Mark Greenwold: And Now What?!

May 30 to July 12, 2019
545 West 20th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues,
New York City, garthgreenan.com

Melodramatic and unhinged though they may at first appear, Mark Greenwold’s paintings frequently depict sexual and violent acts without actually being erotic or horrifying. Teasing the boundary between attraction and repulsion, his works are a litmus test of what you value in art. But if you allow yourself to be distracted by the grotesquery on display in this exhibition, And Now What?!, you might miss an important new direction his work has taken.

His often-naked figures are depicted with a fanatical photographic facticity that emphasizes the imperfect, aging, human body, if anything in a way that makes them even more abject than they might be in actuality. The women are often topless while Greenwold depicts himself, when not nude, clad in a negligee, or dead. It used to be not uncommon to see an ex-wife’s head grafted on a dog’s body, and seemingly none too happy about it, with the dog half getting better treatment. Most of the figures are friends and family, and though it is normally a proud distinction to be depicted in a work of art, in Greenwold’s case, be careful what you wish for.

A Magic Summer, (2017) depicts the well-known artist, James Siena, twice, once wielding a cleaver, and again prostrate in green underpants being stabbed in the heart with long pointed scissors by his topless wife, Katia Santibañez. But those are only three of the seven figures occupying a cramped seaside room, or nine if you include the dog and the disembodied head of Chuck Close floating at the window.

But something else seems to be going on at Greenan. Ostensibly presented as a mini-retrospective, this show really serves to demonstrate how the roots of Greenwold’s most recent paintings can be seen in the radical paintings he was doing while he was just in his early 20s. The four here are a revelation. They are all large (around four by five feet), energetically painted in acrylic, and though packed with figures, animals, and insects, and employing windows to exterior spaces, everything seems invented rather than sourced from photos. Christmas Painting, (1964), The Car & the Bed,” (1964), and Untitled (Lady Bug/Batman), (1965), all employ flat, colored (often brick red) planes to give the paintings the spatial flatness of Matisse’s 1911 Red Studio. Done in the mid 1960s, they were not very hip at a time when minimalist monochrome reigned but seem daring and original today. Though the talented 22-year-old Greenwold was clearly influenced by Francis Bacon, both existentially and stylistically, these paintings have a crazy energy all their own. By 1966-7, in Barbara (Grasshopper), a complexity of pattern and design, with areas requiring meticulous rendering, had already started to dominate. Then four years later, he shifted into more direct photo representational territory.

It is easy to trace the bulk of Greenwold’s mature paintings as deriving from two large works shown here that he did in his 30s: Spanish Mediterranean Bedroom, (1971), and Bright Promise (for Simon), (1971–1975). They both have scrupulously detailed, class-conscious interiors whose figures seem to be collaged into the painting space in a way that reveals the influence of Photorealism, the dominant, au courant representational mode of the early ‘70s. The obvious contrivance of the collaged space can be attributed at once to modernist privileging of artifice and a young painter’s inexperience with constructing congruent space from unrelated photographic sources. Greenwold’s figures in later paintings, while still having an obvious collage construction, are more seamlessly integrated into the space of the paintings even when wildly out of scale with one another.

But several years ago, incongruous clouds of randomly colored wacky biomorphic shapes began to appear above the heads of the people in his paintings. Initially it was hard to tell Greenwold’s purpose other than to introduce an element of abstraction, with the effect of creating unintelligible thought balloons that could further fuck with a viewer’s attempts at comprehension. After seeming to have been subsequently abandoned, recently these areas have reappeared and metastasized into full-blown expressionist tumors across the surface of the paintings. They signal a major evolutionary change in Greenwold’s purpose.

Up until now, mostly what occurs in Greenwold’s mature paintings have been depictions, and the purpose of his finicky small marks has been to render a vivid description of real surfaces and create interiors with furniture, objects, people, and animals that have a smirking sarcastic presence. But suddenly Greenwold uses these strokes to disintegrate objects and people and make the figures and their relationships even more ambiguous. And while writers lately have seen in the mottled, wrinkled, and flaccid flesh of Greenwold’s photorealistic characters a heroic confrontation with aging and death, this new approach is a philosophical shift, an infectious disintegration that doesn’t depict feeling but enacts it. Distasteful rendering of aging and death can be dismissed with an “ugh.” And though a scrupulously delineated surface can pull one in, it can also be tiring to contemplate all that labor. But the surfaces of these new paintings, such as Diaper, (2017) for instance, or Pink Bedroom, (2018) where the brushstrokes have started to come unmoored from their depictions, are energized with possibility. Images lose definition and force viewers to come to grips with the anxious loss of control of their own hermeneutic abilities. As the internal formal gyroscopes of the paintings break down, they hark back to Greenwold in his 20s, with their disrupted surfaces and invented figures.

Diaper, the most unnerving of his recent paintings, seems painted with wild abandon. The ghost of Picasso in his tighty whities, macho posing with his dog, mockingly haunts this painting. The main figure, recognizable as the artist himself, clad only in a yellow-stained adult diaper and knee brace, raises his hands in horror, his mouth open in a howl that would unnerve Munch. Even though he manages to delineate every yellowed tooth, we are easily distracted by his connection to a urine-filled catheter bag lying like a dead fish on a coffee table. Meanwhile, a dog is happily panting behind to the right, which is just below a man hung naked from the ceiling whose bulging eyes ogle a nude woman crouched ass-backwards on a chair below right. With a body that gives new meaning to the term contrapposto, her face has exploded into a cubist pile of expressionist brush strokes, though we can make out eyes, nose, open mouth, and ear, as well her two breasts that have also entered the cubist scrum. There also seems to be a little flying penis squirting cum into her mouth, a detail that requires close attention. Though the small object-packed interiors of his other paintings can seem (intentionally) claustrophobic, air wafts easily through these open brushstrokes affording room for chairs, tables, lamps, fireplace, mirror, and portrait hanging on the wall without feeling confining. A duck head also pops out of a metal vase in the foreground, and a partially formed disembodied head seems about to materialize in the air next to the hanged man.

