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David Krut Projects New York comes to the end of another busy year of new publications, art and book fairs, exhibitions and staff migrations. January closed our Painting Then for Now show with world-renown art historian, Svetlana Alpers, painter James Hyde and photographer, Barney Kulok, leading into an exhibition of Wilhelmina Barns-Graham with Art First Gallery, London. Barns-Graham was the last of the British Saint Ives school of painters, working alongside Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth, before she decamped to her home town of Saint Andrews, Scotland to set up her foundation and paint bold, vibrant abstractions until her death in 2004. David Krut Projects was proud to present her first, be it posthumous solo exhibition, in New York where her screenprints from Graal Press, Scotland, and her ink and wash drawings from the late 1960’s were much admired.

Andrzej Jackowksi, another British painter living in Brighton on the south coast of the UK came to New York in April to open, A Space in the Dark, a collaborative exhibition between DKP and Purdy Hicks Gallery, London. Jackowski is a private painter, secluded high in his attic studio concocting mysterious dark, puzzling works. Beautiful and not without a sense of humour, the drawings on Indian paper of “hive” constructions, hairbrushes, giant rats and the oils on linen were much admired in New York. Jackowski if often compared to his colleague, Merlin James whose work has received much attention in the US – their shared sombre European palettes are a modest contrast to the bombastic American and German painting traditions that hold court at art fairs and in the market of the moment.

After Jackowski’s exhibition, Lucy Rayner, our Johannesburg Director flew over with artist, Michael McGarry, to host Lucy’s thesis show, The New Spell: a group show of six South African artists working in mixed media from video and photography to painting and sculpture. The opening was well attended with South Africa’s Constitutional Court Judge Albie Sachs and SABC present to support Lucy’s first international curatorial project.

September opened with New York’s veteran neon artist, Stephen Antonakos: Here and Beyond , and it was a pleasure to exhibit two new wall sculptures, a tube neon from the 1960’s, drawings for sculpture and models also from the 1960’s, plus a new series of “crumples”. We enjoyed collaborating with friend and colleague, Jim Kempner on the Antonakos show, who displayed a stunning neon work on the exterior of his sculpture court on West 23rd Street and 10th Avenue. The gallery dinner in Stephen’s honour included current and present editors of Art in America magazine, Samantha Rippner from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Phong Bui, Brooklyn Rail Editor among others. David Krut proudly received its first New Yorker review for the show, and we await an article on the exhibition and Antonakos’ work in an upcoming edition of Art in America.

Staff changes in NYC have shifted the year in different directions, with Kate McCrickard relocating to Paris to get married and have a French baby whilst continuing to work with DKP New York and SA as an associative. Andrzej Nowicki, a South African painter, has been looking after the New York space since May, and many thanks to Laura Gencarella, Sophia Carroll, and Marie Van Niekerk for their help this past year. David Krut was back in New York in November to run the Editions and Artists’ Book Fair and the NY Art Book Fair during a difficult economic period and on the eve of the much longed-for election of Barack Obama.

2009 will see us concentrating on a new book publication from South Africa, Art and Justice: The Art of the Constitutional Court of South Africa, with our Managing Editor, Bronwyn Law-Viljoen visiting from Johannesburg to lead a book tour in the USA alongside Judge Albie Sachs in January. We also have a new series of William Kentridge prints based on Gogol’s satirical character, The Nose, plus new editions by Ryan Arenson, Colbert Mashile and Diane Victor to introduce to the US, worked on by printer Jillian Ross in the workshop in Johannesburg.

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