Pistoletto's "Lavoro" at Luhring Augustine

Perhaps photographing Michelangelo Pistoletto's work ought to be considered an art in its own right. In  photos of Pistoletto's show Lavoro, at Luhring Augustine Gallery through April 28, it is difficult to tell what is part of the artist's original composition, silkscreened onto mirror, and what is a reflection.

At least that's the case with my photos. The gallery website provides you with the works sans reflection. But maybe my photos show better what it is like to view the exhibition, and particularly the immersive quality with which Pistoletto draws the viewer and the temporal setting into play with the realistic scenes he creates. The ladies in the background above, and myself below, deserve such a prominent place when looking at and talking about the artist's work. Pistoletto begins to create them, but the works are complete when placed in a room and viewed by a person. 

Lavoro is Italian for work. The bright colors, hyperrealistic treatment of surfaces, and prosaic tools depicted here relate to the industrial kind of work done in warehouses and on construction sites. 

Pistoletto began painting on mirror as early as the 1960s. (I wrote about Pistoletto's early work and original mirror paintings here after visiting the Philadelphia Museum of Art retrospective in 2010.) His cropped compositions and bold color are different here, looking much more like photographs and much less like the delicate portraits on tissue he used to paint. They look like their respective times in that way.

I especially like the sign here, telling the viewer: "Public forbidden to enter."
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Off-kilter Occult: Hernan Bas

I was excited to see that Hernan Bas's had a new show up at Lehmann Maupin after first seeing his work at their downtown location in 2009. Even if I hadn't, I would have been a sucker for the Baudelaire quote in the press release; “The loveliest trick of the Devil is to persuade you that he does not exist." The Miami-born, Detroit-based painter examines lore and legends of the devil in this new group of paintings.

Tartini's Dream (The Devil's Trill)

I really enjoy his dense compositions, like the one above where intersecting branches cover every part of the picture plane, as if they are trying to force their way out. His works tend to suggest complex narratives, suggested by the strange landscapes and dramatic little figures as much as their titles.

A Devil's Bridge

The rainbow of colors used here is representative of his work, and the very bright and light hues he uses manage to seem subsumed into his overall dark composition. I love the figure in the foreground looking out over the water, while a shadowy figure lurks under the bridge behind him. It's cliche, perhaps, but it exists in a vividly colored and slightly off-kilter alternate world.

Detail, A Devil's Bridge

Detail, A Devil's Bridge

Recently in a interview Bas said of his more recent work:

The best way that anyone has described the work so far was in an interview with Maurizio Cattelan titled “Something Off,” which really sums up these thoughts again on how I view the more successful aspects of the work—there’s always something off about them, and I strive towards that off-ness whenever I’m painting. It can come from how I render the figures or skewing the scale; something just always has to be a little wrong. I don’t want to make right painting. 

More from his interview with Art21 here.

A Satanist on a Tuesday

"Occult Contemporary" is up at Lehmann Maupin Gallery in Chelsea through April 21.

Color: Jessica Dickinson at James Fuentes

Just some lovely colors for a sunny fall day. Jessica Dickinson large color wash paintings are up at James Fuentes through December 11. The texture is achieved through layering and and scraping. More of her work here.

Still Life & Motion at DCKT Contemporary

Bouquet, Everest Hall, 2011

Still Life and Motion: Everest Hall and Sean Capone opened Thursday night on the LES DCKT Contemporary gallery, and alltogether made for a nice, small show that speaks to a very contemporary way of handling the age-old still life genre. Everest Hall provides the still lifes of the exhibition's title, with roses on rather geometric  backgrounds that seem paper-thin, fragile, and false. Sean Capone provides the motion, showing roses and other flowers exploding and fading out like a kaleidoscope setting for a flat screen. The works complimented each other nicely, but Hall's work seemed the weaker part of the show. 

Still from Sub Rosa (What We Do Is Secret), Sean Capone, 2009

Capone's two video installations were fascinated to watch as they played on an endless loop. I was also very intrigued by the sales premise behind them. Literally a few minutes after complaining to a friend about how I can't afford any of the artwork I see, I looked at the price list and saw the videos being sold as a file on a USB drive for $125, and that they artist had limited the editions to 100. The artist created his own principle of scarcity that was really interesting, and I could certainly dig projecting those patterns onto my living room wall 24/7. I was also really impressed and interested by the site-specific installations he had created in the past. In fact, they are amazing: see here. 

FloralWall (Skull & Void #3), Sean Capone, 2010

Pat Steir's Winter Paintings at Cheim & Read

I wish I had had a camera with me for the opening of Pat Steir's Winter Paintings at Cheim & Read, so that I could show you up close how well the layers of rich colors overlay each other in these two-tone canvases.

Her latest waterfall paintings--note the textured drippage--use a lot of metallics. The gold felt especially luxuroius. Waterfalls where paint is dripped and poured down the canvas have been a signature of the artist's since the 80s. The layering gives a real saturated and deep coloring to these large canvases, and the waterfall effect encourages contemplation.