The angst-ridden, post-adolescent confrontation, in the paint itself, with impending adulthood of Greenwold in his 20s has re-emerged in his late 70s as an emotionally comparable confrontation, with impending old age, disintegration, and death. Insanity in painting is a freedom of sorts, a letting go of one’s conventional attitudes, even if those attitudes might seem unconventional to everyone else. Beneath Greenwold’s work has lurked a secret hopeless desire to be accepted by a culture whose values he categorically rejects. That dynamic has played out using deliberately outrageous subject matter, softened by a studiously labor-intensive execution. But in art, as often in life, letting go of all calculation, even if already an outlier, often leads to becoming a true culture hero. In his latest paintings Greenwold is achieving the precise depth of emotion he has often only depicted—yielding to feeling, he is starting to lose his mind.

The post Careful What You Wish For: Mark Greenwold at Garth Greenan appeared first on artcritical.

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May 26 to June 25, 2016
535 West 22nd Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York City, 212 647 1044

Karen Arm burrows into essential formulae of nature. Her motifs have been few, but comprehensive: tree branches, water droplets, spider webs, smoke, stars, and waves. Or rather, her motifs are distilled from those sources, broken down into constants and variables. From here she reassembles a vision of nature truer than optical transcription. Her spare, articulate images of restless seawater, for instance, probe beneath the surface, beyond the moment, to capture its fluid drapery. Her work bears superficial similarity to that of Vija Celmins, particularly the water images, but in contrast to photo-based drawings by the latter — uncanny ghosts which provide only the tease of nourishment — Arm really wants to shows us how water works.

There are two motifs in exclusive rotation at Arm’s current show at P.P.O.W.: “suns,” being centripetal accumulations of small circles into enormous ones; and “wavy rays,” in which numerous bendy lines radiate from a central point. The painting Untitled (Yellow Wavy Ray on Brown Red) (all works 2016) is the best of an impressive bunch. Here the radiating line motif, flexible and exact, can be read as a gathered topknot of angel hair, perhaps, or the pulsating rings of a pebble dropped in a pond. If the exquisite dry precision of Arm’s works on paper often eclipses the glazed depths of her larger canvases, in this superb painting the layers of acrylic mix richly, projecting graphic energy forward with wriggling intensity. The complex method of Arm’s color is left for the viewer to contemplate on the dripped edges that fold back to the wall like photochemical rainbows at the bleeding margins of pre-digital art prints; here one sees that the painting’s basic two-color scheme is woven from many strands.

The wavy rays recall Bridget Riley’s Current, and thus of Philip Taaffe’s tribal re-enactments of her imagery. The central burst has also been a device of Mark Grotjahn and an occasional motif of James Siena and Marsha Cottrell. These artists, along with Daniel Zeller, Jacob El Hanani, the late Lori Ellison, and many other participants in the thriving afterlife of linear abstraction, think algorithmically to some extent — most notably Siena, whose gamesmanship is steadily electric. But to a greater extent than most of her peers, Arm is oriented toward the singular, concentrated image. Her true forbear may be Agnes Martin, whose horizontal lines hover above specificity, in search of pure spirit.

If picturing was anathema in a previous age of linear abstraction, artists working in that vein today take inoculating sips of scientific illustration, decorative and shamanic arts, Op and Pop, 19th-century engraving, the animism of Paul Klee, comics, comix, and other pathogens that the scrupulous Riley and the wise Martin steered clear of — as does Arm in her own way, her steely eye always striving to build a convincing image, not a quotation or diagram, out of persistent studio ritual. So it is with the second motif in the current show, the suns, which began some years ago, an order of magnitude more distant, as “globular clusters” — galactic-scaled works that were comparatively dispersed, pinprick stars against unknowable void. In the new work, we are far more quickly drawn into dense gravity. Incalculable accumulations of tiny, concentric bursts of color thicken, in some of them, to haptic hallucinations of pebbly skin or bubbling tissue at a thermonuclear center.

Biographical information is irrelevant to interpreting such formally driven work, but as Nancy Princenthal points out in her biography of Martin, it nevertheless helps to know that her subject grew up in the sere plains of Saskatchewan, and that she was at times overwhelmed by mental illness; perhaps for Martin (as for Ellison) the balm of abstraction was a vital necessity. Arm nowhere puts forward the fact in titles or press releases, but she is personally frank about a long and difficult fight with breast cancer, and it is hard not to see that the suns are breast-like, and subject to a cellular logic bound to run amok — the ineluctable logic of supernovae and black holes.

As serious as these works are — as obsessive, cosmic and, possibly, autobiographical — they are full of lively questions about color and touch, compositional freedom and strategy, and the contours of taste. Untitled (Yellow and Red Sun on Blue) pushes things almost too far, into an excessively hard-won illusion of sphericality. It is as gaudy as an encrusted Lucas Samaras box, and in its own remarkable way, as mystical and gorgeous.

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Alexi Worth: Green Glass Doors at DC Moore Gallery, March 26 to April 25, 2015
Reviewed in these pages by Roman Kalinovski, this was a project room solo that played with boundaries on different levels. Perceptual provocateur Alexi Worth found a theme worthy of his visual mischief: the locked doors of almost completed building or renovation projects. The motif vied with his nudes on the beach or copulating couples precisely thanks to their chilly voyeur-inducing exclusion. Elaborate carpentry and mesh supports played off depiction against construction with surface wit and psychological depth.

Alain Kirili and James Siena at Art Omi, October 11, 2015 to January 3, 2016
This was a year of double exposures for sculptor Alain Kirili, who has divided his career of the last forty years between New York and his native Paris. Two shows brought his latest line-in-space sculptures in forged metal to two-person shows: two halves that add to more than one whole for an artist for whom dialogue, whether with peers, historic mentors or artists in other mediums (music or dance) is axiomatic rather than expedient. One show was with painter Bobbie Oliver at Peter Hionas Gallery, a coupling of the dealer’s suggestion; the other, however, very much of Kirili’s own devising, was with his friend James Siena at Art Omi in Columbia County, NY. Siena, legendary as a painter and draftsman, and whose sculpture also takes line for a walk, enjoyed his sculptural debut earlier this year at Pace Gallery.

