I recently returned from a 10-day trip to Hungary that included a brief stay in Budapest followed by a visit to the southern Hungarian city of Pécs (pronounced variously like “Peach”, “Paych”, or “Paysch”).  Aside from making a nice vacation to a place I’d never visited before, the purpose of the trip was to attend Bridges 2010, a conference that “brings together practicing mathematicians, scientists, artists, educators, musicians, writers, computer scientists, sculptors, dancers, weavers, and model builders in a lively atmosphere of exchange and mutual encouragement.”  I’ll keep this blog post focused on the conference, but hope to eventually add some more information about the rest of my trip.

View of Pecs from our hotel

This was my first time attending the Bridges conference and I only learned about the gathering a few months ago while randomly searching the web for something or another related to art (tessellations, I think).  One of the more interesting subtexts throughout the conference, though seldom explicitly part of the presentations, were the ideas of “What is art?” or “Is that art mathematical?”  So, a painter who was fully engaged in the art world might look at a visual representation of some complex mathematical construct and wonder if the computer-generated image “counts” as art.  On the other hand, some of those more focused on the mathematical side of things wondered whether paintings or photographs that aren’t explicitly based upon equations of some sort were appropriate for the conference.  Fortunately, most of the crowd seemed to be open-minded about and interested in both art and math — thus the apropos appellation “Bridges”.

The best of the talks (formal paper presentations) were fascinating and stimulating and had me writing down topics to explore in the future, tools to track down, and ideas for further reflection.  I’ll highlight a few of the talks here.

Early on the first day, Christopher Carlson kicked things off with an excellent presentation about using the powerful tool Mathematica to interactively explore visual designs such as for corporate logos.  Recently, I had been thinking about Douglas Hofstadter’s ideas about “knob-twiddling”, where he says that, “Making variations on a theme is really the crux of creativity.” (Hofstadter, 1985)  Carlson’s talk was a perfect example of “knob-twiddling as creativity”.  He starts with a basic logo modeled in Mathematica (a tool that he made look incredibly simple), figures out what the “knobs” should be (i.e., how to parametrize the logo), and then starts twiddling.  If you pick the right knobs, you end up with an incredibly powerful way to explore a visual space of logos and find things that would probably have been too difficult to design from scratch.

Later in the morning, Joel Varland, a professor at Savannah College of Art and Design, summoned another author whose work I’m fond of, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, in talking about “flow” in math and the arts.  Flow, as described by M.C., is the mental state you obtain when working with focus on activities requiring both high skill level and a high degree of challenge.  When I’m working on my paintings and things are going well, this is the state where time flies and you’re completely absorbed in the work.  Varland explored some of the more literal definitions of flow as they relate to the arts, such as in the dynamics of lines, gestures, and composition.

Craig Kaplan gave a talk about Parquet Deformations, another topic made popular by Douglas Hofstadter.  Parquet Deformations depict a kind of metamorphosis (a la M.C. Escher) where a tiled pattern varies slowly across space into a different pattern.  They’re fun to look at, hard to draw manually, and Kaplan explained the tools he’s built to help explore the possibilities (more knob-twiddling!).

On the second morning of the conference, Bih-yaw Jin from National Taiwan University explained how he and his students were able to string together some beautiful molecular structures out of ordinary beads.  Focusing on “fullerene” structures (roughly spherical carbon molecules), he explained how by looking at the “sprial code” of a particular molecule, you can learn how to string the beads together such that each bead only needs to be “strung” twice to construct sturdy models.  In his constructions, the beads represent bonds between atoms, not the atoms themselves.  I was fortunate enough to be one of the early birds to his talk and received one of his sample C80 molecules, which has inspired my wife to explore bead stringing designs herself!

C80 molecule in beads by Bih-yaw Jin

In several of my paintings, I’ve used a procedure that I developed in Photoshop to take an image and abstract it into what I found to be pleasing patterns of interacting positive and negative shapes.  It wasn’t until Jonathan Mccabe’s presentation, though, that I learned that these patterns have been around for a long time and were in fact discovered by Alan Turing, one of the fathers of computer science.  (Excitement: Turing found the same thing I did!  Dismay: It’s been around forever and is apparently well known, though not by me!)  Turing described a “morphogenesis” process in terms of chemical producers and consumers and hypothesized that this sort of process could be the cause of zebra stripes.  Mccabe explains his model for generating Turing patterns by simulating the activator and inhibitor dynamics in a randomized grayscale image, and then shows how he can use Turing patterns at multiple scales within the same image to create complex, dynamic, beautifully biological artistic images.

A few of my paintings that include Turing patterns:

Artist James Mai gave a talk about simultaneous color contrast which started with “color theory 101″ but then moved on to his own work, paintings that are specifically about the interaction of colors and the ways in which adjacent colors affect each other in our perceptions.

On “Hungarian Day”, István Orosz explained the motivation and technique behind his double meaning and anamorphic artwork.  In work such as “Durer in the Forest”, Orosz places one image within another, often “hiding” (in plain sight) a portrait of a person that the rest of the image relates to.  In his anamorphic work, a geometrically distorted image is constructed on a flat surface so that when it is viewed as a reflection in a mirrored cylinder, the “correct” image pops into place.  In the best of his pieces, such as in “The Raven (Edgar Allen Poe)”, the anamorphoses are composed so carefully that the image has two meanings, working well without the mirror as one image and then revealing another meaning once the mirror is in place.

Durer in the Forest, from Wikipedia

Later in the day, Ernő Rubik must have been feeling the love from the crowd and he received the full celebrity treatment in giving a talk about the phenomenon of the Rubik’s cube.  With cameras flashing left and right, Rubik explained (in English, for which he apologized that he wasn’t as lyrical as he would be in Hungarian) how he struggled against those who thought the cube couldn’t be successful because it was too hard.  The allure of the cube was through its combination of simplicity of concept with complexity of solution, and its TV-friendliness hit the sweet spot of 80s culture at exactly the right time.

Rubik at Bridges 2010

The fourth day of the conference was “Excursion Day”.  First up were the Vasarely and Zsolnay ceramics museums in Pécs.  Vasarely is one of the fathers of Op Art and the museum provides examples of his work from throughout his life.  (My wife and I also visited another Vasarely museum in Budapest, but that one was a bit of a disappointment as the lighting was poor and the lady at the front desk tried to rip us off while buying tickets; if I’m generous I’d say she was just bad at math, but realistically it felt like she was trying to take advantage of tourists not familiar with Hungarian language or currency… Fortunately, mathematics is universal and subtraction is simple and we paid the correct amount.)  The Pecs museum lights many of the works with perfectly aligned track lighting that makes the paintings appear to glow from within.  This large, flat tapestry appeared to bulge out of the wall.

Tapestry at museum in Pecs

After the museums, we took a trip out to the town of Villány for lunch and a wine-tasting, followed by a visit to a local sculpture garden.

Traditional Hungarian lunch plate

In the wine cellar

On the final day of the conference, Henry Segerman gave a short talk that explained the causes of some interesting artifacts (e.g., the spokes and rings) that occur when you color in a “sunflower spiral” according to a Fibonacci-related metric.

Henry Segerman's Fibonacci metric coloring of sunflower spiral

A few months ago I finished a painting that also made use of a similar sunflower spiral in its underlying composition (which coincidentally had a similar color palette).

Center of Narrative Gravity #3

Nearing the end of the 5-day conference, David Reimann spoke about using Bézier curves to create interesting tilings based upon Truchet tiles.  For the non-mathematicians reading this, a Bézier curve is a way to draw smooth, continuous curves (Wikipedia has excellent animations).  Truchet tiles are squares divided into two triangles (e.g., one black and one white), which when laid out in a grid and rotated in various combinations produce pleasing patterns.  A variation uses two curves from midpoint-to-midpoint rather than a diagonal line to divide up each square.  Reimann showed how using various curves (with both one arc and two arcs per side) on tilings can create aesthetically appealing patterns (reminding me of Brice Marden paintings).  This talk had me thinking about my painting, Conceptual Framework, which has a tiling of curves very similar to those of Truchet tiles.

