On Friday night, after a round of gallery-going in Chelsea, I attended the Curator’s Choice panel of the Artists Talk on Art (ATOA) series at the School of Visual Arts. The panel includes the six winners from this year’s Curator’s Choice juried competition. Although the paintings I submitted weren’t selected, I was interested in learning about the jurying process as well as seeing the kind of work that was chosen.

Juror Jim Kempner from Jim Kempner Fine Art explained his selection process as going through multiple iterations over several weeks, each time narrowing down the field until he found his winners. Over 100 artists entered the competition and only six were chosen, so the competition is definitely a long shot. I was very impressed with not only the quality of the work but also by how articulate each of the artists were in describing their processes and goals; this left me feeling less bad about not being chosen (though only slightly less jealous .

Of the winners, I was particularly impressed with the work of recent RISD grad Celeste Rapone, whose figurative works exploring the meaning of being brought up Catholic were well executed and full of meaning. Rapone uses her illustration background to good effect, creating paintings that are graphic, memorable, and poignant (see Creme Filled, which shows a puffy-faced young girl surrounded by more culturally ideal bikini models).

Kate Teal (I couldn’t find a web page for her) presented a series of oil paintings depicting her and her husband sleeping in bed at night, derived loosely from photos that were automatically snapped every 30 minutes throughout one night. By selectively applying color for the figures’ flesh and by rendering the folds in the pillows and sheets, they are a nice balance of abstraction and representation.

Keun Young Park (no link available) exhibited figurative images collaged together from torn up, creatively Photoshopped photographs, including symbols such as birds to represent the human spirit in her compositions.

Iowa-based Thomas C. Jackson presented composited photographs primarily from his “American Slice” series. Each image consists of two or more slices of larger photographs, spliced together (usually vertically), occasionally with some Photoshopped mirroring or flipping, to create images with compositional interest. The artist says that although all of the images have specific meanings, he prefers to allow viewers to bring their own interpretations to the works.

It was hard to see the details of Michele Bova’s abstract oil paintings in the slides (and the only link I could find was here), but it seemed that they fit nicely into the family of brushstroke-filled abstraction presently seen on West 25th Street that I described in my last posting.

Judd Boloker described his colored pencil on bristol board drawings that are based upon photos he’s taken from places like the Brooklyn Botanical Garden. Starting with one or more photos, he abstracts them into graphic images (see this firework-inspired Papyrus Plant) through the heavy application of colored pencil to the support.

It was an informative evening, though I had been under the impression that more of the work submitted to the competition would be screened prior to the panel presentation. I was hoping to see how my own slides showed up on the big screen and where they might have fit in among the rest of the competition. If you would like to see the work of any of the winning artists in person, they will be included in a group show at Jim Kempner Fine Art, though the date of the show has yet to be determined.

It wasn’t exactly the trek to de Maria’s The Lightning Field, but getting to Chelsea today was quite a slog: suspended train service and persistent, driving rain lengthened the inbound journey to Manhattan to over 2 1/2 hours. Though my mood was only slightly soured, it did mean I had less time to view all the shows I had planned and the rain forced a more rapid pace through the streets.

Fortunately, there were some good shows to see. Most of the action today was on West 25th Street. Three galleries featured brushy abstract expressionism. I try not to miss Joan Mitchell shows and the exhibition at Lennon, Weinberg was worth the visit, though primarily for the one full-scale painting Buckwheat, a 1982 edge-to-edge combat between blues, yellows, and oranges. The rest of the show is comprised of smaller paintings and pastel works on paper. Unfortunately, most of the other pieces don’t capture the magic I find in Mitchell’s large paintings. The pastels consist primarily of scrawly, straight vertical lines or blocks of color rather than her usual curvilinear brushstroke and whether due to scale or medium prove to be less than compelling to look at.

A better show of similarly brushy allover abstract expressionist works by Milton Resnick is found down the block at Cheim & Read. The humongous (approximately 27 feet wide) painting Swan seemed to capture the rainy atmosphere of Chelsea today with its drippy slate gray and blue paint, while the slightly smaller (16 feet wide) Tilt to the Land’s pastel colorings hinted towards a more sunny spring season. The confusingly named Wedding features an even field of olive greens with drops of yellows, oranges, reds, and brighter greens peeking through.