Compared to the Nearly Endless Line exhibition of the artist's I saw about a month ago, these seem remarkably traditional works, but they remain immersive and focused with an in interest in subtle manipulation of one or two elements.

Tara Donovan's Pin Drawings at Pace

Drawing (Pins), 2010

While out for some openings in Chelsea last night, I noticed Pace had kept its doors open, so I got to take a close look at Tara Donovan's latest work. As always when I see her work in person, I love it. Her use of materials manages to be subtle and simple but transformative. I originally thought when I saw the press release that these were graphite drawings, but as you can see below, they are made by sticking pins into gatorboard.

Not only do the pins create line and shading, but there's a nice depth to the varying degrees of how deeply stuck the pins are. The pins themselves have a sheen to them, which picks up nicely in the light as you walk around them, and at 96" x 96" these large works leave some room to walk.

These pieces really don't reproduce well in photographs, so if you have the chance to get over to Pace before March 19, I recommend it. The circles drawings, like the first image, are my favorite, but most of the works are  clean and perfect gradients like these:

Parade of the Bearded Man, or my walk to dinner Friday night took an unexpected turn

First they popped across my view on the Bowery. I heard the Mariachi's cheerful music before I saw the parade leader, neon blue coyote shining from his large paper-mache head.

Then I saw his followers, sporting real and fake beards, carrying  white banners behind him, all bearing the sign of the bearded man. I walked with them up Bowery, east on Houston, and then a bit down Eldridge Street where they began to crowd into a gallery.

Thanks to the wonder that is the internet, I have since learned that the gallery was DCKT Contemporary, the artist was Irvin Morazan, and that is was actually a coyote procession. I stand corrected.

The exhibition itself is called "Temple of the Bearded Man." I can't speak for the rest of it, but the parade was good fun, even though I don't know what happened with the whip cream at the end. A birthday dinner called.

Kevin Bourgeois at Causey Contemporary

The installation of this show is just such a fantastic, seamless background that really shows off the work of Kevin Bourgeois to great effect. I loved it the second I walked in. Here, however, is the rub: the works viewed on their own were something else.

I found it hard to distance my reaction to the (rather horrible) subject matter from the way it was depicted, too distracted by repulsion to judge it as a work of art. Does that mean it failed as a work of art, or conversely that it was successful?

How is one meant to appreciate work that tackles difficult, uncomfortable subjects or, in this case, rather wallows in dark tropes? It's up at Causey Contemporary in Williamsburg through November 14 in case you want to judge for yourself.

Williamsburg 2nd Fridays Gallery Crawl

It's not all crowded subway trains in my neighborhood

What do you know? I moved to Williamsburg just in time for the 2nd Fridays gallery crawl. It will be great to see a bit more of my new neighborhood, an a few galleries I like (Slate Gallery for example) are having events and some I'm not familiar with (Graphite with a new show by Tae Hwang) come recommended.

Full list of events and spaces if you are so inclined:

• Tae Hwang In Between at Graphite
• "Exploring 100 Years of Figurative Art: Part II " Including the Realists" at Figureworks
• Sarah H. Paulson Your point will change... at Alice Chilton Gallery
• Chino Amobi Pregnancy Pact at Like The Spice
• Artist Talk: Barbara Thomas The Floating Color Series at Slate Gallery

And then there's also:

Gitana Rosa (Can't forget the show name: Hung: Checking out the Contemporary Male)
19 Hope St. #7 (b/w Roebling and Havemeyer)


Black and White Gallery (less than a block from my new apartment)
483 Driggs Avenue (between N 10th and N 9th)

Hogar Collection (recommended to me)
362 Grand Street (the corner of Marcy Ave)

Pierogi ( <3 )
177 N. 9th St. Brooklyn

Go See: Pipilotti Rist at Luhring Augustine

It was in my plans even before I read this review of the show to go see the Pipilotti Rist, just because her video installation Pour Your Body Out in the atrium of MoMA was so lush and engrossing. I didn't even know she has made a chandelier of underwear. (pictured above)

Now it's been moved to top priority. : )

Grown-Up Mobiles: Nathan Carter at Casey Kaplan

Williamsburg Brooklyn Public Housing Project Concealed Swinden Call and Response  

I'm really over long, evocative but gibberishy names for exhibitions-- POCKET SHRAPNEL SET-UPS VERONICA VEX AND BROOKLYN STREET TREASURE --being a great example of such. That being said, the art itself in this Nathan Carter exhibition at Casey Kaplan was quite good--small scale Calder-esque with a bit more intricacy. The wall-sized installation above could have been a Miro if flat, but Carter brought out the dimensions by creating the composition from large metal pieces at varying depths to good effect (hard to capture in a photograph).

There was another fabulous, playful piece reminiscent of the game Mousetrap that I loved. However I am in a sad state--camera-less-- and so will have to leave you with this one image pulled from the web and tell you to go see for yourself before October 23. For some reason Casey Kaplan doesn't have any of his new work up.

