A compelling installation by Belgian artist Harold Ancart, of a charcoal dusting over one hundred square feet of sheetrock, at the booth of Bushwick’s Clearing Gallery, helped break up the monotony of the smaller booths. (Ancart also featured in a group show, “Royal Rumble at Waffle House,” organized by Clearing at the Miami studio of the late Robert Miller.)  Dona Nelson’s paintings, displayed on overturned milk crates, were the central feature at Thomas Urban Gallery’s booth. Nearby, at American Contemporary, was David Brooks’ standout piece, Still Life with Stampede and Guano. Made of concrete animal forms painted with wild seabird guano before being varnished, the piece was an Yves Klein-like prank, a commentary on the materials that constitute painting and natural processes.

Dave Miko and Tom Thayer at 11 Rivington blacked out a boxed room and projected psychedelic colors over paintings hung on the walls. Gabriele Hartley’s graphite wallpaper on top of which oil paintings were hung at Foxy Production was another memorable booth. I was later told that paintings had to be ferried out into daylight for collectors to be able to sense their color away from the graphite.

At NADA, as at other fairs, booths that create a singular spatial identity tend to be more memorable. Seeing countless individual works, presented uniformly at eye level, induces a kind of art amnesia. The intensity of seeing in compressed time, a constant looking up close to discern works and far away to navigate through the compartmentalized spaces causes lingering disorientation.  But fairs are worth enduring: the dense gathering of art, forcing us to look inside and outside, all the while expressing, announcing, listening, asserting, opining, connecting, hardly sleeping, and describing what we see, is in some basic sense not unlike the process of making art itself.

The post Still Life with Stampede: Perfect Title for a work at NADA appeared first on artcritical.

It was only Thursday, December 1, but Vixen, a Shiba Inu belonging to Miami collector Sean Gelb, had had enough of the fairs. She lay on her side, panting, at the foot of a pedestal holding one of Patricia Piccinini’s mutant babies. People crowded the booth of Conner Contemporary Art at the Pulse Art Fair to gawk at it, but Vixen remained steadfastly unimpressed.

I’ve been through the trial of fair going in Miami enough times to have worked out a two-part strategy that forestalls the moment when I start feeling like Vixen. Part One is to proudly not see everything. My list for this year was Art Miami, Pulse, Scope and Art Asia (combined in the same circus tent this year), Seven, and Edge Zones. Skipping the main fair may sound like treason, but it means enough art-viewing impetus is left to appreciate the plenitude on offer at six others, which is considerable.

Part Two is to accept the fact that you are at the art equivalent of a farmer’s market. You are there only to admire and sample some minuscule fraction of its bounty.

On Thursday at Pulse, some critical part of my brain titled like a shoved pinball machine when I saw the actor Michael Douglas and the comely rear view of Catherine Zeta Jones making their way through a corridor of art made dark by one of the power outages that plagued the early days of the fair. This is no way to see art, I thought, nor perhaps Catherine Zeta Jones. I wandered toward the exit, where Paul Kusseneers, whose eponymous gallery was showing atmospheric, filmy, grid-based abstractions by Stefan Annarel, stood fuming in the half-light. Even in the dim booth Annarel looked good, but imagine coming all the way from Antwerp and having to present them that way. A longtime Miami artist speculated, without evidence but not without cause, that the fair organizers hadn’t adequately greased the city’s palm. I overheard a man in a black suit, clutching a walkie-talkie, explain to a gallery director in romantic lighting that a generator was being installed posthaste and they were not going to wait for the local utility to restore power.

By Sunday, this or better had been accomplished. I make a habit of asking dealers whether they’re having a good fair, without detailing what I mean by that. Everyone, even Kusseneers, answered yes and seemed sincere about it. So with that problem solved, it was time for a second pass at the art.

