This panel discussion, recorded the day after Alain Kirili received the insignia of Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters from the French government in his New York loft, was both a tribute to that achievement, shared with the artist at the time, and a tribute to a great friend of artcritical and a major force in contemporary sculpture marking his death earlier this week at the age of 74. The diverse job descriptions of our panelists reflect the important roles Kirili played in different spheres, as a patron of free jazz, as a scholar in the history of sculpture, as an artist and a friend. My guests are Michael Attis, musician; Maria Mitchell, dancer; Dorothea Rockburne, painter; and Barry Schwabsky, art critic, poet and editor. In addition to this video, artcritical salutes Alain Kirili with two archived posts brought to our front page: an interview with the artist from 2018 by Mary Jones (where he made an early public acknowledgement of his battle with leukemia) and a review of an exhibition of iron works from Rouen at Philadelphia’s Barnes Foundation from two years earlier.  DAVID COHEN

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There is something especially fitting in acknowledging Alain Kirili at the Vision Festival. (Drummer Andrew Cyrille is the musical awardee in the 24th annual event.) While there is too much talk of so-called “artist’s artists”, the world can always use a musician’s artist. Understand that Kirili is 100% a sculptor. But his work is, at this stage, almost impossible to conceive divorced from music, so intimately connected is music with his modus operandi in the plastic arts. Music is no mere “violon d’Ingres” in Kirili’s case. First thing to state: Kirili himself is not a musician, unless one counts the now silent rhythmic hammering of metal evident along the surfaces of his sculpted lines and forms as some kind of frozen music. But one can “make” music by invitation, and Kirili and his wife and fellow artist Ariane Lopez-Huici have turned their Tribeca loft into a legendary venue for new music over the last four decades. Predominantly devoted to free improvisation, the musical idiom of Visions Festival, Kirili’s guests are not just performers but truly collaborators. Music is made in direct response to the visual art with which it is juxtaposed.

For years this was Kirili’s own work, but true to the ever expanding field of his artistic generosity, more recently guest artists have been invited to install a work for the occasion. Fellow visual artists showcased in this way with newfound musical peers have included Laura Newman, Thomas Nozkowski, Jeanne Silverthorne and Christopher Wool. Whenever he has been given a museum exhibition – which is often, especially in Europe – Kirili has made sure that music and dance play a crucial role in programing.  But the kinship to music runs more deeply than any of this could suggest. The lesson of free jazz for Kirili the sculptor (or, perhaps, not so much lesson as enduring point of commonality) is the example, ubiquitous amongst music-makers but in recent centuries an increasing rarity among painters and sculptors, of symbiosis. That collaborations and dialogues and interchanges are greater than the sum of the individual artists participating. Whether it is his interactions with traditional smiths and forgers in rural settings away from the usual artistic centers of New York or Paris, or his dialogues across time with historic figures like Auguste Rodin, Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, David Smith and Julio Gonzalez, each of whom has been the shared focus of a museum exhibition, or indeed his collaborations with musicians and dancers, the outcomes are by their nature open-ended. The events and exhibitions are truly jam sessions, the sparks beyond predictability. Everything his makes is jazz.

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David Cohen
Here are two memories of Thomas Nozkowski, picked at random from so many that remain vivid of this larger than life yet eminently down to earth man, epitomizing what exhilarating fun he made it to share for a moment in his aesthetic adventures. In 2003, I curated a retrospective of his drawings at the New York Studio School, the first in New York. I say curated, but as I went off to Europe in the preceding summer, after instigating the project, I returned to find that Tom had, impatiently, made a final selection of his own accord. I was, however, given carte blanche in the installation. Conscious of the age and delicacy of some of these works, I researched just how many lumens we could allow in the gallery. The only direction on the hang, besides a judicious last-minute exclusion, was to turn the lights up full blast. The eager-beaver curator tried to explain what he knew of the science, but Tom insisted the only thing that mattered was that they looked good to those who came to see them. “Let ‘em fry!” he exclaimed.

Years later, when I was selecting a show at a commercial gallery inspired by cinema, Tom enthusiastically – but with a promise of discretion – shared his ongoing catalogue of art in movies. With a reach and perspective that would have impressed any iconologist in its multifacetedness, Tom compiled extensive lists of artists as characters, preexisting artworks by known artists that make screen appearances, artworks made for films, and many other permutations. I begged him to allow me to publish it, but he couldn’t let it go to press so long as the research was ongoing—a lifelong pursuit.

Editing these tributes and reminiscences from a cross-section of artists, scholars and friends – again, a sampling – has the humbling effect of making clear that everyone else privileged to come into his orbit felt uniquely special, a confidant of his avuncular bonhomie and encyclopedic knowledge, and of the candor and curiosity he felt about his own artistic inquiries. His wit was kind and merciless in a single instance. He was democratic in that anyone could be included in the conversation and hierarchical in really caring about what was best, what was dispensable. Indifferent towards established canons of high and low, he was fastidious in the sense of quality.

For me, he was a paramount example of an artist who could go against the grain, but do so without rancor, and indeed be an exemplar of community even with a mainstream he might reject. This is what he was as a person and an artist—a maverick who was also a mensch.

Karen Wilkin
I knew Thomas Nozkowski’s work before I knew Tom. I was fascinated by those mysterious, small but commanding works that seemed to be about something very specific but impossible to pin down. I loved the range of paint applications, the delicacy of the incidents, and the surprising color. I’m still haunted by a work from the first Nozkowski exhibition I saw – at Max Protech Gallery about 1990. A wavy edged white shape, like a saddle made of curly sheepskin, hovered against a pale brushy ground. The image was odd, beautifully constructed, and both exquisitely and roughly painted. It was also ferociously intelligent, funny, and, as it turns out, unforgettable. When I got to know the author of this oddball image, I discovered that he shared many of the painting’s qualities, plus irresistible charm. Like the painting, he could seem deceptively off hand, someone who took his work very seriously indeed but didn’t take himself all that seriously. His comments about art were seasoned with throwaway lines like “Why two, if one will do?” and something about oil paint’s being “the queen” of materials.

It was clear that Tom’s elusive works were simultaneously discoveries that emerged from the act of making and distillations of experience. The sense of discovery made repeated motifs seem fresh and newly invented each time. There were loose family resemblances among groups of paintings – shared memories of the grid, repeated structures or background patterns – but color was always arresting and every configuration seemed unprecedented and indescribable: hors catégorie, like the steepest routes in bicycle races. I discovered that the underlying experience that, at some level, provoked the image could range from things glimpsed to things read, and much, much more. Tom made powerful images “about” arcane books on science and walks through the city. No wonder those enigmatic paintings seemed so specific and at the same time, unnameable. They were specific, just unidentifiable by us ordinary mortals. (I recall Tom’s saying that sometimes he found himself unable to remember exactly what had triggered a particular configuration, but if it still seemed resonant, he could use it.)

A few years ago, I invited Tom and Joyce to be visiting critics at Triangle Artists’ Workshop, an intense program of art making and discussion for international artists, held that summer in upstate New York, within striking distance but still a healthy drive from the Nozkowski-Robins home in High Falls. The pair generously spent the day with 20 or so artists from about half a dozen countries – a high point of the session, the artists said – and joined the gang for a fairly raucous dinner. We had offered Tom and Joyce accommodations after their strenuous day in the studios, but they insisted on returning home that night, as I knew they often did after New York openings. “We like driving,” Tom said. If those long nocturnal trips stimulated paintings, we are all the beneficiaries of his stamina behind the wheel.

Many students have told me how much they admired Tom’s work, but few seem to have responded to it directly. They’re wise not to try. Tom’s astonishing images could only have been made by someone with a mind as well-furnished as his, informed by his particular experience, and open to the possibilities suggested by his apparently limitless ways of putting on paint. Of great mathematics, the mathematician G.H. Hardy wrote: “There is a very high degree of unexpectedness, combined with inevitability and economy.” That’s a perfect description of Thomas Nozkowski’s art.

Marjorie Welish
A rare artisanal talent, Thomas Nozkowski developed an image, an image in the true sense of that word. What emerged in canvas after canvas, time after time, was no mere thing but rather entirely more strenuously inventive, as the object became a lapidary form through metamorphosis, in a practice spanning a half century. Very few artists can match that imaginative embodiment.

Robert Storr
Thomas Nozkowski was a wickedly intelligent man and an unrivaled painterly lyricist. The intelligence was natural and unpretentious. He read a lot and developed an astonishingly broad albeit usually understated frame of reference, which made it a delight to match wits with him when everyone else around seemed bent on showing off their readymade erudition. And in a period when many of his peers – though when it came to art itself he had precious few – favored arcane discourses with all their labored jargon he trusted in the American vernacular, a preference doubtless enriched by his consumption of detective stories and films noirs, passions we shared.

As a painter he was the ultimate come-from-behind kid, the day-job-wife-and-family man who paid for all his time in the studio by being his own patron. That job, which consisted of being a layout artist for Mad magazine, made him wary lest the art world ascribe his fanciful caprices for an extension of the house aesthetic. Or so I inferred. Nevertheless, I recall walking across town from MoMA to meet him at his office for lunch and it struck me as entirely natural that those two institutions should exist at the same urban latitude – you know, Low and High – with Tom alert and at home in both. In any event, he need not have feared that the discursive arabesques of his own painting and drawing would be explained away as “mere” cartooning, and worse as a stylistic off-shoot of the perpetually smart-aleck Mad manner: they were nothing of the kind.