Another visually exciting show whose lineage clearly descends from Resnick and Mitchell was by the unknown-to-me, mononamed artist Haessle at the off-the-beaten path Kips Gallery (in the back hallway of ground floor galleries at 531 W 25th). The gallery features some large (7-foot) and some much smaller works from the last twenty years by this artist whose resume at least lists occasional NY solo shows going back approximately forty years.

Perhaps the best show on 25th Street (and of all the shows I saw today) was at the *huge* (7,000 sq. ft), relatively new to New York Arario Gallery. This was the last gallery I visited today and I almost missed this show by the Korean artist Park, Seo-Bo, but I’m very glad I didn’t. To get to the gallery, you have to open a suspiciously loose door on the ground floor at 521 W 25th Street and then climb up a flight of steps that you feel could collapse into a sliding ramp should the gallery owner not welcome your presence. But once you’re there, it’s a gorgeous art space and the Park show is worth seeing. The show is entitled “Empty the Mind” and it features highly saturated acrylic paintings on layers of hanji (mulberry) paper. Most of the paintings follow a similar template: vertical “corrugated” strips of color stand out from the textured background, with a carved out rectangular color field providing what the artist calls “breathing space” somewhere in the canvas. Usually there are one or two horizontal strips of color that also project out from the canvas as small ledges and which add compositional interest. As you walk from side to side and your angle of view changes, the retinal image adjusts as you see more or less of the background and more or less of the projecting strips of color. The pieces all seemed to be named Ecriture (individually numbered); I had to look it up: écriture is the French word for writing and in English it asserts that all writing has a style that shapes our view of the world [answers.com].

For even more color, Dillon Gallery features the highly saturated work of Hector Leonardi, whose bright abstractions are full of layers of drips, marks, and stipples of acrylic color, with underlying forms revealed through masked areas, sometimes in grids and sometimes more organically.

To finish up my highlights of 25th Street, the Jeff Bailey Gallery has a nice little show of graphite drawings on paper by Will Duty. There are several lunar drawings which include repeated instances of a crescent moon as though from a multiple-exposure photograph. But the more interesting images are ones like Untitled (00020), which include some perspective and almost a “pixelation” of light and dark.

A remarkable show by Zhang Huan at the 22nd Street Pace Wildenstein requires a bit of effort to get the full effect. At least during the opening weekend, the artist is completing a monumental “ash painting” in the gallery. To view it, you have to climb up a temporary stairway leading you to a narrow platform overlooking a gigantic slab of compressed ash (looks like concrete) measuring nearly 6′ high by 20′ wide by 60′ long. The artist [or one of his studio assistants] sits on a mechanized contraption above the piece with some brushes and a palette consisting of 8 small buckets of various tones of ash. He [or she] dips his brush into one of the buckets to pick up some ash, leans over, and then taps the brush over the artwork to apply value to the work. The remarkable painting in progress is based on a vintage photograph of Chinese laborers digging a canal.

One final show worth noting was the museum-quality exhibition of mostly minimalist art at David Zwirner (Selections from the Collection of Helga and Walther Lauffs). It features a nice Yves Klein body painting, a very interesting Lee Bontecou “wall relief”, and an small but elegant Fred Sandback cord-and-metal rod installation. (The gallery provides a very helpful online checklist/brochure listing all of the works.)

Today was a beautiful day to stroll around Chelsea (especially compared to the brutal winds on my last visit). With lots of time and no museum shows to visit, I was able to leisurely work my way from 19th Street up to 26th Street, enjoying quite a few of the exhibitions along the way.

One show I was particularly looking forward to — Gregory Crewdson at Luhring Augustine — didn’t disappoint. Even though I love photography, in many photography shows I find myself just moving from one image to another without any need to spend a lot of time on any one image. But the Crewdson photographs demand more attention and it’s worth it. They are beautiful on a purely formal level. The camera is placed for perfect composition and everything fits together: edges don’t touch awkwardly and positive and negative shapes give each other enough room to breathe. The photos are large (approximately 59×90 inches), perfectly printed (inkjet!) on luster paper. But beyond the formal, the images draw you in and as you look around the photo you find one symbol after another: a turned over shopping cart, a broken window, an illuminated street sign. In almost all of the images, one or more old American cars (Pontiacs, Buicks) share the stage with figures who are often alone standing outside a building or under a bridge. Occasionally a pair of figures are visible in the car or in a building window. I found the typical Crewdson cinematic setups to be less intrusive in this show than in the past and the narratives less creepy and more psychologically interesting.

