GABRIELE EVERTZ: EXALTATION
Minus Space, 16 Main Street, Suite A, DUMBO, minusspace.com

SUSAN ROTHENBERG
Sperone Westwater, 257 Bowery, Lower East Side, speronewestwater.com

MICHAEL ST. JOHN: DEMOCRACY PORTRAITS
team (gallery, inc.), 83 Grand Street, Soho, teamgal.com
ASHES/ASHES 56 Eldridge Street, Lower East Side, ashesonashes.com

DAN WALSH
Paula Cooper Gallery, 524 West 26th Street, Chelsea, paulacoopergallery.com

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September 12 to October 27, 2018
257 Bowery (between Stanton and Houston streets)
New York City, speronewestwater.com

In stand up comedy, there can be a thin, easily crossed line between aggressive hilarity and remarks that are racist, sexist or anti-Semitic. A great performer needs to identify and respect these limits. Is it also possible for a painter to go too far? People used to think that Francis Picabia had done so with his ‘bad paintings’, works that inspired David Salle in the 1980s. But now Picabia, and maybe also Salle, belong to the postmodernist canon. Many commentators felt that Giorgio de Chirico, in his later works depicting gladiators and horses, had gone off the deep end, losing touch completely with the inspiration of his haunting early cityscapes. But nowadays it seems unacceptable for retrospectives to include only his early and widely admired masterpieces. The lessons of art history teach critics who reject the transgressive to take care.

Forty years ago Malcolm Morley became famous for his photorealist paintings. Then he had a long, highly successful career, demonstrating an amazing ability to work in a variety of disparate styles. In the 1980s, for example, he was identified as an important Neo-Expressionist. Now, in pictures completed in the three years before his recent death, Morley shows close focus pictures of armored knights. In Piazza d’Italian with French Knights (2017) two knights find themselves in a de Chiricoesque cityscape; in Melee at Agincourt (2017), a canvas of six by nine feet, a crowded field of mounted knights is on a yellow monochromatic background. And French and English Knights Engaged in Mortal Combat (2017) shows a joust in front of a lovingly detailed castle, with a sailing ship in the background. The great plaids in Italian Knight (2016) may recall modernist grids. And the vast green and yellow fields behind the knights in Tilting (2017) might remind you of the backgrounds in Alex Katz’s classic portraits.

Like many boys, Morley loved playing with toy soldiers – in the exhibition catalogue Nicholas Serota notes that his art demonstrates “the way we retain deep in our memory visual triggers to our profound psychological experiences, to our encounters with each other, and our relationship with the material world around us.” Via Paolo Uccello’s Niccolò Mauruzi da Tolentino at the Battle of San Romano (1438-40), the nineteenth-century Scottish history painter James Henry Nixon, and Lawrence Olivier’s 1944 film Henry V, Morley learned how to compose battle scenes.

However bizarre new artworks appear, it’s always possible to adduce sources and argue that they extend visual tradition, in a meaningful way. But for me, these new Morleys stand to history painting the way Liberace’s Chopin stands to normal pianists’ performances. Most of these pictures are absurd, so obviously, deeply silly that I cannot imagine an art world in which they would be taken seriously. Still, I grant that one painting is a real achievement. In The Ultimate Anxiety (1978), the second largest work in the show, a line of freight train cars runs diagonally across the Venetian lagoon, which is filled with gondolas and a golden ceremonial barge, with Venetians observing from the quayside. When in the 1840s a train bridge was built in Venice, John Ruskin worried that his favorite city had been ruined. Morley’s visual commentary, is an inspired update of an, alas, all too real concern for the fate of Venice. One could say, I believe, that the painting makes a fantasy out of Ruskin’s fear. But after that, I think, Morley went too far.

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March 1 to April 19, 2014
257 Bowery between Houston and Stanton streets,
New York City,  212.999.7337

If you have any trouble imagining what a cross between Pieter Brueghel the elder, André Masson, Wilfredo Lam, Gerhard Richter (in his abstract idiom), Walt Disney, San Francisco-style graffiti and a Mughal miniature looks like, don’t worry, Ali Banisadr can put you in the picture in a New York minute. This painter of rich-hued, busy, noisy tableau fills three floors of Sperone Westwater, in his first solo show with the Lower East Side powerhouse, with luridly raucous action dramas.

