Dave Miko and Tom Thayer

ELEVEN RIVINGTON
11 Rivington Street
February 17–March 17

View of “Baseless Legion of Architects Rent Asunder,” 2013.

One half of this show, entered via a quiet door on a thoroughfare, features work you might find familiar—and like—if you know Dave Miko and Tom Thayer’s accomplished individual practices and their vivid joint presentation at the Kitchen in 2011: exquisite, strange, mute projections of heavily processed and degraded color video (Thayer) over rough mural-like abstractions made with enamel, aluminum, and other materials (Miko). The exhibition’s other section, in a smaller, glassed-in space around the corner like one big shopwindow, highlights a complementary logic of collaboration with a caterwauling mess created by fifteen artists the day before the opening. The sprawl of various materials and approaches covers the walls and intrudes onto the floor space. Black kraft paper covers half the vertical surface; layered over and beyond it is a wild, ratty population of items (samples: empty coke vial, empty hair-dye boxes, paintbrush, half-deflated balloon, two sections of installation-day’s newspaper, paint in skeins and Miko-ish spots, a mirror with an agonized, Thayeresque cut-Mylar face attached). An upside-down Kilroy hangs high on one wall; cardboard tubing running floor to ceiling in the middle of the room bears the words SHEER WOOD, either a schematic tree or shaft plunged into the gallery’s heart. Someone scrounged a roll of Jason Rhoades’s signature packing tape, printed with PEAROEFOAM in red and black, and slapped it in a sly, fitting, ugly patch on the floor.

By virtue of Miko/Thayer’s direction, this second component of the show avoids easy division into identifiable passages by artist X, segments by artist Y. The point is not to produce a compendium of styles; nor is it to express a shared look or a group consciousness. Rather, the artists have aggressively staged an incursion into a commercial space that so jumbles and overlays aesthetic codes that any attempt at interpretation—or processing, to use a different vocabulary—is thwarted. The installation is putatively for sale, in named sections, and the presence of a couple of art writers among the participants seals the impression of a full-on plunking for a kind of social, systemically aware art akin to Des Esseintes origami, intricately and mysteriously folded in on itself. When a Magic 8 Ball is cracked open and its deliberating heart transformed into an ornament on a packing-foam cross/tree/scarecrow, the gesture is a good a synecdoche of the show as any—punk as style, scavenging over bricolage, a set of options dangling aprioritized in midair.

This exhibition is also on view at Eleven Rivington, 195 Chrystie Street, until March 17.

— Domenick Ammirati

Anna K.E.

SIMONE SUBAL GALLERY
131 Bowery, 2nd floor
February 17–March 17

View of “Anna K.E.”, 2011. From left: Gloss of a Forehead, 2011, Lucky Weekend, 2013.

Before Anna K.E. was a visual artist, she was a ballerina, and though she may no longer dance, the body and its twists and turns, its shifts and swings, the rhythms replete in a dancer’s movement, are embedded within her New York debut. There is a video, Gloss of a Forehead, 2011, of her pacing in her studio, busy in the making of art. She is bent over and her pants are pulled to her knees, exposing her bare bottom, which points up toward the ceiling. The piece is projected over on both sides of a screen that sits on the floor, dividing the gallery into two areas. Also acting as a spatial intervention—and likewise forcibly directing the visitor’s visual and physical path—is an enormous mosaic, Lucky Weekend, 2013, which is propped up at an angle and made of bathroom tiles. The tiles are all white and square with the exception of a number of curved, colorful pieces that dance up the middle of the piece, forming a pyramid. Pinned to the walls are unframed paper drawings of shapes rendered in colored pencils and glitter and lacquer—the forms create melodic compositions, but can also be seen as echoes of these other interventions, here cutting up the negative white space of the paper itself.

At the crux of this exhibition is a tension between freedom of movement and the way that shapes confine and direct it—whether on paper, in the studio, or in our moving through space. Which brings us back to ballet, a practice strictly defined by a repertoire of positions. The most captivating ballerinas find liberty in these boundaries—harmony as a product of constriction. As a visual artist, K.E. gives herself parameters as well. The free-form swirls of tile are bound not only within a pyramid but also to the gallery’s neighborhood: The relief mirrors the stone facade of a bank seen out the window. Notably, there is an open space in the mosaic where posters made by her artist friends are switched out every few days, giving life to other parameters that restrict artistic license. Social and environmental boundaries are also visible in her video, which riffs on a history of video art and the role of the body with respect to the studio and the making of objects. And of course, there is the visitor. The back of the mosaic doubles as a coatrack: A sign of welcome within a space where movement is inhibited, calling attention to just how free and loose gesture can be.

— Allese Thomson

Joel Shapiro

CRAIG F. STARR GALLERY
5 East 73rd Street
February 1–March 23

Joel Shapiro, Untitled, 1969–70, ink on paper, 17 1/2 x 17 1/2".

Float Joel Shapiro’s name in an art-world crowd, and the images conjured will likely be of shrunken bronze houses and barely balanced sculptures. Spanning the period from 1969—the year of his inclusion in the Whitney’s pulse-taking survey “Anti-Illusion: Procedure/Materials”—to 1972, Shapiro’s latest show distills a moment prior to his foray in the unresolved brand of figuration for which he is now known. Two types of work are on view: drawings composed of the artist’s inked fingerprints, and horizontal spreads of small, fired-clay units that permute sculpture’s essential spatial vectors. Both emerge through direct contact with the artist’s hand as it presses, cups, stacks, and rolls. Contra Minimalism’s obsession with rigidity, Shapiro tests the ways in which materials yield to touch. The result is work caught between art as verbal predicate and art as material instantiation, between the hand’s singularity and the impersonal logic of Donald Judd’s “one thing after another.”

Thirteen fingerprint drawings, all untitled and from various dates, attest to Shapiro’s talent for straddling conceptual binaries. Each consists of repeated impressions of one of Shapiro’s fingers—index or pinky—in wavering lines or looping, allover dispersals that recall Piero Manzoni’s series of several years prior, “Fingerprints,” 1961. Some prints are sharp, their whorls and arcs lithographic; others resemble painterly daubs, their grooves obscured by excess ink. Several compositions riff on the grid’s orthogonal logic, their marks progressing in rows that never quite align at the paper’s rightmost edge. Two are so crowded with ink as to be almost monochromatic. Here, by confining his impressions to a square that is slightly skewed and hedged by a border of untouched paper, Shapiro seems to nod to Kazimir Malevich’s Suprematist icon Black Square, 1915. It is a pairing that deserves to be teased further.

Performing a sort of serial self-portraiture, Shapiro subjects our culture’s definitive sign of identity to an iterative order that, paradoxically, insists on singularity, as variations in pressure and density leave no two prints exactly alike. Ambiguities aside, this show makes one thing certain: If the history of Process art is to be rewritten, Shapiro deserves a starring role.

— Courtney Fiske

Alan Uglow

DAVID ZWIRNER | 519 WEST 19TH STREET
519 West 19th Street
February 19–March 23

View of “Alan Uglow,” 2013.

Doubles and doubling abound in this thoughtfully installed exhibition curated by Bob Nickas, who also contributes a fine text for the exhibition catalogue. Take the paintings Standard #8 (Blue), 1994, and Portrait of a Standard (Blue), 2000: An oblique photographic image of a nearly identical painting from the “Standard” series has been silk-screened onto a canvas, becoming its portrait, and is here positioned on an adjacent wall. The effect is of an image caught in a mirror, situating the real and its photographic other as equal rather than the photographic other as a straightforward reproduction.

The positioning of the paintings—some hanging just a few inches from the ground, others resting on blocks of wood or freestanding—is key. This is Alan Uglow’s territory, where we stand opposite, move toward, or walk past his works, which brings the experience of painting closer to the body. Consider his fascination with soccer, which he references in some of his works. The two parts of the freestanding painting Torwand (Red) / Torwand (Blue), 2004, are identical except for the change in color—Torwand is German for goal wall, which these propped up pieces replicate—and face each other in the main gallery space. Again there is doubling—once because of the two pieces in relation to each other and again in the two holes situated diagonally, one above the other. With this emphatic counterpoint, the structure of the goal wall, sourced from a competitive game, now becomes an object of active visual exchange.

Uglow wants us in the here and now: The ordinary world, including our movement in it, is abundantly and subtly present. A series of photographs, “Moth 1–3,” 2009, are hung on a wall to face the visitor on leaving the gallery. They present a dead moth that had come finally to rest on an Uglow painting, and as vanitas, act as a reminder of our impending mortality.

— David Rhodes

Ragnar Kjartansson

LUHRING AUGUSTINE
531 West 24th Street
February 1–March 23

Ragnar Kjartansson The Visitors, 2012, HD video, sound, color, 64 minutes. Production still.

