Rachel Youens
Judy Chicago, The Dinner Party
Brooklyn Museum of Art
By Rachel Youens
Twenty-two years after its blockbuster opening at the San Francisco Museum of Art in 1979, Judy Chicago’s “The Dinner Party” has been donated and permanently installed at the Brooklyn Museum of Art.
The Manhattan Scene
By Rachel YouensA good painting will converge within the nerve endings of our sight and minds.
MoMA Moves to Long Island City
By Rachel YouensOn June 29, when MoMA QNS opened its doors in the renovated Swingline staple factory in Long Island City, MoMA’s Manhattan building became a sort of archaeological resource for the museum’s 21st-century incarnation.
Jaakko Heikkilä
By Rachel YouensIn Rooms of Man, a series of photographic portraits, artist Jaakko Heikkila documents the relationships between apartment dwellers and their homes; moreover, the dialogue he establishes between people and their environments is broadly narrated as an east-west dichotomy. Heikkila's route includes visits to the Torne River of Finland, to Njuchtja, Russia, Rytow, England, and Harlem, New York.
Richard Pousette-Dart
By Rachel YouensRichard Pousette-Dart’s "Mythic Heads and Forms," abstract paintings which span the decade of the 1930s, with their elliptical organization of thick black lines that forcefully yet almost imperceptibly shift space, have an immediate impact, in the sense of both sureness and conviction.
Greg Stone
By Rachel YouensGreg Stone’s works on paper at Pierogi 2000 evoke mirrored and multiplied geometries, and their immediate gestural effects fluctuate with the elusiveness of a flickering fire. Located in the Pierogi gallery adjacent to the retrospective exhibit of the late Mark Lombardi’s preparatory drawings, one realizes that the artists share an interest in the interstices between visible and invisible worlds. The cool and diagrammatic lyricism of Lombardi’s investigations into the dangerous world of capitalist manipulation surprisingly echoes Stone’s hallucinogenic and organic fields filled with networks of synaptic configurations.
John Walker
By Rachel YouensIn John Walker’s current exhibit titled Changing Light, the artist turns his compass point in an unexpected direction to explore an American theme, the coast of Maine. Yet again Walker provides us with an experience that invokes a conjunction between nature and our collective past. But gone are the charged iconographical and autobiographical motifs, and in their place are deep vistas filled instead with a hushed emptiness.
Lennart Anderson
By Rachel YouensThis broad yet intimate retrospective of Lennart Anderson’s paintings span the last forty years of painting, and their subject matter includes ambitious figure works, nudes, portraits, and still lifes painted throughout his career. Anderson has been described alternately as a realist, or as a classicist, and he is a formalist in the best sense of the word.
Watercolor
By Rachel YouensBy bringing to light the admired yet at times obscure practice of watercolor, curators David Cohen and Susan Shatter direct their audience to the only occasionally acknowledged satisfactions of this medium. Their approach presents watercolor as an experiment that opens a window onto many artists’ normative approaches, yielding at times unforeseen results. I discovered some surprising works by artists I thought I already knew.
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.
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.
Architecture for One
By Rachel YouensFive Myles, located just a few blocks from the Brooklyn Museum, on the “other side of the tracks,” is not just a gallery, but welcomes its neighbors and youth to experience and participate in art.
Ellen Gallagher
By Rachel YouensAlternately rough, raw, heated, and cool, Ellen Gallagher’s show Preserve underscores the discrepancies between modernism’s search for a utopian order and history’s stinging remnants.
Different Strokes at Im N Il
By Rachel YouensBenicia Gantner, Seth Kaufman, Dean Smith, Elizabeth Simonian, Carolee Toon, Carrie Ungerman, Andre Yi. Curated by Susan Joyce
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MILTON RESNICK at Robert Miller Gallery
By Rachel YouensMilton Resnick’s paintings support his idea that the “canvas needs to be stronger than you” by providing an experience where historic and the organic intersect.
TAMARA GONZALES at Cheryl Pelavin Gallery
By Rachel YouensIn her first installation, titled Pama III, Tamara Gonzales gathers together a cross section of feast rituals given to those who have “dropped the body.”
Judith Rothschild: Image and Abstraction
By Rachel Youensat Knoedler&Company This small retrospective highlights a selection of works that span the 50-year career of Judith Rothschild, from early gouaches and paintings that were exhibited during her twenties to a selection of later paintings.
Angela Wyman and Leslie Roberts: Eyewash
By Rachel Youensat Figureworks Angela Wyman’s “Super Deformed” series, inspired by Japanese toys, includes watercolors and two larger paintings.
Joe Brainard at Tibor de Nagy and PS1
By Rachel YouensThe retrospective of Joe Brainard’s oeuvre at PS1, and seventy-five works at Tibor de Nagy share threads of a vision where intimacy and fear, hilarious fun and ruminative moments mix intangibly with a freshness of execution. In books, drawings, collages, flower paintings and cut-outs, this inclusive artist often assembled or serially ordered his smallish works.
Richmond Burton
By Rachel YouensImpressive in scale and color, Richmond Burton’s over-the-top group of abstract paintings I Am is a series intended to embody “an erotics of artmaking.”
Joan Snyder
By Rachel YouensJoan Snyder’s series “Primary Fields” is charged with a presence that is unapologetically expressive.
The Local Scene
By Rachel YouensArtists flocking to Williamsburg were once drawn not only to cheap rents but also to the spectacle of its industrial setting.
Jenny Hankwitz: Cheryl Pelavin Fine Art
By Rachel YouensThe immediate impression of Jenny Hankwitz’s paintings crisp, bright paintings is that they express a release from restraint. Unabashedly ornamental, Hankwitz assimilates mark making from pop, but instead evoke nature’s prolific order rather than a critique of our cultural icons and clichés.
Joan Snyder
By Rachel YouensI have appreciated Joan Snyder’s ability to charge her imagery with exuberance and intelligence and visionary celebration in past exhibits. While her new body of work, entitled Women Make Lists, takes on an elegiac tone (it is dedicated to the women and children of Iraq), Snyder’s largescale paintings—filled with rainbows of pastel colors, dotted and punctuated by dripping blotchy wounds, hearts, nipples, bloody lakes—feel like the funerary foot stomping and hair pulling of women portrayed on Greek vases.
Peter Acheson and Mor Pipman
By Rachel YouensLike the repetitions of a fugue, variation within purity is one of the experiences provoked by looking at Peter Acheson’s paintings. No painting measures more than twelve inches, yet they have the look of field paintings
Nancy Drew
By Rachel YouensAlthough Nancy Drew’s newest suite of paintings at Roebling Hall, facsimiles of well known paintings by modern masters, is touted as retinal and trippy art, and an homage rather than a critique, they still appear to fill the stage with a postmodern moment.
Natalie Charkow Hollander
By Rachel YouensPainters are known to become obsessed by sculpture and sculptors may admire painterly virtuosity, but it is rare that a sculptor’s admiration for painting compels her to capture the spaces and the forms within it.
Barbara Kruger
By Rachel YouensIn a video work titled "Twelve," Barbara Kruger continues her original format of combining loaded phrases with imagery. But she sheds the stylized graphics based on fashion magazines and the look of Russian propaganda art that sustained her oeuvre for at least two decades, and presents "conversations" between people in various urban and domestic settings, like luncheonettes, schools, and cafeterias.
