April 2 – May 8, 2015
528 W 26th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 315 0470

A work of art being so much more than its physical makeup, you can’t classify an artist simply by her knack for manipulating materials. And yet, when paired with a nimble poetic sensibility and a fervent desire to plumb the farthest corners of human experience, aptitude can occasionally ascend to genius. Such is the case of artist and poet Etel Adnan, who at the august age of 90 is finally getting the attention she deserves. The show of her work now on view at Galerie Lelong — a tidy selection of paintings, pastels, tapestries, makimono (Japanese folding books), and a single film — speaks to two things: Adnan’s endless fascination with “the miracle of matter itself,”[1] and her unshakeable belief that there is much more to this world than matter, accompanied by a passionate impulse to explore what lives both within and beyond it. Adnan’s art is a love song to the Universe, and it is our great fortune to have been invited here to bear witness.

Adnan’s semi-abstract compositions are compact, often no larger than 13 x 16 inches, presenting patchwork vistas built up out of numerous teeming and opaque parts. They look not meticulously designed but more intuitively improvised, each distinguished by the brusque yet sensitive juxtaposition of thick bands of color. The paintings in particular are very worldly, yet the planet they evoke is not one riddled with toil and grit (as depicted in Adnan’s literary works such as The Arab Apocalypse and Sitt-Marie Rose) but rather a relaxed, clarified version as seen through the eyes of someone who has glimpsed the bigger picture: mountains, ravines, the skyline, the sea, all rendered in a controlled palette of piquant hues. In Untitled (2014), for example, uneven slabs of taxicab yellow, olive green, rich caramel, and tawny are tempered by a stout sliver of bright cornflower blue; the recipe is unusual and arresting. But the mood is, above all, self-possessed. The images elicit a solid, sturdy calm. They do not move, or when they do, it is by a slow surge of coarse abutting forms or sharp diagonals, careful collisions propelled by broad, textural strokes. Like tectonic plates that shift mere inches over thousands of years, peaks growing slowly skyward.

The internal sense of gravity bestows urgency on these small surfaces and turns them into something other, and more tangibly compelling, than mere decorative objects. Adnan applies her paints with a palette knife, and always on a table or flat surface rather than an easel. As a result her images look putty-ish, almost edible, nourishing even, and somehow more substantial than your average spread. Untitled (1989), the oldest painting included in the show, is especially ripe. Where mossy green pushes up against creamy citron yellow, the two colors are rendered more distinct, yet also manage to merge into a dynamic structure that encompasses the whole. Sky blue, crackled black, tan, Kelly green, and a smear of dusty lilac are at once offset and unified by two dashes of raspberry red, an indiscriminate equal sign. The three pastels (all 1970), conversely, are confections scribbled on paper, their many squarish harlequin morsels coming together with “the suddenness of an island in one’s life.”[2] The total image is lovely, but forceful and fluid in the way a single, soft line is, not unlike the inky trails that delineate the unfurled makimono.

The Universe keeps creeping in, mainly in the color combinations, which are pleasantly disarming and never compromise. The tapestries seem to bustle and buzz with pulsating tones of lime green, blood red, and ochre, while the paintings are more poised and minimal: two milky tones of blue cut with hillocks of tender peach and elephant gray. Adnan’s whites are never flat, but dimensional, tinged with the slightest hint of puce or beige. She is a smart, conceptual colorist. Her sense of art, the seemingly impossible act of reflecting the subjective self and the objective cosmos simultaneously, is moored in the future. She is always reaching forward, though not in a spirit of prophecy, but of hope. Her work may share certain aesthetic qualities with that of, say, Arthur Dove or Hans Hofmann, but it carries an attitude all its own. When describing her artistic process, Adnan once said: “What you do is make your composition. You trust your… shapes, your gestures. You trust that something beyond that will come through even if you don’t know exactly what.”[3] This is an artist who dares to push beyond the empirical, adjusting and challenging the maps we’ve made to navigate our selves, our world, and what we think we know about them. The experience, if somewhat troubling, is terrific.

[1] Adnan, Etel. Journey to Mount Tamalpais. Sausalito, CA: Post-Apollo Press, 1986. 63.

[2] Adnan, Etel. Seasons. Sausalito, CA: Post-Apollo Press, 2008. 30.

