The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 1000 5th ave, and 82st Ellsworth Kelly: Plant Drawings. Through Sep 3rd.

I know this reproduction sucks. It's not indicative of the work. I assure you it's my fault, not the artist. This is a really good show.

Just in case you're not familiar with Ellsworth Kelly, he's one of the founding members of the minimalist movement, and is considered one of the great non-representational artists alive today (although just barely. He's got to be about 90 years old). He's known for his monochromatic, shaped canvases combined in diptych and triptych form. His work is what you think of when you think of minimalism. His name is that tightly aligned with the movement. One of the things that makes this show interesting is that here is one of the most well known non-representaional artists of our day making representational images. What's also interesting is that these drawings were not made prior to his flat, non-representational work, nor after them. They were made contemporaneously with them. In fact, the show stretches from the late 1940's up to present day. So, what we're seeing is how Kelly sees figurative images non-figuratively.

I have to admit that one problem I have with minimalism is it's sterile, self important aesthetic. It's a movement that can be distant, and utopian in a "get over yourself" kind of a way. I've felt that way with some of Kelly's non-representational paintings in the past, but I don't feel that way about these drawings. Maybe it's the subject matter, or maybe it's the inexact tremor within the hand that creates these drawings, but there's a humility and sincerity to this work that's very attractive. It may also just be a characteristic inherent to the medium of drawing. I don't know.

There's a sketchiness in the work from the 1940's and 50's which gives way to clean contour drawings in the 60's and after. We first start seeing this with his "seaweed" drawings, which are particularly striking. Now, as anyone who's ever taken a life drawing class will tell you, there are no outlines in nature. So, once you start drawing contour's you're engaging in an abstract thought process. Kelly, a master of abstract thinking, uses this in a particularly sophisticated way. The drawings are usually made with a graphite pencil, but the lines feel like they've been made with a lazer, dividing the paper into clean cool forms. He creates a tense dialogue of positive and negative shapes existing on both sides of the outline. This is most impressively seen in his large "Beanstalk" drawing in the last gallery. Kelly occasionally uses color (watercolor), but that's usually just to create silhouettes.

Why leaves, and vines, and flowers? Well, what's most apparent in this work, and it's relationship to his more known non-representational paintings is his appreciation of symmetry in nature, and it's more subtle asymmetry. Obviously there's a great history of visual artists being drawn to the nondiscoursive delicacy and purposefulness in natures humbler forms, but minimalists? Aren't they supposed to be driven by grander, more epic subjects than a floppy banana plant? Not Kelly. What I find most revealing about this small show is how he translates natures humble, intimate abstractions into large scale non-representational paintings. He was, in this way, following in the tradition of the impressionists. I know, you're thinking "Ellsworth Kelly? Impressionism? Yeah, sure Matt". But trust me, I'm right on this. If you make the chronological transition from Monet, to Gauguin, to Vuillard, to Mattise, you can see how Kelly falls into that Modernist sensibility. Believe me, he has much more in common with Monet and Cezanne than with Mondrian or Malevich. Or don't believe me, see it your self. It's up till September. Or, don't see it. Kelly's not for everyone. No skin off my ass. I'm just trying to help here. You can stay home and watch NASCAR, and eat beef jerky for all I care.

Matthew Marks Gallery. 522 West 22nd street. Terry Winters: Cricket Music, Tessellation Figures & Notebook. Through April 14th

Matthew Marks Gallery

Terry Winters first became popular in the 80's and early 90's by creating very elegant, painterly abstractions. I'm making a distinction between the term abstraction and non-representation, because his paintings, while abstract, contained images of (or at least references to) things outside themselves. Usually he'd find inspiration in plant life, cell structure, and architectural forms like the geodesic dome. With most of this work it was difficult to determine what the images were representations of, but the drawing was always so specific that it was clear that the images had some representational source. I remember somewhere reading that Winters viewed painting as a means of creating hybrids of visual information.

Then, some time in the early 90's Winters changed styles. He did away with the organic colors and forms, and started painting these very graphic lines that would criss cross at tight angles. The lines would form structures, almost like he was making some very primitive architectural blueprint. His colors also became very garish, and deliberately ugly. Clearly he was challenging himself in order to avoid complacency. He was rebelling against the very things he made his name on, the things he was good at. While I admire his courage, and ambition in branching out like he did, I have to say I didn't much care for the paintings. I found them unresolved both aesthetically and conceptually, and I couldn't see where he was going with them.

Well, apparently this is where he was going. I'm told in the Press release that the term "Tessellation Figures" refer to the process of creating a two-dimensional plane through the repetition of a geometric shape. I guess the mathematical concept of knot theory also inspires some of the work. I have no idea what "Cricket Music" is. But, whatever the source, this is a stunning show. It consists of eleven paintings, nine of which are exactly the same size (76"x80"). The other two are slightly larger. The structure of the images are based on the grid, but are broken up into richly layered planes of light. The grids are warped, and overlap thus creating an asymmetry and an ambiguous sense of space. I couldn't help but think that they looked almost like someone had thrown a cinder block into a Rothko, thus shattering his giant silhouetted blocks of color, and turning them into broken shards flying through space. Those shards never completely leave the picture plane though. They look kind of like they're at a state where they haven't yet deciding what form to take once they reconfigure.

In spite of Winters early popularity he's always been seen as kind of a painters painter. I guess that's because he's always stayed true to that painterly non objectivist ideal, and even when the paintings weren't all that successful, he appeared to be very sincere in terms of process. It became very clear to me while I was looking at this work that if it wasn't for the Abstract Expressionist movement this kind of painting couldn't exist, but I was also acutely aware of why that movement was so important. The Abstract Expressionists, with their large scale, painterly, non objective, nonrepresentational canvases created a new and original identity for painting. A painting was no longer a picture, but an arena. An arena where activities, and interactions of color and form occur. What happened inside the framework of the canvas was not an image, but an event. The people who don't understand Abstract Expressionism do so because they never learned to adjust to this radical new way of seeing. They have my sympathy, because they truly do not know what they're missing. Winters is a virtuoso at this kind of painting.

