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

Seeing Red: New Works by Frank Badur

[“#11-09” (2011), oil & alkyd on canvas. “#D08-23” (2008), pencil & gouache on Chinese paper. “11-10” (2011) oil & alkyd on canvas.]

“Mostly Red + works on paper,” an exhibition of new work by Berlin-based artist Frank Badur—known for his gracefully intuitive and minimalist compositions—will be up at Margaret Thatcher Projects through June 25, 2011. Drawing one into the subtlety of his work with an interplay of surface and color, his viewers experience delicate transition of shade, tone, and texture of each band in a newly heightened way, the veils of reds laying down bands of varying widths and opacity across the canvas. Far from clinical or mechanical in their sensibility, Badur’s paintings create a vibrant and almost tectonic sensation on their surfaces. Carrying this deep emotional weight, each level of surface reveals Badur’s hand.

Badur’s aesthetic language is clear: While tracing from Fauvism and Constructivism through the Color Field paintings of the Abstract Expressionist movement, his work relies on formal restraints combined with control of materials and intuition. Though aware of this evolution, it is also distinct—if not independent. While self-aware, his work—at the same time—seeks a pure and primeval meaning.

A selection of works on paper is also featured in this exhibition. Referred to by Badur as “scrolls,” these long vertical sheets—divided by subdued and delicate graphite and gouache lines, bands and grids—build a visual harmony achieved in his paintings. While of impact, these quieter works carry a gentle stillness. A minimalist who works through series of abstractions, Badur’s meditative paintings, drawings, and prints convey a uniqueness that subsumes any generic outcome. Lines in his drawings and prints are often lyrical and austere, while his paintings show a deployment of color both intense and unexpected. The latter sometimes suggests partial views of unspecific objects. This meditative minimalism—usually found installed in architectural settings—emphasizes an awareness of physical being and spatial experience.

Badur is acclaimed for a cycle of drawings called “Reflections on the Eisenman Grid.” Consisting of 24 small-scale drawings—presented in close proximity to each other on one wall, in four rows of six—they reference Peter Eisenman’s “Monument to the Murdered Jews of Europe” (located close to Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate). Badur’s reaction to this emotionally fraught site is modest and personal—exhibiting no desire to exploit this charged subject. Injecting meaning into a work otherwise potentially neutral, Badur’s drawing in this instance serves as a mental note, topographic memory, and reflection. Over the years, Badur has influenced a number of younger artists including Tim Stapel, Rebecca Michaelis, and Katinka Pilscheur who have sustained an interest in abstraction.

Working in Finland and Berlin, Frank Badur is a professor for painting at the Universität der Künste (Berlin). His work has appeared in such venues as: Malmö Kunstmuseum (Sweden), Moderna Museet (Stockholm), Mondriaanhuis (The Netherlands), Neue Nationalgalerie (Berlin), the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Museé de Cambrai (France), MoMA, the Neuberger Museum (Purchase), and the Museum of Fine Arts (Houston).

Mostly Red + Works on Paper

Frank Badur

Through June 25, 2011

@ Margaret Thatcher Projects

539 West 23rd Street, NYC 10011

New Sculptures: Richard Dupont

[“Consumptive Head” (2011), cast archival polyurethane resin with studio & personal detritus, found, salvaged, recycled objects & waste. “Pink Head” (2011), cast archival polyurethane resin with studio & personal detritus, found, salvaged, recycled objects & waste. “Convergent Head” (2011), cast archival polyurethane resin with studio & personal detritus, found, salvaged, recycled objects & waste.]

Departing from previous installations, Richard Dupont’s second solo exhibition at Carolina Nitsch Project Room presents a series of new sculptural works taking a more experimental approach to process and materials. With physiognomy giving way to the sculptural process in this show—up at Carolina Nitsch Project Room through June 25, 2011—Dupont has upended the historical motif of the self-portrait bust. Material content within each piece varies dramatically: Seen collectively the work represents a dense, contradictory, and paradoxical compression of time and meeting.