Conceptual Framework

There were many other talks, but these were the ones that I found most interesting and relevant to my own art.

Relatively speaking, Thursday wasn’t such a bad day to walk around New York City to see art.  The “cool” 90 degrees was bearable and with some strategic south-side-of-the-street-shade-walking, the worst of the heat could be avoided (“…walking on the sidewalk hotter than a match head…”).  The No. 6 train uptown, with its working air conditioning, was downright comfortable, if a bit aromatic.  I began my day heading uptown to the Whitney.

Starting at the top floor, I finally caught the “Collecting Biennials” show that I had missed during the Biennial proper and am glad I did.  It mostly felt pretty familiar, with staples such as Hopper’s “Early Sunday Morning” and Duane Hanson’s “Woman with Dog”, but many such as Peter Blume’s surreal “Man of Sorrows” were memorable and new to me.

The real reason I visited the Whitney, though, was for the Charles Burchfield exhibition.  (Note that if you visit, the show proceeds clockwise — start to your left as you exit the stairs — which is the reverse of many shows at the Whitney).  It’s a diverse show, with beautifully composed high contrast landscapes alternating with somewhat chaotic, vibrating images in which it seems the artist was attuned to waves of energy from the objects in his scene.  I liked the more graphic (and less chaotic) pieces best and a few of the paintings that dealt with atmosphere and seasons were sensational.  Burchfield is often grouped into the same set of American modernists as one of my favorite painters, Oscar Bluemner, and so I went to this exhibition with comparisons in mind.  Although there are some formal similarities in the occasional use of stark trees and repeated patterns in abstracted architectural elements, to my eye the Bluemner paintings are so much more exciting.  Hopefully, once the Whitney expands into a second space in Chelsea there will be enough room to show more of both artist’s work at the same time and on a more regular basis.

I headed to Chelsea and began exploring, this time starting all the way down on 19th Street at David Zwirner Gallery for a show entitled, “The Evryali Score.”  It’s a group show of largely conceptual art — not usually my thing, but I point it out because of a few items that caught my eye.  One piece, a portion of a composite work by Mary Ellen Carroll entitled “Alas Poor Yorick”, consisted of a large sheet of paper full of tightly scribbled black ink marks that reminded me of the work of one of my colleagues at Artists’ Gallery, Jennifer Cadoff.

I was surprised to find several pieces by Fred Sandback that were not of the threaded space-slicing sort.  Instead, they consist of framed sheets of paper with a phrase or two of typewritten text.  The text defines, as a sort of a database query onto the world in the style of a linguistic discussion on referents, the existence of a sculpture.  For instance, one piece reads, “There exists a sculpture consisting of all infrared radiation present in my studio on 11th street in Brooklyn.”

Another piece was a head-shaker: a blank canvas hung on the wall — that’s it (remember the old Batman episode where the Joker creates a similarly empty painting and calls it, “Death of a Bat”?).  Well, in this case it was the metadata that made the difference in Bruno Jakob’s piece (or at least made it entertaining):  “The BRAIN Untitled”, Invisible painting: brain on unprimed canvas.  It’s not everyday you see a work where the medium is listed as “brain on canvas”!

Moving along, I found another conceptually interesting but much more optically pleasing exhibition at Kim Foster Gallery in the work of Christian Faur.  Faur uses thousands of “hand-cast” crayons in varying tones as the pixels in pointillist portraits taken from Depression-era photographs.  The crayons are stacked in a grid and bound within a frame so that there’s a three dimensional element to the works: as you move from left to right you catch more or less of the length of the crayon.  Though the crayons are colorful, the overall image reads as a toned black-and-white (or sepia) image through a kind of optical integration that changes depending upon your distance from the work.

Upstairs at Kathryn Markel Fine Arts, a small group show contains a number of eye-catching abstracts.  In particular, I loved the two curvy, colorful abstractions by Julie Gross that combine biomorphic shapes with careful geometry.

At The Pace Gallery on 22nd Street, a show by the enigmatic Tim Hawkinson entitled One Man Band takes a minute or two to register and at first I thought it would be an in-and-out experience.  However, the carefully engineered musical objects are each worthy of some study.  Most of the objects are wired up to motion detectors so that as you approach the piece they “turn on” and something starts moving in such a way as to cause the object to make musical sounds.  For instance, in my favorite piece, a long string of carefully spaced beads winds around pulleys mounted on a large tree branch so that when the beads trigger one or more sensors, a slide whistle receives a burst of air and an adjustment to its length, producing a stream of playful toy instrument notes.

After some much needed fueling up with some friends at The Half King, I went to the opening reception of “New York Moments” at George Billis Gallery.  This group show contains several dozen very finely painted images depicting scenes from around New York.  David FeBland, whose work I first came across during one of the TriBeCa open studio tours five or six years ago, shows a piece that was instantly recognizable as his: I remember his work specifically because of the appealingly expressive textures in the often watery scenes of people splashing through the streets of the city.  Andrew Jones has two fine “stoop paintings” remaining from his solo show last month (featuring lovingly painted handrails and stairs from local neighborhood stoops).  Several artists were inspired by the views from rooftops (“…gonna meet you on the rooftop…”) with water towers featuring prominently, including paintings by Ephraim Rubenstein (whose drawing class at ASL was always full so I never managed to get in) and Lucy Gould Reitzfeld, whose Landscape Painting class at The School of Visual Arts I was fortunate enough to be able to attend.  Her painting, “Snow Light“, is part of her recent series of “Mercer Street” paintings that capture the light and atmosphere of views from atop a building on Mercer Street at various times of the day and year.  The reception was packed and unlike another opening I attended that night, the A/C was working (“…despite the heat it’ll be alright…”)!  A New York themed show was a nice way to finish up a day of exploring art around the city (“…in the summer, in the city / in the summer, in the city…”)

I started off yesterday’s trip to New York on the upper east side where I met a friend for lunch, after which I had intended to see the Julie Mehretu show at the Guggenheim. As I started walking towards the museum, I had a déjà vu moment while thinking about why I don’t get to the Guggenheim very often: I’ve done this before, and it’s closed on Thursdays, the day I’m usually visiting the city. So, no Mehretu (or Kenneth Noland) on this visit.

Fortunately, the Met is exhibiting “Picasso in the Met” just a few blocks away. It’s an exhaustingly huge display of all of the Picasso works within the museum’s collection. Unfortunately, shows like this are usually packed and this one was no exception. More frustrating than just being crowded, though, was the exasperating number of people just moving from painting to painting taking photographs with their cameras… and often with just cell phone cameras! It required much restraint to not scream out, “Look at the painting — it’s right there!” But, I need to get over this particular pecccadillo as it’s not likely to go away and isn’t it snooty of me to tell people how to enjoy their museum experience?

I couldn’t spend that much time at the show because the crowds made lingering at any one piece difficult and because I needed to get down to Chelsea to meet a friend for coffee. So I hoofed it across Central Park to the west side and caught the C train down to 23rd Street. After re-fueling and catching up, I started gallery-going in earnest and there are a several shows worth noting.

First up, on 24th Street at Mike Weiss Gallery is Piet van den Boog (the second time I’ve seen his work at this gallery). Big heads (especially the artist’s) are back, along with large bodies in this visually exciting show. The paintings are large, oil-and-clay-on-acrylic-on-oxidized-steel (mounted on stretcher bars), so each piece has a variety of textures: crumbly clay (part real clay, part trompe l’oeil, I think) on the figure’s body, pleasantly stippled brushstrokes in the flesh (especially in the faces), sketchy acrylic underpaintings, and oxidized black steel backgrounds. Consisting of one intense self portrait and perhaps six or seven showing a woman covered with clay, the show is a metaphorical reference to a scene from a Sylvia Plath book where the narrator is paralyzed with indecision about choosing which fig to eat on a fig tree, and while making up her mind she witnesses the decay of the unchosen figs.

