Tyson Reeder: New Cycle

[“Screen” (2011), mixed media on birch panel. “Untitled” (2011), mixed media on canvas. “Untitled” (2011), oil on canvas. “Untitled” (2011), mixed media on canvas. “Untitled” (2011), mixed media on canvas.]

Representing a breakthrough in his “fabulist” oeuvre, a new cycle of Tyson Reeder’s paintings are up at Daniel Reich Gallery through July 15, 2011. His first solo exhibition in New York since 2006, Reeder’s confident work is fresh while—at the same time—connecting with painting’s history and iconography. So unique that they call to mind folk and outsider art, his paintings reflect the brain’s hovering fluidity.

While painting this body of work, Reeder looked at paintings by Dada- and Surrealist-associated Francis Picabia (1879–1953) in which heads superimpose with figures in delimited psychological landscapes. Known for his “portraits mécaniques”—and associated with figures from Marcel Duchamp to Gertrude Stein—the provocative Picabia is credited with introducing Modern art to the United States. Also influential to Reeder—in obvious ways—are the paintings of Jean Fautrier (1898-1964), whose singular style distanced his work from Surrealism, late Cubism, and hard-edged Abstraction. Reeder’s mixed media on a birch panel recalls Fautrier’s post-war painted panels called “Otages” (or “Hostages”). Additionally of influence to Reeder are the predominately abstract, small-scale mixed media works done by Fautrier in late career.

Additionally, Reeder admires Paul Klee (1879–1940) for the musicality and childlike perspective of his work—manifested by a somewhat “cartoonish” imagery. Klee—associated with Wasily Kandinsky and Franz Marc in “Der Blaue Reiter” (“The Blue Rider”) and with Kandinsky, Lyonel Feininger, and Alexei Jawlensky in “Die Blaue Vier” (“The Blue Four”)—was noted for his work’s Expressionism, transcendence, color vocabulary, and connection to metaphysical thought. Most admirably, 17 of Klee’s works were included in the notorious 1937 Nazi-organized exhibition of “Entartete Kunst” (“Degenerate Art“) and 102 of his works in public collections were removed by that regime.

At play in Reeder’s new cycle is an unleashed quality of the brush—seeming to free his brushstrokes from a precalculated banality. The resultant lively movement enumerates the artist’s fantastic—if contrived—world. Humor is palpable here, while one finds haunting beauty in Reeder’s choice of color and execution. One colorful portrait in this show contains a cartoon’s aura in a consciously sedate palette of aqua, yellow, pink, and white. Another of the included works—while pleasing—is obscured behind a mask and impulsive strokes of white paint. Its ocular impudence is rendered is such detail as to possess the gravity and Surrealism of one of the works of Marc Chagall (1887–1985). Reeder invokes an exotic precinct in which past and future coalesce.

Though embracing the hieroglyphic quality of Aztec and Egyptian works, Reeder’s canvases deftly borrow a muted and extremely individualized palette reminiscent of Brice Marden. In fact, the viewer may find Reeder’s cornucopia of references a bit dizzying. One may even discern a bit of the idiosyncratic, suggestive, and “Eastern influenced” canon of Henri Michaux (1899–1984) under the surface of a lone blue tree. In one work with a relic quality, musicians are illuminated by a golden sun. In another, light reflects meditatively on water. All burst with feelings and variations of mood.

Reeder’s work has shown in a number of venues such as: Jack Hanley Gallery (Los Angeles), Greener Pastures (Toronto), Black Dragon Society (Los Angeles), Angstrom Gallery (Los Angeles), Nicolai Wallner (Copenhagen), Hiromi Yoshi (Japan), Cheim and Read, the Swiss Institute, Shane Campbell Gallery, and Museum 52.

Tyson Reeder

Through July 15, 2011

@ Daniel Reich Gallery

537 West 23rd Street, NYC 10011

Donald Judd @ David Zwirner Gallery

[Various untitled works (1989), anodized aluminum clear with Plexiglass.]

When Donald Judd died in 1994, there was a no more vigorous proponent of Minimalist art in the United States—though he just as vigorously eschewed the term. Beginning his artistic practice as a painter in the late 1940s, Judd’s first solo exhibition—of expressionist paintings—opened in 1957. As he explored the woodcut medium from the mid-1950s through the early 1960s, Judd moved increasingly from figurative to abstract imagery. Starting by carving organic round shapes and shallow reliefs, he evolved ever more toward painstakingly straight lines and angles. One of the most significant American artists of the post-war period, Judd’s unaffected and straightforward oeuvre demonstrated an instinctive energy toward color, form, material, and space. Going beyond the creation of work that assumed direct material and physical presence, Judd felt no obligation toward overriding philosophical “statements.” Furthermore, Judd avoided cliché representational sculptural ideas—instead creating a rigorous visual vocabulary and seeking clear and definite objects to articulate. Five decades ago, Judd commenced to create freestanding works using such “elemental” materials as plywood, steel, concrete, Plexiglass, and aluminum. Creating declaratively simple and fundamental sculptural forms, Judd would arrange his works—often in the shape of boxes or stacks—according to repeated or sequential progressions.

This show—up at David Zwirner Gallery through June 25, 2011—presents seminal works drawn from Judd’s 1989 exhibition at the Staatliche Kunsthalle (Baden-Baden). Brought together for the first time since that event, these works have been drawn from private and public collections internationally. Spanning both of David Zwirner’s spaces at 525 and 533 West 19th Street, this exhibition reflects the clarity and rigor Judd intended in this installation. The galley’s inaugural exhibition of the artist’s work since obtaining exclusive representation of the Judd Foundation, the works included herein comprise one of Judd’s few explorations of color on a large scale using anodized aluminum. Indeed, the historic 1989 Kunsthalle exhibition of these 12 identically scaled anodized aluminum works was significant in that it marked the first time Judd used that colored material in such scale. Viewers are given a powerful vantage point from which to investigate these truly focused examples of Judd’s practice.

While Judd had previously examined the qualities of an open box form, works created for the groundbreaking 1989 exhibition display distinctive systematic approaches in determining each box’s interior space. In turn, Judd divided each box vertically into different spatial configurations—while sometimes introducing color through anodized elements or sheets of Plexiglass in blue, black, or amber. Resultant combinations of materials, dividers, and colors—varying from box to box—determine each work’s singular nature within a finite number of possibilities. Thus, each box is an individual work representing just one possibility amid various parameters.

