gallery show

Crackling With Electricity

Rick Briggs — Tue, 12 Mar 2019 14:00:00 +0000

Crackling With Electricity Rick Briggs March 12, 2019 - 10:00

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Judith Linhares' exhibition, Hearts on Fire, at PPOW Gallery (February 14-March 16, 2019), features paintings of nude women coexisting in idyllic nature where they may encounter lions, and tigers, even trolls, but that's all perfectly fine because in these enchanted environs, a magic spell seems to have been cast over all involved.

Linhares is an artist who grew up in the California art scene of the '60s and '70s, and in particular the San Francisco scene of David Park and Joan Brown, from whom she may have drawn inspiration in terms of direct, physical painting. She first established herself in New York when she was included in Marcia Tucker's seminal Bad Painting show at the New Museum in 1978. And while she has lived in NYC for the last 40 years, her work is still infused with Californian light and terrain. The first thing one notices upon entering PPOW is that her paintings have the effect of being lit from within -- the result of high-key, sometimes contrasting, colors placed side-by-side. As with the recent Harriet Korman exhibition at Thomas Erben Gallery, the cumulative effect of this is as if the air of the gallery is crackling with electricity.

In "High Desert" (2018), a neon magenta nude reclines on a bright, multicolored afghan set on a rocky outcropping while a handsomely coiffed lion stands but a few feet away. Behind them, a sky majestically lit with soft yellows, salmon orange, and crimson -- each band of light a separate, long brushstroke of color. The woman, whose expression is one of rapture at the sight of the heavenly fireworks, seems blissfully unaware of the lion's presence. While there is palpable tension and mystery between the unsuspecting woman and the powerful lion, perhaps it doesn't matter. Because, as with Linhares' forebear in this case -- Henri Rousseau and "The Sleeping Gypsy" (1897), the lion seems not to harbor malicious intent, and together they express a unity with nature. This unity is made evident by formal considerations like the relationship between how the woman's long blond hair curls up at the end just like the lion's tail. Together, along with her curling toes, they form a neat compositional triangle. (It's important to note, however, one distinction with Rousseau is that while his woman is passively asleep, Linhares' protagonist is actively engaged viewing the sky.)

While the gallery press release claims Hearts on Fire refers to a type of diamond, the show's title might just as easily (and perhaps more straightforwardly) be read as a comment on desire. The female protagonists in Linhares' paintings happily go about their lives pursuing sensual pleasure -- gazing at the sky, relaxing on the beach, warming their feet by the fire, drinking, and devouring drumsticks. Their pleasure might involve men, as in "Beach," but it isn't dependent on men. These are women with appetites. Take, for example, the spread-legged female in "Revel." Here, we encounter a nude who is lost in the reverie of listening for chirping birds and wood sprites while consuming copious amounts of booze, ensconced in her own merry world. While the figure's pose is not overtly sexual, there is the matter of the most lurid-looking tree hollow just to her right. Desire is also expressed explicitly in the exaggerated hanging tongues of the cartoony wolves in "Thirst," and "Rave," and perhaps more subtly in their phallic snouts.

What separates Linhares from many other figurative painters working today is her commitment to finding the image through the process of painting, as opposed to having an image in mind in advance and simply executing it. It is also in her uncompromising fealty to the formal elements of painting: drawing, color, and composition. There is a precision and clarity to her color choices and drawing that gives her work its strong, expressive power. "Tiger" is a great example of Linhares' masterful command. Constructed stroke by broad stroke, the orange cat's black stripes seem to radiate outward to reflect the rocky terrain and blocky blue ground from which it emerges. Figure and ground are locked together forcing one's eye, as a viewer, to slow down and move carefully around the canvas, back and forth in space.

Linhares' tough-minded work carries forward the highest ideals of painting but does so in a felicitous, light-hearted spirit. She's willing to do the hard work that painting requires, to "carry the water," so to speak, as one of her characters literally does in "Saturday Morning" (2017). She has built a vocabulary of forms over the years, a way of treating the figure, of making a mark, a specific color palette, and a consistent subject matter -- in other words, a set of conditions that form her language and together with her accrued wisdom, give her freedom to roam. Linhares embraces traditional subject matter such as the floral still life and the nude because she knows she can transform them and make them her own. Just as the blissed-out figure in "High Desert" marvels at the multicolored sky, I marvel at the myriad grays that make up the rocky outcropping she's lying on. Purple grays, yellow grays, light blue grays -- colors so specific they deserve their own names, but what are those names? You can only experience them. And the experience is to luxuriate in the pleasure of Linhares' conjured scene. One of my favorite subjects in art is the depiction of the act of gazing. Think: a Matisse young woman staring into a goldfish bowl -- we experience both the beauty of the painting while simultaneously becoming self-consciously aware that what we are in the act of doing is the very subject of the painting: gazing beauty. Similarly in "High Desert," we gaze upon the beautiful scene (the painting itself) of another viewer (the nude) gazing at her own beautiful scene. And by the way, the composition of the painting is as solid as the granite the figure is lying on!

