Acquavella Gallery, New York, November 7 – December 13, 2024
Tag: Contemporary Art
Cecily Brown
Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, October 15 – December 12, 2020
Kiki Smith: “The Presence” 2022
Grand Central Terminal, LIRR platforms, New York, NY
Christina Ramberg: A Retrospective
Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago Illinois, Apr 20–Aug 11, 2024
Whitney Biennial 2024
“Even Better Than the Real Thing”
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York, March 20 – August 11, 2024
Threaded Visions: Contemporary Weavings from the Collection
Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, Feb 24–Aug 26, 2024
Tammie Rubin: Points of Origin
C24 Gallery, New York, New York, January 11 – 8 March 2024
From C24’s Exhibition Description:
Rubin’s conical sculptures reference hoods, headdresses, and helmets, and manifest power, awe, anonymity, horror, and magical thinking. The sculptures have a wide range of references from Catholic capirote hats, Ku Klux Klan hoods, and West African & Aboriginal headdresses, to dunce caps and medieval helmets. Suspended somewhere between familiarity and uncertainty, these sculptures capture the duality that is at the heart of Black life in the United States.
-C24 Gallery
Barkley Hendrix: Portraits at the Frick
Frick Museum at the Breuer Whitney, New York.
Gary Hume
Matthew Marks Gallery, New York, New York November 10 to December 22, 2023
These new works are signature Gary Hume: slick, flat, and glossy. He explores his languid forms with household alkyd paint, leaning, in this case, toward abstraction. The shapes are seemingly unchallenging and easy to digest — is this the visual equivalent of Nickelback? — although the color palette has some interesting dissonance. The motif of swans heads is scattered through the paintings, but they are abstracted and non-specific in their storytelling.
The housepaint used is interesting as some of the early work that established his reputation is starting to effloresce, as house paint alkyd contains different sets of acids than fine arts paints. The substrate is aluminum, which Hume has found balances the need for a visually perfectly flat surface with lightness, strength, and stability.
The questions on this work revolve around the level of seriousness. Is this work glib? Is it overly stylized? Does it have a narrative tension? Not sure that this is much more than law firm conference room art.
Hume (England, 1962) works in both London and the Catskills, New York, although recently put the Catskills studio up on the market.
Pipolitti Rist: Prickling Goosebumps and Humming Horizon
Luhring Augustin, New York, Nov. 18 2023 to Feb 3 2024
Hauser and Wirth, New York., Nov 9 2023 to January 8 2024.
Georg Baselitz: “The Painter in his Bed”
Gagosian, New York, November 9–December 22, 2023
Georg Baselitz (born Hans-Georg Kern, 1938) is a German painter and sculptor, commonly known for painting his subjects upside down. He took this approach as a pivot in his career in 1969, with a show of inverted portraits that soon became his signature gesture.
This exhibit is series of neo-expressionist paintings, paired subjects of figures in a bed and inverted deer stags.
The compelling works featured in The Painter in His Bed focus on two motifs: figures in bed and the stag. Defining human and animal anatomy with raw expression, Baselitz negotiates apperception of these subjects through his distinctive painterly approach. Vigorously applying layers of paint, he affixes stretched nylon stockings and sheets of gauze across the upper parts of the paintings or makes monoprinted impressions of their shapes. With these additions, Baselitz extends the innovation of Springtime, his 2021 exhibition in the same space in New York. Dedicated to the spirited provocations of Hannah Höch, Kurt Schwitters, and other Dadaists, the works in Springtime draw upon these artists’ irreverent introduction of everyday materials into the realm of art. Whereas many of the Springtime paintings are exuberantly colored, the new works are dominated by elemental contrasts of black and white.
Gagosian Gallery
Diana Al-Hadid: “Women, Bronze, and Dangerous Things
Kasmin Gallery, New York, November 2 – December 22, 2023
Al-Hadid is a Brooklyn based artist. Born in Aleppo, Syria, Diana Al-Hadid emigrated to the United States when she was five years old, growing up in Ohio. There she received a BA at Kent State and then went on to earn an MFA at Virginia Commonwealth University.
The exhibition work spans a number of media, including rigid board, styrene, bronze, and wax. Commenting on the mythological content of the subject matter, the gallery writes:
“Across Al-Hadid’s use of motifs in this exhibition—which includes figures from Greek mythology alongside protagonists in Islamic and Christian narratives—the artist’s contemporary interpretations intuitively navigate different attempts of reading the future through our past. Constructions in nature such as mountains and caves reappear as emblematic elements of landscape tied to the social, psychological, and religious narratives that have been absorbed into dominant culture over the centuries. Indifferent to where these narratives find their origin in theology, Al-Hadid’s method of retrieving stories both communicate with history and imagine them anew. At once prophetic and autobiographical, Al-Hadid’s sensitive installation across two sites of the gallery’s architecture articulates a realm that manifests, both physically and metaphorically, above ground and below.”
“Slip Tease” at Kasmin Gallery
Kasmin Gallery, New York, October 26 – December 22, 2023
Shawanda Corbett, Francesca DiMattio, Sharif Farrag, Paz G, Karin Gulbran, Marie Herwald Hermann, Elliott Hundley, Julia Isidrez, Clementine Keith-Roach, Se Oh, Brian Rochefort, Jennifer Rochlin, Anders Herwald Ruhwald, Adam Silverman, Krzysztof Strzelecki, and Elif Uras.
Tadaaki Kuwayama: 1932-2023.
Marlborough Gallery, New York, Nov 9 2023 to January 13 2024.
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.
Ed Ruscha: “Now Then”
Museum of Modern Art, New York, Oct 1 2023 to January 13 2024
A mammoth multimedia retrospective of fellow Oklahoman Ed Ruscha’s artistic output, this exhibition spans six decades across his career. The show emphasizes the unique combination of abstraction and pop imagery in his art. Ruscha is known for his bold text across images, and features these images around aspects of the American West.
Ruscha’s career has also proved influential, as his unique combination of text and images continues to resonate with other artists.
Bridget Riley Drawings: From the Artist’s Studio
Morgan Library, New York, June 23 through October 8, 2023.
I have never really considered that preparatory drawings might be an important part of Bridget Riley’s workflow, but this exhibit at the Morgan proves it. The works are all donated for the show by the artist herself, from her personal collection.
Riley is one of the most accomplished abstract artists of the period, and live in a middle range between Op Art and Minimalism. Seeing the discipline of these small sketches as generators of the larger finished ideas is a revelation.
The exhibition introduction notes that this is the first show of Riley’s drawings in fifty years.
Drawing is having an eye at the end of a pencil
-Riley
