(Un) Common Threads, Part 2: Group Show at Elizabeth Harris

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In Part 2 of Common Threads, we follow a line from Edward Shalala's photographs in the previous post to his tangible work in the group exhibition, By a Thread at the Elizabeth Harris Gallery (up through July 24).
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In a series of four works, Shalala shows the canvas reduced first to thread and then to its ultimate entity: dust. From there the pendulum swings in a more material direction--the artists in the exhibition are connected by the filament and fabric--and then back to deconstruction . Let's start in the back gallery, where Shalala's four canvas reductions are on display. Here's one:

Edward Shalala, Untitled #7, 2009, canvas dust dropped onto contact paper, 18 x 21 inches (image from the gallery website)

Moving around the gallery, we see Mary Carlson's blood spatters rendered in copper wire and Mike Asente's giant embroidery. Did I mention the show is eclectic? Here the element of roundness, and the graphic quality of red, black and white hold the room together.

Mary Carlson, Wiresplat 1, 2009, crocheted copper wire, 79 x 124 x 1.5 inches; detail below. Mike Asente's small embroideries are on the wall around the corner

Mike Asente, Holy Rays, 2009, embroidery floss on linen, steel hoop, 46 x 50 x 1.5 inches; on wall: Boom, 2009, embroidery on non-woven interfacing, 10 x 13 inches

Moving from the back gallery to the front, we see Carlson's splatter sculpture in the distance and Elisa D'Arrigo's handstitched sculpture on the wall. Then we continue around the gallery with more work by D'Arrigo, hangings by Leslie Dill, and a deconstructed piece by Elana Herzog. With these three artists in particular, I'm moved to consider the Norns of myth: the first spins the thread of life, the second fashions it into fabric of individual texture and length, and the third snips the thread when the time comes. Take a look:

From back gallery to front, above: Carlson's Wiresplat 1 and Elisa D'Arrigo's stitched sculpture, which you can see better below:

Elisa D'Arrigo, Terra Cotta 1, 2009, cloth thread, acrylic paint, acrylic medium, pigments, 20 x 18 x 3.75 inches (image from the gallery website)

Panning the gallery: two more small sculptures from D'Arrigo and two "thread poems" by Leslie Dill. Both artists are known for their stitched works

Below: Dill's I was Born with a Veil, 2003, silkscreen, fabric, thread, 90 x 45 inches (image from the gallery website)

Panning the front gallery. More below about column at right

Holly Miller, Snap #18, 2008, acrylic paint and thread on canvas, 36 x 36 inches (image from the gallery website)

Mary Carlson, Wiresplat 2, 2006-2009, crocheted copper wire, 56 x 140 x 1.5 inches; right, Elana Herzog, Untitled, Column Series #3, 2009, stapled fabric on constructed column

Below: a detail of the work (image from the gallery website).
And that takes us back to deconstruction--a nice denouement for a show in which materiality is the theme.

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Thornton Willis at Elizabeth Harris Gallery

Click here for
Stephen Haller: Remembering Morandi

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Warrior, 2008, oil on canvas, 70 x 59 inches; Flash Back, 2008, oil on canvas, 83 x 61 inches

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On the face of it, Thornton Willis’s “lattice” paintings are exactly what you see: hard-edge grids with a slight visual overlapping, as wide bands of color float over or dip behind one another. The construction depicted is as old as human culture, used in physical form for baskets and cloth.

The paintings take liberty with this structure, challenging our spatial perceptions of foreground and background, of what’s smack up against the picture plane and and how that relates to deeper, more ambiguous space. Their proportions, vertically oriented and of roughly human height, function as a kind of visual window into which you can fall, taking your perceptions with you. It’s a thrilling sensation, not unlike standing at the edge of a cliff—although your ideal viewing distance is about six feet away.

Each painting is a variation in color and structure. Even when several paintings have the same long rectangular proportion, the placement and structure of the bands—and certainly, their color, often modulated rather than flat—change, along with their individual cadences and rhythms. Looking at them in this way, music rather than textiles would seem to be the touchstone for the work.

Up close there’s another perceptual shift. What appear initially to be hard-edge paintings are in fact emphatically handmade with wavering lines and unexpected drips, pentimenti, and often a vigorous, textural overpainting. There’s a catalog photograph of Willis standing before an in-progress painting that’s taped where the colored bands are laid down. That must have been early in the process, because it’s only after the tape comes off that things get really interesting.

