June 3 to August 14, 2015
545 West 25th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York City, 212 206 0220

A group exhibition may be tightly focused, like a beam of light that penetrates the artfog to reveal a previously obscure order. Or it may cast a more diffuse glow, allowing the assembled works to illuminate one another, and viewers to intuit an order as they may. The latter curatorial style is just as rigorous as the former; if anything, a less programmatic exhibition requires (and rewards) heightened alertness to unexpected affinities among diverse works. Such an exhibition is the lively, elegant “Space Between,” on view through August 14 at the FLAG Art Foundation in Chelsea.

Curated by Louis Grachos, Executive Director of The Contemporary Austin, and FLAG Art Foundation Director Stephanie Roach, “Space Between” is ostensibly a consideration of objects in which the conventions of painting coexist with characteristics native to sculpture. This cross-generational exhibition of 33 works by 24 artists also reaches to photography to demonstrate the interplay of pictorial and physical space, exploring the fuzzy edges of this fruitfully gray area.

Of course, spatial ambiguity is not front-page news. Duchamp’s Bride Stripped Bare (1915 – 23) is but one illustrious 20th-century example, among many others. And then there is the ancient tradition of bas-relief, which transmutes ambient light into chiaroscuro. But “Space Between” doesn’t overplay this hand, as it touches also on the persistence of a certain shape-heavy, color-centric strain of abstraction and, by extension, urges viewers to think about art history in terms of continuity rather than wave upon wave of innovation, of radical newness.

Three relatively recent works by Ellsworth Kelly anchor the show. The most salient of these is Blue Relief Over Green (2004), two oil-on-canvas monochrome rectangles joined at a right angle and measuring about seven by six feet — plus, (the all-important third dimension) the two and three-quarters inches depth of the panels’ stretchers. The seemingly minor physical displacement of the picture plane interferes with the property of color — even Kelly’s full-throated hues — to appear to advance or recede in relation to one another. The visual tension is exquisite, and sets the tone for ”Space Between.”

Gazing down into Roni Horn’s Pink Around (B) (2008), a solid glass disk 40 inches in diameter and 15 inches high, the viewer is simultaneously impressed by its mass and beguiled by the blushing delicacy of its coloration. Sadie Benning’s compact wall pieces, such as Wipe, Montana Gold Banana and Ace Fluorescent Green (2011), embody color quite differently: on these small, plaster-covered panels, two distinct hues occupy the same physical plane while vying for illusionistic space. Meanwhile, the title divulges the object in Thomas Demand’s photographic triptych, Detail (Sportscar) (2005), in which extreme cropping renders unrecognizable these sleek orange forms.

In this context, attention to color doesn’t necessarily imply abundant chroma. The oldest work in the show is Mystry Man (1984) by Tony DeLap, a seven-foot-high wall construction made of canvas over an eccentrically shaped and beveled wood stretcher and painted a precise shade of gray. Nearby is Wyatt Kahn’s Untitled (2014), another painting/sculpture hybrid, in which the deadpan color of raw linen contrasts with the flat panels’ animated, undulating contours.

There are two corner pieces in the show. Untitled Still Life (2013) by Kaz Oshiro is a large, cherry-red, square canvas tipped 45 degrees, its left corner bent and crumpled where it meets the adjacent wall. It seems a bit reluctantly sculptural. Jim Hodges contributes Toward Great Becoming (orange/pink) (2014), in which two mirror-tiled panels — irregular polygons — reflect each other and complete themselves. It is dazzling, and makes you giddy.

Two adjoining galleries testify to the wide influence of Agnes Martin on the work of contemporary artists. One space houses Martin’s Peace and Happiness (2001), a wonderful 60-inch-square canvas comprising alternating horizontal bands of azure blue and dusty white, faintly delineated in pencil. The mirage-like effect is atmospheric one moment, concrete the next. In its proximity, Rebecca Ward’s clandestine (2015) — a five-foot-high work in which stitched sections of canvas, painted in pearly tones, are partially deconstructed to reveal the stretcher—shares this Martin’s split personality. The Sun, Chapter 1 [diagonal edge, horizontal stripe] (2001), a quiet stunner by R.H. Quaytman, also reflects on its own structure; the primary motif, a diagonal band, depicts in section the plywood panel on which it is painted. The interconnectedness of visuality and materiality is borne out in other splendid works in this gallery by Julia Rommel and Svenja Deininger.

A second Martin, the 12-inch-square Untitled #6 (1999), keeps company with a trippy, mirrored, space-confounding 2D work in glass, mirror and wood by Olafur Eliasson, Walk Through Wall (2005); a cast resin piece by Rachel Whiteread, titled A.M. (2011) — in homage to the Martin? — which seems to refer to a gridded windowpane; and two colored pencil drawings by Marc Grotjahn from his “butterfly” period of a decade or so ago. Rounding out the show are terrific works by Sarah Crowner, Liam Gillick, Sérgio Sister, Andreas Gursky, Blair Thurman, and Douglas Coupland (yes, the novelist).

