February 15 to April 2, 2017
299 Grand Street, between Eldridge and Allen streets
New York City, marcstraus.com

If there is anyone familiar with the vicissitudes of art and fashion, that person is surely Sandro Chia. He was an internationally renowned art star of the 1980s, but his shows of paintings earlier this year at Marc Straus and of drawings, a little earlier, at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects, constituted his first exposure in New York in almost a decade. And to experience his work is to step, somewhat, out of time. He certainly isn’t an artist interested in novelty for its own sake.

Chia, now in his fifth decade of art making, first emerged as part of the transavanguardia, a group of Italian artists championed by the critic Achille Bonita Oliva (he was part of a triumvurate that also included Francesco Clemente and Enzo Cucchi) who reestablished a use for figuration, color and symbolism in their painting. Together with Neo-expressionists in the USA and Germany, they displaced the institutional hegemony of Conceptualism and Minimalism. Bitter arguments about the validity of figuration came and went. Chia weathered the assault on his market value when collector Charles Saatchi dumped extensive holdings of the artist at auction in 1989.

His show at Marc Straus consisted of 15 paintings made between 2014 and 2017, and one earlier sculpture. The dominant motif is of a solitary figure – white, male — walking forwards, often accompanied by animals: birds, ducks, a dog, a horse, a rooster. the depiction of the ‘Wayfarer’, as he calls his man, is strikingly repetitive in terms of style of clothing, scale in relation to the canvas, distance back from the picture plane, and facial expression, and he is always in contrapposto. What changes is the scenery – forest, polar landscape, country road – the pattern on his tight-fitting shirt, and the animals. Chia could perhaps be referencing the trope of computer games that reward your character with a new outfit and environment to explore, each time you make to the next level. Appearances shift, but the character seems unaffected. Chia doesn’t give us new perspectives on the Wayfarer; he is kept at a constant remove.

The light in the paintings, created with an incredible variety of warm and cool grays, sometimes with unexpected pink or turquoise undertones, oscillates between day and night. Close reading of the surfaces suggest an assured paint handling, confident but not showy. Layers are built up with brushy, matte patches of paint to reveal surprising colors underneath in a way that brings Richard Diebenkorn to mind. These paintings delight in skies and clouds whosefleeting, ephemeral quality is contrasted with the solid, healthy muscularity of the Wayfarer. His physique glorified in a figure-hugging T-shirt, is he the white male hero, conquering nature, impervious to time?

Two works on view suggest other motivations. Single Winged Angel (2000), the only sculpture in the show, stands over six feet tall and thrusts forward an offering of a gold heart with two chunky hands. The celestial figure is firmly grounded on a thick, rough-hewn base. Its face tilts upward, an arrow-like nose pointing to the heavens. I notice my reflection in the shiny heart. Nearby, Looking At (2017) depicts a figure also observing his own reflection, in what could be water or a mirror. Areas of green and gray bisect the square canvas horizontally. Unlike traditional depictions of Narcissus, where the reflection is muted in relation to its source, Chia reverses course: His figure occupies a comparatively desaturated space, while the world of reflections is bright and gleaming. Chia’s subjects here are historical and mythological, yet he seems to be getting at something about looking, and the specifically contemporary condition of living side by side with our own representations. The reflections dazzle the reflected.

Chia is telling old narratives with enduring resonance. This casts his use of repetition in a new light. There is a perhaps a parallel with the artist’s own story and the repetitive work of a life in painting. Art history’s role in this earthly, searching journey is displayed in the Picasso-like classicism of the figures, and T-shirt patterns which recall Robert and Sonia Delaunay and Jasper Johns. Color and painting itself are proposed as things to hold onto, via the palette-like object the Wayfarer carries in three of the pictures. In The Prisoner’s Dream (2017), for instance, three birds in primary red, yellow and blue fly upwards, their apparent freedom contrasting with the bound hands of the adjacent figure. Chia folds the history, and struggle, of his medium into these pictures. On one level, this is a familiar story about the individual’s journey, but it is told from the unique perspective of a painter for whom the art form is a life choice, not a passing fad.

