September 6 to October 6, 2018
535 West 22nd Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, dcmooregallery.com

In a 2013 interview with Robert Kushner, Barbara Takenaga relayed her process in nautical terms: “I feel like I am on this really giant ocean liner, and I’ve got this little tiny steering wheel, and I’m turning and turning and turning it.” In this analogy, she describes the shifting directions and momentum through both individual paintings and her entire body of work. She’s also talking about navigating between control and the changes she courts to explore new territory.

This image was on my mind viewing Takenaga’s new show, “Outset,” at DC Moore, her fifth with the gallery. The ship seems straightened now, leaner, and many familiar motifs appear to be thrown overboard. The tarmacs of Nebraska are long behind her, horizon lines have all but disappeared, and with them allusions to her home state skies, suburban hallucinatory wonder, and a certain kind of intentional goofiness. Ahead is somewhere unknown, and acceleration is palpable.

As with earlier work, we are flying, floating, or dreaming through hyperconsciousness, o maybe all of these at once. References to explosions, ecstasy, space travel, aerial views of drifting land masses, and microbiology are well established elements of Takenaga’s vocabulary, as is her ability to deliver this iconography with masterful, exquisite clarity. The surface of the painting is a statement in itself– her signature palette of steel blue-gray delivered in taut flawless satin, a sheet touched and frosted everywhere with iridescence, sometimes in fuschia.

Takenaga plays through octaves of weight. Tiny brushstrokes, hairlines, and rendered dots of white are made with the lightest touch, skittering across a heavy lava flow of poured and puddled acrylic. She knows her chemistry. Untold hours of attention, focus and devotion to her craft are haptically present, the paintings suggest strenuous concentration and, like mediation, allow the viewer to escape the pressures of time and distraction. Takenaga has practiced and honed these qualities through decades, and now she thoroughly owns them.

As Takenaga has recently been categorized as a “mature” artist, like the battered ship and stormy skies of Thomas Cole’s allegorical “The Voyage of Life: Manhood,” she seems to be veering into deep and confrontational turbulence, ready to relinquish some control, take more chances and partner with chaos. The “black holes” of Aeaea (all works, 2018) and Hello rip into the center of her compositions and in this body of work she not only allows them to stay, she cultivates them into the strongest figure-ground relationships in her work to date. Black centered pours cover a third of these two canvases, and the backgrounds have the least amount of pattern. Takenaga embellishes the pour in Hello outlining the shape with thin white and yellow lines, a kind of halo. While working on Aeaea she noticed a long accidental drip along the right side—an outlier of iridescent insect-leaf green—which she incorporated it into the composition. The black shape stretches from left to right, and pulls to all four directions, vaguely figurative and certainly muscular. Delicate Japanese patterns spring forth to inhabit its wildness with waves of fish scales or mountains, a net of pattern that gently tames and lands the form into the blue-gray ground. Her boldness is confirmed in Manifold 5, a sprawling five-paneled painting suggestive of rupture and emotional separation. An immense phallic ellipse divides a pitch black void. Takenaga is unabashedly poetic here and invites, or rather incites, the viewer’s imagination to follow hers. She riffs wonderfully on associations between Japanese screens and patterns, candles floating on the Ganges, submarines, and Whistler’s nocturnes.

As a young artist Takenaga found inspiration in Japanese prints, patterns, Indian painting and mandalas, as well as the work of Sol Lewitt, Eva Hesse, and Yayoi Kusama. It’s interesting to note that while Takenaga was a student at the University of Colorado, Boulder during the mid 1970s, the pattern focused Criss-Cross artists’ collective was still very active. In an interview with Leslie Wayne for “Two Coats of Paint,” Takenaga lets us in on a personal dimension embedded in her use of patterns: “References to my grandmother were coded into mountain shapes … Lots of hiding and coding. The whole series of dot mandalas from 2001-2009 were about my mother, sliding away into space.” In her new show, paintings like Serrulata spell it out for us in rhythmic, ebullient language. Sumi ink-like splotches on a shell pink ground make a koan of cherry blossoms and time, and like the work of another great student of Japanese art, Roland Flexner, the painting coalesenses before our eyes. Taking a cue from the vision of time revealed to Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita, Takenaga has seen her universe blow open, and she’s taking action.