Susannah Phillips at Lori Bookstein
A natural complement to the exquisite Morandi show a block away at David Zwirner Gallery, Susannah Phillips brought a brooding luminosity to her spatial meditations in paintings where the structural elements communicate with the silent intensity of still life. The mountainous scenery of several pictures created a tension between schematic reduction and observational presentness striking a chord somewhere between Milton Avery and Ferdinand Hodler, holding the elements – water, land, sky – in suspense. In more urban images, Richard Diebenkorn and Wilhelm Hammershoi were the presiding ghosts. Upping the ante in intensity were images of a nebulous space, perhaps a holding bay, ambivalent between interior and exterior, where forms pulsate in the dark.

Alternate Histories: Celebrating the 75th Anniversary of the Galerie St. Etienne, January 15 to April 11, 2015
Before New Yorkers could enjoy Seccessionist masterpieces amidst the plutocratic splendors and wafting caffeinated aromas of the Neue Galerie, the redoubt of Austrian and German Expressionism in this city were the altogether more sedate, businesslike premises of Galerie St. Etienne on 57th Street. This venue was a transplant from Vienna where it was founded in the 1920s by Otto Kallir, father of the present owner Jane Kallir, and originally named, indeed, the Neue Galerie. This jubilee exhibition brought together examples of the different strands that have ensured St. Etienne a crucial, vital role in New York art consciousness: arresting images from the likes of Schiele, Klimt, Kokoschka and Kollwitz; American “primitives” like Morris Hirshfield and Grandma Moses; and that fearless living expressionist (no need for any “neo” prefix) Sue Coe.

Tom of Finland at Artists Space, June 13 to September 13, 2015
Touko Laaksonen, better known to connoisseurs and masturbators everywhere as Tom of Finland, enjoyed a steamy double header at the sprawling SoHo and Tribeca premises of Artists Space this summer. On Greene Street an elaborate installation afforded intimate corridor upon corridor of framed drawings and collages from which his published images derived. With glistening graphite he caught the erogenous sheen of muscle-bound workmen bulging in denim and leather uniformed hulks encountering each other in ever-cheerful, spontaneous orgies: S&M with a smile was his hallmark. Down on Walker Street, an utterly exhaustive, thematic vitrine arrangement recalled the fact that  image horder Laaksonen’s background was in advertising. The exhibition archived his sources with an indexical totality that would have impressed Aby Warbug, a veritable iconology of lust.

Alex Katz at Barney’s, Spring 2015
Every year seems to be Alex Katz’s year as far as increased visibility for this prince of painters is concerned. Notwithstanding the absurdly overdue retrospective that New York museums are denying this realist master, 2015 saw its fair share of spectacular outings: new works that took startling liberties with expectations, at once reduxing and reinventing his familiar landscape motifs, closed the downtown space of Gavin Brown, for instance, while Mary Ryan showed a stunning set of nine screenprints, each 80 inches by 30, of women in little black dresses that nodded to The Black Dress, his iconic 1960 portrait of Ada repeated six times in a single canvas. There were big museum shows at the High in Atlanta, GA and at Colby College, ME, but the stand out memory for this critic were his windows at Barneys: with typical chutzpah Katz blacked out the store windows with a parade of starkly elegant figures etched into the glass, a provocation that pushed style outwards to the street rather than luring the stylish in, cajoling passersby with a frisson of exclusion. A related display of paraphernalia on the sixth floor produced for the store under the auspices of the Art Production Fund brought together linens, vanity products and kitchenware, all impressed with startling graphic flowers, heads, or dogs carved black out of white, white out of black. A beach spread purchased by this viewer to spare his couch from dog hairs was expensive for a towel but a bargain for an Alex Katz.

Francis Bacon at Gagosian (Madison Avenue), November 7 to December 12, 2015
When you are a world class modern master and the products of your late work seem, quite literally, washed out, the job of criticism, obviously, is to explain how dissipatedness is a sign of genius. For years, at Bacon retrospectives, of which there have been many, the oeuvre is shown to end on a dry, thin, almost evaporated note. But gather just late works, as Gagosian have done, intelligently and persuasively installed, and the late period does indeed cohere around faded grandeur as an organizing principle. Bacon, at his best, was brazenly decadent, anxiety inducing and tragic; this actually serves to make the “defects” of his late works a virtue. Inveterately inventive even as he wallowed in his own mannerisms, he could turn sterile precision into its own kind of terribilità.

Sean Scully at Montserrat, dedicated June 2015
Sean Scully turned 70 in 2015 and a slew of international events marked the occasion. Laurels included a major exhibition at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, a sculptural commission in south-western France and a sumptuous display in a palace on the Grand Canal, a collateral exhibition of the Venice Biennale, where his land-sea-sky partitioned stripe paintings, reveling in a new gestural looseness, assumed a symbolic role in their temporary home akin to “il Sposalizio del Mare,” the allegories of Venice’s betrothal to the sea. But the jewel in the crown of his birthday celebrations took place in the mystically fabled monastic complex of Montserrat, in this hills overlooking Barcelona. For the Dublin-born, London-schooled, New York-tested and Munich-proved artist, Barcelona has for long been the third node in the split nucleus of his peripatetic career. Within Catalonian national identity, and by extension Scully’s identification with the city, Montserrat has profound resonances, so the invitation to decorate an entire chapel – he has provided paintings, windows and sundry sacred furnishings – provides its own kind of allegorical significance in relation to his mentors, Rothko and Matisse.

The post Old Year’s Resolutions: Eight great shows I didn’t review appeared first on artcritical.

Mar 27, 2015 – Apr 25, 2015
508 West 25th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 989 4258

Lee Ann Norman: There are a few different things happening here in this exhibition: the bronzes that you fabricated at the Walla Walla Foundry, the bamboo works on the wall and on pedestals, and the smaller toothpick and grape stem works, but I think most people know you as a painter. What prompted you to gather these sculptures together and show them now?

James Siena: I’ve been talking about doing this for a long time, but when the technology came along to scan and print the small works on a larger scale, I really started thinking more seriously about it. That was about two years ago. I remember saying back in the 80s when I was making the smaller ones — all of which are destroyed now — that it would be really nice to make these in metal so that they would be more permanent. The technology wasn’t there in ’85, ’86 when I was gluing toothpicks to grape stems.

In the paintings, prints, and drawings, you tend to give yourself certain constraints as part of the process. Did that way of working having any effect on these sculptures?

