Galleries/Gallery Beat
Animal Kingdom
Anne Arnold Humanizes the Wild The sculptures of Anne Arnold, on display at Alexandre Gallery, are so masterful—so pointed and witty, economically configured and nuanced—that you can’t help but wonder: Why has it been 24 years since this artist was last graced with a solo exhibition? Read the accompanying catalogue Anne Arnold: Sculpture from Four...
Colors That Speak
From Classics to Lloyd Martin Michael Rosenfeld Gallery’s busy and exuberant installation of works on paper (…On Paper) reflects the sheer diversity of American art in the 1940s through ’70s. The three dozen drawings, collages, mixed media works and paintings on paper cover a lot of ground—everything from Gaston Lachaise’s breezy line drawing of a...
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Tennessee’s Quiet Storm
Transforming the Classic ‘Streetcar’ Nicole Ari Parker has a triumph in A Streetcar Named Desire that our mainstream media and the cli-quish Tony Awards are ill-equipped to handle. Parker’s ravishing, statuesque presence and intelligent skill make the play what it always ought to have been: a genuine contest between America’s sexual and political hypocrisies; social...
Trompe Liu
Capturing Artists in the Midst Liu Bolin, the “invisible man,” uses photography to turn himself into a ghost. Liu’s“Lost in the City” series shows the artist blending perfectly into cityscapes in his native China; another series shows Liu Lost in New York. He’s recently gone in a new direction with his “Lost in Fashion” series,...
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...
Aluminum Origami
David Rodriguez Caballero Sculpts Nature There is something unbelievably tender about the aluminum in David Rodriguez Caballero’s sculptures, on display for just a few more days at the Marlborough Gallery in Chelsea. The Spain-born artist sands down the metal to give it a soft, flat shine and then folds it like big pieces of origami...
Prints Afloat at Pier Show
Asian Woodblock Wonders The well-known Japanese school of art called ukiyo-e, or “floating world” in English, is one theme of TOJ Gallery’s exhibit of woodblock printing at this weekend’s Spring Pier Show. The exhibit will feature works by western artists who floated between two worlds themselves, living and/or working in Asia during the first half...
Keys to the Pier Show
Typing Words with Friends This year’s Spring Pier Show, taking place March 17th and 18th from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. at Pier 94, will offer a flavor of vintage that writers might find particularly palatable: a “type-in” featuring authentic manual typewriters from the 1950s. Kasbah Mod Vintage Typewriters, the company that will exhibit and...
Burlesquing Media
Mel Ramos’ sexy variations It is when a cigar is not just a cigar that it is really fun. Mel Ramos understood that from the get-go. The playful, bawdy, brash retrospective selection at Bernarducci Meisel Gallery testifies to the gamesmanship that has made Ramos—and pop art, for all its flaws—so popular. In material and cultural...
Tribute to Dynamism
Appreciating the ageless sculptures of John Chamberlain (1927-2011) John Chamberlain’s sculptures of crushed automobile metal are as immediately iconic as Hokusai’s wave. Careful to explain that the material he used was not found but chosen, Chamberlain conceived sculpture as groups of semi-chaotic modules that could be coaxed to fit, and the result seemed the most...
Singular Journeys: Rosenthal’s transcendental landscapes
With her current show at Bowery Gallery, Deborah Rosenthal continues to infuse a highly personal approach with intimations of the mythic. Stylistically, the artist’s abstracted paintings have always recalled for me Robert Delaunay in their melodic, organic overlapping of planes of vivid color. (As a fellow Bowery Gallery artist, I’ve had the opportunity of observing...
Spotland
Journey through Hirst’s dotty past Damien Hirst is tapping into a simple fact: We all like smooth surfaces and bright colors. Since 1986, the bad boy British artist, notorious for his installations of floating animals in cases of formaldehyde, has produced about 1,500 spot paintings, white canvases covered in colorful circles. (He has an army...
Mechanical Garden
Pollack’s error makes art Carrie Pollack is a poet of impermanence. Her subject is memory and the visual echoes that surround us everywhere. On daily walks with her camera, she records deteriorating poster debris, the sky at a particular moment—the usual stuff to which we ordinarily pay little attention—then subjects the imagery to computer processing...
Traditions of Newness
Gordon Moore put in context Where would postmodernism be without paradoxes of context? After all, even works as dissimilar as Jasper Johns’ flag and Jeff Koons’ chrome bunny both recontextualize the familiar to challenge our perceptions of them. At Betty Cuningham, Gordon Moore’s exhibition of abstracted paintings and photo-emulsion drawings poses similar questions about processes...
Lovely Challenges
Buchwald and Lenaghan go for clarity The paintings of Howard Buchwald, on display at Nancy Hoffman Gallery, are as much a call to arms as an exhibition of art. Listen to Buchwald tell it: “Painting is not in the service of some purpose, objective, image or idea residing outside, prior to and independent of the...
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...
Art Crawl 2012 Kicks Off Feb. 4
This Saturday, Feb. 4, join ARTLOG for the first Art Crawl of 2012. Beginning at 3 p.m. at The New Museum, 235 Bowery, the fifth annual event (presented in partnership with Thrillist, The New Museum, Columbia University Alumni and The Appraisers Association) will celebrate the Lower East Side’s leading galleries from 3–7 p.m., concluding with...
Pay Dirt and Pigment: Theresa Byrnes mines the human condition
In her manifesto for Dust to Dust, Lower East Side artist Theresa Byrnes states: “I am not afraid to get dirty, I am not afraid of the cold—I have a high discomfort tolerance, I am not afraid of the rare disorder of the nervous system I have (Friedreich’s Ataxia). Because of FA I ride a...
Two Masters
Turning on to Leaf and Dickinson The Whitney Museum is honoring Sherrie Levine, an artist who helped usher in postmodernism—as if New Yorkers needed another reminder of that movement’s deadening intellectual certainties. Better the arbiter of American art should dedicate its institutional clout to June Leaf, a veteran painter and sculptor whose prodigious oeuvre needs...
Lawton’s Curve Ball
Artist Reflects on City Visions “Curved Reality” is an exhibition of paintings by New York artist Pamela Lawton. It is an unusual show of New York City vistas that takes the urban architecture culture of New York and creates a painterly visual experience. Lawton’s work uses form and color to depict a reality that is...
Machiel Botman’s Mysteries: Depth and Beauty in Monochrome
The Dutch photographer Machiel Botman has a distinctly personal vision, choosing subjects for his exquisite black-and-white photographs that touch him emotionally. Superficially, it’s impossible to discern a unifying theme or figure out what drew him to the scenes or people he commemorates. Each image resembles a self-contained theatrical event, with its own distinctive drama and...