While encountering Ragnar Kjartansson’s “The Visitors,” one cannot help but discern a palpable sense of kinship, reminiscent of the communal bonding that often transpires during artist residencies—a zone not entirely aberrant to this artist’s practice. The exquisite nine-channel video that makes up the entirety of this show and shares a title with it was shot at Rokeby Farm in upstate New York, a bucolic estate gone to seed. Set primarily in the elegant manor house, the film is musical rehearsal–cum–performance art piece that takes place in nine different rooms simultaneously. Each musician is captured in one of the mansion’s rooms, and all of them (many of whom are close friends of the artist) are shot playing a bracing melody based off a poem written by the artist’s former wife. The nine performances, each one featured on its own respective screen, are synced both visually and acoustically and have all the hallmarks of a cathartic working through of lost love, with plaintive lines like, “There are stars exploding around you and there is nothing you can do.” There is Kjartansson soaking in a bathtub strumming a ukulele, a woman bent over a cello at the top of a stairwell, and a group gathered on a porch, singing in unison. The projections are grand in scale and baroque in feel, and they light up the darkened gallery, plunging the viewer physically, acoustically, and visually into the middle of a dense relational fabric.

The evocation of the rich communitarian ethos of the artist residency is notable in that we could reasonably argue that residencies have in recent years yielded a substantial influence over artistic production. It is a core that is at a remove from the center. Which is to say, residencies are the site of some of the most intense relational exchanges—be they creative, intellectual, or personal—that occur far from the marketplaces of contemporary art. That Kjartansson harnesses, and puts to use, these intense emotional connections fostered through a secluded scene of creative production shows the artist to be an astute scout of affective territory. Kjartansson in many respects could be thought to be a pioneer of “Residency Art,” wherein that which is normally unavailable to public view is brought to the fore, exposing and giving form to the intimacy that drives the creative process.

— Zachary Cahill

“Paperwork: A Brief History of Artists’ Scrapbooks”

ANDREW ROTH
160A East 70th Street
February 15–March 29

William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin, Untitled (scrapbook A), 1964–70, mixed media, 12 1/4 x 7 3/4".

Art historian Alex Kitnick muses that scrapbooks, like sketchbooks, act as “research and development” for artists: Their pages show a variety of approaches to dealing with a framing device and each demonstrate a range of modes and energies. These thoughts are part of his essay in Paperwork, the catalogue accompanying this exhibition—cocurated by Kitnick and Andrew Roth—which features a breadth of journals and scrapbooks made by an impressive collection of artists, including Brigid Berlin, Richard Prince, and Monika Baer among twenty-some others. Here, twelve tidy vitrines house an unruly array of overlapping binders, notebooks, and otherwise ragtag accumulations of printed matter. Some works take on a diary role, creating an internal framework for self-examination and reconfiguration, like Isa Genzken’s I Love New York, Crazy City, 1996-97, which marries diary to ledger with photos, faxes, clippings, and correspondence. In the work of Ray Johnson and Brian Buczak, this internal life made physical becomes a currency between artists: Twenty pages of Johnson’ s Untitled, 1941, for example, are transformed by Buczak some thirty years later, creating a collection of campy in-jokes and ironic juxtapositions.

See also the untitled books compiled by William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin from 1964 to 1977, which are chaotic and masterful, like a mixed media Ulysses: a cacophony of voices, references, and appropriations that huddle together in imperfect comfort. Others, such as Gerhard Richter’s open-ended “Atlas” project and Geoffrey Hendricks’s untitled book finished in 2012, record their graphic fascinations into iterations rather than seeking a synthesis defined by the boundaries of the page. In Richter’s case, samples of landscape or group portrait photography are gridded together as if prototyping their relative effects. And, if books intrinsically rebel at their display in a gallery, frozen under glass, a four hour video, Scarphagia, 2013, by Karin Schneider and Louise Ward defies this: Projected on a wall, a pair of hands anonymously toil through each and every volume on display, providing an alternative, if not liberating, viewing experience.

— Zachary Sachs

Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt

MOMA PS1
22-25 Jackson Avenue at 46th Avenue
November 18–April 1

View of “Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt: Tender Love Among the Junk,” 2012–13.

In 1968, drag queen Ethel Dull started leading tours of a sparkling fairyland crafted in an apartment-cum-studio on the Lower East Side of New York. Inspired by power collector Ethel Scull, Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt’s alter ego gave entrée to a private world brilliantly fashioned from dime store materials—glitter, plastic wrap, tinsel, and foil—a world where being gay and Catholic need not be in conflict. This survey exhibition, Lanigan-Schmidt’s largest to date, offers collages and installations in a sanctuary-like display dominated by vivid color and fanciful ornamentation. Remade in 2012, The Gilded Summer Palace of Czarina Tatlina, 1969–70, an early articulation of this alternate universe, is an environment of bubblegum-hued draped plastic wrap, loosely hung and worked into jewel-like chains, with some forty foil and gemstonesque mixed-media chalices arranged on the wall behind it.

Witness to the 1969 Stonewall riots and survivor of the AIDS epidemic, Lanigan-Schmidt has seen much and reveals a darker edge at times. In the mid-’80s, in addition to numerous religious icons and sculptures, the artist made one of his most involved installations, The Preying Hands: In a Little Corner Chapel to Mammon in the Cathedral of Moloch, Greed Makes Human Sacrifices Expedient upon the Altar of Racism, Displacement and Gentrification, 1985, in which devilish figures cavort above downtown tenements in a wall installation framed in glittering garlands but overrun with foil rats and cockroaches. Small shelves hold the supposed trappings of a yuppie lifestyle: Perrier bottles, but also various brands of deodorant, perhaps to mask the stench of gentrification’s steady march. Lanigan-Schmidt’s identity-based practice—ever outside dominant movements—remains largely irony-free, foregrounding a highly personal, obsessively creative process.

— Margaret Ewing

DECENTER

ABRONS ARTS CENTER
466 Grand Street
February 17–April 7

Douglas Coupland, Imagine a Car Crash . . ., 2011, acrylic and latex on canvas, 72 x 72”.

The first Armory Show in 1913 effectively introduced American audiences to modern art; the vast, widely publicized art fair served as the United States debut for European avant-garde movements like Cubism and Fauvism, and provided major exposure for stateside modernists like Charles Sheeler and Marsden Hartley. “DECENTER: An Exhibition on the Centenary of the 1913 Armory Show” at the Abrons Arts Center—the initial announcement of the venue’s construction was made in 1963 on the occasion of the Armory’s fiftieth anniversary—pays homage to the show’s particular influence on contemporary art by featuring digital-age perspectives on Cubist space and abstraction.

Appropriately, the exhibition’s website hosts a rhizomatic cluster of artists’ projects, from Diane Dwyer’s psychedelic GIF, WORRY/don’t, 2011, to Rafaël Rozendaal’s abstraction-inspired animation, from the dark past .com, 2009. At the physical exhibition, Franklin Evans’s sprawling installation, Bluenudesdissent, 2013, strives to emulate the website’s encompassing connectivity. Evans “hyperlinks” the exhibition’s artists to the stars of the 1913 Armory, charting the intergenerational connections between them (humorists Duchamp and Gabriel Orozco, painters Cézanne and N. Dash) through color-coded tape and juxtaposed images of their work sourced from the Internet. Elsewhere, artists render the language of digital media, like Douglas Coupland’s painting, Imagine a Car Crash…, 2011, which pairs geometric QR codes with Gerhard Richter–esque color blocks, or John Houck’s creased digital print, Untitled #155,809,999 combinations of a 2X2 grid, 30 colors, 2013, which uses digital technology to exaggerate the compositional strategies of serial Minimalism.

The most provocative works, however, address the abstractions of history and power. In Liz Magic Laser’s The Digital Face, 2012, dancers perform the gesticulations of Presidents George H. W. Bush and Barack Obama during their respective 1990 and 2012 State of the Union addresses. Andrea Geyer’s drawing, Indelible, 2013, plumbs the gender politics of the first Armory Show, depicting the names of the 1913 fair’s female artists whose reputations now pale in comparison to their male counterparts. Decenteredness, in this curatorial framework, revises the 1990’s term of globalization. Instead of an all-connected international field of artists, the exhibition’s focus on virtual networks shifts both the methods of artistic practice and the exchange of ideas to an all-dispersed system that seeks representation.

— Wendy Vogel

“Dieter Roth. Björn Roth”

HAUSER & WIRTH | CHELSEA
511 West 18th Street
January 23–April 13

View of “Dieter Roth. Björn Roth,” 2013. Center: Selbstturm (Self Tower), 1994/2013.

“Nonart,” wrote Allan Kaprow in a 1971 essay, “exists only fleetingly, like some subatomic particle, or perhaps only as a postulate.” Of any artist, Dieter Roth, whose 1969 US debut entailed staging suitcases of unwrapped cheese at Eugenia Butler’s LA gallery, only to have the show shut down (noxious stench, festering vermin) and the rancid dairy chucked in the desert several years later, seems to most literally illustrate Kaprow’s remark. Roth’s five-decade career turned on the provocation of admitting decomposing matter and other dross into sanctioned art spaces, then delighting in the aggressive unsalability of the art that ensued. As one moves through the works on view at Hauser & Wirth’s impressive new Chelsea outpost, it’s difficult to decide whether Roth’s collapse of art into life yielded a radical, dadaist dispersal or a heroization of the artist as a privileged figure whose every gesture qualifies as art. The answer, it seems, is that Roth achieved both—a position that makes his art by turns fascinating and fascinatingly vexed.