With the social landscape and Dupont’s own body as his works’ starting points—what results are sculptures, prints, installations, and public projects merging the individual and collective. Culminating from his previous deconstruction of the body vis-à-vis works derived from his politically notable 3-D laser scan at General Dynamics, Dupont’s new sculptures subsequently reconstruct body forms out of material residue. Art and non-art materials (including a 10-year accumulation of studio and personal detritus as well as daily waste), salvaged objects, and foodstuffs have provided fodder for his work—molded and bonded together permanently using an archival polyurethane resin.

In addition to the “busts,” this installation includes new sculptures based on casts of various bag shapes. Also cast out of archival resin, their clear, transparent surfaces mimic today’s ubiquitous garbage bag. Within these solid castings are the same accumulations of detritus on finds in the head sculptures. Permanently frozen in time, these objects portray the body/machine of late capitalist consumption—defined by the waste product of that consumption in all its internal contamination. Echoing the body both formally and conceptually, these vivid, gem-like works give permanence to everyday ephemera and waste and reveal a sculptural strategy of transformation, regeneration, and renewal.

Reviving aspects of figurative sculpture, Dupont has taken an anthropological approach emphasizing the interdependence of social and individual processes in a “co-construction” of meaning. To achieve this emphasis, Dupont immerses archaic and classical figurative forms in a “stew” of contemporary concern. In doing this he underlines the present influence of historic precedent. At the most benign, processing ever-increasing information in the digital age affects our view of the physical world. Conversely, this wealth of data—surveillance, tracking, statistical quantification, genetic testing results—have the potential for more ominous results. Dupont’s work in this show is informed by this reality.

Dupont’s work has been shown internationally and has been acquired by such institutions as MoMA, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and the New York Public Library.

New Sculptures

Richard Dupont

Through June 25, 2011

@ Carolina Nitsch Project Room

534 West 22ndStreet NYC 10011

Out of the Boxes: Photos of Wolfgang Tillmans, Part 1 (Curated by Beatrix Ruf)

Andrea Rosen Gallery has initiated a series of presentations in which they invite distinguished curators to select works out of the archival boxes of Wolfgang Tillmans’ small and medium c-prints kept in the gallery. This first presentation—curated by Beatrix Ruf, director of the Kunsthalle Zurich—is on view in their Gallery 3 through June 11, 2011. Spanning 1991 to 2010, these 60 small and medium c-prints have been carefully selected by Ruf.

Encompassing a wide array of genres, Tillmans’ photographic practice—portraits, still-life compositions, sky photographs, astrophotography, aerial shots, and landscapes—has been motivated by aesthetic and political interests, particularly in relation to homosexuality and gender identity. Tillmans’ comprehensive and diverse body of work is distinguished not only by an attentive and insightful observation of his surroundings but also by an on-going, systematic investigation of the photographic medium’s foundations. In his own view, Tillmans takes pictures, in order to see the world.

In the last decade, Wolfgang Tillmans has looked to the very chemical foundations of photographic material as well as its haptic and spatial possibilities. Created in the darkroom without the use of a camera and largely accidental such works present photography as a self-referential medium that could lead the way toward a new type of image structure. How different from the nearly documentary images created with a monochrome laser copier at his first exhibition in 1988! While both are compelling, Tillmans’ work shows ever more manipulation and play with materials and compositions—bringing his photos toward a sculptural sensibility.

Considered one of the most important of today’s contemporary artists, Tillmans was the first photographer and also the first non-English artist to be awarded the Turner Prize (2000). (His installation for the Turner prize show showed hundreds of photographs in a dizzying number of formats such as Polaroids, photocopies, inkjet prints, and cibachrome panoramas in saturated colors!) In 2001, he was awarded first prize in the competition for the design of the AIDS-Memorial for the City of Munich—eventually erected according to his “vision” at the Sendlinger Tor. Meanwhile, Tillmans was awarded the Kulturpreis der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Photographie (The Culture Prize of the German Society for Photography) in 2009. Viewing each exhibition as a site-specific installation, Tillmans often addresses the exhibition space as a larger composition. This year, he travelled to Haiti with the charity Christian Aid to document progress in reconstruction after that nation’s devastating earthquake.