The post Sliding Away Into Space: Barbara Takenaga at DC Moore appeared first on artcritical.

Comedian Louis CK points out, with his characteristic ethical generosity and pragmatism, “A lot of people wonder what happens after you die. Lots of things happen after you die — just none of them include you.” The recent death of On Kawara ends the brief but significant line of a life and of an exceptionally powerful artistic contribution. Human life is a rarer accomplishment than most of us, living day-to-day, sometimes remember. Most of the world is uninhabitable. Probably far greater than 99% of the entire Universe is completely inhospitable to life. Figuring out how to organize the mind and the body into some kind of harmonious, eudaimonic state is an ongoing struggle. Just getting up each day can feel like a victory. And, after any life extends for its short span, it ends. Thereafter everything else continues in its absence. That someone lives and is known at all, is momentous.

Kawara was 81 years old. Born in Japan in the midst of the 20th Century’s great upheavals, he moved to New York in 1965 where he remained until his death last month. Early in his career he showed figurative paintings, but moved toward conceptual art by the early 1960s. He exhibited his work regularly at Paula Cooper in New York, Yvon Lambert in Paris, and other galleries from the late 1960s onward and was included in one of the first large surveys of conceptual art, “Information,” at the Museum of Modern Art in 1970. There’s a permanent installation of his work at Dia:Beacon and a large retrospective to be exhibited at the Guggenheim early next year. His New York gallery, David Zwirner, announced his death on Thursday.

Kawara had a group of friends and colleagues, but he was known for being retiring. He emerged alongside conceptual artists such as Lawrence Weiner and Joseph Kosuth, a close friend. Kawara shared their interest in language and its ability to frame or shape human perception, to describe and to conceal. Only bits and pieces of his life are available, recounted by those who knew him and as documented in works such as his postcards and telegrams. It is likely that he was influenced by American and Japanese fluxus artists who helped develop and formalize (if that’s the right word) mail art in the 1950s and ‘60s. Correspondence evinces his familiarity with John Baldessari, John Evans, Sol LeWitt, Michael Sesteer, numerous curators and dealers in Minimalist and conceptual art of his era, and collectors. But such connections connote only a very hazy portrait of Kawara.

In his best-known series, Today, he documented every day of his life from January 4, 1966 (two days after his 33^rd birthday) until, perhaps, very recently. This project highlights the impossibility of notating one’s life adequately. Even as recording technology has improved and expanded the personal and professional archives of those living in the developed world, when a person dies that’s essentially it. Kawara never published any statements about his work, didn’t grant interviews, never gave speeches, never sat on public panel discussions, wasn’t photographed. And yet with the Today series he recorded his existence by making one painting for every day, consisting solely of a complete date, rendered in white on a monochromatic background. It’s a simple act that gets straight to the heart of a lot of complicated stuff about our existence, experience and finitude. The sum of his archive is paltry in comparison to any person’s life, to Kawara’s life indeed, with a minimum of context provided for each date: a newspaper clipping stored with the painting and a record in a diaristic calendar. But it’s a rich testimony. It was as fleetingly temporal as anything, though it remains.

A parallel to the Today series, Kawara’s One Million Years (1969) is comprised of a 20-volume book that lists the million years that preceded the work’s inception, as well as the million years that are in the process of succeeding 1996 A.D. The subtitle for the first set of volumes reads “For all those who have lived and died.” This is a small addition to the annals of billions of people, long lines of humanity stretching over horizons of space and time, the known and the unknown. And barely overlapping those two dates lays an infinitesimally small span of time — the life of Kawara himself. It was carefully cordoned off and diligently recorded, until it’s not there anymore.

In another series, Kawara sent telegrams to friends and acquaintances, simply proclaiming, “I AM STILL ALIVE.” That affirmation, in the face of the difficulty of being a person, both ontologically and just physically, is deeply affecting. They are messages filled with love and tenderness, a recognition that something mundane and approaching the miraculous has happened, again. Finitude, and our resistance to it at each moment, is something that Kawara noted with exceptional concision and dignity. That is now finished. His death marks both the succinctness of his work, and serves as its ultimate frame. It was the only trajectory the work could have ever taken, but that doesn’t make its sting any less acute. He was alive. That’s important. The world preceded him and time continues. We (other people) continue — an equally valuable recognition. But he will be missed.

