Mathieu Lefevre

REGINA REX
1717 Troutman, 329
May 18–June 23

Mathieu Lefevre, Wash Me, 2009, dust on acrylic on canvas, 18 x 24".

“Irony as method” is how Mathieu Lefevre, the Canadian artist who passed away in 2011 at the age of thirty, once described his work. The ten pieces—indeed a litany of wisecracks and one-liners—included in his first posthumous solo exhibition, “The Stuff Things Are Made Of,” surefootedly pronounce the clear-sighted diligence of a skilled maker who consistently infused his own mischief and pluck into the structure, surface, and content of his artworks.

Wash Me, 2009, spells its title out in the perfect layer of dust Lefevre applied over acrylic paint on canvas, evoking the obvious simile of one commodity (a painting) being like another (a car). Paint Sandwich, 2010, consists of seven rainbow-like layers of thickly applied oil paint carefully smooshed between inward-facing canvases. Shit and Natural Phenomenons (both 2011) display globs and rolls—think of a sausage slid from its casing—of oil paint sprinkled with kitty litter and positioned, somehow tidily, on pristine white canvases. Taken literally or figuratively, a mark has been made (and yes, it does smell). Under the guise of irreverence, which Lefevre very well may have felt in regard to the commercial art world he was navigating, his paintings and sculptures are animated by a palpable joie de vivre and an unmistakable respect for art. While his work may present as wry or disenchanted—e.g., History of Painting, 2009, in which oil paint has been smeared like cake frosting on the board, making an exaggerated trompe l’oeil text book—it does not seem facetious. One senses that Lefevre didn’t find his own humor to be inappropriate; these aphoristic pieces appear to be the sincere and intelligent expressions of a person who loved making art, while never not seeing the forest for the trees.

Monument to Indecision (Version: Regina Rex), 2013, presides over the exhibition like a steampunk Arc de Triomphe. A table saw, space heater, floor rug, car tire, hand truck, garden hoe, and beer can are just a few of the items the show’s organizers have bound together with plastic. Lefevre had photographed his original Monument to Indecision, 2008, and captioned it as, “Photo of all the things in my studio taped together to shape a sort of ‘monument.’” That photograph is displayed within this second version along with the contents of Lefevre’s former studio, since locked in storage. Monument—either version—salutes the maddening solitude of studio hours, the slaphappy humor borne of frustration, and the outré imagination, charm, and physicality of Mathieu Lefevre’s art.

— Corrine Fitzpatrick

Alex Kwartler and Elke Solomon

KLAUS VON NICHTSSAGEND GALLERY
54 Ludlow Street
May 19–June 23

Alex Kwartler, untitled, 2013, pigmented plaster on plywood, 48 x 96".

Alex Kwartler and Elke Solomon’s first mother-and-son exhibition of their individual and collaborative works is a multigenerational ode to light, the latest from a long pedigree of Western artists obsessed with the subject. Like the first modern master of light, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, both of these artists echo the mysteries of the natural world within their work, while also sharing Renoir’s jubilant engagement with daily life.

Kwartler emits this joy through his deceptively simple series of pigmented plaster-on-plywood paintings, which lean gently against the walls like common lumber. The immediacy of his brush marks, which dry rapidly on the wet plaster, offer a visceral sense of motion, as gray, purple, and green brushstrokes bump, careen, and crash into each other like forces of nature. This effect, made even more seductive by being buffed to a soft sheen, conjures a thunderstorm, a rolling field, or backlit clouds with breathtaking evocation that is rare for pure abstraction. Compared to Kwartler’s two-dimensional panels, the elder Solomon’s hanging light sculptures feel more literal, thanks to their use of cheap 99-cent store materials such as fake decorative flowers and plastic jewelry, yet they offer up a similar brand of transformation. Through her unusual juxtapositions and installations (all of the works are hung at varying levels above head height), Solomon reignites her kitsch materials with the transcendent beauty that originally inspired these trinkets.