Duane Hanson, whose work I had seen the day before at Bridge Red Studios Project Space in North Miami, came to mind upon reviewing Piccinni’s animal-human hybrid infant at Conner Contemporary. How much more difficult it must have been for Hanson to achieve sculptural photorealism with 1970s materials. This new take speaks to an imminent biotechnological future in which more and more things are going to demand human treatment despite their categorical position at the edge of humanity. As art, though, it was too illustrative and sentimental. (Charming and patently illustrative work by Maira Kalman, executed for author Michael Pollan’s “Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual” and appearing at Julie Saul, somehow escaped a similar fate.) Also at Conner was a meticulously painted lesbian orgy on a picnic table at night by Erik Thor Sandberg, inexplicably executed on a dramatically curved panel. Doubtless there was some allegory at work – there usually is in Sandberg – but it resisted deciphering, and not to its credit.

Conner also had a handsome Leo Villareal, which I mentioned while admiring a small, animated LED piece, amber and flickering, by Jim Campbell at Hosfelt Gallery. This turned out to be a bit of a touchy subject – the gallery noted Campbell’s earlier work with the medium. Better works of technology-driven abstraction, which is still at its early stages, is at least as successful as its better constructivist counterparts. Bitforms showed a work by Zimoun in which cardboard chits were mounted on little spindles and made to spin and collide in a crowded grid. It was charmingly low budget and seemed to have a determined personality.

There was a note of controversy around some non-technology-driven abstraction as well. Daniel Weinberg Gallery had some small geometric abstractions that looked as if they were studies for Frank Stella’s protractor series, both in shape and pastel palette. They turned out to be works by Walter Darby Bannard, whose art and writings I have studied at length, and they actually predate Stella’s series.

Flirting abstractly with both paint and technology were Michael Laube at Kuckei & Kuckei, Sharon Louden at Morgan Lehman, and Markus Weggenmann at Thomas Taubert Contemporary. Laube had painted a variety of stripes and marks on layers of superimposed Plexiglas, and despite an initial impression of excessive trickiness they held up to repeated viewing. Louden’s deliberate, spare paintings in oil on paper on panel distantly recalled Julius Bissier, reinterpreted in high-key materials. The attractive sensibility refused to translate into her video or sculpture, as evidenced by examples thereof placed alongside them. Weggenmann sends out designs for simple abstractions and semi-abstractions to be executed in high-gloss coatings on aluminum. The lack of touch looks good in enamel-like paints like this, and big, simple shapes tend to stand out at the fairs as visual respites. Jus Juchtmans at Margaret Thatcher Projects served this purpose as well.

At a certain point of art viewing, patterns emerge unbidden from the surfeit of material. Was there an architectural trend at Pulse, exemplified by Gregory Euclide’s whimsical wall-mounted landscape sculptures at David B. Smith, Sarah KcKenzie’s luscious studies of house framing in oil (better than her larger, deadpan treatments of finished buildings) at Jen Bekman Projects, Isidro Blasco’s snappy urban photo-collages at Black & White Project Space, and Ayssa Dennis’s delicately drawn architectural fantasies at Kesting Ray? Was there some kind of weird angle on female sexuality, given data points that include Erik Thor Sandberg, Jeff Bark’s C-Print of a bosomy nude oddly arrayed in kneeling profile among strips of Super-8 film at Hasted Kraeutler, and Hillary Harnkess’s Sinking of the Bismark (2002), a naval disaster acted out by scantily uniformed crew in a style reminiscent of early Renaissance masters, at Daniel Weinberg?  Or was it just time to go home?

But not before stopping in the Impulse section of the fair, dedicated to single-artist installations. Ellen Miller Gallery, for instance, were showing the work of Deb Todd Wheeler, whose photogrammed cyanotypes of plastic bags hauntingly evoke sea life, despite their origins as garbage. Teresa Diehl closed off the booth of Galerie Anita Bekcers for a installation of predatory mammals and fighter jets, cast in clear glycerin, arranged over a spotlit, rotating mirror and covered with a camouflage net of flowers. She made it in response to the revolutions in the Middle East this year, but it grew into a transcendent, timeless narrative. I came to rest at the work of Alia Malley at Sam Lee. Her Frederick-Church-inspired photographs of the Los Angeles County landscape, either deserted or literally desert, presented inviting vistas, refreshingly free of crowds and, well, art.

