October 18 to November 15, 2014 (Zoubok) and to December 20 (Howard)
531 West 26th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York City, Zoubok: 212 675 7490; Howard: 212 695 0164

Billed as a collaborative exhibition, this Judy Pfaff double-whammy at 531 West 26 Street reveals an understated bifurcation in Pfaff’s studio production: extroverted and introverted. It also leaves the viewer convinced that, given the opportunity, the artist could have hung new work on every wall in the entire building, and the neighboring addresses as well. She is unstoppable, having devised a working method that is capable of absorbing an enormous range of materials, processes and moods.

At Loretta Howard, Pfaff delivers her familiar but always engaging blend of elegance and ebullience in 14 works of widely varying size, all dated 2014. In smallish works dedicated to Larry Poons, Helen Frankenthaler, Bridget Riley and Jules Olitski, Pfaff tips her hat to movers in mid-20^th-century abstraction. In these pieces, shards of colored plastic, deformed by being melted, tangle with acrylic, resin, and pigmented expanded foam, and evoke the formal means of each honoree. The biggest of the tributes is Blue Note (for Al), in which Pfaff’s former teacher, Al Held, is celebrated — a 9-by-14-foot wall work featuring concentric circles of blue and orange Plexiglas, fluorescent lights and a meandering, steel-rod musical staff.

Even more convincing is the gallery’s second space, in which the visitor encounters the two largest works in the show. Pfaff’s use of foam in the (mostly) free-standing, three-part There is a Field, I Will Meet You There (Rumi) recalls Lynda Benglis’s innovative use of similar materials, but whereas Benglis’s roiling mounds of polyurethane feel volcanic, Pfaff’s oozing pools are more like quicksand — once you start to get sucked in, it’s difficult to extricate yourself.

In Alberta, another dimensions-variable work, there are echoes of Frank Stella’s late-1980s and early-90s wall works — those with the relatively restrained palette and the rippling, swirling, organic shapes between which you can see through to the wall. In this company, an untitled work dominated by green plastic is both compact and explosive. To achieve such balance of intimacy and theatricality requires that Pfaff nail the scale of the works relative to the room — and that she does.

The mood is darker at Pavel Zoubok, the work there less immediately ingratiating. Their materials feel clotted rather than clustered — not just layered, but laminated. The checklist runs to 73 items (nearly all from 2014 or 2013), of which many are small, individually framed works, many riffing on botanical and decorative motifs, in encaustic and collage on repurposed ledger paper from India and antique bills of lading from a New York paint company. Across tiled expanses of snapshots and postcards of flora, fauna and her own studio activity, these framed works are arrayed, underscoring the idea of inventory or archive. Wrapping around three walls in the gallery’s back space is one such environment, which includes 21 paper works and an untitled, tendrilly sculpture; the viewer might feel a bit lost in the underbrush. Even more than usual for Pfaff, this installation device risks inelegance for the sake of sheer abundance, as if to assert that the irreducible essence of her practice is proliferation itself.

Among the many sculptural works at Pavel Zoubok, of particular interest is Hydroza, nearly eight feet high and dated 1994-2014. A rough bundle of tar, resin and steel wire, enclosing a big bulb of greenish blown glass, dangles by steel-rod vines from a sort of boom mounted at a perpendicular to the wall. It looks like a nest. The gallery’s overgrown, jungly feeling owes much to the preponderance of materials that have been scavenged from the natural world: Hanging Judge, a walk-through sculpture just inside the entrance, makes effective use of several charred chunks of driftwood; in other works one finds tree branches, dried leaves, deer antlers and sections of honeycomb.

These are combined with repurposed manufactured objects such as paper Chinese lanterns, welded steel furniture, plastic flowers and (naturally) more expanded foam. Twenty-four feet long, Let Sixteen Cowboys Sing Me a Song is anchored by a stringy, undulating frieze of what appears to be seaweed encased in clear resin, an element that plays nicely against the other flotsam washed up in this piece: photographs of giant crustaceans; a translucent pool of pigmented resin, mounted to the wall at looking-glass height; roots, branches, leaves; pinwheeling globs of some unidentified polymer product; photographs of old color engravings of deep-sea fish. A rigid, right-angled, polished steel armature lends visual as much as structural cohesion to this sprawling work.

In the best sense of the term, Pfaff is an artist of the old school. She puts the stamp of her personality on whatever theme she takes up. She thoroughly reinvigorates a tired trope — the natural vs. the man-made — and in the process suggests that just about anything is open to being revisited, reinvented, rediscovered. Embracing a familiar idea and completely recasting it in her own idiom, she demonstrates an awe-inspiring tenacity. To rework an old joke: How do you get to have a two-gallery show in Chelsea? Practice, practice, practice.

The post Quicksand: Judy Pfaff at Loretta Howard and Pavel Zoubok appeared first on artcritical.

on view at Pavel Zoubok Gallery as part of the Czech poet and collagist’s exhibition, The Poetics of Silence, through December 19. Birds is also apropos as pic of the week in these last days of the Metropolitan Museum’s exhibition, Vermeer’s Masterpiece: The Milkmaid, which celebrates the loan of a gallery-mate of this painting from the Rijksmuseum, Vermeer’s Woman Reading at Letter.

This was an artcritical PIC in November 2009

The post Jiri Kolar at Pavel Zoubok Gallery appeared first on artcritical.