The post On Kawara: January 2, 1933 – June 27, 2014 appeared first on artcritical.

February 8 to May 8, 2013

The Bertha and Karl Leubsdorf Art Gallery
68th Street at Lexington Avenue
New York City, 212-772-4991

This exchange took place well before the advent of the digital age, at a time when artists were still writing postcards, sending faxes, telegrams, and actually speaking on the phone. Open workalso makes clear the variety of ephemeral media being employed by Latin American artists, such as inexpensive chapbooks, Xeroxed papers, black and white video, documentary photographs, and diagrammatic drawings. Conceptual Art was proto-digital in that the ideas (software) for digital transmission were being disseminated before the hardware became available and the electronics became miniaturized. But herein lies an important caveat: that decade’s best work was much more complex and ambiguous than our contemporary digital reproductions and sound bites have led us believe. The fact is that many small publications and critical surveys on the subject, in one form or another, may not exist on-line, including out-of-print publications, carbon-copied essays, important letters, manifestos, symposia transcripts, audiotaped interviews, and videotaped panel discussions, events, and lectures. Just because Conceptual Art is about “ideas” does not mean that all the significant work exists in digital form, just as not everything digital even begins to approach the complexities of Conceptual Art.

Similar ground to this exhibition was covered in Global Conceptualism (1999) at the Queens Museum of Art, and Arte Conceptual Revisado (Conceptual Art Revisited), edited by Juan Vicente Aliaga and Jose Miguel Cortes (Universidad Politechnica de Valencia, 1990), which proved an invaluable resource in Spanish for artists in Europe and the Americas.  Open Work also establishes an important connection with the Centro de Arte y Comunicacion in Buenos Aires, founded in 1968 by Jorge Glusberg, in which New York conceptualists were often invited to work in Latin America. Each of these events occurred outside the mainstream of activity in northern Europe and the United States, and thus, preceded the more recent interest in researching conceptualism in various regions of Latin America as seen in this exhibition.

The exhibition title’s Open Work is taken from a term first used by Umberto Eco in 1962, in which he identifies a revisionist aesthetic based on ambiguity, participation, and information in contrast to Benedetto Croce’s insistence on intuition and expression introduced in his book, Aesthetic (1908). The curator Harper Montgomery cites Eco as a source for the exhibition given the semiologist’s interest in allowing viewers, listeners, and readers to complete the work. Sometimes participation is an explicitly political component of the artwork. A good example would be Victor Grippo’s installation Analogia IV (1972), a modest table with two settings, separated in black and white, in which the viewer may presumably share a lunch with a peasant worker. The Brazilian artist Antonio Dias’s taped grid with open spaces on the floor is more concrete. Titled Do It Yourself: Freedom Territory (1968), the grid designates a space without authority or control from the outside, obviously in reference to repressive political regimes in his country’s past.

Another Brazilian, Hélio Oiticica, presented his relaxation installation, Nests, at the Information exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1970.  We learn, however, in Jeremiah W. McCarthy’s essay in the exhibition catalog for Open Work that this work was, in fact, a last minute replacement for another film projection installation that he called an “Intentional opened visual-spectator act.” According to the essayist, Oiticica’s proposal was rejected because “the medium possessed subversive potential,” less in relation to the content of the film than in the artist’s rejection of using Olivetti’s formidable Information Machine. In addition to the actions of Cildo Meireles and Rafael Ferrer who questioned the relationship of high modernist art to late capitalism, the graphic works of Luis Camnitzer and Liliana Porter also embodied a strong opposition to the restrictive entitlements and alienating effects of the New York art scene.

The influence of North American artists, such as Sol LeWitt, Joseph Kosuth, Mel Bochner, and Donald Burgy, is present in a manner that offers a kind of necessary tension, while contributing an important advance to some of the more indigenous aspects present in the work of their South American counterparts. Here I am thinking of the time pieces and performances of David Lamelas, Eduardo Costa, Juan Downey, and Marta Minujin, all fascinating artists. In the context of this relationship between artists working in the two Americas, Open Work makes virtually everything—no matter what the work’s original intention – a series of stains by Ed Ruscha, for example – appear as a political statement. This is most likely how the artists included in this provocative and curiously intimate exhibition understood their work at the time – forty years ago– that, indeed, context is what determines content.

