Thursday, April 8 at 7 PM

JENNIFER COATES and DAVID HUMPHREY join DAVID COHEN to discuss

Julie Mehretu at the Whitney and Matthew Bollinger: Furlough at Zürcher Gallery, plus musical bonus

Timed reservations are required to view exhibitions at the Whitney

Whitney Museum of American Art: 99 Gansevoort Street, between Washington Street and 10th Avenue
Zürcher Gallery, 33 Bleecker Street, between Lafayette Street and Bowery

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Salon Zürcher is the ground hog of any art fair week in New York City. Zürcher, on Bleecker Street in Noho, has a longstanding tradition of opening up its premises to form a micro-fair, either with neighborhood galleries or with galleries from around the world. Kicking off Frieze Week is the second iteration of Salon Zürcher Africa gathering five galleries showcasing art from Africa from Addis Ababa, Nairobi, New York and Paris. See THE LIST for details of other fairs around New York City this week.

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Salon Zürcher is to fair weeks what New Hampshire is to primary elections. Armory Week 2017 kicks off Monday with the 16th edition of this boutique fair, an early bird special that hands the keys to Zürcher’s Bleecker Street premises to six galleries from Paris, Brussels, Oslo, Provincetown (MA) and Hangzhou, China, whose Inna Art Space’s booth is pictured here.

Tuesday, February 28: Moving Image New York at The Tunnel, 269 11th Avenue

Jefferson Pinder’s Afro-Cosmonaut/Alien (White Noise) is, according to his gallery, Curator’s Office of Bathesda, Md., “an escapist video narrative that ends in destruction when the protagonist plummets back to Earth after a mystical space journey. Like the doomed Icarus of Ancient Greek myth, the epic fall comes after reaching a brilliant zenith that is both mesmerizing and lethal. This white-faced Butoh-inspired performance is a crude metaphor of the civil rights legacy. Taking cues from experimental films, Pinder plants himself within the work, asking the viewers to watch the images of propulsion and power.”

Wednesday, March 1: Spring/Break Art Show, 4 Times Square

Spring/Break was the most anarchic and exuberant of the fairs back in the days when it was staged in the old USPS administrative offices – a David Lynch-like time-capsule of New Deal bureacracy. Now Spring/Break has been given a break in the form of two floors of a glass and steel high-rise 22 stories above Times Square. But there is no corresponding corporateness in the resulting display. The organizing principle remains: each room has its own curators who sometimes include the exhibiting artists themselves. It was gratifying for artcritical to see some of its own writers among the curators. Eric Sutphin, for instance, has brought together an inspired coupling of New York School painter Rosemarie Beck, who was active from the 1950s onwards with classically sourced, abstractly composed multi-figure compositions, and contemporary mannerist, Angela Dufresne, with her swirling, voluptuous, cinematic scenes. Each display has a neat little office of its own, with spectacular views of the midtown skyline. Too spectacular, sometimes, as it can overwhelm what’s on view. Inspired, therefore, was the decision to hang works in the blinds-drawn windows in one mini show, Thing Gap Method, selected by artcritical writer Megan Liu Kincheloe and featuring Sophia Flood, Sascha Ingber, Kelly McCafferty, Sarah Tortora and Kincheloe herself, whose Dice (2017) is pictured here. DAVID COHEN

Thursday, March 2: The Armory Show at Piers 92 & 94

It’s a good year for texture. Well, so is any year probably, and a good year for anything else if all you want to do is scatter evidence for some such glib hunch amidst the labyrinth that is the city’s biggest art fair, conceptual bread crumbs, so to speak, to trace your way back to the front door. But as the first piece to grab my eye was a fabric work by Jayson Musson at Philadelphia’s Fleisher-Ollman texture became my trail. Next stop, a cunningly camp “salon” for Florine Stettheimer, presented by Jeffrey Deitch, showing latter-day acolytes of the society heiress pioneer of the American avant garde where a 1990s shlock horror wedding cake of impasto by the unjustly forgotten Thomas Trosch abstractly emulated Florine’s Harlem beach scene that presides over the display. From there it was texture everywhere, whether the geological encrustations of Bosco Sodi, preponderant in the fair and to be seen, for instance, at Galeria Hilario Galguera of Mexico City, Blain Southern and Paul Kasmin; the very 1950s-looking sculpted netted grids of Michelle Grabner at James Cohan; or the painterly reliefs of Miguel Barcelo at Thaddeus Ropac. The tactility can even manifest vicariously, as in the Vik Muniz Isis print of a strangely mottled version of Picasso’s The Dreamer, at Edwin Houk. Haptic experiences grounded the gaze amidst the accelerating flow of spectacle. DAVID COHEN