These paintings take time but one never senses the effort. I once heard Alex Katz say that if someone spent 2 minutes in front of one of his paintings, he'd consider it a successful painting. By those standards, Judith Linhares' painting fantasia of a peaceable kingdom where woman and beast live in harmony "in the wild" is wildly successful.

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What Is Nothingness?

Elizabeth Stevens — Wed, 17 Oct 2018 14:01:42 +0000

What Is Nothingness? Elizabeth Stevens October 17, 2018 - 10:01

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Allen Hansen: The Atmosphere of Nothingness / Or 0

LICHTUNDFIRE, 175 Rivington Street, New York, NY

"You're going to have two jobs for the rest of your life -- can you accept that?"

This is what someone said to me before I headed off for the East Coast from Kentucky back in 1987, to paint and study art history. So, the question is -- how do we move forward and remain passionate in an environment that has now become so economically driven that the forest and the trees seem to have been left in the rear view?

Allen Hansen has remained true to his calling as a visual artist, a painter's painter. What most don’t seem to grasp in today’s breakneck non-organic art world is that one of those "jobs" is unconventional -- it's faith and practice.

Hansen's painting is a dark, warm sublime. He has moved forward from landscape into his own vast horizon, developing lush abstractions that play on a cool palette that’s as warm as everyone's radiators kicking in this month. His balance is near-to perfect, absolutely his own, and the result of years of development, focus, and dedication.

Allen arrived in New York in 1979 from California, and after getting a "do everything" internship with Mary Boone (the second job), he had found his Oz and never looked back. This was a completely different time for the contemporary art world in New York, romantic and community driven. I spoke with Allen about this recently, and he considers himself fortunate to have been active during that time; and it was this experience that steered him to the business of professional logistics and art moving for the past thirty years, landing him today at SRI Fine Art Services as Head of Client Relations.

This is another reason I wanted to contribute commentary on his most recent series of seven works from 2018 that were on view at Lichtundfire last month. When I am not researching or writing about the art world, I too work within it, in my case at Gander & White. These positions are demanding, and from my own experience, one can only survive them by having a certain brand of conviction, and an understanding of the artists, collectors, and galleries that manage to exist within its unique ecosystem. The fact that he was able to produce these artworks in the midst of helping others navigate the complexities of today’s commercial art culture is a highly impressive prospect.

Allen mentioned to me that after many years of life lessons, he now balances his painting life and his daily work from a house in Asbury Park, New Jersey that he and his wife bought fifteen years ago, and where they keep his studio and their sanity. Many come to New York to practice art every day, but very few manage to stick it out like Allen has for forty years. To see his latest work is a testament to something not so easily and not so often well done. Good Show!

Allen Hansen is also represented in New York by Carter Burden Gallery. We will look for more work coming in 2019.

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Natural Order of Things

Millree Hughes — Mon, 16 Apr 2018 22:22:30 +0000

Natural Order of Things Millree Hughes April 16, 2018 - 18:22

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Natural Impact

Curated by D. Dominick Lombardi

The Arsenal Gallery, NYC

D. Dominick Lombardi has curated a great show at the Arsenal Gallery in Central Park off of Fifth Avenue. On view through April 26th featuring the work of Tim Daly, Cecilia Whittaker Doe, Jodie Mim Goodnough, Brant Moorefield, Lina Puerta and Dominick Rapone. A show of work imagining that, although the relationship between humanity and nature is seen as having rivaling needs, here the two forces are depicted growing together in dialectical resolution.

I know the painter Tim Daly's work from being a fellow scenic in the film industry. His favourite subject is New Jersey -- a state where the industrial and the organic sometimes contrast in the strangest ways. Some areas are a huge grassland filled with wildlife that is also home to miles of abandoned factory buildings. It's important to see the paintings so that you can experience the way the physicality of pigment on canvas contrasts with Daly's cinematic vision.

As contemporary art has dropped its "isms," its singular ideologies for a preferred mixed approach, art making has become more like thinking. Not just about what an art work means but also about the material character of things. Lina Puerta's "Table" (image below) is a salad of objects on a table. Moss and plastic, printed fabric and artificial plants. A fantasy on a theme of furniture and living matter.

Brant Moorefield's paintings successfully evoke an image of nature carrying or holding humanity. Or is it the other way round? He paints realistically but the compositions are abstract. They really do, do both.

