Color-Time-Space at Lohin Geduld

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Looking in: This view, through closed doors, will orient you to the tour below

Painters Joanne Freeman and Kim Uchiyama curated a sublime geometric show, Color-Time-Space, for the gallery that represents them, Lohin Geduld, on 25th Street. I'm writing about it on the last day of the show, and you're seeing it posted four days later, but not to worry: I'm going to show you around.

In making their selections, the curators noted the relationship between art and music. Rhythm, tone, and visual space (or musical time) are shared elements within the two disciplines. Seeing each perfectly chosen piece initially, I wasn't sure why the premise was necessary. Each work does indeed have a visual musicality, but the visual relationships between the works are substance enough.

Yet as I think about the installation, I can see how well orchestrated it is. Flat, saturated color is a feature of each painting, amplified and echoed in a kind of high-volume harmony in relation to the others. More persuasively, each work has a percussive rhythm in its repeated geometry--rectilinear, angular, banded, curvilinear, pah pah pah, pah pah--a polyrhythmic syncopation as the angles and curves pulse and snap.

Starting with the view through the window, above, we're going to swing to the right: .

On the wall facing the door: Thornton Willis, Blue Sky with Lattice, 2008 (first seen in a solo at the Elizabeth Harris Gallery earlier this year)
On the right wall: Joanne Freeman, Bent, 2009; Gary Petersen, Wish You Well; Kevin Wixted, Flowering Tree, 2009

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Clockwise from above: Better views of Freeman; Uchiyama's Untitled, 2009, which you glimpsed in the doorway, top, and Petersen

Swinging back to the wall facing the door: Julie Gross, Trema Disc, 2005, and a glimpse of Stephen Westfall's My Beautiful Laundrette


Arc over to the left: Jennifer Riley, Modernissimo, 2009; Yvonne Thomas, Untitled, 1963; Stephen Westfall's, My Beautiful Laundrette, 2009

In the smaller back gallery: full view of Westfall's painting; foreground, Laurie Fendrich, Don't You Dare, 2007
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James Biederman, Ben LaRocco and Kazimira Rachfal were also in the show. You can see images of their work on the gallery website. (Rachfal, a lovely surprise.) A second part of this curatorial effort took place at the Janet Kurnatowski Gallery in Brooklyn.

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On the sidebar of this blog, right, you might want to try out the new "Search This Blog" feature. I've written previously about a number of the painters in this show. Type in any one of these names for more about them: Joanne Freeman, Julie Gross, Ben LaRocco, Gary Petersen, Jennifer Riley, Stephen Westfall, Thornton Willis, Kevin Wixted.

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The L'eau Down: Paparazzi Pictures

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Click here for installation shots or scroll down

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Entering the gallery early in the evening. That's Nancy Manter's photograph in the window. Note the second-floor space in the gallery; the next shot is taken from there

Remember the scene in La Dolce Vita when Marcello Mastroianni, the jaded journalist, is cruising the Via Veneto for action and Paparazzo, the photographer, jumps into his convertible? Well, a multi-lingual noun was born.

I got to play paparazza at the opening of Slippery When Wet, shooting most of these pics at the beginning and the end of the three-hour evening, when the gallery was less crowded and I could take time out from conversation. Look out, Page 6! (Installation pics are here.)

Looking down from the second level, above, and from the spiral stairs, below

That's Metaphor's Julian Jackson standing in front of Andrew Mockler's banded canvas. Mockler is standing in front of Peter Schroth's paintings. Schroth, partially hidden, is standing between Jackson and Mockler

Sculptor Richard Bottwin standing in front of my paintings. I love the color coordination, though he assures me it was a coincidence

Below: Matthew Deleget, painter and Minus Space director, flanked by painter Karen Schifano and Richard Bottwin. Both artists are represented on the Minus Space site. (Related news: Minus Space now has a bricks-and-mortar exhibition space in Brooklyn. Bottwin, who shows at Metaphor, is participating in the Dumbo Arts Festival this weekend. I just made a studio visit with Schifano and will be posting the story soon; stay tuned.)

The photogenic owner/directors of Metaphor: Rene Lynch and Julian Jackson. (Lynch has a show of her own opening at Jenkins Johnson next month; Jackson opens 2010 with a solo at Kathryn Markel.)



Jackson, center, is talking with painter Sonita Singwi, who has a studio in Brooklyn
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Below: The handsome bearded gent in the very center of the photo is photographer Don Muchow




Painter Julie Gross talking with Laura and Steven Alexander, the painter

Below: Muchow, an artist named Charles, painter Kylie Heidenheimer chatting with Edward Shalala
(Related news: Heidenheimer has a show up at Gallery Thomas Jaekel ; I wrote about Shalala's work recently, here and here.)