In this sense, Chia can be seen to propose a sort of vision quest. Reiterations of looking and the remaking of representation are offered as a pathway, he seems to suggest, that may lead to personal awakening and spirituality. Chia manages to communicate this complex symbolism with simple yet specific pictorial choices.

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June 21 to July 31, 2015
299 Grand Street (between Eldridge and Allen streets)
New York, 212 510 7646

Marc Straus’s recently closed summer group show, “Gray Would Be the Color, If I Had a Heart,” showcased nearly 30 artists, spread through three galleries on two floors. Each artwork was rendered primarily in grayscale and the show went far beyond grisaille studies, including gelatin silver photographs, drawings, prints, and sculptures. That kind of excess is, although not ideal, pretty much to be expected with a lot of summer group shows. “Gray…” exceeded many similar exhibitions in its more-or-less consistent tone; and it basically achieved its aim of selecting works intended to be, as the press release puts it, “Not completely hopeless. Not utterly bleak. Not fully shrouded in darkness.” The maudlin grimness, which is supposed to be tinged with optimism, is excessive, too. But there were some really great artworks, silver lining or no.

Kind of surprisingly, few of them were monochromes. Although the show celebrates gray, it doesn’t remain there alone, and it recognizes that the color itself is broad: cool grays, warm ones, dark, light, tinted with pink, or blue, brown, orange, nothing at all, reflective, matte, symbolic or concrete, and so on.

There are contrasts from the start: near the gallery’s entrance is a photocollage diptych by VALIE EXPORT, showing a woman’s face towering over and observing a hypnagogic modernist cityscape, set next to two small assemblages by Kristjan Gudmundsson, made by adhering mechanical pencil leads in ordered rows on sheets of aluminum. In a nearby corner of the gallery, Rona Pondick’s man-headed dog sculpture, Fox (1998 – 99), recalls sci-fi horror from Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Mars Attacks! It uses an image variously intended as horrific or absurd. One realizes that chimeras — aesthetic, biological, conceptual, whatever — are usually both.

Here also hangs a totemic punching bag by Jeffrey Gibson, a tight drawing by Joyce Pensato and Matt Ducklo’s South Parkway East Church (2011), a black-and-white photo of a small bus, used by a Memphis church, locked behind a chain-link pen in the middle of an empty parking lot at night. Like a lot of the work here, these simple, spare images are iconic and direct.

Upstairs, the show doesn’t hang quite so neatly together, or at least some of the works in it fall flat. Diana Shpungin’s A Failure of Memory (2015) suffers from a bland execution, as does Grayson Cox’s Vent (2015). The artists’ material choices are unclear: why is Shpungin’s wastebasket cut so loosely in half? Why are the shorn edges lined with plaster-cast material? Why is Cox’s painting framed in a large plywood casing? Why does the frame look so unfinished compared to the naturalism of the painting embedded within it at an angle?

Although Zlatan Vehabovic’s image of a large, dead whale, called Rock Bottom Riser (2014), is painted fussily, the image has deep roots in Dutch printmaking, and it’s a powerful one: a morbid leviathan. One reason that the icon is so common, besides its allegorical value, is because its one that recurs under human guidance. Whales have been threatened for centuries, first by large-scale hunting, and now by climactic catastrophe. Two works by Sam Trioli, hung side-by-side — Harry S. Truman (2014) and Untitled (Vibrations) from 2013 — show in photorealistic detail the mushroom cloud of an atomic bomb, and the man who ordered such weapons dropped on Japan 70 years ago. These, at least, are utterly bleak.