"Forest Therapy Trail" is a photograph by Jodie Mim Goodnough. "Yama no Furusato Mura" is in the region of Okutama in the hills outside of Tokyo. It is a "Woodland Therapy Centre." Another one of those brilliant Japanese ways of communing with the landscape in a slightly curated place that is only an hour and a half from one of the busiest cities on earth. Goodnough's photo reveals how the concept falls slightly short of the reality. Depicting what looks like a shabby minimalist sculpture on a rambly forest path.

Peter Wohlleben's mind expanding book "The Hidden Life of Trees" introduces us to the idea of trees thinking. How the roots of a tree act like a brain and join together underground, with other trees to create a living, considering, feeling forest. The art in this show accepts the consciousness of plants so as to imagine humans and the outdoors communing. But Wohlleben proposes that this need not be a metaphor. That we do already think together.

Hegel employed the dialectic to study thinking more than to study The Natural World. I wonder what he would have made of a thinking countryside?

Postsensical

Millree Hughes — Wed, 04 Apr 2018 14:09:52 +0000

Postsensical Millree Hughes April 4, 2018 - 10:09

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Unreality Bomb

FiveMyles Gallery, Brooklyn

Young Americans in their tweens have adopted a deliberate stupidity as a form of humor. You can see it on TV in shows like Uncle Grandpa. It's a simply executed cartoon where the protagonist talks and acts like an idiot but often with benign results. It’s a Post-sensical psychedelic show on Comedy Central. Fashion-wise girls wear sweatshirts that say -- "I'm sorry I'm late. I didn’t want to come"... Boys wear t-shirts with the wrong band name for the image. Like a Smiths shirt with a picture of Mark E Smith.

Dumb is fun. Who can blame them? Currently the world is monitored, mediated and ruled by the stupid. They demand that arms should be available for everyone no matter how angry or ill they are. They watch Reality TV shows about dreadful narcissists. A medium that has successfully spawned one of its own to take the place of a President. A ludicrous figure who threatens us with Nuclear War via Twitter. The dopes are put up to it by the greedy rich who still don’t have enough money and want whatever’s left of the disenfranchised poor's. Considering the power of the truly thick how can you believe that intelligence has any value at all anymore?

Painter Alex Sewell has curated a clever, funny show at FiveMyles Gallery in Brooklyn that features: Eric Ashcraft, Jake Brush, Dan Fig, Paul Gagner, Maggie Goldstone, Duy Hoàng and Jessica Tawczynski. It reveals that this humor has also struck Painting. Dumb jokes are the new ‘leather thing’. (Crash, bang, crash, ring)*

FiveMyles is a young forward-thinking not-for-profit gallery in Crown Heights run by Hanne Tierney. The gallery prioritizes new art and the needs of its immediate community. It’s part of a group of galleries scattered throughout Brooklyn with more on their minds than Art Fairs and auction results. Sewell is a lucid young painter with Totah Gallery.

Paul Gagner’s great painting "Argle, Bargle Brouhaha" (image below) seems to be calling us out, daring us to make fun of it. It’s a "parody" of a Guston, seemingly. His famous lone hand painting a single stroke on a canvas. The arm comes in from a window that opens onto a night sky. All around the easel that holds the canvas are the instruments of the studio: a level, a saw, a clamp light, and so on. All that for this one stroke? And the artist himself peering in at another window. Tears dripping from the corner of his eye, his face rendered more in the style of "The Fulbright Triptych of 1975" by Simon Dinnerstein. Like his other painting which depicts a full sized equestrian statue from some abandoned town square in his "Storage Space" (the title of the work). A place, like his studio, that he can’t afford to visit very often.

Paul Gagner's "Argle Bargle, Brouhaha"

What every body liked about Guston was the primal quality of his line. As if it was drawn with a burnt stick on the cave wall. But here his ‘stroke’ is rendered with caution.

Careful rendering is also present in the hopeless collection of objects in Eric Ashcraft's paintings. It’s not clear if these things are meant to be "read" or just, witnessed. One engrossing piece shows a cartoonish wooden frame down two sides of the canvas with rest of it a black background. Hanging off the corner of ‘the framed edge is a delicately executed spiders web in white. Woven into it are the words "Pay Attention."

Caution too in the rendering of a large opaque painting by Dan Fig called "Cheap Studio." Is the lack of space for artists a theme? The delicate unsure mark is an antidote to the bold cocksure gesture of Modern Painting. Perhaps this work is distrustful of such surety. Fig's canvas is of a football and a clock whose quarters are marked by Magritte style rocks. Both floating against some cartoon rendered battlements. The studio as a a fortress. That you should be so lucky (or so rich) as to even have one in 2018 in New York and its environs!

Dan Fig's "Cheap Studio"

The paintings in this show seem to reference Magritte's "Periode Vache." His work at that point championed stupid jokes, bizarre rendering, sometimes sloppy, sometimes overly careful paint handling.

