As a stunning show of new work by Arlene Schechet opens at Sikkema Jenkins & Co in Chelsea, we offer this review of last year’s retrospective at Boston’s ICA as a TOPICAL PICK FROM THE ARCHIVES

June 10 to September 7, 2015
100 Northern Avenue
Boston, MA 02210

Working within a notoriously hierarchical art world where ceramics have often been marginalized, Arlene Shechet prefers to describe herself as an installation artist who makes objects, rather than, say, a ceramicist or a sculptor. It is an intelligent way of holding ground. Her beautifully paced survey show at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, Boston, “All At Once”, gathers together two decades of deft, imaginative and fearless work.

Her art is by turn, humorous, poignant and playfully strange. From the outset we find her in conversation with those West Coast artists who, from the late 1950s and ‘60s onwards, were determined to push the boundaries of clay. Breaking with craft tradition, they redefined ceramics enabling it to be both painting and sculpture at once. The deconstructive element of some of Shechet’s clay works dialogue with Peter Voulka’s 1990’s series ‘Stacks’, for instance, energetic, rough re-assemblages in clay that were confident and masterful in their abstraction. Likewise, Shechet’s bold command of color nods to Voulkas’s student Ken Price’s bright acrylics and dense sensuous forms as well as the delicious pop palette of painter and former ceramicist Mary Heilmann. Bucking trends towards theory-driven work, on the one hand, and monumentality, on the other, whether in the sculptures of Jeff Koons who with Italian artisans reproduced rococo porcelain pieces, but of pop icon Michael Jackson, or the new German photographers with their dizzying digital possibilities, Shechet has maintained her artistic integrity by steadily working through the most elemental of materials, undeterred by its limitations of scale.

All At Once displays chronologically and with choreographic flair how Shechet explores formal complexities across diverse materials, whether paper, glass, porcelain or, particularly in the last decade, clay. Evolving through her highly skilled works is the repeated use of splicing, stacking, and vessel as symbolic form.

Opening the show is a series of heads and figures, roughly approximated Buddhas slathered in colors, daubs and drips of plaster. Though in sharp contrast to the classical Buddha image of burnished gold perfection, these off-beat Buddha forms are nevertheless presented in the round, encouraging one to walk around them in a circular fashion as if visiting a Buddhist temple. Madras Buddha, 1997, is patterned in a cheerful plaid of red, pink, orange and lime, whereas Raga, 1999, has blooming splotches of blue, dashes of black and snaky grays. Buddha heads with wry titles such as“Collective Head”, “Head on Head”, or “Head that Happened”, sit atop concrete pedestals dribbled with plaster like candlewax, resembling her seated Buddhas in their semi-formless, paper maché appearance.

Shechet furthers her interest in Asia in her series, Once Removed, 1998, casting Abacá paper onto molds using blue-prints referencing real locations. Twinned vessels are stacked and re-imagined as stupas, the top with lush ink patterns recalling blue and white porcelain, its companion a white plaster blank.

Target (Gyantse and Diamond Mandalas), 1997, a two dimensional paper work reminiscent of mandalas, and stupa floor plans, has lines delicately bleeding cobalt blue that are both radiant and dense at once. Other works are of indigo or inky blue flooded paper in reverse, allowing the white areas and lines to emerge and glow.

In Building, 2003, titled as a verb and noun, Shechet splices and re-stacks varying vessels, again inspired by stupas. Presented high like a skyline, dark, smoky glazed vessels at either end fade to pure white biscuit porcelain at center. This austere installation, a personal response to the attacks of September 11, 2001, evokes a quiet despair. More buoyant is a 2004 series of large crystal vessels of pearly luminescence including Bubble Up, Drip Drop, and Cushion, in which cleverly inverted curvilinear shapes are stacked or doubled inside one another to a point of delicate balance. They exhibit a dynamic tension between crystalline perfection and fluidity of form.

