Category: Culture

Ligorano/Reese Memory of Truth 2006 digital print on Duratrans 96″ × 113″ [large detail of installation as seen from inside the gallery]

Where our nightmare began, five years ago.
Jim Kempner has just taken down one of the most political shows of the season, an exhibition of editions in every price range, curated by Marshall Reese. Yes, it was also art. Ligorno/Reese were also responsible for “The State of Things”, a disappearing ice sculpture which spelled the word, “democracy” . It was installed in the gallery garden last April.

Barry and I now have both post cards and a press release for our show in Williamsburg. The release includes information on each artist, even if we can’t give too much away before the opening. We’re having a great time with our first outing as curators. We hope to see some of you there on the 13th.

[the images above, details of work in the show, are arranged alphabetically by artist]

It was a wonderful block party, and I have no doubts that the show which attracted the crowd is a hoot, but I’m going to have to go back to check out Cory Arcangel’s latest magic show. Openings are usually a real challenge for anyone who actually wants to check out the art, and this one one one of the toughest I’ve seen yet. I couldn’t even get a decent photo image because of the crush.
I’ll try again later in the run of the show.
Meanwhile, the parade of SUVs emptying out of the Holland Tunnel and heading east across Grand Street in pursuit of Friday night excitement in Manhattan had to squeeze through the smart, celebratory crowd which poured out of the doors of Team’s new SoSoHo quarters and then proceded to just hang out for a few hours. There wasn’t even the attraction of drinks, alcoholic or otherwise; just good conversation, pretty people and lots of smiles. The NYPD squad cars inching by didn’t seem to know what to do about large numbers of happy people gathered together in polite society, without benefit of wheels of any description, on pavement laid a hundred years before the invention of the automobile.
I noticed that Mary Boone and gallery neighbor Jeffrey Deitch had to check out the goods inside, or maybe they just wanted to say hi. In any event I didn’t see either of them hanging out on the street on their way in or out.

A couple of crowd shots:



Closing in on Jacob and Jessica Ciocci, two thirds of Paper Rad, comfortably-ensconced on the ancient wall shelf with Noah Lyon:


And, in separate smart clutches, two of our favorite gallerists, John Thomson and Michael Gillespie:

Gerald Davis E.T. and Grandma, 1986 2006 colored pencil on paper 50″ x 38″ (each drawing in diptych) [large details of the installation’s two framed drawings – including ambient reflections]

Gerald Davis’s show at John Connelly is breathtaking for both the simple beauty of the pencil drawings and and the richly personal images they describe. The dates in the title of each work refer to their autobiographical content, although even someone who is not part of Davis’s own generation is immediately and totally drawn into his creative memory of the world which shaped the artist’s passage into adolescence.
It’s an awesome show in the most genuine sense of the word.


Gerald Davis The Rumor, 1986 2006 pencil on paper [installation view]

Christopher Reiger this now, like the beginning, again and again 2006 watercolor, gouache and marker on stretched Arches paper 25″ x 25″

I’m finding it harder and harder to leave this work alone. I regularly see Christopher Reiger‘s vibrant images in my head when I’m not in front of them, and they never look the same to me when I return to look again.
I didn’t know what to make of Reiger’s painting when I first came across it. Even the encounter itself was a little quirky, since it involved a successful online bid for a 2001 work he had generously contributed to a small benefit assembled to help a mutual friend with green card expenses. The piece is much more abstract than most of his work I’ve seen, but it seems to inform, and is informed by, all the others. It’s the first thing I look at every time I walk into the room where it’s currently propped against a window. In a large, very busy salon-hung environment of competing images, that’s just weird.
I understand from the press release for his show at AG Gallery, “Mongrel Truth”, that Reiger’s art is supposed to be bound up with our age’s generally problematic relationship to the natural world and grounded in the artist’s own youthful, very likely profound (and continuing) experience of nature in an Eden most of the people who see the paintings and drawings can barely imagine. But the art doesn’t stop there, for his painted-paper images of plants and animals are neither entirely innocent in their nature nor entirely abused by modern man’s distraction with his own constructions.
They have been redrawn by and for an anxious, creative age which can leave neither inherited nor created sciences and myths alone. I suspect neither nature itself nor these intense paintings and drawings will sit still for any of us now.