Slow, steady maturation of an incrementally improvised, manifestly unprogramatic image was their essence. Working on smallish panels of several standard proportions, and frequently starting with nothing more than an ambiguous ground tone and an amorphous shape, Tom followed the organic growth and mutation of his intricate patterns, eccentric configurations and, by turns, exquisitely subtle and surprisingly bold polychromatic palette. The consistency of his method opened out to stunningly various pictorial vistas contained within irresistibly intimate formats. Looking at his paintings slows the clock and sharpens the eye and mind while massaging, tickling and pinching the haptic synapses. In the old days one might have called Nozkowski a “little master” but his scope was wide, his view long and his faith in his own ultimately immodest gifts was that huge: in short that of a master – period. Of how many contemporary artists can it be said that he or she never bored me or took my engagement for granted? Not many, but Tom was certainly one.

Joseph Masheck
As editor-in-chief of Artforum in the late ‘70s, I was pushing for painting, especially abstract painting, despite the political incorrectness of that. I also hated the art-commerce developing as philistine businessmen discovered art as a new continent for unregulated insider trading, so it was great to discover Tom’s work in shows at the artists’ coop 55 Mercer Street. In the ‘80s I wrote articles in three art magazines on Nozkowski, and curated a show of early drawings at Nature Morte (1983).

The essays were agonizing to write because, I now see, they reflect the kind of freewheeling conversations we had that depended on analogy: how one topic turned by analogy into another. That was all the more exciting because our respective analogies came from different stocks of experience as well as reading. There could be hearty disagreement, too, though Tom was not a dialectical kind of guy. His wide reading is legendary; but politically, his shockingly normal, art-world liberal line might have come out of The Whig Interpretation of History. Once he said that the greatest philosopher was Thomas Paine. Come on, Tom! No wonder why in one of my articles he reminded me of Santayana on Emerson: “There was a great catholicity in his reading . . . But he read transcendentally, not historically, to find what he himself felt, not what others might have felt before him” (Artforum, May 1981).

Now I have to think: maybe being so undialectical—stubborn!—kept the big bear calm and jolly. (Tom, I knew you would like a little roast, like an Irish wake. Oh, Tom . . .)

Jonathan Lasker
I don’t know what brought me to 55 Mercer Street Gallery in the Fall of 1979, but upon entering the gallery I felt that I had stumbled upon a wonderland of everything which I was hoping to see in painting, at that time. I remember increasing delight as I went from one picture to another. Upon leaving the gallery, I muttered to the guy sitting at the front desk that I thought this was a really great show. Of course, I was speaking to none other than Tom himself, who took my compliment for his exhibition with boyish delight. After that Tom and I traded studio visits and a long friendship began. Nonetheless, with each ensuing show by Tom, that feeling of being in a painting wonderland was always there. The feeling of “how did he think this up” and what will the next picture be like. It is very sad that Tom can no longer provide us with this expectation of wonder. Rest well Tom.

Merlin James
I tracked Tom down as soon as I got to New York. He’d stood for something, in my mind, since I was a student in London in the early ‘80s. A British painter, Garth Lewis, had introduced me to the work, via thin catalogues, a few slides and black and white reproductions. Somehow I ‘got it’, perhaps all the more intensely because of the sparseness of information. I got how this apparent modesty – of scale, productivity, pictorial proposition – was a Trojan horse for the greatest possible artistic ambition. I loved visiting Tom and Joyce at the ex-synagogue on Hester Street, eating and talking, listening to music, always aware of Tom’s easel standing a few yards away. Sometimes he’d take me over to look at the current painting. For me, Tom was among a very select band who at any one time keep painting alive.

James Hyde
I first met Tom at the artist cooperative gallery 55 Mercer. It was in the early eighties—the time of big heavy abstract work by the likes of Brice Marden and Richard Serra, as well as the bombast of Neo-Expressionism. While I really enjoyed meeting Tom and Joyce Robins, his paintings merely intrigued. Tom has made a point about the size of his paintings being a political choice. Small paintings, he argued, allowed people to have them in their homes and didn’t require support from big collectors and institutions. There’s an additional, subtle ethical point as well: Since small works don’t force, they at first must interest, then persuade.  Patience and observation are their essential values. Over the subsequent years Tom’s paintings persuaded and rewarded whenever I had the opportunity to see them.  So much so that when a painting from the year of the 55 Mercer show came up at auction, I stretched the budget and now have the pleasure of seeing it daily. Its cryptic shapes provide a Rubik’s Cube of associations, and with the colors alternating between murk and glow, the painting keeps surprising.

Coming out of concrete abstraction I‘ve considered the painting panel to be as evocative as what gets painted of the surface. Some years ago, I was explaining to a group of people that my paintings weren’t sculptural so much as “panel intensive”. Tom, who was there, didn’t miss a beat—“does that mean the paintings are surface-challenged?” It was classic Nozkowski – perfect timing, off kilter and a brilliant turn of phrase. And it was damn funny—funny enough to stick. I took Tom’s offhand remark as an imperative to up my surface game.

I have plenty of company in my enthusiasm for Tom’s paintings. He is legend in art schools and a touchstone for painters. Abstract paintings look different today than in the early eighties. While some are larger, splashier and flashier than Tom’s, it’s hard to find an abstract painting today that doesn’t bear some trace of Thomas Nozkowski’s painting DNA.

Raphael Rubinstein
That a painting is modest in size does not mean that it is modest in ambition—this is one of the many valuable things that Thomas Nozkowski had to tell us. In fact, Tom’s decision at the end of the 1970s to scale down his paintings may count as the most radical and influential aspect of his work, which offered a quiet but firm reproach to ego-driven or market-driven gigantism, and asserted intimacy as a supreme virtue. His downsizing was fundamentally ethical: he wanted to make paintings, as he said, that could never end up in bank lobbies.

The importance of scale in Tom’s work became clear to me in 2013 when I was curating an exhibition for Cheim & Read Gallery (“Reinventing Abstraction: New York Painting in the 1980s”). Tom was among the 15 artists I included in the show, each of whom would be represented by a single painting. I was happy to find that Tom’s New York gallery had several great 1980s paintings that could be borrowed for the show. Two in particular interested me. In my discussions with the gallery, the director encouraged me to take both paintings, and for a while that was my plan. After all, I thought, having two paintings instead of one would convey a fuller sense of Tom’s work, and since they were the smallest works in the show—which included a number of very large canvases—it seemed only fair to give the artist a little more wall space.  It was only late in the process, as I was planning out the installation, that it came to me: there must be only one Nozkowski painting in the show! It was crucial that I treat Tom exactly the way I was approaching the other artists; one work per artist, regardless of size. I understood that to include two of his paintings would be a betrayal of his work, an insult to his decades of insistence that a 16-by-20-inch painting could be just as great, just as important, as one measuring 16 by 20 feet.  In an era when the cost of over-consumption is becoming tragically clear, when spectacle continues its prolonged, asphyxiating stranglehold on our culture, we need to listen more than ever Tom Nozkowski’s plea for the beauty and power of small things.

Valerie Jaudon
Thomas Nozkowski was a key artist in the Conceptual Abstraction exhibition at the Sidney Janis Gallery in 1991, and a prescient figure for today’s abstract painting. Tom’s insistence on working at an easel painting scale created a deliberative arena for his extraordinary art making process. With his uncommonly prolific visual vocabulary and acute historical memory he was able to work freely and consciously, with a sense of contemplative and well-ordered spontaneity. Although his drawing and painting method had much in common with surrealist automatic writing, he was able to direct that spontaneity with considered invention, and to work instinctively and surely without the burden of the abstract expressionists’ often heavy-handed autographic gesture. Tom was a model for contemporary abstraction, but paradoxically one who could not really be imitated.

Catherine Murphy
I’m always puzzled when Thomas Nozskowski is referred to as a modest painter. From my first introduction to his work, his ambition and radical aspirations made me pay the utmost attention. The paintings are intentionally not huge. I’ve always thought that they were brain size, taken directly into the brain. His argument, was, for one thing, that the size was political: They are to be contemplated, put in a house, lived with. Early on, Tom put his neck on the block and when few dared, said paintings should be about the experience of living: Looking, thinking, remembering, learning. plans and games, things we love and things we hate. His work is a joyful complication, a life examined and translated into beautiful painting, food for my aching psyche.

Jennifer Riley
I teach visual studies to graduate students in architecture. Introducing them to abstraction, I guide them through some of the usual suspects of early modernism, up to Ellsworth Kelly, where it’s possible to show one way to arrive at an abstracted reality. Then I expose them to Tom’s work, among others. To my mind, Thomas Nozkowski represents one of the most approachable examples of a contemporary artist working from found forms, shapes or patterns, culled from myriad sources of nature and culture alike, which he morphed and transformed into images with his deft use of color, light, line, and atmosphere. These evocative paintings are at once deliberate and effortless, joyful and serious, specific and open-ended.

In my own practice when I’m chewing on a problem, I look at artworks to tune into a mindset of possibility. I will miss seeing Tom’s new works, as it had become routine to look at Tom’s work that reminds me not to be too serious, but to be deeply serious. To pay attention to the world, but to keep things utterly personal and yet avoid sentimentality. To unquestionably use the richness of any painterly approach or convention and then perhaps when necessary- simply subvert them.

I am not alone in feeling the gravity of this loss to our painting culture. Thankfully, there is John Yau’s very fine, recent monograph from Lund Humphries. With typical generosity, Tom inscribed my copy with words of ‘painterly’ solidarity and optimism along with a witty line drawing. A gesture, I’m sure, to which many fellow painters and friends were treated.

