At times, abstract painting can seem like a received package, with little space left to think outside of the box. In Virva Hinnemo, to overplay the postal metaphor, we have an artist “pushing the envelope” — in her case, literally so. A form vocabulary and a gestural lexicon familiar from mid-century American masters Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell and Philip Guston meet the swift completion of their appointed rounds on flattened cartons as their repurposed, eccentric support. This strategy could have smacked of Arte Povera, Supports/Surfaces or currently fashionable “provisional” abstraction, but somehow in the hands of this Springs, NY-based Finnish artist the work manages to come across as visually sophisticated but stylistically innocent. Their charming, unforced modernism fits right into the refreshingly old-fashioned surroundings of this plush new venue, sharing quarters with another of proprietor Anita Rogers’ enterprises and thus itself an eccentric support.

The post Virva Hinnemo at Anita Rogers appeared first on artcritical.

Julia Westerbeke draws with the shadows produced by puncturing sheets of paper with untold numbers of pinpricks. Swirls and clusters of these craters bring to mind petri dishes and galaxies, merging images of the microscopic and the astronomical. They invoke a haptic feeling of disintegration: her drawings are created through the evisceration of their material base.

Salon Zürcher is at 33 Bleecker Street, between Lafayette Street and the Bowery, on view Sunday, noon to 8pm; and Sunday, noon to 5pm.

The post Frieze Week Pick of the Day: Julia Westerbeke at Salon Zürcher appeared first on artcritical.

Dennis Kardon is the legitimate heir of all the renegade traditions of modern painting, from the bastardized pittura metafisica of late de Chirico through Picabia at his most transgressive to the “classic” “Bad” painters of the 1980s. The Midas of perversity, whatever his brush touches turns to ickiness. The ambivalent orb in the forefront of “Anticipating Disaster” redefines the notion of the “anxious object”: a globe that somehow sprouts vaginal wings out of its melting icecap. Elsewhere in this decomposing composition is a shape wrapped in a crinkly silver foil that hints at a joint of meat you don’t want to unwrap. The chance encounter of this unhappy couple takes place within a still life setting that could read equally as a tabletop or an eerie architectural space of indefinable scale. Kardon is a master of ill ease.

The post Dennis Kardon at Valentine appeared first on artcritical.

The way public discourse and policy are staged may seem ancillary to the actual processes of state and business, but are much more vital than one might assume, serving as a metaphor for the way that the true effect of a pact can be overlooked when focusing on flowery, triumphant assertions. Subtle signals of ostentation, power, and homeliness or populism are often on display in photo ops for the signing of contracts, declarations, treaties. Taryn Simon throws an unfocused but beautiful spotlight on these semiotics in her current solo, “Paperwork and the Will of Capital,” at Gagosian’s 24th Street location. Simon pairs brief summaries of political and commercial agreements with still-life recreations of the flowers present at the press events used to publicly seal such deals. Also included are pressed samples of the flora and lists of their binomens. Barnett Newman once said that “Aesthetics is for artists what Ornithology is for birds.” One might similarly wonder if decorous displays of authority are to politics what flower arrangements are to botanists.

The post Taryn Simon at Gagosian appeared first on artcritical.

Among other distinctions, Spring Break is the only Armory Week fair to spill over to Monday, which fits its image of youthful overreach. It is the most anarchic and exuberant of the fairs: each room of these administrative offices of the USPS (the space has a David Lynch-like quality, a time-capsule of New Deal-era bureaucracy) has its own curator. Myla Dalbesio, for instance, orchestrated a suite of rooms into “you can call me baby,” with various post-feminist takes on the overarching theme of the fair, “cut and paste.” Erin Riley’s  (2015), for instance, appropriates a moment of girl-on-girl porn frozen on an iPhone. A postmodern gesture if ever, except that if you look at old tapestries there’s often fun and naughtiness going on there, too.

The post Erin Riley at Spring Break appeared first on artcritical.

