Rockefeller Center is set to receive shamanic spirit this spring. Human Nature is a group of nine monumental stone figures by Ugo Rondinone.  This powerful sculptural tribe, each member of which is between 16 and 20 foot tall, will populate the New York City plaza from April 23 to June 7.

Swiss-born New York resident Rondinone has hewn his totemic personages from massive slabs of bluestone.  These, roughly cut blocks are replete with drill holes and splits from the quarry.

Organized by the Public Art Fund and Tishman Speyer, Human Nature is supported by Nespresso.   The fund’s director Nicholas Baume describes Rondinone’s colossi as “mythical in scale and imagery, visceral in character and impact.”  The series “reconnects the contemporary world with our most ancient origins.”

Complementing his Rockefeller Center installation, Gladstone will present “soul” on May 10, a series of small-scale bluestone figures, a show that promises an intimate yet equally potent sculptural experience.

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Photos by Manuel Arjona

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International powerhouse gallery Hauser & Wirth opened a second New York venue this week, dramatically their footprint in the city with a grand, 24,000-square foot industrial space on Chelsea’s 18th Street.  Replete with original wooden ceiling, rooftop skyline, and sweeping entry ramp, the column-free expanse, designed by Annabelle Selloff respects the former stable that also once served asthe legendary 1970s roller rink disco, the Roxy.  Vice President and director of the New York galleries, Mark Payot said, “The idea in New York is that while we have the classical townhouse space on 69th Street, some of our artists need more of an industrial setting. We looked for a long time, searching for two years until we found this and it’s been one year in the works. We are convinced this space will be important for our expansion, and will create more possibilities for our artists.”

The inaugural show is of the late Dieter Roth.  The show includes reconstructed works by the Swiss-German artist’s son, Björn, with whom Dieter collaborated for over 20 years, now in turn assisted by his own two sons, Oddur and Einar.  Revered as “a performance artist in all the mediums he touched,” Roth was an early exponent of collaborative art, and the 100 works in this show encompass video, installation, prints, and paintings.  Signature pieces like the chocolate towers and colored sugar towers have been re-assembled in the gallery kitchen, using four basic figurative molds. In 1994, the original Sugar Tower collapsed; Roth later advised Björn to use the broken busts to construct the new tower.  Roth collaborated with many artists in the course of his career, including Richard Hamilton, Dorothy Iannone, Hermann Nitsch and Emmett Williams.  Major works like Large Table Ruin and the Kleiderbilder paintings created from the artist’s own clothes are also on show here.  Organized with the cooperation of the Dieter Roth Foundation in Hamburg, the show features several pieces never before seen in the United States.

“No other artist is closer to our gallery identity,” Payot explained. “Dieter Roth is a father figure of our program, with his emphasis upon not just the finished project. His work has been very undervalued in the American market, and Bjorn and his sons have been here since mid-December to create this work.”

Visitors can stop in for a drink at the “Roth New York Bar,” created especially for the exhibition but which destined to remain as a permanent liquor and coffee bar at the gallery.  Upcoming shows are by Roni Horn, Paul McCarthy and Matthew Day Jackson, all of who have acknowledged the shamanic inspiration of Dieter Roth.

Dieter Roth. Björn Roth, January 23 to April 18, 2013, at 511 West 18th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues, New York City, 212 790 3900

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September 14 to November 11, 2012
1109 Fifth Avenue at 92nd Street
New York City, 212-423-3200

Izhar Patkin explores history, memory and personal and collective reinvention in his powerful, fluid, illusionistic panorama, You Tell Us What to Do Act III at the Jewish Museum, the centerpiece of a show titled “The Messiah’s GlAss.” Painted tulle veils are embellished with haunting imagery, draped curtains that cinematically depict powerful stills drawn from’ the artist’sbackground. Israeli-born, Patkin has called New York home since the 1970s when he first came to prominence with his famous “Black Paintings.” Known for his monumental pieces, Patkin purposely kept a low profile since the closing of his gallery, Holly Solomon, although his work is now exhibited extensively throughout the world. In 2013 MASS MoCA will show the mid-career survey currently at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art.