Now it was time, like Vixen, to find a floor to lie on.

The post Miami at a Gentler Pulse appeared first on artcritical.

November 30 to December 4, 2011
at the Art Miami Pavilion, Wynwood, Miami, Florida

Once again, in our opinion, Art Miami proved the strongest satellite fair this year. Now in its twenty-second year and Miami’s longest running art fair, Art Miami attracted some 50,000 visitors to over 110 galleries (22 first time) from 18 countries in Europe, Latin America, India, the Middle East and the United States.  With works that ranged from Titian to Pop to cutting edge contemporary, Art Miami offered many surprises and unexpected pleasures.

A real Titian at Art Miami?  His St. Sebastian, dated to 1530, at Edelman Arts (NYC) was the centerpiece of a smart thematic show of more than a dozen painters and sculptors, including Red Grooms and Carlos Betancourt who used images of the androgynous saint in their work.  Further proof that powerful portrait painting thrives came in the form of Captain, by David Bates, at Arthur Roger Gallery (New Orleans).

Among the strong examples of familiar American artists was a quintessential Milton Avery painting at Lewallyn Gallery (Santa Fe), Chinese Checkers (March Avery with Vincenzo Spagna), circa 1941, with his characteristic muted colors and quirky rendering of figures that bordered on folk art.  At Antoine Helwaser Gallery (NYC), an impressive early Olitski with a large red orb and a small green one was one of many Olitskis and Kenneth Nolands at this fair, as at Art Basel/Miami Beach, suggesting a resurgence of interest in Color Field painting.  Helwaser also displayed several Abstract Expressionist works including a red and black Adolf Gottlieb sunburst painting and a Robert Motherwell collage painting.  His reclining nude painting by Tom Wesselman was one of many Pop artists in evidence at the fair with a suite of Andy Warhol’s Marilyns at Arcature Fine Art (Palm Beach, FL), a brawny Alan D’Arcangelo highway painting from 1964 at Mark Borghi (NYC), and several Robert Indiana sculptures, including Hope and its Hebrew counterpart, Tikvah, both at Rosenbaum Contemporary (Boca Raton, FL). There were artists who bridged a number of styles including the still underappreciated Jack Tworkov who was represented by a second-generation Abstract Expressionist work from his Barrier Series (1963) at Mark Borghi (NYC) and a geometric work from his Knight series (1976) at Hollis Taggart (NYC).  Other artists’ artists from the 1950s and 1960s who do not fall easily into a single style included Perle Fine at Spanierman Modern (NYC) and Ward Jackson at David Richard Contemporary (Santa Fe, NM).  It was also a treat to see an uncharacteristic one-foot square monochrome painting from 1960 in by the sculptor, John Chamberlain using automobile lacquer and a square metal template.

Several examples of Los Angeles artists currently featured in Pacific Standard Time, the Getty Museum’s initiative of more than 60 museums between Santa Barbara and San Diego (read our review here) were also in evidence at Art Miami.  Scott White (La Jolla) brought numerous examples of De Wain Valentine’s light and space sculpture including two knockouts–the massive Column Mauve from 1968 and the exquisite Circle Blue-Magenta Flow from 1970.  Charlotte Jackson (Santa Fe) exhibited some recent Ron Davis two-tone red paintings, David Richards Contemporary (Santa Fe) displayed a lively geometric abstract painting, Apertures-Eyesights from 2000 by Roland Reiss and Leslie Sacks Contemporary (Santa Monica, CA), featured two crisp red and black striped acrylic paintings (2011) by Charles Christopher Hill.

Not surprisingly, there were several first-rate examples of Latin American art including Jesus de Soto’s geometric optical constructions at Leon Tovar (NYC) and Victor Lugo’s figurative paintings at the Ginocchio Gallery (Mexico City) including a smart diptych with a landscape painting that appeared to be cut from its frame alongside a trompe l’oeil painting of the frame and stretcher supports from which it had been cut.

