May 21 to August 12, 2016
300 South Mission Road (at East 3rd Street)
Los Angeles, 323 406 2587

300 South Mission Road in Los Angeles seems a bit of an unlikely setting for Maccarone’s LA gallery. With graffiti-scarred warehouses and chain-link fence, long dusty blocks of faceless industrial buildings, and wildflower and weeds struggling at the edge of the pavement, the area seems a curious locus to find Paul Lee’s coolly introspective painted constructions.

A few short years ago there was not even the idea of having a gallery down here, much less the western outpost of an established New York dealer. Now there are several, and before you can say “demographic-shift” there will likely be dozens.

No surprise, then, when Lee presented a body of work radically different from what viewers have known, in his solo show “Layers For A Brain Corner.” The works in the show divide into two groups: four large wall drawings/sculptures, and constructions with painted tambourines affixed to shaped canvases, with their interplay of round and straight edges creating an optically vivid whole. These tambourine pieces may arguably reference the body, albeit obliquely.

In works such as Mind Mountain and Washcloth Weight (all works 2016) Lee uses a motif common to his oeuvre: bath towels, here purposed as drawing elements. Lee has excised everything but the towels’ edges, dyed them with black ink, and employed them as lines for his huge wall drawings, which he calls “negatives.” Terming these giant wall pieces “sculptures” is a stretch, though they do protrude from the wall at a towel’s thickness. Lee’s message from what he calls these “spills” and “tumbles” is clear: life is precarious, fault lines are everywhere, the center rarely holds.

Although Lee’s use of towels has previously been described as signifiers of queer culture by critics such as Holland Cotter and Robert Hobbs, the new work lives at the brink of pure abstraction. All that remains of what Cotter terms “the mechanisms of gay coding” is color; indeed, Lee’s palette is a key to his meanings, especially the wan lavenders, the cornflower yellows, the paler shades of white, off-white, dreary gray, deathly black. Lavender in particular has a long association with gay pride, one hypothesis being that it begins with masculine blue, to which is added some feminine pink. As for the evocation of corporeality, Lee told me, “The ‘skin’ of the canvas places them in a technological cultural context that is not immediately obvious. It’s a stand-in for the skin and the body. Sometimes skin is exposed, sometimes it’s hidden in color.”

In “Layers For A Brain Corner,” Lee is edging further away from the sculptural combines for which he is best known — works with bent soda cans, some imprinted with a photograph of a young man’s face, light bulbs, and string. He is moving in the direction of painting. “I was trying to narrow my parameters, so I can learn more,” he says.

“This was going to be a paintings show,” he continues, “but I wanted there to be a dialogue between these two bodies of work. I call these ‘touch paintings’ because tambourines are activated by touch. The first tambourines I made had rectangles on them, and I thought of them as being like touch screens. The touch screen is part of our daily life, you can touch an image and it can lead you to another. The image becomes a path. It’s a visual space that becomes active in a new way. I think it is a new space for painting to happen.”

The specter of the late Ellsworth Kelly hangs heavily over the work, especially in formal terms, though Lee also cites Kelly’s impact on culture. As one enters the gallery, the shaped pieces first seen seem to summon Kelly. “The things I get most from Kelly are that he took the landscape, reconfigured it, abstracted it, and made his own version of it; he made his own space,” Lee says. “I like that shadows are a source for some of his works, how he took something slight and made something glorious and celebratory of it. And I really enjoy that he was a gay artist, that his work speaks of liberation through abstraction.”

Asked about the meanings of the works’ titles, Lee admits to a somewhat random method: “I didn’t want to call them ‘Untitled’ anymore, because I didn’t want people to think they are just designs. So I’d look hard at them, and just put down whatever came into my head.” Sometimes the title lends a poetic flavor to the work, as in Very Slightly; in other cases he veers toward the literal. For example, a piece with a tambourine painted half black and half white, suggestive of a half-moon, is called Either Side Of The Night.