Editor’s Note: Robert C. Morgan, who is a regular contributor to artcritical, is the author of several significant studies in the area of global conceptual art, including Del Arte a La Idea: Ensayos sobre Arte Conceptual (Madrid: Akal, 2003); El Fin del Mundo del Arte y Otros Ensayos (Buenos Aires: Eudeba, 2000); and  El Artista en el Siglo XXI: La era de la Globalizacion (Buenos Aires: Eduntref, 2012).

The post In the Air: Conceptual Art, North and South appeared first on artcritical.

January 12 – February 18, 2012
NEW YORK: 980 Madison Avenue, 555 West 24th Street, 522 West 21st Street
Beverly Hills, London, Rome, Paris, Athens, Geneva, Hong Kong
http://www.gagosian.com

Damien Hirst’s The Complete Spot Paintings is a show of some three hundred works that for the next month has been given the unprecedented, exclusive, simultaneous run of each of Larry Gagosian’s eleven galleries around the world: a big-budget extravaganza in which a mega dealer fetes his mega star. In the age of the Art Career, shows like this one galvanize fans and detractors in equal measure.  But throw in the simplicity of these paintings—colored polka dots painted at regular intervals over a flat ground—and the fact that Hirst has only painted a handful of them himself, and we’re left with an ideological battleground for those who worship at the altar of conceptualism and those who disdain it.

Hirst’s ascent to stardom was rapid. Having organized the Freeze art show in London in 1988 while still in his early 20s, he attracted the attention and benediction of celebrity collector Charles Saatchi. Anointed one of the stars of the future in Saatchi’s Young British Artists exhibition in 1992, Hirst went on to represent Britain in the next year’s Venice Biennale and won the coveted Turner Prize in 1995. He has been a fixture of the art world ever since, scoring a major coup in 2008 when he eschewed his dealers entirely by bringing hundreds of new works to market directly through Sotheby’s. The exhibition, titled Beautiful Inside My Head Forever, reported nearly $200,000,000 in sales.

Known for such works as The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living—the dead shark preserved in a tank of formaldehyde that was recently on view at the Metropolitan Museum—and For the Love of God (a human skull covered in more than 8,600 diamonds) Hirst’s approach to art making is a torpedoes-be-damned embrace of the literal. Early works like In and Out of Love and A Thousand Years, meditations on life and death, actually contained the entire life cycle. In the former, caterpillars hatched into butterflies, which flew into and died upon sugar-coated canvases. In the latter, maggots were introduced into one of Hirst’s signature glass cases that contained the severed head of a cow. Feeding on the cow until they become flies, they flew around before being zapped by the electric insect trap than hung overhead. Offering the public super-condensed confrontations with mortality that were not even the purview of the farmer or outdoorsman, such works aspired to the grand theme of life and death in nature.

Taking the stuff of the natural history museum and bringing it into the art museum, Hirst has made the audacious bet that the literal can stand shoulder to shoulder with the metaphorical. Given the fun-house atmosphere that now pervades many major art museums, this bet seems like a good one. In the past two years in New York alone, one could slide between the floors of one museum, play in a bamboo tree house on the roof of another, and see the entire output of an artist hang, mobile-like, from the atrium of a third. In such company, it is not unreasonable to think of Hirst’s stable of pickled animals as perfect emblems of the zeitgeist.

But if Hirst’s installations appeal in their directness, his paintings suffer from the same quality. For painting, like poetry, is an art dictated by metaphor. If Hirst’s innovation was to show the world that a dead shark has all the resonance and associative power of a dead shark, his failure has been the lack of recognition that painting can contain the resonance and associative power of so much more than paint. So, despite the many layers of celebrity, money and art world mega-wattage involved, the impact of the Gagosian show lies ultimately in one layer alone: that of the commercial house paint applied in perfect round circles by Hirst’s assistants.

