[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/201602088″ params=”color=ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false” width=”100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]

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.

The post February, 2011: Diehl, Gopnik, and Kley with moderator David Cohen appeared first on artcritical.

May 8 – June 19, 2010
525 West 22nd Street
New York City, 212 352 9460

A placard advises visitors to Heather Rowe’s installation to “Please be aware of your surroundings as you move through the space.” It seemed at first glance like a practical request considering the narrow, winding passages of the sculptural modules.  The mirrors’ dizzying and duplicating effects invoke disorientation. But unlike the delicate sculptures in Anne Truitt’s exhibition across 22nd Street, the advisory was less for the safety of Rowe’s robust work than that of its viewers. This is where I read the statement as ironic because Rowe’s installation invites the opposite experience—an intense dislocation of surroundings and place, blurring interior and exterior space. It is impossible to experience the installation without negotiating its narrow passages, where you confront your reflection (with all associated visual and psychological baggage) among steel planks that simultaneously frame other visitors’ craniums—or more disturbingly suggest their decapitation.

Initially, the structure, made up of modules of skeletal scaffolding, resembles uniform floating pieces of furniture such as bookshelves or desks. An eye-level shelf becomes the perceptual locus, containing rhomboid-shaped mirror pieces and fragments of decorative moldings. This installation is less architectural than Rowe’s previous works though still fused to the architecture’s space.

While Rowe’s current exhibition characteristically incorporates sculpture, installation and architecture as an experience, it attempts to grow farther from her well-noted influences. Although the disorientation of surroundings (Dan Graham’s perceptual pavilions), displacement of space and material (Gordon Matta-Clark’s building cuts) and temporal and perceptual dislocation (Robert Smithson’s mirror displacements) are all still elementally present, they’re less apparent in the material language of the work than the sum interaction of the piece.

Rowe’s choice of materials (wood, steel, plexiglass, drywall, wallpaper, carpet, molding, paint) are not as apparent as components and, as a whole, unlike Matta-Clark’s building chunks, are overly refined and suggest aggregation of material rather than their disassembly. The mirrors, like a miniature Kurt Schwitters Merzbau, generate a framing of static/cinematic views as well as a more domestic sense of self-reflection, like looking at yourself in a vanity set. The mirrors also displace views inside and outside the gallery, suggesting an interpretation of Smithson’s dialectic of site/non-site.

But by reducing architectural space to component, fragmented, almost Minimalist parts, what does Rowe say about the interior? Do the mirrors and curvaceous decorative moldings allude to a commentary on domesticity? In Rowe’s world, because these details are sequestered within the gray matter of the installation, inviting one to burrow deeply into the micro-spatiality of her piece, these ideas are often difficult to access or account for.

Rowe has always been one to revel in material details: the unbalanced plexiglass footings in this installation, for instance, or the decorative moldings and carpets, are visually enticing, yet they also point to a sense that her work is beginning to be too carefully considered, even though these particulars also reveal palimpsests—pencil marks, rough cuts and elements of process. The higher the refinement in Rowe, the less risks seem to have been taken.  She is at her strongest when she allows a looseness that breathes with your experience of her work.

The post The mirror stage: Heather Rowe’s latest installation appeared first on artcritical.

At D’Amelio Terras, Elliot Green, the perfectionist, low profile G in the longtime collaborative triplex, Team ShaG (comprising also the highly visible David Humphrey and Amy Sillman) is showing paintings in New York for the first time since 2003.  The hiatus may indicate that Green’s antic comedy of gestures, newly breezy and following upon a solidified, cartoonographic style, has been hard won.  But if the paintings’ touch has changed, their improvisatory premise hasn’t; a time-lapse video shown at Postmasters in 2000 seemed aimed at viewers, conditioned by pop and conceptual painting, who would put Green’s cart – precision screwball – before his horse: an animating coagulation of squiggles, feints, wipes and golem parts.  Green’s engagement with comics and cartoons – call it the comicartoon – is thus the reverse of tough mannerists like Joyce Pensato or Peter Saul.  Where they beat a cheap silk purse into leathery sow’s ears, Green coaxes his contending gestures toward the comicartoon’s gleaming, gimcrack lucidity; if only he might stumble upon some farce of sex, animus and style foretold by Betty Boop or Gerald McBoing Boing.

