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.

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 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?

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.

Datebook: Aug. 5, 2010 - WNYC Culture

Copied from Gallerina at WNYC. She is always worth reading.   ( Carolina A. Miranda is Gallerina . She writes the culture section at WNYC and and the C-Monster blog.   She does great job of finding interesting things around NYC.)

She is always worth reading.

Artsy books sales, Brooklyn art walks, and a Spanish-language film festival.

Here's your guide to what's happening now.

The David Zwirner Pop-Up Bookstore, at David Zwirner Gallery in Chelsea. An excellent opportunity to fill your creaking shelves with rare and out-of-print art books, as well as signed artist catalogues. Opens Monday and runs through next Friday, in Manhattan.

First Thursday Dumbo Gallery Walk, in Brooklyn. A bevy of neighborhood galleries and art spaces are participating in Dumbo’s monthly arts walk, including the artsy bookshop PowerHouse Arena, the Henry Gregg Gallery and the Dumbo Arts Center. Be sure to pop into Mighty Tanaka, on Jay Street, to check out a photographic group show devoted to all things New York City. You can find a downloadable map with all of the participating galleries right here. This evening, from 5:30-8:30pm, in Dumbo.

Sharon Butler, Joy Curtis and Cathy Nan Quinlan, On Display, at Storefront, in Bushwick. At this relatively new Bushwick art space, blogger and critic Hrag Vartanian (of Hyperallergic) has organized a show that examines abstraction in myriad ways. Butler’s paintings are pre-occupied with color and form, Curtis’s sculptures reconfigure the shapes of found objects like battered picture frames and Quinlan’s paintings give ordinary items a surreal flicker. Should be an excellent opportunity for some contemplative gazing. Opens Friday at 6pm, in Brooklyn.

Beth Livensperger, Visible Storage, at the Abrons Arts Center. Precious items sheathed in glass are the current obsession of this New York-based artist, known for her painterly renditions of institutional interiors. This series of paintings — which depicts the visible storage rooms at the Metropolitan Museum of Art — seem to smirk at the way in which humans hold objects in high esteem, by rendering them ordinary, piled high in clear vitrines like objects for sale at a common sidewalk shop. Opens this evening at 6pm, in downtown Manhattan.

Hector Canonge, Epistolar, at 58 Gallery in Jersey City. At the intersection of nostalgia and tech-savvy interactivity lies Epistolar, a 2009 installation crafted by the New York-based Canonge. In this piece, a series of albums contain photographs and other images, as well as barcodes, which viewers swipe with a common price scanner (of the sort used at department stores). The result: the myriad stories behind the image reveal themselves on an overhead screen. Opens this evening, in Jersey City, N.J.

Verano Tropical, a film festival at the Instituto Cervantes. Once a week throughout the rest of the summer, this institute, dedicated to all things Spanish-language, will be holding weekly screenings of Latin American movies, including features and documentaries from Peru, Cuba, Argentina and Mexico. Screenings – which are free – are held on Wednesday evenings. Up next is Sisters, an Argentinean feature film chronicling the lives of two siblings who come together many years after the country’s brutal dictatorship has driven them apart. Through Aug. 25, in Manhattan.

Datebook: Aug. 5, 2010 - WNYC Culture

Lee Bontecou & Bruce Nauman @ MoMA through Aug. 23 & 30

Lee Bontecou: All Freedom In Every Sense, through Aug 30

Bontecou is an artist whose work caught my eye a few times while wandering through MOMA's permanent collection. I think I may have also seen her work in some other museums modern collections, but I can't remember where. Anyway, the work I saw, and that registered in my mind were the large, imposing canvas and metal wall sculptures that she is most known for. She made most of these pieces between 1959 and 1967. I liked them because they seem to fit into that late modernist school of painting that Frank Stella and Elizabeth Murray are part of, where the flatness of the canvas/picture plane literally morphs, and changes shape, so that the sheer physicality of the work causes it to subtly enter the realm of sculpture, but not quite. Unlike Stella and Murray though Bontecou's work seemed somewhat threatening, and ominous. Some look like giant mouths, or post apocalyptic vortexes. I'd only seen a few of her pieces though, and was intrigued to see what else she'd done.

I was more than a little disappointed to see that the whole show fit into one gallery. Apparently she moved to rural Pennsylvania in 1971, and the work she's made since hasn't gotten her much attention. There are a number of drawings and lithographs in the show that seem to be very surrealist or futurist inspired, at least in form. Some of the more interesting ones are made with the soot that was expelled from her blowtorch. But, those are really only interesting because the medium is so unusual. The drawings made from more conventional means are not so interesting, and look like studies for three dimensional work that's no where to be seen. In the middle of the gallery is a very dynamic spinning mobile that apparently she's been working on for 18 years. It's very beautiful, but I would have liked to have seen more of the big cavernous wall sculptures. Unfortunately there were only 2 in the show. I guess I was expecting more of a retrospective of sorts. Technically I suppose this is one, but I would have liked to have seen more work, and learned more about this artist. What I walked away with was that some 45 years ago she made some pretty arresting and important work, and everything since has been kind of a let down.

