Geo/Metric at MoMA, Part 2

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Geo/Metric at MoMA, Part 1 

Geo/Metric at MoMa, Part 3  

Geo/Metric at MoMa, Part 4 

The entrance to Gallery 2. A Bridget Riley print is flanked by a grid of nine ink-on-paper works by Tony Smith, and a gouache-on-paper drawing by Jo Baer. Most of the work in this gallery is from the Fifties and Sixties

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If my first post reads more like a travelogue of the gallery than a discussion of the work, it’s because I really don’t know how to talk about that early-in-the-last-century work.  Here in the second gallery, my art history is a bit better. This is more contemporary work—though by “contemporary” we’re talking late Fifties and Sixties. Work in black and white is installed in the four corners. The dialog between and among these works, mediated by everything else in the gallery, is animated. You join in visually, the way you might join a conversation at a cocktail party, a bit here, a bit there. Because the space is small—and because this unsung show is almost deserted—it is easy to maneuver, and there are many such conversations to join.

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Bridget Riley. Untitled (Fragment 1) from a series of seven screenprints on Perspex, 1965

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So let’s enter the gallery. The optically invigorating screenprint on Perspex (that’s plexiglass to you and me) by Bridget Riley is crisp and fresh, though it dates from 1965. Riley has mellowed in recent years but I remain enamored of the painter who muscled her way into the art scene of the Sixties with her retinally explosive Op paintings. This print, all aggressive angles and vigorous energy, is a fitting metaphor for what it must have taken for a young woman to create a place for herself back then. Plus it’s fabulous.

Over your left shoulder is a black and white work by Myron Stout, one of the great albeit not-so-well-known painters of modernist geometry (or is it geometric modernism?). You’ll see it in a bit as we swing around the gallery. Visible to your left is a wall of gouache and ink works by Ellsworth Kelly. I’m lukewarm about Kelly’s mature work, but these early paintings and collages I love. Their small size and wonderful color, and Kelly's exploration of related shapes and hues, and the dialog between the color and the black and white is still snappy after all these years.

Ellsworth Kelly. Line Form Color, 1951, ink on paper (the black and white work) and colored and pasted colored paper on colored paper. Kelly described the works--from a group of 40 that he created--as "an alphabet of plastic pictorial elements."
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Below: Tony Smith, 4/26/61 (a suite of nine drawings), 1961, ink on paper. (Beyond the wall is a peek at one of a series of small works by Martin Creed in the next gallery)

The gridded installation format continues with the ink-on-paper works of Tony Smith. Is it me or do the photographs of Berndt and Hilla Becher come to mind? Certainly it’s the installation, but it’s also the architectural quality of the images, the black and white, and the slight variations, each worthy of close viewing, within the theme.

A doorway to the large third gallery comes next, but we’re going to continue our tour around Gallery 2 and stop at the two gems by Jo Baer, both gouache on paper. You see the small one on the right when you enter the gallery; it and a partial view of the Smiths flank Riley’s print in a pas de trois of angular black and white.

Up close you can appreciate the energy of the lines in Baer's small work, brushed on confidently with a free hand—and that red line, not quite tentative, yet not fully assertive, traverses the length of the inside space just under the defining upper edge. There’s just the tiniest bit of space between the light red line and the bolder black swipe above it. Then you notice its counterpart at the bottom of the frame. It sits atop the black line there. Is it resting or lying in wait? What energy and equipoise contained in such a tiny space! (See Carol Diehl's review in AiA of what Baer has been up to more recently.)

Two by Jo Baer, both untitled, from 1965 and 1963, gouache on paper. ( Peeking into Gallery 3, we see Gabriel Orozco's digital print wallpaper)

Below, the untitled work from 1963, 5.5 x 7 inches sans frame

Continuing around, we see works by the Brazilians Helio Oiticica, most gouache on board, that are beauties of modernist geometry, and Lygia Clark, whose two black-and-white collages are placed in the diagonally opposite corner to the Tony Smiths and opposite the Jo Baers. The balance of content and placement is this exhibition is staggeringly good!

