Glenn Brown, Oscillate Wildly (after 'Autumnal Cannibalism' by Salvador Dalí), 1999. Oil on linen, 64 x 154 inches. Courtesy of Luxembourg & Dayan

On the ground floor in the very narrow, five story Upper East Side townhouse of Luxembourg & Dayan is Glenn Brown’s Oscillate Wildly (After “Autumnal Cannibalism” by Salvador Dali) (1999). Up the steep stairs you come upon Willem van de Velde the Elder’s pen and ink drawing, A Dutch Harbor in Calm, with small vessels inshore and beached among fisherman, a Kaag at anchor and other ships (late 1640s); and then you view oil paintings by Alex Katz, (Provincetown, 1959) Christopher Wool (Jazz and AWOL, 2005) and Alberto Giacometti (Téte de Diego, 1958).  And still further upstairs, amid austere abstractions by Carl Andre, Daniel Buren, Brice Marden and Robert Morris, Betty Tompkins’ large acrylic Fuck Painting #4 (1972) is something of a surprise.

All these works are in grisaille, which here is understood not just as another color but the non-color remaining when all other colors are eliminated. North Renaissance masters sometimes painted the outer wings of altarpieces in grisaille. Imitating the look of stone, these constrained images were generally visible only during Lent. Because grisaille is perceptually inert, that non-color is ideally suited to conceptual and minimal art.  Jasper Johns’ Screen Piece 5 (1968) feels withdrawn, and Daniel Buren’s Photo-souvenir: Peinture acrylique blance sur tassi rayé, blanc et gris anthracite (1966) looks sullen. We do, it is true, think of ‘a grey day’ as depressing, but in this gallery, set against intensely colored walls, this ensemble of grisaille works is oddly exhilarating.  When academic art historians have devoted so much bookish attention to identifying relationships between the old masters, the modernists and contemporary”artists, how exciting, how positively life-enhancing it is to see the way “grisaille’ relates American and European art from historically distant periods. The great modernist art writer Adrian Stokes argued that color allows pictorial “organization to be  . . .  intricate: a mutual evocation between forms must take place at all angles and at all distances and in all directions throughout a picture, so that each part will seem rooted in its place and working there.” By asking us to identify felt affinities between very diverse paintings and sculptures, savoring the connections between Jeff Koons’s Italian Woman (1986), Gerhard Richter’s Grau (1974), and John Currin’s L’intimité (2011), all installed in front of five lengths of Joesph Dufour et Cie’s panoramic wallpaper entitled Reconciliation of Venus and Psyche: Psyche Abandoned, Psyche Wafted by Zephyrs (1815), this grisaille ensemble functions as a total work of art.

Luxembourg & Dayan has generously supported this sensationally good exhibition, which was first seen in London last month, with a lavish catalogue containing tipped-in plates, like those found in Skira publications of a half-century ago, a nicely luxurious touch.

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November 22, 2011 to January 21, 2012
525 W 22nd Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, (212) 445 0051

George McNeil, Des Moines Landscape, 1969. Oil on panel, 16 x 20 inches. Courtesy of Ameringer, McEnery, Yohe.

Dating from a period in which Abstract Expressionism was being eclipsed by new kinds of art, George McNeil’s paintings of  the 1960s show no let up in expressionistic intensity or compositional rigor. Rather, McNeil seems to hunker down for the long haul, trying to forge something solid and enduring out of Action Painting, as Cézanne did out of Impressionism. Confronted by a climate increasingly hostile to painting, he insists on the basic principles of vivid color, solid construction and compressed space upheld by his teacher, Hans Hofmann; he tightens up his compositions until, as though in response to some neglected principle of physics, gestural shapes become massive, and primitive figures emerge.

A founding member of the American Abstract Artists in the 1930s, a group identified with cleanly defined Cubist structure, McNeil found his way into more psychologically charged painting via Hofmann’s combination of expressionistic gestures with constructive discipline. McNeil aspired to be “completely sensate”, a process that, while aiming for spontaneity, involved long periods of revision, during which he sometimes resorted to a blowtorch to remove unwanted layers of dried pigment. As a student, I visited his studio in the mid-seventies: McNeil liked to start from a pile of random objects, using them to establish reference points on canvas, suggestive of movements through space. He showed us a canvas in progress on the floor, stretched on a panel – “so you can jump on it.” Pouring and scraping, he scanned ambiguous forms suspended in liquid pigments for signs of emerging life.

