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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September 10 to October 29, 2016
537B West 23rd Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 675 7525

Pimples, cinnamon rolls, and a mountain man making paintings in the nude are some of the kinds of imagery found at Rebecca Morgan’s exhibition of recent paintings, ceramics, and works on paper at Asya Geisberg Gallery. The exhibition is titled “In The Pines,” and that is the exact feeling you get when viewing Morgan’s work since all the pieces seem to come out of an off the grid culture. Purposely made to be humorous and grotesque, Morgan presents hyper-detailed representations of stereotypical Appalachian Americans.

The ceramics included here expand on her earlier work in the medium, which she previously exhibited at the gallery in 2014. Her raku sculpture Pajama Jug (2015), with its elaborate and intricate caricature of a head, and its gonzo look, echoes the two-dimensional media. All of the dozen ceramic jugs are figurative with similar anthropomorphic appearance, splayed teeth, and bulging eyes but are individuated too. Each one’s uniqueness leads one to wonder what their backstory is and how they came to be. Moreover, their reference to alcohol and its effects makes a veiled reference to promiscuity and licentious behavior found throughout the exhibition’s images.

Drawing on influences such as R. Crumb, Francisco Goya, and MAD Magazine, with an ice-cold splash of Dutch style — e.g. Pieter Brueghel, Hans Memling, and the Van Eycks — Morgan shakes the bottle and pours out a delicious mixture of exaggerated bumpkin-looking characters. This is evident in Family Reunion (2016), which depicts a trio of all-American country folk indulging in a buffet of cake, soda, corn, and Cheezies Puffs snacks, some of which are served on a matriarch’s saggy, bra-less breasts — yummy!

All of the manically detailed complexity and bright color of Morgan’s work may make viewers envy the pair of awesome shades worn by a stoned young man in After Work Sunset (2016). Although the characters are made comically freakish, Morgan’s cartoonish renderings are imbued with a proud sense of charming guilelessness and self-acceptance. In a 2015 interview with Priscilla Frank for The Huffington Post Morgan says, “These characters are blissfully unaware, unruly, wild, and untamed. They are off the grid and free and not affected by anyone or anything’s influence and I’m very attracted to that concept.”

Morgan uses her crazy bunch as models to show what life could be when guilty of sin. Wandering Smoker (2016), a beautiful drawing, shows a close-up portrait of a strabismus man puffing on a corncob pipe. Rendered in graphite on paper, it’s tame compared to the bright paintings, with its precise hard lines and features, but is wildly drawn to give it virility and ferality. This picture is a break when trying to figure out exactly where Morgan was coming from. It is the perfect portrait of a normal man from the country enjoying a nice unhealthy smoke from a handmade pipe.

Viewers may wonder, however, if these works are too grotesque and belittling of America’s rural citizens. The imagery has the superficial appearance of objectifying and stereotyping country folk as brutish, over-sexualized, and drug-addled lunatics whose lives include a surplus of over indulgence. Nonetheless, most of her characters could easily be transferred to a stereotypical depiction of Brooklyn: beards, beer, anachronistic clothing, promiscuity, self-indulgence.

In the painting Plan B on Easter Sunday (2016), a woman with garish turquoise eye makeup, extends her tongue lasciviously, taking a birth control tablet on it in the manner of a sacrament. Elsewhere, in Creeper in the Grass (2016), a maniacal perverse man voyeuristically spies on a full-breasted blonde woman passed out in a field of daisies. Between the two of them, which join the narrative and portrait aspects of the show, and serve as bookends in its organization, Morgan provides a host of interesting characters for viewers to contend with. Her work is funny, exciting, crude, and skillfully made. Although it may make the viewer feel wrong, it is totally right — a guilty pleasure.

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May 21 to August 12, 2016
300 South Mission Road (at East 3rd Street)
Los Angeles, 323 406 2587

300 South Mission Road in Los Angeles seems a bit of an unlikely setting for Maccarone’s LA gallery. With graffiti-scarred warehouses and chain-link fence, long dusty blocks of faceless industrial buildings, and wildflower and weeds struggling at the edge of the pavement, the area seems a curious locus to find Paul Lee’s coolly introspective painted constructions.

A few short years ago there was not even the idea of having a gallery down here, much less the western outpost of an established New York dealer. Now there are several, and before you can say “demographic-shift” there will likely be dozens.

No surprise, then, when Lee presented a body of work radically different from what viewers have known, in his solo show “Layers For A Brain Corner.” The works in the show divide into two groups: four large wall drawings/sculptures, and constructions with painted tambourines affixed to shaped canvases, with their interplay of round and straight edges creating an optically vivid whole. These tambourine pieces may arguably reference the body, albeit obliquely.

