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4.28.2008

Everything is Illuminated

Other posts about the New York art fairs:
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Big Black Objects
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Ai Wei Wei at Mary Boone, 24th Street
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Two views, above and just below, of what looks like a giant chandelier that wafted to earth and fell slightly awry . . .
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This is the last post from the New York fairs. It seems I've saved the brightest for last. To be honest, I wasn't aware of the amount of physical (and retinal) resplendence on exhibition in the various venues until I started sorting through the images. I've even included a few works that weren't in the fair but that were shown in town during the same period, like the enormous sculpture that illuminated the darkened space of the Mary Boone Gallery, above and below. There's no formal theme here except luminosity, which, when you consider the range of ideas and objects on display during those four days at the end of March, is enough of a thematic concept. Do I love everything here? No. But I like seeing it all together.

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. . . I particularly liked looking into the structure of the piece, which suggested something like an interstellar array



Armory Show: Two views of a sculpture from Galleria Massimo De Carlo, Milan

The vertigo of this piece is exquisite, but the reality is that it's about four inches deep




The long entryway into Pulse




Pulse: Tim Bavington at Mark Moore Gallery, Santa Monica

The high-wattage luminosity is purely optical, both above and below:




Danese Gallery, 24th Street: Julian Stanczak




Armory Show: Pedro Cabrita Reis, The Leaning Paintings #4, at Magazzino d'Arte Moderna, Rome



Armory Show: Marxist message or a vodka ad? At Erna Hecey Gallery, Brussels/Luxembourg



Armory Show: John Armleder at Galleria Massimo De Carlo, Milan

OK, so this might be the love child of Morris Louis and My Little Pony. But it certainly holds it own within the parameters of this post





Armory Show: Martin Creed at Hauser & Wirth, Zurich/London

And this about sums it up

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4.25.2008

Strung Out


Other posts about the New York art fairs:
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Mind Meld: Devorah Sperber, right, with Kirk, Bones and Spock. The work was installed in the Caren Golden Gallery booth at Pulse

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I'm still mining my images from the recent New York art fairs. This post takes a look at at two works that engage gravity and illusion with an allusion to physics.

Working here on planet Earth, Devorah Sperber, known for her pixilated thread-spool sculptures which become recognizable images when viewed through a plastic sphere, has materialized three members of the original Star Trek team with beads, thread and light. In real life, these guys may be portly, wrinkled--or dead--but in what are essentially beaded curtains, they are as scintillating as the first time they beamed up through the transporter. I haven't visited The Starship Enterprise in several light years--even via the wormhole known as syndication--so it was fun to see them again.

In an earlier post, Big Black Objects, I posted the image of Bahk Seon Ghi's Charcoal Installation, a barely materialized staircase and window (shown bottom), but it's in the detail below that you can see how it's done. Pretty low-tech for such a high concept, no?




Suspended animation: A detail view--nylon monofilament strung through the drilled holes of these charcoal pieces and hand tied--of Bahk Seon Ghi's Charcoal Installation, below.

The work was shown at Scope via the Krampf Gallery, New York City


4.23.2008

Tangible Poetry

Other posts about the New York art fairs:

Free of a personal mandate to write about the recent New York fairs in a big reportorial way , I found myself looking at the work differently. I'm not sure I would have written about Big Black Objects if I'd felt the need to report venue by venue. I certainly wouldn't have stopped to ponder those Oddball objects. And I might not have stopped sufficiently long to be moved by the poetry of the three objects shown in this post. The names of their makers are big, mind you, but the work was comprised of small elements that required slowing down for closer inspection. Or is that introspection?



Armory Show: Mona Hatoum, Static, 2006, steel chair, glass beads, wire; at White Cube, London

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With it's scuffed-up surface, the chair above looks like a leftover from the booth setup. But, no, the non-arachnid cobweb tells you otherwise. Closeup, that web is constructed of red glass beads. Are they attached to the wall and the chair, or is the internal armature sufficient to support the web as an object? And look how the structural intersections of the web are repeated in the lines of the adjacent drawings. (Sorry, I don't have the name of the artist who made the drawings.) This piece, a combination of the offhand and the handcrafted, of the thoughtfully installed and the seemingly forgotten, compels you to remember. And to wonder if, perhaps, there might be a Bourgeoisian spider around the corner.