Tillmans held his first exhibition at the Daniel Buchholz Gallery (Cologne). That was followed by large solo exhibitions at such institutions as Kunsthalle (Zürich), Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid), Museum Ludwig in Cologne (2001), Castello di Rivoli (Italy), Palais de Tokyo (Paris), MoMA PS1 (New York), Armand Hammer Museum (Los Angeles), Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, (Washington D.C.), and the Hamburger Bahnhof (Berlin). Tate Britain’s 2003 retrospective of Tillmans’ work was the first time the museum had devoted an exhibition to the work of a single photographer. He was included in the 2005 and 2009 Venice Biennales.

Having organized exhibitions, written essays, and published catalogues on artists such as Jenny Holzer, Urs Fischer, Liam Gillick, Marina Abramovic, Peter Land, Emmanuelle Antille, Angela Bulloch, Ugo Rondinone, Richard Prince, Keith Tyson, Monica Bonvicini, Rodney Graham, Isa Genzken, Doug Aitken, Rebecca Warren, Carol Bove, Oliver Payne, Nick Relph, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, and Sean Landers, it is no wonder that this curator, Beatrix Ruf, is called “the anointer” and the curator commencing this series. Appointed director of the Kunsthalle (Zürich) in 2001, Ruf has served as judge for the Prix Lafayette, and the Enel Contemporanea and LUMA prizes.

To see Tillmans' work through the eyes of eminent curators is to understand his insight in terms of his journey through the photographic medium’s very foundations. Opening at the end of June, the next presentation will be curated by Stefan Kalmar, director of Artists Space.

Out of the Boxes: Photos of Wolfgang Tillmans, Part 1

(Curated by Beatrix Ruf)

Through June 11, 2011

@ Andrea Rosen Gallery

525 West 24th Street NYC 10011

Jasper Johns: New Sculpture and Works on Paper

[“Numbers” (2007), aluminum. “Untitled” (2010), acrylic & collage on paper. “0-9”(2008), silver.]

Featuring nine sculptures completed over the past five years, “New Sculpture and Works on Paper,” up at the Matthew Marks Gallery on West 22nd Street through July 1, 2011, is Jasper Johns’ third one-person exhibition of recent work at the gallery since 2005. Included pieces represent the largest body of work Johns has completed in his career spanning more than five decades.

With one exception, the sculptures featured in this show are Johns’ classic grid of numerals 0 through 9. Making these sculptures in wax first, Johns works their surfaces in a complex pattern of textures. He then often adds collaged elements such as a key, newsprint impressions, a cast of Merce Cunningham’s foot, or a cast of his own hand. Casting them in bronze, aluminum, or silver, he then finally, applies a unique patina to each. The exception is a double-sided relief titled “Fragment of a Letter,” which incorporates part of a letter from Vincent van Gogh to his friend, the artist Émile Bernard. Using blocks of type, Johns pressed the letters of van Gogh’s words into the wax. On the other side he spelled out the letter in the American Sign Language alphabet with stamps he made himself. Finally, he signed his name in the wax with his hands in sign language.

This exhibition also features a room of 20 recent works on paper, including a series of drawings and prints based on three small works Johns made early last year on Shrinky Dinks, a plastic made for children to draw on that shrinks approximately 60 percent when heated. Accompanying the exhibition is a fully illustrated hardcover publication including a conversation with Jasper Johns and Terry Winters.

Johns has been a central figure in contemporary art since the early 1950s when he arrived in New York and became involved—over the years—with such cultural movers and shakers as Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Frank O’Hara, Robert Morris, Andy Warhol, Samuel Beckett, and Bruce Naumann His paintings—appropriating popular iconography such as the American flag, targets, numbers, and letters—quickly became icons themselves. MoMA purchased three pieces from Johns' first one-person exhibition at the Leo Castelli Gallery in 1958. As his career has developed Johns has added crosshatching, marks made by his body, and, more recently, the catenary curve to his collection of motifs. Such motifs constitute a very personal vernacular that Johns has introduced across his entire body of work—painting, sculpture, print, and hybrids combining elements of each. At every step of his career, Johns’ body of rich and complex work has evidenced a concern for process as well as rigorous attention to themes of popular imagery and abstraction and set the standards for American art.