Sally Saul
The first time Peter [Saul] and I visited Tom and Joyce’s home in High Falls, there was a sumptuous Indian meal spread buffet style on the dining table, and a lively grouping of artists and writers clustered around the table and adjoining rooms, as well as art new to us that demanded the viewer’s attention, books and interesting objects. We were so surprised and grateful to realize our life on the other side of the river was not so isolated and remote as we thought. Tom’s openness, generosity, curiosity, and easy sharing of his knowledge and interests always generated conversation, a give and take. He recommended books, and art shows, movies and music. One time he gave Peter a disc of Jim Leonard playing the Super Saw which is still one of his favorites, the whistling sound floats through the studio. We will miss him greatly.\

Suzanne Joelson
Tom counted. His book of daily expenses and conversations was a record James Comey might admire. He knew the names of things, and their histories. One day the artist Mike Metz stopped by after a meeting at Chess records and repeated one of Marshall Chess’ stories about the early days in Chicago. Tom disputed it and found documentation to justify his version.

Tom played favorites. An evening could be spent debating a list of favorite visual artists, or filmmakers, Howard Hawk/John Ford, musicians, architects. He wondered “why Plecnik wasn’t in Moma’s “Toward a Concrete Utopia?” and then showed me favorite details from their four Plecnik monographs. His information seemed endless. What he did not know, Joyce did. And we – that is Gary Stephan and I—would invariably leave their house with a book and a list of new things to buy, research, remember.

When we hiked Tom knew the history, the legal disputes and former uses of the land. He could find the remnants of berry shacks and stone cellars, where discarded vehicles interrupted the reclaimed territory. He went on to map many of the lesser known trails which were published in the “Friends of the Shawangunks” newsletter.

At the end of one of our first day long hikes, Tom stunned me by asking, “What was your favorite part?” I had imagined the experience as a narrative, a layering of sensations and ideas, and had no answer.

Tom devoured information. In his paintings, those ways of knowing rubbed up against each other until the friction ignited an aberration. Maybe his paintings were a respite from counting and naming.  With brush or pencil in hand he could loosen his grip on how he knew the world. In the studio, he suspended judgment. Edges tangled, categories lapped, and a different discernment entered.

Then we gather at a Nozkowski opening. Each rectangle is a different subjective map and instead of my usual ways of considering art, I ask friends, “Which is your favorite?”

Harry Roseman
Thomas Nozkowski was a painter, a wonderful painter. My relationship with Tom spanned decades. It was during the last two and a half years, that, to me, something had shifted. I felt he was letting us all know that he wanted to live his life when possible, as usual, and that he wanted to be as productive as he could. If he referred to how he felt it was mentioned almost as a slight inconvenience. It was somewhere between a stiff upper lip and a particular pleasure in situations and in the people he was sharing this time with. I also know it became difficult for him to work as much as he would have liked. It was a privilege to see such courage as well as heartbreaking to see such a love of living. One thing I wasn’t expecting was seeing some of the paintings he did during this time. They are spectacular. Tom squeezed every last bit of life that was possible to have as it became available in smaller and smaller portions. Shorter, I should say, not smaller.

John Yau
All during the time that I was writing my monograph on him, Tom never complained about what he was going through. A few days before he died, he sent me an email telling me there had been a “glitch in his treatment,” and that he had spent the weekend in the hospital getting blood transfusions, but that there was nothing to worry about, and then thanked me for the DVD of Kaili Blues (2016), directed by Bi Gan, that I had sent to him and Joyce. The rest of the email was about where I could download the films of Mikio Naruse for free, and other related stuff. Tom wore his enthusiasm on his sleeve right up to the end. He spent part of one dinner recounting to John Ashbery, who was no slouch when it came to film, the plots of little-known movies directed by Gregory La Cava and later sent John DVDs of La Cava films that he had not seen. Tom seemed to have seen every film he ever talked about at least twice.  I have piles of books, DVDs, and lists of films he sent me. He was always excitedly pointing me towards something to read or see. I cannot imagine that I will ever go a day without remembering something he said to me.

David Goerk
In 2015, Thomas Nozkowski and I visited Ruth Root’s exhibition of new paintings at Andrew Kreps gallery. Tom was familiar with the artist’s work and obviously intrigued by the new paintings. He signed the guest book as he always did and picked up a catalogue of her artist-in-residence exhibition from the previous year. Tom flipped through the publication, studying each page, and as we were leaving the gallery he mentioned that he liked the new work. After a pause, he asked me if I had ever seen her smoking paintings. I hadn’t. Tom took a certain delight in explaining how Root’s smoking paintings appeared to be taking a much-needed cigarette break, as if being a painting was a difficult job and hanging on a gallery wall all day required some downtime. Tom was truly amused by this notion, he related and really loved the idea.

Whenever Tom visited the city to see exhibitions, he had a checklist in his pocket of exhibitions he wanted to see. He studied the list and proceeded to see as many of the shows as the day allowed. When I had time, I joined him on these gallery outings, appreciating his company and insights – every chance I had to look at art with Tom was special. Sometimes he pointed out a particular moment within an artwork or walked over to see what I was drawn to, other times he slowly circumnavigated the gallery on his own. As we finished up at one gallery and moved on to our next destination, we always discussed a story or observation connected to what we had just seen.

When Tom and I spoke, which was often, he never failed to ask me how I was doing before we discussed the business of the day. The sound of his voice, familiar and reassuring, was that of a teacher. His excitement and enthusiasm inspired, no matter the subject. I had the tremendous pleasure and honor of working with Tom for many years and have never known anyone as generous, genuine or knowledgeable.
[Editor’s Note: Mr. Goerk, a painter, was a director at Pace Gallery assigned to look after Thomas Nozkowski.

Alain Kirili
Tom was a dear friend to me and Ariane, and we were able to see many of his shows, including one of his last, at Art Omi in Gent, NY, last year. Despite his great and encyclopedic love of music, including jazz, Tom was not especially familiar with Free Improvisation, the genre of jazz that for many years my wife and I have featured in presentations in our Tribeca loft. But when I ask him to lend a painting to dialogue with a musical duo, he immediately accepted and had his gallery, Pace, deliver and install the piece. I knew that it would work beautifully. The duo was Michael Attias, saxophone and Mary Halvorson, guitar, and the whole thing was superb! What worked so well was the size of the painting with the two musicians: Tom was such a master at working small and creating dissonances within that restricted size, a combination of skills he shared with the duo. Chamber music, a duo, was a perfect fit with the aesthetic of Thomas Nozkowski! I will never forget that night: He was enchanted and so was our audience. There was a standing ovation. The music and the painting will stay with all of us forever. Merci, Tom.

Peter Saul
I first met Thomas Nozkowski ten years ago when we were both inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was a famous artist with a reputation for stubbornly refusing to let any of his pictures be larger than a certain small size. Then, we both served on a jury charged with giving money to young artists and I got to know Tom better. He was so logical and unprejudiced in wanting to reward artists of different styles. Tom stands as an example of how to behave on an art jury: To be fair, give money to the one whose pictures are best, forget the career stuff. I regret very much not getting to know Tom better.

Elizabeth Hazan
For painters who find imagery as we work, Thomas Nozkowski was a master. His forms sing with reminders of pleasure and possibility. Tom had an endless ability to resolve his paintings in new ways. Yet he told me once he had some he put away for as long as ten years until he could figure out how to make them work. At times that’s been an enormous help to keep in mind. Like de Kooning, Nozkowski had a high batting average for words that resonate in artists’ studios.

It might be surprising to know that Tom felt a strong affinity with the late still life paintings of my mother, Jane Freilicher, and he wrote perceptively about her.  Once you see the connections it gives new insight into both artists’ work: her shapes in front of a cityscape evoke how he saw his own figure/ground relationships. Much of what he wrote about her integrity as an artist applies to his own life and work. Tom was asked to give the tribute for her at the American Academy when she died.  He noted that she apparently never wrote an artist’s statement, which he’d been searching for while writing his remarks.  At the dinner afterwards, he leaned over and said, “I think it’s terrific that Jane got as far she did without writing one of those fucking things.”

Peter Schjeldahl
Tom got along more than well with just about everybody, even me. Our tastes differed, as did our politics and, really, whole worldviews. I revered, and still do, his art; but he amiably shrugged off compliments. Our friendship could seem a sort of dance, amazingly pleasurable, through a minefield. Only once that I recall, at the tail end of a tired and emotional summer evening, was there a blowup; and it was over in what, 30 seconds? Less than a minute, capped by one of Tom’s wry little philosophical smiles that as much as said, “The way things are includes wishes that they were otherwise. But hey, we’re alive.” You don’t hear much these days about strength of character, but Tom had that, with kindness backed by confidence. As well, he was free and brave: a dissenting but platonic American. Maybe because I couldn’t make it to the funeral, he isn’t gone for me yet but as if withdrawn for a spell in the studio, actualizing surprises. I won’t say I “loved” him, because I love him still.

Richard Kalina
I, like many others, knew Tom Nozkowski for many years and liked him immensely. How could you not? He was good company, sure of himself but properly modest, low-keyed, generous, kind, smart, hardworking, and of course talented and endlessly inventive. He was also a very droll fellow and, in many ways, that was key to his art. Tom was bemused rather than ironic – intuitively aware of the inherent skew of the world, a master of mining the inherent, subtle, and inevitable discontinuities of form and intent that present themselves to those attuned to them.  As we know, he preferred to work on an intimate scale – the better I believe to inhabit his paintings rather than address them. His drollness enabled him to keep a quizzical distance from the visual pleasures that he was so adept at providing. He worked through a painting rather than at it, on the continual lookout for the animating and sudden loss of traction that sends a work of art skidding to a desired but completely unexpected place. Looking at a Thomas Nozkowski painting elicits an almost neural jolt of surprise and recognition, and I am sure that will be as true 50 years from now as it is today.