A new art medium that emerged this year at the fair is the use of fiber optics in tapestry. The Catherine Clark Gallery (San Francisco, CA) displayed 50 Different Minds by Nora Ligorano and Marshall Reese that used hand-woven fiber-optic thread, custom electronics and software, and RGB full-spectrum LED lights.   Connected to the Internet, the colors in the nine squares of the weaving changed continuously according to the real-time content of Twitter messages. There were two other notable examples of woven fiber-optic art in Miami Beach—one by Daniel Buren, Two Rectangles of Electric Light: white and blue situated work, 2011 using LED at the Lisson Gallery (London) at AB/MB and the other at Design Miami at Galerie Maria Wettergren (Paris) who showcased the seductive floor to ceiling fiber-optic textile draperies of Astrid Krogh of Denmark that continuously changed color.

There was a lot of buzz around a relatively small Gerhard Richter painting, Abtraktus Bild, 2001 at the Michael Schultz Gallery (Berlin, Seoul, Beijing) when it was reported sold for $1.6m. Seeing the new intimate documentary film, Gerhard Richter Painting by filmmaker Corinna Belz at Art Basel gave us a deeper appreciation for the arduous and self-critical process Richter uses in making one of these paintings.  Another German booth, Galerie Renate Bender (Munich) was particularly appealing with intricately folded felt sculptures by Peter Weber, new monochromatic abstract paintings by Matt McClune, and ambitious amoeboid wall sculptures by Bill Thompson, reminiscent of L.A. Finish Fetish sculptures. Also compelling at John Roger Gallery was Dawn DeDeaux’s plank leaning against the wall (reminiscent of John McCracken). Entitled 8 Feet of Water, it recorded the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in a digital transparency mounted on a tall narrow acrylic support.

Chul Hyun Ahn’s work presented by the C. Grimaldis Gallery (Baltimore, MD) was a showstopper. Using lights and mirrors, his works appear to recede indefinitely despite the fact that they are less than six inches deep.  His 2011 Visual Echo Experiment placed in one of the large fair crosswalks was particularly arresting as was Forked, 2003 in the C. Grimaldis Gallery booth.  An interesting complement to this western art of illusion was a refreshing variety of optical aboriginal painting from Australia at the Leslie Smith Gallery (Amsterdam).

Thanks to Julia Draganovic, the fair’s curator of six videos in the Persol Art Video and New Media Lounge, “ZOOOM! Decoding Common Practice”, we were treated to a trip along Beijing’s major east-west artery in Ai Weiwei’s 10-hour, 13 minute video, Chang’an Boulevard. All strata of the city’s society are depicted in riveting fashion in fixed, one-minute long segments, taken at intervals of 50 meters (approximately 164 feet).

The Richard Levy Gallery (Albuquerque, NM) exhibited Constance deJong’s intriguing bronze and wood wall sculpture, Section, 1991 highlighting an important aspect of this and the other satellite fairs—the opportunity to see regionally well-known artists receive the broader exposure they merit.

As we were leaving the fair, we spotted a vertical work at the Persol display by Chiara Moreschi and Rodger Stevens whose message took us a minute or so to decode but seemed very appropriate: “Beauty is never useless”.

The post A real Titian at Art Miami? The Barons in Wynwood appeared first on artcritical.

How to stand out at or among art fairs: Art Basel Miami, Aqua, Seven

Works, visitors, galleries, memories: it is easy to get lost in the ubiquitous sprawl of an art fair. As if in collective punishment for the sins of modernism, all are victims of the grid.

Events like Art Basel Miami are staged in vast convention centers which are bizarre equalizers: top galleries that ordinarily inhabit swank, architecturally distinct real estate are barely distinguishable from country cousin private or provincial dealers willing to rent a booth of the same size. Visitors, meanwhile loose their bearings.  There are few visually meaningful landmarks.  You make a brash artwork into one and next thing you know, its gone.

The organizers of New York’s upcoming, 2012 Armory Show are savvy to this problem: they have contracted architects Bade Stageberg Cox (of National Academy Museum make-over success) to “spatially contextualize”  the piers’ fairs next year, which means creating memorable sightlines and trails.

