October 18 to December 1, 2013

Lesley Heller Workspace
54 Orchard Street
New York City, 212-410-6120

A New Yorker who relocated a decade ago to the Los Angeles area, Fran Siegel has a longstanding interest in the growth and form of urban centers. In the eight drawings in Plans and Interruptions, Siegel’s current exhibition at Lesley Heller Workspace, the artist reflects on how the history of population movements in and around a particular city determines its manifestation in geographical space and, in turn, the myriad ways that that predominantly horizontal spatial manifestation might lend itself to pictorial representation.In her drawings, Siegel works with familiar materials: pen, pencil, colored pencil, paint and pigment on paper and mylar. Her procedure involves a tremendous amount of collage, so that cut edges and the gaps between them—where the wall often is visible—are crucial compositional devices. In fact, it is useful to consider this work drawing as composition, since the way the pieces are knit together is fundamental to their significance.

Siegel has recently begun to use the cyanotype process, the distinctive blue of which, in a wide range of values, pervades the exhibition. The densest concentration of it is in the commanding Overland 16 (2013), which is 96 by 140 inches, one of an ongoing series of large drawings derived from aerial photographs of LA’s amorphous sprawl. Like its ostensible subject (and in keeping with the other drawings in this remarkable series), Overland 16 is an aggregation of bits and pieces, a collection of discrete parts that are stitched, stapled, glued and laced together, tab-and-slot fashion, to form a provisional, inarguable whole. There are glimpses of anonymous buildings, vacant lots, parking lots and, inevitably, the distant mountains. In the midst of this complex visual texture, a serpentine curve—representing a freeway, one supposes—makes its way from the bottom edge through the middle ground, fragmenting and disappearing as if into a hazy distance among the drawing’s many component shards and facets.

The press release declares that other drawings relate to the cities of Siena, Havana, Manta and Genoa; I surmise that the last is embodied in Navigation (2010-11) 116 x 116 x 4 inches. At the bottom center—like the trunk of a family tree—is a rendering of a Renaissance sailing ship under oar power, as it would be when leaving or entering a port. Elsewhere in Navigation, the graphical vocabulary alludes to diagrams, maps, flow charts and the like; but the informational value of such documents is subsumed in a whirl of overlaps, shadows, incomplete tracings, graftings, and translucent overlays.

 The viewer’s compulsion to decipher such clues is rewarded by Siegel’s assiduous encoding of them. A tangle of tendrils, possibly route maps or boundary markers, appears near the top of the cruciform Tre (2012), 132 x 132 inches; variations on a roughly circular shape (dome? amphitheater? caldera?) appear below, along with hundreds of other notations of equally elusive significance. What comes across beyond any doubt, however, is an idea—and a feeling—about the city as an organism made of interpenetrating systems of which the design, placement, function, and development continually, inexorably change. Siegel tells me that every graphical feature of these elaborate drawings, and the way those details are assembled, is informed by her research into the location. That is easy to believe, as the specifics feel textual—not whistled up out of thin air, not improvised, but rooted in history and arranged according to some kind of plan—more-or-less rational, always evolving, endlessly interrupted.

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University Galleries, Florida Atlantic University
Boca Raton, Florida
February 5 to March 23, 2013

The exhibition was shown in two parts at:
Lesley Heller Workspace
54 Orchard Street
New York City, 212-410 6120

Asya Geisberg Gallery
537B West 23rd Street
New York City, 212-675-7525
April 24 to May 24, 2013

We may one day recall 2013 as The Year That Abstract Painting Came Back. Historical exhibitions have appeared at the Museum of Modern Art (Inventing Abstraction, 1910-1925) and the Guggenheim (Art of Another Kind: International Abstraction and the Guggenheim, 1949–1960), as well as Loretta Howard Gallery (DNA: Strands of Abstraction) and Cheim & Read (Reinventing Abstraction: New York Painting in the 1980s). The year has also been a notable one for contemporary shows: Paul Behnke at Kathryn Markel, Jennifer Riley at Allegra La Viola, Thomas Nozkowski at Pace, to name a few, with Sharon Louden coming to Morgan Lehman in October. And that’s just considering New York.

