July 21–to September 2, 2019
675 West 252nd Street at Bingham Road
The Bronx, wavehill.org

Large, semi-translucent, gesturally painted blue shapes optically sway in space in Riad Miah’s immersive site-specific installation, at Wave Hill’s Sunroom Project Space. “Waves of Light—Entwined Through the Tendrils of Time,” a project space exhibition curated by Eileen Jeng Lynch, explores monthly changes in light through painting in space, a complex retinal and emotional task. Painting on transparent Dura-Lar panels on both sides with oil and acrylic, he mixes large gestural strokes and his signature menagerie of dispersed drips. The shapes are strategically suspended from the ceiling across the perimeter of skylights, enabling a translucent glow throughout the space. A palette exploring a rich spectrum of blues selected for each hanging piece come from careful observation of the sky’s color at a given time each month, as viewed from Wave Hill. The shapes echo the verticality of the windows in the Sun Porch and century old wisteria intricately intertwined on the building outside. Amongst the hanging pieces, four, seaweed-like plastic structures cascade downward from the center of each skylight creating a juxtaposition of manmade and natural twists and turns.

In a departure from his more familiar painting work, but one that does nothing to compromise the essence of his painterly magic, Miah elegantly coaxes gestural painting into another realm. Playing with light, color and paint, the work reflects changing conditions in the space and surrounding environment. At any given time of day or season, the viewer can observe at least one shape that is reflective of the current particularity of hue outsides, creating an intense, metaphysical spirit of place. Miraculously, Miah is able to fuse awareness of space with an acute sense of the two dimensionality of his painting surface, handling this by suspending the paintings in such a way as to generate an illusion of floating. The technique of traditional painting was also modified to sustain the gestural nature of the brushstrokes. The artist uses various media and careful but swift application of acrylic paint to suspend his gestures in space while the gestural strokes are cut out and pasted back on the surface creating an uneven edge. The resulting mirage-like floatation effect further teases out a sensation of time, as each gesture appears frozen in its moment.

While Riad’s debt to David Reed with his autonomous gestural swirls is striking, his project has a deeper affinity with James Turrell’s Skylight and Skyspace series. Miah strives to achieve the unobtainable effect of the sky’s depth. But unlike Turrell, Miah interprets the experience of the sky more literally by exploring the color blue and pushing it to the farthest extents to which pigment can take the eye. To Miah the examination of color is an important element of the work as he breaks down the blue spectrum. The work invites observation, positioning viewers to appreciate subtleties from the artist’s perspective. The ways in which the artist treats his surfaces, accentuates painterly qualities. The confined space in this exhibition forces the observer to interact with each hanging shape’s intimate brushstrokes and glimpse the artist’s obsessive intentionality. While Miah deploys oil paint with his signature technique of paint dispersion on one side of the Dura-Lar, the gestural strokes in acrylic are a new medium for the artist and are used to generate the energetic visual field.

Miah’s poignant manipulation of place and space create a perfect and serene moment of meditation within Wave Hill’s idyllic setting. As a botanical garden and art space, Wave Hill offers a tranquil escape from its urban surroundings. Miah’s work expertly encapsulates this ideal by drawing on more than a decade of visitation to this space. Surprisingly he eschews botanical specifics, focusing instead on the overlooked, ever-unfolding tapestry of the sky. His choices of blue address the intangible nature of the sky while balancing the delicate physicality of his materials.

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January 17 to February 25, 2017
980 Madison Avenue, between 77th and 78th streets
New York City, gagosian.com

The exhibition Painting Paintings (David Reed) 1975 at Gagosian uptown is remarkable both for the quality of the paintings and for the way they embody the transformational moment in which they were made. The 17 paintings filling a single large room are all from 1974-75 and if they are metronomic in their structure and in their presentation, their urgency and excitement are as palpable as when they were first presented. Together with a catalogue by the show’s curators, Katy Siegel and Christopher Wool, that delves into the mid-70s context of Reed’s paintings, this show creates a vivid historical context for the works that commence Reed’s distinguished career.

Painting Paintings reunites many paintings that were shown in Reed’s heady debut at Susan Caldwell gallery in 1975. Reviewing it that year for Art in America, Peter Schjeldahl wrote that Reed’s paintings have “the strength of modesty, of ambition reduced to a level not further reducible. There is no ‘getting around’ these paintings”.