Gagosian‘s two Chelsea galleries both are exhibiting impressive, must-see shows from diverse ends modern art history: Roy Lichtenstein’s pop still lifes on 24th Street and Claude Monet’s late Impressionist work on 21st. The Lichtentstein paintings are completely flat and devoid of visible brushwork, using instead a graphic sensibility, bright primary colors, and high-contrast patterns (stripes or Benday dots) for their visual appeal. Though it’s an impressive show, the still lifes don’t have the narrative interest of his comic paintings or the abstract appeal of his brushstroke pieces. The ones I liked the most were paintings that quoted other figures in art history (is that from a Matisse? is that Leger?). The exhibition includes a handful of very enjoyable sculptures that are like graphic paintings that broke free from the canvas and landed on stilts.

With the Lichtenstein show, the pieces are best seen from a good distance away and there’s not much point in getting up close; this type of work looks about the same in reproduction as it does in the gallery. On the other hand, the Monet show on 21st Street needs to be seen in person. These paintings are, of course, brushstroke intensive and worth getting close to (but not too close! The Gagosian guards are particularly aggressive for this show in keeping people at least a few feet away from the works, which is a shame but probably makes sense for an exhibition like this where the insurance costs must be astronomical!). And as is the case with much of Monet’s work, what you see in a painting depends upon how far away you are from it. Up close, it’s brushstroke, scumbling, and swirls of color. If you squint or step back, though, beautiful snippets of landscape pop into place. Especially exciting are the scenes in the penultimate gallery showing “The Alley of Roses” and “The Japanese Bridge”.

I then headed back up to 27th Street to Sundaram Tagore Gallery and an exhibition of acrylic on fabric over panel paintings by Robert Yasuda. In many of these pieces Yasuda is using what I believe to be interference acrylic paints (I’ve used them as well) that produce a “flip” effect as you view them at different angles with respect to the lighting. From one angle, a paint may appear pinkish but from another it will flip to the complementary green. Multiple sheets of these and regular acrylic, either poured or brushed onto the fabric, produce beautiful fields of color that change as you approach the works. Catch the light one way and you see a beautiful haze of purple streaking across the painting but back up a bit and the purple vanishes. In a few paintings, it appears that instead of the interference effect the artist is adjusting the gloss or reflectivity on the paint, so that for instance a reflective golden yellow blends into a matte yellow backdrop. Fabric is stretched across custom-carved wood panels with organic dimples, protrusions, or nooks that add more intrigue to the composition. Unfortunately, it’s probably impossible to capture the visual appearance of these paintings adequately in photographs, so if you want to see them you’ll have to visit the gallery.

Making for a nice comparison with the Yasuda show, McKenzie Fine Art exhibits the work of James Lecce, another artist using acrylics in creative ways to colorful effect. Lecce’s abstract panels consist of multiple layers of acrylic poured under certain artist-defined procedural constraints. The paintings vary between cool, flat color and reflective metallic pigments in biomorphically dimensional abstractions. As with Yasuda, how you catch the light reflecting off the piece changes your perception of lights and darks. I can’t help but think of technique when looking at them and in particular asking questions about how long do those pours take to dry and what happens if you make a mistake? (Working with poured acrylic can be tricky — better get your medium mixed just right and hope you don’t have dust floating around.)

Andy Goldsworthy heads to the city for a nifty show at Galerie Lelong that features several series of photographs documenting patterns of water evaporating on the ground. In one series, a Goldsworthy squiggle appears as a reflection of water painted on the road in between some parked cars. Over time, the scene darkens towards night and the water evaporates so that the patterns begin to fade away. A separate room exhibits a “triptych” of three video projections that show “rain shadows” from various spots in New York: the artist laid down on the sidewalk as it started to rain and then filmed the resulting “shadow” of a dry spot as it changes over time.

Finally, I went to the opening reception for Andrew Jones‘ latest work at George Billis Gallery. This show continues his series of “stoop paintings” that picture the stair railings of (mostly) Greenwich Village in interesting lights and with creative compositions. Even more so than in his last show, these paintings really pop with dimension through control of detail, contrast, and atmospheric perspective. Both the shadows and the lights in these paintings contain variations of color and tone in the brushstroke so that they’re worth looking at up close as well as from across the room. Most of the pieces focus on the “newel”, the post at the end of the stoop on which the handrail swirls to a flourishing finish, though there are a couple with direct-on views of arabesque railing posts that provide a nice semi-abstract variation from the newels.

(After a day full of walking around the galleries (with some very sore feet to show for it — those shoes weren’t as comfy as I thought), I grabbed a quick bite to eat at Rin Thai on 23rd Street between 7th & 8th. I didn’t get to try anything more than my entree (Bamboo Pad Ped, extra spicy), but it was fantastic and wonderfully flavorful (would have been better to share, though).  Recommended if you’re in the area and like Thai food!)

This year I only managed to make it to two of the art fairs during Art Fair week in Manhattan, but overall it was an enjoyable time spent with a diverse selection of artwork.

First up was The Armory Show, which is open through Sunday at Piers 94 and 92 on the West Side of the city.  As was the case last year, the show is split up into the contemporary art section and the modern section.  This year we arrived at the contemporary section before the show opened and that was a good idea: we did our waiting inside rather than outside where it had not yet warmed up.  The contemporary section has more than 200 galleries and it can be a bit mind-numbing.  You can’t spend a lot of time with all of the work, but then you wouldn’t really want to.  Instead, you have to look for things that catch your eye and focus your time there.

Fortunately, there were quite a few galleries that had work worthy of close study and appreciation, and I will focus on those.  I liked an Odili Donald Odita geometric abstract acrylic painting (at Jack Shainman) on a smokey plexiglass support, where the texture of the painted areas contrasted with the smooth and glassy areas left bare.

My wife and I both admired several Jacob Hashimoto constructions that we found among at least two separate galleries, but in particular the yellow and white “Field of Yellow Blocks” at the Studio La Citta gallery.  It consists of perhaps several hundred paper-like yellow and white waxy rectangles strung together carefully at varying depths between two rows of pegs.  It caught your eye from a distance and then was worth looking at up close from the front and the sides to admire how it  all held together.

Hashimoto @ Studio La Citta

One of my favorite pieces of the day was Rafael Lozano-Hemmer‘s interactive “The Company of Colours“.  It consisted of an LCD screen with a small camera attached; the camera beams out at the world and the screen displays what the camera sees, but does so in a highly pixilated manner.  As you approach the screen, you see that each block of color is labeled with a color name and the image is constantly changing as you move around to reflect the latest colors in the pixilated image.  After a few moments, the screen temporarily changes to show the image using 16 “culturally significant” color palettes in the history of personal computing and gaming (e.g., one of the screens shows a Commodore 64′s color palette, another shows a Sega game palette).

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer

The Canada New York gallery had a nice exhibition of works by Xylor Jane.  Jane uses thousands of slightly raised dots of color as a kind of pixel in making paintings that are full of repetition, counting, numbers, pattern, and color.  It’s not hard to understand why I would appreciate these works!

Xylor Jane

Paul Kasmin put on a large exhibition of wonderful James Nares brushstroke paintings.  These huge canvases are filled each with what looks to be one long, swirly stroke of paint as foreground on a solid background underpainting.  I never get tired of seeing these apparently simple looking but elegant pieces.  What you need to know about how they are made can be summed up by this photo.   In at least one of the paintings in this booth, Nares is using a kind of interference paint where the color of the paint changes based upon your angle of view so that as you walk from one end to the other of the 15-or-so foot long painting, you see the paint changing color as you walk.

