Category: Culture

Thomas Erben Gallery, installation view of the work of Jutta Koehter (reflected in the mylar screen and in detail on the right is Falling . . . Waters from 1995

I’ve been fascinated with Jutta Koether for years. I knew nothing about her earlier reputation in Germany, so I have to believe it’s Pat Hearn‘s fault. I revered her artist choices even when I didn’t understand them, and during the 90’s she gave Koether, then a New Yorker, six solo shows in about as many years.
Thomas Erben has assembled something of a New York retrospective (1990’s to the present) of an extraordinarily colorful creative artist who is at home in many disciplines considerably removed from the dramatic paintings included in the exhibition on West 20th Street, and the gallery has donned a party dress for the occasion.


Thomas Erben Gallery, view of gallery entrance and installation of the work of Jutta Koether (in large detail on the right is Das Wunder from 1990)

For a straight view of more current work, here is an image from the gallery website:


Jutta Koether Coronal Holes and the Sunny Eyes of Women 1999 oil on canvas 72″ x 52″ (inscription: “Trompe L’aime”)

[image at the bottom from Thomas Erben]

Anthony Goicolea Fleeing 2005 acrylic, ink, graphite and collage on Mylar 85″ x 75″ installation view

It’s not just the (always amusing, sometimes enigmatic) manipulated, multiple-self-modelled large-scale photographs any more. Anthony Goicolea is also now working with complex layered drawings, sometimes almost monumental in both their size and imagery, and with large-scale video installation.
The photograph-based work continues, with still more complex manipulations, but everywhere the simple amusement quotient has been suppressed a bit, and the work has grown immensely as a consequence.
It was a relatively quiet afternoon in Chelsea today but the benches in the little rustic barn Goicolea had erected in the back room of the Postmasters gallery space was full, with a crowd (mostly very young) waiting or peering in from outside. Methinks the artist is on to something here.
The show is called, “sheltered Life.” From the gallery press release:

The sense of foreboding tinged with playful fantasy characteristic of many of the photographs is mimicked in a suite of complex figurative drawings on mylar. Androgynous figures of indeterminate age float on top of and through each other in a layered composition separated by planes of semi-opaque vellum paper. The ghostlike figures are caught in free-floating, awkward, transitional states: sometimes their images are doubled; sometimes they seem like as much animal as human. As the figures migrate through the forest in small packs, they fade in and out of each other in a series of tentative lines that read like traces of previous drawings and refer to memory and transition.
A large white barn occupies the second room gallery and acts as a shelter within a shelter while housing a 15 minute single channel video entitled “Kidnap”. The video recounts the tale of a young boy’s obsession and paranoia of being kidnapped. Shot in the Swiss countryside, several characters dressed in red-hooded uniforms engage in a series of clandestine rituals that unfold in a fairytale-like sequence.

Anthony Goicolea Kidnap 2004-2005 video installation, 17 minute DVD

installation view of two Chris martin paintings at Moore College

Roberta Fallon and Libby Rosof each wrote about Chris Martin‘s work earlier this year in their wonderful Philly Artblog. For a bit more insight into his mysteries than I gave the other day, and a few more images, see “The question” and “A painter’s question.”

[image from fallonandrosof]

I neglected to point out yesterday that the works seen in the students’ studios may or may not have been completed at the time they were seen this past weekend. My images may therefore be, in at least some cases, of works in progress. They might also be only studies, not intended to be shown out of their context. While these people are artists, at the moment they are also working as students, in rooms normally not visible to the rest of us.


