Hélio Oiticica: Spatial Relief and Drawings, 1955–59 at Galerie Lelong

November 3, 2018 to January 26, 2019
528 West 26th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, galerielelong.com

The Brazilian artist and activist Helio Oiticica (1937-1980) had a genius for turning settled commonplaces into startlingly stirring problematics. In his hands, the square and the diagonal prove sufficient means to create a world of thought-forms, orders or systems—and, indeed, polemics. A principle believed long settled comes into its own again, full of generative possibilities.

Although the exhibition of his early work at Galerie Lelong is decidedly uneven, to witness apprentice studio exercises alongside drop-dead perfect realizations is far more satisfying than the all-too frequent encounter, in a gallery or museum setting, of predictable examples of masterful production.

The exhibition centers on Oiticica’s emergence as an artist who was none the less soon to become fluent in the language of Neo-Concretism. Thanks to the Grupo Frente, and in particular the mentoring by Ivan Serpa, Oiticica and others, including Lygia Clark, he attained to an abstraction that picked up where Constructivism left off. Eager to reformulate assumptions of society though the potential inherent in combination and permutation of the one and the many, for Grupo Frente (which went from 1954-57) abstract art seemed the ideal means to posit and then to bring about dynamic change. The point would be to approach this modelling of human relations through an integrity of means.

Although certainly not the first time the implications of the square had been proposed Helio Oiticica reasserted it with high hopes and every aspiration to intelligent visual literacy. Metaesquema 212, 1957 and Sêco II, 1957, range between extremes of composition issuing from the square, and the square skewed: a diagonal orientation of the rhombus now activating the developing visual field with mobile relationships.

In a certain sense, this phase shows Oiticica to be an orthodox modernist, albeit while exercising his prerogatives to explore implications within a rigorous set of givens. The diagonal line drawn corner to corner within the square augments the form through its extra length in such a way as to become the source of growth and change. The constraints are not stultifying in Oiticica’s early works. But more expanded vocabulary does not necessarily help matters: and exercises in color to create an encyclopedia formal relationships (of red-plus-blue, in transparent, translucent and opaque stages within and without concentricity of circles crossing quadrilaterals) do seem still in parts. Some of these exercises remain practice pieces, especially when compared with Malevich’s exemplary axiomatic clarity or El Lissitzky’s Proun 99, 1924, at the Yale University Art Gallery, a work that “nailed it.”

The square and the diagonal are enough to create a world of thought forms, and through that, to posit and then inaugurate new ways of being and doing. Untitled, 1955, introducing a curve, is one way; another is through increased concreteness, as in Relevo Espacial, 1959-60, a hanging planar relief constructed of triangles the internal edges of which cause perceptual folds. And there is no one more gifted than Oiticica in enfolding relationships so that the in-between spaces restate the diagonal interstices in ways both sensible and intelligent. The concrete approaches to structuralist antimonies, then, are not just emergent, they compound the art in its productive energies.

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February 5 to March 26, 2016
528 West 26th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 315 0470

Ana Mendieta’s exhibition of experimental films at Galerie Lelong brings 15 works created by Mendieta from circa 1971 to 1975: nine of them had never been exhibited before, just recently uncovered during a cataloguing process. Besides being new to the audience, these experimental films have been transferred from their originals to digital media, which has added a fresh look to them. As we step into the gallery, our eyes are immediately captivated by an image of Mendieta’s face at the back of the main room. In Sweating Blood (1973), Mendieta’s serene semblance appears to be floating in the surrounding darkness. Her hair vanishes amid both the film’s pitch-black background and the walls. While Sweating Blood and Dripwall (1973) face spectators who enter the gallery, six other films have been distributed around the room on the left and right walls. In an adjacent gallery, we can see five more films, two series of photographs, and ephemera from Mendieta’s Estate, such as film reels, cassette tapes, and a notebook with a sketch for Sweating Blood.

