April 12 to June 7, 2015
49 Delancey Street (at Eldridge Street)
New York, 212 219 0326

Walking into “I won’t wait for grey hairs and worldly cares to soften my views,” recently at Callicoon Fine Arts, was like walking into a kids’ art studio where the adults have lost control — but much stranger. Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh, and Hesam Rahmanian, the three artists responsible for the visual cacophony, filled the gallery from floor to ceiling with a schizophrenic amalgam of sculptures, videos, and two-dimensional pieces that fluctuate between fantasy and nightmare. Despite the frequently bright and graphic nature of the works, the artists successfully maintain enough editorial restraint to hold the installation on the precipice of dizzying inundation, without ever falling over.

The Haerizadeh brothers originally met Rahmanian in Tehran, and then moved to Dubai to escape artistic censorship in Iran. In light of the recent controversy involving the United Arab Emirates prohibiting members of the Gulf Labor Artist Coalition and NYU professor Andrew Ross from entering the country, it might seem ineffective for artists to defect from one area of creative oppression to another. The act reveals the omnipresence of political manipulation that artists in the Middle East have faced for decades, which forces artists to find ways to challenge the highly congested political systems both locally and abroad.

The exhibition at first appears to be a playful free-for-all of image and text, and then reveals itself to be a darkly comical and deeply satirical critique of power, identity, sexuality, and culture. Long-stemmed amaryllis — flowers whose common name is Naked Ladies — grow out of a black-and-white, geometric path that snakes around the gallery floors and walls, and leads to a row of collages by Ramin Haerizadeh, hung low on the back wall. Each titled Rib Room (2015), the works feature fractions of images of women from fashion advertisements or art historical paintings with their bodies partially drawn back in with ink and pencil, and stamped labels that read phrases such as “PORK ROAST” and “SKIRT STEAK.” What could be interpreted as an objectification of female identity becomes part of a broader narrative critique of dehumanization by power structures. In two of Rokni Haerizadeh’s series, he paints on printed stills from YouTube videos and makes Rotoscope-like animations over top, adding animal heads and body parts to humans in protests and demonstrations.

Rokni pairs fable-like images, which melt in and out of clarity and painterly abstraction, with titles such as But a storm is blowing from paradise (2014–2015) and Subversive Salami in a Ragged Briefcase (2013–2014) that further enhance the works’ ominous tone. Rahmanian’s paintings and collages continue the thematic removal of identity through images ranging from tragically funny puns to celebrity defacements. In his series Rearview Portraits (2012), we see the backs of the heads of elderly white men in suits and a white-haired woman wearing a crown and pearls (bearing an unmistakable resemblance to Queen Elizabeth II, though none of their identities is openly revealed). The portraits hang close to the ground or shoved into corners, as though they were put on a time-out for bad behavior.

The show’s installation occurred over a period of several weeks, during which time the three artists brought their own artworks, works by Etel Adnan, Hannah Barrett, A.K. Burns, Martha Wilson, and Rose Wylie, and a variety of readymade objects into the gallery space. Through the process of extending their shared work and living spaces into the confines of a commercial gallery, the artists present a good-natured dismantling of the conventions surrounding artistic autonomy; everything is presented as one holistic idea, as opposed to a group show of many separate but related artists. The collaboration has resulted in an immersive experience that is further heightened by the show’s many three-dimensional objects: sculptures inhabit the space as both autonomous objects and interventions with the gallery’s bureaucratic operations. In the back office, where the exhibition continues, the gallerists sit on pieces from Untitled (2015): white plastic lawn chairs with blue painter’s tape partially covering the form or extending it in strange, decidedly nonfunctional protuberances. Break Free II (2015), a fuzzy cat tower decorated with bizarre hoardings both analog and digital stands like an absurd sentry near the entrance. An iPad and an iPhone playing videos of the artists, the devices’ chargers, wind-up teeth, bungee cords, a plastic ear, and various other bits of everyday life make up just one of the installation’s several readymade compositions.

