Author: jameswagner

Judy Glantzman Untitled 2004 oil on canvas 90″ x 80″ [installation view]


[detail]

We’ve lived with two drawings by Judy Glantzman for years, one of them quite small. We’ve also seen her small paintings over even a longer period, but until now I don’t think we’ve seen anything as monumental as the large canvases included in her current show at Betty Cunningham.
The madly-re-worked facial and body gestures work on every scale, but they’re definitely not the same on every scale. Scary wonderful is much easier to hold onto when there’s only one figure to contemplate. These ghostly crowds are of a different order altogether. They are as beautiful as the best renaisance altarpieces, and they may oddly serve a similar purpose in spite of their profaneness.


Judy Glantzman Untitled 1996 Super Sculpey 6.25″ x 8″ x 10″ [installation view]

And then there are the sculptures, which almost no one has seen until now. Perhaps its only because of their full dimensional form, but these pieces speak to something perhaps even more elemental than whatever it is that is claimed by the paintings and drawings.

Downtown at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council artist studio program the New Orleans artist Christy Speakman had installed a number of works relating to environments where materials are in transition, with or without borders. I stopped by on Sunday, the last day of an open studio weekend.
The first image above is only vaguely related to the geography of her native city, but on the top of a painted floor in her studio, which suggests sharp black and white shorelines, she has built diked islands within which cut-out photographs of land- or skyscapes are flooded with clear water.
In the second image, the two photographs mounted to a wall are unmanipulated shots, of rain puddles enriched by errant drops of oil, which Speakman captured on New York City streets.
Thirteen of the fourteen artists transplanted from the Gulf Coast and settled temporarily in LMCC studios will be together in a show at The Bronx River Art Center opening May 12.




The exception, Bernard Pearce, works as a composer and performer of experimental music rather more than in the visual arts, but I can say that his studio was one of the most interesting spaces I saw Sunday afternoon. A little later in the day I heard him performing in LMCC’s 120 Broadway workspace. If he’s been doing that at the same time the rest of them have been doing their thing, it must have been a very pleasant few months. No, it’s not Dixieland.

One of the coolest and most progressive non-profit galleries in the city will be holding its annual fund-raising auction and raffle tomorrow evening.
Saturday is Momenta Art appreciation day.
Barry and I would never miss this one. It’s a chance to be with a great bunch of people while surrounded, if ever so briefly, by some of the most interesting art to be seen anywhere right now. Then there’s the excitement of being able to actually take something home, knowing that this boon is also for the future of the art and artists we love.
Although there are never any duds at a Momenta benefit, this year the offerings are particularly fine. Dues/tickets however are still only $175 (less a 10% discount for artists). There are 110 works and 110 tickets. No one goes home empty-handed, and there’s little of the stress which is always a part of a silent-auction format.
For those who can’t do without that competition there will be a silent auction, of eight additional select works, preceding the drawing itself.
Even if you can’t make it to White Columns, where the works are now on display and where the event is being held, you can still order tickets and arrange for a proxy to make your selection from among the items in the raffle.
See Bloggy for more.

Tonight at the School for Visual Arts MFA studio event we talked to a student who had changed his mind about “painting” while working in his studio over the last [two?] years. He said that he had earlier dismissed it as irrelevant to his own experience, but now felt really good about the medium and expected it would pull together his whole life, absolutely everything he felt strongly about, and likely for – ever.
His enthusiasm was absolutely serious and totally believable.
Joe Fig doesn’t seem to have ever had any doubts about painting. He began as a representational painter himself, but years ago he developed into a “painter” of painters, beginning with the abstraction heroes. Today Fig models the studios of artists he admires regardless of their style – where the magic happens – but what he creates are less models than portraits of the hugely diversiform acts of painting themselves.
The close-ups of some of the seventeen pieces included in the current show at Plus Ultra which I have uploaded below show that Fig still knows how to wield a brush himself. His reduced-scale [all are contained in a plexi box less than twelve inches cubed] reconstructions of artist painting tables are magnificent, but Fig himself doesn’t have to yield to anyone in his understanding of color or his handling of paint.


Philip Pearlstein


Barnaby Furnas


gregory Amenoff


Karin Davie


Bill Jensen