Mendieta produced most of the films in the show during her pre-New York life, when she still lived in Iowa, where she had been exiled from Cuba since the age of 12. When she arrived with her sister, they lived at an orphanage. As a Latina, and outsider, she was ostracized and suffered prejudice. Later on, from 1969 to 1977, Mendieta completed two MFAs at the University of Iowa, the first in painting and the second in multimedia and video. She would move to New York only in 1978. Even though Mendieta participated in many progressive movements of her time, and she was definitely at the forefront of experimentation with the body and performance, it is hard not to feel traces of nostalgia in her work — something that she missed, perhaps due to her arduous life in Midwest, or perhaps as an omen of her tragic passing, her troubled marriage with artist Carl Andre. In the show, death is suggested, repelled and enacted: it begins with her speaking skull in X-Ray (ca. 1975), follows with Sweating Blood and Dripwall, and ends with Moffitt Building Piece (1973).

Sweating Blood, one of the most famous films in the show, is hard to ignore. The work lasts only three minutes, but it feels as if it’s way longer than that. Mendieta’s face, young and beautiful, with her closed eyes, is depicted as a self-portrait: we see her entire face, from the neck up. She does not move onscreen, but we can see when she swallows, or rolls her eyes underneath her eyelids, without opening them. At some point, her skin begins to change: the pores on the top of her forehead, where hair begins to grow, are emphasized, as if she just started to present pox, a rash. A red fluid appears on the top of her mid hairline and soon a drip of “blood” falls from her hair, just to find her left eyebrow. A second drop follows, running towards her left ear. The upper part of her forehead seems to be sweating blood.

In Dripwall (1973), three round holes appear on a white wall, coming from inside, one at a time. Red liquid leaks from them, dripping across the white plane. They reminded me of bullet holes. Moffitt Building Piece shows another of Mendieta’s experiments with blood. It was created in response to the murder of Sarah Ann Ottens, who was beaten, sexually assaulted, and killed in her dorm at the University of Iowa on March 13, 1973. In April of that year, Mendieta staged a violent rape scene in a performance at her apartment, later named Rape Scene, and then started her Moffitt Building Piece, which also responds to Ottens’s murder. Moffitt Building Piece begins with a view of the eponymous storefront in Iowa City. Mendieta is clandestine, filming from inside a car towards the façade of the building. A puddle of blood is seen on the sidewalk, in front of Moffitt’s door. After the camera gives a close-up on the puddle, we notice it’s lumpy, meat-like: Mendieta spilled an animal’s blood and meat on that sidewalk and then filmed the reactions of passersby, who look on the tableau with varying degrees of shock, concern, or disinterest.

While blood in Mendieta’s work has been labeled as “abject,” at Lelong, blood is empowering. Even though she created Moffitt Building Piece in reaction to the pervasive sexual violence against women, blood was not always a negative element for her. Instead, she used it as force, concomitant with her interest in Catholicism and the Afro-Caribbean religion Santería. In Sweating Blood, in Moffitt Building Piece and in Dripwall, blood evokes both presence and absence of a body: the power of blood to induce a trancelike state points to what happens beyond the body, a wall earns its “life” through bleeding like a body, and a woman’s death is exposed through the reminiscence of her corpse. These gestures are far from being abject; blood sanctions Mendieta’s body and creates bounds with our bodies, as spectators.

Magic is everywhere, as if these works were fragments of fairytales, or cautionary tales from a childhood in Latin America. In Dog (1974), filmed during a summer program in Mexico, Mendieta’s small silhouette is seen, moving far afield on an unpaved street in San Felipe, Oaxaca. As the camera focuses on her, we see she is on all fours, wearing a fur skin over her face and possibly naked body. She crawls. A man walks up the street, and ignores “the dog.” A woman and a boy pass next to her, no interaction. She still crawls, vulnerable, as if half-alive, recoiling, hesitant, woman, animal, and outsider.