As his wall-bound assemblages (think Rauschenberg unhinged, with flies) and metastatic sprawl (Grosse Tischruine [Large Table Ruin], begun in 1978 and spreading further with each installation) affirm, Roth did best when he had least at his disposal. Fifty-two small-scale intaglio prints, die Die DIE VERDAMMTE SCHEISSE (the The THE DAMNED SHIT), 1974/75, arrayed sequentially in wooden frames, are the show’s quiet highlights. On each, a found copper plate pocked with spectral, corrosive stains furnishes the ground for a succession of formless marks and tense, frenetic scribbles. Kodak grayscales and scratched-out words join with bulbous, larval forms in scenes at once expressive and anxiously disarticulated. Nearby, a rotating cast of fabricators pours melted E. Guittard chocolate into molds of Roth’s bust and stacks the confections in a self-supporting column. Such acts of performative reconstruction, here orchestrated by Roth’s son Björn often precondition the artist’s work, inclined, as it is, to breakdown and blight. Left to decay in a spectrum of taupes and milky grays, the piece, a 2013 recasting of Selbstturm (Self Tower), 1994, thematizes its own impermanence. Absurd and antiheroic, it’s a fitting monument to an artist whose efforts to flout the art world now find themselves enshrined within it.

— Courtney Fiske

Luigi Ghirri

MATTHEW MARKS GALLERY | 526 W. 22ND STREET
526 W. 22nd Street
March 6–April 20

Luigi Ghirri, Chartres, 1977, vintage c-print
5 x 7 3/4".

Luigi Ghirri was fascinated by the implications of the photograph’s two-dimensionality—its capacity for narrowness and opacity. None of the twenty-five vintage photographs shown here (all part of Ghirri’s self-published Kodachrome, 1978) contain much that could be called reportage, or even a “decisive moment.” Flatness is the focus. In Ile Rousse, 1976, a coastline dotted with sailboats is bisected by a wooden column streaked with shadows captive from another color space. This formal arrangement causes perspective to seem ambiguous, creating two foreign senses of a place—mundane and faintly surreal—that float over each other. Ghirri had a special ability to collapse the hierarchal distinction between subjects: As spatial relation dissolves, so does its perceived importance. Objects, people, and figures of light coexist in a space that lacks foreground or background, gently unseating the viewer’s sense that the photographs depict some actual space. The frequent appearance of pictures within his pictures—cardboard figures, painted logos, bits of postcards—deflates the distance between real and fake.

The press release describes Ghirri’s photos as “deadpan,” and “reflecting a dry wit”—but this can be misleading. It’s true that they are often wry, such as Egmond Am Zee, 1977 (from the complete series, not on view here), which shows a blue sky upstaged by a flag bearing the logo of Coca-Cola. But more often than not, his works are coolly disorienting—in Riva di Tures, 1977, a jet streak forms the top border of a pyramid defined by the two mountain peaks below it, with the enclosed sky’s outline implying another peak. But the show ends with a self-aware one-liner: Chartres, 1977, is divided between a window with a half-unspooled bamboo shade and a wall on which there is painted a 35-mm canister partly pulled out, which reads FILM.

— Zachary Sachs

Mary Beth Edelson

THE SUZANNE GEISS COMPANY
76 Grand Street
March 8–April 20

View “Mary Beth Edelson: 22 Others,” 2013.

Mary Beth Edelson’s 1972 collage Some Living American Women Artists features—as its title suggests—a coterie of female artists cut and pasted over the sallow faces of Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper. Georgia O’Keeffe presides at the center, all cool composure in the borrowed body of Christ, while her disciples number Lee Krasner, Helen Frankenthaler, Louises Nevelson and Bourgeois, and a thickly spectacled Nancy Graves. Though relatively tame in the time of memes, when the piece was first displayed it was read as taking on the church and patriarchy, and thus was quickly taken up as a banner for feminism. Often overlooked is the fact that Some Living American Women Artists was made following the prompt of a male artist, within the framework of Edelson’s two-year experiment “22 Others”: From 1971–73, the artist invited twenty-two colleagues to her studio, instructing each to provide her with a directive to make a new piece. Edelson conceived the project as an attempt to surpass her own ego and access the Jungian collective unconscious, deeming it “not only a self-inner, but also a self-other process.” “22 Others” debuted in Washington, DC, in 1973, with an exhibition split between the Henri Gallery and the Corcoran Gallery of Art.

Forty years later, the Suzanne Geiss Company has chosen to restage the exhibition, with an eye more towards recuperating Edelson’s ego than getting past it. The main space features three large paintings of surreal, grey-scale interiors with undulating floors approximating seascapes. One canvas spills out into the gallery in waves of oversized pillows (in deference to instructions to make a work three-dimensional). On a nearby pedestal a continuous flame burns along the rim of a thin golden halo in Fire Altar, 1972—Edelson’s response to a prompt to investigate “transformation.” A different kind of transfiguration takes place in Story Gathering Box of Wooden Tablets, 1972, a set of tiles neatly filed in a wooden box on a table. Each bears a symbol suggestive of an element of a universal, Jungian language, lacking any set syntax. What shines here isn’t Edelson's technical prowess—passion trumps precision and instructions, provided in a photocopied artist’s book, are followed loosely at best—but rather her ardent conviction that these carved symbols speak simultaneously for the “self-inner” and “self-other.” In other words, we can have our collective unconscious, and Edelson too.

— Kate Sutton

Philip Guston

MCKEE GALLERY
745 Fifth Avenue
March 2–April 20

Philip Guston, Alfie in Small Town, 1979, oil on canvas, 68 x 80".

This year marks the centennial of the late painter Philip Guston and the forty-third anniversary of his alienating midcareer exhibition at the Marlborough Gallery, which prompted New York Times critic Hilton Kramer to proclaim the artist “a mandarin pretending to be a stumblebum.” Kramer was referring to Guston’s unexpected turn to cartoonish figuration after his successful career as an Abstract Expressionist was curtailed by his increasing disenchantment with abstraction’s stymieing commercialism (Guston said in 1969, “Every time I see an abstract painting now I smell mink coats”).

This exhibition of Guston’s works from the mid-1960s on takes this departure as its starting point. At the height of abstraction’s codification in American art, Guston was intrigued by the image as emblem, and how one could create a legible image with the smallest number of marks on a canvas. His subjects were often disquieting tokens of the political climate of 1960s: driving scenes, French fries, cigarettes, and hooded Ku Klux Klansmen. Guston’s Klansmen, while rooted in the artist’s childhood experience as a child of immigrants in 1920s California, are also shrewd reductions of human forms, limbless triangles with ovals for eyes. He painted empty picture frames (Plotters, 1969), open books with fat dots for text (Book, 1968), what look like blank trompe l’oeil plaques (Untitled, 1980), and ominous cartoon-size hands pointing emphatically, like foam fingers at a basketball game, in various directions (Dawn, 1970, and Drive, 1969).

Alfie in Small Town, 1979, depicts a cycloptic dog in a desolate landscape either flying toward or being ejected from a door guarded by several jaunting fingers and the steely heel of someone’s shoe. This painting is dedicated to Gavin McKee, McKee Gallery founder David’s son. (Alfie was the McKees’ dog.) But in this context, one can’t help but wonder if it’s something of a self-portrait, and the coming-or-going ambiguity seems poignant. By the end of his life, Guston’s impudent stance toward abstraction had established his position as a founding father of American neo-expressionism. A hundred years from now, he’ll still have the last laugh.

— Ian Wallace

Sverre Bjertnes and Bjarne Melgaard

WHITE COLUMNS
320 West 13th Street (Entrance on Horatio)
March 10–April 20

View of “If You Really Loved Me You Would Be Able to Admit that You’re Ashamed of Me,” 2013.

“Do you ever question me and my loyalty as your friend?” Sverre Bjertnes asks collaborator Bjarne Melgaard in their video If You Really Loved Me You Would Be Able to Admit that You’re Ashamed of Me, 2013. Melgaard is silent. Alissa Bennett, sitting beside him, responds in his place. The moving camera continuously circumnavigates the three individuals, whose lavish sartorial ensembles change with almost every successive scan. The work was filmed at White Columns—one can even see painters in the background preparing the walls for this collaborative exhibition of the same name—where it is now on view.

Negotiation, circulation, and the process of disposal each calls for attention in this show of many sources. Robert Loughlin’s square-jawed, cigarette-smoking “Brute” is never out of view. At a time when antiques were the hot item, Loughlin triggered the market craze for midcentury retro furnishings. The gallery, replete with the artist’s furniture, paintings, and other objects, has an air of the flea markets from which he originally scouted some of the works. Meanwhile, pages from David Joselit’s essay “Painting Beside Itself,” 2009, are enlarged on vinyl sheets and lay trampled on the floor. Discarded luxury skincare packaging piles up beneath Bjertnes’s Rainbow Crucifixion, 2003, a large oil on canvas work depicting a crucified figure set against a hazy, glowing LGBT color scheme that recalls Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ, 1987. The lurid color-blocked gallery walls configure a visual dialogue with the paintings they present. In Portraying Czigány Dezső, 2013, the rectangular shape of a turquoise mirror leaves the still-life tableau in the work’s top margin to continue onto the gallery wall as part of a checkered pattern. A diagonal line cuts toward the painting’s bottom left corner, complementing the image’s perspective.

