Katy Siegel

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  print Summer 2019

  OKWUI ENWEZOR

  NO LESS PAINFUL for coming after a long illness, the shock of Okwui Enwezor’s death produced a near-universal thought experiment: What would the art world look like today had he never existed? His expansive imagining disoriented the professionals and publics of art alike, to an extent with which we are still coming to terms.

  Okwui was a famously big thinker, and yet one of the great pleasures of working with him was small and routine: discussing the news of the day over coffee. The way he talked politics made the usual liberal chitchat seem pale and provincial; he saw every situation as complex,

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  previews January 2019

  “JACK WHITTEN: JACK’S JACKS”

  Curated by Udo Kittelmann and Sven Beckstette

  Jack Whitten’s enormous artistic risk-taking and rigorous self-discipline helped him produce an oeuvre almost unprecedented in its breadth and dynamism. Spanning his early gestural paintings to the final one he made before his death in January 2018, this thirty-five-painting survey will provide a much-needed introduction for European audiences. Rather than a linear time line, the exhibition aims to create a map of Whitten’s galaxy, presenting many works he dedicated to his artistic and intellectual peers, from Romare Bearden and Louise Bourgeois to

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  print February 2016

  Joan Mitchell

  GESTURE, LIKE EMOTION (or affect, easier to swallow for some reason), is back, but we’re not much better at talking about it than we were in previous go-rounds with AbEx, Informel, etc. We still discriminate too strongly between broad categories such as abstraction and figuration, male and female, first and second generation, but fail to distinguish finely the touch and speed and scale of gestures: licks, drags, pats and pokes, strokes, skitters, pushes, sharp right turns. These marks correspond to, or rather just are, feeling: feeling not as emotion alone, transcribed on canvas, but as a state

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  diary January 13, 2012

  It’s All Over

  OF ALL THE DAMIEN HIRST SHOWS at individual Gagosian satellites, the particular set of spot paintings chosen for the Twenty-First Street press preview on Wednesday featured the widest range of spot and painting sizes, from extra small to extremely large. This “curatorial decision” (there’s a different conceit for each of the eleven locations) nicely emphasized the gallery machine’s wishful differentiation, searching for the supposedly local and unique in the fundamentally global and repetitive condition, labeled here “Damien Hirst the Complete Spot Paintings 1986–2011.” This may or may not work

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  diary March 15, 2011

  Now What?

  THE CHASM BETWEEN DISCOURSE AND EXPERIENCE is hard to ignore: A museum director muses virtuously about the virtues of doing nothing, and then rushes off to a waiting car and driver. Curators-as-intellectuals offer glosses on the history of exhibitions cribbed from Wikipedia and return to their seats to play with their phones and trade Sephora samples (really) as others take their turn onstage. And academics whose commitment to avant-garde thinking is their currency ritually name-check the standard landmarks of the European/American 1960s. Almost all of them, in an era of collaboration and pressing

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  previews January 2011

  Jim Nutt: Coming into Character

  Jim Nutt has been making small, hard, delicate paintings of female heads for the past twenty years.

  Jim Nutt has been making small, hard, delicate paintings of female heads for the past twenty years. Lynne Warren’s exhibition traces the heads’ development back through the decades to Nutt’s more familiar works of the 1960s, depicting characters such as Wiggly Woman and Johnny Whatzit. The handmade frames and changing palette of the intervening years constitute a compelling narrative. But the revelation lies in the more recent and utterly singular work, with its oddly dissociated facial features and meticulous clarity of rendering. If figuration seems pressing now, much

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  previews September 2009

  “Georgia O’Keeffe: Abstraction”

  Seen through the eyes of today’s younger artists, O’Keeffe’s brand of American art looks interesting again, specific and local amid globalism’s anyspacewhatever, late, late modernism.

  For the past few decades, American art’s first lady has looked a bit kitschy to insiders, her artistic mode as pseudo-authentic as “southwestern” cuisine. Then there is her troublesome status as a celebrity, thanks in part to Alfred Stieglitz’s racy portraits (some of which appear in this exhibition), as well as to her subject matter. But maybe we were wrong. By foregrounding her abstractions—130 paintings, watercolors, drawings, and sculptures—the case can be made for a radicality underlying her popularity,

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  previews September 2008

  “Reimagining Space: The Park Place Gallery Group in 1960s New York”

  Historian Linda Dalrymple Henderson has assembled some forty paintings, sculptures, and drawings by the Park Place Gallery’s major artists: Mark di Suvero, Dean Fleming, Robert Grosvenor, Forrest Myers, and six others. They occupied a specific nexus of geometric abstraction and new concepts of space.

  Operating in downtown Manhattan for five exhilarating years, the Park Place Gallery, founded by a group of like-minded artists in 1962, occupied a specific nexus of geometric abstraction and new concepts of space. Seeking to map this forgotten quarter of postwar art, historian Linda Dalrymple Henderson has assembled some forty paintings, sculptures, and drawings by the gallery’s major artists: Mark di Suvero, Dean Fleming, Robert Grosvenor, Forrest Myers, and six others. An accompanying catalogue will reconstruct the work’s heady milieu, which fused diverse

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  previews September 2008

  Per Kirkeby

  Timed to coincide with Per Kirkeby’s seventieth birthday, this major exhibition asserts the importance of the Danish artist’s work from the 1970s through today, with a hundred paintings, fifty sculptures, and a catalogue that includes essays by Richard Shiff, Robert Storr, and Ulrich Wilmes.

  Timed to coincide with Per Kirkeby’s seventieth birthday, this major exhibition asserts the importance of the Danish artist’s work from the 1970s through today, with a hundred paintings, fifty sculptures, and a catalogue that includes essays by Richard Shiff, Robert Storr, and Ulrich Wilmes. Shifting away from overheated interpretations of gestural painting and the local CoBrA legacy, the show makes the case for Kirkeby as a method man, not a modern primitive. An independently organized show of the artist’s sketches, notebooks, photographs, and other archival material

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  print April 2008

  MARKET INDEX: LEE LOZANO

  VAN GOGH’S SUICIDE once seemed the epitome of artistic alienation, but by the mid-1960s, the dominant culture celebrated nonconformity and the gray flannel suit was the butt of jokes. As a new art public wrapped the artist in its sticky embrace—killing him by “smothering him with kisses,” as Art News editor Thomas Hess put it—perhaps the most radical action an artist could take was career suicide.

  The negation of the economy is the fundamental condition for belief in art, as Pierre Bourdieu writes; certain artists simply take this principle to the extreme. No one has embodied a more

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  previews January 2008

  Tomma Abts

  Modernism just won’t go away. Tomma Abts is perhaps the best of the many painters practicing today who still find infinite resource in the complications of image and surface, of illusion and material. Her small canvases come across as faintly historical, but nonetheless don’t look like anything but themselves. Laura Hoptman brings together fourteen paintings from the past ten years in what promises to be an exhibition of heart-stopping density. The catalogue includes Bruce Hainley and Jan Verwoert, reliably insightful writers taking a shot at the mystery that surrounds

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  previews January 2008

  “Solitaire: Lee Lozano, Sylvia Plimack Mangold, Joan Semmel”

  The Pandora’s box of painting continues to let loose spirits from the 1960s and ’70s, changing the way we think about our recent past. Helen Molesworth, formerly chief curator at the Wexner and now at Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum, looks in depth at three artists with specific relationships to feminism, figurative painting, and their own selves. From our vantage point, the communal ethos of a long-ago art world tantalizes. But the late Lee Lozano often stood apart from her surroundings, as Sylvia Plimack Mangold and Joan Semmel continue to do—an autonomy that the