Demonstrating Judd’s visionary approach in use of industrial material—coupled with his unique attitude toward proportion and installation—these works were designed in relation to each other and within the given framework of their design. As an ensemble they present a particularly cohesive perspective of composition and space. Placement of color and other composite elements was part of a larger context for Judd: In presenting these boxes as a group, we are allowed the breath of their intriguing spatial arrangements, colors, and dimensions: This is especially true vis-à-vis the surrounding architectural environment. This show at David Zwirner provides a special opportunity for viewers to experience such a large-scale presentation of a single body of work by Judd. Furthermore, this current installation has been accompanied by catalogue published in collaboration with Steidl (Göttingen)—including new scholarship on Judd by noted art historian Richard Shiff as well as archival material and reprinted interviews with the artist.

The highly articulated work of Donald Judd (1928-1994) has been exhibited internationally for over six decades—in a plethora of formats—at such institutions as Tate Modern (London), K20 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen (Düsseldorf), the Kunstmuseum (Basel), Kunsthalle Bielefeld, the Menil Collection (Houston), the Sprengel Museum (Hannover), Dia Art Foundation (Beacon), The Whitney Museum of American Art, the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa), Documenta (Kassel), the Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven), The Panoramas Gallery (New York), The Leo Castelli Gallery (New York), Paula Cooper Gallery (New York), PaceWildenstein (New York), and Musée d’Art Moderne et d’Art Contemporain (Nice).

Donald Judd

Through June 25, 2011

@ David Zwirner Gallery

525 West 19th Street, NYC 10011

Technology, Memory & Identity: A Convergence

[“Anonymous #59, #60, #61, #62” (2011), computer punch tape & blue masking tape. “Anonymous #54” (2011), computer punch tape & blue masking tape. “Anonymous #53” (2011), computer punch tape & blue masking tape. “Anonymous #26” (2011), computer punch tape & blue masking tape. “Anonymous #27” (2010), computer punch tape & blue masking tape.]

Exploring relationships between technology, memory, and identity, Henry Chung continues his ongoing “Identity/Anonymity” series. These anonymous portraits—rendered in an obsolete technology no longer accessible—are forgotten faces culled from flea markets and antique stores. In looking at these “forgotten” individuals, one is compelled to ponder the lives they lived and their evaporated memories. Integral to how this “evaporation” occurs is its relation to relative levels of anonymity, familiarity, and fame of those individuals.

Cultural/historical memory in our transient and “throwaway” society-in-economic-upheaval is sketchy at best. With personal identity is more fluid than ever, Chung points out the importance of permanence and consistency. Perhaps the Chinese cultural heritage of honoring one's ancestors is the root of Chung's sadness at discovering the discarded evidence of lives experienced. However we come upon these individuals, Chung asks us to contemplate their lives.

Before the advent of disc drives, DVDs, Wi-Fi networks, and cellular technology, paper punch tape was used to store and transmit computer data. Rolls of 1" paper tape were punched by a machine attached to a computer that translated the binary information on the computer into a pattern of holes in the tape, a hole for the number one and the paper left uncut for a zero. This tape was then fed into a punch tape reader connected to other computer equipment and translated back into usable information.

Ingeniously, Chung wrote a computer program translating found images of the forgotten into such aforementioned 1” strips of data: These were then punched by a computer punch tape machine. Chung “recomposes” these images by aligning resultant strips of black paper punch tape. By “drawing” these images of unknown people in holes in paper, he emphasizes loss of memory and identity experienced when he found these vintage images. His work acts as a metaphor for loss, exposes the inherent sadness associated with it, and partially restores the spirit to wit. This body of work deftly and sensitively juxtaposes such losses in physical, metaphysical, and conceptual ways. These images “come to life” when Chung is cuts holes in the paper, creates loss in the paper, and uses an obsolete and unreadable technology to mimic his experience of finding photographs of unknowable people.

Chung’s technological competence and curiosity get vigorous pushes from his background in engineering at Columbia University. But these Conceptual works go far beyond technical fluency: In them one finds powerful currents of history, sociology, and transcendent soul.

Henry Chung

Through July 31, 2011

@ RHV Fine Art

683 6th Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11215

I Celebrate the Vision Elastic!

[“Five Women, Freud’s Bookcase, London” (2011) by Joy Episalla. Pigment print mounted on plexiglass. “When I Put My Hands on Your Body” (1990) by David Wojnarowicz. Gelatin silver print & silkscreen text on museum board. “Untitled” (2011) by Katherine Hubbard. 24 black & white C-prints mounted on styrene. “Portrait” (1983) by Adrian Piper. Photo text collage.]

Curated by Moyra Davey and Zoe Leonard, “Vision Is Elastic. Thought Is Elastic,” explores intersections between photograph and writing. Up at Murray Guy Gallery through June 18, 2011, this exhibition was presented concurrently with the release of “Blind Spot Magazine,” issue number 43—jointly edited by the show’s two curators. Bringing together works by Josh Brand, Roy Colmer, Pradeep Dalal, Shannon Ebner, Joy Episalla, William Gedney, Roni Horn, Katherine Hubbard, Babette Mangolte, Mark Morrisroe, Adrian Piper, Claire Pentecost, James Welling, and David Wojnarowicz, the title “Vision Is Elastic. Thought Is Elastic” comes from the journals of David Wojnarowicz.

While examining a symbiosis between camera and notebook, this exhibition assembles works embodying the spectrum of relationships between such activities as reading, writing, and note-taking. This is in contrast to the iconoclastic milieu within conceptual art in which text is paired with photographs to fragment or unhinge those images. Thus, in these symbiotic relationships, dissimilar organisms coalesce into those mutually beneficial as opposed to one spotlighting insufficiency or artificiality of the other entities. Many of the works assembled in “Vision Is Elastic. Thought Is Elastic” propose interchangeability, flexibility, and fluency between images and text that not only anticipate (in the case of older works) or respond to (for those more recent) today’s proliferating digital interfaces—but rather acknowledge and withstand this reality. With images increasingly—if not ubiquitously—embedded within text (and texts inscribed within the spaces of an image) we can see a number of currents in this show.