Featured item from The Armory Show 2017: Mernet Larsen at Various Small Fires

Various Small Fires, the Los Angeles gallery, has a solo show of preparatory sketches by Tampa, Florida-based painter Mernet Larsen in the Presents section of The Armory Show 2017. Larsen, who also has a work on view at James Cohan Gallery’s booth at the same fair, has only recently come into her own since retiring from a distinguished career in art education, memories of which pervade her frequent return to the motif of the faculty meeting. Rooted in an earlier abstract practice as well as explorations of Japanese prints, Larsen’s jocular imagery thinly disguises her fascination with unconventional perspective systems. She pursues radical spatial solutions that eschew conventional single-point perspective in favor of parallel perspective, reverse perspective and eccentric, seemingly improvised but in fact rigorous fusions of different systems within the same work. By destabilizing the location of the viewer, sometimes indeed to the point of inducing vertigo, she forces us to know, rather than merely see, the situation. DAVID COHEN

Friday, March 3: VOLTA NY at Pier 90, 12th Avenue @ 50th Street

Ruth Hardinger’s striking Volta display at David&Scheweitzer Contemporary draws together disparate forces: the artist’s passionate environmental activism, her longstanding affinity with Mesoamerican culture, and historically informed, critically sharpened investigations of working methods. These are all felt in works such works as Bundle of Rights, a sculpture in plaster and rope, and Reading the Clouds, a tapestry collaboration with Mexican weavers, seen at the Piers. Meanwhile, back at the rancheros, that is to say 56 Bogart Street, the same gallery presents an ongoing retrospective overview of Hardinger work in different media. There are tapestries, a calendar, hanging works in paper and assembled sculptures. Obsessive-compulsive minimalist hatch drawings worked on varyingly rough and smooth surfaces are installed in a grid that conforms to the Golden Rule. Dating from the 1970s, this work manages to resonate with a recent, altogether more robust and spontaneous cast concrete and found slate sculptural arrangement. What binds these efforts across the decades is the humble yet inventive presentness of their maker. DAVID COHEN

Saturday, March 4: The Art Show at Park Avenue Armory, 643 Park Avenue @ 66th Street

The New York art fair scene can be confusing to the uninitiated: the most prominent fair, The Armory Show, takes place at a convention center on the Hudson while the Park Avenue Armory hosts an unrelated fair of its own, The Art Show by the Art Dealer’s Association of America. The work shown in the actual armory tends to be more conservative than the offerings of most of the other fairs, but there can be some surprises. PPOW’s booth this year is devoted to the work of Betty Tompkins, an artist who has been painting portraits of the pudendum for over forty years. Today she is best known for her colossal coital canvases, but her smaller works on paper, such as “Censored Grid #1” from 1974, provide a more intimate view of an intimate act. ROMAN KALINOVSKI

Independent (Art Fair) at Spring Studios, 50 Varick Street

Memo to Independent Art Fair, organizers and exhibitors alike: Enough already, put up some labels.

In the early days of the Basel Art Fair (the real one, in Basel, Switzerland) galleries would get an official reprimand from the all-powerful committee if the labels didn’t include prices. Dealers complained that having to ask was an icebreaker with collectors. But to have to ask who the artist is – never mind the title, medium, date? This is elitist, pretentious and anti-intellectual. To the innocent “general public” this says, this isn’t for you folks. To professionals it is impertinent and irritating, putting one in the humiliating position of asking when you half-know and gobbling up precious time in doing so. For new, unknown artists with foreign names it is a total downer: who is going to remember it, next time? And for collectors, having to beg for basic information has all the novelty and subtlety of a robo-telecall.

Despite this mishegas. Independent is still one of the most pleasing visitor experiences, thanks in no small measure to the gorgeous venue. My epiphanies on this visit were mostly three-dimensional for some reason: Beverly Buchanan’s shack constructions at Andrew Edlin; a bafflingly kinky saddle mounted on a scaffold “horse” by Magali Reus at London’s Approach; and a dynamically voluptuous bronze by the late Hungarian-born Norwegian sculptor Ervin Løffler, exquisitely installed by Oslo gallery VI, VII with works in dye on canvas by young New Yorker Landon Metz (Photo: Sebastiano Pellion) DAVID COHEN

Sunday, March 5: NADA New York at Skylight Clarkson North, 572 Washington Street

A work by Brenda Goodman presented by Jeff Bailey at NADA, the New Art Dealers Association, 2017 fair. NADA was founded in 2002, launching its first fair that year in Miami. This year sees some changes in its New York outing: the time slot has switched from Frieze Week to Armory Week, and they have a new venue in west Soho. In tune with the self-styled progressive profile of the association, half of ticket sales are to be donated to the ACLU. DAVID COHEN

