I visited Chelsea again yesterday, both to catch up on the latest shows as well as to attend the opening reception at Walter Wickiser Gallery, where fellow central NJ artist Thomas Kelly is participating in a group show entitled, “Just the Figure.” Along with three other artists, the show focuses on painterly images of the human form (go figure!). Yu Zhang has two soft-focus baroque-style works whose figures stare out from heads on top of elongated necks; in one, the edges softly fade out to the underlying linen support. Mark Kurdziel shows rougher, more expressionist pieces on coarse-textured linen. One of Michael Price’s paintings is a Cezanne’ish figure surrounded by swirls of color. Thomas Kelly’s contribution includes a wall of a half dozen or so of his illustrative, playful compositions of figures in scenes that practically call out for captions. Rather, the painting titles provide a strong hint as to the narrative intent leading up to the snapshot moment of the paintings. For instance, in “Don’t Block the Sun”, a woman struts her stuff in high heels past three people sitting on a park bench — you start to wonder which one of the four figures is thinking the title’s thoughts? The paintings, all acrylics on canvas, are painted mostly with a light touch, and often look like they could be watercolors. In Helping With the Dress, you notice the careful composition of the figures within the surrounding space as well as the balance of warm and cool colors.

I attended a couple of other opening receptions, including one at Bravin+Lee that featured the works on paper of Thomas Nozkowski and James Sienna (together again) as well as Chris Martin and Jonathan Lasker. A show like this makes me once again wish I had invested in a James Sienna about 6 years ago when I first enjoyed his work, as even a 20″x16″ work on paper now goes for $20,000.

Speaking of Nozkowski, the painting “Rake” (2007) by Tom Holland at Charles Cowles Gallery reminded me of Nozkowski’s Untitled 8-107 (2008) recently on display at Pace Wildenstein. I enjoyed the Holland show, which features a number of epoxy enamel paintings on aluminum or fiberglass supports. These “paintings slash sculptures” include cut sheets of aluminum riveted to the base so that the colors and compositions can work in three dimensions.

The two Gladstone Galleries on 24th Street and 21st Street feature excellent exhibitions of the sculptor Anish Kapoor. At the 24th Street space, Kapoor explores the color red with pieces that seemed overtly sexual, though the titles pointed elsewhere (”Drip“, “Blood Stick“, and “Two Corners“). In Drip, a large, boob-like sculpture hangs from the wall and it’s impeccably smooth, polished surface provides the perceptual indeterminacy and satisfaction that I’ve come to expect from Kapoor’s work. Upon entering the second room from the back of the space, Here for Alba at first looks like a nuclear reactor made out of gridded fiberglass, and my initial reaction was, Huh? But, as you walk around the piece you find an opening slit that dares you to enter the reflective red interior. As you do, your eyes struggle to focus and your depth perception becomes fuzzy. Your steps become tentative in order to avoid accidentally knocking into the convex inner surface of the piece (which also reminds me of a much larger Richard Serra piece I saw in Fort Worth a few years ago — see below).

For even more perceptual fun, head over to the 21st Street Gladstone Gallery, where Kapoor bends reality with highly polished mirrors made from stainless steel. The initial impression is of Fun House Mirror, but in fact some of the scupltures are worth much more time than that. The curved “Vertigo” is amazing: if you stand in just the right spot, your own reflection looks more real than any mirror image you’ve ever seen of yourself. Perhaps it’s larger; perhaps it’s just so smooth; I think it has to do with the concavity of the mirror and how the rest of the space around you becomes distorted. It’s a remarkable effect. (The photo below doesn’t do justice to the work “Non-Object (Door)“, but it’s fun anyway.) For more information about the Kapoor shows as well as his current retrospective in Boston, see today’s NY Times review by Roberta Smith.

At Sundaram Tagore’s second floor gallery there’s a very nice exhibit of works on paper by Vittorio Matino. Several of the pieces are vertical color studies, either pastel or mixed media, where colors are side by side and overlapping to make up a vertical column on a solid background. The remaining paintings (mostly “mixed media”) are more vigorous, full of expressive and dynamic strokes and scrapes.