The eight small panels exhibited here are especially dense. Applied with gestural abandon, McNeil’s swaths of paint are charged with inchoate feelings that defy confinement by drawing. Yet out of the same passion comes an urge to organize. Even in a small painting like Des Moines Landscape 7/12/69 (1969), measured fields of deep red and blue are weighed against a yellow shape, and poignant touches of light emerge from the general flux. As with others in this series, gestural shapes suggest ragged trees and glimpses of sky, traces of more recognizable forms. Massive composition is tempered by a seductive lightness of touch, in delicate lines and traces of color suspended in translucent washes.

George McNeil, Game II, 1968. Oil on linen, 75 x 60 inches. Courtesy of Ameringer, McEnery, Yohe.

These improvisations find fuller resolution in the five larger paintings, all from 1960-1969. The open gestures of Lenox (1960) mass together, and the more self-contained shapes in Asphodel (1962) and Game II (1969) assume the weight and contours of bodies – one hesitates to say “figures”, since they emerge in a less intentional way than do de Kooning’s Women or Guston’s Klansmen. McNeil encloses and squeezes his shapes, trying to endow every area with substance. There’s something wildly eccentric about Game II, in which an elongated “leg” connects to a torso with its head downturned along the side of the canvas, contorted like one of Picasso’s Dionysian dancers. The ochre shape compressed between leg and arm exemplifies the surface tension McNeil cultivates, by lending background shapes a positive character; even the acid-green fields of poured paint around the body assume an enameled hardness, like cloisonné.

Of many artists who studied with Hofmann, McNeil may have worked out most thoroughly his teacher’s fusion of analytical rigor and raw expression. He also exploits Jackson Pollock’s practice of working on the floor, approaching his canvas from all sides, to generate images that could only arise from that process of painting. More than Hofmann, in fact, whose “push-pull” tends to rely on colored rectangles suspended against vertical curtains of paint, McNeil’s acrobats take on a total, more personal, identification with the spaces of his works; they test the limits of the frame with a full range of mobility.

References to figures and landscapes, with place names as titles, call to mind works like de Kooning’s Merritt Parkway (1959), which also cultivates breadth and simplicity. But de Kooning’s mark making is more open, and his figures tend to dissolve into their environments.  McNeil’s assume mass and solidity, even as they develop in more unexpected ways. His weighty shapes have more in common with Philip Guston’s emergent, ambiguous forms of the mid-sixties, which prefigure the outlined objects of his cartoon images.

McNeil worked on through the 1970s, increasingly isolated in New York in his devotion to Abstract Expressionism. His improvised figures – angels, mythological characters – are sometimes humorous but also heroic. In the 1980s, he emerged again on the gallery scene, superficially linked to the youth-dominated culture of Neo-expressionism. But that association, and the exuberant productivity of that period in his work, has tended to obscure the depth and rigor of his accomplishments.  This exhibition helps restore the balance; McNeil’s struggle to define imagery in abstraction argues strongly for his historical significance, both in relation to other Abstract Expressionists and to the overall trajectory of painting after modernism.

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January 5 to February 11, 2012
511 West 25th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212 989 5467

In previous shows, you had to ask to see Lori Ellison’s drawings.  Her elaborate doodles on lined paper were kept behind the desk, in plastic sleeves or retained in their floppy, spiral-bound notebooks.  At McKenzie, a number of these densely florid ballpoints have finally been liberated.  Delicately mounted on the wall, they assume their true dimensions.

Lori Ellison, Untitled, 2003, ink on notebook paper, 11 x 8 ½ inches. Courtesy of McKenzie Fine Art

Drawing is fundamental to Ellison’s practice.  Worthy of contemplation on their own terms, these works are the quaking earth beneath the relatively quiescent structurings of her better-known paintings.  Deprived of the context of the drawings, Ellison’s careful geometric abstraction can look almost too polished, too knowing.  In proximity to the drawings’ thorny touch and seismic agitation, however, these Insider paintings look a lot more Outsider.

