Dec 222016
 

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To keep these posts a little shorter, I have split them up into two parts. The following continues the list of Chelsea exhibitions-

Terry Winters‘ vibrant paintings at Matthew Marks Gallery are made up of layers of marks in oil, resin, and wax.

From the press release-

“These recent paintings are a series of accumulations,” Winters says. “There’s a range of paint application in terms of both material and technique. Each color is a marker, a stage of development. I’m moving across the surface, modulating the material in different ways. That inflection produces an amplification of colors, both physical and chemical. But color is basically wild and full of surprises.”

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Pádraig Timoney‘s work in The Deedle Eye, at Andrew Kreps Gallery, is a diverse combination of painting, photography, and installation.

From the press release-

Despite the visually distinct results, at the work’s core is a focused inquiry into the mechanics of images. Timoney conversely works in both directions – creating new images from abstractions (the captivating results of processes achieved in the studio), or rebuilding them part-by-part from photographs or observation. In each, he acknowledges the inherent flaws of these constructions, from the faultiness of recognition, the errors of translation, and further, the subjectivity of both viewers and the artist.

These in turn become generative openings in Timoney’s work as they are distanced from their original context. The images exist within thrilling, new visual constellations, allowing for the introduction of artifice and illusion, and the question of not only what they depict, but why? Each work records an index of decisions that determine its final state, materially and cognitively, displaying a history that is intentionally left open-ended. Figuration appears to hover only a hair away from abstraction, as if the movement of a line would cause one to collapse into the other. The narrowing of this gap suggests that the works’ initial disparate appearance may lead to an alternate understanding of their connections; a net that widens only to close anew, though what’s caught within it is left for the viewer to decide.

Also make sure to go to the space next door to see Klaus Weber’s sculpture Emergency Blanket.

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Ai Weiwei has four shows up in NYC right now. Two of which are in Chelsea, at Mary Boone Gallery and Lisson Gallery, one is at the Mary Boone Gallery uptown, and one is at Deitch Projects in SoHo. Mary Boone Gallery and Lisson are both showing Weiwei’s Roots and Branches work, which includes large scale sections of dead trees, sometimes like the one seen below in cast iron at Lisson, and a 25 foot sculpture made up of tree parts bolted together. The uptown gallery includes a circle made up of 40,000 spouts broken off from Chinese teapots. Deitch Projects gallery has Laundromat, in which Weiwei has arranged items of clothing left behind by Syrian refugees (after they were forced to leave camps near the border of Greece) that he collected and laundered.

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Dec 212016
 

42125_01_web3        Blue, 2016 (image via Matthew Marks Gallery)

42166_01_web3 The dead baby boy USA, Berlin, December 2015 / Shadow of baby, Berlin, December 2015 (image via Matthew Marks Gallery)

41994_01_web3-1Motherlove: Ayla and Tjioe in a Berlin bar, New York, June 2016 (image via Matthew Marks Gallery)

Nan Goldin currently has two exhibitions in New York City. The Museum of Modern Art is showing The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, a slide show of almost 700 images Goldin took documenting her life and the lives of those around her, starting in the 1970’s and continuing through 2004. The show has taken place in various iterations throughout the years and includes a soundtrack with music from The Velvet Underground and James Brown among others. While it plays you watch the people in these images party, fight, get married, have children, and sometimes, like Goldin’s good friend Cookie Mueller, die, all in a span of about 45 minutes. It’s hard to see these photos and not be left wanting to know more as you are drawn into this intimate world.  This exhibition runs until 2/12/17.

It’s interesting to see the work at MoMA and then to see Nan Goldin:blood on my hands, at Matthew Marks Gallery. It is the first public exhibition of her drawings as well as her new “grid” photos. The small drawings come from diaries Goldin has been keeping since childhood. They are often disturbing but the content adds insight into the personal life and thoughts of someone who has already shared so much. You can also see parallels in the drawings and her photo work, in terms of both content and style.

The photos in the exhibition are large pieces, each created around a specific color, and each taking up a wall in the gallery. The images that combine to make them are from different places and time periods and yet they flow as if they were always meant to be arranged with each other. The results are more contemplative then her other work and an interesting progression.  This show closes 12/23/16.