Johns work has been exhibited throughout the world, at institutions including The Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.), the Centre Pompidou (Paris), and the Kunstmuseum (Basel). Having represented the United States at the 1988 Venice Biennale, where he was awarded the Grand Prize. Johns received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Obama.

New Sculpture & Works on Paper

Jasper Johns

Through July 1, 2011

@ Matthew Marks Gallery

522 West 22nd Street NYC 10011

PBS American Masters: Jasper Johns

MoMA Exhibition Interactives: Jasper Johns

Ali Smith: Exploring the Unknown

[“Merge” (2011), oil on canvas. “Superstructure (2010), oil on canvas. “Civil War” (2011), oil on canvas. “Shard” (2011), oil on canvas. “Waves” (2011), oil on canvas. “Gut Glum” (2011), oil on canvas. “Shape Be Sweet” (2011), oil on canvas.]

Five centuries ago, Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan (1480-1521) embarked on a three-year world voyage, crossing the Atlantic and continuing through to the Pacific—naming the latter in discovering previously uncharted territory. The world was Magellan’s blank canvas, absorbing his narrative as his ship cut its swath through history. Since then, our world has been mapped and charted in minute detail via today’s satellite, internet, and GPS technologies—leaving little to be pinpointed, described, and investigated. What remains is the terrain of imagination inhabited by artists, writers, dancers, musicians, actors, filmmakers, and scientists—many of whom continue to probe “uncharted waters.” While cynics attempt, on occasion, to declare painting’s demise, Smith uses her brilliant medium to explore the unknown.

In this show—her second at Freight + Volume (up through June 18, 2011)—Smith’s journey on canvas is a culmination of stray thoughts, fleeting moments, utter curiosity, and the tenuous line between fact and fiction. Her chosen medium girds her empty landscape and allows her resultant abstract terrains punctuating celebratory and Rococo-like excess and abundance.

Picking up where Arshile Gorky (1904-1948), Willem de Kooning (1904-1997), Philip Guston (1913-1980), and Roberto Matta (1911-2002) left off, Ali Smith delves into deep and near space on her canvases—each painting a window into an unseen world. Her thick and thin brushstrokes, dazzling color, and sculptural relief and flat background—contrasted with muted monochromes—create an unfolding and theatrical mis-a-scene tableau. Such painting titles as “Territory,” “Luxe Life,” “Into The Deep,” and “To Here Knows When” offer clues into the twists and turns of her journey. Smith’s recent paintings sort through daily life’s very complexity of daily life and relate this through a direct, raw language of abstraction at once lyrical and rough. Each painting is created in the moment, intuitively creating and laying bare the world Smith would like to visit or inhabit—while remembering their dimensions of complexity and contradiction.

Through these exuberant works, a viewer is offered a glimpse and gift of the quest in which Ali Smith has long been immersed. Her private and invented utopia is as much compelling as escapist. While the canvases in “Merge” have allowed Smith to make sense of conflict and cacophony, they offer solace and inspiration to those who absorb her works.

Living and working in Long Beach, California, Ali Smith has exhibited her work internationally in such venues as: Mark Moore Gallery (Santa Monica), Rhys Gallery (Boston), Pulse (Miami), DNA Galerie (Berlin), Smith’s work has been reviewed in such publications as Artus, the Los Angeles Times, NYArts, and Artweek.