If Lee’s new work has roots in Kelly and in Josef Albers, its seed was planted by his mentor, Jack Pierson, and result from his encouragement. Pierson, like Kelly, has made a career of “taking something slight and making something glorious of it,” and the lesson has not been lost on Lee. Luck, and talent, and associations with influential and generous friends — having these elements is certainly as vital to an artist’s progress as their ability to draw and paint. But knowing when to shed the obvious reference points of his forbears, that is the trajectory point, the crucial moment, that not all artists attain.

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Rosy Keyser: The Hell Bitch at Maccarone
April 25 to June 6, 2015
630 Greenwich Street (at Morton Street)
New York, 212 431 4977

There are two great exhibitions of painting on view at Maccarone Gallery; one bucks a characteristic trend of its creator and the other is just plain bucking. Cecily Brown’s show, “The English Garden,” is a rarity for the intimate scale of the work. For an artist who generally puts up enormous canvases that dominate entire rooms, it is something special to see almost 30 paintings that could each be carried under arm. More so because these small paintings seem to casually maintain the artist’s robust visual swagger. Nearby, Rosy Keyser’s “The Hell Bitch” approximates in 13 new pieces what profane sanctification might look like. It is thrilling and violent, truly sublime in the most classical sense.

Both shows have a totally different genesis, though in a sense the works themselves share a process-oriented methodology. Brown’s show includes paintings made over a span of years — 2005 to 2014 — that were brought together thanks to the suggestion of Jim Lewis, an acclaimed writer and friend of the artist. By contrast, almost all of the works in “The Hell Bitch” were created in 2015, and in that sense represent a consciously developed body of work. The synchronicity is in the visual vocabulary of two artists who do not know when they begin a painting what it will come to be when it’s finished. Each uses her tools to greatly different ends, though both imbue their work with a sparky primal energy that could light up a forge.

Brown is a British artist, so it’s fair to assume she knows a thing or two about English gardens. The gallery’s take is that if her big paintings are considered landscapes, then these smaller works are gardens. It’s a nice analogy but it falls apart when we consider that English gardens are essentially idealized landscapes. But what’s impressive is the work, which is lush, busy, burning with kind of anti-gravity. The wonderful gestural quality of Brown’s characteristic full-body brushstrokes is carried out here with flicks of the wrist. Occasionally a figure or a face will emerge from the zippy mix — in one work there is a teepee — but more often the paintings hew to a firmer abstraction.

This is the case in two paintings I thought particularly good, Land of the Free, (2008) and Oh I do like to be beside the seaside (2014). Both seem to have been drawn from inside the eye of a tempest, with the paint laid out in a slashing multi-directional bend. The colors are many but the chromatic range is tight. A black-hole kind of density is established, as if the thin layers of oil paint were formerly room size and have been condensed to fit the diminutive frame. They seem at once very serious and utterly reckless, which is exactly how great art looks: daring and effortless, though we know implicitly that this is the illusion of a master.

“The Hell Bitch” is equally forceful and certainly more visceral than “The English Garden.” If Brown’s aesthetic calls to mind a raging storm, Keyser’s brave paintings suggest frozen moments of collision. Any given work might include many materials: rope, tarp, cork, fur, sand, twisted metal, gobs of sawdust, paint applied like handfuls of cement, and, of course, canvas on a wooden stretcher. As the gallery explains, all 13 paintings are born from the hell bitch Keyser keeps in her studio, a “living palate” that the artist uses to test out different ideas.

One may surmise that three basic formats are derived from this unseen matriarch. The first, and most exciting, are those in which the canvas is utterly torn and shredded, appearing to hang onto the stretcher bars like half-flayed skin. In a second range of works the canvas is less distressed, though Keyser’s boisterous brushwork gives the impression of a vehement visual outcry. The third format is a smart juxtaposition: angled metal welded into rectilinear designs and powder-coated in muted monotones. These pieces provide moments of comparative rest. They look like the framework for something, but what that might be is ungraspable. Stitched and stuffed plastic tarp bags dangle from these metal works and lend their otherwise machined aesthetic an organic quality.