I did follow certain procedures specific to the grape stem structures. The bamboo sculptures, which I started making in the last year and half, are more related to my painting procedures. They are rigorously geometric. In the bamboo ones, I tend to work from the outside in, like I do in a painting. The non-stem toothpick works used various means to create volume and structure: Villa Aurelia (one and two) were built around sticks, Margaret Atwood, Charles Babbage, and Dan Schmidt were built around chopstick sections, and Dorothy Vogel, Anthony Braxton, J.D. Bernal, and Eschatologist were all toothpick, made initially in plane geometry mode and built up from that condition.

Of the bamboo ones displayed here, did one give you particular trouble as you made it? When I look at them, I see the geometric precision alongside the presence of your hand in their free form structure. I have a friend who is a sculptor, but has a background in urban planning. I’ve always admired the freehand straight lines he draws in this nerdy kind of way (laughter). I guess I appreciate precision that is not machined.

There is a little bit of slippage that has to do with the inherent qualities of the bamboo. Some of the sticks are severely warped, so I choose the ones that are the straightest to put into the sculptures. I think Morthanveld: Inspiral, Coalescence, Ringdown (2014-15) was one of the most challenging ones to make. It wasn’t based on right angles, and I was pleased, as I built it, to find a second pentagon being iterated by the outer one and then the smaller pentagons alternating internally, creating a decahedron. I used a process that I employ in other works, which is dividing a surface again and again and again in different ways. In this sculpture, volume is divided.

You were talking about surprises that come up, and yet you give yourself constraints . . . in some ways, that sets you into a direction, but you don’t ever really have an end goal when you make the work.

No. With this one, I was just trying to make a column out of shifted pentagons. Freeman Dyson (2014) came out of these two smaller works, Katherine Dalsimer, and Just the Washing Instructions on Life’s Rich Tapestry, and a motif I used in a painting called Conversation from ’93. It’s one that I’ve worked with and distorted over the years. I thought I could do it in three dimensions, and I think it’s pretty successful. On this larger scale, it reached a level of intensity that I did not anticipate.

Sculpture is not painting, but what do I know about sculpture…? In painting, your eye can take a walk, but in sculpture, your eye has to climb around. Or it has to fly. In a painting, I’m often worried about leaving empty or open space, but in a sculpture it seems to make sense. The density or compression I put into my paintings — that desire can be satisfied with these tight areas in the sculptures where the knots coincide. The openness of these sculptures surprised me despite the fact that they are relatively complex.

I think that’s part of their beauty and appeal. The sculptures are dense but there are these areas of space and lightness within them. As we think through the progress of the sculptures, should we sequence them as first the toothpick and grape stem works, then to the bamboo, and then the bronzes?

I started working on the bronzes in the fall of 2013. I made five trips to Walla Walla. I started the bamboo sculptures when I was doing a residency at the American Academy in Rome. I was working on toothpick things, and we would buy our own groceries, so I would go into the grocery stores and hunt for toothpicks. I never liked the round toothpicks, which was all they had. I had to have flat, tapered ones sent over from the States. But what I did find at the supermarket were bamboo skewers for the barbecue. Knotting the joints with string was born of necessity.

Were you in Rome specifically to work though that idea?

No, it was just an open residency and I wanted to work on light things. I was in the mood to draw. Rome didn’t influence me directly, but I like to think it seeped into my bones. The Baroque in particular — Rome is a Baroque city in spite of its ancient past. The Baroque is ecstatic, broad, and architectural. Perhaps there’s a little Bernini in the bamboo works, come to think of it. Particularly Morthanveld…

Tell me about deciding to work in bronze. That seems like a big step away from the other materials.

I’ve always liked the notion of permanence. I try to make things that last a long time, and the bronzes would survive a fire as long as it didn’t get too hot (laughter). I also just wanted to see what would happen. I still want to see what happens if I make a small work in bronze…just how that would feel in the hand. After awhile, it became more and more necessary for me to include the toothpick works because they inform the process of how these were made. I want to take the clothes off the process. The bronzes are mysterious, and the toothpick works mitigate that.

Contents May Differ (2014) in particular was made in the same way as the smaller sculptures. We scanned and cast toothpicks for me to weld together. I cut them to the right length and worked with a master welder to make the welds. I polished and ground away all of these joints to make them smooth There’s no patina on this one — it’s just sanded, polished, and waxed so it has a different presence than the others, although I really like the outcome of the 3-D printing process. The striations on the bronze — they’re all a result of the printing process.

How long did it take to print them?

Printing the plastic-wax from which the bronze was cast? Many hours, depending on the complexity. I would only go to the foundry once the casting was done to work on the patina. I tend to embrace labor in the work. There is labor in making the original, and there’s labor in doing the patina, but it’s unusual for me to just watch this whole process happen.

Right. This kind of going away and coming back to work on something…

And there’s the leaving it to others. But I love making prints with master printers, and Walla Walla Foundry presents similar opportunities and challenges. The metalsmiths and woodworkers are collaborators more than fabricators. They made suggestions that I really responded to, like how much metal I needed to put on a joint and introducing me to new tools and techniques.

The work titles are unusual. It seems like a lot of different influences and interests inform them.

Most of the works are titled after people, places, or enigmatic word combinations. For example, Mark Strand was a friend of mine and a great poet. There are also historical figures. Barbara Tuchman is a very important historian. She wrote about the First World War, and reading The Guns of August got me started on studying that conflict. It’s an important subject of mine…does it make its way into the work? I’d like to think that it does…strategic geometry, perhaps? R.D. Laing is known for a book from the ‘70s called Knots, which is about psychological conundrums and people getting stuck in cycles of confusion. Anthony Braxton is an experimental musician who occasionally writes compositions using very unconventional notation. I think codifying thought through improvisational form is a very fertile field. In some ways I’m talking about neural connections and using the grape stem as a metaphor for that, but it also has to do with homage and pointing to the fact that abstraction doesn’t really exist.

Yes. I think we’re all trying to find some sort of signifier for “things,” but there are only so many “things” (laughter). We can shuffle them around a little bit, but…

There are many combinations, and I think that’s what makes it so interesting. For quite some time, I did not have any titles for these works, but then I started assigning names to them — invented or real — and thinking about how that could nudge the viewer towards my mind. It’s not just naming them Julius Caesar or Martin Luther King though. I thought about what might happen if someone finds a sculpture named Richard Fynman (2014), and they wonder who that is. There’s a little bit of perversity in that kind of misdirection…

What really moves us leads us to other things. It’s the good kind of rabbit hole to go down.

