Through February 26, with closing day concert by Bill Warfield and friends, 2-4pm
547 West 27th Street, Suite 200.

The post Featured Exhibition: Margaret Grimes Memorial Exhibition at Blue Mountain Gallery appeared first on artcritical.

September 16 to November 10, 2021
33 Bleecker Street, between Lafayette Street and Bowery
New York City, galeriezurcher.com

In today’s art world, there are those who dabble in sculpture to produce inflated toys at great expense.  Let Tom Doyle’s sculpture be offered as a counterexample.

As opposed to statuettes writ large, sculpture’s engaged space-time relations attain to a complexity of thought manifestly palpable in the here and now. By this dimensional complexity, what works is given a workout: that is how Tom Doyle’s sculptures establish themselves, that they are also playful does not trivialize them.

The validity of sculpture as altogether worthy, and thus our assumptions about its nature, come through the legacy of modernism, a legacy of modern art’s reinventing itself through the significant styles of Cubism, Constructivism and Surrealism, a complex genealogical stock in the art vineyards giving consequential vitality to art. Doyle would benefit from this and better develop his ‘American vernacular’, as the current exhibition has named it, through an assumption of hands-on craft at home in the modern European abstraction that had already begun to nurture sculpture’s version of Abstract Expressionism.

Located in Kettwig, Germany in 1964 for fifteen months, and being given the run of a disused wool factory, Doyle seized on the opportunity to construct assemblages of metal machine parts and wood scrap. That he was fluent in forging, taught to him as a child by a blacksmith while growing up in Ohio, made it possible for Doyle to develop his idiom from within, and yet while in Germany, at a remove from art-world pressures. According to art historian Kirsten Swenson‘s extensive interview much later, Doyle’s mature sculptural idiom emerged under conditions more permissive than those adopted by David Smith with his strong two-dimensional orientation; although respecting the art of David Smith, Doyle considered his own, gesturing exuberantly in three dimensions, more allied to David Weinrib, John Chamberlain and Mark di Suvero.

To look around plazas where public sculpture sits is to come to terms with the reality that we take the era of the 1960s for granted. But Doyle’s sculptures give us no recourse to passivity, or nostalgia, or the pleasant acceptance of applied abstraction in works interchangeable with one another. No tokens, but in singular works well developed within the formal premises set out, Doyle’s visual literacy is such that it shows as fully cognizant of the difference between the simplistic and the simple, complicated fuss and modulated structural integrity.

A given of modernist theory is that sculpture, no longer a matter of mass, is volumetric, incorporating open and closed spatial relations as it can now by utilizing industrial materials for support and for counterintuitive heft. Sedentary Taurus, 1965, does the job. Folded and bent, cantilevered planar elements are hoisted atop a linear criss-cross frame, yet this basic antinomy is already modulated through skewed orientation and internal twist; voids and their opposite play out, yet not in platitudinous opposition. Helpful to development within form is internal scale: through twisting, large becoming small, then becoming larger again, as sculptural structure induces accelerated shifts through a spectator’s changed position. A changed position is here memory: what was is now still in play imaginatively, a recognition of the relations that still obtain.

How to evade mere décor: that is the problem set out in Swallows Swoop Shiloh, 1965. Doyle makes trouble for himself by invoking good taste: a few elements in neutral off-whites to which a single hue dramatizes the difference in furnishings–a kind of decorator’s “move.” But what he does to outflank taste is to keep the sculptural coherence of the entirety by way of a directness and roughness of the contrastive compound. Further evident is the principle of dislocation: what is massive is a blocky hewn wood element that could be a stand but is midway up; on the ground where the conventional stand should be is a painting—that is, a planar element in color.

Color is indeed the proverbial elephant-in-the-room. The well-known and on-going ideological wars within modern art theory do provide a profound understanding of genre, excelling at its definition: sculpture, the art of three-dimensional work, painting, the art of two-dimensional work—not some mash-up of categories to compensate for a lack of artisanal rigor. But to this, de Stijl has a classic modernist rebuttal: the largest aesthetic category being neither painting nor sculpture, but design. Indicating functional difference through color, then, is a pragmatic strategy, De Stijl design offers a way through space not beholden to isolating the types of practice. So in Swallows Swoop Shiloh, the function of the base gets its due. Meanwhile, antithetical to painting, the color plane is not on the wall where “it ought to be,” but by a radical dislocation makes its appearance on the floor as the necessary base engenders a sculptural presence.