Add to this list POUR, an exhibition that showed simultaneously at Asya Geisberg Gallery and Lesley Heller Workspace after originating at Florida Atlantic University. Curated by Elisabeth Condon and Carol Prusa, POUR established that the desire for good abstract form, achievable by way of liquid paint, is a perennial concern. In Chaim Potok’s 1972 book My Name is Asher Lev, abstract painter Jacob Kahn says to Asher, “I think people will paint this way for a thousand years.” We’re well on our way. Moreover, we seem to be doing so having settled a debt to Clement Greenberg. Greenberg goes largely unmentioned in the catalogues, criticism, and conversations surrounding the aforementioned exhibitions. Helen Frankenthaler’s name comes up in the POUR catalogue (this is a show about pouring paint after all), but so does Rubens and Chinese scroll painting. Finally, we can have a show of abstract painting in New York without it turning into a referendum on Greenberg. When someone turns it into one anyway, as John Yau did on behalf of Thomas Nozkowski in his March 2013 review in Hyperallergic, it sounds dated and beside the point. Greenberg has taken his rightful place in the cosmos and we can choose to navigate by his light, or not.

It now seems possible to draw a line from Carrie Moyer’s lesbian activism to her formidable shape-making, and think it only natural. Moyer, who was made a Guggenheim fellow this year, co-founded Dyke Action Machine! in the early ’90s and designed the group’s  agitprop. Her painted images have long combined elements from political posters, Tantra drawings, and a vocabulary of abstraction derived from Morris Louis. The last of these influences has come to predominate her work in recent years, as she keeps experimenting with painting techniques. While plenty of splatters remain on her canvases in the state in which they landed there, Moyer seems to have enlarged certain incidents of gravity and viscosity until they form flat, opaque arcs with the graphic fortitude of industrial signage. For added visual heft, she paints in subtle shadows around the edges of some of these shapes. The total effect is both delicate and arresting.

The “pour,” as presented by Condon and Prusa, takes one of two forms. The first is the revealing pour, the one with which we’re familiar from Jackson Pollock – paint as the manifestation of itself, the literal trail of evidence made by the action of colored liquid on a support. There is a distinctive grid, irregular and rounded, that appears when you tilt a canvas with a dripping swath of paint on it along one axis and then across it. This drip-grid appears in work by both Jackie Saccocio and Carolanna Parlato. Saccoccio, working handsomely in a vein first opened by Jules Olitski, is emptying out otherwise busy abstractions with a high-value, neutral color poured generously into the center.  She uses the drip-grid to integrate the figure and the ground, by breaking up this central shape at the edge and allowing the more saturated colors there to show through. Parlato, in contrast, uses  the drip-grid as a design element. In Drizzle (2009), areas of viridian, fuschia, and scarlet have been given the same treatment, one layer after the next, and she tops them off with a lemon-over-green coat that is itself allowed to drip, locking in a diagonal that composes the canvas. Angelina Gualdoni used an analogous technique to create Opening the Gates (2011), but the paint was tilted every which way, and she dosed the broad, black pathways thus formed with chalky violet while they were still wet. The interpenetration of the two colors results in luminosity.

The other form taken is the hiding pour, in which the force of the falling paint removes evidence of the human hand from the application, leaving the viewer to wonder how the shapes got there. David Reed’s No. 611(2010) is painted in oil and alkyd on polyester, using dripping, squeegeeing, and masking of translucent paint on the slick surface, producing an abstract calligraphy of blue across an elongated six-foot rectangle. Carrie Yamaoka’s works on reflective mylar, coated with colored gloss that has been allowed to pool across the supports’ bending surface, are so limpid and so devoid of evidence of their manufacture that they may as well have come from outer space. Roland Flexner’s moody, diminutive landscapes of liquid graphite form from controlled accidents of surface tension on paper. Their appearance is a wondrous collision of an abstract contact print with a Sung Dynasty forest scene. Ingrid Calame’s Pop-bright whirls and scrapes of enamel on aluminum may look improvised, but in fact are the product of meticulous tracing in the urban environment.

Later in My Name is Asher Lev, Asher and Jacob conclude a satisfying day of painting with a walk on the beach. Gazing at the sea, Jacob remarks, “Sometimes I think all water is blood. It is a strange feeling.” No more about it is said. Among painters, no more would need to be said. But I might elaborate this way: liquidity is vitality. The artists of POUR have made this beautifully clear.

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It’s always a call for celebration when painter Ron Gorchov’s watercolors are the sole subject of an exhibition. A show of new works on paper, cunningly titled “Curated by Watercolors,” will open Sunday, September 8 at Lesley Heller Workspace. Gorchov’s titles suggest a personal world informed  by Greek mythology, lyric poetry, and ’30s big band music. The attention to surface as a unique support is as evident here as it is in his majestic, saddle-shaped canvases. His technique of mounting the paper so it is not flush with the wall allows each watercolor a curling life of its own. Gorchov’s choice of color is at once hot, dark, and mysterious; lemon yellow, forest green, neon green, and deep cobalt blue are the fruits of hard won victories. Many of the watercolors, like the oil paintings, flirt with the pictorial, describing a twins in space motif, a dance between two parts that once were whole.  Keep dancing, Ron.

