October 27 to December 17, 2016
510 West 26 Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 399 2636

In a show of new sculpture at Alexander Gray, Siah Armajani has made the gallery a mortuary temple stocked with the tombs of two poets, one philosopher, and one martyr. The sculptural/architectural proposition of the tomb has traditionally encompassed both subversive and normative figures from Alexander to Oscar (the Great and Wilde, respectively), so his choice of Arthur Rimbaud, Frank O’Hara, Richard Rorty and Dietrich Bonhoeffer doesn’t stray from tradition. Still, the act of publicly commemorating cultural figures via intricate and monumental sculptural tombs certainly fell out of favor over the course of the 20th century, so Armajani’s pieces, invoking wit and anger with his crisp visual riddles rather than melancholy, is a welcome return to one of humanity’s more enduring tropes of visual culture. The artist’s process is on display in the exhibition as well, with preparatory drawings presented alongside the executed sculptures, but this decision posits much more of a quandary: while the two-dimensional renderings of the monuments are arresting in their sharp orthogonal perspective, their inclusion, as well as that of maquettes for the larger works, primarily serves to double the number of objects in the show and display a variety of scale that is largely irrelevant. In an architecture exhibition, drawings and maquettes are included because the final product isn’t. Armajani is not an architect, he is a revolutionary in terms of the direct connection between politics, life and art which he insistently draws in his work, and the inclusion of these Lilliputian doppelgangers only serves to create a false sense of the magisterial controlling master plans that are the bane of most monumental architectural projects. Armajani’s sculptures, despite their aspirations to the eternal and their sleek signature aesthetic, are humble, deeply heartfelt and personal.

Do the tombs evoke the individuals they represent, or are the titles more of a playful allusion to the artist’s own intellectual meanderings? It’s hard to tell: Armajani expects a lot of his viewers in terms of background knowledge.Tomb for Dietrich Bonhoeffer (2016), a sleek vermillion coffin on black sawhorses, clearly evokes the courageous minister, fitted with a noose, which was the instrument of his martyrdom at the hands of the National Socialists. The tombs of Rorty, Ribaud and O’Hara are not quite as explicit. Tomb for Frank O’Hara (2016) is a jolly affair and a much looser interpretation of the tomb — five disembodied and legless chairs emerge from two tables implying a late-night drunken conversation. The presence of a dark casket arbitrarily placed on the white tables pulls the whole assemblage back to the funereal; but this surreal centerpiece serves to heighten the absurdity, again directing the mind towards a besotted Irish wake rather than an eternal resting place. Tomb for Arthur Rimbaud (2016) also is a play on furniture-as-sculpture, lifting the everyday to the monumental. The “punch line” or pivot around which the piece moves is a pink and baby blue ramp or distorted table, perhaps alluding to Rimbaud’s youth and melancholy nostalgia, as well as his overall surrealism — in this tomb there is no box for a corpse.

The philosopher’s tomb, Tomb for Richard Rorty (2016), is the most architectural, and by that token the least sculptural; a large beige box stands atop a scaffold, like a fisherman’s hut on a pier, while the end of an umber coffin emerges from a rectangular orifice in the side. Both the coffin and its housing are not completely opaque: there are sizeable chinks between the wooden slats allowing for a visual permeability that negates the monolithic quality of the massing. How this is related to the father of neopragmatism is anyone’s guess though. It does seem a very pleasant dwelling place for the hereafter.

Written Iran (2015-16) and 100 and 1 Dead Poets (2016) utilize text in much the same ironic way that the artist repurposes furniture (and, to a subtler extent, architecture). In both cases, Armajani uses words to construct a fabric: in the former, text becomes an urban expanse, and, in the latter, an abstract pattern punctuated by a few small drawn objects referring to the text. As with the tombs, text becomes the jumping-off point of visual experience, and what the words actually say is sometimes less important that what they symbolize or the individual who wrote them. Written Iran brilliantly hops back and forth between the proposition that the city is a regulating geometry and presentational structure for the writing versus the words supplying the building blocks of the city. Armajani’s bridges and towers, recurring images for the Iranian-born artist, function much in the same way — their obvious but limited practicality only serve to highlight their metaphysical and textual meaning as beacons and links between people. In his sculpture, Armajani emphasizes a clear but limited color palette — and one that seeks to visually delineate the different parts of the construction — rejecting the idea of unifying the form through a sameness of medium but instead outlining a narrative by distinguishing the multiple parts and aspects of the piece. This brings a depth of vibrancy, warmth and humor to a dauntingly titled series.