Green’s current paintings supplant his earlier “limited animation” mock-mayhem with the saturated glazes and rendered anatomies of a Golden Age chipmunk fable.  Humility at the Landfill (2008) and Rainbow with Eclipse (2009) evoke old color televisions aglow with putting green-shaped washes of dry glaze that don’t quite register at the edges.  In these gaps a wormy riot of “personified abstraction” – Green’s show title – gets a vital foothold, every squiggle threatening to come alive with chrome highlights.  Flesh Meets Mist (2009) exquisitely can’t cohere into the melodrama it dimly remembers, as if De Kooning in his lyrical senescence were painting Elmer Fudd as Siegfried.  Lemony Soap (2009) becomes a Tom and Jerry Show of speedy automatic gestures warring with hidden faces on a vast, tricky Road Runner mesa.

The classic animations Green’s new work calls to mind were luxuries of common-coin professionalism—think stone tracery and masons’ guilds.  Among the fluent inkmeisters of the funnies and animation studios, an idiot-bastard-son version of “mastery” had come to repose, that value long discredited by incurable Victorian and Beaux Arts decadence and subject to Modernist revaluation. Green’s soft, sad hues of Arcadian twilight suggest something like this sublimated history; that the comicartoon is a tombstone — but that surrounding it a lost Claudian Eden strangely persists by a mournful comedy of zings and ricochets.  Seriously folks.

Green’s comicartoon humor is meditative and self-inflicted compared to Mr. Saul’s recently shown Better Than De Kooning, an absurdly solidified, excruciatingly plastic version of an AbEx pile-up.  Saul is not a cartoonist, but he plays one in the art world and this painting seemed of a species with hilarious screeds from the rapidographs of Spiegelman, Clowes, and Crumb, chip-on-the-shoulder revenge fantasies upon arty pretentions from hard-working lonerswhoknow how to draw! What Green brings to the disputa between High and Low is the exquisite draftsmanship, actually, that De Kooning, Guston, and Pollock, etc. would self-deny.  One senses that Joanne Greenbaum in the gallery’s other room, or Carroll Dunham, or the other members of Team SHaG are exemplars of this tough-guy lineage, rebels against their own proficiency.  For them, beauty is, to pilfer the phrase, an invisible dragon; it can be located only with blind lunges and swats, from a dull sword if necessary.  Green, by contrast, seems incapable of winning ugly.  This is the limitation of his work, its flaw.  Is Green missing the point by being too tasteful?  If so, let us be as contented as Osgood Fielding III: after all, nobody’s perfect.

The post Elliot Green: Personified Abstraction at D’Amelio Terras appeared first on artcritical.

In After the End of Art, Arthur Danto writes, “By contrast with the exultant, even feverish art market of the mid-1980s, which a certain number of grudging but not altogether misguided commentators at the time likened to the famous tulip mania that swamped the characteristic thrift and caution of the Dutch with a kind of speculative fever, the art world of the mid-1990s is a triste and chastened scene.”  Many would now predict that this description will serve equally well for the art market’s shift in the 2000s.  Prediction is certainly not foreign to the art word–a speculative market if there ever was one–prediction, in fact, may be the art market’s primary currency.  Danto’s view of the future continues,  “…the complex of casual determinants that accounted for the appetite to acquire art in the 1980s may never recombine in the form they assumed in that decade.”   Here Danto’s crystal ball proved cloudy, the 2000s saw not only a renewal of appetite, but the creation of a seemingly insatiable one–a veritable tapeworm in the collective stomach of the art-acquiring class.

The real irony, however, is that Danto would be bothering to make predictions at all in a book dedicated to announcing the end of art history.  Of course, the benefit to announcing the end of any history is that one gets to be that history’s final prophet.  Prophecy unites the theorist, the art dealer, and the author of science fiction–each pedaling their vision of the future.  It is in this vein that D’Amelio Terras gives us 1992009, a group show with a catchy sci-fi name that offers the theory that 1992 and 2009 share not only similar cultural landmarks–the replacement of a Bush in the White House with a Democrat, the war in Iraq, and fiscal failure–but also an artistic vision.  Thus heavyweights of the 90s–Christopher Wool, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Sue Williams–are paired with younger artists represented by the gallery, such as Sara VanDerBeek, Leslie Hewitt, and Heather Rowe.