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October 22 to December 5, 2015
528 West 26th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 315 0470

The English critic John Ruskin identified, in his book Modern Painters (1843-60), the “pathetic fallacy.” He described it as a form of anthropomorphism, where inanimate objects are given human qualities, emotions, preferences. As a negative demonstration of the fallacy, Andy Goldsworthy draws from the natural world a dense, corporeal show of new and old work, recently at Galerie Lelong. Like much of his work, Goldsworthy’s photos at Lelong document the artist interacting with found terrestrial materials: stones, leaves, flowers, mud, running water. Each work shows either the result of some manual intervention (a ray of light illuminated by dust) or the process of the intervention itself (Goldsworthy scattering dust, or casting a shadow, etc.). Goldsworthy’s work is balanced slimly between the large-scale land artists of the 1960s and ‘70s, and the performative documentarians of the mundane from the same era, such as Richard Long or Stanley Brouwn.

Straight away, viewers first encounter Poppy spits, Digne, France, 10 June 2015 (2015), a set of four photographs showing the artist somniferously spitting mouthfuls of poppy petals into the air. Other images show him releasing a seagull, hiding in a cave, covering himself in mud, digging a hole. The acts are totemic and often look both a bit silly and sensorially profound. Goldsworthy’s affect resembles a body as experiential meat, rather than explorer or biologist. His actions are minimal, abstracting the unrefined materials only as much as necessary to show their qualities in action, rather than an illustration or a means to some other distant end, such as minerals turned to pigment, to paint, to a picture.

The work here is split between work from the 1970s and ‘80s on the one hand, and new photographs and videos on the other. Formal allusions can be read into all of the images. Hazel stick throws, Banks, Cumbria, 10 July 1980 (1980), which features branches tossed overhead, creates lines reminiscent of Franz Kline. A video of Goldsworthy crawling through bare hedges — called Hedge crawl, dawn, frost, cold hands, Sinderby, England, 4 March 2014 (2014) — resembles early video art by people such as Paul McCarthy, or films by Maya Deren. The slime of Black sand, Morecambe Bay, Lancashire, October 1976 (1976/2006) and petals of Poppy petals, left hand wrapped by me, right hand by my daughter, washed off in the middle of River Sark, the border between Scotland and England, 12 June 2014 (2014) recall paint, or Kazuo Shiraga. But these are largely ancillary and, by themselves, a kind of pathetic fallacy.

Many of the earlier pieces call up allusions to that era, or the one that preceded it: grubby, back-to-the-land hippies; soldiers in Vietnam mire; or the recently discovered Tasaday tribe, a kind of catalogue of varieties of human relations to the natural world. Goldsworthy’s is a primitivist, animist, pseudo-anthropology. He approaches what the philosopher Eugene Thacker calls “the world-without-us,” distinguished from the domain of civilization (world as productive resource) and from the natural world (a subject of inquiry, classification, a source of knowledge). Instead, Goldsworthy records the mute interactions of one mass against another: body in tree, flower petals on water, dust in air.

Like Bas Jan Ader, Goldsworthy treats basically the body, either by slapstick or with more threatening physical danger. It’s meat and eyeballs in a landscape, rather than within a set of human relations and mechanisms. Goldsworthy shows a process of finding out what happens to a body within these spaces, how they affect him physically or what can happen to him there. The show’s eponymous photographic series, Leaning into the wind, Dumfriesshire, Scotland, 15 January 2015 (2015), demonstrates this precisely. The artist, standing on a Scottish ridge, leans far into a strong wind, canting at an angle greater than 45º. There’s not a lot to intuit from this, as all of the pieces are laid at the viewer’s feet. But that wind on a crag can support a man’s body — that such material forces can produce this effect — is shocking. The space and its possibilities are only present because they’re unreformed and untranslated by humans. Instead, Goldsworthy lofts his subjects into the air, high enough that we can get a glimpse of how little we know about what they are.