Many of the artists represented in this exhibition write on the image or in their margins, making photographic surfaces virtual notepads. This includes the mighty elegy by the iconic David Wojnarowicz (1954–1992), the compelling frappé of Mark Morrisroe (1959-1989), and the annotated waterscapes of Roni Horn. Wojnarowicz—prominent in the New York City art world of the 1980s—integrated text into his work from the late 1970s, during the time he created his photographic series of Arthur Rimbaud and made Super-8 films such as “Heroin.” The work of David Wojnarowicz not only calls to mind frontline galleries in which his work was exhibited such as Civilian Warfare, Zero, Gracie Mansion, and Hal Bromm: His work is seen through the prism of his collaborators such as Nan Goldin, Peter Hujar, Luis Frangella, Kiki Smith, Richard Kern, John Fekner, Phil Zwickler, Ben Neil, and James Romberger. David lives on today in the work of countless artists such as Victoria Yee Howe, Matt Wolf, Emily Roysden, Henrick Olesen, Carrie Mae Weems, Mike Estabrook, and Zoe Leonard, a curator of this show. Morrisroe—unofficial “leader” of “The Boston School” (including Nan Goldin, David Armstrong, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Tabboo!, Gail Thacker, and Jack Pierson)—can be seen today through his oeuvre of “autobiographical photography.” Indeed, Morrisroe’s fresh and diaristic body of work will speak across the decades: This includes his technically imperfect Polaroids and photographs (highlighted with scrawled texts along the borders and other signature retouching). Roni Horn’s site-dependent works expand upon Minimalism’s creed of “site specificity.” Having had one-person exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago; Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), Dia Center for the Arts, and Whitney Museum of American Art, Horn creates complex narratives between her work and the viewer. She does this by subverting notions of unique experiences.

Others in the show—such as James Welling (with his paired images of Connecticut) and Shannon Ebner (with her array of blank notebook pages)—photograph notebooks themselves across different states. The images of James Welling transcend categories of still life, landscape, architectural, abstract, color study, and photogram. At the same time, they are layered with irony, history, and paradox—drawing as he does from myriad subjects. Having produced more than 35 distinct series, post-conceptualist Welling pursues several at a time over periods of years. His work has appeared in such venues as Documenta IX (Kassel), Maureen Paley (London), the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Sharon Ebner’s works often spotlight language’s discrepancies—and underline its undulating qualities. In this exploration of language, Ebner invokes those qualities that both imprison and liberate: The viewer is allowed a vantage point from which to examine its possibilities. Her aim at the “war on terror” was especially refreshing. Drawing upon a photographic tradition spanning from Jean Eugène Atget (1856-1927) to Edward Ruscha, Ebner embraces photography’s fundamental contradictions while—at the same time—unearthing its fictions.

The poignant and sensitive tableaux of William Gedney (1932-1989), the documentation and photography projects of Roy Colmer, and the sculptural and carnal constructions of Pradeep Dalal treat photographs as though they were entries in a journal or the means by which to keep a diary. Primarily documenting the environs of New York, rural Kentucky, and San Francisco in the U.S.—and Benares and Calcutta in India—Bill Gedney photographed from the 1950s until his death in 1989. With his particular forte nighttime photography, Gedney received several fellowships and grants during his lifetime—including a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, a New York State Creative Artists Public Service Program grant, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. His work has been exhibited in such venues as MoMA, George Eastman House, and Rochester Institute of Technology. Colmer began to experiment with closed-circuit TV in the early 1970s—sometimes incorporating video feedback. Ceasing his painting to work on documentation and photography projects in the mid-1970s, Colmer’s films and photographs have received critical attention—appearing in such venues as: Museum für Neue Kunst & Medienmuseum (Karlsruhe), the Weatherspoon Art Museum (Greensboro), the Blanton Museum of Art (Austin), and the Mitchell Algus Galley (New York). Examining autobiographical and architectural sites in India, Dalal’s photomontage projects explore senses of legacy and geographical awe. Affected by the flow and rhythm of the works of Arshile Gorky and Jackson Pollock, Colmer sought out and tested opposite values across a range of his projects. A native of Mumbai, Dalal appropriates a 19th century panorama from which he builds tattered yet robust collages challenging personal as well as larger assumptions. His work reigns in an array of moments, genres, time periods, and textures into a single montage: These disparate qualities represent his tangled—and sometimes contradictory—personal experiences. A recipient of a Tierney Fellowship, Dalal’s work has appeared at the New York Public Library, PS 122, TART (San Francisco), Vadhera Gallery (New Delhi), and Aljira Center for Contemporary Art (Newark).

A quick way into one’s psyche is to either investigate their book or music collections. Babette Mangolte and Joy Episalla have done the former—photographing bookshelves and giving external form to such internal activities as reading and writing (the former doing the library of Annette Michelson, the latter that of Sigmund Freud). An experimental filmmaker living in New York, Babette Mangolte has had complete retrospectives of her films and camerawork organized in Munich, Berlin, and New York. Exhibited in such venues as the Film Anthology Archives, Tate Britain (London), Tate Liverpool, and the Whitney Museum, Mangolte is noted also for her photography of dance, theater, and performance. Episalla’s work inhabits interstices between photography, sculpture, and video and focuses on the rich output of information produced by mundane objects and architecture. Art critic Bill Arning has described Joy Episalla’s viewpoint “so close to the subject” and her works’ effect as “especially pronounced.” Like a forensic examiner or palm reader, she combs an array of exposed fissures and entities—rendering and scrutinizing their secrets. A recipient of the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, Episalla’s work has been exhibited at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Carrie Secrist Gallery (Chicago), Debs & Co., Clifford Smith Gallery (Boston), the Contemporary Art Center (New Orleans), The Phoenix Art Museum, ARCO (Madrid), Aeroplastics Contemporary (Brussles), and Studio 1.1 (London).

Josh Brand uses the camera as though it were a writing instrument—evoking photography’s original sense of “writing with light.” He is but one of a number of “recent generation” artists as Liz Deschenes, Wolfgang Tillmans, Eileen Quinlan, and Markus Amm who have—in various ways—explored limitations of non-representational photographic images. Brand has shown his work in such venues as: CRG Gallery (New York), Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, Elizabeth Dee Gallery (New York), QED (Los Angeles), Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery (New York), and White Columns (New York), and Shane Campbell Gallery (Chicago).

