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Zürcher Gallery’s Salon Zürcher is to Armory Week what Groundhog day is to Spring. The gallery shares its premises with venues from the neighborhood and beyond in a popup boutique mini fair that often yields delights, and this year is no exception, with Marie Finaz of Paris, for instance, offering the work of two exquisite outsider artists, Jill Gallieni and Marie-Rose Lortet. From Hudson, New York, Galerie Gris commanded a tour de force of a pairing in the inner sanctum of Zürcher’s Bleecker Street premises, with the radically informal abstraction of Marina Adams and Lizzie Scott. The irregular shapes of dazzling color in Adams look like they want to flop onto the floor in luxuriating heaps; the works of Scott actually do just just.   Look out later this week for showings of Adams at Art on Paper with VanDeb Editions, and Independent where her new book will be featured by Karma. DAVID COHEN

Salon Zürcher through March 6 at 33 Bleecker Street, between Bowery and Lafayette Street, (212) 777-0790

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artcritical backs the call, initiated by artist Marina Adams, to make OY/YO, the public sculpture by Deborah Kass, a permanent feature of the DUMBO riverbank. The work, commissioned by Two Trees Management Company, is scheduled to remain on view at Brooklyn Bridge Park through August 2016.

We support making it permanent for the excellent reasons given by Ms. Adams in her petition to Mayor Bill di Blasio, which we invite our readers to sign:

OY/YO, by Deborah Kass has instantly become a beloved icon, a Statue of Liberty, an I Love NY for the 21st century. It speaks directly to the many communities that make NYC the greatest city in the world. OY/YO has been acclaimed by the New York Times and gone viral on Instagram. New York Magazine calls it perfect public art. It is both a tourist attraction and an integral part of the Dumbo neighborhood and waterfront. (On top of that it is one of the only public sculptures made by a woman!) NYC loves OY/YO and we want to keep it permanent and public so we can continue to enjoy it.

There may be more public sculptures around by women than Ms. Adams implies (there are at least four in New York City by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney alone, to name one artist) but we won’t quibble on that front, especially as there are for sure nowhere near enough. This week, Philadelphians saw the temporary removal of Robert Indiana’s LOVE from the park that bears its name. Indiana’s iconic sculpture, a forebear (see below) of Kass’s street-smart monument, will take up temporary digs in Dilworth Park as Love Park undergoes renovations. It is rare when a work of public art touches the public’s hearts this way, and should be cherished.

But we acknowledge strong arguments against routinely making temporary public art interventions permanent simply because they resonate and are popular. One is that doing so might inhibit future temporary interventions; another is that it might aggrandize gestures that would be sweeter if they were simpler from artists invited to make temporary works but secretly hopeful of winning the bonus prize of permanence. There is always, however, an exception to prove a rule. The Eiffel Tower, initially reviled, was designed to be temporary. What would Paris be without it?

For the record, in November of last year, shortly after it was unveiled, OY/YO was an ARTCRITICAL PICK. Here is what David Cohen said of it:

OY/YO can be read two ways in more ways than meet the eye. Of course, the bright yellow typographically-symmetrical eight-foot-high aluminum letters, sited in DUMBO’s Brooklyn Bridge Park, read in different languages from Manhattan or Brooklyn, in Yeoman Yankee slang  as well as  Spanish if you face east and Yiddish if you have  your back to Kings County. It’s a gentle joke about multiculturalism and borough rivalry perhaps, although kvetching is pretty much universal and non-denominational throughout greater New York. Deborah Kass offers both a recall and a riposte to Brooklyn’s lost Domino sign and the Queens waterfront’s repositioned “Pepsi” through the democratizing while lost in translation reverse legibility of OY/YO. But the real genius of this at once layered and brazen concrete poem is the way it works for different crowds without anyone getting patronized: Kass speaks the language of art historical appropriation to critically savvy insiders – recalling her classic Jewish feminist deconstructions of Warhol, this time she riffs off of Robert Indiana’s LOVE and Ed Ruscha’s OOF – but she equally presents an upbeat, innocent originality to Joe Public, lounging in the park or stuck in bridge traffic. A knowingly classy graphic for a gentrified sometime slum, OY/YO is a two-way mirror of an only-in-New York variety.

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February 21 to March 24, 2013
124 Forsyth Street
New York City, (646) 559-5906

In her first solo exhibition at Hionas Gallery, in this Tribeca-based gallery’s recently inaugurated second space on the Lower East Side,  Marina Adams confirms her position as a player of significance in contemporary abstract painting.  A baker’s dozen of sassy, sexy, exuberant pictures exude freshness and intelligence in strong and equal measure.

The paintings range in scale from just over six foot square to a diminutive 12 by 12 inches, and in format they bounce around from loosely configured concentric circles to what can be described as close-ups of deflated beach balls.  There are also jigsaws of limb-like forms or of flag-like forms.  Uniting these formats are vibrant color, eccentric geometry, insistently handmade lines, and a kind of good-humored ambivalence between spatial depth and pictorial flatness.  Her relationship to shape is strongly redolent of Harriet Korman but her particular stance as a fuser of soft-edged geometry and angst-free art informel entails a distinct set of pleasures and queries.

Adams has a quietly audacious sensibility.  Her chirpy palette eschews primaries, generally preferring pastels and nursery hues.  While avoiding brash juxtapositions and gently pacing color contrasts across the composition, she enjoys teasing the eye with mild dissonances and skewed tonal shifts.  She has a predilection for games with isolated texture: her surface can get brushy or rubbed in one color segment while remaining smooth in a neighbor, as in 40 Watt Moon (2010).  The combined effect of these tendencies introduces almost trompe l’oeil intimations of perspectival recession at the very instant of enforcing awareness of the support. In Spin, (2010) for instance, two of the six scarf-like triangulated color segments that meet at a center – the pink and the burgundy – each have two tones within them, suggesting forms folding or bending back upon themselves, thus implying flutter (and with it, spatial depth).

At ease and optically generous as these paintings are, they are actually radically cropped because gestalt depends upon something beyond the canvas itself.  The edge of the picture, indeed, rarely defines the composition, even less the boundary of an individual shape. This imparts narrative and metaphor to works that would otherwise want to feel present tense and literal.

Adams’ target-like compositions, like Space Embrace, (2011) are almost programmatic in the way they soften, “feminize” even (her bulls eye is difficult not to read as a breast) that trope of modernist hard-edge.  But even in her more personal and complex compositions there are traces of the hard edge softened.  Her use of texture and sgraffito, the way forms are given a shadow, the pentimento-like continuation of an outline beyond the form it describes – in Coming Through Strange, (2011) for instance, the title piece of the show, a Robert Mangold-recalling gesture – all point to a tenderizing of emphatic or clean cut geometric abstraction.  But rather than suggesting Adams as some kind of soft neo-romantic, these strategies come across more as “post hard,” as if her relationships to Mangold, Kenneth Noland (targets) or Ellsworth Kelly are akin to Eva Hesse’s to Donald Judd.

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