MOMA. 11 West 53rd street William deKooning: A Retrospective, through Jan 9th

William deKooning: A Retrospective, through Jan 9th

I've been kind of busy of late and haven't had time to put up any posts, but I had to write something about this. Let me say ahead of time whatever I say won't be enough. This is a big show (comprising nearly 200 paintings, drawings, and sculpture) covering the seven decade career of a hugely important artist. If you care at all about painting, or more generally art, or even more generally visually interesting experiences then I can not urge you enough to see this show. It's always a good sign when you leave the museum feeling like someone gave you a shot of adrenaline. That's how I felt when I walked out of the MoMA.

There's a quote at the beginning of the exhibition by deKooning that reads something like (I'm paraphrasing) "I'm not interested in making a good painting, but in seeing how far I can take it". This deceptively simple statement really sets the tone for the exhibit. He's considered one of the two or three major figures of the Abstract Expressionist movement, and along with Jackson Pollock, is known for an improvisational "action painting" technique and, all over or non-hierarchtical compositions. The other thing he's known for is reacting against the ideals of non-representation by reintroducing the figure into his work. If this retrospective proves anything it should prove that this second part of his reputation is complete bullshit. He never reintroduce representation, because he never abandoned it in the first place. DeKooning never bought into the pure abstractionist ideals of the time, as the critics then would have you believe. He simply saw nonrepresentational form as a newer exciting vehicle that alongside representational form could expand his vocabulary as an artist. He embraced the contradiction between these kinds of imagery, which is one of the things that made his paintings so good. He never cared about theory, or ideology. Just painting, and damn could he ever paint.

In the first gallery we see the mark made on him by artists like de Chirico, Miró, Picasso, Mattise, and Mondrian in the 1920's and 30's. While their influence stayed with him throughout his career, they too were just tools for his ever evolving artistic repertoire. What's most visible are his amazing gifts as colorist and draftsman in these paintings and drawings . In the next gallery we see him abandon both those talents to create the black and white abstractions of the '40's that earned him his first significant recognition. Then, over the years he slowly reintroduced color back into the work.

A lot is made of his "women" paintings of the early 1950's, where the figure dissolves into the background and then reconfigures. Maybe it's because these most directly utilize traditionally recognizable imagery. One of the things I find most interesting about these works is that he seems to use the figure to describe the paint more so than the other way around. Personally I prefer the more landscape inspired "full arm sweep" action paintings of the late 50"s and early 60's. The speed of the huge house painters brush creates more pictorial dynamism than just about any modernist artwork I can think of. Some of the brushstrokes are larger than the viewers standing in front of them. No one ever made paintings like these before deKooning, and the painters that did it after him didn't do it nearly as well. Nearly 50 years later they're still powerful and exhilarating to look at.

The next couple of galleries show his work from the mid '60's through 1980 where he incorporates the figure into a landscape space. He uses a really slippery wet on wet technique that he also finds a way to utilize in his bronze sculpture. In them, the clay looks like it was so wet and slippery you wonder how he managed to cast it. The nebulous painterliness of these 2 and 3 dimensional works show the influence of artists like Soutine, but I couldn't help thinking of Rubens. That would be if Rubens were a 20th century abstractionist maybe he would have painted like this. I don't know if anyone else will see that, but I did. I know, it's a stretch but... whatever.

Then in the last couple of galleries are the late stripped down work from the mid and late 80's which I''m not too crazy about. I think they were more a product of his declining physical and mental health than any artistic choice. But, I couldn't help but feel that if someone had never heard of deKooning's work, and was walking through this exhibit seeing it for the first time, they must be thinking "Wow! Now what does he do next?" I think this is the result of a kind of enthusiastic artistic openness. When I was in art school I remember a professor talking about open and closed paintings. She said that paintings should always start open, and then slowly start to close down as they develop. Some paintings never close down all the way, because once a painting's closed it's hard to open it up again. DeKoonings work always stayed open. I think that this was so that if he decided he hadn't taken them as far as he could, he had a way to go back in, and take them further. Always wide open, like his mind.

Three Interesting Opportunities - Joanne Mattera

This reposted from Joanne Mattera's fantastic Blog. I thought this might be right for some of the artists we know.

Three Interesting Opportunities by Joanne Mattera. 

This blog is not usually a clearinghouse for exhibitions and opportunities for artists, but in the past week three interesting situations have presented themselves. Two are in galleries; one is sponsored by a paint company. What unites them is the ingenuity of the sort that artists have always exhibited in getting their work out into the world and, in the case of the two galleries, finding ways to secure funding in a difficult economic time. I'm not endorsing these projects (well, except for the third one, which I'm involved with), but I like that they put the key in a door that might otherwise have been locked. Ceres Gallery in Chelsea . 

Ceres Gallery

Ceres Gallery, a women's co-op gallery on 27th Street in Chelsea, has organized Exposure 2011, which it bills as "10 simultaneous exhibitions each week for five weeks." Yes, there's a fee, but it's low: $250--light years away from the predatory vanity gallery--and the artist retains all the proceeds from sales. Artists will be more involved than in a conventional exhibition (delivering, installing, deinstalling, promotion) but no gallery sitting is required. There does not seem to be a restriction by gender. Read more here. 

