Michael Snow | Condimental Shifts

Michael Snow

Condimental Shifts

Toronto, Canada: Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, 2007

23.5 × 23.5 × 2.8 cm.

Edition of 265 [+10 AP] signed and numbered copies

Snow conflates painting with smearing condiments around on a plate, using ketchup, mustard, mayonnaise and peanut butter as pigments. The porcelain plate becomes a globe of sorts and the title puns on continental drift. 

The work is still available from Art Metropole, for $800.00 CDN, here. 

A is For Apple

Tomorrow is the last day to see A IS FOR APPLE, a collaborative exhibition made with Roula Partheniou, about pedagogy, pareidolia and pattern recognition. The show features numerous editioned work, which I’ll post over the coming days & weeks. Press release below. 

A IS FOR APPLE

Dave Dyment & Roula Partheniou

September 13 – October 11, 2025

“We see shapes in context, and our reactions to them depend in large part on that context. If this were an illustration for a story about the ocean, we could variously read the red triangle as the sail of a sailboat, a shark’s fin, a volcanic island rising from the sea, a “red nun” buoy, or the bow of a sinking ship. We feel very differently about the triangle if we see it as a sailboat than we do if we see it as a shark’s fin.”

– Molly Bang, Picture This

A IS FOR APPLE, the first collaborative exhibition by gallery artists Dave Dyment and Roula Partheniou, explores play, perception, pattern recognition, and cognitive geometry, from early childhood development back to early civilization.

Loosely modelled after a Montessori classroom, the exhibition features works that take the form of games, puzzles, books, building blocks, flashcards, and other teaching aids. Elemental units such as numbers, letters, and basic shapes are mobilized as conceptual tools to parse how patterns both structure our thinking and emerge from it.

Visit www.mkg127.com for more information. 

Special thanks to Annie Koyama. 

Keith Haring and Andy Warhol play with nine year old Sean Lennon’s Computer

 

“Tuesday, October 9, 1984

I made up some things for Sean Lennon’s birthday and the painting was still wet—a little heart candy-box that said “I love you”—and I also brought a “paint brush” that instead of bristles had strips of red colored paper in a stack. And a bracelet I’d made out of pennies. PH picked me up and we went to the Dakota (cab $6.50). There were fans outside in honor of the day still on the “vigil.” Because the ninth is Sean and John’s birthday. Inside Yoko’s door everybody had taken their shoes off so there was a line of shoes. I wouldn’t take mine off, though, and I didn’t want PH to, either, so that I wouldn’t be alone. PH said that when she went to the Royal Palace once in Hawaii that the tour guides gave you booties to put over your shoes and that would be a better way to keep the house clean, I think. So then when we heard a glass drop and break, that was our excuse—that we didn’t want to be in our socks when there might be glass. 

Yoko ran to call Sean and he came in and said, “Did you bring my dollar?” Yoko said that he’d been remembering and wanting the other half of the dollar I tore in half the last time. So I gave him a whole bunch of torn bills that I’d brought for him and he went off to try to find the match to the half he had. Keith was there and he brought Kenny Scharf as his date. Walter Cronkite was there, and John Cage and Louise Nevelson and Lisa Robinson. On purpose for fun I had spelled Sean’s name “Shawn” on a couple of his gifts, and so when Sean autographed napkins for me he signed it that way, too. He was wearing Michael Jackson-type gloves, but on both hands, that his friend little Max Leroy, Warner Leroy’s son, had given him. Michael Jackson is his favorite singer. He said he likes Prince, too, and he must like Boy George, too, because later on his computer he did a drawing of Boy George. Sean and Keith hit it off. Keith is very good playing with kids—he was playing really “well with another baby that was there, too, coming after her with a stuffed animal. Sean sat between me and Roberta Flack. The cake was a big blond grand piano. Sean was the one who had the idea that it should be a piano. He has a piano in his bedroom. And he cut the cake. Harry Nilsson led everyone singing “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow,” and later Sean made a really nice speech and said that if his father were there we’d be singing ‘Tor They’re Jolly Good Fellows”

We went into Sean’s bedroom—and there was a kid there setting up the Apple computer that Sean had gotten as a present, the Macintosh model. I said that once some man had been calling me a lot wanting to give me one, but that I’d never called him back or something, and then the kid looked up and said, “Yeah, that was me. I’m Steve Jobs.” And he looked so young, like a college guy. And he told me that he would still send me one now. And then he gave me a lesson on drawing with it. It only comes in black and white now, but they’ll make it soon in color. And then Keith and Kenny used it. Keith had already used it once to make a T-shirt, but Kenny was using it for the first time, and I felt so old and out of it with this young whiz guy right there who’d helped invent it. 