Saturated with layered cultural and art historical references that have been turned on their head through the artists’ contemporary reexamination, “I won’t wait for grey hairs and worldly cares to soften my views” creates new language through familiar signs. Imagine a car that has been crushed for disposal at an impound lot, and then expanded back to some semblance of its original form. All the initial information is there, but it has been translated into something entirely new. The collaborative, reconstructed visual lexicon enables the artists to use satire to criticize a humorless system.

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The Islanders at Galerie Mikael Andersen
January 9 to February 21, 2015
Bredgade 63, 1260 Copenhagen, Denmark

The Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, the renowned institution 25 miles north of Copenhagen, has recently mounted a string of ambitious shows of figurative painters with an often psychologically pointed, symbolist bent: Philip Guston (the late work) and Emil Nolde were on view there this past summer, and a retrospective of the German painter Paula Modersohn-Becker continues there through April 6th.

A related expressive spirit infuses Galerie Mikael Andersen’s “The Islanders,” where four English painters of different generations explore the continued possibilities of figurative painting done from imagination and invention. Rose Wylie (b. 1934), 2014 winner of the John Moores Painting Prize, is the unlikely elder statesman of the group, which also includes Billy Childish (b. 1959), Ryan Mosley (b. 1980), and Tom Anholt (b. 1987).

These artists share an interest in intuitive image making, ostensibly rejecting preconceived plans or directly observed models — with the exception of Childish, whose The Great Banks After Wilkinson is a fairly direct copy after a 1936 work by English painter Norman Wilkinson. The show’s title seems to refer not only to the artists’ shared birthplace, but also to the exoticized subject matter of Peter Doig, an art school peer of Childish and likely influence on Mosley and Anholt. The best works here veer away from such calculated idiosyncrasy, offering a more immediate sense of weight and humor.

The whimsically enigmatic quality in Rose Wylie’s work seems to emerge from her asking very literal questions, rather than grasping deliberately for the odd. As she wrote in Frieze Magazine in 2014, “Another route to particularity is to make a written description of a person (or tree), and then to illustrate that list in the painting.” Her fragmented use of text, at first suggesting elusive phrases such as “With Go Imps,” pivots upon closer study to reveal more mundane descriptive purposes, as in the monumentally frumpy, “With Gold Lump.” (In another version of this show’s Gold Lump (single), Wylie attached an image of the Queen of Sheba, resulting in Queen of Sheba with Gold Lump.)

In a large work on paper, Wylie makes a written reference to a straightforward piece of advice from Ingres: “Never in drawing a face omit the ear.” Obligingly, a large yellow ear appears above on a very simplified profile. The humorous implication is that Wylie’s selection of detail has a matter-of-fact logic to it, even while she seems at times like a rogue camera, accidentally zooming in on an odd prop or the back of a head. Her use of scale to humorous effect recalls for me the cartoons collected in Roger Price’s 1953 Droodles, in which not-quite-readable, minimal images are explained by caption, and often revealed as extreme closeups or distance shots; for example, a vertical line and two triangles is described as a man with bow tie stuck between elevator doors. I could imagine Ack-Ack paired with a caption involving eggs or soccer, but it eludes easy reading even after its title has been deciphered as an off-translation of the German “acht-acht,” a common name for an anti-aircraft gun used in World War II. Wylie’s images resist tidy punch lines, reveling instead in the strangeness of figuration itself, and the possibility that something ambiguous or even illegible can, by explanation, become an authoritative representation.

While Wylie’s work also occasionally brings late Guston clearly to mind, as in The Man from London (film notes) (Thanks to Bella Tarr), her work feels forcefully individual. Her simple color choices take on an emblematic punch at a large scale, as she covers expanses of canvas without equivocation.

Satisfyingly direct paint handling takes on a different inflection in Tom Anholt’s paintings, another highlight of the show. His smaller works’ concentrated physicality and variety of mark-making bring to mind Brooklyn-based painter Katherine Bradford, as figures emerge out of layers of misty underpainting. A crust of paint built up on the panels’ edges provides a matter-of-fact record of working as well as a purposeful decorative element. At its best, as in Irish Family, this peripheral appearance of paint- as-itself has a tangible impact on the painted space within the image.

All four of these painters have been prolific producers, and their energy comes through in the work. While the works representing Mosley and Childish feel more forced in their kitschy oddity, Wylie and Anholt make a strong case for the pleasures and freedoms of working indirectly, beginning with what Wylie calls a “sideways jump” into the paintings.