James Nares

I saw several people that I knew or recognized at the art fairs today.  One was Nancy Chunn, whose painting class I took seven or eight years ago at the School of Visual Arts.  She had a huge exhibition at the Ronald Feldman Fine Arts booth, where she seemed to be always tied up explaining her work to others and so unfortunately I couldn’t say Hi (not that she would remember me, anyway, but I wanted to congratulate her on the show).  Each piece consists of perhaps a couple dozen separate canvases that together provide a neurotic narrative of scenes from the life of a fearful Chicken Little (the overall series is entitled, “Chicken Little and the Culture of Fear).  Chunn paints in a crisp, likeable illustrative style with political content and this series has you wondering how much of Chicken Little is neuroses and how much is prescience…

I also spied John Corzine walking around The Armory Show, both at the contemporary side as well as the modern side.  He was simply strolling up and down the aisles looking at the art but he must also have been amused at the path of “There’s John Corzine” that followed a few feet behind him everywhere he walked.  I wish I had thought to invite him to my show next month!  Of course, that would have been rather awkward and probably rude.

We headed over to the Modern side of the fair where there is one gallery after another of top notch blue chip art.  Since so much of the work here was familiar and very likable, I’ll skip listing the pieces but share a few observations.

Unlike at the ADAA show (which I write about, below), the crowd here was a diverse mixture of “the masses”, young and old, art-world knowledgable and not.  One older couple was admiring a Gerhard Richter painting (there were at least 3 of his very nice signature squeegie abstractions spread around).  I overheard the man telling his wife, “Now that’s a style I like…”  The wife asks, “What’s his name?”  Looking closely, squinting, the husband exclaims, “Hmmm…  Jerard Richter”.

As I was walking down the first aisle of pier 92, there was Chuck Close taking in the sights.  He created a stir similar to that of Corzine, though it had a different flair.  More people seemed willing to approach Close, but for those who didn’t recognize him you couldn’t help but feel that they were missing something: I saw a young couple eyeing a Chuck Close print as if they’d never seen one before and I so wanted to point out to them that the artist was but a few dozen feet away (they didn’t speak English).

Jonathan Boos gallery had a very nice Oscar Bluemner painting ($975,000!).  I’m used to seeing Yayoi Kusama “infinity nets” at the art fairs, but this show included an “infinity petals” triptych in red and black.  James Graham and Sons exhibited some of the recent drawings from John Zinsser, meaning that at least two former instructors of mine were represented in the fairs today. The Modern section of the Armory show makes the whole Armory ticket ($30) worthwhile, since even if you go through the contemporary section without finding much work that you love, any fan of modern painting will enjoy this portion of the fair.

After wolfing down a late lunch along Ninth Avenue, we headed over to the ADAA’s “The Art Show” at the Park Avenue Armory at 67th Street.  The crowd here is much more serious and well-dressed than down at the pier, though on the other hand I’ve never seen so many young children at an event like this.  Whether the parents were trying to get their kids some culture or they didn’t want to spend a few bucks on babysitters, it was actually a bit unsettling.  Young kids running around oblivious to the dollar amount of damage that they could do in the blink of an eye made me very nervous!

There’s a lot of good art to see here, too, though it’s a much smaller show than The Armory Show and so the $20 entrance fee feels more like its meant to weed out the crowd (as well as raise money for Henry Street Settlement).  There were some amazing exhibits, including a small Francis Bacon piece; I don’t remember ever seeing a Bacon painting outside of a museum or a book, so it was nice to see this study for a larger work in the art fair setting.  L&M Arts had a nice collection of de Kooning paintings including one his large, late abstractions in tones of orange and blue on white.  Howard Greenberg gallery had some very fine Edward Weston vegetable photographs.  I saw Chuck Close again cruising through the galleries.  My wife thinks she saw Glenn Close (no relation that I know of to Chuck!) though I missed her, which was okay by me (Fatal Attraction still gives me the creeps).

Finally pooped from so much art and quite a bit of walking around, we headed for home.  I’m not much of a Twitter person and so I am wondering if I missed the news:  did somebody repeal all traffic laws today?  Or was it the new moon?  It seemed that there were more crazy people driving without signals, turning left from right-turn-only lanes, cutting people off, and just going bonkers than I’ve ever seen before.  On the way out of the city we experienced traffic snarlups getting into the Lincoln Tunnel that reminded me of one of the Karin Davie paintings I had seen earlier in the day (sort of like this), though the only color here came from the brake lights and the colorful language motorists were using to vent frustration at the insane drivers cutting people off to squeeze in at the last minute without signaling (or waiting for room).  Thankfully we made it home without a scratch and with enough time left in the evening for me to blog about the day.

After leaving the Whitney Biennial, I was looking for some more inspiring fare and so headed down to Chelsea for a quick trip to some galleries whose shows seemed promising.  On 26th Street, Galerie Lelong provided a nice jolt of energy with the work of Emilio Perez: large abstractions full of swirls and whooshes, meticulously and intuitively created by cutting out layers of acrylic paint with an exacto knife.  (I would have guessed that the hard edges came from careful masking, but the gallery’s press release corrected my impressions.)  The paintings read a bit like a Julie Mehretu abstraction done in the style of a Lichtenstein brush stroke painting: from a distance you get the sense of a swirling atmosphere but as you look up close you see hard, graphic edges delineating the various “strokes” of paint.

Emilio Perez @ Lelong

The next block over there’s a wonderful show of paintings by Jean Lowe at McKenzie Fine Art.  The paintings are intriguing to look at while also quite funny.  Entitled, “Yes, Yes, Yes!”, the show is about excessive consumerism and each of the loosely brushed but still globally detailed paintings takes a slightly fish-eyed view of a large room, part grocery store, part Baroque palace!  In the foregrounds, you see rows of products that could easily have come from a Target store, while the backgrounds and ceilings of the rooms look like European palaces or museums decorated with classical paintings.  The show includes a handmade bookshelf containing a number of hilarious paper mâché faux books with titles like, “Kindle: The Missing Manual” (a huge tome of a book!), or, “The Joy of Pickling: 200 Scenarios”.

Jean Lowe @ McKenzie

Down on 20th Street, Kathryn Markel is exhbiting some colorful abstractions on paper by Diane Ayott that are full of pattern and repitition, addressing some formal issues similar to my own work.  Ayott uses objects such as bottle caps and lids as “stamps” to make repetitive marks in ways that create pleasing patterns and fields of color.

Diane Ayott @ Markel

Finally, in the same building on 20th Street, Kim Foster Gallery hosts a fine three person exhibition where meticulous drawing catches the eye and invites close inspection.  First up are William Brovelli’s “Timeline project” canvases, each of which contains a grid upon which the artist has drawn a small characters in ink on the borders of each grid cell.  As time passes, Brovelli whitewashes each of the characters and re-works the grid cells with new ones.  The process continues for many months until the work is sold or the artist shuts down the canvas, leaving the viewer with a snapshot of time and a historical record of artistic decisions and moods.

Next up is Diane Samuels, whose obsessive pen drawings on handmade paper are full of thousands of small circles when added up render a kind of microscopic mapping of the street in Pittsburgh where the artist has lived for thirty years.  Varying amounts of pressure applied to the paper during the drawings’ creations cause the paper to bulge here and there providing a third dimension of interest to these works.

Finally, the gallery displays some of Paul Glabicki’s “ACCOUNTING for…” drawings.  These finely rendered drawings begin with an “under-drawing”, where Glabicki hand draws in minute detail pages from a found 1930s Japanese ledger, providing texture and a structure upon which to continue.  Then, the artist records various bits of information over time on top of the existing drawing: snippets of equations, graphs, curves, notes, and other markings.  These reminded me both of John Zinsser’s recent “Auction Lot” drawings (replicated from pages of old art auction catalogs) and of particle accelerator images with swirls and collisions of data flying around the page.