"We’d like to say shit politely to you, in your false language, Because we bumpkins, we yokels, have absolutely no manners, you realise." Louis Scutenaire in the catalogue to Magritte's show in Paris at the Galerie du Faubourg in May 1948.

Jake Brush is also an absurdist but he may have his eye on something more confrontational. I recognized the influence of Leigh Bowery immediately. The high key colour of his video and the cheap plastic props. '80s London did not produce any radical underground painting (apart from Leigh’s partner in crime Trojan, whose paintings would’ve been right at home in this show) but video, performance, fashion and music hit a giddy peak. It was in response to Thatcher’s strident lack of support for Art and Culture and her disgust with the youth.

Everybody gave up on the idea of becoming rich and famous and made what they liked. Leigh, as documented by Charles Atlas's videos, took liberties with performance and "dressing up" to diabolical extremes.

Jake’s piece in the show is a video mounted over a fake grass shrine. He is on view manipulating red plasticine globs, he is surrounded by strawberries. It's all glossy and tactile but also intimating disease and the vulnerability of the body.

Maybe it’s me but I can’t but see Maggie Goldstone’s pitiful dog paintings as a joke. I don’t find the humorous and the earnest mutually exclusive if it's a joke that I can get behind. Her paintings are made with a sloppy affection that can be read as satirical or pointedly deliberate.

Alex Sewell writes, in his catalogue essay that these young artists have an increased sense of empathy and are backing away from the political to tackle the personal. Perhaps I’m missing something.

What I take to be deliberately pathetic and obtuse for comic purposes is for them a sensitive read on contemporary Art. What I think of as the virtues of Modern American Art, its directness and "tough" painting style. Artists like Warhol, De Kooning and Joan Mitchell: seems to be too authoritative and patriarchal for this generation.

Maybe the new market driven Art World is not for them. Perhaps they don’t want to make art that panders to the needs of the captains of industry. For the time being they’d rather hunker down and feel it out with the misfits than "make it" with the Art bros and their high rolling collectors.

The Power of Nature

Kathleen Cullen — Sat, 31 Mar 2018 14:13:54 +0000

The Power of Nature Kathleen Cullen March 31, 2018 - 10:13

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Cloud Study, Sunset No. 4 (2016) Archival Digital C-prints 30 x 40 inches

There are little gems to be taken away from Pattern, Power, Chaos and Quiet, a show featuring the challenging work of eight very different artists. Curator D. Dominick Lombardi has responded to the idea of landscapes as an ongoing internalization of the idea of nature and an engagement with nature with art as its portal. If art constructs a world, Lombardi's installation is a way of putting together a scene from that world... it is a fantastic palette and inspiration providing us with an in-depth look at choice artists, their use of various techniques, and how that gives way to drama and harmony. As the curator states in his introduction: "historically, artists such as the impressionists or the Hudson River School had been united by a common time and place" (such as Paris in the 1920s and America in the late 19th century, have frequently congregated to debate cultural beliefs, concerns, and approaches to art making -- such artists have used their work as a mechanism with which to question the culture of their times. Within the myriad fringe cultures of today, artists more than ever tend to generate their own societal realities and microcosms in an attempt to transcend the individual. Collectively, the artists in this exhibit remain part of this continuum, while simultaneously pushing the envelope of previous artistic movements. Here, you will find everything from fresh perspectives and appropriations of traditional mediums. Unconfined by a single medium, these artists embrace everything from photography and drawing, to sculpture, painting, and almost any possible combination therein. What unifies them is neither a literal theme nor common medium, but rather a sensibility that acknowledges, questions, and deconstructs (if not jettisons) tradition in favor of the more unorthodox and imaginative. Striving to avoid the regurgitation of their own ideas, this group of artists boldly pushes boundaries through its ambition of perpetual transformation. 

Martin Weinstein's Lily Bed Evenings (top) is the work most directly linked to landscape. Weinstein has an abstracted and stylized way of looking at nature. Like Cezanne, Weinstein uses patches of color instead of drawing in tone to gets to the heart of what is before him. Weinstein tries to match the effects of color and light in the natural landscape in his painting. Weinstein uses remarkable broad areas and patches of color to show the expanse of sky and color sensations of foliage much like impressionist painters juxtaposed patches of color to model form

In Sandra Gottlieb's Cloud Study, Sunset series, we view the micro-creativity of clouds cast in high relief by the setting sun. Gottlieb's pictures are conceptual in nature, capturing moments that are structured to make the observer feel small, accept that one moment is quickly overtaken by another, or that some momentary phenomena remains beyond our reach, in terms of human perception. Here curator Lombardi breaks up the wall with a series of Gottlieb's photographs of clouds at sunset unfolding as a fleeting chaotic, majestic, and frightening vision. With these works there’s collision and collusion between inner and outer. Is the terrifying cloud structure of volcanic moisture bubbling up beyond control a barometer or metaphor for the mental landscape of the country’s under it’s current government leadership?  