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June Leaf: Recent Works at Edward Thorp Gallery
April 23 to June 13, 2015
210 11th Avenue #601 (at West 25th Street)
New York, 212 691 6565

Joan Semmel: Across Five Decades at Alexander Gray Associates
April 2 to May 21, 2015
510 West 26^th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 399 2636

The human body is incumbent in the work of artists June Leaf and Joan Semmel, who are subjects of recent shows in Chelsea at Edward Thorp Gallery and Alexander Gray Associates, respectively. Walking into “June Leaf: Recent Works” feels like stumbling upon a secret. Leaf, who has been practicing since the late 1940s, has frequently likened her working process to dance, and something of her physical body indeed feels present in the objects and paintings.

Much of the work included here examines the act of creation. As making anything is an individual experience for each person, perhaps it is not surprising that Leaf’s work puts vulnerability on open display. You can feel it as soon as you walk into the gallery, and are faced with Woman Drawing Man (2014), a sculpture that sets the tone for the remainder of the show. A concave piece of sheet metal stands atop a second piece, forming a sort of proscenium. On the vertical, a painted, nude, male figure stands with his arms outstretched. Kneeling before him and clutching a paintbrush, a female figure, also nude, applies paint to his body. Unlike the two-dimensional man, the woman is a true body in space, made from scraps of sheet metal stitched together with wire. The naturalistic position of her body — one leg cocked back for support, the outstretched arm — conveys a powerful sense of surrender. Of course, a woman’s surrender before a man is uneasy, because it is always loaded with a more disquieting significance. That Leaf’s work is deliberately primitive adds to the sense that this gesture of female subjugation is a timeless quandary.

A meditation on this link between work and submission continues throughout the show. In Figure Running on the Seam (2014) Leaf has appropriated the skeleton of an old sewing machine stand, suspending a curled wire encased in mesh between the two vertical spindles. At the end of the wire is the eponymous figure, which looks as if she is not so much running as she is collapsed from exhaustion. Beside it hangs a canvas, Making #1 (2013-2014), which depicts the sculpture in an incomplete state. The colors consist mostly of muted browns and grays, except for an emanation of crimson that seems to drip from the table of the base into a shocking puddle at the center right of the canvas. It’s a physical manifestation of the blood that is involved, figuratively or metaphorically, with putting oneself fully into a piece of work. The object is made from the remnants of a machine traditionally relegated to a woman’s domain, and a sly, feminist subtext is once again at play here, as the viewer is asked to confront what it means to have a sagging body caught between its gears.

Elsewhere, Leaf grapples with work and the surrender of the body as it relates to the most private realms. In acrylic painted on tin, Woman Carrying Child Up the Stairs (2011) depicts the female figure ascending a staircase, with a child slumped over her shoulder in deep sleep, while in Turning Pages (2012-2015), done in the same medium, an abstracted couple is caught in the act of intercourse. The woman lays facedown, an arm and a leg trail off in quivery wakes of paint that melt into the background and she offers no struggle, while the male figure kneels atop and astride her body. Both paintings afford the viewer a voyeuristic perspective — as though we are peeping through a doorway undetected, spying upon these private moments between intimates and witnessing their momentarily exposed vulnerabilities. In her ability to lay bare these fraught moments of humanity, one is hard pressed to think of a braver artist that June Leaf.

As Leaf’s work is quiet, and slowly unfolds its meaning, Joan Semmel’s paintings are explicit and confrontational. “Across Five Decades,” her recent career survey at Alexander Gray Associates, made clear that Semmel more definitively embraced the tenets of second-wave feminism. However, like Leaf, Semmel has made a priority of the female body. As she has said of her work, “I wanted to find an erotic visual language that would speak to women. I was convinced that the repression of women began in the sexual arena, and this would need to be addressed at the source.” This desire is unmistakable in her paintings from the 1970s, like the knockout Erotic Yellow (1973). In a vibrant palette of yellows, greens, and pinks, Semmel captures a nude and entwined couple in the middle of vigorous foreplay. Both of their faces are obscured by the man’s arm, and between his spread legs the woman has one hand clamped firmly beneath his balls.

This is especially pertinent in some of the later paintings, where the artist makes herself the subject. In Centered (2002) Semmel has rendered herself nude before a mirror, sitting in a relaxed pose with one arm curled casually around her bent knee, neither obviously flaunting nor hiding her middle-aged body. With her other hand, she holds a camera up to her eye; like in Erotic Yellow (and several other paintings in the show), the face is obscured. The obstruction of her face is not only arch however, but also emancipating. While she purports to an examination of the self, Semmel simultaneously subverts the viewer’s gaze by turning it back upon them with the use of the camera and mirror. The energy of Semmel’s work is triumphal and celebratory. Where Leaf plumbs feminine experience for its ambivalence, Semmel embraces its power.

