discussing exhibitions of  David Adamo and James Castle at Peter Freeman, Inc; David Adamo at Untitled Gallery; Anna Betbeze at Kate Werble;  Matthew Day Jackson at Hauser & Wirth; and Nan Swid at Margaret Thatcher Projects.

The post October 2013: Ara Merjian, Roberta Smith, Stephen Westfall with moderator David Cohen appeared first on artcritical.

Heidi Van Wieren’s current compositions investigate the variegated skies of South Dakota’s Badlands. Working with an unusual set of materials—Elmer’s glue, pigment, and droplets of ink—the artist builds up layers that contain what seems to be an infinite number of stars in a night-time sky. In the case of the “Badlands” series, the drops of ink, which occur in a spectrum of sizes, from very small to rather large, are scattered across the paper or panel. The effects are glorious, ranging from dense dispersions of rounded forms to more spare arrangements, both of which take part in creating receding layers of circular shapes. Although Van Wieren tends to stay focused on a particular palette, colors can be various.  Some of the work has a majority of orange and pinkish red drops, while others are made up of blacks and blues and light browns, Van Wieren’s careful placement of dots suggests an endless, receding background that reads like constellations of stars, galaxies, and nebulae. At the same time, however, it is possible to view these pieces as thoroughly abstract, in which self-referential color fields build up densities of dispersed light. The consequences of Van Wieren’s style allow for simultaneous readings of her art.

In the large (three feet by six feet) panel entitled Badlands 00101 (2009), large blue and large black drops establish a rhythm that is reiterated by smaller drips of the same colors. Across the middle and on the bottom right of the composition, a band of smallish brown drops occurs, as though they were differing star structures at some distance from the complex atmosphere of the blue and black spheres. While one hesitates to claim the influence of the New York School because of the geographical specificity of Van Wieren’s series, it is possible to view the panel as an idealized abstraction, in which the drops combine to create an idealized, nonobjective format. In Orange Fizz (2008) we see a similar dispersion of forms, which rarely overlap and seem to establish an agreed-upon distance from each other.  Badlands (Sunset) 00102 (2009) offers a darker, more mysterious arrangement that approximates the color schemes of dusk; here Van Wieren again uses Elmer’s glue and ink on a fairly large panel, (thirty by sixty inches), building a version of a Badlands sunset in which black is the predominant hue.

While Van Wieren is committed to her idiom—most of the works shown are landscapes consisting of drops of various sizes and colors—two “Constructed Drawings” were also shown. In these works, she is more sharply rational, building patterns that relate to hard-edged abstraction and architecture. Here, in Constructed Drawing 00401 (2009), a layer of glue covers inked lines that create squares and rectangles on top of a yellow ground; the distinctly right-angled format shows the artist at her best, in works that contrast with the more densely arranged layers of circles. Although it is possible to find precedents in the New York School—one might think for example, of the rigorous geometries of Al Held— Constructed Drawing 00401 holds its own in terms of influence. One also is reminded of architectural blueprints, in which the layout of a modernist building is as elegant as the finished building itself. At the same time, the drawing is arranged on the plan of a grid, bringing coherence and discipline into the overall display of the composition. In both the “Badlands” and “Constructed Drawings” series, we see Van Wieren building structures whose supports are elements that are basic without becoming overly simplified. From such origins, she has manufactured images of genuine beauty.

The post Heidi Van Wieren at Margaret Thatcher Projects appeared first on artcritical.

on view through Saturday in his exhibition, Transport, at Margaret Thatcher Projects, 511 West 25th Street, Suite 404, between 10th and 11th avenues, 212 675 0222

Within an essentially graphic design technique of cheery palette and anal retentive precision William Steiger’s highly streamlined means actually revel in a certain complexity. His is a miniaturist’s delight in capturing the inner space of a distant cable car or the almost baroque rythmic complexity of a ferris wheel viewed at an oblique angle.  Modern transport nostalgically rendered, his motif, seems an apt metaphor for an aesthetic as picturesque as it is efficient.

The post William Steiger at Margaret Thatcher Projects appeared first on artcritical.

“Markus Linnenbrink: The Beauty You Are”
Margaret Thatcher Projects until November 29
511 W. 25th Street, between 10th and 11th Avenues, 212-675-0222

“The Sentimental Favorite: abstract painting”
Elsbeth Deser, Iva Gueorguieva, Frederick Hayes, Mark Takamichi Miller, Jennifer Riley
Triple Candie until November 23
461 W. 126th Street, between Amsterdam and Convent Avenues, 212-865-0783

Although, as Cézanne observed, there are no straight lines in nature, art and design more than make up for it. Still, it is surprising how late and inauspicious an entry stripes made into Western consciousness. As the French scholar Michel Pastoureau noted in “The Devil’s Cloth” (2001), when the Carmelites brought the pattern back from the Holy Land, stripes bewildered and infuriated people: The medieval eye was conditioned perceptually by figure-ground relationships. Stripes came to be viewed as diabolical.