This year’s iteration of the NADA fair was probably the most visually exhausting of the art fair week group, with dozens of galleries competing for attention in micro-booths that barely allowed one person to stand comfortably inside. Most of the galleries were from around New York but there were some international standouts, such as a selection of digital prints by Chris Dorland, courtesy of Super Dakota gallery from Brussels. Dorland’s glitchy work, made using a broken scanner and printed on eight foot tall aluminum panels, offered something monumental and digital in a fair that leaned towards the modest and traditional. Pictured: Untitled (corporate cannibal), 2017. ROMAN KALINOVSKI

Monday, March 6: Spring/Break Art Show, 4 Times Square

As befits the most youthful of the fairs, Spring/Break has an extra 24 hours of energy and determination than the others: it is the one fair in Fair Week that makes it to the Monday of the next. And here is an artist who knows how to capture zest. Aneta Bartos, whose dad Zbigniew Bartos has a lifetime of competitive bodybuilding behind him. Naturally, it was to her that he would turn, aged 68, to capture his musculature in its last glory. A room of buff, nicely toned father-daughter photographs takes home trophies for audacity and composure. DAVID COHEN

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Julia Westerbeke draws with the shadows produced by puncturing sheets of paper with untold numbers of pinpricks. Swirls and clusters of these craters bring to mind petri dishes and galaxies, merging images of the microscopic and the astronomical. They invoke a haptic feeling of disintegration: her drawings are created through the evisceration of their material base.

Salon Zürcher is at 33 Bleecker Street, between Lafayette Street and the Bowery, on view Sunday, noon to 8pm; and Sunday, noon to 5pm.

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The unique work of Regina Bogat came to my attention at Zürcher Gallery’s Frieze New York booth presentation in 2015, and later, through a solo exhibition at Zürcher Gallery in autumn of that year. I was already impressed by what I saw before seeing the dates of the works. It is one thing to innovate retrospectively, but quite another to do it contemporaneously in response to the moment. The works seemed, so much, both of their time and of the present. They not only resonate with young artists now; they represent, given their quality and originality, what arguably should have been an acknowledged achievement in the 1960s and ‘70s.  

DAVID RHODES: You are a New York artist, how did you come to live in New Jersey?

REGINA BOGAT: I moved here from Manhattan in 1972 with my husband, Alfred Jensen, and our two young children. Our Division Street loft was slated for demolition to make way for Confucius Plaza. We found this artist’s house; it was purpose-built in 1906 by a German artist and his French wife. The top floor is a studio with large north-facing skylights. It was with reluctance that I left New York. Even though it is only twenty-five minutes away from the city by train, at the time I felt isolated and cut-off from my prior life.

Today artists and galleries are dispersed across the boroughs in a way that is totally other to the concentrated, intimate associations of the New York art scene in previous decades, especially the 1940s, when you began participating in this world. When you arrived, what were your impressions of the New York art world?

As a young student, the New York art world was exciting. Many galleries were opening showing avant-garde art, artists were opening coops and collectors were buying contemporary American art. American art came to the forefront of the art scene, which had previously been led by Europe. America was shaking-up the art world and New York was playing a central role.

You are fortunate to have experienced such an exciting time in American art history and I am fortunate to be speaking with you, a primary source! Did the New York art world seem diverse or was it established entirely around the Abstract Expressionists? I imagine there were different camps.

There was diversity even though the Abstract Expressionists were receiving the most attention. I went to many openings for second generation Abstract Expressionists like Al Leslie, Nicholas Krushenick and Grace Hartigan. The first generation Abstract Expressionists, such as Jackson Pollack, Bill de Kooning and Arshile Gorky, were selling well and entering major collections. Articles about Abstract Expressionism dominated magazines, journals and the art sections of newspapers. I was most aware of the second-generation Abstract Expressionists’ competition with the first generation who already had fame and money from their work.

Some artists resisted action and gestural painting sticking to representational painting with regional themes and there were also those who continued emulating French Fauvism and Cubism. There were midtown galleries devoted to regional art like that of Rockwell Kent and Edward Hopper. At the Art Students League, Will Barnet was still doing derivations of Picasso. Some artists dismissed the abstractionists. I overheard Wolf Kahn refer to Abstract Expressionism as “spaghetti painting.”

The idea of various “groups” seemed to exist via the influential art writers of the period rather than being formed by the artists themselves. People were either for Clement Greenberg, who was doctrinaire, or for Tom Hess (of Art News) and Harold Rosenberg who were both more open to differing views about art.

The influx of European artists escaping WWII added to the diversity in New York. Did they influence your work?