Music for a Drowned World (2015) displays the finest qualities of the first format, which include an incredibly savvy manner of blending materials to transform a single gesture. From the upper right corner, out of a busy nest of black paint, a dark line jettisons. It starts out as paint and becomes a bar of bent and painted aluminum. The materials merge at a distance and one only sees the composition, which suggests a spider-webbed windshield.

The way these paintings change given one’s physical proximity is remarkable. Distance flattens depth, but up close is like having your head neck deep in a dangerous tangle. This is less true with the two metal pieces, Between the Hips and Between the Knees (both 2015), though a relation to one’s physical body remains. Somehow these works seem rigorously formal and yet surprisingly sexual. There is dualism between the right angles of the cleanly cut metal and the dangling roundness of loose sacks filled with sand and seed hulls.

Bird of Paradise (2015) is a good example of the third format Keyser is working with. Here the canvas is left almost entirely intact, punctured only by a plate-sized cork. Blue and black paint ferociously mix and smear from top to bottom, as if clawed by an agitated animal. Bird of Paradise might just as easily be a reproduction of one square inch of a de Kooning woman, scaled up. However one interprets it, there is no denying its raw, primal quality.

Now here’s the question: are these feminist paintings? I wouldn’t have thought to wonder were it not for a panel hosted at Maccarone on the topic of Feminism and Painting with Brown and Keyser sitting alongside Joan Semmel and the distinguished curator Alison Gingeras. The house was packed, suggesting the question might be more urgent than I realized. And the conclusion was more curious than I expected. Neither Brown nor Keyser claimed to make conscious artistic decisions based on their gender or politics; a simpler adherence to aesthetics drives their decisions. It slowly emerged that what the women of Semmel’s generation fought so hard for was being taken for granted by a younger generation, who were privileged enough to have been taught as children that women could do and be anything. I don’t think of these paintings as feminist, but I do think these are two tremendous painters who could one day be great artists.

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For the final meet up of its tenth anniversary season at the National Academy Museum,  it looks like some scratching and biting can be expected at The Review Panel. Power critics Christina Kee, Peter Plagens and Roberta Smith will join moderator David Cohen on May 29, and the shows they are considering, all downtown for a change, somehow reference or allude to wild beasts. They are “Natalie Frank: The Brother Grimm,” at the Drawing Center, “Rosy Keyser: The Hell Bitch,” at Maccarone; C. “Michael Norton: The Wolf I Feed,” at Brian Morris Gallery and “Buddy Warren, Inc.,” and “Christine Rebet: Paysage Fautif at Bureau.” Let’s see if fur flies.

Natalie Frank: The Brothers Grimm at The Drawing Center, 35 Wooster Street, 212 219 2166
Rosy Keyser: The Hell Bitch at Maccarone,  630 Greenwich Street, 212 431 4977
C. Michael Norton: The Wolf I Feed at Brian Morris Gallery and Buddy Warren, Inc., 171 Chrystie Street, 347 261 8228
Christine Rebet: Paysage Fautif at Bureau, 178 Norfolk Street, 212 227 2783

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Maccarone
September 7 to October 19, 2013
630 Greenwich Street
New York City, 212-431-4977

Carol Bove does not consider her art in terms of its site-specificity, which might come as a surprise considering her recent projects for institutions such as the Highline and the Museum of Modern Art.  Hers is a more holistic approach to site specificity as a call-and-response between a sculpture, its materials, and the surrounding environment. In an interview with Art in America in May 2012, Bove explains: “My sculptures can and must be taken apart and then put back together. Disaggregation is important. Therefore, each element needs to maintain its individual identity, its autonomy.” This is why I find it particularly worrisome that the press releases and texts in situ introducing two of her ongoing sculpture installations in New York City, Caterpillar at the Highline Park (through May 2014) and Equinox at MoMA (through January 2014), recommend allegorical interpretations of the art based solely on their material or textual components.