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Project Gallery Miami in Wynwood

Projects Gallery Miami in Wynwood . Projects Gallery in Philadelphia and Miami, has come up with the "Square Foot" show, a way to financially support its gallery while giving artists a way to get their 'foot' into Miami during fair week in December. There's a $60 fee. The work will be shown at the gallery's exhibition space in Wynwood. Wondering about the fee? "It’s not about living off the backs of artists," write the owners (Helen Meyrick and Frank Hyder) in the gallery blog. "There’s much more work involved in this type of exhibition than a solo or dual exhibition. It’s about working together, as artists often do, to think outside the box and to keep things going no matter how tough the going gets." Read more here. 

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For the eighth incarnation of this biennial, the exhibition will be a book. 

Encaustic Works 2011 is a juried exhibition in book form. Open to artists who work in wax and encaustic, it is the eighth in a series of biennial exhibitions sponsored by R&F Handmade Paints, an artist-owned-and-run company, located in Kingston, New York. This is the first time the biennial will take the form of a bound volume. I'm the juror. Entry to the competition is--wait for it--free! Approximately 18 artists will be selected, each given two two-page spreads. Submission is by digital entry. Read more here; access the call for entries here.

The Gallerina Guide to the Fall Openings in Chelsea

This is a very cool and handy guide that Carolina Miranda at WNYC did for the gallery openings in Chelsea.  You can view it on a smart phone or download a PDF.  More information can be accessed at her Gallerina blog here.   Enjoy!

Mexican Revolution & Beyond Exhibition

Installation Photos of Mexican Revolution and Beyond

Mexican Revolution & Beyond

The Casasola Archive: 1900 - 1940

June 24 to July 23, 2011

Here are photos of a show that I curated at Taller Puertorriqueño.  The show closes on Saturday, July 23rd.  

Victor Agustin Casasola photographs chronicle the Mexican revolution from Porfirio Díaz to industrialization and modernism.   This is an amazing collection that should not be missed.  The show will be traveling next to Brownsville, Tx.

Deconstructing by the Deconstructed: Two videos from the hood

Thanks to C-Monster.net for pointing me to these brilliant videos deconstructing art through speech and manners. I know the post is on the human figure in art but these two videos really got my attention. It is brilliant and worth watching. Art speak has been lampooned before, but never like this. Take a gander and let me know what you think.

Gagosian Gallery 555 West 24th street. John Chamberlin, through July 8th

John Chamberlin is one of the major sculptors of the second half of the 20th century, and would be considered an art star by any measure. That star first began to rise early in the 1960's, and unlike a lot of his contemporaries, it didn't fizzle out. Today he's rightfully seen as one of the leading figures of the Post Minimalist movement. Actually his rise happened chronologically around the same time as the Minimalists, but he's considered a Post Minimalist. Now, if you're thinking "Matt, what the hell is a Post Minimalist you pretentious basterd", I'll be happy to tell you. After Minimalism became popular there were a number of artists who rebelled against the principals and conventions of the movement, while embracing some of the freedoms it made possible. These were the Post Minimalists. I suppose the same could be said about the Post Impressionists, or the Post anythings, I guess. Anyway, that's a different discussion.

The Minimalists made hard edge industrial materials, not only acceptable, but preferable for art making, and made inorganic unornamented symmetry the norm. What John Camberlain did was take the industrial, shiny metallic, materials the Minimalists made possible, with all the confrontational honesty that comes with them, and used them to rebel against Minimalism's clean, reductionist aesthetic. He took discarded automobiles, and twisted and crushed them into strange and organic shapes, thus replacing the Minimalist aesthetic with a felt, spontaneous asymmetry, that was even baroque in form. It could be said (and I believe has been) that his messy intuitive aesthetic owes more to Abstract Expressionist painting than to Minimalist sculpture. His forms are more painterly than most paintings I know. I've actually heard some people say that his sculpture looks like Willem deKooning's paintings in three dimensions. I wouldn't say that, but if you want to say it I won't try to stop you. Hey, it's a free country. See if I care.

When Chamberlin is at his best his violently smashed and twisted metal sculptures have a paradoxically playful quality, and an elegance and grace that contradict the materials size and weight. That's a pretty neat trick when he can pull it off, and he pulls it off more often than not. It's also a treat to see the way he merges high concept with technical virtuosity. His use of color is also very thoughtful, and interesting. And, like Abstract Expressionist painting, it looks random, but it isn't. There was a time when it was a real challenge to get past Chamberlin's "junkyard" materials to see the grace and beauty in these sculptures. Clearly that's not really the case any more, but they are still very powerful. I have to say that I think some of the work doesn't quite live up to its aspirations, and just looks large and heavy. Eh, you can't win them all.

This is all new work though, and the fact that the guy is 85 years old, and still turning out this level of sculpture is pretty impressive. I wonder if he has help.

Betty Cuningham Gallery 541 West 25st. John Lees, through May 14th

Jonn Lees at the Betty Cuningham Gallery

John Lees is an artist I'm very familiar with. I know not just his work, but him personally. He was my adviser in art school, and he was such a passionate and kind hearted person that I've made a point of seeing every show of his I hear about. One of the things he's most known for is the amount of time he spends painting and repainting an image. There are, in fact paintings in this show that were started in the 70's. Are they finished now? How can he tell? The paint is very thick and in some places almost sculptural. The pallet is that of Rembrandt, but the surface is more like Albert Pinkham Ryder. The canvas is very worn and beaten up. He's always worked very intuitively, and in certain cases canvases have been literally cut from their stretcher bars, and glued onto a larger canvases, so that Lees could transform them into a larger composition. This is just one of the qualities that make his work extremely uncommercial.

