It wasn’t the best day to walk around New York City, with gusty, cold winds belying the first day of spring. But I managed to see quite a few shows in Chelsea, several of which are worth mentioning.

First up, at a gallery I had never visited before – and one that’s technically not in Chelsea – was Anoka Faruqee at Hosfelt Gallery. (In Feb 2007, I visited Princeton University where the California-based Ms. Faruqee was scheduled to be a speaker; to my dismay I was the only one there as the talk had been cancelled due to a bad snowstorm!) I enjoyed seeing her work in person this time, in what is a very nice gallery space (though rather far out of the way, half a block from the Javits Center). This show is comprised of two kinds of paintings. In her “fade paintings”, thousands of repetitive marks, such as asterisks or swirls, fade into the foggy background colors of the canvas (or perhaps are in fact being obscured by a misty foreground). Although these works have some similar formal issues to my own paintings, I in fact found the second set of works in the show more interesting: each work consists of two paintings, one large piece full of stripes with various color interactions, the other a smaller “copy” of the larger, though the copies appear to be more intuitive replications rather than exact copies. I found these to be particularly interesting to look at in terms of color, surface quality, and paint handling.

In Chelsea proper, another California artist, Tom Leaver, has a show at McKenzie Fine Art that shares some formal characteristics with the Faruqee fade paintings. The Leaver pieces read as large, brushy, drippy landscapes whose foregrounds are prominent (though unidentifiable) but whose backgrounds fade out through a “turpentined” aerial perspective.

One of my new favorite gallery buildings is at 547 West 27^th Street. Not only does the building contain a diverse selection of quality galleries, but the people working in many of the galleries are very friendly and willing to talk with you about the works on display. On the first floor is Sundaram Tagore gallery, which always has high quality shows. Today, they have an excellent pan-Asian group show. My favorite painting was a piece by Hosook Kang, “Autumn”, full of orange and blue rippling waves of color. Also in the building were the Buddhist-inspired works of Tenzing Rigdol & Palden Weinreb (that’s a mouthful) at Dinter Fine Art and eyeball abstractions by Yuichiro Shibata at the funky Monkdogz Urban Art.

Robert Miller gallery has a gorgeous collection of large photographs by Dirk Braeckman. Although the imagery itself in the photographs isn’t particularly exciting – corners of a room, curtains, a figure – the silver gelatin prints themselves are worthy of contemplation. The matte finish and grainy texture make them look like charcoal renderings. The show also includes one huge inkjet triptych print that runs from floor to ceiling which details the light and texture on what looks like a fancy carpet runner.

Byron Kim, whose piece “Synecdoche” I noted from the MoMA Color Chart exhibition, also has a solo show up at Max Protetch. The first painting in the gallery immediately reminded me of the Robert Irwin sculptures I had seen in several Los Angeles museums a few weeks ago. Indeed, the gallery press release explains that this painting (and another similar one) is based on a photo reproduction of Irwin’s sculpture from Kirk Varnedoe’s book, Pictures of Nothing (an excellent book, I might add). Another interesting piece in the show was “Delacroix’s Shadow,” consisting of a painted yellow panel casting a shadow from carefully aligned lights onto a rectangle of gray paint (the title comes from a story about Delacroix noticing how yellows in Paris cast a violet shadow).

At the Valerie Jaudon show at Von Lintel, each painting is a tessellation of squares, with each square containing the same pattern either mirrored or rotated. The forms consist of strips of white paint, some straight, others curvy, thickly painted on raw linen with clear and distinguished brushstrokes. The only problem with the show is the similarity of all the works – although they each use different patterns that are evident upon patient examination, from a macro point of view the pieces tend to all look alike.

I should mention two representational shows worth seeing. First, at BravinLee Programs, Amparo Sard creates wonderful “pointillist” works on white paper using thousands of pinpricks as her mark. The pricks are used for both contours and also for texture and shading (the denser the pinholes, the darker it reads). Most of the works in the show are figures, often of a woman interacting with some sort of planar surface such as a mirror, rising waters, or abstract rectangular shapes.

Finally, I loved Kim Cogan’s brushy, atmospheric cityscapes at Gallery Henoch. The most stunning piece in the show was “Stairway,” which perfectly captures the lighting at night of a stairway between two buildings.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 20th, 2008 at 11:31 pm and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.