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

I’ve been so busy getting things ready for my upcoming show in April that I haven’t had time to finish writing about last week’s art fairs.  But I did want to mention a few things about my second day in Manhattan last week.

I started the day at 9:30 up at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, since none of the art fairs open that early.  At first, as I was waiting outside with a bunch of people for the museum to open, I thought I was making a mistake.  But once I got in and quickly made for the Steiglitz, Steichen, Strand show, the early hour made for a nice, quite and completely private stroll through this fantastic show.  You never know if an old photography show will do much for you since we’re so overwhelmed with photographic images, but I found the show to be fascinating, comparing Steiglitz’ work with Steichen’s soft-focus drawing-like photos and Strand’s later graphic, straight-ahead images.

From there I headed downstairs to the Cezanne “Card Players” exhibition which highlights the famous Cezanne painting, a number of his studies and subsequent treatments of the subject, and a history of earlier card imagery — primarily etchings — from other artists.  It’s a nice little show because, well, it’s Cezanne, though I wasn’t as interested in the etchings, and you can see how the artist progressed from his initial sketches and oil studies to the final painting.

A reasonably quick bus ride to 34th Street brought me to Volta .  The 11th floor space has been the home of many art shows, but I always find it a somewhat awkward layout with no good path through the place.  One gallery had some insanely annoying audio playing over and over that was loud enough to hear quite a ways away.  One show that stood out was Jill Sylvia‘s at Magrorocca: the artist begins with ledger paper and then uses a drafting knife to cut out all of the little boxes in the sheet of paper, leaving a skeleton of just the lines on the page left over!  These remaining artifacts gently float off the wall, held in place by a few mere pins at the corners.  Lined up by the dozens, it makes for a striking exhibition of surprising beauty.

I had a quick lunch at “508“, a nifty little restaurant by the Holland Tunnel that stated off nearly empty but by the time I left had almost a full house.  A few blocks away, Scope NYC was my final art destination of the week.  I wasn’t sure if it would be worth the extra mileage on my feet but it turned out to be a fun show filled with creative artworks.  I enjoyed Federico Uribe’s playful sculptures that I’m calling “Roses with Hoses”, though I don’t know their real title.

Federico Uribe sculpture, petals from hoses, flowers from knobs

I loved Charles Pfahl’s “Revolution” at 101/exhibit, a large painting of metal parts that completely “pops” through its contrasting orange and blue colors.

For video, the artist known as “Marck” at Lichtfeld gallery displayed a few funky “video sculpture” pieces, including one showing a woman squirming around on video with a few spiked spheres rolling on top of the video screen, presumably attached and being driven by magnets underneath.  In another piece, a woman squirming her way through a series of pegs in a video is lined up nearly perfectly with actual pegs on the sculpture to make for an interesting construction.

Two amazing sculptures by Shi Jindian at Contemporary by Angela Li drew crowds.  In one, a full size motorcycle is crafted out of thousands of strands of wire to make a very substantial looking, free-standing object.  In the other, thousands of wispy strands of wire hang from supports above and form a cloudy, ghostly box in which a more densely wired bicycle floats within.  It’s hard to fathom how such a thing comes into being but it is fun to look at!

And now, back to getting ready for April’s show in Lambertville!

It’s art fair week in New York and I managed to hit four of them, plus some galleries and museums, over the past two days.

First up was The Armory Show at piers 92 and 94, which is divided up into “Modern” and “Contemporary” wings, though there’s not always a clear distinction as several artists I’ve seen in past Contemporary wings had migrated to the Modern side (e.g., Jason Martin, whose thick-wavy black monochromes have moved upstairs).  I moved through the Contemporary wing at a pretty brisk pace, deciding this year to look wide, see what catches my eye, and only then move in closer.  (I must have missed some good things, though, as I don’t remember seeing many of the pieces mentioned in Roberta Smith’s review or the Ten Best list from ArtInfo.)

