After the Affordable Art Fair, my wife and I headed over to Chelsea where I had  a long list of galleries for us to visit.  On this trip, there was much to admire!

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.

This was Gallery Week in New York City and so the galleries were more crowded than usual for a Saturday in May.  And unlike my last couple of trips to Manhattan, there were many shows that I loved.  My wife and I headed first towards the Empire State Building where this season’s Affordable Art Fair takes up residence across the street.  It seemed to me that the quality of art was better this time around, with more paintings that I’d want to own or whose skillfulness or creativity I could admire.  Still, the fair has shifted away from “affordable” samplings of well known artists (e.g., Mangold, LeWitt, etc.) and more towards “affordable” pieces by artists I’ve mostly never heard of (“affordable” these days means less than $10K).  There were many galleries from across the pond — London had a large footprint this year — as well as the other side of the river, with Brooklyn having a noticeable presence.

One of the themes here (and also later in Chelsea) was a preponderance of hyper-glossy, “clear coat” like resin finishes on paintings.  Although in some cases I like this look — it can boost saturation or provide a sense of depth to the paintings — I do wonder about what it does for the works over time, since all of the resins I’ve researched claim to yellow with age. And when you see it over and over again it starts to look like a gimmick.

One of the first galleries on our path was Quantum Contemporary where I enjoyed the land/seascapes on brushed aluminum panels by Stiliana Alexieva.  The texture of the metal is scrubbed one way for sky and another for land and each is painted carefully in oil so that you get nifty atmospheric effects as you catch the reflections differently on the painting.  I also liked a different kind of work on metal, the photography-based prints on thin, flexible sheets of steel by Fabienne Cuter at Artemisia Gallery.  She takes photographs of hardware, wires, chips, or other similar items and after some creative manipulation imprints the images onto the stainless steel in ways that give a sense of depth to the otherwise thin supports.

My favorite piece at the show, however, was a beautiful painting by David Febland at Fraser Gallery entitled Waiting on Masters.  In contrast to the splashy New York scenes of Febland’s that I’ve seen (and enjoyed) a number of times at his TriBeCa studio and elsewhere, this painting depicts — in my interpretation — museum-goers sitting outside a museum waiting for it to open so they can see the paintings of the masters.

Following an excellent lunch in Koreatown, we headed over to Chelsea where there’s a lot to see.  I’ll highlight a few exhibitions of note in my next post.

Well, my 2-person exhibition wrapped up last weekend at Artists’ Gallery in Lambertville, NJ.  But the art goes on!  This month, I have four paintings hanging:  Change Over Time, Passages, Center of Narrative Gravity #6, and Emergent Materialism #1.

Change Over Time, acrylic on panel, 24x24

Passages, acrylic on panel, 24x24

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

Emergent Materialism #1, acrylic on panel, 30x24

This month, Michael Schweigart and Norine Kevolic are featured at the gallery in Meditations on Nature, and it promises to be a fantastic exhibition.  The opening reception is on Saturday, May 14, from 5-8pm.

My 2-person exhibition with Alan J Klawans wraps up this weekend.  The weather forecast is great for today and tomorrow, so if you haven’t seen the show, drop by Artists’ Gallery at 18 Bridge Street in Lambertville, NJ, Saturday (4/30) or Sunday (5/1) between 11am-6pm.  I’ll be at the gallery all day on Sunday if you’d like to say Hi.

Center of Narrative Gravity #6, 20x20

On Friday, light holiday traffic made for an easy trip to Manhattan for a day of East Side art viewing.  While the Turnpike was empty, though, the Metropolitan Museum of Art was packed.

Starting with a splash of color on Park Avenue

I began at “Rooms with a View: The Open Window in the 19th Century“, an excellent medium-sized show of European paintings from around the 1820s.  Many of the paintings were worth spending time with, looking at how the artists approached the value compression that occurs when you’re trying to accurately depict a darkened interior as well as a brightly lit sky through a window.  Most artists dulled down the interior colors with umbers and grays.  I liked the perfect composition of Kerstig’s “Couple at the Window“, even if the painting is a bit “illustrative”.