Meanwhile, inter-disciplinary artist Suko Presseau exhibits her multi-screen installation “Love and Ceremony” in Freight + Volume’s video room. Concerned primarily with nature and ritual in her performance and video, Presseau utilizes eco-consciousness, kinesthetics, humor, and spiritual practice in her work. In “Love and Ceremony,” she has combined several vignettes such as “Vernal Fire Moon,” "Love and Ceremony,” and “Fish-Skin" to form a whole. Presseau explores agricultural, trade, and spiritual themes—taking cues from changing seasons, astronomical markers of time, and natural or man-made environments. She conflates memory and meaning, fact and fiction, and reality and fantasy in her suggested narratives to make sense of the individual within the world.

Merge

Ali Smith

Through June 18, 2011

@ Freight + Volume Gallery

530 West 24th Street NYC 10011

Jack Smith: Beyond the Demimonde

[Miscellaneous untitled mixed media works on paper (1964-1985). Miscellaneous untitled black & white gelatin silver prints (1958-1962). “No President” (1967-1970), 16 mm transfer to DV. “Diva” (2011), Blue Ray disc by T.J. Wilcox.]

George Kuchar called Jack Smith (1932-1989) “the king of the underground." Laurie Anderson called him “the godfather of performance art." John Waters called Smith as the “only true underground filmmaker.” According to musician John Zorn, Smith was “the real Warhol.” The enigmatic Jack Smith—who inspired Charles Ludlam (1943-1987) of Ridiculous Theatrical Company fame and further inspired Hibiscus to found the Cockettes—was a multimedia artist before the term used formally. While creating films, sculptures, collages, and costumes—and shooting photographs—Smith was a major influence on Andy Warhol and included Federico Fellini among his fans. Following his arrival in New York in 1953, Smith became one of the most influential members of the American avant-garde and a central figure in the cultural history of the film, performance, and art of downtown New York.

Smith is probably best known for “Flaming Creatures” (1962)—a satire of Hollywood B movies and tribute to actress Maria Montez. Since some scenes were considered pornographic by the authorities, copies of the movie were confiscated at the premiere and it was subsequently banned. The movie provided traction for right-wing politicians during Congressional hearings. In 1998, PS1 mounted a retrospective of Jack Smith’s work that traveled to the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh.

While Gladstone Gallery has represented the Estate of Jack Smith since 2008, this is the gallery’s first exhibition of his works by Jack Smith. Curated by the eloquent and iconoclastic Neville Wakefield, “Thanks for Explaining Me” presents 12 recently restored films, as well as a selection of drawings, collages, black and white photographs, color photographs never previously exhibited, and two seminal slide shows. A writer and commentator on contemporary art, culture and photography, Wakefield is author of “Postmodernism: the Twilight of the Real,” published by Pluto Press in 1988. Contributing editor to Another Magazine, Elle Decoration and Open City, he regularly writes for Artforum, Art and Auction, Art in America, I-D, Interview, The New York Sunday Times, and British and Italian Vogue.

Seeing his curatorial endeavor as a tributary approach to Smith’s creative practice and panoptic production, Wakefield writes: "More than almost any artist of the last century Jack Smith understood that within the prevailing cultures of success, art’s greatest role may have been to provide provision for public failure. To this end his actors and accomplices, props and lighting, drugs and desires were invariably wrong: wrong before the performance had started – before even the lights had gone down. The marathon of tourettic revisions, false starts and delays signaled to the world the impossibility of creating anything of value in a rectilinear lagoon where even the dedicated and willing were dragged to the bottom-feeding level of landlords and lobsters. Yet out of these impossible conditions was born the stuff of exquisite beauty, radical politics, lurid, caustic, pornographic and often hilarious evocations of the sexual and social strata in which we find ourselves. Much of this endures even in conditions Smith would have most likely have loathed. But the fact that the same frictions that heated and formed his work continue to frustrate curators as well as inflame and inspire artists—including those who have agreed to continue the spirit and legacy with works created for this show—is, I hope, testament to the enduring power and influence of Jack Smith’s extraordinary art."