Considering Solomon and Kwartler’s shared affinities, it is unsurprising that their collaborative collage paintings work so well. Shreds of photographs, all of which were taken during a screening of the movie Renoir, 2013, dance across the surface of these small painted panels. Despite their simple two-step process, the works include a remarkable variety of paint handling and compositional moves. One untitled panel features fragments of classical nude imagery nestled inside a dark, spiraling vortex. It’s a lovely and vexing picture that glows with corporeal magic. This work—the entire show in fact—reminds us that even in a throwaway society the artist will always find a way to pay homage to nature and beauty.

— Ryan Steadman

Christian Holstad

ANDREW KREPS GALLERY
537 W 22nd Street
May 11–June 22

View of “The Book of Hours,” 2013.

“The Book of Hours,” the title of Christian Holstad’s debut at Andrew Kreps’s new location, is painted across the gallery’s front doors, a cue to visitors that they are stepping into an allegorical space—a loose, modern take on the eponymous medieval manuscript used as a daily prayer manual during the fifteenth century. Inside, a garden of soft sculptures, wielded from crocheted yarn, twisted towels, bent wire, and other textural flotsam, spreads across the space. Holstad intersperses more bucolic works—a tree stump, a bush of flowers, even a flock of pecking chickens (their feet expressively fashioned from yellow gloves)—among works that seem more coeval with today: A series of trashcans hang off one wall, their tin surfaces reflecting assemblages evoking an abandoned stroller and a pile of soiled adult diapers among other works. The result is a realm simultaneously reminiscent of the fifteenth and twenty-first centuries, at once pastoral and urban.

A back room, accessed through a curtained doorway, provides an intimate fort for viewing the gems of this exhibition—more than a dozen drawings made from erased pages of a newspaper. Here, Holstad reduces headlines to words like BELIEVE and INEVITABLE; advertisements and photographs are rubbed out, becoming cryptic imagery. Within the context of a now ancient book, his use of newspapers is telling. Being a devotional, The Book of Hours guided the direction of one’s day, absorbing individuals in a common ritual. In many ways, this book—one of the most popular of its time—greatly contributed to the formation of a collective cultural imagination. In a similar vein, a newspaper binds sundry demographics with a common set of information about the issues and events that shape daily life while also engendering a daily routine that could be thought of as quasi devotional—and yet it is a waning medium. At play here is a history of shared consciousness, which, set against this dystopic garden, raises questions about rituals of our present time and precisely what binds us today—Holstad’s answer seems very muddied indeed.

— Emily Weiner

Zilia Sánchez

ARTISTS SPACE : EXHIBITIONS
38 Greene Street, 3rd Floor
April 21–June 16

Zilia Sánchez, Mujer (de la serie el silencio de eros) (Woman [of the Series of the Silence of Eros]), 1965, acrylic on stretched canvas, 61 x 61 x 15".

Zilia Sánchez composes her paintings in a syntax of soft swells and fleshed incurves. Born in pre-Castro Cuba, she moved to New York in 1964, where she remained for nearly a decade before settling in Puerto Rico. Contra the heterodox waxes and resins of 1966’s “Eccentric Abstraction,” canvas, pulled taut over frames affixed with objects such as rounded sticks, disks, and cylinders, became Sánchez’s privileged medium. This revelatory survey, the artist’s first in the United States, features twelve of such reliefs, worked and reworked over the course of over three decades. Also featured are two series of ink drawings and four issues of Zona de Carga y Descarga (Zone of Charging and Discharging), a literary journal produced by Puerto Rico’s intellectual avant-garde and designed by Sánchez from 1972 to 1973. While post-Minimalist practice is often positioned as a strict reaction against male-centric Minimalism, the inclusion of Zona recontextualizes Sánchez’s work in a semiotic frame, aligning it with contemporary developments in literary theory and their concern with the ways in which language—or, in Sánchez’s case, canvas—signifies. Similar to how her peer Severo Sarduy stresses the sensual tactility of words, Sánchez denies the demotion of canvas to a passive, flattened backdrop, attending to its status as a site for inscription as much as to its expressive, sculptural potential.