Painted in high gloss against flat white grounds, variously colored polka dots decorate rectangular and circular canvases of all sizes. The dots vary in their colors and dimensions from painting to painting, ranging from one millimeter to five feet. One contains half a dot. Others have four. One has 25,781. The small ones, which bring to mind dot candy, are slightly more interesting than the large, which look like Twister game boards. Optically, one’s eyes tend to follow the darker dots, in a sort of futile attempt to find something to latch on to. While the futility of such a course is, apparently, part of the point, the lasting effect is akin to looking at a giant word search in which the letters don’t ultimately connect.

That these works contain none of the depths of meaning that we expect from serious painting is due entirely to the artist’s inability to work in the language of metaphor. This not-uncommon problem in contemporary painting is in its various guises evidenced by a misuse of the medium’s formal devices. In Hirst’s case it is pattern and color that have been employed as stylistic affectations without regard to meaning. Gagosian has touted the artist’s color sensibilities, and Hirst’s quote on color is offered as a sort of raison d’etre for the paintings:

I was always a colorist, I’ve always had phenomenal love of color . . . I mean, I just move color around on its own. So that’s where the spot paintings came from—to create that structure to do those colors, and do nothing. I suddenly got what I wanted. It was just a way of pinning down the joy of color.

But using color does not make one a colorist any more than banging on a piano makes one a composer, and if the spot paintings are a manifestation of Hirst’s love of color, it seems a chaste love indeed. Ultimately, the paintings miss out on the profound emotional resonance of the effective use of color as metaphor. Thus, despite his candied hues, his employment of color to do nothing situates Hirst far nearer the official salon painters of the 19th Century than the Fauves.

As for Hirst’s other big formal device, it was only a matter of time before pattern got the super-flat treatment. Like the nude, pattern is a subject to which painters of each generation return, perhaps because it provides a historical benchmark by which the painterly tradition is both linked and updated. Those contemporaries who have used pattern to some interesting effect—Sol LeWitt, Sean Scully, Mary Heilman—have employed it the way Picasso used African art, as a motif that strips painting bare of all but its most fundamental, powerful components. For such painters, pattern offers neutral ground on which their true preoccupations play out.

The repeating patterns across LeWitt’s wall drawings become petri dishes out of which grow remarkably startling confrontations with optical perception. Repetition in a Lewitt allows for a mathematical basis by which to judge perception, the way regularly spaced trees or furrowed fields provide similar benchmarks for our experience of scale, space, distance, and even color, in nature. Scully, too, takes the strict confines of pattern as the basis for work that transcends its constraints. His subject is no more the repeated rectangle than Cezanne’s is the dishcloth. The ways in which his rectangles push up against one another, with subtle modulations within their volumes and upon their edges, give tremendous variety to his work.

The little something that does happen when the eye takes in Hirst’s vast fields of colored dots is more akin to looking at a snowy TV screen than a LeWitt. Such effects are more common in Hirst’s round paintings, where the vagaries of trying to keep concentric circles of dots evenly spaced lead to irregularities. That the eye can, in such cases, believe that it is traveling along one path and be thrown unexpectedly off on a tangent is the one and only interesting optical experience of this work.

Time and again, Hirst has pushed at the boundaries of the art world and found them to be exceptionally flexible. His big gambit, that an actual presentation of life and death would hold its own with mere allusions, has made him rich and famous. If, as Saatchi has predicted, Hirst’s name will be mentioned alongside those of Pollock and Warhol in the history books of the next century, it will not, however, be on the strength of “The Complete Spot Paintings,” which misuse the formal devices, and miss out on the real powers, of the medium of painting.

The post Not Dotty About Damien: Hirst’s Spot Paintings Go Global appeared first on artcritical.

Perry Rubenstein Gallery
New York City
212-627-8000

January 10 to February 16, 2008

In the process that Ernst Gombrich dubbed “making and matching” the painter makes a naturalistic picture by gradually matching his representation to the visual world. Speaking, analogously, of “successive approximation” this show presents five artists who in stages achieve some desired degree of accuracy in their problem-solving. In Gombrich’s favorite eras, there were immensely productive links between science and visual art. Uccello and Piero della Francesca drew essentially upon the new Renaissance developments in perspective. And Constable and his contemporaries were fascinated with optics. But nowadays most visual artists are more interested in exploring the implications of mathematics or the sciences, which they understand very subjectively, than in making truthful representations.

