Matthew Weinstein

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  print October 1991

  Peter Schuyff

  Peter Schuyff’s work was first received in the early ’80s among a host of ironic gestures, which included Philip Taffe’s appropriation of exhausted styles in decoupage, Meyer Vaisman’s reduction of the painting to a cartoon of the surface it is wrought on, and Peter Halley’s minimal cells. What separated Schuyff from the rest of these artists was a bat’s squeak of traditionalism. His work allowed for a degree of less mediated painterly pleasure and a transition from painting to painting predicated on overtly formal issues. Schuyff had no specific bone to pick with formalism; instead, he honed

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  print September 1991

  Mary Heilmann

  For Mary Heilmann formalism is less a prison than a resort—a space so well defined that it admits a measure of free play within its precincts. One painting, entitled Sunshine, 1991, consists of a moderately scaled sunflower-yellow rectangle whitewashed with transparent layers of mat white. That this work recalls the obfuscation of the sun by constantly shifting clouds is characteristic of Heilmann’s ability to coax a range of vivid sensations from the dryest painterly conventions (in this case the grid).

  In this show, the viewer is routed through a taxonomy of abstract types: the grid, the

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  print February 1990

  THE HOUSE OF FICTION: ROBERT GOBER

  IN THE CREATION of his Urinal,1984, Robert Gober referred more explicitly to Marcel Duchamp’s readymades (specifically Fountain, 1917) than any other artist now creating sculpture derived from the everyday object. He also departed radically from the originating impulses of this historical model. While John Armleder, Jeff Koons, Haim Steinbach, and others carry on the spirit of Duchamp’s intellectual wisecrack (while exploring issues of commodification, the doubtfulness of discernment, and the irrelevance of the art/kitsch dichotomy, all addressed through a compliant stance toward the marketplace),