Marlborough Gallery, New York, Nov 9 2023 to January 13 2024.
Tag: Painting
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
Hiba Schahbaz at Albertz Benda
“People of the Otherworld: Ken Kiff in Dialogue” Albertz Benda, New York, July 13 to August 11, 2023
(gallery website photo by Adam Reich)
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
Kim McCarty: New Work
Morgan Lehman Gallery, New York, October 26 to December 9, 2017.
Kim McCarty’s new watercolors are, as always, a masterclass in the “uncontrolled” controlled.
Her process involves working on wet paper, which gives her figures (mostly adolescents and botanical forms) this ghostly, translucent quality where the edges seem to be dissolving even as you look at them. There’s a specific kind of tension in these works; because the paint bleeds so freely, every mark feels like a gamble. In this new series, her palette remains muted. Washes of sepia, dusty rose, and bruised blues. These heighten the sense of vulnerability in her subjects. The figures aren’t just portraits; they are meditations on the instability of youth and the body. They feel less like solid things and more like memories that haven’t quite finished fading. It’s a beautiful, fragile show that reminds you how much power there is in the medium.
Louise Bourgeois: An Unfolding Portrait
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Sep 24, 2017–Jan 28, 2018
Kara Walker: The Most Astounding and Important Painting Show?
Sikkema Jenkins and Co, New York Sept 8 to Oct 21 2017
I walked into Sikkema Jenkins today expecting the usual sharp, clean edges of Kara Walker’s silhouettes, but what I found was something much more raw and chaotic.
The title of the show is a mouthful of 19th-century carnival barker bravado, but the work inside feels like a visceral rejection of the “blockbuster” expectations placed on her. Instead of paper cut-outs, the walls are covered in massive, gestural works using Sumi ink, oil stick, and collage on paper and linen. Pieces like U.S.A. Idioms and Christ’s Entry into Journalism are teeming with a kind of frantic, ink-splattered energy. Crowded scenes of protest, violence, and historical ghosts that feel like they were exorcised onto the page. There is a specific kind of “tiredness” mentioned in the press release (a fatigue with being a “role model” or a “voice”) and you can feel that weight in the brushstrokes. It’s messy, uncomfortable, and brilliant because it refuses to be polite or easily consumable. It’s like reading someone’s most private, feverish late-night sketches, only magnified to a monumental scale.
David Hockney: A Retrospective
Centre Pompidou, Paris. 21 June to 23 October 2017
The David Hockney retrospective in 2017 was a global event, but seeing it at the Pompidou—with its industrial “inside-out” architecture contrasting against Hockney’s saturated, sun-drenched canvases—was a singular experience. It was a celebration of his 80th birthday and an example of how an artist can stay relentlessly modern.
The Pools and the Portraits
The show is massive… over 160 works… and seeing the “canonical” Hockney pieces in person is a reminder of why they became icons in the first place. A Bigger Splash (1967) is much more technical than you’d think; the way he painted the water spray with tiny, deliberate brushes makes the “instant” moment feel like it took a lifetime to capture.
But it’s the double portraits that stopped me. Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy is haunting in person. There is a specific kind of stillness in those 1970s paintings, a domestic tension that is both incredibly chic and also unnerving.
The Technophile
The most surprising part of the show is the final rooms. Most artists “slow down” or get traditional as they hit their 70s and 80s. Hockney did the opposite. Seeing a wall of iPad drawings, luminous, neon-bright landscapes of Yorkshire, proves he is more obsessed with the now than artists half his age.
He’s spent sixty years asking the same question: How do we actually see the world? Whether he’s using a Polaroid camera, a fax machine, or a tablet, the answer is always the same: with total, unadulterated joy.
2026 Retrospective Note:
Reading this back, I realize that 2017 was a pivot point. We thought that was the “final” retrospective, but Hockney just kept going. He spent the pandemic in Normandy painting the arrival of spring on his iPad, and those works have since become their own chapter in art history.
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