The real and imagined identities that coalesce in this labyrinthine installation advance a narrative of tested devotions: a commitment not simply between the show’s Norwegian collaborators but more so to the labor of artistic production. In his essay, Joselit writes of painting that “sutured spectators to extra-perceptual social networks.” Here, art’s capacity to act beyond itself pairs with resonating site-specificity and palpable artistic diligence.

— Nicolas Linnert

Sergei Tcherepnin

MURRAY GUY
453 West 17th Street
March 5–April 20

View of “Sergei Tcherepnin: Ear Tone Box,” 2013.

Composer and artist Sergei Tcherepnin fills open spaces with sounds while immersing each of us within the privacy of our own ways of watching and listening. Tcherepnin’s current installation at Murray Guy, Ear Tone Box, 2013, floods the gallery with his recent electronic compositions, swelling into glittering mash-ups, which combine two tones to produce a third: an “ear tone” or “difference tone”—inside the listener’s inner ear. Three “ear tone boxes” are designed to attune the listener to her own private difference tone. Inviting the listener to sit underneath some of the sculptures in relative isolation, Tcherpenin seems to be luring us away from the room as a whole.

“Piper’s Revenge,” 2012, a series of photographs featured in his exhibition last summer at Audio Visual Arts, introduced the artist as the Pied Piper, sounding his pipe from a forest in upstate New York. In Pied Piper Playing Under the Aqueduct, 2012, a video in the current exhibition, Tcherepnin wanders shoeless in fishnet stockings through a public square in Rio de Janeiro, as seemingly unfazed locals pass by. Images from the video, in which Tcherepnin appears to fade into the architecture, are silk-screened onto the veils that cover two of the ear tone boxes. When a viewer looks through the silk scrim, the fibers take on the pixelated quality of a digital projection. One’s breath silently blows the image in and out.

The boxes are seducing, inviting a different way of experiencing sounds and images. However, the Pied Piper is a meandering, even absent subject. He walks in circles through Rio, isolated like the listener. Inside the ear tone box, the city becomes a projection we can peer through—onto an image of ourselves. In between the movable layer of silk and the moving image of Rio, our privacy is made public.
 

— Jordan Lord

Richard Nonas

JAMES FUENTES LLC
55 Delancey Street
March 8–April 21

Richard Nonas, Untitled, 2012, steel, 8 x 9 x 4”.

Since the late-1960s, and with poetic simplicity and an economy of means, Richard Nonas has embraced “locally grown” materials (wood, steel, and stone) to make sense of found space. For “Ridge,” his first solo exhibition with James Fuentes, Nonas aligned his steel floor piece Long Division, 2013, with the entrance of the gallery, as if to immediately pull us into the work. Three untitled works similarly reside on the floor; made of sawn-off steel lengths, they resemble scratched and pitted building blocks, and are the show’s mathematical remainders set within the room’s topography. One sculpture meets the gallery’s white wall in an inverted L-shape, held in place by nothing but gravity.

Nonas also employs split logs hewn from downed trees, such as a pin oak post–Hurricane Sandy or a cherry tree after an earlier storm. He combines the pieces using a wooden-peg construction and installs a sequence of the ad hoc assemblages at eye level on the surrounding walls. In an evocative way, he places the lengths of wood alongside or on top of one another in an arrangement that imbues them with an aura of presence. Untitled, 2013, which is composed of three steel rectangles stacked together, hangs heavy in between the otherwise buoyant works made of wood. Levity and weight are visibly constructed in this elegant show of polar materials that each simultaneously assert the feeling of grounding and dissonance. The complexity of such a transition is at the heart of this work. Nonas asserts, “The most useful moments are the moments of confusion.” His sculptures ultimately become markers for our comprehension of these momentarily invisible lacunae.

— Kathleen Madden

Zarina Hashmi

SOLOMON R. GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM
1071 Fifth Avenue
January 25–April 21

Zarina Hashmi, Dividing Line, 2001, woodcut, Indian handmade paper, 25 3/4 x 19 3/4”.

The lines of Zarina Hashmi’s woodcut-printed and paper-woven maps evoke territorial borders, historical ruptures, and communal scars with a visual language that looks like Minimalism and moves like poetry. Long overdue, Hashmi’s first retrospective, curated by Allegra Pesenti, opened at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles last fall and travels to the Art Institute of Chicago this summer. For now, it resides in the galleries beside the Guggenheim’s central rotunda, which feels spatially right—a small selection of delicate works tucked into an intimate corner.

The viewer’s close proximity to the material encourages sustained engagements with several masterful series. “Home Is a Foreign Place,” 1999, features thirty-six prints of mesmerizing geometric forms, each accompanied by a spare word in Urdu script, meaning sun, moon, and stars, for example, or darkness, stillness, and despair. Meanwhile, “These Cities Blotted into the Wilderness (Adrienne Rich after Ghalib),” 2003, features a suite of nine prints depicting nine cities wounded by war (Grozny, Sarajevo, Srebrenica, Beirut, Jenin, Baghdad, Kabul, Ahmedabad, and New York).

Spanning fifty years of tactile works on paper, the exhibition illustrates the great subtly with which the artist represents liminal states and encourages viewers to cross them—from the threshold of a house conveyed in a stylized floor plan to the partition of India and Pakistan drawn in a rough, jagged line. Like emotional excerpts of Urdu verse, which the artist frequently quotes in titles, wall texts, and compositional elements (a translated line from the revolutionary modernist poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz, “But the heart cannot let go of its loneliness,” is strategically placed inside the entrance to the show), Hashmi’s affective, abstract marks create a sense of structure that in turn establishes a contained space for the suppleness of words and richness of images. Tracing the outlines of that space, one’s imagination burns with associations—from memory, experience, desire, and empathy—which explains at least one reason why Hashmi’s work generates such warmth among viewers.

— Kaelen Wilson-Goldie

“Howard Wise Gallery: Exploring the New”

MOELLER FINE ART | NEW YORK
35 East 64th Street
February 22–April 27

View of “Howard Wise Gallery: Exploring the New,” 2013. Center: Otto Piene, Licht Ballett (Light Ballet), 1969.

A retired midwestern executive who began dealing AbEx paintings but wound up a proselytizer for the techno-utopian avant-garde, Howard Wise was one of the most unlikely characters of the New York art world of the 1960s. His eponymous gallery was primarily devoted to works made with a wide range of technological materials—from phosphorescent paint to phototransistors and phone lines—though the space is mostly remembered for its pioneering efforts in the nascent field of video art. In Wise’s view, the works he showed “humanized” the technologies they utilized, while taking them out of circulation as the efficient instruments of an emergent technocracy; it is partly this attitude that makes him an important, though largely unacknowledged, godfather to those in the art world embracing new technologies today.

In the spirit of numerous recent shows devoted to iconic exhibitions or characters from the recent past, “Howard Wise Gallery: Exploring the New” revisits Wise’s legacy through the prism of a modest sample of works, most of them long belonging to the Wise family. These include works by some of Wise’s most intriguing artists, such as Otto Piene’s Licht Ballett (Light Ballet), 1969, which is a low, perforated chrome cylinder housing rotating bulbs that cast ambling dots of light around the back room. In a short color video on loan from Electronic Arts Intermix (the video art distributor that Wise founded in 1971), Charlotte Moorman performs at the gallery in Nam June Paik’s TV Bra for Living Sculpture, 1969. But accompanying these direct confrontations with technology are more traditional works, like a charcoal drawing by Piero Dorazio, and Peter Sedgley’s colorful, hardedge prints from his “Looking Glass Suite,” 1966. Herein lies the show’s greatest value: In its juxtaposition of works, it recaptures the open exchange of ideas that characterized this moment, before the ossification of “new media” into a ghetto of contemporary practice.

— Tina Rivers

Faith Ringgold

ACA GALLERIES
529 West 20th Street, 5th floor
March 2–April 27

Faith Ringgold, 
Black Light Series #10: Flag for the Moon: Die Nigger, 
1969, 
oil on Canvas, 
36 x 18”.

Following the first comprehensive survey of Faith Ringgold’s paintings from the 1960s at the Neuberger Museum of Art in 2010, this exhibition of her early works includes selections from the series “American People,” 1962–67, and “Black Light,” 1967–69, as well as six examples of her famed story quilt paintings. The Lover’s Trilogy: #2 Sleeping, 1986, an example of the latter, depicts a couple sleeping with a blanket running across their bodies, embellished with the story of their dysfunctional yet loving relationship, while the colors and shapes of fabric surrounding the figures speak to their African heritage. This work, like all of Ringgold’s quilts, revivifies a tradition—historically “women’s work”—while also proposing an alternative format for painting, still vibrant even five decades after its first articulations.