I really like the trestle tables and pedestals that you used to display the work. Was that your idea to install the work on them?

In my studio, I like to work standing up, so my tables are pretty high. As these began to accumulate, I needed more table space so I bought a hollow core door that I put up on some carts, but they were a little low. Then I went to an estate sale for Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof. There were four sawhorses, but I only bought two because I thought I didn’t have that much space and because I’m an idiot.(laughter) They were a perfect height with the door set on them. Having the air underneath the sculptures felt necessary. These pedestals aren’t standard — they’re two different colors, the base and the top, and there’s an overhang. I think these could be installed in a different way, and I wouldn’t have any requirements.

Now that you have a group done, do you feel like this is something you will continue to do?

I’ve been working on this show for such a long while. I need some time to reflect. I’ve been working on some ink drawings lately, and I have an ongoing group of typewriter drawings I started when I was in Rome. I have about 10 other sculptures I didn’t include in this show, so I will continue with those, and I have a painting that’s in the works… I don’t think I’ve ever been in a place like this: a new show of completely new work that almost nobody saw prior…

This idea of transformation through technology is really exciting, but it’s almost too soon to talk about. We’re entering a time where 3-D printing is really in its infancy. When this technology gets ubiquitous, stuff is going to happen that we can’t predict.

The post “A little bit of slippage”: The Sculptures of Painter James Siena appeared first on artcritical.

Photographs by Robin Siegel, Installation shots by Allyson Shea, Report by David Cohen
click any image to activate slideshow

A Mark Greenwold show is hardly less rare than a new painting from this OCD master of minutiae:  to give the fellow a normal-sized show you pretty much need to stage a mini-survey.  That’s what his new dealers,  Sperone Westwater, have done for the veteran fantasy realist on the third floor of their Norman Foster-designed railroad gallery on the Bowery, in a show that takes its title from a line of Stanley Cavell’s hand-inscribed at its entrance: “The cause of tragedy is that we would rather murder the world than permit it to expose us to change.”

His admirers were out in force the Friday night of Frieze weekend, including a number of sitters in his bizarre psycho-dramas.  Amongst the latter category were Chuck Close and James Siena who besides their visages and birthday suits also contribute to Greenwold’s visual vocabulary in the form of their trademark pictorial marks – Close’s lozenges, Siena’s algorithmic zags – that the artist uses as kind of thought bubbles hovering over his dramatis personae’s heads.

In his New York Sun review of Greenwold’s last survey, at DC Moore Gallery in the Fall of 2007, artcritical editor David Cohen wrote in terms that still apply that “Mr. Greenwold revels in capturing each hair on a dog, or each thread in a carpet, with a nutty regard for exactitude

Like psychoanalysis, around which these strange dramas revolve, Mr. Greenwold’s painting mode supposes that no detail is to be ignored and that time is no object. Psychoanalysis is the key — if not to decoding these bizarre, narcissistic soul dramas, then at least to understanding the strange genre in which they occur. For Mr. Greenwold’s pictures occupy an ambiguous space nestled between allegory and narrative. Each of the figures feels highly isolated, and yet each one plays a function in relation to the action unfolding around them all.

On view at 257 Bowery between Houston and Stanton streets, New York City, 212.999.7337 through June 28, 2013

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“Color Your World!” proclaims the headline of the February 2010 Connecticut Cottages and Gardens, typed over a detail of Nina Bovasso’s limited-edition, vivacious floral carpet. Though I am neither a resident of Connecticut, nor possess a home or bank account suitable for the purchase of such a rug, I am seduced by its exuberant Pop sensibility and relentlessly bold, cheery hues. Inside the magazine, in an article cheekily titled “Art Under Foot,” it shares a page with other kaleidoscopically bright, geometric rugs, but it is likely that this is the only rug commissioned by a commercial art gallery that also represents such artists as Mequitta Ahuja, Thomas Nozkowski, and Amparo Sard.

In just under a year, John Lee and Meredith Rosenberg of BravinLee Programs, a Chelsea gallery, have commissioned artists Peter Halley, James Siena and James Welling, as well as Bovasso, to create lush designs for rugs made of hand-knotted, tightly woven wool or silk. “Each rug is one of a kind and has been crafted by weavers in the Kathmandu area, whose skills have been passed down through many generations,” says the website, and each rug displays “rich texture and subtle color variation.” Lee and Rosenberg selected the weavers, based in Nepal, for their high-quality production and laws against child labor, after several test runs with rugs made in India, Morocco and Mexico. They made it a priority to join GoodWeave, a certifiably child-labor-free program that donates part of its profits to educating children in Kathmandu. Each rug is artist-signed, and bears an individually numbered GoodWeave label as a symbol of ethical business.

The process of creating the rugs always begins with the artist’s design, which can be either drafted completely anew or adapted from a previous work—most often a painting, drawing, or photograph. The design is then sent to Nepal, where yarn color samples are chosen and shipped back to BravinLee for approval by the artist. While the original design concept belongs to the artist, it is up to the weavers to interpret the designs, resulting in a process that is ultimately collaborative and dependent on the stellar, by-hand craftwork of the weavers. The weaving process itself takes about three months—with each rug measuring around 6 x 9 feet, this seems no small endeavor—and rugs are usually produced in editions of fifteen with two artist’s proofs. In this way the process is not unlike printmaking, in its scrupulous repetition and production of editions, and in fact Meredith Rosenberg describes it as “the alternative to an editioned print.” Right now, she says, the rugs range from $4,000—$12,000, in an attempt to keep them at a competitive price with other high-quality rugs in the design market. So far the clientele has mostly included the collectors with whom the gallery is already familiar, but interior designers and decorators have been showing interest as well. The ultimate hope is, of course, that even those who have no previous interaction with art galleries will be interested in purchasing the rugs, and interested in the BravinLee Editions project.