In works such as Mind Mountain and Washcloth Weight (all works 2016) Lee uses a motif common to his oeuvre: bath towels, here purposed as drawing elements. Lee has excised everything but the towels’ edges, dyed them with black ink, and employed them as lines for his huge wall drawings, which he calls “negatives.” Terming these giant wall pieces “sculptures” is a stretch, though they do protrude from the wall at a towel’s thickness. Lee’s message from what he calls these “spills” and “tumbles” is clear: life is precarious, fault lines are everywhere, the center rarely holds.

Although Lee’s use of towels has previously been described as signifiers of queer culture by critics such as Holland Cotter and Robert Hobbs, the new work lives at the brink of pure abstraction. All that remains of what Cotter terms “the mechanisms of gay coding” is color; indeed, Lee’s palette is a key to his meanings, especially the wan lavenders, the cornflower yellows, the paler shades of white, off-white, dreary gray, deathly black. Lavender in particular has a long association with gay pride, one hypothesis being that it begins with masculine blue, to which is added some feminine pink. As for the evocation of corporeality, Lee told me, “The ‘skin’ of the canvas places them in a technological cultural context that is not immediately obvious. It’s a stand-in for the skin and the body. Sometimes skin is exposed, sometimes it’s hidden in color.”

In “Layers For A Brain Corner,” Lee is edging further away from the sculptural combines for which he is best known — works with bent soda cans, some imprinted with a photograph of a young man’s face, light bulbs, and string. He is moving in the direction of painting. “I was trying to narrow my parameters, so I can learn more,” he says.

“This was going to be a paintings show,” he continues, “but I wanted there to be a dialogue between these two bodies of work. I call these ‘touch paintings’ because tambourines are activated by touch. The first tambourines I made had rectangles on them, and I thought of them as being like touch screens. The touch screen is part of our daily life, you can touch an image and it can lead you to another. The image becomes a path. It’s a visual space that becomes active in a new way. I think it is a new space for painting to happen.”

The specter of the late Ellsworth Kelly hangs heavily over the work, especially in formal terms, though Lee also cites Kelly’s impact on culture. As one enters the gallery, the shaped pieces first seen seem to summon Kelly. “The things I get most from Kelly are that he took the landscape, reconfigured it, abstracted it, and made his own version of it; he made his own space,” Lee says. “I like that shadows are a source for some of his works, how he took something slight and made something glorious and celebratory of it. And I really enjoy that he was a gay artist, that his work speaks of liberation through abstraction.”

Asked about the meanings of the works’ titles, Lee admits to a somewhat random method: “I didn’t want to call them ‘Untitled’ anymore, because I didn’t want people to think they are just designs. So I’d look hard at them, and just put down whatever came into my head.” Sometimes the title lends a poetic flavor to the work, as in Very Slightly; in other cases he veers toward the literal. For example, a piece with a tambourine painted half black and half white, suggestive of a half-moon, is called Either Side Of The Night.

If Lee’s new work has roots in Kelly and in Josef Albers, its seed was planted by his mentor, Jack Pierson, and result from his encouragement. Pierson, like Kelly, has made a career of “taking something slight and making something glorious of it,” and the lesson has not been lost on Lee. Luck, and talent, and associations with influential and generous friends — having these elements is certainly as vital to an artist’s progress as their ability to draw and paint. But knowing when to shed the obvious reference points of his forbears, that is the trajectory point, the crucial moment, that not all artists attain.

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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.

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April 3 to May 8, 2016
155 Suffolk Street (between Houston and Stanton streets)
New York, 646 429 9073

Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, in his 1942 essay “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins,” referred to a zoological taxonomy translated from a Chinese encyclopedia. The citation was in fact invented but reportedly, this system divided the animal kingdom into 14 categories, including “Those that belong to the Emperor,” “those drawn with a very fine camel hair brush,” and “those that, at a distance, resemble flies.” Borges parodies the irrationalities of classification systems, which govern biological science. In his current shows at Pierogi, “The Felicific Calculus and “The Last Library” (a collaboration with Douglas Paulson), Ward Shelley presents two bodies of work — a series of acrylic paintings on Mylar and an installation, respectively — that draw on the absurd beauty that can be found in the visualization and classification of knowledge by presenting different views of its organization.

The term “Felicific Calculus” emerged as part of Jeremy Bentham’s philosophy of Utilitarianism: it was a pre-digital algorithm for determining the degree of pleasure, or greater good, a given action would cause, providing an illusion of rigor in judging the ethics of any action. This method of turning something abstract, like pleasure, into a quantifiable value predates today’s mania for “the quantified self” by about two centuries. Today, similar processes are used for “sentiment analysis,” a method of analyzing speech to get a quantifiable value of the feelings expressed in a corpus of text, albeit for marketing purposes rather than for Bentham’s “greater good.” Shelley’s “Felicific Calculus” paintings are similarly intertwined with the material history of consumerism. Work, Spend, Forget (Dissected Frog Polemic), v.1 (2013) renders a timeline of the 20th century as a dissected frog, its guts and limbs spread horizontally and labeled with political, social, and technological developments; the mass media forms its nervous system, its arteries are labeled as “mass production.” At the far right of the chart — the present day — the organs merge together to form a incomprehensible pink soup devoid of any obvious organization.