This series of house paintings starts with a simple visual idea of a house or shelter, somewhat reminiscent of Jennifer Bartlett. Giergerich’s combination of color and form and ground inspired by the idea of the house have a strong sense of improvisation and the free-flowing process of being. There are intimations about space of the house: is it safe? Most often it is a combination of shapes or colors which elicit a certain feeling and given the titles of the works this simple a-frame house is a part of the past and a part of the future. It is the idea of the house which possesses us and by which we are possessed. They contain an element of surprise -- or double act. The house as a visual metaphor for night and day reality -- house is a backdrop for the interior world, intrigue and magic.  

Gloria Garfinkel's work is inspired by the pattern and decoration movement of the '80s and formal elements of Japanese Kimonos. Like Frank Stella, Garfinkel's has the ability to pile it on. All references to nature are undercut by the deliberate and gradual accretion of imagery (like Stella). The artist, whose work combines complex geometry and painterly invention, is particularly fascinated by the traditional Japanese kimono and obi. The natural patterns found in nature are juxtaposed with simple abstract compositions that taking the viewer on a journey through the grandeur of color and shape  .

At Forest's Edge Chemigram 16 x 20 inches

Nolan Preece beckons us to look through the illusion of the photo to the scene beyond but we are always reminded of the photo. What we are looking at is not landscape but better because the photographer has conjured up a stark and wild rendition of the fleeting natural image as it enfolds in his chemigrams. Like Stanley Kubrick, Preece work reflects on the idea of the birth of the planet, the death of the planet and the wistfulness of the image. Preece is a conjurer and his work is rooted in a desire to create what he wants to have exist. In the magic of the darkroom he practices his alchemy and discovers his own relation to creation and nature.  

As a medium, wood has been used extensively throughout art history, and has deep roots woven in the realm of furniture, architecture, sculpture, and collage. Unlike many other mediums, wood lends itself to image appropriation providing a uniquely patterned surface as opposed to a blank slate, which fundamentally alters the work regardless of its purpose in the overall aesthetic. Therefore, it is not surprising that John Lyon Paul deals with the materiality of wood in a variety of ways: we have a constructed cabinet, a sculpted figure of a doe, and an assembled and majestic Rune.  

Mark Sharp's interlocking shapes of patterned and painted fabric are collaged together in radiating compositions. They have a lot in common with the pattern and decoration movement of the '80s but with a difference. We look at, between, through, and under successively and simultaneously. Sharp's layering of fabric combines materiality with the energetic sprawl of Pollack's drip paintings.  

And finally we have the deeply felt paintings of Susan Sommer, which borders on a kind of transcendalism. Sommer observes and remarks on her theatrical ambitions or invitation to dance in these works. Expression of the artist sets up an ambiguous depth of field, presenting the viewer with infinity -- the various colored geometric square overlaid upon a loosely painted ground. They are mind-blowing and sophisticated works: enjoyable and technically accomplished. Their mystery and subdued self-awareness are the perfect chaser for the exhibition. The infinitesimal vastness of space and the complex beauty of nature are represented simultaneously. Sommer’s carefully chosen blocks of color creating radiantly abstract landscapes.

Ms. Cullen is a media consultant, art advisor and art dealer with 30 years art market experience. She has held positions with Viart, Vice-President of corporate sales for eyestorm , and continues to advise both private and corporate collections. She has curated the Chubb collection and Virgin Airlines terminals in London. She is presently a director of art and design for Galerie Magazine and Publisher of Modern Painters Magazine.

Black Art is the New Black Music

Millree Hughes — Mon, 09 Oct 2017 01:23:39 +0000

Black Art is the New Black Music Millree Hughes October 8, 2017 - 21:23

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Mark Thomas Gibson Believe Me, 2017 Ink on paper, 55 x 123-1/4 inches

I cannot believe that even the most devout American fascist has not danced or punched their fist in the air to a song created by African American musicians; at a prom, at a frat party or a wedding. "1999" by Prince, "Rock n Roll" by Chuck Berry, "Nutbush City Limits" by Ike and Tina Turner. Black music is an ever-present treatise on American life.