Jakob Alt’s “View from the Artist’s Studio” was beautifully executed and full of light, with plants in a window that foreshadowed my later visit to see Jane Freilicher’s show at Tibor de Nagy.  Martinus Rørbye’s “View from the Artist’s Window” was a real eye catcher, grabbing you from across the room.  And take a look at the size of Caspar David Friedrich’s mahl stick in another Kersting painting.

Rørbye's "View from the Artist's Studio"

Moving from the interiors of 1820 to the drawings of Richard Serra is a shock to the system.  I’ve never seen the Met’s special exhibition gallery set up this way: no carpeting, all white walls, an exposed ceiling.  I love Richard Serra’s trademark cor-ten steel sculptures: they’re fun, exciting, visually forceful.  The drawings are a completely different animal, in this show primarily consisting of heavily applied paint stick (or perhaps a paint brick, at least according to one photo I saw) on huge sheets of paper.  In most cases the paper was completely filled with the thick oil paint and textures range from slightly coarse to downright shaggy.  In several of the rooms of the gallery, entire walls are full of the dark black painted paper, distorting space like a cartoon character who draws a black tunnel on the side of a cliff.  These are very conceptual drawings and it takes a while to get into the flow if you’re coming from the Interiors show.  Whereas Rooms with a View was very crowded, the Serra galleries were almost completely empty, all the better to get into the more meditative mood required.

Heading down Fifth Avenue, I proceeded to Craig F Starr gallery for an exhibition of drawings and paintings by Sol LeWitt and Eva Hesse.  This was an easy transition from Serra, though there’s always some intimidation entering those galleries that require you to hit the doorbell in a fancy building off of Fifth Ave.

A tasty, though not quite hot enough, double-Nespresso helped to fuel the rest of my journey southward.   I hoofed it over to the Fuller Building where I had hoped to see the “70 Years of Abstract Painting” show at Jason McCoy, but alas the gallery was closed for Good Friday.

Across the street I quickly took in the circular canvas conjunctions of Robert Mangold, where not-quite-sinusoidal waves of paint traverse polar coordinates across brighlty colored backgrounds.

Around the corner I headed for Tibor de Nagy, where two artists are featured this month.  For years, Sam Francis was one of the artists whose name I never remembered or whose work I never could recognize, but every time I’d see an abstract work I liked and would go up to it, it seemed it was by Sam Francis.  Well, after so many art fairs, where his work is plentiful, now I can spot a Francis from across the room and this show is full of his frequently used colors splashed especially around the edges of the paper support.  In the adjacent room, Jane Freilicher exhibits muted compositions of flowers in windows looking out at cityscapes beyond.  I’ve enjoyed Freilicher’s work in the past and once even painted an homage (which I won’t share; recommended, though, is this book full of lively, bright images).  This show is a little sad, though, as the flowers all look past their peak (are they sulking or just getting older?), the buildings are hazy, and the colors dulled.

Mikimoto was looking very Sam Francis

In a gallery I don’t remember ever visiting before, I very much enjoyed the chromatic, textured paintings of Mel Rosas at Maxwell Davidson Gallery.   They called to mind Steve Perrault’s portals that lead to the ocean but with dimensional paint handling, and Edward Hopper’s moody lighting and compositions.

Tiffany's was looking very Magritte

The weather was holding up — cool but not cold, cloudy but not wet — and so after catching the F train to East Broadway I was able to take another stroll through the galleries of the Lower East Side (my second exploration, though I never got to write about the first one).  By this point, though, my shoes were feeling uncomfortable:  I wonder how many art reviews turned sour because of poorly fitting shoes on the art critic?  I like walking this area, but there’s not a simple path that will get you to every gallery without much back-tracking.  I didn’t, however, come away feeling particularly inspired by most of the art, at least not on this trip.