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Born in France in 1946, Kirili  came of age amidst the beginnings of post-war French critical thought. The influence of Roland Barthes is particularly evident in the emphasis he has always placed in semiotics and their manifestation in the body. This had been his impetus to study Chinese calligraphy, Hebrew script and the iconography of global cultures. The embodiment of language as sensation and as a sensual experience is, according to Kirili, communicated through working with the hand. “It’s something I refuse to surrender, it’s in my DNA.”

I met with Kirilli in the Tribeca loft he has shared since 1980 with his wife, the artist Ariane Lopez-Huici. We are looking together at his new works on paper, massed on the wall flanking metal sculptures set against colored grounds. The organic lines in the paper pieces are open to multiple readings, as script, brushstroke or some other kind of signifier that references Kirili’s own sculptural forms. They exude confident improvisation. They also bring to mind the late cutouts by Matisse in the way color operates as light. Another ongoing new series functions equally on the wall or on the floor. These are elongated, vertical rectangles of several sheets of newspaper taped together and then intersected in the center by a thin, single “zip,” sliced, pinned, and draped from the center.  Placement, displacement, materiality and references to Barnett Newman reframe these ephemeral remnants from The New York Times. They are physically light, seemingly instantaneous and undulating with the slightest breeze.

ALAIN KIRILI
My life as an artist is an antidote to what I should have become. Kirili is a pseudonym. I left the conventional expectations of my family and chose to become an artist. The creative process for me has always been sacrosanct, I’ve devoted my life to it, and now it is how I stand up to the current negativity of my body. I have bone marrow cancer and am undergoing various treatments. I never know when one will succeed. I confront this negativity with the joy of creation, this is deeply ingrained in my identity. The illness is a new experience for me. Until now, my body has always been a great source of joy and inspiration.

MARY JONES
It’s no wonder that you’ve found a kindred spirit in the late work of Matisse, who having survived his successful surgery for cancer in 1941, felt he had been given a second life and consequently invented the cutouts.   

The new work is a good sign that I want to survive. So, I’m an heir of Matisse’s second life, because when I came out of the hospital I was starving to create, and to challenge any form of negativity. I’ve worked intensely to achieve a celebration of life in this new body of work.

We are now quite used to seeing a field or rectangle of painted color behind your large sculptural works. I’m reminded of British psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion’s theory about the “container and contained.” There’s an interplay between the painted space and the sculptural object. They seem at once to have emerged from that space but also to be extending from it or attached. At times the colored rectangle functions as a base or pedestal. The tension is closer here, as the contrast between materials has narrowed, the color relationships advance. Is this partly due to your renewed admiration for Matisse?

Yes, the fresh, direct perception of color and shape is very new in these works, and there is a specific link to Matisse, to his book “Jazz” and to the “Matisse Chapel,” the Chapel of the Rosary in Vence, France. Ariane and I have attended mass there several times and it has always been very stimulating for me. Of course, I’ve admired the colors of the stained glass, but also the very rich collection of chasubles that he created. The young priest Father Paul Anel even did a mass in honor of Ariane and me wearing a striking chasuble. With that in mind, I’ve been studying the symbolism of colors in religious art in the well-known book by René Gilles, “Le symbolisme dans l’art religieux” (1961). It is crucial to understand that color in a church always has a profound symbolic dimension. I’m choosing and mixing beautiful, resonant colors with specific, ascribed spiritual attributes. There’s a dialectic between the formality and symbolism of the color and the organic aspect of the line, a powerful tension that I like to explore.

The “zips” of your newspaper pieces have a similar armature to the paintings of Barnett Newman, who was a formative influence for you. How do you feel the sensual and the spiritual are resolved in his work? 

The paintings of Newman are fire. Barnett Newman gave us one of the most beautiful titles for a work of art in the in 20th century art. “Vir Heroicus Sublimis.”  It means “Man,” but also “the phallus.”  The spiritual world of Newman is really burning with passion. I think of him as a source of white fire. His first sculptures, “Here I” (1950) and “Here II” (1965) were so important for me. I found them extraordinary. They were not anthropomorphic or architectonic. The only thing left was a presence. The quest for presence is something that has been with me from the beginning and I was happy to discover that in Newman. I’ve also had the opportunity to speak with Tom Hess about him, and to discuss the Talmudic presence in Newman’s work. But I also have a great love and respect for de Kooning, in part because he made one of the most beautiful quotes imaginable, “Flesh is the reason oil paint was invented.”  De Kooning and Newman stand very close to my heart and carry me, and I’d like to add something that I find very impressive, and that I feel is also very lovely. Barnett Newman did a show of “The Stations of the Cross” at the Guggenheim in 1966, and around the same time John Coltrane released “A Love Supreme.”  I’ve always loved to look at “The Stations of the Cross” in the Guggenheim catalog, listening to Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme.”

But there is another Abstract Expressionist artist who has been especially important to me, almost as if he was part of my family: David Smith. I admire his work and character for many reasons and one of them is that he was an artist born in Americawho confronted and forcefully challenged his Protestant heritage. He denounced it in many of his works, including a great one called “Puritan Landscape,” (1946).  He stood up to the Puritan traditions of this country and rose above the influences that could have destroyed or suppressed him. He protected himself by working with such dedication, making more than 500 pieces during his lifetime. I find this incredibly inspiring, and like David Smith I also take issue with all things Puritan!  This was an ongoing argument I had with Louise Bourgeois. We were friends and were very supportive of one another’s work. Although we had verticality and sexuality in common, we had completely opposite views about the Puritan attitudes in America. She loved it, and I hate it. I interviewed her for Arts Magazine [March 1989) and she told me, “Alain, you have too much empathy for the world. I love confrontation, I had a great crush on Alfred Barr, because he was a temple of Puritanism, absolutely inviolable, this challenge was part of the attraction.” So I said, “OK, Louise, I am not like you!”

You’ve studied Smith’s work extensively, visited and studied his library at Bolton Landing many times. You’ve also organized exhibitions and written about his work. But how do you see your essential differences?

A huge difference is that he is a master of the scrapyard. He had the ability to find old metal that he that he could transform through welding. There’s some blacksmithing and forging in his work, but mostly he could make and envision his work from this found raw material. Whereas in my work, I’m deeply concerned with the trace of the hand and blacksmithing. Let’s say, I’m much more of a blacksmith than David Smith. He was a welder. Today, people don’t know the beauty of blacksmithing. It is, for instance, crucial in African art and society. The blacksmith is highly respected. He is a central figure in the village, performing necessary tasks in both utilitarian and cultural ways. When I worked in Mali in 2003, I met a blacksmith among the Dogon and worked alongside him. We had a great experience together, built out of mutual respect.

Even your large metal sculptures have the directness of drawing. Your new pieces are created from drawing subtractively. Is this a new experience?

Actually, the process is almost like blacksmithing. The pleasure of blacksmithing is mysterious and sensual—to create a vibration on the surface of metal and then form a curve. It’s a way to introduce gracefulness, an expression of emotion through the marks of the hammer, or the power hammer. In my new work the signs and shapes are slightly trembling, like in blacksmithing, and like in life.

What’s trembling in blacksmithing?

The fact that you start with rigid line of metal and as you shape it, a trembling quality is created, one that takes away the rigidity.

Is there sound?  Is it percussive?

Oh, yes. You could almost shape it with the sound alone and with your eyes closed. If you beat the metal when it’s getting too cold, your ear is also getting too cold, and when it’s red hot, it’s a different sound. And that’s why a lot of music is born in blacksmithing, in the forge.  It’s very often the secret source of Flamenco.

In this new series, there’s certainly a rhythm you’ve created from piece to piece, and as a whole.

Each work can be by itself, but as an installation they become monumental through multiplicity. Monumentality has always been with me, and I’d like to show them in an environment that activates this potential fully. There’s also an “archeology” of my own work here. Recently, I did some corner pieces of an iron rod and a piece of newspaper on the floor that relate to clay pieces I did in the 1970. The recent sculpture utilizing newspaper on the floor and on the wall is revisiting some floor pieces in zinc from 1972. Wire and paper are traditionally used to give thickness to free standing sculpture before it disappears with the addition of clay or plaster.

Today for me, to show the use of paper and wire is a way to break the traditional hierarchy where only bronze is the final version of the sculpture. Now, paper and wire are revealed and are the final versions of my sculptures.

Monumentality can be thought of as imposing, formal and static, yet your work consistently involves movement, especially with the new paper pieces.

I’m concerned with movement, not stasis. My free-standing sculptures are tactile, fully indicative of the human movements that made them. That’s the beauty of sculpture, a free-standing work of art and that you can touch, and that has brought you something new, and to experience it fully you are compelled to move around it. Sculpture invites you to circumvolution. You are not just in front of a work of art, you turn around it, you dance around it, you have a spiritual experience enacting this very profound, performed movement that human beings need. In every religion in the world, whether church, temple, or a sculpture like a stupa, this movement is practiced. There is a fundamental sense or drive for circumvolution.

And speaking of movements, you and Ariane have recently become US citizens. How’s that going for you?

I first arrived in 1965 and traveled back and forth several times. In France, after the second world war, the art community was destroyed. So, it was great for me to meet artists here that were close to my age, like Mel Bochner, Robert Morris, Marcia Hafif, and to go with Robert Ryman to hear jazz. There was nothing better for me than to meet living artists. I admire them, have great empathy for the difficulties they face, and for the determination of contemporary artists. Life is short, it’s urgent.