Part of the interest of the work, then and now, is how it distills painterliness. The schema is simple—each painting contains roughly a dozen horizontal bands of red or black alternating with white or off-white. The canvas panels are less than a foot wide and about six feet vertically—wider paintings consist of these regular units bolted together. But it is the process that makes these paintings standout. The paintings are the result of Reed pulling a large loaded brush of red or black paint through a thick wet ground of whitish oil paint. What follows from this premise are viscerally compelling incidents where the brushstrokes have dissolved into viscous skeins of paint. Although the gesture of Reed’s brushstroke is simple and repetitive, pigment and gravity collaborate to form detailed arrays of micro-cosmic composition—each is a unique painterly moment, off hand and delectable at the same time.

There is a specific bodily relation to Reed’s paintings that is crucial and cannot be reproduced.  The bands of brushstrokes can be apprehended through photography but in terms of the physical experience of looking at these paintings, the stripes do only perfunctory duty. Rather than function as the paintings’ compositional goal the alternating bands are the structure that allows paint to hang in an intimate choreography of splashes and blendings.  In the catalogue Siegel and Wool note that the linear compositions are like writing with their left to right pulls of pigment. They also bear a resemblence to a musical score. Additionally, the quality of Reed’s paintings relate to the sumptuous and insistently rhythmic compositions that Philip Glass and Steve Reich were performing in lower Manhattan in the mid-seventies. The vertical panel has an ergonomic architecture tuned for a human body to paint its surface. The clarity of each painting’s facture reminds us that as viewers we take up the same location in front of the canvas as the artist did while painting it. The paintings invite us to step in close to see and soak up lush surface specifics.  It is this pull to intimacy that gives Reed’s paintings their humanity and warmth. And that seems to be where the picture is in these works— not in their imagistic configuration but within the physical process of close looking.

Through contemporaneous documents—magazine and catalogue pages, installation and personal photographs, as well as reproductions of works by other artists—the catalogue presents the personal as well as cultural context for Reed’s emergence as a painter. There is an evocative photograph from 1968, for instance, of Reed in attendance at the New York Studio School with the painters Philip Guston and Leland Bell surrounded by students. Although Reed moved on from the conservative spatialist conventions of that institution, the catalogue presents his development less as a rejection as the taking up of a radical rethinking of art underway at that time in New York. The catalogue includes a chapter based on the exhibition, Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials, curated by James Monte and Marcia Tucker at the Whitney in 1969 that manifested the concerns of process-oriented artists of the late 1960s. The show included only one painter, Robert Ryman, and as such might have been called “Anti-Painting”. Most of the artists selected were less interested in the history of painting and sculpture than in science, technology, and sociology. Even so, these “Anti-Illusion” artists employ a number of shared pictorial conventions. Foremost is the use of repetition. Partly this is an affection for rhythm, but it is also a control to discover how different effects come from the same action. Additionally repetition is used to present narrative in a manner like film through a sequence of frames. Finally, there is a taste for documentation as representation—either through the technical means of photography, film or video, or through the presentation of material residue as evidence of the action that produced it. As indicated by the use of the word in the 1969 show title, Material, material, raw and unadorned, is savored in the work of artists such as Lynda Benglis and Carl Andre. It was an insightful choice by Siegel and Wool to include these contemporary works in Reed’s catalogue because it demonstrates how he embraced pictorial values of the zeitgeist. It is an achievement, and an unlikely one, that Reed brought what were often thought to be anti-painting values to his painting so naturally.

One flight down at Gagosian, the curators installed a group of works tangentially related to Reed’s paintings, including examples of Joel Shapiro, Wool himself, Joyce Pensato (a classmate at the Studio School) and Andy Warhol. While such efforts at building context work well in the catalogue, in the gallery the group show seemed more convenient than urgent. In comparison to the focus embodied in Reed’s paintings the group show was at best a pleasant distraction to Reed’s prodigious accomplishment.

As the catalogue emphasizes, Reed spent years painting from life, practicing drawing, and listening to accomplished artists speak about painting. Writings by Reed reveal his love for historical painting; his notes about color and the location of shapes within his compositions show a lineage of academic discipline. Cearly, Reed’s education in traditional painting and drawing have been a resource over the years. Although the works in the “Anti-Illusion” catalogue have a great absurdist exhuberence I couldn’t help but think how evanescent are those works that rely on document and trace rather than engaging the more traditional forms of painting and sculpture. The Hans Namuth photograph of Jackson Pollock in the midst of painting is iconic but it’s the painting that remains to give the photograph its consequence. Inversely, with Richard Serra casting lead against the corner of a wall and floor (also reproduced in the catalogue) it is the photographs that remain to signify the artist and his gesture. In this case it is Serra’s persona, or you could say stunt, that is the primary artwork. For Reed, the painting itself is the primary document. As the title suggests, Reed’s subject is Painting, not his body’s gestures. It was ambitious for Reed to take on the then contemporary pictorial conventions of repetition, documentation as representation, and material immance. As for the accomplishment of these paintings—there is still no ‘getting around’ that.

