Sunday April 17th, 2011
Filed under Reviews, Spring 2011, Uncategorized
by Alex Allenchey
Kazimir Malevich, "Suprematist Composition: Airplane Flying" (1915). Oil on canvas, 22 7/8 by 19 inches. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery.
The newest exhibition at the Gagosian Gallery, “Malevich and the American Legacy,” is an extravagant attempt that achieves only modest results.
In an effort to demonstrate the far-reaching influence of the Russian Suprematist painter Kazimir Malevich, the show surrounds six of his major paintings with a variety of works by modern and contemporary American artists. Curators Andrea Crane and Ealan Wingate have loosely defined the term “legacy” in the exhibition’s title, incorporating a number of works that share only a small degree of formal or conceptual relation to Malevich’s paintings. Though this inclusionary approach allows the show to feature an impressive collection of artists such as Barnett Newman, Ad Reinhardt, Donald Judd and Richard Serra, to name only a few, the diversity of the exhibition serves as a detriment to its overall success. By increasing the number of possible Malevich comparisons, the show also lessens the consistency of compelling connections.
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Tuesday April 12th, 2011
Filed under Reviews, Spring 2011, Uncategorized
by Noah Dillon
Art School: Propositions for the 21st Century
ed. Steven Henry Madoff
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009
384 pages, $32.95
Despite its faults, Art School: Propositions for the 21st Century is spectacular. Edited by Steven Henry Madoff, the anthology captures representatives of every point in the art school matrix: students and teachers, theorists, critics, curators, and so on. There are great contributions from older educators as well as neophytes. The disagreement among its authors is entertaining and challenging. Questions concerning Ph.D. studio programs, the role of interdisciplinary research, and the theory/practice divide are given several contradicting answers, and yet satisfy.
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Sunday April 3rd, 2011
Filed under Reviews, Spring 2011
by Margaret Graham
Courtesy Alexander and Bonin Gallery.
The sculptures, mixed media, and installation works of Mona Hatoum at Alexander and Bonin; Pat Steir’s metallic paintings at Cheim & Read; and Terence Koh’s ritualistic performance piece at Mary Boone Gallery have something in common. For each of these artists, distance—both as an artistic concept and a personal malaise—is made tangible, transformed from an abstraction to something visceral, disquieting, and unequivocal.
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Sunday March 20th, 2011
Filed under Reviews, Uncategorized
by Sara Christoph
Larry Rivers and Kenneth Koch, In Bed (1982), mixed media, 48 by 84 inches.
In early 1950s America, creative sparks lit off like fireworks. The days of WWII were in the past, vinyl record albums hit the shelves, televisions sprouted up in every well-to-do American living room, and the doors of Tibor de Nagy Gallery on West 53rd Street swung open for the first time.
Some of the artists this gallery would be the first to champion—painters such as Larry Rivers, Helen Frankenthaler, and Fairfield Porter, as well as poets such as John Ashbery, James Schuyler and Frank O’Hara—would go on to become legendary figures in the New York art scene. In these early years the gallery was a locus of collaborative energy, a space in which animated minds were let loose to mingle.
Wednesday March 9th, 2011
Filed under Reviews, Spring 2011, Uncategorized
by Kareem Estefan
For more than a decade, the DJ has been hailed as the artist most in tune with the streets, in sync with the rhythms of global life, and in advance of the latest technologies. Every cultural worker, from the poet to the filmmaker to the philosopher, claims to be a kind of DJ, employing the diverse montage strategies of the 20th century, whether they are called collage or bricolage, appropriation or sampling, plunderphonics, plagiarism, or détournement. In the mid-1990s, the DJ’s celebrity ascended from the basement clubs of Detroit, Manchester, and Berlin onto the world stage with the rise of digital technologies and the Internet, and in no small part, because of a brilliantly talented turntablist and conceptual artist named Christian Marclay.
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Wednesday March 9th, 2011
Filed under Spring 2011
by Caroline Dumalin
Installation view, "112 Greene Street: The Early Years" courtesy David Zwirner gallery
Well before the boom in artists’ initiatives in the mid 1970s, Jeffrey Lew founded 112 Greene Street in the fall of 1970. Taking its name from its location in the burgeoning SoHo community, the freeform venue was mainly led by the experimental and improvisatory drive of the artists involved, among whom key figures are Gordon Matta-Clark, Tina Girouard, Suzanne Harris, Jene Highstein, Larry Miller, Richard Nonas, and Alan Saret. The 112 Greene Street: The Early Years (1970-1974) exhibition at the David Zwirner Gallery delivered a fragmentary and trouble-free account of this pioneering “creative laboratory.” The governing “anything goes” attitude was reflected in the aesthetic of the selected works — from patterned fabrics, stenciled wallpaper, found photographs, rotting edibles, architectural rubble, floral drawings, and folded chicken wire to an elaborately staged performance video by Richard Serra.
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Sunday February 27th, 2011
Filed under Uncategorized
by Aldrin Valdez
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Any Number of Preoccupations, 2010. Oil on canvas, 63 by 79 inches
Let the monochrome and the gesture become their own enterprise of sensation, and the eye adjusts itself to the absence of light in the washes of muddy siennas, dark greens, and burnt umbers. Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s small painting Underground (2009) and its double Underwrite (2009), in her solo show “Any Number of Preoccupations,” both feature a dark-skinned figure that emerges in low-chroma patches from the murky ground. Could it be the same man in both, one moment wearing an olive sweater, the next a gray-blue shirt? The interiors echo the titles’ prefix as they suggest subterranean light. Under alludes to below, beneath—to what is not seen or represented.
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Monday December 20th, 2010
Filed under Fall 2010
by Ambereen Karamat
Eric Fertman, installation view, Susan Inglett Gallery, New York, 2010.
In this technologically obsessed world where new art trends are often based on graphically designed images by, or express ideas through combinations of mixed-medium installations like, it is a reprieve to enter the placid world created by Eric Fertman. His show at Susan Inglett Gallery had the serenity of a Japanese garden. Often in his sculptures there are elements of both artificiality and naturalness. The rough bark of a tree is transformed into a smooth, balloonlike form, lightly stained with reds, pinks and yellows.
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Monday December 20th, 2010
Filed under Fall 2010
by Taylor Ruby
Lily van der Stokker, installation view of "Terrible and Ugly," 2010. Courtesy Leo Koenig Inc. New York.
In her recent exhibition at Leo Koenig, Lily van der Stokker created cartoonlike murals and drawings with fluorescent colors, bulbous shapes, and short, catchy texts. With images of flowers, clouds, and assorted handmade furniture (motifs she has mulled over since the early ‘90s), her work is meant to examine the notion of femininity. For van der Stokker, femaleness within contemporary art has been historically trapped behind the nice, the decorative and the pretty.
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Wednesday December 8th, 2010
Filed under Fall 2010, Reviews
by Taylor Ruby
Interested in the link that man has produced between nature and technology, Roxy Paine is known for creating robotic-looking stainless steel trees along with faux fields of poppies and wild mushrooms. Often placing his life-size sculptures of plant and biological life in environments they would likely inhabit (Central Park for instance), he asks his viewers to question the assault of mechanized reality on the natural world.
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