I’ve been so moved to see women emerge in the artworld, people I originally met in the 80s, like Elizabeth Murray, who was a close friend. To belong to a community is important, and to be part of an open world where women are recognized has been wonderful. The “Me Too” movement of today is something that gives me so much satisfaction, and something I never expected. It’s signaling the end of patriarchal power. It’s a revolution and it’s great. To be married to an accomplished woman artist and see that we both can achieve recognition has been very gratifying. As Simone de Beauvoir said, “In a couple there should be room for two.”

I’m not afraid of the feminine or the emotional in art, I welcome it.  I’m completely in love with Italian art and I’ve gone to Italy at least 20 times. It’s my first destination. It’s absolutely stunning what the church has allowed on its walls regarding ecstasy, it interests me very much. The lightness of being is a crucial aspect of sculpture. We speak about weight. When does a woman experience weightlessness?  When she has a climax with God!  That’s exactly what the St. Teresa of Bernini is saying!  There are Hindu temples in India where you see carvings of beautiful bodies undulating, and you begin to understand that when you bring together sexuality and spirituality, you are in masterpiece mode.

The post Lightness of Being: Alain Kirili discusses his new work with Mary Jones appeared first on artcritical.

Despite both coming out of the postminimalism of the 1970s and a close association with the poststructuralists of the Tel Quel circle, French/American sculptor Alain Kirili is at heart a romantic. His aesthetic of “incarnatedness” springs from kinship with the creative principles of Rimbaud and Baudelaire. A student of calligraphy in his young years in Paris, the “drunken” brush has long informed the whirling linear dimension in his work. A spare yet voluptuous three-piece show, one for each room, at Hionas Gallery offers an essay in the notion of drawing in space. To view this installation is to be enlisted as a participant in a freely improvised choreography: a dance to the music of time.

Until May 21 at 124 Forsyth Street, between Broome and Delancey streets, New York City, (646) 559‐5906

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Alexi Worth: Green Glass Doors at DC Moore Gallery, March 26 to April 25, 2015
Reviewed in these pages by Roman Kalinovski, this was a project room solo that played with boundaries on different levels. Perceptual provocateur Alexi Worth found a theme worthy of his visual mischief: the locked doors of almost completed building or renovation projects. The motif vied with his nudes on the beach or copulating couples precisely thanks to their chilly voyeur-inducing exclusion. Elaborate carpentry and mesh supports played off depiction against construction with surface wit and psychological depth.

Alain Kirili and James Siena at Art Omi, October 11, 2015 to January 3, 2016
This was a year of double exposures for sculptor Alain Kirili, who has divided his career of the last forty years between New York and his native Paris. Two shows brought his latest line-in-space sculptures in forged metal to two-person shows: two halves that add to more than one whole for an artist for whom dialogue, whether with peers, historic mentors or artists in other mediums (music or dance) is axiomatic rather than expedient. One show was with painter Bobbie Oliver at Peter Hionas Gallery, a coupling of the dealer’s suggestion; the other, however, very much of Kirili’s own devising, was with his friend James Siena at Art Omi in Columbia County, NY. Siena, legendary as a painter and draftsman, and whose sculpture also takes line for a walk, enjoyed his sculptural debut earlier this year at Pace Gallery.

Susannah Phillips at Lori Bookstein
A natural complement to the exquisite Morandi show a block away at David Zwirner Gallery, Susannah Phillips brought a brooding luminosity to her spatial meditations in paintings where the structural elements communicate with the silent intensity of still life. The mountainous scenery of several pictures created a tension between schematic reduction and observational presentness striking a chord somewhere between Milton Avery and Ferdinand Hodler, holding the elements – water, land, sky – in suspense. In more urban images, Richard Diebenkorn and Wilhelm Hammershoi were the presiding ghosts. Upping the ante in intensity were images of a nebulous space, perhaps a holding bay, ambivalent between interior and exterior, where forms pulsate in the dark.

Alternate Histories: Celebrating the 75th Anniversary of the Galerie St. Etienne, January 15 to April 11, 2015
Before New Yorkers could enjoy Seccessionist masterpieces amidst the plutocratic splendors and wafting caffeinated aromas of the Neue Galerie, the redoubt of Austrian and German Expressionism in this city were the altogether more sedate, businesslike premises of Galerie St. Etienne on 57th Street. This venue was a transplant from Vienna where it was founded in the 1920s by Otto Kallir, father of the present owner Jane Kallir, and originally named, indeed, the Neue Galerie. This jubilee exhibition brought together examples of the different strands that have ensured St. Etienne a crucial, vital role in New York art consciousness: arresting images from the likes of Schiele, Klimt, Kokoschka and Kollwitz; American “primitives” like Morris Hirshfield and Grandma Moses; and that fearless living expressionist (no need for any “neo” prefix) Sue Coe.

Tom of Finland at Artists Space, June 13 to September 13, 2015
Touko Laaksonen, better known to connoisseurs and masturbators everywhere as Tom of Finland, enjoyed a steamy double header at the sprawling SoHo and Tribeca premises of Artists Space this summer. On Greene Street an elaborate installation afforded intimate corridor upon corridor of framed drawings and collages from which his published images derived. With glistening graphite he caught the erogenous sheen of muscle-bound workmen bulging in denim and leather uniformed hulks encountering each other in ever-cheerful, spontaneous orgies: S&M with a smile was his hallmark. Down on Walker Street, an utterly exhaustive, thematic vitrine arrangement recalled the fact that  image horder Laaksonen’s background was in advertising. The exhibition archived his sources with an indexical totality that would have impressed Aby Warbug, a veritable iconology of lust.

Alex Katz at Barney’s, Spring 2015
Every year seems to be Alex Katz’s year as far as increased visibility for this prince of painters is concerned. Notwithstanding the absurdly overdue retrospective that New York museums are denying this realist master, 2015 saw its fair share of spectacular outings: new works that took startling liberties with expectations, at once reduxing and reinventing his familiar landscape motifs, closed the downtown space of Gavin Brown, for instance, while Mary Ryan showed a stunning set of nine screenprints, each 80 inches by 30, of women in little black dresses that nodded to The Black Dress, his iconic 1960 portrait of Ada repeated six times in a single canvas. There were big museum shows at the High in Atlanta, GA and at Colby College, ME, but the stand out memory for this critic were his windows at Barneys: with typical chutzpah Katz blacked out the store windows with a parade of starkly elegant figures etched into the glass, a provocation that pushed style outwards to the street rather than luring the stylish in, cajoling passersby with a frisson of exclusion. A related display of paraphernalia on the sixth floor produced for the store under the auspices of the Art Production Fund brought together linens, vanity products and kitchenware, all impressed with startling graphic flowers, heads, or dogs carved black out of white, white out of black. A beach spread purchased by this viewer to spare his couch from dog hairs was expensive for a towel but a bargain for an Alex Katz.

Francis Bacon at Gagosian (Madison Avenue), November 7 to December 12, 2015
When you are a world class modern master and the products of your late work seem, quite literally, washed out, the job of criticism, obviously, is to explain how dissipatedness is a sign of genius. For years, at Bacon retrospectives, of which there have been many, the oeuvre is shown to end on a dry, thin, almost evaporated note. But gather just late works, as Gagosian have done, intelligently and persuasively installed, and the late period does indeed cohere around faded grandeur as an organizing principle. Bacon, at his best, was brazenly decadent, anxiety inducing and tragic; this actually serves to make the “defects” of his late works a virtue. Inveterately inventive even as he wallowed in his own mannerisms, he could turn sterile precision into its own kind of terribilità.

Sean Scully at Montserrat, dedicated June 2015
Sean Scully turned 70 in 2015 and a slew of international events marked the occasion. Laurels included a major exhibition at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, a sculptural commission in south-western France and a sumptuous display in a palace on the Grand Canal, a collateral exhibition of the Venice Biennale, where his land-sea-sky partitioned stripe paintings, reveling in a new gestural looseness, assumed a symbolic role in their temporary home akin to “il Sposalizio del Mare,” the allegories of Venice’s betrothal to the sea. But the jewel in the crown of his birthday celebrations took place in the mystically fabled monastic complex of Montserrat, in this hills overlooking Barcelona. For the Dublin-born, London-schooled, New York-tested and Munich-proved artist, Barcelona has for long been the third node in the split nucleus of his peripatetic career. Within Catalonian national identity, and by extension Scully’s identification with the city, Montserrat has profound resonances, so the invitation to decorate an entire chapel – he has provided paintings, windows and sundry sacred furnishings – provides its own kind of allegorical significance in relation to his mentors, Rothko and Matisse.

The post Old Year’s Resolutions: Eight great shows I didn’t review appeared first on artcritical.

September 14, 2015–February 07, 2016
11 West 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth avenues
New York City, moma.org

In this edited exchange of emails, artcritical’s David Cohen expected — and received — multiple insights into MoMA’s unparalleled exhibition,  Picasso Sculpture. The three practioners on his panel, Alain Kirili, Michelle Segre and Rebecca Smith, are sculptors of markedly distinct aesthetic outlooks but one thing they share is that they work very directly in materials whose intrinsic qualities are integral to their final result. A maker’s perspective permeates the discussion that follows. At the time of this exchange last month, Segre was the subject of a solo exhibition at Derek Eller Gallery, Kirili was taking part in two-person exhibitions at Art Omi (with James Siena) and at Hionas Gallery (with Bobbie Oliver), and large-scale works by Smith and her father, David Smith, had recently been installed together in a year-long display at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, in the museum’s atrium (through March 1, 2016).

DAVID COHEN
A wonderful thing about Picasso as a sculptor is that we are not looking at three-dimensional equivalents to images resolved already in what we take to be the master narrative, his paintings, but rather a viable, fully-fledged parallel career. If Picasso had only made sculptures, and predominantly those on view at MoMA, he would still be one of the giants of Modern Art.