June Leaf and Joan Semmel hail from a generation that was peculiar for female artists. Leaf, who was born in 1929 and Semmel, born three years later, came of age when work by women artists infrequently garnered attention, but who both nonetheless established steady working practices which saw them into the Women’s Liberation movement of the late 1960s and beyond. Is it too hopeful to believe that the work of these two veterans, who anticipated later twentieth century feminism, now entering the dialogue, is a harbinger of a shift away from that tired, long-established prejudice towards women’s art? For through their heightened sense of the corporeal, both Leaf and Semmel in different ways are unflinching in their ability to strip bare fragilities shared by all humankind. Looking at their work, we realize we have all been exposed.

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September 11 to October 12, 2013
508 West 26th Street #215
New York City, 212-399-2636

Exuberant is the word I would use to describe Jack Whitten’s work over the years. While it is certainly possible to link the artist’s work to his African American background, to political turmoil current and past, to Abstract Expressionism, and even to metaphysics, what I really sense from his art is a man having fun with his materials. Whitten’s current show at Alexander Gray Associates hits you with a room full of color: the lava reds of Nine Cosmic CD’s: For the Firespitter (Jayne Cortez); the pure white of Warping Pythagoras: For Alan Uglow; and the deep black punctuated by colored dots in Remote Control. It’s not just the color that creates excitement in the room. Striking contrasts of figure and ground push the paintings out toward the viewer. Whitten builds materials onto the canvas in a way that is both evocative and tactile. The work hovers between collage, sculpture, and the kind of warped illusion of space wrought by juxtaposing realities that don’t quite fit together. The artist has said to me that the universe has not three or four but multiple dimensions; looking at his paintings, I believe him.

Single Loop: For Toots (2012), is a typical example. The painting consists of a neon red band that resembles a lasso, slapped onto a sculpted surface of radiating ripples. Whitten has applied a fine mist of black spray paint to the ripples, hitting the upside of each bump and leaving the downside stark white. This causes the low-relief surface to resemble a hard-lit black and white photograph of a lunar or desert landscape. Though the red loop is embedded in that surface, it seems miles in the foreground. The effect is like spotting a hair on the lens of a bombsight while viewing a barren topography 30,000 feet below.

Such a sight might not be foreign to Whitten, who trained as a pilot in the Tuskegee University air ROTC unit that succeeded the Tuskegee airmen of World War II fame. Also at Tuskegee, and later at Southern University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, the artist studied medicine. This left-brain background partly explains his interest in things scientific, like the Pythagorean Theorem or the many dimensions of space-time. Whitten applies all meanings of the word “warp” to Greek geometry in Warping Pythagoras (2013). Against a bright white ground, the artist paints an off-kilter black outline diagram—ostensibly showing the relationship between the sides of a right triangle. The diagram’s bent lines might be a nod to the modern cosmologist’s notion that space is warped. However, the painting’s jumbo size (6 feet high by 4 ½ wide/1.8 meters high by 1.4 wide), and the fact that the diagram appears to be skipping along and flapping in the air, makes it as much Pythagoras’s notebook doodle as his measure of the universe. On display here is the artist’s unique ability to both honor and make sport of received wisdom.

Whitten’s exuberance is in full bloom in the very large (approximately 11 feet wide/3.5 meters wide) Nine Cosmic CD’s: For the Firespitter (Jayne Cortez). This 2013 painting unearths the history of the artist’s technical innovations. Its deep red color blend is the result of raking unmixed hues across the canvas with a large tool, inflecting the streams of paint with an up-down ripple and radial pattern similar to that of Single Loop. Along the bottom edge of this hot pool of paint is a series of molded acrylic discs that resemble CDs, but are much funkier in texture than cold metallic audio discs. The technique of applying paint by mechanically raking across—and the insertion of molded objects—were two innovations of Whitten’s from the 1970s and 1980s respectively. Here he uses them again to great emotive effect in homage to Cortez, the performance poet and Black Arts innovator.

Whitten’s nods to African American heroes go back to the 1960s, when he moved from the South to New York City to study at Cooper Union and soak up the lessons of Abstract Expressionism. Although expressive, Whitten’s early works—e.g., the Martin Luther King series–were not quite abstract. In the the1968 painting King’s Wish (Martin Luther’s Dream), for example, faces and figures peer out from amidst a thicket of gestural marks. At the time the artist was dealing with the fallout of personal turmoil as well as the political tenor of the times, and he has said in a 2007 Brooklyn Rail interview with Robert Storr, “I was doing the best I could to contain the kind of imagery I was seeing.” Like his current works, these paintings have an intensity of color and a lyrical quality to the paint application—a vibrating energy that pushes beyond the limits of the canvas.