Brovelli, Samuels, & Glabicki @ Kim Foster (details)

That ended my day in New York City, but there was still some more art to see back in Jersey.  After about a fifteen minute rest at home, I headed out to the Mercer County Artists 2010 show for a fine opening reception at The Gallery.  The exhibition is full of creative, very high quality work in all media and styles and it was a great show to be a part of.  The show remains up through April 1, 2010.

I made it into this year’s Whitney Biennial…   OK, you didn’t fall for that for a second, did you?  Let me start again.  I attended the Biennial today during member previews, which allows you to spend some time with the work without feeling pressed onwards by a huge crowd.  On the other hand, you don’t get a feel for the “buzz” that might surround the event and for something like the Biennial, buzz is an important part of the experience.

And, just as this year there is no official theme other than the time stamp of “2010″, the takeaways from my visit are elusive.  Thankfully, there are fewer of the large architectural installation pieces that filled much of the 2008 show.  However, quite a few rooms are devoted to video pieces, which I find to be awkward art objects at a museum:  you have to walk into a dark room, let your eyes adjust, try not to bump into anyone; the video is invariably in the middle somewhere; there’s not enough room to sit and you’re not sure you want to devote the time to the piece.  I’d rather that the museum set up a movie theater with fixed screening times so that you could take a seat and settle in for an hour or two.

One video that looked clever, though I didn’t give it more than a couple of minutes, was a Josephine Meckseper piece depicting scenes from in and around the Mall of America coupled with ominous music, clips from a flight simulator showing planes in attack formation, and colored filters that implied war footage.

Another film that I would have liked to spend more time with was Kerry Tribe‘s about “H.M.”, one of the most famous subjects in psychology literature.  H.M. underwent experimental brain surgery in 1953 to treat epilepsy but ended up with severe retrograde amnesia: the inability to form new memories or to remember anything for more than about 20 seconds.  The film is projected onto the wall in two places (from a single strip of film) such that there is a 20 second delay between the two videos, cleverly reinforcing (almost Memento-style) the fragility of memory.  The interviews depicted in this film use an actor; I would have loved to see footage of the real H.M.

I had watched a video with Aki Sasamoto on the Whitney’s website ahead of the exhibition and wasn’t expecting to like the actual artwork, but in fact it turned out to be one of the most attention-worthy pieces in the show.  Filling up one small gallery with wires, nets, video cameras, and dangling glasses of “liquid” (hopefully plastic!), it’s the kind of installation that makes you want to figure it out:  where’s the camera that’s projecting that image?  how do those shadows mingle with the charcoal on the wall?  what’s in the glasses?  why those pretty nets?  The art is entitled “Strange Attractors”, with references specifically to the Lorenz attractor, an infinitely looping butterfly-like mathematical structure (not the same as Strange Loops, but you can see why I was “attracted” to this piece).  The artist has a number of scheduled performances of some sort that go along with the installation, though I didn’t see one and so don’t know what I was missing.

There was not a whole lot in the way of painting-that-makes-you-want-to-paint.  Tauba Auerbach‘s  trompe l’oeil paintings had a number of gallery-goers looking intently from up close and from far away, debating with each other exactly what they were looking at.  At first, it looks like a wrinkled bed sheet hanging against the wall.  When you look up close, you see that in fact it’s a painting and only by reading the wall text would you determine the mechanism of its creation (spraying paint onto carefully folded and rolled canvases).

I also liked the tempera and oil paintings of Jim Lutes, whose “Piece of Barbara” summons de Kooning’s women with its mixture of figurative and abstract elements.  Swirls of ribbon-like color engulf  the representational, in this case the likeness of a 1950s B-movie actress.  Lesley Vance exhibited a series of small abstractions derived from still life photographs that had a nice color tone and palette knife paint handling.

At the entrance to the third floor, a huge tapestry by Pae White depicts a photographic reproduction of plumes of smoke.  From afar you could almost mistake it for a Mark Sheinkman painting.  The Whitney web site (and the wall text) seems to go a bit overboard in describing this work as “cotton’s ‘dream of becoming something other than itself’ by contrasting an image of something immaterial with the physicality of fabric.”  Okay…  Whatever.  I will say that the thick and varied texture of the tapestry did make you want to reach out and feel it (as if you were shopping for a rug).

One overall problem is the need to rely on the wall texts to figure out what you’re looking at.  Some of the paintings, for instance, don’t stand on their own and require an explanation that tries to turn something mundane visually into something meaningful intellectually.  In some cases, I think the wall texts stretch too far:  does depicting a few photographs of Baudelaire next to Michael Jackson in “The First and the Last of the Modernists” really “raise questions about the roles of art and popular culture as well as how modern figures are presented, flattened, and distributed through the news media”?  Well, it raised that question, I suppose.  There were quite a few grunts (with accompanied head-shaking) from fellow gallery-goers after reading some of the wall texts, though I couldn’t tell if they referred to the art or the text.

Speaking of grunts, Mariane Vitale‘s video screams directly at the viewer.  Once again, I missed the beginning of one of these video clips and couldn’t subject myself to the screaming for very long, but I did almost enjoy her diatribe about the products that specific states bring to us, exclaiming (if I heard her correctly), “New Jersey brings us GLUE…”  I didn’t know that.

After the Biennial, I headed down to Chelsea for a quick visit to a handful of galleries for some very fine painting exhibitions (whew, I needed some attention-focusing paintings after being yelled at by that last video).  But I’ll have to report on that in a subsequent post.

Desaturation seemed to be the theme of most of the shows I saw in Chelsea yesterday: many grayish paintings and photos without a lot of color.  Although that might be a fit for the middle of the winter, it was a sunny enough day that I was really more in the mood to see some brightness (especially since, on the train ride into the city, I had been reading an excellent technical piece on the subtleties of color by Sarah Sands at Golden).

In the Mostly Monochrome show at McKenzie, I did enjoy the black painting, “Churning Sea, A Moment Later” by Karen Gunderson.  The brushy, black oil paint catches the light differently depending upon your viewing angle and makes for a perceptually interesting work.  It does indeed feel like you’re looking at the sea under moonlight, with things shifting as you move left or right by a few inches.  The overall technique reminded me of a Jason Martin painting  that I saw at The Armory Show a couple of years ago.

At Pace Wildenstein, Richard Misrach exhibits large photographic prints that resemble color film negatives, though in fact the artist is using a digital camera for the image capture and “inverting” the image on the computer.  There’s more to the show, though, than just this particular trick.  In addition to the interesting optics, these works can act like puzzles as you try to do the inversion in your head to figure out what it is that you might be looking at.  For instance, what looks in the negative like huge icebergs jutting out of the water, you realize, must actually be dark silhouetted rock formations on land.  Some of the images read like abstract expressionist paintings but are actually carefully composed or cropped landscape photos.

There’s a similar sort of perceptual ambiguity occurring at Luhring Augustine in the paintings of William Daniels.  I put this show on my list of “things-to-see” while browsing one of my art magazines, but from the advertisement I had assumed that these would be huge, wall-sized paintings.  Instead, the paintings in this show are approximately 12 inches square.  At first, it appears that they are purely abstract images but then your eyes start to put together the scene and you notice that there is a certain volume to the shapes; objects are casting shadows… and reflections.  I then realized that in fact Daniels was painting images from “reflective foil”, crumpled and sculpted into a sort of still life (or landscape?).  There’s a sort of satisfaction that occurs as your eye scans the work and puts it all together in your head.