Rosenberg, who has a Masters Degree from the Fashion Institute of Technology, says she is fully committed to opening up the often esoteric and insular (not to mention expensive) world of contemporary art to a larger audience, as well as further breaking down the boundaries between fine art and design. She discovered the project through Lee, her thesis advisor at FIT, and it coincided with her particular field of study at the time: “I was doing my thesis on marketing conceptual art,” Rosenberg explains, “and how to take something conceptual and make it into a commodity.”  The partnership that became BravinLee Editions was formed not long after, and the “commodity” point of departure shifted from conceptual art to work that is, perhaps, more easily marketable. The website for BravinLee Editions echoes Rosenberg, in that the mission is very much to “explore and experiment with other ways in which fine art and fine art imagery can be utilized as the basis for a design platform.” In exploring the rugs, their strong graphic sensibilities and vibrant colors, I was faintly reminded of a certain strand of modernism that embraced the world of industrial design, that strove to emphasize the purity of materials and craft. The legacy of the Bauhaus seemed nigh—or perhaps it was just the lingering ghost of the recent MoMA exhibiton—but especially that of Anni Albers, whose vivid, austere, and texturally complex formal influence can be found in the bold grids of James Siena’s rugs and the stark, black and white abstract rug by James Welling.

There is, needless to say, a long modernist precedent of artwork that complicates the distinction between visual art, architecture and design, from the Bauhaus, to De Stijl, to Russian Constructivism. If the overarching aim of the BravinLee Editions rug project seems to be to create a utilitarian object that channels the blue-chip aesthetics of artists like Halley and Welling into a completely different medium, this begs the question of why textiles at all? Why not chairs, tables, light fixtures, kitchen appliances? How do the selected artists’ practices, which range from painting to photography, translate into the textile medium? Does this reveal more to us about the depth of their artistic practices; does it actually challenge or inspire the artists to adjust how they view their own work?

Within the last five or ten years, New York in particular has seen the growth of a certain textile zeitgeist and a resurging interest in the “tapestry fetish object,” as Rosenberg put it, in addition to interest in the rich history of the medium. This all was perhaps ushered in with the magnificent tapestries shown in the 2002 Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition “Tapestry in the Renaissance: Art and Magnificence,” so popular it spurred the 2007-08 sequel “Tapestry in the Baroque: Threads of Splendor.” There was the moment early in 2010 when James Cohan Gallery mounted “Demons, Yarns & Tales: Tapestries by Contemporary Artists,” just across the street from the BravinLee gallery which, at the same time, was showing the rugs created by Bovasso, Siena and Welling. Such exhibitions have revealed the relative lack of textile work by contemporary artists, the end product of which, in its labor-intensive and detailed process from the wool-dying to the loom, can be quite stunning. It is often the warmth of textiles—of woven materials, carpets, throws—the tactile, tangible sense of presence and handmade craft, of home, that makes this medium come alive. Perhaps these qualities are what make the prospect of owning a unique, artist-designed rug so compelling.

Most of the artists selected by Lee and Rosenberg work in the two-dimensional mediums of painting, drawing and photography, making their work easier to translate into the carpet format. Rosenberg says, “We’re really interested in [taking] the painting off the wall and living with it on the floor.” This gives the notion of living with artwork on a day-to-day basis a slightly different meaning, when it is a work on which one must constantly worry about spilling crumbs or red wine. Bovasso’s Flowers on a Walk (2009), which runs at a cool $8,000, seems to have garnered the most press attention, with the Connecticut Cottages and Gardens cover, and brief features on the Apartment Therapy and Better Living Through Design websites. The rug does not stray far from Bovasso’s paintings and drawings, which are filled with rich colors and swirling with spastic, orgiastic patterns. The rugs of James Siena—Global Key (2009) and Nine Constant Windows (2009)—also echo and eagerly transcribe his complex, rigidly formal geometric paintings and drawings, which visualize mathematical formulas and sequences. James Wellings’s New Abstraction #1A (2009) seems to channel Franz Kline; based on an abstract photograph, its beautiful, graphic swaths of black seem ready-made for a room composed of clean lines and modern architecture. The vital strength of each rug chosen by BravinLee is the utter translatability, the enhancement of each deceptively simple design in this flexible, heavily-textured medium. The rugs are incurably modern, but this is their strength too, knowing full well that, in the end, each rug must easily match the color scheme of the rest of the parlor or living room they will eventually inhabit.

In the preface to her book On Weaving, Anni Albers wrote: “Though I am dealing in this book with long-established facts and processes, still in exploring them, I feel on new ground. And just as it is possible to go from any place to any other, so also, starting from a defined and specialized field, can one arrive at a realization of ever-extending relationships”. Albers was able to constantly comprehend and learn anew as she pushed her textile practice to the limits, even when it fell out of fashion. One could argue that the artists and weavers who produce rugs for BravinLee Editions are doing the same but with different stakes, producing an object that is tricky to define, skimming the line between fabulous decorative art object and pragmatic design piece.

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The shape-shifting biomorph continues its 100-plus year march at David Nolan Gallery.  Tracking the various frequencies on the pliant bandwidth of Biomorphism, Morphological Mutiny brings together paintings, drawings and prints by Steve DiBenedetto, Alexander Ross, and James Siena.  Incorporating abstraction and figuration, these three artists deliver an absorbing mix of the transformative, illustrational and apocalyptic strains in current painting.

Siena spins out maximalist effects from discreet minimal units.  His deceptively understated work yields a wealth of form and content, ranging from geometric abstract progressions and softly liquefied, optical grid flows, to cosmic-comic characters and sexualized tricksters.  In the middle zone, drawings titled Liminal Spaceand Liminal Pathway probe the ambiguous and interconnected play between unfolding space and figurative embrace. In Liminal Space, Siena dissipates form and charts the expansion of space that accompanies increasing formlessness.  Conversely, Liminal Pathway manifests embodied form that inhabits space.   Remixing high and low with a scratchy line and a fuzzy scrawl, Siena rehatches Biomorphism.  And in Angry Forms, a study sheet of five agitated shapes, he aptly insinuates a connection to Thought Forms, a 1901 treatise by Annie Beasant and Charles Leadbeater about the correspondence of emotion to shape and color.

Siena’s Earthless , with its smooth, enamel-painted aluminum surface, requires only a few seconds of attention before it works its magic and takes your breath away.   The labyrinthine spaces suddenly coalesce and rise and fall, optically vibrating as if an animated topographical map were pooling and waving its peaks and hollows.  For those interested in the psychedelic effects of retinal painting rooted in archetype, Siena offers an amazingly effective delivery system.

