We are excited to be joining the group of exclusive dealers and galleries on the online marketplace 1st Dibs this month. In 2001, 1st Dibs was founded by Michael Bruno after a visit to Paris’s legendary antiques market, Marché Aux Puces. From its origins with a few hand-selected dealers, 1st Dibs has become a global destination for those who must have ‘first dibs’ on treasures — from around the world — that would otherwise be inaccessible.
“Most people want authenticity in their lives, and most especially in their homes,” says CEO, David Rosenblatt. “Home is the expression of one’s personality and interests. The objects in our marketplace are different than what everyone else has. Our customers don’t want their homes to look like a page out of a catalog or be the same furnishings you can buy in a furniture store.”
Accordingly, browngrotta arts’ presence on 1st Dibs will begin with a few dozen carefully curated works by respected artists from the US, Europe and Asia, including Adela Akers, Jolanta Owidzka, Mariette Rousseau-Vermette and Ethel Stein. A number of these works share a mid-century sensibility. All reflect the clean and contemporary aesthetic for which browngrotta is known.
As we have discovered at browngrotta arts, the audience for art is global and they want to explore — and purchase– art on their own time. “It’s the way people want to buy.” Rosenblatt says. “It works across all time zones and allows us to create lots of advantages for our buyers and sellers that don’t exist in an advertising model.”
All 5 million of 1st Dibs’ customers can find something truly unique and different on the site — art or one-of-a-kind objects and design — and now, they’ll fine unique works from browngrotta, as well. Find us there at https://www.1stdibs.com/dealers/browngrotta-arts/?search=browngrotta%20arts and in 1st Dibs’ weekly online magazine, Introspective: https://www.1stdibs.com/introspective-magazine/richard-meier-grotta-house/.
Art & Identity: A Sense of Place
In our 2019 Art in the Barn exhibition, we asked artists to address the theme of identity. In doing so, several of the participants in Art + Identity: an international view, wrote eloquently about places that have informed their work. For Mary Merkel-Hess, that place is the plains of Iowa, which viewers can feel when viewing her windblown, bladed shapes. A recent work made a vivid red orange was an homage to noted author, Willa Cather’s plains’ description, “the bush that burned with fire and was not consumed,” a view that Merkel-Hess says she has seen.
The late Micheline Beauchemin traveled extensively from her native Montreal. Europe, Asia, the Middle East, all influenced her work but depictions of the St. Lawrence River were a constant thread throughout her career. The river, “has always fascinated me,” she admitted, calling it, “a source of constant wonder” (Micheline Beauchemin, les éditions de passage, 2009). “Under a lemon yellow sky, this river, leaded at certain times, is inhabited in winter, with ice wings without shadows, fragile and stubborn, on which a thousand glittering lights change their colors in an apparent immobility.” To replicate these effects, she incorporated unexpected materials like glass, aluminum and acrylic blocks that glitter and reflect light and metallic threads to translate light of frost and ice.
Mérida, Venezuela, the place they live, and can always come back to, has been a primary influence on Eduardo Portillo’s and Maria Davila’s way of thinking, life and work. Its geography and people have given them a strong sense of place. Mérida is deep in the Andes Mountains, and the artists have been exploring this countryside for years. Centuries-old switchback trails or “chains” that historically helped to divide farms and provide a mountain path for farm animals have recently provided inspiration and the theme for a body of work, entitled Within the Mountains. Nebula, the first work from this group of textiles, is owned by the Cooper Hewitt Museum.
Birgit Birkkjaer’s Ode for the Ocean is composed of many small woven boxes with items from the sea — stones, shells, fossils and so on — on their lids. ” It started as a diary-project when we moved to the sea some years ago,” she explains. “We moved from an area with woods, and as I have always used materials from the place where I live and where I travel, it was obvious I needed now to draw sea-related elements into my art work.”
“I am born and raised in the Northeast,” says Polly Barton, “trained to weave in Japan, and have lived most of my life in the American Southwest. These disparate places find connection in the woven fabric that is my art, the internal reflections of landscape.” In works like Continuum i, ii, iii, Barton uses woven ikat as her “paintbrush,” to study native Southwestern sandstone. Nature’s shifting elements etched into the stone’s layered fascia reveal the bands of time. “Likewise, in threads dyed and woven, my essence is set in stone.”
For Paul Furneaux, geographic influences are varied, including time spent in Mexico, at Norwegian fjords and then, Japan, where he studied Japanese woodblock, Mokuhanga “After a workshop in Tokyo,” he writes, “I found myself in a beautful hidden-away park that I had found when I first studied there, soft cherry blossom interspersed with brutal modern architecture. When I returned to Scotland, I had forms made for me in tulip wood that I sealed and painted white. I spaced them on the wall, trying to recapture the moment. The forms say something about the architecture of those buildings but also imbue the soft sensual beauty of the trees, the park, the blossom, the soft evening light touching the sides of the harsh glass and concrete blocks.”