I found some more color at Von Lintel (on 23rd St) in some striking images by David Maisel, whose past work has featured various takes on aerial photography.  His current series, “Library of Dust”, could be described as a “still life portrait”.  The photographs are of decaying copper canisters on black backgrounds where oxidation and other chemical reactions over the ages have turned the copper into colorful messes.  The press release tells us, though, that these cans contained the unclaimed ashes of a psychiatric asylum’s former patients.  This causes you to immediately re-evaluate your feelings about what you’re looking at, from levity at all the pretty colors to a somber recognition that you’re witnessing a kind of “death mask” for someone’s uncomfortable coffin.

The one other show that I’ll mention is Salvatore Federico’s at George Billis Gallery.  My first thought as I entered the gallery was that Von Lintel had moved back into the space!  These are hard edge, geometrical color paintings that are quite enjoyable but very different from most of the other work I’ve seen at this gallery, which mostly has a roster of representational painters.  Several of the works in the show feature a single complex polygon balancing on a sharp point at the very bottom edge of the canvas.  Others are more explicitly grid-based with multiple figures interlocking in a kind of Matisse-like compositional dance.

Although this was a briefer-than-usual trip to Chelsea for me (I ran out of steam on 23rd Street), I did go home feeling energized and ready to do some painting.  (In fact, I’ve finished quite a few paintings recently but have been slow to photograph them…  Expect to see some of them here on my blog soon.)

Chelsea, NYC, Jan 2010

I headed back into New York City on Thursday for an afternoon full of art that included a brisk tour through Chelsea, a (too) quick visit to the Met to finally see that Vermeer show, and an opening reception for a former teacher of mine on the upper east side.

After debarking from NJ Transit at Penn Station, I made a quick stop over at B&H Photo for some supplies and then walked down to 26th Street.  The first gallery on my list today was Galerie Lelong where Sean Scully has a show of his large grid-based abstractions.  The works in this show are immediately recognizable as Scully.  These new paintings are perhaps a little more chromatic in the red oxide and blue shades than I remember from his last show (in 2005), but otherwise are similarly constructed with horizontal and vertical blocks of color.  In one four-part painting he exposes an aluminum panel that looked like it had been brushed to provide some variations in reflectivity.  Some of the paintings have a nice, blended-on-canvas look of brushy flesh colors; some, though, used brush strokes in apparently random directions (not aligned with the grid) reflecting ceiling lights to produce unevenly glossy highlights, an effect that I found distracting from the otherwise meditative works.

Sean Scully @ Galerie Lelong

A couple doors down was a peculiar but compelling show by Teresita Fernandez at Lehmann Maupin.  The works here are made entirely of graphite:  sculptural, chunky, blocks of graphite.  In some pieces, the graphite has been carved and polished into a kind of relief sculpture hung on the wall.  In another, graphite has been somehow machined into a large sculpture of a waterfall with nuggets of graphite on the floor as the foam.  Most interesting, though, was the piece “Epic”, where hundreds or thousands of small nuggets of graphite are affixed to the gallery wall.  Under each nugget is a small streak of graphite drawn onto the wall which can be read as a shadow, but also to me looked like tears or comet tails.

On 25th Street, there are some more David Hockney paitnings at Pace Wildenstein and I think they show even better here than they do uptown; though I love that gallery on 57th Street, these very large works seemed to fit the space better here.  I overheard two people in the gallery mentioning (to someone from the gallery, I think) that they knew Mr. Hockney and were occasional recipients of his “iPhone drawings“, which they were showing off on their iPhone.  I didn’t get a good look at the drawings, however, and didn’t have it in me to butt in, give them my cell phone, and ask if they’d send a few my way.

The most exciting show for me was one that was a surprise — I hadn’t known it was coming and the show hadn’t popped up on one of my standard gallery planning resources.  At Betty Cunningham gallery, there’s a great 2-person show comparing five decades worth of paintings by two artists whose work I always admire:  Philip Pearlstein and Al Held.  As I’ve mentioned before on this blog, I was fortunate enough to meet Mr. Pearlstein at a Carnegie Mellon alumni event earlier this year and I always find looking at his paintings to be worthy endeavors.  Here, you see samples of his work starting from expressionist beginnings in the 1950s progressing through to his signature clear-eyed representational style.  (His latest piece was from 2009, a work that I had seen in progress in his studio; so very cool to now see it finished and on display at the gallery.)

Philip Pearlestein and Al Held @ Betty Cunningham

The first time I learned of the late Al Held’s work was at a show at PS1 back in 2002 where I was blown away by the humongous geometric compositions (probably the largest paintings I’ve ever seen except perhaps for Guernica).  For me, his paintings are like reverse puzzles; I enjoy spending time with them trying to figure out how they “work”. Here at Betty Cunningham, there are only two of his full color “volumetric configurations”, but they’re wonderful to behold.

The gallery has printed a brief essay by Irving Sandler explaining why the juxtaposition of these two very different artists makes sense.  Both started making art around 1950, hung out at The Cedar Tavern, exhibited at co-op galleries around 10th Street, and eventually became life-long friends.  They both rejected action painting early on and both eventually ended up with “hard-edged” styles (Pearlstein, hard-edged realism; Held, hard-edged abstraction).  I would have loved to take some photos of this show, but I made the mistake of asking at the front desk, where an apologetic gallery worker told me that photos weren’t allowed because of the varied ownership of the paintings (another gallery visitor, just moments before, hadn’t asked and had used her iPhone to photograph the whole show in detail.  Sigh.)  Anyway, this is a can’t miss show if you’re going to be in Chelsea before February 13, 2010.

Just down the block at Lohin Geduld Gallery is a nice show of small representational paintings by Joseph Santore.  Like Pearlstein, Santore’s paintings are at least in part about perception:  looking hard, seeing, painting.  The textures on some of pieces have a pleasing “stippled” quality.  A few of the paintings are self portraits, many more of them are complex still life arrangements with an overall abstract quality.  A few charcoal drawings of still lifes take on an almost cubist appearance through their arrangements of lights and darks.

Still on 25th Street, Gallery Henoch has a show of wonderful representational paintings by Kim Cogan.  Some of the pieces are straightforward rooftop cityscapes, painted with Cogan’s brushy style.  More exciting, though, are the high contrast scenes of specific city locales at night, such as Grocery at Dusk.  Here, Cogan’s painterly style excels at capturing the temperature of the light and its reflection and makes you want to keep looking at the painting.  In a few of the pieces, the same figure makes multiple appearances.  Several paintings show scenes from within what appear to be small New York apartments and one, Passengers Manhattan Bound, offers a fisheye perspective of three subway riders directly opposite the artist.

Kim Cogan @ Gallery Henoch

Just upstairs from Henoch in what was formerly Von Lintel is the new incarnation of George Billis Gallery and the gallery is using the new space to its advantage.  The larger walls allow for larger work; there’s more floor space so you can step back a bit (the old space was sort of shoe-horned into an awkward floorplan); and, the extra room that Von Lintel had used for flat files is now additional exhibition space.  Further, by being directly above Gallery Henoch, you now have two reliable galleries that feature representational painting in the same building.  Presently, George Billis has several shows going in the various rooms.  In the front, Enrique Santana has some highly detailed (i.e., every window is painted in the skyscraper) cityscapes full of reflected light.  In one of the back rooms are some charming three dimensional watercolor-on-paper-on-panel landscape-based painting/sculptures by Russ Havard.

I thought I’d give the Caroll Dunham show a chance at Barbara Gladstone, but I couldn’t make it past the image you see upon first entering the gallery.  Ugh.