At the very least, the sculptures hold their own to his painted and drawn imagery—even if his turns to sculpture are episodic. Regarding episodes, each process/material is like a new chapter, generating phases in his sculpture career analogous to the (arguably quaint, if not sexist) division of his oeuvre into “epochs” defined by his female partners! Of course, we might want to argue that divisions of the oeuvre by medium are moot: that any medium contains the DNA of the artist, and that his protean creativity is better divided by time than stuff, and that in a given moment he would express himself through whichever medium made sense and was to hand. But that is to miss a vital point in Picasso, the profound importance of the resistance of materials and processes, and not just their fluency.

The Surrealist writer André Breton famously dubbed Picasso a “creator of tragic toys for adults”. I don’t know if that characterization works especially well for his sculpture necessarily, but in the sculpture we definitely have a sense of serious play. We experience the artist at his most technically inventive, not just in terms of wizardry but also in the directness of his response to materials. Without implying indifference to the physicality of paint in his paintings, maybe a degree of novelty of, say, plaster or steel or ceramic brings out a child-like marvel and whimsicality in his sculptural inventions. Do you all agree?

REBECCA SMITH
Picasso was always inserting the story he wanted to tell regardless of the observable reality.  In two-dimensional works he showed the profile of the nose, the full mouth, and both ears, for instance, attempting to do in a flat medium what sculpture can do — that is, describing the head in the round.  But he goes further with sculpture, adding “distortions” that tell a story different from the real.  In the amazing Cat made during World War II he juts out a rib on one side, communicating motion by showing the form of the Cat turning to one side, though the predominant posture is straight, stepping ahead, perhaps stalking.  That’s how Picasso puts time into sculpture.  This happens also with the Death’s Head of the same period in which the facets of the skull reveal themselves seemingly at slightly different speeds and with different relationships to the description of the subject.  There is the full frontal effect of the face, but one side is thinner and bends in towards the profile view.  When it proceeds to the several rounded facets of the skull, they drop off from looking head-shaped and look more like an abstract form.  The skull was very convincing as a human remnant from the frontal view, but became less so from other views — perhaps the artist suggesting a rock that had never been animate — or possibly retreating from a grisly subject by mutating into an abstract form.   David mentioned the importance of working directly with materials; the agility and layered meaning in these sculptures happen by thinking with your hands and your head at the same time.

ALAIN KIRILI
Anne Umland and Ann Temkin have succeeded in a beautiful and rare installation for a sculpture exhibition: seeing all the sculpture in the round we can appreciate the circumvolution within each work. Truth be told, most curators are afraid of sculpture so they put them up against the wall, flattening them.

Picasso was protean and had a real love for diversity. It feels particularly present in his sculpture because he was free from dogmatic formalism and technical know how. At times, he could even create sculpture conceptually, employing the best craftsmen to execute the pieces for him.

MoMA’s show represents all the different materials Picasso used to amazing effect. But I would say that I regret that Head of Woman (1934) is over exposed in a way that flattens and whitens the concrete, with a loss of gravitas. I could feel this major sculpture much better in its original setting at the Musée Picasso of Antibes where interior lighting brings out contrast and density of material.

I was partly raised in the South of France and I did run into Picasso at Madoura in the 1960s. I also enjoyed seeing the sculpture Man with the Lamb on top of a base in the middle of Vallauris, at the market place where farmers would come and leave a cup of coffee or vegetables at the base of the sculpture as if it were an offering, part of a cult for life. Pierre Daix once wrote to me in a letter that Picasso would have liked to see this sculpture in a public setting “accessible to children and dogs”.

My wife, Ariane Lopez-Huici and I have one of Picasso’s bronze sculptures in Woman (1945) series in our collection. We keep it with prints from the Vollard Suite in our bedroom. It is one where he puts pressure with his thumb into clay to represent a head, something that I’m reminded of in the details in my own forged pieces. MoMA’s sculpture show really reveals in depth that Picasso is about solar incarnation, where Eros fights and wins against Thanatos: the way Ariane and I strive to be, consistently, in our art and life.

I would say that the success of the show owes a lot to the exceptionally generous loans from the Picasso Museum in Paris. This show reflects a very fruitful and great cooperation between these institutions. Before the creation of the Picasso Museum and the publication of Werner Spies’s volume, “Pablo Picasso: The Sculptures”, a large portion of Picasso’s work in sculpture was neglected by the general public. I always knew that Picasso as a sculptor was the best-kept secret in 20th century art!

REBECCA SMITH
I wanted to mention that while we all know that Picasso’s art was influenced by African sculpture, I hadn’t known that he saw African and Oceanic art during his earliest sculpture-making days and in fact collected it.  Matisse, Picasso and their generation of artists were perhaps the first to integrate African and Oceanic art into their sensibilities and practices — no one more so than Picasso.  Did any other European artist comprehend, appreciate and integrate the art of another culture into his practice so fully and at such an early date as Picasso?

Pcasso’s 1914 Guitar (ferrous sheet metal and wire) is for me his most important sculpture. It is tremendously compelling in several distinct ways.  It opens up a constructed object into its separate layers, splaying them out like turning pages in a book.  He pushes collage, recently invented by Braque, into the more three-dimensional manifestation of constructed sculpture. Apart from extending the forms of sculpture, this work addresses itself to the viewer in a unique way, phenomenologically.  One experiences the simultaneity of object recognition and its opposite — the abstract exploration of its forms.  It announces itself as a guitar then seduces you into the exploration of its busy surface, curves, shifting rectangular planes, and rivets you with a dark circle in its center.  Most of what you experience visually has nothing to do with a guitar.  The sheet metal and wire are so thin and fragile, the velvety surface almost tangible, that they almost belie their physicality.   Yet the presence of many deep shadows insist you are looking at an object.  This work opens the door to Jasper Johns’s green and orange American flag; David Smith’s burnished stainless steel surfaces; any art object that does one thing and “says” another.

The 1914 Guitar, the Absinthe edition, Guitar (Paris, 1924), the black-and-white painted Head (Paris, October, 1928) the late folded sheet-metal works are parts of a stream of assemblage works that played with illusionism in sculpture.  This is another aspect of Picasso’s extending the sculptural language by adding on what painting does.  Picasso opened up the space of reliefs into what for me is an extremely rich place that many artists work in today with an enormous range of expression.  Composition with Glove, 1930, is made up of a tableau of real objects attached to the back of a stretched canvas over a wooden frame.  The objects are unified with a coat of sand painted predominantly white with a little light blue.  The sandy surface recalls the presence of color (rust red in the case of Guitar) and both share an overall finely-textured surface.  And like that sculpture, Composition with Glove denies its apparent identity (as a painting) and declares itself something else —a sculptural assemblage.  It is the literalization of image-making in that it gives you the objects behind the flat, imaginary window of the painting plane.  Still within the frame of the picture, the tableau of real things exists as object and picture — most especially the hand of the artist (i.e., the glove).  There is a feeling of fullness, richness and integration about this artwork.  The real object co-exits with illusion and metaphor.  It overflows the shallow space of the stretched canvas — it comes in through the back door, so to speak.  It breaks the imaginary space of the stretched canvas painting and renders it a sculpture, stuffing it with real things.

MICHELLE SEGRE
This Picasso show really did feel like a rare treat.  It’s already unusual to see any major sculpture shows in museums, probably for the physical threat Alain mentions, which is ironic, since our human environment is so full of “objects” and “bodies,” and then the physicality and materiality of this show is like a welcome punch in the face.  Picasso’s ability to project a kind of hyper energy in his work can be quite thrilling and I think in his sculptures in particular there is a sense of freedom, and even joy, like someone working outside the constraints of a program.  The combination of his lack of formal training in sculpture, and his incredible resourcefulness at self-teaching and exploiting the knowledge and technical prowess of others, as well as literally seeming to devour materials and techniques to get his visions realized…all these things contribute to the power of the work.  I was struck by how often he went back and forth between skinny line and flat planes, and bulbous, fat blobs, mirroring the trajectory of his paintings.  But the kinds of distortions and flattening of space and form that he invented in his painting, when carried over into sculpture, have a different kind of relationship to the real world in that they are objects competing in an environment in the round– unlike the paintings, that set up a formal presentation of an illusion of an object, the sculptures are in fact objects that occupy their environment, so they have a kind of earth-bound connection that feels very organic, even as he is playing with pictorial issues.  Rebecca, you touched on this aspect of his work too…I like your description of experiencing the guitar piece.

DAVID COHEN
I’d like to say something more about the general issue of sculpture and what I call the expressive impulses: the graphic, the chromatic, the plastic. Picasso is a great gamesman, and also of course inveterately restless. I used to have a secret theory that – counter to his actual development or career path – he was first and foremost a sculptor, and that painting, for which he is of course best known and celebrated, is, in a renewed one-man paragone debate, the subservient medium. What this show is making me think about is the possibility that he is actually a constant subverter of medium: in painting he is often drawing or sculpting, and his painterliness – the visceral enjoyment of paint, the scumbling, the scatological aspect of smear – is essentially haptic; but then when he is actually sculpting there is so much that is actually painterly: the absinthe glasses, individually colored, essentially make of the edition a 3D print, but also the post-war flat steel pieces, sensationally displayed at the entrance to the show, become supports for graphic or painterly marks. Should we be thinking of him simply as an unbounded creator indifferent to the boundaries of medium, or as playing an active with (against) medium definitions and boundaries?

REBECCA SMITH
I would love to hear more about the skull.  It was done during World War II of course — and to have it cast in bronze was illegal because it was against the war effort — so there you have art sabotaging warfare!