Summer House, 2008, oil on canvas, 68 x 43 inches; Conversion, 2008, oil on canvas, 97 x 70 inches

This latter painting, the catalog tells us, was the pivot between earlier, triangular compositions and the body of work in this show

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Triple Play, 30 x 30 inches; Gotham's Rhythm, 106 x 65 inches; both 2008, oil on canvas

Below: another view of Gotham's Rhythm

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Warrior in foreground; Blue Sky with Lattice and Trellis in the Sun, both 2008, oil on canvas, 61 x 34 inches

Peeking around the corner, Flash Back, a detail of which is shown below

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The paintings appear hard edge from a distance, but up close they bear the enthusiasm and energy of the artist

The show is up through April 19 at Elizabeth Harris Gallery in Chelsea. See more on the gallery website.
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Grids and Lattices

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Grids viewed through a grid: Mary Heilmann's Two Lane Blacktop, up through February 21, at 303 Gallery (the gallery has a no-photo policy, but that doesn't extend to the sidewalk). This exhibition follows her fabulous show at The New Museum

If you read this blog even ocasionally, you know I go looking for geometry and grid-based abstraction. But sometimes even I’m astonished by the synchronous appearance of so many really good exhibitions on one theme. I'm a bit late with this post; between Marketing Mondays and Blogpix (see sidebar also) my posting time has been tight. While some of the shows are down, many live on in the galleries' respective websites. Let me connect some dots for you:

Robert Irwin's Red Drawing, White Drawing, Black Painting installation at Pace Wildenstein, up through February 28.

"What I'm trying to do is eliminate the frame . . and put you in direct relationship to the real power, which is your ability to perceive, " Irwin has said

Irwin's work, fluorescent lights in a non-repeating grid installed on large walls, is shown above and below

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Light without the electricity: Susie Rosmarin at Danese.
The show ended February 7, but the wattage is undiminished. Rosmarin's meticulously crafted paintings draw on op art, hard-edge abstraction and even textile pattern

Above: detail of the acrylic painting shown below



Installation view: Susie Rosmarin at Danese

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Thornton Willis at Elizabeth Harris. This is a peek at Willis's upcoming show, March 19-April 18

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Imi Knoebel at Mary Boone Gallery, Chelsea. The show ended February 14.

Knoebel makes dimensional paintings, or planar sculpture, whose inviting hues and slight dimension create an almost cinematic viewing experience.

And how perfect is that architectural echo?

All the works are wall size except these three below:

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Unexpected:

On the way top MoMA, I saw the grid, above, in the subway.

When I got to the museum and looked down into the atrium, there was the grid in progress below. Sol Lewitt channeling Agnes Martin?

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Acute Conditions, Part 2

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Thornton Willis at the Elizabeth Harris Gallery

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I've got a TON to write about, not least of which is Material Color, the show I'm in at the Hunterdon Museum (as well as a terrific Bram Bogart show at Jacobson Howard that couldn't possibly be any more material or colorful) . But that's a reportorial piece, so while I'm working on it, let me connect a few dots for you in this post.

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Previously I looked at the work of Sharon Butler, Joanne Freeman and Nancy White. The subject: angular elements in geometric abstraction. I'd like to continue with some work I saw this past week, paintings whose geometry has a crystalline quality, which is to say that the angular elements are amassed into a larger whole.

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Thornton Willis, a fave of mine, is in a Gallery Artists show in the enormous second gallery at the Elizabeth Harris Gallery. His painting opens this post. Willis's geometry pushes right up to the picture plane. The angles may suggest a deeper space, but the composition is so insistently two-dimensional--those angles really grip the corners, don't they?--that the image is formally and satisfyingly flat.

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Mary Heilmann, who is having a major moment right now--and long may it last-- is the subject of a small retrospective at Zwirner and Wirth, where the image below was shot, and at The New Museum, where her first museum retrospective, "To Be Someone," will run October 22 through January 26, 2009. I'll have a full report on the New Museum show in a few weeks, but in the meantime, the Zwirner and Wirth show, titled "Some Pretty Colors," was a beautiful show--hot color, often expanding from one canvas to another, restrained by the crispness of her geometry and the parameters of the cool white box.

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Above: Mary Heilmann at Zwirner and Wirth.