“The Messiah’s glAss”, an elaborate clear twelve-foot high glass sculpture, five years in the making, is the crystalline heart of this show. In an allusion to biblical references to the Messiah returning as a lowly ass, Patkin creates a flat tabletop, replete with hooved legs, translucent testicles and a serrated tail, reminiscent of a sativa leaf. Similar to the palanquin that transported the Ark of the Covenant, the table holds a handsome decapitated donkey’s head, crowned with a diadem of donkey ears. The crown gracefully echoes the classical laurel wreath, or perhaps a traditional Torah ornament. The alchemy of figuration mixed with fantasy adds to the sculpture’s potency.

Patkin has said this piece addresses the subjugation of secular Israel by orthodox Jewish fundamentalism. The title refers to the parable of the secular Jew who created the state of Israel, later to be ridden by the religious Jew. Patkin’s exhibition is as brave as it is beautiful, addressing politics poetically, without overt provocation. It is fitting that “the Messiah’s glAss” debuted the week of 9/11, and hopefully its eloquent message of tolerance will be embraced in the midst of the Jewish holiday season.

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June 20 to July 27, 2012
1 Rivington Street at Bowery
New York City, 212-358-8767

The first clue as to what is going on here is the deliberately quirky off-kilter hang of Martha Diamond’s new paintings. Small oils on board – more then two dozen of them, all created in the last two years –are hung in hypnotic groupings that mirror her startlingly original and lyrical imagery.

This new body of work has been painted with the flat, square-headed shorthaired brushes known as brights. A change from her usual choice, the Bright’s spatulate marks transmute to jazzy checkerboards, shadowy figures and shaggy lines. Best known for her neo-expressionist cityscapes, Diamond has always rigorously explored the nexus of abstraction and representation in her work. But her architectural sources are no longer immediately identifiable.

The abbreviated brushstrokes she’s now using create gestural markings and simplified imagery, leaping from the austere though under-painted Pentimento to the linear brevity used to playfully depict weather in Blue 1. A platform built of flat marks provides a pedestal for the enigmatic figures of Philosophe. The bright’s bristles are also responsible for the densely patterned surface of Conversation. Look closely and you can see two pixilated pugilists engaged in a digitalized punch-out.

This show represents the efflorescence of an artist who has always been passionate about paint, interested in brush stoke, color, image. But instead of the iconic wet on wet technique that has long characterized her work, Diamond has made what she describes as “the big-time change” to direct painting, beginning with white background and black paint. “I love black and white, and almost always start with black and white,” she has said. When she occasionally includes color, it is partly a result of seeing “what was under the painting”, and experimenting with “another kind of venture,” the artist has told me.

Diamond, who installed the show, views the Church series as a “sequence developed as a set.” Her methodology is both apparent and intriguing, beginning with a transparent wash in Church I, proceeding to thickly painted and brush-carved lines in Church III, and culminating with the elegant purity of Church VI, the last in the series.

The insouciance of the stripes began “as a torso seated on a swing.” The thick stripes provide a voluminous counterbalance to the obsidian foreground, using black as a note of emphasis and white as an outline. Radio City, with its brushy monolithic totem, heralds the bygone romance of the original skyscrapers and echoes the magical aura of her earlier large building paintings.

I have always loved Diamond’s direct, sinuous touch, the wet-on-wet technique that results in an urban immediacy. Portraying her native city, Diamond celebrates an ever-changing skyline.  In these small works, she has sought out other architectures investigating new landscapes. This is the work of a mature and masterful artist whose technical virtuosity and highly personal vision reinvigorate the act of painting.

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April 26 to June 30. 2012
64 East 77th Street, between Madison and Park avenues
New York City,  212-452-4646

Domenico Gnoli’s last and celebrated New York show debuted in 1970 at the influential Sidney Janis Gallery.  A year later, the dashing young Italian artist was dead. During the final five years of his life, Gnoli created dozens of powerful, prescient works, a selection of which are presented at Luxembourg and Dayan in a beautifully curated exhibition.  Their quirky, charming townhouse gallery is the perfect venue to reintroduce this unknown artist to America.