At times Shechet’s ceramics can seem like creatures dredged up from the darkness of deep ocean floors. What I Heard, 2007 has two symbiotic bulbous forms glazed matt gray, the amorphous surface and velvety finish interrupted by orange aorta-like vents and pockets of shimmering bronze. Using as support a steel stool, Shechet continues her stacking theme, the base integral aesthetically and conceptually to the whole. Her use in these works of raw or painted wood plinths, steel frames, concrete slabs and kiln bricks demonstrates complexities by juxtapositions of color, texture, and form. In Sleepless Color, 2009-10, Shechet shifts her attention to coiled clay, manipulating it into a state of unruly leaning. With its multi-colored kiln brick base and cracked wood pedestal, the piece reaches a point of ungainly, yet unforeseen grace. Now Playing, 2015, shows a skinny white metal frame beneath a hunk of white painted hardwood with missing angled chunks, topped by a precarious pile up of softly bent ceramic bricks in a bubbling white glaze. The whole effect is complex, contradictory yet formally satisfying, Shechet displaying her relish for materials and her penchant for brinkmanship.

Shechet was able to explore a delicate side of her sensibility in her 2012-13 residency at the Meissen Porcelain Manufactory, Germany which saw works of surreal tender moments underpinned by a fascination with the industrial processes of porcelain production. Deliberately inverting expectations, she favored molds as finished forms, or experimented with splicing and re-assembling traditional house designs. Redefining notions of the historically revered material referred to as ‘white gold’ Shechet included dribbled and stained glazes, vases with buttery fingerlike indentations, and the use of extruder blocks made from porcelain waste as worthy forms. We see this in the wonderfully titled Gangsta Girl on the Block, 2012, a headless, armless figurine in a beautifully patterned dress, leaning alert on white gridded stacks that stand aloft like stereo speakers at a reggae block party. After the Flood, 2012, is a pile up of carefully calibrated porcelain presented as if it were detritus: bases of vases, handles, fluting and, unexpectedly, a tiny cut off classical foot, atop a plain upended factory mold bowl. Elsewhere, manic laughing 18th and 19th century Buddhas sit near gently crumpled vases and a glitter disco ball.

Shechet inventively weaves alongside her own works historical Meissen figurines and tableware, creating a lively conversation between periods. Characters such as Dr.Bolardo ca.1738, with rakish hat and moustache, unnerving red lips and pink lined cape, seems to dance on thirteen plates, while a female figurine lies in a dessert stand with an upside down teacup and a blissful smile on her face. A Head of Vitellius ca.1715 in red stoneware, looks sideways and impassively at the room as if unfazed to find himself there. By the entrance is a silent film on a loop, Meissen Porcelain! The Diodattis’ Living Sculptures at the Berlin Conservatory ca. 1912-14 with costumed actors and fluffy greyhound playing traditional figurine tableaux. As a link between the far past and Shechet’s work, it acts as a charming welcome, and on the way out, farewell to the show.

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Ken Johnson, Elizabeth Schambelan, and Joan Waltemath joined David Cohen to review Peter Doig at Michael Werner Gallery and Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, R H Quaytman at Miguel Abreu Gallery, Hiroshi Sugimoto at Gagosian Gallery, and Mary Heilmann at 303 Gallery.

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September 17 to October 25, 2008
Zwirner & Wirth
32 East 69th Street, between Park and Madison avenues
New York City, 212 517 8677

The New Museum (reopened December 2007) still feels new in its vanguard boxy Bowery reincarnation—the lobby all steel and concrete and plate glass—crowded with industrially-clad  European tourists and waifish art students.  This ground-floor space is employed to intentionally discordant effect to introduce curator Richard Flood’s Mary Heilmann survey, as the first grouping of paintings is hung in the terrarium-like narrow glassed-in enclosure that comprises a small gallery behind the snack bar.

Here, a number of works ranging from 1970 to 1994 share a palette of blue, white and black. All feature loosely-painted geometric motifs, ranging from constructivist-leaning floating rectangles, Blue and White Squares (1997) to straight bands of hard-edged horizontal color,Capistrano (1994). Some are on shaped canvas, Miramar (1994). In the earliest of these works, Malibu (1970), the canvas isn’t even stretched: it hangs freely. All evoke seascape, perhaps in homage to Heilmann’s California past (born in San Francisco, 1940, she studied literature and poetry at UC Santa Barbara before taking an MFA in ceramics and sculpture at UC Berkeley). This biographical thread is also picked up on in a series of recent ceramic sculptural objects juxtaposed, made in collaboration with Steve Keister and Rachel Bleiweiss-Sande, poised around the paintings on floor and wall.