Ron Gorchov: Curated by Watercolors at Lesley Heller Worskspace will be on view till October 13, 2013. Lesley Heller is located at 54 Orchard Street in the Lower East Side. The gallery is open Wednesday to Saturday 11 AM to 6PM, and on Sunday from 12 to 6PM. Telephone: 212-410-6120

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1. Aurora Borealis from Abisko National Park in Sweden. Turn off the sound.

2.  Photos by the Hubble

3. Snowflakes.

4. Angelo Plessas’ Mirage Machines. (Hint: cursor)

5. This video by Steve Roggenbuck is as offensive as it is gorgeous. You will not regret watching the whole thing.

6.  Community Weblog, kinda like wiki for blogs

7. Occupy Wall Street, which is still active. Occupy Sandy was and remains an amazing mutual aid movement helping those devastated by Sandy. The Rolling Jubilee is a very interesting debt elimination experiment. Keep you eyes peeled for more projects to come.

9. Vi Hart’s Youtube channel.  This is actually one of my favorite bookmarks and I go back to it regularly.  Vi Hart is a smart, sassy, super creative math grrrrl. I love everything she does.

10, Facebook!  Everyone’s Facebook experience is dictated by the “friends” they manage to collect. From activists to artists to critics to writers to eccentrics, these people are not posting kitty photos or reporting on their laundry. Go ahead and friend them.

Jenna Pope, Photoactivist

Jerry Saltz, art critic

Damien Crisp, Artist/Writer/Activist

(Also by Damien Crips http://dthtxt.wordpress.com/)

Baratunde Thurston, writer,

Dina Seiden, Writer/Performance Artist

Oliver Wasow, Artist

Simon Beck, Snow artist

The post Snowflakes, Auroras and Facebook Friends: Bookmarked… appeared first on artcritical.

September 7 – October 16, 2011
54 Orchard St, between Hester and Grand
New York City, 212 410 6120

Loren Munk’s paintings constitute a borough-based history of art.  They are diagrammatic representations of New York neighborhoods that chart, plot and intermingle the locations of artists and galleries, past and present, giving equal company to those who had enjoyed conspicuous recognition and those who have been largely overlooked. These painting impress upon the viewer how little is known or preserved about the social, personal side of art history. Like historical or canonical accounts, no painting is truly, objectively comprehensive or definitive. Munk’s artistic, social and geographic networks reflect his own personal movements through the city, and his ongoing research into the New York-based contemporary art community and its history.

Applying heavy, brightly colored paint, Munk layers dense clusters of research culled from diverse sources, whether historical texts or his personal interactions in the current scene. Revising and editing on the canvas, he lists artist names and addresses, establishing loose and unexpected associations and a compressed sense of time—for example, oftentimes Munk places a well-known artist next to a lesser-known artist who lived generations apart. He decentralizes a singular institutional or art historical narrative, if one has existed. In What Manhattan Makes, Brooklyn Takes (2004-6), you observe that Dorothy Miller (MoMA’s first curator), Tom Wesselman and Lee Krasner all at one time lived within a three-block span on East 9th Street in Manhattan. Through the compression of conceptual and cartographical space, Thomas Nozkowski’s Hester Street and April Gornik and Eric Fischl’s Greene Street addresses appear adjacently, even though geographically separated by roughly one mile and two neighborhoods.

The more time I have spent with this selection of paintings, the more curious I am about the significance of repeated artists for Munk: Donald Judd, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Pat Passlof and April Gornik/Eric Fischl, to name a few, all caught my eye a few times across a suite of nine paintings. Based on conversations I’ve had with Munk— in his studio and at art openings)— Donald Judd is one artist in particular whose work, writing and life have influenced him. Like Judd who helped shape with his writings what became known as the Minimalist movement, Munk is melding in his paintings his personal aesthetic and art historical perspective , advocating both the present and the past.

Supporting the social and anthropological interests in Munk’s paintings are his unflagging YouTube reports on the art scene, presented under the pseudonym James Kalm.  For nearly a decade, again as Kalm, in his column “Brooklyn Dispatches” at The Brooklyn Rail, he has chronicled the coalescence (and recently self-declared dissolution) of the Williamsburg neighborhood renaissance of artists and galleries. Munk/Kalm’s kaleidoscopic dissection in multiple media call attention to ways in which arts communities are built, function, migrate and fall apart—and how they intertwine with social, political and economic agendas in their endemic communities.