I also thought the man with the lamb was about the war experience.  Picasso said it wasn’t the Lamb of God but I can’t believe that in a Catholic country in those days a work by a Catholic could use a lamb in this way and not having it to be about sacrifice and a symbol of Jesus, the Prince of Peace.  Here is a man who is cradling a stricken symbol of peace, the animal is crying out, and he is stolidly standing there holding this burden — expressionless, almost faceless, and he has no penis.  I can imagine feeling impotent living during wartime in an occupied country.

ALAIN KIRILI
You are absolutely right about the illegal context of his creation and his status as a degenerate artist in that time. The sculpture, Death’s Head (1941) is a bomb. That’s the way it reads in Brassaï’s photograph. Picasso is a fighter, a terrorist in some very profound way. Robert Capa photographed Picasso with Death’s Head in his hand.

Death’s Head is much bigger than a human skull, and it had another purpose and meaning: to me, Death’s Head needs to be viewed as  extremely dangerous, like some sort of grenade. Spanish artists love skulls but with Picasso it is not melancholic but rather a weapon of massive destruction, which is heavy and solid. I am not an art historian, but what I can offer is personal testimony as an artist. The work of Picasso is deeply autobiographical and we feel it so well in this show. His different loves appear at each step of his life and his art, here in his sculptures Fernande, Dora Maar, Marie-Thérèse, Sylvette.

But David, to pick up on your question: For me Picasso’s art and each sculpture are revealing signs of my own evolution through time, sexually, and emotionally. With Picasso sexual desire is present until the end of his life: he spoke about that matter with Brassaï in a New York Times interview in 1971: “we always think about it even if we don’t do it”. And elsewhere in the same interview: “Whenever I see you, my first impulse is to reach in my pocket to offer you a cigarette, even though I know very well that neither of us smoke any longer. Age has forced us to give up but the desire remains. It’s the same thing with making love. We don’t do it any more, but the desire for it is still with us.”

At the same time, Simone de Beauvoir was the first to write on the subject of old age as pariah in our western society in her book  “La Vieillesse”. Picasso treats that subject constantly with gusto and immense drive for creation, even when the old king turns into a voyeur. This is the trajectory from Les Demoiselles d’Avignon of his youth to the bacchanals of the king/voyeur particularly focused on the female sex. On one of his white sheet metal sculptures, the female sex and its hair are drawn with the flame of a torch that cuts into the surface of metal.

His granddaughter Diana Widmaier-Picasso wrote a fantastic book on the eroticism of her grandfather: “Picasso: Art Can Only Be Erotic” (2005). Picasso’s Boisgeloup period is so celebratory of sexuality. These monumental heads of Marie-Thérèse transform the nose and eyes into sexual attributes in a way that is just amazing! I remember when Beyeler and Reinhold Hold exhibited a show of 20th century sculptures in Riehen, Switzerland (the show included my own work), the Jeannette heads bronze series by Matisse were placed in confrontation with the Boisgeloup heads. What a great moment of art and of sculpture in that century.

The models of this sculpture are in the show and the enlargement is nearby in MOMA’s garden. It is a rare experience of a successful enlargement, which is rare in sculpture. We have to keep in mind another very successful enlargement and interpretation by the betograve concrete sculptor Carl Nesjar of the Bust of Sylvette in cement (at 36 feet high, it weighs in at 60 tons!). Nesjar produced 30 works of Picasso on a monumental scale, including the Head at Princeton University. It would have been a good idea, in my opinion, if MoMA had included as a suggested itinerary of the monumental sculptures for which they have maquettes in the show.

REBECCA SMITH
I wanted to respond to what David said about Picasso’s way of bringing in sculpture when he’s painting and vice versa.  You bring up the question of motivation; I don’t think Picasso is oblivious to the boundaries of medium, or even that he is deliberately “subverting”.  It seems to me that he is blending because these boundaries came down for him and why?  Is it because he absorbed African art so fully that it seemed natural to paint sculpture and add materials like sand fiber to paint?   That’s part of it but there is also the way technology was changing the world.  His blending of two and three dimensions is accomplished in a more realized way than traditional relief at the time of a technological revolution — the telegraph, photography, telephone, film.  Rosalind Krauss has written about Picasso’s work in relation to film.  Space was conquered by technology, spewing images everywhere.  This seems to me to be the underlying change that blurred the boundaries.

I feel that I have occupied a place that blends two and three dimensions for almost my whole art-making life.  Even when I purposely undertook the project of making three-dimensional sculpture — a body of work consisting of large, bulbous plaster sculptures built around globelike armatures — I added the pigment to the plaster and dripped it like thick paint.  It wound up being very painterly sculpture.   An early body of work was two-sided, painted reliefs that basically offered alternate views that were never either flat or in the round.  I have found different ways of manifesting that sense of art-making space ever since.  While constructed as an object or sculpture it also partakes of painting space, a metaphorical space, window, page of text, electronic screen.  We are looking in and looking at.

ALAIN KIRILI
What I find very successful in the show is the great selection of small sculptures. For instance, the whole group of small glazed earthenware from 1947, the terracotta Standing Woman (1945), and the tinted foundry plaster Standing Woman (also 1945) are great examples of the subtle distinction in materials that Picasso did appreciate. In addition, knowing that a number of those sculptures exist in bronze, I regret that we did not see any of the bronzes.

Of course, I am an admirer of the very linear work by Picasso and the nice series of studies for the monument to Guillaume Apollinaire, Figure (1928). It pleases me very much because we can see various ways to express the head or hands. But most of all I, of course, really like Figure (1931) in iron and iron wire, materials Picasso used very early on because he could work it “cold”, in other words by hand and without heavy equipment.

I would like to highlight the term Werner Spies coined as “The Encyclopedic Sculpture”, which are sculptures from the 50s that use a huge diversity of objects for an assemblage-sculpture: The she-goat in bronze is really beautiful, but the stage before in plaster is extraordinary and that is true for all the other sculptures by Picasso for that time. It would have been fantastic to have a number of them to fully appreciate how Picasso could go from a stage of heterogeneity of material to the unifying version in bronze.

But those remarks are in no way a critique of the show. On the contrary, it proves that the show is so exciting that we want to express all the possibilities to celebrate the most autobiographical and protean artist of our time.

MICHELLE SEGRE
The question of subversiveness is an interesting one in Picasso.  On one hand his work can be emotionally neutral and formally analytical.  The coolness (temperature) is very seductively off-set by the sensuality of the artist’s touch.  On the other hand, he has a psychologically heavy side to his work that uses distortion and caricature to bring in emotion in a frozen, theatrical display.  There’s often a comic, absurd aspect…I’m thinking of those crazy plaster heads, so proud and strong in their stature and yet profoundly ugly—mutated, spastic body parts with sexualized noses and butts for cheeks.  The welded pieces from the Julio Gonzales days also play with this kind of re-imagining of human form– the figure becomes a giant, mechanical insect with precariously balanced limbs and extensions.  This kind of dismantling of one’s expectations of what the human figure looks like feels so fresh and contemporary, it could have been made by a young artist working today.  Certainly this qualifies as subversive for its time in the sense that it is intentionally turning topsy-turvy any traditional, academic approach to the human form (or animal or plant, etc), and I can’t imagine that he didn’t know he was doing this!  The influence of African and Oceanic art is huge here and I think Picasso looked at this work and found a way to sublimate emotion into the destruction and re-arrangement of the figure.  At the same time this supposedly intentional subversion appears to be coming so naturally and unforced, like someone who is exploring every vision coming to their head in the mechanics of inventing.  This is part of Picasso’s appeal—that he seems to just do whatever the fuck he wants!

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September 25 to October 18, 2015
581 Woodward Avenue, between Menahan and Grove streets
Ridgewood, 718 600 9417

The recent arrival of Valentine Gallery to Ridgewood adds to a growing gallery scene there that includes Famous Accountants, English Kills and Outpost. Fred Valentine, himself an accomplished painter, organizes a program of exhibitions with a bias toward painting, and this, the first exhibition in his new space, presents new abstract paintings by Bobbie Oliver. Though the space is modest in scale its high ceilings readily accommodate larger works. The largest painting here is Teal Daylight (2010) at 63 x 68 inches (it is also the earliest work here) while the smallest, a dark green painting on a sidewall of its own, is Untitled (2015).

Greens are often regarded as difficult colors in abstract painting, but not so for Oliver, nor for the dedicatee of one of the paintings, the much missed Hudson of Feature, Inc. It was in the window of Hudson’s gallery that I first saw a painting of Oliver’s in 2012, a large triptych that recalled the touch and directness of Chinese landscape painting, even from across Allen Street. So, Forever, for Hudson (#1) is a good place to begin contemplating Oliver’s work. It is characteristic of her oeuvre, technically and chromatically. Paint is applied, often wet into wet, and then manipulated using a variety of different methods, some discernable, some not. For example the darker green shape to the left of center appears to mirror its upper and lower halves vertically, though not exactly, as a result of folding of the canvas. Unusually, in this instance, it is a cut piece from a larger work mounted on a smaller canvas, exactly to size. Oliver always preps her canvases with a couple of coats of gesso as this enables a specific surface quality that she desires, and that makes the paintings distinct from color field stain painting that tended to exploit raw canvas. What she achieves is something akin to the immediacy of gouache or watercolor. Avoiding the potential grandiosity of gesture, Oliver imbues the painting with a practical sense of responsiveness, both to the materiality of paint and the fluctuating light of color.