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David Reed, one of New York’s best abstract painters, is presenting more than sixty recent working drawings and color studies at Peter Blum’s long, rectangular space in Soho. The drawings themselves are filled with information and speculation; done on graph paper, they record the artist’s musings and concerns for individual works: phrases such as “thinking of Resnick” and “thought at first that this would work—no longer sure,” as well as highly specific, technical considerations of color, crowd his working sheets. Yet, as interesting as these notes are, the heart of the exhibition lies in the small number of oil and alkyd paintings on show, which are wonderfully clear and distinct examples of Reed’s style. Luckily, we can see in the same exhibit the results of his plans in paintings that continue the New York tradition of abstract, expressive art.

Showing off the artist’s methods enables Reed’s audience to ponder the kinds of decisions he makes as he goes about constructing his art. For one painting, with a working title of #571, Reed devotes four pages of directed thought. On the top of the first page we see four dabs of color; beneath them, written in pencil, are notions about color—what to use that will work. In the middle of the page is a rough graphite sketch of the painting’s forms, with notes about the work’s color and structure on either side. Reed’s art has always been about the innate expressiveness of the brushstroke, even when he was painting landscapes at the beginning of his career. This concern with the tactile results of the brush is again taken up in the second working drawing, in which a column of three of the four yellows dabbed on the first page is painted over his easily recognizable twists and twirls of light and dark. While the result cannot be called a finished work, its exploration of color and structure demonstrates his thinking process very well.

Still, as I have said, it is not the technical aspects the viewer turns to in this vivid show; instead, all the written work leads up to images marvelous in their vibrant hue and overall effect. Reed remains a painter above all else, and his efforts over many years show him to be a superb practitioner of his art. Today, many feel painting is no longer valid as a vocation; nevertheless, it remains stubbornly alive in the hands of serious artists like Reed, Sean Scully, Louise Fishman. Their work is neither anachronistic nor overly historical because they have found a personal idiom that resonates with the past while moving forward in the present. While no one knows which way painting will turn, Reed does an excellent job of keeping its energies contemporary. It should go without saying that painting is neither a folk art nor a scholarly activity. Fortunately, we have painters who continue to prove that true.

Reed’s lyricism never seems overstated—in Color Study 43 (2009), roughly 16 by 8.5 inches, we are confronted with a rough column consisting of ribbons of paint, primarily curves and turns of green over red, with a couple of patches of dark blue in the upper right and a slim purple pole going down the middle of the composition. It is an emphatically explosive piece, whose imagery is linked to an appreciation of the brushstroke’s own forthright energies. The overlaps of paint, done on illustration board, result in a complex play of forms that is at once volatilve and restrained. Color Study 45 (2009), painted on museum board, is 12 by 8 inches in dimension. Again, the orientation is vertical, with curling waves of green painted over a red column. On top of the green is a small, double black-and-white emblem, with a black brushstroke on a white ground and beneath it, a white brushstroke on a black ground. It is exciting to see abstraction bring forth so much undeniable beauty in a current idiom. Reed shows us that there is still much to be done in the field of nonobjective art.

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560 Broadway A New York Drawing Collection at Work 1991-2006, edited by Amy Eshoo, with contributions by Derrick R.Cartwright, James Cuno, Elizabeth Finch, Josef Helfenstein, Glenn D. Lowry, David Mickenberg, Ann Philbin, Earl A. Powell III, Jock Reynolds, and Townsend Wolfe.  Fifth Floor Foundation in Association with Yale University Press, 2008, ISBN 9780300135398, 200 pages, color plates

New York/New Drawings 1946 – 2007. Exhibition catalogue, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Esteban Vicente, Segovia, Spain, 2009, 319 pages, color plates

