During the first month of the exhibition, I will have seven paintings up at the gallery, including the following:

Twisted, acrylic on panel, 20x20

Center of Narrative Gravity #6, acrylic on panel, 20x20

Center of Narrative Gravity #15, acrylic on panel, 20x20

Figment, acrylic on canvas, 20x20

Perceptual Present, acrylic on canvas, 20x20

We made it to a total of (I think) eight art fairs & exhibitions:  The Rubell Family Collection, Art Miami, Scope, Pulse, Red Dot, INK, Art Basel, and NADA.  We found work to like in each of these and overall I was happy with the state of the art world.  It seemed that there was a high “quality” level to the things on the wall, even when the work was something I didn’t like.  There was a lot of painting and less of the head-scratching “what the heck is that?” than I’ve seen at many recent New York art fairs (though there was still some of that).  There was a mix of abstraction and representation (not much realism, though) and art at all ends of the price spectrum (though not much that would fall into the “very inexpensive” range).

One quote by Jeffrey Deitch in The Art Newspaper (the daily that covers these sorts of events) caught my attention: “There is a tremendous energy in painting right now, particularly abstract.”

Every year there are a few artists whose work seems to turn up everywhere.  This year, to my eye at least, the two were John Miller and Carlos Cruz-Diez.  I saw John Miller’s faux gold leaf coated assemblages everywhere (dozens of objects glommed together and coated in gold).  Unless you want to go up close and really decipher what you’re looking at, though, these tend to all look the same from afar (“Oh, look, there’s another one!”).

Cruz-Diez’s interactive wall pieces are fun and interactive.  The first time I remember seeing his work was in 2007 at The Grey Art Gallery’s excellent exhibition of Latin American Geometric Abstraction.  In Miami, it seemed to be all over the place.  Each piece consists of several dozen vertical slats that jut out a few millimeters from the support; the background and each side of the slat can be colored differently.  As you move from left to right, your eye sees more or less of the sides of the slats and more or less of the background color and so the piece appears to change color as your eye integrates the colors of the work differently.

At Art Miami, I liked the spacious environs for the show — each gallery had room to breathe — and thought that throughout the show there was a very high level of work that looked good on the walls.  One gem was Nathan Slate Joseph‘s “Orange Step” from Sundaram Tagore Gallery (I found myself wondering where we could put it; unfortunately it was beyond my budget…); Joseph welds together galvanized steel plates fused with colorful pigments and this particular piece’s three dimensional, sculptural aspects were particularly eye-catching.  Other familiar work included a John Zinsser painting and several of his drawings after Warhol at (the newly re-titled) Graham.

Red Dot across the street from Art Miami

Scope felt like an extension of Art Miami — that’s a good thing — with a lot of eye catching fare.  Red Dot, unfortunately, was a bit of a disappointment; a few highs but much of the time I was thinking, “Need to keep moving”.

Aqua‘s opening reception had a relaxed, casual atmosphere.  Some  work from a gallery I visit regularly, McKenzie Fine Art, made one of the gallerized hotel rooms look familiar.  I’m kicking myself for forgetting to visit the room where Joanne Mattera‘s work was featured — I had hoped to see it in person (her blog is a very helpful resource of tips for artists as well as for reports on Art Basel).

We looked

We really enjoyed Pulse, partially because we had a pass for the opening brunch but mostly because it was a nice-sized fair with a variety of work, much of which we thought was creative and fun.  One artist whose work caught our eye was Karin Waskiewicz at Shroeder, Romero & Shredder gallery.  She carves out wonderfully complex, overlapping patterns into layers and layers of acrylic paint, revealing swarms of colors at multiple levels.

INK was definitely worth a visit for the diversity of prints and works on paper that are (mostly, but not always) in the lower price ranges.  One nifty piece was a Lichtenstein painting on blue “rowlux”, a highly reflective, brightly colored “multi-lensed” film.

NADA was also fun and worth a visit; the location up north right on the beach was a nice change of pace from the other venues.  This definitely had the most “contemporary” feel of the fairs we visited, which I mean mostly in a good way, but some of it was of the head-scratching sort.

Beach View From the Back of NADA

The biggest fair, of course, was Art Basel.  It is, indeed, massive.  Unfortunately, both times we made it into the convention center (for the Vernissage and to explore more thoroughly a few days later) we had to wait on long lines for entry or ticketing.  But once in, there was quite a lot to behold, from the very blue chip to the much more edgy.  Also, since we waited until Friday to tour the entire show, by that point we had seen so much art at the other fairs that our brains were a bit frazzled.  A few great Gerhard Richter paintings stand out in my memory (especially a triptych).