Several floors up at the Allen Gallery is a nice, small show of (mostly sold out) paintings by British artist Helen Brough. The exhibition, “Urban Movements”, features oil paintings on aluminum panels depicting highly abstracted or blurred urban imagery, as if taken from long exposure photos from around New York City.

Finally, James Cohan Gallery features some impressive “marquetry” works by Alison Elizabeth Taylor (I had to look it up: marquetry is when you inlay a material such as wood or ivory into intricate designs and fasten it to another support surface). The artist uses a variety of wood veneer panels of different tones and textures to assemble remarkable representational “paintings”. My favorite is Hank (image #2), showing a man riding a bicycle through the desert mountains: each spoke of the bicycle is a separate piece of wood veneer laid side by side and the texture of the wood veneer works well for recreating the tones of the landscape.

On Friday night, after a round of gallery-going in Chelsea, I attended the Curator’s Choice panel of the Artists Talk on Art (ATOA) series at the School of Visual Arts. The panel includes the six winners from this year’s Curator’s Choice juried competition. Although the paintings I submitted weren’t selected, I was interested in learning about the jurying process as well as seeing the kind of work that was chosen.

Juror Jim Kempner from Jim Kempner Fine Art explained his selection process as going through multiple iterations over several weeks, each time narrowing down the field until he found his winners. Over 100 artists entered the competition and only six were chosen, so the competition is definitely a long shot. I was very impressed with not only the quality of the work but also by how articulate each of the artists were in describing their processes and goals; this left me feeling less bad about not being chosen (though only slightly less jealous ;-).

Of the winners, I was particularly impressed with the work of recent RISD grad Celeste Rapone, whose figurative works exploring the meaning of being brought up Catholic were well executed and full of meaning. Rapone uses her illustration background to good effect, creating paintings that are graphic, memorable, and poignant (see Creme Filled, which shows a puffy-faced young girl surrounded by more culturally ideal bikini models).

Kate Teal (I couldn’t find a web page for her) presented a series of oil paintings depicting her and her husband sleeping in bed at night, derived loosely from photos that were automatically snapped every 30 minutes throughout one night. By selectively applying color for the figures’ flesh and by rendering the folds in the pillows and sheets, they are a nice balance of abstraction and representation.

Keun Young Park (no link available) exhibited figurative images collaged together from torn up, creatively Photoshopped photographs, including symbols such as birds to represent the human spirit in her compositions.

Iowa-based Thomas C. Jackson presented composited photographs primarily from his “American Slice” series. Each image consists of two or more slices of larger photographs, spliced together (usually vertically), occasionally with some Photoshopped mirroring or flipping, to create images with compositional interest. The artist says that although all of the images have specific meanings, he prefers to allow viewers to bring their own interpretations to the works.

It was hard to see the details of Michele Bova’s abstract oil paintings in the slides (and the only link I could find was here), but it seemed that they fit nicely into the family of brushstroke-filled abstraction presently seen on West 25th Street that I described in my last posting.

Judd Boloker described his colored pencil on bristol board drawings that are based upon photos he’s taken from places like the Brooklyn Botanical Garden. Starting with one or more photos, he abstracts them into graphic images (see this firework-inspired Papyrus Plant) through the heavy application of colored pencil to the support.

It was an informative evening, though I had been under the impression that more of the work submitted to the competition would be screened prior to the panel presentation. I was hoping to see how my own slides showed up on the big screen and where they might have fit in among the rest of the competition. If you would like to see the work of any of the winning artists in person, they will be included in a group show at Jim Kempner Fine Art, though the date of the show has yet to be determined.

It wasn’t exactly the trek to de Maria’s The Lightning Field, but getting to Chelsea today was quite a slog: suspended train service and persistent, driving rain lengthened the inbound journey to Manhattan to over 2 1/2 hours. Though my mood was only slightly soured, it did mean I had less time to view all the shows I had planned and the rain forced a more rapid pace through the streets.