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Armory Show: Michal Rovner, video projected onto object about 18 inches in diameter; at Pace Wildenstein, New York City

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At first glance this looked like a well-illuminated object from the Neolothic age. But wait, is that surface pattern moving? It is indeed. Each dot is a tiny silhouette of a human figure in motion. The figures are engaged in actions that look like work: lifting, moving, making things. This may not be a Stone Age object, but it conveys the eons of object making and, by extension, the history of human culture.






Armory Show: Wolfgang Laib, small marble object placed on the floor, surrounded by grains of rice; at Sean Kelly Gallery, New York City

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Of course you know Laib's domestic mysteries--house-like shapes made of natural materials like marble or beeswax placed among piles of hand-gathered pollen or surrounded by handfuls of grain. Here in a bustling commercial enterprise, this tiny sculpture sat as a reminder of the slow, the quiet, the hand carved, the patiently gathered. (And now for the cynicism: I'm sure the price tag reflected the fast, the noisy and the big.)

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4.20.2008

Painting: Not Always about Size

Other posts about the New York art fairs:
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Big Black Objects
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Armory Show: Thomas Nozkowski, untitled paintings from 2001 and 2002, at Pace Wildenstein, New York City

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Thomas Nozkowski is one of my favorite painters. His vision, strongly geometric and vaguely narrative, is unique. And I admire immensely the way he remains true to his vision--not only esthetically but dimensionally. His small easel-size paintings contain a universe of images and ideas. (Tomma Abts is another, and I expect to write about both in greater detail later in the month, as both have shows up now: Nozkowski at Pace; Abts at the New Museum).

At the moment, however, I'm still mining my hoard of art fair images. (And who knew that my timing of this post would coincide with Roberta Smith's paean to petite in today's New York Times?) In addition to Nozkowski's paintings in the Pace Wildenstein booth, there was a wall of quiet, mostly achromatic paintings by Avis Newman at Lisson Gallery; both big-name galleries at the Armory Show. There were some small paintings that stood out at Red Dot, too: those by Sarah Lutz and Anne Neely at Lohin Geduld, and Charles Burwell and Tim McFarlane at Bridgette Mayer. Most of these latter artists work larger as well, but it was the small work that held the big draw.

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Armory Show: Small paintings by Avis Newman in acrylic and graphite at Lisson Gallery, London. This was, for me, the most contemplative installation in the bustling venue.
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Below, a closer look at one work, about 12 x 12 inches


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Red Dot: Sarah Lutz (top) and Anne Neely at Lohin Geduld, New York City. What a pairing, each image anchored by a dark horizontal element at the bottom of the canvas.

I am particularly enamored of Neely's small canvases, whose horizontals create an unmistakable sense of landscape while retaining an unshakable grasp on geometry




Red Dot: Charles Burwell (foreground) and Tim McFarlane (grid of four) at Bridgette Meyer, Philadelphia. Tim's a buddy, and his larger paintings are familiar to me; the small ones were the perfect size for the modest proportions of the room. Burwell's work is new to me. I want to follow it for a while.
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4.18.2008

Peripheral Visionary


Other posts about the New York art fairs:
. Big Black Objects
. Quirky
. Painting: Linearity, Angularity, Materiality, Color
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Write your own caption
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Fans of deadpan humor will recall comic Stephen Wright's joke: "For my birthday I got a humidifier and a dehumidifier. I put them in the same room and let them fight it out. " (This along with such gems as, "I spilled spot remover on my dog. Now he's gone.")

Apparently someone at the recent Scope fair felt the need to materialize the de/humidifier joke and place it in a Koonsian setting. I wonder what they would do with this Wrightsian one-liner: "Right now I'm having amnesia and deja vu at the same time."