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April 2 – May 8, 2015
528 W 26th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 315 0470

A work of art being so much more than its physical makeup, you can’t classify an artist simply by her knack for manipulating materials. And yet, when paired with a nimble poetic sensibility and a fervent desire to plumb the farthest corners of human experience, aptitude can occasionally ascend to genius. Such is the case of artist and poet Etel Adnan, who at the august age of 90 is finally getting the attention she deserves. The show of her work now on view at Galerie Lelong — a tidy selection of paintings, pastels, tapestries, makimono (Japanese folding books), and a single film — speaks to two things: Adnan’s endless fascination with “the miracle of matter itself,”[1] and her unshakeable belief that there is much more to this world than matter, accompanied by a passionate impulse to explore what lives both within and beyond it. Adnan’s art is a love song to the Universe, and it is our great fortune to have been invited here to bear witness.

Adnan’s semi-abstract compositions are compact, often no larger than 13 x 16 inches, presenting patchwork vistas built up out of numerous teeming and opaque parts. They look not meticulously designed but more intuitively improvised, each distinguished by the brusque yet sensitive juxtaposition of thick bands of color. The paintings in particular are very worldly, yet the planet they evoke is not one riddled with toil and grit (as depicted in Adnan’s literary works such as The Arab Apocalypse and Sitt-Marie Rose) but rather a relaxed, clarified version as seen through the eyes of someone who has glimpsed the bigger picture: mountains, ravines, the skyline, the sea, all rendered in a controlled palette of piquant hues. In Untitled (2014), for example, uneven slabs of taxicab yellow, olive green, rich caramel, and tawny are tempered by a stout sliver of bright cornflower blue; the recipe is unusual and arresting. But the mood is, above all, self-possessed. The images elicit a solid, sturdy calm. They do not move, or when they do, it is by a slow surge of coarse abutting forms or sharp diagonals, careful collisions propelled by broad, textural strokes. Like tectonic plates that shift mere inches over thousands of years, peaks growing slowly skyward.

The internal sense of gravity bestows urgency on these small surfaces and turns them into something other, and more tangibly compelling, than mere decorative objects. Adnan applies her paints with a palette knife, and always on a table or flat surface rather than an easel. As a result her images look putty-ish, almost edible, nourishing even, and somehow more substantial than your average spread. Untitled (1989), the oldest painting included in the show, is especially ripe. Where mossy green pushes up against creamy citron yellow, the two colors are rendered more distinct, yet also manage to merge into a dynamic structure that encompasses the whole. Sky blue, crackled black, tan, Kelly green, and a smear of dusty lilac are at once offset and unified by two dashes of raspberry red, an indiscriminate equal sign. The three pastels (all 1970), conversely, are confections scribbled on paper, their many squarish harlequin morsels coming together with “the suddenness of an island in one’s life.”[2] The total image is lovely, but forceful and fluid in the way a single, soft line is, not unlike the inky trails that delineate the unfurled makimono.

The Universe keeps creeping in, mainly in the color combinations, which are pleasantly disarming and never compromise. The tapestries seem to bustle and buzz with pulsating tones of lime green, blood red, and ochre, while the paintings are more poised and minimal: two milky tones of blue cut with hillocks of tender peach and elephant gray. Adnan’s whites are never flat, but dimensional, tinged with the slightest hint of puce or beige. She is a smart, conceptual colorist. Her sense of art, the seemingly impossible act of reflecting the subjective self and the objective cosmos simultaneously, is moored in the future. She is always reaching forward, though not in a spirit of prophecy, but of hope. Her work may share certain aesthetic qualities with that of, say, Arthur Dove or Hans Hofmann, but it carries an attitude all its own. When describing her artistic process, Adnan once said: “What you do is make your composition. You trust your… shapes, your gestures. You trust that something beyond that will come through even if you don’t know exactly what.”[3] This is an artist who dares to push beyond the empirical, adjusting and challenging the maps we’ve made to navigate our selves, our world, and what we think we know about them. The experience, if somewhat troubling, is terrific.