Work in gouache on board from 1958 and 1959 by Helio Oiticica, above
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Below, more by Oiticica and by Lygia Clark in cut and pasted paper on paper. (To orient you: just to the right of the Clarks is the entrance to this gallery)

Now we back ourselves almost into Gallery 3 so that we can take in the foreground and background of this space. On the wall behind the Bridget Riley print is this gouache-on-paper painting by Mary Heilmann, below. Look at the dialog of blues between it and the Oiticica on the left. Pulling back farther, you see the Myron Stout drawing which had not been visible as we entered. The Stout work faces the Tony Smith grid; the exchange of positive and negative planes and spaces between these two installations is so compelling that you might be at a tennis game for the amount of head swinging you do. Through the doorway into Gallery 1 you can see the Hans Arp collage which I showed in the previous post.

Mary Heilmann, above and below, Davis Sliding Square, 1978, synthetic polymer paint on paper, 29 7/8 x 22 1/2
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Above, work by Oiticica is to the left of Heilmann's painting. Below, Myron Stout's choarcoal and pastel drawing is visible to the right, and beyond that, a collage by Hans Arp in Gallery 1

Heilmann is a personal favorite. I find her particular brand of geometry and color both rigorous and sensuous. Neither a minimalist nor a materialist (or perhaps a little of both), she knows exactly how much to put into every painting—or maybe exactly how much to leave out. This work, from 1978, is more recent than most of the other work in the room. Presumably that’s because it leads you into the large Gallery 3, the site of the newest work in the exhibition.

Heilmann's work faces this view of Gallery 3, which is where we’re going in the next post.

Next stop: Gallery 3

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Painting: Linearity, Angularity, Materiality, Color

Other posts about the New York art fairs:

. Big Black Objects

. Quirky

Armory: Sarah Morris, Rings, 2007, household gloss on canvas; Gabriel Orozco sculpture, plaster and acrylic, at White Cube, London

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I went into the New York fairs knowing that I couldn’t do the same kind of reporting I’d done in Miami. In fact, I really wanted to view rather than report. But as I started to see work that interested me, the camera came out. Perhaps not surprisingly, some of the same artists whose work I've liked in the past were the ones whose work I was liking at these fairs, and at the same galleries. I may never get to Dublin, for instance, but I've come to expect that the Rubicon Gallery will have something geometric by Ronnie Hughes, whom I've never met and whose work I know only through the art fairs, and that I will find it appealing. I also looked for Sarah Morris at White Cube, London; Imi Knoebel at Galerie Nacht St. Stephan, Vienna; and my new favorite, Mindy Shapero at Breeder, Athens, and was not disappointed.

If you follow this blog, you know my predilections are for geometry, materiality and color. Here’s some of what I saw and liked, organized for the flow of images.

Armory: Imi Knoebel, kreuz und quer 1 and kreuz und quer 8, both 2007, acrylic on aluminum at Galerie Nacht St. Stephan/Rosemarie Schwartzwalder, Vienna

Armory: Linda Besemer, acrylic over dowel, at Angles Gallery, Santa Monica

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Armory: Bridget Riley painting, Sol Lewitt sculpture foreground at Pace Wildenstein, New York City

Armory: Heimo Zobernig (I think) at Friedrich Petzel, New York City

Pulse: Beat Zoderer, Negativraster No. 2/07, 2007, PVC in lacquer on wood, at Fiedler Contemporary, Cologne




Pulse: Ronnie Hughes, Plexus, 2007, acrylic on linen, at Rubicon Gallery, Dublin

Pulse: Jennifer Coates, Folding Sky, 2004, acrylic on canvas, at Kinz, Tillou & Feigen, New York City

Pulse: Jason Young, cast resin painting at Margaret Thatcher Projects, New York City

Pulse: Ryan Wallace, The Singularity is Near, 2007, oil, acrylic on canvas, at Envoy, New York City

Pulse: Tobias Lehner at Union Gallery, London

Armory: Rebecca Morris, Untitled (#06-06), 2006, oil on canvas, at Galerie Barbara Weiss, Berlin

Armory: Joanne Greenbaum, left, and Pae White at Greengrassi, London




Mindy Shapero, Breeder Gallery, Athens.