Engaged across collaboration, research, lecturing, teaching, fieldwork, writing, drawing, photography, and installation, the investigative work of Claire Pentecost defies those institutional structures. In fact, Pentecost’s website “The Public Amateur,” advocates for those whose work crosses and disturbs the disciplinary boundaries that traditionally cleave to the authorized specialist. Having addressed boundaries between “natural” and “artificial,” Pentecost has taken her work into arenas that include industrial agriculture and bioengineering. An associate professor in the photography department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Pentecost’s work has been exhibited at the Drawing Center, Whitney Museum of Art, Kunstverein (Munich), Corcoran Museum (Washington, D.C.), Center for Creative Photography (Tucson), and American Fine Art Gallery (New York). In her beyond-thorough explorations of performance’s photographic documentation, Katherine Hubbard has examined and redefined equations and structures in that arena. Meanwhile, Hubbard’s sculptural, fiber, and costume-based works have been exhibited at the Rockland Center for the Arts, Higher Pictures (New York), and San Francisco’s SOMArts Gallery and California College of the Arts.

Without a doubt, much of the work by the other artists in this show rests upon the prescient “first-generation” conceptual artist Adrian Piper. Coming on the scene in 1967, her early work incorporated aspects of yoga and meditation (or what she calls the “indexical present.”) Not only did Piper’s work bridge passive contemplation of objects with more dynamic and self-conscious themes, she also introduced issues of xenophobia, race, and gender into the vocabulary of Conceptual art. Her 1987 retrospective at the Alternative Museum (New York) was a pivotal event and brought the media and strategies of first-generation Conceptual art to the larger art public. Over and over again in the following years, Piper has continued to challenge the complacency of art viewers with strategies that shock, outrage, and amuse. Combining photographs with silkscreen drawings and compressed political texts, Piper shines a bright light on reservoirs of political self-deception and disingenuousness. Piper withdrew her work from a 1995 museum survey of early Conceptual art to protest its funding by Philip Morris—replacing it with “Ashes to Ashes,” a photo-text work that narrated her parents’ smoking related deaths. Piper’s artwork of transcendence is in many august collections such as MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoCA, the Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), the Generali Foundation (Vienna), and the Aomori Museum of Art (Japan).

Important are this show’s curators Zoe Leonard and Moyra Davey, who have taken this show on an über-intellectual trajectory. Both have previously used their own artistic practices to focus on physical representations of symbolic systems whose relationships of valuation are in major transition. With black-and-white photography as her principal artistic medium, Zoe Leonard’s prolific work includes sculpture, installation, and film. Reflecting experiences and observations in ways subtle and ambivalent, her work captures conflict and gray areas in gender relationships, nature, culture, and space and time. Leonard’s work—offering a language to the voiceless and bringing visibility to the invisible—has been viewed in such institutions as Documenta (Kassel), Whitney Biennial, Vienna Secession, Kunsthalle (Basel), Centre National de la Photographie (Paris), Fotomuseum Wintherthur (Switzerland), and Pinakothek der Modern (Munich). Editor of “Mother Reader: Essential Writings on Motherhood” (an anthology on maternal ambivalence and the intersection of motherhood and creative life) and author of “The Problem of Reading,” (a book of essays), Moyra Davey is an artist and a photographer whose work has been exhibited at the Kunsthalle (Basel), Wexner Center for the Arts (Columbus), Fogg Art Museum (Harvard), Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia (Madrid), Metropolitan Museum of Art, Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum (Ridgefield), James Cohan Gallery(New York), and American Fine Arts Co. (New York). Thoughtfully, Leonard and Davey have included three artists ripped from us during the AIDS epidemic: Mark Morrisroe, William Gedney, and David Wojnarowicz. We can but guess as to where those visceral artists would have taken their work—“If only...”

Vision Is Elastic. Thought Is Elastic.

Group Show Including: Josh Brand, Roy Colmer, Pradeep Dalal, Shannon Ebner, Joy Episalla, William Gedney, Roni Horn, Katherine Hubbard, Babette Mangolte, Mark Morrisroe, Adrian Piper, Claire Pentecost, James Welling, & David Wojnarowicz. Curated by Moyra Davey & Zoe Leonard.

Through June 18, 2011

@ Murray Guy

453 West 17th Street, NYC 10011

Frank Brunner & Michaël de Kok: Psychic Landscapes

[Frank Brunner: “Untitled” (2011), oil on canvas. “Broken Mirrors” (2011), oil on mylar. “Threshold” (2011), oil on canvas. Michaël de Kok: “Evening” (2011), oil on canvas. “Base” (2011), oil on canvas.]

In this two-person show at Bertrand Delacroix Gallery—up through July 9, 2011—one is overwhelmed by these psychic landscapes by Brunner and Michaël de Kok.

Using repetition and perspective to explore ideas in familiar iconography, Frank Brunner does so in a fog of reminiscence—whether “revisiting the woods from his childhood with the integrated image of suitcases” or “studying human form through reflected pools.” While Brunner’s creative results are unique, his approach is “art historical.” Thematic icons recur on canvas after canvas and manifest themselves within singular surfaces.

Originating from his fascination of greater forces that result from combined smaller efforts, Brunner’s conceptual framework emerges most strenuously. By recalling these memories across the breadth of his canvases, Brunner creates a world of “eternal return.” Brunner’s curiosity with light and form results in visual “poetry”—exposing the viewer to caches of psychic spaces and “rites of passage.” Fusing traditional painting technique with ideas emerging from contemporary life, his reflective work confronts artificial constructs of “nature” and image-making’s inherent complexities.

Windows and mirrors act as metaphors in Brunner’s work—allowing him to deconstruct these images in various ways. As with the work of Gerhard Richter, Brunner’s images are composed of progressively blurred objects: In Brunner’s work they convey melancholy and the fading of memories over time. Deriving from death, pain, and collective consciousness, Brunner’s images combine sculpture with the painted surface. Using a dripping device with his canvases horizontal on the ground, the surfaces of Brunner’s paintings have been worked over and over.

As with Brunner, images of the mental realm swirl within the painted landscapes of Michaël de Kok. While his landscapes are bleak, solitary, and vast, each de Kok canvas punctuates a moment’s impact. His paintings reduce scenes to basics of line, shape, form, and composition—regardless of whether his subject is a road, mountain, or building. Innately familiar, de Kok’s landscapes—with their vast horizons, skies, and spaces—blur these elements by altering such variables as light, palette, and dimension. Leveraged and shadowed degrees of visual, psychic, and emotional impacts then result.