[1] Adnan, Etel. Journey to Mount Tamalpais. Sausalito, CA: Post-Apollo Press, 1986. 63.

[2] Adnan, Etel. Seasons. Sausalito, CA: Post-Apollo Press, 2008. 30.

[3] Weaver, Kathleen. “The Non Worldly World: Conversation with Etel Adnan.” Poetry Flash, May 1986 (No. 158).

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February 14 to March 28, 2015
528 West 26th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 315 0470

You need to know this: some parts of the Cold War are remembered, others are not. One particularly brutal episode that has been mostly forgotten is the Nicaraguan Civil War, which spanned about 30 years. During the 1980s, the US government funneled weapons and money into the hands of the Contras, an array of right wing paramilitary organizations opposing the leftist Sandinistas, who had deposed the American-installed Samoza dictatorship in 1979. The support provided to the Contras by the Reagan administration briefly blew up into a fiasco in 1986, when it was revealed that US Marine Corps Lt. Oliver North had been funding such groups via proceeds of illegal arms sales to Iran, laundering of federal money, and by protecting (or possibly aiding) the Contras’ manufacture and distribution of cocaine. The Contras systematically attacked civilians and aid workers, and used torture, assassination, terrorism, and rape to suppress leftist insurrection. The same tactics were, at that time, being taught to rightist soldiers from several Latin American countries at the US-based and government-funded School of the Americas (now the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation). The civil war was horrific, resulting in the deaths of up to 50,000 people, including a lot of civilians. But that conflict is largely eclipsed by other more optimistic events, such as the fall of the Berlin Wall and reunification of Germany, the ejection of the Soviets from Afghanistan, the Polish Solidarity movement, and Glasnost and Perestroika. Nonetheless, the Cold War’s aftereffects on several nations in the region are still festering, as seen in the immigration crisis of this past summer.

Alfredo Jaar’s exhibition, “Shadows,” now at Galerie Lelong, includes four photographs from the early stages of that war, taken in 1978 by documentarian Koen Wessing (1942-2011). The show is introduced by a short video interview with Wessing, who describes the incident shown in his pictures, which are displayed as 12-by-13-inch lightboxes with black-and-white transparencies. A campesino was executed by the Samoza regime, his body dumped by a rural road. Wessing doesn’t spare any of the violence: the man’s head wound is plainly visible in several pictures, as his neighbors collect his body. The first image one encounters is of soldiers inspecting a bus at a checkpoint, giving some sense of the violent intimidation used on the populace, which had seen inequality skyrocket and their lives abused and threatened.

The primary focus of the exhibition is the overwhelming grief shown by two young women for their father, the slain campesino. After being told of the murder, they arrive at the scene crying, clutching their heads and covering their mouths at the roadside. The lightboxes are hung in a small, darkened corridor, given several feet of space so that their impact is acute and dramatic, unfolding the narrative slowly in discrete pictures. Turning a corner in the hallway, a large room opens with an enormous installation: a photo of the daughters wailing, projected onto the wall, which is covered with an aluminum panel cut around their bodies. Slowly, the rest of the scene fades into blackness, leaving the two girls, torqued by anguish, in empty space. Then, the girls themselves fade into bright white light, backlit LEDs shining in the metal panel’s cutout. They become sharp, blazing white silhouettes in the darkness. And when the light suddenly ceases for a few moments, their afterimage is seared into the retinas until the cycle begins again.

Other photographs in the suite depict the young women at home, crying over the laid-out body of their father, his fatal injury wrapped and his corpse set on a cot. They fold themselves over to weep on the patio, while others stand, stone-faced. They mourn on the grass in front, collapsed.

