Grand Central Terminal, LIRR platforms, New York, NY
Kiki Smith: “The Presence” 2022
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Richard Serra: Running Arcs (For John Cage)
Gagosian, New York, September 12 to December 20 2025.
At Gagosian’s West 21st Street space, Running Arcs (For John Cage) returned to public view after more than three decades, its first presentation in the United States. The three monumental, conical steel plates are arranged in a staggered rhythm that bends the room into corridors of weight. Each plate is roughly 52 feet long, 13 feet high, and 2 inches thick. The title nods to Serra’s friendship with Cage and to the way the piece scores movement, tempo, and chance as you pass along its curve. (Gagosian)
The plates do not tower for effect. They lean in and run, turning peripheral vision into an event and making the floor feel like a material in the piece. It is Serra at his most austere. And most cinematic. (Gagosian)
Richard Serra (1938–2024) reshaped late 20th-century sculpture with site-scaled steel works that use mass, balance, and procession to produce experience. Trained in painting before moving to industrial materials, he developed a vocabulary of rolled or forged steel plates and torqued forms, along with a major body of drawings. His long relationship with Gagosian includes landmark installations across the gallery’s New York spaces. (Gagosian)
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.
Rei Kawakubo / Comme de Garçons “The Art of the In-Between”
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, May 4 to September 4 2017
This show was a total departure from the Met’s usual costume exhibits. it felt less like a fashion retrospective and more like a trip to a high-concept laboratory on another planet.
She show was a shock to the system. No chronological timelines and, most strikingly, no glass barriers and zero wall text to explain what I was looking at. Instead, the space was a stark, fluorescent-lit landscape of white geometric “pods” (circles, squares, and cylinders) that housed Kawakubo’s radical silhouettes. The clothes themselves are defiant; they ignore the human body entirely, adding “lumps and bumps” in places nature never intended (the 1997 Body Meets Dress, Dress Meets Body collection is even more jarring in person). Because there were no labels to lean on, I found myself looking at the volume of the red nylon and the architecture of the shredded lace rather than thinking about “fashion.” The “In-Between” refers to the space between clothes and art, subject and object. Kawakubo designs for ideas that just happen to be worn by people.
2026 Retrospective Note:
Looking back, this 2017 show was the moment the “Met Gala” era truly collided with high-concept avant-garde art. It remains one of the few times a living designer has been given that kind of space at the Met, and it’s clear why.