New and Old: Uta Barth at Tanya Bodaker

...to walk without destination and to see only to see. (Untitled 10.1)

...to walk without destination and to see only to see. (Untitled 10.2)

...to walk without destination and to see only to see. (Untitled 10.3)

...to walk without destination and to see only to see. (Untitled 10.4)

This new series of photographs by Uta Barth on view at the Tanya Bonakdar gallery is a contemplative, lovely, very contemporary body of work. I love how there is a sense of process suggested by the similar subject over time and season. Initially, I didn't connect these large, color works as the product of the same artist who created the small, black and white photos in the back room, which seemed more concerned with negative space than lyricism. Yet Barth created both, albeit 30 years apart. Do I like them both? Yes of course. If I had to choose a faovorite however, the group of small black and white photographs Every Day, below, carries the day with me...by far! Click on the image to enlarge it and get a sense of the playful capture of the everyday and the beautifully framed shots.

Every Day

All Images are courtesy of the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York

Sarah Lutz at Lohin Geduld

Burst, 2009

New work by painter Sara Lutz is going up at Lohin Geduld tommorow, and rather than noting the fact and tossing the release per my usual press release practice I wanted to share her work. Because of the gorgeous colors and textures of her oils, and because of the richness and playfulness of her work, I was hoping one of my lovely blog readers would go in my stead and report back with more images!

This is your mission should you choose to accept it.

Anna Jóelsdóttir: Near Chaos

There is turmoil in the world, too many dots to connect; we are many outsiders floating around lost centers. I want my work to reflect that near chaos. - Artist Statement

Of the openings I went to in Chelsea last night, I saw a lot of more, or less, successful toyings with geometric shapes and color (nostalgia much?). What a relief then, to come upon Anna Jóelsdóttir's show priest chews velvet haddock at the Stux Gallery.

For this exhibition, the Chicago-based Icelandic artist produced mylar installations, paintings, a really extraordinary journal, and a big game of pick up sticks. While that may seem like quite a range of objects, they were very much unified by a stark, sprawling, detailed aesthetic that was precise yet evocative. It was too crowded to get a good installation shot last night, so I pulled the images above from Stux's website. The artist folds, cuts, and otherwise manipulates the painted mylar into a variety of complex forms. The mylar shows her typical thin streaks and spurts of color on a white background.

When the Bough Breaks

Jóelsdóttir's paintings, also on white backgrounds with pulsing color connected by thin lines, create poetic yet direct images. Somehow even where there is chaos and tension, there is also a sort of peace. I'm not sure how well these paintings reproduce here, but seeing them last night I was struck by how refreshing and clean the white background was, and how well the artist used the thin crawling lines to explode the space. They felt very personal and immediate. I like how they reconcile what ought to be opposite characteristics, like emotion and coolness, and strength and delicacy. They'll be up through the New Year if you have a chance to go by, and I recommend you do. More about the artist on her website.

Bent Horizons

Art Isn't Dead

DUH.

I'm hoping the embed option for this video actually starts to work. If not, check it out at New York Magazine's website. Jerry Saltz did a tour of 24th Street to show that Chelsea is still functioning and thriving. Going to Gagosian might not prove that, but it will provide some nice clips of the work by Murakami I was discussing yesterday. He starts the video with the other show in the gallery, which I didn't love. To his credit, he focuses on the less annoying works.

Shiny metallic purple = 80s much?

The video is meant to accompany an article that says the gallery system isn't dead--galleries are existing and new artwork is being shown and made. I like Jerry Saltz and I like his writing. I would like to take a class at the Bruce High Quality Foundation he talks about. But in this video he highlights a few very well established and commercially successful galleries that are still showing art. But of course.

One Goofy Dragon: Murakami at Gagosian

ArtObserved reminded me of a work I saw recently and wanted to share, if only because it strikes me as such a departure from how I thought of the artist. Entitled Picture of Fate: I Am But a Fisherman Who Angles In the Darkness of His Mind, Takashi Murakami has taken over the wall of Gagosian's 24th Street location. This painting is massive, intricately colored and textured, with a storyline from Japanese legend.


When I saw the Murakami exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, including the work above, I was totally turned off. His paintings there were done in saturated color in a super flat style, and accompanied by a Luois Vuitton boutique no less.



This new painting is interesting to look at, which I couldn't have said before. I'm not saying the skulls and dopey-faced lion aren't kitsch or that the colors don't straddle a line between apocalyptic sewage and Rainbow Bright. But the surface and the application of paint is beautifully done. It's worth seeing in person just to marvel at the texures. This may or may not be a saving grace, but it certainly counts for something.

Some reviewers have commented about how the aging artist is seriously wrangling with the themes of death and mortality. This is hogwash. Just because the painting delves beyond otaku culture into older Chinese and Japanese symbolism (or the artist says he is tired) doesn't necessarily make it weightier or more personal. Murakami does not produce earnest, lyric art; he maunfactures an appealing and accessible view of Asian culture with a pop sensibility. That is what I see in his latest picture, and that is what I see in clips from his latest project, a music video remix of Turning Japanese with Kristin Dunst:

Sidenote: The rest of the gallery is devoted to works in the spirit of the 80s ala gold lamé MC Hammer pants. Enter at your own risk.