Author Archive
Keep on Truckin’
Jade Townsend’s “Beastly” Installation Jade Townsend’s new body of work, entitled “Leviathan,” is a challenging show to get one’s arms around. Upon entering the Lesley Heller Workspace on lower Orchard Street, the viewer is faced with two choices: Option one, to the right is the lower half of a human mannequin with a giant red...
Noir Universe
Alex Prager paints pulp fiction If you like your art and cinema on the pulp side, I highly recommend you cakewalk over to Yancey Richardson Gallery to see the latest Technicolor noir dreams of Alex Prager. This exhibition marks the debut of her newest film, La Petite Mort, and an accompanying exhibition of photographs entitled...
A Deluxe Act
Gallagher connects the dots at MoMA Museum exhibitions curated by artists are always an interesting journey into the artist’s brain. Sometimes we find out things we really didn’t want to know, like a hidden passion for paintings of big-eyed children or a love of the color beige. Sometimes, however, we get to peer deeply into...
Post-Colonial Pictures: Modernist Indian painting liberates the Rubin
I love the Rubin Museum of Art, a jewel of a museum housed in the old Barney’s store on Seventh Avenue. However, since its opening in 2004, the museum has struggled with how to be more than just a historical institution. There have been a few forays into the contemporary art world, all tied to...
From Id to Paper: Dubuffet intros art brut
The year starts off with quite a bang at Ricco/Maresca Gallery. The current exhibition, Dubuffet and the Art Brut, is a museum-quality exploration of Jean Dubuffet, as well as the circle of artists that he admired and in some cases collected. Undoubtedly these had a profound effect on Dubuffet’s own artistic development. The connections made...
Broad-Brimmed Art: Bob Thompson revived
Painter Bob Thompson (1937–1966) straddled several artistic worlds. From Old-Master Europe, to hipster 1950s Provincetown, to the Beat poetry and bebop jazz scene of New York City, he was there, absorbing all that he could of these seemingly disparate universes. His artistic mentors and friends ranged from Red Grooms and Lester Johnson to LeRoi Jones...
Secrets and Art: Neo Rauch’s Narrative Enigmas
I have long been fascinated by the work of the German artist Neo Rauch. From his strange, strained color palette to the scenes of modern dislocation that spill forth from his mind, he is consistently one of the most interesting contemporary painters in Europe or the U.S. His current show at David Zwirner Gallery shows...
Rauschenberg’s Delights
An artist shows off his collection One of the most fun things an art lover can experience is a glimpse into the private collection of a beloved artist. The current exhibition at Gagosian uptown featuring Robert Rauschenberg’s private collection leaves one giddy with delight and reeling from the sheer volume and quality of collected work....
In Stitches: Lubelski weaves and shocks
Having seen Nava Lubelski’s last show several years ago at LMAK Projects, I was interested to see what the intrepid stitching artist was up to this time around. Her current exhibition, descriptively titled Roomful, is, in fact, a roomful of her work! Using both hand and machine sewing techniques, Lubelski roams the artistic map—one piece...
Traveling Light
Curious Matter, an eccentric and rarified little gallery, is home to some of the most intellectually rigorous shows in the area.
Out of the Past: Peter Sekaer’s signs trace history at ICP
The stunning new exhibition at The International Center of Photography forces you to slow down, ignore the hustle of the city outside, take a deep breath and dive into a world long gone. Signs of Life: Photographs by Peter Sekaer presents the Danish-born photographer’s now obscure work chronicling America under the New Deal, portraying a...
Portraits of Time and Place
Lisette Model showing in Chelsea There are few galleries in New York City that approach their mission as thoughtfully as Bruce Silverstein Gallery. Silverstein’s exhibitions are curated with consistent care and intellectual rigor. The current show, Self-Reflections: The Expressionist Origins of Lisette Model, is a stunning examination of the relationship between Model and the German...
A Tree Grows in Manhattan
Landscape architecture brings majesty, rebirth to 9/11 memorial site “We’re sometimes dismissed as the guys who put the trees in,” says David Walker about his firm’s seminal role in the design of the 9/11 memorial site. The 50-year-old Walker, who co-led the project for Peter Walker & Partners, his father’s renowned landscape architecture firm, is...
Chris Marker: Passengers
While viewing the gigantic exhibition of photographs by Chris Marker at the Peter Blum Gallery, I was struck by one question: How much of a role should context play in understanding and appreciating an artist’s work? To explain, Marker is a legendary figure in cinema history, having made the movie La Jetée, from which countless...
Frederick Sommer: Choice and chance structure art and nature
“Where a thing is, is more important than what it is.” This undated quote by the artist Frederick Sommer sums up neatly his lifelong aesthetic. A man of restless artistic energies and profound curiosity, Sommer roamed the artistic landscape working in photography, drawing and collage throughout the middle and latter half of the century, until...
John Clement: Oiler
Bigger really is better. This was my thought as I left the Causey Contemporary Gallery after watching John Clement and crew erect an 18-foot-tall welded steel sculpture titled Oiler. Clement, already well known for his large and ambitious sculpture, became smitten with the idea of building one of his pieces using industrial-sized pipe originally manufactured...