Bruce Nauman: Days, through Aug 23

This is a very impressive sound installation by one of Americas great living conceptual artists. As a rule I'm not a huge fan of conceptual art, but I am a fan of Nauman. It's kind of hard not to be. If you've ever seen his work, you remember it. This show consists of about a dozen thin white square speakers suspended by wire cables that reach from the floor to the ceiling. Coming out of the speakers are the recorded voices of children and adults reciting the days of the week on a loop. Some of the voices are men, and some are women. Some are old, and some young. Some recite the days in the correct order, and some don't. The speakers face one another from about 12 or 15 feet away, creating a path that the visitor is encouraged to walk through. There's also plenty of room to walk around or behind them. Nothing's hidden, or disguised as anything it isn't. Like most of Naumans work I don't know what the hell it's about, but it's a very elegant and hypnotic installation. If you get a chance you should get your ass over there. Good stuff!

Where to Watch 4th of July Fireworks!!!

4th of July Weekend

Where to watch go here

Photos of 4th July

What is happening in NY from the latin community go here 

Claude Monet: late work, through June 26t @ Larry Gagosian

Hat's off to Larry Gagosian for this one. This is a show of 27 paintings from museums and private collections all over the world, that must have cost a fortune to insure, being shown in a commercial art gallery where not a single painting is for sale. That's a rarity. It's also a great show. I know that sounds like it should go without saying since it's Monet, but since he lived to such a ripe old age, and was so prolific, not to mention commercially successful, he did tend to occasionally crank out some half hearted, conveyor belt work. None of that can be seen in this show.

Monet is one of those painters that everyone likes, or at least anyone with a heartbeat should. Today his work is very accessible. Every 16 year old suburban white girl has a poster of one of his paintings in her room, probably next to her collection of beanie babies. This makes it kind of hard to imagine that throughout most of his lifetime his work was seen as radical and difficult to appreciate, but it was. This show concentrates on his late work. After he became wealthy and established he bought his home in Giverny, and painted the large luxurious garden he had built around him. If this sounds decadent or bourgeois, it was. Get over it.

The show covers the years 1904-1924, and is divided up into four galleries. The first three consist entirely of images of water lilies. These make up only a fraction of the water lily paintings he created over these years, a subject that obsessed him so much you'd think he was Kermit the frog. The thing that struck me when I walked into the first of the four galleries was that this work seems to have foreseen, and in some ways laid the groundwork for non-representational art. The way he translated light into paint using a few simple color choices, and in such a physical and tactile way suggests that he was recognizing the surface of the image, and the painting as a literal object. The contrast between the thick impasto of the pigment, and the bare primed canvas is undeniably viscerally beautiful. You can see the influence of these paintings in the work of Joan Mitchell, Hans Hofman, and the early paintings of Philip Guston. Some people have suggested that this was because he was loosing his eyesight, and he needed some tactile clues to construct his images. Who knows? Another thing that suggests a move toward abstraction is the unusual compositions of these late paintings. They lack a clear focal point, or a visual anchoring structure that's used in almost all figurative pictures. Because of this, and the way they're oddly cropped some of them look almost like details of larger images. Also, it's not always clear where the viewer is in relationship to the picture plane, or the imagery inside it. One could see these as early prototypes of the non-hierachtical, all over paintings of Jackson Pollock, or William deKooning.

Something else occurred to me as I entered the third gallery of the show. These are some pretty complicated images. We're not just looking at the water lilies floating on the surface of the water. We're seeing the sky and trees, and clouds reflected off of it. We're also seeing the light passing through the water. And, in some cases we're seeing flowers growing out of the lilie pads, and branches and vines hanging in front of the water. So we're seeing the surface of the water, the sky above it, the water below it, and the things on and in front of it. The whole image is about how light conveys information. It's the furthest thing in the world from being non representational. In fact it's ultra representational. It's much more about representing what he saw than most typical representational painting at the time was. Maybe the reason his compositions were so unconventional was that he was losing interest in making pictures, and becoming more interested in studying nature and the effects of light in it. Maybe he wasn't defying the conventional relationship between the viewer and the picture plane, but simply ignoring it. Or, that the unpainted areas on his canvases were there because he didn't feel the need to complete the picture. Maybe after decades of painting from nature, he'd become more interested in studying it than in making art. His interest in natural light was possibly greater than his interest in picture making. I know these are two totally contradictory interpretations of his work, but I think both are equally valid.

The last gallery (1918-24) is the only one that departs from the water lily subject matter. Here we see paths, and bridges from his garden that are painted in a flurry of spontaneous brushstrokes. The colors are almost violent in their richness and intensity. One painting of a Japanese bridge is so impassionately rendered that it makes Van Gogh look like Thomas Gainsborough in comparison. But, I think the thing that makes these late paintings so important in retrospect is the unusual place Monet positions himself as an early modernist pioneer. Usually toward the end of an artists career (particularly such an established, and commercially successful one) the work can get complacent. The fact that this work is both so very figurative and so very literal at the same time shows the brilliance, curiosity and balls-out ambition of Monet to have the audacity to end his career with a question mark.