 

Dec 102016
 

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Carrie Mae Weems currently has two exhibitions in Chelsea at Jack Shainman Gallery’s spaces. Included in the work at the 24th Street space is All the Boys (2016), in which slightly blurred images of young black men wearing hooded sweatshirts are placed next to text panels that include information, some of it redacted, about the black victims of police violence. While those images are more subtle, the most affecting piece in the exhibition is the video All The Boys: Video in Three Parts. It includes some of the cell phone footage from several of the recent deaths of black men at the hands of police, including Eric Garner and Philando Castile, and is incredibly difficult to watch. This is interspersed with funeral scenes, the dreamlike image of a man running on a treadmill with a clock in the background, and Weems’ calm voice speaking over the scenes.

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In the 20th Street space are images that will be more familiar to those aware of Weems’ previous work Roaming and Museums and is an interesting contrast to the work in the other gallery. In Scenes & Take (2016), she places herself, with her back to the viewer, on the sets of various successful television shows created by and starring black people, including Empire and Scandal. She then includes commentary in text on the side of the images.

In a recent interview with the New York Times she mentions the reasoning behind this focus on Hollywood-

I decided to go and stand in spaces where I think significant transformations are taking place in television as a way of pointing, trying to understand the role of black actors. Directors like Lee Daniels and Shonda Rhimes are laying the foundation for what can be imagined within the context of American culture. Most people go for their programming to paid television, so there’s an economic shift. Network television has been left to poor people.

Both these exhibitions close Saturday 12/10/16.

Apr 162016
 
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© Eleanor Macnair (image courtesy Kopeikin Gallery)

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Untitled, 1975 © William Eggleston

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© Eleanor Macnair (image courtesy Kopeikin Gallery)

Nan one month after being battered 1984 Nan Goldin born 1953 Purchased 1997 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/P78045

“Nan one month after being battered”, 1984 © Nan Goldin (image courtesy tate.org.uk)

Currently at Kopeikin Gallery are Eleanor Macnair’s delightful Play-Doh recreations of famous photographs (I’ve included the original photos for comparison, they are not in the show).  In the second part of the gallery is Michael Lange’s serene series Wald/Fluss (Forest/River).

WALD | Landscapes of Memory forest in Germany (image courtesy of Kopeikin Gallery)

This exhibition closes 4/16/16.

Mar 252016
 
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“4995” (image courtesy of Regen Projects)

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“4600” (image courtesy of Regen Projects)

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“0521” (image courtesy of Regen Projects)

For his current solo exhibition Choreograph at Regen Projects, James Welling combines his images of architecture and landscape (common in his previous work), with photographs of dancers to create beautiful dreamlike worlds. Welling once studied dance at the University of Pittsburgh before stopping after a year to go to CalArts, and his continued love of dance is evident in the work.

The process for the creation of these layered images is explained in the press release

To create these works Welling photographed over a dozen dance companies in New York, Philadelphia, Ottawa, and Los Angeles. The dance photographs were then merged with photographs of architecture (buildings by Frank Lloyd Wright, Marcel Breuer, and Paul Rudolph) and landscape imagery (western Connecticut, southern Florida, and Switzerland) in Photoshop’s fundamental red, green, and blue color channels, which are basic to all color photographs. The resulting electronic files were altered by the artist using Photoshop’s Hue and Saturation layers to create complicated, multi-hued photographs, which were then printed on rag paper using a 10 color Epson Stylus Pro 9900 inkjet printer.

For more information on how he achieved the look of the photos in Photoshop, there is a booklet at the front desk that contains a breakdown of the color channels and a list of each color adjustment layer.

This show closes 3/26/16.

 

Feb 272016
 

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Bettina Hubby’s exhibition, THE SEXUAL BRONZE SHOW at Klowden Mann presents several pairs of common objects cast in bronze that take on sexual relationships . This is made even more clear in the back room of the gallery where there are photos of the objects interacting.

And it is definitely meant to be funny, as this quote from Hubby indicates (taken from the press release)-

“I take my humor seriously. I focused intently and took a survey, then plunged deeply and engrossed myself into the grocery aisles to find these pairings and made monuments to my match-made couples’ various proclivities. I honor their diversity and their freedom of expression. I bronzed their essence and photographed them in a white bed of light to reveal their true natures; they gleam with a confident appreciative post-coital sigh.” – Hubby

This show closes 2/27/16 and there is a closing reception from 6-8pm.

