If walls could speak they would make great art market chroniclers.

As gallery goers will have noticed, Yvon Lambert has shut up shop in New York.  When the venerable 75-year-old French dealer retired earlier this year direction of his Paris flagship gallery was handed to Olivier Bélot, who had been managing the New York space.  Running both ventures was too great a strain: that, rather than diminished market, is the given reason for the retreat.

The old space at 550 West 21st Street has a new tenant: Haunch of Venison New York.  They inaugurate their new space Friday September 24 with a group show, Boundaries Obscured, featuring ten artists or artist-partnerships they work with, including Jake & Dinos Chapman, Peter Saul, Gunther Uecker and Ahmed Alsoudani.

Itself a US outpost of a European venture, a coincidence with Lambert for the gallery walls to savor, Haunch of Venison takes its meaty name from the back alley in London’s West End where it started its operation in 2002.  That time, the inaugural show, organized by gallery founders Harry Blain and Graham Southern, was a Rachel Whiteread survey that filled many floors of its sprawling mansion premises.  Since 2007 it has been a wholly owned subsidiary of Christie’s and, in addition to London and New York, also has a space in Berlin.

Their first New York quarters were on two floors of the Rockefeller Center, home of their auctioneer parent, but as director Emilio Steinberger explains, the restricted size of the freight elevator, not to mention the low ceilings of the office premises, limited them in scale.  They also wanted the greater foot traffic for the artists they represent.

There are other connections between the old and new tenants at 550: Steinberger worked for Lambert before moving to Haunch of Venison.  Bettina Prentice, the PR consultant for Haunch at Prentice Art Communications, dealt with press at Lambert.

To some, a launch with a group show might indicate tentativeness and excessive diplomacy.  But Boundaries Obscured, a thoughtful selection made by Steinberger, is not simply a cross-section of stable and stock.  For a start, there are is an abundance of critters as befits the gallery name, from the bronze gargoyles crowning Jitish Kallat’s canvases to the gelatinous, bottom-feeding blob fish (platypus) in Patricia Piccinini’s Eulogy (2011) or the stuffed toy animals in Joana Vaconcelos’s War Games (2011).  There is such an abundance of taxidermy in the Chapman’s Fucking with Nature (2009), a see-saw with copulating wild animals at one end and domesticated creatures at the other, with mice running along the middle and tipping the balance, that the piece has been held up at Customs.

The other theme is memorial, which is apropos of our ominous times but perhaps inauspicious for a launch?  The Piccinini fits this theme as the man bewails the imminent extinction of the newly discovered fish.  Kevin Francis Gray’s The Temporal Sitter (2011) is a Job-like marble monument to a homeless man.  Uecker’s Aschemensch (Ash Man) (1986), is the only known figurative work by the op artist famed for his abstractions in nails.  It was made in the wake of Chernobyl by the artist covering himself in ash and rolling on a canvas, a gesture reminiscent of the athropometries of Yves Klein.

When I shared this observation with Steinberger at the press preview he retorted that Klein was Uecker’s brother-in-law, which I had not known.  That is the kind of art historical details walls can’t share.

Boundaries Obscured, September 23 to November 5, 2011. 550 West 21st Street, between 10th and 11th avenues, New York City, 212 259 0000.

The post The In and Out Club: Haunch of Venison Takes Yvon Lambert Spot in Chelsea appeared first on artcritical.

Brian Alfred: It’s Already the End of the World at Haunch of Venison

15 January – 20 February 2010
1230 Sixth Avenue,
20th Floor, between 48th and 49th streets
New York City 212 259 0000

A few years ago, a Chelsea gallery screened a video, too funny to be genuinely terrifying, which assembled countless Hollywood film scenes showing the end of the world. Tidal waves flooded cities, earthquakes shattered streets, and aliens attacked skyscrapers. In his fourteen new paintings, digitally animated video and installation Brian Alfred offers a very different take, a curiously unclouded, almost comforting vision. At the entrance, his collage Liftoff shows a rising rocket. Then he presents paintings of famous people, Aung San Suu Kyi, the leader of the Burmese democracy movement ; Diego (Rivera); and (Robert) Oppenheimer, father of the H-bomb, to name three; images of political actions, Riot! and Night March; the video It’s Already the End of the World; and an installation, The World Upside Down, with many countries represented by their flags, displayed on three walls in an upside down map, set top to bottom from South to North.

Obviously plenty of allusions to present day disasters are at hand, but oddly enough the world depicted in Alfred’s pastel colors feels weightless, as still as the peaceful social life shown in Alex Katz’s decorative group portraits. Seeing our planet represented upside down in The World Upside Down is relaxing. The painting Attica and the collage Global Seed Bank present contested sites in the same visual style as his images of celebrities.