The biomorphic logic of Ellison’s goth drawing sensibility bursts at the margins, pushing against the limits of dime store materials and human perseverance –– as urgent and resourceful as a prison tattoo.  By default, it induces mesmerizing claustrophobia.  One drawing piles up tiny wagon-wheel rosettes in airless suffusion; another seems to depict undulating skin caught in a shallow relief of ropey netting; a third could be a dissection study of spongy tissue squashed into a box.

Not all the ballpoints are super-dense.  One pleasingly restrained drawing floats what looks like a continuously bending, mile-long bicycle chain above a luminous, wooly ground.  Another airy drawing suggests an unraveling Celtic knot, with fine indications at crossings as to which strand passes above and which below.

If these images are abstractions, they are carefully illusionistic ones, with light-struck volume and precise contrasts of texture, weight, and surface.  On the other hand, Ellison can elicit dizziness by graphic means alone, as with one lapping curve motif that generates something like inside-out, space-filling yams.  Even more purely graphic are her numerous grids and webs: impossibly dense, emphatically wobbly, but geometric to the core.  And it is these ballpoint abstractions of triangles and squares, informed by the occasional lighter touch just described, that locate points of departure for Ellison’s current painting practice.

McKenzie is showing a few earlier paintings, more sculptural and imagistic, but Ellison’s recent two-color gouaches on wood panel, methodically constructed by applying a dark pigment over a light ground of near hue, are the main event.  They are calm where the drawings are frantic; polished and professional where the drawings are abject.  Even when taking direct handoffs of restless motifs from the drawings, the paintings tame these pressurized nets, cages, and cells, toeing a line of polite, measured exactitude.

Three untitled gouaches from 2011, for instance, one purple, one green, and one blue, make use of a freely tiling triangle motif.  The blue version exploits variations in paint density to release the eye into the pattern’s winding, ambiguous depths, which are only implicit in ballpoint.  When this improvisational mesh of geometry is activated, it can dance like the phosphorescent scales of a dragon.  Here, the upgrade in materials provides elegant compensation for the loss of the drawings’ scratch and fury.

But that is the exception to the rule.  The purple and green versions of the motif, though lovely, remain comparatively inert; as with most of these gouaches, the paint is applied with as little inflection as possible, flattening the image into a dispassionate, serially tinted monochrome.  The two paintings that carry off this cool approach best are lively figure-ground interplays of overlapping rectangles, which look as if Ellison had scattered decks of tiny cards over the light-colored ground, applied a coat of darker color, and then removed the cards.  Jagged conjunctions, reading as perforations, suggest fragments of Islamic ornament.

Lori Ellison, Untitled, 2010, gouache on wood panel, 11 x 8 ½ inches. Courtesy of McKenzie Fine Art

Typically, however, her patterns are both more rigid and more handmade, and any associations with sacred architecture or textiles, rather than buoying the paintings up with transcendental energy, tend instead to anchor them in the busy-work of their construction.  Two gouaches, for example, interweave negative and positive triangles into concentric oval bands, like a hooked rug, around an oval void.  Again, Ellison rests her case on the pattern alone, and this one has its nuance and starry fascination –– even, perhaps, a narrative of memento mori in the vacated portrait niche at its center.  But these modest devotional panels remain actual-size.  Their repudiation of psychic sweat, rather than releasing the pattern to do its cosmic work, seems to take for granted that the decorative should lead to the visionary.  As I suggested earlier, Ellison’s paintings can seem all too quotational: not only of tribal, folk, and religious arts, but of Mondrian, Reinhardt, and Frank Stella; of Agnes Martin, Myron Stout, and Bridget Riley; and most of all, of a generational embrace of “hypnotic geometry” –– Raphael Rubinstein’s description of the post-psychedelic Brooklyn-centric scene in which Ellison is well known.  (Rubenstein’s phrase comes from a brochure text written for Ellison, to which  I also contributed.)

At McKenzie, however, Ellison’s paintings can be seen in context as healing balms of meditative objectivity, counterbalances to the blazing obsession of her drawings. The careful craft of her small, luminous gouaches redirects the drawings’ arrested teenage alienation onto higher planes–planes to which Ellison aspires with all the dogmatic fervor of the self-taught convert.  Ellison’s knowingness, in other words, is the exact opposite of Insider sophistication.  If the paintings presume too much, it is from a rare, authentic mixture of erudition, innocence, and desperate hunger.

