March 18 to May 1, 2021
22 West 22nd Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, matthewmarks.com

The nine relatively small bronzes in Rebecca Warren’s current exhibition hold the generous spaces at the Matthew Marks Gallery with remarkable authority. Warren has taken the traditions of modernist sculpture and turned them to her own purposes. The bronzes are roughly modelled and painted in a manner reminiscent of Giacometti or more recently, Bryan Hunt or William Tucker. The shapes are mostly a loosely planar leaf or pod suspended from a stem or trunk. The primary shape droops or waves or slumps with an extra support and, in one case, has a hole in it. Several of the pieces look like a placenta still on an umbilical cord or a piece of underwater plant life. They are all energetically painted on the raw bronze with lots of blues, white, and sparing amounts of red and green, often employing drippy vertical lines in contrasting colors and an occasional crude circle or oblong. One piece, titled “A Glyph,” has what could be read as a snowy landscape with a door or window painted on one side.

Warren has also adapted Brancusi’s innovation of giving the pedestal nearly equal status with the sculpture. Each of her pieces has a precisely designed pedestal, constructed of MDF and painted in pastel shades of salmon or in one instance  a deep brown. The pedestals are like miniature stages or desks, with sometimes a small step in front or a backsplash in the rear. They set the piece at a precise height and assert their frontality, while encouraging a backstage view. As with David Smith, the edge view is active but subordinate. Two pieces are doubles, using two identical or similar casts set side by side. To this viewer’s eye, they are less successful but they do help to round out the show and hold the space.

As Postmodernism recedes in the rearview mirror, it is quite thrilling to see a sculptor forthrightly embrace the modernist tradition and make it her own, and in such a stylish fashion. “The only way out is through” rings true.

The post Making Modernism Her Own: Rebecca Warren at Matthew Marks appeared first on artcritical.

September 19 to October 24, 2020
54 Franklin Street, between Cortlandt Alley and Lafayette Street
New York City, postmastersart.com

Of the sixty or so drawings in Steve Mumford’s recent exhibition at Postmasters, all of which were done on site in a spiral sketch pad with either pencil or pen and ink, roughly half of them were worked up later with watercolor, using cell phone photos as reference. The uncolored ones range from a furious mass of rhythmic scribbles in Police Try to Separate Back the Blue Demonstrators and Counterprotestors, Bayridge, Brooklyn, NY, Jul. 12, 2020, (2020) to a considered group portrait in Officers Wong, Castillo and Chen at Occupy City Hall, New York City, Jul. 15, 2020, (2020). The speed and expressive qualities of the drawings seem to directly reflect the circumstances under which they were made. The colored pieces, some of which are double sheets, are like studies for full scale paintings. The depictions of the people involved move from quick impressions toward fully delineated types, with clothing, haircuts and expressions fleshed out. Some pieces feel like sheets from a graphic novel with comments and noise effects laid in. The range and confidence of Mumford’s method is extraordinary throughout.

The three main locales Mumford went to were Portland, Oregon; a Trump rally in Fredericksburg, Virginia; and his home turf, New York City. It is immediately evident that Mumford was there to observe, not to satirize or idealize. Everything is treated with the same cool objectivity, even as things get violent. One striking image, “Photojournalists Outside Wyckoff Medical Center, Brooklyn, NY, Apr. 7, 2020”, neatly encapsulates some of the questions posed by Mumford’s work. The painting shows a group of photographers from the back, all hung with impressive amounts of camera equipment as they approach a freezer morgue truck behind the hospital. What are they hoping for? It’s just a big truck; maybe an orderly will appear with a corpse on a gurney. I imagine Mumford hanging to the rear with pencil and sketch pad, taking in the scene without any special need for drama, trying to capture some of the paradoxes of the situation. The extended process of his observation is in sharp contrast with the photographer’s quest for a good “shot”. How does his artifact differ from a photo? Does his involvement in the production of the image depend more on memory and imagination, or less? One thing is for sure: His feeling for the reality he sees has a quality of engagement, almost like an interview, something photos are hard pressed to capture.  You feel he is getting to know these people.

At the end of the day there is a conceptual aspect to Mumford’s work that is easily missed as we relate to it as illustration. It is an act of witness, and the paintings are almost a magnificent residue of that act. As with Goya’s “Disasters of War”, the whole presentation states emphatically, “I was there. This is what I saw.”