A pair of handsome, substantial publications document Sally and Werner (Wynn) Kramarsky’s singular collection of American, predominantly reductive, abstract art, with its focus on works on paper. 560 Broadway celebrates the fifteen years of exhibitions at that SoHo address, gallery-office of the Fifth Floor Foundation, until 2006 when the collector moved his operation to smaller premises uptown.  As Elizabeth Finch notes in an introductory essay, Wynn Kramarsky gravitated both towards established figures within the movements that interested him, with an emphasis on Minimal and Conceptual art, and emerging or relatively neglected individuals whose work excited him and whose careers, he felt, warranted patronage: the “namies” and the “newbies” as he and his staff nicknamed the respective groups.  The book also acknowledges the Kramarskys’ proactive generosity as lenders to their artists’ shows, instigators of traveling exhibitions of the collection, and – pace the awesome fifty-odd page catalogue at the end of the book – donors of works to leading institutions.  The Vicente Museum catalogue, which accompanied an exhibition in Spring 2009, contains a transcript of the riveting, insightful, often raucous interview with Kramarsky conducted by poet William Corbett at the CUE Foundation in 2008 in which his background, character and collecting philosophy are all probed.  The catalogue pairs plates with texts by 27 artists in thecollection plus Corbett, including, for instance, Joel Shapiro on Trisha Brown, Terry Winters on Barnett Newman, Jill Baroff on Esteban Vicente himself (a 1951 collage), and Joan Waltemath on Frank Stella.  Among the blue chip Minimal and reductive artists in this balanced selection is a very healthy contingent of “newbies,” many of whom are by now on their way to being “namies” thanks in part to Kramarsky patronage.

SCULPTURE

Tim Scott. Exhibition Catalogue, David Moos and Ken Carpenter,  with foreword by David Mirvish. DM Books, Toronto, 2008,ISBN 9780969075912, 128 pages, color plates

Arthur Carter Sculptures, Paintings, and Drawings, by Charles A. Riley and Peter W. Kaplan.  Abrams, New York, 2009, ISBN 9780810905955, 207 pages, color plates- $50.00

Tim Scott’s catalogue marks two exhibitions and celebrates the restoration of an early work.  Collector David Mirvish, who used to run the commercial gallery that bore his name in Toronto from 1963-75, has a deep commitment to abstract art (Color Field painting, formalist sculpture, etc.) of the period in which he was active as a dealer.  He already owned sculptures by Briton Tim Scott from 1972 and 1983 but had missed the opportunity to acquire something from the artist’s first period, when Scott worked in synthetic materials and correspondingly assertive colors. This was an art historical moment, as Mirvish deftly describes it, in his foreword here, when “the optimism that pervaded the Art World once more supercharged the dialogue between painting and sculpture.”  Then a couple of years ago he was offered – from a museum – a large multi-part construction from 1967 titled Sestina that had been in storage since it was first shown and required extensive “refurbishment.”  Mirvish invited Scott toToronto to complete the restoration, during which time the artist also moved forward on a body of work in clay, a material he had begun experimenting with in the 1990s, producing a series of model house constructions of “intimacy and monumentality.”  Mirvish borrowed various works from the 1960s to exhibit alongside his own holdings, including Sestina, in a rented warehouse in the outskirts of Toronto, while Corkin Gallery, elsewhere in the city, presented the House of Clay series.

If Kramarsky (above) and Mirvish, in their respective ways, demonstrate the creativity of a collector’s interaction with art and artists, Arthur Carter takes that dynamic one stage further, by actually making art.  As this lavish monograph recounts, the Wall Street tycoon turned publishing mogul (he is the former proprietor of the New York Observer and now a board member of the Nation) is also the author of a substantial body of linear metal sculpture.  Like Scott, Carter is indebted to the innovations of David Smith and Anthony Caro, but he equally looks further back to the traditions of Calder, Russian Constructivism and (especially in his works on paper) De Stijl.  There is a striking affinity with Alexander Liberman, a fellowstraddler of the divide between publisher and maker.

SKETCHBOOKS

David Reed, Rock Paper Scissors. Edited by Jochen Kienbaum, Iris Maczollek, and Anke Schmidt, Snoeck, 2009, ISBN 9783940953018, 79 pages, color plates

Will Barnet A Sketchbook 1932 – 1934.  Essay by Robert C. Morgan, Foreword by Will Barnet. George Braziller Publishers, 2009, ISBN 9780807615980, 90 pages, color plates – $49.95

American Dream Drawings from a Rough Childhood by Chuck Bowdish.  Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects, 2009, ISBN9780615276366, copy number 248, 40 pages, plates

Sketchbooks can be endoscopes for the artist’s mind.  Here are three books of very different artists that present, in facsimile, working papers or portfolios that offer insight into early thoughts, in terms either of career or a body of work.  From the German publishers, Snoeck, a gorgeously printed set of working drawings by David Reed exposes the meticulous planning of his slick, photo-like and complicatedly layered abstract paintings.  Actually, the drawings could better be said to chronicle than to plan: each page, on graph paper, deconstructs the evolution of the image almost diaristically, with adjacent color studies or compositional diagrams.  There is an interview with the artist conducted by collectors Dorothy and Herbert Vogel and by independent curator Dean Daderko.  Nonagenarian artist Will Barnet’s sketchbook from 1932-34, from Braziller, make Depression-era Central Park the young artist’s life room, as Robert Morgan recounts in his warm-hearted introduction.  The drawings are robust, tender, insightful and shot through with humor.  Though the title of Chuck Bowdish’s artist book relates to childhood, the drawings, in a classical-naïve pen and ink, arepresentation works juxtaposed with indicative and inspirational texts, in the artist’s childish block letters, from the era of Eisenhower-Kennedy, evoking a tension and distress contrastively absent from Barnet’s Depression-era idyll.