Jaar’s previous work has used similar image sets to light otherwise undiscussed tragedies, and to navigate what is seen and what is not, whether by suppression or by forgetting horror. Jaar has employed documentary photographs of the Rwandan Genocide and, in a 2009 collaboration with critic and poet David Levi Strauss, substituted black boxes for photos of atrocities in the Iraq and Afghan wars that had been withheld from the public by the US government. Instead, Jaar and Strauss described what the images show, including a caption under each picture. Wessing has presented his own images with little or no commentary, intending that they speak for themselves.

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September 12 to October 18, 2014
528 West 26th Street, between Tenth and Eleventh avenues
New York City, 212 315 0470

High gloss panels in resonant hues that range from tan, red, blue, and green through grey and black are placed at varying distances from each other around the walls of the gallery.  As sizes vary, a frieze-like composition in colored rectangles configures differently depending on viewpoint. On passing through Kate Shepherd’s exhibition at Galerie Lelong surface reflections on each panel respond to gallery lighting, shadows and any transient passing of visitors who themselves can observe others, vacant architectural space or their own reflection. Three more panels, be it of an entirely different kind, rest on the floor, lean against a wall or rest on a shelf. An equivalent to the lines visible from closer proximity on the gloss panels emerge in these works too: on the plywood floor piece they are laser cut, after a pattern of cracked concrete, while the other two works are actually fractured and cracked at angels. Either way, all the works in the exhibition have fine lines of one kind or another. In contrast, the painted lines of the gloss panels which derive from computer imaging – more of which later – differ from the other three panels in that the lines they have are accessible as marked, broken or cut – subject to the given happenstance out of which they came – and do not have the ambiguity of the quasi pictorial illusionism present in the enamel painted gloss panels.

The reflections of the gloss panels bring to mind Gerhard Richter’s grey paintings on glass and when the panels consist of two joined parts of contrasting color Blinky Palermo’s fabric paintings. As the panels all refer to painting one way or another and use the characteristics of the room – they are not passive, like fictive windows hanging on a wall – another apposite artist to mention (one for whom, like Shepherd herself, the epithet of minimalist seems a misnomer) is Adrian Schiess. This artist also takes the object qualities of painting and situates them as the subject of an expansive conversation inclusive of extra pictorial possibilities.

Lines across the surface of Shepherd’s gloss panels are based on computer modeling of an image of an Alvar Aalto bent plywood chair and naked models that appear in a 3-D computer game. Shepherd has reversed the process in creating her own three-dimensional models from which to subsequently create two-dimensional images traced in paint across a super illusionistic and reflective surface. For Shepherd this process continues to be explored after many years. What is different in this exhibition is the modified serially transformed computer game cipher of a figure to a figure that has distinctly classical connotations. Where previously abstract spaces were established with Shepherd’s typically fine linear constructs, each one independent, in this new body of work a process of change is elucidated from one painting to the next. Hence the reference in the exhibitions title, to a game of passing on information that involves inevitably changes because of what is added or subtracted in the exchange. Titles of paintings take their names from the computer files that they are based on – another indicator of the parallel process echoed in the paintings.

The process is most explicit perhaps in the triptych womantorse daz3d2 Draw-On-1.lrfr(three scenes) (2014) where pale lines on a black ground shift subtly as the gentle arc of a woman’s body is variously traced in curving vertical lines. Each panel is itself made from two abutted panels and in catching the available light differently; the tone of what are in fact identically colored panels is changed. This gives the impression of lines passing through a different zone or quality of light. From outlined traces located on an equivocal surface to linear signs of fatigue and stress, Shepherd’s otherwise bluntly physical paintings open in both increments and jolts from one distinct sensation to another, from the solid to the ephemeral.