Iranian-born, California-raised, New York-educated and Brooklyn-based, Banisadr comes with a cv as cosmopolitan as his painterly influences.  Ali grew up against the backdrop of the Iran-Iraq war before leaving Tehran with his family, immigrating via Turkey to the States at age 12.

The adolescent refugee soaked up the energy of 1990s graffiti in its golden age under the aegis of Barry McGee and the late Margaret Kilgallen, although the vibe that survives in his own handwriting is less the elaborate figuration of the Bay Area street artists as a more calligraphic tagging, again perhaps tapping his ancestry.

In New York, as Jeffrey Deitch observes in his catalogue essay for the present show, Banisadr maximized his time at the School of Visual Arts and then the New York Academy in the acquisition of manual skills; at SVA, for instance, he enrolled in illustration classes, while clearly reveling in the beaux-arts pedagogy of the Academy.  The debut of this wondrously dexterous artist took place in 2008 at Leslie Tonkonow, where he showed again in 2011, and he has had solo shows in Europe, too.

Our Hieronymus Bosch of graffiti typically delivers his loud crowds in a massed cluster at the base of a tripartite composition.  Despite the all-over energizing of his canvases, Banisadr achieves a strong sense of pictorial depth, with fore, middle and long distances, a clear horizon between sky and ground.  There is an added sense of depth in the variety of scale amongst his heaving horde.  They are a bestiary of varyingly gruesome, comical, menacing and preposterous personages formed in an equally fulsome array of gestures – artful smudges and splatters, striations and strokes, virtuoso flicks of wrist and bravura sleights of hand.

This throng forms a writhing gestalt that itself becomes a singular monster agitating the picture, sometimes sending shock waves of conflict into the anyway rarely very peaceful heavens.  In Motherboard (2013) for example, the title piece of the show, a sharp, vertical band of red streaks out between the scrum below and the sliver of turbulent sky above reading like some barcode of blood.  Or in Ran (2014), the triptych that dominates the ground floor of the gallery, the sky witnesses a strange mottled grid of red impasto that reads like a cross between Richter squeegee and fragments of long-lost cuneiform script. Banisadr’s combatants recall great renaissance depictions of conflict like Leonardo’s now-lost “Battle of Anghiari” (1505), known from presumed copies, and Michelangelo’s “Battle of Cascina,” also lost, except in the place of the naked, idealized combatants supplied by the Italians, Banisadr betrays a more northern penchant for caricature along with his pronouncedly eastern (as well as West Coast) palette in a modern-medieval sensibility.  But what he has in common with the high renaissance masters is a way of enlisting the mass into a singularity while retaining an energetic thrust.

Despite the figuration and the action, and the traditional heaven-and-earth, figure-ground compositional structures, these are essentially abstract paintings.  They are about all-overness, balance, movement, harmony and dissonance, detail and whole.  Their cartoonish gestures — the schematic swishes of air current left in the wake of bodies darting to and fro – adds a kitsch element as do the knowingly vulgar color schemes but the sheer skill and vibrancy with which he marshals technique has us forgive these as surely as we do or ought to do in his surrealist or populist mentors.  In some ways he is a flatter, cleaner version of Cecily Brown, replacing sex with war.  He looks to Matta where she looks to de Kooning, which is to say that his skills are more linear and spatial and less fleshly or voluptuous.

And like Matta, Banisadr has a disconcerting ability to combine a fast read with meticulous, painstaking execution.  It is this disconnection between execution and effect that surely accounts for a slickness some will find worrisome.   It is not that he is postmodern even, so much as unmodern.  This may be why, despite their galvanizing turmoil and breathtaking technique and at once abrasive and retina-soaking chroma, these are ultimately very distant images, emotionally strained and cold.

Banisadr has one stated ambition that he achieves with uncanny force: to generate visual noise.  Somehow, his sheer velocity gives off audible sound.  It is as if, caught up in the excitement, the beholder can’t help but supply, if not a soundtrack at least rather noisy sound effects.

And if you do find the drama does deserve a score, it is up to you whether to bring along heavy metal or a Berlioz symphony.

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Think Bowery and it is either the New Museum or the Bowery Mission that likely springs to mind. But right now it is also the place to view something whose rarity and finesse belies both associations: a newly discovered portrait by the most famous female old “master”, Artemisia Gentileschi.