[3] Weaver, Kathleen. “The Non Worldly World: Conversation with Etel Adnan.” Poetry Flash, May 1986 (No. 158).

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January 10 through February 22, 2015
60 N 6th Street (between Wythe and Kent streets)
Brooklyn, 718 599 4884

In the event that it ever becomes possible to X-ray the human imagination, the results will presumably look a lot like Susan Bee’s “Photograms and Altered Photos from the 1970s.” The dozens of small, unframed works included in this exhibition feature hand-drawn squiggles, primal daubs, imperfect patterns, and bleached silhouettes of found materials that reach out of darkness like weeds or the dreamy remnants of a half-formed thought. All rendered within a dense yet fluid spectrum of surprisingly nuanced (if yellow-tinged) grayscale, the images could also just as easily be isolated stills from a tenderfoot animated film or snapshots beamed from some corner of the Universe where the earpiece of a rotary telephone or pair of scissors float amid other random bits of cosmic detritus. A number of pieces are also whimsically hand tinted, embellished by thin pastels and near-neon hues that scrape and bundle their way through an eerie not-quite black-and-white world. Overall, the collection is inquisitive and crisp, containing something of the prime quality W Somerset Maugham once ascribed to rum punch: it has “the vagueness of music and the precision of mathematics.”

The works are presented in clusters of series, each marked by its own thematic and aesthetic parameters. One sequence, shown on the gallery’s north wall, is reminiscent of the gangling, angular microbes one might find under a microscope and the patchy cultures grown in a Petri dish; others, on the south wall, evoke Anna Atkins’s botanical impressions of plant life and the Impressionists’ proclivity for employing thick upward strokes to capture the bloom and sway of a vertiginous sweep of lawn. Untitled (ca. 1979) is especially energetic, its many blurred, fern-shaped cross-sections flushed with soft cerise, peony pink, rheumy chartreuse and cornflower blue. Another series, this one pinned to the east wall, is more formal and austere, containing only a few colorless overlapping triangles of various weights and sizes. Here, each photogram focuses intently on the interaction of forms and subtle shifts in tone, not unlike Josef Albers’ Homage to the Square series. This attention to relationships between items anticipates the careful relationships Bee now establishes between figures in her current painting practice. One can see the connection, but also the distance travelled. Who knew that addressing how one triangle converses with another, or how two equilaterals act when forced to lean into each other and share a single space, could be so tender, or so telling?

Despite their many differences, these works all have one thing in common: they are, first and foremost, exploratory. Created during and after the time Bee was writing her graduate thesis on the photograms of László Moholy-Nagy and Man Ray, many of the images feel like direct echoes of those she studied so intently, made using whatever objects she found lying around her studio. The process has the effect of making even the most mundane office supplies appear ghostly and phenomenal, giving everything from nuts and bolts to tape dispensers and unruly tangles of wire a second life, or perhaps only the shade of a life. Yet their mimicry is not a flaw, but rather the key to their distinction. These works designate one phase in the career of a deeply curious artist who makes in order to understand, producing works that feel kinesthetic and engage in a pedagogic dialogue with their source material. They are tests — then for the artist to make, and now for the viewer to observe. They are a game, an exercise, a puzzle that not only challenges you to ask, “What is that thing?” but then dares you to go ahead and fill in the blank.

In this critic’s opinion, the photogram is a dramatic but inherently limited medium, very much in the line of “you’ve see one, you’ve seen them all.” But here, the singular experience of viewing and time traveling with the artist slices right through the material’s potential shortcomings. These works are the unassuming glimpses of a younger, more uncertain self, the apt pupil who holds the camera and looks right past us and into the future in Untitled (1977). We don’t know what she sees, but perhaps we can begin to imagine.

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The small show of Vasily Kandinsky’s early work, now on view in the third floor annex of the Guggenheim Museum, offers an intimate, insightful glance at the more formative years of this celebrated artist’s career. The 16 paintings and woodcut prints included in the exhibition highlight a period of inquiry, exploration, and discovery, the decade during which Kandinsky began testing the boundaries of his aesthetic credo and barreling toward his eventual ascension into the heady realm of pure abstraction. And although the low ceiling, low lights, and somewhat disjointed hanging scheme do not quite do them justice, the works themselves are a joy to behold: not only are they lovely and challenging, but they reveal a great mind on the verge of genius, toiling to piece together the aspects of a grand puzzle whose total image would change the face of art and the modern paradigm forever after.