The subject matter is always both humble, and monolithic. There are several images of a bathtub in the show, as well as a road, a farm house, a man in a chair. These are great personal icons to Lees, but he doesn't seem to feel the need to explain them to his audience. There is very little narrative involved in these paintings. There is also very little detail, in spite of the constant reworking. In fact, a lot of the paint application seems to be more about developing the physical presents of the painting than rendering the image. Lees should probably be best thought of as a romantic modernist. He treats the physical object as a fossil. It's lived a life, and had a history. One that it's shared with him.

To tell you the truth, the thick paint and battered surfaces of the paintings that were painted in a year or two don't seem that different from the ones that took 40 years to finish. At least they don't seem noticeably different to me. They probably do to Lees though, who is privy to the amount and quality of information buried under their surfaces. From my experience Lees is not just a romantic. He's kind of a sentimentalist. I think his unwillingness to finish a painting is a reflection of this sentimentality. He spends many years struggling with his paintings, and he doesn't want to let them go. For him it's probably like ending a relationship, or watching your children leave home.

Pace Gallery 510 West 25st. James Siena, through April 30th

James Siena a the Pace Gallery

James Siena is an artist that I've heard a great deal about over the years, and I'm sure I've seen some of his work before. In fact I've probably seen a show of his at some point, but he's someone I know more about from what I've heard than seen. He's know for his repetitive geometric abstract paintings that are done on a very small scale, and are painted with enamel on thick sheets of aluminum. The way he works is by creating some kind of pre-established rule or measured unit, and slowly builds out from that. He refers to it as a "visual algorithm", and each painting has its own original one. The result is a variety of different images. Some paintings are very hard edged and geometric, some are cartoon like and quasi figurative, and some have the character of a never ending doodle.

I've heard his work called intimate, and musical, and I guess those are both good adjectives. To me though the small scale just seems constrained, and stiflingly so. Also, the repetitive way the imagery is painted seems very mechanical, not to mention labored. This must be intentional, because the materials have such strong mechanical associations, but I don't understand what's gained by depersonalizing the work. There are a number of etchings in the show which seem even colder, and more mechanical. One out of every five or six images was kind of pretty, but for the most part these are not attractive paintings. I kept thinking that on some level this must be a parody of geometric abstraction, but none of the literature I've read on him seems to suggest so.

In the back room of the gallery, Siena has a group of more figurative paintings and prints. They're images of monster heads, and close up sexual organs. This caused me to look at the repetitive patterns of the first room differently. It gave the work a kind of pre adolescent therapeutic quality. I'm not sure if that makes it any more interesting though. Maybe I'm just missing something. I do that sometimes.

Pace Gallery 534 West 25st Elizabeth murray: painting in the 70's, through April 30th

Elisabeth Murray at Pace Gallery

This is at the other Pace, just down the block a little west of the other gallery on 25th street. It's a beautiful gallery, but because the work is from the collections of a few museums the guards wouldn't let me take any photos of the paintings. Fascists! Consequently the image I have here is not from the show, but from a book I have at home. It's also not a painting from the 70's.

That said,Elizabeth Murray, who died just a few years ago, is an artist who's gotten a lot of attention ever since the early 80's. In fact she received a retrospective a few years before she died at the MOMA. Personally I don't think that it's nearly as much attention as she should get, or will get in the future. She was a really great painter, and a very important late modernist whose artistic contributions have yet to be fully appreciated. Well, I appreciate them, but I mean everyone else. In her relationship to the cubists, and the abstract expressionists I see her as kind of a female Frank Stella. They were both a generation removed, and the way she literally shattered the rectangle of the picture plane was similar to the way he did, but she seems to have had more fun doing it. Her work is more playful and organic than his, and she seemed willing to allow her paintings to be pretty. That's not something you can say about most abstractionists, and there's something that seems distinctly feminine about it. Some people might think that's a sexist thing to say, but hey, if you have a problem with it, you know where I live.

This show focuses on the 70's. which is particularly interesting, because it's the time when Murray was just deciding to physically disrupt the surface and framework of her paintings. She was also just starting to recognize a relationship, and establish a dialogue between the internal and external space of her work. The show chronicles how she became more aware of the physical integrity of the paint and the surface of the painting. You can see then, how she morphed and fractured the surface of her work so that image and object became one. She ended up making distinct and original paintings that are both intelligent, and wildly imaginative. The show serves as a valuable record of one artists curiosity, and courage.

The New Museum, 235 Bowery. George Condo: Mental States, through May 8th

George Condo is an artist that's been around for as long as I can remember. Although surprisingly, he's not as old as you'd think. He first came to prominence in the early 80s, for painting what he called "fake old masters". He would reference a lot of art historical styles and imagery, and cross reference them with a lot of pop culture, and cartoon sources. These were the early stages of post modernism, so obviously he wasn't the only one at the time making these comments on high and low culture. What made him different though was (A) that he not only appropriated the imagery, but also the technique, and (B) the sheer variety of different source material he used. He contrasts Goya with Crazy Kat at one point, and Velazquez with Loony Toons at another. He takes these different styles, and exaggerates them, thus turning them into a clichés, which ultimately becomes his own distinctive style consisting of a language of clichés. The most obvious influence here is Philip Guston, the unsung (or at least less-sung) hero of the latter half of the 20th century. If it wasn't for Guston someone like Condo couldn't exist.

More than any other singular source, Condo makes a lot of references to Picasso. The way he distorts heads and faces in this hyper-cubist style is both silly and disturbing. It occurred to me at the show that he was combining Picassos early cubist experiments with his late Neoclassical period. So, the faces kind of looked like he had taken the big smooth, clunky late Picasso heads and put them through a coffee grinder, or some cubist slap chop (you know, from the infomercial), and come out with some kind of post modern cartoon mutants. To me it never comes off as parody though. He always seems very sincere in the way he handles the materials and subject matter. His knowledge of modernism's history of distorting the figure informs these faces. He seems to be channeling not just Picasso, but Bacon, DeKooning, Dubuffet, and Kokoschka. Maybe even Chagall. Eh, maybe not Chagall.