I’ll mention one last show from Chelsea:  Richard Serra at Gagosian‘s 21st Street location.  Two of Serra’s signature massive cor-ten steel sculptures fill the gallery and as usual, they don’t fail to impress.  I entered the first piece, “Open Ended”, and actually felt a sense of dizziness as the twisted walls reshape your impression of up and down.  The lighting was dark in the gallery and so on this piece I didn’t notice as much variation in the surface of the steel as you often find in Serra’s work.  After a few long “hallways” and a few twists that seem to spiral towards a “center”, you find yourself in the middle of the sculpture.  Strangely, though, you can keep going in the same direction and you’ll eventually find yourself exiting on the other side of the piece.  It’s not that great a trick when you look at the work in a photo from above, but it is a surprise as you’re walking through it that you can keep “spiraling” and yet still make your way out of the sculpture (hence, “Open Ended”).  The second work, “Blind Spot”, leads you towards a dead end and you’ll have to turn around and retrace your steps.  I love reaching the center of these Serra sculptures, especially if there’s nobody else around — you feel like you’re in a world of your own, protected by a massive steel shield (though perhaps at least a little conscious that you’re hoping there’s no way this thing can tip over).  Blind Spot seemed to have more interesting variations of rusty red and oxidized green/blue color.  Unlike in some past exhibitions, however, a security guard (who followed me closely for some reason — I couldn’t have looked suspicious!) said that no touching of the work was allowed.  It’s a shame, as the rough texture and massive size just call out for a brush of the hand.

Richard Serra @ Gagosian 21st St

Finally, I was finished with Chelsea and I realized that the Met closes at 5:15 on Thursdays and so I had better hustle to the Upper East Side.  Fortunately I found a cabbie on his last drive of the day who took a good route and was at the Met in no time.  Still, I realized that I would have to zoom through the Robert Frank “The Americans” show if I wanted to see Vermeer (I’ll have to get the book, I suppose, to spend more time with that historic collection of photos from fifty years ago).

You never know if seeing a famous painting in person will live up to your expectations.  Some of the Vermeers at the Met don’t (I’ve never been a fan of “Study of a Young Woman”, for instance).  But “The Milkmaid” does.  It’s a beautifully painted piece with exquisite handling of light and shadow.  The woman has a real physical presence.  The wicker basket in the shadow is amazingly painted and the pebbly bread actually looks crusty.  Hockney would make a case that Vermeer used a camera obscura or other lens device.  It’s no big deal to me if he did or he didn’t; either way, this is one of those paintings that are even better in person than they are in reproductions and I’m glad I got to see it while it was in town.

Vermeer's The Milkmaid @ The Met

After “closing” the Met down, I grabbed a relaxing dinner at a reliable Italian restaurant just a few steps away, Giovanni’s.  I’ve been there perhaps a half-dozen times over the years and the food always ranges from quite good to excellent; the servers are attentive even if I’m by myself and under-dressed; and the panna cotta is amazing!  Alas, the place is very expensive to my New Jersey acclimated wallet — well, it’s expensive even to a New Yorker’s wallet, but it happens to be in a great location for where I needed to be and served the kind of food I was in the mood for.

My final art-related stop of the night was to the opening reception at James Graham & Sons Gallery on East 67th Street for John Zinsser’s new show, “Art Dealer Archipelagos”.  I took Zinsser’s (highly recommended) class at The New School some 8 or 9 times starting in September 2001 and he’s largely responsible for my interest in visiting New York galleries so often.  This show is very different formally from anything else I’ve seen of his.  Most of his past work (that I’ve seen, anyway) has explored the interaction of (typically) two colors of paint, either in large alkyd enamel abstractions on canvas that evoke a specific lineage in art history or in smaller works on paper such as his Bible Studies paintings with titles drawn from biblical passages as a way to explore how titles link the content with the meaning of abstract paintings.

Here, Zinsser turns to drawing in two separate sets of work.  The first, and the focus of the exhibition, are the “archipelagos”, some two dozen works on paper, each depicting a fictional island named after a historically important New York Gallery.  “Towns” on these maps are labeled with the names of artists who have had solo shows at the gallery at some time in the past.  The shapes of the land masses are made up but are informed by the atlases the artist consulted in researching this project.  The hand-drawn “typography” is meant to mimic that found on a typical real-world map.  The galleries included are ones that would have either had personal significance to Zinsser in his 25 years of New York City gallery-going or are ones that were historically important in shaping the post-war New York art world.  Since my own experience with the galleries of Manhattan goes back only to 2001, it was interesting to note how many of the galleries represented are no longer in existence and how those that are have changed significantly, either in terms of ownership or in terms of the kind of art they show.  I’m more familiar with Sonnabend gallery, for instance, as a place that puts on top tier photography exhibitions (Hofer, Becher, which are on the map) than as one that would show Winters, McCracken, or Dunham (I like the fact that Koons is an island unto himself).

John Zinsser @ James Graham and Sons

The other set of pieces in this show are the Auction Lot drawings, hand-drawn replications of pages from various art auction catalogs.  One of these works that I particularly enjoyed was Zinsser’s “Al Held” page, which echoed nicely a painting I had seen earlier at Betty Cunningham.

I asked John which of the two kinds of drawings in this show were more fun to work on and he hesitated — probably more from the banality of my question than its profundity — and then ditched, saying that the catalog works were fun but that the focus of the show is the archipeligo with the catalog drawings there to round things out.  I suppose it’s like asking a parent which child they like better at the eldest’s graduation — you can’t expect a good answer.

Feeling guilty about my earlier panna cotta and also refreshed after descending from the hot and steamy third floor gallery (perhaps appropriate for a show about an island archipelago?), I decided to walk back to Penn Station.  Progress was swift except for my flawed decision to “see what Times Square looks like tonight”.  The city is getting ready for Christmas.  It was one of those nights that make you miss being in the city with people out and about but not *too* many people, a comfortable outdoor temperature and a lot going on… until I almost stepped on a rat.  OK, it was actually a mouse.  We have them in Jersey, too.

I walked past MoMA on the way back to Penn Station.

Today was the first day of the Art20 fair at the Park Avenue Armory and I used the occasion to visit several shows on 57th Street as well.  I had hoped to make it up to the Met to catch Vermeer, but with the wind whipping away under threatening gray skies and a need to get to Trenton by 6pm for an opening, I had to save Johannes for another day.

It’s rare that I’ll return to see the same exhibition at a museum more than once.  In 2002, however, the Gerhard Richter retrospective at MoMA really blew me away.  I recall visiting that show at least three times — there was so much to see and so much variety.  So it was with much excitement that I approached the Marian Goodman Gallery (24 W 57th) for what was Richter’s first NY show in four years.  The first room is full of “White Paintings” (which started out as green paintings): large paintings that have been squeegeed over with white paint.  I couldn’t shake the feeling, though, that whatever was underneath the white might have been more interesting than the result, though one that was less green and more mauve had my eyes searching for gestalt.

Gerhard Richter -- Abstraction, lacquer behind glass

In the second room, some more familiar looking Richter abstractions of squeegeed, contrasting colors shared the space with lacquer-behind-glass paintings.  The glass works are arranged as diptychs in the gallery, though not on the web site, and the are probably the most enjoyable pieces in the show as they were something different, with the 2-part arrangements giving your mind something to do in puzzling together the composition.

In the back room are some more white paintings as well as a few smaller works that have representational elements, such as this one, which to me reads as landscape (even in its portrait orientation).

Overall, I left this show somewhat disappointed, not because of any real problem with the work or with the installation, but only because I didn’t feel any of that same excitement that came with the MoMA show.  Whether that’s due to changes in my own appreciation of art or in changes to Richter’s work, I can’t tell.

In the same building, the Michael Rosenfeld gallery has a wonderful small show of paintings by abstract expressionist Norman Lewis (1909-1979).  This gallery consistently puts on museum-quality shows with a focus on “expanding the canon of American art” and “increasing the visibility of under-recognized American artists”, often African-Americans.  I wasn’t very familiar with Norman Lewis, but loved the bold colors in works like Fireflower and Pink Boogie, where brushstrokes  read like stick figures and the painting feels like a jazzy dance party.

