiotics. She explained on what basis Johns’ paintings "raise the question of modernity: Which standards are valid for our time? As a relative rather than absolute mode of work sampling, his "Based on What" is shown in its title Dilemma.

Marjorie Welish, "Undecidability of Logo: Yellow/Black", March 2020. Acrylic on the panel. 20 x 32 ¼ inches. 

In 2017, Blueprint series works were installed in the URBANISME SUR PAPIER / URBANISM ON PAPER exhibition in La Terrasse, Nanterre, France.

Marjorie Welish, Before After Oaths 9, 2016. Acrylic on the panel. 20 x 32 ¼ inches.

Studio installation for painting and sketching in the Undecidability of Logo series: Frame.

In 2007, the With/Without Small High Valley series of works were installed in the Image Works and Word Works exhibitions of Miami University in Miami, Ohio.

 Marjorie Welish, "High Valley", 1984. Oil on canvas. 6 x 8 feet.

Johns' art is inspiring to her. "What his mind already knew appeared in my series of undecidable signs: red, yellow and blue. The same yellow appears in different contexts; the same yellow appears in color samples, but they are of different kinds: modernist primary colors. The color swatches contrast with the shade gradient."

Grace Glueck wrote a related series in the "New York Times"-"Little Takatani" series, he said: "Sudden changes in form and color, structural discontinuities, teasing graphics- The background relationship, free-form brushstrokes and other geometrical interruption devices give these works a game-like feature. But although this game is very attractive on the surface, it is mainly primary colors and seemingly simple forms, but it is extremely complex fear."

Reading Welish's own words and admiring her art work encourages us to understand how her diptych creates the same and different dialogues. In fact, through sharp contrasts or subtle differences, how structure becomes a sign language.

The subtle attention to changing rules and procedures is most evident in her elegant "After the Oath" series, marking the difference in people's directional strokes when crossing the gap, while the gray-blue shade of Delft evokes domestic references. For example, see Before After Oaths Grey 9 (2016), where the tone is active and short.

As Sharon Butler pointed out in an online review on Two Coats of Paint, “Her elegant paintings explore the butterfly effect-this theory holds that Over time, small disturbances like the flapping of butterfly wings can have appreciable consequences. She reminds us that change is the inevitable result of hard work. But this does not mean that we should not be very, very worried."

From series to series, Welish's art reflects on the rules and procedures for organizing and ordering one's own formal resources. Her works seem to tell the story of their self-creation in the evolutionary process, which makes me wonder whether the artist's entire creative output, especially her criticism, is the same process. This is a story told by the process of art itself. "The nature of art determines the musical instrument," she said. "We feel the rhythm it is trying to establish, connect... to create a "dialogue" and want to know "what does the other party think?" She considered these issues in her collection of essays Signifying Art: Essays on Art after 1960 (Cambridge University Press) and her contribution to Art Monthly [UK].

New York is very talkative. "New York raised me," Welsh said. "My mother’s pleasure is to go to the Metropolitan Museum and take me with her when she attends an art lecture in the afternoon. There are several memories, one of which is particularly vivid, seeing and hearing Le Corbusier’s After the lecture, I walked into the sun, and I felt a sense of excitement, which prompted me to ask: why New York’s architecture has not changed to reflect Le Corbusier’s ideas." Why, that is, it has not become a completely modern City?

"Modernism is the global bond of culture, and it places demands on us," she said. "It demands to be visionaries-vision, language and everything else." So what is art? "Technology and form," she replied. "It can be reconciled even in separation. This is a dialectic-it was later developed into a synthesis of art."

Welish, who has recently exhibited in New York, Paris, Vienna, and Cambridge, UK, is looking forward to her exhibition (De)cipher, which will be exhibited at the gkg // Gesellschaft für Kunst und Gestaltung project space in Bonn, Germany in November from 2022 to 2023 February.

Barbara A. MacAdam is a freelance editor and writer based in New York. He has worked for ARTnews and art and auctions, New York magazines, review magazines, and Latin American literature and art for many years. She currently reviews the Brooklyn Railroad regularly.

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