As retrospectives go, the show's pretty small. It starts on the 4th floor, where there's a large salon style wall covered with single figure compositions. They date from about 1984 to the present. I guess it's a recreation of an installation he did in 1985 at the Bruno Bischofberger gallery. Maybe it worked better then because it didn't cover such a huge span of time, but I think this was a horrible curatorial decision. Apparently they thought that because all of the paintings were of a single figure that was enough of a common thread to hang them in a cluster like this, but because it's work covering a 25 year stretch, the stylistic changes that take place made it look almost like a group show. I have to admit I'm not a big fan of salon style hangings anyway, but in this case I though it was particularly bad, and undermined the integrity of the individual images.

The third floor was better, but there were only three rooms. Two consisting of paintings of figures. Some heads, and some bodies. Sometimes single figures, and sometimes multiple. Some excellent. Some not so hot. The wall text was pretty pretentious, and I was about to blame the museum. Then I noticed there were a lot of quotes from the artist. Ouch! So, he paints better than he talks. I got to say the New Museum is a great building, but they have this habit of putting on retrospectives were the work is displayed out of chronological sequence, which I think is a bad Idea. They're doing the same thing with the Linda Benglis show downstairs, and I don't think it works there either. But, that's a different story. It kind of defeats the purpose of a retrospective if you're not going to follow the development of the artists oeuvre. I mean it's an interesting experiment, but I think the time has come to admit the experiment has failed. No?

The last room was of large multi-figure compositions dating from 1985 to the present. It is by far the most abstract, spontaneous, and I think best work in the show. The clearest references I could see were to Miro, and Arshile Gorky, with maybe a little Cy Twombly thrown in. These paintings are playful, and scary, and silly all at the same time. That's where Condo is at his best. It's his mix of sophistication and childishness that keeps the work fresh. He has the knowledge of a learned art historian, but maintains the playful enthusiasm of a 6 year old boy drawing with crayons. Personally, I'd like to see a better survey of his career than this.

MOMA, 11 West 53 street, Picasso:Guitars, 1912-1914. Through June 6th

In 1912, while in his late cubist phase, and still collaborating with George Braque, Pablo Picasso constructed a guitar out of cardboard, paper and string. Obviously it wasn't a functional guitar. Clearly it wasn't a painting (there was no paint involved). It didn't seem to be a sculpture, because of its frail materials, and because it hung on the wall in relatively low relief. It wasn't really a drawing or a collage either, because it didn't lay flat. Although, it clearly developed as an extension of collage. It obviously grew out of cubist sensibilities, but the materials were so cheap and junky looking, and it was thrown together in such a spontaneous, almost careless way that it doesn't at first look like a serious work of art. It certainly didn't look like it at the time. It takes a minute to get past the materials before you can appreciate how structurally imaginative and graceful it is.

What results over the next two years is a pretty sizable body of paintings, drawings, and collages based on the guitar form. Sometimes the subject is specifically a guitar. Sometimes it's some thing else that's clearly influenced by the structure of the guitar. He would break up, and reconfigure the different parts in the cubist manner he and Braque had invented. The one thing all the work in the show has in common is its fearless disregard for convention. When I say convention I'm not just talking about formal convention. Everyone knows what a rebel Picasso was in that department. I'm talking about materials and classifications of art forms. He would mix a charcoal drawing in with a painting. Sometimes he would combine newsprint, wallpaper and cardboard into a drawing, or mix grit (whatever that is) in with his paint. This makes it very difficult to distinguish one medium from another. The general perception is that this was groundbreaking because he was mixing real world elements in with the illusinistic space of the image. This flattened out the surface and drew attention to the picture plane, and subsequently the artifice of the image. The silhouette of a bottle in a still life or the shadow on a mans face is really a clipping from a newspaper. Another thing real world materials have though, is real world references. Contrasting cardboard with wall paper, or a newspaper article with sheet music turns an image into a dumping ground for cultural detritus. Did I mention that this was 1912, not 1985. Not Pop art, not post modernism, early modernism.

In 1914 Picasso reconstructed his first cardboard guitar with sheet metal to make a more archival version. That is also in the show. Personally I prefer the cardboard one. I also prefer the drawings to the paintings. They're more fragile, more spontaneous. They seem more about thinking through problems than making precious objects. Why is art that's made to last more valued than art that deteriorates with time. You'd think it would be the other way around. There's also something less serious looking about the drawings, which reveal a side of Picasso most people don't think of. The artist as playful intimatist. In one of the wall texts it mentions that André Breton was strongly influenced by these works. It's hard to think of Picasso as a surrealist, although his liberal use of the readymade and his blatant disregard for conventional aesthetics may indicate an influence on the dadaists. The single most pressing question I had leaving the exhibit with was why the guitar? Why not the clarinet?

Jake Berthot: recent paintings, through Feb 19th @ Betty Cuningham Gallery, c

Betty Cuningham Gallery

Jake Berthot has always had a reputation as a painters painter. He's a veteran who's never been an art star, but if you mention his name to any serious painter the response will undoubtedly be wide eyed admiration. If not, then they're not as serious as they think they are. He made his reputation by creating intuitively felt, moderately sized, non-representational paintings, with very thick, multi layered surfaces. These paintings usually contained some visual anchor such as a lozenge or rectangle form somewhere near the middle of the image, and were painted in a commitedly non objective manner. I always felt like those paintings, because of their clear cut figure ground relationship had one foot (or at least a few toes) in representational image making. Then, sometime in the late 90's Berthot began painting landscapes. In hindsight this makes perfect sense, but it was also a pretty bold move for an established non -representational artist, and at that point, a commercially successful one now entering his late 50's.