MONOGRAPHS

Alan Gussow: A Painter’s Nature, by Martica Sawin, preface by John Driscoll and recollection by James Kiberd.  Hudson Hills Press, 2009, ISBN 978I555953089, 378 pages, color plates- $70.00

Terry Setch, by Martin Holman, with contributions by Michael Sandle and Paul Greenhalgh, Lund Humphries in association withBroken Glass, 2009, ISBN 9781848221232, 160 pages, color plates

Graham Crowley, by Martin Holman Lund Humphries in association with Broken Glass, 2009, ISBN 9781848220249, 123 pages, color plates

If you own this mammoth, no holds barred book on Alan Gussow and you organize your monographs alphabetically and by nationality it will probably end up next to a smaller, more modest tome on Philip Guston (nothing as grand on Guston is in print) and that will make you wonder whether the invisible hand of the book market is doing its job properly in apportioning effort and resources to the subjects who deserve them. A bias towards Gussow’s later work bears the heavy-handed hallmark of estate/gallery sponsorship.  That said, Martica Sawin does a thorough, indeed loving job of research into the artist’s life, passions and devlelopment, drawing extensively on his archives (he died in 1997.) Her text is truly fascinating when describing Gussow’s environment activism. His style evolved (or devolved, if viewed art historically) from hard-edged abstraction via abstract expressionism to a familiar American fusion of the abstract and the perceptual, with strong shades of Milton Avery and Charles Burchfield and occasional hints of Louis Finkelstein.  Wherever the influences and affinities lie, the art never feels like it achieves modernist rigor: rich, resolved, sincere, always, but somehow more a product than an inquiry.

Two perceptive, thorough monographs on mid-career British artists Terry Setch and Graham Crowley from author Martin Holman are published by Lund Humphries in association with Broken Glass, a firm that specializes in books put together by their artist subjects. Both artists have substantial reputations in Britain and elsewhere in Europe though they will likely not be known to American readers.  Crowley, until recently Professor of Painting at London’s Royal College of Art, one of the most prestigious academic positions in the UK, has been stylistically eclectic, varying from fantasy realism via a transavanguardia classicism to, in the newest work, an intriguing pop landscape idiom.  What is consistent, however, is a gritty, urban toughness to his images, even when at the same time there is an almost Blakean visionary quality to them.  Setch has a sensibility arguably both more experiment and more romantic than Crowley’s.  His work has been “out there” in scale and materials, working for instance with detritus to create poignant landscapes almost polemically imbued with environmental foreboding.

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Ben Davis, Lance Esplund, and Lilly Wei joined David Cohen to review Tara Donovan at the Met, Anne Harris at Alexandre, Bharti Kher at Jack Shainman, David Reed at Max Protetch, and Zhang Huan at the Asia Society.

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July 15 – October 2, 2005

This lively exhibition at the Albright-Knox Museum is about connections and dialogues and more broadly about how to buildbuilding bridges.  The connections do more than demonstrate relationships between works within this exhibition or between this exhibition and past exhibitions curated by the museum’s new director, Louis Grachos.  These connections are bridges to the past, to the present, and to the future.  They open up new possibilities for audiences to appreciate good art that do not presently exist.

If this is not the best possible survey of contemporary abstract art that could be put together, and it is not, it is certainly strong enough and unique enough to be well worth a visit to the Albright-Knox.  Indeed, some of the reasons why this could not be a more representative exhibition of contemporary abstraction,  are part of its strengths.  Dating back to the beginning of the 20th century, the Albright-Knox was one of the first museums to collect abstract art and today, the museum’s collection is approximately 60 percent abstract.  At issue here is a valiant attempt of the museum’s curatorial staff to juxtapose its legacy of abstract masters with current abstract art that is not limited to painting.  Extreme Abstraction reflects a predilection to showcase works that are experiments in materials, color, form, and media (video, computer-based art) as well as various new venues for abstract art—floors, steps, and outside walls.  The result is that the more than 150 works selected for this show enable the past to reframe the present and the present to reframe the past.