His signature finish is achieved through a mix of acrylic and sand resulting in a clay-like texture, which adds a sensual solidity to the transformed domestic subject matter.  It is thus not a surprise that fashion icon Muccia Prada is one of the artist’s collectors.  Certainly Gnoli would have been aware of Elsa Schiaparelli’s clothing designs, since her last show was presented in Rome in 1954. By a nice coincidence, Prada and Schapiaparelli are the subjects of the Metropolitan Museum’s current show, “Impossible Conversations.” Gnoli’s exploration of fashion reflects in close ups of sartorial details, women’s cascading hair, patterned fabrics.  His aesthetic was a direct provocation against the reigning Arte Povera movement of his times.

At eighteen, with the reputation as a precocious genius, Gnoli exhibited his early work with masters like Giorgio Morandi and Giacomo Manzù.  Born in Rome in 1933, his mother an artist and his father an art historian, Gnoli’s youthful wanderlust led him to Paris and London, where he worked as a successful theatrical set designer, an influence that remains visible in his dramatic zooms and bisected details.  As he continued to exhibit paintings, Gnoli’s work began to be included in several mid-fifties New York shows. In 1963, he married the sculptor Yannick Vu after which they divided their time between Rome and Majorca.  Yu has been crucial in organizing this show: 18 paintings of varying sizes from 1964-1969 are on display. Fragments of a bed with two human outlines beneath a patterned blanket, a surrealistically bisected brick wall, and especially the clothing images imbue ordinary bourgeois reality with an almost psychedelic slant.

Known for its august history of craftsmanship, Italy has a passion for “bella figura.” While contemporaries like Mario Schifano and Michelangelo Pistoletto explored a Pop sensibility and Piero Manzoni worked conceptually, Gnoli delved into everyday materialistic life with a unique, gently sardonic perspective.”Striped Trousers” (1969), for instance, focuses on a fractal of a man’s pleated pants, a contemplative perspective inflected by sly sexuality, the Italian eye for rigorous tailoring, and a mysteriously somber palette. “Borsetta da Donna” (1969) sees a rich, reptilian skin shaped into a structured purse.  A hint of a handle in a bizarre angle creates a monumental celebration of the iconic power of pocketbooks, long before the current “trophy purse” mania.

His monochromatic series of “Monster Drawings” create a bestiary of such wonders as a giant snail lounging on an upholstered sofa or an ostrich perched on a car seat. Prodigous drawing skills heighten the surrealistic imagery.

Gnoli ‘s deceptively prosaic subject matter belies his wholly original virtuosity, which is heightened by astounding angles and poetic perspective. These coolly contemporary images invite contemplation and admiration.

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February 9 to March 17, 2012
535 West 22nd Street, 2nd Floor,
between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, (212) 247-2111

Janet Fish, the veteran realist, is known for an opulent palette and masterfully free paint application. This show of a dozen of her luminous still lives spanning the decade from 1999 to 2009 has all the feminist clarity that has made her a touchstone since the 1960s.  Her essays in domestic focus – everyday glass and plastic wrapped fruit, borrowed antique textiles, autumnal branches, souvenir toys – are at once poetic and political. Combining defined movement with detailed arrangement, Fish’s still lives mirror her reality: shelves of glass and pottery, both in the artists Soho and Vermont studios, reflect many years of collecting. She has the ability to infuse the ordinary with hallucinatory beauty.

Fish is the product of an impressive artistic lineage: her grandfather was Charles Voorhees, the American Impressionist, while her mother Florence was a sculptor and potter. Janet was raised in the Caribbean and her uncanny dissection of light might indeed reflect her island upbringing.

The works in this show recall the grand scale of Abstract Expressionism, the dominant artistic movement during her formative years. At Yale in the sixties she studied with Alex Katz and Philip Pearlstein; her early examinations of everyday domestic objects introduced new subject matter to still life. Her work evolved from monochrome beginnings to the evocative tableaux of the present with their passionate palette and personal context.