Foreground: Spider's Strategem, 1995, oil on canvas, 54 x 36 inches; middle: Yoshimi, 2004, oil on canvas, 40 x 52.25 inches; back: Black Dahlia, 2001, oil on canvas, 34 x 40 inches

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Below: Chartreuse, 1987, a shaped painting in her solo "To be Someone" at The New Museum

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I haven't yet seen the Heilmann painting shown above--it's in The New Museum retrospective (I pulled this image from the New York Times online feature)-- but it provides an excellent formal transition to the work of Chris Duncan, whose solo show, The FaithVoid Split was at the Jeff Bailey Gallery. Duncan is a crafty guy who stitches his drawings together and does installations with thread (there's an enormous mandala-like construction in white thread on a black gallery wall). But for this post, what interests me are the angles in his paintings and works on paper--and, as you can see below, the acute-angled doorway through which you enter the show. Go ahead, walk through . . . .

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Above and below: Chris Duncan at Jeff Bailey Gallery

The painting below: A New Way to Cope, 2008, mixed mediums including acrylic and gouache, 72 x 96 inches

. . . . I love this painting, its circle the two-dimensional counterpart to the orb hanging next to it. The angular elements that comprise the circle, and the deep visual space into which the circle is set, give it a pulsing, spinning, throbbing , glowing energy that feels more dimensional than its globular counterpart.

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At Kinz, Tillou and Feigen, upstairs from Elizabeth Harris, Jennifer Coates shows paintings that contain sprawling crystalline forms afloat in an indeterminate space suggestive of both landscapes and galactic nebulae. The dreamy dimensionality of her work is a nice counterpart to Duncan's tightly wound ball of angles--though they both have a kind of sci-fi quality to them--Heilmann's loose-brushed geometry and Willis's flat formalism.

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Jennifer Coates: Thoughts for Naught, 2008, acrylic on canvas, 18 x 24 inches

Paintings and Process--Thirty Years Apart

Larry Poons at Jacobson Howard: Festinniog, 1975, acrylic on canvas, 78 x 69.5 inches

If you read this blog regularly, you know that while geometry is a recurring theme, I'm just as interested in material and process. It is those two latter issues we'll consider in this post via a couple of New York shows--one still up, the other now closed--both with references to nature.

Larry Poons at Jacobson Howard Gallery through March 1

"Throw, Pour, Drip, Spill and Splash" offers a fine selection of Poons’s paintings from the Seventies and Eighties. True to the title of the show, these are paintings at their most process intensive. Layers of paint in frozen rivulets and and richly encrusted surfaces still resonate with the energy of their making, an effect heightened by their large size in relation to the two small rooms of the Upper East Side gallery in which they’re shown.

There was nothing in the gallery information that made reference to landscape, yet the paintings themselves recall all manner of nature and of the payssage: mossy earth, flowered fields, waterfalls. Perhaps I'm reading them too literally, but I see what I see. lllglg

Tantrum 2, 1979, acrylic on canvas, 65 x 165 inches

Detail below

Carolanna Parlato at Elizabeth Harris Gallery, through Feb. 2

Downtown, in "Nature Games," a show that closed on February 2, Carolanna Parlato showed work in the same vein. While her m.o. would seem to cover the same territory as Poons, her process is much more controlled; the enamel-like paint flowed and dripped but only, it seems, until she said, "Stop." The paintings are worked in saturated, uninflected colors, yet the topographical quality of the pentimenti and the substantiveness of the drips show you just how much dimension "flat" can have. (Both painters work in acrylic, by the way.)

Parlato makes a direct reference to landscape in her statement, but I see her elements more as land mass. It's the process here that engages me, and the pleasure of materiality that is just under--and essential to--that glossy surface.

Installation view: Carolanna Parlato at the Elizabeth Harris Gallery, "Nature Games"

Below: The Kiss, 2007, acrylic on canvas, 72 x 80 inches; image from the gallery website

What Goes Up, 2007, acrylic on canvas, 36 x 36 inches; image from the gallery website

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Detail below:

The edge gives you some sense of the push/pull Parlato has managed so well

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I’m not one to ascribe gender to painting, but I feel comfortable saying that the Poons paintings are genuinely beautiful—in part because of the lovely pink and lavender-tinted palette—while Parlato’s are muscular and handsome. Either show would have been satisfying to me on its own, but seeing them in the same period was more than doubly rewarding as the experience challenged ideas of time (they were painted almost 30 years apart), landscape , gender and materiality.