Stormtroopers and Mr. Potato Head, having a party

One problem with trying to get through so many fairs in such a short amount of time is that you really can’t spend much time with any particular artwork.  I’m glad that I did this once, but in the future I think I’d try to slow down a bit so that I could take in more than just the pure optics of the artwork I’m walking past.

Found Art? (outside the convention center)

Tips For Art Basel Miami Beach Visitors

If you can plan out what day you’re going to attend Art Basel Miami, I would definitely recommend getting your tickets ahead of time.  Although you’ll have to pay the obnoxious Ticketmaster fee (assuming you don’t have a free pass of some kind), it’s worth it to avoid waiting in the long box office lines.  You’d think that with all of the money flowing around, the fair organizers could hire a few more people to run the box office.  The last thing you want to do is wait on line for 45 minutes (or more) before walking around the tremendously huge art fair: doing so does not put you in the right frame of mind to enjoy art!

Also, don’t count on the free shuttles to get you between the convention center on Miami Beach and the art fairs in downtown Miami.  They don’t run on a published schedule and so you might wait a *long* time for the next shuttle to arrive.  Most of the time we ended up taking a cab after getting frustrated by the wait for a shuttle.  The shuttles to and from NADA were much better!  Kudos to the organizers and the company that ran the NADA shuttles: they were frequent, they were on time, and the drivers were very professional and knowledgeable.

Wear comfortable shoes!  I brought two pairs of shoes that I knew from previous experience were good for walking long distances and that made a big difference.

Confirm your reservations ahead of time!  Although I used the Basel-approved travel agent to book my hotel, when we arrived the hotel had no record of our reservation!  It was a good thing that (a) they had rooms available, and (b) that I had a printout of my reservation from the travel agency.  Even in this digital world where these things ought not to be necessary, next time I will call ahead to confirm!

We had a lot of decent food, none that was bad, but a few places were memorable.  For a quick bite near Art Miami / Scope / Red Dot, we enjoyed the Cuban diner, Enriqueta’s (con sabor).  Large plates of simple but tasty food at great prices hit the spot.  For a more creative menu, we had an excellent lunch at Sugarcane Raw Bar Grill a few blocks away (try the not-so-traditional hamburger — yumm!); nice, spacious, bustling restaurant with friendly staff.  For an expensive but beautiful and very tasty pan-Asian meal, try The Restaurant at The Setai (the food was great, though this restaurant, bar, and hotel was also worth it for the people-watching and the gorgeous cocktail lounge).

Collins Park had some impressive looking trees,which I liked more than the sculpture

The first of the new paintings is Seeing Red, a piece that contains about a dozen layers of lightly tinted glaze in between my personal marks, so that older marks are buried under deeper and deeper layers of paint, pushing them both physically and visually deeper into the painting.

Seeing Red, acrylic on panel, 20x20

I also am exhibiting three new paintings in my ongoing “Center of Narrative Gravity” series.  These are paintings where interacting colors swirl around to create a nebulous sort of center whose appearance varies depending upon your perspective when looking at the piece.  Here are numbers 21, 22, and 23 in the series:

Center of Narrative Gravity #21

Center of Narrative Gravity #22

Center of Narrative Gravity #23

The final two paintings up this month are Time’s Texture (an older piece) as well as Tango (for which I don’t have a photograph right now).  Artists’ Gallery is located at 18 Bridge Street, Lambertville, NJ, and regular hours of operation are Friday-Saturday-Sunday from 11am-6pm.

Attractors #2, acrylic on panel, 24x24

I’m also exhibiting one of my long-time favorites, “In Light of Our Knowledge”:

In Light of Our Knowledge, acrylic on canvas, 36x36

The show is up now through Sunday, October 2, with regular gallery hours Fri-Sat-Sun from 11am-6pm.  There’s an opening reception for this month’s featured artists, Richard Harrington and Charles Katzenbach, and their bicycle-themed exhibition on Saturday, Sep 10, 2011, from 4-8pm.

Both of these paintings are acrylic on panel, 20×20 inches:

Center of Narrative Gravity #15

Center of Narrative Gravity #6

Two of the paintings are new ones, both 12×18 inches, acrylic on panel:

Meandering, acrylic on panel, 12x18

Attractors, acrylic on panel, 12x18

In addition to these, I’m exhibiting two paintings from my Center of Narrative Gravity series (#17 and #14, both 12×12 inches), the painting Enaction (36×24), and the painting Continuum (20×16).

Artists’ Gallery is open Friday, Saturday, and Sunday from 11am-6pm and is located at 18 Bridge Street, Lambertville, NJ.

The largest of the three is The Affect Effect:

The Affect Effect, acrylic on panel, 24x24

Also up this month are two smaller paintings, continuations in my series, “Centers of Narrative Gravity”.