Norman Lewis, Pink Boogie

There’s a lot more color to be found in the Fuller Building at David Findlay Jr Fine Art where a show by John Opper (1908-1994) calls up ideas from Rothko (turned on its side, perhaps) and Clyfford Still (here).

At DC Moore (724 Fifth Ave), Jane Wilson exhibits some simple but lovely brushy landscapes that capture the skies (and seas, and horizons) of the northeast in mostly pastel tones.  Compositions focus mostly on the sky with just a touch of the horizon to provide some grounding contrast.  Brushstrokes inflect the sky with cloudy texture and capture fleeting effects of moving light.

Jane Wilson, Drifting Sunshower

Continuing with my colorful day but perhaps moving out of the influence of Rothko and away from abstraction, I visited the David Hockney show at Pace Wildenstein 57th Street.  This is Hockney’s first New York show of new paintings in twelve years and it features landscapes — part plein air and part studio work — that describe the English countryside in startling, but pleasing colors.  My favorite was “More Felled Trees on Woldgate”, a work full of bright greens, blues, oranges, purples, and pinks.

David Hockney, More Felled Trees on Woldgate

After finishing up with the galleries in the 57th Street area I headed up to the Park Avenue Armory at 67th Street where the Art20/Modernism art fair is up through Monday.  This is the first year that the art of the twentieth century show was combined with the modernism design fair.  Although I went into the show worried that I wouldn’t care at all about the design component, it in fact provided a nice change of pace with galleries that focus on wall-based works of fine art alternating with spaces dedicated to objects of design (lamps, tables, chairs, etc).  Though most of the design objects felt dated to me (in a sense that I wouldn’t want to live with them the way I would a similarly dated painting), it was visually stimulating to have them as part of this show.

Armory view from the entrance, Bernard Goldberg Gallery

There was a lot to enjoy at the fair (though if you thought a down economy might make buying art cheap, think again!).  There were a number of good Marsden Hartley still lifes scattered throughout but mostly concentrated at BG.  One of my favorite artists, Oscar Bluemner, was present in at least three different galleries.  At Jonathan Boos, a  Bluemner oil painting (which are rarely available) could be yours for the low, low price of (cough, cough) $925,000.  A much smaller work on paper at Levis Fine Art went for $85,000 while a sketch whose margins were filled with detailed notes about color and composition was listed at $75,000 at Michael Borghi Fine Art.  A very nice example of a Sol Lewitt ribbon gouache on paper, priced $38,000, can be found at the Converso space.

I started to head towards the Metropolitan Museum of Art to see Vermeer and Robert Frank, but realized I would never make it down to Trenton if I didn’t reverse course and get back to the PATH train pronto, so I’ll save those shows for another time.

After a long drive down the Turnpike and then over into Trenton, I attended the opening reception for “Point of View” at Gallery 125, where I have one painting in the show.  The reception was packed and the show is full of creative, quality work (including paintings by friends Florence Moonan and Joy Kreves, who both happen to be former members of Artists’ Gallery).  Usually, the first question I get about my paintings is how long they take to make, but nobody asked me that last night:  instead, at least four people asked whether I used a roller to make the marks on my paintings (nope, they’re all hand painted stroke by stroke!).  I received some very positive feedback about the colors in this piece, which made it a nice way to end a color-full day of art.

Opening Reception at Gallery 125

After visiting PhotoPlus Expo at Javits, I decided my feet weren’t tired enough and so I hoofed it on down to Chelsea to see some art.  There were quite a few shows that I enjoyed and found worth noting.

At Stephen Haller Gallery on 26th Street, a Ronnie Landfeild show celebrates 40 years since the artist’s first solo show in 1969 with large, wonderfully colorful landscape-inspired abstractions.  Several of these acrylic paintings are grounded on their bottoms by solid, hard-edge stripes of color, above which large fields of paint intermingle and blend together.

London-based artist Andy Harper has his first US solo exhibition at Danese.  The paintings in this show (viewable in the gallery’s very nice online exhibition software) read as abstract from a distance but up close are seen to contain twisted, interwoven organic forms:  leaves, tendrils, vines, hair.  One is struck by the amount of detail found at every level of these paintings and the amount of work that must have gone into them (and wondering what tricks might have been used to assist in the process).

Two years ago, while on one of my regular Chelsea expeditions, I noticed about a half dozen shows featuring mostly monochromatic, chiaroscuro atmospheric abstractions.  Two of the artists from Nov 2007 are back, exhibiting once again at the same time:  David Mann and Mark Sheinkmann.  At McKenzie Fine Art, David Mann’s  paintings are full of biological, cell-like (or perhaps amoeba-like) shapes that are something of a signature mark for the artist: perhaps a careful half-twirl of the brush, perhaps more meticulously rendered.  The compositions are relatively straightforward — either based around a central form or around one or two horizontal or vertical bands — but the surfaces are fun to look at from varying distances.  (This exhibition reminds me of another show I saw earlier in the week, photograms of glass arranged in plankton-inspired compositions by Laura McClanahan at the Hunterdon Museum of Art.)

Mark Sheinkman is once again at Von Lintel (now on 23rd Street) with smokey monochromatic wisps of oil, graphite, and alkyd on canvas.  This time, the paintings are more minimal and the wisps are less smokey, more ribbon-like.  I very much enjoy this artist’s work, though in this exhibition I found myself wishing for something a little deeper perceptually, even if was perhaps a different (maybe gloss?) finish on these matte works.

Sticking with the monochromatic theme, Abby Leigh’s show “The Sleeper’s Eye” at Betty Cunningham is something to behold.  Although the press release doesn’t mention it, to me the title referred to the “lights” you see when you close your eyes before going to sleep after glancing at your nightstand light bulb.  If you stare at the center of any of these paintings some wonderful perceptual effects take hold as simultaneous contrast and optical afterimages cause your perception of the paintings to change over time.  In fact, the subtle, circular compositions can completely disappear so that it appears that you’re viewing a solid plane, until suddenly as you relax your eyes a bitand the image reappears once again.  In addition to these paintings, a series of drawings made (somehow) from smoke call up target designs by Kenneth Noland as if drawn by Sol LeWitt.  Less dramatic perceptually than the paintings, these drawings still keep your eye moving with their inky wash texture.

Anselm Reyle’s show “Monochrome Age” at Gagosian (24th St) is in fact only partially monochromatic.  Two pieces in the show were most noteworthy:  Eternity, a highly reflective, violet swirl of a bronze sculpture; and Relief, a multi-panel mountainous wall installation back-lit with LEDs that change color over time.

I’ll mention one last monochromatic show:  Jaume Plensa’s “In the Midst of Dreams” at Galerie Lelong.  The front rooms display several alabaster sculptures of elongated female heads.  The artist works from photographs with digital tools to laser-cut the alabaster to form.  The resulting pieces look as if they can’t be sculptures, but rather must be projections or reflections.  Somehow the distorted shapes trigger an expectation of a certain kind of form that doesn’t really mesh with the marble-looking alabaster.  In the back room, a single multi-figure piece takes up the entire space.  Three humongous resin white heads, lit from within, are situated staring at each other among a field of white stones.  Carved into the heads are words describing “states of being”.  I didn’t really know what to make of this piece meaning-wise, but it was interesting to look at.

Finally, for something completely different, there are some beautiful still lifes up at Gallery Henoch.  Ranging from the baseball-themed (sold!) Daniel Greene “Throw ‘Til You Win” from his recent carnival series to the (also sold!) hyper-precise painting of stacks of newspapers (“Recycle”) by Steve Mills, this show is full of finely painted pieces to look at and provided a nice change of pace in the middle of my journey through all the abstract work in the surrounding galleries.

After all of that art, and all of that expo hall walking, my legs had just enough energy left to get me back to Penn Station for the quick and thankfully uneventful ride home.