January 10 to March 3, 2018
257 Bowery, between Stanton and Houston streets
New York City, speronewestwater.com

In case anyone is wondering if the title of this show is metaphorical, Kim Dingle has actually chosen to create an entire body of work blindfolded. These gestural, immediate, expressionistic compositions are formed by a few sweeping brush strokes dashed across Plexiglass panels, mostly in black and white, with the occasional accenting fleck of a primary color. But while the title is literal, the action of taking a brush to these industrially uniform surfaces without the aid of sight is nonetheless a meditation on where knowledge is stored

For most of Dingle’s career, the artist has been known for sculptures and images of a pugnacious little avatar she has named Priss, a character inspired by her niece whose formative years were a pendulum swing between prim Sunday special attire, and head banging flights of havoc. Unfortunately, when an artist becomes known for some specific content, they often feel obligated to produce visually related material in perpetuity. As a joke about feeling the pressure to maintain continuous mechanized production to feed this media leviathan, Dingle tells me, she would exclaim to friends, “I’ve done these Priss works so many times already, I could do them with my eyes closed. I could do them blindfolded… oh. Wait. Is that true? That’s an idea! I will do them blindfolded!”

The result of this initial frustration eventually gave way to emotional discovery. “When I take the blindfold off, the first thing I do is laugh with relief. Nothing comes out right. The girl’s socks are off to the side, and well, that dress is floating a little high. Each piece is a challenge, but I end up showing every one.”

This all-inclusive attitude comes from an experiment put forward by Tom Hatten, a television personality from the 1950s. As host of the Popeye Show he staged a contest where kids were invited to draw a squiggle that Hatten was then required to transform into a character. If he was unable to do so, the squiggler won a free bike. Usually, however, through free association, he found something within the kiddy abstraction. This stuck with Dingle, who now believes that every move is imbued with the possibility for recognition. As a poetic gesture, the artist has also been writing blindfolded on an iPad. While the writing is illegible, upon inspection some intonations arise from the garbled text. Fingers miss their mark on the keyboard, but the rhythm of speech is still evident. This led Dingle to muse upon the underlying muscle memory guiding all physical expression. “The thing about muscle memory is that I can’t be blindfolded and expect to paint Picasso’s Guernica. His figures aren’t within me. I haven’t practiced that dance. But I could imagine the composition, and make my own Guernica, with my girls.”

Muscle memory is formed through habitual repetition and is stored in the cerebellum, way back behind our verbal centers. It is this subconscious experience that David Salle prizes in the seasoned painter. In “How To See” he argues that time spent in repetition enriched the output of painters like Alex Katz and Malcom Morley. Their practiced movements smoothed with the confidence of a lifetime of committed depiction.

For Dingle it is remembering the steps of a dance that resonates through her fully intuitive process.

According to Professor Patrick Haggard (of the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience in London) when a ballerina commits a routine to memory, proprioceptive cognitive ability runs its course. This is an automatic function of the brain. It receives signals automatically about the physical makeup of each moving part of the body, and creates a spatial model of it within our subconscious mind in order to navigate. This activity in the cerebellum is heightened for anyone who periodically runs the same physical routine.

As a final barrier to her conscious, verbal mind hijacking a state of free figuration, Dingle makes sure to occupy her frontal cortex with some trashy talk radio. “I can’t listen to any heartbreakingly beautiful music while I’m making these paintings. It would distract me from becoming distracted, send me down a river of feeling.” Much of this process of stripping away the usually integral senses tied with viewing art seems tied with eradicating socially elicited emotions. After decades of living with Priss, Dingle has made her way to the deepest memory center of her mind, the one that can operate without rational calculations of audience approval or shame.

The post Muscle Memory: Kim Dingle talks about her Blindfold paintings with Lucia Love Mooney-Martin appeared first on artcritical.

Ali Banisadr: Motherboard at Sperone Westwater

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.