Surrealists made a brief impact on my earliest work. I learned the technique of collage from studying Max Ernst. Although not an émigré, Giorgio de Chirico’s juxtaposition of unusual objects and concrete forms influenced me.

Neo-Plasticism was in the mix, led by Mondrian. He had his studio in Manhattan but passed away before I left College. At Brooklyn College, I heard a lot about him because the art department there was influenced by Bauhaus principles and its head, Harry Holtzman, was the executor of Mondrian’s estate. Perhaps I was unconsciously impacted by Mondrian. Bernard Zürcher, who is an art historian, has pointed out similarities in my geometric abstractions.

Duchamp, who later played an important role in New York, was playing chess on Fourteenth Street. I found his art amusing. This might have contributed to the playful dialogue I have with my work as it is made.

Did galleries have a strong role in differentiating various aesthetic tendencies?

Galleries that encouraged avant-garde art promulgated that aesthetic (at that time Abstract Expressionism). The traditional galleries showed conservative art espousing the representational aesthetics. Other galleries specializing in modern art represented aesthetics that were recently avant-garde.

There were two different art worlds vis-á-vis the galleries in New York. The galleries on 57th Street were commercial, while the galleries on 10th Street and the East Village coops were mostly artist-run. Neither world was exclusive to an aesthetic.

The art world became very complicated as more and more money was involved: the galleries looked towards the museums for advice on what artists to show; the museums looked to the galleries to see the latest developments; the collectors looked to both galleries and museums to determine the best work for investments. The critics stepped in to name the art movement of the day. The auction houses were there but they didn’t have the power that they have today.

Were the well-known artists accessible to you and supportive?

I had several wonderful friends in the art world. Some of them were well known. I went to openings, introduced myself to people and wrote for a journal called East. At first, I was in awe of the success of well-known artists. In time, I became friends with several who were accessible and supportive. Many of the well-known artists were erudite but never stodgy.

Was Elaine de Kooning one of these?

Elaine de Kooning welcomed me as part of her family as well as a fellow artist. She invited me to go along with her to visit artists’ studios and compare notes on the visits. She was free with her ideas about painting. She permitted me to stay in her studio while she was painting, something most artists forbid. She was communicative and supportive. She threw wonderful parties to which I was invited. This was invaluable because it was a place to network. Networking was very important as it still is today.

How about Ad Reinhardt and Mark Rothko?

I met Reinhardt at openings. He was friendly and attentive. I learned a lot about how to construct a painting from Ad. He was learned but not pedantic. Ad was using oil paint but wanted the paint to be completely matte; he drained all the oil from the paint. This made his work hard to conserve later. He revealed a lot about his painting techniques.

Rothko had his studio across the hall from mine at 222 Bowery and we became close friends. Mark taught me a lot about the art world: he taught me about galleries; he told me how to avoid shady dealers; he taught me how to prepare for a show; and, he showed me ways to care for and store art. I assisted him in his studio by repairing the edges of his paintings for his show at the Modern. He told off-color jokes which kept us laughing. Mark is often presented as off-putting; however, he really was quite warm, nurturing and could be very funny.

My husband, Al Jensen, was supportive and showed me the world of antiquities. For a young New Yorker, who had not traveled much, a six-month trip to Paris, Switzerland, Italy, Greece and Egypt was mind-boggling. He showed me that what we see as ornament was based on ancient symbolism. He shared his fascination with numbers, science and ancient cultures. My work was deeply influenced by these new experiences.

You mentioned you were writing about art for the journal East at one point. Elaine de Kooning was also writing. Were artists’ opinions the benchmark for each other over what critics were saying? Did artists’ writings contribute to the contemporary art dialogue by championing the less known, or by arguing for what was most important? These days, it seems the market bypasses the opinions of artists and critics while the collectors hold sway.

I have always admired John Ruskin, the result of whose brilliant support of Turner continues to amaze me. It’s hard to go from Ruskin to Saatchi; but, today’s art market was developed by collectors like Saatchi in his championing of Damien Hirst and the YBAs (Young British Artists). Nerve and money overtook quality and connoisseurship. Even so, some gallerists do a great job of supporting less well-known artists; Zürcher Gallery, Paris/New York, is one of them.

I was in London during the 1980s and 1990s when the YBA phenomena and Saatchi’s collecting was taking place; it’s only part of the story as you can imagine. What about New York artists’ writings of the 1940s and 1950s?

In the 1950s, Elaine de Kooning’s art writings were deep, expansive and important. She wrote for Art News extensively. Her observations were sharp. She went into detail about an artist’s life and contribution whereas most reviews were overviews of exhibitions.

In the 1970s, when feminism really started, more women wrote. Feminist writers were celebrated. The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir and The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan were musts. These feminist writers stirred and empowered women artists.