That is all a teaser for the full impact of the show, which comes across visceral and forceful as soon as the elevator doors open to the large, second-floor galleries. Garishly colorful canvases—representing nearly 40 years of free-thinking and playful experimentation—vie for attention in a non-linear hopscotch chronology. Artist-designed rolling “Clubchairs” allow for contemplative viewing—but with an implied restless velocity (think: adult kindergarten).

Early experiments with ad-hoc sculptural materials, Starry Night (Night Sky) (1967) and The Big Dipper (1969), show the young artist already moving toward the painterly, with modeled celestial black and silver clumps played off each other to imagistic effect.

Soon after, by the 1970s, Heilmann is seen grappling with the minimalist ethos of the time, responding to that era’s mostly male color/geometry paradigm of Ellsworth Kelly, David Novros, Blinky Palermo and others. In L.A. Pair (1976), a horizontal diptych employs scraped-off paint to reveal two alternating primary-colored grounds beneath. This strategy—using overpainting to obscure or scraping away paint to reveal—is central to Heilmann’s ongoing practice. It’s a willfully perverse methodology, being assertive by negating the traditional role of the artist and his mark.

The show reaches a sense of triumph in the large nocturnes Neo Noir (1998) and The Third Man (1999), in which retinal chromatic rectangles of atmospheric space float, framed into window-like squares by surrounding strokes of dark sweeping brushwork. Delicate internal illumination is weighed against malevolent obliteration.

Heilmann’s most recent canvases are among her most assured. She often seems be daring herself to do something truly “awful”—only to find beauty in it. In Jack of Hearts (2005), for example, an undulating stain of blood red paint is laid transparent over a simple black-and-white checkerboard. The accumulated brushmarks and open drips make her act of painting transliterate into a kind of crime of passion.

Downtown, under the New Museum’s harsh fluorescent lighting, the paintings have a matte, plastic-like quality, pushing them towards confrontational “ugliness.” Uptown, by contrast, at Zwirner & Wirth’s elegant space, a spare historical hanging has the opposite effect. Here, Heilmann’s works look refined and considered, passing as masterworks of late neoplastic awareness. In this location, there’s no denying it: Mary Heilmann now is “someone.”

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11 West 53rd Street
between 5th and 6th avenues
New York City

Curator Starr Figura uncovers the relationship of geometry to two-dimensional abstraction from 1912 to today without imposing a narrative arc. The attention rests first on individual works of art, however the exhibition is teeming with a myriad of connections between disciplines, formal imagery, and the relationship between spiritual content and conceptual design. Many of the artists represented are equally recognized as teachers (most notably Josef Albers), authors of manifestos, and members of schools or collectives, and an intense doctrinaire commitment to the geometric-based practice runs through many of “Geo/Metric.”Modestly inhabiting the Museum of Modern Art’s newest gallery space on the second floor, “Geo/Metric,” is the kind of user-friendly, yet classically rigorous exhibition that can be taken for granted in the age of curatorial spectacles.  This is unfortunate, since exhibits like “Geo/Metric,” and the recently closed “Multiplex: New Directions in Art Since 1970,” are crucial in bringing MoMA’s naturally inclined historicism into a mutually beneficial relationship with its growing collection of contemporary art.

In the “Suprematist Manifesto” (1915), created the same year as “Black Square,” Kazimir Malevich describes geometric forms as symbols of both a primeval mysticism, and a highly rigorous, intellectual parlay between the artist’s subjectivity and the impassive art object.  For each succeeding generation, this interplay of geometric form and content is located at different points. Malevich and Kandinsky, arguably the first practitioners and theorists of a non-objective art of geometric forms and symbols, are presented alongside lesser-exhibited compatriots, Frantisek Kupka, Vasilii Kamenskii, and Lyubov Popova.