Three collaborative works will also be on view, in which artists Ryan McNamara, A.L. Steiner, and T.J. Wilcox appropriate heretofore unseen Jack Smith film material to create contemporary meditations on Smith’s legendary life and work. Using video and performance, Ryan McNamara’s work centers around the body and the role it plays in establishing identity. Simultaneously playful and contemplative, McNamara’s highly physical works are informed by comedic sensibility and driven by a highly thoughtful inquiry of the body’s limitations and vulnerabilities. His performances have been included in Performa at X Initiative (2009), MoMA’s PS1 (2010), and the Moscow Performance Biennial at the Garage (2010). His work is in the collection of MoMA. A.L. Steiner is a Brooklyn-based artist who uses constructions of photography, video, collage, installation, collaboration, performance, writing and curatorial work as seductive tropes channeled through the sensibility of a cynical queer eco-feminist androgyne. A visiting faculty at UCLA and The School of Visual Arts, Steiner’s solo and collaborative work has been exhibited internationally. T.J. Wilcox has had solo shows at Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), and has had work shown at Museum Ludwig (Cologne), Tate Modern (London), and MoMA. In 2006, a monograph of his work was published in a multi-gallery collaboration.

A special film program will take place on Saturdays from 4-6 PM during the run of the exhibition, wherein newly restored Jack Smith prints will be screened on 16mm celluloid. The films will be introduced by film historians, scholars, friends and collaborators of Jack Smith. The Saturday series will present a rare opportunity to see these eleven film prints in the context of the artist’s larger body of work.

After Smith’s AIDS-related death in 1989, performance artist Penny Arcade and film historian J. Hoberman—along with others in the “downtown arts community”—bravely and tenaciously fended off attempts by Smith’s family to scuttle his artistic legacy. Thankfully, a horrendous decision on behalf of Smith’s estranged biological family by New York Surrogate Court Judge Eve Preminger–after a six-minute “trial”—was stymied by Gladstone Gallery’s purchase of his collection.

Smith, having been referenced by such artists such as Laurie Anderson, Cindy Sherman, Mike Kelley, David Lynch, Matthew Barney, Nan Goldin, John Zorn, Lou Reed, David Byrne, and Robert Wilson–across myriad disciplines–has had momentous, if unrecognizeded, impact on art internationally. Gladstone Gallery's show is a move toward rectifying this situation.

Jack Smith: “Thanks for Explaining Me”

Curated by Neville Wakefield

Through June 16, 2011

@ Gladstone Gallery

515 West 24th Street, NYC 10011

A Legacy Unfulfilled: Ted Stamm

[“Untitled” (1974), graphite & ticket stub. “Untitled” (1974), graphite on ticket stub. Four untitled works (1974), graphite on paper. “Untitled” (1976), graphite on paper. “Untitled” (1974), graphite on paper.]

Ted Stamm unexpectedly died at the age of 39 in 1984. In the 12 years preceding his untimely death, Stamm created a mature body of work—at once responsive to the past, reflective of his time, and telling of the future. Despite this impulse, viewing Stamm’s work calls forth his very process and medium: Stamm’s life, passions, and preoccupations are revealed with each geometric form and mark. When viewing Stamm’s work, one is immediately tempted to focus solely on its surface minimalism. Marianne Boesky Gallery is presenting its first exhibition of Ted Stamm with a Project show of works on paper through June 11, 2011.

Drawing was basic to Stamm’s practice: The graphite lent itself both to tight precise lines and emotive scribbles. After 1972, black dominated his work—both as an artistic investigation and for its popular connotations of nonconformity and rebellion. At the same time, Stamm explored reductive elements of line and form abstraction while seeking his sought-after and “perfect” flat and non-reflective shade of black. In so doing, he nodded to artists whose process he admired, like Abstract painter Ad Reinhardt (1913–1967)—noted for his “black” or “ultimate” paintings—and Frank Stella, significant for his place in minimalism and post-painterly abstraction.