The four early landscapes — picturesque en-plein-air sketches of Munich and Amsterdam — are studious and impressionistic, their subject matter and thick, gestural brushwork emulating the work of Monet. Though the mastery of color that characterizes Kandinsky’s later blockbuster Compositions had yet to materialize, one can sense his curiosity and desire to push his palette further, to release each color from its expected role and see what it might otherwise be capable of. In Amsterdam – View from the Window (1904), for example, there is a palpable tension between tradition and innovation. For all its richness and loose suggestion of form, the painting is still a representational rendering of the empirical world, and everything in it is more or less as it should be: the grass is green, the bricks are red, the sky is blue, and the city sits comfortably on its axis, extending out from a level and distant horizon. Fishing Boats, Sestri (1905) and Pond in the Park (1906) find Kandinsky compressing the picture plane and honing his attention to color, creating increasingly delineated zones in unexpected hues like ochre and cerulean with a vigorous back-and-forth of the brush.

Also included in the show are six woodcuts — four black-and-white and two tinted with metallic paint (all 1907) — whose presence feels largely didactic, serving as stepping-stones into Kandinsky’s next, more pioneering painterly phase. By removing the necessity of color, the medium forced Kandinsky to focus on simplified shapes, careful composition, and the manipulation of space, both in regard to truncated perspective and the rhythmic alternation between inked and non-inked areas. A few of the later jewel-toned paintings, including Landscape near Murnau with locomotive (1909) and Landscape with Rolling Hills (1910), retain the woodcuts’ flat, blocky shapes and further manipulate the space within the picture plane, suspending gravity and tilting the ground at such a pitch that the trees, houses, and clouds seem as though at any moment they might float away or tumble right out of the canvas.

From 1908 onward, Kandinsky began to gradually abstract and strip away recognizable imagery in favor of placing the emphasis on painting itself. Group of Crinolines (1909) marks a major shift in this direction, depicting a luncheon party à la Manet in an expanded palette of vibrant pastels that leans toward the secondary, slanted hues of the Fauvists. On a distinctively larger canvas, eight men and women stand stiff and flat as paper dolls against a highly abstracted countryside, their faces rendered in shades of celery green, lilac, citrine, and ice blue. Close inspection rewards the viewer by revealing a pleasurable trick Kandinsky has played, for the near-neon hues are tempered not by black, but rather by colors that adroitly tip toward black: deep navy or teal, olivey green, or overripe plum. The brusque juxtapositions of Braque’s early landscapes are fused with the scribbled, aggressive marks of Kirchner, giving one the sense that the objects are still isolated but on the cusp of dissolving into a raucous din of color and light.

By the time he painted Pastorale (1911), Kandinsky was squarely en route to abandoning representation altogether, his female figures and their bucolic surroundings blurred into vague, fuzzy fields of buttery yellows and dusty whites accented here and there by saturated shades of blue, pink, and green. His use of color is more material and his composition loosens up, allowing for a new kind of space to enter the picture. As art historian John Golding once observed, this is the moment where:

Kandinsky’s blues, his reds, his yellows, are becoming nouns, objects, substances in their own right: blue is blue, red is red, yellow is yellow… and the pocketing of space, both visually and psychologically, suggests a space that can engulf us. To this extent the picture plane now carries with it implications of concavity; as our eyes penetrate into individual areas, compartments of visual activity, others swim out to the periphery or sides of our field of vision.[1]

Within his first decade as a serious painter, Kandinsky successfully unlocked and activated a realm of aesthetic experience that reverberates through the annals of art history and still has the capacity to inspire awe, and often render viewers speechless. In the year following Pastorale he went on to co-found Der Blaue Reiter and publish his seminal text, “Concerning the Spiritual in Art.” I, for one, am glad to live in an age where these breakthroughs are safely behind us, and can be brought together and marveled at simply for the price of admission.

[1] Golding, John, Paths to the Absolute. (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2000), 90.