The chaos of the current moment is a recurring theme in these paintings, such as Extended Narrative (2014) — a painting that expands on and re-imagines Alfred Barr’s canonical schematic of Cubism and abstract art as a weather chart, with the ominous thunderhead of “Postmodernism” looming over the present day. Most of the charts are organized as timelines, with events illustrated in a linear fashion with historical time as its X-axis. Events are shown merging together or branching off into further nodes, but all of them are constantly moving forward. This merges the imagery of these paintings with their subject matter, a consumer culture that values such “progress,” and the profit it brings, over life itself.

The body of work that accompanies the paintings, The Last Library, takes a Borges-like view of time. Interspersed with the paintings, the walls of the gallery are lined with shelves, each filled with “books that should have been written, but have not,” according to the press release. The spines of these books all recall mid-20th century graphic design tropes, featuring muted colors, black text, and conservative typefaces. Their titles are variously absurd (I Sniffed Your Wife), anachronistic (Puppies, Kittens, and the Internet), and self-referential (The Felicitous Calculus). This body of work recalls a similar project by Agnieszka Kurant, Phantom Library (2011-12), in which non-existent books that had been mentioned in other literary works (such as a volume by Pierre Menard, described by Borges) were written, printed, bound, assigned ISBN numbers, and put on display. Unlike Kurant’s piece, The Last Library doesn’t feature actual books: any illusion is destroyed by a simple shift of the viewer’s perspective, revealing the thin strips of paper-covered wood that constitute each “book.”

Like most libraries, The Last Library is organized and categorized, but rather than using the Dewey decimal system, Shelley has opted for a scheme that recalls Borges’s Chinese taxonomy of animals. The various classifications are written on bookplates placed on the shelves: “Pointing Towards a Singular Truth,” “No Missing Pages,” “Books With 12 Chapters,” and “With Teeth Marks” are some of the categories by which the library is supposedly organized. The Last Library presents a different view of space and time than the paintings do: Shelley’s charts are representations of systems that can be drawn in two dimensions, while the Library’s idiosyncratic organization pokes fun at these methods of visualization. Each body of work provides a perspective through which the other, and the world at large, could potentially be seen.

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You don’t need to know much about the life of artist Niki de Saint Phalle in order to sense traces of it throughout the breadth of her oeuvre. I’m looking through the new monograph, Niki de Saint Phalle (Museo Guggenheim Bilbao & La Fábrica, 2015), thinking of her memory and its constant influence — a cultural memory of women, bodies, the Judeo-Christian religious right, and what a work of art can be. All this seems to me to have conceptual impact on her paintings and sculptures, in a general sense and in the specific — you see it ranging from part to part. But a lot of it also looks ugly if you compare it aesthetically to that of her Modernist friends and the canonized pioneers of the 20th century. This is one reason her work is to me so exciting, in a world where appearances rule. A lot of what she made gives a sense of repulsion, and I like that.

The book is expansive, taking us from her beginnings with writer Harry Mathews, to happenings and the theater, to the end of her creatively fruitful life in 2002. It contains a marvelously detailed timeline, giving a sense of why a lot of her art looks the way it does — with a palpable rage, always a contemptuousness flirting with a kind of heartbreaking and joyous beauty.

She made interesting, weird stuff while a lot of her male contemporaries seemed to care more about career. When asked by Maurice Rheims if she considered herself a Pop artist, she replied, hilariously: “I don’t regard myself as having anything at all to do with Pop art. To begin with, as far as I’m concerned they’re Madison Avenue sellouts, poor publicity-drunk wretches who sit there and wait for Picasso to come out of their navels. As a poet, I have nothing to do with these pathetic people.”

Each thing eventually begins to look not like a solitary object but a fragment of her life’s work in total, something of a serial body of work. Various objects like shoes and other items of clothing, tools like hatchets and pipes, appear frequently. The things she made tastefully lend an impression of personal history or identity. There’s also an imaginative adventuring from or transformation of that specific identity. It’s refreshing, because since Modernism, artists of all kinds have done anything they can to remove the personal, and art in turn takes on the cold aspect of that remove. Les Trois Grâces (1995–2003), from her Nanas series, is a good example of the kind of exuberance that comes from the transformations that I think her creations both underwent and caused. Nanas are biomorphic sculptures of delightfully rotund dancing ladies, larger than life and composed of joie de vivre.