The post There to Observe: Steve Mumford’s Dispatches from Rallies and Protests appeared first on artcritical.

21 February to 6 April, 2019
140 Grand Street, between Crosby and Lafayette streets
New York City, peterfreemaninc.com

I’m peering down at Jack Straws (2015-16), one of the many new works in Charles LeDray’s first gallery show in New York in nearly ten years. The piece consists of perhaps fifty or sixty delicate carvings, each about three or four inches long, artfully scattered on a two-foot square cement board. The material, we are told, is human bone. It looks like forbidden ivory. I am sure it is not lost on the artist that elephant tusk is an illegal material, whereas human bone is not. Each carving is a carefully detailed version of an implement, something made to handle; scissors, a broom, a hammer, a T-square, a ski pole, a feather, a croquet mallet, a skeleton key etc. They are all reduced to roughly the same size so the scale diverges wildly. A ladder and a crochet needle lie near each other. One is tiny, the other maybe half its usual size. Each item has an associated body language depending on how it is grasped and used and a corresponding set of mental attitudes related to its use. We pick up the crowbar in a completely different way and with totally different intent than we pick up the crutch. It amounts to a small catalog of prehension, the way the world we have made is “at hand”.

And yet, as in the game of Jack Straws (or pick up sticks) the entire collection of tiny carvings could be gathered up in two hands, scattered, and then carefully picked up one at a time with a delicate pincer grip. The association with the intense focus and concentration of a childhood game pervades all of LeDray’s work. In the background is the ominous threat of the digital, robotic world on track to wipe out millennia of handmade culture. The supporting backdrop of another piece, Eagles Softball (2016-18), is a miniature pegboard with the silhouettes of a full set of hand tools indicating the appropriate hook for each one. The tools are all gone.

Concrete is another running theme in the exhibition. A dirty, plebeian material that most people want nothing to do with, it is nevertheless constantly underfoot, is formed into foundations or building blocks, and fixes innumerable things in place. It is also highly transformative, going from soft and dry to heavy and wet and, finally, to hard and smooth. The qualities of concrete are perfectly congenial to LeDray’s project, both practically and metaphorically. In The Alsen Twins (2015-17), two miniaturized bags of Portland cement, complete with their manufacturer’s label, stand next to each other on a row of appropriately scaled cinder blocks. Both bags are full, but one has a leather belt cinched tightly around its “waist”. This hilarious couple recalls Jasper Johns’ pair of Ballantine Ale cans cast in bronze, with some of the same underlying jokes about same sex relationships, but LeDray’s piece is much funnier.

Another piece, Free Public Library (2015-19), has well over a hundred miniaturized books scattered on a section of concrete sidewalk with a stone curb. Full of delightfully bizarre conjunctions, the stacks and groupings of titles form mini- narratives or dissertations. One stack goes: “Les Fleurs du Mal,” “The Atlas of Meat Inspection Pathology,” “The Black Camel,” “Pottery of the Europeans,” “Black Figure Vases,” “Free and Female,” “The Strange Life of Objects,” “The Ultimate Cat Book.”  It is a world of culture and obsession thrown out on the curb.

The value of the abandoned, discarded and ignored is another ongoing theme for LeDray, picked up in several pieces like The Janitor’s Closet (2016-18), a roughly half-scale section of pegboard with a beautifully made mop hanging on a hook. The stains from the wet mop run down the wall to the moldy, dirty section of pegboard at the bottom, part of which has broken away to reveal piles of lint on the framing behind. This piece is near Do Not Enter (Red Carpet) (2018), again a more or less half-scale red carpet with stanchions at either end. Notions of class, hierarchy, privilege and access bounce back and forth between these two pieces. The conflict is somewhat relieved by a set of meticulously copied, antiquated “Ex Libris” bookplates on the wall nearby invoking the public commons of the library and the solitary or communal pleasures of reading or being read to. LeDray is remarkable in the way he handles all of these themes with such a light hand, but with laser like focus and precision. And it is all undergirded with a quiet awareness of vulnerability and mortality as set forth in Life Vest, Hotel Manhattan (2018), an outdated kapok life vest with its nearly hidden inscription, “Inspected and Passed 9 Oct 1904”.