Loren Munk’s paintings do not clinch or declare any final art historical pronouncements, but rather allow these associations, opportunity for modification, adjustment and reconsideration. I can imagine him easily adding more entries on these paintings at any time in the future. These additions would only enrich the paintings further, adding more layers of history and narrative until no more pictorial space remains because a painting by Loren Munk, like the record of history, is in constant state of revision.

The post The Map Man: Loren Munk at Lesley Heller appeared first on artcritical.

April 13 to May 15, 2011
54 Orchard Street, between Hester and Grand streets
New York City, 212 410 6120

Imagine if you could speak several languages, switching from one to another to suit your thoughts, inside of a single sentence. You might begin in English for the sake of clarity, then change to Chinese for an apt metaphor, then over to French for color and texture, then to Italian for a bit of structure. Elisabeth Condon can do this, in paint.

Hello, Yellow (2010), a four-foot-wide canvas built around pourings of lemon, gold, and umber,  evokes the history of stained abstraction, Frankenthaler and Louis especially. But certain passages look tie-dyed. They upset the reference and move it into psychedelic territory. Upon them she has painted a stack of gray shapes, outlined in darker gray, through which a white ribbon runs.  It is as if she took mountains from a Giotto, paved them, and divided them with a cubist roadway, going nowhere except into itself. The scene is dotted with precise squiggles. Neil Welliver might have doodled such shapes as he recalled a long day spent tracing.

This painting shouldn’t work. It’s a pastiche of four styles. The colors are weird. The abstract portions won’t settle into their abstractness, and the figurative portions don’t amount to anything recognizable. It looks like it was painted by committee. And yet the painting is working. If there’s a committee, it must be made up of gifted artists, each the product of a different training, living together as an integrated whole inside of Condon. Hello, Yellow rolls over  my objections like a tractor.

Condon’s work takes in the landscape – whatever form it takes,  real or imagined.  Paintings hide beneath paintings in each painting. The surfaces build from stain to film to opacity. The imagery crosses from east to west coast, and east to west hemisphere, with the ease and speed of ideas.

The artist is a voyager. Schooled in Los Angeles and Chicago, based in Brooklyn, her itinerary has included China, Spain, Miami, Tampa, and Saratoga Springs in the last two years. It seems that everywhere she stopped, a local influence took up residence in her psyche. By the time she returns to the studio, they all want to come out at once. Thus Autumn Sprinkles (2010) looks at first blush like a straightforward forest scene from upstate New York, until one notices the fan shapes and axe-cut strokes that typify Chinese landscapes. And then there are rose, rust and peach oblongs sprinkled on the surface. They’re not attached to the tree. They’re not attached to anything. They have escaped from the early Op paintings of Larry Poons and are now fluttering all over the sky to remind us that this is art after all.

Contemporary art comes with a promise of freedom. The old narratives are dead, say its spokesperson-philosophers. The categories are as blended as the breeds of street dogs. All things are possible, and few are impermissible. But it is hard to use all of that freedom. Constraints are helpful because they narrow the infinitude of choices an artist has to make. This is what I admire most about Woke Up to Find it Missing (2011). If it has constraints, it’s hard to say what they are apart from the six-foot rectangle. Over a luscious background of pastel stains, Condon has painted mountains. These mountains are striped orange and white like traffic barrels. She allows darker stains, indigo and violet, to come into the foreground. At the bottom edge the shapes flatten out into opaque areas of black, purple, and brown. It is a surrealism and Pop sandwich between two slices of lyrical abstraction, served on a hard-edge plate. The complexity ought to result in a disastrous mélange, but it’s lovely. The colors are pleasing. The composition holds. It makes no sense, it may even be silly, but the defiance of explanations only adds to the magic.

No less surprising is Yaddo Trees, Autumn (2010). From a hill of blue splashes, spattering the white canvas of the lower right corner, a tree grows. Its last leaves of the season are cranberry red, each with a blobby outline of cotton-candy pink. The sky is teal behind a mountain of stained green. The sky is a more substantial layer of paint than the mountain, which tells us something about the poetic nature of this world. While in residence at Yaddo in 2010, Condon met Jane Hirshfield. “They lie / under stars in a field,” Hirshfield once wrote about green striped melons. “They lie under rain in a field. / Under sun. / Some people / are like this as well – / like a painting / hidden beneath another painting.”

Please click HERE to read Jane Hirshfield’s poem in full

The post Paintings That Shouldn’t Work: Elisabeth Condon appeared first on artcritical.