Catherine Opie has shows at both of Lehmann Maupin’s New York spaces — in Chelsea on 22nd Street, and on the Lower East Side at Chrystie Street. I kind of unexpectedly flipped for the one at the Chrystie Street location, with photos documenting Elizabeth Taylor’s home at 700 Nimes Road, near Beverly Hills, taken between 2010 and 2011. I say unexpectedly because although I anticipated that they’d be, like Opie’s portraits, gorgeous — they are — but I hadn’t anticipated how much I’d read from them. I don’t know much about Elizabeth Taylor or her movies; the films I like largely displaced her generation, starting in the 1960s and ’70s. I know she was glamorous and was connected somehow to Richard Burton and to Michael Jackson. Nonetheless, I find Opie’s intimate vignettes of Taylor’s opulent home and possessions, really revealing about who the actress was. That might be an illusion, but god, it’s a pretty one, and with diamonds, too.

“Catherine Opie: 700 Nimes Road” at Lehmann Maupin, 201 Chrystie, through February 20, and “Catherine Opie: Portraits and Landscapes” at Lehmann Maupin, 536 W 22nd, through March 5; 212 255 2924.

The post Catherine Opie at Lehmann Maupin appeared first on artcritical.

“Ronnie Landfield: Five Decades” is a show that includes the retrospective aspect to which it title alludes in one room and a display of new works, in the other, made since the artist moved upstate following the disastrous flood that claimed his downtown Manhattan studio of as many decades and damaged his archives. Any transition between the restored or spared earlier canvases and his fresh new efforts is seamless to this viewer’s eye. As I wrote of his show  at Stephen Haller Gallery (before the merger of Stux and Haller) in 2011, submitting to an urge to pun on his surname, “here is a painter who reinvigorates the tradition of post-painterly New York School abstraction by making explicit what were –despite partisanship for non-objectivity, or at least non-representation, at its historical outset – irrepressible references and sly allusions to landscape. Landfield puts the field back into Color Field Painting.”

The post Ronnie Landfield at STUX + HALLER appeared first on artcritical.

Doyenne of all things digital, Carla Gannis is the artist who, notoriously, “translated” Hieronymus Bosch into Emoji a couple of years ago, a project reviewed in these pages. She manages simultaneously to channel Marcel Duchamp, Joseph Kosuth and Cindy Sherman in her animated self-portrait video, Nude Descending a Staircase. It is the centerpiece of a show she titles after Kosuth’s 1966 neon sculpture, A Subject Self-Defined. For many years Gannis has used her “self” in conceptually and perceptually disrupted avatars as a disembodied presence in the cyber realm, often exploiting the psychologically disruptive relationship between physical and virtual supports. Her Bushwick show features examples from her collection of 52 digital drawings collected in the volume due to be published March 5, “Carla Gannis: The Selfie Drawings.” As befits an artist fearless in wading into the divide between digital media and hand-made modes of expression, she appears unfazed in her marine descent.

Carla Gannis, Nude Descending a Staircase, 2015. 4K video, 3:37. Courtesy of the Artist. On view through March 12. Transfer, open Saturdays and by appointment, is at 1030 Metropolitan Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11211

The post Carla Gannis at Transfer appeared first on artcritical.

Moira Dryer, who died of cancer aged 34 in 1992, was a luminary of an ascendant new abstraction in the New York scene of the 1980s. Starting out as assistants to Elizabeth Murray and Julian Schnabel and a rare female presence on the roster of Mary Boone Gallery, the young Canadian artist managed exhibitions in her short career at Boston’s ICA and at SFMOMA. Her style was as forcefully her own as that of her perceived peers Terry Winters, Philip Taaffe or Peter Halley with all of whom she shared generational traits: insistently handmade and rich in material presence, her mark making was lyrical yet emotionally neutral in a way that exuded knowingness and attitude. A show of paintings and rarely exhibited drawings inaugurates a new back room second gallery of 11R, as Eleven Rivington is rebranding itself since leaving its eponymous address around the corner and doubling down on Chrystie Street. An acid green and shocking red untitled casein painting on board sporting a striking image of granular stripes  is no less sumptuous and absorbing for its no-nonsense factuality.

Exhibition on view through February 7 at 11R’s west gallery, 195 Chrystie Street. between Rivington and Stanton street, New York City, 212 982-1930

The post Moira Dryer at 11R appeared first on artcritical.