The post A Topical Pick from the Archives: Ali Banisadr at Sperone Westwater appeared first on artcritical.

April 18 to June 6, 2015
257 Bowery (between Stanton and Houston streets)
New York, 212 999 7337

Turner Prize-winning painter Malcolm Morley is currently exhibiting a striking new body of paintings and installation works at the Sperone Westwater. An accompanying monograph has also been published by the gallery. Throughout his expansive 60-year career, Morley has deftly surfed between rigid art-world categorizations such as abstraction, Pop art, photorealism and Expressionism. Ignoring such strictures has allowed Morley to stay true to his subjects — most recently his fascination with military histories and vintage paper models of planes — and, in the process, reveal hints of his own life story and obsessions.

The artist’s fascination with war harkens back to his boyhood in London. During World War II enemy forces bombed his family’s home. The family hurriedly left the house that night, never to return and Morley was deeply affected by this tragedy. During my recent visit to his Long Island studio, he revealed that his last, most poignant memory of home was the distinct image of his newly painted model airplane left sitting on the windowsill of his bedroom.

In these recent works, Morley scripts his color-laden fighter planes, battleships, forts and cannons into raucous, nonsensical battle scenarios — combinations of events and timelines plausible only from a child’s point of view. His recurrent lexicon of war imagery, adapted from vintage toys and model kits, once again resurfaces here. They evince a subtle but important shift in technique, towards a more expressionist brush mark, a loosening of the underlying grid, and a distortion or abstraction of surface. Buttery, sensuous brushstrokes compete with more textural applications of paint. In Freighter with Primary Colors and B2 Bombers (2013), paint is applied as physically articulated marks, both dry-brush and juicy, in stippled applications. The textural elements indicate splashing waves and bombs dropping. Meanwhile, deftly modeled tones of blue and white create poetic transitions in the sky and clouds. The bands of color that make up the deck of the sea vessel are slab-like marks that create tension and physicality as abstraction, a merger of historical fact and pure artistic license. The B2 bombers in this painting are decorated with a variety of stripes and patterns borrowed from aircraft insignia used to guide pilots in recognizing allied aircraft and sea vessels more effectively in the era before advanced radar and radio technologies took over. In the painting Dakota,(2015) the carnivalesque battle engages military forces of historical implausibility. With exaggerated, child-like renderings, history hits the blender as a Viking ship, lighthouse, train and German fighter plane are orchestrated across a silky cobalt green expanse. Although he is depicting naturalistic imagery, Morley does so by magnifying the abstract nature of his materials and subjects.

A number of works in the show incorporate paper assemblage and mixed media installation. In The Searchers (2014) two hand-decorated model airplanes are physically affixed to the cloudy blue sky of the painting plane at oblique angles. Morley explains he attaches the planes as such “to create shadows.” In the largest and most ambitious work in the show, Napoleon Crossing the Alps with Cannon (2014), painting and sculptural components merge into a theatrical, diagrammatic installation. The artist renders Napoleon on horseback, his equestrian pose borrowed from the famous painting by Jacques-Louis David. A paper-and-encaustic cannon, replete with a stack of cannonballs, occupies the floor space in front of the painting, the weaponry aimed directly at the portrait. They’re a commanding presence, seemingly attacking Napoleon’s portrait and the regal militarism for which it stands.

Twisting military fact with fiction, Morley’s illogical narratives can sometimes bewilder beyond patient observation. But the vintage model airplanes, now a primary component of his illusionist reliefs, expand our experience beyond the nostalgia of his biography into a critique of dominant culture’s obsession with militarism. More importantly, their presence on and around the painted image allows for a heightened experience of time and place, both real and imagined, by creating a theatrically staged experience of Morley’s underlying narrative.

The post Flying Aces: Malcolm Morely at Sperone Westwater 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

The post Killer Opening For “Murdering The World,” Mark Greenwold’s Long-Awaited Debut at Sperone Westwater appeared first on artcritical.