Brunner has exhibited in such venues as Norway’s Drammen Museum, Haugar Kunstmuseum, Stenersen Museum, and Sørlandets Kunstmuseum, as well as Berlin’s Stiftung Stadtmuseum and New York’s Kathleen Cullen Fine Arts Gallery. Meanwhile, de Kok has exhibited throughout Belgium, the Netherlands, Greece, and France in such venues as Museum de Wieger and Amsterdam’s lively Stedlijk Museum.

Frank Brunner / Michaël de Kok

Through July 9, 2011

@ Bertrand Delacroix Gallery

535 West 25th Street NYC 10001

Sign on the Dotted Line: Signature Paintings by Todd Kelly

[“Signature Painting” (2011), oil & acrylic on canvas. “Untitled (Tree Painting)” (2011), oil, acrylic & collage on canvas. “Quilt Painting” (2011), oil on canvas.]

A number of elements converge and coalesce in the works of Todd Kelly: “Signature Paintings,” a show of his recent work is up at Asya Geisberg Gallery through June 18, 2011. In Kelly’s avalanche of experimentation, this Michigan native uses his name as a springboard in manipulating its letters as a compositional structure—whether as an exaggerated logo, a half-buried talisman, or entity altered beyond recognition. Imagination, momentary inspiration, present consciousness, and serendipity sustain his work—with Kelly firmly, if naively, believing that painting can make the world a better place.

In “Scrim Painting I”—with its finely nuanced gradients of pinks and zigzag of diagonal lines covering all but the top edge of the painting—the resultant pattern is a geometric extension of the veil. However, while the veil both covers and beckons with its seduction by suggestion, its lines also call to mind a hard-edged grated fence. Coursing underneath are lush jabs of paint, insouciant dots of spray paint, and washes of color. Buried deepest is the negative space of the artist’s initials – a whisper compared to the manic activity on top. Ultimately, the ego is meditatively erased as Kelly’s signature becomes a faint echo.

In “Untitled (Leaves),” actual leaves have been adhered to the canvas, as if to point out the old adage about “seeing the forest for the trees.” A splotchy pink layer rests on top of its precise fine lines—as if a drunken rock star had lost control in an elegant hotel room. “Untitled (Leaves)” are what one sees midway through a crash and burn: starched linens unfurling, sconces still intact, and ashtrays overflowing. Hours of detailed work are required to beget lines of equal length and distance, while quasi-scientific concern for color competes with a Dionysian expression of id. As the artist remarks, “the eye switches back and forth between illusions deciding which to land on.”

Inspired by nonhierarchical approaches to art history and diverse sources such as architecture, graffiti, and graphic design, Kelly takes viewers on an odyssey through modes of abstraction—engaging paintings’ physical and philosophical spaces. In this particular show (and in his paintings generally), Kelly provokes viewers in pondering creative mechanisms behind his work. Layers of brushwork, drips, spray paint, stencil, and collaged elements culminate with a surface of parallel dotted lines. Large areas of paint sometimes cover painstakingly applied marks as expressionistic flourishes vanquish control. Delicate uniform marks form a pattern within the Kelly’s “astral” plane and culminate in an overarching “signature.”

Kelly’s work has been exhibited in such venues as the National Portrait Gallery (London), Seven Seven Contemporary (London), “Artforum,” and the Jerwood Painters Exhibition.

Signature Paintings

Todd Kelly

Through June 18, 2011

@ Asya Geisberg Gallery

537B West 23rd Street, NYC 10011

Gillian Wearing: People

Conceptual artist Gillian Wearing won Britian’s Turner Prize in 1997—among a “shortlist” of four artists, all female. Done to correct the all-male shortlist of 1996, this initially created a hoopla—a hoopla that largely dissipated when the work of the women was actually exhibited. A major solo exhibition of new work by Gillian Wearing—presenting an epic survey of accomplishment since her last major New York exhibition in 2003—is up at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery through June 24, 2011. Featuring new and recent video installations, photographic series, and sculptural work, the exhibition occupies both gallery floors and all four of its public spaces. Continuing her renowned and influential exploration of identity, performance, and storytelling, Wearing describes narratives that land on the edge of public and private, fiction and documentary, and raw improvisation and carefully staged. In projecting these issues through a lens of personal memory, cultural history, and media, a unique and compelling psychological resonance persists throughout.

In Tanya Bonakdar Gallery’s main gallery space on the ground floor, “Snapshot” is a monumental seven-channel video installation paying homage to the evolution of still photography through the implementation of moving images. While tracing still portraiture’s evolution throughout time, it presents an explicit “timeline.” Informed by old photographs—at the same time evoked through moving imagery—seven different women at various stages of life, are depicted on seven monitors corresponding to various eras in the 20th century. Ranging from youth to old age, an anonymous narrator describes the memories of these women, which are—at once—personal and universal. Evident in Snapshot is the influence of Michael Apted’s groundbreaking and poignant “Seven-Up” (Granada Television 1964) upon Wearing. Seven-Up is a longitudinal British documentary series charting progress by a group of children in seven-year increments.

In the second ground floor gallery, Wearing’s latest video work “Bully” counterbalances Snapshot’s exploration of feminine identity. Presented in a black box space, this large projection stems from Wearing’s acclaimed feature length film “Self Made” (2010). Confronting the viewer with an individual’s catharsis in a revelatory moment, one can follow a fiction’s construction while it transcends a character’s personal story to become a “reality” for all participants. Bully showcases Wearing’s efficacy in the role of director. At the same time, her compelling elevation of the mundane offers an angst-ridden view of reality.

Wearing presents another major video installation in this show: “Secrets and Lies.” Within the confines of a small chamber—not unlike a confessional box—the viewer is confronted by one masked figure after another recounting intimately kept personal secrets such as infidelity and murder. Gleaned from announcements placed online, participants answered a call to "Confess All on Video." The disguised features of these participants combine with brutally open honesty, challenging construction of “self” versus portraiture’s very raison d’etre. The mask protects the confessor’s identity while it empowers them to speak truthfully.

In the main upstairs gallery, Wearing exhibits three major photographic works, each a self-portrait of the artist posed as figures from recent art history: “Diane Arbus,” “Robert Mapplethorpe,” and “Andy Warhol.” Each of these mythologized artists' practices profoundly influenced Wearing's own. In each composition, the artist donned a costume and prosthetics to occupy the place of her subjects. In the same room, as if in reverence to these three iconic personas, one finds Gillian Wearing's most recent work “People” (2011). Inspired by Dutch still life paintings of the 17th century, it depicts an elegant and complex arrangement of silk flowers in a small vase. One can only imagine the explosion of color, otherwise more intense and unreal due to the artificial coloration of the faux flowers. These flowers will never wilt or die, and while the piece references the past, the artificiality of its construction is not disguised and cannot be ignored.