Art Basel Miami know they have a problem too: they are victims of their own success. Miami-goers just love the overload, but still suffer its consequences.  Basel opts for neat Swiss taxonomy.  Their “sectors” help chop up the sprawl, either conceptually or geographically. Art Positions and Art Nova function as mini-exhibitions within the exhibition and get their own corner quadrants and placard color-coding.  But their discreteness is more evident on the map than on the ground.  Positions has booths for single artists presenting work on a singular theme, such as Sven Johne at Klemm’s with three circus projects in different mediums: photos he took of empty plots once the circus left town, pictures he found online of sleeping (or dead) circus animals, and an enticingly rousing video of an actor announcing acts that on’t actually materialize.  Nova is for new work by small groups, such as Murray Guy’s complementary presentation of Barbara Probst and Lucy Skaer.  Art Kabinett, meanwhile, is a trail you can follow of space delineated within participating booths for solo concentrations. It is more an honorific – like landmark status from a monuments commission-  than a tangible display within the display. And Art Video (to be reviewed here soon) is a segment of film work from participating galleries, curated by Artprojx of London’s David Gryn.

And yet, however much such sub-categorizing tries to negotiate overload, it actually contributes to it, sorcerer’s apprentice-style.  Rather than dividing the mass is creates a matrix of intersecting grids.

One way for booths to defeat the white cube effect is to wallpaper their way out of the problem.  As luck would have it, two spectacular efforts in this direction ended up next door to one another, almost defeating the purpose of the exercise.  L&M Arts used Warhol’s legendary cow and self-portrait wallpapers inside and out for their mini-drawings retrospective while Mary Boone had Barbara Kruger “textorate” their exterior with an excoriating statement about money making money worth less.  Although both visual statements yearned a sea of white to help them pop, the sightlines of one to the other were actually amusingly sumptuous.  Another way to subvert the ubiquity of the white walls – besides painting them black, as London’s Alison Jacques Gallery did to exquisite effect for her moving two-woman Lygia Clark/Hannah Wilke display, or inviting one of your artists to make a wall drawing, as in the case of the Viennese Galerie Nächt St Stephan Rosemarie Schwarzwälder and Ernst Caramelle – is to have your artist puncture holes in your walls.  No one does that more artfully than Sarah Oppenheimer at Annely Juda.

And yet, however seasoned a fairgoer one is, the booth effect is draining upon aesthetic experience.  The pleasures of getting lost in the stacks wears off after a while.  The Seattle-based boutique fair Aqua offers an antidote. Recalling “The Waves” in it name and “A Room of One’s Own” in its organization, it achieves a stream of consciousness.  This courtyard-accessed two-story motel on Collins Avenue is perfect for Aqua’s 45 domestically-oriented galleries.  Each gets a similar, nicely-proportioned, emptied-out deco bedroom.  And this means they get what no one paying exponentially more in a convention-center fair can wangle: real walls and natural light.

As if in emulation of the modest modernism of these surroundings, stand-out  exhibits at Aqua included McKenzie Fine Art’s salon hang of Don Voisine; the subtle understated architectural white reliefs of Sarah Bostwick at San Francisco’s Gregory Lind Gallery, who was also showing Sarah Walker and others;  precisionist matchbox-sized grids based on Artforum ad page layouts by Norwegian Lisa Liedgren at Seattle’s Prole Drift; and the funky abstractionist stable of Conrad Wilde Gallery of Tucson, Arizona, amongst them the sensual encaustic monochromes of Joanne Mattera and the biomorphic reliefs of Ruth Hiller.