It is Bove’s solo show at Maccarone, her second with the gallery, titled RA, or Why is an orange like a bell? that most thoroughly escapes this trap of over interpretation. The work in all three exhibitions share materials: concrete, brass, cast steel, and powder-finished steel; unlike the outdoor installation on the Highline and the show at MoMA, the gallery pieces are not physically bolted down and hence not corralled by a specific space and its host of references. RA, or Why is an orange like a bell?  confounds traditional notions of artistic authorship and object category. Only six of the twelve works listed are attributed to Bove herself, who regularly folds the works of others into her own shows in what she calls “forced collaborations.” Among Bove’s six works, a large percentage of the materials were industrially fabricated or found, and their identity as “artworks” is complicated by this sense of previous history. Just past the gallery’s entrance is one of Bove’s simplest and most eloquent works—an untitled sculpture in the round, made in 2013, in which a slab of petrified wood is fastened to one edge of a steel beam towering almost a dozen feet tall. Here, the support structure is an essential armature, and the fossilized organism an animated protagonist in comparison.

One of her most virtuosic displays is Peel’s foe, not a set animal, laminates a tone of sleep (2013). The work consists of delicate brass open cubes and rectangles screwed into intricate formations and woven into the openings of a concrete pillar. Even though not all the shapes implemented are regular cubes, the edges of both materials contribute to the contours of a regular grid when viewed straight on. As one walks around the piece, however, the tidy geometry ebbs into formal chaos before straightening itself again. The same could be said of her two white powder coated steel sculptures, Solar Feminine and Hieroglyph (both 2013), whose forms yawn and contract when observed in rotation, and I-Beam Sculpture (2013), which is set low to the ground and becomes nearly indistinct from it at certain angles.  In all these works, Bove’s aforementioned notion of disaggregation is not merely a physical phenomenon, but an optical one.

The remaining works in the presentation were made by Lionel and Joanne Ziprin, Harry Smith, Richard Berger, and other unnamed members of their Lower East Side bohemian circle from the 1950s and ‘60s. Their contributions include a glass vitrine of anonymous doodles, scraps, and more complete works on paper (ca. 1951-1955). These, the list of works informs us, are not meant to be scrutinized for their content, but to be “illustrative of the creative atmosphere of the Ziprin circle”—much in the way the books in Bove’s iconic George Nelson shelf sculptures operate as cultural indicators rather than texts.  The centerpiece of the show, if such a work exists, is Harry Smith’s Design for Qor Corporation (ca. 1960), a diminutively sized painting on cardboard sporting a brash red and green grid-like pattern with Celtic affinity. It is suspended high between two large panes of glass—a two-dimensional vitrine—such that one can’t look at the Smith painting without seeing other works in periphery. In a brilliant multi-dimensional play, this work is at once a motif, a shadow, and a physical intervention, imprinted upon the show without leaving an actual trace.

The artist does not make explicit why she chose the Ziprin circle’s works to feature alongside her own. The choice was certainly not incidental or merely aesthetic; in conjunction with her Maccarone show, Bove co-curated with Philip Smith a reading-room of Ziprin and Harry Smith ephemera a few blocks away at 98 Morton Street. In this appendix-like exhibition are works from the duo’s short-lived design company Qor Collective and other eccentric commercial projects like Inkweed Studios. When Lionel Ziprin passed away in 2009, he left behind an epic volume of poetry, which included the autobiographical lines: “I am not an artist. I am not an / outsider. I am a citizen of the / republic and I have remained / anonymous all the time by choice.” Nine years ago, Bove offered a companion statement in an interview with the curator Beatrix Ruf: “It has to be apparent that the piece was put together for this particular occasion, in this particular space, which exists in a particular cultural context at a particular moment in time. […] The objects are assembled from non-art objects and my fantasy is that they could return to a state of non-art.”

The show probably leaves room for an essay to be written about the link between Ziprin and co.’s Kabbalistic undertakings and the spiritual inflections in Bove’s titles, but I believe that it is unwise to give too much emphasis to cross-interpretation. Rather than looking at either body of work as an index, allegory, and appendage to the other, we should regard RA as a staged meeting of kindred objects that we are invited to observe before everything disbands again.

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