In the mid-to-late 1950s, Kelly and Martin worked in a loft building on Coenties Slip in lower Manhattan. Contrary to the prevailing Abstract Expressionist autographic touch, improvisational composition and spatial flux, they concerned themselves with unbroken color and unambiguous, hard-edge shape. Decades of “isms” (and the neighborhood’s loft buildings) have fallen like dominoes since those days, but the deeper structures of contemporary art’s visual vocabulary remain intact and vital. As Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns are lauded for eliding painting and sculpture in the neo-Dada 1950s, so too do the efforts of Kelly and Martin (and other Coenties Slip figures like Jack Youngerman and Charles Hinman) echo today.

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The March 7 edition of The Review Panel saw Nation art critic Barry Schwabsky join moderator David Cohen, Nora Griffin and newcomer to the series Drew Lowenstein, respectively editor, associate editor and a contributor at artcritical.  Taking their cue from the overdose of Armory Week these indefatigable art journalists chose  six topics for discussion in what is a departure from normal TRP format.

Gideon Bok: Welcome to the AfterFuture
Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects, 208 Forsyth Street, 917 861 7312

Elana Herzog: Plumb Pulp
LMAKprojects, 139 Eldridge Street, 212 255 9707

Julia Rommel: The Little Match Stick
Bureau, 178 Norfolk Street,212 227 2783

David Row: There and Back
Loretta Howard Gallery, 525-531 West 26th Street, 212 695 0164

Leslie Wayne: Rags
Jack Shainman Gallery, 524 West 24th Street, 212 337 3372

John Zinsser: Paintings and File Studies
James Graham & Sons, 32 East 67th Street, 212 535 5767

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Editorial Note: Today (Monday, May 13) is the last day of Frieze, and yesterday tickets and transportation sold out: the fair recommends online booking to avoid disappointment.
Some images with this article are awaiting their correct permission and caption details

It’s somehow fitting that this year’s installment of the Frieze Art Fair takes place during the same weekend as the opening of Baz Luhrmann’s 3D adaptation of The Great Gatsby. Luhrmann’s movie has been criticized for its emphasis on excess, its literally in-your-face materialism. But, in the final analysis, under those unnecessary trappings, the story is really pretty damn good.

Frieze, in its second year at Randall’s Island, also tells a great story, even if you sometimes have to look beneath the bloat (and pay a $42 entrance fee) in order to discover it. With over 180 galleries (about half of them from Europe) spread over territory the size of three football fields, it is easy to come down with a case of art fatigue. But the nice thing about Frieze is that it balances excess with the sort of refinement that allows the fairgoer to forget, at just the right moments, that the whole thing is founded on crass commercialism.

For starters, there is the whole middle section of the fair, which features the Frame and Focus selections, the Frieze designation for participating galleries founded less than six years ago (Frame) or in or after 2002 (Focus), each showcasing a single artist whose work has not previously been seen in an art fair context (Frame) or a curated project specifically proposed for the fair. These are the fair’s cool kids, its bathroom smokers: they strike just the right mix of not caring at all and caring a lot, of posturing and earnestness. There is, in many of the Frame booths, a kind of compelling, contagious energy, as if the people involved have not yet had the chance to become jaded, to lose faith, and the results are a little rough around the edges in a really nice way. These aren’t underdogs exactly—one of the Frame artists, Stewart Uoo, showing at New York’s 47 Canal, has a small show at the Whitney, which opened the same day as Frieze, and features his former art school classmate, Jana Euler, who happens to be part of the Focus display at dépendence—but they also have not yet grown complacently satiated by success.

One of the Frame standouts is Julia Rommel at the consistently excellent New York gallery, Bureau. Rommel’s understated monochromes have a stunning simplicity, and they serve in the manner of a sorbet palate cleanser during a multi-course meal: a necessary corrective, a chance to remember why you are there in the first place.

Rommel’s work speaks to a truism oft forgotten in this era of blockbuster museum shows and auction extravaganzas: less is usually a whole lot more. In fact, over and over again, it is the most restrained exhibitors that strike the sharpest at Frieze. One excellent example of this is Cheim & Read’s booth, which includes Pat Steir’s beautiful Birthday Painting. For whatever reason—experience? national disposition? royal decree?—London galleries are especially apt at this. At Maureen Paley, Paul P’s small-scale portraits, suggesting a terrifically depressed Elizabeth Peyton, are wonderful, as is Maaike Schoorel’s painting, Vanitas. And there is something playfully innocent about Birgit Jürgenssen’s Polaroids at Alison Jacques Gallery. An  exception to good London taste is White Cube, highlighting Damien Hirst’s medicine cabinets and Tracey Emin’s neons in a rehash of last year’s offerings.

Still, there is at least one point when the axiom invoked above fails to hold up or simply disintegrates in the face of insistent spectacle. At the fair’s North entrance stands Paul McCarthy’s Balloon Dog, courtesy of Hauser and Wirth. Giant and vibrantly red, it suggests an unabashed delight at taking the whole shebang in stride. On Friday afternoon, the sun lighting up the Frieze tent, Balloon Dog practically signaled the coming of spring and renewal.

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