There are 13 paintings in this show (not including the two behind the desk), and two drawings. All are landscapes except for one still life. The press release claims that there are two still life's, but the second one must have been hiding when I was there, cause I only saw the one. It's of a scull and a vase arranged on a table. This clearly Cezanne inspired image, while the most specific and clearly recognizable in the show, paradoxically is most reminiscent of his early non-representational work in the fixation on, and handling of the figure ground relationship. The landscapes are less specific. They seem to be more references to trees, and mountains, and of light permeating mist than actual depiction's of them. His colors are, as always beautiful and evocative. Rembrandtesque is the best word I can think of to describe his dark atmospheric pallet as well as his elegant handling of the medium. But, he's referencing a lot of older romantic landscape painters with this work. Rembrandt is just the first that comes to mind. But, the genre is so broad I suppose you could find references from Van Ruisdael, to J.M.W.Turner, to Albert Pinkham Ryder. More interestingly though is how the relationship between form and ground in these paintings moves from indefinite to virtually nonexistent. This is a characteristic organic to the medium of landscape painting, and may be what drew Berthot to it in the first place. It challenged his conventional way of working, and forced him to see things differently; to in some ways reinvent himself.

If you're at all familiar with his early work you will recognize some of the sensibilities and devices he's become known for. In some ways he's a loyal modernist, and is still very conscious of the physical integrity of the painting. All the paintings in the show seem to be physically heavy objects that insist on being recognized literally, even if the subject matter is figurative. One device that's carried over from his early work is the use of thin wooden frames applied to the sides of the canvas before (or possibly during) the painting process. The paint frequently travels from the image onto the frames indicating that they're not afterthoughts. This not only draws attention to the painting as a physical object, but seems to contain the image; locking the viewers, and possibly the artists eyes in. A lot of painters have used some internal framing device, but for different reasons. Giacometti did something similar, but with a painted line and not a literal frame. Another indication of formal abstraction is his use of an underlying grid. This is only clearly visible in one painting and the two drawings, but the suggestion is that it's buried under the pigment of most, if not all of the others. This delicate balancing act Berthot has been playing between modernism and romanticism has served over the years as the primary content of his work. With these recent paintings the artists emotional connection to the landscape, or maybe to the practice and history of landscape painting threaten to drown out his modernist sensibilities. I don't know if that's a good thing or not, but I guess that's just his path to walk.

Chris Silva + Lauren Feece, Rubber Swords, Lovers & Fighters, Taller Pr, Philadelphia

This One Will Hold You In Her Arm, These in Their Mouths

Taller Puertorriqueño

Dec. 10 to February 26, 2011

Multi media artists Chris Silva and Lauren Feece in their show “Rubber Swords, Lovers & Fighters,” at Taller Peurtorriqueño through their work channel the spirit of discovery, humor and collaboration.  The young artists Christopher Tavares Siva, who is from Puerto Rico and his partner Lauren Elizabeth Feece, from the United States, have brought to the Lorenzo Homar Gallery installation, paintings, photographs and assemblages with drawings.   The work in the gallery was all done in the last four years from their stay in Puerto Rico.    The title of the show “Rubber Swords, Lovers & Fighters,” is both a nod to Mary Hirsch’s well known quote, “Humor is a rubber sword, it allows you to make a point without drawing blood,” and their collaboration and activism together.  

The installation in the front of the gallery, “This One Will Hold You in Her Arm, These in Their Mouths,” is a combination of found wood discovered on the beach, painted in the bright colors of the Caribbean and cartoon drawings.   It is a sprawling fort like work with drawn blue hands set apart at either end and somber faces staring back at you from walls.  It’s parts seem not to be fastened together but set near each other to create a whole.  Due to its flatness, and the somber simply drawn faces, it has a childlike quality that is both surprising and mysterious.  It could be part of a theater set or a remnant to some youthful fantasy.  Confronting it for the first time I can imagine allowing myself to be lost in its off-handed charm.

The Little Mermaid Realizes the Prince was a Douchebag

In keeping to the tone of the show but in contrast in its scale is the assemblage “The Little Mermaid Realizes the Prince was a Douchebag.”   It is a small work in the form of a flintlock pistol with a dour blue faced woman drawn on scraps of wood.  The painted and worn scraps of wood form the body, a torn sign with the word “agua”(water) in blue block letters form the barrel, and a fin forms the handle with a nail sticking out where the hammer should be.   The object is not large but hangs on the wall like an exclamation point signaling the punchline.

Sour Outlook Briefly Disarmed By Oh Holy Shit Life is Beautiful Moment

To look at their work is to think of the time they are from. They are children of the age of Takashi Murakami.  They are children of assemblages that mix history with artifacts, that cross cultures with abandon.  Where high art meets Estsy.  Where differences may be irrelevant, and function will always succumb to style.  To reflect on their scale and use of medium is to explore a certain mindset.  On the walls are individually painted skateboards.  Next to them is an assemblage that seems almost to be a toy truck.  Not far from it is a square work constructed of found wood and paper that would seem tame if not for its title,  “Sour Outlook Briefly Disarmed By Oh Holy Shit Life Is Beautiful Moment."  To take in the show as whole and accounting for their collaboration is to see the formation of a life style, a point of view, a melding that tries to be hopeful while being both playful and somber at the same time.  The found materials in the installation are from the beaches of Peurto Rico, far from individually painted skateboards taken from an urban landscape.  The cartoon imagery is from the rectangular TV screen that seemingly unites it all.    The show starts from the installation and spreads itself out, and we are forced either to laugh or cry at its easygoing disjunction.