Her portrait of an unidentified, fashionable young nobleman, dated to the 1630s, is on view as part of a display of a dozen or so Italian paintings from the 17th and 18th centuries on the fourth floor of Sperone Westwater. This is the first time pre-modern art has been show in this gallery’s new, Norman Foster-designed premises, where paintings by the likes of Francesco Guardi and Luca Giordano share pristine white wall space with works dating from the 1960s, on the lower floors, by Heinz Mack, the veteran German artist and member of the ZERO group. The Italian Paintings are presented at Sperone by the London and Milan-based dealers Robilant & Voena.

The new Artemesia was acquired under a different attribution. During restoration the monogram AG emerged in the trinkets on the young man’s chest, and after lengthy analysis experts are agreed now on the portrait being from her hand. It is to be included in a large public exhibition of her work in Milan later this spring. This tall handsome painting is likely from the period just after she gained independence from her father, Orazio’s workshop.

Artemesia is best known for her powerful Baroque interpretations of beheading scenes such as Judith and Holofernes, a theme she returned to often. Besides being one of very few women artists of note before the modern era, she also figures in the annals of feminist art history thanks to the transcript of a lengthy rape trial in which she was the plaintiff.

Until February 19 at Sperone Westwater,  257 Bowery, between Houston and Stanton streets, 212 999 7337

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Greg Lindquist, Barbara MacAdam, and John Perreault joined David Cohen to discuss Suzan Frecon at David Zwirner, Liz Cohen at Salon 94 Bowery, Oliver Herring at Meulensteen, and Guillermo Kuitca at Sperone Westwater.

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The opening of a branch of Lehmann Maupin in late 2007 on Chrystie Street signaled that big guns were on their way.  Now a battleship has moored on the Bowery in the form of Norman Foster’s spectacular design for the new Sperone Westwater. The gallery, which has been active since the 1970s, relocated from premises in the Meat Packing District.  The new space responds with spectacular verticality to a footprint of 100 by 25 feet as a rectangular black box with a dynamic glass front, recessed at the point where the façade lines up with its neighbors.  Until 2008 the previous building on the site had housed a company that rents vintage machinery and fixtures to the film industry.

The inevitable point of comparison with Lord Foster’s design will naturally be the New Museum itself, just a block away, where Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa solved the same problem of highly restricted ground plan with an irregular, offset stack of gallery cubes.  Seeing the two venues sparring with one another could bring to some art historians’ minds the great ideological/architectural contest between the German and Soviet pavilions at the 1937 world exhibition, though which recalls which is a speculation that is better not entered into.

Hopefully, more galleries will attempt similar feats, to make the Bowery a 21st-century San Gimignano—a much more edifying comparison.

Sperone’s new building accommodates three floors of exhibition space, with offices and showrooms above, and one particularly striking, and no doubt rather costly feature: an elevator room that can be parked on different floors.  For the inaugural exhibition of recent works by Argentine painter Guillermo Kuitca this peripatetic room houses a 1992 installation, Le Sacre, of tightly fitted-together mattresses on which the artist has imprinted miscellaneous maps from around the world, which here becomes a moving padded cell.

The neighborhood, meanwhile, welcomes two architecturally more conventional, though artistically adventurous new additions this month.  Dodge Gallery at 15 Rivington Street boasts fabulous top lit space in its double-volume rear gallery.  Principal Kristen Dodge has signed up seven artists for initial representation and anticipates developing a stable that reflects her bias towards art of conceptual rigor with a high degree of craft, with an emphasis on 3-dimensional work.  Dave Cole’s installation, Unreal City, her first solo presentation opening October 2, is billed as a somber meditation on history, war, and industrialization.

Around the corner at 195 Chrystie Street the relocated Hendershot Gallery (formerly on West 27th Street) launches with a group show organized by gallery director Jessica Shaefer, Digression, of seven women under 40.  These include Kenya (Robinson), the parentheses part of her exhibiting name, a self-taught artist whose sensibility fuses pop imagery and black identity.  Shaefer worked previously for Vito Schnabel where she developed a taste for projects that entail dialog between generations.

Kuitca’s work, meanwhile, is to be one of the subjects discussed at The Review Panel in October.  The artist’s nationally touring retrospective makes its final stop this month at the Hirshhorn Museum, opening October 21 in Washington DC.