One show that I did enjoy was the Naoto Nakagawa exhibition at Feature, where the artist renders closeups of flowers and their occasional insect visitors in concentric, highly saturated but monochromatic rectangles.  Place a beautiful quinacridone gold, perhaps, adjacent to some phthalo greens and things really pop color-wise.  Imagine looking at flowers through a macro lens with a Josef Albers filter.

Caetano de Almeida‘s work is also full of color at Eleven Rivington, where taped stripes and curves of color sometimes produce a Moire dynamic between the foreground and background.  Each piece has its own sort of logic, texture, and color scheme, with enough diversity to make you want to think through each painting.

By the time I finished the Lower East Side, it was approaching dinner time.  But the growing crowds in SoHo, where I ended up, made it seem unlikely that I’d find a good spot to eat, so I grabbed a train down to the World Train Center (figuring that the WTC PATH would be easier to get to than the 6th Avenue line) and found a very empty, but quite nice Asian fusian restaurant, Koko, where the service was friendly and helpful and my dish was nice and spicy.

Thank you to The Philadelphia Inquirer Weekend edition and art critic Victoria Donohoe for the kind mention of “Curves and Colors” in the April 22, 2011, issue.

The online version of the writeup can be found here on Philly.com.  For a snapshot from the digital version of the print edition, click below.

I enjoyed David Brooks’ column in today’s New York Times about the use of metaphor in everyday thought.  Ever since I read Philosophy in the Flesh, by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (referenced in the Brooks column), I’ve been interested in both embodied cognition and the use of metaphor in our daily reasoning.  I’ve tried to bring some of those ideas into my artwork in paintings such as Journey (we see life through a journey metaphor), In Light of Our Knowledge (we equate light with understanding in many metaphors), Moving Forward (time and our lives take on spatial metaphors with detours and leaps), and Having in Mind (where understanding is seen through a containment metaphor).

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

I’m very excited about my two-person show with Alan J Klawans, “Curves and Colors”, which opens tomorrow (Friday, April 8, 2011) at Artists’ Gallery in Lambertville, NJ.  We’re hosting an opening reception on Saturday, April 9, from 2-6pm and I hope to see you there!  Full details are available here.

Center of Narrative Gravity #12, acrylic on aluminum, 12x12

It’s just two weeks until my show with Alan J Klawans, “Curves and Colors“, opens at Artists’ Gallery in Lambertville, NJ.  The opening reception is on Saturday, April 9, from 2-6pm, and the show is up from April 8 through May 1.  I hope you’ll be able to make it!  Complete details, including a printable PDF page for your refrigerator, can be found here.  If you’re not familiar with Lambertville, I’ve put together a quick summary of where to stay and what else to do while you’re visiting.

One of the paintings in the show is this one, entitled Emergent Materialism #2.

Emergent Materialism #2, acrylic on panel, 30x24

It’s been a long time since I’ve had such a long list of galleries on my “must see” list for a visit to Chelsea.  I used a relatively new web site, art-chelsea.com, to plan out my itinerary.  The site makes it very easy to find shows that you’d like to see due to its simple interface and large, informative thumbnails.

Alas, quite a few of the shows I was really looking forward to turned out to be disappointments, but let me instead focus on those shows that were enjoyable and worth seeing.

The big event of the night was the James Sienna opening at Pace on 25th Street.  The reception was packed and the show looked fantastic.  I’ll have to go back to the gallery when it’s not so crowded to spend more time with the art, but Sienna is best known for his enamel paintings with algorithmic patterns filling up aluminum panels and this show has a bunch of them in a variety of sizes.  The enamel flattens out so these works are almost entirely brushstroke-free and the colors are clean and decisive.  All of the edges are crisp and each gives you something else to look at, whether it’s visual zigs and zags or other interlocking, nesting, or fractal-like shapes, some of which must have been painted with brushes that have but one strand of hair on them.  In the rear room are some paintings that incorporate figurative elements, and while it’s interesting to see how Sienna is looking to branch out in new directions, no matter who’s doing the painting and however interesting the brushwork I’m going to be less intrigued by genitalia art (a few of these pieces are interesting, though, looking like the graphic grandchildren of a Dubuffet splayed figure).