Stamm dubbed his earliest black works “cancel” paintings—createing them by covering the surfaces of his colorful poured abstractions with a grid of black paint. Such gestural forms eventually yielded to more pronounced lines and geometry reflecting shapes striking Stamm in his daily environment. These shapes were given specific names with specific rules. “Woosters” combined rectangular and triangular shapes derived from forms he had seen on Wooster Street. Semi-circular “Dodgers” culminated in tilted rectangles. Named for the Brooklyn Dodgers, they were possibly derived from baseball field perimeters. “Zephyrs” referenced high speed trains, with their sleek, elongated cross shape.

An early experimenter with graffiti, Stamm discreetly stenciled his “Dodger” form on buildings that were meaningful to him. On subsequent visits, he added to the work until—in a fourth stage—his final work was carefully documented. In his “Tag Pieces,” Stamm further enumerated his life and art. Found tags were glued to identical sketch pads, with guests to his studio asked to mark the page as they wished. Stamm responded with his own mark in the other sketchbook. The resultant work memorialized this implicit “collaboration.”

While remaining true to minimalism’s basic tenets with his concern for space and the object, Stamm injected his own interest in advancement and movement, which reflected his boyhood fascination with cars, trains, and planes. Perhaps describing his own work best, Stamm said “it represents no beginning and no ending. This is my life.”

Stamm’s work is included in the collections of Brooklyn Museum, Carnegie Museum, (Pittsburgh), MoCA (Los Angeles), Phoenix Art Museum, The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art (Ridgefield, Conn.), MoMA, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and Western Australia Art Gallery (Perth).

Ted Stamm: Works on Paper

@ Marianne Boesky Gallery

509 West 24th Street, NYC 10011

Through Jun 11, 2011

Full of Gumption: Vigorous Paintings & Works on Paper at ZieherSmith

[“Don Juan & Don Quixote Riding My Horse” (1998), oil on signboard by Kirk Hayes. “Stairs (for Kelson” (2006), oil on panel (trompe-l’oeil) by Kirk Hayes. “You’re Late” (2007), mixed media on canvas by Trenton Doyle Hancock. “Panel Starers Triptych” (2010) oil on dyed fabric by Melissa Brown.]

ZieherSmith presents a group exhibition featuring vigorous paintings and works on paper by Melissa Brown, Tomoo Gokita, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Kirk Hayes, Keegan McHargue and Gary Panter through May 7, 2011.

Print maker Melissa Brown’s cuts across all disciplines: Among her recent projects are oversized woodcuts, stencil paintings, lecture performances, and collages made from discarded scratch-off tickets. Preoccupied with what is ubiquitous, Brown’s images put an array of vernacular styles and symbols into imaginary settings. Her work has enlarged the familiar while also accentuating an object’s embedded geometry. Meanwhile, Brown’s performances have ranged from the mystical to statistical. Brown studied at the Rhode Island School of Design (BFA) and Yale University (MFA). She has shown her work in such venues as Bellwether Gallery, Kenny Schachter/Rove Projects, Artist Space, and the Socrates Sculpture Park.

With Kirk Hayes’ work ones eye can play tricks on you. At once it appears to slap torn paper, tape, wood, and metal together. Yet Hayes skillfully applies oil paint to look like something it is not—assaulting your senses with bold, dark humor. Eschewing the mechanical, his present body of work offers the illusion of assemblage—suggesting torn cardboard, rusted metal, wood scraps, and masking tape as painted effects. Hayes’ fluency with trompe l’oeil makes us believe we are looking at tattered and discarded objects put together on gritty, torn surfaces, complete with coffee cup rings and doodles. Yet this is not the case. Beyond his finesse with paint is how he employs collage to defy convention while exploring chance and randomness. Hayes shares the mischievous intent of Dada artists in his faux-assemblages in oil and enamel on signboard. With this technique in hand, we are invited into the grotesque, sarcastic, and even cathartic precincts of his subjects. Hayes has shown at Horton Gallery (Berlin), as well as the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art (Overland Park), the Blanton Museum (Austin), Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, and Artspace (San Antonio).