In Tauba Auerbach’s video Telephone (2007) a phrase is whispered from person to person around in a small circle, so that it is transformed by the time it comes back to the starting point. Following the subtitles, you see the stages in which the original words change, with only traces of their original sense preserved. And her The Answer/Wasn’t Here (Anagram VII) (2007) writes out those words in varied colors running left to right, then right to left from top to bottom. Mike Quinn’s March Mad Addition Descent (2007) shows 31 framed panels about New York Times’ coverage of basketball, with these collages climbing up the wall in a graceful arc, as if mapping the trajectory of a ball heading towards the hoop. Like the athletes whose feats he chronicles, Quinn thus shows the pleasures and fatigue of pursuing an obsession. Robin Rhode’s Untitled, Bottles (2005) is a ten minute, nine second video showing him drawing bottles on a wall. He’s dressed informally, drawing freehand and working outdoors, but his meticulous procedure has obvious affinities with those involved in the creation of sinopia, the fresco underdrawings of Renaissance masters. So too, does his Shell Drawing 2 (2007), an all-over image, made employing a shell with charcoal and spray paint on paper. These young artists are joined by two grand senior figures: Sol Lewitt, whose Pyramide MH 13 (1991) approximates that ideal shape, and Daniel Buren, whose Peinture Acrylique Blanche sur tissu raye blanc et vert (1972) applies acrylic on a white and green striped canvas.

Too often group exhibitions, especially those that mix together young artists and famous figures, fail to reveal elective affinities. This tight small show, however, revealed that these nine very different looking works of art all shared a genuine concern with successive approximation. And in doing that, it also displayed the totally unexpected relationship of these contemporary works of art with the traditions of old master painting. Just as Cimbue and Constable, whose images are so different, do making and matching, so for Auerbach, Buren, LeWitt, Quinn and Rhode one act of making follows another, to quote from the gallery handout, “until the unknown becomes known, until the work reveals itself.” Gombrich was very often criticized for his lack of sympathy with contemporary art. How fascinating, then, to see that what he identified as this mainline European tradition continues. With one interesting change: none of the five artists in exhibition create naturalistic images. Where earlier painters used successive approximation to make figurative images, Auerbach, Buren, LeWitt, Quinn and Rhode are interested in what might be called the poetry of visual problem solving.

The post Successive Approximation: Tauba Auerbach, Daniel Buren, Sol Lewitt, Mike Quinn and Robin Rhode appeared first on artcritical.

PHONG BUI
Sarah Bowen until August 7 (210 N. 6th Street, between Driggs and Roebling Avenues, Brooklyn, 718-302-4517).

For all his extreme, at times arid, cerebrality, Sol LeWitt has a soft spot. The Minimalist who helped define “conceptual art” – literally, in landmark statements of the 1960s, as well as visually – Mr. LeWitt creates works that are severe, reductive, and anti-expressive. Yet the echt geometrician is nevertheless a sensualist at heart: Both the romantic and classic sides of his artistic personality come across in his latest murals, his largest to date, which show him both at his most sumptuous and rigorous.

Wall-drawing has been a key component of Mr. LeWitt’s output. Early in his career, they were part of the fashionable drive against the bourgeois, conventional easel picture: Rather than produce a commodity, the drawing was an event. The purchaser received an artwork intentionally balanced between idea and thing.

A trademark characteristic of a LeWitt wall drawing is that it be executed by a team of assistants. In place of anything so old-fashioned as a “touch,” what came from the master’s hand was a set of instructions. The usual results entailed serial blandness: dull, even-paced hatching or grids, and simple math.

But at a certain point Mr. LeWitt, famous for the stated ambition of making “art that’s smart enough to be dumb,” added to his aspirations the desire to make something he could show Giotto with pride. By the 1980s, a new sensuality set in. His murals became gaze-enveloping installations of saturated fresco color. His stand-alone drawings, often large-scale gouaches, admitted vaguely loose, wobbly lines and shapes, with a gestural or at least vaguely organic shape vocabulary.