In the words of David Pagel, these are mostly examples of “hands off” art that eschew the use of a brush to apply conventional paint (oil or acrylic) to canvas.  Hot art is compared to cool art.  The basic dialogue then is between this newer art and the museum’s very strong, albeit not complete, permanent collection of abstract art beginning with Malevich,  Rodchenko,  and Mondrian, and then journeying through Abstract Expressionism, Optical and Kinetic Art, Color Field and Minimalism.  Here, masters include: New York School painters Jackson Pollock, Arshile Gorky, Clifford Still, Mark Rothko, Franz Kline, Wilhelm deKooning, Hans Hofmann and Ad Reinhardt; Color Field painters such as Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland, and minimalists of varying sorts—Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, Sol Lewitt,  Elsworth Kelly, and Agnes Martin.  It is noteworthy that the permanent collection is so strong that one has to work hard to find omissions like Barnett Newman,  Robert Ryman and Brice Marden.  But then again Morris Louis and Richard Serra are present as bookends between the end of Abstract Expressionism and the rise of Minimalism.  Here, an Eva Hesse would have been welcome but there is a strong Lynda Benglis floor piece.  There are also two excellent examples of the Light and Space Movement—Craig Kauffman and Robert Irwin.  The Bengalis  and Kauffman are particularly important because they represent direct antecedents  to the contemporary extreme abstractions in regard to the use of quirky, industrial materials and colors, as well as blurring the line between painting and sculpture.   They portend the delightful impurity of the Extreme Abstraction sensibility by exchanging extroversion for introversion, affirmative emotions such as joy and playfulness for angst, and substituting a garden of earthly delights for high-minded ideals.  And most telling, such artists producet art that is perhaps more expressive of the materials they use than their own personal struggles to wrest meaning out of the void.

The installations here are crucial.  For example, a powerful Jackson Pollock, “Convergence” (1952), is paired with a floor piece,  “Reckless” (1998) by Polly Apfelbaum, which is an assemblage of individually cut pieces of synthetic stretch velvet, fabric and dye.  Such dialogues are multifaceted.  At certain formal levels the works are similar—they both show all-over abstraction and they are both floor pieces albeit in different ways.  Apfelbaum’s is a floor piece in terms of the installation and Pollock’s in terms of how the work was painted.  But they are also profoundly different in ways central to today’s Post-Modern abstraction.  The Apfelbaum and related works in the exhibition such as Linda Besemer’s Fold painting, consisting of a sheet of pure acrylic paint draped over a bar, have a feminist agenda; they, along with Lynda Benglis’ “Fallen Painting” (1968) which is a floor piece of pigmented latex rubber, demonstrate that women’s work can give rise to “high art”.  Specifically, such works are “crafted”, not painted on canvas,  playful rather than driven.  There is, however, a deeper connection that needs to be explored.  Pollock, Apfelbaum, Besemer and Benglis create art that, in the terms Robert Smithson (1965) used to describe Donald Judd, have an  “uncanny materiality”..   How these works were created and how they need to be viewed are transformed by the expressive materials used.  Such art encourages a viewer to look at Jackson Pollock differently.  Pollock’s style of working, in regard to his throwing and dripping paint as he danced around a canvas, created art that is best seen in an active, embodied way.  Michael Fried not withstanding, theatricality in abstract art is born here with Pollack, not with Judd’s minimalism.  The scale, surface tactility,  and complexity of pattern invite the viewer  to complete the work by moving close to it and walking from side to side.  This is also true of Apfelbaum’s and Bengalis’ floor pieces.

A major strength of this exhibition is that works do more than enhance one another—they have a synergistic effect.Another interesting form of connection or dialogue is how the museum’s installation allows different works to enrich the meaning of works in the same visual space.    John Armleder, for example, uses in his own work to key an installation of Oop and Kinetic art he curated form from the museum’s permanent collection.  The installation newer work, especially coupled with a video by Jennifer Steinbcamp makes theisolder art seem fresh, exciting and contemporary in feeling, and not so distant from cousin to Leo Villareal’s monumental outdoor light piece.  Although Villareal’s mechanisms are extremely different being based on computer software and LED lights, his work in this context becomes a contemporary descendent of Op and Kinetic art..  Then there is a wonderful dialogue among works from different artists and different periods all of which turn color into lava-like flow fields.  What other exhibition comes to mind that would encourage us to see similarities among the work of Clifford Still, Morris Louis, Lynda Benglis and Ingrid Calame?