It is in her oil paintings, however, that one sees how Ringgold directly grappled with the weight of the European tradition she learned as an art student at the City College of New York in the 1950s. Take Black Light Series #10: Flag for the Moon: Die Nigger, 1969, for instance, which was created in response to the first image of the Apollo 11 moon landing. The piece portrays the American flag, with some editorial revisions. Embedded among the gray stars of Old Glory, and only a few hues darker than them, is the word DIE. Though rendered in capital letters, it is surprisingly subtle, coded into the pattern. But the command is clear, testifying to a reality of enduring prejudice and racism still apparent in the fabric of our society. Irregular, mazelike gray and red stripes suggest an alternative iconic image for another America, perhaps the one first glimpsed on a mass scale during the civil rights movement by way of the newly established ubiquity of television and media. Ringgold’s stars and stripes disrupt the image and narrative of national harmony that the flag vaunts, and challenges America’s hubris in perpetuating a legacy of colonization. These early works remain relevant as evidence of the struggle and triumph of her fight to claim difference and individual identity as both a virtue and a form of resistance to the homogenization of artistic discourse.

— Paige K. Bradley

Joe Zucker

MARY BOONE GALLERY
745 Fifth Avenue
March 1–April 27

Joe Zucker, British Empire, 2012, watercolor, gypsum, plywood, 48 x 48”.

Joe Zucker has an interesting way of melding subject matter and the objective qualities of materials in his paintings. After all, from 1975 to 1976, Zucker executed an intensive series about the ignominious history of US cotton production using his signature “painting” material—the cotton ball. His latest works on display, together titled “Empire Descending a Staircase” (all works 2012), offer connections between their physical attributes and their historical references, which are intertwined as tightly as ever.

Zucker’s work has always bred a unique affinity with textile-based art, a product of his sustained interest in painting’s inherent grid. The “Empire” paintings continue in this thread, though without the fibrous material. Instead, they are made of gypsum board, our empire’s signifying material par excellence (above all, the relative “health” of our economy can be measured directly by our demand for the stuff). In his process, Zucker scores the drywall sheets with a network of lines and then removes the paper from the scored side of the board, uncovering the plaster beneath that bares a pocked, irregular relief of quarter-inch squares. These squares are later painted over with bluish-grey or black watercolor.

Then there is Zucker’s represented material of pixelated classical columns and colonnades. The pillars, even at a distance, appear broken—some mimetically and many literally so. Here, the broken column becomes a borrowed-metaphor-cum-memento meant to evoke both faded empires and the enduring loss of the illusionistic picture plane. Do we dare suppose that Zucker’s take on the latter is celebratory? It certainly seems so. And what of the American empire at present? Based on these new works, we can assume Zucker’s perspective rings true with Edward Gibbon on Theodosius’s Rome: “The mad prodigality which prevails in the confusion of a shipwreck . . . may serve to explain the progress of luxury amidst the misfortunes and terrors of a sinking nation.”

— Nathaniel Lee

Catherine Murphy

PETER FREEMAN GALLERY
140 Grand Street
March 14–April 27

Catherine Murphy, Snowflake, 2012, oil on canvas, 52 x 52”.

For too long now, critics and curators have segregated realist figurative art from the contemporary mainstream, as if representation were proof in itself of naïveté or belatedness. If anyone can shatter that ahistorical parochialism it’s Catherine Murphy, whose first New York exhibition in five years displays such sophistication and perplexity that it destroys all prejudices about the ambitions of mimetic art. A longtime senior critic at Yale University School of Art, Murphy spends months if not years on each painting or drawing and yet, despite the painstaking method of facture, her art has never been a showcase for skill. Rather, it is a charged system in which the smallest details—the wrinkles in a dress draped over a bedside, or the ribs of a broken umbrella sticking through stretched nylon—give rise to the grandest questions of phenomenology and of being in the world.

Murphy does not work from photographs. Instead, she compresses infinite acts of perception into a single tableau that captures the passage of time via unfamiliar emphases and off-kilter scale—such as in Coming or Going, 2010, a tall, thin Hudson Valley landscape with a fawn in the foreground that overwhelms the lower half of the canvas. Seemingly anodyne imagery can take on awesome significance. In another example, two square-format paintings depict diamond-shaped paper snowflakes taped to a window, each one taking up exactly half the area of the canvas. In Snowflakes, 2011, the night air outside is filled with snow, while in Snowflake, 2012, the sun shines through pine needles.

Reality and image, fixity and change, nature and civilization, the singular and the countless, the painting as window and the painting as object: all of these dualities end up crashing upon one another in an irresistible relay of moments just beyond language or reason. This complexity tempts me to invoke the lineage of abstraction or conceptualism, but Catherine Murphy confirms that realist painting doesn’t require any outside defense to stand at the forefront of contemporary art.

— Jason Farago

Vera Iliatova

MONYA ROWE GALLERY
504 West 22nd Street, Second Floor
February 21–April 27

Vera Iliatova, Let Themselves Be Sad Songs, 2013, oil on canvas, 24 x 18".

“Nostalgia—it’s delicate, but potent,” says Don Draper of the American period drama Mad Men. “Nostalgia literally means ‘the pain from an old wound.’ It’s a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone.” This particular brand of manipulation is familiar territory for painter Vera Iliatova, who in her third solo show at this gallery is proving herself a consummate craftsman of this complex emotion.

Her eight elegiac paintings on display each take the rough form of a landscape, but what drives this artist’s moody remembrances is the figurative element within each work: a nostalgic surrogate who is always beautiful, winsome, and perfectly attired. Person You Choose, 2013, for instance, a golden fall landscape scene resplendent in shades of orange, yellow, and brown, is punctuated at the bottom left by a quintessentially erudite young woman wearing a fashionably oversized jacket, tresses of ochre hair wisping across her brow. It is easy to identify with this comely girl, somewhat due to the ghosts of her vanquished and semiforgotten colleagues that lay painted in blocky Cézannean fashion above. In Major In A Minor Key, 2013, Iliatova tweaks her usual figure/ground dynamic by pushing a post-Impressionistic still life (composed of a cheery birthday cake and a pair of forlorn holiday flowerpots) to the foreground, while two preppy girls approach from out of a wintry wooded sunset. The surroundings, as if in a faint memory, break apart into spiky sprigs and slender darts of black, laid over sumptuous bands of blue, red, and grey. Even the tablecloth in the lowermost section of the painting splinters into jagged shards of furious orange that threaten to topple its holy triumvirate.

Today’s practice of oil painting is itself fueled by nostalgia, reminding us of a purer time when art seemed to have a sacred quality, either literally or figuratively. Iliatova is clearly adept at pointing to the various peaks of painting’s heydays, reminding us as much of the Belle Époque as the height of Abstract Expressionism. What’s remarkable about her practice, however, is the way she uses different strategies to describe not only memory but also the fading of memory that stirs in us a longing to be reunited with our past.

— Ryan E. Steadman

“Some Redemptions”

SOLOWAY
348 South 4th St
March 24–April 28

View of “Some Redemptions,” 2013.

“Some Redemptions,” a group show curated by artist Josef Strau, is framed by a text that acts as both Strau’s proposal for the exhibition and a piece within it. Cut up and positioned between the other works on view, the text is a meditation on the artist’s attempt to redeem his work from “the consequences of his own production.” At stake is not only redemption but also the “salvation” of the artist, which Strau proposes as “an idea to save the idea before the production from its production.”

Several of the artists in the show locate redemption within a name or subjectivity. Antek Walczak’s broadsheet, Last Resort, 2013, is a series of printed texts, one of which reflects on the “appellation” of discharged LAPD officer Chris Dorner (in February of 2013, Dorner became the subject of a massive manhunt after he threatened the lives and families of his fellow officers, subsequently killing four individuals). In a manifesto on his Facebook page, Dorner asks: “What would you do to clear your name?” Later, he charges the LAPD with the consequences of their own production, stating, “I am the walking exigent circumstance you created.” On one side of Walczak’s broadsheet, the text frames a photograph of Dorner the patriot, standing proudly in front of an American flag. Printed on the photo is the address of Dorner’s manifesto, “From: Christopher Jordan Dorner / 7648, To: America, Subj: Last Resort.” Dorner addresses his manifesto with the classification that the LAPD had given him, feeding back the name that the system created, controlled, and distributed. In his text, Walczak finds redemption for Dorner in “the narrative of returning their techniques to them.” Installed opposite the curator’s text, Walczak situates Dorner alongside Strau‘s piece—both attempts to take back one’s name from the system that made it by turning the system against itself.

There is an undeniable, self-conscious problematic at work in both Walczak’s and Strau’s redemptions. Strau calls it “blasphemy” to even speak of redemption for the artist, asserting that, “art is today the most profane practice possible.” Salvation would be to buy back from the system what one gave up in the first place by taking on the name artist—the ability to speak outside the system that produced one as a subject. Ultimately, Strau thinks of this advance as a kind of originary debt. While redemption offers the possibility of canceling one’s debts, it can also be a means of deferral.

— Jordan Lord

Eddie Martinez

THE JOURNAL GALLERY
106 North 1st Street
March 8–April 28

Eddie Martinez, Matador #5 (Prince Rebel 95), 2013, oil, spray paint, disc sander, computer print out and baby wipes, 7 x 10'.

The title of Eddie Martinez’s exhibition, “Matador,” characterizes his new paintings as the outcome of a brute encounter between man and beast. These brawny canvases—measuring seven by ten feet apiece—burst with hastily applied spray paint, arbitrarily collaged gum wrappers and baby wipes, and viscous oil paint scraped and smudged with a wide palette knife and housepainter’s brush. The artist even defaces his impasto surfaces with an electric disc sander. Also demonstrable are the influences of Picasso and Miró, with whom Martinez shares a love of bold color, painterly gestures, and cartoonish forms, as well as the immediacy of illicit graffiti. What is unusual amid this macho expressiveness is the fact that all five paintings included in the show look more or less alike.