The cynical read conjures an obvious ploy to lend credibility to the gallery’s roster by billing these younger artists as stars of the future–imagine a 2029, this show whispers, in which Jedediah Ceasar is the new Robert Gober.  Such gestures–recession marketing, if you will–abound in Chelsea at the moment.  Witness the close proximity of solo shows by Jennifer Dalton and William Powhida, at Winkleman and Schroeder Romero Gallery respectively, which both offer cute, topical takes on the art world’s monetary woes.  Elsewhere, it is easy to imagine financial considerations as the motivator for a gallery’s selection of works even when this might not be the case, easy to see the recession lingering behind every hopeful show of mid-sized and polite paintings, and screaming behind sure-to-please blockbusters such as Picasso at Gagosian.

1992009 offers neither overly polite works nor guaranteed crowd pleasers.  The show’s relationship to the dates that form its title is largely the matter of the curatorial statement, rather than a topical consideration of the art, so it is easy to ignore this premise and focus on the work.  And here cross-generational relationships do emerge.  Nicole Cherubini’s vessel and pedestal are connected by a thin, wobbly arc that turns the whole sculpture into a sort of cup, creating the sense that the real purpose of ceramics is to offer a set of conventions that can be undone, and Steve Parrino’s canvas lies across its stretchers bars with the unruliness of a slept-in bed–here too it is the misuse of a set of material traditions that provides the work with its substance.  Noah Sheldon and Maggie Peng’s oversized, motorized wind chimes are a little bit beautiful, a little bit mysterious, and a little bit silly in a way that is not dissimilar to Kiki Smith’s white wax figure, crouched on the floor with long, outstretched arms.  Peter Missing tags the gallery wall with red lines representing an overturned wine glass atop three marks slashed through by a forth; this improvised hieroglyph mirrors the question mark slashed by two lines in Jessica Diamond’s graphic red and black wall painting.

“What money?” Diamond’s painting reads, the most overt reference to recession in the show.  That her work would have responded to the art market in such a fashion only makes sense, in the 90s Diamond’s paintings were primarily concerned with capitalist critique.  That this is not a cause unanimously championed by the other artists in the show doesn’t prevent meaningful relationships from forming among much of the very good work in 1992009, but it does contribute to the shows  failure to create a gestalt.  Despite the 2009 dating of many of the younger artist’s contributions, these pieces came out of bodies of work formed not during an art market bust, but rather in the height of its boom. Art is inevitably a product of the time in which it was made, but how this financial crisis will affect art, it is still too early to tell–even for a prophet.

The post 1992009 at D’Amelio Terras appeared first on artcritical.

Unbelievably, painting is yet again under assault. Despite strength of activity evident in commercial galleries, art school degree shows, and studios, the medium is held in suspicion thanks to its virtual exclusion from the Whitney Biennial and the inaugural exhibitions of the new New Museum. Once more, oil on canvas is made to feel like a guilty pleasure.

There is no better way to savor that sensation than in the enjoyment of “Bad” painting. In this strange stylistic phenomenon of conceptually driven academicism, kitsch, and mannerism, painterly technique is less a means to end than an end in itself. Being a painter becomes a performance, a posture.

And yet, once they make a career out of this position, painters are in an odd place: however tongue-in-cheek they may have been about painterly quality, the sheer mechanics of working in traditional styles, confronting the very problems that were historically the motor of stylistic development, means that their “bad” painting gets better. There is progression within their transgression.

Two iconoclasts currently showing now are in danger of getting so good as to become iconic: Delia Brown, at D’Amelio Terras, and Hilary Harkness, at Mary Boone. Both artists manage to collide issues of gender and technique in ways that give avant-garde edge to their formal finesse: “old master” technique is played off against the femininity of their motifs.

Delia Brown’s show is titled “Precious,” a suitably ambiguous term, equally connoting treasure and affectation. Her subject is mother-child relations, so the word fits the sense of intense connection. But it also sits well with the highly wrought surfaces of these compressed genre scenes, which are generally no more than a foot and half in their longest dimension. She depicts figures in luxurious domestic interiors in a virtuoso style, at once tightly observed and dashed off. They merge the unabashed sentimentality of Norman Rockwell and the bravura brushwork of John Singer Sargent.

Ms. Brown chose her models from among acquaintances in their late 30s, women nearing the outer reach of childbearing age who are not yet actually mothers. The kids they are posed with were borrowed. Knowing this adds a layer of “as if”-ness that bolsters the artifice of the artist’s investment in her appropriated, academic figurative language.

Sargent notwithstanding (the artist’s printed notes also cite Mary Cassatt, Fragonard and Balthus as pictorial points of reference), Ms. Brown’s work more strongly recalls mid-20th Century traditionalists like John Koch, and countless marginal, conservative artists whose commissioned family portraits graced upper middle class homes of that period than they do bona fide art historical sources.