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While many of the most lucrative sales in auctions devoted to Chinese contemporary art have gone to large-scale expressionist-style painting, Liu Ye offers a subtle counterpoint as if to suggest that not all painting in China travels the same direction.  Indeed, these paintings pursue a non-conformist, rear-guard image in the current Asian art scene.  Rather than conforming to a hackneyed style of figurative expressionism, Liu Ye reveals more controlled, refined, aspect of painting, one that is given to an implicit geometry.

In a glance one can see Liu Ye’s adroit, cartoon-like female figures – forever young and fashionably dressed – in paintings such as Leave Me in The Dark (2009), Banned Book 2(2008), and Miss (2008), and immediately grasp the blithe mannerism inherent in these paintings. Each work possesses a purist transparent surface that begets a different mood when compared with the hyper, smiling faces, for instance, in the paintings of Yue Min-ju.

In addition to being the title of this relatively sparse exhibition at Sperone Westwater, there are two versions of Leave Me in the Dark: one vertically cropped smaller painting, and another larger painting with a more effective horizontal expanse. In each case, a small doll-like Asian woman stands squarely in the middle of the painting.  The straight ground-level horizon is slightly raised behind her feet, where a wintry sky appears rendered in warm gray tones.  It is snowing.  Her cheeks are rosy. She is poised holding her black pull-along suitcase adjacent to her firmly placed blue plaid pants.

In contrast, Banned Book 2, the young woman (presumably the same model) is reclining horizontally in a prone position, again elegantly dressed with a tiny waist and long black hair descending over the side of her face that descends in front of the book she is reading. Barbara Pollack suggests in her catalogue essay that the book is Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, which created a sensation in countries as divergent as the Islamic Republic of Iran and the People’s Republic of China. The painting heralds a curious form of irony as the reclining subject appears self-content, and not particularly distraught as to the contraband material om which she delights.

Much has been made concerning the artist’s relationship to Mondrian.  There are many, examples of Mondrian-influenced pictures by Liu in the stand out Fu Ruide collection of Chinese paintingWhereas the more obvious Mondrian influence at Sperone can be found inComposition with Toy Bricks (2009) includinga faux Cubist table top with a geometric arrangement of colored shapes painted in red, yellow, and blue, the less obvious, yet more implicit structure can be found in one of the truly magnificent paintings in this show, Miss(2008).

Here again, our friendly young girl – this time, wearing a stylish bowler – stands alone with two suitcases on either side.  There are no red, yellow, and blue shapes in this painting, yet in purely formal terms, the asymmetrical balance of the baggage in relation to her figure holds a mystifying internal tension within the open pictorial space.  Liu’s use of the void brings home the differences between the meaning of the void in China and the Western world. In Liu Ye’s paintings, the void is a representation of space in Taoist or Zen Buddhist terms; it is more formal in Miss and, I would argue, more elegant than the Western colloquialism – “It just came out of the void.”.  Here I am caught between two sensibilities. While I feel the necessity to say that no art comes out of the void, I simply cannot deny the indelible absence in the paintings of Liu Ye of what John McLaughlin called, in reference to the fifteenth century Japanese landscape painter, Sesshu, “the marvelous void”. What I find exciting about the application of the void in Liu Ye’s modest paintings of figures in open space is their accuracy in bringing the Zen meditative concept of wu-nien (no mind) into a refreshing context. In so doing, Liu’s paintings internalize large ideas within small spaces, thereby reinvigorating a new possibility for intimacy in art within the transcultural excess of the present.

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March 20, 2009 at the National Academy Museum and School of Fine Arts, New York

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Michael Brenson, Carol Diehl, and David Ebony joined David Cohen to review Kamrooz Aram at Perry Rubinstein, Siah Armajani at Max Protetch, Alfredo Jaar at Galerie Lelong, and Susan Rothenberg at Sperone Westwater.

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Zero, an Italian group started by Heinz Mack and Otto Piene and active between 1957 and 1966, included artists from France, Italy, Germany, Belgium, and Switzerland. These people worked in deliberate contrast to the prevailing post-war expressionism with its claim to individuality and personal discovery by using modest, minimal, and often non-traditional art materials to artists from their artwork. Working outside the gallery system, these artists made single-evening exhibitions, often in their own studios, issuing manifestos with these events. While some artists involved with Zero, like Lucio Fontana, are well recognized in America, this is the first survey of the lesser-known group in the States.

