My Year in Review

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I saw a lot of art in 2008 and wrote about as much of it as I could. What follows is My Top 10, culled from what I posted. It's alphabetical because there's no way I could possibly quantify such a variety of artists, images and issues.
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El Anatsui at Jack Shainman
Call them paintings, tapestries or sculptures. Strips of metal are pierced and held together with twisted wire, row-on-row, but the overall effect is one of fluidity and organic growth.




Bourgeois at the Guggenheim
This was the career retrospective of nearly 70 years of work by a woman who, had she been born Louis, would have been bigger than Picasso. I hate the ramps, but metaphorically this was the place to have had the show: Bourgeois's oeuvre is a towering achievement.
Image courtesy of The Guggenheim


Donovan at the ICA, Boston
I ended up writing just about her cubes in a twinned post with Jackie Winsor, but the whole show, from styrofoam cups to Mylar mounds to drinking straws was a marvel of, well, straw into gold.
Image from the Internet


Geo/Metric at MoMA
An under-the-radar gem that was heads above just about anything else MoMA showed this year. And because all the work was from the museum's collection, photography was allowed. I went overboard with four posts.
Foreground, Bridget Riley

Geometry and Color in General
. All Kinds of Geometry and Abstraction from Abts to Zox
. Acute Conditions, Part 1 and Part 2
. Thomas Nozkowski
. On the Geometric Trail Thomas Nozkowski at Pace Wildenstein
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Heilmann at the New Museum
The perfect yin and yang of loose-limbed geometry and aggressive color in the best new white box in town.
Image courtesy of the museum


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Kapoor at the ICA, Boston
That big red dome of gooey wax, continually slumping and being remade, was the existential showstopper at the ICA in Boston , but don't overlook two concurrent shows at Barbara Gladstone .
Image courtesy of the ICA

Material Color at the Hunterdon Art Museum
“While it is not the entire story, the idea of paint as a sub-stantial material is central in all of these works," says curator Mary Birmingham. (I'm one of the artists in this show.)
Detail of painting by Wil Jansen

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Miami
Say what you will about the humongopalooza that takes place in December, but where else in the country can you see such a range of art in such a concentrated space for 12 hours a day--and bump into everyone you know while doing it?

Objects, Big and Black
The Armory fair and its satellites in March were full of menacing, mysterious, or quirky objets noirs.

Andy Yoder's licorice pipe, at the Winkleman Gallery booth

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A Few Bests and Mosts

Best show that got no critical attention: No Chromophobia
Holland, Roberta, Ken, Jerry, where were you? Curator Rick Witter filled all six exhibitions spaces at OK Harris with paintings in which color, typically embodied via reductive geometry, was the unifying element. (If you left “Color Chart” at MoMA wondering where the other half of the art world was, it was here.)

Best film whose plot you knew that still had you holding your breath: Man on Wire
That's Philippe Pettite on a cable strung between the Trade Towers on the morning of August 4, 1974. I posted it on 9/11.

Photo by Jean Louis Blondeau

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Most Ill-Timed Panel: Is The Killer Art Market Killing Art?
Great discussion back in March but who knew that while they were talking, the banks were collapsing, the Dow was at the precipice, and the economy was about to tank? The Downturn in Chelsea became apparent
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Best Blasts From the Past in the galleries
Morris Louis and Al Held at Paul Kasmin
Jackie Winsor Cubes at Paula Cooper, image left
Tadasky and Anuskiewicz at D. Wigmore Fine Art



Best 2007 show that continued into 2008: Martin Puryear at MoMA to January 14
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Best Bargain of 2008 or any year: Visiting the galleries for free

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Best Surprise: The crowd that turned up for Art Bloggers at Red Dot
Sharon Butler (Two Coats of Paint) and I had convened a similar event in Miami 2007 with a small (but lively) turnout, so imagine our surprise when you actually stepped away from the computer and headed over to this one. Thanks to George Billis of Red Dot for providing the space.
Image courtesy of Hrag Vartanian

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And the Art Booger Goes to . . . . . MoMA's Color Chart: Reinventing Color 1950 to Today
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The show was good, as far as it went. But let's get real. If color is being "reinvented" without women (6 artists out of 44) then it's really not being reinvented, is it?
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El Anatsui at Jack Shainman

Fading Scroll, 2007, aluminum and copper wire, 88 x 472 inches

I have given up trying to cover gallery shows while they’re still up. That’s the job of a paid journalist. My reportage is typically presented after the fact, and until my twin clones are perfected, that’s probably the way it will remain.

So here we are at the Jack Shainman Gallery on 20th Street at the end of January. The show is El Anatsui’s "Zebra Crossing." God, I love this work: large, fluid expanses that hang slightly away from the wall, occasionally bulging or sagging as they yield their great weight to gravity.

Detail below

Zebra Crossing III, 2007, aluminum and copper wire, 61 x 107 inches

Detail below

The work embodies some lovely dualities. There’s an underlying geometry to the structure. Strips of metal—the aluminum wrapping from the neck of liquor bottles—are pierced and held together with twisted wire, row-on-row, but the overall effect is one of fluidity and organic growth. The patterns are textile-like in their structure, like Ghanian kente cloth, but sculptural in their presence. The work is made of junk, but the light shimmers sublimely across the surface. And of course there’s the metaphor of transcendence. It took the labels from a damn lot of devil water to make this celestially beautiful work.

Area B, 2007, aluminum and copper wire, 155 x 236 inches

You can call this work sculpture, tapestry or painting, and any description would be correct.

El Anatsui is a professor of sculpture at the University of Nigeria, so perhaps sculpture is the word he would use. But the relative flatness of the surface suggests painting. Think, for instance, of the gilding and drape of Klimt. And the structure does suggest tapestry. Are you familiar with the work of Colombian-born artist Olga de Amaral, whose large scale tapestries are painted and gilded? See both below.

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Above, Klimt: Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, 1907, oil on canvas with gold and silver gilding, now at the Neue Gallery, New York City; The Kiss

Below: Olga de Amaral, Cesta Lunar, fiber, gold leaf, acrylic

More El Anatsui: Takari in Black, 2007, aluminum and copper wire, 60 x 76 inches. This one is my favorite. I particularly like the coolness of the silvery hue, and the organic geometry of the composition.

Detail below

In case you’re interested, the prices ranged from $250,000 for the smaller works, such as the one above, to $500,000 for the big one that opened the post And every single one on the gallery list had a red dot. A sante!