"Stripes/Solids" at Paula Cooper Gallery

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What you see when you walk in:

Sherrie Levine's Untitled (Broad Stripe:6), 1985, casein and wax on mahogany, 24 x 20 inches, with Ellsworth Kelly's Green Panel in the distance

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With an economy of words, the description of Stripes/Solids on the Paula Cooper Gallery website says simply: "The works in this show, dating from 1962 to 2008, embody a clarity and resolution of line, color and form through simple gestures."
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I would add that there's a strong sense of materiality here, from the wax in Sherrie Levine's Untitled (Broad Stripe: 6), which you see when you walk in, to Brice Marden's wax and oil monochromes, to Jan J. Schoonhoven's stacked cardboard with the corrugated edges forming the surface structure, to Rudolf Stingel's enormous styrofoam relief. There's also an unexpected river of blue and green that runs through the gallery. .

We're going to tour the large main gallery and then peek into the smaller front room that faces the street. To orient you, the Dan Walsh painting, below, is on the other side of the wall from Levine's. Stripes/Solids is up through October 31..
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Dan Walsh, Gray Field, 2008, acrylic on canvas, 55 x 90 inches; Brice Marden, Trade Painting 2, 1974-64, beeswax and pigment on canvas, two panels overall 50 x 30 inches
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Marden's painting; Robert Mangold, Brown Ellipse/Gray Green Frame, 1988-89, acrylic and pencil on canvas, two panels overall 74.5 x 137.75 inches
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Mangold's painting; Rudolf Stingel, Untitled, 1999, carved styrofoam, 120 x 192 x 4 inches; Jan J. Schoonhoven, R 77-3, 1977, corrugated cardboard on wood
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Stingel's sculpture; Ellsworth Kelly, Green Panel, 1980, oil on canvas, 72 x 88 inches
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Kelly's painting; work by Anne Truitt and Josef Albers, described below

Below: Truitt's Breeze, 1978, acrylic on wood, 60.24 x 5.5 x 4 inches; Albers's Study to Homage to the Square: Vernal, 1978, oil on masonite, 17 7/87 x 17 7/8

(Barely visible in the front gallery: a painting by Agnes Martin )
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In the street-facing front gallery: Agnes Martin, Untitled #10, 1994, acrylic and graphite on canvas, 60 1/8 x 60 1/8. (Even here the work is barely visible.)

Below, on the wall opposite Martin: John McLaughlin, #8, 1966, oil on canvas, 40 x 60 inches

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In this museum-quality exhibition, with one work per artist, the spare installation provides an opportunity to immerse yourself in each work while finding yourself in the middle of visual conversations between the geometric elements. It turns out there's a lot going on with these "simple gestures." As a title, Stripes/Solids is something of an understatement.

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Ellsworth Kelly at Matthew Marks

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Ellsworth Kelly has been exhibiting for longer than most of us have been alive, so it seems pointless to cavil about the work. If I sound less than enthusiastic, that’s both true and not true.

I am not a fan of his paintings. They leave me completely unmoved. But his works on paper, over half a century old, still jump off the wall.

Ellsworth Kelly installation at Matthew Marks Gallery, up through April 11

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Let’s start with the paintings. In the large gallery at 522 W. 22nd Street, eight works from 2007 and 2008—each a colored rectangle of stretched canvas placed diagonally atop a more square rectangle of white canvas—are meant to challenge your perception of shape and space. While I always like seeing color and shape, I have to admit that I'm not particularly challenged by this work. But their installation in this gallery provides an experience. The illumination from the skylights creates luminous parallelograms that float like visual echoes above the pigmented shapes, which hover slightly away from the wall. But you have to stand at a remove--as I did to shoot the photographs--to take in the mise-en-scene. Once you break through the fourth wall, so to speak, the drama is gone.
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Now let me do a 180 and say that I love the works on paper, on view in the small space next door at #525. Created between 1954 and 1962, these small framed works in gouache (or oil, ink and/or graphite) feature shapes, abstracted from natural forms, as well as some purely geometric compositions. They are intimate, inquisitive, fresh, still resonating with energy.

You can see some excellent installation shots on the gallery website, but let me show you a few up close:
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In the gouache-on newsprint drawing above, I can't help but think of Jasper Johns's encaustic on newsprint Green Target. Johns and Kelly are contemporaries; I think they might even have been living on Coenties Slip downtown at the same time, so the visual connection might have been borne of geographic proximity

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You're seeing some reflection in the glass from across the gallery--visible in the other pictures as well, even though I shot each individual work at an angle

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Each of these works is about 14 x 16 inches. Look closely at the one above and you'll see that the same yellow rectangle which appears as a painting in the top photograph also appears here. Can you make it out? Here it's on a same-yellow ground, and of course it's much smaller, but it's interesting to see how Kelly's layered shapes have recurred

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I love these variations on a theme

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And there's that yellow rectangle again, below:

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Homage to the Square . . . .

El Lissitzky, Of Two Squares: A Suprematist Tale in Six Constructions, one page of an illustrated book with seven letterpress illustration, 1922, page 10 15/16 x 8 7/8

Here's one last look at the Geo/Metric show. As you might expect in a show on geometric abstraction, the square was a leitmotif that floated throughout the galleries (the rectilinear version of "follow the bouncing ball"). This is a strictly subjective selection.

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Josef Albers, two from Homage to the Square: Ten Works by Josef Albers, 1962, each 16 1/2 x 16 1/2.

Above: Full; below: Tenuous

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Ellsworth Kelly, Purple and Orange from the series Line Form Color, 1951, gouache on paper, 7 1/2 x 8 inches

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Mary Heilmann, Davis Sliding Square, 1978, synthetic polymer paint on paper, 29 7/8 x 22 1/2. I love how the two Jo Baer gouaches are reflected in this work

OK, I have really finished with this series now. I'm moving on to Louise Bourgeois in the next post.

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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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