Dec 192015
 

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James Hyde’s exhibition Ground at Luis de Jesus Los Angeles combines photography and painting to form strong graphic images.

From the press release

The title “Ground” resonates with the descriptive photography of western landscapes. In the painting context, the ground is the active place on which painting occurs. Hyde uses a home brewed paint for these works, consisting of pigment dispersed in acrylic mediums, and in most cases that pigment is a form of ground earth. In turn, Hyde’s photographs follow a “light-room” process developed in the computer, distorting and adjusting it and challenging the notion of any factual naturalism.

Resisting genres and traversing mediums, Hyde investigates the abstract gesture in relationship to photography. His opposition to the “realism” of digital photography, placed against the colors of abstracted shapes, snaps photography into place, making it a site, a location, and naturalizing it as a pictorial fact while reframing the question of the truthfulness of photography.

This exhibition closes 12/19/15.

(images via Luis de Jesus Los Angeles)

Nov 282015
 
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Melinda Gibson

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Grete Stern

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Carolle Benitah

Her First Meteorite, at ROSEGALLERY, is a wonderful selection of photographic collages by Carolle Benitah, James Gallagher, Melinda Gibson, Ken Graves, Stéphanie Solinas, Annegret Soltau, and Grete Stern. The work included in the exhibition ranges in time period from the late 1940′s to present day. Each of the photographers included brings a unique perspective to the different ways a photograph can be altered to create an effective image.

This exhibition closes 11/28/15.

Nov 272015
 
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Aaron Fowler

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Work by Genevieve Gaignard

The New New, at Diane Rosenstein Gallery in Hollywood, is an exhibition of painting, drawing, mixed-media, and collage by six emerging artists from New York and Los Angeles- Ray Anthony Barrett, Aaron Fowler (pictured above), Genevieve Gaignard (pictured above), Tschabalala Self, Michael Shultis, and Jason Stopa.

From the press release

The works in this show are multi-dimensional, with some artists using heavy impasto, collage, or flirting with the intersection of painting and sculpture. Connecting the varied practices in The New New is an explicit use of text – song lyrics, art theory, slogans, and commercial branding – in a formally exciting interplay between word, image and painting.

The New New brings together emerging artists with distinct approaches – but all with a shared engagement with the aggregate of received imagery and personal narrative.

This exhibition closes tomorrow, 11/28/15.

Sep 122015
 

Perfect Likeness: Photography and Composition, organized by UCLA art department professor Russell Ferguson and currently at the Hammer Museum, is an engaging exploration into the concept of creating a photograph.

From the museum:

When we say of a portrait that it is a perfect likeness, we mean not just that it accurately delineates its subject. There is a further implication that the image penetrates beyond surface appearance to give us some deeper sense of the person depicted. The same logic can be applied more broadly. There was a time when it seemed a plausible goal for the artist to resolve a picture so conclusively that the result of his or her work would potentially transcend simple representation to reveal the essence of the subject. Today such a project might seem naïve.  We are glutted with images. What single picture might separate itself from this flood? Any such attempt to make such a work will lead inevitably to the question of composition. This issue is perhaps most urgent for artists working in in photography, a medium that now pervades every corner of daily life. The exhibition Perfect Likeness: Photography and Composition looks at artists’ work with carefully composed photographic images.

The images chosen for the exhibition are often not exactly what they seem on first glance. Thomas Demand’s Diving Board is actually a model created in cardboard and paper. Florian Maier-Aichen’s La Brea Avenue in the Snow was inspired by a historical photo which he then created by drawing in snow on to his photo of Los Angeles houses and adding cars from different eras. Catherine Opie’s portrait of artist Lawrence Weiner appears at first like a Rembrandt painting but it’s the details within the image that draw you in for another look.

There are so many incredible images in the exhibition, it’s hard not to want to talk about them all. Check it out this weekend for free with two exhibition tours given by Russell Ferguson on Sunday (it closes 9/13/15).

(images via Hammer Museum and Art in America)