Abstract Expressionism and more in Chelsea
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.)
Tags: Chelsea