Artists are eager for attention and especially want to hear what people think of their work. Artists value studio visits: when Swiss painter Max Bill saw one of my geometric abstractions from the 1960s, he said that he “always tried to put red and blue together but here you have achieved it in your painting”; when, in 1982, curator and critic John Caldwell wrote in The New York Times about my show at Douglas College, I was tickled pink by “quirky” and “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Throughout your oeuvre, your work reflects the time in which it was made and has connections to other artists’ work of that time; yet, it is different. Since the 1960s, your use of materials other than paint, thread for example, extends the painting from its pictorial function; as in Eva Hesse’s work, these unorthodox materials breach the painting sculpture divide. Since my student days, I’ve been very interested in Hesse. Your use of strong color together with this three dimensional aspect is an approach that young artists are engaging now. The difference is you didn’t know where it might lead. How did other artists react to your use of materials at the time these works were actually made?

The best thing about being largely ignored in the 1960s and ‘70s, was that I was free to do as I pleased. There was no pressure to comply with particular expectations or “-isms.” My use of unusual materials was mostly intuitive and unconscious. I can’t explain it without returning to childhood recollections of household trimmings and the needlework children were taught. Justification came later when I read Huizinga’s Homo Ludens (play is culture). Some of my contemporaries were also expanding into mixed media, painting with sculptural projection. My friend, Eva Hesse, pursued this extensively. Around the same time, Lucas Samaras also used unorthodox materials such as rainbow-colored wool.

In the early 1970s, I was chosen by a panel of women artists to participate in “Women Choose Women” with a painting, constructed in 1971, of dowels and rope. This was an affirmative reaction in action as a limited number of participants were chosen from many applicants.

Although collectors purchased my pieces shortly after they were completed, I don’t recall any artists’ reactions to the materials I was using during the 1960s-1970s when I first began using mixed media. Interestingly, now, the younger artists appreciate my work from that period very much. They are surprised to learn that I did the work in the ‘60s and ‘70s because it resonates with their work today. They like the threads, cords, wooden sticks and dowels. They are enthusiastic.

That doesn’t surprise me at all! Your works from the 1960s and 1970s are not only innovative and apposite to their time they are also prescient of some work being made today. This only happens with artists who have ability, vision, and of course it’s important to say, the courage, to do what they need to do, and remain undeterred if others don’t get it at the time. How did the various elements (dowels, sticks, threads, cord and so on) function for you?

The various unorthodox materials in my work function as the structure of the painting; they are never superficial ornaments. For example, in the untitled 1971 painting, shown at “Women Choose Women,” the dowels are my brushstrokes. In other paintings, the wooden sticks I have used function as lines. Artist and writer, Steven Westfall, pointed out that the sticks in my paintings create a chromatic haze. In my Cord Paintings, the cords are tactile, they add a sense of touch to the work. Although they shouldn’t be touched, people can’t keep their hands off them! All these materials are the structure of my paintings. They are not something I just attach to my work but rather they are the substance of my work.

Al Jensen based a lot of his work on a grid structure. I learned that the grid was a great organizing element and employed it in many of my works. It serves as the underlying format beneath much of the materials I use.

Let’s discuss your new work; what are you working on currently?

Beginning in 2013, I felt the state of the world was becoming so oppressive I could hardly breathe. My paintings took on a smoky, violent and sinister feel. I used a lot of red, black and black cord. Where my work of 2000-2010 was largely open and atmospheric, employing many colorful, transparent layers, in 2014 I began positioning an opaque board onto my work. The board was an emotional element, a closed door or the anxiety-provoking image of the little window to a solitary confinement cell. This work culminated in the Palmyra series of 2015, my response to the destruction of antiquities in Syria. I had never used painting to comment on a contemporary problem before, but the destruction of Palmyra and Aleppo alarmed me. The paintings suggest the vulnerability of the archeological site as they progress through stages of sadness and despair ending in final darkness. Invoking Zenobia, the third century warrior queen of Palmyra, who fought the Romans, is something else I had not done before in painting. The series will be on view at Zürcher Gallery along with the sculptures of Wang Keping through April 29, 2016.

My impression of the new works is that, on a metaphoric level, the qualities that you describe are certainly present, as we can now see in your Palmyra series with Wang Keping’s sculptures at Zürcher Gallery. It has been a pleasure talking with you, Regina.

“Face to Face: Regina Bogat, Wang Keping” continues at Zürcher Gallery, 33 Bleecker Street, between Lafayette Street and Bowery, through April 29

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To represent concurrent and complementary group exhibitions from curator William Corwin, here is a work by an artist in neither. Perverse, I know, but bear with me.