Ms. Brown’s preciousness relates to a broad current of contemporary women artists presided over by Elizabeth Peyton (whose latest show closes at Gavin Brown this weekend) who knowingly fuses commercial illustration style and fey emotion. Ms. Harkness’s intense detail and miniaturist skill, equal parts old master and comic book, fits the same somewhat nerdish aesthetic.

In her statement, Ms. Brown understands the gender issues of her stylistic departure in historic terms. “In painting school, one was told not to be ‘precious,’ which was a way of saying that one must instead be bold, muscular, unattached, unsentimental — in a word, masculine.” Ironically, the paint handling and compositions of the shows that first brought the artist to attention had such qualities — orgy scenes of well-bronzed young figures and self-portraits that accentuated her buxom features were suitably Rubeneque, in a highly kitsch way.

In compression of scale, however, Ms. Brown has begun to tap a genuinely precious seam of her own talent. Without losing the insolence that is essential to her aesthetic, she has painted a show of real gems. The tight scale makes it harder for the artist to indulge her tendency towards slick mimesis, energizing the work with an enriching awkwardness. This comes out, for instance, in the treatment of space in “Snack Time” (all 2008), in which a child sits at Saarinen’s Tulip table with an English Bull Terrier nestling up to him while a French bulldog looks on: all the postures and expression — canine and childish — are perfectly caught in this reduced space.

In “Mother’s Bathroom” two teenage girls try on make up while perched on the edge of a tub. Their intertwined, spindly legs have a soft floppiness more akin to Ms. Harkness’s mannerist figuration than Ms. Brown’s habitual soft-core photorealism.

“A Pink Rocker” plays odd games with scale as an Asian woman with an occidental child on her lap sits in what is probably the child’s chair in a distant room, a toy filled cot dominating the foreground and adding further confusion to the varying head sizes.

There is still plenty that is obnoxious and meretricious about these pictures: Neither Ms. Brown nor her champions would want it otherwise. But even in the most self-consciously “decadent” Fragonardian painting, “A Young Girl’s Room,” in which a Chloe Sevigny-like adolescent with dreamy limbs frolics with a Highland Terrier, the play of different lights, textures, and perspective has more to do with the dynamics of facture – getting stuff down in limited space – than with detached style games. It makes for a rich painterly experience.

Ms. Harkness, who has been written about in-depth in these pages before, is a mannerist with an unwavering ability to marry perversity and skill. She is a master of kinky scale, packing busy compositions with tiny yet dynamic figures engaged in strange activities that fuse cruelty and pleasure. Their industry — relentless yet dispassionate — mirrors that of their own making, and our viewing. The figures in the paintings, and the paintings themselves, exude a cold, absurdist eroticism.

She paints armies of Barbie doll-like stick-figure women, their tight-fitting apparel, rather like Lara Croft’s, suited equally to the bedroom and the battlefield. Their activities generally involve pleasuring or torturing, but with little emotional involvement in either case.

The scene has a Second World War ambiance, though often with contemporary details thrown in. Her style is a cross between comic book fetishist Eric Stanton and Hieronymous Bosch. She will present a building or battleship in cutaway isometric so that you can see room to room overrun with her women, ant-like in the way they devour space.

“Pearl Trader” (2006) makes the Christies auction house at Rockefeller Center, with its distinctive curved façade and Sol le Witt mural, the locale for a battle orgy surrounded by art. In one room there is a Damien Hirst tank and a Roy Lichtenstein “girl” signaling suitable touchstones for Ms. Harkness’s reductive eroticism and chilled cruelty.

Ms. Harkness shares with Sade not just the pathology to which the Marquis lent his name but also an essential element of style — endless variation, at once exhilerating and enervating, upon an obsessive theme.

In a departure from Ms. Harkness’s normal procedure, “Gertrude Stein & Alice B. Toklas, Paris, October, 1939” (2007–08), painted on copper, increases the scale of individual figures, and is overtly quotational. It is a handsome work, and it is understandable that the artist should look for an escape from her bizarre servitude to the miniature, but it does not yet have the bravura awkwardness that is her essential hallmark.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, May 15, 2008 under the heading “Gallery Going:  In Defense of Painting”

The post Delia Brown: Precious at D’Amelio Terras, Hilary Harness at Mary Boone appeared first on artcritical.