Across the gallery hangs Ross’s Untitled 2008-9 painting of a glam, klieg lit, sci-fi biomorph ready for its close up.   Glistening and chiseled, the figure is a world away from Siena’s expansive tail-biting interiority.  Instead, we face a caffeinated realm of enhanced, bright but relatively normative space.

Utilizing a computer collage aesthetic, Ross manipulates photo images of his plasticine sculptures and paints the results with sumptuous color and graphic finesse.  His seductive and precisely organized gradations of volume announce an ultra-mediated process.  Inspired by the microbial, Ross restyles the surrealistic figure via YvesTanguy and Gumby, shelving any vestige of automatism.  What remains is an emphatically descriptive, photo-realized affair with mutations from the lens.

In Untitled 2008-9 Ross’s highly articulated figure is set against an abstract ground; the ensuing construction of pictorial space is simple and graphic.  The preening alien seems grafted onto the decorative backdrop, an effect oddly reminiscent of Cecil Beaton’s 1951 Vogue shots of a model in front of a Pollack painting at the Betty Parsons Gallery.  In Untitled 2009 however, the ground is a dynamic field that creates a compelling tension with the figure, as both share a structural DNA that intimates the possibility of infiltration through a porous border.  It will be interesting to see if Ross will allow the figure to burst its container and break on through to the other side.

Unstable and apocalyptic, Steve DiBenedetto’s mesmerizing drawings and energetic paintings are intriguingly complex.  In DiBenedetto’s Untitled and Quantascape drawings of 2009, colored pencil and graphite seem to scatter and coalesce in rhythmic pulsations across the sheet.  Using a protean array of line and color, in which figures slip into fields, architecture and constellations, DiBenedetto distinguishes himself as one of the best drawing practitioners around.  In Untitled 2009, shape-shifting grotesques meander across the oscillating fields, and freely associate like Rorschach blots in a psychedelic blur of color.  In Quantascape the punchy and economical use of white ground nearly upends the colorful swirl of effects.

There is a method to DiBenedetto’s sympathetic and synaptically connected free flow of imagery; the continuity between the paintings is undeniable. In Untitled 2008 DiBenedetto uses a relatively modest paint application against which he incises a web-like scaffolding by drawing paint away from the surface.  White and amber paint is then reapplied to openings within and around the structure creating a golden glow. He conveys an experiential ethos reminiscent of late Surrealist paintings of the 1930’s and 40’s by the likes of Matta, Gordon Onslow-Ford and Jerome Kamrowski.

Dibenedetto along with his comrades Siena and Ross have defined an architectural endoskeleton within the body of the biomorph, a decidedly third millennium proposition.

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James Siena’s sprawling show of mostly new works and some older materials, filling PaceWildenstein’s hangar-like 22nd Street premises, is a landmark in the development of this artist.  Mr. Siena has, up until now, been known for highly wrought, invariably intimate, abstract works on paper or panel.  His imagery entailed intensely concentrated geometric patterns executed freehand while adhering to strict mathematical rules.

His love of rules situated him firmly within a trajectory of modern American art which included such luminaries as Alfred Jensen (whose work Mr. Siena collects) and Sol LeWitt.  Exuding the conceptualism of the latter, the funky faux-primitive decorative intensity of the former, Mr. Siena found himself the contemporary examplar of a 40 year survey of rule-based art, including Jensen and LeWitt, organized by Marc Glimcher three years ago.

But now this rule-fiend seems intent on breaking his own cardinal principles.  The new work signals two points of departure with major implications for his practice.  Firstly, he is starting to work big, not simply in terms of larger surfaces but with scaled-up marks that suggest a freer, faster conception, and a determination to make a stronger initial impression than tended to be the case with the quirky, eccentric vocabulary of his previous work.

And secondly, this relentlessly abstract artist whose style seems to fuse a myriad of ethnographic and art historical precedents has started to admit the figure.  This is in the form of grotesque faces, screaming or grimacing old men from German medieval art arriving by way of Ivan Albright and Mad Max Magazine.  There are also strange tantric patterned decorations on erotic, onanistic themes.  The genie is out of the bottle.

The experience in this richly diverse exhibition is not, however, of transition so much as consolidation: the new works, whether big loopy abstractions in fat confident brushstrokes or the weirdo figuration described above, seem legitimate outgrowths of the precious, tight, miniaturist Mr. Siena of old.  And the old religion is still practiced: There are many of gorgeously colored grids of comb motifs, for instance, dating from 2006 or 07 hanging happily alongside the new genres.

The quality of line in the grotesques, meanwhile, relates to the quilt- or lattice-like grids and labyrinths of classic Siena pictures not just formally but in terms, too, of their own morphology: the line seems as subservient to algorithm as depiction, even though they work depictively.  In “First Old Man,” (2006) for instance, there is more a sense that the figure emerged from a maze-like algorythm that went awry than that the eye-popping, snarling figure was himself the prime mover of the linear form meandering about the page.  And yet this colon-like form, doubling back and forth on itself, does perfectly describe the loose-gums and folding flesh of this wrinkled geriatric.

The increased scale of Mr. Siena’s abstract paintings has opposite emotional implications to his figural drawings.  Where the faces and bodies show a goofy, mortal, and thus vulnerable side of the artist’s personality, the large abstract works are cooler, somewhat more ethereal than his tighter, smaller ones.  You sense the hand being more distant from the artist’s body in the bigger pieces, generally pages in portrait format at 60 by 40 inches, with cool, fluid results, whereas in the intimate formats, where the aluminum or copper plates, or masonite boards, are less than half that size, you feel the artist’s shoulders hunched over the support, the slim lines exacting a fiercer quality of concentration, more retinal, less muscular.

And yet, in part to contradict this observation while confirming it, one of the most glorious of his new, large format linear abstractions, “Untitled (Brown White)” (2007), betrays a key aspect of his earlier miniaturist modus operandi: That while the line follows a tight logic, it also fluctuates in color intensity in a way that suggests the mind deciding where to go next—the brush is stopping not just to ink but to think.  Miraculously a coiling thick line twists and turns to fill the whole page evenly yet never overlaps itself, and rarely (and when it does, good naturedly) butts into itself.