It was through rational experimentation with materials that Whitten found the proper outlet for this nervous energy. Beginning in the 1970s the artist departed from the style of Abstract Expressionism and began to apply paint in controlled ways using squeegees and afro-combs. These experiments produced the blurred horizontal lines of April’s Shark (1974)—an effect that would show up in the work of Gerhard Richter ten years later. In spite of these innovations, Whitten’s fame waned by the 1990s, to the extent that a 1991 Arts Magazine review put him in the category of “underknown” artists. Recent attention to his work— including a major 2007 exhibition at MoMA PS1, one at the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University this year, the inclusion of his painting 9-11-01 in the current Venice Biennale, and numerous exhibitions at Alexander Gray, has corrected this condition.

The serious and the funny come together quite nicely once again in Whitten’s monumental 2013 painting Remote Control. Its tight array of acrylic pop-ups, ordered in finer and coarser grid intervals, has some of the remoteness and control of an Agnes Martin. It might be a vast field of stars, brighter or dimmer according to their distance in space, and sharing the jet black firmament with the occasional red tail light from an airplane. With its long, narrow proportion and overabundance of colored protrusions, it is most certainly a gigantic TV remote. If the revolution is televised after all, you can be sure that Whitten’s paintings will pick up the signal.

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November 2 to December 15, 2012
508 West 26 Street #215, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City,  212 399 2636

The powerful group of welded-steel artworks on view at Alexander Gray Associates surely makes it clear why Melvin Edwards is one of the strongest sculptors we have today, for Edwards maintains formal mastery even as he has invested his work with materials—chains most especially—resonant of black American experience. Indeed, “Lynch Fragments,” the name of a sequence of pedestal-size sculptures that incorporate chains and elements such as farm tools that pertain to black history, is likely his best-known series. Yet he finds presence and strength in the chains as signs of cultural connectedness, even as his work implies violent repression.

This double message is transmitted through Edwards’ remarkable sense of form, which results in constructions dense with materials and meaning alike. The “Lynch Fragments” are eloquent but also brutalized shards of content.  The individual constructions, installed at eye level and several feet apart, feel as though they are ready to explode—not without reason, for the first example of the series was made in Los Angeles in 1963 against a backdropof political upheaval. Remarkably, Edwards has continued to make works belonging to “Lynch Fragments,” with the latest example in the show dated to this year.

The iron nexus that the examples of the “Lynch Fragments” afford shows us how one can speak eloquently of prejudice and loss while maintaining a vigorous, even positive, presence as an artist. Most of the pieces are tight with metal objects, fragments, and cultural attributes that pertain to black American culture.  Texcali (1965), one of Edwards’ most inspired works, consists of a chain dangling from a square piece of steel. The latter butts outward and is placed in the middle of the disk that serves as the sideways platform of the sculpture. What looks like part of a C clamp seems to hang off the center left of the piece. At the bottom of the last chain loop are two steel balls, which give the work an assertively masculine authority of self-defense, a stance found often in the series.

The raw intensity of Texcali is understandable in light of the time: the sculpture was made in 1965, the year of the Watts Riots. But its density and that of the others belonging to the sequence also suggest that the constructions are not without hope, even if that hope is based on anger and rebellion. Another example from this year, Nite Work, makes use of tools such as a wrench and small saw, placed in a rough spiral that opens toward the viewer. In its middle are a chain and a bent horseshoe. The imagery can be thought of as having two readings—one interpretation views the work as pushing back oppression, while the other sees the tools as constructive implements. Other works in the show are more abstract: Ways of Steel (1988) nicely celebrates its own materiality, and here the chain that extends away from the sculpture’s open center is a formal element quite free from political overtones. And the massive stainless-steel work To Listen (1990), nearly 90 inches tall, also has a chain. Draped along a diagonal edge of the central panel, it is eloquent and self-sufficiently sculptural.

Curtain for William and Peter (1969/2012), a drapery of sorts, is made with barbed wire bordered at the bottom with heavy chains. This piece functions like another model of resistance–the violence of the materials cannot be denied. Political art in America has often, arguably, been weakened by over-involvement with its own posturing.  It is clear, however, that an artist like Edwards found the right vocation working with steel, in order to propose an alternative to esthetic meekness. It is strange but true that sometimes the material itself carries a resonance that speaks to social frustration.  And  Edwards has made things even more complex by pouring his anger into work that is highly skilled. Edwards represents a unique combination of a close-to-modernist esthetic and a sharp eye for historical implications.

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Carol Diehl, Blake Gopnik, and Elizabeth Kley joined David Cohen to discuss Brice Dellsperger at team (gallery, inc.), Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe at Alexander Gray Associates, Tracey Moffatt at Tyler Rollins Fine Art, and Cornelia Parker at D’Amelio Terras.

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