Three mosaic-tiled figures — made from black and white mosaic tiles and mirrored glass — in multihued swimsuits, are caught in three different positions of dance. The imaginative composition of the sculptures is a signature of de Saint Phalle. They don’t look “good” or conventionally sexy, but in their freewheeling, curvaceous absurdity they recall a Renaissance view of the female body to remind that roundness is quite lovely and that the prior view of perfection in said form isn’t real. The Nanas are celebratory, but they certainly don’t represent the celebrated paper-thin girl figure, and the artist knows this. Flipping the pages of Niki de Saint Phalle, female figures and various otherworldly forms congregate — forms which subvert the proposed feminine ideal (still coming after the physiognomy of ancient Venus statues of all things) that’s been around since what seems like forever.

Wonderful quotations are peppered throughout this book, in a script-like white typeface on cobalt pages, which mimics the charm of her handwriting, a recurring element in her work. In a viciously funny interview, called “Art and Guys,” Rheims asks her why, if she’s so anti-men, does she wear clothing only to attract them even more. She replies, “I have no grudge against men. Basically, I just think they’re rather pathetic types who are only good enough to decorate my bed and polish my boots. But for other things, I have no need of them.”

The many interesting textual examples we see throughout don’t undermine the rest of de Saint Phalle’s work. I mention this because contemporary artist statements tend to have the inverse of the intended effect. Looking at the more conceptual of our era’s art, there’s often an attempt to augment what we see, to make better sense of it through explanation; in the case of Niki de Saint Phalle, the text adds context and insight while confirming what we can already see at a glance.

De Saint Phalle’s later work is full of other femininities like necklaces, pendants, brooches, perfume bottles, and (you guessed it) more Nanas. Come to think of what I’d said of the serial aspect of her work, some of her late sculptures even take on their Nana form while replicating memorable celebrity figures like Louis Armstrong. In addition to these, though, are her very mystical totems, tarot cards, and whole sculptural gardens with which the artist and her viewers get to approach the present with a playful and imaginative advance.

Talking de Saint Phalle’s Tarot Garden (1978-1998) in Tuscany Italy, inspired by Antonio Gaudí’s Park Güell in Spain and based on the 22 major arcana of the Tarot card pack, de Saint Phalle describes “a place far from the crowd and the pressure of time,” showing how through the reimagining and exploration of figures and spaces, one is able to re-approach time. One of the figures in the Tarot Garden, the Hermit, is the representation of triumph. The figure “resembles an Amazon — very sexy and feminine, but strong. There’s no doubt she’s in control of the situation.” It’s an allusion to a continuous battle for the composure of her mind. Another representational figure arises in her sculptural works, the female hero archetype. But it’s the photograph of the artist herself poised with a rifle at the camera, Niki de Saint Phalle Taking Aim (1972), featured on this book’s cover, that seems heroic, especially considering that there’s paint inside the chamber. In the ‘60s, de Saint Phalle saw the television as a framework for artistic experimentation. She once used a TV news spot to shoot paint onto canvases with a rifle. What moxie. These performances were reactions to Modernist painters’ machismo, and are good examples of her ingenuity.

De Saint Phalle seems to come after, formally anyway, the stranger works from the milieus of Pop Art and Surrealism, and, like almost anyone making art in his wake, the paintings of Henri Matisse. That said, Matisse’s paintings are more stylized than much of de Saint Phalle’s art, and because of this I might even more readily liken her sculptural works and collages to someone like Alberto Giacometti, whose creations also seem more like physical embodiments of utterances from within, as opposed to aesthetically, or retinally, beautified stylings.

De Saint Phalle didn’t wait around for big things. In a 1985 TV interview, she said “I had this dream of building a huge sculpture garden; but there are no great patrons anymore. So I thought: ‘Why don’t I become my own patron?’” She then designed a perfume line that would be mass-produced and sold in order to finance her sculpture garden. The perfume bottle is a blue crystalline rectangle topped with a gold lid, upon which two entangled snakes face (perhaps to kiss); one is green, blue, yellow, red, and white, while the other snake is the same gold as the bottle’s lid.

De Saint Phalle defied conventions (and anything else in her way), in keeping with the Dada movement that preceded her. But she went beyond Dada in her ability to transcend the banal and the juvenile. Her buoyant figures and architectural forms are abstract but also go beyond, say, the proto-process abstract Nudes made by Matisse in the ‘50s, in both their expression and abstractions. They remind that exuberant figures and vibrant colors don’t preclude the occurrences of emotion or even despair. My absorption in her work’s visual dynamics was broken only by the realization that, having such optically vexing (read: pretty/ugly) aspects, she may have been one of our greatest masters of blending the conceptual with the physical.