In Teal Daylight, pouring, and blotting off, with newspaper draw attention to the surface of the painting in the way condensation does to a windowpane. Again, Oliver eschews grand sweeping gesture in favor of slow spilling movement, distributing paint compositionally in ways that determine a fluid, shifting pictorial space. The openness of method does not diminish the mystery of the final configurations. There is closely restricted color range, but it would be misleading to think of this as a monochrome painting as there is nothing anti-compositional about the piece. The shapes and tonal play recall shadows and reflections, or clouds and sheets of rain. But these shapes are not literal representations of things, eschewing the tradition of perspective and its assumptions.

Another recurring color choice for Oliver is the red/blue/violet of Under + Over (2012). Acknowledgment of the edge of the painting by cutting off shapes adds an almost geometric contrast to the flows of color across the rectangle. The looseness of painterly facture is impressive when considering how precise the relationships end up being. There is a rightness or dynamic balance that arrives like the sound of a chord in relation to its constituent notes.

We have another opportunity to view Oliver’s paintings at Hionas Gallery in a show that opened October 8 where she has been placed in an interesting pairing with the sculptor Alain Kirili. Both artists bring to my mind the legacy of Jackson Pollock: Oliver, by focusing on the fluid materiality of paint and its possibilities for pictorial space; Kirili by drawing in space in a way that is linear, punctuated and cursive like the drawing in late Pollock.

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MoMA PS1, Sunday, November 2, 2014

Maria Alekhina and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, better known to the world as members of Pussy Riot, were co-winners of the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought, 2014. The performance artists spent 22 months in a Russian jail in terrible conditions for their notorious anthem, “Virgin Mary, Put Putin Away,” and were released on the eve of the Sochi Olympics last year. Their film-performance of their “Punk Prayer” is part of PS1’s current exhibition “Zero Tolerance,” a show that brings to mind the alternative spirit of PS1 in its foundational years in the mid-seventies. Last month, the curator of “Zero Tolerance,” PS1 director Klaus Biesenbach, interviewed Alekhina and Tolokonnikova, and Tolokonnikova’s Russian-Canadian husband Petya Verzilov, who served as spokesman of Pussy Riot during their incarceration, in a public event which I attended.

Although I wrote an article supporting Pussy Riot in August 2012 in the Parisian paper Liberation, this was the first time I have seen them in person. Their manner and appearance were both graceful and forceful. I was impressed by their detailed attention to the Russian-English translation of their “Punk Prayer,” which they corrected several times in order to get it precisely right. At the very outset they emphasized a clear statement: they love Russia. They confirmed that they love living in Moscow, where they plan to continue their courageous activism. Their future goal, they said, is to publish an account of their time in jail and to organize performances concerning sexual issues such as homophobia in Russia. They plan to stay very active in denouncing the local justice system and conditions of imprisonment, which have not changed since the Stalinist era. Apparently the Gulag survives perfectly in Russia today. On the very first day they arrived in prison, they were beaten and dressed in clothing that would not be changed for almost two years (clothing is only changed once every three years in this prison system). In their 22 months in jail, they were never allowed minimal privacy; one noted that conditions were so bad that her menstruation cycle ceased.

When their performance prayer to the Virgin in August 2012 was interrupted, the Cathedral’s security personnel asked them to leave. It was a full week later, and based on manipulated witness accounts, that the police arrested Alekhina and Tolokonnikova, along with a third member of the band, Yekaterina Samutsevich, who was later released on a suspended sentence.

The artists said that when one is put on trial, one automatically goes to jail afterwards in virtually all cases. As the world knows, they were already incarcerated in a cage during their trial.

Pussy Riot is an artistic collective in which multiple members represent the whole. We can all be Pussy Riot, they seem to be saying: it is a state of mind. Their artistic and political activism translates itself into punk music, interviews, writing, and disguises. The group recalls the long history of agitprop, which was so creative and effective in Russia during the revolution. Indeed, their work derives specifically from that of Vladimir Mayakovski, the poet and creator of Russian Futurism, and perhaps the ultimate propagandistic agitator. This tradition of political and creative movements reaches back to the Paris Commune (1871) and the engagement of Gustave Courbet. Even earlier, it appears in Eugene Delacroix’s painting Liberty Leading the People (1830), which presents a beautiful young topless woman with a French flag, guiding and inspiring the people at the barricades. In the 20th century, after the Russian Revolution, there are many examples of related activism, such as the amazing creative process that produced the posters during May ‘68 in Paris. The Situationist movement was composed of visual artists and philosophers who created paintings, comics, posters, and now-familiar slogans such as “la Beauté est dans la rue” (“Beauty is in the street”). Dada and Surrealism likewise contributed to their critical commitment against what Guy Debord would later call The Society of the Spectacle (the title of his 1967 book). The members of Pussy Riot studied philosophy, literature, and visual arts, and certainly read Debord.

Women play a particularly striking role in this and other related contemporary resistance movements. It’s very important to relate Pussy Riot not just to the Guerrilla Girls, but also to contemporary Muslim women in revolt against the sexism of their societies. I am thinking, for instance, of Taslima Nasrin who I met at the premiere of by Steve Lacy’s “jam opera” The Cry (1999), which sets some of her texts to music. And of Ayaan Hirsi Ali who wrote the scenario for assassinated film director Theo Van Gogh. Ali denounces the situation of women in Islam through her books and her contributions to films like Submission (2004).

In China there are extremely courageous artists like the sculptor Ai Weiwei, now in permanent household arrest, and the great writer Liu Xiaobo, an imprisoned dissident who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010. Add to their number Salman Rushdie, one of the first writers to undergo a fatwa, and we have a long line of writers, filmmakers, cinema photographers, dancers, and visual artists that are explicitly expressing their sense of revolt against repressive political situations around the world.

Creation is an act of resistance. Today in our world, the resistance is against the sleekness of kitsch. Kitsch, as I define it, is a simulation of emotions and the representation of derision. The Austrian writer Hermann Broch reminded us, in his 1955 essay “Some Remarks on Kitsch,” that behind a kitsch work of art there is kitsch man and kitsch society. There is a connection between kitsch and fascism: this form of art should never be taken lightly. Creation is a political act when it’s not kitsch, but rather alive with subjectivity and emotion. A rebellious work of art is as challenging to dominant institutions as an explicitly political artwork. Both are political and complementary.

Pussy Riot received worldwide support against their imprisonment in part because the arbitrary regime of Putin is obviously complicit with the Russian Orthodox Church, notably the Patriarch Kirill. Whereas, in the West, there is no democracy without the separation of church and state, Putin has eliminated this separation. Today Pussy Riot can be arrested at any time and attacked by any nationalist individual. Last March, Alekhina and Tolokonnikova were attacked by a group of young nationalists in a restaurant in the city of Nizhny Novgorod. The thugs poured a green antiseptic liquid over the women, an action that was filmed. In Sochi, police were ready to arrest them on the basis of false accusations of stealing in their hotel. Their commitment is crucial in a world of cynicism and corruption where art is manipulated by capital. They believe in the endless symbolic power of art. This is the reason why the art world should not be silent on their actions but, on the contrary, deeply vigilant in its support of them. Theirs is a deeply artistic engagement.

Translated from French by Philip Barnard.

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This weekend sees a significant expansion in the stunning and sprawling annual three-day festival, Bushwick Open Studios, put together by the volunteer Arts in Bushwick organization.  In addition to the 677 shows on offer, some in labyrinthine studio complexes, others in storefronts and private dwellings around the eastern Brooklyn neighborhood, this year sees the launch of a new art fair in conjunction with the festival, one that promises the literal opposite of business as usual.

NEWD brings together artist collective, project spaces, nonprofits and artist-run galleries in a show sharing 7000 square feet of industrial space.  As befits its acronym, the fair strives for a new level of transparency.  Besides bringing collectors into less mediated contact with artists, NEWD is introducing “negotiated resale royalty agreements” with the sales that take place under its roof.  The event takes place at the 1896, an historic warehouse space at 592 Johnson Avenue close to the Jefferson Street L.

Participants in NEWD are naturally open for business in their own premises, too, over the weekend.  At 56 Bogart Street, for instance, hub of such galleries and alternative spaces as Momenta Art, NURTUREart, and Life on Mars, THEODORE:Art, the latest gallery incarnation of Soho veteran Stephanie Theodore, continues a sensational show of sculptor Joyce Robins that emphasizes her roots in painting—by actually including stunning early 2D works alongside her pigmented clay reliefs.  Upstairs from these galleries, meanwhile, are good old-fashioned open studios by individual practicing artists.  Check out luminous abstractionist Delfina Nahrgang,.

Another sculptor active since the 1970s, Paris- and New York-based Alain Kirili,  inaugurates splendid new premises of ArtHelix at 299 Meserole Street, near the Montrose Avenue L.  Describing Kirili’s new steel wire and rubber tubing drawing-in-space sculptures in the brochure accompanying this show, artcritical’s David Cohen detects “an almost fugue-like relationship between elements chasing and embracing each other like lovers.”

Cutting edge new media artists Man Bartlett and Carla Gannis are part of a five-person open studio at Studio 303 at 41 Varick Avenue.  While their work engages in literally splicing together traditional and innovative techniques and protocols, a group show with an emphasis on painting draws on splice as its organizational metaphor. MIXTAPE, curated by Sophia Alexandrov and Todd Bienvenu, draws a parallel between curatorial efforts and the making of a good party compilation.  Their show, at 195 Morgan Avenue, No. 4 Studio, brings together the likes of Katherine Bradford, Margrit Lewczuk, Gili Levy, Sangram Majumdar and Kyle Staver.

And talking of parties: Twenty-Three Artists From In and Around, in the garage at 386 Jefferson Street, which includes Paula DeLuccia, Lori Ellison, Lawrence Swan and Richard Timperio in their number, has an opening Friday sponsored by Hendrick’s Gin, as if such company weren’t sufficient guarantee of a wild time!

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