Works in his new genres exude all the excitement of thematic departure, but the most intense pleasures in this show occur when Mr. Siena is on familiar ground—whether because of this viewer’s comfort level, or the artist’s, is a matter of conjecture.  Unusually for an artist who is reported to be partially color blind, Mr. Siena achieves exquisite, lryical intensities of color relationship in his works in enamal on metal plates.  “Heliopolis, third version” (2006) connotes the sun of its title with a close-knit gold and yellow shot through with dark blue.  It is a tight composition in which the gaze is funneled into the center of the plate, while the inexactitude of this handmade image, with the pattern wobbling rather as if it were weaved than painted, reminds of the artifice and ensures a sense of flatness.

While Mr. Siena’s compulsive personal industry is taking his art in disparate directions simultaneously, it is reassuring to find him equally fascinated, and fascinating, in each of them.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, April 3, 2008 under the heading “Making and Breaking his own Rules”

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JAMES SIENA
PaceWildenstein until January 28, 2006 (534 W 25 Street, between 10 and 11 Avenues, 212 929 7000)

BARBARA TAKENAGA
McKenzie Fine Art through December 17 (511 West 25 Street, between 10 and 11 Avenues, 212 989 5467)

SUZAN FRECON
Peter Blum through January 14, 2006 (99 Wooster Street, between Prince and Spring, 212 343 0441)

James Siena is like a one-man lost civilization. An odd mix of diversity and unity, his work is uniquely his own, yet charged with a suprapersonal force more familiar from enthnographic artefacts.  His first exhibition at his new gallery, PaceWildenstein, offers a dozen new paintings and two dozen drawings that extend a pictorial language he has made familiar in the last fifteen years of complex lattices, at once tight and wayward, and repeating patterns of mesh, of herring bone, or of bento box-like structures of rectangles within rectangles, Russian-doll like in their endless succession. His use of sign-painter’s enamel on metal lends his compelling, enigmatic works surfaces of cool succulence, glowing but distant.

There are numerous shades of other artists and cultures—this viewer is reminded, on the collective side, of African textiles, Maori tatoos and Tantric art and such individuals as Gustav Klimt (his decorative backgrounds), Joaquin Torres Garcia, and the obsessive outsider artist Friedensreich Huntertwasser.  Rather than coming across as referential, Mr. Siena seems something of an outsider himself, plumbing his own depths to arrive at an authentic, primordial intensity.

He couldn’t be less of an outsider, as it happens: a Cornell graduate, a star of the last Whitney Biennnial, and an acknowledged leader of his generation, he’s as clued in as any artworld insider.  But his abstract language has a remarkable freedom from either the old fashioned modernist fusion of disparate primitive and prehistoric influences into a generalized soup of Ur-forms, or a postmodernist deliberate cacophany of styles.  Instead his weirdly exquisite, compulsively detailed, fanatically methodical designs seem disarmingly practical, charged with the kind of energy you might get in a precolumbian proto-computer, or cosmologies from a vanished religion.

This purposiveness is hard won, for Mr. Siena works within stringent rules. Homo ludens—the man who plays—his drawings are elaborations of what he himself describes as visual algorithms.  Each work has its own predetermined set of procedures in relation to which the results both adhere and deviate, as a title like “Coffered Divided Sagging Grid (with glitch)” reveals.  Despite his art having great warmth, charm and empathy, Mr. Siena is, par excellence, a conceptual artist, as he is interested in seeing what happens if you submit your art to the realization of a preconceived idea.

Some pictures, like put me in mind of Mr. Close’s almost occult portrayal of a Svengali-like Lucas Samaras.

The nutty, trippy, transcendentally labor intensive aspect of Mr. Siena’s work places him in the company of a broad spectrum of contemporary artists whose art taps a finely wrought psychedia. Peers in this realm would certainly include Bruce Pearson and Fred Tomaselli. The Whitney Museum’s recent “Remote Viewing” exhibition of painters of invented worlds, and the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art’s survey of art that explores the narcotic, “Ecstasy: In and About Altered States” point to a spaced-out strand in the zeitgeist.

Barbara Takenaga is a priestess in this cult.  She creates sumptuous decorations of mind boggling complexity that fill you with a sense of awe not just because of the exhilerating cosmos they depict but because of a sense of the heightened consciousness required for such creation. Once the eye adjusts to a sense of gaudy overload, and overcomes the prejudice of feeling you might have seen such imagery on the cover of a molecular chemistry textbook, it becomes clear that she is an image crafter of formidable power.

Each of the fourteen paintings on display, which range from 12 by 10 inches to 70 x 60, a significant jump in size for this artist, must have required staggering feats of patience and mental organization.  “Rubazu” and “Corona #2 (Golden), both of 2005, are spirals packed with vibrant balls of radically disjunctive scale.  At the heart of each vortex are tiny little dots that such the eye into infinite space.

She favors a much tighter, neater delivery than we get in Mr. Siena, with a bright, dense all-overness and dazzling synthetic color.  As a result, we don’t get the sense, as we do in Mr. Siena, of a hand leading directly to mental presence.  But for an art that seems at first to be all about special effects there is a surprising amount of surface pleasure to be had in Ms. Takenaga.  This comes out especially in a play of solid against acqueous paint, which corresponds with a theme of flatness versus depth, as in “Gold + Red” 2005, where the orbs, distributed in an almost Paisley-like spiral, each have a sense of being a contained world, filled with wobbly light.

While Ms. Takenaga complements Mr. Siena’s near-psychotic obsessiveness, his timeless, archaic quality resonates with another remarkable exhibition opening today, also a debut with a new gallery, Suzan Frecon at Peter Blum. She has half a dozen large paintings, three of them in fact diptychs of horizonal canvases stacked to nine foot high by 87-3/8 inches.

Her art can be described, in a contradiction that also recalls Mr. Siena, as hand-made hard edge: Patiently crafted, unegotistical, lovingly carved-out forms whose sense of the definitive feels personally won rather than merely given.

A consumate colorist, Ms. Frecon concocts her own mixtures of oil and pigment, favoring subtly discrepant tones rather than contrastive hues.  “composition with red earth and red earth,” 2005, uses the stacked canvses to posit one tone of terracotta against another, the top slightly more paprika, the bottom chocolate.

While some of the forms are strictly rectangular, a favorite motif is a curved shape of vaguely Islamic reference, somewhere between a turban and a dome, depending whether you read them in positive or negative against their ground.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, November 17, 2005

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