Topología Erótica (Erotic Topology), 1978, is a cloven rectangle, its two halves joined along a horizontal split. Above the break, a blunt rod presses against the canvas at a downward skew; below, an immured circle bevels up, echoing the rod’s slant. The word “topology” operates on mathematic and bodily registers, and Sánchez’s diptych draws on both, recalling the slow build of a sine wave and the organic arc of an areola. On the surface, concentric ovals of pale peach, chalky blue, and white acrylic ring the two protrusions, forming a lopsided lemniscate. Across the room, a thin-edged disk bulges from the bottom center of Mujer (de la serie el silencio de eros) (Woman of the Series of the Silence of Eros), 1965, its contour at once vaguely labial and reminiscent of the burnished camber of a Brancusi bronze. In Sánchez’s elegantly coherent oeuvre, works which span such large temporal gaps fit together seamlessly, each dilating the subtle, tensile eroticism of the others.

— Courtney Fiske

Reto Pulfer

SWISS INSTITUTE
18 Wooster Street
May 8–June 23

Reto Pulfer, Zustandseffekte (detail), 2013, mixed media, dimensions variable.

While a dream about a cave with a constellation of stars inspired Reto Pulfer’s US solo debut, he does not attempt to re-create this experience in a literal sense. Instead he has utilized language as a map, creating a tale—available as a handout for visitors to take—as a way to embed this dream within his mind. In subsequently transforming this verbal aide-mémoire into a three-dimensional installation, he has effectively untethered imagery from words. The result is Zustandseffekte, 2013, the only piece on view in this show—a vast canopy of sheer white cotton sheets that Pulfer has pulled tautly across the ceiling and down the walls of the Swiss Institute, transforming its space into planetarium-like dome. Lit only by natural light, which streams in the gallery’s skylights and through the fabric, he transforms the space into a timeless realm, anachronistic save the lambency of the day. A celestial belt of blue, green, and yellow acrylic paint rushes across the center of the canopy, which seen from below seems like splash of astral sky, a dream that has stained the surface of this weightless world.

The word weightless is key, as the premise of this exhibition concerns fleeing from that which grounds. Just as Pulfer uses his mnemonic tale to ultimately free his dream, he uses sheets to emancipate the gallery from architectural restrictions, and natural light to liberate the exhibition from the way artificial light imposes artificial time. Also part of Zustandseffekte is a trunk that resembles a treasure chest, which Pulfer has painted in the same palette as his acrylic cosmos, flushing the wood with midnight and aqua blues among bursts of yellows and oranges. Inside are tiny ceramics—totems, portents, talismans—the stuff that steals us from gravity.

— Allese Thomson

Jannis Kounellis

CHEIM & READ
547 West 25th Street
May 2–June 22

View of “Jannis Kounellis,” 2013.

K in this exhibition stands for Kounellis. Like a drop cap, in Untitled (all works 2013), an oversized steel K extends into the gallery space, impressing on the spectator the arrival of something to take note of, something distinctive to be considered in lettered specificity. The works included in this show were made from locally sourced materials—from the steel itself to the coal, chunks of colored glass, and (presumably) the tar that Kounellis has thrown onto sheets of paper in three other untitled works. These are among the most compelling, injecting a refreshing messiness into an otherwise highly poised exhibition.

To the right of the K, glass cups and vases acquired from a collector’s trove in Brooklyn are lined up on shelves to stand as a demonstration of what the artist calls “the human epic:” all the people who have dwelled, lived, and accumulated little possessions in the great city of New York. While photographs of numerous rows of glasses collapse into an illusory similarity, when one views them up close, however, these groupings show remarkable variation, including in some cases colored patinas from past use and surprising changes of shape and scale that can catch the viewer unaware. For example, a German-style stein, which one usually encounters in its large form, is posed here on a steel shelf as a striking miniature.