The Reception for show is Friday, December 10th, from 5 to 8PM

Laura Battle, through Dec 23rd

Lohin Geduld Gallery, 531 West 25th street

First, I should probably disclose the fact that Laura Battle was a professor of mine when I was an undergraduate, and was something of an inspiration to me as an artist. That said, her paintings have changed a great deal since I was her student, as any good artists work should. They do still have the same intricate, complex formal sensibilities that I remember. She also still exhibits the same intense fascination with geometry, and continues to make use of the grid, but in a very different way than was once the case .

Battle's current work employs a vocabulary of marks and forms that clearly reference old maps, graphs, and star charts. Not just in structure, but in their stained and distressed surfaces. I'm calling her a painter, but paint makes up only a small part of her media. She uses a variety of pencils and markers, as well as water and oil based pigment. While her use of color is very evocative, even the work on canvas could much more accurately be called drawing. In fact there seems to be many drawings within each individual work, usually superimposed on top of one another. Transparent lines criss cross and disappear into more opaque forms, referencing architectural blueprints, scientific charts, celestial maps, Aboriginal dream imagery, and occult diagrams. Each work is loaded with sprawling, and complex abstract imagery both scientific and spiritual. It's actually kind of confusing, and makes you wonder what all these sources of inspiration have to do with one another. The one thing that ties them together is that they're all forms of exploration into unknown or uncharted territory. Battle seems to be making an analogy between non objective abstract painting (drawing) and exploration into unknown worlds and lost civilizations. Or rather that she sees art is a form of both science and mystical exploration, and that the same spirit of intuitive wonder that fuels one also infuses the other.

The work is very beautiful, and Battle has developed an undeniably elegant mastery of mixing wet and dry medium. It's also quite remarkable that as dense and intricate as these paintings are, and as mechanical as most of the drawing is, they never seem tedious or labored in execution.  Sometimes though, there does seems to be a somewhat self consciously weathered beauty to these pieces.  Also, some of the forms that make up her vocabulary seem to be derived more for formal or aesthetic reasons than for symbolic associations.  But, as simply visual experiences they're quite stunning, and if you believe (as I do) that good art should allow you to see more the longer you look then you should really take a look at this.

James Cohan Gallery, Roxy Paine: Distillation, Through Dec 11

Roxy Paine is a sculptor with installationist sensibilities. Some would call him (that's right "him") an installation artist with sculptural sensibilities, but they would be wrong, and if they have a problem with that, they can talk to me about it. A lot of people know him from the piece he had on the roof of the Metropolitan Museum about a year ago. I, unfortunately missed that, but this is in the same "Dendroid" series as the Met piece. "Distillation" is one continuous, sprawling, stainless steel sculpture, branching from the front door of the gallery all the way into the back storage room. It starts by the front desk with a large tank that looks like a water heater, which then connects to a big glass beaker in the next room, filled with some powdery yellow substance. From there it grows into a wild twisting metal form that in some places literally runs right through the walls and floor of the gallery. In some ways it looks like a giant water pressure or ventilation system, with all the valves and tanks, and meters placed at various points.  In another way it looks kind of like an enlarged metal cast of some creatures circulatory system, with what appear to be hearts placed in various thick tangled sections. It also looks like a tree lying on its side with gnarled serpentine branches and twigs reaching across the room. In one case a group of mushroom heads sprout from an extension. But, in other areas it's hard to tell if we're looking at branches or veins, or synapses. Is this monstrosity animal, vegetable, or mechanical?

In an adjacent room a wall is covered with very delicate mushrooms, and other strange wormy fungal forms, laid out in kind of a loose spiral shape. They appear to be actually growing out of the wall. It's paradoxically repellant and quite beautiful in a tactile sort of way. I'm assuming this is a separate piece, and it would be pretty interesting on its own. It's soft porous material compliments the hard steel surface of "Distilation", but it pales in comparison to the giant piece that takes up about 80% of the gallery.

The first association I made from this huge steel structure was to John Chamberlain, I guess I was responding to the twisted metal and the organic/mechanical highbred aesthetic. But, the more I thought about it I realized that , at least aesthetically the art historical president for this kind of twisting mass of a work that reaches from one room to the next dates back to the high Renaissance and the Sistine Chapel. I know that sounds like a stretch, but indulge me on this. The roots, and soul of this kind of work can be found directly starting with the era of Michelangelo, leading up through the Baroque, and culminating in late Rococo sculpture and tapestries much more so than with anything post minimalist. It's just the materials that point to late, and post modernism. Frank Stella has shown similar sensibilities in his recent work, but that's a different story. The reason I'm focusing on this aesthetic is that it's a direct reflection of the content of the work (as any good art is). What looks at first like organic machinery transforms into a kind of industrial alchemy. Paine is identifying with the long tradition of the artists role as sorcerer or magician. The title of the piece is "Distillation", and you start to wonder what it is that's being distilled, and where can I get some.

Tom Nozkowski, at the Pace Gallery, Through December 4th

I'm not sure when the Pace Gallery took over this location, but thank god they did. It's a big beautiful space in a prime area, and the previous owners (I don't remember their name) put on some of the crappiest shows I've seen in Chelsea. It was frustrating to see what a waste of good resources that was. I don't know what they were thinking, or how they could afford such a great space when they were so clearly unqualified, but I guess it's just proof that you can't buy taste or talent, try as they did. Anyway, I guess their gone, so on to the show.