By the way, for the taxonomy of mass, see Doyle’s Rally Al Round, 1964: a sidelong glance at the geometric elemental form by which cylinder, sphere and cone are primary structures.

In Doyle’s art, knowledge of the tradition is enabling, not disabling, as it gives him the formal instrumentalities with which to think with the medium. Let us count the ways: point, line, plane; vertical, horizontal, diagonal, and torque for these: as well as folds, bends, bends’ reversing convexity to concavity’s implicating volumetric space; scale within volume, opacity, transparency at eye level, above and below the same; gravity and levity–degrees of.

The post Gravity and Levity: Tom Doyle in the mid-1960s appeared first on artcritical.

Sharmistha Ray, Barry Schwabsky and Marjorie Welish discuss Dorothea Rockburne: Giotto’s Angels & Knots at David Nolan Gallery, 24 East 81st Street, Fourth Floor (on view through December 23)

David Brody, Lilly Wei and Alexi Worth discuss Intersections: Ron Baron and Sarah Walker at John Molloy Gallery, 49 East 78th Street, Suite 2B (on view through December 18)

The post The Review Panel, Guest of Brooklyn Rail’s the New Social Environment, Zoom, Friday, at 1PM ET appeared first on artcritical.

The panel of three painters (Rickert is co-curator with Graham Nickson of the Studio School exhibition, on view through November 28) is moderated by David Cohen and takes place amidst the Resnick-Passloff’s own newly-opened exhibition “Jane Freilicher and Thomas Nozkowski: True Fictions”. The Anderson exhibition’s sumptuous catalogue ($45) will be available with contributions by Martica Sawin, Susan Jane Walp, and Paul Resika, and an interview with the artist by Jennifer Samet.

The panel is sold out, but standby tickets ($15) will be released at 4.15pm. 87b Eldridge Street, between Grand and Hester.

Lennart Anderson, Nude, 1961-1964. Oil on canvas, 58-1/2 x 50 inches. Brooklyn Museum, John B. Woodward Memorial Fund

The post A panel today on Lennart Anderson at the Resnick-Passlof Foundation with painters Steve Hicks, Rachel Rickert and Kyle Staver, 4-6PM appeared first on artcritical.

David Cohen has been invited to MC the closing of the silent auction at this year’s virtual gala for the New York Studio School, which he feels to be a “signature honor.” You can see the works on offer and start bidding already at bidpal.net/nyssbenefit. Yesterday Cohen recorded an Instagram Live walkthrough of selected treasures, discussing scale and texture in works by Kamini Avril, Andrea Belag, Susanna Coffey, Cora Cohen, Lois Dodd, Angela Dufresne, Bruce Gagnier, David Humphrey, Alex Katz, Medrie MacPhee, Graham Nickson, Janice Nowinski, Sean Scully, Stuart Shils, Kyle Staver and Susan Vecsey.

Kamini Avril’s effulgent small oil painting, Forsythia, 2019, pictured here, is valued at $1800 with an opening bid of $650

The post Silent Auction at the New York Studio School appeared first on artcritical.

Meeting ID: 894 5779 0639
Passcode: 060676

The post Howard Sherman discusses his work with David Cohen on Zoom this evening at 6.30PM EST appeared first on artcritical.

Richard Rezac at Luhring Augustine Chelsea

531 West 24th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, luhringaugustine.com

A drawing in a project room of Richard Rezac’s solo exhibition this summer at Luhring Augustine was at once plan and elevation, as elegant as it was documentary—but of what, the viewer might ask? Provisionally it be called a thingmabob.

On consideration, one can discover a legitimate way of naming these works, as Rezac’s catalogue essayist Graham Bader does, as the entwining object and image. This set of terms is more than merely felicitous. “Object” and “image” are not mere words chosen at random but key terms in the history of ideas through which significant aesthetic ideologies have fought for creative co-existence. (Put differently: not all things are art; criteria matter.) When Donald Judd speaks of objects, what gives his reductive modernism force is that Constructivist engineering has informed his thinking, a certain narrative by which sculpture is non-trivial. Or, when André Breton and Aimé Césaire speak of an image, they are wielding the instrumentality of Surrealism to get at psychological and political resistance and revolt. No mere juxtaposition will do: under the rule of metamorphosis, sense becomes other: a kind of signifying non-sense, or otherwise, an annealing synthesis.