In the new season of New York galleries, Kara Walker, Sanford Biggers and Mark Thomas Gibson are Black American artists who "Keep on Pushing."*

Sanford Biggers, Overstood, 2017,

Sanford Biggers' show, SELAH is up until October 21, 2017 at Marianne Boesky Gallery, 507 West 24th Street, NY. He mixes African and American themes. The show is made up of found quilts and other fabric sewn together forming delicate and seductive "paintings." Other pieces jam on the floor with mixed materials and African statues or sprawl across the wall. (Overstood, image left.) He riffs on retro '70s soul band '60s black consciousness tropes in the way hip hop uses them. Not for any historical or geographical imperative, but looking for a hook. It's not how Korean American artists, mix their two parts together because this equation is unnaturally weighted. For many, particularly young people, African American culture is American culture.

Kara Walker is showing at Sikkema Jenkins and Co, 530 West 22nd Street through October 14th. She has made black ink drawings and large scale paintings. There is one of the large cut out silhouette pieces that she is well known for.

She's an artist with a public face and a message that cuts a good deal deeper than her contemporaries. Since her first show at Wooster Gardens she's made savagery against the black body social and the black body politic her subject. The slave camps of the South were death camps where people were treated worse than cattle. The cotton processing slave owners preferred to restock their fund of labor through the slave ships, rather than through breeding, as the tobacco industry did in Virginia and Carolina. Many died in the fields. This pitiless attitude still prevails there and most of the worst treatment of black people by the police and in the prisons occurs in the Southern States.

With the silhouettes it worked. They seemed to have been put together in 'Illustrator' for maximum graphic impact. In the new show she creates free-flowing, fleshed-out figures in space that rely on her drawing skill to cast light, make space, perspective and dimension. The references from Americana and art history are all there but doesn't have the chops; she's no Robert Colescott. I came to get down, but sat it out and listened to the lyrics (which are still powerful by the way).

Mark Thomas Gibson is showing at Fredericks Freiser Gallery, 536 West 24th Street through October 24th. His paintings and drawings are of the current political moment. Riot police banners and flags, protest and Trump. He ghost writes in the style of the golden age EC comics. Tales From The Crypt and The Vault of Horror. He's not quite 'doing' Wally Wood or Joe Orlando. But the angular use of flatter than flat color and the arch and complex compositions make up for any lack in his Goth Horror line. In this work America judders from the shockwaves as The MAGA White Dwarf becomes a supernova.

A disproportionate amount of attention has been focused on the behavior of African Americans. They've been scapegoated and feted; copied and pilloried. But the unrepresentative focus has been used by the black, brown and tan community to allow their take on American society to get a spotlight. Consequently the larger group -- the white working classes -- have become envious. Some would say that the current President is their revenge for the election of Barack Obama.

New Black Art is not going to make them feel any better. It's angry and militant and at the same time beautiful and desirable. Black artists appropriate the way hip hop does. They strip the found elements back to the bone, set them off against a simple background and then riff on the theme the way Lauren Hill rhymes or John Coltrane wails. But looking and listening aren't the same; when the party's over and the band's gone home the painting still keeps going on and on and on.

*"Keep On Pushing" by The Impressions (featuring Curtis Mayfield) -- was adopted by Martin Luther King as an anthem of the civil rights movement.

A Gallery Ramble under Darkening Clouds

Elizabeth Stevens — Thu, 07 Aug 2014 16:40:45 +0000

A Gallery Ramble under Darkening Clouds Elizabeth Stevens August 7, 2014 - 12:40

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Elizabeth: Trawling around today's Chelsea galleries recently made David and me mindful of the days when we would wander the streets of SOHO looking at art in some pretty great galleries. After the sun set, there were no Comme des Garçons or Cookshop to light the way home, but thin bedraggled men filling dumpsters with compacted shredded rags from the remaining sweatshops that dotted the area south of Houston Street. Frankly most of what was below Houston in the late 1970s and 80s was pretty creepy, outside of a few old standbys. Still, if you were there for the art, music or dancing, its edginess was exciting and romantic. It was also affordable to take a cab out of there -- if you could find one.

David: Yeah, today’s Chelsea is fast becoming the Epcot center for flashy haut bourgeois boutiques, signature architectural confections designed to blot out the light and in time, no doubt, the views from the High Line, that originally brought developers to the area and are now forcing long established businesses and galleries to leave. One of these is headed by the highly esteemed gallerist Betty Cunningham, who takes a real interest in her artists, and cares as much about their careers as she does about making sales. She told me she is very happy to be downtown in the LES, a real neighborhood instead of a warehouse district, and near to where she started, in a gallery over Fanelli’s Bar in SOHO.

Elizabeth: I was thrilled when David ushered me into her new location at 15 Rivington Street, opposite Freeman's Alley in the Lower East Side. Her new space has two levels with wide plank fruitwood flooring extending back from the entrance and flanked by large recent works in oil and watercolor by Philip Pearlstein in honor of his 90th birthday. Pearlstein is a perennial favorite in my book, his works are at some points breathtaking and he manages to continue to surprise and comfort me at the same time. Two paintings in particular were standouts in the downstairs space. As I first got a glimpse of them from the end of the upper level, David pointed to the large painting, Two Female Models with Legs Crossed and Kazak Rug, 2013, (image below) on the back wall and exclaimed: "It's one of his very best works. And he can still pull it off at ninety!" It is and he can.