March 2 – April 3, 2011
54 Orchard Street, between Hester and Grand streets
New York City, (212) 410-6120

Daniel Wiener’s sculpture is ugly beautiful.  Using a pigmented, self-hardening epoxy, Wiener engineers a surprisingly sensuous range of feels. Alongside this plastic’s familiar sheen, Wiener cultivates a thumbed juiciness more usual to Plasticine, the matte polish of old bowling balls, and a raspy grit produced when half-dry masses are torn apart. Most compelling of all, Wiener wrestles a sort of vividly colored cloisonné into his obdurate, constipating material, expressing the painterly skin as much as the sculptural bones.

Indeed, works with predominant flat surfaces become as pictorial as tattoos.  In the wall piece “Flame Meander” (2010), inset blocks of red and green marbling confer something of the psychedelic decorum of Chinese dragonry on a black loop-de-loop with ragged gold border, while “Sagging into the Space Between Slats” (2011) is a bench-like floor piece whose buffed, eye-popping seat top is inlaid with the concentric targets of a toxic caterpillar.

“Sagging” is exceptional in this group of works in going so far toward goth, sci-fi furniture, as if Wiener wanted to be the Nakashima of interplanetary drug lords;  few of Wiener’s design imperatives, natural, functional, or cultural, play out even so lopsidedly as that.  Normally, any flat surface, repeating rhythm, or representational impulse frays into ropes of twisted color, or breaks apart, or bends away into skeptical curvatures of narrative.  In “Harlequin Poison” (2011), for example, a projecting bedside shelf twists down into prosthetic paws, and forward into red ribbons of looping, Art Nouveau frog’s tongue.  The law of Wiener’s exploratory, morph-or-die universe is the reverse of our inertial one: objects never remain at rest.

Like fresco, epoxy dictates by drying. Against this unforgiving constraint, Wiener draws up, at most, only vague plans –– but there is much method to his improvisation.  Most of his forms clearly begin as laminations of vividly contrasting strata of color, which are then deformed, faulted, or rolled into ribbon-like conglomerates.  When these masses are sawn through after hardening, like geodes, or rolled out to slabs and sliced while soft, like pastry dough, complexly banded patterns are made manifest in cross section.  Color-packed discs and panels of kindred motif can thus be cleaved from a single body and stockpiled for later insertion.  With this process, Wiener achieves, as I’ve said, a kind of rhythmic, cloisonné effect that can fascinate in the manner of fractals, cauliflower brain scans, ornamental overload, and state-of-the-art geometric abstraction –– as filtered, that is, through the melting optics of a hippie-candle, with all due pathos.  Not that Wiener’s work drips with lassitude; on the contrary, it is restless in its artistic vacillation.  This restlessness, this pathos of vision unattained, can seem funny enough, but it is ultimately the grave pathos of entropy.

“Making is Thinking” is the title of a wall piece in which that text is painstakingly, if shakily, inlaid in a raw gnarl of greenish matter; the phrase also serves as the title of the show, and must be meant as a kind credo –– but a tenuous one, given how the letters are nearly crushed in their matrix.  Still, it is a nakedly unironic, conscientious objection to quick takes and eye candy.  When “thinking” gets physically “made,” shit happens –– all manner of accident, in other words, much of it useful and some of it astonishingly beautiful.

Wiener is rarely so literal about the necessary impossibility of follow-through as in the title piece, but something along the lines of struggling not to change horses mid-stream is very much the structural drama in all the works –– some big, brutish gesture of almost comical excess is produced to support, or hold off, exquisite small-scale fiddling.  The giant clam form of “Ruckus” (2008), orange with streaks of toothpaste teal, looks like it was partially flattened by traffic.  It seems all speed and impact.  But look closer and one gets lost in tightly orchestrated episodes of efflorescent growth in the nooks and crannies, as small reef forms gorgeously reclaim Wiener’s calculated wreck.

“Maiden Queen and the Angel Mild” (2008) cements a large, whitish ball like a stegosaurus egg to a rising armature of black, twisting vines.  The segregation of light and dark, smooth and gnarly, endomorphic and exomorphic is as programmatic as Wiener gets –– and inevitably, his ethos of industrious neurosis sets in where the opposites join: cusps and tendrils of the vine cannot but penetrate the egg, which unshell-like, goops in reaction.  Climbing among the vines are more cusps for fruiting bodies, precisely rendered; empty cusps might trap insects or furnish brackets for candles.  At the top is a roughly torn agglomeration that suggests a goat skull with devilish, twisted horns –– an angel mild only by Blake’s revaluation of values, or maybe Linda Bengliss’s: ugly beautiful.

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