Cyborg, now in its closing week at Zürcher Gallery, does indeed include three photo/text pieces by Juliana Huxtable, the model of Frank Benson’s 3-D printed sculpture pictured here. (In the course of writing this article, Benson’s Juliana emerged as the final ARTCRITICAL PICK for 2015.) Benson’s work, voluptuous and ethereal in equal measure, was the presiding presence over the 2015 Triennial at the New Museum and feels a fitting cover image in the dwindling days of a year joyfully marked by increased transgender visibility. But that isn’t the theme of either of Corwin’s exhibitions.

Cyborg unites disparate contemporary visions of man/machine hybrids, going well beyond cinema’s Vitruvian conception (Metropolis to Ex Machina) of the robot. The show encompasses everything from Michel Huelin’s visually overbearing computer renderings of post-nature environments to Cordy Ryman’s stark yet engrossing walk-in representation of the digital binary in relief panels of alternating and repeating bars of color; and from Tamar Ettun’s disconcertingly “other” casts of the artist’s isolated body parts to Corwin’s own sculptures eerily evocative of the phantasmagoric-vehicular vision of Ezekiel that, as he recounts in an essay, he found himself discussing with Huxtable in her studio during the planning stage of his show.

While Cyborg deals with the future of embodiment, with the literal conquest of death, Devotion, at Catinca Tabacaru Gallery, concerns itself with visual contemplations of afterlife in a traditional if uber-ecumenical religious way. It is a glorious jumble of contemporary works, ranging from Roxy Paine hyperrealist sculptures of mushrooms and Elizabeth Kley ceramic lanterns and Serra Victoria Bothwell Fels’s rood screen dividing and cramping the gallery’s commercial premises into an approximation of a sacred space to Mike Ballou friezes of birds and a psychedelic throne by Rico Gatson, among others, with Russian and Romanian icons from the Tabacaru family collection thrown in for good measure. Some of the works are overtly spiritual, but many are joyously press-ganged into ritualistic duties in a curatorial installation that is itself a hybrid, to extend the metaphor of Cyborg, of chapel and wunderkammer. Taking a cue from Corwin’s curatorial energies, therefore, the Benson-Huxtable hermaphrodite thus presents itself as a connective tissue between the two shows, a vision of harmony of human will and biological grace.

Cyborg at Zurcher Gallery, December 1 to 29, 2015. William Corwin, Anthony Gormley, Katie Holten, Tamar Ettun, Juliana Huxtable, Michel Huelin, Mike Cloud, Cordy Ryman. 33 Bleecker St, between Lafayette Street and Bowery, New York City, (212) 777-0790

Devotion at Catinca Tabacaru Gallery, November 21, 2015 to January 17, 2016. Mike Ballou, Joe Brittain, William Corwin, Serra Victoria Bothwell Fels, Elizabeth Ferry, Rico Gatson Elisabeth Kley, Rachel Monosov, Roxy Paine, Joyce Pensato, Katie Bond Pretti, Carin Riley, Paul Anthony Smith, Justin Orvis Steimer, Gail Stoicheff, Sophia Wallace. 250 Broome St, between Orchard and Ludlow streets, New York City, (212) 260-2481

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September 17 to September 20, 2015

Four years into its latest iteration under the management of Tony Karman, what is there to say about Chicago Expo?

Let’s start with the art, which was wide ranging and of consistent high quality. Naturally, Chicago galleries were present in force and brought along some of the more pleasant surprises. For instance, at Richard Norton, two paintings by the hermetic Chicago painter Gertrude Abercrombie, notably Broken Limb (c. 1940). Corbett vs Dempsey, a gallery whose programming grows more interesting with each passing year, shared a booth with New York’s David Nolan Gallery, which allowed them to pair two Jim Nutt drawings across from Karl Wirsum’s painting Count Fasco’s Mouse Piece Whitey Jr. #2 (1983). In the Exposure section for smaller galleries, the one-year old Regards Gallery featured work by Megan Greene.

With the high cost of participation, there can be an understandable tendency in art fairs for galleries to spread their risk with overly wide selections of materials. This can easily lead to a kind of visual overload, where you see so much that you wind up remembering very little. Happily, to make a more forceful presentation perhaps, quite a number of booths at Chicago Expo showcased a single artist’s work. Flowers Gallery (London and New York), for instance, featured a notable mini-retrospective of Richard Smith, highlighting works from his “Kite” series, and created an invitation-sized catalog with essay especially for it. Galerie Zürcher, with venues in Paris and New York, featured a solo show of Cordy Ryman’s funky painted 2×4 sculptures and wall pieces that stood out for being so raw in a sea of polish. On Stellar Rays, out of New York’s Lower Eastside, focused on J.J. Peet, whose paintings, drawings, and a sculpture are so diverse they could be mistaken for a group installation. One of his paintings went on to be selected for the Northern Trust Arts Club of Chicago Purchase Prize. And Garth Greenen Gallery out of New York devoted his entire space to only three jewel-like paintings, each not much bigger than a sheet of notebook paper, by Victoria Gitman.

