Nils Karsten

ArtSeen

In her puff piece on Marcel Dzama in the Style column of The New York Times Magazine, Deborah Solomon writes that Dzama’s “lugubrious fairy-tale sensibility…exemplifies the latest drift in contemporary art. Call it cute tragedy or tragic cuteness: either way, it refers to the impulses of a post-Warhol generation that uses the popular art forms of childhood to express a startling array of adult feelings.” It would be simple, I suppose, to place Nils Karsten, a Brooklyn-based, German-born artist, alongside Dzama as another standard bearer of this freshly-minted, Times-sanctioned market niche. But I wasn’t reminded of Dzama while visiting Karsten’s recent solo show at Marvelli Gallery in Chelsea. I didn’t think of Henry Darger either—their common, uncommonly perverse predecessor—until encountering an echo of Darger’s practice of endowing male genitalia on prepubescent girls.

John Graham

ArtSeen

Sum Qui Sum

Alan Stone Gallery

Three Generations of Abstract Painting: _Alice Trumbull Mason, Emily Mason, & Cecily Kahn_

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This show gathers paintings, drawings, and prints by Alice Trumbull Mason, her daughter Emily Mason, and granddaughter Cecily Kahn, turning scarce space into lively, intimate space. Kahn and her mother are productive today—both had solo shows in New York galleries in 2005—and a good deal of their work here is very recent. With each artist’s work so tightly juxtaposed, the correspondences among the pieces jump out. Thus, what becomes a more interesting method of looking is teasing apart the ingredients that each artist turns into her own idiom.

If It’s Too Bad To Be True, It Could Be DISINFORMATION

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Plato famously banned poets and by extension all artists from his Republic because, among other things, they are at third remove from the truth and they lie. However, we live in an era (and perhaps all eras are alike in this way) in which our government lies to us using simple answers waged to defend current policies. (That is, the political answers alluded to by Bush when he said “I don’t do nuance.”) If It’s Too Bad To Be True, It Could Be DISINFORMATION offers a heaping of misdirection and nuance without falling into the usual trap of political art: boring and didactic truisms not qualifying as art.

Aron Namenwirth and Jason Van Anden

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“Mixed Feelings” is a curious name for Jason Van Anden’s sculpture. His two robotic figures at VertexList are unequivocal: they laugh incessantly. Circuit boards displayed on the gallery walls show the circumscribed paths of their internal activity while small motion detectors mounted under their chins help them interact with their surroundings. Their computer-monitor heads bob around on stick necks while their waists rotate giving them a complete, if unstable, survey of the room. Their skin is papier-mâché rubbed with graphite. Both have prominent gluteal clefts and sagging breasts designating them as female. They are, in utterance and appearance, quite hideous.

Nancy Spero: The Drawing Center & Galerie Lelong

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Shirin Neshat

ArtSeen

In her latest exhibition, Shirin Neshat continues her cinematic translation of Iranian writer Shahrnoush Parsipour’s Women Without Men. Her latest filmic installation lingers on a prostitute, named Zarin, in an Iranian brothel, a place saturated with color and languid characters that frame the protagonist’s psychological breakdown as she begins to see skin grown over the eyes and mouths of all the men she encounters. The metaphor is heavy-handed, but the elegance of Neshat’s visuals and storytelling make it enticing. The ten-minute film, Zarin (2005), is part of an unfinished full-length film based on Parsipour’s book about women’s lives after the 1953 CIA coup in Iran. Beginning in 2003, and on the invitation of the Sundance Institute’s Writing Workshop Lab, Neshat has been laboring to realize her first major narrative project.

Mediating the void Gabriel Orozco

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After a few moments amongst the paintings in his recent exhibition at the Marian Goodman Gallery it becomes clear that Gabriel Orozco doesn’t intend to take up a dialogue with the history and medium of painting; he is painting not as a painter, but rather employs the format of abstract painting as a possibility for depicting his geometrical thought. The surfaces of Orozco’s paintings are fairly uninflected, paint here is read as a given or found term; it works within the context of a gallery space where a formal play between the paintings can be read inside the limits of walls, floor and ceiling.

The Long Ride of Larry Poons

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Larry Poons is famous for having been famous young. The painter, who has just shown ambitious new work at Jacobson Howard in Manhattan and Sideshow in Brooklyn, had his first solo show in 1963 at age 26 at Richard Bellamy’s legendary Green Gallery. His signature geometric “dot” paintings were a highlight of MoMA’s 1965 op art survey, “The Responsive Eye.” By 1967, he was showing at Leo Castelli, alongside Dan Flavin, Andy Warhol, and Roy Lichtenstein.

Egon Schiele

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To this writer there is hardly anything more moving in art; there are few artists whose work is more passionate and embracing of life’s dramatic emotions than that of Egon Schiele (1890–1918). He is one of the most impressive and highly influential geniuses, the kind who inspires us to live up to our own fullest creative potential. Someone, who in the course of his relatively short life achieved the extraordinary, creating a body of work speaks to the generations that follow.

Richard Pousette-Dart

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In 1951 Life magazine published a now well-known photograph of “The Irascibles,” fifteen of the eighteen painters who had signed a letter accusing the Met of rigging the jury for a national exhibition of American art. The guy on the far left of the picture (trying unsuccessfully to look as irascible as possible), one of the youngest artists in the group, is Richard Pousette-Dart. Nine of his first-rate paintings made between 1962 and 1976 comprise this show. Pousette-Dart was such an Irascible he didn’t think the group should be photographed for a popular magazine. Neither did Pollock or Clyfford Still (though as Irving Sandler points out, “They all showed up.”)

Judy Simonian

ArtSeen

The relationship between painting and architecture through the years has been a fruitful one. In its adolescence, modern art embraced the mathematical regularity and geometric precision of suspension bridges and steel-frame skyscrapers for their formal and symbolic potential.

Bob Thompson

ArtSeen

That’s what it’s all about finally—symbolism with paint. That’s why painters make paintings.

Luc Tuymans

ArtSeen

Luc Tuymans is one of the current darlings of the European art establishment, and has the resume to prove it.

Daniel Zeller

ArtSeen

Daniel Zeller’s recent exhibition at Pierogi is similar to his last one two years ago. The gallery is filled with a number of fairly large framed abstract works on paper that are so meticulously drawn they look as if they could be photographs of the earth taken from a satellite.