Fortunately, there were some good shows to see. Most of the action today was on West 25th Street. Three galleries featured brushy abstract expressionism. I try not to miss Joan Mitchell shows and the exhibition at Lennon, Weinberg was worth the visit, though primarily for the one full-scale painting Buckwheat, a 1982 edge-to-edge combat between blues, yellows, and oranges. The rest of the show is comprised of smaller paintings and pastel works on paper. Unfortunately, most of the other pieces don’t capture the magic I find in Mitchell’s large paintings. The pastels consist primarily of scrawly, straight vertical lines or blocks of color rather than her usual curvilinear brushstroke and whether due to scale or medium prove to be less than compelling to look at.

A better show of similarly brushy allover abstract expressionist works by Milton Resnick is found down the block at Cheim & Read. The humongous (approximately 27 feet wide) painting Swan seemed to capture the rainy atmosphere of Chelsea today with its drippy slate gray and blue paint, while the slightly smaller (16 feet wide) Tilt to the Land’s pastel colorings hinted towards a more sunny spring season. The confusingly named Wedding features an even field of olive greens with drops of yellows, oranges, reds, and brighter greens peeking through.

Another visually exciting show whose lineage clearly descends from Resnick and Mitchell was by the unknown-to-me, mononamed artist Haessle at the off-the-beaten path Kips Gallery (in the back hallway of ground floor galleries at 531 W 25th). The gallery features some large (7-foot) and some much smaller works from the last twenty years by this artist whose resume at least lists occasional NY solo shows going back approximately forty years.

Perhaps the best show on 25th Street (and of all the shows I saw today) was at the *huge* (7,000 sq. ft), relatively new to New York Arario Gallery. This was the last gallery I visited today and I almost missed this show by the Korean artist Park, Seo-Bo, but I’m very glad I didn’t. To get to the gallery, you have to open a suspiciously loose door on the ground floor at 521 W 25th Street and then climb up a flight of steps that you feel could collapse into a sliding ramp should the gallery owner not welcome your presence. But once you’re there, it’s a gorgeous art space and the Park show is worth seeing. The show is entitled “Empty the Mind” and it features highly saturated acrylic paintings on layers of hanji (mulberry) paper. Most of the paintings follow a similar template: vertical “corrugated” strips of color stand out from the textured background, with a carved out rectangular color field providing what the artist calls “breathing space” somewhere in the canvas. Usually there are one or two horizontal strips of color that also project out from the canvas as small ledges and which add compositional interest. As you walk from side to side and your angle of view changes, the retinal image adjusts as you see more or less of the background and more or less of the projecting strips of color. The pieces all seemed to be named Ecriture (individually numbered); I had to look it up: écriture is the French word for writing and in English it asserts that all writing has a style that shapes our view of the world [answers.com].

For even more color, Dillon Gallery features the highly saturated work of Hector Leonardi, whose bright abstractions are full of layers of drips, marks, and stipples of acrylic color, with underlying forms revealed through masked areas, sometimes in grids and sometimes more organically.

To finish up my highlights of 25th Street, the Jeff Bailey Gallery has a nice little show of graphite drawings on paper by Will Duty. There are several lunar drawings which include repeated instances of a crescent moon as though from a multiple-exposure photograph. But the more interesting images are ones like Untitled (00020), which include some perspective and almost a “pixelation” of light and dark.

A remarkable show by Zhang Huan at the 22nd Street Pace Wildenstein requires a bit of effort to get the full effect. At least during the opening weekend, the artist is completing a monumental “ash painting” in the gallery. To view it, you have to climb up a temporary stairway leading you to a narrow platform overlooking a gigantic slab of compressed ash (looks like concrete) measuring nearly 6′ high by 20′ wide by 60′ long. The artist [or one of his studio assistants] sits on a mechanized contraption above the piece with some brushes and a palette consisting of 8 small buckets of various tones of ash. He [or she] dips his brush into one of the buckets to pick up some ash, leans over, and then taps the brush over the artwork to apply value to the work. The remarkable painting in progress is based on a vintage photograph of Chinese laborers digging a canal.

One final show worth noting was the museum-quality exhibition of mostly minimalist art at David Zwirner (Selections from the Collection of Helga and Walther Lauffs). It features a nice Yves Klein body painting, a very interesting Lee Bontecou “wall relief”, and an small but elegant Fred Sandback cord-and-metal rod installation. (The gallery provides a very helpful online checklist/brochure listing all of the works.)