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November 3 to December 23, 2011
31 Mercer Street, between Howard and Grand
New York City, (212) 226-3232

Simone Jones, All That Is Solid, 2011. Four-screen 3D animation, run time: 12 minutes. Edition of 3

For her first solo show at Ronald Feldman, Simone Jones claims Marshall Berman’s book, All That is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity, as thematic inspiration. Through diverse examples, from Goethe’s Faust to Robert Moses’ public works, Berman articulates modernity as “a maelstrom of perpetual disintegration and renewal.” This duality causes an uneasy split—you can’t have ‘the good’ without ‘the bad.’ Otherwise, creative energies are snuffed out with destructive ones. Berman’s modernity is a balancing act and always on the move.

Jones’s video installation, All That is Solid, is an exercise in perpetual motion. Projected onto four screens propped against the wall, computer-generated 3D cubes, spheres, and reductive architectural models tumble vertiginously over film noirish photos of hallways and staircases. These uninhabited transitional spaces—facilitating movement from one thing to another—have the generic, institutional feel of school/office/hospital. Even if glimpses of this ‘real’ world did possess any distinguishing features, attempts to identify them are frustrated by the shapes, which continuously expand and contract, burst on the scene and disappear just as suddenly. While the photos of old, ossifed modernity pan horizontally back and forth, the geometric avalanche only moves one way: right to left. There is, however, an exceptional moment of resistance: a small cube makes a slow break but quickly succumbs to the leftward momentum. Is this the maelstrom of modernity at work in our digital age? If so, it takes time and attention—both uncharacteristic of the current moment—to catch the breach. Accompanied by a sinister soundtrack, this piece is distinctly dystopic despite trading in a techno-pastoral currency.

End of Empire is also sinister. While this 14-minute video mimics the conditions of Warhol’s eight-hour film, Empire, times have changed since 1964. Both pieces depict the Empire State Building, but Warhol’s locked-down lens fixates on (what was) an emblem of enduring glamour and success. Jones sees the Machine Age icon differently. Her camera pans up the landmark while her crane-like robot tilts the projected image onto the ceiling. In this position, it’s possible for viewers to assume the position of tourist—feet planted, head back—a stance rarely taken by locals who do not gawk at what they take for granted. The projector then tilts back down to the wall while the camera pans down to a murky, architectural thicket. Here, the grainy base of the city’s tallest building melts into air. Supposedly, this Toronto-based artist isn’t referencing 9/11—an impossible leap for any New Yorker. Rather, Jones shares Warhol’s sentiment, “I like old things torn down and new things put up every minute.”

Representative of quick, visually explicit turnover, Jones’s piece does not illustrate Berman’s split, it embodies it. When the video makes its second upward migration, the building is gone without a trace. Even Thomas Cole’s Course of Empire (1836) left some remnants in the ravenous, vegetal wreckage. Jones’s End of Empire is neither that literal nor is it as symbolically complex as Matthew Barney’s Cremaster 3 (2002). Jones’s modernity—today’s modernity—is digital dematerialization; it is both good and bad.

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Vita Petersen (1915-2011). Still from a video from 2007. Courtesy of the New York Studio School.

Vita Petersen, one of the last survivors on the New York School, died this last October in her ninety-sixth year.  She was indefatigable in her pursuit of sensual form; when an eye condition made it impossible for her to continue to work in color she switched to black and white.  It is not fanciful to see in her last works, which opens tomorrow evening  (January 26) at the New York Studio School, a nostalgia for the vibrancy and surprises of color evoked despite its absence.

It is fitting that the Studio School should host her tribute as Petersen gave countless years service to that institution as a teacher, governor, trustee and doting, and in turn doted upon, confidant of students and deans alike.  Mercedes Matter, the founder of the school, was one of the first people who befriended Petersen when she arrived as a refugee from Nazi Germany in 1938.

She came from an aristocratic, assimilated Berlin Jewish family: a descendant of Moses Mendelssohn,  she was younger sister of the future renowned medieval art historian, Otto von Simpson.  Through Matter Petersen befriended legendary figures of the New York School, among them Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and fellow emigre Hans Hoffman.

