A New Season Begins
In the sauna that was west Chelsea last night, a new art season began. The hot and sticky weather didn’t keep the art-goers away, however, as the streets between 22nd and 27th were packed. Fortunately, there were quite a few good shows worth mentioning.
I began my tour on 22nd Street where Keith Tyson has a show entitled “Fractal Dice” at Pace Wildenstein. The show explores the use of rule-based systems to generate art works, while incorporating both randomness (the “dice”) and nesting of levels of abstraction (the “fractals”). The artist has provided detailed instructions to the gallery for the fabrication of the pieces in the show, with rolls of the dice determining how a cube is to be deformed and colored and finally “instantiated” is an art object in aluminum and plastic. I like my conceptual art to have a strong visual component and this show passed that test. (My feeling regarding conceptual art is that I like it less if reading about a piece — or even seeing it in reproduction — provides about the same experience as seeing it in person.) The sculptures consist of semi-matte, smooth surfaces in red, green, blue, yellow, black, and white in a variety of arrangements, some lying on the floor and some hanging on the wall.
Although Lohin-Geduld Gallery on 25th Street isn’t having the formal opening reception until next week, they had their doors open late last night for a show by Joanne Freeman and Kim Uchiyama. Freeman’s works pop with optical contrasts and seemed to me to fit historically into a Stuart Davis / Bridget Riley / Brice Marden family tree, with my favorite piece being Electra. Whereas Freeman’s works tend towards more vertical compositions, Uchiyama’s paintings consist of horizontal striations of color.
Who would have thought that marshmallows would provide such interesting subject matter for still life painting? In the front space at George Billis Gallery, Derek Buckner exhibits a handful of beautiful paintings whose subjects are mounds and mounds of marshmallows, illuminated dramatically by a glowing yellow light. The images on the web site don’t do the colors justice (they’re much more saturated in person). The paintings are a study in temperature and value contrasts as well as adept paint handling. Although the press release relates the subject to one of overcrowding and proliferation, I prefer to enjoy these works for their formal characteristics. Thinking about the subject matter makes you first crave a stick and a fire but then you quickly recall the sickening feeling of one too many marshmallows!
Up the block at Dillon Gallery, Scott Redden exhibits his colorful, billowy landscapes in The Farmland Paintings. Houses, barns, churches and other buildings sit atop mounds of rolling farmland, most often lit on one side by low yellow sunlight and the other by a cool blue sky. I would categorize the paintings in this show into two types: ones with large boulder-like “clouds” floating above the landscape and ones without. I prefer the ones without these clouds even though they provide an ominous narrative to an otherwise still painting. Though the paint handling is very different, the non-cloud paintings remind me of Hopper’s New England landscapes. This is the second show of Redden’s I’ve seen at Dillon and in each of his paintings I notice one or more small drops of the underpainting in red, orange, or blue poking through the later layers, a kind of signature mark that the artist leaves behind.
Across the street at Gana Art is an exhibition of beautiful paintings by Korean artist Ko, Young Hoon. In most of the show’s 10 paintings, a single object stands or floats in front of a white background: for several of the works the subject is an ancient Buddha statue, beautifully rendered in paint so that you can practically feel the texture of the sculpture. Other subjects include ceramic jars also painted with incredible surface detail (though fortunately you can still see the brushstrokes upon close inspection).
Over on 26th Street, another Korean artist, Kwang-Young Chun, exhibits his now very familiar and yet still very fascinating “Aggregation” pieces. Chun’s work, for me, falls into that category of “Darn, why didn’t I buy one of those earlier?” When I first saw one of these pieces perhaps four or five years ago, I loved it immediately — it would have made a great investment then as the pieces on display his show at Robert Miller go for upwards of $150,000 now! If you haven’t seen them, Chun wraps small polystyrene shapes with Korean mulberry paper covered with Korean characters and aggregates them onto a support that hangs on the wall. The resulting pieces resemble rocky landscapes as the artist uses changes in value, texture, and size to suggest craters and hills. This is the first time I’ve seen him incorporate color; tints of blue in some of the craters stand out from otherwise monochromatic surfaces. These works are worth examining both from a distance and up close.
To top off a fine evening of art-going, over at the Betty Cunningham gallery I happened to run into Mel Liepzig and Linda Pochesci, both of whom I had the pleasure of exhibiting with in group shows this year (at D&R Greenway with both of them and at the Trenton City Museum with Mel). The new season is always exciting and this year’s has gotten off to a stimulating start!
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