Bloum Cardenas, Camille Morineau, Catherine Francblin, et al. Niki de Saint Phalle (Bilbao, ES: La Fábrica/Guggenheim Bilbao). ISBN: 9788415691983. 368 pages, $65

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Sylvia Plimack Mangold: Floors and Rulers, 1967-76 at Craig F. Starr Gallery
February 5 to March 26, 2016
5 East 73rd Street (between Madison and Fifth avenues)
New York, 212 570 1739

So much held in a heart in a lifetime. So much held in a heart in a day, an hour, a moment. We are utterly open with no one, in the end. […] We open windows to each but we live alone in the house of the heart.
-Brian Doyle

In so many words, this poetic excerpt gets at the heart of Catherine Murphy’s work, which is fortuitously on view at Sargent’s Daughters, and is featured in a new Peter Freeman, Inc. publication with a foreword by Svetlana Alpers and an essay by John Yau. The book offers the best possible surrogate to experiencing Murphy’s paintings and drawings in person, further providing a comprehensive, chronological exposition of her life’s work. Yau has clearly dedicated as much rigor and fidelity to Murphy as she herself has invested in her paintings and drawings. The reader is provided with an intimate, formal, conceptual, and even spiritual survey that touches on her personal life and artistic career. Living reclusively with her husband outside New York, Murphy submitted herself entirely to painting and drawing, frequently using the view from her apartment window as the vehicle for her expression. Yau writes, “Often, we find ourselves scrutinizing Murphy’s paintings and drawings in search of a clue to explain why she chose this particular moment and not some other one. The feeling of awe and bewilderment embodied in such concentrated looking is akin to what I experience when I again turn to her views from an apartment window, done nearly forty-five years ago.”

Murphy’s work hangs somewhere between an exacting and invented space. In the book she explains that while measured, it is necessary to avoid the pigeonhole of photorealism. Such a formulaic precision is too easy; rather, her observation must simultaneously bump up against and work with her own invention. As another rule, her invention never relies on overt markmaking and gesture. Despite the personal content, she never cares to assert her ego through those means, but rather aims toward a higher end: to deliver an experience of being in a particular moment.

We see her direct, emotionally reserved hand in the preparatory drawings on view at Sargent’s Daughters. Working Drawing (Getting Set Up) (ca. 1998), for example, depicts a note the artist wrote to herself about the anxiety of getting set up for a painting. Anxiety is literally expressed with words, and even felt in the painstaking accuracy of the picture. But true to the artist’s paradoxical insistence, one also experiences great pleasure in Murphy’s careful rendering of the moment this crumpled note rested on her desk or floor. She is incredibly serious, but always remains open to life in a lighthearted manner. In Working Drawing (Cathy) (ca. 1999), we see her name, apparently traced with a finger on the outer side of a foggy window. Cued by the painted version of this composition done a year later (featured in the book) we know that this was a very sensitive, factual study of a moment in time. But the drawing gives something the painting doesn’t: a cheeky red smudge in the top right corner. An element of chance is revealed in a number of colorful, incidental smudges found on the drawings. This body of work also demonstrates how experimental Murphy is in composing the scenes from her life. Working Drawing (Hand Mirror) (ca. 2006) is comprised of two pieces of paper unabashedly taped together in order to expand the originally conceived composition.

Murphy appears to be preoccupied with a number of relationships. Clarity and ambiguity meet in Working Drawing (Lampshade Reflected on a Painted Wall) (ca. 2000), where a fuzzy atmospheric thumbnail compares to a more linear study. In Working Drawing (n.d.) an economic contour drawing of a chair sits starkly in front of obsessively detailed wallpaper.

One cannot help but think of Murphy’s contemporary, Sylvia Plimack Mangold, who also has a show up at Craig F. Starr Gallery. In the same vein, Mangold insists on acute observation while walking the fine line between naturalistic exactitude and invention, resulting in a variety of mysterious, peculiar pictures. Floor with Laundry No. 3 (1971) brings the viewer into the painting by plopping three white, yellow, and brown pieces of fabric onto wooden floorboards. Because we cannot affirm a particular perspective, it being something between hovering above and sitting on the floor, it is clear that Mangold, like Murphy, paints, with a deeply felt love of perspective and perception, for her experiences’ sake and not necessarily for the viewer’s benefit. Four Coats (1976) is simultaneously intense and simple. Two rulers rest on the right and left edges of the painting to create an immense pressure squeezed between them. But that space between is but a plain, white field — possibly the floor or a sheet of paper.

Murphy and Mangold share a miraculous ability to reveal the extraordinary nature of everyday happenings, the ordinary. Perhaps in this present time, in dealing with the immediacy technological advances impose, we can find their work especially vital. We can look towards these artists who have clearly shown us how to slow down and wake up to life.

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curated by Bella Easton and John Stark
January 4 to February 19, 2016
19 Neptune Quay
Ipswich, Suffolk, England, +44 01473 338654

Royal Academy-trained painter and independent curator Bella Easton lives and works in South London. Last year she interviewed regular artcritical contributor Paul Carey-Kent about his show “The Presence of Absence.” Carey-Kent now takes the other side, talking to Easton about the latest in her series of “Collateral Drawing” exhibitions.

PAUL CAREY-KENT: You are, first and foremost, an artist. How did you come to be organizing exhibitions?

