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

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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