The new murals, site-specific, or at least site-sensitive – they fill the available walls, at 16-1/2 feet high and 27 and 34 feet wide – have relentlessly matter-of-fact titles: “Wall Drawing #1166 Light to Dark (Scribbles)” and “Wall Drawing #1167 Dark to Light (Scribbles).” His titles are not merely descriptive but instructional. Made by a team of 15 assistants, these works are built out of loose, irregular scribbles. While this allows for some personality in the line, the fact of a whole platoon of scribblers curtails individual expressivity.

Density is tightly determined by the artist, who stipulates the number of layers and the H and B factor of the graphite pencils used within gridded-out circles. The light areas are barely touched with oscillating lines, giving the faintest sense of activity. The thickly clustered darker areas are animated by little flecks of whiteness where wall remains inviolate. The murals, placed at 90 degrees to one another, read like pulsating orbs: a giant eye and an exploding sun.

These huge works evoke a sense of mystery, not despite but because of the transparent, simple, contained way in which they are made. The squad of doodlers under Mr. LeWitt’s meticulous but trusting direction have lent their labor to a sublime mix of ego and egoloss, wildness and control. As such, the murals belong in a religious tradition of art as a picture of the universe. Can’t speak for Giotto, but I was impressed.

Mindful, perhaps, of its reputation as a valhalla of graying avant-gardists, PaceWildenstein has a summer group show of relative youngsters, many of them newcomers to the stable. Although not officially acknowledged, the selection seems a deliberate complement to Mr. LeWitt, if not an homage. Tim Hawkinson, for instance, an inventive humorist in the tradition of Jean Tinguely, has a giant eyeball whose iris is made from converging green disposable pens, some of them icons of design from the era of Mr. LeWitt’s entry upon the scene. It almost reads like a riff on the Minimalist’s new murals.

Mr. Hawkinson’s giant, 10-foot-by-12-foot “Studio Wall Drawing: JANUARY 2005; “ALL FROM ONE (PROTOTYPE ZIGGURAT)” PIECE FOR DIONYSIAC SHOW AT P” (2005), whose colon like squiggle-shapes also read as a sardonic comment on the purposive doodling of the LeWitts. “Nebulous” (2004), a floor piece of honeycomb structures in Scotch tape by Tara Donovan, a pair of untitled pigment ink-jet prints by Corban Walker of computer-generated circles – one proceeding from light to dark, the other from dark to light – an uncharacteristically broadbrushed gouache by James Siena, and an elegantly sparse Kiki Smith of bronze-cast doilies and poetic text all look too much like spin-offs of Mr. LeWitt to be a coincidence.

Mr. LeWitt isn’t the only artist in town presenting a modernist slant on frescos: Phong Bui, showing at Sarah Bowen in Williamsburg, has an installation that’s a kind of walk-through cubist collage. Mr. Bui is a legendary force in the art world, not least as the founder/publisher of the Brooklyn Rail, an art and literary journal of record.

In fact, he is so ubiquitous a figure on the scene and so active in many fields that you could be forgiven for assuming that actual art-making must now be his violin d’Ingres. Recent installations – “Night Flight #1” in last winter’s American Academy Invitational and now “Hybrid Carnival for St. Exupery #2” – put paid to that prejudice: Spunky, zestful, historically informed, and personally inventive, these genre-busters are in equal measure physically, formally, and emotionally ambitious.

The installation features boldly colored triangles which tease the walls with varying degrees of flatness, trompe-l’oeil depth, and actual, architectural protrusion. The experience evokes the heady, early years of Modernism: Along with Cubism, “Hybrid Carnival” is pleasantly haunted by Schwitters’s “Merzbau,” Tatlin’s “Monument to the Third International,” and Van Doesburg’s “Cafe Aubette,” making it a kind of Lascaux of the infancy of abstraction.

In addition to his potpourri of nursery and primary colors, Mr. Bui has added text and texture to his installation by playfully inscribing in florid, delicate lettering the names of all the historic figures and living art-world personalities that have influenced him: a gesture true to many people’s experience of the artist as an incorrigible name-dropper.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, July 21, 2005

LeWitt and Summer Group Show

Bui until August 7 (210 N. 6th Street, between Driggs and Roebling Avenues, Brooklyn, 718-302-4517).

The post Sol Lewitt and Summer Group Show at PaceWildenstein, Phong Bui at Sarah Bowen appeared first on artcritical.