After exploring the Miró and Van Gogh shows at MoMA, meeting a friend for lunch, and doing some business in SoHo, I headed back northwards to Chelsea where there’s an abundance of interesting art to see right now.

Of the several major photography shows up today, my favorite was Richard Avedon at the Pace Wildenstein on 22nd Street.  Although I’ve seen many of these images from the Avedon retrospective at the Met a few years ago, you don’t get tired of seeing them.  Many of the shots are his signature white-background portraits, but the show includes more “snapshot” type images as well.  I love seeing the old, barely recognizable Groucho Marx, the triptych of Igor Stravinski with his puddling eyes, the very young Bob Dylan.

At Gagosian’s 21st Street space, Hiroshi Sugimoto exhibits fourteen “Seascapes” photos.  Sugimoto uses a large-format camera to take shots of the horizon at sea, varying exposure times to produce images that range from abstract and hazy to crisp and clear.  More interesting perhaps than the photos themselves is the installation (though I love Sugimoto’s work, these aren’t his most exciting pictures).  The huge gallery has been divided in half, with the first room lit by natural and fluorescent light and the seascapes are of daylight scenes.  In the back half, the gallery is pitch black except for the spotlights which cause the borders of the dramatic night-time seascapes to glow.

Matthew Marks is exhibiting some neat new photos by Andreas Gursky on 24th Street.  These huge images capture the peculiar architecture and the dancing clientele at a nightclub in Germany.  A few of the shots show the club practically empty, drawing attention to the honeycomb-like walls of the room, while others show hundreds of people in a frozen state of dancing.  (I’m not sure to what extent digital manipulation is going on, but I only noticed one patron whose eyes were blinking…  How does he do that, if I can’t even get a family photo with 6 people to all have their eyes open?

The last big photography show I saw gave me the creeps:  Cindy Sherman at Metro Pictures.  Sherman takes shots of her dressed-up, made-up self in front of a green screen and then superimposes them onto background images.  Perhaps it was something I ate, but these images of her, which continue “her investigation into distorted ideas of beauty, self-image and aging”, litereally caused my stomach to turn.  I guess that’s what they’re supposed to do.

Moving on to painting, there’s a nice show of large Joan Mitchell sunflower paintings at Cheim & Read.  If you like Mitchell, this is a great little exhibition worth seeing.

I was looking forward to the Terry Winters show at Matthew Marks (22nd St).  From what I’ve read about him, he shares a number of formal and subject-matter interests with me:  science, technology, mark-making, tessellated patterns, topology, and color theory.  But for some reason these “Knotted Graph” paintings didn’t excite me the way a mini-retrospective of his work that I saw in Texas a few years ago did.

There’s an interesting painting show of works by Sandro Chia at Charles Cowles gallery.  I’d call these “mash-up” paintings, in that they seem to pull stylistically from and mix together a bunch of periods of art history.  Mix in a handful of Picasso, tablespoon of Gauguin, a dollop of Matisse, and a splash of Warhol, and you get these colorful, playful images, whose subjects, however, are cowboys, Indians, and pirates.

At George Billis Gallery, Kenny Harris (who happens to be a friend of my brother’s) exhibits some paintings made while he was traveling cross country for a reality show about whether he could travel across the country by trading artwork for food and shelter.  They’re gorgeous paintings mostly of interiors (e.g., hotel rooms) with a particular sensitivity to light, atmosphere, and floor reflections (which are remarkably interesting to look at).

Finally, there’s a nice, small show of paintings at Jeff Bailey.  Mark Shetabi’s “Arena” paintings of images from a Queen concert (with their immediately recognizable late lead singer) vary from small and intimate to large and abstract.  The paintings are alternately representational and abstract.  The representational works show Freddie Mercury on stage in front of huge stadium audiences or capture the machinery of a concert (e.g., speakers, instruments) in low-chroma style.  The imagery gets more abstract as the artist zooms in on the equipment: an amplifier, a sound absorber.

Whew — a long day of art, but quite a bit of it worth seeing, the kind that makes you ready to go home and paint.