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March 22 – April 28, 2012
528 West 26th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212-315-0470

Catherine Lee’s new paintings, a series entitled “Quanta” (2011-12), seem to glow from within. Composed on pencil-drawn grids, the paintings are hand crafted in layers of pigment, applied square by square and stroke by stroke.  The grid provides a foil for the sensually inflected material surfaces. What at first glance seem monochromes are actually “duets” between a base color and at least one contrasting color applied over it. The application, without the help of masking tape, leaves irregular edges, and the underlying colors show through to varying degrees; the seepage of colors and flickers of light at their edges create complex perceptual effects. Sometimes they suggest surfaces of low relief, like ceramic tiles or woven mats, but paintings like Slate Night (Quanta #10), (2011) also look like pixelated monitor screens.

As a complement to the 18 oil paintings, the exhibition features Alice, an array of 105 ceramic forms mounted in grid formation on the wall of an adjoining room. Like heart shaped knives, bound at the handles by stainless steel wires, the forms seem archaic and mysterious, displayed like archaeological specimens, sharing a family resemblance like leaves of a plant, but each unique. Their red, raku-fired surfaces recall the concentrated colors of Chocolate Cadmium (Quanta #21), (2012) albeit generated by a different sort of alchemy.  Names of family members and places inscribed on the pieces allude to personal content in a literal way; Alice is the artist’s mother, and 105 the age she jokingly claims. Lee records what Matisse once termed “a moment in the life of the artist”: her objects gather up feelings and memories, invoked in ritualistic repetition, for which the grid provides an armature.

In Quanta, our focus is less on the individual elements; attention is diffused, but there’s still a psychological charge. If Alice recalls Lee’s earlier wall installations, like her Alphabet Series, (1991-95), in which cast bronze objects with lush patinas referenced an alphabet of place names, Quanta harks back still further, to her Mark Paintings from the 1970s, which were also grids, but more like drawings, with zigzag lines inscribed in each small square; austere and contemplative, like early Agnes Martin, they used the mesh of the grid to establish a personal space.

The irregular patches that fill the grids of the new paintings create a similarly intimate space, but the subject, front and center, is color. Lee favors strong primaries, along with variations on black and white, yet each painting aims to create its own particular effect. The overlaying of contrasting colors, akin to the constructive facture of late Cézanne, opens up a wide array of possibilities. Ranging from six inches square to almost six feet, the paintings also vary in the density of their grids. The small ones, on which the marks have more material presence, include Brevity (Quanta #25), (2012) very dense and virtually gray, and When Things Go Wrong (Quanta #17), (2012) in which black patches over red create the effect of neon.

Lee’s patches of paint recall the famous “yellow patch of wall” in Vermeer’s “View of Delft”, which Marcel Proust’s character, the writer Bergotte, longingly admires as he dies.  Like Proust, Lee associates memories with intense sensory experiences. Her own yellows vary from the warmth of August Like Suns, Yellow Cd (Quanta #20) to the desiccated gold of Ivory Sahara (Quanta #1), (2011) or the lemony Dream of Reason (Quanta #23), (2012). Lee’s patches, of course, are more abstract than Vermeer’s, or than the shapes in Alice, yet their regular repetition is undercut by irregularities of application that keep our attention shifting; elements group and regroup. As in quantum mechanics, where aspects of individual particles remain indeterminate, meaning is displaced onto the overall field. The shifting energies suggest brain activity, as networks are constantly activated and renewed.

Rosalind Krauss argued in a 1979 essay that the grid retains its interest in contemporary art because it enables an underlying spirituality to lurk within modern materialism. She notes in particular its association with nineteenth-century studies of physiological optics, the sort of investigations that inspired painters like Georges Seurat. More recently, the Lacanian art historian Georges Didi-Huberman has brought renewed scrutiny to Vermeer’s “patch” (pan, in French); for him, like Lee, layering of patches emphasizes painting as “colored material rather than descriptive sign”. As Lee negotiates new territory for the grid, moving away from the specific objects and familiar armature of her wall installations – and from literal references to particular persons or places – she generalizes and amplifies the realm of memory, which now seeks a home in the measured sensuality of her seductive fields of pigment. While “Quanta” as a title implies the extension of physiological optics into the globalized space of electronics, the works on view reassert the efficacy of painting itself.