Influenced by Abstract Expressionism as well as other forms, Trenton Doyle Hancock transforms traditionally formal decisions—such as the use of color, language, and pattern—into opportunities to create new characters and convey symbolic meaning. His prints, drawings, and collaged felt paintings work as an ensemble to tell the story of the Mounds—a group of mythical creatures reflecting the artist’s unfolding narrative. Each new work by Hancock contributes to the Mounds’ saga—portraying the birth, life, death, afterlife, and even dream states of these half-animal, half-plant creatures. Space offered within Hancock’s works allows for a psychological dimension that balancing moral dilemmas with wit, language, and color. Included in two Whitney Biennials, Trenton Doyle Hancock’s work has been exhibited in such venues as the Dallas Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art (Cleveland), and James Cohan Gallery (New York).

Japanese artist Tomoo Gokita has shown at Bill Brady/ATM Gallery (New York), Taka Ishii Gallery (Tokyo), the Museum of Contemporary Art (Rome), and Deitch Projects (New York). Keegan McHargue’s work has shown at Jack Hanley Gallery (San Francisco), Hiromi Yoshii Gallery (Tokyo), Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin (Paris), and Metro Pictures (New York). Painter and graphic artist Gary Panter has exhibited at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles), the Phoenix Museum of Art, Milwaukee Art Museum, and the Jewish Museum (New York).

“Gumption”: featuring Melissa Brown, Tomoo Gokita, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Kirk Hayes, Keegan McHargue & Gary Panter

Through May 7, 2011

ZieherSmith

516 West 20th Street NYC 100011

Jack Pierson & Elliott Puckett: To Cut & Construct

[Seven untitled works by Jack Pierson (1998), photographic collages. Two untitled works by Elliott Puckett (2011), ink on paper.]

In association with Cheim & Read and Paul Kasmin galleries, Danziger Projects presents a two-person show of collages by Jack Pierson and Elliott Puckette. Synthesizing the artists' interest in the practice of collage as well as their longstanding friendship, this exhibition presents two quite different expressions of the medium. Pierson's collages are made from cut photographic c-prints while Puckette's are assembled works made on heavy handmade artist's papers. Linking these works are visceral qualities of the finished pieces and their execution’s very skill and originality.

Jack Pierson's work explores emotional undercurrents of everyday life—his photos and collages colorful quests bursting with tropical vegetation, cloud scattered skies, and blurry human figures. Cut and assembled into beguiling abstract shapes and compositions, his works explode with vibrant color. Like much of his work—including his well-known "word" pieces—Pierson's photo-collages harness narrative content and mine his visual archive’s form and color.

Elliott Puckette's work utilizes distinct use of line: What results are abstract paintings and works on paper that reference the body, calligraphic script, and musical scores. In Puckette's painted works, the line is carved out of colored grounds with a razor blade, while her works on paper reverse the process. Starting with a blank piece of handmade paper, Puckette begins with gesture. The resultant composition is developed carefully, painstakingly, and viscerally. Meticulously painted in ink, her lines wax and wane as they journey around the paper.

Puckette's collage works deconstruct the fluidity of her elegant compositions on paper. In her own words, collage becomes "a kind of recycling, of taking old drawings and ripping them up, and reconfiguring them to create a disjointed image." Yet, in doing so she mirrors her usual labor intensive process. Her torn drawings are held together with glue, which starts to pucker underneath the layers of paper. This is "the paper having its own life," she says. This is a reminder of loss of control, and a forcible letting go.

Jack Pierson and Elliott Puckette have each had solo exhibitions at Danziger Projects. This is their first joint show at the gallery. Both artists' work can be found in major museum collections throughout the world.

The exhibit of new paintings and drawings, at the Earl McGrath Gallery Los Angeles, is Elliott Puckette’s first solo show with the gallery. Puckette's paintings have shown in New York, London, Milan, and Los Angeles since 1993, including the Paul Kasmin Gallery, Matthew Marks Gallery, and The Armand Hammer Museum.

“Collage”: Jack Pierson & Elliott Puckette

Through April 30, 2011

@ Danziger Projects

534 West 24th Street NYC 10011