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.

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This entry was posted on Friday, May 30th, 2008 at 5:07 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.