Posts tagged "gallery beat"
Elements of Art
Cézanne’s Wine Bottles Part 3 In the third version of Cézanne’s “The Card Players” series, the one now on view at the Musée d’Orsay, human figures enter the world that formerly belonged solely to the inanimate objects of drinking and eating. But in this version of genre painting, Cézanne once again gives primacy to the...
Enraptured by Nature: William Christine: New Paintings
William Christine’s paintings may not flirt with the cutting edge, but his landscapes at Prince Street Gallery impress for their sturdy pursuit of nature’s exuberance. Despite their brisk, brushy attack, simplified forms and vivid hues, his two dozen oil paintings and watercolors suggest an expressionism freed from any sort of indulgence, as if the artist...
Solo Exhibitions
A series of Hugh Bell photographs, now on display at the Soho Photo Gallery, shows us great jazz musicians caught in moments of silence. Billie Holiday stands in her dressing room, squinting and holding a cigarette. Charlie Parker holds onto his saxophone and looks mournfully into the distance. These are intimate moments. The musicians here...
Matt Keegan: I Apple NY
A collection of photographs, sculptures and printed texts, Matt Keegan’s composite vision of New York City captures the gaudy and the gritty, the mundane and the maniacal, and the everyday moments that inundate us. Like everything else in the city, Keegan builds on what came before, inviting collaboration and openly riffing on influences. A fawning...
Living in Havana
Few countries arouse as much curiosity as Cuba. Its politics, music, dance, countryside and poverty conspire to make it especially intriguing, especially to Americans who have long been prevented from visiting legally. Seeing the work of Cuban artists who live in Havana provides a fascinating window into life there, especially since those in this exhibit...
Hunter Reynolds: Survival AIDS
Americans are famous—and derided—for not knowing their history. Hunter Reynolds counters this dangerous deficiency with a profound and wrenching series that commemorates a particularly heinous period in our recent past. Living with HIV/AIDS since 1984 and an early member of ACT UP, he has long fought the prejudices and misconceptions surrounding the disease, both as...
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...
Sweet Toof: Dark Horse
Why so long in the tooth? After losing 10 friends “in a series of freak accidents,” a Danse Macabre sensibility has gripped London-based, veteran graffiti writer Sweet Toof. In Dark Horse, his first solo show in the U.S., Sweet Toof invades Bushwick’s Factory Fresh Gallery with his iconic swollen gums and pearly whites.
Video: Popular Outsiders at ADAA Art Fair
The question, “What does it mean?” replaced the older, “What does it look like?” when the modern age took hold. Three galleries at the ADAA (Art Dealers Association of America) art fair, featured artists who managed to balance the era’s cutting edge theory with their own very personal imagery. Richard Diebenkorn, seen at Greenberg Van...
Soile Yli-Mäyry
Though she comes from a small Finnish village, Soile Yli-Mäyry has conquered the world with her dazzling and soulful paintings, winning collectors and fans throughout Asia, South America, the Middle East, Europe and the United States. She brings together Symbolism, Expressionism and Surrealism in a heady and entrancing mix, her works bursting with color, emotion...
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...
Paul Gabrielli: Generally
At first glance, the sculptures in Paul Gabrielli’s Generally appear as readymades, grouped together by functionality and a common theme. On closer inspection, however, deconstructed ideas of ideal objects appear. In his second show at Invisible-Exports, pedestrian objets trouvés are paired in three-dimensional investigations of functionality and perception.
Jackson Pollock: Drawings on Paper, Canvas and Sculpture
The most celebrated artists are usually preceded by their auras. Before entering a room of Van Goghs, we anticipate the air of a soulful loner; with Picasso, we expect a nose-thumbing, adolescent genius. With Jackson Pollock, we expect an impression of fierce and fearless self-discovery—and more than for most artists, the evidence of global shifts:...
Meg Hitchcock: Obsession: The Book of Revelation from the Koran
“And thank you to God, for making me an atheist!” I got a lot of satisfaction out of Ricky Gervais’ closing statement at the Golden Globes: something about the ambiguity of inheriting a tradition in which one is clearly an outsider, epitomizing itself in a statement of humor. I got a similar charge out of...
With Shows Like These, Who Needs Blockbusters?
MoMA and the Met highlight rarely explored aspects of two modern titans Right now New York is being graced with a pair of small—though monumental—interrelated exhibitions that spotlight rarely explored aspects of two of the giants of Modernism. The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Cézanne’s Card Players and the Museum of Modern Art’s Picasso: Guitars 1912-1914...
José Manuel Ciria: The Execution of the Soul
Huge congratulations to the Stux Gallery for this impressive exhibit of the remarkable Spanish painter José Manuel Ciria, who has been shown far too rarely in the United States. One of the great artists of our time, he has been avidly collected by individuals and museums in Europe, Canada and Latin America for over 20...
Relief: Drawing in Depth
Sometimes a single exhibition can inspire an entire enterprise. Such is the case with Natalie Charkow Hollander’s memorable installation of relief sculptures at Lohin Geduld Gallery in 2004. These sculptures, which transposed scenes from master paintings into carved stone, moved Cynthia Harmon, Jock Ireland and Jolie Stahl to try their own hands in more pliant...
…OUT OF HERE: The Veterans Project
Krzysztof Wodiczko has always been concerned with vulnerable groups; his work has fought for the homeless, for immigrants and—as now—for war veterans. In his current show at Galerie Lelong, however, the conceptual and political rigor that gave his previous activism its strength is strangely missing.
Alice Maher: Godchildren of Enantios
The Irish artist Alice Maher plunges us into a mythic world, populated with fanciful and grotesque characters, as engrossing as Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights.” In her recent videos—“film drawings,” as she calls them—sculptures and prints, she shows herself to be as talented at telling stories as at making art, imagining ambiguous metaphoric scenes where...
Concrete Improvisations: Collages and Sculptures by Esteban Vicente
Esteban Vicente (1903-2001) was the only Spaniard among the Abstract-Expressionists, and he was among the very few of them to devote considerable time to collage. His relative lack of recognition can be attributed to the fact that he started showing in New York a few years after de Kooning and Pollock—and perhaps, too, to the...