The James Sienna opening, just getting started

Across the street a smaller show that perhaps was timed to coincide with Sienna’s features the work of Laura Sharp Wilson at McKenzie Fine Art.  The similarity is in the incredibly small detail, tiny brushwork, and interwoven forms.  The effect is very different, though, as the color harmonies are more nature-derived and the imagery is clearly abstracted from reality instead of geometry or algorithms.

Still on 25th Street is a show of Joan Mitchell’s work from the fifties at Lennon Weinberg.  My favorite piece was an untitled painting from 1954-55 where, as you let your eyes settle in, you feel an instability between horizontal and vertical brushstrokes that’s not initially evident.  Way down on 20th Street Yolanda Sanchez channels the later, more chromatic Mitchell, at Kathryn Markel, with garden-themed abstract expressionist paintings in lively colors.

One of the artists whose work I always look forward to seeing is Tara Donovan.  At the 22nd Street Pace Gallery, her exhibition “Mylar” contains a single huge construction made up of thousands of sheets of silver and black mylar, folded, curled, and glued into hundreds of disco-ball like shapes and attached into a single large sculpture.   Donovan has been busy, and I never got a chance to write about her other recently closed show, perhaps my favorite show of the year.  In it, she stuck foam core supports with thousands of tiny pins in various patterns.  From afar you see the large scale patterns of the “dots” as graphic, almost magnetic field images.  As you approach, the reflections from the pin heads morph and you begin to focus on the texture, the silvery light and gray shadows, and how the surface reacts as you move around the gallery.

One particular painting at Mitchell-Innes & Nash’s Kenneth Noland show caught and kept my eye:  “Earthen Bound”, a 1960 acrylic on canvas that appears to be a simple combination of violet, yellow, and sienna, but when you stand in front of it the afterimages kick in and you get a sort of neon effect around the edges of the circle that was quite pleasing.

I’ve enjoyed Kate Shepherd’s monochromatic, blueprint-like paintings for a number of years.  In her current exhibition at Galerie Lelong, she lets things hang a little more loosely in that many of the architectural structures depicted on the highly glossed, colorful enamel backgrounds now look like they’ve had some starch taken out of their joints and are hanging out, a bit more relaxed, dangling from the tops of the multi-panel paintings.  (The exhibition also includes dangling wire sculptures, but I wasn’t really sure what to make of them…)

At Lohin Geduld, Kevin Wixted exhibits a dozen or so very appealing paintings full of lively colors, geometric shapes, and likable paint handling.  They’re playful in a Nozkowski-like way, though with less implication of narrative; these works are more clearly abstracted from reality: buildings, plants, other paintings from art history.

I hadn’t been to Claire Oliver gallery in a while, but the current show — different from much of their regular program — is a fun one to spend some time with.  Herb Jackson‘s multi-layer (as many as 200 layers, according to the press release) abstractions are full of color and texture.  The texture comes from the addition of mica and ash and from the carving and scraping into the layers of paint.  It almost appears as if the paint layers could have been torn up and collaged back together.  The surfaces sparkle from the mica and the compositions (and titles) hint at landscape.

Speaking of landscape, there were two representational shows along my path yesterday that caught my eye.  At ACA Gallery, Matthew Daub’s show “Kempton” alternates between watercolor and conte crayon paintings and drawings that skillfully depict the atmosphere of the deserted streets and alleys of a town (Kempton?  There’s no press release so I’m not sure!).  Capturing the more gritty atmosphere of New York City with looser, more “washy” watercolors is Tim Saternow at George Billis Gallery.  They make you feel the humidity in the air after a rainstorm or the heat on a smoggy stretch of industrial New York.  Thankfully, the real New York was only chilly yesterday, not too wet, windy, or smelly, making it a good day to stroll around and take in the latest art in Chelsea.

Fun with my phone on West 26th Street