Each work consists of the same four interlocking shapes—small blue rectangle, central orange slab, tall yellow lump, and peculiar black form—on a white background but with variations in style, arrangement, and texture. The freest and messiest is Matador #3 (Street Fruit), 2013, especially compared to the relatively clean and sober Matador #8 (Joint Compound), 2013. The elements of Matador #5 (Prince Rebel 95), 2013, feel the most experimentally diffuse. But because Martinez created the series simultaneously rather than sequentially—numbers for the altogether ten paintings just indicate the order in which he completed them—determining the significance of the differences becomes tricky. Does the artist ever hit his stride or exhaust the motif? Can one painting be stronger than another? If Martinez is genuinely interested in critiquing originality, it’s only to jocularly wave a red cape at anyone foolish enough to come charging.

In street art, an arena from which Martinez draws inspiration, an identifiable tag or style that can be repeated ad infinitum is essential for legibility and notoriety; an alleged contradiction between unique and repetitive expression is beside the point. Similarly, the venerated tradition of bullfighting is as much a scripted (though unrehearsed) event as it is a contentious blood sport, with a bull’s seemingly unpredictable behavior read and exploited by an experienced foe who is less a daredevil than a highly trained showman. Besides, a matador who cannot repeat a successful performance usually meets his untimely demise.

— Christopher Howard

“Radical Terrain”

RUBIN MUSEUM OF ART
150 W. 17th St.
November 16–April 29

N. S. Bendre, Times Square, 1950, gouache on canvas, 14 1/2 x 18 1/2".

In its two previous exhibitions on Indian modernism, the Rubin looked first at figurative traditions and then at abstraction from the decades after independence in 1947. For the third and final installment in this welcome series, curator Beth Citron has turned her attention to postindependence landscape painting, placing it alongside contemporary work by eight American artists, only some of whom are of South Asian descent. It’s a productive conversation. The Indian painters, several of whom belonged to Mumbai’s pioneering Progressive Artists’ Group, imbued local topography with Western styles (expressionist brushwork, cubist delineation of forms) to establish a painterly language for a new nation. For the younger artists, working at a moment wherein both modernist certainties and postmodern critique seem exhausted, the syncretism and dynamism of Indian modernism hold a special allure.

Some of the American artists have approached the Indian painters’ work in an oblique fashion, while others have responded more directly: Janaina Tschäpe’s abstract assemblage of geometric paper cutouts quotes the curving lines of a 1960s landscape by K. S. Kulkarni. In one case the historical and the contemporary are literally overlaid. A painting by the New York–based Marc Handelman, which depicts Rajasthani pink marble so photorealistically that it seems almost an abstraction, serves as the wall on which hangs a work on paper by H. A. Gade (1916–2001).

Not all of the older work depicts India. Just after independence the artist N. S. Bendre traveled to New York, where he painted Times Square, 1950, in expressionistic splotches of blue and brown. It’s paired here with Hasan Elahi’s Concordance, 2012, a three-screen video work that broadcasts a prerecorded loop of the New York street just outside the Rubin’s walls. Silent and monotonous, it translates landscape into a much more sinister form of surveillance—and asserts that in the last century and this one, landscape is less an idyllic genre than an undertaking imbricated with questions of sovereignty and violence.

— Jason Farago

Anthony Campuzano

CHURNER AND CHURNER
205 Tenth Avenue
March 21–May 4

Anthony Campuzano, Forecast, 1998, newspaper, tape, projector. Installation view, 2013.

Many artists today attempt to remove any evidence of their hand from their work, but Philadelphia-based artist Anthony Campuzano chooses instead to flood his otherwise reductive compositions with a compulsive scribble. Areas are densely filled, sometimes thrice over, with colored or black pen lines, reminiscent of a certain vein of outsider art like that of Adolf Wölfli. But what puts Campuzano in a unique class is his deep understanding of the history of abstraction and his ability to negotiate it around his unpretentious handicraft.

The Storm, 2013, for example, is a jumble of amorphous ink shapes on board that at first resembles a late Paul Thek abstraction; upon moving closer, one sees that the picture’s tense and muted surface is due to a web of frenetic doodles that traverse these forms. Poking out from this plane is what looks like a crude representation of a Post-it note and a thought bubble locked in an intimate dialogue, one that is colloquial yet poetically symbolic of any relationship under duress.

Campuzano’s compulsive tendencies also venture into film with Forecast, 1998/2013, in which he takes cropped images from six months of weather forecasts from the Delaware County Daily Times in 1998 and puts them in chronological order on a filmstrip projector. What we are presented with is the ultimate abstraction of time and place—that spot in Philadelphia during that year—via non-figurative sunrays, curlicues of wind, and fulminous jags that move by quickly in succession. Campuzano stands as a symbol of how far we’ve come in regards to blurring the lines between high and low art, in an art world that can now comfortably discuss Martín Ramírez in the same sentence as Josef Albers. Campuzano’s agile synthesis is nothing new (think Jean Dubuffet, who went so far as to collect art by the aforementioned Wölfili), but is still a relevant and illuminating pursuit.

— Ryan E. Steadman

Stanley Whitney

TEAM GALLERY | GRAND STREET
83 Grand St.
April 11–May 12

Stanley Whitney, Bodyheat, 2012, oil on linen, 96 x 96".

Stanley Whitney’s paintings are not so easy to describe, because they foreground color, and color is not so easy to define. It routinely divides opinion and evades certainty, and so is available for infinite exegesis. It is both elemental—as seen here in its physicality as painted surface—and abstract in its potential to awake thoughts and feelings. Bodyheat, 2012, a ninety-six-by-ninety-six-inch painting, awaits visitors in the smaller, rear room in Team’s Grand Street gallery. Its impact is to double down on the already concentrated presence of color in seven paintings installed in the main space. The effect of intense color in a more confined space is still surprising, both dramatic and intensely pleasurable.

The exhibition takes its name from the painting, Other Colors I Forget, 2012, which pulsates with a wide range of tones—some radiant, others subdued—all amassing with both urgency and playfulness. The hues combine and interchange across the painting, resisting stasis. The viewer participates in this process as the eye moves and new constellations of color take prominence. Pinks and olives are alternately elbowed or caressed by stable reds or loud yellows. The geometries of grids and stacks allow color to register borders or proportions. Together, the vertical and horizontal shapes of the grid, the paintings’ edges, and the visible paths of a brush that occasionally leave drips of paint are crucial in identifying and adjusting spatial relationships. The exhibition contains paintings even more eventful, complex, and open than is usual for this artist, who is clearly expanding the field of possibilities for his work, without agenda or pretense.

— David Rhodes

David J. Merritt

KANSAS GALLERY
59 Franklin Street
April 6–May 12

David J. Merritt, Array vI.I, 2013, aluminum, victory wax, sculpting wax, Sex Wax. Installation view.

For his latest exhibition, David J. Merritt brought in a utility locator employed by the city to spray-paint neon-orange lines demarcating the water pipes and electrical lines that run under and above the gallery. The markings evoke a construction site tailor-made for Merritt’s work, one which keeps his ambitious, boundary-breaking deployment of sculpture, painting, video, and photography from conceptually crumbling apart.

Merritt’s “templates” on view are molds of a sort: negative impressions of experiences he has as he lets his hands and arms roam in rectangular boxes filled with ceramic clay. Pulling and prodding the viscous material, he forms metastatic chance manipulations that then harden into about-face totems of poured-in gypsum cement. The artist claims he came into sculpture by way of film, and while, with these objects, he exorcises actual motion, leaving just fossil records, the pieces are no less ridden with narcissism than film is. His time, his fingers, even his saliva and hair get thrown into the physical process, churning out an anatomy, literally and abstractly, of his operations. Template CS-G (all works 2013) appears to have a brachial bone embedded within the cement. One’s perception of the work’s “limb” meets the awareness of one’s own forearm—an inclusive relationship of the sort that dates back to the paintings of Piero della Francesca.

In the back room, the steel “zips” that make up Array V1.1 are reminiscent of Barnett Newman but repeat like a Judd series. They are installed beside the locator’s last spray-painted gesture: a dot that terminates in a dash, which happens to stand for A in Morse code. In effect dematerializing the wall by signifying a presence beyond, this painterly shorthand challenges Minimalist notions of the wall as the end of viewing space and transforms the five zips beside it into more than a mere rehashing of Newman and Judd. Upon closer examination, each vertical bar surrenders the prefab appearance of its references, betraying either dents or discolorations caused by Merritt’s gestural errors. Peering at them from their right side exposes another hidden-from-view feature—a fleshy undercoating made of Sex Wax behind the steel—revealed like the solution to a cryptogram, or a momentarily up-lifted skirt. We’re all Peeping Toms, the artist seems to say, curious about medium and its specificity.

— Frank Expósito

Sadie Benning

CALLICOON FINE ARTS
124 Forsyth Street
April 7–May 12

View of “Sadie Benning: War Credits,” 2013.

