Museum of Modern Art, New York, Sep 14, 2015–Feb 7, 2016
Picasso Sculpture
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Piero Gilardi “Tappeto-Natura”
Magazzino Italian Art, Cold Spring, May 7, 2022–January 9, 2023
Robert Ryman: 1961-1964
David Zwirner, New York, November 9, 2023—February 3, 2024
Robert Ryman (May 30, 1930 – February 8, 2019) was an American conceptual artist closely identified with the high modernist Minimalist mode of painting in the 1960’s. Interestingly he did not attend an art school or program of art studies at a university. Instead, his visual interests began when he worked as a security guard at MoMA, befriending fellow employees Sol Lewitt and Dan Flavin.
From the David Zwirner exhibition text:
Ryman gained initial recognition for the work he made in the late 1960s and early 1970s. As a result, his paintings created prior to this period remain less well known to this day. Yet it was during the early 1960s that Ryman began to firmly establish the broad parameters of his radical and inventive practice. His paintings from these years reflect how, even at this early point, Ryman was already looking to interrogate and reinterpret the fundamental precepts of painting by experimenting with different supports and materials; deconstructing the relationship between frame and wall; and more broadly, investigating the visual, material, and experiential qualities that define the conditions in which a work of art is encountered. It was also at this time that the artist settled on the square as the primary format for his art and began experimenting with scale, a consequence, in part, of his move around 1961 to a studio space that afforded him the ability to work in larger formats.
David Zwirner Gallery
John Hoyland: “Thresholds, Paintings 1965-1970”
Hales Gallery, New York, 1 December 2023 – 20 January 2024
A post-war abstract painter, Hoyland explored from London a parallel course to his contemporary New York painters in the abstract expressionist movement. This show at Hales Gallery highlights his investigation in acrylics, with layering, staining and other inventive mark-making.
From the Hales exhibition:
-Hales exhibition catalogue
Hoyland (b.1934 Sheffield, UK – d.2011 London, UK) was one of the most inventive and dynamic abstract painters of the post-war period. Over the span of more than a half-century his art and attitudes constantly evolved. A distinctive artistic personality emerged, concerned with color, painterly drama, with both excess and control, with grandeur and above all, with the vehement communication of feeling.
Anish Kapoor
Lisson Gallery, New York, New York, November 2 – December 16, 2023
Okay let’s get to the paintings first, because… they are so, so BAD. Poorly drawn, acid combinations of colors that frankly would probably not be exhibited without considering the artist’s established reputation as a sculptor. Many painters and sculptors that cross over into the other’s discipline fail to make powerful works in the alternative medium and that’s okay, they can be interesting failures. And every once in a while, an artist can pull it off (Sara Sze comes to mind since she was recently exhibited in this very room).
On a brighter note the sculptures are intriguing as objects. This is the first exhibit of Anish Kapoor’s trademark gimmick, the Vanta Black pigment that approximates absolute black. The spatial effect of light dying into a form is quite interesting. One work is a rough pile of the stuff heaped on the floor, and the mounds of form and contour can only be seen as silhouette. As you walk around the piece you see that it must have misshapen lumps here and there but they can only see them as a perimeter outline – the light does not reflect back to allow you to perceive any other spatial depth looking into the form itself.
The effect works almost as well in the other pieces, which are simpler form and have different formal interests in absorbing the ambient light. They are interesting, but seemingly one liners and these pieces might not be anywhere near the heights of great art. I can’t imagine, for instance, the idea of their having an influence on another generation of artists. They feel like a dead end.
Such is the power of these miserable paintings that they affect my evaluation of the more familiar sculptures presented here – maybe this is unfair but it’s hard to swim hanging on to an anchor. I try to only review exhibits that I like, and so why include this one? As I said the Vanta Black creates an interesting object, and it’s worth considering. There is perhaps a difference between an interesting object and a worthy work of art, and if it weren’t for the paintings I would consider that.
Anish Kapoor was born in 1954 in Mumbai, India, and works in London and Venice. He currently is exhibiting the show “Untrue Unreal” in the Palazzo Strozzi, in Florence.