The gallery visitor is greeted with silence. Many of the works recede, rather than thrust forward. One reason for this is a marked lack of color, with a predominance of dreary grays, deep blacks, ashen browns. Now and again, a saturated red or yellow will flash and spark. Some of the rooms here are hung salon-style, creating a smart rhythm echoing that of the works. In place of labels, artist’s names are lightly handwritten in graphite on the walls next to their art, a choice that reflects the group’s lack of preciousness.

Throughout this exhibition there is an emphasis on materials. From Arman’s piling up of ready-made objects in Accumulation Lampes Fiat Lux (1960) to Yves Klein’s burnt paper on wood in Fire Painting (1961), attention seems focused on distinct formal textures. Weathered and soiled surfaces tend to look damaged,burned, scarred, trampled. As the Cubists and Dadaists before them, the Zero artists wanted to incorporate materials from everyday life in an attempt to collapse the boundaries between art and life. Rather than present themselves as alienated from society as many of the American Abstract Expressionists tended to, through stubborn avoidance of technology and escape into interiority, Zero artists embraced technology and nature alike.

The exhibition mostly consists of two-dimensional wall works that take on the appearance of paintings, but are often not paintings in a conventional sense. Piero Manzoni’s Achrome (1958-59), for instance, is a white horizontal surface of polyester soaked in cobalt chloride, while Hienz Mack’s Folium Argentum (1968) is an etched aluminum panel. Other Zero artists used materials such assand, plastic, mirror, fire, electric light, and smoke. Otto Piene’s Light Ballet on Wheels (1965) is a small, black drum on wheels that projects various shapes of moving light onto the walls and ceiling. It is an investigation of the ephemeral, of the fleeting glimpse. The neutral, plain-looking drum can adapt to any situation, ready to affect a new space with it’s outpour of light, yet also ready to submit to it’s own lack of control. If a space isn’t dark enough, Light Ballet on Wheels surrenders itself to the role of static sculpture.

Another way the Zero artists were counter-expressionist was in their adoption of delicate, minimal forms, often focusing on that staple of modernism, the grid. A 1964 work by Jan Schoonhoven of a grid made with wood, cardboard, and papier maché more closely resembles a metal street grate than a Mondrian painting. However, touch does remain vital to these artists. Throughout the exhibition there is a clear need for a physical engagement with the work. An example being Lucio Fontana’s torn paper on canvas, Concetto Spaziale (1958). Here, the jagged holes cut into the paper aren’t to be seen as violent, but as another mode of mark marking, as the ultimate disturbance of the picture plane. The Zero group was interested in basics, which can be seen in the logical and fundamental way they organized space. As well as the grid, these artists often used circles, triangles, and diamond forms to order compositions. There is an elegant simplicity and economy that ties all the work together.

It is not difficult to locate affinities between the Zero group and the proceeding Italian movement Arte Povera and, also, current artists such as Sergej Jensen and Stefan Muller. Beginning in the late sixties, Arte Povera, which Fontana and Manzoni were also part of, shared Zero’s interest in using inexpensive and often found materials, in hope of establishing a more democratic form of art making. Sergej Jensen and Stefan Muller incorporate into their paintings different types of fabrics that are stained with chemicals or in other ways weather-worn. Particularly, Jensen’s “money paintings” find their precedent in Jan Henderiske’s Centenrelief (1966) and Common Cents (1967). Both “paintings” feature coins attached to stretched fabric that acknowledge their commodity status from the get-go. These are ways to make “freak paintings”, or paintings without paint, that curiously come across as mundane.

This is where the strength of the Zero artists lies, in their ability to expand the parameters of art, particularily painting, in a subtle way. This is not the drawing of a moustache on the Mona Lisa, this is the shift that occurs behind your back, in silence, without you even noticing.

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Suzaan Boettger, Charlie Finch, and Bridget L. Goodbody joined David Cohen to review Kevin Landers at Elizabeth Dee, Kim Dingle at Sperone Westwater, Philip Pearlstein at Betty Cunningham, Mary Lucier at Lennon, Weinberg, and Rebecca Smith at Jeannie Freilich.

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