In Blue Decanter, Polka-Dot Bowl, Suzani, (2009) the poppy, wild lily and lupine bouquet may well have been picked from the artist’s verdant Vermont garden. An anchoring green Fiesta pitcher, replete with voluptuous reflection, could be a treasure unearthed in a local yard sale. The playful wooden figurines in Russian Dolls, (2009) are juxtaposed with ruby glass cups and an opalescent blue bowl. Tassels of an embroidered fabric provide a vibrant frame, and the inclusion of lushly blooming roses echoes the handcrafted fabric. A reflective blue glass tabletop is the magical unifier.

There’s a   seductive randomness to the complex celebratory summer scene of the show’s largest piece, Balloons, (1999).  Light infused pastels evoke a clear hot New England afternoon. People are an uncommon delight in Fish’s work. The frolicking children in the grass are no more beautifully detailed then the perfect facets of an empty cut glass bowl. But Fish is a meticulous, if organic art director.  Landscape, arranged objects and figures, all amplified by Fish’s unswerving brush, create a dynamic, hyper-realistic harmony.

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The Jewish Museum’s May Ray exhibit is a blockbuster without the line, which is the result of the surprisingly little critical acclaim it has garnered.  Curated by Mason Klein, this beautifully designed show is the most comprehensive and analytical since the survey of this seminal modern artist at the Fondazione Mazzotta, Milan, in 1999. “Alias Man Ray’ includes photographs, assemblages, and paintings, and introduces little known treasures like the1911 fabric piece Tapestry made in Brooklyn before the artist left his family home; the original assemblage piece, Obstruction, a mobile of 63 wooden hangers; and the protoPop masterpiece of two silhouetted profiles kissing, Image a deux faces, (1959). The 110 cloth blocks of Tapestry, gathered from his family’s sweatshop cutting room floor, sets the standard of Man Ray’s meticulous craftsmanship, his blurring of exquisite fabrication with modernist sensibility.

As a Brooklyn Jew myself, I always knew Man Ray (Emmanuel Radnitzky) as an almost-native son. Born in Philadelphia in 1890, he soon moved to Brooklyn with his family of Russian immigrants. What I did not realize, however, was Man Ray’s fierce dedication to obscuring his origins, to the point of cropping a family photo to leave only an image of himself and his mother. Assimilation provides the premise for this illuminating exhibition, as detailed in Klein’s incisive catalogue essay: “In changing his name from the colloquial Manny to the unmoored Man, the artist lost and found himself in anonymity.”

Man Ray began his artistic career as a teenager, and these adolescent works – high school mechanical drawings- reveal a lifelong fascination with duality and concealment. An early proponent of Dada, (and a lifelong bohemian), Man Ray’s first marriage to Adon Lacroix, a Belgian poet, introduced him to French culture. In 1920 he created The Riddle also knownn asThe Enigma of Isidore Ducasse, a prescient work in view of his future allegiance with the Surrealists. An old sewing machine – aluding to the famous line from Lautreamont about the chance encounter of an umbrella and a sewing machine on a dissecting table but also, perhaps, a reference to his sweatshop childhood – was wrapped in army blanket and rope, photographed and then discarded. Man Ray recreated the piece in 1971.

When Man Ray emigrated to Paris in 1921, Marcel Duchamp (who had befriended him in New York) welcomed him at the train station. Even before his arrival, fellow Dadaists knew Man Ray’s work. Two 1918 photos, one of an eggbeater, (L’Homme) and another of clothespins and light reflectors (Woman or Integration of Shadows) were included in Salon Dada: Exposition Internationale before the artist’s actual arrival.

It was in Paris that Man Ray became a professional photographer. Vanity Fair, under the editorship of Frank Crowninshield, published two early Rayographs for theirNovember 1922 issue. Rayographs derived from a process of solarization discovered by chance in the artist’s darkroom; they entail direct exposure of objects on the photographic plate without intervention of a camera. Man Ray used modern machinery parts,or everyday objects combined with human faces or hands, in a technique Jean Cocteau described as “painting with light.” Another early collector, famed couturier Paul Poiret made Man Ray’s portraits a chic and commodifiable entity.