The professionalism, range, and quality of the galleries no doubt owed something to the selection committee, which included not only some of the heavy weight gallerists that one might expect – Marianne Boesky, David Zwirner, David Nolan, Rhona Hoffman, Isabella Bortolozzi – but also younger visionaries such as Jessica Silverman, Suzanne Vielmetter, John Corbett (Corbett vs Dempsey), and Candice Madey (On Stellar Rays). The result was a happy mix of blue chip, mid-range, and emerging dealers from 16 countries.

The art was good, then, and so too the venue. The large hall at the end of Navy Pier provided a friendly and vastly superior art viewing space than the slightly claustrophobic Merchandise Mart space that hosted previous fairs. The layout of the booths was generous and intelligent with wide, easy-to-navigate aisles. And Jason Pickelman’s JNL Graphics, the design team that gave the distinctive look to Chicago Art Expo during its heyday in the ‘90s, was once again in charge of the Expo’s image where a clean, professional atmosphere prevailed.

This is all welcome news for an art fair that has gone through as many incarnations as Dr. Who. It’s hard to remember now, but for a long time in the 80s, the fair started by John Wilson to mirror Art Basel was the most important art fair in the Western Hemisphere. Reformulated by Thomas Blackman (who had been the director of the fair under Wilson) its dominance continued into the late ‘90s even as competitors emerged. But it stumbled as it entered the 21st Century, at one point with three competing fairs fighting for dominance, this at the same time that New York, and then Miami, began to become major venues. Moreover, when the first Chicago art fair opened in 1980, it was at the geographic center, literally, for American collectors who were also the major buyers. This is no longer the case; art collecting is international, with major collectors in London, Moscow, Dubai, and other world financial capitals flying from continent to continent to attend the 200 art fairs currently hosted annually. It is a long way to Chicago from Shanghai, or Abu Dhabi.

Chicago very much wants to host a world-class art fair. Tony Karman and his team, along with the selection committee, have worked very hard to give them one. The galleries came and brought the art. But it is yet to be decided if collectors can once again think of Chicago Expo as a must-see destination.

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Artists, inevitably, are captivated by movies.  Many in this show manifest their infatuations in their work, and in a variety of ways.   French artist Marc Desgrandchamps, for instance, gravitates – in his work in general and in his two lithographs in the present exhibition – towards scenes that embody a cinematic sense of flux while tapping modernist conventions of transparency and montage.   Angela Dufresne, in her two paintings, fixes upon scenes that are simultaneously iconic and perverse.  Dawn Clements, in a giant drawing in ballpoint pen, Jessica Drummond in Bed (My Reputation, 1946), 2012, the largest work in the show, exploits the subliminal sense of a movie playing on TV in a domestic situation, with obsessive notation blurring boundaries between inner and outer projections. Duncan Hannah casts Nova Pilbeam, star of Alfred Hitchcock’s early British movies, in a scene of Hannah’s own devising that pays three-way homage to – and emphasizes connections between – his beloved Nova, Hitchcock, and Edward Hopper.  Seduction and self-absorption are recurring leitmotifs, meanwhile, in images of other actors “starring” in the exhibition, whether Elle Fanning in lithographs by Will Cotton, Nastassja Kinski in a painting on liquid graphite by Ena Swansea, or Jeanne Moreau in a work by Dufresne.

Cotton is joined by a number of printmakers in this exhibition for all of whom variation within repetition is as much an expressive or thematic element as it is a technical or publishing factor.  His own pair of lithographs plays an optical game, when hung together as they are here, that recalls the transitions from black and white to color in The Wizard of Oz.  In prints by abstract sculptor Willard Boepple and painter and sculptor Steve Locke the variation and repetition of screens generate or propel the imagery.  Locke is represented by four from a set of 13 lithographs, Rapture, 2009, which envision sexual encounters in which one party, a believer, is “saved” in flagrante delicto, leaving only his clothing behind—but mid action.  There is further play between iconography and process as the prints repeat stenciled groupings from plate to plate with one pair or group highlighted in each work.  In a comparable way, the stencils used by Willard Boepple in his screenprint monoprints are colored uniquely and sequentially within sets of identical configuration so as radically to alter perspective, depth and even form in otherwise unchanging structures.