Center of Narrative Gravity #16, acrylic on panel, 12x12

Center of Narrative Gravity #17, acrylic on panel, 12x12

This month’s exhibition runs through July 31, 2011.  There’s an opening reception for the gallery’s featured artists, John Treichler and Alla Podolsky, on Saturday, July 9, from 2-6pm.

Center of Narrative Gravity #15, acrylic on panel, 20x20

Center of Narrative Gravity #14, acrylic on panel, 12x12

The show is up now through July 4, 2011.  The opening reception for this month’s featured exhibition (Jo-Ann Osnoe and Eric Rhinehart) is Saturday, June 11, from 4-7pm.  (Regular gallery hours are Fri-Sat-Sun 11am-6pm, with extended hours for Lambertville’s Friday Night Fireworks…).

I started off on the upper east side at the Whitney to see the Glenn Ligon show. I like the formal qualities of the disintegrating stenciled text pieces, but didn’t have the heart to really dig into the rest of the artwork, whose conceptual nature requires a consideration of the politics around race. (I am reminded of a recent paper that shows judges are unlikely to grant paroles right before lunch; after lunch, parole rates jump back to 65%… Perhaps I ought not see art right before lunch?)

On another floor, the “Breaking Ground” exhibition displays several rooms worth of art from the museum’s 1931 opening. The highlight was the room containing two Bluemners, Hopper’s “Early Sunday Morning”, a few Stuart Davis paintings, and a few Charles Scheeler — all great stuff (alas, no photography was allowed).

The Fuller Building, 57th & Madison

After the Whitney I headed south along Madison, where good lunch spots with room for one on a nice sunny day are hard to find, but did manage a decent meal on 60th Street. From there I proceeded to the Fuller Building where I finally got to see the “70 Years of Abstract Painting” show that includes a small piece by my former instructor, John Zinsser, as well as a nice collection of paintings by notables such as Anuszkiewicz, Albers, Held, Hofmann, Nozkowski, and others. The final room in the exhibition is hung salon-style and provides quite a feast for the eyes.

Across the street Pace has an exhibition of de Kooning figurative paintings and drawings (the best of which, IMHO, are the ones where he stayed within the color range of yellow-to-peach-to-orange without too much green), and around the corner D. Wigmore takes on an earlier slice of abstraction history than McCoy with a focus on (primarily) geometric American abstraction of the 1930s and 1940s.

I felt compelled to stop by MoMA to check out “German Expressionism: The Graphic Impulse” since I was in the neighborhood, but it wasn’t really my thing. I liked the Kandinsky and the Beckmann paintings, where color and brushwork are prominent, but the more graphic pieces, often woodcuts, aren’t as interesting, at least not on a quick stroll (this show might be worth another visit if I had some more time to spend with the graphic items, but there’s something about the drawing style of many of these artists that just doesn’t pull me in).

Jennifer Bartlett in the atrium at MoMA. Click for larger view.

I took the E train down to Chelsea and caught a few regular hour exhibitions that I had missed earlier in the week, most notably Tim Maguire and Donald Judd. Maguire’s gorgeous paintings at Von Lintel are exciting and they look great from across the room and from up close where you can see the overlapping washes of color (that mimic the printing process) and the purposeful disruptions to the surface in the form of splotches of color (or removed color) that reads almost as photographic grain from far away. The subject matter in this show is flowers, up close, and is an interesting contrast to the Naoto Nakagawa show I mentioned a few weeks ago in terms of close-up, macro views of flowers with a highly personalized style of coloring.

I wasn’t sure about heading all the way down to 19th Street to the Donald Judd show, since his work can be so hit or miss for me, perhaps depending upon my own mood. But I enjoyed most of these box constructions at David Zwirner. Each of the pieces in the show is a large open-topped “box” with a silvery finish. Looking into the pieces over the edges of the box you see a super-glossy floor, often in chromatic hues like bright orange. Crossing from side to side within each box are a number of thin vertical planks of varying heights and distances from the ground. In the best of the pieces, there’s some nifty color interaction going on that changes as you catch the work from different angles, such as when the orange floor reflects upon a bright phthalo blue plank causing the plank to look nearly black from one angle but bright blue from another.

After a quick bite to eat for dinner it was time for a couple of openings. One that I enjoyed was Torben Geihler at Leo Koenig. These large geometric abstractions, according to the press release, are based upon musical structures and the Fibonacci sequence, though I read them as crystalized, desaturated Brice Mardens, with some similar formal issues about approaching edges, overlapping structures, and pentimenti.