There is also a productive visual dialogue between David Reed’s exuberant xxxx vertical painting of brushstrokes that playfully twist and turn and fold and unfold and a massive sculptural piece that shares many of these attributes by Liz Larner.  Here, blues, greens,  redsyellows, and purples speak to each other across a broad visual field, thereby giving a dynamic, contemporary twist to Albers’ color contextualism, this time across media.  The Reed and Larner works also share a kind of tawdry sensuality of form and color and both require an active, embodied viewer since they change from different distances and viewing stations.  Further, they are neither organic nor inorganic, but trapped between these worlds (Larner’s sculpture could be seen as e an alien space ship.)

The exhibition also reflects a hidden connection across time and space with a previous show that involved Louis Grachos, the new Director of the Albright-Knox Museum.  Specifically, his earlier curation at Site Santa Fe of an exhibition entitled, Postmark: An Abstract Effect (1999) included thirteen artistsmore than a dozen artists that are in the present show.  This suggestsIt appears that the seeds of at least certain aspects of Extreme Abstraction were planted in Postmark’s exhibition of “hands off” abstraction—w, work informed by the movies, TV, computer screens and automobiles.  These abstractions captured a world in which the boundaries between high art and low art are blurred if not obliterated.  In this connection (pun intended) Extreme Abstraction’s placing of a Flavin light sculpture across the room from David Batchelor’s “Idiot Stick” is illustrative.  Specifically, this exhibition, as did Postmark, celebrates the impurity of a current abstraction that is often more decorative than spiritual.  The impurity also extends to the inclusion in the current exhibition of photographic and video forms of abstraction including the photographic material of Adam Fuss and Gregory Kucera and the videos of Jeremy Blake and Jennifer Steincamp, the latter of which dialogues so beautifully with the large Armleder light piece

.  There is also an interesting connection albeit a much lower degree of overlap between the Albright Knox’s previous exhibition, The Forman Collection of Monochrome Art, which although it included some nontraditional materials like Florence Pierce’s resin pieces which were also in the PostMark exhibit but did not make it into this one.  This is unfortunate because Pierce’s work is an interesting hybrid.  It has an affinity to Agnes Martin’s transcendental minimalism while at the same time being much a creature of the expressive industrial material it uses, a subtheme of the present exhibition.

There is also what is likely to be an unintended  but we find fascinating connection between several works in this exhibition and a classic surreal painting by Salvador Dali, the Persistence of Time.  In Dali’s work, the line between inorganic and organic objects is blurred, time pieces flow and drip, losing their rigid boundaries.  Interstingly, there are a number of works in this exhibition that have a kind of flowing, bendy, drippy kind of quality that threaten their integrity as solid objects.  These include works as divese as Apfulbaum, Pollock, Besemer, Reed, Zimmerman, Yamaoke, Grosse and Davie.  This affinity group suggests that at least for a subgroup of artists in the Extreme Abstraction exhibition,  there is a kind of meta-impurity, what might be termed surrealist abstraction.

Finally, the museum and especially its director are to be congratulated for initiating an exhibition program, starting with the Forman Collection this spring, that departs from the current rage for a kind of decadent figuration reminiscent of Klimpt and Schiele.  InsteadThe Albright-Knox is offerings us a virtual library laboratory for the study of abstraction in its many forms.  Taken together with Grachos’ earlier Postmark exhibition at Site Santa Fe,we have a demonstration these three exhibitions demonstrate that the death of abstract art has been greatly exaggerated.  Abstraction has once again abstraction has morphed.  It has changed its material, form and aesthetic sensibility, thereby making it an ever more elusive target for the its would-be executioners  of abstraction.  Indeed its arch-enemy, Post-Modernism, has now been assimilated into it.  Abstraction is dead; long live Abstraction.

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“Garth Evans, Watercolors” at Lori Bookstein until January 7 (37 W. 57th Street, 212-750-0949).

“Lisa Hoke: The Gravity of Color” at Elizabeth Harris until December 23 (529 W. 20th Street between 10th & 11th Avenues, 212-463-9666).

“Alfred Leslie 1951-1962: Expressing the Zeitgeist” at Allan Stone until December 22 (113 E 90 th Street between Park and Lexington Avneues, 212 987 4997).

David Reed and Garth Evans are improvisors at the top of their form. Where Mr. Evans is like a laid back pianist tinkering away at a set of variations in a warm, quiet bar, Mr. Reed is the last of the big bandsmen, high in style, decibels, and spirits. Mr. Reed is showing new paintings at Max Protetch, Mr. Evans a set of watercolors in the project room at Lori Bookstein—in their different ways they both have us rethinking one of the most cherished dichotomies of the painting phenomenon: transparency versus opaqueness. Each is fascinated by the spatial depths and related emotional resonances of color and materiality. Each uses technique at a high pitch to play depth against surface, closure against ethereality. But the differences between them come down to more than mere mood or means.