This year I’m not going to detail too many of the pieces throughout the show that caught my eye, in part because my notes are too sketchy and I didn’t take many photographs (too many people *were* taking photographs and I didn’t want to be one of them), but also because it seems that very few galleries are providing images on their web sites about what they’re exhibiting.  It seems to me that in a world of social networking and blogging, it would be useful for galleries to have sharing-ready images of their artwork available at least for hot-linking.

One thing I noticed at all of the art fairs was that pure abstraction was a distinct minority.  Even pieces that were largely expressionistic, brushy, disfigured, or conceptual were in essence representational.  And there was a distinct whiff of Bacon, and I’m not referring to the surely pork-product smell wafting from the dining area at the Scope fair.  Rather, Francis Bacon seemed to be everywhere: a swirly, slashy, center-focused pseudo-portrait aesthetic in at least a dozen galleries.  Unfortunately, once you’ve seen real Bacon paintings in person (as opposed to reproductions), with their surprisingly beautiful paint application, these newer works don’t really hold up so well.

A few galleries exhibited some nice colorful abstractions, such as a classic Julian Stanczak at Danese, some buzzing stripes and colorful shapes at Jack Shainman (by Tim Bavington and Odili Donald Odita), a fantastic small Al Held piece tucked in the corner at Betty Cunningham, and a nice collection of bona fide op art at D. Wigmore, similar to work in their excellent “Structured Color”  show presently up at their Fifth Ave space (which I saw a couple of weeks ago but didn’t have a chance to blog about).

I loved a photograph entitled “Concert” by Julie Blackmon at Catherine Edelman gallery, depicting a young girl playing the violin in a large empty room at home with two (presumably) siblings in various states of paying attention.

A nifty sculptural piece by Aristarkh Chernyshev at XL Gallery uses a ribbon-like ticker of LED lights (à la Holzer) winding in an out of a wastebasket, displaying headline news, and entitled “Urgent!”.  To me, it mocked the perpetual “breaking news” graphic that’s ever-present on today’s pseudo-news channels.

Over at the Modern section of The Armory Show, Galleria d’arte Maggiore exhibited two Giorgios in their space: de Chirico and Moriandi.  Though a strange pairing aesthetically, it worked and I enjoyed browsing the large number of quality paintings by two famous Giorgios.  Nearby, a small jewel of a painting at Allan Stone’s gallery was a surprising Willem de Kooning that you could easily have mistaken for a Miro.

What made this visit to the Armory Show even more appealing was remembering that MoMA membership grants you access to both the Armory Show and Volta, saving you $40 worth of entrance fees.  It’s a fantastic benefit for becoming a member at MoMA, though not one that seems to be widely advertised!

After the Armory Show, I headed up towards the ADAA’s “The Art Show” which is actually at the 67th Street Armory.  But first I took a quick stop through the Fuller Building, which now has an increasing and surprising number of high end hair salons.  I did find a couple of shows that made the detour worthwhile, in particular the maximum chroma show of recent abstractions by Emily Mason at David Findlay Jr Fine Art.  My eyeballs were happy to follow the subtle and not-so-subtle color transitions in these warm-and-cool contrasting paintings.

Emily Mason lights up the floor at David Findlay Jr in The Fuller Building

Upon entering the ADAA show (sadly, no museum membership discounts apply, though since this show raises funds for the Henry Street Settlement, I suppose that makes sense), there’s the sudden seriousness of the place followed by the anticipation of seeing so much familiar, quality work for sale (albeit mostly way out of my price range).  The highlight for me was at Debra Force Fine Art, where she’s showing a handful of wonderful Oscar Bluemners in various sizes and media, including a $1.35M (yes, million) oil paintings and a $15K colored pencil drawing.  I wish more of the dealers would put prices on the labels, but instead many (most) make you ask if you want to know…

That was all the art I could fit in on Thursday.  In my next blog post, I’ll cover Friday’s trip to the Met, Volta, and Scope.

I’m happy to report that one of my paintings, Continuum, has been accepted into the Mercer County Artists 2011 group show at The Gallery @ Mercer Community College.  The exhibition runs from March 8 through April 7, 2011, with an opening reception on Wednesday, March 9, from 5-7:30pm.

Continuum, acrylic on panel