The post The Janitor’s Closet: Charles LeDray at Peter Freeman appeared first on artcritical.

In an upstairs gallery at Paula Cooper, Charles Gaines has 12 identically-sized, clear acrylic boxes march around the perimeter in an orderly parade. Each box is about six feet high by five feet wide and six inches deep. Both the front and back surfaces are gridded in black with a neat handwritten number and letter system running down the left vertical edge. The front panel of each box has a highly generalized drawing in a particular color of the face of a famous philosopher or writer starting with Aristotle and proceeding in rough historical order to bell hooks. Each filled-in square has a number, counting out from the midline, carefully written on top in a contrasting color. The colored “pixels” are painted on front and back of the clear acrylic giving them a slight visual shiver. Despite the imposing scale  of these frontal “headshots”, the generous track size of the grid (about one half an inch) gives these pixelated drawings an extremely abstracted, lo-rez feeling. They immediately call to mind the facial landmarks extracted with widely used facial recognition algorithms.

As the series proceeds, each drawing drops to the opaque panel on the back of the next  box as a new one occupies the front. So, as you proceed, the most recent portrait stands out in front of an increasingly dense tangle of all the preceding ones in the series. Whenever a spot in two or more drawings occupies the same “pixel” on the back panel, the colors are carefully mixed to form a new tone. There is some variation in the intensity of the color from pixel to pixel and the unoccupied pixels on the back panel are given a variegated scrubby gray. These minor variations in hue reminded me of old mosaics in the New York subway. The whole thing accumulates in a logical fashion like some big board game, while all the time getting more and more challenging to read. Clarity and confusion are set at war with each other. The snarl of color in back becomes increasingly entrancing as each new outline in front struggles to take its place. Despite their obviously systematic method of manufacture and the corresponding suppression of any personal gesture or expression these pieces nevertheless have a distinctly hand made quality, the product of a considerable amount of time and attention. The aura of the mechanically rendered or the computerized graphic hovers in the background more as metaphor than as method.

The faces are hard to identify without the title sheet, but once you have them in mind, certain individuals do seem to stand out, particularly W. E. B. Dubois in red and Edward Said in a deep aqua blue.  They all run toward the history of leftist, liberationist thought with important inclusions of African American thinkers like Malcolm X. The theme is the politics of identity. The second wall with Dubois, Malcolm and Jacques Lacan and the fourth wall with Said, Molefi Kete Asante and hooks are particularly powerful. As the color in the back panel increases in density the areas around the eyes and mouth tend toward rich tonal browns giving the later portraits a slightly scary backdrop. The multiple outlines of hair and beards turn into slightly wild, vibrating auras.  Any sense of dry, methodical production in the series is belied by this chromatic crescendo . This points to the possibility that within the world of rational procedure there is still a chance for affective engagement. A person can be moved by the impersonal. And despite the chaos of context there may be some access to another’s identity. To give an analogy: While it’s certain that reading Das Kapital in 2018 is a very different experience from reading it in 1917, nevertheless the text itself retains traces of a living consciousness and to some extent reading that text lets us enter into that individual’s reality. Gaines’s portraits seem to project this somewhat tenuous access to identity onto the accumulating entanglement of history. It literally gets harder to read the individual as the context gets thicker and yet the relief of the individual against that context gets more striking. Identity emerges not as a goal but as a process. Whereas initially Gaines’s piece seems almost didactic, I think, in fact, he is interested in these paradoxes. Somewhere in the space between logic and emotion, system and chance, language and image, simultaneity and history, Gaines sees a void that opens up and that is where he wants to stand. At each moment of history there is the possibility of constructing a workable identity with which to negotiate the paradoxes of the changing environment.

In a second room Gaines shows the preparatory drawings for Faces 1: Identity Politics and two musical scores from a series called Manifestos 3, created by assigning musical notes to the letters of the alphabet in two speeches by Martin Luther King and James Baldwin. The scores play as a video monitor scrolls by the words of the speeches. I do not have the musical knowledge to assess what I heard, but I was struck by the gentle, almost mournful quality of the music lending a quiet counterpoint to the contained fury of two of the most brilliant figures of the 20th Century.

The post Workable Identity: Charles Gaines at Paula Cooper appeared first on artcritical.