BELLA EASTON: I grew up in a creative family: my father is a painter, and mother an oil painting restorer. For as long as I can remember I knew I would also train as an artist. After studying at the Royal Academy Schools, I exhibited my work for some years before I started organizing my own exhibitions nomadically. I then set up and ran a project space in South East London for four years, to 2015. I continue to promote and collaborate with others and have many future projects and exhibitions lined up in the UK and abroad. Being both artist and curator has enabled me to work with a diverse range of artists, writers, journalists, gallerists and curators.

What is “collateral drawing”?

Collateral Drawing is an on-going project run under my curatorial platform, BEASTONprojects. For each project I invite a co-curator, such as you, Paul, for the Berlin version. Collateral drawing explores the by-products left behind from the artist’s working process. Each invited artist reveals elements from their practice that would otherwise remain unseen by the public, alongside a finished artwork. That can take many forms, but I’m especially fascinated by the way each artist’s methods inflict marks on their surroundings. Whether dripped, scratched, taped, cut, erased, smeared, or hammered — all are repetitive and typically unguarded instances of drawing. The wall, floor or table acts as a raw surface to capture these ongoing ritualistic activities. Those work surfaces are rarely displayed, but hold a fascination of their own: not just as a documentation of the creative process, but as an insight into the relationship between what is subconscious and conscious in the artist’s work.

This is the fourth in a series of shows on that theme. Why a sequence, and how many do you expect there to be?

When Collateral Drawing was launched at Plymouth College of Art, two years ago, there was no particular emphasis on where its 10 artists came from. Subsequently, the artists have had some connection to each venue’s location, including at two international project spaces. Beton7, which was staged in Athens in 2014, showed Anglo-Greek artists. And rosalux, in Berlin in 2015, brought together artists linked to London and Berlin. The fourth show, in Ipswich, features 16 artists with an East Anglian connection.

The whole project is documented through the Collateral Drawing website. I’m keen to expand the sequence as far as I can take it. Three more are planned for London, Margate and Toronto in 2016 and ‘17. I am aware, though, that funding will be necessary! I hope it will eventually be possible to produce a book of the project.

Where is Ipswich, and what makes a good place to put on this show?

It’s near the East coast in Suffolk, East Anglia. Collateral Drawing will be presented in a public gallery within the new university site at Ipswich Docks. Having begun my artistic training in Suffolk, I have always been aware of the vibrant artistic community East Anglia attracts, and am at a stage in my own practice where exhibiting the project on home territory provides a platform for my own artistic reflection.

The series feature a high proportion of painters. Why is that?

I’m not sure that’s been planned, but perhaps my painting background has led me to work with curators who, like me, are inclined to select painters; and painting does provide a visceral and tangible way into the collateral process. That’s changing though: this show includes some artists who don’t work in conventional terms of painting or sculpture. So that the notion of collateral drawing is being challenged and expanded. I’m expecting the London CD to include several photographers, and I’m co-curating the 2017 Margate CD with photographer-curator Julia Riddiough.

Are studio visits an important part of the process?

The ideal would be to visit each artist’s studio. That isn’t always possible, but I am always conscious of the importance of picking up on the subtle habits each artist’s workspace holds — and which they themselves may not recognize because they’re so absorbed in the making.

Could you give an example or two of collateral drawing that struck you from the previous shows?

Goodness, that’s a hard task. It’s all interesting. I was intrigued by Frances Richardson’s use of an eight-by-four-foot sheet of MDF as a work surface, which, over time, built up drill holes and saw marks. It was beautifully intricate and like an artwork in itself. Or there’s the way Mark Titchner’s paperback books related to the inkjet prints set alongside them, which edited and magnified their back covers to a point where the statements printed on them were reinterpreted.

Has there been a line of development over the first three versions?

There has been a gradual process of editing down how many collateral elements represent the process of each exhibiting artist. John felt there needed to be a further reduction with the current CD and as a result we feel this has achieved greater clarity between the collateral clues and the finished artwork.

You’ve included your own work each time. What do you think you’ve gained from that double involvement?

It’s helped me to be far more objective about my own practice, and made me consider the methods I use more thoroughly and openly when I return to my studio. It is a very direct and honest way to develop as an artist, similar to peer learning.

You also have a co-curator, also an artist in the show and a local resident. Can you tell us something about John and his work, and how you have collaborated?

We were introduced through John’s gallerist, Zavier Ellis and found we had Suffolk in common. John recently moved to Aldeburgh with his wife, Da-eun, after living in South Korea. We both studied at the Royal Academy Schools, albeit at different times, and I like John’s philosophy and humorous outlook on life. He’s been a real asset.

The last time I saw Glenn Brown’s work, it occupied the whole of the Gagosian booth at Frieze. How did you persuade such a high profile and commercially successful artist to take part in such a modestly funded and provincially located show?