Finally, two small bronze figures, Gervais (2010) and Terri (2011), are the first of a new body of work Wearing refers to as "social sculpture." Depicting lifelike renderings of apparently everyday people, plaques below the sculptures describe the heroic role each has held within the broader context of their society. Of particular significance for this exhibition in New York, Wearing approached NYPD officer Terri Tobin, a hero of the 9/11 disaster, to model for the depiction of "Heroine." Ten years later, through the simple bronze figure, Wearing discreetly resounds the monumental in the everyday man and woman.

In her range of works such as “Dancing in Peckham” (1994), “One Sixty Minute Silence” (1996), “Drunk” (2000), “Broad Street” (2001), “Fuck Cilla Black” (2003), “Family History” (2006), and those in this current show, Wearing has pushed the limits of portraiture in photography and video and drawn out—in all their complexity—narratives on various relationships between people. Her works focused in Peckham and South London bring the magic of that milieu—known so well to Americans through the literary works of Hanif Kureishi (and their film adaptations)—to the arena of the plastic arts.

In addition to being a recipient of Britain's most prestigious Turner Prize, Gillian Wearing is internationally regarded as one of the most influential artists of her generation—with her work exhibited at such institutions and venues as PS1, the Guggenheim Museum, MoMA, the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), Whitechapel Gallery (London), the Tate Gallery (London), City Racing (London), Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), and K20 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen (Düsselfdorf).

People

Gillian Wearing

Through June 24, 2011

@ Tanya Bonakdar Gallery

521 West 21st Street NYC 10011

Fernando Bryce: El Mundo en Llamas

Alexander and Bonin Gallery is hosting the exhibition of two new works by Fernando Bryce—marking the first solo presentation of his work in the United States. Bryce’s drawings systematically re-examine how historical events are represented and reconstructed in real time through the media. Describing his work as “mimetic analysis,” Bryce culls archives for advertisements, newspaper articles, leaflets, comics, and other print materials focusing on specific political currents. He then reproduces these original documents in ink on standard paper formats. Representing Bryce in this show are his two respective—and most recent—works, “El Mundo en Llamas” and “Das Reich / Der Aufbau.” Up through June 18, 2011, both focus on representations of World War II in the popular press.

Panoptic in scope, Fernando Bryce’s painstaking work is the result of collecting historical documents, images from media, and illustrations, which are then combined and translated into large ink drawings. Poetically, he breathes life into these images by reimagining and reinterpreting them into various formative contexts.

Translated as “The World in Flames,” “El Mundo en Llamas” is an expansive set of 92 drawings in which headlines from major world newspapers are juxtaposed against advertisements for Hollywood film as they were rebranded at the time for a Peruvian audience. As with many of his installations, mainstream political coverage is weighed against the spectre of cultural imperialism: News of military maneuvers is followed by celluloid depictions of heroic pilots and femme fatales dubbed in Spanish. Spanning the period from 1939-1945, included are full-page spreads of “The New York Times,” Communist Party organ “L'Humanité” ("Humanity"), “Berliner Zeitung am Mittag,” “The Washington Post.” and the Peruvian “El Comercio.” Bryce’s juxtaposition of World War II news with events in Peru is ironic for one major reason: One of the only active roles played by that South American nation during that conflict was the rounding up of Peruvians of Japanese ancestry—with the connivance of the U.S. State Department—and the expropriation of property and other assets of these hapless people by Peru. [Only 79 Japanese-Peruvian citizens returned to Peru after the war, and 400 remained in the United States as "stateless" refugees.]

In “El Mundo,” as in his other works, Bryce has acted as a para-historian—revisiting and highlighting remnants of various historical perspectives. The artist opened a window through which historical events—anchored by significant military turning points of World War II—could be discerned and examined. Bryce searches newspaper archives on key dates—selecting and editing those pages whose graphic and ideological content he finds most compelling and emblematic. Bryce’s drawings embody unique views on history’s mediation.

Problematic examples of the period include the war reportage of the collaborationist Paris newspaper “Le Matin,” which emphasized anti-Soviet discourse. The days of “Le Matin” were numbered: Published from 1883, the once advanced periodical that had questioned the dubious charges against Alfred Dreyfus (1859-1935) had been reduced to anti-parliamentary vitriol and a pro-Nazi line before disappearing in August 1944 after the liberation of the City of Light. By comparison, “L'Humanité”—the daily linked to the French Communist Party and founded in 1904 by Jean Jaurès—continues to this day as the last French national newspaper of the left, despite the foundering of its parent party. In contrast to most French newspapers, the readership of “L'Humanité” has actually increased. Its pages heralded the Popular Front of Léon Blum in 1936: Despite its being banned during World War II, it published clandestinely until liberation of Paris from German occupation.

For “Das Reich / Der Aufbau,” Bryce has reproduced in full 14 covers of two periodicals—the German-language Jewish journal, Aufbau, then published then in New York, and Das Reich—spanning the months from July to October 1944. This period, after the liberation in July of the Majdanek concentration camp by the Soviet Army and the liberation of Paris in August by the forces of the “United Nation,” marks the beginning of the end of the war in Europe. By presenting the two publications together the viewer is able to compare the topics covered and how they might fit the ideology of the given publication. In hindsight Das Reich’s headlines (“The Utmost Effort,” “Full Display of Force,” etc.) read like fantasies of increasing power in the face of impending collapse. The differing style and formatting of these publications are also telling. Das Reich, for instance, sports a neo-classical, serifed masthead followed by one central headline. Aufbau’s masthead, by contrast, is modern, fat and angular and its multiple headlines are dispersed, and printed in different fonts. Design decisions such as these reiterate larger ideological constructs: Das Reich (and National Socialism) being Teutonic and monolithic whereas Aufbau (and the “United Nations” forces) modern and cosmopolitan.