Alicia Gibson (detail of painting)

Gibson is actually part of Hunter’s BFA degree program, not the MFA; she wasn’t in her darkened studio when we passed through it, so this image of one of the paintings is compromised by my camera’s flash; what I saw there was extraordinary, mature work which will not stay in the dark for long; she will be part of the college’s “Degree Show” opening this May


Chris Coronel

Coronel showed somewhat ghostly small paintings of midwestern grain elevators, beautifully executed; my favorite by far was the one shown above, but because the image is fuzzy I felt I had to make an exception to the format I’ve used otherwise in these two posts and show a second work below


Chris Coronel


Stephen Canino

incredibly dramatic use of color and form for pictorial narrative


Jennifer MacDonald

luscious small drawings and two wonderfully-bizarre short videos

I’ve run out of camera images, but I can still see in my head the good work, among that of so many others, of Becket Bowes, who seems to be at home in almost every media; the drawings and haunting desert photographs of Christina Dixcy; the humanist photo portraits, far beyond documentary, of Roberto Carlo Soto; the smart/silly sculpture and video of Scott Penkava; and the sweet/sorrow playground landscapes and jungle gym “portraits” of Lauren Orchowski. After this too-short list, testimony to a ridiculously inadequate memory, I begin to lose track altogether.

seen on the 6th floor, between WC’s marked for separate genders

Fortunately we were on foot. And at least we didn’t rush uptown on opening night, when the most of the local artworld zipped through the open studios at the Hunter College BFA degree show. We waited until the last day (okay, it was also only the second day). Actually, for all I know, these people have already all signed with New York’s most agressive galleries.
Nevertheless, I’ve uploaded below images of some of the most interesting work Barry and I found today, although their presence here is very much dependent on whether I was able to get a satisfactory picture. To be sure, there’s still much, much more left on West 41st Street.


Emily Noelle Lambert

wicked good painter, growing in leaps with every work we’ve seen


Ruslan Trusewych (tape on large vinyl surface on stretcher)

minimalist sculptor and painter, and the most common materials imaginable


Katy Krantz (large detail)

gorgeous works on paper


Dominic Nurre (view of studio)

Nurre’s genius aches to be unwound and shown: I’m thinking a project room somewhere would be appropriate – now


Zach Harris (painting and artist’s frame)

this stuff is scary brilliant, and I mean that in every sense of both words


Hope Hilton (cut-out paper installation)

beautiful, sensitive, smart and mesmerizing, although the work is difficult to photograph

I’m going to stop for tonight, and continue in another post tomorrow. If anyone is interested in seeing more of the work of any of these artists, I may have some additional images I could share, or at least be able to direct you to a website or an email address.

Chris Martin Midnight 2002-2004 oil, enamel and spray paint on plastic

I took this gorgeous image from the website of the Uta Scharf gallery, which is currently showing paintings by Chris Martin. It’s a bit smaller than what I normally like to show here, but this shot looks much better than what I could come up with using available light on my visit this afternoon. Still, I have to say that there’s no way I could try to reproduce many of Chris Martin’s other, signature works on such a small scale.
It was the larger, much larger, canvases which first jumped in front of me a number of years ago, and I haven’t been able to forget them since. Although his 1997 show at Pierogi 2000 had just closed, in the spring of that year I picked up a card at Joe Amrhein’s space whose image was that of two men carrying across a Williamsburg street an extremely large (129″ x 143″) black canvas with a few iconic straight, white, chalk-like lines. The reference was the Abbey Road LP cover, whether conscious or not, but I was certainly hooked. I had to know who this artist was, and while I did a little research, for a while I couldn’t find a live show anywhere.
In 2001 I was finally able to see what I had missed. That spring Martin had, I believe, shows in three separate venues at once, in Brooklyn and Manhattan. I think I might trade an entire salon-style wall of works by other artist if I could afford one of Martin’s big pieces. A few years ago Barry and I managed to claim a smallish canvas at a wonderful something called, I think, “The Cheap Art Show” in Williamsburg. It really was cheap, and we’ve treasured Chris’s [blacklit abstract birds] ever since.
I think he’s a brilliant and materially-spectacular artist. What you will find in the modest space on 76th Street this week is an amazingly rich and remarkably heterogenous selection of his current work, with a couple of pieces stretching toward sculpture. Unfortunately the current show at Uta Scharf closes Saturday, but I’m sure Ms. Scharf would be more than happy to pull out a few pieces from the back room if asked.
In the meantime, please forgive me for uploading so many images here; it was hard enough to stop with just five.