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With her installation at the Brooklyn Museum, entitled “Submerged Motherlands,” New York-based artist Swoon (Caledonia Curry) has come home in full force. For the better part of the last decade, Swoon has brought her particular brand of socially conscious and thoughtfully impermanent street art around the globe, from the banks of the Hudson to New Orleans to Venice to Haiti. Her creations, like a turn of phrase by poet Ann Lauterbach, powerfully convey “something in the mix of habit and hope.” They’re lavish yet down-to-earth, full of youthful dynamism and the fragility of time. Swoon combines found materials, expressionistic figure drawing and intricately detailed patterns on a grand scale, layering personal narrative and community crises into a dense, dramatic outpouring of lovingly curated objects. Of late, she has emerged alongside such artists as Ai Wei Wei and Shirin Neshat as a master of a kind of civic-minded, positively impactful art activism that is often as exquisite as it is challenging.

“Submerged Motherlands” has engulfed the entire Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Gallery on the Museum’s fifth floor, transforming it into a dreamy ad hoc jungle village where the sea has crawled up to marry the land. An enormous tree stands tall at the center of the gallery’s rotunda, reaching gracefully up to the skylight, its limbs draped and dripping with delicate circular paper cutouts. Flanking the tree’s massive trunk — which is woven from long, vertical strips of fabric, each dyed a different muted tone — are two ragtag boats that the artist previously floated down the Mississippi River (in 2006), the Hudson River (2008) and into the Venice Bienniale (2009). Sets of mirrored cardboard figures radiate outward from the heart of the installation, looming large like sentinels or sphinxes, deities that bless and protect the space within. One is a pair of Incan mothers, arms outstretched as they gaze skyward, with matching crowns made of tentacles and breastplates of crabs’ legs; another couple resembles plump, seated Buddhas, each sporting a careworn grimace and a bandaged hand. Here, the mundane and discarded have been invigorated and made beautiful; waste has been turned to want.

Everywhere the viewer looks there is something new to see: on the walls, the floors, the ceiling, in every nook and crevice. The forms are sundry and precise, and the textures and colors created by the play of light are splendid. According to the artist, the piece was conceived as a response to Hurricane Sandy, which struck the Atlantic Coast in 2012, and to the great tsunami that destroyed Doggerland, a landmass that once connected Great Britain and Europe, 8,000 years ago. References to the sea are pervasive: ornate mandalas and medallions made of thick lines sketched in marker on cardboard echo shells, aquatic plants and cephalopods, while the walls have been splashed with various jewel tones of blue. By fusing these maritime elements into the larger landlocked installation, Swoon rhythmically reiterates the simultaneous life-giving and life-threatening force of water, reminding us that the key to our existence and extinction lies curled in the crest of every wave. And while the artist’s style of mark making is decidedly street, embodying a frenetic sense of forward movement, the overall effect is calm, almost otherworldly, as though viewed from the quiet recesses of the ocean floor.

When faced with this magnanimous installation, one realizes the aptness of the artist’s pseudonym: Swoon. It is little wonder that standing in this space evokes a rush of emotion, like falling in love or the flush before a faint. There is a sense of safety, but no comfort, for to swoon is the body’s defense against perilous circumstance — extreme heat, fear, or fever, say — the moment when consciousness becomes too much to bear.”Submerged Motherlands” feels like the moment before that moment, or perhaps the one just after, when delirium sets in and sends the mind reeling, everything at once impossibly fuzzy and terribly clear. You focus on a single spot at the core of your vision while mirror images bloom along the periphery. Shapes and shadows swirl and flutter, multiplying and expanding until all dissolves into the unknown.

On a more literal note, the installation is also meant to be a memorial to the artist’s mother, who became ill and passed away during the gestation phase of the project. Swoon is very aware of her loss, and that awareness (and wariness) presses her toward an intimate way of making art that both embraces and cautions the viewer. Every aspect of the installation feels personal, and poised just so, as though it could collapse at any moment. Like a site-specific sculpture by Sarah Sze, the work is elaborate and immense but also vulnerable, forever on the verge of falling apart. In it, ideas of shelter and exposure, past and future, life and death are folded together into the very real, often difficult, often lovely median state where we live. The figure of a mother breast-feeding her child, or a skeletal woman whose bones are wrapped around the artist’s self-portrait are enough to convince this critic of the integrity of Swoon’s means, whatever (and whenever) the end.

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