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I guess it is time to eat some words.  In a welcome extended to Frieze Art Fair New York that was measured to the point of being somewhat surly, in which as it happens a culinary comparison figured, our editorial promised that “artcritical will do its duty and report on what it finds.”  Well, what was found is, simply put, the best art fair this writer has visited in America.

At least, that is, in terms of creature comforts.  The general level of art on show was respectable, in relation to other fairs, but not significantly or demonstrably higher than such rivals as the Armory Show or Art Basel Miami. And, by and large, this was not a fair of seriously high-end, blue-chip offerings.  Instead there was a focus on younger artists, with an emphasis on collectible objects – with a predominance of painting and domestically scaled sculpture and not much by way of installation or video.  Frieze seems to attract a classier, savvier average exhibitor perhaps on account of the very fact that it settled on a leaner roster of participants than its humungous, sprawling rivals; under one roof, it was in more than one sense contained.

And beautifully managed. The snaking tent is a triumph of design, affording a blessing rare enough alas in museums and almost unheard-of in North American fairs: natural, diffuse, overhead light.  (This was perhaps a tad over-augmented the Sunday of my last visit with harsh artificial light to compensate for an overcast start to the day.)  The curved layout  avoids the oppressions of the grid so that as the viewer moves through the space there is a sense of progress, of arriving at a new bend in the curve.  Spaces are neat but individualized and sight lines nicely varied.  According to David Nolan of David Nolan Gallery, the organizers managed to “get rid of the politics” that is the art fair norm.  The management told him “not one gallery complained about placement.”  There is ample space between sections, booths are big, the floor is strictly a uniform, gray wood paneling – rather than the oppressive concrete, cheap carpeting and pretentious cacophony of individual booth flooring solutions that mar the fair going experience at convention centers and armories.

And because they had struck out with their own temporary structure at Randall’s Island, Frieze didn’t have to work with the catering contracts and intransigent unions of these venues.  This meant invitations to top-notch eateries like The Fat Radish and the late Leo Castelli’s watering hole, Saint Ambrœus, and it meant relaxed, friendly staff.  The perceived remoteness of the location and the steep entrance fee of $40 meant an absence of crowds.  Exhibitors I spoke to do not regret the selected volume of attendees as it meant a more committed (read “likely to spend”) kind of viewer had a better time of it.  According to Frieze exhibitor Alexander Gray, of Alexander Gray Associates, who has never exhibited at the rival Armory Show but has had challenging experiences shepherding collectors around the piers, “Art is an aspirational market; if the surroundings fail to inspire and engage, then some people are not going to bother.”

Other dealers I spoke with were candid about sales.  A mid-level class of collector was identified who might have “blown their wad” for the year at the March fairs.  Sales were “decent but not great” according to another trusted source.  As word gets out of the superior visitor experience (for collectors and professionals if not the average enthusiast) that might change in 2013.  But there is no question, whoever comes out top in sales figures, that the British invaders have raised the bar in the fair going experience.

Frieze continues Monday, May 7 through 6pm, with reduced tickets from 1pm (last entry at 5pm)

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Most viewers of Rose Wylie’s show at Thomas Erben Gallery, titled “WHAT with WHAT”, would want to conclude that the rambunctious, street-smart brutalism on display there is the work of an inner city kid who has been introduced with reluctance to the conventional and transportable medium of oil on canvas.  Rotten luck with the guesswork. The author of these magisterially unrefined, at times gargantuan canvases,  is a demure, “well spoken” English lady who resides in rural Kent: Think Miss Marple channeling Jean-Michel Basquiat.  This 17-year survey is the New York debut for the septuagenarian Wylie, who shows at Union in London and was recently also included in a group show at the prestigious Timothy Taylor Gallery.  But Wylie had already turned sixty when she had her first solo show anywhere. Appropriately for a  late bloomer who is also “ever a beginner” in Rilke’s sense, Wylie is a painter of sophisticated naiveté.  There is nuance where you least expect it.

Until November 13, 526 West 26th Street, Fourth Floor, between 10th and 11th avenues, New York City, 212 645 8701

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