Literally meaning “The [German] Empire,” “Das Reich” was a weekly newspaper founded by Nazi Germany’s propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels in May 1940. Primarily the creation of Rudolf Sparing, Rolf Rienhardt, and Max Amann, Goebbels was not involved with “Das Reich,” other than having founded it and apart from contributing a weekly editorial. Except for Herr Goebbels very delusional editorials, “Das Reich”—with its foreign contributors, book reviews, essays, and news reports—did not share the tone of other evermore barbarous and strident Nazi publications such as “Der Angriff” ("The Attack"), the pornographic “Der Stürmer” ("The Attacker"), “Völkischer Beobachter” ("Völkisch Observer"), and “Das Schwarze Korps” (“ The Black Corps”). In the other part of the show, Bryce even included a 1942 issue of “BZ am Mittag”—by then a droning facsimile of the lively, urbane tabloid it had been when owned by the House of Ullstein prior to the Nazi takeover and the resultant “Aryanization” of that august publishing house. The latter was “put out of its misery” when it ceased publication in February 1943 in compliance with measures for the “Total War.”

“Aufbau”—including such names on its masthead as Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann, and Hannah Arendt—was an important source of news about the war for those fortunate German-speaking Jewish émigrés who managed to avoid the Nazi dragnet. The very first newspaper to report on the murder of European Jewry in gas chambers, its reprinted deportation lists were used in evidence at the Nuremberg trials. From September 1, 1944 through September 27, 1946, it printed numerous lists of Jewish Holocaust survivors located in Europe, as well as a few lists of victims. Lists published in “Aufbau” were prepared by many different sources, such as Jewish relief organizations or officials in displaced persons’ camps. The vast majority of these lists are survivors. The only victims' lists give the names of persons who perished in the Shanghai ghetto. After the war, “Aufbau” helped those trying to relocate family and friends by running notices in its “searching for” and “saved” columns.

Other of Bryce’s series include: “Walter Benjamin’ (2002), “Trotsky” (2003), “Spanish War “(2003), and “Revolución” (2004). The first two are personal tributes to two intellectuals caught up in tragic maelstroms. In all of Bryce’s works, the past is ruthlessly un-romanticized as he addresses the tragic banality of historic sources.

Fernando Bryce was born in Lima in 1965 and now divides his time between Lima and Berlin, where he moved in the late 1980s. His work has been included in Manifesta in Frankfurt-am-Main (2002), the 8th International Istanbul Biennial (2003), the 26th Biennial of São Paulo (2004), and the 54th Carnegie International in Pittsburgh (2006). This year, his work is the subject of a survey exhibition organized by the Museo de Arte de Lima (MALI).

“El Mundo en Llamas”

Fernando Bryce

Through June 18, 2011

@ Alexander and Bonin

132 Tenth Avenue NYC 10011

Martin Kippenberger: I Had a Vision

[“Ohne Titel (aus der Serie Heavy Burschi)” (1989-1990). Color photo graph. “Heavy Burschi” (1991). Chipboard container; silkscreen, metal, plexiglass, oil, cast resin on canvas. [“Ohne Titel (aus der Serie Heavy Burschi)” (1989-1990). Color photo graph. “Untitled” (1991). Wood, leather, metal, motor & seat, carousel & ejection seat. “Untitled (Wall paper)” (1991). Four-color offset print. “Cineastenabgang” (1990). Wood, felt, plexiglass, neon tube (set of 3).]

“I Had a Vision”—an exhibition of sculptural work by Martin Kippenberger (1953—1997) will be up at Luhring Augustine through June 18, 2011. Offering a partial reconstruction of two major shows from the summer and fall of 1991 that shared much of the same content, the included pieces evince a self-mocking disposition through transmogrification of domestic décor (lamps, mirrors, wallpaper). Those previous shows were “New Work (Put Your Eye in Your Mouth)” at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and “Martin Kippenberger: Tiefes Kehlchen (Deep Throat).” The latter occupied an unused tunnel between two subway stations in Vienna and had been included in that city’s public art series “Topographie.” Considered Warhol's German heir, Kippenberger’s irreverence toward art world conventions comes through here: His taste for kitsch and an inclusion of electric vehicles denote this exhibition as a kind of “theme park.”

More than appropriate with relation to the works in this installation, the title “I Had a Vision” was also used for the San Francisco show’s catalogue. “Broken Kilometer” (1990), a series of boxes identical in length—but with ever shorter resin inserts—makes more concrete the optical perceptions of size and distance. The “Kippenblinky” lamp (1991) and “Cineastenabgang (Cineastes’ Egress)” (1990) supply foreground illumination: Their lighted steps function as a guide. “Mirror for Hang Over Bud” (1990) presents a mirror made out of aluminum foil rather than glass and eliminates viewer possibilities to see anything but hazy reflections. “Heavy Burschi (Heavy Lad)” (1990) comprises a dumpster full of paintings that Kippenberger asked an assistant to put together based thematically on other paintings of his, which were then destroyed by the artist. Exhibited alongside photographs of the paintings in their original state, it embodies paradoxes of presentation and representation—work that the artist shows to the public only through the process of its own demolition, abetted by the photographic likenesses of the pictures.

Known for his prolific output across myriad media (painting, drawing, records, books, posters, architecture, performance), Kippenberger also relocated frequently. He once referred to himself as “a traveling salesman” dealing in ideas: His itinerancy is felt in “Untitled (Carousel with ejection seat)” (1991). This looped train track was placed in the center of the San Francisco show and enabled visitors sitting in the motorized van seat to view the exhibition’s contents—arranged in a circle—in perpetual motion. This echoed Kippenberger’s own continual transit and encouraged viewers to synthesize works as a panoramic whole. In Vienna, an electromobile carried a resin-cast figure of Kippenberger wearing a suit jacket, white shirt, tie, dark shoes, and jeans, and traveling one-way down a track. This underlined Kippenberger’s conception of the show as an “art ghost train” with himself as the driver.

Kippenberger’s forerunner (and iconic) shows alluded to a correlation between the temporary nature of exhibitions and his transitory domiciles. Many of the objects had appeared in prior exhibitions and would reappear, recontextualized, in subsequent ones. It was almost as if he was moving house. It becomes clear that as with the rest of his oeuvre, Kippenberger’s personae and psyche permeated his ever-evolving sculptural work. His exhibitions were just as much an extension of himself as his living quarters.

