“People of the Otherworld: Ken Kiff in Dialogue” Albertz Benda, New York, July 13 to August 11, 2023
(gallery website photo by Adam Reich)
Tag: Painting
Michela Martello, in “The Divine, The Passion, and the Magic”
Visitor Center, Newburgh, New York, June 24 to August 19, 2023
I was given a tour of the Visitor Center by the director Eva Zanardi, an eloquent advocate of the Center. It was a group show, but I attended to see the incredible installation by Michela Martello.
This installation is a collection of pieces she worked on during a fellowship in Taiwan, working on these divinities on large scale filter paper. The works subject and style is a riff on the local religious traditions, and feminine divinity, but worked across large sheets of luminous filter paper. The resulting light-soaked space formed by shaping the papers into a circle is at once monumental and ephemeral, spiritual and fleeting.
The effect combines a fascinating level of detail and inventiveness, which also shifts to larger architectural scale as an installation shaping the space. The enclosure and filtered light were gorgeous.
Martello is a surpremely gifted draftsman, she has a lovely sense of line and balance of detail to large gesture. The portraits of the figures receive the most careful and nuanced attention with line, with other areas rapidly worked to describe texture or pattern.
Martello is from Grosseto, Italy but now based in New York City. I became personally acquainted with her work through its representation by Pen and Brush, where she has contributed beautiful and inventive work.
Yayoi Kusama, “I Spend Each Day Embracing Flowers”
David Zwirner Gallery, New York, May 11 – Friday, July 21, 2023
Yayoi Kusama is one of Japanese Pop-Art’s leading lights, combining monumental works with a minimal, feminist, and conceptual blend of sculpture and painting. Her signature gesture is a field of dots, in the case of this show applied to monumental abstracted squash / biomorphic shapes. The effects range from bland to transcendent.
The New York Times comments on her instagram-perfect immersive scenarios:
“It’s a beautiful effect. (Or it was for me, alone in the room; you’ll be sharing the experience with up to three other visitors at a time.) But you needn’t be Dr. Freud to diagnose that the narcissism of a new selfie-devoted public has canceled, utterly, the goals of self-obliteration that Ms. Kusama intends her infinite installations to achieve. The self cannot dissolve when the selfie is the goal.”
“Bodies, Bodies, Bodies: Raffish Vulnerability and Profane Ambivalence”
Pen + Brush, New York, June 15 to August 26 2023
“‘Bodies’ represents the authentic and earnest ways in which these artists buck convention so thoroughly that the final product appears unabashed, even crude. The body is literally what binds us, yet here, and contemporarily, it also separates us as we inevitably react to this public and radical display. This show forces viewers to reckon with their own perspectives, values, boundaries, and biases” -Curator Parker Daley Garcia.
Inka Essenhigh
Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY April 27 to June 3 2023
Louise Bourgeois: An Unfolding Portrait
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Sep 24, 2017–Jan 28, 2018
Raymond Pettibon: Th Explosiyv Shoyrt T
David Zwirner: New York. April 29—June 24, 2017
Ai Wei Wei: According to What
Perez Art Museum, Miami, Dec 4 2013 to March 16 2014
Martin Wickström: Perfume River
Mike Weiss Gallery, New York, April 10, 2014 – May 10, 2014
Ross Bleckner
Mary Boone Gallery March 8 to 26 April 2014
Current paintings by Ross Bleckner at the Mary Boone Gallery.
Christopher Wool
Guggenheim, New York Oct 25 to January 22 2014
Ink Art: Past as Present in Contemporary China
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Dec 11 2013 to April 6, 2014
Eric Fischl “Portraits”
Mary Boone Gallery, New York. Feb to March 17, 2012
Damien Hirst: The Complete Spot Paintings
Gagosian Gallery, New York, January 12–February 18, 2012