For a completely different kind of photography, see Ion Zupcu’s show at Clamp Art. These small (15×15 inch) black-and-white gelatin silver prints are abstract, geometrical swirls and angles. A few of them look like aerial shots of Richard Serra sculptures, but in fact the artist is photographing black paper in natural light that the artist has folded, twisted, and sculpted into interesting shapes.

I’ve stumbled upon Devorah Sperber’s work at a number of art fairs in the past: you’re walking down the aisle and at first you notice a wall of color splotches, but then you look into a small crystal ball and those splotches (really spools of thread all strung together) are shrunk and inverted, and voilà, you get the Mona Lisa or a Vermeer. When I stumbled upon her show at Caren Golden Fine Art this time, it was the subject matter that was most surprising: images from Star Trek! There are a few of the spool thread works, complete with mirrored balls that do the shrinking and pixelating, but when the images resolve you see Mr. Spock or Captain Kirk. In addition, there are a few pieces that are made from hanging strands of glass beads and these shimmering images read like figures in the process of being beamed up. There’s also a piece made with “chenille stems” (i.e., pipe cleaners!) to do the pixelation.

At the Dike Blair show at D’Amelio Terras, the room is filled with dozens of small inkjet prints of eyeballs scanned from the artist’s previous paintings. This reminded me of one of my own paintings from several years ago of my own eye. The question raised by this show, however, is: if the press release is itself an inkjet (or laserjet) print of one of the eyeballs in full color (albeit at a lesser quality), do I now own one of the artist’s works (unsigned, of course)?

Kim Foster gallery has two intriguing photography-based shows. First, Sherry Karver makes large black and white prints of digital images and uses them as a kind of grisaille for a subsequent oil painting. Layers of glazed color are added so that it’s hard to tell where the photo ends and the painting begins. The subjects are people caught moving about in a crowd, such as on the street or in a train station. Some of the figures are superimposed with fictional texts that are a kind of psychological description of the characters’ thoughts or hidden histories. I don’t usually enjoy text works as they demand a certain kind and direction of attention, but these were worth reading, full of sadness, insecurity, and sometimes humor.

The other show at Kim Foster by artist E.E. Smith contained a series of hyper-grainy “oil prints” made from cropped, enlarged photos. (The press release says that the artist hand coats watercolor paper with a light-sensitive coating in order to make the prints.) The resulting images look like conte crayon renderings. As with the Karver show, the subject matter is people caught in the act of doing their daily business and the grainy imagery of the prints has the look of surveillance photos.

One of the galleries in the huge David Zwirner space on West 19th Street contains a series of James Welling “photograms” (camera-less photographs, a few of which are also on view at the Whitney Biennial). The artist has taken window screens and cut, twisted, and sculpted them into torso-like shapes and then laid those shapes onto photo-sensitive paper to create beautiful, biomorphically abstract images.

Alexander Ross, whose works I loved several years ago at Feature Gallery and also at the Whitney’s “Remote Viewing” show, has moved on over to Marianne Boesky’s gallery (see the NY Times article, “Dear Gallery: It Was fun, but I’m Moving Up”). Unfortunately, these works don’t seem to have quite the same dimensional pop as the earlier works which so fascinated me. Some of the large green paintings are still quite interesting — blobs of green organic shapes (based on the artist’s clay models) rendered with gradients of color on a blue background. But they look flatter than in the past and aren’t quite as playful. In addition to the large oil paintings, the show also includes some smaller collages that mix photos of the artist’s paintings (or perhaps photos of the clay models) with crayon-like scrawls on paper.

Thankfully, not everything that I saw today was photo-based! I’ll save the descriptions for some fine painting shows by Thomas Nozkowski, James Sienna, and Julian Stanczak for my next post.