Like Boepple’s hard-edge glyphs, the evocative, painterly, ethereal monotypes of Stuart Shils explore possibilities of shadow and trace in phenomenological ways that accent the more literary allusions that abound elsewhere in the show.  He exploits to the utmost the suggestion of ghost image in the palimpsest of the monotype plate.  The ghost within the image is accentuated in the three unique works by Nicole Wittenberg that recall a printmaking sensibility by deploying contrasting painterly approaches to a same appropriated photograph by Paul Outerbridge, which image itself recalls Northern Renaissance paintings of the mother of mankind with all its implications of temptation and generation.

A number of artists share – if without the eschatology – Locke’s collision of realism and abstraction as a means to literalize absent presence.   In works on paper by French artist David Lefebvre, for instance, oil painted hard-edge bars or geometric shapes of color intervene in evenly modulated graphite drawings in which orders of what is real and what is stylized, what is natural and what is schematic, are subverted; blocked-out shapes come to signify lacunae in the field of vision. Matt Bollinger’s fracturing of a boy’s head, recalling the faceting of cubism, evokes the mirroring ghost of split identity. And in cool yet voluptuous graphic images painter Alexi Worth explores the interaction of depicted shadow and the actual mesh screening material of his support with deft pictorial wit.

Also incorporating interplay of depicted shadow or shadowy activity into the conceptual fabric of her work is German painter Kerstin Drechsel.  Her sweaty snapshot-like depictions of lesbian nightclub play constitute a kind of tender voyeurism in their intimate, delectable facture, resonating across the show with a small scene from Rear Window by Dufresne and with the artful misregistrations of a Shils monotype.

And here, by way of conclusion, or perhaps introduction, is the personal, curator’s statement offered with the exhibition.

“As a boy of sixteen I worked as a bank messenger, dashing around London with documents to be signed and contracts to be sealed, mostly using the tube to get from Holborn to the West End or the City.  At that time, I was quite obsessed by Tess of the D’Urbervilles: the novel, the movie, the character.  I played a game with myself on each errand that if I passed the poster for Polanski’s Tess (then on general release) a given number of times in my subterranean peregrinations I would win the hand of Nastassja Kinski.  I became expert in strategically positioning myself in the right carriage so that, say, at Chancery Lane I’d maximize the number of posters along my route.  The rules were quite strict: I was not allowed to retrace steps or deliberately miss an exit.  Gradually and surreptiously, other ads began to supplant my beloved poster as the Tess campaign wore off and the posters would be covered up or torn away.  As if Tess’s fate and Nastassja’s languid gaze were not poignant enough, an insipid sensation of absence crept in, of the vacated spot.  The memory or trace of her visage began to fade in a deepening recession, lost in the shadows of romantic impossibility.”

on view through February 16, 2014 at Zürcher Studio, 33 Bleecker Street, between Lafayette Street and Bowery?, New York City, 212 777 0790 

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The Untitled tent is a beauty, a sleek luminous airplane hangar. It doesn’t hurt that you approach from the beach, walking across long carpets laid in the sand. Inside, after a brief collector bottleneck, the space felt invitingly high and bright. Pausing to look up and around, visitors could almost literally stumble across the amazing Jacolby Satterwhite, in a brightly colored body suit, performing a kind of slow-motion break dance, and then leading us, pied-piper style further into the interior.

A first circuit and a couple of drinks left an overwhelmingly positive, and surprisingly coherent impression. The dominant mode seemed to be ingenious high-key abstract painting—rippling patterns, tweaked 3D surfaces, imagery partly camouflaged under layers of eye-candy. Some examples, chosen nearly at random: Letha Wilson’s beguiling meta-marbleizing “paintings,” in fact made of concrete and crumpled photographic prints (at Romer Young); Wendy White’s crepuscular sprayed abstractions (at Anna Kustera), Josh Marsh’s weird, floating, prismatic apple-cores—like a cross between Ivan Albright and Gorky (at Jeff Bailey), and at Zürcher, Brian Belott’s wall of small highly decorative panels, each built around a single dirty sock.

Of course, further circuits (but alas not more drinks– they were too expensive) complicated that impression: there was, for instance, some striking black-and-white photography, including Carlheinz Weinberger’s biker portraits (at Rod Blanco), and Duane Michael’s portraits of Andy Warhol (at DC Moore). But certain art world staples—stark geometry, youth culture, or for that matter, sex and politics—seemed surprisingly scarce. Subject matter was largely an oblique presence here; instead, the spirit of the event, perhaps in keeping with the fair’s own wry title, was a kind of savvy playfulness.

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Elisabeth Kley, Hearne Pardee, Martha Schwendener joined moderator David Cohen to discuss Matt Bollinger at Zürcher Studio, Nayland Blake at Matthew Marks Gallery, Sergei Tcherepnin at Murray Guy, and Sylvie Fleury at Salon 94 Bowery

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