On 28th Street, there was a crowd, a buzz, and a lot of fantastic “photograms” at the Foley Gallery’s Edward Mapplethorpe show.  I wasn’t at all familiar with this artist until I heard about the exhibition a few days ago and then read the fascinating back story about his relationship with his famous brother, Robert (whose work is also on display the next block northward). In “The Variations,” Mapplethorpe creates unique photographic prints without a camera, purely through chemical processes and (I presume) creative exposure to light. The result are depth-filled, warm-toned, Pollock-like allover abstractions that, like Pollock, are exciting to examine at multiple scales, up close and from across the room. In many of the pieces, the splashy marks remind me of a Edgerton “Milk Drop Corona”. The artist looked happy and I can understand why, as the crowd was into the show and the exhibition looked great.

Photo Impressions of Rush Hour Traffic in Chelsea (c) Andrew Werth

We started off on 29th Street on the upper edges of the art district with Alexander Ross.  I first admired Ross’s work when he exhibited at Feature a long time ago and then enjoyed his work in the fantastic Whitney show, Remote Viewing.  I last saw him at Marianne Boesky, but that show seemed to be lacking a certain oomph.  In this show at David Nolan, he’s back to the creative, dimensional clay-like compositions with topological painterliness that I find eye-catching.

I hadn’t seen the listing for the show, but was very glad that we stumbled into the Robert Mapplethorpe exhibition at Sean Kelly, also on 29th Street.  While they were setting up for a panel discussion we had a chance to examine the 50 photographs, each selected from the artist’s catalog by someone from a different state.  Most of the photographs are not of the controversial, sexually charged type that is usually associated with Mapplethorpe.  Instead, you find a fantastic collection of formally beautiful images ranging from still lifes to portraits (I especially liked the young Susan Sarandon and the old Willem de Kooning).  I’d highly recommend the show to anyone who loves photography.

We hit a few galleries on 28th and 27th before reaching Robert Miller Gallery on 26th Street where we were both taken in by the work of Robert Greene.  In his present body of paintings, Greene paints oil abstractions on sheets of vellum, which he then slices into strips (ranging from about 1/4 inch wide to several inches wide) and then re-arranges those strips mounted on aluminum panels.  In monochrome works the effect hails from minimal color field painting (with great texture up close and occasionally metallic reflectivity).  In the multi-colored abstractions, you feel more of an inheritance from abstract expressionism.

In a building I don’t get to often enough at 210 Eleventh Avenue, we happened upon Colin Brown’s beautiful nighttime cityscapes at Fischbach Gallery.  Easily passing for photographs at just a few feet away, as you look close you can see incredible detail and paint handling (actually, these pieces are white boards coated with a carbon, charcoal, or nickel black layer that are then carved into to reveal the white lights of the city).

On 24th Street, we dutifully attended the John Chamberlain show of crushed car part sculptures at his new Gagosian home.  For the most part, though, it’s like listening to poetry in Swahili:  I know there’s something formal there that might be beautiful or meaningful, but I don’t speak the language.  One piece, I thought, was stunning:  a 25-30 foot high, narrow construction of chrome, black, and perhaps platinum colored metals whose beauty was evident despite my language deficiency.  A helpful article in today’s NY Times shed some more light on the artist and I can at least sympathize with his tiring of trying to explain his particular artistic vocabulary.

Across the street is something completely different, another tour de force exhibition of photorealistic oil paintings by Yigal Ozeri (& assistants) at Mike Weiss.  Amazingly detailed, Ozeri’s latest work continues to feature muses at play or pose in nature.  Here, the photographic source material is particularly evident through the blurred tall grasses surrounding the figures, the result of a shallow depth of field.  A few paintings on canvas are slightly more chromatic but I think perhaps the canvas texture takes something away from the gorgeous surfaces of the works on paper.

We were starting to run out of steam as we reached 22nd Street and so skipped another Chamberlain show at Pace and hastily skimmed Jasper Johns at Matthew Marks (I love much of Johns’ work, and particularly liked his catenary paintings from a few years ago at the same gallery, but this show of drawings and cast sculptures didn’t have the same sort of immediate formal intrigue to keep us lingering).

On 21st Street, we joined the crowds at the newer Chelsea Gagosian Gallery for another must-see, museum-quality exhibition at this flexible, changeable space:  Picasso and Marie-Thérèse.  We forgot about our tired feet as while we took in an amazing quantity of Picasso paintings, all inspired by one of Picasso’s muses.  Useful photographs and later on some video clips of Marie-Thérèse give you a sense of who this model is that struck Picasso so forcefully.

Finally, before heading homeward, we caught a few more shows on 20th Street, most interestingly the steel-and-car-paint sculptures of Luke Achterberg at Kathryn Markel.  While the colors and materials may seem to be related to Chamberlain, and perhaps this show is timed to coincide with the two crushed car exhibitions, the effect is completely different:  light looking, lyrical curves hang on the wall in bright colors, with references to calligraphy and perhaps Lichtenstein brushstrokes.  These works are written in a language that’s easy to understand and enjoy, no translation required.