When, in 2007, as gallery director at the Studio School,  I worked with Vita on an exhibition of her recent pastel paintings, I had the immense honor of interviewing the artist for a short film about her work,  click here to view video (Courtesy of the New York Studio School).  In it she speaks of the founding of the school, her own training and how it contrasted with that offered at the school, and her love of specific forms in art and nature.   As comes across vividly in this film, shot  and edited by Graeme White, Vita was a fearless though gracious lady who balanced generosity towards others with voracious painterly hunger for sensual delight.

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Rupert Goldsworthy in his studio and Damien Skull in the Daily Mail, 2011. acrylic and Flasche on wood, 23 x 36 inches.Courtesy of Rupert Goldsworthy

SHARON MA What is your methodology for making an artwork?

RUPERT GOLDSWORTHY I like to highlight incongruity, juxtapose ideas that seem mutually exclusive. I think a lot about medium and scale and display and audience. Usually I start off with an object or a design that I find unique, it just turns me on, and I want to understand it more, so I reproduce it or I hybridize it in some way. That unlocks its mystery for me.

SHARON MA What drives you to make the work that you do?

RUPERT GOLDSWORTHY I can never paint something that doesn’t hypnotize me. My heart isn’t in it. When I make films or perform, it’s usually similar. A fascinating object or document starts me off. Maybe just a scrap in the street on a lamp-post or a line from a song, something ephemeral, something that has a beauty, a history, a poetry, a sadness to it– something elusive that I want to spotlight and commemorate.

SHARON MA You are always doing something or going somewhere. How do you manage multiple projects in different countries?

RUPERT GOLDSWORTHY I come from London, and have lived between NYC and Berlin since the late 1980s. All three cities have thriving art scenes. So I have slowly done a lot of projects between those places. I have family and work and friends there and I can earn a living in all three.

I only ever do one project at a time and I don’t juggle things. Patience is key.

SHARON MA Who are the contemporary artists you identify with, either through their personalities or artwork?

RUPERT GOLDSWORTHY I admire the mavericks and the succinct. I identify with the grassroots East Village artist-run galleries or early Soho artists more than this current moment.

Félix González-Torres was a brilliant, funny person to be around and studying with him remains inspiring. Warhol I never met but the work is great, plus he built a circle of people around him, he nurtured a scene, and created an open system, not a hierarchy. He didn’t seem a snob.

I find it hard to separate the personality from the work. The handling of the career is often as interesting to me as the work itself.  I’m interested in the idea of retaining one’s integrity both socially and artistically.

I like the subject matter of Bruce LaBruce and Johan Grimonprez and I know them personally a bit. I admire painters like Inka Essenhigh and Marilyn Minter.

I always think about the work of Hans Haacke and Art & Language because what they did remains better than what most people later have achieved in that field.

SHARON MA I read that you are also a curator, how do you come up with a theme for an exhibition?

RUPERT GOLDSWORTHY You have to find a topic that’s hot, a bit edgy, but also that you personally love and know a huge amount about. You have to extend the dialog.

SHARON MA What do you look for when choosing works to show?

RUPERT GOLDSWORTHY Because I began as an artist myself, I only like to show artists who can do something that I can’t do, usually technically or conceptually. That’s part of the exchange for me. I show their work because I am a fan. If I know I could make the work easily myself, I don’t want to show it.

SHARON MA What do you put out that is related to the exhibition, and how do you show it?

Rupert Goldsworthy, Nice One Bakery, 2011.acrylic and Flasche on paper, 54 x 30 inches. Courtesy of Rupert Goldsworthy

RUPERT GOLDSWORTHY These days I list in magazines and on facebook and make online PDF catalogs. I also write press releases and sometimes make printed catalogs.

SHARON MA I remember how you said that we should keep an eye on galleries that show works similar to our own, how does one approach a gallery, if at all?

RUPERT GOLDSWORTHY I would never suggest approaching a dealer cold, it’s better to dialog with an artist you meet who shows at the gallery and whose work you like.  Then follow up and ask them if they think their dealer or a curator might like it. I think if you are doing something good, people will find you. Artists define things: they are always the first to see a new good artist. Your peers create a critical mass.

SHARON MA As a working artist, what do you stress as key elements to being successful in the art world?