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March 24 to April 30, 2011
528 West 26^th St, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212-315-0470

In this new body of work Kate Shepherd adeptly fuses modernist architectural images with formal minimalism and a compelling eccentricity.  And Debris presents twelve glossy oil and enamel paintings and seventeen adorably homespun wire sculptures.  The paintings are created with Shepherd’s characteristic coolness; she uses architecture and animation programs on her computer to map out her composition before painting.  The finished pieces reflect this measured approach – they are elegant and alluring– at once angular and lyrical.  Against high-gloss monochromatic enamel backgrounds the artist dangles and intertwines collapsed geometric shapes etched in wavering white lines of oil paint.  Titles range from the descriptive and comparatively straightforward Hung Tied String Figure on Grey (2010) to the appealingly esoteric Violet Grey African Rabbit Skin (2010).  Rabbit skins exist as empty vessels, divested of the living animal they once encased, and re-imagined by Shepherd as triangles and quadrilaterals suspended without infrastructure and hanging limp.

The wire sculptures consist entirely of unbent coat-hangers awkwardly reshaped into irregular amoebic forms and suspended from the gallery ceiling with 28 gauge steel wire so they dangle at eye level with the standing viewer.  Eight are human-scale and vaguely creepy; their negative space threatening, like the shadows of sinister ghosts, or portals into a disordered alternate universe.  When viewed as a group, especially from end to end, they oddly resemble 3-D versions of Ellsworth Kelly’s plant drawings, twisting and swaying gently in eddies of air.  In the side gallery there is another series of smaller wire sculptures rather less successful then their larger counterparts.  At about half the size, they are a bit baffling, appearing more as puzzles or questions then the statements and demands of the large-scale works.   The sculptures are at their best when viewed en masse – their amalgamated formlessness is visually enticing and borders on the physical, as the viewer walks around the works.  I was strongly tempted to climb through some of the larger works – just to see what was on the other side.

Viewed singly, the medium of the sculptures becomes the message, as one is reminded of the unpleasant connotations of the coat hanger in the quotidian culture, from back-alley abortions to the hideous scene from the movie, Mommie Dearest: “No more wire hangers!”

The exhibition’s title theme, debris, is underscored in grainy black and white photographs printed on newsprint, displayed folded in a case at the entrance and available as handouts.  The photos are of the view from the artist’s studio – a messy detritus-filled lot and a tangle of dissected wire hangers reinforcing the mundane simplicity of junk and underscoring its alchemical transformation into art objects.

The exhibition is quirky and captivating, inviting gallery goers to linger in contemplation whether deciphering the twisted geometries of the paintings, admiring their shiny surfaces and pleasing colors, or confronting the ­­­compelling ambiguity of the wire sculptures.  Shepherd’s older work was more blatantly architectural (she has a background in architecture) and her work’s evolution into a more veiled and nuanced subtlety is a pleasure to see.  A new unrest has crept in, adding layers of complexity and challenging easy interpretation.  One wonders if a glimpse through the coat-hanger portals or an untangling of the paintings’ ordered chaos would yield a view into a parallel world – one slightly more sinister than our own.

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Robert Storr, Sarah Valdez, and Joan Waltemath joined David Cohen to discuss Lois Dodd at Alexandre Gallery, Ellen Phelan at Gasser Grunert Gallery, Laurie Simmons at Salon 94, and Krzysztof Wodiczko at Galerie Lelong.

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March 20, 2009 at the National Academy Museum and School of Fine Arts, New York

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Michael Brenson, Carol Diehl, and David Ebony joined David Cohen to review Kamrooz Aram at Perry Rubinstein, Siah Armajani at Max Protetch, Alfredo Jaar at Galerie Lelong, and Susan Rothenberg at Sperone Westwater.

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