Shooting the shooter

Kylie Heidenheimer, right, in conversation with painter Cecile Chong and her husband Ryan Behroozi

Below: painters Margaret Neill and Peter Schroth

Jackson, Alexander, Alexander, Gross

Below: Chong, Alexander, Alexander and me

Mary Judge and Julian Jackson with a soupcon of Julie Gross and Rene Lynch

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Below: Art to represent the artists. Suzan Batu, left, was home in Turkey, and for some reason all the pictures I had of Susan Homer showed her obscured by someone else

The Man on the Bike, aka James Kalm and Loren Munk

Below: Night falls

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GeoMetrics II at Gallery One Twenty Eight

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I spend so much of my time in Chelsea that going to the Lower East Side is like an out-of-town trip. I went there with map in hand. Not that I'm totally unfamiliar with the LES, I just don't have the order of streets in my mind the way I do other parts of the city. Allen? Chrystie? Essex? Orchard? I get confused.

But I do know Rivington Street. Geometrics II marks the third time I have been in a group show at Gallery OneTwentyEight, located at #128. (The first was in 1997 when Harmony Hammond curated Material Girls: Gender, Process and Abstract Art Since 1970; the second was two years later when Sylvia Netzer curated Pieces III, an exhibition of work made with substantially material means.)

These days, Rivington--east of Bowery and right around the corner from the New Museum--is smack in the middle of an area that is chockablock with new galleries: Sue Scott, Eleven Rivington, both on Rivington; Number 35 on Essex Street; Canada on Chrystie; and Invisible Exports on Orchard. Just to name a few.

Looking from front to back, before the gallery filled up

For Geometrics II, curator Gloria Klein selected 12 artists from the Geoform website. Geoform, as I've mentioned in the past, is a fabulous online resource dedicated to abstract geometric art maintained by Julie Karabenick. Gloria and Julie are two of the 12 artists in the show. The others are Steven Alexander, Laura Battle, Mark Dagley, Julie Gross, Michael Knutson, Bruce Pollock, Lynda Ray, Larry Spaid, Lorien Suarez and me. (Specifics on the sidebar, right.)

I'm not sure what drove Gloria's selections--because the work ranges from hard edged and mathematically inspired to intuitive and more organically developed, and from maximal to minimal--but you can see from the installation that it works. All the paintings are modest in size, in keeping with the gallery's modest (well, shoebox) proportions. Given the economic downturn, there was something comforting about the scale, though at one point artists and friends were packed in pretty much check by jowl.

You can see more on the gallery's website, and read an opinion of the show at Chris Rywalt's blog, NYC Art. So here just let me say that I loved the installation, and I'm delighted to be showing with these hard-working and accomplished mid-career artists.

The view as you enter: Counterclockwise, my two paintings, Vicolo 35 and Vicolo 36; Gloria Klein's mathematically complex and visually mesmerizing crystalline composition, Beach Umbrellas; Steven Alexander's ordered color blocks, Calypso Rose; Lynda Ray's two small patterned geometries, Float Copper and Driftway

The image above moves you around the gallery

Below, continuing counterclockwise: Bruce Pollock's almost monochrome circles within circles, Red Square Cluster; Michael Knutson's organic and mathematic composition, Crossing Oval Coils XII, which is so energetic it almost gives off sparks; Mark Dagley's 16-point circle, Distressed Orb; and Julie Gross's sensuous circles, Mirro-B

Two more views

Above: Following the counterclockwise movement from Lynda Ray's two paintings, there are two framed works from Larry Spaid, and Lorien Suarez's intersecting circles, Wheel Within a Wheel 28. (I think "intersecting" characterizes the curator's selections, as there are many points of connection between and among the works.)

Below: Julie Karabenick's Composition 78, 2008, acrylic on cancas, 30 x 30 inches, at far left, the last work as you swing around counterclockwise from the front door

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Curator Gloria Klein standing in front of her painting, Beach Umbrellas, 2007, acrylic on canvas, 30 x 30 inches



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Three of the artists from the show, above: Steven Alexander (in leather jacket), Michael Knutson barely visible behind him, and Larry Spaid. Foreground: painter Binnie Birstein with her back to the camera; background, sculptor Richard Bottwin



Curator Gloria Klein with her back to the camera. (The camera is looking to the front of the gallery.) .

Awash in Color: "No Chromophobia"

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Updated 6.17.08

This post is about “No Chromophobia,” an exhibition of non-objective color on view at OK Harris Works of Art through September 6 (with a hiatus July 12 –September 1). I’m in the show, so consider this an exhibitor’s report.