Since the 1970s, Jannis Kounellis has upped the ante in terms of how he describes his work, alluding to Masaccio and Caravaggio as well as breakthroughs by Kazimir Malevich and Jackson Pollock as important precedents to his practice. One clear connection between Kounellis and such illustrious company is the pursuit of something that initiates a veritable shift in awareness. It’s as if these exhibited works, which demand the viewer’s attention, are a calling card for the immediate reinvestigation of Kounellis’s entire oeuvre.

— Christopher Bennett

Katherine Wolkoff

SASHA WOLF GALLERY
70 Orchard Street
May 8–June 30

Katherine Wolkoff, Deer Bed 2, 2007, C-print, 40 x 50".

The prevailing metaphor of photography is that of the hunt. Photographers shoot, even stalk, their subjects; in the case of Katherine Wolkoff’s work, the absence of “prey” itself becomes the subject of the project. Wandering the fields of Block Island off the coast of Rhode Island, Wolkoff searches for deer beds, the matted-down sections of high grassland that deer create to sleep in. Because deer are skittish animals, those of us who aren’t sportswomen can scarcely imagine a deer relaxing enough to nap, and at times Wolkoff tracks the animals only to have them dart off moments before she arrives. Her series of large-scale color photographs depict the subtlest of traces of wildlife in the landscape; to the uninformed, these areas off the beaten path would be wholly invisible. Portrayed at near life size, and hung from opposite walls, the enclosures in the photographs surround the spectator, and any sense of a horizon line is obscured by the tall meadow. Tamped down and horizontal, as opposed to erect and vertical, the space of the deer bed is the simplest kind of construction—that of the nest. When it is shown in the white cube gallery, the dissonance between these two types of places—between the human-organized and that which is determined by instinct—allows the viewer not only to traverse the remote spaces of nature, but to viscerally inhabit the architectures of the nonhuman.

— Eva Díaz

Vittorio Brodmann

LESLIE FRITZ
44 Hester Street
May 12–June 16

Vittorio Brodmann, Deep Insight, 2013, oil on canvas, 16 x 28”.

The thirteen paintings in Vittorio Brodmann’s latest exhibition—with their cast of mutant and misbegotten grotesques, drooping visages, and a swirling, variegated palette—could be described as Sunday comic strips dipped, so to speak, in bad LSD trips. Painted on small, seemingly store-bought canvases, the canvases attest to a winsomely casual, doodle-esque spontaneity. Indeed, so apparently blithe at times is Broadmann’s execution that success seems more a happy accident than the by-product of concerted planning.

Some works are, if not compelling, then more appealing than others. Among the latter are those fashioned with poppy blocks of color, such as Moods (all works 2013), which features a multiple-headed figure on an orange ground. See also Flirtatious Trap, with its smiling blue face, or Hunger is the Best Sauce, starring a green goblin-like head and his brown bouffant of hair. Other pieces veer into a handling of paint that appears more muddy and expressive, as in Scrambled Eggs, whose pugnacious and brooding panoply of ponderously painted figures seem to lack the conviction of the works mentioned above—but then again, how much conviction can or should a doodle have?

For all this work’s apparent levity and casualness, something deeper and more fundamental is at stake. Each canvas seems to depict a private, anxiety-fueled little hell, and this invests the works with an endearingly comic, humble quality. In the dog-like figure frowning in front of a computer and surrounded by disapproving visages in Deep Insight, and in the weeping farrago of faces in Too Many Jobs, we may recognize versions of our own casual infernos.

— Chris Sharp

Peter Roehr

OSMOS
50 E 1st Street
May 6–July 3

Peter Roehr, Untitled, 1964, typewriter ink on cardboard, 4 x 4".

As an artist, Peter Roehr explored making objects that could be mechanically reproduced. He worked feverishly at times, but ultimately rejected the idea of being an artist, his life ending shortly thereafter, when he died of cancer at the age of twenty-four. Of the five mixed-media works and a three-part film on view, two are punch cards, both untitled and created in 1963, with numbers zero through nine running serially in individual bands across the rectangular paper. Here, machine-stamped micro voids replace the work of the artist’s hand and exemplify Roehr’s minimal interest in artistic production.