After seeing the Miró show, I headed down to the second floor to take in the blockbuster “Van Gogh and the Colors of the Night.”  It’s worth becoming a member of MoMA for this show just so you can avoid the timed-ticket entry and the associated very long lines: just flash your membership card and you can proceed straight into the galleries without any delay.

The show focuses on Van Gogh’s longstanding interest in the night: landscapes at dusk, nighttime interiors, and star-light night skies.  It includes, of course, the museum’s super-famous “Starry Night”:  fortunately, if you’ve been to MoMA often you’ve seen this painting a million times and can skip the huge crowds here.  There are several “Sower” paintings where peasants work the fields as the sun sets in the background.  The Potato Eaters is here and it’s nice to see it in person instead of in your art history books (all of them!).

The Dance Hall in Arles is a Gauguin-like interior full of dancers and is noteworthy for its surprisingly flat forms and lacking the signature broken brushstroke of most of Van Gogh’s other work.  In The Night Cafe, Van Gogh tries “to express the terrible human passions with the red and the green”.

In a show full of knockout paintings, the “star” is the other Starry Night (“…Over the Rhone”), a gorgeous scene of a couple strolling in the foreground, the town of Arles shimmering in the distance, and reflections of the town and the stars in the sky flickering over the water of the Rhone.

My only complaint about this show is that it’s so crowded, even with the timed entry tickets.  Worse, large crowds loiter around the paintings with audio explanations, audioguide glued to the ear, oblivious to the space and people around them.  My suggestion is that you go and just look at the paintings as much as you can and read the text or listen to the audio from MoMA’s excellent online exhibition ahead of time.  But most of all, be sure not to miss this show!

Pipilotti Rist: Pour Your Body Out (7354 Cubic Meters)
In MoMA’s large atrium, there’s a site-specific installation by artist Pipilotti Rist.  I remember being entranced by Rist’s video / sculpture installations in Chelsea a few years ago.  The video component of the present piece is projected up against the walls of the atrium while the center of the space contains round cushioned benches for viewers to lie back on.  People are encouraged to make themselves comfortable, to get to know others around them, and to take off their shoes before stepping onto the light colored carpet!

The Printed Picture
In another show that I had to hurry through but will have to revisit (it’s up through June 1, 2009), MoMA documents the history of multiple-copy image prints (the exhibition coincides with the publication of the book The Printed Picture).  In a nifty curatorial strategy, examples of dozens of different kinds of prints are exhibited along the walls of the gallery, many of them coupled with 50x magnifications that let you easily see what’s going on at a very low level on the paper (e.g., you can quickly see the difference between halftone screen patterns and stochastic screen patterns).  There’s an awful lot to look at here, so this show might be best enjoyed in detail through the book.

It’s pretty much peak art season at the galleries and museums in New York City right now and yesterday I managed to view a whole lotta art.  In this post and the next, I’ll cover the first half of my day, spent at the Museum of Modern Art.

Wow — there’s a lot to see at MoMA right now!  First up, on the sixth floor, is Joan Miró: Painting and Anti-Painting 1927-1937.  The show is organized by “series”, with each room displaying works from a specific period in Miro’s output over these 11 years.

Things get off to a slow start in a gallery of works whose goal was to “assassinate” painting.  The important feature of these, apparently, is that they were painted on raw, unprimed canvas.  The works themselves, while perhaps of import art historically, don’t offer much visual interest today:  a few splotches of white or black paint, some schematic lines here and there.

Things begin to get more interesting in the next room, with Miró’s “Spanish Dancers” and “Portrait of a Dancer”.  Here, the artist enters the third dimension with his “constructions”, collages of real-world objects onto painted supports.

The third room features what I consider to be the most iconically “Miró” pieces, his Dutch Interiors and Imaginary Portraits (this could just be due to my familiarity with the piece Dutch Interior (I), a part of MoMA’s permanent collection that I have painted into a still life several years ago).  These paintings abstract, simplify, morph, and twist scenes that one would have found on Dutch interior paintings.  The compositions become complex negotiations of positive and negative spaces, while the forms are painted with out-of-the-tube colors.

