ArtSeen
A Studio Visit with Franklin Evans: EYESONTHEEDGE
By Kara L. Rooney“You can just step on the plexi-covered portion,” Evans said as I walked into the space and across the beginnings of the artist’s installation at Sue Scott Gallery on the Lower East Side.
JEAN DUBUFFET The Last Two Years
By Valery OisteanuJean Dubuffet (1901 – 1985) began his professional life as a wine merchant, but by age 41 he had devoted himself full-time to painting—his true passion, and one that had begun years earlier when he briefly attended the Académie Julian in Paris.
SERGEJ JENSEN Sergej Jensen
By Linnea KniazIn his third solo exhibition at Anton Kern Gallery, Sergej Jensen mediates between disparate forces in such a way that the resultant fine-tuned choreography moves not as a breeze or gale, but rather as a multifaceted cyclone. In tandem with a new and unexpected fervor, Jensen’s characteristic tranquility directs the viewing experience with greater authority than it would given over to either extreme.
THOMAS SCHEIBITZ A Panoramic View of Basic Events
By Jonathan GoodmanBorn in Germany and living in Berlin, artist Thomas Scheibitz is a solidly established painter who is pushing abstraction into new directions. Not unlike our Thomas Nozkowski, Scheibitz seeks patterns that relate to the world beyond the self.
JOSEF ALBERS Paintings, Drawings, Prints
By David RhodesJosef Albers’s (1888 – 1976) artwork, while concise in nature, allows complexity to reveal itself with prolonged looking. What is initially declared through simple means—some lines or a few colors—is free of graphic stasis. Nothing in an Albers stays still.
FLORINE STETTHEIMER Hieroglyphs of Pleasure
By Jarrett EarnestPaintings are, more than anything, physical facts. And it is in this way, in the way that Florine Stettheimer’s paintings disclose themselves to me as surfaces, that I love them.
BILL JACKLIN Recent Work, New York
By David St.-LascauxBritish artist Bill Jacklin, who moved to New York in 1985, has been making dynamic-atmospheric paintings of New York life ever since. His subject matter in these colorful, “moving” pictures includes people eating pizza, mid-bite, in Little Italy; ice skating in a massively larger-than-real-life Rockefeller Center; populating Times Square; sunbathing in Battery Park; and standing in the surf, a pair in starlight.
JANET FISH Recent Paintings
By Vincent KatzWe have come to expect something from a Janet Fish exhibition, and we are happy when we get it. We do not go to a Fish exhibition to be confounded, befuddled, or made to re-think what art or society may be. We go to delight in the surfaces she makes and the textures and qualities of light her paintings evoke.
UNTITLED FRIEZE FAIR 2007 Installation by Gert and Uwe Tobias
By Anne Sherwood PundykTo coincide with the inclusion of the artists’ work in MoMA’s current “Print/Out” exhibition, the typed, printed, molded, and designed room-sized installation by Romanian identical twins Gert and Uwe Tobias (originally shown at Frieze Fair in 2007), has been reinstalled at Team Gallery’s Wooster Street location.
BOSILJKA RADITSA The Nature of Memory
By William CorwinIn this small, delicate show of gouache paintings and pencil drawings, Bosiljka Raditsa has fashioned a vibrant pageant of meditations on color and gesture. Though the paintings are thoroughly abstract, memory is a clear subtext throughout the works, secondary to formalist aesthetic experimentation.
GEORGE ORTMAN
By Robert C. MorganOrtman’s recent exhibition at the Algus Greenspon Gallery in Greenwich Village was special for a couple of reasons: his work is significant, but rarely shown nowadays, and if seen, there is the problem of classifying it in a way that makes sense. To actually see the work, to read it and view it as a first-hand encounter, may leave a viewer without any clear art historical or stylistic category, thus suggesting that not all art needs a category to be experienced, even within the realm of abstraction.
MAGNUS PLESSEN
By Stephanie BuhmannDespite occasional references, Plessen has worked hard to define his own voice. He has found it in the intermingled forms of abstract gesture, geometric structure, and figurative subject matter.
PATRICK WILSON Color Space
By Corina LarkinPatrick Wilson is on a self-professed quest for beauty in the realm of color and form. His search takes him back to 20th-century abstract colorists and reaches forward into contemporary, technology-dominated, urban life. Such rigorous study of color relationships, careful observation of artificial and natural light, and references to technological motifs yield complex and sublime results.
LIU XIA The Silent Strength of Liu Xia
By Charles SchultzLiu Xia (b. 1959) may be the most under-recognized Chinese artist alive. Since she was 30, her paintings, photographs, and poetry have been banned in China. When her husband, Liu Xiaobo, was awarded the Nobel Peace prize in 2010 the situation grew worse; she was placed under strict house arrest and deprived of all means of contact.