Roehr’s creative process focused on systematic patterns and structural order within everyday life. One 1966 paper on cardboard work, also untitled, is a square stock sheet of thirty-six red starburst-shaped stickers. Each circular crimson symbol is spaced evenly from the other to form a grid. Likewise, in Untitled, 1964, a square expanse of countless Ts is typewritten over cardboard. As objects, the two works highlight the artist’s ability to rework media specifically through presenting it (a sheet of stickers or a printed letter) as an object itself, with minimal manipulation. As images, the pieces show a structural order with no single focal point. These are entropic images; possessing an expansive focal plane in which content (red starbursts or a sequence of Ts) and form are identical, similar to the second law of thermodynamics in which energy is divided equally among particles.

The austere, exacting works on paper are countered by the boisterous Film-Montagen 1-3, 1965, which is screened on a suspended panel from its original 16-mm reels. Jazzy saxophone notes, whirring automobile traffic, and marketing jingles for shampoo and gasoline play ad nauseam as corresponding images of sunlit skyscrapers, glistening headlights, caressed hair, and rotating motor oil logos project repeatedly in tandem. For the series, Roehr excerpted brief clips from popular advertisements and looped them into repetition, which both scraps away their enchanting narrative qualities and exposes their underlying filmic structure. The film and the surrounding works rekindle an awareness of contemporary society’s relentless productive output and the artist’s own fascination with the consumption of his work. Roehr left us with many parting words, among them: “You can consume as much as you want, but you have to be aware of it.”

— Nicolas Linnert

Marcia Kure

SUSAN INGLETT GALLERY
522 West 24 Street
May 5–June 19

Marcia Kure, The Renate Series: You Know Who and the Chambermaid VI, 2013, kola nut pigment, silver acrylic, pencil, and watercolor on paper, 22 1/2 x 18".

Despite the muted and humble appearance of Marcia Kure’s work, her interior world is extensive. Perhaps this is due to the African-born artist’s migration from Nigeria to Berlin, Maine, Atlanta, and now New Jersey, before the age of forty-three. As a result, cultural mores from a cluster of traditions are amalgamated into Kure’s modestly sized sculptures, watercolors, and collages, via the hand of someone who has seen a wide array of human social dynamics.

Kure has a keen awareness of modern artistic forms, as well as an eye for the anthropomorphic and how it pertains to her imagery. These attributes commingle vividly in The Renate Series: You Know Who and the Chambermaid VI, 2013, a work on paper that features a refined hair/helmet/shroud detailed in delicate gold, ocher, and brown slivers. This sleek, faceless object evokes a tribal headdress as easily as it does the blond Pantene ideal of hair. Behind it lurks a smaller shape that suggests a child’s candy-striped toy or outfit, while blue, brown, and violet washes swirl turbulently around this dyad. Here Kure melds American beauty standards and her African upbringing into an expansive vision of the complex contemporary female: a fierce and protective child-bearing seductress to be both flaunted and hidden away.

Also on display are Kure’s bric-a-brac found objects and ceramics, which effectively work like three-dimensional collages. The largest of these objects, Unveiled, 2013, is a bulging form that is covered, cinched, and draped with gray cloth and attached to a carpeted wall mount. Bits of fur and toy parts peek out from the cloth at various intervals, giving the object an appearance that is at once monstrous and comical. Unveiled is autobiographical and anthropological—a physical fusion of motherhood and fashion across cultures.

Much like the artist Ellen Gallagher, Kure works with perceptions of race, culture, fashion, and femininity, but Kure’s distinctive collage-based approach allows her to abstract her final forms, enabling a more open-ended and subconsciously inflected read. A world’s worth of meaning is buried within these artworks, and Kure lets you draw it out slowly and enjoyably.

— Ryan Steadman

Wolfgang Tillmans

ANDREA ROSEN GALLERY
525 West 24th Street
May 4–June 22

Wolfgang Tillmans, Fespa Digital/Fruit Logistica Grid, 2012, 128 offset prints, overall 4’ 9” x 14’ 9”.