Yes, and John was especially thrilled when Glenn agreed to take part as he admires him very much as an artist who — like him — has made a successful career from re-working old masters. Glenn grew up in Norfolk and now lives and works between London and Suffolk. He really liked the unusual concept and was very understanding about the (lack of) budget. He has loaned a drawing from that Gagosian project, together with palettes and his light box, which holds photo reproductions. Glenn likes to support worthwhile local projects, and in 2012 he exhibited in the Aldeburgh Festival’s visual arts program.

Ryan Gander is also well known internationally. I imagine, with his love of playing with what a work of art can be, that he took particularly readily to the concept of the show?

Yes like Glenn, Ryan also lives between London and Suffolk. He instantly agreed to participate and is showing Things that mean things and things that look like they mean things (2008), a fictional documentary film that explores the production of an artwork that doesn’t exist. That brings an interesting angle: John describes Ryan, Daphne Warburg Astor and Kayle Brandon’s works as “utilizing the collateral, which then feeds back into or becomes the art work, a chicken and egg situation which could be described as an ouroboros.”

You are also featuring Matthew Collings and his wife, Emma Biggs. He’s an artist better known as a critic, especially on TV. Did he have anything to say about CD from that perspective?

Yes, I can quote him:

I think criticism is unrecognizable now. In practice it’s someone that calls him or herself a critic saying more or less random things, whose only purpose is to make clear to an audience that figures and ideas in art with which the audience is already familiar are very well known to the critic as well. From the position of the sort of art critic I am, I would say the Collateral Drawing is really well conceived because it brings into focus the process of making.

Matthew and Emma have made a painting for the exhibition and show an old studio table that has years’ worth of layers of cheap paper masking taped to its surface, placed as a way of always having a more or less clean and tidy surface. Matthew states that, “at the stage we offered it to the Collateral Drawing exhibition it had some scribbled quotes in charcoal on it from YouTube interviews with Francis Bacon because I was writing an article about a show called ‘Bacon and The Masters.’”

Daphne always records the work she makes each day. How does that flow into the collateral way of things?

For CD she started working on May 22, 2015, in a temporary studio in an empty garden shed on a farm surrounded by plants, bees and migrating birds. Her collateral is through recording and collecting, and her work is always connected to the land. Elements, such as wheat and pollen in this piece, are then utilized to make the drawings, which are incorporated into the final installation; so there is a slippage between the collateral and the final artwork which John and I found very interesting.

I often find that unexpected conjunctions emerge from a group show. Is that the case in Ipswich?

Always. These formal things are what interest me the most in bringing a show together. This exhibition seems to adopt a visual contrast between the industrial and synthetic versus the raw and earthy. There is an interesting dialogue between the real and the unreal. And light is important in many of the works. Trisant’s shiny enameled paint surface draws the outside in, whereas Chris Hawtin’s sci-fi landscape creates a synthetic light through its painted illusion; the ethereal illumination in my fabricated landscape contrasts with the intimate candlelit space of John’s painting. And there’s much more: you can find surprising conjunctions through all the artists shown here.

The post “Surprising Conjunctions”: Paul Carey-Kent and Bella Easton Discuss the Collateral Drawings Series appeared first on artcritical.

December 29, 2015 to January 17, 2016
312 Bowery (between Bleecker and Houston)
New York, 212 466 1100

It’s a photography show that isn’t. At least, that’s the conceit. “Not a Photo,” which opened at The Hole in December, collects works that look like or employ photography, but can’t themselves classically be called photos.

It’s a kind of a sister show to “Not a Painting,” at The Hole this past summer. That show, while similar in concept, explored the sustained aesthetic and compositional influence of painting on a younger generation of artists to whom the confines of genre and medium are largely irrelevant. “Not a Photo,” though ostensibly having similar aims for its chosen medium, does not operate in this way.

Tellingly, the works shown in each exhibition are not dissimilar. Many of the artists could easily have been in either one, such as Adam Parker Smith, who was in both. Smith is perhaps the best example here of the fluidity of medium. His work in the show, Crush (2012), is a photograph of a woman printed on canvas, blonde human hair sewn into the surface and blown amiss by a household fan in front of it. It’s a clever play on active imagery, like an animated gif come to life.

To the show’s credit, Smith is not the only example of humor. Susy Oliveira, who turns photographic prints into origami-like sculptures, contributes a blocky bouquet of flowers that look like low-quality computer graphics circa the late ‘90s. And Eric Yahnker’s piece, iFire (2015), the face of the show, is a pencil illustration of a pulpy man, mustache’d and shirtless, having his cigarette lit by an iPhone Bic lighter app.