A pair of black-and-white videos of videos constitute the core of this taut and principled exhibition by Sadie Benning. The twenty-eight-minute In Parts, 2012, strings together long takes of motion within narrow parameters: A leopard paces tensely in a zoo, penned between rocks and the glass front of its cage; tall grass blows in an empty lot; a 45 rpm record spins on a turntable, scratching out an old soul song. To make War Credits, 2007–13, Benning aimed her camera at the closing credits of three Hollywood war movies, then played back the resulting tapes and reshot them until the names became shimmering blocks of illegible white, like redacted intelligence, flaring at intervals into cruise-missile spasms of light. The Pixelvision videos that launched Benning’s career in the 1990s worked with visual imprecision too, but there it spoke to intimacy and immediacy, while the present works deal—just as affectingly—in muddles and loops. The unceasing finale that is War Credits accentuates the temporal wrinkle between “Mission Accomplished” and No End in Sight.

Two smooth-surfaced plaster-on-fiberboard “paintings” subtly echo the videos. The truncated bull’s-eye of Red and White Painting, 2013, with sizable gaps between the cells of its four-by-four grid, rhymes not just with a bomber’s sights but also with War Credits’ sense of a closed cycle that isn’t graspable in full. The repeated right angles of Blue and White Painting, 2013, reprise the constrained motion of In Parts, with its lines of varying widths seeming almost to vibrate in place.

Nearby, the fragmentary cuneiform-like carvings of Jangled Nerves, 2013, suggest both an ancient code not yet cracked (an untranslated war epic?) and something only partly inscribed. And untitled (newspaper painting), 2010, layers gouache over pages from the New York Times. Beneath the blocks of pigment, the newspaper’s record of events is visible only in scraps; yet the events themselves, and their effects, persist.

— Sara Marcus

Michele Abeles

47 CANAL
47 Canal Street, 2nd Floor
April 18–May 19

Michele Abeles, Transparencies, 2013, archival pigment print, oil on glass, 38 5/8 x 29".

Michele Abeles’s ink-jet prints emerge through twin operations of building up and flattening out. In the nine compositions on view, Abeles permutes a stock vernacular of images—palm fronds, stippled skin, torn newspaper, a box of Abilify—that she photographs digitally and then recycles. Each is arranged in intercalated planes that, rather than recede into the frame, sit strangely atop its surface, creating tableaux whose depth mimes that of a computer screen. Her first show at 47 Canal turned on the allure of passing analog techniques for digital, with ostensibly edited effects arising through an intricate architecture of Perspex, gels, and green screens. This second round, while still beholden to in-studio sculptural setups, collapses the two modes. Photoshop’s default, the rectangular “layer,” furnishes the photographs’ logic, and Abeles deploys many of the program’s signature quirks, bounding planes with drop shadows and filling shapes with slow, synthetic fades. If software and-studio-based abstractions are impossible to distinguish, parsing the two, Abeles suggests, is a moot project.

A recumbent cat, rendered so sharply as to appear almost suspended above a patterned rug, anchors the triptych Coaches, 2013. The animal, its gaze trained at the camera, appears twice: first in the upmost photograph and again, slightly smaller, in the leftmost iteration. Planks of unvarnished wood rim the carpet, forming a sort of frame within the frame and hedging a spread of lush greenery. In a subtending layer, metal chains and gessoed tiles weave across a creamsicle-to-lime gradient. These elements recur in the bottommost print alongside an incurved cutout of a Monet water lily overlain with stencil-style type.

Literalizing Abeles’s theme of repetition, Transparencies and Transparencies II, both 2013, are an identical pastel-smooth pastiche. Atop the glass pane of the first work, a mangled female nude, lifted from Francis Picabia’s own “Transparencies,” is outlined in red oil. The two titles prove provocative in light of both the opacity of the prints’ facture and the long-held notion of the photograph as an unclouded window into the world. In the compressed, high-def spaces Abeles constructs, transparency only ever affords a view of another plane of pixels.

— Courtney Fiske

Chuck Close

EYKYN MACLEAN | NEW YORK
23 East 67th Street
April 16–May 24

Chuck Close, Phyllis/maquette, 1981, gelatin silver print with graphite and ink mounted to board, 30 x 20”.

Whether in laboriously executed paintings or technically complex fine art prints, Chuck Close has famously reprised the same subject throughout his long career: the visages of his friends, his colleagues, and himself. The degree of removal that characterizes the transition of these works from documentary image to abstracted interpretation suggests that portraiture serves Close as a vehicle for technical experimentation, rather than an end in itself. Yet this exhibition of twenty-seven unique photo maquettes (mostly large-format Polaroids) taken by the artist as source material to be scaled up and reinterpreted in his more famous works may prompt reconsiderations of such assumptions about Close’s production over the past four decades. These intermediary images bear the traces of the exacting transformation enacted upon them, including masking tape and coordinated grids. A didactic display of several maquettes alongside the works that resulted from them reveals the dramatic shift from photograph to final work. For instance, a smiling child in Emma/maquette, 2000, who leans toward Close and his camera is juxtaposed with a 2002 woodcut of her close-up face abstracted into orbs of color.

The show also emphasizes the unexpectedly ephemeral origins of Close’s practice, in which quotidian, even banal images develop into finished products that are designed to overwhelm, either through scale or sheer labor. Many of the photographs on view reveal the relaxed poses of their sitters while also bearing evidence of the photos’ casual presence in the artist’s studio. The lower right corner of Phyllis/maquette, 1981, for example, is covered with thumbprints and smudges. The margins of the maquette, as well, are punctuated with the artist’s notes: a math problem worked out by hand, perhaps related to scaling up the final product, and, even more personally, a scrawled phone number and movie title. In the same pencil and loose cursive of the latter, however, Close deliberately signed, titled, and dated the work, a gesture that solidifies both the importance of these long unseen photographs and the unconsidered duality of his enduring and evolving practice.

— Britany Salsbury

Zak Kitnick

CLIFTON BENEVENTO
515 Broadway
March 23–May 25

View of “Zak Kitnick,” 2013.

Like John Baldessari's What Is Painting, 1968, Zak Kitnick’s recent wall-mounted sculptures are playfully self-reflexive. Available in thirty-two permutations, each sculpture comprises a monochrome steel shelving unit holding multiples of the same unit stacked one on top of the other, constituting an absurd display of displays, as in Family, Health, Community, Cultivate Social Life, Strengthen Family Ties, Improve Health, Wood, Green, 2013. (One wonders if they obliquely parody the recent ubiquity of artworks that, by telegraphing their value as a financial investment, seem to sell themselves.) The sculptures are complemented by a similarly industrial series of vertical steel panels, which are coated with a silvery powder and printed with planes of matte black, like Love and Marriage, Kun (Earth), Pink, Love/ Relationship, 2013, installed on the walls of the gallery space.

Though not readily apparent to the uninitiated, the shapes of black on the panels, like the colors and placement of the shelves, were determined by overlaying the Bagua grid of Feng Shui—a three-by-three rubric of color-coded elements such as wealth, health, and creativity—over a map of the gallery. Cribbed from the internet, Kitnick’s hokey-looking Bagua grid suggests the impoverishment of esoteric forms of knowledge in the digital age, as well as the reduction of artmaking to a banal formula: Like acquiring the right MFA degree or claiming the right influences, the Bagua grid guarantees success.

By invoking the design principles of Feng Shui, Kitnick ups the ante on the trope of artist-as-designer. At stake, as the square form of the Bagua grid indicates, is the legacy of Minimalism. But while other artists interpret that legacy stylistically (as in the parlor game “Judd or IKEA?”), Kitnick’s turn to Feng Shui foregrounds Minimalism’s interest in phenomenological space. It also reminds us of the latent irrationality of Conceptualism (evidenced by the works of Sol LeWitt, which echo here), as the deployment of Feng Shui to motivate abstract works of art is simultaneously systematic and ludicrous.

— Tina Rivers

Alexandre Kojève

THE JAMES GALLERY OF THE CUNY GRADUATE CENTER
The Graduate Center, The City University of New York, 365 Fifth Avenue
April 10–June 1

View of “After History: Alexandre Kojève as a Photographer,” 2013.

In a present where posthistorical, postpolitical, and, in the field of art, postmodern ideas prevail, looking back at a past theorization on the end of history hints at what retrospective reflections on our own contemporary might look like one day. Russian-born French philosopher Alexandre Kojève is best known for arguing that ideological history had come to a close with the French Revolution. From lecturing the likes of Bataille, Camus, Lacan, Merleau-Ponty, and Sartre in Paris during the 1930s to becoming a statesman instrumental in laying the foundation for what would become the European Union after the war, Kojève personifies the uneasy interrelationship between theory and practice. For the exhibition “After History: Alexandre Kojève as a Photographer,” curated by Boris Groys, this somewhat discordant relationship is made manifest by the archive of the philosopher-turned-dignitary’s travels.