Preoccupied with artistic currents of the 1980s, Kippenberger’s net output embodies creative sensibilities of that period. One who consistently appropriated, challenged, absorbed, transferred, and transformed what he saw around him, Kippenberger drew upon any number of “disciplines”—art, popular culture, architecture, music, history, politics, and the anecdotal into his ever-reinvented and rambunctious oeuvre—a veritable late-Modernist clearinghouse. Legend was the response when—to test his thesis that painting was an overrated, if useful, form—Kippenberger bought a small gray 1972 monochrome painting by Gerhard Richter, fitted it with metal legs, turned it into a coffee table, and transformed it into a “Kippenberger sculpture.” Nothing less than nucleus of a generation of German enfants terrible such as Albert Oehlen, Markus Oehlen, Werner Büttner, Georg Herold, Dieter Göls, and Günther Förg, Kippenberger collected and commissioned work by many of his peers. Some of his exhibition posters were designed by such art world figures as Jeff Koons, Christopher Wool, Rosemarie Trockel, and Mike Kelley.

The work of Kippenberger—who died in 1997 at the age of 44—has been the focus of major retrospectives at the Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles), MoMA, the Tate Modern (London), K21 (Düsseldorf), and Museo Picasso Malaga.

Martin Kippenberger: "I Had A Vision"

Through Jun 18, 2011

@ Luhring Augustine

531 West 24th Street, NYC 10011

Ori Gersht: Falling Petals

[“Will You Dance for Me” (2011). Dual channel HD video projection with sound (13 min. 45 sec.). “Hiroshima Sleepless Nights: Never Again” (2010). Archival pigment prints mounted on dibond (diptych). “Hiroshima Now: Motoyasugwa River to Cross” (2010). C-type mounted on dibond.]

Ori Gersht’s creative process—beset by and engaged with awareness of memory, experience, and embedded history—converges in “Falling Petals,” his recent series of images up at CRG Gallery through June 25, 2011. Comprised of images garnered from April to May 2010 during a trip to Japan, “Falling Petals” is culmination of his travels to cities affected by World War II (as well as ancient locations in the western part of that nation). In the latter locations, Gersht examined the evolving symbolism of the cherry blossom. Initially associated with Buddhist concepts of renewal, the celebration of life, and good fortune, the cherry blossom was reappropriated during Japan’s 19th century militarization and colonial expansion. Once celebrated as a healthy and abundant flower, the falling of the tree’s petals came to symbolize Kamikaze fighters. In contrasting cherry trees planted before the war in remote and relatively unaffected areas against those planted in Hiroshima’s post-nuclear soil, Gersht explores interplay between life and death.

In using digital cameras to allow for capture of images under extreme light conditions, Gersht questions photography’s very ability as a medium to convey a singular truth or story. His digital process—which presents documentation of assumed and exact locations—allows for questioning the veracity of light and color. By extension, viewers may interpret the “history” of such locations. Thus undermined are defined relationships engaged by photography. Such an understanding of film’s chemical and physical limitations, allows Gersht to more fully push the envelope in terms of the medium’s resonance. What results is Gersht’s highly dimensional vehicle portraying meaning through time, light, and other phenomena—and exposing human memory’s capacity and limitations.

Unlike previous series focusing on geographic journeys (Walter Benjamin’s following the Lister Route in Gersht’s “Evaders” of 2009 or “The Forest” of 2006, in which Gersht’s family found an unlikely refuge from annihilation during the Holocaust in the Ukraine), “Falling Petals” offers imagery conveying past and present without a specific and linear narrative. Gersht’s photographic process—in this case—implies passage of time without providing starting or end points in what he depicts. [In “The Forest,” the camera panned a lush, primeval forest. Shot deep in the Moskalova woods spanning Poland and the Ukraine, sound alternated with silence and suddenly a tree fell to the ground with a thunderous echo. Gersht’s departure point in doing that work came out of the adage: “If a tree falls in a forest, and there is no one there to hear it, does it make a sound?” Yet a host of other existential questions emerged.]

Additionally, this show will debut Gersht’s new film “Will You Dance for Me” (2011). The film opens to a close-up of an old and fragile woman in a rocking chair moving backward and forward meditatively—drifting in and out of focus. Slowly this woman—Yehudit Arnon—fades completely out of the dark scene as snow falls from the sky. Eventually, the rhythmic falling of snow and the rocking chair give way to a virginal, white landscape.

Arnon—a native of Komarno (Slovakia) and veteran of Hashomer Hatzair—was an inmate in the hellish precincts of Auschwitz concentration camp. During her confinement there—at the age of 19—she was ordered to dance at the Christmas party of an SS officer. When Arnon refused, her punishment was to stand barefoot in the snow all night. At that point, Arnon resolved to dedicate herself to dance should she survive the ordeal. Upon her release, Arnon moved to Budapest and began study with Hungarian dancer Irena Dückstein (and disciple of noted German choreographer Kurt Jooss). In 1948, Arnon and her husband emigrated to Israel and settled at Kibbutz Ga’aton in the Western Galilee, where she still lives with her family. In 1962, Arnon created the Kibbutz Contemporary Dance Company, which drew emerging talent from around Israel (such as Hedda Oren, Oshra Elkayam, Ya’acov Sharir, Flora Cushman, and the acclaimed Rami Be'er) and toured throughout Israel, the United States, Europe, and the Far East. In the following decades, she attained international recognition in the arts—culminating in 1997, when she received the “Distinguished Artist Award” of the International Society for the Performing Arts in recognition of her contributions to the dance world.

“Will You Dance for Me” springs from this specific, preexisting, and inspiring personal narrative. Within the cadence of Arnon’s rocking chair, Gersht’s construction encourages viewers to absorb the absence, presence, and persistence of her life of dance now in cessation.

In this show at CRG Gallery—including as it does, a series of large-scale photographs and an arresting video projection—Gersht’s work yet again encourages viewer reflection on the power of natural beauty affected by human intervention. Through such coinciding forces one finds powers of resilience.

Ori Gersht is represented by Noga Gallery of Contemporary Art (Tel Aviv), Mummery+Schnelle (London), Angles Gallery (Santa Monica), and Brand New Gallery (Milan). Born in Tel Aviv in 1967 (and now located in London), his work has been viewed in such venues as the Tate Modern (London), the Victoria & Albert Museum (London), the Hirschhorn Museum (Washington, D.C.), the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Centro Andaluz De La Fotografia (Almeria), and MARCO (Vigo). A signed edition of 100 C-prints entitled “Come and Go” (2011) by Gersht will be available to benefit the Japan Earthquake Relief Fund (via the Japan Society).

“Falling Petals”

Ori Gersht

Through June 25, 2011

@ CRG Gallery

548 West 22nd Street, NYC 10011

A Conversation with Ori Gersht