Using flat, simplified forms and detached, mellow colors, Alfred reveals in all of his images the sensibility of his dreamlike video, which is accompanied by multiple soundtracks. It’s Already the End of the World moves us effortlessly through security checkpoints. After scenes of airplanes taking off, the Pentagon and subways, when shown a woman clutching an automatic weapon, we quickly move to a close up look at her lovely red fingernails. Alfred has a very stylish take on the end of the world.

For a long time, American political art has focused on political protest. Moralizing artists tell us what is wrong. Alfred offers something totally different, revealing that novel sensibility generated by our new visual technologies. Born in 1974, he is totally at ease with these media. In the fabulous galleries of Haunch of Venison, atop Rockefeller Center, with city vistas in three sides, he presents the events and personalities that make the daily news, but with none of the messy bomb explosions or plane crashes which appear on television. Alfred’s world, though the site of many insuperable problems, is breathtakingly beautiful. In that way, he makes a subtle political statement.

Right now there co-exist two totally different Americas: that sadly dysfunctional country whose airports, cities and political culture decay; and the technocratic world of Amazon, Apple and Google, which offers progress and ever more astonishing marvels. But these two Americas are interconnected, for it is from the web that we learn what is going wrong. Communications function ever more swiftly, but mostly the news we get thanks to these new media is pretty depressing This deep felt tension between awareness of the startling promise of these technologies and the everyday problems of our seemingly terminally dysfunctional society is shown here.

In a curiously formal way, Alfred’s note perfect exhibition strips his media images of their usual affect to present the soothing vision of an extreme aesthete. By providing reviewers a DVD containing images and the music from the video in lieu of an old-fashioned hard copy catalogue, Haunch of Venison contributes significantly to the success of this handsome exhibition. You are already living in the future, this show seems to say. Enjoy it!

The post Brian Alfred: It’s Already the End of the World at Haunch of Venison appeared first on artcritical.

David Anfam’s monograph, Abstract Expressionism (Thames & Hudson,1990) remains the mostlucid and plausible account of that movement. It has been thirty-eight years since New York City has seen a full-blown exhibition devoted to its greatest School, so this large gallery show curated by Anfam provides a great opportunity to evaluate his claims. The canonical Abstract Expressionists, Jackson Pollock, de Kooning and others, are joined here by two women, Lee Krasner and Joan Mitchell; by the African-American Norman Lewis; by the photographers Harry Callahan, Barbara Morgan, Hans Namuth, Aaron Siskind, and Minor White. And there are strong paintings by a number of figures often thought marginal to Abstract Expressionism, William Baziotes, Richard Pousette-Dart, Ad Reinhardt, Charles Seliger (born 1926), and Mark Tobey among them. Anfam’s title comes from Richard Poirier’s A World Elsewhere: The Place of Style in American Literature. We need, he argues, to understand properly the Americanness of Abstract Expressionism, without treating it either as a triumph of chauvinistic mythmaking or as an episode in the Cold War.

I am modestly puzzled by the inclusion of Seliger and Lewis; by the Tobey which to me looks fatally finicky; and by the very large Pousette-Dart, Time is the Mind of Space, Space in the Body of Time (1979-82).  And I am disappointed by the absence of Richard Diebenkorn. But no doubt even Haunch of Venison, situated in midtown Manhattan on the twentieth floor, has limits in its abilities to procure loans. The show include some marvelously strange Pollocks, Number 17, 1950 (Fireworks), for example, and strong paintings by Motherwell, Rothko and Still. Krasner is not my artist, but Another Storm (1963) causes me to reconsider that judgment. Tworkov’s Idlng I (1970), uncannily related to Cy Twombly’s all-over pictures, makes me wonder what else I have missed. I wish that Anfam would say more about why his photographers are peers of Abstract Expressionists. Siskind’s Jalapa 46 (Homage to Frank Kline) (1973) does, I grant, show a Klinean motif, but in a small image. To my mind, the comparison of this and the other photographs to abstract paintings seemsa pseudo morphism.

But it would be ungracious and inappropriate to evaluate A World Elsewhere critically simply as an exercise in taste. Since in a general way this art, though not all of the paintings on display, is mostly relatively familiar, what is most valuable here is the perspective provided by Anfam’s catalogue. As he rightly notes, most recent scholars tend to treat Abstract Expressionism as a step moving very quickly towards the next generation, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. But that narrative, he urges, fails to deal seriously with the visual qualities of this art, and its highly ambiguous place within American literary and political culture. That Anfam is British perhaps explains his marvelous sympathy with this movement, which he eloquently describes as “an indelible artistic episode in the history of a wish for a world elsewhere probably as old as human longing itself,” and why he then quotes Andrew Marvell’s “The Garden.”

When it withdraws into its happiness,
The Mind, that Ocean where each kind
Does streight its own resemblance find;
Yet it creates, transcending these,
Far other Worlds, and other Seas.

What then should a history of abstract art after Abstract Expressionism look like? Answering that question will take another exhibition, one I hope Anfam organizes.

The post Abstract Expressionism: A World Elsewhere curated by David Anfam at Haunch of Venison appeared first on artcritical.