Chris Martin Untitled 2005 oil, acrylic and collage on canvas 43″ x 30″


Chris Martin Thirteen (For Ray Johnson) 2004 oil on corrugated plastic 26″ x 24″


Chris Martin Psilocybin 2004 oil, acrylic and collage on shirt 24″ x 18″


Chris Martin 1,2,3,4,5,6,7… (Ravine) 1987-2004 oil, aluminum foil and collage on canvas 25″ x 15″

[images from Uta Scharf]

Diana Puntar Dual Disturbances 2004 plywood, plastic aluminum laminates 47″ x 40″ x 60″ large detail of installation

But we found much more than Gae Savannah‘s newest creature extravaganza, a slightly-larger-than-life-size sculpture, “Paroxysm,” at Jack the Pelican Presents this month.
As for the at least slightly-quaint title of the show, “Culture Vulture,” the press release explains it simply:

In 1967, Carl Andre said, “Art is what we do. Culture is what is done to us.” “Culture Vulture” show explores notion that art and culture are not the same thing.
“Culture Vulture” originated in diverse sources: a sixties article in MAD Magazine on the rent-a-beatnik craze; tourists at Hopi villages, buying up all the cheap roadside jewelry like it were the last on earth and gawking at rain dances; revelers at night clubs; late night internet junkies downloading Paris Hilton. The search for culture, or its most immediate facsimile, is a search for identity. Culture is an imposition, or even a virus, that infects us with the need to fill in the blanks.

The crowds at the opening reception for this very interesting group show curated by David Gibson were almost overwhelming, so a proper look at the goodies was very difficult, and for the same reason decent pictures were almost out of the question.
I love group shows; they often open up totally new worlds to the curious. But they also present some difficulties. Aside from the occasional frustrations caused by a look at interesting work which under the circumstances can only be a tease, the problem with installations which can display only a single piece by a new artist is the difficulty the format presents for any kind of fair judgment. In this case however I can already stand by my impressions of the pieces I saw that night by Savannah, Diana Puntar, Karen Heagle, Russell Nachman, Katherine Daniels, Amie Cunningham and Emmanuelle Gauthier (list in formation). Ooops, is it unfair that I am already at least slightly familiar with the work of five of these seven artists? Or am I just demonstrating my point about the challenge of group shows?
Gotta go back, if I can, and do some sleuthing.


Karen Heagle Holly 2003-2005 oil on panel 53″ x 61″ large detail


Emmanuelle Gauthier Courtesans 1996 C-print mounted on plexiglas 30″ x 40″ large detail

Meredith Allen blue bunny #5 (blue sunset) 2000 C-print 8.5″ x 11.5″

Meredith Allen is showing her wonderfully-inspired combination of concept, color, abstraction and humor in a show of new work, “Forever,” at Sarah Bowen Gallery in Williamsburg.
From the press release:

In Forever, a series of photographs portrays the artist’s mother’s loving yet obsessive collection of beanie babies preserved in found plastic packing materials as well as clear Ziploc bags. The photographs are at first glimpse personable; however the literal and somewhat amusing presentation of beanie babies enclosed in plastic bags becomes more unnerving upon examining the logical yet perverse nature of encapsulation as a cherished act of preservation.

The image at the top of this post is obviously not part of the show, but I wanted to show it here anyway. It’s a favorite of mine. It haunted me from the first moment I saw it, I think because its sweetness didn’t hide a suggestion of mischief, vulnerability, even terror. Blue Bunny is part of an older series, “Sugar Tales.” I don’t think it’s been shown anywhere yet.
Allen’s own site, which was incidently built by Barry, includes many more really great images, both from the current show and of older work, but two of her beanie babies are shown just below.


Meredith Allen Forever (walrus) 2005 digital archival dry pigment print 11.5″ x 17.25″


Meredith Allen Forever (cockatoo) 2005 digital archival dry pigment print 11.5″ x 17.25″

[images from Meredith Allen]