Learning at the table of the Russian Constructivists, Helio Oiticia’s five luminous gouache on board works, radiate a fresh Neo-Constructivism. Created when Oiticia was in his early 20s, and a member of Rio de Janeiro’s concrete art collective, Grupo Frente, the “Metaesquemas” (1957) series are simple, cut-out geometric forms in red, white and black, composed within the limits of a grid or rectangle form on a neutral ground. The total effect captures the timing of a free jazz drumbeat, a minimalist re-interpretation of the rhythmic linoleum prints of Lyubov Popova and the paper collages Hans Arp.

Mary Heilmann’s “Davis Sliding Square” (1978), provides relief from the black and white reductive optical build-up of Bridget Riley and Francois Morellet. The painting is synthetic polymer paint on paper, a Malevich on acid description of a blue square and rectangle against a yellow backdrop. Similar to Blinky Palermo’s bright green triangle on white paper (from the screenprint series “4 Prototypes,” 1970) the geometric forms have a presence that is both organic and chemical.  Classical geometry, in the hands of Heilmann and Palermo, are indeterminate substances, peeled and placed like stickers on a flat plane. In this company Ellsworth Kelly’s  “Line Form Color” (1951), a series of ink and gouache building block color forms radiates a graphically controlled precision.

The fluid concept of “radical art,” how it was defined in its own era and is understood today, also permeates the rooms of “Geo/Metric.”  A case in point is Jo Baer’s two 1965 gouache on paper compositions—thin, deftly painted frames that illuminate the paper’s white center. Baer’s work can be overlooked in a room of the decade’s flashier offerings, but it offers some of the first investigations into the conceptual perimeters of painting and painted abstraction.  Like many artists who realize a mature vision early in their chosen art practice, Baer came to art-making from a multidisciplinary background of science and philosophy, which she brought to bear on her own development as a painter.  Her frame compositions connect the hand-made line to the impersonal and industrial forms of Minimalism. Like Agnes Martin’s grids, the form realized is at once contemporary and primitive, derived from repetitive processes that reveal a wide species of spaces.

The geometric graphic’s counterpart, the ghostly space of the paper, is investigated through radical printing practices by Dorothea Rockburne. Her “Locus” print series (1972) is comprised of paper sheets bearing lines and ridges preserved from the process of folding prior to being run through an etching press.  The slight three-dimensionality of the paper (which hangs unframed at MoMA) is geometry come to life off the page. The “Locus” prints have the sublime singularity of a child’s crumpled napkin, lending themselves to the illusion of self-created works of art.  Inseparable from the invisible mechanics of the formal process, there is an important metaphysical dimension to the work.  Describing her experience working with paper in the 1970s, Rockburne alludes to the spiritual properties underlining a highly analytic practice.  “Paper began to assume terrific importance to me. I locked myself in my studio and just stared at sheets of paper. I thought that the paper would tell me something – something that I needed to know. Finally, I felt as though I became the paper.”

“Geo/Metric” brings the conversation up to date with only passing reference to the sweeping effects of digital media on geometric abstraction, a direction that, admittedly, could be better explored in a smaller survey of artists.  Instead the exhibition satisfyingly closes its narrative with an artist, Mark Grotjahn (b. 1968), whose drawings seem to embody in equal parts the early lessons of the Russian and Brazilian Constructivists, the hard edges of Minimalism, and the flash bulb presence of Op and Pop Art. The pencil on paper “Butterfly” series are tightly realized compositions of radiating color bands meeting at horizontal perspective planes.  The awkward precision of Grotjahn’s forms and the impossibility of the spaces they describe project the jubilant urgency of a hand-painted carnival sign. After being run through the pressure chamber of Conceptual Art, geometric forms for many artists working today are not indicative of a strict allegiance to any kind of school of non-objective thought or practice. From the storied history laid out in the rooms of “Geo/Metric” it seems that geometry in art has indeed reached its highest accomplishment: the freedom of eternal fresh starts.

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