But some dealers are determined to go yet further in their bid to beat the grid with its  relentless compartmentalization.  For some years Soho gallerist Ronald Feldman and Brooklyn’s Pierogi Gallery shared warehouse spaces in the Miami Design District.  This year, for the second year, they have expanded to form Seven, with Postmasters, P.P.O.W., London’s Hales Gallery, BravinLee programs, and Winkelman Gallery. In a raw, sprawling industrial space on the North Miami Avenue  gallery street (Diana Lowenstein, Bernice Steinbaum, Hardcore et al.) the seven galleries have created a show where the labels alone identify gallery affiliation.  Curating is by “passive-aggressive consensus” according to one participant.  The fortuitous juxtapositions that arise by serendipity in a big grid fair are aesthetically composed here: the way a painting by Veteran West Indian-born abstract expressionist Frank Bowling sets off a dialog with a Fabian Marcaccio, for instance, or a Ward Shelley speaks to a David Diao.

Writing these notes prompts an observation about  journalism that relates the strange equalizing power of fairs to the ubiquity of booths: Fairs are like states in the UN or the senate.  However much the critic reminds himself that Art Basel is the main event and Seven is, well, just seven, one unit gets at least a paragraph the way Seychelles or North Dakota get a desk in the plenum.  But really, does Red Dot even warrant observer status?

The post Get Lost! Victims and Victors of the Art Fair Grid appeared first on artcritical.

Art has found its place in the sun.  This week sees the tenth edition of Art Basel Miami, previewing Wednesday,  with a host of other fairs and art events also taking over the Art Deco Miami Beach neighborhood, the Design District, Wynwood and Downtown Miami.  artcritical will be covering the fairs day by day with highlights and personal reports from our regular correspondents and guests.

Art Basel Miami is the US sister event of Art Basel, the Swiss fair that has taken place on the Rhine since 1970.  The Miami iteration, launched in 2002,  quickly eclipsed the preexisting Art Miami and usurped Chicago, the nation’s previous front running expo.  Some say it has even overtaken its Swiss parent in terms of size, if not earnings.

But Miami is not just for 1%’ers, as our title cheekily implies.  With 40,000 visitors expected through this coming weekend Miami can make credible boasts to be the art Olympics.  Besides Art Basel Miami and the persistent – actually reinvigorated – original Art Miami there are over a dozen satellite (or should that be parasite?) fairs, whether informal, pop up fairs in hotels along Collins Avenue or substantial rivals like NADA, the New Art Dealers Association event, striking out at the Deauville Beach Resort in North Beach, where Rachel Uffner’s stand includes the work of Sara Greenberger Rafferty, or Pulse, in the Ice Palace, where Morgan Lehman features Sharon Louden.  And there are specialist fairs devoted to Asian art, photography, and design.

For all the offshoots and tolerated rivals  (in fact they are encouraged, as Art Basel even lays on free buses) Art Basel does remain the main event.  Aisle upon aisle of blue chip historic shows  (L&M Arts, for instance, with Andy Warhol drawings of the 1950s and ‘60s or Robert Miller with Louise Bourgeois) are cheek by jowl with the latest novelties, or simply fine offerings by mid-career artists like Alexander Ross, on display at David Nolan New York or Nabil Nahas at Sperone Westwater.

For the second year a group of (mostly) New York galleries will present Seven, antidote to the booth after booth overload of the biggies, in which the eponymous seven integrate their artists in a unified display.  Douglas Florian, for instance, is represented at Seven by BravinLee programs.

And this year more than others there are signs of concerted efforts to integrate all this frenzied commercial activity with museum and non-profit cultural centers across the city, offering hopefully more focused and thoughtful displays.  The Bass Museum of Art, for instance, offers a solo exhibition of Austrian sculptor Erwin Wurm while the reviving Miami Art Museum is showcasing Faith Ringgold paintings of the 1960s.

And many local galleries enter the fray  with curated group exhibitions.  Carol Jazzar Contemporary Art at 158 NW 91st Street presents a ten-person international line up, curated  by Omar Lopez-Chahoud, and including New York artists Franklin Evans and artcritical contributing editor Greg Lindquist.  The show is titled “you are here forever…” But as artists, collectors, dealers and casual perusers of art fair craziness must all realize, we are actually here for a weekend.

CLICK THUMBNAILS TO ENLARGE

The post Checkbooks on the Ready: Art Basel Miami 2011 appeared first on artcritical.