Sean’s bedroom had two mattresses on the floor and lots of Beatles pictures and the big Rupert Smith picture of Yoko on the wall. There was wrapping paper and presents all over the floor, and lots of robot toys on the shelves. After we left I was so blue because before I was Sean’s best grownup friend and now I think Keith is. They really hit it off. He invited Keith to his party for kids the next day and I don’t think I was invited and I’m hurt.”

- Andy Warhol, The Andy Warhol Diaries

Jan Voss

Jan Voss celebrates his 89th birthday today. 

Peter Saville

Happy Birthday to Peter Saville, who turns 70 today. 

Dorothy Herzka | Pop Art One

Dorothy Herzka

Pop Art One

New York City, USA: Publishing Institute of American Art, 1965

16 pp., 15 × 19 cm., spiral bound with loose leaves

Edition size unknown

One of the earliest documents of the New York Pop Art scene, this uniquely designed publication was edited by Dorothy Herzka. Herzka moved to Manhattan at the age of 24, to work at the Bianchini Gallery, on the Upper East Side. The following year, the gallery staged the exhibition The American Supermarket [see previous post] where she met her future husband.  

“We asked Roy [Lichtenstein] and Andy [Warhol] if they’d put an image on a shopping bag. I met Roy when he came in to sign the shopping bags,” she told Gagosian Quarterly in 2018. They married in 1968 and were together until his death in 1997. Dorothy died at her home in Southampton, New York on July 4, 2024, at the age of 84.

Pop Art One is comprised of twenty-seven loose leaf plates by Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns, Claes Oldenburg, James Rosenquist, Tom Wesselmann, and Warhol. It includes brief biographical notes and small photographic portraits of the artists.

The cover and pages of text are cut lengthwise in half, with plastic-comb binding on the outer edge of each half, folding together in the centre to enclose the portfolio of loose plates. The cover was held together with a sticker designed by Lichtenstein, though few of these survived, as the had to be torn for the book to be opened. 

Copies sell for between four and five hundred dollars. 

Bianchini Gallery presents the grand opening of the American Supermarket

Bianchini Gallery

Bianchini Gallery presents the grand opening of the American Supermarket

New York City, USA: Bianchini Gallery, 1964

[2] pp., 43 x 55.7 cm., folded double sided exhibition poster

Edition size unknown

Sixty-one years ago today the groundbreaking American Supermarket exhibition opened at the Paul Bianchini Gallery on East 78th Street, New York. Curated by artist and collector Ben Birillo, the exhibition is thought to have effectively launched the genre of Pop Art, catapulting many of the artists involved to international fame: Billy Apple, Richard Artschwager, Mary Inman, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, James Rosenquist, Andy Warhol, Robert Watts, and Tom Wesselmann.

Each produced works that could be displayed in a supermarket setting, alongside plastic replicas of food. Warhol and Lichtenstein created twelve dollar silkscreened paper shopping bags, of a Campbell’s tomato soup can and turkey, respectively. Mary Inman contributed life-like wax replicas of meats and cheeses. Bob Watts produced egg cartons, Jasper Johns exhibited his 1960 Ale Cans, and Wesselmann contributed a plastic turkey. A turnstile by Artschwager, checkout counters and Muzak gave the gallery the look and feel of a common grocery store. 

Reviewing the show for Time Magazine, Calvin Tomkins wrote “We may well inquire why so many young artists have hit on food as the ideal subject matter. The artists can be counted on to reply promptly, why not? Food is always around, for one thing, and it has always had a solid place in art. Grace Glueck in the New York Times noted that on the eve of the opening collector Robert Scull insisted on the removal of his Jasper John's work, because he did not want anyone touching it.

“In 1964, Dorothy Herzka was the director of the Paul Bianchini Gallery (16 E. 78th Street), one block south of Leo Castelli’s, which had hosted Lichtenstein’s career-making sold-out show in 1962. Blonde, with all-American good looks, Dorothy could almost have been a romance comic “girl in distress” in a “Lichtenstein painting. Charged with devising art shows for Bianchini that showed more of a contemporary edge, Dorothy scheduled the American Supermarket show.

This exhibition was a unique type of art show, even for the heyday of Pop: the gallery was set up like a grocery store, with items for sale that were also original works of art: Warhol soup cans; a 3-D turkey by Tom Wesselman; sculptures of cakes, cookies, and candies by Oldenburg; plaster loaves of bread by Robert Watts; and, presumably for gallery goers to carry purchases home, shopping bags emblazoned with screen prints of a cartoon turkey by Lichtenstein and a Campbell’s soup can by Warhol.”

- Mark P. Bernardo, Lichtenstein in New York