Group Show Season in Chelsea
To paraphrase an oft-cited (and sometimes misattributed) quote about tourists, “If it’s group show season, why can’t we shoot them?” Many of the galleries in Chelsea have group shows on display as their final exhibition before August recess. Not that there’s anything wrong with group shows, but if you go to Chelsea often it does mean that you’ll get to see some pieces you’ve seen before. Because many of these shows are just collections of the gallery’s artists, there might not be any curatorial theme to the show beyond, “Here are our artists.”
One group show that does have a common theme is the nice collection of representational work at George Billis Gallery. “City Light” contains a plethora of cityscapes by gallery artists. Friend of a friend Andrew Jones has a fine oil painting in the show (“Bank Street Twilight”), part of his ongoing quest to capture the light on the stoops and iron railings near his NYC home. Other memorable work at Billis includes some Rackstraw Downes-like panoramic cityscapes as well as a collection of very small, square, detailed street traffic scenes.
At Allen Gallery, Sharon Weiner’s exhibition “Dreamscicle” includes a number of corpuscular abstractions that are the stars of the show. These layered paintings are full of red blobs that read as blood cells or, perhaps, figures.
The only other show I visited in Chelsea that really kept my attention was the Philip Pearlstein show at Betty Cunningham which contrasts some of the artist’s work from the 1960′s with work from the 1990′s through today. I’ve always liked Pearlstein’s paintings and always enjoy studying them carefully, from composition to coloration to paint application. In the early works, it’s mostly the figures who take center stage, though they are often cropped mid-limb for abstract purposes. Later on, Pearlstein includes all manner of props (such as a Michelin man and a zeppelin). I find that I can’t help but think about the artist’s process when looking at these paintings — what was the studio like, how did he choose the props, were the models posing at the same time? As I’ve mentioned before, one of my criteria in evaluating an exhibition is whether it makes me want to go home and paint, and this one certainly does: as you look at the works you get a visceral feeling of palettes, paints, mixing, layers, and composition. (And for some extra fun, I sometimes like to see who else has signed the guest book. For this show, I signed right under art critic Jerry Saltz and artist Robert Bechtle, whose work I enjoyed at this year’s Whitney Biennial.)