Mr. Evans is the more old-fashioned of the two. You can tell right off that he is primarily a sculptor. It is not just because there is always a figure set against a ground (in his case geometric shapes rather than anything anthropomorphic). There’s also an awareness of the expressive value of roughness; although the page is saturated by watercolor used counter-intuitively with almost chalky, pigment-rich earthiness. There’s little instance of the watercolorist’s traditional love of the naked whiteness of the paper, and yet the support has presence: its physicality is played off against the illusion of receding space, achieved with billowing, brooding, pulsating color. The geometric forms have a complexity that subverts the space around them, tucking themselves back and forth within competing picture planes.

Mr. Evans is consumate in his skillful use of the medium and profound in his play with depth and surface, but there is something strong and honest about the use of material; we see through it to form. Mr. Reed, by contrast, is a wizard, a pyrotechnician with paint. He wows and disconcerts with his layering techniques. Where an Evans is spatial, a Reed is spacey. The former is rough on the edges, but you see what you are getting; the latter is silky smooth and slick, reveling in enigma. One is about form, the other style.

With Mr. Reed, the retina feels like its being seduced by a jelly-fish. His complexities of temperature and speed throw the eye about with a tricksiness of baroque proportions. His squiggles manage to recall at once medieval drapery and Bronx graffiti: Martin Schongauer meets Kenny Sharf. Actually, at his best he recalls Sargent in his painterly panache. Where Mr. Evans carves out strong, solid, albeit spatially ambiguous forms, Mr. Reed’s highly energetic, slippery, ethereal squiggles are much more about sensation as an end in itself, about perception than that the perceived. Observers have often remarked how his paint looks photographic. Like a photograph, we see right through the paint to the image it evokes, and yet his image IS the paint—philosophically he is as slippery as his squiggles, which is just the way we like it.

Lisa Hoke has seemed in the past an amusing decorator whose trademark motif would soon exhaust itself. Her installation at Elizabeth Harris puts paid to that: it is good, true and beautiful. She follows on neatly from Mr. Evans and Mr. Reed, not just because of a shared affection for serpentine forms and rich chroma. She has found a strategy to saturate the gaze without teasing the mind. Building effective, rich patterns from banal yet gorgeous means.

She recalls Antonì Gaudi in this regards: as his walls are encrusted with shards of gaudy, glistening ceramic, hers postmodernize the found object while preserving its jouissance with a vocabulary consisting, primarily, of two elements: found paper coffee or soda cups and plastic beakers quarter filled with paint. These are massed to form blocks of color, the cups protruding sculpturally, the beakers swirling into swathes of pure surface. These elements bring to mind the pioneers of painterly digitalism, Seurat and Klimt. She isn’t just about technique and its semiotic implications, however: there is genuine exploration of color sensations—not just chroma but hue. It is a major work that demands return visits to penetrate its depths, and to revel in its surfaces.

***

Alfred Leslie’s abstraction is the stuff of legend, for it is often told how he turned his back on an accomplished early style to embrace the new perceptual realism of the 1960s, the style for which he is better known. It turns out, as the cache Allan Stone has gathered together at his Upper Eastside Gallery, that he was a highly accomplished if somewhat derivative Abstract Expressionst in the 1950s. The experience of this show is rather like finding a vintage cadillac in a long locked garage: they are as fresh as the day they were painted and roaring to go.

There are undoubtedly strong influences from better known painters like de Kooning and Kline in the way emphatic brushstrokes define structure, chance effects are given full play, and the paint embodies the sensation of flesh, and there is probably some influence from such figures as Al Held and Milton Resnick. But the palette has a panache of its own that belies the existential heaviness of his peers, and the energy is prodigious.

I spoke with him as his show opened about the distance he must feel from his early artistic self. On the contrary, he sees absolute continuity between his charged, loose, gutsy bravura painting and collage of the 1950s and the hermetically tight realism, with its bid to create a contemporary history painting, of the subsequent decades, such as his Caravaggesque series devoted to the death of Frank O’Hara, or the monumental series of full-frontal male and female nudes. He stresses frontality, confrontation and all-overness as the underlying formal continuum.

There is a clue about his impatience with abstraction in the experimental movies he directed, two of which are being screened by Mr. Stone in a special projection room (including “Pull my Daisy” with a script by Jack Kerouac, who narrates). Ms. Leslie’s allegiance was to the avantgarde in its broad manifestation, not towards a specific style or technique.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, December 16, 2004

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