In our own times, however, the stripe appeals to artists of a reductive bent precisely because of its ubiquity and standardization, the unostentatious way it sits upon the eye. (No room for the devil if there aren’t any details.) Three painters currently showing revisit stripes: Two – the German Markus Linnenbrink and the Bostonian Jennifer Riley – are relative youngsters, but Kenneth Noland is a grand master of the motif.

As ever with Mr. Noland, his exhibition at Ameringer Yohe of nine new canvases is in equal measure elegant and enigmatic. In his last show at the gallery, the artist revisited his trademark “target” format, first seen in the late 1950s. Now it is the turn of stripes, which became his idiom ten years later: emphatically horizontal bands of solid color, posited in radical chromatic relationships with one another.

Mr. Noland’s own rhetoric, and that of his formalist champions, speaks about optical hedonism. His style and achievement were pitted, historically, against the hard, cold, logic of the minimalists. But while this new show deploys sumptuous colors, ranging from the pumped-up synthetic to the shamelessly pretty and pastel, it is hard to get these paintings to work in the way one assumes they are supposed to. How is one to resist the banal conclusion that they are delightful graphic designs?

Scale helps. In their bid to envelop the gaze, these canvases are heroically horizontal. At least double-square, they sometimes stretch in width to more than three times their height. But getting the eye horizontal doesn’t mean these paintings have their wicked way with it. Bands of color are hardly more prone to blend on the retina than Seurat’s dots; they insist on their autonomy. At best, if stared at long enough, there’s a bit of optical buzz, but – to pursue the bedroom analogy – it is hardly as if the earth moves.

Mr. Noland’s paintings are “about” color relationships rather than actually embodying them: They are beautifully printed scores, not symphonies. This artist, who has suffered for his formalism, is actually not formalist enough. Revisiting his own high-modernist halcyon days at a time when *de rigeur* ironists are doing the same, Mr. Noland has become an inadvertent postmodernist.

***

I first became aware of Markus Linnenbrink at the Hammer in Los Angeles last spring, where a floor-to-ceiling mural filled the UCLA museum’s entrance. This stunningly audacious décor, “Myself Outside,” fused the yin and yang of painterly abstraction: the stripe and the drip. It was droll, canny, and felicitous in its balance of semiotics and sweetness.

Mr. Linnenbrink’s third solo show at Margaret Thatcher Projects, however, disappointed me. If only he could heed the classic modernist dictum that less is more; instead, the artist seems to be hedging his bets with a variety of strategies and confections. It is not that there aren’t winners on hand. In “Ladylove” (2003) strips of bright, colored, epoxy resin form a beaded surface, each strip artfully seeming to drip its way to a point. In “Zimmer in the Dead Sea” (2003), horizontal lines of epoxy, tentatively zigzagging and densely clustered (at places almost sandwiching), shimmer or dribble over faintly legible collage materials to intriguing effect.

It is the array of that ideas is unbecoming. Whether the artist means to show off, is unsure where to go, or is placing his disparate efforts in clever-clever (Richterian) quote marks is unclear. This market-stall act is decidedly gauche from an artist of such proven poise.

***

Jennifer Riley’s contribution to the stripe renaissance is to be found in an eclectic and bizarrely titled group exhibition at Triple Candie. “The Sentimental Favorite: abstract painting,” is like the Harlem industrial space that hosts it: sprawling, rough at the edges, and quite a trip.

Ms. Riley, who is represented by three large canvases in this five person show, appears to be the only artist who can plausibly be described as abstract. It is also difficult to believe that abstraction is, or ever has been, “the” sentimental favorite. But so what? The true selection principle is that these are emerging artists with some reputation in their hometowns: New Orleans, San Francisco, Seattle, and, in Ms. Riley’s case, Boston.

It’s worth the detour, incidentally, for another painter in the show, the emphatically figural Mark Takamichi Miller, whose fast, thick, gooey action paintings read like family snapshots caught in atomic meltdown. In contrast to these gushing fountains of virtuosity, Ms. Riley’s sparse, introverted compositions reveal their quirky individualism as if by micro-irrigation. They pay a kind of warped homage to the earnest mystical abstraction of Agnes Martin, the Zen nun of stripes. Ms. Riley, however, is devoted to what are more like heraldic bars.

She is often symmetrical, but more in the breach than the observance. In “Multiflex” (2003), color schemes seem suspended between the random and the sensical. Typically of the artist, the eye is beckoned towards an ever-elusive logic. Ms. Riley’s subtle touch creates fluid, almost sinewy lines. Strangely flesh-toned, these can almost misread as stretched stockings (connecting with the funky Mr Takamichi Miller after all). It is as if by stealth this gentle subversive is claiming back – for nature, for the body – the hardest edge of abstraction.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, November 13, 2003.

The post Kenneth Noland, Markus Linnenbrink and The Sentimental Favorite: abstract painting appeared first on artcritical.