In Wolfgang Tillmans’s latest exhibition of casual snapshots, abstractions, and framed and unframed photographs—many from his recent “Neue Welt” exhibition at the Kunsthalle Zurich—he suggests that a single image always contains multitudes. Jeddah mall I, 2012, evinces this idea in a wonderfully literal way. The ink-jet print depicts a woman shrouded in a black burqa riding an escalator in a Saudi Arabian shopping mall. The gleaming mirror finish of the escalator sends reflections skittering around the surrounding store windows and fixtures while her opaque figure cuts the only interruption in this frenzied, fun-house industryscape. It’s a timely reminder that traditions often coexist uneasily with modernity’s sleek environments and technology’s engineered clangor.

In another room, Tillmans offers a radical perspective on globalization with Fespa Digital/Fruit Logistica Grid, 2012, 128 offset pages from his newest book individually Scotch-taped to a wall. Juxtaposing shots from a digital printing fair with eerily similar ones from a Berlin-based fresh produce trade show, these are picture postcards from the image-industrial complex. What’s most troubling here are the surreal portraits of vibrantly colored produce festooning booths and sealed in plastic on light-box shelves, implying that food, formerly a basic need, is now a commodity subject to the values of progress and improvement built into design, industry, and digital technology. The issue of a globalized market of food parallels the crisis of the unique art object in an age when technology enables a flood of both cheap, synthetic products masquerading as sustenance and easy digital images with illusions of meaning. Tillmans’s pictures stand out because they address that overflow of imagery and information and insist we consider the political implications of images now primarily functioning as foot soldiers for desire-producing industries.

— Paige K. Bradley

“Paul Thek and His Circle in the 1950s”

LESLIE-LOHMAN MUSEUM OF GAY AND LESBIAN ART
26 Wooster Street
April 12–July 7

Peter Hujar, Thek in the Palermo Catacombs (II), 1963/1994, gelatin silver print, 7 x 7”. © 1987 The Peter Hujar Archive LLC.

Three years ago, Paul Thek’s first American retrospective at the Whitney provided a comprehensive survey of his oeuvre, from his first exhibited “meat pieces” of the mid-1960s to the paintings he made just before his death from AIDS in 1988. The current exhibition, which features largely unseen early works by Thek, his lovers and his friends (Peter Harvey, Peter Hujar, and Joseph Raffael, to name a few), culls from a decade, 1954–64, directly following President Eisenhower’s 1953 executive order banning homosexuals from federal employment. Offering a glimpse beyond the thin veil of the McCarthy-era “lavender scare,” when gay rights were a quixotic notion at best, this sensitively curated gathering presents a poignant and aptly timed foil to the current global campaigns for marriage equality. Here, a former, improvisatory approach to identity comes into view, one that rejected any attempt to assimilate to the proscriptive sociosexual code of the period.

An untitled 1953 collage by Raffael, for example, undresses the heteronormative ideal of the heroic male athlete: A collapsed footballer, whose limp body and unbridled expression suggest the erotic, is escorted off-field by dismembered hands that seize him by forearm and underarm. To the left, a man’s upper limb and axilla, here shown nude and vulnerable, bear the fragmentary yet pregnant letters UN BE in seeming anticipation of George Joseph Thek’s own self-rechristening as Paul in 1955.

A later vitrine displays Thek’s untitled wax cast of his arm from his “Technological Reliquaries” series, 1964–67; painted silver and pink and bejeweled, it offers a burlesque take on his own Catholic mortality. Adjacent, Hujar’s macabre photograph Thek in the Palermo Catacombs (II), 1963, affirms Thek’s early preoccupation with bodily transience, decades before his physical deterioration from disease. Viewers may leave this show feeling a conflicted nostalgia––perhaps for an era when unacknowledged forms of love, sex, and death persisted despite the inertia of legislative politics––but, like one of Thek’s relics, this vestige of the past is best admired under a glass case.

— Julian Elias Bronner