ArtSeen
A Quiet Incursion in Queens: Public Art as Infiltrator and Saboteur
By Peter EleeyBy the time you find Pepón Osorio’s piece in a back section of the Queens Botanical Garden, you will probably have received a number of curious looks from the volleyball players nearby. After you’ve passed the construction fence remaining from a refurbishment of a nearby underpass, head for the patch of tall reeds. In the middle you will discover a dead tree given new life by the artist, who attached boughs of leaves marked with the fingerprints of children from Queens.
THOMAS PIHL Paintings
A Norwegian painter who has shown in the U.S. and Norway, Thomas Pihl’s first solo exhibition in New York contains twelve untitled paintings. His work calls to mind Jules Olitski, Kenneth Noland, and other painters of the late ‘60s who were championed by Clement Greenberg and sought to reduce painting to its essence, namely surface and color.
Willem de Kooning and John Chamberlain: Influence and Transformation
By Rachel YouensDe Kooning had surged past "Excavation" when John Chamberlain entered the New York scene. In the upcoming fall show at PaceWildenstein Gallery, Willem de Kooning and John Chamberlain: Influence and Transformation, three to four decades of paintings and sculpture will be selected to yield a mixture of high energy contrasts between de Kooning’s originating gestures and Chamberlain’s almost rhetorical proliferations of modernism’s language of fragmentation and redemption.
If you lived here you would be dead now
By Daniel BairdChristoph Draeger’s work, which has previously been shown at Roebling Hall in Dystopia/Babel (1998) and in Out of Order (1999), is at once apocalyptic and bitingly sardonic, while remaining carefully orchestrated and politically subtle.
MARC SWANSON At First Sight
By Jeffrey Cyphers WrightA harsh terrain of primordial forces—a far-off land of fantastic trophies and paralyzing loss, a place where love alchemically becomes living memory—is where Marc Swanson explores our universal precepts. Through iconic fabrication, he keeps an alternative universe alive by integrating it with his own sense of self-preservation.
MIES VAN DER ROHE Mies in Berlin
By Phillipe Baumann“Mies in Berlin,” the exhibition on view at the Museum of Modern Art until September 11th, organized by Barry Bergdoll and Terence Riley, presents 50 projects done by the Berlin office of Mies van der Rohe prior to his relocation to Chicago in the summer of 1938.
MIES VAN DER ROHE Mies in America
By Karl JensenFor instant gratification few pleasures are more rewarding than a well-aimed flipoff. I’m not very good at it myself which may explain why, when some angry soul lobs a good one my way, I can’t help but partake in its delicious offense. Architecture has no shortage of offensive buildings, although most are unintentionally so.
NANCY DAVIDSON
By Rachel YouensNancy Davidson’s sculptures in her one-person show at Robert Miller Gallery in September may again seem to storm the citadel of art with a guerilla girl-like assault on the normative standards and values of the marketplace. Of course, nowadays such an assault looks more like careerism than any genuine subversion of cultural form and value.
MY REALITY: CONTEMPORARY ART AND THE CULTURE OF JAPANESE ANIMATION
By Art AskéMy Reality is an exhibition of Asian and American artists whose work has been influenced by manga and anime. Manga (the Japanese word for comic books) and anime began to gain popularity after World War II. Osamu Tezuka, the creator of the anime Astro Boy and one of the most influential artists of the first wave of Japanese animators, was so heavily influenced by Disney, so much so that he is called the Walt Disney of Japan.
PHIL FROST Litany
Originally a skateboarder and graffiti artist, Phil Frost exited the street and entered the gallery during the mid-nineties. Like Barry McGee, another street artist who managed the same shift, Forst has not wholly renounced his past. The current exhibition of his work at the Jack Shainman Gallery illustrates a complex intertwining of obsessive patterning, figures, collage, and startling manipulation of found objects.
WARD SHELLEY The Cube
By Lori OrtizLast fall at Eyewash Gallery, during the Elsewhere weekend, Ward Shelley exhibited a penciled map networking the Williamsburg art community. With inherent humor, the normally hushed politics were set down on paper with neither apology nor judgment. It was a magnification of our reality; a print, a photograph.
SHARON HORVATH Recent Paintings
By Megan HeuerAfter a summer full of flashy group shows, Sharon Horvath’s Recent Paintings is a quiet shift towards a more subtle and contemplative exploration of idea with a coherent formal vocabulary. Horvath draws inspiration from everything from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities to Tantric diagrams of energy and color, but ultimately the work is about the artist’s own visual language.
Printed Works: Terry Winters at the Metropolitan Museum of New York
By Daniel BairdAfter a dazzling Spring show of his drawings at the Matthew Marks Gallery, a retrospective exhibition of Terry Winters’ printed works has been mounted at The Metropolitan Museum. The strongest show of contemporary art at The Metropolitan Museum in recent memory, “Terry Winters: Printed Works” includes a generous selection of Winters’ formally ambitious and technically inventive lithographs, etchings, and relief prints from the early 1980s to the present.
The Painting Center: Repetition in Discourse
In Freud’s famous analysis of the repetition compulsion, obsessive repetitive behavior is a disguised reenactment of a repressed trauma. But repetition has also been cultivated as a technique for the spiritually meditative: Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam have all used the repetition of gestures, sounds and words to draw the mind inward, away from the contingencies of ordinary life.
TODT: Exurbia
By Rachel GordonIf your brain needs a workout and you like a good spectacle, look no further than the TODT show at Sideshow Gallery in Williamsburg. Step one foot inside and your mind will short-circuit with a sudden burst of electricity. Who is TODT and what is this plastic Garden of Eden, this green jungle of tshotchkes?