Detail, above, of this oddly appealing, easel-size work:

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On the Geometric Trail in Chelsea

There was a wealth of geometric expression in Manhattan last month. I photographed some of it. Then I went to Miami for the fairs and spent the subsequent two weeks blogging about them. I was prepared to let this New York report go--one has only so much time, after all--but in reviewing the images, I realized the work was too interesting to ignore. I made time. If you don’t go to New York regularly, I suppose it doesn’t make all that much difference when you see these shows en blog; and if you did see the shows, well think of this post as a bit of 2007 déjà vu all over again.

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Bridget Riley: Recent Paintings and Gouaches
at Pace Wildenstein

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Of course you know Riley’s work. She shot to fame in the 60s with eye-blazingly, undulatingly graphic paintings that practically created the genre of Op Art. She’s mellowed. The colors are Monet-esque and the geometry is larger, more sinuous than searing. As you would expect at this gallery, the work was big--but it was an invitation to see, not a challenge. A catalog is available. Click gallery website for more info.

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Above: The central gallery at Pace Wildenstein. The work on the right is painted directly onto the wall. The painting visible through the doorway to the far gallery orients you to the installation below

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Gail Gregg: Recent Paintings
at Luise Ross

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Gregg has taken the lowly packing carton and turned it into geometric abstraction. Her symmetric shapes, reminiscent of totemic images, are from flayed carboard boxes, carton dividers, cup holders—the stuff of our throwaway culture—all coated with wax. Some works hang as relief sculptures; others are laid onto a wax ground. Technically these latter are more assemblage than painting, but painting embraces everything these days, and Gregg is a painter with a great sense of compostion and color.

You can see more at the gallery's website and at www.gailgregg.com

Installation view of Gail Gregg's show at Luise Ross

Below, a work from the show

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Polished and Pressed: Bill Thompson and Peter Weber
at Thatcher Projects

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First I liked the title, with its suggestion of neatness and order. Then I liked the work: relief sculptures that played shiny against matte, rounded edges against sharp, crease against smooth. Thompson has the polished work: geometric wall sculptures carved from urethane, many of which glisten with layers of, I’m guessing, automotive-type paint. Weber has the pressed work: felt objects that have been folded and formed into geometric order, like weave patterns under a microscope. See more at the gallery's website.

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Polished and Pressed at Thatcher Projects: Bill Thompson, above, and Peter Weber, below

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The Geometry of Seeing: Elaine Lustig Cohen
at Pavel Zoubok Gallery

Although I knew of Cohen’s work, I hadn’t realized the breadth of it. Thanks to the show at Pavel Zoubok and the impressive catalog with it, I saw a range of Cohen's work in this 40-year retrospective. Painter, collagist, sculptor and graphic designer, she has worked within a hard-edge idiom that has traversed fluidly within her various modes of expression. See more on the gallery's website.

A second part of this exhibition was held at the Julie Saul Gallery. I didn't get there, but you can visit the website to see more work.

The Geometry of Seeing: Elaine Lustic Cohen at Pavel Zoubok Gallery. This view looks into the gallery from the entry

Below, a view behind the desk

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Alberto Burri at Mitchell-Innes and Nash through January 19

When you hear arte povera, you think Merz or Kounellis. Burri? Who knew? The exhibition is a 40-year-plus survey of the artist, who died in 1996. The work is varied but the constants are the materials--commonplace stuff like plastic, Celotex wallboard, burlap, clay--and a geometric sensibility that threads its way through the material and the years. Not surprisingly, Rauschenberg cited Burri as an influence. Read more and see additional images at the gallery website.

Above: Alberto Burri installation view

Below: Oil and gold leaf on Celotex--a little ricca with the povera

Next post: The geometric trail continues below Houston