The relevance of object-image to Rezac’s works is spot-on. What should be frivolous in his art is not, because the object’s physical properties forge a connection through strong antinomies. The image comes into sharp enigmatic focus through an unapologetic assertion of difference.Take  Soliloquy (2019) for example. In some parallel universe, a carpenter’s workbench and underground grain vaults cohabit, and the resulting tool plays a practical role.  Another work, Untitled (19-05) (2019) consists of a table atop of which is some sort of dune. If this artifact coheres it is owing to an unsaid force whereby heavy rectilinear gravity is tipped toward image by an unshapely shape atop it. Of the considerable inventiveness typical of Rezac, perhaps the least effective is the most apparently inventive: the suspended piece, Chigi, Pamphili, (2019), an assemblage with three elements that remain unassimilated and, hence, rather twee.

Relief assumes the orientation of painting yet with the rights and privileges of sculpture. Through the binding of painting with sculpture comes a certain gravitas, as with the cast bronze Untitled (18-06) (2018). The causes are clear. Small as most of this sculptor’s works are, the size of this piece is not diminutive as it falls within the viewer’s normal sight lines. And even so, smaller than most paintings typically are, this relief and almost all others, draws the view close, enlarging the subtly calibrated craft for engaged  perception. Rezac’s choice of scale, then, brings material and technique into view as a constructed intensity embedded in planarity. Relief is sculptural compression. Here lies the force of its construct. Tension between technologies is a content of that construct, a kind of agon despite the patterning —Indeed, because of it, given that Rezac flaunts ornamentally and structurally extremes in the same .   Untitled (19-11) (2019) .Why can its overt decoration of the diaper pattern seem engaged between clamps? Think of the suction cups for footpads of a gecko on a tree branch.

The post The Entwining of Image and Object: Richard Rezac’s Sculpture appeared first on artcritical.

Jennifer Coates, Triumph of Pan, 2020. Acrylic and spray paint on canvas, 60 x 72 inches. Courtesy of the Artist

The post Jennifer Coates in the National Arts Club’s Exhibition, “Painting the Narrative” appeared first on artcritical.

Above Store For Rent Gallery at 179 Grand Street, Brooklyn, New York. Best viewed from the north-west corner of Bedford and Grand
There are two flags alternating week by week through April 9, with changing flags at 4pm Fridays
Mask Flag 1 features Justin Sterling (pictured) and Joel Lahey, Mask Flag 2 features Helen Oji and Adé.

The post Brenda Zlamany at the Grand Flag Project appeared first on artcritical.

COVID has canceled countless exhibitions, projects, events. But in a subtler grade of cruelty, for shows that have gone ahead there has been stunted attendance and muted fanfare in what are nonetheless turning points in artists’ careers. Jennifer Riley has recently opened a solo exhibition (which I curated) at the 1GAP Gallery in the Richard Meier-designed condo building that in healthier days hosts the afterparties for The Review Panel. The lobbies, common rooms and elevator landings are filled with her lush, voluptuous abstraction. The centerpiece of her show is a mural, BBS1GG, Schmetterlinghaus, 2021, an audacious painted wall with richly colored steel and wood protrusions, utilizing what has become a signature element in Riley’s work, the  steel “skeletons” from which engine parts have been plasma cut. Named for the “Butterfly House” at Vienna Zoo, this is a departure for this otherwise resolutely abstract artist. With its skyscrapers, sun and fluttering butterflies, Riley was determined to appeal to the condo’s children while also speaking to all of us who have been cooped up for months during the pandemic. The butterfly, like her repurposed industrial materials, is a potent symbol of transformation.

While the show is open strictly by appointment with the artist or the curator, there is ray of hope for the curious and intrepid: The blinds and the lights will be kept up at night, giving pedestrians a private view of the mural from the street. It’s a stunning work: go see for yourself! DAVID COHEN

Through April 20, 1 Grand Army Plaza, between St John’s Place and Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn (opposite Brooklyn Public Library).

Installation shot © Adrian Wilson

The post Jennifer Riley at 1GAPGallery, Grand Army Plaza, Brooklyn appeared first on artcritical.