RUPERT GOLDSWORTHY Being generous and open to dialog and making yourself aware of what a lot of other emerging artists are doing. Also understanding marketing clearly.

Success in the art world is really about being a success on your own terms– being a compassionate person and acting with great personal integrity. Some of the best artists are great teachers, great community activists and/or doing amazing stuff that is not centered on any commercial/institutional-success paradigm. Being in the Whitney Biennial is clearly not the central thing, because that fame can be very fleeting. It’s more important that you make great work and really parent it into the world in a cool and ethical way.

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December 9, 2011 – January 25, 2012
530 West 22 Street at 10^th avenue
New York, (212) 929 2262

Trisha Brown, Untitled (London), 2003. Charcoal and oil pastel on paper, 107 x 126 inches. Courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co.

Trisha Brown’s long, illustrious career as a choreographer and dancer has won her many awards and much recognition. Now age 75, her early work was colored by friendships with Gordon Matta-Clark and Robert Rauschenberg, the later artist with whom she collaborated. Her choreography, featured in a video in the gallery shot by Brown herself, is athletic and gently humorous, gaining her an international reputation as an artist of supreme skill and subtlety. She is perhaps not so well known for her performative drawings—works on paper, placed on the floor, that are accomplished while Brown dances with pastels or charcoal in hands or feet, recording her movements on stage. The exhibition consists of these large sheets of paper, shown vertically on the gallery walls, recording Brown’s motions and appearing, rather oddly, like the traces of atomic movement. Relating to the abstract expressionist movement, the works on paper, part of the “It’s a Draw” series, are easily compared to the abstract, richly evocative spectrum of marks and scribbles achieved by Cy Twombly.

It is important to remember, however, that Brown’s drawings reflect a physical activity: the dance performance. While there is a direct correlation between Brown’s dances and the marks she makes on paper, the relations between the two are resolutely abstract—we cannot reconstruct the dance from the marks alone. This uncertainty actually becomes an advantage in Brown’s hands, in large part because the drawings belong to the idiom of the New York School, which gives the artist a context in addition to the defining but invisible circumstances to which the marks refer. The result is a marvelous tension between the drawings’ origins and the way they are actually seen: the works quite literally mark actions occurring over time, so that there is a fourth dimension to what Brown is doing. Like many successful ideas in art, the concept of registering motion is simple but generates an esthetic of considerable complexity. The drawings therefore may be said to possess two lives—one as a record of dancing, a different artistic activity; and another as a sequence of independent drawings belonging to the tradition of the New York School.

Most of the drawings in the show are remarkably large, with their squiggles, smudges, and blotches pinning down the memory of actual movement occurring in real time. Oddly, but beautifully, there is a moment when the memory of the dance performance and the performance of the drawing merge in an action-based insight of which the visionary John Cage would have entirely approved. Viewers must remember that Brown’s career as a dancer spans more than just one generation and argues for a tradition of alternative art; this small but genuine history gives Brown the context she needs, while the drawings themselves build whimsical structures that actually refer to the dancer’s body and its expressiveness. In the first work of the suite Untitled (London), 2003, most of the linear activity is occurring in the lower half of the composition, with the scrawls building some sort of structure.

The intelligence of the work is not to be denied and can even suggest a certain curiousness, in the sense that Brown was not thinking at all when she made her marks. But even so, it can be acknowledged that the body has its own perceptions, sometimes of acute insight. Untitled (Montpellier), 2002 consists of a suite of the large drawings and there is little stylistic difference between the two groups of works. Despite the visual muttering evident in Brown’s art, the drawings’ integrity wins out because their origins belong to another field. Brown is thus triumphant not in one but in two modes of expression, leading us toward the understanding that complexity can be both personal and publicly compelling when handled intelligently.

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artcritical’s The Review Panel  returns to the National Academy Museum January 27 at the new start time of 6.30 PM.  Anthony Haden-Guest is welcomed as a new voice on the panel where he joins veterans Michèle Cone and Berlin-based Ana Finel Honigman, and the program’s founder moderator David Cohen

Ai Weiwei’s Sunflower Seeds, installed in 2010 at the Tate Turbine Hall in London, has its first New York exposure at Mary Boone Gallery in Chelsea where it opened January 7.  Slater Bradley is showing a video titled “Don’t Let Me Disappear” at Team in SoHo, which opened yesterday (January 12).  The panelists have also picked Sarah Sze’s ongoing exhibition, Infinite Line, at the Asia Society, consisting of a small display of older work and a large new body of work, and a show by the young expressionist painter, Lola Montes Schnabel, title “Love Before Intimacy,” at the Hole.