Through idiosyncratic flowcharts, we learn that Kojève was an avid voyager who meticulously documented his itineraries. Displayed on tables are copies of some of the thousands of postcards he collected picturing various monuments and artworks seen during his trips. The gallery’s back room also presents seven synchronized slideshows of Kojève’s snapshots from the 1950s and ’60s of China, Japan, South Asia, the USSR, and Europe. Like the mass-produced cards, many of these personal photographs depict unpopulated ancient and religious sites, as if Kojève were attempting to lend these places a timeless focus capable of outlasting the flash in which the snapshots were taken. In the catalogue, Groys proposes that the photos exhibit a “post-historical melancholy” by documenting a past elided by posthistorical reality. Yet, it also seems that these emphatically historical, heterogeneous cultural scenes do not square neatly with Kojève’s Eurocentric end-of-history model.

This rift speaks to the ever-relevant cognitive dissonance between thinking about the world in an ideal sense and looking at it with all of its untidy particularities. Comparably, documentation of the same journeys today would evince a more interconnected reality, but still not one that is as smoothly uniform as contemporary posthistorical globalization discourses describe.

— Sarah Lookofsky

Josh Tonsfeldt

SIMON PRESTON
301 Broome Street
April 24–June 2

View of “Josh Tonsfeldt,” 2013.

The primary operation in Josh Tonsfeldt’s solo show is the layering of architectural forms—the accretion of references to locations beyond the gallery that relate to the artist’s personal experiences. Tonsfeldt has transformed Simon Preston Gallery by diagrammatically integrating the Iowan farmhouse where his grandfather lived, mapping the midwestern building onto the conditions of the gallery. In the main installation eighteen three-foot-wide and nearly eight-foot-tall plaster casts of the gallery floor are propped up like Minimalist slabs to represent the modest, domestic height of the farmhouse walls inside the industrial scale of the gallery’s space. The gallery and the house architecturally fuse. Additionally there are hints of another space—the Brussels gallery that is Tonsfeldt’s next venue, designated here by freestanding plywood sections that denote the position of the walls in Brussels and are situated at the perimeter of the plaster casts. When conceptually layered these unexpected locations act as multivalent pointers to the mutability of space and memory.

Tonsfeldt returned to his grandfather’s farm after a fire rendered the house uninhabitable. It was full of decaying surplus materials, as well as damaged furniture, selected elements of which he has installed sparingly in the reconstructed house. While creating this space of memory and composite architecture, Tonsfeldt discovered behind the white walls of the gallery a forgotten window, and cut away the sheet rock to reveal it. Natural light now enters the gallery, just as daylight gained access to the farmhouse after the destructive fire. On the once-hidden windowsill Tonsfeldt found a one-gallon plastic jug holding water, which he juxtaposed with a printer lid discovered in the rubble of the farmhouse, also plastic, and melted beyond recognition. Like delicate memories pieced together over the topography of architecture, this show functions to annunciate layers of time and place.

— Kathleen Madden

Jay DeFeo

WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART
945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street
February 28–June 2

Jay DeFeo, The Eyes, 1958, graphite on paper, 42 x 84 3/4”.

Four years ago, the Whitney presented an exhibition by a renowned artist whose work, for some, wavered on the brink of kitsch. Georgia O’Keeffe, so celebrated for her petunias and lilies, seemed like another person: The bold and graphic abstractions on view proved overwhelming. Even Alfred Stieglitz’s racy photographs of O’Keeffe posing nude with her paintings looked fresh. Now, the museum is taking on another difficult and sometimes discounted artist—Jay DeFeo, best known for a flower of her own (The Rose, 1958–66)—by mounting an elegant and revelatory retrospective. Comparisons between O’Keeffe and DeFeo could go on. In 1976, the younger American remarked about the dowager, “I feel that she is probably motivated, much as I am myself, by natural forms, and I think I respond to them much as she does.” Yet the strength of this exhibition is its focus on the robust individuality and moxie of DeFeo’s oeuvre. Her lifelong resistance to categorization and a signature style is evinced throughout the show—in her early jewelry, the midcareer photographic experimentations, and the chapel-like room that can barely contain The Rose—but also in her later paintings, which blend hardedge abstraction with Minimalism and a hermeneutic interest in materiality. One is always left wondering if DeFeo’s subjects are organic, manufactured, or some compelling hybrid.

Not on view, but thankfully included in the excellent catalogue, is a selection of Wallace Berman’s 1959 gelatin silver prints of DeFeo posing nude, spread-eagle, and sometimes pinned against The Rose. These images, as well as The Eyes, 1958 (which was based on her eyes and is installed directly across from The Rose), portray the unblinking visionary as self-aware, unafraid to gaze directly forward, or back at us. That’s also how DeFeo’s friends in the Bay Area, where she lived nearly all her life, have largely remembered her: driven and animated by a strong life force. If the rest of the world hasn’t yet caught up to DeFeo as equally essential and as master blasting as Eva Hesse, Lee Bontecou, Lee Lozano, and, yes, Ms. O’Keeffe—this exhibition says we must. And we will.

— Lauren O’Neill-Butler

Anselm Kiefer

GAGOSIAN GALLERY | 522 WEST 21ST STREET
522 West 21st Street
May 3–June 8

View of “Anselm Kiefer: Morgenthau Plan,” 2013. Foreground: der Morgenthau Plan, 2012–13. Background: Von der Maas bis an die Memel, von der Etsch bis an den Belt (From the Meuse to the Memel, From the Adige to the Belt), 2012.

“Morgenthau Plan” presents paintings and sculptures with a quintessentially Anselm Kiefer–esque repertoire of elegiac imagery molded upon scorched and densely processed surfaces. Here, fifteen large-scale canvases depicting barren expanses strewn with detritus, sparse stalks, and pastel-hued flowers—painted over enlarged photographs of blooming fields near the artist’s studio in southern France—stretch into an immersive continuum. The visual rhetoric of these monumental landscapes, evocative of an ideological past at the core of Kiefer’s critique yet infinitely bound to his psyche, has been central to his art since the 1970s, ever propelled by the artist’s cathartic reckonings with Germany’s haunted modern history. This show’s title refers to the 1944 proposal devised to enforce the industrial disarmament of post-WWII Germany by reducing it to an agricultural state; eventually un-instituted, it led the artist to contemplate the precariousness of oversimplified grand schemes. Yet the aesthetics of Kiefer’s painterly and symbolic scars remain largely familiar—in some places satisfyingly so, in others verging on literalism.

Of particular interest is Von der Maas bis an die Memel, von der Etsch bis an den Belt (From the Meuse to the Memel, from the Adige to the Belt,), 2012, a tempestuous seascape of gravitas and a monstrous presence, anchored near the gallery’s entrance. The nuanced combination of its massive frame—constructed from lead panels—and the ominous Romantic imagery results in a chilling sense of immediacy. Yet there is also an eerie luminosity: an incandescent emerald seeping through encrusted impasto layers that bypasses easy associations with Turner or Courbet and conjures instead Tintoretto’s Christ at the Sea of Galilee. The title of this new painting, scribbled on a sleek plaque affixed to the frame’s base, transcribes an obsolete stanza in “Deutschlandlied” (Song of Germany) that extols four rivers demarcating a much broader territory than the country currently encompasses. Its omission from the current national anthem potentially illuminates an undercurrent that traces back to “Occupations,” 1969, Kiefer’s early series of staged photographs in which he struck Nazi salutes against monumental or natural settings—one of these a seascape.

— Xin Wang

“Jane Freilicher: Painter Among the Poets”

TIBOR DE NAGY GALLERY
724 Fifth Avenue
April 13–June 13

Jane Freilicher, Portrait of John Ashbery, 1968, oil on canvas, 20 1/4 x 18".

The poet John Ashbery wrote, “[traditional art] can offer no very real assurances to its acolytes and since traditions are always going out of fashion it is more dangerous and therefore more worthwhile than experimental art.” It may be this sentiment that brought the poet and painter Jane Freilicher together as friends, though “Jane Freilicher: Painter Among Poets” suggests there was more than formal appreciation to their relationship. The exhibition consists of several landscapes and still lifes as well as a couple abstract paintings by New York–based Freilicher, whose career has extended over the past sixty years, along with two videos by Rudy Burckhardt starring the painter, and four vitrines featuring missives and illustrations created as well as traded among Freilicher, Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, Joe Hazan, Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler, Joe Brainard, and more.

This show departs from the curatorial thematic of the artist’s circle in that the collaborative product of poet and painter is not the focus of the show, rather it is the relationship between the two that is on exhibition. In the vitrines, letters between O’Hara, Ashbery, and Freilicher exhibit the influence each artist had on the other through diaristic and informal written exchanges, while Freilicher’s portraits of both poets and of her own studio lend the texts immediacy and intimacy. Early descriptions of exhibitions at Tibor de Nagy and gossip about the circle of artists who showed there abound in the Parnassian and epistolary back and forth. In the work Parts of a World, 1987, Freilicher depicts a table with a blue china bowl, a blushing orchid, and a gray plate holding four luminous sardines, with a crepuscular cityscape glowing in the background. A gossamer sheet draped over the table radiates against a soft blue that Freilicher uses to flatten the space between foreground and background—a technique she is fond of—drawing the viewer into a poetic and emotional relationship with the space and objects. The resulting effect of the vitrines and paintings is not only documentation of Freilicher and her prominent position within the New York School poets, but also an important record of the history of Tibor de Nagy Gallery and the second-generation Abstract Expressionist movement.

— John Arthur Peetz

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“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