David: "You know, despite all his success, I think Pearlstein is largely misunderstood as merely a 'cool, eye-ball realist'." In fact, he is one of the more complex and paradoxical of contemporary artists: his work is perceptually executed but conceived of abstractly, notice the crossed axis here. He focuses on the human figure without sentiment but often conceals a sly humor in his orchestration of forms, which often remind me of his early engagement with Francis Picabia. Pearlstein is the anti-humanist humanist; his work’s facture has a deadpan inflection, like the voice of Chet Baker. Still, for all that, his central achievement is his re-examination of the nature of our looking, and through the close-focus mapping of what we see, a new way of experiencing the world appears; that cannot be said of his recently departed competition, Lucian Freud. He is the perfect artist for an extended dual location show that is both a Hello and Goodbye.

Elizabeth: Well I simply refuse to say goodbye without adding that there is a special and subtle pleasure in Pearlstein’s work that people frequently don’t see. It is a lifelong engagement with the same room, the same light, models, rugs, objects, etc., that reveal in their nuanced differences an inexplicable richness, a life lived in looking, as you put it. Corrupted by today’s internet, many onlookers may mistake 50 different Damian Hirst pictures as serious variations on a theme, although they are in reality merely rote repetitions. And you know how much I like everything Pop!

It was then that David and I strolled over to the just opened Morgenstern's Ice Cream shop, across the street at 2 Rivington. Sincerely, this was some of the best sorbet I have ever had, made spectacular by the intense color of my handmade treat. It is a foodies' fashion must, as cool as the Lower East Side.

David: After enjoying our cones at Nicholas Morgenstern’s across the street, we ventured on to Chelsea where most of the established galleries are still active. DC Moore gallery is sporting works by Robert De Niro, Sr. (image, top) to coincide with the HBO showing of a documentary on the artist, featuring his son reading from his father’s journals. De Niro was part of the generation that Pearlstein was reacting against when he was defining his own practice; in many ways they are opposites, and yet they are united in the commitment to working from life. A selected survey of works from 1947 to 1989, were on view and there were a number of standout pieces. Although most of his early work was lost in a studio fire, the Untitled Abstraction, actually a still life from 1947-48, gives a clear demonstration of why he was highly thought of by Hans Hoffmann and others. The picture is taut with pictorial tensions opening up the space with vital painterly gestures that hold well against works in the back room by de Kooning and Kline.

Elizabeth: Well, I am so happy to see that DC Moore has helped to keep attention on De Niro, Sr.’s work and life as an artist. His work has such a great love of color; he was a real painter’s painter.

David: Several works from the early sixties were new to me and memorable, especially the large canvas, Woman in Red, from 1961. Where Pearlstein relies on the slowly-achieved tonal articulation of forms, De Niro is all about broad masses of color holding forms in space while locking those shapes into the surface. Executed with a seemingly casual spontaneity, De Niro achieved a lively evocation of the woman’s presence, elegant and a bit reserved. Here color does several things at once: it creates a mood and atmosphere, and it creates pressures that open up the space of the room’s blue field, pushing a bright yellow back and pulling forward the red dress and purple shawl. The contrast of blue-black lines against the red-orange brown of the sitter’s flesh gives the picture its psychological focus, while the ochre kid glove provides the nexus of the picture’s movements. Returning to the street, I mentioned my feeling for the large portrait to Elizabeth, which she liked as well.

A few blocks away, we found ourselves at Marianne Boesky Gallery and were pleasantly surprised by our first viewing of portraits by an established Dutch painter Hannah van Bart. Drawing is the central expressive vehicle in these works; color is secondary to line and tone, mostly serving as an accent to off-white, taupe or grey tones. Drawn, or more likely projector traced from found photographs, these portrait heads and full figures have a nostalgic air, as if of people who lived seventy years ago, during the war. Van Bart has developed a few drawing mannerisms which give the features of her men and women a family resemblance; her lines vary between precisely confident, but without a searching quality, and mannered to appear quivery. If a bit illustrational, they nevertheless project an intriguing quality of enchantment.

Elizabeth: I don't know about this show, David. I can’t say that I was dazzled but when von Bart hones in on a particular detail, it knocks my socks off. Then there are particular portraits that felt almost like gesture drawings that were equally amazing. Overall, she seems to be in the middle of something; I would love to see what her next move in the studio will be.

