LAILA PEDRO, BARRY SCHWABSKY and ROBERTA SMITH join DAVID COHEN to discuss

Frank Bowling: Make It New
Alexander Gray Associates, 510 West 26 Street, New York alexandergray.com

Charline von Heyl: New Work
Petzel, 456 West 18th Street, New York petzel.com

Yasumasa Morimura: In the Room of Art History
Luhring Augustine Bushwick, 25 Knickerbocker Avenue, Brooklyn luhringaugustine.com

Pope.L: One thing after another (part two)
Mitchell-Innes & Nash, 534 West 26th Street, New York miandn.com

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LAILA PEDRO, BARRY SCHWABSKY and ROBERTA SMITH join DAVID COHEN to discuss

Frank Bowling: Make It New
Alexander Gray Associates, 510 West 26 Street, New York alexandergray.com

Charline von Heyl: New Work
Petzel, 456 West 18th Street, New York petzel.com

Yasumasa Morimura: In the Room of Art History
Luhring Augustine Bushwick, 25 Knickerbocker Avenue, Brooklyn luhringaugustine.com

Pope.L: One thing after another (part two)
Mitchell-Innes & Nash, 534 West 26th Street, New York miandn.com

artcritical.com/reserve

Explore the archives: This will be Roberta Smith‘s tenth appearance on The Review Panel, Barry Schwabsky‘s sixth, and Laila Pedro‘s second. Podcasts go back to the series’ debut at the National Academy Museum in 2004 and can be accessed here at artcritical. Here are the most recent appearances of the October guests:

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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.

September 14 – October 16, 2010
53 East 58th Street
New York City, (212) 832-1400

In Frank Bowling’s earlier, more representational work, he was often concerned with the kind of autobiographical and socio-political themes that occupy many other artists of Afro-Caribbean descent. In England, he is still best known for the semi-abstract “map” paintings he made in the later ‘60s, with stencilled images of South America on the far left and Africa on the far right, the ocean in the middle evoking the infamous “Middle Passage” by which captured or purchased African men, women and children were transported to slavery in the New World. Nevertheless, when Bowling made his own transition, around 1965-66, from being London-based to being New York-based, he gradually transferred his allegiance from the representational to the abstract, finding that abstraction liberated him to focus on those aspects of picture-making that mattered most to him. “The practice of painting within the boundaries of Formalism,” he wrote in May 1972, “provides a setting in which I am able to test and ultimately prove my own freedom.”

Today, he divides his time between studios in London and DUMBO (having been elected to membership in the Royal Academy of Art in 2005, and made an officer of the Order of the British Empire two years ago).  He was born in 1936 to a shop-keeping family in Guyana, then a British colony, and sent to England in 1950 to complete his schooling. Initially, he considered a writing career, but after visiting the Continent, and seeing Goya, Rembrandt and Van Gogh, he turned toward painting.  Graduating from the Royal College of Art in 1962, he at first moved in circles of representational artists, including Larry Rivers (then resident in London) and fellow RCA graduates like David Hockney. His full-time stay in New York lasted approximately ten years, and included a stint as a contributing editor to Arts Magazine from 1969 to 1972. He was introduced to Clement Greenberg in 1971, at a party given by Peter Reginato, and Greenberg became a visitor to Bowling’s studio, offering advice and encouragement.

The earlier paintings in the Spanierman show are in the tradition of color-field paintings of the ‘70s and ‘80s.  The Bowlings from the ‘70s, with their loose, vivid and flame-like pourings of paint, are clearly related to near-contemporary paintings by Helen Frankenthaler or Paul Jenkins. The Bowlings of the ‘80s, with their subdued, closely valued colors, often mottled or with intricately-wrought accretions of gel and other elements, are kissing cousins to the works of Jules Olitski and Larry Poons from this period. Yet all the work at Spanierman retains its own vigor and individuality. Nobody with any familiarity with this school could mistake a Bowling for a Jenkins, Frankenthaler, Poons or Olitski.  Though he belongs in their company, he is his own man. This is especially evident with canvases like 13th Hour (1976), in which a thrilling, vertical whoosh of brilliant yellow rises in the center of a narrow soft pink field, accompanied by accents of chartreuse and rust.  Another memorable picture is Odysseus’s Footfalls (1982), a monumental panorama of speckled cloudlike shapes of pink, purple and mint. It clearly takes its name from the enormous foot-like shape descending through its middle, though certainly Bowling never intended to paint a foot.  Rather, the shape must simply have emerged in the course of creating an abstraction, and the artist (whose literary talents frequently lead him to whimsy and word plays in his titles) titled it after the fact.

Were Greenberg still alive, he might not be as enthusiastic about Bowling’s work since the ‘90s, but it too is distinguished, in a different way.  Pictures are smaller, and the paint is much more controlled, often sutured into collaged elements. Squares, strips and rectangles of brightly painted fabric are cut out (sometimes with pinking shears) and stapled into place. In some of these paintings, especially those from around the turn of the century, the palette is ripe with rich, deep browns and other urban hues, but the newest works of this show are mostly clearer and brighter. This is especially true of a series of three done this year, in which a central area, dominated by yellow, is decorated with playful little flower-like dabs of pink and blue, and framed by strips of fabric in contrasting colors. The largest and most successful of this series is Old Dutch Vase (2010).   Some examples of the later work are a bit off from the high standard set by most of the other works on view, but this is a minor cavil.  On the whole, the show offers an outstanding artist who (as the Guide Michelin might say) vaut le voyage.

The post The Ultimate Proof of His Freedom: Frank Bowling’s abstract painting appeared first on artcritical.

on view at Anita Shapolsky Gallery and Art Foundation, 152 East 65th Street on the Upper East Side, as part of the exhibition, African American Abstract Masters, curated by Dr. Mary Anne Rose and presented in celebration of Black History month. The exhibition also includes works of Betty Blayton,  Ed Clark, Herbert Gentry, Bill Hutson, Sam Middleton, Joe Overstreet, Thomas Sills, Merton Simpson and Frank Wimberley.  The poster for the exhibition poses two blunt and provocative questions: Do you know these people?  Why not? Through April 24.

This was an artcritical PIC in February 2010.

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