Tom Nozkowski is an unusual nonrepresentational painter, and a veteran of the genre. When I say unusual, I don't mean that his style of painting is without precedent. It's not. In fact he's obviously very aware of the tradition he's taking part in. It's just that the tradition is usually more closely aligned with representational than nonrepresentational painting. There is a school of early 20th century American abstract painting that he seems to be referencing. It's the school that artists like Marsden Hartley, Stuart Davis, and Patrick Henry Bruce were members of. But, he's taking that tradition in a different direction. The reasons his work is unusual when compared to more modern abstract painting are several. For one, his scale is modest (all paintings in the show are 22"x28"), not tiny or precious in size, but pretty much standard easel painting dimensions. This runs contrary to the traditions of monumental, arena like painting established by the abstract expressionists 60 some years ago. Also, unlike most nonrepresentational painting Nozkowski doesn't make the physicality or the application of the paint an issue. There are some shifts in transparency and opacity of the pigment, but it's subtle. Equally subtle are the shifts between symmetry and asymmetry, and soft and hard edge forms. The work also varies from quite beautiful to downright ugly. But, I don't think aesthetics are high on his list of priorities. More interestingly though, there's something about the way he paints that looks like he's working representational, or maybe metaphorically (if that makes any sense). He has a certain vocabulary of forms, and while he's clearly working intuitively, or non objectively, there's something about them that feels rendered, as opposed to being the product of some spontaneous painterly event. Part of that may come from the way that the forms are cropped, or the fairly clear cut figure ground relationship that seem to also reference the use of composition with figurative images. other figurative characteristics are the occasional horizon lines, or shadow like shapes that rest at an angle below brighter more pronounced forms. It's all a way of embracing certain traditions in order to react against others.

What makes this different from other Nozkowski shows is that next to each painting is a smaller, framed drawing (all 8"x 10") that are all clearly related to the painting beside them. The presumption is then that they are preparatory studies for the paintings. This would be incorrect. In fact they are made after the painting is finished, and are used, as Nozkowski puts it, as "cool down exercises". Nozkowski, in the tradition of most nonobjective abstract painters, never believed in preparatory drawing, fearing that it would limit or stifle the progress of the painting. To the best of my knowledge, the tradition of artists making drawings from their own completed paintings is small, but not unheard of.   I know Corot did it, and so did Van Gogh. There may be others I'm not aware of, but I've never before heard of the practice used as a "cool down exercise".  It's very challenging to tradition, and it makes me think about the role, identity and possibilities of drawing as related to painting. These are pretty bold, and heady objectives for such seemingly humble work.   Clearly brains and balls work well together.

MOMA, 11 west 53rd street Abstract Expressionist New York: Through April 25th

MoMA: Abstract Expressionist New York

To use the term "New York abstract expressionist" is a little like saying "southern NASCAR driver", or "tall NBA player."  Virtually all Ab Ex's were New Yorkers at one time or another. The only one I can think of that wasn't was Richard Diebenkorn, who painted out of the California Bay Area.  There might be others, but their names don't exactly jump to mind.   Anyway, it's considered a New York movement, and it's historically what made New York the center of the art world. It's been over 60 years since these artists came to prominence, but I think they're still a little touchy about the whole thing in Europe. The show is all work that's already in MOMA's permanent collection, so if you're a frequent visitor to the museum you've undoubtedly seen a lot of it before, but a lot of the work isn't usually on display, so some at the very least should be new to you. I know there's a lot that I hadn't seen before, and I go there all the time.

It's a big show that covers a big subject and while the bulk of it is on the 4th floor of the museum, it extends down onto the 3rd, and 2nd floors. While Abstract Expressionism is known primarily as a movement of painters, there is a lot of sculpture in the show by artists such as Isamu Noguchi, David Smith, and Herbert Ferber. Refreshingly, there are also a lot of women in the show, like Lee Krasner (of course), Grace Hartigan, the always underrated Joan Mitchell, and the always overrated Helen Frankenthaler. Louise Nevelson and Louise Bourgeois both have great pieces in the show. They are also both sculptors and women, so by including them the curators manage to kill two birds with one stone.

The show starts with some of the early, surrealist inspired, quasi-figurative work that kind of got the ball rolling on the movement by artists like Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and the under appreciated Richard Pousette-Dart. Also, there are a few beautiful pieces by Ad Reinhardt, who's paintings are frequently mistaken as a minimalist. Pollocks "She Wolf"(1943) is the most famous painting in this section, and probably the truest to the surrealist technique of using automatism as a tool to unleashing images from the collective unconscious. Those images would later famously dissolve into pure automatism.   Actually, Pollock was more committed to the ideals of surrealism than most of the surrealists were. He also had the tenacity to take it a lot further than they did. But, they were French and he was a New Yorker, so what do you expect.

Art historical convention breaks the Ab Ex's into two groups; action painters, and color field painters (ignoring the sculptors completely). This show draws attention to how the surrealist roots of this movement created in the artists a fascination with, and an intense search for the sublime. So, I think you could just as easily divide them into two other categories; Ab Ex's that focused on totemic, mythic forms and images, and those that focused on intuitive, painterly abstraction.

In the first category Rothko has to be seen as the leading figure. He's represented by some powerful work in this show, and I have to say that people who can't appreciate him must just lead sad, empty, pathetic lives. Clifford Still is another great "totemic" abstractionist, but is less accessible than Rothko. Barnett Newman painted a couple of iconic images, but to me his paintings are far too self consciously important. Usually when I look at his work I want to say "relax, it's just a painting". Other artists that fit into this category would be Robert Motherwell who I have to admit I never really understood, Adolph Gottlieb, and Bradley Walker Tomlin. Both of whom I also don't really get.

Some of those who would fit into the "painterly intuition" category would be Pollock (obviously), deKooning, Mitchell, Krasner, and Hans Hoffman. Personally I prefer this second group, but some of these artists seem to have pursued more lyrical goals than tragic, or sublime ones. Pollock seemed to be able to do both, keeping a foot in each world. In some ways the same could be said for Philip Guston, who after becoming one of the leading abstract expressionists turned his back on the movement, and in some ways helped to destroy it. If Charles Burchfield is Americas Van Gogh, Guston is our Picasso.