David: My favorite works were the portrait head of a Young Woman, 2011 and She Knows, 2013. Elizabeth also liked Doubt, 2013. The Young Woman (image left) has the kind of linear grace Foujita could sometimes give to his subjects and She Knows seem like an update on early Paul Delvaux, still they are not yet in a world. Before we left, we lingered over a Dutch catalog of her early work, clearly inspired by Georg Baselitz. The drawings there made it clear that von Bart can possess a real vitality in her drawing when she isn’t a slave to the photograph. We’ll have to wait for the next show.

Elizabeth: We walked down to 23rd Street and Margaret Thatcher Projects, where the Munich-based artists Venske & Spanle are showing hand-carved marble sculptures they call Smörfs. These well-crafted works are meant to be a new species of creatures with very sexy forms that are shown in this exhibit interacting or exploring various everyday objects that the artist couple has had in their home. Each work shows a creature’s curiosity by their tactile investigation of what goes on in the everyday world of humans.

David: Is Smörf the German word for Al Capp’s equally biomorphic creature the Shmoo? Or so it would seem, does anyone even remember Al Capp? In any event, these giant marble mollusks lean, against walls, stretch, grope, and droop about objects like the one hugging the bulb of a lamp. It involves a lot of carving to make these sculptures appear humorously playful; they are also a tad disturbing in their evocation of sexualized parasitic creatures. Looking at this work one wants to see them set out in force over the extensive landscape of a park or even a mock city dump where they would appear astonishing.

Elizabeth: If you are tempted to reach out and touch something -- well it is there. I’m never disappointed in Thatcher projects; her space is so inviting. Rarely have I been at Margaret’s gallery without street traffic coming and going. Venske & Spane's latest efforts are nutty and delightful.
I want to point out that here in Chelsea galleries tend to end up in these spaces due to dealer efforts, despite what has become a very rough environment for artistic creativity. For example, the Boesky space we visited earlier has been changed physically to accommodate several shows I have seen through the years.

David: Well you have introduced me to an interesting duo that also draws upon the great form tradition of Arp and Brancusi. I want to finish our stroll with a visit to Mathew Marks Galleries featuring works by a great contemporary original in this tradition -- the late ceramic sculptor Ken Price. Featured are his largest works, cast in bronze and lacquered in iridescent paint. While they are magical, the iridescent colors don’t have the same luminousness that his use of acrylic paints produced. Where the Smörfs remain one thing, Price’s sculptures continuously transform, as you move around them, revealing sensuous and sexual aspects with an almost hallucinatory giddiness; with a change of just 30 degrees a piece can change from male to female as in the stunning piece Percival, 2009, set off by itself in the small gallery on 22nd Street.

Elizabeth: Speaking of sexy, this show is sexy! Arp and Brancusi aside, this work falls into a particular type of organic work that I have not seen outside of artists who flourished in the 1960’s and 1970’s, mainly in that brief time when sex was glorious and an artist like Price understood this and was able to celebrate it. Even in a huge hollow and characterless white box, Price turns out works that are outrageously alive.

David: Oddly enough some of these biomorphic distortions bring me back to the shocking strangeness, the newness really, of the women’s legs in the large picture we saw by Pearlstein at the start of the afternoon. Who would ever link such different artists, but that is just what can happen on a day at the galleries.

Elizabeth: Back on the street, the force of the wind gusts made us look up at the menacing clouds darkening all around us. David was in one of his impish moods and pointed toward the sky, turning to me, he exclaimed: “Do you see it? It’s Donald Trump in drag on a broomstick, writing, 'Surrender Chelsea', in black smoke!”

What a nut. Just then, the sky opened with a first downpour; we were stuck under the High Line. After a while, we waddled like ducks over puddles to slip into the Half King, for a drink, because the sky was falling. It’s the end of the gallery season and like the weather, the atmosphere of the art world is changing; soon, we may be talking about a different New York Art World.

'Til next time. - Elizabeth Stevens & David Carbone

Ms. Stevens has been in Art and Antiques for 30 years, from representing her family's auction house in Cincinnati to Import Director at Hedley's New York in the early '90s to Salander O' Reilly Galleries, organizing art fairs and traveling exhibitions for more than 12 years. She is the former director of Yellow Bird Gallery in Newburgh, NY as well as the former Exhibitions Curator for the Thomas Cole House. She is now the owner of Elizabeth Stevens & Co. with offices in New York, New Jersey, and soon Florida.

Mr. Carbone is a painter, a critic, a curator and an educator. He has shown nationally in galleries and museums; written for Modern Painters and The Sienese Shredder anthologies, among other publications; occasionally appeared on NPR's Morning Edition with David D'Arcy between 1992-2005; and curated selected retrospectives. He is currently the director of graduate studies in studio arts at the University at Albany, where he teaches painting.