“Collage/Construction” at Pavel Zoubok until August 15 (1014 Madison Avenue, at 78th Street, 212-879-5858)

With her installation “The Triple Point of Water” in the Whitney’s appropriately moat-like sculpture court, Sarah Sze has once again pulled off a provocative fusion of whimsy and grandeur. She proves herself a successor of one of the house gods of the Whitney: Alexander Calder. In both artists, gaiety, wit, and invention prove to be vehicles, not obstacles, to aesthetic depth. Both achieve an oxymoronically bravura fragility.

In a zany, cartoonish, and schematic way, Ms. Sze’s installation represents an eco-system. The word “represents,” in this case, could equally be used to mean “depicts” or “constitutes.” For the true marvel of Ms. Sze’s creation is that interdependence is not just the work’s subject matter but its defining quality. The way in which artifice and nature interact in her handling of materials, the relationship between the found and the manipulated, the micro and the macro, are all symbiotic. The real beauty is that ultimately even what could be construed as faults – flimsiness, arbitrariness – are folded back into the meaning of the work: stabilizing as a metaphor of the preciousness of life.

The piece incorporates actual plants, which sit primly in their pots, leaves and branches stuck into squares of insulation board that are punched along the edges to read like eroded continental plates. These squares rest horizontally on a complex grid of vertical pipework sending water through the installation, coursing out here and there to fill a fish tank or sprinkle a plant. The flora sometimes grow out, sometimes through, this unlikely support. There’s no attempt to disguise the found quality of this polyurethane material, which still sports its trademark “Pactiv.” Intermingling with the plants and grasses are finely modelled mountain ranges, which entirely throw any sense of scale. (These could equally be artist-made or readymade from a model kit, and cutely recall the Whitney’s Charles Simonds sculpture, “Dwellings” [1981], permanently installed in their stairwells.)

And then there are scattered household objects – push-pins, scissors, a tape measure, and so on. Typically of Ms. Sze, these are color-coded; on the top layer, for instance, orange is the predominant color, which could relate to an idea of light, because rays of light in the form of orange string crown the whole of her creation.

The wall label invites a somewhat literal reading of the piece in site-specific terms (life beneath the sidewalk), but this is arguably too limiting. It is much more fun to imagine “Triple Point” as a mad scientist’s model of the world. That adds an element of desperation to the hi-jinks, to the kindergarten-cum-green warrior determination to find in materials at hand a means to give persuasive shape to ecological concerns. That her installation is set off by the concrete brutalism of Marcel Breuer’s Whitney lends weight to a sense of a life-bearing planet floating precariously in a cold universe.

***

Sarah Sze’s genius is to intuit the dual nature of the found object as thing in itself and freed form. In her handling, a half-used bottle of Windex is at once a signifier of false consciousness (a pollutant that cleans) and a bright blue shape, jarring and harmonizing simultaneously. This instinct is invariably lacking in those invited to make large-scale museum installations, but it thrives quietly among artists working on a private, even intimate scale within the tradition of collage. A felicitous complement to the Sarah Sze experience is offered close at hand by Pavel Zoubok, a young dealer who represents important practitioners, contemporary and historical, in this now somewhat specialist niche.

His summer show deftly pairs collages and assemblages he has collected by a roster of artists. Collage, of course, is intrinsically actual, but the comparison between two- and three-dimensional appropriation and manipulation proves rich in yield. You’d expect the sculptural objects to be more visceral than their pictorial counterparts, and yet often with the artists at hand the objects are encased or boxed, or – in the case of Ray Johnson’s chopped in half-volume of Robert Frost poems – wrapped up, somehow making what’s contained more ethereal.

Joseph Cornell leads the way in this respect: He is represented by an exquisitely mysterious boxed glass rabbit; the dark, coppery luminous glow of the box’s interior is bounced around by shards of mirror. Other box makers like Joan Hall and Varujan Boghosian share with Cornell a connection with the votary, but they do not tap his particular vein of preciousness. In the case of May Wilson, her papier collé, though seamless, is also visceral, whereas her found objects are sprayed in silver paint that makes them seem sealed in like cast sculptures.

Michael Cooper is an artist who links Cornell’s and Ms. Sze’s sensibilities. Mr. Cooper’s objects are diptychs of plexi boxes which contain accumulated scraps – keys, screws, ornaments – collected by color. According to Mr. Zoubok, the artist continues to add to the collection until a piece is sold. His collages here are similarly monochromatic arrangements of metallic reflective material.

Assemblages of a traditionalist stripe are provided by the redoubtable Hannelore Baron, and a kindred spirit, Ilse Getz, who offsets an artfully distressed wooden paddle with porcelain balls and a tiny doll. This is classic assemblage, a depiction of precarious beauty alienated in a brutal world.

Nostalgia is, across the board, a defining aspect of the collagists at Zoubok, which might ultimately be what edges Sarah Sze apart from their sensibility. Mind you, Al Hansen is free of it, too, with his outsiderish Venuses of Willendorf created out of cigarettes or matches. You have to love the prurient visual and verbal punning with which he intimates the pubic region with heads of spent matches.

This article first appeared in the New York Sun, July 10, 2003

The post Sarah Sze at the Whitney Museum, Collage/Construction at Pavel Zoubok appeared first on artcritical.