Christopher Reiger a dead silent cock 2006 watercolor, gouache, sumi ink and marker on stretched Arches paper 25″ x 25″

[images from the artist]

Alice Könitz Magazines and Stand 2006 wood, Chromolux paper, magazines 47″ x 25″ x 20″ [view of installation]

Hudson Franklin has a wonderfully-challenging (okay, it’s actually pretty baffling, and for me that’s like catnip) show of sculpture and collage by Alice Könitz.
Much of the work shown is assembled from cut paper, but what beautiful paper and what beautiful cuts! Most of the other materials used are pretty common as well, even if the installation is anything but. If we were only looking at an elegant room, it would be as sterile as such a space always is when empty of people and dreams, and this gallery is not unoccupied. There’s solid stuff underneath Könitz’s paper glitz, and it’s worth exploring.

Haeri Yoo Untitled 2006 acrylic and gouache on canvas 12″ x 12″ [installation view]

While I was in Thomas Erben‘s gallery yesterday I couldn’t help thinking about the fact that I was looking at the work of one established artist, one just beginning to be recognized and sought, and a third who has hardly been seen at all. Only while I’m writing this now do I also notice that each of these artists is a woman.
The artist who is becoming increasingly visible is Chitra Ganesh, and she deserves even more than all the goodies that have been said about her. The underknown artist is Haeri Yoo, whose small drawings Barry and I first encountered in the Queens International two years ago.
I had not seen anything of hers on canvas until yesterday, but if this very beautiful small figured “landscape” is representative of what she can do, I expect my earlier enthusiasm to me more than just renewed if she contiues to work in this medium.

Dona Nelson Untitled 2004 acrylic on canvas 69″ x 80″ [installation view]

[detail]


Dona Nelson Walnut Way 1999 charcoal on canvas 88″ x 106″ [installation view]

[detail]


Dona Nelson Gaucho Groucho 2005 acrylic and cheesecloth on canvas 88″ x 106″ [installation view]

[detail]

I think it’s a great show. I went into Thomas Erben’s gallery this afternoon pretty much ignorant of the work of Dona Nelson, although I knew enough to realize that was a lamentable admission. Nearly an hour later I left her brilliant installation, “Brain Stain“, very impressed, also thoroughly charmed, and wanting to know more.
The work could speak for itself in any environment, but I have to say something for the installation: It manages a huge success of its own, balancing the paintings in the way normally only a good museum show can, while accomodating the fortunate visitor’s access to both sides of two of her extraordinary double-sided canvases.
Five years ago Roberta Smith wrote in her review of the artist’s solo show at Cheim & Read that “Ms. Nelson is painting up a storm.” The end of her last paragraph, “. . . these works suggest that the dead horse of modernism still has plenty of kick.” could have been written for the current show.
I was told that Nelson was fully responsible for the installation herself, so perhaps I should ask her forgiveness for giving the priority of location here to the untitled red (very red) painting hanging in the project room behind the main space.
Check the gallery’s press release for more about the artist’s technique and some “performance” notes, but if you are in the New York area and you find what you see here the least bit seductive you really should visit 26th Street in person.

UPDATE: The artist who created the object has finally been identified on a label attached to the window (see the credit immediately below the image here), and it seems that the window is now the responsibility of something called Art Production Fund. Some geometric abstractionist cognescenti (I confess: not including me) will immediately notice that the title of Anthony’s piece has a history.


Anthony James New York City II 2004 [installation view]

I like it, but I have no idea who did it. This piece has been installed inside the Kantor/Feuer Window on 10th Avenue since Tuesday at least, but there’s no label and the website hasn’t been kept updated.
The box, punctured in a number of places for the passage of a number of colorful neon tubes, is constructed of a better grade of plywood and lined with a reflective material, perhaps mylar.