The subject of many of his most beautiful photographs, the young American Lee Miller sought Man Ray out as both lover and mentor. Miller also inspired Object of Desire, a drawing of a metronome capped with a photo of Millar’s languid eye. Instructions commenced with “Cut the eye from a photo of one who has been loved but is seen no more.”

For twenty years, Man Ray worked as a Parisian artist, creating such surrealistic gems as Le Violon d’Ingres, (1924) and La Fortune (1938) with its foreboding primary colored clouds, a reaction to Europe’s increasingly dangerous political scene. His fashion and society images regularly appeared in Vogue and Harpers Bazaar.. He photographed the cool crowd –from Barbette, a drag queen championed by Cocteau to Ernest Hemingway, Meret Oppenheim, Kiki de Montparnasse (another of his lovers), Gertrude Stein, Picasso, and those tourists wealthy and connected enough to commission a portrait.

Joining European artists like Thomas Mann, Max Ernst, Luis Brunel and Salvador Dali, Man Ray fled the Nazis in 1940, and went to Hollywood where he married Juliet Browner in a dual ceremony with Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning. Juliet was his companion for the rest of his life, and they returned to Paris in 1951. Late pieces like the magnificent screen Message to Marcia(1958/65) and the Smoking Device (1959/1970), with its surgical tubing predating today’s vaporizers, show that the artist continued a fruitful creative life.

Man Ray lived to become an inspiration for Allan Kaprow, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Andy Warhol whose 1974 portrait paid homage to the artist, with its unusually complex composition and deliberately blurred edges.

The premise of the artist’s desire to obliterate his history is well illustrated and further documented by the wall text, and presents an intriguing addition to our understanding of his work. But even without its investigative information or theory,  “Alias Man Ray’ is a revelation. Ray’s added artistic details are always inherently modernistic – from the solarized photos with their defining outlines, his use of inscription, to his 1947 lithograph self portrait and it’s linear bisection.

Transgressive, experimental, fiercely individualistic, Man Ray is an iconic artist who bridged European and American experience, worked creatively and commercially, and evaded any categories not of his own creation.

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The ten paintings in “The Divide” are the powerful culmination of many years research and travel. Denyse Thomasos’s long interest in the architecture of confinement has taken her to Europe. Africa, Asia, and most recently, to the new super jails Maryland. Merging indigenous structures such asMali mud huts and Indian dwellings with hi tech prison catwalks and a punchy palette, Thomasos has made an opulent creative breakthrough in this new body of work. Known previously for her monochromatic elegance, the unexpected jolts of cotton candy colors replicate industrial stairwells and the quirky hues of current fashions.

While Thomasos shows widely in her native Canada (especially her monumental wall pieces) this is her first New York solo show in several years. In October, Lennon Weinberg included her more abstract 2001 painting, Inside Wyoming, in a superb group show, “Before Again”, alongside works by Joan Mitchell, Harriet Korman, Melissa Meyer, and Jill Moser.  These new works of complexity and intensity are beautiful in their pattern making and pattern breaking, allegorical architectures that present new possibilities for painting.

The artist portrays futuristic environments that reference slavery and imprisonment. There is also an element of fifties space age nostalgia in her diagonally floating crosshatched apparitions. Trinidadian by birth, raised in Canada, now a New Yorker, the artist has a sophisticated visual language in which intense dimensionality allows for a free flow of ideas and information. Her masterful hand reveals poetry in the political.

If early modernist abstraction was inspired by nature, Thomasos’s vigorously contemporary abstraction is constructed upon imaginary metropolitan grids in which subterranean cages rise to skyscraper scale and architectural renderings blur into infinite space. In the receding passageways of Inca Matrix (2009) weirdly pastel swatches emblazon the skeletal blueprints while otherworldly structures are pierced by hot pink unwavering brushstrokes.

Form and content are inseparable in Lollipop Nation (2009) where a cage imprisons a vermillion-saturated block, perhaps a bloody heart. Of this particular piece, the artist has said: “We can live in luxury and the invisibility of imprisoning mostly black kids.” The methodically built textural surfaces of her imaginary infrastructures, as if corresponding to cultural codifications, intimate a nuanced view of oppression.

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