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Sarah Sze at work on her installation at the Asia Society

PLAY OUR NEW YEAR’S QUIZ AND WIN A DRAWING BY DAVID COHEN

artcritical takes this opportunity to wish readers and followers of The Review Panel a year of stimulating reading and impassioned debate.  The New Year’s Quiz at artcritical has this drawing by David Cohen as its prize.

David Cohen, Untitled (Lunch in the Studio), 2008. Graphite, 12-1/2 x 12-1/2 inches. Courtesy of the Artist

David Cohen, Untitled (Lunch in the Studio), 2008. Graphite, 12-1/2 x 12-1/2 inches. Courtesy of the Artist

No one will say our mystery artist had his or her fifteen minutes. His/her 2011 New York show consisted of a single and singular piece that was nothing if not timely according to artcritical’s review.

Forename clue: “unless presented in the present […] art is dead.”

For an acrostic of the mystery artist’s family name, assemble letters from the clues below. All the clues relate to articles you could have read here in 2011.

HINT: The first letter of their family name is shared by our mystery artist and the artist transcribed in Cohen’s drawing.

SECOND HINT: If curiosity or the desire to win gets the better of you, use artcritical’s search box to send you to the articles from which our quotes are culled—and don’t worry, thusly “cheating” helps our visitor stats!

CLUES:

first letter of the family names of the following artists:
Insect Immigrants consists of a collection of found white doilies, each hand embroidered with a different insect and displayed to face the wall, making visible the painstaking production of each loop and knot.

One mottled, stony white figure seems part Casper the Friendly Ghost, part Ken Price sculpture… Rifling through the last 100 years of painting with indexical panache, [these] biomorphs also nod to Picasso’s 1930’s beach bathers, Miró, Arp, Richard Lindner and Elizabeth Murray but function together as if [the artist] snapped a shot at the right moment at a party.  There is an interesting tension between what is guided and what is a more randomized gesture.

[the artist's] “efforts at attaining an art free from form and style was dirty and laborious business. These deeply emotional canvases present bewilderingly dense surfaces in which energy feels trapped, pulsing beneath craggy mountains and cavernous pools of oil paint… There is a sense of a slow, forceful swirling motion, like a maelstrom gathering energy

”The artist’s speed of production mirrors [his/her] interest in the rate at which new technologies reach obsolescence, a theme central to his practice.  Equal parts hacker and historiographer, X’s meditations on authenticity, access, and authorship speak to [his/her] politics of open source culture: the exhibition “catalogue” is a downloadable PDF and the artist encourages the viewer to reproduce [his/her] works at home.

[painting] “uses color and stain to denote distance and differentiate the play of light and mist on receding hills with the polite subtly of a watercolor, despite its nine feet width and its being acrylic on canvas.”

first letter of this artist’s forename:
“The projecting and hanging rock formations, partly body, partly landscape, bring to mind venerable traditions of Chinese art: landscape painting, certainly, with rocky heights floating among clouds, seemingly disconnected from the earth, but more specifically the miniature rock formations that became popular during the T’ang Dynasty.”

first letter of the author’s forename and of the mental condition cited
If you’re prone to fits of [mental condition], the 25th floor of the John Hancock Center may not strike you as the ideal location for an art gallery.  But staying abreast of the latest shows in Chicagoland requires precarious treks across neighborhoods, dizzying sprints up skyscrapers, and even trips across time-zones, all while maintaining your balance.  On rare occasions, it means facing your fears.

Use the comments box below to submit your answer.  The prize cannot be won by employees of artcritical LLC  though they are welcome to play.

AND THE WINNER IS…

Congratulations, Juan Manuel Bocca, on being the first reader to identify the mystery artist.  Jim Walsh and Erika Schneider got it right the next day and will receive runners up prizes.  Everyone else, please continue to play and a sketch might finds its way to you, too!