ArtSeen
Brian Jungen
By Stephanie BuhmannFollowing his 2004 installation at Triple Candie of a life size basketball court made of 224 sweatshop tables, Brian Jungen revisits New York with an extensive survey of works from 1993 to 2005. A leading member of a new generation of Vancouver artists, Jungen covers the entire ground floor at the New Museum’s transitional location in Chelsea.
Joan Jonas
The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things
By Geoffrey Cruickshank-Hagenbuckle
Conceived and directed by performance artist Joan Jonas with original piano score by Jason Moran, the central narrative focus of The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things is the unprecedented life and work of art historian Aby Warburg (1866-1929).
El Museo’s Bienal: The (S) Files/The Selected Files
El Museo del Barrio
By Chris Howard
The difficulties of El Museo del Barrio’s mission are reflected in the conflicting statements and provocative questions raised by The (S) Files/The Selected Files, the museum’s first attempt at a biennial of contemporary art.
Manufactured Landscapes: The Photographs of Edward Burtynsky
By William PowhidaEdward Burtynsky’s show of large scale photographs of the industrial landscape owes more to the photography of Ansel Adams or the paintings of Charles Scheeler than to contemporaries like Andreas Gursky or Gregory Crewdson.
Marcia Hafif
By John WalthemathAlthough she shows extensively elsewhere, Marcia Hafif’s exhibition Glaze Paintings in Chelsea provides a rare opportunity to see the artist’s work in New York. The pure sensation of light that bounces off the surface of each of her canvases seems to indicate colors so precisely calibrated that each emits a single frequency of light.
Christopher Wilmarth
Sculpture and Drawings
By Ben La Rocco
Chris Wilmarth wrote country music and loved it enough to contemplate giving up sculpture for it. Like his sculpture, his songs are without frills. They’re rough around the edges and wistful, with a strong dose of nostalgia straight out of the blues. His voice is high and nasal and has a bit of Dylan and a bit of Guthrie in it. Hank Williams was his favorite.
Roland Flexner
Nocturne
By Shane McAdams
If you ask Roland Flexner, he will adamantly deny being anything so categorically limiting as a “process artist,” despite the ingenious mark making events using blown bubbles of soap, ink, and water he has come to be known for. He’s not playing coy about the sexy forms that emerge in his art—these methods are the journey for him, not the destination.
Alex Katz
First Sight: Working Drawings from
1965–2002
By Thomas Micchelli
Two years ago, the Peter Blum Gallery held an exhibition called “Alex Katz: Cartoons,” which raised some entertaining questions about the role of intentionality in the creation of a work of art. The drawings on display were essentially by products of the process Katz uses to compose his large-scale paintings.
Geoffrey Dorfman
Recent Work
By James Kalm
Paint, the essence of paint, the substance of paint, the materiality of paint, the culture of paint. Geoff Dorfman is an artist who has spent the better part of the last three and a half decades immersed in the implications of what it means to be painting now.
Rick Briggs
Painter Man
By James Kalm
A little “painter man,” brush in hand, strokes away at a broad black line. Following the trail of this line, it doubles back on itself again and again, passing through the doorway at the center of the picture, filling the room behind, then streaks on to fill another, on an endless continuum.
Nicolas Carone
A Selection of Works on Paper
By Tomassio Longhi
Nicolas Carone, who turned 88 this year, is a painter who has been reluctant to be categorized as a second generation Abstract Expressionist. His work—while leaning towards the same argument for and against de Kooning’s expressiveness of the then controversial synthesis of the figure and abstraction at the first glance—has in fact far greater affinities to wider sources in art history.
Lordy Rodriquez
By Katie Stone SonnenbornMaps have always served at least two purposes: to get people from point A to point B, and to demonstrate or set claim to domains of power and control. The further you go back in history, the more both of these functions become speculative and the more maps assumed an air of exploration.
Micki Watanabe
Lost and Found in the Stacks
By Shane McAdams
Above the din of chatter and clinking espresso spoons from the coffee shop in the Brooklyn Public Library’s atrium, several constructions by Micki Watanabe sit quietly and inconspicuously behind glass on the second floor.
" />
Shirley Jaffe
Tibor de Nagy
By Ben La Rocco
When you think of the French tradition in painting, you think of Poussin, Delacroix, and Ingres. Monet comes to mind. Braque, Matisse, and Léger follow along with all the foreigners who flocked to Paris at the turn of the 20th century to help make it the center of the international art world.
Jasper Johns
The Flag Drawings
By Jim Long
A fortunate exhibition of Jasper Johns flag drawings at Craig F. Starr Gallery presents mostly early drawings, from 1955 and 1956, in a variety of mediums—graphite wash, pencil, ink, collage, watercolor, and some re-worked lithographs—reflecting the artist’s versatility in creating variations on a theme.
Beyond the Visible: The Art of Odilon Redon
By Valery OisteanuSymbolist, member of the Decadence group, and a proto-Surrealist, Odilon Redon (1840 – 1916) was a native of Bordeaux, a painter and graphic artist, who composed his enigmatic art works sort of “like music.”