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Installation view: This is what you see when you walk into the first gallery of "No Chromophobia" at OK Harris. Geometry rules in a cool tonal palette that's more subdued here than in the other rooms. Image courtesy of the gallery

The work of the artists, from left: Cora Roth, Rella Stuart-Hunt, Yuko Shiraishi, Kazuko Inoue, Pat Lipsky

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Above: First gallery, from left. Pat Lipsky, Kazuko Inoue, Rebecca Salter, Marthe Keller

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Below: Keller, Louise P. Sloane

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First of all, it’s an enormous show. All six exhibition spaces are filled with works from 33 primarily mid-career artists who are represented by several works each. (The gallery website features a rotating selection of installation shots, which changes weekly.)

It’s a painting show. If you left the Biennial hungry for, well, anything besides junk in the hallway, this is the antidote.

And by design, it’s a show of work primarily by women artists, so if you left “Color Chart” at MoMA wondering where the other half of the art world was, voila. But let me state flat out that it’s not a “women’s show” any more than Color Chart was a “men’s show.” Still, I like the numbers—and the work—here.

The enormous two front galleries hold the larger work, from Pat Lipsky’s dark-toned geometry to Rebecca Salter’s subtly textured monochrome to higher-key color fields by Marthe Keller and Louise P. Sloane. Sloane's more saturated palette, along with the room's strong sense of geometry, carry you into the second gallery where more highly chromatic work by Sharon Brant, Paula Overbay, Diane Ayott, Rose Olson and others dominates.

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Above: From the first gallery, looking into the second. From left: Mary Obering, Doug Ohlson, Yuko Shiraishi

Below: In the second gallery looking back into the first. Those are Sharon Brant's paintings flanking the doorway in Gallery 2

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Above: This view (image courtesy of OK Harris) will orient you around the second gallery, continued below:

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In the second gallery. From left: Li Trincere, Joan Mellon, Diane Ayott, Mellon again, Mary Obering

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.In the second gallery: Joanne Klein, Rose Olson, Jean Wolff, Li Trincere

There is a visual narrative in the exhibition that takes you from large and minimal to smaller and more compositionally complex, so that by the middle room (ego alert: where my own work is installed) there’s a mix of the two, moving to more compositional abstraction in the smaller back gallery. By the time you reach the large back room, size—small—is the overriding element, with a range of visual expression in evidence.

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Third Gallery: I know this room. From left: a grid of nine of my Silk Road paintings, each 12 x 12 inches, encaustic on panel (I showed earlier work from this series in a small solo show at the gallery last year); Uttar 238, encaustic on panel, 36 x 36 inches; an assembled work on paper by Siri Berg

(A large, fluid composition by Margaret Neill, also in this room, is not shown here, but it's on the gallery homepage, take a look )

Below: My painting, Berg's work, and an installation by Cathleen Daley

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On the wall to the right of Daley's work: fluid geometries by Julie Gross on either side of a poured color field by Kate Beck.

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Steven Alexander, a painter whose work could easily have been at home in this show, wrote cogently about it, noting: “There is a conspicuous absence of irony—these artists are engaged in painting not as pastiche, but as a deeply intelligent exploration of visual and tactile properties. In addition to the focus on color, the show is unified and driven by reductive form, and what could be described as succinct construction— delicate balancing of the analytical and the sensuous— surfaces and objects that are beautifully and specifically crafted, infused with sagacious knowledge of the medium and the language, with absolutely no fluff: direct painting, deceptive in its simplicity.”

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On the long wall in the back room: Paula Overbay, two small vertical works by Rose Olson, two by Soonae Tark, one of my grids, Doug Ohlson, another by Overbay.

(The installation in the back room has changed somethat since I shot this; check the gallery homepage, and in the rotating images you'll see that it's now Overbay, two by Olson, me, and another Olson)

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The size of this show alone would make it impressive, but the selection is beautifully curated and installed. Viewing this show, I have been introduced to the work of artists whose work is new to me, just as I have had the chance to see new work by artists whose work is familiar. Happily, we are awash in shows about color right now--what little miracle seeded the ether to compel so many gallerists to focus on hue at the same time?--and I am honored to be part of this one.

The show was curated and designed by Richard Witter, the gallery’s long-time installer, and managed by Suzanne Kreps, the gallery manager. The two knew it would be an abstraction show, but the parameters shifted this way and that as they made studio visits and tossed around ideas. The focus on non-objective color sharpened slowly--and independently of all the other color-themed exhibitions.

The idea took a more concrete form a year ago January in the "cold and bleak" dead of winter, recalls Witter: "I needed a shot of Jules Olitski." Instead he purchased two little brilliantly hued gouache abstractions at a small gallery in Chelsea, and that started him thinking about color as subject, as object.

Another parameter was materials. "I knew I wanted traditional tools and supports--the brush, canvas, panels, paint, artists colors," he says. And another: a reductive sensibility. "I wanted [the show] to be a portrait of color." But get close and look at those surfaces--tactile, sensuous, sublime. The art world may be growing younger by the minute, but paint handling like this develops over time.

If the Chelsea sirens have pulled you away from SoHo of late, let the chromatic call of this show bring you back downtown.

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