Bouncing back in the opposite direction, Miró then returns to mostly colorless collages (less collage-objects this time), now frequently cutting holes into the supports, adding some surface interest to otherwise not-so-exciting pieces.  In the next series, Miró returns to painting in a series of “Large Paintings on White Grounds”, which MoMA’s texts describe as “willfully ugly”.  Compositions are less formally balanced and brush strokes are loose and child-like.  I did notice, however, that the work “Painting (Mediterranean Landscape)”, which is easy to pass by quickly, looks very different when you look back on it from the next room:  the mountains are painted like a scrim and make the painting pop with depth.

The show proceeds to works of “non-sculpture” objects/constructions, then to “Paintings Based on Collages”, and then to “Drawing Collages” (which pair found materials with biomorphic black lines).

Once again color comes back into the picture in the room “Pastels on Flocked Paper” from 1934.  (“Flocked paper” refers to paper that has been painted and then, while still wet, sprinkled or otherwise coated with a texture-providing material such as dust or fibers.)  These works include dimensional modeling of surreal figures with exaggerated limbs and other protrusions.

Moving back to paint, Miró completes a series of works on cardboard that he considered a look back on his career with works full of the colors and shapes that signify Miró.  From there, this show moves to a series of works on copper and masonite, occasionally working with tempera instead of oil.  These works are worthy of closer study, with intense color, detailed brushstrokes, and a more narrative structure that includes ghastly figures and other beasts at play on barren landscapes.

Perhaps coming full circle, the last series on display use “minimal means” on mostly raw masonite supports, with images becoming more schematic, more abstract, less colorful and much less attractive.  The final work in the show, however, is something of a rock star, “Still Life with Old Shoe”.  Miró returns to representation and working from life in this psychadelic, surreal play of forms and colors.

If you can’t make it to see the show in person, be sure to check out MoMA’s excellent online exhibition which includes wall texts, audio explanations, and images for all of the works in the show as well as a few that aren’t.

I just got back from the reception for the Absolutely Abstract 2008 show at the Philadelphia Sketch Club, where my painting Figment received an honorable mention award.  There were 125 pieces in the show, seven honorable mentions, and three top prizes.

(Award winners, from left-to-right:  Daniel Buchler (?), Deborah Riccardi (co-chair), Ben Cohen (?), Michelle Marcuse, David Foss, Lisa Lawinski, Hunter Stabler, Andrew Werth, James Moss (?), and Don Brewer (co-chair))

Acrylic on panel, 20″x16″, 2008

I’m happy to report that one of my paintings, Figment, has been accepted into the Absolutely Abstract 2008 juried group show at the Philadelphia Sketch Club.  The exhibition is up through the end of November and the gallery is open Monday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday from 1-5pm.  The Sketch Club is located at 235 South Camac Street in Philadelphia.

I’m happy to report that I have recently joined Artists’ Gallery, an artists’ co-op in Lambertville, New Jersey. If you’re not familiar with the area, Lambertville is a small town on the Delaware River across the water from New Hope, PA, that features art galleries, antique stores, and other shopping and dining goodies. Artists’ Gallery has been around since 1996 and exhibits the work of some eighteen area artists working in a diversity of styles. I’m very excited about this opportunity to show my work more regularly, both as part of member shows each month as well as in a yearly featured two-person show (my first two-person show will be in September 2009).

This month (Nov 7-Nov 30) I’ll be exhibiting two of my “Strange Loops” paintings (Strange Loops 3 and Strange Loops 4) as part of the group show in the rear gallery space. Artists’ Gallery is located at 32 Coryell Street, Lambertville, NJ, and is open Fridays through Sundays from 11am – 6pm. The opening reception for this month’s two featured artists, Carol Sanzalone and Bonnie Schorske, is this Saturday, November 8, from 6-9pm. For more info, check out the Artists’ Gallery web site at

http://www.lambertvillearts.com/index.php