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4.16.2008

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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4.13.2008

Quirky

Other posts about the New York art fairs:
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Quirky (i.e. peculiar; slang: oddball)



Gesine Hackenberg, Kitchen Necklace, French soup plate, nylon thread, at Sienna Gallery, Lenox, Mass., at Bridge Art Fair

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One of the things I love about browsing the art fairs is finding the oddball object. Typically they're at the smaller fairs--or in the smaller booths of the larger venues--whose close quarters reward you with nose-to-object intimacy. These are some of the oddballs I liked.




John Salvest's tower of soap at Morgan Lehman Gallery, New York City; at Pulse



Diem Chau's carved Crayolas at Mark Wolfe Contemporary Art, San Francisco; at Red Dot

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4.09.2008

Big Black Objects




Armory Show: Avery Preesman at Zeno Gallery, Antwerp. Ridder, Dood en Duviel, 2004-2005, triptych; oil, wax pigment, cement
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In fashion, two of anything is a coincidence; three is a trend. This axiom was on my mind as I began to see first two, then three, then more—many more—black objects at one fair after the other. Did anyone else notice this?

The objects themselves are varied, as you can see above and below. The cage-like object protruding from the wall at the Armory Show produced in me a primal frisson of fear, while the large cube at Pulse, which commanded the open space in the center of the venue, pushed the button on a mental soundtrack that began duuuuuh duuuuuh duuuuh DAA DAA.

The bituminous staircase at Scope was clever (though having seen the similarly constructed table and chair at Scope Miami, the surprise factor was missing here); the big fabric sphere, at the Armory Show, was oddly appealing; while the vaguely anthropomorphic sculptures made from polystyrene pellets and trashbags at Pulse evoked Rodin. There were even a few paintings that had sufficient objectness to be included here (one would be Chris Martin’s) or a shape that so reflected ones I was seeing in three dimensions that I included it.

Materials ranged from cloth to Mylar to packing peanuts and trashbags, charcoal to wax, coffee-cup lids to roofing sheets. As for the licorice pipe and shoes, the only recognizable objects in this lineup, they were just dementedly fabulous.

Cue the sound track of "Thus Spake Zarathustra" and scroll down:


Closer view of Ridder, Dood en Duviel





Armory Show: Mindy Shapero at Breeder Gallery, Athens. No information given for the looping sculpture, foreground




Armory Show: Vincent Tavenne at Galerie Giti Nourbakshch, Berlin. No title given for the spherical sculpture, foreground, which is cloth over a modular wooden armature





Pulse: Nathaniel Rackowe at Bischoff/Weiss Gallery. Black Cube, 2007, corrugated bitumen roofing




Scope: Bahk Seon Ghi at Krampf Gallery, New York City. Charcoal installation, 2007, charcoal, nylon thread




Pulse: Johannes Girardoni at Lukas Feichtner Gallery, Vienna. Diptychon and Drip Box, both 2008, beeswax, pigments, wood





Bridge: Arthur Mednick at Ch'i Contemporary, Brooklyn. Three small metal sculptures, left, with a closeup of one below (the painting is by Norman Mooney):








Armory Show: Tara Donovan at Pace Wildenstein. This sculpture is actually silver Mylar, but the curving folds give it an inky blackness




Armory Show: Chris Martin at Mitchell-Innes and Nash, New York City. I don't have the title for this painting, which has funny little raised discs placed all over the surface. The composition is very sculptural, don't you think? The sculptures to the left are by Jessica Stockholder




Armory Show: Jacob Dahlgren at Andrehn-Schiptjenko, Stockholm. Sydney, 2006, coffee-cup lids and aluminum.
Detail below






Pulse: Seung Wook Sim at Carl Hammer Gallery, Chicago


Armory Show: Padraig Timoney at Galleria Raucci/Santamaria, Napoli. Exhausted Quarry, 2008, pigment, rabbitskin glue, ink and wood on canvas; diptych



Pulse: Dan Steinhilber at G Fine Art, Washington, D.C. Untitled, 2008, polystyrene packing peanuts, polyurethane glue, polyethelyne hose, trashbags






Volta: Jesse Bercowetz at Galerie Michael Janssen, Cologne/Berlin




Pulse: Andy Yoder at Edward Winkleman Gallery, New York City. Above, Pipe; below, Licorice Shoes. The pipe is woven, like a basket. The shoes are 10 feet long.