There’s also a current of wry conceptualism. Ryder Ripps has one of his Ho portraits—appropriated from someone else’s Instagram, digitally manipulated, and then re-rendered in paint on canvas. Mark Flood includes one of his photomosaic prints. A meme of memes, Flood has arranged found images from the dark corners of the web to spell the word “KEK,” itself an Internet idiom, semi-synonymous with “LOL.” These works, if interesting (and the jury’s still out), are little more than a joke here, removed as they are from their larger conceptual contexts.

Indeed, much of the work is hindered by this problem: they’re stripped of their intended framework, or held in relationship with other works which, altogether, do not work in concert. Individual artists stand out in the show, both good and bad, but not because of the curatorial direction. The show’s conceit — that these artists use the medium of photography as a launching point or otherwise important step in their process — might be true, but only because it’s true for most artists. The strongest works here utilize the power of photography — namely its verisimilitude, or the print — to extend the reach of other mediums, and vice versa.

Letha Wilson is a good example. Her work here features emulsion transfers of landscape photos onto hunky concrete slabs, pleated like a handheld fan. They simultaneously bring a sense of physicality to photographs, and a lightness to the sculpture. She’s in conversation with folding photogramers like John Houck, and concrete-based artists like Sam Moyer. Contemporaries of Wilson, Kate Steciw and Rachel de Joode, have works hanging nearby. (These three were also in a strong three-person show at Martos Gallery that ran concurrently, and closed in mid-December.) Steciw’s pieces here, triangular photo-sculptures collaged from found images and hung from the ceiling, act as a kind of unavoidable visual obstacle in the gallery — a suitable metaphor for the profusion of visual media her work explores. Kate Bonner, too, is cut from a similar cloth: her work featuring digital images cut up, rearranged, and layered with a distinctly Photoshop feel. And while these works are strong independent of each other and represent a recent trend of colorful photo-sculpture, there is perhaps an overindulgence of this type of work.

Finally, there is Matthew Stone, whose two pieces actually help to justify the curatorial limitations of the show. His works, which look like cheap knock offs of Richter’s scrape-paintings are actually digital facsimiles of thereof. Stone paints on glass, photographs the result and digitally alters the images, then prints and collages them hodgepodge, one here on canvas, one on a translucent surface. The resolution of Stone’s prints is great enough so that from a distance the texture of paint translates seamlessly, and it’s not until you’re up close that you realize they’re prints. Viewed digitally though, they appear to achieve impossibilities of depth and contour. Like you can’t actually picture what they might look like in person. It’s the clearest and best example here of an artist using the camera as a way of changing the way the art works, while also considering the work as a digital image, which is how most of us are going to see it anyway.

The post Ceci N’est Pas: “Not a Photo” at The Hole appeared first on artcritical.

October 10 to November 22, 2015
260 Richardson Street (at Kingsland Ave.)
Brooklyn, 646 729 4682

Nicola Ginzel’s recent solo exhibition at Brooklyn’s Cathouse FUNeral featured a considerable amount of small-scale mixed media objects and embroidered works on paper. Occasionally framed but mostly hung directly on the wall, these works were shown in close proximity and at an unusual height. Allowing only a tall viewer to peruse them at eye-level, works could easily be inspected both frontally, as well as slightly from below. This made for an intimate acquaintance between viewer and subject, serving Ginzel’s work particularly well. Rooted in the playful mixture of eclectic materials, her enchanting concoctions aim to not only disguise but to reinvent the familiar; she adds value not where it was lost, but where it hardly existed in the first place.

Hybrids between sculpture and painting, Ginzel’s objects involve a staggering amount of found, fragmented, and usually random ingredients. The latter can range from tea bags, mohair, wax, thread, gaffers tape, wasp nest, felt, clothing remnants, rubber band and gold leaf, to dirt. Mixed, re-matched, and altered, the remnants are stripped off their former functionality and everyday context. However, that does not equate with a loss of meaning. In fact, Ginzel’s hand-sized objects can exude an almost shamanistic quality. One might easily imagine them playing an important part in some ritual. The fact that some of the materials involved are gathered in specific places, including dirt from the music haven Muscle Shoals in Alabama, for example, enhances this notion.

In addition to her three-dimensional works, Ginzel also continuously embroiders various scraps of paper. These can either be discarded snippets of mass-produced candy wrappers or popcorn packages, for example, or involve more personal notations, such as schedules, index cards, or specifically selected book pages. Stitch-by-stitch, these mundane items are elevated from the commonplace to the carefully considered. By tenderly abstracting her materials, Ginzel helps them to obtain a sense of preciousness and even an air of Romanticism.

In order to provide a comprehensive overview of Ginzel’s oeuvre, “My Bed is Made of Atoms” presented a selection of works from the past 15 years. In that period she has consistently found inspiration in mainstream culture. However, it is the elegant execution of her work, as well as her careful handling of her materials, that reveal a high regard for craft. She is interested in interacting with her subjects in a simple and yet profound way, or as she has pointed out: “It is in the simplicity and interaction, where the essence of life’s breath resides, not in the end result or goal achieved.”

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