Also upstairs is a small and reserved etching by Jasper Johns: an image of one of his pewter-colored flashlight sculptures, titled Flashlight (1967 – 69). Johns was a gray eminence who sort of inspired the much-remarked on work of another of the color’s most famous painters, Brice Marden, whose early monochromes likely subsequently influence some of the other artists on view, such as Jessica Dickinson, Geoff Hippenstiel and Jim Lee. These artists are still exploring the marriage of surface, color and image. And for whatever reason (there are probably several that the artists would cite) gray is a good way to do that.

Finally, Dove Bradshaw’s 2013 painting, Contingency (Snow Tracks), shows a really concrete, absolute way to think about color’s use in art. Bradshaw made the painting by applying liver of sulfur to a silver-coated canvas (the former substance reacts to patinate the latter). Her technique here and in other works uses chance-based methods — developed by Johns’s friends Robert Rauschenberg, Merce Cunningham and John Cage — in order to create images rooted in the precise relationship of one chemical to another. There’s nothing more factual than that. It’s not morose or bright, just true. Another fact is that this show had a lot of interesting work, a mélange. I don’t know about anyone else’s heart, but mine is there: it’s a gray fact.

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Bettina Blohm, a graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, moved to New York City in 1984. Currently she divides her time between New York and Berlin, maintaining studios in both cities. This, her first exhibition with Marc Straus Gallery, coincides with a landscape-painting survey in Germany, which originated at the Kunsthalle Bremen and will later travel to Städtische Galerie Bietigheim-Bissingen. Although Blohm’s paintings often appear to be completely abstract, she actually makes many drawings in the landscape. Her paintings comprise loosely geometric shapes and patterns. Working intuitively, the imagery evolves over time, through repeated addition and subtraction of paint. The resolved image is not anticipated. Grids spill and torque their rigidity in favor of what amounts to a visually kinetic structure. Procrustean Physics (2014), for instance, comprises a black-blue ground ostensibly over-painted with an impure white diagonal grid. The diamond shapes formed between the lines are themselves adjusted with over painting such that the lines of the grid that picked up traces of blue appear at moments in front of, and at other moments behind, what become segments of more proximate color pushing forward as if through a net. The grid is subject to an occasional doubling, with an extra line running alongside at an angle, like an after-image.

Great Escape (2014), which like Procrustean Physics measures 68 x 84 inches, has black curved strokes that change direction from one square to the next appear to possess a restless energy — like a flickering diagram. In counterpoint, the squares each tilt at a shallow angle, maintaining the rhythmic shifting of both space and surface. Matisse certainly comes to mind in the red, black and white color range and the way in which the black curved lines recall the body, albeit indirectly. The degree to which decorative effect and broken pattern proliferate changes from painting to painting. Sometimes the linear element becomes an improvised knot, as in Small Snag (2013), where white painted lines are inconsistently opaque across black to produce subtle grays as well as white, tracking the artists’ movements across the surface. Diagrams of abstract thought come to mind that in the perceiving invoke different emotions.

In fact, two works on paper come from a 2014 series titled Diagram. Diagram 1 comprises a number of vertical lines that are bisected with irregular circles toward the lower edge of this horizontal format. A similarity to musical notation connects this pictorial composition to musical composition as does the pulsed repetitions of frame echoing verticals and obliquely oriented disks. Acrylic, charcoal and ink are used in this work and acrylic and charcoal in Diagram 10, completing the notion of an importation of traditional means from drawing to painting and from painting to drawing. Altogether, it is true to say that Blohm has no problem moving between a non-representational mode and its opposite, although it is the former alone that is present in this current exhibition. Interchanges between figure and ground and an evolving variety of similar forms both make for a concise vocabulary that repays close attention to her work.

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January 24, 2014 at the National Academy Museum,  moderator David Cohen’s guests were Hrag Vartanian, co-founder and editor of the blogzine, Hyperallergic; Christina Kee, a regular contributor at artcritical; and Village Voice critic Christian Viveros-Faune.

The shows discussed were Allison Schulnik Eager at Zieher Smith, Thomas Bangsted at Marc Straus,  Wade Guyton at Petzel and Lori Ellison at McKenzie Fine Art.

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